A Million Caesars: Phillida Lloyd’s Julius Caesar

From the first moments of Phillida Lloyd’s all-woman production of Julius Caesar I knew I was in safe hands. A row of studied female prisoners was marched out, perfectly studied in the peculiar manifestations of gender in institutionalised women: quiffed, buzzed, or tied-back hair; swaggers, struts, and the careful movements of the self-contained ones, the ones with pent-up energy. Still, it was only when when the dialogue of Shakespeare’s play itself burst in and interrupted the cons’ politicking that I become conscious that I was in the presence of something extraordinary.

There is something deeply Shakespearian in the gender reversal employed here, something that became a touch of genius when set in a prison, where, as Caesar struts and Brutus and Cassius plot, screws stroll overhead shining torches and twirling their keys. Once, one conspirator was told to leave by a prison guard, forcibly removed by only a few words backed by systemic violence; her replacement fluffs her lines, and is theatrically beaten by the other inmates.

We are not watching the prisoners stage a play within a play, but a play within a cage; the bars of that cage are composed of gender, discipline and surveilance, and systemic gendered violence.

Nothing I say about the genius of its production can take away from the superb acting that allows it to work. Once immersed in the play itself the four figures around which action revolves take centre-stage: thumb-and-forefinger smoking Brutus, played by Harriet Walter with straightforward butch honesty, Jenny Jules’ loyal Cassius,  agonisedly caught in a situation spiraling outside his control, the luminous charisma and tiger-like sexuality of Cush Jumbo’s  (historically doomed) Marc Antony, and Clare Dunne’s Octavius (historically, later the first emperor Augustus), delivering calculatedly brutal violence with a Belfast accent.

Indeed, there was one stroke that I missed: Clare Dunne also plays the doomed, sacrificial Portia, occupying the dual role of eventual victor and first to die after Caesar; the ghost that Brutus later sees is Portia, and at the play’s end Portia dances nude around Brutus’ dying troops, bringing us back to considering the soldiers as sons and lovers, constituents of the families that can no longer be reproduced after the conspirators unleashing the unstoppable forces of struggle for state power.

Through their machinations the main characters come to embody these forces, and through the gendered habituses – usually unnoticed ways of dress and movement and social interaction – of the cast as well as the deft production touches of other cons spotlighting and filming them, the performativity of gender itself leaps into focus. Still, this isn’t a production about undoing gender, but about reproduction of violence, and the key, forever obscured fact that both are intimately tied in together.

It takes a lot to untie and tease out those links. In the light of recent British media mendacious foolishness around Suzanne Moore, in an era where the most visible manifestations of feminism are iterations of columnar idiocy, it is clearly required to emphasise that gender is both a socially, discursively imposed fact and a performance; something the murderous reaction to the inevitable moment when the first personally privileged, naive trans woman to have a womb surgically implanted will doubtless, sadly show.

As it is, this Caesar manages to shed light on those links too: this is indeed a “play within a cage”, with all action onstage being shaped by the whims of the screws, the reality of offstage power.

What it also does is bring out hidden elements of Shakespeare’s text: with the actors’ genders reversed, the genderedness of Brutus’ pre-battle confrontation with Cassius leaps into focus, and all Brutus’ talk of “heights” and “tides” becomes plainly his outfacing Cassius’ more cautious masculinity with his own. This then, as in the original, segues into Brutus’ surely implied homosexual liasion with the flute-playing Lucius, and it is after this that he sees Portia’s ghost, the ghost of the reproductive family he effectively killed when he murdered Caesar.

With the all-woman nature of the cast, something extraordinary happens to gender. Homosociality between men, with eroticism sublimed or barely visible, becomes outright homoeroticism. Indeed, the entire Roman aristocratic class, bonded through their masculinity, seem instead as though they are in an extended polyamorous relationship, a way of seeing homosociality which has almost certainly not been tried, and which suddenly seems worth trying.

At the play’s conclusion, the Roman soldiers fall dead one by one, danced around by the ghost of Portia, now carrying a baby. She silently asks and answers one question: how is society reproduced? Through violence. Then the screws announce lights out, and darkness falls.

Whatever one’s gender, I’d swear you’ll be left with two things: a lingering longing for the beauty of Cush Jumbo’s Marc Anthony, and a sense of juissance from the new-found ability to sensually trace and unpick the lines of engendering and violence in your own life and retold story.

Some brief notes on “Pure rationality”.

Recently a moderately prominent UK journalist wrote a blog stating that, as a member of “the left”, he was against abortion. As it was tweeted to 35,000 followers it caused somewhat of a storm, leading to accusations of “twitter mobs” and “dogma” flying right and left.  Another Angry Woman covered this issue extremely well here.

As is typical in these cases, the writer of the original article stated that he is open to “rational debate”, similar to discussions I have been part of in the past where many responses, particularly those by women, are labelled as “not sensible”.

“Purely rational” is always code for a debate to be set in ways that favour the privileged: it erects an “irrational” straw man, or in this case a “hysterical” straw woman in opposition. It is absolutely absurd to argue that one point of view does not factor emotions into decision making while one does; it is, with supreme irony, against all logic, as well as against all that science tells us about the brain, what we know about how human beings make decisions (rather than how they justify those to others), and most of what philosophy tells us about human experience. 

When one states that a debate must be “sensible” or “rational”, one is indeed setting out the linguistical battlefield in a way to favour privilege: that which society constructs as masculine, the upper middle class corpus of language, and so on. It favours those with power, in this case to enact laws which affect them in only the most passingly indirect of ways.

“Rational” assumes that one can know the totality of another’s experience, or that their experience is simply irrelevant. It is an expression of power, whether emotionally experienced as such or not; when disempowered by this ontological absurdity enforced as reality, one’s natural reaction is of course emotional in turn. Emotions are drives, and drives are influenced by culture and the structure of social relations; they do not happen in a vacuum.

It is not “illogical” or “post-structural” to state that one can only have limited knowledge of the universe, and that one cannot solve all problems by a-priori reasoning. Indeed, current scientific understanding points towards knowledge as  something which is conditional and difficult to attain, a vision of the universe that makes a great deal of sense given the thousands of years of human endeavour and inch-slow advancement of material culture which it has taken us to reach this point.

A “rational perspective” cannot be taken on with an effort of will, it must be carefully built out of attempts to un-learn unconscious biases as well as successful ways of resolving social conflict and hurt rather than leaving it one-sided, hidden, and un-resolved. It is a painful communal project of the willing, not the crusade of the lonely, gifted thinker.

And it is something which may ever be approached asymptotically, which will always remain tantalisingly out of reach.

Information is a precious thing. Indeed, the contribution of those who possess wombs is more valuable in a debate about wombs than that of those who do not. We would not make this argument about ice-fishing; it would be immediately apparent that a veteran fisher would know more than an untutored novice. Why, then, do we continue to let moribund rhetorical constructs about the nature of debate shape our thoughts, and so our relations with all those around us?

(In the course of formulating these thoughts, I was accused of causing an “unedifying spectacle” due to the reactions of others. For a few thoughts on the historical policing of guilt, innocence, and women who breach social norms, see this excellent post on Scolds, Lies, and Innocence. )

Lord of the Rings and structural Orientalism

On first reading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, at the age of nine, I loved it unquestioningly and, once finished, immediately began reading it again. Later, in high school English, I wrote about it as an epic synthesis of myth, overwhelmingly sourced from the peoples who were later themselves synthesised into Englishness: Saxons, Danish, Scandinavians, Normans, and so on. I also became uncomfortable with the largely simple good-versus-evil binary of the text, and the axiomic irredemability of Tolkien’s Orkish “race”.

There is much to evoke deep discomfort about Lord of the Rings. Many writers have found the racialised depictions of Orcs, Haradrim and Easterlings disturbing, especially their juxtaposition with the idealised, hyper-white beauty of Tolkien’s elves.

Yet little has been written about the structure of the Lord of the Rings. It is fairly well known that Tolkien re-worked many myths in the compiling of his “legendarium”; most notably, that of Turin Turambar from the Norse Sigurd and the Finnish Kulervo. Yet Tolkien did not restrict his borrowing and reworking to English and Norse myth.

The death of Boromir and the Song of Roland: Sounding the Horn

The Song of Roland, the oldest surviving work of French literature, records Charlemagne’s victory over Muslim rulers in Spain; the song itself alters the historical betrayal of Charlemagne by his Basque allies into betrayal by one man and the death of Roland at the hand of “Saracens”.

Transfigured by Tolkien, the betrayal is instead that of Sauruman, whose army of Orcs comes upon Boromir and the two hobbits. Like Roland, Boromir bears a great horn; like Roland, he is massively outnumbered and is overcome; like Roland, his allies do not reach him in time, and find only dead bodies.

Curiously, the name of Roland’s horn, Oliphant, is transfigured again by Tolkien into the name of the gigantic elephants of the far South; Boromir’s horn is simply the Horn of Gondor (Gondor’s real world namesake, Gondar, was part of Christendom’s historic southern bastion in Ethiopia); its sounding leads to Aragorn on his first steps not East with Frodo, but West, along the path that will lead to him claiming his rightful crown.

El Cid and Gandalf: the White Riders

A rider, clad all in white and riding a white horse, returned from the dead to lead the “forces of good” to victory. Not simply the story of Gandalf, but part of the legend of El Cid, who in many tales was embalmed and tied to his horse after his death to lead his charging knights to victory against the Moors. Like Gandalf and his sword, Glamdring, El Cid also had a famous, named sword, Tizona. Like Gandalf, who selected his white horse Shadowfax from the stables of King Theoden, El Cid obtained his horse as a gift: in many versions, he chose his horse from the stables of his godfather, or was given it by a king.

What is more, film representations of both legends have striking similarities.

El Cid (1961)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqFWBNB2xfI

Note the orientalised “Moor” at 1:11 and the “barbarous” skull-bedecked tower he stands in, the sounding of the giant gong at 1:16, the preponderance of black-cloaked “Moors”, and the barbarous-looking siege towers at 4:13.

For those who don’t want to sit through all of that, here is El Cid appearing, after death, haloed by white, and causing the “Moors” to flee in panic (6:11): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqFWBNB2xfI#t=06m11s

Here is Gandalf’s charge of the Orcs at Helm’s Deep, from the 2002 film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL9vUjm2mIE&feature=fvwrel

The iconography of the “White Rider” has been embraced by European fascist groups; “White Rider” is also a 1987 album by Skrewdriver, the most prominent white power band in the world.

The Corsairs of Umbar and the Battle of Lepanto

From the victory at Helms Deep, the heroes move on to confront the traitor Sauruman and then to aid Gondor. Aragorn, driven by need, takes “the Paths of the Dead” where he holds a dead, ghostly people to their oath to Gondor. He then leads this undead army to a city in the south of Gondor, Pelargir, where the “Corsairs of Umbar” are attacking.

Who are these Corsairs? Corsair as a term originally applied to the pirates of the Barbary coast, who later fell under the dominion of the Ottoman empire. Cervantes, who wrote Don Quixote, was among those enslaved by them. The Ottoman navy was defeated in 1571 at the battle of Lepanto, which assumed mythic resonance; Cervantes was also present at Lepanto, and there was badly wounded.

The Siege: Minas Tirith and Vienna

If the archetypal battle against “Corsairs” was Lepanto, the archetypal European siege was that of Vienna. Besieged by the Ottoman empire in 1529 and again in 1683, its relief marked the ascendance of European dominance of the world. Attacked from the South and East from a city historically friendly – Byzantium fell in 1453 and became the capital of the Ottoman empire – the territorial parallels with Minas Tirith under attack from its former sister-city Minas Morgul are obvious, and the battle has the same enormous significance for Gondor as the relief of Vienna was considered, by contemporaneous European writers, to have for Europe.

While one final battle is fought by Aragon in defence of Gondor, at the gates of Mordor, it takes little space in the text, and is not resolved through human action but in a sense through grace, as Gollum grabs the One Ring and plummets into Mount Doom, destroying Sauron and his empire.

The Orientalised Other

Structurally, then, we can see how Lord of the Rings, in particular the sections concerning Gondor, mirrors the perceived historical conflict between “Christendom” and “Islam”. While such a model had limited historical validity even then – it seems foolish to conflate the relatively tolerant Al-Andalus of before around 1150 with the later slave-taking, sometimes European-captained Barbary pirates; it seems as foolish to conflate the diverse, squabbling European powers which fought them – such models certainly do not function in a helpful or predictive manner now.

In his book, Orientalism, Edward Said describes the process of construction of a model of the Orient as “other” by Western scholars, in particular the ideological production of Islam as unchanging, monolithic, and antithetical to “Western values”.

While Tolkien himself explicitly argued against political or allegorical readings of his work – he intended it as a linguistic project – it is clear that many of the myths which he drew upon are certainly political and unconsciously centre conflict against a dark, evil, inhuman “other”.

Criticism of Tolkien in this vein is certainly nothing new. Michael Moorcock, in his excellent essay, stated “I don’t think these books are ‘fascist’, but they don’t exactly argue with… white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on what’s best for us.”

The “natural order” and Aragon’s right to rule

Aragon demonstrates his power and right to rule by being able to hold the ghosts of the Dead Men of Dunharrow to their oath to Gondor. Here Aragorn first demonstrates his sovereignty, his right to rule as part of the natural order; it is his blood claim to the crown of Gondor that the undead sense and defer to, and thus he exerts his claim over nature, that is, over the fact of death itself.

While Aragon’s myth is that of Arthur, the king returned to save the land from disaster, it is worth examining precisely who he is saving it from – a constructed “other” that only Sam ever wonders about, and at that powerlessly and wistfully:

““He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil at heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace.”

And with that he ceases wondering, and so do we.

Hierarchy is woven through the fabric of Lord of the Rings, in a fundamental, existential sense. Aragorn deserves to rule; Samwise is happy in his place as servant; Orcs are inhuman and deserve death; Easterlings and Corsairs must be driven back and subjugated. All have their place in a “natural” order. It is only when we reconsider that natural order and consider the world less in terms of hierarchy than of systems, that the “other” becomes humanised, that eternal conflict can end.

Patterns in myth and mythical patterns

There is much that I still find profoundly moving about Lord of the Rings. Yearning for a deep and unknowable past is, after all, an inescapable characteristic of advancing capitalism which is forever more deeply invading the structures of everyday life. Yet it also tells of time flowing inevitably onwards, and that the past is inevitably left behind. I must now admit that much of my own uncritical enjoyment of Lord of the Rings has flowed from my own white privilege.

If the unsatisfactory paradigm of “Islam” and “Christendom” as competing power blocs ever had validity, it was from a time when the power of each was roughly equal. This is certainly no longer the case now. The First World War that so affected Tolkien led to the creation of Iraq, and when ongoing Western hegemony dictated that it be invaded in 2003 this led to around a million excess deaths. US-led war with Iran now seems plausible, despite the immense power disparity. All the while, economic inequality grows, and global warming goes unchecked. It would seem timely to change our paradigms, our patterns of thought, and so our myths.

“For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air.”

On Criticising a Game of Thrones

Trigger warnings: discussion of rape and rape culture.

Spoilers: GOT/ASOIAF spoilers!

There is a great deal of intelligent, elegant writing both by and on the genre of fantasy. Sadly, there seems to be something about GRR Martin’s epic A Game of Thrones series that brings out the worst in all of us.

Let me clarify: I very much enjoy both A Game of Thrones on television and the series of books, A Song of Ice and Fire. I also hold the apparently radical opinion that one can enjoy something and still find it problematic.

Laurie Penny’s review of A Game of Thrones has caused somewhat of a storm across the SFF blogosphere, with the descriptive phrase “racist rape culture Disneyland with dragons” and the contention that GOT has “goodies and baddies” proving catalytic to critical responses.

Clearly, there is more to GOT than a simple dichotomy. I personally get the greatest amount of pleasure from reading it as a parable, watching the personal and political constraints of feudalism shaping characters’ actions and beings in ways which can hardly be written off as “good” or “evil”. I really enjoyed Charli Carpenter’s post on Game of Thrones as theory, and if you’ve read this far, you likely would too.

However, there is much in what Laurie says about the inherent “goodness” of the Starks that really can’t be written off as simplistic analysis, as not present in the text. The Starks make terrible kings, it is clear, with one Hand being executed and the King in the North finding his own doom when both find themselves constitutionally unable to play the games of politics.

Still, the surviving Starks are, although young, simply devoid of flaws as she said, and, together with their uncanny communication with wolves and inherent link to nature, clearly axiomatically “good” in some sense. The fact that the messy human world will not allow them to rule is a rather different story, and the sundering of Sansa from her wolf by her father’s hand rather symbolises her being cast out of the “natural” order by political marriage. Whether Anya Stark will ever be reunited with her own abandoned wolf remains to be seen.

While the best of the Starks end up dead as a result of their own actions, the best of the Lannisters, Tyrion, was indeed a rapist from the start, though against his own will. Forced by his father to rape a prostitute with whom he fell in love, as part of a grotesque punishment, Tyrion starts off an offence against nature: his dwarfism is felt as an insult and marring by the entire Lannister family, and he killed his mother in childbirth. From these beginnings he goes on to become the most responsible of the Lannisters, for which he is effectively cast out of the social order, ending up by killing his own father and fleeing.

The “good-evil” dichotomy is definitely present in AGOT, although, like some elements of rape culture and like some basic tropes of orientalist racism (in Dany’s freeing of the slaves),  it is deconstructed over the series. This doesn’t mean it is not present, and while “racist rape culture Disneyland with dragons” doesn’t encompass the entirety of the series, it remains a valid description of many generic fantasy tropes – most of which are not deconstructed at all. We write about these things because we still do live in a culture with stark problems: if we were free of rape culture, I could walk down the street free of harassment and my flatmate could go to the beach on her own, many disparate writers have found the treatment of race in AGOT problematic, and so on.

I am, however, very surprised at the level of resistance to Laurie’s  statement that “the quest for the good ruler” is the (other) main theme of the series. This seems rather obviously true, as the main premise of the plot is internal division while an existential threat, the coming Winter and the Others gathering in the North, is ignored; Winter, indeed, is coming, and the people of Westerros will need to stand united against it if they wish to survive.

By the end of the fifth book the main candidates for the mythical role of Returned King seem to be  the hardened, canny Stannis, Jon Snow, whose precise parentage and possible claim to the throne is obscured and who may not survive, and the uncannily beautiful Danerys, linked with nature through her dragons and the resurgence of magic in the world which they either channel or portend. The dragons seem key, with their dragonfire a historically potent weapon against Others; still, it is also likely that GRR Martin will play things out more complicatedly than this. There still remains a bevy of compromised, interesting Southerners in play, after all.

Sadly, I have not yet seen any refutation of Laurie’s points which doesn’t itself indulge in the fundamental attribution error of considering her understanding “superficial”, rather than the brevity of her piece to require superficiality, or which doesn’t simply set up straw women to tilt at, claiming that Laurie wanted to watch “Sweden with wizards“, rather than maybe considering whether  it might be possible to address those themes with just a little less triggering rape culture and normative violence. Pointing out that these things are still damaging of themselves is not the same as calling for censorship. As for me, I can’t help but find feudal rape culture just as viscerally upsetting as the real thing, but I’d rather remain watching and enjoying – while also pointing out problems – than lock myself in a metaphorical room just because it’s safer.

A Game of Thrones very clearly really is about society’s leaders, rather than ordinary people who are swept along or aside; just because the consequences of this are repeatedly shown does not mean that it is not the case. Yet, there is a huge underground tension in the novels between whether the plot being driven by the feudal “1%” really is “natural” or not. The surviving Starks are forced into an education among the common people that will leave them far less naive than their dead patriarchs. Varys may be one of the few to rise into the ruling class, but he is also one of the few of the ruling class to truly care about the people of the kingdoms. Jon finds himself undone by the requirements of his position; in making tough decisions he undermines the institution that has him as Night’s Watch Commander, and faces an attack from his own men.

Even Danerys, with her Valyrian purple eyes and white hair and inborn right to rule by commanding dragons, finds her despotic orientalist ruling style little use in actually helping the people whom she wishes to help. One can’t help wondering if the magic-enhancing dragons really will save Westerros from the Others in a storm of fire, or end up eventually causing whichever mysterious problems led to the “doom of Valyria”. Perhaps the common man or woman of Westeros does think that the problem of who can rule them can “go to the Others”, yet if they are not free to store corn against Winter that is exactly what will happen to all of them.

I don’t believe that we can read a text in only one way, but it’s disingenuous to argue that Laurie’s view on this type of story isn’t very valid indeed. With no discussion of any alternative to austerity present at the recent Tony Blair-headlined Astana Summit, I’m pretty worried about my own society’s reaction to  existential Winter myself. Maybe we’d be better off without a ruling class at all, but if we’re stuck with one for the moment I’d bet my dragons on Tyrion Lannister over Blair any day. Isn’t that in itself pretty telling on behalf of reality?

Whose academy? Academic feminism, privilege and the Age of Austerity

Does academic feminism oppress women?

This piece holds that it does, broadly arguing that universities, like other societal institutions, are patriarchal and exist to further the interests of men, and that academic feminism often silences non-academic feminists, reinforcing existing authority and ways of being rather than supporting calls to action and effecting real change. It argues that “You don’t need to read books to be a feminist. You don’t need to be able to read at all.”

What is academic feminism, and does it have a case to answer? There is a vast range of feminist writing, and it is hard to pinpoint exactly where it begins: was it with Wollenscroft’s 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with the aristocratic female poets of earlier centuries, with women who did not write in English? These are books as separate from academic feminism, though: academic feminism can specifically be said to have begun around the establishment of the first Womens Studies departments in 1970.

What we can also definitely say is that in recent decades feminist argument has often been used by those in power to state that women need educated along the path to becoming equals; that the West is inherently superior – an argument used to justify the Iraq war, despite the deterioration of conditions in Iraq and the immense misery and suffering the war has caused to women; and to state that certain groups of women such as straight women, practitioners of BDSM or trans women are inherently anti-feminist.

The “third wave” of feminist thought of the 1990s also has many specific criticisms of the “second wave” of the ’70s and 80s centred around the flaws with essentialist thought and the intersectionality of oppression: by avoiding binary distinctions, by playing with and owning the language we use, and by fighting all kinds of oppression that affect women, it was thought that we could progress towards real gender equality. A great deal of queer theory was written, taking its inspiration from radical communities and activists which pursued a critical, non-assimilationist politics.

Many of the most criticised “second wave” feminists were and are academics. Roz Kaveney’s criticism of Sheila Jeffreys centres around the essence of her feminism as an academic, theoretical project, and criticism of the recently-glitterbombed Greer does likewise.

Modern academic feminism, however reluctantly, also includes figures like Catherine Hakim, who argues that feminism is over and that any oppression women suffer is because they are not trying hard enough. Clearly there is much to criticise about all periods of academic feminism. But is making individual critiques enough?

Looking back from 2012, the inherent superiority of “feminism 3.0” is becoming less clear-cut. There are many accounts of ’70s and ’80s feminism being vastly more diverse than the academic history suggests, and a general project is taking place to reclaim and rethink the term “radical feminist”, and re-read and re-appreciate the many fierce “second wave” feminist thinkers, some of whom, like Dworkin, were not originally academics.

We are also facing an age of austerity, and feminist thought is re-focusing on the economic realm, the intersectionality of struggle and on the function of labour. So what does this mean for academic feminism? Does the academy specifically function to oppress women?

The wider role of academia

Anti-oppressive critiques of academia can be taken back to not long after the Enlightenment itself. Edward Said, writer of Orientalism, deeply critiqued the role of 18th and 19th century philologists in “fixing” representation of the orient and of the “orientals” living there. This school of thought was a crucial influence on the intellectual ideas used to justify the emergent forms of fascism in the 1920s and 30s.

However, in the same piece Said calls for a current return to philology, a discipline which can only be broadly categorised as the creative study of language. Academia is a terrain in which disciplinary boundaries and the weight of evidence are constantly shifting, and a mode of study which was once reactionary may later be undertaken to different effect.

It is also difficult to place the role of academia in society in relation to the geopolitical and the economic. Marx believed that intellectuals held a crucial position in driving revolutionary change, and Gramsci later developed this into a specific critique of the social role of intellectuals in society: “all men are intellectuals” [and presumably women] “but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals”.

Gramsci called for “traditional intellectuals” – today’s academics – to be joined by “organic intellectuals” from the working class to effect social change. This is somewhat of an oversimplification of Gramsci, and it is worth noting that the vast majority of people today fit Marx’ definition of the proletariat – those who must exchange their labour for the means of subsistence, whether that means be rent or mortgage. It seems likely that many online-educated social justice activists might themselves fall within his definition of “organic intellectuals”. Still, there is a general critique here: academia has a social role in propping up current hegemony, and it cannot simply wish that role away through sufficiently stringent enquiry.

Chomsky, writing more recently, suggests that common sense is and should be sufficient to understand the social sphere, and has somewhat disagreed with Marx’s take on the role of state power for some time. Chomsky also specifically dislikes Marx due to Marx’s role as a theorist: Chomsky feels that ideological change must not come from the auspices of some overarching theory, but from practical argument, evidence, and common sense. Quite what Chomsky thinks of the radical anthropologist David Graeber, who appears to share and comprehensively evidence this view on state power, is still a mystery.

None of these thinkers seem to take a position specifically against academia, however, calling instead for critical self-evaluation. Giroux, writing this year, draws on the writing of the Brazilian radical educator Paulo Freire to argue that Occupy is right to insist on an emphasis on education as part of participatory democracy; neoliberalism is stifling critical thinking in academia, and critical thinking is essential for any kind of real democracy. “Education cannot be neutral”, he states.

But let us not vanish here into the competing arguments of male thinkers. Decades before Occupy, feminist bell hooks had met Friere and considered the same issues, concluding that literacy is essential for the feminist movement: “because the lack of reading, writing and critical skills serves to exclude many women and men from feminist consciousness. Not only that, it excludes many from the political process and the labour market”.

bell hooks practices a notion of praxis similar to Friere’s, combining reflection and action and, in teaching, requiring this from both students and teachers. Teachers must be aware of the power disparity they possess when in the classroom, and take a holistic approach emphasising well-being and self-actualisation of both student and teacher.

Clearly a part of this must be being critical of the role of academic outside the classroom, as well. However, nothing about academia functions specifically to oppress women – though it may have a social role of oppression, this is one which functions intersectionally, and cannot be combated by a posited removal of one axis of oppression alone. Remove gendered oppression, and we still have race, class, and so many others. And perhaps you don’t need to be able to read to be a feminist, to survive under capitalism: but it helps.

Neo-liberal governmentality – who watches the watchers?

Under neoliberalism, we watch each other.

Critiques of academia in previous generations centred around its social role, too.  Writing in 1969 on the back of a decade of student-led upheaval, Chomsky stated “It is pointless to discuss the “function of the university” in abstraction from concrete historical circumstances”. And while the 1960s shook the capitalist world to its foundations, the dreamed-of revolution never materialised. It seems likely that Chomsky’s views on “the marketplace of ideas” would now be rather different, as the market is more obviously a creation of the state.

The critical thinker Michel Foucault also shared later Chomsky’s and Graeber’s understanding of the state’s relationship to the market – at least until the birth of neoliberalism. Under neoliberalism, “It is the market form which serves as the organizational principle for the state and society”. This sea-change in conception, if not in political fact, has resulted in a definite change in social relations under neoliberalism, referred to by Foucault as “governmentality”, and characterised by”social responsibility becoming a matter of personal provisions”.

This regime has necessary implications for anti-oppression work. Current models of privilege are intertwined with governmentality, asking that the individual take responsibility for their own white privilege, male privilege, and so forth, and individually work to educate themselves and, so far as possible, remain aware of their own privileges as the first step towards dismantling them.

Thus systemic racism and other forms of oppression can only be challenged by first making an intervention – challenging someone – which is predicated on neoliberal understandings of the self. A hegemony which is based on global racism, sexist division of labour, resistance to the social model of disability, and so forth, can only be opposed by first intervening in a way which is based on this hegemony. Challenging privilege often meets with a vitriolic response. Among frantic derailing and privilege defence, there is also sometimes a component of generational resistance to neoliberal social relations. It is worth understanding this and, where possible, to treat it separately, in order to better challenge the privilege which it conceals.

This resistance is no excuse, of course, for perpetuating oppression. Older systems of social relations also perpetuated oppression, failing in the end to overcome it and often having their struggles derailed and rendered futile by lack of attention to other forms of oppressions, to intersectionality. For many people, older concepts of community and communal struggle did not prove to be communal at all. What, as feminists, can we learn from this dynamic?

Firstly, that the privilege-based model of oppression came not from academia, but from grass-roots activism. Innovative responses to current conditions need not come from the academy, nor need academia to give them legitimacy. Using academic language is not the same as being politically part of academia, nor is it necessarily the same as not being understandable.

Secondly, that academic expression is not always optimal or desirable. Frequently the most impenetrable academic theorists – Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak – are those articulating the most interesting ideas, rendered near-unintelligible by their need to simultaneously defend themselves against hostile male colleagues; this elaborately-buttressed language renders their ideas unassailable, yet difficult to use effectively. Yet it is also a style, just as technical writing is a style, and without this style neither theorist would have been able to have the significant influence which both have had. We cannot simply choose our mode of speech, it is also determined by our environment. An idea may not currently be articulable within one way of speaking, while being so within another.

Thirdly, that there is at least one privilege that it is massively difficult to address within our current understanding: that of the English language. Currently the English language is globally dominant, and as bell hooks argued that literacy is essential to empowerment, our current understanding is that the English language is essential to global empowerment. Yet English is simply not added to a non-anglophonic person’s choice of means of speech: there is a power disparity globally, with many writers from non-anglophone countries choosing to write in English simply to find an audience. Hegemony tends to edge out other choices, to perpetuate power dynamics, to present a totality from which there is no easy escape. We must be mindful of this ambiguity of language, and place it in context among global oppressions which can be pitted one against the other, amongst hierarchies of power, privilege and being which invisibly rule.

And we must not simply watch one another, as individual actors, but recover some sort of sense of solidarity and communal struggle. The queer community is  built around this: grass-roots, communal, informed by academia, against imperialism, patriarchal capitalism and every form of oppression. Yet there are some profound ambiguities here: in being defined against something there is the potential to create both in- and out-groups, to repeat the mistakes of the past. The language-slippage of “queerness” seeks to counterbalance this, but will it be enough?

Academic language is essential to governmentality, as neoliberalism uses academic language to legitimise its ruling strategies, to ensure that we govern ourselves as (neoliberal) consensus sees fit. Whether we want it or not, academia and academic language is shaping up to be a major battleground as neoliberalism is becoming austerity neoliberalism, a process which is the natural consequence of changes during decades before.

Austerity and Academia

Now we have left the early days of neoliberalism and entered an age of austerity, in which previous liberal certainties appear to be under attack.

Academia is under attack, also. In 2010 funding formulas meant that Middlesex Philosophy – a department that cut across language divides in studying (often, presumably, in translation) French and German philosophy – was cut. Other UK university cuts have followed suit, with London Met soon to become little more than a technical college. The University of Sussex is finding itself increasingly far from its 60’s radical roots, as the future of its Sexual Dissidence comes under question, while increasing support is being given to Security Studies. The state and the market are acting to close in the gaps, to solidify one particular set of interests – and these are broadly not the interests of women.

Women are under attack. Austerity is a vitally significant moment for feminism. Cuts are having a vastly disproportionate effect on women, leaving women unemployed, without childcare, forced into remaining in abusive relationships, doing more unpaid work, being pushed inch by inch back towards the margins. Meanwhile, most feminist discussion in the media consist of manufactured attacks by women on other women. Something is entirely rotten here, and it must be fought.

Feminism and Austerity are holding a conference to examine austerity and to combat and resist negative changes in academia – as well as in the wider public sphere, considering challenges to women’s writing, art and performance as well as scholarship.

While this is worthwhile, it is becoming increasingly obvious that any approach which attempts to fight austerity in academia alone will not be enough. We need solidarity across the board, between classes, races, genders, between all people committed to making a better world than the ideologically and linguistically whitewashed dystopia which austerity capitalism offers.

Being an individual is not enough, and neither is being a class.

How should we speak to power?

If we cannot choose not to fight on every front, we can at least prepare the battlefield.

Academic feminists must become conscious of the social role of academia, particularly under neoliberalism. We must also be conscious that academic language is a particular kind of speech; different kinds of speech have different relations to power under different historical conditions. At present, academic speech is heavily privileged under neoliberalism: this makes it both a tool, and a potential accidental weapon against those with less privilege.

While it is not quite true to say that academia oppresses women, the writer who argued that it did was quite right to not spend her time casting about for references to permit her to argue from authority.

Where I have done so, it is more an attempt to weave a tapestry from which a pattern can be discerned, than to argue in order to convince, to force, to educate without doing so mindfully, to compel. These issues exist together with other “women’s issues”, together with all people’s issues, in a way that ties women’s work across time and across space. This is a pattern of progress for some women – and only some: first worldly, sociologically middle class, articulate, here.  We must act mindfully to ensure systemic change for all, before the thread is rudely cut off.

What we can do is be conscious of our speech, and speak appropriately. We can challenge privilege where others are unconscious or uncaring of it; we can snark to each other and in the face of power, as marginal speech acts to build solidarity. We can speak to power openly on our own terms, rather than adopting a different discourse, rather than labouring emotionally to make our words palatable to others.

What we cannot do is disengage from power entirely, but often we are better speaking to each other, so that when we do address the mass media we do so honestly and giving the minimum potential for distortion. So that when we speak to each other we do so as as close as we can come to equals, as feminists and allies, as mindful human beings.

When we do speak to power, we should do so to amplify the voices of the unheard, rather than to put forward our own interpretations and agendas: under neoliberalism, they are not entirely our own.

And when we do leap up to take action, we can do so united as one body rather than striking alone against one form of oppression. We stand at a vital point in history, and our words and actions will weigh disproportionally in the scale of what comes next.

Seven SF novels for radicals, utopians, and dreamers

So what is SF? Partially a hazy roadmap, partially a utopian dream, and very often a mirror of present conditions, the genre resists settled categorisation just as it resists elevation to the hallowed heights of literary fiction.

Where to start?

1) Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series. The three books, Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars articulate a vision of a future well informed not only by possible technological progress but by history, sociology, and politics. Poetic and evocative, they are well worth a read by anyone wishing to give texture to their dreams of space.

2) Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution Series, particularly The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal and The Cassini Division. Optimistic on technological progress, realistic on real world geopolitics, realpolitik, and on “with how little care the world is run.” I think on re-reading I’d be a bit critical of the depiction of one female character, but in a future where people are constructed and rebuilt pinning down what’s ethical and what’s not will be a tricky job indeed. Highly reccommended.

3) Iain M. Banks Culture Novels. It’s a bit difficult to pick favourites here: many would plump for Excession, while Use of Weapons, The Player of Games and Consider Phlebas are darker, more accessible, and more human. (My personal favourite Banks is the poetic, guttingly sad Against A Dark Background, which isn’t even a Culture novel at all, so best to ignore that for now).

The Culture novels are best described as a cross between an anarcho-syndicalist post-scarcity utopia, and a liberal utopia and mirror of the Now. While the Culture is definitely utopian, it’s effectively ran by small, genial cabaals of artificially intelligent Minds that use people and species as unknowing pieces on a chessboard. This is a situation which would once sound like echoed theories of dubious conspiracists, but as the evidence begins to come in, reminds one of our far less intelligent and altruistic rulers more and more each year.

4) Ursula K. Le Guin: either The Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness, or, frankly, both. Deeply informed by feminism, anthropology, and the social and political base to technology, Le Guin’s books blazed a trail that affected every novel in the genre to come after them.

Being less directly concerned with specific technological advances, Le Guin’s books have a great deal more space to breathe and to play and to give rise to both striking personal and political insight. Neither novel would be the first SF I’d recommend, but they might easily either be the most critically influential.

5) Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty. While not looking into the future but the past, Spufford’s far from uncritical examination into the apogee of Soviet technology and economics sheds a vastly needed amount of light into where everything went wrong with the Soviet dream… as well as hinting at the potentiality for similarly critical examination of the capitalism which co-evolved with and eventually defeated it. Absolutely essential reading.

6) The Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic. Written in 1971 in the USSR and refused publication for a number of years, it was later turned into the Tarkovsky film Stalker – a film made twice as the first version was “accidentally destroyed” by the processing service.

Roadside Picnic is now available to read free online, and, as a novella, it is possible to do so relatively quickly. But just why was this short novel so subversive? In brief, it is a critical examination of the impartiality and social function of technology that, in its depiction of a hostile “zone”, echoed Soviet environmental pollution and foreshadowed Chernobyl. Vital reading.

7) Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. I’m going out on a limb here, as I haven’t actually read Parable yet, but based on how superb Wild Seed and Lillith’s Brood are, it has to be reccommended.

Here we have something striking: the only clearly dystopian novel here is the only one by a person of colour. Why is this the case? And why have I recommended Parable rather than either of those I have read? And why, interestingly, why have I not recommended anything by Sam Delany, whom I hold in the highest possible regard?

I have to confess that I found reading Lillith’s Brood disturbing, and that this was due to the power disparity between the aliens and humanity, and that my finding this disturbing was due to my white privilege. (Perhaps how disturbing I found it is the highest recommendation of all). Wild Seed is excellent, but is not science fiction: Butler’s examination of power and community reaches far into the past before arriving at the present. And Delany: Delany has not written any science fiction novels for far too many decades.

So here we are: all of the white Western delvers into the future who I mentioned above – Banks, MacLeod, Robinson, Le Guin – are working on dreams of futures where global racism is no more, but it is strikingly difficult to find a convincing vision of this by anyone who is not white. Clearly we have much further to go on this than we realise, and Octavia Butler’s Parable represents much of her most recent thinking around the subject.

And here we are.

And for the wild card, and because I never miss an opportunity to recommend it: neither SF nor a novel, David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years sheds more light on the present through the lens of the past than any examination of possible futures could. Potentially epoch-defining, and a beautifully constructed and illuminating read. Go.

Love Will Tear Us Apart, Again

Last weekend our glorious government spiced up the long bank holiday with its own special blend of haplessness and idiocy, proposing that all under 25s be denied Housing Benefit, thus forcing them to “move back in with their parents”.

It does not take long to realise why this is completely unworkable: many people cannot move back in with their parents, many parents do not have room – especially those who have separated, found a new partner, or been compelled to downsize rented property. In the end the reasons for quietly dropping it are far more about the cost of assessment rather than  those who cannot speak up to say “I can’t”: those estranged, those abused by their families as well as LGBTQ youth who would be forced into abusive relationships, survival sex work, and street homelessness.

It is wrong to dismiss the suggestion out of hand as simply a bank holiday-motivated wheeze, however. Among the callous indifference and breathtaking naivete, a few good intentions lie buried. When seen alongside Rowan Williams’ speech on the ills of identity politics, a pattern begins to emerge of a rising tide of nostalgic communal conservatism. To remain with this specific case, perhaps some young queers will be able to repair their relationships with parents once forced back into the parental home. Yet, for me, the thing that worked to restore my once-fraught relationship was distance: with distance came the ability to see things clearly, and with distance came equality of power. The one thing that would not have worked is trying to force me into a proximity that, through putting us on an uneven footing, would have prevented real communication and created an abusive relationship. As a lonely young queer person, I knew this well, and had I had to choose between that and the streets, I would have chosen the streets.

This is not just about me, however. Not just the Tories but Labour have been speaking of this. Take this quote from 2010, for example:

“The politics of equality of opportunity has licensed ever greater inequality; we need instead a more radical economic egalitarianism coupled with the recognition of a difference of roles and a hierarchy of excellence.”

If this sounds like justification of entrenched inequality couched in the language of progressiveness, well, that’s exactly what it is. But it’s not alone. Today saw two astonishing pieces on gay rights: one in the Guardian, advocating that Stonewall, a notoriously socially conservative group, should stop advocating social change and stick to an almost-Victorian charitable comforting of the bullied; the other in the Telegraph, arguing that the Christian message that “Gayness can be cured” is more progressive than “We should stop attacking gay people”.

Never mind the facts, this utopian vision of return to some imagined communal, conservative past is here to stay, and as equal rights legislation is repealed and campaigns against abortion ramp up in both the US and the UK, this is rhetoric that we will see again and again.

So where is this drive coming from? It is worth taking some time to look at the idea of the community, the communal. In Science Fiction fandom, a generational shift is becoming apparent, with new activist writers and fans clashing with an older communal “union culture“; the new generation centres anger at racism and other forms of often unconscious discrimination, while the old generation centres following established procedures and first taking care of the emotional needs of the group. Both groups often have the same aims, which makes the disagreements all the more bitter and heartbreaking. When miscommunication happens, it seems almost intangible: we seem to inevitably split into both sides, with neither comprehending the emotional dynamics and unstated assumptions of the other.

Ideas of the “new lost generation”, the “generation without a future” are mocked almost as often as they are felt to be fiercely true. Yet the gap between generations is not just an economic divide. Neoliberalism has struck deeply at the structure of social relations, leaving the majority of a generation with embedded liberal assumptions that there truly is no “us and them”: just as there is no outgroup which is fundamentally and absolutely different, there is no ingroup which can always be trusted and relied upon for support. Each social relationship must for ever be renegotiated at the point of contact, like a NHS service put out to tender to the best-connected bidder. The assumption that no outgroup member is fundamentally different doesn’t combat prejudice, it simply airbrushes it, writing off discrimination as failure to meet a set of “objective” criteria, meritocracy in action. There is no real ingroup, only circumstance and situational alliance. We are all in competition with one other, from the cradle to the grave.

How can we imagine something other than this? At present this is a difficult question: we already seem to be living in a dystopia imagined by our forebears, with Orwell and Atwood seeming more like writers of a blueprint than warners against potential disaster. Dystopian fiction is incredibly popular, particularly among young women, who already face vastly intense pressures on their appearance and conduct. Do we already live in a kind of surveillance society, where keeping a watchful eye on one another has replaced mutual identification, respect, care?

It’s starting to seem as if we do, which is one reason why nostalgic, dangerous dreams of some sleepy 1950s village have such appeal.

If we are not to sleepwalk into some hellish future-past, we need to begin thinking big and daring to dream beyond identity politics –  in a positive sense. We need to reforge some new version of the communal, collapsing down neoliberalism’s eternal Elsewhere and Elsewhen of suffering and dissent in order to Be in the here and now. We need to recognise the inherent ambiguity of technological progress, yet turn it into a tool in our hands and at the direction of our imagination, not of our fears. We need to re-centre science and factual analysis, while remaining conscious of science as a social process that can be twisted to any end. We need to sweep away old certainties, and turn away from the past to look ahead into the real future, with our only comfort the fact that we are not doing so alone, but are proceeding, step by rough step, hand in hand.

An Island

“Arriving in Keflavik is like landing on Mars.” I hadn’t thought that it would rain this much on Mars.

At first, the transition away from Britishness was gradual: depart through a terminal gate emblazoned with “Barclays”, arrive through one logoed “Landsbanki”. Airports exist to facilitate the free movement of capital, not of people, not that I was in any danger of forgetting this: like a growing number of my student peers, I was an economic migrant. Come to Iceland on the ERASMUS program, pay less rent than London, and receive an additional grant together with a tuition fee waiver. Alone in a new country, speaking none of the language, I suddenly had cause to doubt my own economic logic. Was any of it worth this?

Outside the terminal showed more promise. I peered through my coach window, stunned by public art that wasn’t a hideous corporate abortifact: a metal seed sprouting hesitantly among a pile of rocks; the Norse gods’ rainbow bridge, Bifrost, reaching up into the air. Perhaps Iceland is different, I thought.

First impressions confirmed that. Reykjavik is a spacious, green city, with better weather than Edinburgh: colder, brighter, with winter snow that’s less hostile than driving rain, heated by free geothermal energy. I saw no homelessness; sleeping rough in winter would equal murder. I found that I breathed more easily once outside the UK, away from the grinding negativity of the media and from new-found fear of the police, inspired by student and activist friends’ accounts of truncheons and dubiously legal arrests.

I did feel that I had escaped something by coming to Iceland, but exactly what? Contrary to the hype, Iceland hasn’t escaped the economic consequences of the banking crash, facing cuts and the ratcheting open of the country to outside corporate investment. Still, as Iceland’s government stated firmly to the IMF, this is a Nordic social democracy, with a solid social safety net. Was the difference here purely economic?

Something did feel different. There was no nastiness in the air, no murmuring about scroungers and laziness. Some of my friends had the kind of precarious service-jobs that usually serve up micromanagement and bitter depression to their workers. Here this was completely absent, personality clashes aside. Crime was rare, supervision minimal, and people were free to work under their own initiative.

Still, clearly the Crash showed that everything wasn’t hunky-dory, with many of Iceland’s richest people having fled abroad to escape prosecution. This wasn’t some kind of capitalist utopia. Socially, historically, and geographically Iceland is different, even from the other Nordic countries: family and social bonds are strong, and, knowing this, many women have children young – and choose to do so across social classes. There is less pressure on women to be thin, to regulate their sexuality, to fit into a specific media-mediated mould. Society in general felt less controlled, less hierarchical, and more open to possibility.

I opened my own mind, too, and found myself thinking less about how much of freedom is economically determined, and more about how much is not.

Living in Iceland, I found myself linguistically privileged. Most Icelandic people speak English, and are happy to do so when asked, otherwise defaulting to Icelandic. People talk freely in English about the rich, about Klein’s Shock Doctrine, yet most of the country’s political debate is conducted in Icelandic. If there is nastiness in Iceland, it doesn’t make it across the language barrier. Whatever regulatory regimes exist work on those living within a culture permanently, mediated through social connections and language. As a foreign visitor, albeit a long-term one, I got a free pass.

This, naturally, led me to read about the English. I read about how much of class is mediated in Britain through language: the usage of living room, sitting room, or lounge being one gross, banal example. Iceland isn’t the classless society it would like to be, but it doesn’t have that. I also felt free through not being part of the horrific grind of British politics, with its accompanying apocalyptic levels of pessimism from Left and Right.

I wondered: when I did feel hopeless about the future, how much of my pessimism was based on direct experience, and how much on media-mediated narratives, on shows and articles commissioned for profit? Anyone who reads anything online knows how awful and unrepresentative comment threads are, and how impossible they are to avoid. A few awful experiences, a few hate-filled idiots, are far from the totality of experience, though in terms of word-volume it feels as though they are.

–

When Occupy Wall Street began to take off, I attended meetings in Reykjavik, understanding little, speaking less, and ultimately cooking in lieu of words. I saw Occupy Reykjavik evolved, not into the equitable meetings between homeowners, nationalists and radical left that we hoped for – and initially saw – but into two or three hardy men sleeping in tents, raising awareness of something that everyone in Iceland was perfectly aware of already. Something had gone wrong here, and something inevitable: instead of working on change in Iceland, we were replicating what we saw on Youtube and looking overseas.

Looking to New York, and to London, centres of global economic hegemony – and world centres of the English language.

It turned out that I couldn’t escape after all.

Yet now I don’t feel so hopeless. Another world is certainly possible, though not one I can step into by boarding a ‘plane. I couldn’t cut my ties to the UK so easily: every day I was online reading, talking with friends and relatives, all in English.

I love Iceland, and my hopes go with it into an uncertain future; I remain confident in Icelanders’ ability to fight back against negative social changes, no matter how economically inevitable they are painted to be. Yet building something new, something needed? That’s something we all need to do, through organisation and through language, and hiving off and becoming an island is the only thing that isn’t possible.

–

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as a manor of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne

–

But islands can only exist
If we have loved in them

Derek Walcott

The “War on Twee” and the illusion of choice

Cupcakes, it seems, are feminism’s new enemy. There’s no arguing that a new wave of pink sugar-frosted femininity and its love for kittens, craft fairs, and retro kitch of every kind has burst out from a section of the indie scene to become mainstream. Decried as some sort of female class treachery in Jezebel, it is now due to become completely inescapable, as the US sitcom New Girl explodes across our screens.

Let’s take another look at that Jezebel article here. Leaving aside just when it became feminist to go after how other women dress, it has a lot of problems. First of all, the article casually assumes that all women who embrace “twee” do so simply so that men will have sex with them. Not only does this assume that all women are heterosexual – or perhaps that only heterosexual women are “real women” – but it states as given that this entire package of gender expression exists solely in order to please men.

The equation of femininity with weakness , artificiality, and existing solely in order to please men is hardly a new thing. What is new, or at least newer, is separating out the quality of femininity with the lived reality of being female, and then using that separation as a basis for feminism. It’s okay to be a woman, as long as you don’t act too girly about it.

This is simply femmephobia, attacking feminine qualities rather than women in general. The “natural” femininity advocated in Jezebel isn’t precisely defined, yet a general picture is painted: seriousness, “age-appropriate”ness, wine rather than fro-yo. All of which are certainly less juvenile, but also strikingly gender-neutral. There is another unstated, and therefore unchallenged assumption here: that femininity is rightly taken less seriously, that it somehow precludes serious thought, that it abolishes female agency. The Jezebel article’s alternative, however, is somehow magically free of patriarchal pressure: male ideas have influenced twee girls’ style and sense of self-worth, yet the formless proposed negation of all things kitteny stands alone among historical womanhood in being free of these influences. Amaze.

What is also amazing is the sheer intensity of the hatred for this kind of “cupcake femininity”. Just like every other cultural trend co-opted by capitalism, this kind of retro-geekery happened in waves. While online hatred of trend-latecoming hipsters abounds, criticism of neotenous tastes: 8-bit gaming, animation, comics, bad movies, cupcakes, crafts, and kittens, is reserved only for the “feminine” things on that list. It’s fine to indulge in this kind of zeitgeisty retro fetishisation if a man does it – or so long as a woman steers clear of that awful fake girly thing.

Now, a kind of neotenous femininity has one striking advantage for women: the avoidance of compulsory sexualisation. That’s wrong, too, right? Modern feminism is sex-positive, and women who pose as oversized children must just be playing weird and questionable games with male sexuality.

This, too, is horribly problematic: “male sexuality” is centred and naturalised, put forth as something we should all aspire to. Sex positivity is all, any woman who doesn’t want sex needs help dealing with her shame, or perhaps medical intervention, and the existence of rape culture is, again, magicked away. The issue of self-determination, instead of being paramount, shrivels away and vanishes. Any thought of the economic and societal trends behind delayed social maturation is also verboten: what a consumer chooses to do with their money and the increasing age of being able to afford a first mortgage couldn’t possibly be connected in any way, right?

In reality, women in 2012 have few choices in our self-expression. We can embrace a juvenile version of femininity: pink, twee, and  less sexually objectified. The price is the boundless ire of other women, who know that their preferred strategy for survival under kyriarchical capitalism makes them better than us.

Or we can embrace mature femininity, the illusion of choice, sex positivity, and deal with objectification: in contrast to the Jezebel article, misogynists are still perfectly able to indulge in woman hate whether or not women are “adult” or not. A glance at any popular internet forum, or indeed the comments section of almost any media article written by a woman proves that.

Our final choice is a queer androgyny that is becoming increasingly masculinist in its appearance, language, and outlook. For those committed to abolishing patriarchy, none of these offer any meaningful choice at all. We can mix and match to our hearts content, yet no simple combination of gendered behaviour will make the bars around us fall away.

The Lie of Iceland – and what it might mean for the UK

Iceland has the solution to the banking crisis, or so I keep reading on Twitter. It’s true that, unlike many other countries, Iceland has actually arrested some bankers. Still, of the four government ministers implicated in the Special Investigation Commission’s “Truth Report”, only one is being tried. In a country where family ties are strong and in which government ministers are frequently passed in the street, it’s impossible to have a catastrophe on the scale of the banking crisis without someone carrying responsibility. Icelanders talk openly about the rich, responsible for the crisis, many of whom have now fled the country completely.

It’s worth highlighting the inconsistencies in the media account. It’s often said that the banks were “allowed to fail”, yet a State Department cable released by Wikileaks clearly calls Icelandic government intervention a “bailout”. One of the three banks involved remains publicly owned, while the other two are now largely owned by anonymous foreign investors.

The way in which successive Icelandic governments have dealt with the crash is illustrative. The Icelandic Krona was saved from complete decimation by means of an IMF-agreed refloatation together with currency restrictions. Still, Iceland didn’t go crawling to the IMF, cap in hand: talks were held with Russia over a currency deal, and it seems unlikely that the issue hasn’t been discussed with China, too. This is hardly without precedent: while Iceland hosted a US base at Keflavik until 2006, Cold War talk of switching sides to Russia was a useful negotiating tactic. It seems to have worked in the case of the crash, with the IMF deal being infinitely less harsh than the “structural adjustments” often imposed on the global south.

Iceland has also dealt with its debts advantageously, at least up to the present. The money owed after the Icesave crash may soon see repayment, as prospects of a good deal on the Iceland food chain are now much better. Even if frozen food doesn’t pay off all the debt, there will be years more to find a solution before the European Court renders a judgement.

While Iceland’s outgoings look stable, the same can’t be said about her assets. While Naomi Klein initially bought in to the heroic story of Iceland resisting the IMF, the current austerity and sale of Iceland’s assets could come straight from her account of the neoliberal shock doctrine. Before the crash, almost all businesses in Iceland were owned by Icelanders. Now the foreign-owned aluminium industry is swiftly growing, and debate over use or sale of land continues. When you follow the money, what emerges isn’t so much the story of the lone plucky Viking but a country which has had much of its own “rich”, it’s own ruling class deposed in favour of the rich from abroad, and which now only awaits the lifting of the currency restrictions to lie open to foreign capital.

It is worth emphasising the scale of resistance to land exploitation in Iceland. In 1970, opposition to a large dam project was so strong that farmers dynamited a smaller dam in warning. Iceland has always had a strong rural conservative element, and this allied to environmental concerns has made Iceland a tough nut to crack. It is only after the crash, and the threat to the standard of healthcare and education, that Iceland has come to accept the current need to court foreign investment which it is now convinced that it needs.

Since the crash, levels of private debt have soared, particularly levels of mortgage debt, due to the effect of the crash and refloatation of the Krona on mortgage indices. While the current left-wing government largely holds repossessions in moratorium, it seems clear that, just like in the rest of Europe, the banks’ private debt has been socialised. Right now there is no alternative to neoliberalism, and there is no escape: though more Icelanders have emigrated than at any time since 1887, a few have even gone directly to serve as soldiers for Norway in Afghanistan.

There is hope in Iceland. The swiftly-occurring ousting of Haarde’s 2008 government put down roots, and while things are now quieter there is much scope for future co-operation between broadly nationalist, home-owning, environmentalist and left-wing groups. Most ongoing protest in Iceland centres around the issue of mortgage debt, yet the lack of trust in government and demonstration of the power of protest shows the potential for a dual-power situation to arise. In the Europe of 2011, such movements are largely concentrated in the European South, yet Iceland shows that there is yet hope for the North, though perhaps in some unexpected places.

Iceland’s geopolitical position is different from that of the UK, just as its economic and sociological position is different. Iceland drifted into being a Norwegian client since well before vassalisation in 1262, and since then it has been a Danish protectorate, owned (briefly) by a Danish pirate operating from Barbary, (briefly) by a Danish adventurer, been occupied  by the UK during WWII and afterwards hosting a US base. Iceland knows very well how international conditions can swiftly change.  However, like pre-crash Iceland, the UK economy is strongly reliant on its financial sector, the UK parliamentary left and right are both firmly neoliberal, and Cameron & Osborne have been making some particularly poor decisions of late.

Iceland’s leading professor of economics observes that “we need to know how to read the warning signals. We need to know how to count the cranes”. It may be worth taking a look out at the London skyline – and learning what we can from Iceland now.