Essays from Yes Means Yes
All these are from Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power & a World Without Rape, edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, and published by Seal Press.
Nota bene: Seal Press. Feministing. One of the essays (white-authored, not discussed below) heavily cites Amanda Marcotte's It's a Jungle Out There.
Speaking only for myself: I believe that Colonize This! is important enough that, at most, Seal's publications should only be selectively boycotted -- i.e., I'll buy Seal Press books that feature significant representation of women of color. Re the ciscentrism boycott, that hit after this book was already in my hands. Even so, I'm still loathe to direct people away from this book because of the freakin' awesome essay by trans femme Cedar/Hazel Troost, which deconstructs ciscentric and ableist notions of implied degrees of consent. (Zie isn't the only trans essayist in the collection, but that essay particularly wowed me.) The heavy citing of Jungle just plain pisses me off, especially since it was in an essay that I otherwise loved.
2. "A Woman's Worth," Javacia N. Harris
3. "Queering Black Female Heterosexuality," Kimberly Springer
4. "What It Feels Like When It Finally Comes: Surviving Incest in Real Life," Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (brownstargirl!)
5. "Invasion of Space by a Female," Coco Fusco
6. "Trial By Media: Black Female Lasciviousness and the Question of Consent", Samhita Mukhopadhyay
7. "The Not-Rape Epidemic," Latoya Peterson
8. "Killing Misogyny: A personal Story of Love, Violence, and Strategies for Survival", Cristina Meztli Tzintzun
9. "When Pregnancy is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will be Pregnant," Tiloma Jayasignhe
10. "Who're You Calling a Whore? A Conversation with Three Sex Workers on Sexuality, Empowerment, and the Industry," Susan Lopez, Mariko Passion, Saundra
2. "A Woman's Worth," Javacia N. Harris
Fairly straightforward deconstruction of the attempt to market the Pussycat Dolls and other objectified, male-gaze images of women as "feminist" and "empowering" for women. (Hint: not so much.) I liked the acknowledgement of the complicating factor that women themselves do consume these same images, often because they do find aspects of those images empowering. But even so, how should one regard the disempowering aspects, which come part and parcel with the empowering ones?
3. "Queering Black Female Heterosexuality," Kimberly Springer
Springer lays out the history of negative constructions of straight black women's sexuality, and the apparent choice of contemporary black women between being either a "proper Black Lady" -- a woman with effectively no visible sexuality -- or a jezebel. Springer advocates looking to the LGBT movement for a solution ("taking something back" from it, as the LGBT movement took some of its language and inspiration from the Black Civil Rights movement): instead of accepting the idea that black women's sexuality is a pathology, black women should adopt the LGBT movement's "pride" language and refuse to accept the frame that their sexuality is negative. Springer explains:Queering black female sexuality would mean straight black women need to:
Springer goes on to expand these ideas further, as well as address intersectionality and privilege issues, pointing out that she is not advocating the political lesbianism of the 1970s, and that straight black women need to be cognizant of their straight privilege in adopting the language and ideas of queerness. Additionally, even as she recommends that both straight black women and white queers should be looking to the words of black lesbians and gay men -- Audre Lorde, Keith Boykin -- we should not be reducing said individuals to their sexualities, either. Springer then gives some examples of black women who are already taking risks to express their sexuality: Sarah Jones' three-year battle with the FCC over censorship of Your Revolution (Will Not Take Place Between These Thighs) and Renee Cox standing up against Rudolph Guiliani's attempted censorship of her artwork, Yo Mama's Last Supper.
4. "What It Feels Like When It Finally Comes: Surviving Incest in Real Life," Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (brownstargirl!)
An excerpt:Ten years later, I'm thirty-two, being paid to perform my one-woman show, a lightweight number about long-term healing from incest, to brilliant and freaked-out eighteen-year-old women of color at Sarah Lawerence. I am cranky and tired and miss my girlfriend. At the pub that doesn't have alcohol (it's a cafeteria), the brilliant and freaked-out eighteen-year-old women of color are asking me burning questions. Questions like, "Can you talk about healing? Like, what did you do?"
And I realize that this is the flipside of being finally grown. Looking at them, I see how, at thirty-two, I can't even play that I'm a youth anymore. I have a responsibilty to share what I know. But what I know is hard to package.
5. "Invasion of Space by a Female," Coco Fusco
An excerpt from the performance project and book, A Field Guide for Female Interrogators.
When the Abu Grahib photos came out, I remember being surprised by the prevalence of female soldiers in them, and was unable to decide if 1) I was just out of touch with the prevalence of women in the U.S. military (and how that prevalence would concentrate in non-combat jobs, such as prisons), or 2) there was something more going on there. And then I put it aside, because I didn't have the first idea of how to find out.
Coco Fusco, on the other hand, found out, even going through interrogator training herself. In this book and art project, she discusses the way the military uses women to perpetrate sexual abuse on prisoners, with Fusco placing that within the context of how the military uses sexual violence against its own female soldiers. (In that context, there are some especially disturbing passages about how the women performing these interrogations don't see sexual abuse against prisoners as wrong, and see themselves as deficient for being squeamish and unable to perform the abuse properly.)
I think this treatment suffers for being an excerpt, unfortunately (f'rex, it took me a long time to figure out where Fusco was going), but I'm definitely going to be checking out the book.
6. "Trial By Media: Black Female Lasciviousness and the Question of Consent", Samhita Mukhopadhyay
Analysis of the media narratives around the Duke rape case. We've got everything here from "black women are too sexual to be able to withhold consent, and thus can't be raped," to "white men don't rape black women," with detours through "strippers and other sex workers can't be raped," "strippers and other sex workers are lying whores and can't be trusted," "black women are just seducers out to entrap white men," and "won't anyone think of the young men whose lives may be ruined by all this?"
(BTW, if you've got the guts to wade into the archived discussion for the Wikipedia talk pages on the Duke rape case -- I'M SO NOT LINKING TO THAT CRAP -- all of these narratives are being re-enacted there. Including that thing about "if she can't prove she was raped, then she was obviously lying." NPV, MY ASS.)
Special bonus points for the white DA who prosecuted this for political gain, while women of color have had to bear the brunt of the case's backfiring. Also deserving of a bonus-points "honorable" mention: Fox news for televising the woman's name, address, and car registration -- way to make sure that the cost of not winning a rape case is so high that you daren't ever risk bringing one.
7. "The Not-Rape Epidemic," Latoya Peterson
An awesome personal account of the popular discourse's focus on RAPE as the only worth-mentioning type of violence against women, and how it leaves women -- especially young women -- completely unequipped to speak about sexual coercion and assault that doesn't meet one's internalized stranger-in-the-bushes definition of rape. And that when one does try to verbalize it, one's pre-emptive "I'm not calling it rape" disclaimer trumps the assertion of the assault itself.
(I wish this article didn't resonate with me. And that it didn't resonate with all the other women testifying that it resonates with them.)
You can also read the essay on Racialicious: The Not-Rape Epidemic. Trigger warnings, obviously. But if you can deal with reading it, I absolutely recommend it.
8. "Killing Misogyny: A personal Story of Love, Violence, and Strategies for Survival", Cristina Meztli Tzintzun
This is a follow-up to Tzintzun's essay in Colonize This! written when she was nineteen, wherein she detailed the abuse that her mother lived through from her white husband, and declared her own status as a radical womon of color and her intent to resist patriarchy being lived out on her body as it was lived out on her mother's.
In this essay, written in her mid-late twenties, Tzintzun writes about her shame and frustration to have ended up in a relationship with an abusive white professor -- which is what her abusive father had been -- and repeatedly going back to him, even after violence, STDs, and cheating with his students. I found this essay brutal to read, especially the parts about how she allowed her familiarity with radical theory to be a wedge between her and other women in her violence survivors support group, and how her knowledge of radical theory wasn't enough to prevent her living these things.
It's very worth reading -- the difference between what you know and what you do, especially in matters surrounded by societal shame, can be monstrously enormous, and I don't think there's enough acknowledgement that knowing what to do doesn't mean that you can actually do it. But I'm not going to say that it's an easy read, either.
9. "When Pregnancy is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will be Pregnant," Tiloma Jayasignhe
An itemization of how the U.S. criminal justice system is used to control and limit the fertility of poor women and women of color. The article mainly focuses on the conflation of drug use during pregnancy with child abuse (propaganda courtesy of the war on drugs!), but there are also doozies in here about courts making birth control a term of parole for forgery. If you aren't fully fluent with these ideas from elsewhere, this is a must-read.
10. "Who're You Calling a Whore? A Conversation with Three Sex Workers on Sexuality, Empowerment, and the Industry," Susan Lopez, Mariko Passion, Saundra
There is so much in here that I couldn't possibly summarize. I was especially impressed with their take on the virgin/whore dichotomy, and that the "whore stigma" is literally -- not metaphorically -- a stigma against sex workers. Additionally, If one removes the stigma against sex workers, you end up disarming the stigma's ability to control any woman, whether that woman is a sex worker or not. Conversely, the only way to disarm that stigma against women who aren't sex-workers, is to disarm that stigma against sex-workers themselves -- in fact, centralizing sex workers is likely to be a fastest and most effective way to defang that stigma.
Nota bene: Seal Press. Feministing. One of the essays (white-authored, not discussed below) heavily cites Amanda Marcotte's It's a Jungle Out There.
Speaking only for myself: I believe that Colonize This! is important enough that, at most, Seal's publications should only be selectively boycotted -- i.e., I'll buy Seal Press books that feature significant representation of women of color. Re the ciscentrism boycott, that hit after this book was already in my hands. Even so, I'm still loathe to direct people away from this book because of the freakin' awesome essay by trans femme Cedar/Hazel Troost, which deconstructs ciscentric and ableist notions of implied degrees of consent. (Zie isn't the only trans essayist in the collection, but that essay particularly wowed me.) The heavy citing of Jungle just plain pisses me off, especially since it was in an essay that I otherwise loved.
2. "A Woman's Worth," Javacia N. Harris
3. "Queering Black Female Heterosexuality," Kimberly Springer
4. "What It Feels Like When It Finally Comes: Surviving Incest in Real Life," Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (brownstargirl!)
5. "Invasion of Space by a Female," Coco Fusco
6. "Trial By Media: Black Female Lasciviousness and the Question of Consent", Samhita Mukhopadhyay
7. "The Not-Rape Epidemic," Latoya Peterson
8. "Killing Misogyny: A personal Story of Love, Violence, and Strategies for Survival", Cristina Meztli Tzintzun
9. "When Pregnancy is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will be Pregnant," Tiloma Jayasignhe
10. "Who're You Calling a Whore? A Conversation with Three Sex Workers on Sexuality, Empowerment, and the Industry," Susan Lopez, Mariko Passion, Saundra
2. "A Woman's Worth," Javacia N. Harris
Fairly straightforward deconstruction of the attempt to market the Pussycat Dolls and other objectified, male-gaze images of women as "feminist" and "empowering" for women. (Hint: not so much.) I liked the acknowledgement of the complicating factor that women themselves do consume these same images, often because they do find aspects of those images empowering. But even so, how should one regard the disempowering aspects, which come part and parcel with the empowering ones?
3. "Queering Black Female Heterosexuality," Kimberly Springer
Springer lays out the history of negative constructions of straight black women's sexuality, and the apparent choice of contemporary black women between being either a "proper Black Lady" -- a woman with effectively no visible sexuality -- or a jezebel. Springer advocates looking to the LGBT movement for a solution ("taking something back" from it, as the LGBT movement took some of its language and inspiration from the Black Civil Rights movement): instead of accepting the idea that black women's sexuality is a pathology, black women should adopt the LGBT movement's "pride" language and refuse to accept the frame that their sexuality is negative. Springer explains:Queering black female sexuality would mean straight black women need to:
- Come out as black women who enjoy sex and find it pleasurable.
- Protest the stereotypes of black female sexuality that do not reflect our experience.
- Allow all black women -- across class, sexual orientation, and physical ability -- to express what we enjoy.
- Know the difference between making love and fucking -- and be willing to express our desires for both despite what the news, music videos, social mores, or any other source says we should want.
- Know what it is to play with sexuality. What turns us on? Is it something taboo? Does our playfulness come from within?
- Know that our bodies are our own -- our bodies do not belong to the church, the state, our parents, our lovers, our husbands, and certainly not Black Entertainment Television (BET).
Springer goes on to expand these ideas further, as well as address intersectionality and privilege issues, pointing out that she is not advocating the political lesbianism of the 1970s, and that straight black women need to be cognizant of their straight privilege in adopting the language and ideas of queerness. Additionally, even as she recommends that both straight black women and white queers should be looking to the words of black lesbians and gay men -- Audre Lorde, Keith Boykin -- we should not be reducing said individuals to their sexualities, either. Springer then gives some examples of black women who are already taking risks to express their sexuality: Sarah Jones' three-year battle with the FCC over censorship of Your Revolution (Will Not Take Place Between These Thighs) and Renee Cox standing up against Rudolph Guiliani's attempted censorship of her artwork, Yo Mama's Last Supper.
4. "What It Feels Like When It Finally Comes: Surviving Incest in Real Life," Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (brownstargirl!)
An excerpt:Ten years later, I'm thirty-two, being paid to perform my one-woman show, a lightweight number about long-term healing from incest, to brilliant and freaked-out eighteen-year-old women of color at Sarah Lawerence. I am cranky and tired and miss my girlfriend. At the pub that doesn't have alcohol (it's a cafeteria), the brilliant and freaked-out eighteen-year-old women of color are asking me burning questions. Questions like, "Can you talk about healing? Like, what did you do?"
And I realize that this is the flipside of being finally grown. Looking at them, I see how, at thirty-two, I can't even play that I'm a youth anymore. I have a responsibilty to share what I know. But what I know is hard to package.
5. "Invasion of Space by a Female," Coco Fusco
An excerpt from the performance project and book, A Field Guide for Female Interrogators.
When the Abu Grahib photos came out, I remember being surprised by the prevalence of female soldiers in them, and was unable to decide if 1) I was just out of touch with the prevalence of women in the U.S. military (and how that prevalence would concentrate in non-combat jobs, such as prisons), or 2) there was something more going on there. And then I put it aside, because I didn't have the first idea of how to find out.
Coco Fusco, on the other hand, found out, even going through interrogator training herself. In this book and art project, she discusses the way the military uses women to perpetrate sexual abuse on prisoners, with Fusco placing that within the context of how the military uses sexual violence against its own female soldiers. (In that context, there are some especially disturbing passages about how the women performing these interrogations don't see sexual abuse against prisoners as wrong, and see themselves as deficient for being squeamish and unable to perform the abuse properly.)
I think this treatment suffers for being an excerpt, unfortunately (f'rex, it took me a long time to figure out where Fusco was going), but I'm definitely going to be checking out the book.
6. "Trial By Media: Black Female Lasciviousness and the Question of Consent", Samhita Mukhopadhyay
Analysis of the media narratives around the Duke rape case. We've got everything here from "black women are too sexual to be able to withhold consent, and thus can't be raped," to "white men don't rape black women," with detours through "strippers and other sex workers can't be raped," "strippers and other sex workers are lying whores and can't be trusted," "black women are just seducers out to entrap white men," and "won't anyone think of the young men whose lives may be ruined by all this?"
(BTW, if you've got the guts to wade into the archived discussion for the Wikipedia talk pages on the Duke rape case -- I'M SO NOT LINKING TO THAT CRAP -- all of these narratives are being re-enacted there. Including that thing about "if she can't prove she was raped, then she was obviously lying." NPV, MY ASS.)
Special bonus points for the white DA who prosecuted this for political gain, while women of color have had to bear the brunt of the case's backfiring. Also deserving of a bonus-points "honorable" mention: Fox news for televising the woman's name, address, and car registration -- way to make sure that the cost of not winning a rape case is so high that you daren't ever risk bringing one.
7. "The Not-Rape Epidemic," Latoya Peterson
An awesome personal account of the popular discourse's focus on RAPE as the only worth-mentioning type of violence against women, and how it leaves women -- especially young women -- completely unequipped to speak about sexual coercion and assault that doesn't meet one's internalized stranger-in-the-bushes definition of rape. And that when one does try to verbalize it, one's pre-emptive "I'm not calling it rape" disclaimer trumps the assertion of the assault itself.
(I wish this article didn't resonate with me. And that it didn't resonate with all the other women testifying that it resonates with them.)
You can also read the essay on Racialicious: The Not-Rape Epidemic. Trigger warnings, obviously. But if you can deal with reading it, I absolutely recommend it.
8. "Killing Misogyny: A personal Story of Love, Violence, and Strategies for Survival", Cristina Meztli Tzintzun
This is a follow-up to Tzintzun's essay in Colonize This! written when she was nineteen, wherein she detailed the abuse that her mother lived through from her white husband, and declared her own status as a radical womon of color and her intent to resist patriarchy being lived out on her body as it was lived out on her mother's.
In this essay, written in her mid-late twenties, Tzintzun writes about her shame and frustration to have ended up in a relationship with an abusive white professor -- which is what her abusive father had been -- and repeatedly going back to him, even after violence, STDs, and cheating with his students. I found this essay brutal to read, especially the parts about how she allowed her familiarity with radical theory to be a wedge between her and other women in her violence survivors support group, and how her knowledge of radical theory wasn't enough to prevent her living these things.
It's very worth reading -- the difference between what you know and what you do, especially in matters surrounded by societal shame, can be monstrously enormous, and I don't think there's enough acknowledgement that knowing what to do doesn't mean that you can actually do it. But I'm not going to say that it's an easy read, either.
9. "When Pregnancy is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will be Pregnant," Tiloma Jayasignhe
An itemization of how the U.S. criminal justice system is used to control and limit the fertility of poor women and women of color. The article mainly focuses on the conflation of drug use during pregnancy with child abuse (propaganda courtesy of the war on drugs!), but there are also doozies in here about courts making birth control a term of parole for forgery. If you aren't fully fluent with these ideas from elsewhere, this is a must-read.
10. "Who're You Calling a Whore? A Conversation with Three Sex Workers on Sexuality, Empowerment, and the Industry," Susan Lopez, Mariko Passion, Saundra
There is so much in here that I couldn't possibly summarize. I was especially impressed with their take on the virgin/whore dichotomy, and that the "whore stigma" is literally -- not metaphorically -- a stigma against sex workers. Additionally, If one removes the stigma against sex workers, you end up disarming the stigma's ability to control any woman, whether that woman is a sex worker or not. Conversely, the only way to disarm that stigma against women who aren't sex-workers, is to disarm that stigma against sex-workers themselves -- in fact, centralizing sex workers is likely to be a fastest and most effective way to defang that stigma.