First, an Emotive Post about Ft. Hood.

I don’t want to make this all about me, but the hatred spilling out of this incident is making me frightened.

Back when the Virginia Tech shooting happened (it was the 16th) I was reading the paper the morning after (the 17th, my birthday) and I had a woman question my ethnicity because she thought I was Korean. And it was really hurtful and fucking terrifying because the next few days I was worried I’d get my ass kicked for looking Asian.

Yesterday on campus I heard some guys talking about how they wished they could give those “Muslims” some “payback”. Now I’m seeing all this hatred of Muslims pop up, I’m intensely worried for my classmate, D, who is Muslim and of Lebanese heritage. She’s spoken about being harassed at the community college I live next to for being Muslim, when she studied there, and I’m worried for her safety.

I’m going to talk to her tomorrow in sculpture class and tell her if she’s feeling scared, that I’ll walk her to her ride, since we share two studio classes. I have pepper spray and I know that I can at least buy enough time for her to call police if assholes try to mess with her.

But I also feel like this is a goddamn band-aid. It’s not going to change the ignorance and malice. It will help D be safer while I am with her, but it’s not going to make things safer for her in the long run.

Hell, if some future spree shooter was Chinese, then I’d get crap for being Chinese, and the thought of having to deal with the kind of shit my Muslim friends do, for being Chinese, pisses me the fuck off and also terrifies me.

And that’s what makes me feel helpless about this situation. I want to help, and the only concrete thing I can do is a very little thing in the grand scheme – I can walk my friend to her ride and make sure she gets there safe, and I can listen if she has concerns, and help her talk to campus security.

But that’s not enough. I want to try and teach people that folks aren’t necessarily evil because of their differing ways, that I lived peacefully with neighbors of all religions and stripes in Singapore, and I don’t know how to get the fucking message out there. Or even if they will listen. Or if I’ll get my ass kicked if I try.

I’m such a fucking coward. This incident has me in tears from time to time trying to figure out what the hell to do. I just want to leave the world in a better place than when I entered it, but I don’t know what to do any more.

-Mel

PS: WGS-oriented analysis of the situation later, when I’m more awake and less teary-eyed.

[In The World] My Uterus Makes Me Uninsurable?!

From the New York Times: Some insurance companies are treating being female as some kind of preexisting condition. Women who have had previous C-sections are being denied insurance unless they get their tubes tied.

The reasoning goes: a woman of child-bearing age may have a child, which is a risky situation. If she has had a C-section prior to said pregnancy, she will likely require another C-section as there is a minor chance of uterine rupture with a vaginal birth.

So, if a woman has had children via C-section, the company is not going to insure her because her uterus is a pre-existing condition.

Moreover, in other health insurance news, rape victims who wish to take antiretroviral medications preventatively (so they don’t catch AIDS from their rapists) get dropped by their insurance companies. (Note: United Health is the company in both news articles. Surprise surprise.)

This is making me feel that being female in as of itself is a pre-existing condition. While there are men out there who have indeed been sexually assaulted, RAINN’s statistics state that 1 in 6 women will be sexually assaulted over their lifetime, compared to 1 in 33 men. That’s five times the women compared to men. (A tangent on this: some states charge rape victims thousands of dollars for the processing of the DNA-evidence collecting rape kit. I kid you not.)

Moreover, until interesting advances in medical technology have been made, women are still the only ones who can give birth (save for male seahorses – go seahorses!).

So being female is getting to be awfully expensive nowadays. One has to worry about sexual assault, about getting STDs from said assaults, about insurance dropping us like hot potatoes if we try to prevent said STDs, and should we get pregnant from the rape, we’re not having our abortions covered by the insurance companies.

Oh, and if we decide to keep the child and give it up for adoption and require a C-section to birth it, then we’re pretty much uninsurable unless we go get sterilized. You know, maybe that whole “hatched out of cabbage patches” thing would have been a better idea.

Wombs: proof that if there is an intelligent creator out there, that he’s a misogynist too.

[In The World] Post Of Incendiary Rage Number 1.

I’ve a couple things to be really annoyed about, and there may be angry words thrown around. I’ll try not to use four-letter words, but my invective may be creative and emphatic. Readers, sit tight and keep a good hold of your “Jesus Christ handles” (those things in a car that you cling on to when your driver does something that makes you go “JESUS CHRIST!”).

Here I go.

Yesterday, I attended the UNCG-held Autumn Moon festival, ostensibly for the enjoyment of visitors. Okay, my mental expectations went like this: “So it’s a week late according to the Chinese lunar calendar, but maybe I’ll get to hang out with other students of Asian origin and have mooncakes.”

Bzzzt. Mel was wrong. Mel was very wrong. Mel regrets being wrong.

Yesterday afternoon, I showed up to an exercise that felt as though it was geared to turn any Asian student showing up into a human zoo exhibit.

In the front was a calligraphy demonstration, which was actually fine for the mooncake festival on account of its connection to the poets and literati of feudal China. There was also an origami demonstration, however. Whatever origami has to do with a predominantly Chinese and Vietnamese festival, I don’t know.

There was also supposed to be a yukata-wearing demonstration, which also had nothing to do with the cultural origins of the autumn festival. (Nice yukata, though.)

The presentation was horrible. A Chinese professor rounded up some of his students and had them sing various little ditties, and we were informed that various schools from the area would be coming over to partake of the celebration.

That was about when I got uncomfortable and left.

I’d wanted to show up to a space where I could talk with like-minded people about missing home, and instead I got the distinct feeling that the school was basically luring me there with the offer of mooncake and then showing me off as a token model Asian student. “Look at our diversity! Check out their curious customs!”

If it doesn’t quite make sense to an American reader, imagine going off to a far-off Asian country and having to miss the Fourth of July several years in a row. Your foreign college tells you that it’s going to set up a Fourth of July celebration and you show up expecting a grill and hot dogs and burgers.

You show up and they have some warmed vienna sausages from a can and canned corned beef in little buns instead of burgers, and then you go to an uncomfortable presentation where they talk about Bastille Day and that this is how it’s celebrated in the generic West.

It’s not my job to be anyone’s model Asian person. I’ll gladly enlighten someone if there’s a question they have or something they want to know, but it’s not my responsibility to be a walking stereotype 24/7. I’m a lot more complex and interesting than some buck-toothed, squinty-eyed caricature that will show up kow-towing for the little scraps of social acceptance Massa White Man is giving me.

Adding a level of ridiculousness to this farce of a “cultural activity” is the fact that this was organized by the school’s International Relations office. You know, the folks who are currently handling the new Asian studies major.

If this is the amount of cultural sensitivity they’re displaying, I suspect that the school’s international studies/Asian studies majors may accidentally start a few diplomatic standoffs in the future.

- Mel

PS: Next, lemme catch my breath before I pen a rant about how PepsiCo treats women like some kind of Sexual Pokemon.

[In The World] Yaoi: Sauce for the Gander?

In my last In the World entry I mentioned the existence of Japanese comic books with homoerotic content. Japanese comic books in general are called manga, and the genre of pretty young men making out with each other or shagging is generally called shonen-ai (Japanese for boy love) or yaoi (Japanese acronym for plotless smut, basically) depending on how visually graphic the contents are.

Shonen-ai tends to be more concerned with the romantic aspect of the relationship and tends not to be very graphic. Yaoi, on the other hand, tends to be fairly pornographic. Both of these genres are aimed (some might say oddly enough) at female readers.

I’m sure the Internet has already enlightened most of the people in this WGS 250 class on the heterosexual male fascination with girl-on-girl pornography. As a result, I’m fairly sure that the general response to the existence of shonen-ai and yaoi would range from “So what?” to “Well, guys are doing it too,” to “That’s hot.”

Personally I quite like the visual conventions of the two genres but I’m not really sure I like the subtext at all. Visually both genres tend to be very similar, with the stylization typical of manga. Male characters tend to be highly feminized, with slender, willowy builds and androgynous features. Depending on the artist, genitalia may either be concealed via clever posing and composition, depicted as vague, glowing cones of light or drawn in glorious detail. An attempt at self-censorship may sometimes be made using either inverted color bars or very fine digital-style mosiac.

Subtextually, however, both shonen-ai and yaoi tend to further a heteronormative sort of point of view. The male partners are almost always categorized as seme, that is, the “top”, or uke for the “bottom”. These roles tend to be fairly stratified, and in a certain sense, the seme often initiates the uke into the realm of sexual experience. Replace the seme with “male” and the uke with “female” and you see what I mean by this.

While I tend to find such genre conventions somewhat trite and stereotyped, my real objections stem from the tendency of other fans towards the romanticization of non-consensual sexual activity. If you replaced the uke character with any female protagonist from a bodice-ripping romance novel or a seamy potboiler, the stories would not scan any differently. Yet, the reactions are markedly different.

If a story about how a young woman is forcibly initiated into kinky sex is unacceptable and most definitely not-feminist in intention, then why is it so okay for younger female readers to actively enjoy reading comics where a male character is dominated, often against his will, by a rapacious sexual partner?

I suspect that this is because using a male stand-in for the passive partner makes such sexual content feel safer for a reader who might find the fantasy of domination thrilling, without having it come too close to the potential reality of relationship abuse and date rape. There is probably also the transgressive aspect of watching a male character – someone in charge of his own sexuality by most societal norms – being made into the passive partner as the status quo expects of women.

My problem with this, however, is that yaoi and shonen-ai can lead to the objectification of gay and bisexual men, as well as presenting inaccurate ideas of their relationships. As a queer individual with a female body, I find a lot of male-oriented “lesbian” pornography laughable. The women in those videos do not make love like I would with a woman, and I would certainly not let those three-inch manicured nails near my tender bits.

Similarly I have had gay and bisexual male acquaintances complain of the unhealthy image yaoi and shonen-ai presents to impressionable females who think they’re being queer-friendly just because they read comics with boys kissing each other in them. That’s about as queer-friendly, sadly, as the average copy of “SORORITY SISTERS GONE WILD” (that is, not at all, and in fact, rather insulting).

Personally I can’t say I object to yaoi (or its English counterpart, slash) in any way at all, as long as folks understand that this stuff resides strictly in the realm of fantasy. While most of it fails to appeal to me on any but the most superficial level due to the unrealistic relationships portrayed within, I’m not the kind of person who goes around telling people what they shouldn’t read.

I’d appreciate a greater level of awareness in the fandom in general, however, especially when it comes to the more pernicious aspects of heteronormativity disguising themselves as genre conventions. If glorifying non-consensual sex is wrong when the victim is a woman, it should be equally wrong when the victim is male. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and inflicting what we (feminists) stand up against upon male characters doesn’t make things equal, it just makes us as bad as the folks who think such things are right.

All that said and done, I might actually one day write and draw a comic utilizing the visual conventions of the genre without bringing in the heterocentric gender roles normally associated with it, if only because sitting here and complaining about what I don’t like isn’t going to get as much done as just rolling my sleeves up and doing what I want done.

[In The World] The Internet Is For Porn! (Or: Feminism and Pornography)

I’m a bit backlogged on these In The World entries due to some psych issues, but hopefully things will be sorted out now I have access to medication again.

In this entry I want to wrestle with the specter of pornography. One of the sentiments I keep running into with regards to feminism is that porn is bad, exploitative and degrading to women.

I have some personal mixed feelings about pornography thanks to my abusive upbringing, but I can’t help but feel that this is a pretty broad brush to be tarring an entire genre of work with. While most mainstream pornography is, in fact, quite exploitative and degrading (not to mention tasteless and devoid of any artistic value whatsoever), I know of pornography that at least encompasses a somewhat less trashy view of the individuals performing.

Then there’s the semantics of quality pornography being classed as “erotica”, and the rest of it being just plain porn, which I feel is just a quibble. You watch it, view it or read it for titillation value, it’s porn. As an artist, I have drawn illustrations with pornographic content despite my personal inability to watch it without needing to pop a Xanax (aforementioned psych issues again). Oddly, the act of creating it frees me up to at least appreciate it for what it is. (I wouldn’t personally presume to call what I did “erotica”. I don’t have that great an opinion of my own work.)

I know of female-gendered individuals who consider mainstream hetero pornography objectifying and disgusting, but who also collect Japanese-styled comics of pretty young men kissing (or shagging) each other. I also have a male-gendered bisexual acquaintance who believes that those comics themselves contain some pretty serious objectification of the male, which will be a topic for another In The World I’ll post some time in the future.

I’ve also personally been burned by the Madonna/whore split when it comes to creating work with sexual content. Apparently according to some individuals, if a woman is involved in drawing pornography, she shouldn’t ever complain about say, a card game glorifying pimp-on-sex-worker violence because she’s just as bad as those individuals she’s taking exception to.

And the thing is, I can’t help but feel that the more strident kinds of anti-pornography sentiment within the feminist movement draws on that double matrix, that “sex is a bad-dirty-thing” sort of thought that I personally despise. I’m fairly sure I can say I’m a sexual being; I’m also fairly sure other women are. So why is it that pornography is bad? A quick search on Good Vibes (link NSFW) shows a good amount of videos directed by women.

While I have not watched those personally, I’m sure those videos would likely contain less objectification and exploitation than mainstream porn. Are those videos, then, still as bad as something you’d watch in a booth somewhere?

With the Internet you can find all manner of videos and images floating around. Do women who partake of pornography help oppress other women, then? Or are they embracing their own sexuality? The answer is different depending on who you ask – hell, depending on the context itself.

As for me, I think I’m going to continue drawing what I want, depending on what I’m thinking. Maybe something even calculated to titillate its viewers. If this makes me a bad woman by other women’s standards, then maybe they should take a long hard look at themselves and ask themselves who the hell they are to tell me what the hell I should do with my own creativity and personal life (and if they’re any better than the mainstream status quo for doing so).

PS: Next will be a scan of the four-panel comics I’m putting up for my Visitor Project and another In The World, about those boy-love-comics that I talked about briefly here.

It’s Been A While.

This blog has been collecting some dust, hasn’t it? This semester, I found out that I needed a blog for Women’s and Gender Studies 250, and so I decided to use this little bit of webspace again.

I’ve also been fortunate enough to acquire a MacBook Pro so I’ll be able to blog from school. Expect more posts, be they for art, sociology homework or other random detritus.

To facilitate the job of my professor, the TA and my fellow students who are also reading blog entries pertaining to WGS 250, I have added three tags and one category. “WGS 250″ is for entries pertaining to the class in general. “Visitor Project” and “In The World” both pertain to the specific projects and entries that they are applied to.

The “Sociology” category will allow individuals wanting to filter the art-talk out to select all my sociology-related posts for reading, without having to trawl through my Design 100 posts.

The Postmortem.

The Green Bean project was one of the hardest things I’d had to do in my life. I tend to be a very private person most of the time.

But when Lee took us out to the Green Bean to write about the space we were going to set our project in, I had a sudden couple PTSD flashbacks. I’m used to having them all the time. My medications help, but sometimes little things can trigger an unwanted memory. It wasn’t so much a rational decision, then, as much as just an urge to try and share with the world the insanity and pain I deal with privately on a daily basis. From then, my Green Bean project was born.

I wanted to give someone insight into an internal world they may never have thought existed. There’s always a slight feeling of vague discomfort when you sit down on a chair still warm from someone else’s body heat, unless they’re your significant other. I wanted to breach the outside space of that table and chair into someone’s thoughts and flesh.

If you’re wondering whether the contents of the monologue are true, I’m sorry, but I will neither confirm nor deny its veracity. All I can say is that whether it’s my life or someone else’s, someone else has likely experienced similar things. One in four women is a sexual assault survivor.

Think on it.

PS: I also did the poster for the class as a whole, painting a bunch of coffee beans wet on wet on some paper for a background image. It’s been manipulated a bit in Photoshop for the finished piece.

This below is what the original coffee bean inky background actually looks like. I quite like the way the wet-on-wet looks, and I might save this piece for some collage work at some future point.

The Green Bean Project

Audio here.

Collage, Missed Classes.

I’d missed several classes due to sickness that was best described as the PLAGUE. For a while I was wondering if I’d contracted the ghost of someone else’s consumption. I lost my voice for several days (making the recording for the Green Bean Project something of a nightmare) and then had a cough that would not go away. My chest was completely stuffed with gunk and snot.

I missed the little outing the class had, making fake pigeons with copies of the Rhino Times (boo, hiss) and drawing chalk outlines in the city, which I regret greatly.

Nevertheless I persisted and prevailed with the Collage project.

Lee’s instructions to us were simple – pick up three books at random from the school library, make a collage that relates somewhat tangentially to the book’s subject matter, and then return the books to the library with the collages still in the books.

Lost-and-found art.

The books I pulled out the shelves after a random search of the art section were these.

I managed to take pictures of my collage postcards before I turned them loose into the great wild beyond. (Well, okay, the loving hands of the librarians.)

This one, residing in a book on anatomy, was a clipping from the medieval “Wound Man” cut up autopsy-style and stitched back shut with bits of sinew.

Doll parts for a sculpture book, and my very own fingerprints on vellum.

This one slipped into a book titled “A House For My Mother”.

I enjoyed the collage project very much – I’m quite a fan of comic artist David Mack, whose work is incredibly loose and fluid for the comic book genre. He likes to work in watercolors and collage on top of his finished drawings, leading to gorgeous, layered images.

I can’t say I’m in any way as good as him, but I tried.

Premade Soulmates

We were asked to bring a premade art object into class the Monday after Spring Break. In short, a “premade” is an item that already exists in the world, without alteration or additional mark-making to make it arty.

I brought two things – a large sand dollar, and a fresh shed from my pet corn snake. The shed skin eventually won out as the most interesting item, and so I brought it with me to the Weatherspoon Art Museum on Lee’s directions, where I tried to find a visual soulmate to it.

The snake skin was perfect in every detail, down to the tiny scales at the end of the tail, and the scales covering the eye. It was shaped like my snakelet perfectly, as though it was a stocking he had taken off. (Which in a sense, it was.)

With that in mind, I wandered through the current collection looking for a piece that fit, and eventually found one.

The piece I was attracted to was “Untitled (White Books)” by Stella Waitzkin, a sculpture of books, cast in wax, plaster and resin.

Why so?

A snake skin is like a molding taken of the snake. It shows you every detail of the snake, but it is not alive. It lies there, the life and essence of the snake having gone somewhere else. Similarly, those casts of books showed us the outsides of those books; the form and shape of them, but not their contents. We would never be able to take those books off the shelf and read them.

A hollow outside, and a solid inside, and they somehow dovetail as two parts of the same sentiment. At least, that’s what drove me to consider that sculpture my snake skin’s symbolic soulmate.