“If we go back to the 19th century, photography was kind of born as a labor-saving device, although we don’t think of it that way. One of my favorite stories, which might be apocryphal — I can’t tell you for sure that this is so, although photographers traded this story for many years. But the way the piece of folklore goes is that during the Civil War era, and a little after, the very earliest photographers would go around with a collection of photographs of people who matched a certain archetype. So they would find the photograph that most closely matched your loved one and you’d buy that because at least there would be representation a little like the person, even if it was the wrong person. And that sounds just incredibly weird to us.”
—Jaron Lanier
June 2013
1 post
May 2013
5 posts
“Sometimes you have to remind people that a critic can mock something, deride it even, and still love it, or at least love parts of it. This is always how I read Meltzer and Bangs on the Doors. In one of his early reviews of them (I forget of which album), Meltzer calls the band (not even Morrison, but the band) “ridiculous” but means it, I’m pretty sure, in a way that is entirely complimentary. Bangs referred to Morrison as a bozo, but also was intensely moved by some of their music; in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, he suggests that “Light My Fire” paved the way for “Gimme Shelter” (an argument I think Greil Marcus picked up in his recent book on the band). One of the trends I find disconcerting in so much music criticism today is that writers seem unwilling to acknowledge the idea that ridiculousness and pretensiousness and buffoonery sometimes don’t prevent great music, and in fact, sometimes lead directly to great music.”
—Scott Woods, “Critics Are Strange”
“In 1997, NBC canceled the sitcom “The Single Guy” after two seasons; it had an audience of 20.1 million people. This month, NBC is on the verge of renewing “Parks and Recreation,” which has an audience of 2.5 million, which tells you everything you need to know about the dwindling viewership for network TV. The highest-rated show this season among 18- to 49-years-olds — the demographic advertisers really care about — is not even a network show: it’s AMC’s “Walking Dead,” a cable show that drew a total of 12.4 million viewers for its recent season finale.”
—Willa Paskin, “Network TV Is Broken. So How Does Shonda Rhimes Keep Making Hits?”
“From the 19th century onward, liberally educated people from a variety of backgrounds have had at least four ways of responding to the onward march of industrial capitalism and state-supported ideology: they can become bourgeois (like most college professors), they can become anarchists (which means dropping out and behaving badly, like Rimbaud, Tzara and the Sex Pistols), they can become aesthetes (like Baudelaire, Wilde, Joyce, Woolf, and all the great modernists), or they can become revolutionary political activists (like Mother Jones, Lenin, Fanon and Malcolm X).”
—James Naremore, Movie Mutations
“
Everything is at once hideous and hilarious, from the gory apparition of the parasitic creature in the bathtub to the zombielike orgy in the swimming pool at the end. [Shivers] neither idealizes nor condemns these transgressive moments of physical violation and orgiastic excess. Rather, it slyly suggests that the bourgeois sexual ‘revolution’ in fact merely reproduces the aggressive, hysterical logic of a commodified competitive society. Transgression is not transcendence.
Cronenberg is thus equally skeptical of “left-Fruedian” visions of personal and social liberation through the lifting of repression, and of right-wing claims that desire must always be repressed because it is inherently evil and disruptive. These positions are, in fact, mirror images of one another. They both posit a soul, an originary human essence—whether good or evil—and ignore the shady complicity that always already contaminates desire with the regulation and repression of desire. Humanist visions of unlimited freedom and conservative visions of original sin (or of inevitable limits) both strive to reject monstrosity, to deny the violent ambivalence of bodily passion. Harmonious utopian projections and anxious defenses of the status quo alike betray a continuing need to idealize, a panic in face of the excesses of the flesh. Both ideologies are trying to transcend the anxiety and insecurity implicit in the state of being a body.
” —Steven Shaviro, “Bodies off Fear: The Films of David Cronenberg”April 2013
3 posts
“Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually consider that they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys, and it is only when they make a tape recording that they realize that boys are dominating the interactions.
Dale Spender, an Australian feminist who has been a strong advocate of female rights in this area, noted that teachers who tried to restore the balance by deliberately ‘favouring’ the girls were astounded to find that despite their efforts they continued to devote more time to the boys in their classrooms. Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time.
In other public contexts, too, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that they are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender explains this as follows:
The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.
In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as ‘too much’ by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts. This may sound outrageous, but think about how you react when precocious children dominate the talk at an adult party. As women begin to make inroads into formerly ‘male’ domains such as business and professional contexts, we should not be surprised to find that their contributions are not always perceived positively or even accurately.” —
Dale Spender, an Australian feminist who has been a strong advocate of female rights in this area, noted that teachers who tried to restore the balance by deliberately ‘favouring’ the girls were astounded to find that despite their efforts they continued to devote more time to the boys in their classrooms. Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time.
In other public contexts, too, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that they are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender explains this as follows:
The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.
In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as ‘too much’ by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts. This may sound outrageous, but think about how you react when precocious children dominate the talk at an adult party. As women begin to make inroads into formerly ‘male’ domains such as business and professional contexts, we should not be surprised to find that their contributions are not always perceived positively or even accurately.” —
“Think about these things, reader. Don’t sigh and turn the page. Think that I have written them and you have read them, and the odds against either of us ever having existed are greater by far than one to all of the atoms in creation.”
—Three Colors: Red, December 1994 (via ebertquotes)
March 2013
2 posts
The shaming of indie R&B
I really like inc.’s album. It’s my favorite album of the year, for whatever that’s worth in early March. It seems like more people feel “eh” (or worse) about it, which I understand — it’s slight by design. But the album has also been swimming upstream in some circles because it’s indie R&B, both literally (it’s on 4AD) and in terms of aesthetics. This, I think, is unfair — but that’s not the real issue.
Creatures of the internet who grew up on pop or R&B or rap have been bred to cast suspicion on our indie rock friends and foes. How open and adventurous are they as listeners? What are their worldviews? Are they SECRET RACISTS? Et cetera. That mindset is not totally without reason, but it’s also not at all disentangled from the infiltration of R&B into indie rock culture.
In fact, of course, there is a direct connection. A decade-plus (nb: I’m confining this discussion to the Pitchfork era, more or less) of the cool kids telling the squares what they ought to like has finally led to what we have now: Indie rock audiences elevating R&B albums to the same level as canonized indie records, indie rock audiences breaking major R&B acts before R&B audiences and indie rockers making their own R&B music.
This is what people wanted, right? Or maybe, it turns out, it’s just what people wanted in theory. Regardless, it’s more than a bit disingenuous to spend years imploring indie audiences to open their ears to R&B only to turn around and shut the doors after R&B has been listened to, loved and internalized to the point where it’s influencing indie music. It’s a cycle of shame where the blame is now being passed off onto the victim.
Which is to say this: if you’re going to cop to fathering the style, it makes you an asshole to abandon the baby.
“In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist. In 1957, neighbors in Levittown, Pa., uniting under the flag of segregation, wrote: “As moral, religious and law-abiding citizens, we feel that we are unprejudiced and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community a closed community.”
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Good, Racist People”
February 2013
9 posts
“The current crop of affluential women artists are not especially positive examples of egalitarian empowerment. The peculiar mix of ambition and self-regard that percolates in late-capitalist culture has given rise to a new role for the female superstar that lies halfway between exploiter and exploited. If they are not stereotyped in the high old-fashioned way, today’s female popstars are targets of a commodification that is more worrying because it is more universal. In previous eras, the female pin-up was exploited by men as a sex object; in the neoliberal period, she has become an infinitely serviceable fashion icon, an eclectic mannequin of lifestyle envy for men and women consumers alike.”
—Alex Niven on Women Make Noise (via @lindsayzoladz)
“Yet until recently the dominant strains of queer theory have tended to privilege the avant-garde. At one point in my life as a scholar of queer culture and theory, I thought the point of queer was to be always ahead of actually existing social possibilities. On this model, it seemed that truly queer queers would dissolve forms, disintegrate identities, level taxonomies, scorn the social, and even repudiate politics altogether (and indeed, there is one wing of queer theory that does privilege this kind of negating work). But this version of “queering” the social text strikes me as somewhat akin to Eve Sedgwick’s notion of paranoid criticism: it’s about having the problem solved ahead of time, about feeling more evolved than one’s context. Now I think the point may be to trail behind actually existing social possibilities: to be interested in the tail end of things, willing to be bathed in the fading light of whatever appears useless. For while queer antiformalism appeals to me on an intellectual level, I find myself emotionally compelled by the not-quite-queer-enough longing for form that turns us backward to prior moments, forward to embarrassing utopias, sideways to forms of being and belonging that seem, on the face of it, completely banal.”
—Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, xiii (via starlit-mire)
“
PITCHFORK. So if there is no difference between popular music and commercial music nowadays, does that mean that there is no space for resistance to commercialism?
TIMOTHY TAYLOR. I think there is: Kids who have a garage band but don’t have any intention of signing with a label, or people who sing in a church choir, are a form of resistance. For another project, I’ve been interviewing indie rock musicians here in L.A., mostly associated with Burger Records. I interviewed one person who doesn’t copyright her music, has a day job, and doesn’t have an interest in trying to make a living as a musician. She told me that her goal is to try to stay in the shadows. So I think the only way to resist capitalism now is not so much to try to overthrow it—I don’t think that’s going to happen—but to do things that capitalism doesn’t care about, or is not interested in. A lot of people who don’t have any interest in making a living at music derive a lot of pleasure from playing or singing, and that pleasure matters.
” —“The Sounds of Capitalism”“We looked at how we had constructed some of our more unusual songs, and a lot of them were made from concrete music, found sounds, and we looked at what we had explored in the past and we were trying not to repeat ourselves, and, well, we’ve done trains; we’ve done machinery. And then I actually said to myself “I realise now that everything that we’ve sampled from the real world – trains, machines, computers, guns, typewriters – they were actually accidental”. The audio that we had sampled was a waste product from the specific design function of whatever it was that we had recorded.
Let me clarify that: a typewriter is designed to type things onto a page, not make a clicking noise when you hit the key. A steam engine is not designed to go ‘chuff chuff’. That’s an audio waste product of the inefficiency of its engine. And as the world has modernised, the accidental audio by-products, waste products, of the things that have become concrete music are going to be less and less because the designers have designed out the waste so that the machinery of the modern world has actually become more silent.”
I trimmed the quote a bit to zoom in on this really interesting point about “audio waste”
I was thinking the other day about how there aren’t songs anymore with found-audio samples from interviews, like “Little Fluffy Clouds.” It was such a thing in the 90s, and now it’s not. What happened? If anything, it’s become easier to find these sorts of things. And I think that’s precisely the problem. Before, these snippets were rare, passed around on cassettes or bought as secondhand records at flea markets. But now, almost any interesting moment from media in the past lives on YouTube, and everyone has access to them. If you put them in a song, the listener hears someone playing a YouTube clip, not the sounds themselves. In the 90s, though, they would be hearing the obscurity, the rarity, the unexpectedness. The clip functioned as a signal of something ephemeral and therefore magic captured and preserved by an audio connoisseur. Now, however, it’s just another banal aspect of everyday life. You might as well put the audio from “David After Dentist” on your electro track. And you can do that, of course - but it will mean something very different now than it did then.
“George Bataille explains that the language of Sade is paradoxical because it is essentially that of a victim. Only the victim can describe torture; the torturer necessarily uses the hypocritical language of established order and power. “As a general rule the torturer does not use the language of the violence exerted by him in the name of an established authority; he uses the language of the authority… The violent man is willing to keep quiet and connives at cheating… Thus Sade’s attitude is diametrically opposed to that of the torturer. When Sade writes he refuses to cheat, but he attributes his own attitude to people who in real life could only have been silent and uses them to make self-contradictory statements to other people.”
—
Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty
I haven’t put all the pieces together, but I was thinking about the Weeknd recently when this passage came to mind. It seems highly relevant to the Weeknd’s aesthetic.
“Whenever a man came onto my bus, he had to drop trou, and I took a Polaroid of him, just to emasculate him and make sure he knew he was in the vagina jungle. That’s what I call my bus.”
—Ke$ha
January 2013
4 posts
Jamieson Cox: I like the Tegan and Sara album as much as the next member of the... →
jamiesoncox.tumblr.com
I like the Tegan and Sara album as much as the next member of the music Twitterati - the first three songs in particular are near perfect - so this isn’t intended as a slight, but I found it interesting: isn’t the narrative surrounding this album basically a poptimist’s dream? Two indie rock…
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“You see, that’s why I really work like a dog, and I worked like a dog all my life. I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation… This transformation of one’s self by one’s own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting?”
—Michel Foucault
"The Critic's Technique in Thirteen Theses" by Walter Benjamin
I. The critic is the strategist in the literary battle.
II. He who cannot take sides should keep silent.
III. The critic has nothing in common with the interpreter of past cultural epochs.
IV. Criticism must talk the language of artists. For the terms of the cenacle are slogans. And only in slogans is the battle-cry heard.
V. “Objectivity” must always be sacrificed to partisanship, if the cause fought for merits this.
VI. Criticism is a moral question. If Goethe misjudged Holderlin and Kleist, Beethoven and Jean Paul, his morality and not his artistic discernment was at fault.
VII. For the critic his colleagues are the higher authority. Not the public. Still less posterity.
VIII. Posterity forgets or acclaims. Only the critic judges in face of the author.
IX. Polemics mean to destroy a book in a few of its sentences. The less it has been studies the better. Only he who can destroy can criticize.
X. Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
XI. Artistic enthusiasm is alien to the critic. In his hand the artwork is the shining sword in the battle of the minds.
XII. The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
XIII. The public must always be proved wrong, yet always feel represented by the critic.
December 2012
12 posts
PORPENTINE: can we analysis the versatile uses of favs →
porpentine.tumblr.com
1) The fav’s obvious use, APPROVAL, GOLD STAR, NICE TWEET
2) When you want to acknowledge others but have no emotional energy, like when you get a lot of replies
3) To graciously signal that a conversation is over, ending on a wordless bloom of vague good will
4) To “spine” down someone’s timeline (coined by @Trilety), when you love so many of their tweets and aren’t ashamed to show it
5) The Crush: when your crush signs offline to go to bed and all you can do is go to their twitter and smittenly fav until you fall asleep
6) To add extra punch to a retweet, “faved and retweeted”, the whole package, “holy shit”, max appreciation
7) favs to comfort someone who is depressed. it can be hard to know what to say. a way to signify, “i’m listening”
8) Subtle social engineering, approval intended to guide their tweets to a better place.
9) To remember something for later—this technique decreases in efficacy if you fav a lot, “favstorm” practitioners beware!!!
10) When something interests you or even turns you on but you’re too anxious to RT it because it would acknowledge you share that interest
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IMPOSSIBLE MANSION: HANDSHAKE WITH MORTALITY →
jchastain.tumblr.com
Which is what it is, and that unnerves the Immortals (with their bodies whole and perfect health and bubble of faux teenage invulnerability inflated to the point that it absorbs their entire lives (attempts,Blobbishly, to absorb everyone else’s, too.))
The prevailing narrative has to be that kink is a corrupt response to trauma, rather than a fairly obvious means of articulating, to one’s self, to one’s partners, what it is to live in a Universe that, by its nature, permits trauma. Beyond its interaction with the social signifiers we’re entrenched in, it examines consciousness itself, the experience of existence as an organism, and the negation and affirmation of each.
Engaging in play with fear, pain, and negation/death violates their sanctity, threatens to dilute their cultural currency in Binary Land (where there is light, and there is dark, and where we have the ability to cast you from the former to the latter at any time.) More directly: the problem with incorporating bondage and “torture” into sexual contexts is the suspicion it casts on our motives for binding and torturing humans at home and abroad. Stop making us feel weird.
“I have never met any kind of Latino who, although he may have claimed his family was very woman-dominated (“mi mamá made all the real decisions”), who did not subscribe to the basic belief that men are better. It is so ordinary a statement as to sound simplistic and I am nearly embarrassed to write it, but that’s the truth in its kernel. Ask, for example, any Chicana mother about her children and she is quick to tell you she loves them all the same, but she doesn’t. The boys are different. Sometimes I sense that she feels this way because she wants to believe that through her mothering, she can develop the kind of man she would have liked to have married, or even have been. That through her son she can get a small taste of male privilege, since without race or class privilege that is all to be had. The daughter can never offer the mother such hope, straddled by the same forces that confine the mother. As a result, the daughter must constantly earn the mother’s love, prove her fidelity to her. The son - he gets her love for free.”
—
Cherríe Moraga
I remember the first time I read something Moraga had written and it really affected me, but this was the first time I read something so impactful, true and close to home that it made me cry.
(via telepathicaffair)
“George Eliot said “the purpose of art is to extend our sympathies” which I think is very beautiful. Kubrick wished all movies were “more daring and more sincere.” A lot of directors today are focusing on what is daring, but are not really focused on what is sincere.”
—James Gray
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“JESSICA HOPPER: There is a lot written about what you look like and wear, people calling you “elfin” and “Rainbow Brite” — essentially treating you like a magical angel child rather than an adult woman.
GRIMES: I think about that. I find it extremely obnoxious. My image seems to be so infantilized and I don’t really know why. It belittles the music. Maybe it’s because my voice is high-pitched. I look at my peers and I’m actually three or four years older than Azealia Banks or Sky Ferreira. I’m 24. I’m not a kid, but my image is very teenaged. Maybe it’s my fault. I was very into K-Pop and J-Pop when I made “Vanessa” and “Oblivion.” Those videos are kind of cutesy. And when I made them, I didn’t even think of that resonating with people. But I can see how it would. The sexual [stigma] is more dangerous than the cute thing. I see a lot of female artists who have a sexual image — it’s almost impossible for them to be taken seriously in a critical sense. And that’s really scary. If you focus too much on development of the visual angle, it could be a detriment to what you’re doing musically.” —From Jessica Hopper’s Grimes interview.
GRIMES: I think about that. I find it extremely obnoxious. My image seems to be so infantilized and I don’t really know why. It belittles the music. Maybe it’s because my voice is high-pitched. I look at my peers and I’m actually three or four years older than Azealia Banks or Sky Ferreira. I’m 24. I’m not a kid, but my image is very teenaged. Maybe it’s my fault. I was very into K-Pop and J-Pop when I made “Vanessa” and “Oblivion.” Those videos are kind of cutesy. And when I made them, I didn’t even think of that resonating with people. But I can see how it would. The sexual [stigma] is more dangerous than the cute thing. I see a lot of female artists who have a sexual image — it’s almost impossible for them to be taken seriously in a critical sense. And that’s really scary. If you focus too much on development of the visual angle, it could be a detriment to what you’re doing musically.” —From Jessica Hopper’s Grimes interview.
November 2012
18 posts
“It’s curious how songs begin, because the origin of the song, every song, has a kind of grain or seed that somebody hands you or the world hands you and that’s why the process is so mysterious about writing a song. But [“Dance Me to the End of Love”] came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria, in certain of the death camps, a string quartet was pressed into performance while this horror was going on, those were the people whose fate was this horror also. And they would be playing classical music while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burnt. So, that music, “Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin,” meaning the beauty there of being the consummation of life, the end of this existence and of the passionate element in that consummation. But, it is the same language that we use for surrender to the beloved, so that the song, it’s not important that anybody knows the genesis of it, because if the language comes from that passionate resource, it will be able to embrace all passionate activity.”
—
Leonard Cohen on his song “Dance Me to the End of Love”
“Begin Again” is as much a dialogue with Swift’s catalogue as a story of a budding relationship. The song’s first line is one she’s used before (in “Fifteen”), and she wields her tunes’ temporal geography for thematic purposes: where Swift narratives used to take place on Tuesdays (“You Belong With Me” “Forever and Always”), “Begin Again” culminates “on a Wednesday, in a café.” It’s as if she’s Bill Murray waking up at the end of Groundhog Day; on the final track of Red and after four albums obsessing over the minutiae of romantic tumult, Taylor emerges with this spare, tentative tale of rebirth. “I’ve been spending the last eight months/Thinking all love ever does is break and burn and end,” she whispers over brushed drums and gentle mandolin, her tones awed, her words still aching with hurt. Swift enjoys formal exercises — it’s part of her country tradition — and this has those in the malleability of the repeated “…but I do” refrain, which traverses the separation between private thoughts and public behavior (“You don’t know how nice that is”) and the present and the past (“He didn’t like it when I wore high heels”). But as important are the breaks with formal songwriting structure, which lends the song verisimilitude: the superfluously specific James Taylor reference, for instance, or the wordy, overly detailed description of certain Christmas traditions. Nevertheless, when it comes to getting over things, these mundanities matter.”
—Jonathan Bradley on Taylor Swift’s “Begin Again”
“
Change is a motherfucker when you run from it. And right now, the conservative movement in America is fleeing from dramatic change that is certain and immutable. A man of color is president for the second time, and this happened despite a struggling economic climate and a national spirit of general discontent. He has been returned to office over the specific objections of the mass of white men. He has instead been re-elected by women, by people of color, by homosexuals, by people of varying religions or no religion whatsoever. Behold the New Jerusalem. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a white man, of course. There’s nothing wrong with being anything. That’s the point.
This election marks a moment in which the racial and social hierarchy of America is upended forever. No longer will it mean more politically to be a white male than to be anything else. Evolve, or don’t. Swallow your resentments, or don’t. But the votes are going to be counted, more of them with each election. Arizona will soon be in play. And in a few cycles, even Texas. And those wishing to hold national office in these United States will find it increasingly useless to argue for normal, to attempt to play one minority against each other, to turn pluralities against the feared “other” of gays, or blacks, or immigrants, or, incredibly in this election cycle, our very wives and lovers and daughters, fellow citizens who demand to control their own bodies.
” —David Simon, “Barack Obama and the Death of Normal”
A CARELESS MAN'S CAREFUL DAUGHTER: i love on tori amos records when she just goes “well,” at the... →
deadgirlfriends.tumblr.com
This is one of my favorite things I’ve ever read about why the internet can be an amazing thing. James Brooks (who wrote it and who is also Elite Gymnastics, who make great music that you should listen to) is one of my favorite people.i love on tori amos records when she just goes “well,” at the beginning of a line as if she is going to say something and then doesn’t, letting her silence kind of hang in the air for a minute. i guess this is ironic because the song that is maybe her best known and most beloved is about ending…
Do you really think that transgender discrimination is the biggest civil rights issue right now? Like, nothing else tops it?
It doesn’t ever make sense to pit these kinds of struggles against oppression, discrimination, and just plain ignorance against one another (hello, intersectionality!), and in fact, I think doing so, and prioritizing one over the others (as Marxists did with class, which admittedly seemed like a good idea at the time), is kind of a hallmark of an outdated paradigm.
On the other hand, there are two ways we could more approvingly look at what Joe Biden said. First, it’s a rhetorical statement, as are most statements by politicians. There’s an important distinction to be made between speech that’s representative (accurately depicting an objective reality) and speech that’s generative (creating a new reality). I see Biden’s statement as being more generative: saying what he said communicated something very essential to the woman with whom he was speaking—the whole thing was part of a conversation, not a speech, after all—and put an issue on the political map that wasn’t really there before on a mainstream level. In that sense, it doesn’t matter if what he said is true, because it’s more valuable as a statement that redirects our attention to places where it hasn’t been and where it is needed.
But also, I think there’s another way to look at it. People get upset when you say one “civil rights issue” is the most important one, but in another sense, maybe it’s just that each era is defined by the issues that surface at the time. The late 1950s and early 1960s were defined by issues of race. That doesn’t mean that race isn’t an issue after that, nor that it somehow takes a backseat to other issues, but that it is no longer the emergent issue of that era. In the last few years, the right of gays and lesbians to get married was emergent in a way it wasn’t before, and the force of that is quite strong: already, I feel, there is so much more acceptance and embrace of difference re: sexuality among young people, like a radical shift from previous generations (even mine, and I’m only 27).
The reasons why the rights of trans people matter now are numerous. It’s a life or death matter for many. They constitute a relatively small minority of people, but to ignore the urgency of what they face every day would be inhuman. It’s not like being or not being able to get married, it’s about the right to even be recognized as who you ever (sometimes even by yourself). But also, I think it’s important because, for one, feminism is meaningless if it ignores trans people (and feminism is really, really important) and, secondly, gender is this giant, domineering force in our society, one I would argue is even more fundamental than sexuality, and there’s an urgent need for us to enlighten ourselves about it.
That’s why these issues transcend the groups they affect directly: combating misogyny affects women but also men, confronting homophobia affects gays and lesbians but also the straights, and opposing transphobia gets to the core of the gender mess that I think plagues the lives of even cis people. In some ways, and of course I can’t speak for them and don’t want to minimize what they are going through, I imagine there’s something really powerful about being trans (and we should regard it as just another awesome facet of being human) because it forces you to reflect on your gender identity more consciously. The whole nation could stand to do that (and I bet cis folks would learn a lot about themselves in the process), and if there’s the momentum, I don’t see why we shouldn’t see this issue as a defining one of the era in which we live.
