Author Archives: Anna Clutterbuck-Cook

are we talking "acting" or "passing"? (and why it matters)

15 Saturday May 2010

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A lot has been written in the last week or so criticizing an opinion piece by Ramin Setoodeh published in Newsweek in which he appeared to claim that gay actors are unsuccessful at playing straight (see Jos @ Feministing for more details).

Yesterday, upset that “the internet” is dumping hate on him, Setoodeh published a response to these responses, claiming that the critiques of his original article are off base

But what all this scrutiny seemed to miss was my essay’s point: if an actor of the stature of George Clooney came out of the closet today, would we still accept him as a heterosexual leading man? It’s hard to say, because no actor like that exists. I meant to open a debate — why is that? And what does it say about our notions about sexuality? For all the talk about progress in the gay community in Hollywood, has enough really changed? The answer seems obvious to me: no, it has not.

Here’s the thing. The way Setoodeh frames the question the second time around, he makes it clear that the question is about how society at large responds to knowledge of a queer actor’s sexual orientation. If a successful actor, known for playing straight romantic leads, suddenly came out as gay (that is, in real life not interested romantically in women), how would the hitherto rapt audience respond?

Setoodeh claims they wouldn’t respond well. And if that was truly the gist of his argument, I’d be totally on board: we do, as a culture, respond uncomfortably to people playing characters whose sexual orientations don’t match their own. How much, and how consistently, we respond negatively to gay actors playing straight is another question. As others have already pointed out, he cherry-picks his examples and shoehorns them into the argument he wishes to make. He also blithely skims over the question of straight actors playing gay characters, suggesting they don’t catch flack for accepting such roles. While it’s possible that actors who are straight have more room to maneuver, I’d question whether someone James Franco (who played Sean Penn’s lover in Milk) never faced questions about his own sexuality. He was definitely questioned closely by Terry Gross about how he was able to play a character whose sexual orientation did not match his own. People speculate, and given the homophobia in our culture, those speculations are often mean-spirited.

The bigger problem, though, is that that wasn’t his original argument (or at least not all of it). Setoodeh’s original essay targeted actor Sean Hayes in his stage performance as a straight male lead in Promises, Promises, arguing that Hayes was unconvincing as a straight character because, according to Setoodeh, he’s just so flamingly gay.

But frankly, it’s weird seeing Hayes play straight. He comes off as wooden and insincere, like he’s trying to hide something, which of course he is. Even the play’s most hilarious scene, when Chuck tries to pick up a drunk woman at a bar, devolves into unintentional camp. Is it funny because of all the ’60s-era one-liners, or because the woman is so drunk (and clueless) that she agrees to go home with a guy we all know is gay?

What strikes me about the difference between these two arguments is where the burden of responsibility is placed. In the first piece (above), Setoodeh is critiquing Hayes for failing as an actor to play straight, suggesting that in order to play a character Hayes has to “hide something” (his sexual orientation), as if this is somehow categorically different from the task that faces all actors: to embody a character on stage whom they, as human beings, are not in real life.

I understand this impulse to a certain extent. We generally place the burden of embodying a role on actors, stage and screen. After all, that’s their job: to play a part. We go to the theater expecting the cast and crew to create an atmosphere in which we can suspend our disbelief — in which we can put aside our knowledge that these are human beings on a stage telling us a story — and experience that story through a collaborative leap of the imagination.

But the suggestion that Setoodeh is uncomfortable with Hayes performance because he feels he’s being lied to is where this actors-bearing-responsibility things breaks down for me.

If our knowledge of an actor’s personal life (say, their sexual orientation) changes the way we — as audience members — interpret their performance, doesn’t that shift the burden of responsibility back to us? If the onscreen chemistry between George Clooney (to use Setoodeh’s example) and his leading ladies changes in our minds once we imagine he’s gay (incidentally: why is bisexuality never a part of these conversations? hello??) then the problem is not with the actor (whom, until we believed he was not-straight seemed to have all the chemistry in the world) but in our heads.

I’d suggest, here, that Setoodeh might learn something from the discussion within the trans community about the problematic framework of “passing,” which places the burden of performing gender identity and/or sexual orientation on the individual rather than on the audience (society) which interprets appearance and behavior according to all kinds of social cues that are completely outside the control of the individual. See, for example, Bear Bergman’s essay “Passing The Word” in The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You.

When we continue [in the trans community] to use the word pass, we continue to hamper ourselves by endlessly repeating a narrative of deception, not to mention the legacy of racism, the cultural arrogance, and the spectacular level of objectification it brings with it….I would rather move the burden back where it belongs, to the observer, the person whose cultural lens and personal locations on so many aces are in so many ways the day-to-day deciders of how a person is read….passing is fleeting, tricksy, temporary. But what it takes or means to read depends, rightly and righteously, entirely on who’s doing it (112).

I’m sure there are “bad” actors out there — actors who, regardless of sexual orientation, struggle to set aside themselves in order to embody a character who is not them. I’m a terrible dissembler: it’s one of the reasons I write nonfiction instead of fiction and gave up my childhood dream to be in musical theatre. I realized I had no interest in being anyone other than myself, and in fact felt profoundly uncomfortable whenever I tried to slip out of my skin and into someone else’s. But Setoodeh isn’t dismissing Hayes because he thinks the guy is a bad actor. In his initial piece, he is quite clearly suggesting Hayes isn’t successful because he’s gay.

This, for me, is where his where his credibility as a cultural critic breaks down. Want to critique an actor you think is doing a shitty job? Sure: your prerogative as a consumer of theatrical performances. Want to speculate on how our cultural narratives about human sexuality impede our ability to suspend disbelief about actors playing characters whose sexuality differs from theirs? I’m with you all the way. Suggest that actors (particularly non-straight actors) are incapable of playing characters with an orientation not their own? So…what: hetero actors can only play hetero parts, gay and lesbian actors can only play queers, and those of us who are bi are really (taking this argument to its logical conclusion) the only people capable of auditioning for any role going?

I just can’t buy it. It’s a huge fucking red light that suggests to me the issue is not the actor’s abilities, but rather with the audience member who is unable to let go of their discomfort at seeing someone not-straight play someone who is. Which, as Setoodeh points out in his second piece, has everything to do with “our notions about sexuality,” our way of reading the actor we know to be gay, rather than with that person’s skill as an actor to embody the character they have chosen to play on the stage.

*image credit: Ianto and Jack, Torchwood, Season Two, still from To The Last Man, snagged from Moansters Incorporated.

booknotes: silver borne

14 Friday May 2010

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I’ve been all angsty the last couple of days, so I thought I’d slide into the weekend with something a little more lighthearted: a few thoughts on Patricia Briggs’ latest (#5) installment in the Mercy Thompson series, Silver Borne.

I’ve written posts about Briggs’ other books Bone Crossed (the forth installment) and Hunting Ground (in a related series) if you want a little background on what I like about these books. You know, other than their general shapeshifter urban fantasy goodness.

Mild spoilers below for anyone who cares.

Silver Borne picks up where any self-respecting novel should start: the return of a borrowed book. Mercy — the shapeshifter mechanic protagonist of the series — has borrowed, in Bone Crossed, a book of fae folklore from a fae antiquarian bookdealer friend of hers. What with one thing and another she still hasn’t had a chance to return it, and at the beginning of Silver she gets a cryptic message from him indicating he hopes that she is taking good care of it.

When she goes to return the book, Phin (the fae) is nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile, her old friend Sam — a former lover and ancient werewolf — who has been struggling with the ennui that threatens to overtake older werewolves in this particular universe — attempts to commit suicide. He fails because his wolf takes over and refuses to let him, but this leaves Mercy with a werewolf on her hands who may or may not be capable of self-control.

And then there’s the slight problem of Mercy’s current lover, the local Alpha werewolf, whom she’s finally chosen to be in a relationship with, but whose pack is not exactly thrilled to have a shapeshifter (rather than werewolf or full human) as their Alpha’s mate.

So Mercy has a lot on her plate: rescue a missing fae, return book that is more than it first appears, find Sam a reason to live before he mauls half the state of Washington, and on the way by assert her dominance as the highest-ranking female in the wolf pack, despite the fact she’s a shapeshifting coyote not a were.

In short, one big supernatural soap opera.

But I’m continually impressed by the way that Briggs writes her supernatural soap operas in a way that keeps her characters interesting and refuses to reduce them to stock characters. Or rather, encourages her stock characters to develop twists, three-dimensional personalities that stop them from being cookie-cutter chess pieces moving around the board for the sake of the story.

Of the three storylines she has going in Silver Borne, I found the most satisfying, actually, to be the one that remained largely in the background of the two most immediate plots (the magical book plot and the Sam in jeopardy plot): the ongoing issue of Mercy’s position in relation to the werewolf pack. Briggs turned what started out as a fairly contrived feeling “female werewolf jealous of interloper” story into an opportunity to flesh out a few of the female characters other than Mercy (something I’ve definitely missed in previous books) and also raise questions about the patriarchal structure of the werewolf pack itself which has potential for interesting developments in the future.

The Sam story, too, has potential for further development, and possibly a spin-off along the lines of the Alpha and Omega series, of which Hunting Ground is the second chapter. Sam is (rather conventionally, I’ll admit) saved from suicidal despair by the re-surfacing of a female fae he loved and lost, but despite her comparatively short “screen time” in the novel she emerges as a complex character with an interesting history. And the fact that she is fae (a supernatural population that coexists uneasily with both humans and wolves) offers the possibility for some interesting storylines that deal more directly with fae-human and fae-wolf politics and inter-species (as it were) relationships.

So anyway, if you’re looking for a quick and enjoyable summer read, and shapeshifter mechanics are your thing, definitely check out Mercy Thompson (or if you’ve already discovered her, enjoy the latest installment and keep your fingers crossed for more!)

"it’s Michigan": some thoughts on regionalism

13 Thursday May 2010

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So I’ll start out this post by saying up front that there are myriad personal and political reasons why I moved out of West Michigan. I spent the first twenty-six years of my life (with a few brief gaps) living in or near Holland, in Ottawa County, one of the most politically conservative counties in the nation. While my liberal (dare I say radical?) parents did what they could to connect us with other like-minded families and groups, both local and far-flung, it was clear we were out of step politically, culturally, religiously with the majority of our fellow residents. At of this writing, I’m living in Boston, my brother in Portland, Oregon and my sister leaves Holland in a few weeks’ time for Austin, Texas. We’ve all felt the need to get the hell out of Dodge, so to speak. At least for a while. And our parents have understood, completely, our reasons why.

But, in part because I lived for so long in the area, I resist writing Holland off as a town full of Euro-American Calvinists, insular and disengaged from the political and sociocultural issues of our era. I became who I am not only despite, or in opposition to, the people around me as I grew into my twenties: I became who I am, as well, thanks to the encouragement and example of many, many mentors. Some of whom were Hollanders born and bred, some of whom had moved to West Michigan from other parts of the country (or, in some cases, the globe). These people are part of Holland, too, and far from being glad I got the hell away I’m often acutely saddened that I left them behind.

I’ve been thinking about all this again in the past week for a couple of reasons. One is the conversations that have taken place in the wake of last Friday’s decision by the Hope College Board of Trustees not to rescind the College’s 1995 stance against homosexuality. There is, justifiably, a lot of anger about the College’s decision, and a lot of the national net-based coverage (and associated comment threads) have characterized the decision as one that is right-wing religious wingnuttery (agreed!) that is more or less what one could have expected from small-minded, religiously conservative small-town Midwesterners hmm . . . possibly not-so-agreed).

“It’s Michigan,” wrote one ex-Michigander in a comment at Change.org. “Those Neaderthals up there HATE gay people.”

This view of West Michigan was shared, after a fashion, by Jill @ I Blame The Patriarchy who recently traveled to Holland and Saugatuck (twelve miles south of Holland) to visit relatives. A trip which she documented in her customary snarky fashion last Monday.

Back in Holland Michigan, at one of the 358 or 359 Tulip Time parades down the main drag, I made a few observations.

1. I espied a float, sponsored by the Turning Pointe School of Dance and Borculo Wrecker Service, toting the Holland Area Mothers of Multiples. Nothing warms a spinster aunt’s heart like the spectacle of white women dressing up like LDS wives and getting acclaimed for their feats of reproduction.

2. No persons of color attended the event.

3. White people in Holland, Michigan, when feeling festive, eat things called ‘elephant ears’: absurd globs of fried dough the size of hubcaps.

Again, don’t get me wrong: having lived through Tulip Time as a local for twenty-six years, I have no illusions about its “wholesomeness” quotient. The whole thing was invented during the 1920s as a municiple beautification project that had less to do with historic ties to the Netherlands than it had to do with ethnic stereotypes about the Dutch drawn from the Old Dutch cleanser girl ads of the era (Jill, this might make the whole “street scrubbing” phenomenon a little clearer!) As Jill rightly observes, Tulip time is terrifying! Though I’d argue more in a Waiting For Guffman way, rather than in a Stepford Wives kinda way. As my mother summed it up in a recent email: “Tulip Time pretty much a pain.”

So in many ways, I agree with these observations. That is, most stereotypes have within them an element of truth. Holland and Hope are not exempt from any of the “isms” that plague the rest of the nation: racism, sexism, homophobia, class divides, political divides, etc. Holland has a significant Latina/Latino and Asian-American population, as well as other non-Dutch, non-Euro-American populations whose presence is often ignored or sidelined when it comes to community celebrations. Particularly when it comes to Tulip Time.

The problem with these narratives of insularity and exclusion, however, is that too often they rely on the larger story we tell ourselves (on both the right and the left) about Middle America. Since moving to Boston I’ve become more aware of the way in which “the Midwest,” as a region, occupies the space of the Other in the minds of many folks who live in big cities in the East and West. This is by no means universal (I don’t want to perpetuate the same Othering here I’m trying to call out in this post!) but it can be frustrating to hear one’s home town or region, with all of its multi-layered, globally-interconnected politics, be dismissed as full of bigoted, white fundamentalist Republicans.

This ignores the presence of bigoted, white fundamentalist Republicans in America’s coastal urban centers and likewise erases the presence of non-whites, non-Christians, liberals and queers from anywhere except cosmopolitan cities.

Racism happens in Holland, Michigan. Every day. It also happens on the streets of Boston. Homophobia happens here (in Boston) as well as there (in Holland). Neither coastal, urban America nor cities in the Midwest have a monopoly on progressive politics or small-mindedness and bigotry. Geography doesn’t determine personal or community values. We do.

I suspect that a lot of the knee-jerk ridicule of “small town America” (although Holland is hardly a small town) rings true to a lot of folks precisely because they’ve escaped, escaping, or ardently wish to escape, from their own places of origin. The Midwest of our minds is Anywhere, USA: the deadend, insular place where motivated people escape from to the urban centers, full of the chaotic possibilities of freedom and self re-invention.

The urban/rural cultural narrative works both ways, depending on which side of the argument you’re on (folks can argue for the superior conservative morality of rural and Midwestern spaces or for the superior cosmopolitan morality of urban, Coastal spaces) and both are reductive. Both erase anyone living in those spaces who do not fit the stereotypical image of the region.

This also lets both groups off the hook, allowing folks who argue both sides of the coin to claim they’re spaces are more inclusive, more diverse (if you’re on the liberal side of the argument) or more Christian, more harmonious (if you’re on the conservative side). It allows us to assume there is a simple “geographic cure” for what ails us, socially and politically as well as personally, rather than challenging us to dig in and do the hard work of being the change we want to see in the world no matter where in this country we happen to live.

I fail at this constantly. I roll my eyes at West Michigan and say things like, “What did you expect? It’s Michigan.” I left Holland because I got tired of running up against the same (seemingly immobile) ideological walls. I was tired of having to start (or end) every discussion of values with the Bible as lingua franca. I was tired, I was lonely. So I left.

But I want to be careful to remember (this post is a reminder to myself as much as anyone else) that that shift of mine was not, geographically speaking at least, a move to somewhere better. It is only somewhere different.

*image credit: 8th Street by eridony @ Flickr.com.

the politics of (another kind of) choice

12 Wednesday May 2010

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As a follow up to my letter to the Hope College Board of Trustees last week, I thought I would share a great article on queer politics found via the Bookforum (h/t to Hanna). Stephanie Fairyington @ Utne Reader offers a passionate, personal plea for queer activists to re-discover the language of choosing non-straight relationships and identities, in her essay The Gay Option.

Until homosexuality is cast and understood as a valid choice, rather than a biological affliction, we will never rise above our current status. We will remain Mother Nature’s mistake, tolerable (to some) because our condition is her fault, not ours.

By choice, I don’t mean that one can choose one’s sexual propensities any more than one can choose one’s personality. What I mean is that it’s a choice to act on every desire we have, and that acting on our same-sex attractions is just as valid as pursuing a passion for the Christian faith or Judaism or any other spiritual, intellectual, emotional, or physical craving that does not infringe on the rights of others. And it should be respected as such.

Fairyington acknowledges the enormous political advantages of framing non-straight sexuality as natural, rather than nurtured, proclivity — and she doesn’t reject the possibility (confirmed by her own personal experience) that one’s sexual orientation is something one is born with, and is immutable.

At the same time, she challenges us to recognize that this political strategy — which has made real gains for the human rights and legal protections of non-straight, non-gender conforming folks — is a claim to rights that relies upon queer sexuality being a biological trait does not require those with anti-gay sentiments to re-examine their understanding of homosexuality as a physical or emotional deformity: rather, it is a framework perfectly adaptable to their claims to success in ex-gay therapies or a quest for “the gay gene” which could somehow be manipulated to alter someone’s sexual desires.

The typical conservative assault on homosexuality casts it as a sinful choice that can be unchosen through a commitment to God and reparative therapy. And the left usually slams into this simplistic polemic by taking up the opposite stance: Homosexuality is not a choice, and because we can’t help it, it’s not sinful.

By affirming that homosexual practice and identity are a choice, we can attach an addendum—it’s a good choice—and open the possibility of a more nuanced argument, one that dismantles the logic of the very premise that whom we choose to love marks us as sinful and immoral and interrogates the assumption that heterosexuality is somehow better for the individual and society as a whole.

I grew up in a very conservative community (although my family and immediate circle of friends were by-and-large liberals), and I’m aware of how powerful the biology-based identity argument is when it comes to challenging folks’ assumptions about homosexuality = sin. Because arguing that someone is “born that way” draws parallels to skin color and biological sex — it seems like an easy hook. But likewise, I’ve also seen how the biological argument so often misses the point that the anti-homosexuality crowd is making. In short, the point that Fairyington makes above: that we selectively choose to act on our desires, and that those choices have moral and ethical implications. We may have thoughts of violent revenge, but choose to practice nonviolence. We may have thoughts of panicked self-defense, but choose to practice compassion.

If queer activists rely solely on the “it’s biology” argument, we miss the opportunity to make a moral and ethical case for same-sex relationships, and the capacity of those relationships to add to the sum total of joy and well-being in the world. This is a message much more radical, when you stop to think about it, than scientific debates over the origins of human sexual orientation. Those scientific explorations are stimulating from an intellectual perspective, but will not satisfy our desire as human beings to discern right from wrong. A scientific answer to the question of where same-sex desire originates may inform, but cannot dictate, what we do with those desires.

I think we would do well, as Fairyington proposes, to speak more often and with great passion about the ethical, life-giving nature of our relationship choices. We would do well to speak about following our passions for the sexual relationships that best nourish us and our loved ones. To speak about the way in which feeling at home in our skins when we move through the world grows our capacity for compassion for others (because we no longer have to work so hard to protect ourselves). To speak about the glorious, chaotic uniqueness of every human life, and how all of those lives (ours included) can honor [chosen diety or spiritual path here] through all manner of consensual sexual activities and relationships.

This in no way contradicts the notion that sexual orientation (be it hetero, homo, bi, or otherwise inclined) is biological in nature — but it does not rely on it either. Using both together, mixing and matching as reflects our own personal experiences, will hopefully broaden our options for political debate and give us a much stronger, multi-faceted place at the table.

quick hit: infant morality

11 Tuesday May 2010

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Tangentially related to my post last week about treating children as people, Paul Bloom @ The New York Times Magazine discusses current research into how human beings acquire morality (or if they are born wired, so to speak, with a sense of justice and injustice)

Morality, then, is a synthesis of the biological and the cultural, of the unlearned, the discovered and the invented. Babies possess certain moral foundations — the capacity and willingness to judge the actions of others, some sense of justice, gut responses to altruism and nastiness. Regardless of how smart we are, if we didn’t start with this basic apparatus, we would be nothing more than amoral agents, ruthlessly driven to pursue our self-interest. But our capacities as babies are sharply limited. It is the insights of rational individuals that make a truly universal and unselfish morality something that our species can aspire to.

I don’t necessarily agree with all of the ways he defines moral and immoral sentiments and actions, but it is an interesting overview of some of the more recent theories vis a vis how we construct a mutually agreed upon moral framework in which to operate as a human society.

multimedia monday: clean living

10 Monday May 2010

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Two videos for you this morning that attempt to teach young people just how narrow a road they must walk in order to survive into adulthood.

First, a health education film for 1950s college students. While it ostensibly targets both men and women, notice how much more time they spend panning the camera up and down the coeds’ bodies, and how clearly the female students are positioned as primarily objects of the male gaze (forget about your homework, girls!). It’s also clear that although the women are supposed to be sexually alluring they are not under any circumstances supposed to cross the line into sexual availability (slut!) or actual sexual activity.

As my friend Rachel put it: “CREEPIEST. DAD. EVAR.”

Enjoy. And then go wash your eyeballs with carbolic soap.

sunday smut: links on sex and gender (no. 21)

09 Sunday May 2010

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Thursday, May 6th, was International No Diet Day, but as gwen @ Sociological Images reports, some news outlets seem to have missed the point. ” Perhaps illustrating the article with an image of a slender body indicating a significant amount of weight loss wasn’t the best choice?”

Lena Chen, also known as Elle @ Sex and the Ivy graduates this month from Harvard (congrats!), and as part of her senior thesis on evolution of the virginity ideal, she held a one-day conference on Rethinking Virginity. You can find a round-up of related blog posts and media coverage at Sex and the Ivy. If rethinking virginity is your thing, I totally recommend clicking through and checking some of the posts out. For a nice thumbnail recap, check out Feministing’s list of ten virginity myths that were discussed (and debunked) at the conference.

On the not-so-positive side of things, Femocracy @ Feministing Community muses about why media stories about rape so often get it wrong, while Jacelyn Friedman @ Salon analyzes how CNN took her anti-slut-shaming talking points and made her sound like a prude. “The woman on the television screen looked and sounded a whole lot like me — in fact, she was me — but she appeared to be saying things that…I would never say. This is what it’s like to see yourself quoted out of context and turned into a sock puppet on national TV.” Friedman was allowed to follow up with a counterpoint which you can read on the CNN blog.

Mary Elizabeth Williams @ Salon also muses upon the perilous balance teenage girls (in particular) must strike in our culture between youthful testing of boundaries and behavior that will earn them the status of social pariah in Miley Cyrus: Not a girl, not yet a Britney. “Very few people ever transition seamlessly from cute teen to mature adult – whether they’re an ordinary girl or Disney’s biggest princess. Cyrus, like anyone who’s ever been 17, has a right to stumble and look silly. But if you’re going to tell the world you can’t be tamed, maybe you should consider doing it in a way that doesn’t look so painfully contrived.” Sady & Amanda @ The Sexist discuss.

In other awkward bids for attention, Andy Wright @ AlterNet reports on the six strangest things men have done in the quest for the perfect penis.

lisa @ Sociological Images offers us an intriguing set of graphs showing trends in the social acceptability of homosexuality and prostitution in selected Western nations and offers five possible explanations for the disparity between the two (homosexuality steadily more acceptable, prostitution not so much).

Not all Christian fundies are opposed to sex, they just want to make sure it’s God-approved sex. Sadly, it is often difficult to find those God-approved sex toys without being subjected to icky non-Christian depictions of sex. Never fear! As Cath Elliot @ The Guardian reports, these Christian sex enthusiast can now shop at Christian Love Toys, an online sex you store for those with vanilla tastes.

Tracy Clark-Flory @ Salon, however, reports on the limits of Christian sex. “Sex addiction” has, of course, been a topic du jour for Christian conservatives long and long. At Dirty Girl Ministries, however, they tailor the message specifically for “impure” women: “On the Dirty Girls Ministries message board, visitors swap tips for keeping on the straight and narrow — for example, wearing a rubber band around your wrist and snapping it every time an impure thought crosses your mind.”

Let’s just not hope that particular Dirty Girl isn’t into a little pain with her pleasure.

And finally, via Hanna, comes this lovely blog post on How to Be Attractive (“First, remove some of the mirrors in your house.”)

*image credit: “Siege” by Clayton Cubitt. Hat tip to Hanna this week for finding the image for this post, via Warran Ellis’ blog.

alma mater update: in other unsurprising news…

08 Saturday May 2010

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Here’s the promised update re: Hope College and its Institutional Statement on Homosexuality, which I wrote about on Thursday.

The group Hope Is Ready, which has been one of those petitioning to have the statement withdrawn by the Board of Trustees, shared (through their Facebook page; apologies if this means you can’t follow the link) the following letter from Hope College President James Bultman yesterday afternoon.

May 7, 2010

Dear Members of Hope is Ready:

Thank you for your interest in Hope College and for the time and effort committed to sharing your concerns with the Board of Trustees. Your insights were helpful in our discussions. Those elected to hold the college in their trust have thoughtfully, thoroughly, and prayerfully considered your petition.

Relative to your petition, the Trustees have taken these actions:

1. The Board of Trustees denied your request to remove the 1995 Institutional Statement on Homosexuality

2. The Board of Trustees appointed a Trustee committee to expand the college’s 1995 position statement in the larger context of all human sexuality in such a way that the Hope community is called to a renewed encounter with the clear, demanding, and healing biblical witness regarding human sexuality.

The college’s current position on homosexuality is based on its interpretation of scripture. It is recognized that well-intentioned Christians may disagree on scriptural interpretation. Still, humbly and respectfully, the college aligns itself in its interpretation with is founding denomination, the Reformed Church in America, the orthodox Christian Church throughout the ages, and other Christian colleges and universities.

On behalf of the Hope College Board of Trustees, I thank you for your concern for the college we love and respectfully ask that you accept these decisions in the spirit with which they are rendered.

Cordially,

James E. Bultman
President

In short, it basically says nothing that hasn’t already been said, and the fact it was up on the web by 2:33pm yesterday afternoon makes it pretty clear that the Board of Trustees didn’t spend much time deliberating on their course of action.

Sad, despiriting, but unsurprising.

I’ll be thinking today about all those folks in the Hope College community — many of whom I’ve known my whole life — who do not think this way, and who work hard everyday to make sure the official college position is not the only one that gets heard.

I said in my letter to the Board, and I’m going to repeat it here: to tell any person that being sexual and making positive, fully consensual, sexually intimate connections with another human being is destructive to their spiritual well-being is an act of violence. To codify such a belief in an institutional statement makes it institutionalized bigotry, giving that belief the authority of college administration that has the power to materially effect the lives of students and employees.

I absolutely believe that such an act of violence runs counter to the Christian message that we are all called to increase joy, practice love, and work toward wholeness in the world. I don’t see how this decision by Hope’s Board of Trustees does any of that. So it sure as hell doesn’t seem very Christian to me.

*image credit: Hope College Voorhees Hall, made available through the public relations office website.

quick hit: general theory of individuality

08 Saturday May 2010

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Hat tip to my friend Joseph for sharing this article with my on Google Reader earlier in the week. Davis Barash @ The Chronicle of Higher Education asks why scientists have historically shied away from acknowledging and exploring the reality of the individuality of organisms.

One of the unspoken secrets in basic scientific research, from anthropology to zoology (with intervening stops at physiology, political science, psychology, psychiatry, and sociology) is that, nearly always, individuals turn out to be different from one another, and that—to an extent rarely admitted and virtually never pursued—scientific generalizations tend to hush up those differences. It can be argued that that is what generalizations are: statements that apply to a larger class of phenomena and must, by definition, do violence to individuality. But since science seeks to explain observed phenomena, it should also be able to explain the granular particularity of such phenomena. In fact, generalities lose potency if they occur at the cost of artificially leveling otherwise significant features of reality.

* * *

The current dearth of “individuality theory” may thus reflect the fact that, until recently, advances in applying evolutionary biology to human behavior have been almost entirely the work of biologists, who typically have given individuality short shrift. By contrast, psychologists—stimulated in part by the early work of Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton—have generally been more receptive to individual differences, with anthropologists occupying a more or less intermediate position (although with no small amount of individual differences!). Perhaps the growing involvement of the latter disciplines in attempts to flesh out a truly evolutionary theory of human nature will result in fuller incorporation of behavioral individuality.

Western science since Aristotle has sought to identify and understand classes of phenomena, looking beyond the particular to organize knowledge into general categories. Accordingly, my request for greater attention to individual differences may seem strangely retrograde. Maybe the best way to justify so perverse a preoccupation is to substitute individual differences for the famed question about climbing mountains: Why study individual differences? Because they are there.

You can check the whole piece out over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, and I think it’s well worth the read.

booknotes: end of semester omnibus edition

07 Friday May 2010

Posted by in book reviews

≈ 1 Comment

This is the last week of the semester, and although I only had one class that met regularly (and will continue working on my thesis throughout the summer), I still feel that end-of-the-semester accumulation of Things Undone that always hits me this time of year.

A few of those Things Undone are some booknotes blog posts that have been sitting in my drafts file for weeks, waiting for inspiration to hit. Since inspiration is apparently being sucked dry by other things at the minute, here are some thumbnail reviews of a few books I read, enjoyed, and hope you’ll read and enjoy as well.

S. Bear Bergman | The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You. It’s been a while since I read a book from the library and loved it so much that I turned around and bought it a week later. The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You is just such a book. A collection of essays by self-described “gender-jammer,” author and speaker Bear Bergman, The Nearest Exit is like if Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies had been written on the subject of gender, rather than faith. Although it has some faith in it. And family. And stuff about trying your best to be a good person in the not-so-perfect world we live in. Just go read it, everyone!

S. Bear Bergman | Butch is a Noun. Since I loved Exit so much, I hunted down Bear’s other book, published in 2006, Butch is a Noun. While I’m still browsing my way through it a few essays a night, I’d say Noun feels less comfortable in its skin than the later book. It’s possible I’m just responding on an emotional level to the butch/femme culture so many of the essays are about, which is something I’ve never quite gotten on a personal level. Still, it definitely still has that gentle, forgiving, thoughtful Lamott quality I enjoyed so much in the later book. So enjoy this one too :).

Loraine Hutchens & Lani Kaahumanu (editors) | Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out. Continuing on the theme of human sexuality (which I am wont to do, as you know), Hanna found this 1991 anthology for me on a dollar cart recently and I’ve been browsing my way through it. Twenty years is centuries when it comes to the politics and culture of sexual identity, and a lot of the contributions feel super dated . . . but it’s a valuable snapshot of bisexuality in an era where people with more fluid sexual identities felt intense pressure from the gay and lesbian community to identify as exclusively homosexual, and from the straight community to identify as hetero. Bi invisibility is still an issue today, but I think fewer queer folks, at least, question the very existence of folks who aren’t exclusively interested in one sex or gender.

Susan J. Douglas | Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminisms Work is Done. When I had this book in the reading room of the MHS one day, a researcher saw it and remarked “now there’s a contradiction in terms!” Which of course is Douglas’s point. She argues — drawing on her background in media studies and cultural criticism — that women of all ages are being sold neo-traditional notions of gender packaged as “feminist” or “post-feminist” by the media, marketers, and politicians who want to believe that inequality based on gender and sex is a thing of the past (or at least want us to believe it.

Rick Perlstein | Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. Perlstein is an independent scholar whose passion is clearly American politics: the 748 densely researched pages of Nixonland chart the political career of Richard Nixon in the context of the postwar/Cold War politics of 1960s and 70s America. While I am only part of the way through the book, I suspect he may be slightly over-stepping his evidence when it comes to arguing that Nixon’s style of presidential politics (and the opinions of those for and against him) are emblematic of our era. He spends more time on the ins and outs of politicking in Washington and less of the public’s response to said politics than I would like. But then, I’m primarily a cultural historian and an historian of ideas, not politics.

Connie Willis | Blackout. I had some vague hope of holding Connie Willis’ latest novel out as a carrot for the end of my semester — but then Hanna found a copy on the library’s express read shelf and I was a lost cause. (Blackout, readers should be warned, is volume one of at least a two-part narrative arc, the second volume of which is coming out in September. So if you won’t want to be left hanging, hold off.) The plot takes a while to gather steam, mostly because of the vast cast of characters and locations, all of which have to be introduced. But readers familiar with Willis’ time travel fiction, such as To Say Nothing of the Dog will likely find they can ride along until the critical problem becomes clear — while enjoying the period details on the way by.

Next on the reading list? Laurie R. King’s latest installment in the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series, of course (The God of the Hive) and Patricia Briggs’ latest Mercy Thompson novel (Silver Borne). Not to mention (ahem) the more serious, scholarly reading that will likely come up in the process of drafting my thesis. Wahey! More books: here we come!