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Every once in a while, however, the subordinates of this world contest their fates. They protest their conditions, write letters and petitions, join movements, and make demands. Their goals may be minimal and discrete — better safety guards on factory machines, an end to marital rape—but in voicing them, they raise the specter of a more fundamental change in power. They cease to be servants or supplicants and become agents, speaking and acting on their own behalf. More than the reforms themselves, it is this assertion of agency by the subject class—the appearance of an insistent and independent voice of demand — that vexes their superiors. Guatemala’s Agrarian Reform of 1952 redistributed a million and a half acres of land to 100,000 peasant families. That was nothing, in the minds of the country’s ruling classes, compared to the riot of political talk the bill seemed to unleash. Progressive reformers, Guatemala’s arch-bishop complained, sent local peasants “gifted with facility with words” to the capital, where they were given opportunities “to speak in public.” That was the great evil of the Agrarian Reform. ↗
Hypocrisy is our friend. Power structures have to pretend to hold values in order to win the loyalty of at least some of society. We can use the gap between those professed values and reality to move people to try to change the reality towards the values. ↗
Tomorrow, you promise yourself, things will be different, yet, tomorrow is too often a repetition of today. And you disappoint yourself again and again. ↗
And with light lips yet full of their swift smile, And hands that wist not though they dug a grave, Undid the hasps of gold, and drank, and gave, And he drank after, a deep glad kingly draught: And all their life changed in them, for they quaffed Death; if it be death so to drink, and fare As men who change and are what these twain were. And shuddering with eyes full of fear and fire And heart-stung with a serpentine desire He turned and saw the terror in her eyes That yearned upon him shining in such wise As a star midway in the midnight fixed. Their Galahault was the cup, and she that mixed; Nor other hand there needed, nor sweet speech To lure their lips together; each on each Hung with strange eyes and hovered as a bird Wounded, and each mouth trembled for a world; Their heads neared, and their hands were drawn in one, And they saw dark, though still the unsunken sun Far through fine rain shot fire into the south; And their four lips became one burning mouth. ↗
Sex discrimination and hate crimes against women don't come from the leather community or its pornography. They occur within contexts like industrial capitalism and marriage that most people take for granted as if they had always existed, like gravity or continental drift. If feminism is going to change the world, it has to focus its critical lens on what most people think is normal, not on what most people think is abnormal. ↗
The abject is evident in the bizarre bodily changes found in films as different as Videodrome (1983) and M Butterfly (1993), both of which focus on mutating or deviant men. Cronenberg’s work at this level achieves a rupture of the categories constituting gender difference: as Williams has it, in these films ‘mutation signals a more pervasive postmodern gender-fuck at work: women conceive without men (The Brood), and men turn themselves into women’. In the ‘fisting’ scene in Videodrome, for example, when Harlan thrusts his arm into Renn’s vagina slit what is attempting is a form of rape. However, the vagina dissolves his arm, and he is left with a bleeding stump, prefiguring the stump of a hand and dissolved ankle which Stathis Borans is left with at the end of The Fly. In Crash (1996), the complexities of this order of conceptualization are developed further, as the question of the boundaries between the inner and outer, the private and the public, of which the male body has been the focus, finds the automobile a new kind of expression. ↗
Look, girls. It is important to all of us that we win this game, right? Well, when it comes to athletics, boys are simply better suited than girls. It’s a fact of nature that no one can change. I’m sorry, but maybe you can play next time when it’s less crucial. ↗
