Re: [sudo-discuss] cuddling it

Thanks for the pointers. It's not the first time I've come across the term or the concept of reappropriation, and the nuances of the idea were part of why I brought up Heeb Magazine specifically. That magazine caused a great deal of controversy by portraying Jesus and Mary in extremely sexually provocative ways, and referencing a long history of oppression of Jews by Catholics, that raises a lot of interesting questions: - Mary was portrayed with bare breasts, and pierced nipples, and the model portraying Mary Magdalene was described as "Evangelist-cum-nymphomaniac." Was this using slut-shaming to fire back at Catholics, a different kind of commentary on Catholic attitudes towards sex, something else, or neither? - Jesus was portrayed with his genitals wrapped in a Jewish prayer shawl. Was this meant to desecrate a holy Jewish symbol, to reflect on the attitudes of some Christians towards what Jews hold sacred, or something else? - The feature contains the quote, "Christians believe the Jews killed Jesus; that is why there is so much anti-Semitism in the world. The church was created on that one simple anti-Semitic principle. Christians who say otherwise are making it up or misrepresenting their own religion." Was this intended just as written, or as a commentary on how some Christians view Judaism in preposterously oversimplified terms, or something else? - Christians and Jews have a long history of complex relationships including antagonism that reached the highest extremes of violence, including the following: Street fighting among gangs in ancient Alexandria, before there was a clear distinction between the two groups; Catholic crusades to invade and colonize the near East and displace the Jewish and Muslim cultures from it; Jews and Christians living together as oppressed groups called Dhimmi under the Caliphate in medieval Andalusia, and many other Islamic states; the complicity of much of the Catholic hierarchy in the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews even as many Christians risked their lives to save Jews from it, some explicitly motivated by their religion, some for other reasons; the Jewish and Italian (strong Catholic ties) mafias working together in America to set up Galveston and Las Vegas, despite many kinds of serious tensions; in the last few years in Israel, anti-Christian hate crimes including a bonfire of New Testaments, regular spitting on an Archbishop, and a member of the Knesset taking video of himself tearing up the New Testament, calling it a despicable book that belongs in the dustbin of history (his words). How should all this influence how I interpret what Heeb Magazine published? Can I draw a simple narrative featuring a privileged group and an oppressed group from all of this to frame my other questions about how to interpret things? ​Ultimately, very much as a person from a Catholic family with strong personal ties to both Catholic and Jewish cultures, I accept what Heeb Magazine has done as a valuable contribution to a conversation between cultures regardless of, or perhaps because of, its having apparently been calculated to provoke and offend in every available way (which few remarks that cause offense actually are: my own an example). I value offense as a way to break taboos and make new kinds of conversations possible, (but not for the emotional trauma it can cause, which I do my best to avoid,) including especially those that tell truth to power, which is why offense has a special place in satire. But also in lateral conversations where groups that have suffered from mutual antagonism that serves the interests of power overcome the symbols around which their mutual antagonism has been organized and learn to work together on the basis of their ample common ground. I have even taken many of the same symbols Heeb Magazine used, and other related ones from both Judaism and Christianity, and played with them in my own fiction in irreverent, transgressive ways that while very different are also full of ambiguity and make copious references to a complex history and are hard to interpret in any one consistent way (as most language is). I've done this in order to participate in a cultural dialog that seeks common values and cooperation towards bettering everyone's lot. That is the sense in which I ask whether Heeb Magazine has a place on sudo room's shelves. On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 10:03 AM, rachel lyra hospodar &lt;rachelyra(a)gmail.com <mailto:rachelyra@gmail.com>> wrote: On May 7, 2013 11:15 AM, "Anthony Di Franco" &lt;di.franco(a)gmail.com <mailto:di.franco@gmail.com>> wrote: mainstream connotations words have and the implicit assumptions they throw over everyday discourse. Does Heeb Magazine have a place on sudo room's shelves? Sure, right next to Bitch Magazine. But woe be unto you if you think that makes 'heeb' or 'bitch' appropriate descriptors for anyone, or that they can be used by you in casual conversation. You are basically bringing up the practice of reclaiming language, a process where members of oppressed groups take words that are/have been used pejoratively towards them, and defiantly use the language for themselves. I did some quick google searching around this issue and would like to share two links that seemed most helpful here. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation http://www.womanist-musings.com/2011/11/reclaiming-language-and-who-gets-to… Basically, any white folks wanting to REclaim language around the african-american experience, can't. Boo hoo. It's because that language is already CLAIMED by white folks, for its pejorative purpose. If you don't like that, well, sit on it. Meditate on our white supremacist culture and cry big salty tears. Whatever. Similarly, if you want to help women at large reclaim some kinda nasty word, but you are a man, too bad for you. There is no way for you to use those words without reinforcing their negative meanings. Unless & until a woman invites you, eg, to go on a Slutwalk. Then you can write the word 'slut' on yourself & walk down the street amongst a group doing the same thing. R. <mailto:anca@techliminal.com>> wrote: &lt;alcides888(a)gmail.com <mailto:alcides888@gmail.com>> wrote: own phrases and not try to replace anything. Instead of characterizing any current or past lingo, we could just go ahead and move on... NEW LINGO! political/cultural/social frustrations due to sensitive associations and differing perspectives of describing whatever random related concepts. lingo, we can just submit positive words and tech words into a bucket and creatively combine them to attach to whatever cool concept. (BEAUTIFUL CODE! = GREAT DISCUSSION!) sounds kinda fun to me!!! What if it was a raffle / poetry / public reading party???? I'm sure there would be great code there! <mailto:maxb.personal@gmail.com>> wrote: game of oppression bingo. i will make this brief. dominant majority with a huge history of colonialistic oppression, at the expense of any class who has experiences colonialistic oppression is pretty offensive. if you want to qualify this as "what they wrongly refer to themselves as" then use quotes and indicate as such. ie "Doesn't the so-self-called 'civilized' psyche secretly crave the things it sets itself apart from and gives up and projects on its image of the noble savage though?" it would be better however to reword this overall to say something like "Doesn't the privileged majority psyche secretly crave the things it sets itself apart from and gives up and projects on its image of the oppressed culture though?" involves understand that you are referring to the named trope and not using that term as an offensive term. this can be solved by referencing the trope at hand. ie http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Noble_savage because it is still hugely offensive to native peoples even as it is used as a handy moniker to call out offensive behavior by the privileged majority. americans is doubly offensive, even if it fits the point you are trying to make fyi. if you MUST use tropes to refer to POC, make sure you are using the correct one that examines the colonial aspects of the behavior being discussed. correct thing to do is not double down and try to explain that you weren't being offensive. the correct thing to do is to say something like "i am sorry my language choice offended you. what i was trying to say was___". do not attempt to use dictionary.com <http://dictionary.com>, etymology, wikipedia usage, etc to try and prove that you weren't being offensive. offense is not in the eye of the person who offended, it is in the eye of that person offended. so just accept that you behaved offensively even as you did not intend to and move on. trying to explain to the world at large how you totally weren't offensive citing media to try and "prove" it just makes you more offensive, and it is incredibly disrespectful to the person you are communicating with who likely doesn't give a shit what you were actually trying to say at this point, and did not sign on for a weeks long multiple page scroll email battle/war of attention attrition. accept, move on. don't become a cliche. the right to say anything you want. and we all have the right to think of you as an asshole for saying it. if someone says "don't say that" they aren't depriving you of your right to free speech, they are trying to save you from losing friends and allies in your community. "congress shall make no law abridging free speech." there is nothing in there that says someone HAS to remain your friend after you were unintentionally a racist asshole. not want to argue about it in their hobbies. respect that. just because you have the time and inclination to have a long-winded email argument does not mean that you are not also being totally offensive by assuming the other person wants/needs/is going to engage in it. often times i see people "win" arguments on email lists only because they were the more persistant asshole, not because they are right. and be aware that that is totally obvious to people not involved but still reading. there are still many thriving native cultures, and people need to understand that when they refer to native things or topics they are talking not just about past people that were wiped out, but also active real working native peoples still here. the bay area is full of native people who are active in their tribal affiliations, who work to promote native rights, and who are invested in the topics of native americans. when you frame out things like that there is a "civlized" society, and native societies (implying not civilized) many of those people are GOING to be super offended. Like when native people try to call out white people on wearing headdresses as culturally appropriative, and white people rebut with "YOU ARE ON THE INTERNET. THAT WAS INVENTED BY US MAYBE YOU SHOULDN'T USE THAT". fucked up. (for the ignorant: native people are americans as well and have equal rights to share in american culture as any other american. besides which: last i checked many native peoples have also contributed to the internet, even as there are colonial privileged oppressionistic usages of native culture as well, such as apache.) try to keep that in mind as you use terms that may evoke native americans, at the risk of being seen as a total racist asshole. &lt;di.franco(a)aya.yale.edu <mailto:di.franco@aya.yale.edu>> wrote: wrote, and while I don't have anything to add about the immediate question beyond what I said yesterday, I'd like to talk about some of the broader context you brought up in your reply and the more general issues involved. trying to do as having a discussion, so it seems to me that when there are misunderstandings that is exactly when we should be having more discussion to clarify what we are trying to say and find out effective ways to say it, not less. Meanwhile, you are using the terms of some sort of power struggle where I am being attacked and defending myself and allegiances are forming and shifting around the patterns of conflict. I do not see a power struggle but rather a community trying to communicate and communication depends on shared understanding among senders and recipients of symbols and how to use them to convey meaning. Where this is not immediately clear, clarifying it explicitly seems the most direct way to move towards better mutual understanding. I hope this can be reconciled with your own views and I welcome further discussion on this. uncomfortable with some things. To speak of attacking and defending and also then to say that the subject of the attack should *stop defending* reminds me too much of the revolting cries of "stop resisting" from police - I could certainly never meditate on such an ugly phrase and I find the suggestion grotesque. It's something I've heard while authoritarian thugs victimize people who are not resisting but only perhaps trying to maintain their safety and dignity under an uninvited attack, perhaps not even that, and one way the phrase is used is as a disingenuous way of framing the situation so that later, biased interpretations of what happened will have something to latch onto. I am glad we have much less at stake in our interactions here than in those situations but I still really don't like to see us internalizing that logic in how we handle communications in our group. which is the idea that people should respond to feedback only by silently assenting. This reminds me too much of other situations where people, sometimes myself, were supposed to be seen and not heard, and it deprives people of agency over and responsibility for what they do by expecting them to let others determine their behavior unilaterally. I am happy to take feedback and, generally, I hope you can trust people to act on feedback appropriately rather than trying to short-circuit their agency. The more informative feedback is, then, the better, and it should contain information people can use themselves to evaluate what they are doing the way others do so they can figure out how to accommodate everyone's needs. When feedback consist simply of naked statements it is too much like trolling in the small or gaslighting in the large, and especially then, amounts to an insidious way to deprive people of agency by conditioning them to fear unpredictable pain when they exercise agency, and has a chilling effect. In general, the idea that certain people are less able than others to handle the responsibilities of being human, and so they should have their behaviors dictated to them unilaterally by others, is a key to justifying many regimes of oppression, especially modern ones, and because of that I am very uncomfortable when I see any example of that logic being internalized in our group dynamics. trump cards but if the card game analogy really is apt then it may be a sign of trivializing the question of safe space by saying that certain people's concerns trump other people's concerns, based not on the concerns themselves, but only on who is raising the concerns. Both are important. I have heard some justifications for 'trumping' as I understand it that remind me of the debate around the Oscar Grant case. There, defenders of Mehserle's conduct claimed that police should be the judges of what legitimate police use of force is because they have special training and experience that give them a uniquely relevant perspective on what violence is justified and what demands of compliance they can legitimately make of people. Another justification I heard was that police are especially vulnerable due to the danger inherent in their duties and so things should be biased heavily towards a presumption of legitimacy when they use violence or demand compliance. To me both these justifications seem problematic because they create a class that can coerce others without accountability and can unilaterally force standards of conduct on others. I am happy that there is much less at stake among us here than there is in cases of police brutality or Oscar Grant's case, and that there is no comparison other than this logic being used. But the logic that certain people's perspectives are uniquely relevant, or that their vulnerability gives them license to force things upon others unilaterally, is still a logic I don't think we should internalize among ourselves, because it produces unaccountable authoritarianism that can be exploited for unintended ends, and does not help with the ostensibly intended ones anyway. It results in us 'policing' ourselves in a way much too much like the way the cities are policed to the detriment of many people and of values we share. I want to clarify my experience of what happened there. My 'aha' moment didn't have anything to do with the point you were trying to make - I can't even remember exactly what that point was, because it is so strongly overshadowed by my memory of how you treated me. You called me out for something that had passed between you and me in the middle of a social gathering among a mix of friends and strangers, none of whom were involved, which immediately put me in a very uncomfortable situation. Then, you dismissed my attempts to defer speaking to a more appropriate setting, and to open up a dialog with you where I shared my perspective. The only way out you gave me was to assent without comment to you. My 'aha' moment was when I realized that things between us had degenerated to that point; it was when I realized I was mistaken in trying to have a discussion because we were interacting like two territorial animals, or like a police interrogator and a suspect, and you were simply demanding a display of submission or contrition from me before you would let me slink off. While it felt degrading, I took the way out you offered to spare myself and the others in the room the experience of things continuing. I take the risk of sharing this openly with you now because I think we know each other much better than we did then and we would never again end up interacting like potentially hostile strangers passing in the night, or worse. I think we can and should and have been doing better, and overall it's best not to let a mistaken assumption about what I was thinking and how I felt influence an important discussion about how we treat one another in our community. time to write this admittedly long-winded reply, not to suck the air out of the room, whatever that means, but to contribute to a discussion that moves us towards a better shared understanding of how to respect our shared values and towards more appreciation of one another's perspectives. &lt;rachelyra(a)gmail.com <mailto:rachelyra@gmail.com>> wrote: intent here was not to be offensive, but unfortunately... Here we are. I am responding to the specific message below because it is the one that made me want to unsubscribe from this mailing list and unassociate myself from this group. Everything that came after, gah. unintentional giant jerkface: if someone points out that you are offending or harming them, they are not seeking an explanation, but a change in behavior. Perhaps an apology or acknowledgement, even a query. If someone says 'i think your POV is fucked up and harmful' please do not go on to elaborate on your POV to them. Even if you think they don't get your amazing nuances. Your amazing nuances are not always important, and part of 'oppression' is that some peoples' nuances are always shoved in other people's faces. Sometimes being a friend means keeping your opinion to your damn self. 'the trump card'. We are all individuals, and as such we ultimately need to keep our own house in order. The trump card concept relates to safe spaces - as safe as eddan might feel in a space, I'm not going to average it together with my safety levels to achieve some sort of average safety rating. My safety reading of a space will always, for me, trump eddan's, and while I am happy if he feels safe it doesn't really matter to my safety level. making you feel unsafe, or that they are offending you, is that for some reason their response is almost never 'gosh, whoops!'. It's more usually like what happened here - a bunch of longwinded explanation that completely misses the point, and then a perceived ally of the offender jumping in, also talking a lot, and sucking all the air out of the room. People always have reasoning for why they did what they did. Requiring offended folks to read about your reasoning for why you said what you said misses the point, and to me makes this conversation read like you don't care if you were offensive. and explanation around the terms you used. It seems identical to our debate around the use of 'constable' and it is sad to me to see you take refuge in the same pattern of defense. It doesn't matter about the etymological history of a phrase. It doesn't. As fun as you may find it to think about, the way things are *heard*, by others, NOW, is a trump card for many. time out of my life to write this message in the hopes of helping you to modulate your behavior to be less offensive. I am sure you remember the first time I engaged with you on this topic, at Marina's house. Perhaps you'll remember the aha moment when you *stopped defending* and simply accepted the input, thanking me. Perhaps you'll find in that a sort of meditative place of return. community and am sure I will stay connected in many ways. &lt;di.franco(a)gmail.com <mailto:di.franco@gmail.com>> wrote: sets itself apart from and gives up and projects on its image of the noble savage though? through it. <mailto:netdiva@sonic.net>> wrote: of appropriation of african american vernacular by the mainstream. excellence and immense progress. it has a violent, forceful connotation. evidence - have established a belief that operating at the highest levels of talent requires mindfulness, awareness, and calm. thus, a better term, which they have started to playfully use, is "cuddling it." <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org> <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org> <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org> <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org> <tel:415%20867%209472> <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org> <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org> <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org> facebook.com/techliminal <http://facebook.com/techliminal> <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org> <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org>