'Does masculinity really have an interiority? Is it really in crisis at all? I would suggest that it is more than coincidence that the so-called crisis in masculinity has arrived at the same time that capitalism has run out of shit to sell women and requires a new market, and at the same time when the very technological advances that have enslaved women to biological reproduction might allow us to rethink the entire species survival game. It’s been decades since Sartre declared man a useless passion. It’s nothing new. And besides, if all cis-men are being gendered, sexed and sexuated according to a logic of self-hate we aren’t seeing a diminishing of patriarchal social relations.'
part three of a series of posts exploring the phenomena of murder-suicide in the shadow of Andreas Lubitz. part one; part two. Content warnings follow for discussion of suicide, murder, sexual abuse and male violence.
the sadness of men
“War Machine” Jonathan Paul Koppenhaver: MMA fighter, misogynist, abuser and nietzsche mis-quoting MRA idiot who tried to kill himself after being imprisoned for sexual assault.
Andreas Lubitz crashed an aircraft into a mountainside. Everything in the case is picked apart, the search team sweeping through the psychic debris scattered across an inexplicable landscape. Everything is tirelessly rehearsed. What diagnosis did he have? Could he have been a psychopath? Might he have been an evil monstrosity? Psychiatric contaminants all over him, of course he was a madman! After all, too kill oneself is to refuse the logic of life, to no longer march to the optimistic rhythms of affirmation, currently bolstered and intensified by a capitalist ethos of compulsory positive affect, is obvious to be insane.
The newspapers know and they have chewed it all over, looked it all square in the factual eyes, and set down the record from the black box voice to the psychiatric files and work histories to the ex-girlfriends and their half-baked stories. Look how it all plugs in too; already the proliferation of discursive connections being forged into new enunciative openings- should pilots have less privacy? Lubitz the harbinger of danger. Once you worried about aircrashes, hijackings, jihadi suicide missions, and now it is the pilots who are insane, mad men who long for the brooding dangers of the art of cloud sculpting. And airlines, scared of their new found suicidal maniacs at 30,000 feet, their smooth voiced sky-captains who once signified the Eros of leaving terrestrial imprisonment but who now seem like unhinged monsters in tarnished epaulettes, these airlines are urging those captains to marry. We know Lubitz crash that plane after he broke up with his girlfriend.
Being alone is a bad thing. Suicidologists have said it for a long time. We know it. Lubitz was unmarried and being an unmarried man of a certain age means you’re much more likely to do this kind of thing. This smashing into the side of a mountain at thousands of kilometers per hour kind of thing. This take a screaming mass of people with you kind of thing. Being married, it makes you less lonely. Here is the traditional response to depression and to the act of suicide, the immunological response, the histamine response: the couple-form and the family will save society.
Even Franco Berardi in his own analysis of suicide wants to tell us that suicide is a mental illness, or that it is at least the result of a mental illness, and of course it can be but must we follow the tired path of psychiatrist’s as we deploy the psychiatric language? To speak in the language of psychopathology, of lunatic desires, is not to speak as if one were looking for cures. We used to want to turn our illnesses into weapons and to push forward into great waves of elective insanities, or at least to depathologise our sicknesses as we politicised them. Today leading left pessimists can simply say that suicide is a sickness and so denounce it, rendering it a diagnostic indicator of the horror of this life whilst refusing to admit it might indicate something about life as such, or to speak of suicide as even possibly being a noble death, a voluntarism we might believe in.
In Bifo’s book we have a parade of killers who chose to end their own lives. We get all the recent big names. We get those fascinating psychopaths he correctly speaks of as indicative of our “dysempathic” culture and, on the other side of these men, because they are all men, he places the vanishing mother. This is the mother of attachment theory. It is the mother who teaches the child language and the affective sense rather than only the “operational” pragmatics of words. It is the mother who the child becomes able to carry empathy through and thus become properly part of the human race. It’s a weird 1950s psychoanalytic version of the mother who, in her displacement by digital and visual media technologies, recalls or indeed fully resurrects the ludicrous idea of the schizophrenogrenic mother tauted by analysts like Fromm-Reichman.
It’s not so much that Bifo is wrong it is just that he makes a dangerous backwards step, especially given the disaster of the refrigerator mother hypothesis who is here, what?, the automated “mother”? It isn’t that Bifo is wrong exactly as there is evidence to back up his claim even if he prefers to leave it unexplored. It is more that his characterisation of murder-suicide falls under the ambit of a gendered schema in which all killers and suicides are men, all women are mothers, and all primary care givers are women. In this Bifo is entirely in line with the contemporary suicidological finds that the majority of suicides are carried out by men, and that the majority of these rare instances of murder-suicides-there no more elegant name?- are carried out by men, even if he also corresponds with contemporary essentialising epistemologies of care and empathy.
Circle back. Pause. Go back to the start. Hold this circling pattern before coming in for runaway conclusions. Andreas Lubitz crashed a plane into a mountain. We seem to know everything, to have said everything, except to say anything about these facts. Brute, senseless and mute, we make facts and data stand up and walk around dressed up as arguments so we can settle our nerves. So let’s unsettle ourselves to settle ourselves down once again. I want to pick up the thread of this gendering of suicide in what follows.
masculine methodologies
society has killed men. Suicidology is the subcategory of thanatology that deals specifically with the sociological study of suicide. I was never meant to live in this era anyway. After training as a psychiatric nurse I thought about pursuing something along those lines, an academic career in the study of death, maybe even suicidality specifically. Follow your dreams and think for yourselves. But suicidology, like all sociology, is too cold for me, too remote, too distant from the misery of everyday life and the cruel miracle of the human capacity to endure it. keep alpha male shit alive. The study of society, the study of what keeps us alive, isn’t enough for me. My own way of coping is to get down in it with the despairing. To have solidarity with the dead, the dying, and the Void. may my strength be with you. I wanted to turn myself into the object, to fall into their world, to never look away from the suffering that tears and shakes the unseen edges of our comfortable worlds. society has killed men. And in it is men, by and large, who go that final step towards dying by their own hand and taking other with them. This is the lesson of suicidology, and of the lines from War Machine’s suicide note that are interspersed through this passage.
War Machine, the name the very apotheosis of a kind of pathetic masculinity, attempted to kill himself after being arrested for a vicious sexual assault on his partner. If War Machine’s Men’s Rights Activism rhetoric is in any way true, if society has killed men, it is also true that men, by and large, have tended to be the ones killing their social neighbours. And as the suicidologists repeat they tend to do so by much more violent and spectacular methods than their female counterparts, even though it is women who try to die much more often. Male violence. Masculine violence. Men killing themselves and bringing everyone else with them because how intolerable it is to die alone. how horrible to truly achieve some strange autonomy. Bifo’s book on such men is entitled Heroes, and we can see what kind of heroism it is.Andreas Lubitz crashed an airplane into a mountain.
That men die by their own hands more violently than women is as uncontroversial a statement as we’re likely to get from suicidologists or the WHO. It seem so well established and so readily explained by a “crisis in masculinity” that the Campaign Against Living Miserably has been set up to respond to the male suicide problem. Some feminists, many of them cis-men themselves, and philosophical pessimists might say the problem is that not enough men are choosing to relinquish their hold over the earth and society. Let’s not dwell on that at the moment. Let’s move on and ask, as we’re bound to ask, why it is that men choose such violent methods?
One answer might be that the crisis of masculinity has produced a male body riven by contortions and paroxysmal agonies. Men, faced with their increasing social and reproductive irrelevance, and their technological displacement by trans-men, have imploded into a suicidogenic spiral of despair, self-loathing and hatred that enacts a very psychoanalytic kind of suicide: the suicide that is the murder of the hated other that one contains within one’s own interiority. I don’t want to dismiss the idea of a suicide driven by self-hate but I think in this context we would be hard pushed to sell it.
Does masculinity really have an interiority? Is it really in crisis at all? I would suggest that it is more than coincidence that the so-called crisis in masculinity has arrived at the same time that capitalism has run out of shit to sell women and requires a new market, and at the same time when the very technological advances that have enslaved women to biological reproduction might allow us to rethink the entire species survival game. It’s been decades since Sartre declared man a useless passion. It’s nothing new. And besides, if all cis-men are being gendered, sexed and sexuated according to a logic of self-hate we aren’t seeing a diminishing of patriarchal social relations.
It all stinks of a little too much historical metaphysics, a little neat and tidy periodisation, a linear unfolding that historians of the future, if there is such a future and if this civilisation is deemed worth remembering, will talk about as The Age of Man giving way to the Transhumanist Postgendered World. I admit I could be wrong. There are those for whom body modification of the slightest form is terrifying. The virulence of technoscientific devaluation of even these simplest and most basic of values must pose an existential threat to those men, and those structures that prefer male power, who haven’t realised they were always pointless from the perspective of the cosmos. But like I said…this is all a bit speculative, verging on the weirder fringes of thinking where suicide joins up with technologically assisted extinction. I’ll keep my palliative pessimism out of it for now.
Men, cis-men, it is argued, are intrinsically more violent. The “Male Warrior” evolutionary psychological account of why men are so violent by focussing in on the way the fact that the brain has evolved not as a singular or modular unity but as a multiplicity of accidental and experimental pragmatic kluges that have been and remain effective at solving certain environmental problems. In the Male Warrior story the specific problems we have in sight are those of intra-group and inter-group living in periods of evolutionary history marked by competition, high risk social exchange, and periods of relative scarcity. According to the Social Brain Hypothesis
the need to form ever larger coalitions [to secure mates, food, territory and other resources] spurred the increase in human social network size and led to a concomitant brain size in order to hold these networks together and deal effectively with an intensified competition for resources…our social brain is therefore essentially a tribal brain [here].
Flowing from this is the idea that the human organism sets itself up with these group alliances in order to form coalitions against death that necessarily acts with at least suspicion, if not out right hostility, towards people who fall outwith the group. This is to repeat, to naturalize even, the fundamental decision that is central to so much political theory in recent decades between the friend and the enemy. These are shadings and “layers” to this picture of intergroup interactions that add some more depth and make space for the way in which intergroup negotiations, assimilations or organising for mutual aid can take place as much as racism, xenophobia and other constitutive-exclusionary mechanisms take place. There will however be occasions where these coalitions come up against rival coalitions, or irrational sets such as “people who live on that side of the river”, and conflict will arise between them. Sometimes this means tribal warfare as in images conjured up by Society Against the State, and other times it will means the victimisation of the madman, the cognitively impaired, the physically impaired, or whatever other tic or idiosyncracy has been deemed a contaminant or threat to group cohesion and survival. From this evolutionary perspective this might be a distal etiological theory of capitalism’s racialized imperialist drives, or of the easy and unconcerned acceptance of by a cross-class national alliance in accepting the contemporary biopolitical state’s tales of immigrant colonialism of the fatherland.
All this requires bodies capable of acting for the benefit of the group. Aggressors require bodies capable of attack, defender require bodies capable of mounting defence. Arguing from the evidence of historical and contemporary modes of aggressive and defensive violence- mostly carried out by men within patriarchal structures that systematically privilege men- the Male Warrior Hypothesis weds the idea of the social brain to the need to form coalitions that can plan, organize, carry out and dynamically adapt to the demands of specific instances or sustained campaigns of “intergroup conflicts”. It suggests that as men carry out most of the violence in our society it stands to reason to speculate that men have been evolutionarily selected as the bodies with the cognitive mechanisms for this work of strategic and bloody hate. The theorists go on to discuss convergent evidence from cousin species to humans, the idea that human females tend to invest much more in their offspring than males such that aggressive behaviour is too high cost, and to studies that demonstrate that men are more likely to demonstrate racist attitudes and behaviours than women. You can read the rest for yourself in the link above. You could also re-frame all of this in a much more thanatosophical way by placing it within the epistemological axioms of the incredibly well evidenced terror management theory without losing anything of much value.
So what? What does this have to do with men and suicide, or men and murder-suicide? Well the USA’s Centre for Disease Control reports a staggering 91% of murder-suicides are carried out by men and that of these 88% are conducted with a gun. Of course this is to do with availability of the weapon as much as anything else- if I can’t get my hands on a gun I can’t shoot myself or other people. Andreas Lubitz was a pilot. Andreas Lubitz killed himself and 150 other people by crashing a plane into a mountain. In the UK to male murder-suicide pattern for 1991-2005 was reported at 100%.
This theoretical model, the model of the Male Warrior his rage turned against himself and the others around him, is appealing because of its simplicity and its ease of explanation. It is an elegant theory: men carry out more violent suicides and suicide-murders because men are inherently more violent than women. When something goes wrong in a man’s life, when he has no wife, as that Turkish airline fears and as our suicide statistics show, if he has no sense of “belonging” (I despise the word but it is popular in the suicidologist’s lexicon), then he takes his own life………for some reason. It is only a partial explanation. But at this stage we have to be satisfied with that. We can’t walk into the mind of Andreas Lubitz. We can’t ask him “why?”, and even if we could would we be able, intoxicated with sociology, with philosophy, numbed by the opiates of our chosen theoretico-ideological habit, would we be willing or able to understand him?
interruption
In the next part of this series of posts exploring Andreas Lubitz actions and the wider assemblages it both constitutes and is constituted by I will explore the question of male violence and the gendering/sexing of suicide. I also want to return to the specificity of the pilot-plane-mountain relationship. So far we seem to be at the point of saying men have evolved to be violent. Really it all boils down to that: men are violent. They have been biologically engineered, or at least evolutionarily cobbled together, for violence and bloodshed, for the tactical thinking of inter-tribal savagery, destruction, brutality, murder and war.
This is a hard picture for me to deny. Although I’m not a violent man, have always been afraid of harming others, this might be because I am lucky enough to be a weak man in a position of relatively benign co-operative coexistence with my tribal peers. Of course in other more obscure ways I enact all manner of strategic games, and carry out all kinds of in-group and out-group identifications, I can’t help but find others with whom to huddle against corporeal vulnerability and so forth. Yet there is also a sense that this outline of a theory of male violence is inadequate. In the next post I will try to explore and depart from this purely biological picture, if not from the reality revealed by the statistics. Men, for whatever reason, simplyare more violent.
As a kind of post-script I want to say why I was prompted into writing this post. I was compelled by two facebook posts. The immediate prompt was from nick snircek who posted up another of Bifo’s post-Heroes interviews that deals with Andreas Lubitz all too quickly, neatly folding him into Bifo’s pre-constituted theorisations. The first and more immediate was a question posed by a particularly badass feminist friend of mine. In the light of the discovery of the remains of Karen Buckley, and the fact that this coincided with the rape of another woman in the same club in which Buckley spent her last night of dancing, my friend simply asked: “when will men end their violence against us”? It is hard not to be pessimistic in the face of the endless and ancient violence of men.
i’m turning 25 this weekend so I collected all my favorite tunes to celebrate!
DJ HEAVEN IS FOR REAL - UNAPOLOGETIC MILLENNIAL PARTY MIX
STREAM // DOWNLOAD (right click + save file as. or I think you can just click on it?)
mostly youtube rips and extra gain for that lossy, blown-out sound you crave
continuous mix. 45 minutes.
Kero Kero Bonito - My Party (bo en remix) 00:00 Yufu Terashima (寺嶋由芙) - Like a Virgin (Madonna cover) 03:48 Jaako Jarvinen - 50 Things to Do Before You Die Interlude 07:20 Cezar - It’s My Life (live at Eurovision 2013) 07:35 Murat Nasyrov (Мурат Насыров) - The Boy Wants to Tambov (Мальчик хочет в Тамбов) 10:30 Porpentine - Crypt Worlds Piss Economy Interlude 13:40 BILLIE IDLE - Be My Boy 14:00 Valentín Elizalde - Como Me Duele 17:30 Hechizeros Band - El Sondito 19:54 Grimes - REALiTi 21:58 Tom Cruise - BABY YOU’RE A SONG YOU MAKE ME WANNA ROLL MY WINDOWS DOWN AND JOIN THE CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY Interlude 26:09 Florida Georgia Line - Cruise 26:21 Nickelback - She Keeps Me Up 29:43 TRF - survival dAnce ~no no cry more~ 33:43 Perfume - P.T.A. Corner Interlude 36:35 BiS - survival dAnce ~no no cry more~ (TRF cover) 36:39 Heaven Is For Real - Yelling @ God Interlude 37:33 Nightwish - Wanderlust 37:40 Hannity & Colton Burpo - God Has Not Allowed Me To Remember Interlude 41:44 The Bird Calls - My Kind Of Party (EXCLUSIVE UNRELEASED SPECIAL JAM) 42:23
Part 1 of yesterday’s sketches (Part 2: Dragon Age Edition up next). Thanks again, you guys. If I missed a few people, it was because I figured the request was already more or less covered by something else, or because I didn’t know the reference well enough - in which case I’ll take it as a recommendation for something to check out.
MARIAN DRAWING MOLLY MILLIONS FROM NEUROMANCER WOOO!!!
'Photography enforces a particular kind of authority and encourages the appropriation of spaces. Players of Snap can certainly be seen as doing this as they explore new areas, photograph new subjects, and alter the environment around them. Players consume and dominate the spaces they enter on their quests for the ultimate collection. This quest consumes not only the digital space, but leaks into the physical as well. Snap’s in-game power relationships between subjects of photography and the player as a digital photographer encourage digital colonialist impulses, such as the intrusion into an “unclaimed” space and a disregard for the consequences of interrogating its population for personal gain.'
Alexandra Orlando is a PhD student at the University of Waterloo and Associate Commentaries editor at FPS. Her research interests include narrative theory and treating video games as literary texts.
Betsy Brey is a doctoral student in English at University of Waterloo and associate essays editor for FPS. She researches game mechanics and narrative.
Photo Play & Playing Photos
Cameras in games can be easy to forget. It might even usually be the mark of a good camera mechanic if players don’t notice it at all. Player awareness of his or her guided perspective through a game is often only noted when it fails or inhibits play, but a game camera is often a silent narrator of the game experience. The camera and its operations are crucial to the navigation of digital spaces—perhaps the key component of digital gameplay (Manovich 244). However, most players will not consider gameplay as photographic, yet their entire experience is mediated through a camera, impacting the limitations and expectations of a game. As noted by Michael Nitsche in Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure, “it is in the nature of a camera (virtual or real) to select, frame, and interpret. Through this selection, the moving image infuses the virtual world with a perspective. It narrates the space” (77). Yet, until 1999, it was not used as a gameplay mechanic itself.
This silent narration was shifted entirely when Nintendo released Pokémon Snap for the Nintendo 64 console. Cindy Poremba, in discussing the role of the camera in digital spaces, points out that “in many games, the player’s role is hybrid: as camera avatar, players not only navigate through the game world, they film it as well” (49). The character has a point of view, but is essentially always being “filmed” for and by the player. This is a “‘gameness’ of photography” (Poremba 55) which is often forgotten in video games. Interestingly, the cameras that allow the player visibility into Snap most closely resemble games in the on-rails first-person shooter genre, such as the House of the Dead and the Time Crisis series in which a camera follows a set path and player interacts with objects within those predetermined frames within a pre-set time limit. Players in Snap are also asked to shoot, even if the shooting is done with a camera instead of a gun—perhaps making it one of the least violent first-person shooter games out there. It shares several mechanics and play-style elements with the goriest first-person shooters, where timing and accuracy are the main skill required for the games. However, just because the shooting is done with a camera and not a gun doesn’t make this kind of shooting any less weaponized. The purpose of the attack in the case of Snap is not to “shoot to kill,” as seen in most shoot-em-ups, but instead is to master and dominate: the same ultimate goal, but different methodologies.
Drawing from the international popularity of the Pokémon series, Snap repositions gameplay from the role-playing mechanics of earlier games. Due to its in-game mechanics and integrative real-world mechanisms, Snap shifts the definitions of digital subjects and photographers, illustrating the complex relationship of subject and shooter in digital photographic practices. Ultimately, the practices portrayed in Snap prove to be deeply imbalanced experiences in terms of power dynamics, complicated by the popularity of the Pokémon series which encouraged players to “catch ‘em all.” These competitive practices extended beyond digital spaces with the intersections of print and digital photography and the gamification of photographic practices as taught and presented by the game.
The Eye on the Scene
Games and photography already have much in common, even before Snap introduced explicitly gamified photography. Games are visual, but more importantly, games are models of experiences—not just depictions or descriptions (Bogost 4). The same can be said of photographs, which are also not representations of themselves, but instead, models of what they reveal. Barthes calls these “photographic referents,” stating that what the lens captures is different than what the lens was aimed at, both of which are different than the “real thing” intended to be put on film (76). The multiple layers of references, like in a game, reveal something entirely different than the actual—a model of a situation, moment, or person. However, viewers of photos and players of games often forget this difference. Barthes believes “a specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents), or at least it is not immediately or generally distinguished from its referent” (5). Because photographs have a strange sense of authority, in which they capture the “real” in ways other media could not, the camera can be considered an extension of the eye. There is an organic sense to a camera, making it inherently connected to the biological. The camera is placed up against the eye which re-represents the subject in the photo. Even in Snap, the photographer avatar holds the camera up to his eye. However, it is ultimately a representation of the biological through the dual manipulation of both the avatar’s camera and the game’s interface camera. This conflation of real and unreal, simulated and simulacra, biological and mechanical, complicates the “meta-realism” the game portrays (as discussed in Manovich 208). Such is the case with a game like Snap, where the practices of the game encourage players to model a specific kind of behavior and practices.
In Snap, the impact the player has as he or she engages with the space portrays a lack of consequences. The game takes players into a representation of the “true” wild habitats of Pokémon, away from the towns and walking paths which make up of the map of the other games. While the player might temporarily impact a Pokémon or environment (for example, knocking a Pokémon into a lava pit, forcing it to evolve), any disruptions reset upon re-entering the level. Instead of walking through these environments, a small cart runs through different Pokémon’s habitable spaces, acting as nothing more than a guided tour car from which the player takes snapshots. The player remains stationary while “it is the virtual space as a whole that changes its position in each shot. Using contemporary vocabulary of computer graphics, we can say that this virtual space is rotated, scaled, and zoomed always to give the spectator the best viewpoint” (Manovich 108). In the case of Snap, the on-rails experience guides the player through which shots to take based on curves in the track and visual cues such as glens in forests, signs and sounds. But the very presence of this rail system points towards unexpected implications. There are costs to “off the beaten path” wildlife photography in which the technologies (in Snap, the cart, including train tracks and teleporter gates) have been built directly in the middle of habitats.
The disruption and reconfiguration of these spaces is done, in the words of the game, to “take pictures of Pokémon for the Pokémon Report” (Pokémon Snap), where the Report acts as visual evidence of Pokémon habits and ecosystems. Instructed to “try to take a lot of Pokémon pictures,” the player is challenged to seek out new kinds of creatures each trip (Pokémon Snap). However, this is always accomplished through additional disruptions to the habitat, as well as occasionally at the cost of harming the subjects of the photos. As Susan Sontag notes, “the view of reality as an exotic prize to be tracked down and captured by the diligent hunter-with-a-camera has informed photography from the beginning” (55). The digital world of the videogame is never in one single state. From the moment the player arrives on Pokémon Island, everything has already been reshaped. It is the goal of the player to manipulate this world in some form. Although Snap was one of the first games to utilize photography skills as the basis for this manipulation, it is one of the only ones to approach them as photographs and not in-game screenshots, even if that is what they ultimately are. However, Snap’s approach to collecting and mastering the space through photography is as equally contrived as other in-game photographic moments: Snap is simply the first game to offer it as the only means of mastery.
How’s the Technique?: Aim and Shoot
The various methods of mastery these snapshots represent are both basic real-world photographic skills as well as skills that only function in the game space. Snap teaches players how to shoot the in-game film camera in a short tutorial (seen in its entirety below), and then leaves players on their own to manipulate the point-of-view camera to look and shoot at appropriate subjects—almost always Pokémon.
However, these basic photographic skills, although certainly transferable, are not unique to Snap as a game or to photography. “Press A to shoot” could be from nearly any shooter game or point-and-shoot camera. Instead, the gamification of photographic techniques is performed through implementing a points-based feedback and critique system. Photographs determined as poor representations are awarded low points, and photos with traits assigned to be quality representations are awarded high points. Players are not informed of these criteria before taking photos for the first time—they are only instructed to “take a lot of photos” and to “Press A to shoot” (Pokémon Snap). They are also not informed that only a single shot of each Pokémon type is eligible for judgement per trip. Only through attempting to snap too many photos do players find they are limited to 60 exposures per trip, and only through attempting to select multiple snapshots of a single subject do players realize they can only bring one to the expert for critique.
Each photo is judged on a few main qualities: size of subject, pose of subject, and technique of the shot. Additional bonuses are added to the score if there are multiple subjects in the photo, or if the player has performed certain events on a course that lead to special or unique poses (for example, getting a Pokémon to stand on a surfboard or sing in a group). The game privileges shots in which the subject’s size takes up about a third of the frame, the subject is in the centre of the frame, and is facing the camera. Some poses are encouraged over others, such as dancing with or attacking other Pokémon, but for the most part, all that is emphasized is that the Pokémon should not be facing away from the camera. The player is taught these specifics through the feedback sessions, in which the Pokémon expert makes comments such as “This shot would have been perfect if the Pokémon were in the middle of the frame,” “How’s the size? It’s so-so,” “It disappoints Pokémon to be photographed from behind,” “You were close [to beating your old score],” or “All right! [This photograph is] very nice!” (Pokémon Snap). Each comment is prompted from a particular point range. For example, a perfect score in a category is 1,000 points, whereas a score of 350 or below is considered a poor attempt.
The player learns which traits are desirable through this feedback and begins to incorporate those requests into his or her gameplay style. This teaches players to take a particular kind of photo—a very simple, straight-forward photo in which the subject of the photo has been posed in a desirable manner in the middle of the photo. This means that the player has very little creative input and is not encouraged to explore creative or personal style.
Strike a(nd) Pose
The fact that Snap gamifies basic photography skills and teaches its players how to create a single kind of photographic image indicates a single acceptable or desirable kind of photography. Not only does it teach just one style, but it also discourages learning others in the game space. This can be viewed as a kind of photographic colonialism—the limitation to a single viewpoint at the expense and extinction of others by a controlling power outside of the immediate environment. Snap disallows a variety of voices within its gameplay and photographic requirements, separating itself from photographic arts, which seeks to “find new voices, explore new ways of making art, and also includes a large number of people dedicated to education, criticism and preservation” (Sandor and Fron). Instead, Snap prefers its players to produce particular kinds of photos in a particular way.
There is an easily-made analogy between the reckless photographic practices of Snap and tourist photography in general. This idea, wherein a temporary resident takes away part of a place for his or her own purposes, acts to reminds us that “much tourist photography is about ‘consuming’ significant places” (Larson 25). This consumption comes at the price of place itself. As the player rolls through various habitats in Snap, safe in the cart, he or she is encouraged by the game’s mechanics to throw objects at their photographic subjects—either apples, which on one hand are desired food items by the Pokémon but can also cause harm when hit repeatedly with them, or an item called a “Pesterball,” which contains a misty purple gas that stuns or knocks Pokémon unconscious. The game does not discourage players for manipulating the environment in any of these manners: in fact, an 800 point bonus is applied to a photograph taken of an unconscious Pokémon.
An unconscious creature is, after all, easier to get near and to pose. This lack of concern for the subjects of these photos (and the subject of these abuses) brings attention to the inherent power dynamics this meta-realistic Snap portrays. Players find themselves “gazing on other people’s reality with curiosity, with detachment, with professionalism, the ubiquitous photographer operates as if that activity transcends class interests, as if its perspective is universal” (Sontag 55). The player’s goals of consuming the space and mastering his or her collection are the only perspectives that matter in the game.
Gotta Collect ’em All: Digital Photos
Become Physical
The mastery elements encouraged by Snap and Pokémania in general were amplified when Nintendo introduced real-world printing booths for the in-game photographs. According to Bogost, snapshots are the smallest most intimate modes of expression (73). Snap’s printed snapshots can be considered a way to combat the private nature of traditional snapshots while at the same time encouraging competition and mastery. Because everyone playing the game has a similar experience and players understand they are given the same photographic subjects, sharing the photos is a kind of proving ground in and of itself. There are 63 Pokémon in the game and players must photograph them all to win. So each player’s snapshots are both communal and private, capturing moments established and shared by all. At the same time, this does not make them any less intimate because only players of the game would have the knowledge base required to see the mastery elements these photos represented; while snapshots tend to be personal, the specialization required to take these photos was not limited to a single individual, creating a sense of community where there previously was not. Sontag compares photography and collector-culture, noting “like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past” (77). When the collector is also a photographer, and vice-versa, the relationship becomes considerably more about collecting a past in order to present it to others. These snapshots, when digital only, are difficult to use as evidence of mastery. Snap is not a multi-player or online game, so players couldn’t compete during gameplay itself. Instead, the permanent past-tense of the snapshot was a method of proving the consumption and control of the gamespace. Poremba notes that screenshots act as “surrogate possessions” due to the fact that “they present a means of appropriation within the normally defined context of a constructed game experience” (51), meaning they are objects used to show off the time and effort put into a game: trophies. Additionally, players’ Snap results were limited to their own gaming console and cartridge, so they might have become even more private and personal, but the introduction of the Pokémon Snap stations changed this. The stations, which existed in participating Blockbuster Video stores in North America, were set up as modified Nintendo 64 stations in arcade cabinets. Players would save their Snap photos on a Nintendo 64 memory card at home and insert it into the station and be able to print 4 sets of four postage stamp-sized sticker sheets at $3 a sheet.
The printing stations were a promotional tool; the printed photos acted as tangible proof that was easy to share and proliferate, if a player could get ahold of them. Since physical photographs are both objects and images (Larson 31), they also signaled that the player had the funds to print the photos, as well as consistent access to the station itself. On a larger scale, Pokémon in all its forms dominated the 90s schoolyard; children who were allowed to bring (and owned) their binders full of Pokémon cards and their Nintendo Game Boys to school were part of a small elite group; they collected more than other children, some who were not fortunate enough to have their own. To capture and collect Pokémon is to participate in consumer culture and thus show dominance over minority groups, namely children from more wealthy families over less wealthy families and adults over children as a whole. “Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection” Sontag writes, “that its militants thought it universal is the only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois” (54). The elitist nature of photography connects back to the early days of portrait painting and daguerreotypes, but video gaming, just like any new form of technology, is also an elitist act requiring the money, time, and physical capabilities to play. For children, this meant acquiring a level of agency through their parents while also living in an area which had game stores and Blockbuster Video stores. Is the participation of collecting and sharing Pokémon photos a way to go beyond the scope of the game and the limitations of the scoring system? Perhaps if it had been more economically and socially viable for its audience. Without the ability to print and share photos outside of the rule-based proceduralism of the game, players lose their changes to form and maintain their own criteria and judgements for their Pokémon snapshots. Without the social sharing that the physical snapshots allowed, only the game’s point system places value on the photos and stipulates how those photos ought to look.
Conclusion: Be the Pokémon Snap Master
Photography enforces a particular kind of authority and encourages the appropriation of spaces. Players of Snap can certainly be seen as doing this as they explore new areas, photograph new subjects, and alter the environment around them. Players consume and dominate the spaces they enter on their quests for the ultimate collection. This quest consumes not only the digital space, but leaks into the physical as well. Snap’s in-game power relationships between subjects of photography and the player as a digital photographer encourage digital colonialist impulses, such as the intrusion into an “unclaimed” space and a disregard for the consequences of interrogating its population for personal gain. The mastery elements promoted by Pokémania were played up through the material printing stations, acting to extend the dynamics of power in collection-culture. This competition outside of the game environment prompts players to return to their private digital world, exhaust it, and tout their trophies among elite peers outside of the digital space—playful exploitation and extraction of desirable material from an under-developed area for the benefit of the digital colonist. Lastly, the gamification of photography teaches and encourages players to learn a particular set of photographic skills which privileges conformity to a specific structure established by the game. Only one kind of photo is considered acceptable, appropriate, or worthy of praise, no matter how the subjects are treated or manipulated. Deviations or explorations of the limits of this conformity are discouraged and punished through the points system. The type of mass-produced photo, although comprised of different types of Pokémon, still remains a repetitious process as opposed to the facilitation of a creative outlet. These constructions of power within the game, as well as outside of it, speak to the level of control and agency a player has in a digital world and thus, meta-realistic representations of photography as play.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. 42-60. Print.
Bogost, Ian. How to Do Things with Videogames. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2011. Print.
Larsen, Jonas, and Mette Sandbye. “The (Im)mobile Life of Digital Photographs: The Case of Tourist Photography”. Digital Snaps: The New Face of Photography. Ed. Jonas Larson and Mette Sandbye. New York: I.B. Taurus, 2013. 25-46. Print.
Manovich, L. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2001. Print.
Nitsche, Michael. Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Game Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008. Print.
Pokémon Snap. HAL Laboratory and Pax Softnica. Nintendo. 1999. Nintendo 64.
Poremba, Cindy. “Point and Shoot: Remediating Photography in Gamespace.” Games and Culture 2.1. 2007. 49-58. Web.
Sandor, E., and J. Fron. “The Future of Video Games as an Art: On the Art of Playing with Shadows”. Playing by the Rules: The Cultural Policy Challenges of Video Games. 2001. Web.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador USA, 2001. Print.
'People of Color in the United States have been systematically disenfranchised for centuries. We are told explicitly and implicitly that we don’t have histories, and/or that they aren’t important. We are shown in many ways, through many vehicles, that even now we don’t exist. And in turn, this deliberate destruction of history and identity is used to delegitimize us as human beings.
And if you can’t parse that sentence, let me put it another way: the first time I was asked the question, “What are you?” I was in kindergarten, and the only answer I had then was “I don’t know.”'
Let’s pretend for a second that this “question” doesn’t come off as vaguely hostile, that I didn’t have to make several police reports last year about people stalking me in person to “see if I looked white”, and that I haven’t received harassment or death threats based entirely on what people assume is my racial identity, as well my actual racial identity. Let’s also pretend that what I look like is some kind of secret, that I haven’t posted about my racial identity openly on this blog and associated media, that I haven’t spoken at events in person as MedievalPoC, and that hundreds of people who’ve read this blog haven’t also witnessed my physical manifestation in the flesh, demonstrating that I am neither a ghost, nor a sophisticated Turing machine barfing out posts into the great void of the internets.
The thing about genocide, both cultural and physical, is that it erases human histories. I’m mostly Native American, I have non-white European ancestry, and I’m something like ¼ white. And since we’re getting personal, I’ll let you in on something: I can never really know my history for sure, not in the way that many other people are able to. That disconnect is a source of constant grief and loss to me, every day that I am alive.
People of Color in the United States have been systematically disenfranchised for centuries. We are told explicitly and implicitly that we don’t have histories, and/or that they aren’t important. We are shown in many ways, through many vehicles, that even now we don’t exist. And in turn, this deliberate destruction of history and identity is used to delegitimize us as human beings.
And if you can’t parse that sentence, let me put it another way: the first time I was asked the question, “What are you?” I was in kindergarten, and the only answer I had then was “I don’t know.”
The great thing about Medievalpoc is that my personal ideologies can be utterly ignored or removed from the content here, since it mostly consists of images, research, and text sources. I do my best to summarize or explain it in order to be accessible to anyone, not just academics. It is meant to be disseminated as widely as possible, adapted for use in classrooms, read for fun, or shared with friends and family. Additionally, I try to show others how they can do their own research, and make better creative choices.
Removing a person’s history and context drastically affects the formation of their sense of self, their sense of identity. It is an injury to their humanity. Connecting other people to this information is, for me, like replacing something that has been stolen or kept away from someone who is entitled to it. For multiple reasons, I most likely will never be able to reconnect with my own history in that way, but trying to help others feel empowered to seize their own does a little bit towards ameliorating that hurt.
These ideas aren’t new, and they aren’t particularly unique.
My father’s father was Filipino-Chinese… My father’s mother was
African American-Native American… My mother’s father was
German-Danish… My mother’s mother was German… I was born in
Brooklyn, New York, but I grew up in Japan…
For once it’s not just
black and white. In this compelling chronicle of his journey through
life as a multicultural and multiethnic American, Teja Arboleda uniquely
and personally challenges institutionalized notions of race, culture,
ethnicity, and class. Now, in this
book, he fleshes out the depth of his experience as a culturally and
racially mixed American, illustrating throughout the enigma of cultural
and racial identity and the American identity crisis.
I am perfectly capable of seeing that the general idea behind this kind of personal attack is to delegitimize the content here by implying that I have lied at some point about who I am, and therefore am untrustworthy and must surely be capable of all manner of nefarious deeds.
And here’s the thing. None of that holds any water whatsoever. In the end, it’s irrelevant to what this whole project is about. People will quite literally make up anything, say anything, repeat rumors and generally foment drama for its own sake. Or as a scaremongering tactic, a silencing tactic, and an attempt to derail discussions. Or just because they feel entitled to increasingly invasive personal information about me.
They’re not, and you’re not. So then, you might wonder, why did I bother to write this? Simply because while I know all of this is out there, you in particular decided that you just couldn’t allow me to continue ignoring the frankly ridiculous wastes of time time I could indulge in if I were to seek them out. You ignored my repeated requests to respect that, came into my inbox and tried to make THEIR problem into MY problem. Also, sending someone a message like this is rude.
“If you’re an alien how comes you sound like you’re from the north?” Billie Piper’s Rose Tyler asked The Doctor ten years ago – now Christopher Eccleston has finally revealed why his Time Lord had a northern accent.
“Lots of planet have a north” the Doctor told Rose way back then, but
Eccleston (who returns to our TV screens in ITV’s new thriller Safe
House on Monday April 20th at 9pm) gives a rather different answer in
this week’s edition of Radio Times.
“I wanted to move him away from the RP (received pronunciation) for
the first time because we shouldn’t make a correlation between intellect
and accent” he says, “although that still needs addressing”.
The self-described working-class actor also says that cultural
inequality is “much more pronounced” in Britain than it used to be, and
that it would be difficult for a young actor with his background to
succeed in the industry today.
“You can’t blame Eddie Redmayne or Benedict Cumberbatch but
inequality will lead to a milky, anodyne culture. To an extent that’s
already happened,” he argues.
Eccleston stresses that it’s not just about the working class though.
“There’s not enough writing for women or people of colour” he says. “It
frustrates me when they insist on doing all-male Shakespearean
productions – a wonderful intellectual exercise, maybe, but it’s
outrageous because it’s putting a lot of women out of work.”
In a whiny queer-femme-who-is-sick-of-dating kind of mood, and before I moan about this I’d like to apologise in advance to straight girls as I don’t wanna offend u, u r awesome and I feel ur pain 4real . So here it is: dating successfully when you’re a straight white cis guy is piss easy because you just gotta show up like “I have *okay* politics, an *okayish* face, socialised bullshit confidence which u can totally see through…. also I’m sort of funny…sometimes…I know that I’m inherently a bore and am therefore grateful u give me ur time at all…aren’t I just a lovely guy? Also ur feminism is so cool and respectable *thrusting movements* pssst!! Look at ma willy!”
imho ‘binarism’ only makes sense as a construct within a broader analysis of white settler colonialism. trans people might be dismissive of or shitty towards nonbinary people but people being bad to you or your identity not being recognized is not the same thing as structural oppression; if it were, a lot of internet subcultures would be oppressed too. so yeah, let’s talk about binarism, but as a part of a colonial project that all white folx (including those who identify as nonbinary) have historical connections to and continue to benefit from.
i owe a lot of my thinking on this to folx like nina malaya of biyuti press and i encourage people to read her & other women of color’s work to understand the complexities around this topic.
definitely have mixed feelings about this. I guess she's shocked at what she perceives to be this woman's masochism, and she's portraying it as something quintessentially French.
Spotted in the Paris Metro in 2013. I really did not believe what I was seeing.
This heartbreaking comic, which juxtaposes the experiences of going through chemotherapy and playing Animal Crossing as a distraction during those treatments, comes from Chicago-based artist Krystal DiFronzo.
It’s part of a series of comics about Krystal’s experiences since she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma last August (she completed her treatments in January). She intends to release a collection of her Chemo Comics called The Good Hodgkins in June at the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo, and will sell them online shortly after. You can follow her Tumblr here.
I heard about this piece from the first episode of Young Talk, a great new podcast about comics, hosted by Kris Mukai and Laura Knetzger. They also talked about Fantasy Life in that episode, which was neat. Follow them too!
I checked some of these and they're not all white writers! c:
Awhile ago, I wrote about the New Zealand colonists’ attempt to wipe out local species as a reflection of their conflict with the indigenous Maori. While not done as a direct attempt to hurt the Maori people, both the stated intent of making New Zealand “more European” and the result of Maori language, culture and health being threatened mark the use of invasive species as an imperialist tool.
Well, there is another example of humans attacking the environment as a means of attacking another culture, and unlike the plausible deniability the New Zealand government has, this example was done EXPLICITLY to wipe out the religion and culture of a group of people. It was one of the single most dramatic uses of environmental terrorism performed in the pursuit of genocide, and it was only about 140 years or so ago.
An easy mistake for us descendants of settlers to make is the assumption that indigenous history was stable or static until our ancestors showed up. North America was home to hundreds of different cultures and languages (today 566 tribes are recognized today in the United States alone). There was centuries upon centuries of trade, migration, war, immigration, communication and cooperation. Even after European diseases killed off almost 90% of the continent, there was centuries of indigenous history that had nothing to do with settlers. The history of the Kiowa is a great example. The Kiowa people first emerged as a distinct culture coming out of the Missouri River Basin. The Kiowa creation myth tells that the first Kiowa emerged from a hollow log, small in number because most of them became trapped inside, and immediately headed south in search of a new home, arriving in the Black Hills around 1690. Traditionally nomadic hunters who traveled with cart-pulling dogs, the Kiowa would form two relationships with animals of the Dakotas that would come to define their culture: horses and buffalo.
While horses were a recent (but very successful) arrival to the Americas, buffalo had been part of North America for millions of years. While closely related to the European bison, the American bison had undergone a number of significant physical and behavioral changes from their common ancestor, and most of these changes can be explained by the evolutionary success of their greatest predator: homo sapien. Humans came to North America in several migrations, and they were so successful in their ecological niche that every ecosystem on the continent was changed. A number of large mammals couldn’t survive the arrival of a fast, intelligent, social predator like humanity, while others had problems dealing with the changes to the plants and environment that humans brought. The buffalo survived and later thrived by adapting.
Say you’re a solitary, primarily forest-dwelling large mammal that browses on leaves and up until recently was only hunted by solitary big cats and packs of wolves that wouldn’t come near as long as you were healthy and your long, front-facing horns could protect you. Now say a new predator comes that hunts in packs but is also equipped with tools that rival the big cats’ saber teeth and also allow the predator to attack from a distance. Suppose this new predator also has no problem hunting healthy members of your species and is incredibly stealthy. Let’s ALSO say that since this new predator arrived, the forests have been shrinking and the plains have been growing. Not a recipe for success. With the change in landscape and food, bison had to adapt to grazing over browsing, but this put them at a distinct disadvantage when it came to their new predator. Browsing leaves allows animals like the European bison to keep an eye open while they eat. Grazing on grass means your head is down and you’re easier to catch unaware. Grazing also meant that the buffalo’s long, front-facing horns would get in the way of eating, and so over time American bison were selected that had smaller, side-facing horns and lower necks. This took away the buffalo’s traditionally most effective method of protecting itself. These problems were overcome by becoming significantly more social. Grazing in a herd means that you can rely on others of your species to keep an eye on things, and when a predator appears you can join forces. Long, sharp horns or not, a herd of buffalo is an intimidating thing considering how soft and squishy the average predator is in comparison. Of course, having your food source be in a big herd suits some predators just fine, including ancient humans. In the end, the changes suited both species, and while it was a partnership based around one side being eaten, it was a partnership none-the-less. Humans are a species that change our environment just by existing, so being an animal that we like is a REALLY effective evolutionary strategy. Both intentionally and unintentionally, humans would help create a continent that was perfectly suited to the buffalo. That is how the arrival of the most deadly predator in history resulted in a bison population boom into the millions.
When the Kiowa arrived in the Dakotas, the buffalo had long been established, and their herds could stretch for miles. That plus the ability to train and breed horses meant that the wandering hunters now had a steady source of food, which meant that they did not need to wander anymore. The Kiowa settled and became famous for their horsemanship. When over on the east coast, the American Revolution was taking place, further west there was another war going on. The combined strength of the Cheyenne and the Dakota Sioux fought against the Kiowa, resulting in them abandoning the Dakotas and moving further south. This put them into conflict with the Comanche, which later blossomed into an alliance that would give them complete control of the southern Great Plains. The Kiowa were comparatively a small tribe, but their fame and ability as warriors made them feared. Among other exploits, they were famous for their warriors’ ability to fling themselves over the side of their galloping horses and shoot arrows at their opponent while hanging from their horses’ necks. The Kiowa elite warrior society, the Ka-itsenko, only had ten members in the entire tribe. Naturally, when the US government began invading Indian lands in the 1800s, the Kiowa were among the tribes that fought back the strongest and the longest.
The fact that first contact with American soldiers in 1833 resulted in multiple mass epidemics of smallpox didn’t help. A treaty of friendship was signed in 1837, but the following decades of smallpox and cholera (which would kill thousands and nearly wipe out tribes such as the Mandan) put incredible stress on the people of the Great Plains. To add to that stress, the US settlements in the east would drive multiple displaced tribes into western territory. Conflict broke out between the displaced eastern tribes, often armed with long-range rifles by the same white soldiers who kicked them off their land, and the Plains tribes. By 1863, the Plains tribes were fed up with the clearly one-sided “friendship” and the Kiowa, Dakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche and Apache called for a general uprising. The response of the US military was a swift and simple order, “kill every Indian in the country.”
This proved harder for the US government than they anticipated. Even with their opponents’ numbers devastated by disease and with superior fire-power on their side, the US military was facing a force that was highly mobile, intimate with the terrain, and quickly catching up in regards to rifles. So the US military turned their attention away from direct conflict and towards their food source.
While over-hunting by settlers had already begun, the buffalo still outnumbered the people of North America, even as late as 1870. The US government stepped things up and promoted mass hunting of the buffalo. Nine years later, it was all-but gone. General Phillip Sheridan described the effects of the policy, “The buffalo hunters have done in the past two years more to settle the vexed Indian Question than the regular army has accomplished in the last thirty years. They are destroying the Indians’ commissary. Send them powder and lead, and let them kill until they have exterminated the buffalo.” Lieutenant Colonel Dodge was just as explicit “there’s no two ways about it, either the buffalo or the Indian must go.” 75 million hides were taken and sold between 1850 and 1880, and it is unknown how many more animals were simply shot and left to rot on the Plains. Many of these animals were shot by hunters the US military had illegally sent into Indian lands, one of many direct violations of the treaties the US government would make.
The loss of the buffalo became part of the US’ diplomatic policy with the indigenous tribes. When General Winfield Scott met with the Arapaho chiefs at Fort Dodge he made it a point to tell them “You know well that the game is getting very scarce and that you must soon have some other means of living; you should therefore cultivate the friendship of the white man, so that when the game is all gone, they may take care of you if necessary.” Even when white settlers and politicians began calling to protect the buffalo, the US government took pains to continue. President Ulysses Grant pocket-vetoed a bill to protect the animal in 1874, and General Sheridan would personally testify before congress and plead that the buffalo slaughter be allowed to continue. Sheridan also argued that buffalo hunters should be given a medal to commemorate their service, a medal featuring a dead buffalo on one side and a dead Indian on the other.
Like nearly all of the Plains tribes, the Kiowa did not just depend on buffalo for food. It was a cultural keystone species, providing countless material uses and was inextricably linked to their religion and culture. Every summer, the Kiowa would come together for the Sun Dance, the single most significant event in their religion. It was a multifaceted ceremony, celebrating warfare, spiritual renewal, connection to the land and the divinity of the sun which could be shared among mortals. The Kiowa version of the Sun Dance was centered around the Tai-me, a sacred fetish representing (or perhaps literally being) the source of life itself. It was kept safe all year by a Keeper, a hereditary position in the tribe, and never exposed to light outside of the Sun Dance. A traditional buffalo hunt supplied the sacrifice required to the Tai-me. When the Kiowa were finally forced onto reservations they were, like the other Plains tribes, intentionally moved to reservations that were miles from any surviving buffalo herds. As a result, pilgrimages had to be undertaken to find an animal for the Tai-me. By the last Sun Dance, there were no buffalo left to send delegations to, and the Kiowa had to make do with old, weathered buffalo hides. Without the buffalo, the Sun Dance could not be complete and the Tai-me could not be honored. The people could not connect to the divine and life itself would wither. In non-spiritual terms, this was also true. Bison were a vital part of the Plains ecosystem, and their loss and replacement with western cattle ranches meant that the Plains would become inhospitable for traditional agriculture. Today’s poor topsoil and freshwater throughout the region is partially due to the loss of buffalo.
On July 20, 1890, the Sun Dance was officially outlawed. Indigenous religion was punished with imprisonment and even death. It remained banned until 1978 and the passing of The American Indian Religious Freedom Act. It should be noted that the Kiowa, like many of the other displaced Plains people, would come to redefine their religious and spiritual connection through a different species. Peyote had long been part of the spiritual practices of Pre-Colombian Mexico, and had slowly been moving north through trade and war. However, it is a relatively recent arrival to North America. In the mid-1800s, it reached the Great Plains, and following the apocalyptic destruction of the buffalo and the loss of their land, its use rapidly grew among the Plains tribes in the 1880s. This movement would become the Native American Church, which would have to (and continues to) fight hard for the legal right to perform its ceremonies.
And so we see an example of a government intentionally wiping out a keystone species in order to make a culture more “pliable” and, as a result, completely screw the ecology of an entire continent. Sadly, this is not even the only case of this taking place on this continent alone. The ensuing narrative of an unchanging people and an unchanging environment then works to protect the perpetrators. Extinction and environmental collapse become “inevitable” and “unavoidable.” People simply “vanished” from history a “long time ago” and the struggles people went through, and continue to go through today, are ignored. Continuity between “ancient times”, “US history” and “today” is lost. The fact that we, the descendants of settlers, are trained and continue to train our children that this history did not take place then gets in the way of addressing very real problems we face today. Want to address the drought devastating California? The ever increasing wildfires across the continent? Why the tiny part of the country I’m in is unseasonably freezing its ass off while the rest of the world is unseasonably boiling? We’ll never be able to do that unless we finally and truly address all the times and ways we launched a one-sided war on nature in order to better destroy other people.
Sources:
Davis, Wade. One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Smits, David (Autumn 1994). “The Frontier Army and the Destruction of the Buffalo: 1865–1883”. The Western Historical Quarterly (Utah State University) 25 (3): 312–338
Jawort, Adrian (May 9,2011). “Genocide by Other Means: U.S. Army Slaughtered Buffalo in Plains Indian Wars”. Indian Country Today.
N. Scott Momaday. The Way to Rainy Mountain. University of New Mexico Press, 1969
Comic making workshop and reading • THURS APRIL 30 2015 • 6:30-8:30 PM • Seattle Public Library • DOWNTOWN Central Branch • 1000 4th Ave • Come join me with cartoonists MITA MAHATO and ANDY PANDA for a workshop and reading on themes of disability, race, healthcare and sexuality. For access needs contact leap@spl.org (ASL interpreter requests honored up to one week prior to the event).
“The true meaning of solidarity is under serious attack and runs the risk of being drastically changed. The proof of this is how fashionable its usage has become, how easily it rolls off the tongues of all sorts of speakers, how unthreatening it is. If the true meaning of solidarity were understood and intended, visible radical change would be happening in the lives of those who endorse it with their applause. Solidarity is NOT a matter of agreeing with, of being supportive of, of liking, or of being inspired by, the cause of a group of people. Though all these might be a part of solidarity, solidarity goes beyond all of them. Solidarity has to do with understanding the interconnections among issues and the cohesiveness that needs to exist among the communities of struggle.”
- Ada María Isasi-Díaz, “Solidarity: Love of Neighbor in the 1980s” (via lastuli)
i'm not into kottke or daring fireball (ugh), but i approve this message
Social Media Induced Depression? Is that a real thing?
Good question. Let me Google that for you. Yes, yes it is. I think most of us have experienced it in some form or another. It has to do with the anxiety people feel while being away from social media or general feelings of despair brought on while using social media.
The problem I have with social media is that it isn’t enriching. I feel responsibility to wish people happy birthdays, like their posts, and attend their events. And, of course, it can inspire feelings of jealousy. I could live with those side effects if social media also enriched my life in some way. But it’s rare that Facebook turns me on to a great article that is relevant to my interests or leads to any inspiration.
For me and a lot of people I know, there’s a much better way to fill your empty moments than to hop on a social media app. It’s reading. I don’t always have the time or energy to open up a book. The great thing about RSS feeds is that they take up little time, much like social media, but are endless sources of enriching and inspirational information. You can get smarter and better informed even if you only have 5 minutes to spare. With The Old Reader, there are social elements too. But instead of Happy Birthdays or photos of myself at the beach, we’re sharing posts that enrich our lives.
So the best way I know to defeat social media-induced depression is to forego that visit to Facebook and spend a few minutes with your favorite blogger. Mine is probably Kottke, or Daring Fireball. Who’s yours?
Let me tell you a bit about this book. To begin, I wrote a few pages for it and when I was first asked to write a little bit about queer sexuality and trans women, I thought it’d probably be yet another instance of something written just with cis women in mind and one little section mentioning trans women. I was happy to be told that information for trans women would be included in every chapter of the book, freeing my writing to be more than just the basics. Even so, when I got my hands on the final copy last week I was amazed at just how much it exceeded my expectations!
The colorful playful illustrations throughout the book just casually include trans women alongside everyone else. In one of the narrative sections describing sex between an older dyke couple there’s a simple mention about how sex is different for one of them because she has a prostate. In the section on hormones, birth control and transition are discussed in the same paragraph. In the section about post-surgery bodies, hysterectomy, menopause, and vaginoplasty are discussed side by side.
The anatomy chapter uses “phallus” instead of “penis” and the explanation of why includes: “Remember, a clit is basically a small penis. A penis is basically a big clit. And both of them are phalluses.” In the chapters on hand sex and on cunnilingus, there’s a ton of techniques and several pages of discussion about how those techniques may work differently for trans women who haven’t had vaginoplasty (see examples above).
The care put into integrating information for trans women alongside everything else is just one example of all the things this book got right. It also does a great job talking about disability, flirting, consent, healthy relationships, polyamory and monogamy, and more.
A lot of guides can feel a bit academic or bland, in part because they are never written for me. It’s like they are letters written to straight and/or cis folks that I have intercepted and I have to interpret the information and figure out what applies to my life and my body. This was the first time I read a guide and felt it was speaking directly to me.
The fun and friendly tone throughout the book is incredibly inviting, alongside cute stories, small comics, strong encouragement, clear guidance for dealing with difficult situations, and a ton of puns and silly humor. I’ve been teaching sex ed for more than 15 years and there was still a plenty here new to me. I found myself laughing, getting playful, and kinda turned on.
I highly recommend picking up a copy of the book at girlsex101.com and maybe a copy or two for those in your life that can’t afford it. And If you can catch the launch party May 9th in Oakland you should go for it.
Spotted in the Paris Metro in 2013. I really did not believe what I was seeing.
