Category: gender and sexual difference

native americans &butches

we let marcia know that we want to go to Norma Jean’s tonight, and she lets us know that she needs our help to eat four crabs. (so it’s maría and didier that help out…) her other guest is an impressive woman called joan. she’s native american, with one belgian grandparent, and to somehow make the point she gives us waffels (the thin galettes) that she baked – the best i ever had.

but it’s her story that impressed me most. more than 10 years ago she set up the Native American AIDS Project in San Francisco. there’s a population of 70.000 (!!) Native Americans in the Bay Area, there’s a high incidence of HIV in the population (one of the highest), and the project is the only one specifically focused on Native Americans. this means that they try to address the specific conditions that hit the population really hard, like homelessness and sustance abuse, and also that they rely on traditional rituals and practices of medicine and healing in their work. in many cases they basically accompany people dying, and they do traditional burial rituals. lots of work with little people nor resources, and in the face of great insensitivity from the health sector (including an umbrella Native American health organization) about the problems Native Americans with HIV often face. i want to visit the project, and i wished i had already encountered joan while sahar was here – sahar, you will have to come back.

Norma Jean’s is different tonight. very little people showed up for the announced christmas night (and show). among the ones that did, a bunch of strictly butch/femme couples, from Salinas, we find out. when maría and i join them on the dancefloor, there’s a sweet dynamic: one of the butches invites maría to dance, and basically leaves me with her femme woman. how one gets positioned, without asking for it, to be explored further, with sarahjain in the house and sahar & giulia on the phone…

norma jean’s

Marcia joined us to the movies and afterwards she insists on going to Norma Jean’s in Castroville – she had been wanting to go ever since she got here, in January. with the year was close to ending, it was about time. Norma Jean’s is thé gay latino bar in the region. which is not the only thing that gives the bar its aura of local legend; the place is named after Marilyn Monroe who was the artichoke queen of the town, back in 1948. Castroville is artichoke land.

after marcia got her surfboard out the pick-up truck and stationed it at our house, i jump in and we drive down south to Monterey County. it’s my first time to meet her; maría had met marcia at a thanksgiving dinner in her house. marcia is a new professor in Community Studies at UCSC, and we talk about the experience of living in Santa Cruz. she also hated it at first. she lives in the “Beach flats” (“there’s no other place i could live in Santa Cruz”), the tiny latino neighborhood of town next to the Boardwalk which is considered, according to racist common-sense, to be an unsafe part of town. she continued to consider to move back to San Francisco for the longest time, till she found pacification in being in Santa Cruz in this moment of her life: the ocean. our conversation elaborates on the privileged and white character of this place, and i find out that the guilt side of white privilege, which maggie had observed in dealing with high school kids in Philly, is also present here. the self-righteousness strikes me deeply, but i haven’t come across much guilt. it would almost seem a welcome break from the self-righteousness. wait till you have them in class, marcia said, then the guilt comes out. it’s almost worse than the self-righteousness. cause somehow they look for her to fix it. drawing the boundaries in order not to take care of their guilt.

after passing the surreal landscape of the PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electricity) plant at Moss Landing, the lowest point of Monterey Bay, we approach Castroville. once we leave Highway One i get a sense of how small this place is. we find ourselves in a sea of darkness – the fields, no doubt. then we hit the main street, with an arch that announces: “Castroville. The Artichoke Center of the World.”

Norma Jean’s is on the left side of the street. on the other side, the straight bar. people hanging out in front of both bars, mainly a bunch of guys, cowboys, on the straight side, who have their eyes fixed on Norma Jean’s, in a way that suggests that the interesting stuff happens on at the other side of the street. actually, Norma Jean’s might be the only thing happening in this tiny town. one inevitably enters the center of attention marked by their gaze to enter, and i feel myself straightening my shoulders when i do.

once we’re inside we’re overwhelmed by the crowd, the music, the dancing, the atmosphere. (a latino crowd indeed, i must have been the only white person.) and in between, Marilyn Monroe images all over the place. once on the dancefloor, the variety strikes me: from what looks like old land laborers with cowboy hats dancing to the banda music, to incredibly dressed up women; from cool butches in lumberjack shirts to fashionable kids eagerly waiting for (latin) hip hip to do their thing. men and women and everyone in between – and then there’s line dancing! and a drag queen show later in the night, in a part of the bar that kind of invokes a saloon. (marcia gives me some dollars to offer it to the performer on stage, but as i shy away she does it, with a quite impressive performance herself.) all of this is worlds apart from the kind of sexual identity politics that i associate with white middle-class and urban crowds, like in San Francisco. and Norma Jean’s definately is a far more attractive and interesting space. i discovered my favorite bar in the region tonight.

american appalling

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tonight down in LA natascha and friends are launching their calender that leashes out to the ads by American Apparel, the LA clothing company that prides itself to be sweat-shop-free. a blurb from the project:

“Horizontally Conceptualized Marketing. American Appalling is an art project and parodic critique of American Apparel, a clothing store geared at a young, hip, and politically conscious audience. While the ‘sweat-shop-free’ aspect promises an economically guilt-free shopping pleasure, the campaign style does not fall short of sexism and gendered racism. Over the course of several months, we shot 12 different models, celebrating all which we do not see in commercial photography: the awkward, the exaggerated, the queer.”

for more on the project: nataschaunkart.com/americanappaling

healing

i finished reading God’s Daughters. Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission in an airport or an airplane somewhere. it helpfully elaborates on something that strikes me, since i’m living in the U.S., as a peculiarity of the religious formations that i came across thusfar. a peculiarity that seems to have grown wild in california and santa cruz.

healing.

the book is grounded in an ethnographic study of Aglow, a nation-wide (and international) network of Christian charismatic women. positioning this specific mode of religiosity, within existing religious and cultural coordinates the author identifies three main threads of which the movement is made.
1/ the Pentacostal revival since the 1900s, with its prophetic message and experiental, ecstatic style of workship. in the following decades, a strand of Pentacostal evangelists focussed less on preaching the gospel and calling people to salvation than on bringing down the power of the Holy Spirit to enact miraculous healings -culminating in the American “healing revival” of the late 1940s and 1950s.
2/ the Recovery Movement and Therapeutic Culture. This is traced back to the 1930s when Alcoholics Anonymous was found, and since then methods of “twelve-step”, “self-help” and “recovery” were elaborated, transposed to various realms, and became part of popular culture.
3/ an emphasis on women’s “eerie restlesness” and the need to find cures for it. such discourses were very much part of late Victorian America, and when the crisis of female “restlessness” was reformulated in the post-war era, it provided one of the impulse of second wave feminism (cfr. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique). while conservative evangelical women would come to conclusions very different from the feminists ones, the point has been repeatedly made that there is some shared ground in perceiving a problem with the social roles and situations women find themselves caught in.

it’s the heavy mixing of the therapeutic with religion (less perhaps in the third thread, although there’s a lot of therapeutization going on in the field of “women’s restlessness”). religion marked by a cultural shift from salvation to self-realization. connected to the so-called “small group” movement with people seeking authentic, intense experiences that they fail to find elsewhere. the sacred becoming personal, and serviceable in meeting individual needs. a tendency that fails to acknowledge hiearchies of human suffering, and that is drenched in selfism and narcism in its exaggeration of personal pain. and its particular attraction to women.

living in Santa Cruz means living with the omni-presence of therapeutic discourse. it’s simply part of the air one breathes over here. it comes with a vague sense of spirituality here, although it is not so difficult to see its (Protestant) evangelical and charismatic influences and roots.

the difference with “indigenous” Protestantism and evangelicalism in Europe is sharp. remember the fierce rejection of vacinations and other kinds of modern medical treatments in the Dutch Bible-belt: as much as healing might be taken as the working of God’s hand, so is getting sick and dying, and one should not mess with that. there is no salvational quality to healing. and perhaps more importantly, there is a resistance to the psychologization of religious experience (among believers). among my visits, conversations and encounters in the field of Dutch Protestantism, there’s only one instance where religion and psychology met, in the person of an orthodox reformed believer who was also doing a phd in psychology. she discussed with much interest psychological studies and takes on religion, where the religious is connected to emotional needs. but it remained fingerspielerei for her, in which she engaged for pleasure, but that did not interfere with or taint her sense of belief.

the healing discourse repulses me both ways around. the individualist and voluntarist take on physical, mental and social (and societal) health. the way it domesticates and impoverishes the sacred, pushing that what fills us with awe, God, to revolving around me-me-me. the worst of two worlds.

women’s day

antwerpen, the (flemish) women’s day. a heart-warming way to make a very brief visit to vlaanderen, surrounded by a bunch of familiar faces, political companeras and friends. some friends said i look really different these days, some insisted it was the californian influence that made me look mexican… (okay, maybe the rose in my hair played a role in this; and of course women in mexico all wear roses in their hair. i had thought there might have been an opportunity to sing bread and roses during the day, but then i realized i didn’t know all the lyrics…)

and we had quite some work to do – our gebroken wit workshop which developed out of things we learned from the challenging white supremacy sessions with sharon and many other sources. haar antwerpen is screened and sold – pleasurable to feel a material product in hands that now is starting to spread and lead its own life. and i have to participate to the general debate, for nextgenderation of course. (oh god, as the facilitator was increasingly working on my nerves, and curtailing what i felt was an expression of political passion with a flat and annoying “but i thought women would do things differently, less violently”, it slipped out of my mouth: “well there has been no struggle for liberation without violence.” as nadia added afterwards: “it’s merely a sociological observation.”)

what i most enjoyed came after all the work. the beautiful meeting with rauda morcos from ASWAT, a palestinian gay women’s association based in haifa, and hanging out toghether with the Women in Black from leuven who had invited her (leuvense WiB insisting i connect with the bay area WiB; rauda insisting i connect with the bay area network of arab queer women – it seems that every time i leave europe to the US there’s a new set of facilitated contacts… and then we do the little plot to get Aswat T-shirts to friends and to Helem in Beirut). and plenty of laughter in good sweet company at the end of the day with the queer cafe and stand-up comedy, and singing our hearts out and dancing with hilde to beautiful french chansons…

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(rauda morcos, photos by lieve snellings)

intimate politics

i’m working hard to meet the deadlines before leaving. eh maría, i’ve been working in your room today – it is beautiful to know your room like this, and it reminds me of you. mihui sneeked in with a book, asking if it was okay if she’d read while i wrote (this is becoming the collective working room). she made me laugh: she seemed hesitant at first, and when i made it clear that of course she’s welcome to do so, and of course i don’t mind that she’s in pyjamas, she did a mihui cheer: “all right, this is like family!”

but despite all the work clea convinced me to come to the Santa Cruz Bookstore tonight to hear Bettina Aptheker present her memoires – Intimate Politics. and i’m happy that i went. there is something fascinating and challenging to the way my brain tends to order things and history about having this small woman in front of you talking about growing up (with parents who were part of the communist party and targetted by the communist witch hunt; with W.E.B. DuBois as an affectionate grandpa-style friend coming to the house; with Angela Davis as a friend since they were eight) and going to college (Berkeley in the sixties, becoming a leader in the student movements). something about how quotidian (and familiar – oh how student movements can resemble each other…) it all sounds, only to be constantly interrupted by the sense of “big history”. how she campaigned to get Angela Davis out of jail in the early 1970s. her split with the communist party in the early 1980s, after years of struggling to reconcile feminism and marxism (they wouldn’t publish the book on women and race they commissioned from her, it was deemed too feminist).

what stuck most with clea was the friendship between these two woman – angela and bettina – since they were 8 years old, studying at the same university then (berkeley), teaching at the same university now (santa cruz), and all of their radical political trajectory in between. it made me think that these kind of memoires should be written in a collective way.

tijuana meeting

on the bus home i met with Lili, a young woman from the Brown Berets with whom i didn’t yet get a chance to talk to. she comes up to me, surprised that i’m also at UCSC, and insisting that i could join the small group that drives from UCSC every thursday to the meetings in Watsonville. you can’t imagine how much easier that will make it for me. i missed last two meetings because it was difficult to get everything organized. oh yes, she laughs, i don’t have a car nor a driver’s license, i hear you.

beautiful energy to be talking with Lili. she’s just back from Tijuana and overwhelmed by the experience. the meeting the Zapatistas had called for, with latino groups and leaders from the U.S. a destroyed cinema theatre with no roof. a first day with local mexican groups telling their stories and strategies. the second day with US latino groups telling their stuff. the Brown Berets talked about the raids on migrants, the migra watch. Sandino brought up the importance of free radio in the US. about 11 brown berets went together to Tijuana, and ended up doing quite a bit of security work, around el subcomandante Marcos. Lili couldn’t believe that she found herself a body guard of el subcomandente, and was impressed by the way men and women were treated equally. if didn’t matter if you were a small woman, she said, if you were the bodyguard, you were considered as such and treated with equal respect. i could envision her well in the brown uniform and beret, taking her task very seriously. when i read some of the reports of the meeting, i saw that women raised the issue of sexism and machoism in their communities. but in “full armor” and in charge of security, the power dynamic looks different…

on thursday evening Lili had an idea… if el subcomandante would phone to the Brown Berets meeting in Watsonville, to greet the companer@s. got everybody in Watsonville very excited. and just this busride with her got me very excited as well… won’t be long till i go to the next Brown Berets meeting.

read more:
on the Otra Campana website: 18 october | 19 october
on narconews.com: The Other Campaign Hits the US-Mexico Border, Where the Indigenous Are Called “Migrants” and Roots Run Deep

and below is a translation of piece on the Brown Berets in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada

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The Brown Berets of Watsonville, California

In a City of Immigrant Farmworkers, a New Youth Movement Draws
Inspiration from the Zapatistas and the Radical Organizing of the 60s

By Gloria Muñoz Ramírez
La Jornada
October 24, 2006

They take up the legacy of Chicano agrarian leader César Chávez, of Malcolm X, of Martin Luther King, of the Zapatistas and, of course, of sixties movements like the Black Panthers and the Brown Berets. From this last group they retake its name, its berets and its fighting spirit.

The new Brown Berets are a group of autonomous youths, most of them students, dressed head to toe “in the color of the earth.” They are based in Watsonville, California, an agricultural region inhabited and, above all, worked by tens of thousands of people of Mexican, African American and Filipino origin.

Ramiro Medrano relates: “We began to organize in 1994. There was a lot of social mobilization in the United States in that year, because social assistance was being taken away from undocumented people with Proposition 187. That was also the year of the Zapatista uprising and we as Mexicans in the United States, as Chicanos, well, it made a big impact on us. The Chicano has an identity problem. We feel Mexican, but we are not recognized as such in Mexico, and neither are we gringos. After 1994, we were proud to say, together with the Zapatistas, we are Mexicans, indigenous people, and we are proud of it.”

In Watsonville, 80 percent of the population is Mexican or of Mexican origin. The majority are field workers, indigenous people who confront racism daily through organization and strength of character. They are the workforce of the U.S. city that has the greatest exports of strawberries, lettuce, broccoli and raspberries, as well as other products harvested by the exodus on this side of the Rio Grande.

“In 1994, the gang violence here left a young girl and her brother dead of gunshot wounds. This caused us to say ya basta – enough already! – to the violence generated by racism in the schools and in the fields. Young people with no options search for an identity, a sense of belonging, and that is how the gangs are formed. We didn’t want that in our neighborhoods anymore,” Ramiro continues. And that is how the Brown Berets began. First with a great march for peace and unity that went through all the battle-torn neighborhoods. Later, once organized as a group, they had more long-term goals: get the youths out of the gangs; have representation in the schools and on their administration to avoid racism in the selection of students; organize against immigration raids and their agents’ actions in the barrio; hold workshops and events to strengthen identity through education, and many more, including the organization of a “Justice Network” in order to communicate by telephone the actions of la migra. Through this network they organize rapid concentrations of people to stop attacks by immigration agents, which they record and distribute. “It’s about not just standing by.”

Published in Spanish in Gloria Muños Ríos’ column “Los de abajo” (“The Underdogs”) of October 21.

abortion day dream

i wake up from a deep sleep with a morning dream… that was abortion day at SC Planned Parenthood and the waiting room was filled with women consumed with their misery, alone. i pauzed in front of the door, took a deep breath and stepped in. began to talk with one woman and she’d tell me her story, and then another one and before long the waiting room was buzzing with stories shared between all. abortion days followed, with more women coming back to PP and more stories to be shared. among the crowd was maría, and our friend. and all the women who came for an abortion brought many friends. each time the buzzing would go on till the last woman came back from the surgery and then we’d all walk in the sun and lie on the beach and eat ice-cream… “happy abortion day” someone would say (and everybody would understand, that it was about shaking off dominant choking moralism and taking collective care).

abortion

it was still dark outside, when maría and i left the house this morning to meet up with a friend in a cafe. she had sneeked out of her house, so that nobody would know. she is having an abortion this morning. Planned Parenthood, the second floor of a grey building at parking lot at the back of Pacific Avenue. our friend was petrified.

today was abortion day in Santa Cruz Planned Parenthood. once a month they do abortions. once the month. for whatever reason, this scarcity (and with problematic consequences – like in the case of our friend she had to fix an abortion appointment before having made the decision, the next appointment would be too late), it keeps the place from being identified as an “abortion clinic”. it keeps the picket lines away, a nurse says.

the process of making a decision was tough. drenched, and drenched again, in feelings of shame, humiliation, fear. surrounded by nightmares. we were the only friends she found she could tell. we begin to feel, from the inside of friendship, how fragile and small social acceptance of abortion is in this country. old childhood friends, “best friends”… she was terrified by the idea that they would know. i’m talking about circles where the legality of abortion is defended (not to be taken for granted in this country); it still feels like the forbidden.

women in the waiting room. most of them alone. some look miserable. the nurses and doctors attending to our friend kept on asking about us. “are these your friends?” “how lucky you are.” “not one, but two friends came with you.” this was the part that made me most sad.

our friend was unemployed and without health insurance when she got pregnant. this means that she should qualify for Medicaid, a state funded program providing medical care to people who are part of designated eligibility groups. being pregnant should make one eligible. last week our friend had an appointment with Planned Parenthood in order to do the paper work and apply. the woman she talked to questioned her decision to have an abortion. was she really sure… she could be making a big mistake… many women regret it afterwards… it wasn’t a good thing in the eyes of god… a whole arsenal of weapons in an embryo saving mission. it caught our friend by surprise, made her feel miserable (as if she hadn’t felt miserable enough the last weeks), she couldn’t stop crying. the emotional pressure came with financial pressure. if our friend would have the baby and give it up for adoption, the woman would make sure that our friend didn’t have to pay a thing, that she’d be fully covered. this still remained to be seen in the case of an abortion, the woman suggested, and made sure our friend understood that she was on the commission that takes the decision.

(the insistance on adoption, also on the flyers. it’s not the “keeping pregnancy vs. abortion” decision as it is mostly played out back home. no, giving up for adoption is very present as an option.)

we were so angry. this is Planned Parenthood, this is after counselling sessions to help women make an informed decision. probably there’s a better screening of those counsellors, maría suggested. but i wouldn’t be surprised if women on embryo-saving missions infiltrate these places. our friend partly feels she should follow up on this, file a complaint somewhere, but of course it’s the last thing on her mind these days. maría has fantasies of an action like dumping a whole lot of chicken embryos in front of the door (you want embryos… here they are!) but it’s not clear at all how that would distinguish us from those anti-abortion activists. that was last week, when we were angry.

today is different. some sadness, some fear, lots of care and tenderness.

the nurses. one telling our friend about how she had been alone to cross the picket-lines years ago when she had an abortion. another one recognizing what our friend feels and offering her (“i probably shouldn’t be asking you this, but do you believe in God?”) to pray together, that she will be safe and all will be fine. a picture of an ocean, beach and palm trees on the ceiling, right above where one’s head lies on the table.

the darkness of the night was just pulling away when we entered the PP building. there’s beautiful sunlight in a clear blue sky when we get out. we have a good meal together and spend the entire afternoon on the beach, where our friend wanders in and out of sleep. today was not a bad day.

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(photo from maría’s ocean woman series)