I Don't Ever Wanna Talk That Way Again: Transfemme Singers and the Dissonant Body

Shouting and howling. Pitching up and clipping out. Smothering in soundscapes of sighs. From 100 Gecs to Against Me! to Ada Rook, trans women push vocal technology to the breaking point--and in the process expose how we think of gender.

The Image of the Body: Ferguson, Agency, and Leftist Appropriation

Photo of Twitter user @eyeFLOODpanties taken by Robert Cohen

I want to center this week's article in a somewhat odd way--around a bibliography. I'm doing this for ethical reasons--as a white person writing about the murder of Michael Brown and the resulting protests and violent, militant police repression of the people of Ferguson, MO, events that are fundamentally a product of racism both systemic and individual, I want to do my best not to co-opt the events for the sake of an abstract academic argument. This is particularly important in the context of the specific ideas I'm going to attempt to grapple with, since I want to talk about issues of agency, the use of images and signs, and the political transformation of people into signifiers. Centering this article upon the bibliography of information I drew upon in writing it is, in part, an attempt to avoid the behaviors I'm trying to call out.

First, for the background details of what's happening in Ferguson, I'd recommend the article Ferguson is Fighting Back from Socialist Worker, which, unlike corporate media outlets, recounts the story from the perspective of the oppressed rather than the militarized police that have been terrorizing a small town for over a week. In particular, it is worth considering this quote from the article:

"Eavesdropping on questions asked of residents by the mainstream media was instructive. Again and again, reporters wanted to know about "looting" and "violence," entirely missing the main point of what was unfolding before them: every resident, if asked, could have told them about the routine police violence they've experienced." --Socialist Worker: Ferguson is Fighting Back

Instructive indeed. That framing is important to the questions I want to consider about the way this is not merely a war waged materially but waged with symbols. This is a battle of words, and corporate media has sided with state terrorism in this battle.

I also want to highlight the ongoing commentary from blogs Gradient Lair and This Is Bobby London, without which I could not have composed this article. In particular, it's worth reading over Bobby London's piece which frames looting not as a random act of greed but an act of political resistance and rebellion (particularly relevant now that we're seeing reports of people breaking into McDonald's in order to get milk to sooth the suffering of civilians who were assaulted by the militarized police with chemical weapons), and three pieces from Gradient Lair, one on avoiding the consumption of black bodies in discourse about events like Ferguson (which I've tried to take to heart here), one on the transformation of black bodies into metaphors for other forms of violence elsewhere in the world, and one on the history of the terrorist/psychological warfare of lynching and the way the treatment of Michael Brown's body fits into that history.

In the interests of contextualization, it's worth taking note of a few other stories about images, image sharing, and the desperate iconoclasm of the militarized police. From Tech Dirt comes a story of a police campaign in Washington to (incorrectly... illegally?) get people to stop filming them with a remarkable statement about responding to smartphones the way they respond to guns; from Z-Net comes a story about Apple's new patent to kill cell phones automatically, because hey, another week, another instance of Apple or Microsoft furthering corporate fascism, and lastly, from Medium, comes an excellent analysis of the way Ferguson represents proof positive of the dangers of a non-neutral Net, as Facebook algorithms systematically sank information about the atrocities being committed against civilians while Twitter sank the #ferguson tag in the US despite it trending globally.

If you want to get involved in pushing back against the militarization of police and the state terrorism on display in Ferguson, here is a list of resources (updated 4:08 Eastern 8/19):

• This Tumblr post provides a list of ways to get involved and spread information
• This petition requests that Obama actually do something leftist for once in his life and work towards enacting federal anti-police laws.
• Similarly, this petition involves having police wear cameras, and while it's on the ridiculous pseudo-democratic site We The People you might want to sign that too. You know, in case you want to get a limp, Good Liberal, noncommittal placatory response from some aide you've never heard of.
• This petition, in contrast, involves demanding a special prosecutor to investigate Mike Brown's death, as the current prosecutor has demonstrated bias in favor of the police.
• And this bill would put a stop to the military's sale of equipment to police. Keep an eye on this; it'll be worth raising some hell with our representatives over this.
• Anti-State STL is raising money for bail for the Ferguson protesters. I have no idea how I'd begin going about vetting this organization, but this is a way to get involved.
• Similarly, no vetting here but someone has set up a wishlist for getting supplies to the protesters via Amazon.
  
  Updates:
• Here's yet another post with various other links that might be useful to you (there is some overlap between this and other lists obviously)
• iwriteaboutfeminism has been covering the events in Ferguson extensively, largely by pulling from Twitter, which is useful for those of who who, like me, find the flood of information on Twitter to be utterly overwhelming.
• Twitter user @SheSeauxSaddity has been tweeting information about how you can get involved, and among other things seems to be leading an effort to sell t-shirts to raise money for the protesters under the name #OperationHelporHush
• As school has been cancelled in Ferguson, a Ferguson teacher put together a funding site to get food to the kids who depend on school lunches.
• Feel like supporting the community at large? The Ferguson Youth Initiative is one place to start.
• And perhaps most importantly, the gofundme campaign for the Brown family is still live. Although they've reached their goal, I can't imagine that they WON'T have a use for more money, and in a country where the law is determined by the free market by way of lawyer fees, justice might very well depend on every extra bit of cash the family can get.

Since I'm adding links, I figure it's worth making a point of mentioning the way in which I'm curating this. I can't vet every one of these donation drives, because I'm honestly not sure how I'd even begin doing so, so that's a limitation I have when I'm posting links. But one thing I can do as a curator of these links is vet the voices being heard. And a great way to make sure you DON'T get included on this list is to post shit about how everything would get better if the left and right would just listen compassionately to one another, or how Obama's hands are tied and he's just doing the best he can politically, or any of that other weak Liberal nonsense. Last I saw, it wasn't the Left lobbing tear gas at civilians. The point here is to boost voices that are drowned out by the corporate media shit show.

With all that said, let's get to the secondary content of this post. Let's talk about the man in the photo at the top of this post, that photo, and its use.

I want to frame this discussion with these three tweets:

Please consider not purchasing shirts of my image. None of that money is going to me or the #MikeBrown family.
— Your New Friend (@eyeFLOODpanties) August 15, 2014

Salute to @eyeFLOODpanties for being practical AND political. We don't waste lives or chips. That shot of him is EVERYTHING.
— Princess of Zamunda (@Artemis_J) August 15, 2014

Yo @eyeFLOODpanties ----> the new Captain America. I thought of this when I saw your pic. #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/2si2t8V4k5
— dj spydermann (@djspydermann) August 15, 2014

Tony Stark in the Integrated Circuit: The Iron Man films and Cyborg Feminism

In Iron Man 2, Tony Stark describes his suit, the Iron Man suit, as a prosthesis. Now, granted, he's describing it that way in order to flummox a congressional committee who assert that his suit is, in fact, a weapon. The scene as a whole is full of uncomfortable, almost Randian grand standing^one. It's a problematic scene, to be sure.

The wild thing about Tony's claim, though, is that the films are almost calculated to back him up and support his claim. Iron Man--or, later, the Iron Men--is/are an extension of Tony's being. They are a prosthetic not in the sense that they restore him to some idealized "normal" human functionality but in the sense that they are a tool that acts as an extension of the human body in order to facilitate a human's aims.

It should be obvious that Tony Stark is a cyborg, though not a conventional one. His most obvious cybernetic feature is the power core embedded in his chest, but his suit, in the way it extends both his body and will, is also a part of his cybernetic being. The films consistently portray the Suit as a second self for Tony, an eventually unlimited tangle of extra limbs that transform his body into a fluidly-bounded and ambiguous mass.

Why am I bringing all this obvious stuff up?

Well, because these concepts aren't just of interest to transhumanists and science fiction fans, they're also of interest to a particular strand of contemporary critical theory--Cyborg Feminism. And the films don't just have a veneer of cyberization, they also can serve as an access point to these ideas and the deconstructive power they level at the existing power structures of the world.

Let's talk about Tony Stark the Cyborg.

I'm on a Giacometti kick after last article.