‘Slay’ bells ring? A semi-seasonal post on the origins of the term ‘yas’.

This post responds to the Reply All podcast from the 7th of July 2016 entitled Disappeared. If you would like to listen to it first, the link is: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/69-disappeared/. I will be focusing on the second half of the podcast from 19 minutes onward. However, the first half is an equally fascinating discussion about Left-Pad, Azer Koçulu, and opensource licensing of code, which I equally recommend that you listen to.

That being said, the second half explores the origins of the term ‘yas’, which is an incredibly popular way of expressing an intense appreciation for something or someone on the internet; any brief jaunt through Twitter, Tumblr, or potentially Facebook will undoubtedly return at least one use of it. For example (credit for all tweets given to the original account holders):

Yaas tweet 2

The tweet above appears to relate to the viral video that is credited with bringing ‘yas’ into popular culture, as is referenced in the Reply All podcast.

yaas tweet

This tweet (above) is also interesting from an analysis perspective, and potentially offers an explanation for the popularity of the expression. It also engages with an interesting facet of drag culture as an exaggeration of stereotypes or gendered characteristics, as well as performed expressions of emotion.

There are even gifs of velociraptors from Jurassic World with ‘yas’ superimposed upon them:

yas dinosaur gif

Returning to the original usage, however, I myself have used ‘yas’ on Twitter multiple times in response to things I loved. However, quite shamefully, I had no idea of its etymology. The Reply All podcast informed me that it first appeared in Harlem in the 1980s as a part of ball culture – specifically drag balls. Here is the origin of my shame as one of the communities with which I identify most as a bisexual woman is the LGBTQIA+ community. Clearly, I need to widen my knowledge of LGBTQIA+ history beyond UK borders. Regardless, learning about ball culture, the related house families that took in young, queer Black and Latinx people, and hearing Jose Xtravaganza speak about his own experiences with the House of Xtravaganza (of which he is now the Father) was both enlightening and emotive. I later went on to watch Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, which offers an intimate portrayal of multiple drag balls and speaks to numerous queens about their backgrounds and their experiences of being drag queens in New York City. It is an amazing and incredibly emotional documentary. It also expanded upon the Reply All podcast for me, in that the queens in Paris is Burning explain the meaning behind many more popular terms used at drag balls, almost all of which I have seen and heard used online today. I recommend that you watch the documentary for a better understanding than I can provide in a short blog post.

The main thing that irritates me about the popular culture usage of ‘yas’ and other drag terms is not the fact that they have been popularised, per se, but that they have been popularised at the expense of their cultural heritage. I have no problem with multitudes of people using these words, but they have no idea of the atmosphere in which they were birthed. The vast majority of people using these words don’t understand why the subculture from which they come came into being; they don’t appreciate the immense hardships that these groups of people faced, or the relief of the sense of belonging that using these words and understanding them within gay culture gave. They are now part of mass culture. It feels almost as if by absorbing and appropriating gay language, popular culture has subsumed gay subculture, taken what it wanted, and spat the gay people out as ‘still not accepted’. It doesn’t come from a place of welcoming acceptance of gay culture and inclusion of popular slang used by the gay community with knowledge of the words’ heritage; it just lifts the word and erases its past and present as a ‘gay’ word. Homophobic people, transphobic people, biphobic people – people who are just unnaccepting of any and all parts of queer life and the queer subculture use ‘yas’ both online and in real life.

It is ironic in a way that a word with a queer history exists in the mouths of people who would absolutely ‘gag’ – in the basic sense of the word – and wash away all traces of it if they knew it had been used to celebrate drag queens and positive queer youth culture. But it also just stings. Part of the balls in Harlem was a competition to see if people could ‘pass’ for a certain gender or social class: they played with normative culture, and now one of their celebratory words is normative culture, but without them. It is still used by queer subcultures online, but many of those people are equally as unaware of the origins of one of their most-used words as I was. I think the main thing that saddens me is just that the revival of a word into mass usage doesn’t necessarily mean that social or societal groups are progressing and diversifying, but almost that popular culture is continually homogenising history and subculture into a mulch of ‘accepted’ popular culture. Words are stolen, repurposed, or even used in the way in which they were originally intended, but by different groups of people that cast them as monochromatic.

Popularising gay culture and drag culture is in no way bad when it reflects a more positive attitude towards LGBTQIA+ people: this is incredibly necessary, and a wider occurence of positive attitudes towards queerness would save so many people so much pain. But I don’t feel like that’s what this is. For me, and in my experience, the success of ‘popular gay culture’ like Ru Paul’s Drag Race has been mostly down to a fetishization and exoticising of gay culture for a straight, cisgendered audience who want to ogle the exiled ‘different’ people and the way in which ‘they’ live. There are, of course, LGBTQIA+ people who adore Ru Paul and feel represented by it, but its encouragement of stereotypes and high-performance ‘gayness’ has often been a turn-off for me and others in my own life. I do not speak for everyone and I am not trying to, but this is my personal discomfort with the ways in which ‘popular gay culture’ is sold.

I think that by educating anyone and everyone who uses the word ‘yas’, or any of the other terminology that originates in drag culture, we could solve the problem of it being appropriative. That way, those who are accepting of its origins and willing to continue the process of educating others can continue to use the words, fully aware of their history, and anyone who is upset by gay or drag culture will probably dislike the taste of ‘yas’, and cease to use it, thus eliminating the appropriation.

 

Some links for further reading/ watching:

There is no separation between the artist and their work.

 

There is a major trigger warning on this post for profane language, and descriptions of and allusions to sexual and physical assault – something publishers and academic institutions that set books like this should also fucking provide.

Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be:

Why would you write this?

No, seriously, why would someone write this book? I understand that some people like to pretend to themselves that they’re James Joyce^ and they’re being so incredibly revolutionary by shocking their audience with *gasp* graphic descriptions of blowjobs, but this is disgusting.

An excerpt from pages 243-245 of HSAPB:

As I slept that night I saw a room on the twelfth floor of a building with a courtyard in the centre, and in this building lived young people and social workers, educators, lots of people. And into a room at the top there came deliveries of sharp, long knives, short knives, twisted knives, all sorts of knives, guns, ropes, and huge shipments of drugs. Razors were sent there, picks, files, cuffs, scissors, things to pull with, things to clamp with, and chains, everything like that, so that no one who saw the shipment and loved their sister could leave her there in that room with those boys, and yet someone did. Lots of people did. One person took the elevator down and told the social workers, "I'm scared. I think something might happen to my sister! I think something might be going on in that room!" But the social workers did not understand; one said she was going to go up, but she was not as scared as the person who left her sister, who just stood there pacing, beyond worrying, so certain, on the main floor in the center of that courtyard. Because it would now be too late. The social worker went up, but it was too late because more boys had gone up with all their frightening clothes on, all their paint, all the things they dressed in regularly to scare people. They went up, and the room got more and more crowded with people who thought they should take part in the orgy because why not join in for once? Why always remain aloof? Why not join in and stick the things, the metal bars, into the mouths? They wanted to have a good time. The room was small, but it held all the women you could think of and all the men you were ever scared of in your whole life, passing on the street or just imagining, and all the men you loved the most. That is when the party started. So many of these people were crowding in from the elevator that the social worker could hardly make her way into the room, and she never did make her way into the room, but came back with a pale face, her hair frizzed with fear from not being let into this room with all the tools and all the drugs, and that is where the orgy began. That is where it began in no innocence at all, but compared to what was to come, it began in innocence. There were knives and girls skinned alive and kept alive, and one woman screaming but trying to laugh it off to another, "Look what they did to my face!" - and there were the amputations performed right there, the limbs cut off, and the bars fucked with in the mouth, and all the things that can be done to a person including the pulling and ripping of everything that we don't even know we love about a person - their intactness, their perfect intactness - and all the things that seem to us the person - they were destroyed, ripped away, so that you could not tell one girl from the other except some were taller, some were thinner, but you could not see it in the face, just bloodiness, like animals turned inside out. And in the courtyard, and in the balconies surrounding all twelve floors of the courtyard was the whole audience; rowdy, unhappy guys who were waving their flags and watching and waiting, so that at every floor they had their paint - orange, yellow, purple, blue - and when they were done with the girls, and when they were still doing them, doing everything before they dropped each girl, one by one, to her terror, thrown from the room, twelve floors down to the concrete floor of the courtyard, blood falling off her body as she fell - no skin, no face, but kept alive - then from the balconies came the colours flung, and she would fall through eleven floors of thick paint, house paint and wall paint, burning at her skin that was no longer skin - a nice bright green, a happy yellow, orange, purple, red, a rainbow. (Sheila Heti, How Should A Person Be? (Vintage: London, 2013), pp. 243-245.)

I get that this can be viewed as a metaphor for the internet, and society’s wilful ignorance towards the depravity that exists there and what it potentially inspires. I get that it’s potentially highlighting the fact that women are often only valued as someone’s sister/mother/aunt/daughter/wife, when we’re actually people separate from our relationship to a man. Or that the ‘blame’ for assault is often a strangely detached and disembodied entity. Or that men are ‘boys’ in the passage a lot of the time and are infantilised and it’s their parents/ society/ social conditioning’s fault that they act like they do and they’re separated from responsibility. And that their ‘clothes’ they wear ‘to scare people’ are them performing this role. I can do the academic assessment of it, I am just refusing to centre this post about that.

I also see that it’s arguably critiquing society through the microcosm of the building in which everyone knows what goes on, but no-one, even those employed to do so (the social workers), does anything about it- as unfortunately often happens in real life. The bystander effect. “There’s nothing I can do”. But just with Sansa’s rape in Game of Thrones, the horrifically graphic suicide scene in Thirteen Reasons Why, and the needlessly triggering documentation of anorexia in To The Bone, this scene is fucking unnecessarily graphic, triggering, and fucked up. I don’t care what point you were trying to make, Sheila Heti, or what I can ‘read it’ as, you do not need to add to the mutilation and assault on womens’ bodies that happens for sport in the world already by writing this scene. 

The thing that added to the sting of reading this kind of exploitative ‘artwork’ was the fact that Sheila Heti is friends with Lena Dunham, and has had Margaret Atwood write a blurb for this particular text. Both Lena Dunham and Margaret Atwood have explicitly denounced and attempted to discredit women who have spoken out about assaults that they have suffered. Lena Dunham in particular has made some appalling comments over the years (some of which are documented below), and Heti counts her as a friend whilst profiting from womens’ pain in the work quoted above. Here is a tweet of Dunham’s, supporting white women who spoke out about abuse:

Lena Dunham Tweet

Ignoring for a moment the potential subtext beneath the idea of women lying about what they eat for lunch and the perpetuation of eating disorders, this is supportive. Of white women. When a young woman of colour, Aurora Perrineau, spoke out, detailing how a writer for Girls (Lena Dunham’s almost-entirely-white, only-accessible-to-those-who-can-pay-for-access-to-it American ‘sitcom’), Murray Miller, had assaulted her when she was 17 and he was 35, Dunham ‘responded’ by attributing her accusation to ‘the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year’. She later tweeted:

LD Tweet 2

Margaret Atwood also signed an ‘open letter’ to the University of British Columbia that ‘concerns the firing of former UBC Creative Writing chair and best-selling writer Steven Galloway who has been accused by multiple female students of sexual assault and sexual harassment.’. This quote has been taken from an article on jezebel.com, linked below. In the letter, all co-signatories called the accusations ‘unsubstantiated and unexamined’, adding that the university ‘amplified’ claims against Galloway, ‘severely damaging Professor Galloway’s reputation and affecting his health. The University has not, however, made any allegations public, citing privacy concerns. No criminal charges were laid against Professor Galloway at the time. None has been laid since.’. The letter has been criticised for seeming to place Galloway’s well-being and career before the well-being of the women assaulted – a criticism with which I agree. Too many times have we heard that allegations of assault are damaging to men’s careers, and that women should “think twice” before reporting a man because it could ruin his life. What of the effects upon the person who experienced the assault?

This year has seen many women speaking out about trauma that they have suffered at the hands of high-profile individuals, and I fully support all of these women in seeking justice. I do not support anything that hurts survivors’ recoveries, nor anything that takes some kind of perverse schadenfreude in detailing horrors. What do passages, books, or people like this contribute?

There is no separating the artist from their art. An artist’s connections and personal morals matter when deciding whose work to support. The list of people whose work I do not associate myself with grows longer, but the list of individuals whose contribution to their respective field has been damaged by trauma, and whose healing I hope for and empathise with is longer yet. I stand alongside them to prevent its further growth. #MeToo, and no more.

Helplines:

UK:

  • Rape Crisis: Freephone 0808 802 9999 : 12 noon – 2.30pm and 7 – 9.30pm every day of the year. https://rapecrisis.org.uk/
  • Freephone 24 hour National Domestic Violence Helpline: 0808 2000 247
  • Refuge: The Freephone 24-hour National Domestic Violence Helpline: 0808 2000 247 helps women find spaces in refuges across the UK. The police and social services can also put you in touch with us.
  • Safeline: Support for men, women and young people affected by rape and abuse. (Opening hours for both helplines Monday, Wednesday & Friday 10am – 4pm, Tuesday & Thursday 8am – 8pm , Saturday 10am – 12 noon)
    • Men specifically: 6Million Men Helpline: 0808 800 5005
    • Everyone: Helpline: 0808 800 5008

USA:

  • RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 24 hours a day: 1-800-656-HOPE
  • National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-SAFE (7233)
  • National Teen Dating Abuse Helpline: 1-866-331-9474
  • Anti-Violence Project for LGBTQIA+ and HIV+ persons: 212-714-1141

Australia:

  • National Sexual Assault, Family & Domestic Violence Counselling Service: 1800RESPECT
  • Kids Help Line:
    • Freecall: 1800 551 800
    • National 24 Hour telephone counselling for children and young people

New Zealand:

  • Shine/Te Kakano Tumanako: FREE Confidential Domestic Abuse Helpline 0508 744 633

WEBSITE LISTING HELPLINES AND ORGANISATIONS FOR EVERY COUNTRY:  http://www.hotpeachpages.net/a/countries.html

 

 

 

^ Note: I do not like James Joyce, nor do I personally think that he was revolutionary.

Some potential links for further reading:

Guardian digested read of How Should A Person Be?:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/27/how-should-person-sheila-heti-digested

A Guardian review of How Should A Person Be?:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/11/sheila-heti-how-should-person-be

A New York Times review of How Should A Person Be?:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/books/review/how-should-a-person-be-by-sheila-heti.html

Goodreads reviews of How Should A Person Be?:  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9361377-how-should-a-person-be

Lena Dunham in the media: notable events in reverse chronological order. (CONTENT WARNING: sexual abuse, (?) false accusations, (?) animal abuse, abortion):

Margaret Atwood’s signing of an ‘open letter’ to the University of British Columbia (amongst numerous other writers):

…search term ‘real feminism’ not found…

Before I begin this blog post, I would like to acknowledge something that I find incredibly frustrating: whilst I understand that university-level study is part of academia, and engaging with academic writings obviously requires a high level of knowledge, and understanding of a wide variety of concepts and terms (particularly English studies, as it often borrows from other specific schools like sociology, psychology, linguistics, history, art history and criticism, performance studies, etc), writing about feminism in this high academic style feels counter-productive to me. The style is exclusionary, the bibliography of referenced works is often almost as long as the essay itself, suggesting that a reader cannot fully appreciate the academic’s argument without also having read each of these listed pieces, and it does very little to encourage a non-academic to participate in thinking about feminism as something that relates to them. I often feel as though I’m being spoken down to, almost ridiculed, for not having made the writer’s connections between works before, and I do understand or recognise around half of their references. In my opinion, many academics writing about feminism, or post-feminism, or the importance of intersectionality would do more for education by reminding themselves that those who may not have had access to archives of academic writing are still a valuable readership.

However, ‘popular feminism’ is so repetitive, cyclical, and insubstantial that it does little to fill the void that exists between non-university-educated people and ‘feminist theory’. The reason why I believe that this is such a problem, is that it leaves generations of young people with very little accessible information about feminism, and leaves them at the mercy of media outlets’ bias against and – at times – total demonisation of feminists. It is also vital to note that we cannot simply assume that these young people will get to university and automatically engage with high theory about feminism because a) they may study a subject that never crosses paths with feminism, b) their views may have been so skewed by misinformation by the time they reach university that they have lost all open-mindedness towards feminism, and c) they may never go to university, the financial and standard-of-education reasons for which are the subject of a whole debate of its own.

To stray into the personal on what, I am aware, is intended to be a blog dedicated to a set of academic readings of contemporary popular culture, I would like to illustrate the above point with an account of the affect taken on by sections of society under the rise of ‘popular feminism’. This is an example of the situation described by Gill in ‘Post-postfeminism?: new feminist visibilities in postfeminist times’ as being complexly characterised as: ‘for every uplifting account of feminist activism, there is another of misogyny; for every feminist “win”, an out-pouring of hate, ranging from sexual harassment to death threats against those involved; for every instance of feminist solidarity, another of vicious trolling.’.

I am lucky that my sixth-form education took place at a Grammar School in Shropshire that was so saturated with misogyny, toxic masculinity, and casual sexual harassment that I became irrepressibly angry at the school’s complacency towards the breeding ground of upper-class entitlement over which the Senior Leadership presided, and thus sought refuge with the two feminist female teachers who still remained. They introduced me to what my parents had sheltered me from: the world is fucked up, but there are other people who are as angry about it as you are.

I actually do count myself lucky that I had the awful experiences I had at that school. Despite the fact that even as I studied Government and Politics under one of the aforementioned teachers, every expression of horror, revulsion or anger that I showed towards sexism, racism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or any incarnation of the discrimination that dominated the current media stories, political precedent and historical records we analysed was met with taunting, trolling, and commands for me to ‘shut [my] left-wing, queer-loving, hairy-feminist mouth’. Even from the only two other girls in a class of twenty-three. The backlash and internalised misogyny were everywhere: in history, in the news, and in my classroom. I applied for and won the position of Deputy House Captain in my Upper Sixth year, and yet every decision I made was overruled by the six other male members around the table. No member of staff stepped in, although they were fully aware. I see stories of discrimination against girls in school dress codes across social media every week, and I relate: I was pulled up for wearing a red scarf because ‘wearing red would give the boys the wrong idea’ about me.

I could go on for thousands and thousands of words about the horrors I myself have experienced, the victim-blaming from other women, and about the sexist questions female actors like Scarlett Johansson are asked by journalists, the exploitation and abuse of the French actresses Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux during the filming of Blue is the Warmest Colour, and the stories of harassment and assault that every one of my female friends is forced to remember. So studying what popular feminism looks like is a little difficult for me, because to me it just looks hollow. I don’t know if it can be classed as a failure of society in general, a failure of parents, or separated and held at arms’ length as a failure of the education system and, by extension, the Government. But I do know that the occasional magazine-cover about “fem-powerment” and “choosing to do something about your own low self-esteem” isn’t cutting it.

 

Further reading/ referenced links:

(A short piece by Gill that is incredibly guilty of referencing an enormous amount of theoretical writings. Interesting, but inaccessible to many, in my opinion) https://lisbonconsortium.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/rosalind-gill_postfeminism-and-the-new-cultural-life-of-feminism.pdf

(Q: Analyse some of the questions, and the wording of the result paragraph, esp. ‘lean in’) https://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicamassa1/how-much-of-a-feminist-are-you?utm_term=.byzeQP79n&quiz_result=9285417_20091921#9285417

(V. Interesting article written by bell hooks about Sheryl Sandberg) http://www.thefeministwire.com/2013/10/17973/

(A brilliant resource for accessible and articulate articles about all aspects of intersectional feminism) https://everydayfeminism.com/

 

 

The First Casualty: An Introduction.

Millennials are not possessed of the Midas touch of the baby boomers: we turn all that we connect with to quartz, at best with a little iron ore. But here is my connection with you, through this blog. I am a third-year English student at Queen Mary University of London, and over the next twelve weeks I will be posting about Contemporary American Popular Culture. We shall see if I believe that there is indeed any gold.

 

A week thinking about Claudia Rankine’s ‘Citizen: An American Lyric’.

Rankine assembles Citizen like a current contemporary life; it reads like the experience of being alive as a black woman over the past twenty-five to thirty years. Almost like a museum curator, Rankine leads us through an exhibition of everything that has ‘turned [her] flesh into its own cupboard’. Except, that phrase is written in full as:

‘You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard.’ (Rankine, Citizen, pp.63)

And it is the use of second person that both generalises and specifies; it identifies its audience as a universal, whilst separating those who sympathise in theory from those who truly empathise. After reading Citizen (once several months ago and once again this week), I explored blog posts and newspaper articles written by other people attempting to marshal their thoughts about Rankine’s work into some sort of coherency, and I discovered something of a theme: people appear to focus either on the content of the poem (what Rankine appears to say about racism) or on its form (e.g her inclusion of pictures, video stills, and world news quotations), but rarely both. I can see why. Both form and content are so evocatively arresting that it is difficult to process anything else once either an image or an anecdote has struck you; you are drawn along their path at least for your first reading.

Form and content are not starkly separate, however. Rankine employs the second person ‘you’ throughout Citizen, effectively shattering the fourth wall between writer and reader. One memorable instance of this occurs as Rankine addresses the reader directly during section II of Citizen with ‘though you felt outrage for Serena after that 2004 US Open…’. This could be taken as a general ‘you’, but I felt the effect much more strongly, and much more personally. It felt to me almost like an appeal, like an outstretched hand that I did not have the right to take, because I don’t remember the 2004 US Open. Despite knowing that I was barely ten years old when the event took place, I felt sharply ashamed of my lack of awareness, I think particularly because the writing felt as though Rankine was looking directly at me. Here, her choice of address form and textual angle sharpened the boundary between the reader and the narrative of the anecdote to a razor’s edge, nigh on physically biting into my skin.

In terms of my lack of memory of the 2004 US Open, this also made me think about Rankine’s potential assumption of a common cultural experience within her audience. Thinking of Citizen purely as an exhibition of her life is potentially quite reductive, and despite it feeling that way to me, I wonder if that is in fact part of Rankine’s masterful artistry. By forcing the reader to feel as though they are being personally spoken to, even invited, almost, to step into a life alongside a Virgil-esque guide, any unrecognised names, events, videos, or artworks take on a higher priority for research so as to be able to fully engage with the conversation between reader and text. It is also worth noting that there are a swathe of references to both current contemporary examples of pop culture and historical artefacts. Rankine references things like Turner and Millet paintings, stringing together a picture of pop culture and contemporary art through time that has both profited from and erased blackness. Often coming to historically define an age, in academic settings we use texts that were pieces of ‘popular culture’ to inform us about the state and shape of the time in which it was written. Therefore, the consistent erasure of people of colour in any position other than subservience perpetuates the colonialist narratives that have served white people since the time of overt slavery. When pop culture now is white-washed, white people often view it as a one-off thing that is not worthy of the outrage it receives because we don’t see that it has occurred throughout history: we don’t automatically see anything as missing when we look back through history and see our own faces reflected back at us. ‘This is right’, we think, ‘These people look like the kind of people I imagine when someone asks me to think about a group of people’. And so we continue, serving ourselves. Rankine is calling our attention to injustice far more politely than we deserve.

With this in mind, I think there is a certain validity to her assumption that her particular readership will be aware of references like Hennessy Youngman’s YouTube videos; she does risk alienating unaware readers with these references, but I think it is a valid hope that anyone who does not recognise her references will take the time to explore them in order to be able to connect with her argument. It is a form of interactive education, and it is emotionally charged, as any account of trauma is. I also feel that perhaps she is trying to isolate you; she is trying to show you what you don’t remember because you don’t recognise it. Because you don’t have to. She is showing you all the things that you are able to move past and forget and unsee because they don’t speak to your existence. She is exposing the nerves that are constantly touched when the white skin that covers them on your body isn’t there for someone else.

 

 

Links to blog posts and other pages I visited over the course of the week in relation to Rankine’s Citizen, some referenced within the post above:

(CONTENT WARNING: VIOLENCE/ PHYSICAL ABUSE. This link leads to the full video of police brutality against Rodney King/ ‘the Rodney King video’.)  https://www.youtube.com/embed/sb1WywIpUtY

(CONTENT WARNING: RACIST LANGUAGE AND GRAPHIC IMAGES OF VIOLENCE/ ABUSE. This link leads to Hennessy Youngman’s video entitled ‘Art Thoughtz: How To Be A Successful Black Artist’.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L_NnX8oj-g

The Problem with Hennessy Youngman

Notes toward understanding Claudia Rankine’s imaginative transformation of race in Citizen: An American Lyric

http://www.theotherblog.org/on-little-girl-citizen-and-racism/

http://wordchoicesoprfhs.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/little-girl.html

(CONTENT WARNING: DESCRIPTION AND IMAGE OF ABUSE. This link leads to a Wikipedia page about Emmett Till.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

Guardian article referenced within the above post:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/30/claudia-rankine-citizen-american-lyric-review

 

Janelle Monáe: An analysis of the official short film entitled ‘Many Moons’.

This analysis of Monáe’s short film will be split into two sections: the first my initial thoughts and interpretations, and the second some further thoughts informed by reading Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s ‘Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race’, published in Camera Obscura number 70;  Daylanne K. English’s and Alvin Kim’s  ‘Now We Want Our Funk Cut: Janelle Monae’s Neo-Afrofuturism’ from American Studies 52.4; and John Calvert’s ‘Janelle Monáe: A New Pioneer Of Afrofuturism’, published by The Quietus. All three essays are linked at the end of this post. To give a brief background to ‘Many Moons’ for readers who may not be acquainted with either the film or Monáe herself, the feature takes place in the last remaining city on Earth, Metropolis, in the year 2719. Monáe’s character is Android No. 57821 – Cindi Mayweather – who is already branded a rebel for falling in love with a human, and for leading an enlightened android rebellion, a key part of which was creating ‘a rebellious new form of pop music known as cybersoul’ (quotation taken from the liner notes of the Metropolis EP). This ‘cybersoul’ is exemplified in ‘Many Moons’.

Upon first listening to the track and watching the official video (fan-made versions and videos ‘inspired’ by Monáe’s also exist on YouTube), I was first struck by the video’s pixellation, which is clearly visible even when watching the HD 2009 version, rather than the original 360p 2008 incarnation. Presumably, then, the visible pixels are a deliberate artistic choice. The reason this struck me particularly is because the video is intended to be set in 2719, by which time technology may be expected to have advanced beyond what we call high-definition today, let alone the now-outdated 2009 offering. However, I then realised the immediate effect that actually seeing the pixels has: it forces the viewer to consciously recognise the screen at which we are looking. We are aware of the technology we are using, causing additional attention to be directed towards the technology featured in the video and the use, or lack of, digital screens and machines. Pushing deeper, the antiquated sensation that looking at pixels produces (I myself spent a good two or three minutes selecting the 720p HD setting on YouTube, then refreshing the video and trying again when it appeared not to load) highlights the temporality of the setting, and the transient, disposable nature of technology: we become hyper-aware of the age of Monáe’s video, and the disconnect between the year 2719 and seeing pixels. Once we have ascertained that yes, whatever device we are watching on is not malfunctioning, and yes, there was HD video in 2009, these pixels can only be attributed to the time portrayed within the narrative of the film – 2719 Metropolis then takes on a monochrome tarnish of age, like an iPhone X running iOS 3. From the first few seconds, it feels that there is something unsettlingly technologically antediluvian about this supposedly futuristic world. When the parade of available Android women of colour up for auction begins, the ‘something’ is given a name.

From here, the essays mentioned above offer a deeper understanding of Monáe’s use of technology and the invocation of the slave trade by exploring race as technology. ‘Technology’ as I understand it so far may here be defined as something that is used as a tool; it can be employed to benefit a section of society by creating images and categories, or individually to build a performed persona. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s essay in Camera Obscura particularly sets out how viewing race as technology separates itself as a ‘body of scholarship’ from viewing race as a biological or cultural phenomenon. Specifically, she states that ‘it [considering race as technology] also highlights the fact that race has never been simply biological or cultural, but rather a means by which both are established and negotiated.’. Looking then at ‘Many Moons’, by performing as Cindi Mayweather, Lady Maestra: Master of the Show Droids, and as every other female Android in the film, Monáe visually harnesses the element of technology as a means of exposing the way in which the black female body is commodified and consumed as a purchasable entity in society. As she pushes a switch at her temple at 0:39, her skin changes from pure white to her natural colour, signalling the beginning of her perfomance; from this it may be interpreted that there are expectations of how one should perform as a black woman in society. The character of Mayweather, however, refuses to conform to these trends, and the Metropolis saga (continued across multiple EPs and albums) presents a harnessing of race as technology for revolutionary ends.

I could write a very long essay about the musicality and political elements of Monáe’s work, but I will end this post here. Please see below for links to all essays mentioned for further reading, and to the HD version of ‘Many Moons’ on Monáe’s YouTube channel.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, ‘Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race’:  http://cameraobscura.dukejournals.org/content/24/1_70/7.full.pdf

Daylanne K. English and Alvin Kim, ‘Now We Want Our Funk Cut: Janelle Monae’s Neo-Afrofuturism’:  file:///C:/Users/Student/Downloads/4475-8068-1-PB.pdf

John Calvert, ‘Janelle Monáe: A New Pioneer Of Afrofuturism’:  http://thequietus.com/articles/04889-janelle-mon-e-the-archandroid-afrofuturism

Janelle Monáe, ‘Many Moons’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZyyORSHbaE

“…[figure skating] is something white people do – like skiing, or brunch”.

This blog post is a response to the RadioLab podcast entitled ‘On The Edge’, which covers the story of the French Olympic figure skater Surya Bonaly. Adopted as a baby by a white couple from Nice in the South of France, Surya was brought up around figure skating and showed immense promise as a figure skater herself; she began skating at only eighteen months old. However, Surya’s career never quite seemed to reach its projected peak. ‘On The Edge’ opens the floor for discussions about Surya’s professional reception from commentators, judges, and fellow competitors in an attempt to analyse the extent to which Surya’s trajectory was stalled by the combination of stereotypes of femininity and prejudices against black women. It is a shame that the commentators of the podcast seem to be so willing to gloss over the racism experienced by Surya Bonaly whilst claiming to discuss it.

In light of this, before I begin writing about my personal response to the RadioLab podcast, I feel the need to acknowledge my lack of lived experience; as a white woman, systemic racism against myself does not exist. I cannot speak as though I understand. I am not trying to score points by stating this, but I feel the need to be open in my ability to view this only academically.

This said, the main question that the podcast raised for me is not necessarily whether Surya herself was experiencing racial prejudice that prevented her from winning her gold medal. This is obvious. Instead, I question why Surya was the only black woman competing at a world-class level in figure skating in as recent a time as 1998? In fact, the date is irrelevant: why do black women appear to have been excluded from figure skating? The answer seems to lie in the method of judging attainment in skating: subjective (read: racist) white aesthetics. At the core of figure skating there exists systemic exclusion. Describing her as ‘exotic’, and focusing upon the ‘elegance’ and overall ‘aesthetic’ appeal of a skater’s routine, the only possible reason for the harsh marking Surya experienced is that the judges didn’t view black skin as being appealing. They didn’t view her ‘more muscular build’ as being ‘feminine’. What they wanted was a ‘balletic’, “delicate” white girl. Or at the very least a light-skinned, white-passing girl.

The questions I am then left with are incredibly telling about the vast gulf of opportunity that Surya’s history shows still exists. Would Surya have even become a figure skater if her adoptive mother had not been a skating coach? Would she have been able to access professional support? Would she even have held the ‘dream’ of Olympic skating without being placed on the rink at a young age? From my research I can only find one other black female figure skater who competed at the Winter Olympics: her name is Debi Thomas, and that was in 1988. Debi Thomas is the only African-American woman to have ever medalled in Figure Skating at the Winter Olympics. Surya grew up almost completely devoid of representation of her image in top-level figure skaters.

Surya Bonaly is remembered first for her ‘defiance’ and ‘aggression’: incredibly negative characteristics to attach to a young woman who tried to change her entire skating style to fit the model of white lyricism that she was judged against. But she is also remembered for being the first female figure skater to attempt a quadruple jump, as well as being the only known figure skater to be able to land a backflip on one foot on ice. She is the only known person to be able to land the most dangerous move, let alone landing it impulsively with a pulled muscle in one leg and a recently ruptured and repaired Achilles’ tendon in the other. Her ability is undeniable. So is her struggle. Listening to ‘On The Edge’ I was reminded of the comments that still surround athletes like Simone Biles and Serena Williams, the latter particularly having suffered at the hands of racist umpires throughout her career. I wish I couldn’t think of current examples of prejudice, but I think such a statement relates to my earlier point about being white. As far as what we can learn from ‘On The Edge’, from Surya Bonaly, and from other black women, I think one statement from the podcast stuck out to me: ‘racism makes black people crazy’. One commentator went so far as to suggest that black people are paranoid. What we can learn is that it is not paranoia; it is that anyone who is not white is forced to live with the constant fear that the person they are talking to, working with, or being scored by harbours a belief that at best, they are better than them because they are white. At worst they want them dead.