PUNK PLANET 46 (Sometime in 2001)

My #1 fave film of all time is The Legend of Billie Jean. (With Times Square and Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains running a close second and third). After countless viewings, I am still mesmerized by the scene of her transformation — the beautiful but unassuming girl from the trailer park, after one too many violations of her sense of dignity, cuts off her hair (and her sleeves) and otherwise embraces her outlaw status. That the film also deals with the outlaw figure as fashionable commodity –inspired, girls from all over shear their heads, though Billie Jean is troubled by her own iconicity– is also absolute genius.

(There are, of course, great clothes: Billie Jean in her wide-belted, paperbag-waisted shorts, striped tank top and rolled handkerchief, before; Billie Jean in men’s trousers tucked into calf-length boots, a jaggedly tailored wetsuit, fringed fingerless gloves, and dangling earrings doubled up in one ear, after; her brother Binx in his zebra-striped painter’s cap, or his ’50s gray short-sleeve button-up with black detailing worn with highwater pants, dress shoes and no socks. I also love the fact that every jacket she comes across in the movie quickly loses its sleeves!)

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This bloody road remains a mystery / This sudden darkness fills the air /What are we waiting for? / Won’t anybody help us? / What are we waiting for? / We can’t afford to be innocent / Stand up and face the enemy / It’s a do or die situation / We will be invincible!

Whether princess or pauper, Molly Ringwald in all her incarnations meant nothing to me. The sum of her girlish charms left me unmoved. Neither pouting lips nor thrift-store femininity could persuade me. I remained unimpressed with her seemingly eternal pursuit of heterosexual romance — a pursuit which was translated on film as “spunk” or “personality.” As an ominous sign she favored feathered blonde boys in white linen suits and my god, they were in high school. Bad taste by way of Simon LeBon was continental maybe, but unfailingly bland. Or she slummed it for an afternoon with the broken boy from a broken home, whatever — she got her kicks by crossing the tracks just far enough to fake the danger.

When feeling especially vicious, I imagined her twenty years later, her pale mauves and hot pinks turned to suburban corals, a sickly salmon hue. From Pretty in Pink to Some Kind of Wonderful to Say Anything, The John Hughes oeuvre was unfailingly conservative – either you learned your place in the social-class continuum, the value of upward mobility, or both — Reagan-era cultural politics for teenagers. And the dangerous girls, the ones with potential –the baby dykes and raccoon-eyed freaks– were inevitably tamed by the promise of romantic heterosexual love, that old sleight of (empty) hand. Like anyone really believed Watts with her red-fringed gloves and drumsticks in back jean pocket would fall for a chump boy like sensitive-yet-superficial Keith. We all knew in our heart of hearts that she was destined for girls like us, girls who wanted to rock (and make) out with other girls. I envisioned her in Greyhound buses and truck cabs, blonde head pressed against the rain-spattered window, trekking to the Pacific Northwest after a last-gasp graduation to join an all-girl rock band. And I cheered when The Basketcase in her black shadow and black mood uttered, “When you grow up, your heart dies.” That felt real and prophetic, even. But when Ally resurfaced from high school bathroom in white lace and distastefully muted eyeliner, I recognized the set-up and cursed Molly (and Hughes) for her awkward, awful transformation and looked away.

But Billie Jean — now she was a girl who could bruise your heart.

This shattered dream you cannot justify /We’re gonna scream until we’re satisfied /What are we running for? / We’ve got the right to be angry / What are we running for? / When there’s nowhere we can run to anymore /We can’t afford to be innocent / Stand up and face the enemy / It’s a do or die situation /We will be invincible!

I love The Legend of Billie Jean. I first saw it when I was fourteen, three years after it was released. I was an alternateen looking for punk rock and I found Billie Jean. Not instead, but simultaneously. It had everything a girl like me could ask for in a “whirlwind story about a group of kids who challenge the adult world:” a girl outlaw in fingerless gloves and a righteous sense of justice. Isn’t this every girl’s teenage fantasy?

In The Legend, it’s summer in Texas, and the heat is sweltering. Billie Jean is an attractive working-class white teenager who lives in a trailer park with her divorced mother and bleached blonde younger brother Binx. Because she is “from the trailers,” the local boys believe she must be cheap, and led by ringleader Hubie, the boys trash Binx’s scooter (and later Binx) when Billie Jean proves otherwise.

Billie Jean arrives at Hubie’s father’s seaside shop to demand the exact amount for the scooter repairs after appealing to a sympathetic but dismissive police lieutenant. The senior Pyatt invites her upstairs to the office, ostensibly to withdraw money from the safe. Once there, he suggests a “play as you pay” plan – and he makes himself plain, sliding his hand against her arm and suddenly lunging. No wilting Texas rose, she knees him in the groin and flies down the stairs into the shop, where Binx has discovered the gun in the register. Seeing his sister threatened, he waves the gun at Pyatt, and the gun accidentally goes off. Thus begins their headlong flight from the law, taking their best friends Ophelia and Putter with them in a battered station wagon.

After a failed attempt to negotiate with the police at a mall -Pyatt brings a gang of teenage thugs for an ambush- the kids break into a mansion for food and shelter, and discover an ally in the son of the District Attorney. He suggests they make a video to present their demands and Billie Jean, earlier mesmerized by Jean Seberg’s portrayal of Joan of Arc (the film is playing during a group discussion), prepares herself for inadvertent pop stardom. Making sense of her situation through an image of Jean/Joan burning at the stake, she shears her locks and shreds her clothes, making herself over into a modern Joan of Arc or a more righteous (rather than merely art-damaged) Penelope Houston. It is through a commodity image that Billie Jean realizes her political strategy — manipulating a cinematic sensibility, she presents a striking figure on video. Her friends are awed – and soon, so is everyone else within reach of radios, newspapers and television sets.

The video of Billie Jean with her fist in the air, shouting, “Fair is fair,” is played everywhere. Inspired by her message she becomes a touchstone for teenage rebellion, a fugitive aided and abetted by legions of youth. They slip her past police roadblocks, offer her shelter in underground clubs, nourish her on their fathers’ credit cards. Young white girls get the “Billie Jean cut” and even Putter (no stranger to the “real” Billie Jean) invests in Billie Jean’s celebrity and defiantly cuts her hair before a rapt audience of wannabe Billie Jeans, cops, and her abusive mother.

Beneath the layered guitar wanking and arbitrary (but temporary) love interest lies not only a critique of misogyny and classism, but also a meditation on commodity culture, pop presence, and fantasies of identification. This is not limited to Billie Jean’s identification with the cinematic image of Jean/Joan. In the course of her criminalization Billie Jean becomes iconic as a sexualized body in ways which she cannot control. Ever the businessman, Pyatt not only displays the bloody shirt he’d been wearing when shot, but shills photographs of Billie Jean taken by Hubie’s pals, emerging enraged from a local swimming hole in a clinging top and bikini. He pawns pastel-hued t-shirts emblazoned with her “mug shot,” the red concentric circles of a target framing her head. There are visors (oh so ’80s) and posters and bumper stickers and frisbees and beach towels, some of them ironically emblazoned with the slogan “Fair is fair.”

Her gender and class status as “white trash,” those markers that contain and constrain her mobility through the world, are coded as dangerous and criminal. As such her status as a “white trash” teenage girl makes her hyper-visible to the disciplinary state, but also to commodity culture, even while her ascent to cult figure in some ways depends upon ignoring the historicity of those social conditions; so that even as she is pursued by the mustered strength of Texas law enforcement, her image reaps profit and (pop) pleasure for others.

The Marxist model of commodity fetishism describes an affective process, a substitution of meanings – the social relations of labor are disguised by the commodity form. But commodities and images do not simply veil “real” conditions, but constitute them. Images are also social relations, and this becomes clear for Billie Jean as the line between state surveillance and her supposed celebrity is blurred. This is a different order of fetishism – a fetishism of figures, in which the iconic persona of “Billie Jean” is invested with a life of her own. People relate not to Billie Jean per se but her image, and in a way that obscures the histories of its determination as image — including Billie Jean’s own meditation upon Jean Seberg’s cinematic portrayal. Like all pop icons, she (both Jean Seberg as Joan of Arc and Billie Jean) becomes the screen upon which an audience of thousands projects their fears and fantasies. In the latter case, the adults are afraid of her, the kids adore her. They make meaning of their own lives, whether seemingly threatened or otherwise encouraged, in relation to her image.

A group of preteens rally to her, hoping that she’ll save a neighborhood boy from the physical abuse of his father; a man spies her adolescent “gang” and vows to bring her to justice, and like a Old West vigilante (complete with cowboy hat and rifle) he guns his pick-up truck at the gathered children. And as a pop figure the social relations that conditioned Billie Jean’s outlaw status are obscured – the girl who offers Billie Jean a ride in her Ferrari might not have done so if she were not a celebrity, and the throngs of teenagers who sport her image may very well have been her torturers only days earlier. The girls who turn themselves in to the police, all claiming to be Billie Jean, participate in a projective fantasy of being “bad” like Billie Jean in ways that elide uneven class relations and hierarchy and also manifest a desire for “authenticity.” It is a fantasy with material force – while the sense of solidarity forged between the girls is mediated by commodity culture (and punk rock is no exception), it is still a meaningful relation, enough to inspire the contradictory impulse to both appropriate and inhabit Billie Jean’s notoriety. Their gesture is not simply part disrespect and part homage, part consumption and part conviction, but a mixture of all these things at once.

The conclusion of the film finds Billie Jean confronted with her iconic stature, literally. Her brother has just been shot by state troopers -mistaken for herself in a dress- and disappeared into the back of an ambulance at the beach where she was to turn over the “hostage” and receive a new bike. There are crowds of young and old (but mostly young) attracted to the beach by the media-frenzy over Billie Jean’s scheduled appearance. In the hours before the exchange -boy for bike- was to be made, beach-goers are treated to Billie Jean haircuts, Billie Jean contests, Billie Jean souvenirs. Radio station DJs broadcast from sandy towels and portable amps and the teenaged audience parties in anticipation.

Billie Jean only notices once her brother is taken away that everyone has her face stuck to some part of their bodies, and follows the trail of lights in the dimming dusk to the circus tent Pyatt has erected to sell his wares. Towering above the beach is a paper-mache effigy of Billie Jean, pointing a gun toward the ground, other hand on hip. Before the crowd, the cops and the cameras she confronts him about his sexual coercion, his unwillingness to otherwise pay for the damages to the bike – and seeing that she has an audience, he grins, stutters, and attempts to bribe her into silence, or submission. He reaches into the register and pushes a wad of bills into her limp hand. “A little more, a little less, does it matter?” he says. “It’s not about the money,” she replies scornfully, and throws the bills into the fire. As Pyatt scrambles on all fours to recover the cash Lloyd moves behind her to toss a poster into the growing flames. Soon the crowd is coming forward to lay their souvenirs in the fire, or lofting them through the air. Everyone watches as the fire grows to consume the posters, t-shirts, tent and effigy, perhaps participating in another, totally different kind of collective pleasure.

In film after film Molly (and others like her) triumphs when she wins the rich boy in her homemade prom dress or bride’s maid gown, proof she is worthy of heterosexual desire. Not Billie Jean. In the end she walks away from the fire, the boy, and Texas. (This is when the Pat Benetar song “Invincible” plays, and this is why I tear up like a big gooey baby every time I hear it.) Her burning effigy is not only an allusion to Joan of Arc – having led the people to a dream of freedom, she’s misunderstood and betrayed by the very same- but a potential critique of consumption as “revolutionary” activity. But at the same time it speaks to the dangers of consuming and appropriating radical stances and images, of the depoliticization of historical conditions or capitalist relations, it also points to the contradictory pleasures of fantasy identification with our pop stars and the possibility for that pleasure to become a kind of political agency, however temporary.

Is any of this coincidence? One of the screenwriters for the film was Walter Bernstein, a blacklisted writer in the 1950s who was targeted by the House on Un-American Activities Commission for his leftist political alliances. It’s entirely possible that he was versed in the kinds of intellectual debates circulating among leftist cultural workers at the time, and retained some of these threads even in penning a mainstream film marketed for the vast American teenage market.

Is it cheesy? Well, you could argue all teen flicks by necessity are idealistic and melodramatic, and this is a fantasy about a teenaged heroine who struggles against a homegrown injustice. Overt metaphors (perhaps Joan of Arc is a bit much) and the cringe-worthy menstruation scene are distracting. And clearly Billie Jean the character depends upon Helen Slater the actor being recognized as conventionally “pretty:” tall, thin, blond. But I think the demand for absolute resistance is misguided, and to demand purity in pop culture ignores contradictory and complex realities, and so maybe there’s hope for Molly after all. We know by now that no mass cultural production (especially film) is shaped outside of corporate management and market influence; we know capitalist culture is able to assimilate even the most “revolutionary” sorts of images or themes without threat to its survival.

But it may be that because we already know these things, we can begin to ask other questions. The issue of how to capture the popular imagination is at the center of the struggle for hegemony. Instead of dismissing popular culture (and its audience) for the fact of its messy manufacture, we might probe further to examine the character and range of any given commodity form’s power and possibility, what moment of crisis it might represent, what (problematic) pleasures it might afford. We should neither blindly denounce nor embrace these pleasures, but instead try to understand what produces them. This does not mean we abandon the analysis of late capitalist culture or patriarchal relations; on the contrary, it might mean that we take these more seriously. And as black queer theorist Wahneema Lubiano writes, “It might well be that taking popular culture seriously could teach us something about form, about aesthetics and about the development of pleasure in politics.”

And maybe I just want to be able to take seriously my own pleasures; as a queer Asian American girl reader of pop culture, I remember what it meant for me to harbor crushes on Duckie and Watts (and thus imagine her alternate endings), or to read Wonder Woman as “almost Asian” (I was seven, and it was the black hair that did it). But it’s also because when I first saw this movie at fourteen, it was like how punk rock used to feel – impossibly, hopefully idealistic. However uneven my own fantasy of identification, it fueled both my nascent desire for rebellion and my sense of its potential. And watching it however many years later, it reminds me how good it felt to believe.

I’ll always love you, Billie Jean.

And with the power of conviction /There is no sacrifice /It’s a do or die situation /We will be invincible /Won’t anybody help us? / What are we running for? /When there’s nowhere we can to anymore /We can’t afford to be innocent /Stand up and face the enemy / It’s a do or die situation /We will be invincible!

Punk Planet 56 (July/August 2003)

Two weeks after the war began I donned my red Members Only jacket, slicked back my skate punk hair and jumped in the car to drive across the Bay. A fellow feminist and queer academic, Matt had invited me to his appearance with the drag troupe The Disposable Boy Toys at a Queer Alliance benefit in the City. Before the show he drew me backstage through a wondrous sea of boys packing and binding: punk boys with mohawks and sleeveless jean jackets, glitter boys in angel wings and pink ties, and jock boys in backward baseball caps and smudges of facial hair. I didn’t need the MC Summer’s Eve to tell me, as she did before presenting the first act, “You may think you don’t swing that way, but you do.”

Between the effeminate nerds in glasses and natty slicksters in three-piece suits, the larger political possibilities of drag denaturalize the matching of binary gender to particular bodies and present a range of femininities and masculinities. But drag can also highlight the acts of policing that non-gender normative persons are subject to in their everyday lives, the demands they face to perform the “appropriate” gender and the threats that follow. What appears as performance in the theatrical space of the drag show is a matter of off-stage survival for some. These tensions dramatized in the drag show — between the interior and the exterior of the self, the privilege of mobility and violence of normalization, the hierarchical spaces of disruption and danger– can also be put to work at other pressure points where social forces constrain the available possibilities for being in the world.

As a drag troupe with a critical political consciousness, the Disposable Boy Toys performed an anti-capitalism act and an anti-war act (and these are simplifications of their “messages”), both featuring vignettes of acts of policing. In the first, the Pledge of Allegiance was recited by a small group standing at attention before the song kicked in with heavy guitars and lyrics despairing the state of the union. As two performers furiously lip-synced the verses, men in lab coats adjusted the height of arms in salute, delivering scoldings and slaps when a person failed to maintain the proper posture. In the antiwar act, a police officer under the direction of a masked George W. Bush gagged protesters (with duct tape) who mouthed the lyrics: “Hey hey, U.S.A., how many kids did you kill today?” At the conclusion of the song, one of the protesters held up a sign that read, “What are YOU going to do about it?”

Watching these staged acts of civil disobedience, I thought about how the accumulation of an array of effects — the songs chosen, the voiceless gestures translating agreement or dissent, the address to the viewer– communicated a particular critical position in relation to nationalism and the state. The theatricalization of political rage is historically a vital component of radical queer activism, and as a strategy of contestation manifests other possibilities for a radical cultural politics. In particular, these acts can pose a challenge to the short-circuiting of the civic imagination and provide a critical mode to think through the production of national affect or sentimentality. While drag addresses the intimate levels of consciousness at which gender and sexuality are lived and felt –as meaningful embodiment or violent regulation– its theatrical mode can also be made to interrogate the intimate levels of consciousness at which nationalism and democracy are lived and felt. The anti-war acts suggests that political anger is not sanctioned in the current climate. What modes of feeling are, and what does this mean for realizing democracy?

In a national address George W. Bush reads out loud a letter from a fourth grader offering her father up for war, and television cameras capture U.S. soldiers inscribing the names of the World Trade Center dead on bombs dropped over Iraq. Tri-colored banner headlines scream “UNDER GOD” and full-color t.v. footage stream Senate members reiterating their allegiance to “God and country” after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals released their ruling on the necessary separation of church and state. Newspapers and magazines print photographs of tearful wives kissing husbands good-bye as carriers loom on the horizon, and pundits of all sorts scold anti-war protesters for undermining the social unity of the nation. Amassing at the heart of the U.S. national imagination, these are not moments that are concerned with gritty political dialogues and the democratic process. Instead, democracy is conceived as a sentimental and moral category, above or outside of the political. What emerges from these nationalizing discourses is a romantic ideal of civic life –the nation as family– that discourages participation in necessarily difficult dialogues about politics and power.

We witness the shrinking of available political exchange as war becomes the governing principle of the U.S. American foreign and domestic policy, and popular discourse allows for limited discussion of the military action in Iraq in not political but moral and emotional terms. As a dominant media source and staging ground for national sentimentality, the television news gives us the war as an orchestrated melodrama of intense emotionalism and personal triumphs; the cable news networks stream the headline “Saving Private Lynch,” and there is no doubt a docudrama in the making. As a cultural form, the melodrama presents the war in the overdetermined and excessive gestures of personal sacrifice and honor in order to frame the meaning of the war as prepolitical. In particular, the war melodrama evades critical historical and political frameworks to instead individualize interpretations of global events and “manage” them as stories. Enacting simple binaries of opposition (between savage and civilized, good and evil, most notably) to bolster its claims, the melodrama seeks to resolve uncertainty with recourse to the personal, the familial and a moral authority assumed to transcend all political stances.

The belief that the nation provides a sentimental mode of social unity that transcends the political has become a widespread, “common sense” definition of democracy. And while the television news is perhaps the most obvious example of the war melodrama, this phenomenon is not limited to the media. Generated and regulated by a national constellation of discourses and institutions, this (forcibly) consensual space of the nation is emptied of debate, in which feeling differently is a traitorous act. It takes multiple forms but always as an antipolitical gesture that refuses disagreement or meaningful contestation. There is nothing that is not ideological about this, though it pretends to be innocent. For instance — encouraged to consider the military apparatus as something other than an industrial-economic institution, as instead the folksy muster of “our boys,” the therapeutic language of troop support reduces the range of acceptable terms and categories with which to discuss war to nonpolitical and sentimental ones. And as an ethnocentric discourse (inasmuch as it pits “our troops” against a foreign “other,” out there), it traffics in the active disavowal of the political and historical conditions of the conflict and its implications for targeted populations.

These popular discourses produce modes of feeling that constrain and block the political process of functioning disagreement, contestation, and dialogue. The frightening result is the sacralization of democracy as the moral measure of the U.S. nation, residing outside of history or politics, a thing to be safeguarded from popular use or alternative interpretation. It is an exercise that assumes the protection of democracy from its actual practice. And in these sentimental moments of staged social unity, the state must seem to care, even when injustices on all sides can be attributed to its daily operation. It offers a narrow definition of democracy that is full of erasures and excuses, translating into immigrant detentions, the USA PATRIOT Act, deregulation and the dismantling of labor and environmental protections, a dangerous unilateralist foreign policy, and the slashing of domestic social programs, including billions from the Veterans Affairs budget which pays out soldiers’ benefits and other forms of “support.”

The chief social power of these sentimental discourses is in the labor of socialization. That is, they tell us how to be citizens and how to feel about the world. As political theorist Barbara Cruikshank writes, “the citizen is an effect and an instrument of political power rather than just a participant in politics,” and there are a range of dangers involved in expressing the “wrong” identifications and the “wrong” feelings. Drag, of course, politicizes these dangers in terms of gender, bodies and sexual desire. But if drag theatricalizes gender as an effect and instrument of power, can it model a similar strategy for thinking through the making of national subjects? And can we conceive of a political cultural project able to appropriate the intimate, emotional address into a demand for democratic potential?

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Boy Bands Against the War (BBAW) wants to save us from an abusive relationship. Or more, they want us to save ourselves. A member of the San Francisco-based drag troupe the Transformers, Jason Blue envisions BBAW as a political network of boy band members united in their opposition to the war and the Bush administration. In a letter sent to O-Town, N. Snyc, Backstreet Boys and a slew of drag kings, Jason Blue pitches for this coalition of cuties:

Dear Past or Present Boy Band Member,

The massive anti-war demonstrations that have sprung up all over the world in the past few days have been amazing, inspiring, empowering, and beautiful – except for the embarrassing and shameful absence of boy bands. Boy Bands Against the War is the solution to that problem: a coalition of past and present members of boy bands, united in our commitment to global peace and global justice.

The letter continues, “No one understands heartbreak like a boy bander. We know: it. s time to break up with George Bush.” As an organization in its infancy, local BBAW members (a.k.a. The Transformers) have already performed their antiwar rendition of the N. Snyc Top Ten break-up hit “Bye Bye Bye” at various venues. But as a larger political project, Boy Bands Against the War speaks the language of popular culture, the wish fulfillment of crushes and other fantasies of identification with its stars. As black British theorist Stuart Hall argues, “Popular culture is a theater of popular desires, a theater of popular fantasies. It is where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented, not only to the audiences out there, but to ourselves for the first time.” The boy band is a commercial phenomenon of global proportions, a billion-dollar industry in and of themselves — you can’t get much more “pop.” But instead of dismissing popular culture (and its audiences) for the fact of its non-innocence, what else can we say about the character and range of any given commodity form’s power and possibility, and what pleasures it might afford?

The promises pop musicians offer to audiences ring with emotional resonance because there is something utopian about their sentiments, combined with the sheer power of their mass appeal. In particular, the break-up song is both the end of illusion and the promise of a brighter future. The self-imaginings of a stronger “me” in the aftermath of deception is a standard tale in the break-up song; I don’t know boy bands, but I do know Christina Aguilera is a fighter. ( If it wasn’t for all that / you tried to do / I wouldn’t know / just how capable / I am to pull through / so I wanna say thank you / Cause it makes me that much stronger / Makes me work a little bit harder / It makes me that much wiser / So thanks for making me a fighter! ) The break-up song is not just the realization that our horizon of potential is limited within the confines of an especially bad relationship; it is the affirmation that we deserve better than what we presently have. The break-up song is never just bitter — it is an avowal to realize a more fulfilling existence, to find meaning in other relationships, to desire other ways of being. So just as these songs (as commonplace and trite as some of them seem) employ forms of support and pleasure in pursuit of something other than a particular romance — a relationship doomed to fail because of lies, or a lack of communication, or inequality– BBAW employs forms of support and pleasure in pursuit of something other than a nationalist affect or uncritical patriotism.

This apparently trivial analogy is actually significant for the way it uses the intimate address not to shrink but expand the range of possibilities for the subject of betrayal to break away from what is safe, from what is perhaps sentimental, to instead imagine a different, more daring life. The individual initiating the (song) break with the deceptive lover or boorish President struggles through a public declaration of independence from the sanctioned space of romantic love or national unity, where we are so often told to look for social fulfillment, to demand a more equitable and accountable relationship. The prescriptive nature of courtship and marriage (especially in light of legislation privileging marriage for poor women and the continued delegitimization of non-heternormative relationships), of proper citizenship and patriotism, is challenged by this public performance of disenchantment. In the right hands, the break-up song can become the space in which the nationalization of sentimental feelings (as dominant metaphors for subordinate citizenship to the state) is rejected in the song. s revelation of its controlling violence.

While there is no word yet from the top-charting boy bands, the drag kings are in it all the way. And of course, the queering of boy bands (though perhaps not such a leap) is itself a critique of available and “appropriate” masculinities and objects of desire. That a drag king might position himself in the firmament of pop stars is to reevaluate those norms of gender and desire, as well as our understanding of fantasies of identification and what they mean for how we build new ways of being in the world.

Channeling the utopian commodity image of the boy band, BBAW suggests that self-fulfillment as a desiring subject can be found outside of the bad relationship and in the collective hunger for democratic practice. As such BBAW reimagines an ideal love as the pursuit of social justice: “When the visions of war around you bring tears to your eyes, and all that surrounds you are the government’s secrets and lies, we’ll be your strength. We’ll give you hope. Keeping your faith when it’s gone. Our love for the people of the world is like a river, peaceful and deep. Baby, call on us tonight, because this we promise you: another world is possible. And Boy Bands Against the War pledges to make it real.”

While popular culture is never innocent, it is important. Between its intense affect and ubiquitous presence, it is a critical arena for the struggle over the popular imagination and hegemony. After all, it can make tenable the nationalization of sentimental feelings and contain the available possibilities for transgression and social transformation; it can also the imaginative space where we remake ourselves as desiring, desirable subjects, as queer superheroes and transnational pop stars. The break-up song is hardly inherently subversive; but as such, BBAW offers both a critique of the limitations of popular culture and an appropriation of its pleasures. As queer theorist Wahneema Lubiano argues, “It might well be that taking popular culture seriously could teach us something about form, about aesthetics and about the development of pleasure in politics.” The use of self-theatricalization and star fantasies in the BBAW project stages and reclaims what has been made queer about democratic desire in the current political climate. And that fucking rules.

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After the benefit I drove to Iraya’s house, where she gave me some lip-gloss and applied sweeps of green eye shadow to her own lids while standing on the toilet. The car loaded with crates of LPs, CDs, and a six-foot keyboard, we picked up Jesse and Reginald and a keyboard stand and headed to the bar for Co-ed Magnetic, the queer discotheque offering “nasti new wave,” “trashi rock,” “hott hip-hop” and free admission to those who brought their anti-war protest citations.

We danced to the best mixes ever (how long has it been since I’ve heard, “Boom, boom, boom, let’s go back to my room,” let alone, “Two of Hearts” by Stacey Q?) as loops of found footage screened behind us, a hypnotic blend of spliced scenes from ’70s porn, B-movies, concert films, multipled, quartered, and overlaid with Atari game graphics. Just after midnight Gary (a.k.a. D.M. Feelings) donned a black wig, shorts (tied with a chiffon sash) and a rare Frankie Goes to Hollywood t-shirt with a doctored photograph of Ronald Reagan, a bullethole square in the middle of his forehead. Only Frankie can stop me now!, the shirt read, and I pondered for a moment what it would be like had Frankie been able to do so. The small dance floor cleared, he became “Bibi,” lip-syncing to “The Professionals” from Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains as the “Bargain Bins” (a handful of us waving our arms in the air and shaking our fine asses) acted as his Greek chorus: Does this country mean that much to you? Not me not me not me!

The political project of “materializing democracy” is multifaceted. I need poststructuralist political theory, drag troupes and club nights with antiwar admission policies to sustain me in this continuing state of emergency. (As Matt said, “For some persons and populations, this level of state surveillance and social discipline is not new.”) This sort of performative political theory is as vital as arguments concerning the nuances of social policy or collective organizing for structural reform. While these difficult political dialogues and decisions require a different sort of commitment, when these dialogues and decisions are blocked by cultural practices that manage and contain discourses about democracy, we need to examine how and why.

The staging of forbidden feelings of queer desire, critical rage, or democratic disappointment is a critical counterpoint to the naturalization of hierarchies of “right” feelings, “right” ways of being. The violence of national normativity that is, among other things, gendered and sexualized, is here laid bare like a lover’s deception, or a state’s violence against its subjects. These are crucial projects that get at how ideology operates at the intimate levels of consciousness, feeling, and body, how fantasies and nightmares about who are imagine ourselves to be are produced at the junctures of power. They force us to reimagine how democracy is lived and felt, how it is translated into personal effects and collective desires, and for what purpose. And it means we recognize that these other cultural forms so often dismissed as trivial and sentimental –the break-up song, for instance, or celebrity crushes– can be politically powerful, if only we could teach everyone the right moves.

CFP: Punk Anteriors

Women and Performance invites submissions for a special issue, “Punk Anteriors: Genealogy, Performance, Theory.” They invite critical essays, short texts, book and performance reviews, artwork, and photo essays that examine questions relevant to a critical discussion of the intersection of punk, music, race, gender, and performance. Submission deadline: July 15, 2011.

Call for Papers – Special Issue “Punk Anteriors: Genealogy, Performance, Theory”

Revisions to the phenomenon of punk have been circulating since its inception. This issue seeks to capture the performance of those revisions, conducting a genealogical mapping of the punk movement, scenes, music, ethics, and aesthetics utilizing queer and feminist punk analytics. While some valuable feminist critiques of punk have surfaced – mainly to lionize the riot grrrl movement – many uneasy questions around race, nation, and sexuality remain unarticulated in feminist and gender performance scholarship. The interdisciplinary articles in this issue will address the performances and politics of these exclusions.

We are interested in the temporality and spatiality of punk performances through a collective and archival process. We use the word “anteriors” in the title of this issue to frame the articles that address these punk spaces and remnants, plotting what comes before, anterior to, the telling of punk’s narratives in two senses: first, in the temporal sense which interrogates punk’s resistant genealogy; and, second, in the material and spatial sense of place, bodies, and archives. What can be situated in front of the generic narratives of punk’s beginnings and mainstays as a form of resistance? Where do articulations of racial formation, gender, nation, and sexuality fit into generic notions of punk origins, temporalities, and classisms? Can punk epistemologies be used to critique punk’s exclusions?

Possible topics include:

• Race, imperialism, and punk
• Women of color feminism and punk
• Diaspora and punk
• Transnational movements and festivals
• Zines and feminist interventions
• Riot grrrl
• Underground sound and gender
• Punk, history, and ethnic studies
• Aesthetic, performance, and music
• Queer punk and other questions of sexuality in performance
• Disidentifications, performance, and punk outlaws
• Subjugated histories and punk feminism
• Art and new media performance
• Punk responses to theory and punk theories
• Supplemental spaces of punk

Women and Performance invites critical essays, short texts, book and performance reviews, artwork, and photo essays that examine these or other questions relevant to a critical discussion of the intersection of punk, music, race, gender, and performance. Submissions should be 10,000 words or less in length and adhere to the current Chicago Manual of Style, author-date format. Questions and abstracts for review are welcome before the final deadline. Complete essays and texts for consideration must be submitted by July 15th, 2011.

Please send all work to Fiona Ngô and Elizabeth Stinson via email (MSWord attachment):  ngo@illinois.edu and stinson@nyu.edu. Further submission guidelines may be found at: http://www.womenandperformance.org/submission.html. Women and Performance is a peer reviewed journal published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis.

How To Stage A Coup: An Interview with Helen Luu (Maximumrocknroll ??? 2000)

In a 2009 Maximumrocknroll column, Osa (Shotgun Seamstress) thoughtfully reflects on her “brown punk” predecessors, including myself and Helen Luu. In the interests of creating an archive for other “brown punks,” those of us who came before and those who come after, I want to offer this 2000 or 2001 Maximumrocknroll interview I did with Helen, who put together the compilation zine How To Stage A Coup: An Insurrection of an Underground Liberation Army. Helen eventually grew more interested in other kinds of music and subcultural scenes in which she didn’t feel like such a minority. She continued to pursue her interests in social justice as she moved away from punk, organizing around racism and immigration and facilitating anti-oppression workshops. She also works for various organizations (for youth, women and trans people, and immigrants and refugees) as a community worker. Helen now DJs as Miss Ruckus, writing a music blog with some friends and playing taiko drums in an all-Asian women collective.

HTSAC was the last zine Helen ever made.

—————————————————-

HeartAttaCk columnist and activist Helen Luu recently edited a compilation zine called How To Stage A Coup, aimed at creating a dialogue among people of color involved in subcultural pursuits (including punk rock) around race, racism and politics. Contributors like Lauren Martin (You Might As Well Live, Quantify), Lynn Hou (Cyanide), Celia Prez (I Dreamed I Was Assertive), Elizabeth Martinez (Colorlines) and Vincent Chung address a wide variety of issues from organizing and identity politics, to activist dynamics and punk rock betrayals. What does it mean to look at the photographs of Third World suffering on the covers of grindcore records? What does it mean to talk about “pride”? Where was the “color” in Seattle/WTO? What comes first – “being brown or being famous”? The contributors to this compilation ask important questions that need asking, again and again, and Helen Luu brings it all together. Interview by Mimi Nguyen.

So tell me, Helen, who the hell are you, and what do you do?

I’m a 23-year-old Vietnamese/Chinese Canadian, once-upon-a-time refugee, recent university graduate, who is on the margins of punk rock (like many other people of color who began to realize that punk is not a safe haven for them…a lot of us are either on the margins or we remove ourselves entirely). A lot of stuff in our world pisses me off and makes me sad (police brutality, the injustice system, corporate globalization, poverty, sweatshops, etc.), and so I try and do something about it by getting involved with political activism in whatever form I see fit. I think that a lot of this stuff falls under the banner of capitalism or is connected to it in some way, and so I guess I can say that a lot of the work that I do is in challenging capitalism.

You’re involved in both social justice organizing and critique. What motivates you? What discourages you? Why do you feel it’s necessary to do both?

What motivates me is the fact that there are alternatives to the fucked up system that we are living in. Lately, I have been meeting (in person, on the Internet, through letters, etc.) a lot of amazing people whom I find incredibly inspiring and this helps to empower and motivate me to keep going. There are people out there doing amazing work and I just feel a lot of hope these days that we can really change things, but it takes work, and it takes continuous critiquing and questioning and challenging, including looking at ourselves and other progressive activists. I guess that’s something that discourages me – encountering not-so-progressive things among supposedly progressive people/groups (and yes, that would include punk!) like racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, etc.. But hey, I’m not gonna let that get me down. I find that it can sometimes be easy to feel burnt out though, so finding ways to stay inspired and empowered is really important. I was sitting in one of my favorite classes in my final year of school and it suddenly dawned on me that I was really sick of that class and what it represented. I was a sociology major so a lot of the time, and we sat around and criticized society and whined about how messed up it is and that sort of thing. But that day, I looked around and thought about how I never see any of these people (including my “lefty” professor) doing anything except sit on their academic high-horses and theorize. And I thought about how far removed this all was from real people and real lives. I couldn’t wait to graduate and get the hell out of there. I’m very critical now of anyone who fails to marry theory and critique with practice. I think that critique without practice is, more often than not, just a lot of mental masturbation.

How did HTSAC come together, conceptually and practically?

I’ve been doing zines for a few years now and because of this, have also read a lot of zines and corresponded with lots of people. I started noticing that some zine kids have some really fucked-up notions about issues like racism and that zine culture, like punk rock, is mostly this sea of white – not only in terms of people but also in terms of ideas and ideology and perspectives and that sort of thing. At the same time though, I would sometimes come across amazing zines by kick-ass people of color with really great critical commentary on race. One day, into my lap fell Evolution of a Race Riot, which was this compilation zine put together over a number of years by you, and which was filled with writings and art by some amazing people of color. It was hands down the most inspiring and empowering zine I had ever read, because this was the first thing I had ever encountered that was about us, by us, and for us, on our own terms. And it was this collection of voices from all over North America who might not even have otherwise known about each other were it not for the zine. I am proud to say that HTSAC is in the spirit of Evolution of a Race Riot because our fire ain’t gonna die down! To all our misguided friends and enemies: be very very afraid. As people of color, we need to build on and continue positive projects like Evolution of a Race Riot. I felt that it was important that HTSAC be by, for, and about people of color because a lot of us want to engage in a different kind of discourse. A lot of us are really sick and tired of constantly having to play the role of “educator” to white people who just don’t get it, and who instead accuse us of “reverse discrimination,” of being “too angry,” of being “ungrateful immigrants” because they feel that their positions of white privilege and power might be threatened. So anyway, I just started putting out the word about the zine, making the call for contributions, and when I finally decided to get my shit together and stop putting it off, I started nagging people more for submissions and they just started to pour in.

How hard was it to round up contributors, seeing as how scarce people of color are in the punk scene (where I assume you did the most “recruiting”) added to the usual bumps and twists with contributor-based projects?

This is the second comp zine I’ve ever put together and from my past experiences, I already knew that it would be hard to get people to contribute stuff and that I would have to be more proactive in recruiting submissions. I found that a lot of people I approached were very positive about the zine, and I think part of the reason why is that people feel there is a need for this kind of thing, and feel a need to network and communicate with other people of color, to share experiences and find out that we share a lot of similar ones.

This is probably especially true of people involved with scenes like punk where we are few and far between. I was also lucky because in the past little while, I’ve been fortunate enough to network with and have connections to other punks of color, through zines, through internet communities, and that sort of thing so finding people involved with punk wasn’t too hard. However, because I don’t have the same kind of access to other scenes, I found it much more difficult to recruit people who participate in other subcultures, the result being that most of the stuff in the zine are from people involved with punk.

What’s your take on how race and racism have, let’s say, typically addressed within the so-called “punk community”? Do you have a standard response to the too-common assertion that punk is both “inclusive” and “outside” of dominant racial hegemony?

I am very critical of the way that race and racism are typically addressed within punk. The worst part is that punks are too often in denial of the fact that oppression is alive and well within the scene, arrogantly believing that somehow punks are morally superior to the rest of society. There is this ridiculous idea that punks, and punk as an institution, are somehow never guilty of racism (or any other ism). If punk is so damn inclusive, why the hell is it still so white-dominated? And why the hell do so many people of color I know drop out of it like flies? I think that a lot of punks also tend to mostly look at racism as an individual problem, and not as a systemic one that holds this society up the way it does. The belief is that the problem is with a few “bad apples” (which would be racist neo-nazi groups and individuals) and so there’s this notion that by getting rid of and challenging these bad apples, things will be all right and well with the world! Hence, we end up having groups like the brave and mighty (and mostly white) ARA to save and defend the people of color from the big bad racist people. (Sarcasm rules.) Another way that racism is often addressed within punk is that whole “colorblind” bullshit: “We are all of one race, the human race.” Basically, what this really means is “everything is okay as long as we all pretend that everyone is white.” It ignores the fact that the history and experiences of a white person are NOT the same as mine (even if we are of the same class) as well as denying me the right to my history and experiences. It’s a way of attempting to not really address racism, of not acknowledging that the problem is not gonna go away just because we should all forgive and forget and just be one big happy family. I think one of the biggest problems that spawn these kinds of non-solutions is the fact that too many people do not have an adequate power analysis – who has power in society and who doesn’t, and how this plays out in society and in punk rock. Because of this, we also get people who espouse that whole “race traitor” rhetoric, that the world would be a happy place if white people would only reject and shed their whiteness. Sorry to say, but it’s not that easy! Ideologically rejecting one’s whiteness does not even tip the power scale in the real world! I find that a lot of the discourse within the punk scene on race and racism tends to be pretty superficial, good intentions aside. For example, tokenism is a favorite response of white punks trying to address racism. Oh yeah, and newsflash: sporting an ARA or crossed-out swastika patch doesn’t mean you’re somehow automatically not racist!

The way race sometimes gets dealt with in the punk scene is so superficial; for instance, the common assertion that having “blue hair” is equivalent to having black skin, that both invoke discrimination. The whole “race traitor” trend seems to follow along those lines, only with a lot more rhetoric. What’s your take on what’s missing from these approaches?

I think what is missing is a real, critical analysis of power in society and who has access to that kind of power. A white punk with blue hair still has power and privilege over a person of colour (with blue hair or not) on the basis of race. Punks with blue hair can wash the blue out of their hair or whatever and the “discrimination” will stop. People of colour cannot exactly wash out the colour of their skin (although there have been attempts by some due to internalized racism, like with bleaching creams that you sometimes see on the market in some countries)! It also goes much deeper than just skin colour as well because of historical and social context and the way that race is constructed, etc. It’s the same with the faulty race traitor approach, ideologically proclaiming yourself “not white” is fine and dandy (and I think it’s also a way for white people to relieve any feelings of guilt and feel better about themselves). Don’t expect that doing so will suddenly relieve you of the white privilege and power that society grants you!

What’s been the response to your “race work” so far? Do you feel tokenized, ever?

The response has been mixed. I’ve received a lot of positive responses from other people, which has been great. With my columns in HeartAttaCk, I find that when I write about race stuff, I get a lot of positive responses from mostly people of color who just want to dialogue and say that they feel the same way. That’s been an incredible experience. It’s that whole recognition thing. However, I also get my share of reactionary and defensive responses from people too. For example, I had a white person (a friend, actually) tell me that what I felt about racism was wrong and that I was just being paranoid. He was basically telling me that I was being an “ungrateful immigrant” but in more subtle terms. I don’t want to give off the impression that I think that all white people don’t get it and all people of color do because that is totally not true. I’ve had my share of reactionary arguments from people of color so I harbor no illusions that we all know where it’s at. But I think there is still a difference when dialoguing with people of color versus. with white people, because the type of discourse that is available is different and the way that things like power, and how it plays itself out, differs as well. And with tokenism, well, many times I’ve felt like I was used as the token person of color. Like I said before, tokenism is often a favorite response of white punks – and white activists too – when the issue of race and racism comes up. It’s simplistic, superficial, and it’s an attempted easy way out of having to adequately address racism. It also works to marginalize people of color. The thing is though that even while I’ve felt that I was being tokenized, I would often still get involved with whatever it was that I was recruited for if I believed in the aims of the project or the protest or whatever. Sometimes, you can use that position to do good things like making your voice heard, or changing things from the inside, subverting things and turning it around so that race and racism are genuinely addressed, whereas it might not have been if you didn’t participate. So it’s kind of a sticky, complicated thing. Put simply, I guess you can say that tokenism = bad, but tokenized people subverting things = good.

Of course, HTSAC isn’t just about, say, representing people of color –since as we’ve recently experienced, just because you’re brown doesn’t mean you’re down– but about raising important questions about racism and hegemony, and not just within the scope of punk rock. Why was that important to you?

Representation alone is definitely not good enough. Oftentimes, mere representation does nothing to change or even challenge the status quo. It’s important to me to raise these kinds of questions about racism and hegemony because that’s a step towards toppling this thing. There needs to be real critiques and real discussions about race issues, not just superficial ones, which are what are predominantly out there. These days, there is this superficial race thing going on in North America, like how Canada prides itself for being “multicultural” and “diverse,” and how all things ethnic (food, clothing, furniture, etc.) are held in high esteem. But if we look deeper, we see that multiculturalism in Canada means look ethnic and celebrate your culture, but don’t you dare get political or criticize, and the same goes for the ethnic trend. It’s all lip service. It’s all just a big act to make us believe that racism is going away or doesn’t exist anymore, and if it does, it’s just a problem with those few bad people and not with the system (or punk!) itself. Fuck that!

This sort of sounds cheesy, but what do you get personally out of putting so much energy into projects like HTSAC?

I always wondered why I do zines because it takes up a lot of time, and can cost a fortune and you rarely – if ever – break even. But there is just something about finishing a zine that feels really good, you know, having put the whole thing together yourself and having this finished product in your hands. And then there’s the communications aspect of writing letters, engaging in dialogue, and meeting people through zines. With HTSAC, I guess there is also the satisfaction that this zine is helping to link up people of color, and helping to connect us through stories and shared experiences. And I guess it’s also like a big “fuck you, we’re not gonna take it anymore!” shouted in the general direction of the punk scene (amongst others), and saying fuck you always feels good! Aw yeah!

What are your other zine-related projects, past, present and future?

I’ve been putting out zines for a number of years now (since high school) and like a lot of other zine kids who are embarrassed by older issues of their zine, I now like to pretend that most of my older zines no longer exist. But the ones I’ll mention are Paint Me a Revolution, which was a comp zine about gender/feminism that I put together a few years ago which I’m no longer happy with anymore; and Moving Parts, which is my personal/political zine (although it takes me forever to put out an issue). As for the future, I still intend to put out issues of Moving Parts, and I also have some other plans in the works but nothing definite yet. I can’t imagine not doing zines.

Shotgun Seamstress: “A Race Riot Did Happen.”

It’s odd how “old” I am in “punk years.” Here, Osa (from Shotgun Seamstress) ponders the “bad old days” of being a person of color in punk rock in a 2009 Maximumrocknroll column. I want to respond to some of these questions at some point in the future (I still read Maximum every month! I’m not dead yet!), but for now, I’m glad I had some impact on pushing punk to be a little bit better than how I found it.

Race Riot was an anthology put together by Mimi Nguyen and How To Stage a Coup was another anthology put together by Helen Luu. Both came out in the late 90s. These two women, and the legions of punks of color that submitted to their anthologies, had been part of predominantly white punk scenes, including riot girl. They were totally pissed about their experience, and understandably so. These anthologies are straight-up rant fests calling white punks out on their ignorance and hypocrisy.

I think what made racism in predominantly white punk or activist scenes more disappointing and hurtful than the racism one might encounter anywhere else is the fact that these people who are making your life miserable claim to be anti-oppressive, feminist, anti-racist. Naively, some of us expected more from our white peers and got let down harder.

Subsequently, many of these POC punks left the scene. They were bitter and fed up with their experiences. Now this is where my mind starts manufacturing millions of questions. 1. Where exactly did these “ex-punks” end up that was an anti-racist utopia? Where do you go if you’re a person of color where you don’t have to experience racism? 2. How did these people suddenly turn un-punk? I mean, they’re all making a totally diy zine together. That’s punk, right? Some of those people continued making zines and participating in punk after that, although maybe to a lesser degree. If you found a home in punk because yr a super weird queer kid, if punk is something useful to you, if it’s the way you make art and the way you were politicized, how do you just leave? Where do you go?

…

Anyway, the only thing I can assume is that it really was that bad for the POC punks who came before me. As far as my experience goes, I can definitely say that the pros of being a black punk outweighed the cons. But ten or fifteen years ago, that wasn’t the case, and it may not be the case for many punks of color today depending on a number of factors, including what part of the country they’re in. The people who paved the way for us did so and then moved on because they couldn’t stand it anymore. So, as much I appreciate all the support that people like Tobi and Layla to give newer, younger generations of feminist punks, it would’ve blown my mind to see Mimi, Bianca or Iraya at one of our shows. It would’ve meant so much. It’s immensely disappointing that punk rock, a movement that claims to be so forward thinking and progressive has been (and to some extent, continues to be) alienating to people who do not represent a punk rock norm (which, by the way, isn’t supposed to exist!).

I wonder what the expectations were of those punks of color who left punk rock. What did they envision for punk kids of color in years to come? Even though the fact that they left the scene is pretty much a sure sign of their pessimistic cynicism, I’d still like to believe that their intention was to leave the scene better than they found it. What was the point of putting out zines like Race Riot & How to Stage a Coup, if not to try to spawn some kind of change in the punk scene? Well here we are! The change (I hope) they wished to see in the world! People of color punks, empowered by the words and deeds of those who came before us, building community with each other, and ready to fuck shit up.

With all of the new books and DVDs coming out documenting riot girl, it’s completely unacceptable that those riot girls’ brown punk sisters are left out of that history. As much as people try to document punk history, punk rock can still be so ahistorical. People leave the scene and move on, records and zines go out of print, white punks continue to ignore the contributions of punks of color… and it’s like all of it never happened. Well, a race riot did happen and I’m living proof. I know I wouldn’t be here if other punk rock feminists and POCs hadn’t carved out by force a nice comfy space for me to exist.

I guess all of this is just a long-winded way of saying, “Thank you.”

Yeah, I had a “spy thing.”

Some of the old images that used to be on worsethanqueer.com or headers for my Punk Planet column. I believe I was asked to change my header from “some spies hide their bombs in books” some time after 9/11, and prison authorities were clamping down on the content of materials sent to prisoners.

Punk Planet 38 (July/August 2000)

Sometimes I wonder how it is that I got here from a far-flung there. I used to be a different kind of girl: I growled, scratched, ducked my head when I spoke, balled fist always in air. Somewhere along the way I’ve developed some skills I didn’t have before — patience, and a loud clear voice that carries to the backs of lecture halls. I explain poststructuralist feminist theory with (I hope) flare. I’m making an effort here, translating tough girl into academia.

And then I find myself driving around the City, blasting the Blatz/Filth split cassette in my car in a continuous loop, twenty-something mid-term papers on the seat beside me, all of them outlining the trajectory of Asian American cinema to by-now monotonous effect. The “check engine” light blinks at me from behind the wheel and I’m shouting loud and off-key, my words lost out the window, in the wind: “Berkeley is my baby and I want to kill it!“

I feel volatile. I want to take a saw to my furniture and a knife to gut the mattress and shred my clothes like flags. Ransack the room, I’d like to throw all my books out the window. There’s a dumpster conveniently located below my third-story apartment. Only a removable screen between orderly shelf and big metal dustbin, why not?

Are the months of March and April known for violence? Is it a season for storms, for fierce upheavals?

How did I get here again? On the tail of a tornado, or was it a war?

::

Karina and I have been swapping tales from our respective exile communities — hers, concentrated in Miami and mine, scattered throughout California. (We are distanced from these, ideologically.) She says Elian’s relatives are crazy; the twenty-two year-old cousin is prone to hysteria and the uncle–? Driving while under the influence of alcohol. Even her mother, who is no fan of Castro, believes the boy should go home with his father. Her mother says, “Why knows what kind of people the relatives are?” We discuss the videotape, released by the relatives and which looks like a hostage video, psychological abuse, the mayor of Miami, the crowds in front of the relatives’ home, struck with ecstatic visions and ideological fervor, swearing to die for the cause.

And I remember something Karina once said to me, grinning, “I was taught in pre-school that Castro loves all the little children. When I saw the grown-ups complain, I figured it was just adults he didn. t like and no wonder, I didn’t like them either!”

I tell her I am going to a gallery opening; an American Vietnam veteran and artist has created forty lithograph portraits of Ho Chi Minh in an effort to reconsider Ho both as political icon and political revolutionary. The anticommunist Vietnamese community in San Jose and Westminster (Little Saigon) have promised to protest. I show her year-old printouts from a Vietnamese American on-line messageboard, when the controversy centered around a Little Saigon video store owner who had erected a Vietnamese flag (the red one, with the star) alongside a poster of Ho Chi Minh. The threats and the insults are vicious; they mouth slogans I first heard when protesting the Gulf War: Love it or leave it! Because of racism and poverty, I find their professed patriotism –real or strategic– for America jarring.

Karina says to me, “It’s like looking into a mirror.”

“My people,” I say wryly, “and yours should get together.”

Although we are also refugees, my parents are not inclined to the same fire; I was not raised with the bitterness of lost homelands curdling my tongue. They don’t object when I tell them where I’m going; instead, they’re merely curious, and a little worried.

My practical father suggested I park the car a few blocks away from the scene of the protest, saying, “You don’t want them to know what car you’re driving, you don’t want to have to replace your windows.” And my mother gave me the same thoughtful advice she did when I first told her I was doing clinic defense, “Wear good tennis shoes, so you can run if they come after you.”

It is dizzying, disorienting. (I find out later that there are two thousand protesters here.) Mark and I arrive in the warehouse-business district of Oakland where the gallery is located, driving past crowds and clusters of Vietnamese holding small, paper South Vietnamese and American flags and cardboard signs. We park and approach the block where, it seems, the gauntlet begins: the police have erected barricades behind which most of the protesters are arrayed. The rest wander across the road, with bullhorns, in anticipation of what–?

There is a yellow van painted with three horizontal red stripes. I think a dummy is strapped to the grill — it’s too dark to be sure– and there are hundreds of men in their old South Vietnamese military uniforms staring at the small group of gallery-goers congregating by the police car. Collectively, we all agree to make a run for it — the gallery is at the other end of the block. As soon we start half-walking, half-jogging, the cacophony surges like a wave, or a storm.

I wonder if they will recognize me as Vietnamese, and get especially vicious.

I hold my breath and plow through the crowd behind a bald white man in a leather jacket, Mark’s flash glaring in continuous bursts as young men behind the barricades call out, “Take my picture! Hey, over here!” Is it a protest or a football game?

I look into faces and look away, elderly grandmothers spitting vitriol: “Are you a VC whore?” “Kill communists!” “You belong in the toilet with Ho!” Their mouths open and shut and open, shouting epithets endlessly, the way fish breathe in water. Because it is dark, their features drift in and out of focus, lit-up ghostly and contorted. (I’m starting to panic.) Shock registers when I pass a large placard with a grim, goblin-like caricature of Ho Chi Minh labeled “GOOK HO,” and I wonder briefly if Presidential candidate John McCain taught them the racial slur; I see it repeated once or twice more on homemade signs, printed posters.

A middle-aged man –he is about fifty, or sixty even– in a yellow sweatshirt banded by three red stripes drags an effigy of Ho Chi Minh by a noose, yelling. In the other hand he carries a long, thin stick. He runs alongside our small, beleaguered group and makes eye contact with me before he begins to beat the mannequin with deliberate strokes, and I understand what he is saying: You deserve this too.

Later, my mother says she doesn’t want me to write anything about the protests, either for publication or my dissertation, but not because she necessarily disagrees with me. My mother is afraid I’ll turn up dead, murdered by the anticommunists, which was an often-enough occurrence in the 1980s.

She says to me, “Don’t write anything that will make them mad.” I say, “How can I not?”

::

I thought I’d purge, like I do every year or two. I hoard things. Newspaper clippings, flyers, whatever. I revisit former selves I no longer recognize, except this one, and sometimes I miss her because she amazes me. Once violence described my everyday and I wonder how I ever made it out, sane.

It’s true: at one point in my life I was surrounded by convicted clinic bombers, stalkers and potential assassins on a weekly basis. It was a game only not so much, calling out names and transgressions loudly, brashly, “Look, it’s Cheryl! Remember? She’s the one who was convicted of bombing a bunch of clinics in San Diego!” Matt Trewhella– founder of the anti-abortion terrorist group Missionaries to the Pre-Born– once admonished a Midwestern Christmas congregation, recommended good Christian parents buy their children SKS rifles and 500 rounds of ammo. One of the Missionaries working with Operation Rescue California is an “ex-”Nazi, Brian Kemper, the “777″ of a South African white supremacist organization tattooed on his thick arm. He punched a woman once, entering a clinic, and participated in “minutemen” attacks — bodily rushing clinics and tearing apart furniture, equipment, files, whatever, in a frenzy of righteousness and just as quickly, escaping in getaway cars idling on the sidewalks outside. He organizes Christian hardcore and ska shows in Orange County, makes appearances on Politically Incorrect, once even performed his spoken word at Lollapalooza. In some generic lifestyle magazine –Swing, I think– a recent profile on Christian punks featured him prominently and nowhere mentioned his racist past, or his many convictions for violent harassment.

It was endless. Stone-faced children chanted in their high-pitched, munchkin voices, you’re going to hell. Their parents promised this. We received death threats on our answering machine, we were warned to be careful, to stay away, we were being followed. The disembodied voices were inevitably male, masculine, disguised; they would identify themselves only as friends of the fetus and then, in a furious verbal rush, suggest we stick our heads up our pussies. (I wonder, how did it make them feel to say such forbidden things?) In Redding they etched the names of clinic workers on flat-metal bullets before dropping them on clinic doorsteps, threatening. Godly men pointed their index fingers, squinting along the length of their thumbs, and mimicked the kick-back gesture of a gun being fired.

We would come together for birthday potlucks, go out for beers after work, but the persona of activist became an embodied one, a second skin. While steaming vegetables or playing cards, we would watch the news; at the bar we discussed fundraising. It became woven into the daily fabric of our coming and going. (It was as natural to me as the impatient gesture I brush my hair back with or the way I sometimes cover my mouth when I talk, filtering my words between my fingers.) And when it got to be too much we asked ourselves, quietly, “How much more? Is there a limit to our ability to endure?”

And once, in a strange airport, I picked up a TIME magazine, bored, and faltered upon an investigative account on the anti-abortion movement. It was no different than any other piece of mainstream coverage, full of shoddy background checks and partial histories, but there, in that airport lounge, I became anxious. Wretched, alone, suddenly burdened with a terrible, secret knowledge. I knew who was capable of killing, or capable of convincing others to kill, but who could I tell? Who would understand me? It was an alien language, it would seem as if I were speaking in tongue, hysterical. I looked up at the passive faces standing in line behind me to buy their cheap romance novels and Wall Street Journals and was amazed that this panic of mine could pass among them so quietly. I was so used to other bodies. I felt like crying.

::

I am always restless these days, not sure what I’m looking for. I prowl the apartment until Melanie calls, invites me over for dinner.

She puts me to work chopping apples and roasted red bell peppers while she sends Sean forth in search of oil-soaked olives, which he finds hidden on a store shelf, covered in a thin layer of dust. It is a full house tonight; Lance, Tom, and Jeff wander in and out while Arwen fills out survey forms for a nicotine addiction clinic, a fat packet of multiple-choice questions and scan-tron evaluations of her moods. (“Do you feel like you need a cigarette right now? What cigarette will be hardest for you to give up? The one you have in the morning? After meals? During stressful situations? Do you feel as if your friends and family are supportive?”) Melanie buzzes around the kitchen, cooking pasta in three inadequate pots and despairing of the household’s one metal fork. (We are so punk.) Multiple conversations shifted around the room –about zines, about advertising, about punk rock, about politics– and we dish gossip and theories about record collectors and creeps along with the food.

We eat with plastic utensils culled from neighborhood restaurants, which are carefully washed afterward, and play a speed-game of Trivial Pursuit. We are ashamed of Sean when he misses the Anne Frank question, and awed by Arwen’s supernatural ability to draw every possible question about fish and sea creatures. We decide to cheat on Sports & Leisure since no one could really expect a bunch of punks, geeks and art students to know who was MVP of the NBA in 1984.

“Who knows that stuff?” We grumble. “Let’s make it a wild card category.”

Later, squatting against the wall in the BART station, I read Tourism and Sustainability: New Tourism in the Third World, pop candy hearts in my mouth and wait for the 10:55 train. Two police officers are standing only a few feet away; they discuss my hair –bleached and dyed pink in stripes– as if I can’t hear.

As I top the stairs coming out of the station I notice a hand-scrawled sign hanging in the attendant’s glass booth: “NO VALIDATION TODAY.” Feeling whimsical, I picture the booth as a one-stop therapy shop on days when validation might normally be offered. The neatly outfitted attendant listening patiently through the speaker, reaching out to touch the glass with a kind murmur, “I hear and understand your pain, and want you to know that your feelings are completely valid. You should do whatever you have to, in order to fulfill your needs. The Fremont train arrives in five.”

Later still, walking the three blocks home through quiet residential streets, I pass a darkened house. A front porch window is lined with gold tin foil and a giant red crepe-paper heart hangs suspended among white Christmas lights. I stand transfixed on the sidewalk across the street: it seems as if the house, all black and angular against the night sky, has been cut open to reveal its warm, carnival interior, the bright gay heart of a home.

::

The knots in my shoulders turned to stone, I need something drastic to force me past this crisis, this lack of output. Turn over new leaves, throw open doors to china shops, take the pins out from the doll. I’m in a rut, bored, restless. Too much substance and not enough style, maybe. Where did my glitter go? No, never mind, give me my old black jeans, shiny with dirt and grease and ass-patched, I want to tie a black ribbon around my hair and commit small vandalisms, like I used to.

I want to clip photographs of technicolor foods, things like cling peaches and blood-red meatloaf, garish groceries found in the old LIFE magazines I’ve been buying at flea markets and estate stores. (My hands turn black from the dust and dirt.) I will make flashcards and caption each with non-sequiteur slogans from long-dead revolutionaries, like, “No more tyrants!” or maybe, “Rent is theft!” I want to discover the secrets of gelatin molds and that old adage, “If you can bake a cake, you can make a bomb.”

I find that I can’t write anymore; after pounding out ten pages of lecture notes a week, I feel like my quota’s been wasted on reiterating what I already know. (How many different ways can I outline Derrida and differance? How do I explain Lacan, the mirror-stage, and the formation of the fragmented ego to bored, boring seniors?) It’s not that I don’t care about these things anymore, but I feel there must be a better way to teach critical theory to eighteen year-olds. Subliminally, maybe — I could broadcast lectures along the emptied streets at three a.m., pitched at a register where I might trespass their dreams, scrawl Foucault or Spivak like graffiti, all intimate-like.

And maybe all I want to do is this: discover the secrets to spontaneous combustion, catch up on my conspiracy theories and listen to Dutch punk rock with my eyes closed, dreaming.

Punk Planet 37 (May/June 2000)

I have to recruit Floyd to carry the projector the three long blocks between my car and Mission Records, tearing him away from the game on the television above the bar. (I have about three muscles and the sum of these is not enough for the task at hand.) Sean had called from work to ask me to come by the Maximumrocknroll compound and pick up the equipment for the screening; and as Floyd cheerfully hoists the projector out of the trunk, I’m wondering how the kids will take to the punk rock pedagogy to come.

But the Mission Records screening is a rare occasion. For once, for the first time in a long while, I feel comfortable with my punk rock surroundings. A dark, somewhat dank back room, furnished with ratty couches and much-scrawled walls? Perfect. With the store space quickly filling up for the show, Martin arrives and we weigh the options: VCR or projector? Shower curtain or–? The boy behind the counter is helpful and solicitous; he rummages in the back room and excavates from a seeming junk heap a working screen, jury-rigs the sound with a series of cords and power strips. The room fills with punk and indie kids settling on flat cushions and concrete floors in this, a communal living room, in front of the blank white screen.

Mas Alla de Los Gritos / Beyond the Screams is a half-hour video documentary about Chicano/Latino participation in U.S. punk and hardcore, a statement which hardly begins to encapsulate the project begun here. Bracketed by the early East L.A. punk scene (featuring too-short interviews with Alice Armendariz from The Bags and Teresa Covarrubias from The Brat) and ’90s U.S. hardcore, Martin Sorrondeguy traces the historical trajectory of Chicano/Latino punk rock and more, its always-emergent body politic, with brilliant skill.

In voice-over (as boys in a pit mosh in slow motion), Martin outlines the premise of Mas Alla: “The Latino punk scene in the early ’90s really exploded because all of a sudden we had a hell of a lot to sing about. What started happening politically in the U.S. pissed us off so much, and we were feeling targeted and we were feeling cornered as a community that we began writing songs about it.”

As such, Mas Alla is incredibly moving and effective, and on a number of levels immediate and far-reaching. Well-edited interviews, stills and show footage make for a dense but riveting thirty-minute record of Chicano/Latino participation in punk rock, indexed here as a culturally vital and politicized counterpublic, a kind of punk rock “teaching machine.” Members from Subsistencia, Kontra Attaque, Bread and Circuits, Los Crudos and Huasipungo discuss the political nature of their everyday lives and art, the implications of singing in Spanish and dialoguing at shows, and the mechanisms of both survival and insurgency. Newsreel clips of border patrol and police brutality are made that much more harrowing by Revolucion X’s snarl-delivered cynicism, the words scrolling across a funereal black screen: “Killing Mexicans is too much fun!” Latin American dictatorships, NAFTA, a slew of anti-immigrant measures fuel the gut-level rage and critical impetus; corresponding resistance movements inform this unabashedly leftist analysis of punk as passionate politics. With all the revisionist timelines of punk rock being published, this is an important recovery and contextualization of otherwise hidden histories and unacknowledged influences. The result is a collective self-portrait of art as activism with transnational ramifications and impressive vision.

But while Mas Alla posits punk rock as a potentially transcendent subculture from which radical politics easily find root and emerge, I’m not so sure. No, check that: I’m positive. Punk rock is not, after all, a “neutral” space and rebellion not a “neutral” quality; it is weighted with ideological underpinnings, cumulative histories and certain modes of operation and valuation, all of which bear close interrogation. The political connections made in the video, I think, have less to do with an inherent punk rock sensibility and more to do with the articulate, impassioned individuals making those connections. That is, and it has to be asked: what is it about punk rock that requires an intervention like Mas Alla in the first place?

Or as Michelle Christine Gonzales wryly notes in Mas Alla: “People in the punk scene are notorious for saying ‘racism sucks,’ but when it comes down to having friends of color, it’s cool until they open their big mouths. There are desirable people of color and there are undesirable people of color, and if you’re too brown or too down, then you’re going to piss somebody off or make somebody uncomfortable.”

And so is it too much to ask for, punk kids respectfully engaging an important intervention like Mas Alla is –? The Mission Records screening feels good; afterward, there is some discussion, much praise, and an update on dangerous youth crime bills, the struggle to establish a local queer youth shelter, and future benefit shows and rallies. It feels like how I wish punk rock would, all the time. But the night before at the Gilman screening, the band following the video began tuning as the last of the credits were rolling across Arwen’s shower curtain, nailed to the wall, leaving no room for discussion. Did you get that? Too anxious to rock out, white boys climbed on stage and curtailed the possibility of dialogue with their noisy feedback and chord progressions. Had they been waiting for the end sequence, impatient and bored? How many others, too, arms crossed and unmoved? Smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk outside, Bianca and Chandra tell me they heard muttering, a few snickers, and make bitter comments about white people.

To be truthful, it might be too late to save me. Or more, too late to save punk rock for me.

I still have what I consider to be punk-rock reflex. I take unambiguous pleasure in xerox machines, raucous vocals, house shows and more; I can’t begin to explain the why or how of it. It baffles and amazes friends and sometimes even me, in my more critical moments. So at the same time punk rock is not a home, nor is it a space from which I might take a stand.

That is, my identification is precarious, partial and proceeds at pace with my simultaneous deprogramming. (It’s true, I talk myself out of it all the time.) I’m always one step away from walking out, like I did before. Once, when a straight, white punk boy wrote a song about wanting to rape me or now, thinking about this. And it is not a coincidence but a small part of a far-flung pattern that on the zinesters list-serv, a white girl with a zine and a mail order wants to know what’s wrong with “white pride,” and argues black nationalism is “just like Hitler.” Worse, others agree and want to know, too, why people of color are always making whites “feel bad.” (These missives invade the safety of my living room by way of my computer, and I can only feel as if I have been broken into.) And why would I want to be in a space in which such “opinions” are so blithely engaged, as if I didn’t get enough of it everywhere else in the world that I need to argue too, in this more intimate space I once held so much closer?

Thumbing through my cache of punk rock propaganda reminds me why I became an expatriate in the first place, why I continue to hold it at arm’s length. Nor is this simply a comment on race, as if I could even imagine race as a discrete category apart from others, like cans in a cupboard (my usual analogy). There is an unmistakable continuum I could trace, like a spiderweb or a breadcrumb trail, winding (or blanketing, maybe) across the landscape of punk rock cultural and political production. “Disco is for blacks and homosexuals,” a 1979 fanzine sneers; maybe it’s no accident that it was called Final Solution. “The United Negro College Fund is a sublime absurdity,” lambasts a Hitlist magazine columnist in this new year, and I remember that the same writer once argued feminists were too. There are the presumptuous disavowals of both racism (“punk is anti-racist”) and race (“there is no race but the human race”), familiar reformulations repeated when gender or class or sexuality or borders are invoked. And once swastikas were worn as accessories, could the iconic manipulation of Third World suffering for record sleeves and gatefolds be far behind? (In this sense, punk rock follows in the tradition of the white European avant-garde and its foundational myth of originality and refusal of accountability, but that’s a whole other story.) Indie rock girls ask why gays and lesbians want “special rights,” punk boys rape or beat girlfriends and acquaintances, and in between there are the innumerable insults, the slips of tongues, and the violent gestures.

And it need not be an extreme example. Recently I interviewed Iraya Robles and Gary Fembot from the defunct queer-pop quartet Sta-Prest, nesting in my living room to dialogue about punk, performance, pop and politics; they arrive armed with a pair of leather pants (for me) and a tape recorder (Mark took his on tour). The Sta-Prest cadre has always been particularly astute when deconstructing liberal cultural politics, and Iraya makes with the stinging one-liners, her special skill. A queer Filipina mestiza with political consciousness tucked into her jumpsuit pockets, she makes a deprecating gesture and quips, “Beck ‘discovered’ mutations only a few years ago, I’ve been a mutation all my life.” (I nod and giggle wickedly.) Gary describes doing the “white on white,” the name they’ve given to a tactic of white accountability and consciousness-raising. I ask for a scenario and he gives me the simultaneously incredulous and frustrated stare that is so Gary and says, with force, “It’s not okay for a white boy to pretend to channel a black slave picking okra in a field.”

I tally the evidence like calculus; it gets to be too much to ignore, overwhelming. It takes something like Mas Alla to pull me out of the muck, even if just for a little while, long enough to catch my breath before wading back into the fray. And I do have punk rock allies and I respect and appreciate enormously all their efforts to turn the tide, to argue for a more radically democratic subcultural space than what we’ve got now. Still, many have left punk rock somewhere in the dust and detritus, Iraya and Gary included, and who can blame them? For their political and personal integrity, I am infinitely grateful. (Thank you.)

Punk rock proves to be as contentious a cultural, political and social sphere as any other, including a national one. As such, punk rock is not an exception to the rule, to the so-called “mainstream,” and neither are punk rockers. This (and I gesture widely) is yet another pop-culture battlefield on which struggles for power and meaning are fought, hardly an “alternative” but a subsidiary or more, a parallel public.

And neither do I feel community here: I used to believe but I don’t any longer. After all, “community” is a double-edged sword, a formation dependent on a clear-cut perimeter, borders that can be defended and enforced. In a sense, a community operates with qualifications for inclusion and more, criteria for exclusion; so my relationship with punk rock is not like yours: we are not all “punk” the same and some punks are more equal than others.

Revisiting Bikini Kill zine, some things feel far too familiar: “And see, I have come to the conclusion that we are banging our heads against a big wall. We are trying to find that magic word that will change their minds, make them see. We are trying to fit through the doors of a clubhouse that is smelly and gross inside anyways. We only want in cuz we’ve been taught to want it. We change ourselves to fit, alter what we say, how we say it, just hoping, hoping they will change their rules.”

(And the rules have not changed, last time I checked the book.)

It’s not just a matter of demographics; or as Sta-Prest might have it, “Let’s be friendly with our friends / I hardly know anyone who reflects / the population in my head.” It’s not that simple. Discourses focused on exclusion often push for “inclusion” as a solution, but meanwhile recruitment or “discovery” (“Look, there’s a person of color!”) is hardly an adequate response. Or as South Asian feminist theorist Chandra Mohanty argues, “The central issue is not one of merely acknowledging difference,” but how and which differences are recognized and engaged.

Does my presence necessarily or automatically critique punk rock hegemony? Did the presence of women in punk rock mean that riot grrrl did not fundamentally tear at the social fabric of unquestioned masculinity and privilege in punk? Does the fact of Latino or Asian American or black or queer participation within the span of punk rock history negate the mountainous evidence of racisms and homophobia? (Answer to all of the above: NO.) Without downplaying the complex acrobatics of identifying, what are the terms and logic of inclusion? What do I have to look like, act like, speak like, in order that I might become one of the gang? Or consider: do you read my presence as a reaffirmation (to your relief) of your punk rock (and Americanist) bootstrap ideology of exceptionalism and self-made individuals? “Oh, she’s different than the others.” (That’s not my idea of a compliment.)

Iraya and I have gone over this before, a million times and even across thousands of miles. And while I continue to believe that the ways we took punk rock and translated it through our experiences and politics as colored queer girls had legitimacy, resonance, and meaning, our identification with punk rock was (is) an incomplete circuit. There is still the contradiction and the loss we experienced in translation, and what could make up for that?

So honestly, I’m tired of “discovering” myself in punk rock, over and over. It gets me nowhere. There is a difference between affirming an identity within punk rock parameters (“I’m a queer Asian girl and punk rock! You can do it too!”) and thinking critically about the allowances and limitations of one’s mobility through the world, and I’d rather the latter. The first gets too slippery, too unwieldy when uncomplicated, and the second allows me to wonder about power and hegemony and social and psychic space. Does it matter that I might be rare or does it matter more that I want to destroy punk rock?

There is something to the riot grrrl formula that still appeals, that needs reproducing, again and again. That is, if punk rock is not a “safe space” for me, why should it be for you?

Punk Planet 36 (March/April 2000)

Browsing through cardboard boxes, I bought a library discard called Customs and Culture of Vietnam by Ann Caddell Crawford, published some time in the early 1960s, a sort-of guidebook. (I always buy this stuff, old LIFE magazines with “exposes” on Viet Nam and garishly colored desserts, Third World travelogues with “tips” for dealing with “the locals.”)

Apparently “comprehensive and authoritative,” the book is typically full of pastoral descriptions and shoddy pseudo-anthropological observations, snippets like, “The first things that newcomers usually notice in Vietnam are the smiling faces of countless children, and the lovely fragile-looking women in their flowing dresses reminiscent of butterflies. The people are a gentle type who are shy, yet can be outgoing with foreigners, especially Americans.” The Vietnamese are thus described as docile and submissive, never mind the lengthy history of native Vietnamese struggles to oust the Chinese, French, and Americans from the region, of course. (I roll my eyes.)

I flip to another chapter, the section on “costume,” in which Crawford writes at length,

The women of Vietnam have, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful national costumes in the world. It is called the ‘ao-dai’. The over-dress is form-fitting to the waist, with long tight dresses. At the waist, two panels extend front and back to cover the long satin trousers underneath. Correct fit dictates that the pants reach the sole of the foot, and are always slightly longer than the dress panels. Occasionally lace is sewn around the bottom of each leg. Tradition has kept the color of the pants of the ao-dai to black or white.

When a woman sits down, she takes the back panel, pulls it up and around into her lap. When riding a bicycle, they often tie the back panel down to the back fender to keep it from getting tangled in the wheels. Often, girls can be seen riding along the streets of Saigon on motor bikes with the back of their ao-dai flying loose, causing foreigners to comment that they look like butterflies, and beautiful ones at that.

Many Americans have become so fond of the dress that they have some specially made to send home to their families. They make excellent hostess gowns.

It bears mentioning again (or more explicitly) that this book was written at the height of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia and that the author’s husband was a U.S. Army officer assigned to the Military Assistance Command in Viet Nam. The appendices include “Useful Phrases in Vietnamese,” some of which are too obvious: “Show me some identification,” “The wound is infected,” and “They are surrounded.” These are, after all, the material and historical conditions that made it possible for suburban American housewives to sport the next new “exotic” look at their dinner parties, “reminiscent of butterflies” while serving casseroles and blood-red meatloaf.

Fashion has politics and (sometimes-bloody) histories, you know.

::

I lent my computer to Karina to finish a paper on the “mammy” figure as she’s produced and circulated as a tourist commodity in Cuba, making her return as a nostalgic and immensely popular “kitsch” artifact of Cuba’s sugar plantation past. Karina showed me pictures she took in Cuba of “mammy” figurines and cloth dolls dressed in colorful fabrics and overtly over-endowed –occupying gift shop shelves next to porcelain white baseball players. practically the only black bodies you’ll ever see (officially) in the tourist sections of Havana. (And never mind that most Cuban baseball players are black or mulatto.)

The corollary to the “mammy” is of course the “Jezebel,” who also makes an appearance as a painted statuette — enormous bosom and buttocks, black as coal with thick red lips, in the picture Karina shows me she is a money bank. You put your pennies between her breasts or booty and watch them disappear. (It is an overt reference to the illicit sex industry that operates for the benefit of the mostly white European tourists to Cuba.) In Cuba the “mammy” even has a name — Inez, I think– and her own long history there. In the photographs Karina took it seems that “Inez” is everywhere, and I wonder what the meaning of her popularity (and her commodity production and consumption) is.

It’s an odd, wrenching collision between history, amnesia and transnational capitalism — how do you look at a rag doll, made over in a gendered caricature constructed out of slavery, sitting on a shelf in a tourist shop and not be struck by its totemic rememory of ships, sugar, and servitude?

::

I spend yesterday afternoon in a cramped doctor’s office in Oakland’s Chinatown, straining to hear the words coming from the television, not being able to read cartoon lips. Mark and I wait over an hour before he is called, reading National Geographics and sitting on slated wooden chairs. After a while the elderly Asian couples sitting with us no longer stare, having returned to each their own tasks (nagging, arguing, reading newspapers). One old man grabs a copy of W magazine to lay across his lap. I watch as the cover girl directs her glossy pout at him invitingly, staring unblinking through thick eyelashes. (Her hair is artfully tousled.) From out of his pocket he produces a pair of nail-clippers, and begins trimming his nails over her bared white cleavage.

Mark shows me a full-color photograph from a National Geographic of convicts (all black) with bags slung over shoulders in contemporary Louisiana, on work-detail in what looks to be a field, or farm. “They’re picking cotton,” he says grimly. We can’t help but think backwards, recalling plantations and also-imprisoned black bodies bent over white bushes.

Is history ever just “past,” really over? Recognizing the specific social circumstances, the ideological development and material differences hardly breaks the thread — just splits it, like a net cast wide.

I can’t think in anything more than fragments lately. I’m unfocused and in disarray; I sit down to try to bang out one of the academic abstracts and essays I’ve got due in a week, two weeks, but nothing comes to me but these small punctures in my daily routine. For instance: a friend e-mails me a call for papers for a panel on women and trauma, and I come up with lists like this one.

And how many incidents like this do we encounter everyday? Do you even notice anymore, what sociologist Avery Gordon calls the “phantoms of modernity’s violence”? (They are everywhere if you allow yourself to notice.) Did you think that the legacy of slavery was all but disappeared? Of war, human bondage, invasion or assault? There are at least a hundred cases on the books of Cambodian refugee women who have been struck blind out of thin air; health experts, finding no physical explanation, can only conclude that the blinded women are experiencing a psychosomatic reaction to the atrocities they witnessed under the Khmer Rouge. POW/MIA advocates continue to look for the phantom bodies of wronged patriots in Southeast Asia even while thousands of veterans are homeless “at home” in the United States, sleeping under freeway overpasses and in doorway stoops. States build memorials to some genocides and not others; grandmothers reveal tattooed numbers beneath polyester blouses; a woman pulls her coat tighter and walks a little faster, keys clutched in hand, passing a particular alley in downtown Seattle; tango fever sweeps the nation while the U.S. role in Argentinean dictatorships and mass “disappearances” is swept under rugs; “Indian” mascots are claimed as common American heritage even as Native protesters are spit upon outside the gates.

We are so haunted; we are so used to it.

And a black girlfriend of mine offers a bag to an older white male bookstore customer, par for course in retail cashiering. He says in response, “No, but I could use a couple of Nubian slaves to carry these books out to the car.”

Overwhelmed, still I’m a packrat: I catalogue every small instance, every stumbling bump I can. I try very hard to let every one of these ghosts inhabit my memory for at least a little while, if only to remember where they came from and that they still exist, as injustice also does.

::

Note to letter writers, et al. — There is an enormous difference between critiquing a social and structural logic that abstractly privileges some bodies over other (such as, say, heteronormativity or, in the shorthand notation, “straightwhiteboy” hegemony) and making sweeping generalizations about the “character” of all individuals perceived as belonging to an identity category or group (“lesbian feminists are mean”).

Note to “what about unity?” inquirers, et al. — What kind of unity is bought at the price of forced silence, policing, and exclusions? (It’s so old school anyway.) Whose “common good” is served when we don’t examine the politics of our rhetoric or our strategies? It’s not a nuisance we can put off until that mythic “after the revolution,” but a task that has to be constantly offered as a challenge to how we imagine we might “do” politics. Can we really avoid that kind of critical self-reflexivity by claiming to be “caught up” in the moment, that the times are too urgent to allow for an accounting of how we couch and conduct our actions? The race and class-based movements of the Left too often continue to insist that “we” need to close ranks against an imagined “outside” — and all of a sudden I’m “outside” because I don’t want to coalition with overtly homophobic nationalists or romance the ghosts of ’70s radicalism. A student in my women’s studies class wants to know if I think if women ran the world, there would be no more war. Mentioning Margaret Thatcher, Janet Reno, and Madeleine Albright, I point out that women can and do violence to other women in the context of uneven race, class and international relations. I’m not going to make another list here, but can we afford not to subject our politics to scrutiny? It’s hardly too much to ask that we articulate our goals under pressure from each other in order to ensure that we democratize our politics.

Punk Rock/Riot Grrrl Plenary

Below is a photograph from the 12th Annual Women’s History Month Conference at Sarah Lawrence, called “The Message Is In The Music: Hip Hop Feminism, Riot Grrrl, Latina Music, and More,” March 6, 2010. On the left is my colleague Fiona I.B. Ngo, who presented on her fascinating preliminary work pursuing a critical geography of punk in post-war Los Angeles. That’s me on the right, apparently measuring how big my punk rock is. (Click the link for some thoughts on my own presentation on “Aesthetics, Access, Intimacy, or Race, Riot Grrrl, Bad Feelings.”)