I’ve gotten some questions about what’s going to happen with this blog now that tumblr has changed its terms of service. Chances are that this blog (and potentially all the blogs connected to this account - I’m not sure how tumblr will approach this) will be deleted. I don’t plan to adjust my content in order to comply with the new rules. The rules supposedly allow “nudity found in art, such as sculptures and illustrations,” but I don’t trust tumblr to be able to make any sort of legitimate distinction between what is and is not art. That question in and of itself is one that can’t really be resolved, and especially not when misogyny and homophobia are involved. If you’re interested in previous attempts to draw lines between what is and is not art, there are a few notable examples, including Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s 1964 statement regarding the film The Lovers:
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
and Jesse Helms’s attempts to bar the National Endowment for the Arts from using government money to
promote, disseminate or produce obscene or indecent materials, including but not limited to depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts, or material which denigrates the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or nonreligion.
Debates over what is and is not obscene are also highlighted in This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which documents how sex scenes are evaluated differently by the MPAA when they involve gay content, and The Celluloid Closet, a foundational film (and book) on the representation of gayness in film. Other resources include Richard Meyer’s Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art; Gregory D. Black’s Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies; and Jaye Zimet’s Strange Sisters: the Art of Lesbian Pulp Fiction, 1949-1969 (and so many others).
This blog and this website are incompatible for many reasons, not least of which is that I have no fucking clue how to define a “female presenting nipple” and I suspect tumblr doesn’t either. Even if there was some logic behind visually (or theoretically) determining the difference between a male nipple and a female nipple, the policy itself is explicitly misogynist and transphobic, and I no longer have any interest in hosting my blog here. I’m not sure if I’ll be moving to another site, building my own site, or leaving the project behind. I’m going to do my best to archive the materials here and make them available, but otherwise I’m unsure. One option I’ve considered is refocusing my attentions toward creating a more robust “lesbian art” category on wikipedia.
I started this project as a way to have content for my research readily available to me. There are a significant number of resources for the study of lesbian art, but I found this format to be potentially more comprehensive and useful to me personally. I’m sad to see it go, but I’m also a little excited about being pushed out of this forum, which has exposed me and others to so much homophobia and misogyny, and toward something new. If the blog is deleted before I can make more plans, you can find updates here: twitter.com/lesbianart.
On the heels of this, just days before the opening of the exhibition, the curator called me to say that the museum had made the decision not to respond to my letter, and moreover not to permit the exhibition of my letter. If I made the edits they requested to the video, they would permit its exhibition, framed by a text to be written by them. I do not know what they had in mind for this text, but Dr. Fürstenow-Khositashvili, the curator and only present proponent of my work, was also to have been excluded from the writing of this proposed text. I was outraged, and so withdrew from the exhibition, a decision I communicated to them by email, with, again, no response.
Although Papers, Please’s political honesty and concern about racism are null, as if the game didn’t instrumentalize it to push its particular agenda forward in the first place, this title focuses on a basic notion of systemic injustice: totalitarianism. It would’ve been, at that point, fairly excusable to depict totalitarianism as impartial, universal and what not. But that was just not the case. For some reason, and I’m guessing it’s the way western fictions tend to portray communism, the graphics are oddly specific, presenting Soviet imagery as the core of the visual style.
But as pleased as I am to finally witness a mild risk taken in this game, any trace of communism here stands out as anecdotal. In fact, the game as a whole, as you may have already guessed, is thoroughly embroiled in the roots of late capitalism.
We must conclude that revolutionaries, for all their visionary ideals, have not tended to be particularly imaginative, especially when it comes to linking past, present, and future. Everyone keeps telling the same story. It’s probably no coincidence that today, the most vital and creative revolutionary movements at the dawn of this new millennium – the Zapatistas of Chiapas, and Kurds of Rojava being only the most obvious examples – are those that simultaneously root themselves in a deep traditional past. Instead of imagining some primordial utopia, they can draw on a more mixed and complicated narrative. Indeed, there seems to be a growing recognition, in revolutionary circles, that freedom, tradition, and the imagination have always, and will always be entangled, in ways we do not completely understand. It’s about time the rest of us catch up, and start to consider what a non-Biblical version of human history might be like.
Graham lent his imprimatur to this recommendation. Thus the preacher was advocating a policy to the US Commander in Chief that on Nixon’s own estimate would have killed a million people. The German high commissioner in occupied Holland, Seyss-Inquart, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg for breaching dikes in Holland in World War Two. (His execution did not deter the USAF from destroying the Toksan dam in North Korea, in 1953, thus deliberately wrecking the system that irrigated 75 per cent of North Korea’s rice farms.)
Nostalgic distortions aside, it is undeniable that the events of the 1960s liberalized sexual and cultural norms. The rates of premarital sex, use of contraceptives and divorce rose sharply as the average boomer reached adulthood. In a general sense, this was a movement against taboos, and its exponents were and are incredibly wary of creating new ones. The goal is to “rebel,” after all, not to build a better world. We see this reluctance to condemn any non-illegal sexual misbehavior in so many boomer writings about #MeToo. New York’s Andrew Sullivan, age 54, noted the “censorious Victorianism” of the movement and shed tears for disgraced boomers, like the journalist Mark Halperin, who rubbed his boner against subordinates, and former Sen. Al Franken, who enjoyed grabbing womens’ breasts without permission. Katie Roiphe, a boomer in a late-Gen-Xer’s body, warned in Harper’s that #MeToo and the infamous “shitty men in media” list could lead to a “totalitarian state,” despite no evidence of innocent mens’ lives being ruined by false accusations.