Gender Across Borders

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Dear WordPress.com and Google Ads,

It has come to my attention that GAB readers have alerted us to the advertisements for mail-order brides showing up on this site. I saw this when I traveled to Nigeria for work and was appalled. One reader in particular, who I will call “SW,” sent us this email:

As you have made it very clear, Gender Across Borders does not have control over those ads. In fact, WordPress.com, these are your ads. You are the people making money off of these sick advertisements.  While we understand that you need to make money, too, and we appreciate your free service, Gender Across Borders does have any sort of revenue to pay a fee to upgrade to the “No-Ads” feature of WordPress.com*. Read the rest of this entry →

M.I.A. performing at Out Side Lands Music & Arts Festival. August 30, 2009. Image courtesy of Maria Guzman.

A week prior to its July 13th release, M.I.A.’s new album, /\/\/\Y/\ (or Maya), was made available streaming on the artist’s MySpace page. The agitprop-meets-cyberpunk video for “Born Free” is the most inspiring thing I’ve seen all year (a clear indication that M.I.A.’s message is as much visual as it is aural), and my guess was that her latest effort would be the most overtly conceptual album that M.I.A. has recorded.

The first track, “The Message,” begins with the sound of keyboard strokes that reminded me of early alternative rock heroes R.E.M. and experimental musician John Cage. It creates a rhythmic paranoid beat laid over a mechanical nursery rhyme. A male voice suggests that the body is no longer private property, and spells it out for the “connected” listener: “Headbone connects to the headphone/Headphones connect to the iPhone/iPhone connected to the internet/Connected to the Google/Connected to the government.”

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Harald Fassanelli’s defensive biting was not the only controversial incident at last week’s Christopher Street Day in Berlin. Notable gender theorist and philosopher, Judith Butler, also attended — she was to be honored with the event’s Civil Courage Prize. Butler instead rejected the award, citing her opposition to racism in Berlin’s LGBT community:

We all have noticed that gay, bisexual, lesbian, trans and queer people can be instrumentalized by those who want to wage wars, i.e. cultural wars against migrants by means of forced islamophobia and military wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. In these times and by these means, we are recruited for nationalism and militarism. Currently, many European governments claim that our gay, lesbian, queer rights must be protected and we are made to believe that the new hatred of immigrants is necessary to protect us. Therefore we must say no to such a deal. To be able to say no under these circumstances is what I call courage. But who says no? And who experiences this racism? Who are the queers who really fight against such politics?

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While recent events in Arizona have raised the profile of discussions about immigration in the U.S., other Western nations have their own problematic policies and implementations thereof. The UK is a prime example. Even while small steps to improve the situation are taken, such as ending the practice of detaining children in centres such as Yarl’s Wood and Oakington, many and plicies laws continue to make life difficult for immigrants. For the past few months, I’ve been complaining to pretty much everyone who knows me about the amount of paperwork I have to go through to get married to a UK citizen over here, but that’s just a bourgeoipeeve because in the end I know that I will be able to get through the process and stay with the person I love. And even if for some reason I couldn’t, I wouldn’t be killed.

Kiana Firouz may be killed because the Home Office has denied her application for asylum.

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Hi GAB readers! I’m very excited to announce our first giveaway!

Try to Remember is the debut novel from award-winning poet and expert in US immigration and asylum law Iris Gomez. The novel tells the story of Gabriela, a Latina daughter who attempts to sustain her family as her father battles with mental illness after immigrating to the United States. In light of the recent anti-immigrant law in Arizona, and the feminist community’s response to it, the timing of this giveaway could not be more appropriate.

This is not only your chance to win a free book, but your chance to give us some feedback on the site! In order to enter yourself for the giveaway, please leave a comment below with your thoughts on GAB: what you like, what you would like to see more of, etc.

To enter yourself more than once, mention us in a tweet with your comments (@GABblog) or leave a comment on our Facebook wall.

We will pick two winners randomly on Friday morning at 10 am CST.

Update: our winners have been picked in this post. Because the giveaway is over, we have closed the comments for this post. We plan to do more giveaways in the future.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE9rUHDXRFI&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]

“Born Free” was released on April 23^rd to promote M.I.A.’s latest album, which will be released on June 29, 2010.  Recently, the L.A. Times reported that the video had been banned by YouTube.  Although this was untrue, the production did incite strong reactions-so strong, that YouTube ultimately obscured the video in order to appease angry YouTubers and the general public.  In response to the potential censorship, M.I.A. tweeted about it and added a direct link to the video on her official website.

The video begins with military sounds and imagery-sirens lazily blare as the sleepy-eyed Los Angeles S.W.A.A.T. team sits in anticipation of their next mission.  Bursting out of the van, they proceed to terrorize the unsuspecting tenants. Using their batons and pointing guns at bewildered tenants, they search rooms until they find their intended target-a young man wearing a tracksuit.

What follows is the disturbing part.  A bus full of redheaded young males are taken to a deserted area and ordered to run.  Upon refusing, a young boy is shot to instill fear, and they take off into the desert.  It doesn’t look good for them-there are landmines surrounding them and the S.W.A.A.T. team follows them in a black van.  With the music reaching a crescendo, a young man is blown apart as he inadvertently runs onto a landmine.  The rest of the redheads are beaten, and these are the images that the video ends with.  For most of us that have viewed the video by Romain Gavras, the violence is not anything new.  The most striking aspect of this is a genetically-determined feature-red hair. The mystifying cast of detainees has sparked the most reactions from viewers who just want to know, “Why?” “Born Free” is offensive and hard to watch. Fine. It’s meant to stir up feelings.

The discomfort can be understood as a culture shock of sorts, culled from the “antiracist and antisexist cultural tactics in ’70s activist art,” which A.S. Van Dorsten described as a “decentering.”  Atlantic writer Aylin Safar referred to it as “flipping the subject.” This is ultimately the success of M.I.A.’s video.

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Welcome to the Gender Across Borders series Singing for Survival. This series is about speech, singing and noise; it is about using voices, musical instruments, and other forms of auditory expression to make an impact. The posts included in this series stretch the boundaries of the term “singing,” and range from a description of noises heard in the streets of Haiti after the earthquake to posts about Aretha Franklin, M.I.A., Buffy Sainte-Marie, and other artists and activists who sing for the survival of others.

This series ran on May 13-14, 2010. Click on the links below to see the posts featured in the series!

• Buffy Sainte-Marie and the Universal Soldier, by Kyle Bachan
• Addressing U.S. Immigration Policies in M.I.A.’s ‘Born Free,’ by Maria Guzman
• Glee: Confronting Adversity with Hyperbole and High Notes, by Roxanne Samer
• Ode to Aretha, or Reconnecting Women and Singing, by Clara Fischer
• The Sound of a City Shattered: Haiti, January 2010, by Daniel Patterson
• Singing, Survival and San Juan Copala: Murdered for their voices, by Amy Littlefield

On June 1st, we’ll begin discussing Infidel, a memoir by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  Hirsi Ali is one of the most well-known Islamic dissidents of the 20th century.

Born in Somalia, Hirsi Ali grew up in Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Kenya and Sudan before fleeing to Holland as a refugee in the early 90′s.  She provides a blow by blow of her personal, spiritual and professional metamorphosis.

A Somali refugee-cum-global freedom fighter, Hirsi Ali says we must evolve to survive.  And evolving means sometimes casting off the antiquated shell of what we’ve known.  The individual – alone, free, thinking and questioning – should prevail.  Once a self-described Islamic fundamentalist, Hirsi Ali is now an atheist and outspoken critic of Islam, especially in its oppression of women. Her personal choices in striving for personal freedom had huge implications — her presence in Holland caused tidal waves of unrest and danger, eventually leading to the cold murder of Ali’s friend and film maker Theo Van Gogh.

But is her feminism accidental?  A mere outgrowth of her own personal drive to survive, as an individual woman, within a cultural system where she is raped, beaten, mutilated, and manipulated in various ways?  Can an individual fight against a system for his/her own benefit without broadening his/her fight on behalf of the “all”?

There are a number of other prolific Muslim feminist and human rights activist who have worked for a broader freedom than Hirsi Ali — who has seemed more like an accidental icon than a deliberate one.  For instance, Shrin Ebadi — an Iranian human rights lawyer who worked for the rights and liberation of women from within Iran during the Islamic Revolution, rather than from outside like Hirsi Ali.

Is she effective?  Is she right?  Does it matter?

Please join us on June 1 for a discussion of Hirsi Ali as a feminist and human rights activist.

Image by Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times / April 21, 2010

Erin recently wrote about Arizona’s horrifyingly racist immigration law that was passed last week. Although that particular law has only been enacted in one state, it is symptomatic of a larger trend in immigration policy — a hardline crackdown on immigration that ultimately harms people who seek U.S. citizenship but may not have the resources to obtain it.

Take, for instance, Ekaterine Bautista, an Iraq War veteran. She immigrated to the U.S. illegally from Mexico and, under her aunt’s name, enlisted in the U.S. military. After six years in the military, including a 13-month tour of duty in Iraq, Bautista was able to apply for naturalization. Five days before her swearing-in ceremony, the federal government denied her that right.

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Protests against Arizona bill/ Franklin for AP

Thanks to a new state law passed Friday that has rapidly earned national attention and a rebuke from President Obama, Arizona will soon require its police officers to detain anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant and demand immigration papers. It is unclear exactly what the police are supposed to base their suspicions on, because according to the New York Times, Governor Jan Brewer has promised that racial profiling won’t be tolerated and police will “have proper training to carry out the law.” Presumably this training will include some sort of ESP lessons so that officers may guess a subject’s citizenship while blindfolded.

The new law is of course intended to address Arizona’s largely Latino illegal immigrant population.  It goes without saying that a lot of Latino and human rights groups are denouncing this law, which has the potential to cast a guilty-until-proven-innocent suspicion over all people in the state who appear to be of Latino origin. (I know in many parts of the country such an attitude toward Latino people already exists, places where I’ve heard people commonly use ‘Mexican’ as a blanket term for all Latino people while pronouncing the word as if it were a slur).

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