Gender Across Borders

Thanks for visiting Gender Across Borders. If you're interested in writing for us, check out our call for writers. And don't forget to subscribe to our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter (@GABblog), or friend us on Facebook.

Amid all of Lady Gaga’s gender-bending and hot topic love affairs (most recently, her Phoenix concert appearance in which she bore writing on her body in protest of AZ SB 1070), a work of art was made found. I mean, made. Found…well, here it is:

Lady Gaga. Armitage Shanks. 2010. Image courtesy of SHOWstudio.com.

In an act of art historical savviness, Lady Gaga has again aligned herself with a historical figure-Marcel Duchamp. For anyone that is not familiar with the Dadaist object, known as The Fountain (1917)-let me recap:

1. Duchamp denounces the regime of “high art” objects and proposes his own work of art-a urinal inscribed with a name, “R. Mutt,”

2. The gesture goes down in art history, and introduces the public (and many, many art students) to “readymades,” and

3. Art’s repertoire is substantially broadened thanks to the clever artist.

What has Gaga added to the almost century-old dialogue about art? How does it relate to our culture in 2010? In her latest work, now on display at the London art space SHOWstudio, she inscribed this note to the public:

“I’m not f***ing Duchamp, but I love pissing with you.”

Based on her inscription, she is not trying to outdo Duchamp but she gets the joke. Yet, the comparison remains. Perhaps a better question would be, “How has her appropriation disrupted our notion of her, Duchamp, or art?” To begin with, consider this quote on the SHOWstudio.com site, which explains her version of Duchamp’s statement:

Read the rest of this entry →

Image courtesy of ifccenter.com

Last night, I attended a screening of the Finnish documentary Miesten vuoro (Steam of Life in English). The film offers a look inside the Finnish sauna, with a primary focus on the men who visit saunas as a way of communing with each other. Without narration or establishing any firm facts or conclusions, Miesten vuoro simply observes as anonymous men (we don’t learn the names of any of the individuals profiled until the credits) sit in saunas and talk with each other about deeply personal issues, including love, lust, family, abuse, addiction, friendship and death. Rather than perpetuate the notion of men as quiet and emotionless, Miesten vuoro highlights a masculinity that is open and sensitive, if one that hides behind the surface in most public situations.

Read the rest of this entry →

Image courtesy of wired.com

Since 1946, BBC Radio’s “Woman’s Hour” has provided a daily space for women to discuss and learn about topics that interest them. A cursory glance at the show’s archive reveals a wide variety of subjects covered, including politics, body image, marriage, the arts, sports and religion. “Woman’s Hour” does not pigeonhole women or stick to tired stereotypes. Instead, the program is interested in exploring a diverse assortment of topics and perspectives that relate to women’s lives and experiences.

But, of course, others are beginning to feel left out of the fun. So, BBC Radio 5 Live is preparing to launch “Men’s Hour,” a program designed to address issues of interest to men.

From the Guardian:

Each week the live programme will feature an interview with “a man we all admire – blokes with an emotional depth,” said [BBC broadcaster Tim] Samuels, listing Jamie Oliver, Noel Gallagher and José Mourinho as dream guests. Regular features will include Thought for the Gay, in which a guest ruminates on an issue such as gay adoption, and The Question No One Is Asking, which sees Samuels investigate something obscure. On the pilot edition, recorded today, he tried to find out which moisturiser Robert Mugabe uses to keep him looking so youthful despite the stresses of being a dictator.

In 60 Second Hypochondria, the panel will answer “the sort of questions you would never ask your doctor, like whether drinking too much soy milk will damage your sperm,” said Samuels, 34.

Read the rest of this entry →

Photo from wikipedia

In many countries around the world, this Sunday is Father’s Day. In his book, The Daddy Shift, Jeremy Adam Smith looks at how our perceptions of fatherhood are changing and shares the stories of fathers who have cut back on paid work to spend more time with their children. A growing number of studies have documented the importance of a father’s early involvement in his children’s lives:  better cognitive development in infants, higher educational attainment, fewer behavioral problems in teen years, lower rates of criminal behavior and better social functioning. But making the “daddy shift” is easier in some countries than in others. In Sweden, for example, where at least two months of parental leave are reserved exclusively for dads, 85 per cent of fathers take parental leave.

As deputy prime minister, Bengt Westerberg introduced Sweden’s first month of “daddy leave” in 1995 (the policy didn’t force fathers to stay home, but if they didn’t, their families would lose one month of subsidies). The share of fathers on leave increased dramatically and in 2002 the government added a second non-transferable month. According to Westerberg and others, this shift in father’s roles is changing the definition of masculinity:

Many men no longer want to be identified just by their jobs. Many women now expect their husbands to take at least some time off with the children.

Read the rest of this entry →

“We often discuss patriarchy and its many faces; we often talk about men beating their wives, men raping women during war, men dominating politics, economics, culture and religion… what if our own liberation actually starts with seeing men not only as perpetrators and obstacles, but also as victims of their own gender construct?”

In recognition of the 2010 International Women’s Day for Peace and Disarmament (May 24) the Women Peacemakers Program published a manual entitled “Together for Transformation – Men, Masculinities and Peacebuilding.” The main gist of this assortment of articles is that we live in cultures that chronically dehumanize men as well as women. War, in particular, narrows men’s gender identity to one that is rooted in extreme violence (and this impacts men whether they are in a country like the Democratic Republic of the Congo or the United States).

Different than most of the material I’ve seen on “engaging men”—which focus on fostering men as allies in the women’s movement by emphasizing the rights of women—the articles and case studies in this manual build off of a principle that Dr. Martin Luther King is famous for espousing. That is, that perpetrators are also victims; that those who oppress others also oppress themselves. Read the rest of this entry →

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Walking skeletons, stacks of bodies in morgues, mountains of newly turned earth in cemeteries.

According to a recent New York Times article, “At Front Lines, AIDS War is Falling Apart,” this will soon be the reality in most of Africa and other countries like Haiti, Guyana and Cambodia.

For those of us in developed nations, AIDS often seems like a thing of the past; a challenge that we’ve overcome. (However, the reality, here too, is that it’s not. Did you know that every 35 minutes an American woman tests positive for HIV? Women and girls of color—especially black women and girls—bear a disproportionately heavy burden of HIV/AIDS in the United States.)

Globally, HIV/AIDS is still an epidemic of unsettling proportions. There are currently 33 million people infected with HIV/AIDS; 14 million are immuno-compromised enough to need drugs yet fewer than four million are on treatment. Globally, 7,400 people are infected every day.

As the global AIDS crisis persists, there is an increasing shift among donors to focus health initiatives on “cost effective interventions.” For example, under its new Global Health Initiative, the Obama administration has announced plans to shift its focus to mother-and-child health—emphasizing investment in “diseases that cost less to fight, including pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria and fatal birth complications” rather than “expensive” AIDS interventions.

I, like other feminists, have been thrilled to witness more and more attention on global maternal and reproductive health in the past year. However, I can’t help but question the motivations. Is a mathematical “bigger bang for our buck” approach valid when we are considering human lives? Furthermore, human beings—and the diseases that impact them—don’t exist in isolation from one another, or from their societal context. Is it effective to confront health initiatives as if they do? Read the rest of this entry →

In as much as Hip Hop as a culture and rap as a musical genre are highly misogynistic, the term “Hip Hop Feminism” may seem more a paradox than anything else. In his article “Re: Definitions: The Name and Game of Hip Hop Feminism,” Hip Hop feminist Michael Jeffries begins his attempt to conceptualize a Hip Hop feminism and a Hip Hop feminist agenda with the following preface: “In hip hop culture, women’s collective and individual performance or criticism is not feminist by nature; only if performers act with the goal of challenging male domination are they practicing feminism” (Jeffries, 215) [emphasis added].

What does it mean to “challenge” male dominance? How do these challenges take shape in a rap genre where the women act like men in order to grant themselves agency as women? In light of the intense focus on sexual politics, where does one draw the line between sexual liberation and sexual exploitation?

As Hip Hop scholar Gwendolyn D. Pough theorizes, Black women participants in Hip-Hop culture “bring wreck to the patriarchy” and “disrupt dominant masculine discourses” in part by remixing (male) rap(pers’) songs. As a rhetorical practice, the remix is a convention of rap music which allows rappers to Signify on, or revise one another’s songs.* Typically, unsigned artists (or artists at the outset of their career), such as Nicki Minaj, make their musical debut by releasing mixtapes. Unlike official albums, mixtapes often consist of remixes of other artists’ songs. Essentially, a remix is a recreation or remake (get it, “re-mix?”) of an original song and a mixtape is a compilation of these remixes.

By remixing male rappers’ songs, female rappers are able to inject and inflect feminine discourse into dominant masculine discourse. However, as Jeffries states, there is a distinct difference between feminine discourse and feminist discourse.

Read the rest of this entry →

Caption: "Drone Porn. The article is kinda scary, but the photo is hella sexy." (Photo from Wired.com)

Drone porn. Have you heard of it? I hadn’t. And I certainly didn’t realize that it was the newest YouTube hit.

As soon as I saw it referenced in an article I was immediately inquisitive about what drones had to do with porn and why the phenomenon was so popular.

My curiosity led me to discover quite a few things… 1) that watching (never mind participating in) deadly warfare is intended to cause sexual arousal, 2) that the Department of Defense (DoD), or at least a private company that appears to be contracted by the DoD, has uploaded images of the aforementioned warfare onto YouTube, and 3) that the images are the catalyst for a maelstrom of online hatred. Read the rest of this entry →

A moonlit night and an empty, marble-floored room conspire to patch up all misunderstandings between frustrated lovers by pure force of atmosphere – at least, in the pros’ world.

In this climactic scene from The Gay Divorcee (1934), none of the characters’ accumulated faux pas (so to speak) are actually ironed out. There seems to be no time for that. Instead, Guy (Fred Astaire) furnishes the proof of the words he uses to court Mimi (Ginger Rogers) – “You are the one” – with their bodies.

As she’s about to leave the room, he spins her into his space so they’re walking in step. After a few moments of holding her in this intimate harmony of motion, he loosens their position so they stand side by side. He locks eyes with her but gives her body space, pointedly making contact only with his hand on hers. While their relationship so far has been his to pursue and hers to rebuff, in this moment Mimi transitions from guarded to on board. Given space to leave, she now continues to dance with Guy. A smile passes over her face as she witnesses herself dancing by his side, an equal partner in crime, not merely an object of pursuit. He’s called her bluff. They dance on.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV5e7mWcQJE]

From The Gay Divorcee at youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV5e7mWcQJE

Astaire and Rogers’ ten films together, made between 1933 and 1939 except for the final film, in1949, chart an eager-to-please Astaire and a self-possessed Rogers battling with barbs, navigating confused identities, and moving almost accidentally – yet indelibly – into a cathartic dance scene that proves they’re destined to be together.

The playful gender dynamics in their iconic musical films may come as a surprise to modern viewers. Their films consistently reverse roles and lampoon power dynamics and social conventions.

Read the rest of this entry →

Photo/ Demandmore.org

Hello, readers!  I’m new here, so I thought I’d start with an introduction.  My name is Sam, I’m 100% stoked to be writing for GAB, and I am incredibly privileged.  Yes, I’m going to admit it up front, because it’s entirely relevant to the scope of this blog.  And because I’m relatively invisible to all of you, more of a collection of words and ideas than a person, it’s important that you, the reader, understand where I come from.

I am light-skinned, young, and male.  While my sexual preference does not preclude the possibility of any particular pairing, I have only dated women.  Thus, in the matrix of oppressions, I am generally part of the caste of oppressors, and hardly, if ever, oppressed.  In a funny way, that information has the possibility of marginalizing me in this community, and that’s OK.

But what place do “people like me” have in writing for a “blog like this”?  I’ve really never experienced oppression , and thus, it’s pretty difficult for me to identify fully with what it means to have any number of traits that are excluded by our society by various “isms”.  Some “people like me” have stated that empathy and sympathy are just as good as experience, but I beg to differ.  Read the rest of this entry →