The Audacity of Races and Genders: A Personal and Global Story of the Obama Election
224
The Audacity of Races and Genders: A Personal and Global Story of the Obama Election
224Hardcover
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Overview
Tracing the social and political presence of Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin and Barack Obama, the book present 25 conceptual "frames" of fast-paced critical analysis that places the US presidential election in the context of; the global economic crisis, the new positions of China and India, Islamic feminisms and new secularisms. Illuminated by Eisenstein's distinctive style and personal narrative as she travels the world, Eisenstein challenges her readers to always be looking for the "newly new" political configurations in order to create a politics of and for the globe.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848134195 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publication date: | 10/08/2009 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Zillah Eisenstein is one of North America's most prolific anti-racist feminist writers and activists of her time. She is well recognized for her earlier activism and writing about the rape camps in Bosnia, breast cancer activism in Cuba, the impact of globalization on women workers across the globe, the racialized gender politics of affirmative action in the US, neo-liberal assaults against feminisms of all sorts and feminist struggles in the former Soviet Union, India, Turkey and Iran. Her books include Against Empire (2004), Sexual Decoys (2007), Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. (1978), The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (1981), The Color of Gender (1994) and Hatreds, Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in the 21st Century,(1996). Zillah Eisenstein teaches political theory and anti-racist feminisms in the Politics Department of Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York.
Read an Excerpt
The Audacity of Races and Genders
A Personal and Global Story of the Obama Election
By Zillah Eisenstein
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2009 Zillah EisensteinAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-421-8
CHAPTER 1
Fluid Frames
I have chosen a method of writing that allows me the openness and momentariness and changeability that I need in order to think "newly". Thinking "newly" means seeing what was not evident or seeable before, seeing what was formerly unknown, seeing what might happen next. So thoughts meander as they need to and should; are concluded and then reappear; are exposed and then become shadows and whispers. My mind's wanderings and meanderings began early on when Barack Obama declared his candidacy for president of the United States. I wondered if there was a formerly unknowable kind of politics emerging: a new set of political possibilities to discover and find. And my wondering continues to this day.
As such, this book is random and unpredictable, but only in the way that life itself is so. The way one person survives the massacre in Mumbai, and another dies. The way one sister is born with a genetic mutation, and another is not. Often it is simple curiosity that leads me one place rather than another. I sometimes write in diary form in order to expose the variability of my thinking. Instead of creating an enforced coherence, I show the back and forth of my political thoughts as they emerge. The story narrated here has no clarifying beginning because each present moment is already connected to previous histories and realignments. My earlier books also map the journey I have taken to establish the many ongoing dialogues found in these next pages.
The inside story of this book — an unconventional storytelling of the 2008 US presidential election — has just begun. The outside story — written with added context of the economic and military crises of the globe — unfolds daily. Media-ted election noise drowns out the complexities and multi-vocal viewpoints of both inside and outside, often creating a global monologue, rather than the needed multiple dialogues.
I describe leafleting in the north side of Philadelphia, in predominantly black and poor neighborhoods during the primaries, and I end in Liberty City, Florida, helping to get out the early vote the week before the election. I share ongoing discussions with friends and colleagues in the US who speak with their various identities — Pakistani, Iranian, Ghanaian and so on — and with friends and activists on my visits to South Africa, Spain, France and Sweden. While interrogating the anti-Islamic narrations at home and abroad, I ask people in the US to listen to Chinua Achebe's guidance. Gay marriage, gender bending, Turkish and Iranian feminisms, new notions of the secular/ religious divide, the Chinese Olympics, and the global economic crash, are threaded and webbed together in idiosyncratic fashion.
I reconfigure and reframe the complex engendered and racialized historical trajectory of Obama's victory. The 25 different frames, or chapters, presented here form an unlikely porous grid through which to examine the economic excesses of capitalism at present while the price of oil ebbs and flows, and the price of food skyrockets across the globe. Each frame seeks to expose the particular way that sex, race and class interweave with and without regard to nation.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world watched the US 2008 election thinking they should have a right to vote given that they will live by the new rules, or lack of them, that the next administration puts in play. But the election is part of the embedded systems of power and cannot be understood without its global context, as nations and their "patriotism" pretend they are self-contained within their own borders.
A key thematic of this book is that sex, heteronormative gender, and race — specifically its white privilege — in their specific class definition are historically routed/rooted constructs and are more fluid than they are static. There are cross-cultural vectors of contact that both statically encrust and also reframe and change them. So politics and political possibility remain in flux with the shifting meanings and new constructions of race and gender. Because the racializing of gender and the engendering of race are in continual process it is not always easy or possible to know the truthfulness of these categories. It is why gender and race can pose in decoy fashion: a female body that does not believe in women's rights, or a black person who denies the significance of race. In this fashion, misogyny and white privilege are continually formulated through newly strange locations and configurations.
Global flows of labor are changing gender and racial constructions; the newest militarism of the US also does so. As these structural needs of power change, gender and with it its white privilege morphs. The 2008 primaries tell this story as it is written with and on the bodies of Hillary Clinton and Barack and Michelle Obama. New racial formations both subvert earlier forms, and reinscribe them with established heteronormative gendered meanings. Yet the newest constructions of race and gender and their class realignments also chart unknowable new trajectories.
The effects are hardly linear. Progressive possibilities emerge alongside possibilities that are incredibly anti-democratic. White privilege and gender are not static biological constructions, so they shift and change with class formations. Therefore, I am always looking for their newest formulations and intersections. As race and gender often expose their own malleability and fluidity they undermine the normalizing of biological gender and race. So it was pretty clear to many that Sarah Palin was being used as a decoy of sorts; one vagina is not necessarily exchangeable with another, even though Sarah was offered up as an alternative to Hillary.
Although gender and racial white privilege change they also are unchanging, or in part stagnant. These categories often reproduce themselves without a newly clear articulation and then frame our thoughts in outmoded ways. Patriarchy, misogyny, and their racialized forms morph and don't. So Michelle is mommie-in-chief, but not quite like Laura Bush. Obama, a "new" man of sorts, is still the one who is president, not Michelle. Hillary eventually becomes Secretary of State while Bill angles for center stage, to not look wifely. The world is black, and brown, and yellow so Barack looks like more of the world than he does not. He is a perfect choice for the multicolored globe while Clinton stands in for the newly complex notions of gender, looking somewhat "yesterday". Women are elected as presidents in Liberia, and Chile, and Germany, and Argentina despite the glass ceiling in the US.
I must continually open the newest ways of thinking, what I term the "newly new" in order to see and to find insights that are not readily available. I use the awkward phrase "newest-new" or "newly new" to call attention to the way that what we think of as new, is often not in its newest form because it is changing and becoming newer still. New is not a stagnant category. New is always in process. So there is new, and newer and newest; and yet this process always weaves the old along with the present. In this sense, the new or newest is never simply that because it is also "new-old" simultaneously. The "before", which is in some sense old, remains a part of this process.
My focus in these following frames is to open myself and my readers to what is new and maybe unknown in order to build new political possibilities. That which is new represents change, and often feels uncomfortable because it is not necessarily easily known. The familiar, the knowable, is often thought to be more comforting. I ask you to travel with me, embracing the discomfort.
I therefore always want to be looking for what has changed and is changing, and the new capacities that are to be found in this process. Some will think that I see too much as new; others will think I do not see enough of what has changed. I see old in the newly new, a togetherness of sorts. My sense of an undetermined and unknown set of political possibilities emanates from here.
I am an activist and political theorist who has critiqued elections as superstructure and symbolic rather than structural and real. I never expected to write and decipher election talk. To choose this inside location was new for me. Because the storytelling from inside loses the needed critical lens, I position the election always with an outside, and I keep changing the location of the outside. But it is also hard to keep the borders clear between them because the borders are porous and permeable. Maybe this is why people choose to locate themselves in one place or the other, rather than in both. So radicals of all sorts who dismissed Obama from the start felt too outside to me; and people who thought that he was the new Messiah felt too inside.
Obama's presidency has pledged to bring about change — to fix the problems that keep the US from its promissory for all. Yet Obama offers himself as proof of the possibility of success. "We" the people, need change; and the Obamas are proof that change can happen. They were born black and poor and they now occupy the White House. Dreams can come true. This is a delicate and dangerous storyline.
I remember watching the first night of the Democratic convention, in August 2008, and afterwards feeling as though maybe I had made a mistake to get so involved in the campaign. The Obama family looked too picturebook beautiful, too perfect, too color-coordinated, too American Dream for me. Although the successes of Barack and Michelle are proof of the change that can happen in America they also prove that much more change is needed for their story to become anybody's let alone everyone's. Yet, the next morning when I awoke I was back in the fold. It felt miraculous that a black family stood in for everyone's dreams.
On election day, November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was the only plausible alternative to the present language of colonization that defines too much of humanity as unemployed, undocumented, illegal, and unhealthy. These were desperate times. The fascistic militarist direction of the Bush regime must be formidably redirected, most especially in Iraq and Afghanistan. Whether and how Obama will take this path remains to be seen.
As I write it is not clear how this story, or my story, will end — what new formations US empire will take and whether it will embrace, or be forced to embrace, a more democratic dialogue and relationship with the globe. Nevertheless, the 2008 election is a beginning toward launching a serious challenge to neoliberalism and global capitalism's newest forms of heteronormative militarized racialized gender and sexualized racism. Leaders — in Britain, Poland, and Australia — who were aligned with Bush/Cheney and their war in Iraq lost public support.
I hope we will want Obama to stay for a second term. But, if not, there is a better starting point for the next time and the next struggle than there was with Bush/Cheney. I am hoping for new, even if small, beginnings that will matter greatly.
CHAPTER 2Bodies and Me
I think and meander with my body. It is forever present even when it is not being mentioned. "Bodies have memories" even when we try to silence or deny them. Bodies also always wear their sex and color and storylines so they are very much a part of the political narrative told here.
Obama is slender, and agile, and looks very young. He moves with "physical grace ... like an athlete much more than a politician, taking pleasure in his body" as he bounds onto the stage with total energy. And his hands are always clapping, while his arms reach outwards to the crowds. McCain's body told a very different story. He moved slowly and stiffly. His "prolonged suffering" as a prisoner of war has ruined his shoulders so he cannot raise his arms and physically embrace his followers by doing so. Instead he appeared distant, and hobbled.
Our bodies are also lenses into the randomness of life. We do not choose our bodies. They choose us. And, when they fall seriously ill they can take over and demand too much. I started writing this book while I was still recovering from invasive cancer surgery, and on chemotherapy. Because I cannot be sure exactly how my struggle with cancer has impacted my thinking, it is a story to reveal. It is just now about a year since the treatments ended and I feel more myself again. Yet I look at my scar-marked body with its closed wounds and remember, but not fully. My scars "expose the injury" and remind me of my bodily emotions, as Sara Ahmed might say.
The following details are not important, and yet set the stage. One day in the early part of April 2007 I saw a bit of blood in my urine. I had just come in from my usual run, and felt fine, so I pushed back at my thoughts and hoped the blood would not appear again. I continued daily life: running, doing my yoga, doing Nautilus weights, teaching my classes, living contentedly. I left for a conference in Paris forgetting about the blood. I had breast cancer many years ago and prophylactic surgeries to protect me from my risk of further breast or ovarian cancer so I simply hoped the blood was an aberration, or maybe a kidney stone, or something else easier than cancer. My daughter Sarah was studying for the Medical College Admission Test in order to apply to medical school in the fall and I just could not let myself consider that I was in jeopardy. So I didn't, although I also did.
Upon my return from Paris, and after a long hard run to assuage my jet lag, my urine had turned to all blood. My friend and doctor Sami Husseini found what he thought at first was a bladder tumor, but the surgery revealed a much more complicated challenge. Miriam and Isaac and Biddy and Peggy made hurried phone calls to get me to the best specialists. I went with my partner Richard to Sloane Kettering for further diagnosis that kept changing: from the rare urachal cancer — the urachus is an embryonic remnant — to a peritoneal ovarian-like cancer, back to the possibility that it was bladder cancer.
The complexity of the tumor defied easy identity. Doctors Chi and Bochner nonetheless removed the tumor and part of my bladder with great skill and precision. Numerous biopsies were done and found benign. Although I appeared "clean" the tumor board at Sloane-Kettering pressed me hard to do chemotherapy treatments because of the unknown status of the tumor. Sarah asked me to do the chemo because she could not bear that if I died without doing the treatments, she would wonder each and every day for the rest of her life if I might have lived. So we — my wonderfully large number of intimate friends and family — would begin chemo.
I was told at the start that the cancer was rare and aggressive and life-threatening. Somehow I suppressed the grief and simply disallowed it. I remember not crying. I was calm and peaceful because I just so fiercely wanted to be. I knew I was at the edge of something, even if I could not know exactly what this edge was. I did not want the cancer to dominate me.
I desperately wanted to face into the cancer celebrating my life while looking at death. I kept thinking that maybe if I could face dying, I could face living without being able to know if I would live. I was trying to blend and blur the lines of living and dying. I felt defiant and exhausted at the same time. I would fight for my life while accepting death if it came. I kept reminding myself that I had loved my life, and that brought deep, deep solace. So I felt affirmative, hopeful that I could make something of this random assault. I was profoundly sad, but not desperate.
I needed to accept the possibility of death so that I would know if and when to stop trying to live. Yet, as Zadie Smith writes of her dad's dying, "death doesn't happen at all ... it is, in fact, the opposite of a happening"; that "facing death's absurd non-face" is the only choice. She reminds us that death "cannot be conquered, defied, contemplated, or even approached, because it's not there; it's only a word, signifying nothing". The death of funerals, the death we mark, "is a fake". But I was not thinking about the fake. I was looking to know and accept that there is an end. That Sarah would have to and could live on, without me.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Audacity of Races and Genders by Zillah Eisenstein. Copyright © 2009 Zillah Eisenstein. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introducing my Mindscape
1. Fluid Frames
2. Bodies and Me
A New Circular Globe
3. Chindia and New-Old Economies
4. Gender Bending with the Globe
5. Global Capitalist Crises
6. Chinua Achebe and Listening to Africa
7. The Newest China and her Olympics
New-Old Discourses on the Globe
8. God Bless America and Her Troops
9. New Cold Wars and Global Warming
10. Mythic Enemies and Newest Races
US Presidential Election Talk
11. Hillary Chose Not To Be a Feminist
12. Yesterday's Hillary
13. A Post New Hampshire Diary of Sorts
14. The Audaciousness of Race
15. Hillary is White
16. Michelle is Obviously Black
17. Sarah's Right Wing Vagina
18. US Feminisms
Shifting the political landscapes
19. Gender Mainstreaming in the Land of Picasso
20. Chadors, Veils, and Pantsuits
21. New Iranian and Turkish Feminisms
22. Heteronormative Silences and Gay Marriage
23. Being White in Cape Town
24. On the Ground in Florida
What is Next?
25. Unfinished Beginnings and Endings