kiss me deadly

Kiss Me Deadly will be playing this coming weekend (April 28th & 29th) as part of the Northwest Film Center’s Film Noir series, “Killer Ladies.” In the 1940s and 50s, Film Noir combined the grim vision of the American hard-boiled detective novel with the dramatic camera angles and lighting of German expressionist cinema, and Kiss Me Deadly is considered a late masterpiece of the genre. Directed in 1955 by Robert Aldrich, the film draws its title, though little else, from a Mickey Spillane book. It opens with a barefoot woman in a trenchcoat stopping a car on a dark road. The hitchhiker, Christina Bailey, played by Cloris Leachman, and the driver, private detective Mike Hammer, played by Ralph Meeker, are themselves stopped by mysterious thugs who torture them and leave them for dead. Mike survives, and his subsequent interrogation by interstate police convinces him that he’s on to something big, and potentially profitable. With the help of his secretary Velda, played by Maxine Cooper, he pursues the secret that Christina was hiding, and along the way encounters her supposed former roommate, Lily Carver, played by Gaby Rogers, as well as an opera singer, an art dealer, a number of boxers, and assorted cops, thugs, and other sadists wielding knives, guns, and hypodermic needles.
For more on femmes fatales and film noir, listen to the Old Mole Variety Hour tomorrow (April 23), or check out these links.



http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0600/rc1fr10m.htm
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/classics/rr0600/cfrr10b.htm

queer morality

Last month, General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gay service members by saying that "I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts.” He apparently did not comment on the morality of, say, invading a country and directly or indirectly causing the deaths of approximately 655,000 individuals.

That evident contradiction, according to which gay love is bad, but killing is good, is addressed by Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America in a recent column in Truthdig:

"The radical Christian right . . . has built a binary worldview of command and submission wherein male leaders, who cannot be questioned and claim to speak for God, are in control and all others must follow. Any lifestyle outside the traditional model of male and female is a threat to this hierarchical male power structure. Women who do not depend on men for their identity and their sexuality, who live outside a male power relationship, challenge this pervasive cult of masculinity, as do men who find tenderness and love with other men as equals. The lifestyle of gays and lesbians is intolerable to the Christian right because its existence is a threat to the movement’s chain of command. . . .

This hypermasculinity, which crushes the independence and self-expression of women, is a way for men in the movement to compensate for the curtailing of their own independence, their blind obedience to church authorities and the calls for sexual restraint. The images of Jesus often show him with thick muscles, clutching a sword. Christian men are portrayed as powerful warriors. Jesus’ stoic endurance of the brutal whippings in Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ presages the brutal, masculine world of this ideology. . . . Jerry Falwell, in a New Yorker interview, said Christ was not a gentle-looking, willowy man: “Christ was a man with muscles,” he insisted. Falwell and Gibson see real men, godly men, as powerful, able to endure physical pain and suffering without complaint. Jesus, like God, has to be a real man, a man who dominates through force. The language of the movement is filled with metaphors about the use of excessive force and violence against God’s enemies.

The unspoken truth is that Christian men are required to have a personal, loving relationship with a male deity and surrender their will to a male-dominated authoritarian church. . . . Glorified acts of force and violence against outsiders, against nonbelievers, compensate for this unquestioning submission. The domination that men are encouraged to practice in the home over women and children becomes a reflection of the domination they are taught to endure outside the home.

This cult of masculinity keeps all ambiguity, especially sexual ambiguity, in check. It fosters this world of binary opposites: God and man, the saved and the unsaved, the church and the world, Christianity and secular humanism, and male and female. There runs through this radical belief system a dread of disorder and chaos. The belief in a binary universe helps believers avoid confronting the confusion of human existence. Reality, when it is defined in these absolutes, is made predictable and understandable. All configurations of human life that do not conform to [this] rigid [. . .] model, such as homosexuality, are forms of disorder and tools of Satan and must be abolished. A world that can be predicted and understood, a world that has clear markers, can be managed and controlled."

Successful challenges to this movement are unlikely to come through legislative reform alone, any more than an end to racism came though the 1964 civil rights act outlawing racial segregation and discrimination. But legal recognition and rights would certainly be a step in the right direction.

You have a chance to participate in such steps this very evening, Monday April 9, 2007, when the Oregon House Elections, Ethics and Rules Committee holds a public hearing on two gay rights acts: the Oregon Equality Act (SB 2) and the Oregon Family Fairness Act (HB 2007). Hearings will be held at 5:30 PM today in Hearing Room E at the Capitol in Salem.

The House Family Fairness Act would provide for civil unions between same-sex partners. The Senate Equality Act would provide gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people with protection from discrimination in employment, housing, access to public places and other areas.

While antidiscrimination law seems a no brainer (though the exemptions for religious groups raise thorny questions, and have been the subject of much negotiation), civil unions are more complicated.

Bonnie Tinker, writing in this month’s Portland Alliance, asks,

“How can I support a bill that treats same-sex partners as a separate class and asks us to wear the pink triangle of civil unions? On the other hand, how can I oppose a bill that intends to make things better for lesbian and gay families?”

She suggests,

“Go to the hearings on HB 2007 and demonstrate outside, or testify inside from a neutral position that they have given us the wrong choices. We need a choice that offers equality.” And Tinker propses several further actions: those in other sex relationships can refuse special rights and wear “the pink triangle of civil unions” along with queer couples; those in legal marriages can testify to the privileges they receive; on forms that ask for marital status, queers in couples might check the box that says “married”; those in legal marriages might check “single” in order to reject special rights.

Tinker concludes, “Our acceptance of the caste system of legal marriage rights is a reflection of the depth of heterosexist conditioning in society. It is no longer acceptable. As with any oppression, the first step toward changeis to pay attention ot unconscious and unstated privilege. The next step is to negotiate for change. We are now ready for the next step: non-violent direct action to resist the inequality of legal marriage.”

passive voice and other crimes

From today's NYTimes:

Quotation of the Day

"I acknowledge that mistakes were made here."

-ALBERTO R. GONZALES, the attorney general, on the dismissals of federal prosecutors.

manifestoon

wrr: women's reproductive freedom

The defeat in Oregon of Measure 43, which would have required parental notification when a minor seeks an abortion, and the repeal in South Dakota of the law allowing for abortion only to prevent the death of a pregnant woman, both mark modest defeats for those opposed to women’s reproductive freedom. But in the campaigns around these measures, the rhetoric of anti-choice advocates has increasingly adopted the argument that abortion should be banned because it harms women.

Like the groups trying to suppress multicultural education in the name of academic freedom, or to disrupt the teaching of evolution in the name of scientific debate, many anti-choice advocates have been appropriating the language of their more progressive opponents.

We can see some of this in the career of Eric Keroack, recently appointed by George W. Bush to be the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs, a position that oversees a number of Health and Human Services programs, including the Office of Family Planning.

Until recently, Keroack was medical director for a chain of “crisis pregnancy centers” called A Woman’s Concern, which use a variety of techniques, including deception, to pressure pregnant women to continue their pregnancies, avoid contraception, and remain abstinent until marriage. His career has been dissected and his arguments refuted on the website talk2action.org, as well as a number of other venues.

For instance, the idea that it’s concern for women that’s expresessed by A Woman’s Concern when they try to encourage women to continue unwanted pregnancies is refuted by the American Psychological Association’s statement that

research shows that the ability of women to make decisions about their own childbearing (including timing) is a necessary condition for their health and mental health, as well as for their families. Abortion is a safe medical procedure that carries relatively few physical or psychological risks and that yields positive outcomes when the alternative is unwanted pregnancy.

In an article in the American Prospect, reposted on AlterNet, Reva Siegel and Sarah Blustain have noted that all of that evidence and argument was rejected by the South Dakota legislature and the document on which they based their decision,

a 70-page set of findings contained in the “Report of the South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion” -- by far the most comprehensive government account of the arguments and evidence for protecting women from abortion.

South Dakota’s official endorsement of these arguments gives them more validity than ever and virtually assures that they will be employed to justify abortion restrictions across the nation.

The task force’s report … argued that the state needed a ban because of the epidemic overriding pressures on women to abort -- from a family member, a husband or boyfriend, or an abortion clinic -- that make extra protection from abortion necessary. Finally, to make credible its claims about women’s health and women’s choices, the task force made repeated claims about women’s nature. It asserted that women would never freely choose an abortion -- even absent outside pressures -- because doing so would violate “the mother’s fundamental natural intrinsic right to a relationship with her child.” The task force took as a statement of biological and psychological fact that a mother’s connection to her unborn baby was more authentic than her own statement of desire not to be pregnant. These gender-role convictions are at the heart of the movement’s claim that the nation must now combat an epidemic of dangerous and coerced abortions.

The legislature also heard testimony from women who said that their experiences of legal abortion had caused them psychological trauma.

The task force argues that abortion causes symptoms of what it calls Post-Abortion Syndrome (or PAS) because abortion violates women’s nature: “It is simply unrealistic to expect that a pregnant mother is capable of being involved in the termination of the life of her own child without risk of suffering significant psychological trauma and distress. To do so is beyond the normal, natural, and healthy capability of a woman whose natural instincts are to protect and nurture her child.”

In July, Democratic Congressman Henry A. Waxman released a report on the “False and Misleading Health Information provided by Federally Funded Pregnancy Resource Centers.” These anti-abortion and “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs), according to a March report in The Washington Post based on a review of federal records, received more than $60 million in federal funds between 2001 and 2005 and represent a small fraction of the more than 3,000 centers in North America. According to Waxman’s report, the centers provided “false and misleading” information about a link between abortion and breast cancer, the effect of abortion on future fertility, and the mental-health effects of abortion. Indeed, Waxman’s report details the major government and professional studies that discredit PAS.

Which is why the stories of women are so important. What the PAS movement lacks in scientific credibility, it makes up for with dramatic and often touching stories of individual women who feel it is legal abortion that allowed them to be coerced into giving up pregnancies they wanted to continue. Crisis Pregnancy Centers (or CPCs) help women understand that feelings of loss and self-destructive conduct can be traced to unacknowledged guilt over past abortions. In offering suffering women this relief, the CPCs produce meaning. In the process, abortion comes to symbolize women’s disempowerment -- and its prohibition promises women healing, protection, maternal recognition, and freedom.

The predicament of women who grieve their abortions raises questions about the counseling and social supports available to women facing unintended pregnancies.

But criminalizing abortion is not a response. It would not only force motherhood on women who would choose to terminate their pregnancy under any conditions, but it would do nothing to

address the needs of women who seek an abortion because they lacked contraception or were raped or are living in an abusive relationship, or will have to drop out of work or school to raise a child alone, or are stretched so thin that they cannot emotionally or financially provide for their other children.

There is a cautionary message in all this, as well, to supporters of choice … who in recent years have embraced a vocabulary of grief around abortion. There is an ocean of difference between “safe, legal, and rare,” as Bill Clinton put it, and criminal, as in South Dakota. But it is plain that the [liberal] emphasis on abortion-as-tragedy will feed right into the woman-protective frame unless the pro-choice camp anticipates its opponents’ arguments and grounds the case for abortion rights in ... a broader agenda of progressive family values.

But beyond the claims of Siegel and Blustain, progressives might also want to clarify the real causes of women’s disempowerment, and call again for the real conditions of our freedom.

chicken

Robert Jensen on Academic Freedom in Counterpunch:

All teaching -- especially in the humanities and the social sciences -- has a political dimension, and we shouldn't fear that. The question isn't whether professors should leave their politics at the door (they can't) but whether professors are responsible in the way they present their politics and can defend their pedagogical decisions. It's clear that every decision a professor makes -- choice of topics, textbook selection, how material is presented -- has an underlying politics. If the professor's views are safely within the conventional wisdom of the dominant sectors of society, it might appear the class is apolitical. Only when professors challenge that conventional wisdom do we hear talk about "politicized" classrooms.

But just because the classroom always is politicized in courses that deal with how we organize ourselves politically, economically, and socially, we should not suggest that it's all politics. Because there's a politics to teaching doesn't mean teaching is nothing but politics; indeed, professors shouldn't proselytize for their positions in the classroom. Instead, when it's appropriate -- and in the courses I teach, it often is -- professors should highlight the inevitable political judgments that underlie teaching. Students -- especially those who disagree with a professor's views -- will come to see that the professor has opinions, which is a good thing. Professors should be modeling how to present and defend an argument with evidence and logic.

opium

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.