The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
____________
I discovered Jason Karns’ Fukitor thanks to the controversy in The Comics Journal thread over his use of racist imagery. That I ordered some issues based on those questionable images probably hints at my take on the controversy. Bigotry can be funny. It wasn’t too long ago, for example, that I was chortling through a documentary on Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church (I believe it’s called Fall from Grace, available on Netflix). They’re the ‘God hates fags’ family/church who express opposition to the homosexual control of America through a series of signs — often presented at funerals of soldiers and rock stars — on which they thank God for AIDS and pray for more dead soldiers. Even the KKK finds their ideology objectionable (really). It’s hard not to laugh at that. You really can’t caricature the Phelps clan. How could their message be any more risible? Nor will arguing with such people do much good if they’re too extreme for white power groups. Some belief systems are too nuts to take seriously. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t worry about hate groups and religious extremists, just that it would be a bit silly to treat what they say or believe within the parameters of a rational discourse. You don’t need to argue with them, just keep away — and laugh from a safe distance. The Westboro Church would fit right into a Fukitor storyline, if Karns ever felt like “analyzing” Christianity. His aesthetic is well suited. Phelps’ religious justification for his homophobia is about as convincing and complicated as the following (only with hellspawn that are to be more feared for being less straight):
Fukitor 7, “Doctor Werewolf versus the Zombie Sadists”
I imagine that something like that is what Phelps fears in the afterlife should gay marriage achieve equality. There’s no way that image or one like it should enter a theological discourse where it’s not taken as imbecilic. Yet, it seems that the primary opposition to Fukitor is that people are going to take it too seriously, that its macho-chauvinistic worldview isn’t sufficiently ludicrous to simply point at it and laugh. (Like a censor, the critic is, of course, quite capable of not being swayed by the dangerous message he perceives. The problem is, you know, other people who don’t possess the critic’s cultural analytic skills.) Some of the response over at TCJ reminded me of those critics of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers who pointed out the Nazi-like uniforms worn by its heroes as evidence for the film’s fascism. With a style that hardly could be called delicate or nuanced (or so I thought), he both delivered on the entertaining genocidal slaughter of a highly evolved alien insect species while pointing out that it was genocide we spectators were enjoying. Karns’ extremism is doing something similar: Fukitor’s diegeses take place within a particular sort of mindset — a souped up, more explicitly rendered version of 70s and 80s action film heroics and grindhouse terror. It finds enjoyment there in the same way one might be entertained by the xenophobic worldview of Chuck Norris’ Missing in Action series, but makes it all sufficiently extreme that only a true psychopath could ever find it a plausible expression of otherness. Here’s an example of heroic victory (against the Viet Cong) from the comic:
Fukitor 5, “The Green Hellion”
Having the hero become a cannibalistic war machine with one of “our boys” hiding in the back, meekly proclaiming victory with his fist raised in a feeble show of solidarity is enough to create something of a Brechtian distancing effect – at least, within me. That’s another way of saying I’m not merely going along with the literal views of the characters, nor is the story wanting me to. However, Darryl Ayo might still say (if he ever bothered to read the comic): “This isn’t subversive, this is the real thing. This is what racist caricature and hostility against nonwhites in the popular arts looks like. This is what racism looks like, served straight up.” What this fails to see is the caricature of white masculine power that pervades the comic. I can’t imagine even the staunchest white power patriarch wanting this comic to represent his worldview (just like the KKK has its rhetorical limits). Maybe Phelps is right, people need signs: “do not identify with hero,” “do not sympathize with the bigotry.” Thus, I’m going to supply some context for those who believe Fukitor entertains its ideal reader by simply presenting a shared worldview (as if this reader thinks the comic fairly presents his ideological take on existence).
Much of the imagery in the three issues (5 through 7) that I purchased more easily serve radical feminism as misandrous stereotypes/parodies of patriarchal power than as actual reinforcement/mere reiterations of said power. Most of the examples for these stereotypes in what follows came from Judith Levine’s My Enemy, My Love. It occurred to me while reading some of that book around the same time as Fukitor that Karns shares or mocks (you decide) the same nightmarish fantasy that Andrea Dworkin, among others, has about masculinity: “Violence is male. The male is the penis; violence is the penis or the sperm ejaculated from it. What the penis can do it must do forcibly for a man to be a man.” [p. 138, Levine] Perhaps Karns’ most manifest take on this theme (if it’s possible) will be what he’s currently working on, a barbarian tale called “The Coming of Kok,” but from what I have in hand, look at this pinup scene from issue 5’s inside cover:
A demonic cabal (cf. red eyes) of white capitalists (note the business suits) is about to sacrifice a woman (with the ceremonial sword) after a masked executioner-type finishes sexually having his way with her. It’s hardly reading between the lines to find affinity between this drawing and the radically feminist conflation of capitalism and patriarchy: “to attack male supremacy […] consistently, inevitably means attacking capitalism […]” and “when you talk women’s liberation you inherently talk anti-capitalism and anti-private property.” [p. 78-9, Echols; first statement is from Redstockings’ co-founder Ellen Willis, the second from an unknown speaker at the 1968 Sandy Springs conference] Levine suggests this analysis understandably leads to misandry: “[M]an-hating remains not an action but a reaction, not a power but a subversion of power. In a patriarchal world, woman-hating is built into every institution. […] If misogyny is the Establishment, man-hating is no more than a counterculture.” [p. 18] She analyzes three overarching stereotypical categories of misandrous imagery (Infant, Betrayer and Beast), but the one that Fukitor deals in, almost exclusively, is the Beast: “Images of [which] confront the male body, its attractions and its threats. While [its subtypes] the Prick and the Pet indicate a raised eyebrow (and a raised skirt) toward “animality,” the Brute and the Killer embody women’s detestation and terror of male violence.” [p. 27]
The Brute is represented by that big, fat, white trash dude in quasi-Klan gear who’s just polished off a lot of Bud before going to town on his victim. Levine describes this subtype as “the ogre under that bridge, and his weapon is real: rape. Representing predatory, rapacious, implacable, and misogynistic sexuality, the Brute embodies what every man could do to every woman, and crucial to his efficacy as a terrorist is his penchant for disguise.” [p. 136] Those men surrounding the Brute represent another subtype, the Killer. This guy is the technocrat who avoids empathy in favor of realpolitiks, i.e., downplaying feminine characteristics in favor of masculine ones. Violence is always an abstraction, a matter of rationality. It’s as if Karns used this stuff for a script: Capitalists, not wanting to get their hands dirty, are using a loutish workingman — plying him with cheap beer — to rape a woman in service of their plutocracy. In other words, capitalism rests on a big fat underbelly of structural violence (violence that’s written into the system), and that violence is rape. If you’ve spent any time reading feminist critiques of pop culture on the web, you’ll know that the term for this emboldened allegorical message is ‘rape culture.’ Quoting Susan Brownmiller, Levine notes how sexual violence is conjoined with keeping the peace: “Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”
From Fukitor 6, “Dick: Vice Squad”
Phallogocentric laws require like-minded law enforcement, and Detective Dick is rape culture’s perfect policeman — a renegade who won’t go soft on crime, which is analogized to womanhood. He is also an example of another subtype, the appropriately titled Prick. He is “imperious, self-centered and self-satisfied, puffed up and truculent.” Dick’s the walking embodiment of the phallus, i.e., “masculine authority, power, patriarchal law and language; [depending] for its reputation on not being seen.” [p. 160] His eyes are behind shades, so he can see you, while you can’t exactly return his look. According to Laura Mulvey, the stereotypically masculine role is to do the defining, the feminine is to be defined: “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly.” To reverse the gaze, to see through those shades, is to possibly see the phallus as a flaccid, impotent penis (smaller than you think, like the man behind the curtain in Oz). Thus, “[a]ccording to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification.” The Prick has to keep up appearances of being hard. One way of doing this is pretty common throughout Fukitor, such as in the present example or the “Green Hellion” page above, namely use a weapon as the phallus, making violence the signifier of hardness, of masculinity. I don’t much see a difference in Karns’ treatment and the feminist message of, for example, Sue Cole’s “President Raygun Takes a Hot Bath”:
Both take pleasure through humorous depiction of overcompensating macho violence. In showing the Prick for what he is, “humor is the great deflator.” [p. 165] The message behind “Dick: Vice Squad” cannot reasonably be equated with Dirty Harry’s expressed anxiety towards San Francisco’s feminized, liberal bureaucracy when the hero’s success at dealing with hostage situations tends to look like this:
In the same issue, Karns satirizes another prominent area of phallogocentric domination, the objective world of science. Rather than the image of a rationally disinterested observer that feminists such as Luce Irigaray have questioned, the scientific explorers of “Buttraping Bat-Apes on Pluto” are bullheaded and driven by petty jealousy and selfishness:
Being petulant children, they require a mothering figure. Instead of the Beast, these fellows fit the stereotype of the Mama’s Boy (a member of the Infant class). Levine describes it as, “women trade stories of manipulating and being manipulated by, doing for and being done in by their big male bundles of needs, demands, and expectations. Yet women are exasperatingly eager to take the rap for these bad boys: if men are babies, guess whose fault it is?” [p. 32] The men, because of their cocksure nature and obstinate refusal to listen to the woman, are systematically dismantled in the fashion suggested by the story’s title. But she has her day, avenging her fallen colleagues:
Thus, the woman becomes the hero only after slaughtering the butt-raping primates, chaining the masculine spoils around her neck. This image is a more comically violent interpretation of Martha Nochimson’s feminist critique of Kathryn Bigelow’s meteoric rise in Hollywood power circles with Hurt Locker. Referring to her as the “transvestite of directors,” Nochimson wrote, “[l]ooks to me like she’s masquerading as the baddest boy on the block to win the respect of an industry still so hobbled by gender-specific tunnel vision that it has trouble admiring anything but filmmaking soaked in a reduced notion of masculinity.” The director, like the female scientist, appropriates phallic power by dressing herself in it. Although Karns isn’t necessarily criticizing his character’s actions.
I could keep going with examples (such as Karns’ twist on the James Bond spy as a werewolf, a swaggering poonhound that he reduces – recalling Twilight‘s Jacob — to a lapdog), but that’s enough. Either the reader will buy it at this point or never will. A comic that can be read so effortlessly as radical feminist stereotypes of masculinity in pop culture suggests something other than a straightforward support of white male privilege. If Karns had done all this in prose form, it would read something like talking points from Valerie Solanas’ hilarious SCUM Manifesto:
The male is completely egocentric, trapped inside himself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others, or love, friendship, affection of tenderness. […] His responses are entirely visceral, not cerebral; his intelligence is a mere tool in the services of his drives and needs; he is incapable of mental passion, mental interaction; he can’t relate to anything other than his own physical sensations. […] He is trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans and apes, and is far worse off than the apes because, unlike the apes, he is capable of a large array of negative feelings — hate, jealousy, contempt, disgust, guilt, shame, doubt — and moreover, he is aware of what he is and what he isn’t. […] To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo. It’s often said that men use women. Use them for what? Surely not pleasure. […]
His greatest need is to be guided, sheltered, protected and admired by Mama (men expect women to adore what men shrink from in horror — themselves) and, being completely physical, he yearns to spend his time (that’s not spent `out in the world’ grimly defending against his passivity) wallowing in basic animal activities — eating, sleeping, shitting, relaxing and being soothed by Mama. Passive, rattle-headed Daddy’s Girl, ever eager for approval, for a pat on the head, for the `respect’ if any passing piece of garbage, is easily reduced to Mama, mindless ministrator to physical needs, soother of the weary, apey brow, booster of the tiny ego, appreciator of the contemptible, a hot water bottle with tits.
Fukitor takes enough pleasure in puncturing and dicing up men, mocking and castrating phallic power, to qualify as an auxiliary work in service to the Society for Cutting Up Men: “[T]he Men’s Auxiliary are those men who are working diligently to eliminate themselves, men who, regardless of their motives, do good, men who are playing ball with SCUM.” One doesn’t have to agree with the message being delivered to find something enjoyable or worthwhile here. Regarding Solanas’ appeal to some feminists, Levine writes, ”a kind of lunatic nihilism helped burn over the old assumptions, clearing space for constructive revolutionary ideas.” Quoting Vivian Gornick: “The first time a woman said, ‘Cut it off!’ it was great. You never dreamed for a minute she meant it. It was the announcing: we are no longer afraid to say the unsayable.” [p. 216] Appreciating Solanas doesn’t make a woman into the nightmare a Men’s Rights Advocate has every time he hears a Loreena Bobbitt joke. Likewise, enjoying Fukitor doesn’t commit one to supporting whatever views that are expressed therein. As alluded to above, it’s a fairly simplistic view of how belief systems work in the minds of racists, gun rights advocates, chauvinists, paleoconservatives, the pro-war contingent, or whomever else might be represented within Karns’ aesthetic to believe he’s merely giving voice to how they feel about themselves. Nevertheless, even if one takes the comic as a straightforward depiction of a troubled psyche’s bigoted worldview rather than (as I’ve been arguing) the intentional use of such a worldview for comical purposes, one could still laugh at it by treating it as if it’s as worthy of serious reflection as one of Phelps’ signs.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
References:
Echols, Alice (1989) Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975. University of Minnesota Press.
Levine, Judith (1992) My Enemy, My Love: Man-hating and Ambivalence in Women’s Lives. Doubleday.
So, a few comments:
First, Andrea Dworkin was adamantly opposed to the idea that women were naturally superior to men. She compared people who thought women were better than men to Nazis, and said they betrayed feminism, which she saw as a fight for radical gender equality.
Second, you don’t really deal here with the issues that were brought up in the thread about Karns, which were related to racism, not sexism. In particular, you don’t really address the fact that Karns, in defending himself, argued that his representations of Muslims were accurate. That seems like it puts considerable pressure on your argument that the comic is ironic (you can still read it ironically, I suppose, but it seems like you’d want to take into account that the intention of the creator in this case is in fact avowedly racist, which was Darryl’s point.)
In terms of racism, you seem to be arguing that hyperbolic depictions are undermine themselves. I don’t think that’s true. Karns’ racist depictions aren’t more racist or more hyperbolic than depictions of Japanese during World War II, or than Marston/Peter’s depiction of black Africans as Nazis. Racism isn’t actually based in reality, iconographic or otherwise; as a result, simple hyperbole doesn’t undermine it — it just reproduces it. If you want to parody racism, you have to do more than simply replicating the imagery and ramping it up.
In terms of feminism and Fukitor — I think you make a good case that Karns participates in the anti-establishment default of the underground. However, attacking the patriarchy in the name of anti-establishment bona-fides isn’t necessarily feminist, though it may dovetail with certain feminist interests. In this case, for example, the fever dream about cutting off men’s penises — that’s very much sneering at male/father authority, but it’s doing it in part by using women as parody. The father is all the more ridiculous because he’s attacked by a woman. I think it’s worth pointing out, for example, that the one avowedly feminist author you’ve got up there is not, in fact, interested in pulp pleasures, nor in showing sexy female bodies. The iconography is very different. You don’t deal with that at all, which I think is telling. (You can argue about how effective the feminist image is, but it’s pretty clear it’s trying to do something different than Karns.)
Basically, wanting to castrate the big daddy doesn’t make you feminist unless you are trying to do it in the interest of gender equality. If you’re trying to do it in the interest of just making yourself the new radical violent sexy father — that’s broadly liberal, but it’s not actually feminist. Karns is just an underground cartoonist “tweaking” the establishment. The only way you get him to be feminist is by not really thinking through the context, and assuming that radicalism equals feminism, which it really doesn’t, necessarily.
Tania Modleski’s “Feminism Without Women” seems appropriate here. So does Andrea Dworkin’s “Right Wing Women”, which explains at length why radicalism and feminism aren’t necessarily the same thing.
This is a weird argument, though I don’t know the context (Fukitor looks pretty funny though). The Onion makes fun of newspapers, so pious jerks who want to police journalistic integrity on Fox should get over it?
And also, The Onion is inherently critiquing through satire the same thing that Democracy Now (or pick your leftist news outlet target of choice) is critiquing, so Democracy Now can stop whining, but, by the way, Democracy Now is just as dumb as Fox, so there. Is that it?
Question re: the capitalist sacrifice image from Fukitor 5:
You claim repeatedly Karns is attacking capitalism/patriarchy as a form of rape by depicting the Brute/Executioner having sex with a woman while businessmen await to stab her. All well and good as an interpretation, but how does this square away with Karns’ depiction of the woman herself?
It’s barely noticeable, what with her being cropped out of most of the image (is this the full pinup?), but what we see of her–legs wrapped around the Brute’s torso, licking her lips, her hands squeezing her breasts–seems more like Karns is implying the woman is a willing participant in the whole deal. If such is the case, this actually undermines the notion of this image as “capitalism=patriarchy=rape=bad.” If the reading is intended to be the woman is coerced/manipulated by the system around her into becoming a sacrifice on the altar of rape culture, it’s not apparent in either the artwork itself or your analysis of it, and instead just seems like cheap titillation (with an undercurrent of “she really wanted it” apologia)in the form of “underground,” “radical” comic book art.
I’m not so sure that the Westboro Christian family is impossible to get through to in any way. Some people left it and that may have had something to do with a lot of the outsiders who came to interview them. Louis Theroux did a far better job interviewing them than anyone else I saw. He did a follow up documentary where he interviewed one of the daughters who had left the family inbetween his 2 documentaries; I’d like to think his genuinely curious and quietly questioning manner was a factor in her leaving.
Last night I saw the first part of a Stephen Fry 2 part documentary about homophobia. It was good and he was very brave to go to interview serious homophobes in africa and america. He talked about the utter strangeness of the logic of homophobes, how in africa especially they make up all these bizarre consequences of being gay; how they focus on anal sex obsessively while Fry claims that sodomy is a far bigger heterosexual activity than it has ever been a gay one, yet the homophobes never seem that interested in stopping male on female sodomy.
The show was sad in a lot of ways but also very hopeful and I hope it doesnt just stay in the uk.
I’m getting a bit worried about whenever I go to sites about comics, videogames and books; there is so much discussion of controversy regardless of how interesting the source of the controversy is.
I’m annoyed at how controversy alone has made that Miley Cyrus thing the cultural event of the year.
Mark Millar is a very savvy self-promoter and I actually think when he says something controversial that he very possibly calculates it. I think when he claimed that Kick Ass was a feminist film, he knew that some *cough*fools would go see it and discuss it extensively on the internet and people would join in to give their version on the matter.
And I see some talk that Disney might be smartly ignoring that film about Disneyland because a suing controversy might inflate the fame of the film.
It is as if our culture is getting decided by crowds following the biggest noise. Would it really be so irresponsible if we just ignored these things? I saw Sarah Horrocks talk about her fatigue of all this because so few of the discussion are about interesting things.
I dont have an opinion on Karns/Fukitor because I’m not interested enough to think about it.
This was a hard read, Charles. To put it very mildly, I disagree with pretty much everything you wrote.
On the most basic level, I just want to echo what others have already said and make it clear that just because something is RIPE for feminist criticism doesn’t make it feminist. There’s a reason these criticisms exist in the first place, after all. Drawing a bunch of burly, white men torturing “whores” who resist at first and then give in to the pleasures of rape isn’t progressive.
It’s perverse and counterproductive to defend these racist, cruel, and misogynistic comics as secretly, cleverly feminist. I didn’t get into any discussion of the misogynistic elements of Karns’ work when I was arguing with him, because he was already having trouble getting his head around the concept of racism. You seem smarter than Karns, Charles, so it’s hard for me to understand how these comics read to you as liberal and feminist. Karns set out, by his own admission, to write straightforward action comics. Santorno, in advertising the comics, said, “Karns is not trying to do a throwback style or appropriate “bad comics” in order to make some sort of art comic. This is the real deal.” Noted racial and feminist scholar Ben Marra described Karns’ comics as “raw” and “amazing.” Karns himself goes out of his way to make it clear that he just wants to draw AWESOME COMIXXX, BRO.
Given all of that, how the fuck are you trying to make a case for feminism in these comics? Noah made a nice set of academic counterpoints to you above, but I’m going to ask you on a more basic level – what the fuck? Try selling these comics as feminist or progressive to someone who’s actually been through trauma, or to someone whose race is being caricatured as subhuman. It’s laughable. Karns is, charitably, a racist idiot. His work is the vomited lovechild of EC Horror, Joe Sacco, and Team America (with more than a little Limbaugh thrown in for good measure.) You say, with a seemingly straight face, “a comic that can be read so effortlessly as radical feminist stereotypes of masculinity in pop culture suggests something other than a straightforward support of white male privilege.” Could you see how, potentially, the fact that this comic reads like the worst white male power fantasies could be because it IS, actually, a horrible white male power fantasy?
Feminism isn’t a woman cutting off a man’s penis. Feminism isn’t showing really gross men raping women. Feminism isn’t showing white male demigods massacring gibbering ‘others.’ Karns draws action/horror stories, and Karns says so himself. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say that Karns would absolutely refuse to classify any of his work as feminist. Karns means to offend, and Karns is a white man writing violent power fantasies for other white men to enjoy.
I’d like to remind you of a couple things Karns has written. First, above the image I linked to when I was giving an example of his racism, Karns wrote:
“Update – 9/2/13 – Orders have gone waaayyy up since some people started bitching about this imagery. Thank you. Please, keep bitching.”
A couple days later, he updated his blog with this:
“I make fun of terrorists in the new issue. There’s been a lot of shit-talk online about it.
In issue #7, I made fun of nazis.
Below are some samples.
I await the large group of supporters of cartoon nazis to come out of the woodwork with their accusations, name-calling, and college essays on why this is racist towards Germans.
(At least, I hope so. Because it just means more sales.)”
Click through if you want to see the samples (spoiler alert: burly Nazis are raping skinny, sexualized, white “whores!”)
The one comment on that post reads, “Anything that offends a sententious windbag like Darryl Ayo can’t be all bad.”
Well, as a sententious windbag myself, here’s my take on the whole thing:
Fuck. This. Racist. And. Sexist. Garbage. And fuck the idea that it’s secretly good and progressive, because that’s garbage too.
To add something I forgot to put in my comment, I think artists can get a depressing amount of recognition by saying (through their work or by communicating otherwise) “Hey! Look at me, I’m a bit racist and maybe you can tell me how questionable my depiction of women is.”
That is the problem with irony. When a person something sarcastic, that person expects you to know what they really mean.
The Kams guy is basically Howard Stern– he’s baiting all the sensitive new-age sissies, right Charles? That’s not feminist by a long shot, but it’s possibly innocuous vulgar provocation.
Not this shit again … Karns and Johnny Ryan are really the least interesting comic makers i can think of. I think that’s why they are trying so hard to be ‘controversial’ , otherwise no one would even look at their comics again.
I see what you mean about laughing at Fred Phelps’ beliefs, but I think it’s a mistake to see it that way. He’s not just some laughable fringe figure. He speaks for a lot of people, or at the very least his viewpoint is related to a widespread one. His endurance as a cultural figure speaks to that and so does the endless parade of viral posts about “look what they did across the street from the WBC!” I’m from Kansas, and trust me, not much makes it out of there, so something about Fred Phelps’ insanity is resonating and repelling people very consistently. In fact I think his enduring appeal and notoriety is very much related to our ability to laugh him off; to say that we as a society are not homophobic and that crazies like Phelps are the true face of homophobia. Laughing Phelps off is a way of avoiding the issue. It’s not that his viewpoint in itself is worthy of reflection. It’s not. It’s that we should examine ourselves when we see racism, sexism and homophobia in pure forms, not assume that we could never be implicated in them and that we can just laugh at the poor deluded souls who buy into them. I hope someday we make it that far, but for now, laughing at Phelps and assuming that his words have no purchase are nothing less than a way of shoring up societal homophobia and ignoring the very real pain inflicted not just by Phelps and co., but by society as a whole. Relate this to Karns as you will, but Phelps is a clearer example of the homophobic bogeyman who lets us all be enlightened tolerant people by comparison.
I’ll second Robert’s recommendation of Louis Theroux’s two documentaries about the Westboro church. He barely managed to get any time talking to Phelps, who comes off as a real arsehole even independently of his, uh, controversial views and tactics; but Theroux’s interactions with the rest of the church are fascinating. There’s this crazy, absolutely nuts, cognitive dissonance between how friendly and warm they are to him, and their explicit theological and eschatological beliefs about him, viz. that he’s a pawn of satan, promoting a fag-loving world order, and thus doomed to eternal hellfire. (And their affability isn’t because they hope he can still be saved, I don’t think)
I dunno, I figure that if I genuinely thought that about someone, I wouldn’t feel much like palling around with him. Oh hey, Hitler, good to see you man, pull up a chair and grab a drink
A couple of years ago, I invested a huge amount of time in watching every Louis Theroux documentary I could find on YouTube. Besides the Phelps one, he’s done some great stuff about militia members, white supremacists, black supremacists, the porn industry, Philadelphia gangs and prostitutes–just about every weird subculture you can think of. It’s amazing how he’s able to befriend some of these people, whom he genuinely seems to like and vice-versa. His friendship with one anti-government militia guy, whom he leaves with the words, “Please don’t do anything silly,” was particularly touching. My impression is that he’s a big star in England but virtually unknown in America, even though all of his documentaries are about us.
I’m not sure I would say he was a star, but he was very well known a couple of years ago but his documentaries come out less frequently now so he’s a bit less famous.
He comes from a fairly famous Theroux family. Father Paul is a writer, brother Marcel is a writer, uncles Alexander and Peter are writers but cousin Justin Theroux is an actor in the more recent David Lynch films.
For me the most memorable Theroux documentaries are the pedophile rehab hospital one and the infuriating one about that bastard who had a christian cult under his control and had torn families apart; I just thought there’s got to be a way they can get that guy in jail but it seemed utterly hopeless. Especially when he raped his son’s wife and said that god made him do it. I wish there was a hell for that guy to burn in.
Somehow I cant find the listing of what episode the one of the religious cult with the father who rapes his son’s wife. Bizarrely I cant even find mention of this on his site. I’m certain I saw this.
Justin Theroux is probably most famous for his role as Jennifer Anniston’s boyfriend.
I agree with Jacob that this was a really hard read. I agree with Noah, Jacob and Emily’s critiques, and Robert’s exasperation that we’re even arguing about this. I don’t feel like Fukitor was baiting ‘sensitive new age wussies’ or whatever nearly as much as this defense of Fukitor. Karns work is very transparently taking pleasure in the offensive power fantasies that the quoted feminists are trying to deconstruct– how does this in any way make it seem like he was writing from their ‘script?’ It’s gross, and it grosses me out to see intelligent people elevate it in favor of their own illusion of bad-assery.
Noah,
While true equality is opposed to bigotry, dreams of equality aren’t always. If Dworkin believes in “radical equality” (whatever that’s supposed to mean: more equal than equal?) only when everyone stops acting “masculine,” that is, I’ll concede, a dream of equality, but her hatred of masculinity is clear enough:
At least the stupid, hateful shit in Fukitor is intended as a joke.
As for why I didn’t more directly address racism. Racism and misogyny are regularly conjoined in the discussion: Jacob does it when speaking of his “agenda”; Heidi does it, too, in her commentary that was this roundtable’s impetus. I figured that’s a common enough conjoining to not have to explain it, since it’s rare to see white male power that’s either assumed to be just white or just male. It’s suggested by the comic itself. That is, the comic takes place within the white macho chauvinist world of something like True Lies with its villains, the Crimson Jihad, who also gibberish. I agree that these are racist stereotypes, but the comic takes them a lot less seriously than most of the movies it’s mocking. James Cameron just couldn’t be bothered to do any research; Karns intentionally can’t be bothered because that’s part of the joke. My idea was something like this: the sexism and racism are coming out of the same mindset; Fukitor mocks that mindset, as shown by the way he plays up feminist caricatures of masculinity for the basis of that mindset; therefore, the use of racist caricatures is also being mocked and not intended to reflect the views of the model reader. Maybe the detractors would take his junk German and silly scientific jargon equally serious (they’d have to, it seems, if they’re committed to this book being a straightforward depiction — maybe someone could address why his treatment of Germans is different). I take none of this seriously, because the book is sufficiently ludicrous on all levels.
Do hyperbolical depictions undermine themselves? Yes, they will unless you yourself have issues and minus any other context. Karns clearly doesn’t take these images seriously, since his American heroes are hardly part of the propaganda campaign that went along with grotesque depictions of the Japanese. His treatment of the heroes should be a clue as to how the other stuff is intended (it would be the “something more” that you say is needed for parody — I give examples, such as the hostages that Dick is getting killed due to his own macho cluelessness, so feel free to deal with them). It should be noted that the look of his non-white characters aren’t any sillier than his white characters. The supposed problem all has to do with their phony language and having them get slaughtered.
I’m not sure why only one of the women I mentioned is an avowed feminist, or what you mean by that. They’re all feminists. And I don’t know what you mean by different iconography. But I don’t think Fukitor is feminist, only that, by its use of the same hyperbolical expressions of masculinity as what exists in the nightmares of feminist extremists, you should read a comedic intent. But if you share the same cartoonish view of men (I mean regarding other men, not yourself, of course) — e.g., that’s just the way soldiers are — this would make it hard to see that Karns is joking.
Andrew,
You actually provide a counter-reading to what I suggest above, so thanks. Yep it’s the full pinup. I agree that I should’ve covered that and I agree that it’s ambivalent. The image can be read as both titillating for the woman and as if she’s being used as a tool for the system. I don’t think either of these readings take precedent. In place of your conclusion that her potential enjoyment undermines the “capitalism=patriarchy=rape=bad” message, one might also read that people learn to love their oppression. Some people willingly give themselves over to sacrifice. It starts to feel a bit silly talking about this comic like that. It is exploitation, after all. For example, all the women are Russ Meyer types. The whole comic both takes enjoyment out of its imagery at the same time that it mocks what’s being shown.
Robert,
You have a different memory of the Theroux doc than I. It pretty much exists to show how superior Theroux is to the family. It’s funny and entertaining, yes, but definitely looking down on the family. The movie on Netflix is a less condescending presentation, even though it’s not hard to figure out the viewpoint of the filmmakers. Both of Theroux’s docs can be seen on YouTube.
Thanks to everyone for responding even if you loathed reading it. I’m out of time, but I’ll be back to comment on what I couldn’t get to this go round.
Jeez, I just watched Theroux’s second Phelps documentary, and I thought it really humanized those people despite their horrible beliefs, which is kind of his specialty. In one scene, a beautiful teenage Phelps girl shows off a photo she took of an “adorable Muslim boy” while her family was picketing a Muslim funeral. At another point, a little boy says something like, “The Bible says they’re fags, so you can just shut up!” Theroux says, “Did you just tell me to shut up?” and the boy immediately responds, “Oh, I’m sorry!” as if mortified by his rudeness. It’s like these kids have strong moral impulses that are trying to break free from their programming.
When I was looking through all these episodes of his shows, I saw a lot of opinions about him, I was amazed to see how many people didnt like him, but a lot of those people were calling him a “pussy” or saying he was too sympathetic to some groups and I think some people felt threatened by his questions. There were some who thought he exploits his subjects and makes them look bad, but I’ve always found him totally sincere, never acting superior; if many of his subjects look bad or weird to people, I just think they get those reactions because they are incredibly unusual people and there isnt much he can do about them seeming so odd.
“Tee cow dow now tong dee.”
Do I even have to say anything more?
Scott, no fucking kidding.
Charles, you assert that hyperbole undermines racist representations. That’s just an assertion. It’s based on nothing. Karns says himself that his racist representations are accurate. Yet you refuse to engage with that context. Why? The Jungle Imp is about as extreme a blackface caricature as you can get; it is not parodying racism.
Dworkin’s talking about masculinity as an ideology, pretty clearly. She’s not advocating hatred of men.
And again; mocking the patriarchy absent actual feminist commitments just isn’t necessarily feminist. All the underground guys make fun of the Man. That’s in the interest of being cooler/hipper/more transgressive, i.e., bigger dicked than the man himself. Showing the Man’s Women being defiled isn’t in the interest of those women. Crumb isn’t a radical feminist.
I also dispute your claim that you don’t take the material seriously. I’m not sure what that means in this context, but you’ve spent a lot of words and a lot of thought defending it. I think the claim that you take it as a joke seems just like a rhetorical maneuver to make yourself seem even more serious/thoughtful/adult than the folks who are taking it seriously. It mimics Karns’ tactics; hyperbolic “humor” in the interest of tearing down the man/showing he’s above it all. Humor in this context isn’t transgressive or a destruction of idols; it’s just a way to elevate the humorist as deity.
Emily,
Your suggestion that we all reflect on ourselves when confronted by Phelps’ bigotry sounds nice enough, but I’m not buying it. What issue are we avoiding by laughing at him? What, for example, have you learned about your own responsibility for or potential implication in his bigotry? I haven’t learned shit from him, nor do I take responsibility for him, nor do I feel implicated in his stupidity. He’s an idiot and anyone who agrees with him is an idiot. I think his signs are funny, but that doesn’t mean I’m laughing at the targets, just the person who thought these signs were worth making.
Bert and Kailyn,
I don’t think Karns or my defense is any more baiting new age sissies than the accusations of bigotry were baiting potential fans of the comic or Karns himself. If you disagree with someone and are doing it in public, then this could always be called baiting. You two just did it to me. See how that works? I think the comic is funny and have enjoyed what I’ve seen, thus I share some of his humor (probably because we share many of the same references). I don’t ideologically agree with the characters being depicted and the way they see things. This is really not a problem for me, separating comical depictions of terror from the real thing. I don’t like women getting run over by vigilante cops or soldiers eating Vietnamese intestines. Others seem to have a problem reading humorous intent, so I attempted to suggest why this isn’t merely a matter of bigotry being transmitted and some of us favorably receiving it.
Robert (again),
I meant to say I agree with your general sentiment regarding obnoxiousness and the rise of shit culture. On the one hand, I discovered Fukitor because of a ridiculous controversy, and liked it. On the other, I’d gladly give up that experience if people would never discuss stuff like Miley Cyrus.
Jacob,
As I said to Noah, Fukitor isn’t feminist. At least, overall. The few places where it does suggest feminism (of the egalitarian type, not the violence is inherently masculine or gender is the master signifier type) is where women are rescuing or avenging men. I didn’t focus on that, since it’s not the prominent treatment in what I read. Instead, I stuck to the use of feminist phantasmagoria.
It also isn’t particularly progressive (nor is a lot of feminism, for that matter — see above or Noah’s beloved Wonder Woman). I think its purpose is to revel in and make fun of certain types of generic diegeses. It’s not a grand ambition, to be sure, but as a fan of some of the same stuff, I think it’s funny. And it does serve as an ironic critique of that enjoyment, too, which is progressive over many of the films (since they actually play this offensive stuff straight, as something to identify with).
“Could you see how, potentially, the fact that this comic reads like the worst white male power fantasies could be because it IS, actually, a horrible white male power fantasy?”
No, given that he undermines the fantasy by mocking it. Is there a white male who says, yes, this is how I view myself? Clearly, Karns doesn’t think of himself as a racist, since he was arguing with you about your accusation. Not everyone does all that great in an online argument, and Karns definitely didn’t put his best face forward in the confrontation. I give that argument to you. However, I don’t think you’re right. You’ve yet to deal with one thing that Karns himself brought up: he makes all of his heroic figures into idiots. That should make identification somewhat dubious. Why would he do this if he’s promoting the bigoted worldview?
Noah (again),
Regarding hyperbolical representations undermining themselves, you might not accept that fallacious reasoning undermines an argument. Yet, such an argument is undermined regardless of your acceptance. The same is true of racist depictions. Whether someone acknowledges racism as a false or stupid set of beliefs, it still is. Once again, the caricatures are occurring within a borrowed diegetic space. It’s both an appreciation and a mocking of certain types of films that did use racist caricatures. It doesn’t, however, play them straight as can be seen by how heroic victory is achieved. This is true, regardless of whether you acknowledge it.
Your defense of Dworkin is pretty facile. Replace ‘men’ with ‘black’ or ‘homosexual’. “She doesn’t hate blacks, just their ideology.” “If the blacks started to behave with less blackness, post-blackness, then the world would be better.” The notion that men have an ideology called masculinity, which is responsible for pretty much all the evil in the world is about as clear an expression of bigoted hatred as one can get (aside from just saying “I hate group X”). Jesus. She, like Phelps, only deserves our ridicule.
“I also dispute your claim that you don’t take the material seriously.”
Eh? I take the accusation of racism seriously, just not his use of racist stereotypes as a serious reflection of his own or his model reader’s bigotry. Thus, I seriously defended it in response to the serious accusation.
Has anyone read Dan Clowes’ story ‘Gynecology’? It features an artist who paints the most clichéd, grotesque racial caricatures under the guise of postmodern irony — to great commercial and critical success.
Charles, fallacious reasoning and racist iconography share some things in common, but they aren’t the same. Racist iconography isn’t an argument; it’s an appeal to emotion and prejudice. Hyperbole is not an effective way to deal with that, as Karns, Crumb, and really the entire history extremely hyperbolic racist iconography demonstrates.
Oh, and nobody thinks of themselves as racist. Not you, not Karns, not anyone, just about. Yet Karns said that his hyperbolic descriptions of evil Muslims was based in reality. That’s racist, no matter how you contextualize it.
Refusing to think of racism as a continuum leaves you defending a racist work in a really tortured and convoluted matter, not despite its racism, but almost because of it. I think that’s fairly strong evidence that Emily’s onto something.
Oh, and I don’t think Dworkin believes that it’s individual men who have that ideology; certainly not all individual men. She’s saying masculinity is an ideology which anyone, of any gender, can accept or reject. It’s like condemning black nationalism more than it’s like condemning blacks for all having a particular ideology of blackness.
Again, she actually says that she strongly rejects the ideology of folks who think that women are somehow inherently superior. She calls them Nazis.
Dworkin’s complicated, and I disagree with a lot of what she says. But comparing her to Phelps doesn’t seem very thoughtful to me.
Not sure if it’s worth it to start tossing around Dworkin quotes, but it seems a bit premature to say that her condemnation is simply of “the system” — patriarchy as an ideology to which anyone can fall prey and that anyone can reject (like any system of thought).
Indeed, part of Dworkin’s fame (or infamy) comes from her willingness to make blanket condemnations of men, saying (for instance) that every women’s son is her potential betrayer and an “inevitable” oppressor and rapist of other women. Often there seems to be no outside to the system, from which one can accept or reject this role, just as Dworkin equally challenges whether women can ever fully consent, within patriarchy, to sexual activity, to “partnership,” to the law, to anything.
The oppression/ideology is bred in the bone and is even formally indistinguishable from the body itself: “Physically, the woman in intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal territory occupied literally: occupied even if there has been no resistance, no force; even if the occupied person said yes please, yes hurry, yes more.”
I know that her views evolved somewhat since the 1970s, but these earlier, more influential arguments are the those that impel most people — critics or supporters — to cite her. It is what most mean when they say “Dworkin,” right?
Yeah; fair enough. She’s always rhetorically extreme (even when condemning other feminists as Nazis for thinking men are innately inferior.)
There does often seem no outside to the system. At the same time, she does I think pretty consistently have a vision of a utopia without unequal power relationships,and that’s a utopia for both men and women.
I’m not saying she shouldn’t be criticized. I don’t agree with her views on porn; I think her investment in false consciousness is ultimately self-defeating; her insistence on constantly claiming the victim role is tiresome and again leads down blind alleys. Charles is saying (as I understand it) that her work is entirely worthless and that she should be taken no more seriously than the Westboro folks. I don’t agree with that. Whatever her problems, her analysis of women’s oppression is often very smart, and her insistence that that oppression is systemic and not (as Charles would have it?) the product merely of individual evil choices is valuable. That is, erasing individual choice entirely in terms of sexism is problematic, but I think seeing it as entirely about individual choice is wrong too. Being a man does mean having a particular relationship to power, which it’s difficult to disavow. Masculinity really is tied into sexism in complicated ways. Dworkin has a lot to say about those issues, and I think her discussion of them is more enlightening that the Westboro Baptist’s assertion that gay people are going to hell.
The above said, I wonder about whether you, Charles, can imagine any limit-cases to your own argument.
For example, in the work by Karns, we see pornified women raped and killed by zombies, pornified women raped and killed by satanists, pornified women raped and killed by businessmen, and pornified women raped and killed by Nazis.
At what point might one reasonably argue that — in spite of the artist’s admittedly parody representations of the male attackers — the real point of these comics is the fun one can have drawing pornified raped and dismembered women?
Noah, regarding your comments about Dworkin above, I completely agree.
The trio of Kams, Dworkin, and Phelps is an interesting one. Both Phelps and Dworkin seem to have unambiguous political commitments, and, despite their distinctiveness, Charles wants to make the rather banal point that extremists, no matter what their commitments, are similar in their extremism. Charles and everyone else then want to make claims about the political commitments of Fukitor– whose apparent extremism is clearly satirical.
The modern hero is the satirist, from Cervantes, Voltaire, and Swift, to any hack who wants to draw pickaninny Hottentots or Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. Is Kams exercising his rapier wit against Phelps? Against Dworkin? Or perhaps just anyone too uptight to not enjoy sadistic imagery?
It’s pretty unconvincing to just stop at the claim that all three figures are equivalent, simply by virtue of being (that ’90s marketing juggernaut) EXTREME!!!!! But if Charles wanted to make a claim that sadism has a role in politics as well as in art, and then try to figure out when that deployment is morally and/or aesthetically worthwhile or successful, that might be interesting. To me.
This is maybe off to the side — but I was just thinking that Dworkin is kind of similar to Malcolm X as a figure in some ways. Very smart things to say about the functioning of oppression coupled with extreme rhetoric against oppressors which often seems to make the oppressors biologically evil (albeit with numerous caveats and possible changes in thinking over time.)
Do you see Malcolm X as innately ridiculous Charles? Or is Karns more thoughtful than both Malcolm X and Dworkin because he’s a humorist?
Noah,
Yeah, you read me right on Dworkin, but I was being hyperbolical, thinking only of her misandry, not the fact that quite a lot of radicals will say a lot of stupid shit while also having something worthwhile in their discourse (broken clocks …). That’s true of Malcolm X and it’s true of Dworkin. Is it true of Phelps? The guy has a law degree — not that plenty of lawyers aren’t capable of being wrong quite regularly (see Catherine MacKinnon), but he’s probably capable of analyzing reality in some way that’s more thorough than what we witness in these docs. But I wonder if Dworkin ever rejected so much of her earlier bigotry in the way Malcolm X did. And, in terms of having any actual influence on changing things for the worse, Dworkin has had more of an impact than Phelps (the former had a hand in censorious laws).
Karns, however, is different from the whole bunch because he’s not proposing a trenchant commentary on society, but playing around within certain generic fictional domains. Being confused about that is what made for l’affaire Fukitor in the first place.
Peter,
It is exploitation, so any double take on its content that the comic might suggest of itself also rests on the original take, which does include the sexual violence. Exploitation always walks that transgressive line for those among its audience who aren’t psychopaths and who still enjoy this questionable material. ‘Transgression’ is just the synonym that makes ‘exploitation’ more respectable and comfortable — nothing in Karns is any where as awful as De Sade or Bataille. At what point in their fiction does it come down to enjoying really horrifying porn? That’s certainly an element, I’ll grant you, but Fukitor is hardly a straightforward argument to think and act like his characters. It’s much more mocking in tone, than 120 Days. Maybe Fukitor needs its own Barthes.
Bert,
Is Karns any more objectionable than Extreme Metal? Maybe you think your enjoyment of the latter is somehow more excusable than my enjoyment of the former, so why? Karns is a lot less serious about his content than Mayhem or most black metallers. He’s more like the Black Satans, having a love for the objectionable material while also capable of making fun of it.
Bert said he thought Karns looked interesting/possibly enjoyable. He’s not questioning your enjoyment of it. He’s questioning why that enjoyment seems so wrapped up in denying Karns’ racism and sexism, and insulting those who find that racism and sexism offputting.
“Karns, however, is different from the whole bunch because he’s not proposing a trenchant commentary on society, but playing around within certain generic fictional domains”
Generic, yes. Not trying to comment on society — I don’t buy that. Karns is firmly in the underground meme of sticking it to the man. That’s a commentary on society, albeit not a very trenchant one. He’s not very thoughtful, but I don’t know why that makes him superior to the other folks you talk about.
Missed this:
Noah,
Racist iconography only works when it’s translated into beliefs of some sort. If one doesn’t link the particular pic up to a group of people and assume that the pic somehow depicts the behavior or characteristics of that group, then the pic will have no effect. That’s just another way of saying it requires some of sort of cognitive/reasoning process, which requires fallacious reasoning in the case of false generalization.
And it’s always telling that people never include themselves when making statements like “nobody thinks of themselves as racist. Not you, not Karns, not anyone, just about.” This is some of what I was getting at when responding to Emily. She wasn’t really talking about herself being implicated in Phelps bigotry, but implying that others have a lot to learn from it. Why not acknowledge that you believe yourself capable of dealing with something objectionable without being tainted by it? I’d agree. We can laugh at Phelps and we can laugh at Fukitor without really being altered or expressing our beliefs about otherness.
I agree that Karns’ defense was really poorly made and downright contradictory (the terrorists are based in reality, but how do you know they’re supposed to be Muslim, etc.). Regardless, you can still have a distance from the depictions that allows you to see the comedic intent without buying into an actual treatment of really existing Islamic terrrorists. Making a racist joke isn’t necessarily the same as holding a racist view. For example, sometimes the expression of racism is actually a joking stereotype of the person making the racist comment. (Many of my friends and I have recurring jokes based on the conjunction of racism and my Southern heritage.)
I wasn’t aware that I insulted anyone?
I agree that sexism and racism are part of the comic, just not the assertion that the comic is advocating for them.
Re: Dworkin’s bigotry. I think her misandry was always significantly more qualified than Malcolm’s anti-white statements. I don’t know that she changed as much, but I think she started out from a more ambiguous place.
The point about Dworkin’s role in bad laws is well taken. She’s a frustrating figure to admire, there’s no doubt. I read an anthology of hers (Dispatches from the Front, I think) which had an amazing, inspiring, beautiful analysis of violence in Wuthering Heights. Then that was followed by five or six versions of the same boilerplate, misguided article on porn. Then that was followed by the completely unexpected, impassioned piece on the evils of misandry.
I keep saying this, but…Karns said his depictions of Muslims were accurate. How is that not racism?
I thought he said his depiction of terrorists was rooted in reality. I didn’t see a comment from him where he accepts that he was reflecting all Muslims.
And where did I insult anyone?
“Why not acknowledge that you believe yourself capable of dealing with something objectionable without being tainted by it? ”
I don’t know that I do, though. That is, if you’re saying, “why not just admit that you’re not tainted by racism” — well, I actually think I am tainted by racism. I wouldn’t say that I’m always and in every way not racist. And I think Emily was in fact saying that she was implicated in Phelps’ bigotry.
The problem with separating yourself from that taint is that it often serves as an excuse to indulge in racism. I was the unfortunate witness to an exchange on twitter where a guy accused an Asian woman of prejudice against white people, and then started spouting deliberate, vicious, racist slurs at her. He didn’t think he was racist. He thought he could use those slurs precisely because he wasn’t racist.
I think the radical insistence on difference here — that is not me in any way, therefore I am not implicated — ends up being not so much a disavowal as an embrace. That’s what happens here, right? You say, I’m not racist, therefore I can enjoy racist imagery without any sense that it might be problematic, and I can even explain to black people why they’re being ridiculous when they think they’re being insulted by this.
Re: hyperbolic imagery. I think your confusion is in believing that there has to be a reality the imagery is referring to or else it’s incomprehensible. Blackface iconography is it’s own history and tradition; you can refer to that tradition without having pretty much anything to do with real black people. The jungle imp doesn’t look like actual black people, it doesn’t have anything to do with actual black people. It’s referencing conventional racist stereotypes. This is the point. Racism is not anchored in reality. It’s a fiction. It’s made up of tropes. And those tropes are paranoid, hyperbolic, and often apocalyptic. Exaggerating the tropes is therefore ineffective; exaggeration is part of the trope. You need to be smarter than that about how you’re using the tropes if you want to undermine them.
“You say, I’m not racist, therefore I can enjoy racist imagery without any sense that it might be problematic, and I can even explain to black people why they’re being ridiculous when they think they’re being insulted by this.”
Was there an Arab who voiced offense in that thread? Seems like it was a bunch of people being offended for others.
I wouldn’t object to any black person not wanting to listen to Emmett Miller, or any other black face performer or many country artists with questionable views. I can also understand why many white people wouldn’t want to listen to Public Enemy or Last Poets. What I’d object to is someone telling me that by enjoying that stuff, I’m simply a racist or hold racist views or don’t take racism seriously. They’re telling me that I’m not capable of distancing myself from it, that such a distance is preposterous or “ridiculous.” Likewise, I’d object to anyone who flat out opposes as immoral any enjoyment of PE based on their ties to bigotry.
To reiterate, I was trying to sort of stick up for you, Charles. “Is Karns any more objectionable than Extreme Metal? Maybe you think your enjoyment of the latter is somehow more excusable than my enjoyment of the former, so why?” Paranoid much?
I don’t think racist black metal is somehow cleverly spoofing racism– neither is Metalocalypse or the Black Satans. I am in fact willing to be troubled by the racist things I like, without pretending they’re not racist, or that I’m not racist. Malcolm X and Andrea Dworkin are not lacking troubling aspects. Neither are Gandhi and Martin Luther King and whomever else we want to sanctify, but speaking for the rights of an oppressed group to take power is morally different from speaking for the rights of an oppressing group to be dickish, The aesthetics of evil are worth discussing, but you’re not really discussing it.
Aesthetic enjoyment doesn’t really have an obvious, direct connection to actual physical/social violence. It’s neither as straightforward as you imagine in your defense of Kams, nor as nonexistent as you imagined in your defense of the Pixies video.
With friends like these …
But if the Black Satans is spoofing black metal and makes it look foolish while using racism (because racism is part of the source), does not that bring into question whether the group is straightforwardly advocating racism? (I don’t know if this even comes up in their songs, but hypothetically ….) I don’t see how that would be “speaking for the rights of an oppressive group to be dickish.”
I’m not sure what you mean in your last ‘graph.
Charles, your arguments continue to be slippery and irritating – I admire Noah’s patience. Although it’s an absolutely bullshit argument to say “Was there an Arab who voiced offense in that thread? Seems like it was a bunch of people being offended for others,” it might please you to know that I’m biracial, with an Iranian immigrant mother who spent the bulk of her childhood in Arab countries. As your designated Ethnic Representative (TM), I hereby give permission for white people to call out racism against My Kind (TM).
I repeat Noah’s point to which I was responding: “I can even explain to black people why they’re being ridiculous when they think they’re being insulted by this.” That is supposedly what I was doing. I wasn’t, which was my point. Anyone should be allowed to speak up about racism when they see, or debate the perception. Opening the argument to all was not the point behind Noah’s rhetorical move. It was meant to pretend like I was lecturing others on their offense, rather than disagreeing with their reading.
You’re doing both, though, aren’t you? Darryl says, this is what racism looks like, in my experience; your response is, that you yourself aren’t racist, and can therefore see that Karns is funny and not racist at all. That “I am not racist” there does a lot of work for you, is what I’m saying. It might be worth thinking about it.
And satire lets everyone feel smug, is more or less my point, to make it succinct.
No, Noah, what I’m saying is that Daryl and Jacob are both ignoring the way the comic paints the supposedly heroic types, so their reading is incorrect. It has nothing to do with Darryl’s experience. Experience can both mislead you and point you down the correct path, but that really had no play in anything I’ve said here. I gave a reason why the worldview depicted isn’t supposed to be taken at face value, which one can argue with or not. The irony presently is that Jacob was arguing against my insistence that only certain identities should be allowed to have an opinion on Fukitor’s offensiveness, when it was actually you pulling out the old “as white man, you shouldn’t be ….”
Anyway, I’m sorry it makes Jacob feel uncomfortable that I disagree with him. Nothing I can do abou that, though.
Bert, I guess, but I’ve lost the train of your thought.
I think white folks can certainly talk about these issues. However, I think it’s probably useful to listen to folks on the receiving end of oppression when they say, “this is what oppression looks like.” You actually acknowledge this by your extended and repeated insistence in posts and comments that racism has nothing to do with you. Why is that necessary? What work is it doing for you? Why do racist statements in our culture so often begin with the disavowal, “I’m not racist, but….”
Darryl and Jacob initially were looking at the Muslim caricature, not the heroic types. The heroic types seems like a distraction. You can make fun of heroes and still present racist caricatures as racist. Why couldn’t you? Crumb does. Angelfood McSpade is meant to parody white people, but it’s also a sexualized, supposedly humorous caricature of black women which is supposed to be exciting/energetic/fun. It dehumanizes black women in the interest of providing a laugh/demonstrating the cool truth telling of the author. Karns, like a good underground drone, just follows Crumb’s script, albeit he’s too dumb to know that he should disavow the racism in public.
We just watched the Theroux documentary on Nazis, in which they all at least admit they’re racist. Problem is, they’re still stupid bigots, but I actually see that as one point in their favor (versus, say, Crumb or Fox News).
Yeah. Hypocrisy does make you less evil in some sense — at least you’re acknowledging that what’s right is right. But on the other hand, honest evil is at least honest.
I often think about John Boswell’s comment that Jesus mentions hypocrisy about fifty times or something and never mentions homosexuality. Hypocrisy is shitty. Which makes it hard to process some right-wing metal. Although I could survive without Graveland, Drudkh, or Burzum, I confess, they really are better than the “acceptable” black metal of Wolves In The Throne Room or Nachtmystium or Xasthur.
So do I say aesthetics somehow transcends politics? No. But I also pay taxes to a government that bombs wedding parties and bails out wealthy shitheads. Things are messy, but going around being too cool to acknowledge the propaganda value of the art you like is boneheaded.
This is a quote in Charles Seife’s _Proofiness_ from a Supreme Court decision ignoring a black defendant’s right to use the Baldus study, a pretty solid proof that Georgia has made death-penalty decisions with significant racist bias: “to prevail under the Equal Protection Clause, McCleskey must prove that the decisionmakers in his case acted with discriminatory purpose. He offers no evidence specific to his own case that would support an inference that racial considerations played a part in his sentence. Instead, he relies solely on the Baldus study.” Putting the onus of proving malicious intent on members of an unambiguously oppressed group, which is sort of a recurring motif in this thread, is at least somewhat gross.
In our sexist society I don’t think there is anything wrong with women as a rule not liking or trusting men. You don’t have treat each member of the the class that oppresses you as a special snowflake you must evaluate on their own merits.
Fuikior does look pretty readable though. Part of me wants to be like is it really any worse than red hood and the outlaws. Because its more explicit? at least the dialogue here is funny, and the art isn’t shit.
Better than red hood and the outlaws is a really, really low bar.
Just looked up RH&O. That is, indeed, a low bar.
Noah,
What I’m getting from your (and Jacob’s, for that matter) approval about white folks talking about bigotry is it’s ok as long as it’s in the affirmative (i.e., “there it is”), but it’s instances in the negative that cause you problems. To me, that’s a problem among left-leaning/wouldbe radical types discussing stuff like this. It’s why such discussions often escalate in who can find the most bigotry somewhere.
I don’t much like Crumb, but I don’t share your offense, either. Is that because you’re more authentically left-wing and genuinely care about social injustice than I or any individual who’s ever argued that Angelfood doesn’t advocate for racism, or is it that maybe some of us still make a use-mention distinction? Furthermore, I think you can approach real advocacy for bigotry in a similar manner — put someone’s bigotry in quotation marks and laugh at it. It’s not just white hipsters at VICE who do this.
Anyway, I’d suggest Fukitor is closer to the TV show Eastbound and Down than Angelfood McSpade. That show follows an obnoxious bigot around, saying obnoxiously bigoted things all in the service of comedy. The target audience enjoys the character, inhabiting his space, even perversely rooting for him, all the while knowing that he’s an idiot. You’d have to be a complete imbecile to unproblematically identify with the lead character, to wholly accept his view of the world he’s inhabiting. This isn’t to deny racism or sexism in the show, just to suggest that their appearance is more of a mention than a use. But I’m betting that I can find an online source calling the show straight up racism or sexism without searching too hard (I haven’t tried).
Bert,
Part of what I’ve been suggesting here is that this kind of stuff makes for sorry propaganda if one is advocating for white male power. Maybe the Aryan Nation could pick a few panels to use (you know, out of context), but I strongly doubt they’d find a whole story to be a view of themselves they’d like to spread.
Charles, with the exception of your first sentence, everything you’ve typed is bullshit.
First, my point was not and is not (evil voice) “white people should only talk about racism when saying something IS racist, that is what is preferential to meeeeeeeee, the partly-ethnic liberal!!” My point IS that, when confronted with something that is OVERTLY RACIST OR SEXIST like Fukitor here, it’s pretty derailing to keep insisting that the racism/sexism is imagined by (pick your favorite: oversensitive liberal whites, easily angered nonwhites, stupid idiots who couldn’t recognize a joke if it up and bit them in the ass).
Second, your flailing use of the use-mention distinction is hilarious. Very convenient to be able to split hairs to such a fine philosophical degree that a racist caricature is (gasp) Not At All What It Seems! Angelfood McSpade is hardly an academic placeholder for the definition of blackface, sorry – those comics contribute to racism as much as any Al Jolson-type.
And I’ve never seen Eastbound and Down, but I’ll use a similar-seeming TV example: All in the Family. Specifically Archie Bunker, America’s Favorite Bigot! I consider Archie Bunker an excellent character, and part of an excellent, satirical show. Why is it not comparable to Fukitor? Because Archie Bunker is a bigot in a largely normal world, which highlights the absurdity of his bigotry. For All in the Family to be more like Fukitor, Archie Bunker would need to be surrounded by gibbering sub-human stereotypes of various nonwhite races, and Edith would need to be a pornstar-looking chronic rape victim. Not exactly a show worth watching, and I hope I don’t have to explain how it would undermine the premise of the show’s satire.
And yeah, I’m SURE you could find an example of someone on the internet getting needlessly and exaggeratedly mad about something that doesn’t deserve it! But the ability to find an extreme example or misapplication of an argument doesn’t invalidate the argument, sorry.
“Part of what I’ve been suggesting here is that this kind of stuff makes for sorry propaganda if one is advocating for white male power. ”
You’re assumming that white male power and the man are synonymous — or more precisely that white male power equals white male conservative traditional establishment power. It doesn’t have to. Liberal radical attacks on white male power can still be themselves invested in white male power; old boss and new boss don’t have to be all that different. Both can, for example, enjoy rape fantasies. Do you think de Sade was a feminist? (There are certainly feminists who have used his text in various ways, but that doesn’t make him a feminist any more than Freud was a feminist.)
Oh, and I think white folks can say, this isn’t really racist; or guys can say this isn’t sexist; I do that with Johnny Ryan, right? My point is that if you do that it behooves you to make some effort to recognize that the folks who are actually affected have legitimate concerns, and not portray them as humorless agenda-pushers. Again, if you said, “I can see how this could be racist/sexist, but I also think there are contexts in which it can be read against itself” I’d still disagree with you, but it would be a somewhat less inflammatory argument.
Otherwise Jacob’s pretty much covered it
Just thought I’d post a link to some of Kara Walker’s work, which uses racial stereotypes in a much more investigative way. Don’t compare Crumb’s Angelfood McSpade to this.
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/kara-walker
Yes! Walker is a great comic artist, and “After the Deluge” is a pretty great comic book — extended field, a la Domingos.
Just saw this sequential mural (only half visible here) at the Milwaukee Art Museum:
http://media.jsonline.com/images/28007169_30_walker.jpg
She did a pop-up book too. http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/rbsc2/ga/unseenhands/collection/F6DSC_0033.jpg
Pingback: The Best Comics From The Rest Of 2015 | Random Thoughts