Another then another story about Caster Semenya. First it was a visual impression and suspicion. Then it was blood tests or whatever. Now it is speculation about Semenya’s internal organs and genitalia. Terribly bitter and mean reporting, all of which sucked the joy out of a fabulously exciting performance in Berlin. My remark here, however, is not about how international governing bodies should deal with sexual identity or what counts as sexual identity and so on. That’s another issue and I’m not sure what to say about it, truthfully. Instead, I’m interested in what it means to be someone other than that governing body looking at bodies like Semenya’s. Read the rest of this entry »
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I saw Wall-E a couple of weeks back. Unlike most, if not all of my friends who saw the movie, I didn’t like it very much. It was of course visually awesome and charming, for the most part, and told a decent enough story. It’s hard to “disagree” with the moral of the story, which, so far as I can tell, is that garbage is bad for the earth. And that submission to the spectacle of marketing is also bad. I got that. But I do think there is a more problematic something about the film – not a “message,” but instead something more like a presupposition.
Slate.com has an interesting write-up on a new technology, you know, the one making it possible to never menstruate again. Like the author, I’ll pass over the debate about the relation between womanhood, nature, and the body – not really my place to make a comment. Except this: I’m wary about the whole “keep technology off our bodies” rhetoric, not because of the politico-economic suspicions underlying the rhetoric (sound enough), but simply because technology is so deeply inside our bodies that we should talk more about boundaries than abolition. Rather, my main interest in this reflection is a familiar name: Jerry Falwell. What would Jerry think? Read the rest of this entry »