Dispatch from SlutWalk Houston
By Daniel Rigney
They're wearing black this year at SlutWalk Houston. And yellow and brown and green and red and white and blue. They're wearing short shorts and dressy dresses, jeans and thigh-high stockings, t-shirts and tanktops. This is an easy-going and good-humored feminist occasion -- men welcome. Since you don't have to be female to be feminist, I'm here to support this ironically-named event and to learn more about it. Today's event is co-sponsored by a coalition of feminist organizations, including two from the University of Houston (Downtown and Clear Lake campuses), joining forces to send one clear message: Wardrobes don't cause rape. Rapists cause rape. The diverse clothings on view here today dramatize the political point that while sexualities and styles of self-expression may vary, they are never excuses for sexual coercion.
This event follows closely on the heels of similar events in other cities, beginning in Toronto earlier this year when a representative of the Toronto police advised a meeting of law students that if women don't want to be raped, they shouldn't dress like sluts. He really shouldn't have said that. It's not just that the words were poorly chosen. The problem lies in the more deeply-rooted beliefs and crudely-traditional attitudes toward women that such words commonly express. I've often heard similar views expressed in Texas. This isn't just about one guy in Toronto. But I have to wonder: By choosing these words, was the police officer just asking for a mass international protest?
Katha Politt, commenting on SlutWalks in this week's The Nation,* notes that the word "slut" (originally a menial kitchen-worker) is associated in our language with dirt (read: dirty, soiled, filthy, earthy), and therefore, metaphorically, with culturally-defined sexual "impurity" -- hence the binary contrast between the virgin and the vamp, the madonna and the whore. This sort of simple-mindedly categorical thinking has had the effect of containing and controlling women's sexualities and their means of expressing them within the narrowing confines of what nice women are supposed to do.
In Simple World there are only two kinds of women: the pure or higher women and the contaminated lower women (such as the lowly slut). It is a sacred duty of men to guard the purity and family honor of their own women so that they aren't contaminated. Contaminated women (e.g.., those with sexual experiences outside of marriage) are, to varying degrees, "sluts" or worse.
This basic cultural script and its myriad variations have been passed down, often uncritically, from one generation to the next in traditional societies even to this day, and even in some segments of modern societies such as the United States.
SlutWalk has a different and more complicated story idea. It has the temerity to suggest that in a Complex World there are many kinds of women, who may express themselves in many different ways in many different contexts, and in different modes of dress, and that none of them deserves rape. (P.S.: In this story I am supposing that men can also be diverse and complex.)
But why tell this story through an event like SlutWalk? And why this name, which many will surely find tasteless and offensive?
The ironic use of "slut" in SlutWalk parallels other ironic inversions of meaning in recent decades. Counterculturals in the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, commonly embraced the word "freak" as a self-description as they sardonically donned military-surplus clothing. So, in time, did some (not all) occupants of other stigmatized social categories, taking on ironic self-descriptions by choosing to call themselves "queers," or "niggahs," or, now, "sluts." In choosing these self-descriptions, some on the margins of social life have turned epithets into epaulets, wearing them as badges of honor, as a way of nose-thumbing (or finger-saluting) their tormenters. Hence the SlutWalk, a defiant digital salute that devalues the devaluers, and that unites the nice and the naughty, and everyone in between (which is pretty much all of us), as we walk alongside each other in support of expanded choices for women. As Politt observes, there's something of "I am Spartacus. No, I am Spartacus!" in all this, each participant defending the right of every other to sexual and sartorial self-expression.
I'd say more about ironic self-description, but I'm just a "nerd." NerdWalk, anyone?
The Limits of Irony In a recent blogpost in the Houston Press, our town's most visible alternative newspaper, Mandy Oaklander** describes the SlutWalk dress code as "wear what you dare." The event offers women (and men) of all walks and talks a chance to send diverse personal and cultural messages, ironic or not, to a largely uncomprehending public.
"SlutWalk? Huh? Are they really calling it SlutWalk? That doesn't make any sense."
The wild diversity of clothing choices on display at SlutWalk sends a message of its own. This is what feminists look like now: Skin in all shades of brown, from pinkish-tan to dark chocolate. Bodies in all sizes and shapes. Many modes of dress. Many ways of performing gender. Many kinds of people. One message. Rapists cause rape.
Yes, we know that gray is the new black and white, and that cultural complexities abound whenever we talk about sexualities and their contextualities. And yes, we know that women have to be careful, and so do men, and so do children and those who protect them, and that there will always be dangers.
But where sexual matters are concerned, SlutWalk draws a clear line in the shifting postmodern sand: No still means no. Pre-ironically, no. Ironically, no. Post-ironically, no. No means no means no. Trans-ironically.
In a culture of irony, words like "transgressive" and "subversive" are often used admiringly and sometimes uncritically to romanticize daring adventures in cultural resistance. But the culture of pure irony and the romance of boundary transgression, it turns out, have their dangerous and potentially-lethal limits. Rape, for example, is a transgression of boundaries. But not all transgressions are romantic, and not all boundaries are in need of transcendence.
Highlight Clips
I'm flipping through my blogging notepad now for highlights from today's event, which my wife and I observed and participated in this morning. She tells me that this event reminds her of the Take Back the Night marches she saw in Austin years ago. Our crowd combines elements of countercultural politics, art and youthful energy. It resembles enclaves one can find in Austin (and probably Berkeley, Portland, and a dozen or more other cities in the U.S. alone) on any day of the week.
The main aim of Take Back the Night in Austin was to raise a loud, communal, and explicitly-feminist voice against the crime of rape as a coercive act of aggression against women -- and, I think we should always add, against men who have been raped as well.
Today's event has a similar theme, printed in its flyer. SlutWalk's name is "intentionally subversive" of a "victim-blaming mentality" propagated through media and popular culture against women who have been raped. Today's moving demonstration is billed as a "come-as-you-are, whoever-you-are" event.
And so they come to Houston's Cherryhurst Park this morning in all manner of costume, as if Halloween has arrived in July. One woman wears a lingerie top with cutoffs and cowboy boots; another, a similar top with black athletic shorts, aqua-blue fishnet stockings, and what appear to be a pair of black Chuck Taylor lowtop basketball shoes. Both are wearing Playboy bunny ears with pink trim for that traditional feminine touch.
One guy wears a black clerical shirt with notched collar, black short-shorts, and black shoes and socks. Is this a religious or anti-religious fashion statement? A woman in a comic parody of a slut costume finishes her outfit with a pair of Doc Martens-type high platform black boots. She's not looking for trouble.
And then there's the Marlboro Man. I'm not sure what he's looking for.
I'm especially curious, though, to know the backstory of a woman I see wearing what looks like a Muslim head scarf. I wonder what life experiences are impelling her forward today. There's a whole used bookstore full of backstories here at SlutWalk Houston. I imagine that each is unique and that each is comic or dramatic or mysterious in its own way.
Many in the crowd arrive unexceptionally dressed in the usual hot-humid-Houston summer weekend uniform -- t-shirts, shorts or jeans, athletic shoes -- or in nice-girl, tastefully-understated party dresses. I don''t see any prairie dresses or pilgrim bonnets, but I do see many other dress-coded messages, ranging from churchwear to grocerywear to streetwalker wear. Today we're all streetwalkers. Or sidewalk walkers, rather. We have no official parade permit to walk in the street.
Horns honk at us, as Houston horns often do. Are they showing support, or are they just annoyed that we're holding them up when we cross the street in front of them?
I don't ask who's wearing a pretend-costume today and who's just dressing in the usual costumes of everyday life, nor do I interrogate anyone about sexual orientation. Don't ask. Don't tell. Don't care. None of my business.
I also refrain from asking political questions, but I'd bet dollars I don't have that most here today are center-to-left on the U.S. ideological spectrum, including some "liberaltarians," and that nearly all embrace not just the broadly egalitarian aims of feminism, but also the name itself. I'm not sure how many generations or "waves" of feminism there have been in the United States in recent decades (periodizations vary), but those here today seem to represent a younger vintage -- most in their 20s and 30s, I would guess. A few older, a few younger.
I'm also guessing that most of those present today are ironic (or "post-pre-ironic") in their cultural sensibilities, understanding that cultural messages may have multiple layers of meaning, including meanings intentionally opposite their surface meanings. These participants would readily "get" an ironic self-description like "slut," understanding it as a kind of cultural counter-punchline.
But other feminists may be culturally pre-ironic and/or have severe personal, political or aesthetic objections to using the word "slut" to name a feminist event. Some of these probably chose to stay home this morning.
The most overtly political person I chat with at SlutWalk is a stocky older woman selling copies of the newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. The paper's cover photo features a woman carrying a sign that reads "No More NYPD Rape."
I ask this American revolutionary about the identity of the man whose image is emblazoned on her t-shirt. She tells me he is the national leader of the organization. I'm curious to know where he's based, and I learn that his location has not been disclosed for several years. I have fun imagining what a Drudge or a Fox or a Breitbart would do propagandistically with this tiny tidbit. ("Slutty Texas Sex Clowns Infiltrated by Hidden Communists, etc.") Headlines like these are an easy sell to uncritical thinkers, and the those in the political tabloid sector of the meme industry know their meme markets.
SlutChants
A flyer passed out to walkers recommends some group chants:
"Show me what a feminist looks like. This is what a feminist looks like." [chanted by women and men of many different appearances]
Another: "Slut, skank, bitch, ho. Whatever you call me, NO MEANS NO! .... No means No! Yes Means Yes! Wherever We Go, However We Dress!"
One chant I hear on the march ("We are the SlutWalk, the mighty mighty SlutWalk ....") flashes me back to an old high school football cheer: "We are the Trojans, the mighty mighty Trojans, and everywhere we go, people want to know, who we are, so we tell them, We are the Trojans, the mighty mighty etc." And yes, our high school mascot really was named after a famous condom. I guess it symbolized our commitment to safer sports.
Signs of the Times
But I digress. One of my favorite things about SlutWalk Houston is the signs that many walkers (and rollers -- several are in wheelchairs) carry:
My short skirt is not an invitation.
Don't taunt me. I'm a happy fun slut.
Sluts have feelings too.
My slut level is over 9000 [a meme citing an episode of Japanese manga/anime series/film/videogame(s) Dragon Ball Z, and meaning something like "my slut level is extremely powerful."]
Most poignantly, a woman being pushed in a wheelchair, surgical mask over her face (perhaps to conceal her identity [correction: to protect her health -- see comment below]), is carrying a sign that reads "I was a child. My PJ's were not sexy." Next to the inscription is a multi-colored handprint in finger paints.
SlutWalk Meets Vietnamese Demonstrators
The most remarkable intercultural experience of the day occurs near the end of the walk, as our group threads its way through a demonstration of Vietnamese or Vietnamese-Americans in front of Houston's Chinese consulate on Montrose.
I stop counting flags of the former South Vietnam (three thin horizontal red stripes across a yellow field) after the first twenty or so. In the crowd or in passing cars, Vietnamese flags fly alongside U.S. and even Texas flags in a display of imagined solidarity against China. I learn from their English-language signs that the demonstrators are protesting "Chinese Navy Pirates," and demanding that they "Stop Killing Vietnamese Fishermen" in Spratly and Parecel, disputed islands in the South China Sea. Will war in Vietnam never end?
As a few hundred SlutWalkers pass slowly through the middle of the crowd of a few hundred Vietnamese demonstrators, we witness one of those odd, twilight-zone moments when culture meets culture unexpectedly in an entirely unplanned encounter. As we approach the Vietnamese group, I talk briefly with SlutWalk parade leaders, who have no idea in advance that another, and completely unrelated, protest event has been separately scheduled to share this moment with us in space and time.
We pass through the Vietnamese group like a cord through a bead.
During this passage, the two groups of protesters are more than cordial toward each other. Walking through the Vietnamese crowd, I reach forward awkwardly to meet their extended handshakes and high-fives across ethnic boundaries. Each protest group is congratulating the other. Each is almost surely unomprehending of the other's issues. But what can we do? Go home and quickly research the issues to make an informed choice about whether or not to extend our hands? Politics makes strange hand shakers.
Most comically, perhaps, several SlutWalkers finish our parade twenty minutes later waving tiny Vietnamese flags as souvenirs of their ephemeral intercultural encounter with the friendly other.
Have two subcultures just inadvertently passed socially-transmitted memes to each other in a casual and unplanned encounter between strangers? Can this be the beginning of international feminist-Vietnamese solidarity against powerful and violent invaders? We may never know.
But clearly, the problem of violent assault at every level, from rape to war, is pervasive and persistent on many fronts around the world -- including the personal, the sexual, and the political. And sometimes all three at once.
Signing Off from New Texas
So that's the way it looks*** this Saturday, July 9, 2011, as we sign off our narrowcast from Schlotsky's sandwich shop at the corner of Weistheimer and Montrose in Houston. The cultural and political side of Texas from which I'm reporting is in an enclave of what I'll call "New Texas," a newer, bluer Texas emerging from within the urban centers of the more conservatarian and rural Old Texas, or Red Texas, if I am permitted one last irony. I reckon that New Texas is starting to make Old Red just a mite nervous.
I'll have more to say about emerging possibilities in Texas politics and culture. But as we say here in New Texas, that's the subject of a whole 'nother blogpost.
*Katha Politt, "Talk the Talk, Walk the SlutWalk." The Nation, July 7, 2011. The acknowledged anthropological classic on "purity" and "contamination" as cultural categories is Mary's Douglas's Purity and Danger, 1966.
**Mandy Oaklander, "SlutWalk Houston Sure to Shock and Empower." Houston Press (blog), May 23, 2011.
*** a tribute to the late Walter Cronkite, who grew up and went to school in this neighborhood. Lyndon Johnson also lived hereabouts in his early days as a young school teacher.
http://open.salon.com/blog/danagram
By Daniel Rigney
They're wearing black this year at SlutWalk Houston. And yellow and brown and green and red and white and blue. They're wearing short shorts and dressy dresses, jeans and thigh-high stockings, t-shirts and tanktops. This is an easy-going and good-humored feminist occasion -- men welcome. Since you don't have to be female to be feminist, I'm here to support this ironically-named event and to learn more about it. Today's event is co-sponsored by a coalition of feminist organizations, including two from the University of Houston (Downtown and Clear Lake campuses), joining forces to send one clear message: Wardrobes don't cause rape. Rapists cause rape. The diverse clothings on view here today dramatize the political point that while sexualities and styles of self-expression may vary, they are never excuses for sexual coercion.
This event follows closely on the heels of similar events in other cities, beginning in Toronto earlier this year when a representative of the Toronto police advised a meeting of law students that if women don't want to be raped, they shouldn't dress like sluts. He really shouldn't have said that. It's not just that the words were poorly chosen. The problem lies in the more deeply-rooted beliefs and crudely-traditional attitudes toward women that such words commonly express. I've often heard similar views expressed in Texas. This isn't just about one guy in Toronto. But I have to wonder: By choosing these words, was the police officer just asking for a mass international protest?
Katha Politt, commenting on SlutWalks in this week's The Nation,* notes that the word "slut" (originally a menial kitchen-worker) is associated in our language with dirt (read: dirty, soiled, filthy, earthy), and therefore, metaphorically, with culturally-defined sexual "impurity" -- hence the binary contrast between the virgin and the vamp, the madonna and the whore. This sort of simple-mindedly categorical thinking has had the effect of containing and controlling women's sexualities and their means of expressing them within the narrowing confines of what nice women are supposed to do.
In Simple World there are only two kinds of women: the pure or higher women and the contaminated lower women (such as the lowly slut). It is a sacred duty of men to guard the purity and family honor of their own women so that they aren't contaminated. Contaminated women (e.g.., those with sexual experiences outside of marriage) are, to varying degrees, "sluts" or worse.
This basic cultural script and its myriad variations have been passed down, often uncritically, from one generation to the next in traditional societies even to this day, and even in some segments of modern societies such as the United States.
SlutWalk has a different and more complicated story idea. It has the temerity to suggest that in a Complex World there are many kinds of women, who may express themselves in many different ways in many different contexts, and in different modes of dress, and that none of them deserves rape. (P.S.: In this story I am supposing that men can also be diverse and complex.)
But why tell this story through an event like SlutWalk? And why this name, which many will surely find tasteless and offensive?
The ironic use of "slut" in SlutWalk parallels other ironic inversions of meaning in recent decades. Counterculturals in the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, commonly embraced the word "freak" as a self-description as they sardonically donned military-surplus clothing. So, in time, did some (not all) occupants of other stigmatized social categories, taking on ironic self-descriptions by choosing to call themselves "queers," or "niggahs," or, now, "sluts." In choosing these self-descriptions, some on the margins of social life have turned epithets into epaulets, wearing them as badges of honor, as a way of nose-thumbing (or finger-saluting) their tormenters. Hence the SlutWalk, a defiant digital salute that devalues the devaluers, and that unites the nice and the naughty, and everyone in between (which is pretty much all of us), as we walk alongside each other in support of expanded choices for women. As Politt observes, there's something of "I am Spartacus. No, I am Spartacus!" in all this, each participant defending the right of every other to sexual and sartorial self-expression.
I'd say more about ironic self-description, but I'm just a "nerd." NerdWalk, anyone?
The Limits of Irony In a recent blogpost in the Houston Press, our town's most visible alternative newspaper, Mandy Oaklander** describes the SlutWalk dress code as "wear what you dare." The event offers women (and men) of all walks and talks a chance to send diverse personal and cultural messages, ironic or not, to a largely uncomprehending public.
"SlutWalk? Huh? Are they really calling it SlutWalk? That doesn't make any sense."
The wild diversity of clothing choices on display at SlutWalk sends a message of its own. This is what feminists look like now: Skin in all shades of brown, from pinkish-tan to dark chocolate. Bodies in all sizes and shapes. Many modes of dress. Many ways of performing gender. Many kinds of people. One message. Rapists cause rape.
Yes, we know that gray is the new black and white, and that cultural complexities abound whenever we talk about sexualities and their contextualities. And yes, we know that women have to be careful, and so do men, and so do children and those who protect them, and that there will always be dangers.
But where sexual matters are concerned, SlutWalk draws a clear line in the shifting postmodern sand: No still means no. Pre-ironically, no. Ironically, no. Post-ironically, no. No means no means no. Trans-ironically.
In a culture of irony, words like "transgressive" and "subversive" are often used admiringly and sometimes uncritically to romanticize daring adventures in cultural resistance. But the culture of pure irony and the romance of boundary transgression, it turns out, have their dangerous and potentially-lethal limits. Rape, for example, is a transgression of boundaries. But not all transgressions are romantic, and not all boundaries are in need of transcendence.
Highlight Clips
I'm flipping through my blogging notepad now for highlights from today's event, which my wife and I observed and participated in this morning. She tells me that this event reminds her of the Take Back the Night marches she saw in Austin years ago. Our crowd combines elements of countercultural politics, art and youthful energy. It resembles enclaves one can find in Austin (and probably Berkeley, Portland, and a dozen or more other cities in the U.S. alone) on any day of the week.
The main aim of Take Back the Night in Austin was to raise a loud, communal, and explicitly-feminist voice against the crime of rape as a coercive act of aggression against women -- and, I think we should always add, against men who have been raped as well.
Today's event has a similar theme, printed in its flyer. SlutWalk's name is "intentionally subversive" of a "victim-blaming mentality" propagated through media and popular culture against women who have been raped. Today's moving demonstration is billed as a "come-as-you-are, whoever-you-are" event.
And so they come to Houston's Cherryhurst Park this morning in all manner of costume, as if Halloween has arrived in July. One woman wears a lingerie top with cutoffs and cowboy boots; another, a similar top with black athletic shorts, aqua-blue fishnet stockings, and what appear to be a pair of black Chuck Taylor lowtop basketball shoes. Both are wearing Playboy bunny ears with pink trim for that traditional feminine touch.
One guy wears a black clerical shirt with notched collar, black short-shorts, and black shoes and socks. Is this a religious or anti-religious fashion statement? A woman in a comic parody of a slut costume finishes her outfit with a pair of Doc Martens-type high platform black boots. She's not looking for trouble.
And then there's the Marlboro Man. I'm not sure what he's looking for.
I'm especially curious, though, to know the backstory of a woman I see wearing what looks like a Muslim head scarf. I wonder what life experiences are impelling her forward today. There's a whole used bookstore full of backstories here at SlutWalk Houston. I imagine that each is unique and that each is comic or dramatic or mysterious in its own way.
Many in the crowd arrive unexceptionally dressed in the usual hot-humid-Houston summer weekend uniform -- t-shirts, shorts or jeans, athletic shoes -- or in nice-girl, tastefully-understated party dresses. I don''t see any prairie dresses or pilgrim bonnets, but I do see many other dress-coded messages, ranging from churchwear to grocerywear to streetwalker wear. Today we're all streetwalkers. Or sidewalk walkers, rather. We have no official parade permit to walk in the street.
Horns honk at us, as Houston horns often do. Are they showing support, or are they just annoyed that we're holding them up when we cross the street in front of them?
I don't ask who's wearing a pretend-costume today and who's just dressing in the usual costumes of everyday life, nor do I interrogate anyone about sexual orientation. Don't ask. Don't tell. Don't care. None of my business.
I also refrain from asking political questions, but I'd bet dollars I don't have that most here today are center-to-left on the U.S. ideological spectrum, including some "liberaltarians," and that nearly all embrace not just the broadly egalitarian aims of feminism, but also the name itself. I'm not sure how many generations or "waves" of feminism there have been in the United States in recent decades (periodizations vary), but those here today seem to represent a younger vintage -- most in their 20s and 30s, I would guess. A few older, a few younger.
I'm also guessing that most of those present today are ironic (or "post-pre-ironic") in their cultural sensibilities, understanding that cultural messages may have multiple layers of meaning, including meanings intentionally opposite their surface meanings. These participants would readily "get" an ironic self-description like "slut," understanding it as a kind of cultural counter-punchline.
But other feminists may be culturally pre-ironic and/or have severe personal, political or aesthetic objections to using the word "slut" to name a feminist event. Some of these probably chose to stay home this morning.
The most overtly political person I chat with at SlutWalk is a stocky older woman selling copies of the newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. The paper's cover photo features a woman carrying a sign that reads "No More NYPD Rape."
I ask this American revolutionary about the identity of the man whose image is emblazoned on her t-shirt. She tells me he is the national leader of the organization. I'm curious to know where he's based, and I learn that his location has not been disclosed for several years. I have fun imagining what a Drudge or a Fox or a Breitbart would do propagandistically with this tiny tidbit. ("Slutty Texas Sex Clowns Infiltrated by Hidden Communists, etc.") Headlines like these are an easy sell to uncritical thinkers, and the those in the political tabloid sector of the meme industry know their meme markets.
SlutChants
A flyer passed out to walkers recommends some group chants:
"Show me what a feminist looks like. This is what a feminist looks like." [chanted by women and men of many different appearances]
Another: "Slut, skank, bitch, ho. Whatever you call me, NO MEANS NO! .... No means No! Yes Means Yes! Wherever We Go, However We Dress!"
One chant I hear on the march ("We are the SlutWalk, the mighty mighty SlutWalk ....") flashes me back to an old high school football cheer: "We are the Trojans, the mighty mighty Trojans, and everywhere we go, people want to know, who we are, so we tell them, We are the Trojans, the mighty mighty etc." And yes, our high school mascot really was named after a famous condom. I guess it symbolized our commitment to safer sports.
Signs of the Times
But I digress. One of my favorite things about SlutWalk Houston is the signs that many walkers (and rollers -- several are in wheelchairs) carry:
My short skirt is not an invitation.
Don't taunt me. I'm a happy fun slut.
Sluts have feelings too.
My slut level is over 9000 [a meme citing an episode of Japanese manga/anime series/film/videogame(s) Dragon Ball Z, and meaning something like "my slut level is extremely powerful."]
Most poignantly, a woman being pushed in a wheelchair, surgical mask over her face (perhaps to conceal her identity [correction: to protect her health -- see comment below]), is carrying a sign that reads "I was a child. My PJ's were not sexy." Next to the inscription is a multi-colored handprint in finger paints.
SlutWalk Meets Vietnamese Demonstrators
The most remarkable intercultural experience of the day occurs near the end of the walk, as our group threads its way through a demonstration of Vietnamese or Vietnamese-Americans in front of Houston's Chinese consulate on Montrose.
I stop counting flags of the former South Vietnam (three thin horizontal red stripes across a yellow field) after the first twenty or so. In the crowd or in passing cars, Vietnamese flags fly alongside U.S. and even Texas flags in a display of imagined solidarity against China. I learn from their English-language signs that the demonstrators are protesting "Chinese Navy Pirates," and demanding that they "Stop Killing Vietnamese Fishermen" in Spratly and Parecel, disputed islands in the South China Sea. Will war in Vietnam never end?
As a few hundred SlutWalkers pass slowly through the middle of the crowd of a few hundred Vietnamese demonstrators, we witness one of those odd, twilight-zone moments when culture meets culture unexpectedly in an entirely unplanned encounter. As we approach the Vietnamese group, I talk briefly with SlutWalk parade leaders, who have no idea in advance that another, and completely unrelated, protest event has been separately scheduled to share this moment with us in space and time.
We pass through the Vietnamese group like a cord through a bead.
During this passage, the two groups of protesters are more than cordial toward each other. Walking through the Vietnamese crowd, I reach forward awkwardly to meet their extended handshakes and high-fives across ethnic boundaries. Each protest group is congratulating the other. Each is almost surely unomprehending of the other's issues. But what can we do? Go home and quickly research the issues to make an informed choice about whether or not to extend our hands? Politics makes strange hand shakers.
Most comically, perhaps, several SlutWalkers finish our parade twenty minutes later waving tiny Vietnamese flags as souvenirs of their ephemeral intercultural encounter with the friendly other.
Have two subcultures just inadvertently passed socially-transmitted memes to each other in a casual and unplanned encounter between strangers? Can this be the beginning of international feminist-Vietnamese solidarity against powerful and violent invaders? We may never know.
But clearly, the problem of violent assault at every level, from rape to war, is pervasive and persistent on many fronts around the world -- including the personal, the sexual, and the political. And sometimes all three at once.
Signing Off from New Texas
So that's the way it looks*** this Saturday, July 9, 2011, as we sign off our narrowcast from Schlotsky's sandwich shop at the corner of Weistheimer and Montrose in Houston. The cultural and political side of Texas from which I'm reporting is in an enclave of what I'll call "New Texas," a newer, bluer Texas emerging from within the urban centers of the more conservatarian and rural Old Texas, or Red Texas, if I am permitted one last irony. I reckon that New Texas is starting to make Old Red just a mite nervous.
I'll have more to say about emerging possibilities in Texas politics and culture. But as we say here in New Texas, that's the subject of a whole 'nother blogpost.
*Katha Politt, "Talk the Talk, Walk the SlutWalk." The Nation, July 7, 2011. The acknowledged anthropological classic on "purity" and "contamination" as cultural categories is Mary's Douglas's Purity and Danger, 1966.
**Mandy Oaklander, "SlutWalk Houston Sure to Shock and Empower." Houston Press (blog), May 23, 2011.
*** a tribute to the late Walter Cronkite, who grew up and went to school in this neighborhood. Lyndon Johnson also lived hereabouts in his early days as a young school teacher.
http://open.salon.com/blog/danagram
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