Vani Natarajan

Diwata

caitlin — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 16:00:00 +0000

As a librarian, when I’m asked for a recommended read by someone thirsty for tales, I instinctively direct them to the fiction stacks. I forget how poems, too, can be rich with narrative. Barbara Jane Reyes’ Diwata teems with stories. Exploring subjects like the creation of human life on earth, the phenomena of thunder and lightning, the violence that war and occupation inflict on women, and the complexity of the sea’s color, Diwata contains so much imagination and vision it’s hard to believe it’s just eighty-two pages long.

Reyes, a poet born in Manila, Philippines and currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area, takes the title of her book from a word in Tagalog. The back of the book defines diwata as “a term for a mythical being who resides in nature, and whom human communities must acknowledge, respect, and appease in order to live harmoniously in this world.” Diwatas make numerous appearances in Reyes’ poems, in some cases as the narrator, in others, as one situated in a temporally or spatially remote place, or one residing close by, implored by the poet to speak. In “Crossing,” a diwata visits a hunter in her sleep and helps her to cross a bridge between herself and her ancestors.

Among the themes that run through this book are the complications of human intimacy. The title of the first poem, “A Genesis of We, Cleaved,” uses a word that has two opposite meanings: to come together and to separate. Reyes writes in cleverly lyrical language in “Eve’s Aubade”: “Here I shall weave a selvedge of we.” In fiber art, a selvedge is an edge that keeps a work from fraying. This implies a woven-togetherness between the speaker and the beloved. And yet, a selvedge also suggests an edge, a deliberate marking off of where one ends and another begins.

The poems in Diwata are written in a range of forms, with some longer pieces like “The Fire, Around Which We All Gather” exploring a prose poem structure, and others, like “Polyglot Incantation,” juxtaposing lines in Tagalog, Spanish, and English. “The Villagers Sing of the Woman Who Becomes a Wave Who Becomes the Water Who Becomes the Wind” cleverly employs a braided pantoum pattern, mimicking the shapeshifting of the poem’s subject.

Reyes ends her collection with a stark and striking short poem, “Aswang,” presumably in the voice of a diwata. The speaker names herself “the bad daughter, the freedom fighter, the shaper of death masks,” and in the last line, says, “Upend me, bend my body, cleave me beyond function. Blame me.” Here, we are confronted as humans who all too often use myths to perpetuate violence. We are left with a voice that insists against the misuses of mythology, a voice that will haunt us. This is an outsider voice of a deity misunderstood, a woman misunderstood, whose stories we must try harder to hear.

Written by: Vani Natarajan, September 28th 2010

Feminist Technology

caitlin — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Edited by Kate Boyer, Linda Layne, Sharra Vostral

University of Illinois Press

On the cover of this book, a silhouette of what resembles a hand holding a speculum, above the words feminist technology, prompts questions. Whose hand holds the speculum? Is it just me, or is it kind of shaped like the letter “F”? The image hints at Feminist Technology’s project: to look at technologies in the context of the hands that design and use them, and to consider how they might or might not facilitate feminist social relations.

The scope of both feminism and technology is vast, and where they meet is no small place. So, the editors focus on just a few medical technologies, with articles on the menstrual suppressing birth control pill, the breast pump, the home pregnancy test, and the tampon. In her introduction, Linda Layne writes, “…clearly technological fixes are not enough. Feminists must also work toward undoing patriarchy in all its forms. This means not only introducing new technologies, but changing technosocial systems…”

Aengst and Layne’s article on menstrual-suppressing birth control pills explores effects of the pill on ways of thinking about gender by looking at how the construction of a monthly period as biologically “natural” gets disrupted by the birth control pill’s ability to suppress menstruation and to create new cycles. The article ends by imagining how different strains of feminism would interpret the pill. The two scant paragraphs under the header “African American feminism” are a rare glimpse, in this book, of a feminist of color perspective cognizant of the reproductive injustices historically directed toward women of color. Aengst and Layne implicitly marginalize this politic by naming it so fleetingly. The article ends by proclaiming that the pill Seasonale “might very well be a useful technology for middle and upper class women who seek convenience and can afford to choose among many contraceptive technologies.” One wonders: what about everyone else?

While the language of feminism used in the book is quite universalizing, the focus remains largely on technologies in the US and Canada marketed towards cisgender women, implicitly economically privileged. While Anita Hardon’s piece does mention the disturbing ways in which the Population Council used Norplant coercively in Brazil and Bangladesh, it does so in a way that lacks an analysis of the underlying racism that constructs the bodies of people of color as unworthy of care. In reading, I hoped for more outrage from the author at how technology has been used in decidedly unfeminist ways.

In looking at the book’s final articles on the training of feminist designers in universities, I wondered about how feminist design might be imagined even outside of the increasingly inaccessible world of higher education. Considering means of production, in what conditions would people create these new objects, and how would their labor be valued? What materials would be used?

While Feminist Technology provides a trove of historical anecdotes on the development of various technologies, it could do better at revisiting the question of what makes a technology feminist by critiquing the very model of feminism it uses—and the voices it might implicitly exclude. If this topic interests you, consider also the feminist technology blog Difference Engines, whose “concerns are not only with gender, but all manner of differencing, including race, ethnicity, and humanity.”

Written by: Vani Natarajan, September 26th 2010

The Promise of Happiness

admin — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:03:00 +0000

By Sara Ahmed

Duke University Press

In the introduction to her new book The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed asks readers a provocative question: “Do we consent to happiness? And what are we consenting to, if or when we consent to happiness?” Ahmed takes on the elusive topic of happiness not to define it, but to look at how it works. Amazingly, this book does not get trapped in abstraction. Sara Ahmed approaches her critique of happiness with explicitly feminist, anti-racist, and queer analysis, always attentive to the historical moment in which she’s writing. She moves through what she calls an “archive of happiness,” comprised of novels, philosophical treatises, films, utopian proposals, and dystopian visions that all deal in some way with happiness.

In the first chapter, the author reads older European philosophical and psychological accounts of happiness, many of them concerned with the family as a site of happiness. This history of ideas sets the groundwork for the ways in which happiness is constructed in contemporary times. Ahmed introduces the figure of the “affect alien” as a person who challenges the happy family ideal. This figure takes shape in the next three chapters in the form of “feminist killjoys,” “unhappy queers,” and “melancholy migrants.”

These chapters demonstrate how happiness gets used as a form of social control. In looking at how feminists challenge the notion that people are naturally happiest in rigid gender roles, Ahmed writes, “The struggle over happiness forms the political horizon in which feminist claims are made.” Her reading of the classic novel The Well of Loneliness considers how an unhappy ending for a queer main character opens up a possibility for social critique that a “happy” one might not. In her reading of the film Bend It Like Beckham, Ahmed asks why certain kinds of rebellion (say, against one’s immigrant parents) get celebrated in mainstream film while other kinds (say, against British imperialism) don’t. She also recasts the age-old parental plea of “I just want you to be happy,” as a way in which a child is obligated to be happy in order to make the parent happy (a kind of debt).

In concluding chapters, Ahmed cleverly turns her gaze to the future by looking at the varied promises of happiness presented in speculative fiction. Dystopian visions, such as Ursula LeGuin’s short story “The People Who Walked Away from Omelas,” can show how insidiously the happiness of the majority might be used to justify cruelty toward the marginalized. Ahmed acknowledges that positioning happiness as a goal has disturbing implications. She suggests a new approach to living: “...if we no longer presume happiness is our telos, unhappiness would register as more than what gets in the way. When we are no longer sure of what gets in the way, then ‘the way’ itself becomes a question.” In her conclusion, Ahmed uses the word hap (itself so much more buoyant in sound than the heavy happiness) as a way to work through new ideas at the level of language.

Ahmed writes in her introduction, “To kill joy... is to open a life, to make room for possibility, for chance. My aim in this book is to make room.” I think Sara Ahmed succeeds in her project. Fresh in its premises and elegant in its follow-through, with plenty of incisive questions to move it along, The Promise of Happiness offers new lenses on an emotion rarely challenged. I suggest you make room for it on your shelf.

Written by: Vani Natarajan, July 7th 2010