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George "Sulu" Takei responds to Tim Hardaway's homophobic remarks

  
  

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ONLY NICE THINGS
05:23 / 28.02.07
Ah - on reflection you may be right, there. He said:

Well, you know, I hate gay people. I let it be known I don’t like gay people. I don’t like to be around gay people. I’m homophobic. It shouldn’t be in the world, in the United States, I don’t like it.

A lot depends, I think, on how you go about interpreting "it shouldn't be in the world", but yes, he seesm to be saying that homosexuality should not exist, and by extension homosexuals, rather than advocating the extermination of gay people.

I wonder how his therapy's going?
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
09:04 / 28.02.07
I hope it's going something like this:

"Clear!"

*BZZZZZZT!*

Hardaway writhes horribly and bites down on a bit of plastic in his mouth.

But anyway, back to the matter at hand...

Yes, and that was, at least partially, the point i was making. As i said in my last post i think the latter [gender] is a real and biologically valid category, whereas the former [race] isn't.

Leaving aside that I don't accept yr essentialist, biologically determined views on gender, natarajah - do you not accept that if race is just something that's constructed around certain physical characteristics, then everytime you attach a bunch of non-physical associations to, say, skin colour, you are constructing an idea of race. And it just so happens, natty, that the associations you mention are ones that are already very common in certain constructions of 'blackness' which people who identify as white create. They're very much at play in the not-insignificant number of people who, for example, want all black musicians to be 'positive', 'conscious', spiritual - unthreatening unless they're threatening the forces of Babylon, man... Now, I'm not saying you're one of those people. But I would remind you that your promised responses to the posts of myself and others, in that thread in which you compared Jay-Z to Skrewdriver, are still forthcoming.

The whole "well doesn't that mean that you can't find any physical characteristic attractive without being guilty of fetishising AHA DO YOU SEE?" strikes me as exactly the kind of reductio ad absurdium (pardon my piggish Latin) that is often wheeled out when people are reluctant to change their behaviour or ways of talking of accept the political implications of the same: "if I'm supposed to call someone a boy just cos they say so, does that mean I can say I'm a tree and everyone has to call me that?", when the issue of transpeople arises, for example (though if you believe gender is biologically determined, I guess you'd be down with that...).

As Haus has said, if you're turned on by one particular characteristic/attribute no matter whom it's attached to then yeah, that's a fetish, that's pretty much the definition of a fetish or at least its most popular current usage. Is it really that hard for people to grasp that some fetishes may have political implications in a way that others don't?
 
 
jentacular dreams
09:34 / 28.02.07
Or perhaps that history, culture and politics forces implications on some fetishes in ways they don't on others?
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
09:37 / 28.02.07
I don't see the difference between the two statements, except I suspect that yours is leading towards "and so since it's not our fault we have these fetishes, but rather the fault of history, etc., we shouldn't be troubled by those implications or have to deal with them"...
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
09:42 / 28.02.07
Actually, as an example, the popular fetish club Torture Garden has a policy on Nazi uniforms - it doesn't allow them. So, if you have that particular fetish, you have to accept, if you wish to enter the space, that the expression of that fetish is not acceptable (for political reasons) whereas other fetishes - balloons, say - are.

Now, is there a distinction between fetishes based on physical characteristics and fetishes based on external objects? Is there a difference between fetishising feet and fetishising a set of physical characteristics that are often gathered together and associated with the culturally-conditioned identifier "black", or similar identifiers?
 
 
jentacular dreams
09:45 / 28.02.07
Not so much that, I was just trying to remind that the fetish itself may not be sourced directly from history or politics/culture. Sometimes (/usually) they can derive more from personal experiences (which I'll grant are shaped by h/p/c, but still vary between individuals). i.e. that it's important to remember that the implications of and source of a fetish need not be even remotely similar.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
09:50 / 28.02.07
Well, it's pretty hard to identify the source of a fetish. A lot of aetiologies appear to be reverse-engineered. If I have a yen for a young lady to burst balloons all over me, I might explain that this is because I had a really good fifth birthday party, in which balloons featured heavily. However, can I say with confidence that this is the motivation? I don't think I can, although I might get quite upset about that idea, because my identity may be heavily invested in this aetiology.
 
 
Hydra vs Leviathan
10:16 / 28.02.07
On gender - I didn't say that gender was (always, absolutely) biologically determined. I said it was a biologically valid category, which, i think, is subtly but importantly different.

I actually didn't believe that for the majority of my life - in fact, for quite a few years, i had a hell of a lot emotionally invested in believing that gender wasn't a real, biological category, but purely a sociological one, and that the concept of "brain gender" didn't exist - in short, i had the same sort of views on gender as the likes of Janice Raymond (except without so much of the trans-hate, but i a) didn't really understand what it was to be transsexual at all and b) the only motives i could possibly imagine for someone physically transitioning would be "misguided" sociopolitical ones).

Then a friend of mine, who has a biology degree, came out as a trans woman, and i ended up living with her, and we had an extremely long and deep series of conversations which drastically changed (and possibly even saved) my life (and who knows, maybe hers too), and i realised the huge wrongness of the gender-is-totally-sociological view, which, although it's an extremely attractive view, especially for those (like me) which don't identify with binary gender, utterly disregards and attempts to invalidate the life experience of those who do have biological gender, but due to accidents of biology have brains of a different biological gender to that of the hormone-producing parts of their bodies.

(Note that "biological gender" basically boils down to "a brain which requires female/male hormones to function without severe clinical depression, and which is programmed to include female/male genitalia in its body-plan", and has absolutely fuck all to do with what sort of clothes you like to wear, what sort of role you like to play in relationships or in society-in-general, or who you find attractive...)

There quite blatantly isn't anything remotely comparable with regard to "race", which is the point i was making. Apologies for assuming that everyone here was aware of, and agreed with, the above analysis of gender (and thereby for potentially looking like a gender-essentialist).

But I would remind you that your promised responses to the posts of myself and others, in that thread in which you compared Jay-Z to Skrewdriver, are still forthcoming.

Fuck, i totally forgot that thread. I've got a shitload on at the moment, including hopefully getting myself the permanent housing situation i've been lacking for the past several months, within the next couple of days. When that's sorted, i'll be in a much better place emotionally, and will probably feel able to get back to the large number of threads i've intended to get back to for a long time (altho the Ashley X one is probably going to be my priority, and will by itself probably take up so much of my intellectual and emotional energy that all the others may still have to wait quite a bit longer)...
 
 
Blake Head
10:43 / 28.02.07
I may be mistaken, but I believe sex, rather than gender, is usually what is being referred to when discussing biological categories; gender more commonly being used to describe something formed in various ways, potentially including, as you say, biologically.
 
 
Red Concrete
11:45 / 28.02.07
"Clear!"

*BZZZZZZT!*

Hardaway writhes horribly and bites down on a bit of plastic in his mouth.

Yes, because all the bigots should be rounded up and subjected to ECT until their minds are changed? Well, I can't imagine you really mean that.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:59 / 28.02.07
I imagine that it's what we in the business call hyperbole. Well worth drawing attention to, though, RC.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
12:12 / 28.02.07
This thread has been interesting. Maybe the problem is that there is really no correct way to read the clip. It's not possible to read Takei as being properly 'racist', but neither is it necessarily possible to feel entirely comfortable with the possibly-racialising connotations of saying, 'chocolatey'.

It reminds me of two things. One is, Samuel Delany in The Mad Man makes a pretty good (although fictional) case for things we might call 'fetishes' being both based on racial difference, and also viable -- in the right context, with the kind of thinking that Ex was referring to, in terms of understanding the (potential) ideological significations of particular desires and the possibility that a particular form of desire always might slip into racialisation. Oddly enough, Delany is less dismissive of desire based on racial difference than you might espect him to be.

The second thing this discussion of 'fetish' and racial difference reminds me of is the fairly well-documented phenomenon within gay men's sexual cultures of 'rice queens', 'potato queens', 'sticky rice' etc. Do people know what I'm talking about, here? A rice queen is generally understood to be an older Anglo guy who has a sexual preference for younger, Asian men. Those terms can be fetishising, and there's certainly a stereotypically 'icky' exoticising of differential power between sexual partners of different geocultural locations that can happen within the gamut of rice queendom. But I also know Asian men who use the terms to describe themselves ('sticky rice', 'potato queen') and who deploy 'rice queen' ironically about men they might consider sleeping with. (Ie, 'Do you think such and such is a rice queen?')

It strikes me that within gay men's sexual cultures, there does exist a really explicit and accepted practice of articulating one's desires in a language that acknowledges racial difference. I don't know that anyone can claim this is 'good' or 'bad', but I think Takei's clip bears parsing through that culture. The 'chocolatey' remark begins to look less racist and more gauche, deprived of its possible context, redeployed for the mainstream media's purposes to divide and conquer.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
13:11 / 28.02.07
[Offtopic] the popular fetish club Torture Garden has a policy on Nazi uniforms - it doesn't allow them.

Really? That's news to me. Can't say I'm exactly devastated, you understand.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
15:17 / 28.02.07
Yeah, that's new... not been there in years. Maybe I should start going again, as the wankers in Nazi getup were always, at the very least, a little unsettling to be around, which tended to ruin the whole "fun" aspect of that particular night out. And that's speaking as a white guy.
 
  

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