Apropriación del estilo de la clase obrero: tener dinero es hacer violencia

Empleo y escucho criticas denunciando las tendencias modernas de apropriación del estilo de la clase obrero por parte de los ricos culeados. A menudo, la respuesta es que es la mejor opcion que hay, que utilizar o crear un estilo prpio a los burgueses es hasta más violento.  Voy a esquivar esta dualidad, esta manera de enmarcar la conversacion entre dos opciones y si bien destacar lo que la conversacion expuesta: que el hecho de ser rico es un acto violento  y todo de lo que uno hace, siendo rico, solamente puede expresar esta violencia.

Al parecer, llevar guante y botas de lana, a pesar de tu sueldo personal que podría alojar una familia entera, es una acto inofensivo o hasta uno de solidaridad con los con menos recursos materiales. Despues de todo, es una manera de normalizar y quitar la estigma de estilos. Si los ricos eligen a llevar la misma ropa que los pobres tienen que llevar, asi podemos empezar a borrar las líneas entre las clases sociales.  Parece una buena manera de solidarizar con la clase obrera.

Vale destecar un par de misconcepciones importantes en este argumento. Primero, hay que entender que son pocos los pobres que no tienen opciones para vestirse y que tienen que recurrirse a ciertos estilos y prendas. Tienen agencia y escogen a vestirse como manera de expresarse. Pensarlo de otra manera muestra una falta severa de respeto para la gente que suele ser la mas resistente y creativa de nuestras sociedades.

El segundo punto que deseo destacar expande a partir del otro punto. La actitud de los que se piensan los salvadores de los pobres por haber intentado a "normalizar" sus estilos es paternalistica y hace daño. Segun los estudios de movimientos sociales, estilo es una manera de luchar contra, de expresar desacuerdo con poder. El negro de los punks. El maquillaje de los queers. Las pijamas en publico de los pobres. Son todas maneras legitimas de expresar descontento. Cuando los ricos eligen a apropiar los estilos de la clase obrera, estan haciendo uso de sus privilegios para depoliticar la vida cotidiana, para quitar la agencia y la voz directamente de la garganta de los pobres. No es una manera de solidarizar. Es una manera de silenciar.

Si adoptando los estilos del Otro es un acto de violencia, se puede pensar que les queda un sola opcion: crear  y utilizar estilo propio a la clase burguesa. No necesitamos pensar tanto para darnos cuenta de que  esa tendencia ya es violenta. Profundiza la segregación de la sociedad. Contribuye a hiper consumerismo y a consumo conspicuo. Con el poder de dinero, es inevitable que los estilos que llevan ricos son y serán manchados con todo el residuo reflejado en la sociedad misma que tiene un base importante en la distincion de las clases.

Entonces, que hacemos? Que hacen? Si los ricos no pueden vestirse sin violencia, es cierto que tienen que hacer violencia? Yo digo que sí. Mientras sean ricos no hay posibilidad de no hacer violencia. Pero, no se preocupen ricos del mundo porque hay maneras de quitar la violencia de sus acciones: dejar de ser ricos. se puede cumplir con esa meta en varias, pero no en cualquiera, forma. Es recomendable darles dinero directamente, y no a traves de una organizacion "sin funes de lucro". Es avisable usar el dinero para instalar instituciones de las que no serás un líder. Las pobres, las gordas y las putas tienen que ser las personas mas importantes en estas organizaciones. En resumen, hay que compartir sus privilegios socials y materiales. Corto de eso, seguirán haciendo violencia diariamente.

Yes, the Rectum is a Grave: Shame, Trauma and Breeding

Shame and trauma are integral themes in queer theory, as well as sociological studies of sexual minorities, and with good reason. Knowing that shame plays a role is, however, very different from understanding how it functions. Shame works both as a despised position and as a desired emotion. It leads to teenage self-cutting alone in bedrooms and to six-packs abs floating down canals in Amsterdam.

In the subculture identified and discussed in Tim Dean’s piece, “Breeding Culture: Barebacking, Bugchasing and Giftgiving,” the desire to experience shame and trauma is a pervasive, defining and motivating force. This group of people and this activity partially accomplish and complicate both Leo Bersani’s and Michel Foucault’s calls to action in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” and in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, respectively. Despite Bersani’s claims that his writing serves as a critique of Foucault’s redemptive theories of sexuality, their positions on sex have overlapping assumptions and similar goals in some cases. I will use Dean’s piece to illuminate their differences and agreements, as well as to add to the discussion of the relation between penetration, shame and politics articulated in the aforementioned works as well as by Michael Warner in “The Trouble with Normal,” and Ann Cvetkovich in “Trauma and Touch: Butch-Femme Sexualities.”

Bugchasing, giftgiving and barebacking, the activities at the center of Dean’s piece, are the defining activities of a specific “breeding” subculture. Barebacking is the practice of having sex without a condom out of a desire for enhanced pleasure, to reassure one’s constantly-threatened masculinity, or out of forgetfulness. While this interaction looks the same as bugchasing and giftgiving, as all are forms of unprotected sex, they differ in their motivation: giftgiving and bugchasing involve the deliberate transmission of HIV among gay men, which is the central activity in a subculture that has its own terms, practices and values.

Dean notes in his piece the values that are created through this breeding subculture. Arguing that breeding culture has formed in opposition to values and norms of both the heterosexual and homosexual communities, he argues the culture reimagines “kinship” through serostatus, which creates “ostensibly permanent forms of bodily and communal affiliation.”¹ He connects this rebellion against gay norms with the increasing acceptance of gay life, as evidenced by gay marriage and adoption, even asking the reader to “conceive of exchanging bodily fluids as a viable alternative to exchanging wedding rings.”² These behaviors and this subculture constitute newly created sexual identities, and, in this regard, are creative and shamed.

Creative rebellions against dominant sexual discourse are exactly what Bersani requests in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” In this piece, he identifies the horror of AIDS crisis as an opportunity to shame homosexuals into “welcoming the return to monogamy”³--something he advises gay men to avoid. In calling for gay men (and presumably others) to rebel against sexual regimes, he is also calling for an embrace of the pleasures and value of shame and trauma he sees as inherent to penetrative sex.⁴ Bersani sees his piece as a critique of the “general enterprise” of the “redemptive reinvention of sex.”⁵ Because he sees sex as inherently traumatic, self- shattering and antisocial, our best option, accordingly, is simply to embrace the these seemingly negative aspects of sex as the pleasures that our bodies constantly desire.

While Bersani positions himself in opposition to Foucault’s call to continually discover the pleasures of the body, they actually share many assumptions and prescriptions. They both end their pieces with calls to action, requesting an embrace of pleasures; even those that may at first not seem like pleasures. As an integral part of this appeal, they both advocate for a destruction of the self: Bersani by connecting the “strong appeal of powerlessness” with the “radical disintegration and humiliation of the self” inherent in penetration,⁶ and Foucault in his call for to leave behind our sexualities and instead inhabit only our bodies. Believing that sex has inherent value,⁷ they both argue for the removal of moralism in order to allow for the full pleasures of the body. While it is true that Foucault, unlike Bersani, imagines a time before sex became a stigmatizing act, Bersani’s call for embracing shame can at times be a route to realizing Foucault’s utopian vision.

Breeding culture, as a group which embraces the pleasures of trauma and shame as described by Bersani, represents a fulfillment, and complication of many of the aspects of Foucault’s and Bersani’s prescriptions for sex. Bersani points out that while penetration has always functioned as the “grave” for the “masculine ideal of proud subjectivity … AIDS literalizes that potential,” as well as contributing to the rectum’s symbolic status as such.⁸ In contrast, in Dean’s piece, being seropositive comes to be one “humiliation” that proves your “masculine status” within the bareback community, as evidence of having endured “physical ordeals.”⁹ While breeders fulfill his call to embrace shame (of being seropositive) they do so in a way that reinscribes masculinity, rather than shatters it.

The practice of conversion parties, in which one person would be penetrated by many HIV-positive men,¹⁰ speaks to Bersani’s belief of sex as anti-social and to the comparisons of paranoia surrounding 19^th century prostitutes. To Bersani, sex is antisocial, riddled with power dymanics and “anticommunal.”¹¹ For breeders, being converted by multiple partners is a communal act that is at once an antisocial auto-displacement away from mainstream values and society, as well as initiation into a “community of outlaws”¹² that spans generations. In choosing to practice seroconversion in groups, breeders are seemingly in agreement with Bersani’s prescription to resist the monogamy that the AIDS crisis and its representations encourage.¹³ This practice also reflects onto representations of 19^th century prostitutes, where multiple orgasms, “an unquenchable appetite,” and “the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman,”¹⁴ all factor into societal perceptions of them. The communal nature of their sexual activities adds to the shame and trauma breeders strive to endure.

Ann Cvetkovich, in “Trauma and Touch: Butch-Femme Sexualities,” adds to our understanding of trauma, how one can embrace it and the multiple meanings of penetrations. Cvetkovich asks the reader to imagine that any single sex act (i.e. phallic penetration) may have more than one social meaning.¹⁵ One of the meanings that can inspire trauma is the breach of boundaries, both of the mental and physical shells.¹⁶ Two additional routes to inspiring trauma are the penetrated’s feeling of being used solely for the pleasure of the penetrator and the unknowability that creative and newly forming sexual identities inhabit.

Effectively and persuasively, Michael Warner asks us to understand shame as a social process, involving politics and in-group purification, as well as a way of unifying a subculture. Warner helps articulate the trauma associated with social exclusion to citizenship, as caused by¹⁷ unknowability, but he also believes this shame “intensifies the oscillation of aversion and fascination,” ¹⁸ signaling that shaming another is a product of curiosity. By focusing on identity, rather than the politics of shame, the LGBT movement , he writes, have used shame to engage in “in-group purification,” allowing shame to be an adhesive force for queer subcommunties, functioning similarly as it does for LGBTQ generally.¹⁹

Although Dean does not examine shame or trauma in any serious way, both Cvetkovich and Warner can help us understand how integrally shame functions in breeding culture. Breeding subculture, like all sexual identities, is historically contingent; in this case, most obviously upon the AIDS crisis. Bugchasing is a new phenomenon that seems completely at ends with many of society’s seemingly core values. For this reason, bugchasing is on the edge of knowability. For many, to imagine anything but revulsion to multiple HIV-positive semen samples swimming around inside one’s body, or even to anal sex, seems impossible.

Trauma as a breach of boundaries has multiple iterations in breeding culture. One is the desire for penetration expressed by the bugchasers. Another is the breech of the healthy subject; HIV runs through the blood, deteriorating the entire body: it is fully penetrative of the body and the mind. The lack of condom also serves as a way to secure the trauma by dissolving barriers, or as one bugchaser, quoted in Dean’s piece, put it:

Over and over, I asked myself why it was so appealing for me to get fucked without a condom. I'm a bottom, and I honestly can't tell whether someone is fucking me with or without a condom. It feels the same to me. Yet I still didn't want the barrier, and it really disturbed me that I didn't know why.²⁰

The surface sensations have nothing to do with why this particular barebacker chooses to disregard the condom. The multiple barriers being broken inspire multiple sources of pleasure via shame and trauma.

Another route to trauma, which the bugchasers seemingly invert, is when “the bottom is constructed as humiliated by or used for the pleasure of the person doing the fucking or penetrating.”²¹ Butch-femme discourse on this matter emphasizes the potential give and take of penetration and the power that being the penetrated can entail.²² Breeding culture signifies the power of penetration slightly differently. The terms “bugchasing” for the penetrated and “giftgiving” for the penetrator construct the “bottom” as the desiring subject and the “top” as fucking to satisfy the desires of his partner. The penetrated, Dean writes, “gets to enjoy the men, sexually possessing them all…”²³ In breeding culture, being penetrated is the crème de la crème, partially because it is more likely to result in seroconversion, and thus elevated status in the community.

The HIV virus has created stigmatized identities. Bersani points out that the AIDS crisis has given new cultural legitimacy to the persecution of homosexuals, many of whom had entered mainstream normalcy.²⁴ This association of homosexuals and AIDS led to panicked in-group purification²⁵—changing sexual practices, identity distancing, etc. Homosexuals with AIDS have come to be seen as a separate class from HIV-negative homosexuals. This construction allows for HIV-positive semen to carry significance along with the virus. The trauma associated with ostracization from what was one’s community, is exactly what breeders are striving for as they rebel against ethical norms associated with mainstream U.S. culture and mainstream gay culture.

An analysis of how embracing trauma and shame functions in breeding culture has many things to teach us with regard to the creative fulfillment of sexual pleasures. One is a greater appreciation of the multiple meanings of penetration. Here, the penetrated is masculine, has access to others’ bodies, and is the receiver of, not only the phallus, but also pleasure and the “gift.” Because this particular expression of sexuality has little to do with bodily pleasures (as evidenced by the quote above: I honestly can't tell whether someone is fucking me with or without a condom. It feels the same to me.”) it remains firmly in the field of sexuality, and thus not in line with Foucault’s dream of a world without sexuality, that would focus on pleasures. The practice does, however, square with Bersani’s calls for creative ways to embrace the inherent shame of sexuality. Although breeders in ways reject his argument that being penetrated necessarily means humiliation, they do seek to enjoy that humiliation in other manners. Whether or not these theorists would approve of these specific desires, or if they would see them as in line with their aspirations for sexuality is indeterminable from these essays, given the relative youth and just-barely-thinkability of these manifestations.

1 Tim Dean, “Breeding Culture: Barebacking, Bugchasing and Giftgiving,” (University of Massachusetts Review: 2009) pg 82.

2 Ibid.

3 Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Homos (Harvard University Press: 1996) pg. 218

4 Bersani, 216.

5 Ibid, 215

6 Ibid, 217

7 Bersani, 217, 222

8 Bersani, 222

9 Dean, 85

10 Dean, 85

11 Bersani, 215

12 Dean, 82

13 Bersani, 218

14 Bersani, 211-2

15 Ann Cvetkovich, “Trauma and Touch: Butch-Femme sexualities,” in An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke University Press:2003)

16 Ibid, 56

17 Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. New York (The Free Press: 1999), Pg 7. I am using “citizenship” broadly to refer to access to goods, resources and cultural legitimacy.

18 Ibid, 23

19 Ibid, 31-2, 34-6

20 Dean, 83

21 Cvetkovich, 59

22 Ibid, 59-60

23 Dean, 88

24 Bersani 203-4

25 Warner, 32

Esta semana en creatividad culinaristica

Recien llegamos a nuestra casita y la tierra ya nos tembló. La onda, las fantasmas nos invaden desde la mañana hasta la mañana. Con la vibraciones vienen angustia, fruto, miradas hacia adelante y magia. La magia que fluye es extension de los instintos, que comunica con lpos cuerpos, con redes, con el espacio y las vibraciones. Es el base de comunicacion, del flujo y de la creacion.

Estamos saltando. Como cabritas sin preocuparnos (de la caida)

proyectos abundantes

Por el momento te dejo una pizca de jugo seductor en la lengua. El proyecto mas realizado, que ha rendido el mas placer hasta entonces es la comida. Como con todos los placeres, andamos experimentando, compartiendo, entorpezando y epandiendo. Miauw!!!

1. Nos encantra la mezcla de salado y dulce. Lo complejo hace dificil entenderlo y la lengua rezuma y expande en busqueda --> Salteamos peras con salsa de soja. Funciono como el clave contrasto cuando lo juntamos con carne de soja y calabaza aromatizadas con comino. Con tantos sabores que complimentan, la boca no se aburre do los placeres. prrruuaa

2. Despues del ejercico de la mañana, tuvimos de aterrizarnos. El vuelo desde la cama hasta la cocina fue duro y lo teniamos presente cuando inventamos panqueques con harina tostada. El sabor terroso fue super rico con la salsa de chocolate casera pero la magia de la cosa (como mucha mucha magia) aun no ha sido totalmente explorada. Lo imaginamos con queso, flotando en una rica sopa de espinaca, o enrollados con champignones.  Esperen ver esta cosa estrenar en las cenas creativas de LAB 00

3. Y en la tradicion chilena, estamos haciendo mermelada de alcayota. El proceso dura varios die pero vamos a temrinar con algo super rico. Le echamos gengibre y amaretto encima de la receta normal. Ademas guardmos un  trozo (!) para experimentar despues. Nadie sabe todavia

My family is fucked. Thank the gods!

My family is fucked. Few caveats break my family’s impressive streak of failings. Six years into my life, my mom divorced my abusive, alcoholic, crack-addicted dad, whose presence is infrequent and dreaded. Driven mad by a lifetime of stress from parental and spousal abuse as well as raising four kids alone, my mom is depressed, anxious and lonely. My older brother, Jake, is currently working as a grunt at an arcade because he knew better than to finish his first semester of Community College. Luke and Cori, too often lumped together as the youngest siblings, are failing sophomore and freshman year of high school, respectively. That is, whenever Cori is not being hospitalized for bipolar disorder. And I’m a boy who likes to kiss other boys. Yeah, we’re fucked.

At least we have learned not to strive. The magazine's teachings fall on deaf ears ion our household, lost in the static between the animal droppings and the unwashed dishes, we are fortunate enough to have time to care about the what the fucking neighbors think about whom I fuck, or to try to be another ass hole man in a suit. No, thankfully, we don't have time for your shit.

Doing our best to add some Jazzy to his ciudad aweanada. 

We decided to go out one night like this. Well, because its fun and important to celebrate with colors and despite the negative energy of this city. Day in day out we explode. Like a jazzy grenade that a heterocapilast has thrown his body over, we, admittedly, are muffled, but not without leaving our mark