Re: [-empyre-] geuzennamen

Ryan Griffis <ryan.griffis@gmail.com> · Wed, 25 Oct 2006 12:06:30 -0500

On Oct 25, 2006, at 12:33 AM, N.Mauro-Flude wrote:
he main
ongoing activities we have are the Genderchanger Academy
(http://www.genderchangers.org), the Syster Server Project
(http://systerserver.net) and the Eclectic Tech Carnival
(http://www.eclectictechcarnival.org).
These are grassroots projects, as a response to our own experiences of
gender issues in the IT world and beyond.

great projects! i really like this from the genderchangers.org site

"The logical hierarchy of the GCA website is designed in a way a  
typical linux directory tree is organized. Unfortunately a  
"technical" structure often excludes those who are not familiar with  
the structure from participation. Our goal here, is not to confuse  
people, but to introduce people to the linux file system in a way  
that may be memorable."

the dual use of the linux hierarchy structure is great.
blakkbyrd wrote:
 I can see how this might be empowering to certain women when  
explored in a controlled environment with trained therapists.  But  
a website is not a controlled environment.
Can you share your audience demographics with us?  How many t  
shirts have you sold to   women, and how many have you sold to   
males?  How many teenagers and children visit your site?

i think the lack of control you find problematic is kind of the  
point. not that it's not problematic, but the problems are integral  
to what's going on. if you want to get clinical and professional  
about it you have to do more than borrow the most obvious questions  
from a marketing perspective.

We actually get teenagers that email us because

they want to add to our list of words, or they want to buy a T- 
shirt.

Is every purchasor screened to ensure that they correctly  
understand the theoretical underpinnings of your project before  
purchase?
How much traffic does the site get and how much revenue does it  
generate from sales and advertising?  Do you break even?
In the absence of such information, the project appears  about as  
effective as handing out bottles of scotch to alcoholics would be  
in campaigning against alcoholism.
gender-ads is far more effective and doesnt sell anything
http://blakkbyrd.blogspot.com/2006/08/gender-ads.html

Analyzing ads and marketing is great. i don't think deGeuzen's work  
is trying to function on the level of strict critical analysis  
however. i think you're rightly trying to bring some kind of rigor to  
the questioning of art projects (as Craig Owens insisted a long time  
ago), but i don't know that such rigor should (or can) come from the  
language and strategy of marketing solely.

and the analogy to alcoholism is a bit of a simplification to say the  
least. for one thing it accepts the medicalization of the problem of  
addiction (as an individual problem of mental/moral/biological  
weakness), and by comparison does the same to oppression and  
violence. anger-management is pretty much the only official/ 
institutional treatment regarding violence against women in  
"domestic" situations (at least in the US) - they must treat their  
"anger" as alcoholics must treat their addiction, as "sick"  
individuals. And women are seen as "survivors" in the same way cancer  
survivors are. see the problem? (my knowledge of this comes from a  
partner who worked for several years as an advocate for women in  
situations of domestic violence in the US)

any poetics certainly has to be challenged for how it reinscribes  
cultural norms and politics (ideology), but it seems equally  
problematic to interrogate the problems of poetics and the  
subrational with the same techniques that are used to manipulate  
subrational desires by oppressive forces. it sounds like you're  
essentially asking for complete control of communication on the part  
of the artists here, which is antithetical to the very project  
itself. re-appropriation is about (IMHO) trying to alter a dominant  
power relationship through low-level means of engagement and co- 
opting the language of the oppressor. it's not necessarily a rational  
process, or one that can be quantified in the language of sales and  
demographics. to be sure, those things can be data used to discuss  
what's going on. and don't get me wrong, i'm all for arguing and  
critiquing these things, as i find lots of problems with such  
practices (as i've said before). but i think we need to be just as  
critical of the easy conflation of re-appropriation (and its effect/ 
affect) and the appropriation of specific/oppressed bodies by a  
dominant culture.

in other words, are we arguing over whether or not deGeuzen's t- 
shirts are contributing to a culture of violence in the same way that  
abercrombe + fitch are through their marketing? or are we arguing  
over how effective it is at resisting that larger culture of  
violence? is it a conflict over strategy or tactics?

this is a larger question of how to be critical of poetics (beyond  
formal analysis) i think, which is very interesting and potentially  
productive. but also very difficult.

best,

ryan