BOOIFICATION

noun. the process of becoming boos.

by,
Marlon M. Bailey

Fierce Debate about Black Women in Porn

I recently found out that a blog called White Men Who Prefer Black Women. They posted my 2005 Colorlines article "Hardcore Desire: Black Women Laboring in Porn." There were over 100 comments from readers about it. While there were many who disagreed with my argument, I'm glad that there was a debate. The world would be boring if we all agreed after all. Thanks to everyone for your feedback.

Little Girl Dancing with HIPS!

We saw this little girl doing her thing in a drum circle in Madrid. She was beautiful and knew how to move her body to the music. I was struck by her because so often we women of color police our daughters and tell them that if they dance a certain way or move a certain way they are being "fast". But why must we negatively sexualize children and reproduce colonial/neoliberal discipline on them? Children do have sexuality, and that's ok, why must we deny it? Adults who are discipling and guilting them into not being sexual seem to imagine that ignorance and innocence actually protect children from harm (be it abuse or disease), when it actually makes them more vulnerable. Anyway, this girl is dancing our culture and she's beautiful. The whole gathering was stunning. Nowhere in the U.S. can people gather so freely, without police intervention, to drum, dance, drink, smoke, play, sing, shout, and be collective. Paz Madrid!

Desiring Ourselves

I'm finally posting an experimental video I did in 2006 with my class, Black Feminist Multimedia, at UC Santa Barbara. It was my first video ever, and0 you can tell. I wanted to engage the archive I'm in the process of collecting of "historic erotica" of black bodies in the West, soon to be called The Black Body Archive. These images were not formal erotica, but were created, circulated, and consumed as erotica by western men. Similar to the images one finds in vintage (and contemporary) National Geographic, these photographs were created by scientists, explorers, and other imperialists from Europe during their travels to Africa. I purchased rights to the images from a private French collector, and plan to develop a digital as well as print archive featuring the images. In this short video, I am experimenting with combining my subjectivity--and my own thoughts about my desire for the women and girls in the photographs, although the images were part of an exploitative imperialist project. I am also, through my voice and written words embedded in the text, attempting to think through what it meant for these women and girls to pose for these white imperialist photographers, how it felt, and what was their sense of sexual subjectivity versus perhaps feeling objectified. These are hard things to know from these historic (19th and early 20th century) photographs, and difficult to gleam from the faces that stare, hauntingly and knowingly, back at us. Who owns the gaze?

Samba School

ASWAD trip to Brazil. Samba group in Rio.

A Much Needed Update!

Ok, I know it's been 6 months--well, more--since I wrote. As our fantastic Black Feminist Multimedia class ended, there was so much to do. And then I got evicted and had to find a new home. And then I went to South Africa for the summer. And then I came back with an infection and had to teach 2 new classes while get better. And now the new quarter is starting and I never got to tell everyone about the end of BFM and my adventures in South Africa! Over the next month I will post my photographs from S.A., where I went to research Black women sexual minorities--queers and sex workers--in Johannesburg and Cape Town. I have some awesome photographs and memories of the amazing women of FEW in Jopburg (Forum for the Empowerment of Women) and Behind the Mask--the Black queer media org. I must get back to that meaningful work and write my articles for the wonderful people that shared their lives and time with me. I miss them!
Before I do that, let me just sum up that the BFM class went really well. The students did a great job. Some excelled more at the website project than the film projects, and others, vice versa. Most did what they liked the best. I only wished they would have listened to me and put their final videos on line. You can access their websites (those that sent me links) at
http://www.womst.ucsb.edu/bfm/
We had a screening of the final 10 minute video projects at UCSB's MultiCultural Center--on the big screen with a good sized audience. Videos were about a range of feminist topics: depression, single motherhood, the criminalization of women who resist partner abuse, ethnic identity and family, hair (older Asian women and the short perm!), the glass ceiling, gender politics and the dating scene. I was so proud of the girls for their work! And it was fun.
During the fall I taught a collaborative feminist video class called Documenting Feminist Studies. More on that later, but it was very different than BFM, but also very interesting and in the end, a powerful experience!
This quarter I'll be teaching on Sexual Cultures, as welll as Women, Gender and Media, so expect posts on these topics. I promise to start using my blog again to think about my teaching work as well as my longtime book project on Black women in porn. I go to Vegas this week for that project. Yay!
More soon!

Black Feminist Multimedia Day 8

Before going over the requirements for the class (you people are not blogging!), and thinking about how we would like to screen our final projects we had a guest speaker today. Sherri Barnes, UCSB women's studies librarian came to present her groundbreaking website: Black American Feminism Biblography (http://www.library.ucsb.edu/subjects/blackfeminism/) also on our site (http://www.womst.ucsb.edu/bfm/). Created on a limited budget, Barnes did a huge amount of work to put together a bibliography that is so needed in the websphere, particularly for those women and girls who may not have access to other library daatabases. Barnes spoke about how to navigate the site and how to then take the citations to the UCSB library's database to search for their locations for research. This was very beneficial to students, as they will be required to have outside sources for their final video projects, but also because many of them were not familiar with Women's Studies specific and Black feminist specific resources for research. Following this presentation, the students were given a series of questions about the significance of creating archives and bibliographies, and on the readings for the week to blog about. Most chose to write about the question of archives and bibliographies, such as Karen, who brought up the importance of these to young women, who like herself in high school would like more information about Black feminism and to read basic texts by Black women authors. Channing pointed out in her blog the ways in which this can be very empowering for a range of women to view and create new networks for dialogue and research. We also talked about everyone's plans for final projects. Since then I've been meeting with class members as they plot out what their questions are and how they will narrate them for the 10 minute final video!

Black Feminist Multimedia Day 7

This week we began to learn about our homepages. Having created a template for everyone's homepage based on Nicole's webpage (see: http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~n_star/), and my new webpage (see: http://www.womst.ucsb.edu/faculty/mmilleryoung/) we got a chance to introduce everyone to the template. Alex Sanchez, feminist supporter tech guru from UCSB IC, ran the demo in the media lab. The class liked the flash elements we added for the menu, and were all a gaggle about the possiblities. We will return to our sites to add the media elements and writing sections in Week 9. Following the session I screening my contribution to the Self Portrait Porject collaborative effort, called Desiring Our Bodies, Decolonizing Ourselves. The piece plays with sound (ala Nina Simone's verve remix version of See Line Woman and my voice doing spoken word) and archival images of Africa women from my collection for the Black Female Body Archive project I'm working on for distribution online next year. Students approved of my small time effort at video art. All love in this class!

Black Feminist Multimedia Day 4

We worked on Final cut pro, blogging, and camera work today, as well as a discussion on the readings, from the problematics of cyborg theory for women of color, to the relationship women have to technology across race, class, and space. Working our way towards the longer self portrait projects! We screening our TA/collaborator Nicole's film from her MFA days at USC called Life Story. A powerful short about sexual identity, desire, and self narratives told through still images and sound. It was very effective in showing students what they can do with still images in multimedia, and in how they can tell very personal stories via this collaborative space.

Black Feminist Multimedia Day 6

Today we viewed the class' 3-5 minute video shorts for the Self Portrait Video Project (our midterm). I was deeply impressed by everyone's work. Lihn's spook on Sex in the City, called Sexism in the City, was a hilarious take on the post-feminist constructions of the famous TV show, and a subversion of it. Scarlet's piece, Bare All, used powerful imagery of her body, train tracks, police brutality and ordinary images from nature and the household to symbolize her personal narrative of coming from a Chinese immigrant family and coming to a feminist and queer politics of liberation from State violence and control. Juliet was very creative and artistic in her piece which used the voices (through interviews) of friends and animation to play with the question of "Is Juliet a feminist? Why or Why Not?" which got at issues of how we define feminism, and the relationship between feminism and the Christian (Mormon) church. Mary film, Hella Complex, also considered her ethnic, family, and personal history and identity as foundational to her transformation into a feminist activist at college. She showed very powerful footage which she captured of a cultural and family ritual which marginalizes girls and women and connected it to her activism for womyn's rights and in the current immigration battle. Yvonne's film took a slightly different approach to get a similar question of activism and empowerment via feminism in college, as she included several Disney cartoon characters that informed her sense of womanhood as a girl growing up, such as the little mermaid. She turns it around by saying that at a certain point she came to realize that the pseudo feminism of these childhood role models was really all about getting the man, and sacrificing everything to do it. This realization certainly formed her development as a feminist, as did her experience in the military--depicted in her video with very personal family photographs from the time. Channing's video, You Just Be You, also dealt with issues from her childhood, particularly around the issue of beauty and self confidence. Her video used images of ordinary Black women she captured, from the beauty salon (great location!) to public events, to show the range in looks and what we might consider beautiful. A powerful soundtrack and Channing's discussion of the ambivalence these women felt when interacting with her camera tied the piece together. This would be a great piece to have young Black women see! Kristen's video, Searching for My Father, was very affecting, and many of us in the class were sincerely moved. It told the story, via found images online rather than her own, of a girl who grew up without her father feeling the loss of him, who then comes into herself in college and forms a different relationship to the idea of Father that releaser her from the feelings of loss or regret. This was an autobigraphical tale told in a universal lense, using stock images of Black daughters and fathers, but creatively putting them together in a narrative that speaks very personally to the longterm effects on one's sense of womanhood and empowerment the absense of the father enlists. Great job everyone!

Black Feminist Multimedia Day 5

My friend and colleague Xavier Livermon attended class today for a vibrant presentation on the sexual and racial politics around South African Kwaito star Lebo Mathosa. She's at the center of a public debate in SA about decency (see Tumi Sedumedi's Blog: http://matumzaonline.blogspot.com/2006/03/decency-and-entertainment-industry.html) and the exploitation of Black women's sexuality in the media and music industries. Mathosa was accused of not wearing panties during her performance, an accusation she firmly denies. Livermon, who is earning his PhD in African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley, pointed out that Mathosa's performance of sexuality challenges the normative constructions of Black women's sexuality in the South African cultural sphere, adn that her videos and live concert performances point to important reversals of masculine dominance with female pleasure, spectatorship, and visual desire. Thanks Xavier!
Following this presentation, the class discussed the limiting constructions around Black women's sexuality, and the problematics of sexual subjectivity and desire being constantly framed as a lack of decency, respect or racial consciousness for Black women actors, including hip hop video girls and sex workers. The alternatives of feminine, mother-earth goddess are equally limiting, students pointed out.
We watched the documentary Nobody Knows My Name, by Rachel Raimsit, which also touched upon the issue of how women in hip hop are viewed as purely sexual scenery. Students were interested in the framing of hypersexual women dancing in clubs with one of their favorite performers, Medusa, who posits a very different image..the goddess one. Left unanswered are the implications of Medusa's performance of masculinity in her MC battles and the question of lesbian desire in the film. Students were interested in the format of the video, and we discussed ideas about how to construct a documentary using the format that Raimist lays out, ie. capturing multiple voices in the beginning and telling the narrative via each woman's commentary. Students, big fans of hip hop, were happy to see a doc like Nobody Knows My Name, and were certainly encouraged that Raimist was a MFA student when she made it.

A Day Without A Mexican

Si se puede! I'm happy to see the mass actions taking place across the country on CNN today. Of course, they loop the same tired pictures of the rallies, without actually giving airtime to the voices of the protesters and spokes people of this unprecedented day of action for the rights of immigrants, along with shots of Mexicans standing on the corner waiting for work as laborers, and Mexicans running across the border and climbing walls to get into the country. Why does the media ignore the story of immigration in this country that included how ALL white people got here, and then became white? Aside from indigenous people and the decendants of slaves, everyone here is an immigrant, and most of you came illegally. Of course, US immigration law has always limited immigration from people of color, and Europeans deemed less desireable (a very racialized discourse) like the Irish and Italians. This discourse of illegal and legal immigration cannot be understood outside of this racialized narrative of nation building. This story is about the meaning of citizenship and belonging in the nation-state. In the history of the US, the majority of people were not citizens, and did not have the legal rights of citizens, such as the vote. Citizenship has expanded to include formers slaves, the white poor, and others as a way to consolidate power in the nation-state. But the story of globalization tells us that the nation-state is becoming increasingly irrelevant, hence the hyper-nationalist backlash.

Will Tony the Token on CNN please shut the hell up? Tony, you dont speak for all African Americans when you jump on the Lou Dobbs bandwagon and blame immigrants for the decline in wages, including the minimum wage. Tony said "When I was a kid growing up in Baltimore, I washed dishes, and now, because of illegal immigration, young Black kids like me can't work as dishwashers!" So this is the fault of the 12+ million immigrants, and not the employers? Aren't they the ones that lowered the minimum wage to 30+% lower than it was 20 years ago? Aren't they the ones that set up the exploitative terms, not the folks just trying to find any work that will accept their illegal status and make a life? Tony, you dont speak for the Black folks I know, who know that this is globalization: racial capitalism on a global scale. Black folks know how wages have always been depressed when we were the workers, and now. And we know that poor people are NOT the problem, business/Capital is.