Literate Perversions

  • Home
  • Speak Out!
  • Writing
    • Times Square: A History of Sin
    • God Is A Bullet
    • Looking At My Cock
    • Two Women, One Year, and Hep C
    • Beautiful Scars
    • The St. James Infirmary: A Safe Medical Haven for Sex Workers
    • Sexy Beasts! A Look at Vampires in Porn
    • Review: The Good Old Naughty Days
    • Fencesitter Blues
    • The Barbary Coast
    • Review: Roman Sex
    • Sex and Death in Four Colors

Natalie Reed Interview: Transphobia in the Hawkeye Initiative

By Chris Hall
January 11, 2013
3 Comments

Tweet

For my most recent piece at the SF Weekly, I wrote about the controversy that’s been boiling up around a new Tumblr Blog, The Hawkeye Initiative. In a way, it’s a blog that I’d like to applaud. It’s based on a very real and serious criticism of superhero comics for depicting female bodies in really weird, oversexualized, and distorted ways. The most famous example is the “boobs and butt” pose, which has become ubiquitous in superhero comics. A few examples of female characters contorting their spines in order to give the viewer tits and ass are seen below:

Wonder Woman strikes a classic "boobs and butt" pose.
Wonder Woman strikes a classic “boobs and butt” pose.
Red Sonja, swiped from Escher Girls
Red Sonja, swiped from Escher Girls
Fei Rin from Anarchy Reigns Videogame; another one from Escher Girls.
Fei Rin from Anarchy Reigns Videogame; another one from Escher Girls.

The Hawkeye Initiative has tried to critique this over-the-top aesthetic by having fans submit redrawn versions of comic book art that substitutes the Marvel character Hawkeye for female characters, in the hopes that it would make the absurdity of the poses more visible to people who take the boobs and butt approach for granted. And at first, there was a lot of positive response. The Hawkeye Initiative became the meme of the month for December of 2012, with media coverage from Wired, Geeks Are Sexy, Bleeding Cool, and i09, among others. But there’s also been an increasing amount of criticism on grounds that Hawkeye Initiative is using the very old trope of mocking effeminate men to make its point.

Transfeminist blogger Natalie Reed has been a very vocal critic of the Hawkeye Initiative. She was one of the first people I interviewed for the SF Weekly piece, and in fact, her thoughts make up the bulk of the quoted material in there, along with the ever-fabulous Kitty Stryker. One of the most painful parts about writing the article was figuring out just what I could cut and what to leave. She has a lot to say, and says it very well, and with her permission, I’m posting the full text of the interview here. There’s a lot to think on here; not only about gender and how we perceive it, but also about how to build and maintain truly intersectional analyses, instead of fighting one evil by building up another.

#

Chris Hall: First of all, could you summarize for me your criticisms of the Hawkeye Initiative?

Natalie Reed: So, my main concern with the Hawkeye Initiative, and related strategies of critiquing the representation of women in comics by placing men as substitutions in the poses, costumes or anatomy of female characters, boils down to how much of this strategy is based in the basic idea of “But it would be ridiculous if Hawkeye / Batman / Iron Man / Captain America were placed in this pose”, which is the suggestion that a male character being placed in the same pose/costume/anatomic-style will be perceived as more ridiculous than the female character, or make the ridiculousness more obvious while obviously the basic “point” here is to expose the ridiculous, impractical or anatomically impossible nature of the way female characters are represented, that point ends up falling over pretty heavily into transphobia and femmephobia by imagining these representations become more ridiculous by placing men in them. Frequently, in the Hawkeye Initiative or similar strategies, you see things like word balloons saying “I’m so pretty!”, or caption jokes about “look at Tony Stark’s seductive face!”, wherein the humor and “ridiculousness” of the drawing comes not from the basic preposterousness of the female representation itself, but from the way our culture perceives it as innately or intrinsically ridiculous, funny, disgusting, absurd or frivolous for a man (or person whose body we perceive as male) to dress, behave, or perform in “feminine ways.” This idea that it’s somehow inherently comical, or ridiculous, for a man, (or someone so designated), to do “feminine” things is one of the cornerstones of both trans-misogyny and femmephobia (the idea that femininity is inherently more superficial, silly, ridiculous, weak, or impractical than masculinity). [Read more…]

Tweet

Filed Under: Comics (and Comix), Gender, Pop Culture, Queer Politics Tagged With: comics, feminism, lgbt, queer, sexuality

Not Being Gay in the GOP

By Chris Hall
March 25, 2007
Leave a Comment

Tweet

Joe.My.God‘s blog Sanchez and Coulterhas streaming audio and mp3’s of Matt Sanchez’s twenty-minute-plus weasel session on Michelangelo Signorile’s show on Sirius Radio. The positions that Sanchez twists himself into would be truly amusing if you could perform them physically with the hottie(s) of your choice. As rhetoric, though, they’re just sad, and illustrate the levels of paranoia and denial that are necessary to not only exist as a black, gay member to the Republican Party, but to be able to convince yourself that an organization filled with people like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin is the one that’s gonna have your back when the shit really starts to come down. Among other things, Matt asserts that despite all that cock, he’s not really gay, not even bi. I can understand the frustration with strict labels, but Matt really goes out of his way to let us know how icky all that faggy stuff is to him. He’s going to be a lonely man. He thinks that even though his past has been splashed all over the interwebs, he doesn’t have to worry about getting kicked out of the military. I wouldn’t bet on it. It’s unlikely that his conservative friends are going to associate with him any more than they have to, much less make him their poster boy. And it’s gonna be a long time before any self-respecting gay folk buddy up to him.

Tweet

Filed Under: Queer Politics Tagged With: closet-case, matt-sanchez, michelangelo-signorile, queer

Thank God SOMEBODY Said It

By Chris Hall
August 5, 2006
2 Comments

Tweet

Two things have bugged me about the LGBT movements in this country for the last ten years or so.

Well, actually, lots of things have bugged me about LGBT politics, but that’s because I’m a skeptical, misanthropic bastard.  But for the moment, let’s pare it down to two, just so I don’t have to keep typing until my fingers bleed.  The first is the insistence on a biological origin of homosexuality.  As a matter of scientific inquiry, it’s always interesting to play the “nature or nurture?” game. But as a point of political ideology, it’s a dead end.  It smacks of cowardice; if it’s biological, being queer isn’t a choice, and therefore it isn’t your “fault.” In essence, pushing the “gay gene” idea amounts to institutionalized whining: “We can’t help being homos; it’s in our genes.” But more importantly, it surrenders to the ‘phobes the idea that it matters.  In a country that promises the freedom that America does, it shouldn’t matter one bit whether gayness is locked in by a molecular switch flipped by your mom listening to Color Me Barbara eight million times while she was knocked up, or if it’s something you decide as casually as the choice between Chinese food and steak; who you fuck should be as sacred as what god you worship, and by hammering on homosexuality as biological destiny, the national LGBT groups have completely abandoned that principle.

[Read more…]

Tweet

Filed Under: Queer Politics Tagged With: gay-marriage, lgbt, Politics, queer

Literate Perversions Calendar

By Chris Hall
July 10, 2006
Leave a Comment

Tweet

Untitled document

I'm trying an experiment.

I've placed a new page on the site called the Literate Perversions NYC Calendar.  It lists an eclectic assortment of events and happenings that I, for one reason or another, think sound kind of interesting.  Mostly it's stuff that's sex- or kink-related, but the criteria is stuff that I think sounds cool, one way or the other. It's stuff that I might like to attend, or at least know is going on. This can include anything from politics to readings to sex parties. The success of my little experiment depends not only on people being interested enough to subscribe, but in me being able to find enough events that interest me to make the venture worthwhile. If anyone knows of anything happening that should be on a queer-friendly, pervert-friendly, nerd-friendly list, drop me a line.

Tweet

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: Events, Google-Calendar, iCal, New-York, queer

Recent Posts

  • We Need to Fight the (Police) Unions For Justice in Law Enforcement
  • Hooray for Femme Superheroes: Supergirl’s Skirt is Badass
  • Infographic: Police are Threats to Sex Workers, Not Protection
  • A Song Stripped Naked: The Be Good Tanyas Version of “Waiting Around to Die”
  • Steven Pressfield and Impostor’s Syndrome

Copyright © 2021 ·Metro Pro Theme · Genesis Framework by StudioPress · WordPress · Log in

✖

Cancel reply

Connect with:
Google Twitter Yahoo! Tumblr Windows Live

Cancel