Nightjar

This is a form of backdoor bigotry from both normative facts (there are more straight than gay relationships) and well represented bigoted beliefs (men are superior to women).

Among President Trump’s most vocal supporters are South Africans seeking asylum in the US. An estimated 6,300 people have arrived in the US since the administration’s announcement in February last year of a refugee resettlement program specifically for white South Africans and other minorities. So far, 206 Afrikaners have resettled in Ohio, a state that has struggled with population decline for decades. The Trump administration recently announced it plans to increase by 10,000 the number of refugee resettlement places for South Africans this year. But since arriving in the US, Afrikaners – largely the Afrikaans-speaking descendants of Dutch settlers and French Huguenots – have faced major challenges, in large part due to policies aimed at immigrants and enacted by the White House and Ohio’s Republican-run legislature. Last June, Ohio introduced new driving license rules for lawful residents who are not citizens or green card holders. They include the requirement for all applicants to complete eight hours of lessons through a designated driving school, 24 hours of classroom work and 50 hours of driving with a licensed adult before being able to take a driving exam. The cost of fulfilling these requirements is estimated at about $500 and could take up to nine months, when in the past it took a matter of weeks. All this has created a major barrier for the new South African arrivals, many of whom claim to be victims of a so-called “white genocide”, a debunked conspiracy theory. South Africa was an apartheid state for 48 years until 1991, a time in which many white South Africans prospered as land and business owners, while Black South Africans were subjected to systematic racism and poverty. Since the fall of apartheid, some white South Africans have claimed they have become victims of violence, racial attacks and targeting by successive governments. A post on X by an Ohio-based South African from 7 May called for authorities to “Stop sending South African refugees to Ohio immediately!” due to alleged “ridiculous driving laws”.

Cisness is the way to name the historical process through which myriad forms of collective life were punished, made invisible, marginal, or pathological such that one way of living could appear as the natural, neutral, correct, and healthy one; the productive, the orderly, the non-criminal, the thing compatible with goodness and sociality. This is also the story of sex and gender moving from the realm of public recognition to the realm of private truth. All other ways of life had to be subjected to the presumption that they must strive toward that ideal. This is a way of thinking that connects this history of sex as a racial technology to Victorianist accounts of the “angel of the house,” and the persecution of sex workers, with trans history, trans studies ideas, and disability liberationist ideas about what kind of bodies are valuable. But, it’s not only an historical emergence; it’s not only a simple chronological process that runs from before cisness to the epoch of cisness. Cisness is the conceptual tool that names the regime of power regularly revitalized to put down challenges to the social order of assigned sex, as these challenges arise in history when such a revitalization serves capital and white supremacy. We are living in such a historical moment.

The critical term “cisness” clarifies the points of contact between different scholarly arguments about the appropriate bourgeois standards of comportment, of life narrative, of the consolidation of a bourgeois class identity against both the febrile aristocracy and the many forms of racialized monstrosity, including that of the metropolitan proletariat. As you alluded to earlier, there’s a homology between bourgeois whiteness and cisness. These are mutually constitutive social forms. That’s the point. But we’ve needed a way to talk about the elements of that that are about assigned sex. I’m trying to avoid saying “gender,” here!

SL: We ought to drop “gender” or “the binary” and instead use “cisness,” because we can have sexual difference without cisness. Correct?

EH: That is what I’m advocating. Cisness, as the racialized presumption of sexed naturalness, actually affords a great deal of gender expansiveness to white bourgeois people, and in our era this modality of cisness is most visible and significant in the availability of masculine priority to bourgeois white women. One has only to think of the centrality of Crossfit and machine gun masculinity to a MAGA woman like Marjorie Taylor Greene, herself a crusading transphobe. Or TERF valorization of an ill-defined normal, neutral expression of gender over a mocked femininity, which also often comes with a sort of confession of youthful masculinity, presented as the tragedy that they might have been trans boys or misrecognized as such. Or the liberal commitment to the “successful” woman leader who has triumphed over the attempts to contain her in the limiting work of social reproduction. We might think of Greene, J.K. Rowling, and Hillary Clinton as emblematic hanks of this braid. How do we name the reality that these groups of women attain priority and power from the ways they work, work out, dress, and carry themselves, ways that supposedly violate the “stereotypes” or norms of “female gender?” I’m saying that they are not violating norms. Rather, the latitude for white women to engage in masculinist behaviors, even the incentive to do so, is itself an exercise of cisness as a way to express white identity in this moment. The presumed normalness and neutrality of the sex of white people––the cisness of whiteness in other words––is emphasized and enacted, rather than violated by these social forms.”]

Cicada sketches by Vincent van Gogh.

I say this as someone who sells pottery, and many people who see my art assume I am using art as an outlet to “express myself.”

I am not.

I use art to challenge myself. A lot of what I do is the equivalent of doing a hard sudoko or a half marathon, answering the question of “can I do this?”

I use art to question things and explore ideas. Finding physical synthesis between concepts and working out a design to its end state.

I use art to make money. I make some things just because I suspect they’ll sell well, and I keep making them when they do.

This idea that an artist is “putting themselves out there” every time they create is not only stupid, but harmful, and it kills critique and analysis.

Yes every creative work is influenced by its creator, but the most preliminary step of analysis is to define the purpose of a work of art (functional, narrative, entertainment, persuasive, decorative, ceremonial, etc.) and a vanishingly small percentage of that is self-expression. Even then, it’s generally tied to the self’s relationship with something else—perception, society, etc.

It’s very tiresome to have people assume they know you because they like (or dislike) your art, to make assumptions about who you are and how you approach the world. It’s nothing new— people called the Impressionists insane and the Fauvists degenerate. And now people are expected to hand out their identities and traumas to prove they have the right to explore certain subjects.

Post Caller

TLDR: In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire job was to listen to volunteers. Most of the people they fired were union organizers. Wikipedia’s editors are now threatening to strike in solidarity. The Foundation is sitting on $296 million in reserves and a freshly profitable AI revenue stream. This is a confrontation with global implications.