#logxx

This idea that attraction and happiness are intangible and easily obscured is one that is articulated in practically every female character of Utena, because Utena is willing to address what both Beauvoir and Ikeda were reluctant to acknowledge: patriarchy does not care whether a woman wants it or not. The girls of Utena are each dragged into the patriarchal apparatus, some joyfully, some kicking and screaming, but the outcome is always the same.

Often in saying one knows a “language” one really likes to say they know a people or even a nation. In many ways, we imagine that a language is a people– take, for example, the complicated problem of who is an “Arab.” Where national unity is desired, or where a country wants to distinguish itself from another, language is often invoked, as Gaelic has been invoked in Ireland. Where individuals wish to enrich or understand themselves, they often turn to language. The issue with this approach is it is rarely taken with the intention of actually learning to speak to anyone. Instead, the purpose of the language is to further identify oneself with an ethnic group with which the learner interacts in a way that is often voyeuristic, and which they imagine as static and homogeneous.

Art that seeks to be political has a twofold problem of interrogating itself both as a political entity and as art. The aim of the political writer is, of course, to communicate the politics in which they believe— for example, that the United States is founded on antiblackness. The aim of the artist is to produce an exemplary work within their medium, a task which requires interrogating the nature of the art itself, from history to the material conditions of its production. Art functions well only when it considers how these problems intersect, and art that recreates a political problem it criticizes fails in whole or in part as art.