jfood posted:Why is the geisha thing 'cultural appropriation'? Isn't it just a business model, like any other form of sex-trade work? If you're talking about the Katy Perry thing, there are a lot of ways in which her act used stereotypes about geisha, Japanese people, and Asians generally, many of which are outright incorrect when it comes to geisha and still have a lot of currency in American culture. Thus, Asian-Americans protested it because they felt it damaged their ability to be free from racial stereotypes.
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Apr 1, 2015 03:29
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unlimited shrimp posted:Is a non-rastafari black guy appropriating when he wears dreds or does he get a pass because of strategic essentialism? I guess that depends. Has he given a TED talk? quote:Are rastas appropriating Spartan culture? No they're appropriating the nazarites but it's syncretism so that's OK. Come on keep up, man.
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Apr 1, 2015 03:34
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what are thread's thoughts on Wu Tang e: Wu Tang is a very broad subject area, so feel free to pursue any thread of conversation that the W brings to mind. Rodatose fucked around with this message at 03:40 on Apr 1, 2015 |
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Apr 1, 2015 03:35
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Rodatose posted:what are thread's thoughts on Wu Tang Frankly, I think that both Nia and Blazing Arrow are far superior albums, but I think RZA is musically cool as hell and Ghost Dog was a great movie.
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Apr 1, 2015 03:46
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jfood posted:Why is the geisha thing 'cultural appropriation'? Isn't it just a business model, like any other form of sex-trade work? Geisha and modern day Geisha especially are not sex workers. People rightfully object to the fetishization of Asian women and somehow Geisha get grouped into that. Usually people complaining about geisha imagery have zero connection to Japan or knowledge about Japanese culture, viewing Geisha a stereotype instead of a cultural practice with a long history that still exists (albeit in a dying form.) Let us English fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Apr 1, 2015 |
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Apr 1, 2015 04:11
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Let us English posted:Geisha and modern day Geisha especially are not sex workers. Finish your thought. Additionally, how are geisha themselves not a fetish?
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Apr 1, 2015 04:19
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jfood posted:Finish your thought. That's a complete sentence, and although I'd disagree with it, geisha aren't prostitutes, which is what we think of when we think of sex workers. This is also using a different definition of what "fetish" means, which I have to chuckle at now that it's rebounding on people who complained about it earlier.
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Apr 1, 2015 04:24
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jfood posted:Finish your thought. Geisha are real human beings doing a job like other performers and musicians. The work has been fetishized as part of the general fetishization of Asian women, but Geisha themselves are human beings, not fetishes. Much like a nurse is a human being, despite the fact that some people get off on nurses outfits.
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Apr 1, 2015 04:27
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Exclamation Marx posted:Although the kanji example isn't really the same when I think about it, because Japanese people traditionally don't tattoo kanji on themselves. Not entirely accurate. But where they might it's usually part of a larger piece and not the focus of it. I'd post examples, but it would all be a bunch of yakuza dudes' asses and probably just better that you just take my word on it since it doesn't really change anything.
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Apr 1, 2015 04:31
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How does Bjork fit into the spectrum of perspectives on cultural assimilation?
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Apr 1, 2015 04:34
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I have seen some odd examples of people calling things appropriation. One that puzzled me a bit was a reference to UK 80s ska as "cultural appropriation". This seems weird to me since Prince Buster, the jamaican inventor of the genre actually went out of his way to hire white musicians and set up integrated bands because he wanted it to be a music that "unites the tribes". I spoke a few years to Pauline black , the english-caribean (whats the right term here? I'm aussie so i'm dumb at this) cofounder of the selecter about it and she was pretty surprised too. I think it really comes down to context. White reggae well might be appropriation, since from its inception it was a music of black power. Whilst Ska and Two Tone where always intended to be music for integrated audiences (And keep in mind the context of the 60s where that originated from where blacks and whites being able to attend the same gigs was still a hurdle for the civil rights movement). On the other hand the US "ska" movement of the 90s has gently caress all to do with Jamaican Ska or UK Two tone, cos seriously kids, combining hardcore and ska diminishes the vitality of hardcore and the soul of ska producing the muck that passed as US ska in the 90s. So yeah, maybe *thats* appropriation? Or maybe I just think that because I love 70s ska and detest 90s ska.
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Apr 1, 2015 04:38
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duck monster posted:I have seen some odd examples of people calling things appropriation. One that puzzled me a bit was a reference to UK 80s ska as "cultural appropriation". This seems weird to me since Prince Buster, the jamaican inventor of the genre actually went out of his way to hire white musicians and set up integrated bands because he wanted it to be a music that "unites the tribes". I spoke a few years to Pauline black , the english-caribean (whats the right term here? I'm aussie so i'm dumb at this) cofounder of the selecter about it and she was pretty surprised too. It's probably because people don't know the history of ska.
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Apr 1, 2015 04:40
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Exclamation Marx posted:I wasn't being entirely serious, but "permission" in this case is getting a Maori tattooist to do it. Ngati Toa is a tribe or some kind of organization though isn't it? And the legal ownership of the specific Ka Mate haka doesn't cover "hakas in general" does it? Plus isn't the ownership of it more symbolic than anything else? The wikipedia article says they can't collect royalties on it or make injunctions against its use. That seems to indicate they don't actually have intellectual property rights to it. Even if they did have all those rights with respect to it though, it still wouldn't be a good analogy to tribal tattoos, since the Ka Mate Haka is a specific composition, not a genre. After all this it's still unclear to me how 'a culture' can have an intellectual property interest in some broad practice or some aesthetic.
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Apr 1, 2015 04:45
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Let us English posted:Geisha are real human beings doing a job like other performers and musicians. The work has been fetishized as part of the general fetishization of Asian women, but Geisha themselves are human beings, not fetishes. Much like a nurse is a human being, despite the fact that some people get off on nurses outfits. They're real human beings, who trade on a certain look and act in a certain way to elicit a sexual or emotional response in men and then get paid for it. That's sex trade work, like a pro domme. A domme is a real human being and what they do is probably an art form as well. Your argument is not only unsupported, but entirely circular.
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Apr 1, 2015 04:48
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hakimashou posted:After all this it's still unclear to me how 'a culture' can have an intellectual property interest in some broad practice or some aesthetic. The overriding legal system is just another 'culture' that enforces intellectual property rights according to its own values set on equally arbitrary lines over what is proprietary and what is public. Rodatose fucked around with this message at 04:54 on Apr 1, 2015 |
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Apr 1, 2015 04:50
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jfood posted:They're real human beings, who trade on a certain look and act in a certain way to elicit a sexual or emotional response in men and then get paid for it. That's sex trade work, like a pro domme. A domme is a real human being and what they do is probably an art form as well. You don't even seem to have any sort of argument. I guess it could be that all sex workers are scum? Or it's that treating people as objects is actually good, maybe? I dunno. Maybe say what you mean instead of walking in circles around it.
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Apr 1, 2015 04:51
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Effectronica posted:You don't even seem to have any sort of argument. I guess it could be that all sex workers are scum? Or it's that treating people as objects is actually good, maybe? I dunno. Maybe say what you mean instead of walking in circles around it. I asked a question and the answers were unsupported so I couldn't take them at face value. Why are you of the opinion I think sex trade workers are scum?
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Apr 1, 2015 04:55
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jfood posted:I asked a question and the answers were unsupported so I couldn't take them at face value. You're asking why people get upset about the depiction of geisha, and then through a chain of events, you say that they're equivalent to other sex workers. Since the complaint involves geisha not being treated as fully human, and you don't understand the complaint, that is an entirely plausible thing you could be thinking. As is the other thing I posted. Maybe you should explain yourself some! Meanwhile, what would count as support? Me throwing a book on the development of geisha in the 19th century at you?
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Apr 1, 2015 05:06
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The whole obsession with cultural appropriation is probably the worst thing to come out of the internet left in the past few years and really the only useful thing left about it is to laugh at the 15-year-olds who've managed to take a nominally progressive idea and come out thinking that "white means white" and burritos are racist.
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Apr 1, 2015 05:09
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Thug Lessons posted:The whole obsession with cultural appropriation is probably the worst thing to come out of the internet left in the past few years and really the only useful thing left about it is to laugh at the 15-year-olds who've managed to take a nominally progressive idea and come out thinking that "white means white" and burritos are racist. I disagree.
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Apr 1, 2015 05:14
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Effectronica posted:You're asking why people get upset about the depiction of geisha, and then through a chain of events, you say that they're equivalent to other sex workers. There was no chain of events, it's actually the point of origin and I fail to see how that makes them any less human. It's just a job... maybe it's art and maybe it ain't, no one here is qualified to make that distinction. So again, how are geisha so succinctly different from other sex trade workers that the business model must remain racially pure?
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Apr 1, 2015 05:23
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hakimashou posted:Ngati Toa is a tribe or some kind of organization though isn't it? And the legal ownership of the specific Ka Mate haka doesn't cover "hakas in general" does it? Plus isn't the ownership of it more symbolic than anything else? The wikipedia article says they can't collect royalties on it or make injunctions against its use. That seems to indicate they don't actually have intellectual property rights to it. I think you're being sidetracked by me jokingly calling it intellectual property? I was trying to make a comparison to sacred cultural artifacts that TheImmigrant might understand. Ngati Toa is an Iwi (tribe), yeah. That Wiki article is a little out of date; an attribution law passed last year. Individual haka are composed and individually tailored in the same way the tattoos are, and tā moko do tell genealogy and relation to iwi, hapu and extended family. My high school got a haka in my second to last year there and it was a Really Big Deal. To be clear, Maori do absolutely take insult at mock tā moko or Haka. The cultural interest comes from how sacred the appropriated cultural elements or things are to the original culture; the fact that cultural expression was suppressed or outlawed during colonial rule, and that today they're taken and pastiched for only their aesthetics. I'd further argue that even elements which were originally mundane gain their own importance if they were suppressed. Thug Lessons posted:The whole obsession with cultural appropriation is probably the worst thing to come out of the internet left in the past few years and really the only useful thing left about it is to laugh at the 15-year-olds who've managed to take a nominally progressive idea and come out thinking that "white means white" and burritos are racist. That's stupid. Those 15-year-olds not getting it doesn't make it any less valid a thing.
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Apr 1, 2015 05:26
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jfood posted:There was no chain of events, it's actually the point of origin and I fail to see how that makes them any less human. It's just a job... maybe it's art and maybe it ain't, no one here is qualified to make that distinction. This has nothing to do with what anyone has talked about in this thread, and there are more non-Japanese geisha than members of the National Diet. As for why just anyone can't call themselves a geisha, the trade has professional standards that must be fulfilled.
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Apr 1, 2015 05:27
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Thug Lessons posted:The whole obsession with cultural appropriation is probably the worst thing to come out of the internet left in the past few years and really the only useful thing left about it is to laugh at the 15-year-olds who've managed to take a nominally progressive idea and come out thinking that "white means white" and burritos are racist. What do you think about the Native Americans who talk about it?
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Apr 1, 2015 05:32
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jfood posted:They're real human beings, who trade on a certain look and act in a certain way to elicit a sexual or emotional response in men and then get paid for it. That's sex trade work, like a pro domme. A domme is a real human being and what they do is probably an art form as well. So is teaching English to Adults in East Asia by that definition. And they're not trying to elicit a sexual response anymore than a pop-singer is. Which is to say that can be part of it, but it wouldn't be accurate to call Katy Perry a sex worker. I don't think it makes sense to loop Joe America teaching bored Chinese housewives English, Katy Perry, and performers like Geisha into the same category of work as a dominatrix and phone sex operator. And that doesn't even begin to touch on the aspects of Asian fetishism that have led to the western impression of Geisha as prostitutes in the first place. All of this is problematic independent of any ideas regarding appropriation.
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Apr 1, 2015 05:38
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Exclamation Marx posted:That's stupid. Those 15-year-olds not getting it doesn't make it any less valid a thing. No, it's definitely possible for a term to be so widely abused by complete idiots that it becomes useless, you do it all the time. A great example here would be "political correctness", where any sort of potential for the term to add anything to analysis or debate has been completely erased by the fact it's so firmly associated with excusing bigotry. I also have a pet theory that terms that end up getting so easily abused actually weren't great ideas in the first place
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Apr 1, 2015 05:44
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Thug Lessons posted:No, it's definitely possible for a term to be so widely abused by complete idiots that it becomes useless, you do it all the time. A great example here would be "political correctness", where any sort of potential for the term to add anything to analysis or debate has been completely erased by the fact it's so firmly associated with excusing bigotry. I also have a pet theory that terms that end up getting so easily abused actually weren't great ideas in the first place Fascinating, but The Jacobin and the revival of "no war but the class war" are unarguably worse things that have come out of internet leftism recently.
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Apr 1, 2015 05:46
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SedanChair posted:What do you think about the Native Americans who talk about it? American Indians have a great argument that drunk college kids dancing around in war bonnets are idiots being racist. But if they write an article about an overarching sociological concept of cultural appropriation I'm not going to be very sympathetic.
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Apr 1, 2015 05:47
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Thug Lessons posted:No, it's definitely possible for a term to be so widely abused by complete idiots that it becomes useless, you do it all the time. A great example here would be "political correctness", where any sort of potential for the term to add anything to analysis or debate has been completely erased by the fact it's so firmly associated with excusing bigotry. I also have a pet theory that terms that end up getting so easily abused actually weren't great ideas in the first place "Political correctness" was a term created to excuse bigotry in the first place.
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Apr 1, 2015 05:47
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Effectronica posted:Fascinating, but The Jacobin and the revival of "no war but the class war" are unarguably worse things that have come out of internet leftism recently. Jacobin sucks but they've put out some decent articles, some of them a lot more valuable than even most reasonable stuff on cultapp (like the stuff in the OP).
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Apr 1, 2015 05:49
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Thug Lessons posted:American Indians have a great argument that drunk college kids dancing around in war bonnets are idiots being racist. But if they write an article about an overarching sociological concept of cultural appropriation I'm not going to be very sympathetic. What ideas do you have objections to, that are in "cultural appropriation"? Thug Lessons posted:Jacobin sucks but they've put out some decent articles, some of them a lot more valuable than even most reasonable stuff on cultapp (like the stuff in the OP). Only the sort of idiots and pederasts that inhabit GBS take fifteen-year-olds seriously and most tumblr dorks will grow out of it. Jacobin has real dangers associated with people taking them seriously, even though Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writes some good stuff.
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Apr 1, 2015 05:49
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SedanChair posted:"Political correctness" was a term created to excuse bigotry in the first place. No it wasn't, do you really think nobody said the term "politically correct" before Rush Limbaugh?
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Apr 1, 2015 05:51
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Thug Lessons posted:No it wasn't, do you really think nobody said the term "politically correct" before Rush Limbaugh? In America? They didn't.
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Apr 1, 2015 05:59
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Effectronica posted:Only the sort of idiots and pederasts that inhabit GBS take fifteen-year-olds seriously and most tumblr dorks will grow out of it. Jacobin has real dangers associated with people taking them seriously, even though Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writes some good stuff. I don't think it's a wise strategy for the left to pretend that their crazies are only 15 year-olds on tumblr. To be sure, that's a great way to understand a lot of social justice BS on the internet, but there are plenty of idiotic think pieces writting for Salon, The Atlantic, or the The Guardian that rival anything seen on Tumblr. For one it overshadows actual grievances that can and should be addressed. I'm not convinced that cultural appropriation is a useful lens through which to view many racist actions in our culture, but the cries from the internet outrage machine outside of Tumblr over ridiculous things like an Avril Lavigne video or white people making empanadas do little to make me any more sympathetic to the argument. Let us English fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Apr 1, 2015 |
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Apr 1, 2015 06:02
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Let us English posted:I don't think it's a wise strategy for the left to pretend that their crazies are only 15 year-olds on tumblr. To be sure, that's a great way to understand a lot of social justice BS on the internet, but there are plenty of idiotic think pieces writting for Salon, The Atlantic, or the The Guardian that rival anything seen on Tumblr. G O O D J O B repeating the thing I said, and using the phrase "internet outrage machine" as though it was a real thing rather than an unholy chimera of a conspiracy theory and the loathing of the old for the young.
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Apr 1, 2015 06:04
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Effectronica posted:G O O D J O B repeating the thing I said, and using the phrase "internet outrage machine" as though it was a real thing rather than an unholy chimera of a conspiracy theory and the loathing of the old for the young. It's not a conspiracy theory or loathing of the young. The business incentives of online publishing make appealing to anger very effective I've worked writing online and was pretty drat good at appealing to outrage and writing clickbait headlines. The phrase describes a very real social phenomenon that is being exploited by writers.
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Apr 1, 2015 06:10
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Effectronica posted:What ideas do you have objections to, that are in "cultural appropriation"? It's difficult to talk about the ideas that define the term because there isn't any formal definition. Talk of cultural appropriation grew out of specific localized objections to things like frat boys in war bonnets and was then generalized into a loose conception that white people doing things associated with other cultures is bad, with the specifics of what defines this more or less entirely up to individual interpretation. It was probably inevitable that the loudest and most numerous voices were going to idiots because this isn't a great way to generate ideas, you can't just scale up from war bonnets to the entire world.
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Apr 1, 2015 06:25
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Let us English posted:So is teaching English to Adults in East Asia by that definition. Really? This is your counter-point? You still haven't given a reason as to why the theatrics and character work of a pro domme are some how lesser than a particular type of professional submissive. Just that one is not worthy of the same respect or status. There are years of study that go into the perfection of either character. This is why I don't understand why dressing up as a geisha is a bad thing. No one will do so with the intention of pretending they suck dick for cash, there are far easier ways to accomplish the task and look the part. They want to take part in the beauty and elegance of the character, and that's what they are, a role played. There's a real person underneath, much the same as a domme, who's gonna fart then giggle just like the rest of us, after the costume gets put back on the hanger. You can't expect education without participation and playing that role, if only for a night, seems to me a safe and healthy way to break down those stereotypes. It's not blackface or whoopin' it up in a war bonnet, it's pretending to be someone else just like the geisha herself. Given the rather unfriendly nature of Japanese culture towards women, I think it's intellectually dishonest that geishas being a fetish or seen as whores began with either Kate or Matthew Perry.
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Apr 1, 2015 06:42
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jfood posted:Given the rather unfriendly nature of Japanese culture towards women, I think it's intellectually dishonest that geishas being a fetish or seen as whores began with either Kate or Matthew Perry. Nobody said that. Nor did I condemn dressing as a Geisha. I don't even think Effectronica was arguing against it. What I did say is the Geisha are not sex workers unless you take the most broad and ridiculous definition of that word possible. I said that Geisha inspired fashion like Katy Perry's show is just fine, but many are offended by it as Geisha imagery has been part of the fetishization of Asian women. Despite this, the arguments against Geisha dress come from people who are ignorant of Japanese culture and history and are generally patronizing towards Japanese people and their own agency. All that said, viewing Geisha as whores by and large comes from the west. Japan disparages prostitutes in the same way the west does, they are not looked kindly upon to say the least. Geisha on the other hand, are viewed highly and have influenced modern Japanese culture more than most Japanese even realize. For example, modern Japanese as it's been spoken since the late 19th century comes directly from the language used by Geisha. The default first person pronoun in modern Japanese is feminine and the proper conjugation of verbs and use of the verb to-be come directly from Geisha language. Equating Geisha work to sex work comes from western interaction with Japan. GI's using the word "Geisha" to refer to any serving woman, many of whom did engage in sex work, during the occupation did not help matters.
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Apr 1, 2015 07:09
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War bonnets and geishas seem to be relics of cultural sexist norms if anything. Which begs the question: is cultural appropriation all that problematic when it makes a mockery of values not consistent with modern ideas about gender, race, and other social issues? Is dressing up as a geisha an attack on Japanese culture in general, or is it a specific attack on a norm we need not encourage?
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Apr 1, 2015 07:22
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