Hjartao Hamast

The image of icelandic kitsch six minutes in is the turn in this video: all the slow motion photography of landscape is problematized by this interlude: which is the “real” experience of Iceland? How is it problematic to sell your nation– to literally use it up– for the sake of its “realness”?

What does it mean to consume iceland as a cultural construct– natural, eerie beauty–when Iceland itself is literally being consumed by rising sea levels, a sinking economy, and its literalization– Alcoa’s mining and abuse on the island? Will a “woman” “know better”, “do better”? Could she? Death, according to Blanchot, held no terrors for him because he had already faced it as a child— is the “death” of a planet different or nation different?

Spaces and Written/Writing Bodies

“But at second sight the words seemed not so simple. The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like, or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them, or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light… At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial—and any question about sex is that—one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact. Therefore I propose, making use of all the liberties and licences of a novelist, to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming here—how, bowed down by the weight of the subject which you have laid upon my shoulders, I pondered it, and made it work in and out of my daily life”–Ginny W. nee Stephens

Context does change some things...

The woman at question here:

my mother–who transformed like the swan brothers in the Danish fairy tale from impotent to proud, resistant: clothes make the man– context makes the woman.

Icelandic culture–the media in the US that i’ve been able to consume is preoccupied somewhat with running the story of economic meltdown in the country through the relay of gender and power– although fwiw, Obama seems to have received similar treatment at times, as well– and yet– similar cries or consciousness raising in the US about women’s economic power have not occurred despite similarities–American women still make less than men and are underrepresented in the very high risk professions that landed the planet in this crisis.

myself– the I/me double spoken/speaking, written/writing subject who couldn’t get here by any way shorter than this because, to paraphrase Blanchot– a short cut doesn’t get you there faster– you just end up missing stops that were necessary for your journey.

I am no novelist, essayist, or even much of an academic writer–but i am blogging– so I am “becoming a blogger” (Blanchot, ibid).

Women and Children first, please?

“Icelandic women, however, are more likely to be studying the financial news than the recipes – and more likely to be thinking about how to put right the mess their men have made of the banking system than about cooking them comfort food. The tiny nation, with a population of just over 300,000 people, has been overwhelmed by an economic disaster that is threatening its very survival. But for a generation of fortysomething women, the havoc is translating into an opportunity to step into the positions vacated by the men blamed for the crisis, and to play a leading role in creating a more balanced economy, which, they argue, should incorporate overtly feminine values.”

From “After the Crash, Iceland’s Women Lead the Rescue”–Ruth Sutherland (Guardian Feb 22, 2009)

“Obama doesn’t play the sax. But he is pushing against conventional—and political party nominating convention—wisdom in five important ways, with approaches that are usually thought of as qualities and values that women bring to organizational life: a commitment to inclusiveness in problem solving, deep optimism, modesty about knowing all the answers, the courage to deliver uncomfortable news, not taking on all the work alone, and a willingness to air dirty linen. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is taking a more traditional (and male?) authoritarian approach.”

“Obama: First Female President? “– Martin Linsky (Newsweek Feb 26 2008)

Colbert on Iceland or, Has anyone got change for a paradigm?

Stephen Colbert: On the disaster in Iceland

Highlights, because I can’t get the video to embed properly:

“Yes, they may have free health-care, a 99.9% literacy rate, and more clean, renewable energy per capita than any country in the World, but [dramatic pause] they also eat skyr.” 

Although overlooked in the economic armageddon of late, one of the more interesting facets, for me, of the meltdown has been the ways in which gender and sexuality have, somehow worked their way to the fore. 

A probability map for electrons in a Hydrogen atom

As the “Stephen Harper” quip in the clip may indicate, there is something about socialism that is read, satirically or otherwise, as effeminate: to fail to perform or enact free-market capitalist policies is to “be” a real “man” (or woman, if we’re buying into Butler’s arguments that discrete genders are intelligible when one presumes a heteronormative matrix). I wonder what it will mean to be “gay” or “straight” or “Icelandic” or “American” when so much of our time online problematizes notions of time, place, and “self”/”being”/”interiority”: just look the jurisdictional morass opened up by trying by taxing online activities- or only gambling:

“… categories equal metaphysics: what is real, and hence what constitutes problems and solutions, are relative to the apparatus. Or, as Thomas Kuhn said about paradigm shifts, a new paradigm does not solve problems of the old paradigm, it just makes those problems irrelevant” (Ulmer, Electronimc Monuments, 99).

If identity politics are  vexed by this new apparatus  (online, no body knows you’re a robot, a tomato, or a node in the worlds largest fungus), then why is gender/sexuality asserting itself again and again in American representations of this country’s meltdown? Why does this help us mythologize this disaster in a way that’s useful to us? And what kind of “use” are we looking to derive from it?

In need of new prescription or new optics?

Some women in Iceland have asserted that the banking meltdown is the result of male leadership.

Having training in both marxist and feminist theory is making watching the global economic meltdown like always having a single lens with a prescription that’s too weak–

  How to read the re-monumentalizing? Although the disaster is now, ongoing– still unfolding, actually– this image itself is both deeply of the moment and deeply anachronistic:

separatist feminist politics largely died with the second wave  after the eighties–lesbian separatism especially. 

the square that the statue is set is a typical urban assemblage of simultaneous chronologies— statue, modern architecture sutured onto slightly less contemporary architecture…and the previous posted anti IMF poster

the protestors wielding pink– the only bright color in the whole dreary, slightly out of focus affair– check the midground. 

 

This statue, of a male national hero of sorts, is now decked in drag– could he– is he being reclaimed or disciplined? Globalization inevitably shifts relations between and among men, women, families, the nation state such as it is— what’s up with the pink? 

 

Nicholas Kristoff, fwiw, agrees with the ladies, apparently:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/opinion/08kristof.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink