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Icelandic Heathens Rising, Cultural Appropriation Violence, And Free Software And Sexual Freedom

Icelandic Heathens Rising, Cultural Appropriation Violence, And Free Software And Sexual Freedom

Last updated on: March 30, 2017 at 1:12 am by Tom Swiss

Icelandic Heathens Rising, Cultural Appropriation Violence, And Free Software And Sexual Freedom 2017-03-30T01:12:13-04:00 Tom Swiss

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Our usual mid-week selection of quick commentary.

Icelandic Heathens Rising

The BBC reports on the rise of heathenism in Iceland:

National Statistics Bureau figures show that followers of the Asatru Association still lag far behind the established Lutheran Church, which accounts for 237,938 or almost 70% of the population and has remained stable for decades. But the total of Icelanders who revere Odin, Thor and the Goddess Freyja has leapt 50% since 2014 to 3,583, with more than twice as many male as female faithful, Morgunbladid newspaper reports.

Icelandic Asatru has, so far, been largely free of the racist dingbat hangers-on that have troubled our heathen friends elsewhere. (OTOH, maybe it’s easier to keep racism at bay in an ethnically homogenous society; it’s complicated.) They are currently working to build the Iceland’s first temple to the old gods in 1,000 years. Good for them!

Photo by Lenka Kovářová

Photo by Lenka Kovářová via Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0

“Cultural Appropriation”: Violence…

According to the Daily Hampshire Gazette, the idea of “cultural appropriation” has once again provoked violence from someone who decided they have the right to police the personal choices of others.

(If you’re new here, cultural appropriation is something we’ve discussed before.)

Hampshire College student Carmen Figueroa has been charged with assault and battery and related charges after allegedly assaulting members of the Central Maine Community College women’s basketball team over some of the team member’s hairstyles.

Figueroa demanded that the women remove braids that she found objectionable. When they refused, Figueroa allegedly started a fight with one player. Another, unknown, Hampshire College student pulled a second player to the ground where Figueroa allegedly kicked and stomped her. A third player attempted to protect her fallen teammate but Figueroa reportedly grabbed her by the head and threw her to the ground. Coaches broke up the fight, but Figueroa (again, allegedly) continued to try to punch the Maine students, swearing and shouting and racial slurs.

I repeat my prior opinion: there are a number of errors and offenses one can commit regarding ideas from cultures not one’s own. Misrepresentation, dishonesty, plagiarism and disrespect are failings to be avoided. But copying good ideas from other cultures is not a failing, and the concept of cultural appropriation is not only unhelpful in avoiding the errors, it confuses ideas with property, and confuses offenses against one’s sensibilities with a violation of one’s rights. And as we’ve seen in a few instances now, that later confusion can lead to violence.

…and Censorship

In related news about cultural outrage, an abstract painting inspired by the open-coffin funeral of lynching victim Emmett Till has inspired controversy and protest (which is fine) and calls for censorship and even a hoax letter sent fraudulently in the artist’s name (which is not fine). The controversy is not so much about the piece itself as about the fact that the artist is a person of whiteness rather than a person of color.

The artist is white American Dana Schutz; the most prominent critic is biracial, black-identified, English-born, Berlin-residing artist Hannah Black. I shall leave the question of who might have better insight into American racism, the white American or the black European, to the reader to ponder.

Artist, writer, and curator Coco Fusco take on the controversy:

It is difficult to reason with the enraged, but I think it necessary to analyze these arguments…Hannah Black’s letter can and should be unpacked separately from an interpretation of Schutz’s painting as a painting, or as the expression of a white person’s sentiment.

Black makes claims that are not based in fact; she relies on problematic notions of cultural property and imputes malicious intent…on the basis of race. She presumes an ability to speak for all black people that smacks of a cultural nationalism that has rarely served black women, and that once upon a time was levied to keep black British artists out of conversations about black culture in America. Her argument is laced with an economically reductionist view of artistic practice…

Furthermore, in her letter, Black does not consider the history of anti-racist art by white artists. She does not recognize that the trope of the suffering body that originated in Western art with the figure of the Christian martyr informs much representation of racialized oppression — by white and black artists. She does not account for the fact that black artists have also accrued social capital and commercial gain from their treatment of black suffering. Numerous black artists have depicted enslaved bodies, lynched bodies, maimed bodies, and imprisoned bodies…

The authority to speak for or about black culture is not guaranteed by skin color or lineage, and it can be undermined by untruths….

…

…In the absence of informed discussion, we get unadulterated rage.

Hannah Black claims to know more about black suffering than Schutz, but her treatment of history could use more accuracy and depth.

[Emphasis added]

Fusco’s critique is a model of reasoned response to claims of outrages about art that crosses cultural boundaries.

Free Software and Sexual Freedom

Drupal is a popular free software/open source (GPL) content management system.

If that sentence made no sense to you, bear with me for a small bit of techno-talk.

Free software is a philosophy that states that people should have the right to use, share, study, and change computer programs. Open source is a development strategy, related to but distinct from free software.

A content management system is a piece of software that allows users to post and manage a variety of content on a website. (WordPress, the software that behind Patheos’s blogs, is another CMS; it’s more popular than Drupal but perhaps less powerful and flexible. I don’t want to get into a flamewar here, I just want to clue people into what a CMS is.)

Large free/open source software projects are usually developed by distributed teams, with a relatively small core group directing things and a larger number of volunteers — often programmers who happen to use the software — contributing fixes to the core and/or developing add-on modules. Some people make their living directly adapting free/open source software to customer’s needs, or providing paid support; others are employed by companies that use the software, and share the fixes and improvements they make for their employers with other users.

If that’s reasonably clear, we can move on to the other ingredient here. I’m going to assume, post-Fifty Shades of Grey, that readers have some idea what BDSM is. Not that Fifty Shades, which started off as Twilight fan-fiction of all things, is an accurate portrayal. BDSM in its broadest sense includes all sorts of things outside of bondage, discipline, Dominance, submission, sadism, and masochism; many forms of creative and consensual fantastic play can be included — “pony play”, body modification, role playing, rubber fetishists, whatever. So, some prefer the broader term “kink”. (Others, as usual, would dispute the relationship between the terms, as well as the relationship or lack thereof between sex and BDSM and/or kink. Let skip over the semantic quagmire for the moment.)

Disclosure: unless you’re going to ask me out, my sexual proclivities are none of your concern. However it is a matter of public record that I’ve presented workshops at events that had a kink emphasis on sacred sexuality. In the broadest sense I consider myself a member of the BDSM/kink community.

One of the more controversial subcultures within the kink community is the Gorean culture, based around John Norman’s series of “sword and planet” adventure novels set on the planet Gor. I’ve not read these books, but it is widely agreed that they feature a sexist culture of dominant men and submissive, often enslaved, women.

This does not mean that people in the Gorean subculture believe that women are or should be inferior, or are not deserving of full legal and social equality. It means that they enjoy games — sexy games between consenting adults — based around that premise. Like other subcultures in the community, those games may take up a large or a small part of participant’s lives, and some people take them more seriously than others. Certainly, in some cases, they take them too seriously; but being part of the Gorean subculture doesn’t mean one believes in sexism any more than being into pony play means that one believes one is a horse.

Unfortunately this fact has escaped the notice of Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal project. Buytaert basically demanded that Larry Garfield, a prominent Drupal contributor, leave Drupal project when Garfield’s Gorean predilections came to light.

Garfield has not, as far as I can find, been accused of any misbehavior towards anyone in the Drupal community. No one (so far as I can find) has accused him of violating the project’s code of conduct. Nor did he choose to make a public spectacle of his kink.

The problem seems solely to be the squick that his kink produces in some people in the Drupal community, and their inability to separate his actions from his thoughts and emotions. Someone discovered his Gorean play, and decided to out him.

Former tech venture capitalist Nadia Eghbal points out:

In the past, Dries might’ve kicked Larry out because “BDSM is a threat to family values”. Today, leaders like Dries kick Larry out because “BDSM is a threat to gender equality”. Unfortunately, the end result is the same.

So if you’re upset about Dries’s decision (and it seems that many are), just remember: you created this. I created this, too, by not standing up for others in situations where I felt someone was unfairly taken down for their beliefs.

Beliefs are not actions. We cannot persecute people for what they believe, no matter how much it disgusts us, and simultaneously maintain a free and open democracy.

We are all responsible for the increasingly alarming practice of coercion masquerading as equality, in which someone like Larry can be persecuted, in which nuance is overlooked because “it’s a moral question”, in which diversity is starting to look a lot more like conformity.

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