The
media often brings up cases of when noted celebrities and powerful
figures are accused of sexual assault and brought to the legal system
(the courts, the judge, the lawyers etc). The media seems to
understand sexual assault as a case of gender discrimination, since
women are more likely to get assaulted by famous and powerful men.
However, what is peculiar about the cases of sexual assault by famous
men is that they often are also considered a publicity stunt
on the part of the lesser known female figure. Even though this
particular opinion about the event is usually professed only in
secret and generally considered to be a unjust interpretation, what
enables the sexual assault case to turn into a publicity stunt (and
not a serious gender-based discrimination) should be looked at.
In one vein, the publicity stunt is viewed negatively, and justifiably so. The
publicity stunt (we believe the phrase “publicity stunt” and
“going public” goes further in demonstrating a positive
connotation than the word “fame” etc does) is an important element within the cultural
aspects of capitalism today. The publicity stunt is a quick and
effective way of being recognized in the system. What is noteworthy
about it is how it has replaced accomplishment, ambition and hard
work as characteristics needed to be a successful capitalist subject.
Doesn't the publicity stunt show precisely that the demands of
capitalism today are for a type of production of subjectivity without
the mechanisms of production at play? Isn't the capitalist system,
with the receding of the industrial proletariat, going towards
production without production processes anyway? And, in the case of a
human subject, don't we have the desire to be recognized but without
the hassles of hard work? Aren't the machines considered ugly and
outdated? The days of capitalism being associated with faceless hard
work are truly over. Even so, the evanescent nature of the publicity
stunt demonstrates that perhaps we are not completely in a
post-industrial age, but that we are getting there. And if “going
public” is the dominant trajectory of a capitalist subject's life,
then we can really say that the consumer of human capital (the
human capital here is the sports star, the celebrity actor, the
charismatic politician) is the star, the celebrity and the
powerful figure herself. (We are not saying that the publicity stunt is a good or bad thing, but we are saying that it propels a subject radically 'forward' given the context of capitalism, going beyond the prescribed movement of capitalism to an extent that it becomes anti-capitalist.)
All
of this derives from an interesting question: how are women
represented in capitalism? We are asking, what is the image of the
woman, how is she taken to be by others etc. For the longest time,
women were not represented at all, but, then came social institutions
were formed which, as an unintended side-effect, began to
represent women in them. These social institutions gave women nic(h)e
images in the household, within the family, within the process of
child rearing, that is, in many ways intimately connected to
capitalist things but still marginal as represented and
representatives of capitalism. More importantly, these institutions
and processes denied women a chance to engage in free competition, a
chance to be proper individual and independent identities etc. It is
in this context that women decided that it was time to do away
entirely with formations in society, such as the household, so that
they could arrive at a point where they could properly live a
valuable life. They began the process of ignoring free competition
and individualism too. Rather than finding a solution to
discrimination within capitalism, they went around it, and found the
issue of and the concept of “gender discrimination” itself to be
a capitalist construct. And so, it is in this way that women began to
utilize the legal mechanism in their own way and for their own ends.
When
a woman has a sexual encounter with a famous star, sometimes there
ensues a legal battle where the woman may claim some wrongdoing etc.
Now, someone would argue that it is precisely in this process of
claiming wrongdoing that the woman finds herself a purpose in life,
an identity etc. However, this accessing of the legal mechanism is in
fact just a way of subverting capitalism. This is because, the final
conclusion of these sex-related trials is always that the woman used
it as a publicity stunt. This means that she negates the legal
mechanism and instead attempts to utilize it (one may say, “exploit
it”) for her own ends of creating a individual, independent
identity. Coming before the law is not the resolution or the final
point of a struggle against gender discrimination, rather, it is
within the logic of the publicity stunt that the law is utilized. The
legal battle is never empowering, but the results of a publicity
stunt are, precisely because going public subverts the legal
mechanism. The woman's problem is not with the individual man
acting out of sexual desire, but with the legal mechanism which
thinks it can articulate her own desire. The woman's tactic is
straightforward: the more that the justice department is used to give
her publicity, the weaker the department itself gets in terms of its
seriousness, effectiveness and legitimacy. The woman realizes a very
important truth: that the capitalist's law is there to regulate
desire, but desire itself does not originate out of the capitalist
system. In short, the woman who has sexual relations with a celebrity
does not want to punish the celebrity, but wants to demonstrate the
fallibility of a law when it is concerned with desire.
In
conclusion, what we must not do is celebrate our legal and justice
system for its work on gender equality. Whatever gender equality has
arrived has been by subverting such a system, that is, by
anti-capitalist measures. If the legal system is, in some ways, the
pinnacle of the capitalist system because it stands for truth, then
subverting it is what makes women who go public in order to drive a hole into the legal system the true stars of our times. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, who asked why people desire their own "repression," we ask why do women desire their own "gender-based oppression"...and the answer is precisely because gender-based oppression has now come within the legal discourse, and it can infect this legal system with true women's empowerment once the woman completely ignores capitalist law's need to pass judgement on her oppression. The woman seeks law in order to ignore it...
No comments:
Post a Comment