Obama is the Catherine MacKinnon for the oppressed white guy and nasa engineer. Remember last week when I said that his "yes we can" speech was premised on othering, and it made effective use of the copula? Well, watch, this is how he manages to be an empty signifier -- and you bet Monaco that I lay the blame at his feet. he knows precisely what he's doing with this -- that or his speechwriter:
Obama's rhetoric is successful only in part because of the repetition. It's the copula or the "collapsed continuum". Now first, let me borrow from MacKinnon who is master at fucking her readers with the copula. I call it Count Copula. Her sentence are breathless with the and, and, and -- comma, comma, comma, -- repeat, repeat, repeat, -- pound, pound, pound -- bang, bang, bang, -- and, and, and:
Here's how you are fucked:
"Socially, femaleness means femininity, which means attractiveness to men, which means sexual attractiveness, which means sexual availability on male terms. What defines woman as such is what turns men on."
"The way subordination is done in pornography is the way it is done in prostitution is the way it is done in the rest of the world: rape, battering, sexual abuse of children, sexual harassment and murder are sold in prostitution and are the acts out of which pornography is made."
Is the way it is X, is the way it is Y, is the way it is Z, is the way it is A, is the way it is B, .... Until you are convinced by the end that pornography is prostitution is rape is battering is child molestation is harassment is murder... and back round again to prostitution and pornography.
If you are a blogging radfem, then it is pornstitution. You don't even need to separate the two words: bang, pound, fuck, slap, smack, crush them together there is nothing about them that is different.
Halley, in her book Split Decisions, teases out these lists in various feminist and queer theory texts, contrasting collapsed continuums with exploded continuums. (more on that at the blog if you search copula, lists, water pitcher :)
Watch how Obama uses the copula -- and why I argued last week he lays the ground work for a hypernationalistic patriotism that I find terrifying:
You start with the C where it is our _DESTINY_ as a nation. Never mind how those documents counted slaves as 3/5 of a person or anything...
<<< Yes we can.
It was a creed written into the founding documents
that declared the destiny of a nation.
Yes we can.
The collapsed continuum or the convergentizing list begins:
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as
they blazed a trail toward freedom through the
darkest of nights.
Yes we can.
Notice that slave and abolitionists get the spotlight followed by the Yes We Can which also seques into the next item on the list
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from
distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward
against an unforgiving wilderness.
Yes we can.
Here, whitey gets to have his say, right there with abolitionists and slaves.
Slaves and abolitionists Immigrants and pioneers
They are the same.
Next, though, and for no explicable reason since he could have repeated the setup of pairs divided by the call, Yes We can. He didn't. He smashed a bunch of things toghether:
It was the call of workers who organized;
women who reached for the ballot;
a President who chose the moon as our new frontier;
and a King who took us to the mountaintop and
pointed the way to the Promised Land.
Yes we can to justice and equality.
Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity.
Yes we can heal this nation.
Yes we can repair this world.
Yes we can.
How bizarre, to slip in Kennedy and the space program as somehow about workers struggles as about sufragettes' struggles as about civil rights struggle.
This is how it appears all things to all people.
And then he rounds it all of with "repair the world". THAT terrifies me quite frankly.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)