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Essential Problems and Dialectical Solutions (‘Deep Breath’ 5)

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Many people have already commented on the expansion of Clara’s character in ‘Deep Breath’.  I think there’s something to this… in that Clara now appears to have a character, now that she’s been freed from her tedious and contentless mystery-arc.  Those impatient with the right-on critique of Moffat will respond with all sorts of examples of brave, complex things she did in Series 7, and some of those examples will be right, but still… she really did look like a characterless blur across the screen, a sort of jumble of traits, a Rubik’s Cube with a face drawn on it.  There’s no denying, she looked better in ‘Deep Breath’.  It’s possible that, as with so much else that seems better about ‘Deep Breath’, I may just be perceiving an improvement because the episode is largely free from the dominating and infuriating presence of a certain actor who will not be missed at all by me.  But then, such things do make a difference.  One performance in an ‘actually existing’ production of a written text can change the meaning.

Clara’s monologue rebuke to Vastra is part of her apparent improvement… though I have to say (in my complainey way) that the monologue contains yet another example of Moffat fetishizing the powerful, with Clara saying that Marcus Aurelius was her only pin-up.  Of all the philosophers she could have idolised, Moffat chooses the one who was also a Roman Emperor!  I also noticed an implied contempt towards teenage girls who like boy bands, as if that makes them inherently trivial people.  Clara gets to angrily reject the notion that she is unwilling to accept an older man, but the idea is expressed in terms that imply contempt for young women who who don’t reject young hot guys for old, establishment figures.  To be painstakingly fair, I’m sure this is not what was intended.  It’s one of those examples of a writer being unable to fully win no matter what he does.  Which happens.  Sometimes writers can’t win.  Sometimes they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.  It’s not about their flaws so much as the social context in which they write.  That’s not an excuse, but it is a thing.  The solution to this, as I’ve said before, is not to find better writers, or better ways of writing which square such circles away nicely and neatly so we can all watch in perfect comfort, but rather to change society so that massive imbalances of power don’t keep setting off these little textual mines.  Sounds like I’m demanding a lot, doesn’t it?  Well, I am.  Deal with it.  That’s just how I roll.  Etcetera.

At first, the whole business with Clara’s difficulty accepting the new Doctor reminded of the nasty reaction towards ‘fangirls’ that was unleashed by the news of Capaldi’s casting, with all those memes about the shallow, hormonal girlies, supposedly devastated by the news that the new Doctor was someone old and wrinkly.  Just another manifestation of the ‘fake geekgirl’, a chimeric invention of a closed shop full of males objecting to the scary presence of women in ‘their’ fandom. …

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A Presumptious Dilettante’s Five Belated Eggs

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The more I think about it, the more I think a humble, sympathetic, non-domineering, non-entryist engagement with the anti-oppression movements springing up around issues of gender identity (i.e. Trans issues) is going to be absolutely crucial for the Left in the coming years. 

This isn’t just a moral imperative.  Sure, the Left must stand with the oppressed.  Always.  By definition.  Otherwise why bother being on the Left?  Otherwise, what does ‘The Left’ mean?  But it’s also a tactical imperative.  The system must be attacked at its weakest points.  The righteous and rightful rage felt by many on the axis of Trans oppression is absolutely one of the system’s weakest points.  It hits people where they live: in their bodies.  Bodies are oppressed, disciplined, punished, curtailed, invaded, wounded and even dissected by capitalism… and it behoves the Left to realise that this happens in arenas outside the sites of direct capitalist production.  This is one of those things that everyone formally ‘gets’ and then puts to one side.  That’s not good enough.  Capitalist oppression is total, hegemonic, far-reaching and omnipresent.  It is intimately and demonstrably bound up with oppression along lines of personal identity, bodily autonomy, bodily identity, sexual identity, gender, sexuality, and race.  This is why intersectionality is a crucial concept that’s only going to get more crucial.  The task will be to relate all these issues to class.  Not so that they can be subsumed, assimilated and/or digested, but so the analysis wielded by the Left can be enlarged, educated, made stronger and more inclusive.  That is an end in itself – if we know what our ultimate goal really is.

The good news is that class is as intimately bound up with these things as the Left thinks it is.  The bad news is that we have to stress the importance of class without playing ‘issue trumps’ (i.e. our preferred axis of oppression is more crucial or ‘primary’ or ‘causal’ than yours… and, by the way, how dare you stress the issues that hit you where you live before the issues that we think of as theoretically more important???). 

But there is more good news.  We can stress how capitalism, and thus class exploitation along lines of work and wage exploitation (which is basically just another way of saying ‘capitalism’), generates and exacerbates such oppression… for the simple reason that it bloody does; it’s the currently regnant form of class society, and we can adduce powerful facts to show how the structure of class society generates sexism, female oppression, gender essentialism, the reduction of people to categories, the reification of socially constructed categories into hegemonic ‘facts of life’, etc. 

That’s why this is so good.  There isn’t anything in there that constitutes new and startling revelation, but it’s a great little summary/primer/starting-point, from the perspective of a totally ‘on-side’ Marxism.  I found it so anyway – speaking as someone who personally embraces the elderly Goya’s maxim “I’m still learning”.

One (related) crucial issue to remember… and here I’d proffer the great work of Silvia Federici… is that the oppression of women is not an optional extra with capitalism, nor is it a by-product of capitalism. …

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3

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“Not so much of that oatmeal, girl,” says Meg to one of the kitchen drudges, “It’s only pikemen we’re feeding, not horses.”

They’re in Irongron’s castle, somewhere in the century or so following the Norman Conquest.  Sarah is undercover, cooking Irongron’s stew.

“Don’t the guards on the gate get stew?” she asks, wanting to know in which pots to drop the Doctor’s knock-out potion.

“What, meat for those common creatures? I should say not. They’ll have oatmeal the same as the rest of us, and lusty enough they are on that. So you watch yourself if ever you take out that skillet.”

So class is, perhaps, a more fundamental division than gender, but gender oppression brings its own particular problems.

“I’m not afraid of men. They don’t own the world.”

Well, they kind-of do… but Sarah isn’t discussing actual property relations.  She’s talking about the way the world should work, with no one group ‘owning’ it.

“Why should women always have to cook and carry for them?” she demands.

“What else should we do?” asks Meg.

“Stand up for ourselves. Tell the men you’re tired of working for them like slaves.”

“We are slaves,” says Meg.

Wow.  No mincing words there.

“Then you should set yourselves free,” says Sarah.

None there either.

“Oh? And how should we do that?”

That’s a trickier question.  It always is.  But surely the first hurdle, before the plan, has to be the will.

“Don’t you want to be free?” she demands.  Essentially, this has become workplace agitation.

“Women will never be free while there are men in the world, girl,” says Meg, “We have our place.”

You still hear stuff like that today, albeit filtered through layers of code.

“What subservient poppycock!  You’re still living in the Middle Ages!”

Yeah.  We are, in many ways.  We’re meant to laugh at this outburst, but there’s no question in my mind that we’re also meant to be on Sarah’s side.

There are all sorts of problems with this story.  Sarah is – at least in conception – a stereotypical ‘wimmin’s libber’, all touchiness and naivety.  The Doctor is deliberately (more) sexist (than usual) in her presence, and we’re meant to think this is funny.  She’s made the butt of much sexist behaviour, apparently for our amusement.  For instance, there’s the bit quoted above about the “lusty” guards… it’s obviously supposed to be cute, even as it acknowledges the particular dangers faced by women in a class hierarchy.  And so on.  Someone wants to say this story is irredeemably broken by sexism?  I’m not going to argue.

But the fact remains, Sarah responds to a woman who is by demonstrably smarter than the men she serves –  and aware of the fact that she’s a slave – by saying “set yourselves free”.

It shines out amidst the crap.…

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TW

Adelaide screams at the sight of Palmerdale’s dead body.

Leela slaps her across the face, silencing her.

This is horrible.  It’s one of the relatively few examples of serious, realistic, non-Fantastic, gendered violence in the show.  Companions are captured by monsters, etc., but this kind of thing happens rarely.  It is better in some places.  Worse in others.  In ‘The Time Meddler’, Edith’s implied-rape is in there simply to tick a box of genre tropes.  Yeurch.  In ‘Vengeance on Varos’, Maldak slaps Peri across the face to assuage his bruised ego.  It’s utterly gratuitous and revolting.

But this is a woman slapping another woman.  (That’s not worse… except in the sense that the representation, authored by a man, alibis male involvement in violence against women by ostensibly disappearing its gendered dimension.)

More than that – it’s Leela slapping another woman.  Wonderful Leela, who has never done anything like this before.  Okay, she’s a ruthless killer in battle… but slapping a ‘hysteric’ like she’s James Bond or something?  Normally, though she dreads weakness in herself because of her self-identification as a warrior, she is gentle and kind to the weak, to the scared.  This is part of her warriors’ code.  She will be back to her real self in later stories.  She’s even kind to Adelaide later in this story.

What has actually happened here?

Somewhere along the line, Leela – or perhaps I should say, the character of Leela – has internalized the male attitudes of the time in which she is a visitor: the Edwardian era.

None of the male characters from that period physically abuse Adelaide, but Adelaide is secondary to almost all of them.  To Palmerdale, she is a secretary and, probably, a mistress.  Harker has no doubt about that, dismissing her as “the owner’s fancy woman”.  Skinsale evidently desires her sexually, and also desires her esteem, yet finds her frustrating because she resolutely refuses to like him more than her boss.  His delight whenever she becomes dependant upon him is evident.  Vince Hawkins is the only person to whom she can feel comfortably superior, treating his bashful attentions as the services of a instrumentum vocale.

This story is all about class in many ways… but it is also about gender.  In many ways, it’s quite good on the subject.  It depicts male attitudes in a non-exculpatory fashion.  Leela is a forceful presence, crossing gender boundaries by putting on “men’s clothes… working clothes”, etc.  Leela’s actions and personality imply that Adelaide isn’t just a dishrag because she’s a woman; she’s like that because she has been trained in a particular kind of social role owing to her gender and class… a role that involves men looking upon her with varying degrees of objectification and contempt, looks which they train at Leela but which bounce off her.  There are other hints at these themes.  Women as property.  Reuben keeps pornographic pictures under his bed, for example.

But there is still a problem with that slap… which is that it comes from someone outside the Edwardian class system (this is, by the way, a depiction of the dynamics of that system that easily outclasses Downton Abbey or ‘Human Nature’). …

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The Obligatory Returned-Episodes Post

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Hurrah, etc.

As Lawrence Miles says, there’s no point trying act all cool at a time like this.  It’s great news and I’m very happy about it.  Sincerely.  You’d have to be a miserablist of a more perverse and determined stamp than I not to be as pleased as punch.

Of course, I could whinge about some things.

And will.

This blog has a USP after all.

I could, for instance, mention the way Nigeria – where the episodes were found – has suddenly swung briefly onto the mental radars of people who, until a few days ago, probably had only a dim idea that it existed at all.  It’s ironic because, at more or less the time when those missing episodes were made, the Wilson government was helping the corrupt Nigerian military dictatorship crush Biafra.  Britain continued arming the junta for years, despite government denials.  The regime was engaged in a longstanding war against the Ogoni people – one of the forgotten persecuted peoples in the world.  Shell’s exploitation of oil reserves in their region has had untold environmental and human costs, making the Niger Delta one of the most petroleum-impacted regions on Earth.  In 1995, the Nigerian government – utterly in thrall to and bound up with Shell – began a campaign of ruthless repression against the growing anti-Shell protest movement.  The ‘Ogoni Nine’, including Ken Saro-Wiwa, were arrested and executed, causing a (brief) international outcry.  Nigeria achieved formal democracy in 1999 but the corrupt government still wages war against the living standards and rights of the Nigerian people in the service of international oil profits.  Indeed, as in so many places, this war is a condition of IMF debt relief and loans.  The American government occasionally declares itself troubled by the rigged elections and violence in Nigeria, but Nigeria supplies them with large amounts of oil – the country is up there with Saudi Arabia when it comes to oil exports – so they never do anything beyond the pious declarations.  The crippling economic situation in Nigeria, with a huge portion of the population living in slums, is the root cause of ongoing ethnic and religious violence.  Even the BBC is capable of making the connection between the violence and the poverty rate (above 60% and rising).  Boko Haram, an Islamic fundamentalist group responsible for many attacks – including this last month – are based in the predominantly Muslim north-east, hardest hit by poverty.  Go figure.

But they also had ‘The Enemy of the World’ and ‘The Web of Fear’ on a shelf somewhere, so I guess its swings and roundabouts, yeah?

Back in what I like to call my TARDIS Whingeorium, I could also mention the relative importance given by some to the release of these old episodes and the wanton sell-off of Royal Mail, which was announced on the same day and which constitutes a swindle on the taxpayer to the tune of millions, possibly billions… with much of the benefit available only to huge international ‘sovereign wealth funds‘. …

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Vixens and Saxons

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Some disjointed thoughts about ‘The Time Warrior’.  Is it sexist?  Is Linx really a girl?  And what is the correct Socialist attitude to Irongron?

1.  Men Are From Earth, Sontarans Are From… umm… Saturn?  No, couldn’t be.  ‘Saturn’ is an anagram of ‘Rutans’ for a start…

‘The Time Warrior’ is the chronicle of a failed romance.  Irongron and Linx.  The odd couple.

Made for each other.

The initial attraction. The slowly dawning mutual realisation that they have much in common. They take turns helping each other out. Terms of affection pass between them: Linx is Irongron’s “brother” and will be his “general”. Physical intimacy follows, as Linx allows Irongron to see his face then almost takes his arm as they leave to deal with the android knight. Irongron gives Linx a familiar nickname (albeit a rather unkind one).  Then the inevitable falling out. Linx feels disappointed. He questions Irongron’s commitment. They squabble. There is a physical fight. Violence always changes a relationship irrevocably. An uneasy aftermath. Awkward attempts to rescue and preserve the friendship. “Thanks good toadface… er, good Linx”. Irongron helps the bound Linx in an act of residual solidarity. They stand face to face, close together, Irongron fascinated by Linx’s visage.  “I was struck down from behind,” says Linx, not wanting to lose face in front of Irongron, but also sounding almost as though he is pleading for sympathy and solidarity. Then there is the final drunken argument.  Linx is ready to move on but Irongron doesn’t like the idea of being dumped.  He does the dumping, he doesn’t have it done tohim.  “For the last time Linx,” says he, “let there be no more talk of leaving!”  But Linx makes it clear, his spaceboots were made for walking and that’s just what he’ll do.   Then, of course, the ultimate break.  Linx was going to leave and destroy all Irongron’s stuff in a final act of scorn.  The drunken, spurned Irongron tries one last time to delay the dumping.  He gets physical again.  Linx puts him down.

They were made for each other, but that itself is what makes their union impossible.  That and the inevitable social stigma against same-sex and different-species relationships (talk about a double standard!). 

Am I actually arguing for a gay subtext?  No, perhaps not.  But there is something unusually… well, ‘relationshippy’ about the way Irongron and Linx come together and then fall apart.  Linx even tries to get rid of Irongron’s friends, or at least to push them out of an inner circle which increasingly includes just him and Irongron.  Irongron, meanwhile, does a lot of tipsy complaining to his best mate about how unreasonable Linx is.

“My Sontaran doesn’t understand me.”

2.  Sexism and the Citadel

I’ve argued elsewhere that ‘The Time Warrior’ is actually fairly good on the issues of feminism and sexism (everything being very relative, of course).…

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