Privilege: A Reader

Edited by Michael Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber
Westview Press

A historian once said that the more one can know about something, the more you can control it. Michel Foucault was specifically talking about the control of psychiatric patients, prison inmates, and people's sex lives, but we can certainly extend his thoughts to a plethora of other examples. What Foucault did not say, however, was how exposing and learning about power and dominance can lead to their dismantling.

After more than two decades since his passing, the inheritors of Foucault's ideas make an appearance in a handsome new book that explores the invisible power of privilege; namely the privilege of being White, heterosexual, and middle class in America. Privilege: A Reader is a collection of essays compiled and edited by Michael Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber, both scholarly experts in masculinities and ethnic studies respectively. The book takes on a welcoming and accessible feel with essays that come a personal place, many written from a first-person perspective by heavyweights like Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Tim Wise.

Some, like Allan Bérubé's experience as a gay rights activist brings to light the complications of being White in anti-racist gay rights movement. Not being White, I found Bérubé's angst about pointing out the Whiteness of influential gay groups in the U.S. an eyeopener. For White people, it seems, it was convenient to remain racially invisible and to depend on the unspoken rules about keeping that Whiteness unchecked. Awkward silences, defensiveness, and hostility form the repertoire of White discomfort when the racial gaze is turned to Whiteness.

In Michael A. Messner's piece on "Becoming 100 Percent Straight," he raises questions that heterosexual people rarely ask: how do we know for sure we're straight? And what made us straight? Messner's question is interwoven in a study of his own sexuality that touches on his memories as a young man who was infatuated with a male classmate and friend. In repressing this infatuation, he belittles and rejects his friend—a process Messner calls the heterosexualisation of his masculinity.

With every chapter I am reminded of the discomfort the topic of privilege raises and how important that it should remain unsettling. I learn that Black men and working class White people, as privileged groups, are highly contested categories in the face of institutional racism and poverty. And dishearteningly, I discover that the gateway to social mobility undermined by the unearned privilege of being accepted to Ivy League colleges by virtue of having parents who are alumni.

Kimmel and Ferber's book takes us on a journey of self-reflection, of deconstructing the power of invisibility, and asks us some difficult questions about our many roles in maintaining oppression. But it does not try leave us beset with racial or class guilt. Rather, it invites us to pursue, both on a theoretical and practical level, ways of recognising the overlapping nature of social privileges and overcoming differences in the name of solidarity against oppressions.

Though Privilege: A Reader could be a more comprehensive, far-reaching catalogue of dominance, both insidious and overt, if it had taken on board the narrative of privilege from other non-White experiences and interrogated what being able-bodied and cisgendered mean. The absence of trans, disabled, Asian, and Native American voices speaks, ironically, of Kimmel's and Ferber's privilege of omitting these important experiences that are key to dismantling the edifice of privilege.

I praise Privilege: A Reader nonetheless, for its courage to speak from a place that prefers to remain silent, for raising attention to a things that want to stay hidden, and its overall critique of life's many taken for granted experiences and “common sense.” I'm sure Foucault would be proud of that.

Review by Alicia Izharuddin

Homophobias: Lust and Loathing Across Time and Space

Edited by David A. B. Murray
Duke University Press

Homosexuality seems to always be a topic of interest for researchers, at least in this day and age. Perhaps it is most interesting because sexuality is one of the most private aspects of a person’s life, and nothing seems to generate interest in quite the way that something so mysterious and private can. Homophobia, like homosexuality, varies in degrees of presence, and is often intertwined with the complexities of the cultural, economic, and political workings of the environment it finds itself situated. In Homophobias, edited by David A. B. Murray, the topic of homophobia and its prevalence is examined across cultures and time.

Of particular interest to me has always been the weaving together of racism and homophobia, which is discussed in the article by Brian Riedel titled, “Stolen Kisses: Homophobias as ‘Racism’ in Contemporary Urban Greece.” Ratsismós, which is the Greek word for racism, encompasses much more than the North American conceptualization of “race,” as stated in this article, in that racism is not restricted to a form of discrimination based on phenotype. In the context of the North American concept of racism and its history, relating racism to homophobia would be and is often vehemently protested by people of color. The argument lies in the views of many who are victims of racism that a person can more or less hide sexuality, while one cannot hide his or her skin color. However, with the linguistic structure of the aforementioned word and its encompassing of not only a race but also a nation or tribe—as opposed to a specific group of people based on phenotype—one would be forced to contemplate how one relates to the other.

In the essay, “The Emergence of Political Homophobia in Indonesia” by Tom Boellstorff, an examination of masculinity and national belonging takes place. Boellstorff defines political homophobia as a “cultural logic that links emotion, sexuality, and political violence,” and states that homophobia is often specific to geography and history. He writes that this definition was exemplified in an anti-American newspaper in Indonesia that gave former President Bush a makeover in the form of lipstick, earrings, and a leather jacket, equating him to an emotional transvestite. This was to signify the failed masculinity Bush displayed in seeking allies to attack Afghanistan, as opposed to a one-on-one duel with Osama Bin Laden; thus, by those standards, Bush was operating as a non-normative male.

Suzanne LaFont’s “Not Quite Redemption Song: LGBT-Hate in Jamaica” captures how firmly heterosexism is institutionalized in Jamaica, in that prejudice and discrimination against LGBT people are tolerated and supported partly by police and politicians. She states that there is a moral superiority held by Jamaica over Western liberal sexual ideology. The institutionalized discrimination of gays also evidenced by the outspokenness of Jamaica’s music artists attests to this held superiority and is reinforced with the continued support of artists that speak out so strongly through their music, even promoting murder against gays.

Homophobias is a well-edited collection of how homophobia is captured across cultures, time, and space. It also questions how homophobia—an exclusive prejudice against homosexuals—can exist as a universal form of discrimination, and how that discrimination can exist in various forms from political emasculation to violent attacks. Homophobias serves as an important collection of works with which to move past preconceived ideas of what one thinks constitutes homophobia.

Review by Olupero R. Aiyenimelo