A Dyke In Defense of Offense: Yes, Je Suis Charlie

By Kelly Cogswell

I guess you know by now that the key staff at Charlie Hebdo in Paris were slaughtered by Islamist extremists outraged at, well, almost everything, but especially how the satirical magazine attacked Islamist extremists. But before their bodies were even cold, the glorious automatons of the American left were eviscerating the work of these dead cartoonists and journalists, taking it out of context, blaming the victims, projecting the subtext loud and clear: these colonialist, racist pigs only got what they deserved.

I don't even know where to start.

Except that if you think it's important to speak the truth to power, or at least try to, you should've had their backs. Not that Charlie Hebdo always got it right. Satire is tough. Sometimes they had brain farts like anyone else. Case in point--the time that they were trying to do a take down of Minute, the extreme right magazine that caricatured France's black Minister of Justice, Christiane Taubira, as a monkey, justifying it as humorous. Charlie Hebdo responded with their own version captioned, "Minute is not Charlie Hebdo. Racism is not funny…" While their intent was to critique racism, the image seemed to reinforce it. Like when some writers and filmmakers have depicted rape scenes, gay-bashings, and other graphic violence.

Fine. Whatever. Let them all be butchered, discarded without grief. Our artists should be perfect. And careful. We should put our work in the drawer for years, see if it holds up, and maybe wait until a team of censors can weigh in. Probably we should ban journalism altogether, along with late night comedy shows. Any form of media that is topical and subject to errors --of judgment, good taste, history, and our murky collective subconscious.

Somebody might mistake an attack on fat cat imams or violent Islamists like IS for an attack on Mohammed himself, or ordinary Muslims just trying to go to mosque and pay their bills. Neither should we repudiate the Israelis attacks on Palestinians because the resulting anti-Semitism will no doubt lead to dead Jews in Parisian supermarkets. No, don't expose the tyranny of the Castro brothers in Cuba, or it'll look like you're supporting U.S. meddling. Likewise, queers in West Africa getting stoned by mobs will have to do without our American help because somebody might accuse us of colonialism.

Above all, we must never grieve the imperfect dead. We must stand above the fray and keep our delicate white, our delicate, brown hands clean.

I read somewhere that all this criticism was progress, an attempt to avoid exercising "white male privilege." No matter that the resulting carefulness, outraged superiority and demand for perfection is itself rooted in privilege and power. The only careful people are those that have a lot to lose. Who if they aren't already there, believe they might yet be invited to the grownups' table, and having other resources at their command can define the only speech worth protecting, usually their own perfectly nuanced, calibrated, respectful and educated sneers.

People like me will never measure up. Mild as I am I'll be considered too shrill, too queer, too furious to always get it right. And when we open our traps we're dismissed or attacked. Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. You'd think she'd be heard as a nice brown Somali woman herself born inside the Muslim faith, but no. Every time she's scheduled to speak somewhere, there's a huge lefty outcry. Islamophobe! somebody screams. And maybe she is, literally, afraid of Islam. In the name of it, her female body was mutilated. People around her were murdered. She herself has been condemned to death. Me, I'm afraid of it, too. Like all religions. No matter how many reforms the Big Three go through, it's there in black and white that women are worthless. Queers should be killed. And we are killed any place, any time religious fundamentalists get the upper hand.

I feel sorry, I feel sick, at these nouveau Torquemadas offended at offense. If I was a cartoonist, I'd draw them with their heads protruding from a considerable ass, and the delicate rose of that hole would be their vile little mouths. Or maybe that's me. Or who I'd like to be some days. Like Charlie Hebdo a vulgar satirist down in the metaphorical mud, sneering at my betters, and making rude noises, but also wailing with inconsolable grief at the two towers I watched burn from the roof of my building, and then, also, at the resulting slaughters in Afghanistan and Iraq. At all the dead in France. Because in some things you don't actually have to choose sides. In fact, you must not.

As Harry Bosch once said, fictional homicide detective, and the only prophet I revere, "Everybody counts or nobody counts."

Muslim Women in France

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

You see tons of Muslim women in Paris near the Institut du Monde Arabe on the fancy Left Bank. They're mostly young and scholarly, and charge down the sidewalks with colored headscarves, or black hijabs and abayas floating behind them like capes.

They remind me of young queers taking to the street in their uniforms of leather bracelets and Doc Martens with pink and black triangles on everything, part fashion choice, part remembrance, hopefully even, a symbol of resistance. Because sometimes, if you're lucky, you can take the sign and means of oppression, and transform it into a declaration of war.

Not always though. It's enough to imagine what those pink and black triangles would mean on New York queers if dykes and fags across the river in New Jersey were actually obligated to wear them, embodying discrimination. Then, would the Nazi's pink or black triangle on your Manhattan leather jacket be an act of solidarity, or stupid ignorance? Are we even allowed ignorance any more in our tweet and blog world?

The double-edged nature of symbols arises every time some American jumps into the debate about "the right" of Muslim women to wear a headscarf or body-covering abaya, usually reducing the complicated social debate, especially in France, to a matter of religious freedom. Women should do what they want. Anybody considering restrictions must be a euro-centric Islamophobe.

Besides the problem that such critics erase Muslims that are opponents of "covering," the truth is religion is the least of the matter. In Paris, anyway. On the one hand, you do have those mostly young Muslim women of the scholarly Left Bank wearing headscarves, abayas, and sometimes even the burkha, partly in religious devotion, but often it seems like a flag of cultural difference that they wave at the charging French bull in a big fuck you.

And if they were the only Muslim women in France, maybe I'd say fashion, religion, who cares? It's not worth wasting our breath.

Unfortunately, cross the real and metaphorical river Seine and those little fabric squares covering hair, or bodies, even faces, have little to do with god, or even culture, but misogyny in its purest form. A whole range of women are actively coerced by brothers, boyfriends, fathers, even sons into "covering" in public, and they enforce their will with threats, beatings, rape, and the occasional old favorite of acid sprayed in any naked female face.

Pressure to comply seems worst in the banlieus, in the suburbs, where segregation and poverty are at their most intense, and angry young men are looking for ways to assert themselves. But you see it often enough in the poorer neighborhoods inside the city--the women creeping down the sidewalks behind the men that effectively own them. Tiny girls already in scarves, veiled seething teenagers, and their future selves -- not stylish liberated women at the fancy Left Bank Institut du Monde Arabe, but sacks of exhausted flesh broken with childbearing and hard work. There's nothing sanctifying or empowering at all about the ugly black dirty drapes that hide older Muslim women as they stagger down the street.

When I see them I want to ban all the abaya, hijabs, and headscarves I see. And give a good hard kick in the balls to the young men and boys with their degenerate fathers sauntering several yards in front of the women they despise as trash. I also want to yank aside those Left Bank Muslim girls and remind them that the symbols they're obviously playing with haven't been fully transformed. Black covering robes and scarves may work as a nose-thumbing gesture to the predominantly Christian West. But as a tool against the mostly masculine forces that have imposed them, they're not doing anything subversive at all.

The logical conclusion of "covering" women is a mere 3485.1 miles east in Afghanistan where that piece of compromised shit Hamid Karzai is throwing females to the Taliban wolves in hopes of improving his election chances there. The Shiite Personal Status Law he allowed to pass into effectiveness in July allows husbands to starve their wives if they fail to obey sexual demands, requires women to get male permission to leave the house, tolerates rape if the rapist coughs up dough for the girl or marries her. It strips women of rights to their own children, granting sole guardianship to their fathers and grandfathers.

While this law theoretically only enslaves Afghanistan's three million Shiite women, a huge amount of Afghan women of all origins have protested because it is expected to have an impact on all future legislation regarding family and women's rights.

Given that reality, one thing at least is clear. That it's not more freedom of religion most Muslim women need, but freedom from the monsters that use it to keep them safely hidden and in chains.