The Courage of Hopelessness: Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously by Slavoj Žižek

Author:Slavoj Žižek [Žižek, Slavoj]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Political, Religion, Religion; Politics & State, Social Science, Social Theory, Sociology
ISBN: 9780241305584
Google: DC_eDQAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1612190030
Barnesnoble: 1612190030
Goodreads: 35083711
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2017-05-10T23:00:00+00:00

There is a certain quasi-poetic, uncanny beauty in this image of the bearded lady (for a long time a standard feature of cheap circus freakshows) as the symbol of a united Europe – no wonder Russia refused to transmit the Eurovision contest to its TV public, with calls for a renewed cultural Cold War. Note the same logic as Khomeini’s: the truly feared object is immoral depravity, the threat to sexual difference – Boko Haram just brought this thinking to its logical end.

In many African and Asian countries, gay movements are also perceived as an expression of the cultural impact of capitalist globalization and of its undermining of traditional social and cultural forms; consequently, the rejection of gay liberation appears as an aspect of the anti-colonial struggle. Does the same not hold for Boko Haram? For its members, the liberation of women appears as the most visible feature of the destructive cultural impact of capitalist modernization.

Sexual difference as a set of fixed features that define the role of each gender of course implies strong hierarchy and divided responsibility. The soft attitude towards rape in Muslim countries is clearly based on the premise that a man who has raped a woman must have been secretly seduced (provoked) by her into doing it. In the autumn of 2006, Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, Australia’s most senior Muslim cleric, caused a scandal when, after a group of Muslim men had been jailed for gang rape, he said: ‘If you take uncovered meat and place it outside on the street […] and the cats come and eat it … whose fault is it – the cats’ or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem.’15 The scandalous nature of this comparison between a woman who is not veiled and raw, uncovered meat distracted attention from another, much more surprising, assumption underlying al-Hilali’s argument: if women are held responsible for the sexual conduct of men, does this not imply that men are totally helpless when faced with what they perceive as sexual provocation, that they are simply unable to resist it, that they are totally enslaved to their sexual hunger? In contrast to this presumption of a complete lack of male responsibility for their own sexual conduct, the emphasis on public female eroticism in the West relies on the premise that men are capable of sexual restraint, that they are not blind slaves to their sexual drives. This total responsibility of the woman for the sexual act is confirmed by the weird legal regulations in Iran, where, on 3 January 2006, a 19-year-old girl was sentenced to death by hanging after admitting having stabbed to death one of three men who tried to rape her. Here is the deadlock: what would have been the result if she had not decided to defend herself? If she had allowed the men to rape her, she would have been subjected to 100 lashes under Iranian laws on chastity; if she had been married at the time of the rape, she would likely have been found guilty of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning.

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