Death By Torchwood, And The Rise Of The Queer Superhero

Few deaths have been more shocking to gay television viewers than that of Ianto Jones in this summer’s Torchwood: Children Of Earth. His death during the fourth night of the BBC miniseries created a huge backlash, none of which surprised me more than claims that Ianto’s demise was an expression of the show’s homophobia.

Created by Russel T Davies, an openly gay writer famous for the complex and empowering Queer As Folk (UK), and starring John Barrowman, who might just be the most boisterously “out” star in the industry, Torchwood has been a bastion of queer pride since its debut in 2006. It evokes a world where homophobia is so non-existent that labels “gay,” “straight,” and “bi” have become irrelevant.

So how does the death of one of TV’s few prominent queer characters involved in a same-sex relationship fit into the show’s socially progressive vision? To my mind, Ianto’s death, rather than being homophobic, serves as a marker on the continuing road to true gay empowerment – a road that has frequently been two steps forward and one step back.

Gay and lesbian characters on screen have gone through a long and difficult journey from invisibility and vilification to understanding and acceptance. This journey is by no means over: queer people all over the world are still fighting for the most basic forms of cultural recognition. But while queer visibility in the media is on the rise in the Europe and North America, the nature of this visibility – and its effects on queer viewers – are not always positive.

If we stand with Muslims, will Muslims stand with us?

Lately, I've been counting my blessings that I don't live in Europe. From the relative safety and comfort of Canada, it looks like England and France are on the verge of what would probably amount to a civil war - and the rest of Europe is not far behind.

On the one hand, Islam is growing by leaps and bounds, carrying with it the threat of social conservatism. Islam is not exactly supportive of women's equality, gay rights, or freedom from religion; and progressive Muslims willing to fight for these ideals within their communities seem to be few and far between.

On the other hand, white supremacist movements and racist organizations are rising to prominence in ways they hadn't done in Europe in decades. Like its poster-boy BNP, this bunch isn't exactly socially progressive: in fact, while they hate Muslims for their skin color and non-adherence to Christianity, the racists and nationalists hold much the same opinion of women, gays, and freedom of thought as that held by Islam.

Each side strengthens the resolve of the other. The racist and nationalist threat doubtless drives many moderate Muslims to become more radicalized, and further radicalization of the Muslim community whips nationalists into even more of a frenzy. It's a destructive circle jerk of fear and hatred.

And to someone like me - a queer, atheist woman - both sides are equally terrifying.

I also happen to believe that self-criticism is the key to progress (or, in fact, survival). Of Jewish background, I tend to be more critical of Israel than my Muslim-born partner. Raised in the Soviet Union before its collapse, I am more suspicious of communism than many of my Western left-wing friends. And since I'm white, I consider it my responsibility to stand against white supremacists and unequivocally say NOT IN MY NAME.

And yet, I can't ignore the fact that the community currently under attack by the white supremacists and nationalists in Europe is not exactly on my side.

My guess is that many social progressives in Europe are facing the same dilemma. Right now, for those of us whose lives literally depend on feminism, gay rights, and freedom from religion, it's easier to figure out whose side we're NOT on than whose side we support. As both sides whip each other into further heights of frenzy, true social progressives are left standing on the sidelines, more confused than they've been since the early days of the Bolshevik revolution.

There's no question of social progressives supporting racism and nationalism. But what does that mean, in practical terms? What does that mean during clashes between white supremacists and Muslims? What in this batshit crazy world are we supposed to do?

If we stand with the European Muslims in the fight for their survival, will they stand with us in the fight for ours? Will they support progressive ideals? Will they support gay rights - including the rights of their own gay children? Will they support women's equality - including the equality of their own wives? Will they support freedom of religion - including the freedom to have no religion at all?

Is it right to expect them to?

An Atheist Afterlife

Religions tell us that an afterlife awaits us after death - an afterlife which we will enter as individuals, as the people we currently are. From the standpoint of continuation versus ending, many religious people look at atheists with pity: it must be terrible, or so they think, to believe that you just... end.

Of course many atheists believe nothing of the sort. Far from despairing over the end of their individual beings that comes with death, many atheists derive joy from the simple scientifically based knowledge that, as their individual being disintegrates with the dead brain tissue, they remain vibrantly present as part of the boundless living world, not the dead world of heaven, hell and the afterlife.

Our brains die and disintegrate - but our minds and spirits live on, quite independently from our individual entities. Each time we meet another person, each time we speak or write or smile at a passer-by or give a bank teller a dirty look, we contribute to the body of human consciousness. Famous people are the most obvious examples of immortality of the human mind - but one doesn't have to be famous. We are all products of our history, as individuals and as a society on the whole; and our history is comprised of all the people who have ever lived. Through us, their consciousness, the product of their now dead brains, is as alive as it ever was in their lifetimes.

This immortality of mind goes not only beyond famous people, but beyond recorded history. The thoughts and beliefs of people living during recorded history were based on the thoughts and beliefs of their ancestors; the fact that they were never written down makes them no less a part of our shared body of consciousness in the 21st century.

The bottom line is, whether we publish books and make discoveries that revolutionize our descendants' world, or whether we simply interact with people in our daily lives, the bits and pieces of what we think and feel, by way of influencing the people around us, will live on in them, their children, their grandchildren, and so forth - even if none of them ever learn our name. The very act of our being makes us forever part of the body of human consciousness.

As with our minds, so with our bodies. As the structural integrity of our bodies falls apart in the grave, our bodies don't disappear - on the contrary, they spread across the world, becoming an integral part of more places than we could ever hope to visit while alive. As our individual being rots in the earth, it feeds the bugs who feed the birds; it feeds the flowers that feed the bees, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The bees and birds carry bits and pieces of our bodies, dropping seeds and pollinating flowers - and next thing, our bodies are feeding humans halfway across the world, becoming parts of their bodies just like our ancestors fed us and became parts of our bodies. Humans who were alive millennia ago are still around today, giving us life as part of the neverending food chain; and we will be around millennia from now, becoming flowers and bees and fruits and people and earth over and over and over again.

The Racism of Cultural Relativism: Germany Cites Koran in Rejecting Divorce - New York Times

Throughout the Western world, cases of domestic violence against white women are met with vigilance. But thanks to cultural relativism that expects tolerance of intolerant customs, this might no longer be the case for non-white women.

In Germany, cultural relativism was once again exposed as the appallingly racist ideology that it is, when a white female judge refused to grant divorce to a battered woman whose husband threatened to kill her, on the basis that the woman is from Morocco.

Mark Landler writes in his New York Times article:

In a remarkable ruling that underlines the tension between Muslim customs and European laws, the judge, Christa Datz-Winter, said that the couple came from a Moroccan cultural milieu, in which she said it was common for husbands to beat their wives. The Koran, she wrote, sanctions such physical abuse.

[...]the greatest damage done by this episode is to other Muslim women suffering from domestic abuse. Many are already afraid of going to court against their spouses.

Western feminists have shown an appalling disregard for their third-world sisters. The fact that a female judge in Germany, a country with some of the most progressive laws in the world, has decided to withhold these rights from another woman on the basis of her country of birth, is only the most obvious example of apartheid to which too many Muslim women are subjected in the West.

When Ideologies Clash: It’s a Numbers Game - But What Are We Counting?

As the birth rates of many Western countries plummet, with those countries’ orthodox religious communities picking up the slack, the “numbers game” concept is gathering steam. Where even a couple of decades ago, this xenophobic demographics-based concept was the nearly exclusive domain of right-wing nationalists, more and more liberals seem to be jumping on the “numbers game” bandwagon.

The panic is certainly understandable: as Muslim communities expand throughout Europe and North America, their members are seen as carriers of an ideology that threatens the hard won progressive secular values of their host countries. Like a menacing clawed hand of the enemy army crawling across the map of Europe in old World War II movies, Islam can be seen as leeching into the Western culture, carrying with it the threat of misogyny, homophobia and intolerance, and pushing Christianity (which can be - and has been throughout history - no less virulent given half a chance) back into a dangerous position of relevance along the way. But does the “numbers game” attitude help to stave off the threat to secular values like women’s self-determination, sexual freedom and gay rights?

On the contrary: I suspect that it only compounds the problem.

Air Show Porn - NOW Magazine

This Labour Day weekend was marked (or rather marred) by fighter jets ripping holes in the beautiful Toronto sky. Every time one of them passed overhead, making the city shake and leaving a trail of poison, I would flash back to the weeks after 9/11, when every New Yorker would stop and look nervously at the sky each time a plane appeared.

Mike Smith talks about the effects of the Labour Day Air Show on Toronto's refugee population (not to mention its environment) in his insightful article in NOW Toronto Magazine.

Sure, the whole thing’s over in days, but what if you came here to escape that ghastly circus? Over 60 per cent of refuge-seekers in Canada settle in the GTA. For them, Air Show memories may quietly take up residence with pre-existing trauma.

The term "post-traumatic stress disorder" has certainly been overused to the point of losing most of its impact; but I can't deny that witnessing the events of 9/11 first hand has left me with emotional scars that are unlikely to heal completely. And tragic and soul-crushing as it was, this was just one event, just one attack. Watching the fighter jets pollute our world with fumes and noise, I couldn't help but wonder how thousands of refugees who've found a safe haven in this peaceful city, many of whom had escaped lives full of death and explosions, felt about this rude and insensitive invasion.

"The Death of Ianto Jones: The Point of Pointlessness" - the Space Channel

Did Torchwood creator Russel T. Davies make a mistake in expecting a certain level of maturity from his audience? After reading post after post full of verbal abuse (and sometimes even threats of bodily harm) in the wake of the tragic events of Torchwood: Children Of Earth, I had to chime in.

My brief rebuttal was picked up by the blog at the Space channel which carries the BBC hit Torchwood in Canada.

The death of Ianto Jones in the 4th episode of Children of Earth seems to have sent a few shippers off the deep end. And even to the uninitiated, the death might seem like a plothole: these people are professionals, this is what they do, so how can they not have a plan? But if you've followed Torchwood from the beginning, this should come as no surprise.

Read the rest at Space channel's blog.

Added on September 7th, 2009: Referring to Ianto Jones' contentious death during the September 4th Torchwood panel at DragonCon, Gareth David-Lloyd, the actor behind Ianto, said, "I thought it should be as unremarkable, as pointless as possible..."