This post discusses rape, sexual harassment, and rape culture. Read with whatever care you need.
Birth of a Nation and black feminists’ solidarity
Birth of a Nation is a film that chronicles the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. In the autumn of 2016, the anticipation over Birth of a Nation became somewhat overshadowed by the history of its director, co-writer, and star, Nate Parker. In 1999, Parker was charged with rape. He was acquitted. His then college roommate, and Birth of a Nation story co-writer, Jean McGianni Celestin, was convicted of the sexual assault. Celestin’s conviction was later reversed.
Many of Parker’s public statements about the alleged rape didn’t seem to take seriously concerns about rape culture. In Variety magazine, the sister of the victim (who died in 2012 by suicide) argued that the Parker and film exploited her sister’s story insofar as a fictional rape is used in the film to justify Turner’s rebellion.
In a New York Times op-ed, writer and cultural critic Roxane Gay wrote:
We’ve long had to face that bad men can create good art. Some people have no problem separating the creation from the creator. I am not one of those people, nor do I want to be. I recognize that people are complex and cannot be solely defined by their worst deeds, but I can no longer watch “The Cosby Show,” for example, without thinking of the numerous sexual assault accusations against Bill Cosby. Suddenly, his jokes are far less funny.
I cannot separate the art and the artist, just as I cannot separate my blackness and my continuing desire for more representation of the black experience in film from my womanhood, my feminism, my own history of sexual violence, my humanity.
Gay decided not to see the film, and she wasn’t alone. A number of people, black women in particular, chose to boycott the film, despite thinking that Turner’s slave rebellion was an important historical moment deserving of attention. Black women even received blame when the film did not meet expectations at the box office.
Bikram yoga and rape culture
As I observed the solidarity that arose around racialized victims and survivors of sexual assault, I began to ask questions about my own involvement in a practice pioneered by an alleged rapist: Bikram yoga.
Since moving to Kitchener-Waterloo, Bikram is the primary form of yoga I practice. Recently the main studio where I practice rebranded itself from “Bikram Yoga Kitchener-Waterloo” to “Midtown Yoga Kitchener-Waterloo.” Among the reasons the studio owner offered for the name change was that he sought “a name that was hip and modern, as well as unpretentious and welcoming to all” (my emphasis).
Bikram Choudhury, the man who pioneered the sequence of postures that are repeated in each Bikram class, has a reputation for being pretentious, unwelcoming, and disparaging. While often described as charismatic, he is also reportedly narcissistic. But, Bikram’s (well documented) reputation as a sexual predator has been the primary reason I’ve questioned my Bikram practice.
My main question isn’t about how to spend my money. I don’t know if my studio was one of the 700 studios that paid Bikram a franchising fee. (Given a recent court decision, Minakshi Jafa-Bodden, Bikram’s former legal head, now controls his company. She won a sexual harassment suit. She was fired for investigating claims of sexual misconduct).
Rather, my question is about responsibility for maintaining rape culture. What does it mean to show solidarity for victims and survivors, of Bikram’s sexual abuse in particular, but also for victims and survivors more generally? In relation to my yoga practice, what is my responsibility for building an inhabitable world for everyone? What if one of my teachers were one of the women bringing complaints against Bikram? What if I were at the bar spouting off about my love of Bikram yoga to a woman who had been assaulted and could no longer practice yoga without trauma?
How to take responsibility?
Having just finished Anya Topolski’s book on Arendt and Levinas, I can’t help but think of Heidegger. The Holocaust, or the Shoah, was formative for both Arendt and Levinas’ respective projects. Their teacher Heidegger, the philosopher who is perhaps best known outside of the discipline for supporting Nazism, was also formative. Topolski notes:
Both thinkers were rightfully awestruck by Heidegger’s philosophical brilliance, so much so that their disillusionment with his words and deeds during the war was all the more unbearable. Both responded to Heidegger in a way he had taught them to–by writing and thinking–by trying to make sense of the world. [. . .] Both Arendt and Levinas appreciated [. . .] that Heidegger’s personal failings were tied to his scholarly approach. (Arendt, Levinas and a Politics of Relationality, pp. 218-219)
Of course, Arendt and Levinas reject/revise/reinterpret aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy differently. What I find interesting is how they respond to what they recognize as his personal and philosophical failing with respect to the Shoah. Can I transform my Bikram practice in a way that takes responsibility for rape culture? Or is Bikram yoga more akin to a film, to an artistic production that one can choose to avoid?
This blog post is a bit of a mess, mostly because I don’t have any answers to the questions I pose. There’s much complexity to each of these three cases–Parker, Bikram, and Heidegger–that I am not mentioning. I also want to be clear that I am not equating Parker, Bikram, and Heidegger as the same kind or degree of “bad guys.” Rather, I am reaching for disparate threads to think through how to respond to a context where a flawed (an evil?) individual in intimately wrapped up with things of incredible value.
Bikram is a yoga practice that seems impossible to separate from the man who pioneered it. Given the largeness of his personality, I don’t think I can merely say, “I reject the man and keep the yoga practice.” I feel pulled to somehow take responsibility (and this would be political responsibility, for Arendt) for how sexual violence is intimately connected–and undetachable–from Bikram yoga.
What does this responsibility mean in practice? I don’t know. I wholeheartedly support removing “Bikram” from the name of my studio and minimizing the degree to which we are a Bikram studio (my studio offers a range of yoga classes, including yin and ashtanga-inspired classes). But surely this isn’t enough. For me, doing Bikram yoga means wrestling with how the man and the yoga are intertwined. Though Bikram yoga isn’t an old practice, sexual assault is part of it’s history, it’s public story. So taking responsibility for this history means, I think, doing more to talk about and prevent sexual based violence. It means doing more to address rape culture.
Why don’t we pay more attention to white perpetrators?
Something I wish to flag: I’ve been wrestling with Bikram in this post, and drew on the controversy around Nate Parker’s sexual misconduct as well. But when we are talking about pop culture, perpetrators of colour seem to get more media attention than white perpetrators do. This imbalance also warrants reflection.
Photo credit
Kristopher Allison via Unsplash