Cultural Hijacking: the Svastika

Nothing makes my blood boil more than people who appropriate other people's culture for their own uses or with no understanding of the original culture. Let's be clear: I am a Canadian who studied Chinese History, and that's not a problem to me. It's cool to study and write about other cultures, just don't think I'm going to wander around in yellow face ever. I study and practice yoga, but no way am I going to start spouting off about ancient Hindu texts as I have zero idea on that.

Neither of these women doing yoga are me. (from Seattle Yoga News)

The absolute worst cultural appropriation award should go to the German Nazi Party of the early and mid-20th century. Why? Because not only did they decide that the ripping off the past glories of other nations and mythologizing their nation was a great way to cement their Fascist nationalism, but that stealing the icons of cultures that they barely knew about and probably would have tried to kill off anyways. One image was the Svastika.

Svastika, not Swastika You Idiot...

It's a Nazi horse? No you fool - it's a coin from Cornith, 500 BCE.

First, what is this odd cross like symbol? According to my go-to place of first blush information, Britannica Online (eat that Wikipedia) it's an ancient symbol always with with arms bent at right angles, all in the same rotary direction, usually clockwise.  The word is Sanskrit: svastika, meaning “conducive to well-being.” It was a favourite symbol on ancient coinage. In Scandinavia, the left-hand swastika was the sign for the god Thor’s hammer.(They missed that detail in the movies.)

The swastika also appeared in early Christian and Byzantine art where it became known as the gammadion cross, or crux gammata, because it has four Greek gammas [ Γ ] attached to a common base. The symbol is universal in that it occurred in South and Central America among the Maya and in North America among the Navajo peoples.

Here's where I laughed my ass off: The swastika as a symbol of prosperity and good fortune is widely distributed throughout the ancient and modern world. So...the Nazis were wishing themselves prosperity and good fortune. Ugh.

Peace and prosperity to you all, and...OMG what is that gargoyle doing up there?

In India the swastika continues to be the most widely used auspicious symbol of Hindus, Jainas, and Buddhists. Among the Jainas it is the emblem of their seventh Tirthankara (saint) and is also said to remind the worshipper by its four arms of the four possible places of rebirth—in the animal or plant world, in hell, on Earth, or in the spirit world.

A clear distinction is made between the right-hand swastika, which moves in a clockwise direction, and the left-hand swastika (more correctly called the sauvastika), which moves in a counterclockwise direction. The right-hand swastika is considered a solar symbol and imitates in the rotation of its arms the course taken daily by the Sun, which in the Northern Hemisphere appears to pass from east, then south, to west. The left-hand swastika more often stands for night, the terrifying goddess Kālī, and magical practices.

In the Buddhist tradition the swastika symbolizes the feet, or the footprints, of the Buddha. It is often placed at the beginning and end of inscriptions, and modern Tibetan Buddhists use it as a clothing decoration. With the spread of Buddhism, the swastika passed into the iconography of China and Japan, where it has been used to denote plurality, abundance, prosperity, and long life.

The legend goes that the Gautama Buddha (the historical Buddha) was inscribed with this symbol on the chest by his disciples upon his death. We often see statues of him with this symbol on the chest or on the sole of the feet. Many Buddhist texts start with this symbol, thus it has started being used in Japan as a symbol representing temples, especially on maps as the torii gate represents Shinto shrines.

"My goodness there's a lot of Nazis in Kyoto. I guess they really were allies in WWII"

Goose-Stepping Thieves!!!

"Seriously don't associate me with those people"

The Holocaust museum has an amazing amount of research available on the acquisition of the Germans of the swastika. The advent of using the symbol begins pre-World War I. In 1910 a poet and nationalist ideologist Guido von List had suggested the swastika as a symbol for all anti-Semitic organizations; and when the National Socialist Party (NSP) was formed in 1919–20, it adopted it. They knew about the symbol from being nuts about archaeology: the famous archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann discovered the hooked cross on the site of ancient Troy. He connected it with similar shapes found on pottery in Germany and speculated that it was a “significant religious symbol of our remote ancestors.”  His work soon was taken up by the NSP movements, for whom the swastika was a symbol of “Aryan identity” and German nationalist pride.

This conjecture of Aryan cultural descent of the German people is likely one of the main reasons why the Nazi party formally adopted the swastika or Hakenkreuz (Ger., hooked cross) as its symbol in 1920.
The Nazi party, however, was not the only party to use the swastika in Germany. After World War I, a number of far-right nationalist movements adopted the swastika. As a symbol, it became associated with the idea of a racially “pure” state. By the time the Nazis gained control of Germany, the connotations of the swastika had forever changed.

In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote: “I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form; a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black swastika in the middle. After long trials I also found a definite proportion between the size of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the swastika.”

On Sept. 15, 1935, the black swastika on a white circle with a red background became the national flag of Germany. This use of the swastika ended in World War II with the German surrender in May 1945, though the swastika is still favoured by neo-Nazi groups.

I said Neo, not Neon...

Screw You I'm Still Using It

Can the symbol be-reclaimed in the modern world? Well people use it still all the time outside of Europe and the Americas because fuck the Nazis. And they had it first. So when I went to China and Japan, I did see it on a few statues. There's a lot of people out there who want to reclaim the symbol from its misuse by the Nazis. But my friend John and I once talked about this and he was vehemently opposed, as it was a sensitive issue for many people. And I think he sums up a lot of what people feel: I'd rather just forget about it and never talk about it again.

I have to disagree: I watched a great BBC4 documentary on reclaiming the swastika and I think that's the better answer. I think we should commit to sharing information that reveals its long and varied history and the spiritually deep meaning that underlies it. For, if we allow the swastika to remain forever distorted, then those responsible will have won.

No way are we going to take this sitting....down...I mean....

If you haven't noticed, I didn't include one picture of a Nazi Swastika, because those assholes have gotten enough mileage out of stealing other people's stuff. And to more appropriately express my feelings, here's comedian Eddy Izzard on the Nazis and Hitler "the mass-murdering fuck head":

Books more your take?

Heidtmann, Horst. “Swastika.” In Encyclopedia of the Third Reich, 937-939. New York: Macmillan, 1991.
Heller, Steven. The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption? New York: Allworth Press, 2000.
Quinn, Malcolm. The Swastika: Constructing the Symbol. London: Routledge, 1994.

Divine Rebellion: The History of Drag Queens

Harry S Franklyn, 1920s Drag Queen

(The scene: a hot summer day at my favourite beverage place, the Hop and Brew.)

Me: I'm writing an article on the history of Drag Queens.

Marc, my buddy from Seattle: Sounds cool. And I don't know anything about them. As a people or performers outside Priscilla, Hedwig...etc.

Me: I know some history but not outside of North America. My ignorance and your ignorance are perfectly matched.

Marc: (Laughs) That's the first I've hear that being dumb is good.

Me: Well, let's start off with your questions, then I'll use this as the base for the article.

Marc: Sure! And our reward for such an endeavor...more beer?

Me: Done!

What is a  Drag Queen? 

Eltinge with and without his dress - 1920s

To get all technical on you all, a drag queen is usually a male of any ethnicity who dresses as a woman (in drag) with exaggerated femine traits for performance and entertainment in some capacity. Meriam-Webster dictionary online has the incorrect definition, that it's a homosexual man only. That's not the modern or current usage, as any performer can identify with any gender and sexual orientation. It does not mean the person also is a Transgender as well, which is when a person born with one gender transitions to the opposite gender, or none at all. But the line has always been blurry: the early 20th century American vaudeville and film performer Julian Eltinge is called the greatest female impersonator in theatrical history. His hyper-masculinity off the stage, and his very ambiguous sexuality is still up for debate.

Do they exist all over the world and for how long? 

Heck yes!  Men dressing as women in performance was very common in the European theatre world: you see it a lot in Shakespearean theatre even today. In Asia, Chinese and Japanese theatre, men would play the parts of women because women were not allowed on stage. I'll focus more on Chinese performers here, as gender in Chinese history was more my area of study in University. Men performing in drag were not the modern concept of drag queens: their actions cannot be divorced from the cultural context surrounding them. In an article by Dawei Ji,  he states that in 20th century literature they were viewed as undesirables:

... I name them "performers of the paternal past" where the word perform references both theatrical art and speech act theory. Often paired with paternal figures, they dramatize and visualize the past as if it were a theatrical play, but they also operate and sustain the past, as if it were a wristwatch that needed winding up. Furthermore, with their androgynous bodies, these ambiguously gendered characters represent trauma in China's history. Drawing on Julia Kristeva's explication of the abject in Powers of Horror, I argue that both female impersonators and the Chinese past exemplify abjection in these novels. The abject, like bodily excreta, is both filthy and indispensable for the subject. It lingers on the subject's borders, at once repudiated and retained. In the works that I discuss, the past is abjected by the present, and female impersonators, who seem to be detained in the past, are abjected by normatively gendered characters.

One of the modern performers is Li Yugang (李玉刚) who really blurs gender lines and sexuality normative with his videos and work in opera. On his facebook page it states "A charming woman on stage, a man in real life", because the whole thing could be a bit blurry...

She is all man...and can wear a dress better than me.

How about just in North America?

The term Drag Queen first appears in 1870s, and is a popular item on the vaudeville stages pre and post WWI. However, after WWII there was a big backlash against anything seen as counter-culture or not hetero-normative. Being a homosexual was never 100 percent legal, but now after 1945 in Canada, Mexico and the US the government and police actively persecuted all LGTBQ people. The wearing of opposite gender clothes were banned, and people were often publicly humiliated, harassed, fired from jobs, jailed or placed in mental institutions.

And then came Silvia...

The suppression could not continue: The growing gay rights movement in 1950s and 60s America really exploded in the 1969 Stonewall Riots, started at the legendary bar in New York. It was the only gay bar in New York at that time and was raided on June 28th, 1969. Many lesbians and drag queens began to fight back, including the drag queen Sylvia Rivera, who threw pennies and quarters at police. Three nights of riots ensued, where other drag queens like Marsha P. Johnson smashed a police car window with her hand bag. (You kick ass girl!)

Because of these early fighters, people began to embrace again the drag queens, and it came out of the closet as more performances and careers were launched. One famous drag queen who gained international fame was Logan Carter who rose to fame in the early 1970s. My personal favourite, Travis Shaw has been better known as Foxy De-Rossi, a biracial diva from Prince George who has been an great advocate for human rights.

Is it a derogatory term?

No it's not but it's up to the individual to what they would like to be refered to as. Drag queens in North America do not like the term Transvestite being used for them, as they are not Trans people. Others, however, have no problem with being called Tranny as they want to take back the term, just like the old slur "Fag" meaning gay man. It's up to the person: so ask! Or how about just calling them by their name, that works too.

OK - Divine and other extreme drag queens kind of freak me out...

She's fierce to me but I can't stand her music really....

...and that's ok, but understand that your reaction to another human being is important. Divine was Harris Glenn Milstead, (October 19, 1945 – March 7, 1988), an American actor, singer and Drag Queen best know for his work with filmmaker John Waters. He personally did not identify as Transgender, but male and gay, which flies in the face of many stereotypes of what a drag queen should be. He was, however, as Divine, very edgy and in your face. Who can forget his great comedic timing and slapstick act in Hairspray? So next time you're freaked out, understand not everyone has to like everyone's performances, but that Divine was just expressing herself and we should honour that.

Me: (After I give this to Mark) So beers next week? Are you buying?

Mark: Yep, and after all this, I might just throw in the pizza too.

Me: Thank you, Saint Divine...

For more info, ask a local drag troupe. Or do some reading and watching:

Around the World in 80 Drag Queens

I am Divine: A New Documentary

The Imperial Court