Personal and Distant Bridge

 

Contrapoints is a youtube channel created by Natalie Wynn. In her videos, she unpacks controversial political topics, constantly fluctuating between her own feelings and a panel on the subject. Transposing Socrates' dialogue form into a youtube video format, Natalie creates different characters to synthesize opposing views on multiple contentious debates. Their dialogue is a conversation that reflects the main ideas of different relevant groups, and at the same time, distinct forces that debate within the creator as she researches and reflects about the topic of choice. In her video titled Gender Critical, Natalie evokes one of those personas: 

 

"It is 2019 and I think most people have heard of TERFS: Trans-exclusionary radical feminists. You know, these fanatics like Germaine Greer who call trans women “it” and think that trans men are lost lesbian sisters. You guys do know about transgender men, right? Male-to-Female is not the only kind of transgender person. There is also people who were born, well, people who were assigned, people who were always, people who identify. TERFS don’t like being called TERFS, they think it is a term of disparagement, which, it is. They call themselves radical feminists, RadFems or, lately, gender critical. The idea is that femininity, masculinity, gender roles, all that, it’s all a patriarchal construct and biological sex is the only thing that makes a person a man or a woman."

 

"In the past on this channel I have always caricatured TERFS as being like angry, men-hating bigots who’s only tactic is accusing transwomen of being creepy men. And there definitely are some people who are really like that, but I want to be fair, I want to be balanced. So, in preparation to making this video, I posted an invitation on twitter asking people who used to be gender critical feminists to share their stories with me. And I got hundreds of responses, a lot of them from women who have had traumatic experiences with men and who at one time found comfort in a rigid view of gender where women and men are completely separate species, where women are safe and men are dangerous."

 

"For a lot of those women, allowing trans people into their picture of the world, at first, challenged their sense of stability and comfort. It was difficult emotional work, work that they needed to do, but still difficult. And that makes total sense to me. Like, its very easy for me to understand why someone would feel that way. So, it’s not just evil bigots who are attracted to the gender critical worldview. And in this video, I don’t want to just parody TERFS. This time, I want to really engage with gender critical ideas in the public arena of free speech open communication dialogue conversation debate idea marketplace expression discourse. Maybe I’ll even get in touch with my inner RadFem. She’s a little shy, sure, but she is here—not queer—reads a lot of Germaine Greer and when I am having a dark night of the soul, sweaty, she’s feeling XXtra biological and when the full moon shine, she speaks."

 

Waltz of the Sugar Plum Fairy, from Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” starts playing. A witch-like Contrapoints with long nails, a black headpiece, glitter all over her face appears. The dark medieval woodland with a supernatural green light in the background seems to make the character a reference to the witch Maleficent, from Walt Disney’s version of Sleeping Beauty.

 

"Ugh, this is agony," says the TERF version of Contrapoints. "I am a biological woman trapped in the body of a male narcissist. Can you imagine?"

 

Nuanced and controversial political debates become sexy and engaging as different characters speak, from within and through Natalie, whom does not think of herself as Contrapoints. “It’s complicated,” she says, in an interview for Vice—“I would say I’m a little impersonal—my main persona (Contrapoints) is an idealized version of myself," she says. "It’s how I wish I argued in person! I’m actually very timid and non-confrontational.” At the same times she, in that same interview, explains why her characters are also personal: “You have to put some of the darkness, shame, and self-disgust in there—it’s about having enough of myself in the mix that I feel like I’m being authentic.” And she, indeed, is. Most of her videos are clear windows into Natalie’s open wounds. She does not hide behind her main persona, but from it she expands an intimate private essence that couldn’t be externalized if Natalie spoke in her channel as herself. She is Contrapoints, she is that TERF wizard, she is the woman in Cat ears that she uses to talk about an aesthetically insensitive left and at the same time she is none of those things.

 

Through her characters, she mimics the world as it is: a constant dialogue between disagreeing, screaming, confrontational personas. Contrapoints masters the difficult task of being personal and distant, speaking about a fragment to be able to reach a Universe, discussing about itself to reach other people. Often, in my own academic life, I am called out for speaking about myself. Bringing in an apparently irrelevant personal discourse, personalizing a debate that should be sterile, clean of the authors subjectivity. Ai Wei Wei and Natalie Wynn are creators that prove that, at times, admitting the impossibility of not being personal is the best way to uplift the discussion. They do not attempt a fragile pseudo-scientific, distant approach to a subject, but they embrace their sided viewpoint, and after that deliver an almost anthropological thick description.

 

Presenting multiple actors without forgetting to explain why they view them that way, a good example lies in Ai Wei Wei’s 2013 work S.A.C.R.E.D—(i) Supper, (ii) Accusers, (iii) Cleansing, (iv) Ritual, (v) Entropy, (vi) Doubt—a six-part installation near-life size dioramas showing the artist and his prison guards inside steel boxes, depicting the artist’s 81-day incarceration. By showing his own experience in detail, we get to reflect about the incarceration process as a whole. Putting ourselves in the prisioner’s position whoever they may be.

 

Contrapoints has put herself in the place of people in the alt-right, incels (men who identify as involuntarily celibate, a group that often produces mass murderers among some of its members, who consider women—and their intrinsic sexual deviation—as the ones responsible for their celibacy), TERFS and more. In the process we get to know her and the development of her identity and struggles as a trans woman. Both Ai Wei Wei and Natalie Wynn have the power of bringing in their art personal struggles that unveil the stories within many other members of society, humanizing the groups they are a part of and simultaneously all they disagree with.