CW: this post discusses a comic that uses racial slurs, images of racialized violence, misogyny, and transphobia for entertainment purposes.
I just read Howard Chaykin’s The Divided States of Hysteria, a comic that has been the subject of some controversy. It was probably most visible when its fourth issue was published, featuring on its cover a lynched and castrated Pakistani man with a racial slur written on his name tag.
The main cast consists of a disgraced federal agent, a black man who went on a killing spree targeting white people, a Jewish man who stole from and killed the idle rich, a gay serial killer, and a trans woman. The first issue introduces the cast, interspersing the lead-up to a terrorist attack with the arrest of the latter four characters. All of these sequences are rife with stereotypes and, as has been pointed out elsewhere, the first issue’s trans representation employs common harmful tropes about trans women and fetishizes their abuse.
The main story follows the agent as he enlists these four people because they’ve all had dealings with the people behind a big terrorist act, a group of “black nationalists, white supremacists, Islamic terrorists, all covering each other’s [sic] backs.” (Those dealings, it turns out, are fleeting and not really connected to anything in particular.) What follows is a series of killings in what seems to be Chaykin’s idea of an escalating series of depravity, and is then wrapped up in a quick, confusing way that left me going back a few times to try to figure out what was going on. We are treated throughout to an almost endless series of racist, transphobic, homophobic, and misogynist slurs.
Right off the bat, Chaykin indulges in racist fantasy on a truly remarkable scale. The main conflict kicks off when a group of Muslim women carrying nuclear and biological weapons in their wombs blow up a significant chunk of New York City, killing millions.
In addition to using the trope of the Muslim terrorist, ever-present in the post-9/11 “west,” Chaykin also enlists older and contemporary fear-fantasies. He picks up the long-standing notion that “the enemy’s women” are the harbingers of “our” demise; today this eugenic fear is often expressed in claims that Muslims are “replacing” white people and their cultures. In this comic, a version of the conspiracy theory of “white genocide” is literlized and brought to a grotesque fever pitch. By using female reproductive organs as the source of terror, Chaykin doubles down on the terrorist trope and suggests that Muslim women breed weapons that threaten the USA.
In addition to fear-mongering about terrorism, Chaykin seems to be anticipating a new civil war. A constant refrain of the series is that the US has become a “Balkanized” shadow of its former self, descibed in issue three as an ostensibly “superficially unified national mass [turned] into a splintered sprawl of multicultural separation.” The nighmare scenario envisioned here is of a “nationwide guerrilla action, with cadres of armed citizens slaughtering other cadres of armed citizens, all in the name of entitlement.” The previous issue sketches a line from Civil War to the present, that has to be seen to be believed:
Try as I might, I just can’t get from where Chaykin starts to where he ends up without making some truly superheroic leaps and bounds of logic. But even if the history were sound (it’s not), and even if the comparison between a literal civil war and identity politics – because that is where he is going with this – were sound (it’s not), we’re still left with a mind-boggling understanding of the past and present: the sweeping survey of the USA’s past by necessity includes things like the Civil Rights movement, the fight for Indigenous recognition, women’s liberation, gay rights, and innumerable other struggles for recognition of basic humanity. I can’t tell whether Chaykin hasn’t thought through the implications of what he’s writing for more than a second here, or if he truly believes these movements were founded on flighty expressions of “entitlement”?
As Tara Marie notes over on Polygon, this perspective comes out of a privileged myopia:
Divided States of Hysteria supposes that America, and the world, is more divided than ever. But that’s simply not the case. America wasn’t less divided during segregation, or during the Stonewall Riots. It’s just that those in power could ignore the disenfranchised more easily. Social media didn’t change what was happening, it has just showed us what was happening.
Add to this myopia that Chaykin smoothes every claim to identity over into a general Badness that ruptures the social fiber – this is manifest on covers like the one for issue #3 (below) or on the back cover (also below) of the trade – and it becomes clear what his self-expressed “aversion to identity politics” is really about: maintaining privilege.
Chaykin’s nostalgic call to get back to some ideal pre-Balkanized era is not about justice, stability, understanding, or cooperation. It’s about silence. He doesn’t want some mythic unity that never existed – he wants to not have to hear about the dehumanization and oppression of other people. In short, Divided States is built on a solid footing of white, male identity politics, white rage, and plain old white grievance.
In a rambling, incoherent mini-essay about the series, Chaykin wrote:
So instead of “Trigger warnings,” “Cultural appropriation,” “Safe spaces,” and “Social Justice Warriors,” maybe we on the left should have put aside all this balkanizing nonsense and been fucking Americans for fuck’s sake, instead of allowing this nihilistic shithead to mainstream and legalize the racist, sexist, bigoted and flat-out moronic sensibilities that have always been there, but were held in check by a common understanding that one doesn’t get away with that shit in the United States of America.
The problem with this claim is that people have been getting away with this shit for centuries. Trump didn’t make Americans racist, sexist, transphobic, or otherwise bigoted, and while some types and expressions of bigotry have become more visible since 2016, they are by no means new. People of color, Muslims, LGBTQ+, trans people, Indigenous people, and many others have been trying tell us what life can be like for them. The last thing we in the privileged majority should do is not listen or, like Chaykin, tell them to shut up and “be fucking American.” The dismissiveness Chaykin relishes in is itself a “racist, sexist, bigoted and flat-out moronic sensibilit[y]” and has helped people get away with bigory and oppression for far too long.
Chaykin doesn’t really explain what he defines as being “a fucking American,” but considering his opposition to critique of racism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, and other structues of oppression, it would seem that being American means shutting up, not dissenting, assimilating.
Weaponizing words and phrases like “trigger warnings” or “cultural appropriation” or using the term “Social Justice Warrior” doesn’t speak highly to one’s sense of empathy or desire to see things from somebody else’s perspective. Other people’s experiences, perspectives, or understandings simply don’t matter here.
Yet, naturally, the trade paperback includes Chaykin’s comment on the controversy surrounding the cover mentioned at the start of this post. Unsurprisingly, he claims to have been misunderstood and unfairly maligned. The “banned books” cover variant (below) shows all sides – including Black Lives Matter and white supremacy joined together – hating on the poor, misunderstood genius. Instead of joining this unholy alliance Chaykin’s dreamed up whole cloth, he seems to be saying, we should offer him a courtesy he is entirely unwilling to offer anyone else, and put ourselves in his shoes before judging his intentions. White male fragility at its finest.
Image publisher Eric Stephenson inadvertently captured the self-contradiction and either lacking self-awareness or hypocrisy at the heart of Divided States, when he wrote about the comic that “it’s intended to provoke thought about how and why things have reached a state where the tools for progress—discourse, understanding, cooperation—are shunned in favor of treating anyone with an opposing viewpoint as an enemy combatant.”
But treating those with opposing or different viewpoints as enemy combatants is exactly what Chaykin is doing. It’s the central premise of the comic. It’s repeatedly and aggressively beaten into the reader’s head. After all, for Chaykin people who don’t see things his way, who dare to demand recognition of their basic humanity, are guilty of Balkanization and fracture, and are simultaneously waging a new civil war and not “real” Americans, whatever the fuck that means.
So yes, Chaykin is showing how divisive political discourse in the USA can be, only not in the way he thinks he is.
Martin Lund 