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The Way We Remember: An Anthropological Observation of Museums and Their Purpose

By Niamh McConnell

INTRODUCTION.

To live in a human society, I believe, is to live on the foundations of the past and of memory. But to what extent do we interact with memory in both our public and our private spheres? How do we memorialise events and people within our collective and personal histories? When Kenny discusses how Renaissance scholars made up the idea of a ‘mind palace’ to help them remember their material, he describes a palace filled with rooms and furniture, each filled with a memory, what he ends writing as “a theatre of memory” (Kenny 1999, pp. 422) – which may just be another word for a museum. From there, based on that logic, is the museum is a theatre for memories, than what stories do those memories tell? In that way, the museum is not the only place where memories are preserved, but where narratives about our history are presented – one article noting how museums can be responsible for placing meaning onto simple objects and events, where “a museum object is imbued with multiple meanings and can be used as material evidence to represent different epochs and historical narratives; once the objects are placed in an ideological environment, value and meaning get attached to them.” (Blakkisrud and Kuziev 2019, pp. 1010).

With regards to the museum as the creator of meaning and narratives, the museum can also act as a memorial; with that, there is always the question of what the museum is memorialising in question, what narratives are being upheld versus others, something which is discussed by Tota, writing “in this respect, the choice of representing a controversial past through a specific cultural form can be viewed as a good terrain in which to study the process of selecting one of the competing versions of this past.” (Tota 2004, pp. 132) What meaning and narratives museums end up creating and supporting is always, naturally political – especially as talked about with Knell, with the museum being considered an important aspect of democracy, where Knell “aligns the museum with law courts, the free press, universities and other autonomous institutions which contribute to a state built around truth, justice and equality” (Knell 2020, pp. 143-144).

In the context of Australian democracies, this leads to the question of what narratives museums – museums like the Museum of Western Australia – decide to support and create, and which ones are left out. More particularly, what narratives our Australian democracy refuses to acknowledge – particularly that of Aboriginal history. According to the book, Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes, the Ames views the museum as a institution based upon the subjugation of non-Western cultures, stating “museums are cannibalistic in appropriating other people’s material for their own study and interpretation, and they confine their representations to glass box display cases.” (Ames 2014, pp. 3). However, I feel that this does not do complete justice to the role of museums – while museums have played a part in the objectification of Aboriginal culture and history, the museum also holds the place to recognise the historical injustices committed in the name Australian society, with museums potentially “addressing cultural injustices requires a politics of recognition; and addressing political injustices requires a politics of representation” (Power and Taylor 2013, pp. 468) In this essay, looking at these essays, I intend to observe how museums encourage the public to interact with our private pasts – and I intend to observe what narratives museums create, through it’s objects and it’s exhibits; and whether museums are capable of representing post colonial narratives authentically and truthfully.

METHODOLOGY

At first, I did not take active notes of what I had written – I had feared that people may suspect that I was observing them, and because of that, their natural behaviour would change. I was planning on simply using my experiences – as a disabled queer women – as I watched people and interacted with the museum, and transcribing my experiences into thick description as soon as I got home. As noted by someone, the nature of the thick description as when observing museums through the lens of human rights research, “is helpful for countering the legalistic and mechanistic approaches which have predominated in human rights studies, for capturing the complexity of rights talk and processes” (Sandell and Nightingale 2012, pp. 196). This was not to say I did not take notes at all, during the time – I went so far as to take photos of the exhibits and write a few sentences in bullet points, but I made a point as to write more of what I experienced as soon as returned home. More importantly, I went and made an observation on the 21st of November, 2020 – on a Thursday, to be more precise.

FINDINGS: OBSERVATION AT THE MUSEUM

From there, I roamed the Western Australia Museum Boola Bardip and observed not only the exhibits, but also the people and how the museum was built in a way to encourage people to interact with the memories collected in a specific way – the map and the museum workers encouraging me to start from the third floor and descend from there. Since I was there with my mother at the reopening way of the Western Australia museum in 2020, I found the museum a little less lively (through there were still people there to be observed). People were encouraged to be quiet, to not run (any parents there I saw ended up scolding their child when they ended up forgetting that rule), to not touch certain objects - like the jewellery or the statues or pottery in the Ancient Greece special exhibit, versus when one is encouraged to feel a meteorite in the Diamonds to Dinosaurs exhibit.In this case, to walk through a museum to be in the presence of a walk-through memorial – the behaviour expected from museum goers being similar to that of attendants during the ANZAC Dawn Ceremony.

But what’s most fascinating is not necessarily how people were encouraged to behave in a public setting which acts as an eternal memorial, but more of how people are encouraged to use technology to interact with the past – and also to see what histories are being included within the museum. From the very title of the museum Boola Bardip, a term in Noongar meaning ‘many stories’, the museum has gone out of it’s way to include the histories and culture of Indigenous Australians – the museum having it’s own exhibit, Katta Djinoong, which focuses on Indigenous people (more specifically, the Noongar people of Western Australia) pre-colonisation to our present.

Beyond the inclusion of indigenous history, there is also the interesting question of how personal memory becomes public memory – what is considered worthy of remembering and memorialising? Some of the things memorialised in the museum have only happened five or ten years ago – when I attended the museum in 2020 for reopening day, for example and out of recollection, the museum had a temporary exhibit featuring the stories of nurses, doctors and essential workers during the COVID-19 (which featured photographs of my mother, as the disaster coordinator). Beyond that, during my visit on the 21st, there was an aspect of the museum which focused upon immigration – on which we saw the personal belongings of refugees on a boat that came over five years ago, alongside comparisons of anti-immigration refugee from the 19th century to now. The wedding dress of a Balinese woman who immigrated to Australia with her Swiss husband during WWII, the concentration camp uniform of a Polish Jewish refugee, the play items of children from 1910s Australia, the travel ads telling people in Britain to come over to Perth (a sign asking you consider what is the reputation of Western Australia amongst the international community).

And the last interesting aspect of the museum is how the museum positions people to actually interact with memory, not just to observe it – particularly with technology being the way to help pave the space between the present and the past. As seen in the peoples exhibit, for example, there are five long TV screens which show five people across different wars – the mother of a soldier during WWI, a young woman during WWII, a soldier from the Korean War, an Aboriginal soldier from the Vietnam War, and a solider from the Afghanistan War – all interacting with each other, all sitting at a table and in the same room. In front of you is a table with buttons – from there, you control what stories these people tell each other – about communication during the war (where memorably, we go from hearing the weeks-long wait for news from soldiers and how mothers ran from the sight of priests bearing bad news during WWI to hearing how an Afghanistan War veteran heard about the death of his friend from email), about how they were received after the war ended, about how civilians at home coped, and so on.

Some were personal, such as the experiences of how Aboriginal soldiers during discriminated during the Vietnam War, or about how female civilians found work aiding the war during WWII, all were interesting – all were presented in a way that could not have being possible 15 or 20 or 30 years ago. Alongside this, there are many examples of technology used to aid in the education and memorialisation of history. Going into a dark room with aboriginal artwork of lava and magma roaring across all the walls, the ceiling and the floor included, emulating the early days of the world. Animation of an everyday life long abandoned – like parties, like weddings, like war – coming alive on Ancient Greek pottery. A large room filled with stars, where the narration of the Big Bang is intertwined with Aboriginal astronomy and mythology. The ways of technology has expanded our ways of living – so too, it seems, it has expanded our way of remembering.

DISCUSSION

While the Boola Dardip museum has gone out of it’s way to present a history of Australia that traditionally has being excluded from Australian museums (and, by extension, within the mainstream social and legal systems of Australia), the museum as an institution itself could still be considered a source and weapon of trauma for marginalised histories. As discussed by Greenwood and the concept of archival violence, there is still the opportunity for museums to place Indigenous history and culture define by Western standards, where “the return of Aboriginal people’s histories is tied up in systems of recognition that demand discursive displays of evidence” (Greenwood 2018, pp. 595). This is also supported by Kenny, when discussing about the issue of historical amnesia for Aboriginal communities (particularly pertaining to the Yir Yoront) – where “that Aboriginal history can be told, but only in an Aboriginal way” (Kenny 1999, pp. 424).

From this logic, Aboriginal history and memory is viewed through a Western perspective , the museum being responsible for taking Aboriginal memories and trauma and presenting them into a narrative consumable for Western audiences. This, of course, creates the question if museums can play any role in being able to truthfully and authentically depict Indigenous or non-Western histories This difficult question of negating Western and Aboriginal truths within museums and anthropology itself is also discussed by Pilbrow, Pilbrow going on to write how “attempts to reclaim language and cultural practices are a double-edged sword when in confrontation with the state’s narrow and confining conceptualisation of tradition and authenticity” (Pilbrow 2013, pp. 232-233).

However, this is not to discredit the work I saw at the Boola Bardip museum – one thing that probably should be important to note, is that people would not have being encouraged to engage with narratives about Aboriginal history or colonisation ten or fifteen years ago as actively as we do now. Looking at both the academic readings concerning the role of the museums in the creation and maintaining of historical narratives and about the role of museums in colonialism, after going around the Boola Bardip museum, there is a question as to whether museums can present a postcolonial narrative of Australian history – one that acknowledges and includes the culture and history of Aboriginal Australians. As discussed by Knell, he articulates the principles of ‘contemporary museology’ in the face of growing information technologies and ‘borderless worlds’, one of which does not place hierarchies on societies and cultures, and one where museum attendants are encouraged to “look at the world from the position of the citizen rather than through the windows of the institution” (Knell 2020, pp. 154-155). Part of this ethical enquiry, of Knell’s issue to know and remember well, can be presented in what I found at the Boola Bardip museum – the possibility of integrating Aboriginal history and culture into mainstream institutions; something which was also found an article describing the use of Maori culture into the Museum of New Zealand, where the museum had placed emphasis in allowing the Maori people to become more than just subjects for the museum to display, but to also care for the collections and have power over what stories were told by the museum (Henare 2004, pp. 59).

One aspect that I found interesting, with the findings, was also how technology was used to interact with the past – when technology is usually discussed in accordance to museums, its discussed as a distraction, technology as the future that intrudes onto the past. However, an argument can be made for technology actually aides in the education and preservation of memory, noting how technology can be apart of democratising museums and about “collection makes it “the potential for visitors to access more information about the collection makes it possible to produce a deeper and more diverse engagement between visitors and the museum” (Brown and Waterhouse-Watson 2014, pp. 2). To the point wherein, returning to Pilbrow’s article, technology may be the one thing that allows for Aboriginal forms of oral history to be preserved – indeed, around the Boola Bardip, there were videos which had Aboriginal elders discussing about their culture, one example being the Aboriginal perspective of the Broome bombing. Indeed, there may be a way for a museum to be more than just cultures placed under glass boxes – but a place where all truths can be heard.

References

Ames, Michael M. 2014. Cannibal Tours And Glass Boxes. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Blakkisrud, Helge, and Faruh Kuziev. 2019. "Museums, Memory And Meaning‐Creation: (Re)Constructing The Tajik Nation". Nations And Nationalism 25 (3): 997-1017. doi:10.1111/nana.12519.

Brown, Adam, and Deb Waterhouse-Watson. 2014. "The Future Of The Past: Digital Media In Holocaust Museums". Holocaust Studies 20 (3): 1-32. doi:10.1080/17504902.2014.11435374.

Greenwood, Ashley. 2018. "Memory, Forgetting And The Reconciliation Process". History And Anthropology 29 (5): 584-598. doi:10.1080/02757206.2018.1528244.

Henare, Amiria. 2004. "Rewriting The Script: Te Papa Tongarewa The Museum Of New Zealand". Social Analysis 48 (1): 55-63. doi:10.3167/015597704782352762.

Kenny, Michael G. 1999. "A Place For Memory: The Interface Between Individual And Collective History". Comparative Studies In Society And History 41 (03). doi:10.1017/s0010417599002248.

Knell, Simon J. 2020. The Museum's Borders: On The Challenge Of Knowing And Remembering Well. New York: Routledge.

Pilbrow, Tim. 2013. "The Magic Of Narrative In The Employment Of State-Subject Relations: Who's Telling Whose Story In The Native Title Process In Australia?". Oceania 83 (3): 221-237. doi:10.1002/ocea.5022.

Power, Sally, and Chris Taylor. 2013. "Social Justice And Education In The Public And Private Spheres". Oxford Review Of Education 39 (4): 464-479. doi:10.1080/03054985.2013.821854.

Sandell, Richard, and Eithne Nightingale. 2012. Museums, Equality, And Social Justice. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Tota, Anna Lisa. 2004. "Ethnographying Public Memory: The Commemorative Genre For The Victims Of Terrorism In Italy". Qualitative Research 4 (2): 131-159. doi:10.1177/1468794104044429.

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The Right to Believe Against the Right to Exist:The Gender-Critical Movement and their Impact On Trans and Women’s Rights

By Niamh McConnell

In 2019, Maya Forstater had appealed to her employment tribunal about the reasons to why her contract was not renewed by the organization she was employed by; she believed that she was wrongfully terminated for saying that ‘sex was real’; essentially, to read in-between-the-lines, that trans women were not women but were actually men (and vice-versa), and because sex was immutable, she had the right to misgender trans people within her workplace. A belief that the ERHC found to be ‘absolutist’ and created a hostile environment for trans employees within the workplace, saying that her beliefs were ‘unfit for a democratic society’ (Bowcott, 2019). A belief, which since the early 2010s within the UK, has being the tenet to a rising social movement known either as trans exclusionary/exterminatory radical feminism (TERF) or as the gender-critical movement. The gender-critical movement has gained a powerful foothold within the socio-political landscapes of both the UK and the USA; within 2021 alone, for example, over 117 bills which restrict the rights of trans people to access healthcare or access public spaces have being introduced within the US (Krishnakumar, 2021). But in using the Maya Forstater tribunal as a principal case study alongside the reactions towards the Maya Forstater tribunal (i.e J.K Rowling’s essay in response, social media made by the gender-critical movement), I intend on investigating how the gender-critical movement has grown and how it has impacted both cis women and trans women within the UK.

While there are many figures and organisations to use as a case study to investigate gender-critical movement, J.K Rowling being a particularly famous case with an essay she posted stating her beliefs around trans women and men in 2020 (whose quotes will be used within this essay alongside Forstater’s), what made her famous as a member of the gender-critical movement was when she tweeted in support of the Maya Forstater case, directly saying ‘dress however you please; call yourself whatever you like; sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you; live your best life in peace and security; but force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill ’ (Rowling, 2019), and by extension, elevating the public view of the gender-critical movement into the mainstream. Going exactly into the nature of the Maya Forstater case, in 2019, Maya Forstater’s contact with an organisation was not renewed due to behaviour which had made her co-workers uncomfortable and was found to be hateful and discriminatory and was followed up by action with her contractor (Bowcott, 2019), sending out transphobic tweets and setting up a private channel discussing about issues she had with potential reformation of the Gender Recognition Act to allow self-determination of gender (UK Employment Tribunal, 2020, pp. 7).

As explained by the government article which details Maya Forstater’s tribunal, Maya Forstater was considered to be adamant and ‘absolutist in her view of sex and it is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment’ (UK Employment Tribunal, 2020, pp. 25), and while the tribunal noted that Forstater had the right to have gender-critical beliefs (to believe that trans women are men), those beliefs did not guarantee that she can violate the rights of those protected under the Equality Act (UK Employment Tribunal, 2020, pp. 25). Many other British media sources also took to the stance of supporting J.K Rowling and spreading misinformation about what the Maya Forstater case was truly about, stating how Maya Forstater’s loss was a major impact against women’s rights in the UK, with sources such as the Daily Mail or the Mirror framing the case as Maya Forstater being unfairly fired for stating that ‘sex is real’ and that it infringes on her right to freedom of speech (Barrett, 2019); conveniently, such sources also ignored Maya Forstater’s discriminatory treatment towards transgender people and how this ‘sex is real’ argument was being used to justify misgendering and dead-naming of trans people.

Now, it is important to put the Maya Forstater case in the context of the gender-critical movement and their beliefs – while Maya Forstater is one of the most famous examples of the gender-critical movement within the media (majorly due to J.K Rowling coming out in support of Forstater), Forstater’s case merely illustrates the larger trend of transphobic beliefs and actions behind the gender-critical movement. As pointed out by Hines, the majority of the gender-critical movement does not just believe that trans women are not women, but that they’re perpetrating ‘gender fraud’ and that their very presence within female spaces is a danger to women, this ‘invasion of space’ being considered practically equal to rape to the gender-critical movement (Hines, 2017, pp. 152) – a belief that Forstater has expressed in her tweets and within the tribunal as to why trans women should not access women’s spaces, to the point where Forstater has stated that merely addressing a trans women by female pronouns is equal to being drugged with rohypnol (UK Employment Tribunal, 2020, pp. 9). This belief around trans women being men in dresses (or, if they are generous, that trans women are trans women but not belonging to women entirely) comes from the belief that while gender identity may be flexible and fluid, sex is not so much assigned but rather observed – in other words, it is immutable and the basis of womanhood and manhood (Pearce et al, 2020, pp. 679). By that extension, in the eyes of the gender-critical movement, to say that trans women exist and that sex is mutable and exists beyond a binary is to essentially deny the reality of sex, and by extension, deny the reality of sexism and place women’s rights in danger (Rowling, 2020); despite the fact that UK law does not independently define ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ with regards to women’s rights at this present moment (Pearce et al, 2020, pp. 680).

While the gender-critical movement saw a major rise of action and support when there were proposals to the Gender Recognition Act which would allow trans people to change their birth certificate through self-determination as seen with Forstater (UK Employment Tribunal, 2020, pp. 7; Pearce et al, 2020, pp. 678), exclusion of trans women by the gender-critical movement truly began in the 1970s and 1980s of the second-wave feminist movement. As pointed out by Hines, with regards to the nature of the female body in second-wave feminist movement, “the insistence that one must have a female body to be a feminist was employed to dispute the position of cis men within feminism, more recently it has been used to question the place of trans people, and especially trans women, within feminist communities” (Hines, 2017, pp. 148) – to what extent does biology determine gender and sex (and whether womanhood can be defined and shaped not by biology, but by sociology and culture) has always being of serious debate within the feminist movement and within academia (Pearce et al, 2020, pp. 683). Objections to trans women being accepted into women’s spaces and being accepted as women have being a major factor, as reported by the New York Times, while may have started within a paranoid faction of radical feminism in 1970s America, the roots of the gender-critical movement truly took root in the UK around the 1980s where UK lesbian separatists found themselves ‘resisting’ against ‘patriarchal sciences’ such as nuclear warfare, test-tube babies and male-to-female gender confirmation surgery (Lewis, 2019) – essentially trying to protect the ‘natural’ from being harmed (as will be discussed below).

One major methodology to use when investigating the Maya Forstater case and the beliefs and actions of the gender-critical movement is intersectionality – or, in the case of Maya Forstater and the gender-critical movement have pointed out, how they reject intersectionality. As pointed out by Pearce, Eriksainen and Vincent in an article, the concept of ‘valid’ or ‘natal’ womanhood for the gender-critical movement is based upon racist, colonial and heteronormative ideas – transgender women being an aberration against those ideals that womanhood (Pearce et al, 2020, pp. 687). As expanded upon by Williams, when it goes on to explain how the gender-critical movement is built upon ideals of ‘God-given’ or ‘authentic’ femininity with transgender women viewed as ‘unnatural’ and ‘monstrous’ and therefore worthy of ‘mandating out of existence’ as famously said by Janice Raymond (Williams, 2020, pp. 723-721); even through there was a point where lesbians, by the same rhetoric used by the gender-critical movement to dehumanise trans women, were argued not to be ‘real women’ by the mainstream feminist movement in the 1970s and were cast out as a ‘lavender menace’ (Williams, 2020, pp. 718-719). This rhetoric, even when used against trans women today, still has an real-life effect on gender-nonconforming women and butch lesbians today when they try to access women’s spaces, where they have being physically attacked in bathrooms due to being mistaken for being trans women (Frostenson and Crockett, 2016).

Looking at the gender-critical movement at an intersectional perspective, as noted in a latter article in 2020, basing the assumption that oppression of women is purely focused on their bodies or sex assumes that all cis women face oppression in the exact same way – something which intersectionality fights against, fighting against a narrow version of womanhood that uplifts cisgender/white/straight/middle-class women and their experiences to be universal, while silencing and excluding other versions of womanhood that contradict the idea of ‘universal womanhood’ – with black women and trans women as examples (Hines, 2020, pp. 708). Adding onto this, Koyama adds to the discussion by directing how assuming sex is to the most severe form of oppression ignores the other aspects to marginalisation that women face such as racism, to the point where the concerns of women of colour about exclusion and racism in the feminist movement was dismissed as men trying to create division within the feminist movement (Koyama, 2020, pp. 738-739). And with regards to how the gender-critical movement intersects with racism and imperialism, as deconstructed by Hines, to define women and men by their biology (and by extension, their rights and who can access those rights) is to return to the Western belief that ‘biology is destiny’ which excluded indigenous and non-western expressions of gender/sex (Hines, 2020, pp. 701), with Irish feminists having refused to ally with the British gender-critical movement because of their own direct experiences of colonialism (Lewis, 2019).

Finally, after investigating the beliefs of the Maya Forstater case and by deconstructing the discourse that underlies the gender-critical movement, it would be remiss to not write about how both have a major real-life effect on trans people. Janice Raymond, who famously wrote of morally mandating trans people out of existence in the 1970s, was someone who ended up writing a report for the National Center for Health Care Technology that majorly restricted trans people’s ability to access private and public healthcare in the 1980s US (Williams, 20 ). With regards to healthcare now in the UK, it has came to the point where a case known as the Tavistock vs. Bell limited healthcare to trans people under the age of 16 as so to where they could not gain puberty-blockers (Gessen, 2021) and where Liz Truss (the UK Minister for Women and Equalities) has said that she wanted to ensure ‘protections for single-sex spaces’ and that people under the age of 18 were to be protected “protected from decisions that they could make that are irreversible in the future” (Truss, 2020) – echoing the beliefs about ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria’ and ‘men in dresses preying on women in bathrooms’ stated by J.K Rowling and Forstater (UK Employment Tribunal, 2019; Rowling, 2020).

According to the IGLA-Europe, anti-trans bias within the media has increased by - with the IGLA directly attributing this rise of violence and prejudice to J.K Rowling and how her public platform has allowed gender-critical views to become mainstream (IGLA-Europe, 2021, pp. 119); directly to the point where J.K Rowling’s words on transgender people was directly used by a Republican senator to vote against the Equality Act which was made to guarantee nation-wide legal protections for LGBT+ people (Fitzsimons, 2020). And adding onto this, as described through statistics gathered by the national LGBT+ organisation Stonewall, transphobic harassment has to the point where two out of five trans people have experienced a hate crime (Stonewall, 2018, pp. 6). And as consequence to this rise of transphobia and as the gender-critical movement gains more power and mainstream attention, it has gotten to the point where a trans woman was able to successfully seek asylum ‘on extreme humanitarian ground’ to New Zealand, due to years of persecution on the basis of being transgender while living in the UK (Roy, 2017).

Bringing this essay to a conclusion, the gender-critical movement poses not only a serious danger to the rights of the trans community, but also a serious danger to the rights of all women within the UK. With their rhetoric of ‘protecting women’ being based around protecting people and ideals that only benefit cisgender straight middle-class white women, we also see how their cries for ‘sex-based rights’ could do the opposite of ‘protecting women’ but at undoing decades of legal and social work that feminists fought for; how they have forgotten (wilfully or innocently) how feminists have fought for women not be purely defined by their bodies or by their sex, in the way that men and patriarchy had defined them and continues to do so. But while the gender-critical movement does pose a major risk to cis women, it should not be forgotten that the community that has being majorly impacted by the gender-critical community is trans women. And as seen by the increase of transphobic harassment and violence, by the increasing bias against trans people within the UK media and as seen with the Maya Forstater case, with growing legal challenges against protections of trans people such as the Gender Recognition Act, it is the gender-critical movement that are the ones that truly threaten to take away the human rights of those marginalised in the name of protecting their own rights – and by that extension, protecting the systems of patriarchy that they claim to fight against.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Frostenson, S., & Crockett, Z. (2016). It’s not just transgender people: public restrooms have bred fear for centuries. Vox. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/2016/5/27/11792550/transgender-bathroom

Gessen, M. (2021). We Need to Change the Terms of the Debate on Trans Kids. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/we-need-to-change-the-terms-of-the-debate-on-trans-kids

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Williams, C. (2014). Fact checking Janice Raymond: The NCHCT report [Blog]. Retrieved from https://www.transadvocate.com/fact-checking-janice-raymond-the-nchct-report_n_14554.htm

Williams, C. (2020). The ontological woman: A history of deauthentication, dehumanization, and violence. The Sociological Review, 68(4), 718-734. doi: 10.1177/0038026120938292

Woodcock, A. (2020). LGBT+ campaigners concerned over government plan to protect under-18s from 'irreversible' gender decisions. The Independent. Retrieved from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/lgbt-gender-government-liz-truss-transgender-rights-consultation-a9478901.html

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Keep Them Behind the Wall: Biopower, Statelessness and the Politics of Fear of Migrants in America

In the election of the Trump Administration from 2017 to present-day, the rise of Donald Trump to presidential office has being related to the rise of racism and xenophobia against immigrants coming to America – more particularly, xenophobia against South Americans coming into America as migrants seeking asylum and American citizenship. However, since the creation of the 2018 policy to separate migrant children from their parents on the basis that all migrants attempting to cross the border are criminals, these policies have accompanied reported abuses of human rights and multiple deaths – some of those reported deaths being young children – within mass detention centres created to hold these migrants and their families; arguably exercising what Agamben coined the state of exception, where Foucault’s ideas of biopolitics has being taken to its absolute extremes. Going into the treatment of migrants by the US administration under the justification of national law and of protecting the border (and by extension, the nation and its people), this research essay hopes to apply the concepts of biopolitics and the state of exception, to argue how migrants have being reduced to the condition of ‘bare-lives’ and ‘homo sacers’ under the US government and how this maintaining of the homo sacer status is justified through underlying fears concerning security and nationality.

Before we can apply and analyse Foucault and Agamben’s theories to the situation of growing xenophobia against migrants, background must be given about international laws concerning immigration and also the reported treatment of migrants under the Trump administration. In an academic article that goes into detail about international human rights law, Mousin discusses how the United States accepted the Refugee Convention of 1951, which was created in response to those that tried to flee from the Nazis, convention that was based on the principle that ‘persecuted persons or those fearing persecution should be permitted to request asylum at another nation’s borders without fear of immediate return to danger’ (Mousin, 2018, pp. 59). This is also collaborated by the Declaration of Human Rights, which specifies in Article 14 and Article 13, that one has the right to freely leave their country and everyone has the right to seek asylum from persecution within another (United Nations, 1948, pp. 28-30). These principles all resulted within the US Refugee Act of 1980, which was created to negate the issues of border security, saying that anyone may apply for asylum regardless to their legal status and whether or not they claim asylum at a designated port of entry (Mousin, 2018, pp. 59).

However, the US Refugee Act of 1980 was killed by the Trump Administration when they created a ‘zero tolerance’ policy where all migrants – even those that are seeking asylum –  were to be prosecuted as criminals for crossing the border and by extension, those prosecuted were to be separated from their children due to the fact that children cannot be allowed in criminal jails (Horwitz and Sacchetti, 2018). This created the family separation policy, first starting in 2017, where thousands of children were taken away from their parents with the strong possibility that the child would never be reunited with their parents – the separation of the children potentially being a part of a deterrence policy to discourage migrants from coming to the US (Hirschfeld-Davis and Shear, 2018; Dickerson, 2018). This separation of families is just an example upon many of reported abuses within the US immigration system, the American Civil Law Union (ACLU) reporting atrocious conditions that have led to hunger strikes (and in return, forced feedings) and resulting stillbirths and miscarriages (López, 2018).

This has been collaborated with extensive reports from the Human Rights Watch organization about the treatment of migrants within US detention centres. Bochenek writes about women and children (some being unaccompanied children) being held in overcrowded, frigid cells deemed ‘iceboxes’, forced to sleep on concrete floors, with no possibility to clean themselves and with strong pressure from detention officials to stop their claims of asylum and allow themselves to be deported (Bochenek, 2018, pp. 7-31). Meanwhile, Long goes into the poor-to-non-existent medical treatment of detained migrants that has led to the deaths of 12 migrants under the Trump Administration (from 2017 to 2018); with strong evidence that these deaths were preventable and related to unreasonable delays in providing medical care, poor nursing care and ill-equipped emergency response (Long, 2018, pp. 39-54). As of the time of this essay (June, 2019), over six migrant children have reported to have died within US custody with little possibility that those overseeing the children will be held to legal consequences – the youngest being Jakelin Caal Maquín, who was only 7 years old at the time of her death (Hennessy-Fiske, 2019). As strongly noted by the American Civil Law Union, ‘the administration’s intent is clear: strip away the humanity and dignity of immigrants through hostile, anti-immigrant policies, like family separation and zero tolerance’(López, 2018) Like the family separation policy, these deaths and mistreatment appear to be deliberate, these abuses weaponised by the US government with no consequences foreseeable in the present future.

This leads to needed questions: why does the US want to deter migrants? Why is protecting ‘the border’ so important? What control does the US have over migrants and what is the ideologies underpinning the detention centres and the relating abuses prevalent within the detention centres? This leads to the central concepts of biopolitics. Biopolitics, being defined by Genel who is informed by Foucauldian theory, saying that it ‘focuses on collective phenomena that have long-term political effects and strives to regulate them’ (Genel, 2006, pp. 46) – in the context of the migrants, biopolitics is about trying to regulate the phenomena of individuals leaving one nation for another – a phenomena that definitely has long-term political effects. It’s within Hannah Arendt’s famous 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism that we see a description of this attempt to regulate these collective phenomena, where Arendt talks about the ‘stateless’ in the context of those fleeing their countries during WWII; how the legal systems that were in power during WWII found that ‘that only nationals could be citizens, only people of the same national origin could enjoy the full protection of legal institutions, that persons of different nationality needed some law of exception until or unless they were completely assimilated and divorced from their origin.’ (Arendt, 1951, pp. 275). This need for law of exception could be considered an early description of what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘the state of exception’, which Zannettino provides a description, where ‘temporary suspension of the juridical-political order becomes a new and longer-lasting spatial arrangement inhabited by the bare-life that can no longer be inscribed in that order – the camp thus becomes the permanent space of exception and disjuncture between birth (bare-life) and the nation state.’ (Zannettino, 2012, pp. 1110)

Salter makes a compelling argument to the idea that the border acts as an example of the permanent state of exception that Agamben and Zannettino disccuss about, arguing how ‘in the border interrogation, what is a natural right – mobility – is presented as deviant, as abnormal, as requiring explanation; what is invented – state sovereignty – becomes unquestionable; the right of mobility of is always mediated through the intentions of the traveler, discretion, and the nation’ (Salter, 2008, pp. 373). By the fact that the natural right to mobility is criminalized that was supposed to be protected by international human rights law (UN, General Assembly, pp. 28-30) as displayed within the ‘zero tolerance’ policies created by the Trump Administration (Horowitz and Sachetti, 2018), these ‘zero tolerance policies’ creates the biopolitical state of ‘bare-life’, to that law of exception that Arendt taks about in the past section. There, Zannettino noted that where the border acts as a state of exception, ‘the detained refugee is homo sacer in that she/he is all at once naked of the legal and civil rights of the state in which she/he has sought refuge yet is simultaneously subject to the power and control of that state, which can ‘legally’ do whatever it wants with her/him’ (Zannettino, 2008, pp. 1099). In the context of migrants within US detention centres, migrants are forced to become subject under US law, without any of the protections that are granted to those deemed as nationals or citizens to the US.

However, it should be noted for a permanent state of exception to be maintained, there needs to be a justification for the suspension of law to protect those individuals that become subject to the state of exception. This justification for the state of exception is explored within Perera’s 2009 book Australia and the Insular Imagination: Beaches, Borders, Boats, and Bodies where she talks about how the concept of a homeland was constructed as birthright to the land that became the ‘nativized essence of the people’ and how this creates the paradox of both foreignness and ownership, Perera writing how ‘as homeland security dictates the continual redrawing of boundaries within the body of the nation, it explodes that self-same sense of a territorially based and securely bounded, whole, deep-rooted, and thickly interconnected nation founded on “birthright” that the term homeland is meant to invoke’ (Perera, 2009, pp. 147-149). This desire to establish and protect the rights of the nation, even above the protection of human rights, is also discussed by Hannah Arendt, Arendt noting how people believed that ‘true freedom, true emancipation, and true popular sovereignty could be attained only with full national emancipation, that people without their own national government were deprived of human rights’ (Arendt, 1951, pp. 272).

It’s with this context, that the existence of migrants crossing the border could be constructed as a narrative over attack of one’s birthright and needed border protection, where deterrence – even at the suspicion of law and the abuse, and even deaths of human lives – is required to protect the nation-state. An idea expanded upon by Pickering where he discusses and analyses the discourses of border terror, there he noted that the events of 9/11 illustrated the United States vulnerability to the world outside its borders, writing that ‘as the refugee had threatened the integrity of the territorial nation state, the terrorist threat exacerbated existing fears of the inviolability of the nation.’ (Pickering, 2008, pp. 2004). This narrative of the refugee/migrant as the criminal is also supported by Guia, Koulish and Mitsilegas, where they argued that the arrest of migrants for even ordinary crimes was assumed upon the ‘noncitizen presumption of dangerousness’, where mandatory detention becomes a necessary thing to protect American lives from people who are considered dangerous simply on the basis of having crossed the border illegally (Guia, Koulish and Mitsilegeas, 2016, pp. 230-233).

In conclusion, we can see how the reduction of migrants to the state of homo sacers – resulting the separation of families, rampant abuse within detention centres and resulting deaths of refugees with no possibility for accountability – is linked to the underlying belief of protecting the nation, of an ‘us vs. them’ narrative that was strong enough to create a permanent state of exception. Perera makes the argument that the ‘the very urgency of securing the home-land throws the sense of being at home, of possessing a “birthright,” of entitlement, into crisis by revealing the deep fissures that constitute the homeland: the homeland as such is a construct that generates racial terror’ (Perera, 2009, pp. ). It’s this racial terror – the idea of losing one’s nation to another – that is at the heart of the furthering abuses of migrants within the US; and may even find itself closer to home.

References

Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism (3rd ed., pp. 265-290). Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Bochenek, M. (2018). In the Freezer: Abusive Conditions for Women and Children in US Immigration Holding Cells (pp. 7-31). New York: Human Rights Watch.

Dickerson, C. (2018). Hundreds of Immigrant Children Have Been Taken From Parents at U.S. Border. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/20/us/immigrant-children-separation-ice.html

Genel, K. (2006). The Question of Biopower: Foucault and Agamben. Rethinking Marxism, 18(1), 43-62. doi: 10.1080/08935690500410635

Guia, M., Koulish, R., & Mitsilegas, V. (2016). Immigration Detention, Risk and Human Rights: Studies on Immigration and Crime (1st ed., pp. 199-224, 215-249). London: Springer.

Hennessy-Fiske, M. (2019). Six migrant children have died in U.S. custody. Here’s what we know about them. The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-migrant-child-border-deaths-20190524-story.html

Hirschfeld Davis, J., & Shear, M. (2018). How Trump Came to Enforce a Practice of Separating Migrant Families. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/16/us/politics/family-separation-trump.html

Horwitz, S., & Sacchetti, M. (2018). Sessions vows to prosecute all illegal border crossers and separate children from their parents. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessions-says-justice-dept-will-prosecute-every-person-who-crosses-border-unlawfully/2018/05/07/e1312b7e-5216-11e8-9c91-7dab596e8252_story.html?utm_term=.5f105ae312b5

Long, C. (2018). Code Red: The Fatal Consequences of Dangerously Substandard Medical Care in Immigration Detention (pp. 39-54). New York City: Human Rights Watch.

López, V. (2019). Rampant Abuses in Immigration Detention Prove ICE Is Rotten to the Core. Retrieved from https://www.aclu.org/blog/prisoners-rights/rampant-abuses-immigration-detention-prove-ice-rotten-core

Mousin, C. (2019). Rights Disappear When US Policy Engages Children as Weapons of Deterrence. American Medical Association Journal Of Ethics, 21(1), 58-66. doi: 10.1001/amajethics.2019.58

Perera, S. (2009). Australia and the Insular Imagination: Beaches, Borders, Boats, and Bodies (pp. 137-160). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Pickering, S. (2004). Border terror: policing, forced migration and terrorism. Global Change, Peace & Security, 16(3), 211-226. doi: 10.1080/0951274042000263753

Salter, M. (2008). When the exception becomes the rule: borders, sovereignty, and citizenship. Citizenship Studies, 12(4), 365-380. doi: 10.1080/13621020802184234

United Nations General Assembly. (1948). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (pp. 28-30). Paris: United Nations. Retrieved from https://www.un.org/en/udhrbook/pdf/udhr_booklet_en_web.pdf

Zannettino, L. (2012). From Auschwitz to mandatory detention: biopolitics, race, and human rights in the Australian refugee camp. The International Journal Of Human Rights, 16(7), 1094-1119. doi: 10.1080/13642987.2012.664136

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A Critical Reflection on Terror and the Everyday (in the Form of a Letter)

Dear Dr. Briggs,

In April of 2019, during the reporting of a riot that broke out in Derry, Lyra McKee – an Irish journalist and novelist who covered the legacy and consequences of the Troubles in her work – was fatally shot by a group called the “New IRA”; the first journalist killed in the UK in nineteen years after the murder of Irish journalist Martin O’Hagan whom also covered the political violence that ran rampant in Ireland. A young woman and civilian killed roughly twenty years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, that placed an end to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. A peace agreement that is as old as I – and an agreement that is now coming into question with the resurrection of political violence within Northern Ireland and the possibility of the resurrection of Checkpoint Charlie within Ireland after Brexit. Even an entire world away, living as a Literary & Cultural Studies student (minoring in Human Rights and Creative Writing), it’s Lyra McKee’s death that is the first thing that comes to mind when being asked to reflect an important questions for this assignment: How can the academic study of terror and the everyday inform your understanding of the relations between media, terror and political power? Other students, perhaps cleverer students with better executive functioning skills (a deep apology to my long-suffering tutor, Professor Briggs), would focus on how the media presents terrorism within the context of conflict within the Middle East, of our relationship with media and the government with concern to the portrayal of radical Islamic terrorism. However, to you, Dr. Briggs, I would like to present a different subject to help answer a needed question: how can we answer the question posed, of ‘how can the academic study of terror and the everyday inform your understanding of the relations between media, terror and political power’, through the applying this question to the Troubles and its legacy in 2019 within Ireland?

Before we can look at the benefits of applying academic knowledge to terror and political power, we should understand the Troubles itself. The Troubles was a period of ethno-nationalist conflict within Northern Ireland that extended itself over thirty years and had killed over 3,500 and injured over range of 40,000-100,000 people – eighty percent of the Irish population knowing someone who was killed or injured because of the Troubles (Lynch and Joyce, 2017, pp. 184). Starting with a campaign to end discrimination against Irish Catholics within multiple places such as housing/voting/employment that later escalated to an anti-imperialist campaign to have Ireland gain sovereignty away from the United Kingdom, the Troubles escalated into a thirty-year-old civil war between the people of Ireland, carried out by paramilitary forces and most predominantly, the British government (Dorney, 2015). Coming into this class, I came in as someone who immigrated from Northern Ireland over nearly twenty-years ago – but still felt the ramifications of the Troubles, seeing my father grew up on Falls Road (the epicentre of the Troubles and of violence between Protestants and Catholics), my paternal grandfather was a member of the British Royal Forces that worked against a famous riot in 1968 and ended up converting from Protestantism to Catholicism to marry my grandmother and both my mother and father were medical professionals – my mother being an ER nurse practitioner and my father a paramedic – who saw first-hand the deadly aftermath of violence on Belfast’s streets. It’s their stories passed onto me that have framed my understanding of the event and by extension, of terrorism overall before coming into this class.

The biggest thing we can gain understanding from the Troubles is the idea of the state of exception, an idea that is described within Giorgio’s Agamben’s 2005 book State of Exception, saying that it is ‘the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system’(Agamben and Attwell, 2005, pp. 2). This idea particularly is expanded upon and also described within Christina Lee’s book Spectral Spaces and Hauntings: The Affects of Absences,within the context of the disappeared within Argentina’s Dirty War – a context that could also apply to the Disappeared within Northern Ireland. There, she describes how governments within the state of exception take the role of magic tricksters towards the people they subjugate, how ‘normal (cognitive) operations are held in abeyance and the extraordinary is allowed to happen’ (Lee, 2017, pp. 183). As she goes on to talk about how the state of exception was used to justify the forced disappearances of those who may threaten the Argentinian government, she notes how this disappearance requires both the act of seeing and not-seeing (Lee, 2017, pp. 182); one idea that I think I’ve learned with cocerns to our understanding of terror, how terrorism requires a witness, but one willing to claim that they saw nothing so that life and society can go on as normal (without being held to questioning of how these terrorist acts are different from each other, as this very unit is all about).

Looking back of one of the purposes of the text, we can understand that Agamben’s State of Exceptionwas written to critique America’s creation of the Patriot Act; a policy that in the aftermath of the terrorist acts of 9/11 which lead to massive loss of life, allowed the American government to take people who are considered to be threats towards American security under custody and to be removed from the law and any attached protections to prevent human rights abuses, ‘radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally un-nameable and unclassifiable being’(Agamben and Attwell, 2005, pp. 4) – all in the narrative of protecting the American people from an outsider. The same dynamic, of how terror can be weaponised by governments and the media, are also backed up and discussed by Lynch and Joyce’s academic article about the usage of collective victimhood within the political discourse of the Troubles: how a state of exception was established through a historical narrative provided by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), about how the Irish Catholic population were ‘victims of injustice’ that had to be protected from British rule (Lynch and Joyce, pp. 188-189). Another text accomadiates how the state of exception was used within the Troubles, Punch noting that ‘some of the key actors in Northern Ireland appeared to be conveying the message, ‘the situation here was exceptional, so you can’t judge us on outside standards, youhave to make allowances’  (Punch, 2012, pp. 181).

’

So, as I established to you, Dr. Briggs, how the Troubles could be considered an exercise of the state of exception, how we can apply political power’s usage of terror in the justification of the removal of political and human rights. Another major concept that Terror and the Everyday explored was how colonialism is another form of terror, but more legally and cultural sanctioned and one that can be expanded beyond a single event and has a decades-long legacy. This, however, means buying into the narrative that Lynch and Joyce talk about (and more particularly, buying into how my parents and extended family have talked about the conflict) – how the violence that the PIRA committed on the British government (and by extension, the violence that was inflicted on innocent civilians) was justified as an anti-colonialist/anti-imperialist rebellion. Most of my understandings of colonialism relates to the colonialization of Australia and the attached oppression of Indigenous Australians – a topic is more applicable to the readings. But, let’s decide that the narrative of Irish Catholics being victims of injustice is correct – does British occupation of Northern Ireland (as seen by the fact that Northern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom and as seen on the news, will be effected by Brexit) count as colonialism and how does terror become a weapon within colonialization?

For me, Dr. Briggs, based on my knowledge of Irish history, there definitely appears to be a colonialist/imperialist force that exists within Ireland – and which legacy, one could argue, could still be present within 2019. One of the few variables that makes this different from colonialization of Indigenous Australians, is that colonialization/imperialization happens on the basis of culture, not race – seeing that both Ireland and Britain can be considered a part of the West. However, there was a reading which caught my eye and one I feel applies to both the British occupation of Ireland and the British occupation of Indigenous Australian land. Williams and Chrisman go on to talk extensively about how one purpose of colonialization is to divorce the native population from their culture, to place it under a hegemony where the colonializing culture reigns on top, noting ‘A national culture under colonial domination is a contested culture whose destruction is sought in systematic fashion. It very quickly becomes a culture condemned to secrecy’ (Williams and Chrisman, pp. 46). This… definitely feels relevant for me, one particularly strong example being the very language I know – or don’t know: Irish Gaelic. The British government had made the learning and speaking of Irish Gaelic illegal due to the fact that it had ‘potency as the pre-eminent symbol of Irish national identity’ (Mac Giolla Chríost, 2017, pp. 413) – making the resurrection of a national culture independent of England to be a sign of rebellion against their masters, as William and Chrisman discuss.

Restricting one’s knowledge of their culture and of their national identity is something that Reddy and Kohn also talk about, noting how a major aspect of Orientalism was the regulation of what people knew about the ‘Orient’, relying on Foucault’s ideas of how knowledge is another form of power (Kohn and Reddy, 2017). However, as pointed out within the famous essay by Spivak called The Subaltern Speaks, how knowledge and representation is circulated (is a different story of perspectives, Spivak arguing that ‘post-colonial critics must learn not to seek for the subaltern’s voice but point to the silence’ (Childs and Williams, 1997, pp. 163-164) – in other words, Spivak’s essay argues against the post-colonial narrative of the Troubles as a reaction against British cruelty that Lynch and Joyce investigates and studies, instead asking us to look for the silence between two narratives crafted by the Troubles, where it is either defined as  ‘war’ as used by the Republicans, to define the Troubles as a guerrilla war to liberate Ireland, to bring Ireland and Britain as equals, or ‘terrorism’, used by the British government and Unionists, to place Britain as peacekeepers (Dorney, 2015). There comes another ultimate understanding of terror: how political power can become so powerful, that it has the power to restrict and create new narratives to justify its power and the terror that is used to keep that power.

Yours sincerely and faithfully and kindly,

Niamh M. McConnell

References

Agamben, G., & Kevin, A. (2005). State of Exception (pp. 1-31). Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Childs, P., & Williams, P. (1997). An introduction to post-colonial theory (1st ed., pp. 157-178). London: Routledge.

Dorney, J. (2015). The Northern Ireland Conflict 1968-1998 – An Overview. Retrieved from http://www.theirishstory.com/2015/02/09/the-northern-ireland-conflict-1968-1998-an-overview/#.XPUuVNMzaL8

Kohn, M., & Reddy, K. (2017). Colonialism. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition). Palo Alto: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

Lee, C. (2017). Spectral Spaces and Hauntings: The Affects of Absence (pp. 182-194). Basingstoke: Taylor & Francis Ltd.

Lynch, O., & Joyce, C. (2018). Functions of collective victimhood. International Review Of Victimology, 24(2), 183-197. doi: 10.1177/0269758018758396

Mac Giolla Chríost, D. (2012). A question of national identity or minority rights? The changing status of the Irish language in Ireland since 1922. Nations And Nationalism, 18(3), 398-416. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-8129.2011.00508.x

Punch, M. (2012). State Violence, Collusion and the Troubles: Counter Insurgency, Government Deviance and Northern Ireland (pp. 26-53, 197-225). New York City: Pluto Press.

Williams, P., & Chrisman, L. (1994). Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (pp. 36-52). Cambridge: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

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To Love is to be Ethical: Moonlight, Beloved and the Denial of Embodied Experiences as Denial of Humanity

With thirty years that separates the two from each other’s premieres, with 142 years that creates the space between 1874 and 2016 from where their texts are set, the texts of Beloved and Moonlight are renown for illuminating African-American life to mainstream society. Beloved, published in 1987, is a ghost story that explores the intergenerational trauma of slavery in America and the possibility of recovery and life after such trauma. Moonlight, screened in 2016, is a realist coming-of-age film for a young man coming to terms with his sense of identity under the pressure of toxic masculinity and homophobia in modern-day Miami. With the space of time and the difference of protagonists with Sethe and Chiron, there is two connections between the two texts. The exploration of African-American experiences in America – from the aftermath of the Civil War and the 13thamendment to the poverty-stricken neighbourhoods of Miami (with such poverty an intergenerational result of slavery). The exploration of the embodied experiences of suffering and love – how both U.S slavery and modern-day toxic masculinity end up denying these embodied experiences, and in doing so, end up denying the humanity of characters such as Sethe, Chiron and Paul D. The last subject – the denial of embodied experiences as denial of human rights

To understand the mechanisms of denial of embodied experiences in Beloved and Moonlight, we need to define embodied experiences and their relationship with human rights. Within the praxis of human rights, the prevention of suffering is considered to be an important factor to the construction of international human rights law. More particularly, one of the most renown human rights instruments – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – was drafted and created in 1948, in response to the atrocities committed in World War Two i.e. the Holocaust, the Hiroshima bombing, Nanjing Massacre and so on (all, which you may notice, was institutionally and governmentally sanctioned). And perhaps, arguably, the creation of international humans’ rights laws and instruments could be a response to the concept of ‘a bare life’. The philosophy of a ‘bare life’ came from the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, which focused on biopolitics (i.e. the politics of the body), where a bare life is defined as the life of an individual that is restricted to the sheer biological fact of living (eating, drinking, surviving) to where the quality of the life – the act of living, beyond just surviving, of existing politically and socially -  is not considered (Buchanan, 2010, pp. 41).

The denial that the characters of Beloved and Moonlight are capable of suffering, is shown to be a denial of human rights. In the historical context of American slavery before the 13th amendment in 1868, slavery denies the subjects underneath this institution their own personhood, only allowing a paradox to occur; for slaves to be considered people to face legal consequences but considered property and, therefore, without protection from the law that demands that they be held to be consequence. This is shown in Belovedin multiple instances when Sethe and Baby Suggs recount their experiences before they escaped their owners; when Sethe and her lover are not able to legally marry, when Baby Suggs has multiple of her children taken away from her, when Paul D is put into a chain-gang. Slavery reduces them from people capable of loving and suffering to merely bodies that act in servitude to white men; Allain writing how slave-owners theorised that slavery was the natural condition of African-Americans on the basis of their skin colour, in order to justify slavery (Allain, 2012, pp. 131).  Crossing over generations and centuries later, one could make the argument that the legacy of slavery also lives on within the neighbourhoods of Miami, which is the setting of the 2016 film Moonlight. Centralizing around the protagonist of Chiron (who is addressed across different stages of his life; Little as a child, Black as an adult and Chiron only as a teenager), the audience is witness to Chiron’s life in Miami. More particularly, the situation of trying to survive where his mother neglects him (on the basis of her drug addiction), living him to fend for himself in poverty and also being the subject of intense bullying (mostly due to homophobia).

A massive aspect that links the denial of suffering is how their suffering is ignored or delegitimized – both of which are aspects to the trauma of slavery and of toxic masculinity. In the book Narrating Violence, Chandra talks about how the taking of Sethe’s milk by the schoolteachers men, after Sethe attempted to run away, is unique in degrading her from her humanity: “this act is, therefore, set apart from the more familiar physical or sexual violence of whipping and rape, both of which are forms of subjugation which recognise the humanity of the slave in the very attempt to suppress the rebellion. The taking of milk, however, is a qualitatively different form of othering whereby the polarisation is not one of master–slave but the far more radical one of human– animal.” (Chandra, pp. 50-51). This discourse of associating black bodies with animalism is also associated with black bodies, more particularly black male bodies, a discourse that Chiron is forced under the weight of. In the book We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, the acclaimed intersectional theorist bell hooks wrote how the presentation of black masculinity in a society predominantly ruled by white patriarchal societies is the legacy born from the plantations of Antebellum America: “black males who refuse categorization are rare, for the price of visibility in the contemporary world of white supremacy is that black male identity be defined in relation to the stereotype whether by embodying it or seeking to be other than it.” (hooks, 2002, pp. xxi)

The entirety of Moonlight is about Chiron being caught between embracing what society wants him to become – a hardened, stoic and strong man – and what he actually is, which goes against it – a gay man who is ridiculed in his childhood and teenage years for his emotionality, shyness and sensitivity. Chiron is forced to deny his feelings of suffering and rejection – from his peers and most predominantly, from his mother – as a major aspect of toxic masculinity, whereas mentioned in another text of bell hooks, “to indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings” (hooks, 2004, pp. 22). However, as many philosophers note, the body can remember experiences – hence the term embodied experiences– where the mind refuses to, Bergthaller noting how until Sethe and her community can found the linguistic means to tell their stories, their emotional/psychological pain that is denied and repressed is transformed into bodily realities that cannot be ignored or denied: Sethe becomes colour-blind after she murders her daughter Beloved, Denver becomes deaf and mute after discovering the revelation of how far her mother was willing to go to prevent Denver from being returned to Sweet Home and Paul D. loses control of his hands after he is sold from the plantation (Bergthaller, 2007, pp. 120).

However, while the denial of suffering is a form of denial of humanity prominent in Beloved and Moonlight, there is also another major embodied experience that is linked to humanity and consciousness: love. As expressed by my lecturer Joanne Jones, the famous philosopher Julia Kristeva wrote about the psychological aspects of love within culture and semeiotics in the 1987 book Tales of Love. Paraphrasing from both Joanne Jones and from Tales of Love, the central idea of Julia’s Kristeva���s theories on love sees that in loving the Other, we able are able to recognize ourselves in the Other and by recognizing ourselves, we recognize the dignity of all and we are able to become ethical beings (Kristeva, 1987). If anything, the biggest denial of embodied experiences is the denial of that one can love and be loved in return and belong to a community towards the characters of Beloved and Moonlight. In a passage from Beloved, Paul D. notes how he can only pick the smallest stars in the sky to love, because any love greater – and the heartbreak that results from death or separation that was constant for slaves – could end breaking him; “to get to a place where you could love anything you chose - not to need permission for desire - well now, THAT was freedom” (Morrison, 1987).

This denial of love (and by extension, the denial of embodied experiences) also is prominently found within Moonlight, most particularly between Chiron and Kevin and between Chiron and his mother, Paula. Paul D. and Chiron share the greatest similarities out of all the characters; both are young men who have being denied the possibility of community and love and have closed themselves off from love, only for the text to show the character’s journey of relearning how to love and be loved. Another particular connection between Beloved and Moonlight is the recovery of family. As drug abuse and poverty create a chasm between Paula and Chiron, the intergenerational trauma of slavery (which Beloved becomes the flesh-and-blood embodiment) creates a divide between Denver and Sethe. The situations between the families of Beloved and Moonlight, may call back to Julia Kristeva’s connections with love and the Other; that only in being able to love can we become ethical. It’s important to note that within slavery, the family unit was impossible to protect with family members frequently being sold to other slave owners, causing the separation of child from parent, wife from husband, sibling from sibling. And while the situation is not so dire in modern-day Miami, poverty in black-majority communities can be considered a legacy of slavery and because of the forced inability to form a family, the difficulty of creating loving relationships – where slavery did not allow African-Americans to occupy the position of being someone’s child or mother or lover – still lingers generations onwards. Because these families have being relegated to their most biological dimensions, relegated to ‘bare lives’, they can only struggle in truly living a life that goes beyond the biological (Buchanan, 2010, pp. 41).

Which is why one of the significant aspects of both Beloved and Moonlight is the relearning of how to love when one has been forced to deny the possibility of love. Paul D. and Chiron, through living in poverty or living in slavery, are presented as individuals with fragmented identities and both of whom are closed off from love – most shown through the presentation of the narrative of Moonlight, where the three chapters of the film are titled with the different epithets that Chiron takes on (‘Little’ as a child, ‘Chiron’ as a teenager and ‘Black’ as an adult). Paul D., as explained above, is someone who has closed himself away from feeling, who feels that his red heart has now became a ‘rusted tobacco tin’, one which he feels ashamed of sharing with others – and where only with a sexual interaction with Beloved, does he gain his heart back (Chandra, 2008, pp. 52-53. And yet, by giving themselves permission to the embodied experience that is love, Chiron and Paul D. are able to finally gain a whole sense of themselves. Only when Chiron reunites with Kevin and tells him that he loves him, that no other man has touched Chiron (physically and emotionally) the way Kevin has touched Chiron, years after he has embraced violence, does he finally gain a complete sense of self, to make the identities of ‘Little’ and ‘Black’ and ‘Chiron’ together as one person. As Bergthaller writes, only in remembering their bodies and their families and their histories  – when Chiron is able to look back at his life, when Paul D. is able to make sense of his past – can they recollect the experience of being embodied (Bergthaller, 2007, pp. 126).

In conclusion, Beloved and Moonlight where the narratives of people being brought down to the physical parts of themselves and are denied any other embodied experiences of suffering and love that validates their sense of humanity. Through toxic masculinity and slavery, many characters are left fragmented and alienated and confined to their bodies – by a system that has reduced them merely to bodies. Yet, as seen in both Beloved andMoonlight, the possibility of reclaiming their bodies (and in doing so, reclaiming their ability to suffer and love and be recognized as human) is possible in both texts. Moonlight and Belovedpresents the possibility of rising above the bare lives that the characters are given, in being able to find a future – but only through embracing the truths and experiences of our bodies.

References

Allain, J. (2014). The Legal Understanding of Slavery (pp. 105-134). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bergthaller, H. (2007). Dis(re)membering History's revenants: Trauma, Writing, and Simulated Orality in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Connotations: A Journal For Critical Debate, 16(1-3), 116-136. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/docview/196677714?rfr_id=info%3Axri%2Fsid%3Aprimo

Buchanan, I. (2010). A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2nd ed., p. 41). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chandra, G. (2008). Narrating Violence, Constructing Collective Identities: 'To Witness these Wrongs Unspeakable' (pp. 50-72). New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

hooks, b. (2004). The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Washington Square Press.

Hooks, B. (2004). We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. London: Routledge.

Kristeva, J. (1987). Tales of Love. New York: Columbia University Press.

Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. London: Vintage Classics.

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Saving Marion Crane: Women in Horror and Fanfiction as a Revolutionary Act of Reclamation for Women Writers

A Research Paper on women in the horror genre and the creation of the literary zine The Story of a Beautiful Dead Woman

Everyone knows the story of Marion Crane; a young woman who skips town after stealing a large sum of money, so she can help her lover divorce his wife, only to find a motel and met her end through gaining the attention of one of the most famous horror villains in cinematic history: Norman Bates. Marion Crane, whose famous moment of dying in the acclaimed psychological horror film Psycho (1960) was the embryo to one of the constant tropes that make up the horror genre; the death of a beautiful, sexual woman. Marion Crane, who was designed to merely act as the false protagonist, written to die so the real story of Psycho – the story of Norman Bates and his beloved mother - could be told. With the creation of Bates Motel in 2013, the genre of horror has evolved and grown between the fifty-three years that separates the texts. In between this stretch of time, we have seen the horror genre (especially the genre of slasher horror) – be characterised with horrific acts of violence (both physical and sexual) against female characters. And interestingly, during the fifty-three years, the internet was born and the wide-accessibility to reproduce and recreate and retell texts from mainstream culture, to recreate these texts as fanfiction, was born. Fanfiction, in particular, which is predominantly created by women to fulfil desires that are not given acknowledgement or satisfaction by mainstream popular culture. Fanfiction which allows readers to become creators and engage critically with horror texts, as so to remediate them into narratives that fulfil the audience’s desires better.

Women (and Female Sexuality) in Horror.

Looking at the wide range of the literary and academic sources regarding the representations of women in the horror genre, the majority of academic sources have noted the underlining theme of misogyny and gendered violence within horror – Psycho (1960) only being one example amongst many. What’s notable is that like fanfiction, the slasher horror genre has been ignored and considered lesser deserving of academic attention – on the basis that it was exploitative, that the domain of the horror genre belonged to low-brow culture (Trencansky, 1990, pp. 64). This is especially relevant since the literary zine I focused on is a retelling (transformative text/fanfiction piece) about one famous film, Psycho (1960), which in particular is considered to be the cinematic piece that birthed a specific branch of horror cinema, known as the slasher film; where the violent deaths of female characters are a common aspect of the genre. In a survey that examined over 57 slasher films, Gloria Cowan and Margaret O’Brien noted that female sexuality often leads to death in slasher films – that women portrayed as sexually active were more likely become victims of the killer than chaste women or men in general (Cowan and O’Brien, 1990, pp. 194). Andrew Welsh followed up with another survey in 2010, noting that while sexuality in general was a factor of death in slasher films, female characters depicted as sexual were more likely to die and were depicted with longer death scenes as punishment for that sexuality (Welsh, 2010, pp. 770). With the passage of twenty years, it’s illustrated that the brutal deaths of women in horror is still a common aspect to horror cinema.

Another aspect that interlinks with the punishment of female sexuality is the punishment and Othering of non-traditional masculinity. Referring back to Men, Women and Chainsaws, Clover had proposed that male audiences are forced to identify with the surviving female victim, named the ‘Final Girl’, as she kills the villain – even through while the thought of female protagonists being supported is progressive,  it should be noted that the Final Girl is often presented as chaste and often presents herself as more masculine in comparison to the female victims (Clover, 2015, pp. 40) This is especially important to understand in the dynamic of whom she has to survive and ultimately kill. In a study focusing on the presentation of masculinity in horror cinema, Rieser noted that famous villains – such as the famous Norman Bates from Psycho (1960)– may be presented as monstrous because they do not fulfil their roles as men; that they may be virginial (Michael Meyers from Halloween and other examples) or non-gender conforming (i.e. Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs) or convinced that they are a woman – as in Norman Bates and his persona, Mother (Rieser, 2001, pp. 374). So even with the theory of women successfully fighting back against their killers, the subtext of negativity about the feminine – that only masculine means of power can be considered powerful, that feminine men are monsters – still exists in horror.

Fanfiction and Women.

Fanfiction, when the research is not properly done, is characterised as either shallow and badly-written sexual fantasies written by teenage girls or acts of copyright violations that disrespect the texts creators and devalues the text itself. However, I would make the argument that if art is a conversation between the consumer and the creator, fanfiction is the response to when culture does not fulfil the desires of an audience. The principle of fanfiction, as discussed by culture theorist Henry Jenkins, is that ‘once television characters enter into a broader circulation, intrude into our living rooms, pervade the fabric of our society, they belong to their audience and not simply to the artists who originated them’ (Jenkins, 2012, pp. 333). And one particularly interesting aspect to fanfiction is how the majority of fanfiction participants are female audiences that become women-writers, one study proposing that fanfiction could be the ‘result of the need of the female audience for fictional narratives that expand the boundary of the official source products’ (Peeples, Yen and Weigle, 2018, pp. 258). This is especially important when you consider that there are female audiences who watch and consume horror films and may even be paradoxically felt to be spoken to by the text (Trencansky, 1990, pp. 64).

Fanfiction, an activity that is about the circulation and active critique of original texts amongst communities of fans (Jenkins, 2012, pp. 331, is all about being able to indulge in desires and fantasies that mainstream society cannot fulfil, all under anonymous identities that separate the writer’s real life from their writing (Peeples, Yen and Weigle, 2018, pp. 259). But at its heart, fanfiction is seen as a form of participatory culture, a culture that has flourished with the birth of the internet which allows for creators that may be gatekept out of traditional spaces (i.e. the exclusion of female and minority creators in Hollywood or traditional publishing) to write texts that defy the narratives upheld in popular culture – even (and perhaps, particularly) about the narratives of gender and sexuality in horror. Fanfiction, as Henry Jenkins famously said in a New York Times interview, is a ‘a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk’ (Harmon, 1997).

Case Study: A Fanfiction.

To look at how fanfiction can act as an act of remediating and reclaiming male-focused horror stories for female creators and female audiences, it’s important to now focus on the praxis of fanfiction by examining three fanfiction pieces posted on Archive of Our Own – a website and server space created by the Transformative Works. By examining the two transformative texts in their relation to their original texts, we can see how fanfiction is a method of participating in the creation and recreation of culture. The first text, “so close (just the two of us)” (Espeones, 2018), the fanfiction rewrites the Halloween series with Michael Meyers (the masked villain of Halloween) being depicted as the victim of stalking to Laurie Strode, the final girl of Halloween now depicted as a killer and stalker. By inverting the violence once put upon Laurie, by rewriting the original story into a story of female-perpetrated violence against a male victim, the story could be calling to Clover’s idea that ‘gender is less a wall than a permeable membrane’ when it comes to the presentation and dynamics of gender in storytelling (Clover, 2015, pp. 46). This switching of moral roles between antagonist and protagonist within, falls under one of the ten categories of how fans rewrite original texts, known as moral realignment, where such fanfictions deliberately ‘blur the original narrative's more rigid boundaries between good and evil’ (Jenkins, 2012, pp. 221).

The second text, “A Deal’s a Deal – Freddy Kreuger x Reader” (summerdayghost, 2018), is a fanfiction where the reader is encouraged to insert themselves as an insert into the story, where they gain the romantic interest of Freddy Kreuger, who helps the reader gain revenge on the people who bully them. This sort of fanfiction, self-insert fanfiction, is the most controversial within fandom – falling under the category of personalization – which is about fulfilling the desires of both writers/readers to embed themselves directly into the story rather than identify with another character (Jenkins, 2012, pp. 227). However, this fanfiction could theoretically be considered a form of escapism and also a rebuttal against Rieser’s theory of feminine men as monsters. Personalization fanfiction texts asks readers to rehearse unconscious ideas about romance and courtship, askes the readers to give themselves permission to feel desire and fantasise in a safe space through identification of a fictional stand-in (Knobel and Lankshear, 2007, pp. 160). More particular, instead of the text identifying feminine desires as deserving of punishment and having female characters act in passive ways and also identifying Freddie Kreuger as a monster, the fanfiction places the reader in the position of loving the monster and aiding him in the crime – and having the monster love you back, without hurting you. These two fanfiction pieces merely being two amongst many ways of rewriting horror texts to ‘better speak to the audience's cultural interests and more fully address their desires.’ (Jenkins, 2012, pp. 333).

Conclusion/Discussion.

While the representations of women and female sexuality in the horror genre, we see that the horror genre – and cinema and television, in general, has a long way to go. If the horror genre does not punish women for sexuality or force them to abandon femininity to survive – the same way that Lady McBeth of Shakespeare was forced to cast away for womanhood for power, it makes monsters out of men that do possess femininity. Which is why the rise of fanfiction is so important – to claim these texts as our own, women-writers have the freedom to reclaim outdated narratives to tell new stories. Even in mainstream cinema, the 2010s have being subject to a renaissance of horror cinematic pieces such as The VVitch (2015), the Babadook (2014) or Hereditary (2018); The VVitch about a Puritan woman caught in the paranoia of a witchhunt and whom becomes a witch herself, The Babadook being a fable where the monster acts as an allegory for grief and the terrors of motherhood and Hereditary being the story of mental illness and familial trauma through the perspective of a family falling apart. All capitalised by the creation of Bates Motel, a television adaptation of Psycho (1960) where the text is transformed to have Marion Crane – the woman whose death gave birth to slasher horror – survive and leave the hotel unharmed. All these texts show the direction of horror bending towards feminist storytelling, towards perspectives once erased in cinema and actively celebrated in fanfiction communities.

References

Clover, C. (2015). Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (pp. 21-64). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Cowan, G., & O'Brien, M. (1990). Gender and survival vs. death in slasher films: A content analysis. Sex Roles, 23(3-4), 187-196. doi: 10.1007/bf00289865

Espeones. (2018). A Deal's a Deal - Freddy Krueger x Reader. Retrieved from https://archiveofourown.org/works/15385824

Harmon, A. (1997). In TV's Dull Summer Days, Plots Take Wing on the Net. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/18/business/in-tv-s-dull-summer-days-plots-take-wing-on-the-net.html

Jenkins, H. (2012). Textual Poachers: Televison Fans and Participatory Culture (Updated Twentieth Anniversary Edition) (pp. 215-229, 330-340). Abingdon, Oxford: Routledge.

Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (2007). A New Literacies Sampler (pp. 137-165). New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Peeples, D., Yen, J., & Weigle, P. (2018). Geeks, Fandoms, and Social Engagement. Child And Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics Of North America, 27(2), 247-267. doi: 10.1016/j.chc.2017.11.008

Rieser, K. (2001). Masculinity and Monstrosity: Characterization and Identification in the Slasher Film. Men And Masculinities, 3(4), 370-392. doi: 10.1177/1097184x01003004002

summerdayghost. (2018). so close (just the two of us). Retrieved from https://archiveofourown.org/works/16605782

Trencansky, S. (2001). Final Girls and Terrible Youth: Transgression in 1980s Slasher Horror. Journal Of Popular Film And Television, 29(2), 63-73. doi: 10.1080/01956050109601010

Welsh, A. (2010). On the Perils of Living Dangerously in the Slasher Horror Film: Gender Differences in the Association Between Sexual Activity and Survival. Sex Roles, 62(11-12), 762-773. doi: 10.1007/s11199-010-9762-x

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You Must Stop Moving: The Foucauldian Discourse of AIDS, Religion and Queer Identity in Angels in America

Produced in 1994 as commentary of the AIDS Crisis in North America, Angels in Americahas become an acclaimed theatre piece focused around what it meant to be queer in the fast-changing political and social landscape that was the Reagan Administration. But not only did this play question what it meant to live with HIV in a time before life-extending treatment, it also questioned multiple sections of 1980s American society in how and why it operated during the AIDS crisis. Understanding Foucauldian discourse – how relationships of power within our society is reflected in our way of language, through commonly accepted societal practice and through the media we consume (Given, 2008) – we can understand Angels in America from a different perspective; through the discourse and ideologies and sense of subjectivity it espouses. And from viewing Angels in America through Foucauldian discourse, we can understand how Angels in America was able to disrupt the ideologies and discourse about queer identity, religion and AIDS that made up 1980s America.

Before delving into how the ideologies of 1980s America were disrupted, further discussion and clarification of what Foucault’s ideas of ideology and discourse are. As explained by Sage, the main principle of Foucault focuses on how we understand the world is constructed through commonly accepted belief and language; how ideology constructs the real. This is expanded by Given, stating that Foucauldian discourse “focuses on how power is operationalized through language” (Given, 2008). An example of how power is used through language was the naming of AIDS through the two different labels that were used to describe HIV/AIDS; an example of constructionist language, where “it constructs the world through naming it, and constructs the concepts through which we understand life and the world” (O'Shaughnessy & Stadler, 2012). Before the disease was termed AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Disease Syndrome), it became known firstly as Gay-related Immune Deficiency (GRID) in 1982.

The practical reason being that the first recognised cases of AIDS were found in gay men, only to be discovered that AIDS effected all sexual identities. Only for the term GIRD or the ‘gay cancer’/ ‘gay plague’ to still be used well into 1995, even after AIDS was renamed to reflect the wider demographics of infected people (haemophiliacs, drug users, Haitans, African-Americans etc.) in 1982. Discourse – of addressing the disease as a ‘gay plague’, by emphasizing the sexual identity of those diagnosed with HIV/AIDS – connects the disease to a sexual identity considered immoral and abnormal during the 1980s, making the disease itself connected to immorality and abnormality in return. This is one example of many to see how the discourse of HIV/AIDS was constructed in 1980s America; one that was heavily intertwined with the discourse of queer identity and the discourse of religion (with the societal/religious treatment of HIV/AIDS similar to the religious discourse of the Black Plague); a discourse constructed to place queer community and mainstream society, the infected and non-infected, into a dichotomy of ‘us against them’ and ‘good and bad’.

A discourse that was disrupted in how AIDS and queer identity is addressed and represented in Angels in America against that discourse; thorough the presentation and writing of the main characters, Prior Walter, Louis Ironside, Joseph Pitt and Roy Cohn. Firstly, Prior Walter, an American gay man, acts as the text’s protagonist; going through his journey of being diagnosed with AIDS, being abandoned by his lover after his condition worsens and essentially gaining spiritual contact with an angel. Secondly, there is Louis Ironside; a Jewish, deeply liberal political gay man working as a word processor, who struggles with Prior’s sickness and eventually leaves him out of fear. Thirdly, Joseph Pitt, a Mormon law clerk, has his story also examined in Angels in America; recording his struggle of being caught between embracing his true identity as queer and his desire for Louis Ironside against his faith as a Mormon, his marriage and his convictions in President Reagan’s administration. And lastly, there is Roy Cohn, who acts as the fictionalised version of the real-life Roy Cohn (the political advisor to President Nixon and President Reagan, who died of AIDS in 1986).

It is through how these three characters are presented and the ideologies which have constructed these characters – queer men of different faiths and political parties and moralities, struggling with mortality and religion and love in one of the most LGBT-unfriendly political administrations in American history – that Angels in America uses interpellation to address the audience. Going into the term of interpellation. if discourse is the ideologies that are unspoken and make up the structures of society, interpellation is how individuals internalise those ideologies to understand and construct themselves; how they position themselves and how they position others in the ‘reality’ they inhibit to create subjectivity (O'Shaughnessy & Stadler, 2012). Interpellation is particularly true for media, media being a way of communicating discourse; a concept Cindy Nguyen expanded on, using the example of how films traditionally position the audience in the point of view of the leading man (Nguyen, 2017). The concept of the male gaze acts as an example of interpellation, to treat men as subjects of the narrative with women only being objects to play part of the narrative rather than central to it. By using the male gaze as an example of interpellation in media, we can understand how the narratives that are told can have effect on the subjectivity of audiences. And from understanding how the male gaze works to interpellate the discourse of gender in film, we can examine how Angels in America interpellates a discourse of subjectivity related to queer identity; deconstructing and rejecting the discourses that surrounded the queer community.

One particular aspect of Angels in America’s discourse of queer identity, is how religion is treated in Angels in America in relation to queerness. During the AIDS crisis, because of the discourse that linked AIDS to queer people, it was believed that AIDS was God’s punishment against those infected with the disease. An ideology which is rejected in how three characters – Prior Walter, Louis Ironside and the Angel - are framed inside of the narrative. In the text, Prior Walter’s narrative arc revolves around becoming a prophet to a new covenant, one to bring God back to heaven after he left heaven in 1906 (as shown in Part 2 of Angels in America). This covenant, presented by the Angel, is based upon having humanity stop moving, to stop progressing. A message – for humanity to stop moving – becomes more significant for the receiver of the message; a gay WASP dying of AIDS. Another aspect is also looking at the giver of the message. The Angel, who acts as the symbolic representative of America itself and for a personification of religious faith, is written to be intersex (as evidenced in page 175) and having interactions with Prior (in page 174) and Hannah Pitt (Joe Pitt’s mother, in page 252) that are both sexual and religious. This creates an interpretation, where the ecstasy of religious faith can arguably be synonymous with the ecstasy of queer sexuality.

However, one could also reason that Angels in America reinforces the discourse of queer identity in the characterisation of Joe Pitt and Roy Cohn. In the text, one of Joe Pitt’s main conflicts is coming to terms with his religious faith, referring to the story of Jacob wrestling with the Angel as a point of reference for Joe struggling with his closeted feelings of desire for queer sexuality. A struggle which Joe loses; Louis separates from Joe upon discovery of Joe’s loyalty to Roy Cohn, Joe last depicted in the text miserable and abandoned in Brooklyn at page 274. Meanwhile, Roy Cohn is depicted as a deeply closeted gay man who dies from AIDS, with his death considered a worthy punishment for his actions against Ethel Rosenberg (a real life person persecuted by the real Chohn, leading to her execution on charges of spying). And like Joe Pitt, he is depicted in someone who tries to separate himself his identity and from the queer community, as seen from page 48 to 52, in an exchange with his doctor when diagnosed with AIDS. “ Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men,” Roy Chon says, “homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council.” It is through Cohn’s articulation of power dynamics found in how homosexuality is referenced and discussed, the position of powerlessness of gay men in 1980s America, that Cohn ends up articulating the common discourse held in that era.

It becomes clear, as seen within the ideas of the relationship of power to language in Foucauldian discourse, that queerness is not just associated with just sexuality but with power – more accurately, lack of power. One could argue, in how queerness is hailed in Cohn and Joe, that queerness is interpellated to be interlinked with immorality, with suffering, with inability to effect positive change. Nevertheless, this is not to say that Angels in America completely reinforces the common discourses of 1980s America. Examining Nguyen’s article again, she pointed out that ideology can act with duality. How it can be used to have a dominant power suppress and limit who the discourse hails as subjects while simultaneously giving the subject the possibility for resistance and agency (Nguyen 2017). This is also supported by O’Shaughnessy and Stradler, saying that power can be subverted in the usage of language and giving an example on how gay men were able to reframe the terms ‘gay’, ‘queen’ and ‘queer’ from negative terms to Other and shame queerness to celebrate and normalize it (Shaughnessy and Stradler, 2012). This is where we finally can see how Angels in America defies the religious and social discourses of queerness; in reframing the subjects inside the discourse.

Where AIDS was treated as a sign of God’s wrath, it becomes notable that Angels in America reframes a gay man to be the subject of spiritual attention by becoming a prophet. It becomes the duty of a gay man to stop humanity from progressing, on the behalf of an angel who represents America. Essentially, through symbolism and the subtext of the play, it is an AIDS patient that is left to uphold a covenant to have America return to tradition and stability before the AIDS crisis, before the queer rights movement that left America changed for good. Only here Pitt struggles his inner demons of self-hatred and lack of belong and fails, comparing himself with Jacob wrestling with the Angel, the same comparison can be made for Prior both literally and metaphorically. Literally, in the sense that Prior wrestles the Angel when the Angel confronts Prior in page 250 to 251, Prior succeeding and allowing entrance into Heaven. And metaphorically, from page 263 and 267, it is displayed that Prior rejects the anti-Migration covenant, saying that progress and motion are innately modern. And, by extension, changing the discourse of queer identity to be linked to that modernity, that progress of humanity.

Reinstating the points of the essay, the principles of Foucault focused on how power in society is instrumentalized and positioned in the language we speak and the subjects we address and how we address those subjects; whether we view queer sexuality and spirituality as two separate subjects in constant conflict, or as interrelated facets to human experiences; whether we position the subjectivity of queer people as us against them, or it is interpellated for queer people to be empathised with and dealt with as equal subjects to straight people. Angels in America disrupts the power dynamics of othering and demonising queerness and the AIDS disease connected to it in 1980s by interpellating to audiences a new way of positioning queer people and HIV+ people and by reframing the discourses to bring power back to those effected. And by examining Angels in America, we can understand how the stories – whose stories deserve to be told – play a significant part to the larger discourses of today.

References

Given, L. (2008). The Sage encyclopedia of qualitative research methods (p. 217). Los Angeles, Calif.: Sage Publications.

Nguyen, C. (2017). Interpellation. The Chicago School of Media Theory . Retrieved from https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/interpellation/

O'Shaughnessy, M., & Stadler, J. (2012). Media and society (5th ed., pp. 61-75). South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

Kushner, T. (1991). Angels in America. London: Nick Hern. Retrieved from https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r5ooVcTYj-J9wSC4DQssVogWgOOQILAn/view

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Cultural Mythmaking in the Twenty-First Century: A Defence of Fanfiction as Acts of Participatory Culture and Radical Storytelling in the Digital Era

One of the acts in which makes humans individuals is the act of storytelling. More particularly, as human society progresses and evolves, so does the act of storytelling and the stories themselves change. From oral tradition to writing, theatre to film and from paper to the internet, storytelling is an interaction where media evolves and even begins its foundations on old narratives to create new ones. This act of stories based on older narratives – known academically as intertextuality, more known commonly as fanfiction – has gained further attention since the evolution of digital media. With the internet becoming a constant to daily life in the twenty-first century, the internet has provided itself as a creator and distributor of new media – one such form of new media is fanfiction, retellings of original stories remediated into new texts. While fanfiction has received a reputation as a possible violation of author’s legal rights (which will be explored in the content) as recent developments and as lesser to ‘original work’, this essay concerns itself with fanfiction as an act of actively participating, critiquing and creating culture; creating new forms of storytelling merging with digital culture to provide better representations outside mainstream media and creating relevant questions, concerning to who is allowed to participate and the value of fanfiction in the twenty-first century.

Beginning this discussion, it should be noted that in order to understand fanfiction in the digital culture, an outlining of the history of fandom and explanation of the term ‘participatory culture’ is needed. Participatory culture, as defined by Henry Jenkins in the 2009 report, requires “ provides strong incentives for creative expression and active participation ” (Jenkins, 2009, p. 6) and more importantly, participatory is a reaction to the explosion of new media which allows audiences to critically engage texts in different ways i.e archiving, recirculating, appropriating and other textual interactions (Jenkins, 2009, p. 9). More particularly, as Jenkins noted in the 1956 book Textual Poachers , this recirculation and critical interactions with narratives characterises fandom, where fandom as participatory culture “celebrates not exceptional texts but rather exceptional readings” (Jenkins, 1956 – p. 337).

However, while participatory culture is used to describe the interactions with audiences to new media, it should not be mistaken that fanfiction is new. This particular argument is stated by Terry Flew in the 2014 book New Media, where Terry makes the argument that ‘new media’ has foundations within ‘old media’ (Flew, 2014, p.2) to recirculate stories. Flew explained this phenomenon as textual convergence, Flew describing Meikle and Young’s theory of media convergence as four dimensions, textual convergence being explained as ‘the re-use and remixing of media into what has been termed a 'transmedia' model’ (Flew, 2014, p.6). Zubernis and Larsen’s 2012 book Fandom At The Crossroad: Celebration, Shame and Fan/Producer Relationships expands on the academic term of textual convergence in through convergence culture, where they review how convergence culture is about new media and old media coming together to create original/derivative work and where interactions between audiences and creators are more varied (Zubernis and Larsen, 2012, p. 3).

Particularly, we can also see this regulation of narratives and texts before the rise of the digital era, as detailed by Grady, who written how beloved literary texts such as The Aeneid acts as a transformative text to the Iliad or how many works of Shakespeare were based off older texts (Grady, 2016). This understanding of fanfiction as an historical act of transformative media and an activity of fandom is also supported by Cavicchi in the 2014 journal article Fandom Before Fan; Cavacchi discusses cases of fandom in a historical context, with the ‘Wagnerians’ who were followers of the Richard Wagner’s works (Cavacchi, 2014, p. 62) or the general love nineteenth-century audiences had for musical concerts comparable to modern-day audiences love for TV shows or films, where music lovers ‘depleted their savings to do [attend musical concerts] so every night; [and] they described their feelings about what they heard in diaries, and they waited, longingly, for their favorite performers to return so that listeners could hear those performers again and again’ (Cavacchi, 2014, p. 56). In understanding the idea of convergence and participatory culture (through both a modern and historical lens), we can understand the paradox of fanfiction in its limitations but also its abilities to connect and thrive.

In the modern-day world of constant internet access, cultural studies scholars have found unrecognized benefits to the creation and reading of fanfiction, one of the greatest as stated by Henry Jenkins in the New York Times being that ‘fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk’ (Harmon, 1997). Elaborated by Tindall, Garcia, Binstock and Jenkins, these scholars give comprehensive reasons to how fanfiction are positive aspects to today’s participatory culture. Tindall outlined how social media has brought both audiences and creators together, where celebrities of texts can engage with fans on controversies such as Gamergates or causes special to the celebrities (Tindall, 2016, p. 22). More particularly, Garcia solidifies this idea in the creation of fan communities where fans can interact with other fans, especially for young fans where ‘at a time when young people are trying to find their voice and their identity, fandom can provide the comfort of familiarity’ (Garcia, 2015). The collaborative and community-based interactions points back to Jenkin’s discussion on the major aspects of fanfiction, where meaning and depth from the text is only created when that meaning is debated with other fans (Jenkins, 1958, p. 331).

Another major aspect to fanfiction is the creation of representation not readily available in fanfiction, which Garcia addresses once more, saying that ‘fanfiction may afford an exploration of gender, sexuality, or race that is often underrepresented or underserved’ (Garcia, 2016). Binstock, in a 2016 article about queer identities in fanfiction for Slatemagazine, addressees Garcia’s statements fully by exploring how queer fanfiction acts as a reaction to a mainstream media that continues to uphold heteronormative standards of romantic love while delegitimizing and underrepresenting queer relationships and identities, as quoted, “[Queer fan fiction] turns an essential but societally marginalized part of our identities into a tool for creating real and recognized art” (Binstock, 2016). Adding to this, Larsen and Zubernis (in Fan Culture: Theory/Practice ) reviewed by fanfiction itself can be used to teach students how fanfiction goes beyond restrictive systems of what’s considered legitimately creative, and how fanfiction ‘ provides a necessary perspective on the variability of history, truth, and representation in any cultural system’ (Larsen and Zubernis, 2012, p. 184).

More particularly, one of the greater and more complicated aspects of fanfiction is how fanfiction challenges corporations and capitalist productions of texts. Fanfiction challenges the concept that a text can only be actively interacted by the ‘author – with even greater debate to whom is allowed to be considered a legitimate ‘author’ – and that audiences are only to interact passively, an idea personified by a quote from Henry Jenkins, where ‘all fans are potential writers whose talents need to be discovered, nurtured, and promoted and who may be able to make a contribution, however modest, to the cultural wealth of the larger community’ (Jenkins, 1956, p. 333). This discussion is also personified again in the 2009 report, where a major aspect to participatory culture is the belief that all creative contributions will be valued and that there is freedom to contribute creatively (Jenkins, 2009, p. 6). However, that is not to say that fanfiction is without restriction or that separation between commercial and non-commercial works are not required.

The question of fanfiction becoming professionally published and the question of ownership and copyright and privacy has become a major debate in the cultural studies and fanfiction community. In Fan Culture: Theory/Practice, Larsen and Zubernis details the ‘rules’ of privacy to avoid cease-and-decease orders from the original text’s creators and to avoid linking of public identities to their online identities and by extension, to creative texts which could cost their livelihood and negatively affect their workplace and family relationships because of explicit content (Larsen and Zubernis, 2012, p.38-39). In a legal article by the Houston Law Review, Lipton reviews how commercialization of fanfiction would present issues due to lack of proper legal framework to commercial publication of fanfiction and also could result in the possible licensing of fanfiction to copyright holders (instead of the fanfiction creators) as seen in Kindle Worlds policy (Lipton, 2014, p. 461-462). This creates serious issues to limiting participatory culture and about the freedom of creative content and distribution on the internet.

In conclusion, we can understand that while the domain of fanfiction becomes more varied and concerns of copyright and belonging are legitimate, we can validate fanfiction as a legitimate expression of creativity and storytelling with historical background and relevant values of freedom to expression. As a form of participatory culture, we can see the ascension of fanfiction not as obsessions or abnormalities, but the result of individuals who wish to actively and critically engage in media through instruments of technology that allow us to connect and express more freely than ever.

References

Binstock, R. (2016). Why Do Queer People Write Fan Fiction? To See Themselves in Mainstream Culture. Slate. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2016/05/30/queer_people_write_fan_fiction_to_see _themselves_in_mainstream_culture.html

Cavicchi, D. (2014). Fandom Before “Fan”: Shaping the History of Enthusiastic Audiences. Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, 6( 1), 52-72. doi: 10.5325/reception.6.1.0052

Flew, T. (2014). New Media (4th ed., pp. 2 - 6). Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

Garcia, A. (2016). Making the Case for Youth and Practitioner Reading, Producing, and Teaching Fanfiction. Journal Of Adolescent & Adult Literacy , 60 (3), 353-357. doi: 10.1002/jaal.589

Grady, C. (2016). Hamlet, The Divine Comedy, and 3 other pieces of classic literature that are also fan fiction. Vox . Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/2016/4/5/11363816/five-literature-fanfiction

Harmon, A. (1997). In TV's Dull Summer Days, Plots Take Wing on the Net. The New York Times. R etrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/18/business/in-tv-s-dull-summer-days-plots-take-win g-on-the-net.html

Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (pp. 5-14). Cambridge: MIT Press. Retrieved from https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/confronting-challenges-participatory-culture

Jenkins, H. (1956). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (2nd ed., pp. 330 - 340). New York City: Taylor and Francis Group. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/curtin/detail.action?docID=1097854

Larsen, K., & Zuberis, L. (2012). Fan Culture : Theory/Practice [Ebook] (1st ed., pp. 38-56, 174-187). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/curtin/detail.action?docID=1107098

Lipton, J. (2014). Copyright and Commercialisation of Fanfiction. Houston Law Review , 52 (2), 425-466. Retrieved from http://web.b.ebscohost.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=6a7c69 7a-a7aa-498b-91ae-22f2514e0c45%40sessionmgr102&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl 2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=100571713&db=lft

Tindall, N., & Hutchins, A. (2016). Public Relations and Participatory Culture: Fandom, Social Media and Community Engagement [Ebook] (pp. 21-23). Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge. Retrieved from http://web.a.ebscohost.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=4fb179 83-6a32-4c0b-9f8c-2b1cf54115ed%40sessionmgr4006&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3Qtb Gl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=1197960&db=nlebk

Zubernis, L., & Larsen, K. (2012). Fandom At The Crossroad: Celebration, Shame and Fan/Producer Relationships [Ebook] (1st ed., pp. 1-15). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/curtin/detail.action?docID=1133107&query=

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The Body as Sites of Power: Reproductive Rights and Patriarchy in Orphan Black and The Handmaid’s Tale

With the recent mainstream ruminations over reproductive rights in the 21st century and over the fate of Roe vs. Wade, there has been discussion over women’s bodies as the site of regulation and domination by institutions and societies both in history and in the present. More particularly, with the rising questions over the agency and subjectivity of women and their bodies, more of mainstream popular culture has ruminated over these important subjects with material such as the American TV series The Handmaid’s Tale and the Canadian TV series Orphan Black. Both texts – texts of speculative fiction focusing around women, where one text is about the possible loss of women’s rights in America and another where a group of women are found to be the subject of genetic experimentation – focus on women’s bodies as subjects to rules and laws beyond the subject’s control. More particularly, at the thesis of this essay, Orphan Black and the Handmaid’s Tale make the important connection between two subjects: how patriarchal systems, be they religious or scientific in name or nature, are interlinked with the control of human reproductive and more specifically, the control over women’s bodies and their ability to reproduce.

Understanding how control over the reproductive rights of individuals (mostly cisgender women) is an extension of patriarchy is important to answer, before we can discover how Orphan Black and the Handmaid’s Tale deals with this question in its text. Reproductive rights, as defined by the United Nations’s International Conference on Population and Development, declares in the Programme of Action that ‘reproductive health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity, in all matters relating to the reproductive system and to its functions and processes’ (United Nations Population Fund, 2014, pp. 59). More particularly, while the issue of reproductive rights does apply towards all human beings (cisgender men, the transgender community and the intersex community), the target of restrictions over reproductive rights is predominantly cisgender women, where women are perceived as ‘“deviant,” “not respectable,” even “criminal” when they are seeking medical services that allow them to control their sexuality and reproduction’ (Chesney-Lind and Hadi, 2017, pp. 73). Particularly, when women go against the socially-sanctioned roles as the providers of resources – most predominantly, though the reproduction of children.

Within the system of patriarchy, one important aspect is the control of women’s bodies as resources of continuing on legacies (children being these legacies) and as sites of control for men. This is compellingly argued by Barbara Katz Rothman who said that with regards patriarchal kinship systems, motherhood is seen as giving birth to ‘children born of men, out of women’ (Rothman, 1994, pp. 141) – women’s bodies merely becoming the medium to blood-ties between fathers and sons. This is supported by Sibley and Osborne, who made the correlation between men’s negative attitudes about abortions and men’s ambivalent sexism which idealizes women’s places in societies as wives and mothers – where women are connected to their roles as providers of care and children to men, even to carry out pregnancies that are dangerous to the women’s health (Huang et al, 2014, pp. 445).

It should be noted that these two texts have patriarchal systems work in different ways to assert control over the female characters. In the Handmaid’s Tale, June Osborne and all Handmaids in Gilead become subjects of state-mandated rape and forced pregnancies with radical interpretations of Christianity being used as justification. If anything, the ideology of how women are used to provide men children (Rothman, 1994, pp. 143) taken to extremes with how June is seen as a ‘walking womb’ to carry Commander Waterford’s child and carries no maternal/genetic ownership when her child is born and separated from her.  In Orphan Black, the main characters are the product of illegal genetic experimentations where their bodies are literally patented by corporations, with science becoming the justification of the women’s loss of autonomy over their bodies. A situation which calls an argument an acclaimed feminist theory Lerner made about the commodification of women, where “women themselves became a resource, acquired by men much as the land was acquired by men” (Lerner, 1986, pp. 212) – in the same way the clones become merely genetic material to be monitored and experimented on. However, it should be noted that most of the main characters (excluding Sarah and Helena, who are actively hunted down because of their ability to reproduce) are female clones designed to be infertile, whilst male clones are designed to induce infertility on women who have sex with them. This aspect may see the weaponization of infertility as simply another aspect of the patriarchy, where Chesney-Lind and Hadi noted that such fears of children from disenfranchised communities where weaponized to reduce fertility levels in third-world countries – which reflects the Dyad Institute’s fear of not being able to fully control the clone’s bodies (Chesney-Lind and Hadi, 2017, p. 74).

Both Orphan Black and the Handmaid’s Tale reflects real-life historical and modern situations where religion and science have been used by patriarchal systems to assert control over the right to reproduction. In the same way that the clones of Orphan Black were deliberately made sterile, sterilizations have been done on women in order to prevent the birth of ‘defective’ children – particularly children born women of color, disabled women and poor women (Patel, 2017). In the same way that the Handmaid’s Tale invalidated abortion laws within America, in some nations male control over abortions is institutionalized where women require the consent of their husbands to gain abortions (Petterson and Sutton, 2018, pp. 235). In the same way that the main characters of Orphan Black were illegally monitored by medical professionals without their permission, women in real life have been subjected to unconsented medical surgeries without their permission (often in relation to medical procedures concerning pregnancy, such as C-sections), such medical abuses now deemed as obstetric violence (Kukura, 2018, pp. 730-734). And the darkest example is the usage of rape during genocides to impregnate victims with their perpetrator’s children (where in patriarchal societies, their children are viewed as their father’s linage – a call to Rothman’s explanation of patriarchal kinship systems), these forced pregnancies being classified by the United Nations as a method of committing genocide against a community (Smith, 2013, pp. 95).

In conclusion, both texts – despite the differences in how patriarchal systems operate against the female protagonists of the texts - both patriarchal systems in the texts of Orphan Black and the Handmaid’s Tale (the scientific institute of Dyad and the theocracy of Gilead), it restricts women to no longer being subjects of rational thought but as subject their bodies before anything else (Groaz, 1994, pp. 14). Such texts reflect the reality of how the control over reproductive rights (to have or not have children, to be or not be sexually active and in what circumstances and in what was) is merely one head to the monster that is patriarchy’s control over women’s roles as the bearer of children. In both texts, we see how women are reduced to merely being the subject to control. But in both texts of the Handmaid’s Tale and Orphan Black offer ways of rebellion, of becoming more than just defined by one’s body.

References

Chesney-Lind, M., & Hadi, S. (2017). Patriarchy, Abortion, and the Criminal System: Policing Female Bodies. Women & Criminal Justice, 27(1), 73-88. doi: 10.1080/08974454.2016.1259601

Huang, Y., Osborne, D., Sibley, C., & Davies, P. (2014). The Precious Vessel: Ambivalent Sexism and Opposition to Elective and Traumatic Abortion. Sex Roles, 71(11-12), 436-449. doi: 10.1007/s11199-014-0423-3

Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism(pp. 3-24). Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.

Kukura, E. (2018). Obstetric Violence. Georgetown Law Journal, 103(6), 721-737. Retrieved from https://heinonline-org.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/HOL/Page?lname=&public=false&handle=hein.journals/glj106&page=721&collection=journals#

Lerner, G. (1986). The Creation of Patriarchy(p. 212). New York: Oxford University Press.

Patel, P. (2017). Forced Sterilization of Women as Discrimination. Public Health Reviews, 38(1). doi: 10.1186/s40985-017-0060-9

Petterson, A., & Sutton, R. (2017). Sexist Ideology and Endorsement of Men’s Control Over Women’s Decisions in Reproductive Health. Psychology Of Women Quarterly, 42(2), 235-247. doi: 10.1177/0361684317744531

Rothman, B. K (1994). Beyond Mothers and Fathers: Ideology in a Patriarchal Society. In E. Nakano Glenn, G. Ghang & L. R. Forcey (Eds.), Mothering: Ideology, experience and agency(pp. 139-157). Abingdon, NY: Routledge.

Smith, R. W (2013). Genocide and the Politics of Rape. In J. Apsel & E. Verdeja (Eds.), Genocide Matters: Ongoing Issues and Emerging Perspectives(pp. 82-102). Abington, Oxon; Routledge.

United Nations Population Fund. (2014). Programme of Action (20th Anniversary Edition) (p. 59). United Nations Population Fund. Retrieved from https://www.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/programme_of_action_Web%20ENGLISH.pdf

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The Power to Become Powerless: Corrective Institutions of Patriarchy in the Handmaid’s Tale (2017) and the God of Small Things.

One text is an acclaimed television series of speculative fiction, focusing upon a dystopic future of America and televised in 2017. Another text is a celebrated postmodernist novel, documenting the trials of mid-century India and published in 1987. European vs Indian, historical against futuristic, with twenty years between the two. However, both The Handmaid’s Tale (2017) a nd The God of Small Things share commonalities; in being written by a highly acclaimed female author with The Handmaid’s Tale first being written as a novel by Margaret Atwood, and The God of Small Things being written by Arundhati Roy; in their postmodernist usage of language to explore subjective realities; and in their searing criticism of institutions that create dynamics of unequal social relations and oppression in our culture. More particularly, the main subject of this essay, the Handmaid’s Tale and the God of Small Things explores how corrective institutions inforce restrictions upon female sexuality, motherhood and female agency in the wider cultural and societal spectrum. More particularly, the subject of the essay will discuss how The Handmaid’s Tale and The God of Small Things depicts the intersection of being both victim and perpetrator for women in these corrective institutions.

Before we can understand the role of institutions in the reproduction and reinforcement of misogyny, a definition and discussion of institutions in the field of cultural studies is vital to the wider debate. In Tim O’Sullivan’s Key Terms for Communications and Cultural Studies, O’Sullivan outlines institutions as ‘regulatory and organizing structures of any society, which constrain and control individuals and individuality’ (O'Sullivan, Hartley, Saunders, Montgomery & Fiske, 1994, p. 152). Berger expanded on the concept of institutions, documenting the construction of institutions as the result of human socialization and habitualization, noting that ‘society is a human product; society is an objective reality; man is a social product.’ (Berger and Luckman, 2008) Focused as a major source of social codes and rules, O’Sullivan goes on explain how multiple institutions intersect in regulating and responding to social issues at three principal levels: economic, political and cultural (O'Sullivan, Hartley, Saunders, Montgomery & Fiske, 1994, p. 153). The most prominent examples of institutions that regulate the social realities within the two texts is the caste system of The God of Small Things and the social system of Gilead (one major component being the Handmaid’s model) of The Handmaid’s Tale (2017).

Where the caste system depicted in The God of Small Things is a historical and present reality and the social system of Gilead is fictional, both are examples in how these institutions create and regulate the roles and expected behaviours that particularly effect women. In the book The God of Small Things, Roy makes reference to the Love Laws, ‘the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much’. More particularly, these Love Laws act as another term for the caste system of India; a system of classes (Brahmins, Kshatryas, Vaishyas, Shudras and Untouchables) starting in Hinduism and consistently present within the novel – the Ipe family belonging to the Brahmin caste while Velutha, an Untouchable, begins an inter-caste relationship with Ammu (a member of the Ipe family, mother to the two protagonists and recent divorcee). While in The Handmaid’s Tale , the text focuses on the system of Gilead, where individuals are placed into the model of Handmaids, Commanders, Wives, Aunts, Angels and Unwomen – June Osborne (also addressed as Offred) being positioned in the TV series and novel as the Handmaid to the Waterford household.

How these characters are positioned in these institutions, as mothers and as properties to men, shows in the very names the two main characters are addressed; June is addressed as Offed - of Fred , where the institution positions and addresses her directly as property to Frederick Waterford and addressing her role as a fertile woman (a Handmaid); Ammu (a Sanskrit form for ‘mother’) is never given any other name by other characters in the text, placing her indirectly in the text and in institutions as a mother going against the prescribed behaviours of motherhood and wifehood such as divorcing her husband and raising her children on her own, a substantial concept of dishonour that Ammu is aware of. More particularly, we can examine how individuals (and society by default) treat Chacko’s divorce (Ammu’s brother) and Ammu’s divorce; where Chacko (who his wife, Margaret, divorced due to Chacko’s lazy behaviour) is treated with sympathy, Ammu (who divorced her husband due to his alcoholism and abuse) The addressing of the characters and their positioning in the institutions is similar to Althusser’s theory of ‘hailing’ (known also as addressing or more formally as interpellation) subjects through language in relation to addressors i.e indirectly through institutions (O'Sullivan, Hartley, Saunders, Montgomery & Fiske, 1994, p. 155), the bookMedia and Society used the example a popular nursery rhyme to see how a song hails boys and girls to prescribed behaviours of what ‘real girls’ and ‘real boys’ are meant to act (O'Shaughnessy and Stadler, 2012, p. 185).

The main conflict of the two texts is how the two main characters – Ammu from The God of Small Things and June from The Handmaid’s Tale – come into conflict with these institutions. June Osborne’s story in the TV series (and the Atwood novel), focuses on her ability to mentally survive the oppressive government of Gilead where women’s places in society are measured in their abilities to provide children and sex (Handmaid’s), emotional companionship (Wives) or servitude (Marthas) for men (Screenprism, 2018). Ammu’s story is the crux of the novel as told through the perspectives of her children, how her status as a divorcee and single mother brings chaos to the Ipe family and how Ammu rebels against patriarchal corrective institutions through being a good single mother and falling in love with a man below her caste, going against the caste system that ruled your career and worth and the people you could love and marry. But attention must also be paid to not only how individuals resist against institutions, but how institutions act as a paradox of agency and disempowerment. This requires an understanding to the power dynamics of hegemony and, more precisely, what power means within the field of cultural studies.

Hegemonies, as simply defined by Arthur Asa Berger in Media and Society: A Critical Perspective , are the processes to which mass consciousness is shaped by dominant classes, as first described in Marxism and Literature (Berger, 2012). First addressed by the Marxist politician and philosopher Antonio Gramsci, a cultural hegemony acts as a paradox of coercion and consent; hegemonies, as further analysed by Daldal, requires the consent of the subjugated to be ruled by the dominating, to ‘incorporate the will of each single individual into the collective will turning their necessary consent and collaboration from "coercion" to "freedom"’ (Daldal, 2014, p. 156). As succinctly written by O’Sullivan, ‘our active participation in understanding ourselves, our social relations and the world at large results in our complicity in our own subordination.’ (O'Sullivan, Hartley, Saunders, Montgomery & Fiske, 1994, p. 152). This concept of hegemonies, where individuals are responsible for consenting to their oppression by corrective institutions of class and race and gender, in texts concerning resistance against corrective institutions may appear counterintuitive and even questionably victim-blaming; the Handmaids, regulated to ‘walking wombs’ to provide children for the ruling class of Gilead through government-mandated rape, are forced into the roles by Aunts through threat of legally sanctioned violence and death, with June resisting her role as Offred and trying to escape Gilead in Season 2; the caste system in The God of Small Things is legally and socially reinforced through the legal system, this conflict against the caste system indirectly results in the brutal and fatal attack of Veluthu, the indirect death of Sophie Mol, Ammu’s separation from her child Estha and Ammu’s disownment by Chacko (after Baby Kochamma discovers Ammu stopped the police from pressing charges of rape against Veluthu and tried to recover his body) and indirect death.

However, how to expand on the understanding of cultural hegemonies, it should be noted that the concept of hegemonies in its paradoxical usage of coercion and consent still the subject of debate within cultural studies; Maglaras writing with regards to Jackson’s statement of cultural hegemony, where ‘consent, for Gramsci, involves a complex mental state, a ‘contradictory consciousness’ mixing approbation and apathy, resistance and resignation’ (Maglaras, 2013. p. 5). With regards to the corrective institutions of patriarchy, this can place women into the intersectional positions of both resisting these institutions while also upholding it. These positions of contradictory consciousness, which have been detailed upon in intersectional feminist theory, are thoroughly criticised through the characters of Baby Kochamma from The God of Small Things and Serena-Joy Waterford from The Handmaid’s Tale alongside their relationships of subjugation with Ammu and June Osborne.

In a famous writing of feminist and writer Audre Lord, Lord written in 1997 a proto-intersectional feminist text expressing the intersections of race, sexual identity and gender. As famously quoted, ‘What woman here is so enamoured of her own oppression, her own oppressed status, that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face?’ (Lord, 1997, p. 284). This attitude is viscerally displayed through the characterisations of Baby Kochamma and Serena-Joy, who are placed into positions of powerlessness by patriarchal institutions and yet given power over other women – and even other men – through other corrective institutions (such as class and race). Baby Kochamma is Ammu’s paternal aunt who, after unsuccessfully trying to romantically pursue a priest and is relegated to the older unmarried woman, is the individual who outs Ammu and Veluthu’s relationship and the outfall that results. Serena-Joy Waterford is the Wife (married before the rise of Gilead) to Commander Waterford who openly allows for June’s sexual abuse, plans to separate the child who June becomes pregnant with and is eventually revealed to be the architect of Gilead (and therefore, responsible for the dismantling of women’s and LGBT rights in America).

Throughout both texts, it’s shown that even through the women are powerless – Baby Kochamma being considered unmarriageable after her attempts to marry a priest, Serena-Joy forced to concede as the meek and demure wife while her husband leads – they are shown to extort whatever power they have over women. More particularly, we see how these women consent to the hegemony in a different way from June and Ammu; where Ammu conducts her relationship in secret and June only complies with her place as a Handmaid out of fear of retaliation, Baby Kochamma and Serena-Joy consent to these institutions because of the standing they have over others. This a major aspect to the antithesis of intersectionality, known as white feminism; a term, as Desmond-Harris explains, where the the fight of women’s rights is based upon fighting only for middle-class, straight and white women while consenting to institutions that oppress others (such as queer people, people of colour and poor people) in order to still have worth over someone (Desmond-Harris, 2017). Even through these systems create powerlessness over Serena-Joy and Baby Kochamma, they are still willing to uphold the system as to get something positive from the system, a major aspect of hegemonies where ‘by forcing people against their conscious will or better judgement to concede power to the already-powerful, but that it describes a situation on whereby our consent is actively sought for those ways of making sense of the world which 'happen' to fit in with the interests of the hegemonic alliance of classes’ (O'Sullivan, Hartley, Saunders, Montgomery & Fiske, 1994, p. 133).

One example of intersectionality is the God of Small Things, with how Chacko and Veluthu are treated differently in their ‘crimes’. Where Chacko is guilty for sexually assaulting lower-caste women who work in the pickle factory Chacko owns, Mammachi (and by extension, Hindu society) excuses Chacko’s actions as ‘men’s needs’ in Chapter 8. But where Veluthu is falsely accused is raping Ammu (Baby Kochamma filing it as rape to protect scandal from occurring), Veluthu is tracked down by the police and brutally murdered in what’s also described as ‘men’s needs’ in chapter 18. This is a prime example of ‘systems of oppression that work together and mutually reinforce one another’, which intersectional feminism is based around criticizing (Allen, 2016).

Coming to conclusion, we can understand ideologies as institutions made material (O'Shaughnessy and Stadler, 2012, p. 182) and in doing so, we can understand as instututions that constantly create realities for our society and those that inhabit these societies. Where people such as June and Ammu resist against unfair hegemonies of power and control, institutions and hegemonies should also be understood in how even those made powerless in these institutions (such as Serena-Joy and Baby Kochamma) can play the roles as reinforcers and oppressors through different levels and lenses of class, race and sexual identity. Which leaves the more important question to what role, you, the reader plays: the one who resists or the one who obeys (and perhaps even both)?

References

Allen, A. (2016). Feminist Perspectives on Power. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy. San Francisco: Stanford University. Berger, A. (2012). Media and Society: A Critical Perspective (3rd ed., pp. 9-23). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Berger, P., & Luckman, T. (2008). Society as a Human Product. The Social Construction Of Reality: A Treatise In The Sociology Of Knowledge . Retrieved from http://www.sociosite.net/topics/texts/berger_luckman.php

Desmond-Harris, J. (2017). To understand the Women's March on Washington, you need to understand intersectional feminism. Vox . Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/1/17/14267766/womens-march-on-washington-ina uguration-trump-feminism-intersectionaltiy-race-class

Lord, A. (1997). The Uses of Anger. Women's Studies Quarterly , 25 (1/2), 278-285. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40005441?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Maglaras, V. (2013). Consent and Submission: Aspects of Gramsci’s Theory of the Political and Civil Society. SAGE Open, 3( 1), 1-8. doi: 10.1177/2158244012472347

O'Shaughnessy, M., & Stadler, J. (2012). Media and society (5th ed., pp. 180-191). South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

O'Sullivan, T., Hartley, J., Saunders, D., Montgomery, M., & Fiske, J. (1994). Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies (2nd ed., pp. 139 - 155). London: Routledge.

ScreenPrism. (2018). The Handmaid's Tale is About the Present [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R45eiu8SXko

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What Difference Does It Who Speaks: The Question of Gatekeeping, Privilege, Authentic/Non-Essentialist Representation & the #OwnVoices movement

If there is a form of immortality possible to humanity, stories may be the one way that keep those that are written about alive long after they’re gone. But if storytelling is a form of immortality-making, there comes two important questions. Who, by getting to be represented in the story, gets to live forever? And by extension, who gets to tell these stories and about the people within those stories? A revelation that has resulted in the #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement that was born in 2014, a reaction to a book publishing industry that has lacked diversity and representation in both its books and the authors who write those books; the latter resulting in the #OwnVoices movement, where it’s encouraged for books featuring minority representation to have minority authors writing the story (i.e. a black female author writing a book with a black female lead etc). While the question for the unit askes for us to write about representations in and of themselves (aka the representation of Muslim athletes in America, representations of intersexuality in Australia etc), this essay is less interested with representations and more concerned with the ambition of analysing the natureof representation as presented by the #WeNeedDiverseBooks/#OwnVoices movements and mainstream society and the question of how those representations are effected by whom gets to create them within the media we consume. If non-marginalized authors write about marginalized communities, does that very fact make the representation essentialist – regardless to the quality and content of the representation? Are there limits and potentially bad outcomes to the increasing desire to see authenticity within the media we consume?

Before we can understand how representation of characters is linked to whom writes these representations, we should understand the concept of the death of author – and how #OwnVoices may be considered a rejection of this death. The death of the author, as first described by Roland Barthes in the famous 1967 essay La Mort de L'Auteur, talked about the separation between the text and the author and allowing the text to be purely cpercieved by the reader, saying ‘literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes’ (Barthes, 1967, pp. 2). Foucault also addressed the relationship between texts and authors, as addressed in the 1969 essay What is the Author (as displayed in a collection of essays published in 1980), saying in support of Barthes, ‘we would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long: who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse?...What difference does it make who is speaking?’ (Bouchard, 1980, pp. 138).

However, as John Farrell noted in the 2017 book, ‘when we read literary texts it is people we are trying to understand — people under varying historical circumstances; it is their creative actions we are trying to appreciate, not mere collections of words’ (Farrell, 2017, pp. 243). This central idea, that one cannot simply divorce literature from the humans who create them because that literature isthe expression (and therefor, an extension through words) of the creator, is an important idea that is arguably foundational to the #OwnVoices movement. An idea also compounded by an video essay by Lindsay Ellis, where she expressed the notion that a major fault of the death of the author concept is the assumption that all people of all backgrounds have the same equal opportunity and by extension, all texts have equal opportunity for exposure on the basis of their merit – despite the fact that texts are judged on whom tells what story, that storytellers background and why they are telling the story (Ellis, 2018). This rejection of the death of the author and this question that Foucault poses, what difference does it make who is speaking, matters deeply when storytelling is a matter of gatekeeping and privilege.  

This comes to another major aspect of the #OwnVoices situation, addressing whom (and who doesn’t) gets to be the author; who gets to direct cinema, who gets to write music, who gets to write the books that express the world around them and, by doing so, gets to construct the narrative of the world for the audience. Of the publishing and writing industry, as published in a major report, notes that the majority of writers and publishers are white and male by the majority. Within the publishing industry, according to an extensive survey in published in 2016 concerning diversity of book creators in 2015 (and not just diversity within the books themselves), it was found that the statistics of the publishing industry overall is 79% white, 78% cisgender female, 88% straight/heterosexual and 92% able-bodied (Lee, 2016). Another report about the publishing industry supports this, Melanie Ramdarshan Bold going on to investigate the state of diversity within the British publishing industry by analysing all young adult books published from 2006 to 2016 – and who found that only 8% of all YA authors within Britain are writers of colour, 90% of British YA authors being white (Ramdarshan Bold, 2018, pp. 398). This is also reflected within the cinema industry, where a comprehensive report investigated the statistics of those who directed and wrote 1200 mainstream films from 2007 to 2018 – and found only 3.6% of film directors were women, 6% were African-American and 3.6% were Asian-American, the majority of directors and creators of cinema being white men (Pieper, Choi & Choueiti, 2018, p. 1-9)

So we have established the important relationship between stories and the storytellers and we have now determined that the majority of our media – which includes representations of marginalized communities – have majorly being created by non-marginalized storytellers. The last question needs to be answered” is storytelling outside of your identity (be it cultural, racial, sexual, gender or disability) a form of cultural appropriation? Such questions about the #WeNeedDiverseBooks and the #OwnVoices movement have come up with backlash against the publication of certain books pertaining to the identities of their authors and how it connects to content of their books; Helen Barr’s debut novel Blood Makes Noisewas called to be cancelled before it was even published, on the basis that a story about the AIDS crisis (which predominantly effected gay men) should not be told by a straight woman, one commenter called Jay Elliot saying that ‘a woman profiting off the stories and experiences of gay males during the AIDS epidemic is despicable, and I hope this entire project burns to the ground’ (Kheraji, 2018); the book APlace for Wolves, a self-declared #OwnVoices book,is ‘cancelled’ and prevented from being published on the basis that the author ‘appropriated’ the historical genocide of Bosnia as the setting for a same-sex love story (Rothstein, 2019); people call for the book Blood Heir to be prevented from publication due the belief of insensitive portrayals of slavery inspired by the slavery of African-Americans, despite the author saying that the depiction of slavery was not based in U.S slavery but on indentured servitude from her own country of Asia (Hoggatt, 2019)

These are just examples of what is believed to be a growing toxicity within the #OwnVoices and #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement, covered by Rosenfield where she discusses the growing pressure on minority authors to not just sell their stories that focus on diverse themes, but also to sell themselves and their identities in relation to their stories, even if it means selling private information about themselves – such as closeted sexual identities or mental illnesses, information that if released could create unsafe situations for the author – for public consumption. (Rosenfield, 2019). This situation of dissatisfaction between the identification of authors with their stories is also discussed within the New York Times by Jami Attenberg, where her article acts as a rejection of the principles behind the #OwnVoices movement where fiction becomes a reflection of the authors life, saying ‘how do you even explain the creative process, that there are all these little bits and pieces, that a work of fiction can be a kaleidoscope of your life, looking nothing like the original whole, just made up of shattered bits. Why can’t people let fiction be?’ (Attenberg, 2017).

One can argue that the overzealousness and toxicity of the publishing community, of cancelling books before they’re published and creating ever-impossible standards of whom can write what story, of not allowing fiction to simply be and allowing the author to die, is a reaction to the statistics that we just saw about the publishing industry – that the narratives about marginalized communities have always being the creation of non-marginalized authors, even narratives that have stereotyped and dehumanized these communities. But the belief underlying the #OwnVoices movement and the resulting examples discussed above all show a troubling underlying issue; that certain stories should only be written by certain people, that as Heather Heath says, ‘While we live in a culture that tries to tell us that some groups are so different from us that we cannot possibly understand them, this is simply untrue; we are all human beings and we can come alongside each other and learn from one another’ (Heath, 2018). Is the perspective of someone who is another race or another sexuality, according to some individuals within the #OwnVoices movement, so Other can no amount of research or work or sheer human empathy can cross the boundaries and have that story properly told? Is the perspective of a bisexual autistic immigrant woman – of myself – a perspective so different that it cannot be written or told or understood by others outside my identities, let alone be properly written?

In conclusion, while this essay was not concerned with representations in and of itself, we can conclude to an ideal of storytelling that Lindsay Ellis talks about with the famed novelist John Green, that by telling a fiction, it is human nature that we feel connected to that person that tells that story – regardless of who that person is (Ellis, 2018). The #OwnVoices and #WeNeedDiverseBooks is a long-needed and necessary reaction to the exclusion of minorities from the stories we tell in our books and television and cinema – but one that requires a sophisticated understanding that who tells what story is never black or white, but must always be considered with nuance. If the statistics do not improve behind the scenes of our media industry and if the toxic implications of gatekeeping are still maintained, if men are forced to write only about men and white people can only write white people and so on and for forth, we are far less likely to create empathetic and progressive stories of identity and diversity that are needed after decades of absence. Foucault once asked, what difference does it make who is speaking. For us and for the publishing community and for all storytellers, who can tell stories is a difference that means everything.

References

Attenberg, J. (2017). Stop Reading My Fiction as the Story of My Life. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/books/review/stop-reading-my-fiction-as-the-story-of-my-life.html

Barthes, R. (1967). La Mort de L'Auteur [Ebook] (pp. 2-6). Pittsburg: Aspen. Retrieved from https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Barthes.pdf

Bouchard, D. (1980). Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (p. 138). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Ellis, L. (2018). Death of the Author [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGn9x4-Y_7A

Farrell, J. (2017). The Varieties of Authorial Intention: Literary Theory Beyond the Intentional Fallacy (p. 243). Springer.

Heath, H. (2018). 5 Problems Within the Own Voices Campaign (And How to Fix Them) [Blog]. Retrieved from http://hannahheath-writer.blogspot.com/2018/04/5-problems-within-own-voices-campaign.html

Hoggatt, A. (2019). An Author Canceled Her Own YA Novel Over Accusations of Racism. But Is It Really Anti-Black?. Retrieved from https://slate.com/culture/2019/01/blood-heir-ya-book-twitter-controversy.html

Lee, J. (2016). Where Is the Diversity in Publishing? The 2015 Diversity Baseline Survey Results. New York City: Lee and Low Books. Retrieved from https://blog.leeandlow.com/2016/01/26/where-is-the-diversity-in-publishing-the-2015-diversity-baseline-survey-results/

Kheraj, A. (2018). does it matter who writes queer stories?. Retrieved from https://i-d.vice.com/en_au/article/8xeg4b/does-it-matter-who-writes-queer-stories

Pieper, K., Choi, A., Choueiti, M., & Smith, S. (2019). Inclusion in the Director's Chair? (pp. 9-10). University of Southern California Annesburg School for Communication and Journalism. Retrieved from http://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/inclusion-in-the-directors-chair-2019.pdf

Ramdarshan Bold, M. (2018). The Eight Percent Problem: Authors of Colour in the British Young Adult Market (2006–2016). Publishing Research Quarterly, 34(3), 385-406. doi: 10.1007/s12109-018-9600-5

Rosenfield, K. (2019). What Is #OwnVoices Doing To Our Books?. Retrieved from https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/04/228847/own-voices-movement-ya-literature-impact

Rothstein, K. (2019). Another YA Author Withdraws Book From Publication After Backlash. Retrieved from https://www.vulture.com/2019/02/kosoko-jackson-a-place-for-wolves.html

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What Makes the Woman a Woman: Artificial Intelligences, Androids and the Construction of Femininity (and Feminine Bodies) in Science Fiction.

Within the majority of feminist history, feminist theory has been centralized around the subject of feminine bodies. What the feminine body is capable of (such as reproduction and sexuality), what abuses are possible against feminine bodies and more particularly, what makes feminine bodies unique. However, a criticism to such theories is the idea that the identity of womanhood is restricted to the body, which leaves feminists in the paradox of wanting women to be associated away from the body but having their bodies define womanhood. Which is what makes the representation of femininity in science-fiction texts such as Her (2013)and Person of Interest (2011-2016) so interesting; because of the fact that they are feminine characters presented without a corporeal body. The two characters – Samantha from Her (2013)and the Machine from Person of Interest (2011-2016)– are framework-based artificial intelligences that lack the physical presence of bodies to interact with the physical world, unlike androids such as Joi from Bladerunner 2045 (2017)or Ava from Ex-Machina (2015). The characters of Samantha and the Machine present an interesting interpretation of femininity: femininity that exists outside and independent of physical bodies. Interpretations of femininity. Interpretations of femininity, which the essay focuses on, that creates three issues of gender that the essay plans on addressing: how femininity is linked to humanity/subjectivity, how femininity is constructed through the interconnected dynamics of socialization and performativity and how femininity can exist without a body to be subjected on.

To understand how femininity and feminine bodies are constructed (and in return, deconstructed) in science fiction, we need to understand the context of the two texts Her (2013)and Person of Interest (2012-2017).In the filmHer, the character of Samantha is a talking operating system which the main character Theodore downloads – something created to explicitly interact and assist Theodore with everyday life (like a secretary). With Theodore choosing for her to talk in a feminine voice and addressing her with feminine pronouns, the film depicts Theodore and Samantha falling into a romantic relationship (which involves a sexual surrogate to act as Samantha’s physical stand-in) while Samantha’s programming evolves to gain independence from Theodore and eventually leave him. Meanwhile,Person of Interest has the character of the Machine; a heuristic computer system designed by Harold Finch, a brilliant hacker and software engineer, to help the U.S government predict federal crimes before they happen. While Theodore from Her (2013)places femininity onto Samantha, validates her femininity and enters a romantic/sexual relationship with her, the opposite dynamic happens. The Machine does not go by a feminine name and mostly interacts with the physical world through voiceless texts and Morse code (only choosing a feminine voice to commemorate a lost friend) and the relationship between the Machine and her creator resembles more a daughter/father relationship with Harold distressed by the Machine’s revelation of gender (which correlates to the Machine’s growing sense of humanity, as it goes away from the purpose that Harold Finch designed her for). Both the Machine and Samantha relate to femininity as a form of humanity – even if they lack physical existence.

For the characters, the Machine and Samantha’s feminization is presented as a form of consciousness that relates them closer to humanity than to machines. This situation, where their revelations of gender relates to the revelation of their humanity, relates back an argument that Nick Mansfield made about how we consider gendering as a way of recognizing ones humanity and consciousness, how ‘there is a horror at the use of the word ‘it’ as a general term for human beings, rather than the more conventional ‘he’ or ‘she’: it seems that the failure to ascribe gender in the usual way is interpreted as a denial of your very humanity.’ (Mansfield, 2000, pp. 74). Mansfield’s argument is especially relevant to the Machine’s growing consciousness, where Harold Finch (her creator) refuses to address the Machine with female pronouns (referring to the Machine as ‘it’), and by extension, refuses to address the Machine as an intelligent and sentient subject. An act that is framed by the text as needlessly cruel and unfair, causing Harold to rethink his ideas about the Machine and soon address her with female pronouns by the end of the TV series.

This rejection of gender – and by extension, rejection of the individual’s subjectivity about their sense of consciousness and about the sense of their body – could potentially be linked to a transgender narrative, of the parent (Harold, the creator of the A.I) rejecting a child who has recently came out as transgender (the A.I). Stryker in particular notes how science fiction narratives often act as an analogue for narratives that question the nature of gender, commenting upon Donna Haraway’s texts about cyborgs and how they create ruptures in boundaries once held solid: ‘The cyborg, in Haraway’s usage, is a way to grapple with what it means to be a conscious, embodied, subject in an environment structured by techno-scientific practices that challenge basic and widely shared notions of what it means to be human’ (Stryker and Whittle, 2006, pp. 103). In the same way that cyborgs are liminal beings, Stryker continues on, caught between human and non-human and whose bodies act as the site of politics concerning physicality and immateriality, so too are the bodies of intersex and transgender individuals that become sites over the struggle of what it means to be a human being – to be a gendered subject – in the 21st century (Styker and Whittle, 2006, pp. 103). This struggle – what it means to be a woman – could very well be applied to Samantha and the Machine. Which leads to the next question to be answered – how do they become women?

The second issue linked back to how gender is connected to subjectivity and consciousness, there comes the question of how gender is first created – especially how the feminization of artificial intelligences acts as an analogue to the feminization of human beings. In traditional science fiction texts, artificial intelligences that are coded female are usually coded through the construction of the bodies who the artificial intelligences occupy. More particularly, as some feminist theorists have noted, the bodies of female-coded A.I’s are created for the sexual and aesthetic pleasure of the (human) men who interact with them. This is prominent in many science fiction texts; texts such as Ex-Machina (2015), where the android Ava is literally designed based to appear desirable and potentially seduce the human subject in a Turing test; where iconic figure of Robot-Maria in Metropolis (1927),who is designed in the very image of the creator’s lost beloved and whose unnaturalness (coded also as sexuality) is a contrast to Maria’s naturalness and purity (i.e. her humanity) and the one, through her sexuality and beauty, leads Metropolis into chaos. Androids designed for men, designed in men’s ideas of the perfect (and sexual) woman, embrace an idea of women being created to act in relation to men which Simone de Beauvoir discussed in the trademark book of The Second Sex(De Beauvoir, 2011, pp. 5-6). An idea that is supported in a Guardian article, where it’s being dissected that the gendering of voice-based artificial intelligences, such as Alexa or Siri, are a bigger part of the cultural bias that women act as helpers or assistants (Hempel, 2015).

With no body to focus on, to sexualize or violate or confine to, one can make the argument that the feminization of the Machine and Samantha occurs in relation towards the human men they interact with, Samantha with her human lover Theodore and the Machine with her creator/father Harold Finch. This comes back to Simone de Beauvoir’s idea of women acting in relation to men, with women as incidental and men as whole (Simone de Beauvoir, 2011, pp. 5-6) while also giving to the main principal that once ‘subjected to gender, but subjectivated by gender, the “I” neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender relations themselves’ (Butler, 2011, pp. 11). This principle of machines being subjected to a gendered society goes in different directions for the two texts, where the Machine and Samantha feminine in different ways. Theodore subjects Samantha to perform femininity; choosing for Samantha to speak in a feminine voice, to be addressed with feminine pronouns and choosing a female surrogate to act as Samantha’s physical stand-in when Samantha and Theodore decide to have a physical relationship. Meanwhile, the Machine has a more progressive arc where despite being created and interacted with as a genderless subject, the Machine actively chooses gender and does not have femininity hosted onto her.

However, it must not be mistaken that the Machine’s pathway of feminization is better than Samantha’s; it must not be mistaken that one can simply choose to be a woman. Rather, Mansfield argues that gender is merely a system of performances that are highly regulated, that ‘gender performance is not just a question of dressing or behaving in a way acceptable to a peer group; nor is it a simple matter of not standing out in the crowd; we are imprisoned within endlessly repeated and endlessly reinforced messages from the media, schools, families, doctors and friends about the correct way to represent our gender.’ (Mansfield, 2000, pp. 77). If anything, the fact that the Machine can’t adequately perform femininity – the fact that the Machine is absent in bodily and vocal form, where Samantha can gain a degree of corporality and physicality through the physical surrogate – is why Harold Finch turns against her. If anything, the Machine actively going against the system of performances that Harold Finch expects of her – to exist outside of gender – is a reinforcement of Mansfield’s idea of how individuals who do not perform gender to society’s standards – particular if women don’t perform femininity for men – about subjects to violence and discrimination and Othering. All that the artificial intelligences in the texts do is reinforce an important aspect to science fiction in how it illuminates an aspect of humanity, in depicting the very nature of nonhuman characters undergoing the process of discovering and performing gender identity without the pressure of sex and gender, Person of Interestand Herdepict one argument that Judith Butler made: ‘Hence, the strange, the incoherent, that which falls “outside,” gives us a way of understanding the taken-for granted world of sexual categorization as a constructed one, indeed, as one that might well be constructed differently’ (Butler, 2002, pp. 176).

In the conclusion, Person of Interestand Her (2013) are not the only stories that actively question the nature of femininity through analogues of cyborgs and androids and artificial intelligences – creatures literally constructed to fulfil one’s ideas of a woman. But Person of Interestand Her (2013) are revolutionary in dissecting how femininity can act independent of the body, and through that independence, end up questioning how we – the humans – occupy our bodies and occupy the ideals of womanhood that our society upholds. As Butler has famous noted, we are the ones who assign meaning – assigning femininity and masculinity – to our bodies, from there creating sex that acts as the foundation (or divergence) of gender and from there, limiting ourselves to the confines of our sexes and genders (Butler, 2011). By the mere act of existing without a body, and therefore without a predetermined sex and gender, the Machine and Samantha provide an interesting interpterion of the constructionism and socialization of the female role in society. Of what it means to become a woman, what it means to perform and to choose and to live as a woman in the 21st century, where just like cyborgs, these stories recognize the liminality that is gender.

References

Beauvoir, S. (2011). The Second Sex (pp. 5-6). London: Vintage.

Butler, J. (2002). Gender Trouble: Tenth Anniversary Edition (2nd ed., pp. 137-216). New York [etc.]: Routledge.

Butler, J. (2011). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1st ed., pp. 5-24). Abingdon, Oxford: Routledge.

Hempel, J. (2015). Siri and Cortana Sound Like Ladies Because of Sexism. WIRED. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2015/10/why-siri-cortana-voice-interfaces-sound-female-sexism/

Mansfield, N. (2000). Subjectivity: Theories of the self from Freud to Haraway (pp. 66-78). St Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin.

Stryker, S., & Whittle, S. (2006). The Transgender Studies Reader (p. 103). London: Routledge.