#Margaret Cerullo

[ajapablog]

Bodies and Bodies

Disclaimer: Written in choppy bursts, this post is under construction and may get way too personal. 

Over the course of the past month, I’ve been thinking about the many ways in which we use our bodies and what it means essentially to be physical beings. For those of us who read and write, the world of the mind often becomes our primary concern but we are also physical bodies— made of chemicals, organs liquid. We appear to others as visible objects. What I really want to talk about is the many meanings of doing different physical things— striking, screaming,  swimming, sleeping, etc among others. This is a very non-physical way of talking about the physical body, but let me try. 

Strike

I’ll begin with Judith Butler’s  Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street, a piece that I read with Margaret Cerullo many years ago in a class on the Occupy movement. Here is a bit from Butler’s piece to start us off:

It is not that bodies are simply mute life-forces that counter existing modalities of power. Rather, they are themselves modalities of power, embodied interpretations, engaging in allied action. On the one hand, these bodies are productive and performative. On the other hand, they can only persist and act when they are supported, by environments, by nutrition, by work, by modes of sociality and belonging. And when these supports fall away, they are mobilized in another way, seizing upon the supports that exist in order to make a claim that there can be no embodied life without social and institutional support, without ongoing employment, without networks of interdependency and care.

What Butler basically seeks to do in the above is to talk about protesting bodies that make claims against the precarity of the material spaces and social structures that make their bodies viable. In other words, Butler takes Arendt’s argument on natality and reads her to imply that the body that appears in the public space is a social body reproduced by the labour of the domestic sphere. However, she goes further to ask if the material world in which the body appears to make claims is conducive itself to make such claims. One of the things that people agree did not allow for the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement to sustain itself was the difficult conditions of physically occupying wall street. People need to eat, sleep, shit and clean themselves and the space where they come together in the street is often not conducive to these bodily processes. This is a rather simple idea, commonplace even. 

But this idea was brought in sharp focus when the graduate union that represents me went on strike over March. It was tough to picket for hours and those who supported the strike understood this and often brought food to the strikers. There is something uplifting about being fed. It is a recognition that the body sustained by food and the time to prepare that food that strikers gave up on in choosing to use their body otherwise. The striking body was also asking to be paid more to be able to feed itself. The relationship between striking and eating is intense. Although the food that we ate during the strike was mostly wheat and sugar based foods, this wasn’t unusual. Anyone aware of the history of food and bodies and work knows that these are the staples/stimulants of bodies that need quick energy. It is only in recent times with greater access to protein and unseasonal vegetables that out diets have changed. Working bodies mostly run on sugar. The strike made this apparent. 

Swim

I am not a good swimmer. I plod along in the water. Before understanding that my bodies really likes water, I thought I didn’t like being in the swimming pool. Now that I think about it, it probably had to do with years of being uncomfortable with body hair. But now I understand the effects of water on my psyche are calming and soothing. Here’s a poem I conceived in the water:

What do you do if you are eternal fire and you fear burning yourself or the next person to witnesses you bare? You learn to breathe underwater.  To trust it not to extinguish you to know that it will only turn you into a cool and beautiful blue, a streak of streamlined silver,  not hungry to scorch, or to turn everything into char.  You learn to become gracefully- the old and ancient hue of the wise woman’s hair.  So when you walk into the garden of your psyche you will see the bloom, the spring tended with patience, with deep and knowing peace and slow burning fire merely harnessed in water. 

Sex (Rated: Adult)

The body longs for another body. This is its truth. The other’s body is a fetish. It is imbued with so many meanings that to have sex is never to just to do so. But what does pure sex look like? Does it even exist? Skin to skin, mouth to mouth— nothing else. This is impossible. You cannot not fetishize a body you engage with sexually. At the very least you would think about its history in the world of transmissible diseases. Where has the body been? Does it hold scars from emotional trauma? What is muscle memory? Can you disentangle your body from the myriads of experiences it is constituted by when you enter into an encounter? Does the encounter with a stranger remain in your bodily archive? Can the body forget? I do wonder. In instances of corporeal absences— when you are denied the other’s body, when distance and disavowal are literally the relationship between your body and that of the other’s— these are thoughts on the body. 

Sleep

I am a light sleeper. I wake up when I am cold, I wake up when I feel hot, I wake up on the slightest movement in the other room. So when sleep comes strong to me, I embrace it. Psychologists have found that a lot of healing, mending and tending of the psyche happens during sleep. I do not ignore sleep. There may be days I sleep less but if I want to sleep, I do not deny myself the pleasure of healing. 

[theoldgods]

So over the course of 2016 I decided to try to make a list of all the good female characters I enjoyed in media I consumed throughout the year. Some are recurring from earlier years (mostly in the case of TV shows), some were first met in 2016. Personal Special Faves bolded.

Csethiro Ceredin (The Goblin Emperor)

Kiru Athmaza (The Goblin Emperor)

Susan Cooper (Spy)

Nancy B. Artingstall (Spy)

Rayna Boyanov (Spy)

Elaine Crocker (Spy)

Joy Newsome (Room)

Eilis Lacey (Brooklyn)

Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies)

Judy Hopps (Zootopia)

Clarke Griffin (The 100)

Raven Reyes (The 100)

Abigail Griffin (The 100)

Lexa kom Trikru (The 100)

Octavia Blake (The 100)

Indra kom Trikru (The 100)

Luna kom Floukru (The 100)

Elise Wassermann (The Tunnel; The Tunnel: Sabotage)

Laura Roebuck (The Tunnel; The Tunnel: Sabotage)

Eryka Klein (The Tunnel: Sabotage)

Louise Renard (The Tunnel: Sabotage)

Katherine Powell (Eye in the Sky)

Elizabeth Jennings (The Americans)

Nina Sergeevna Krilova (The Americans)

Tatiana Evgenyevna Ruslanova (The Americans)

Martha Hanson (The Americans)

Claudia (The Americans)

Paige Jennings (The Americans)

Sarah Manning (Orphan Black)

Siobhan Sadler (Orphan Black)

Rachel Duncan (Orphan Black)

Susan Duncan (Orphan Black)

Cosima Niehaus (Orphan Black)

Delphine Cormier (Orphan Black)

Rosalee (Underground)

Elizabeth Hawkes (Underground)

Boo (Underground)

Ernestine (Underground)

Pearly Mae (Underground)

Susan Vernon (Love and Friendship)

Alicia Johnson (Love and Friendship)

Hope van Dyne (Ant-Man)

Natasha Romanoff (Captain America: Civil War)

Wanda Maximoff (Captain America: Civil War)

Helena Justina (Marcus Didius Falco novels)

Jean Grey (X-Men: Apocalypse)

Ororo Munroe (X-Men: Apocalypse)

Holly March (The Nice Guys)

Piper Chapman (Orange Is the New Black)

Galina Reznikov (Orange Is the New Black)

Suzanne Warren (Orange Is the New Black)

Taystee Jefferson (Orange Is the New Black)

Poussey Washington (Orange Is the New Black)

Dayanara Diaz (Orange Is the New Black)

Gloria Mendoza (Orange Is the New Black)

Sophia Burset (Orange Is the New Black)

Crystal Burset (Orange Is the New Black)

Tiffany Doggett (Orange Is the New Black)

Carrie Black (Orange Is the New Black)

Alex Vause (Orange Is the New Black)

Cindy Hayes (Orange Is the New Black)

Nicky Nichols (Orange Is the New Black)

Janae Watson (Orange Is the New Black)

Maria Ruiz (Orange Is the New Black)

Brook Soso (Orange Is the New Black)

Jane Ingalls (Orange Is the New Black)

Judy King (Orange Is the New Black)

Lolly Whitehill (Orange Is the New Black)

Jane Porter (The Legend of Tarzan)

Erin Gilbert (Ghostbusters)

Abby Yates (Ghostbusters)

Jillian Holtzmann (Ghostbusters)

Patty Tolan (Ghostbusters)

Jed Marshall (The Night Manager)

Jaylah (Star Trek Beyond)

Nyota Uhura (Star Trek Beyond)

Commodore Paris (Star Trek Beyond)

Elsa Fennan (Call for the Dead)

Nancy Wheeler (Stranger Things)

Barbara Holland (Stranger Things)

Eleven (Stranger Things)

Joyce Byers (Stranger Things)

Ailsa Brimley (A Murder of Quality)

Liz Gold (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold)

Bridget Jones (Bridget Jones’s Baby)

Miranda (Bridget Jones’s Baby)

Dr. Rawling (Bridget Jones’s Baby)

Darlene Alderson (Mr. Robot)

Angela Moss (Mr. Robot)

Dominique DiPierro (Mr. Robot)

Joanna Wellick (Mr. Robot)

Krista Gordon (Mr. Robot)

Shama “Trenton” Biswas (Mr. Robot)

Whiterose (Mr. Robot)

Shayla Nico (Mr. Robot)

Phiona Mutesi (Queen of Katwe)

Nakku Harriet (Queen of Katwe)

Misty Knight (Luke Cage)

Claire Temple (Daredevil; Luke Cage)

Mariah Dillard (Luke Cage)

Deborah Lipstadt (Denial)

Hong Thi Pham (Dragonfish)

Tuyet Phan (Dragonfish)

Mai Thi Pham (Dragonfish)

Karen Page (Daredevil)

Madame Gao (Daredevil)

Vanessa Marianna (Daredevil)

Doris Urich (Daredevil)

Elektra Natchios (Daredevil)

Elena Greco (Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels)

Raffaella Cerullo (Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels)

Joan Watson (Elementary)

Christine Palmer (Doctor Strange)

the Ancient One (Doctor Strange)

Nam Sookhee (The Handmaiden)

Izumi Hideko (The Handmaiden)

Elizabeth II (The Crown)

Princess Margaret (The Crown)

Teresa (Moonlight)

Paula (Moonlight)

Louise Banks (Arrival)

Porpentina Goldstein (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them)

Queenie Goldstein (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them)

Alessandra Cecchi (The Birth of Venus)

Moana (Moana)

Keiko Kimura (Allegiance)

Jyn Erso (Rogue One)

Mon Mothma (Rogue One)

Lucrezia Borgia (Blood and Beauty)

Vannozza dei Cattanei (Blood and Beauty)

Giulia Farnese (Blood and Beauty)

Rose Maxson (Fences)

Sun Bak (Sense8)

Nomi Marks (Sense8)

Kala Dandekar (Sense8)

Riley Blue (Sense8)

Amanita Caplan (Sense8)

Daniela Velasquez (Sense8)

My top 5 overall were probably roughly

Elizabeth Jennings

Stoic but with a beating heart, vicious, competent as shit, loving in her own manner, deeply gray and amoral, Complicated “Emotionless” Bitch™️ in a way women on TV aren’t often allowed. And hot as shit.

Lena Greco and Lila Cerullo

Let me tell you, if you want some complicated fucking female friendships (slash borderline more if you squint), these two, from Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, are Good Shit. Two girls growing up in a whirlwind of poverty, misogyny, unequal educational opportunities, and crime in Naples, from the 1950s to the present day: the ways in which society fucks them over, they fuck themselves over, they fuck each other over (intentionally and unintentionally), they scheme to make their positions better, they love each other, and they hate each other are breath-taking, and the world they inhabit is insanely rich and atmospheric and wonderful. Probably the best books I read this year.

Abigail Griffin

Tenacious, hopeful, loving, gritty at times, competent as hell, a leader amongst all men and women. A Mother Character™️ who’s allowed to be a lot more, and 10/10 would bang, to boot.

Elise Wassermann

Competent, bad at reading and interacting with most people but good-hearted and in search of justice nonetheless, awkward and endearing without being made overly precious or having her competencies and intelligence downplayed.

Siobhan Sadler

Competent, another Mother Character™️ allowed to be more, scary at times and loving, violent and scheme-y at times, can be amoral, but gorgeously so.

(I...might have an Older Woman Competence Kink, love Italian fuckery/stories about girls fighting for education, and love awkward smart women...)

Anyway, here’s to more excellent women in media in 2017, may I find and love you.

[neelumfilms]

Pakistani novelist Uzma Aslam Khan, whose work is included in A Thin Wall, introduced the film in these words at the screening at Hampshire College in April 2017:

I’m thrilled to welcome you this evening, to the film screening of A Thin Wall. Thank you to all those who made this possible: South Asian Political Cultures, Eqbal Ahmad Initiative, Creative Writing Program, School of Critical Social Inquiry, Office of Diversity & Multicultural Education, Law Program, Spiritual Life, and Third World Studies. A warm thank you especially to my lovely and incredible colleagues and co-organizers, Uditi Sen and Margaret Cerullo.

It’s an honor and a joy to have the filmmaker, Mara Ahmed, here with us. I’m going to say a little about Mara, and the film, then she’ll say a few words. After the screening, we’ll open the floor to questions.

[...] I first came into contact with Mara when she was still in the process of making A Thin Wall, because we both come from families who were, and still are, divided by Partition. Once the film was made, one of the things that struck me most was how the script and the visuals – often through multiple layers of narrative that include animation and include silences – all of it, so delicately capture the rootlessness of those who've inherited the pain of partition. We're scattered everywhere, as though once we scatter we keep scattering. I also appreciated how many of her storytellers of Partition are women. I sent her an email saying as much, and she replied, and I quote her, “the film is more of a collage than straightforward narrative. I wanted it to ebb and flow much like memory and leave the audience to fill in some of the gaps and make their own connections. I don't see documentary as a substitute for journalism but rather as a piece of art - like any filmmaking - except that it deals with real people and real stories. I am also unapologetic about creating feminine film or writing or art. I'm constantly aware that we are stuck in an artistic syntax which is predominantly male.”

I hope it’s okay to share that exchange with everyone here, but I think it’s so crucial, as we reimagine our past and our present, and reimagine what we mean by borders and how they shape and distort us, to celebrate the voices, the memories, and the silences of those on all sides of all borders – as those who are most affected are the ones most often written out of history.

[ajapablog]

The Gender of History

A historical text that has been important to me, as I think about what it means to be trained to do this kind of work, is Bonnie G Smith’s The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice. It has been key in helping me think through professions as gendered. Networks, circuits, groups, associations and such are integral to any kind of profession and the historical profession, or any academic profession for that matter, is not outside of these. To think of associational/relational structures, I would argue, is to think of gender. To think of gender as a subsidiary, an additive outside of the structures and processes we seek to understand is a form of patriarchal violence. This is somewhat along Joan Scott’s point in her critical methodological piece — Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. So the question: what does it mean to be a part of a gendered structure of historical knowledge production is a question that warrants asking. I do not purport to answer this question now, in a blogpost. But I want to address my own concerns and some insights: the personal is political but also generative and productive intellectually. 

The CHS seminar discussions out of which I began to work on BP Koirala for my MPhil thesis was largely formed by female identifying membership.That gender is critical in how we learn and work was a fundamental premise for me by 2015 when I began doing this work. I had arrived at this premise through years of enjoying learning in specific contexts (1). An A levels sociology class dominated by female identifying students first peaked my interest in academic thinking. I had been raised up in a rather conservative patriarchal Brahminical household by liberal parents and sociological theory helped me make sense of my complex socialization. I had then gone through a stellar training in the social sciences and humanities at a women’s college in Western Massachusetts. 

In the pioneer valley I found my mentor in the brilliant language historian late Kavita Datla, the very erudite scholar of Indic literatures, Indira Peterson, the radical activist and educator Margaret Cerullo at Hampshire College, and the Harvard-trained leading researcher on middle class Black cultural production, Patricia Banks. I do not claim that there were no male professors at Mount Holyoke that I learned from, but the point is, these were the women I could also lean on. This is exactly the point: learning requires a leaning on and the question is who is amenable to creating professional relationships where this kind of support is not seen as a weakness. The notion of the brilliant male prodigy working entirely in solitude is a trope and the ideal type, which doesn’t exist and the making of this ideal is precisely what Bonnie Smith narrates in her history of the historical profession in Britain. 

You could say, learning with women and from women is perhaps the only thing that I knew until I reached JNU. Outside the classroom at Mount Holyoke, I was a part of a group which would become a movement within the two years that those of us in this group graduated from Mount Holyoke. Sadia Khatri and Natasha Ansari of the Girls at Dhaba movement in Pakistan were at Mount Holyoke, members of the Desi corner/chai group that convened in a corner of Mount Holyoke’s library and in Eliot house: the interfaith house. The coming together of South Asian women at Mount Holyoke cannot be understood outside the ambit of education, even formal education for that matter. You must realize that we took classes together, argued over readings, we worked with the same advisor and worked on related research subjects for our undergraduate theses. What is most important is that we also spent time cooking, watching films and discussing private and public issues and listening. This kind of community requires a vulnerability and the willingness to concede that one is both reliant on the community but also must contribute to it— a kind of horizontalism if you must. 

In JNU, it was Neeladri Bhattacharya’s 2015 MA seminar that fostered this. Neeladri has always been self reflexive of his pedagogy. His seminar discussions where he would do what Kavita Datla once described as “gently nudge” students to think on their own and through each other’s questions and comments through active listening was very productive. Neeladri’s insistence that the self—including the researching self— be understood in all its relationships was a feminist epistemology. His chapter in The Great Agrarian Conquest on the Lawrence brothers is, I think, testament to this in his own academic writing. So when I worked on Koirala,  the questions that shaped the work came from colleagues in classrooms, and in the streets of JNU, and from a generous mentor but also from a sensitivity to gender in the field developed over the second half of the 20th century. I am not entirely fond of my chapter on Koirala’s political speeches from 1947 to 1961 which I hope will acquire a different form at some point. However, the other three chapters, are chapters where I have tried to think through what it meant for Koirala to write of of men and women as gendered being and how being and thinking of himself so shaped his professional and personal life. 

In my chapter on his diaries from his two jail terms, my attempt was really try to get at the heart of how conceptions of masculinity, familial obligation and strength were constituted in Koirala’s writings. My contention is that his diaries and his letters addressed to his family and children are not outside academic analysis and in fact they tell of the complex negotiations he performed over the tensions that a public life created for his ideal of a married and familial life. Here is an extract that might give you a sense of how I tried to think through this: 

Two diary entries written in the span of a few days suggest that Koirala confronted the notion of the conjugal as a site of comfort and support, grappled with the implications of what he considered his “non-committal” behaviour toward it, and mulled over the questions of what it would require of him to reconcile with such a tension... The correspondences with others where we wrote about his wife and the diary entries where he spoke of her also suggest a deep-seated concern over his role as a husband and the responsibilities that it entailed. An affirmation of his wife’s expectations and a pledge to give up extramarital affairs that he otherwise did not deem problematic allowed for a contingent resolution for this anxiety. As I suggested above these anxieties on Koirala’s part suggest that he espoused notions about the family itself as a unified unit and a husband and father as one who is present and accountable. This was a gendered reading of the man and the woman’s distinct ideal attributes within a family. Such a reading is also evident in his characterization of Jacqueline Kennedy, upon her husband’s death, as an “ideal feminine type” who was able to maintain love and cohesion in the family.  Thus, as Koirala’s career choice was not materially conducive in his affirmation of such an ideal notion of family and of himself as a husband, his diary entries were constant expressions of guilt over his absence through imprisonment. While framed in the language of absence and separation, the subterranean concern in these entries was the over not being able to materially and physically contribute in the sustenance of the family as an ideal “breadwinner.”

I have, in a previous chapter explored Koirala’s idealized notions of conjugality in his literary and autobiographical writings. In the direct dialogue with his wife, and the immediacy of the epistolary sources, Koirala’s notions of conjugality and commitment constituted within these sources become slightly different from the kind we are confronted with in his literary writings, particularly in Teen Ghumti. If his literary sources constitute an idealized vision of companionate marriage based on love, the epistolary sources show that not only the material constraints of political life and imprisonment, but also societal notions of masculinity and femininity formed complicated the realization of such ideals. What is evident from our discussions above is that even if Koirala resorted to the complete affirmation or the denial of certain ideals, these resolutions were contingent and would emerge differently in another form. From this se can argue that Koirala’s self-formation through this tension was an emergent process that had to be negotiated with time and again in different kinds of writings. They raise the question as to whether Koirala ever resolved these questions entirely over his lifetime.

I am not bringing in the excerpt above to claim that I am doing anything new or to make any claim over original research. I haven’t read enough Nepali scholarship on Koirala to know what my measly musings on Koirala’s diaries mean in the larger scheme of things. What it means to me personally is that expressions of anxiety over one’s profession as gendered anxieties, can be gleaned from the writings of a man who lived the life of a “professional” politician. I address in another section, how the kin-like networks with their affective trappings and alliances with North Indian leaders like Jayaprakash Narayan formed an integral part of Koirala’s life, both personal and professional. These are the things that interest me. These are the things important to me. I  will most likely move away from Koirala for my PhD work. But I will try to continue to think of the gendered lives of individuals and institutions.  

And as I think of my future work, I am also actively thinking of the networks, alliances and community that will sustain me. I am thinking actively about who I will best learn from and who will make me feel that my efforts, my interests and my commitment to this life is not entirely useless. I have found immense joy this semester learning from a Russian historian who works with poststructural frameworks on questions of race. Her classrooms have that horizontal quality of argumentation, discussion, empathy that reminds me of why I wanted to continue on in higher education. If I ever find myself in the privileged position to teach a seminar course, her approach along with that of Neeladri’s are ones I will definitely emulate.  I have also found a peer mentor in a friend in the history department in a close-by institution who has been very supportive. It is not as if the decision to spend a good chunk of your life, if not the entirety of it, working in a field is an easy one. There are, you must understand, opportunity costs, constant impostor syndrome, inertia over reaching out to individuals and networks whose responses to your vulnerabilities is something you cannot measure. But as long as I can find others who understand that community is central, that those who learn are vulnerable, and that professional relationships too can and should have horizontal sensibility to them, I think I will be fine. 

(1) as I wrote “enjoying learning” I realized that many might argue that enjoying it is not important, doing it well is. To this I say, please read on. I take the affective as important in shaping any work that we do. It important in understanding why it is that we do what we do and the meanings we give to it. In other words, emotive descriptions are a way of meaning-making.