Politics, Popular Culture, Poststructuralism

Where Am I Going in this Handbasket, Anyway? Or, Dissertation Blog #1

2011-12-21T08:34:00.002-06:00

Though that the little sidebar over there on the right says that this blog is a place to preview things I'm working on, it hasn't ever been so far. However, in a week when no current events or pop culture topics stand out to me (though as Bradley Manning's Gender Identity Disorder defense broke this morning, too late to blog, I was nevertheless tempted), and I'm going to be traveling on Blog Thursday anyway, I thought I'd give it a go.

I've recently finished reading two very smart dissertations, Julie Levin Russo's Indiscrete Media: Television/Digital Convergence and Economies of Online Lesbian Fan Communities and Suzanne Scott's Revenge of the Fanboy: Convergence Culture and the Politics of Incorporation.

These are scholars I personally know and respect and thinkers after my own heart. So much after my own heart, in fact, that my reading of their dissertations was punctuated by bouts of fear that one or the other of them—or both!—had already written what I wanted to say in mine.

Both are interested in the interface of fandom and industry, like me. They are wary, rather than uncritically enthusiastic, about the impact of digital technology, like me. They are concerned about the role of capital in contemporary fandom, especially as labor—like me. Among the objects in all three dissertations is Battlestar Galactica's website and video maker. That's a lot in common.

And, I suppose I could look at it as: If three dissertations, produced across the country (East Coast, West Coast, Midwest), with no more than minimal collegial interaction (like, I had already planned to look at certain issues before I got around to doing this reading, and we haven't really discussed it—maybe Julie and Suzanne were in closer touch), are doing this work, then maybe that means it's just time for these questions to be asked.

But I don't entirely have the luxury of just celebrating the fact that other people have noticed the things I care about. The scholarly project, as currently defined in the U.S. anyway, is to produce something new, that no one has said, and differentiate it from what people have said before. For my dissertation to be seen as valid, then, it has to be different from Julie and Suzanne, so when those moments of "OMG, she wrote my dissertation!" came over me, I would take a moment to figure out how I differed.

Here's what I came up with.

I am, first, way more of a Foucaultian than either of them. What I find interesting about contemporary practices of "embracing" fandom (or, at least, how I frame it) is the way that the waning of repressive power—saying "no" through cease-and-desists, say—looks like no power at all. But of course it still is power. It's just productive power—inciting and normalizing certain behaviors and practices, and in so doing producing fandom.

To those whose behavior is incited and within the norm, it looks like a free-for-all, but at the margins—often produced through gender (Scott) and sexuality (Russo)—the seams show. We scholars can see around the edges, then (and so can some fans, to provisionally accept a standpoint, "the oppressed can see the system better" argument that I'm not sure I totally buy).

Recognizing, then, that what's in that middle, normative space is constructed and partial and benefits industry/capital way more than fans, if the cultural status of fandom has shifted in the internet era, what is it now? How does mainstream American culture make sense of this concept "fan"?

When we see fans on our television or cinema screens, who are they and what do they do? If they're no longer automatically murderers (which I'll be the first to admit is an improvement), that doesn't mean that what they are now doesn't matter—so what's the meaning of this concept that we see representationally constructed?

When industry extends a hand to fans, who do they reach out to? What do they invite them to do? What do they think a fan is? And, with the much-vaunted capacity of the internet to make things possible, what actually becomes a possibility? When industry invites fans to come play, what does that consist of? What do official websites afford or not afford, and how is that implicitly an argument about who fans are and what they do?

Rather than looking at specific texts or cultures of fandom, as Russo and Scott do (exceedingly well), my aim is to assess the cultural field of meaning surrounding the idea "fan" by tracing how it gets deployed across the mediascape in fictional and nonfictional representation and by industry in web design and their own conceptualization of the term.

And rather than asking how industry practice matches up (or doesn't) to existing fandoms, I turn the question a different direction: With this productive power, what is "fan" being produced as?

And that seems different enough, and to produce enough of a different set of knowledge, to be worth doing despite the great things that have already been done.

Of Hate Crimes, Livable Lives, and Taking a Stand

2011-12-15T09:49:00.002-06:00

On Wednesday, December 6, 2012, at 5:44am, a white guy leapt on a South Asian man in the train station in Champaign, IL, shouting something about this being his (the white guy's) country—exact verbiage hasn't been clear.

The white guy, identified by local news outlet the News-Gazette as 23-year-old Joshua Scaggs of Fithian, IL, then proceeded to choke the non-white guy, identified as University of Illinois law professor Dhammika Dharmapala, and cut him with a utility knife, opening a "six-inch cut on his throat which bled profusely."

Scaggs was arrested for a hate crime, but ultimately charged with "attempted murder and two counts of aggravated battery"; the prosecuting attorney "opted not to file it [the hate crime charge] because the other charges carry heavier penalties and he's confident he can prove the aggravated battery based on the information he has."

Clearly, the hate crime law is not written in a useful way here. It's not an add-on that increases the severity of any crime, but a separate charge. Somewhere, in an article I can't find now, somebody involved on the prosecutorial side of this said that usually the hate crime gets prosecuted with misdemeanors like vandalism or theft, indicating that the penalty attached to a hate crime is worse than that but less than aggravated battery.

This was surprising to me, because I feel like most hate crime laws are written as the tack-on variety—"Now, with 15% more sentencing!" And, I don't know how I feel about that.

I mean, on one hand, the things one is doing while committing a hate crime are generally already illegal. And, as the prosecutor noted in the quote above, it's often hard to prove intent enough to get a conviction.

Therefore, I'm not totally on board with hate crime legislation. I certainly don't think that attempts to put it on the books should be the be-all and end-all of activism (you hear me, LGBT nonprofits?), not least because I'm wary of constructing such positions as inherently, unlivably vulnerable to violence in the process.

Though of course, this case seems pretty clear cut. It's quite evident that "this is my country" meant "it's not yours" or "you don't belong here"—and that it was racially motivated. Dhammapala was visibly different from Scaggs' idea of "his country." It's not plain xenophobia, that is, because a German-born person, say, wouldn't have produced that same visual trigger. And neither would a person of African descent, whether first generation or eighteenth (Slavery in America estimates 12 generations from the first Africans to the end of slavery; Racematters.org says there have been 6 generations since).

So, even though a racist imaginary would think of the default "American" as white, it would also readily identify a black person as American in a way that East Asians, South Asians, Arabs, and Latinos don't get—as my Asian-American friends who get drunk fratboys ching-chong-ing in their faces or assuming they don’t speak English can attest. So, race is more complex than the usual American reduction to black and white, but it's still pretty relevant and this was still an attack motivated by racial hatred.

Moreover, the fact that juries apparently don’t buy it when prosecutors argue that crimes were prejudice-based deserves critique as an instance where attempts to redress structural inequalities become figured as "special rights."

This, then, brings me to the other hand, which is that it is structural inequality that makes hate crime possible. Some people are seen as less important, less worthy, and indeed less human than others, and—when you get somebody crazy enough—members of certain groups make more cultural sense as targets. Given that, a structural solution seems reasonable.

That is, though I'm not sure anyone has ever shown that increased hate-crime penalties serve as a deterrent for people who for whatever reason translate social devaluation into a hunting license, it does make a statement that, as a society, we don't find such hunting acceptable.

In this way, hate-crime legislation, simply by existing, perhaps lessens the devaluation that starts the cycle. The challenge, then, is to prevent that devaluation from being replaced by a pervasive, uninhabitably-terror-inducing sense of vulnerability. We also have to not let the framing of a group in the law as not-attackable be framed as "special rights" rather than as a corrective to actual special rights already enjoyed by other groups.

And we certainly have to contest the response to such incidents in platitudes—the email from University of Illinois President Michael Hogan to the so-called campus community ways called for a renewal of "our commitment to tolerance" and requested that "we all take a moment to remember that compassion is our greatest virtue and that we are united together in a wish for healing and understanding in the wake of such a tragic incident."

This is real. This is serious. It demands more of a response than this. "We," whoever we are, are quite evidently not "united" and don't have "understanding." It's not an" incident" but the product of a system. And don't even get me started on the implicit superiority of the tolerate-r over the tolerate-d (because I know I go on about it all the time; just check out Wendy Brown's Regulating Aversion).

With vapid and condescending responses like this, hate crime laws start to look better and better.

Taking Advantage of Rachel in Glee's "The First Time"

2011-12-08T11:00:00.008-06:00

I'm a little behind on watching Glee. Really, I'm perpetually behind on all TV; I don’t think there's been a time since Star Trek: Voyager went off the air that I tuned in to watch something in a regularly scheduled time slot—not least because that was the point when I stopped having regular access to TV.

No TV, plus a number of other factors, mean that I am late to the party on discussing Glee's "The First Time" episode, which aired on November 8, 2011. But it annoyed me enough that I'm going to write about it anyway.

The episode has gotten some positive press because it depicts gay teens making the same virginity-losing decisions as heterosexual ones, rah-rah once again Ryan Murphy makes the world safe for people like him.

Though, in their defense, I think that the decision to be really vague about both the heterosexual and homosexual sex scene avoided the whole problem of the double standard whereby a much lower bar for what's offensive exists for gay sex than heterosex, so yay for that.

Glee tends to do an ok job representing white gay men—Kurt is a little stereotypical, but to some extent that's because they cast Chris Colfer and that's how he is, so I'm ok with it—but a pretty horrendous job with everybody else.

In particular, in this episode, the character of Rachel is done a disservice--and through her, so are teen girls.

Rachel has very clear plans for herself, such as moving to New York City, attending the fictional New York Academy of the Dramatic Arts, starring on Broadway, etc. One of these plans, the series has established, is not to have sex until she's 25. In "Grilled Cheesus" (2.02), Rachel and Finn have this exchange:

Rachel: I need to know that when I’m 25, and have won a bunch of Tonys, and I’m ready to have intercourse and babies, that those babies will be raised in a certain way.

Finn: You’re really not going to have sex until you're 25?

The show has enough continuity that this is referenced again in "The First Time" (3.05)

Finn: Why now? The last time we talked about this you said you wanted to wait until you won a Tony.

Rachel: Or any other major award. Emmy, Golden Globe. People’s Choice would’ve gotten you to third base.

Now, I'm not claiming that this is a good plan, necessarily. It's indicative of someone who underestimates the power of social norms on them and overestimates their own control of their life to be able to plan so far out. It is, that is, the plan of someone quite young, as Rachel is.

But Rachel, over and over in the show, is someone who sticks to her guns. She decides what she thinks is right and she goes for it wholeheartedly. And, especially if it has to do with her career, god help you if you get in her way. This person would totally believably have sex to further her acting ability, despite Brett Berk's contention in Vanity Fair's "Gay Guide to Glee" entry that

as desperate, conniving, and monomaniacal as Rachel is about advancing her acting career, it is neither believable nor even amusing to imagine that she might be “convinced” to try out intercourse in order to better her portrayal of a character like Maria in the high-school production of West Side Story. (It is, in fact, grotesque.)

Grotesque it may be, or "supremely stupid, even considering 'Glee’s' tenuous tether to reality," as Mark A. Perigard described it at BostonHerald.com, but it is actually pretty believable because it's congruent with the Rachel who sent exchange student Sunshine Corazon to a crack house because she felt threatened by her talent.

However, for all her selfishness, Rachel can be selfless too. In 1.13, after telling Finn that Quinn had misled him to think that her pregnancy was his child (for selfish reasons), she was genuinely sorry and offered to let Quinn hit her if it made her feel better. Rachel organized interfaith prayer with one glee club member who tolerates her (Mercedes) and one who verges on hatred (Quinn) when Kurt's dad Burt had a heart attack in 2.02.

She arranged with Finn to throw the duets competition in 2.04—unexpected from the super-competitive, rival-sabotaging Rachel—so that new member Sam could win and feel welcomed to the team. In 3.06, Rachel withdrew from the class president election in order to help Kurt's chances at winning and thus help him get into NYADA.

This Rachel might well have been selfless enough to offer her virginity to Finn as a consolation prize for losing out on his football dreams.

But the writers shouldn't have gone through with it. Not like that. Because, at least under our culture's odd relationship to sex (which the show seems to share), the first time is supposed to be a special event for Rachel, but in this episode it wasn’t even about her.

And, like, I'll admit that as a Faberry shipper (Rachel and Quinn) Finchel (Rachel and Finn) is objectionable all by itself, but I have a more specific critique of Finn here. Even in this episode when we'd imagine Finn will be set up as a good boyfriend so that he "deserves" the ending, he feeds Rachel, a vegan, actual meat. And then doesn’t confess. And then takes advantage of Rachel's sympathy for him.

That's pretty horrifying, and that fact has gotten missed in the discussion about the show, at times glaringly so, as when Jerome Wetzel of Examiner.com concludes that there's nothing more to critique after the have-sex-for-acting plot is resolved, commenting that "once Rachel and Blaine stop trying so hard and enjoy being in their respective relationships, sex does happen for each." Blaine and Kurt do indeed "do the deed" out of enjoying being with each other, but not Rachel.

And, you know, I get it. Kids make bad decisions. I know I made some. And they make the decision to have sex for worse reasons than wanting to comfort their partner. As Vanity Fair's Berk reminds us, "an overwhelming physical desire for Finn, or some socially motivated goal of impressing her friends" would have been more in line with "the two core incentives for teens." And like Berk, "I appreciated that she, as the girl, was the instigator" rather than the usual storyline of "boy pressures girl."

But if Glee is trying to do the Very Special Episode shtick, they needed to do better. Because I, too, "wish I could un-see that Endless Love remake these two created in front of the fireplace at the Hudson/Hummels, and un-hear Rachel’s creepy pledge to 'give Finn something no one else will ever get'" (Berk).

I wish they hadn't even filmed it. I wish they had written Finn differently so that he wouldn't take advantage of Rachel's moment of generosity. I wish they themselves hadn't taken advantage of the character of Rachel. Because that just replicates in the structure of the episode that story of girls being pressured into sex for reasons that have nothing to do with them that they tried to avoid in the narrative itself.

Harry Potter and the Screaming Teens, Or Dr. "Edward Who?"

2011-12-01T10:35:00.002-06:00

So, uh, I don't know if you heard about this, but there's this Twilight movie thing? With, like, sparkly vampires and stuff? And the latest installment came out recently? People were camping out and everything.

(They didn't get treated like those other people taking up public space by camping out, though. Apparently, camping out places is a sometimes crime, like cookies are a sometimes food, and, like Occupy Best Buy, waiting to spend money is A-OK!)

But of course, unless you've been living under a rock, you have heard of Twilight, and you have been aware of the level of devotion exhibited by fans of the series—exemplified by the camping-out behavior.

Indeed, Twilight fans are routinely the object of ridicule and hatred for the apparent excesses of their love for the books and film series and the personnel involved (actors Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, and Taylor Lautner and author Stephenie Meyer).

For example, when looking for readily available internet commentary on the difference between OWS and Twilight for the aside above, I found a Facebook status message suggesting that the poster was going to "try setting up occupy wall street signs at my local movie theater in hopes that the police will beat and arrest all the twilight nuts camping out," which is, perhaps regrettably, fairly typical.

Before I go on, full disclosure: I haven't seen or read Twilight. My exposure to the franchise has consisted of news reports and teaching Buffy vs. Edward every semester (Sometimes twice if I guest lecture. I've also been known to show it at parties). I have a group of students making a video about Twilight this semester, though, so perhaps I will soon be educated.

Nevertheless, by means of this indirect consumption of Twilight I have gathered that there's a lot to critique about the way the franchise frames gender, heterosexual romance, and sexual activity. It is apparent that the text has a lot of problems, but from what I can tell it's not markedly worse in this respect than other popular teen romances—or, indeed, much of the rest of media.

Okay, so Twilight fans are imagined as hysterical, weeping, teenage, female masses, and this deserves analysis all on its own. That is, though this fits into longstanding traditions identified by Joli Jensen in her now-classic 1992 piece "Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization," the usual story is that stereotyping fans is a thing of the past, as I explained in "Fans Turn to Bomb Threats": Journalists Turn to Stereotypes, so when these same old narratives crop up again we should take that seriously.

What I find really interesting, however, is not that this happens in general, but something much more particular, something I felt compelled to write about after being retweeted two things:

Lord_Voldemort7 The Dark Lord

Dear people (women) attending Breaking Dawn at midnight.... THIS is why you're alone every other night at midnight.

HipsterDalek hipster dalek

IF THE DOCTOR REALLY WANTED TO SAVE HUMANITY, HE'D GO BACK IN TIME AND STOP "TWILIGHT" FROM BEING PUBLISHED.

I have, for a while, been intrigued by the times when fans go around hating other fans, starting with some trends that emerged in my MA Thesis (which apparently has a Google Books entry! Pardon the excessive alliteration. It seemed like a good idea 5 years ago when I named the thing).

But when I got two separate Twilight-disparaging tweets, from two different people, encompassing two other fandoms in the scifi/fantasy speculative fiction spectrum, it seemed like time to take it on.

So, what do these tweets tell us about the cultural meaning of Twilight? People who would attend Breaking Dawn at midnight are women, and they are alone "every other night at midnight"—because they have no family, or no friends, or (most likely given the trope) can't get a boyfriend. Moreover, Twilight is a scourge on humanity from which we should be saved.

But again, this is standard enough in making sense of things beloved by teenage girls in general and Twilight in particular. What's really interesting is who we learn it from, and how.

Here we have the humorous Twitter accounts created for a Harry Potter character and a Dr. Who character, the deployment of which involves imagining what these characters might say about current events and writing the tweets they might write. In some sense, this involves inhabiting or becoming the character, if only temporarily. It definitely involves having extensive knowledge of the object of fandom, to conjure the voice of the character accurately.

It is, then, a practice that requires fandom, both in the execution and in the inclination to do such a thing in the first place. Moreover, Harry Potter and Dr. Who are themselves objects whose fans are often subjected to ridicule as losers under the same set of stereotypes about who fans are that they're deploying against Twilight.

That's pretty strange. The same people who would surely dispute that Harry Potter and Dr. Who fans are excessively emotional, inappropriately sexual losers are fully willing to not only accept but actively promote the idea that Twilight fans are exactly that.

What this suggests, then, is that not only are anti-fan stereotypes alive and well, but that the very people who are ridiculed by them are complicit in their reproduction. They just think that they apply to someone else.

Vodka Tampons and Myth-Based Moral Panics

2011-11-23T08:20:00.003-06:00

When I saw the headline "Vodka Tampons & Butt Chugging Growing Trend With Teenagers," my first thought was that it was a story from satirical newspaper The Onion that had been mistaken for real news.

This has happened before. As the Wikipedia article on The Onion points out, it actually happens with surprising frequency. Most of the examples they have of "The Onion taken seriously" are from international news outlets, the employees of which might be excused for missing the subtleties of satire in second languages. But large-scale U.S-based sources have done it too, like Fox News subsidiary Fox Nation in November 2010 believing, predictably, a piece mocking Barack Obama's tendency toward the verbose.

Even the Grey Lady herself has been taken in, including a spoofed cover of Tiger Beat among real covers in an April 2011 discussion of the magazine's trajectory over the years.

So, with something as self-evidently ridiculous as "vodka tampons and butt chugging," it seemed a foregone conclusion that it was a satirical commentary on the panic we have over youth alcohol use.

Except that it wasn't. It was just an example of the panic we have over youth alcohol use, delivered with a completely straight face by KPHO in Phoenix and distributed farther by several other news outlets.

The story alleges that teenagers are a) soaking tampons in vodka and then inserting them in their vaginas or rectums and b) undergoing alcohol enemas because, they say, these means of imbibing prevent alcohol breath and get them drunk faster.

Now, the mechanics of this have been debunked by several people. Tiny Cat Pants points out that cardboard tampon applicators would be destroyed, the tampon would swell enough to render plastic applicators unusable, applicator-less tampons would be quite difficult to get in wet, and, well, this is worth quoting in its entirety:

in the interest of science, I then ran one of the tampons against the mucous membrane on the inside of my mouth. It was both very cold and burned, which, I imagine, would be a most unpleasant feeling as whoever was aiding you in the administration of vodka-soaked tampons shoved the limp, soggy, shape-changing, burning, and yet very cold thing inside you, or attempted to. I’m honestly not sure the incredibly cold feeling might not cause some uncontrollable clenching which would then make the insertion or removal of the tampon something of a nightmare.

It has also been debunked, somewhat less colorfully, by the authoritative source on contemporary mythology, Snopes.com. This is before we get to the social anxiety that putting anything—even alcohol—up one's butt would cause to no-homo-ing, "dude, you're a fag-ing young men.

The moral of the story is that clearly teens aren't doing this. What's interesting, then, isn't the strange new imbibing process—since it doesn't exist (and isn't new: Snopes notes that this rumor has been in circulation since at least 1999)—but rather the fact that people found it believable enough that it traveled the way it did.

In order to believe in vodka tampons and butt chugging, you have to not think about the physics of expanding tampons and liquid absorption, the biology of alcohol on mucous membranes and clenching when things are cold, and the social challenges of needing someone to help you put alcohol into your digestive tract in reverse. That's a lot of obstacles.

So how does it happen?

Well, it turns out that the most powerful force in the universe is American adults' belief that youths are recklessly, stupidly hedonistic. We think they can't handle alcohol responsibly, so we forbid it to them way later than in other parts of the world and then spend high school and parts of college policing it.

The trouble is, this is somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the argument they get is "no alcohol for you!" it becomes more exciting because it's forbidden at the same time that we deny them education and supervised practice with using it correctly. This is quite evidently a recipe for disaster—and the problems that kids run into show that it's a high-yield one.

So, far from being an epidemic of dangerous alcohol use, "vodka tampons and butt chugging" is an opportunity. It's a textbook case of this panic, first. But second, it's transparently false enough when approached with any skepticism or with any sort of measured response that it points out the absurdity of other iterations, even those that are more subtle.

And once we recognize this as a myth, it becomes easier to ask what social purpose this myth serves for us, and with what consequences. And then maybe come up with a saner response.

And if we wanted to do something saner than abstinence only in sex while we're at it, that'd be good too. Sociologist Amy Schalet has some ideas garnered from a comparative study of the U.S. and the Netherlands.

"Fans Turn to Bomb Threats": Journalists Turn to Stereotypes

2011-11-16T08:50:00.007-06:00

In his 2006 book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins applauds the fact that since he began his research, “I have watched fans move from the invisible margins of popular culture and into the center of current thinking about media production and consumption” (p. 12).

In Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, a volume of collected essays from the same year, Jenkins describes fans being "marginal to the operations of occur culture, ridiculed in the media, shrouded with social stigma, pushed underground by legal threat, and often depicted as brainless and inarticulate" in the past tense, as something that has been superseded in contemporary culture (p. 1).

Nancy Baym's 2007 article "The New Shape of Online Community: The Example of Swedish Independent Music Fandom" makes an even larger assertion that “fandom is a harbinger of cultural phenomena to come” and “online fan communities now sit at the cutting edge of ‘consumer culture.’”

Similar sentiments have been expressed by numerous other scholars, starting in around 2006, but these two authors can stand in for the larger group since they give me good soundbites. And it's a compelling argument. All kinds of intensive involvement with media objects is now entirely reasonable, if not expected. While I have my own problems with that (hello, unpaid labor! Shameless self promo time: I'm guest editing a special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on F andom and/as Labor), it does seem to be a step up from running away screaming from one's fan base.

But let's not kid ourselves. "Fan" still means "freak" and "crazy" and "pathological" and often "violent" an awful lot of the time, to an awful lot of people.

You know how I know? These headlines, from November 9, 2011: "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 fan threatens to blow up Best Buy " and "'Modern Warfare 3' Fans Turn to Bomb Threats, Dramatic Heists "

We get these stories because this is what we culturally expect of fans. This isn't to say that people didn't actually do these things. I don't doubt that, as the Forbes piece reported, two different shipments of the game in France were actually "robbed at gunpoint." I'm sure Lomorin Sar of Aurora, Colorado really did go crazy when denied his copy of the game and threaten to kill the store's employees and blow up the building.

But it is equally true that those shipments contained "thousands of copies of the game worth hundreds of thousands of Euros." That is, the thieves could have just been out to make a quick buck, but somehow they become fans rather than just some people seeking to appropriate other people's property for their own gain.

Similarly, Mr. Sar, Slashgear reports, "has had at least six other run-ins with police over traffic violations – apparently memorable enough to have been listed in police records – hot head!" He's a violent guy. He seems to blow up at the slightest provocation, like a traffic ticket. But the headline didn't read "Known violent, crazy guy is violent and crazy." It read "fan threatens to blow up Best Buy."

In light of this rhetorical equivalence, I have to look at those "fans have been mainstreamed" arguments and say "Cool story, bro."

And perhaps you're saying to yourself, "Wait, weren't you just calling out fans the other week for being racist, and now you're defending them against being called violent?" (I'm going to interpellate you as a regular reader, mmkay?) This might seem like a contradiction, but it isn't. I can both call attention to the less savory aspects of fan culture and try to protect them from stigma.

That's because, like I discussed last week about the sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain, there's a difference between attributing bad behavior to someone solely on the basis of their category membership and not being able to critique bad behavior at all when someone in a less-privileged category engages in it. I both want to protect fans from unfair critique and to speak the truth to or about them when things they do aren't okay, even if that's unpleasant.

So, the bomb-threat guy didn't make those threats because he's a fan any more than Herman Cain (allegedly) sexually harassed women because he's a black man. But Cain is still responsible for his (alleged) actions as an individual abusing his power, and the fans who produced the "This is not who I am and this is not okay" poster about the daleks are responsible for their actions trivializing racism.

Those things can all be true at the same time. Life's complicated like that.

Herman Cain and Sexual Harassment, Or: Why we Still need Intersectionality

2011-11-09T10:02:00.001-06:00

Reports that Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain was accused of sexually harassing some women in the mid-1990s, accusations that were settled out of court at the time, have been at the top of Google News for at least a week now.

The headline slid down a little when Andy Rooney died and to make way for election results, but never "below the fold," not least because the number of women allegedly harassed has continued to grow—four at last count. This has seemingly become the only story in the 2012 campaign.

My first instinct is to be sick to death of sex scandals. Far too often (and ever doing it is too much for me) people's fitness to hold office is assessed on the basis of having sex other people disapprove of. I get annoyed when substantive issues get shoved aside in favor of tabloid-esque coverage.

Of course, it's not a great first instinct, since that's not what's going on here, as sexual harassment is categorically different from an affair or sexting or gay sex with consensual adult partners—the things other politicians have found to end their careers.

Indeed, some of the coverage, in particular one opinion piece that got me fired up enough to write this blog in the first place, shows why, as much as it shouldn't be the only story, the accusations against Cain should be a story. Joe Klein of Time argues that "fleeting moments of human frailty, especially of the testosterone-addled kind, are inevitable and should remain private, absent extenuating circumstances (like physical assault). I’m generally opposed to the press setting moral standards that most of us can’t meet"

No, no. No no no. Just, no.

Assuming you have a right of access to other people's bodies is not "human frailty," nor is it "inevitable." Nor is refraining from doing so a "moral standard" that anyone should have trouble meeting as much as what's required by basic human decency. Having testosterone, however much it might "addle" you, does not give you a free pass. Physical assault is not the only kind of inappropriate behavior for which one should be called out, and keeping abuses of power private does little to discourage them.

Klein adds, "Yes, sexual harassment is different from general poking around since it is a form of aggressive behavior–but it is also more difficult to prove (although the two women in question received cash settlements from the Restaurant Association, which means that we’re probably dealing with some form of industrial-strength obnoxiousness here)."

Seriously, you're going to defend something you call "general poking around" as not a form of aggressive behavior? See above re: assumption of a right of access.

That's before we even get to the echo of the old assumption that women tend to make up sexual assault, and the fact that Klein contains this with the mention that there were settlements and "industrial-strength obnoxiousness" doesn't make up for that suggestion. Yes, of course women might say this happened even if it's not true, because they are treated so well when they come forward and being violated is so easy to talk about.

All of this points to why it's vital that this conversation be had, not just with Cain, but with any case where there's this sort of question of coercion or hostile work environment or power differential. First, if people hear this often enough, they'll get the idea that it's not an acceptable way to behave. And second, if it's true, it's something people have a right to know before they go electing someone to the highest office in the land.

Because yes, I'll come out and argue that if Cain is, in fact, a harasser he's not fit to run the country. Importantly, again, it's not just because there's a sex scandal—I am a firm believer in the fact that any kind of sex anybody wants to have with other consenting adults is perfectly acceptable even if I personally find it revolting.

But there aren't consenting adults here; what makes a sexual harasser unfit for duty is the abuse of power it represents. That's where the problem lies. That's why that person shouldn't be given any more power and should possibly lose the position they had that they decided to abuse in the first place.

Of course, it is totally reasonable to argue against the way in which the news has come to focus on this to the exclusion of all other topics. As Klein points out, "there is far more important business–like Herman’s Cain prohibitive lack of knowledge about almost every relevant issue–to be discussed." There needs to be more substantive debate about Cain—and someone needs to remember that there are other candidates, two or three of them still serious contenders.

But then there's the elephant in the room (har, har). This sexual harassment case isn't just an issue of gender (which isn't to imply that it ever is, but it sometimes gets treated as such); it's also bound up in issues of race.

"The notion of black man as sexual predator is a particularly toxic stereotype–and it may intensify the self-righteous satisfaction some Republicans are getting from supporting a conservative black man for President. As in: those liberals pretend to be pro-black, but every time a Clarence Thomas or Herman Cain comes down the pike, they throw sex at him."

On one hand, I'm deeply uneasy with the ways in which that "toxic stereotype" probably has a whole lot more to do with the wall-to-wall coverage of this Cain story than the journalists and readers want to admit. The story makes sense to run and catches people's attention because it meshes with this idea.

There is something deeply worrisome about this being the basis on which African-American republicans are undermined. That's a reason to resist the frenzy—though as stated above I don't think there's any reason not to talk about the issue altogether.

On the other hand, there's a problem when race and gender get pitted against each other like this. Thinking back to Clarence Thomas—an obvious precedent—there was this weird thing where somehow Anita Hill had to either have solidarity with (implicitly white) feminists and call out Thomas's misconduct or have solidarity with African-Americans and keep quiet so that there could be a black Supreme Court justice.

Here again, there's some implicit demand to either not critique Cain—what the right is implicitly saying "liberals" ought to do if they are really "pro-black"—or be take a stand against sexual harassment if one is really "pro-woman."

The problem is that, as many an intersectional theorist and woman of color feminist has argued, you can't separate out those things. You're not black plus a woman, so it's not one or the other. It's also not one or the other in critiquing the behavior of such an African-American man.

The weight of history makes this tricky to navigate: the "myth of the black rapist" relies on the assumption of black men as less civilized, less controlled, and having outsized sexual urges, and I know that this is bound up, to greater or lesser extent, with the Herman Cain Sexual Harassment Extravaganza of 2011. I don't want to perpetuate the myth even as I say Cain's not fit to lead if the accusations are true.

We have to call out the racist logics that make this a "good" story—i.e. exciting—even as we insist that it is still an important story. A pretty tall order, but I think it's possible.

Fandom and the Myth of Oppressed People Points

2011-11-02T09:27:00.010-05:00

Tagging the archive of P3 entries made me realize I have a lot fewer blogs about fandom—you know, my primary academic interest—than just about anything else. Now, the fact that I often blog on the basis of current events that catch my attention (next week, Herman Cain and sexual harassment) has something to do with this, of course, but it's still an unfortunate situation.

And then, just as I was thinking this and wracking my brains for something not only timely but interesting to say about fans, a fan-related blog topic fell into my lap. And that would be awesome if it weren't for what it was.

To start, I love fans. I am a fan. I'm totally aware that fans are often misrepresented through a focus on the fan practices that are most nonnormative in relation to non-fan culture, and it makes me want to protect them. But sometimes fans do something awful and indefensible—and, in this case, racist—and it makes me feel terrible but I have to call them out on it.

It all started when I saw something about the "We're a culture, not a costume" project. I feel like it was on Twitter, but I can't find it now so maybe I saw it on Google News. (If I got it from you, tell me so I can give you credit!)

In this campaign, the Students Teaching Against Racism in Society (STARS) organization at Ohio University produced a series of posters urging people to rethink their Halloween costume choices. Each had a student who's a member of a particular racial or ethnic group holding up a picture of a Halloween costume that purports to allow people to pretend to be a member of that group.

Predictably, we see Asian woman = geisha, Middle Eastern or Muslim man = terrorist, and a "gangsta" white girl in blackface (or black-body, as all of her visible skin is brown-ed). The captions say, "This is not who I am, and this is not okay." Bonus: @BobbyBigWheel made a handy flowchart to help you decide whether to wear blackface on Halloween (via the ever-fabulous @Halfrican_One)

The STARS campaign is a really powerful statement about the harm done by stereotyping and reducing an entire group of people to the most offensive denominator. (There is, a typo showed me, revealing wordplay in there somewhere about demon-inator.) I think one of these posters should be made and distributed at my campus to jolt the student body out of their largely unreflexive support of the retired Chief Illiniwek mascot.

And then, some science fiction fans turned around and made a "This is not who I am and this is not okay" poster showing a Dr. Who dalek and some women dressed as "sexy daleks."

To suggest that "misrepresenting" a fictitious species of villains is equivalent to misrepresenting an actual group that has materially suffered as a result of white supremacy, as tumblr user tarynaria notes, "undermines the impact of the original campaign: namely pointing out racist Halloween costumes (or costume party costumes) as racist."

She adds, "it’s rude and disrespectful to those involved in the campaign," because to make this joke is to "tell them that their voices don’t matter." This poster, as a response to the STARS set, indicates that its maker doesn't care about the message the original was trying to get across. It frames the racism of the costumes as either as trivial or as made up by people who are overly sensitive.

(Also, bonus awfulness points for reinforcing the idea that women's science fiction costuming is always insincere or "pandering" and attempting to be sexy. I don't think the these things are unrelated.)

Implying that racism is trivial or a product of excessive sensitivity are classic tactics of white dismissal of race as a relevant category. They're even on the Fantasy and Science Fiction Bingo, No Racism in Fiction edition card! And the fact that this poster as a response to an important argument about racism in costuming made sense not only to produce but to reblog across fandom (it got to me via a tweet by a scifi fan) makes the assumption of default whiteness within fandom glaring.

This, of course, is at odds with the way that fandom is frequently characterized as a space where the culturally downtrodden can make media work for them. Though there have certainly been critiques of the argument and attempts to nuance it, mostly what we hear is that fandom is resistant to norms. Fans are the heroic underdog rebels struggling against the Evil Corporate Empire.

And there's a certain amount of truth to this. Fans are actually perpetually under threat of legal challenge from corporate media capital.

In addition, the fans who engage in the kind of fandom most often noticed in fan studies are mostly women. Fairly often (at least, out of proportion with the rest of the population), they're queer, either in the sense of having same-sex desire or by breaking norms of sexuality more generally. Fans do absolutely resist and rework norms of gender and sexuality from a subordinate position in the schema of normativity.

In these ways, yes, fans are underdogs and resistant and available to champion. The problem comes when we have an insufficiently intersectional understanding of what constitutes oppression. Yes, fans are downtrodden in some ways, but that doesn't excuse them from treading on others by other criteria.

That is, if Glee creator Ryan Murphy has a case of Gay White Man Syndrome, lots of fans and fan scholars have White Fan Syndrome, and we need to call it out.

Here's where the Myth of Oppressed People Points comes in. There's a pervasive sense that if a person is her- or himself oppressed in any way, they get a pass for oppressing others. As I put it when discussing Glee, this is like saying “I understand what it’s like to be discriminated against as a woman because I’m gay” or “I can’t be racist, I’m gay!”

Those statements are patently absurd, but so is it absurd to claim "I can't be racist, I'm downtrodden as a fan!" Because clearly people can.

There's fairly widespread awareness and critique of the default maleness of fandom in the popular and industrial imaginary and the ways in which that's exclusionary for women. I raised it in my blog about Comic-Con 2011's "Sexy Geek" Panel. Suzanne Scott pointed it out when blogging about that incident before me as well as in her excellent dissertation Revenge of the Fanboy: Convergence Culture and the Politics of Incorporation (especially the conclusion).

You can also see this in Henry Jenkins's discussion of fan viding vs. fan films in Convergence Culture and in Julie Levin Russo's careful articulation of the specificity of femslash fandom in her Indiscrete Media: Television/Digital Convergence and Economies of Online Lesbian Fan Communities. The point (besides a chance to show off that I've been reading a lot lately), is that people get that gender is a factor in fandom.

However, race has not received anything like the same attention. I actually had to put down a fan studies article recently lest I fling it across the room because it so totally ignored the obvious role race played in the phenomenon it was discussing.

In fact, so far the only academic attention to this that I've seen is a 2009 Symposium section in Transformative Works and Cultures called Pattern Recognition: A Dialogue on Racism in Fan Communities, though I know that there's a special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on Race and Ethnicity in Fandom coming out later this month because I'm published in it.

The dalek poster reemphasizes why this work is necessary. We can love fans and celebrate the way that they are resistant, sure. What we can't do is get so caught up in our love and our underdog narrative that we can't see when they aren't so lovable or downtrodden. It's our responsibility to critique fan practices when that's necessary. There are no Oppressed People Points, just intersecting systems of privilege.

What's up with Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party? #OWS

2011-10-26T09:19:00.003-05:00

When I first started contemplating this blog entry two weeks ago and change, Occupy Wall Street was barely news. The accusations that the mainstream media and Twitter were suppressing it were only very recently becoming past as it started to be more publicized. (I'm satisfied that it wasn't covered up. The Twitter censorship claim's been pretty well debunked, and the national news media probably didn't think it was going to be much of a thing until it became one.)

And it seemed pretty obvious to me right away that Occupy Wall Street could be, at least in part, described as a left-wing Tea Party. Now, to describe it in that particular way is to instantiate the Tea Party and the right wing as the default, but in that the Tea Party came chronologically first that's not totally unreasonable.

Oddly, this didn't seem obvious to anyone else. House Majority Leader and Tea Party ally Eric Cantor (R-VA), in fact, called Occupy Wall Street a "mob" (and then, as in that particular article, caught flak for it). And right-ish New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg (he was a Democrat, then a Republican, then Independent, but he's obscenely wealthy enough to be worried by the kinds of arguments they're making) was anything but sympathetic. Recently, he's been promising to increase arrests.

It was perhaps unsurprising that the Tea Party themselves would resist this comparison, as indeed they did, because it would undermine them as the go-to for populist anger.

But what I didn't anticipate was the level of hatred in the rhetoric the Tea Party used in rejecting the similarity. Mark Meckler of Tea Party Patriots, in a Politico opinion piece, said that the comparison "bothers me because it groups millions of patriotic tea partiers, who want to build America back up, together with a bunch of criminals who want to tear America down."

Wait, seriously? I get that he thinks their proposals would lead to ruin (they surely feel the same way about his), but I don't follow the leap from having a different opinion about the right direction to head to actively intending to destroy the nation. Even more perplexing is the contention that OWS is "a bunch of criminals." What crime, exactly, are they guilty of?

Of course, the weird disconnect that equates peaceful (albeit disruptive) protestors with criminals has been an important question since the first reports emerged of NYPD officer Anthony Bologna pepper-spraying apparently nonviolent protestors. And girls at that! (Insert notions of women's weakness here.)

There has been pushback on this assumption of criminality, of course. Bologna's actions were widely decried (though sometimes for the wrong reasons, see previous aside). The outrage against the actions of Oakland police against Occupy Oakland is in the same vein. Because seriously, I get that Oakland PD isn't a paragon of police restraint on a good day and they've had enough riots to be paranoid, but riot gear and tear gas against protestors, really?

Indeed, U.S. News and World Report blogger Leslie Marshall asks, "Why Do Police Treat 'Occupy-ers' Like Terrorists, Not Tea Partyers?"

And hey, there's the Tea Party again. This comparison keeps cropping up, and that means something.

But resistance to thinking about the two together isn't just coming from the Right. Ishaan Tharoor of Time (admittedly the right-ier of the two major national weekly newsmagazines, but still fairly centrist) argues at length—with a four-point plan!—that Occupy Wall Street should not be compared to the Tea Party.

There are, of course, major differences between the two, which should be taken seriously. The Tea Party wants less (maybe no) government and are a-ok with (and funded by) corporate bigwigs. Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, thinks corporations are the problem and government is the solution. That matters.

But I think it's important to recognize that both are populist uprisings against a system that they feel has failed them—they just differ as to what the system is and where the failings lie. Neither of them is happy with Washington business-as-usual. Neither of them is thrilled about corporate bailouts

Weirdly, the argument that most resembles mine is from right-wing bastion Fox News, where an opinion piece by Ellis Henican proclaims "Hey, Tea Partiers, Go Join Occupy Wall Street." Henican argues that "it’s a grass-roots coalition that is just begging to be made. It’s the also perfect opportunity to fulfill the second half of the Tea Party credo, addressing the excesses of Big Business along with those Big Government."

I have to admit that it's a little strange to find myself agreeing with Fox News, but if the populists on either the Left or the Right are serious about getting politics to listen to the little guys instead of carrying on as usual, banding together is probably their best bet.

Though if the Tea Party actually was grassroots instead of having been co-opted into Astroturf (since I do think it was a genuine populist uprising at first) that would help too.

Appendix

Here's some good reference material to explain Occupy Wall Street to unsympathetic relatives at upcoming holiday dinners, from Business Insider, oddly enough: Here Are Four Charts That Explain What The Protesters Are Angry About...

The Day the Internet Surprised Me, or RPF and Rage

2011-10-19T10:13:00.002-05:00

When I posted about Chaz Bono a while back, I said I don't read the comments to online news stories, but now that I've said it I must confess I totally do. I've realized it's more accurate to say that I don't read the comments unless I am prepared to cope with the absolute worst of humanity.

A second confession: I have a Google Alert set for Lea Michele. So, when the PR folks (his? hers? I don't know) announced that she and her boyfriend had broken up a few weeks ago, and it echoed through the gossipsphere, I got a lot of emails. And, I was a) curious what the response would be and b) prepared to see people being awful . . . so I took a look.

And the Internet surprised me.

Well, at first it didn't. I went to the comments fully expecting to see a deluge of suggestions of who Ms. Michele should hook up with next—which were definitely there.

I also assumed that the Real Person Fiction (RPF) shippers would be there, pouncing on the opportunity to say that she would either soon be dating one of her castmates or secretly has been the whole time. And indeed, the story went up at 6:42 and at 6:50 someone commented "MONCHELE LIVES!! " followed at 6:51 by "Achele is end game" and 6:54 by " Achele* fixed it for ya **" A decoder ring: "Monchele" refers to Michele paired with her Glee costar Cory Monteith; the "Achele" portmanteau indicates a romantic relationship between Michele and Dianna Agron (who, as avid P3 readers may recall, likes girls, but not in a sexual way).

I was, particularly, expecting the Achele shippers to be out in force, because they're a vocal bunch. (Confession 3: I also happen to think they make a pretty compelling argument. Not that the relationship between the two is necessarily "real," but I can see how it could be. I know that social norms for friendships between women allow some latitude in terms of acceptable levels of physical affection, but those girls are SNUGGLY. One of MANY videos, if you're curious.) And, indeed, Achele was a pretty substantial presence in the comments.

I was prepared for the response to the Achele shippers to be somewhere between dismissive and ugly: A commenter named Emily said, "If I read one more comment about 'achele' I'm gonna flip Dianna and Lea aren't gay Dianna has a boyfriend, respect people's sexualities please."

This kind of thing is pretty standard in how we make sense of sexuality. It's got "straight until proven gay." It's got a complete lack of recognition that sexuality exists beyond a 100% hetero/100% homo binary, that Agron and Michele could have boyfriends today and girlfriends tomorrow, and that one needn't "be gay" to date someone of the same sex. So, the greatest hits are all there.

But then the Internet surprised me.

Allison: "@Emily The Mo[n]chele/Lark comments are JUST as insulting...Lea has NEVER said anything about her sexuality for one thing, so if you complain about Achele complain about the other ships, because yes, your comment's exclusive nature to only Achele is homophobic" (Ship, short for "relationship," refers to advocating a particular coupling within a fan object, either of characters or actors)

Wow. Okay, some random person commenting on a gossip story the internet—a place usually chock full of venom, hysteria, and general inanity—has calmly and rationally pointed out that being offended at the suggestion that an actor might be in a same-sex relationship is homophobic. Maybe this is just my academic snobbery (of which I'll admit I've got plenty), but I don't usually expect that kind of sophistication in online comments. And who knows, maybe Allison is actually an academic herself and my snobbery needn't be challenged.

Commenter Nicola replied, "@Allison Insinuating that Dianna and Lea are gay are just as insulting as saying that gay people should go straight." And she had a relatively complex and valid point too, though I may be putting words into her mouth in my interpretation of it.

That is, to enforce an ideal sexuality on another person isn't okay no matter what direction it goes. One ought not to police other people's behavior and insist that they belong to a particular category that they haven't chosen to join regardless of what category that is, as I argued with Marcus Bachmann.

Now, the thing did go off the rails after that.

Allison shot back, "@nicola...when exactly did I insinuate they had to be gay? I didn't, my point is we have NO idea if they're gay, straight or bi...It's not fair to exclusively bash Achele just because it's two girls. It's not okay to ship Lark or Monchele any more than it is to ship Achele. "

And I think it's absolutely right to resist default straightness. I also think it's right to resist the erasure of the middle of the Kinsey scale —we're not all zeroes and sixes.

But, as a queer theorist, a fan studies scholar, and a fan, I'm uneasy about throwing out the RPF shipping with the bathwater, which Allison does by saying that no shipping is okay. That is, I would argue that it's perfectly acceptable to interpret people's behavior selectively and subversively for one's own pleasure, whether that person is a fictional character or a real human.

However, one should not then impose that interpretation on the body of that actual person and demand that they comply with it, which is where I draw the line with some of the more enthusiastic and dogmatic Achele shippers.

But that's because one shouldn't impose and demand in general, not because it's somehow wrong to imagine what kind of sex other people have.

Or, rather, not because it's wrong to admit we all routinely imagine what kind of sex other people have, or would have if they did. Sometimes in great detail. (If you're curious, check out http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Glee%20RPF/works -- but read the tags carefully. You’ve been warned!)

Why AoIR is My new Favorite Conference #ir12

2011-10-12T22:11:00.004-05:00

In her opening remarks on the conference’s first day, outgoing Association of Internet Researchers president Mia Consalvo said that the conference was like a family. And, being used to massive conferences like the National Communication Association where anyone less famous than God or the Beatles gets lost in the crowd, I rolled my eyes a little. But as I’m here longer, I’m starting to think she was right.

Point 1: I had lunch with a complete stranger yesterday. Now, I’m one of the least social humans on the planet. I. Do. Not. Like. Strangers. But there I was, at the info desk asking the concierge about where to eat at the same time as someone else, and we just decided to go together. And it was a totally great experience, and I have to think there’s something about the culture of the conference that made that possible.

Point 2: I went up to a scholar after her panel to ask if any of her students might be interested in publishing in the special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures I’m guest editing, and she not only handed a copy of the CFP to her student but took one for herself. Maybe my expectations are really low from a number of bad experiences with Big Name Scholars (who shall remain nameless), but she totally treated me like a worthwhile human being!

Point 3: A professor from my university, who a) isn’t in my department and b) isn’t even on my committee (but who was my professor for a class once, two years ago) came up to me at the reception and asked who she could introduce me to. Faculty just don’t do that kind of stuff in my experience up until now. Don’t get me wrong; the professors in my department are amazing and will totally promote the bejeezus out of us, but we have to ask them.

And, it’s not related to the “professional organization as family” part, but I have really never been at a conference where so many of the people I see walking around are people whose work I not only know but admire. This indicates, I think, that this is the right kind of place for me to be hanging out.

This is all to say: I less than three AoIR! And I will be back any time it’s someplace I can afford to fly!

Addendum, October 13: The moderator for my panel carried my bag into the elevator when I didn't have enough hands to wrangle it + breakfast, cuz she'd read my post and wanted to make sure I kept feeling welcome.

A Tale of Two Executions

2011-10-05T17:40:00.006-05:00

It's that time of the semester when blog posting gets to be challenging, but I will do my best.

On Wednesday, September 21, 2011, two men were executed.

Troy Davis, convicted of the 1989 shooting of an off-duty police officer, was the subject of massive news coverage, an appeal to the Supreme Court, and support, Wikipedia lists, from Amnesty International, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, former President Jimmy Carter, Rev. Al Sharpton, Pope Benedict XVI, Nobel Peace Prize recipient Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and former FBI Director and judge William S. Sessions.

Lawrence Brewer, convicted of the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd, on the other hand, was executed almost unnoticed.

There were, of course, a lot of other differences between the two.

Davis maintained his innocence to the end; his last words were "I'd like to address the MacPhail family. Let you know, despite the situation you are in, I'm not the one who personally killed your son, your father, your brother. I am innocent."

Brewer also claimed innocence, according to KHOU in Houston: "the man who’s facing execution for the crime still says he didn’t commit murder, and that he was just going along with friends for a ride."

Brewer did, however, say that “as far as any regrets, no, I have no regrets [ . . . ].No, I’d do it all over again, to tell you the truth,” and this contention that even if he didn't participate in the murder he wouldn't have stopped it makes his a less compelling declaration of innocence. (This has been reported as him saying he would kill Byrd again, but in the original context that seems not to be the case.)

The MacPhails were very invested in Troy Davis dying for the death of their family member. When he was pronounced dead, MacPhail's son and brother smiled.

Byrd's son, on the other hand, said "You can't fight murder with murder. Life in prison would have been fine. I know he can't hurt my daddy anymore. I wish the state would take in mind that this isn't what we want."

With Davis, Wikipdia notes, "Following the original trial, seven witnesses changed or recanted all or part of their testimony." Indeed, one of the rallying cries for the Davis case was "too much doubt."

On the other hand, according the New York Times in 1999, " In letters introduced into evidence, Mr. Brewer referred to the killing and boasted about 'rolling a tire,' which prosecutors said was a derogatory term for assaulting a black person. 'Well, I did it,' Mr. Brewer wrote. 'And no longer am I a virgin. It was a rush, and I'm still licking my lips for more.'" That is, it seems relatively clear that Brewer did it, despite his protestation of innocence.

As a police officer, MacPhail was in a category with a lot of baggage. Some people, including the most vocal proponents of executing Troy Davis, would contend that killing a police officer, as a representative of the law (even if, as MacPhail was, the officer is off duty at the time), is worse than any old fatal shooting. Others would point to histories of police abuse and suggest that it made him a less compelling victim.

Byrd was described, in an article I can't find now, as an especially sympathetic victim. He was a good guy whom everyone liked and even sort of downtrodden in that he didn't have a car and walked everywhere he went, which was how he came into the path of the people who killed him in the first place. Killing Byrd, this argument goes, is worse than killing just anybody.

According to Wikipedia , "MacPhail was shot twice: once through the heart and once in the face." He probably died pretty quickly.

When James Byrd Jr. died, on the other hand, his killers "beat him severely, urinated on him and chained him by his ankles to their pickup truck before dragging him for three miles. [ . . . ] [F]orensic evidence suggests that Byrd had been attempting to keep his head up while being dragged, and an autopsy suggested that Byrd was alive during much of the dragging. Byrd died after his right arm and head were severed after his body hit a culvert." It was brutal. He suffered.

But I hope that at this point you're resisting this narrative, Dear Reader.

How can I say that one murder is worse than another? How can there be an assessment that one victim is less tragic than another? I can't, and I know it. These things can't be quantified.

The reason I made the argument is to point out is that it's equally illogical to say that having celebrity supporters vs. being entirely unsympathetic makes one deserve to die more or less. It doesn't. Neither does proclaiming one's own innocence or not, there being a family desire for vengeance or not, or killing a member of a more or less privileged category.

That's because no matter how heinous someone's crime is, or how sure you are that they committed it, they don’t deserve to die.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that "Spencer Lawton, the Savannah prosecutor who helped convict Davis, said the case shouldn't morph into a broader debate about capital punishment," but it has, and it should.

There's something a little absurd about, as the quip goes, killing people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong.

There's also something not very encouraging about the U.S. being in a club of capital punishers that included, in 2010, countries most Americans consider themselves to be freer than (China) or otherwise superior to, including George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" members Iran and North Korea, John Bolton's "Beyond the Axis of Evil" members Cuba, Libya and Syria, and Condolezza Rice's "Outpost of Tyranny" Belarus. (On the Axis of Evil and its later elaborations, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil). Nice company we're keeping there.

The U.S. likes to think of itself (along with, usually, Europe) as a shining example of civilization, but it's not joined by any country in Europe in continuing to use the death penalty.

In fact, it has been beat to the punch on abolishing it by 71% of the world: 49% of world nations have abolished it entirely; 5% keep it only "for crimes committed in exceptional circumstances (such as in time of war)"; 17% technically have it on the books, "but have not used it for at least 10 years and are believed to have a policy or established practice of not carrying out executions, or it is under a moratorium." Only 29% of countries—just 58 of them in the world—actually use the thing regularly.

And, even if most of humanity moving away from using this form of punishment doesn't move anyone to reassess whether the death penalty is really something we want to have, the damn thing is expensive. Counterintuitive though it may be, it costs more to kill someone than to imprison them for life.

Some crimes are horrible. Hell, some people are horrible. Some people do things that are so horrible that it's reasonable not to expose the rest of humanity to the danger that they'll do it again. Sometimes there's not a single redeeming quality about such a person. We might be tempted to not call them human, even.

But that's the one step we can't take.

It's an inability to see another as human that allows someone to do something horrible in the first place. So why would we replicate it in our response?

Chaz Bono, (In)Sanity, and the Gender System

2011-09-21T09:24:00.003-05:00

Ordinarily, I have a "don't read the comments" policy. People are, generally speaking, impressively hateful and cruel online because the relative anonymity means that there are few repercussions—I'm sure we've all been on the receiving end of this.

But with the controversy around Chaz Bono being cast in Dancing with the Stars, I'm finding myself unable to help looking at the comments—much like one can't look away from a horrific car crash. And, even if I had not been reading the comments, when there's this much controversy the same sort of extreme viewpoints tend to end up in the articles themselves as "telling both sides of the story."

Predictably, it's awful up one side and down the other. People are going around refusing to respect Bono's self-definition and using his birth name "Chastity" and the pronoun "her" and insisting that "His/Her chromosomes haven’t changes [sic] since birth and never will" (which, as my Fausto-Sterling-savvy Gender in the Media students can now tell you, doesn't actually mean as much as people think). And, of course, they're hysterically screeching about the Bible. The thread at the ABC blog has all of these strategies in play.

And in relation to those people I take Bono's side. I think it's ludicrous to argue that casting him somehow makes DWTS not safe for children because it'll make them turn out trans or gay or serial killers or whatever it is they're arguing. I absolutely think they're wrong to treat being trans as some sort of mental illness—comparing it to being an elective amputee, really?

I have to fight my knee-jerk response to think that these are bad people—or, as Chaz's mother Cher put it, "stupid bigots"—and instead think of them as just lacking knowledge. But I still feel superior to them and their bible-thumping, same-sex-sexuality-hating ways. (That's not me collapsing gender identity and sexual object choice; they're the ones saying "it is CLEARLY stated in the Bible,,, [sic] men are not to lay down with other men, same for women.")

But beyond that moment of support, things get tricky. I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea that being inclined toward certain behavior or having certain feelings means your body needs to look a certain way. I think that ultimately this rigid correlation between body and behavior is something we have to resist rather than try to shape our bodies to fit into.

But of course, that behavior = body sentiment is exactly what we all hear all the time, though usually as body = behavior. "You're a girl (body) so you should act like it (behavior)." The idea that your body is your destiny is so completely ingrained in us that we can't think anything else. My students argued this about athletics even after reading and hearing that bodies are socially constructed.

So the arguments that Bono is going to destroy gender, or whatever, are totally off base. Transitioning, when done as a complete "I really am this other category on the inside and I need to fully move into that category" process, is actually very much about obeying and supporting gender rules. Changing the shape of one's body requires a pretty serious commitment to playing along.

This isn't to paint transfolk as dupes, by any means. The ways in which bodies get shaped in these processes are the product of medical institutions deciding what counted as transitioning. This matters because being able to count as transitioned is what makes you able to be able to change your state identity documents. In order to work in a mainstream, above-board kind of job, one has to have those documents, and unless you happen to have a particularly progressive employer they have to match the way you look when you walk in the door (and with the USA PATRIOT Act's insistence that terrorists might have fake documents that don't "match" their gender it may not matter what your boss thinks). I get that this is all very real and at times a matter of survival.

I also get that it can be a site of resistance, since transpeople routinely bend or break the rules. When the law says that in order to transition one has to have to have surgery to reassign their sex, that statute is intended to refer to genital surgery that will more or less render them both sterile and unable to experience sexual pleasure. But with a sympathetic doctor, someone can get a letter certifying that surgery to change sex has occurred without saying exactly what—that it was top surgery and not bottom surgery, say. There are ways to work the system, and people do.

Experiencing a high degree of mismatch between oneself and the social norm is a bad situation, and people like Chaz Bono are making the best of it.

But here again, like with 9/11 or with gay marriage, I see it on two levels simultaneously, and considering individual people as opposed to large-scale structures produces a dramatically different response. I almost wish I had less appreciation for subtlety and could be more dogmatic. It'd be easier.

That is, though I completely appreciate why people find it necessary to comply with the medico-legal framework to get access to the resources they need, I ultimately don't think it's a good idea to go appealing to the state for validation for one's body image any more than for one's sex life.

We all have a set of really narrow options of what bodies are supposed to look like and what it's appropriate to do with them, options that don't conform to the configurations people actually come in (however it is that you think we come to have a gender and a sexuality and a body that's a particular shape).

And we all have to work and struggle and cram ourselves into boxes—some more than others, of course—to find a place that's comfortable within that. Chaz Bono got a bad deal out of the boxes of the gender system. Or, we all get a bad deal out of the gender system, but Bono and other transfolk more than most.

These are real pressures with real consequences, but I simply cannot feel that the solution is to accept the boxes.

We have to expose the boxes as artificial, as constraining, as sometimes deadly. We have to work to dismantle the ways that the boxes hold the power they do over who gets jobs and how people get medical care and all kinds of other services and resources and opportunities.

We have to work toward some different way to configure people, such that you can feel however you want on the inside and look however you want on the outside, with no demand that those fall into a set of patterns, much less a rigid equation.

But, in the meantime, Bono's decision to get his body surgically altered to move him into a different category than the one into which he was born doesn't make him crazy, no matter what the fever pitch of think-of-the-children might say. Instead, the system is crazy. And even though I wouldn't choose the same way of coping with it, trying to make it work for you is a perfectly sane thing.

Of September 11th

2011-09-15T12:58:00.002-05:00

I wasn't going to blog the 10^th anniversary of 9/11, but then it came and the news coverage was sort of unavoidable, so I got to thinking about it. I thought it'd be pretty easy to make sense of, but it turns out I have a lot of mixed feelings.

In 2001, 9/11 was pretty abstract. I woke up that morning to my roommate watching it on his computer. His mom had either already called him and freaked out and encouraged him to stay away from target-like buildings or she was about to. I don't think I talked to my mom at all that day, which should not be taken as an indictment of either of our care for each other.

And then, like any other Tuesday that semester, I went to work. The only thing different was that my boss grumbled about our corporate overlords being soulless (which was usual enough) because they didn't close the store (that part was different). Then I went to class, and I think maybe my professor said something before lecturing on some facet of 20^th century American literature, but maybe she didn't.

All of this is to say that 9/11, the first time around, didn't impact me personally all that much. I was on the West Coast, far from the site of the attacks, and I didn't even know anybody on the East Coast. Maybe I'm giving the 18-year-old me too much credit, but I don't remember being scared and I feel like my first thought was "Oh God, what is that cowboy in the White House going to be able to justify doing?" That part is fairly likely a false memory, but the rest I think is right.

Maybe I've gotten soft in my old age, but with the 10^th anniversary coverage I teared up a little. I was thinking about the human toll, about people who went to work or got on a plane one day and just. never. came. home. I was pondering what it must have been like to flee that horror, for those who were able to. I shied away from considering what it was like for those who couldn't escape. Children lost parents that day. Parents lost children. When I think of it that way, it's real and it's weighty.

Reading the news stories about each of those lives that either ended or was dramatically changed that day leaves me with a feeling of sadness I wasn't anticipating in revisiting this event.

Then there were those people who ran against the tide of fleeing people to help, some of whom died trying. There were people, I'll swear, giving away water to survivors and rescue personnel out of their stores, though the Internet has no record of it now. There were forty people aboard Flight 93 who knew they were probably going to die either way, who fought back against the hijackers on their plane and kept it from being crashed into another building. People all across the country donated blood.

And there's something incredibly moving about that. That moment, that response of standing together and giving to one another and caring for one another was one of the few times in my adult life so far that I have been really proud to be an American.

When I think about the individual people like this, I feel like my general response to September 11^th is in or near the mainstream. I get the grief and the memorials and the ceremonial quality of it all on that level.

The trouble is, I can't see only on that level for very long.

I start to think about the fact that we don't have the same response to the 3,000 people who die every day from car accidents. Aren't they as "innocent"? What about the 3,000 Nigerians dying daily of hunger? Or the 3,000 African children dying each day of Malaria? And those are just the daily deaths that ballpark the number in the World Trade Center attacks—there are lots of other things that kill fewer people, or more. I think we need to look a lot harder at whose lives we do or don't grieve.

I also can't help thinking about the fact that U.S. neoimperial policy had everything to do with 9/11. The U.S. has, as a matter of foreign policy, gone around stomping all over other countries ever since it became a superpower. Ward Churchill's characterization of 9/11 as exemplifying Malcolm X's statement about "chickens coming home to roost" is relatively accurate in that sense.

Here is where things get tricky: the U.S. had it coming, but the U.S. is amorphous and indeterminate and ultimately comprised of individual people. And those individual people did not have it coming.

That is, I don't agree with Churchill's assertion that the 9/11 dead were "little Eichmanns." In fact, for someone who has such a good grasp of the extenuating effects of U.S. intervention in Iraq and the role of those effects in causing September 11^th, he seems to not understand systems all that well.

There's a difference between:

a) bombing the bejeezus out of Iraq to try to damage Sadaam Hussein's rule and resources with (admittedly wanton) disregard for the way this will entail suffering for people who didn't necessarily even support him and

b) genocide, which is a deliberate and systematic effort to kill a group of people just for being members of that group. Genocide requires intent.

This is a difference Churchill's polemic doesn't recognize, and it should. There is much the same difference between:

a) the fact that yes, the people who died in the 9/11 attacks benefited from and supported the U.S. neoimperialist activity even, in the vast majority of cases, without meaning to, and

b) the fact that they themselves didn't actively engage in imperialist activity. They didn't kill any Iraqi children.

There is, of course, no such thing as complete innocence, but there are matters of degree, and most of those people were on the mid- to high-innocence side.

And that's where I end up, vacillating between the big picture of U.S. imperialist crime and callous disregard for human life and the individuals who had no idea why they died, had no chance to try to rectify the situation for which they were (unfairly) held responsible. And then I don't know what to think about 9/11.

Captain Obvious to the Rescue: College is Hard

2011-09-07T08:29:00.004-05:00

Apparently, I'm turning into an education blogger. If it's not your cup of tea, bear with me. I'm sure something else will catch my attention soon.

When I read the headline "Public high school grads struggle at college," I was concerned. It's always possible—and indeed likely—that there could be a public school vs. private school divide in terms of quality, because private schools have so many more resources and so do the students who attend them.

But as I read the article, it turned out that it discussed the ways public high school graduates struggle in college only to the extent that the Tribune was reporting on its own analysis of "data available to Illinois citizens," produced in accordance with a mandate from the state legislature, that measured college vs. high school grades.

Less interested already, I nevertheless pressed on through the article. And, lo and behold, what did they discover? Student grades go down in college: "The average freshman GPA was 2.52 across all state universities and community colleges, roughly C+ work, based on the state's tracking of more than 90,000 public high school students who graduated between 2006 and 2008. In high school, those same kids exceeded a B average — 3.08."

The article suggested that this "for the first time raises fundamental questions about how well the state's public high schools are preparing their students for college."

They even tried to find an explanation: "College and K-12 officials blame the performance declines on myriad factors, from inadequate high school preparation to high school grade inflation, newfound independence and increased partying away from home."

They argued that "there is a real lack of alignment (between high school and college)" and "kids aren't necessarily ready for freshman-level classes."

What?

Let me get this straight. Getting B and C grades in college means that high schools aren't doing their job? I don't dispute that probably many high schools aren't doing a great job, but is this really the measure of a problem? Or alternately, B's and C's result from independence and partying and high school grade inflation?

All of that is ridiculous. Of course there's a "lack of alignment between high school and college." College is harder. Your grades should go down. Or, if they don't, you should have to work a lot harder to keep them at the same level as previously.

Farther down in the article, there was a comment from "Gery Chico, chairman of the Illinois State Board of Education," who "said that a C+ average as a freshman 'is not a horrible thing,' pointing out that college-level work is more complicated than high school courses, and college instructors have a tougher grading system."

And I was like, "Great, a voice of reason!" But then, he went on to say that "as students adjust to college, they can improve their GPAs."

Are you fucking kidding me?

Okay, I get that with the job market being as tight as it is, the GPAs that college grads have earned are coming to matter to employers increasingly much. So, students want to do as well as possible. I understand this. But I have to ask: What the hell happened to C as average?

And here I thought it was just my students—unfortunately many of whom fit the "overprivileged kid from the Chicago-suburbs" stereotype—who thought they should all get A's just for trying.

And, interestingly, my campus is, in fact, singled out: "Among the four-year state universities, only at the state's flagship campus, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, did these freshmen average at least a B, with a 3.14 GPA for freshmen coming out of Illinois public high schools. Those U. of I. students had an average high school GPA of 3.7."

This is not so shocking, when you consider that the flagship is going to have the highest admissions standards. Those students are already exceptionally good at school, so they cope better when school gets harder.

Though, of course, this better result could also be because the kids who are in a position to get in to this institution are more likely to be pushy about their grades (the Overprivileged Kid Theory). Or, it could be that there's grade inflation at UIUC because we all (me included) assume that we're teaching high-quality students, whether that's true or not (the Flagship Fallacy).

But here's the thing that worries me the most about this whole conversation about grades. A provost at Northern Illinois University, one of the state schools, said "It costs a lot to go to college now, and people want to know …'What am I getting for my dollar?'"

I'll tell you what you sure as hell don't "get for your dollar": you don't get to buy your grades. Maybe at for-profit institutions, but honest-to-deity colleges are not fee-for-service places. What you get for your dollar isn't your GPA but the content in the classes, the stretching of your brain to think critically that will serve you for the rest of your life.

The idea that we somehow owe students a certain grade for their (parent's or lender's) dollar is worse even than the professionalization of undergraduate degrees that I complained about a couple of weeks ago.

Now, this isn't to say that there aren't some actual causes for concern in the article. The Tribune points out that "Bolingbrook High School graduates had an average 2.44 at the University of Illinois, while those from Glenbrook South High School earned a 3.43 — even though college-bound students from both schools had similar average high school GPAs." That's worth commenting on, because it points to disparities in the preparation at those two institutions.

Similarly, when the chancellor at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale says that "more and more students seem to be less prepared for college; particularly math and English skills are not where we would like them to be when they come to college," then we can get worried. It's if they come in and can't do the work, rather than if they come in and find it harder than they did before, that determines "struggling" in college, not what grades they get but "Can they hack it?"

Not some misguided sense that one's GPA should stay the same even as the difficulty increases.

Of Women and Weakness, Or: What Decade is This?

2011-08-31T07:57:00.005-05:00

I taught some selections from Anne Fausto Sterling's Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality to my Gender in the Media class this past week, and it was an interesting experience.

The students were predictably horrified at cutting up infants to make them conform to normative genital configurations, especially within 24 hours of birth and without giving parents enough information or time to make a reasoned decision. Some wondered if it was feasible to wait and let the child decide for her- or himself.

They were (perhaps, in hindsight, also predictably, though I didn't see it coming) not sure that deciding not to correct intersex babies was ethical either, worrying that this might lead to social or psychological distress.

That is, when I asked them to think about the quote from a surgeon calling ambiguous genitals "a medical and social emergency" (p. 45), they were certain that it wasn't a medical emergency, but they thought it might be a social one.

But what I didn't expect at all was their reaction to the discussion of sex testing in sports. They were pretty adamant—the women as much as or more than the men—that sports had to be-sex segregated. Men are stronger, they said, and it's not fair to women, end of story.

I reminded them of Hermann Ratjen, who competed as the woman Dora Ratjen in the 1936 Olympics despite being a man . . . and didn't win. Surely here was evidence that women can beat men at sports. But no, they didn't find that compelling.

(Incidentally, there are a number of conflicting stories about this athlete. Wikipedia says Ratjen was named Heinrich, raised as Dora, and only found out about hir biological maleness much later and competed innocently as a woman. But elsewhere in the article, it says the Nazis put him up to it deliberately, which Fausto-Sterling also says. Except that, if you believe Halberstam [who I often cal J-Hal just to refuse/mock the Judith/Jack hipsterfest] the Nazis would have been totally opposed to men behaving in any way feminine. So, this is a bit of a mystery and possibly not the best example.)

I tried again. Okay, so men might on average be stronger (though, I pointed out, averages mean that sometimes they aren't), but not all sports are won by strength. Women might be more agile. Or they might have superior endurance. What about sports that are won on those criteria?

They really weren't having any of it. The idea that women can't compete with men was just too much the truth for them to be able to think anything else. And it was a little disappointing. I was a little frustrated by how far gender politics had not come. Or maybe I had stumbled into a time machine and not noticed. Something.

One male student told a story of the one girl in his football league (whether high school or youth it wasn't clear) and how "she had a target on her back" as all the boys went after her because "if you're going to play you have to take the consequences." And he was totally unabashed about it, probably seeing it more as "this is a rough game and we're not going to take it easy on you" even if the reality was more like "this is our game and we're going to hurt you to show you you're not welcome."

But right alongside finding it sad, I found this fascinating. People dismiss or dislike feminism because they feel like it makes women into victims. That was the reason for the anti- or post-feminist sentiment at the "Oh, You Sexy Geek!" panel I blogged about a couple of weeks ago. The panelists wanted to feel empowered, not like if they chose to be sexy they were being objectified by men or pandering or anything but owning their own bodies.

But here were a group of young adults who probably don't identify as feminists, who chuckled (as intended) when I showed them a "OMG women are victims" YouTube video and then told them I wasn't teaching that class, reproducing the exact "women are weaker" party line all by themselves.

And I guess that's why classes like mine are important (which I say with no self-aggrandizement). That's why paying attention to gender is important, either in day-to-day life with one's friends or for part of a class session or the whole semester. I have to hope that by the end of the semester my students at least will be able to start questioning the obviousness of this kind of thing.

So, despite the dis-ease with feminism I expressed in the Sexy Geek post, maybe we do still need it—at least, in the non-victim flavor. This incident would seem to call for feminism (or something like it) to continue to point out

a) the pervasiveness of these assumptions about what it means to belong to gender categories and

b) the fact that they're only socially real and it could actually be another way if we worked to change them.

Because, as much as I thought it would be obvious to a group of relatively bright people once it was pointed out, it apparently still isn't.

On Degree "Inflation"

2011-08-24T17:24:00.006-05:00

Among the hats I wear, I’m an educator. I’m also someone who already has one postgraduate degree and is working on another. So when Laura Pappano of the New York Times discussed “The Master’s as the New Bachelor’s,” it hit close to home on a couple of fronts.

I first became aware of the upward push of credentialing when one of my students, not a particularly hardworking or brilliant one, mentioned that he was thinking of going to grad school. Thinking that maybe he was a nonmajor who was actually a smart and involved student in his home discipline, I asked him “In what?”

His reply? “I don’t know, but you have to have a master’s to get a job these days.”

This was immensely irritating to me, because he seemed all ready to go to grad school without having the slightest sense of how it works—even something so basic as the fact that it doesn't work like undergrad where you figure out your major later. And, honestly, it offended me a little personally, since it felt like a lack of appreciation for my education.

But thinking back to that master’s degree of mine, maybe I should have been aware sooner that lots of people go to grad school in a way that feels to me like not really meaning it. Most of the people I went to school with, in fact, weren’t planning to be academics.

Particularly for the students in their early 20s, many of them were just used to being students and kept going. Or they wanted to have more time to figure out what they wanted to do with themselves. For this kind of master's student, grad school was a place to take a time out on growing up.

This probably sounds patronizing, but it's not. Just because I knew I wanted to be an academic as soon as I got over my teen-angst desire to be a poet in a garret (so, like, when I was 18?) doesn't mean everybody is as certain about their path, as evidenced by the wide range of ages among my colleagues in my PhD program. If you don't know where you're headed, it's definitely better to pull over than to keep driving.

Another subset of my MA colleagues had, in the snarky-fabulous words of a friend,

a very narrow interest in one subject and they saw getting a sociology degree as a conduit to being able to study the subject that they really cared about personally. Those were the students who were totally disengaged in all of our classes because they really only wanted to study that single thing and instead, they got stuck with 2 huge books of Weber or Bourdieu or Foucault.

And I do think that desire to study a particular thing is valid, even if I'm not sure getting a master's degree is the right way to go about it.

However, quite a few of the students in my MA classes just wanted to have a piece of paper that showed they were smarter or more dedicated than a BA because, as the NYT article suggested, that's not enough anymore. In the communication department, for example, one was an office worker—I think maybe an HR manager?—trying to improve her options by getting a master's with a focus in organizational communication.

This last group I find troubling. I feel like there are things you legitimately need a master's degree to do, but there are also all kinds of things you don't, and you shouldn't get one just to get one, particularly since student loan debt never, ever, EVER goes away even if you declare bankruptcy.

I mean, seriously, there are things you don't even need a bachelor's degree to do. We need plumbers and roofers and all kinds of other tradespeople, and those are jobs that are way too important to be as socially devalued as they are. That's a problem. That's a place where we need a cultural intervention to change how we think about those careers.

Additionally, a surprising number of young adults who really aren't cut out for academics feel compelled to get a college degree anyway. Which also might sound patronizing, but I don't mean to say that these students aren't bright; what I mean is that there are different ways to be smart and we're increasingly tending to put everyone into only one box labeled Bachelor of Arts (or Sciences). Again, here's a site where an intervention is sorely needed.

These are complex issues that have, I'm sure, inspired voluminous publication among researchers of education. They deserve careful, measured attention beyond what I've got to give to a blog entry. I'm no expert, and the question of college becoming de facto compulsory affects broad swaths of the population—not least those who don't go and then find their possibilities radically curtailed.

If the expectation of universal college degrees is a First World Problem, degree inflation to the master's is definitively a Bourgie People Problem. However, even though wealth does not "trickle down," norms and the hoops one has to jump through to succeed do. This means that, just as college went from being middle class to being the ticket to the middle class, the master's degree may well follow suit.

Eric A. Hanushek, whom the NYT piece describes as "an education economist at the Hoover Institution," argues that “We are going deeper into the pool of high school graduates for college attendance,” which makes a "bachelor’s no longer an adequate screening measure of achievement for employers," and I find this incredibly telling.

Hanushek means to make an argument about the students who are not in the top 10 or 25 (or maybe even 50) percent of their high school class, such that people who get college degrees aren't only the spectacular students anymore.

However, that class rank correlates quite strongly with other categories in a way that matters. The kids at the top, who traditionally had access to professional jobs, are disproportionately middle class and white, but now the college pool is expanding beyond those privileged categories.

That means that, whereas once the B.A. separated out the middle class kids from the working class ones, that's no longer true now that everyone's going to college. The rush to the M.A. begins, then, to seem a bit like "OMG, poor kids are getting bachelor’s degrees! Better raise the bar!"

As the Times article says, "browse professional job listings and it’s 'bachelor’s required, master’s preferred,'" and it makes me wonder whether what they really mean is "upwardly mobile required, middle-class preferred."

Hanushek argues that there's “some devaluing of the college degree going on,” which makes the master's more valuable as an indication of ability. As Pappano argues, "perhaps all this amped-up degree-getting just represents job market 'signaling' — the economist A. Michael Spence’s Nobel-worthy notion that degrees are less valuable for what you learn than for broadcasting your go-get-’em qualities."

This devaluing of the B.A. and signaling ability with the M.A., then, is a trend that’s likely to continue. After all, as the Times article pointed out “Nearly 2 in 25 people age 25 and over have a master’s, about the same proportion that had a bachelor’s or higher in 1960,” and that's probably not a historical coincidence as much as an indication that the former will follow the latter's trajectory.

So, who knows? Give it 50 years, and we might well be having this conversation about the PhD. (Though the life expectancy for when I was born has me dying sometime around 2058, so I might not be around to see it.) That aspect of history repeating itself means that Hanushek may then be less hyperbolic than he intended when he quipped that “in 20 years, you’ll need a Ph.D. to be a janitor” as part of his condemnation of “credentialing gone amok.”

Now, as I said above, there are things you legitimately need master’s degrees to do. Generally, those are professional degrees: the MBA is helpful in learning how to run a business, the MSW helps you be a social worker, the MFA is good for being an artist or architect. The degrees that are proliferating are variations on these degrees: a "master’s in public history (for work at a historical society or museum), in art (for managing galleries) and in music (for choir directors or the business side of music)."

That is, there seems to be something of a "shift of graduate work from intellectual pursuit to a skill-based 'ticket to a vocation.'" Pappano is pretty critical of this: "What’s happening to academic reflection? Must knowledge be demonstrable to be valuable?" she asks. "Or have we lost the ability to figure things out without a syllabus?" I am sympathetic to this, as this has been my gut reaction—to my student, and to my M.A. colleagues.

But, upon further reflection, if these degrees mean we can stop the professionalization of the bachelor's, I might be in favor of it. That is, there's an increasing push to turn the undergraduate curriculum into a factory for white-collar workers. There's a tendency toward teaching students "skills" that they can immediately apply in the jobs they (apparently won't) get after graduation.

But college is a time to learn how to think. Not what to think, despite the exactly one student evaluation form every semester concerned that I am "too liberal," but how.

As the product of a really good undergraduate education (Cal has consistently been somewhere in the top 5 in the world in the numbers I have. And, we beat Stanford in 2010. Go Bears!), I had a leg up on people I encountered when I worked in the business world.

Yes, I walked into my first office job without specific knowledge about business, but I knew how to think critically and ask questions, which ended up serving me pretty well and maybe actually being the "skill" set I needed to work that professional job after all, despite the tendency toward vocationalization.

That's what we owe undergraduates. To extend the platitude, it's not to give them a fish, but it's also not to teach them how to fish. We have to teach them how to figure out how to fish. It's second-order. Or maybe third-order. Something. And if they then want to go and get specific skill training in a master's degree instead of doing research, I suppose I can be down with that.

As long as I get an asterisk next to mine that shows I did do research.

That (Quickly Becoming Infamous) "Sexy Geek" Panel

2011-08-10T11:06:00.010-05:00

Up front, two confessions:

1. I didn't attend the "Oh, You Sexy Geek!" Panel at Comic-Con. I didn't even attend Comic-Con. Never have, in fact. But I have consumed a number of recaps of the panel (including a video excerpt, which I rely on pretty heavily here) and I do study fandom, so the terrain is relatively familiar

2. I'm deeply uncomfortable with feminism, because that word and the movement it describes have a lot of historical baggage of gender essentialism and insufficient attention to race, class, and sexuality (among other structures). But I do know a thing or two about gender and the media (enough that they're letting me teach an upper division college course on it, at least).

Therefore, despite these two confessions, I'm wading in.

What's readily apparent to me about the Sexy Geek panel is that it had at least two purposes or personalities, a fact which has tended to be glossed over in the discussion about it. It was, first, a discussion of whether it is "pandering" when women dress as sexed-up characters—this was its explicit goal. But it somehow also became a referendum on female fan costuming practices and female fandom itself—whether women are ever, or can ever be, "real" fans.

And in fact, much of the discourse around fandom tends to rely on the premise that women aren't actually fans, but instead—as Suzanne Scott points out in the blog post that prompted me to look into this incident in the first place—"female attendees are constructed through and defined by their male cohort’s gaze and companionship."

That is, as Scott parses out in her analysis of the July 25, 2008 sidebar in Entertainment Weekly cataloguing Comic-Con archetypes (which is available at her blog but not, sadly, in its original context on EW's website), they're either a "Princess Naked" trying to look sexy for men or a "Dr. Girlfriend" dutifully following their fanboyfriend. What do we learn from the vision of fandom put forth by this set of images? Well, off the top of my head:

1. Women are never really fans and don't want to be there for their own sake.
2. Women are always heterosexual (and, according to the pictures, white).
3. Women's behavior exists solely in relation to men (who are also always heterosexual and white).

These three factors, then, are why a panel about sexy costuming and pandering (apparently) turned into a discussion of female fandom more generally: sexiness = heterosexuality = women are there for men = women aren't real fans.

Okay, then, what about the sexiness part of what the panel was supposed to be about? The idea of "pandering" suggests that women are insincere when they dress sexy. They aren't actually fans and they don't actually like the characters, but they wear the revealing costume in order to prey on the desires of "genuine" heterosexual male fans. This is, the argument goes, either for their employer—as with the so-called "booth babe"--or because they themselves like this sexualized male attention.

One response to this "it's pandering and really for men" idea is to take a stance that often gets called (or gets to call itself) feminist—but is actually more specifically associated with second wave feminism—and deplore the exploitation of women for the male gaze. This is a point of view often derisively called the "humorless feminist," which the lone scholar-like representative on the panel, Jennifer Stuller, author of Ink Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology joked about being when she was the only one to raise this sort of question.

However, though there is something to be said about resisting the idea that female sexuality exists only for male pleasure, this sort of thing is exactly why I'm not down with feminism. It constructs women as victims of men, who coerce them to bare themselves for the men's gratification, rather than agents making decisions within cultural constraints.

Way to reinforce the idea that women are weak and men are strong, y'all.

Of course, as evidenced by Stuller's complaint that she was the only feminist on the panel, this wasn't the stance that the panel tended to take. Instead, the argument was that, in Scott's words, "many fangirls choose to cosplay in sexually explicit garb and claim that choice as empowering."

Alternately, the attitude can be described, as pointed out over at Feminist Fatale, as the contention that "women who were critical of sexy geek culture in any way were just jealous, had no confidence, and were projecting their issues with self-esteem onto the women who felt empowered by walking the Comic-Con floor in a Slave Leia costume."

Or, there's the point made by one of the panelists that "I like many characters. Some of them are less dressed than others. I can't help that." That is—though the panelist didn't mean it this way—regardless of what fans decide to do with their costuming practices, they're working with characters that already exist, and particularly female characters that tend to be scantily clad and unrealistically proportioned. (As I say in my Intro to Media Studies lecture on gaming, accompanied by a suitably cleavage-y photo, Lara Croft is so busty that Angelina Jolie, of all people, had to wear a padded bra, and this body type is not unique to video games.)

It is with these three pro-sexy-costuming positions that things get complicated. Feminists have, rightly, pointed out that the demand that women be sexy is offensive and should be resisted. As audience member Seth Green interjected when he took the mike, it's no longer the case that women have to rely on their sexuality to get ahead, and there are different opportunities now, so we should be wary of reinforcing the idea that all women have to offer is sex.

We should also be critical of the narrowness of the beauty ideal represented in mediated bodies. A very large percentage of the time, these are bodies people don't tend to actually have. With roughly equal frequency, they're quite fully displayed in garb that's either skin-tight or skin-baring.

To argue that it's a problem that women have to be sexy, then, is not to be "just jealous" of people who're rocking the faux-metal bikini. It's an important conversation that needs to be had.

However, the contention about empowerment does have some merit. It can be empowering to dress sexy if the intention is to seize control of your own body. If it's not about someone else's gratification (male gaze) or following someone else's rules (humorless feminist forbidding), there's agency to be had.

After all, it is, as I've noted in blogs about policing Lea Michele's sexuality or the occasionally unfree nature of what gets to stand as freedom, equally offensive to demand that someone be sexy and to demand that they not be sexy.

The challenge lies in the fact that the same scantily-clad body has multiple meanings. What happens if you're being proud of yourself but some sleazy boy informs you, as incredibly unprofessional panelist Chris Gore said to his co-panelists, that he'd like to put his penis into you?

What if you're expressing self-ownership but some feminist tells you you're delusional and antifeminist and playing to the male gaze?

What about if you actually like the character and know everything about her, but you get read as just another Princess Naked by male fans who may actually be less invested than you but get to count as real in a way you don't?

Despite this variety of scenarios—and I didn't even include all the scenarios that might arise if one was cosplaying in a not-revealing fashion or not costumed at all—there's a fair amount of consistency in the solutions: take action, get in their face, and tell them off.

If women were to collectively tell people like Chris Gore to keep their penises to themselves (or put them into something else, the garbage disposal maybe?) and stop assuming that all female-bodied individuals are always flattered by that kind of sexualized attention, eventually they'd get the message.

It has to be everyone, or a general trend, though, because, as Stuller pointed out at her blog, a lone response could "reinforce the 'humorless feminist' label I had tried to joke about – and which was later suggested as the problem of anyone who didn’t get the joke via Gore’s Twitter feed, along with accusations of sexual repression."

That is—and this is one thing feminism's gotten right—wanting to look sexy doesn't automatically mean that you're interested in sexual attention from random men (or women) you encounter, and not wanting that attention doesn't mean you don't like sex. It just means you don't want people you don't know to act as if they have a right of access to your body.

The exact same response of getting in people's face can be used toward actual humorless feminists, whose demands that people not dress sexy seek to take away ownership of female fans' own bodies just as much as catcalls do.

Finally, a good throwdown of "look how extensive my knowledge about this realm is" can shut up the naysaying male fans who consider women at conventions to be accessories for men.

As Seth Green—who, as many have pointed out, was sort of the best thing about the panel—argued, the question is about authenticity and costuming, sexy or not, can't be pandering if it's sincere. The "girls" (his word, not mine, and I'm not totally thrilled about it) who enjoy these sort of cult fan objects have had to fight to participate and they've been considered definitionally inauthentic, but as long as they really love the object of fandom they should be allowed just like anyone.

Because, as Green asked, what does it get you to say that other people aren't allowed to like it because they haven't liked it as long as you have? Someone has got to push back on this hipsterization of fandom—"it was better before it was so mainstream" is an absurd argument, even more so when those same fans are completely invested in mainstream normativity on a number of levels: masculinity, heterosexuality, whiteness, notions of appropriate media consumption, etc.

With respect to this panel, then, it seems pretty clear that it needs a sequel, or maybe two. The question of what sexy costuming means in fan culture deserves more than it got. And the question of female fandom in general sort of deserves its own panel.

But even if there's only one "Sexy Geek Redux," it has to be different. My wishlist? For the love of god, can there be fewer postfeminist bloggers? Because, though it's a valid position to have involved in the debate, they were totally overrepresented. I'd also want more academic representation. Someone who studies sexuality, maybe? And to have something other than a skeezy boy representing men. Seth Green seemed pretty interested in these questions; why not actually put him on the panel this time?

With Comic-Con rapidly becoming the go-to destination for promotion of damn near everything (Really, 24? And Glee?), the character of the convention is changing. And this is as good a time as any for the broad and amorphous subculture that circulates through its halls to really take a look at these issues.

So let's try that next year.

I'm moving again next week and then it's the first week of school. I do sincerely hope this won't cause an interruption in the blogging, but it might.