7 Quick Takes

1.
I realize that I have been neglecting this blog. For a period I thought about writing a post explaining why, but that might be too self-indulgent. I don’t know what to expect of the future: I could suddenly be more productive, but I could also continue by unreliable trickle. We will see. In the interim, I can at least tell you what is going on with me.

2.
I have finished my courses for my Master’s of English Literature. In a few days I begin a Master’s of Library Science. The good news is that I am not moving from the city or, indeed, my apartment. All is jolly roses here.
A short word on the switch: there are very few professorships available, so getting a PhD is risky; I am feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the seclusion of the English department, as I am uninterested in producing knowledge that will not reach people making decisions; I want a degree which gives me some clear career path, so that even if I do not wind up following that path, I at least know that I can if I need to; I find the idea of helping people access information and knowledge appealing.

3.
For those of you curious about academics, would you be interested in knowing what I have been writing about? I wrote a paper about the trouble with empathy in Wilfred Owen’s poetry; I wrote another paper, for a class on the history of the discipline, trying to figure out the epistemological base of Stephen Greenblatt’s new historicism, finally arguing that he produces a sleight-of-hand covering over a fundamental instability (fusing the old historicism and new criticism); and I wrote a final paper, in my summer course, using Laplanche’s psychoanalysis and Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself to analyze the asexuality described in the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network (AVEN).

4.
I went on a cross-country trip with Jon after my summer course; I also went to Florida and (very briefly) the Bahamas, including a day in the Magic Kingdom; afterwards, I stayed with my parents in Fort McMurray, where we started a road trip to Hay River, Northwest Territories. It was a busy summer.

5.
What have I been reading? Half-World, by Hiromi Goto, is a YA urban fantasy novel that is surprisingly bleak and difficult, but certainly engaging and worth a read (so long as you aren’t put off by journeys into hell-worlds). Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, and Witch Week, by Diana Wynne Jones are the first three of the Chrestomanci series (if you order them according to Jones’ recommended reading order, and not publishing or internal chronological order). Of them, I think I preferred The Lives of Christopher Chant, though I did quite like Charmed Life. Silver: Return to Treasure Island, by Andrew Motion, is a sequel (written by another author) to Treasure Island. It was enjoyable and a highly appropriate read in the Bahamas, but it has perhaps unachieved presumptions to Literature. The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head, by Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan, is an interesting, readable, Oliver-Sacks-style set of essays on psychological cases, though I would accuse it of voyeurism and unfounded philosophizing. G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Knew Too Much is what you would get if a Catholic, somewhat bitter C. S. Lewis wrote detective fiction in the school of Sherlock Holmes (at least, that's what I took from it).
From class, I would recommend Roberto Bolano’s Amulet, Pat Barker’s Another World, Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself (caution: theory! jargon! Neitzsche! Kafka! Foucault!), and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (which I had the pleasure of discussing as a TA rather than as a student, and which is now my favourite play ever). I would even recommend Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead; I did not especially enjoy the beginning and it was very difficult to teach, but it got better as a plot sedimented.

6.
Of course I have also been reading webcomics. I have picked up John Allison’s Bad Machinery and Scary Go Round, both of which are lovely just for their linguistic talent. Scary Go Round is one that improves as it goes, beginning without much strength but getting wonderful as it loses one set of protagonists and picks up a couple other sets of protagonists. (It is somewhat like what Questionable Content would be like if the characters went on adventurers, stopped genuflecting, had a plot, and decided to investigate the weird things going around them instead of mope about relationship issues...OK, so it’s not much like Questionable Content, I guess.) Bad Machinery, the sequel to Scary Go Round, begins wonderful and holds the note. Namesakes is also a lot of fun for people who are interested in things set in Oz, Wonderland, and other public domain fantasy settings.
And my sister-in-law-to-be is about to launch a web-serialized graphic novel entitled Megan Kearney’s Beauty and the Beast, located here. This I will be reading.

7.
I have also been watching lots of things. I will not list them all, but I especially loved BBC’s Sherlock Holmes. With The X-Files I for perhaps the first time in my life shipped a couple (and was satisfied). I have finished off everything Joss Whedon has directed for television, after watching his work for years. The Secret World of Arriety is gorgeous. I am also starting to watch the Disney "classics" again or for the first time, as the case may be. So far, I have seen Sleeping Beauty, Pocahontas, and The Little Mermaid.

Sleeping Beauty’s Three Good Fairies

or, What Makes a Feminist Protagonist Anyway?

I do not think this image is proportionally representative of the film.

For a few reasons, I have decided to re-watch many of the Disney films in the coming weeks (or months, if that’s what it takes). The first I watched, however, was not a re-viewing, but a viewing for the first time: Sleeping Beauty (1959), which I had never seen before (to my memory). My expectations were therefore fairly few. Nonetheless I discovered upon watching the film that I did have some expectations after all: I expected Princess Aurora and Prince Philip to be the main characters. I do not think that this expectation was fulfilled.

These days there is a lot of talk about how women characters are portrayed, and Disney princesses are a popular subject of this conversation. One can even find lists which rank the princesses according to how feminist they are. Princess Aurora usually does not fare well in these discussions. Granted, it would be difficult to rig a version of Sleeping Beauty which is particularly feminist: the princess spends almost all of the story a victim, and in most of it an entirely passive one (she’s sleeping!). As a character, Disney’s Aurora is hard to make out; she seems clever and active enough when left to her own devices, but she falls in love with a strange man after one song (mind you, he’s the only man she ever met and she’s sixteen, so it’s not implausible) and then weeps all the way from there to the fateful prick. As far as the plot goes, Sleeping Beauty is a feminist’s nightmare: the princess is marked out as a victim from infancy while simultaneously subject to an all-powerful patriarchal authority (father and king in one figure); her life is planned out for her, and she raised in seclusion under the assumption that she must always be protected, rather than taught to protect herself; all men are kept away from her, and as a result she does not know how to interact with them; when her aggressor finds her, the princess is inexorably drawn, without resistance, to a domestic and traditionally gender-linked device, which promptly puts her to sleep; the princess then waits passively until a male hero defeats her aggressor and binds her to himself in matrimony. (Maybe even worse, the villain is a classic instance of a woman who wants power becoming evil.)

While I am not about to suggest that this nightmare is actually absent from the movie or that the movie is somehow not problematic, I will suggest that we might perceive Sleeping Beauty to be worse than it is if we imagine either Prince Philip or Princess Aurora to be the protagonist of the movie. Rather, I think a strong case could be made that the Three Good Fairies are the protagonists of the film. They get more screen time than the prince and probably even the princess, and they get more control over the events of the story than any of the royals, too. If it had been up to Prince Philip, the sleeping curse would have lasted for the traditional one hundred years, but the Three Good Fairies circumvented that—so, in a more metafictional sense, they did change the story from the original to the Disney-version. Sleeping Beauty is in a lot of ways what happens if we take the behind-the-scenes-operators and give them the main attention of the narrative, which is an interesting experiment.

But you might object that the Three Good Fairies are not feminist protagonists. I certainly agree that they are not feminist characters in the sense that we are used to them. Most obviously, they are incompetent and silly a lot of the time. When trying to imagine how they might save the princess, one of them suggests turning her into a flower. This is precisely the kind of silliness a chauvinistic man might attribute to women. Worse, their squabbles over what colour dress Aurora should wear is what gives away their position to the enemy. What better metaphor for a woman’s supposedly misplaced priorities? Bear with me, though. They do ultimately wind up being competent: in a show of remarkable bravery, they infiltrate Maleficent’s castle, sneak into Prince Philip’s cell, remove his chains with magic-wand cutting torches, arm him, and protect him from enemies during his escape. Prince Philip cuts through the thorns and fights dragon-Maleficent, yes, but during his moment of weakness they arrive and cast a spell on his sword, which allows him to finally defeat Maleficent. As far as support roles go, they do almost all of the work. Prince Philip gets to be the regular masculine hero, victorious through violent monomachy, but the focus is on the support. The heroism of support could be a strong opportunity for feminist re-tellings; after all, women have historically be shuttled (whether willing or not) into support positions, and those stories so rarely get told. Sleeping Beauty may not be explicitly thematizing this unfairness, but insofar as the Three Good Fairies take protagonist positions, the movie is doing some of the work of telling those stories. The Good Fairies are not Whedonist super-powered women or self-aware anti-heroic Atwood types, but that does not mean they are not “strong role models” for all that.

Let’s go back to the part where the Good Fairies are incompetent. What is it that they are not competent in? Clearly they are good at magic. No, when they are most useless it is in domestic activity. They are terrible domestic help. One of the most amusing parts of the movie is watching them make a childish mistakes when trying to prepare for Aurora’s sixteenth birthday: one of them, making a dress, cuts a hole in the middle of the fabric for the princess’s head and neck; another, making a cake, puts the icing on and stacks the layers on top of each other before putting it in the oven. I find it very interesting that these female characters, clearly ones we are supposed to admire (eventually), fail consistently at being “good women.” Now, this comedy relies on an expectations that three grandmotherly-types would be good at domestic arts, and the recognition that domestic arts take real skill is undermined when they just magic it all away in the end, but I think that at least we can acknowledge an ideological tension present between Good-Fairies-as-unconventional and Good-Fairies-as-domestic-fairies. Put differently, they are shown as both unrealistic domestic goddesses and as real, futzing people who are not terribly good at cooking. (Also, they are old and they are not offered as sexy eye candy. Chalk a few more for the good guys.)

I am not hailing Sleeping Beauty as a feminist masterpiece. But I do have two lessons that I have taken away from this. The first is that we might need to re-imagine what a feminist protagonist would look like (and this is work already well underway, has been for a while, but we need to continue re-imagining); the second is that part of ethical reading (or viewing) involves asking questions about who the protagonist is (who is driving the action? with whom is the film trying to ally the viewer’s sympathies?) and trying to monitor one’s assumptions about it.

[Some lingering problems: 1. Women are often encouraged to let men take credit, because men are not penalized for self-promotion but women are. Is celebrating women who stay in the background a way of telling women to wait for others to notice their accomplishments and do the promoting work for them? If so, that promotion—and so the career promotions—will not happen. 2. What about Maleficent? She seems in lots of ways like a regular wicked witch, a standard evil-women-with-power. There's also a whiff of sexy=evil. What can we do with her? 3. Did anyone else prefer Aurora's peasant dress to her princess dress?]

Leah's Ideological Turing Test

I totally forgot to advertise this before!

Leah could use your help stat to increase her sample size for her Ideological Turing Test this year. (Leah's a stats geek, so sample sizes mean a lot to her.) Go here to vote on whether the entries are written by atheists/Christians (depending on the round) or by their counterparts in disguise!

Responding to Judith Butler on Bodies in Motion

Just this night I went to see Judith Butler talk here in Vancouver, and I wrote these thoughts up afterwards. Please be aware that they are off-the-cuff and written in a state of mild-to-extensive tiredness. If I have time later (unlikely), I might write more about each issue later. You should also know that other people who saw the talk responded to my note on Facebook (identical to this one) disagreeing with their interpretations of particular statements Butler made, such as in the case of the first note.

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I liked, found useful, agreed with most of what Butler said. I want to begin this way because I won’t talk much about that here. Rather, I want to talk about some issues I had with things that were not central to her argument. This means simultaneously that I can accept what she said mainly without worrying about these objections, but nonetheless that I am a little more upset about these concerns because she could have easily presented the bulk of her ideas without triggering these issues the way she did.

1. I found problematic her assumption that we (the audience) shared particular sexual experiences or histories—that is, that we have all entered into particular agreements (specifically as liberals), and then found ourselves unexpected vulnerable in those agreements. Given the amount of struggle the asexual community has had in order to gain recognition or legitimacy of any kind at all, and given the fact that virgin-shaming and naïf-shaming more generally exist alongside and as a corollary to slut-shaming, both as forms of heteronormative sexual power that negatively affect men and women (among other things), and given the further fact that many cultural and religious groups practice sexual conduct that would exclude them from those categories, I am somewhat shocked that someone like Butler would be willing to include all of us into this set of experiences. I suppose this comes in part from the fact that I’m starting to enter into conversations about the over-valuation of sexuality and romance as universal human experiences, and Butler was not thinking of those conversations (nor is even necessarily aware of them), so I can't hold her accountable for not addressing them, but I did find this a personally uncomfortable moment. It was off-hand, but it was also easily avoided.

2. I also disliked the left-right polarization she presented. I know this is a personal quirk, in that I refuse to orient myself on the left-right axis and therefore get grumpy about people who think only in terms of the axis, but I still think it is a problem. For instance, the assumption that right-wing politics is necessarily antithetical to justice or equality, even as a leftist would define or conceive of those terms, is disconcerting to me. I wonder how we would respond if the political right mobilized bodies in opposition to the foreign occupation of Afghanistan, for instance, or in opposition to demonstratable political corruption? (With Ron Paul, these things seem plausible.) Surely these are things that those of us who would traditionally be categorized as left-wing (I dislike the axis, but I recognise that this is where political opinion tests place me) would be willing to support? Another way of asking this question is to ask whether the political handedness is inherent in the protestors or the issue: Butler specifically said that she would not celebrate the mobilization of right-wing protestors, that is right-wing people protesting, but what if the protest’s central issue is not itself clearly left- or right-wing? Would she not celebrate that even if that particular protest is something she could support? Or, as Butler herself might wonder, can a body have a political orientation regardless of the mobilization it is in?
[To be clear, for people who would offer me the political compass: I know of it, and I like it better than the left-right continuum, and I think it is still nonetheless woefully inadequate.]

3. I am wondering about the vulnerability of the police. Riots do happen, sometimes as results of protests. This is not to say that most police crackdowns of protests are not in the interests of state power more than democracy, that things like “security” are not often alibis for more unsettling political purposes, or that most demonstrations are not legitimate. But I am wondering what the language of “police power” or “police force” does to dehumanize the police themselves. Even (or especially) as instruments or embodiments of state power, the police-as-persons are also vulnerable, and there are times when the tropes of leftist discourse have been employed (generally by privileged undergrads who want to claim political legitimacy for their misbehaviour) to legitimize violence towards police officers in public spaces. I am thinking here of illegal street parties at Queen’s University, where paramedics, police officers, and police animals (a horse) were physically assaulted by partiers during the course of those state workers’ official and non-violent duties. (In this particular case, they were attempting to provide medical attention to injured students.) I say at the beginning of this entry that I “wonder” because I am thinking aloud here more than making a particular claim. I am not disputing anything that Butler has said, nor do I think this is an issue that she should have addressed, since it is not her focus. I do, however, think that we need to be careful when talking about body mobilization, violence, vulnerability, and police power/bodies. Not all occasions in which police interact with mobilized bodies are characterized by police violence on civilian bodies; sometimes civilians perform unprovoked violence on police bodies as well.

4. Let’s finish this with something I did like. “Unity means struggling.” Butler wanted to correct the misconception that disagreement among a coalition means that attempts to find unity have failed. Instead, struggling through issues means that the members have agreed to stay in the coalition rather than check out. I like this, though I find it exhausting, because what it suggests is that the painful discussions about equality, justice, and privilege may never end. It is easier for us to think that we are working towards—progressing towards, with all the problems that word contains—a utopic world in which injustice has been eradicated. The picture Butler offers is one of endless conflict and ambiguity. I say I find it exhausting, and I wonder if that exhaustion is one of the major motivators for utopian visions: that in the future (or in our gated community, if people go with segregation rather than proselytization), we will no longer have important political disagreements, and we can at last rest, we will no longer be so tired (so angry, so guilty, so hurt, so sad...). I don’t like what Butler is offering, but I think she’s right, and I like it more than the sort of homogenized Marxist or secular-atheist or gender-neutral or post-race utopias that many people seem to want to build (not least because I could not belong to some of those).

A Thought on Justice

The other day I was thinking about justice, which in the Christian theological tradition has historically been contrasted with mercy. On the one hand there is justice, which requires that all people receive what they deserve due to the content of their actions. On the other hand, there is mercy, which requires kindness to those who are suffering. To fully embody these two qualities is our goal, but it is impossible for humans and for human institutions. Only God can do so and God can only do so on, or through, the cross.

What if we have justice wrong? What if it doesn't mean that all people receive what they deserve? (For one thing, I have difficulty explaining this mechanism of "deserving.")

I tried to think of what I mean or imagine when I think of justice. I discounted the first few things I thought of, because those were phrases with the word in them--Justice Department, Justice League--or metonyms--scales, swords, paladins. The best and closest articulation, one which encompasses the realm of justice departments but also social justice issues, was this: justice is the action towards creating and maintaining a fairly ordered world. (This is not "fairly" in the sense of "rather" or "reasonably", but more like "equitably".) This is of course not a perfect definition because we then fall back to what "fair" means--it might evoke deserving again--but I'm going to use it to make a distinction.

This history of ideas is located firmly in the armchair-philosophy position, but in lieu of extensive research I'm going to offer it regardless. I wonder if we have fooled ourselves about justice from quite a long time ago, around the time people developed law. In the pursuit of a fairly ordered society, communities resorted to punishment models of enforcement. That is, in order to deter crime and therefore promote a fairly ordered system, those who committed crime were given predictable punishments so that they would not want crime. Punishing crimes then became an instrument of justice, and the activity of that punishment became an organ of justice. But societies did not have (perhaps, initially, did not need or could not produce) other forms of justice, such as universal health care or financial accountability or anti-heterosexism initiatives. As a result, the law enforcement system became the entirety of the justice system, and humans developed the idea that justice was identical to the punishment of crimes (and perhaps the inverse, the reward of good deeds).

Let's look at the famous introduction to Law and Order: "In the Criminal Justice System the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups. The police who investigate crime and the District Attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories." (Dun dun.) Even noting that this refers specifically to criminal justice, what I notice is that there is no sense whatsoever of reparation to the victim. There is no consolation. No healing. And there is no healing for the offenders, either; there is no concern for rehabilitation. There is also no concern for the prevention of crime. There is only retribution. This is only a small part of the movement towards a fairly ordered society. There is law, yes, and a certain kind of order, but that order seems to only be a legal one.

So I'm wondering if retribution is even a necessary component of justice at all. It has been a part of justice, necessarily, in the past. But is it one necessarily, in the philosophical sense? I don't think so; it seems only to be a component of justice insofar as it is a move towards a more fairly ordered system. If my suspicion is correct, then it seems to me that we need to rethink a lot of our political, legal, moral, and theological formulations.

One Discipline to Rule Them All, and in the Academy Bind Them

(My title does not have the same ring that the original does.)

In “On Disciplinary Cultures,” a chapter in her book How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgement, Michéle Lamont, a sociologist of knowledge, considers the way in which humanities and social science professors conceive of their own disciplines and other disciplines (since one’s own discipline is in part defined by how it compares to others). She is particularly interested in the ways in which each field approaches the production and evaluation of knowledge, so she looks in this chapter at the ways in which professors discuss applications on interdisciplinary grant panels. I found the chapter an interesting read, but deeply problematic in a lot of ways. For instance, Lamont takes the interview statements as self-evident; she does not interpret the data, or at least she does not acknowledge that what she is doing is interpretation. This can make her rather dull, but it also leaves me wondering whether there isn’t more to say. However, I want to talk less about Lamont and more about some of the interviewed statements and things it got me thinking about.

One of the things that struck me was how arrogant the philosophy professors seemed to be. This might well be oversensitivity on my part, and it might be an issue of presentation, but they sounded rather pompous. In particular, some philosophers have a conception of their field which could come off as a bit patronizing to other fields: “Princeton philosopher Alexander Nehamas notes that American philosophers think of their field as a ‘second order discipline,’ superordinate to all other disciplines, because it investigates the claims made by other fields.” (Another reason might be that analytic philosophers sometimes conclude that while they are qualified to assess history or anthropology proposals, historians and anthropologists are not qualified to assess philosopher proposals. This might be true in a certain sense, but not everyone considers being incomprehensible a good thing.)

My first reaction to philosophy's supposed superordinate status was to remember how I once considered English a superordinate discipline, though I would not have used that term. One thing we do in English is look at ways meaning is conveyed through language; specifically, we tend to look for ways in which more meaning was conveyed than appears on an explicit level, and usually more than was intended to be conveyed. (There is a lot more going on in the discipline than this, but it is one thing we are trained to do.) Thanks to the ingestion of deconstruction into the department, we also tend to look for internal contradictions and paradoxes ("instability") in the language that is used. I have since learned about discourse analysis and the digital humanities, which use an impressive array of quantitative analyses to look at how particular discourses are conducted, what kinds of responses are necessary in light of the situation, and what new responses are made necessary by those. (I know very little about this field, so I cannot say much more.) In my department, we have assembled a set of tools that are applicable to any text; discourse analysis is usually used to look at media on politics, for instance. We (can) do much more than read literature these days. And so it seems that if a literary scholar had enough background in philosophy to know what the philosophers are talking about, she could use her literary analytical tools on their discourse and understand what it is doing—and where it is going wrong, where it is blind to itself. My discipline was superordinate to all other disciplines because all disciplines communicated in text, and we were the ones who knew text.

I am no longer quite so cocky, of course. Among other things, I am more aware of the anthropologists, who know culture. All disciplines have cultures, and all disciplines exist in a culture. The anthropologists also have a claim to superordinate status. Lamont, a sociologist, seems to be silently positioning her field’s superordinateness in this chapter, first by omitting sociology from her analysis, and second by subjecting other fields to her scrutiny, to try to come to understand their inter- and intradynamics. Particular historians work in the history of ideas, which seems sort of like philosophy and anthropology swallowed up by history, but I am not worried about disciplinary boundaries; historians of ideas (I don’t know what they use as nouns for themselves) might also want to claim superordinate status. I can even see evolutionary psychologists making such a pitch (but ... no, I shouldn’t even start, because I’ve been having a hard time being nice about ev psych lately).

Once the claim to superordinate status begins to proliferate so wildly, no claim looks very valid. Anthropologists use reasoning in their texts and discourses to convey ideas in a particular historical moment within a particular society. Philosophers write in language to convey ideas to particular people, within a particular society and a particular culture in a particular moment in history. No one can say to another field, “You use the thing we study, so we are of a higher order than you,” without that field replying, “But you use the thing we study, so we are instead of an even higher order than you.” And everyone could use their tools to study that argument, too. (By "no one" and "everyone," I mean within the humanities and maybe the social sciences. Engineers and mathematicians and chemists, you are out of luck. Sure, you made the pencils we use to write, but the pencils do not impact the content.)

 Most of these claims are based on slightly different epistemologies. Usually an interdisciplinary scholar can pick and choose between tools without worry, but some topics make this less feasible. A self-aware scholar finds that his selection of tools is strategic, and that in order to do what he wants to do, he needs to cover over the fact that his synthetic (patchwork) method hides contradictory epistemologies. Analytic philosophers believe that language can be used transparently, or at least that logical reasoning can be done in spite of language’s limitations; literary analysts do not agree, believing that language always shapes the ideas it is used to convey. Literary analysts tend to be too widely dispersed methodologically to be subject to the same attacks as a whole, but I am sure that most positions a literary analyst might hold are subject to some analytical-philosophical attack.

Ordinarily this does not matter very much, but what I have been thinking is that, when you are engaged in a conversation with someone, it is not enough to find out what premises they are working from. You also need to figure out what tools they think they are using, and what those tools’ epistemological grounding is. You should figure out what sorts of methods they think are superordinate. And you should probably concede that if they differ from you on this, you will not convince them unless you can use their own methods to show them that their methods are wrong. That can get a bit conceptually hairy. But I am not yet done thinking this through.