1. Observation
I was — am — at war with my body. I have
anxieties about my appearance, dysphoria and dysmorphia ruminate constantly.
Being seen is a source of panic, being photographed is terrifying. Once
intellectualizing and talking circles around my problems failed, and I
scheduled an appointment with a therapist.
My new therapist sat opposite me, a poodle
beside her in a little vest. A therapy dog, probably; there were plenty in the
building.
“I just have this constant worry that I am
ugly.” I told her, already tearful.
“Well. Are you?” she asked, point-blank.
My tears stopped mid-streak in confusion.
“Are you ugly?” she repeated, “I’m blind.
You’ll have to tell me.”
The poodle, a seeing eye dog, staunchly
refused to help with this assessment. I stopped crying and started laughing.
She was fully blind. I saw a blind therapist
for my self-image.
Moving from film production to library
science was a self-preserving career move. My job at a talent management
company evaluating teenage models had been an unhealthy choice, in retrospect.
In an archive, I was alone in a back room shuffling papers. I could go
unremarked upon. One day, a contractor came through the space and our director
pointed at spots on the ceiling best suited for cameras. My stomach turned. I
wanted out of that job before the security cameras were installed. I had
nothing to hide, no stolen artifacts lining my sleeves. I simply hate being
observed. The camera would pry into a space where I could, on occasion, stare
into space and puzzle out the shape of a collection. On one particularly long
day of erasing and rewriting labels, I idly played with the shavings until they
transmuted into a kneaded eraser. Episodes of Radiolab and The Magnus Archives
played in one ear while prying off staples for hours. Security cameras look for
wrongdoing, and in work spaces, failing to max out productivity is a cardinal
sin.[1]
I did not want to stay long enough to be scrutinized.
I am very aware of being surveilled. I am:
brown, fat, working-class. My body is checked for delinquency. My body is a
site of wrongdoing. My body is criminal.
What my job is determines if I am frisked
before and after work, or allowed to wander rare collections without comment.
Am I disciplined for wasting time (“time to lean, time to clean”), or
encouraged to think about abstract ideas? The archive is also a warehouse. The
warehouse is also an archive. In both, I pace down concrete floors and stacks,
pulling just the right object, sorting manifestations from works. I am the same
body and mind in both places; the punitive measures, attitudes and pay range
are entirely arbitrary. I am a mule from a temp agency carting ballots; I am a
professional scholar transporting precious sources. I am a Mexican, and this is
why I am: plentiful, lazy, cheap; I am first-generation Mexican-American and
this is why I am: precious, hard-working, rare. The ways a job can abuse or
commodify me has nothing to do with an innate trait of my own body, but the
norms and expectations of the spaces I inhabit.
I am very aware of being surveilled. I am
brown, fat, working class. There are spaces for these traits on the scholarship
form. The scholarships love to know these things about me. The grants love when
I dig into our family’s pain and find the words indigenous, first-generation,
food desert. Since I do not have the privileges of connection and money, I feed
into white supremacy narratives for cash. I sell a story about how this
brain thinks real good for one so brown-fat-poor. I don’t tell them: there were
dozens of me in each class in public school. There were lots of smart fat brown
kids who should be in grad school. I did not succeed. I survived.
These days, I try to reject Cartesian
dualism. I try to no longer think of my brain as piloting my meat-suit body. I
am political because my body is political. I am not exceptionally smart in
spite of my phenotypes. I am trying to
remember I am whole.
This is a library science blog. I talk about
my body at length (and width) because it, too, is library science. I do all of
my best work while inhabiting a human body. I haven’t tried doing it without
one. How does a nonbinary body catalog sex? How does someone “ni de aqui, ni de
alla” [2]
label maps? How does someone coming from punitive-disciplinary normative work
spaces react to benign racism, diversity and inclusion in archival spaces? I
cannot divorce being a material, visible person in the world from the
intellectual work I do. I fear I am ugly, I resist the gaze, I notice that
gaze, I see it replicated. My dysfunctions made it easy to identify
surveillance and ruminate. My body first told me I am surveilled as a
disciplinary tactic that enforces societal norms. Foucault put it into thousands
more words. Fat bodies are unruly and undisciplined. Trans bodies defy
categorization. If I was more disciplined, I would not be fat. If I was more
disciplined, I would be good at being a woman. I would finally be beautiful.
But to whom?
“When
we speak of the ills of the world—violence, poverty, injustice—we are not
speaking conceptually; we are talking about things that happen to bodies […] Injustice
is an opaque word until we are willing to discuss its material reality […]” [3]
2. Blindness
Is the solution simply, avoid being
perceived? If my discomfort with my body stems from other people observing and
evaluating me, is the solution to stop being visible?
Sometimes.
Sometimes, I love it when my friends send
the “I pretend not to see it” meme. Maybe they did see my birth name on my
Paypal, and humorously communicate that it’s so forgotten that it was never
seen in the first place. Sometimes I tell my clumsy friends that nobody saw
them trip (I did. I saw). What we mean in those moments is: I witnessed but did
not record. I noticed but will not remember.
Things I didn’t see:
- A stranger shoplifting
- An awkward moment in class
- My professor bursting into tears from stress
- A coworker arriving late
- Extraordinarily raunchy porn in an author’s papers
- My sister’s episiotomy during birth
It’s not that my eyes did not process visual
stimuli. Technically, I just recorded all of those things here in a blog. I
mean something about grace. I will treat you with compassion: I will not
involve the law, I will not laugh at you, I will not leave you to your pain or
grief. I did see you. I will not keep track of your messy, complex moments. I
will not punish you.
My therapist’s blindness frustrated my goal
to be categorized. If I was wrong about being ugly and unnecessarily obsessed,
then the DSM-IV would call it body dysmorphia. If I was right and appropriately
concerned, then I was self-aware.
Categorizing helps make things easy to assess. I crave assessment,
praise, acknowledgement, comment. I don’t want to be invisible. I want to be
seen without punishment.
Tim Kreider’s essay “I Know What You Think
of Me” ended up being a massive internet meme for its line, “If we want
the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being
known.”[4]
I think it struck a chord with my fellow neurotics. The paradox is that in
order to receive praise, love, acceptance, people have to allow themselves to
be visible and vulnerable. It’s a paradox only because we live in this
nightmare Foucauldian relationship with visibility. When observation is geared
towards correction, criticism and control, it doesn’t bring cathartic emotional
vulnerability. Observation is a threat.
Racism, sexism, ableism, homo- and transphobia,
ageism, fatphobia are algorithms created by humans’ struggle to make peace with
the body. A radical self-love world is a world free from the systems of
oppression that make it difficult and sometimes deadly to live in our bodies.[5]
3. Refocus
Times I
Was Grateful There Were Cameras:
- Pandemic Zoom meetings. I saw into people’s homes and saw: needy animals, cozy pillows, the nests people make to work from home, signs of human life. Every pet was delightful.
- Photos of comic conventions in the 70s, from the archive. So many important nerds doing silly nerd things.
- Rearview cameras on cars, saving me from curbs.
- Silly photos of my friends
For the
most part, I love windows into humans being very human. Foibles. Unflattering
angles. Laughs caught mid-wheeze. Photos, like archives, hold onto things we
can’t dedicate space to remembering in full.[6]
It’s in archives that I fell deeply in love
with the past. Sometimes, I point to Hollinger boxes and quip from SpongeBob: “My
friend’s in there!”.[7]
In the long hours of compiling box-level inventories for hundreds of feet of
material, I sketched out the shape of a stranger’s life. My initial goal was
data, spreadsheets, Archives Space arrangements. Hard data, calculated labor. Curiosity,
time, and lack of strict surveillance let me spend time with that collection. I
relaxed into something like an interview with a ghost. Hello, Fred. You kept a
scathing letter from Stephen King. You kept pins from every convention. You
doodled your fursona in the margins. You are my friend, now, death and time
parting us, I can still get to know you. Death, I think, is the one time the
mind/soul/self does split from the body. The morgue gets the body, the archive
gets the soul. As interim psychopomp, I learned a new way of observing
and imagined the potential to be observed with compassion.
My self-image issues have improved significantly
by 1) distancing myself from beauty as an industry, 2) cultivating the media I
consume carefully and 3) being in queer spaces.
I wasn’t seeing through my own gaze. I had borrowed the standard set:
looking through the eyes of a white, cisgender, allosexual man who prizes
beauty as a commodity. Those lenses distort. A blind therapist asked me about
my reality, and I had no answer that came from my own ken. I had unflinchingly
internalized a standpoint that had nothing to do with my own experiences.
When we approach looking with the
mindset of the panopticon, every problem and solution revolves around
punishment. But what is observation to: an artist? A mother? A NICU doctor? Do
we watch vigilantly for a newborn to misbehave, and soundly thrash it for
breathing wrong? Is that absurd? Does the power differential between
doctor-preemie mean the doctor has power over a lesser subject, or a responsibility
to care? Observation will be adversarial as long as we use the lens of violence
to perceive. After struggling as a subject of observation, I find myself moving
into a career with more power and control over a space. How will I choose to
see?
“It is through our own
transformed relationship with our bodies that we become champions for other bodies
on our planet. As we awaken to our indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired
to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and
oppression against all bodies. There is a whisper we keep hearing; it is saying
we must build in us what we want to see built in the world. When we act from
this truth on a global scale, using the lens of the body, we usher in the
transformative opportunity of radical self-love, which is the opportunity for a
more just, equitable, and compassionate world for us all.”[8]
"[…]proposes four
inter-related shifts in archival relationships based on radical empathy:
the relation-ship between archivists
and records creators,
between archivists and
records subjects, between archivists
and records users,
and between archivists
and larger communities. In each
of these relationships, we
argue that archivists have affective responsibilities to other
parties and posit
that these affective responsibilities should
be marked by radical
empathy."[9]
[1] Foucault, Michel,
1926-1984. Discipline and Punish : the Birth of the Prison. New York :Pantheon
Books, 1977, 153-154, 153-154.
[2] Anzaldúa, Gloria,
Borderlands = La Frontera : The New Mestiza. San Francisco, Spinsters/Aunt
Lute, 1987.
[3]
[4] Tim Kreider, “I Know What
You Think of Me,” Opinionator, 1371315098, https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/i-know-what-you-think-of-me/.
[5]
[6] Ghaddar, J.J. 2016. “The Spectre in the Archive:
Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Archival Memory”. Archivaria 82 (December), 26.
https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13579.
[7] SpongeBob. 2000 "Big
Pink Loser/Bubble Buddy." Amazon Prime video, 24:00. Nov
16.https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B000ID4KGE/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r.
[8] Taylor, Sonya Renee. 2021. The Body Is Not an Apology. 2nd ed. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler.
[9] Caswell, ML. (2021). From
Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in Archives. UCLA.
Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0mb9568h
No comments:
Post a Comment