Queer/Trans/Drag and Gender as Category | Daniel Williford

In June, 2014, a Time magazine’s cover featuring actress Lavern Cox declared a “Trans Tipping Point,” calling transgender rights, “America’s next civil rights frontier.” In 2017, National Geographic magazine featured a trans kid with the title “Special Issue: Gender Revolution.” A number of examples in between are available, mostly centering on figures from art and fashion, but not exclusively. While these declarations sound good as publication titles, they may or may not mean that transgender revolution is taking place. Nonetheless, they index a reality in which trans activism, which started in earnest in the 1960s, has had a real impact on cultural discourse and more importantly on the lived experience of trans and gender non-binary people.¹ That lived reality is, nonetheless, one of precariousness in terms of safety, security, health, and wellness: being outside of the norms of gender means being subject to enhanced scrutiny, suspicion, interrogation, and confrontation by representatives of state power and administrative bureaucracy.

In “Administering Gender,” Dean Spade documents the way that a) the administrative practices of the state reinforce the idea that gender is a necessary and central part of our social identities and b) that such administrative practices police our adherence to binary gender categories. Queer identities make such gender-based administrative practices more visible because non-normative social identities do not readily conform to administrative apparatuses. As a result, assumptions about gender identity built into those administrative apparatuses prove inflexible.

Spade is interested in people who occupy social identity positions at the margins of the biopolitical order of things, who are therefore most vulnerable because they are least able to be assimilated into the administrative and bureaucratic systems that govern and order the nation-state. Trans individuals who engage with various apparatuses of administration often show, through a painful experience, just how inflexible such administrative apparatuses are to gender identity. Spade cites examples that show how trans people are subject to not only normative violence in society, but also administrative violence. Spade’s point applies equally to everyone: gender is itself an ordering logic, that establishes norms of behavior across numerous biological systems, all of which are meant to “add up” to a unified presentation of one out of two possible genders.

Transphobia in the LGBT community is far more pervasive than the acronym might suggest, but among those who challenge the insistence on identity as essential, trans sometimes appears conservative. From an outdated queer perspective, transgender people take gender too seriously, because they take it seriously at all. This might be one reason why the popular drag performer RuPaul Charles has once again earned criticism for his transphobia (this time for suggesting that trans women couldn’t perform on his show).² Of course, it’s crucial to understand that drag is not trans; drag is a theatrical artform in the genre of camp comedy, and as such “makes fun of” and “makes fun out of” gender.³ Still, drag performers like RuPaul are very often high-femme gay men, and as such are often sympathetic to trans-identified people. According to historian-activist Susan Stryker, drag and other forms of stylized gender-crossing and gender-blurring can be considered transgender.⁴

RuPaul, however, comes from a queer-punk background, and his political engagement has primarily been to reject politics, norms, rules, and structures--except those of neoliberalism; being decidedly of the world of consumer culture. Understanding why RuPaul is obtuse on the issue of transgender identity is complicated, but might come down to his genderqueer-ness: his sense that any gender identity is a societal construct that ties us down into power structures rather than liberating us from them.⁵ This might be an apologetic or generous interpretation, but as a fan of RuPaul’s work, I say as much based on having heard RuPaul speak about gender at length for decades. His position is not without precedent, even if it seems stuck in the 90s, the decade which, in fact, Queer Theory came into prominence.

Queer identity is often a self-identification with an identity that is non-normative, positioned in opposition to assumed norms, especially related to gender and sexuality. At least, that’s what is meant by the sort of queerness that became solidified in academic queer theory in the 1980s and 1990s in the U.S., a terminology that drew from a longer history of LGBT discourse, especially embedded in AIDS activism, lesbian feminist theory, and camp culture. RuPaul might best be explained with reference to queer theory, but he is obligated to find resources to educate himself about trans identity, if only to keep up in a changing world.

In her critique of the approach by LIS scholars to the project of correcting problematic library classification taxonomies and subject headings, Emily Drabinski emphasizes the role that librarians and others in the field have in emphasizing knowledge structures as incomplete and contingent, rather than portraying reality as it really is or reality as it ought to be. According to Drabinski, categories, especially those about social identity, are “discursively produced and historically contingent rather than...essential or articulable once and for all."⁶ She suggests that a queer approach is better than one that seeks to correct authoritative sources like subject headings.

RuPaul might agree that it is worth resisting policed language and fixed gender identities, but what Spade reminds us is that the lived reality of trans people means that administrative violence is everywhere present, and that structures of knowledge including classificatory terminology and colloquial language all participate in the administrative ordering of gender. Although there are reasons to challenge the seriousness of gender identity on a philosophical or political basis, we must not be dismissive of calls from the trans community for terminology adheres to state administrative apparatuses, especially when those procedures mean access to safety, healthcare, legal status, rights, and basic visibility.

¹ Gender is a topic about language more than about physiology. Structures of knowledge that fall under the purview of Information Studies are involved in the reordering and expanding of language to accommodate a richer articulation of gender. For an IS-specific history of terms related to trans and queer identity, see K.R. Robert, “Inflexible Bodies: Metadata for Trans Identities” in the Journal of Information Ethics, Fall 2011. 

²Michael Blackmon, “Queens are Questioning RuPaul’s Grip on Drag Culture after His Controversial Trans Comments,” BuzzFeed News, March 9, 2018. https://www.buzzfeed.com/michaelblackmon/rupaul-drag-race-queen-trans-transphobic

³ My reference here is to the description of camp and drag in Christopher Isherwood’s novel The World in the Evening (1954), in which one character explains camp in terms of play: "You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance."

⁴ Susan Stryker, Transgender History, Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008. 

⁵For further background on the impact of queer feminist postmodern theory toward questioning gender as binary and inherent, see Hope A. Olson, “Patriarchal Structures of Subject Access and Subversive Techniques for Change,” The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science 26 (2/3), 2001.

⁶ Emily Drabinski, “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction,” Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, 83(2), 94-111, 2013. 

Neoliberalism, Libraries and Cars in Space | Sara Bond

My supervisor asked the library staff at a recent meeting if we had any ideas for how to use the library’s open and reconfigurable seating space in a new way. A couple days later, I emailed her and suggested setting up Legos and board games there, so that people could come and take a break from their work and do something fun and spontaneous, and maybe even meet someone new that could spark a new collaboration. I work at a special library, where the general public doesn’t come in, and government clearance is required to even step foot inside. The library is one of the few spaces, if not the only, that has common-use space for anyone from any part of the institution to come and use, but its value is misunderstood, and physical space is shrinking to make way for other projects, i.e., projects with market value that are not simply cost centers.
 

My supervisor liked my Lego and board games idea, but asked me to prove the “ROI,” the return-on-investment, of such a venture. “What benefit is it to the institution?” she asked. The benefits of having a communal space are no longer self evident. I ended up defending the idea by looking into Google’s studies on “serendipitous” spaces at their campuses, which are “proven” with some kind of data-driven method, to improve employee morale, and encourage creativity and collaboration, which ultimately is about keeping workers working, which boosts Google’s financial gains. Google has several spaces for employees to gather casually, including spaces with Legos and board games. My supervisor liked this reasoning, and the financial ethics of it all seemed to resonate as something to be valued and respected by the higher ups. But, to borrow from Audre Lorde, neoliberalism’s tools will never dismantle neoliberalism’s house.
 

I’m fearful that, with the reality that libraries face each and every day, as their budgets are cut, and the demands to track metrics and measure their value quantitatively and financially increase, this “financial talk” may be all a librarian fighting for survival has to fight back with. However, there is no winning a neoliberal game when the intrinsic value of a library lies in its commitment to the public good.
 

As David Harvey writes in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, “Neoliberalism has meant, in short, the financialization of everything.”[1]  Without “financializing” itself, the library has no place in this neoliberal world. My librarian-in-the-making self cringes at the thought of what a “financialized” library looks like, though it is already happening. In my personal experience as a reference desk assistant at the UCLA Science and Engineering library, I have to log every interaction, all in the name of usage metrics. How to use the printer, where the bathroom is, where the stapler is, why is this book not on the shelf, etc. Log all of it. What isn’t logged are the hundreds of students that don’t talk to me, but that come in every day, to sit, read, browse the internet, procrastinate, sleep, and generally do whatever it is a group of stressed out academics does to stay afloat. The space itself has a value that neoliberalism can’t touch, but what gets valued are the metrics.

In her article, “The McDonaldization of Academic Libraries and the Values of Transformational Change,” Karen Nicholson writes,

James K. Elmborg argues that, when we market library space as a product, it ceases to be an “absolute space” endowed with cultural significance, to become instead an “abstract space,” emptied of intrinsic meaning and given over to commercial use and generic identity, “like mini-marts, Wal-marts, McDonalds, and malls.”[2]

Fighting neoliberalism with neoliberalism debases the library’s true power - that of a cultural institution in the public sphere. Why do we constantly undercut our true value to appear more like some kind of convenience store, logging sales of cigarettes and those mysterious hot dogs that rotate under the heat lamp by the register?
 

There is something about neoliberalism that is so slippery, that is hard to see. It is hard to define. Why? Nicholson writes: “It is precisely because neoliberalism is part of our everyday lives that it remains largely invisible to us. This might explain why LIS has paid little attention to neoliberalism to date.”[2] It is so inherently part of our culture and lifestyles, that to try and challenge it is especially difficult. It’s so naturalized and normalized, we, or perhaps I, don’t know what it would be to exist without it. It is like a moving, slimy creature in the jungle out of an 80s movie like The Predator, slippery and invisible to those that try to see it for what it is, but able to outdo us easily by the humanness and warmth we exude despite ourselves.
 

I tend to want to put some kind of visceral feeling to what neoliberalism “feels” like. What does it feel like to live in a system that, as Harvey puts it, “seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market?”[1] It’s maybe easier to think about when you think of all the bodies that are not able to perform this marketized human action.  That is, disabled bodies, or elderly bodies, or child’s bodies. Bodies that are sick, or tired, or hungry, or in danger. There are so many shapes that humans take that are not marketizable, financializable. The answer, in neoliberal doctrine, is they fall through the cracks, and with 45 in the office, they have no safety net. Neoliberalism is for the “white, straight, healthy, neurotypical, upper and middle-class, cis- and able-bodied man who makes his home in a wealthy country, has never not had health insurance, and whose importance to society is everywhere recognized and made explicit by that society; whose importance and care dominates that society, at the expense of everyone else.”[3] Neoliberalism gets to decide who is worthy of survival, and that seems to be determined by their domain in the market.
 

I had a brief moment, a few weeks ago, looking up at the night sky, where I mistook the glow of the 76 gas station sign, round and persistent, oddly, reassuring, for the moon itself. Is even space safe from neoliberalism? There is now a Tesla looking down at us from above in our solar system, and it doesn’t seem a stretch to picture a McDonald’s on Mars. But what about a library on Mars?

Works Cited

[1]  Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

[2]   Nicholson, Karen P. “The McDonaldization of Academic Libraries and the Values of Transformational Change.” College and Research Libraries 76, no. 3 (2015): 328–38. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.76.3.328.
[3]  Hedva, Johanna. “Sick Woman Theory.” Mask Magazine, n.d. http://maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory.

Latinas in the Entertainment Industry: Diversity, Intersectionality, and the Problem of Structural Whiteness / by RLivier

“Latinas in the Entertainment Industry: Diversity, Intersectionality, and the Problem of Structural Whiteness”

           

            When I am asked, “how did you go from being an actress to… wait, what is it you’re studying?” I believe there may be layers of questions within that question that need unpacking, including: “What is the underlying logic that connects these two fields for you? What is Information Studies? Why study that? What is the relevance and/or significance of this perceived connection? Why does it matter?” And, depending on the context, it may also include, “Did you leave acting? Did you go back to school because you’re not working as an actress?” Now, it is possible that I may be identifying a lot of complexity here that may not have been intended by the person(s) asking, yet, as an artist, I have been trained to read between the lines and, as an immigrant and a Latina, navigating micro-aggressions is nothing out of the ordinary. In other words, in my intersectional experience, deciphering subtexts is almost a way of life. The goal of this paper is to address those more subtle, potential, (imagined?) questions in order have a deeper and more robust elevator pitch that answers the questions behind the question and to develop an engaging sound bite ready for when I, myself, need reminding of why exactly I am pausing an artistic career and attempting to overlap it, with an academic one, at this particular point in time. (Seriously, why?!)

The first question to address is: what is information studies? It is an umbrella term for an area of study that takes a critical look at information and what that means, including how knowledge is created, how it transverses time and cultures, and how it is stored and organized.[1] Secondly, what is information? While Jonathan Furner tells us that there is a whole body of literature that attempts to answer this question, he gives us a “taxonomy of common conceptions of information”[2] that includes information-as-particulars (utterances, thoughts, situations), information-as-action (communication), and information-as-universal (informativeness, relevance).[3] So, what does this have to do with acting? My job, as an actress, is to interpret the thoughts, ideas, points-of-view (information-as-particulars) that someone(s) has written down as a script (information-as-action), and interpret their story and characters and their subtexts by embodying a character and bringing it to life (information-as- action) with the goal of disseminating these thoughts and imaginings across space, time, and cultures.

I became an actress because I am interested in many of the same concerns I am now addressing from an academic angle in my doctoral program, including; issues of representation (both vertretung, political representation and darstellen, re-presentation)[4], issues of power, hegemony, oppression, whose voices are heard, whose voices are silenced, whose stories are told and by whom. As a Latina actress in Hollywood, I have had some opportunities to address these issues via my work, but they are wonderful exceptions of which I am both grateful and proud, they are not the rule. I am always left with the hope that, in between jobs that pay the bills, I will get another opportunity to participate in a project that has something meaningful and/or constructive to contribute to society. For Latinas, opportunities to work in traditional media have been disproportionately low.[5] We usually have to either be very good at “playing whiteness”[6] or at playing into someone’s thoughts about who they imagine us to be, as representatives of our demographic (stereotypes), not as complex and nuanced individuals. This experience is endemic of a business that has historically resisted ethnic and female inclusion and, as Kimberle Crenshaw identifies, the multidimensional experiences of ethnic females are additionally “distorted” when analyzed via a “single-axis” of either gender or race.[7] Under this rubric, Latinas, may be the most underrepresented group relative to our numbers in the U.S. Why has progress in more equitable representation in, so-called, liberal Hollywood been so slow?

Interrogating the structures that allow the exclusion of those of us who represent (darstellen) the majority world[8] is difficult when you lack the tools and the vocabulary with which to identify what is occurring on a structural level and when you have dutifully bought into your neoliberal indoctrination, (which seems to be a key component of an immigrant’s process of assimilation). Who gets to tell which stories in the entertainment industry matters because it has material and affective consequences for society as a whole. The stories that Hollywood tells are the information-as-action (communication) that global audiences receive and that participate in shaping our views and perceptions about each other. Yet, how, with so many diversity initiatives at the studios, networks, and even our actors’ union (SAG-AFTRA), could the problem be structural? Where is the evidence? The problem of structural whiteness is challenging because, as Hathcock identifies in her article, “the normativity of whiteness works insidiously, invisibly… and a major contributor to this invisibility is that whiteness has played such a fundamental role in the profession from the start.”[9]

To bring information studies back into the conversation, this area of study is equipping me with the theoretical and methodological tools with which to identify social, political, and institutional structures, the power dynamics that are embedded in them, and it is legitimizing my right to interrogate them. This information is empowering because it is arming me with the insights, tools, and vocabulary via which to understand how power operates, from which directions, and to what purpose(s). Critical Race theory (CRT) and Intersectionality are theoretical frameworks that support and corroborate life in the U.S., in the entertainment industry, and in academia, as I experience it. With these theoretical and methodological tools, I can, for example, begin to pushback against SAG-AFTRA’s claim of neutrality and inclusion. Hathcock’s article could almost be re-subtitled: “Diversity Initiatives at SAG-AFTRA.” Appropriating her brief, I could easily state, “Whiteness… has permeated every aspect of [the actors’ union] extending even to the initiatives we claim are committed to increasing diversity.”[10] What we need are radical transformations not diffusion mechanisms, which are strategically employed to diffuse tension and give the illusion of change.[11] This keeps those of us who are under-represented (both vertretung and darstellen) perpetually holding on to hope, since true change, as defined by CRT, only comes with convergence; when the interests of the hegemony converge with the interests of the majority world, and with those of us, who, in the entertainment field, represent it.

So, back to the original question, “How did you go from being an actress to… wait, what is it you’re studying?” My elevator response might go something like, “I’m studying Information Studies because, among other things, I needed to understand how and why Hollywood is exclusionary on a structural level and this meta-field provides me with the tools with which to interrogate power and point to evidence that corroborates that this exclusion is constructed and can therefore be disrupted. And, here’s one way we can begin this process of interrogation and disruption, which might bring us closer to a more equitable distribution of work…”

---

[1] Gilliland lecture, October 9, 2017.

[2] Furner, Jonathan. 2004. “Information Studies without Information.” 438.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” As reprinted in The Post- Colonial

Studies Reader, Bill Ashcroft et al, eds. New York: Routledge, 1995, 28-37.

[5] Negrón-Muntaner, Frances. The Latino Media Gap: A report on the state of Latino in

U.S. Media. Columbia University, 2014. Online.

[6] April Hathcock, “White Librarianship in Blackface: Diversity Initiatives in LIS,” October 2015,

http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/lis-diversity.

[7] Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist

Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” The

University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989): 139-167.

[8] Hudson, David J., and Kathleen Lowrey. 2016. “On Dark Continents and Digital Divides: Information Inequality and the Reproduction of Racial Otherness in Library and Information Studies/Response to Hudson.” Journal of Information Ethics 25 (1): 65.

[9] Hathcock.

[10] Hathcock, April. “White Librarianship in Blackface: Diversity Initiatives in LIS.”

[11] Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. 2001. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. Critical America. New York: New York University Press.

Can We Design for the Subaltern? | Jonathan Calzada

As I write this academic blog post, I contemplate the appropriate tone and prose subsequently forcing myself into a bifurcation of which I can only take one path. I can write in short and clear sentences in the hope that my ideas are interpreted as I intend. Alternatively, I can attempt to construct rich and referential text that leave the non-academic readership without means of comprehension nearly as effectively as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak left me when I first read her work. This is a critical point where a design decision takes place. It is one of many such decision points in a constant process of production. As a software designer, I have worked under similar (if not the same) standards of production. Standards that are calibrated by notions of the imagined consumer. The path I take when I encounter a split in the road between simplicity/accessibility and complexity/inaccessibility says more about me and the institutions for whom I produce, than the very meaning of my work. The effectiveness of my work is lost or found in its design.

Producing for dominant institutions often excludes more consumers than it includes thereby rendering a vast range of them invisible. The human production of ideas begins with the craft we employ to represent them, as we strive to give them form such that they are conveyed intact to the imagined consumer. This does not only beg the question of who the imagined consumer is but also leads to a realization that it is “I” (the designer) who is performing the imagining and forming representations of the consumer. In this light then, for whom do we ultimately design and produce? Is it satisfactory to design/produce for our imagined representations of the consumer? Given these parallels within academia (theory) and software design (praxis), I want to use the term representational-production to include the process of information design in both spaces, and ask if we are capable of designing for the subaltern? [1]

Software as it is designed today is imbued with the worldview and representations of the imagined user and their identity coming from a non-subaltern worker/producer. For example, Western software companies tend to classify users by creating User Experience personas based on their conceptualization of the user. Academia can be seen to do the same representational-production work through classification of their readership or academic consumers. To some degree both claim that they are producing for the best interest of their consumers. Olson connects this process to hegemonic power by stating that “classification and thesauruses are hierarchical structures that award position based on conceptualization by a central power whose worldview purports to reflect the values of the population” (Olson 2010, 299). I have designed software with such specificity in the past. When I did in fact think about some of the classification of users/personas including who the unimagined user could be, I did so with a limited representation of them. Even after conducting usability studies, interviews, and ethnographic research with the ‘ideal’ consumer, I found representation to be problematic. To illustrate this problem, I will reference Spivak’s vertreten and darstellen distinctions of representation, and by using my own history, I will expand on how even representing oneself is fraught with imperfections given a temporal dimension.

The Problem with Representation of the Self & the Other: Temporal-Representation

I can (only) truly represent myself in my current state of self. In the years prior to my academic training, professional standing, US citizenship status, and the ability to speak English, I did not have a voice in this country. As a young boy, I found myself in the principal’s office too many times blamed for actions I did not take or incidents I did not begin; but because I grew frustrated with accusations, and the ensuing arguments would place me there. I was one of five Latinos in a predominantly white elementary school. I did not have a voice then. When I spoke, no one believed me, even during the moments when they physically listened. Faces unlike my own looked at me in distrustful and unfriendly ways. I wish I could stand up for myself then as I do now. However, rather than this being a temporal impossibility, it is a representational one.

Today, I cannot represent myself as the person I was then. I am a different person. There was an imperceptible point of departure from the condition of a voiceless subject to the person that I am today. Now, I have ‘lines of social mobility’ that allow me to speak more than I ever could then (Spivak 1995). To attempt to represent that young boy today is to try to ‘unlearn my privilege’ and revert to that young state (Spivak 1995). If such a mental transformation were possible, I would simply just be him (then) and not me (today) once again not able to speak. I have memories, but every time I recall them, I recreate them in my mind attempting to experience the past. I remember most of the details, but I feel very different today. How can I represent that boy now? Spivak makes a distinction between representation (Vertretung) and re-presentation (Darstellung) (Spivak 1995).  Representation (Vertretung) as in politics and speaking on behalf of others does not assume the representative to be in the embodied experience and condition of those who are being represented.  Re-presentation (Darstellung) as in art and philosophy only attempts to reproduce the ‘presentation’ of the subject.  It ends up being a simulacrum with varying degrees of imperfection. How then can the subaltern speak for themselves if once they have acquired social lines of mobility, they stop being subaltern and in turn leave their younger and voiceless selves in the irretrievable past?

I can only politically represent my younger self today. I cannot be that boy any longer, for the attempt alone would be disingenuous. It is not squarely an Einsteinian categorical problem of time travel—which he argued was an impossibility—but more precisely a representational (Vertretung) one. It is a temporal-representational problem of the self. If your life originated as an ‘other’ (perhaps even a subaltern), a split may occur through the course of your life where you begin to make the connections, gain the social and cultural capital within a system that allows you to mobilize and be heard. Your voice begins to take form, substance, and gain decibel levels. You can hear yourself through others that have heard your voice. You can even hear yourself through the type of ‘other’ that you were once before. In this new world, the self does not exist without the reflection of the other. In this new world, you can speak. In this world your former self has become the ‘other.’

How then do you design for the ‘other’ especially if s/he is you or rather your former self? After all, who knows you better than you know yourself? I begin with designing for your former ‘other’ to foreground the most obvious of problems with representation. Spivak uses semiotics to articulate this point. She critiques Deleuze and Foucault as post-structuralists having done away with the signifier/signified rendering a transparency in which there is not a need for representation. Within this framing the ‘other’ and the subaltern can speak, and therefore help themselves out of their struggle. However, as I have argued above “experience itself is constituted through representation,” as it is even problematic to represent oneself let alone the ‘other’ and even much less the subaltern (Kohn and Reddy 2006). In Spivak’s words “representation has not withered away” and is in fact problematic particularly because the medium such as language can be coerced by power dynamics favoring a hegemony (Spivak 1995). Representation then cannot be taken for granted as a transparent and authentic process. Reflexive interpretation may be necessary to design for the ‘other’ and the subaltern. Reflecting on the fact that as a producer/designer working for a prominent institution, you are not a subaltern or even an ‘other.’ You are neither because you have voice. You are not a subaltern because you have social connections that make any degree of upward social mobility possible. Is deep reflexive interpretation of representations of the ‘other’ a key step toward designing for the subaltern? If not, what representational-production work needs to take place in order to design for the subaltern? More importantly, what compels you (or me) to try to design for the subaltern in the first place?

The Object of Seduction that Compels Designing for the Subaltern

How can the non-subaltern produce/design for the subaltern and like it? What compels those that can speak to produce/design for those that cannot? In the current state formation where power is embedded in all modes of production through capitalism, the most obvious ‘object of seduction’ is capital. It is ultimately a self-defeating and tautological argument. What interests the ‘representing intellectual’ or capitalist is the continuation of the status quo or oppressive system that leaves the heterogeneous subaltern serving them on the periphery within a fragmented and unrecognized/invisible labor force. Within a capitalist framework, how is it then possible to provide such an object of seduction if that (capitalist) object ends up sustaining the immensely profitable system that placed the subaltern in a state of struggle in the first place? Who, if anyone, will be the subaltern representative (Vertreter) “that sends them rain and sunshine from above?” (Spivak 1995). What compels, coerces, or convinces the colonial/capitalist masters to dismantle their system that defines their purpose for being? More personally, how do I learn, grow, or force myself to like designing for the subaltern if there is not an object of seduction, remuneration, or any sort of recognition for me?

Conclusion

The cognitive bifurcation to which I referred at the beginning of this blogpost was created when I started to write, which now seems far behind. I made a conscious decision to check my privilege and then take a path. I chose to overcomplicate things. As it turns out, I write for myself, the academy, and for my institution. None include the subaltern or even the ‘other.’ There seemed to be no object of seduction for me to keep things simple. It simply does not pay and so I continue to sustain the ivory tower of academia in its ‘rightful’ place high above the ‘uneducated,’ unrecognized, and un-designed-for consumer. I keep the representational-production within a self-serving circle. I did not co-create with those I am ‘trying’ to help or even try to interpret their needs or wants. In fact, I have not answered anything and wrote too much. I end up with the same question and so I keep asking if we are capable of designing for the subaltern? [1] In asking the question it implicates political, historical, and ethical concerns that mainstream techno-society does not currently recognize or acknowledge. Instead the subaltern is displaced, sanitized, and their context removed from the record/systems. However, the thesis question itself places the producers/designers in a reflexive mode recognizing their privilege and limitations, especially with representation. In fact, the question itself may be impossible to answer fully because of the problems inherent within representation, but the fact that we are employing it as a method to reflexively interrogate design practices is, I argue, an ethical imperative to designing/producing technology/software that aims to liberate the subaltern.

Notes

[1] Discussing Spivak with Peter Pollack we re-contextualized vertreten and darstellen within software design to come up with the question: can we design for the subaltern and like it?.

References

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” As reprinted in The Post- Colonial

Studies Reader, Bill Ashcroft et al, eds. New York: Routledge, 1995, 28-37.

Kohn, Margaret, and Kavita Reddy. 2006. “Colonialism.”

Hope Olson and Melodie J. Fox, “Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Deconstructionist, Marxist,

Feminist, Postcolonialist,” in Critical Theory for Library and Information Science (Santa

Barbara: Libraries Unlimited, 2010), 295-309.

The Humans in Our Care | Julie Botnick

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks sought treatment for invasive, advanced cervical cancer. She died the same year, but her cells live on as HeLa, the first cells multiplied in a lab setting, which have contributed to breakthroughs in almost every field of medicine. Lacks was not informed her doctors took not just a diagnostic sample, but an additional, lab-bound research sample of her cancerous cells. She did not consent. For a half century, Lacks’ family did not know about their matriarch’s magical cells. When they learned about HeLa, they believed the actual woman was being cloned, poked, prodded, and irradiated. Were they wrong? Each of those cells contains the genetic material that was - is - Henrietta Lacks. Today, any HeLa research must get permission from the Lacks family as the representatives of Henrietta. 

Like a repository of cells, archives are not spaces where materials die; rather, they are places archival creators and subjects continue to live, where knowledge about them only grows. We can never know less about an archival creator or subject; even increasing our recognition of how much we don’t know about a person is an expansion of knowledge.

In the dominant Western archival tradition, records have been defined as the neutral byproducts of bureaucratic activity. But apology letters, locks of hair, recipe cards, and fanzines are not neutral and not bureaucratic. Rather, they are the byproducts of the most human of activities - loving, mourning, nourishing - and are as human as cells and tissues. I propose considering archival materials as human specimens, which recognizes the bodily labors of creating, protecting, processing, and accessing these materials. With this shift comes the immense and imminent need to protect the bodies in our trust. To this end, archives should set up ethical review committees analogous to Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) within their organizations to review practices around archival and curatorial description and proposed scholarly research on collections.

IRBs were set up in the 1960s in response to the progressive revelations of the Nazi medical experiments (1939-1945), the Thalidomide tragedy (1957-1962), and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932-1972), plus dozens of other unethical medical trials. In each of these cases, the men in charge of the studies argued their actions were justified because with full free, prior, and informed consent, they would not have had open access to new knowledge horizons. However, it is not a surprise that the victims of these studies - children, prisoners, mothers, black men - did not look like the men holding the clipboards. IRBs were set up to protect the most vulnerable in society from the illogic that access to knowledge is more important than those from whom that knowledge is derived.

Protecting vulnerable bodies and respecting the wishes of living subjects was not always standard practice. It is no coincidence that IRBs sprang up in the same decades that civil rights, women’s rights, indigenous rights, and other movements of self-determination came to the fore. Calling archival materials human specimens is outside the bounds of the current conception of our profession, yet respect for cells would have sounded equally absurd just a few years ago.

Setting up ethical review boards would demand that institutions include a voice from the community represented as subjects or creators of materials, correct previously incorrectly described materials, and build an institutional pathway for advocacy for vulnerable populations, such as restricting access to or repatriating culturally sensitive or sacred materials belonging to indigenous peoples. Every IRB must include one or more members with knowledge about and experience working in the community proposed as the research subject. Understanding that humans are represented within collections in very literal and not simply figurative ways shifts the framework of protection from intellectual property law and other patriarchal, capitalist forms of legal rights to rights rooted in social, relational, community-based ethics. This also flips the standard of accountability from a reactive one based on a framework of punishment to one rooted in methodology, personal experience, subject representation, and proactive consent.

There is a worry that putting humanities research through ethical review committees would put the entire field on a toboggan on a slippery slope of censored research, limited scholarly access, and politicized academics. However, this view completely overlooks the fact that research by and about certain groups is censored in practice, that scholarly access has been used as a way to legitimize intrusive, non-consensual research, and that no research, in the humanities as much as the sciences, is truly neutral.

Technically, IRBs have been set up not to protect individuals, but to protect institutions from being sued for infringing on the rights of individuals. Research was so egregiously harmful and one-sided that these systems were set up to institutionalize ethics. Some of the positive effects ethical review committees have, particularly in building trust and partnerships with vulnerable and underrepresented communities, ultimately still benefit the institutions. While IRBs have done work to reduce harm, the question remains as to whether using a tool born of the system can be liberating to those within and outside of it. Considering that a non-institutionalized ethic of care might not be particularly caring toward everyone, is there a role for law - with all its pitfalls of patriarchy and Western authority - which in theory applies universally? 

Accardi (2013) notes, “knowledge produced in the male-dominated culture is traditionally privileged as valid, true, and important, so an emphasis on legitimizing other forms of knowledge, especially the knowledge of oppressed classes, is a feminist act.” [1] The archive as it is commonly conceived and practiced is a Western, patriarchal structure and a colonial site. The dream of the public domain and the prevailing hope that if only we had access to all the knowledge of the world, we would finally understand everything are both Western, patriarchal ideas that fulfill a vision of domination rather than empowerment. Non-Western epistemologies make space for knowledge to live within complex social webs of relationships rather than in repositories, and view knowledge as a responsibility rather than a right.

This acknowledgment of the social aspect of knowledge production challenges archivists to look not just at the materials, but at the human relationships behind their creation and preservation. Ultimately, it is in the relationships within materials - the friend addressed in a letter, the ex-lover grieved in a diary - as well as, importantly, the relationships between archivists and the materials’ custodians and between fellow archivists that we find life. 

If “archivists can enter into relationships of care with the creators of records that transcend time and space,” [2] the living humanity of those creators should also transcend time and space. When Caswell and Cifor (2016) speak of archival creators and subjects as linked with archivists in a web of relationships of care in a framework of radical empathy, they emphasize that “The notion of empathy we are positing assumes that subjects are embodied…This emphasis on empathy takes bodies and the bodily into account. Bodies and care are intimately linked.” [3] Borrowing from Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s work criticizing “The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship” which “turns decolonization into a metaphor,” [4] a feminist ethic of care is similarly “not an approximation of other experiences of oppression…a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and our schools.” [5] When we truly animate the two-dimensional and consider the relationships that give life to the materials, we will embrace the challenges and opportunities that come with facing the people in our care.

Notes

[1]  Maria Accardi, Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction (Sacramento: Library Juice Press, 2013), 38
[2] Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives,” Archivaria, 81 (Spring 2016), 34
[3] Caswell and Cifor, “Feminist Ethics,” 31
[4] Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization 1:1 (2012), http://www.decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/18630, 1
[5] Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization,” 3

References

Accardi, Maria. Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction (Sacramento: Library Juice Press, 2013), 23-69. 

Caswell, Michelle and Marika Cifor, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives,” Archivaria, 81 (Spring 2016): 23-43. 

Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization 1:1 (2012), http://www.decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/18630. 

Product: In Processing Settler Complicity Through Indigenous Thought // Joyce Gabiola

You may not read this post until the very end, so I provide two links immediately below, ahead of anything I have to say about the importance of process(ing) in relation to product.

Mapping Indigenous LA

"Uncovering multiple layers of indigenous Los Angeles through digital storytelling & oral history with community leaders, youth and elders from indigenous communities throughout the city." https://mila.ss.ucla.edu

Eve Tuck 

"Biting the University that Feeds You" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXEEzqIjA3I  

Upon reading selected works by Indigenous scholars about decolonizing and indigenizing library and information studies (LIS), I share a reflection to assert that process(ing) is as important as the product. Actually, perhaps process(ing) is more important than the product, but that is a conversation or thesis for another time. (I require more time to process that thought.)

At some point while reading Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, thoughts of Horkheimer and the notion that critical theory is emancipatory unexpectedly seeped into my mind. As I set out to give my undivided attention to Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s explanation of why decolonization should not be used as a metaphor,[1] I remembered that Marx paralleled a Black man to an animal and later compared him to a machine.[2] While reading Tuck and Yang’s discussion about settler colonialism, forced labor, and excess power,[3] I was interrupted by thoughts of Marx, the means of production, and labor power as a commodity.[4] In those moments where I am learning about the ways in which I am/could be complicit as a researcher, as a colleague, as a settler whose parents are Philippine immigrants, as a queer person of color, I wish I could prevent the non-intersectional ideas, however emancipatory and relevant, of white male theorists from encroaching on the time and place reserved for Indigenous thought. I share these small observations because such intrusive moments seem to serve as reminders of the extent to which seemingly insignificant ideas and actions assert their power. The other side of such moments is how they serve as reminders to always be reflexive as a researcher throughout the research process…and just as a person engaged with one’s everyday environment.

In addition to the disruptive thoughts, I found myself feeling uneasy as I progressed through Tuck and Yang’s article. However, this is not surprising. In my first quarter at UCLA, I enrolled in my very first Asian American Studies course. I am almost embarrassed to admit that I did not know anything about Asian American Studies, besides my own personal experiences and the knowledge that I have produced through those experiences. It was in this course that I first learned of interests in interrogating the notion of empire and it was the first time I had heard the term, settler colonialism, as a fellow classmate referred to herself as a Filipinx settler from Hawai’i. I came to learn that I, too, am a settler, but I did not know the full meaning behind this identity, and in carefully following Tuck and Yang’s discussion about settlers and Janet Mawhinney’s notion of 'settler moves to innocence'—the ways in which settlers attempt to relieve their feelings of guilt and complicity in contributing to settler colonialism,[5] I noted the moment when I said to myself along the lines of "Ah, I don’t do that. I’m not that bad." So while I was pleased that I was finally reading a meaningful examination about settler colonialism to further understand its complexities, my place, my complicity, and my responsibilities to Indigeneity as a settler, I was still compelled to feel (or prove to myself?) that I was at least not as guilty as other settlers. I am not certain how I can express this realization in a more academic way, but to say: That is messed up, right?[6] As I read the explications of how settlers attempt to relieve their feelings of guilt and complicity, I, a settler, identified which moves to innocence did not seem to apply to me and felt relieved in those moments of relief. See? Messed up.

In addition, as Tuck and Yang warn, "The absorption of decolonization by settler social justice frameworks is one way the settler, disturbed by her own settler status, tries to escape or contain the unbearable searchlight of complicity, of having harmed others just by being one’s self,"[7] and yet, I continue to relate their discussion to my research interests in interrogating whiteness/diversity and their relationship to harm/survival within LIS/higher education because what they explicate resonates with me as a queer student of color. In a presentation at the University of Regina, Eve Tuck explained, "When we look at the origin stories of many of the academic disciplines, we see that they are entangled with the project of settler colonialism, justifying the theft of Indigenous land and the demolition of Indigenous life, establishing racial hierarchies to justify the enslavement of Africans."[8] With the dispossession of Indigenous land and destruction of Indigenous life, and our everyday occupation, if fellow settler researchers and I continue to pursue scientific inquiries, then we must do so with direct service to Indigenous peoples. Do you agree?

I am guilty of using decolonization as a metaphor for social justice. I first took notice of the term as I read a tweet posted by a highly regarded archivist as a call to "decolonize archives." I kept hearing the concept of decolonization/decolonizing in the context of LIS by practitioners/educators who pursue critical inquiry and employ social justice frameworks, so I quickly adopted the term and incorporated it into discourse. Upon learning about decolonization as a concept from non-Indigenous archivists and academic librarians, I should have then engaged the works of Indigenous scholars. Through this current process of reading and reflecting on selected works by Indigenous scholars, I somehow started to ponder process(ing) in relation to product in archives. That said, it is almost impossible for archivists to not think of process and product without thinking about "MPLP"—more product, less process[9]—a strategy in which productivity is most valued. 

Proposed by archivists Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner in 2005 as a solution to help relieve backlogs that many repositories face, MPLP requires archivists to spend less time processing archival materials in order to provide access to the materials as soon as possible. While providing access is important, the outcome of the "product" using MPLP could be less than ideal, particularly if the creator/donor/subject is intersectional and marginalized. I assert that process extends beyond the act of processing to include hiring archivists who possess the knowledge and sensitivity to, for example, mindfully process materials and write respectful finding aids. I wonder, then, if I should propose "MPMP"—"more process, meaningful product" as a reminder of our responsibility as archivists and/or researchers to fellow humans/Indigenous peoples, hand-in-hand as a reminder of the forces that control process, product, discourse, and society—settler colonialism, white supremacy, whiteness, and capitalism.


Notes

[1] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization 1:1 (2012): 1-40.
[2] Karl Marx, “Wage Labour and Capital,” The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: WW Norton, 1978): 203-217.
[3] Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 6.
[4] Marx, “Wage Labour and Capital,” 207. 
[5] Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 9.
[6] In real life, I did not use "messed up" to convey the disappointment in myself.
[7] Tuck and Yang, Ibid.
[8] Marc Spooner, "Eve Tuck Biting the [University] that Feeds You," YouTube Video, 43:59, August 12, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXEEzqIjA3I.
[9] Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner, "More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing," The American Archivist 68 (2005): 208-263.


References

Greene, Mark A. and Dennis Meissner. "More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing." The American Archivist 68 (2005): 208-263.

Marx, Karl. “Wage Labour and Capital.” The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: WW Norton, 1978): 203-217.

Spooner, Marc. "Eve Tuck Biting the [University] that Feeds You," YouTube Video, 43:59.  August 12, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXEEzqIjA3I.

Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization 1, no. 1 (2012): 
1-40.