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.