When We Can Only See the Walls Inside a House

jaime ding

I am writing this in the middle of February 2023, Black History Month. As we have noticed year after year, the proliferation of inspiring quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. denotes the celebration of Black History Month, and the demand for visibility of Black scholars, writers, artists, thinkers, and doers rises, even after the 2020 “unprecedented reckonings” that had promised change. Such hypervisibility during one month of the year acts as signposts, pointing towards, if not attempts at structural change, at least obliging the understanding that visibility is one step towards thinking about that change. 

In the higher education industry, Audre Lorde’s quotes and visage used in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion materials echo the use of Martin Luther King Jr. during Black History Month. Her speech at the Second Sex Conference in October 29, 1979 , “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” and is often cited in speeches, posts, and texts. But what is the house? And what are the tools? And has her sharp, smart commentary of the gaps within feminism, become a tool in itself? Honoring the quote requires the context of her ideas, as visibility for visibility’s sake is simply decorating the Master’s House. 

Audre Lorde’s comments during “The Personal and the Political” panel is full of quotable sentences, as she calls for a deeper look at what equality looks like. Prior to that famous sentence, she clearly states, “It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.”  Namely, she states how differences are a site of power and political knowledge, and that they should be welcomed, understood, and seen as related to each other, while also urging those attending the conference to understand how de-radicalized identity politics continues the structures of oppression that so many have been fighting against. Difference can be a strength, while division is a tool. The house? The patriarchy - a structure of power. 

These are the pertinent questions: What are the tools? What is the house? In higher ed, we often think about The Institution as the house. Are they tools or are they the house? In an Inside Higher Ed column arguing against the use of the GRE, Audre Lorde is cited to have reminded us about the master’s tools dismantling the master’s house. Upon first read, the tools seem to be standardized testing, the house, higher education institutions. And while the author, Michael Hunt, points out how the GRE is inequitable, one could assume that marginalized students need equal access to the resources that might help their GRE scores. Hunt points towards holistic admission, and calls for radical approaches to selecting graduate students. Do we, in this scenario, actually want to keep the house? 

While understanding the house as a metaphor for the institution is absolutely valid, I do think it’s important to remember what house Audre Lorde was calling out. Her words were not just about representation within higher education, where she was denoted as visibility for Black lesbians, or Black women, or lesbians. Her call to action is a politicized representation, a push against patriarchy and homophobia, and an ask for intentional understanding of difference to combat racist patriarchy.  Often our calls for representation loses that politicized part — visibility, even as a difficult accomplishment in itself, is not the easy answer. Changing the game does not always involve winning the game.  

Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight point out the tools in their conclusion of Knowledge Justice.

We can push for BIPOC knowledge without invalidating or rejecting other knowledge(s) or considering it less valuable in order to make our own knowledge more important. To do so would not only be using the master’s tools (Lorde 2007), but also lead to fatigue in the long run. As we are committed to structurally transforming LIS to be more just, we must continue toward liberation for and with BIPOC by interrupting how White Supremacy continues to construct knowledge…(320). 

That is, the house is white supremacy, the tools, division in thinking one form of knowledge is better than another (one right way, a white supremacy characteristic). This does bring criticality in our citations, a troubled understanding of how LIS practitioners validate knowledge and uphold our own practices and politics of citation. In a cursory (not thorough at all!) search through Springshare’s community forums, a few LibGuides pop up with citing Audre Lorde’s particular quote. Some used the quote as simply a standalone quote in the book circles that came out of the summer of 2020 (“Is Everyone Really Equal? Book Discussion Series” and Session 1 Questions: Foreword thru Chapter 3 - Actions Speak Louder) while others cite a collection of her work as a part of a reference list in anti-racist resources. Of course Audre Lorde’s work should be cited, but I often wonder at the citation in reactionary, ‘justice focused’ resources. What are we saying are the tools? What is the house? 

In that fall of 1979 in New York University, Lorde ends her comments partly with “I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there.” That call for self reflection - not just outside signposting, but internal reflection - is important, especially in our own politics of citation. Often learning about oppression comes with a deep unsettled feeling of uncertainty, a crisis of, how can we see anything except for these walls? Fighting against oppression, even when our practice begins as a thought provoking prompt, we have to be clear what we are saying the house is, what are the tools, and if the intent is actually to dismantle the house. Sometimes we are not, and that is okay. There are other spaces and places outside of a house. 

    Photo of the ocean and green bluffs with blooming bright orange poppies in Montaña de Oro State Park, taken by the author in Feb 2023. 

 

 

The Rights to One’s Self and The Archive(s) By Abby Mortimer

 The Rights to One’s Self and The Archive(s)

By Abby Mortimer

Who “makes” a portrait? Is it the photographer, who after adjusting the lighting and selecting their lens, captures their subject? Is it the scientist who commissioned the photos in order to study his subject, his data, classifying each pixel according to a taxonomy of truth? Is it the subject himself, Renty, a Congolese man enslaved and photographed for study without his consent, lest he be beaten, tortured, murdered? Could it be his children, his children's children, the daughters-now-mothers sharing stories of Papa Renty - survivor, musician, writer - lest their past be forgotten, worse, overwritten? As Tamara Lanier, great-great-great-granddaughter of Renty asks: “Who has the rights to the violence of the past?”[1]

The courts made their statement in Lanier v. Harvard (2020), citing Continental Optic Co. v Reed, “the subject of a photograph does not own the negative or have any property rights therein” and the person who “made” or contracted them has the rights. The courts acknowledge the archival institution (Harvard), an extension of the 19th century racist Harvard pseudoscientist seeking evidence for White Supremacy, as having a right to property while simultaneously denying Renty the rights to his personhood. The law maintains archival rights to property while the archives safe-keeps their whiteness as evidence. However, Tamara’s story does not go unheard. Counternarrative, a powerful component of Critical Race Theory, conspiring with archival theory “radically critiques”[2] the centering of whiteness and the myth of objectivity in U.S. institutions in a way that re-centers BIPOC’s rights and knowledge in the archive(s).

U.S. law and government is created of and for racism. Bell says “In short, without slavery, there would be no constitution to celebrate. This is true not only because slavery provided the wealth that made independence possible, but also because it afforded an ideological basis to resolve conflict between propertied and unpropertied whites''.[3] This ideology gives property to whiteness in itself, with wealthy able bodied men at the pinnacle of deservingness. The codification of whiteness as a right to property justifies to colonial settlers the subjugation of BIPOC and the theft of Turtle Island. Archives, much like American law, are not neutral institutions;[4] many are deeply implicated in the construction of racism and maintenance of whiteness as normative. Under the guise of “Veritas”, Harvard staked their claim to the narrative of Black enslaved men and women when they took the daguerreotype photo record of Renty.

Critical Race Theory and Praxis in the archive, through highlighting experiential knowledge, allegory, counterstories, and the imagination, recognizes and amplifies the power of Tamara Lanier’s story. Her counterstory to Harvard’s claim to “proper care and study” of Renty posits him as the creator of his portrait. He was a man who loved his family as well as a man who did not consent to be studied.  Renty’s voice is brought to life by his descendants. Rachel Winston’s Critical Race Praxis theory of an informed approach to archives urges the profession  “not only embrace but also privilege counterstories”[5] of information professionals, communities collaborated with, and those represented in the collections. She also puts forth the tenants of Black Feminist ethics of care which make space for and honor the different kinds of knowledge and experiences, quoting Black woman archivist Chaitra Powell and colleagues, “our professional practice demonstrates caring for people as evidence of the capacity to care for materials”.[6] If Harvard were to honor the humanity of Renty and acknowledge the love and labor Tamara has poured into her family archives, they would recognize Tamara as the proper caregiver of the daguerreotypes and his image.

We can build new archives with Critical Race Theory and Praxis at the core of their values, but how do we dismantle the institutions that couldn't care less? Bell might suggest accepting this as reality and to instead focus on areas where improvement is hopeful. Harvard ignored Tamara in the ten years preceding her case in attempts to silence her. Ultimately dismissing her case, the Massachusetts Supreme Court urges Tamara to sue for emotional damages. The toll of Black Women’s emotional labor is costly and exhausting, as Winston and Crenshaw’s accounts detail. If Tamara wins that case, the top down “solution”, an interest convergence between Harvard and Tamara, does not address the foundational problems at play. Still, Assistant Professor of Law LaToya Baldwin Clark says that while the law falls short of justice, this is a step, a “means to an end” for greater visibility. It may be that the law falls short of justice, but archival theory does not have to. 

Tamara’s story being documented and shared begins to fill a gap where a silence in the archive dwells. Her story belongs in the Imaginative Dimensions of the Afterwor(l)d, with community who values her for her whole being and centers her story, which includes Renty. In this dimension, the locus of power no longer rests in the archives of traditional, white institutions. It is where “we refuse racial and social justice projects that…hoard power, employ only one way of doing things, force us to convince people, or even worse, convert people’s thinking, accept “perfection” or “objectivity,” or use a false sense of urgency to ignore the very real harm we could cause with our “solution”,[7] and open space for “collective liberatory practices”.  Archives that subscribe to a CRT framework that privilege counter stories, no matter their banality, struggle, creativity or joy, care for Tamara and Renty’s voices.  In this dimension Tamara and Renty might find rest and justice, with only their being as evidence to deserve it.

[1] Free Renty - Lanier v. Harvard (David Grubin Productions, 2022).

[2] Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, and Jean Stefancic, The Derrick Bell Reader (New York University Press, 2005),  78

[3] Bell, 28

[4]  I, too, am not neutral. As a white woman, my whiteness keeps me afloat despite the other facets of my identity (disabled, queer, neurodivergent, for example). My fragility has kept me complicit in too many cases and my purview is limited by my white lens. I aim to hold myself and the information professions accountable for our implicit biases so that we may create systems of full accountability.

[5] Rachel E Winston, “Praxis for the People: Critical Race Theory and Archival Practice,” Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory , 2021, pp. 283-298, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11969.003.0020, 293.

[6] Chaitra Powell et al., “This [Black] Woman’s Work: Exploring Archival Projects That Embrace the Identity of the Memory Worker,” KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 2 (2018): p. 5,  https://doi.org/10.5334/kula.25

[7] Sophia Y Leung and Jorge R Lopez-McKnight, “Conclusion: Afterwor(l)Ding toward Imaginative Dimensions,” Knowledge  Justice, 2021, pp. 317-334, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11969.003.0022, 326.

Reading is Fundamental: Reading in Resistance, the docile archive - Jade Levandofsky

 

Before we looked up words online, we referred to dictionaries. Within those dictionaries often one may find multiple definitions for a word based on parts of speech, context and usage. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the definition of the word “read” can be a transitive verb or intransitive verb, the transitive meaning of the word means that it acts upon a direct object, and the intransitive verb is one that does not require a direct object. The transitive definition takes on a passive tone as if words and their meaning impose themselves onto a reader, whereas the intransitive definition has a more active role where the reader is a participant performing the “act of reading.”[1] My attention lies on the intransitive definition and the more active tone it takes on by including the words “perform” and “act” within its meaning. Building upon scholarship from Judith Butler who writes about “gender performativity” I look at reading as a form of performance that both archival caretakers and visitors engage in. Additionally, I build upon the conceptualizations that Jamie A. Lee introduces in her book Producing the Archival Body, where she introduces the body as integral to her methodological strategy and the framework that she uses in conceiving of the archive as a body. As archivists work to protect, collect, store and apprise knowledge so too do our individual bodies. Drawing upon our class’s readings this week of Adler, Foucault and Browne, the themes of disciplinarity and discipline that they invoked challenged me to consider the normalizing acts with which I daily engage. I claim that it is not enough to question the taxonomic systems that we use to label and organize archival materials, rather it is imperative to find new ways to “read” the archive and its body of work and to challenge the various archival performances that institutions impose.

“Reading is fundamental!” From a quirky aphorism quoted by RuPaul on practically every season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, to the adage that formed the largest non-profit children’s organization Reading is Fundamental Inc (RIF) founded by Margaret McNamara in 1966.[2] As a formulaic communication style found predominately in queer and trans communities of color, to American literacy expectations, in either case both speak to the value of reading and how one is perceived in society. There are many techniques and beliefs surrounding how to read, some ways that we read are commonly quoted in our vernacular such as “reading between the lines” which is to understand more than what is stated directly on the page (subtext). Reading always has connotations with power such as “reading someone the riot act” which is a commanding way to read a situation and often requires reprimanding those within the situation in question. Reading also constructs identity as Simone Browne quotes Fanon in her book Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness and his concept of “epidermalization,” reading for difference is a disciplinary tool that creates identities through difference and surveillance.[3] In primary school children are taught how to read for literacy and are evaluated based on their “reading level.” Once in secondary school teenagers are expected to read for absorption, to absorb the material of their textbooks or assigned novels and regurgitate it back to the teacher so they can be graded on reading comprehension, sometimes in more inspired classrooms this reading encourages pupils to read in order to build connections with their own lived experience. If a student decides to pursue post-secondary education, they are then guided by the disciplinary knowledge of that field which they have chosen to pursue. Adler described in her article Disciplining Knowledge at the Library of Congress how the act of naming and tagging can situate certain knowledges within the canon of certain disciplines. These disciplines often rely on the knowledge structure and organization of materials held by the Library of Congress and thus Adler argues that these situated knowledges are disciplined into place, the library shelves, by deploying techniques of power such as normalization, routines, convention, tradition, and regularity that produces those “administrative forms of governance.”^[4]

We often take our body for granted as we carry out our daily responsibilities and do not question it until it fails us. Through sickness, we are reminded that our body is not just a singular whole but an assemblage of parts working in unison. I use the concept of body as I think it fulfills my purpose as a concept that is both singular and plural at the same time, “a mass of matter distinct from other masses: a body of water” and “AGGREGATE, QUANTITY, a body of evidence.”[5] What this definition demonstrates without explicitly mentioning is the concept of boundaries, of finding similarities within difference, the nexus of collections. Foucault’s reading of the body within the third part of his book Discipline and Punish, frames the body as docile. He starts out this section by identifying how the soldier’s attitude with his head held high and movements such as marching, are a “bodily rhetoric of honour [sic].”[6] Foucault continues that for soldiers who are seen to express an air of authority are still docile bodies as the construction of their bodily rhetoric has been completely manufactured, almost like a machine. Referring to the work of La Mettrie’s L’Homme-machine, he explains how this “docility” is imposed and absorbed by its subjects, “A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved.”[7] The docile body is one that exists within borders and forgets about its assemblages. The disciplinarity that Foucault and Adler discuss is what relegates docile scholars to their selected fields of study, rarely permitting opportunities for interdisciplinary imagination. This mindset is what scholars rely upon when then choose to visit an archive and read it for their selected disciplinary value.

In developing a queer archival methodology Jamie A. Lee takes reading beyond a disciplinary delimiter to “…unsettle---to reconsider how archives are defined, understood, deployed, and accessed to produce subjects in time.”^[8]  This is one way of reading that I myself choose to engage in by grappling with the paradoxical nature of the archive as a singular and plural body simultaneously. Reading can also be liberatory, not simply how books can metaphorically transport a reader to a new setting, but “reading against the grain” which is to approach reading from “unexpected or unconventional perspectives” or to unearth something in the archive that appears serendipitously.[9] Reading in resistance is a tool for those who enter an archive to consider the standpoint of that archive. This entails considering questions such as who or what founded this archive and for what purpose? Where are materials sourced from and are there sibling archives with which to compare and contrast? This is not to say that we should abandon all other forms of reading all together, rather it is important to add more tools to the tool belt and question the normalizing practices that we engage with. The slippages between normalcy and disciplinary logic are easy to overlook and often replicate dominant narratives that maintain the curtailing power of institutions which oppress us all especially those most marginalized. Reading in resistance is not passive it is indeed an active performance, and it is labor, yet it is a labor of love to work outside the confines of disciplinarity and to consider new readings to preserved histories. Like a beautiful bouquet it is not just beautiful for the biggest blooms but for the shades of green that support it and the blend of scents not just the dominating aromas but the subtle fragrances that uplift the bouquet entirely.

 

 

 

 

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[1] Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “read,” accessed January 30, 2023, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/read.

[2] “FAQ.” FAQ | RIF.org. Accessed January 30, 2023. https://www.rif.org/faq.

[3] Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015):1-62

[4] Melissa Adler, “Disciplining Knowledge at the Library of Congress,” Knowledge Organization 39(5).

[5] Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “body,” accessed January 30, 2023, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/body.

[6] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage Books, 1995, “Part Three: Discipline,” 135-228.

[7] Foucault, 136.

[8] Lee, Jamie A. Producing the Archival Body. S.l.: Routledge, 2022.

[9] CalPolyPomona, RAMP. “Reading with and against the Grain.” Reading, Advising, & Mentoring Program (RAMP). CalPolyPomona. Accessed February 14, 2023. https://www.cpp.edu/ramp/program-materials/reading-with-and-against.shtml.

 

Wealth, Ownership, and Power in Museum Provenance Data - Nicole Wood

     In “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” authors Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang emphasize decolonization as the unsettling act of repatriating Indigenous land and life, not as a metaphor that can be absorbed to advance general social justice efforts, recenter whiteness, or relieve the settler of feelings of guilt (2012, 3; 21). Tuck and Yang problematize several “settler moves to innocence” that are used as “excuses, distractions, and diversions from decolonization” and are employed as strategies to “relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility” without requiring the settler to return land, give up power or privilege, or “change much at all” (10). Central to this argument is the relationship between land ownership and wealth. In this blog post, I argue that these themes of wealth, ownership, and power can be applied to museum provenance data.   

    It is necessary to recognize that Tuck and Yang concentrate their argument on decolonization around the specific act of repatriating land to Indigenous peoples. However, there are compelling overlaps between land ownership and the ownership of art and cultural heritage objects. My experience with museum provenance data largely derives from my work with the Getty Research Institute’s “America and the Recentering of the International Art Market: From Dealers to Collectors to Museums, 1880 – 1930” project, which seeks to understand the economic role of the United States art market during the Gilded Age, a time known for rapid economic growth that also witnessed the U.S. annexation of Hawaii, the Wounded Knee Massacre, and the establishment of Native American boarding schools.

    The Gilded Age art market is unsurprisingly and overwhelmingly white, male, and wealthy. The favored art for collectors also tended to match this demographic description, with the most valued art produced by European ‘Old Masters,’ such as Sandro Botticelli and Johannes Vermeer. However, Native American art appears sporadically in art dealer stock books, such as those in the Getty Provenance Index’s collections. American art historian Elizabeth Hutchinson has written about the “Indian craze” of the late nineteenth century, in which it became stylish for white households to have an “Indian corner” consisting of Native American handicrafts. Hutchinson’s analysis of the “Indian corner” reflects several themes present in Tuck and Yang’s writings, including the idea of “playing Indian” (Hutchinson 2009, 103; Tuck and Yang 2012, 8) and the indigenized consciousness of the settler (Hutchinson, 2009, chapter 1; Tuck and Yang 2012, 17), which Tuck and Yang use as an example of a settler adoption narrative that “spins a fantasy that an individual settler can become innocent, indeed heroic and indigenized, against a backdrop of national guilt” (2012, 14).

    These Native American works of art were often produced by students at government-sponsored boarding schools (Hutchinson, 2009, chapter 1), in which students were simultaneously forced to relinquish their Indigenous identity and conform to white settler ideas of Indigenous culture through the production of baskets and other wares that could be sold to supply market demands (Slivka 2011, 237). This setting can make provenance research difficult, but not impossible. This provenance research could benefit from Dr. Eve Tuck’s Collaborative Indigenous Research (CIR) Digital Garden, which showcases instances of participatory Indigenous research in academic and community scholarship. An example of participatory Indigenous research at the Getty includes the recent Codice Maya de Mexico exhibit, in which the curator collaborated with Comunidades Indigenas en Liderazgo (CIELO) to translate the exhibition text in written and audio form in three Mayan languages: K’iche, Mam, and Peninsular Maya. A second example includes a recent exhibit titled “Reinventing the Americas: Construct. Erase. Repeat,” which showcased the artwork of Indigenous artist Denilson Baniwa to counter the mythologies and utopian visions of early European depictions of the Americas. 

    This collaborative research could be employed to confront wealth, ownership, and power in museum provenance data. Provenance research and data focus on the social aspects of how art exchanges hands and fluctuates in value as the art is bought, sold, gifted, or donated. In response to Tuck and Yang’s call for “decolonization as material, not metaphor” (2012, 28), provenance data can assist repatriation efforts by identifying the original creator for the return of museum holdings. The artist may be anonymous, as in the artwork produced by Indigenous students at boarding schools. In these instances, provenance data primarily focuses on subsequent exchanges, likely from white hand to white hand, until the works find their way to museums. When determining how to recognize an artist who may remain permanently nameless, Collaborative Indigenous Research may help determine how to describe the artist and if/how/where to repatriate artwork. For example, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition offers consultations for community allies. The Carlisle Indian School Project plans to open a museum and heritage center and may be interested in returned student works. However, it is important to note that this can be traumatic work, particularly for Indigenous individuals, and collaborations/repatriations should only occur if desired by the originating communities.

    In the conclusion of their article, Tuck and Yang highlight the incompatibility of incommensurability and reconciliation. Incommensurability unsettles settler moves to innocence, while reconciliation attempts to rescue settler normalcy (2012, 35). Museum provenance research must prioritize the work and self-sovereignty of the original Indigenous creator and community over the subsequent property exchange. Efforts to repatriate artwork and artifacts must result in a tangible return of property, if desired by the originating community, when what are considered “legal” museum acquisitions and provenance fail to consider the history of systematic cultural looting. Because this provenance research can potentially retraumatize, considerations must include who will be tasked with performing this work, and what therapeutic support will be offered. 

References

Carlisle Indian School Project. “Future.” Accessed February 6, 2023. https://carlisleindianschoolproject.com/future/.

Collaborative Indigenous Research. “Collaborative Indigenous Research Digital Garden.” Accessed February 6, 2023. https://www.collaborativeindigenousresearch.com.

Getty Research Institute. “America and the Recentering of the International Art Market: From Dealers to Collectors to Museums, 1880–1930.” Projects & Initiatives, n.d. https://www.getty.edu/projects/america-recentering-international-art-market/.

Hutchinson, Elizabeth. The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915. Duke University Press, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392095.

Slivka, Kevin. "Art, Craft, and Assimilation: Curriculum for Native Students during the Boarding School Era." Studies in Art Education 52, no. 3 (2011): 225-242.

The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. “Get Involved.” Accessed February 6, 2023. https://boardingschoolhealing.org/get-involved/.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

Autoethnography: Observed subject(s) by Glen Theory Sturgeon

 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:

1. A stranger shoplifting
2. An awkward moment in class
3. My professor bursting into tears from stress
4. A coworker arriving late
5. Extraordinarily raunchy porn in an author’s papers
6. 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:

1. 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.
2. Photos of comic conventions in the 70s, from the archive. So many important nerds doing silly nerd things.
3. Rearview cameras on cars, saving me from curbs.
4. 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]

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[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] Taylor, Sonya Renee. 2021. The Body Is Not an Apology. 2nd ed. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 18.

[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] Taylor, Sonya Renee. 2021. The Body Is Not an Apology. 2nd ed. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

[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