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]

---

[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

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.