A Feminist Critique of Women's History Month Programming┃Dana Laderer

"What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable"

- Audre Lorde[1]

As a straight, white, cisgendered, able-bodied woman, I check nearly all of the boxes of the privileged WEBCCCHAM identity framework that puts me in a position of power as defined by our social structure.[2] When feminism demands that we acknowledge difference, it demands that I, and women who identify similarly, recognize the privilege of our established normativity. Recognizing socially constructed privilege is not only necessary for us as individuals, but also for the spaces we create. By spaces here, I am not referring just to the physicality of space, but to the power relations formed within space as well. Who is seen in a space? Who is prioritized? Having spent a majority of my adult life in New York, I was interested in seeing how a feminist critique of created space would map out onto the New York Public Library (NYPL) system's Women's History Month programming.[3] After reviewing the 2020 programming through the lens of feminist ideology, I found that the events valued personal experience and the creation of community, but failed to focus on difference in its presentation of womanhood. Without highlighting difference, the NYPL fell short of creating a feminist space by centering white, ethnically European, bourgeois, Christian, cis, citizen, heterosexual, able-bodied women (WEBCCCHAW)[4] as the "normative" female experience and creating a platform through which white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism could be perpetuated.[5]

Feminist frameworks operate with the goal of "exposing and ending oppression against women and all other kinds of marginalization".[6] True feminist frameworks work in the service of all women, whose identities are multifold. With this in mind, I want to be clear in stating that there are layers of oppression that impact a woman based on the many different aspects of their identity, and a feminist framework requires us to call attention to all of these aspects in order to fight oppression. Feminist frameworks therefore depend on our recognition of difference as well as our valuing of women's experiential knowledge that are informed by these differences.[7] Additionally, feminist frameworks rely on the promotion of community collaboration[8] and the centering of women with the purpose of subverting the dominant social hierarchy.[9] I considered these core aspects of a feminist framework when looking at the NYPL Women's History Month programming. 

As I did not attend any of these events myself, I chose to rely on the promotion information for these events released to the general public by NYPL.[10] I tracked how many of the events centered women, promoted community/collaboration, and highlighted experiential knowledge by noting trends in the types of events offered and event topics detailed in the event descriptions. I analyzed NYPL's recognition of difference by looking through the descriptions and noting explicit mention of race, ethnicity, class, religious identity, sexual orientation, mental/physical ability, or transgender identity. For descriptions that referenced a particular person, group, or movie but made no explicit reference to any number of these identities, I performed additional research and noted representation of these identities (especially focusing on how individuals have identified themselves). These methods guided my understanding of how the NYPL utilized the various aspects of feminist ideology in their Women's History Month programming and how the events did or did not work to subvert dominant social hierarchy.

A common theme across the NYPL events was an emphasis on personal experience and community collaboration. Events like the International Women's Day Poetry Reading gave women space to write their own poems and share them with the community. Book socials, women's circles, and the Local Voices Network Conversation for working women were designed to provide women opportunities to gather together and share their perspectives with one another. A community partnership event with Women's Activism NYC focused on the stories of individual women working to make active change around the world. These events create space to value women's experiential knowledge and provide opportunities for community collaboration, learning, and joy. NYPL should continue to highlight these aspects of feminist framework in their future events.

My issue with the programming came in how the events failed to address difference. Feminist ideology acknowledges how our educational and cultural spaces are "tethered to the dominant patriarchal, sexist, racist, and homophobic culture from which [they] emerged"[11] and I noticed the replication of these oppressions in the NYPL programming. NYPL created space to celebrate "women" and "females" without being clear that the female experience is not a monolith.[12] When looking through the program descriptions, only 6 of the 38 listed event descriptions on their main page made explicit reference to race, ethnicity, or class.[13] There were no explicit references made to religious identity, sexual orientation, mental/physical ability, or transgender identity. Additional research on the events showed that just over a quarter focused on identities outside of the WEBCCCHAW narrative. Of this quarter, there was difference in race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and religion (albeit in a limited capacity) in relation to the authors, artists, and speakers, but there were no events offered that specifically highlighted transgender women or women of differing ability. This demonstrates an overwhelming focus on the normative WEBCCCHAW perspective and excludes the experiences of a wider range of women. While the programming emphasized personal experience, it only made space for the certain kinds of experiences that society has privileged. By not identifying women's differing identities and experiences in the world, NYPL is allowing this dominant narrative to consume the space they created for the Women's History Month programming. 

Audre Lorde clearly states that "difference must not merely be tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic."[14] This understanding should act as a guiding light for NYPL moving forward. It is my hope that NYPL will truly invest itself in creating space that honors women and works to subvert the dominant social hierarchy. It can start by taking a critical look at the role it currently has in tolerating difference and ask: In what ways do we as a library currently prioritize the experiences of women that society deems "normative"? Whose experiences have we excluded and need to make space for? How can we be explicit in highlighting women's differing experiences and knowledge with the goal of subverting oppressive systems? These starting questions can be a guide for library programming in general to avoid molding feminism into a platform for perpetuating white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism[15] and the NYPL Women's History Month programming is a great place to start.

Discipline in Archives by Juliana Clark

 What strikes me most about Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison is how normalized and wide-spread these modes of power and dominance and docility are across the world. Foucault writes that, “The classical age discovered the body as object and target of power,” and that bodies which are docile can be, “subjected, used, transformed, and improved.”[1] In order to achieve domination over said bodies, discipline must be enforced on them, and this is achieved by four methods that Foucault discusses: distribution of bodies in a space, the control of their activities, the organization of their geneses, and the composition of bodies into forces.[2] The objectification of bodies as cogs in a machine intended for production can be applied in archives in the sense that artifacts and documents function as cogs in an information machine which is utilized for the production of new information. I argue that archivists rely on discipline to exercise control over bodies via records by housing them, organizing them, following collection policies, and by compiling records into collections and exhibits.

    Because most records that we collect are about cultures and people, it can be said that records are the embodiment of real bodies that lived. Ramesh Kumar Sharma explores the topic of embodiment and the self, writing that, “[One’s] manifestation to others as a conscious subject becomes possible only through the medium of the body.”[3]  But because all bodies die, he argues that, “The self is not ‘existentially’ dependent on the body,” and therefore, “it is possible that the self should not perish along with the death of the present body and go on rather to survive in some other form, whether embodied or otherwise.”[4] When the medium of the body ceases to exist, a different type of body carries on the manifestation of the self. Records are the replacements of bodies that have died or will die. Here we will think of records as bodies. The mere existence of archives already establishes Foucault’s first method of discipline, which is that bodies be distributed in space. First they are enclosed within an institution’s walls, which is represented by a physical repository, then this, “Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed.”[5] Archives enclose records down to the item level, where they are enclosed into envelopes and boxes. This has the purpose of isolating individuals for their assessment, classification, and ranking into hierarchies, and so that each body may be surveilled. 

    The second method of discipline is the control of activity. This is practiced by establishing rhythms, imposing particular occupations, and regulating the cycles of repetition as a means of regulating time.[6] Records cannot literally perform activities, but archivists are able to impose activities onto them via monitoring record life-cycles, accessioning, deaccessioning, and organizing materials into classification systems. Another way that we see this is in what Foucault calls exhaustive use, where bodies are constantly put to use by the machine so that the use of time may increase into, “Ever more available moments.”[7] This makes me think of the preservation and conservation efforts of archives to use every last bit of time that a record can be useful before its ultimate deaccession and/or disposal. 

    Third is the organization of geneses, which refers to, “The progress of societies and the geneses of individuals,” that uphold power structures through time.[8] Melissa Adler notes how libraries accomplish this via library classifications, which she argues, “Are in the business of producing and reproducing disciplinary norms within the academy.”[9] She continues that, “Those in control can formulate categories, averages, and norms that are in turn a basis for knowledge” and that, “they reproduce dominant discourses and produce silences through censorship or undercataloging.”[10] Because archives set their collection policies and project their values and interests on what records they collect, they are able to curate and present a body of information (which often includes dominant narratives) to society that they choose to reproduce. This screening of records limits the ways that society, who uses said records, may think by presenting them with only certain types of information, reproducing an information norm. When archive users engage in research, this facilitates the genesis of new information that upholds the norms set by information institutions. 

    The fourth method of discipline is the composition of bodies into forces, “In order to obtain an efficient machine.”[11] Foucault says that, “The soldier whose body has been trained to function part by part for particular operations must in turn form an element in a mechanism at another level.”[12] Again, Adler makes the connection between libraries and discipline, stating, “Library materials are placed in sections of the library according to the discipline in which catalogers determine the books intend to participate.”[13] We see this in archives when records at the item level become part of a distinct collection or exhibit. An example could be a record, which represents the individual (like a photograph of  Dolores Huerta), being part of a broader collection, which represents a force (a collection about the Chicanx Movement). This is accomplished through the use of metadata and description, which categorize and organize records so that they are more easily identified and aggregated into collections or exhibits. Jeffrey Pomerantz says that, “The word ‘metadata’ indicates something that is beyond the data: a statement or statements about the data.”[14] Thus, metadata contributes to the disciplinary processes by assessing, classifying, and ranking records into hierarchies in the same way that bodies are in society.

    Archives today function out of societies that uphold power structures of dominance and docility, and so naturally are designed to further uphold these power relations. Archivists have already been taught by society to perpetuate norms and judgments. When dealing with records, which are pseudo-bodies of the masses, it makes sense that archivists would feel an almost natural obligation to objectify the cultures and life experiences of people via their records, and to regulate and control them. Archives further contribute to the regulation and control of living bodies by exposing them to dominant discourses that the institutions reproduce so that the population can abide by.

[1] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1995), 136.

[2] Foucault, 141-169.

[3] Ramesh Kumar Sharma, “Embodiment, Subjectivity, and Disembodied Existence,” Philosophy East and West 61, no. 1 (2011): 7, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23015253.

[4] Sharma, 29.

[5] Foucault, 143.

[6] Foucault, 149.

[7] Foucault, 154.

[8] Foucault, 160. 

[9] Melissa A. Adler, “Disciplining Knowledge at the Library of Congress,” Knowledge Organization 39, no. 5 (2012): 370, https://doi.org/10.5771/0943-7444-2012-5-317.

[10] Adler 370-371.

[11] Foucault, 164.

[12] Foucault, 164.

[13] Adler 371.

[14] Jeffrey Pomerantz, Metadata (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2015), 6.

Creative Acts in Foucault’s Panoptic Surveillance State by Daryl Bergman

 “…with certain acts of cultural production we can find performances of freedom and suggestions of alternatives to ways of living under routinized surveillance.” [1]

 

In Disciple and Punish, Michel Foucault describes post Enlightenment structures of power that forge socially constructed individuals through discipline. [2] Foucault gives little consideration to the idea of human agency in his portrayal of the panoptic state. His characterizations of social interactions are wholly habituated, even vapidly procedural. Discipline and Punish conjures a kind of horror show; his analysis de-humanizes without reprieve. Although Foucault’s descriptions of the effects of panoptic surveillance are resonant, I found myself interested in the ways in which agency might be repossessed. Through this lens, the emergence and endurance of samizdat under domestic Soviet surveillance regimes offers a compelling challenge to Foucault’s portrayal of the docile, state-controlled body.

 

Broadly speaking, samizdat describes the practice of creating and distributing self-published clandestine texts in Soviet Russia and the greater USSR. (The term samizdat is derived from the Russian word samebyaizdat which translates to ‘a publishing house for oneself.’) [3] Early samizdat began circulating in the mid 1950’s and were primarily produced in academic and intellectual circles. [4] Samizdat provided a channel for distributing content outside of the prescriptions of the state and included, among other things, literary works, periodicals and bulletins, news, open letters, analytic texts, religious materials, manifestoes, satire and pornography. [5] Since access to printing equipment was minimal, some publishers used carbon paper and typewriters to copy texts while many others had only pen and paper. Some publications were bound, while others might have been held together with only paperclips. Many samizdat were meant to be added to or diffused through many writers. Since few copies could be made by such labor-intensive means, and since fewer copies were easier to keep out of the hands of secret police or government officials, samizdat were produced in small quantities and passed from person to person through trusted networks. [6]   

 

Like other modes of self-publishing, samizdat operated as loci of social activities that existed outside authoritative bodies of knowledge. In this way, samizdat can be seen as a form of resistance that undermines Foucault’s assertion that panoptic surveillance necessarily conditions people to behave in prescribed ways through the “partitioning” of “docile bodies.” If it is true that people were partitioned, then, via samizdat, they passed concealed notes through holes in their “cells.” Samizdat constitute physical evidence of resistance to the attempted partitioning of bodies. Their materiality bears traces of human touch and trade: paper brittle or crinkled from handling, smeared ink, handwritten notes, typos and corrections [7] convey a deep desire for communication and exchange of knowledge. 

 

Samizdat produced, preserved, and disseminated knowledge which might have otherwise been buried or lost. Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, for example, was first circulated as samizdat [8] as was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s, The Gulag Archipelago which was published, uncensored, outside the USSR in the early 1970’s.[9] The rights activist bulletin, Khronika Tekushchikh Sobytii, or Chronicle of Current Events, ran from 1968 until 1983 and informed readers of reports of human rights abuses and violations. Editors instructed readers to aid in the distribution of the Chronicle by re-typing or transcribing issues or by simply handing their copy to another reader. Since it would have been dangerous to publish the names or mailing addresses of the editors, information was passed from the Chronicle’s readership to the editorial team through the same person-to-person channels that were used for distribution. [10]

 

Through the proliferation of texts, and therefore knowledge, samizdat allowed editors, publishers and readers to maintain agency through creative cultural production. If, as Foucault asserts, power is everywhere, the persistence of samizdat represents a reactionary oppositional power that was able to preserve and grow its own influence. Given the success of samizdat, can it really be said that Soviet citizens were rendered docile? In 1982, several years after the publication of Discipline and Punish, Foucault gave his lecture Technologies of the Self in which he states that technologies of the self “permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies, souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being.” [11] Is this statement a re-examination of his earlier depiction of the disciplined body? If so, perhaps Discipline and Punishis a warning rather than a polemic.  

 

Like samizdat, libraries and archives are creative sites that legitimize knowledge and proliferate power. Art historian Ekaterina Degot contends that samizdat’s orientation was “on human relationships” and that “it [constructed] a system of interactions.” [12] Likewise, librarians and archivists construct systems of interaction and power through creative acts under prescribed systems of standards and rules. As LIS professionals, our work should also place emphasis on human relationships and interactions rather than prescribed procedures. If we privilege the idea that LIS work is a creative social activity, rather than an administrative one, we will necessarily construct practice around community needs and requirements. 

 

**

While searching for a topic, I became interested in samizdat from a history-of-rare-books-perspective as well as the notion that they might provide a connection to what I found lacking in Foucault’s explication of modern panoptic surveillance societies. This post is exploratory, but I am interested in continuing to examine how all this relates to LIS work, as well as other ways in which Foucault’s theories can be applied to the history and political nature of samizdat, artists’ books and small presses.  

 

Anecdotal to this post (but perhaps relevant for a longer paper) I learned while doing research that in 2014 a law was passed in Russia that made it possible to shut down websites with more than 3,000 daily visits unless owners gave the government full access. This law forces website owners to forfeit their anonymity and take legal responsibility for the factual accuracy of their content. [13] Effectively, it became impossible for dissident or anti-government speech to be posted online. Social media outlets are also easily censored by governments; a fact which inspired New York times opinion columnist Gal Beckerman to suggest that Russians “forget Facebook” and “bring back samizdat.” [14]

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[1] Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

[2] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

[3] Johnston, Gordon. “What is the History of Samizdat?” Social History, vol. 24, no. 2, d1999, pp. 115-133. Taylor & Francis Online, doi: 10.1080/03071029908568058. Accessed 23 Jan, 2021.

[4] Komaromi, Ann. “The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat.” Slavic Review, vol. 63, no.3, 2004, pp. 597-618. JSTOR, doi: 10.2307/1520346. Accessed 23 Jan, 2021.

[5] Johnston, Gordon. 

[6] Komaromi, Ann. “The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat.” Slavic Review, vol. 63, no.3, 2004, pp. 597-618. JSTOR, doi: 10.2307/1520346. Accessed 23 Jan, 2021.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Komaromi, Ann. “Samizdat and Dissident Publics.” Slavic Review, vol. 71, no.1, 2004, pp. 70-90. JSTOR, doi: 10.5612/slavicreview.71.1.0070. Accessed 23 Jan, 2021.

[9] Komaromi, Ann. About Samizdat. Soviet Samizdat and Periodicals, https://samizdat.library.utoronto.ca/content/about-samizdat. Accessed 23 Jan, 2021.

[10] Ibid. 

[11] Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of The Self: Lectures at University of Vermont October, 1982.”  Foucault.info, https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.technologiesOfSelf.en. Accessed 23 Jan, 2021.

[12] Gilbert, Anne. Publishing as Artistic Practice. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016.

[13] “Russia Enacts ‘Draconian’ Law for Bloggers and Online Media.” BBC News, 31 July, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28583669.Accessed 23 Jan, 2021.

[14] Beckerman, Gal. “Forget Facebook, Bring Back Samizdat.” New York Times, 11 May, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/opinion/forget-facebook-bring-back-samizdat.html. Accessed 23 Jan, 2021.

Producing Truth at the Skid Row History Museum & Archive | Brian Belak

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault concludes his chapter on disciplinary training with a statement on the productive nature of power: “In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.”[1] Through processes of hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination, Foucault describes systems of disciplinary power that construct classification and knowledge about individuals and moral society. Melissa Adler then applies this analysis to library and archive work through a critique of classification at the Library of Congress. Arguing that library classifications “reproduce dominant discourses and produce silences through censorship or undercataloging,” she calls for the implementation of self-tagging within these systems, thereby providing “opportunities for minority and marginalized voices to speak in their own terms.”[2]

In this post I will apply these analyses of disciplinary power to the work of the Skid Row History Museum & Archive (SRHMA), where I am interning this academic year.[3] As a community-based archive dedicated to the unhoused and neglected community in Los Angeles’ Skid Row neighborhood, SRHMA demonstrates a process of resisting dominant strains of discourse to produce alternative knowledge. Like Adler’s call for self-tagging, SRHMA creates the opportunity for production by the marginalized, not those in control of a surveillance system. Despite this potential, I conclude by questioning my own positionality as an MLIS student working remotely on this archive during the COVID-19 pandemic and contributing to its organization as an outsider.

            As a project of performing arts group Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD, an acronym itself designed to confuse the nomenclature of power), SRHMA has its roots in previous LAPD projects that assert the past and presence of a thriving and artistic community, notably the 2002 exhibition Is there history on Skid Row?.[4] The archive today contains a variety of materials made by LAPD and affiliated artists across its almost forty-year performance history, collected from activist organizations working from Skid Row, and created by academics, journalists, politicians about Skid Row and its residents. The museum and archival workspace is situated in a storefront downtown and ordinarily hosts exhibitions, performances, and community gathering—though the museum is currently closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

            For Foucault, examination is one part of disciplinary power that constructs knowledge through “the accumulation of documents, their seriation, the organization of comparative fields making it possible to classify, to form categories, to determine averages, to fix norms.”[5] Archivists demonstrate this power through their collection and documentation procedures, thereby asserting significance about materials and deciding norms in the historical record. SRHMA’s mission is therefore to use this same power on behalf of the marginalized community to create alternative understandings of significance and normality. Furthermore, Michelle Caswell describes the productive power of identity-based community archives as “not just about collecting materials that document people who look like us … but about finding precedence in the past for how we move forward” – the archival imaginary.[6] By asserting the history and humanity of those who live in Skid Row, SRHMA produces knowledge for the future and tools for justice.

This process is executed through a collection policy that expands beyond materials made by Skid Row residents to materials from outsiders, creating a corpus of discourse about Skid Row to be analyzed and mobilized. One of the collections I’m working on consists of newspapers and articles related to Skid Row and homelessness, including many from mainstream publications – Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Herald ­­Examiner – that present a dismissive view of the neighborhood. Simone Browne quotes Steve Mann to define sousveillance, a corollary to surveillance, as “acts of ‘observing and recording by an entity not in a position of power or authority over the subject of the veillance.’”[7] SRHMA’s collection presents a method of sousveillance of the systems marginalizing the neighborhood and its residents through popular and political discourse. Articles that emphasize violence, drug use, and portray Skid Row residents as criminals on the street by choice have fed directly into programs like the Safer Cities Initiative that increased the police presence on Skid Row dramatically.[8] Similar to the case study from Gillian Rose of historians studying London’s East End of the 1880s to “examine the way bourgeoisie produced an apparently truthful account of the working-class area, and to explore the effects that had on its residents in terms of the various institutional interventions legitimated by that ‘truth,’”[9] LAPD uses these collections in their performances and activism to advocate for better treatment and resources for Skid Row residents. The current exhibition at the museum, “How to House 7000 People In Skid Row,”[10] connects directly to LAPD’s organization of public comments on the City Planning Department’s DTLA 2040 plan, arguing instead for a plan to extend affordable housing zoning to all of Skid Row.[11]

Beyond simply collecting the material, SRHMA presents the opportunity for materials to be contextualized according to the community’s perspective. Adler discusses institutional Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) that misrepresent and marginalize groups that are deemed somehow flawed and “incapable of adequate social participation.”[12] Yet LSCH and other disciplined vocabularies are adopted widely by institutions to describe archival and library materials, regardless of affiliation to the Library of Congress itself or other federal institutions. The description and metadata at SRHMA does not incorporate LCSH and is instead formed from the vocabulary of activists and residents in Skid Row. As the archival work is typically undertaken in the same museum space that acts as a community gathering space, dialog can readily inform description. Additionally, as many of the collections are formed from LAPD projects written and performed by Skid Row residents, their perspective is inherent in the documents themselves. A project like What Fuels Development? (2016) that comments directly on events in the neighborhood—in this case, activism to halt a liquor license for a restaurant in the ground floor of a residential hotel housing formerly homeless people—demonstrates this process. Within the project is a critique of euphemisms for parts of Skid Row used by developers to rebrand the neighborhood without its current residents like “historic core,” “gallery row” or the “new downtown.”[13] The materials and recordings of the performances are housed in the archive and serve to frame and describe collected outside accounts of the events.[14]

Unfortunately, the days of the COVID-19 pandemic are not typical times. While archival work continues, I began my internship in September and haven’t been able to work in the museum or collaborate much with the community that would otherwise influence the description and classification I impart to SRHMA materials. While the pandemic has furthered hardship for Skid Row residents, I am privileged to have steady housing, food, and means to stay healthy. In many ways, I am an outsider, yet I participate in the discourse that produces knowledge in the archive. That my perspective may reproduce dominant discourse and limit the productive power of SRHMA’s archival work remains a challenge.

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[1] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Prison. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 194.

[2] Melissa Adler, “Disciplining Knowledge at the Library of Congress,” Knowledge Organization 39, no. 5 (2012).

[3] Sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the UCLA Community Archives Lab.

[4] Los Angeles Poverty Department, “Is there history on Skid Row?” https://www.lapovertydept.org/projects/is-there-history-on-skid-row/

[5] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 190.

[6] Michelle Caswell, “Inventing New Archival Imaginaries: Theoretical Foundations for

Identity-Based Community Archives,” Identity Palimpsests (Los Angeles, CA: Litwin Books, 2014), 49.

[7] Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 19.

[8] Heather Mac Donald, “Skid row in rehab,” Los Angeles Times, November 18, 2007, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-nov-18-op-mac_donald18-story.html/

[9] Gillian Rose, “Discourse Analysis I and II” in Visual Methodologies: 3^rd Edition (Sage: Thousand Oaks, CA, 2012), 196.

[10] Video walkthrough available while the museum is closed: https://vimeo.com/481505119

[11] “Public Comments by Skid Row advocates submitted to DCP's DTLA2040 draft community plan.” YouTube video, 43:07, Los Angeles Poverty Department, January 13, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx-aZN0IdRw

[12] Adler, “Disciplining Knowledge.”

[13] Los Angeles Poverty Department, “What Fuels Development?” https://www.lapovertydept.org/what-fuels-development/

[14] Gale Holland, “Alcohol permit denied for eatery in building that serves homeless,” Los Angeles Times, March 13, 2014, https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-xpm-2014-mar-13-la-me-ln-skid-row-alcohol-20140313-story.html

“Windows and Mirrors” Curricula and Colonial Control | Anders Villalta

During my early career in elementary school libraries, I frequently encountered enthusiastic discussion and implementation of a “windows and mirrors'' framework for children’s literature. In this analogy, mirrors are books that reflect the reader’s own experiences, while windows are those that show the experiences of others. This framework is attributed to Emily Style, a white educator and founding co-director of the widely acclaimed National S.E.E.D. Project (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity), as originally published in 1988. According to Teaching Tolerance, students need “texts that reflect their own identities, experiences and motivations (mirrors) and also provide insight into the identities, experiences and motivations of others (windows)” so they can build “nuanced perceptions of the world around them.”[1] The framework is largely mobilized to advocate for more representations of Black, Indigenous, and people of color in US school curricula.

In this short paper, I argue that the windows and mirrors framework falls far short of a liberatory strategy for anti-oppression, instead encouraging continued white supremacist colonization through the strategy of white voyeurism. I draw on the work of critical theorists including Said’s Orientalism to implicate Style’s founding text in a larger project of Western domination.[2] These arguments are further illustrated through anecdotes from my own experience as an educator.

One fundamental issue with the windows and mirrors framework is that it requires a binary classification of stories as relating either to the self, or to the Other. Teaching Tolerance suggests that educators ask students, “Is this text a window or a mirror for you,” and provide two answer choices.[3] The centrality of binary oppositional thought to the project of Western imperialism has been explored by critical theorists including Said, and further elaborated in the context of Library and Information Studies. David J. Hudson writes that “narratives of racial difference [...] came to be elaborated in binaries of self and Other.”[4] Hudson argues that this racialized binary promotes descriptions of the West as universal and superior, legitimizing conquest through the physical violence of empire. In effect, asking students to approach and to classify all stories as either mirror or window reaffirms colonial conceptions of self and Other that maintain ideological boundaries between racialized groups.

In 1990, educator Rudine Sims Bishop challenged Style’s framework when asserting, “Usually the window is also a door, and a reader has only to walk through in imagination to become a part of whatever world has been created or re-created in the book.”[5] Here Bishop identifies that the ideological boundary implied by a “window” framing of cultural difference is in fact artificial. Said has further suggested the very notion of separate and distinct cultures is little more than the requisite grounds for aggression.[6] I am not suggesting “all cultures are the same,” but that Western delineations of cultural sameness and difference were and continue to be mobilized for Western domination. By framing literature as a door, Bishop rightly asserts the reader’s agency to meaningfully engage with human experience as constituted by all people. After all, educators can–and I believe they should–use literature to build students’ capacity for supportive engagement in community, rather than promoting passive observation (voyeurism). While “literature as door” may not be a useful framework in isolation, it does effectively demonstrate a major limitation in the window-mirror binary. However, as educators continue to extol the virtues of Style’s framework decades later, Bishop’s contributions have rarely been incorporated into the pedagogical tools shared widely across institutions.

A few years ago, I read the book Jacob’s New Dress with my kindergarten classes.[7] The book is about a child who endeavors to, and then wears a dress to school, which falls outside of the gendered expectations placed on them by family and classmates. After our discussion, each student received a sheet of paper with a simple, customizable drawing of Jacob. I invited the students to “draw an outfit you think Jacob would like.” While the majority designed colorful dresses akin to those Jacob admired throughout the book, many of my students socialized as boys quickly drew Jacob wearing a t-shirt and shorts. More recently, I designed a similar extension activity with the book Hair Love.[8] The story is about Zuri, a Black girl whose father gives her a range of hairstyles before finally finding one Zuri really loves. Kindergarten and first grade students were asked to draw a hairstyle on Zuri that they thought Zuri might like. While some truly beautiful renditions emerged, in multiple classes, several non-Black students colored Zuri’s eyes red, drew devil horns, and/or scribbled emphatically across Zuri’s face. 

In both examples, many students who occupied social positions of privilege struggled with extension activities that asked them to consider the feelings of characters in corresponding positions of marginalization. Even after three to four years of daily lessons using diverse representations in literature, longstanding windows and mirrors curricula failed to prepare students for exercises that employed literature as a door. When presented opportunities to engage and show care informed by what these characters would like, some students responded with expressions of symbolic violence. These outcomes encouraged me to reflect on the uncontroversial adoption of this framework for diverse representation in US schools and libraries.

In Style’s founding piece (which cites the intellectual work of over a dozen scholars and artists, all of whom are white) she writes, “Differences exist. They never melted down into “the melting pot” and, now, in a nuclear age we have no choice but to educate youngsters (and ourselves) to handle them more realistically so as to avoid, at all costs, a foolish nuclear melt-down of us all.”[9] This argument for diverse representation as a means to prevent global catastrophe recalls Said’s invocation of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s charge that the duty of the US is to “construct an international order before a crisis imposes it as a necessity.”[10] Here we see the value of diverse curricula as a means to ensure the survival of (white) US empire. 

The imperative for white children to learn about the Other therefore tacitly serves to proliferate white voyeurism–observation without relationship–in order to ensure continued colonial control.[11] Meanwhile, the demand for non-white children to see themselves reflected in US literary programs may be read as part of a larger shift to assimilate non-white people into the project of US imperialism. In Orientalism, Said pays particular attention to the role that educational institutions play in incorporating what might otherwise pose a threat to Western hegemony.[12] In this sense, the mirror is a consolation. In Mohawk Interruptus, Audra Simpson calls this passive recognition of cultural difference “a multicultural solution to the settler’s Indian problem.”[13]

These and other projects clearly stress the need for white students to learn about the Other (through windows), and for non-white students to see themselves represented in US educational institutions (in mirrors). But why is it important for white students to see whiteness in literature and, importantly, why should non-white students read about white culture? Moreover, if as Style puts it, “the student is understood as occupying a dwelling of self,” what happens to opportunities for cohabitation?[14] Must we live in isolation, in a home with no doors? Is this not in simpler terms a prison? I believe the gaping absence of these considerations from pedagogical discourse about diversity is profound. Ultimately, these silences only further implicate the windows and mirrors approach to literature–and to culture more broadly–as a project of continued colonization through divisive systems of control.

“Free Labor," the gift economy, and fan labor│Julianne Wagner

 

• “Free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time shamelessly exploited.” (Terranova 2000, 37)

We are all big fans of something. At some point in our lives, we have all loved a team, a singer, a movie, a book to some excruciating degree that the text imprints itself on the psyche. Fandom studies, stemming from cultural studies and media studies, takes a multivalent look at just that imprinting experience, tracking the viewer’s reaction and interaction with cultural phenomena, including literature, games, sport, music, fashion, television, and even politics. A highly interdisciplinary area of study, one of its core tenets is that fans are not merely passive consumers; rather, they are highly savvy prosumers (productive consumers, so says Fuchs).[1] They create websites to house extratextual works (fanfic, fan videos, etc.) and commentary, moderate and contribute to forums, edit wikis, exchange information and links, guide fellow fans with search, comment on stories, review and screen-cap episodes, translate, tag, compile newsletters, animate .gif sets, create user icons, edit zines (the list can truly go on and on.) These activities are information work and “communication power,”[2] albeit labor-power freely and joyously volunteered. 

Such practices are guided by loyalty, commitment, and active or passive promotion to/for the particular media objects. When we frame labor as active, participatory, elected, compulsive, dare I say it, something we do out of of love, things get thorny. Such affective labor does operate on a labor theory of value, but not necessarily as Marx saw it. The value of fannish labor is not precisely the worth of labor-power (i.e. the amount of time spent doing communication work like the examples above), nor is it explicitly based on the use-value or exchange-value to be extracted by the capitalist. Fandom is an excellent example of a gift economy, a circular, overlapping network of affinities in which individual agents freely produce, trade, receive, and reciprocate tasks and creative works. 

How can we look at fandom as communitarian, arising from anti-capitalist urges? Simultaneously, how is it shackled to commodity fetishism? Isn’t its existence and maintenance reliant upon digital labor, a feature of capital commodifying leisure time? Does this digital labor necessarily create goods and products, or does it instead result in laborers trained in the craft of world-making? I shall use Terranova’s insights on the digital gift economy, Marx’s formulation of labor as life-activity, and the freedom inherent in Fuchs’ “playbour” to ping-pong between fan labor’s positive and negative dynamics, unearthing their dialectic intertwinement. I close with a few ways LIS professionals and memory institutions can highlight the identities of fans as both cultural producers and amateur digital archivists. 

Marx foresaw that his definitions of capitalist labor would mutate: “…the mode of production and the means of production are continually transformed, revolutionised, how the division of labour is necessarily followed by greater division of labour…”[3] The gift economy woven into our often-always-online lives is evidence of such a shift of traditional Marxist labor-power. Tiziana Terranova’s piece “Free Labor” is vital for working through the complications of fannish labor, especially since in 2020, fandom predominantly originates from and spends time in/on the Internet. Terranova finds overemphasis on autonomy in Barbrook’s optimistic formulations of the gift economy. While the gift economy is increasingly important to late capitalism as a whole, it cannot upset or overturn capitalism “from the inside.” Terranova states: “The Internet is always and simultaneously a gift economy and an advanced capitalist economy.”[4] I see fandom in much the same way. 

Media and performance scholar Abigail de Kosnick positions fandom as somewhat oppositional to capitalism: “Fans generally conceive of their activities as ‘resistive’ to consumerism, [therefore refusing] to consider that their works might constitute promotional materials or ancillary products that increase the value of the objects of fandom and therefore might be deserving of compensation.”[5] On the one hand, fandom is a means of approaching consumption of the arts which involves obstinately remaining in a performance frame when it is no longer there. Acts of reenacting, reusing, and preserving the once-purchased commodity through obsession, conscious re-remembering, and re-contextualization into an auxiliary paratext eschews the dangerous refrain of “single-use item.” Yet, as de Kosnick hints, perhaps contributing to a fandom’s gift economy out of love and/or membership in a cherished community is too insular: being blindly invested in a passionate community means fans might not notice how commodity capitalism benefits off of their unseen labor.

Marx’s formulation of labor as life-activity is particularly interesting and can be interpreted in the two opposing lenses we have engaged with thus far.[6] Consider the term “diehard”, which is defined as “strongly or fanatically determined or devoted;” there are countless examples of devotees of a given sports team, musical artist, television show, or film who would consider it an object, experience, or world they are involved with for their entire life. Such love means labor given to fandom does not feel like work. Yet, neoliberal capitalism preys on emotive pull towards work to reproduce it.

Relatedly, it is impossible to ignore that fandom ecosystems require capitalist consumerism, and in tandem, capitalism needs fandom’s labor-power. If you have found yourself a fan of an active musical act or currently “on-air” television show, even waiting for new material is labor-power. While the process of waiting and anticipating can be a way to build community amongst the fandom, this waiting to consume is part of capital’s choreography.[7] As Terranova puts it: “the self-organizing, collective intelligence of cyber cultural thought captures the existence of networked immaterial labor, but also neutralizes the operations of capital.”[8] The matter is further complicated by the fact that many fans and fandoms now utilize social media (especially Tumblr and Twitter) to share information, exchange fan graphics, and a whole host of other “new forms of creativity, sociality, and participation.”[9] The high visibility of social media interactions invites exploitation. Privileging the capitalist’s survival (but not the laborers’) remains intact — it is becoming more commonplace for media monoliths to assume, prepare, and extract fans’ hype to use in marketing campaigns. Examples include HBO’s multi-platform transmedia storytelling campaign before the release of Game of Thrones, corporate ownership of fan conventions, or brands partnering with makeup companies in advance of a film’s release, like 2011’s Wonder Woman x Mac Cosmetics, or 2015’s Star Wars x CoverGirl. Industry doesn’t prey only on positive behavioral surplus: even fan outrage (e.g. men upset by the all-female cast of 2014’s Ghostbusters re-boot) can be used so as to become “a viable market focus down the road.”[10]

I’d like to turn back from the overwhelming glare of industry commodifying affective fannish labor and return to what possibilities fan labor affords its laborers. Christian Fuchs’ deliberate convergence between play and labor (“playbour”) offers a useful handle: “Play is a free activity without duration and permanence; labour is an unfree activity with duration and permanence. Play labour has the semblance of freedom but is unfree in that it creates wealth and profits that are controlled by others.”[11] I agree with the former statement, but not the latter. A cursory glance at two genres of fannish texts — erotic fanfiction and video game playthroughs — suggests that the ultimate products (if they exist at all) are not items to be sold or purchased; their takeaways are to be accepted and experienced. Fanfiction, generally, and smut, in particular, asks that both writer and reader drop preconceptions of their present reality and imagine somewhere and/with someone else. While many video game playthroughs act as instructional manuals, some few are invitations: less this is how you win the game and more this is how you can win the game. The practiced labor of choosing and building a different/better/not-this world is a muscle our society would do well to exercise. Imagination and love may just be the way out; as Charlie Ledbetter puts it: “Escapism is not a departure from reality. Rather, escape de-centers the hegemony of oppressive systems that announce themselves as real and creates space to imagine alternatives.”[12]

So, in closing, where can we go from here? How can LIS professionals and memory institutions fit in? As for industry co-optation, for starters, all digital workers (both in the “free” moments of clacking and clicking towards play, growth, and investigation, and during the plodding tedium of doing the email job) need to practice resistance while we stare at the screens, and discipline in building face-to-face communities. But at a perhaps more innocent level, library and information studies scholars can illuminate the labor behind the work of media connoisseurs like fans through acquisition and exhibition. Certain fan archives can be found in university libraries (e.g. Sandy Hereld Fanzine Collection at Texas A&M University, digital fanzine archives at the University of Iowa, the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz, which owes an incredible debt to personal collections by Deadheads) but current curation of these items suggest that the fanmade works are the subjects to be valorized, instead of the identities and labor of their makers. Could this be done by a library or archive creating an emulation to a born-digital archive? Secondarily, archival workers may be exactly the individuals to work with fandom communities to move their archives off proprietary platforms and/or create robust cataloging and description systems to enhance resource discovery and knowledge exchange. “Digital technologies are not innately archival, but must be made to serve archival purposes by the constant efforts of archivists.”[13] Trained archivists collaborating with passionate amateur archivists (fans) could hold the potential to revolutionize how we all continually remake and preserve Internet locales. If a collaborative project between archivists and fan-archivists were to take shape, it would need to be tailored precisely to the needs and wishes of fans, so as to retain the fans’ agency over their own community archival spaces. Most crucial to fandom communities and their archival habitats is that they remain in flux, they remain welcoming, and they are a place done together.[14]