Everyday Life

Non-Reductive Conceptions of Difference

“If ‘everyday life’ is going to provide a re-imagining of the study of culture…then it might need to put on hold the automatic explanatory value placed on accepted cultural differences. If cultural differences, such as gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity and so on, are going to be useful for the understanding of everyday life (and I assume that they would be) then there usefulness cannot be just presumed or taken for granted”(2). I am drawn to this quotation because of the conversation that occurred in our small group about whether or not Highmore wants to do away with the notion of difference in favor of commonality. From this quotation I take away the idea that Highmore places a high value on differences between people, that differences are “useful for the understanding of everyday life.” In addition Highmore adds that the identity categories normally used to “classify” people should not be assumed to mean the same thing to each person that may characterize or be characterized by these identity categories. In other words these identities black, brown, white, lesbian, upper-class etc should not be essentialized and fixed as having the same meaning in all contexts for all people. However, while writing these words I see myself alluding to a more nuanced version of differences, as opposed to contemplating his idea of commonality. However, on the next page Highmore suggests that it is the “negotiation” between differences and commonalities that is necessary. So that while we may visibly see, and viscerally feel differences, in our selves, and between ourselves and others, that these differences may not have to be divisive. This may indeed sound a bit “cum-by-ah,” but I do think that we often tend to solely focus on differences, without being at all considerate of ways we might be similar (not the same) as someone else. However, I also think that in order to find commonalities people must be willing to see the things that may mark our bodies as different and be self-reflexive in understanding how power and privilege work in everyday interactions. I think this idea touches on much of what Judith Hamera is saying when she states her second thesis: “Reductive conceptions of everyday practices ignore the social, historical, and political realities that enable or constrain communication”(14). I believe Hamera is echoing Highmore’s sentiments that people’s lived realities are more rich and complex then the labeling of differences can account for. While she is not specifically calling for an examination of commonalities, she is also not set on simply identifying differences, but on examining their layers. Like Highmore, Hamera wants to look at the rich complexities of everyday practices, which, reductive accounts of everyday-ness ignore. Hamera definitely wants differences to be a component of analyses of “the everyday”, however, like Highmore; Hamera is interested in a non-reductive view of the everyday but a more generative approach. I think that this can prove to be a useful too for examining the everyday, one that accounts for difference, but doesn’t settle for it to be simply “the way things are” without the potentiality for things to grow, change, and challenge the status quo.

Performance and the Everyday

Performance and the Everyday

I am very interested in making the connection between the “everyday” and “performance.” I feel that performance has the potential to inform the study of everyday life mainly through tactics of resistance to the reiterative practices we perform everyday often without even thinking about them. As Judith Hamera says: “Central to all such readings are aesthetics, the animating principles of art’s social lives. These principles emerge in the objects and events that aesthetic practice leaves behind, and in the routine transactions of those for whom art making is, and happens in, a neighborhood, a set of corporeal possibilities, comforts and constraints linking private self- and object-fashioning to community practice”(47). Hamera is invoking Dwight Conquergood’s notion to “To move [performance] outside of Aesthetics and situate it at the center of lived experience”(Hamera 46). This positions performance as not solely something that occurs on a stage with an audience but as something that happens in the everyday. It also insinuates that these everyday actions can be artful, beautiful, and aesthetically pleasing. Performance then becomes the way in which we enact in our everyday lives. However, performance isn’t simple, we don’t have endless performances available at our disposal, we only have performances that position us within the discourse as negotiated within society, culture, and history. Hamera allows us to see the ballet studio, ritualized Native American performances, and others as aesthetic performances that are grounded in the everyday, mainly through the body. Our bodies do have constraints within the everyday; we position ourselves and are positioned in culture through our bodies. But I have to believe that to some little extent my body in not devoid of agency but can instead choose to enact a very micro, yet resistive performance. This performance may not be as extravagant as some of the cultural performances Hamera shows us, but they are aesthetic performances that occur in the everyday. I am thinking of Tiffany’s example f being a person of color and nodding at another person of color while waiting for public transportation. This may not seem grandiose, but to me this is an aesthetic person. Although it is not performed on a stage there is some ritualistic element to it, one that says, “I may be the only person to offer this to you today, but I see you, I recognize your humanity,” There is an art form to this, something beautiful in that human connection. Of course I have not had this experience, I can never fully understand it, but I can empathize with it and recognize how it can function as a mode of resistance to dominant ideologies. Sometimes these small processes are what are truly resistive and yet aesthetic at the same time. As Highmore suggests, “If the everyday is that which is most recognizable, then what happens when the world is disturbed and disrupted by the unfamiliar”(Figuring the Everyday)? The unfamiliar becomes those performances that disrupt and challenge the everyday-ness of everyday practices. Sometimes these are grand bodily performances like practicing and performing ballet, sometimes it is a more simplistic head, nod but both performances allow us to have agency in the everyday. I am going to post a link to a video that Arianna posted last year that relates somewhat to what I am writing about but is just a really cool understanding of disruption of the everyday. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EYAUazLI9k&hl=en&fs=1&]XX

Surveillance and the Black Female Body

From taking this class as well as the “Voices of Women of Color” class I am interested in surveillance of the Black female body both historically and in the present day. While we think of surveillance in terms of technology, I think it is also important to examine surveillance through a historical lens, to not forget the ways we as a culture have come to see the Black female body. I come at this as a white, queer, woman, and thus, not a place of authority, but as a space where, there still remain sites of overlapping and interlocking oppressions that Black women face because of the surveillance of their bodies, and how this does vary from the way white people’s bodies are surveilled and how this surveillance creates a barrier for social justice to prevail. This is an idea I am still working through and I do not have the logic worked out. David Lyon argues that “Surveillance is just one aspect of this mediated world…Surveillance does also raise questions about power, citizenship, and technological development, and about information policy, regulation and resistance”(243). He goes on to say that, “The body has steadily disappeared from these relationships [relations mediated through surveillance methods]”(244). While I do agree that face-to-face interactions have diminished, our culture continues to view Black women’s bodies as commodities on display for all to see, whether through, the slave auction block, Facebook, or MTV music videos. These mediated forms of surveillance are linked to the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and capitalist enterprises. As Patricia Hill Collins argues, “Not only are commodification and exploitation linked, patterns of exploiting Black women’s sexuality have taken many forms…For example, slave auctions brokered the commodified bodies of both Black women and men”(143). Unfortunately surveillance, commodification, and exploitation, all work together to target Black women’s bodies. Lyon suggests, “Surveillance as understood here exists on a long continuum along which data is collected and processed for a range of purposes from policing and security to consumption and entertainment”(250). Although we now think of surveillance in terms of what computer sites we visit, what banks we use, and our discount cards, if we are to believe Lyon, we must recognize the ways in which data has been collected on Black women’s bodies throughout time. Sarah Bartmann’s (the Hottentot Venus’s) body was used for entertainment purposes and watched by upper class white people in order to see the irregularities of Black women’s bodies for entertainment value. Similarly, slave purchases took place on a block where, bodies were surveilled and sold for purchase. Surveillance has played an important role in the commodification and exploitation of Black women’s bodies. In popular culture Black women’s bodies are used for spectatorship, reduced down to “booties,” and are hypersexualized. But while this is happening our culture is using these images, collected through surveillance, to monitor things like the reproductive rights of Black women. Forcing sterilization against the will of a Black woman is not uncommon, and it is no surprise given the way that surveillance has been and is used to condemn and police Black women’s bodies into a white paradigm of behavior. There is not necessarily a specific conclusion to be gained, but it is very interesting to look at the way surveillance intersects with commodification, and exploitation to discipline Black women’s bodies into conformity. This allows the dominant culture to gain and hold privilege while marginalized Black women suffer from this surveillance. I am adding the new Beyonce video in order to sort of demonstrate the ways that we now surveil, commodify, and exploit Black women's bodies. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mVEGfH4s5g

Walking in the City, Space, and Resistance

“Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible. Within this ensemble, I shall try to locate the practices that are foreign to the ‘geometrical’ or ‘geographical’ space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions”(Michel de Certeau 93). We talked about this quotation a lot in class and discussed the ways that there is no totalizing theory of the everyday. What I find really fascinating about de Certeau’s theorization of the everyday is the concept of “strangeness” and foreign practices within a laid out geographical space. What I take from this portion of the book is that the disruptions of everyday places, the negotiation of space, is not necessarily where resistance occurs, but it is where we see the negotiations of power within the everyday, and where we see the interesting facets of the everyday in general. I was recently told about the MTV Video Music Awards and Kanye West’s disruptive performance, in attempting to usurp Taylor Swift’s win for her video. I feel like this is an interesting site of understanding disruptions of spaces. While this may not be a “common man’s” everyday space, this is an everyday “pop cultural” space that the public is privy to. So this display caused a lot of controversy and Kanye West was referred to as a jerk for stating his opinion and disrupting the space of the Video Music Awards. I do not necessarily want to place a value judgment on this situation because what I found most interesting in this moment were the power relations that were playing out in this disruptive moment not my own opinion on the situation. At a surface level Kanye West appeared to just be a jerk that ruined Taylor Swift’s moment of glory. However, going beneath the surface level we can see the power relations at play between a semi-powerful black man and a young white woman. While Kanye was advocating for Beyoncé, a black woman, it was not Beyoncé asserting her power upon Taylor Swift. How interesting to think about the intersections of race and gender in this situation. While Kanye is male he is also black and thus, seen as a threat and marginalized. Taylor Swift while white, is also female. In the historical relationships between black men and white women black men are seen as the ultimate threat to white women and their sexuality. Thus, Swift was portrayed as a victim of black male violence. While an unfair characterization of West, he definitely seemed to hold power by being able to speak his mind, while Swift seemed stunned, small, and voice-less. Kanye was not thrown off stage (the fact he made it onstage seemed strange to me), and while some booed him, others cheered him on. But by the very nature of her whiteness and normative, Swift was not powerless, or a simple victim. What also is interesting about this situation, especially in a de Certeauian sense, is that in this moment we can see below the visible to see the disruptions of the everyday. While there is some panoptic surveillance happening in this situation, there is no one theory or one way to view this moment. It is disorderly and thus a moment in the everyday. It was a moment of improvisation that complicated the everyday. It may have been a moment of resistance but really it was a negotiation of power, thus, making it an interesting site of meaning making. Here is the video http://www.mtv.com/videos/misc/435995/taylor-swift-wins-best-female-video.jhtml

Interviews, Power, and Change

I have really been thinking about whom to interview for class and how to make this project meaningful, yet not necessarily have it be the pinnacle of my doctoral program, or necessarily include it for further research. I think it is possible to do a project in this way and think of it as a practice run for learning how to do interviewing and oral history and looking at it in terms of stories. As Thomas King writes, “The truth about stories is that’s all we are.” When I read this I have a very visceral reaction, and though I digress, I read parts of this book at my great grandmother’s funeral because I remember her as a storyteller. While I cannot interview her, I am interested in hearing someone’s stories just to hear the words of someone else in order to learn about their everyday. And King’s words ring true, we are our stories, and our stories make us. They tell us how to behave in the world but they also make up our world. They show the differentials of power in the ways they are told as well as the messages they convey. It may seem silly but the person I want to interview, although I am not sure if I will, is the woman who threads my eyebrows. She is an Indian woman who has been threading eyebrows since she was a small child. While we had a short conversation the first time while she was doing my eyebrows I would like to get to know her more formally and talk about her life. Threading eyebrows is a traditional Indian practice of hair removal, where a cotton thread is used to remove hairs. The process is less abrasive than waxing, and helps to shape eyebrows in a more natural and less dramatic way. I feel that this woman, Priyah is her name, is situated in the theoretical lens of the everyday and at the very least is a part of my everyday. While I feel that it may be a stereotypical role (the beauty/service industry,) and I would in no way want to exploit her, I think she may have interesting stories. She deals with mostly white, middle class women on a daily basis, taking part in this ancient Indian ritual. It would be virtually impossible to not see some of the power relations, but I see much more her agency in the situation. She is the one with this somewhat subjugated knowledge imparting it on me, giving me a lecture on how I need to let my eyebrows be more natural and how she can help me with that but how I need to trust her to let them grow. She has power in this situation although it might not always be seen as such. Anyway, I think she might be very interesting and I think she might have important stories to share and ways to speak to knowledges of the mundane and everyday. But of course I have the important first step of asking her and the dynamic has the potential to be awkward but we’ll see. To be continued… [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIeHYNt-rl4&hl=en&fs=1&]

Queer Public Cultures

I really love Ann Cvetkovich. When I read her book on Lesbian Public Cultures and trauma, I swear my life was changed. At first when reading this article, I was afraid because she announced that her current project on public feeling was taking the place of some of her early work on trauma. I thought her work on trauma theory and sexuality was quite prolific and was worried that she might have toned down her politics. However, in the end, I was able to really see how she is not only negotiating public feeling but how those often come into being because of traumatic events—both public and private. But it is really the way in which, she queers affect, which demonstrates her contribution to the study of affect more broadly—which, is I think, quite a political standpoint. Emotions are not only not private, but they are also always sexualized, making emotions publically sexual. There is something so radical in this because sexuality is still taboo and people, as general rules do not want to think of the sexuality that might play out in traumatic situations or within their own emotions. As confused as I am about sexuality, the even more confused and yet intrigued I am by affect and their connections together. As Cvetkovich writes, “The embrace of affect within queer studies has also enabled new forms of personal voice in academic work, including criticism based in memoir, public intellectual work that seeks a general audience, or overt declarations of love and other investments in our intellectual projects”(463). I find this to be one of the most compelling pieces of Cvetkovich, as it relates to my work. I find that the concept of affect, which, I interpret as meaning public feeling, is very useful especially in understandings of new ideas of queer theory. Whereas queer theory used to be white centered, incorporating new and performative voices, especially those of queer people of color actually end up utilizing a different affective process. In this sense these new voices, these personal voices not only used a different form of affect but they also created new affects with the personal voices of scholars of color. The voices of queer people of color have changed, and richened, queer projects calling academics to continue doing queer work but in a more responsible, and what I would call, intersectional way. In my mind I am drawn to performance artists like Carmelita Tropicana, who is a subversive queer Chicana, who performs a very outward sexuality, while being a lesbian. She draws on elements of camp and drag to make her performances lively, while, always critiquing, dominant structures. I recall a video of hers where she is imprisoned with a bunch of other women. The subtext of the performance was their queerness. In the end the women perform a subversive song together in the jail cell, singing about their lost loves, like lipstick (potentially a metaphor for another woman.) Anyway, these women, including Tropicana, all do a very public, very visual performance of feeling their sexuality. I think with affect, that one thing I have to always keep in mind, is that it isn’t just about public feeling, but the ways those public feelings are performed and used, and where the power is located in public feeling. In the end I am wondering if there is no moment or emotion left unmediated by the social and cultural world in which, we live? I am really excited to discuss this topic and to keep reading materials along these lines.

Affective Narrative

"Everyone knows there's something not quite right about suburban sprawl: the deserts of plywood spreading over hayfields; the kids getting fat eating potato chips in front of the TV; the creeping lure of the affordable dream house that comes in the same four basic plans no matter where you are. But the houses are big, beautiful, white, more than you ever expected to have. More than you can resist”(49). If affects are public feelings I wonder why if everyone feels there is “something not quite right about suburban sprawl,” then why do so many people buy into it? Why is it still happening everywhere, under our noses, even when we may detest it? This weekend my girlfriend and I got lost between Longmont and Denver. We were attempting to return to my house in Denver after visiting my grandmother. There is road construction EVERYWHERE, so inevitably we end up taking a detour. The detour takes us through Erie, we look around and for miles and miles around us we see houses. Houses that are big, maybe to some people beautiful, but to us our own version of personal Hell. As they sing at the beginning of the television show Weeds, “Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky. Little boxes on the hillside. Little boxes all the same.” Watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W6dOEdEAAQ&feature=related She and I do not fit in with the master plan of gated communities. They aren’t made for families who can’t procreate or at least don’t want to. We turn and stare, not only are the communities marked by huge stone signs, distinguishing the various ones, but some by elaborate landscaping and artistry. We laugh because one community is surrounded by metal buffalo sculptures (I hesitate to use that term and feel buffalo spectacle might be a better word for it. “The suburbs,” I say, “The place where they kill off the buffalo and make hideous visual representations of them.” We both laugh, frightened because we know how true this joke is. We don’t live in places like this—we refuse to. In the mountains we have the privilege of escaping the suburban sprawl. We don’t need a place with a 24-hour pharmacy, or chain restaurants, or, the same stores repeated over and over. But some people like those amenities. My brother for example would never consider living someplace without a Target. Where would he and his wife go if they needed something late at night? I tell them they would probably save money because they wouldn’t be able to run out and pick up a movie at ten o’clock. I explain that sometimes those luxuries are unnecessary but that we utilize them simply because we can. We use them uncritically. We forget to look at who cannot use them. We forget to look at who is not allowed to live in gated communities, who doesn't fit in at the local Chiles. If we all feel there is something not right about this then why is it happening everywhere? Why is there also a sense of comfort in this sort of repetition? How do our interactions become standardized? Just because a restaurant maybe displays a local high school’s memorabilia does not mean it has any ties to the community of which it is a part. Instead it is a way to “fake the customer out.” Fake them into thinking that a huge chain restaurant cares. Create a sense of feeling that this “cog in the wheel” really desires to be different—that they appear to be interested in the community. They don't. They just want to look like they do. But even the other restaurants are competing to convey that they do not abide by these standards. Thus, a customer comes to believe that at a non-chain restaurant they are getting a more authentic experience, which, may in fact be just as constructed, just in a totally different way. We provide real food from real people, or real animals? But this real-ness just creates a new affect. We can be connected through the authentic even if authenticity is created out of a feeling and not somethings actual authenticity. It is circuitous just as affect is. We still leave people out. Those who cannot afford this kind of food. How does race factor in-certainly whiteness is re-centered in these communities. People of color usually aren't invited with open arms into these communities. I wonder how affect and power work together? If affect is “public feeling”(Stewart 2) then who benefits from the affect created by gated communities and who does not? How do standardized communities promote consumerism and a certain level of class privilege? And how is consumption in and of itself both problematic and yet necessary? I laugh at the buffalo, yet know I cannot live in the mountains forever—I have to negotiate my way through the “master plan” of gated communities and suburban sprawl. I have no answers just feelings. Feelings of ickiness, of confusion. Is there any authenticity? Should there be?

Humour

Humor: The Mind, The Body, and Affect

I am very interested in the corporeal aspects of humor and how this relates to the affective subject.

As Simon Critchley writes:
Let me go back to the body. If humour is, as I suggested, the return of the physical into the metaphysical, then it is important to point out that the human being remains an ineluctably metaphysical entity…if the bodily dimension of the comic takes place in the gap between being and having, between our souls and arseholes, then this hole cannot be plugged or bunged up. We cannot simultaneously be what we have. The critical distance with regard to the world and nature that opens up in the incongruities of humour is testified to in the alienation we experience with regard to our bodies. This is why the experience of the body in pain is so oddly analogous to the pleasures of laughter—which is why it can hurt when you laugh(50).

Firstly I do not know what this means. Not wholly. But I felt here are a few key ideas that I would like to work through and to a degree “flesh out.” Critchley defines humor in terms of a gap between the physical body and the metaphysical self and the returning of those two dimensions to one another. I frame this in my own mind—humor is a reconciliation of the supposed mind/body dichotomy or split. Humor affects not only the body in the form of something physically happening, but we can only make sense of this humor through the logos of the mind, of realizing that whatever funny thing just happened, broke with logic of the mind. And I think maybe this is what Critchley is getting at—that humor is not located solely in the body or in the mind. Humor is located at the intersections of both body and mind.

But there is a place I think that humor works that is maybe not even in the realm of just a simple mind/body split, but that instead humor exists in its next affective nature. Humor exists somewhat in its public nature, in its ability to affect people in public scenarios. Humor wouldn’t necessarily be funny if someone else wasn’t around not to witness it. Thus, humour is both in the mind, in the body and in the affective gaps between, around, and underneath, these temporal and spatial locations.

Incongruency is key here. Humor is all about incongruency and the complexities of non-sense making. The things that are funny are so in part because they are unexpected and do not meet normative expectations. I am reminded of Margaret Cho, an Asian-American bisexual comedian and some of her skits. There is one part in a skit where she takes on the identity of an old “Washer Woman” named Gwen. When you would expect to her to be coming around asking to take in work like laundry, or ironing (as is stereotypical Asian women’swork) she instead pretends to be going around using the line “Hi, my name is Gwen and I’M HERE TO WARSH YER VAGIIIIIIIIINA!!!!!!!!” It’s funny because it is unexpected and really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But I laugh because I find it humorous that an Asian woman, supposedly old, a/de sexualized is walking around asking women if she can warsh their vaginas. It does not make sense but we cans see the connection of the mind and body while simultaneously sublimating them. The body is necessary but the mind is also. In the scenario as an audience we are affected by the consequences of stereotyping of Asian women and ways to de normalize those stereotypes.

I don’t have any answers, but I do think that humor is not as simple as we sometimes assume it to be. It is not just that some things are funny and others are not. There are gaps where humor occurs, spaces between bodies and minds. And even then, humor is not simple; it is a complex set of relations, practices, and performances of bodies and the affects of these performances on others. Is there ever an original place of humor, or something’s inherent funny-ness? I don’t think so, which is why I think it is important to think of the humor in terms of the mind, the, body, and affect.