Semicolon Fall 2022

SEMICOLON SEMICOLON AN ARTS AND HUMANITIES STUDENTS’ COUNCIL

PUBLICATION

WHAT WE

RE ABOUT

What We’re About

Symposium and Semicolon are the official publications of the Arts and Humanities Students’ Council at Western University, published bi-annually. To view previous editions or for more informa tion about our publications, please contact the AHSC in Room 2135 at University College. Publications can also be viewed virtually at issuu.com/ahscpubs.

Semicolon is the academic journal for the AHSC. It accepts outstanding A-level essay submis sions written in any Arts and Humanities undergraduate course.

Sharing one’s work can often be daunting, so the Publications Team would like to thank all stu-

SEMICOLON SEMICOLON

Copyrights remain with the artists and authors. The responsibility for the con tent in this publication remains with the artists and authors. The content does not reflect the opinions of the Arts and Humanities Students’ Council (AHSC) or the University Students’ Council (USC).

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

What We’re About

First things first, I’d like to say thanks to you, the reader. It’s been quite a semester, so thank you for taking the time to pick up our AHSC publications.

Our theme for this semester was “The Fantastical.” Pieces in this issue span from the fictional worlds of Tolkien to those of Shakespeare. They question the naturalization of our norms, articulate the absurd and awe-inspiring, and interweave the thoughts of other academics in their analyses. Like all excellent literature, “The Fantastical” implores the reader to embrace fresh perspectives and ideas.

A final thank-you must be imparted to the brilliant and dedicated Publications team for pulling out all the stops this semester. You guys are truly fantastical.

Until next semester, keep well, enjoy the snowfall, and curl up with some lovely words courtesy of your Western peers.

All the best, and happy reading.

Safaa Ali Editor-in-Chief

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Inside Title

The Coldest God: Winter Imagery in Two of Emily Dickinson’s Poems

By Gray Brogden

Absurdity, Acceptance, & the Quest for Meaning By Sara-Emilie Clark

The Difficulty of Deathlesness in Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings

By Rachel Tersch

Grendel’s Motive By Julia Piquet

Iran Unveiled: Dress Code Policy Under Reza Shah and the Internalization of the Colonial Gaze

By Parsa Albeheshti

Gender Transgression: A Queer Anarchist Locus of Resistance By Ziyana Kotadia

“Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness”: Cross-Dressing and Gender Expectations in As You Like It and Twelfth Night By Gray Brogden

Consciousness, Time and the Role of Memory By Parsa Albeheshti 30

On Sublimity, The Republic, Poetry and Gender By Liam McGarry

The Ambivalent Nature of NFTs: Ana lyzing New Technologies Through Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” By Rachel Tersch

The Coldest God: Winter Imagery in Two of Emily Dickinson’s Poems

What We’re About

By Gray Brogden

Though winter is rarely found in her poems, a close examination of the works of Emily Dickinson reveals that she uses imagery of the coldest season to create atmospheres of contemplation and meditation on subjects such as despair, death, and God. In their essay “God’s Place in Dickinson’s Ecology,” Nancy Mayer, argues there are three gods to be found in Dickinson’s poetry: a familiar female entity, an indifferent overseer, and an unsympathetic God who serves as a cruel ruler of a harsh world. It is this “God of Job” (Mayer 270) that appears in the two poems “There’s a certain Slant of light” and “Victory Comes Late.” Both poems use winter imagery to strengthen the image of a cold dictator who takes life as easily as he bestows it.

While few Dickinson poems reference winter directly, L. Edwin Folsom, 1975, determines there are upwards of 60 works that include some form of winter imagery, such as ice, snow, frost or freezing. While these references dwarf in comparison to some 200 references to summer, they are nonetheless an important part of the Dickinson canon (Folsom 362). Having spent her entire life in Amherst, MA, the reality of New England winters would have been impossible to ignore, and it would therefore be foolish to believe that winter and the imagery associated with it could escape her writing.

Since the myth of Persephone and Demeter, winter has been used throughout time and literature to sym bolize a season of bareness and death. The works of Dickinson are no exception, as Folsom points out: “[w]inter for Dickinson is the season that forces reality, that strips all hope of transcendence. It is a season of death and a metaphor for death” (363). Dickinson’s winter imagery provides a steady undercurrent of mortality and despair in several of her poems. In “There’s a certain Slant of light,” the “Winter Afternoons” (Dickinson 2) provide a harsh illumination for the meditation of despair, while in “Victory comes late,” images of “freezing lips” (2) and frost denote death.

Nancy Mayer argues that “the poet Emily Dickinson needs God as a trope a figure to stand in for either an unresponsive universe or for the absurdity of our expectation that there be a response, or, conversely, a figure who represents the welcome mystery and fitness of sensual life” (269). Mayer goes on to offer “three various and conflicting versions of God that act as place-holders in ecosystems where humanity’s place is problemat ic” (269) within Dickinson’s body of work. One God is a female God “who is familiar enough to be addressed colloquially” (270), while another is portrayed as a simple overseer who is a witness to the goings-on of mortals but rarely interferes. However, the third type of God is the “God of Job” (270), whom Mayer describes as:

a dictator who creates a brutal ecosystem as a playground for His sadistic streak or takes a human life with grim Calvinist whimsy. We can choose, in this deity’s universe, to take our place with God and against our own humanity or with His victims, identifying with the hunted and with our own creaturely vulnerability. (269-270)

This is the God found in the poem “Victory comes late” and alluded to in “There’s a certain Slant of light.”

One of the few poems that directly reference the season, the “Winter Afternoons” in “There’s a certain Slant of Light” provides the backdrop for a meditation on despair. The light is characterized by the speaker as oppressive, “like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes” (Dickinson, “Slant of Light” 3-4). The implication that religion provides its own form of oppressive weight is symbolic of a dictatorial and unsympathetic God. The speaker goes on to discuss the “Heavenly Hurt” (5) they feel under the glare of winter’s light, drawing a direct link between their despair and God. The oxymoron forces the reader to confront the disparity between a presumed benevolent God and a lived experience of harsh reality. Like the ringing of the “Cathedral Tunes” (4), Heaven is

a burden to be borne rather than a refuge.

The final stanza strengthens the oppressive weight of the winter light by stating, “When it comes, the Landscape listens— / Shadows— hold their breath” (13-14), which showcases a natural setting subservient to the quiet, despairing contemplation of a winter afternoon. The stillness associated with held breath recalls the imagery of a winter afternoon; blankets of snow deafen any sound, and bring “a chilling death, a cold immor tality” that “never offers transcendence to a life beyond this one, rather only threatens this life as it brushes death close by as a warning” (Mayer 363). Winter, death, and God are intricately linked in the perfect setting to contemplate despair.

Inside Title

In “Victory comes late,” “winter and death become concomitant conditions; the coming of one indicates the presence of the other” (Mayer 364) as the winter body of a would-be victor is too late to their spoils:

Victory comes late –

And is held low to freezing lips –Too rapt with frost

To take it –

How sweet it would have tasted –

Just a Drop – (Dickinson, “Victory” 1-6)

The first half of this poem conjures the image of a mortally wounded soldier being given a drink as the warmth drains from his body. The “freezing lips—Too rapt with frost / To take it” (2-4) further develop the theme of victory being something we can only attain once it is too late: we can only drink from this cup knowing we are about to die, knowing “How sweet it would have tasted” (5). Like the forced contemplation of despair in “There’s a certain Slant of light,” “Victory comes late” highlights that winter brings forth death and mediation on one’s own mortality.

The second half of the poem dives deeper into the relationship between God and his creatures. The speaker asks, “Was God so economical” (7), reflecting on his cruelty of placing the spoils of victory just out of reach. “His Table’s spread too high for Us— / Unless We dine on tiptoe” (8-9) implies that there is no way for humans to fully enjoy food, love, or power from God without constant strain. This exertion lessens our enjoy ment by forcing us to focus on the task of simply getting there. In the last four lines of the poem, the speaker suggests a form of hierarchy for the creatures under God:

Cherries – suit Robbins –The Eagle’s Golden Breakfast strangles – Them –God keep His Oath to Sparrows –Who of little Love – know how to starve – (11-14)

By stating that the “Cherries” are fit for the robins but the “golden breakfast” of the eagle would strangle the lesser bird, the speaker implies that God gives each creature exactly what they need. However, the speak er complicates this assertion with the final two lines, as “God’s Oath to Sparrows” can be understood in two different verses in the Bible: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall to the ground without your Father” (King James Bible, Matthew 10:29), and “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them” (Matthew 6:26). These verses promise that God will care for all his creatures, even the lowly sparrow. However, the speaker knows this “oath” is broken sometimes as sparrows “of little Love— Know how to starve” (Dickinson, “Victory” 13-14). This God who forces humans into physical exertion for the chance of “Crumbs” (10) and seemingly forgets his promise to care for all his creatures, is the perfect illustration of Mayer ’s “God of Job” (270), and mirrors the cold, harsh reality of the winter imagery used throughout both poems.

Despite its sparse use, winter imagery remains a powerful and impactful tool in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. “There’s a certain Slant of light” and “Victory Comes Late” are prime examples of how images of frost and snow lend themselves to create atmospheres ripe for contemplation of the most despairing subjects, such as death and the reality that God may have harsh, and sometimes cruel intentions.

Works Cited Dickinson, Emily. “There’s a certain Slant of Light.” The Essential Emily Dickinson, HarperCollins, 2016, pp. 12.

Folsom, L. Edwin. “‘The Souls That Snow’: Winter in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson.” American Literature, vol. 47, no. 3, Duke University Press, 1975, pp. 361–76, https://doi.org/10.2307/2925338. Mayer, Nancy. “God’s Place in Dickinson’s Ecology.” A Companion to Emily Dickinson, edited by Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz, Blackwell Publishing, 2008, pp. 269-277, https://doi. org/10.1002/9780470696620.

The Bible. Authorized King James Version, Edited by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett, Oxford UP, 1998. “Victory comes late.” The Essential Emily Dickinson, HarperCollins, 2016, pp. 52.

Absurdity, Acceptance, & the Quest for Meaning

By Sara-Emilie Clark

White Teeth by Zadie Smith is an exercise in absurdity. The novel’s two protagonists, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal, are representative of the inherent conflict that exists between an individual’s search for meaning and their inability to find it. This is the premise for absurdist philosophy. Albert Camus and Soren Kierkegaard, two renowned absurdist philosophers, each put forward a method to defeat the absurd. While Camus believed the only way to do so was to confront it directly, Kierkegaard advocated for a commitment to subjective truths and a leap of faith that would enable the individual to fully transcend. Archie and Samad are a physical repre sentation of both of these theories. Archie’s method of attributing significance to his existence is reflective of Albert Camus’s philosophy; Samad’s approach is closer to Kierkegaard’s. Although both seek meaning, only Archie is ever able to find it. In this paper, I will compare and contrast the ways in which each character at tempts to overcome the absurdity of life. Through an analysis of the two men’s distinct relationships with the absurd, I will argue that the novel ultimately proves Camus’s theory: in order to truly conquer the absurd, we must face it head-on.

Albert Camus’s theory of the absurd is tied to his essay The Myth of Sisyphus. The work, which draws on a nihilistic framework, uses the Greek tale of Sisyphus as a metaphor for the absurdity of life (Agustyn). The gods punished Sisyphus by commanding him to push a boulder up a hill for eternity. Each time he crested the top of the hill, however, the boulder would roll down and Sisyphus would be forced to start again. His existence is reduced to this act: Sisyphus has no other choice but to continue to push the boulder back up the hill. Camus argues that suicide, one of the hypothetical methods for beating the absurd, is not an option for Sisyphus. This leaves acceptance. If Sisyphus can rejoice in the mundanity of this cursed repetition, then it is no longer a pun ishment and thus no longer absurd. He will have found intrinsic meaning in the act itself (Agustyn).

In many ways, Archie Jones’ literary life offers parallels with the story of Sisyphus. An unremarkable, bland Englishman, Archie’s life is so constant, so regular, so meaningless, that it appears completely and utterly absurd. He is described as a man “whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios”:

Pebble: Beach.

Raindrop: Ocean.

Needle: Haystack.” (Smith 11)

One of Archie’s few claims to fame is his history as a track cyclist. Reasonably talented, Archie qualifies for the 1948 Olympics in London. His brief career in athletics, however, is marked by two absurd peculiarities. The first is his remarkable consistency. Every single lap he completes over the course of three years takes precisely 62.8 seconds. This unwavering repetition is reminiscent of Sisyphus’s task: no matter what happens, nothing changes. Just as Sisyphus is doomed to roll the boulder up the hill forever, so too is Archie stuck in his own loop, perpetually cycling at a speed of exactly 62.8 seconds per lap.

At the Olympics, Archie ties with a Swedish gynecologist named Horst Ibelgaufts for thirteenth place. Both men record a time of 62.8 seconds. This achievement is the second instance of absurdity. The secretary responsible for transcribing the event misses Archie’s name, resulting in his absence from the list of partici pants. Through her failure to acknowledge his accomplishment, the secretary effaces Archie’s presence from the Olympics. This carelessness with which his existence is treated is one of the central tenets of absurdist theory. Camus argues the universe’s inability to validate our existence is one of the only certainties in an individual’s life. The secretary failing to note Archie’s attendance at the Olympics is an apt metaphor for the indifference with which absurdist philosophers posit the universe treats human life. In one fell swoop, the pinnacle of his

athletic career — participating in the Olympics — is effectively erased from history. It is as if Archie never attended the Olympics at all.

What We’re About

Following his divorce from his Italian wife, Ophelia, Archie first tries to reconcile with the absurdity of his life by attempting to commit suicide. Both Camus and Kierkegaard, however, dismiss the validity of suicide as a way of overcoming the absurd. Suicide provides an avenue for escape, not comprehension. According to Camus, killing oneself is simply a confession “that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it” (Camus in Weddington 120). Suicide thus does not defeat the absurd; it simply reinforces it. By ending one’s life as a response to their inability to find meaning in a cold, indifferent universe, the individual is merely prov ing there is no inherent value to their existence (Weddington). They have not beaten the absurd; the absurd has beaten them.

Archie’s suicide attempt, however, is interrupted by the butcher, a pigeon-hating man named Mo Hus sein-Ishmael. Upon finding Archie prostrate in his car with his mouth closed around the nozzle of a vacuum, Mo exclaims, “No one gasses himself on my property. We are not licensed” (Smith 10). Bewildered but grateful for the intervention, Archie moves on from this moment determined to make the most of what life has to offer. He chooses to face life head-on. This is Camus’s ultimate recommendation for how to beat the absurd. Acceptance of the absurd does not inhibit the individual, he argues, but rather allows them to live life to its fullest. It is a revolt against hopelessness, and one that enables the discovery of “ideas capable of restoring a relative meaning to existence” (Camus in DeLancey 1958). Archie has taken out a new lease on life and he is determined to use it. “A new Archie,” writes Smith, “is about to emerge” (Smith 18).

From this moment onwards, Archie’s life changes fundamentally. Following his suicide attempt, he comes across an End of the World Party. The host, a man named Merlin, initially turns Archie away, assuming that he is selling either encyclopedias or God. “Cos if it’s encyclopedias,” says Merlin, “we’ve got enough, like, information…and if it’s God you’ve got the wrong house” (Smith 19). The party, with its guests who do not care about finding meaning in books of science or religion, is further representative of Archie’s victory over the absurd. The attendees are content simply in their existence. Archie, with his newfound vigor and lust for life, is drawn to this carefree attitude. While Merlin posits that the failure of the world to end is both a disappoint ment and a blessing, Archie says, with passion, that it is a “hundred per cent, bona fide blessing” (Smith 21). No longer troubled by the absurd, Archie is able to find joy and meaning in life itself. At the same party, he meets Clara Bowen, marries her six weeks later, and has a child named Irie. Having faced the absurd directly, Archie now lives in a peaceful state. He occupies a minimal role throughout the remainder of the novel following the resolution of this philosophical imbalance in his life.

In sharp contrast to his friend, Samad Iqbal never experiences this kind of contentment. Samad is a man mired in constant conflict. He is the absurd personified, torn between his desire for meaning and his failure to find it. Samad suffers from his inability to find any sense of meaning in the world around him and, by extension, his inability to find meaning within himself. He feels “the urge, the need, to speak to every man and, like the Ancient Mariner, explain constantly, constantly wanting to reassert something, anything” (Smith 58). Just as the Mariner in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s infamous poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is compelled to tell his story to every stranger he encounters, so too does Samad feel obliged to have his existence validated by the external world. He wants to wear a sign around his neck, a placard that reads:

I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIENTIST, A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH. I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN

ALLAH,

I’M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND ARCHIE AND OTHERS. I AM FORTY-NINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE STREET. (Smith 58)

Inside Title

Camus would argue the purpose of such a public advertisement of Samad’s life story is to convince others that his life has some deeper significance that he matters. This reliance on external validation, however, prevents Samad from understanding the intrinsic value of his own life (DeLancey). Because of this, Camus would further contend that Samad can never truly transcend the absurd.

In an attempt to find meaning elsewhere in his life, Samad uses his Muslim faith as a crutch to immerse himself in subjective truths. According to Kierkegaard, subjective truths are “internalized feelings and values that one commits oneself to live by,” such as religious beliefs (Kierkegaard in Roskowski 17). In contrast to Camus, Kierkegaard argues that commitment to subjective truths is what is required for an individual to over come the absurd, so long as they unwaveringly sustain their faith. Samad fails to prove Kierkegaard’s theory, however, as his relationship with Allah is inconsistent and unreliable. He is caught between two worlds: the spiritual and the secular. Samad’s struggle with these opposing forces is continually highlighted throughout the novel.

In 1976, Samad marries a woman named Alsana. The union, which is traditionally arranged, is an ev er-present reminder of Samad’s cultural background and, by extension, his religious beliefs. It is also the site of Samad’s greatest failures to uphold his faith. Samad, who struggles to feel any sense of sexual attraction towards his uninterested wife, seeks the advice of an Islamic scholar regarding the possibility of masturbation. Masturbation, according to the scholar, is prohibited under Islam. The scholar cites a report claiming that “it has been forbidden that one should have intercourse with oneself” (Smith 138). Only the purest of men are permit ted to take part in the act or, jokes the scholar, Anglicans, who are devoid of morals. This mention of Anglican ism is significant because it is one of the dominant faiths in England, the secular nation to which Samad has immigrated. Samad, the scholar asserts, is not a pure man. He insinuates that pleasuring himself would make Samad no better than an Anglican, thus confirming his place in English society and his commitment to the sec ular world over the spiritual. Despite the warning from the scholar that, in order to remain steadfast in his faith, Samad should “stay away from [his] right hand,” he is ultimately unable to resist the temptations of his flesh (Smith 139).

Samad is also unable to resist the temptations of the flesh of others. In 1980, he meets Poppy Burt-Jones, the pretty, red-haired music teacher of his children, Magid and Millat. He develops an instantaneous obsession with her. In an effort to relieve himself of the mounting guilt he feels about this attraction, Samad fasts daily and masturbates in abundance. He spends every waking moment in the restaurant in which he works to distract him self from feeling like “a masturbator, a bad husband, an indifferent father, with all the morals of an Anglican” (Smith 141). Eventually, however, Samad succumbs and engages in an affair with Poppy, effectively forsaking his faith and any chance of reconciling with the absurd. Adultery is one of the ultimate transgressions in Islam: Samad cannot even hold himself accountable to one of the most fundamental laws of his religion. His infidelity is further proof of his inability to devote himself to subjective truths.

This conflict Samad experiences with the spiritual and the secular is perhaps best represented by his own children, the twins Magid and Millat. In an attempt to restore his own relationship with his faith and culture, Samad sends Magid to Bangladesh. Ironically, however, Magid becomes an atheist who is completely devoted to science and objectivity. Conversely, Millat, who remains in England, joins the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation (KEVIN), a Muslim fundamentalist brotherhood. As Samad’s offspring, each twin is a symbol for a component of his identity. Magid is a physical manifestation of the secular; Millat is a physical manifestation of the spiritual. The inherent difference between the two sons emphasizes Samad’s inability to

reconcile this fundamental division in his own life.

Samad himself, however, acknowledges the struggle he experiences in attempting to live a wholly spir itual life. During an altercation with Mad Mary, a voodoo woman known for her nonsensical behavior, Samad confesses that he feels he is a split person. He explains “half of [him] wishes to sit quietly with my legs crossed, letting the things that are beyond [his] control wash over [him]. But the other half wants to fight the holy war. Jihad!” (Smith 179). This passage highlights the internal quarrel with which Samad struggles. So long as Sa mad experiences this sense of division, he will never be able to fully devote himself to subjective truths and derive any meaning from his life. Ironically, it is Samad’s urge to engage in his religion that prevents him from overcoming the absurd. Kierkegaard’s theory of subjective truths is thus inherently problematic in this context. Samad’s compulsion to participate in Islam is responsible for his inability to accept the meaningless of life. At the same time, his failure to take the leap of faith and commit himself fully to subjective truths further con demns him to a perpetually absurd existence. This is the paradox that arises out of Kierkegaard’s philosophy of the absurd, and one of its most significant critiques (Fleming 3013).

Archie’s success in reconciling with the absurd and Samad’s failure to do so validates Camus’s theory over Kierkegaard’s: the only way the absurd can be truly overcome is to face it head on. Ironically, it is Samad’s wife, Alsana, who alludes to this at the beginning of the novel. In order to understand something, to unearth its hidden meaning, she argues that one must “look at it dead-straight between the eyes; an unflinching and honest stare” (Smith 83). A leap of faith to immerse oneself in subjective truths, as prescribed by Kierkegaard, will only take an individual so far in terms of defying the absurd. Unless an individual is fully and totally engaged with their faith, it is inevitable that they will continue to be haunted by the absurdity of life. The individual thus cannot concern themself with anything outside the scope of their immediate understanding and experience. To do so, according to Camus, would simply be another way of eluding the absurd and betraying the present. The bravest and most important thing an individual can do is to first confront, and then joyfully accept, the absurd (Camus in Roskowski 17).

Despite the closeness of their bond, Samad’s and Archie’s lives differ fundamentally. Through an anal ysis informed by the philosophies of Albert Camus and Soren Kierkegaard, this paper has explored the ways in which Archie and Samad approach the absurdity of their existence. Samad, the self-proclaimed man of God, ties himself to his religion. The struggles he experiences in holding up the tenets of his faith, however, prevent him from transcending the absurd and deny him contentment. His best friend, Archie, lives in a state of peace that Samad never himself knows nor understands. Having accepted the absurdity of life, Archie has reconciled the conflict that all of humanity faces: the desire for meaning and its absence. No longer troubled by this inherent opposition, Archie experiences the joy that Camus predicted would occur in his theory of defeating the absurd. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is thus a thought experiment as much as it is a novel. The story takes up two compet ing methods of defeating the absurd and ultimately presents Camus’s philosophy as the victor. The protagonists, Archie and Samad, prove that only when an individual has completely given up their search for significance can meaning be found in an otherwise meaningless existence.

Works Cited

Agustyn, Adam. “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2020, www.britannica.com/topic/The-Myth-of-Sisyphus.

DeLancey, Craig. “Camus’s Absurd and the Argument Against Suicide.” Philosophia, vol. 49, no. 5, 2021, pp. 1953–1971, doi:10.1007/s11406-021-00333-7.

Fleming, Wesley H. “Moral Injury and the Absurd: The Suffering of Moral Paradox.” Journal of Religion and Health, vol. 60, no. 5, 2021, pp. 3012–3033, doi:10.1007/s10943-021-01227-4.

Roskowski, Matthew. “Absurdity and the Leap of Faith.” Journal of Student Research, 2013, pp. 15–23, doi:https://minds.wisconsin.edu/bitstream/handle/1793/66395/RoskowskiMatthew.pdf?seq uence=1&is Allowed=y.

Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. Penguin Books, 2020. Weddington, Hank S. “The Education of Sisyphus Absurdity, Educative Transformation, and Suicide.” Journal of Transformative Education, vol. 5, no. 2, 2007, pp. 119–133, doi:10.1177/1541344607303464.

Grendel’s Motive

By Julia Piquet

Julia Kristeva begins to define the abject as “a massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either” (Kristeva 2). Within the poem “Beowulf,” the abject makes its pres ence known through Grendel, the monster who terrorizes the kingdom at night. The poet, when introducing the monster, fails to offer the reasoning behind his repeated acts of destruction. Lines 88 through 93 depict a ban quet in Heorot Hall, with the playing of harps and a poet’s retelling of man’s beginnings at the hands of God: “The din of the loud banquet / every day in the hall, the harp being struck / and the clear song of a skilled poet / telling with mastery of man’s beginnings, / how the Almighty had made the earth / a gleaming plain girdled with waters” (“Beowulf” 88-93). Lines 120 through 125 unfold Grendel’s sudden descending terror upon Heorot Hall, which results in the murder of thirty men: “Suddenly then / the God-cursed brute was creating havoc: / greedy and grim, he grabbed thirty men / from their resting places and rushed to his lair, / flushed up and inflamed from the raid, / blundering back with the butchered corpses” (120-125).

The poet never offers a glimpse into Grendel’s mind or motivation for enacting such evil unto a previ ously joy-filled hall, which leaves the reader to wonder why the monster feels this grievance and rage. In this essay, I will argue that Grendel’s personal motive for creating havoc, otherwise made uncertain by the poet, is directly conditional to his existence as the abject. Grendel, as the abject, cannot resist straying further from familiarity, and in doing so, causing chaos. Grendel, as the abject and as Cain’s mythological descendant, must exist as the demonic in opposition to the divine. Finally, Grendel exemplifies that the abject must return and must repeat, never ceasing to cause harm.

First, Grendel’s existence as the abject within “Beowulf” means he cannot resist causing terror. In the monster’s first mention in the poem, before he attacks, the poet describes Grendel as a “grim demon / haunting the marches, marauding round the heath / and the desolate fens: he had dwelt for a time / in misery among the banished monsters” (102-105), undoubtedly setting him as a monstrous, unfamiliar creature in the eyes of the kingdom. These descriptions of Grendel are constant throughout the poem, such as “powerful demon” (86), “death-shadow” (160), and “corpse-maker” (276), asserting the fact that he is a monster. Said to be “merciless Grendel,” (135), “greedy and grim” (122), and “malignant by nature, he never showed remorse” (137), the poet offers the reader Grendel’s rage and grievances by setting him up as a murderer but fails to offer the motive behind such gruesome actions.

Kristeva sets forth the abject as “a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself) and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing” (Kristeva 8). When ap plying this definition to Grendel’s existence and acts of destruction, he becomes the abject who cannot resist straying, and who “kills in the name of life … [and] lives at the behest of death” (15). For Grendel to remain in a state of abjection is irresistible. It is necessary for him, as the monster, to cause terror, to murder and descend the kingdom into chaos, and to stray from familiarity. He cannot help it, as his status as the defined abject within the poem demands it of him. Thus, Grendel’s motive for his acts of terror is directly conditional to his status as the abject who “cannot help taking the risk at the very moment he sets himself apart” (8), and wreaks havoc wherever he goes. Previously made unknown by the poet, within his existence as the abject, lies the reasoning behind his murders.

Second, Grendel’s mythological descendance from Cain, simultaneous with his status as the abject, creates a need to be the evil in opposition to good. As the poet introduces Grendel, they place him as a part of “Cain’s clan, whom the Creator had outlawed / and condemned as outcasts. / For the killing of Abel” (“Be owulf” 106-107). From the onset, the poet associates Grendel with the first murderer in Christian history and makes him unfamiliar, an outcast to all. Described as a “God-cursed brute” (121) ruling “in defiance of right, one against all” (144-145), this places Grendel in direct opposition of the divine as a demonic force. The poet defines Grendel as a demon who causes chaos and death, thus defining his nature and his acts of horror: “And his glee was demonic, / picturing the mayhem: before morning / he would rip life from limb to limb and devour them, / feed on their flesh” (730-733). However, the poet does not define why Grendel subjugates to acting as the demonic, nor why he commits gruesome acts to oppose God and good.

The abject, when related to sin and Christianity, sees itself as “threatening the divinity, acting inde pendently of it and analogous to the autonomous power of a spirit of evil” (Kristeva 90) and implies that the impure, “which unsettles [the pure], … establishes disorder” (98). For Kristeva, the abject is the impure: the evil that must exist in antagonism to the pure and good. They are “inseparable, the second (‘sublimated’) one unable to exist without the first (perverse)” (124). Good depends on evil, Christianity depends on sin, and humanity depends on monstrosity. In “Beowulf,” Grendel is the demonic which resists the divine. Therefore, he must cre ate havoc and commit acts of evil since, as the outcast, the descendant of the first murderer, and the unfamiliar abject, he is the impure which causes disorder and harm. Hence, although made uncertain by the poet, Grendel’s motive behind his gruesome murders and destruction is directly conditional to his existence as the abject within “Beowulf” and his relation to Cain.

Third, Grendel, as the abject, must return and must repeat his acts of harm and terror upon the kingdom. After his first attack upon Heorot hall, Grendel comes back the next night to continue his massacre: “He was numb with grief, but got no respite / for one night later merciless Grendel / struck again with more gruesome murders” (“Beowulf” 134-136). The poet describes a relentless monster, with no satisfaction for his acts of terror in sight, as “for twelve winters, seasons of woe, / the lord of the Shieldings suffered under / his load of sorrow” (147-149). The people of the kingdom sing sad tunes about “the vicious raids and ravages of Grendel, / his long and unrelenting feud, / nothing but war; how he would never / parley or make peace with any Dane / nor stop his death-dealing nor pay the death-price” (152-156). Grendel’s havoc has no nearing end, as the poet defines it. He is a blood-thirsty monster who seeks to create a continuous cycle of pain, horror, and evil upon the kingdom. Albeit, the poet does not put forward Grendel’s motivation for such. They leave the reader wondering why Grendel goes on numerous murder rampages, with seemingly no motive in mind. And “so that trouble time continued, woe / that never stopped, steady affliction / for Halfdane’s son, too hard an ordeal. / There was panic after dark, people endured / raids in the night, riven by the terror” (189-193).

The abject, as expounded by Kristeva, is “on the edges of primal repression” (Kristeva 11). Primal re pression is defined in Powers of Horror as “the ability … to repeat” (14) and that which “cannot really be held down” (13). Grendel, within the context of abjection and primal repression, therefore, must return and must re peat. His status demands of him to continue to cause harm and create chaos, as he cannot forever remain exclud ed in his lair of “fearful waters” (“Beowulf” 1260) which “at night (…) something uncanny happens: / the water burns” (1365-1366). Grendel “transforms [his] death drive into a start of life” (Kristeva 15), a resurgence into the kingdom which has previously repressed him, coming back stronger and with an insatiable lust for terror and “maddening for blood” (“Beowulf” 724). Ergo, Grendel’s motive for his persistent slaughters, left unknown by the poet, is the inevitability of his repeated returns to wreak havoc as the abject and primal repression within “Beowulf.”

All in all, I have argued that Grendel’s personal motivation for the chaos he creates is directly condition al to his existence as the abject. When reading Kristeva’s Powers of Horror alongside “Beowulf,” I encountered an interesting idea I would like to delve into. Kristeva’s abject is that which we have excluded but was once part

of us. It is that through which “I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself” (Kristeva 3), intimately connecting the abject to its repressor’s identity and existence. The abject “uphold[s] ‘I’ within the Other” (15). There is no abject if there is no ‘I,’ as it comes from within me, and vice-versa. If that is to be the case within “Beowulf,” in which Grendel is the subject of abjec tion, where does he come from? What has expelled him, spit him out?

A plausible answer would be Beowulf is that which abjects Grendel, meaning the monster comes from within the hero. In the poem, the existence of “the truth of horror and sickness, of weakness and downfall, is its confrontation with the other term — the powerful, rich, and feared: “‘there are two of you together’” (143-144). Dissecting this with Grendel’s abject status in mind, the poet places Beowulf as the direct opposition to the horror of the monster’s actions by eventually having him kill the creature. Beowulf is the defined hero because Grendel, his abject, is the defined villain: “as long as either lived, / he was hateful to the other” (“Beowulf” 813814). That said, by defining Grendel as his monster, can we hold Beowulf accountable for the gruesome acts of horror that come down upon the kingdom? If, for Beowulf to be the good, he must abject from within himself a monster to be the evil, would that entail Beowulf’s lack of morals and virtue? Is Beowulf truly the hero if he has created the villain which he fights? Further reading is needed for the answer to these thoughts.

Works Cited

“Beowulf.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, 10th ed., vol. 1, W. W. Norton & Company, 2019, pp. 42-109. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982.

Iran Unveiled: Dress Code Policy Under Reza Shah and the Internalization of the Colonial Gaze

By Parsa Albeheshti

My aim in this paper is (a) to examine the role of the colonial gaze in forming Western representations of Muslim veiling and the policies these representations help produce, and (b) through the case study of dress code policies in 1930s Iran, demonstrate how the gaze and the representational logic that accompanies it can be internalized by victims of colonialism, even compelling them to engage in cultural self-destruction. I will begin by explicating Fanon’s account of racialization through the Sartrean notion of the Other’s gaze, and Al-Saji’s application of the gaze to explain the representational schema that dominates Western perceptions of Muslim veiling. Then, I will apply this concept to the special case of dress code policies in Pahlavi Iran—where a sovereign government, rather than a colonial power, took it upon itself to enforce mandatory unveiling and Western clothing—as an example of the complete internalization of the colonial gaze and Western representational logic. Through this case study, I aim not only to argue in favour of Fanon and Al-Saji’s accounts of the question of Muslim veiling, but to further Fanon’s arguments regarding the internalization of colonial attitudes, demonstrat ing the totalizing effect of colonization.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon sets out to investigate colonization through a psychological lens, exposing the mechanisms through which colonialism is internalized by the colonized; to show how colo nization instills an inferiority complex in its victims; and how, through the mechanism of racism, those victims come to emulate their oppressors (Sardar x). In the fifth chapter of the book, Fanon, drawing on Sartre’s exis tential system and terminology, offers a phenomenological account of the lived experience of the Black subject—an account which, with some modification, can be applied to the experience of all colonized people, or in Fanon’s own words, all “people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root” (2).

One existential concept crucial to Fanon’s description of the lived experience of Black people is the Sartrean notion of “being-for-others.” Sartre elucidates this concept through the following thought experiment. Suppose you are spying on someone through a keyhole, so pre-reflectively immersed in the scene you are ob serving that you have but a minimal awareness of yourself as separate from it. Suddenly, you hear footsteps and realize that you were also being watched by another person. In that moment, through the experience of shame, you gain an acute awareness of yourself, not as a subject, but as an object in the eyes of the Other. The Other’s gaze, in this scenario, turns you into a being-for-others (Reynolds).

Fanon’s account of racialization appropriates this concept to explain the mechanisms by which Black people are fixed into racial categories. The Other, in this context, is white people and all those participating in their system who, by means of their gaze, transcend and objectify the Black subject. In the same way the gaze of the Other turns the peeping Tom in the example above into a being-for-others, the “white gaze, the only valid one” constitutes the “Black” as other to the “white” (Fanon 95). Through this process of abjection, all nega tive, undesirable, and impure qualities are projected onto Blackness, hence defining whiteness in opposition to it as all that is good and pure. Moreover, because of its epidermal character (above all its association with skin colour), this notion of race comes to be seen as a natural category rather than a social construct, thereby con cealing the racist mechanism by which it was produced (Al-Saji 884). It is by means of this othering gaze and its subsequent naturalization, argues Fanon, that Black and white people alike are “locked” into their respective racial categories (xiii-xiv). While here Fanon is concerned strictly with the Black-white relationship, we can apply his account to the colonial situation at large. Colonization operates not merely through military, political and economic domination, but also through an entire “apparatus of representation that over-determines perceptions of the colonized” (Al-Saji 883). In the same way the racializing gaze constitutes the Black as other to the white,

the colonial gaze constitutes the image of the native in opposition to the metropolitan society.

Alia Al-Saji draws from, and also goes beyond, Fanon’s notion of the racializing gaze to provide an account of the representational schema that dominates Western discourses on Muslim veiling, particularly in France. Al-Saji’s central contention is that the representational logic of the West is not primarily concerned with veiled Muslim women at all, but with Western notions of gender and identity, which are constructed in opposi tion to images of veiled Muslim women. “The West,” claims Al-Saji, “is an imaginary formation that constitutes itself through representations of its (racialized and gendered) ‘others’” (878). In this context, images of Muslim veiling play a constitutive role in relation to Western constructions of identity, gender and womanhood, serving as a “negative mirror” against which those constructions are positively reflected. This is achieved through the projection of gender oppression onto the veil, which de-subjectifies veiled Muslim women (Al-Saji 888). In the specific context of the French debate over veiling, Al-Saji argues, it was precisely the equation of veiling with gender oppression, or rather the conflation of French secularism with notions of gender equality, which set the stage for the passage of the 2004 “law on the headscarf” (880), and also allowed the pro-law side to co-opt feminist discourse in the interest of excluding Muslim women from public spaces. Central to the pro-law argument was the “visibility” and “conspicuousness” of Muslim veils as religious symbols in public spaces (Al-Saji 882), which raises the question of why veils, as opposed to other religious symbols, are perceived as particularly conspicuous.

In order to interrogate the representational structures that give rise to such perceptions of conspicuous ness, Al-Sajji refers to another important historical moment when the issue of Muslim veiling took centre stage in French public discourse—namely, the colonial project to unveil Algerian women in the 1930s. Here, she draws from Fanon’s essay “Algeria Unveiled,” wherein he describes this French policy in terms of the colonial gaze discussed above (Al-Saji 882). Fanon argues that the Muslim veil becomes the most visible marker of Al gerian culture in a visual field structured by colonialism—that is, a field of vision made possible by the French colonizers’ ability to travel to, live in, and observe Algeria. Thus, the veil becomes metonymically identified with Algerian culture, and its elimination forms part of the goal of destroying that culture (Al-Saji 882). In this context, the French perception of the veil is not a mere “innocent seeing” (Al-Saji 883). It is, rather, an instan tiation of the othering gaze that operates through a mechanism of abjection, much like the one involved in the racialization of Black people. Since racialization, in the context both of anti-Black racism and Muslim veiling, operates primarily through a visual register, Al-Saji complicates Fanon’s account by interpreting it through Mer leau-Ponty’s idea of the intentional structure and habitual nature of vision (884). According to Merleau-Ponty, seeing is not a neutral act, but an intentional one—an act, that is to say, which makes certain things more visible than others in accordance with sedimented visual habits (Toadvine). According to Al-Saji, racializing vision relies on the intentional and habitual character of vision at large. It is through this “[learning] to see” that certain perceptions come to the foreground in relation to Muslim veiling, and it is through this mechanism also that the habits of seeing which structure the visual field are themselves concealed (Al-Saji 885). Since representations of Muslim veiling operate through this same racializing vision, Al-Saji argues, they constitute a form of “cultural racism,” whereby what becomes hypervisible is not skin colour, but epidermal manifestations of Muslim cul ture, which is defined as repressive and de-subjectifying (887).

As Al-Saji points out, such representations of the Muslim veil are almost invariably accompanied by policies that, while ironically appealing to the oppressive nature of veiling, are designed to exclude veiled women from public spaces (877). Such was the case in 2004 France, as in 1930s Algeria. However, I wish to complicate the discussion by examining another historical example of state-enforced unveiling that was enacted around the same time as the Algerian example: Reza Shah’s Kashf-e-Hijab campaign in Iran. As I hope to show, this campaign relied on a very similar representational logic as the French campaign in Algeria. The crucial difference, however, is that in the Iranian case, it was a national government rather than a colonial power that undertook this policy.

Significantly, the anti-Hijab campaign was not a lone policy, but a part of a larger conglomeration of

compulsory dress codes. In 1928, a law mandated all Iranian men to wear European clothing and Pahlavi hats (a Persian variation of the French kepi). In 1935, another decree replaced the Pahlavi hat with the European bowl er hat. The campaign towards compulsory dress codes culminated in the shocking 1936 decree which ordered all women to remove their veils or face harassment by the police (Katouzian 217-219). Thus, this period saw a large-scale movement towards state-enforced dress codes aimed at making the people look more European.

The motivation behind these policies can be partly explained as a part of Reza Shah’s larger project of standardization, centralization and nation-building (Katouzian 218). However, such an explanation would elide an important psychological motivation. Firstly, the goal of creating a standardized national dress code does not explain why this dress code had to be European. Secondly, the 1935 decree demanding all men to wear bowler hats seems unnecessary in light of this explanation, since a unified national dress code was already in place. It seems, rather, that these policies were motivated by the same culturally racist representational schemata de scribed above, which projected notions of backwardness, closedness, and savagery onto Muslim Iranian culture, by contrast associating European culture with modernity, civilization, and openness. The similarities can be seen most dramatically in the case of the unveiling policy. As in the French case, the official discourse around this policy justified it on the basis of the veil’s representation as a barrier to gender equality and the social partic ipation of women. The Shah himself even went as far as telling Prime Minister Mahmoud Jam, “Chador and Chaghchoor [Iranian variations of the veil] are the enemy of the country’s progress” (Salah 118). Also like the French case, it was ironically the unveiling policy itself that obstructed women’s participation in society, as many veiled women decided not to leave their home for years, and those who did were subject to harassment, violence, and abuse by the police. Thus seen, the logic underpinning the dress code policies in 1930s Iran is comparable to those guiding the colonial campaign in Algeria and contemporary debates in France, and there fore the othering gaze discussed above serves as a valid explanatory framework in this case as well. What is troubling, however, is the absence of an actual colonizer in this story. “Whose gaze?” we might ask, since here we are faced with national policy imposed by the government of an independent country.

The Iranian case, in my view, should be understood in terms of the internalization of the colonial gaze— along with its entire representational apparatus—by a people affected by colonialism. While Iran was never officially the colony of any one empire, British and Russian interference in its affairs throughout the nineteenth century amounted to colonization in all but name (Katouzian 154). As a result, Iranians inevitably suffered from the psychological harms of colonization, which include internalizing the logic of their oppressors. Reza Shah’s dress code policies—particularly his anti-Hijab campaign—show it is possible for victims of colonization not only to imitate the logic of their oppressors, but to thoroughly internalize the colonial gaze such that the mecha nism of abjection described above operates without the need for any actual intervention by the colonizer—and, what is more, that this can occur at the level of government as well as that of individuals. The following journal entry by Mokhber-al-Salteneh perfectly captures this internalization:

In an audience the shah took my [bowler] hat off my head and said, ‘Now what do you think of this?’ I said it certainly protects one from the sun and the rain, but that [Pahlavi] hat which we had before had a better name. Agitated, his majesty paced up and down and said, ‘All I am trying to do is for us to look like [the Europeans] so they do not ridicule us. (Katouzian 218)

This passage not only reveals the desire to emulate European culture that motivated Reza Shah’s dress code policies, but also exposes the role played by the omnipresent colonial gaze that predominated in the Shah’s thinking. The Shah, as the embodiment of the Iranian state, had internalized the colonial relationship to such an extent that the colonizer’s racist gaze was already implicated in his decision-making. To return to Sartre’s exam ple of the peeping Tom, imagine a situation where you have grown so accustomed to the shame of the Other’s gaze that you behave on the assumption that they are constantly watching you. In such a scenario, the presence of the Other is no longer even necessary for your being-for-others to reveal itself. The dress code policies in question are a result of such a situation.

My aim in this paper has been to complicate Fanon’s account of the internalization of oppression by the solonized and his idea of the racializing gaze by analyzing a special historical instance of compulsory unveiling. In doing so, I relied first and foremost on Alia Al-Saji’s application of Fanon’s work to the analysis of the rep resentational schema involved in Western perceptions of the Muslim veil. By focusing on the Iranian anti-Hijab and dress code campaigns, I wanted to ask what mechanisms are at play when a sovereign government assumes the culturally destructive role of a colonial power with respect to its own people. The answer, as my analysis has shown, lies in the internalization of the colonial gaze and its representational structures by victims of colonial ism. Two critical areas for further exploration, which were beyond the scope of this paper, are the role played by feminist movements in facilitating and resisting the racializing logic of unveiling in the French and Iranian contexts, and the place for the current Iranian policy of compulsory Hijab in this picture.

Works Cited

Al-Saji, Alia. “The Racialization of Muslim Veils: A Philosophical Analysis.” Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 36, no. 8, pp. 875-902.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2008. Katouzian, Homa. The Persians: Ancient, Medieval and Modern Iran. Yale University Press, 2010. Reynolds, Jack and Renaudie, Pierre-Jean. “Jean-Paul Sartre.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2022.

Salah, Mehdi. Kashf-e-Hijab: Zamine ha, Vakonesh ha va Peyamad ha. Tehran, Moaseseye Motale’at va Pazhooheshaye Siasi, 2005.

Sardar, Ziauddin. Foreword to the 2008 edition. Black Skin, White Masks, by Frantz Fanon, Translated by Charles Lam Markman, Pluto Press, 2008, pp. Vi-xx.

Toadvine, Ted. “Maurice Merleau-Ponty.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2019.

Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness

: Cross-Dressing and Gender Expectations in As You Like It and Twelfth Night

By Gray Brogden

The heroines of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Twelfth Night both spend a significant portion of their plays disguised as men. Rosalind dons the disguise of the shepherd Ganymede when exiled from her un cle’s property. Viola disguises herself as the eunuch Cesario to gain employment under Count Orsino of Illyria. Initially, their male disguises seem to offer the young heroines freedom and protection in a world designed for men. However, both characters are barred from their true desires when disguised as their male alter egos: Rosa lind’s relationship with Orlando is hidden under the layers of her Ganymede-Rosalind act, while Viola is stuck trying to dissuade Olivia of her love for Cesario at the same time she is pining for Orsino. While both these characters support various readings of androgyny and sexual fluidity, the conclusions of both plays illustrate how the male disguises that the heroines don inevitably end up reaffirming traditional gender roles and expecta tions: both heroines abandon their disguise in favour of heterosexual marriages. Although cross-dressing seems like a liberating action for women in a time when women had little mobility and opportunity, it inevitably ends up reinforcing the very gender binaries it appears to subvert.

When Rosalind is sentenced to exile by her uncle, both she and her cousin Celia understand the dan gers of being unaccompanied female travellers in the forest. As Rosalind points out: “Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold” (Shakespeare, As You Like It 1.3.116). In an effort to protect themselves, both Rosalind and Celia choose to don disguises. However, while Celia chooses to disguise herself as a simple maid, Rosalind chooses a different direction:

ROSALIND: Were it not better, Because that I am more than common tall, That I did suit me all points like a man? A gallant curtal-ax upon my thigh, A boar-spear in my hand, and in my heart Lie there what hidden woman’s fear there will, We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside— As many other mannish cowards have That do outface it with their semblances. (1.3.121-129)

Rosalind’s choice to disguise herself as male is twofold: one, she already has a somewhat boyish appearance due to her height, and two, she understands that a man is less likely to be threatened and has more socially ac ceptable ways to defend himself, such as carrying weapons like an axe or spear. Her male disguise ends up help ing her immensely throughout her time in Arden as it helps her gain freedom and status, as Julia Libor points out in her discussion of the Forest of Arden:

Rosalind appears to gain more power through her male appearance than Celia does with her choice. While both women share a similar status in the city, they achieve a significantly different status in the forest. Rosalind’s male appearance grants her more freedom, whereas Celia is forced into a subordinate position, as can be seen in her arranged marriage. (20)

While Rosalind’s motivations for disguise are perfectly clear (her personal safety while travelling the forest), Viola’s reasons for cross-dressing in Twelfth Night are harder to dissect. James Stone suggests that “Vio la’s male clothing allows her both to mourn and to fill in vicariously for the loss of what she takes to be her

recently deceased brother” (25), while Catherine Belsey, in her “Modern Perspective” on As You Like It, at tributes her resolve to “present herself to Orsino as a eunuch” to frustration “in her initial desire to seek em ployment with Olivia.” In both cases, Viola’s decision to masquerade as Cesario results in greater mobility and freedom to express herself both socially and emotionally. Cesario proves to be quite the feminine male, characterized by Malvolio as someone “between boy and man” (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night 1.5.158) who “speaks very shrewishly” (1.5.159). With this characterization in mind, Hsiang-Chun Chu contends that the “role of Viola-Cesario becomes a site for the contesting forces of gender representation, and thus puts the conventional binary framework of gender into question” (187). However, throughout the play the gender binary that Vio la-as-Cesario seems to question ends up reinforced through heterosexual romance.

Despite the protection offered by her male alter-ego, Rosalind nevertheless must sacrifice quite a bit for Ganymede, as Libor points out:

Rosalind pays a high price for the experience of perceived freedom in moving through the forest. It seems problematic to interpret Rosalind’s cross-dressing as a liberating action. How can the female to male cross-dressing be a liberating tool when it is merely used to adapt to a male space? Looking at cross-dressing as a tool for such an adaptation shows it to be part of a mechanism to ensure the continu ing male influence and oppression of women. (20)

Not only does Rosalind-as-Ganymede help reinforce existing patriarchal values, it also impacts her on a person al level by keeping her from her one true love, Orlando. Under the cover of her Ganymede alter ego, Rosalind masquerades as herself, asking Orlando to treat her as he would his Rosalind. Through this arrangement, Rosa lind-as-Ganymede-as-Rosalind is able to experience a semblance of a relationship with Orlando. However, their charade falls short of a true relationship, and Rosalind must accept that to truly be with Orlando, she must give up her disguise, a truth made painfully clear through her interactions with Orlando:

ROSALIND (as Ganymede): Why, then, tomorrow I cannot serve your turn for Rosalind?

ORLANDO: I can live no longer by thinking. (Shakespeare, As You Like It 5.2.51-53)

While Orlando has been content playing her game, he can only sustain the illusion for so long. He does not want Ganymede pretending to be Rosalind; he wants his actual Rosalind, and will not be satisfied without her. Celia also points this out, telling Rosalind-as-Ganymede, “It pleases him to call you [Rosalind], but he / hath a Rosa lind of a better leer than you” (4.1.70-71). Since Celia knows Ganymede-as-Rosalind is actually Rosalind, mak ing this comment acts as a not-so-subtle reminder to Rosalind that eventually, she will have to drop her charade and return to being just Rosalind. Susan Snyder points out, “Rosalind remains the woman in love while also entering into her acquired persona of the scoffing boy Ganymede, who jeers at love and lovers,” enforcing the idea that underneath her male persona she remains a woman who will inevitably discard her disguise in favour of the love of a man, thus reinforcing heterosexuality and women’s place within patriarchal society.

While Rosalind had already fallen in love with Orlando and therefore had an idea of what she was doing, playing games with him in the forest of Arden, Viola’s situation is much more harrowing. Dressed as a boy and sent to woo Lady Olivia on Orsino’s behalf, Viola quickly finds herself in love with Orsino, stating: “I’ll do my best / To woo your lady. (Aside.) Yet a barful strife! / Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife” (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night 1.5.44-46). However, she is unable to show her affection to Orsino due to her male disguise. She is instead reduced to hiding her affections in a fabricated story of a sister:

VIOLA: A blank, my lord. She never told her love, But let concealment, like a worm i’ th’ bud, Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought,

And with a green and yellow melancholy

She sat like Patience on a monument, Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed? (2.5.123-127)

The pain she describes her imaginary sister suffering is, in fact, the same pain that Viola is experiencing, unable to escape the confines of her male persona. Since she is actually a woman and not a man, she is forced to suffer for her love the way any woman would: “with a green and yellow melancholy…smiling at her grief.” A disguise that should have created more freedom in both employment and mobility becomes a prison, which bars her true self from the world. Viola herself laments, “Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness, / Wherein the pregnant enemy does much” (2.2.26–27).

While their male personas stop them from completely being with the man they love, both Rosalind and Viola also experience the troubling result of women falling in love with them while disguised as Ganymede and Cesario, respectively. Rosalind-as-Ganymede draws unwanted attention from the shepherdess Phoebe, despite attempting to warn her away: “I pray you, do not fall in love with me, / For I am falser than vows made in wine” (Shakespeare, As You Like It 3.5.77-78). Regardless of Rosalind’s warnings, Phoebe remains resolutely in love with Ganymede, and the only way to cure her of her affections is for Rosalind to show her that she is a woman. Being caught in the middle of Phoebe and Silvius is an annoying result of Rosalind’s disguise and plagues her throughout her time in the forest of Arden.

Like Rosalind, Viola also attracts the affections of a woman while disguised as a man. However, in Vio la’s case it is not a simple shepherdess but rather the noble Lady Olivia:

VIOLA: Fortune forbid my outside have not charmed her! She made good view of me, indeed so much That methought her eyes had lost her tongue, For she did speak in starts distractedly. She loves me, sure! (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night 2.2.18-22)

Sent to woo Olivia on Orsino’s behalf, Viola finds herself in the precarious situation of Olivia falling for her alter ego Cesario, as Doniger explains:

Olivia’s infatuation with Viola-as-Cesario is an instance of the folk theme of the love-messenger who woos for himself, somewhat complicated by the fact that this messenger, not being a man like the man f or whom “he” woos, does not wish to woo and is unwillingly wooed in return. (252)

Olivia’s infatuation with Viola-as-Cesario is particularly distressing to Viola not only because she does not return Olivia’s affections but because Olivia’s love for Cesario could compromise her standing with Orsino, which it almost does when Orsino believes Cesario has married Olivia:

ORSINO: O thou dissembling cub! What wilt thou be When time hath sowed a grizzle on thy case?

Or will not else thy craft so quickly grow That thine own trip shall be thine overthrow?

Farewell, and take her, but direct thy feet Where thou and I henceforth may never meet. (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night 5.1.173-178)

Like Rosalind with Phoebe, Viola attempts to dissuade Olivia’s advances, stating: “I am not that I play” (1.5.180) and again later, “I am not what I am’’ (3.1.141-42). Despite these hints, Olivia’s passion remains unre lenting, to the point where she marries Sebastian believing him to be Cesario. Between pining for Orsino and

defending herself from Olivia, “Viola is constrained within a gendered double bind: a woman’s body (and soul) straitjacketed in the supposedly liberating clothing of a man” (Stone 27).

Despite various flirtations between assumed same-sex couples (Ganymede-as-Rosalind/Orlando and Ce sario/Orsino), as well as hidden but true same-sex couples (Rosalind/Phoebe and Viola/Olivia), both play’s neat resolutions discredit same sex attraction and negate any subversion of traditional heterosexual relationships. Phoebe forgets her affection for Ganymede as soon as she learns he is actually a woman: “If sight and shape be true, / Why then, my love adieu” (Shakespeare, As You Like It 5.4.124-125). Phoebe’s quick farewell to her “love” illustrates the disparaging attitude towards same-sex couples. Orsino relinquishes his affection for Olivia in favour of Viola, but with the important caveat of her discarding her Cesario disguise:

ORSINO: We will not part from hence.—Cesario, come, For so you shall be while you are a man. But when in other habits you are seen, Orsino’s mistress, and his fancy’s queen. (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night 5.1.408-412)

Because Cesario is indeed female in disguise, the Orsino/Cesario romance can be vindicated as opposed to for gotten, but is only valid once Viola resumes her previous life and redresses as a woman. As Doniger points out:

[S]ince explicit homosexuality plays no part in Shakespeare’s official world onstage, Rosalind’s and Viola’s uneasiness is an expression of the embarrassment that they as heterosexuals feel in response to what is perceived, on some level, as a homosexual attraction. But since we know that Rosalind and Or lando, like Viola and Orsino, are sexually different (a woman and a man), the play affirms their encoun ter even though they appear to be of the same gender. (255)

Any same-sex pairings, either real or believed, are discredited as love triangles are solved, and everyone finds a suitable opposite-sex partner. In As You Like It, Phoebe agrees to marry Sylvius, leaving Rosalind free to wed Orlando, while Twelfth Night is “able to resolve the triangular tangle by squaring it, adding a fourth person, Se bastian, to make it come out even, like a good dinner party” (Doniger 265). Both the androgyny of their characters and the homosexuality previously hinted at are banished the minute the heroines reveal their true identity as females. In As You Like It, Hymen, the god of marriage, enforces heterosexual ideals particularly well, when he says: “Then is there mirth in heaven / When earthly things made even / Atone together” (Shakespeare 5.4.112114), simultaneously praising the marriages of heterosexual couples, while implying the wrongness of homo sexual attraction.

Both As You Like it and Twelfth Night present cross-dressing as a method of gaining freedom, mobility, and security for their female heroines. However, both plays undermine the power associated with cross-dressing for female characters in various ways. “Rosalind can travel safely through the Forest of Arden in male attire, but only thanks to her performance of a seemingly aggressive masculinity” (Libor 23), reinforcing patriarchal val ues. Both Rosalind and Viola are kept from their true love due to their male-alter egos and must sacrifice their disguises and any perks associated with being male for their relationships. The final acts of each play praise heterosexuality with the marriage of several opposite-sex couples while discrediting and renouncing homosexu al attraction, real or imagined, present throughout their narratives.

Works Cited

Belsey, Catherine. “A Modern Perspective: As You Like It” The Folger SHAKESPEARE, Folger Shakespeare Library, 31 Mar. 2019, https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/twelfth-night/twelfth-night-amodern-perspective/.

Chu, Hsiang-chun. “‘The Master Mistress of My Passion’: Cross-Dressing and Gender Performance in Twelfth Night.” SEDERI: Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies, vol. 12, 2001, pp. 181–91. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/login.aspx?di rect=true&db=mzh&AN=2004653608&site=ehost-live.

Doniger, Wendy. “Gender Blending and Masquerade in As You Like It and Twelfth Night.” Chicago Shake speare Theater: Suiting the Action to the Word, edited by Regina Buccola and Peter Kanelos, Northern Illinois UP, 2013, pp. 248–69. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501756863-019.

Libor, Julia. “The Gendered Forest? Exploring Relations of Cross-Dressing and Nature in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.” Shakespeare Seminar, no. 14, 2016, pp. 17–26. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com. proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2018140523&site=ehost-live.

Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Washington Square Press, 1997. Folger Digital Edition.

Twelfth Night. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Washington Square Press, 1993. Folger Digital Edition.

Snyder, Susan. “A Modern Perspective: As You Like It” The Folger SHAKESPEARE, Folger Shakespeare Li brary, 31 Mar. 2019, https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/as-you-like-it/as-you-like-it-amodern-perspective/.

Stone, James W. “The Transvestic Glove-Text of Twelfth Night.” Crossing Gender in Shakespeare: Feminist Psychoanalysis and the Difference Within, Taylor & Francis Group, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/west/detail.action?docID=481148.

The Difficulty of Deathlesness in Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings

By Rachel Tersch

It is a natural desire to want to live forever, as J.R.R. Tolkien writes in his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” “the oldest and deepest desire” of humanity is “the Great Escape… from Death” (22). Immortality is a com mon theme within fantasy literature, often having characters who are biologically immortal or who seek out a suspension from the confines of mortal life, thus appealing to a reader’s own desire for the same supposed gift. However, Tolkien expands his original statement, explaining that “few lessons are taught more clearly in [fairy-stories] than the burden… of immortality.” With this, he clarifies that while escaping the time limits of mortality is desirable, it is also greatly unpleasant. Tolkien proves exactly that in Book 6 of The Lord of the Rings by using the One Ring and its ability to grant deathlessness to demonstrate how unnatural an endless life truly is, as it inspires little more than obsession and suffering. Instead, readers are encouraged to develop a phi losophy more akin to that of Samwise Gamgee, who is rewarded for being content with mortal life.

Gollum is significant because his character is so deeply reliant on the One Ring that his life and his pur pose are entirely devoted to that single object, which represents one of the many dangers of an endless life. As learned early in the series, Gollum is a shrivelled creature, retaining little of his previous life as Smeagol due to the effects of the Ring. In the sixth book, this is taken to the extreme when the narrative reads, “even as his eyes were lifted up to gloat on his prize, he stepped too far, toppled, wavered for a moment on the brink, and then with a shriek he fell” (Tolkien, The Return of the King 266). This simultaneous destruction demonstrates how Gollum’s life does not exist beyond the Ring at all. The contrast of Gollum’s eyes being “lifted up to” the Ring with how “he fell” demonstrates the strength of his worship, which remains extremely potent even though it is the cause of his demise.

This dependency is an issue of deathlessness as can be seen in comparing Gollum to Frodo or Bilbo, as Gollum also serves as a warning as to what might happen to the hobbits should they have kept the ring for hundreds of years. Smeagol, who was once a hobbit as well, comes from the same breed of humble people. However, while Gollum is seen to have purpose only in regards to reclaiming his Precious, Frodo and Bilbo retain a greater purpose beyond serving the will of the Ring. Time is then the operative difference, as Bilbo and Gollum are separated most notably by nearly half a century of life, but Bilbo lives for Frodo, writing his book, and exploring. Therefore, it can be understood that one burden of deathlessness lies in purpose. When one lives too long, all other purpose is lost.

Frodo’s suffering is emphasized across the entirety of the final book of The Lord of the Rings, which serves as a statement of the status of heroes and how they cannot live forever. There are numerous passages dedicated to Frodo’s pain, repeating similar phrasing to describe that Frodo is “wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden” (323) in a fashion that “will never really heal” (371) because he is “too deeply hurt” (376). Through each of these passages, the readers glean not only a sense of his pain, but also feel the drag of his weariness. Though Frodo does not die on Mount Doom, bearing the Ring has taken essentially everything he had to give, and each day that he continues to live, he suffers. The repetition gives the sense that Frodo is in a process of slowly dying himself, being torn apart from the inside.

Heroic figures are often seen to be deathless, especially in stories. They are depicted in their triumph, but not the struggle to continue after it has all been defeated. Frodo tells Sam something that is everlastingly important, that “when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them” (376). By this, he means that heroes sacrifice themselves to save everyone else from danger. While read ers might want to see their heroes as deathless, to see them happy after triumph, Tolkien takes a realistic stance and depicts the mortality of his heroes. This all leads to Frodo’s final decision. Earlier in the book, while in pain,

Frodo asks Gandalf “where [he] shall… find rest,” but the wise wizard “did not answer” (323). His question is instead answered later when he decides to go with the elves to the Havens. Frodo chooses to conclude his life to find rest, something an immortal being would not be granted. He chooses a short, significant life over one of the likes of Gollum that is painful, obsessive, and empty.

While Frodo and Gollum are both tempted by the allure of the Ring and its promises, Sam’s sensibility is strong enough to ward him against desiring anything more than regular life, and for this, he is rewarded with contentedness. The temptation the Ring uses on Sam is the image of “Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land” (206). This figure presented is the typical heroic arche type that was once the expectation in stories; someone who is strong, armed, and deathless. Sam is capable of claiming the Ring, but instead, his “plain hobbit-sense” leads him to reject the chance of powerful immortality. He recognizes the trickery of the Ring, that the image of a “flaming sword” represents more violence and evil than heroism, and finds more value in regular life. He does not need to be deathless to be happy, for he already is happy.

This denial of the Ring is the reason Sam does not depart with the other Ring-bearers to the Havens. Both Frodo and Bilbo must go, but as Frodo says to Sam he “will have to be one and whole, for many years” (375). Because he is humble enough to recognize the value of his short, but uncorrupted life, Sam does not suc cumb to greater promises of a larger, longer life, and he is gifted an enjoyable, mortal existence. As such, Sam’s ending serves not as a warning of the burden of immortality, but the reward one receives for being content with their life. When consumed by a desire to live longer, one risks giving up the days they have left to either obses sion or suffering, and Sam is wise enough to recognize that.

Conclusively, Tolkien makes a clear statement regarding the unnatural nature of immortality through the fates of Gollum, Frodo, and Sam. Frodo and Gollum are both miserable, being Ring-bearers who did not die, while Sam is happy because of his short, humble life. To wonder what an immortal life would be is inherent to human nature and fantasy; The Lord of the Rings allows readers the ability to explore such desires, while pro voking pertinent conversations regarding the true flaws of such a concept. In that sense, the sixth and final book attempts to impart to readers the importance of valuing one’s time, for that is how to truly be content.

Works Cited

Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-Stories.” 1939.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Return of the King. HarperCollins, 1994.

Gender Transgression: A Queer Anarchist

Locus of Resistance

By Ziyana Kotadia

Our economic order, political systems, and social structures rely on the maintenance of a gender bina ry to uphold colonial state power. As an essential organizing principle of our contemporary society, the social construct of gender is created and enforced as a way of exerting disciplining biopower over the populace. The act of transgressing the cultural borders of gender, therefore, can expose the workings of and destabilize com pulsory gender categorization. As such, acts of gender transgression and the experiences of genderqueer people — whose gender identities and or expressions inherently defy binary boundaries — can reveal the state’s depen dence on the gender binary by demonstrating how, in living their daily lives, they generate social and political surveillance.

Given that anarchy rejects all forms of systemic oppression, the weaknesses in state power that are revealed when gender boundaries are crossed create space for anarchists to creatively reimagine how we might organize our world. A distinctly queer anarchism, which questions the borders defining binaries and theorizes beyond these oppositions, can highlight and target this state reliance on gender expressions that are coded as legitimate. Given this, I argue that defiance of the gender binary, a key tool the state uses to manage the popula tion, can be considered a form of queer anarchy.

Anarchism is a movement that seeks to abolish hierarchy and all structured relations of inequality. As Ackelsberg writes, “anarchism can be defined as a political philosophy of opposition to the state, capitalism, and the hierarchy and inequality begotten of these institutions” (Ackelsberg 1). By dismantling the systems of social, economic, and political domination that organize how our globalized societies function, anarchy seeks to achieve liberation and promote autonomy for all people. However, anarchism is not solely defined by its oppo sition to hierarchy and inequality. Anarchy has a rich history of organizing to destroy systems of exploitation, but this destructive potential is also supplemented by a creative urge to develop new social relations in place of institutionalized hierarchies. Daring et al. articulate this duality: “while… anarchists wish to break with the existing society and contain within them a negative politics, it’s also important to recognize that historically anarchists have had a generative politics. That is, within destruction is also creation” (Daring et al. 8).

As such, we can understand anarchy as the pursuit of an alternative to the structures of domination and subordination — such as capitalism, the state, white supremacy, and patriarchy — that govern our institutions. Anarchy, operating “according to the fundamental belief that society exists to efficiently and equitably serve the needs of the individuals that build it,” imagines a world founded on ideals of equality, mutual respect, and reciprocity (Herman 76). It is an anti-authoritarian ideology that values both the autonomy of individuals and the capacity of these individuals to organize through cooperation and solidarity.

Though anarchy did not develop specifically to address the relations of domination perpetuated by the system of gender, many anarchists have recognized the separate but interrelated and co-creative dimensions of hierarchy, and thus anarchist thought has become an important tool for gender-based critiques of authoritarian power and movements of gender and sexual liberation. Shannon writes that “anarcha-feminists typically lo cate their beginning in the work of women such as Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, and Voltairine de Cleyre, all active women and theorists in the turn-of-the-19th-century anarchist movement” (Shannon 60). These ear ly anarcha-feminists argued against a class reductionism within the milieu of anarchist movements, wherein women’s issues and men’s systemic domination of women were often peripheral to the core class-based focuses of anarchist movements. As such, “early anarcha-feminists, then, began writing about issues such as prostitution and sex trafficking (Goldman 2001), forced sterilizations (Kropotkin 2001), and marriage (de Cleyre 2004 and 2001) to widen the anarchist critique of hierarchy” (Shannon 61).

These early anarcha-feminists called attention to how normative assumptions of gender have been used to uphold a status quo that creates hierarchies based on sexual and gendered practices. The politics of sex radicals in the United States, rather than arising from a homosexual rights movement, became visible when anarchist sex radicals began to lecture about and support same-sex love: “in fact, there has been a long history of anarchism as a movement and a philosophy recognizing and embracing the pivotal importance of sexual and gender liberation” (Liesegang 87).

Transfeminist thought is founded on the belief that gender is a social construct, which is also a key concept in anarcha-feminisms. Just as anarchy values the autonomy of people and seeks to creatively reimagine our world order, transfeminism offers that we can creatively forge our own unique understandings of gender as alternatives to the gender binary and thereby destabilize the system of compulsory heterosexuality (Rogue 28). As the Transfeminist Manifesto states: “transfeminism believes that we construct our own gender identities based on what feels genuine, comfortable, and sincere to us as we live and relate to others within a given social and cultural constraint” (Koyama 251).

Butler’s writing on gender performativity helps illuminate how the system of compulsory heterosexuali ty has been leveraged by the state. She writes that “gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time - an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 519). As Butler suggests, the gendering of bodies is not exempt from social and cultural influences rather, the binary social categorization of the two different and unequal categories of man and woman is legitimized through a false biological dichotomy. Ultimately, “the association of a natural sex with a discrete gender and with an ostensibly natural ‘attraction’ to the opposing sex/gender is an unnatural conjunction of cultural constructs in the service of reproductive interests” (Butler 524).

As such, we can see that the various acts of gender create the concept of gender, and the system of com pulsory heterosexuality cultivates bodies into two discrete genders in order to reproduce and conceal itself. The state supports the maintenance of compulsory heterosexuality to exploit the reproductive power of bodies; as Butler writes,

In effect, gender is made to comply with a model of truth and falsity which not only contradicts its own performative fluidity, but serves a social policy of gender regulation and control. Performing one’s gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all. (Butler 528)

Butler’s writing illuminates how Western dualistic ideas about gender, sex, and sexuality have been manipulat ed in order to manage the populace, wherein punitive consequences are enforced for those who do not perform gender in accordance with the collective cultural fictions of there being two discrete, polar genders.

Foucault theorizes about the concept of ‘biopower,’ which describes the exchanges of power that occur when the state acts as the administrator of life, controlling bodies as productive machines and treating violence as a tool for protecting the population. It is a form of control that can be exerted over the populace when institutions maintain power through their capacity to support and control life, rather than predicating their power on the capacity to take life away (Foucault 140). Foucault investigates how the construction of sexuality has al lowed biopower to act on populations. He writes that sex itself is a manifestation of the discourse around sex uality and does not come before its social determination, positing that the deployment of sexuality is powerful because it rests upon the materiality of the body and can claim to precede its discursive construction (Foucault 154).

Foucault finds in his study of sexuality that ‘the homosexual’ as an identity category can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century during the rise of sexual science, meaning while same-sex love was practiced and

experienced before this point in time, homosexuality was then invented as a category of sexual orientation (Foucault 44). As Daring et al. articulate, “before the mid nineteenth century…where before we had an activity, it was transformed through complex historical processes into an identity — complete with border, and in some cases, rigid in-groups and out-groups,” reducing the complex relations of desire and connection to the gender of a person and that of the person they are attracted to (Daring et al 10).

Taken together, Butler and Foucault demonstrate that power relations have created gender and sexuality as political constructs and identities with rigid borders. Stacy aka sallydarity echoes this, arguing capitalism and the state have manufactured divisions between genders and races to be politically, socially, and economically significant so as to maintain its regime of exploitation (Stacy aka sallydarity 54-55). They argue that “binary gender and compulsory heterosexuality have to be destroyed because they regulate us all into our gender and sexuality boxes, limiting our ability to be liberated and to participate in resistance” (Stacy aka sallydarity 55).

Queer theory puts identity categories, particularly those related to gender and sexual orientation, under a critical lens; it plays with power, desire, and bodies in ways that destabilize the borders of these categories and definitions. Heckert writes “the questioning of borders is at the heart of queer theory,” arguing that “queering might allow recognition that life is never contained by the boxes and border the mind invents. Taxonomies of species or sexualities, categories of race or citizenship, borders between nation or classes or types of politics — these are fictions” (Heckert 64-65). As such, queering becomes a powerful way of undermining the key systems of readable gender and sexuality the state uses to uphold its power, and queer politics asks pivotal questions about how identities themselves are state-like in the policing of their strict borders.

Herman recognizes that these cultural borders and categories, “which explicitly and implicitly separate social groups through the delineation of norms, values, and behaviors, serve to create and amplify social hierar chies” (Herman 86). These borders are regulated on individual, interpersonal, and institutional levels, with the level of policing along them and the intensity of the penalties for crossing them varying depending on the extent to which the transgression challenges established social hierarchies. As Herman emphasizes, “gender transgres sors fail to consistently inhabit a fundamental category of bodily identification, crossing borders and disturbing cultural expectations of acceptable gender inhabitance. Because of this existence in the borderlands of binary gender, the transgender body is scrutinized as unruly, unstable, and transient” (Herman 86). The violence with which these cultural borders are maintained by the state illuminates that crossing them poses a threat to the state, as these border violations subvert and confuse modes of classification that the state relies on to control and discipline the populace.

In applying Foucauldian theories, we can see that the state maintains compulsory heterosexuality as a form of biopower to create reproductive populations. Stacy aka sallydarity expresses, “we are imprisoned by a gender binary… clearly those who do not fit into these gender boxes are seen as a threat and are disciplined through threats of acts of discrimination, verbal abuse, harassment, and or/violence” (Stacy aka sallydarity 45). Though all members of society experience the disciplining power and scrutiny of the nation-state, those who transgress the borders of gender and sexuality the state uses to organize labour and exploit the reproductive power of bodies produce particular forms of often violent surveillance and discipline. Those who present and identify in ways that exceed or trouble these rigidly policed ideals of gender and sexuality face social, legal, and medical scrutiny and repercussions.

Herman takes up the term ‘transgender’ as an umbrella term for encapsulating a variety of gender non-conform ing or genderqueer experiences, theorizing about ‘tranarchism’ as a way of conceptualizing how, while trans gender identification is not inherently anarchic, gender subversion acts as a tool of anarchy (Herman 79). They explain how state power engages with this revolutionary potential:

Because of their dangerous potential to inflame dynamics of resistance in matrices of power, the state

must contain defiant and transient populations through surveillance. Transgender people are particularly subject to this scrutiny because they trouble a fundamental tool of power used to regulate and control bodies and populations, sexuality. If sexuality is indeed, as Foucault claims, ‘an especially dense transfer point for relations of power’, then sexed bodies are the conductors of these electrified exchanges. (Herman 84)

Herman’s writing illuminates how genderqueer people and gender transgressors, in crossing state-maintained cultural gender borders, “pose a threat to the state, as they challenge and befuddle modes of classification that allow for the discipline and control of bodies” (Herman 88). In resisting the state-constructed norm of gender as singular, static, binary, and easily categorizable, the multiple and transient gender identities and expressions of genderqueer people create cracks in state power by undermining the sex/gender taxonomic order. As Stacy aka sallydarity writes, the work of “illuminating the ways our oppression is not ‘natural’ can be done partly through the actual demonstrations and experiences of gender fluidity and queerness” (Stacy aka sallydarity 54-55).

Bodies that transgress the norms of sex and gender disturb the deployment of sexuality, and thereby create points of resistance within systems of hegemonic power; they are able to subvert this key regime of control simply by moving through the world. This is powerful potential; as Herman explains:

[Although] this resistance cannot be imbued with necessarily insurrectionary meaning… its manifestations do have the potential to fracture and remold hegemonic power. If the resistance exerted by gen der-transgressive bodies can reproduce to infiltrate networks of power relations, it has the potential to incite revolution. (Herman 84)

Anarchy, therefore, as an ideology that opposes all types of institutional authority and seeks to elimi nate the power assigned to hierarchical establishments, must value the potential a queer analytic can offer in its capacity to trouble and expose gender and sex as a construct upon which a binary hierarchy has been naturalized. By deconstructing the workings of biopower and “examining the ways that gender non-conforming bodies disrupt control and discipline enabled by classification and hierarchy,” we can expose ambiguities in the state itself (Herman 91). A queer anarchism, therefore, must begin disassembling the borders between ‘identities’ by demonstrating, such as through the experiences of genderqueer people, that human beings exceed the categories the state imposes upon us (Volcano 33).

Genderqueer and “trans people, as laid out by anarchist sex radicals, gay liberationists, and queer theo rists, defy society’s precepts of gender identity and expression and challenge, at its core, societal, religious, and state demands and constructs” (Liesegang 96). Gender transgression, therefore, can be considered a powerful form of queer anarchy. Given how reliant the state is upon readable and binary categories of gender to exploit the reproductive power of the populace, anarchy must centre gender non-conforming lives and experiences in developing its praxis to transcend opposition.

Ackelsberg, Martha. “Anarchism and Gender.” The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2016, pp. 1–6.

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, 1988, pp. 519-531. Accessed 1 April 2022.

Daring, C. B., et al. “Introduction: Queer Meet Anarchism, Anarchism Meet Queer.” Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire, edited by C. B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Volcano, 2012, pp. 5-18.

Foucault, Michel. “Part Five: Right of Death and Power over Life.” History of Sexuality Vol. 1, translated by Robert Hurley, Vintage Books, 1990, pp. 133-160.

Foucault, Michel. “Part Two: The Repressive Hypothesis.” History of Sexuality Vol. 1, translated by Robert Hurley, Vintage Books, 1990, pp. 15-50.

Heckert, Jamie. “Anarchy without Opposition.” Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire, edited by C. B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Volcano, 2012, pp. 63-76.

Herman, Elis L. “Tranarchism: Transgender Embodiment and Destabilization of the State.” Contemporary Justice Review, vol. 18, no. 1, 2015, pp. 76–92. Accessed 28 February 2022.

Honkasalo, Julian. “Genderqueer.” Lambda Nordica, vol. 25, no. 1, 2020, pp. 57–63. Accessed 15 January 2022.

Koyama, Emi. “The Transfeminist Manifesto.” Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century, edited by Rory Cook Dicker and Alison Piepmeier, 2003, pp. 244-259.

Liesegang, Jarimarie. “Tyranny of the State and Trans Liberation.” Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire, edited by C. B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Volcano, 2012, pp. 87-100.

Rogue, J. “De-essentializing Anarchist Feminism: Lessons from the Transfeminist Movement.” Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire, edited by C. B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Volcano, 2012, pp. 25-32.

Shannon, Daric. “Articulating a Contemporary Anarcha-Feminism.” Theory in Action, vol 2, no. 3, 2009, pp. 58-74. Accessed 28 February 2022.

Stacy aka sallydarity. “Gender Sabotage.” Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire, edited by C. B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Volcano, 2012, pp. 43-62.

Volcano, Abbey. “Police at the Borders.” Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire, edited by C. B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Volcano, 2012, pp. 33-42.

Consciousness, Time and the Role of Memory

By Parsa Albeheshti

Oliver Sacks’ account of how severe amnesia disrupts a patient’s continuous sense of consciousness raises interesting questions about the nature of human consciousness and its relation to time. Do our conscious experiences in every moment rely on the retention of past memories? More broadly, is consciousness itself extended in time or independent from it? In this essay, I will (a) argue for a retentional model of temporal consciousness—namely, the view that our experiences of temporal phenomena, while themselves confined to momentary episodes, include representations of recent memory—and (b) make the case that despite this, our immediate self-consciousness precedes physical embodiment and, by extension, temporality.

1. Clive’s Dilemma

In Musicophilia, Sacks presents the case of Clive Wearing, a professional musician and severely amne sic patient with a memory span only a few seconds long (202). Clive’s journal is littered with endlessly repetitive proclamations denying and re-affirming his own existence or alive-ness. His wife describes his world as a “film with bad continuity” (202). Despite Clive’s ability to process information with the narrow window of his memory span remaining largely intact, his stream of consciousness clearly undergoes some disturbance; but what would happen if this window were to get smaller and smaller? Suppose Clive’s amnesia got progressively worse, and his memory span approached an infinitesimal fraction of time, smaller than the minimal threshold for visual or auditory experience of duration1. He would clearly know less and less about the world and himself, but would there eventually come a point past which he would lose consciousness completely? In other words, does consciousness unfold within linear time (and thus depend on it) or does it exist outside of time?

2. The Paradox of Temporal Awareness

The puzzle here is that consciousness seems to be situated within time and at once able to encompass temporal intervals within itself. Moreover, our direct awareness of the present moment does not seem to possess temporal extension in itself, as its object is strictly momentary. Yet we remember the past, anticipate the future, and perceive temporally extended phenomena such as succession, change, and persistence. How does the mind reconcile these ostensibly contradictory forms of awareness and incorporate them into a phenomenologically coherent perception of time? Historically, three models have emerged in response to this question.

3. Models of Temporal Consciousness

The cinematic model explains the stream of consciousness in analogy to a movie—a succession of strictly momentary snapshots, each lacking temporal extension in itself (Koch 264)2. On the opposing side, there is the extensional approach, which holds that awareness is itself extended in time and thus encompasses tem porally extended intervals and phenomena (Stern 313)3. The retentional model proposed by Kant provides the most coherent view of temporal consciousness. Kant viewed time as an a priori category of the mind—a feature of our cognitive faculty that serves as a condition for sensory perception. He argued that the mind organizes raw sensory data into cognizable objects according to its own categories—that is, it constructs apparently temporal

1 Empirical estimates of the minimal time interval required for experiences of duration vary from 25 msec to 150 msec (Coren, War and Enns 351).

2 This model fails to accommodate the Strong Continuity Thesis, which asserts that there needs to be some connection between immediately neighbouring, discrete moments (James 7). Lacking a sufficient account of such a connection, the model inevitably results in a Phenomeno-Temporal Antirealist position—that is, it denies our very awareness of change—which is phenomenologically incoherent.

3 This approach fails to account for the fact that our awareness of the present moment seems to be different from, and privileged over, our awareness of all other moments. Surely it is easier to forget what one did yesterday than to lose consciousness of what one is doing in every moment, but the extensional model blurs these distinc tions.

It (a) collects sensory data from the outside (“synthesis of apprehension”), (b) retains the sensations and reproduces them in memory (“synthesis of reproduction”), and (c) connects the retained sensations through a unified consciousness (Kant, “Critique” 133). Thus, in Kant’s model of temporal consciousness, the mind brings to gether both the momentary awareness of the present and the memories of the recent past to create a perception of time. This is a much more viable account than its cinematic and extensional alternatives. It coheres to our phenomenological view of time, accommodates the momentary nature of immediate awareness, and provides a satisfactory case for Phenomeno-Temporal Realism.

However, the retentional model is bad news for Clive. In this model, memory is a necessary condition of consciousness. This does not seem surprising, given what we already know of Clive’s case. After all, his dete riorating memory disrupted the continuity of his self-consciousness. It seems only a logical step further that a sufficiently dramatic reduction in his memory span would bring about the destruction of his consciousness—but is it?

4. Saving Clive: Cogito and the Floating Man

So far I have treated consciousness as if it has a simple structure, which is an unfounded assumption. Surely, a scientist who knows everything about the world around him is somehow more aware of his surround ings than a person who only knows trivial things; but is there a more basic and primordial form of conscious ness underlying this sort of acquired knowledge? Descartes demonstrates that there is. He points out that our sensory knowledge of the external world—which has thus far been the focus of our discussion of temporal consciousness—can never be certain. The only clear and distinct first principle of which we can be absolutely certain is our own existence as thinking things (Descartes 13-17). Thus, even without any sensory awareness of the external world we can still retain a very basic, ontological form of consciousness.

In this essay, I have tried to respond to the question of consciousness and its relation to time and mem ory by proposing a view that reconciles a memory-dependent retentional model of temporal awareness with the possibility of a primordial consciousness that transcends temporality and can survive any damage to the mem ory. However, the implications of these arguments go well beyond the issue of amnesia. An important aspect of Descartes’ Cogito argument is his substance dualism. By granting consciousness of our thinking selves priority over consciousness of our bodies, he claims that consciousness transcends embodiment. The question of phys ical embodiment is also intertwined with the question of time: The only reason we assume that our conscious ness is temporal is because we are confined to spatio-temporal bodies. Thus, if it is possible to demonstrate that our primordial self-consciousness is in fact independent of physical embodiment, we will have reason to be lieve it is also independent of time. Centuries before Descartes, Avicenna proposed the “Floating Man” thought experiment to prove the immaterial existence of consciousness: Since it is impossible for us to conceive of a bodiless person, let us conceive, instead, of a person who is suspended in midair with all of their senses blocked, unable to see, hear, smell, or feel their own body. Would such a person, despite their total loss of connection to sensory data, still be aware that they exist (Gutas)? The obvious answer is yes, and it underscores Descartes’ argument that we have an immediate form of self-consciousness that precedes physical embodiment and stands outside of time. Fortunately, many of the questions whose burdens formerly fell on the thought experiments of philosophers of mind, now fall within the realm of experimental neuroscience. It would be fascinating to see how, for example, the Floating Man argument would fit into special neurological cases where sensory experi ence is disrupted.

Works Cited

Coren, Stanley, et. al. Sensation and Perception. 6th ed., New York, Wiley and Sons, 2004.

Descartes, René. Discourse on Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences. Translated by Elizabeth Haldane, Digreads.com Publishing, 2017.

Gutas, Dimitri. “Ibn Sina.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2016.

James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York, Longmans, 1912.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. London, Penguin Classics, 2007.

Koch, Christof. The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. Colorado, Roberts Publishers, 2004.

Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Toronto, Vintage Canada, 2008.

Velasquez, Manuel G. “On Kant.” Philosophy: A Text With Readings, Wadsworth Publishing Company, 2004.

On Sublimity, The Republic, Poetry and Gender

By Liam McGarry

Longinus’s On Sublimity and Plato’s Republic seem at first to be contradicting texts. Both authors have opposing views on whether poetry is something we should celebrate. However, despite the opposing conclusions, conversations about gender run through each text, and both ultimately believe poetry to be destructive to artificial masculine values1 via its antagonistic relationship with reason. However, while The Republic views this danger as a reason to reject masculinity, On Sublimity ultimately attempts to subsume the danger of a feminine sublime within masculinity and masculine values; its danger is recognized as a positive, but the text ultimately attempts to reincorporate this danger into masculinity.

Plato’s concern over the destruction of reason in the text is rooted in his idea of reason being a masculine value, and specifically his worry of poetry corrupting men. He supports this with his discussion on the poet’s effects on the soul: “[…The poet] calls forth the worst elements in the soul and then nourishes them and makes them strong, he destroys the soul’s reasoning part. He corrupts the individual’s character with fabrications far removed from reality and panders to the soul’s fool…” (Plato 605). Plato associates poetry with images of corruption, and while his concern seems initially to just be about poetry destroying reason, he specifically connects poetry’s destruction of reason with feminine behaviour. He does this by establishing what he believes as the masculine value of remaining logical and stoic in the face of tragedy, bringing up an example of a father who lost his son, and characterizes what ‘good men’ would seek in that scenario: “Thought. We need to think about what has happened to us. One must accept the way the dice fall and… ought not to behave like children who have stumbled, wasting time wailing” (603-4). Plato specifically characterizes rational behaviour as a man’s behaviour in this scenario, especially in contrast to succumbing to one’s emotions; ‘reason’ and emotion are fundamentally opposed for Plato. This means Plato views intense emotion as improper, especially for a man; his example here is of how the standard for masculinity would act in this situation, implying he believes this level of stoicism is something to which all men should aspire. Plato further supports this via his discussion of poetry’s effect of destroying reason and causing emotional responses. Using the example of a grieving hero in a poem, he contrasts the audience emotionally reacting with men’s standards for experiencing grief: “When we experi ence personal sorrow ourselves, however… We pride ourselves if we are able to maintain our equanimity and bear the burden. We reckon this to be a man’s behaviour. But what we found favour with just now in the poem we generally consider to be the behaviour of women” (605). Plato reveals in this line his central issue with poetry: he believes it fundamentally goes against reason, and ergo cultural values of how men should act. The idea of masculine values being defined by reason is highlighted by the text Rediscovering Masculinity: Reason, Language and Sexuality by Victor Seidler. When discussing the relationship between masculinity and reason, Seidler explains, “…[historically,] men have sought to silence the voices of others in the name of reason… The experiences of women, children and animals have been closely identified as lacking reason, and being closer to nature” (Seidler 14). When he characterizes a show of emotion as feminine behaviour, in his quote discussing what poetry models, he both characterizes the standard for men as being unemotional, and associates poetry with feminizing men. Thereby, when Plato attributes poetry with destructive imagery, the nature of the destruc tion is revealed to be a feminization; a destruction of the masculine ideal of reason.

Longinus similarly conceives of poetry and the sublime as destroying reason. In On Sublimity, Longinus expresses this using imagery of natural disasters: “…Archilochus, with his abundant, uncontrolled flood, that bursting forth of divine spirit which is so hard to bring under rule of law?” (33.5). Longinus’s framing of poetry as destructive combined with the metaphor he uses about the “rule of law” similarly implies that poetry destroys reason and the individual’s logical barrier against poetry and fiction. Therefore, Plato’s conception of the mascu 1 This paper defines masculine values as traits typically associated with men as opposed to women, as a guideline for what men are supposed to strive for and uphold. This will be discussed in regards to Plato later in the essay, but these include things like reason and stoicism.

line fits seamlessly into Longinus’s text (33.5); Plato’s ‘masculine’ (man as rational, man as unemotive) consti tutes the behaviours Longinus suggests are destroyed by poetry. When Longinus describes poetry as a flood that cannot be brought under “rule of law,” he characterizes it as something that destroys the barrier of ‘masculine’ reason. Longinus supports this through his admiration for Sappho’s love poem; he valourizes feeling “…cold and hot, mad and sane, frightened and near death,” not just emotionally reacting that way in real life, but reacting that way to a poem as well. Longinus’s admiration of that intense emotion goes against how Plato believes men should emotionally react under emotional stress, mainly by means of suppression. The poem destroys that resistance. What Longinus valourizes in poetry directly fits with what Plato despises in it, but both position poetry as a force destroying reason.

Longinus agrees with Plato that poetry is feminine; however, the very framing of the text attempts to subsume this within masculinity via classification. We can see this in his justification for writing a piece on writing sublime poetry. Countering the idea that great poetry cannot be taught, Longinus responds with the metaphor of a female nature: “Though nature is on the whole a law unto herself… she is not a random force… it is method that is competent to provide and contribute quantities and appropriate occasions for everything, as well as perfect correctness in training and application” (2.2). If Plato’s association of poetry with the feminine is why he believes that poetry is destructive to the masculine, Longinus supports this idea, believing that the most important aspect of poetry—its natural, destructive energy—is inherently feminine2 and opposing mascu line values of reason. However, while Longinus admires the danger of the sublime, his own reason for trying to classify the sublime is because the feminine nature needs the presumably masculine “method” (here, reason or education) to truly stabilize and refine it. He even mentions this later on in his thesis as why quantifying poetry is necessary: “Grandeur is particularly dangerous when left on its own, unaccompanied by knowledge, unstead ied, unballasted, abandoned to mere impulse and ignorant temerity” (2.2). Longinus contradicts himself in this passage. He seemingly values the destructive aspects of sublime poetry and nature; however, when discussing why he is writing this text, argues it in fact needs the masculine reason or else it will be even more dangerous, despite Longinus seemingly admiring this dangerous aspect of the sublime. This is because of the fundamental confusion behind the text: Longinus values poetry and its ability to wipe away reason, but seems to recognize via his feminization of nature that this is opposed to the idea of masculinity valuing reason. To get around this, he is forced to attempt to neuter the feminine danger of poetry and nature by claiming that the sublime is too dangerous without the ‘masculine’ reason stabilizing it.

This attempt to neuter the feminine via masculine reason is supported by the patriarchal framing of the text. Longinus’s text is a discussion between men, as a response to a man, and about men. On Sublimity is directed to his supposedly male friend, in response to a male author’s thoughts on sublimity, and mostly brings up men in the text as exemplars of poetry. He even mentions that he is writing this text in the hopes it may be “thought useful to public men,” and whenever he brings up a theoretical audience of the text, it is almost al ways male (1.3). Longinus further emphasizes this when he analogizes admiring the beauty in nature to admir ing the sublime in poetry, stating, “If anyone wants to know what we were born for, let him look round at life and contemplate the splendour, grandeur, and beauty in which it everywhere abounds… admire not the little streams… but the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and above all else the Ocean” (35.3). When Longinus specifical ly characterizes “anyone” as being male, it signifies that he believes only men are able to admire the beauty of the sublime. His intended audience is for men, and his exclusion of women signifies that he perceives quantify ing a feminine nature as a masculine activity, viewing both himself and his audience as the man in his metaphor admiring the Nile (35.3). Longinus is attempting to appropriate the feminine Nature as a man. The danger of poetry is only valuable to Longinus because it is something a masculine ‘reason’ can conquer. This attempt for masculine conquest is further expressed by Longinus invoking older famous poets. On Sublimity’s second half frames creating sublime poetry as a competition between great men: “Plato could not have … so often risen to poetical subjects and poetical language… if he had not tried to compete for the prize against Homer, like a

2 This paper will be referring to characteristics that go against Plato’s masculine values as feminine.

young aspirant challenging an admired master” (13.4). If Longinus has framed poetry to be conquered by men, it is for the purpose of a competition between them. The masculine appropriates it as a means of competition for who can apply reason to nature the best. The text fundamentally wants to learn from these “great men” and the ways in which they have quantified and enhanced nature (36.1). Longinus further demonstrates this when he says that nature “brought [man] into life and into the universe as into a great festival, to be… an enthusiastic contestant in its competitions” (35.2). The feminine nature here is to be conquered and claimed by men in a pre sumably masculine competition. To Longinus, the danger of the sublime is desirable so long as it is dominated by masculine reason.

In conclusion, both Plato and Longinus view the sublime as weakening normative masculine values. However, while Plato acknowledges this and views it as straightforwardly negative, Longinus views it as posi tive insofar as it can be conquered by the masculine. This is demonstrated via the shared association of destruc tive imagery and poetry made by both Plato and Longinus, with Plato gendering reason and logic, Longinus’s framing of poetry as a masculine application of method to the more important, feminine nature, and his idea of poetry as a competition. Longinus’s attempts to frame poetry as masculine via its breakdown into reason and method ultimately lead to the question of whether attempts to break down poetry and fiction are ultimately an attempt to “conquer” something, or if it is merely the reproduction of a patriarchal way of thinking onto a new arena. Literary criticism is valuable, but the text Longinus needs to write to masculinize poetry possibly signals that the intentions behind dissecting what makes great art are ultimately suspect.

Works Cited

Plato. “The Republic”. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Edited by Leitch, Vincent B, 3rd edition, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., pp. 78-89. Seidler, Victor. Rediscovering Masculinity: Reason, Language and Sexuality. London, Routledge, 1989. Longinus. “On Sublimity”. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Edited by Leitch, Vincent B, 3rd edition, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., pp. 146-64.

The Ambivalent Nature of NFTs: Analyzing New Technologies Through Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility

By Rachel Tersch

First published in 1935, technology has advanced considerably since Walter Benjamin considered the implications of the reproducibility of art in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Repro ducibility.” From the advent of the world wide web to the creation of iCloud, the ability to share art has been re defined numerous times. Often, with digital art and photos, it became extremely difficult to distinguish between an original and a copy, until non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were invented. NFTs are defined as “tokens stored on a blockchain that can be used to represent ownership of digital assets like artworks, recordings, virtual real estate and pets” (Pinto-Gutiérrez 1). In that sense, NFTs act as a kind of coded signature to identify digital owner ship. Seemingly, this denotes a return to the cult value of artwork, as it brings back layers of traced ownership, uniqueness, and ritualistic behaviour that Benjamin describes as qualities of an artwork’s cult value. However, the attempt is ultimately incomplete, as NFTs fail to solidify the authenticity or true aura of the artwork it en codes. NFTs, therefore, are ambivalent in their relationship to cult and exhibition value, expressing characteristics of both.

To expand the definition of an NFT, it is a form of technology very similar to that of cryptocurrency, often attracting the attention of the same demographic of people who have invested in or bought cryptocurrency before (2). They are not the same as cryptocurrencies, however, in that “cryptocurrencies are fungible or inter changeable; they are all worth the same amount” while “NFTs are non-fungible, meaning that an NFT cannot be exchanged for another since each one is unique” (1). NFTs have also “become quite popular among investors and collectors” (2) after they grew immensely in prominence over the year of 2021. Pinto-Gutiérrez and his associates noted that in 2021 alone “the NFT market went from total daily sales of about USD 183,121 in 2020 to an average of USD 38 million in 2021” (1).

What is distinctly unique about NFTs is that their value can differ immensely depending on scarcity. The entire purpose of an NFT is to own a distinct sequence of code, which clearly demonstrates that any perceived value would be determinant on rarity. This is true, to an extent. All NFTs are designed to be one-of-a-kind, but for certain NFTs their value is determinant on many others buying the same kind of NFT. Pinto-Gutiérrez and his associates also cite a game called CryptoKitties “where players collect, breed, buy, and sell various kinds of virtual cats” (2) and the NFTs face “rapid devaluation quickly if not enough players are in the game” (2). Therefore, how rarity determines value depends on the distinct nature of a particular NFT.

NFTs have carved out a section of digital space and created a community that engages in various ritu als associated with them, implying that NFTs do have some degree of cult value. The value of an NFT then, is defined by two rituals: scarcity and popular engagement. In the case of CryptoKitties, players must interact in a ritualistic fashion to increase the value of their NFT. The former is more akin to the kind of ritual that Benjamin defines in his essay, stating that “cult value as such tends today, it would seem, to keep the artwork out of sight” (982). Much like how “certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cellar” (982), the ability to purchase a digital asset and share it only at one’s own discretion contributes to a ritual of privacy. Before this, Benjamin states that “the unique value of the ‘authentic’ work of art has its basis in ritual, the source of its original use value” (981). This is further enforced by the fact that an NFT’s value is highly dependent on rarity or the lack thereof. Pinto-Gutiérrez and his associates note additionally that the possession of certain NFTs can act as tickets of sort to access groups within online social platforms such as Discord, whose rituals have yet to be clearly defined but undeniably exist by nature of exclusivity. These rituals, which are increasingly growing

around the exclusive natures of NFTs, denote a characteristic of cult value because they encourage the private gathering of various members, able to be controlled by the ownership of one unique code.

Another aspect of NFTs that exists as a characteristic of cult value is the notion of ownership, which denotes a distinct claim upon a digital asset despite how many exact reproductions exist. Nataliya Atanasova, a scholar who has done some research into the growing development of NFTs, identifies them as “positional goods” (97), by which she means that “what is possessed by many is owned by one” (97). The value of NFTs, then, derives from the ability to be the sole owner of a particular asset. This develops cult value because it enables control. If an owner should wish to engage in the ritual of privacy as mentioned above, they have the power to decide whether they want to share it or not.

Benjamin notes as well that “changes of ownership are part of a tradition which can be traced only from the standpoint of the original in its present location” (978). Digital art has various methods outside of NFTs to trace the origin, such as watermarks, artist signatures, and social media tags. However, with the advent of NFTs, ownership not only of the original artist but various owners as it is sold and inherited will be traceable. While the digital sphere has augmented people’s access to information, details of ownership can get lost due to the in flux of information before such technologies were invented. Having a traceable means would establish the layer of tradition that is inherent in cult value, reinstating the fading concept of “the original” (978).

Atanasova also defines NFTs as “certificates of authenticity” (97), but this is not in the same sense that Benjamin uses the word. They are, to an extent, similar in that Benjamin says “the authentic work retains its full authority in the face of a reproduction made by hand, which it generally brands a forgery” (978). While a screenshot of a digital artwork bought by NFT is no different than the NFT itself, the latter retains authenticity by means of ownership. What if, however, the NFT itself is already a reproduction of another digital artwork? Which, then, would be the “authentic” work: the original or the owned? There is no clear answer. Furthermore, Atanasova contextualizes her definition by saying that “in future [NFTs] can also be used as a more extended version of visual tokens, such as: events tickets, grants and awards, educational certificates…, identifications, real estate contracts, [and] brand merchandise” (97). By authenticity, then, she means proof of purchase or a ticket of some sort, meant to prove that an individual has bought a particular digital asset.

NFTs branch further away from Benjamin’s definition of authenticity as he expands on the concept. He notes two reasons why technological reproduction does not retain authority. The first is that “technological reproduction is more independent of the original than is manual reproduction” (979). While an NFT is meant to distinguish the original from a reproduction, copies of an NFT are still very similar to the NFT itself. With a painting, somebody else must copy exact techniques, colours, harvest the same materials from paints to canvas and so forth. They must create an entirely new painting on their own. If a friend were to send me a copy of their NFT, the components would be virtually the same and all that is required is a two-second click to grab a screen shot. Techniques, colours, and materials would not need to be replicated in any fashion; the copy would be ex tremely faithful to the original. Not a single pixel would be off. The only difference would be a bit of code that identifies the NFT, but as NFTs grow older, there will undoubtedly be hackers who will learn how to forge NFT certificates as well. This also addresses the second reason, which is that “technological reproduction can place the copy of the original in situations which the original itself cannot attain” (979). As mentioned, NFT copies are not difficult to be made exact, whereas other forms of artwork usually demand specific circumstances, such as location or materials, to be a faithful reproduction.

Therefore, while NFTs attempt to return a sense of authenticity to an original, the process is impossible to do given the age of technology. At least, authenticity by the means in which Benjamin defines. NFTs fall short in one other distinct fashion: the scarcity of an NFT is an entirely artificial concept, as within digital space, technically infinite reproductions could be made at very little cost. Atanasova states that “scarcity in the digital space refers only to the notion of a ‘restricted access’ towards the object and not to the real availability of the

object” (97). Interestingly, however, “free copies of the digital goods, which are easily retrievable from the in ternet… does not reduce demand for paying for [NFTs]” (97). Then, there is an entire market of people who see ownership and apparent authenticity as desirable assets, even if the same products are available for free.

Zeller, a scholar who wrote an article commenting on the utopian ideals seen within Walter Benjamin’s work, suggests the reason for this is that true authenticity latches onto utopian, cult-like “concepts of ‘purity,’ ‘unity,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘originality’” (Zeller 75). He argues that “the idea of authenticity emerged when revolutions in media technology challenged prior modes of perception” (71), meaning that authenticity only truly became a concern with the advent of technologies that could possibly strip away proof of authenticity. NFTs, then, attempt to return some of these values. Benjamin would disagree with the concept of technology instituting the need for authenticity, as he cites examples of cult value as old as the stone age itself, when the newest technologies were chalk and pictograms. However, certainly the modern innovations that made reproducibility much easier would call for more extreme means of authentication. Benjamin would agree with authenticity being associated with the utopian concepts of purity, originality and the likes, as these traits are very reminiscent of cult value. These call back to the ritualistic and traditional nature of cults which prefer the “authentic” work that requires gathering and worship, rather than the ability to access any digital artwork from anywhere for free. This is yet another way in which NFTs deviate from cult value, as an owner may be able to decide whether to share their NFT or not, but once they do, endless reproductions can be made and it would be difficult to control the spread of screenshots and reproductions. Once an NFT is shared, then, the cult value is lost.

NFTs would not have much, if any, authority, but they would also have the same quantity of aura. This is because Benjamin notes that the “core [of the work of art] is its authenticity” (979), meaning that an artwork’s authenticity is strongly connected to its aura. Benjamin also notes that aura has a “quintessence of all that is transmissible in it from its origin on, ranging from its physical duration to the historical testimony relating to it” (979) but “since the historical testimony is founded on the physical duration, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction, in which the physical duration plays no part” (979). While ownership can be traced through NFTs, physicality cannot. The physical structure of an NFT will not change like paint that might wear or stone that might crumble. It will remain the same, no different than the day it was made, and thus it will contain no sense of aura through history.

Another important component of aura is that it requires “the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place” (978), according to Benjamin. This becomes a deeper conversation with NFTs, as technically it does exist in a unique subset of digital space. However, that space can be accessed at the same time in different physical locations. It can be shown in various ways at various different times, as with any tech nological asset. Its nature as an NFT does not change this. Ultimately, its digital existence means an NFT cannot capture that essence of “here and now” (978) of which Benjamin speaks.

Because NFTs do not accurately uphold the aura and authenticity required for a work to have cult value, they cannot fully be equated with having cult value. However, the invention of NFTs was undeniably an attempt to reinstate cult value as its entire premise is controlling the means by which digital artwork is shared. Therefore, it cannot have exhibition value as well, since NFTs are designed to control the exhibition of work. Therefore, NFTs exist in a liminal space between cult and exhibition value with qualities of both. For cult value, ownership and rituals are reinstated, able to impress some level of tradition upon NFTs. For exhibition value, NFTs are devoid of authenticity and aura, since their products are easily reproducible to the same quality as the original. Given that NFTs are a very new construct, there is time yet for this ambivalence to be resolved, as developers may be able to innovate the technology and learn how to instate ownership and rituals, and fully develop the cult value they desire.

Works Cited

Atanasova, Nataliya. “Non-Fungible Tokens Or: The Creation of a Social Contract in the Digital Agora.” XIIIth International Scientific Conference ‘E-Governance and E-Communications,’ 2021, pp. 93100, http://81.161.246.248/pokani/Proceedings10B-2021-22-(1)v.pdf#page=93.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 3rd ed., edited by Leitch, Vincent B., et al., W.W. Norton, 2018, pp. 976-996. Pinto-Gutiérrez, Christian, et al. “The NFT Hype: What Draws Attention to Non-Fungible Tokens?” Mathematics (Basel), vol. 10, no. 335, MDPI AG, 2022, https://doi.org/10.3390/math10030335.

Zeller, Christoph. “Language of Immediacy: Authenticity as a Premise in Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.’” Monatshefte, vol. 104, no. 1, 2012, pp. 70–85, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41495743.