Intersections Vol. 9 Spring 2017

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The McGill Undergraduate Journal of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Spring 2017

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Intersections McGill’s Undergraduate Journal of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Volume 9 | Spring 2017

Head Editor

Paniz Khosroshahy

Editors

Janna Bryson Bee Khaili Coco Zhou

Cover & Design

Rahma Wiryomartono

With support from Rachel Collins and Rhiana Warawa

A note to readers “I am delighted to introduce

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volume 9. This volume is made possible by the

Table of contents 04 21

36 51 60

Guilty until proven innocent: the carceral state, Black childhood, and American disciplinary systems

By Juliette Mueller Toward a hysterical embodiment of religion: reclaiming St. Teresa of Avila’s religious experience through feminism and psychoanalysis

By Saima Desai Creating a monster: exploring the trans/gendered dimensions of “Catullus 63”

By Grace Brown A gendered exploration of art, trauma and memory: Charlotte Salomon’s Life or Theatre?

By Nuala Murray “A special sense of hostility:” a study in women’s sexuality during World War II

By Ella Hartsoe

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Female students’ perceptions and experiences of safety at McGill

By Arianne Kent

82

Blindness and queering epistemology

By Benjamin Kirsebom

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Guilty until proven innocent: the carceral state, Black childhood, and American disciplinary systems Juliette Mueller

A

ctivists and scholars are now long familiar with comparisons between schools and prisons.1 Both are sites of social control and discipline, and both often create and perpetuate racial inequities and inequalities.

Moreover, the emphasis on the orderly movement of students and inmates and their obedience to rigid codes of conduct is key to the operational and societal functionings of both schools and prisons.2 In this neoliberal age, scholars have studied the corporatization and privatization of the two institutions.3 While there is a wealth of scholarship available examining the disciplinary tactics of American schools and prisons, there has been little consideration of the parallels between (and ultimately, convergence of) these establishments. This critical examination is much-needed, for it is increasingly the case that, in America, prisoners and students have much in common. Each population is targeted by race—schoolchildren (particularly Black students) are treated like criminals, and inmates are treated like children. This comparison becomes particularly salient when considering the school-to-prison pipeline/nexus, which ushers students closer to prison than to graduation by funneling them out of school and into jail cells. For many Black students, this pipeline is unidirectional: they are simultaneously locked into prisons, and “lock[ed]… out of education,”4 not only because of the lengthy terms they must serve, but also because of the many legal obstacles that may prevent them from obtaining affordable schooling depending on their sentence.5 In both American schools and prisons, students/inmates6 are subject to harsh disciplinary action, ostensibly to discourage them from breaking rules or acting out. These methods, however, have proven ineffective. In fact, they have shown to be counter-effective: the dropout and expulsion rates in public education are skyrocketing while recidivism rates are at an all-time high.7 Because punishment is distributed unevenly with regard to race,8 these methods exacerbate preexisting racial disparities, ensuring that the majority of push-outs9 and offenders

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are Black students.10 The present analysis focuses on precisely this population of students.

Changes in school discipline throughout the U.S. have mirrored broad shifts 11 These trends have occurred alongside the quadrupling of the U.S. imprisonment rate without corresponding increases in crime.12 Consequently, we are currently observing a growing correspondence between inner-city schools and prisons and the growth of the school-to-prison pipeline. This rise of discriminatory and excessive discipline policies in the U.S. demands a multifaceted approach: both critical policy to identify and address the immediate effects of this epidemic, and an overhauling of the system. In order to fracture this pipeline, and to grapple with over-incarceration, we must ultimately shift from punitive to transformative measures that give the offenders a voice and decrease the likelihood of dropping out of high school, serving prison time, or, as is often the case, doing both. Dismantling what Angela Davis refers to as our present-day “carceral state” requires that we “ask questions that see beyond the given.”13 It is with Davis’ wisdom in mind that I suggest a prison abolitionist framework is necessary to fracture the school-to-prison pipeline so that schools no longer resemble prisons, prisons themselves fade from the American landscape, and our approaches to safety and discipline are completely re-imagined.

Situating myself It is essential that, before embarking on an analysis of the way American carceral culture affects Black students, I acknowledge my positionality as a white woman writing in the context of a university classroom. I have had limited contact with the American prison system, and yet I endeavor to explore the way Black youth are disciplined, controlled, devalued, and systematically mistreated. I recognize that my personal ability to comprehend these issues is limited by my status as a white woman, that the vantage point that I write from hinders my appreciation of the nuanced, variegated ways carceral culture affects Black youth. I believe that scholarship on the school-to-prison pipeline demands critical race perspectives, and those best equipped to provide these perspectives are those who are not me—those with lived experience as Black Americans. My primary intention with this paper is to deepen my own understandings of the issues at hand. As such, I am reconciled with the fact that my reach is limited. It is my hope that I have succeeded in toeing the line between exploration and exploitation, and

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that the product of my research is both appropriate in content and considerate in approach.

The school-to-prison pipeline and nexus The “school-to-prison pipeline” refers to the growing pattern of tracking students out of educational institutions, directly and/or indirectly, into juvenile and adult criminal justice systems. Notably, this pipeline has emerged in the context of media hysteria over youth violence and mass incarceration in both juvenile and adult legal systems.14 While the school-to-prison pipeline is facilitated and sustained by a number of trends in education, its existence is most directly attributable to the expansion of zero-tolerance policies. These policies have no measurable impact on school safety, but are associated with a number of negative effects, such as racial disproportionality, increased suspensions and expulsions, elevated push-out rates, and legal issues related to due process.15 While the pipeline suggests that students are transferred directly from the classroom to a jail cell, the link between schools and prisons is not as direct and the path to prison is in fact far more complex. Relatively few youth are arrested in schools, although the numbers are still too high. Instead, most are given out-of-school suspension, in-school suspension, or other school punishment.16 Furthermore, because school-based arrests tend to be for minor offenses, an individual is more likely to receive a suspended sentence or probation than jail time. Therefore, the pipeline analogy is misleading. Students punished at school experience many consequences that affect their futures or encounters with the law, but do not always result directly in prison time. Instead, they may miss valuable class time, their grades may suffer, and they may become less likely to graduate as a result.

implies that it is necessarily schools that shape the risk of incarceration, rather than the role of social welfare, child welfare, and mental health systems.17 Further, this metaphor overlooks the structural inequalities that fuel the pipeline,18 as well as the racial disproportionality in who enters the pipeline.19 In favor of the “pipeline” visual, I adopt Erica Meiners’ terminology. Meiners,

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author of Right to be Hostile: Schools, Prisons and the Making of Public Enemies, calls the aforementioned network a “school-to-prison nexus”20 which acknowledges the different entry points along the school-to-prison “pipeline,” from its front opening, including “inadequate and inequitable access to resources, to its back end, such as the various barFigure 1. Model of school-to-prison pipeline (Source: Hirschfield) riers that confront court-involved youth who wish to continue their education.”21 Transformative justice Transformative justice is an alternative to traditional disciplinary practices. At its core, it is a way of practicing alternative justice that acknowledges individual experiences and works to actively resist the state’s criminal ‘injustice’ system.22 Transformative justice recognizes that systemic oppression is often the root of harm, abuse and assault. As a practice it therefore aims to “address and confront [...] oppressions on all levels and treats [transformative justice] as an integral part to accountability and healing.”23 Moreover, a transformative justice framework positions the structural racism and class inequality of our existing punitive systems at the center of its theory, assuming that a central function of the current system is to enforce these inequities. For many, the American punitive system has failed because the core principle upon which it is based—the idea that retribution is synonymous with justice, and thus with community improvement— is fundamentally incorrect. Through implementing transformative justice, we can recognize prisons, educational institutions, and the criminal legal system as sites where violence and trauma are often enacted, rather than as solutions to harm.

Zero-tolerance policies In recent years, school punishments have become more “formal and actuarial.”24 Mirroring developments in juvenile justice, school punishments are based on rigid procedural and disciplinary guidelines evolving around the nature of the

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offense rather than the discretion of teachers and other traditional disciplinary agents.25 “zero-tolerance.” These policies were spurred by the 1994 Safe Schools Act, which mandated that in order for a school to receive federal money, it must have written policies detailing: “a) its internal procedures, b) clear conditions under which exclusion will be imposed, and c) close cooperation with police and juvenile justice agencies.”26, 27 In response, many schools have created rules under the zero-tolerance umbrella, mandating that students who commit certain categorical acts, including possessing weapons, alcohol, or drugs, are suspended or expelled regardless of the act’s severity.28 Limiting school administrators’ discretion to divert some students from punishment, these policies have led to increased punishments for Black students, who are not treated with the same leniency as their white peers.29 Indeed, national data from the Federal Department of Education indicate a clear increase in suspension rates from 1974 to 1998, particularly for Black students.30

Because his scholarship carries undeniable academic clout, to take up Foucault’s work on carceral culture when discussing the school-to-prison nexus is tempting.

However, I would be remiss to cite Foucault as the foundation for a race-based analysis of carceral culture, for he “erase[d] the spectacle of racialized State violence.”31 I agree with Davis’ claim that there is “a need to move beyond a strictly Foucauldian genealogy in examining histories of punishment”32 and, as such, I rely upon Black feminist and prison abolition scholarship to inform the following analysis. Namely, I will take up Kimberle Crenshaw’s consideration of Black girls’ relationship to the school-to-prison nexus, Angela Davis’ work on prison abolition, Beth Richie’s understanding of what it takes to build abolition futures, and Michael Dumas’ conceptualization of the psychological trauma that school environments can incite in Black students.

Prisons and schools resemble one another not only because of their similar manipulate and guide [the potential of certain souls] to act in certain ways toward 33 In schools and prisons alike, these goals are order, stability, and compliance. In effect, students are treated as criminals and criminals as schoolchildren, both subject to the whims of their superiors with little to no

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autonomy. Unsurprisingly, those most frequently targeted for punishment in school often appear—in terms of race, gender, and socioeconomic status— like miniature versions of the adults who are most likely to be targeted for incarceration in society.

The aforementioned goal of exerting control over students/inmates are achieved through disciplinary technologies that standardize and normalize behaviour inside and outside of prisons/classrooms. American schools increasingly control� that mirrors control inside of prisons. As such, it has become ordinary surveillance cameras, zero-tolerance policies, and random searches with drug34, 35 all in a purported effort to guarantee student safety. Prisons and schools each favor zero-tolerance policies, physical forms of such security, schools with high nonwhite student enrolment at all educational stages are the most likely to use metal detectors.36 The types of discipline employed most frequently in prisons are presented below alongside their educational equivalent in decreasing order of their incidence.37

Figure 2. Chart of prison disciplinary tactics and their educational equivalents

What the above chart illustrates is not that the disciplinary methods in schools and prisons are precise replicas of one another, but rather that the mentality behind them is similar. In both institutions, ostracism, loss of privileges, and

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violence take precedence over communication. Clearly, young adults are “systematically constructed [and treated] as criminals.”39 Eventually, these constructions are realized when these over-disciplined, underserved students are pushed out of schoolyards and into prison yards.

a third nationally.40 In a 2004 national survey, sixty percent of high school teachers reported having armed police in their schools.41 This increasing police presence means students and prisoners are often disciplined by the same individuals. Moreover, using law enforcement practices on students ingrains the belief that over-policing is normal, particularly for Black youth; this is achieved through the consistent use of handcuffs, emphasis on the orderly movement of students, strict codes of conduct, and threats and punishment that ensue if students do not comply. This approach to discipline an altercation, disagreement, or infraction occurs. Schools, then, are part and parcel of our “‘disciplinary society’ within which practices of social regulation operating within prisons have spread across institutions into the very fabric of society.”42 It comes as no surprise that these punishments are distributed asymmetrically by race. In particular, we must bear in mind the overwhelmingly disproportionate rate at which lower-class Black Americans are sentenced to prison when noting that Black students are three times more likely than white students to be suspended.43 More than 64,000 students were arrested at school in 20112012, according to the most recent federal civil rights data.44 A staggering 30 per cent of those arrests involved Black students, despite the fact Black students accounted for just sixteen percent of the overall student population.

This racial disparity cannot be explained by behavioural differences; research has found no indication that Black youth violate rules at higher rates than other groups.45 Rather, this gap must be understood through the differential enforcement of zero-tolerance policies on Black students. Eighty-three per cent of American teachers are white,46 can shape their decisions to suspend or expel. As such, the races of those who are distributing and receiving punishment in prisons and schools mirror one another. Evidently, there is a growing “racialization of punishment practices”47 both inside and outside of prisons.

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Black children are punished disproportionately compared to their white peers in part because they are often immediately presumed guilty. Black boys can from the assumption that children are essentially innocent.48 Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles discovered that, when asked to estimate the age of a Black individual in a photograph, white respondents overestimated the ages of those photographed by an average of four-anda-half years.49 This same study found that in some cases, Black children may be viewed as adults when they are just 13 years old.50 Childhood ostensibly provides certain protections against harsh, adult-like treatment, but for Black youth the opposite is true. Young Black boys in institutional settings are often treated with adult severity and therefore experience adult consequences. Black children are often held personally accountable for “mistakes” for which other children are given “second chances.”51 This works in the opposite way, as well. pro-White ‘humanization.’”52 This humanization results in white children being treated with the patience, trust, respect, and leniency that Black children are not afforded.

Black girls have been largely excluded from the study of school discipline.

Crenshaw’s 2015 study, titled “Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Over-policed and Underprotected,” aims to rectify this. The study notes that Black girls factor for females than it is for males; the relative risk for suspension is higher for Black girls when compared to white girls than it is for Black boys when compared to white boys.53 These dynamics may contribute to perceptions by decision-makers that a Black girl has “run afoul of institutional norms, and that punishment, rather than transformative or therapeutic responses, is warranted.”54 The excessive discipline Black girls face is exacerbated by racial stereotypes. One study Crenshaw cites revealed that teachers sometimes discipline Black girls into adopting “respectable” feminine traits, such as being quiet and passive.55 Crenshaw calls for a closer look at the gendered pathways to absent in the public discussion about the school-to-prison pipeline/nexus and mass incarceration.

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As the penal state expands, a system of interconnected institutions continues to degrade, control and manage young Black bodies. Education scholar Victor Rios calls this system of degradation the “youth control complex… an ecology of interlinked institutional arrangements that manages and controls the everyday lives of inner-city youth of colour.”56 One clear consequence of this hyper-surveillance “is that communities of colour are tracked into further state control and management.”57 Indeed, the harm the harshness of zero-tolerance for prisoners who are subject to severe sentences and aggressive discipline while serving their terms. A Public Safety Canada study demonstrated that harsher criminal justice sanctions had no deterrent effect on recidivism.58 Rather, punishment produced an increase in recidivism. Further analysis of the incarceration studies found that longer sentences were associated with higher recidivism rates (sentences of more than two years had an average camps, electronic monitoring, scared straight, drug testing and restitution also increased recidivism.59 In order to legitimize the domination racialized students experience, institutions of social control such as schools must convey that these youths are indeed ‘criminals.’ These institutions must convince students that surveillance, brutality, crime, and criminalization are part of everyday life. As they grow older, a vicious cycle emerges. As ‘bad kids’ and ‘thugs’ – racially-coded epithets for youth of colour – internalize their criminalization as a normal part of their everyday lives, they will “react to [their] criminalization through criminality.”60 The infractions of the dominated groups may increase in frequency and severity, leading to an heightened severity of sanctions. Increased surveillance leads these children “to commit acts that further criminalized them and often led to a second arrest.”61 This has a lasting effect: being contained, monitored, and threatened for long periods of time leads to an inability to act “normally” once direct authoritative treatment ended.

Much research supports the conclusion that labeling and exclusion practices

established the existence of “stereotype threat,” lends evidentiary support to

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this assertion.63 Their study provided evidence that negative stereotypes can disrupt performance, produce doubt about one’s abilities, and cause individuals to disidentify from their ethnic group.

The impact of these modes of surveillance and discipline extend beyond the physical and into the psychic realms of children. Education scholar Michael Dumas writes that “schooling is a site of suffering,” and that we must consider “how policy is lived… [and] the deep impression… policy [makes] on flesh, bone, and soul.”64 He examines the way this constant assault is internalized

by Black students, who can feel stigmatized, outcast, shamed, defeated, or hopeless as a result of negative interactions and sanctions imposed by authority figures. Fine and Ruglis attribute this psychological effect to “circuits… of dispossession” wherein schools “[tattoo] material and psychic scars of ‘lack’ onto most Black, Latino, immigrant, and/or poor students.”65 Schools, they explain, are intimate locations where youth develop their identities, construct their senses of self, “read how society views them, develop the capacity to sustain relations, and forge the skills to initiate change.”66 The harm of these educational and prison policies reinforces the need for a prison abolition framework, which would provide more effective solutions than our current penal model.

The problem of responsibilization Modes of governance have become internalized under the current penal system. Today, the ethical subject is someone who is involved in his or her own “rehabilitation” through self-governing.67 Because carceral institutions aim to produce self-monitoring subjects who willingly engage in introspection,68 governing largely happens via responsibilization. Responsibilization is the process through which delinquents are (ideally) “transformed and ethically reconstructed into prudential and self-governing individuals who take full responsibility for their lives and actions and align themselves with the neoliberal project of governing.”69 Breaking the law is constituted as a personal problem resulting from behavioural and cognitive deviance rather than a systemic issue that causes youth to “offend.” Students/prisoners are expected to, no matter their infraction, take responsibility for their actions and “adopt the rhetoric of redemption and present and perform a rehabilitated self.”70 As such, students and prisoners alike are supposed to adopt discourses of regret and individual responsibility.71

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The approach of responsibilization proves to have a harmful objective. Rather to do what they did (or whether they in fact did what they were accused of doing), inmates/students regurgitate what is expected of them and feign remorse.72 Within this framework, healing and strengthening individuals and communities is not the ultimate goal; rather, it is to enforce a sense of culpability as a means of achieving “justice” and deterring future crime. This is what Fine and Ruglis term a “shadow discourse of personal responsibility,” which is largely performative.73

The transformations required appear overwhelming. The solution, however, is straightforward, though not easy: a prison abolition framework must be applied to American schools. Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, notes that “the education justice movement and the prison justice movement have been operating separately […] as though they’re in silos,” when in fact they are deeply connected.74 Davis also links education and incarceration, naming “decarceration” as the crux of social and institutional transformation: Positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we [should] try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment-demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels […] and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.75 As Meiners explains, this means practicing the “both/and:” providing services and inciting radical social change. Incarcerated youth need many services, and “yet equally important are structural and paradigmatic shifts that alter the contexts that produce such high levels of incarceration in the U.S..”76 A tension arises from this “both/and” framework. This is the push and pull between the calls to reform and the calls to abolish, between the immediate reforms that directly address the conditions and needs of individuals affected by the system, and the need for a total re-envisioning of the system. Much can be gained through the application of a prison abolition framework to schools, and in order to jumpstart this change we can begin with short-term reforms with a “both/and” approach.

What is most crucial about prison abolition is that it positions community at the centre of the process. Young individuals, parents and community members who live, work, and learn at schools where discipline is an issue can provide the

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impetus for policy change. This same constituency can hold the decision makers, changes. For example, in Denver, Colorado, the community, the school district, in schools.77 This agreement prohibited the police from disciplining students or interfering with their learning, and ensured that school-based incidents would not result in juvenile or criminal charges. Schools employed a graduated, incremental (rather than zero-tolerance) approach to deciding consequences.

This kind of discipline calls for caps on the duration of suspensions, particularly for low-level infractions, as well as limitation of suspensions for off-campus conduct, and the use of in-school instead of out-of-school suspension.

The San Francisco Bay Area, where nearly three-quarters of the 37,000 students in district-run schools come from low-income families, has also proven to be at the heart of the drive to combat youth criminalization in schools. In May

otherwise willfully defying the authority of school staff) as a reason to suspend any student and to invest at least $2.3 million to expand transformative justice practices in the district’s schools. These measures produced great success, reducing suspension rates by 87 per cent.78 Also in 2015, San Francisco’s school

crime prevention services in the school environments) intervention only to the most serious criminal cases, such as those involving weapons or serious bodily harm. Since 2015, the number of arrests inside Bay Area schools has been cut in half, from nearly 200 to about 90.79 The decrease in arrests can be linked to the investment in resources to help teachers and administrators create positive school climates. When students feel valued and comfortable speaking to an adult if they are troubled and need help, they are less likely to act out.

The fact that Black boys are so often stripped of their innocence signals that white teachers must unlearn racist tendencies. Additionally, and importantly, schools must also diversify their staffs. Having more staff who are members of racial and ethnic minorities may help ameliorate the racial gap in school discipline, if they are less inclined to view youth of colour as menacing and dangerous. Though school staff who are members of racial and ethnic minority groups may still

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employ punitive strategies, research on attitudes among juvenile justice system Diversity in schools might lead to greater attention paid to the problem of race and ethnicity and school punishment, which could result in reductions of racist punitive discipline.

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As per the both/and framework, the required changes go beyond policies like those mentioned above. They also require a paradigm shift in the way we approach reform. Open communication, including the collection, analysis, and dissemination of detailed data about the school-to-prison nexus is critical to the transformation of schools. This data-driven reform is crucial to identifying the precise sources of the nexus in various communities and understanding students’ encounter with exclusionary discipline and the juvenile justice system. Data is also needed in order to eliminate the asymmetric assignment of punishment based on race. As Crenshaw notes, “to grasp the full dimensions of the educational crisis with greater clarity, it is essential that data be disaggregated by race and gender.”81 Moreover, we must both develop and assess more data on Black women and girls in prison and educational systems. The Department of Education should therefore conduct race- and gender-sensitive analyses of its raw data and include that information in its annual reports.

Working toward abolition is not easy. Meiner explains that “the work for prison abolition is at once a policy issue, a community accountability issue, a family issue, and an issue that must be understood to be deeply personal.”82 As scholar and antiviolence worker Beth Richie outlines, if we are to build stronger communities,

implications for educators, disciplinarians, and administrators of ‘justice.’

Through prison abolition policies, we can trade harmful policies for positive approaches to discipline, such as transformative justice practices, positive behaviour supports, and federal legislation promoting positive school climates.

Transformative justice and prison abolition go hand in hand and can be considered in tandem in a ‘transformative/abolitionist’ framework. They each seek safety and accountability rather than relying on alienation, punishment, or state/systemic violence, and they can both be implemented in prisons and

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schools to great effect. Critical Resistance, an American organization dedicated to opposing the expansion of the prison industrial complex, reports that in their of recidivism and have thereby contributed to lower crime rates.”83 Indeed, the aforementioned Public Safety Canada study found that community sanctions promote crime deterrence more effectively than incarceration.84 Integral to an improved social justice philosophy of peace and justice, transformative justice creates a much-needed pathway toward a new criminal justice system in the U.S..

Finally, fracturing the school-to-prison nexus calls for the building of other sustainable frameworks for public safety. Prevailing carceral logic “recycles the false notion that safety can be achieved through essentially more of the same: more guards, fences, surveillance, suspensions, and punishment.”85 Building abolition calls for a recognition of the fact that these methods (building more prisons, expelling and suspending more Black students, policing schools) will not make schools safer nor communities stronger. Increased punishment does not guarantee safety and in fact may hinder it.

The use of tactics and methodologies from the realm of criminal control in educational facilities is no accident, for schools are “sites of dynamic social interaction wherein functions are continuously negotiated, structural constraints subjectively interpreted, proper responses hotly contested and inconsistently implemented.”86 Youth of colour are constructed as “disposable, embodying danger, worthy of dispossession, or in need of containment in order to protect ‘us.’”

In classrooms or prison barracks, the effects are similarly deleterious. Excessive punishment leads to higher dropout and expulsion rates, incarceration, and recidivism rates, and has a profoundly negative psychological impact. In order to resist and change the state of discipline in America, it is essential to create critical policy tasked with taking targeted steps at not simply reforming, but overhauling our approach to discipline. Fine and Ruglis put it best when they say that “[t]he the bleeding, within and beyond schools.” With this intentionality, we will shrink our bloated prisons and strengthen our schools synchronously. With a prison abolition framework, we can ensure that all American children have a chance at obtaining a high school diploma rather than a criminal record.

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Notes

Souls 8

1. Samuel Bowles, Schooling in Capitalist America

no. 2 (2006): 40-54.

Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age

within the school environment (including tests,

of Crisis (London & New York: Verso, 2001); Loïc

attendance and discipline policies) ultimately result in

Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and

dropout.

(New York: Basic Books, 1976); Christian Parenti,

Prison Meet and Mesh”, in David Garland (ed.) Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences, pp.

82–120. (London: Sage Publications, 2001); William

12. Gilmore.

G Staples, Everyday Surveillance: Vigilance and

Abolition democracy: Prisons,

Visibility in Postmodern Life (Lanham, MD: Rowman

Democracy, and Empire (New York, NY: Seven Stories, 2005): 23.

International

Journal

of

Qualitative

Studies

in

Education 16, no. 4 (2003): 553–65.

the School to Prison Pipeline,” From Education to Incarceration (2014).

Theoretical Criminology 12, no.1 (2012): 79-101.

Review and Recommendations,” The American Psychologist 63, no. 9 (2008): 852.

Transforming Anthropology 17, no. 1 (2009): 20-33; and Punitive School Discipline,” Social Problems 57, Women in Canada,” CGPC Gender, Place & Culture

no. 1 (2010): 25-48.

17, no. 6 (2000): 705–723 4. Ruth Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California Policy Centre, 2000).

The New Jim Crow:

20. Erica Meiners, Right to Be Hostile: Schools,

Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New

Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies (New York: Routledge, 2007): 548, emphasis mine.

22. Toward Transformative Justice: A Liberatory Approach to Child Sexual Abuse and Other Forms of Intimate and Community Violence,

this paper.

Disproportionate impact of K-12 school suspension and expulsion on Black students in southern states.

25. Barry Feld, Bad kids: Race and the Transformation of the Juvenile Court James, The Angela Y. Davis Reader (Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1998); Russel

Press, 1999).

26. Jonathan Simon, Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear,

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a 13-year-old student to the ground and hurting his

tolerance language in school discipline manuals was

who was crying in the hallway (Washington Post, 2015).

28. Skiba; Simon; Kimberle Crenshaw, “Black Girls

39. Rios, 41.

40. Reynolds et al.

41. Teaching Interrupted: Do Discipline Policies in Today’s Public Schools Foster the Common Good?

Dehumanizing Black Children.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106, no. 4 (2014).

on Police in Schools”, The Washington Post. WP Schools

and Suspensions: Self-reported Crime and the

Company, 18 Feb. 2013 45. Skiba.

Growing Use of Suspensions (Washington, DC: 47. Davis, The Angela Davis Reader, 103.

Panthers” (City 11.3: 313-56, 2007): 342.

32. Davis, The Angela Y. Davis Reader, 96.

51. See Eileen Poe-Yagamata, and Michael Jones,

breathalyzers.

36. Note that metal detectors evoke the criminal

knowledge,

historical

dehumanization,

and

contemporary consequences,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94, no. 2(2008): 292–306.

53. Crenshaw, 17. prison mentality.

., 24.

56. Rios, 52.

Changing Penal Enterprise,” Punishment & Society 6,

57. Meiners, 40.

no. 3(2004): 255–70.

60. Rios, 48. in South Carolina, where a student was thrown out

., 46.

62. e.g. Ronnie Casella, At Zero Tolerance: Punishment, Prevention, and School Violence (New

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Intersections: Journal of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Schools and Delinquency

87. Fine and Ruglis, 31.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69, no. 5 (1995): 797-811.

Race Ethnicity and Education, 17 no. 1 (2014): 3.

65. Fine and Ruglis, 20.

67. David Garland, “Governmentality and the Problem Theoretical Criminology 1, no. 2 (2007): 173-215.

Practice,” The British Journal of Criminology 53, no. 3 (2013): 419-437.

73. Fine & Ruglis, 20.

74. Quoted in Jody Sokolower, “Schools and the New Rethinkingschools.org, Rethinking Schools, 2012.

75. Davis, Abolition democracy, 107.

76. Meiners, 550.

77. St. George.

78. Brett Garland, Cassia Spohn, Eric Wodahl, “Racial

Justice Policy Journal, 5 no. 2 (2008).

80. Johanna Wald and Daniel Losen, Deconstructing the School-to-Prison Pipeline: New Directions for Youth Development, Number 99 (New York: JosseyBass, 2003).

81. Crenshaw, 41.

83. The Abolitionist Toolkit, Resistance, 2014. http://criticalresistance.org.

85. Meiners, 559.

20

Toward a hysterical embodiment of religion: reclaiming St. Teresa of Avila’s religious experience through feminism and psychoanalysis Saima Desai

T

hroughout her life, Saint Teresa of Avila suffered from chronic pain, fainting, and seizures, which were retroactively diagnosed as hysteria by 19th century writers over 300 years later. She writes of pain so overwhelming that “the entire body contracts and neither arm nor foot can be moved.”1 believed it to be part of the “divine favours” sent to her by God. Teresa was a mystic who believed that the ultimate religious experience was one’s absorption into God—a necessarily ecstatic experience characterized by heightened spiritual awareness. Her seizures became such an integral part of her ecstatic and mystical experience that she was christened the “Patron Saint of Hysterics.”2 Since being that has been applied almost exclusively to women.3 Because of its gendered origins, Micale called hysteria “a dramatic medical metaphor for everything that men found mysterious or unmanageable” in women.4 In 1980, hysteria was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM); we now understand that hysteria was a name used to group a stunning variety of somatic symptoms rather than a single, cohesive medical condition.

Despite the fact that Teresa’s experiences of ecstasy had acute physical symptoms, Teresa insisted that the body can play little or no part in religious experience. In her text, The Interior Castle, Teresa guides the reader through a journey of faith whereby the soul must “enter into itself” in order to achieve unity with God. This dismissal of the body is suspicious because of Teresa’s struggles with bodily pain throughout the writing of The Interior Castle. Moreover, this dismissal must be contextualized within a long history of Western patriarchal religious thought desacralizing bodies—especially female ones. In this paper

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experience, and argue that despite this dismissal, her religious experience appears to be one that resists disembodiment. I will then argue that Teresa’s embodiment of religion and ecstasy, which can and has been read as hysteria under Freud and Breuer’s account of the condition, allows us to reclaim hysteria as a feminine mystical religious experience which treats the body as the site of sacred union.

While hysteria has a long history preceding Freud, I focus on Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria when examining Teresa’s experience of ecstasy. One of Freud’s earliest works, the text was instrumental in his development of the idea that psychological states manifest as somatic symptoms. Later, second-wave feminist thinkers would attempt to reclaim hysteria to argue that, rather than being a medical condition, hysteria represented the corporeal manifestations of living in a female body that is subject to the violence and proscriptions of patriarchal culture. In combination with Teresa’s embodied experience of ecstasy, I use Freud’s idea of psychosomatic illness and feminist reclamations of hysteria to challenge Western religious thought, particularly its assumption

The Interior Castle In Chapter 1 of The Interior Castle, Teresa describes the human body as the “coarse setting of the diamond, or the outer walls of the castle.”6 The text is premised upon distinguishing between the soul and the body. Teresa constantly exhorts her reader to privilege the soul above “earthly matters,” arguing that the body is merely an “accessory.”7 The soul is the seat of true spirituality, at the centre of which stands “the principal chamber in which God and the soul hold their most secret intercourse.”8 This rhetoric of the ‘soul above body’ hierarchy reaches its climax as one achieves unity with God, at which point the soul is seemingly “literally separated from the body.”9 Teresa was never afforded the luxury of forgetting about her body; despite her obvious disdain for the body, her body constantly reasserts itself in the text as a of the soul, the body is a persistent intrusion. Teresa begins the book with an admission that “during the last three months I have suffered from noises and a great weakness in my head that have made it painful for me to write even on

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necessary business.”10 She repeatedly interrupts her own writing on the soul to reference her illness—her writing is punctuated with admissions of physical pain. Partway through the The Interior Castle, she writes: Whilst writing this I am thinking of the loud noise in my head which I mentioned in the Introduction, and which has made it almost impossible to obey the command given me to write this. It sounds as if there were a number of rushing waterfalls within my brain, while in other parts, drowned by the sound of the waters, are the voices of birds singing and whistling.11

the body precludes one from focusing on the spiritual journey. For Teresa, of mind. And yet, the fact that Teresa opens the text with a discussion of the body, and an admission of pain, means that the text already acknowledges the importance of the body, and situates the soul in relation to it. At the least, the fact that Teresa feels the need to immediately denigrate the body points to her understanding that a preoccupation with one’s body is pervasive and universal, and that religious exhortations to dismiss the soul’s “mortal covering”12 are

At the beginning of The Interior Castle, the body asserts itself as a site of pain and a distraction or hindrance to Teresa’s work of religious writing and prayer. This bodily pain subsides during the experience of ecstasy. She later says, “This noise [in my head] disturbs my prayer when unaccompanied with ecstasy, but when it is ecstatic I do not feel any pain, however great.” She even suggests that “God has sent this suffering in my head to help me to understand the matter”14 of the soul’s separation from the body at ecstasy. But ecstasy, rather than liberating Teresa from her body, actually reasserts the body for the second time, this time as the site of mystical experience.

Teresa admits that religious experience leading up to ecstasy can produce bodily symptoms. Though she denies having experienced such symptoms, she

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sometimes they cause a compression of the chest, and uncontrollable exterior motions violent enough to cause bleeding at the nose and other painful effects.”15 throughout all the mansions and faculties, until at last it reaches the body.”16 devotion, since their “weakness of constitution makes them more liable to such mistakes.”17 She writes: On feeling any interior joy, [women’s] bodies being languid and weak, they fall into a slumber—they call it spiritual sleep—which is a more advanced stage of what I have described; they think the soul shares in it as well as the body, and abandon themselves to a sort of intoxication. The more they lose self-control, the more do their feelings get possession of them, because the frame becomes more feeble. They fancy this is a trance and call it one, but I call it nonsense; it does nothing but waste their time and injure their health.18 This ‘fake trance’ that women affect and Teresa disdains is juxtaposed against the “genuine raptures, not fancies that come from women’s weakness,”19 which Teresa experiences during ecstasy: [...] for when He intends ravishing the soul He takes away the power of speech, and although occasionally the other faculties are retained rather longer, no word can be uttered. Sometimes the person is at once deprived of all the senses, the hands and body becoming as cold as if the soul had 20

The body seems to die as the soul departs, and then is reanimated. The soul, then, cannot escape the body—it always returns to the body following ecstasy, and ecstasy itself has profound physical symptoms. Teresa uses descriptions of the body to explain religious experience and ecstasy, and repeatedly references her headaches—even going so far as to argue that God sent the pain to assist her in her spiritual journey. It is suspicious that she would begin The Interior Castle by excluding the body from being an important part of religious experience, given her admission that physical pain can be a facet of one’s divine journey.

Teresa’s dismissal of the body isn’t new; her writing must be contextualised

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within a long Christian tradition of denigrating the (female) body. “Western by association, of the female person,” writes Lanzetta.21 “Throughout this history, despite cultural and religious variations, women’s bodies have been effectively desacralized, treated as biologically inferior, morally corrupt, and wantonly carnal,” she continues.22 Mikhail Bakhtin posited that Western culture was structured by two representations of the body: the classical and the grotesque. proportionate, spiritual, and pure,” grotesque bodies were “disproportionate, heterogeneous, profane, sinful, congenitally impure, and deserving of punishment.”23 Grotesque bodies were associated almost exclusively with women and other marginalized groups. Under Bakhtin’s theory, the grotesque concerns itself with the “lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy and birth.”24 Thus, to reference or represent the body— even if only to then dismiss it as unimportant—within a religious text is not a neutral act. Rather, the ways that bodies are dismissed within classical Christian thought participates in the patriarchal legacy of Western theologies.

Many mystics have recorded experiencing “a peculiar type of traumatic physical seizure often accompanied by powerful, disruptive emotions.”25 These seizures became the subject of what Mazzoni calls the “hysteria-mysticism interpretive tug-of-war,”26 where 19th century doctors, theologists, and psychoanalysts with such seizures and fainting spells throughout her adult life, and they became associated with her mystical experiences. She describes the “tortures” sent to her by God: [...] the pain is so excessive that one can hardly bear it, and occasionally, according to those of my sisters who sometimes see me like this, and so now understand it better, my pulses almost cease to beat, my bones are all disjointed, and my hands are so stiff that sometimes I cannot clasp them together. Until the next day I have pains in the wrist, and in the entire body, as though my bones had been wrenched asunder.27

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Mazzoni catalogues the many times that Teresa has been retroactively ‘diagnosed’ with hysteria by 19th century writers. Charcot pronounced her an “undeniable hysteric,”28 and his student, the Belgian Jesuit Father Hahn, produced a lengthy study which concluded that Teresa suffered from “an organic hysteria as characteristic as possible.”29 Teresa, who Mazzoni calls the “quintessential mystical woman,” set the stage for future doctors and psychoanalysts to generalize her experience and diagnose other mystics as hysterical.30 It was Freud and Breuer who, in their 1895 Studies on Hysteria that the origin of hysteria was psychological, rather than physical. Under their framework, hysteria was caused by a traumatic incident, or “a number of partial traumas forming a group of provoking causes.”31 Trauma has an affect—a sort of emotional energy—that must be discharged, usually through an action such as revenge. If the discharge does not occur, this “blockage” of the affect, which causes the hysteric symptoms, can be “abreacted” by talk-therapy.32 Often, says Breuer, hysteria ensues when the “nature of the trauma excluded a reaction.” He 33 Breuer catalogued the hysterical symptoms that were a result of such trauma, some of which align closely with Teresa’s account of mystical experience, such as “contractures and paralyses, hysterical attacks and epileptoid convulsions, which every observer regarded as true epilepsy, petit mal and disorders in the nature of tic [...] various forms of disturbance of vision, constantly recurrent visual hallucinations, etc.”34 Freud and Breuer also argue that hysterical attacks were prone to recurrence.

Though an attack could occur spontaneously, it could also be provoked “either by stimulation of a hysterogenic zone or by a new experience similar to the pathogenic experience.”35 Likewise, there is a sense of recurrence in Teresa’s account of ecstasy. She writes that the intensity of ecstasy cannot be maintained; rather, one cycles through peaks of ecstasy and valleys of subdued devotion.

“This supreme state of ecstasy never lasts long,” writes Teresa, and one may only achieve ecstasy once in many years.36 But, indeed, the entire task of The Interior Castle is to act as a manual to guide the reader towards the experience of ecstasy, to cause ecstasy to recur. In a similar way as a hysterical attack recurs until the affect has been abreacted, so too can one achieve ecstasy repeatedly.

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Freud and Breuer’s accounts of hysteria do not map perfectly onto Teresa’s symptoms; in particular, Freud’s assertion that hysteria resulted from the repression of early sexual trauma in those predisposed to the condition “does 37 Some, like James Leuba, have rejected the psychoanalytic theory of repressed sexual trauma while still applying Freud and Breuer’s broader framework of hysteria to Teresa. Leuba argues that the mental and physical toll and the ‘unnatural’ celibacy of ascetic monastic life act as the trauma that causes hysteria in so many mystics—the latter cause being particularly important in the case of Teresa.38 In this paper, I do not seek to ‘diagnose’ Teresa (or any other mystics) with hysteria, as Leuba does—to do so the ways that Freud and Breuer’s gendered conception of the mind-body connection in hysteria lay the groundwork for a theory of mystical experience that is embodied by female mystics like Teresa. Doing so does not require me to determine whether Teresa had a ‘real’ medical condition, or whether her seizures were a non-pathological religious experience.

Segal explains that, prior to Freud, “the patient’s body manifested pain, sensitivity, cramp or paralysis—conditions often so extreme as to make active life impossible. But no physical cause was in evidence. How then to explain, treat, or even diagnose such a problem? And what to call it?”39 Freud’s theories of hysteria were seminal for their explanation of the power of the mind over the body as well as for ‘solving’ the problem of hysterical symptoms by arguing that hysteria was a psychological state manifesting as physical signs.

It was Breuer’s case study of Anna O (Bertha Pappenheim) that Freud would discuss in length in his Five Lectures, and out of which he would later develop his psychoanalytic method of the “talking cure.” Breuer would visit Anna regularly and have her recount her “whole stock of imaginative products.”40 He wrote, “When this was done she became perfectly calm, and next day she would be agreeable, easy to manage, industrious and even cheerful.”41 It was by “abreacting” the psychological blockage through language that the physical symptom then disappeared. By linking physical symptoms with an affect—a deeply rooted, lingering feeling often resulting from an event or idea—Freud

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The body became the stage on which emotions were being played out. While Teresa posits that the soul literally separates from the body during the course of a hysterical attack/ecstatic experience, Freud and Breuer make the mind and the body inseparable. Freud and Breuer’s conception of hysteria is useful, since it inscribes hysteria onto the (female) body, which allows us to then employ the (female) body as evidence of psychological states. As Segal writes of the hysterical body, “Something ‘inside’ must be made perceptible by coming ‘outside.’ Only then can it become a textual witness.”42

Freud invented psychoanalysis on the basis of Studies on Hysteria and his experiences with the patients—nearly all of whom are women. Freud does not say that hysteria affects only women, but women are the subjects of all of the case studies in Studies on Hysteria, and Freud notes that “needlework and similar occupations render women especially prone” to hysteria.43 “The basis of psychoanalysis, the ‘invention’ of modern hysteria (by Freud and Breuer, after Charcot) is thus also the ‘invention’ of modern femininity,” writes Devereux.44 The term “hysteria” comes from the Greek word for ‘womb.’ In Timaeus, Plato explains that hysteria occurred when the womb wandered upwards, with the risk of it blocking the woman’s airwaves.45 Since its inception, hysteria has always been gendered, and has always served as a way to mark women’s bodies as different from men’s—our strangely anarchic wombs are the biological basis for our supposed weakness and instability. Later, hysteria would be used to group and medicalize an astonishingly broad variety of illnesses and nonpathological behaviours under one name, becoming a shorthand for everything that men found mysterious and inscrutable about women. In fact, in “Female Sexuality,” Freud wrote that hysteria was “characteristically feminine.”46 For Freud, hysteria was the result of women’s inability to achieve identity through the Oedipal moment of recognition: women are psychically scarred by their “castration,” with the female genitalia representing loss and absence of a penis. Today, the term “hysteria” has fallen out of use, in part because of its misogynistic and gender-essentialist roots, but also because it’s splintered into many different illnesses. “On the one hand, hysteria appears to be a category without content; on the other, hysteria has an amorphous content incapable of being controlled by a clear category,” writes Georges Rousseau.47 Today, hysteria

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is far more useful as a conceptual tool than as a medical diagnosis. I intend to wield it as the former.

More recently, women have taken up the term “hysteria” with the intention of reclaiming it for a feminist project. According to Devereux, within secondwave feminism, hysteria emerged “not as a medical condition but a cultural one, an embodied index of forms of oppression that Showalter described as ‘a that cannot be verbalized.’”48 The demonstration of somatic symptoms with unknown pathology came to symbolize the ways that patriarchy was making women ill, manifesting as dis-ease on the female body. Some thinkers, like Julie Mitchell, have even argued that feminism itself was “the demand for the right to be hysterical.”49 Devereux terms hysteria a “pathology without origin other than the fact of femininity.”50 Hysteria came to signify any feminine dis-ease under the conditions of patriarchy, and so womanhood was a state of perpetual hysteria—thus, the “demand for the right to be hysterical” was a demand for recognition and respect for womanhood.

It is a dangerous and tricky project to reclaim hysteria, and to take up the language developed by 19th century psychoanalysis for a contemporary feminist project. The second-wave feminist thinkers who tried to reclaim hysteria did not wish to reinstate hysteria into the DSM, or to regress to a world in which hysteria was treated as a ‘real’ mental illness or medical condition. Writing as a student of third-wave and trans-inclusive feminisms, I am wary that, by

Second-wave feminist scholars took up “hysterical engagement” as a critical practice, to make the point that hysteria “represents the ground of the problem women confront across all the registers of socially engaged gender as they try, with reference to the prescriptions and proscriptions of psychoanalysis and other patriarchal apparatus, to ‘speak as women.’”51 Their task was “to demonstrate how women are driven ‘mad’ by patriarchal ideology, and how that ‘madness’ erupts in women’s writing which can in consequence be read as symptomatic of patriarchal oppression.”52 Hysteria, thus, became a “women’s language.” My project is similar, in that I use hysteria as women’s language of the body. I engage with hysteria to make the point that, historically, there are

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ways in which women and feminine people are trapped inside their bodies.

This is not a function of the body itself—I don’t subscribe to the idea that there is an essentially female body that necessarily includes a womb or any other manifestations of femininity, in its various bodily iterations.

In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty gives an account of the relation of one’s lived body to one’s world, which he believes applies generally to any human existence. What Merleau-Ponty describes is a way in which transcendence moves outwards from the body’s immanence towards the world, calling forth capabilities. This transcendence is unbroken, continuous, pure,

to female bodies.53 Both Young and Merleau-Ponty assume the lived body, rather than pure consciousness, as the locus of subjectivity and transcendence. Young makes the point that female bodily existence is not simply rooted in immanence, but everything women do with their bodies is overlaid with immanence. “A source of these contradictory modalities is the bodily self-reference of feminine comportment, which derives from the woman’s experience of her body as a thing at the same time that she experiences it as a capacity,” she writes.54 She describes an “ambiguous transcendence, a transcendence that is at the same time laden with immanence.”55 According to Young, it’s impossible for women to transcend our bodies in the way that men can; we are trapped between being subjects and objects. Our bodies—pinched, ogled, denigrated, raped, and murdered—are always objects, at the same time as they are that which enacts our intentions.

Women have never been afforded the luxury of dismissing our bodies, as religion would have us do. This leads to the ambivalent position of Teresa, who was caught between trying to align with the obsession with transcendence found in Western religious texts written by men, and recognizing her immanence as a woman. When we speak in general or universal terms about bodies, we are necessarily speaking of normative bodies. The—white, able-bodied, cisgender—male body represents this general and universal body, while the racialized, disabled, trans, and female or feminine body is particular. It is grotesque, and unable to be dismissed as unimportant, or transcended in the

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traditional sense. Transcendence of the body is a central conceit of Western religious experience—even a requirement for some types of religion—and is assumed to apply to all people in the same way and present the same struggles to all those who attempt it.

Teresa’s ambivalent relationship with her body through the course of The Interior Castle is symptomatic of a larger issue within Western religious thought: ignoring the body as a possible site of religious experience. Lanzetta calls this the “excessive transcendence of Western patriarchal theologies.”56 This “excessive such as that which occurs during the ecstatic experience. During ecstasy, Teresa writes, “the soul really appears to have quitted the body.”57 Some feminists see another attempt by patriarchal culture to abandon the body.”58 Lanzetta writes: Western representations of the body perpetuate an antiquated suspicion of the 59

to their bodies in ways that men are not, and are also punished for this fact by a culture that treats anything less than transcendence as weak and sinful.

As I have established, ecstasy is usually seen as a type of transcendence; Teresa believes ecstasy to be the experience of the spirit literally separating from the

ecstasy, rather than discharging the body as a whole, simply strips away the mundane, instrumental aspect of the body: The mystical ecstasy of losing oneself does not dismiss the body as an illfunctioning machine; rather, it sets the body free for a different and new self-expression. […] What is left behind in being-outside-of-oneself is not the body but the body’s instrumentalization as a tool for work or a sex-object.60 Lanzetta, too, seeks to reconceive ecstasy as immanence—which, according to her, is particularly female. According to Lanzetta, “Women live with an intuitive,

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if unrealized sense of the mystical.”61 Lanzetta draws on the writing of Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, and other mystics, who believed that the core of religious experience was a struggle for unity between the self and God. She argues that “women’s presence on earth, on the level of the body, society, and world, [is] a labour and living out of this profound ontological unity.”62 Another way to situate the body within religious experience is to reconceptualize transcendence itself as a version of immanence, as Lanzetta does: I use the concept of transcendence in a particular way: as a sign not of divine distance but of divine closeness. Here transcendence is understood always seeking to communicate its divine origins.63 For Lanzetta, women’s bodies are always already divine, and union with God does not mean discarding the body, but perhaps instead inhabiting it more fully.

If women are to participate in religion through practice, theory, and leadership, it’s essential to theorize a mode of religious experience that does not simply “abandon the body,” but acknowledges—and perhaps even celebrates— women’s immanence. So how does one move towards an experience of ecstasy that is grounded in the body? The answer may lie in the experience of hysteria.

If, through Teresa’s account of ecstasy, we take the symptoms of hysteria as evidence of union with God, then hysteria is an essential part of ecstasy and women’s bodies become the site of ecstatic/hysterical experience. Just as second-wave feminist scholars celebrated women’s embodiment of hysteria, we can celebrate women’s embodiment of religion through ecstasy, too—especially considering the overlap between hysterical and ecstatic experience.

Theorizing hysteria as a type of ecstasy allows us to understand how, for women, the body is not secondary, but rather necessary to religious experience. In the same way that Freud and Breuer connected the psychical and the physical in to the space of the mind, soul, or emotions—also play out on the body. It’s important that I focus on mysticism and ecstasy in this paper. Mysticism focuses on the experience of union with a deity and attaining spiritual knowledge— but in such a way that is inaccessible to the intellect. Thus, mysticism removes

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religious experience from the intellect and traditionally relocates it to the soul.

However, religious experience could perhaps instead be relocated to the body.

As a hallmark of mysticism, the experience of ecstasy, with its profound and acute physical symptoms, lends itself to readings of religion that situate religious

to occur in both. Teresa (perhaps inadvertently) hints at the inextricability of of her senses feels but little dismay at her soul’s being drawn above her, while sometimes, as we read, even the body rises with it?”64

long been the project of spiritual feminisms and goddess traditions. But often reproductive capacity—and we return to the early days of hysteria, when the condition was caused by simply possessing a womb. Despite her disclaimer that of biological femaleness to connect female bodies to the divine.65 For Lanzetta, women’s participation in menstruation, pregnancy, birth, and lactation imbues women with an “intuitive, if unrealized, sense of the mystical.”66 The metaphors of reproduction recur in her writing when she says, “There is something distinctively female in the act of the mystical that bears within itself and labors to bring the divine into the human sphere.”67 But the female body need not be reduced to reproductive capacity in order to believe that the mystical and ecstatic experience is fundamentally female. On a more modern reading of the holiness of the female body, drawing on Young, women living under the constraints of patriarchy have a shared sense of immanence that allows for—or forces—their religious experiences to be embodied.

Teresa denies that her body plays an important part in her religious experience.

To doubt or interrogate this claim is to question Teresa’s sovereignty over her own body and her own experience. A project that is premised upon doubting inception and I do not seek to undermine or invalidate Teresa’s experiences.

Rather, I seek to contextualise them, to use her writing as evidence of a history of desacralizing bodies, especially female ones. I use Teresa’s writing because I

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see in it an ambivalence born of the attempt to fall in line with a historical legacy of thought which fails to match one’s own experiences. This ambivalence about the place of the female body in religion could only come from a woman writing in a patriarchal tradition.

Most (white) men have the privilege of writing from a “universal” standpoint, one that treats all bodies as similarly able to be transcended and all religious experiences as standard. It is clear that Teresa has inherited this legacy. She was commanded to write The Interior Castle by one of her male superiors, and the conceit of the desacralized body persists throughout the text. In order to shed light on Teresa’s experience, it is essential that we interrogate the ways in which her experience of religion, as a woman, would depart from traditional male religious experience. By examining Teresa’s experience, I hope to make it evident that by continuing to privilege the texts of white, Christian men within religious philosophy, we participate in a tradition that erases and invalidates the religious experiences of women and other marginalized people.

“The history of hysteria is composed of a body of writing by men about women,” writes Micale.68 In the same way, the history of Western religion is a body of writing by men, which purports to speak for all people—women included. Women have historically been excluded from self-representation and participation in economies of knowledge in both psychoanalysis and religion. The second-wave feminist reclamation of hysteria is an instance of women demanding the right to speak about themselves and their own bodies. This epistemic shift is similarly essential to the project of religion; when writing about women in religion, it’s important to ground feminist projects in women’s own descriptions of their embodied religious experiences. However, it is imperative that a contemporary theory of female embodiment of religion does not rely on essentialist notions of gender, but rather is founded on women’s shared immanence under patriarchy.

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Notes

1.

Hysteria (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000), 6.

Journal of Religion and Health 24, no. 4 (1985): 304.

2.

3.

Clinical Practice & Epidemiology in Mental Health 8, no.

1 (2012): 110.

4.

5.

Wave,” ESC: English Studies in Canada 40, no.

1 (2014): 20.

The Interior Castle or The Mansions

2006), 42.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21. Beverly J. Lanzetta, Radical Wisdom: A Feminist Mystical Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005),157.

22.

23.

24. Catherine Cucinella, Poetics of the Body: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Marilyn Chin, and Marilyn Hacker (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 74.

25. Bache, 300.

26. Cristina Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism, and Gender in European Culture 27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

Bache, 300.

Mazzoni, 37.

Bache, 301.

Mazzoni, 37.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37. Bache, 302.

38.

39.

Journal of Romance Studies 9, no. 3 (2009): 76.

40. Freud and Breuer, 30.

41.

42. Segal, 81.

43. Freud and Breuer, 13.

44.

45. Segal, 76.

46.

The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Standard edition 1931), 222.

47. Segal, 77.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (New 54.

55.

56. Lanzetta, 159.

57.

58. Dorothee Sölle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 47.

59. Lanzetta, 175.

60. Sölle, 47.

61. Lanzetta, 157.

62.

63.

64.

65. Lanzetta, 156.

66.

67.

68.

Studies on

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Creating a monster: exploring the trans/ gendered dimensions of “Catullus 63”

By Grace Brown

T

he poem “Catullus 63” has been called “the most remarkable poetical creation in the Latin language.”1 Written by 1st century BCE poet Catullus, “Catullus 63” is part of a collection known as the Liber Catulli Veronensis, likely published during Catullus’s lifetime in 54 or 53 BCE.2 Catullus’s poetry often concerns love, sometimes alluding to the Greek poet Sappho.3 Indeed, the subcollection of poems to which “Catullus 63” belongs, known as the carmina maiora, all has to do with marriage.4 However, “Catullus 63” has a seemingly peculiar subject: the myth of Attis and the cult of Cybele. A religion going back to perhaps 6000 BCE, the worship of Cybele, also known as Magna Mater or the Great Mother, is one in a long tradition of gender-variant goddess religions in the Near East that continued until at least 400 CE.5 6 Priestesses of Cybele, known as gallae, castrated themselves, played pipes and drums, and wore women’s clothing. The cult of Cybele was brought to Rome from Phrygia, a kingdom in Anatolia, in 204 BCE.7 The cult was so popular that in some cities gallae.8 Most Roman cities had a temple to Cybele, including one at the very centre of Rome, and two major Roman festivals were organized around her worship. Cybele’s popularity also made her cult an important target for Christian writers.

In “Catullus 63,” a youth called Attis sails to Phrygia with a number of others in order to become gallae. In a moment of religious ecstasy, she and her companions castrate themselves and sing Cybele’s praises.10 The next day, however, Attis regrets her choice and makes a speech lamenting her gender transformation. Hearing this, Cybele becomes enraged and sends her lions after Attis, threatening her into submission. The poem ends with the poet imploring Cybele to stay far from his home lest the same thing happen to him. Because of Catullus 63’s subject of gender variance, the poem is of particular interest to

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trans studies scholars. The last 25 years have seen the rise of trans studies as an academic discipline. There has been an explosion of writings not just analyzing trans and gender non-conforming phenomena but increasingly applying methods of analysis borne out of trans lived experiences to new and disparate 11 One area trans studies has left relatively untouched, however, is classics. Certainly it would be ahistorical to apply the concept of the transsexual or the transgender person, which arose, respectively, in Western capitalist medical and political activist contexts, to ancient Greece or Rome.12 However, to ignore methods of analysis that trans studies has supplied is equally myopic; it is to risk privileging the unmarked, unsituated cis heterosexual male subject in historical analysis.13 To this end, I have sought to analyze “Catullus 63” through the lens of trans studies in order to perhaps bring a new perspective on the poem. In this paper I therefore have sought to use an epistemology that avoids the traps of standpoint epistemology while remaining situated and embodied as a trans woman in my analysis.14 Howard Chiang’s comments in the introduction to Transgender China, in which he warns of the perils of applying a largely Anglo-American analytical concept of transgender to a Chinese context. Instead, Chiang argues for a development of a Chinese transgender framework based on an understanding of Chinese gender variance and “its own unexpected terms.”15 In this paper, I have sought to apply such a framework to Roman gender variance. I argue that “Catullus 63” highlights, generally, Roman cultural anxieties surrounding castration and gender variance and can be read as the worship of Cybele as a foreign religion. I wish to address the interplay of the concepts of wholeness, humanness, and abjection with respect to the trans body, read through Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” and informed by Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror. Developing an analysis of these anxieties surrounding the trans body in Roman times, I will then analyze the mediation of this gender variance across cultural borderlands, read through Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages. I develop the concept of the “monster-Oriental-gallus” following Puar’s concept of the “monster-terrorist-fag” and will use the “monster-Oriental-gallus” to examine Roman cultural anxieties surrounding gender variance. I argue that both the three

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and abjection) and the ethnic otherness that lay at the heart of the cult of Cybele co-constitute a cultural anxiety that lies at the interstices of Roman ethnicity, nationhood, and masculinity.

Un-wholeness In my reading of “Catullus 63” through “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” I identify three Othernesses that characterize the trans body both in “Catullus 63” and in feminist and gay and lesbian writings criticized by Susan Stryker: bodily un-wholeness, animality, and abjection. I argue that “Catullus 63” demonstrates a linkage between bodily wholeness and humanness in a manner similar to that expressed in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” written in the industrial capitalist era of the transsexual. After her castration, as she expresses regret for her religious fervor, Attis refers to herself as “a mere part of [her]self, a sterile man.”16 Similarly, Attis is referred to as “no true woman” earlier in the poem.17 Thus it is heavily implied that Attis is no longer whole once she has castrated herself.

This view of the castrated body is also present in Book 3 (section 3.4) of Silvae, a poetry collection by Roman poet Statius, written in 90s CE. In lines 73-7, Statius praises Roman Emperor Domitian for outlawing castration, writing, “The beautiful generosity of our emperor had not yet begun to keep males intact from birth; now it is a crime to break gender and to change a person. Nature is happy to see only what she has made, and slave mothers are not afraid to be pregnant with sons because of the wicked law.”18 The terms “intact” and “to break gender” suggest a lack of wholeness once a body has been castrated; one is no longer “intact” once castrated but broken. The Latin term intactus has the additional connotation of virginity: “A man’s maleness becomes like a woman’s virginity: pierceable, breakable,” that is to say able to be broken or made un-whole.19 Animality In addition to the problem of bodily wholeness, Attis is implied in “Catullus 63” to be non-human—or animal—after her castration. “Catullus 63” refers 21 This 22 but also connects her with animality. Later Attis refers to herself as being “amid the snow and

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the chilly haunts of beasts,” and “where the hind lives in the woods, where the boar wanders the groves.”23 The implication is that, with her castration and entry into the worship of Cybele, Attis is now in the realm of the animals and is less than human. Similarly, the spectre of the transsexual that haunts today’s Western capitalist society is one that is, at its core, perceived as “at war with nature,” a “creature” with an “unnatural body” and no longer fully human.24 In feminist theory the spectre of the transsexual-monster surfaces as writers such as Mary Daly and Janice Raymond refer to trans women as “necrophilic” or “Frankenstein” and call for them to be “morally mandated out of existence.”25 Stryker suggests that this spectre is similar to Victor Frankenstein’s horror at his own creation in the novel Frankenstein.

Abjection The horror that the trans body, both of Stryker’s transsexual and Catullus’s Attis provokes, is what Kristeva describes as abjection.26 Kristeva writes that the object and abject are both in opposition to the subject.27 However, while being confronted with the object is necessary for the perception of meaning, being confronted with the abject threatens to collapse meaning: The abject has only one quality of the object – that of being opposed to I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me towards where meaning collapses.28 Abjection is, in Kristeva’s words, “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”29 In this sense, Stryker’s transsexual is a clear example of the abject. it was born,” the transsexual breaks down the system of gendered embodiment 30 Similarly, Attis becomes an example of the abject in “Catullus 63.” She disturbs the gendered boundaries of Roman society, becoming “no true woman” while not being a normative Roman adult man either.31 The 32

just as Kristeva describes “a wound with blood and pus” as demonstrating “the

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border of [one’s] condition as a living being.”33 Attis’s reaction is a typical reaction when the subject is faced with the abject: horror. Attis breaks the border between male and female in addition to the border between humanness and animality. In fact, Sue Winters Cohen argues that “Catullus 63” punctures the boundaries of time and space in its narrative as well as the boundaries between living and non-living. For example, Cohen ship to Phrygia and on dry land at the same time.34 Meanwhile, Attis mentions cymbals that “make [their] voice[s] loud,” as if they are alive.35 These narrative techniques further the sense of abjection in “Catullus 63.” The main difference between Catullus and Susan Stryker’s depictions of abjection through bodily from my home,”36 Stryker rejects the subject, “roar[ing] gleefully away from it like a Harley-straddling, dildo-packing leatherdyke from hell.”37 Ethnicity Besides the abjection, animality, and un-wholeness of the trans body, there is an additional factor at play in the poem: ethnicity. Stephen Harrison, writing in Mnemosyne, explores gender and ethnicity in “Catullus 63,” yielding a possible starting point from which to examine the interplay between ethnicity and the trans body in the poem. In analyzing gender in the poem, he explores what he calls the “transsexual” use of allusion to Roman writer Euripedes’s Bacchae and Medea. Harrison highlights similarities between Attis’s speeches in “Catullus 63” to speeches given by the characters Agave and Medea in Bacchae and Medea. Like Agave after killing her son in Bacchae, Attis initially gives a speech of celebration of her violent deed in a state of madness. Attis sings: Come, go together, Gallae, to the lofty groves of Cybele, Go together, wandering herds of the lady of Dindymum, You who, seeking foreign regions in the manner of exiles, Following my line under my leadership as comrades, And unmanned your bodies in mighty hate of Venus.38 However, both characters later give speeches of remorse after realizing what

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they have done. Similarly, Attis, like Medea, regrets leaving her home due to divine intervention. Upon waking the day after her castration, Attis says: Shall I be carried far away from my home to these groves?

Shall I be away from my homeland, my wealth, my friends, my parents?

Shall I be away from the forum, the wrestling-school, the stadium, the gymnasia?

My poor, poor spirit, I must lament again and again.

For what kind of shape is there which I have not passed through?

I have been a young man, a youth, a stripling, a boy […]

Shall I now be spoken of as the servant of the gods, the handmaid of Cybele?

Shall I be a Maenad, a mere part of myself, a sterile man?39 Both characters cross the boundaries between east and west and male and female.

While Medea does not castrate herself or enact as clear a gender transformation as Attis does, Medea’s characterization has some trans/gendered attributes; she is portrayed “as a sort of Homeric hero in the mould of Achilles” and as a “manlike and active female.”40 Nonetheless, Harrison does not explain his usage of the term “transsexual” in his analysis nor does he explore the term’s implications.

He does, however, explore the issue of ethnicity in “Catullus 63.” According to Harrison, myths surrounding Attis and the cult of Cybele usually have Attis as being a youth from Asia, either Phrygia or Lydia. However, in “Catullus 63,” Attis is suggested to be from Greece through a number of allusions. Catullus alludes to Greek cultural institutions, such as “the forum, the wrestling-school, the stadium, the gymnasia,”41 as well as a journey across the (presumably Aegean) sea to Phrygia. Moreoever, Attis’s name possibly alludes to being from Attica.

Hence, “Atthis”—Attis with added aspiration—means a woman from Atticaas and also possibly alludes to the work of Sappho.42 These allusions to Attis’s Greek-ness highlight the foreignness and exoticism of the poem’s setting.

In the same issue of Mnemosyne, Ruurd Nauta takes on the question of ethnicity in “Catullus 63” in the Roman context. According to Nauta, the cult of Cybele had a highly ambivalent position in Roman society. Cybele was honored by

from marriage and normative adult male sexuality. In “Catullus 63,” Attis gives the reasoning for her and her comrades’ self-castration as a “mighty hate of

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Venus,” rendered by Nauta as “excessive loathing of sex.”43 Furthermore, gallae (castrated priestesses) were often viewed by Roman writers as cinaedi, or men who took the passive role during sex.44 This practice was seen as dishonorable

by Roman normative standards.45 Along with the abandonment of marriage and normative Roman sexual practice, Nauta argues, using other Roman sources, that Attis’s self-castration is an abandonment of the Roman ideals of pietas patria (homeland). Attis voices regret about leaving her parents—the representation of pietas—and her homeland—the representation of patria—in her journey to Phrygia.46 Similarly, the Roman author Lucretius argues that the gallae’s castration was punishment for their lack of pietas through ungratefulness towards their parents, symbolized by Cybele the Great Mother.47 Lucretius also links the ideals of pietas and patria; the gallae are punished for their lack of both.48 Because of the lack of such core Roman values as marriage, pietas, and patria, the worship of Cybele was viewed with a certain amount of suspicion. Until 101 BCE, no Roman citizens could become gallae, and it was not until 50 CE that all restrictions on becoming gallae were removed.49 This ambivalence would have manifested as a cultural anxiety because of Phrygia’s mythic linkage to Roman national identity. In Vergil’s Aeneid, Rome is said to be settled by Trojan settlers. These Trojans are often referred to as Phrygians in “Catullus 63,” and Cybele is characterized as an important Trojan/ Phrygian goddess. In the poem, an enemy of the Trojans/Phrygians insults their masculinity and suggests that they “leave weapons to the men” amid multiple references to the worship of Cybele, most notably the pipes and drums characteristic of the gallae.50 Thus, through their descent from Aeneas, Romans’ national character would, in the minds of readers of “Catullus 63,” contain a certain relationship to the worship of Cybele including the gallae.51 Thus, “Catullus 63” speaks to a certain cultural anxiety around the Roman national character. This anxiety is produced by the ambivalent relationship of the cult of Cybele both as a foreign religion and as a state-sponsored religion mythically linked to the founding of Rome.

“Cattallus 63” and Terrorist Assemblages To bring ethnicity into conversation with the Othernesses of the trans body that

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Terrorist Assemblages, an approach parallelling Harrison and Nauta’s analysis of Greek and Roman ethnicity in the poem. However, while Harrison and Nauta largely keep these analyses separate from the trans/gendered aspects of “Catullus 63,” I see ethnicity and gender as co-constituting one another, in line with Jasbir Puar’s analysis of the War on Terror in Terrorist Assemblages. In Terrorist Assemblages, Puar seeks to analyze the creation of queer subjects that are acceptable and unacceptable to the nationalist/imperialist state (in this case the United States of the 2000s), as well as the queering of those subjects who are deemed unacceptable to the nationalist/imperialist state, regardless of those subjects’ actual sexualities.

Puar gives the example of the portrayal of Osama bin Laden in the U.S. following 9/11 as a main example of the queering of unacceptable subjects. Her analysis involves American depictions of bin Laden in which he is shown to be anally penetrated, perceived as a “man of narcissistic homoeroticism,” called a “bitch” and a “fag,” shown as possessing a micropenis (and thus being unmanly/ emasculated), and engaging in bestiality.52 All of these depictions construct an image of bin Laden as exceedingly perverse and emasculated/feminized. His depiction as gender variant and queer perpetuates longstanding Orientalist discourses surrounding “Oriental” men, becoming the prime example of the spectre of the “monster-terroristfag” haunting contemporary American society.53 This spectre then provokes a separation of queer subjects into “good” (patriotic, gender-conforming, white, middle class, monogamous) and “bad” (terroristic/un-American, gendervariant, racialized, working class/poor, perverse) queer subjects.54 Thus, despite the temptation in dominant discourse, queerness and race cannot be cleaved from one another.55 Rather, queerness and race co-constitute queer subjects in the era of imperialism.

Terrorist Assemblages is not a work of trans studies, but comes from the related 56 Nonetheless, Terrorist Assemblages holds a number of insights for trans studies scholars. Just as race, nationalism, and sexuality become inseparable from one another in Terrorist Assemblages, so too do nationalism and gender variance.57 After all, part of what makes a good homonationalist subject is a distinct lack of gender variance, while the spectre of the “monster-

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terrorist-fag”58 is marked by effeminacy—gender variance—just as much as it is marked by perversion. In the homonationalist, masculinist imagination, faggotry is always synonymous with femininity.59 Furthermore, Susan Stryker has noted the role monstrosity plays in the construction of the spectre of the transsexual in the popular, as well as feminist and gay-and-lesbian imaginations.60 Thus, as much as Terrorist Assemblages belongs to queer theory, it can also provide a basis for trans studies analysis as well. Clearly much of Puar’s analysis is not directly applicable to pre-capitalist, pre-imperialist Rome. However, her central insight into the interplay between race, sexuality, and nationhood has clear implications for the analysis of the work. Indeed, “Catullus 63” sharply demonstrates how ethnicity, gender variance, and nationhood constitute Roman subjects. This constitution can be seen to the trans body come together with an Orientalist understanding to produce what we might call, following Puar, the spectre of the “monster-Oriental-gallus,” who haunts the good male Roman citizen.

“Monster-oriental-gallus” in “Catullus 63” As I have already demonstrated, Attis in the poem is treated as abject, as unwhole, and as unhuman. However, this transformation is informed just as much by her location and by ethnic concerns as it is by her gender. As Harrison points out, in her regret speech, Attis decries both her new embodiment and her new distance from Hellenistic cultural institutions. The next few lines of the poem are arguably even more illustrative. Attis laments of her past: I have been a young man, a youth, a stripling, and boy, My doors were crowded, my thresholds were warm, When I came to leave my bedchamber at sunrise.61 In this passage, Attis expresses a libidinal attachment to her old homeland of Greece as well as her role as an attractive pais kalos (“beautiful boy”). As a distinctly Greek sexual role, Attis’s loss of being a pais kalos is intimately bound up in her loss of

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her current role as “sterile man,” linking the image of the good Roman male citizen to erotic power and the “monster-Oriental-gallus” to impotence.

Similarly, Attis’s embodiment as a “monster-Oriental-gallus” is explicitly tied to place, that is to say, to Phrygia. Attis’s gender transformation is, after all, preceded by her geographic boundary-crossing from Greece to Phrygia. Her arrival at Phrygia is the motivating factor that leads to her castration: When he touched the Phrygian groves in desire and with speeding foot And approached the shady region of the goddess clothed with woods There, goaded by raving madness and wandering in mind 63

Furthermore, it is the physical characteristics of Phrygia that give Attis the sense of animality. As stated previously Attis refers to herself as being “amid the snow and the chilly haunts of beasts,” and “where the hind lives in the woods, where the boar wanders the groves.”64 the savage groves.65 Phrygia is, in Catullus’s description, a wild, animalistic country, juxtaposed against the Greece of the “the forum, the wrestling-school, the stadium, the gymnasia.”66 Phrygia’s wildness in Catullus’s depiction parallels its political situation—the region had been only recently incorporated into the Roman Republic at the time of the writing of “Catullus 63.”

of “Catullus 63,” in which this spectre literally haunts the poet. Catullus writes: Goddess so great, goddess Cybele, lady goddess of Dindymum, May all your madness stay far from my home, mistress: Drive others in frantic speed, drive others to madness.68 Catullus in this passage appeals to Cybele to be spared the same fate as Attis. The plea exposes an anxiety around masculinity and gender variance for Catullus, but it also shows an opposition between the good Roman male citizen and the “monster-Oriental-gallus.” Nauta remarks that, in contrast to the now-wandering Attis, the narrator has a domus (home),69 while Cohen and Skinner theorize that the

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narrator is Catullus himself. Combined with the fact that there were restrictions on Roman citizens becoming gallae in the period in which “Catullus 63” was written, it is extremely likely that the narrator of “Catullus 63” is a male Roman citizen. If we follow Cohen in arguing that “Catullus 63” can be interpreted as a nightmare, Roman citizen by the spectre of becoming a “monster-Oriental-gallus.”

“Monster-Oriental-gallus” and Roman masculinity Having demonstrated the existence of the spectre of the “monster-Orientalgallus” in “Catullus 63,” I will now mobilize this concept to better analyze Roman cultural anxieties around gender variance more generally. In order to understand the threat posed by the “monster-Oriental-gallus” to Roman masculinity, the means through which Roman masculinity functioned must gender presentation, but also on age and dominance—erotic dominance as well as dominance in the home and in the family. Any loss of dominance was viewed as a threat to one’s maleness, producing immense cultural anxiety surrounding the preservation of masculinity.70 As Nauta demonstrates, the achievement of masculinity was highly bound up with the Roman ideals of pietas and patria.

While effeminate, passive boys were seen as legitimate objects of sexual desire in Roman society, men were excluded from relations with freeborn boys in order to preserve the achievement of masculinity among Roman citizens. Eroticized passive boys were therefore ideally of slave or ex-slave backgrounds; crucially, many of these boys were of foreign origin.71 emerge from the Roman sexual system: the masculine, virile male Roman citizen, and the foreign-born, Other, feminized, passive boy.

This division is clearly visible in Book 1 of Tibullus (section 1.4), written by Roman poet Tibullus a couple decades after “Catullus 63” was written. The narrator, the virile god Priapus, praises boys who love poetry and the arts. However, Priapus curses those who prefer gifts to poetry with castration: “Let that one follow wanderings, and may he sever his worthless genitals in the Phrygian way. Venus 72 This threat demonstrates a clear division between the virile Roman god Priapus, and to a lesser extent cultured boys, on the one hand, and feminized Phrygian gallae

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on the other hand. Furthermore, Moore notes that this threat exposes a Roman masculinity that is always under threat by “eastern effeminacy” (emphasis mine).73 The spectre of the “monster-Oriental-gallus” even turns up in Silvae 3.4 despite its celebratory nature. The poem is a celebration of Earinus, the emperor Domitian’s favorite eunuch. In the poem, Venus convinces Earinus to come to Rome to be a eunuch by comparing him favorably to Attis: I confess I’ve neither seen in all the world, nor given birth to anyone as sweet. Endymion and Attis shall freely yield to you, and Narcissus consumed in vain by his image in the pool, a barren love. The nymphs, preferring you to Hylas, would have seized your urn.

You, lad, exceed them all; only more handsome is he to whom you shall be given.

The poem also makes reference to Mount Ida, the mythic home of Cybele.

Thus, even when castration is celebrated there remains the fear of the Oriental, feminized Other in the background. These examples among others in this paper serve to demonstrate a profound cultural anxiety at the heart of Roman masculinity, encompassing not only sexed/gendered embodiment but also an intertwined anxiety regarding nationality and ethnicity.

With this essay I have sought to analyze “Catullus 63” through insights gleaned from contemporary trans studies, forwarding a provisional concept of the spectre of the “monster-Oriental-gallus,” located at the interstices of masculinity, nationhood, ethnicity, and sexed/gendered embodiment. However,

This necessity is not merely out of a commitment to liberal/inclusive identity politics or a restorative history. My effort instead represents an un/covering of previously submerged epistemologies and methods of analysis borne out of counter-hegemonic sexed/gendered embodiments.

To close, I wish to highlight one example of the necessity for further trans studies theorizing, cited from the scholarship built on in this essay. Skinner argues that

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the need for achievement and preservation of Roman masculinity marks Roman Western masculinity or gender identity more generally. However, queer and trans scholarship destabilizes Skinner’s assumption. When examining the vast sex/gender diversity in the population that is assigned male at birth (AMAB), including but not limited to trans women, gender non-conforming men, gay men, AMAB non-binary people, as well as the immense cultural pressures and social scripts surrounding “proper” gendered expression, hegemonic Western masculinity emerges as similarly achieved and fraught with anxiety as does Roman masculinity. If Roman male adolescence is “fraught with potential for psychological misadventure,”74 how much more fraught is Western AMAB adolescence, with its potential for exploration of increasingly proliferating and increasingly surveilled sexualities and gendered possibilities? How might a view of the modern Western sex/gender system,75 revised and opened in these ways, be mobilized for a deeper comparative analysis with the Roman sex/ gender system? These questions are outside the scope of this paper, but serve to demonstrate the need for trans interventions into the further analysis of Roman masculinity and the Roman sex/gender system more generally.

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1.

2.

3.

4.

Notes Mnemosyne 57, no. 5 (2004): 513.

Brill’s New Pauly Schneider, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15749347_bnp_e229290.

Ruurd R. Nauta, “Catullus 63 in a Roman ConMnemosyne 57, no. 5 (2004): 597.

5. and Queer Sects: Romans 1:23-28,” Journal of Biblical Literature 130, no. 4 (2001): 716-22.

6.

7.

8.

Nauta, “Catullus 63,” 622.

Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 41.

9.

Queer Sects,” 717-8.

10.

11.

in this paper.

Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jane WSQ 36, no. 3 (2008): 11-22.

12.

The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4.

13.

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).

14. in Is Science Multicultural?: Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies (Bloomington, 15.

16.

17.

18.

Transgender China (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 11.

Catullus 63, 69.

Silvae 3.4,” American Journal of Philology 135, no. 1 (2014): 101-2, emphasis mine.

20.

Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Franken-

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22.

23.

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48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 245-6.

Catullus 63, 33.

Nauta, “Catullus 63,” 604-5.

Catullus 63, 54; 72.

Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” 245-6.

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection Press, 1982), 1-2.

Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” 245-6.

Catullus 63, 27.

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3.

Dreamer,” The Classical Bulletin 54, no. 4 (1978): 51.

Catullus 63, 21; Cohen, “Catullus 63,” 50.

Catullus 63, 91-3.

Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” 246.

Catullus 63, 12-17. der, and Genre in Catullus 63,” Mnemosyne 57, no. 5 (2004): 527.

Catullus 63, 60.

Catullus 63, 17.

Nauta, “Catullus 63,” 611-2.

Catullus 63, 59.

Nauta, “Catullus 63,” 615-6.

Queer Sects,” 720-1.

Nauta, “Catullus 63,” 620-1.

Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke

19.

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54.

55.

56.

GLQ 10.2 (2004): 212-215.

57.

58.

59.

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61.

62.

Gina De Vries, “Girls,” in Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to , edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (OakStryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein.”

Catullus 63, 63-7.

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63.

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Skinner, “Ego Mulier,” 464.

Catul. 63, 91-3.

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Skinner, “Ego Mulier,” 455-6.

The Comparatist 37 (2013): 285-6.

Skinner, “Ego Mulier,” 458.

Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination, edited by -

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A gendered exploration of art, trauma, and memory: Charlotte Salomon’s Life or Theatre?

By Nuala Murray

I

n 1933, a momentous and ultimately catastrophic political shift occurred in Germany, during which the promisingly liberal era of the Weimar Republic fell, leaving the nation in the hands of fascist dictator Adolf Hitler. During the Third Reich, the social progress that Jewish-German women made under the Weimar Republic was fatally halted by the political, social and cultural tyranny of the Nazi Regime. In the years leading up to the Holocaust (19401942), Jewish-German artist Charlotte Salomon composed her extensive work, Life or Theatre?, an autobiographical visual memoir composed of 769 individual paintings.1 both a woman and a Jew in a society that worked vehemently to discriminate against and exclude people of these marginalized identities.

In the dominant historical discourse, personal narratives of female Holocaust victims have been deemed unworthy of scholarly pursuit and have consequently been erased by many historical accounts of World War II and the events leading up to the Holocaust. In a parallel manner, art produced by twentieth century female artists has generally been kept outside the academic, male-dominated canon of modern art. Through an analysis of individual works in Life or Theatre?, this essay will demonstrate how Salomon’s self-representational visual memoir subverts the patriarchal nature of historical discourse, provides Salomon with a medium through which to express the female experience of internal and external trauma, and challenges the male-oriented structures of modern art and artistry.

Personal narratives of Holocaust victims are imperative in constructing an understanding of the events that occurred under the Third Reich prior to and during the Holocaust. Although there is extensive scholarship on the memoirs

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of Holocaust victims, there has been a discriminatory lack of attention to female narratives in both academic study and cultural discourse on this topic. As Carol Rittner and John Roth assert in Women and the Holocaust: Much of the most widelyread scholarship—historical, sociopolitical, philosophical and religious—treats the Holocaust as if sexual and gender differences did not make a difference. Thus the particularities of women’s been submerged and ignored.2 1. 4808, Life or Theatre? Charlotte Salomon, The insistence of academic Figure 1942, Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam scholarship on creating one universalized memory of the Holocaust (based primarily, if not solely, on male testimony and experience) undermines the intersectional nature of the oppression experienced by female Jews in the Third Reich. In “Exiled histories: Holocaust and Heimat,” Marsha Meskimmon states:

Women’s art offers a unique praxis through which to consider the connections between embodiment and articulation, beyond the legacy of universal representation and monolithic history. It is not a separate or oppositional ‘women’s history,’ but a nuanced intervention into those singular narratives which so easily permit us to forget.3 As Meskimmon suggests, Salomon’s Life or Theatre? effectively penetrates the monolithic, patriarchal structure of the academic history of the Holocaust.

Throughout Life or Theatre?, Salomon makes a comment on the exclusion of women’s narratives in patriarchal society through her visual exploration of female silence. As a literary work as well as a visual memoir, Life or Theatre? is largely composed of paintings that are accompanied by textual captions and

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A gendered exploration of art, trauma, and memory

dialogue. However, despite the pervasiveness of words throughout Salomon’s work, the artist strategically decides not to include dialogue in a few poignant paintings, effectively rendering her own work (and the characters within it) silent. As Shultz and Timz assert in “Charlotte Salomon: Images, Dialogues and Silences,” “These lapses into silence are all the more resonant in contrast to the wordiness of her predominant style.”4 In painting 4808 (Figure 1), Salomon sits on her bed alone, dejectedly looking at her suitcase as she prepares to leave Germany. In addition to the silence communicated by the lack of words in this painting, Salomon depicts herself with her hands over her mouth. In this painting, Salomon looks into the suitcase demonstrating her experience of being alienated and silenced. Salomon’s linkage claim made by Meskimmon in We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism: “We have been unable to hear the different voices of women in history not because women were materially and historically made marginal but because ‘woman’ was structurally denied access to voice.”5 Although 4808 the oppression women faced in everyday life during the Third Reich, Salomon’s visual exploration of female silence also resonates as a powerful critique of the broader lack of female voices in contemporary Holocaust studies and modern art.

Figure 1. 4288, Life or Theatre? Charlotte Salomon, 1942, Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam

The autobiographical nature of Life or Theatre? is another avenue through which Salomon resists the patriarchal structure of dominant historical discourse. As Ernst Van Alphen states in “Charlotte Salomon: Autobiography as a Resistance to History:”

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The frameworks that women have at their disposal to narrate their autobiographies are the products of a culture dominated by men. This makes it impossible for women to ‘confess’ their stories, because those stories are not self-present to them. Women’s lives can become stories only in the act of representation or narration, that is, in the resistance to and transgression of the unavoidable male frameworks with their male assumptions and prescription.6

to tell their own histories. As a result, they were forced to embrace alternative methods of storytelling, including autobiography and memoir writing. In Life or Theatre?, Salomon resists traditional, male-dominated conceptions of what constitutes historical discourse, presenting visual memoir as an alternative framework for studying Holocaust memory.

Danielle Knafo states in In Her Own Image: Women’s Self-Representation in 20th Century Art, “Self-portrait creates a special opportunity to examine the artist’s psyche, its relationship to the creative process, and its potential for self-healing.”7 Life or Theatre? provides a medium for Salomon to work through her own personal trauma in the midst of an oppressive and emotionally tumultuous period in her life. As Christine Conley states in “Memory and Trauerspiel: Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or theater? and the angel of history,” “Life or Theatre? presents us with a continual return of the trauma, a repetition that may be understood in Freudian terms as a

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Figure 3. 4179, Life or Theatre? Charlotte Salomon, 1942, Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam

A gendered exploration of art, trauma, and memory

‘working through’ of the loss, that is, the work of grief and mourning.”8 As such, the self-representational nature of Life or Theatre? allows Salomon to come to terms with her own grief through the repetitive artistic expression of trauma.

Throughout Life or Theatre?, Salomon repeatedly depicts herself in a state of despair and struggle. Salomon’s visualization of depression and suicide subverts inauthentic representations of female psychology in terms of abjection and hysteria that are often reproduced in works by male artists. Salomon boldly embraces female interiority, painting many self-portraits within Life or Theatre? that depict her inner thoughts. Painting 4288 (Figure 2), is a close-up portrait of

colours in order to give an impression of translucency in contrast to the strong opaque colours of Salomon’s face—a technique Salomon employs to indicate these insides of Salomon’s mind, represent her internal anxieties about her relationships with her family members.

These visuals of psychological distress are underscored by the work’s caption: “And my husband loves me not. And my child, she needs me not. Why, oh why, am I alive?... So her thoughts ran in her mind.” Additionally, in order to visually evoke a mood of sadness and despair, work with a soft medium blue hue. By boldly creating a self-representational work, risking denouncement by her male contemporaries and the Nazi Regime itself, Salomon found a way to artistically work through her own

Figure 4. 4303, Life or Theatre? Charlotte Salomon, 1942, Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam

In addition to the representation of her own depression in Life or Theatre?,

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and trauma by linking womanhood itself with suicide. Salomon’s mother, grandmother, and several of her aunts suffered from severe depression and eventually died by suicide. Life or Theatre? visually establishes a relationship between womanhood and suicide by linking all the female characters in the work through their shared fate. When Salomon was nine years old, her mother jumped out a window. Throughout Life or Theatre?, she revisits the motif of the window, using it as an ominous and symbolic background in several paintings. In 4179 (Figure 3), Salomon presents a Figure 5. 4602, Life or Theatre? Charlotte Salomon, 1942, Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam

grass. Salomon locates these women within the frame of a windowpane,

covering the natural feminized landscape, girlish pink and orange hues of the scene—in order to visually link the experience of womanhood with that of depression and suicide.

In Life or Theatre? Salomon temporally grounds her autobiographical narrative with references to the increasingly invasive and oppressive Nazi occupation in Berlin in order to situate her own personal trauma (the predominate focus of the work) within the large-scale, public suffering of Jews in Germany. In 4304 (Figure

this period and the inhumanity of the Nazi army. In this painting, a large red the frame, emphasizing the symbol of peace that has been appropriated by the Nazis to represent terror and violence. Salomon dates the painting overtly in the

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middle of the work, clearly referencing the parades following the Nazi rise to power in 1933. Hence, although Life or Theatre? primarily focuses on Salomon’s individual experiences, the few explicit visual references to Nazi’s takeover of Germany demonstrates the link between Salomon’s own deteriorating internal state with the chaotic and depressing social conditions of Berlin at the time.

In Life or Theatre?, Salomon visualizes the experience of being a female artist in a cultural realm dominated by men. In several of Salomon’s paintings, she depicts herself showing her artwork to her male lover. In 4602 (Figure 5), Salomon presents her lover with several paintings, and the text reads, “Which one would you like?” This painting, although a reference to a personal interaction, visualizes the the male gaze that explicitly dominates the male art world. In “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” Griselda Pollock addresses the tensions inherent in the female artist’s gaze (building on an argument of scholar Mary Kelly) stating, “The woman who is an artist sees her experience in terms of the feminine position, that is as object of the look, while she must also account for the feeling she experiences as an artist occupying the masculine position as subject of the look.”9 In Life or Theatre?, Salomon often negotiates her contradictory position as a woman artist by rendering herself the object of the male gaze while continuously putting herself Figure 6. 4925, Life or Theatre? Charlotte Salomon, into the traditionally male role of artist. 1942, Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam Throughout Life or Theatre?, Salomon continually self-fashions as an artist, subverting the oppressive discourses of art history that perpetuate the idea that creativity and the role of artist are exclusive to men. For example, on the cover of Life or Theatre? (Figure 6), Salomon depicts herself painting, reclaiming

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a profession and mode of artistic expression that is associated solely with men, and proudly informing her viewers that this work is her own story and perspective. In 4835 (Figure 7), the work’s epilogue, Salomon depicts a series of seven women in the act of painting. This scene is foregrounded on a natural landscape that features a

setting with femininity. In addition to the female painters, a line of women is in the background of the scene. In this epilogue, Salomon advocates for women’s reclamation of the act of painting, demonstrating her hopes that her own visual memoir will inspire other women to express their own feelings of trauma and oppression through art.

Figure 9. 4835, Life or Theatre? Charlotte Salomon, 1942, Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam

In her rich visual memoir, Life or Theatre?, Charlotte Salomon composes an artistic narrative of life as a Jewish-German woman in the years leading up to the Holocaust. Through self-representation, Salomon boldly depicts an and suicide, linking her own personal suffering to the large-scale suffering of both women in patriarchal German society and Jews under the Nazi Regime.

Salomon uses her autobiographical composition of paintings in order to subvert monolithic, universalized and patriarchal discourses of both Holocaust history and modern art. In this deeply intimate and courageously revealing collection, Salomon demonstrates the importance of women’s art in overcoming personal and discursive oppression.

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1.

2.

Notes Charlotte Salomon: life? or theatre?

Netherlands: Waanders, 1998).

Carol Rittner and John Roth, Women and the Holocaust: Different Voices (St. Paul, MN:

3.

Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics. (London: Routledge, 2003), 24.

4.

5.

Silences.” in Word & Image 24, no. 3 (2012): 275.

Marsha Meskimmon. We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism

6. in Inside the Visible 7.

Reading Charlotte Salomon, edited by Michael P. Steinberg and

8.

In Her Own Image: Women’s Self-Representation in Twentieth-Century Art Press, 2009), 21.

9.

Femininity,” Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1998), 86.

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“A special sense of hostility:” a study in women’s sexuality during World War II Ella Hartsoe

A

report in the Examiner in the summer of 1943 recorded the antics of two British women conversing with Black American soldiers. The report painted scenes such as this: “In the darkness of the night a female voice cried out, ‘Goodnight, my darkie boy…’

Men’s and women’s voices came from neighboring doorways. Once when an 1

Such imagery of young British women in sexually promiscuous situations— embracing, perhaps even loving, non-British men while their fathers, brothers, and husbands were off at war—displays an anxiety held by the British public concerning British women, their sexuality, and a crisis of British nationalism and identity during World War II. Politicians, reporters, the general public and later historians lamented the decline of sexual morality during the war both domestic and working spheres. For decades after World War II, scholars accounted the rising rates of pregnancy and venereal diseases during the 1940s to British women’s unfaithfulness to their husbands and irresponsible indulgence in promiscuity.

However, by challenging the legitimacy of the analysis, recent feminist scholarship has sought to shift the discourse towards one concerned with the logic behind the increased surveillance of women’s sex lives. In this paper, I will seek to undermine the historical narrative that British women were driven to wild sexual demonstrate, British anxiety around female sexuality during and after the 1940s underscores a demand for the control of women’s bodies as a means of preserving national identity in a time of war and crisis. In controlling women’s bodies and their sexuality, the wartime British state sought to control the parameters of who belongs, and who does not belong, within the militarized state.2

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In order to fully understand the context in which sexuality was viewed in 1940s Britain, it is necessary to conduct a brief overview of social expectations and concerns about sexuality at the war’s outbreak. Following the World War I, the 1920s became a breakout decade for women’s liberation, particularly sexual liberation. For example, women gained the right to vote in 1918 and the right to sue for divorce on the same terms as men at the start of the 1920s. Soon came a demand for comprehensive and accessible birth control and the establishment 3 Shifting away from a conservative dress code, women “bobbed their hair, donned short skirts, smoked in public and wore the heavy make-up which had formerly been the attribute of a harlot.”4 Overall, having gained economic and social independence during World War I, many British women became less concerned with Victorian ideals of womanhood.

This relatively tame sexual revolution did not go unchallenged. Edwin Muir, British poet and novelist, commented in 1924, “The lovely Woman, the Fair Charmer has passed away [...] how, in striving for emancipation, woman has time.”5 Vigilance Committees, an ad-hoc initiative by citizens concerned with the government’s lack of response to the apparent moral decline, were founded across Britain in the 1920s to purify the streets. But as Ralph Nevill remembers in his memoir Yesterday and Today, such actions did little to stop premarital sex: unmarried couples simply stayed indoors.6 However, this short-lived period of moral laxity was pushed to the side in favor of what historian John Costello calls “the frigidity of the new Victorian social climate” of the 1930s.7 The interwar government, lead by conservative Nancy Astor sought to reverse some of the sexual liberalization of the 1920s. Astor was a generous supporter of the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (AMSH), an organization which demanded an end to government distribution of prophylactics to soldiers, argued for a halt to the treatment of venereal diseases, and pushed for compulsory examinations of prostitutes suspected to be infected with venereal disease.

Men, according to AMSH, should simply refrain from engaging in premarital sex. Astor intended for these policies to work on behalf of “moral feminists”— women who generally saw liberation as the re-establishment of conservative sexual morality, thus pushing back against a 1930s wave of liberal, more sex-

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positive feminism.8 Astor and her contemporaries had mixed success: while the years following World War I had seen some advances for women’s equality, the remaining interwar years were faced with increasing governmental policing of sexual relations in a quasi-Victorian manner, under the pretense of pushing a “moral feminist” agenda.

Both primary and secondary sources from World War II suggest that during the 1940s, British women became uncontrollably sexually promiscuous and hence jeopardized British military success and national pride in the face of the Axis powers. Nina Epton writes in her 1960 book Love and the English that the war years were characterized by “short courtships, hasty marriages [...] moments of oblivion [...] a crop of unwanted black babies [...] conceived at a time of nervous strain in the atmosphere of violence.”9 Author John Costello also comments, “It seemed that sexual restraint had been suspended for a duration.” He quotes one British housewife explaining her behavior while her husband was away at war as saying, “We were not really immoral, there was a war on.” Costello continues to argue, citing dubious Freudian psychology, that the extreme of war demanded the extreme of lust, and thus the violence the total war stimulated called for “the urge to love and be loved.” He also notes, perhaps more practically, that sex was one of the few freely available wartime pleasures, as rations restricted material goods and Britons’ time and efforts were demanded by the country’s militarization. Problematically, Costello simply accepts earlier sources at face value, conceding that women’s promiscuity was a result of lingering sexual freedoms discovered at the end of World War I. He writes, “While traditionally was incompatible with soldiering [...] many wives were [now] confronted with their own new choices and opportunities.”10

The narrative of the unfaithful wife and the brave husbands at war continues to linger in modern historical scholarship. Much of the male commentary during and following World War II lamented a perceived overall decline in moral For example, in the 1940s, many assumed that women signed up for positions in the armed forces as an opportunity for sexual adventure. These accusations

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hold little weight considering the British government denied the women in their forces any means of combating venereal diseases or unwanted pregnancy, which were available to men in the same forces. These accusations resist placing responsibility on potential male partners and invalidate the decisions and labour of women in the forces. Furthermore, more women reported misogynistic encounters, such assexual harassment, by their male comrades (as I will examine later in this paper) rather than extramarital and premarital sexual encounters.11 Male bias about women in uniform One of the groups that gained notoriety for “social mixing” and being a breeding ground for sexual promiscuity was the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). The ATS caused the government considerable concern: in response to public outcry, the British government was forced to conduct investigations into the ATS, which in themselves further legitimized the rumours.12 “As the British government attempted to tighten control in a war climate of censorship and secrecy, the moral panic about the ATS thrived, and the Service became known as “The 13

At a peak of anxiety over an alleged epidemic of pregnancy and venereal disease in auxiliary services, Churchill’s cabinet formed a committee in 1941, at the height of the Blitz,14 to investigate the rumors. The report concluded that rumors of sexual promiscuity in the forces were false.15 It stated that:

courage and determination, are not a military race. They cherish a deeprooted prejudice against uniforms; consequently a woman in uniform may rouse a special sense of hostility, conscious or subconscious [...] the woman in uniform becomes an easy target for gossip or careless talk.16 The parliamentary report highlights an important fact to remember when studying women in the war years: young women were subject to male bias from the moment they put on their uniforms. Hall notes, “Uniforms in general aroused ‘deep-rooted prejudice,’ perhaps traceable to long-standing negative images of a ‘brutal and licentious soldiery,’ exacerbated by the gender transgression of women stepping outside a ‘natural’ role.”17

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on men’s masculinity and the changing status of women in previous decades, became prevalent for everyday British women in the military.

Overall, many women reported such bias in the forces. Historian Penny

“Some [male workers] didn’t really like women coming into [the forces...] because in those days women didn’t do jobs like that, and if anything went wrong, oh it used to be one of the WAAFs that had done it, you know, it always used to be the women.”18 Men expressed doubt in women’s competence and intelligence, women consistently triumphed, proving the men’s doubts as unfounded.”

Women imposed on themselves an obligation to prove their capabilities, may be questioned.19 May Richards, an ATS radar mechanic, remembered feeling “rotten, groggy” because of her pregnancy, but “you were given no leeway” in the workplace. Another woman commented that no concessions were made for women’s differences, “like monthly times, when women perhaps didn’t feel too good, you still had to keep on [...] because otherwise [men] would say, ‘oh look, women are no good.’”20 It seems female workers bared an internalized pressure to perform well on behalf of all British women.

Sexual harassment in the forces Women also reported a broad range of harassment from their male counterparts: Eliza Little, another WAAF worker, recalled a male trainee who pulled out women’s chairs from under them as they were about to sit down.21 Sexual harassment was also prevalent: one woman recalled wearing her uniform, walking through the factory, and “[getting] a lot of wolf whistles and cat-calls.”22 On the other hand, women also reported that men were chivalrous toward them, sometimes even giving them special treatment and pampering. This type of chivalry can be summed up in the words of Peggy Peters, a civilian secretary at a naval base. She said, “[Male workers] seem to treat us with kid gloves.”23 Whether patronizing women, pressuring them to work without complaint or harassing them to assert their masculinity and sexuality, male soldiers exhibited misogynistic behaviours recorded by few historians who lament women’s moral depravity of the war years.

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various ways. While for some, wartime did present previously unusual sexual opportunities,24 many men and women were hesitant to take advantages of them. “There was the attitude [from the public] about girls in uniform, that they were easy, but they weren’t any different from other girls,” one member of the WAAF insisted. She often changed into civilian clothes when out dancing to prevent men’s advances and avoided sleeping with her colleagues.25 Nor does it seem that many men—particularly older husbands—participated in sexual relations with their female counterparts. Instead they continued to insist that promiscuity was alive and well in the very women they were not sleeping with in their workplaces.

War, race, and a threatened sense of nationhood Behind these men’s paranoid views was the fear that “the many wives separated […] inevitably began relationships with servicemen, also bored and restless, troops.”26 men into Britain. She highlights that the American GI soldiers—particularly Black GI—presence in Britain when British men were at war was a source of serious stress on British morale. Not only did the American soldiers’ “invasion” of Britain brought attractive, young men who looked and sounded like the movie stars British women were attracted to, but American men also brought something more tangible: money. With the British pound falling to the American dollar, even the lowest ranking soldiers could buy women anything from soda to candy—or even clothing, an incredibly expensive item in wartime economy.27 their American allies stationed in Britain.

Moreover, as epitomized in the newspaper portrayal at the onset of this paper, the presence of Black American GIs was a particular source of worry for British men and the British society at large. The notion of white women’s purity and virginity being in need of protection from men of colour, particularly Black men, has a long history in white supremacist nations like 19th and 20th century Britain. In people of colour into Britain, British identity was synonymous with whiteness.

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Potential interracial babies resulting from the feared unions between young, white, and unaccompanied British women and foreign Black men would have challenged the country’s white national identity. These births would have demonstrated that people of colour in Britain were not a temporary “wartime inconvenience,” but that in fact the country’s demographics were on the brink of substantial change in the second half of the 20th century. Thus the image of Black American soldier, playing into long established, racist systems of white supremacy the British had become familiar with.28 It is important to note that the 1940s did see a rise in illegitimate births among all fertile groups in Britain, and the number of known illegal abortions quadrupled.29 Many of these illegitimate births were, indeed, to mixed children.

However, these births or abortions did not necessarily signify an increase of unrestrained sexual indulgence: many conceptions happened within relationships which, in prewar years, would have been occurring during or very soon leading to marriage.30 Why such an intense reaction against women and their sexual behavior on behalf of the public and British government?

morality and surveillance of women’s bodies and sexual activity. She writes, “War 31

Anthropologist Mary Douglas bolsters this argument by writing that the idea of “bodily control” is “an expression of social control [...] the group is likened intrusion.”32 In times of war, states often perpetuate nationalism. Any subversion triggers a social paranoia about the nation’s identity, and is thus considered a threat to military success and domination. As mentioned previously in this paper, philosopher Richard Rorty notes that morality is a kind of “vocalization of we.”33 morality of the nation’s population—and I would argue that this crackdown particularly impacts marginalized groups like women and people of colour— that attempts to articulate the boundaries of national belonging. British women partaking in transgressive premarital sex, potentially with men whose offspring would challenge the very notion of Britishness, became the hysterical conclusion

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of a nation concerned with keeping its civilian body focused on contributing all resources to the war effort.

While there are tangible records of women having sex in the interwar years—as pregnancies, abortions, and venereal diseases did continue to rise—historians have long accredited statistics to incorrect assumptions. Namely, they have argued that British women had thrown the morality of their mothers’ to the wind and were behaving immorally while their male counterparts were away have simply been ignored in the face of lingering anxiety concerning female history. In looking for and evaluating a complex historical dialogue, we see that women were having sex and that that sex was sometimes with non-British men.

However, the legacy and blame put on British women is a direct result of British men’s bias during World War II. From the media publication of reports documenting and fueling a national fear of interracial babies to the scholarship recording the tired narrative of a wild moral decline in the 1940s, British women sexuality and bodies in times of war. Instead of simplistic conclusions reached by many historians, the realities of women’s wartime sexuality are much more complicated and deserves to be evaluated within a larger context, particularly when unpacking British obsession with the control of an affront to the very notion of Britishness—women’s sexuality.

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Notes

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

(October 4, 1943),

The American Historical Review 103, no. 4 (1998): 1158.

Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Press, 1989), 59.

Love and the English (London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1960), 330.

John Costello, Love, Sex and War 1939-1945 (London: William Collins Sons and Co Ltd., 1985), 1.

Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain Press, 2000), 78-9.

Pugh argues that (as is seen during and

unintentionally

lessened

the

pressure

on

16.

countryside, particularly London.

17.

public opinion...one or two cases which, in

“emotional stresses due to the war which lead

18.

19.

was “corrective rather than an incitement to bad conduct.”

Costello, 82-3.

Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880 (London: MacMillan Press Ltd., 2000), 143.

20.

21.

22.

not be characterized as “heroic” because system which was inherently hostile. Many

communicating to their male comrades and and that they had no want to push the men out

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

68

the rising gender reversal.

Epton, 330-2.

Costello,12.

Pugh, 247-9.

Epton, 335.

Costello, 23-28.

Pugh, 269.

Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and subjectivity in oral histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Costello, 79.

Groundsheets were used in military tents,

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28. the parliamentary report which was particularly

subsequent scholarship have deemed cases

“A special sense of hostility:” a study in women’s sexuality during World War II

were actually discharged. While there is debate as to whether women living with women revealed to

petty restrictions and surveillance, as being a lesbian 29.

30.

31.

32.

Costello, 79.

Pugh, 270.

Costello, 280-281.

The American Historical Review 103, no. 4 (1998): 1152-1156.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

Pugh, 133.

Rose, 1148.

Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (London: Routledge, 2002), 69.

Roty, 59

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Female students’ perceptions and experiences of safety at McGill

By Arianne Kent

A

ccording to a 1993 survey by Statistics Canada, 50% of all Canadian women will have had at least one experience of physical or sexual violence by the age of 16.1 While this statistic is outdated, a follow-up survey of this nature has yet to be completed in order to investigate the safety of women in the private and public spheres. The only government data and activism campaigns that seek to raise awareness concerning gender-based violence focus exclusively on overt forms of violence such as assault. This focus creates an unrealistic image of gender-based violence in Canada by failing to account for experiences of implicit forms of violence, including the invoking of 2, 3, 4

Sue’s Microaggressions in Everyday Life describes the presence of gender discrimination on many levels, including “interpersonal behaviours, institutional practices, and cultural values/ beliefs.”5 He draws a comparison between sexism in the past and “Modern Sexism,” highlighting how, unlike past sexism, “Modern Sexism” is manifested through increasingly implicit and subversive means. These “verbal, behavioural, and environmental indignities [...] that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative [...] slights and insults to the target person or group,”6 regardless of the perpetrators’ intentions.7 Sue argues that, disguised as a result of the normalization of discrimination, microaggressions generally operate outside the consciousness of the perpetrators and victims.8 Swim and Cohen contribute to the literature on microaggressions by highlighting the necessity of evolving the way we measure general treatment and social attitudes towards women. They note that the traditional method of measuring sexism through the Attitudes Towards Woman Scale (AWS) focuses on overt attacks while, on the other hand, the Modern Sexism Scale (MS) deals with a full range of violence experienced by women, including microaggressions.9 Gartner and Sterzing assert that microaggression are a part of a continuum of violence

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that ranges from implicit violence to those that are increasingly explicit. Societal refusal to recognize microaggressions as legitimate violence, they argue, encourages an environment that is accepting of microaggressions, resulting in its normalization. This normalization impedes the development of strategies to prevent the multiple dimensions of violence against women.10

Considering the social extent of gender-based violence, as well as McGill’s lack of comprehensive data collection concerning these issues on and around campus, this study seeks to explore how female McGill students navigate public space and how they perceive and experience implicit and subtle threats to their safety on and around McGill’s campus. The purpose of this research is to bring awareness to subversive forms of gender-based violence that occur at McGill and beyond, and to contribute to an ongoing process of improving women’s safety on and around campus.

The McGill campus climate Acording to McGill’s Safety Report,11 during the 2015-2016 academic year, there were 9,232 calls of reported incidents McGill Security Services. In the 2014-2015 academic year, there were 294 calls regarding criminal incidents—in the context of “criminal act or attempted criminal act.” This number increased to 465 in 2015-2016. However, the overall rate of calls to security services declined in the 2015-2016 academic year. Moreover, the 2015-2016 Safety Report highlights the rate of occurrence of “Incidents Against Property,” “Incidents Against the Person,” and “Incidents Against the Good Order.”12 The types of violence falling under the category of “Incidents Against the Person” are explicit types of violence. Hence, there is no data collection concerning student experiences of microaggressions or other implicit forms of violence. This signals that McGill is concentrating primarily, if not exclusively, on overt threats to student safety, ignoring the importance, complexity, and consequences of subtle aggressions. In this sense, McGill’s data collection contributes to a culture that normalizes microaggressions.

Overview This research project consisted of two focus-groups comprised of McGill students.

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on their availability. The interview guide (Appendix A) was developed based on individual experiences, perceptions of safety and safety threats in public spaces.

Emphasis was placed upon physical identity in terms of personal appearance, and held in private rooms booked at McGill’s Redpath Library, with each focus session lasting for approximately one hour. The focus groups were digitally audio-recorded and transcribed. The transcripts were then coded using MAXQDA software. The information form this process was used to identify recurring themes that were then further explored through cross-comparison between participants’ narratives.

Participants and recruitment Participants for this study were recruited through McGill departmental “listserv” advertisements, posters, and Facebook posts. The target audience was McGill students studying in any department at the undergraduate or graduate levels.

Interested participants were emailed a demographic survey (Appendix B) to complete. The purpose of this survey was to gain further understanding of potential All those who expressed interest in the study were allowed to participate if they were over the age of 18, a McGill student, and consented to being audio-recorded.

The participants were compensated with an instructional yoga DVD and pass. The names used in this study are pseudonyms.

focused exclusively on the narratives of the female participants because, as

Arab, one as Kazakh, and one as Turkish. While four of the female participants regularly wear religious attire (for example, a cross or a hijab). Finally, none of

Analysis of the focus group data revealed four key themes concerning women’s perceptions and experiences relating to safety on campus: an environment of

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gendered microaggressions, ractionalization of one’s safety as a coping strategy, use of mobility-limiting behaviour to maintain a sense of control over one’s safety, and extensive engagement in the psychological labour of vigilance.

Microaggressions as gender-based violence The prevalence of gendered microaggressions was a prominent theme in both focus group discussions. This phenomenon is enabled by the social environment.

For example, a woman may feel unease in a public space when surrounded by men. According to the participants, key elements of social environmental microaggressions were isolation, the presence of power dynamics, and the sexual harassment of women by men. Participants discussed that isolation often felt unsafe in that it increased the risk of an unsafe situation in which no other individual would be around to intervene. Melissa, a white undergraduate student, described an experience she had while walking through an isolated public space near her home. She said, “There’s a creepy tunnel right by my apartment to get to the metro and I’m walking by this man [...] he turned around, noticed me, turned around and I kept walking and he started walking after me as well and started trying to talk to me.” As demonstrated by this example, women may perceive and experience risk when in an isolated public space.

In addition, participants frequently discussed the presence of power imbalances—a social environmental microaggression—as a factor that decreased their perception and real experience of safety. Claire, a white undergraduate student, described her choice to Uber home at night in order to avoid the isolation and lack of visibility involved in walking home alone at night. However, she also said, “being in a situation [like taking an Uber] where I’ve put myself in isolation and giving someone else complete control over my decision women often must make in order to best ensure their safety: while Claire chose Uber to avoid the potential dangers of walking home alone at night, she still felt at risk not only due to the isolation of being in an Uber, but also due to the power imbalance between her and the male driver. Eloise, an Arab undergraduate student, echoed a similar sentiment. She stated, “People have walked into my building, following me home. If I didn’t have a doorman, they would have probably followed me up to my apartment. This has happened with two men.” In this instance, the power imbalance was present in the perceived

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threat of a physical attack associated with being followed, as well as in the fact that Eloise had to rely on her doorman in order to avoid this threat.

Sexual harassment—which includes unwanted sexual advances or touching, verbal harassment of a sexual nature, and status or coercion-based requests for sexual favours—also serves as a social and environmental microaggression against women. In the focus groups, participants discussed sexual harassment in the context of dating culture, where harassment is often normalized. Despite being visibly distressed while discussing their experiences, the participants did not explicitly articulate harassment as a safety threat or gender-based violence.

[…] this guy was a little bit obsessed with me in my old apartment building[...] he was stalking me. [I would run into him in places like the gym]; the gym had never been a place I’d thought to feel unsafe, but suddenly I was like ‘oh my god I don’t want to walk down that corridor anymore, because I’m scared I’m going to run into him and something bad is going to happen […]

After literally three months of calling me every single day and telling me he this is harassment, you’re making me feel very uncomfortable I’m going to have to take further measures, and like by the way I have a boyfriend!’[...]

And then he replied ‘Wow jeez I just wanted to be your friend.’ This is why girls have such a hard time being friends with guys because this [type of behaviour] is what they think guys want.

Claire went on to describe how this experience of sexual harassment led to emotional and mental distress, as well as severe discomfort in certain public spaces. She described what she believed to be the cause of the harassment: I think there’s this unfortunately perpetuated male-female dynamic where the woman is like in media and TV shows resisting male attention, like ‘no, men are taught to be really aggressive and persistent, and I feel like this has happened in two situations for me: the guy in my building and currently there’s somebody else, and in both of those situations guys expressed interest in me and I said no, but they didn’t take it to mean no they took it to mean

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maybe or not yet. That’s what’s unfortunate—this aggression stemming from this notion of persistence.

As Claire’s anecdote demonstrates, owing to the normalization of this persistence, women are, under the guise of dating culture, subjected to everyday forms of gender-based violence through sexual harassment. In short, the presence of social environmental microaggressions leads to women’s perceptions and experiences of safety issues in public spaces. These offences are often increasingly implicit, owing to their subtle content and their lack of physical manifestation. Due to their normalization, they are also not socially considered as violence, even though they still create an implicitly hostile and unsafe environment for women public spaces.

Rationalization to cope with constant threat of gender-based violence Participants were observed to rationalize their safety as a method of coping with the omnipresence of gendered microaggressions and violence in everyday public life. This practice was evident in the contradictory statements made in the focus groups. In some instances, after asserting a general feeling of safety, the same woman would go on to recount an experience during which she was unsafe or perceived a likelihood of being unsafe. Claire began with saying, “I’ve never felt like my safety has been threatened on campus,” before proceeding to describe an instance of a male peer harassing her on campus. She dismissed this harassment as “not a safety issue,” even though it led her to feel at risk and to change her behaviour in order to avoid the male peer.

Rather than responding to a question about her general feeling of safety around McGill’s campus, Hilary, a white undergraduate student, began to recite the services offered around McGill such as Walk Safe and Drive Safe.14 Hillary’s answer demonstrates a reliance on these services to provide safety in an environment that may be unsafe otherwise. These coping methods were employed by the participants as a means to rationalize that their level of safety in public spaces was acceptable. In the above narratives, women diminished their perceived risk of a safety issue through reliance on campus services or minimizing harassment and uncomfortable experiences. In doing so, the women could then rationalize that the public space was safe.

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Self-disciplining mobility and behaviour As a result of experiencing microaggressions, the informants reported selfimposed behavioural changes and mobility limitation as methods to both cope with and reduce the risk of experiencing safety threats. Carmen, a Chinese undergraduate student, expressed a reluctance to interact with strangers following a past negative experience. Carmen had given her number to a man who helped her carry some purchases to the metro station. This man proceeded to call her once a day for a month, harassing her and depriving her of a sense of safety within the private sphere (her residence room). She explained, “I just feel like the world outside of McGill is quite dangerous, it really affected me making friends outside.” For Tina, her past experiences of safety threats and perceived risk of future safety threats led her to feel “less comfortable to go outside my comfort zone and go to unfamiliar places.” For both Tina and Carmen, past experiences of violence and harassment led to an impulse to limit mobility in order to avoid similar situations in the future.

Since these self-disciplined behavioural changes often appear to be personal behaviours as reactions to environmental microaggressions. Eloise stated, “I kind of stopped going to the gym that I used to go to. I went back recently, but up until now I’ve had a lot of trouble wanting to go there. Because everyone used to talk to me all the time. It would make me feel very uncomfortable, I hated going back.” However, minutes before this statement, she said she felt unsure as to whether she had stopped going to the gym due to her own lack of motivation, or if it had been because of this harassment.

This uncertainty prompted a discussion about the struggle of many women to strike a balance between placing responsibility on themselves for the policing of their behaviour, while still recognizing the role of others in creating safety threats. Asked if she felt that it was likely that she would experience a genderbased safety threat again, one participant stated that she believed it to be “Likely.” She continued, “Well, it depends on my behaviours but because I’m always out and about and taking the metro at night […] most likely something will occur.” Her statement highlights a sense of responsibility for avoiding safety threats. Another participant echoed this sentiment, stating, “I think this kind of

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“I feel like everyone blames themselves for putting themselves in that situation. knowing it’s not your fault if someone put you in that situation.”

In short, the participants discussed various instances of self-policing and mobility limiting in order to guarantee a certain level of safety. These practices gender-based violence in the public sphere. Moreover, as illuminated through the participants’ responses, these practices highlight that environments are not physically and socially constructed to be safe for women. Thus, women face threats to their inclusion and safety in environments that are generally argument: by contrasting men and women’s respective fear of crime, one can demonstrate that self-discipline and mobility limitations are particular to women’s management of safety threats.15 The psychological labour of vigilance in the public sphere The notion of “constant vigilance” emerged in both focus groups as a practice women use in order to maximize their safety levels in public spaces. This practice involves the constant—but subconscious—awareness of surroundings and measurement of the level of safety of an environment. Melissa discussed her own practice of constant vigilance:

always in the back of your mind. [The fear of] unwarranted advances of any kind, and sometimes it actually does happen […] there is sort of that level of vigilance, like I’m always vigilant when I feel unsafe I think. There’s always that sort of heightened [awareness], where you’re just ready for anything.

Thelma, a Turkish undergraduate student, offered insight into one of the reasons women practice constant vigilance. She said: I think [the practice of constant vigilance occurs] because fear is engraved in you and [you hear] all the stories […] it happening to yourself personally is super rare. But because you hear all the stories, that one little thing happened, you hear it on the news and you expect it to happen to you.

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Thelma’s statement suggests that one’s perception of societal unsafety plays a role in creating the need for constant vigilance.

Moreover, one of the focus groups discussed the impact of one’s familiarity with an environment on the need for constant vigilance, with a higher level of comfort being associated with a decreased need for vigilance. Hilary articulated how moving away from home impacted her use of constant vigilance. She said: I think I have a lot more awareness since coming here of like the repercussion of my actions, little things you wouldn’t think about. One girl that I know […] this guy showed up at her door at Rez, she [had only] told him what Rez she was in. He somehow found out her room number and was knocking at her door late at night. So even little things like that. You meet someone new, just being a lot more careful, which I wouldn’t have to think about when I lived with my parents in a smaller city.

The participants also highlighted a belief that when men they do not know initiate an interaction with them in a public space, some form of harassment is bound to follow. Claire stated: I’ve gradually learned that it sucks, it sucks that’s it’s on me to change my nature to combat this constant harassment, but initially, I used to be very friendly, but over time it just gets super annoying. You learn to be like ‘okay, no bye’ and put your headphones back in. Where do you draw the line between ‘you are literally just being friendly,’ and ‘you’re invading my space’?

Claire’s testimony demonstrates her use of constant vigilance even in possibly harmless situations to protect herself against potential harassment. A further example of constant vigilance in a harmless situation was highlighted by Thelma: There was this one man[...] he came up to talk to me, I get that feeling like ‘oh crap’ but he was super nice and walked me [to my destination]. I was like ‘oh shoot what did I do.’ But he was super nice and walked off right when we got there. You kind of forget that people are nice, they’re not all evil.

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Thus, constant vigilance impacts one’s perception and treatment of others, which, for women, limits their ability to engage socially in the public sphere.

As is evident in the above examples, regardless of the actual threat to their physical safety, women practice constant vigilance in order to limit their exposure to threats.

Through conducting discussions in two focus groups of female McGill students, four key themes emerged concerning women’s perceptions and experiences of safety and safety threats in public spaces. First, there was a recurring narrative of a general presence of gendered environmental microaggressions — a form of gender-based violence — in public spaces. Second, due to the prevalence of these microaggressions, participants described a coping tendency to rationalize that their environment was safe. Third, participants highlighted a common practice of self-discipline, such as limiting personal mobility or socialization with strangers. Fourth, owing to the constant implicit threat of genderbased violence, female participants described extensive engagement in the psychological labour of constant vigilance.

The use of a focus group methodology allowed this study to foster complex discussions between participants, which is conducive to the complicated and nuanced nature of the issue being researched. Although this study included women from a variety of races and ethnicities, allowing for insight into how women from different racial backgrounds perceive issues of safety at McGill and beyond, it is limited by the small number of participants and thus cannot be used to generalize about the experiences of female undergraduates across Canada.

Further research on this subject should be conducted with larger sample sizes; such research should seek to include participants of diverse social positions in order facilitate comparative analysis as well as the development of a more intersectional picture of the issue of women’s perceptions and experiences of safety in public spaces.

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Acknowledgements

14. home at night by providing either a volunteer to 15.

Feminist Criminology

participants.

4, no. 1 (2009): 83.

1.

2.

Notes

Camada, Statistics Canada, Violence Against Women Survey, 3896, released 30 June 1994, Ottawa.

Canada, Statistics Canada, Measuring Violence against Women: Statistical Trends, by Maire

APPENDIX A: Interview Guide

INTRODUCTION AND CONFIDENTIALITY STATEMENT

questions are all very broad with no right or wrong

2013, Ottawa.

3.

questions.

The Facts About Violence Against Women, Canadian Women Foundation.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

everyone has the chance to speak, and that people Derald Wing everyday life: orientation,

Derald

Wing

Sue, race,

Microaggressions in gender, and sexual Moreover, everything said today will be kept

Sue

et

al.,

“Racial

American Psychologist 62, no. 4 (2007): 271.

Sue, 22.

Janet K. Swim, and Laurie L. Cohen, “Overt, Psychology of Women Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1997): 103.

Rachel Gartner amd Paul Sterzing, “Gender

31, no. 4 (June 21, 2016): 491.

Morty Yalovsky, Lynne Gervais, and Robert Couvrette, 2015-2016 McGill University Annual Safety Report: A Report to the Human Resources Committee of the Board of Governors of McGill University, Report, Security Services, McGill, Oct. 2016, 18.

12.

13.

this will be the case.

BACKGROUND QUESTIONS

MAIN QUESTIONS

PROBE: What role do physical and/ or emotional you consider physical or emotional variants to have a

Ivory Power: Sexual Harassment on Campus,

80

is very important that everyone here maintains

Female students’ perceptions and experiences of safety at McGill CLOSING

study. Do not hesitate to contact me at any point should

APPENDIX B: Preliminary Demographic Survey Potential Participants

Please be as candid as possible. You may choose to decline to answer any questions, or to terminate your 5. Can you describe to me any particular

participation at any time should you desire.

one hour in length, where you will be asked about your verbal and emotional aggressions and harassment on

you see other entities having a role in making on and

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Blindness and queering epistemology Benjamin Kirsebom

P

divergent ways of being in the world. As a framework, phenomenology is useful for building an epistemology of blindness – a way of making sense of the world that relies on non-visual bodily senses. As Sara Ahmed recognizes, disorientation is vital to a queer phenomenology: overcoming our discomfort can allow for joy and deeper understanding of ourselves and others.1 If blindness, or onset blindness, is conceived as a permanent disorientation, blind ways of knowing deviate from the norm and must be queer. I argue that blindness is epistemologically unique as ways of knowing that do not include sight are connected to the body on a deeper level than vision. I critically analyze Ahmed’s groundbreaking “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” drawing on works by blind scholars such as Rod Michalko and Georgina Kleege, Asia Friedman’s study on blind interpretations of sexed bodies, and Davina Quinlivan’s analysis of queer cinema. Through a synthesis of these sources, I will demonstrate how a reading of Ahmed’s piece on blindness strengthens our understanding of queer phenomenology.

Ahmed begins her essay by discussing Husserl’s idea of the “zero point of orientation,” the jumping-off point from which we make meaning in interaction with the world. The zero point for sighted individuals begins with what can be seen while other senses are rendered secondary. Husserl describes himself standing at the writing table, using memory to visualize what is behind him and out of sight. He then reimagines the room with his eyes closed, noting that he now has “no perception” of the table. Yet he recognizes that it still exists, but that sight is what brings it into his consciousness.2 In her analysis of this model, Ahmed notes that objects behind Husserl are just as close in proximity to his body as those in front of him, even though they cannot be seen.3 While Husserl uses memory to visualize what he cannot see, these visualizations are not less “real” or tangible. Our line of sight often obscures that which is still there, much like the limited scope of the camera frame. What Husserl can see does not make the object any more real, though he is oriented toward it. Conversely, we are

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unable to discredit Husserl’s conceptual memories as less real. Husserl’s model ignores non-visual means of perception, which he is unable to comprehend because such experiences are non-normative.

Ahmed argues that, though “[Husserl’s table] is intended through perception,”4 it cannot be fully understood through vision alone, because he only sees a portion of the table while the rest is out of sight. Ahmed writes, “[What Husserl] sees is shaped by a direction he has already taken, a direction that shapes what is available to him, in the sense of what he faces and what he can reach.”5 Here, Ahmed refutes the idea that sight is the all-encompassing way of knowing, and paints Husserl’s privileging of vision as limiting and often misleading. As sighted people, our vision colours what we perceive in ways that inhibit our ability to engage with the world on a more sensory level, as blind people are often capable of doing.

Michalko writes similarly, “[The] world and sight are both ‘just-there’ and both take each other for granted.”6 It is critical to engage with blind epistemologies because sight is the norm and does not exist without its dialectical counterpart— blindness. This is comparable to how heterosexuality is constructed in relation to queerness. If we are to understand what it truly means to ‘see,’ we must subvert the meaning of the word and equate it with a plurality of perceptions. We must take into account the ways that those without sight make meaning of the world.

Ahmed writes that learning the history of an object or phenomenon is important to gaining a deeper understanding.7 Given that blind people navigate physical space using a combination of bodily senses rather than vision alone, the way they perceive and make sense of the world must be inherently more emotional and nuanced.

Quoting Pierre Bourdieu, Ahmed notes that our bodies are shaped by histories, and that “such histories are described [by Bourdieu] as the habitus, as ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions,’ which integrate past experiences through the very ‘matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions.’”8 According to Bourdieu’s idea of habitus, lived experiences are integral in shaping the way that blind people perceive and comprehend the world around them. Kleege describes the colour pink in a work of art as “the colour of pureed raspberries with a little cream mixed in,”9 illustrating how her sense of taste helps her to feel and understand colour.

Paradoxically then, blindness can allow people to sense their surroundings in an affectively rich way, whereas sighted people take for granted the visual world they live in and do not exist in the complexly embodied way that blind people do.

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One example of blind people’s embodied knowledge can be seen in Friedman’s study on blind people attribution of sex and gender expression to the bodies they encounter. Friedman begins by acknowledging that “dominant cultural privileges visual perception.”10 Insofar as visual realities are often taken for granted and perceived as more true or ‘real,’ we live in an ocularcentric society.11 Even the language we use to describe our perception is highly visual, such as the verbs ‘to see,’ ‘to appear,’ and ‘to look like.’ Part of studying concepts of embodiment should involve decentring the visual and elevating our more visceral senses, seen as misleading and less ‘real.’ Friedman writes, “While blind people are unable to perceive certain sex differences that seem visually obvious, the sighted are equally unaware of aspects of sex that are obvious to blind people.”12 To sighted people, visual cues are often the sole determinant of someone’s sex or gender identity. By relying on vision, we fail to recognize many other ways people choose to present themselves, and we run the risk of mislabeling trans bodies that do not conform to conventional gender presentations.

In Friedman’s study, 27 blind individuals of various backgrounds described their use of olfactory and auditory cues as the main indicators in sex attribution.

Almost all respondents cited tone of voice as the most common indicator of sex, followed by other cues such as scent.13 Participants “commented that they are often surprised that sighted people do not experience bodily odors as intensely as they do.”14 They also noted the sound of someone’s footsteps as an indicator of sex, like the sound of high heels or the heaviness of the steps. While the use of these cues can be misleading as well, they can allow for more complete understandings of how people choose to express their gender since the surface of their skin is not taken at face value as an indicator of sex. Friedman writes, “Several respondents mentioned that the sighted can have a distorted view of people because they are ‘hindered’ and ‘consumed’ with the body and its appearances.”15 This emphasis on the deception of vision is a recurring theme in my research, and points to a need for the sighted to become more attentive to our other senses, especially those such as touch that requires more processing.

Kleege has written extensively on her lived experiences as a blind academic and further elaborates on this notion of sight as illusory. In “Blind Imaginations,” she

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that my eyes will usually deceive me, so I need to come by knowledge by other means, either through other sensory information or else through the testimony of others’ eyes.”16 Perhaps her reliance on non-visual senses could be seen as an epistemic strength, in a culture where what we experience viscerally is often overlooked in favor of what we can ‘see.’ Kleege is concerned with the false authenticity of photographs and how they cannot always capture the ‘truth.’

There are so many ways to interpret a photograph, and one person’s description is never enough for her to determine the objective ‘truth, if there even is one.17 Kleege is also an art lover and describes her aptitude to the haptic as a superior way to grasp the abstract in art, because the visual does not interfere with her understanding.18 Her senses often work in conjunction with one another and with past memories in her experiences with art.

Moreoever, Michalko recounts a time when he walked into a Toronto bar and was told to “watch his step” as he entered, even though he knew the layout of the bar precisely. Sighted people tend to view blindness as a weakness, since a disability is perceived as ‘a lack’ and a sign of difference. However, in Michalko’s anecdote, his awareness of his surroundings could not be understood by the sighted person, because his sense of the location stemmed from embodied knowledge. Quoting Merleau-Ponty, Ahmed argues that the body “is not ‘merely an object of the world,’ rather ‘it is our point of view in the world.’”19 If all 20 the white cane can be seen complicating the notion that only our hands are able to touch. As Ahmed notes, “Bodies and objects […] become more than matter insofar as they can be sensed and touched, insofar as they make and leave impressions. Bodies are ‘something touching which is touched.’”21 We give and receive meaning through tactile impression, and the sense of touch is integral to our being. Not only do blind people shape the objects they touch, but they are simultaneously shaped as bodies in constant interaction with the objects of the world. This interaction is of a deeper and more nuanced nature than the experiences of sighted people, whose impressions are mainly visual.

Many respondents in Friedman’s study mentioned the pervasiveness of ocularcentric assumptions in their understandings of gender. They noted

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feeling they did not understand gendered notions of presenting oneself, even though blind people are very attuned to markers such as scent and voice.22 Friedman concludes, “This is a powerful illustration of the way that, as members of sighted society, people who are blind must learn and navigate a territory of visual perception even though they use other than visual cues.”23 Blind people’s perceptions of sexed bodies are often slower and more deliberate, because they do not experience another person all at once, as sighted people do visually.

This lack of vision could, however, allow for a greater diversity of gender embodiment and expression. As Friedman writes, “Another aspect of the temporality of perception is the deployment of past experience and knowledge in the process of perception.”24 Because it takes longer to process, nonvisual sensory information is often associated with more emotion. A few of Friedman’s respondents described the process of sex attribution as “draining” and challenging. They reported being more comfortable with androgyny as they prefer not to intentionally try to determine someone’s sex.25 Friedman notes that blind people “are usually aware of the sex of strangers only when they are out.”26 The decentring of vision could allow for a greater understanding of sexed and gendered embodiment because “without sight, even non-transgender bodies are frequently ambiguous—at least until the point of direct interaction.”27 Blind epistemologies can thus queer our notions of the world.

experience.28 She writes, “The rustle of trees may mingle with the sound of my breathing, or conversely the booming music may inhabit my chest and move my body from the inside.”29 Queer cinema makes use of sound to evoke embodied responses which cannot be achieved through visual means.30 Quinlivan She references Ahmed’s piece in her analysis, musing, “If [...] disorientation is key to queer phenomenology, then the audio-visual evocation of breathing in disturbs our perceptions of bodies.”31 Queer moments such as these have the potential to disrupt and reorient our perceptions.

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Ahmed muses that the “queer subject within straight culture […] deviates and is made socially present as a deviant.”32 Can the same be said of the blind subject in sighted culture? Because blindness is not a choice, to apply this idea of permanent deviation seems daunting and alienating. However, rethinking blindness as epistemologically unique from sighted ways of knowing allows us to imagine a future without the sight/corporal, mind/body dichotomy. Ahmed expands on this, describing the queer body as “a failed orientation.”33 If we replace the word “queer” with “blind,” and conceive of heteronormativity as parallel to sighted culture, we can think of blindness as a “failed orientation.” Because blind bodies are always compared to the sighted and able-bodied, normative conceptions of the blind body as limited always delegitimize blind realities. Ahmed also posits heterosexuality as a “straightening device.”34 The need for queer bodies blind people to orient themselves to the sighted world in ‘socially acceptable’ ways. As is the case with queer people and homonormativity, the ‘acceptable’ blind person lives as if they do not have a disability, as if they have completely forgotten their difference. The pressure of assimilation makes it easier for sighted people to treat blindness as something that must be overcome instead of recognizing its epistemic strengths.

For Michalko, blindness is seen as extraordinary in everyday situations because “these are ordinarily activities conducted in the socially organized spatiality of sight.”35 When a blind person enter spatially normative situations, sighted people try to conceptualize them in relation to themselves and to normativity. The blind person becomes someone ‘who merely happens to be blind.’ Similar to how the gay person may be understood as someone who is ‘normal’ aside from their sexual orientation, normative conceptualizations of blind people as merely lacking sight devalue their lived experiences in an inherently alienating culture and fails to account for the systemic forces behind the construction of culture. Kleege also writes about the inaccessibility of sighted culture, noting her frustration when artists “make patronizing and reductive assumptions about the kind of art that will be understandable to blind people.”36 Many blind people who frequent museums have a knowledge of art that surpasses that of sighted people because they must understand art in ways that circumvent the visual. Kleege recants a conversation she had with a blind friend on conceptualizing colour. Kleege’s friend understood colour “through an analogy to sounds—louder and softer volumes, higher and

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lower pitches.” The relation of colour to sound, similar to how Kleege herself relates colour to taste in her description of pink, reveals a queer understanding of art that is intrinsically deeper than what sight allows.

A queer phenomenology allows room for those who have been marginalized to reclaim space. Blind epistemologies means for the blind to reclaim their bodies in a sighted world that overlooks, ignores, and devalues them. Blindness is typically seen as an “exception to the ‘rule of sight,’”37 privileged status of vision. Comparing the lived realities of a sighted person and those of a blind person assumes that their realities are similar when they are in fact radically different. Non-normative bodies should not be forced to assimilate into dominant spaces. Blind ways of knowing, which queer our notions of what it means to ‘see,’ ultimately challenges the visual sphere. Kleege writes, “In real life, just as sighted people vary in their skill at translating images into words, blind people vary in the level of their interest in visual matters.”38 To be able to reclaim blind ways of knowing as Other and different without equating them to sighted realities is to embrace a queer making of meaning. As Ahmed concludes, “A queer phenomenology would involve an orientation toward queer, a way to inhabit the world that gives ‘support’ to those whose lives and loves make them appear oblique, strange, and out of place. [Husserl’s] table becomes queer when it provides such support.”39 Throughout this paper, I have applied blindness to Ahmed’s concept of queering phenomenology to show how blind ways of knowing disrupt normative notions of perception and deconstruct the visual as a source of ‘truth.’ Friedman’s analysis of blind perceptions of sexed bodies, as well as Michalko’s and Kleege’s writings on their lived experiences as blind scholars, have helped me illustrate the depth and nuance of non-visual perceptions, as well as ways to use the body that are unintelligible to sighted people. Blind epistemologies are essentially queer, make space for blind people to have their stories heard and respected, and allow for greater understandings of queerness and embodiment.

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Notes

1.

Phenomenology,” GLQ: a Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 544.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Disability Studies Quarterly 30 no. ¾ (2010).

7.

8.

9. into Woods,” Southwest Review 93, no. 2 (2008): 235.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

Kleege, 228.

Margrit Shildrick, “‘Why Should Our Bodies End Somatechnics,” Hypatia 30, no. 1 (2016): 15.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

Friedman, 292.

Might Feel,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 9, no. 1 (2015): 63.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

Michalko.

Kleege, 234.

Michalko.

Kleege, 230.

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About the authors Juliette Mueller

Juliette is a third-year Gender, Sexuality, Feminist and Social Justice Studies student with a minor in Russian Literature. She wrote “Guilty until proven innocent: the carceral state, Black childhood, and American disciplinary systems” in order to further develop her understanding of today’s carceral culture, which bleeds into all aspects of society and remains a one of the most pressing feminist issues today. Prior to writing this paper Juliette was involved in the research and implementation of transformative justice educational policies in Oakland, California. She intends to devote her career to combatting the prison industrial complex and the school-to-prison pipeline. A fun fact about Juliette is that Dwayne the Rock Johnson once shared a photo of her on his Instagram. Another fun fact is that back in California Juliette is an amateur beekeeper. Ecofeminism!

Saima Desai

Saima is a U3 Philosophy major, focusing on phenomenology and feminist theory.

Her paper, “Towards a hysterical embodiment of religion: reclaiming St. Teresa of Avila’s religious experience through feminism and psychoanalysis,” was written for a graduate seminar on religion, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology, as a response to the fact that the seminar’s syllabus included only one woman— the only thinker who had had a religious experience. As such, the essay is grounded in a longstanding frustration with the ways that Western canonical philosophy excludes, tokenizes, and shouts over the voices of women and other marginalized people.

Grace Brown

Grace is a fourth year History and Women’s Studies student. She wrote her paper, “Creating a monster: exploring the trans/gendered dimensions of ‘Catullus 63,’” to try and make a much-needed trans studies intervention in classics. She is a singer, an Irish speaker, and likes to do Tarot readings.

Nuala Murray She chose to write her paper, “A gendered exploration of art, trauma and memory: Charlotte Salomon’s Life or Theatre?”after realizing how many incredibly talented women artists have been excluded from the art historical canon. Writing her paper was a way for Nuala to explore how oppression and trauma are represented in women’s art while shining some much needed light on a lesser-known, but gifted her time listening to Drake and wishing it wasn’t winter.

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Intersections: Journal of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies

Ella Hartsoe

Ella is a U1 student doing a Joint Honours degree in Classics and History, with a minor in Gender, Sexuality, Feminist and Social Justice Studies. She wrote her paper, “‘A special sense of hostility:’ a study in women’s sexuality during World War II,” because male scholarship’s bias is too real, even here at McGill in our lecture materials and curriculum. She wanted to begin to grapple with that, even if it was in a small way. A fun fact about Ella is that the lyrics to “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” by Whitney Houston will be on her tombstone. She gave

Arianne Kent

Arianne is in her third year, completing an Honours in Sociology and a minor in Gender, Sexuality, Feminist and Social Justice Studies. She wrote her paper, “Female students’ perceptions and experiences of safety at McGill,” as part to promote female safety and inclusion in urban environments. Her paper is important as it elaborates on the gendered dynamics of public space, and sheds about Arianne is that ninety per cent of her diet is quesadillas.

Benjamin Kirsebom

Ben is a U2 student majoring in Gender, Sexuality, Feminist and Social Justice Studies and minoring in Sociology. He wrote his paper, “Blindness and queering epistemology,” to build upon work at the intersection of queer and critical disability studies that challenges homonormativity and ableism in the queer community. He will be studying abroad in Mexico City next winter, where he hopes to research tourism in Latin America and its effects on queer identity construction and embodiment. In his spare time, Ben has been perfecting his death glare to scare off masculine men on public transport. He also enjoys painting his nails, drinking red wine, and watching RuPauls’s Drag Race, often all at once.

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Copyright © Intersections: McGill’s Undergraduate Journal of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, 2017.

Editorial selection, compilation, and material © by the 2017 Editorial Collective of Intersections and its contributors.

Intersections is a McGill University undergraduate academic journal with literary submissions

Printed and bound in Canada by Rubiks Printing.

All rights reserved.

Except for brief passages quoted and cited from external authors, no part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including, but not limited to, photocopying or recording, or through any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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