The College Hill Independent V.25 N.3

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT Brown & RISD Weekly | V. 25 N. 3 | 9.28.2012

from the editors So let me tell you ladies—this was definitely an impulse buy. I mean, my hubbie Scott uses them all the time but I always found them to be a little too masculine for my taste. Honestly, I’d rather just get a mani. But you know what they say, “When in Target, do as the yogis do!” So I tossed a pack in my shopping cart, put the bag in the back of my suburban, dropped my eight-year-old twins Gracie and Moira off at Pilates and totally forgot I’d even bought them. Gracie was helping Mommy (a.k.a me…LOL) unload the trunk yesterday after we went grocery shopping when she held up the package and asked, “Mommy, what are ‘BIC Cristal For Her Pens?’”

Oh. My. God. I had to get right on my blog to tell my chicas about this pen. It is absolutely divine. I don’t really need pens. It’s easier to just memorize my grocery lists and I can recite my infamous 300-calorie carrot cake recipe in my sleep. It’s only been a day but I’ve been finding so many excuses to write stuff. I surprised Scott with a little note in his briefcase asking him for a new vacuum for my birthday—looks like there’s a new Hoover in my future ;). Anyway, here’s a quick description: the outside of it is super-smooth, so you don’t have to worry about getting those callouses from gross man-pens. It’s also much lighter so it hasn’t been a hassle carrying it around in my bag. Finally, a company made a pen woman can use. Tons of women (and guys!) have been raving about these pens on Amazon. I just have one teeny issue with the packaging. The outside of the pen is pink but when I use it, it comes out in black. Has this happened to any of you? Leave a comment if it has! Love, MamaDrama — DSF P.S. The link to the carrot cake recipe is below. Yum!

news

ephemera

2 3

WEEK IN REVIEW looking glasses // alex ronan & kate van brocklin

science

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elkinton, emily gogolak & kate van brocklin

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sports the indy is

MANAGING EDITORS Raillan Brooks, Robert Sandler, Erica Schwiegershausen NEWS Barry Elkinton, Emily Gogolak, Kate Van Brocklin METRO Joe de Jonge, Doreen St. Felix, Jonathan Storch FEATURES Sam Adler-Bell, Grace Dunham, Alex Ronan, Ellora Vilkin ARTS Ana Alvarez, Olivia-Jené Fagon, Christina McCausland, Claudia Norton SCIENCE Jehane Samaha FOOD Ashton Strait INTERVIEWS Drew Dickerson SPORTS Sam Rosen LITERARY Emma Janaskie, Michael Mount X Drew Foster LIST Allie Trionfetti BLOG Greg Nissan DESIGN EDITOR Allie Trionfetti DESIGNERS Abigail Caine, Carter Davis, Mary-Evelyn Farrior, Allison Grosso, Annie Macdonald, Jared Stern, Joanna Zhang ILLUSTRATIONS Diane Zhou PHOTO Annie Macdonald STAFF WRITER MaryEvelyn Farrior SENIOR EDITORS Belle Cushing, Mimi Dwyer MVP Sam Rosen COVER ART Allie Trionfetti

reachably yours College Hill Independent PO Box 1930 Brown University Providence RI 02912 theindy@gmail.com twitter: maudelajoie Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI press in Seekonk, MA. The Independent receives support from Campus Progress/Center for American Progress.

Campus Progress works to help young people make their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at CampusProgress.org

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NOT MY REF hustle on the side // sam rosen

5 6

breaking the seal // doreen st. felix

13

hauptman

features

7 9

15

perman

LAKH THE VOTE lakhs on lakhs // david adler

museums & manuscripts // olivia-jené fagon & christina

DESIGN-ABLE sara hendren // ana alvarez

CLASSÉ ACTION guillaume legault // jonathan storch & ben tucker

literary

17

BLUE eighteen eyes // mary-evelyn farrior

x-page

IN TRANSIT where’s the ENDA? // will fes-

REAL SCHMEAL

interviews

HOME STAY pack the house // megan

jehane samaha

mccausland

metro KNOW THYSELF

no problem // nina ruelle &

arts

UNASSEMBLED shit mahmoud says // barry

NO SPERM

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THINK TANK // drew foster

WEEK IN REVIEW

by Alex Ronan & Kate Van Brocklin Illustration by Robert Sandler

Current Events

Dear Diary

Magic Mirror

after floating in the north sea for 98 years, a message in a bottle was pulled in by a Scottish skipper near the Shetland Islands last April. A tortured lover? Not quite.

“Please state where and when this card was found, and then put it in the nearest Post Office,” read the message.

“You will be informed in reply where and when it was set adrift. Our object is to find out the direction of the deep currents of the North Sea.” The scrap of paper in the bottle—certified by Guinness World Records on August 30 as the oldest ever recovered—was part of an experiment designed to map water circulation patterns in the seas around Scotland. Captain C. Hunter Brown of the Glasgow School of Navigation sent 1,890 bottles adrift on June 10, 1914, as a test of local ocean currents, according to doctor Bill Turrell, head of Marine Ecosystems at the Marine Scotland Science Agency. Message number 646B was found by Andrew Leaper only nine miles from where Brown released it.

Turrell’s government agency, based in Aberdeen, keeps Captain Brown’s log updated. Leaper’s discovery marked the 315th bottle of the series to be recovered. Each one was “specially weighted to bob along the seabed,” according to Turrell.

The tradition of putting messages in bottles has been ubiquitous for centuries. Around 310 BC, the Greek philosopher Theophrastus sent sealed bottles out to sea to prove that the Mediterranean was created by the inflowing Atlantic. In the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I of England appointed an ‘Uncorker of Ocean Bottles’ in an attempt to protect secret messages sent home by British spies and deemed it unlawful for anyone else to open a floating bottle.

Drift bottles are still used today by oceanographers.

Initiatives such as the Drift Bottle Project, started by climate researcher Eddy Carmack at Canada’s Institute of Ocean Science, examine global currents. Over a period of 12 years, Carmack and his team have sent 6,400 messages in bottles out to sea from ships around the world, about four percent of which have been discovered. One bottle circled Antarctica one-and-a-half times, eventually showing up on the island of Tasmania. Another traveled from Mexico to the Philippines. An ecological connection was made when oil and debris from development in Canada’s Labrador Sea and Baffin Bay were found on bottles on Irish, French, Scottish, and Norwegian beaches.

Physical oceanographers and hydrographers study currents like El Niño and La Niña—mid-Pacific heat-driven circulations that affect climate around the world. They also track wind-driven currents like the Gulf Stream and the oceans’ deepest currents, known as the Great Ocean Conveyor, which are driven by temperature and salinity. With technology like radar altimetry (satellites that track currents and tidal changes), maritime bottle traditions hardly seem to be current events. — KVB

last friday, Anderson Cooper admitted to using the private diary of the late Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens to report on Stevens’s growing security anxieties preceding his death at the American Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. On September 11, Ambassador Stevens was killed along with three members of his staff when an armed mob attacked the consulate following the release of the Arabic translation of the trailer of Innocence of Muslims. On his show, Anderson Cooper 360, Cooper said that in the months leading up to his death “a source familiar with Ambassador Stevens’s thinking” said that Stevens worried about continual security threats, al Qaeda’s growing presence, and the rise of Islamisic extremism. Cooper did not mention that the information regarding Stevens’s fears was first gleaned from his diary, which was found by CNN inside the US consulate in Libya four days after the attack.

Cooper’s reporting received a quick condemnation from the State Department. Philippe Reines, senior adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, called CNN’s actions “disgusting” and “indefensible.” According to Reines, CNN “completely ignored the wishes of [Stevens’s] family.” CNN has defended its decision, maintaining that not mentioning the source of information was not an act of deception, but rather an act in compliance with the family’s wishes. On the network’s Monday morning coverage, Mark Whittaker, the managing editor of CNN worldwide, insisted that CNN respected the wishes of the family. “When we talked to the family, their main concern was [that] they wanted the physical journal back and they didn’t want personal details from the journal revealed. We felt we had respected that, and as a result, we didn’t report on the existence of the journals or any of those details,” he said. Many sources have since repeated Reines’ accusation, but the Independent could not find any that had directly spoken to Stevens’s family.

CNN executives have since admitted to some ambiguity in the conversation between Richard T. Griffiths, a senior editorial director, and Tom Stevens, the ambassador’s brother. Since the initial phone call, the network has not been in touch with the Stevens family. Nonetheless, a CNN representative asserted that the public “has a right to know” what CNN learned from “multiple sources” about the issues that “are now raising questions about why the State Department didn’t do more to protect Ambassador Stevens and other US personnel.” The representative added, “perhaps the real question here is why is the State Department now attacking the messenger.” — AR

oftentimes when one looks into a mirror, it is to examine oneself. A student at MIT is subverting convention with his new invention—a mirror with a camera that examines you.

The mirror component would aid those who require ongoing monitoring—the system can easily be built into a bathroom mirror. People who want to keep track of their pulse, respiration, oxygen saturation, and blood-pressure readings could track these health indicators with the display panel in the corner of the mirror.

The technology can monitor a person’s vital signs— pulse, respiration, and blood pressure—when a person simply stands in front of a low-cost camera. Graduate student Ming-Zher Poh in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program has shown that his system can accurately detect pulse measurements from ordinary lowresolution webcam imagery. Poh is now working on new technology that would be able to monitor blood pressureas well as measure respiration and oxygen levels. Initial results of his work were published earlier this year.

The science behind the system involves measuring slight variations in brightness produced by the flow of blood through blood vessels in the face. Once the position of the face is identified by the software, the digital information from the facial region is broken down into separate red, green, and blue portions of the video image. Poh adapted a method called Independent Component Analysis (formally used to extract a single voice from a roomful of conversations) to pinpoint the pulse signal of the individual in front of the mirror. Poh’s system can gather accurate pulse signals from three people in the camera’s view simultaneously.

Poh’s system would have the ability to perform initial telemedicine screening tests using only a webcam or cell phone camera. The noninvasive screening process—one need only stand in front of a camera—would benefit burn victims, newborns, and other situations where attaching sensors to the body would be uncomfortable or laborious.

Though the concept of using a camera to determine health indicators is not new technology, Poh’s innovations open up the realm of fancy touch screen computer mirrors to the public, as his system only requires low-cost camera equipment. The Wall Street Journal recently featured different models of “smart mirrors,” which contain myriad sensors, cameras, and a touch screen display built into the reflective surface. Though these mirrors function similarly to Poh’s invention, the use of low cost cameras is revolutionary. Compared with the Panasonic model of the smart mirror, which costs $38,000, Poh’s technology benefits not just the fairest of them all. — KVB

SEPTEMBER 28 2012

WEEK IN REVIEW // 02

U N A S S E M B LY H I T PA R A D E

1960

by Em i ly G ogola k & K at e Va n B roc k li n

THE LAST HURRAH

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev interrupted the conference by hammering both his fists on a table and taking off his right loafer, then “banged it on the table, louder and louder, until everyone in the hall was watching and buzzing,” according to William Taubman, author of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. His hysterics were in response to a delegate from the Philippines who claimed that Eastern Europe had been “deprived of political and civil rights” and had been “swallowed up by the Soviet Union.”

Cuban President Fidel Castro gave a four-and-a-half-hour-long debut speech at the UN—which still holds the record of longest speech ever in the General Assembly. The climax was probably: “Were Kennedy not a millionaire, illiterate, and ignorant, then he would obviously understand that you cannot revolt against the peasants.’’ The comment was not particularly surprising—by 1960 he was a staunch member of the Soviet Camp—but he did leave General Assembly history with an especially bizarre memory: Castro kept live chickens in his hotel room.

1973

Ugandan President Idi Amin Dada, then-chairman of the Organization of African Unity, extolled British Prime Minister Edward Heath by comparing him to Adolf Hitler. Amin, who had praised Hitler’s extermination of the Jews in the past, was already under scrutiny for the imprisonment and execution of his enemies. When a German correspondent encouraged Amin to elaborate while he was speaking, he quickly retracted the statement, saying, “Not Hitler—I meant Winston Churchill. Mr. Heath is like Winston Churchill. Please make that Churchill. I don’t want to quarrel with my friends. I don’t want to open a second-line front against me.”

1994

Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali refused to invite former Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim to the UN’s 50th anniversary celebration. In the mid 1980s, Waldheim had been charged with murder by the War Crimes Commission for his involvement as an intelligence officer for the Nazis during World War II. In an effort to maintain fairness, Boutros-Ghali also disinvited Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, the only other former Secretary-General alive at the time.

Pérez de Cuéllar did not attend, saying that he understood.

2003

Ahmadinejad at the UN Assembly

In his argument for the invasion of Iraq, then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented Washington’s evidence to the UN Security Council, including a vial of anthrax and photographs of purported weapons of mass destruction in the country. The case played a crucial role in the conflict that affected countless Iraqi and American lives. Ultimately, the US uncovered no weapons of mass destruction and Powell conceded to BBC News that the information “appears not to be...that solid”.

by Barry Elkinton

2006

Hugo Chávez began a rant against President Bush and the US by praising portions of a Spanish-language edition of Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. He went on to call President Bush “the devil” and mentioned a lingering smell of sulfur in the assembly hall. There was an upsurge of sales of Chomsky’s book in the US following the speech.

2009

last week, iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in New York to attend the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly. With his second and final term as president set to expire next June, Ahmadinejad’s speech on Wednesday marked the last of his eight controversial appearances before the UN. Given the recent anti-American protests in the Middle East, the ongoing conflict within Syria, and simmering tensions between Israel and Iran, many world leaders were hoping that Ahmadinejad would resist the temptation to go out with a bang. On Sunday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon met with Ahmadinejad to express this general sentiment. “The Secretary-General drew attention to the potentially harmful consequences of inflammatory rhetoric, counter-rhetoric, and threats from various countries in the Middle East,” Ban’s office said in a statement.

To almost everyone’s surprise, Ahmadinejad mostly followed Ban’s advice, giving a relatively subdued speech on Wednesday. Other than his brief comment that the world’s current problems are attributable to “the self-proclaimed centers of power who have entrusted themselves to the devil,” Ahmadinejad largely avoided the controversial statements that have made his past UN appearances so infamous. “Ahmadinejad gave a long, rambling speech,” said one anonymous European diplomat to The New York Times. “Previously we’ve walked out because of his anti-Semitism, threats against Israel, and 9/11 conspiracies. This year his only crime was incoherence.”

But if Ahmadinejad’s speech this week was surprisingly tame, few are likely to forget his previous eight speeches before the General Assembly, when Ahmadinejad dramatically polemicized the United States, Israel and other Western powers. For Ahmadinejad, the UN speeches have served an important role in promoting his controversial foreign policy and personal character. While Ahmadinejad makes controversial statements almost as a matter of habit, his annual address at the UN is the only time when he gets a chance to stand behind a podium and address the world at large, or at least symbolically. For Ahmadinejad, the stakes are raised even higher by the UN’s New York location—behind enemy lines, so to speak—where he otherwise could not travel given the diplomatic standoff between the United States and Iran. Therefore, even if the General Assembly’s power is limited, the symbolism of the platform remains powerful.

This atmosphere of ritual without consequence fosters an environment where Ahmadinejad traditionally has taken a no-holds-barred approach in criticizing his enemies. Most controversial have been Ahmadinejad’s suggestions of a conspiracy behind the Holocaust and the September 11 attacks. In 2010, speaking about September 11, Ahmadinejad declared, “some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime.” Moreover, Ahmadinejad confidently stated, “the majority of the American people as well as other nations and politicians agree with this view.”

Ahmadinejad has also had plenty to say about human rights, an issue that has consistently dogged the Iranian nation. “The precious existence of women as the manifestation of divine beauty and as the peak of kindness, affection, and purity has been the target of heavy exploitation in recent decades by the holders of power and the owners of media and wealth,” said Ahmadinejad in 2007. Ergo, he suggested, strict female dress code were vital to preserving the dignity of women.

But if most people see the UN primarily as a site for symbolic theater, Ahmadinejad seems to regard the Assembly in more celestial terms. In 2005, after his speech, he said he felt a divine presence enter the room, causing the audience of diplomats to sit in unblinking rapture. “When I say they didn’t bat an eyelid, I’m not exaggerating because I was looking at them,” said Ahmadinejad in a video translated by PBS. “It seemed as if a hand was holding them there and had opened their eyes to receive the message from the Islamic republic.” This year, Ahmadinejad has made no mention of any supernal happenings during his speech; if there were any, they were certainly more ethereal.

03 // NEWS

President George W. Bush’s address to the General Assembly insulted Cuba’s diplomatic delegation to the point of departure.

Bush proclaimed, with reference to the declining Fidel Castro, that “in Cuba the long rule of a cruel dictator is nearing its end,”which provoked a Cuban delegate to throw down his translator’s earpiece and walk off. “The Cuban people are ready for their freedom,” Bush said, as the rest of Cuba’s diplomats left the room.

In a General Assembly low, Sudanese President Omar alBashir riled the General Assembly when he flat-out denied his government’s wide-scale military campaign of violence, which the UN claimed had killed more than 200,000 people and displaced 2.5 million since 2003 and which President Bush and other key players in the international community had recently declared a genocide. “The picture that volunteer organizations try to give in order to solicit more assistance and more aid, have given a negative result,” al-Bashir said. He then blamed Israel and Zionist organizations for spreading lies in order to weaken the Sudanese government.

The late Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi gave a 100-minute speech to be remembered. “It should not be called a security council, it should be called a terror council,” he said, and then listed a series of conspiracy theories which included accusing the Untied States of developing swine flu and questioning the official record of the Kennedy assassination. He also (unsuccessfully) attempted to set up a Bedouin tent in several New York-area locations and instead pitched his tent on an estate belonging to Donald Trump in suburban New York (seriously). But Qaddafi was fired—the tent was dismantled.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

HAPLESS IN SEATTLE The NFL’s Replacement Referees

by Sam Rosen // Illustration by Robert Sandler

this past monday, immediately following the Seattle Seahawks’ victory over the Green Bay Packers, ESPN.com ran a reader poll: “what did you make of the touchdown call at the end of the Packers-Seahawks game?” Voters had two choices: “it was correctly ruled as a touchdown” or “it should have been an interception.” If you don’t follow football closely, the question would have struck you as strange.

How could there be uncertainty as to whether a play resulted in a touchdown or an interception? For NFL fans, though, this kind of confusion has been the focal point of the first three weeks of the season-a season that has had one of the strangest starts in sports history.

The Seahawks, playing at home, were losing 7–12.

With time to execute one final play, Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson lofted a long pass to wide receiver Golden Tate, who was in the corner of the end zone, surrounded by three Packer defensemen. As the players jumped to the ball, Packers safety M.D. Jennings appeared to snatch the gameending interception. On the way down, however, Tate got his hands on the ball as well, and all four men landed in a tangled heap, the ball completely obscured among the flailing limbs. Two referees ran over to inspect. One referee immediately raised his arms to signal a touchdown. The other swiftly ruled the play an interception. As is customary on such tough calls, the officials gathered on the sidelines to watch an instant replay. The video, shown to the referees and the 16.2 million watching around the country, seemed to prove, without much doubt, that Jennings had intercepted the pass. America was fully expecting a reversal of the decision when the head referee emerged to address the players and crowd. The verdict: play upheld. Touchdown.

Seahawks win.

NFL referees have made bad calls before, but what made this one noteworthy was that it wasn’t made by actual NFL referees. The regular refs were on strike, and with the top college officials refusing to stand in as an act of solidarity, the league had turned to woefully unprepared replacements. Just a few weeks ago, these men were working as bankers and real estate agents; one replacement had never called a college game above the Division III level prior to this season.

At the heart of the labor dispute were retirement benefits. The league wanted to freeze the referees’ decades-old pension plan in favor of a 401(k) system. The NFL Referees Association (NFLRA) wouldn’t abide the change and asked for $16.5 million in additional benefits over the next five years. “The key is the pension issue,” NFLRA head Scott Green, himself a referee, told The Huffington Post.

“A lot of our guys have made life-career decisions based on assuming that pension would be there.” In the NFL, $16.5 million over five years works out to about $100,000 per team per year—a figure roughly one-twentieth of the average annual salary of an NFL player. The referees had been on strike since June.

In football, there are 22 players on the field during every play, and the difference between a legal move and a penalty can be something as small as the angle of someone’s shoulders at the point of contact. As such, officiating in the NFL can be much more complicated than in

SEPTEMBER 28 2012

other major sports. Prior to the start of the season, no one around the league seemed to know exactly how the change would effect the games, but it quickly became clear the replacements were in way over their heads. Replays from the season opener between the Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants showed players executing egregious holding penalties after both sides realized the officials were scared to make controversial calls. In response to the opening-night backlash, replacement officials around the league started calling an outrageous number of penalties. The trend came to a crescendo the night before the controversial finish in Seattle, when the New England Patriots played the Baltimore Ravens in a matchup of last season’s AFC Championship game. Responding to some chippy play early on, replacement referees called an astounding 24 penalties over four quarters (in 2011, the Ravens and Patriots combined for an average of 10.4 penalties per game). On the last play of the game, Raven’s kicker Justin Tucker lined up for a field goal attempt with his team down 28-30. The kick sailed to the right and high, so high that it went over the top of the right goalpost. The referees immediately ruled the kick good, and the New England sideline erupted in anger. As the officials ran—literally ran—off the field, usually reserved Patriots coach Bill Belichick grabbed a passing official, demanding an explanation. The move was shocking—NFL coaches, no matter how angry they get, never grab a referee—and Belichick was docked $50,000 the next day. Belichick wasn’t the only coach fined that day—Washington Redskins offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan had to give up $25,000 for accosting an official in the tunnel after his team’s game. The replacements have caused off-field controversy as well. The league pulled a line judge minutes before he was set to work a New Orleans Saints vs. Carolina Panthers game after his Facebook profile revealed him to be a diehard Saints fan. The Lingerie Football League recently released a statement saying that they had once fired a handful of incompetent refs that the NFL had picked up as replacements.

This was the turmoil that backgrounded the calamity in Seattle. For years fans have been kvetching that a bad call ‘cost their team the game.’ On Monday night, however, Packer fans could truly claim they had been robbed of a victory—the call had literally cost them the game. The referees’ decision was so bad that on Tuesday morning the NFL issued a statement saying that Tate’s actions in attempting to catch the ball “should have been a penalty for offensive pass interference, which would have ended the game” and given the Packers the win. The NFL, however, does not change the outcome of games retroactively. In a league with a 16-game regular season, every game has huge importance. Last year, the New York Giants finished the regular season 9-7, just barely making the playoffs. A month later, they capped an incredible playoff run with a Super Bowl Championship. Had the Giants lost just one more game and gone 8-8 in 2011, a different team would be the defending champion. The loss could also have huge financial implications for the Packers, the only publicly traded franchise in the NFL. As American Public Media’s Marketplace reports, even if the Packers do make the play-

offs—which they are still likely to do—Monday’s loss could effect how many playoff games they get to host. Between luxury boxes, general ticket sales, parking, concessions and advertisements, losing a home playoff game means missing out on millions in revenue and the Packers weren’t the only ones who lost money on Monday night. Various estimates report that the final call swung anywhere between $150 million and $1 billion dollars in bets—one website, the offshore betting hub SportsBook, was even planning to refund some betters who wagered on Green Bay. the replacement referees skewed the outcome of important games, and may have put player safety at risk with their inability to monitor dangerous play. This debacle, though, has led fans to an even more troubling realization: that the NFL may simply be too big to fail. Hall-of-fame quartback and current ESPN commentator Steve Young captured the dynamic in a recent on-air rant: Everything about the NFL now is inelastic for demand. There’s nothing they can do right now to hurt the demand for the game. The bottom line is they don’t care. Player safety doesn’t matter in this case. Bring in the Division III officials – it doesn’t matter. In the end you’re still going to watch the game, we’re going to all complain and moan and gripe but... it doesn’t matter. Go ahead gripe all they want.

I’m going to rest. Let them eat cake. odd marie antoinette reference aside, Young highlights an important paradox. Americans care so much about the NFL (roughly 136 million voted in the record-setting 2008 presidential election; 111 million watched last year’s Super Bowl) that they’re unlikely to stop watching even if their tuning-out would be in protest of an issue that desperately needs adressing. Many Packers have mentioned that they’re considering some kind of organized dissent, but in a league where the average career is fewer than four years long, it’s unlikely that players will ever do much to put their paychecks in jeopardy.

Late Wednesday night, the league reached an agreement with the NFLRA that will end the strike and have the real referees back on the field in time for Thursday’s game between the Ravens and the Cleveland Browns. The deal is a victory for fans, players, and officials, but the collective jubilation should be tempered by the realization that the dispute only ended after an unprecedented debacle.

That the strike continued after weeks of blown calls and dangerous play suggests that the NFL is quite willing to operate without regard for player safety, the integrity of its sport, and the wellbeing of its employees if we’re all willing to keep watching. Either way, there will be football—real football—on Sunday, which is all anyone seemed to care about in the first place.

SAM ROSEN B’14 will

what.

be watching on Sunday, no matter

SPORTS // 04

BIRTHRIGHT

Rhode Island Adult Adoptees

by Doreen St. Félix illustration by Kady Windemuth

this past july, Gary Osbrey, 50, drove from his home in Putnam, Connecticut to Capitol Hill to learn his birth name. He and three other adult adoptees stood on the stage of the auditorium at the Rhode Island Department of Health; from the audience, dozens of supporters snapped photos of the group. Gary’s adoptive siblings flanked him, his brother Raymond holding his left hand and his sister Jonna squeezing his right. After completing his remarks, Governor Lincoln Chaffee handed each person a white envelope. Inside the envelope, finally, was Gary’s birth certificate. Upon opening it, Gary took off his black-rimmed glasses and covered his face with his hands. The few seconds it took Gary to open the envelope felt longer than the 15 years he spent navigating—unsuccessfully—governmental barriers to find his birth mother. This was the closest Gary would ever get to meeting her.

“I’m speechless,” Gary later told reporters at the July 2 ceremony. The law, called Rhode Island S 478 Sub AA, went into effect that day. Passed by Governor Chafee in September of 2011, the law grants adult adoptees born in the state of Rhode Island access to non-certified copies of their birth certificates from the Office of Vital Records.

For Gary Osbrey, this means knowing that his birth mother, who passed away in the early ’90s, was Italian. “It means looking like people,” says Kara Foley, a 27-year-old Providence resident active in adoption-reform organization Access Rhode Island, who was able to track down and meet her birth mother. Across the nation, reformers focused on incorporating the adoptee perspective in adoption policy see the law as restoring a civil right: the right to know one’s self. articles 7 and 8 of the 1989 United Nations on the Rights of the Child state that it is the responsibility of national governments to register each child immediately after birth. The registration is documented as the original birth certificate (OBC); this is the first and most important piece of legal identification a person receives from the government. A birth certificate proves you exist and have rights.

The newborn child has the right from birth to a name and nationality. Birth registration also gives the child the right to be adopted. Prior to July 2012, after a child was legally adopted in Rhode Island, his or her OBC was sealed. It was filed among the 30,000 dating back to the 1800s in the dusty annals of the Office of Vital Records in the Department of Health. The adoptee then received an Amended Birth Certificate (ABC), listing the adopted parents as parents of birth.

The sealing of birth records as standard practice didn’t exist in America until the mid-20th century. Prior to that time, adoptions were often informal. Sisters raised their orphan nieces during the Depression. During WWII, relatives from the East took in cousins from the West. The ’60s brought about a national movement to regulate document adoptions. Elizabeth Samuels, Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore, attributes the advent of the an-

05 // METRO

thropology of kinship as the pivot point for the American attitude towards adoption. “The idea became that families formed through adoption should be indistinguishable from those formed by birth,” she said. In her 2001 essay “How Adoption in America Became Secret,” Samuels notes how state legislatures in the ’70s maintained “birth parents’ lifelong right to anonymity,” while foreclosing the rights of adult adoptees to their birth records. By the ’90s, OBCs in 45 states were permanently sealed. As of this past July, the number is now 44.

Back in 1944, Rhode Island was one of the first states to pass a law sealing birth records. Before this, virtually no confidentiality or secrecy provisions in adoption law existed in the United States. In the ’30s, the US Children’s Bureau, a subset within the Department of Commerce and Labor in 1925, began to conduct research on adoption. The reports, compounded with sociological and anthropological study, concluded that an adoptee’s access to birth certificates undermined the idea of adoption. In order for adoption to work, the triad—birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptee—had to be protected from public scrutiny.

Lawmakers agreed. So unless an adoption was open or semi-open, it became impossible for an adult adoptee to find the critical information an OBC registers. Though he attempted to find loopholes, Osbrey was stuck in a legal labyrinth for 15 years. He consulted genealogists. He dug through city archives. He even registered with the Passive Voluntary Adoption Mutual Consent Registry act. “I was just stopped in my tracks,” said Gary. three days after he was born in Providence in 1961, Gary was adopted. “I always knew I was adopted. My parents told me everything,” he says. Gary wasn’t looking for his birth parents and the history attached to them out of spite, which is what opponents of unsealing OBCs—usually both adoptive and birth parents—often fear motivates adult adoptees. Yet Gary grew up in a loving home and secured his adoptive father’s blessing before beginning his journey in 1998. “It’s a crucial piece of information [that I want to know],” says Gary. Paul Schibbelhute, the executive director of the American Adoptive Congress, advisor to adoptee rights organizations such as Access Connecticut and Access Rhode Island, and a birth parent himself, conceptualizes this “right to know” in legal terms: “It is a basic human right to have access to a birth certificate,” he told the Norwich Bulletin. “All of us have the right to know who our families are.” Several years ago, he reunited with his birth son.

Organizations who advocate for the unsealing of birth certificates as a civil rights issue have passionate supporters across the country. Bastard Nation “fights rather than cries,” says Shea Grimm, a founder of the adoptee political advocacy group. Since 1996, ahe and her cohorts have invigorated the adoptee rights movement with their pugnacious campaigns. These include staging ‘Bastard Walks’ in front of offices of Vital Records across the country, distribut-

ing strongly-worded pamphlets called ‘Bastard Bytes’ and appropriating the radical activism of queer politics group ACT UP. Shea, a self-described ‘Bastardette,’ denigrates media and political depiction of adoptee reformers. “Why is there the fear of the angry adoptee?” she asks. “I’d say that the ‘angry adoptee’ represents to adoptacrats—traditional lawmakers, rich adoptive parents, and secretive birth parents—a soft repudiation of their personal humanitarian mission and the accompanying legal and social control that comes with doing something for a ‘good cause.’” For the reader, Shea pauses to indicate which words must be in scare quotes. She and the thousands of supporters of Bastard Nation criticize ‘adoptacrats’ for making adoptees second-class citizens. Indeed, the group’s name is a punchy nod to the stereotypical—if outdated—perception of adoptees: that they are the rootless, pitied products of illegitimate unions.

Bastard Nation published a congratulatory post on their website, bastards.org, the day after the Rhode Island law was passed. It lauded Kara Foley, who campaigned with Access Rhode Island, a self-described “grassroots campaign to pass legislation in Rhode Island allowing adult adoptees access to their OBCs.” Access Rhode Island begam campaigning for this legislation in 2005. The group is part of a national advocacy fight for adoptee rights. In recent years, Access Connecticut has appealed to Congress to reintroduce legislation to unseal birth certificates. In the face of opposition from the ACLU and Catholic Charities, the Adoptee Rights Coalition, headquartered in San Antonio, has been organizing civil rights demonstrations for over a decade. The success of Access Rhode Island has reinvigorated these decades-old advocacy efforts. Yet state lawmakers generally remain unwilling to budge. A month after posting about Access Rhode Island, Bastard Nation published one about New Jersey. Governor Chris Christie vetoed a similar adoption bill in October of 2011. “This is just what we expected,” it reads. “This is a nightmare.” kara foley is hopeful that the new Rhode Island law will turn the tide toward favoring adoptee rights across the country. Her bangs fall over her eyes—“my mother’s eyes,” she says—when she considers that “no matter what people find out, adult adoptees now have access to the truth, and that is a very important step.” Gary echoes Kara’s thoughts.

“For me and other adoptees throughout Rhode Island, this movement has to catch on in other states. This is a good thing. This is the truth,” he told reporters at his birth certificate ceremony.

Kara learned from her birth mother that her birth name was Meagan Elizabeth. Even though his glasses were off as he read his birth certificate for the first time, Gary could still make out his birth name.

“That was probably the strangest thing, seeing a different name on the birth certificate,” says Gary. “Mark.”

DOREEN ST. FÉLIX B’14 was

left at the monastery gate.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BLEAK HOUSE Tenants Stand Their Ground

by Megan Hauptman Illustration by Diane Zhou

roline burgison hasn’t paid rent on her South Providence home in almost a year. She, like many other Providence renters, was unaware that the apartment she had been living in was up for foreclosure until she received a letter from the bank last October, advising her to stop paying rent to her landlord and move out immediately.

Burgison, who has moved 13 times in Providence the past 30 years—four times due to foreclosures—was sick of moving. So she stayed put.

Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), a community organization based in Providence, wants tenants in foreclosed buildings to know and defend their rights. A day after the bank unsuccessfully tried to auction off the house Burgison was still living in, DARE doorknockers stopped by her house. DARE organizers use the auction section of The Providence Journal to identify homes that are likely in foreclosure, and then go to these properties to inform homeowners and tenants of their rights and options if they want to stay in their home. They knocked on Burgison’s door last fall, and she has been working with DARE ever since.

It is harder to evict a tenant from a foreclosed home before the property is bought by another entity, so banks often try to encourage renters to move out by offering them a small lump sum—usually between $2,000 and $4,000— to leave immediately. “Cash for keys,” as this strategy is often called, is “good if you have another place to move to,” Burgison says. “But I don’t want to move, I want to stay where I’m at.” dare models its methods for fighting foreclosure on those of City Life, a Boston community organizing non-profit that has pioneered a direct action approach to stopping foreclosures in the Boston area since 2007.

City Life describes its strategy for fighting foreclosures on its website as “getting out in the community to get the message out; holding meetings that build solidarity; providing access to lawyers; [and] organizing bold and creative protests that apply public pressure and attract media attention.”

City Life and DARE employ this two-prong approach of legal and direct action tactics to help individual residents stay in their homes, as well as to gain the attention of major mortgage lenders such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with the goal of radical policy changes. A major policy target is getting large lenders to reduce principal balances, which involves lowering the payments that homeowners owe to reflect actual market values (many houses are currently valued at far less than the original mortgage agreement). This policy would decrease the number of homeowners unable to pay off their debt, as well as increase payments to the banks, who receive no money when owners default on loans. Other demands are to end evictions of tenants and homeowners after foreclosure and to stop the sale of empty, foreclosed homes to investors and banks. soon after meeting representatives from DARE, Burgison attended a members meeting where she heard testimonies from other Providence residents who were fighting foreclosure. DARE’s solidarity efforts inspired her:

SEPTEMBER 28 2012

as well as beginning her own legal battle to get Fannie Mae to give her a lease to her apartment, which has allowed her to stay in her home, she has been involved in rallies at other foreclosed homes, the Providence State House, and in other cities, including a protest at Freddie Mac’s headquarters in New York on September 12. in providence, much of the activism around foreclosures has been focused on passing Just Cause legislation, a bill that was introduced into the RI House of Representatives four years ago by Tiverton Representative John Edwards.

The bill, which is modeled after similar legislation in Massachusetts, would prevent banks from evicting residents in foreclosed properties without just cause—falling behind on rent, not maintaining the property, or violating their lease in some way—allowing them instead to continue to pay their rent directly to the bank. Also known as “Right to Rent,” this bill has passed the House of Representatives but stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee this year. The RI Mortgage Bankers Association lobbied against the bill, focusing their efforts on the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Michael McCaffrey. McCaffrey has the power to stop the bill from being voted on in the committee, and thus from reaching the Senate floor, and his vote last spring did just that. Proponents of Just Cause have put together a study group to discuss future strategies for passing the bill.

Edwards, who introduced the legislation, stated in a phone interview that he believes that “this [bill] is a win for everyone. Banks have properties that are maintained, they have a source of income rather than a broken down shell of a house. Families aren’t disrupted, the kids don’t have to move to a new school district, and it is a win for the state, because the taxes continue to get paid.” Burgison has observed the effects of widespread foreclosures in her own neighborhood, where property values have been dropping as the number of foreclosed and boarded up homes grows.

These homes are often vandalized or burgled. Burgison recently encountered someone trying to take the outdoor pipes off of the first floor of her building, unaware that she was still living on the third floor. according to data published by Rhode Island Housing Works, Rhode Island has the highest rate of foreclosure in New Englan, and is ranked16th in the nation. Central Falls and Providence have the largest number of foreclosures per mortgaged stock in the state (13.7 percent and 9.8 percent, respectively).

Sub-prime loans-loans made to borrowers with less-desirable credit ratings-have higher interest rates to compensate for the risk that the borrower will not be able to pay back the loan. Such mortgages, as well as the recession, account for much of the rise in foreclosures in the past decade. In 2003, a study released by the Mortgage Bankers Association rated Rhode Island number one in the nation for sub-prime loans (at 14 percent of all mortgage loans).

Analysis of lending patterns in recent years by the Federal Reserve points to a disproportionate number of sub-prime loans given to Black and Hispanic borrowers, who were approximately twice as likely to be steered into a higher interest loan by mortgage brokers than white

borrowers with similar credit ratings. Both Wells Fargo and Bank of America recently agreed to settlements ($175 million and $335 million respectively) to minority borrowers in the face of accusations of racial bias and discrimination in their lending practices.

Recent investigations into the repercussions of the mortgage crisis suggest that property values in primarily Black and Hispanic neighborhoods are more likely to fall as a result of foreclosures. A national study published by the National Fair Housing Alliance this year, concluded that bank-owned homes “in minority neighborhoods. . .were 34 percent more likely to have significant trash and debris outside and 82 percent more likely to have broken or boarded windows. Bank-owned houses in white neighborhoods . . .were 33 percent more likely to be marketed with ‘for sale’ signs, which is critical to attracting owner occupants as buyers, rather than investors.”

Whether or not these upkeep decisions are explicitly racially motivated, lower-income minority neighborhoods are more likely to have foreclosures, based on the disproportionate number of sub-prime mortgages.

Unoccupied homes are more likely to be neglected or vandalized, contributing to the falling home values in these neighborhoods, which creates even greater disparities between the actual value of the home and the value of the mortgage payment. Based on his observations of foreclosed homes throughout Rhode Island, DARE employee and organizer Chris Rotondo believes that real estate agents’ upkeep decisions vary based on the racial and economic make-up of neighborhoods and that “a foreclosure in a community like Washington Park, or the South Side of Providence or even the West End brings down the housing values of the whole neighborhood, so everyone suffers.”

some government services do exist for Rhode Island residents falling behind on their mortgage payments. The Rhode Island Hardest Hit fund, run through the state housing department, has given more than $23 million to RI homeowners with “documented financial hardship” towards paying off their mortgages. Adam Mbaye, a Pawtucket homeowner and DARE member, applied for financial help from RI Housing in March, and the Hardest Hit fund has been paying 70 percent of his mortgage for as long as he remains unemployed. With the help of DARE, he has still been petitioning Freddie Mac to reduce the principal of his mortgage, which he estimates is $80,000 over the market value of the home. Despite the help from the Hardest Hit fund, the current system still leaves Mbaye without a long-term solution for paying off an inflated mortgage. “People with hardship deserve principal reduction,” he says, because “a home is a right, not a privilege.” Burgison, like Mbaye, believes in the community organizing strategies of DARE: “We want to be heard, and not just seen as a piece of paper or this address or this number or this amount. People need to know that there’s a lot of us out there.”

MEGAN HAUPTMAN B‘14.5

is staying put.

METRO // 06

MARRIAGE to a ‘T’ transgender issues in the gay rights movement

by Will Fesperman Illustration by Diane Zhou

owen still remembers being five years old and thinking that everyone was like Mr. Potato Head, his favorite toy. “I thought you could just pick and choose the outfit or the female or masculine features that you were going to have…

Turns out that’s not the way it was.” At the time, Owen was female-bodied and went by ‘Heidi.’ As a teenager, he considered taking hormones to change his body, but the pressures of high school discouraged it, so he decided to wait. “It’s a rough road to walk down, and there was a lot of bullying,” he told me. Instead, Owen came out to his family as transgender, “in small doses.” First he told them he was ‘queer’; a few years later he told them he wanted to be called ‘Owen’ and be referred to with male pronouns: he, his, him. This was difficult news for his conservative, Catholic family. “It takes them a while to be okay with things they’re not okay with,” Owen said.

I first met Owen in June 2010, in the Baltimore headquarters of Equality Maryland, a civil rights group for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Marylanders. I was interning for Equality Maryland because I wanted to fight for same-sex marriage; I hadn’t given much thought to the “T” in LGBT until then. As part of my training, Owen, a field organizer for Equality Maryland, gave me a run-down of various identities that fall under the term ‘transgender’: genderqueer, those who have a gender that is neither male nor female, or is fluid; transsexual, those who identify as a different sex than one was born with, sometimes using surgery or hormones to change one’s body, cross-dressers, those who dress in clothes typical of the opposite gender.

Owen, who identifies as genderqueer, has been the victim of two hate crimes since he began taking testosterone ten years ago. In both cases, he said, the police were unresponsive. The list of offenses goes on. “I’ve been homeless. I have been denied employment after people have been really excited about hiring me and I’ve come in to meet them and they wouldn’t even shake my hand. I’ve been asked to leave restaurants.”

Many transgender people in the US experience similar discrimination. In a 2009 study conducted by the National

07 // FEATURES

Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 97 percent of the 6,450 transgender people surveyed reported being harassed or assaulted at work for being transgender. 27 percent reported losing their job because of their gender identity. 15 percent of respondents reported incomes of $10,000 or less—twice the national average reporting this level of income. Besides employment discrimination, problems commonly arise in situations that require government-issued identification— air travel and rental applications for housing, for example.

Transsexual people often have IDs that list their names and gender at birth, but not their current name and gender. Applying for a change of gender on one’s license is a difficult process and in many states requires that one has had sex reassignment surgery.

Many states lack legal protection against discrimination. In 34 states, including Maryland, a person can be denied housing, employment, or public accommodations for being transgender. In 29 of those states, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is also legal—Maryland is one of the five states with protections for sexual orientation but not gender identity, Rhode Island is one of 16 states that protects both. Baltimore City and three Maryland counties have passed ordinances that prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, but these local ordinances often go unenforced, and many people don’t know they exist.

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, is a pending federal bill that would protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender citizens from employment discrimination in any form—firing, not hiring, or harassment on the job—with exemptions for religious organizations.

Lawmakers first introduced the bill in 1994 to prevent discrimination on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation. Year after year, ENDA failed in committee.

The 2007 version of ENDA was the first to include gender identity, but when it became clear that a trans-inclusive ENDA had little hope of passage, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts), who is openly gay, removed gender identity from the bill. The move was highly controversial,

since by 2007 most LGBT rights groups had vowed they would only support an ENDA that included protections for transgender people. “I consider transgender people part of the same family,” Sara Whitman, a lesbian blogger, wrote in an op-ed for the Huffington Post at the time. “Removing them from the bill is like telling me I can bring two of my children along, but not the third.”

In a press conference in October 2007, Rep. Frank expressed his frustration with activists who opposed a watered-down ENDA, saying their all-or-nothing approach was “profoundly wrong in the moral sense,” and that transgender activists were “unrealistic [about] what a democratic political system can offer.”

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation’s largest gay rights group, had promised to only support a trans-inclusive ENDA in 2004, but in October 2007 the organization settled on an uneasy neutrality—they wouldn’t support Rep. Frank’s ENDA, but they wouldn’t oppose it, either. That alone was too much for Donna Rose, HRC’s only transgender board member, who resigned that October. “It is our moral obligation,” Rose said in her letter of resignation, “to make a loud, clear, unmistakable statement that we are a community and we will not be divided.”

A month later, HRC went a step further and officially endorsed the gay-only ENDA, provoking widespread protest in the LGBT community.

Yet according to Lambda Legal, a national legal group for LGBT people, much of the discrimination against gay people has more to do with their gender expression than their sexuality. In October 2007, the group published a report showing how removing gender identity from ENDA actually limited its ability to protect gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. “[Under Rep. Frank’s ENDA] you can’t be fired for being lesbian, gay or bisexual but you can be fired if your boss thinks you fit their stereotype of one,” said Kevin Cathcart, Lambda Legal’s executive director, in a press release.

As expected, both bills failed, but the debacle exposed divisions in the LGBT rights movement over transgender

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

issues. Since then, every version of ENDA has included gender identity. The House Committee on Education and Labor postponed the bill in 2009, and in the three years since no action has been taken to move ENDA out of committee. in maryland, a transgender non-discrimination bill appeared ready to pass during the 2012 legislative session.

Governor Martin O’Malley had endorsed the bill and public polls showed support for it. But the bill was never brought up for a vote in the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee, leaving it to die in late March. Gender Rights Maryland, a transgender rights group, blamed the bill’s failure on Senate President Thomas V. Miller, who they said prevented the bill from being brought to a vote in committee. “It is unfortunate that a single person…can decide the fate of so many Marylanders,” the group posted on its website.

But other factors also led to the bill’s demise. During my time working at Equality Maryland, it was apparent that gay marriage was prioritized over transgender rights. In 2010, volunteers worked long hours collecting signatures in support of both same-sex marriage and the transgender bill. The signatures were collected as postcards to Maryland legislators, two to a page. When we approached people in public places, clipboards in hand, the first question we asked was always “Do you support marriage for same-sex couples?” If the person said any form of “No,” we were supposed to say, “Have a nice day,” and move on. The postcard for same-sex marriage came first. By prioritizing gay marriage, we lost the opportunity to talk to tens of thousands of Marylanders about transgender issues and get their written support. Same-sex marriage also came first on scripts for phone banks. This ordering makes a difference in cases where a person is opposed to same-sex marriage but supports rights for transgender people.

“Marriage got more money, marriage got more time, it got more coalition support,” Owen said. Marylanders for Marriage Equality, the coalition in support of same-

SEPTEMBER 28 2012

sex marriage, reached one hundred members this August, with supporters including Equality Maryland, HRC, the NAACP, and the ACLU. The informal coalition in support of the transgender bill, however, had only 12 members.

Jillian Weiss, a professor of law and society at Ramapo College, said that the focus on same-sex marriage has partly to do with class differences within the LGBT community, a factor that she says has marginalized transgender issues from the beginning. In the 1990s, as the gay rights movement was beginning to include transgender people, “central elements of the gay community, who were of a middle class or upper middle class background…saw the transgender community as potentially an obstacle to progress,” Weiss said. Transgender people, who generally face greater discrimination in employment and education, couldn’t get “an equal footing” to push their issues. The Maryland legislature’s LGBT Caucus contains only gay and lesbian—not transgender—delegates. And while three openly gay people (including Rep. Barney Frank, of ENDA infamy) serve on the U.S. House of Representatives, no transgender person has been elected to a state legislature.

According to Weiss, the wealthiest gays and lesbians have determined the focus of the LGBT movement.

“Wealthy gay people have been sparked by the issue [of same-sex marriage] and feel that this is a way in which they are immediately marked as second class citizens, and so they donated lots and lots of money,” she explained. Two of these gay donors are Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook whose estimated net worth is $850 million, and his husband, Sean Eldridge B’09, the political director of Freedom to Marry, a national marriage equality group. Though the couple has donated thousands of dollars to same-sex marriage campaigns—pledging to match up to $25,000 in donations to Equality Maryland in 2010, and pledging $100,000 to Mainers United for Marriage last May—they have not donated to transgender causes.

societal attitudes toward gay people and transgender people also play a role in skewing the gay rights move-

ment toward marriage. In an interview with City Paper, a Baltimore-based weekly, Dana Beyer, a transgender activist in Maryland, said, “It’s not easy to introduce a community to a state, to get people to understand. Many gay people didn’t understand who trans people were, let alone straight people.”

LGBT groups lose an opportunity to educate the public about transgender people when they cast same-sex marriage as solely a gay and lesbian issue. As Owen sees it, same-sex marriage is a transgender concern as well, even if not the most urgent. He himself is engaged to someone who shares his legal sex (female), making his marriage officially a “same-sex” one, although he doesn’t think of it that way. For Owen, this begs the question, “Why aren’t there people who are transgender talking about the importance of validating our marriages?” All—or at least the vast majority—of ads promoting marriage equality feature only straight or gay couples.

But Weiss says that mixing gender identity issues and same-sex marriage could be dangerous: “I could easily see campaigners having the idea that it would be best not to get into that minefield,” she said.

For Owen, it’s simply a matter of including everyone under the LGBT mantle. The fight for same-sex marriage “is never inclusive,” he said. “And that is really sad. And that really divides the community.”

WILL FESPERMAN B’15 was

never brought up for a vote.

FEATURES // 08

JUGAAD last friday, in the calm, early hours of the morning, Delhi University prepared for Student Union elections.

Stout men with heavy moustaches plastered competing posters across North Campus—ABVP Ankit Choudhary ABVP; NSUI Arun Hooda NSUI. Campaign members swarmed students at the campus metro station, passing out thousands of stamped cards with detailed instructions for the ballot. Rickshaw drivers accepted a few rupees to wear hand-painted shirts supporting various candidates.

Hundreds of policemen in light blue camouflage—armed with rifles and batons—blocked off the streets. The candidates stared themselves in the mirror as they tucked their white shirts into their blue jeans, the famously auspicious outfit for Delhi University Student Union (DUSU) candidates. Students were advised to stay out of the streets.

The next day, election officials announced a sweep by the youth wing of the Congress Party, the National Student Union of India (NSUI), of the four Student Union positions. Campaign cadres chanted in the streets—“Ay! Ay! NSUI!”—hoisting their garlanded candidates into the air. The incumbent president of the Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, clasped her hands together in prayer position and bowed to President-elect Arun Hooda. Meanwhile, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP)—the student representatives of India’s other major right-wing party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—filled the streets of North Campus to protest the election results, pushing forcefully toward the police barricades. Police took up their batons, chasing ABVP activists into Delhi University’s Central Library, where a brawl between sides put ten in the hospital, two of them with severe head injuries. “The polls were surely rigged and we suspect that the attack on our supporters was planned,” ABVP spokesperson Rohit Chahal announced. “We will agitate and go to court against the results.”

For a student union election, DUSU’s high drama appears excessive. Over the next nine months of NSUI reign, the elected representatives will meet three or four times, over coffee or perhaps a meal, and discuss issues about the university—how to ensure safety for students,

how to provide better university infrastructure, how to plan evening classes for working students—to present to the University administration. Yet the high stakes of the DUSU elections reside not in the authority they bestow on the victors but rather in their direct connection to the political parties that lurk behind the scenes. By securing 5,000 more votes than his opponent, NSUI’s Hooda has also secured a career in Parliament. By sweeping the elections, the NSUI has provided perfect political fodder for a struggling Congress Party to assert its popularity. As Outlook India tellingly reported, the victory of the NSUI “reiterates people’s belief and faith in the Congress [Party].”

RULES OF THE GAME

The campaign pyrotechnics of the Delhi University Student Union are the exclusive territory of the ABVP and the NSUI, the two major student parties. These parties have, according to Delhi University student Shomit Sirohi, “maintained a stranglehold over the union.” Shomit is affiliated with the Students Federation of India (SFI), a left wing party connected to West Bengal’s Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM (not to be confused with the Communist Party of India, CPI, which split after the Sino-Indian war of 1962 due to conflicting views of their Chinese comrades). His party, along with CPI’s student party, the All India Students’ Association, commands only a small base of supporters in the elections—a microcosm of the waning influence of the Left in India’s parliamentary politics. SFI members ask their left-leaning professors for pittances of 200 rupees; they offer general body meetings to discuss issues of workers’ rights and college infrastructure.

But they pale in comparison to the ABVP and the NSUI, whose parent parties continue to dominate parliamentary politics. For over half a century, these two parties have held control of the DUSU presidency, switching back and forth with the sway of national politics.

DUSU elections offer an easy and effective avenue for political parties to reach the youth and rally them to action—albeit with bribes and promises and petty streetcorner populism—establishing party loyalties for life. Far more important, however, is that DUSU elections

have come to represent a mid-term referendum. Back in the 1980s, Congress Party politicians used to appear sideby-side with NSUI candidates on the campaign posters; backing NSUI was directly equivalent to backing the Congress. And for good reason: these were candidates who would move from DUSU up the political chain, dragging with them a major constituency from their college bases.

Today, for a struggling Congress party—in the midst of a wavering economy and very public accusations of corruption—the recent victory has been portrayed as a resurgence of their political prowess, using the elections to launch Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s son Rahul Gandhi into the political scene as an icon of the youth movement.

On my first day at Delhi University—where I have been studying for the last few months—I was greeted immediately by the aggressive style of DUSU politics, met by party representatives waiting at Delhi’s North Campus metro on the first day of classes, thrusting ‘Welcome Freshers!’ signs into the faces of first year students.

According to Shomit, this is the first step in a long process of recruitment and training. The second step takes place at the dorms, known as hostels, which “serve as the core for the party politics,” Shomit tells me. Each of Delhi University’s 77 colleges has at least one hostel, reserved only for the best of DU’s 130,000 students, who have a wide variety of economic and geographical backgrounds.

An easy target, these hostels are linked to a party through intermediaries—“mostly ex-students from that hostel who have passed out, or more likely failed out, of the college”— who welcome and help usher in the first years. These are the Babas or Bhaiyyas of Delhi University, the “hired goons, the real thugs, who make their bread and butter on the paycheck of the organization,” Shomit explains.

Here, on the first day of the school year, the dorm will have its first meeting. The party thugs—usually in their late 20s—will escort the 60 or so first years around the school, giving them a small tour. A week or so later, the second meeting: they buy the kids food or take them out for a movie, something simple and apolitical. But “their third meeting will be serious business: now you realize that

by David Adler Illustration by Diane Zhou

09 // FEATURES

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

CORRUPTION, VIOLENCE, AND PARTY POLITICS IN THE DELHI UNIVERSITY STUDENT UNION

the hostel has a particular privilege, a particular status,” Shomit says, his index finger stretched forward. “They’ll say, ‘you need to protect your hostel; this is your country.

The outsiders are just immigrants.’” Riling up the first years with a dual sense of fear and privilege, the Babas give them their first assignment: find ten friends each to join our campaign.

So, in a matter of days, the 60 first years yield 600 votes—“the bare minimum” for a first-year electoral base.

Once the 600 have been established, the Babas prepare a meeting with the DUSU candidate and a handful of party higher-ups, members of parliament or their colleagues.

“The intermediaries stand right in the middle and say: ‘there’s 600 votes, now let’s discuss my paycheck,’” Shomit says.

Without any real platform on which to run, the DUSU parties seek to exploit this sort of insider-outsider logic even beyond the hostel, where most students are not yet acquainted with the candidates and their background.

“It’s all about networks,” Shomit explains. “Candidates are always trying to appeal to some sort of regionalism—‘I’m from Haryana, you’re from Haryana; I speak Malayali; you speak Malayali.’” Add to the regional and linguistic “a great deal of caste-ist politics as well. If you are from Uttar Pradesh and you are a Jat [a caste known for its landowning wealth], you will get all the UP Jat votes.”

CAMPAIGN FINANCE

Back in 2005, following a wave of violence in student union elections across India, the Supreme Court asked Former Chief Election Commissioner J. M. Lyngdoh to head a committee that would investigate university politics and offer recommendations on how to curb violence and corruption. These recommendations have since become the regulating code for student union elections throughout the country. But for the most part, candidates pay little attention to the Lyngdoh report, partly because it is hard to regulate such vast and decentralized operations, and partly because the political parties to whom they are connected have enough money to bribe whomever they must.

Most egregiously, the report limits ‘election-related

SEPTEMBER 28 2012

expenditure’ to Rs. 10,000 ($200). Even Shomit acknowledges that this number is “ridiculously low. Left organizations even exceed that—80,000 to 150,000 rupees.”

For the ABVP and NSUI—hiring people to make posters, hiring people to put them up; hiring people to treat the first years to dinner, paying for that dinner—this number is laughable. “Right wing organizations spend something like 90 lakhs ($180,000) to 1.5 crores ($300,000) in campaign funds.”

These financial requirements influence the selection of a party candidate. In one DUSU election, a party will typically start out with a list of about 50 potential candidates. As the campaign proceeds, the candidates who can acquire the largest following are selected by the party to be on the ticket—some, by using a family name to attract voters; others, through a strategy of what is called ‘friendly persuasion,’ bribing or intimidating other candidates out of the race. Either way, getting on the ticket requires funding.

“You would never see a poor kid standing for NSUI or ABVP; you need to have a few lakh [Rs. 100,000] just to get involved,” Shomit tells me.

Once you’re in, though, you’re in: in a storm of handshakes, a candidate is escorted by intermediaries to the higher-ups of the party, who say “okay, now that you’ve got this, we’ll look after your election,” Shomit tells me. As the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), ABVP’s parent party, as well as the All-India Congress, NSUI’s parent party, are both active free market advocates, the parties have little trouble soliciting funds from their parent’s corporate sponsors. And with funding secured, the candidates are left to duke it out on the street, vying for a position in the Student Union that will ensure enough celebrity to guarantee a career in politics—“whoever gets DUSU has been catapulted into the political scene,” Shomit asserts.

The high stakes help explain why candidates often have two A’s at the beginning of their name. Apathetic voters, it has been shown, pick the first name on the ballot, inviting DUSU candidates to add an A to their names to move to the top of the ballot. “It makes the election easier,” Dagar told me. This year’s NSUI ballot reads as follows: President: Arun Hooda. V. President: AAA Varun Khari.

Secretary: AA Varun Chaudhary. Jt. Secretary: Raveena Choudhary.

TAKEAWAYS

Many of my peers at Delhi University argue the upside of the DUSU elections. The student union and the publicity it attracts, they say, present an opportunity for the youth to express their political preferences. In a parliamentary system where nepotism reigns supreme—Indira Gandhi to Sanjay Gandhi, Sanjay to Rajiv, Rajiv to Sonia, and now Sonia to Rahul—the DUSU elections provide a sort of purifying source of political energy in an otherwise stagnant, dynastic system.

But this is an optimistic view. Active intimidation of opponents, bribes to local officials, and violence against university administrators have colored the DUSU elections for close to half a century. Much of that is the direct responsibility of the Parties, who plan provocations and agitations on behalf of their candidates; much more of this violence, however, is the result of a mob mentality that is given room to thrive in the atmosphere of the DUSU campaigns. Just two weeks ago, at an NSUI campaign rally, a group of men began harassing a female student from the IP College For Women. On her way to the metro, her rickshaw was stopped by the group of men, and—in broad daylight on Delhi’s North Campus—she was molested before the crowd. “But you know, every year they come back,” Shomit told me over the phone when we discussed the election results. “Every year, there is violence. You shouldn’t be surprised by this.”

With a university population of close to 400,000 students and staff, the Delhi University elections stand for something much larger than student politics. In the heart of the nation’s capital, where student candidates receive face-to-face endorsements from their party presidents, DUSU has served as a training ground in the rules of the game of parliamentary politics beyond campus, summed up in the Hindi word jugaad—where there’s a will, there’s a way; whatever it takes.

DAVID ADLER B’14 is

the real thug.

FEATURES // 10

Male Control With Methods Cums Responsibility

by Nina Ruelle and Jehane Semaha Illustration by Nina Ruelle method: “the male pill” - hormonal and systemic approaches how it works: Stopping sperm production chemically seems to make sense, especially as that’s how many women do it. And somehow, taking a pill or getting an injection might seem a lot easier than some of the other methods. But whether it’s trying to halt spermatogenesis (as with compound JQ1) or simply to keep the sperm from swimming, it doesn’t look like this one’s going to be available for a good long while. effectiveness: Unknown reversible: Unknown available: Still in the works cost: TBA

method: condoms how it works: Physical barrier, keep sperms on lock. Plus, protection from most STIs. effectiveness: 10–20 percent failure (typical use), 2 percent failure (perfect use). reversible: Yes. Remove condom and it won’t work anymore. available: Most places. No excuse. cost: Free to $2.50/each.

method: reversible inhibition of sperm under

guidance (risug)

method: vasectomy how it works: Tie your tubes, male style. Local anesthetic, scalpel, ice.

Blocking off your vas deferens means your sperm won’t ever make it out of your body. You still ejaculate, it’s just semen without the sperm. effectiveness: ~99 percent contraception. reversible: Possible, but don’t count on it. Reattaching the vas is a complicated and expensive surgery. Only choose a vasectomy if you’d like it to be permanent. available: At medical offices, hospitals, clinics. cost: $350-$1,000, one-time only

11 // SCIENCE

how it works: Takes 15 minutes; a gel is injected into the vas deferens, which solidifies into a small plug. The barrier explodes the membranes of sperm that try to pass by. effectiveness: >99 percent contraception where tested. reversible: Fully! Another injection can flush the plugs from the vas deferens. available: In India for the last 15 years.

Social venture groups are crowdfunding to begin clinical trials in the US cost: estimated <$500, one-time

method: heat and ultrasound how it works: Balls swing low to keep them cool and breezy enough to produce sperm. Getting your testes hot (especially with an added zap from an ultrasound) on a routine basis keeps down sperm count. Careful: 110 degrees feels like a warm shower and a 118 degrees is the adult pain threshold. You have to soak ‘em in 116 degree water for 30 minutes every day for a few weeks. So go on a strict hotbath regimen, wear an electric ball-heating sack, or put on a pair of constricting briefs for a DIY fix. effectiveness: 100 percent contraception for specialized constriction briefs in France; one hundred percent contraception for “hot-sitz” baths in India. reversible?: Unless you get them too hot, you’ll be able to start making sperm again with time. available?: Readily accessible, right in your own home! Just please make sure you do it right. cost: Minimal, depending on your heating bill.

today, sexually active women expect to shoulder a disproportionate burden of the pain, anxiety, inconvenience, cost, and discomfort of birth control. Tomorrow, men could be able to share some of the responsibility.

Planned Parenthood reports that currently, men have a short list of birth control options: abstinence, condoms, outercourse, vasectomy, and withdrawal. With such limited options for guys, many hetero couples rely on female birth control as their primary method.

According to a recent survey conducted by Strategic Pharma Solutions LLC 38.8 percent of women ages 18 to 49 had not used contraceptive methods in the past 30 days and were at risk for pregnancy. Nearly 37 percent of women surveyed had relied on a method of female birth control in the past 30 days, including options like birth control pills, female sterilization, intrauterine devices, birth control injections, vaginal rings, patches, implants, and female condoms.

Meanwhile, 13.2% of the women surveyed reported relying on male birth control methods in the past 30 days, such as the male condom, male sterilization, and withdrawal. No men were surveyed for this study, perhaps underscoring a central assumption in American discourse surrounding contraceptives—that women have a greater capacity for and agency in family planning.

Though we rarely hear of it in the US, researchers across the world have been laboring for decades to refine new male birth controls and test their effectiveness. However, the plethora of options out there—heat and ultrasound treatments, vas deferens blocking methods, and hormonal and other pharmaceutical methods—just haven’t made it over here.

The ideal method would be cheap, effective, applied infrequently, and reversible. But many such methods are kept out of the US market. With US sales of female birth control pills at over $3.5 billion in 2011 according to IMS Health Inc., pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to develop cheap alternative options for men. Some male birth control methods such as RISUG have been already been used in India for up to 15 years (and India is no lightweight in the world of medical research). Though it is an easy, reversible, and effective technology, no major companies have taken the lead in funding US clinical trials.

On a more promising note, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Baylor College of Medicine found a compound this past August called JQ1 that works as a reversible birth control method in male mice. Originally synthesized to block a cancer-causing gene, JQ1 also blocks sperm production—perhaps a daily oral male contraceptive for the U.S. is on the way.

NINA RUELLE B’13.5 wants to swing low, sweet contraceptive.

JEHANE SEMAHA B’13.5 uses

with male bodies.

a diaphragm when having sex

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The Louvre’s Islamic Art Wing (title)

OL D A N D N EW S

by Olivia-Jene Fagon & Christina McCausland Illustration by Adriana Gallo

Winging It this week the louvre in Paris opened a 30,000-squarefoot Islamic Art wing, intended to showcase their collection of over 18,000 Islamic works dating from seventh to the 19th century from Spain, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Iran, and Afghanistan. The 3,000 works on display include a 16th century Ottoman manuscript, an entire 14th century Mamluk porch, and perhaps most interesting, three illustrations of Muhammad. In the wake of recent international tension between Muslim communities and the West, the opening of the new galleries is being described as timely.

The museum’s elegant tagline, “Islamic Art: Resplendent at the Louvre,” contrasts sharply with the “Death to America,” “Death to France,” and “Death to Britain” signs of protesters who gathered at the French Embassy in Iran this past Saturday to express outrage over the incendiary characterizations of the Islamic Prophet Mohammed in the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo as well as in the American YouTube trailer for Innocence of Muslims.

Much of the rhetoric surrounding the opening has been explicitly political. The new wing is intended to show “Islam with a capital I,” explained Sophie Makariou, the Head of the Louvre’s Department of Islamic Arts, at

a recent press preview. “We are suffering from simplistic views of the Islamic world. [Some] would make us believe that there is just one Islam, which is just not true.” The French President François Hollande himself attended and spoke at the wing’s opening ceremony. “The best weapons for fighting fanaticism that claims to be coming from Islam are found in Islam itself,” he said. “What more beautiful message than that demonstrated here by these works.”

Similarly, Prince Waleed Bin Talal of Saudi Arabia made this statement about the wing: “After 9/11 all Arabs and Muslims have the duty and the responsibility to tell the west about real Muslims, about real Islam, and how peaceful our religion is.” Yes, art’s symbolic power has the ability to talk, but so does France’s Muslim population, the largest in Eastern Europe, whose voices or opinions of the new wing have been notably absent from its news coverage.

While the Louvre’s newest addition is mostly being celebrated as a timely gesture of cultural affirmation by the West and the French government, who funded the majority of the wing’s $130 million dollar construction along with Morocco’s King Mohammed VI and Saudi Prince Waleed Bin Talal’s foundation, it has not been without criticism. In

particular, many have found the title “Islamic Art” reductive. Considering the term in this instance is being employed to describe both art made in service of Islam as well as any secular art created in a place under Islamic rule over the course of 11 centuries and from five different countries, the accusation of cultural consolidation has merit.

The wing in its entirety is meant to depict “the radiant face of a civilization,” Louvre director Henri Loyrette stated.

This type of comment, plus the exoticizing wall text found throughout the galleries, which describes the collection as the “Louvre’s Islamic Treasures” or a display of lapis jewelry as an example of “the riches of Syria” makes it unclear what Muslim world the museum thinks its new addition is talking about? Ultimately however, the construction of this wing is a very good thing. It makes accessible incredibly rare and important ancient art works to the Louvre’s eight million yearly visitors. But to conclude that the display of ancient—not contemporary—works of calligraphy, textiles, ceramics, and ornaments are in direct dialogue with current events and the current global and French Muslim community would be shallow indeed. — OF

Authenticity & Authorship barthes may have declared the author dead over 40 years ago, but that notion has proven a bit radical for most of us.

We still like the unity of a figure, an artist with a face and a biography. Emily Dickinson, whose life’s work of over 800 poems wasn’t discovered until after her death, seizes interest through her notoriously reclusive life as much as through her poetry. At the 2012 meeting of the Emily Dickinson International Society, a possible new daguerreotype of the poet—who, as every single Emily Dickinson fan has been pointing out for the past month, claimed in letters to have no portraits of herself—was revealed. Polly Longsworth, a Dickinson biographer, observed that “Dickinson may have surprised us once again. It’s that uncanny ability she had—there’s always something she hasn’t yet told us.” The “new” photograph is exciting because, dead long before the popularization of film, Dickinson had few opportunities to be photographed. There is only one authenticated portrait of her, and it’s a 16-year-old Emily looking small and ethereal, almost sickly. The newly-surfaced daguerreotype shows two women sitting beside each other, one (the maybeDickinson) with her arm gently around the other’s back.

SEPTEMBER 28 2012

The Amherst College Archives notes that this woman seems “a mature woman showing striking presence, strength, and serenity,” and enthusiasts seem eager to assign this poise to the poet.

The actual process of authentication is a little vague.

So far, Dr. Susan Pepin, an opthalmologist who “has long been interested in Dickinson’s eye problems” (namely an astigmatism in one eye) positively compared the eyes in the images, and a fabric sample that matches the blue checked dress in the photograph was found in the Emily Dickinson Museum’s textile collection. The other woman has been identified as Kate Turner—a close friend and rumored lover of Dickinson’s—based on other images. It’s unclear exactly how much more evidence is needed for the final confirmation, but the Amherst College Archives has put out a call for any information regarding the photograph.

This discovery and clue-finding process may be more climactic than the actual implications of an authentic photograph. Earlier this month at Columbia University, a manuscript by Claude McKay discovered three years ago was authenticated. The work was unearthed when a gradu-

ate student organizing materials in Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library discovered the unpublished novel inside a bound cardboard cover bearing the title “Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem” and McKay’s name. McKay was prominent in the Harlem Renaissance, as well as the author of the first novel by a black American to become a best-seller (1928’s Home to Harlem). For the past three years, the graduate student and his advisor have rooted around in library archives across the country, gathering archival and circumstantial evidence to substantiate McKay’s authorship of the work. In addition to the appearance of themes, characters, and neologisms in the manuscript that recur in the writer’s other work, the vital discovery was in the correspondence between McKay and his friend, the writer and political activist Max Eastman. A letter from Eastman contains a direct quote from the novel. William J. Maxwell, the editor of Complete Poems: Claude McKay, called the authentication of the novel “scholarly gold.” The manuscript is back in the archival box it was found in—only now, it is catalogued. — CM

ARTS // 12

R E P L AC E M E N T Inside the Prosthetic Imaginary Interview by Ana Alvarez, Illustration by Diane Zhou

Sara Hendren is an artist, researcher, and writer who explores how design and art practices can inform technoscientific research and knowledge-building. She is the writer-editor of Abler, an online ‘think space’ where art and design are linked together with high and low-tech prosthetics, both practical and speculative, to explore questions about ability, disability, the normalized and medicalized body, and more. Abler juxtaposes posts featuring assistive technologies normally relegated to the field of rehabilitative medicine with questions concerning smart cities, cyborg transhumanism, and the future of democratic communities.

I Skyped with Sara about the politics of abled and disabled bodies, the artist as amateur, and our hopes for a cyborgian future.

The Independent: You’ve

written that Abler is one big umbrella project for your work. Can you talk about the ideas driving the site?

Abler brings together four streams of interest: First, an interest in the innovations of the high-tech prosthetic fields. Second, I’m interested in tracking the tradition of artists who have been working on prosthetics very broadly defined—a more metaphorical notion of the “prosthetic” as an extended tool that becomes a proxy, or a substitute for experience. For artists, the prosthetic becomes very subtle and associative, pointing to tools for needs we don’t even know we have. Third, I’m looking at ideas about the cyborg and the future of bodies: how we negotiate our dance with machine parts of all kinds, and whether the enhancement and augmentation they promise is tempered enough by good critical conversations. And then fourthly, I’m pointing to what are commonly called “assistive technologies”—the very medicalized devices that lots of people use but that don’t get much analysis as design or culture. Everything from crutches, to wheelchairs, walkers, ankle braces.

Those four fields tend to exist in more or less separate worlds. But all these things have much to say to one another. Abler puts them in adjacency online, along with critical writing, in a form that juxtaposes these ideas against one another and creates cross commentary to try to mix those categories. And ultimately to ask: Who is being assisted by what kinds of technologies? And what kinds of assistance do we want in the future?

The whole project has been to create a blog that’s not just a story-chaser, a popularizer of technology; neither did I want it to become an academic exercise, denouncing the politics of technology development as inherently oppressive. I wanted to take some of the really interesting questions about normalcy and abnormalcy, dependence and independence and look at artworks, design, and engineering work that all address these issues. I wanted all those conversations to exist in one place, to be rich and generative and ultimately really exciting because of what they provoke in the imagination and also the critical conversations they spark about abled and disabled bodies.

Sara Hendren:

It seems like we are going to be using the words “disabled” and “abled-bodied” quite a bit. I want to first ask you, not necessarily for a definition but more of a complication of these terms: what does it mean to be able or disabled and how is that tension addressed in your work?

Indy:

13 // FEATURES

People who work in disability try to keep raising the idea that being “disabled” is not a fixed and assigned identity. It is not about a body status or a capacity level, but much more about this very complex, changing, evolving, and perhaps temporary, perhaps longer term, political state—in some ways, similar to how we’ve come to understand the slippery designations of race and gender.

The built environment and socio-political institutions all make allowances and disallowances for certain kinds of bodies and capacities, and those affordances have ripple effects in cultures, creating abled-ness and disabled-ness. And disability is a status that is always in flux: you enter into different seasons in your life where you are more or less bodily and cognitively able to access those institutions, avenues of social mobility, and so on.

People working within disability studies also think about the ways that bodies and lives get commodified by notions of independence, autonomy, and economic productivity. So there’s a larger conversation there to be had about measuring worth and the ideally productive body.

Defining who is “able” has everything to do with assumptions about the market economy.

What started Abler for me was a desire to stay away from this notion that only people who are disabled have a political interest in their own rights. There’s something really interesting and provocative about looking at disability politics and technology within these larger questions about economic structures and power dynamics. It makes us ask: what’s the kind of future we want to create? What kinds of bodies and minds do we want to foster and create greater possibilities for?

SH:

When I was reading your work on Abler I was most excited by the idea of what role the artist or designer has in this field. You present the idea of the artist as an amateur that is in a perfect position to go into a prosthetic field that is technologically specialized and add input. You also look into the notion of the role of an artist in society in a broader sense, that instead of just conjecturing and aiming critique at things, artists can have a real, generative, and purpose driven change in people’s lives. I was wondering where you place yourself in that spectrum?

so much radicalism there: It’s not the kind of industrydriven, high-tech engineering and gee-whiz- manufacturing that you normally see in prosthetics. It’s a low-tech practice that’s an overlooked, undervalued corollary to high-tech design.

Next I’ll be trying to think what other more speculative cardboard devices could be made, how else they might point outward from their diagnostic uses. In this way, the artist is partly a fabricator, partly mediator, between the formal and informal cultures, linking specialists and labs where there’s a lot of cultural caché and an ability to drive the agenda for development, and then these low-tech engineering practices that are really off the radar. With Abler and my other projects, I want to construct devices, situations, and critical conditions by which people who tend to be invisible in these conversations get a more public voice.

Indy: In

one of your articles you mention eyeglasses as one of the most successful prosthetics that either hide or reveal difference. Your Abler article about hearing aids has a great quote that touches on this same tension: “[T]here’s presuming that a hearing impairment is an inherent lack, and therefore asking, ‘How well can we ‘hide’ a functional hearing aid, to blend in with the flesh surrounding it?” And then, instead, there’s asking: “What would a visually striking hearing aid look like? What would make you want to wear it? If we grant visibility to this kind of aid, how does it alter our view of its user?” And, most provocatively: “What else might a hearing device do, that’s so far not been imagined?”

Indy:

I am really interested in what my own amateur background as a visual artist brings to what critic Brian Holmes has called “expert cultures” in medicine and biotech. The way I am interested in working in those communities, as you said, is not only in a critique from the gallery about a dystopian technological future. What I am more interested in doing is working alongside experts in engineering, science, and medicine in a collaborative way.

I’m also getting trained in building low-tech adaptive technology. I started working with the assistive device center at the Perkins School for the Blind, who I found through the Adaptive Design Association in New York.

They collaboratively develop and build tri-wall cardboard devices, mostly for children, all highly customized. A number of these users have multiple, complex atypicalities in their bodies beyond blindness, so these designers work with tri-wall, which is incredibly physically robust, to make these provisional, temporary prosthetics with a single user in mind. They’re totally custom and they’re low cost. There’s SH:

Could you talk more about the importance of granting visibility to disabilities as a tool for changing perceptions?

People ask me that a lot—what is the goal of the design research here, is it to provide most discretion possible so they feel that their disability is sort of masked, or is the design research really for making these things much more outward?

SH:

Indy:

I think for eyeglasses you take it from being this deviation from normalcy to being this positive, original trait. I think that is important in transforming our notions of abled and disabled bodies, and how these are assigned negative and positive labels.

SH: Eyeglasses

have become so naturalized and desirable to people because you think of them purely as a handbag, as an accessory; they’ve really become quite transformed. So it’s interesting for instancwwe that hearing aids still carry so much stigma. People report being treated as if they know less than they used to, or as if they are cognitively disabled when they are not. There are assistive technologies that we register as this really medicalized need and these other technologies that we completely take for granted as being prosthetic tools. Graham Pullin, who wrote Design Meets Disability, wrote that this is one of the most interesting and productive tensions to think about—in what situation is discretion desirable, and in what situations is a much more

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

PA R T S

performative and visually striking product desirable? Ideally there are places for both, where people can make choices.

Beyond practical tools, I’m particularly interested in finding ways to temporarily estrange ourselves from our received ideas about technologies, to reconsider how we are using them. Artists are particularly good at doing that work: repositioning, hacking, inverting technologies to help us see them again. What experiences we’re gaining, what experiences we’re shutting off from ourselves—I’m interested in a truly open-handed posture towards how we implement technology in our lives. Not with a kind of suspicion or paranoia, and also not with a submissive and thoughtless consumption.

One of the things that piqued my interest most when I read your work is your ideas surrounding the cyborg.

What is the cyborg to you, and what does this cyborgian future entail?

Indy:

There tends to be either an overly sanguine story about the cyborg self—like, in the future, there will be no disability because, “Oh these legs don’t work anymore? I’ll SH:

SEPTEMBER 28 2012

just strap on new ones.” Or, conversely, there’s a kind of dystopian fascination with our dependence on technological proxies. People either imagine the liberatory cyborg, where we merge bodies and machines in a way that is clean and utopian, or where: Yikes! We’re all going to die, because the machine overlords—they’re coming! But both of those stories make a big leap over harder questions.

One of the things I say a lot when I lecture is that people with disabilities who are using assistive technologies every day are our richest resource of wisdom about the cyborg-self, about how we integrate technologies into our lives. They’ve been doing it in significant ways already, everyday, for a long time. But because we have these notions of assistive technologies as medicalized, and a kind of a medical-tragedy story we tell ourselves about these people, we have ignored them as a knowledge resource. We’re too busy consuming and replicating this very futuristic idea of the cyborg monster.

With Abler, I’m trying to engage a nearer future that is manifestly open, to suggest that there’s always contingency.

We choose what to do with what we make. We should enter the post-human with our wits about us, with our critical

eye on these things. Feminist and disability scholars have both long asked: Where is there recognition for experiences that involve dependence, or inter-dependence? How do we make a culture that affords space for those experiences, instead of continuing our obsession with one kind of useful-able-bodied-autonomous-unfettered self? I’m not sure interdependence is a thing we want to wholly eradicate from the human experience. I want an alternative to the idea that absolute autonomy is the only desirable state of being.

ANA ALVAREZ B’13 is

an abler.

FEATURES // 14

QUEBEC STUDENT STRIKE An interview with student union coordinator Guillaume Legault Interview by Benson Tucker & Jonathan Storch Illustration by Robert Sandler

after a winter semester of massive student strikes and repressive government reaction, Quebec university life may finally be returning to normal. Last Thursday, the newly installed Party Quebecois announced that it would repeal the Liberal government’s tuition plan, which would have raised yearly fees 70 percent to $3793 by 2017. Starting in February, anger at the plan led more than 150,000 students across the province to boycott classes in what became the largest student strike in North American history. Government intransigence and police violence in response to strike demonstrations galvanized the student population, which rallied around CLASSÉ, the radical student union that was involved in the initial strikes. The Liberal government further exacerbated students’ anger with its May adoption of Bill 78, which suspended the semester, required protests to be approved by the police, and outlawed any demonstration that would disrupt school.

The day after Bill 78’s passage, more than 300,000 marched in protest, and CLASSÉ announced its plans to defy the law. In August, Prime Minister Jean Charest called for an election to demonstrate the support of the “silent majority” for his party’s leadership; much of the energy aroused by the student movement was channeled into the effort to defeat him, which was successful in the September 4 vote.

Following the tuition hike repeal, CLASSÉ, which now represents over 100,000 Quebecois students, announced its readiness to pursue the goal of tuition-free university education.

inclusive as possible and to respect the fact that some people don’t want to go as far as others. And slowly a radicalization process has been going on through the whole strike. And at the end more and more people were sharing the same political perspectives on many issues.

Indy: What

were some of the areas where there were serious disagreements?

One of them would have been on the issue of condemning violence. In the altermondialisme [alternative globalization] movement there have been these great debates, beginning in the year 2000, about whether or not we should condemn violence. This has been going on forever.

GL:

Indy: So do you guys maintain the idea that property destruction is something individuals choose?

GL: We have always decided to respect the idea of the diversity of the tactics. But with this new debate lots of people tried to reframe this position. We were really targeted by the media as the radical dangerous terrorist organization, which in fact we were not. Civil disobedience isn’t violence, and we have to make a clear difference, ’cause for the government, for the media, making a picket line is something violent, which it really isn’t.

Indy: Can

On Tuesday evening, CLASSÉ general coordinator Guillame Legault spoke to an audience of about 75 in Salomon Hall at Brown University. Beforehand, the Independent had a conversation with him on the patio of the Stephen Robert Campus Center.

you define violence?

GL: Well,

I can give you the definition that CLASSÉ has been able to give. CLASSÉ finally decided to condemn violence, as the act of someone hurting someone on purpose without being in a position of self-defense.

The Independent: CLASSÉ was originally formed out of Assé, a smaller anti-globalization student union. How did the dynamics of CLASSÉ change as more students got involved?

Indy: So CLASSÉ does not consider property destruction violence?

Guillame Legault: We have seen less radical student unions join CLASSÉ, and that created some friction with the initial members. But even though there were some really big disagreements on some issues, we decided to be as

Indy: Which

15 // INTERVIEWS

GL: No.

is a good stance to have. I think that’s the stance that SDS had. That’s a conventional stance.

and what we should condemn. ’Cause they even wanted us to condemn the actions that we organized ourselves, which was completely stupid. We wouldn’t organize something that we would condemn. We just simply wouldn’t do it!

Indy: With the election and the repeal of the tuition hike and Bill 78, is the energy that was present in the spring pretty much gone?

The colleges and the CEGEPs [pre-university public colleges] were the first ones to vote on whether they were going to continue the strike into the fall. And most of them voted against. So this really discouraged lots of people.

With the elections, the two other student federations decided to get really involved into the open promotion of the vote. In fact, the former president of the collegial federation has been elected under the PQ banner. Which is in my opinion a complete tragedy, cause this is not the way we believe that we should be doing things. So it’s sure that lots of people just don’t seem to have the same will to fight.

Because most of the issues they were addressing or they were trying to fight are not there anymore. Since the very beginning we have always been saying, we’re not fighting for a number, we’re fighting for ideas. And lots of people shared that. But the summer just dramatically hit us.

GL:

Indy: What’s

the next action?

GL: This weekend there’s gonna be a congress about what’s up next with the campaign. The newly elected minority PQ government is looking forward to doing these sort of roundtable meetings, a summit on education. People are gonna get organized to get themselves heard there. Lots of people were talking about going on a temporary general strike on the road to the summit, maybe organizing a counter-summit. Now also people are gonna have to ask themselves some questions. Because some student unions have already put in the next congress book the question of dismantling CLASSÉ and going back to Assé. Because there’s no more strike, and at the very beginning, CLASSÉ was a temporary coalition for the strike.

Indy: You’re

GL: And

it got us out of the debate about what is violence,

currently working on a graduate degree, on social movements like this one. Why is it important to you

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

to have a college education? in the way that it is actually structured, and the goals that we give to education, are not the ones that I would privilege. But still, education and culture are things that are really, really important for people to be able to emancipate themselves and to go against an order that is already there, and that you just have to fit into.

anything you had to do, would you rather go to school or work?

GL: Education

why organize within the current university system? Why continue to support a culture that you have to pay into, rather than create a different culture?

GL: I

guess it would depend on the day.

Indy: Good answer. As a social scientist, you’re familiar with structural lenses to social life. What balance between structural constraints and personal responsibility do you strike when considering the police?

the university campus is something that is really missing in a lot of places. That’s the first thing. These chairs are not the most comfortable chairs ever. They could be made out of recycled wood. They could be not. I don’t really care.

Indy:

Should the students of Brown University drop out?

Depends why they are going to these schools. Why should they drop? Why shouldn’t they?

GL:

Indy: But

GL: I totally agree with that. The question is, when you’re already involved into something that you already study, and you come to the point that you have a certain amount of critiques about what you’re actually doing, and you face your own contradictions, you try to do your best within the institutions you’re involved in. It’s something I would really wish to have the time to get involved into, to help people to get involved into permanent education, and adult education, and neighborhood or community education. Still, I think university isn’t all bad. But the democratization of the whole university network is slowly going away. And I think we can, and we have, stopped these things.

GL: I guess it could depend on the police officer you have in front of you. But as long as this person has a stick that is made especially for hitting you in the face, I’m not gonna like you. I don’t see them either as victims, because cops have a role in maintaining the hierarchy and the dominance, and the distance between the elites and a lot of people in the society. That’s one of the things I didn’t like about the one percent that people from Occupy were always talking about. It’s more than one percent! A lot of people contribute to keeping these people there without even knowing it.

Indy: How do you consider the relation between your personal consumption choices and your involvement in radical social movements protesting neoliberalism?

Indy: Well, they could stop paying someone to teach them, they could be part of a cooperative where they learn!

GL: Yeah,

Indy: Because

they want to have jobs. Maybe.

GL: Why? Indy: I don’t know! I don’t know why either of us are in college. We just keep doing it, right? Why don’t we just go to California and go and— GL: And Indy:

I’m not the ambassador of consumption, or organic consumption, or . . . no. My choices are pretty much mine.

I live with my contradictions and I’m pretty ok with that.

I don’t want to judge myself like I don’t want to judge the others. Like, I’m vegetarian. I could be vegan. I could eat raw food. I don’t give a shit if you eat meat. Eat as much as you want! I can find it like bad if you eat, like, only steak every time, but I don’t give a shit. [laughs]

why not?

create an anarcho-syndicalist commune!

And live in an anarcho-syndicalist commune!

GL:

Indy: I

understand you support yourself with a part time job. What do you do?

GL: I work in a warehouse. I’m a forklift driver. Real proletariat. [laughs] Indy: Is

your warehouse organized?

GL: I’m the only person that works in my warehouse, so it could be hard to unionize myself. I just imagine myself being the president and the only member of the assembly.

Indy:

But you prefer school.

GL: I

don’t see a hierarchy between school and work.

Indy: If

you woke up in the morning, you didn’t have

GL: I

don’t know! I don’t feel that bad with the life I’m living.

Indy: You

just want to make sure that the tuition doesn’t go

up.

Indy: So what actions do you think people should take in their daily lives, what would you like to see the people right here do differently?

If it would be only about this, I don’t think I would have done everything I’ve done last year. I think it’s important to start by speaking about principles and other ways of seeing everything we do every day. But I don’t have the good answer. As you don’t.

GL: Well,

Indy:

first of all, people here, who seem to buy things, could simply be part of a cooperative. Or they could do a little more than buying packed stuff. They could instead collectively buy dishes and wash them themselves and not pay someone to do it. I think the spirit of community on

GL: No.

No, I certainly don’t.

No one has. Well, if you find someone who has all the good answers, I don’t know what we should do with this person, but that could get us into trouble.

GL:

Indy: Yeah.

GL: That

SEPTEMBER 28 2012

I agree.

is the weirdest interview I have ever had.

INTERVIEWS // 16

EGO

by Mary-Evelyn Farrior I. He had these smudgy blue eyes that startled me. I always thought they would be dark brown, but up close they were this muted shade of blue, with a layer of death glazed over them. Like an old cocker spaniel with cataracts. I could not bear to look at him without chills running through me.

And even when I did match his eyes, they seemed to be looking at something beyond myself.

II. He had these piercing blue eyes. I imagine the ice water near the South Pole would produce a similar feel as did his gaze. They silently attempted to control any conversation.

I frequently diverted my eyes away from his in order to preserve some shred of personal power.

III. He had these sad blue eyes that wanted to be something.

The constant yearning for something unattainable could be sensed from the simplest glance. I watched them try so hard to find comradeship in others, and he may have believed he found it in some of these contacts, but it all seemed so contrived to me.

IV. He had these childish blue eyes. They provided him with a constant life force, yet all I felt in them was hollowness.

An overwhelming feeling of complete solitude that comes only from realizing that all that can be known is yourself.

A dark, glorious mirror of another revealing only your extreme isolation.

V. He had these sunken blue eyes. Deep caves of orbitals with tiny blue beads for eyes. They were always making up for this physical imperfection through imperialism, pleased at the submission of others. The irises were the lightest shade of blue, leading one to believe he would be kind; however, I only found a devastating breed of hubris when our eyes met.

VI. He had these darkened blue eyes. They were once pale and gentle but have bittered with time. He constantly strove to prove himself, and rather bullishly at that. I did all I could to get out of his way. I do not know what happened to him, maybe enough disappointment finally caught up with him.

Selfish to take it out on others.

VII. He had these tired blue eyes. Droopy little things that looked like they would burst into tears at the slightest touch. I kept to light subject matter whenever I talked with him for fear he would start crying if something more serious was discussed. Nothing is worse than crying in public. Everyone is too uncomfortable to handle it appropriately.

VIII. He had these solemn blue eyes. Steadfast like the top of a pendulum around which all else rotates. I always tried my hardest to win an approving glance. That is how people take over the world. They merit respect, and then they advance in power. At least that is my belief.

IX. He had these plain blue eyes that reminded me of a dulled knife. They made me wonder what it would be like to be him. Maybe he does think constantly and questions life.

Or maybe he just does as he should, and he will be a good worker one day. I would feel better if I knew that someone else thought about the same things that I do.

17 // LITERARY

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

the list

week of 9.28–10.4

friday the 28th

sunday the 30th

nan jombang dance & master classes 1–5pm // ashamu (77 waterman st) // $10 two movement workshops that blend minangkabau performing arts traditions, spirituality, & contemporary movement. registration is required (community call 421-4278). free for brown students.

pawtucket film festival 12pm // 175 main st (pawtucket) // $10 the fest is 13 years old. catch it in its last day. full schedule at http://www.thepff. com/#!schedule/c1h6a.

eva and franco mattes 6:30pm // c.i.t. 103 (weybosset st) do you know 0100101110101101.org? a talk by brooklyn-based artist-provocateurs / pioneers of net art / inccurrers of lawsuits / creators of a media campaign for a non-existent action movie. 01010001! romance, devotion & drama (a concert) 8pm // sayles hall (brown) dedicated to the work of italian-american composer mario castelnuovo-tedesco, a prolific composer of operas, instrumental music, & hollywood scores. featuring brown’s orchestra & the schola cantorum. saturday the 29th block island birding thru sunday // block island (duh) it’s annual fall birding weekend! come cozy with more than 150 species of birds! field trips, salt marsh bird identification, bird banding demonstrations, wildflower identification, & more. dash bicycle birthday scavenger hunt 12pm // dash bicycle (broadway st) come see if you can beat nice slice’s reigning bike babes. dash is 3 years old. teams of 3 have 2 hours to find, eat, & photosnap wildly before a 2pm tally / prize / cookout. wear a helmet & register at 11am. self sufficiency & survival skills 5pm // libertalia // $5–10 suggested for radicals & everyone! the first of a series of five saturday workshops facilitated by wilderness skills & survival instructor daniel quiray.

recycle-a-bike trans & lady night 7–10pm // recycle-a-bike // $0–5 a night open to trans- & female-identified people—come work & learn on your bikes. $5 studio use or work/trade. new & used parts available. see johnny at xspelledx@gmail.com. monday the 1st film theory & national publics in divided korea 1pm // pembroke hall 305 (172 meeting st) a colloquium of scholars of korean film & media. discussion of cinema’s ideological function in the development of state-craft and culture in north & south korea. tuesday the 2nd

action speaks: private rights & public fights 5:30pm // as220 this year action speaks (a nationally-distributed radio show bent on democratizing public dialogue) looks at moments when the rights of the individual have clashed with the needs or beliefs of the public. weekly radio recording sessions through nov. 21st. adrian tomine: new york drawings 8pm // as220 providence launch of book by famed new yorker cartoonist adrian tomine. “fun” music 9pm // black box at 95 empire st // $ to round out the as220 options, there will be sounds in the upstairs space. namely, night mode, winter line, dave public, gyna bootleg, ultra spasm aktion, soft target. thursday the 4th city arts celebrates latino heritage month 5–7pm // cityarts (891 broad st) cityarts is proud to show artwork by 11 local latino artists, including pieces by new urban arts mentors & cityarts students.

project unbreakable 7–8pm // chace auditorium (risd) grace brown works with survivors of sexual abuse who volunteer to be photographed holding a poster with a quote from their attacker. her work has been featured in time magazine & the guardian. audience members will have a chance to participate in the project after the lecture.

x-rays: in living color 6pm // sarah doyle gallery (benevolent st) gallery opening for lois goglia’s latest showing. lush translucency becomes, transcendental sensation & medical form appropriated for artistic ends.

wednesday the 3rd

in the know? email listtheindy@gmail.com

the power of narrative and empathy in medicine and literature 5:30pm // macmillan hall 117 (brown) vincent lam, author of bloodletting and miraculous cures, and the novel the headmaster’s wager, to present on the interstices between science & humanities. reception & book signing to follow.

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