Don Tuzin

I don’t know how many anthropologists or UCSD students read this blog, so the name Don Tuzin may not mean much to this blog’s readers. He was the senior member of the Department of Anthropology at UCSD, and he died on Sunday after what sounds like a short and inexplicable illness. I never had the chance to take a class with him, but I had the pleasure of having several long conversations with Don at a few department receptions. He was gregarious and fascinating and kind in those conversations, and he also had the most amazing stories–about drinking Scotch with Margaret Mead in his hut in Papua New Guinea during his field work, about annoying Mary Douglas by choosing to go grad school somewhere besides where she was, about penile bloodletting, which he wrote and lectured a good deal about. (In fact, the whole penile bloodletting thing is so famous around the department that for the grad student picnic last fall, a penile bloodletting cake was made–with a twig stuck in the urethra, as they do in PNG, and strawberry filling doubling as blood.) He was also interested in the whole intersexual issue, which I’m fascinated by, too, and we talked for a while about John/Joan and my experience reporting on ISNA. Anyway, Don was a great guy and a major figure on campus and in Melanesian anthropology, and he’ll be missed. After the jump I’ve posted the press release from UCSD.
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In other news, I’m still working on my thesis

Yes, Glenn was right. I was stuck. Or maybe I am stuck.

As you may recall, I turned in my thesis on January 8. In fact, I may have said that “Our long national nightmare is over” or somesuch. As it turned out, it had only begun. While the hard part was figuring out what the hell I was going to write about and then somehow writing 45 pages about what the hell I was planning to write about, the excruciating part was what followed: revisions. What’s the difference between hard and excruciating? Making a chocolate soufflé is hard, while pouring molten, bubbling chocolate all over your hand is excruciating.

Granted, what I turned in on January 8 sucked. It sucked in a few ways: my argument was implicit, not explicit, and this stuff is supposed to be as obvious as skywriting; the third chapter was so rushed and underwritten that its relevance to the rest of the thesis was not apparent; the introduction and conclusion, which I wrote last and thus were even more rushed and even more underwritten, were both God-awful. (By the way, what does God-awful actually mean? As awful as God? That’s just weird. It should be Devil-awful. Hmm.) But I didn’t really know this until my advisers gave me their comments. I won’t go into my initial feelings about the comments, because when I expressed them to my mother on the phone, she asked, “Can anyone hear you?” I’ll just repeat what someone told me my adviser situation was akin to: “Nancy’s the carrot, and Keith’s the stick.” That pretty much sums it up.

So, after decompressing, thinking, and procrastinating, I went back to the thesis for round two. I made my argument explicit–my argument being that some people use their hybridity agentively–and I made a lot of clarifications and corrections and I expanded that rushed chapter. And I rewrote the introduction so that it seemed a little more like skywriting. And I did some actual fieldwork, interviewing an agentive hybrid, and using that interview to conclude the thesis. Also, the interview proved my thesis. At least, I thought so.

I turned it. And ten days later I got an email that read, “i read your thesis over the weekend and think you made major improvements. congratulations. keith and i still have some concerns, though.” Emphasis mine, as they say. The concerns, as it so happened, was that they didn’t like “agentive hybridity.” At all. Not that it was the title of thesis. Not that it was the point of the thesis. Not that it was… ARGH. They thought that the way I was using agentive hybridity made it sound as if not all hybrids were agentive, when everyone, even the most oppressed, have agency. Of course, I thought it was obvious that 1) I believe that everyone has agency, and 2) I believe some people have more agency than others, and 3) my thesis was explaining how all of this works. But as my Geometry teach Mr. Roll always said, “Don’t assume anything!” To be fair, when Nancy told me this, it didn’t seem to be such a big deal. She’s the carrot, remember? All I needed to do was reframe “agentive hybridity” as “cultural capital.” This means that every hybrid is agentive, but not every hybrid has the knowledge and skills to be socioeconomically successful. The knowledge and skills are “cultural capital.” Some have actual capital, too, but that’s not my point.

So, back to the revisions. Technically, the thesis has been “approved,” meaning the school has a form saying so. But I have to fix it, meaning that I have to go through the thing and remove almost every reference to agency and so on. And do some other stuff, such as put blunt conclusions in the second and third chapters and rejigger the conclusion. All of which, of course, I’d rather pour molten chocolate all over my hand than do. Why? Because I’m sick and tired of my thesis and because I thought I had a neat little idea in agentive hybridity and I wanted to write a thesis that had an original idea. Cultural capital is not new. Pierre Bourdieu came up with it in the 1970s and Philippe Bourgois perfected its application in In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio in 1996. So, instead of doing something new, I just synthesized some old stuff. Yay: This is my job. I’m an academic. This is my life.

I spent five hours at Urban Grind yesterday doing the revisions. I had thought they’d be much easier, and I’d told Nancy that I would have the final revision in her mailbox this morning. Nope. At 7:30 last night, I packed it in without writing a conclusion to the third chapter or fixing the actual conclusion. I just couldn’t do anymore. I wanted a drink, some dinner, and some “30 Rock.” (In fact, 30 Rock and the drink went well together, or at least they did until I laughed so hard while trying to swallow that I spit wine all over myself and the couch. Good thing the couch is red.) This afternoon, I hope I can finish up. I better, because if I don’t bring it to Nancy’s party tonight, I’m going to feel like a bigger loser than I already am.

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I’m sure you were wondering how Donnie Davies and Luce Irigaray could be synthesized. Well, wonder no more!

In case you don’t obsessively read all of the professional gay blogs (they’re all listed in my blog roll in the middle of the page as “gay blogs”) then you may not be up on the controversy du jour among the fags online: Donnie Davies and his band Evening Service’s video “The Bible Says” and their ex-gay ministry Love God’s Way. Here’s the Technorati search.

[embedyt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MRWqlf_8M8[/embedyt]

Before I saw the video, I read a bunch of posts on how horrible and shocking and evil the song was. The refrain: “God hates a fag…” And how it proves how horrible and evil the Christian Right is. Then I saw the video. And the websites. It is so, so, so clearly satire. And brilliant satire at that. The night that I was Donnie Davies-obsessed was also the night that I was reading feminist theorizing on the body for my phenomenological anthropology class. It was sort like that old Reese’s advertisement when the chocolate bar and the peanut jar crash into each other. You got an ex-gay in my phenomenology! And so, I ended up writing my weekly 4 to 5 page paper (ugh) on the phenomenology of gaydar and the use of parody in feminist activist theory. Of course, I have posted the paper after the jump. I’m probably going to some sort of academic hell for writing it. (FYI: I did it very quickly.)

“So if you’re a fag, He hates you, too”:

Donnie Davies, the phenomenology of gaydar, and the feminist call for parody

Over the last several days, various gay bloggers have been linking to a music video of Donnie Davies and his band Evening Service performing their song “The Bible Says.” Filmed like a cross between a video of a run-of-the-mill country artist and a 1980s arena rock band like Night Ranger, it was full of images of Donnie praying, raising his arms like Jesus, and singing with a little too much gusto to appear to be “cool.” It looks like a Christian rock video. What most bloggers and their readers objected was the song’s refrain: “God hates a fag / God hates fags / God hates fags / So if you’re a fag, He hates you, too.” Before I saw the video, I read a number of posts about how deeply offensive the song and the Donnie were, how this proves how hateful the Religious Right could be. But then someone noticed that it was a little too over-the-top; it seemed like parody. Last night, there were nearly 200 comments on the popular gay blog JoeMyGod debating whether or not it was satire. Joe himself wrote, “I mean, COME ON, take a swishy bear [“bear” is gay slang for a husky, often hairy, gay man] in a PINK shirt and have him sing about fighting homo temptation? It’s GOLD, Jerry! And the line ‘To enter heaven, there’s no backdoor’? Priceless” (2007). For some the hints of satire were in the double entendre of the lyrics, but for others it was the way that Donnie moved, his gestures, his way-of-being that made him seem, well, gay. (Though this latter observance would not necessarily mean that he was joking, considering that he states on his website that he is a “reformed” homosexual.) Because I have been reading feminist theorizing on the body all week, I thought, well, yes, Donnie moves gay-ly; our interpretation, my interpretation that he is gay, that he cannot be anything but gay, arises out of culturally, historically embedded notions of the male and female body, notions that have only somewhat changed (even if they have been complicated) by the feminist intervention.

First, let’s look at a possible reason for why so many self-identified gay viewers—gay bloggers and their gay readers—would so readily identify “gay” behavior. If we take for granted Sheets-Johnstone’s belief that “movement forms the I that moves before the I that moves forms movement” (1999:138, italics in the original) as well as Foucault’s that “Discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile bodies'” (1975:138), then we can theorize that certain behaviors, certain ways-of-being can be unconsciously learned or appropriated before a conscious understanding of the cultural connotations of that behavior. Boys who grow up to self-identify as gay often over-identify with their mothers. (Freud thought that an overbearing mother and a distant father caused a child to become gay, but most psychologists now believe that it is a child’s inherent gayness, whatever that might be, that scares the father into withdrawal; the mother smothers as overcompensation.) Effeminacy, the “feminine” behavior of men, can then be taken as behavior that is appropriated by the child by copying the behavior of his mother. The mother is not deliberately disciplining him to behave as she does, but her constant presence is nevertheless de facto discipline. Sheets-Johnstone says that we move before we think we can move. Effeminacy, then, except when done deliberately as camp, as it often is in Western gay culture, is an unconscious habitus-like movement, mimicry of “feminine” behavior. Once they reach adulthood, most gay men are keenly aware of how their behavior is interpreted. In order to pass, we will consciously sublimate whatever seems to be feminine in our movement and our speech; we become “the I that moves forms movement.” This constant policing of our behavior makes us particularly observant of effeminacy in others. Hence “gaydar.”

One of the projects of the original gay rights movement (not the current, mainstreaming assimilationist movement) was the de-tabooing of effeminacy and the deconstruction of the hostility to the effeminacy of gay men. Effeminacy is upsetting and taboo because it is a merging of female behavior with the male body. As Mary Douglas theorized 40 years ago in Purity and Danger (1966), “uncleanness is matter out of place” (40). Thus: Homosexuality (re: effeminacy) is disgusting. This attitude is based on a highly essentialist view of the innateness of the male and female, a Cartesian dualism embedded in modern philosophy and belief. As Grosz writes, “Dichotomous thinking necessarily hierarchizes and ranks the two polarized terms so that one becomes the privileged term and the other its suppressed, subordinated, negative counterpart” (1994:4). Male behavior is considered rational, while female behavior is emotional. Mixing the male body with female behavior is disconcerting. (And as Irigary says in “Any Theory of the ‘Subject,’ it is this disconcerting-ness that can be revolutionary. It is “better to speak only in riddles…” she writes. And she does. (143)) These attitudes are not only used against homosexuals and homosexual behavior but also against men who show themselves as “feminine.” Men who are nurturing (like women), who cry (like women), who react emotionally (like women) are seen a weak, unfit, unmanly. Grosz explains,

Relying on essentialism, naturalism and biologism, misogynist thought confines women to the biological requirements of reproduction…women are somehow more biological, more corporeal, and more natural than men. The coding of femininity with corporeality in effect leaves men free to inhabit what they (falsely) believe is a purely conceptual order while at the same time enabling them to satisfy their (sometimes disavowed) need for corporeal contact through their access to women’s bodies and services. (14)

And from where do our notions of femininity come? Kristeva shows that at least some (if not most) come from the Christian idolatry of Mary, of the belief that women must be Mary, the virgin mother. Maternal behavior is what is correct for women.

Irigaray’s call for an ethics of sexual difference, for a renewed sense of “wonder” of the other sex (“Sexual Difference,” 13), would not solve the problem. It keeps the binary that, as Grosz writes, “hierarchizes and ranks.” As Weiss explains, “What Grosz is calling for… is more of an ethics of sexual differences rather than an Irigarayan ethics of sexual difference. The former suggest that there are an infinite number of ways for sexual difference to be establish and express, the latter invokes (however unintentionally) a more monolithic, binary conception of sexual difference” (1999:84). Weiss later contends that we need “new morphological fantasies in order to combat self-imposed as well as socially imposed limitations on our own body images” (86). This is reminiscent of Judith Butler’s call for making gender trouble (in Gender Trouble), for disrupting notions of gender performance (and therefore gendered being), through drag (1990). It is the disconcerting-ness that causes people to question, to become “the I that moves forms movement.” She advocates parody of gender performance as activism. Donnie Davies is, probably unknowingly, taking up Weiss and Butler’s call. Just this morning, the busy bloggers found a picture of someone who looks exactly like Davies on the website of a talent agency. “Davies” is a professional comedic actor. His parody of a “reformed homosexual” and Christian bigot, possibly unknowingly, does exactly what Weiss and Butler desire: subversion, disruption of performance, a “[recognition and affirmation of] the power of individual agency in the construction of, deconstruction, and reconstruction of the very terms of corporeality” (ibid).

Works cited:

  • Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.
  • Davies, Donnie and Evening Standard. 2007. “The Bible Says.” Music video. www.eveningservice.com.
  • Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. New York: Routledge.
  • Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University.
  • Irigaray, Luce. 1985 (1974). ”Any Theory of the ’Subject’ Has Always Been Appropriated by the ’Masculine.’” In Speculum: Of the other woman, trans. Gilllian C. Gill, 133-146. Cornell, NY: Cornell University.
  • Irigaray, Luce. 1991 (1984). ”Sexual Difference.” In The Irigaray Reader, ed. M. Whitford, 165-177. Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Jervis, Joe. 2007. “God Hates Fags: The Musical.” Joe. My. God. January 23. http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2007/01/god-hates-fags-musical_23.html.
  • Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 1990. The Primacy of Movement. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
  • Weiss, Gail. 1998. Body Images: Embodiment as intercorporeality. New York: Routledge.
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Not sucking

I just did a dramatic reading–as in, I read it dramatically, not as in, I read it in costume in a Cockney accent–of the first four and a half pages of my thesis. And it doesn’t suck. Or at least it doesn’t sound like it sucks. A taste:

Mestiza/o hybridity, at least in Anzaldúa’s manifesto, is nearly agentive, and, in practice, resistant. Anzaldúa’s identity was not simply a byproduct of violence, but also, using Roseberry (1996), a language of contention, created by the border, for the border, by the mestiza/os, by necessity, for both the Americanos and the Mexicanos, for both Mexico and the United States. As Wilson and Donnan write, “[t]he new politics of identity is in large part determined by the old structure of the state. In fact, the new politics of representation, redefinition and resistance would be nowhere without the state as its principle contextual opponent” (Wilson and Donnan 1998: 2). Much has been made about the deterritorialization of economies, polities, and identities in our postmodern world; nearly every study of transnationalism and border experience begins with a description of ironic juxtapositions of local and global imagery (a sushi bar in Sao Paolo, a Peruvian mango farmer wearing a Disney “Pocahontas” t-shirt, Sisqó’s “Thong Song” playing in cab parked outside the Hagia Sofia). But rather than the aesthetics, or humor, of floating signifiers and postmodern discourse, it is the territorialized—the localized—effects of this cross-pollination that matters to human experience and, perhaps just as importantly, to the political ramifications of that experience. Despite rumors to the contrary, the state is alive and well and doing everything it can to perpetuate itself, its power, its hegemony. Hybridity is just one way that capitalism’s discontents can contend.

Please don’t steal this idea, because it’s all I’ve got going for me right now. Um, yeah, like anyone would steal that. Ha.

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Why I do it

On Friday, my students turned in the final draft of their final paper. They had to write about an argument in DBC Pierre’s Booker-winning satire Vernon God Little. For instance, what is Pierre saying about masculinity in America? Or justice? Or the media? The book is profane and ridiculous, and I have more than a few problems with it; some of his writing is so insanely overwrought as to be unspecific, and his depiction of women and non-whites is problematic at best. But it’s a rich text, and my students really dig into it. I think they enjoy being able to say “fuckin” in their papers, in class, and in any discussion of their homework. (I like to imagine them at Thanksgiving dinner, their first since going to college, and them talking about the scene when Vernon and his pal Jesus discuss the philosopher Manual Cunt. Hee.)

Their previous paper was an analysis of the argument in John Bongaarts’ article “Population Growth and Global Warming.” Those papers sucked, because the article sucked–it was duller than a door-nail (whatever that means.) Everyone passed, and some of the papers were very well-written, but they were boring to read and boring to write. There was only one way to write the paper, and if they didn’t figure it out (or listen to me when I told them how to do it), their papers sucked. Never again will I assign that article. Hideous. Cruel. Et cetera.

The second papers have all been much, much better. One is crazy good, possibly better than a really, really good grad student paper. And it’s not plagiarized! Every one of my students wrote a better second paper, and I’m pretty sure they all wrote better papers because they stopped doing the bad stuff that I told them to stop doing. The students who wrote complicated, clunky sentences in their first paper wrote stream-lined, clear sentences in their second. For the most part. The students who avoided analysis in their first paper filled their second paper with analysis. When I was reading the second paper of a student who got a C+ on his first and I realized that the second paper was really, really good–well, the feeling was fabulous. These kids learned something. All of them. Which means I taught them something. All of them. It’s a thrilling feeling. Granted, it’s a somewhat narcissistic thrill, but better that I get it from teaching than from, say, trading hedge-funds.

Some of the papers are so good that I’ve been reading parts of them aloud to Rob and the other teachers. Of course, there are some doozy-ish mistakes; like the student who used the word “buzzard” when she meant “buzzer.” And doing it six times in one paragraph. But there are also sentences like “Though the traditional Judeo-Christian interpretation of salvation includes remuneration for sin, Vernon does not save others by sacrificing himself–he saves himself by sacrificing others.” And there’s the guy who starts out his paper with “It has come to my attention that American has a drug problem,” and then goes on to say that people are addicted to stock options and bling and Bentleys. Then he writes, “Now you may be thinking, ‘Heyyy…Gold and diamonds aren’t drugs!’ and you are an idiot because it’s just a metaphor.” Yeah, I lucked out this quarter. I had great students who wanted to do better and tried to do better, who wanted to learn something and so they did. As my old high school principal said, “It’s not aptitude. It’s attitude!”

This is why I went back to grad school. To teach. To have this feeling of accomplishment, of vicarious accomplishment. To have students to tell me that I did a great job. Now that’s cool. I just wish that everyone took their jobs as seriously. Some of my teachers suck donkeys. I just got back a paper that I wrote a year ago. I got it back today. With about 17 words of “criticism.” Niiiiice.

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