The exploration of queer representation in Hannibal allows for a greater understanding of the conventions of gender and sexuality within the thriller genre. Highly-fictionalized thrillers such as Hannibal thrive on extreme relationships, but also rely heavily on non-traditional erotic relationships to further depict the extremes of personalities in its central characters. The cop-vs-serial killer subset of the thriller genre adds an element of intense, personal desire to what would otherwise be a genre categorized by rote sleuthing. So it is in Hannibal, where the main draw of the series (besides its stunning visuals) is the eroticly-charged cat-and-mouse game between FBI agent Will Graham and cunning killer Hannibal Lecter. Several characters of the series equate the furious obsession the two men share for each other to love. This suggestion troubles the relationship between the two men, indicating that their painful, self-destructive relationship is based simultaneously in love and hate. They are unable to pull away from each other, just as they are unable to completely become one. Instead, their relationship serves to complicate the viewer’s understanding of desire and the desire to kill.

HTo fully understand the complexity of Hannibal and Will’s relationship, we must return to one of the first incarnations of this relationship in the 2002 thriller Red Dragon.^[1] What is unique about the Silence of the Lambs trilogy is that no one film depicts Hannibal’s time before prison in great detail.^[2] Hannibal’s crimes are defined largely through rumor and his own description; Hannibal is the arbiter of his own mythos. However, there is a significant gap in the viewer’s understanding of the relationship between Hannibal and Will. This is deftly remedied in the opening scene of Red Dragon. Over the opening credits, Will Graham, here played by Edward Norton, comes to the shuddering realization that the mysterious killer is eating his victims — and that the killer is none other than his close confidante. At the crescendo of Will’s understanding, signified by the drawing of his gun, Hannibal sinks his knife into Will’s stomach. Despite the violence of the action, there is unmistakable tenderness as well. The stabbing mirrors a lover’s embrace; Hannibal rests his chin on Will’s shoulder, hushing him gently. In this scene, Hannibal gains no visible pleasure from hurting Will. Instead, he is careful, tender. “Remarkable boy,” he says. “I think I’ll eat your heart.” The reverent, intimate delivery of the line, coupled with the way Hannibal holds the fallen Will around the waist like a dance partner suggests a fond tenderness that goes beyond the bounds of homosocial friendship. Their intimacy serves to hint at a homoerotic bond that is only briefly touched upon in Red Dragon.

HThis highly-charged bond is given far more screen time and consideration in Hannibal. The two men are far closer in age, diminishing the mentor/pupil relationship present in Red Dragon^[3] and emphasizing a more equal footing. Furthermore, the first two seasons of Hannibal take place prior to the moment of understanding in Red Dragon that culminates in Will’s stabbing. The challenge of Hannibal then is to balance the painful anticipation of this “breakup” with the pleasure of watching the budding relationship between two fascinating, electric men. And a pleasure it is. Hannibal and Will have a powerful chemistry that obsesses the narrative. They share intense, longing looks, have little regard for each other’s personal space, and have many moments of strangely endearing domesticity. Hannibal is always cooking for Will, seeking to impress him with increasingly elaborate presentations. Food in Hannibal is always a matter of seduction and charm, a way for Hannibal to exert power over his guests (Will most frequently) while simultaneously providing them with nourishment and artistic pleasure.

The homoeroticism of food and eating crescendos in Hannibal’s second season, when Hannibal and Will share a meal of songbirds eaten whole. In an interview with Logo, director Bryan Fuller comments on this feast below:

We really want to explore the intimacy of these two men in an unexpected way without sexualizing them, but including a perception of sexuality that the cinema is actually portraying to the audience more than the characters are. There’s a scene at dinner where we were tackling in the edit bay because it was so transparently homoerotic. They were doing something that was not sex or anywhere near sex, but it was shot so suggestively that they may as well have been …

This scene lingers lovingly over open mouths, swallowing throats, and blissful expressions. In mood, framing, and aesthetic, it is a sexual scene. And yet, everyone’s clothes remain on. The evident homoeroticism of the scene is tempered by its modesty. There is power and seduction, but the lack of sexual acts and romantic physical gestures such as kissing leaves it clear that the relationship is not a traditionally romantic one.

For LGBT audiences, representation in film and television is an obstacle course of flirtation with canon. This battle with on-screen depictions of queer couples is often waylaid by a phenomenon known as queerbaiting. Queerbaiting teases the viewer with hints to a homosexual relationship in order to entice LGBTQ viewers, but this potential relationship ultimately remains unfulfilled. (Shows such as Supernatural are notorious for queerbaiting its fans.) Despite accusations of queerbaiting when it became apparent that central characters Will and Hannibal’s relationship would never be a physical one, queer fans nonetheless rejoiced at Hannibal. While Will and Hannibal would not explore a homosexual relationship on-screen, which frustrated some fans, many others were content in the highly-aesthetic, subtext-heavy portrayal of Hannibal and Will’s relationship.

Fans of this relationship, which is affectionately dubbed “Hannigram,” are quick to admit that the relationship between the two men is certainly an abusive one. For all of the intimacies between Will and Hannibal, their relationship is one built on manipulation, violence, and entrapment. However, for many, this is part of the attraction. The intensity and darkness is appealing, especially with two lead actors with significant fanbases. Many elements of “Hannigram” are aesthetic; there are large sects of fanworks dedicated to the sheer beauty of the show and its actors. However, the appeal of “Hannigram” is not wholly artistic. The cat-and-mouse element of their relationship, emphasized by a history of serial killer/cop films with similar relationships, is characterized by danger and seduction. In a show about the art of violence, “Hannigram” dances alongside the violence, rather than shying away from it. The honesty of the appeal of “Hannigram” in (largely female) fans allows for a deeper exploration of the intimacy of violence between Will and Hannibal.

This violence culminates in a stabbing, just as in Red Dragon. In Red Dragon, the stabbing is presented as a shock. In Hannibal, however, there is great anticipation for the moment. While this could be, in part, due to lingering audience familiarity with the source material, it is more likely a reading of the tone of the scene. Red Dragon amplified the shocking element, playing off of Will’s horrified revelation about Hannibal’s guilt. In Hannibal, however, we anticipate the betrayal. Will has spent the season desperately, obsessively working to prove Hannibal’s guilt. And yet, when the time comes to make the arrest, Will balks; he reveals the ploy to Hannibal. When he finds that Hannibal has not run but instead done grave violence to Jack and Alana, Will is heartbroken. “You were supposed to leave,” he says, his voice low and devastated. Hannibal responds by touching the side of Will’s, and stabs Will like an apology, like a betrayal.

The embrace that Will and Hannibal fall into speaks to the unsustainable nature of their relationship. They are so deeply caught up in each other’s obsession that they are desperately linked. They are fated to trap each other. While their romance departs from traditional depictions, Will and Hannibal are still star-crossed, their mutual erotic obsession only just beginning.

^[1] There is also an adaptation of Red Dragon even before Silence of the Lambs, a thriller titled Manhunter released in 1986. However, this did not enjoy the same popularity as the later Harris-based film trilogy.

^[2] A later film, Hannibal Rising (2007) attempts to remedy this, but it is considered separate from the trilogy.

^[3] This is not to say that mentor/pupil relationships lack homoeroticism. Rather, this particular relationship is strengthened by a different power dynamic.

Molly Cavanaugh received an MA in English Literature with a focus on Game Studies and New Media. She uses these fields to explore her additional interests of race, gender, sexuality, and LGBT representation. She has also studied Victorian literature, the Gothic, and 19th century American literature. Her teaching interests include film, graphic novels, and popular culture.

The post “Remarkable Boy … I Think I’ll Eat Your Heart”: Revisiting Hannibal appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

As highlighted in last week’s post, one of the concerns with shows that revolve around queer romance is the risk of defining what queer love is supposed to look like. To that concern I would add a danger in queer representation that attempts to answer “what queer life is supposed to look like.” However, within a seemingly bland sitcom formula that would enact these dangerous representations, Please Like Me adds a twist. Josh’s gay coming of age story is constantly interrupted by his mother’s (Debra Lawrence) mental illness. It is her constant need of care that disrupts what would be a classic coming-out narrative. Through these disruptions, a better reflection of the realities of living as a queer individual is displayed.

In the very same episode, Josh has his first queer encounter with Tom’s coworker Geoffrey (Wade Briggs) and hears of his mother’s attempted suicide. The morning after an awkward and ultimately sexless night with Geoffrey, he checks his phone to find multiple voicemails from his frantic father. But the shot itself lacks the urgency of a reaction to a suicide attempt: the camera gradually zooms in on a banal scene of Josh brushing his teeth with his phone at his ear, signifying for the audience that rather than a surprise, these calls are routine.

 This event suddenly shifts the trajectory of the narrative, denying what should have been the “coming-out” moment between Josh and his best friend Tom. As Tom drives Josh to the hospital they casually talk about the previous night and Tom says, “Just so I know, we aren’t talking about your mum because you’re all like, emotionally stunted yeah? And we are just ignoring the fact that Geoffrey is a man?”  To which Josh answers, “Yup.” Tom’s casual introduction of the two events exemplifies how Josh’s mother’s suicide acts to disrupt and expose the fiction of the singular coming out “moment”. In life, there is no true “coming out” where individuals exclaim their queerness to the world popularized in shows like Glee.

In Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet, she demystifies this idea, highlighting how life institutes a plethora of closets to “come out” from, “every encounter with a new classful of students, to say nothing of a new boss, social worker, loan officer, landlord, doctor, erects new closets whose fraught and characteristic laws of optics and physics exact from at least gay people new surveys, new calculations, new draughts and requisitions of secrecy or disclosure. Even an out gay person deals daily with interlocutors about whom she doesn’t know whether they know or not.” (68) By disrupting the show’s narrative from Josh’s gay storyline to Rose’s struggle with mental health, Please Like Me illustrates the reality behind life as an “out” queer person: the daily trials of “Do they know? Should I tell them? Do they even need to know?” In fact, Josh lives in sexual identity limbo for most of the first season. There is no actual moment in which he says, “I’m gay” (he makes a quip about how coming out is so 90’s) instead he is outed multiple times by the show’s other characters: Claire’s outing of him to the audience and Geoffrey’s outing of him to his father and mother on separate occasions; these multiple outings better represent life alongside Sedgewick’s theorizations and life as an out queer person.

Please Like Me also complicates the representation of queer life through scenarios between Josh and his lovers in heteronormative and hypermasculine spaces. These scenes show how interconnected these oppressive structures are in the mindset of queer individuals, how they influence behavior, even how they influence opinions. In the first season, Geoffrey buys tickets for him and Josh to watch a rugby match. Josh, reluctant to see any sports at first, is titillated by the aggressive catharsis in engaging with the highs and lows of a rugby match. The two bond over escalating insults towards the players’ poor performance that results in emasculation, eventually calling the players faggots. They are immediately asked to leave for “homophobic language” to which Geoffrey responds, “This is my boyfriend, we’re not being homophobic” and energetically kisses Josh.

The scene leaves us with no closure other than the irony of two gay people removed from a hypermasculine space for being homophobic. But it does bring up interesting questions: is it okay to scream faggot if you’re gay? Who gets to scream faggot? Or better yet, who gets to tell whom whether they can or can’t scream faggot?

This scene is much more complex when considering queer affection in hypermasculine spaces and unearths for viewers a unique complication: queer Public Displays of Affection (PDA). After getting booted from the game, Josh and Geoffrey start fighting over the kiss. The camera angles reveal the shame that each feels for the other: as they spar the shot switches between them, cutting the face off the other, signifying their inability to “meet the other’s eyes.” Josh is ashamed of being known as queer in public, whereas Geoffrey is ashamed and frustrated with Josh’s inability to express his feelings publicly.

This scene is surely familiar to many queer people and brings up deeper questions: Is Josh really ashamed to be seen kissing a man? Or does he generally not like PDA? Queer individuals constantly wrestle with this dilemma, one that is often confused and interconnected, asking a darker question: Can I truly dislike PDA without it being part of gay shame? The interconnection here marks heteronormative structures’ infiltration into the very conceptions of our own opinions on our queer intimacies. Please Like Me offers no resolution to these questions (because there aren’t any) and in its ambivalence better reflects the reality of queer experience.

Mark Muster is a master’s candidate at Syracuse University studying the relationship between time and alternative kinship formations in American film and literature.

The post No True Coming Out: Queer Life in “Please Like Me” appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

In a 1986 New York Times interview regarding My Beautiful Launderette (1985), director Stephen Frears notes, “It’s a completely ironic film, isn’t it? We wanted people to have a wonderful time, but to make the film provocative, turning everything on its head.” Indeed, the made-for-TV movie highlights a topsy-turvy–like ’80s Britain.

The film’s irony comes from the portrayal of a Pakistani immigrant family at the center of a Thatcher-era story of “rich get richer, poor get poorer.” In contrast to classic images of corporate greed or poor immigrants, My Beautiful Launderette stars immigrants as greedy and corrupt, while the poor are represented by the British working class. Omar (Gordon Warnecke) is an unemployed young man taking care of his alcoholic father, a leftist ex-journalist who acts as the foil to Omar’s uncle, Nasser Ali (Saeed Jaffrey), a successful businessman who is best exemplified by the advice he gives to Omar, “In this damn country which we hate and love you can get anything you want … you [only] have to know how to squeeze the tits of the system.” Nasser and his family are decadent with their wealth: hosting lavish parties, and, at one moment, literally throwing money around.

Taking a job with his uncle, Omar’s own ’80s-inspired greed and ambition earns him a shot in the family business turning over one of his Uncle’s many properties, a destitute launderette in a poor neighborhood of London. Meanwhile, Omar’s childhood friend Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), exemplifies the poor English working class as a homeless kid whose punk gang resorts to crime and squatting for survival. These two worlds merge at the site of the launderette, owned and exploited by Nasser, whose revenue comes from his English working-class patrons. Omar and Johnny’s queer relationship and Nasser and his British mistress Rachel’s (Shirley Anne Field) infidelity represent aberrations in the film’s familial structure: where business and wealth are insulated and grown within Nasser’s vast family, Johnny and Rachel stand on the outside. They are the “dirty laundry” kept secret from the successful family. Renamed “Powders” (how gay is that?), the launderette becomes the symbol of the film’s tensions: anti-immigrant sentiment, greed, gentrification, and economic inequality play out as lovers Omar and Johnny renovate and run the launderette together.

Highly acclaimed, the film moved to theaters in Britain and America, where it received an Oscar nomination for the best original screenplay (beaten by Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters). This ability to move from British television to American theatrical distribution reflects the film’s reach and makes it a prime subject for analysis on queer representation.

In terms of queer relationships, we arrive at Johnny and Omar’s intimacy quite late. The first time we see them together on screen is a serendipitous reunion (we learn later they were very close childhood friends). We enter their relationship not at its conception but in a revival; we encounter them without experiencing their romantic past. This positioning may seem trivial but it does important work: it muddles the spectacle of queer intimacy. With much LGBT media centered around dating and romance, a potentially damaging and myopic structure emerges around these representations: What does queer love look like? What is queer love supposed to look like?

By denying us identifications with the beginnings of Johnny and Omar’s intimacy, we must find other ways to love their relationship. This makes us focus on what their love does, rather than what it looks like. We watch the two literally build a business together. Yes, it is a business that does indeed make money for Omar’s corrupt uncle and feeds Omar’s greed. But it is also a business that allows Johnny to break out of his cycle of crime for survival, and one that allows Omar and Johnny’s love to blossom.

At the height of the film, the aberrant relationships challenge the divisive theme of anti-immigrant London, showing the intersectional and connective power behind “queer” love. On the opening day of the launderette, Omar is nervous. Johnny — seeming to want to help him relax — pulls Omar into the back to fool around. However, with Johnny sitting on his lap, Omar reveals that he knows Johnny participated in anti-immigrant marches, and how xenophobia took part in his father’s alcoholism and his mother’s suicide. While Omar confesses, Johnny is sympathetic, sitting close to Omar, undressing him and caressing his chest. Johnny apologizes as Omar starts to strip Johnny in turn. Their intimacy is mirrored by Rachel and Nasser entering the launderette together. Flirting and laughing, the two seem to be truly in love. As they marvel at the beauty of the renovated launderette, Rachel says to Nasser, “Dance with me … we are learning.” They begin to waltz across the launderette as Johnny and Omar share champagne and make out behind the two-way mirror.

These two couples, whose love is immoral in structures of monogamy and heteronormativity, are actually the only characters who suture a racially and economically divided London. They kiss and dance at the very site that will connect these two sides for the benefit of both.

Looking deeper, Johnny and Omar’s queer love is actually intertwined with challenging London’s racial and economic divisiveness. In another example, queer love acts as comic relief, aimed at the audience to subvert the tension between Johnny’s anti-immigrant punk gang and Omar’s greedy drug-dealing uncle Salim (Derrick Branche). Omar exits the launderette to pay Johnny for his work, sharing glares with Johnny’s gang who are loitering at the entrance. As Salim drives by to check on the business, we look through his side-mirror, his hand in the shot, as both he and the gang observe Johnny and Omar.

The tensions of the film build and center themselves as “all eyes” are on Omar and Johnny. But the tension calms, as the audience is privileged with a shot from the opposite viewpoint: Omar hugs Johnny for a job well done, and we see a close up of Johnny’s head next to Omar’s. Playfully, he sticks his tongue out and licks Omar’s neck, a recognition of their love that eases the tension from these encroaching forces.

Other cute, quirky, and hilarious moments mingle with the queer love of these two characters and recall a specific moment that encapsulates — for me — the beauty of this film: in Nasser’s house, Salim makes a snide comment to Omar when discussing the launderette, “You haven’t fucked your uncle’s launderette, you little fool?” Omar, smug, lifts his head from his chair to meet Salim’s eyes and responds, “In my small opinion, much good can come of fucking.”

Mark Muster is a master’s candidate at Syracuse University studying the relationship between time and alternative kinship formations in American film and literature.

The post Dirty Laundry in “My Beautiful Launderette” appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Recently, there has been an uptick in the amount of “gay-centric” media created by the mainstream film and television industry. Movies like Call Me by Your Name (2017), Moonlight (2016), Carol (2015), Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), etc. mark a notable shift in LGBT narratives to being not only more mainstream—more desired—but actively produced for recognition among the Hollywood award circuit. In the wake of Moonlight’s win (or perhaps earlier with Dallas Buyers Club (2013) and the snubbed Brokeback Mountain (2005)), LGBT narratives were solidified in the slew of dramas that catch Oscar-esque attention; though notably, these narratives remain a majority gay, white, and male-centered. With multiple queer and gay narratives watchable in theaters, stream-able online, and available on network TV, there is an ostensible perception of a surplus.

With waxing LGBT representation, queer-identified people — long erased and caricatured in television and film or marginalized to the edges of the screen — finally find themselves at the center of these narratives, finally up for best-actress and actor as opposed to being ossified as the side-kick, the friend, the best supporting actress/actor. But even after the recognition of films like Moonlight, a brilliant tale of queer intimacy and intersectionality in Miami, my desire for queer media only increases. I begin to reject these new pristine studio-made representations of queer lives; I feel a guilty disappointment. They are simply not enough.

Unpacking these feelings unveils the larger and multi-tiered problem of popular queer representations in film and television — tiers that build on each other and consequently narrow the multiplicity of queer narratives. Part of this homogenized representation comes from the infrastructure of the American entertainment industry. Run mainly on viewership, products appealing to the lowest common denominator will always thrive in contrast to media that attempts to be unique. Even in the age of Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming services where competition allows viewers to demand more creativity from television, “LGBT” shows and movies must constantly compete with straight media that statistically annihilates even the strongest queer fan base.

Beyond this economic obstacle, there is a problem with the very identifier of “Gay” as a genre in film and TV. Based solely on classification by the sexual binary, Gay TV as a genre becomes a sweeping conglomeration for any kind of media whose narrative crucially involves or revolves around a queer character. The trap of Gay TV then lies in being classified by a heteronormative industry, a label which itself invites a lens of tunnel vision, reducing shows to the characters’ sexual object choice rather than classifying the show as a drama, romance, comedy, game-show etc. This tunnel vision hails a specific audience that on the one hand is useful for those queer-identified people seeking representation but weakens the agency and reach with which some media have the potential to cause. Instead of exposure to these shows and movies, the algorithms of streaming services that recommend based on genre choices will never promote queer media to a wider audience, consequently stifling the ability of queer narratives to challenge heteronormative structures of intimacy, social formations, even story-telling.

The third tier, and the issue where I want to dwell, lies in my own conundrum when desiring queer representation. By scouring history for queer-leaning figures we create our own queer historiography, forge a lineage, and construct a model for future queer people. However, when binging queer photography, queer art exhibitions, queer film and TV I am also consuming in an attempt to connect: as if to say, “Ah! There I am, that’s me.” This desire may originate from the first moment one notices their asynchrony with heteronormative sexuality: the need to find oneself in a world full of images that represent a very specific type of person, relationship, body, family, etc. When I watch a gay TV show like Looking or a film like Call Me by Your Name, I am looking to recognize and connect with aspects of my queerness. In other words, when I consume these medias, I am trying to feel closer to the represented identity of “gay.”

But, the endeavor to identify with these narratives inevitably fails. No matter how close I want to connect to a character like Patrick (Johnathon Groff) in Looking, he is not me, and his queer experience is not my queer experience. Therefore, I wonder how we might envision alternative ways to consume LGBT representations that relocates this desire? Instead of focusing energy on how I might recognize parts of myself in these characters, it might be better to look for queerness in content, form, or style. How do certain aesthetic choices reflect queer experience and queer life in a heteronormative time and space?

This set of posts is deeply inspired by José Muñoz’s Disidentifications, in which he traces a cogent methodology of disidentifying with harmful or problematic representations and discourses in order to utilize aspects of these works for minoritarian subjects as a matter of survival and a method of resistance. These posts work alongside Muñoz within the process of identification attempting to reconfigure the moment of connection within these representations from the characters or works, to acts and techniques. For the next three weeks I will explore three different queer representations. Focusing on aesthetics, I hope to show how these films and TV connect with us by commenting on contemporary queer experience. Tune in next week for my thoughts on My Beautiful Launderette.

Mark Muster is a master’s candidate at Syracuse University studying the relationship between time and alternative kinship formations in American film and literature.

The post What is Wrong with “Gay TV”? appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

***

            The girl who takes my fast-food order has conspicuous miniature band-aids over her dimples, raised away from the skin by the dermal jewelry they cover. Her nose has a hole with no stud. Her cuticles are stained black where the nail-polish remover didn’t penetrate. She smiles brightly, her extended hand holding my change, each finger sporting a ring.

The retail worker who helps answer my questions about pre-order bonuses for Mass Effect Andromeda has long-sleeves on. When he reaches for a top shelf, his right sleeve pulls back. His arm is covered in vivid scales, the sweep of a Koi-fish revealed for just a moment before he tugs the sleeve of his shirt back into place. I’ve seen work like that before, hundreds of dollars and hours spent under the needle. The lanyard that holds his name badge has a pin with koi-fish in swirling water.

My friend meets me for coffee. She’s changed her hair since the last time I saw her. The hot pink streaks in her blonde hair have been covered over with a chocolate brown that matches her roots but make her look pale and tired. The medical monopoly that runs all the hospitals in the area insists that their nurses have “natural” hair colors. Her fingernails where she holds her Cappuccino are bright pink.

***

Particular ways of seeing, or rather, not seeing, manifest themselves with vehemence in Toledo, Ohio. All of these moments, instances that wouldn’t have fazed me before I lived in Syracuse, now strike with precise and disquieting force as I visit my hometown during spring break week. A few hours away, in New York, these bodies are allowed to exist in the public spaces. The waitstaff and retail workers sport tattoos and piercings and bright hair colors. They paint their faces with startling hues and ornament their unique bodies. Non-normative people exist, and insist on their existence in public spaces. I’ve only been gone from Toledo since August, but it was a shock to the system to return.

It is a particular brand of cognitive dissonance that maintains the normative through the repression of non-normative bodies. It maintains equilibrium by enforcing blindspots through the control of Capitalist structures. These young people working in food services and retail, these thirty-somethings serving in the medical field, all need these jobs in order to survive. Yet, these jobs act as a powerful normalizing force against them. Keep your piercings out or you can’t take burger orders. Cover your tattoos or you can’t answers questions about video games. Dye your vibrant hair a “natural” color or you can’t possibly administer life-saving medication and care. Remain “professional.”

The Midwestern “normal” functions through the creation and maintenance of purposeful blindspots that deny the existence of alternative forms of expression. “Blindspots” only remain viable so long as non-normative bodies are forced into invisibility and silence. This silence does not actually remove their existence, but instead denies them space within the discourse of normality. If piercings must be removed, tattoos covered, and hair dyed, then alternative modes of self-expression will continue to be absent from professional settings. These alternative bodies must find voice on the fringes or not be voiced at all, relegated to the silences within discourse that Michel Foucault describes in his History of Sexuality.

***

My reflections on queer existence in our present political moment from my post last week (which you can read here: https://broadlytextual.com/2017/03/10/facebook-and-uncanny-identity/) no doubt primed me for noticing these “blindspots” during my trip home (in fact, the use of body modification by the queer community for self-expression makes this censorship of non-normative bodies all the more relevant for me, see Victoria Pitts’ article “Visibly Queer: Body Technologies and Sexual Policies” in The Sociological Quarterly). It was actually discouraging to see the ways that these non-normative forms of self-expression were being systematically crushed by structures within Capitalism. I recognize that this happens in the back of my mind constantly, but seeing it physically manifested in front of me was difficult.

Cue Disney’s new release of Beauty and the Beast. The Internet has been all atwitter since the announcement a few weeks ago that the character of LeFou, Gaston’s sidekick, will be portrayed as openly gay. First came the initial excitement over representation of an LGBTQIA+ character by a major motion picture. Then came fear about what that representation might look like (yet another queer villain, a gay man who is uncomfortable with his own sexuality, etc.). Regardless of the problems that may arise surrounding this character, it is the first openly gay character that Disney has put in one of their films, a historic moment of representation.

Not long after this announcement, demands for censorship started to roll in, the carefully crafted mode of cognitive dissonance deeply disturbed by representations of a gay man in a film about a love story between a beast-animal creature and a young woman. It is impossible for queer and non-normative bodies to remain invisible and non-existent in the minds of the majority if their entertainment represents these lives. In order to maintain this normative silence, LeFou had to go.

For a moment, my heart sank. After all, this is the same company that changed a male Tibetan character into a white Celtic woman in order to maintain profits for Doctor Strange abroad. The power of Capitalism over the film industry functions powerfully to reinforce hegemonic ideals of the normal within their representations. I thoroughly expected to start reading reports of censorship by Disney of LeFou and the films touted “gay scene” in order to maintain their profits. That was why it was such a joy to see this article (http://www.nbc26.com/news/national/disney-delays-release-of-beauty-and-the-beast-in-malaysia-after-gay-moment-cut-from-film) from NBC, stating that Disney will not remove the scene from the film even if it costs them profits. In fact, the company has chosen to pull the film from Malaysian theatres rather than remove LeFou or his scenes.

By no means is this an ultimate victory or a complete solution. Often, these systems are so powerful and deeply entrenched that it doesn’t seem that there will ever be hope for representation for non-normative bodies and identities in our mainstream culture. Yet, this film is a moment of encouragement, a bright spot, further proof that systems can be changed over time. The service industry workers in New York can have further autonomy over their modes of identity constructions. They can have bright green hair, and septum piercings, and chest tattoos, and LeFou can be hot for Gaston.

Hillarie ‘Rhyse’ Curtis is a Ph.D. student at Syracuse University where she studies (and occasionally writes about) queer narratives, masculinity, trauma, war, and fan fiction, among other things. 

The post “Blindspots” and Bright Spots appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

They ask us to share a rough spot and a bright spot from our week. Rough spot, for the first time in a while, is a quick answer for me. Usually, it’s been a toss-up between any number of novel and horrifying developments, but this week it’s simple: The rough spot was turning on my phone and seeing the repeal of bathroom protection for Transgender students. I cried, staring at my phone, at the headline that one of the default news apps decided to plaster across my unlock screen. I cried for the teenagers who will face even more bullying in their school halls, I cried over the lives that will be lost because it’s not really about bathrooms but about basic humanity and decency, I cried over the level of ignorance and hate that would drive someone to make such a ruling about a group of marginalized young people who we should all be working to protect. When I shared my sadness, the faces in the room mirrored back what I imagine mine looks like now on a daily basis, weary sadness.

Finding a bright spot has become incredibly simple for me over the past few months. Did I get out of bed? Did I make it through the ten minutes of time I allot myself each morning to check out my social media and news apps to see what latest violence has been done against marginalized groups? Did I feed myself? Did I attend or teach class? Those actions are a bright spot each day, moments when I didn’t let despair sit on my chest like too-deep water. These moments of caring for myself, for my queer body in this hostile environment, are small, empowering moments of radical resistance in my day-to-day. I showed up. It’s my bright spot. There are nods and half-smiles in response.

As we circle the room, the concerns change: several foreign students are concerned about the attitudes toward LGBTQIA+ individuals in their home countries. What might it mean for them to be denied a job in the U.S. after completing their degree? Another student is struggling with a family member who purposefully misgenders them and says that they will always be their dead gender (I can’t help but hear the rhetoric surrounding the bathroom bill echoing through my head). Another student is concerned about the example of Gay-ness presented by Breitbart editor, Milo Yiannopoulus, the virulently hateful and, allegedly, pedophilic poster-child for acceptable Alt-Right Queerness. The concerns are different. The exhaustion is the same.

Each person in this room is exhausted, emotionally empty, rattled and just a few moments from tears. But why?

***

I’ve been trying to sort it out since late-December, reading the think-pieces and the status updates from my friends, attending rallies and marches and poster-making sessions. The sadness and tired hangs everywhere, but I still couldn’t figure it out. So I did what so many academics do, I compartmentalized it, allowed that part of my mind to fill up with pertinent data, waited for a late night “Ah-hah” moment when it finally clicked. It didn’t. I moved on, left it to simmer in some back part of my brain, focused on reading theorists, and grading essays, and getting out of bed in the morning. I left the sadness and its answer for a different day.

I started listening to musicals. I’ve been a bit behind the curve, so Hamilton was a new and heart-wrenching beauty in my life. I wept the first time I listened to the soundtrack. It was good to cry.

Next, my brother suggested I listen to the soundtrack for Fun Home. (He blessedly warned me that it might hit close to home in some ways. He was right.) I listened to Alison Bechdel’s coming-out story about her life again, this time accompanied by music instead of the panels of the graphic novel where I first encountered it. I remember watching a video of Bechdel creating one of those panels, taking Polaroid pictures of herself to use as reference. The time and effort that went into each panel was astonishing. The music from the play recreated that experience of her writing and drawing the graphic novel, that astonishment and awe. I was hooked.

After spending the majority of late-January and February listening to the soundtrack on repeat, a question popped into my head. What was it like for Bechdel to see her own life played out on stage in front of her? Luckily, Alyssa Abbott asked the same thing of Bechdel shortly after the show’s first performance in 2013 in an interview for The Atlantic (which can be found here. Two statements from Bechdel struck me as she described her experience of seeing the show: she described seeing her own life on stage as “very strange and surreal” and also described the experience of seeing the show with her brother’s and aunt—“There were no words. We just let it wash over us.” I couldn’t peg down why those statements struck me as particularly important, but I stored them away in the random bits of knowledge part of my brain that may one day make me a Jeopardy star.

***

Their importance came a week ago, when discussing a project for one of my classes involving the subject of the uncanny. Stephen King describes terror as “when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute.” This description has been used by Lucy Hunter, a contributing editor for Critic magazine out of the Otago University Students’ Association, in her article “Journey into “The Uncanny Valley”” (which you can visit here). When discussing experiences of the uncanny, Hunter describes the “Uncanny” as “the sensation of something being both strange and familiar. It helps explain the reason why some things scare us, while others just creep us out. The uncanny is not simply a matter of the mysterious, bizarre, or frightening: it involves a kind of duplicity (both in likeness and deception) within the familiar. A disturbance of the familiar.”

Finally, with this idea of the uncanny bouncing around in my head, it all clicked. Alison Bechdel’s statements about watching the play of her life had hit me because she described it as “very strange and surreal,” and experience that had to “wash over” her and her family. These were moments when the familiar elements of her life has been disturbed, replaced by the interpretation of the playwright and the actors and the musicians, a strong resemblance, but not the same. This was my every day experience looking at the headlines on my phone or the posts on my Facebook wall. The headlines identified me: “Millennials say ‘Not My President’,” “Trump Repeals Obama-Era Transgender Protections,” “Radical Left Professors Poison University Campuses.” These were terms I had used for myself, modes of constructing who I was, but they had replaced me in the narrative. These headlines had walked into my house, taken me out and left a replica in my place, an ill-informed idealist, a supposed predator, a target for hate and ire.

They came so quickly, these stories of horrific ignorance and self-centered greed, invading every moment of my life, from my Facebook wall, to my classroom discussions, to chats with colleagues and mentors in the halls. Me, who I had thought of myself as, was existing out there somewhere, an uncanny version for people to then assign back on to me with the same words I had used as a method of empowerment and self-realization. But these things that they said were not me. I may be an empathic idealist, but I pride myself in remaining informed, I am not a predator, I am kind and compassionate, I am not a rabid automaton of Leftist-rhetoric set on indoctrinating young minds in my classroom, I am a hard-working teacher who values pedagogy and the success and growth of my students. These headlines made a straw man of me, dressed it in my clothes, and trampled it to bits with their rhetoric, and I could not stand as my own witness. I could only offer my testimony in noxious comment sections and wait for the flame-war to ensue.

I was left to feel the weight of these events, so far outside my realm of immediate influence, wash over me with no time to process. Every event comes now in a rapid fire stream, so many executive orders, and bills before Congress, and life-shattering decisions tossed about like pawns in a game of Chess, meant for sacrifice and violence.

***

 The night at the LGBT Resource Center provided some very essential insight for me.

The media available to me for self-expression had been insufficient. Posts about my experiences on social media were met with affirmations from my colleagues and friends, who felt the same way, and virulent declarations of degradation from others; I should “grow up,” my life “sure must have been easy if this Presidential election is enough to break [me],” and “I sure hope you never have to face any real hardship in your life.”

My attempts to witness about the trauma of existing in this moment felt hollow. How do you provide testimony about a violence that exists not in blood spilled but in existence denied? Laverne Cox put it so much more pointedly than I had been able to when speaking about what the bathroom bill meant for transgender people on MSNBC: “When trans people can’t access public bathrooms we can’t go to school effectively, go to work effectively, access health-care facilities — it’s about us existing in public space,” she said. “And those who oppose trans people having access to the facilities consistent with how we identify know that all the things they claim don’t actually happen. It’s really about us not existing — about erasing trans people.”

I felt not only useless to witness for myself, but useless to help those who are without voice in this moment. Not all trauma is equivalent. I am in a place of privilege where my white skin, my social class, my vocation, my regional location, and even my ability to still pass as female in public spaces has granted me protections that are not available to so many others who exist in a far more marginalized space than myself. I want to make space for them, to open the floor and hold the haters at bay and let them scream out their truths about themselves, witnessing to their own trauma and terror in a country that has robbed them of their right to humanity and existence.

In this political moment, there has been both erasure and replacement of me as a non-binary, trans, millennial in the education field. And until that night at the LGBT Resource Center, I had had no way to witness about it in a way that felt real, to talk to others who had the same expressions on their faces that greeted me in the mirror before I plastered a smile on my face each morning. But in that room, it started to come together, the kernel of knowledge in the swirl of emotion and struggling thoughts. In that room, I could hold space for others, I could be the listening ear that is so essential for those testifying about their experiences. In that room, I could witness while others held space for me.

***

So what does it all mean? I’m living in a strange world where my life is related back to me and my value and identity determined by people in rooms hundreds of miles from me, and then blasted out over the media that permeates my life. It’s uncanny, and terrifying, and emotionally exhausting, yes, but I’ve got a framework for it now, a way of understanding where this feeling comes from, for me at least. And for me, as a scholar, having that framework to understand is usually my first step to finding a solution.

Hillarie ‘Rhyse’ Curtis is a Ph.D. student at Syracuse University where she studies (and occasionally writes about) queer narratives, masculinity, trauma, war, and fan fiction, among other things. 

The post Facebook and Uncanny Identity appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

During a recent outing to a local restaurant, a couple of friends and I were seated at our table finishing our drinks before heading home for the night. While we were sitting there, chatting amiably amongst ourselves, a highly intoxicated young woman sprawled across our table to procure the menu, then asked us to read said menu since she was too drunk to do so.

Now, there wasn’t anything particularly unusual about this incident at first blush. People frequently intrude into other people’s space when they have had a bit too much to drink. It wasn’t even than unusual for her to note that I had an unmistakable look of disgust on my face.

What happened next, however was, as we academics like to say, problematic.

This young woman, whom I had never met, abruptly inquired, “Can I ask you a personal question” (always cringe-inducing), and having procured my assent proceeded to ask, “Are you gay?”

Yes. You read that right. She asked me if I am gay.

To be clear, I have no problem telling people in public spaces that I’m gay. I have no investment in “straightness,” and I certainly do not have a (conscious) investment in traditional hegemonic masculinity nor in a performance of it. In fact, I actually take a lot of pleasure in performing my queerness and will, in most cases, tell people I’m gay within a few minutes of meeting them. For me, proclaiming my sexuality on my own terms can be a profoundly liberating and empowering act. However, that is a choice that I make. It is not one that is forced upon me by someone else.

While I was not upset on my own behalf, I couldn’t help thinking about all of the other people who might have been in my position. What if I was someone who wasn’t even close to coming out, or someone who was struggling with their sexuality or, heaven forbid, what if I were just a man who doesn’t perform masculinity in the way expected of straight men? Had I been one of those people, this moment would have been even worse.

If ever there was a time when Eve Sedgwick’s epistemology of the closet–the idea that the closet remains a structure with which all queer people must contend, either implicitly or explicitly, in their daily lives–was made material, this was it. As Sedgwick explains: “every encounter with a new classfull of students, to say nothing of a new boss, social worker, loan officer, landlord, doctor, erects new closets whose fraught and characteristic laws of optics and physics exact from at least gay people new surveys, new calculations, new draughts and requisitions of secrecy or disclosure. Even an out gay person deals daily with interlocutors about whom she doesn’t know whether they know or not.” In other words, every encounter with a new person demands that the queer person decide:  will I tell this person who I truly am? And what will the consequences be? Do I keep this part of my identity secret, or do I live openly?

This exchange also revealed much about the way in which sexuality and gender remain wedded together in the vernacular imagination, since I’m speculating that it was my failure to adequately perform masculinity that prompted her to ask her question. What was it about me, I wonder(ed) that allowed her to read me as gay? Was it my ever-so-slightly “effeminate” affect and behavior? Was it my voice? My mannerisms? Some combination of the above? Some other affect that cannot be quantified but only felt by those that I come into contact with, something that triggers the proverbial “gaydar” in my fellow human beings? I don’t know the answer, and that in itself troubles me.

What’s more, this incident revealed to me, in a shockingly visceral sort of way, how privilege works in everyday life. This person asked me an incredibly invasive question, and without any sort of self-awareness that what she was doing was in any way intrusive. To her, it seemed perfectly natural and acceptable to ask this sort of question, and it probably never even occurred to her, in this Modern Family, post-Obergefell v. Hodges world, that such a question is itself a form of violence. She just assumed that I would be perfectly comfortable answering her question, and that it wasn’t a form of violation to ask me this in a public space (keep in mind that we had never met each other before this evening). To her, it no doubt seems that all gay men (and probably all queer people) feel comfortable confessing their orientations to complete strangers, regardless of the social setting.

Furthermore, it also forced me to consider:  why did I even feel compelled to answer this question? What was it about the power relations that she established with that question that put me in the position where I felt compelled to answer? After all, I could have just told her, in a matter-of-fact way, that it wasn’t any of her business (which it wasn’t). Part of it, of course, stems from my own avowed investment in owning and displaying my queerness, but part of it also stems from the fact that I was expected to be willing to answer that question without feeling put upon or violated. For that matter, so were my friends, who were also asked the same perplexing question, in a similarly nonchalant manner. Her privilege, unassuming as it was, enabled her to ask this question without a trace of chagrin or discomfort.

Some time ago, my brilliant colleague Melissa posted a brilliant piece on this blog about the power of gay male privilege, and what strikes me about my own encounter is how it is the inverse of her experience. Rather than being the recipient of said privilege, I was now being subjected to someone else’s. It was one of those increasingly common moments when I recognized that privilege works in all sorts of ways, not all of them immediately obvious. If we are truly invested in making this world a more just and equitable one for all citizens, we need to start by calling out these moments of privilege for what they are. If I could go back and redo that night, I would have informed her that it was none of her business, reclaiming my agency from her privileged grasp.

But I didn’t, precisely because it never occurred to me to do so.

And that truly disturbs me.

T.J. West III is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English. His dissertation, tentatively titled History’s Perilous Pleasures:  Experiencing Antiquity in Post-War Hollywood Film, explores the historico-biblical epic and the ways in which it attempts to mitigate the terrifying nature of modern history through an appeal to the ancient world. He teaches courses on film, popular culture, race, and gender, and in his free time enjoys watching The Golden Girls and nerding out over the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and their various adaptations. He frequently blogs at Queerly Different. You can follow him on Twitter @tjwest3.

The post “Are You Gay?”: Public Space, the Closet, and the Exercise of Privilege appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Oral history of Buckland tells the tale of Josiah’s early escape attempt: he rubbed his chains against the wooden floor in his bedroom for about a year, finally breaking them. This story is recorded in Neil Perry’s 1966 article for the Springfield Morning Union. While there is much sensationalism in any newspaper article written about Josiah, my trip to the Spaulding house in Buckland in 2012 led me to believe this had actually happened.

After some research, I managed to locate the owner of the former parsonage, built in the late 1700s, the home of Reverend Spaulding, Mary Williams and their children. There has been very little restoration or modernization done to the former Spaulding home. I was invited there by its owner at the time, Edward Purinton, whose family goes back two hundred years in the Buckland area. Ed grew up in Josiah’s room and his mother had been a local Spaulding researcher. She collected funds from the community to install a gravestone for Josiah in the churchyard cemetery alongside his family, for Josiah, who died at the Deerfield Poor Farm, was buried in an unmarked grave.

Ed told me that the room was very cold in the winter, and in the letters, Josiah’s sisters often expressed concern that he stayed warm enough. Josiah’s bedroom still had the original wide-plank floors, the type of which is no longer seen in the United States. Ed moved the bed out of the way, and there underneath were the chain grooves made by young Josiah, who had been chained in front of the fireplace.

The grooves in the floor where Josiah scraped his chains.

According to legend, Josiah managed to break his chains after he rubbed them into the wooden floor. He escaped from his bedroom out the back staircase, which was situated very close to his bedroom and would have been easily reached. The original hardware was still on the doors of the house, and Josiah’s bedroom only had a latch—typical hardware of the late 1700s in this region. The back staircase did indeed open to the kitchen, where the back door was about a foot away. The barn was also very close to the house; here, Josiah attempted to take the family horse and ride to freedom. According to oral history, a neighbor commandeered Josiah and brought him back to the Reverend. Next door to the Spaulding house is an early nineteenth century house that would have been there in 1812. Josiah’s sister Lydia is said to have alerted her father of his escape, and in the commotion, the neighbor came out to tackle Josiah.

The villagers of Buckland were all aware of what had happened to Josiah; they knew that he was “insane,” and that the Reverend was keeping him chained up. It may be hard to believe that the villagers did not think of it as abusive, but at this time, they did not view it that way. Instead, church records and biographies of Reverend Spaulding refer to his “affliction,” his punishment from God: his son, Josiah Jr. Just like epidemic disease in this era was not understood to be biological in nature, mental illness was believed also to be something that God put upon a family. These afflictions were not anyone’s business to interfere with, especially not if it was the family of the highly revered local minister. Reverend Spaulding spoke from the pulpit about what had happened with his son and his version of events is what everyone believed, although it is unclear exactly what he may have said. Whatever he said, it did not elicit sympathy for Josiah. The sympathy was for the Reverend.

After Josiah’s foiled escape-attempt, Reverend Spaulding knew he had to contain him in something much stronger and harder to escape, so he had an iron cage built by the local blacksmith. In this very small, rural village, the blacksmith and the villagers all would have known exactly for whom they built the cage. It was delivered to the Spaulding home, probably carried there, and strong men assisted the Reverend as they forced his son into it. Once Josiah was put into the cage, his relationship with his sisters and his friends effectively either ended completely or was greatly changed. Letters from Josiah’s friend Ezra Fisk were no longer sent to the Spaulding house and Josiah’s correspondence with his favorite sister, Mary, also ended. The horror and desperation Mary must have felt upon learning that her brother had been put into an iron cage one can only imagine. It most likely only compounded her own feelings of being trapped, isolated, incarcerated in the patriarchal world of the early 1800s in which she could not attend college, work, or be independent of men. There was absolutely nothing Mary could have done about her brother’s situation—and she knew it.

Shortly after Josiah was caged, Mary’s husband Isaac died at age thirty-three from what I suspect may have been cholera or dysentery, when Mary was pregnant with her second child. Their three-year-old daughter also died of disease around the same time. At this time, Mary wrote one of the most heartbreaking letters of the collection to her parents, in which she implored them to help. Mary was entirely alone in Southampton with her second child. Her handwriting was wild, and her tone was of arrant, devastated and hopeless emotion, the kind that occurs only after a remarkable tragedy like what she had experienced: she lost almost everyone important to her in a matter of a few years. Mary had little choice but to return home to Buckland to stay with her parents. Upon her return the family home, she was met with the reality that her brother was now in an iron cage, and that was where he was going to stay for the rest of his life. I do not think that Mary ever recovered from any of these events, and she died at age thirty-nine. None of the Spaulding women survived past the age of fifty.

The Spaulding Family graves

I often wonder if Mary talked to her brother after he was caged, or if he implored her to let him out. The Spaulding daughters and their mother, Mary Williams, were in charge of keeping Josiah clothed, fed and warm. They did his laundry, stoked the fireplace, and cared for him. Josiah was not at all a “raving maniac”; he was not a “lunatic”; and there is no evidence that he was ever “deranged”—whatever those words mean. He was guilty, as his father would have said, of great sin: for being different. He was guilty of running off to Southampton to have fun, of not sharing his father’s Calvinist beliefs, of what may have been possible homosexuality based on the letters that were sent to him by a seemingly infatuated Ezra Fisk. The possible outcome of all of this, as Reverend Spaulding knew, was a challenge to the indomitable religious, patriarchal hold the Reverend maintained over his family and the village. It was such an incredible hold, made stronger by its ultimate physical manifestation in the form of Josiah’s cage, that it continued to socially incarcerate the Spaulding family for decades after the Reverend died. Reverend Spaulding’s death in 1823 around the same time as his wife’s death, did not mean a release or reprieve for Josiah, who by then was in his forties. The next generation cared for him, in his cage, as Josiah was transported up the hill to his sister Lydia’s house after the death of his parents. He was taken from the cage, his limbs long atrophied, carried up the hill by villagers, some of whom also carried his cage, in a grim procession to his destination at the home of Lydia. They lived right across the street from the First Congregational Church of Buckland, where the Reverend had preached for twenty-eight years. In its shadow, Josiah would live out the second half of his adult life.

Disability history is imperative to the field of Disability Studies, especially when there is primary source material like Josiah’s letters. In this case, a researcher can analyze his life in a more direct fashion, and also can learn from the letters of his family. If we were to read only newspaper articles and biographies of Reverend Spaulding and Josiah, we might come to the conclusion that Josiah really was violent and deranged, and that his poor father had no other choice but to cage him. Understanding that people with psychiatric and other disabilities are often very intelligent, observant, caring and nonviolent people is imperative to creating and fostering a world where disabled people like Josiah are given the resources they need to achieve contribute to what Disability Studies scholar Rosemarie Garland Thomson would call a biodiverse world. Diversity amongst humans and perspectives of those who think differently or experience the world differently are an important part of fostering intellectual development for all humans. Presuming the competence of those with disabilities, as former Syracuse University Dean of the School of Education, Douglas Bicklen, would say, is a great way to start the process of biodiverse societal inclusion. Josiah’s letters clearly disprove presumptions of derangement, being “lower than a brute” and “insensate.” However, portrayals of psychiatric disability from the nineteenth century and before have continued to create stigma and bias today. Understanding the history of these perceptions and biases and where they began is necessary to unravel them, and see—really see, without presumption —the lives and experiences of disabled people now and in the past.

The cover photo is the room where Josiah was kept.

Kate Corbett Pollack is a graduate student in Cultural Foundations of Education and Disability Studies at Syracuse University.  Her scholarship has grown from Josiah’s story, and has led to an interest in prisons, mental illness, social reform, education and disability. She wrote a monthly blog for almost three years, which can be viewed at americanpomeroys.blogspot.com, the blog for the American Pomeroy Historic Genealogical Association. She has also written for and done work with the Landmarks Society of Greater Utica on the history and families who lived in a few of the beautiful old mansions in that area. Prior to coming to the university, she lived in Brooklyn, and before that Eugene, Oregon where she was born, and Utica, New York. Her family in Syracuse goes back one hundred years, and she has lived here over the years on occasion.

The post “While the dearest of friends lays in the cold ground”: Epidemic Disease, Incarceration and Patriarchal Control; The Continuing Story of Josiah Spaulding appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

A particularly painful example of the pitfalls of a catchy title happened in the highlight of an article on primate sexual behavior. In December 2014, a group of researchers published a study on reproductive conflict and male aggression in chimpanzees. [1] They found a correlation between high-ranking male aggression toward females during the females’ non-fertile period, and the amount of offspring that male fathered. The scientists hypothesized that sustained male aggression played a role in sexual coercion. The title of their article was relatively innocuous: “Sexually Coercive Male Chimpanzees Sire More Offspring.” However, in a companion piece meant to attract attention and describe the research for a more general audience, the title lost some nuance: “Sexual Conflict: Nice Guys Finish Last.”[2]

Nice guys finish last is a trope that has been increasingly adopted by the MRA (Men’s Rights Advocacy) movement to disparage the sexual choices of women. Although the use of this phrase was likely to add levity and attract attention with no ill intention, I was startled to see Nice guys finish last used so flippantly in a scientific journal without any consideration of the broader cultural implications. Especially last year, when misogynistic ideologies perpetuated violence against women that could not be ignored,[3] it was disturbing to see this phrase used in a way that normalized as natural biological behavior male violence towards women.

Popular science writing about fruit fly sexual behavior can also be extremely anthropomorphic and distasteful. I have come across a couple of examples in my own research area that set my teeth on edge.

About a dozen years ago scientists identified a gene that when mutated resulted in male fruit flies courting and trying to mate with other males. Their article “Conditional Disruption of Synaptic Transmission Induces Male-Male Courtship Behavior in Drosophila” discussed this gene in terms of regulation of fruit fly reproductive behavior and the flies’ ability to distinguish between females and males.[4] Misguidedly, a news post on the Science journal website decided to make this research stand out by suggesting it had direct relationship with human sexuality. In an outrageous cognitive jump, the piece was called “How to Make a Fly Bi” and included a figure caption and other language that insinuated bisexuality was the equivalent to lowered inhibitions and increased promiscuity.[5] Bisexual advocates struggle to combat the misconceptions that bisexuality is equivalent to a lack of discernment or confusion. But here, popular writing associated with  a respected science journal perpetuated in these misconceptions and problematic assumptions about bisexuality.

Research on changes in female fruit fly behavior after mating suffered a similar fate in popular media. A study titled “Drosophila male sex peptide inhibits siesta sleep and promotes locomotor activity in the post-mated female” found that a specific component of the male ejaculate decreased the amount a female sleeps after mating and also increases foraging activity. [6] In a blurb on the research by the University’s publicity office the title became “Female fruit flies do chores after sex”.[7] An article by a clinical psychologist on the HuffPost Healthy Living Blog took it even further: “Housework After Sex, Not Sleep.” [8] These accessible articles drew a direct relationship between fruit fly behavior and women’s “domestic-type duties or housework” that were not implied in the original research. Although I do think changes in postmating behavior in fruit flies have some fascinating implications for changes in human behavior during gestation and birth, a direct comparison cannot be made. I am concerned about the way the popular media twisted the scientific research to reaffirm underlying assumptions of a woman’s domestic role and primary childcare provider.

Popular science writing wants to attract public interest. As a result, the cautious conclusions that scientists make with clearly stated caveats and limitations can be distorted and aggrandized in the process. Scarily, it can then be used to further a political or philosophical agenda. There is a clear responsibility for science journalists to be more rigorous in reporting the intricacies of science research, as well as be more cognizant of the ways their reporting uses research to reaffirm cultural stereotypes. As a scientist, I also wonder what is our responsibility after we publish a paper? Are we completely out of control of the dissemination of information to the public? If research is taken out of context, or absurd associations to humans are drawn, if the scientist is appalled with the implications derived from their work, what should we do? Scientists need to become more involved in the science communication process, and to be trained how to explain and our research in ways that the public can understand, but that still situate it appropriately in broader contexts. The challenge is finding the time and a platform for a scientist to make sure the totality of their research message makes it safely, with only minimal slips, to the public.

[1] Feldblum, J.T., Wroblewske, E.E., Rudicell, R.S., Hahn, B.H., Paiva, T., Cetinkaya-Rundel, M., Pusey, A.E., Gilby, I.C. 2014. Sexually Coercive Male Chimpanzees Sire More Offspring. Current Biology. 24: 2855 – 2860.

[2] Thompson, M.E. 2014. Sexual Conflict: Nice Guys Finish Last. Dispatch, Current Biology. 24: R1125 – R1127.

[3] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/24/elliot-rodgers-california-shooting-mental-health-misogyny

[4] Kitamoto, T. 2002. Conditional Disruption of Synaptic Transmission Induces Male-Male Courtship Behavior in Drosophila. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sciences.

[5] Beckman, M. 2002. How to Make a Fly Bi. Science News Biology http://news.sciencemag.org/2002/09/how-make-fly-bi

[6] Isaac, R. E., Li, C., Leedale, A.D. 2009. Drosophila male sex peptide inhibits siesta sleep and promotes locomotor activity in the post-mated female. Proc. Royal. Soc. B.

[7] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090929203941.htm

[8] Breus, M.J. 2010. Housework After Sex, Not Sleep. Huffpost Healthy Living Blog. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-michael-j-breus/housework-after-sex-not-s_b_345568.html

Caitlin McDonough is a first year biology graduate in the Center for Reproductive Evolution. When not dissecting fruit flies, she plays rugby, draws and disrupts conventional scientists by talking about feminism and queer studies. More information can be found at her website cemcdonough.com or fledgling blog ideaspermatheca.com.

The post Perils of Click-Bait Science Communication, or There’s Many a Slip ‘twixt the Cup and the Lip appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

While at the birthday party of a good friend some months back, I was introduced to the new love-interest of a high school classmate. He was a young, charming, gay man, and a pleasure to talk to. Yet, we shared one exchange that serves as the focus of this post.

A couple hours and a few drinks into the party, this man comes closer to me, and in an almost-whisper asks, “can I touch them?”

Yes, THEM. The girls. The twins. Jugs. Boobs. Breasts. Whatever you call them, this stranger had asked if he could take a hold of mine.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was taken aback. But, because this man was gay, I suspected his question was one of curiosity and not sexual desire, and, because of this (and maybe the drinks), I said ok. After a light fondle (the type you might get from an airport security guard—yes, that happens), this man says to me, “you are not wearing the right bra.”

“Excuse me?” I replied, honestly stunned. Due to their size and my personality, my boobs have always been a source of conversation among family and friends. Additionally, my many years as a Lane Bryant employee eradicated any sense of taboo that might have once surrounded the conversation of mine or anyone else’s busts. I am comfortable with conversations ranging from good-natured teasing, commiseration, awe, and the useful sharing of information. But no one (and specifically no man) had EVER, unsolicited, criticized how I was wearing my breasts.

“You are clearly not in the right bra,” he continued.

“Ok,” I said, growing agitated. Not wanting to cause tension at a friend’s birthday party, I resisted the urge to smack his hand away and yell, “Who do you think you are!?” Instead, I took a different approach. I began to calmly explain to this man that I had actually been a bra fitter for a number of years at Lane Bryant. “Well, have you ever been professionally measured?” Yes, I responded, and I have measured others repeatedly (and occasionally still do with the bra fitting tape I might have from my former job).

“Well, I help my mom with her bras all the time, and can definitely tell you need a different one. They should be up here” he said, adjusting my straps to elevate my chest. I attempted to explain to him that because of my bra size, it is difficult to find affordable options and often I am left with a less successful bra for budgetary reasons. When I told him my bust size (again, something I often share without shame to friends and family) he replied, “You can’t be that size! My mom is only a [insert size], and you look the same!” To this man, regardless of what I had to say, I knew little about my own breasts or how to wear them.

I did a little lift and tuck of the girls which appeased him, and we were able to move on to a different topic. But for the rest of the night, I could not shake the feeling that this conversation was, as many academics are wont to say, “problematic.”

As I mention above, my chest is not a topic I often shy from, but it is an intimate one that is usually only undertaken with family and friends—not the recently-met boyfriends of family and friends. While this individual apparently wanted to be helpful, his delivery repeatedly undermined my own assertions about my body and its presentation, suggesting that his experience with his mother was more valid than my years of both professional and personal experience buying and selling bras.

My source of agitation, I believe, is best articulated through the term “mansplain.” To clarify for those unfamiliar, mansplaining is when a man “explain(s) something to someone, typically a woman, in a manner regarded condescending or patronizing.” This portmanteau gained popular usage after Rebecca Solnit wrote an essay for the Los Angeles Times outlining instances where “Men Who Explain Things” went to great lengths to incorrectly explain information to her upon which she had written well-received books. According to Solnit, some men seem to assume they hold more knowledge than women because of (likely unconscious) gender biases. Mansplaining underscores for women that their knowledge of the world is suspect for no other reason than because they are women.

Perhaps complicating my personal experience was the fact that my mansplainer was gay. Actress Rose McGowan recently caused a stir when she asserted during a podcast interview that “gay men are as misogynistic as straight men, if not more so.” While I would never argue that gay men hold the same cultural privileges as straight men (they definitely don’t), my exchange with this particular individual demonstrated to me that gay men can indeed be guilty of wielding male privilege to the disadvantage of their female counterparts. Tim Murphy’s thoughtful piece for New York Magazine in response to McGowan’s comments considers the complicated relationship that gay men often have with women, whether through their drag performances or friendships. And, while rightly critiquing McGowan’s assertion for its homogenizing effect and lack of recognition for the supportive relationships often shared between gay men and straight women, he also observed that “Gay men are men…And as men, we carry male privilege. If we’re white and well-educated, we carry a lot of privilege.” Because the subject of my story was a man, he assumed my knowledge to be less than his own. And because this man was gay, he assumed an understanding of and access to my body that had not been established. Being gay and being male does not a boob expert make. Until you’ve worked for years navigating the absolutely bizarre brazier world both personally and professionally, get your hands off my breasts.

Melissa Welshans is a PhD Candidate in English at Syracuse University and is currently working on her dissertation The Many Types of Marriage: Gender, Marriage and Biblical Typology in Early Modern England. Melissa’s research is concerned with issues of gender and sexuality in early modern England, especially as it pertains to the institution of marriage. In her free time Melissa practices her nail art skills and snuggles with her husband and their two cats. 

The post Get your Hands off my Boobs: Mansplaining and (Gay) Male Privilege appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.