The stoa
Fall 2012
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, we would like to extend our gratitude to everyone who contributed work to The Stoa’s first issue. It is because of the many excellent submissions we received that we were able to transform a simple idea into an impressive collection of of scholarly texts.
We owe special thanks to Catherine Taylor for the thoughtful input and professional guidance she offered us throughout the various stages of production. We were able to avoid many potential failures as a result of her generosity.
We extend additional thanks to Professor Thomas Girshin, Tony Azzara, Stephen Briggs, the members of SGA, Theresa Radley, and the various others who supported us along the way.
We owe special thanks to Catherine Taylor for the thoughtful input and professional guidance she offered us throughout the various stages of production. We were able to avoid many potential failures as a result of her generosity.
We extend additional thanks to Professor Thomas Girshin, Tony Azzara, Stephen Briggs, the members of SGA, Theresa Radley, and the various others who supported us along the way.
Killing Venus: The Crisis of Female Sexual Dysfunction in the Western World
|
Bibliography
1 Walter R. Stokes, “Inadequacy of Female Orgasm as a Problem in Marriage Counseling,” The Journal of Sex Research 4.3 (1968): 226.
2 Deborah L. Tolman, Meg I. Striepe, and Tricia Harmon, “Gender Matters: Constructing a Model of Adolescent Sexual Health,” Journal of Sex Research 40.1 (2003): 6.
3 Stokes, “Inadequacy of Female Orgasm,” 226.
4 Stokes, “Inadequacy of Female Orgasm,” 226.
5 Josie Butcher, “ABC of Sexual Health: Female Sexual Problems 1: Loss of Desire—What about the Fun?,” British Medical Journal 318.7175 (1999): 42.
6 Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2010), 102.
7 Valenti, Purity Myth, 102.
8 Tolman, Striepe, and Harmon, “Gender Matters,” 5.
9 Ibid, 5.
10 Stokes, “Inadequacy of Female Orgasm,” 228.
11 Ibid, 229.
12 Richard C. Robertiello, “The 'Clitoral versus Vaginal Orgasm' Controversy and Some of Its Ramifications,” Journal of Sex Research 6.4 (1970): 309.
13 Robertiello, 309.
14 Stokes, “Inadequacy of Female Orgasm,” 228.
15 LeMon Clark, “Is There a Difference Between a Clitoral and a Vaginal Orgasm?,” Journal of Sex Research 6.1 (1970): 27.
16 Josie Butcher, “ABC of Sexual Health: Female Problems II: Sexual Pain and Sexual Fears,” British Medical Journal 318 (1999): 112.
17 Kenneth J. Davidson Sr. and Carol A. Darling, “The Sexually Experienced Woman: Multiple Sex Partners and Sexual Satisfaction,” Journal of Sex research 24 (1988): 150.
18 Stokes, “Inadequacy of Female Orgasm,” 233.
19 Tolman, Striepe, and Harmon, “Gender Matters,” 6.
20 Tolman, Striepe, and Harmon, “Gender Matters,” 6.
Notes
* The medical aspect of this problem should be noted. Deeper medical or physical issues can sometimes cause inability to orgasm. Should these problems go untreated because of a woman’s hesitance to convey her inability to either a partner or medical professional, her condition could worsen.
† When I describe sexual morality as being “Victorian,” I mean that they reflect the strict code of sexual ethics that was held up by that society. This code reflected a over-simplified, dualistic view of femininity. In this view, a woman could either be a pure woman or a fallen one, a Mary or a Magdalene. These ideas imply that a woman who enjoys sex or is open about her sexuality is morally corrupt.
‡ When I refer to this problem as “self-perpetuating,” I am referring to the fact that a woman who is experiencing sexual dysfunction often becomes anxious about having sex, thus making it even more difficult for her to have enjoyable sex. This is not just the case with inability to regularly orgasm. Refer the vaginismus chart on page 111 of Josie Butcher’s “ABC of Sexual Health: Female Sexual Problems II: Sexual Pain and Sexual Fears” for an example of this self-perpetuation.
§ Robertiello and Stokes both point out that individual and couple’s therapy can be a good start to treating the problem. A couple may then be able to work on making the woman feel comfortable and assure that the partner does not take the inability to orgasm as a personal affront to his or her sexual prowess. However, one can never reach this point of understanding if the woman does not acknowledge and communicate the problem.
** I realize that waiting for societal attitudes to change require patience. However, part of that slow process of change includes the demand of said change, something that I am attempting to do with this essay.
†† Though there is growing interest in this area of study, the biological purpose and function of the female orgasm is in gross need of more research. Sexuality experts are still debating the existence of female ejaculation, whether there are differences between the vaginal orgasm versus the clitoral orgasm, etc. The better the academic world understands it, the more we will be able to teach young women about their own bodies. However, we should still be discussing these debates in classrooms to make young women aware and comfortable with discussing the female side of sexuality.
1 Walter R. Stokes, “Inadequacy of Female Orgasm as a Problem in Marriage Counseling,” The Journal of Sex Research 4.3 (1968): 226.
2 Deborah L. Tolman, Meg I. Striepe, and Tricia Harmon, “Gender Matters: Constructing a Model of Adolescent Sexual Health,” Journal of Sex Research 40.1 (2003): 6.
3 Stokes, “Inadequacy of Female Orgasm,” 226.
4 Stokes, “Inadequacy of Female Orgasm,” 226.
5 Josie Butcher, “ABC of Sexual Health: Female Sexual Problems 1: Loss of Desire—What about the Fun?,” British Medical Journal 318.7175 (1999): 42.
6 Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2010), 102.
7 Valenti, Purity Myth, 102.
8 Tolman, Striepe, and Harmon, “Gender Matters,” 5.
9 Ibid, 5.
10 Stokes, “Inadequacy of Female Orgasm,” 228.
11 Ibid, 229.
12 Richard C. Robertiello, “The 'Clitoral versus Vaginal Orgasm' Controversy and Some of Its Ramifications,” Journal of Sex Research 6.4 (1970): 309.
13 Robertiello, 309.
14 Stokes, “Inadequacy of Female Orgasm,” 228.
15 LeMon Clark, “Is There a Difference Between a Clitoral and a Vaginal Orgasm?,” Journal of Sex Research 6.1 (1970): 27.
16 Josie Butcher, “ABC of Sexual Health: Female Problems II: Sexual Pain and Sexual Fears,” British Medical Journal 318 (1999): 112.
17 Kenneth J. Davidson Sr. and Carol A. Darling, “The Sexually Experienced Woman: Multiple Sex Partners and Sexual Satisfaction,” Journal of Sex research 24 (1988): 150.
18 Stokes, “Inadequacy of Female Orgasm,” 233.
19 Tolman, Striepe, and Harmon, “Gender Matters,” 6.
20 Tolman, Striepe, and Harmon, “Gender Matters,” 6.
Notes
* The medical aspect of this problem should be noted. Deeper medical or physical issues can sometimes cause inability to orgasm. Should these problems go untreated because of a woman’s hesitance to convey her inability to either a partner or medical professional, her condition could worsen.
† When I describe sexual morality as being “Victorian,” I mean that they reflect the strict code of sexual ethics that was held up by that society. This code reflected a over-simplified, dualistic view of femininity. In this view, a woman could either be a pure woman or a fallen one, a Mary or a Magdalene. These ideas imply that a woman who enjoys sex or is open about her sexuality is morally corrupt.
‡ When I refer to this problem as “self-perpetuating,” I am referring to the fact that a woman who is experiencing sexual dysfunction often becomes anxious about having sex, thus making it even more difficult for her to have enjoyable sex. This is not just the case with inability to regularly orgasm. Refer the vaginismus chart on page 111 of Josie Butcher’s “ABC of Sexual Health: Female Sexual Problems II: Sexual Pain and Sexual Fears” for an example of this self-perpetuation.
§ Robertiello and Stokes both point out that individual and couple’s therapy can be a good start to treating the problem. A couple may then be able to work on making the woman feel comfortable and assure that the partner does not take the inability to orgasm as a personal affront to his or her sexual prowess. However, one can never reach this point of understanding if the woman does not acknowledge and communicate the problem.
** I realize that waiting for societal attitudes to change require patience. However, part of that slow process of change includes the demand of said change, something that I am attempting to do with this essay.
†† Though there is growing interest in this area of study, the biological purpose and function of the female orgasm is in gross need of more research. Sexuality experts are still debating the existence of female ejaculation, whether there are differences between the vaginal orgasm versus the clitoral orgasm, etc. The better the academic world understands it, the more we will be able to teach young women about their own bodies. However, we should still be discussing these debates in classrooms to make young women aware and comfortable with discussing the female side of sexuality.
TV and you: You're doin' it wrong!
by Meredith clarke
Class: Academic Writing Major: English '15
In 2009, superstar Alec Baldwin appeared in a commercial for the online television streaming website, Hulu. In the advertisement, Baldwin takes observers through a fictionalized testing facility for the website in which ordinary people are intensely viewing shows on the internet. The participants seem as if they are in a heavily sedated, hypnotic state as they stare blankly at the screen in front of them. Baldwin then informs the audience that TV “softens the brain” through “cerebral gelatinizing shows,” and as this explanation is given, an x-ray showing a participant’s brain melting into a “cottage cheese like mush” is displayed.1 Despite the obviously satiric nature of this advertisement, the view that television rots the brain is widely held and generally accepted as fact. However, this assumption is based off of limited exposure to and knowledge of television and discounts the plethora of educational and complicated shows on air. TV can potentially be as beneficial to the mind as reading a book.
There are plenty of negative social stigma attached to gratuitous television watching, the most popular being that watching too much TV rots your brain. Several scientific studies back up this claim. One in particular was conducted by the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College in London. In the study, participants were given a general health questionnaire that examined the relationship between screen-based leisure activities and mental health. The results concluded that participants who engaged in at least four hours of television per day had the highest risk for mental health disorders dealing with depression and memory, and physical health disorders including obesity.2 Other studies have shown that watching television suppresses the “dynamic flow of communication between all of the regions of the brain, which facilitates the comprehension of higher levels of order,”3 and can potentially lead to the development of ADD.4 In essence, this research shows that watching too much TV turns your brain off and prevents it from functioning properly in the future.
While these evidences may paint a dismal picture of television, there are two important points to consider when reflecting on these results. First, those people who displayed high risk for mental and physical disorders at University College reported watching four hours or more of television per day. This number is higher than the average viewing time of roughly three hours per day5, and considering many of the participants reported watching more than four hours per day, it is safe to assume that this group of people is on the more extreme side of television viewing. The results cannot be fairly applied to the rest of the television-viewing population.
Secondly, the researchers do not specify what type of television shows the participants are watching. It is safe to assume that, most likely, participants were viewing popular shows falling in the genres of sitcoms and reality TV, given that these are two of the most heavily viewed types of shows on television. It is also safe to assume that these types of shows do not contribute to cognitive activity or facilitate critical thought due to their flat characters, simple plots, and often times nonsense content. But what of those television shows with worthwhile content, complicated storylines, and a vast and diverse cast of characters? Can they provide the cognitive stimulation that scientists so fervently deny is possible from a sedentary, screen-based leisure activity? I say yes.
In first world countries, television is an accepted fixture in many, if not most, homes. Given that the TV is on for an average of three hours a day in such households, this means that for those families with children, exposure to the silver screen starts at a young age. Many television nay-sayers believe that subjecting children to television at an early age can be detrimental to their physical and mental health. Some parental advice websites even claim that watching television as a child can increase school drop-out rates and even affect educational achievement at age 26.6 While it is ridiculous to argue that plopping your kids in front of a TV for hours on end is a good thing, it is equally ridiculous to make the universal assumption that all TV is bad for them. According to a study performed by researchers at the University of Texas, young children who watched a few hours per week of educational television performed better on achievement tests regarding reading, math, and vocabulary skills than children who did not watch television. Testing three years later confirmed that those TV-viewing children still scored higher on academic tests.7
This same study also confirmed that children who spent large amounts of time watching entertainment television scored lower on the academic tests than those who watched fewer hours. These findings indicate that it is not the institution of television that is apparently destroying the brain, but more so the content to which the viewer is subjected. Obviously, educational programs expose children to content and knowledge they had no previous access to, and so they will absorb the new information. Similarly for adults, television channels such as the Discovery, History, and Travel Channels offer insight into topics a viewer may not be familiar with. Provided that the viewer is actively engaged in the program, there is no conceivable way that watching informational TV shows is detrimental to brain function or development.
Educational television, however, is not immensely popular with the general public. Most people watch television in order to be entertained, therefore fictional comedies and dramas are some of the most widely consumed shows on air. But just because a show doesn’t chronicle the fall of Ancient Rome or explain how a B-52 fighter plane’s engine is constructed doesn’t mean it will rot your brain. When considering fictional shows, content does matter, but what is more important is the way in which the content is presented, and the way in which the viewer engages the content. In the early days of television, programs were short with a singular storyline, occasionally containing another very short, humorous side plot. These types of shows are extremely simplistic, involve relatively few characters, and require little to no thought on the part of the viewer to follow and comprehend. Most early television shows conformed to this simplistic structure, and some still do, but over the past few decades, television shows have greatly increased in complexity and plot structure. In his essay, “Watching TV Makes You Smarter,” New York Times columnist Steven Johnson argues that the recent emergence of complicated, intertwined storylines in prime-time television shows (and the like) also gave rise to a new way of watching television.8
Johnson claims these revolutionary shows can actually increase our intelligence. The concept of intertwining storylines, “multiple threading” as he calls it, is one of the most crucial elements of beneficial television shows. A show with multiple threads is one with a vast array of principle characters dealing with several other stories on the side besides the main flow of the plot.9 In order to keep track of each character and their individual difficulties as well as keep the overarching plotline in mind, the viewer must actively participate in the on-screen action and pay keen attention to how each character interacts with the others, else subtleties and indirect cues be lost.
A perfect example of this type of cognitively demanding show has recently taken the HBO Channel by storm. “Game of Thrones,” a medieval-type fantasy show, involves no fewer than 23 characters. While many of their stories are very closely connected to one another, each character has their own individual struggles and specific relationships with other characters spanning the geography of an entire world. For example: Ned Stark is Lord of Winterfell and is married to Catelyn Tully, but while he was on a military mission, had a bastard son called Jon Snow who is hated by Catelyn and has no chance of inheriting the throne from his father, so he is recruited by his Uncle Benji to become part of the Knight’s Watch in the far North where he receives notice too late that his half-brother Rob has gone to war with King Joffrey who resides in King’s Landing in the South and is actually a child of incest of twins Jamie and Cersei Lannister who attempted to kill Bran, another son of the Stark’s, when he discovered their filthy secret, but framed their other Lannister brother, a dwarf named Tyrion who was kidnapped by Catelyn for the attempted murder of her son, MEANWHILE, across the Narrow Sea, the Dothraki ruler, Kahl Drogo, was recently married to Daenerys, one of the two remaining members of House Targaryen, by her vengeful brother, Viserys, who is the rightful heir to the throne after the Mad King was killed by Jamie Lannister and the reign of the Baratheons began, and who plans, through the marriage of his sister, to raise a rebel army to the Baratheons. I think I’ve made my point.
This synopsis, while seemingly very detailed and all-encompassing, hardly scratches the surface of the plot of this extremely complicated show. Outside of this description, there are still ten more characters to be considered, each with their own personal multiple threads, and at least three more geographical settings to keep track of. In order to follow every thread, there can be no passivity while watching this show. The viewer must always be actively engaged, listening, and questioning the information presented to them in order to fully comprehend what is going on. The focus of the narrative often jumps around sporadically from one character to another, and the viewer must also be able to store information and remember significant events that occurred perhaps episodes ago. The mental activity required for this degree of retention must be noted and respected as beneficial for brain function. Viewers may not be absorbing facts and statistics, but their brains are assuredly working hard to process the immeasurable whos, whats, wheres, and whys of such a cognitively demanding show.
Besides the complicated interpersonal relationships between the characters, the complex political system and ambiguous transfer of power in this medieval society must also be understood. Royal bloodlines are easy enough to follow; there’s a king, he’s married to the queen, they have some babies, and the oldest son becomes king after his father dies. The system becomes a bit more complicated when the kingship was turned over to an undeserving heir upon the murder of the rightful king, a new family comes to power, marries into another family, has the aforementioned children, but with a surprise incest child in the mix. The bloodlines are extravagantly confusing, and opinions on who truly deserves the throne vary considerably. The mystery is so well concealed, because each character deeply holds convictions regarding who deserves the throne. The audience has no idea who in fact does deserve it. Mix in a rebellious northern state intent on sovereignty which adds an entirely new throne and you’ve got yourself quite a situation to follow.
This political ambiguity forces the viewer to create a mental map of past rulers and family lines, which is not an easy task considering the dialogue ostensibly reveals next to nothing regarding the past, before the chronology of the show began. References to the past are only made in passing conversation which forces the viewer to constantly and consistently attend to the rapid dialogue and draw broad conclusions from small bits of information. Shows that embody this type of plot development do not use what Johnson refers to as “flashing arrows,” or obvious indications as to where the plot is going.10 A popular feature in older and substandard television shows, flashing arrows facilitate passivity in viewing because they do not allow the reader to connect the proverbial dots for themselves. Emerging shows have abandoned this hand-holding tactic to empower the viewer to think for themselves, make predictions, and second guess the objective truthfulness of dialogue.
Active listening, character mapping, content retention, making predictions; these are all valuable skills and strategies that must be utilized in order to comprehend complex shows such as Game of Thrones. These same strategies are also used extensively during the act of reading. Television shows and books share many of the same qualities. Both tell stories, whether it be a story about a man or an entire nation; both involve diverse casts of characters; both vary considerably on subject matter, from the Pyramids of Giza to vampires; both use a variety of figurative devices to enhance the storytelling, such as metaphors and foreshadowing. Yet, despite these critical similarities, television is constantly stepped on by intellectuals and concerned people everywhere who are convinced that television spells the cognizant downfall of mankind.
Among the various reasons defending reading as the superior form of story consumption are these: reading indulges the imagination, makes you well-travelled, is therapeutic, and improves your memory and creativity.11 While all of these things are assuredly true of books, they can be just as fairly applied to quality television shows. TV absolutely and without a doubt indulges the imagination. Television can guide a viewer through impossible places, such as the immense world of Game of Thrones, or take him through space and time as never experienced before; take for example any show on the SciFi Network. The Discovery and Travel, and History Channels provide a personalized tour of foreign lands and cultures, ensuring that the viewer is well-travelled. Television is a kind of therapy for many individuals who have difficulty escaping the stresses of everyday life. Keeping track of and comprehending complex shows from episode to episode and season to season requires immense use of memory, and frequent memory exercise, such as viewers receive when keeping up with complicated television shows, improves memory function. As for increasing creativity, exposure to fantastic worlds and far off places can only infect the mind with even more fantastic ideas and intensify curiosity.
The reason people can’t seem to grasp the truth about television and its many benefits is that popular television is frivolous tripe. Reality shows offer no complexity, and sitcoms are only as good as the writers’ sarcasm. These popularized shows require little to no thought to comprehend. But there is an immense and valuable variety of worthwhile television shows that exist just below the surface of popular TV, and these shows demand just as much cognitive activity from their audience as books do from their readers. Doctor Aletha C. Huston agrees with me; “The public discussions dismissing television without distinguishing the content seem to be missing the boat”.12 Content is everything.
The only difference between books and television is the way in which they are consumed. Books provide visual-verbal stimulus, and television primarily relies on audito-verbal stimulus. Bad television only calls for passive listening, but good, meaningful television requires hearing and active mental processing. This is the most crucial and constantly overlooked concept in solidifying television as a truly beneficial force in today’s pop culture. Once it has been realized by the masses, perhaps we may be able to resurrect television from its cultural damnation and reestablish it as the positive force it is.
There are plenty of negative social stigma attached to gratuitous television watching, the most popular being that watching too much TV rots your brain. Several scientific studies back up this claim. One in particular was conducted by the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College in London. In the study, participants were given a general health questionnaire that examined the relationship between screen-based leisure activities and mental health. The results concluded that participants who engaged in at least four hours of television per day had the highest risk for mental health disorders dealing with depression and memory, and physical health disorders including obesity.2 Other studies have shown that watching television suppresses the “dynamic flow of communication between all of the regions of the brain, which facilitates the comprehension of higher levels of order,”3 and can potentially lead to the development of ADD.4 In essence, this research shows that watching too much TV turns your brain off and prevents it from functioning properly in the future.
While these evidences may paint a dismal picture of television, there are two important points to consider when reflecting on these results. First, those people who displayed high risk for mental and physical disorders at University College reported watching four hours or more of television per day. This number is higher than the average viewing time of roughly three hours per day5, and considering many of the participants reported watching more than four hours per day, it is safe to assume that this group of people is on the more extreme side of television viewing. The results cannot be fairly applied to the rest of the television-viewing population.
Secondly, the researchers do not specify what type of television shows the participants are watching. It is safe to assume that, most likely, participants were viewing popular shows falling in the genres of sitcoms and reality TV, given that these are two of the most heavily viewed types of shows on television. It is also safe to assume that these types of shows do not contribute to cognitive activity or facilitate critical thought due to their flat characters, simple plots, and often times nonsense content. But what of those television shows with worthwhile content, complicated storylines, and a vast and diverse cast of characters? Can they provide the cognitive stimulation that scientists so fervently deny is possible from a sedentary, screen-based leisure activity? I say yes.
In first world countries, television is an accepted fixture in many, if not most, homes. Given that the TV is on for an average of three hours a day in such households, this means that for those families with children, exposure to the silver screen starts at a young age. Many television nay-sayers believe that subjecting children to television at an early age can be detrimental to their physical and mental health. Some parental advice websites even claim that watching television as a child can increase school drop-out rates and even affect educational achievement at age 26.6 While it is ridiculous to argue that plopping your kids in front of a TV for hours on end is a good thing, it is equally ridiculous to make the universal assumption that all TV is bad for them. According to a study performed by researchers at the University of Texas, young children who watched a few hours per week of educational television performed better on achievement tests regarding reading, math, and vocabulary skills than children who did not watch television. Testing three years later confirmed that those TV-viewing children still scored higher on academic tests.7
This same study also confirmed that children who spent large amounts of time watching entertainment television scored lower on the academic tests than those who watched fewer hours. These findings indicate that it is not the institution of television that is apparently destroying the brain, but more so the content to which the viewer is subjected. Obviously, educational programs expose children to content and knowledge they had no previous access to, and so they will absorb the new information. Similarly for adults, television channels such as the Discovery, History, and Travel Channels offer insight into topics a viewer may not be familiar with. Provided that the viewer is actively engaged in the program, there is no conceivable way that watching informational TV shows is detrimental to brain function or development.
Educational television, however, is not immensely popular with the general public. Most people watch television in order to be entertained, therefore fictional comedies and dramas are some of the most widely consumed shows on air. But just because a show doesn’t chronicle the fall of Ancient Rome or explain how a B-52 fighter plane’s engine is constructed doesn’t mean it will rot your brain. When considering fictional shows, content does matter, but what is more important is the way in which the content is presented, and the way in which the viewer engages the content. In the early days of television, programs were short with a singular storyline, occasionally containing another very short, humorous side plot. These types of shows are extremely simplistic, involve relatively few characters, and require little to no thought on the part of the viewer to follow and comprehend. Most early television shows conformed to this simplistic structure, and some still do, but over the past few decades, television shows have greatly increased in complexity and plot structure. In his essay, “Watching TV Makes You Smarter,” New York Times columnist Steven Johnson argues that the recent emergence of complicated, intertwined storylines in prime-time television shows (and the like) also gave rise to a new way of watching television.8
Johnson claims these revolutionary shows can actually increase our intelligence. The concept of intertwining storylines, “multiple threading” as he calls it, is one of the most crucial elements of beneficial television shows. A show with multiple threads is one with a vast array of principle characters dealing with several other stories on the side besides the main flow of the plot.9 In order to keep track of each character and their individual difficulties as well as keep the overarching plotline in mind, the viewer must actively participate in the on-screen action and pay keen attention to how each character interacts with the others, else subtleties and indirect cues be lost.
A perfect example of this type of cognitively demanding show has recently taken the HBO Channel by storm. “Game of Thrones,” a medieval-type fantasy show, involves no fewer than 23 characters. While many of their stories are very closely connected to one another, each character has their own individual struggles and specific relationships with other characters spanning the geography of an entire world. For example: Ned Stark is Lord of Winterfell and is married to Catelyn Tully, but while he was on a military mission, had a bastard son called Jon Snow who is hated by Catelyn and has no chance of inheriting the throne from his father, so he is recruited by his Uncle Benji to become part of the Knight’s Watch in the far North where he receives notice too late that his half-brother Rob has gone to war with King Joffrey who resides in King’s Landing in the South and is actually a child of incest of twins Jamie and Cersei Lannister who attempted to kill Bran, another son of the Stark’s, when he discovered their filthy secret, but framed their other Lannister brother, a dwarf named Tyrion who was kidnapped by Catelyn for the attempted murder of her son, MEANWHILE, across the Narrow Sea, the Dothraki ruler, Kahl Drogo, was recently married to Daenerys, one of the two remaining members of House Targaryen, by her vengeful brother, Viserys, who is the rightful heir to the throne after the Mad King was killed by Jamie Lannister and the reign of the Baratheons began, and who plans, through the marriage of his sister, to raise a rebel army to the Baratheons. I think I’ve made my point.
This synopsis, while seemingly very detailed and all-encompassing, hardly scratches the surface of the plot of this extremely complicated show. Outside of this description, there are still ten more characters to be considered, each with their own personal multiple threads, and at least three more geographical settings to keep track of. In order to follow every thread, there can be no passivity while watching this show. The viewer must always be actively engaged, listening, and questioning the information presented to them in order to fully comprehend what is going on. The focus of the narrative often jumps around sporadically from one character to another, and the viewer must also be able to store information and remember significant events that occurred perhaps episodes ago. The mental activity required for this degree of retention must be noted and respected as beneficial for brain function. Viewers may not be absorbing facts and statistics, but their brains are assuredly working hard to process the immeasurable whos, whats, wheres, and whys of such a cognitively demanding show.
Besides the complicated interpersonal relationships between the characters, the complex political system and ambiguous transfer of power in this medieval society must also be understood. Royal bloodlines are easy enough to follow; there’s a king, he’s married to the queen, they have some babies, and the oldest son becomes king after his father dies. The system becomes a bit more complicated when the kingship was turned over to an undeserving heir upon the murder of the rightful king, a new family comes to power, marries into another family, has the aforementioned children, but with a surprise incest child in the mix. The bloodlines are extravagantly confusing, and opinions on who truly deserves the throne vary considerably. The mystery is so well concealed, because each character deeply holds convictions regarding who deserves the throne. The audience has no idea who in fact does deserve it. Mix in a rebellious northern state intent on sovereignty which adds an entirely new throne and you’ve got yourself quite a situation to follow.
This political ambiguity forces the viewer to create a mental map of past rulers and family lines, which is not an easy task considering the dialogue ostensibly reveals next to nothing regarding the past, before the chronology of the show began. References to the past are only made in passing conversation which forces the viewer to constantly and consistently attend to the rapid dialogue and draw broad conclusions from small bits of information. Shows that embody this type of plot development do not use what Johnson refers to as “flashing arrows,” or obvious indications as to where the plot is going.10 A popular feature in older and substandard television shows, flashing arrows facilitate passivity in viewing because they do not allow the reader to connect the proverbial dots for themselves. Emerging shows have abandoned this hand-holding tactic to empower the viewer to think for themselves, make predictions, and second guess the objective truthfulness of dialogue.
Active listening, character mapping, content retention, making predictions; these are all valuable skills and strategies that must be utilized in order to comprehend complex shows such as Game of Thrones. These same strategies are also used extensively during the act of reading. Television shows and books share many of the same qualities. Both tell stories, whether it be a story about a man or an entire nation; both involve diverse casts of characters; both vary considerably on subject matter, from the Pyramids of Giza to vampires; both use a variety of figurative devices to enhance the storytelling, such as metaphors and foreshadowing. Yet, despite these critical similarities, television is constantly stepped on by intellectuals and concerned people everywhere who are convinced that television spells the cognizant downfall of mankind.
Among the various reasons defending reading as the superior form of story consumption are these: reading indulges the imagination, makes you well-travelled, is therapeutic, and improves your memory and creativity.11 While all of these things are assuredly true of books, they can be just as fairly applied to quality television shows. TV absolutely and without a doubt indulges the imagination. Television can guide a viewer through impossible places, such as the immense world of Game of Thrones, or take him through space and time as never experienced before; take for example any show on the SciFi Network. The Discovery and Travel, and History Channels provide a personalized tour of foreign lands and cultures, ensuring that the viewer is well-travelled. Television is a kind of therapy for many individuals who have difficulty escaping the stresses of everyday life. Keeping track of and comprehending complex shows from episode to episode and season to season requires immense use of memory, and frequent memory exercise, such as viewers receive when keeping up with complicated television shows, improves memory function. As for increasing creativity, exposure to fantastic worlds and far off places can only infect the mind with even more fantastic ideas and intensify curiosity.
The reason people can’t seem to grasp the truth about television and its many benefits is that popular television is frivolous tripe. Reality shows offer no complexity, and sitcoms are only as good as the writers’ sarcasm. These popularized shows require little to no thought to comprehend. But there is an immense and valuable variety of worthwhile television shows that exist just below the surface of popular TV, and these shows demand just as much cognitive activity from their audience as books do from their readers. Doctor Aletha C. Huston agrees with me; “The public discussions dismissing television without distinguishing the content seem to be missing the boat”.12 Content is everything.
The only difference between books and television is the way in which they are consumed. Books provide visual-verbal stimulus, and television primarily relies on audito-verbal stimulus. Bad television only calls for passive listening, but good, meaningful television requires hearing and active mental processing. This is the most crucial and constantly overlooked concept in solidifying television as a truly beneficial force in today’s pop culture. Once it has been realized by the masses, perhaps we may be able to resurrect television from its cultural damnation and reestablish it as the positive force it is.
Bibliography
1 “Alec Baldwin Superbowl Commercial,” Youtube, February 1, 2009.
2 Mark Hamer, Emmanuel Stamatkis, and Gita D. Mishra, “Television and Screen-based Activity and Mental Well-Being in Adults,” American Journal of Preventative Medicine, April 2010.
3 Wes Moore, “Television: Opiate of the Masses,” The Journal of Cognitive Liberties,2003.
4 Daniel Amen and Randy Alvarez, “ADD with Dr. Daniel Amen, M.D. And Randy Alvares,” Youtube, January 28, 2009.
5 “Television Viewing by Country,” NationMaster, Ed. Luke Metcalfe, 2012.
6 Kayla Boyse and Brad Bushman, “Television and Children,” Television (TV) and Children: Your Child, University of Michigan Health System, August 2010.
7 “Educational TV May Boost Intellectual Development,” Center for Media Literacy, 2011.
8 Steven Johnson, “Watching TV Makes Your Smarter,” Reading Popular Culture (New York: Pearson Education Inc., 2011), 188-200.
9 Johnson, “Watching TV,” 188-200.
10 Johnson, “Watching TV,” 188-200.
11 Amie Harms, “10 Reasons Why Reading is Good for You,” My Book Club, October 16, 2011.
12 “Educational TV May Boost Intellectual Development,” Center for Media Literacy, 2011.
1 “Alec Baldwin Superbowl Commercial,” Youtube, February 1, 2009.
2 Mark Hamer, Emmanuel Stamatkis, and Gita D. Mishra, “Television and Screen-based Activity and Mental Well-Being in Adults,” American Journal of Preventative Medicine, April 2010.
3 Wes Moore, “Television: Opiate of the Masses,” The Journal of Cognitive Liberties,2003.
4 Daniel Amen and Randy Alvarez, “ADD with Dr. Daniel Amen, M.D. And Randy Alvares,” Youtube, January 28, 2009.
5 “Television Viewing by Country,” NationMaster, Ed. Luke Metcalfe, 2012.
6 Kayla Boyse and Brad Bushman, “Television and Children,” Television (TV) and Children: Your Child, University of Michigan Health System, August 2010.
7 “Educational TV May Boost Intellectual Development,” Center for Media Literacy, 2011.
8 Steven Johnson, “Watching TV Makes Your Smarter,” Reading Popular Culture (New York: Pearson Education Inc., 2011), 188-200.
9 Johnson, “Watching TV,” 188-200.
10 Johnson, “Watching TV,” 188-200.
11 Amie Harms, “10 Reasons Why Reading is Good for You,” My Book Club, October 16, 2011.
12 “Educational TV May Boost Intellectual Development,” Center for Media Literacy, 2011.
With the LIghts Out
by Evan Johnson
Class: Argument Major: Journalism '13
DEARBORN, MI—Sources are confirming that at 8:45 p.m. this evening, Thomas E. Dewey High School junior Jessica Milly officially put out. Though many had predicted she would finally give it up to her boyfriend Josh Gibson this Friday, those close to the 17-year-old said Milly "just wanted to get it over with already" and went all the way with Gibson at his house approximately 15 minutes after his parents left to watch his little sister Emma's dance recital. At press time, text messages to Milly asking, "How was it?" "How many times?" and "Condom?" have not been answered.1
During high school, I had an admittedly vague idea of sex. I won’t go far into my own personal history, but throughout my four years at Brattleboro Union High School, my perception of sex was the result of several memorable factors. The first were the details of conquests constantly being elaborated upon at soccer practice by my teammates. The second was my health teacher, a recovering alcoholic of fifteen years with an unnatural affection for his female students. He expounded on the horrific effects of gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia and some mysterious three-letter acronym called HIV. This was before holding up what to me looked like a glorified water balloon (I was never told how to use a condom or even where one could be obtained). However, what had the biggest influence on me in terms of my sexual education was something I saw every day when I got off the bus at 7:15 in the morning. At the back of the school, near the bus stop roundabout, was a daycare center for the children of students. It was managed and funded by the school district and was included in the yearly budget. Every day, teen mothers (I never saw the fathers) would drop off sometimes as many as three kids before going to class. They picked their children up again when classes ended at 2:20.
In hindsight, my three earliest exposures to human sexuality at a pubescent age illuminated several issues regarding sex. Some seemed appealing (a girlfriend seemed like a nice idea), others terrifying (Lice? WHERE?), and the rest were downright mysterious (anything and everything regarding female anatomy). This dilemma demanded that I either disregard them all or try and teach myself. I treated my questions much like any other jittery and awkward high school virgin: with a whole lot of casual speculation among trusted friends, and a serious pornography habit. Years later, I had never had any idea that human sexuality could be something so divisive and so difficult to discuss in a classroom.
An editorial in the Christian Science Monitor said that “One of the best signals for what is worst in American society is its child births – by children,” and, fortunately, teen pregnancy rates in the United States are slightly on the decline. And just as with any positive development in the public sphere, politicians and policy makers are jumping over each other to take credit. Fewer unintended pregnancies are better for everyone, but teens are still having sex, and that can come with many unintended consequences – pregnancy being just one of them. The United States continues to have the highest teen pregnancy rate of all industrialized nations and the prevalence of condom use among sexually active teens has reached a plateau. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who used alcohol or drugs before last sexual intercourse has increased.2 This problem of unintended pregnancies and the spread of sexually transmitted infections/diseases, including HIV and AIDS, can be addressed in multiple ways, the best of which is to confront the issue via the people most affected: the teens and young people having sex for the first time. Educators are right to do this, but this is where a serious problem takes root.
Every year, thousands of American pre-teens and teens receive a regrettably brief and insufficient education in human sexual behavior in health classes, life skills classes, and other classes in which they are told not to binge drink or smoke marijuana. As part of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, states can receive up to four dollars of federal funds for every three dollars in state funds they spend on programs that stress “abstinence until marriage.” Current federal law dictates that states wishing to obtain such funds must adhere to a list of eight standards for curriculum to follow. Abstinence-only-education (AOE) has the exclusive purpose of teaching that refraining from sexual activity until marriage is an expected social norm; bearing children out of wedlock will likely have negative impacts on the child, the parents and society; and abstinence from sexual activity is the only certain way to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and other associated health problems.
Clearly, abstinence in the broadest terms is presented because it is the form of contraception with the lowest rate of failure. It’s easiest to tell students to “just say no,” but that is harder than it sounds when the federal abstinence-only mandate fails to define “abstinence” as well as what being “sexually active” means. Often, abstinence is defined in behavioral terms such as “postponing sex,” or “refraining from [vaginal] sexual intercourse.” However, the definition fails to provide any clarification for that non-coital gray area that makes anyone over the age of 40 blush. This has created a lack of consensus within the pro-abstinence camp. In a 1999 e-mail survey of 72 health educators, nearly one-third responded that oral sex was considered abstinent behavior. A similar portion (29%) responded that mutual masturbation would not qualify as abstinence.3 To make matters more complicated, some programs are committed to educating about sexuality in as scientific a manner as possible, so as not to provoke any objection from parents. This, according to researcher Tom Klaus, creates a Catch 22: “Adolescents cannot practice abstinence until they know what abstinence is, but in order to teach them what abstinence is, they have to be taught what sex is.”
Abstinence only education is also defined in a moral and even religious context, which is highly problematic when considering the language used and the connotations it carries. Very often, programs use words such as “chaste” and “virgin” or emphasize morality in phrases like “being responsible” or “making a commitment.” Should students engage in sexual activity, they are subject to becoming viewed as a pariah (especially girls who become pregnant), especially when federal regulations demand that programs to receive funding will “[Teach] that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity.”4
This generic cultural standard that young people are expected to embrace utilizes outdated gender roles, fear-tactics, and bogus science. This is done with insufficient or no government oversight of curriculum they fund. Consider the following excerpts taken verbatim from AOE teaching guides. All of these programs received federal funding.5
In hindsight, my three earliest exposures to human sexuality at a pubescent age illuminated several issues regarding sex. Some seemed appealing (a girlfriend seemed like a nice idea), others terrifying (Lice? WHERE?), and the rest were downright mysterious (anything and everything regarding female anatomy). This dilemma demanded that I either disregard them all or try and teach myself. I treated my questions much like any other jittery and awkward high school virgin: with a whole lot of casual speculation among trusted friends, and a serious pornography habit. Years later, I had never had any idea that human sexuality could be something so divisive and so difficult to discuss in a classroom.
An editorial in the Christian Science Monitor said that “One of the best signals for what is worst in American society is its child births – by children,” and, fortunately, teen pregnancy rates in the United States are slightly on the decline. And just as with any positive development in the public sphere, politicians and policy makers are jumping over each other to take credit. Fewer unintended pregnancies are better for everyone, but teens are still having sex, and that can come with many unintended consequences – pregnancy being just one of them. The United States continues to have the highest teen pregnancy rate of all industrialized nations and the prevalence of condom use among sexually active teens has reached a plateau. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who used alcohol or drugs before last sexual intercourse has increased.2 This problem of unintended pregnancies and the spread of sexually transmitted infections/diseases, including HIV and AIDS, can be addressed in multiple ways, the best of which is to confront the issue via the people most affected: the teens and young people having sex for the first time. Educators are right to do this, but this is where a serious problem takes root.
Every year, thousands of American pre-teens and teens receive a regrettably brief and insufficient education in human sexual behavior in health classes, life skills classes, and other classes in which they are told not to binge drink or smoke marijuana. As part of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, states can receive up to four dollars of federal funds for every three dollars in state funds they spend on programs that stress “abstinence until marriage.” Current federal law dictates that states wishing to obtain such funds must adhere to a list of eight standards for curriculum to follow. Abstinence-only-education (AOE) has the exclusive purpose of teaching that refraining from sexual activity until marriage is an expected social norm; bearing children out of wedlock will likely have negative impacts on the child, the parents and society; and abstinence from sexual activity is the only certain way to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and other associated health problems.
Clearly, abstinence in the broadest terms is presented because it is the form of contraception with the lowest rate of failure. It’s easiest to tell students to “just say no,” but that is harder than it sounds when the federal abstinence-only mandate fails to define “abstinence” as well as what being “sexually active” means. Often, abstinence is defined in behavioral terms such as “postponing sex,” or “refraining from [vaginal] sexual intercourse.” However, the definition fails to provide any clarification for that non-coital gray area that makes anyone over the age of 40 blush. This has created a lack of consensus within the pro-abstinence camp. In a 1999 e-mail survey of 72 health educators, nearly one-third responded that oral sex was considered abstinent behavior. A similar portion (29%) responded that mutual masturbation would not qualify as abstinence.3 To make matters more complicated, some programs are committed to educating about sexuality in as scientific a manner as possible, so as not to provoke any objection from parents. This, according to researcher Tom Klaus, creates a Catch 22: “Adolescents cannot practice abstinence until they know what abstinence is, but in order to teach them what abstinence is, they have to be taught what sex is.”
Abstinence only education is also defined in a moral and even religious context, which is highly problematic when considering the language used and the connotations it carries. Very often, programs use words such as “chaste” and “virgin” or emphasize morality in phrases like “being responsible” or “making a commitment.” Should students engage in sexual activity, they are subject to becoming viewed as a pariah (especially girls who become pregnant), especially when federal regulations demand that programs to receive funding will “[Teach] that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity.”4
This generic cultural standard that young people are expected to embrace utilizes outdated gender roles, fear-tactics, and bogus science. This is done with insufficient or no government oversight of curriculum they fund. Consider the following excerpts taken verbatim from AOE teaching guides. All of these programs received federal funding.5
Men sexually are like microwaves and women sexually are like crockpots...men respond sexually by what they see and women respond sexually by what they hear and how they feel about it.
AIDS can be transmitted by skin-to-skin contact.
If [a girl] has been involved in sexual activity…sexually, she is no longer a virgin, she is no longer pure, unspoiled, fresh.
It is also important to note that when (or more likely, if) the curriculum covers sexual assault, it is stressed that it is up to the girls to prevent their own rape by not “teasing” boys or sending “mixed messages” by wearing revealing clothes or engaging in any behavior deemed “risky.”
Under the same federal requirement, emphasis is placed on heterosexual marriage as the only appropriate context for sexual relationships. This has a detrimental effect on the well-being and education of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender and questioning (GLBTQ) youth as it consistently frames homosexuality as deviant, unnatural and even detrimental to society. This complete lack of information represents either a failure by the federal government to acknowledge the needs of the 1 in 10 young people struggling with questions of sexual identity or simple ignorance.
AOE is the cause of much backslapping and self-congratulating by social conservatives. After all, protecting an idealized sense of morality is something that, unlike sustainable economic policy, the safety of food or environmental health, is politically easy to support. However, the federal expectation of abstinence-only education has created a generation of young people that are misinformed and confused by a lack of accurate information about all forms contraception and/or marginalized by a morality that is alienating and unrealistic for the majority of young people.
Today this model is unfortunately embedded in the education system because of the attractiveness of federal funding for cash-strapped states. In addition, supporters of AOE believe that the parameters for teaching young people to practice abstinence are consistent with other standard messages regarding other risky behaviors such as drinking or drug use. An article written by Senator Tom Corburn, M.D., R-OK for the CQ Researcher on the topic of sex education, stresses the importance of this so-called consistence:
Under the same federal requirement, emphasis is placed on heterosexual marriage as the only appropriate context for sexual relationships. This has a detrimental effect on the well-being and education of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender and questioning (GLBTQ) youth as it consistently frames homosexuality as deviant, unnatural and even detrimental to society. This complete lack of information represents either a failure by the federal government to acknowledge the needs of the 1 in 10 young people struggling with questions of sexual identity or simple ignorance.
AOE is the cause of much backslapping and self-congratulating by social conservatives. After all, protecting an idealized sense of morality is something that, unlike sustainable economic policy, the safety of food or environmental health, is politically easy to support. However, the federal expectation of abstinence-only education has created a generation of young people that are misinformed and confused by a lack of accurate information about all forms contraception and/or marginalized by a morality that is alienating and unrealistic for the majority of young people.
Today this model is unfortunately embedded in the education system because of the attractiveness of federal funding for cash-strapped states. In addition, supporters of AOE believe that the parameters for teaching young people to practice abstinence are consistent with other standard messages regarding other risky behaviors such as drinking or drug use. An article written by Senator Tom Corburn, M.D., R-OK for the CQ Researcher on the topic of sex education, stresses the importance of this so-called consistence:
Abstinence education also makes good sense. We don’t tell teens to smoke a little. We tell them not to smoke. We don’t tell teens to drive carefully if they drink and drive. We tell them to never drink and drive. We don’t tell teens to use narcotics in moderation. We tell them to “just say no” to drugs. Our message on sex should be consistent.6
By this logic, safe, consensual sex between two partners is something to be as avoided as crack cocaine or 160 proof vodka. But when placed in the context of what any teen experiences every day, it registers as inconsistent. As demonstrated through my own anecdote, there is no “consistency” between messages regarding drugs, alcohol and especially sex given to young people and the cues provided by the environments they inhabit. Popular culture emphasizes and glorifies lifestyles that are far more risky than depicted. Any thoughtful education plan in a sensitive area such as this should intelligently engage those messages and encourage students to acknowledge and openly discuss them – not simply ignore or criticize it from a distance or an obstinate moral “high horse.” As young people become adults, they will learn to evaluate these messages and decide what is best for them. Abstinence only education fails to help them make some of those important decisions in regards to sex by misinforming, shaming or ignoring them.
Social conservatives tout AOE programs for their comprehensiveness and “scientifically proven” efficacy in preventing premarital sex. In comparison to other youth health programs such as drugs and alcohol awareness, however, AOE is not remotely reliable. More than a dozen states have evaluated abstinence-only programs and have found a disappointing failure to foster significant behavioral change. Past studies with conclusions that supported AOE (1) did not have a clear definition of abstinence (2) lacked appropriate research design, (3) did not address variables such as social desirability bias in surveying, and (4) did not sufficiently use demonstrable behavior changes as conclusions.7 A 2004 review of 11 states did show abstinence programs to have a positive effect on encouraging students to refrain from sexual activity until marriage, but only for the short term. They gradually lost their efficacy. States where abstinence is stressed and methods of contraception are either ignored or insufficiently covered rank higher in teenage pregnancy as well as STD rates. Mississippi leads the nation in preference for AOE, yet has the highest rate of teen pregnancy8 as well as the highest rates of gonorrhea, chlamydia and primary and secondary syphilis (CDC).
It can be concluded that despite all best intentions, AOE represents a shocking lack of focus and adequacy in terms of what young people need and deserve from any health education. Fortunately, health classes are a commonplace in many public school systems across America. The framework for providing effective and necessary education that young people can relate to and appreciate is in place. What is needed is a focus-shift away from equivalence of abstinence with morality and towards the needs and desires of the students and the young people having sex for the first time. What is needed is a comprehensive sex education plan that still presents abstinence as the most effective contraception choice available.
While social conservatives howl about the need to protect purity and family values, the rest of the United States is in the midst of a sexual paradigm shift. It would be easy enough to indicate the hypocrisy of some individuals who preach such moral righteousness as grounds for dismissal (Bill Clinton had an unfortunate encounter with a blue dress; Herman Cain’s presidential bid has been derailed by sexual abuse allegations). But what is more important than individual mistakes is the fact that the likelihood of an individual’s first sexual partner to be that person’s spouse has been gradually diminishing since the 1970’s as the gap between first (vaginal) intercourse and first marriage widens.
Given the behavior of the majority of Americans, it is unsurprising that most Americans support a comprehensive sex education plan. A recent nationwide poll by the Guttmacher Institute found that 90% “believed it was very or somewhat important that sex education be taught in school.” This is paired with 7% that did not want sex education to be taught in schools. Not only do the majority of parents want their children to receive a complete education, they want their students to be knowledgeable and aware of all possible areas that an abstinence-only approach would neglect. 95% of parents want their students to know how to make responsible decisions regarding sex based on individual values, 91% of parents want their children to know how to use and where to obtain contraceptives and 77% of parents want their children to know about homosexuality.9
Comprehensive sex education is valued and desired in part because of its inclusive nature towards every student, including GLBTQ students. Instead of ignoring or emotionally isolating them from their peers, a comprehensive plan would foster a safe and inclusive community for students who are insecure in their sexual identity.
Parents’ approval of a comprehensive plan is supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Foundation for AIDS Research, American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, American Public Health Association, the Institute of Medicine, and the Society for Adolescent Health And Medicine.10 Clearly this plan has the support of medical professionals, parents, and most importantly, students, because it equally values every individual and provides them with answers they need, instead of forcing them to explore on their own and make uninformed decisions that could put their health and life goals at risk. Comprehensive sex education for young people is not only logical and attainable, it is what they deserve.re to edit.
Social conservatives tout AOE programs for their comprehensiveness and “scientifically proven” efficacy in preventing premarital sex. In comparison to other youth health programs such as drugs and alcohol awareness, however, AOE is not remotely reliable. More than a dozen states have evaluated abstinence-only programs and have found a disappointing failure to foster significant behavioral change. Past studies with conclusions that supported AOE (1) did not have a clear definition of abstinence (2) lacked appropriate research design, (3) did not address variables such as social desirability bias in surveying, and (4) did not sufficiently use demonstrable behavior changes as conclusions.7 A 2004 review of 11 states did show abstinence programs to have a positive effect on encouraging students to refrain from sexual activity until marriage, but only for the short term. They gradually lost their efficacy. States where abstinence is stressed and methods of contraception are either ignored or insufficiently covered rank higher in teenage pregnancy as well as STD rates. Mississippi leads the nation in preference for AOE, yet has the highest rate of teen pregnancy8 as well as the highest rates of gonorrhea, chlamydia and primary and secondary syphilis (CDC).
It can be concluded that despite all best intentions, AOE represents a shocking lack of focus and adequacy in terms of what young people need and deserve from any health education. Fortunately, health classes are a commonplace in many public school systems across America. The framework for providing effective and necessary education that young people can relate to and appreciate is in place. What is needed is a focus-shift away from equivalence of abstinence with morality and towards the needs and desires of the students and the young people having sex for the first time. What is needed is a comprehensive sex education plan that still presents abstinence as the most effective contraception choice available.
While social conservatives howl about the need to protect purity and family values, the rest of the United States is in the midst of a sexual paradigm shift. It would be easy enough to indicate the hypocrisy of some individuals who preach such moral righteousness as grounds for dismissal (Bill Clinton had an unfortunate encounter with a blue dress; Herman Cain’s presidential bid has been derailed by sexual abuse allegations). But what is more important than individual mistakes is the fact that the likelihood of an individual’s first sexual partner to be that person’s spouse has been gradually diminishing since the 1970’s as the gap between first (vaginal) intercourse and first marriage widens.
Given the behavior of the majority of Americans, it is unsurprising that most Americans support a comprehensive sex education plan. A recent nationwide poll by the Guttmacher Institute found that 90% “believed it was very or somewhat important that sex education be taught in school.” This is paired with 7% that did not want sex education to be taught in schools. Not only do the majority of parents want their children to receive a complete education, they want their students to be knowledgeable and aware of all possible areas that an abstinence-only approach would neglect. 95% of parents want their students to know how to make responsible decisions regarding sex based on individual values, 91% of parents want their children to know how to use and where to obtain contraceptives and 77% of parents want their children to know about homosexuality.9
Comprehensive sex education is valued and desired in part because of its inclusive nature towards every student, including GLBTQ students. Instead of ignoring or emotionally isolating them from their peers, a comprehensive plan would foster a safe and inclusive community for students who are insecure in their sexual identity.
Parents’ approval of a comprehensive plan is supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Foundation for AIDS Research, American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, American Public Health Association, the Institute of Medicine, and the Society for Adolescent Health And Medicine.10 Clearly this plan has the support of medical professionals, parents, and most importantly, students, because it equally values every individual and provides them with answers they need, instead of forcing them to explore on their own and make uninformed decisions that could put their health and life goals at risk. Comprehensive sex education for young people is not only logical and attainable, it is what they deserve.re to edit.
Bibliography
1 “Report: Jessica Milly Has Put Out,”The Onion, November 16, 2011, http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-jessica-milly-has-put-out,26696/.
2 Karen Perrin and Sharon Bernecki DeJoy, “Abstinence-Only Education: How We Got Here and Where We're Going,” Palgrave Macmillan Journals (2003), http://www.jstor.org/stable/3343387
3 Lisa Remez, “Oral Sex Among Adolescents: Is it Sex or Abstinence?” Guttmacher Institute (2005), http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3229800.html.
4 J. Santelli, M. Ott, M. Lyon, J. Rogers, D. Summers, and R. Schleifer, “Abstinence and Abstinence-Only Education: A Review of U.S. Policies and Programs,” Journal of Adolescent Health 38.1 (2006): 72-81.
5 “No More Money- In Their Own Words: What Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs Say,” No More Money (2008), http://www.nomoremoney.org/index.cfm?pageid=950.
6 “Teen Sex,” CQ Researcher 15.32 (2005): 777.
7 “U.S. Teen Sexual Activity,” The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Jan. 2005, http://kff.org.
8 Perrin and DeJoy, “Abstinence-Only Education”.
9 Remex, “Oral Sex Among Adolescents”.
10 “No More Money-In Their Own Words”.
1 “Report: Jessica Milly Has Put Out,”The Onion, November 16, 2011, http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-jessica-milly-has-put-out,26696/.
2 Karen Perrin and Sharon Bernecki DeJoy, “Abstinence-Only Education: How We Got Here and Where We're Going,” Palgrave Macmillan Journals (2003), http://www.jstor.org/stable/3343387
3 Lisa Remez, “Oral Sex Among Adolescents: Is it Sex or Abstinence?” Guttmacher Institute (2005), http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3229800.html.
4 J. Santelli, M. Ott, M. Lyon, J. Rogers, D. Summers, and R. Schleifer, “Abstinence and Abstinence-Only Education: A Review of U.S. Policies and Programs,” Journal of Adolescent Health 38.1 (2006): 72-81.
5 “No More Money- In Their Own Words: What Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs Say,” No More Money (2008), http://www.nomoremoney.org/index.cfm?pageid=950.
6 “Teen Sex,” CQ Researcher 15.32 (2005): 777.
7 “U.S. Teen Sexual Activity,” The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Jan. 2005, http://kff.org.
8 Perrin and DeJoy, “Abstinence-Only Education”.
9 Remex, “Oral Sex Among Adolescents”.
10 “No More Money-In Their Own Words”.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it
by andrew lindsay
Class: Truth & Artifice in Memoir Major: Writing '13
When John D’Agata
essays, he has no compunction about changing a date to make a
sentence sound better or combining characters to heighten drama. Such
creative license is seemingly taboo in America’s mainstream
literary culture, as Oprah’s public shaming of James Frey
evidences. Yet, this is an author who teaches Creative Writing at the
University of Iowa, one of the most prestigious schools of writing in
the world, where he received MFAs in both Poetry and Nonfiction.
In The Lost
Origins of the Essay, D’Agata asks, “Do we read nonfiction in
order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art?”1
He raises a point. The problem, though, is that truth and honesty are fundamental principles in American culture. Our first amendment protects freedom of speech, press and assembly, meaning truth is the first thing the founding fathers thought to protect when writing the Bill of Rights. Even one of the most mythic and recognizable figures from popular culture, Superman, fights for Truth, Justice and the American Way.
Readers expect strictly facts from nonfiction as they hold Truth close to their hearts. After all, the blanket term, nonfiction, refers to everything that is not-fiction. This includes genres like journalism, in which the writer is obliged to the reader to detail accounts as factually accurate as possible, or autobiography, which is an account of a person’s life based on documentation or other solid evidence. The perception people have of memoir is that it’s like autobiography, just told in scenes. While this does hold some validity, it is not necessarily the case. Despite being marketed and categorized as nonfiction, it doesn’t quite fit. Memoir isn’t fiction because, like autobiography, it’s based on factual personal experience. It is taken from actual, not imagined, occurrences. This is why memoir is categorized as nonfiction. Because of the strict nonfiction mindset—that everything in a memoir happened the way it’s written—readers invest themselves more so than maybe other genres. When they do this, they also invest themselves in, as Francine Prose points out, the second, implicit story that is grafted onto a memoir: a survival narrative.2 Readers invest themselves emotionally when they think they’re reading true-as-it-happened stories of endurance, hope and triumphs of the human spirit. As Prose points out, it’s the American Dream—insurmountable problems can be overcome and life will go on.3 Naturally, readers who have worked themselves up believing every word to be factual would feel betrayed by the author. This, though, is not necessarily the goal of memoir.
The reality is that memoir works with memory, not history. It is meant to be more artistic than informative, which leads to issues for readers who don't realize this. People approach the genre from the perspective that since it’s nonfiction, the whole thing is true-to-life-as-it-happened. Memory is not a perfect record though, and could contradict what other, more tangible, evidence says happened. Keeping this in mind, memoirists might even invent details or change circumstances to try and get at the heart of a personal story. These writers carefully choose their words, set their scenes, and painstakingly characterize their subjects, whereas autobiographers compile their research, and arrange it into an accurate, historical account. It’s this type of craftsmanship, this narrative purpose that goes into memoir that makes it artful and distinct from more informative and formal genres in nonfiction. Memoir doesn’t fit in either of these polarized literary fields—fiction nor nonfiction, instead it sits on the blurry line between these two markets. Memoir is the truth of the moment; not the fact of the matter.
As an art form and literary genre, Memoir is meant to shape an idea of the self and mold personal experience into a narrative. To achieve this narrative purpose, memoir uses literary devices of fiction such as invention, time compression or a persona. The memory isn’t perfect, and recalling the level of detail in order to make a remembered scene vivid is impossible unless the writer has a photographic memory. So memoirists invent these details based upon their approximation of their experience. For the sake of clarity, as well as a means of good story telling, the chronology of some events may be compressed or expanded to help make the narrative less confusing or more interesting or emphasize the right point. A memoirist is indelibly the narrator of their work, and so a memoirist crafts this voice, this persona, carefully. Using the persona, though, is like dressing for the occasion; it is not self-reinvention. Otherwise, the narrator would not be the memoirist, and it would not really be a memoir. These liberated literary devices, provide and guide the reader through an experience, taking personal insight and applying it toward a larger idea—some form of truth. This is not the same kind of truth as nonfiction genres like autobiography. Vivian Gornick writes in The Situation and the Story:
He raises a point. The problem, though, is that truth and honesty are fundamental principles in American culture. Our first amendment protects freedom of speech, press and assembly, meaning truth is the first thing the founding fathers thought to protect when writing the Bill of Rights. Even one of the most mythic and recognizable figures from popular culture, Superman, fights for Truth, Justice and the American Way.
Readers expect strictly facts from nonfiction as they hold Truth close to their hearts. After all, the blanket term, nonfiction, refers to everything that is not-fiction. This includes genres like journalism, in which the writer is obliged to the reader to detail accounts as factually accurate as possible, or autobiography, which is an account of a person’s life based on documentation or other solid evidence. The perception people have of memoir is that it’s like autobiography, just told in scenes. While this does hold some validity, it is not necessarily the case. Despite being marketed and categorized as nonfiction, it doesn’t quite fit. Memoir isn’t fiction because, like autobiography, it’s based on factual personal experience. It is taken from actual, not imagined, occurrences. This is why memoir is categorized as nonfiction. Because of the strict nonfiction mindset—that everything in a memoir happened the way it’s written—readers invest themselves more so than maybe other genres. When they do this, they also invest themselves in, as Francine Prose points out, the second, implicit story that is grafted onto a memoir: a survival narrative.2 Readers invest themselves emotionally when they think they’re reading true-as-it-happened stories of endurance, hope and triumphs of the human spirit. As Prose points out, it’s the American Dream—insurmountable problems can be overcome and life will go on.3 Naturally, readers who have worked themselves up believing every word to be factual would feel betrayed by the author. This, though, is not necessarily the goal of memoir.
The reality is that memoir works with memory, not history. It is meant to be more artistic than informative, which leads to issues for readers who don't realize this. People approach the genre from the perspective that since it’s nonfiction, the whole thing is true-to-life-as-it-happened. Memory is not a perfect record though, and could contradict what other, more tangible, evidence says happened. Keeping this in mind, memoirists might even invent details or change circumstances to try and get at the heart of a personal story. These writers carefully choose their words, set their scenes, and painstakingly characterize their subjects, whereas autobiographers compile their research, and arrange it into an accurate, historical account. It’s this type of craftsmanship, this narrative purpose that goes into memoir that makes it artful and distinct from more informative and formal genres in nonfiction. Memoir doesn’t fit in either of these polarized literary fields—fiction nor nonfiction, instead it sits on the blurry line between these two markets. Memoir is the truth of the moment; not the fact of the matter.
As an art form and literary genre, Memoir is meant to shape an idea of the self and mold personal experience into a narrative. To achieve this narrative purpose, memoir uses literary devices of fiction such as invention, time compression or a persona. The memory isn’t perfect, and recalling the level of detail in order to make a remembered scene vivid is impossible unless the writer has a photographic memory. So memoirists invent these details based upon their approximation of their experience. For the sake of clarity, as well as a means of good story telling, the chronology of some events may be compressed or expanded to help make the narrative less confusing or more interesting or emphasize the right point. A memoirist is indelibly the narrator of their work, and so a memoirist crafts this voice, this persona, carefully. Using the persona, though, is like dressing for the occasion; it is not self-reinvention. Otherwise, the narrator would not be the memoirist, and it would not really be a memoir. These liberated literary devices, provide and guide the reader through an experience, taking personal insight and applying it toward a larger idea—some form of truth. This is not the same kind of truth as nonfiction genres like autobiography. Vivian Gornick writes in The Situation and the Story:
Truth in a memoir is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. For that the power of a writing imagination is required.4
Gornick appeals to the idea that the truth memoir seeks out is not the same as the truth of other nonfiction genres, and addresses the necessity of using conventional literary devices of fiction, i.e. the power of imagination, to reach it. Joel Agee defends this claim, writing, “The liar steals truth; the artist creates it”.5 Autobiography tries to say “this is what happened,” whereas memoir seeks to explain “this is what it meant.” Memoir can do a subject or an experience justice, possibly more than just facts, through an appeal or an evocation of a reader’s sympathy through the use of a less factual, more narrative form.
However, how far is too far? How much are memoirists allowed to invent? There isn’t a clear answer because any answer provided is utterly subjective. The best a reader can do is to look at the effects of inventing details or changing circumstances. Do these adjustments or inventions help guide the reader to a more meaningful understanding of the experience at hand? Do they pull a larger truth from the raw material of life?
In Gornick’s memoir, Fierce Attachments, she completely invents a scene in which her mother addresses a homeless man. Her mother’s admonitions are “the first time in God knows how long that a mark has acknowledged his existence”.6 The intention behind the scene is to show the extent of her mother’s compassion and its color—a tough love that she is unafraid to disperse. Whether or not the scene fails is subjective. However, we see a side of her mother that we otherwise might not have; one that Gornick thought was necessary. She might even have had an anecdote that actually occurred illustrating the point, but she ultimately decided that invention was the best route to show this detail. The scene helps the reader learn the larger truth that Gornick was trying to explain. In an article titled, “A Memoirist Defends Her Words,” Gornick explains, “At the heart of the embroilment lay a single insight: that I could not leave my mother because I had become my mother. This was my bit of wisdom, the story I wanted badly to trace out.”7 Gornick, as a memoirist, was within her right to invent the scene. She committed no literary crime. Gornick is also purportedly a relatively abrasive person. This comes through in an article on salon.com, when she comes off a little condescending as she calls her readers, “willfully ignorant”.8 Bearing this in mind, she crafted the narrator of Fierce Attachments, to be composed, reflective and articulate so that readers would be more empathetic and the prose would be more articulate.
James Frey supposedly gritted his teeth and held on in rehab. A Million Little Pieces portrays him standing up to the counselors everyone’s afraid of and scaring a Mafioso. This tough guy persona was further characterized by his supposedly extensive criminal record, which as it was famously exposed, was greatly exaggerated.9 Frey’s exaggerations don’t seem to lead the reader towards some higher understanding about his experience. Does it take a badass who can assault an officer or incite a riot to get through rehab without the aid of Alcoholics Anonymous? Was this his intention? Frey might argue he artfully creates for us the persona that he actually experienced rehab as and consider it an authentic part of his self, because it originated in his mind. Perhaps he legitimately does remember being a badass in rehab like his memoir shows. However, the extent to which he hyperbolizes leads one to believe that he created the persona, that he invented the narrator, rather than stylistically crafting it. Memoirists have to be honest with themselves about themselves, before they can be honest with the readers.
Fictive nuances are vital to a successful memoir and must be approached with that in mind. The American literary culture must excuse memoirists from the fact-fetish, and approach the literature with an open mind. Readers must judge memoirs for the quality of craftsmanship put into the writing and not its historical veracity.
After all, memoir is about trying to evoke the same emotions in the reader that the writer felt at the time of experience, like poetry. It took Ezra Pound a year until he was finally able to express a startling moment of clarity and beauty as he stepped off of a Parisian metro in 1911. The final work, “In a Station of the Metro” can be considered a memoir, as the poem shares the genre’s outlined purposes of trying to articulate an experience based on authorial memories. Pound writes, “The apparition of these faces in the crowd : / Petals on a wet, black bough”.10 No one questions Pound’s accuracy, because it is poetry. So it should be with memoir. Readers should suspend their disbelief, giving the memoirist some slack and accept that some things in a memoir might not be historically accurate.
Writers can take liberties in memoir for the honest sake of art. That being said, they must remember that they are seeking the truth of the matter. If writers take too many liberties with the story, it will no longer resemble life or memory, and will gently pad its way into the realm of fiction.
However, how far is too far? How much are memoirists allowed to invent? There isn’t a clear answer because any answer provided is utterly subjective. The best a reader can do is to look at the effects of inventing details or changing circumstances. Do these adjustments or inventions help guide the reader to a more meaningful understanding of the experience at hand? Do they pull a larger truth from the raw material of life?
In Gornick’s memoir, Fierce Attachments, she completely invents a scene in which her mother addresses a homeless man. Her mother’s admonitions are “the first time in God knows how long that a mark has acknowledged his existence”.6 The intention behind the scene is to show the extent of her mother’s compassion and its color—a tough love that she is unafraid to disperse. Whether or not the scene fails is subjective. However, we see a side of her mother that we otherwise might not have; one that Gornick thought was necessary. She might even have had an anecdote that actually occurred illustrating the point, but she ultimately decided that invention was the best route to show this detail. The scene helps the reader learn the larger truth that Gornick was trying to explain. In an article titled, “A Memoirist Defends Her Words,” Gornick explains, “At the heart of the embroilment lay a single insight: that I could not leave my mother because I had become my mother. This was my bit of wisdom, the story I wanted badly to trace out.”7 Gornick, as a memoirist, was within her right to invent the scene. She committed no literary crime. Gornick is also purportedly a relatively abrasive person. This comes through in an article on salon.com, when she comes off a little condescending as she calls her readers, “willfully ignorant”.8 Bearing this in mind, she crafted the narrator of Fierce Attachments, to be composed, reflective and articulate so that readers would be more empathetic and the prose would be more articulate.
James Frey supposedly gritted his teeth and held on in rehab. A Million Little Pieces portrays him standing up to the counselors everyone’s afraid of and scaring a Mafioso. This tough guy persona was further characterized by his supposedly extensive criminal record, which as it was famously exposed, was greatly exaggerated.9 Frey’s exaggerations don’t seem to lead the reader towards some higher understanding about his experience. Does it take a badass who can assault an officer or incite a riot to get through rehab without the aid of Alcoholics Anonymous? Was this his intention? Frey might argue he artfully creates for us the persona that he actually experienced rehab as and consider it an authentic part of his self, because it originated in his mind. Perhaps he legitimately does remember being a badass in rehab like his memoir shows. However, the extent to which he hyperbolizes leads one to believe that he created the persona, that he invented the narrator, rather than stylistically crafting it. Memoirists have to be honest with themselves about themselves, before they can be honest with the readers.
Fictive nuances are vital to a successful memoir and must be approached with that in mind. The American literary culture must excuse memoirists from the fact-fetish, and approach the literature with an open mind. Readers must judge memoirs for the quality of craftsmanship put into the writing and not its historical veracity.
After all, memoir is about trying to evoke the same emotions in the reader that the writer felt at the time of experience, like poetry. It took Ezra Pound a year until he was finally able to express a startling moment of clarity and beauty as he stepped off of a Parisian metro in 1911. The final work, “In a Station of the Metro” can be considered a memoir, as the poem shares the genre’s outlined purposes of trying to articulate an experience based on authorial memories. Pound writes, “The apparition of these faces in the crowd : / Petals on a wet, black bough”.10 No one questions Pound’s accuracy, because it is poetry. So it should be with memoir. Readers should suspend their disbelief, giving the memoirist some slack and accept that some things in a memoir might not be historically accurate.
Writers can take liberties in memoir for the honest sake of art. That being said, they must remember that they are seeking the truth of the matter. If writers take too many liberties with the story, it will no longer resemble life or memory, and will gently pad its way into the realm of fiction.
Bibliography
1 John D'Agata, The Lost Origins of the Essay (Graywolf Press, 2009).
2 Francine Prose, “Books and Circuses: The Politics of Literary Scapegoating,” Harper's Magazine, September 2008, 88.
3 Prose, “Books and Circuses,” 88.
4 Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002), 91.
5 Joel Agee, “A Lie That Tells the Truth,” Harper's Magazine, January 2008, 53-58.
6 Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), 72.
7 Vivian Gornick, “A Memoirist Defends Her Words,” SALON, August 12, 2003.
8 Terry G. Sterling, “Confessions of a Memoirist,” SALON, August 1, 2003.
9 “A Million Little Lies,” The Smoking Gun, January 4, 2006.
10 Joey Franklin, “Essaying 'The Thing': An Imagiste Approach to the Lyric Essay,” The Writer's Chronicle, September 2012, 31.
1 John D'Agata, The Lost Origins of the Essay (Graywolf Press, 2009).
2 Francine Prose, “Books and Circuses: The Politics of Literary Scapegoating,” Harper's Magazine, September 2008, 88.
3 Prose, “Books and Circuses,” 88.
4 Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002), 91.
5 Joel Agee, “A Lie That Tells the Truth,” Harper's Magazine, January 2008, 53-58.
6 Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), 72.
7 Vivian Gornick, “A Memoirist Defends Her Words,” SALON, August 12, 2003.
8 Terry G. Sterling, “Confessions of a Memoirist,” SALON, August 1, 2003.
9 “A Million Little Lies,” The Smoking Gun, January 4, 2006.
10 Joey Franklin, “Essaying 'The Thing': An Imagiste Approach to the Lyric Essay,” The Writer's Chronicle, September 2012, 31.
White Antiracism: THe Contradiction and the COmmunity
by Rebekah l. Forni
Class: Women of Color Major: Philosophy/ Sociology '12
The writings of women of color have helped to develop my vision of what a white-antiracist identity might look like, through the idea that building a community is an act of agency against the racialized norms and customs of U.S. culture. Through the course of writing this paper, I have come to believe that a white-antiracist identity plays a necessary role in ending racism, and that this role can only be actualized if white-antiracists make a choice to use their agency to form a community with one another based on dismantling white supremacy. I will use this paper as an opportunity to record how my thought has progressed since the beginning of the spring 2012 semester, in the class Women of Color with professor Belisa Gonzalez, at Ithaca College. At first I viewed whiteness as a bureaucracy and the constraint that a racialized society puts on people of color as well as white people. Then I discovered the agency that women of color find through community, which has led me to question what it might look like to create a community of white-antiracists committed to ending racism through building intentional relationships with one another, and how this action can be an instrument of social change.
When I first conceived of this paper, I wanted to point out the primary aspects of U.S. society that perpetuate racism, and to begin thinking about the ways that a community of people can combat those aspects of society that perpetuate racism. For this topic, I would have needed to provide a foundation for the understanding that whiteness operates in our society as more than a racial identification category but also as a social and cultural norm which all members of US society are expects to assimilate much akin to a bureaucracy. What I mean by calling whiteness is bureaucracy is that in the U.S., the social construction of whiteness functions as a measuring stick that all people are measured up against and constricts all people to meet certain standard. Those who failed to meet that standard where ostracized to some degree. I was drawn to this topic because I was interested in examining the way that identifying factors of whiteness such as individuality, independence, and competition serve not only to oppress people of color, but also serves to constrain white people. This rational would have made it easy for me to argue that all people have a stake in ending racism because racial identities are dependent on one another and so all people are constrained by racism.
Approaching my paper this way would have resulted in very theoretical paper arguing the existence of whiteness as a social ideology which seeps into social structures and manifests in the consciousness of all people. This paper would not have been a new idea for me and would have been an exploration of social structure in ways that I have already explored. It construction of my paper would have used the writings of women of color that we have studied in class with an add-on approach at the end of the paper about how building community can be a powerful tool in social change. It would have looked a lot like many of my papers where I spend the bulk of the paper qualifying and justifying information that I have already grasped leading me to conclude an idea that while I believe to be true, I spend little time integrating into the rest of the paper. The idea that the very act of building a community is an act of agency against oppression is an idea that the women that we have been reading in class discuss directly. Much of the works that we have been reading explores different ideas about consciousness, agency, and community and how the three are linked. By narrowing down my topic to focus on the solution of my proposed topic (intentionally building community), instead of the problem (a bureaucratic like racial system) I will be able to engage more with the writings of women theorists of color rooting my paper and researching in ideas that I gained from this class instead of adding them onto research that I have accumulated of four years of undergraduate study in philosophy and sociology.
My journey for this project began when I read Maria Lugones’s piece “Speaking Face to Face” about Ethnocentric Racism. Lugones explains that ethnocentric racism works through ideology in the sense that, “you do not see me because you do not see yourself and you do not see yourself because you declare yourself outside of culture”.1 Lugones is arguing that culture is intimately connected to an individual’s identity and that her identity as a Latina living in the U.S. is different from my identity as a white women living in the U.S. because we have different cultures. Using this understanding, she pushes her argument to say that because I am a white woman and I am living in the U.S. where the dominate culture is white culture, I do not view myself as having a culture. I cannot truly see myself because my identity is linked to my culture and I view myself as not having a culture. By being unaware of my culture, I am unaware of the ways that ways that I force my culture onto others and how I constrain others through my expectation that they adapt to my culture. Of course I am not talking about my actions alone, but how the position of being unaware of one’s identity is linked to being white and impacts others through ethnocentric racism.
Yet being unaware of one’s culture does not mean that one does not belong to a culture. Lugones says that even “one’s experience of time, of movement through space, one’s sense of others and of oneself are all culturally formed and informed”.2 She then compares some common sayings between English and Spanish that capture similar situations of daily interaction. In these interactions, the English interpretation is consistently of a colder, distant, and more alienated tone, while the Spanish interpretations focus much more on the value of connecting with friends. Her point is that the ways in which people talk to each other and relate to each other and think of time and space, and the way that we exist in both of these dimensions, is intimately linked to the culture that a person comes from. My take-away from this piece was that whiteness does have a culture – and it is one which assumes individuality, and separation from one another, a community in which people are identified by a kind of separation from one another.
I have trouble claiming this white culture as my own because of all of the oppression which stems from it. It has become clear to me that white culture not only constrains people of color but white people as well.
After I read this piece I began to think about whiteness as a bureaucracy and a system which goes beyond any personal identity. Lugones’s piece reminded me of Bonilla-Silva’s article, “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation”3 in which Bonilla-Silva means to shift the paradigm that is used to think about race from an individual psychological paradigm to a structural paradigm. She argues that racism should be thought of as a racialized social system in which the economic, political, social, historical and ideological structures of a society work to place people in a racialized social hierarchy in which racism is the normalized outcome of social relations. I think that what one important point to take from Bonilla-Silva is that racism is the normal outcome of our social relations in two ways: First, it is the norm because it resides in our ideology and so white people are able to justify their privilege in ways other than race (in part because of the intersection of race, class, and gender providing multiple intersections for privilege); Second, racism is the norm because it is the unavoidable result of the intersections of our economic, political, social, historical and ideological social systems. Whiteness becomes invisible and white culture is seen as the norm because of the way our social systems intersect and connect with one another. An example of the interconnectedness of these systems in racialized societies is the prevalent theme in the responses that upper middle class white men gave when questioned about their attitudes about racism as recorded in Fegan and O’Brien’s book White Men on Race: Power, Privilege, and the Shaping of Cultural Consciousness, 4 in when the white men associated someone’s race with the likelihood that they will be a productive addition to our capitalist society. Similarly, Fegan and O’Brien identify a history of segregation to be a contributing factor to a lack of empathy across color lines, an ingredient that is essential in building community. Another theme that was found throughout the responses was the use of a color-blind ideology, where respondents did not often attribute their privilege to their race, or else referred to the few black men with whom they had amicable relationships as “just like everyone else” or “white black”,5 signaling that the respondents have distanced themselves from their white culture and use it as a norm for how all cultures should interact. White people can conform to this white culture differently according to gender, class, and religion. Because of this, people are likely to attribute privilege and identity to these other factors without seeing how they are constituted along racially segregated lines. Fighting racism inherently means fighting against the ideological norms of the very fabric of the way that we think about ourselves in relation with one another.
To further my thought on the impact of our racialized social system and the normalization of whiteness, I decided to read Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment,6 by Patricia Hill Collins. This book helped to solidify my belief in the ultimate power of the community as a tool of agency in social justice. By intentionally creating a safe space through relationships with one another, women of color are able to reclaim the freedom to define themselves as individuals in a community with one another. The act of developing loving relationships is an act of agency against a multi-dimensional oppressive structure because these relationships allow people to define themselves instead of following the roles and scripts determined for them by the capitalist social structure. What I took from this is that there exists agency in relationships with other people. Hill-Collins writes about how black women are able to find agency through self-definition within the space of the relationships that they have with one another. Self-definition and relationships with other people becomes a way to develop a new form of knowledge based on an ethics of care. These relationships create a space where women of color are able to reimagine how they relate to the world so that they are not constrained by the dominant ideologies, but are able to create their own type of community through freedom of consciousness. Hill-Collins integrates these two ideas, that of group solidarity and that of individual agency, into black feminist thought.
This means that it is a characteristic of individual consciousness to be able to redefine the self through relationships with other people. For white people, this would involve developing both an antiracist personal identity, as well as interpersonal relationships within the broader community. For white people to act against the “white bureaucracy” is to create an intentional community with one another. While Hill-Collins paints many pictures of what these kinds of relationships look like for women of color, I am left questioning what it might look like for a white-antiracist community.
I finished reading Black Feminist Thought on the bus on the way to New York City to interview for a missionary internship focused on community organizing and social inequality at a religious agency, where both my mother and my step-father have worked for the past twenty-two years. I walked into this three day long interviewing knowing that the internship would compromise many of the beliefs which I had critiqued and revised throughout my undergraduate career, but I felt that I needed to go because of familial obligation. To be honest though, a part of me still held onto the hope from my youth that a career as a missionary devoted to social change would provide me with the community committed to social justice that I had always longed for.
I sat through three days of a strict, conference like schedule where I engaged in conversations with the twenty other applicants about social justice, theology, and community building. Being in competition with one another for the internship, all under the watchful eyes of the staff, made it impossible to build the “organic community” which we were supposed to cultivate. During this interview I could not help but noticed the striking contrasts between what the staff said, most of which I felt were good things in principle, and the ways in which they actually interacted with one another. They talked about building community while at the same time complaining about how much they hated living in New York City. They talked about including others while there was a striking racial divide between those who spoke and those who did not speak before the group – those who were white or else highly educated and without an accent spoke freely and those who were of color, or who had an accent were usually occupying a job title which pulled them to the corners of the room to work with technology or logistics. Sometimes, they would just be sitting silent at tables. Then there was the uncomfortable racial and economic divide between those who had offices and those who had cubicles, as I observed when walking through the office spaces. Those who were white and highly educated, or who were missionaries from other countries, took up much of the office space while many who just had cubicles were usually women of color who spoke with accents, and who were usually secretaries. When talking to my mother about my experience I told her that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,”7 the title of an essay by Audre Lorde, an Africana Womanist thinker who has recently inspired my thought. I questioned how an agency who clearly has trouble creating a community within their own walls could possibly add to a community in the far corners of the world. She thanked me for going to the interview, though I believe that she held many similar concerns as I do. Perhaps I think this because she was smiling and nodding in that way which says, “I know where you’re coming from and I don’t like what I’m hearing and I hope you shut up before anybody important walks by.” Perhaps I think this because I want to believe it. While I was there I had an interaction with a woman who was a retired missionary. She explained to me that the symbol for United Methodist missionaries was a cross with an anchor at its base. This symbol represents the way that missionaries are supposed to ground themselves in the communities they are visiting in order to do their mission. I could not help but think that Hill-Collins would point out that they had it backwards. In order to properly do social justice work, Hill-Collins would argue that one needs to ground themselves in their self-definition through their home communities and not turn to others to define them. I would add that looking to others to define the self is characteristic of whiteness because whiteness is defined by what it is not and so grounding ourselves in the culture of another only serves to propel us further into the ethnocentric racism that Lugones warns against.
The idea that community is an act of social change made me think about the roles that community plays in my own life. I am part of many communities, though this does not mean that these communities play an empowering and liberating role in my life. Indeed, many of the communities in which I live play a more oppressive role on my person. Or rather, I constrain myself within these communities for fear of being abandoned by them. Like many of the other writers that I have read in this class, I am able to shift from one setting to another, changing which parts of myself I show in each setting. From being alone in my house, to being in relationship with my roommate in my house, to each different class, to walking through the hallways with friends, to practicing yoga downtown, to communicating with family members, to working in relationship with my co-workers at work, to working in relationship with customers as a waitress, to drinks at the bar or simply walking home with my co-workers or friends at the end of the day, I find myself shifting the parts of myself. I once defined myself as being “adventurously flexible” on the application for the missionary internship because of my willingness to shift between these parts of myself in such a way that allows me to use the parts of myself to help fit within the communities within which I am operating at a given time. In this way I am always constructed by my surroundings, attempting to put others at ease by meeting their expectations. The problem that Hill Collins might point out with my consciousness about myself within the world (and I’m sure I share this self-consciousness with other white women in the US) is that I allow myself to become defined – I lack the empowerment of self-definition.
One important idea that I have gained from Lorde’s essay, “The Use of the Erotic: Power of The Erotic,”8 which has inspired my thought for this paper, is the power of the “erotic.” The erotic is an extremely powerful feeling of pleasure that one gains through indulging in doing what feels good. It is not a rational feeling, it does not fit into a logical proof, however it is another powerful tool in self-definition and therefore in empowerment. Lorde describes the erotic as a kernel that exists within the depths of each person which we are taught to constrain and feel shame about encountering. Even behind closed doors with people who we love, women like me (white, Christian raised, young, middle class women) are taught to fear and feel shame and regret for interacting with that kernel of the erotic and are taught to act as an empty vessel through which our partners are able to exploit our erotic for their own gains. So I would argue that a first step in creating a community is to reclaim our access to the erotic power that exists within each of us or, to reclaim our knowledge of our deepest selves. According to Lorde, as she articulated in “The Master’s Tools,” we come to interact with the erotic by interacting with the difference that exists deep within ourselves. These two pieces by Lorde helped me to begin to see what it might look like to begin to develop a meaningful relationship with myself. One element of self-definition is getting to know the self and sharing that self with others. Just as we must develop relationships with others where we struggle to empathize and understand those who we love, we must also develop that relationship with ourselves. But again I am lead to my first question, what would this look like for a white woman and what would this look like for an antiracist?
How do we create a community which intentionally targets structural inequalities according to race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, age, religion, and nationality (to name only a few) that allow us to accept our whole selves and to engage meaningfully with other people. And how do we even begin such a task? I think that some light was shed on this question the first week of class when we read a piece by a group of students who took a class on the Latina feminist identity called “Imagining Differently: The Politics of Listening in a Feminist Classroom.” In this piece, the students in a class on Latina studies began their class believing that because their identities were identified as the same that they should be able to develop a bond of solidarity. They were surprised when they found that this was not the case. While they were able to form bonds of solidarity with one another, doing so took a lot of intentional work, and the community that they developed did not look like the one that they had originally envisioned. They say that in order to create an intentional community with other others, they needed to develop a “loving perception” of one another which was developed through active listening and a willingness to grow, with they define as playfulness. While I understood the concept of what they were talking about in this article, I was somewhat confused about the process. Then I stumbled upon an article in Making Face, Making Soul called “Playfulness, ‘World’ Travelling, and Loving Perception” by Maria Lugones which helped to clear the fog for me. Lugones begins by explaining that we love each other incorrectly. The type of love that we often have for one another is based on a dependency and so when we become independent of each other, we become incapable of loving each other. Love is instead developed through learning to travel across “worlds”. When Lugones talks about traveling “worlds” I believe that she is talking about frames of consciousness. Worlds are the way that we imagine ourselves within our environment. Loving somebody, she goes onto explain, is developed through a conscious effort to enter into someone else’s “world” and learn how she sees herself and other constructed through her own consciousness. We do this “playfully” making up our rules as we go along, as though we are playing a magical game full of learning through developing a relationship with one another in an effort to understand. Through this piece I began to understand that because white people are encased by and held to the standard of a white cultured society, they have difficultly forming relationships with one another because they are unable to travel to each other’s worlds. I think that this was a boundary that we faced in our own class and that this uncomfortable dynamic was magnified by competition of being students of a class together. The act of creating empathy between two people is difficult across color lines but it is also difficult within color lines as well, even with those people we have known for our entire lives. This piece made me realize that intentional relationships require an aspect of playfulness, of making up the rules as two people go along, getting to know each other. In this way, two people must expand their consciousness to imagine new possibilities as they learn to empathize with one another. Through empathy, two people are able to see each other not as society sees them but as individuals see themselves, in contexts where they are both comfortable and uncomfortable.
The final book that I read for this project was Whites Confront Racism by Eileen O’Brien.9 In this book, O’Brien explores how white people are able to form an antiracist identity through community with one another. I found that she drew, as I did, from the writings of women of color, and many of the strategies that I have explored above were incorporated into her book to help analyze two antiracist organizations: Anti-Racist Action and People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. The first step that O’Brien outlines is that white people need to create empathy for people of color through what she calls, “approximations.” Approximations are experiences that white people have where they develop empathy for people of color and realize that white privilege is the root of racial disparity. The next step is for white-antiracists to be able to connect antiracist narratives by sharing their own. As white people are able to connect their antiracist narratives, they plant the seeds that other white people may need to develop empathy across color lines as well. O’Brien stresses that planting seeds is important and must be done intentionally. Sometimes this means using anger in the midst of a situation, while other times it means staying quiet and waiting for the right opportunity to speak. One way to plant seeds that are powerful in creating empathy between white people is through sharing our experiences that brought antiracists to begin their antiracist work.
Another important part of antiracist work that O’Brien outlines is creating an autonomous white identity through developing empathy with people of color, and building relationships with white-antiracists. The first step in creating a community of antiracists is to identify antiracist role models. White people can do this by surrounding themselves with people who are passionate about white-antiracism. Through community with other antiracists, the white-antiracist then becomes a role-model herself. I think that a big part of this process is taking others along with you. It’s very easy to write people off but it’s much harder to stay at the table and maintain relationships with others – especially loved ones. O’Brien notes that an important part of building community with white-antiracists is to be able to hold yourself and others accountable. Through community with others white-antiracists learn that their words, thoughts, and actions all have consequences and so being intentional about the relationships that white-antiracists have with one another allows them to become more intentional about the ways that they relate to others who are not antiracists as well. Authentic relationships take trust, and so part of being an antiracists is working toward developing trust in all of your relationships not just in ones with people of color and not just with white-antiracists.
O’Brien also touches on how important it is for the white-antiracists to develop an intentional relationship with herself that mirrors the community relationships that she is building with her fellow antiracists. Through this relationship with the self, it is important that the white-antiracist develop humility to recognize her mistakes and then regenerate after them. Through this relationship with herself, the white-antiracist comes to understand that authentic humility is a lifelong process, and that she can offer knowledge to other people through her mistakes and her acknowledgment of her mistakes.
When I reflect on the first time I read Black Feminist Thought one year ago, I remember feeling like I was reading something that was written for someone else, like I was being a voyeur into someone else’s world. This time when I read Black Feminist Thought, I gained so much more insight into myself as well as my relationships with the people around me. I wonder what made me look at the writing through new eyes only a year later. I think that part of this change was the acceptance that it is not my place as a white woman to fix the problems of other people, but it is my place to develop empathy. Through cultivating empathy with people I am around in my everyday life, a group of people who are predominantly white, I am doing antiracist work. Through developing authentic relationships with each person in my life, I become an ally in the struggle for racial equality. I think the hardest part in this process is learning how to listen and developing the humility to forgive myself.
When I first conceived of this paper, I wanted to point out the primary aspects of U.S. society that perpetuate racism, and to begin thinking about the ways that a community of people can combat those aspects of society that perpetuate racism. For this topic, I would have needed to provide a foundation for the understanding that whiteness operates in our society as more than a racial identification category but also as a social and cultural norm which all members of US society are expects to assimilate much akin to a bureaucracy. What I mean by calling whiteness is bureaucracy is that in the U.S., the social construction of whiteness functions as a measuring stick that all people are measured up against and constricts all people to meet certain standard. Those who failed to meet that standard where ostracized to some degree. I was drawn to this topic because I was interested in examining the way that identifying factors of whiteness such as individuality, independence, and competition serve not only to oppress people of color, but also serves to constrain white people. This rational would have made it easy for me to argue that all people have a stake in ending racism because racial identities are dependent on one another and so all people are constrained by racism.
Approaching my paper this way would have resulted in very theoretical paper arguing the existence of whiteness as a social ideology which seeps into social structures and manifests in the consciousness of all people. This paper would not have been a new idea for me and would have been an exploration of social structure in ways that I have already explored. It construction of my paper would have used the writings of women of color that we have studied in class with an add-on approach at the end of the paper about how building community can be a powerful tool in social change. It would have looked a lot like many of my papers where I spend the bulk of the paper qualifying and justifying information that I have already grasped leading me to conclude an idea that while I believe to be true, I spend little time integrating into the rest of the paper. The idea that the very act of building a community is an act of agency against oppression is an idea that the women that we have been reading in class discuss directly. Much of the works that we have been reading explores different ideas about consciousness, agency, and community and how the three are linked. By narrowing down my topic to focus on the solution of my proposed topic (intentionally building community), instead of the problem (a bureaucratic like racial system) I will be able to engage more with the writings of women theorists of color rooting my paper and researching in ideas that I gained from this class instead of adding them onto research that I have accumulated of four years of undergraduate study in philosophy and sociology.
My journey for this project began when I read Maria Lugones’s piece “Speaking Face to Face” about Ethnocentric Racism. Lugones explains that ethnocentric racism works through ideology in the sense that, “you do not see me because you do not see yourself and you do not see yourself because you declare yourself outside of culture”.1 Lugones is arguing that culture is intimately connected to an individual’s identity and that her identity as a Latina living in the U.S. is different from my identity as a white women living in the U.S. because we have different cultures. Using this understanding, she pushes her argument to say that because I am a white woman and I am living in the U.S. where the dominate culture is white culture, I do not view myself as having a culture. I cannot truly see myself because my identity is linked to my culture and I view myself as not having a culture. By being unaware of my culture, I am unaware of the ways that ways that I force my culture onto others and how I constrain others through my expectation that they adapt to my culture. Of course I am not talking about my actions alone, but how the position of being unaware of one’s identity is linked to being white and impacts others through ethnocentric racism.
Yet being unaware of one’s culture does not mean that one does not belong to a culture. Lugones says that even “one’s experience of time, of movement through space, one’s sense of others and of oneself are all culturally formed and informed”.2 She then compares some common sayings between English and Spanish that capture similar situations of daily interaction. In these interactions, the English interpretation is consistently of a colder, distant, and more alienated tone, while the Spanish interpretations focus much more on the value of connecting with friends. Her point is that the ways in which people talk to each other and relate to each other and think of time and space, and the way that we exist in both of these dimensions, is intimately linked to the culture that a person comes from. My take-away from this piece was that whiteness does have a culture – and it is one which assumes individuality, and separation from one another, a community in which people are identified by a kind of separation from one another.
I have trouble claiming this white culture as my own because of all of the oppression which stems from it. It has become clear to me that white culture not only constrains people of color but white people as well.
After I read this piece I began to think about whiteness as a bureaucracy and a system which goes beyond any personal identity. Lugones’s piece reminded me of Bonilla-Silva’s article, “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation”3 in which Bonilla-Silva means to shift the paradigm that is used to think about race from an individual psychological paradigm to a structural paradigm. She argues that racism should be thought of as a racialized social system in which the economic, political, social, historical and ideological structures of a society work to place people in a racialized social hierarchy in which racism is the normalized outcome of social relations. I think that what one important point to take from Bonilla-Silva is that racism is the normal outcome of our social relations in two ways: First, it is the norm because it resides in our ideology and so white people are able to justify their privilege in ways other than race (in part because of the intersection of race, class, and gender providing multiple intersections for privilege); Second, racism is the norm because it is the unavoidable result of the intersections of our economic, political, social, historical and ideological social systems. Whiteness becomes invisible and white culture is seen as the norm because of the way our social systems intersect and connect with one another. An example of the interconnectedness of these systems in racialized societies is the prevalent theme in the responses that upper middle class white men gave when questioned about their attitudes about racism as recorded in Fegan and O’Brien’s book White Men on Race: Power, Privilege, and the Shaping of Cultural Consciousness, 4 in when the white men associated someone’s race with the likelihood that they will be a productive addition to our capitalist society. Similarly, Fegan and O’Brien identify a history of segregation to be a contributing factor to a lack of empathy across color lines, an ingredient that is essential in building community. Another theme that was found throughout the responses was the use of a color-blind ideology, where respondents did not often attribute their privilege to their race, or else referred to the few black men with whom they had amicable relationships as “just like everyone else” or “white black”,5 signaling that the respondents have distanced themselves from their white culture and use it as a norm for how all cultures should interact. White people can conform to this white culture differently according to gender, class, and religion. Because of this, people are likely to attribute privilege and identity to these other factors without seeing how they are constituted along racially segregated lines. Fighting racism inherently means fighting against the ideological norms of the very fabric of the way that we think about ourselves in relation with one another.
To further my thought on the impact of our racialized social system and the normalization of whiteness, I decided to read Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment,6 by Patricia Hill Collins. This book helped to solidify my belief in the ultimate power of the community as a tool of agency in social justice. By intentionally creating a safe space through relationships with one another, women of color are able to reclaim the freedom to define themselves as individuals in a community with one another. The act of developing loving relationships is an act of agency against a multi-dimensional oppressive structure because these relationships allow people to define themselves instead of following the roles and scripts determined for them by the capitalist social structure. What I took from this is that there exists agency in relationships with other people. Hill-Collins writes about how black women are able to find agency through self-definition within the space of the relationships that they have with one another. Self-definition and relationships with other people becomes a way to develop a new form of knowledge based on an ethics of care. These relationships create a space where women of color are able to reimagine how they relate to the world so that they are not constrained by the dominant ideologies, but are able to create their own type of community through freedom of consciousness. Hill-Collins integrates these two ideas, that of group solidarity and that of individual agency, into black feminist thought.
This means that it is a characteristic of individual consciousness to be able to redefine the self through relationships with other people. For white people, this would involve developing both an antiracist personal identity, as well as interpersonal relationships within the broader community. For white people to act against the “white bureaucracy” is to create an intentional community with one another. While Hill-Collins paints many pictures of what these kinds of relationships look like for women of color, I am left questioning what it might look like for a white-antiracist community.
I finished reading Black Feminist Thought on the bus on the way to New York City to interview for a missionary internship focused on community organizing and social inequality at a religious agency, where both my mother and my step-father have worked for the past twenty-two years. I walked into this three day long interviewing knowing that the internship would compromise many of the beliefs which I had critiqued and revised throughout my undergraduate career, but I felt that I needed to go because of familial obligation. To be honest though, a part of me still held onto the hope from my youth that a career as a missionary devoted to social change would provide me with the community committed to social justice that I had always longed for.
I sat through three days of a strict, conference like schedule where I engaged in conversations with the twenty other applicants about social justice, theology, and community building. Being in competition with one another for the internship, all under the watchful eyes of the staff, made it impossible to build the “organic community” which we were supposed to cultivate. During this interview I could not help but noticed the striking contrasts between what the staff said, most of which I felt were good things in principle, and the ways in which they actually interacted with one another. They talked about building community while at the same time complaining about how much they hated living in New York City. They talked about including others while there was a striking racial divide between those who spoke and those who did not speak before the group – those who were white or else highly educated and without an accent spoke freely and those who were of color, or who had an accent were usually occupying a job title which pulled them to the corners of the room to work with technology or logistics. Sometimes, they would just be sitting silent at tables. Then there was the uncomfortable racial and economic divide between those who had offices and those who had cubicles, as I observed when walking through the office spaces. Those who were white and highly educated, or who were missionaries from other countries, took up much of the office space while many who just had cubicles were usually women of color who spoke with accents, and who were usually secretaries. When talking to my mother about my experience I told her that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,”7 the title of an essay by Audre Lorde, an Africana Womanist thinker who has recently inspired my thought. I questioned how an agency who clearly has trouble creating a community within their own walls could possibly add to a community in the far corners of the world. She thanked me for going to the interview, though I believe that she held many similar concerns as I do. Perhaps I think this because she was smiling and nodding in that way which says, “I know where you’re coming from and I don’t like what I’m hearing and I hope you shut up before anybody important walks by.” Perhaps I think this because I want to believe it. While I was there I had an interaction with a woman who was a retired missionary. She explained to me that the symbol for United Methodist missionaries was a cross with an anchor at its base. This symbol represents the way that missionaries are supposed to ground themselves in the communities they are visiting in order to do their mission. I could not help but think that Hill-Collins would point out that they had it backwards. In order to properly do social justice work, Hill-Collins would argue that one needs to ground themselves in their self-definition through their home communities and not turn to others to define them. I would add that looking to others to define the self is characteristic of whiteness because whiteness is defined by what it is not and so grounding ourselves in the culture of another only serves to propel us further into the ethnocentric racism that Lugones warns against.
The idea that community is an act of social change made me think about the roles that community plays in my own life. I am part of many communities, though this does not mean that these communities play an empowering and liberating role in my life. Indeed, many of the communities in which I live play a more oppressive role on my person. Or rather, I constrain myself within these communities for fear of being abandoned by them. Like many of the other writers that I have read in this class, I am able to shift from one setting to another, changing which parts of myself I show in each setting. From being alone in my house, to being in relationship with my roommate in my house, to each different class, to walking through the hallways with friends, to practicing yoga downtown, to communicating with family members, to working in relationship with my co-workers at work, to working in relationship with customers as a waitress, to drinks at the bar or simply walking home with my co-workers or friends at the end of the day, I find myself shifting the parts of myself. I once defined myself as being “adventurously flexible” on the application for the missionary internship because of my willingness to shift between these parts of myself in such a way that allows me to use the parts of myself to help fit within the communities within which I am operating at a given time. In this way I am always constructed by my surroundings, attempting to put others at ease by meeting their expectations. The problem that Hill Collins might point out with my consciousness about myself within the world (and I’m sure I share this self-consciousness with other white women in the US) is that I allow myself to become defined – I lack the empowerment of self-definition.
One important idea that I have gained from Lorde’s essay, “The Use of the Erotic: Power of The Erotic,”8 which has inspired my thought for this paper, is the power of the “erotic.” The erotic is an extremely powerful feeling of pleasure that one gains through indulging in doing what feels good. It is not a rational feeling, it does not fit into a logical proof, however it is another powerful tool in self-definition and therefore in empowerment. Lorde describes the erotic as a kernel that exists within the depths of each person which we are taught to constrain and feel shame about encountering. Even behind closed doors with people who we love, women like me (white, Christian raised, young, middle class women) are taught to fear and feel shame and regret for interacting with that kernel of the erotic and are taught to act as an empty vessel through which our partners are able to exploit our erotic for their own gains. So I would argue that a first step in creating a community is to reclaim our access to the erotic power that exists within each of us or, to reclaim our knowledge of our deepest selves. According to Lorde, as she articulated in “The Master’s Tools,” we come to interact with the erotic by interacting with the difference that exists deep within ourselves. These two pieces by Lorde helped me to begin to see what it might look like to begin to develop a meaningful relationship with myself. One element of self-definition is getting to know the self and sharing that self with others. Just as we must develop relationships with others where we struggle to empathize and understand those who we love, we must also develop that relationship with ourselves. But again I am lead to my first question, what would this look like for a white woman and what would this look like for an antiracist?
How do we create a community which intentionally targets structural inequalities according to race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, age, religion, and nationality (to name only a few) that allow us to accept our whole selves and to engage meaningfully with other people. And how do we even begin such a task? I think that some light was shed on this question the first week of class when we read a piece by a group of students who took a class on the Latina feminist identity called “Imagining Differently: The Politics of Listening in a Feminist Classroom.” In this piece, the students in a class on Latina studies began their class believing that because their identities were identified as the same that they should be able to develop a bond of solidarity. They were surprised when they found that this was not the case. While they were able to form bonds of solidarity with one another, doing so took a lot of intentional work, and the community that they developed did not look like the one that they had originally envisioned. They say that in order to create an intentional community with other others, they needed to develop a “loving perception” of one another which was developed through active listening and a willingness to grow, with they define as playfulness. While I understood the concept of what they were talking about in this article, I was somewhat confused about the process. Then I stumbled upon an article in Making Face, Making Soul called “Playfulness, ‘World’ Travelling, and Loving Perception” by Maria Lugones which helped to clear the fog for me. Lugones begins by explaining that we love each other incorrectly. The type of love that we often have for one another is based on a dependency and so when we become independent of each other, we become incapable of loving each other. Love is instead developed through learning to travel across “worlds”. When Lugones talks about traveling “worlds” I believe that she is talking about frames of consciousness. Worlds are the way that we imagine ourselves within our environment. Loving somebody, she goes onto explain, is developed through a conscious effort to enter into someone else’s “world” and learn how she sees herself and other constructed through her own consciousness. We do this “playfully” making up our rules as we go along, as though we are playing a magical game full of learning through developing a relationship with one another in an effort to understand. Through this piece I began to understand that because white people are encased by and held to the standard of a white cultured society, they have difficultly forming relationships with one another because they are unable to travel to each other’s worlds. I think that this was a boundary that we faced in our own class and that this uncomfortable dynamic was magnified by competition of being students of a class together. The act of creating empathy between two people is difficult across color lines but it is also difficult within color lines as well, even with those people we have known for our entire lives. This piece made me realize that intentional relationships require an aspect of playfulness, of making up the rules as two people go along, getting to know each other. In this way, two people must expand their consciousness to imagine new possibilities as they learn to empathize with one another. Through empathy, two people are able to see each other not as society sees them but as individuals see themselves, in contexts where they are both comfortable and uncomfortable.
The final book that I read for this project was Whites Confront Racism by Eileen O’Brien.9 In this book, O’Brien explores how white people are able to form an antiracist identity through community with one another. I found that she drew, as I did, from the writings of women of color, and many of the strategies that I have explored above were incorporated into her book to help analyze two antiracist organizations: Anti-Racist Action and People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. The first step that O’Brien outlines is that white people need to create empathy for people of color through what she calls, “approximations.” Approximations are experiences that white people have where they develop empathy for people of color and realize that white privilege is the root of racial disparity. The next step is for white-antiracists to be able to connect antiracist narratives by sharing their own. As white people are able to connect their antiracist narratives, they plant the seeds that other white people may need to develop empathy across color lines as well. O’Brien stresses that planting seeds is important and must be done intentionally. Sometimes this means using anger in the midst of a situation, while other times it means staying quiet and waiting for the right opportunity to speak. One way to plant seeds that are powerful in creating empathy between white people is through sharing our experiences that brought antiracists to begin their antiracist work.
Another important part of antiracist work that O’Brien outlines is creating an autonomous white identity through developing empathy with people of color, and building relationships with white-antiracists. The first step in creating a community of antiracists is to identify antiracist role models. White people can do this by surrounding themselves with people who are passionate about white-antiracism. Through community with other antiracists, the white-antiracist then becomes a role-model herself. I think that a big part of this process is taking others along with you. It’s very easy to write people off but it’s much harder to stay at the table and maintain relationships with others – especially loved ones. O’Brien notes that an important part of building community with white-antiracists is to be able to hold yourself and others accountable. Through community with others white-antiracists learn that their words, thoughts, and actions all have consequences and so being intentional about the relationships that white-antiracists have with one another allows them to become more intentional about the ways that they relate to others who are not antiracists as well. Authentic relationships take trust, and so part of being an antiracists is working toward developing trust in all of your relationships not just in ones with people of color and not just with white-antiracists.
O’Brien also touches on how important it is for the white-antiracists to develop an intentional relationship with herself that mirrors the community relationships that she is building with her fellow antiracists. Through this relationship with the self, it is important that the white-antiracist develop humility to recognize her mistakes and then regenerate after them. Through this relationship with herself, the white-antiracist comes to understand that authentic humility is a lifelong process, and that she can offer knowledge to other people through her mistakes and her acknowledgment of her mistakes.
When I reflect on the first time I read Black Feminist Thought one year ago, I remember feeling like I was reading something that was written for someone else, like I was being a voyeur into someone else’s world. This time when I read Black Feminist Thought, I gained so much more insight into myself as well as my relationships with the people around me. I wonder what made me look at the writing through new eyes only a year later. I think that part of this change was the acceptance that it is not my place as a white woman to fix the problems of other people, but it is my place to develop empathy. Through cultivating empathy with people I am around in my everyday life, a group of people who are predominantly white, I am doing antiracist work. Through developing authentic relationships with each person in my life, I become an ally in the struggle for racial equality. I think the hardest part in this process is learning how to listen and developing the humility to forgive myself.
Bibliography
1 Lugones, Maria. “Speaking Face to Face: An Exploration of Ethnocentric Racism,” in Making Face, Making Soul, ed. Gloria Anzaldua (Berkley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 46-54.
2 Ibid, 53.
3 Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation,” American Sociological Review 62 no 3. (1997): 465-480.
4 Joe Feagin and Eileen O’Brien, White Men on Race: Power, Privilege, and the Shaping of Cultural Consciousness (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003).
5 Ibid.
6 Patricia Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990).
7 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 110-113.
8 Ibid, 53-59.
9 Eileen O’Brien, Whites Confront Racism: Antiracists and Their Paths to Action (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001).
1 Lugones, Maria. “Speaking Face to Face: An Exploration of Ethnocentric Racism,” in Making Face, Making Soul, ed. Gloria Anzaldua (Berkley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 46-54.
2 Ibid, 53.
3 Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation,” American Sociological Review 62 no 3. (1997): 465-480.
4 Joe Feagin and Eileen O’Brien, White Men on Race: Power, Privilege, and the Shaping of Cultural Consciousness (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003).
5 Ibid.
6 Patricia Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990).
7 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 110-113.
8 Ibid, 53-59.
9 Eileen O’Brien, Whites Confront Racism: Antiracists and Their Paths to Action (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001).
Seeing Gray: THe Power of Interpretation in Chris Burden's Shoot
by Amber Donofrio
Class: Performance Art, Institutional Criticism and the Museum Major: Writing '14
…at any moment, the world presents us with a composition in which a multitude of meanings and realities are available, and you are able to swim, lucid and self-contained, in that turbulent sea of multiplicity.
–Richard Foreman1
At 7:45 p.m. on November 19th 1971, performance artist Chris Burden was shot. Standing still inside an empty gallery space, surrounded by white walls, he watched as his friend pointed a loaded rile at his left arm from a distance of approximately fifteen feet. Ten people observed the scene; they stood to the side. The trigger was pulled, and a black and white photograph was taken to document the event (Figure 1).2
Chris Burden’s performance Shoot instantly became infamous, making his name known to those in the art world. Since then he has been labeled as a masochist, a social therapist, a hero, and a victim.3 Regardless of what artworks he produced afterward—anything from a 1974 performance piece entitled Trans-fixed in which he nailed himself to the top of a Volkswagen Beetle4 to a 1988 sculpture labeled Medusa’s Head which represents what he describes as “a 19th century ecological nightmare that didn’t come to pass”5—Burden has become known as “the artist who shot himself.” Yet, as Burden himself said in a 1996 interview, “I wasn’t the artist who shot himself, and I am not the artist that pushes museums down.”6 Burden’s Shoot may have involved him getting shot, but the title of “artist who shot himself” has far outlived the wound. Thus, despite orchestrating the action, Chris Burden is not in control of how he or his art is perceived. The viewers ultimately instill the meaning.
Known for performing Shoot and other acts of self-inflicted pain,7 Burden is continuously referred to as “quasi-masochistic” and “quasi-sadistic”8 despite his own explanations for his art pointing otherwise. “The masochist intends to hurt himself, that’s not my intent,” Burden stated in response to a The New York Times article about Shoot,9 but viewers continue to label him. Called “the Evel Knievel of art” by critic Douglas Davis in Newsweek, “the last rictus of Expressionism” by Robert Hughes in Time magazine, and an “avant-garde novitiate” by Peter Plagens in The New York Times, critic and historian Hal Foster even went so far in his art history textbook Art After 1960 to describe Burden’s art as “a sacrificial theater” in which the “ambivalent positions of narcissism and aggressivity, voyeurism and exhibitionism, sadism and masochism” are all evoked.10
Yet, as critic Kathy O’Dell goes on to mention in her book Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s, the use of the term “masochism” to label Chris Burden and his work all depends on one’s definition of that word. According to O’Dell, although Burden’s art may reflect some desire of his to inflict suffering on himself, “masochism must be technically linked with sexual practice,” this arousing of fantasies which Burden presents no signs of possessing.11 In fact, as writer and art critic Maggie Nelson states in response to Shoot in her book The Art of Cruelty:
Chris Burden’s performance Shoot instantly became infamous, making his name known to those in the art world. Since then he has been labeled as a masochist, a social therapist, a hero, and a victim.3 Regardless of what artworks he produced afterward—anything from a 1974 performance piece entitled Trans-fixed in which he nailed himself to the top of a Volkswagen Beetle4 to a 1988 sculpture labeled Medusa’s Head which represents what he describes as “a 19th century ecological nightmare that didn’t come to pass”5—Burden has become known as “the artist who shot himself.” Yet, as Burden himself said in a 1996 interview, “I wasn’t the artist who shot himself, and I am not the artist that pushes museums down.”6 Burden’s Shoot may have involved him getting shot, but the title of “artist who shot himself” has far outlived the wound. Thus, despite orchestrating the action, Chris Burden is not in control of how he or his art is perceived. The viewers ultimately instill the meaning.
Known for performing Shoot and other acts of self-inflicted pain,7 Burden is continuously referred to as “quasi-masochistic” and “quasi-sadistic”8 despite his own explanations for his art pointing otherwise. “The masochist intends to hurt himself, that’s not my intent,” Burden stated in response to a The New York Times article about Shoot,9 but viewers continue to label him. Called “the Evel Knievel of art” by critic Douglas Davis in Newsweek, “the last rictus of Expressionism” by Robert Hughes in Time magazine, and an “avant-garde novitiate” by Peter Plagens in The New York Times, critic and historian Hal Foster even went so far in his art history textbook Art After 1960 to describe Burden’s art as “a sacrificial theater” in which the “ambivalent positions of narcissism and aggressivity, voyeurism and exhibitionism, sadism and masochism” are all evoked.10
Yet, as critic Kathy O’Dell goes on to mention in her book Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s, the use of the term “masochism” to label Chris Burden and his work all depends on one’s definition of that word. According to O’Dell, although Burden’s art may reflect some desire of his to inflict suffering on himself, “masochism must be technically linked with sexual practice,” this arousing of fantasies which Burden presents no signs of possessing.11 In fact, as writer and art critic Maggie Nelson states in response to Shoot in her book The Art of Cruelty:
…to place this work of Burden’s too quickly under the rubric, or even in the vicinity, of ‘cruelty’ seems wrongheaded…in contrast to other artists whose work seems to embrace the clinical definition of a masochist—‘one who derives sexual gratification from pain’—Burden has always seemed aloofly adrift from carnal pleasure, and more devoted to the formal creation of abstract, minimalist, intensely charged spaces.12
It is true that Burden imposed pain on himself, but that does not mean this pain brought him pleasure. Nothing about the documentation of Shoot implies that Burden found joy in the act, or any form of gratification. As objectively stated in the documentation of Shoot, at 7:45 p.m. on November 19, 1971 Chris Burden had his friend shoot him in the arm, but that is all. He went no further than stating the facts, leaving this “abstract, minimalist, intensely charged space” for what happened that night open for the public to interpret—which they did, by placing him into the “diagnostic category called ‘masochist.’”13
Further, not only did viewers immediately label Burden and his art as both cruel and offensive, but they also interpreted Shoot as a commentary on the tragedy of the Vietnam War, despite Burden never explicitly stating that relation. This comparison was inevitable given the time period of the piece, how it was performed amidst the turmoil of the war itself, yet questions such as Plagens’ “What has this to do with the real violence of the Vietnam War?”14 carry only as much weight as they are allotted. Burden made sure to clarify how his wound was nothing like those of the soldiers in the war,15 but apart from that he never said Shoot was about Vietnam or gave any indication alluding to that idea. In fact, there is a paradox in Plagens’ inquiry as he evidently assumed “real violence” only occurs in war, yet Burden’s work itself gained controversy because of its supposed cruelty. What, then, constitutes actual violence? And if the violence in Shoot is not “real,” then why did it trigger such strong reactions?
According to Chris Burden himself, “everyone subconsciously has thought about what it’s like to be shot,”16 and perhaps that has something to do with the public’s reactions to his art piece. In a culture overflowing with depictions of violence in the media, there has to be some explanation for why television representations are acceptable whereas real-life acts of violence are viewed as travesties. Burden did not ask to be shot because he wanted to hurt himself, but because “it’s the idea of being shot to be hit…it’s something to experience.” In his own words, “How can you know what it feels like to be shot if you don’t get shot? It seems interesting enough to be worth doing it.”17 As opposed to acting solely for the purpose of commenting on the war, Burden initiated Shoot out of a curiosity for what being shot felt like, a desire to experience the event rather than simply portray it.
Yet, this boundary between real life and performance is not one people typically cross; just as writer Willoughby Sharp went on to comment while interviewing Burden for Avalanche magazine, “Most people don’t want to be shot.”18There is this disjunction between reality and fiction, what is acceptable in theory versus what is acceptable for the real world. Viewers may “subconsciously” desire to be shot through some inner fantasy as Burden proposes, but just because people watch violence on television does not necessarily mean they actually advocate violence outside of the screen. As philosopher Judith Butler even goes on to say, discussing performance in her essay “Perfomative Acts and Gender Constitution”:
Further, not only did viewers immediately label Burden and his art as both cruel and offensive, but they also interpreted Shoot as a commentary on the tragedy of the Vietnam War, despite Burden never explicitly stating that relation. This comparison was inevitable given the time period of the piece, how it was performed amidst the turmoil of the war itself, yet questions such as Plagens’ “What has this to do with the real violence of the Vietnam War?”14 carry only as much weight as they are allotted. Burden made sure to clarify how his wound was nothing like those of the soldiers in the war,15 but apart from that he never said Shoot was about Vietnam or gave any indication alluding to that idea. In fact, there is a paradox in Plagens’ inquiry as he evidently assumed “real violence” only occurs in war, yet Burden’s work itself gained controversy because of its supposed cruelty. What, then, constitutes actual violence? And if the violence in Shoot is not “real,” then why did it trigger such strong reactions?
According to Chris Burden himself, “everyone subconsciously has thought about what it’s like to be shot,”16 and perhaps that has something to do with the public’s reactions to his art piece. In a culture overflowing with depictions of violence in the media, there has to be some explanation for why television representations are acceptable whereas real-life acts of violence are viewed as travesties. Burden did not ask to be shot because he wanted to hurt himself, but because “it’s the idea of being shot to be hit…it’s something to experience.” In his own words, “How can you know what it feels like to be shot if you don’t get shot? It seems interesting enough to be worth doing it.”17 As opposed to acting solely for the purpose of commenting on the war, Burden initiated Shoot out of a curiosity for what being shot felt like, a desire to experience the event rather than simply portray it.
Yet, this boundary between real life and performance is not one people typically cross; just as writer Willoughby Sharp went on to comment while interviewing Burden for Avalanche magazine, “Most people don’t want to be shot.”18There is this disjunction between reality and fiction, what is acceptable in theory versus what is acceptable for the real world. Viewers may “subconsciously” desire to be shot through some inner fantasy as Burden proposes, but just because people watch violence on television does not necessarily mean they actually advocate violence outside of the screen. As philosopher Judith Butler even goes on to say, discussing performance in her essay “Perfomative Acts and Gender Constitution”:
In theatre, one can say, “this is just an act,” and de-realize that act, make acting into something quite distinct from what is real…[but] on the street or in the bus, the act becomes dangerous, if it does, precisely because there are no theatrical conventions to delimit the purely imaginary character of the act…there are no conventions to facilitate making this separation.19
Shoot fostered discomfort in its audience purely because it broke down the separation traditionally imposed between the public and private spheres of performance, those of the act and of life outside of the act. Chris Burden was shot as a performance piece, but was also shot in real life. This, in part, accomplished what Maggie Nelson describes as a “full-fledged assault on the barriers between art and life,”20 a dissolution of the expected boundary between representation and reality. It is one matter for Burden as an artist to get shot, but the fact that he imposed that pain on himself in actuality, as a person rather than as a character, is problematic insofar as it is difficult to comprehend. And, in sensing this confusion, the inconceivable nature of Burden’s supposed “performance,” viewers feel the need to interpret Shoot and attempt to decipher some definite meaning or purpose behind it.
To complicate matters further for the audience, Burden went at means to keep his work as neutralized as possible, avoiding “delivering a verdict” as he left the decision-making up to the viewers.21 Through the various forms of documentation kept from the performance—that three- sentence description mentioned earlier, a handful of photographs, and a blurry, black-and-white video of the event—Burden evaded stating any direct opinion about his piece: his views on violence, any intentions (apart from his desire to experience getting shot, mentioned after-the-fact), or even his reaction to wounding his arm. He withheld any comments of pain or panic, providing just the facts of the performance and nothing more. This left it up to the audience to make whatever assumptions they desired from the fragments available to them, whether their interpretations were of the cruelty of the artwork or of its significance given current political conditions.
This said, the controversy following Burden and Shoot is only as prevalent as the viewers say it is. As horror author Brian Evenson states, as quoted in The Art of Cruelty, “In life, violence happens to you. In literature, you make the choice to pick up the book and read, to continue reading.”22 Although viewers and critics alike went into an uproar about the violence of Shoot, they were ultimately the ones who allowed the piece to affect them, who willingly looked at the work and attempted to unearth some meaning from it. “Burden stares glass-eyed at the camera…clearly shocked, and probably speechless, as he sits there trapped in the moment of having just been shot,” Communication Studies Professor Patrick Anderson from University of California, San Diego states, describing a documentation photograph of Burden (Figure 2) in his essay “Trying Ordeal: Henry Tanner and Chris Burden in the Event of Subjectivity”23; yet, this itself is just one interpretation of the photo. There was no evidence, apart from the photograph itself, that Chris Burden was shocked or traumatized by the event, and claiming he was is simply making an assumption about how Burden seems to have reacted from the image of him. Photographs are often viewed as “stupefying evidence of ‘this is how it was,’” to quote theorist Roland Barthes,24 when in fact they themselves carry the weight of subjectivity, both through which pictures are taken and how the viewer wishes to interpret them through his or her own bias.
Going even further, this loaded view of Burden’s intentions behind Shoot, as well as the ambiguous meanings of the documentation from the performance, could perhaps relate to what Collective Actions, an art group in Russia which organized performances throughout the 1970s and 1980s, refers to as an “empty action.” Simply put, any action which an artist performs is “empty” when first executed. Only when the viewers reflect on that action does it become “real” or carry any meaning.25 In other words, Shoot was meaningless until discussed. Chris Burden was shot in the arm as a personal experiment to discover what being shot felt like, but that was the extent of his experiment. Only when people began to react, calling Shoot masochistic and questioning what sort of person would perform such an act, did the art piece begin to carry any social or political significance. “My work has always been political,” Burden said in a 1990 interview with art critic and historian Suzanne Muchnic, “but not in the sense that war is bad or the poor are oppressed.”26 These are connections we as viewers create, links between what we see in the performance piece and what we want it to mean. Just as Nelson surmises in The Art of Cruelty, “the implicit reasoning behind such arguments is that art has more value if its creator or its ultimate ‘message’ can be somewhat neutralized into the benevolent, or at least interpreted as critical of the cruel—or if its creator could be satisfactorily proved to be uncontaminated by any sadistic or narcissistic urges.”27 If the artist does not explicitly state the “message” behind his violent work, as is the case with Burden and Shoot, then he runs the risk of being categorized as sadistic and narcissistic, among other analyses, as explanation for his cruelty. Just as Sharp mentioned in his interview with Burden discussed previously, people do not generally ask to be shot in the arm. Therefore, it might be concluded from this artwork, as many people did conclude, that Burden as a person delights in self-inflicted pain.
Still, one more explanation for peoples’ reactions to Shoot, and to their subsequent search for its meaning, deals with a natural human inclination to pinpoint the familiar. Looking again at Figure 2, the documentation photograph Anderson described, one is struck by what O’Dell names a “contract with the skin,” this sensual reflexivity in recognizing Burden as a performing body.28 In that photograph, Burden looks out at the viewer, and yet it is not Burden as an individual people see, but Burden as an artist (the “artist who shot himself”), and, ultimately, Burden as an object of his artwork. As writer Lea Vergine argues about performance art, the artist “becomes his object…[T]he artist is the thesis with respect both to himself and his subject, this is to say that he posits himself as object since he is conscious of the process in which he is involved.”29 Chris Burden is a subject in Shoot, but in being so he also objectifies himself as thing-which-is-shot. His body is the material of his artwork just as the bullet is, and in recognizing this audience members grow further aware of their own bodies in relation to the artwork, how they too could very well be in Burden’s position.
In fact, as Burden himself mentioned in a 1996 interview with artist José Antonio Sarmiento, “all the audience cannot help but place themselves into my shoes.”30 In recognizing Burden as “a piece of skin that touches at the same time as being a piece of skin that is touched,”31 a stranger’s hand grasping and isolating Burden’s wounded arm in the photograph, viewers grow vulnerable as they think of themselves and their own experiences of what it feels like to have someone touch them. This, in part, further strengthens the familiarity of the circumstance, each viewer able to relate to the concept of being touched on the skin and therefore able to better visualize themselves as Burden, to question why or how one would go about getting shot. This attributes to the emotional reaction to Shoot many experienced, how placing themselves into his shoes they could not distance themselves enough from their bodies to grasp the concept of willingly being shot, for the sake of art or experience.
Therefore, although Chris Burden is the artist of Shoot, the viewers are the ones who ultimately give significance to both he and his artwork. Leaving his art as neutral in opinion as possible, providing only a brief description and unexplained photographs and video, Burden created a space open for interpretation, where the audience could unearth whatever meaning they wanted, whether that be a commentary on the violence of the Vietnam War or simply a masochistic artist providing himself with sexual pleasure via pain. Burden gave up control over directing the message of his work, yet in doing so he allowed Shoot to become all the more controversial, giving an opportunity for all the “multitude of meanings and realities” dramatist Richard Foreman mentions in an artwork to come forth and reveal themselves to the world. Shoot is significant because it keeps people curious and unsettled, diving deeper in their psyches to determine why they have this reaction, ultimately realizing how who they recognize in the work is themselves. Because, after all, as Maggie Nelson goes on to conclude in The Art of Cruelty, when it comes down to it, “no one can do our waking for us…The door has to stay open.”32 Whatever truths or realizations may be buried in Shoot is not for Chris Burden to say; the viewer is the one who must go searching.
To complicate matters further for the audience, Burden went at means to keep his work as neutralized as possible, avoiding “delivering a verdict” as he left the decision-making up to the viewers.21 Through the various forms of documentation kept from the performance—that three- sentence description mentioned earlier, a handful of photographs, and a blurry, black-and-white video of the event—Burden evaded stating any direct opinion about his piece: his views on violence, any intentions (apart from his desire to experience getting shot, mentioned after-the-fact), or even his reaction to wounding his arm. He withheld any comments of pain or panic, providing just the facts of the performance and nothing more. This left it up to the audience to make whatever assumptions they desired from the fragments available to them, whether their interpretations were of the cruelty of the artwork or of its significance given current political conditions.
This said, the controversy following Burden and Shoot is only as prevalent as the viewers say it is. As horror author Brian Evenson states, as quoted in The Art of Cruelty, “In life, violence happens to you. In literature, you make the choice to pick up the book and read, to continue reading.”22 Although viewers and critics alike went into an uproar about the violence of Shoot, they were ultimately the ones who allowed the piece to affect them, who willingly looked at the work and attempted to unearth some meaning from it. “Burden stares glass-eyed at the camera…clearly shocked, and probably speechless, as he sits there trapped in the moment of having just been shot,” Communication Studies Professor Patrick Anderson from University of California, San Diego states, describing a documentation photograph of Burden (Figure 2) in his essay “Trying Ordeal: Henry Tanner and Chris Burden in the Event of Subjectivity”23; yet, this itself is just one interpretation of the photo. There was no evidence, apart from the photograph itself, that Chris Burden was shocked or traumatized by the event, and claiming he was is simply making an assumption about how Burden seems to have reacted from the image of him. Photographs are often viewed as “stupefying evidence of ‘this is how it was,’” to quote theorist Roland Barthes,24 when in fact they themselves carry the weight of subjectivity, both through which pictures are taken and how the viewer wishes to interpret them through his or her own bias.
Going even further, this loaded view of Burden’s intentions behind Shoot, as well as the ambiguous meanings of the documentation from the performance, could perhaps relate to what Collective Actions, an art group in Russia which organized performances throughout the 1970s and 1980s, refers to as an “empty action.” Simply put, any action which an artist performs is “empty” when first executed. Only when the viewers reflect on that action does it become “real” or carry any meaning.25 In other words, Shoot was meaningless until discussed. Chris Burden was shot in the arm as a personal experiment to discover what being shot felt like, but that was the extent of his experiment. Only when people began to react, calling Shoot masochistic and questioning what sort of person would perform such an act, did the art piece begin to carry any social or political significance. “My work has always been political,” Burden said in a 1990 interview with art critic and historian Suzanne Muchnic, “but not in the sense that war is bad or the poor are oppressed.”26 These are connections we as viewers create, links between what we see in the performance piece and what we want it to mean. Just as Nelson surmises in The Art of Cruelty, “the implicit reasoning behind such arguments is that art has more value if its creator or its ultimate ‘message’ can be somewhat neutralized into the benevolent, or at least interpreted as critical of the cruel—or if its creator could be satisfactorily proved to be uncontaminated by any sadistic or narcissistic urges.”27 If the artist does not explicitly state the “message” behind his violent work, as is the case with Burden and Shoot, then he runs the risk of being categorized as sadistic and narcissistic, among other analyses, as explanation for his cruelty. Just as Sharp mentioned in his interview with Burden discussed previously, people do not generally ask to be shot in the arm. Therefore, it might be concluded from this artwork, as many people did conclude, that Burden as a person delights in self-inflicted pain.
Still, one more explanation for peoples’ reactions to Shoot, and to their subsequent search for its meaning, deals with a natural human inclination to pinpoint the familiar. Looking again at Figure 2, the documentation photograph Anderson described, one is struck by what O’Dell names a “contract with the skin,” this sensual reflexivity in recognizing Burden as a performing body.28 In that photograph, Burden looks out at the viewer, and yet it is not Burden as an individual people see, but Burden as an artist (the “artist who shot himself”), and, ultimately, Burden as an object of his artwork. As writer Lea Vergine argues about performance art, the artist “becomes his object…[T]he artist is the thesis with respect both to himself and his subject, this is to say that he posits himself as object since he is conscious of the process in which he is involved.”29 Chris Burden is a subject in Shoot, but in being so he also objectifies himself as thing-which-is-shot. His body is the material of his artwork just as the bullet is, and in recognizing this audience members grow further aware of their own bodies in relation to the artwork, how they too could very well be in Burden’s position.
In fact, as Burden himself mentioned in a 1996 interview with artist José Antonio Sarmiento, “all the audience cannot help but place themselves into my shoes.”30 In recognizing Burden as “a piece of skin that touches at the same time as being a piece of skin that is touched,”31 a stranger’s hand grasping and isolating Burden’s wounded arm in the photograph, viewers grow vulnerable as they think of themselves and their own experiences of what it feels like to have someone touch them. This, in part, further strengthens the familiarity of the circumstance, each viewer able to relate to the concept of being touched on the skin and therefore able to better visualize themselves as Burden, to question why or how one would go about getting shot. This attributes to the emotional reaction to Shoot many experienced, how placing themselves into his shoes they could not distance themselves enough from their bodies to grasp the concept of willingly being shot, for the sake of art or experience.
Therefore, although Chris Burden is the artist of Shoot, the viewers are the ones who ultimately give significance to both he and his artwork. Leaving his art as neutral in opinion as possible, providing only a brief description and unexplained photographs and video, Burden created a space open for interpretation, where the audience could unearth whatever meaning they wanted, whether that be a commentary on the violence of the Vietnam War or simply a masochistic artist providing himself with sexual pleasure via pain. Burden gave up control over directing the message of his work, yet in doing so he allowed Shoot to become all the more controversial, giving an opportunity for all the “multitude of meanings and realities” dramatist Richard Foreman mentions in an artwork to come forth and reveal themselves to the world. Shoot is significant because it keeps people curious and unsettled, diving deeper in their psyches to determine why they have this reaction, ultimately realizing how who they recognize in the work is themselves. Because, after all, as Maggie Nelson goes on to conclude in The Art of Cruelty, when it comes down to it, “no one can do our waking for us…The door has to stay open.”32 Whatever truths or realizations may be buried in Shoot is not for Chris Burden to say; the viewer is the one who must go searching.
Bibliography
1 Foreman quoted in Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2011), 52
2 Chris Burden’s original description of his performance: “At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket 22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.” (Frazer Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot,” October 95 (Winter 2001): 114.)
3 Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot”: 116.
4 Hal Foster, et al, Art Since 1960 2 (New York: Thames & Hudson Inc., 2004), 568.
5 Burden quoted in Suzanne Muchnic, “Wrestling the Dragon,” ARTnews 89, no. 10 (Dec. 1990): 124.
6 Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot”: 114.
7 Further examples include Into the Night Softly (1973) in which he crawled across broken glass on his bare stomach and White Light/White Heat (1975) in which he lay on a platform in the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Gallery in New York for three weeks starving himself. (Muchnic, “Wrestling the Dragon”: 128.)
8 Foster, Art After 1960, 568.
9 Burden in Kathy O’Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 3.
10 Davis and Hughes quoted in Muchnic, “Wrestling the Dragon”: 128; Plagens quoted in Ward, , “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot”: 116; Foster, Art After 1960, 568.
11 O’Dell, Contract with the Skin, 3.
12 Nelson, The Art of Cruelty, 110.
13 Patrick Anderson, “Trying Ordeal: Henry Tanner and Chris Burden in the Event of Subjectivity,” Radical History Review 98 (Spring 2007): 151.
14 Plagens quoted in Ward, Gray Zone: Watching Shoot”: 128-9.
15 Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot”: 120.
16 Burden quoted in Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot”: 119.
17 Burden quoted in Gwen Allen, “Against Criticism: the Artist Interview in Avalanche Magazine, 1970-76,” Art Journal 24, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 57.
18 Sharp quoted in Allen, “Against Criticism: the Artist Interview in Avalanche Magazine”: 57.
19 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones (New York: Routledge, 2002), 398.
20 Nelson, The Art of Cruelty, 95.
21 Muchnic, “Wrestling the Dragon”: 126-7.
22 Evenson quoted in Nelson, The Art of Cruelty, 94.
23 Anderson, “Trying Ordeal: Henry Tanner and Chris Burden in the Event of Subjectivity”: 147.
24 Barthes quoted in O’Dell, Contract with the Skin, 15.
25 Boris Groys, History Becomes Form: Moscow Conception (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010), 151.
26 Muchnic, “Wrestling the Dragon,” 129.
27 Nelson, The Art of Cruelty, 121-2.
28 O’Dell, Contract with the Skin, 16.
29 Vergine quoted in O’Dell, Contract with the Skin, 9.
30 Burden quoted in Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot”: 119.
31 Psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu quoted in O’Dell, Contract with the Skin, 15.
32 Nelson, The Art of Cruelty, 118.
1 Foreman quoted in Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2011), 52
2 Chris Burden’s original description of his performance: “At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket 22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.” (Frazer Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot,” October 95 (Winter 2001): 114.)
3 Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot”: 116.
4 Hal Foster, et al, Art Since 1960 2 (New York: Thames & Hudson Inc., 2004), 568.
5 Burden quoted in Suzanne Muchnic, “Wrestling the Dragon,” ARTnews 89, no. 10 (Dec. 1990): 124.
6 Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot”: 114.
7 Further examples include Into the Night Softly (1973) in which he crawled across broken glass on his bare stomach and White Light/White Heat (1975) in which he lay on a platform in the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Gallery in New York for three weeks starving himself. (Muchnic, “Wrestling the Dragon”: 128.)
8 Foster, Art After 1960, 568.
9 Burden in Kathy O’Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 3.
10 Davis and Hughes quoted in Muchnic, “Wrestling the Dragon”: 128; Plagens quoted in Ward, , “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot”: 116; Foster, Art After 1960, 568.
11 O’Dell, Contract with the Skin, 3.
12 Nelson, The Art of Cruelty, 110.
13 Patrick Anderson, “Trying Ordeal: Henry Tanner and Chris Burden in the Event of Subjectivity,” Radical History Review 98 (Spring 2007): 151.
14 Plagens quoted in Ward, Gray Zone: Watching Shoot”: 128-9.
15 Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot”: 120.
16 Burden quoted in Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot”: 119.
17 Burden quoted in Gwen Allen, “Against Criticism: the Artist Interview in Avalanche Magazine, 1970-76,” Art Journal 24, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 57.
18 Sharp quoted in Allen, “Against Criticism: the Artist Interview in Avalanche Magazine”: 57.
19 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones (New York: Routledge, 2002), 398.
20 Nelson, The Art of Cruelty, 95.
21 Muchnic, “Wrestling the Dragon”: 126-7.
22 Evenson quoted in Nelson, The Art of Cruelty, 94.
23 Anderson, “Trying Ordeal: Henry Tanner and Chris Burden in the Event of Subjectivity”: 147.
24 Barthes quoted in O’Dell, Contract with the Skin, 15.
25 Boris Groys, History Becomes Form: Moscow Conception (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010), 151.
26 Muchnic, “Wrestling the Dragon,” 129.
27 Nelson, The Art of Cruelty, 121-2.
28 O’Dell, Contract with the Skin, 16.
29 Vergine quoted in O’Dell, Contract with the Skin, 9.
30 Burden quoted in Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot”: 119.
31 Psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu quoted in O’Dell, Contract with the Skin, 15.
32 Nelson, The Art of Cruelty, 118.
The Twain Shall Meet: A Comparative Study of the Christian-Buddhist and Buddhist-Christian Perspectives
by c.w. Accardo
Class: Religion and Society Major: English '13
It was Rudyard Kipling who once exclaimed,
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet…
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!*
Clearly, Kipling was not aware of the wars that would be fought between the “strong men” of the East and the West, and the effects of those wars: World War II, Korea, and Vietnam would all show that the meeting of military mights does not often bring about the chivalric equanimity he had imagined. Interestingly, however, from these conflicts we have seen a sense of equality and sharing come forth, but not from the machismo “strong men” Kipling expected, but rather from the self-humbled and pacifistic meek men of the East’s and West’s various religious traditions. When we consider the most recent of these East-West wars (Vietnam), we specifically see a developing interaction and dialogue between the more Western Catholic/Christian religion and that of the Eastern Buddhist, as throughout the war dialogues and meetings had been held between the two faiths in hopes of finding solutions for peace. Beyond the war and stretching into the present (and likely the future), these dialogues have developed and changed to look beyond (although not exclude) the commonality of politics and warfare, and have begun to explore the differences and similarities between the religions themselves, and how they interact.
However, as of late we have seen more than dialogue and conversation, but an actual melding of these two faiths in certain individuals and even larger communities, and the identifications as a “Christian-Buddhist” and a “Buddhist-Christian” are becoming increasingly popular in our globalizing world. To paint a picture of how prevalent these phenomena are, when typed into the Google search engine, the former yields over 14 million results, and the latter 2 million. Although not the most academic way of proving prevalence, when we are dealing with the subtleties of religion and identity, I cannot think of many other ways of proving that the bi-religious phenomenon between Buddhism and Christianity is undoubtedly becoming not only a part of our own culture, but the world’s. Interestingly, these two searches have yielded two very different numerical results, and one must wonder if to be a “Buddhist-Christian” is the same as being a “Christian-Buddhist.”
I will begin by arguing that there is a difference, but that this difference does not inherently imply a differing belief system (although differences are prevalent and will be proven later), but rather implies an ordering in which these religions have been integrated into one’s life. For the sake of argument and semantics, in this identification system we will consider the first tradition to be one’s “home” religion (what they were raised with or practiced primarily), and the second to be one’s “adopted” religion (the religion they later integrated into their life). For example, a Christian-Buddhist is one who first practiced Christianity, and then adopted Buddism; a Buddhist-Christian would be the reverse. Recognizing these differences in perspective, we then can ask if there is a difference in the beliefs of these two bi-religious practices: do they ultimately come to the same conclusions, or do they reinterpret the adopted-religion within the lens of their home-religion? Recalling Kipling, we must wonder the implications if “never the twain shall meet” even in a seeming unity between East and West, and if “the twain shall meet,” will East become West, and West become East?
To explore this question, I have forgone the forums and the “common voice” of the internet (personal journals, blogs, Facebook groups, etc.), and instead decided to read the works of three very influential religious figures who have found varying degrees of unity with these differing faiths; this is an intentional choice, as it is these sorts of ordained practitioners who typically produce the written and spoken works which affect the larger religious populace as a whole. Thus, I have read and compared the works of the famous Trappist monk Thomas Merton, the Jesuit/Zen priest Father/Roshi Robert E. Kennedy, and the Vietnamese Zen monk Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh. Each of these men has had contact and conversation with each other, and has found enough inspiration in the other’s tradition to extensively write on the matter and include its religious practices into his own. In doing so what I discovered is that, more often than not, these religious figures do not find separate and unique truths in the other religion, but instead draw parallels, and view the other religion as a sort of equal-reflection to their own. Even though their practices may look similar, and even the vocabulary in which they explain these practices may sound similar, the intention and reasoning behind them is still very different, and it seems that each of these writers is incapable of (or does not even desire to) wholly remove the lens of their own religion in participating in the other. If religion is the language of how one reads and expresses a deeper and truer reality, what we find is that in learning and adopting another’s religion, one cannot learn the language of the other religion without first going through the already known language of home-religion, much the way an American student who learns Spanish must understand Spanish through translation into English. In no way is this essay criticizing any of these men for their views, nor is it claiming in either direction that Buddhist-Christianity/Christian-Buddhism are mutual adulterations of each other, but rather it is a simple analysis in how quasi bi-religious perspectives operate.
After reading Kennedy’s book entitled Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit (can’t you hear the echo of Living Buddha, Living Christ in the title?), what I found is that it seems like the majority of Christian-Buddhists do not adopt Buddhism out of an intrinsic desire to practice Buddhism, but instead do so to augment and improve their own religious practice. In short, a Christian-Buddhist practices Buddhism to become a better Christian. As Kennedy writes, Zen can be used within a Christian context as a means to “...remind us of essential truths in our Christian religion which, because of contemporary social preoccupations, we tend to forget”.1 These essential truths include contemplative prayer, which is used in the Christian tradition to become closer with God. To integrate Buddhism into Christian prayer, Kennedy suggests that Christians should recognize the Buddhist belief of anatman, or ‘no-self,’ as a means of emptying one’s ego, so as to leave room for God to fill that space. In Buddhism, the practitioner must come to realize that he has no-self in order to remove unnecessary clinging; the ‘self,’ which the practitioner initially views as inherent and lasting, is truly composed of transient aggregates. When these aggregates change and fail, the practitioner will suffer if they are ignorant to the ever-changing nature of things. Thus, for the Buddhist, when one fully removes the attachment to the self, one removes suffering, and thus enlightenment has been achieved--this is the goal of realizing anatman. However, Kennedy reinterprets the purpose of anatman for the Christian-Buddhist practitioner as a means of “...relax[ing] his grip on anxious questions concerning the ‘I’ and the ‘Thou’ of the relationship [between him and God]”.2 Kennedy finds that this Buddhist perspective confirms Christ’s commandment that “Whoever loves me, let him forsake himself”,3 for in forsaking one’s notion of self, the practitioner comes to “the experience that God lives in us” rather than existing distinctively in what Kennedy calls the “I-Thou experience”.4 Kennedy argues that this view of no-self is reflexive between Buddhism and Christianity, and notes that, in his comparison of Christianity and Buddhism, Zen Buddhist Yamada Roshi translated the phrase “Jesus emptied himself” as “Jesus became mu”,5 with mu being the Zen word for emptiness-of-phenomena, or nothingness. Thus, Kennedy comes to the conclusion that “Zen reminds us that Christian contemplation is not a looking at Christ, or a following of Christ, but a transformation into Christ”.6
However, when we consider Yamada’s translation of that Biblical passage, we see (quite literally) that certain religious and spiritual ideas can only be translated, and not fully conveyed. Yamada interpreted the Biblical verse within the context of his own religion, and it seems that Kennedy is doing exactly the same thing in his analysis of anatman and its application to Christian practice. Thus, although Kennedy accurately describes the Buddhist idea of no-self, and has a very firm personal understanding of it, his application of it is not towards the Buddhist goal of enlightenment; rather, he is using Buddhism as a means of practicing Christianity. Albeit, this Christianity is reinterpreted from its typical understanding, it is still very Christian and works to very Christian aims. In this context, Buddhism is being used to fulfill a promise the Buddha never made himself, and in fact refused to make: the connection and interconnection with a higher power (God).
Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk, took a similar approach to his study of Zen in Mystics and Zen Masters. As the title denotes (and as we found in Kennedy’s work), Zen most often seems to be integrated into mystical traditions of Christianity. Likely, this is due to Zen’s famous lack of dogma, which is created through its intentional breaking of common logic with spiritual and logical paradoxes; this gives Zen a certain flexibility that often allows it to be integrated and applicable to other religious traditions. Thus, Zen Buddhism is most similar to mystical Christian traditions more than any other, but Zen itself is not a mystical tradition and does not make the claim to be one. However, Merton finds that “statements about the ‘nothingness’ of beings and of ‘oneness’ in Buddhism are to be interpreted just like the figurative terms of Western mystics describing their experience of God,” and Merton argues that in both Zen Buddhism and mystical Christianity “the language is not metaphysical but poetic and phenomenological”.7 Although his statement is, to a degree, correct, it is interesting that we again see a Christian interpreting Eastern Zen ideas within a Christian context.
This notion of Christian contextualization becomes quite obvious throughout Merton’s work. He typically tends to study a particular facet of Zen Buddhism, spending much time on the no-self like his counterpart, Kennedy, as well as other ideas like prajna. On the former concept, he writes that for the Zen Buddhist, enlightenment is gained by “self-forgetfulness” and not by any attainment, which he finds “reminds us of St. John of the Cross and his teaching that the ‘Spiritual Way’ is falsely conceived if it is thought to be a denial of [the senses]”.8 He reinvokes St. John of the Cross again when he argues that the emptiness of Buddhism is “much more like that todo y nada of St. John of the Cross than the illuminated inner self of the Neo-Platonists”,9 and here we see that even in describing what emptiness is not, he must find a Western comparison. It is on the latter subject (prajna) that we see Merton make the most equalizing comparisons after analyzing the Chinese Chán patriarch Hui Neng’s work:
However, as of late we have seen more than dialogue and conversation, but an actual melding of these two faiths in certain individuals and even larger communities, and the identifications as a “Christian-Buddhist” and a “Buddhist-Christian” are becoming increasingly popular in our globalizing world. To paint a picture of how prevalent these phenomena are, when typed into the Google search engine, the former yields over 14 million results, and the latter 2 million. Although not the most academic way of proving prevalence, when we are dealing with the subtleties of religion and identity, I cannot think of many other ways of proving that the bi-religious phenomenon between Buddhism and Christianity is undoubtedly becoming not only a part of our own culture, but the world’s. Interestingly, these two searches have yielded two very different numerical results, and one must wonder if to be a “Buddhist-Christian” is the same as being a “Christian-Buddhist.”
I will begin by arguing that there is a difference, but that this difference does not inherently imply a differing belief system (although differences are prevalent and will be proven later), but rather implies an ordering in which these religions have been integrated into one’s life. For the sake of argument and semantics, in this identification system we will consider the first tradition to be one’s “home” religion (what they were raised with or practiced primarily), and the second to be one’s “adopted” religion (the religion they later integrated into their life). For example, a Christian-Buddhist is one who first practiced Christianity, and then adopted Buddism; a Buddhist-Christian would be the reverse. Recognizing these differences in perspective, we then can ask if there is a difference in the beliefs of these two bi-religious practices: do they ultimately come to the same conclusions, or do they reinterpret the adopted-religion within the lens of their home-religion? Recalling Kipling, we must wonder the implications if “never the twain shall meet” even in a seeming unity between East and West, and if “the twain shall meet,” will East become West, and West become East?
To explore this question, I have forgone the forums and the “common voice” of the internet (personal journals, blogs, Facebook groups, etc.), and instead decided to read the works of three very influential religious figures who have found varying degrees of unity with these differing faiths; this is an intentional choice, as it is these sorts of ordained practitioners who typically produce the written and spoken works which affect the larger religious populace as a whole. Thus, I have read and compared the works of the famous Trappist monk Thomas Merton, the Jesuit/Zen priest Father/Roshi Robert E. Kennedy, and the Vietnamese Zen monk Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh. Each of these men has had contact and conversation with each other, and has found enough inspiration in the other’s tradition to extensively write on the matter and include its religious practices into his own. In doing so what I discovered is that, more often than not, these religious figures do not find separate and unique truths in the other religion, but instead draw parallels, and view the other religion as a sort of equal-reflection to their own. Even though their practices may look similar, and even the vocabulary in which they explain these practices may sound similar, the intention and reasoning behind them is still very different, and it seems that each of these writers is incapable of (or does not even desire to) wholly remove the lens of their own religion in participating in the other. If religion is the language of how one reads and expresses a deeper and truer reality, what we find is that in learning and adopting another’s religion, one cannot learn the language of the other religion without first going through the already known language of home-religion, much the way an American student who learns Spanish must understand Spanish through translation into English. In no way is this essay criticizing any of these men for their views, nor is it claiming in either direction that Buddhist-Christianity/Christian-Buddhism are mutual adulterations of each other, but rather it is a simple analysis in how quasi bi-religious perspectives operate.
After reading Kennedy’s book entitled Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit (can’t you hear the echo of Living Buddha, Living Christ in the title?), what I found is that it seems like the majority of Christian-Buddhists do not adopt Buddhism out of an intrinsic desire to practice Buddhism, but instead do so to augment and improve their own religious practice. In short, a Christian-Buddhist practices Buddhism to become a better Christian. As Kennedy writes, Zen can be used within a Christian context as a means to “...remind us of essential truths in our Christian religion which, because of contemporary social preoccupations, we tend to forget”.1 These essential truths include contemplative prayer, which is used in the Christian tradition to become closer with God. To integrate Buddhism into Christian prayer, Kennedy suggests that Christians should recognize the Buddhist belief of anatman, or ‘no-self,’ as a means of emptying one’s ego, so as to leave room for God to fill that space. In Buddhism, the practitioner must come to realize that he has no-self in order to remove unnecessary clinging; the ‘self,’ which the practitioner initially views as inherent and lasting, is truly composed of transient aggregates. When these aggregates change and fail, the practitioner will suffer if they are ignorant to the ever-changing nature of things. Thus, for the Buddhist, when one fully removes the attachment to the self, one removes suffering, and thus enlightenment has been achieved--this is the goal of realizing anatman. However, Kennedy reinterprets the purpose of anatman for the Christian-Buddhist practitioner as a means of “...relax[ing] his grip on anxious questions concerning the ‘I’ and the ‘Thou’ of the relationship [between him and God]”.2 Kennedy finds that this Buddhist perspective confirms Christ’s commandment that “Whoever loves me, let him forsake himself”,3 for in forsaking one’s notion of self, the practitioner comes to “the experience that God lives in us” rather than existing distinctively in what Kennedy calls the “I-Thou experience”.4 Kennedy argues that this view of no-self is reflexive between Buddhism and Christianity, and notes that, in his comparison of Christianity and Buddhism, Zen Buddhist Yamada Roshi translated the phrase “Jesus emptied himself” as “Jesus became mu”,5 with mu being the Zen word for emptiness-of-phenomena, or nothingness. Thus, Kennedy comes to the conclusion that “Zen reminds us that Christian contemplation is not a looking at Christ, or a following of Christ, but a transformation into Christ”.6
However, when we consider Yamada’s translation of that Biblical passage, we see (quite literally) that certain religious and spiritual ideas can only be translated, and not fully conveyed. Yamada interpreted the Biblical verse within the context of his own religion, and it seems that Kennedy is doing exactly the same thing in his analysis of anatman and its application to Christian practice. Thus, although Kennedy accurately describes the Buddhist idea of no-self, and has a very firm personal understanding of it, his application of it is not towards the Buddhist goal of enlightenment; rather, he is using Buddhism as a means of practicing Christianity. Albeit, this Christianity is reinterpreted from its typical understanding, it is still very Christian and works to very Christian aims. In this context, Buddhism is being used to fulfill a promise the Buddha never made himself, and in fact refused to make: the connection and interconnection with a higher power (God).
Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk, took a similar approach to his study of Zen in Mystics and Zen Masters. As the title denotes (and as we found in Kennedy’s work), Zen most often seems to be integrated into mystical traditions of Christianity. Likely, this is due to Zen’s famous lack of dogma, which is created through its intentional breaking of common logic with spiritual and logical paradoxes; this gives Zen a certain flexibility that often allows it to be integrated and applicable to other religious traditions. Thus, Zen Buddhism is most similar to mystical Christian traditions more than any other, but Zen itself is not a mystical tradition and does not make the claim to be one. However, Merton finds that “statements about the ‘nothingness’ of beings and of ‘oneness’ in Buddhism are to be interpreted just like the figurative terms of Western mystics describing their experience of God,” and Merton argues that in both Zen Buddhism and mystical Christianity “the language is not metaphysical but poetic and phenomenological”.7 Although his statement is, to a degree, correct, it is interesting that we again see a Christian interpreting Eastern Zen ideas within a Christian context.
This notion of Christian contextualization becomes quite obvious throughout Merton’s work. He typically tends to study a particular facet of Zen Buddhism, spending much time on the no-self like his counterpart, Kennedy, as well as other ideas like prajna. On the former concept, he writes that for the Zen Buddhist, enlightenment is gained by “self-forgetfulness” and not by any attainment, which he finds “reminds us of St. John of the Cross and his teaching that the ‘Spiritual Way’ is falsely conceived if it is thought to be a denial of [the senses]”.8 He reinvokes St. John of the Cross again when he argues that the emptiness of Buddhism is “much more like that todo y nada of St. John of the Cross than the illuminated inner self of the Neo-Platonists”,9 and here we see that even in describing what emptiness is not, he must find a Western comparison. It is on the latter subject (prajna) that we see Merton make the most equalizing comparisons after analyzing the Chinese Chán patriarch Hui Neng’s work:
[The conscious'] destiny is to manifest in itself the light of that Being by which it subsists, as a Christian philosopher might say. It becomes one, as we would say, with God’s own light, and St.John’s expression, the “light which enlightens every man coming into this world”,10 seems to correspond pretty closely to the idea of prajna and of Hui Neng’s “Unconscious.”11
As Hui Neng saw, it really makes no difference whatever if external objects are present in the “mirror” of consciousness...True emptiness in the realization of the underlying prajna-wisdom of the Unconscious is attained when the light of prajna (the Greek Fathers would say of the “Logos”; Zaehner would say “spirit” or “pneuma”) breaks through our empirical consciousness and floods with its intelligibility not only our whole being but all the things that we see and know around us…[In the light of prajna] We know them [external objects] in a vastly different way, as we now know ourselves not in ourselves, not in our own mind, but in prajna, or, as a Christian would say, in God.12┼
Like Kennedy, Merton finds that these similarities have an application to the Christian’s practice, as “to a Christian perhaps the most extraordinary thing about it [the Void] is that it sees the primal ontological constitution of being or void in a Trinitarian relationship”.13 The Zen perspective of the void, albeit useful to Merton, is only useful when “we...look to the transcendent and personal center upon which this love, liberated by illumination and freedom can converge. That center is the Risen and Deathless Christ in Whom all are fulfilled in One”.14 Again, we find that Merton draws very accurate comparisons between Zen and Christianity, but does so only within Zen’s ability to fit within a Christian model, and Merton ignores D.T. Suzuki’s perspective (which he was aware of) that “Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Zen experience is that it has no personal note in it as is observable in Christian mystic experiences”.15 Thus, to Merton the Christian perspective can reconcile and even equalize differences between its own tradition and Zen, even if the other cannot.
Although Suzuki is definitely a voice of authority on the matter of Christian-Buddhist differences, he is in no way the only voice, and we find that other Buddhist practitioners are much less divisive than him. In fact, some Zen Buddhists have gone so far as to integrate Christian beliefs and practices into their own tradition, creating the counterpart Buddhist-Christian perspective. The Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, who was a close friend of Merton, is famous for his dialogue and influence between Christians and Buddhists, and although he is an ordained Zen monk, Hanh clearly has internalized Christian practice personally to some degree: on his own altar at Plum Village, Hanh has images of Christ alongside the Buddha, and he frequently alludes to the Bible and Christian beliefs, even when speaking outside the realm of Christian-Buddhist dialogue. However, in light of our analysis of Kennedy and Merton, we must wonder if Hanh is interpreting Christianity through a Buddhist lens.
When we look to Hanh’s Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers, we can essentially glean Hanh’s equalizing perspective from the title, and find that to Hanh, Buddhism and Christianity are “brothers” that are equal but different. At first it seems as though Hanh has fully integrated a theistic religion into the nontheistic Buddhism when he writes “God is happiness. God is peace. Why do we not enjoy God?...The practice of mindfulness helps us to free ourselves to enjoy what is there”.16 For Hanh, the total meditative mindfulness found in the Buddhist tradition is a form of “Horizontal theology [which] helps us establish links with what is around us,” and that “by getting in touch with them [everything around us], we will be able to get in touch with God”.17 This “Mindfulness is the Buddha,” Hanh writes, and “Mindfulness is the equivalent of the Holy Spirit, the energy of God”.18
Thus far it seems as though Hanh and Merton/Kennedy share almost identical beliefs, in that from both perspectives mindfulness and meditation become a way of reaching God, but we must still question how Hanh is defining God/Holy Spirit, and we noticeably find that he refuses to do so. Although Merton is undoubtedly more mystical and holistic than other Christians, it is clear that the Christian-Buddhist perspective still maintains some shred of anthropomorphism when dealing with God, as is evident from Merton’s belief that Buddhism lacks the “personal center” of God. This is not the case for Hanh, as the Zen Buddhist must (as the dramatic phrase goes) kill all of his or her notions of the Buddha; so too does Hanh kill his notions of God, arguing that “In discussing whether God is a person or not a person, you are trying to compare the ground of being with one expression at the phenomenal level. This is a mistake”.19 A practitioner should not “say anything about God…[as] the best theologian is the one who never speaks about God”.20 For Hanh, God takes on the elusive qualities of Buddhist enlightenment, and is not discussed or elaborated upon, but is simply mentioned.
In spite of this refusal to describe God or what God is, Hanh does go to greater lengths in describing Jesus, as “God is concrete in the form of...Jesus Christ,” and this is similar to how “in Buddhism, the...body of the dharma, is embodied in...the Buddha Shakyamuni;”21 because Buddhism anthropomorphizes a representation of enlightenment, so too can Christianity have Christ represent the Holy Spirit and God, so long as we are not discussing the actual nature of the Spirit itself. It is in this way that both Jesus and Buddha are brothers in Hanh’s eyes, but this was not always the case: Hanh admits in his other book, Living Buddha, Living Christ, that he thought of the Buddha as superior teacher to Christ, as the Buddha had spoken much longer on this earth than Christ ever did. However, Hanh removed this prejudice when he remembered how the Buddha once compared the capacity for enlightenment to the spark’s ability to light a fire, and thus age does not limit the capability of a Buddha. Upon remembering this, Hanh recognized Christ as a legitimate teacher, and finds that he did not come to the conclusion earlier because he did not understand the teachings of the Buddha thoroughly. Thus, we find that Christ must first be legitimized by Buddha before he can be accepted by the Buddhist-Christian.
After coming to this conclusion, Hanh then Buddhifies his view of Christ in Going Home:
Although Suzuki is definitely a voice of authority on the matter of Christian-Buddhist differences, he is in no way the only voice, and we find that other Buddhist practitioners are much less divisive than him. In fact, some Zen Buddhists have gone so far as to integrate Christian beliefs and practices into their own tradition, creating the counterpart Buddhist-Christian perspective. The Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, who was a close friend of Merton, is famous for his dialogue and influence between Christians and Buddhists, and although he is an ordained Zen monk, Hanh clearly has internalized Christian practice personally to some degree: on his own altar at Plum Village, Hanh has images of Christ alongside the Buddha, and he frequently alludes to the Bible and Christian beliefs, even when speaking outside the realm of Christian-Buddhist dialogue. However, in light of our analysis of Kennedy and Merton, we must wonder if Hanh is interpreting Christianity through a Buddhist lens.
When we look to Hanh’s Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers, we can essentially glean Hanh’s equalizing perspective from the title, and find that to Hanh, Buddhism and Christianity are “brothers” that are equal but different. At first it seems as though Hanh has fully integrated a theistic religion into the nontheistic Buddhism when he writes “God is happiness. God is peace. Why do we not enjoy God?...The practice of mindfulness helps us to free ourselves to enjoy what is there”.16 For Hanh, the total meditative mindfulness found in the Buddhist tradition is a form of “Horizontal theology [which] helps us establish links with what is around us,” and that “by getting in touch with them [everything around us], we will be able to get in touch with God”.17 This “Mindfulness is the Buddha,” Hanh writes, and “Mindfulness is the equivalent of the Holy Spirit, the energy of God”.18
Thus far it seems as though Hanh and Merton/Kennedy share almost identical beliefs, in that from both perspectives mindfulness and meditation become a way of reaching God, but we must still question how Hanh is defining God/Holy Spirit, and we noticeably find that he refuses to do so. Although Merton is undoubtedly more mystical and holistic than other Christians, it is clear that the Christian-Buddhist perspective still maintains some shred of anthropomorphism when dealing with God, as is evident from Merton’s belief that Buddhism lacks the “personal center” of God. This is not the case for Hanh, as the Zen Buddhist must (as the dramatic phrase goes) kill all of his or her notions of the Buddha; so too does Hanh kill his notions of God, arguing that “In discussing whether God is a person or not a person, you are trying to compare the ground of being with one expression at the phenomenal level. This is a mistake”.19 A practitioner should not “say anything about God…[as] the best theologian is the one who never speaks about God”.20 For Hanh, God takes on the elusive qualities of Buddhist enlightenment, and is not discussed or elaborated upon, but is simply mentioned.
In spite of this refusal to describe God or what God is, Hanh does go to greater lengths in describing Jesus, as “God is concrete in the form of...Jesus Christ,” and this is similar to how “in Buddhism, the...body of the dharma, is embodied in...the Buddha Shakyamuni;”21 because Buddhism anthropomorphizes a representation of enlightenment, so too can Christianity have Christ represent the Holy Spirit and God, so long as we are not discussing the actual nature of the Spirit itself. It is in this way that both Jesus and Buddha are brothers in Hanh’s eyes, but this was not always the case: Hanh admits in his other book, Living Buddha, Living Christ, that he thought of the Buddha as superior teacher to Christ, as the Buddha had spoken much longer on this earth than Christ ever did. However, Hanh removed this prejudice when he remembered how the Buddha once compared the capacity for enlightenment to the spark’s ability to light a fire, and thus age does not limit the capability of a Buddha. Upon remembering this, Hanh recognized Christ as a legitimate teacher, and finds that he did not come to the conclusion earlier because he did not understand the teachings of the Buddha thoroughly. Thus, we find that Christ must first be legitimized by Buddha before he can be accepted by the Buddhist-Christian.
After coming to this conclusion, Hanh then Buddhifies his view of Christ in Going Home:
Then Jesus went to the mountain to spend forty days in retreat. He practiced meditation and strengthened the spirit in order to bring about a total transformation. Although it’s not recorded in what position he practiced, I’m sure he did sitting and walking meditation, and that he practiced looking deeply…Maybe he sat under a bodhi tree, like the Buddha.22
We can note that, instead of using typically Christian terms like “praying” and “looking to God,” Christ seems to be doing a Zen sesshin while in the desert. Although more than likely just being playful, Hanh’s statement about Christ under the Bodhi tree reflects how he is Buddhifying Christ. This becomes even more apparent when Hanh writes that:
The image of Jesus that is presented to us is usually of Jesus on the cross. This is a very painful image for me. It does not convey joy or peace, and this does not do justice to Jesus. I hope that our Christian friends will portray Jesus in other ways, like sitting in the lotus position or doing walking meditation.23
Although Hanh is correct in saying that the image of a crucified Jesus is a painful one, his reasoning behind removing it lacks an understanding of the Christian perspective; although the image of a tortured Christ is saddening at first, to a Christian it represents the last sacrifice of blood, and it comes to be a symbol of total salvation to the one who gazes upon it. There is optimism in Christ’s bloodshed, but Hanh, coming from a very nonviolent form of Zen Buddhism, is unable to see this; he would much rather focus on Christ’s meditations than the very Abrahamic notions of sacrifice and salvation, and again explicitly Buddhifies Christ by putting him in the lotus position during meditation. There is an irony to the fact that Hanh warns Christians from viewing God as a human like figure, which he finds understandable considering their human perspective, while he himself views Christ as a Buddha-like figure, which is equally understandable considering his cultural and religious perspective.
This transformation of religious figures is not something that we have seen in Merton or Kennedy, who for the most part leave the imagery of Buddhism and the Buddha in tact while changing the ultimate purpose of meditation to fit a Christian means. In fact, there seems to be a noticeable absence of the Buddha as a religious figure, and Merton and Kennedy look more to very human and tangible teachers. Considering this, we must wonder if Hanh’s changing of the image of Christ is some reflection of his integration of Christianity into his Buddhist practice, which is different than that of Merton and Kennedy. Unlike the Christian-Buddhist perspective, it seems that the Buddhist-Christian perspective that we find in Hanh’s practice does not actually use Christianity as a means of enhancing or actualizing one’s Buddhist practice, but instead the relationship between the two becomes one of equality: the Buddha first says something, and it is re-legitimized by Christ saying it as well (however, if Christ says something alone and Buddha does not, we do not hear about it). We see this all throughout Hanh’s writing, in that everything between the religions that is similar becomes paralleled: Buddha/Christ, Enlightenment/God, Mindfulness/Holy Spirit. Thus, for Hanh and the Buddhist-Christian perspective, there is a need to make Christ appear like Buddha in both philosophy and artistic representation.
However, no matter how much similarity Hanh finds between the Buddhist and the Christian traditions, and no matter how useful Merton and Kennedy find Buddhism to be when integrated into Christian practice, there is an obvious and consistent acknowledgment of difference between the faiths. Although these writers go to great lengths to find similarities and applications of the adopted faith, they never fully find it to be equal to the home faith. As mentioned previously, Merton finds Buddhist notions of emptiness and prajna to be similar expressions for (respectively) the emptiness that Christ experienced, and God, but ultimately believes there is a noticeable and irreconcilable difference, in that Buddhism lacks the personal centeredness that one finds in the Christian tradition. Kennedy likewise finds that Buddhist ideas can be compatible with Christian practice, but acknowledges that many Christians will be unable to adopt the Christian-Buddhist lifestyle because of obvious of Zen’s “disagreement with Christianity on theological and philosophical issues,”24 which Kennedy does not attempt to reconcile. In spite of his tendency to equalize Buddhism and Christianity, Hanh also does not ever deny the differences, and finds that “the only difference between them lies in the degree, in the emphasis;”25 however, Hanh does maintain a certain holistic equality in spite of recognizing the differences, and compares Buddhism and Christianity to an orange and a mango, in that “when you look deeply into the mango and into the orange, you see that although they are different, they are both fruits”.26 He does not say what Buddhism and Christianity share beyond both obviously being religions, but he does imply that there is some deeper and intrinsic connection between them; that they are of some similar origin or function, much the way the two fruits are.
Thus, by looking to the influential works of ordained practitioners from both the Christian and Buddhist perspectives, who have integrated the practice of the other religion into their own, what we find is that the prevalent Christian-Buddhist and Buddhist-Christian perspectives are very different; however, this difference is due to their shared tendency to view the adopted religion within the lens of the home religion. For Kennedy and Merton, the Buddhist faith still retains its elements of anatman and enlightenment, but the Buddhist emptiness-of-phenomena becomes transformed into an emptiness to be filled by God, and enlightenment is not an ends, but a means of building a true and deeper relationship with God. To the Christian-Buddhist, Buddhism becomes a way of reinventing one’s tired perspective of the world, and thus uses Buddhism and meditation as a means to a Christian, god-based end. This is not the case from the Buddhist-Christian perspective as presented to us by Hanh, where the notions of God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit are Buddhified and seen to be reflections of Enlightenment, Buddha, and mindfulness. Christianity is not necessarily adopted or additive to the Buddhist-Christian’s practice, but is seen as a verifying extension of it. Ultimately, it seems that no matter how seemingly eclectic or holistic the perspective, even this holism is really just an extension of a previous held religious practice. Returning to the opening words of Rudyard Kipling, we find that the “twain” of Buddhism and Christianity can meet and have met, but that East is still East, and West is still West, and the two will never be the same, although perhaps always similar.
This transformation of religious figures is not something that we have seen in Merton or Kennedy, who for the most part leave the imagery of Buddhism and the Buddha in tact while changing the ultimate purpose of meditation to fit a Christian means. In fact, there seems to be a noticeable absence of the Buddha as a religious figure, and Merton and Kennedy look more to very human and tangible teachers. Considering this, we must wonder if Hanh’s changing of the image of Christ is some reflection of his integration of Christianity into his Buddhist practice, which is different than that of Merton and Kennedy. Unlike the Christian-Buddhist perspective, it seems that the Buddhist-Christian perspective that we find in Hanh’s practice does not actually use Christianity as a means of enhancing or actualizing one’s Buddhist practice, but instead the relationship between the two becomes one of equality: the Buddha first says something, and it is re-legitimized by Christ saying it as well (however, if Christ says something alone and Buddha does not, we do not hear about it). We see this all throughout Hanh’s writing, in that everything between the religions that is similar becomes paralleled: Buddha/Christ, Enlightenment/God, Mindfulness/Holy Spirit. Thus, for Hanh and the Buddhist-Christian perspective, there is a need to make Christ appear like Buddha in both philosophy and artistic representation.
However, no matter how much similarity Hanh finds between the Buddhist and the Christian traditions, and no matter how useful Merton and Kennedy find Buddhism to be when integrated into Christian practice, there is an obvious and consistent acknowledgment of difference between the faiths. Although these writers go to great lengths to find similarities and applications of the adopted faith, they never fully find it to be equal to the home faith. As mentioned previously, Merton finds Buddhist notions of emptiness and prajna to be similar expressions for (respectively) the emptiness that Christ experienced, and God, but ultimately believes there is a noticeable and irreconcilable difference, in that Buddhism lacks the personal centeredness that one finds in the Christian tradition. Kennedy likewise finds that Buddhist ideas can be compatible with Christian practice, but acknowledges that many Christians will be unable to adopt the Christian-Buddhist lifestyle because of obvious of Zen’s “disagreement with Christianity on theological and philosophical issues,”24 which Kennedy does not attempt to reconcile. In spite of his tendency to equalize Buddhism and Christianity, Hanh also does not ever deny the differences, and finds that “the only difference between them lies in the degree, in the emphasis;”25 however, Hanh does maintain a certain holistic equality in spite of recognizing the differences, and compares Buddhism and Christianity to an orange and a mango, in that “when you look deeply into the mango and into the orange, you see that although they are different, they are both fruits”.26 He does not say what Buddhism and Christianity share beyond both obviously being religions, but he does imply that there is some deeper and intrinsic connection between them; that they are of some similar origin or function, much the way the two fruits are.
Thus, by looking to the influential works of ordained practitioners from both the Christian and Buddhist perspectives, who have integrated the practice of the other religion into their own, what we find is that the prevalent Christian-Buddhist and Buddhist-Christian perspectives are very different; however, this difference is due to their shared tendency to view the adopted religion within the lens of the home religion. For Kennedy and Merton, the Buddhist faith still retains its elements of anatman and enlightenment, but the Buddhist emptiness-of-phenomena becomes transformed into an emptiness to be filled by God, and enlightenment is not an ends, but a means of building a true and deeper relationship with God. To the Christian-Buddhist, Buddhism becomes a way of reinventing one’s tired perspective of the world, and thus uses Buddhism and meditation as a means to a Christian, god-based end. This is not the case from the Buddhist-Christian perspective as presented to us by Hanh, where the notions of God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit are Buddhified and seen to be reflections of Enlightenment, Buddha, and mindfulness. Christianity is not necessarily adopted or additive to the Buddhist-Christian’s practice, but is seen as a verifying extension of it. Ultimately, it seems that no matter how seemingly eclectic or holistic the perspective, even this holism is really just an extension of a previous held religious practice. Returning to the opening words of Rudyard Kipling, we find that the “twain” of Buddhism and Christianity can meet and have met, but that East is still East, and West is still West, and the two will never be the same, although perhaps always similar.
Bibliography
1 Robert E. Kennedy, Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit: The Place of Zen in Christian Life (New York: Continuum, 1999), 32.
2 Kennedy, Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit, 35.
3 Matt. 16:24
4 Kennedy, Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit, 36.
5 Ibid, 37.
6 Ibid, 37.
7 Thomas Merton, Mystic and Zen Masters (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), 20.
8 Merton, Mystic and Zen Masters, 26.
9 Ibid, 33.
10 John. 1:9
11 Merton, Mystic and Zen Masters, 25.
12 Ibid, 27.
13 Ibid, 39.
14 Ibid, 42.
15 D.T. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings, Ed. William Barretr (New York: Three Leaves Press, 1956), 124.
16 Thich Nhat Hanh, Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), 2.
17 Hanh, Going Home, 2-3.
18 Ibid, 18.
19 Hanh, Going Home, 11.
20 Ibid, 8.
21 Ibid, 53.
22 Hanh, Going Home, 46.
23 Ibid, 46.
24 Kennedy, Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit, 32.
25 Hanh, Going Home,17.
26 Ibid, 17.
Notes
* Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West,” in Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (London: Heinemann and Balestier, 1892), 85-94.
┼ Italics do not appear in original text, added by author for emphasis
1 Robert E. Kennedy, Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit: The Place of Zen in Christian Life (New York: Continuum, 1999), 32.
2 Kennedy, Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit, 35.
3 Matt. 16:24
4 Kennedy, Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit, 36.
5 Ibid, 37.
6 Ibid, 37.
7 Thomas Merton, Mystic and Zen Masters (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), 20.
8 Merton, Mystic and Zen Masters, 26.
9 Ibid, 33.
10 John. 1:9
11 Merton, Mystic and Zen Masters, 25.
12 Ibid, 27.
13 Ibid, 39.
14 Ibid, 42.
15 D.T. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings, Ed. William Barretr (New York: Three Leaves Press, 1956), 124.
16 Thich Nhat Hanh, Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), 2.
17 Hanh, Going Home, 2-3.
18 Ibid, 18.
19 Hanh, Going Home, 11.
20 Ibid, 8.
21 Ibid, 53.
22 Hanh, Going Home, 46.
23 Ibid, 46.
24 Kennedy, Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit, 32.
25 Hanh, Going Home,17.
26 Ibid, 17.
Notes
* Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West,” in Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (London: Heinemann and Balestier, 1892), 85-94.
┼ Italics do not appear in original text, added by author for emphasis
The Didactic intentions of storytelling: Gender-Role Reinforcement in hansel and gretel
by Samantha Wallace
Class: Women and Fairytales Major: Writing '13
Stories, particularly those stories we are told as children, are our first exposures to the expectations and realities of the adult world. Although these tales are often riddled with fantastical elements — talkative and helpful wild animals, powerful witches, enchanted forests — they are, at their core, social contracts meant to be internalized and heeded, maps of the cultural landscape we are subject to. For child psychologist and writer Bruno Bettelheim, the fairy tales we hear when we are young are the most accessible way for us to learn how to read the proverbial roadmap, and though the true aim of these stories may not always be explicit, it is no less legitimate. In his essay The Struggle for Meaning, Bettelheim states that these didactic tales fulfill a child’s need for a “moral education which subtly, and by implication only, conveys… the advantages of moral behavior, not through abstract ethical concepts but through that which seems tangibly right and therefore meaningful.” 1In other words, what would have been made boring and inaccessible to children by formal education is made engaging and within reach by fairy tales. The messages in these tales grow out of and because of the culture in which the story is told, and while themes may vary depending on place, the overall intention does not: these stories are meant to shape a child’s belief and behavioral system. In compiling and editing their collection of French-German fairy tales, the Grimm brothers were not exceptions to this rule. The tales they told, and the way in which they told them, reflected the moral code and values system of 19th century Germany. The voice of patriarchy was speaking quite forcefully through Grimm’s fairy tales, instilling in its young listeners the ideals of the dutiful and subservient female and those of the hardworking and practical male.
The world in which the brothers Grimm lived at the start of the 19th century was ripe with social and political transformation. The German nation, which had been divided in the past, was now starting to unite under a sense of increased nationalism. Though resistance to Napoleon’s war machine had aroused some patriotism from the Germanic peoples a few years earlier, in 1813, just after the Grimm’s published their first volume of Children’s and Household Fairy Tales, this resistance morphed into a new, more aggressive wave of nationalism. This emerging German identity was based around the ideas of pragmatism and sacrifice for the country, and called for people of all classes and industries to do their part in the effort to craft this new German character. Patriarchy was also an important part of the German sensibility; it was another logical layer of institutions that kept each person in his or her proper place, women sacrificing their bodies and minds for child bearing and house keeping, men sacrificing their bodies and mind for the creation of industrial and intellectual capital.2 The Grimm brothers saw their collection of fairy tales as an important cultural contribution to the German identity. In a place where “literary revolutions [had] always been more common than real political ones”, the Grimm brothers were simply following tradition.3 These stories not only catalogued and consecrated the lives of the German volk, but also perpetuated them through the passing of these stories to younger generations. Though many of the Grimm stories were actually French in origin (as opposed to German), they became, through their inevitable modifications, so entrenched in the German lexicon that any details that would have been recognized as certainly “French” were either erased or became certainly German. If the Grimm’s intentions in assembling this collection of tales was to further the German nationalist cause, then surely it is right to deduce that the tales they chose, and the editions of these tales, were all in some way or another intrinsically German, and that their German-ness existed for children to glean and mimic.
One of the tales that came to be most clearly identified with the German character was Hansel and Gretel. In this story, a woodcutter, his wife, and his two small children, Hansel and Gretel, live together in a house at the edge of the wood. They are very poor, and during a famine the woodcutter realizes he cannot provide enough food for his family. As he lies in bed one night, he tells his wife of his worry. She quickly devises a plan to “take the children out into the darkest part of the wood…make a fire for them and give them each a piece of bread…go about work and leave them alone”. 4 After much resistance, her husband finally agrees to the plan. Hansel and Gretel had been awake and heard what their stepmother intended for them, and so Hansel devises a plan to gather white stones from the yard and leave a trail for his sister and him to get back home by. The next morning, the woodcutter, his wife, and Hansel and Gretel all go into the wood to do a day’s work. Hansel keeps looking back at the house (which his stepmother reprimands him for) so as to make an accurate path of pebbles back toward it, and, after they are left in the woods alone, Hansel and Gretel are able to find their way back to safety by following the white pebbles that shine in the moonlight. Upon their return, Hansel and Gretel’s father is overjoyed and their stepmother considerably less so. A few weeks go by, but the famine has become much worse, and again, the woodcutter fears he will not be able to feed his entire family. Again the woodcutter’s wife convinces him to lead the children out into the woods, and again the children overhear the plan of their demise, but this time the stepmother has locked the front door so that Hansel can’t gather up the white pebbles he needs in order to save his sister and himself. The next morning as the family is walking into the woods, Hansel decides to break up his piece of bread into crumbs and sprinkles those along his path. Unfortunately, when he and Gretel try to find their way home, they realize their crumbs have been eaten up by birds and become lost as a result. After walking much deeper into the woods, they come upon a house made of gingerbread. The children are relieved to have found a source of food, and begin to eat away at the house. The house is owned by a blind witch who catches them in the act of destroying her home and who throws Hansel into a shed to be fattened while Gretel remains in the kitchen as the witch’s helper – cooking Hansel’s sumptuous meals. Hansel manages to keep himself alive by presenting the witch with a chicken bone whenever she asks to feel his finger to see if he’s put on weight. One day the witch tells Gretel she’s going to cook up her brother, and so Gretel tricks the witch into climbing into the oven and shuts the door behind her. Hansel is freed, and the children fill their pockets with the witch’s jewels before finding their way home. Their father, newly widowed, welcomes them home and they live richly for the rest of their days.
Within this tale, the cultural values and gender roles of the Grimm’s Germany make themselves known. The woodcutter, the ultimate patriarch, provides practical wood to his country so that it may prosper economically, and he provides food and shelter for his family so that they may go on surviving. When the woodcutter is unable to bring home sustenance for his family, he seems to lose his sense of morality and his power to make the decisions for the family. Utterly distraught at the idea of not being able to provide, he is vulnerable to acceptance of his wife’s evil desires, and eventually agrees to her plan of leaving the children to die. Here, the Grimm’s are telling their young readers that when a man can no longer support his family, he is no longer a whole man; he is no longer able to act as the power-holding patriarch. Further, he allows his wife to usurp some of this power from him, and in doing so allows her to make poor and possibly even sinful decisions. Hansel follows in his father’s footsteps as shining example of the ideal 19th century German male. He makes all the decisions for he and his sister. While she is “wailing” and “crying bitterly” throughout the story, her brother is forming plans to potentially save them.5 Hansel makes no attempt to calm his sister, but instead dismisses her altogether, telling her to “be quiet and stop worrying [while he figures] out something”.6
The only moment in which Gretel is actually allowed any authority or decision-making power is when she decides to push the witch into the oven. Though this may seem the most important decision that is made in the story, note its circumstances. Gretel is not defying her father as Hansel did by planting a trail home; it is only an old and evil witch that she plans to kill, a character which is so universally reviled that Gretel needs no permission from the men in her life to plan the witch’s demise. And Gretel pushes the witch into the oven. It seems that Gretel’s only power is in the kitchen, where the tasks of homemaking were typically left to the women.
Finally, the witch herself offers an interesting explanation as to what happens when a woman is left without a guiding male figure to govern over her. The woman will use the small powers she has (cooking, keeping a house, and raising children) in dangerous ways, allowing her unnatural and evil desires to come to the forefront as her main motivations. Here, the witch creates a house of gingerbread, executing a supernatural level of domestic talents, only to subsequently capture and consume children – the very opposite of what the nurturing and life-giving mother’s role in society is. And it is not too far of a stretch to read the stepmother as a kind of precursor to the witch. Though she essentially wants the same thing as the witch – to kill the children in order to have sustenance for herself – she is neither so gruesome nor as purely evil as the witch. After all, she is looking out for her husband (the only real contributor to society) as well as her own stomach. She still needs her husband’s permission to carry out her plan, while the witch can act of her volition, and the stepmother’s husband seems to keep her plan much more humane than what the lone witch has in mind for the children.
Each of the characters in the Grimm brothers’ Hansel and Gretel plays a different role in the “education establishment which indoctrinates children to learn fixed roles and functions within [the] bourgeois society” of 19th century Germany.7 This tale, as well as many others in their collection, teaches by example the proper gender roles and values of the time and place of the Grimms, and reinforces those ideals which were so important to unifying the Germanic peoples under one identity. These tales were part of the “socialization process which placed great emphasis on passivity, industry, and self-sacrifice for girls and activity, competition, and accumulation of wealth for boys”, and in their distribution among the youth of the German nation, the Grimms contributed to the effort to strengthen and perpetuate the new German character.8
The world in which the brothers Grimm lived at the start of the 19th century was ripe with social and political transformation. The German nation, which had been divided in the past, was now starting to unite under a sense of increased nationalism. Though resistance to Napoleon’s war machine had aroused some patriotism from the Germanic peoples a few years earlier, in 1813, just after the Grimm’s published their first volume of Children’s and Household Fairy Tales, this resistance morphed into a new, more aggressive wave of nationalism. This emerging German identity was based around the ideas of pragmatism and sacrifice for the country, and called for people of all classes and industries to do their part in the effort to craft this new German character. Patriarchy was also an important part of the German sensibility; it was another logical layer of institutions that kept each person in his or her proper place, women sacrificing their bodies and minds for child bearing and house keeping, men sacrificing their bodies and mind for the creation of industrial and intellectual capital.2 The Grimm brothers saw their collection of fairy tales as an important cultural contribution to the German identity. In a place where “literary revolutions [had] always been more common than real political ones”, the Grimm brothers were simply following tradition.3 These stories not only catalogued and consecrated the lives of the German volk, but also perpetuated them through the passing of these stories to younger generations. Though many of the Grimm stories were actually French in origin (as opposed to German), they became, through their inevitable modifications, so entrenched in the German lexicon that any details that would have been recognized as certainly “French” were either erased or became certainly German. If the Grimm’s intentions in assembling this collection of tales was to further the German nationalist cause, then surely it is right to deduce that the tales they chose, and the editions of these tales, were all in some way or another intrinsically German, and that their German-ness existed for children to glean and mimic.
One of the tales that came to be most clearly identified with the German character was Hansel and Gretel. In this story, a woodcutter, his wife, and his two small children, Hansel and Gretel, live together in a house at the edge of the wood. They are very poor, and during a famine the woodcutter realizes he cannot provide enough food for his family. As he lies in bed one night, he tells his wife of his worry. She quickly devises a plan to “take the children out into the darkest part of the wood…make a fire for them and give them each a piece of bread…go about work and leave them alone”. 4 After much resistance, her husband finally agrees to the plan. Hansel and Gretel had been awake and heard what their stepmother intended for them, and so Hansel devises a plan to gather white stones from the yard and leave a trail for his sister and him to get back home by. The next morning, the woodcutter, his wife, and Hansel and Gretel all go into the wood to do a day’s work. Hansel keeps looking back at the house (which his stepmother reprimands him for) so as to make an accurate path of pebbles back toward it, and, after they are left in the woods alone, Hansel and Gretel are able to find their way back to safety by following the white pebbles that shine in the moonlight. Upon their return, Hansel and Gretel’s father is overjoyed and their stepmother considerably less so. A few weeks go by, but the famine has become much worse, and again, the woodcutter fears he will not be able to feed his entire family. Again the woodcutter’s wife convinces him to lead the children out into the woods, and again the children overhear the plan of their demise, but this time the stepmother has locked the front door so that Hansel can’t gather up the white pebbles he needs in order to save his sister and himself. The next morning as the family is walking into the woods, Hansel decides to break up his piece of bread into crumbs and sprinkles those along his path. Unfortunately, when he and Gretel try to find their way home, they realize their crumbs have been eaten up by birds and become lost as a result. After walking much deeper into the woods, they come upon a house made of gingerbread. The children are relieved to have found a source of food, and begin to eat away at the house. The house is owned by a blind witch who catches them in the act of destroying her home and who throws Hansel into a shed to be fattened while Gretel remains in the kitchen as the witch’s helper – cooking Hansel’s sumptuous meals. Hansel manages to keep himself alive by presenting the witch with a chicken bone whenever she asks to feel his finger to see if he’s put on weight. One day the witch tells Gretel she’s going to cook up her brother, and so Gretel tricks the witch into climbing into the oven and shuts the door behind her. Hansel is freed, and the children fill their pockets with the witch’s jewels before finding their way home. Their father, newly widowed, welcomes them home and they live richly for the rest of their days.
Within this tale, the cultural values and gender roles of the Grimm’s Germany make themselves known. The woodcutter, the ultimate patriarch, provides practical wood to his country so that it may prosper economically, and he provides food and shelter for his family so that they may go on surviving. When the woodcutter is unable to bring home sustenance for his family, he seems to lose his sense of morality and his power to make the decisions for the family. Utterly distraught at the idea of not being able to provide, he is vulnerable to acceptance of his wife’s evil desires, and eventually agrees to her plan of leaving the children to die. Here, the Grimm’s are telling their young readers that when a man can no longer support his family, he is no longer a whole man; he is no longer able to act as the power-holding patriarch. Further, he allows his wife to usurp some of this power from him, and in doing so allows her to make poor and possibly even sinful decisions. Hansel follows in his father’s footsteps as shining example of the ideal 19th century German male. He makes all the decisions for he and his sister. While she is “wailing” and “crying bitterly” throughout the story, her brother is forming plans to potentially save them.5 Hansel makes no attempt to calm his sister, but instead dismisses her altogether, telling her to “be quiet and stop worrying [while he figures] out something”.6
The only moment in which Gretel is actually allowed any authority or decision-making power is when she decides to push the witch into the oven. Though this may seem the most important decision that is made in the story, note its circumstances. Gretel is not defying her father as Hansel did by planting a trail home; it is only an old and evil witch that she plans to kill, a character which is so universally reviled that Gretel needs no permission from the men in her life to plan the witch’s demise. And Gretel pushes the witch into the oven. It seems that Gretel’s only power is in the kitchen, where the tasks of homemaking were typically left to the women.
Finally, the witch herself offers an interesting explanation as to what happens when a woman is left without a guiding male figure to govern over her. The woman will use the small powers she has (cooking, keeping a house, and raising children) in dangerous ways, allowing her unnatural and evil desires to come to the forefront as her main motivations. Here, the witch creates a house of gingerbread, executing a supernatural level of domestic talents, only to subsequently capture and consume children – the very opposite of what the nurturing and life-giving mother’s role in society is. And it is not too far of a stretch to read the stepmother as a kind of precursor to the witch. Though she essentially wants the same thing as the witch – to kill the children in order to have sustenance for herself – she is neither so gruesome nor as purely evil as the witch. After all, she is looking out for her husband (the only real contributor to society) as well as her own stomach. She still needs her husband’s permission to carry out her plan, while the witch can act of her volition, and the stepmother’s husband seems to keep her plan much more humane than what the lone witch has in mind for the children.
Each of the characters in the Grimm brothers’ Hansel and Gretel plays a different role in the “education establishment which indoctrinates children to learn fixed roles and functions within [the] bourgeois society” of 19th century Germany.7 This tale, as well as many others in their collection, teaches by example the proper gender roles and values of the time and place of the Grimms, and reinforces those ideals which were so important to unifying the Germanic peoples under one identity. These tales were part of the “socialization process which placed great emphasis on passivity, industry, and self-sacrifice for girls and activity, competition, and accumulation of wealth for boys”, and in their distribution among the youth of the German nation, the Grimms contributed to the effort to strengthen and perpetuate the new German character.8
Bibliography
1 Bruno Bettelheim. “The Struggle for Meaning”. The Classic Fairy Tales (New York: Norton, 1999). Page 270
2 Valerie Paradiz. Clever Maids: the Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales (New York: Basic, 1999).
3 Jack Zipes. “Who’s Afraid of he Brothers Grimm? Socialization through Fairy Tales.” The Lion and the Unicorn Vol. 3. (Baltimore: Project Muse, Winter 1979-1980). Page 2
4 Maria Tatar, ed. The Classic Fairy Tales (New York: Norton, 1999). Page 184.
5 Tatar, The Classic Fairy Tales, 188.
6 Ibid., 184.
7 Zipes, The Lion and the Unicorn, 2.
8 Ibid.
1 Bruno Bettelheim. “The Struggle for Meaning”. The Classic Fairy Tales (New York: Norton, 1999). Page 270
2 Valerie Paradiz. Clever Maids: the Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales (New York: Basic, 1999).
3 Jack Zipes. “Who’s Afraid of he Brothers Grimm? Socialization through Fairy Tales.” The Lion and the Unicorn Vol. 3. (Baltimore: Project Muse, Winter 1979-1980). Page 2
4 Maria Tatar, ed. The Classic Fairy Tales (New York: Norton, 1999). Page 184.
5 Tatar, The Classic Fairy Tales, 188.
6 Ibid., 184.
7 Zipes, The Lion and the Unicorn, 2.
8 Ibid.
Bolivia Under Evo Morales
By Isuru somasinghe
Class: Latin American Politics Major: Politics/ International Study '15
When assessing the Bolivian government under Evo Morales, the first Bolivian indigenous president from the party known as Movimiento al Socialismo or MAS, it is important to pay attention to the 3 main areas of the governing project: the political, the social and, most importantly, the economic focus. Running with a leftist agenda and strong support from the indigenous, rural peasants and urban poor, Morales promised what many considered radically leftist policies, such as nationalization of mines, land reform and the eradication of the corporate and regional influence of countries from the global North, particularly the United States. His famous campaign concluding remarks ‘Long live Coca! Death to the Yankees!’ highlighted his anti-American sentiment. It must be noted that although the governing structure can be divided into 3 different groups, all 3 groups significantly overlap, alter and depend on each other simply due to the fact that the socio-political climate of Bolivia is predicated so greatly on the economy and vice versa. To the disappointment and critique of many, Morales’ government, following his election, did not deliver on the above mentioned promises, instead, it has maintained a fairly moderate political stance, prompting many to dub his governance inconsistent to what was presented during his election.
In my opinion, the accusation of Morales being ideologically unstable is rather unfair given the reality of Bolivian politics and politics in general. As cited in S. Sandor John’s Bolivia’s Radical Transition, Bolivia has endured several decades of political uncertainty as a result of extreme political polarity, where coup after coup have occurred--particularly in the years leading up to Morales’ election. Despite not taking a radically left path to governance, the Morales government has implemented significant changes that have resulted in the long-term improvement of politics, civil society and the economy.
The social and political elements of the MAS government can be intertwined together. Before elaborating further, it is important to note that Morales did, in 2009, what no other Bolivian president had done: win a second consecutive tern with a greater margin, 64% with 90% voter turnout.1 This factor alone should be a justifiable indication of how much a majority of Bolivians trusted Morales and the path he was taking; no critical review of his politics by an outsider like me can be a better reflection than the choice of the Bolivian citizens and voters. Despite this, one cannot deny that the government readjusted its goals, differing from what was promised, particularly economically. The issue of the nationalization of mines, a strong running point for Morales during the 2005 elections, was not addressed effectively once he gained power as his “plan of nationalization… watered down [to] a proposal to increase taxes on private mining companies,”2 which illustrated his retreat from aggressive leftist policies of nationalization. In my opinion, this refocusing was based more on the reality of politics than it was on the fact that Morales had shifted ideologically, like previous leftist leaders of the past such as the MNR President Paz Estenssoro in the 1950s under President Paz. In order to create a government that benefited all the people, Morales needed to walk a straight line of moderation, as opposed to the more popular polarized visions of ‘left or right’.
Jeffery Webber criticizes this approach, comparing it to Bolivian Colonel Gualberto Villarroel’s approach in the 1940s where he stated that, “We are not enemies of the rich, but we are better friends of the poor.”3 Webber criticizes a populist approach as potentially detrimental, as has been in the past when leftist regimes attempted populism by failing to “confront the economic and political power bases of the urban capitalist.”4 While Webber is accurate in saying that Morales did not crack down on the elite and the powerful, he is wrong to generalize this ‘failure to confront’; the Morales government’s political positioning is predicated on its economic plan, which will be highlighted later on in this paper. I fundamentally disagree with the accusation that the administration and the president have failed to deliver to the people in key ways, because in reality, the Morales government has made significant strides to balance the scales politically. Perhaps one of the most significant actions by the Morales government in the right direction was the proposal of a new constitution in 2009 that included the rights of the indigenous while also incorporating elements of the indigenous culture.
The new constitution put forth by Evo Morales heralds one of the biggest steps towards granting much needed rights to the indigenous population by incorporating them into the focus of state activities, “based in respect and equality among all, with the principles of sovereignty, dignity, complementarity, solidarity, harmony and equality in the distribution and redistribution of social product, where the search for a good life predominates, with respect for the economic, social, juridical and cultural plurality of the inhabitants of this land.”5 Despite the utopian appearance of the constitution and how good it looks on paper, Nancy Postero elaborates on how much of a struggle it was to pass a bill in Congress to schedule a public referendum on the constitution, and how President Morales had to take an extremely critiqued unconventional path to achieve this. The question about the democratic nature of Morales’ governance arose when MAS “bused many of the delegates--but not those from opposition parties—to the nearby city of Oruro and, in a highly controversial special session, passed a version of the constitution.”6 Although Morales’ actions may have resembled that of a “political power grab,”7 one must also take into consideration the necessity for Morales to act in such a way, given the blatant rightwing opposition he faced. Even when Morales and his Vice President, Garcia Linera, reached out with “calls for negotiations with the far right.” These groups responded with blatant rejections and often with “massive and coordinated direct actions: road blockades; racist attacks against unarmed pro-government rallies; terrorization of poor, mainly indigenous neighborhoods in the eastern lowlands.”8
With this mounting opposition against, not only the government, but Morales’ supporters (particularly the indigenous), one must ask the question: was Morales’ unconstitutional or unconventional maneuver to change the constitution entirely wrong and contradictory of the “peaceful and democratic revolution” path he claimed to partake in when he came into power? Could their claim to “legitimacy at the international level” be questioned now that Morales had gone down this path?9 In my view, Morales did the most appropriate and ideal thing because the “liberal democratic institutions that existed could not accomplish the form of justice they [MAS] felt that Bolivia needed.”10 Under the previous constitution, the indigenous’ rights were not protected, despite accounting for over 60% of the Bolivian population. However, under the new constitution, they were protected. The authors of the new constitution included “particular indigenous cultural values as the fundamental ethical basis for the state”11 that focused on ethical and moral principles. For example, the use of the “Aymara moral code, do not be lazy, do not lie, do not steal – ama qhilla, ama llulla, ama suwa”12 is particularly significant because it highlights the adoption of these values by the state. The constitution calls for “universal rights for all Bolivians… those social and economic rights that UNDR (United Nations Declaration of Human Rights) recognized but that don’t appear in the U.S. constitution.”13 Therefore, to criticize Morales for adopting an undemocratic approach to establish a democratic constitution that adheres to the needs of all people, including the indigenous, would be contradictory and ironic, given the end result of this ‘undemocratic power grab’ was a more cross sectorial and all-encompassing democratic structure than what has previously existed in Bolivia.
In addition to the new constitution, one of the biggest elements of the Bolivian civil society was the presence of the numerous social movements that existed within it. The effectiveness of the relationship between the Morales government and these movements reflects the social aspect of Morales’ government project. Before elaborating further, it must be clarified here that not all social movements were in favor of Morales during the first election, despite the misconception that they were. Morales did have a solid base that consisted of members from various social movements, which gave him and MAS, the ability “to mobilize its social bases so as to circumvent advances by the far right.”14 This influence over and support of many social movements was a direct reflection of MAS’ support by the people, which was evident in the referendum calling the Morales government into question, where MAS increased their “nationwide lead by 14%.”15 While MAS and Morales remained extremely popular amongst the majority, surprisingly due to its “predominantly rural base in a country that has recently become majority urban,”16 the government has often experienced tension with social movements when the topic of resource nationalization arises. The disappointment and dissatisfaction by the social movements is understandable given that many supported Morales expecting more progress under his governance; resource and mine nationalization was one of Morales’ campaign pledges to the people. However, it is also important to identify and acknowledge the limitations, particularly socio-political, he faced once he gained power.
As Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing state in Political Geography, the Bolivian social movements supported Morales with the expectation he would “use natural resource wealth to transform the country socially and economically” via the guidance of four key areas: “Poverty reduction, education and healthcare, transportation and productive infrastructure, job creation and industrialization.”17 The fundamental expectation by the social movements was that the wealth from resources and resource rents would empower the government with the fiscal ability to fulfill these hopes; however in reality, this was not possible. A lot of the social movements’ frustration stems from the economic policies of MAS and Morales, which were intended to take a dramatic leftward shift, yet remains a “balancing act [by MAS]; convincing supporters that it is fulfilling a resource nationalist agenda while continuing and even expanding reliance on transnational capital”, a “double discourse” of sorts.18 While criticizing MAS for not moving more towards nationalization, one must also pay attention to the rebellious nature of its opposition from the right; “MAS’ efforts to increase mining royalties and revenues”, a watered down alternative to nationalization, have been “thwarted by the powerful cooperative miners federation”, whose vast numbers, militant origins and ability to mobilize effectively provide them with the ability to oppose the government.”19 This opposition, combined with the structural and economic limitations on the government, is one of the main factors hindered the administration from carrying out the tasks it intended to upon election, forcing it to retreat from previous far leftist positions towards a more moderate one.
When focusing on the ‘contradictions’ of the Morales administration, all factors boil down to one main issue: economics. The economic strength of Bolivia is the biggest obstacle the Morales administration faces. Prior to gaining power, Morales spoke out vehemently against capitalism, foreign influence and corporate control within Bolivia, however, after his election the Bolivian economy’s economic constraints forced him to readjust his views. Through this readjustment, and the influence of Vice President Garcia Linera, MAS has heralded and championed a “reconstituted neoliberalism,”20 also named “Andean-Amazonian Capitalism:”21 a readjusted form of capitalism that is more suited and focused on the Bolivian people.
Even following his second election, Evo Morales spoke “frequently in international forums from an anticapitalist perspective” by presenting capitalism “as a system based on the exploitation of people, particularly the poor”. However, as Jeffery Webber points out, Morales’ Vice President, Garcia Linera, embodies a different perspective that starkly contrasts Morales’ anti-capitalist stance; Linera speaks about the “impossibility of socialism in the current context in that country [Bolivia]”, and instead promotes the idea of “Andean-Amazonian Capitalism.” In short, this form of capitalism is meant to represent a “capitalism with a human face,”22 which, to the surprise of many, gained the praise of officials at the IMF. This economic focus is highlighted in the “Plan de Desarollo Nacional (National Development Plan);”23 essentially, this plan is predicated on the successful exportation of primary resource commodities like hydrocarbons and minerals via the financial help of, what Webber dubs, “imperialist capital”, but with more royalties and tax revenue going to the state.24 The revenue gained from these royalties and taxes are then utilized in funding social programs and other areas like education, intended to help the poor, particularly the indigenous. Webber himself highlights that the goals of this state were to drive the “petty bourgeoisie into a future national bourgeoisie of a size and significance unprecedented in Bolivian history. This new national bourgeoisie would be of indigenous heritage—Andean Amazonian.”25 The goal of the Morales government was to lift up the groups of people who were historically plagued by poverty into a new and structurally stable society.
Critics like Jeffery Webber accuse the Morales government of merely tweaking neoliberalism by altering a few areas. He states that the plan merely replaces “comparative advantage with systemic competitiveness,”26 essentially stating that entire social community systems would compete in the global system against one another, as opposed to competing only with a few commodities. While insightful, this particular criticism, in my opinion, is flawed because it fails to reflect the tactics of the Morales administration. Instead of this tweaked neoliberal approach, the plan offered by the government is one that has been altered to fit the mold of what is required by Bolivia at this time, a plan that is sensitive to the requirements of the Bolivian economy but also aware and complementing a gradual shift towards a socialist society. Vice President Linera’s statement regarding the gradual shift towards socialism is a valid one because it is realistic. Had the Morales administration implemented radical leftist policies upon its election, Bolivia would have been devastated economically because, as Kohl and Farthing state, “new administrations depend on the revenues derived from extractive enterprises as much as their neoliberal predecessors.”27 The expectations by many was that Bolivia’s natural resources alone could push Bolivia out of its dependency on Foreign Direct Investment and into a self-sufficient nation, where the government “could make US $75 billion per year (3/4 of GDP) if the country were to fully nationalize and industrialize hydrocarbons.”28 The reality, however, is that this is impossible in the present situation, primarily due to the structural restrictions facing Bolivia. As has been in many other European colonies, the profits from the extraction of natural resources have “historically benefited primarily foreigners and their local partners” while excluding the indigenous due to the failure to “absorb large amounts of unskilled labor [indigenous].”29
This is precisely why the PND is so important, for if the previous plan had been left in place, a majority of the profits from Bolivian resource extraction would have ended up outside the country, with very little coming back. If the Morales administration had swung completely leftward and followed suit with mass nationalization, then the industries would have been crippled with no capital, no funding, no investment and, most significantly, no profit. By establishing a system that increases the royalties and taxes on foreign corporations, the Bolivian government now has the ability to collect this money and use it towards programs focused on building Bolivian society, particularly the indigenous, via education, technical training and job preparation. This course of action, gives all Bolivians the ability to gradually gain the required knowledge to take over the industries in the future; this is the gradual progression towards socialism that Linera was speaking about.
It is extremely convenient to be an outsider critiquing the Morales administration and the job it has done thus far, while maintaining a safe distance. However, it cannot be denied that this administration has made progress when compared to many of the others in the past. Despite facing a mounting opposition from members of the rightwing, the Morales government has pushed the country to demonstrate a “record growth rate of 6% in 2008”, from a rate of 4% in 2005.30 In addition to this, the poverty rates of Bolivia dropped from 63.1% in 2003 to 59.9% in 2006; a significant decline in 3 years given the direction Bolivia was heading in. The administration has also attempted to break away from its American and Global North dependence by trying to establish strong relationships with its neighbors, particularly Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina via multiple trade agreements like ALBA, CAN and Mercosur. These particular relationships are beneficial to Bolivia, supported by the fact that, Mercosur in particular, “accounted for 63.95% of Bolivia’s trade surplus in 2007, (while CAN accounted for 6.55% and ALBA for 14.12 %).”31
It is evident therefore that while the Morales administration did not take the much expected radical leftward swing towards revolution and mass nationalization, its current path, while gradual and slow paced, attempts to bring a wave of stability and structure to a country that has been plagued by political instability for decades. While the political stability of Bolivia is still in question, given the massive opposition faced by Morales, one cannot simply dismiss the progress that has been made in the past 7 years. From recognizing the rights of the indigenous in the most important document of the country, to making corporations more fiscally accountable, to helping build better relationship with its neighbors, Bolivia under Evo Morales has moved into a phase where all members of society are now participating and being heard. This gradual process may not achieve all its goals in Morales’ term(s) as president, it may even take decades, but for a country that has lacked stability and equal representation for decades, perhaps gradual stability is the right way to go.
In my opinion, the accusation of Morales being ideologically unstable is rather unfair given the reality of Bolivian politics and politics in general. As cited in S. Sandor John’s Bolivia’s Radical Transition, Bolivia has endured several decades of political uncertainty as a result of extreme political polarity, where coup after coup have occurred--particularly in the years leading up to Morales’ election. Despite not taking a radically left path to governance, the Morales government has implemented significant changes that have resulted in the long-term improvement of politics, civil society and the economy.
The social and political elements of the MAS government can be intertwined together. Before elaborating further, it is important to note that Morales did, in 2009, what no other Bolivian president had done: win a second consecutive tern with a greater margin, 64% with 90% voter turnout.1 This factor alone should be a justifiable indication of how much a majority of Bolivians trusted Morales and the path he was taking; no critical review of his politics by an outsider like me can be a better reflection than the choice of the Bolivian citizens and voters. Despite this, one cannot deny that the government readjusted its goals, differing from what was promised, particularly economically. The issue of the nationalization of mines, a strong running point for Morales during the 2005 elections, was not addressed effectively once he gained power as his “plan of nationalization… watered down [to] a proposal to increase taxes on private mining companies,”2 which illustrated his retreat from aggressive leftist policies of nationalization. In my opinion, this refocusing was based more on the reality of politics than it was on the fact that Morales had shifted ideologically, like previous leftist leaders of the past such as the MNR President Paz Estenssoro in the 1950s under President Paz. In order to create a government that benefited all the people, Morales needed to walk a straight line of moderation, as opposed to the more popular polarized visions of ‘left or right’.
Jeffery Webber criticizes this approach, comparing it to Bolivian Colonel Gualberto Villarroel’s approach in the 1940s where he stated that, “We are not enemies of the rich, but we are better friends of the poor.”3 Webber criticizes a populist approach as potentially detrimental, as has been in the past when leftist regimes attempted populism by failing to “confront the economic and political power bases of the urban capitalist.”4 While Webber is accurate in saying that Morales did not crack down on the elite and the powerful, he is wrong to generalize this ‘failure to confront’; the Morales government’s political positioning is predicated on its economic plan, which will be highlighted later on in this paper. I fundamentally disagree with the accusation that the administration and the president have failed to deliver to the people in key ways, because in reality, the Morales government has made significant strides to balance the scales politically. Perhaps one of the most significant actions by the Morales government in the right direction was the proposal of a new constitution in 2009 that included the rights of the indigenous while also incorporating elements of the indigenous culture.
The new constitution put forth by Evo Morales heralds one of the biggest steps towards granting much needed rights to the indigenous population by incorporating them into the focus of state activities, “based in respect and equality among all, with the principles of sovereignty, dignity, complementarity, solidarity, harmony and equality in the distribution and redistribution of social product, where the search for a good life predominates, with respect for the economic, social, juridical and cultural plurality of the inhabitants of this land.”5 Despite the utopian appearance of the constitution and how good it looks on paper, Nancy Postero elaborates on how much of a struggle it was to pass a bill in Congress to schedule a public referendum on the constitution, and how President Morales had to take an extremely critiqued unconventional path to achieve this. The question about the democratic nature of Morales’ governance arose when MAS “bused many of the delegates--but not those from opposition parties—to the nearby city of Oruro and, in a highly controversial special session, passed a version of the constitution.”6 Although Morales’ actions may have resembled that of a “political power grab,”7 one must also take into consideration the necessity for Morales to act in such a way, given the blatant rightwing opposition he faced. Even when Morales and his Vice President, Garcia Linera, reached out with “calls for negotiations with the far right.” These groups responded with blatant rejections and often with “massive and coordinated direct actions: road blockades; racist attacks against unarmed pro-government rallies; terrorization of poor, mainly indigenous neighborhoods in the eastern lowlands.”8
With this mounting opposition against, not only the government, but Morales’ supporters (particularly the indigenous), one must ask the question: was Morales’ unconstitutional or unconventional maneuver to change the constitution entirely wrong and contradictory of the “peaceful and democratic revolution” path he claimed to partake in when he came into power? Could their claim to “legitimacy at the international level” be questioned now that Morales had gone down this path?9 In my view, Morales did the most appropriate and ideal thing because the “liberal democratic institutions that existed could not accomplish the form of justice they [MAS] felt that Bolivia needed.”10 Under the previous constitution, the indigenous’ rights were not protected, despite accounting for over 60% of the Bolivian population. However, under the new constitution, they were protected. The authors of the new constitution included “particular indigenous cultural values as the fundamental ethical basis for the state”11 that focused on ethical and moral principles. For example, the use of the “Aymara moral code, do not be lazy, do not lie, do not steal – ama qhilla, ama llulla, ama suwa”12 is particularly significant because it highlights the adoption of these values by the state. The constitution calls for “universal rights for all Bolivians… those social and economic rights that UNDR (United Nations Declaration of Human Rights) recognized but that don’t appear in the U.S. constitution.”13 Therefore, to criticize Morales for adopting an undemocratic approach to establish a democratic constitution that adheres to the needs of all people, including the indigenous, would be contradictory and ironic, given the end result of this ‘undemocratic power grab’ was a more cross sectorial and all-encompassing democratic structure than what has previously existed in Bolivia.
In addition to the new constitution, one of the biggest elements of the Bolivian civil society was the presence of the numerous social movements that existed within it. The effectiveness of the relationship between the Morales government and these movements reflects the social aspect of Morales’ government project. Before elaborating further, it must be clarified here that not all social movements were in favor of Morales during the first election, despite the misconception that they were. Morales did have a solid base that consisted of members from various social movements, which gave him and MAS, the ability “to mobilize its social bases so as to circumvent advances by the far right.”14 This influence over and support of many social movements was a direct reflection of MAS’ support by the people, which was evident in the referendum calling the Morales government into question, where MAS increased their “nationwide lead by 14%.”15 While MAS and Morales remained extremely popular amongst the majority, surprisingly due to its “predominantly rural base in a country that has recently become majority urban,”16 the government has often experienced tension with social movements when the topic of resource nationalization arises. The disappointment and dissatisfaction by the social movements is understandable given that many supported Morales expecting more progress under his governance; resource and mine nationalization was one of Morales’ campaign pledges to the people. However, it is also important to identify and acknowledge the limitations, particularly socio-political, he faced once he gained power.
As Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing state in Political Geography, the Bolivian social movements supported Morales with the expectation he would “use natural resource wealth to transform the country socially and economically” via the guidance of four key areas: “Poverty reduction, education and healthcare, transportation and productive infrastructure, job creation and industrialization.”17 The fundamental expectation by the social movements was that the wealth from resources and resource rents would empower the government with the fiscal ability to fulfill these hopes; however in reality, this was not possible. A lot of the social movements’ frustration stems from the economic policies of MAS and Morales, which were intended to take a dramatic leftward shift, yet remains a “balancing act [by MAS]; convincing supporters that it is fulfilling a resource nationalist agenda while continuing and even expanding reliance on transnational capital”, a “double discourse” of sorts.18 While criticizing MAS for not moving more towards nationalization, one must also pay attention to the rebellious nature of its opposition from the right; “MAS’ efforts to increase mining royalties and revenues”, a watered down alternative to nationalization, have been “thwarted by the powerful cooperative miners federation”, whose vast numbers, militant origins and ability to mobilize effectively provide them with the ability to oppose the government.”19 This opposition, combined with the structural and economic limitations on the government, is one of the main factors hindered the administration from carrying out the tasks it intended to upon election, forcing it to retreat from previous far leftist positions towards a more moderate one.
When focusing on the ‘contradictions’ of the Morales administration, all factors boil down to one main issue: economics. The economic strength of Bolivia is the biggest obstacle the Morales administration faces. Prior to gaining power, Morales spoke out vehemently against capitalism, foreign influence and corporate control within Bolivia, however, after his election the Bolivian economy’s economic constraints forced him to readjust his views. Through this readjustment, and the influence of Vice President Garcia Linera, MAS has heralded and championed a “reconstituted neoliberalism,”20 also named “Andean-Amazonian Capitalism:”21 a readjusted form of capitalism that is more suited and focused on the Bolivian people.
Even following his second election, Evo Morales spoke “frequently in international forums from an anticapitalist perspective” by presenting capitalism “as a system based on the exploitation of people, particularly the poor”. However, as Jeffery Webber points out, Morales’ Vice President, Garcia Linera, embodies a different perspective that starkly contrasts Morales’ anti-capitalist stance; Linera speaks about the “impossibility of socialism in the current context in that country [Bolivia]”, and instead promotes the idea of “Andean-Amazonian Capitalism.” In short, this form of capitalism is meant to represent a “capitalism with a human face,”22 which, to the surprise of many, gained the praise of officials at the IMF. This economic focus is highlighted in the “Plan de Desarollo Nacional (National Development Plan);”23 essentially, this plan is predicated on the successful exportation of primary resource commodities like hydrocarbons and minerals via the financial help of, what Webber dubs, “imperialist capital”, but with more royalties and tax revenue going to the state.24 The revenue gained from these royalties and taxes are then utilized in funding social programs and other areas like education, intended to help the poor, particularly the indigenous. Webber himself highlights that the goals of this state were to drive the “petty bourgeoisie into a future national bourgeoisie of a size and significance unprecedented in Bolivian history. This new national bourgeoisie would be of indigenous heritage—Andean Amazonian.”25 The goal of the Morales government was to lift up the groups of people who were historically plagued by poverty into a new and structurally stable society.
Critics like Jeffery Webber accuse the Morales government of merely tweaking neoliberalism by altering a few areas. He states that the plan merely replaces “comparative advantage with systemic competitiveness,”26 essentially stating that entire social community systems would compete in the global system against one another, as opposed to competing only with a few commodities. While insightful, this particular criticism, in my opinion, is flawed because it fails to reflect the tactics of the Morales administration. Instead of this tweaked neoliberal approach, the plan offered by the government is one that has been altered to fit the mold of what is required by Bolivia at this time, a plan that is sensitive to the requirements of the Bolivian economy but also aware and complementing a gradual shift towards a socialist society. Vice President Linera’s statement regarding the gradual shift towards socialism is a valid one because it is realistic. Had the Morales administration implemented radical leftist policies upon its election, Bolivia would have been devastated economically because, as Kohl and Farthing state, “new administrations depend on the revenues derived from extractive enterprises as much as their neoliberal predecessors.”27 The expectations by many was that Bolivia’s natural resources alone could push Bolivia out of its dependency on Foreign Direct Investment and into a self-sufficient nation, where the government “could make US $75 billion per year (3/4 of GDP) if the country were to fully nationalize and industrialize hydrocarbons.”28 The reality, however, is that this is impossible in the present situation, primarily due to the structural restrictions facing Bolivia. As has been in many other European colonies, the profits from the extraction of natural resources have “historically benefited primarily foreigners and their local partners” while excluding the indigenous due to the failure to “absorb large amounts of unskilled labor [indigenous].”29
This is precisely why the PND is so important, for if the previous plan had been left in place, a majority of the profits from Bolivian resource extraction would have ended up outside the country, with very little coming back. If the Morales administration had swung completely leftward and followed suit with mass nationalization, then the industries would have been crippled with no capital, no funding, no investment and, most significantly, no profit. By establishing a system that increases the royalties and taxes on foreign corporations, the Bolivian government now has the ability to collect this money and use it towards programs focused on building Bolivian society, particularly the indigenous, via education, technical training and job preparation. This course of action, gives all Bolivians the ability to gradually gain the required knowledge to take over the industries in the future; this is the gradual progression towards socialism that Linera was speaking about.
It is extremely convenient to be an outsider critiquing the Morales administration and the job it has done thus far, while maintaining a safe distance. However, it cannot be denied that this administration has made progress when compared to many of the others in the past. Despite facing a mounting opposition from members of the rightwing, the Morales government has pushed the country to demonstrate a “record growth rate of 6% in 2008”, from a rate of 4% in 2005.30 In addition to this, the poverty rates of Bolivia dropped from 63.1% in 2003 to 59.9% in 2006; a significant decline in 3 years given the direction Bolivia was heading in. The administration has also attempted to break away from its American and Global North dependence by trying to establish strong relationships with its neighbors, particularly Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina via multiple trade agreements like ALBA, CAN and Mercosur. These particular relationships are beneficial to Bolivia, supported by the fact that, Mercosur in particular, “accounted for 63.95% of Bolivia’s trade surplus in 2007, (while CAN accounted for 6.55% and ALBA for 14.12 %).”31
It is evident therefore that while the Morales administration did not take the much expected radical leftward swing towards revolution and mass nationalization, its current path, while gradual and slow paced, attempts to bring a wave of stability and structure to a country that has been plagued by political instability for decades. While the political stability of Bolivia is still in question, given the massive opposition faced by Morales, one cannot simply dismiss the progress that has been made in the past 7 years. From recognizing the rights of the indigenous in the most important document of the country, to making corporations more fiscally accountable, to helping build better relationship with its neighbors, Bolivia under Evo Morales has moved into a phase where all members of society are now participating and being heard. This gradual process may not achieve all its goals in Morales’ term(s) as president, it may even take decades, but for a country that has lacked stability and equal representation for decades, perhaps gradual stability is the right way to go.
Bibliography
1 Jeffery Webber, Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation, and the Politics of Evo Morales (Chicago: Haymarket, 2011), 153.
2 Ibid, 109.
3 Ibid, 124.
4 Webber, Class Struggle, 124.
5 Nancy Postero, “The Struggle to Create a Radical Democracy in Bolivia,” Latin American Review 45 (2010): 72.
6 Ibid, 66
7 Postero, “The Struggle to Create a Radical Democracy in Bolivia,” 67.
8 Webber, Class Struggle, 133.
9 Postero,” The Struggle to Create a Radical Democracy in Bolivia,” 66.
10 Ibid, 66.
11 Ibid, 73.
12 Ibid, 73.
13 Postero, “The Struggle to Create a Radical Democracy in Bolivia,” 72.
14 Webber, Class Struggle, 124.
15 Ibid, 127.
16 Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing, “Material Constraints to Popular Imaginaries: The Extractive Economy and Resource Nationalism in Bolivia,” Political Geography 31.4 (2012), 232.
17 Kohl and Farthing, “Material Constraints to Popular Imaginaries,” 233.
18 Ibid, 233.
19 Ibid, 233.
20 Webber, Class Struggle, 177.
21 Ibid, 168.
22 Ibid, 169.
23 Ibid, 192.
24 Ibid, 192.
25 Webber, Class Struggle, 189.
26 Ibid, 184.
27 Kohl and Farthing, “Material Constraints to Popular Imaginaries,” 225.
28 Ibid, 226.
29 Kohl and Farthing, “Material Constraints to Popular Imaginaries,” 225.
30 Manuel Mejido Costoya, "Politics of Trade in Post-neoliberal Latin America: The Case of Bolivia." Bulletin of Latin American Research 30 (2011), 88.
31 Costoya, “Politics of Trade in Post-neoliberal Latin America,” 85.
1 Jeffery Webber, Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation, and the Politics of Evo Morales (Chicago: Haymarket, 2011), 153.
2 Ibid, 109.
3 Ibid, 124.
4 Webber, Class Struggle, 124.
5 Nancy Postero, “The Struggle to Create a Radical Democracy in Bolivia,” Latin American Review 45 (2010): 72.
6 Ibid, 66
7 Postero, “The Struggle to Create a Radical Democracy in Bolivia,” 67.
8 Webber, Class Struggle, 133.
9 Postero,” The Struggle to Create a Radical Democracy in Bolivia,” 66.
10 Ibid, 66.
11 Ibid, 73.
12 Ibid, 73.
13 Postero, “The Struggle to Create a Radical Democracy in Bolivia,” 72.
14 Webber, Class Struggle, 124.
15 Ibid, 127.
16 Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing, “Material Constraints to Popular Imaginaries: The Extractive Economy and Resource Nationalism in Bolivia,” Political Geography 31.4 (2012), 232.
17 Kohl and Farthing, “Material Constraints to Popular Imaginaries,” 233.
18 Ibid, 233.
19 Ibid, 233.
20 Webber, Class Struggle, 177.
21 Ibid, 168.
22 Ibid, 169.
23 Ibid, 192.
24 Ibid, 192.
25 Webber, Class Struggle, 189.
26 Ibid, 184.
27 Kohl and Farthing, “Material Constraints to Popular Imaginaries,” 225.
28 Ibid, 226.
29 Kohl and Farthing, “Material Constraints to Popular Imaginaries,” 225.
30 Manuel Mejido Costoya, "Politics of Trade in Post-neoliberal Latin America: The Case of Bolivia." Bulletin of Latin American Research 30 (2011), 88.
31 Costoya, “Politics of Trade in Post-neoliberal Latin America,” 85.