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Archives for Things Critical

Who Created the Voter-Fraud Myth?

Posted by  on Tuesday, October 23rd 2012     

Imagine this: “You are hereby notified that your right to vote has been challenged by a qualified elector…”

Writing for the New Yorker (10/29/12), Jane Meyer tells about the man behind the myth that American elections are threatened by fraudulent voters. Many election experts say that Hans von Spakovsky, a conservative Republican lawyer who served in the Bush Justice Department, and is now a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has played an “improbably large” part in fanning fear about voter fraud.

Never mind the evidence, sometimes it’s enough to say that something is happening for people who are already disposed to believe to be persuaded.

category: Things Critical, Things Rhetorical
tags: , , , , ,

“Nonthreatning novelty,” or, you know, people

Posted by  on Thursday, August 30th 2012     

Tom Jacobs over at Salon.com takes note of the rise in roles for South East Asians on film and T.V. Why now? For the answer, Jacobs goes to Shilpa Davé, an assistant prof. of American Studies. She explains it this way:

…demography, technology, global politics, and, of course, commerce. She notes that producers and directors are perpetually in search of nonthreatening novelty, and contends Indians fill this role particularly well in the post-9/11 world. Many Americans might be wary of a character identified as Arab or Chinese…

Please, tell me more about “nonthreatning novelty.”

All of this makes it sounds like we are buying children’s toys for a very special child. Wait, when it comes to popular entertainment and the media in the U.S. that’s exactly what we’re doing–casting “novelties” that won’t be threatening to the viewer. Better if these make him/her feel special. 

category: Things Critical, Things Rhetorical
tags: , , , ,

This is what Arizona’s non-racial profiling law looks like

Posted by  on Saturday, July 7th 2012     

Arizona’s former governor Castro stopped for a third time by law enforcement to question him about his legal status.

category: Things Critical
tags: , , ,

The Myth of the Latin Woman Becomes Her

Posted by  on Wednesday, April 18th 2012     

I taught Judith Ortiz Cofer‘s “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria” this term, and my students and I discussed various ways in which the myth of the Latin woman, as it is replete with associations to sensuality and food, becomes material in culture. It seems that the details coming out of the prostitution scandal involving the secret service is one clear example of the real-life consequences of this myth. Or maybe it is a clear example of how it may not be a myth at all.

Juliana Jimenez, in writing for slate.com, notes that, “That this happened, I believe, is a result of, and will add to, the image of overly sexualized Latin American women,” adding that “a beautiful moment of transnational bonding took place in this scandal: both sides of the Caribbean did their part to reduce women to their sexuality and perpetuate the stereotype of the over-sexualized Colombian woman” (XX Factor, 4/17/2012).

Writing as long ago as she did, it seems that Ortiz Cofer’s claims as to the effects of holding such an image of the Latin American women continue to stand even today. And that image is likely to be around for a bit longer:

Sofia Vergara on SNL

category: Things Critical
tags: , ,

Pilgrims’s (near)Progress

Posted by  on Tuesday, December 13th 2011     

White people love to talk about politics around the dinner table, which might explain the continuing popularity of the Thanksgiving holiday. More than any other day or time on the American calendar or schedule (which are typically governed by all manner of rules and directives about “polite company” and social taboos), Thanksgiving is the day when white Americans expect to talk and argue over the politics du jour. In that sense, the cover of the November 28, 2011 New Yorker got it exactly right:

"Promised Land" by Christoph Niemann

The artist, Christoph Niemann, told the New Yorker’s Mina Kaneko and Françoise Mouly that his purpose in doing this cover was infuse complicate an ongoing discussion about immigration in the U.S. through juxtaposition, an approximation of America’s heroic settlers with America’s current “invaders”:

Too often in politics, very complex subjects are being turned into sound bites, so it’s easy to take them apart In “Promised Land” I draw a parallel between current immigrants and early settlers—the hope is that it will provide context, to help keep things in perspective. Cartoonists, not politicians, should be the ones who condense political discussions into simple images.

To be sure Niemann’s impulse to want to complicate the current immigration “debate” by  denoting the subjectivity at work in contemporary and popular conversations over immigration is a worthy one, though I wonder if his final claim, that it should be cartoonists and not politicians who distill complex issues into simple images, doesn’t contradict that impulse and ultimately render his critique ineffectual? For, I wonder, should anyone be condensing political discussions as complicated as the US-state’s ongoing issues with immigration into simple anythings?

Looking again at Niemann’s recent cover for the The New Yorker one realizes that there is an attempt to simplify–or at least condense–the debate over immigration in the U.S. In both scope and scale, “Promised Land” takes on but a very small set of symbols and a very small frame from among all those that could be used to represent the “very complex subject” of US immigration discourses, popular and legal. This is what Niemann gives us:

  • It is night, as the star- and moon-lit dark sky indicate;
  • We are viewing a scene that place in the dessert per the barren landscape and the occasional cactus;
  • Five figures, all dressed in stereotypical ”American pilgrim” garb (black breeches and skirts, stiff white collars and cuffs, buckled shoes, belts, and steeple hats, white aprons and bonnets) and arranged in a line that crosses the image from the top-left corner to the bottom right corner.
  • The facial expressions and bodily positions of the pilgrims clue us in that they are in the midst of some form of illicit, unauthorized, possibly even criminal activity. You can tell as much because of their faces and bodies are represented: the figure farthest afield, and female pilgrim, seems to be tip-toeing (she lifts us her skirt as if to take lighter steps across the dessert floor) and looks to her left for any sign of detection; in front of her a male pilgrim also tip-toes and, looking straight at the viewer, holds his left index finger up to his lips as if to “shoosh” us. He means to make us complicit in their trespass; this pilgrim is almost to the fence, where the third pilgrim is caught in the very act of breaking through, her hands clawing at the ground in front of her, and her face betraying her fear; the male pilgrim in front of her doesn’t look back–he’s in a full run and the drops of sweat falling away from his face suggest that he’s work hard to make it through and isn’t about to give up; the final and fifth clothing–we can only see half of his face worried–he’s “made it” and his body already exists off of the image, the page, his body is almost in “our” world, the world of The New Yorker reader.
  • The other prominent figure in the image is a tall chain-link fence crowned in barbed wire that extends from the top-right of the page and into the bottom-left. This line and the other prominent line on the page, the one made of the bodies of the pilgrims, intersect at the body of the female pilgrim who is caught in the very act of crossing-over. Her body simultaneously bisected by the fence and bisecting the fence. This is the focal point of the image.

This visual analysis, if anything, already indicates how difficult–if even possible–it is to simplify popular and legal discourses surrounding immigration in the U.S. Even when a skilled artist, through technique, awareness, focus and through the selection of a limited field, wants it to make it so, complications bubble up and spill out of the page. And while a lengthier and more critical interpretation of the preceding analysis might be worthwhile, for the purposes of this post I’ll limit my comments to two of these complications: the fence and the body caught at the fence.

It might be useful to start a discussion about the fence with a rather obvious statement: The pilgrims represented here, and which are supposed to remind the viewer of the “first” settlers to the U.S., did not have to cross a fence. Now, I am not suggesting that crossing an ocean wasn’t a difficult task crossing the Atlantic as settlers to the New World is not the same things as getting through a fence on the U.S.-Mexico border. Rather, while the ocean is allowed to remain an abstract obstacle in the pilgrims’s experience, the fence at the U.S.-Mexico border cannot be. The fence (and the border it is on) are a metonym for the US state, an entity that didn’t exist in the 1500s. Whereas the pilgrims (for the sake of simplicity we’ll continue to call them that) had to endure and survive the natural vicissitudes of maritime travel and later of the environment in the New World, migrants coming across the U.S.-Mexico border have to both endure and survive the perilous southwest dessert and also the hostilities of the US-state’s immigration enforcement apparatus, which includes both state-sanctioned modes of enforcement (border patrol) and none-official but somehow permissible modes (militias).

In material terms, what does the border zone on the U.S.-Mexico border actually look like, and what might the actual experience of getting into the U.S. actually be like? To offer one example, in May 2010 The Hill reported that “Predator B aerial drones, which have proved successful fighting insurgents in Afghanistan, were deployed this week along the border between Texas and Mexico” (Bolton). These drones came as part of an escalation on the part of the Obama Administration which included the deployment of an additional 1,200 National Guard troops; together these troops and these drones “augment the federal government’s presence along the 1,900 mile border. The agency already has a few other unmanned aircraft as well as about 20,000 agents and nearly 700 miles of fencing” (Bolton).

Add these dangers to the natural dangers that migrants seeking entry in the U.S. via the U.S.-Mexico border and you have vastly different picture than the one represented by Niemann. Hundreds of people die in the southwestern dessert in their attempts to cross into the U.S. This is especially true in the high summer months, which bring extremely high temperatures to the region. In late 2010, for example, immigration authorities reported finding over 250 bodies along the Arizona desert that year, setting a record that prompted questions as to the nature of the increase. Not surprisingly, the aforementioned escalation likely played a role in the increased deaths, according to a story by NPR:

In recent years, the U.S. government has built a border fence, improved technology and hired thousands more Border Patrol agents.

That has helped reduce the number of people caught crossing illegally, but it has also pushed crossers into more remote and dangerous places to avoid detection — places where sore feet or a broken ankle can mean death from dehydration or exposure. (Robbins)

Now, to turn to a discussion of the female pilgrim caught and literally bisected by the border.

According to Eithne Luibhéid, the author of Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border, the U.S. immigration control system has served as a crucial site for the construction and regulation of identities, including those of race, gender, and sexuality (x-xi). The way in which immigration laws and procedures have “differentiated women into categories such as wife, prostitute, and lesbian reveal the role of immigration control,” according to Luibhéid. In a very real sense, the way in which this female pilgrim is represented, as a body that’s literally stuck and momentarily bisected by the fence, demonstrates just how historically and presently the US state, through its various iterations of the immigration control system, uses the women’s bodies as sites for the refiguring of both state and nation (xi).

Since 1875 the US state has looked directly at women’s bodies as they seek entry into the U.S. to apprehend them as either desirable and intelligible, or as unfit. At the border a woman is looked at and analyzed, and her admissibility decided upon based on whether or not she has been understood to be a wife, a prostitute, or some other “immoral” person (xi). But this border control hasn’t always stopped upon successful entry into the state, rather migrants, especially racially-, sexually-, and gender-marked ones find themselves monitored and disciplined by an extension of the state’s gaze into their private and public lives within the state. Luibhéid describes this surveillance as an example of the “carceral archipelago of modern society” that Michel Foucault writes about, one that includes but is not limited to the immigration control systems of the US state. Thus, a woman’s experience at the border simultaneously individuates her (much in the same way the female pilgrim is individuated in Niemann’s cover), while also tying her into a wider systematic and multi-institutional network of surveillance (xv).

So, while Niemann’s cover for the November 28, 2011 The New Yorker attempts to be critical of the ways in which US immigration is typically talked about, it ultimately fails as it needlessly further simplifies the conversation. One wonders what a more expansive canvas for “Promised Land” might allow a more critical Niemann to produce. And one wonders what an artistic representation of the migrant’s experience looks like outside the limited frame of this cover. Would Niemann draw large, imposing, SUVS cutting across the desert night, its high beams piercing through the darkness to catch a rustling bush here, a receding foot there? Would he draw the armed militias that patrol the areas just outside the border patrol’s jurisdiction? Would he draw the murmuring drones scanning the horizon for signals of brown bodies (and would Neimann transgress typical U.S. conceptions of its idealized migrants/founders by racializing them in this revised cover?)? Would Neimann find a way of representing the abstract state gaze that through all manner of institutions–legal, educational, social, political–envelop discipline the 21st-century pilgrim’s presence in “the promised land?” I wonder.

 

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Luibhéid, Eithne. Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Print.

 

 

category: Things Critical
tags: , , , , , , ,

Bartering for Citizenship

Posted by  on Wednesday, July 6th 2011     

A few weeks ago I wrote about the possible (read: likely) effects of employing certain rhetoric when advocating for same-sex marriage (namely that which aligns homosexuality with heteronormativity…homonormativity?). Historically, civil rights discourses have pitted minority groups against the dominant group in a sort of “tit-for-tat”; if you want this, then you have to give this up. If you want that, then you have to behave this way.*

NPR published a story on 28 June 2011 in which Corey Dade describes a recent rhetorical tactic being used by many undocumented youth i/o/t gain both visibility and support for legislation that would give these youth a path to citizenship:

This so-called DREAMers movement has gained wide attention for engaging a new generation of young immigrants who have grown up in America and would have been granted legal status under the legislation. Despite the bill’s failure, organizers say thousands of young people continue to “come out,” fueling an expansion of grass-roots efforts in multiple cities and making legislative pushes on the state level.

Dade gives one specific example, that of Viridiana Martinez, ” 24, who disclosed her illegal status at a rally last year, is one of thousands of young adults and teens who have organized nationwide based on a new strategy that places themselves on the front lines in the debate over immigration reform.”

Because both the gay rights movement and the immigrant rights movement (of which the undocumented youth movement is part of) are happening simultaneously in our cultural moment, we have a unique opportunity to observe and compare how the rhetoricians working within these two movements employ (or don’t) the common tropes of previous civil rights movements, and whether or not their respective rhetorical strategies take the opportunity to undermine homogeneity in the U.S., or if they too will reinforce it.

(Let me just say that I understand that people involved in civil rights movements aren’t particularly interested in how their means might be rhetorically analyzed; I understand that–first-and-foremos–civil rights activists want to ensure whatever rights they feel they are being denied. Nonetheless, some civil rights movements and the resulting legislation have been more effective than others. After all, there’s such a difference as de jure and de facto.)

Another important aspect worth mentioning of civil rights movements and their ability to be co-opted into bigger (read: national) discourses is how politicians describe, support, or denounce these movements, especially as an election season nears (and this shouldn’t be news to anyone). (But) take the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example. The way we remember the passage of the act includes JFK’s early drafting and support of it. Our collective memory also gives us Lyndon B. Johnson’s avowed efforts to pass the act immediately after he assumed the presidency. Writing for Slate.com about a recent release of recordings made of Johnson’s White House phone conversations between 1 June to 4 July 1964, Jason Sokol notes that

Five days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Johnson committed himself to a strong civil rights bill. Scholars have depicted this as a defining moment in his presidency. The native Texan wanted to show skeptical Northern liberals that he stood tall for racial equality.

The phone calls that transpired between Johnson and other law makers in the weeks leading up to the passing of the Act offer a counter-narrative to this popular story, however:

The tapes make it clear that the president who enacted the most important civil rights legislation of the last 140 years was deeply suspicious of the civil rights movement. Johnson phoned only two African-Americans during this five-week span: NAACP head Roy Wilkins and National Urban League director Whitney Young. Both were moderates. Johnson thought grass-roots leaders were pushing too fast and too hard. At one point, he referred to Martin Luther King Jr. and James Farmer as “outlaws.” In public, Johnson distanced himself from King. Scholars treat this as a pragmatic maneuver designed to hold the political center. But in these phone conversations, Johnson occasionally belittled and denounced King. His maneuvers appear rooted in personal distaste as much as political pragmatism.

It should come as no surprise that political pragmatism is also at work now that many Americans have been made aware of their proximity to undocumented youth by virtue of their “coming out.” Combine this with the widely-accepted reality that Latinos–the group which, because of media representation is often correlated with immigration, is being stereotyped and legislated against–will become a significant majority of voters in the next and subsequent election cycles, and it’s no wonder that we see politicians taking careful measure of how they react and/or respond to this public activism. For your consideration, the timing of this announcement (as reported by Dade):

ICE last week issued a memorandum granting its agents “prosecutorial discretion” to extend leniency to DREAM Act-eligible people and others while cracking down on those who pose “a clear risk to national security.” Leniency would take the form of deferred deportation…

A few days after the lauded reporter Jose Antonio Vargas disclosed his own immigration status in the New York Times Magazine, Dade asked whether or not the revelation that Vargas has been living in the U.S. illegally for decades would result in his deportation. He concluded that it wouldn’t. David Ramirez, an undocumented youth who was detained during a protest in Atlanta, GA, but who wasn’t deported, offers this simple, but accurate explanation: ”I think we got special treatment. Trying to deport us probably would have caused too much of an uproar.”

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*Consider Reconstruction. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) promised 1) citizenship to blacks; 2) due process to all persons; 3) equal protection for all people. And that’s it. The Amendment simply and only outlined what previous slaves (and future residents of the U.S.) would get. It in no way prescribed what they needed to do to “deserve” it. And yet, Amendment XVI has, for a long time, been interpreted as some sort of deal (which some, like Bill Cosby, feel blacks haven’t held up their end of) where if former slaves act and seem more like white Americans, they can be considered citizens, enjoy due process, and equal protection.

For another example, see the “If I Were a Negro” column, which ran in Negro Digest during the 1940s. The column, often penned by prominent white members of U.S. society, offered unsolicited advice to blacks hoping for something better in the years leading up to the civil rights era. Eleanor Roosevelt’s contributions offer some of the most salient examples of the “tit-for-tat” rhetoric.

category: Things Critical, Things Rhetorical
tags: , , , ,

Industriousness + Productivity = The American Way!

Posted by  on Friday, July 1st 2011     

Linton’s Week’s long-ish article on NPR, “Lazy In America: An Incomplete Social History” (1 July 2011), does a nice job of demonstrating how the tension between being productive and industrious versus having leisure time (or how one spends his/her leisure time) has continuously been used to promulgate the idea of one type of American over another:

But always there was a parallel American voice that was alarmed by donothingness. In 1973, the rate of increase in American productivity had slowed down so much, the Department of Commerce launched a $10 million advertising campaign to encourage Americans to be more productive. “Americans didn’t get rich by goofing off,” was one of the ads.

Lady Lazy leisurely lounging.

Namely, Weeks does an nice job (in a short space) of letting us hear the official voices of American identity formation–government and the media–so as to get a sense of how direct their message of either do-more/make-more or donothingness was being wielded, at specific times, to create a national sense of “Americaness.”

What Weeks doesn’t do is indicate how much of this discourse was used to Other entire groups who were resistant to do-more/make-more ideology.* Ultimately, wanting to work less and be lazy more kept plenty of people outside of  ”American” for quite some time.

 

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*Usually, these minority groups were resistant to 12-hour, six-day work weeks. See the rise of unions.

category: Things Critical
tags: ,

I swear I’m straight…except for the gay sex part

Posted by  on Saturday, June 25th 2011     

New York state is the latest–and largest–state to recognize the right of gays and lesbians to marry. By all means, this is good news as everyone who wishes to marry should be allowed to, and in every state in the U.S. However, the manner by which proponents of gay marriage have gone about gaining greater access to mainstream society might benefit from some complicating. Here’s one way we might do that:

The images of gays and lesbians that proponents of gay marriage have deployed to garner support for marriage equality from mainstream society often represent gays and lesbians as monogamous, pious, patriotic, fully-employed, home-owning, child-rearing, civic-minded, neighborly, discrete couples who just happen to be of the same sex. Ultimately, the gays and lesbians that lawmakers and mainstream society is agreeing to let marry are staunchly middle-class and, as Thaddeus Russell writes, “sexless and their relations platonic” (330).*

Russell also writes that

Today’s movement for gay marriage–a renewal of the homophile movement–ended gay liberation, is helping end straight liberation, and seeks to return all of us to the 1950s. Like the homophile movement, the gay marriage movement demands that, in order to gain acceptance as full citizens, its constituents adopt the cultural norms of the American citizen: productivity, selflessness, responsobility, sexual retraint, and the restraint of homosexual expression in particular.^ (330)

And therein lies the problem: by suggesting (the proponents of gay marriage)–or by insisting (mainstream society)–that same-sex couples who wish to marry play by the rules of heteronormativy, the rules of heteronormativity are reinforced. And this at the expense of all those who don’t wish to–or can’t–play by the rules.

Sure, there might be some gay couples who naturally look like the upstanding, all-American citizens that the rhetoric of marriage equality has proffered, but there are many more who don’t. There are, in fact, thousands upon thousands of gays and lesbians who don’t wield the same consumerist power as the ideal “American citizen” does, and by suggesting and/or insisting that we do, the false homogeneity of U.S. society is reinforced.

And reinforcing the homogeneity of U.S. society will ultimately result in a harder-fought fight for the next group who feels itself oppressed by the dominant group (now thousands-more stronger!).

 

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*Which isn’t to say that this sexless-ness is only applicable to (the image of) gays and lesbians mainstream society has been presented with–in fact, a Victorian sense of propriety and prudishness is characteristic of American society in general. So, in a way, it makes a lot of sense that the marriage equality movement would do away with sexuality if it means to gain full acceptance into mainstream society. One need only look at the various ethnic identities in U.S history that have been successful in being re-categorized from “ethnic” to “white”–the Irish, Italians, and Jews, for example–to see how so much of that success was dependent on them doing away with the ascribed lasciviousness of their culture and the adoption of more restrained and “civilized” behavior. Rhetorically speaking, proponents of gay marriage have been quite successful in doing precisely that in states such as New York.

^The homophile movement that Russell refers to here was an organized response to the antihomosexual culture of the 1950s. In February of 1950 a State Department official testified before Congress about how the State Department was overrun with homosexuals. Congress responded by initiating an investigation into the “perverts” working for the federal government that lasted for five years. The FBI surveilled thousands of Americans suspected of sexual deviance, the armed forces doubled the number of discharges on account of sexual deviance, and President Eisenhower banned all homosexuals from serving in the federal government (a pre-employment screening was used to identify homosexuals). At the state and local level, police departments conducted thousands of raids on suspected gay bars and cruising areas, and newspapers and reporters took to “reporting” the names of men and women who had been arrested for illicit sexual practices. Dozens of homophile organizations were formed during the era–the Mattachine Society, the Daughters of Bilitis, and Janus Society, for example–to offer a response. In all cases these homophile societies adopted “the politics of respectability” through the condemnation of effeminate behavior in men, masculine behavior in women, and through wearing conservative and business-proper attire. Now we know that these attempts at putting on of heteronormative airs was all for not: “The respectable movement of the 1950s failed to end police harassment (it actually increased in the 1950s and 1960s), won no civil rights, and, by eliminating the most powerful form of sexual dissent in American culture, actually contributed to the sexual conservatism of the time” (326). I ask: could the adherence to these heteronormative tropes (which–if not for the sexual liberties this institution inadvertently inherited from Gay Liberation–would still require married couples to sleep in separate beds) in the name of marriage equality also end up contributing to the conservatism of our time?

category: Things Critical, Things Rhetorical
tags: , , , , ,

Have “American Dream,” Will Travel

Posted by  on Thursday, June 16th 2011     

Julia Felsenthal’s brief but illuminating discussion of the uniqueness of the idea of the “American Dream” on Slate.com (10 June 2011), “The not-American Dream: Do other countries have national catchphrases?” stops a beat short when she aptly writes that “a central tenet of the “American Dream,” home ownership, may no longer be within reach,” because she fails to take her claim to its logical and almost too-obvious conclusion that the “American Dream” has been and continues to be entirely tied-up with the American citizen’s ability to buy, consumerism.

In the same paragraph, Felsenthal links to Jon Talton’s column in the Seattle Times in which he argues that Americans should use this “opportunity”–the current economic downturn in which fewer and fewer Americans can actually afford to own a home–to stop associating the “American Dream” so strongly with buying a house or a condo.” But if we do that, then what of the “American Dream” is there left. Not much, if anything.

What Felsenthal inadvertently does in her column (because, again, she stops short of actually making any critical claims) is further establish how the “American Dream” is but another name for consumerism, and thereby how one’s ability to acquire the “American Dream,” aka consumer power, strongly informs just how “American” one can or cannot be.*

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*The closest Felsenthal gets to making this strong of a correlation is when she writes that “the generic principle of the American dream—an identifiable vision of what it means to be middle class, and a path to achieving that—exists in some way in lots of different places.” One of those places is China, of which we’re getting reports that it will soon surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest economy. “In China,” Felsenthal writes,

as in the United States, urban middle class-ness entails owning a home and a car, as well as having access to education and travel. When talking about home ownership, the Chinese sometimes refer to wanting an urban “oasis,” a term that connotes an apartment of one’s own decoration and appointed in a modern way. Such aspirations a step away from the more traditional Chinese national idea of a society in which everyone is comfortable but nobody is rich.

It would seem that China, then, is well on its way to gaining its very own version of the “Amer”–err, “Chinese Dream.”

category: Things Critical
tags: