Grandma died this morning. I had written a letter to her earlier this year, a letter I had been meaning to write for a long time. I'm glad that I got around to doing it. That letter is below.
Dear Grandma—
You’ve been on my mind. I’ve been thinking about the gift of your presence in my life. So much is said these days about the struggles of women who juggle the roles of worker, mother, wife, daughter, friend….I don’t have to look very far to be strengthened and encouraged as I go through these same struggles. You are right there. Your life is an example to me, in the truest and best sense of the word. You are the root of a tree that has born the sweetest fruit imaginable.
Looking back on those days when I was putting myself through school by cleaning toilets and washing towels at the recreation center…at those cold Michigan winters when I barely had enough money to catch the bus to my classes, I see things clearly. It was YOUR spirit that kept me going, kept me striving even when I didn’t get into grad school the first time around. It was the spirit you passed on to your daughter G. that gave me a family and a place to live while I worked my way through graduate school. There were so many times when I thought I wouldn’t be able to make it—that I wasn’t strong enough, or smart enough. In those darkest moments, God has been there, and so have you. I am because you are--because of the spirit that you possess, a spirit that you gave to each of your children—and all of them are an inspiration to me. Even though life has not been a “crystal stair” for any of us, we are who we are because of you.
As a child, I remember your son's sketch books and fashion designs, L.'s fancy clothes and shoes, G.’s wonderful desserts, J.’s scripts and my mother’s medical books and dictionaries…
As a woman with a daughter of my own, my heart seems to overflow when I think of the fact that J. pursued his dreams in New York, that L.—with only an associate’s degree—has become the first African American general manager of a department store, that G.—after retiring from her state job after 20 years—has become a pastry chef and traveled the world, that J. has financed her own movies and entered them in film festivals, even while working full time as a special education teacher.
And I think about my mom. I think about how she had me when she was nineteen. I think about how she raised me and my brothers and sister and then went back to school to pursue her own dream. I think of how proud I am to say that age 50, my mother became a doctor.
And then, my thoughts turn back to you, when I lay awake at night and my heart literally aches with the desire to be a writer. I believe that is why I have chosen to help African American girls and boys express themselves through stories. As I try to nurture their creative spirits, I wonder if I am doing enough to keep my own dream alive.
Langston Hughes once asked “what happens to a dream deferred?” Like your own dreams, each of your children’s dreams have been deferred. But we have held on to them, nurtured them and kept the fire going when those dreams were just coals among ashes. I imagine that this is what you did, when you wrote bits of poems on church programs. When you wrote the beginnings of stories late at night after your children were asleep, as you hemmed pants and sewed curtains for your customers.
I am so incredibly proud that at the age of 84, you've taken creative writing classes, written children's stories...and you have published your own book of poetry. Through it all—through working, through raising your children, through caring for Granddad as he struggled with Alzheimer’s, you kept your dream alive.
I want you to know that I believe that I can be a writer, and it is because of you. You are my inspiration and my muse. Your spirit lives on in my mother, and it lives on in my heart and my soul.
I love you so very much, and I just wanted you to know that God has blessed me beyond belief by making you a part of my life.
Your Granddaughter,
f.e.wright
Friday, September 28, 2007
Monday, September 24, 2007
From My Other Blog Again
I'm sensing a theme here. I keep having doubts about the posts that I make to my non-anonymous, "professional" blog. Makes me think that perhaps I should just skip the middle step and post anything longer than a paragraph here at LouLou's. Warning: the post below is a tad lengthy.
On Ontologies and the Moon
Relationality and mobility are the root metaphors that have come to guide my thinking about new media and new literacies. Specifically, the centrality of "connectedness" to my theorizing of mobility has led me to an exploration of relational ontologies, as they are operationalized in different disciplines.
Connectedness. How I would get better at defining what I meant by connectedness? I mean, Cresswell goes back to Soja and LeFebvre because of this idea of a third space, when in reality, the third space is just another way of restating a dualism between the first and second. I know I'm not quite getting it, but I feel like Soja is saying that there's first and secondspace and thirdspace is the "best" because it is both first and second. It's not additive or multiplicative, but it is still dependent on first and secondspace for it's identity or definitionality. Which makes me think of what Dewey said, or at least my loose paraphrase of what he said--a concept that gets its identity from a prior concept is not identifying or articulating something new, it's just restating the old in the form of a dualism. Right now, thirdspace seems to be trilaterialism with a bunch of fancy words around it.
I have a colleague that references strategic essentialism when I try to talk through my emerging conceptualization of mobility in the context of new literacies, but I really hope that what I'm talking about is starting to move away from a duality between place and mobility...I hope that I'm beginning to think through more sophisticated ways to talk about place and mobility as interdependent.
I was just laying upstairs in the bed with my daughter snoring gently in my ear, her arm resting on the pillow above my head and my mind was churning away…I absolutely did not want to get up from that place, next to her and next to my husband. But I felt as if my thoughts would disappear if I didn't get up and try to type them out. I told myself, in my mind, Get your ass up out of bed. Get the fuck up. It was so hard to pull myself away from that space/place, I think that my thoughts were enabled because of my connection, my laying there next to them.
Instead of the warmth of my daughter's breath on my cheek, now what I have in terms of a sensory experience is the sound of my fingers hitting a keyboard....A very lame exchange if you ask me.
In any case, I was thinking about the way that Cresswell's geographical understanding shapes his presentation of the concepts of space, place, representation, and practice. He talks at great length of the way we've framed the idea of "home" and the way that people have alternatively demonized and celebrated "nonplaces" (Auge)…but home, nonplaces (airports, McDonalds), these things are human constructions…True, there is nothing that human activity has not altered or changed, with the NPR newstory this afternoon about the speedy melting of the icecap being clear evidence of "man's" destructive touch….but when we talk about place, why is it that we orient ourselves continually around the places humans have created but do not talk about our relationship or metaphorical understanding of the natural environment? I know that anthropologists talk at length about the way that the environment is a part of our lives….but as they study culture, its not the natural world that is the focus but what people do with it. I know
I'm losing the original thought I was trying to express…. What I'm trying to say is that even through Cresswsell is giving credit to Butler and to Bourdieu for their theorizing of the way that our bodies are the sites of cultural production, difference, habitus and general meaning making at different units of analysis, they do not discuss the way that these same bodies are an important part of how we see place and space as we look at the natural world....Or maybe they do. I'll keep reading. Until then, here are my own thoughts.
Sky, Sea, Rock
I know I am not alone when I say that I feel something powerful when I look at the sky. I am never disappointed at the ability of the sky's expansiveness and the movement of clouds across it to provoke wonder and awe. And it's not just the movement of the clouds, its the way that the colors and shapes of the clouds at dawn or twilight are really quite magical. I focus on these times of day because often that's when I'm coming to or from home down a long stretch of highway in the Deep South. My commute consists of travel up and down a ribbon of asphalt punctuated every now and then by a chicken or hog-toting eighteen wheeler, in the midst of gently rolling hills, and underneath a sky that makes me feel large and quite small at the same time. I would not feel this magic in the same way if I was not situated with my feet or the wheels of my car on the ground--anyone who's been in the window seat of a 747 can attest to that. Different kind of magic all together. There is something about looking up from a "situated" place at the sky
…Pilots talk about the danger of losing one's bearings when flying a plane because of the way in which you can lose a sense of what is up and what is down. It is this fear that popular culture plays on when they show a space traveler who, as the victim of foul play, has been set adrift forever in space. This same fear is used in movies set in the ocean. Think about Titanic, Poseiden, The Hunt for Red October, or The Abyss. Conversely, think about how different it feels, the sense of wonder and awe and peace one feels when we have the opportunity to take a long walk along the beach. Even the innocent child's game of "keep away" with the incoming waves of the tide seems to be implicitly tied to our constant search for both a figure and a ground, a metaphor for the interdependent way that our "rock" (earth) and the "unknown" (sea/sky) helps us feel as if we are a part of something "real."
Feeling connected, feeling that we are a part of something real requires, absolultely requires a connection--be it to an idea, a place, a person, a discourse….and it absolutely requires a PRACTICE that is based in those connections…Feeling that we are a part of something real requires an acknowledged practice of the interdependence between space and place…Of course, this is nothing new to anyone who is reading this that has spent much more time than I puzzling through these things, and in much deeper ways, but given that I'm pretty much the only one that consistently reads my blog, if you happen upon this post, please forgive my broad brushstrokes and feel free to help me think more deeply. So maybe I'm not even too the brushstrokes stage yet. I guess I'm mostly fingerpainting now...but you never know...someday soon I might be doing water colors like Bob Ross used to...
In any case. The other night I was driving home and I looked up, as I often do, at the moon. On this evening it was a half moon, a pale glowing yellow…like a photograph of a luminous bowl provisionally taped to a midnight sky. As its position changed, its color deepened…I started trying to capture what it was that I was seeing. I imagined that the moon was this large rock, slippery with sea moss, half submerged in some vast body of water. I felt reassured by its presence…and even as I watched, wisps of nighttime clouds coalesced above this half-circle moon, like waves of some water that had been captured by Ross's brush. Skip forward to today.
I was thinking about the concept of time. Actually, I was thinking about why it was that I was trying to do something weird like imagining that the moon, or time were my "friends." The moon is cool with me, but it is much more difficult for me to be friendly with time. And then I started thinking about how the moon aganst the sky is also a metaphor for our relationship, an uneasy one, with time. We have a constant need to mark time,to fix ourselves in particular ways based on our understanding of where we are relative to the moments that have just passed or that seem to be approaching. The moon helps us to do that, whether it is in the course of a single night, and we are standing in a field or whether we are traveling home on a course that takes us West , and then Southwest…Or whether it is in the course of a month and we see the way the moon changes as it goes through different phases…The sky and the sea are scary precisely because they have the ability to unfix us from our ways of understanding who we are within the flow of time. We know through the work of so many philosophers and social scientists that it is through time that we make meaning of our lives and the lives of others. That's why, when we see Brad Pitt's character at the end of The Perfect Storm, bobbing up and down so precariously on top of the roiling monstrosity of the hurricane-whipped ocean, it conjurs up feelings of hoplessness and despair.
That's also why we are so very excited to see video of the ballroom of the Titanic still intact. We like to know that there are dishes and knives and spoons that are sitting at the bottom of the ocean in this great ship's kitchen, just waiting for us to come down, fish them out, clean them up and eat off of them again.
All of this leads back to the importance of a relational ontology for social science research and methodology. Isn't all of social science predicated on this idea? Whether one's view of what can be known falls up or down the objectivity/subjectivity continuum, what we choose to try to know still requires that we orient ourselves through relations…how fast does a bowling ball fall from the Tower of Pisa in relation to a feather? Aren't things so much better for black people now that when we were slaves? In what kind of relationship does a dependent and independent variable exist? Who am I now vs. who I was ten years ago? We constantly meditate, fixate, and relate through time/temporality.
That is why the sea and the sky are so scary when we're in the middle of it, why the moon is comforting when we are standing on the ground and why we penetrate the sky with space shuttles and satellites.…Time is just too central to our lives for us to be on friendly terms with it.
On Ontologies and the Moon
Relationality and mobility are the root metaphors that have come to guide my thinking about new media and new literacies. Specifically, the centrality of "connectedness" to my theorizing of mobility has led me to an exploration of relational ontologies, as they are operationalized in different disciplines.
Connectedness. How I would get better at defining what I meant by connectedness? I mean, Cresswell goes back to Soja and LeFebvre because of this idea of a third space, when in reality, the third space is just another way of restating a dualism between the first and second. I know I'm not quite getting it, but I feel like Soja is saying that there's first and secondspace and thirdspace is the "best" because it is both first and second. It's not additive or multiplicative, but it is still dependent on first and secondspace for it's identity or definitionality. Which makes me think of what Dewey said, or at least my loose paraphrase of what he said--a concept that gets its identity from a prior concept is not identifying or articulating something new, it's just restating the old in the form of a dualism. Right now, thirdspace seems to be trilaterialism with a bunch of fancy words around it.
I have a colleague that references strategic essentialism when I try to talk through my emerging conceptualization of mobility in the context of new literacies, but I really hope that what I'm talking about is starting to move away from a duality between place and mobility...I hope that I'm beginning to think through more sophisticated ways to talk about place and mobility as interdependent.
I was just laying upstairs in the bed with my daughter snoring gently in my ear, her arm resting on the pillow above my head and my mind was churning away…I absolutely did not want to get up from that place, next to her and next to my husband. But I felt as if my thoughts would disappear if I didn't get up and try to type them out. I told myself, in my mind, Get your ass up out of bed. Get the fuck up. It was so hard to pull myself away from that space/place, I think that my thoughts were enabled because of my connection, my laying there next to them.
Instead of the warmth of my daughter's breath on my cheek, now what I have in terms of a sensory experience is the sound of my fingers hitting a keyboard....A very lame exchange if you ask me.
In any case, I was thinking about the way that Cresswell's geographical understanding shapes his presentation of the concepts of space, place, representation, and practice. He talks at great length of the way we've framed the idea of "home" and the way that people have alternatively demonized and celebrated "nonplaces" (Auge)…but home, nonplaces (airports, McDonalds), these things are human constructions…True, there is nothing that human activity has not altered or changed, with the NPR newstory this afternoon about the speedy melting of the icecap being clear evidence of "man's" destructive touch….but when we talk about place, why is it that we orient ourselves continually around the places humans have created but do not talk about our relationship or metaphorical understanding of the natural environment? I know that anthropologists talk at length about the way that the environment is a part of our lives….but as they study culture, its not the natural world that is the focus but what people do with it. I know
I'm losing the original thought I was trying to express…. What I'm trying to say is that even through Cresswsell is giving credit to Butler and to Bourdieu for their theorizing of the way that our bodies are the sites of cultural production, difference, habitus and general meaning making at different units of analysis, they do not discuss the way that these same bodies are an important part of how we see place and space as we look at the natural world....Or maybe they do. I'll keep reading. Until then, here are my own thoughts.
Sky, Sea, Rock
I know I am not alone when I say that I feel something powerful when I look at the sky. I am never disappointed at the ability of the sky's expansiveness and the movement of clouds across it to provoke wonder and awe. And it's not just the movement of the clouds, its the way that the colors and shapes of the clouds at dawn or twilight are really quite magical. I focus on these times of day because often that's when I'm coming to or from home down a long stretch of highway in the Deep South. My commute consists of travel up and down a ribbon of asphalt punctuated every now and then by a chicken or hog-toting eighteen wheeler, in the midst of gently rolling hills, and underneath a sky that makes me feel large and quite small at the same time. I would not feel this magic in the same way if I was not situated with my feet or the wheels of my car on the ground--anyone who's been in the window seat of a 747 can attest to that. Different kind of magic all together. There is something about looking up from a "situated" place at the sky
…Pilots talk about the danger of losing one's bearings when flying a plane because of the way in which you can lose a sense of what is up and what is down. It is this fear that popular culture plays on when they show a space traveler who, as the victim of foul play, has been set adrift forever in space. This same fear is used in movies set in the ocean. Think about Titanic, Poseiden, The Hunt for Red October, or The Abyss. Conversely, think about how different it feels, the sense of wonder and awe and peace one feels when we have the opportunity to take a long walk along the beach. Even the innocent child's game of "keep away" with the incoming waves of the tide seems to be implicitly tied to our constant search for both a figure and a ground, a metaphor for the interdependent way that our "rock" (earth) and the "unknown" (sea/sky) helps us feel as if we are a part of something "real."
Feeling connected, feeling that we are a part of something real requires, absolultely requires a connection--be it to an idea, a place, a person, a discourse….and it absolutely requires a PRACTICE that is based in those connections…Feeling that we are a part of something real requires an acknowledged practice of the interdependence between space and place…Of course, this is nothing new to anyone who is reading this that has spent much more time than I puzzling through these things, and in much deeper ways, but given that I'm pretty much the only one that consistently reads my blog, if you happen upon this post, please forgive my broad brushstrokes and feel free to help me think more deeply. So maybe I'm not even too the brushstrokes stage yet. I guess I'm mostly fingerpainting now...but you never know...someday soon I might be doing water colors like Bob Ross used to...
In any case. The other night I was driving home and I looked up, as I often do, at the moon. On this evening it was a half moon, a pale glowing yellow…like a photograph of a luminous bowl provisionally taped to a midnight sky. As its position changed, its color deepened…I started trying to capture what it was that I was seeing. I imagined that the moon was this large rock, slippery with sea moss, half submerged in some vast body of water. I felt reassured by its presence…and even as I watched, wisps of nighttime clouds coalesced above this half-circle moon, like waves of some water that had been captured by Ross's brush. Skip forward to today.
I was thinking about the concept of time. Actually, I was thinking about why it was that I was trying to do something weird like imagining that the moon, or time were my "friends." The moon is cool with me, but it is much more difficult for me to be friendly with time. And then I started thinking about how the moon aganst the sky is also a metaphor for our relationship, an uneasy one, with time. We have a constant need to mark time,to fix ourselves in particular ways based on our understanding of where we are relative to the moments that have just passed or that seem to be approaching. The moon helps us to do that, whether it is in the course of a single night, and we are standing in a field or whether we are traveling home on a course that takes us West , and then Southwest…Or whether it is in the course of a month and we see the way the moon changes as it goes through different phases…The sky and the sea are scary precisely because they have the ability to unfix us from our ways of understanding who we are within the flow of time. We know through the work of so many philosophers and social scientists that it is through time that we make meaning of our lives and the lives of others. That's why, when we see Brad Pitt's character at the end of The Perfect Storm, bobbing up and down so precariously on top of the roiling monstrosity of the hurricane-whipped ocean, it conjurs up feelings of hoplessness and despair.
That's also why we are so very excited to see video of the ballroom of the Titanic still intact. We like to know that there are dishes and knives and spoons that are sitting at the bottom of the ocean in this great ship's kitchen, just waiting for us to come down, fish them out, clean them up and eat off of them again.
All of this leads back to the importance of a relational ontology for social science research and methodology. Isn't all of social science predicated on this idea? Whether one's view of what can be known falls up or down the objectivity/subjectivity continuum, what we choose to try to know still requires that we orient ourselves through relations…how fast does a bowling ball fall from the Tower of Pisa in relation to a feather? Aren't things so much better for black people now that when we were slaves? In what kind of relationship does a dependent and independent variable exist? Who am I now vs. who I was ten years ago? We constantly meditate, fixate, and relate through time/temporality.
That is why the sea and the sky are so scary when we're in the middle of it, why the moon is comforting when we are standing on the ground and why we penetrate the sky with space shuttles and satellites.…Time is just too central to our lives for us to be on friendly terms with it.
More about (the Real) Me
God has plans for you. Or, at least this is what an angel named Earl told Detective Anna "Grace" Darko in the season finale of Saving Grace on TNT. In the show, Grace is a boozing, slutty police detective who is visited on a regular basis by Earl, who has been sent to "help her"…I'd tivoed the final show, and I just watched the end of it after having a phone meeting with a graduate student who asked for some advice on her plans for coursework.
Though Saving Grace is basically a darker, more focused version of that smarmy 90's show, "Touched by an Angel," the underlying hook is the same: God has a plan for you. One of the most powerful ideas behind television & movie plots that pulls me in (and pulls others, I assume, given Saving Grace's popularity) is the concept that there is a purpose to my life, a purpose that only I can fulfill. God's plan. I'm certan this is why I cannot give up…and don't really want to give up…my belief in an omniscient God (see an earlier post below).
I'm not claiming that my thoughts are darker than most, that my inner turmoil is more violent or more important than anyone else's. I don't need to make that claim to own my own experience. I do know that in order to keep going, to get out of bed, to try to do whatever… I have to hope and pray that there is some presence "looking down" on me that knows that even as I fail spectacularly in most of my endeavors…
It's okay.
Or, at least, even if I don't think it's okay, there is someone/thing "up there" that feels that I am okay and crazy as it sounds, I should keep persisting, trying, living.
I had an important conversation with a friend last week. We talked about this blog, and I made light of the fact that the ads that Blogger felt it most appropriate to list at the bottom of the page were ones that started with the phrase "Feeling down? Your'e not alone--there's help out there." In and through our conversation I put some things together (with the help of a couple bottles of Sam Adams).
I realized that I'm writing this blog to gain clarity, whatever that might mean. I realized that I am not attempting to find someone whose experience mirrors my own (actually a very frightening thought). And, as much as I might want it to be about my daughter, my relationship with my husband, my struggles to be a better scholar/researcher, the blog is about me owning up to the fact that I struggle with being depressed.
A lot.
It fucking burns me up to write that. One more thing to add to my ten foot long of list of personal failings and flaws? Fuck! What's next? And then I think, it should make me feel good to admit that, right? I mean, isn't the truth supposed to set you free, give you wings like Red Bull? No, not really. Most of the time telling the truth about myself just feels shitty.
So…for what it's worth, I'll keep writing about my life, about how shitty it feels to struggle with depression, about the good things that do, on occassion, happen. I'll be honest about my struggles and I'll keep hoping that at some point I'll feel a little bit better. That, and I'll stop scheduling, then canceling appointments with my therapist. Thank God for Tivo and TNT.
Though Saving Grace is basically a darker, more focused version of that smarmy 90's show, "Touched by an Angel," the underlying hook is the same: God has a plan for you. One of the most powerful ideas behind television & movie plots that pulls me in (and pulls others, I assume, given Saving Grace's popularity) is the concept that there is a purpose to my life, a purpose that only I can fulfill. God's plan. I'm certan this is why I cannot give up…and don't really want to give up…my belief in an omniscient God (see an earlier post below).
I'm not claiming that my thoughts are darker than most, that my inner turmoil is more violent or more important than anyone else's. I don't need to make that claim to own my own experience. I do know that in order to keep going, to get out of bed, to try to do whatever… I have to hope and pray that there is some presence "looking down" on me that knows that even as I fail spectacularly in most of my endeavors…
It's okay.
Or, at least, even if I don't think it's okay, there is someone/thing "up there" that feels that I am okay and crazy as it sounds, I should keep persisting, trying, living.
I had an important conversation with a friend last week. We talked about this blog, and I made light of the fact that the ads that Blogger felt it most appropriate to list at the bottom of the page were ones that started with the phrase "Feeling down? Your'e not alone--there's help out there." In and through our conversation I put some things together (with the help of a couple bottles of Sam Adams).
I realized that I'm writing this blog to gain clarity, whatever that might mean. I realized that I am not attempting to find someone whose experience mirrors my own (actually a very frightening thought). And, as much as I might want it to be about my daughter, my relationship with my husband, my struggles to be a better scholar/researcher, the blog is about me owning up to the fact that I struggle with being depressed.
A lot.
It fucking burns me up to write that. One more thing to add to my ten foot long of list of personal failings and flaws? Fuck! What's next? And then I think, it should make me feel good to admit that, right? I mean, isn't the truth supposed to set you free, give you wings like Red Bull? No, not really. Most of the time telling the truth about myself just feels shitty.
So…for what it's worth, I'll keep writing about my life, about how shitty it feels to struggle with depression, about the good things that do, on occassion, happen. I'll be honest about my struggles and I'll keep hoping that at some point I'll feel a little bit better. That, and I'll stop scheduling, then canceling appointments with my therapist. Thank God for Tivo and TNT.
Friday, September 14, 2007
From my other blog life...
...Still thinking about the Hollywoodization of anthropologists, "Bones," in particular. I'm certain that the cult of personality, as manifested in our professional meetings, is partially to blame for my preoccupation. Bones is just Hollywood's version of the cool social scientist that draws a standing room only crowd when he/she gives a presentation at a conference.
And really, who can forget the first graduate student that rushes into one's office excitedly exclaiming "Oh my gosh, I just got back from the .......Association meeting and I got to meet (Fill in the Blank)! He/She was SOOO cool!" Oh, wait a minute...I was that graduate student.
Anyway. I'm presently preoccupied with the question of how Hollywood represents the life of a woman whose profession requires her to represent the lives and identities of others. I took a second look at this question. In talking with graduate students, I often ask them what the "question behind the question is..." As most of us do, I've found that they tend to first create questions for which they already have answers. So...I already knew the answer to the question above. Bones:
Is sexy
Likes to carry a gun and can do pseudo-Karate (a la Steven Seagal)
Relies on a postpositivist ontology (otherwise, how would she ever catch the real murderer?)
Must wear a ballet top and a chunky necklace of unknown ethnic orgin at least once every episodeSo what is the question behind the question? Well...given my burgeoning interest in mobility and a very real desire to stop acting starstruck everytime I meet (insert name here), I think it is this: How do the creators of Bones see (and therefore write) the mobility of a white, female, gun toting, karate-kicking, postpositivist, heterosexual forensic anthropologist? I think the answer might be best addressed through a scene in which Bones goes to a hip hop club (only at the urging of her artsy, exhibitionist friend) in order to get practice at "being social" and "having fun." At the bar, Bones asks if her "costume is all right," after which she and her friend proceed to the dance floor and have this dialogue with four nameless club goers who I imagine might described in the script as "Ghetto Bitch #1," "Ghetto Bitch #2," "Thuggish Black Dude," and "(Smart) Ghetto Bitch #3:"
Bones: I love this music...It's so tribal!
Friend: Don't say tribal sweetie...
Bones: Why--because of all the Black people?
Friend: Sweetie, just for tonight have fun, stop dissecting and take part!
Bones: African Americans aren't the only one with tribal heritage.
GB#1: (Arms crossed, stepping in front of Bones) You sayin' we natives of some tribe?
Bones: Anthropologically speaking, we're all members of tribes!
GB#2: You better shut your mouth!
Bones: No, I just meant hip hop mirrors the direct visceral connection you see in tribal communication...
TBM: WHAT?
Bones: After the Cartesian split in the 17th century we separted our minds from our bodies...the numeros from the animalistic...
GB#1: Are you callin' me an animal, bitch?
SGB#3: No, bitch, she's usin Cartesian philosophy to say she's down with the music.
GB#1: Who you callin a bitch, bitch? (To Bones): Get out my way. (Tries to push Bones aside). Bones: (Pseudo-Karate chops GB#1 and knocks her to the floor)
Of course, I was deeply offended by the absolute racist/classist cheeziness with which this scene has imagined an exchange between African American club goers and Bones. After watching the scene a second time and listening more closely to the dialogue, I'm thinking that each of the GB's probably studied acting at Julliard.
...Okay, I admit it. I was also put off by the way in which Bones was portrayed as so completely uncool.
....And then I remembered the last time I was at a conference and stepped into a club that had been inundated with "real" enebriated social scientists (present company included).
Maybe Bones isn't so bad after all.
And really, who can forget the first graduate student that rushes into one's office excitedly exclaiming "Oh my gosh, I just got back from the .......Association meeting and I got to meet (Fill in the Blank)! He/She was SOOO cool!" Oh, wait a minute...I was that graduate student.
Anyway. I'm presently preoccupied with the question of how Hollywood represents the life of a woman whose profession requires her to represent the lives and identities of others. I took a second look at this question. In talking with graduate students, I often ask them what the "question behind the question is..." As most of us do, I've found that they tend to first create questions for which they already have answers. So...I already knew the answer to the question above. Bones:
Is sexy
Likes to carry a gun and can do pseudo-Karate (a la Steven Seagal)
Relies on a postpositivist ontology (otherwise, how would she ever catch the real murderer?)
Must wear a ballet top and a chunky necklace of unknown ethnic orgin at least once every episodeSo what is the question behind the question? Well...given my burgeoning interest in mobility and a very real desire to stop acting starstruck everytime I meet (insert name here), I think it is this: How do the creators of Bones see (and therefore write) the mobility of a white, female, gun toting, karate-kicking, postpositivist, heterosexual forensic anthropologist? I think the answer might be best addressed through a scene in which Bones goes to a hip hop club (only at the urging of her artsy, exhibitionist friend) in order to get practice at "being social" and "having fun." At the bar, Bones asks if her "costume is all right," after which she and her friend proceed to the dance floor and have this dialogue with four nameless club goers who I imagine might described in the script as "Ghetto Bitch #1," "Ghetto Bitch #2," "Thuggish Black Dude," and "(Smart) Ghetto Bitch #3:"
Bones: I love this music...It's so tribal!
Friend: Don't say tribal sweetie...
Bones: Why--because of all the Black people?
Friend: Sweetie, just for tonight have fun, stop dissecting and take part!
Bones: African Americans aren't the only one with tribal heritage.
GB#1: (Arms crossed, stepping in front of Bones) You sayin' we natives of some tribe?
Bones: Anthropologically speaking, we're all members of tribes!
GB#2: You better shut your mouth!
Bones: No, I just meant hip hop mirrors the direct visceral connection you see in tribal communication...
TBM: WHAT?
Bones: After the Cartesian split in the 17th century we separted our minds from our bodies...the numeros from the animalistic...
GB#1: Are you callin' me an animal, bitch?
SGB#3: No, bitch, she's usin Cartesian philosophy to say she's down with the music.
GB#1: Who you callin a bitch, bitch? (To Bones): Get out my way. (Tries to push Bones aside). Bones: (Pseudo-Karate chops GB#1 and knocks her to the floor)
Of course, I was deeply offended by the absolute racist/classist cheeziness with which this scene has imagined an exchange between African American club goers and Bones. After watching the scene a second time and listening more closely to the dialogue, I'm thinking that each of the GB's probably studied acting at Julliard.
...Okay, I admit it. I was also put off by the way in which Bones was portrayed as so completely uncool.
....And then I remembered the last time I was at a conference and stepped into a club that had been inundated with "real" enebriated social scientists (present company included).
Maybe Bones isn't so bad after all.
Monday, September 10, 2007
Play Time
I am on a quest to link my work with my play. For example, I would like nothing better than to have a caramel sunday from McDonald's, to rent the first season of Bones, and find the episode where Bones goes to a Hip Hop club and gets into a fight with a stereotypically "ghetto-acting" Black lady after Bones says that she really likes the "animalistic" beat of the music.
I mean, there are times when popular culture just seems like the most wonderful petri dish for attempting half-baked deconstructions of race, class and gender. It's the intellectual compliment to my as-yet unconsumed sunday. Or maybe its more like a twinkie for my brain? Anyway.
The video store is only five minutes away. I'll be back in as much time as it would take me to procrastinate about doing the work I'm currently feeling guilty for not having done....
I mean, there are times when popular culture just seems like the most wonderful petri dish for attempting half-baked deconstructions of race, class and gender. It's the intellectual compliment to my as-yet unconsumed sunday. Or maybe its more like a twinkie for my brain? Anyway.
The video store is only five minutes away. I'll be back in as much time as it would take me to procrastinate about doing the work I'm currently feeling guilty for not having done....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
