Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017-2018 John B. Hurford '60 Center for the Arts
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Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017-2018 John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities Haverford College featuring Jack Brower ’19 Chelsea Richardson ’18 James Gisele ’19 Emily Chazen ’18 Maurice Rippel ’19 Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017-2018 John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities Haverford College Body Text is published annually by the Body Text Editorial Board at Haverford College, 370 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, PA 19041. Formerly the Haverford Journal, it was founded in the spring of 2004 by Robert Schiff in an effort to showcase some of Haverford’s best student work in the humanities and social sciences. The publication was renamed in 2012 but still holds true to this original mission. Student work appearing in Body Text is selected by the Editorial Board. Entries are judged on the basis of academic merit, clarity of writing, persuasiveness, and other factors that contribute to the quality of a given work. All works cited as in the original text. © 2018 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF body text Madison Arnold-Scerbo ’18 /ˈbädē/ /tekst/ noun BOARD MEMBERS Tania Bagan ’18 Kevin Gibbs ’18 1 The main part of a printed text, excluding Anna Mehta ’18 items such as headings and footnotes. Ariana Wertheimer ’18 (The Oxford English Dictionary) Alice Healey ’19 Matthew Jablonski ’19 2 Haverford College’s student-run, student- Isabella Siegel ’19 Joanne Mikula ’20 written academic journal, which publishes the sharpest, most provocative undergrad- ADVISORS uate scholarship in the Humanities and James Weissinger Social Sciences and explores the limits of Kelly Jung academic writing outside the classroom. COVER ART Isabella Siegel ’19 DESIGNER Duncan Cooper TABLE OF CONTENTS 9 Environmental Violence: The 1641 Irish Rebellion 87 Right Under Your Nose: Analyzing the Conceit Jack Brower ’19 of Pests in Donne’s “The Flea” and Hayes’s “American Sonnet for My Past and Future 31 Queering Immigration: The Right to Family Assassin (Why are you bugging me…)” Life for Binational Same-Gender Couples Maurice Rippel ’19 Chelsea Richardson ’18 49 Oceanics of Un/Becomings James Gisele ’19 73 Deconstructing Patriarchy from Within the Master’s House: Feminist Musings on Carol Ann Duffy Emily Chazen ’18 LETTER FROM THE EDITORS Dear Body Text reader, year are seniors Tania Bagan and Anna Mehta, and junior exchange student Alice Healey. Welcome to the 2017-2018 edition of Body Text! The As always, we were incredibly impressed by essays in this issue were selected for their clarity and the caliber of academic writing by our fellow Haverford persuasiveness, as well as their individuality of per- students. While they span a variety of topics — from spective and diversity of expression. We believe that cows to fleas, from deconstructing intersectionality this issue embodies some of the greatest undergraduate and the patriarchy to expanding the definition of fam- academic writing that Haverford has to offer, and we are ily — these essays are all a product of a tumultuous pleased to present it to you. and divisive year in the United States. They encourage The Editorial Board is grateful for the contribu- readers to take new perspectives and to challenge the tions of last year’s editor-in-chief, Courtney Carter ’17, status quo, by engaging both indirectly and directly who led the board through an exciting period of growth with political topics. and visual rebranding. British colonization and its responses have Those returning to the board this year include been major shaping forces throughout the world since seniors Kevin Gibbs and Ariana Wertheimer, juniors the dawn of the British empire in early modernity. Matthew Jablonski and Isabella Siegel, and sophomore Jack Brower’s “Environmental Violence: The 1641 Irish Joanne Mikula. Joining our board for the first time this Rebellion” addresses one of the first sites of colonial re- sistance and examines environmental violence, one of the understudied forms of resistance used by the native of family, can nations ensure the protection of human Irish to inhibit the establishment and growth of English rights for queer families and immigrants. colonizers. Resistance took the form of disrupting the In “Oceanics of Un/Becomings” by James Gisele, production of foodstuffs and using environmental models of intersectionality are deconstructed and chal- features as weapons against the English. By reading the lenged to make room for a method of conceptualizing court depositions following the Irish Rebellion of 1641, identity and experience that the author calls oceanics. Brower helps us come to a more complete understand- They argue for an inclusion of a theory of oceanic identity ing of the impact of this form of colonial resistance on in order to mitigate the restricting nature of linear, mathe- both the English and the land itself. matical models of identity (which we would typically refer How do formalistic definitions of family pro- to as intersectionality). They pull together the arguments duce discriminatory immigration laws, and how do we of multiple thinkers from different disciplines who all formulate more inclusive family reunification policies? take on the project of expanding on Freud’s pre-Oedipal These are the questions raised by Chelsea Richardson in oceanic model. In doing so, they provide a framework her essay “Queering Immigration: The Right to Family for thinking about phenomena of identity including but Life for Binational Same-Gender Couples.” Her work not limited to “blackness and transatlantic diaspora, interrogates the restrictive nature of immigration policy femininity and maternity, immaturity and pre-Oedipal and formalistic marriage rights through an internation- modes, queerness and sex/uality, death and trauma, al perspective, one grounded in a human rights-based and Sacred or religious experience.” This essay’s scope definition of family. Only through a more-encompassing and ambition is exceptional and presents a compelling understanding of the function, rather than the structure, pushback against academic tradition. Emily Chazen explores the potential for on the significance and functionality the image of the female liberation within a capitalist society in her bug assumes in Hayes’ and Donne’s work, and explores essay “Deconstructing the Patriarchy from Within how the insect is used, in both poems, to introduce the Master’s House: Feminist Musings on Carol Ann themes of love, religion, and eroticism. Rippel’s com- Duffy.” Chazen highlights Duffy’s somewhat coun- parative analysis offers insight into the evolution of the terintuitive appropriation of gendered ideologies and traditional, 16th century sonnet, which Hayes revises capitalist rhetoric to dismantle the gendered systems in function of his political message. that oppress women. By appropriating the language of pre-existing frameworks, Duffy often reinforces the Sincerely, very gendered systems she hopes to undermine even as she does tremendous work to transform oppressive Madison Arnold-Scerbo ’18 social systems. Her poetry ultimately appears as both Tania Bagan ’18 a powerful force for social justice and a poignant re- Kevin Gibbs ’18 minder that the perfect reform of engrained inequality Anna Mehta ’18 is likely unachievable. Ariana Wertheimer ’18 In his essay, “Right Under Your Nose,” Maurice Alice Healey ’19 Rippel draws a series of connections between contem- Matthew Jablonski ’19 porary poet Terrance Hayes’ political sonnet, “Why Isabella Siegel ’19 Are you Bugging Me,” and John Donne’s traditional, Joanne Mikula ’20 modern sonnet, “The Flea.” Rippel focuses specifically ENVIRONMENTAL VIOLENCE: THE 1641 IRISH REBELLION Jack Brower On the evening of October 22, 1641, Sir Phelim O’Neill, detail on how O’Neill’s seemly brilliant plan unfolded.2 an important political and military leader in Ireland, Livestock appear so frequently in 17th century British snuck behind enemy lines to seize Charlemont castle, colonial sources that historians like Maxwell take their sparking a ten-year rebellion against Protestant presence for granted.3 Although these creatures often settlers. O’Neill accomplished this military feat by feigning to search for stolen cattle.1 Percival Maxwell, the historian who examined O’Mellan’s journal to 2 Unfortunately I cannot fnd more information on discover this military ruse, does not provide any more O’Mellan’s journal. It only exists in its original form at the Trinity College Dublin library. The offcial citation is O’Mellan’s Journal TCD MSS 1071: 16-19. 1 Percival Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641, (Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 214. 3 Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, (New York: BROWER 9 make mundane appearances in colonial sources, such arrived Protestants. Fearful of starvation due to lack as the 1641 depositions, one should not dismiss them as of food and unwilling to accept a foreign presence historically irrelevant. To the Irish, cattle symbolized that aimed to replace Catholicism with Protestantism, British colonialism. Thus, the confederates targeted Irish peasants and elites in Ulster County (the most these animals and other symbols of British agriculture northern county) took up arms against the colonizers to frustrate English colonial development. Indeed, in hopes of reclaiming their lands. The rebellion rapidly unremitting rebel violence against Protestant planta- spread throughout the country, creating an eleven-year tions reveals what the Irish resented most about British conflict that England’s military leader Oliver Cromwell