Unbecoming Adults: Adolescence and the Technologies of Difference in Post

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Unbecoming Adults:

Adolescence and the Technologies of Difference

in Post-1960s US Ethnic Literature and Culture

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

James K. Harris, M.A.

Graduate Program in English

The Ohio State University

2017

Dissertation Committee:

Dr. Martin Joseph Ponce, Advisor

Dr. Lynn Itagaki

Dr. Jian Chen

James K. Harris

2017

Abstract

Adolescence has always been a cultural construction. The designation of a separate space apart from the presumed innocence of childhood and the myths of autonomy and responsibility that come to define adulthood is a surprisingly modern phenomenon. As such, adolescence bears the traces of the ideologies of race, gender, sexuality, and nation that attend so much of the period that calls itself “modernity.” My dissertation asks how writers and artists of color imagine themselves into the archive of coming of age narratives in post-1960s US literature and culture. In thinking about the importance of identity in the period following the advent of nominal civil rights, I offer the “long(er) civil rights movement” as a way of resisting the move to periodize the struggles through which difference has historically accrued meaning in the US nation- state. Each chapter centers around a “technology,” the academy, the body, the entertainment industry, and the internet, which is essential to the formation of adolescent identity in the post-war era, alongside a key term in the lexicon of American culture that accrues added meanings when filtered through the experience of difference. Ultimately, I argue for understanding the liminal space of adolescence as a dynamic metaphor for writers and artists of color to work out questions about the meaning of difference and the concept of progress.

My first chapter, “Becoming Excellent,” places Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of

Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez and Rigoberto Gonzalez’s Butterfly Boy: ii

Memoirs of a Chicano Mariposa side by side to unpack the racialized valences of

“excellence” inside the American academy. I read these two memoirs as overlapping, and at times competing, accounts of the fraught and often invisible labor involved in becoming “one of the good ones.” The second, “Becoming Trans,” considers the advent of trans identity in the context of questions about desire, and metamorphosis. I turn to

Octavia Butler’s sci-fi epic Adulthood Rights as eerily prescient in its understanding of both the increasing value attached to trans identity and the very serious risks of belonging simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. The third chapter “Becoming Deviant” examines to two more recent films, Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow and Dee Rees’

Pariah to ask what currency terms like Independent Black and Asian American have on the marketplace of contemporary cinema. I argue that the emergent value attached to non- normative, or deviant, cinematic types can be understood as a part of a larger emphasis on the optics of multiculturalism and the performance of inclusion. For the final chapter,

“Becoming Digital,” I ask what cultural labor the “digital” performs as a mediating concept in postwar understandings of adolescence and innocence. Here, I pursue a two- fold strategy of both offering a materialist account of the infrastructure underpinning the technological revolution often shorthanded as “the digital age” while also attending to literary and creative works, Sarah Schulman’s The Child and a computer program designed to simulate a virtual child for the purposes of soliciting potential predators, that ground these issues in human-scale stakes and consequences.

iii

Dedication

For Lindsay

Vita

2010...... B.A. Liberal Arts, Ohio University

2012...... M.A. English, Ohio State University

2011 to present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department

of English, The Ohio State University

Fields of Study

Major Field: English

Table of Contents Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... iv

Vita ...... v

Fields of Study ...... v

Table of Contents ...... vi

List of Figures ...... vii

Introduction: Adolescence and the Technologies of Difference...... - 1 -

Chapter 1: The Academy: ...... 30

Becoming Excellent: Inventing the “Good Minority Student” in Richard Rodriguez’s

Hunger of Memory and Rigoberto Gonzalez’s Butterfly Boy

Chapter 2: The Body ...... 76

Becoming Trans: Desire and Metamorphosis in Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites

Chapter 3: The Entertainment Industry ...... 122

Becoming Deviant: Difference and Cinema in the Information Age

Chapter 4: The Internet ...... 165

Becoming Digital: Imagining Sex and Adolescence in the Information Age

Epilogue: The Struggle is Long(er) ...... 211

Bibliography ...... 221 vi

List of Figures

Figure 1 - "Sweetie" ...... 203

vii

Introduction: Adolescence and the Technologies of Difference

“…You’re not asking yourself the real question that America needs to decide once and for all. And that

question is: how old is fifteen, really?”

-Dave Chappelle, For What It’s Worth

By the fall of 2016, America’s Broadcasting Company (ABC) had finally hit on a winning ratings formula. Following a few years of steeply declining revenues,1 the network was finding its stride. The winning combination proved to be a healthy dose of the idyllic multiculturalism coalescing under the banner of “ShondaLand”2 and a kaleidoscopic array of family sitcoms, each centered around a distinct modality of difference. And so, that fall found ABC with a lineup that neatly packaged gay (Modern

Family), Black (black-ish), Chinese-American (Fresh off the Boat), disabled

1 A situation surely not aided by the Writer’s Guild of America strike from November 2007 to` February 2008. For more on the Writer’s Strike, see Johnathan Handel, Hollywood on Strike!: An Industry at War in the Internet Age – The Writer’s Guild Strike and Screen Actors Guild Stalemate (Online: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011). 2 For signs of the arrival of ShondaLand into popular culture consciousness, one need look no further than the formation of the “ShondaLand studies” area of the National Popular Culture Association. While the term officially refers to the television shows created by Shonda Rhyme’s production company, ShondaLand, it has accrued a wider resonance as a way of talking about difference, desire, and the politics of multiculturalism and race in television. For more, see Treva Lindsey, et. al, “‘I woke up like this’: Desire and Respectability in ShondaLand” (presentation, ShondaLand Symposium, Duke University, Durham, NC, January 19, 2015). https://fsp.trinity.duke.edu/projects/shondaland-symposium.

(Speechless), (white) female (American Housewife), and working-class white (The

Middle) identity into lucrative consumable bits, separately but equally united under the flag of “network.” It was a strategy for incorporating difference that had already become familiar to ABC’s parent company, The Walt Disney Company, which had spent the previous two decades desperately trying to recast its image away from the anti-Semitic legacy of its beloved founder.3 Though retroactive posturing would find Disney claiming

Pocahontas and later Mulan as having always already been part of their vaunted

“Princess” lineage, in 2009 the company decided to go all in on injecting diversity into the lineup with the release of The Princess and the Frog, and to far greater fan-fare,

Tiana, the first Black Disney Princess.4

These images of an increasingly diverse plethora of lifestyles remained a stark contrast to the network’s news coverage, consumed as it was by stories about the ongoing abuse and murder of black teenagers at the hands of police officers5 alongside those of

3 For more on the troubled history of Disney and difference, see Jason Sperb, Disney’s Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence, and the Hidden Histories of Song of the South (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), and Eric Avila, “‘A Rage for Order’: Disneyland and the Suburban Ideal,” in Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 4 Interestingly, the film itself was met with somewhat muted praise, and even scorn in some circles. For more, see Brooke Barnes, “Her Prince Has Come. Critics, Too,” The New York Times (May 29, 2009), http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/fashion/31disney.html. Nevertheless, Tiana has remained a crucial part of Disney’s all-important “Toys and Merchandising” agenda. 5 Some realities confound the logic of citational practice. Among the chief impediments driving the formation of the grassroots organization that would become Black Lives Matter was concern over a lack of reliable statistics that might provide precision in understanding black deaths at the hands of the state. That the state has been so consistently and emphatically resistant to providing such information tells us much about the grisly possibilities they likely conceal. In the absence of totalizing numbers, we are left with only snapshots, or, more likely video clips and a cultural history that informs what we see in the just off-screen. For one such snapshot, see Wesley Lowry, “Aren’t more white people than black people killed by police? Yes, but no,” The Washington Post (July 11, 2016). https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/arent-more-white-people-than- black-people-killed-by-police-yes-but-no/?utm_term=.ad03a5ca6e0a. - 2 - preparations to begin arresting and deporting undocumented minors under the incoming administration’s expanded understanding of the peculiar neologism “criminal aliens.”6

For a nation that had always been driven by its own self-image,7 the cognitive dissonance required to maintain the post-war fantasy of racial liberalism8 in the face of increasing resegregation9 was clearly taking its toll. How these two archives, one a testament to the nation’s obsession with the promise of youth and persistent need and desire for cultural difference, the other evidence of the intransigence of white supremacist ideology, could coexist so comfortably inside a technology refashioned from the remnants of an increasingly bloated (and newly-race conscious) military infrastructure and through

6 As any number of journalists were quick to point out, this term would only be possible at the scale the Trump administration imagines/needs if the definition of criminal is collapsed into alien, thus making being alien into the crime that justifies its application. For more, see Dara Lind, “Donald Trump promises to deport 3 million ‘illegal immigrant criminals,’ That’s literally impossible.” Vox, November 14, 2016, http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/14/13623004/trump-deport-million-immigrants. 7 For more on this point, see Brian Ward, “‘I want my country back, I want my dream back’: Barack Obama and the Appeal of Postracial Fictions,” in eds. Danielle L. McGuire and John Dittmer Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 329-364. 8 My understanding of postwar racial liberalism comes from Karen Ferguson’s discussion of the complex interplay between the motives of white liberals and black radical and nationalist movements in attempting to restructure the political economy of the postwar nation: “Whites reshaped racial liberalism in their effort to forge a national consensus on race in the wake of the seismic changes wrought by both the legislative victories of the civil rights movement and the urban crisis of postindustrial, ghettoized cities that spurred black power.” She goes on to describe how this required both maintaining exclusion and increasingly managing inclusion: “In this period, the critical national project for the American liberal establishment was to domesticate black power and its challenge to liberalism, reforging a social consensus on race.” Karen Ferguson, Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 3-4. 9 A phenomenon which, by summer of 2016, had become so pervasive as to warrant notice from the Washington Post’s editorial board: “62 years after the Supreme Court acted to end segregation in public education, U.S. schools in the 21st century are rapidly resegregating — a function of widening disparities in wealth, entrenched housing patterns and policies, and disparate allocations of funding by government at all levels.” Editorial Board, “A resurgence of resegregation,” The Washington Post (June 5, 2016). https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-resurgence-of-resegregation/2016/06/05/a3b2ce76-1ebd- 11e6-b6e0-c53b7ef63b45_story.html?utm_term=.4d1b60497fd3. - 3 - which images of the modern homestead coalesce is the central paradox this project aims to unpack.

Adolescence is contested terrain. Within the academy, competing schools of approach argue not infrequently over which discipline can claim it as their proper object.10 In the broader world, this question of who can claim adolescence takes on even more immediate and dire importance. In one of his more famous stand-up routines, comedian Dave Chappelle dives right into the heart of the matter. After a moment bemoaning the diminished status of black celebrity, here figured in the icon of R&B singer R. Kelly, Chappelle engages with the popular press coverage of a scandal in which

Kelly allegedly filmed himself urinating on a fifteen-year-old fan. Chappelle prevaricates momentarily over Kelly’s innocence before shifting gears to focus on the construction of underage victimhood: “I’m not saying that a person is as smart as they’re gonna be at fifteen…But I am saying, fifteen to me is old enough to decide whether or not you wanna be pissed on.”11 This point is offered as a direct contrast to media coverage of Elizabeth

Smart, the fifteen-year-old white girl from Utah who was missing for six months and held hostage within a few miles of her home: “I’m just saying, you kidnap me, you gonna have to take me more than 8 miles from my house. That’s two exits!” Extending the joke(?) further, he goes on to highlight the disparity that renders Smart a perpetual

10 Here I am thinking of “proper objects” in the complicated sense that Robyn Wiegman invokes in arguing for the importance of object determination to the formation of a fields with “social justice” as an overarching goal. See Robyn Wiegman, “Doing Justice with Objects, or the ‘Progress’ of Gender,” in Object Lessons (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 36-91. 11 Dave Chappelle, For What It’s Worth, directed by Stan Lathan (2007, Los Angeles, CA: Sony Pictures). - 4 - innocent in need of protection in contrast to the treatment men of color receive at the same age, quipping:

…that’s the discrepancy. When you talk about a little girl like Elizabeth

Smart, the country thinks that fifteen is so young and so innocent. On the flip side,

here comes fifteen again. Now we talking about a fifteen-year-old black kid in

Florida. This kid accidentally killed his neighbor when he’s practicing wrestling

moves they saw on TV. Now, was he a kid? No, they gave him life. They always

try our fifteen-year-olds as adults.12

Chappelle’s insights reveal much. They frame conversations about adolescence as necessarily invested in questions of social value, the ideologies of difference, and the productive uses of identity in constructing sympathy, consent, intention, and abjection. In this moment, he simultaneously chronicles an experience of racial adolescence that insists on its centrality to the American project as he gestures toward new ways of thinking about race, age, gender, and sexuality.

Chappelle’s work is also helpful for underscoring the theoretical value in minority cultural productions. That minority culture is a vital site for articulating theories of difference and identity in contemporary American society is one of the founding precepts of this project. In this commitment to taking culture seriously, it builds on the work of women of color feminists like Barbara Christian, who compellingly argues for appreciating the theoretical import of cultural production: “My folk…have always been a race for theory – though more in the form of the hieroglyph, a written figure which is

12 Ibid. - 5 - both figural and abstract, both beautiful and communicative.”13 Christian and others have long insisted on reading minority literature and culture as vital sites for understanding values and ideals that exist outside dominant heteronormative ideologies. It is a strategy that Lisa Lowe adopts in her own proposition for the importance of critiquing culture:

Culture is the medium of the present – the imagined equivalences and

identifications through which the individual invents lived relationship with the

national collective – but it is simultaneously the site that mediates the past,

through which history is grasped as difference, as fragments, shocks, and flashes

of disjunction. It is through culture that the subject becomes, acts, and speaks

itself as ‘American.’ It is likewise in culture that individuals and collectivities

struggle and remember, and in that difficult remembering, imagine and practice

both subject and community differently.14

Unbecoming Adults: Adolescence and the Technologies of Difference in Post-

1960s US Ethnic Literature and Culture sifts through the archive of coming of age narratives by writers and artists of color to uncover the histories of racialized adolescence during what might be called the long(er) Civil Rights Movement. Historian Jacquelyn

Dowd Hall offers the formation of the “long civil rights movement” as a counter to the historical master narrative that would isolate the struggle over social equality and the value of difference to a single tidy decade. As she explains:

…confining the civil rights struggle to the South, to bowdlerized heroes,

to a single halcyon decade, and to limited, noneconomic objectives…ensures the

13 Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique 6 (1987): 52. 14 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 2. - 6 -

status of the classical phase as a triumphal moment in a larger American progress

narrative, yet it undermines its gravitas. It prevents one of the most remarkable

mass movements in American history from speaking effectively to the challenges

of our time.15

Hall’s formation of the long civil rights movement, in contrast, paints a much broader historical picture that “[takes] root in the liberal and radical milieu of the late

1930s, was intimately tied to the ‘rise and fall of the New Deal Order,’ accelerated during

World War II, stretched far beyond the South, was continuously and ferociously contested, and in the 1960s and 1970s inspired a ‘movement of movements’ that ‘def[ies] any narrative of collapse.’”16 This project contributes to the growing body of scholarship invested in thinking through the long civil rights period as it makes a case for extending that trajectory through the close of the twentieth century. Unbecoming Adults argues that the concerns that animate representations of adolescence by minority artists throughout the second-half of the twentieth century and beyond can never be divorced from the debates and disagreements which came to define the civil rights struggle.

Why adolescence? As is perhaps to be expected, the adolescent arrives late to the history of the US national project. A curious byproduct of the transformation from an agrarian economy to the industrial landscape that would define American “modernity” at the close of the nineteenth century, the adolescent was invented, as many scholars and critics have compellingly argued, in response to increasing concerns about urban poverty

15 Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 no. 4 (2005): 1234. 16 Ibid., 1235 - 7 - and the growing influence of immigrant culture.17 As such, it has long been a flashpoint for anxieties about cultural change, the dangers of encroaching modernity, the loss of presumed innocence and increasingly libertine attitudes about intimacy and kinship.

As a new generation began to emerge that was significantly more diverse, both ethnically and politically, adolescent identity cohered through the commonality in that generational difference, with a healthy assist from the proliferation of new social structures that would create a much more unified experience of the period between childhood and adulthood for most people. The turn of the twentieth century saw not only an explosion in immigrant populations from around Europe (and to a lesser extent, the rest of the world) but also an increase in jobs requiring laborers with at least high school- levels of education. For this reason, as Kent Baxter points out, by the 1890s, high school enrollment throughout the country doubled, with colleges seeing a 38.4% increase, over their enrollment numbers from a mere decade before.18 Of course, as is usually the case, the changing economic and social incentives of late nineteenth century living provided opportunities for new industries to emerge, here in the form of the burgeoning “leisure time” industry which worked to create entertainment (read: diversions) for the new class of young workers who were relocating to urban centers en masse in search of educational opportunities and higher wages.

17 For more on the invention of adolescence, see Sarah E. Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America (Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), and Kent Baxter, The Modern Age: Turn-of-the-Century American Culture and the Invention of Adolescence (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008). 18 Baxter, The Modern Age, 4. - 8 -

Though the coinage of the term “teenager” is typically attributed to a 1941 issue of Popular Science Monthly,19 the social group it names had become a fixture of

American social life decades before. Still, the appearance of the “teenager” is hardly insignificant as it marries the developments of adolescence to changes in technology, society, and politics that would define America’s shifting modes of self-identification during the latter half of the twentieth century. Or, put another way, given that adolescence was always simultaneously an invention of the industrial era and a metaphor for concerns about societal change, the mid-century moment finds both the meaning of adolescence and the particular technologies through which social difference is constructed undergoing almost unimaginable change.

To say that the period of US history following the second world war was dramatically different from what came before would be both a tremendous understatement and a healthy dose of wishful thinking. On the one hand, the same nation that had written racial segregation into its formal identity and codified it with each individual branch of government, judicially in the form of the Plessy Vs. Ferguson

Supreme Court decision, legislatively with the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act of

1882, and executively through an almost comically long list of Presidential orders and amicus briefs, was now attempting to remake itself as the global face of racial liberalism in contradistinction to the homogeneity of its competing cultural ideology: the Soviet

Union. At the same time, concerns about the threat of foreign invasion or influence, the

19 Tellingly, the first appearance of the teenager comes in a moment of exasperated incredulity with the author declaring: “I never knew teen-agers could be so serious.” - 9 - growing civil unrest among minority populations throughout the country,20 and the challenge to the structure of the nuclear family from both queer and women’s rights groups21 sparked a resurgent conservatism that found its most powerful articulation in the ideological purification ritual of McCarthyism.

And so it is with the project of adolescence in the latter half of the twentieth century: a constant push-and-pull between the forces of social change and the obstinacy of cultural conservatism. As in the decades before it, the teenager of the 1950s represented a nexus of assumptions about the nature of youth and concerns over the shifting cultural landscape against which identity is constructed. Yet in all of these overlapping assumptions, certain commonalities remain. Writing about the cultural construction of adolescence, Nancy Lesko reconstructs the triad of race, gender, and nation through which the “teenager” is articulated: “When I state that adolescence was raced, I mean that it carried ideas of proper and mature human beings that stemmed directly from middle-class white perspectives…[by] gendered, I mean that emerging ideas of teenagers and their proper growth centered on masculine characteristics as desired and necessary for the progress of individuals and societies.”22 As for the role of the nation, Lesko argues that “at the heart of the adolescent problem and potential is a sense of citizenship, and…proper development is meant to produce well socialized,

20 For more the cultural development of black nationalist ideology during the period, see James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 21 For more on the importance of gender and, more specifically, backlash to queer identity at the core of McCarthyism in the 1950s, see David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 22 Nancy Lesko, Act Your Age!: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence (New York: Routledge, 2001), 6 - 10 - productive citizens who will bolster the nation’s policies, both domestically and abroad.”23

Even still, we might stop short of arguing, as Chappelle and others have, that the space of adolescence, with its incredible leniency for so-called “youthful indiscretions,” is off limits for nonwhites. As Chappelle’s own work, and the nation’s trouble past have shown, minorities are endlessly creative about writing themselves into histories that demand their exclusion. Theorists of race, colonialism, and social difference have offered an array of terms to describe this interplay: from mimicry24 to signification25, disidentification26 to mimesis27. Each names a gesture, however small or covert, that allows difference to write its own subjectivity into the archive of lived experience. Yet each of these strategies remains predicated in some way on participating in the very systems one imagines oneself as working against.

Unbecoming Adults asks how the experience of difference is written into the history of American adolescence in the wake of the massive political and social upheavals that would characterize American life in the closing decades of the twentieth century and beyond. I begin not with the immediate aftermath of World War II, but rather about a generation after, when the seeds of social agitation begin to bear the fruit of

23 Ibid., 7 24 See Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse." Discipleship 28 (1984): 125-133. 25 See Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 26 A term borrowed from José Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1999) 27 For more on mimesis, Susan Kozel’s explication of Luce Irigaray’s feminist interventions is helpful. See "The Diabolical Strategy of Mimesis: Luce Irigaray's Reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty." Hypatia 11.3 (1996): 114-129. - 11 - meaningful change. My goal is to understand how the emerging discourses of equality and inclusiveness collide with the growing homogeneity of mainstream ideology and the persistent reoccurrences of conservative backlash to inform how minority writers employ, extend, revise, critique, and expand notions of adolescence. In pursuit of a genealogy of coming-of-age narratives by minority writers, I hope to highlight the versatility of adolescence as metaphor for working through questions of value, desire, rejection, and incorporation. At the same time, this project recounts a materialist history of the particular technologies through which difference is manifested in the age of the so-called

“shared society”28 to ask how changes to the exigencies of everyday living influence the production of difference itself.

Unbecoming Adults is structured around inquiries into four technologies that have been integral to the creation of adolescence in the US post-1960: the academy in

“Becoming Excellent,” the body in “Becoming Trans,” the entertainment industry in

“Becoming Deviant,” and the internet in “Becoming Digital.” Some of these technologies will seem familiar to students of earlier epochs. Indeed, both “the academy” and “the body” have been central to the designation of adolescence since its inception. Others gesture toward more distinctly “post-modern” concerns. But I argue that even the more familiar elements of adolescence undergo drastic change during the second half of the

28 This term originated among particularly optimistic NGOs. The World Leadership Alliance’s Club de Madrid offers a fairly standard explanation: “We define a Shared Society as one in which all individuals and constituent groups hold status as equally contributing participants, free to express their differences while integrating their voices within the broader population. It respects everyone’s dignity and human rights while providing every individual with equal opportunity.” See Club de Madrid, “Project Summary: The Shared Societies Project,” (public report, Madrid, 2016. http://www.clubmadrid.org/en/ssp/project_summary. - 12 - twentieth century. Consequently, even ideas as apparently familiar as school and boyhood had, by the 1960s, been made deeply unfamiliar. Another way to think about this project, then, is to say that it queers post-1960 adolescence.

“How old is fifteen, really?” is a vexing question for many reasons. For Dave

Chappelle, it highlights the intersection of racial and gender disparities at work that render the adolescent black (female) body in ecstasy29 necessarily exploited while the adolescent black (male) body at play becomes always already a potent threat. Age has always been a contentious issue, in minorities cultures in particular. So much rests upon youth, hopes for a better future, concerns about a world of injustice that knows no boundaries, fears of alienation, all of which are compounded by the inequities maintained under the guise of race, gender and sexuality. At the same time, minority artists (by which I mean women, queers, racial others, and Judith Butler’s infamous “illimitable et cetera”)30 have long turned to the coming of age trope as a metaphor for a kind of coming to consciousness. This project contributes to the growing body of scholarship that argues for understanding the liminal space of adolescence as especially fertile terrain for critiquing normative conceptions of the “good life.”31

29 To borrow Jennifer Nash’s brilliant formulation. For more, see Jennifer Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 30 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 182. 31 Other work in this lineage includes Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), Geta LeSeur, Ten is the Age of Darkness: The Black Bildungsroman (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995), and Martin Japtok, Growing Up Ethnic: Nationalism and the Bildungsroman in African American and Jewish American Fiction (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010). - 13 -

Women of color feminists June Jordan,32 Barbara Smith, whose formation of

Black feminist criticism this works aspires to do justice to, Hortense Spillers,33 and

Gloria Anzaldúa,34 and others have been invaluable in informing my understanding of the meaning and value of difference. It also articulates a theory of adolescence and temporality that is deeply indebted to the work of queer theorists such as Heather Love,35

J. Jack Halberstam,36 and Lee Edelman who have produced rigorous critiques of the normative assumptions of temporality and progress while clearing space for understanding queer forms of development and survival in contemporary life.

What’s past is prologue. For that reason, I want to begin by briefly looking back to the overlapping and intersecting histories of difference that came to define American identity during and after the 1960s. From there, I offer a theory of adolescence as a metaphor for liminality that can account for the manifold uses to which it is put throughout the genres and forms of ethnic literature and culture. Armed with a bit of context and a common language, I conclude by providing a guide to the journey ahead.

32 We’ll return to Jordan’s early work in the next chapter, but her more later contributions have been equally important to my understanding of the relationship between race and community. For more, see June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essay of June Jordan (New York: Civitas Books, 2002). 33 I’m particularly invested in Spiller’s work on the formation of racialized subjectivity as a historically situated phenomenon. See, Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17 no.2: 65-81. 34 Anzaldúa’s theorization of the borderlands as a liminal space charged with affective potentiality remains essential. See Gloria Anzadúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). 35 Particularly Love’s work on the temporality of queer feeling. See Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 36 Especially Halberstam’s notion of queer time and place. See, J. Jack Halberstam, In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005). - 14 -

The Long(er) Civil Rights Movement – Adolescence since the 1960s

Particularly given that they follow immediately at the heels of the so-called

“greatest generation,” the 1960s inspire an impressive array of superlatives. For some, it represents the beginning of the end of American hegemony,37 for others it was the birth of counterculture.38 Most analyses tend to cohere around the tension between the peaceful ignorance of mainstream culture and the growing social consciousness of minority groups. It was the decade of Leave it to Beaver and The Feminine Mystique. It was the beginning of ethnic studies programs and formal Civil Rights legislation as well as a resurgence in racially-motivated terrorism.39 It was a decade that began with a fight over whether homosexuality was obscene per se40 and ended in the riots at Compton’s

Cafeteria and Stonewall. Historian Jeff Kisseloff names the youth of this period the

“generation on fire” in recognition of the increasing emphasis on social agitation, protest, and resistance as strategies for young activists. And indeed, from classroom sit-ins to bra- burnings, by the 1960s the discourse of “change” was coming to dominant the national imaginary of the nation’s youth.41 Nevertheless, our long view of history reminds us that

37 For more on the resurgence of white nationalist identity politics as a particular instantiation of nostalgia for the 1960s, see Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012). 38 A refreshingly novel take on this argument can be found in Bethany Hillman, Dressing for the Culture Wars: Style and the Politics of Self-Representation in the 1960s and 1970s (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015). 39 The Southern Poverty Law Center offers a helpful primer on the many acts of violence and intimidation undertaken by white nationalists in response to the advancements of people of color throughout the decade: Battling the Klan in the 1960s. Montgomery, AL: SPLC Intelligence Report, 2009. Online. 40 Technically, the Supreme Court decision in One, Inc. Vs. Olesen, which overturned a lower-court ruling that declared homosexual content to be necessarily obscene in all instances, was decided in 1958, but its impact would reverberate throughout the following decade. 41 Clayborne Carson offers a fascinating history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that details the shifting modes of protest spearheaded by student groups throughout the decade. See - 15 - this heightened visibility was largely the result of political and historical forces which had been set into motion decades before.

While many historians locate the birth of the modern US nation at around the time of the New Deal, James Sparrow makes a compelling argument for thinking about the second world war as the moment when the nation truly began to imagine itself as a coherent whole, “From sea to shining sea.”42 With its mutual (if not entirely equal) investments in welfare and warfare, the US during and after World War II is structured around a profoundly different set of interests and imperatives than the model of nationhood that preceded it. Sparrow demonstrates how, through everyday interactions like the draft, but also in smaller moments like commodities rationing and the sale of war bonds, citizens began to understand the government as an intimate part of their everyday lives. At the same time, this added sense of presence meant that people began to demand more from their government. These demands took many forms, from lifetime benefits for former soldiers to the development and maintenance of a national infrastructure that would render the country more seemingly whole to social equality for marginalized groups (particularly women and African Americans, though other groups would soon follow).

Sparrow’s warfare state is predicated on the citizenry being personally invested in the nation’s successes and failures in the international arena. And so, while America would refuse to formally enter another military conflict following the end of World War

Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). 42 See James Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). - 16 -

II, the nation and its citizens were more than ready to engage in an ideological war (and a series of proxy military operations,43 both covert and not) against the new foreign menace emerging to the east.

In another fascinating turn of history, the 1950s finds American popular culture overrun with anxieties about cultural invasion,44 the dangerous potential of rebellion,45 and the growing influence of minority culture. As the growth of the interstate highways drew the nation closer together, fears about the Soviet Union and the potential for nuclear catastrophe created a climate of mass paranoia that operationalized primarily as repression. The 1950s is almost terrifying in its effortless juxtaposition of images of modernity and progress with those of violence and injustice. “White flight” is the terminology typically given to the cycles of targeted blight and redevelopment that reshuffled the urban landscape of the nation and gave birth to the suburbs.46 What that term occludes is the aggressive projects of racial, gendered, and sexual discrimination that allowed the suburbs to coalesce in the national imaginary as a pristinely modern oasis from the troubles of contemporary living.

Mary Dudziak has demonstrated how widespread social inequality became a serious liability for the US during the Cold War. Having just won a war that it claimed as

43 Interestingly, even the textbooks used throughout the nation to teach the conflicts in this period refer to them as “wars,” Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. That the nation refuses to formally accept such designations is telling. 44 As a case in point, check out the science fiction classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (dir. Walter Wanger, 1957) 45 See J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (New York: Little Brown and Company, 1951), or, for a more cinematic approach, Rebel Without a Cause (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1955). 46 For more on this point, see Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). - 17 - a moral victory over the forces of racism and bigotry, the US was forced to confront its own legacy of slavery and segregation as the Soviet Union began turning those legacies against America in aggressive propaganda campaigns. Worried about the reputation of the US on the international stage, the nation’s politicians and intellectual leaders quickly became invested in the discourse of (at least nominal) Civil Rights to counter international criticism.47

So, for a nation that had once told its members of color that “[i]t is obvious that they were not even in the minds of the framers of the Constitution when they were conferring special rights and privileges upon the citizens of a State in every other part of the Union,”48 the Cold War created new incentives for minority inclusion and participation. Beginning with the formal desegregation of public schools in 195449 and continuing throughout the following decade, a series of legislative and judicial victories dramatically altered the political and structural realities of difference. A nation that had once insisted on the virtue of “separate but equal” was coming instead to embrace the image of the interethnic collaboration, moving difference from the side to the heart of the matter. In one vein, we can say that the 1960s was the adolescence of American multiculturalism, offspring of the politics of Civil Rights and fears of foreign interference, and committed to the values of the newly invigorated nation-state.

47 For more on the importance of the Cold War to the discourse of American civil rights, see Dudziak’s Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 48 Plessy V. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896) 49 A history to which we will return in greater detail in Chapter 1. - 18 -

The embrace of difference accounts neatly for the fate of the welfare state at the close of the twentieth century. Where the second part of Sparrow’s dyad, warfare, is concerned, though, difference would prove somewhat more difficult to incorporate.

Suzanna Reiss has examined how US drug policy was always about maintaining a racial hierarchy in which whiteness consumes, brown-ness produces and blackness suffers.50 In a separate but similar tradition, Nick Turse has examined how campaigns of indiscriminate violence waged against non-European combatants served as fertile testing grounds for developing new military technologies as well as necessary outlets for imperial anger and aggression.51 Multicultural American identity “grew up” we could say in a climate of increasingly vehement anti-colonial/anti-imperial sentiment globally. It is both intimately intertwined with these global social justice movements52 and diametrically opposed to their goal of a world without boundaries or borders.

Beyond the geopolitical quandaries (quagmires?) posed by the advent of nominal

Civil Rights, or what Hall would call the “classical phase,” the terrain of culture was undergoing a tectonic shift of its own. The term postmodernism can often feel needlessly vague. Generally located around the 1960s, it is a term that began life in the world of architecture (and, more appropriately esoterically, architecture criticism) before quickly become the favorite buzzword of everyone from literary critics to filmmakers, visual

50 See Suzanna Reiss, We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 51 See Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: MacMillan, 2013). 52 Let us never forget that Martin Luther King was not assassinated for agitating for Civil Rights for American blacks. It was his move toward global solidarity for the world’s poor that proved a bridge too far. - 19 - artists to musicians. Broadly speaking, the term typically denotes, as Brian McHale has argued, an “ontological break,”53 wherein society becomes overrun with questions about meaning, the value of meaning, the purpose of culture, and the possibilities of the (recent) past. But as many theorists of minority culture have pointed out, postmodernism (and its philosophical justification: poststructuralism) moved to embrace the end of subjectivity as we know it just as the categories for inclusion were expanding beyond the purview of exclusively white men. In a sentiment that calls to mind Christian’s insights about how minority artists are excluded from the canon of critical theorists, Sharon Monteith and

Malcolm Halliwell point out how “[i]n the historical moment in which individuals came to voice and the cultural was celebrated as experiential, the importance of the individual began to be worn away in the poststructuralist move toward decentering the subject.”54

Yet, in this tension, there is potential. This project reconnects the theoretical lineages that drive both ethnic literature and culture as well as the intellectual offshoots of poststructuralist thinking. In its emphasis unpacking the structural underpinnings of social difference and its commitment to articulating the critical value of cultural production, Unbecoming Adults contributes to the growing body of queer of color critique.55 In the next section, I want to briefly rehearse a theory of adolescence and liminality that highlights the affinities between race and queer studies which animate my analysis.

53 See Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1977) 54 Sharon Monteith and Martin Halliwell, Twentieth-Century American Culture: American Culture in the 1960s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 185. 55 For more on the combination of racial materialism and poststructuralist thinking the defines my approach to queer of color critique, see Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). - 20 -

Queer Time and the Liminality of Adolescence

Temporality has long held a special place in the world of queer theory. Born at least in part of the impulse toward poststructuralism that defined continental theory throughout the 1960s and 70s, queer theory has become one of the most generative and capacious ideological constellations for asking questions about nature and normativity.

As a locus for concerns about development, family, vulnerability, life, death, intimacy, and embodiment, temporality has remained a flashpoint in debates about the proper role and limitation of queer interventions. Unsurprisingly then, where temporality as a theoretical paradigm comes into conversation with the material experience of adolescence, there is room for lively discussion.

Lee Edelman describes how US political discourse is overdetermined by the logic of reproductive futurity. For Edelman, the nation justifies its existence (and the attendant atrocities) through a discourse of preserving an image of the future that is predicated on the continuation of the nuclear family. The strategy of queer theory, he argues rather polemically, should be to embrace the end of futurity and jettison the ideological baggage necessarily entwined with the image of the child:

If Cardinal Law, by adducing this bitter concentrate of a governing

futurism so fully invested in the figure of the child that it manages to justify

refusing health care to the adults that those children become, if Cardinal Law can

thus give voice to the mortifying mantra of a communal jouissance committed to

the fetishization of the child at the expense of whatever it renders queer, then we

- 21 -

must respond not only by insisting on our right to enjoy on an equal footing the

various prerogatives of the social order, not only by avowing our capacity to

confirm the integrity of the social order by demonstrating the selfless and

enduring love we bestow on the partners we'd gladly fly to Hawaii in order to

marry or on the children we'd as eagerly fly to China or Guatemala in order to

adopt, but also by saying explicitly what Law and the law of the symbolic he

represents hear, more clearly even than we do perhaps, in every public avowal of

queer sexuality or identity: fuck the social order and the figural children paraded

before us as its terroristic emblem; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Miz; fuck

the poor innocent kid on the 'Net; fuck Laws both with capital "L"s and with

small; fuck the whole network of symbolic relations and the future that serves as

its prop.56

Speaking back to this idea, other scholars have insisted on resisting the move to political nihilism and the abandonment of the child. José Muñoz for his part takes issue with the absence of difference in Edelman’s notion of “the child”: “Theories of queer temporality that fail to factor in the relational relevance of race or class merely reproduce a crypto-universal white gay subject that is weirdly atemporal—which to say a subject whose time is a restricted and restricting hollowed-out present free of the need for the challenge of imagining a futurity that exists beyond the self or the here and now.”57

56 Lee Edelman, “The Future is Kid’s Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive,” Narrative 6, no. 1 (1998): 29. 57 José Muñoz, “Cruising the Toilet: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity,” GLQ 13, no.2 (2007): 360. - 22 -

In contrast to this vision, Muñoz offers “queer futurity” as a counter to the normative logic of “straight” time. Linking his work to Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of mestiza consciousness, Muñoz outlines the aim of his approach as “a looking back to a fecund no-longer-conscious in the service of a futurity that resists the various violent asymmetries that dominate the present.”58 For Muñoz, both the “not quite here” and the

“no longer conscious” gesture toward the radical potential of queer futurity, for, as he explains “[q]ueerness, if it is to have any political resonance, needs to be more than an identitarian marker and articulate a forward-dawning futurity.”59 In figuring the possibilities of the past from the position of a future that remains uncertain, the coming- of-age narratives I discuss open themselves up to Muñoz’s version of queer futurity. Even in the instances where their potentiality collapses into normative expectations, I argue that their texts leave space for imagining otherwise.

Elizabeth Freeman characterizes queer temporality as a project which “consists in mining the present for signs of undetonated energy from past revolutions.”60 Following that logic, this project insists on queering adolescence to ask what versions of adult subjectivity failed, faded, or where denied. Many of the artists I discuss engage directly with questions of sex, sexuality, and queer sex. Yet even where those themes are absent, the problems they pose vis-a-vis the stakes of normativity, the possibilities of kinship and the nature of development never fade away entirely.

58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), xvi. - 23 -

That adolescence is a period of “transition” seems almost too trite to bear repeating. But transition as a metaphor has come increasingly under critical scrutiny.

Writing in the foreword for the edited collection Landscapes of Liminality: Between

Space and Place, Robert Tally describes the liminal as a “utopia of the in-between.”

Tally’s invocation of “utopia” shares more than a linguistic similarity to the work on queerness that Muñoz and others have done in its emphasis on understanding the liminal as a space of “in-between-ness” that avoids the logic of essentialism and the entropy of stasis.61

In critical theory, liminality represents both precarity (all the ways things could go awry) and potentiality (all the ways they could go well). In many ways, the same could be said of both queerness and adolescence. This project argues for a queer reading of the liminal space of adolescence in minority literature and culture that accounts for both the histories of injustice through which minority identity in the US has historically been constituted as well as the methods of growth, survival, and even pleasure that have rendered minority communities the envy of the Western world.

I frame the objects of this study as “coming of age” narratives in part to foreground the importance of liminality to my critical approach. Tellingly, this project is not concerned with either “children’s” or “young adult” literature, both rather awkward designations that name intended audiences more than specific content. Instead I am invested in thinking about what adolescence means and how it is understood by

61 See Robert T. Tally, "A Utopia of the In-Between, or Limning the Liminal," in Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place. Ed. Dara Downey, Ian Kinane and Elizabeth Parker (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016), 1-15. - 24 - communities who have historically had such a vexed relationship to its ideals. After all, as Princess Tiana well knows, it is the parents far more than their children who determine which dolls on offer eventually find their way into the home. In so doing, these parents decide for themselves but also signal for their children, what images of adolescence they are willing to consume. We might similarly think of US ethnic literature and culture’s adult-authored variations on the “coming of age” trope as another way of producing a counterdiscourse of American adolescence, one that is more attentive to both difference and the structural apparatuses through which difference is produced and maintained.

The Journey to Come

I mentioned earlier that each chapter is framed around a particular technology which has been integral to the development of adolescence in the US post-1960. In addition to a technology, each chapter also considers a particular imperative created by the advent of that technology. In pairing both together, I hope to demonstrate how the development of new technologies impacted not only the meaning of adolescence but also the nature and value of difference. Moving difference from the margins to the center of our understanding of contemporary adolescence, each chapter unpacks a key term in the lexicon of late-twentieth-century living that has unique salience within the genealogy of ethnic literature and culture.

The first chapter, “Becoming Excellent: Inventing the Good Minority Student in

Richard Rodriguez’s The Hunger of Memory and Rigoberto Gonzalez’s Butterfly Boy:

Memoirs of a Chicano Mariposa,” takes up the image of the academy as it appears in

- 25 -

Latino literature during the advent of affirmative action and its backlash. Building on

Roderick Ferguson’s insight that “[t]he ‘academy’ names that mode of institutionality and power that delivers [minority difference] over for institutional validation, certification, and legibility, bringing them into entirely new circumstances of valorization,”62 this chapter considers the politics of excellence in the memoirs of two writers who have deeply ambivalent relationship to the American system of higher education at the moment of its newfound imperative for minority inclusion. Where

Rodriguez ultimately decides to abandon teaching altogether to take up a career as a

(conservative) public intellectual, Gonzalez uses his memoir as a kind of recompense for his own guilt about the politics of selective inclusion that made his narrative possible.

Both represent challenges to the image of the minority intellectual as either radical dissident or co-opted representative of the state that deserve further attention.

My second chapter, “Becoming Trans: Desire and Metamorphosis in Octavia

Butler’s Adulthood Rites,” considers the body. While the body has always been central to understandings of adolescence, from the cultural idea that womanhood begins at menses to arguments that childhood is a time free of sexual differentiation, the simultaneous advent of possibilities for medical intervention alongside changing cultural ideas about fluidity versus fixity combined to create previously unimaginable challenges to the concept of the body as a vector of truth. This chapter considers how the discourse of truth being written onto the body is impacted in the moment of the body’s medical and social modifiability. I open with a consideration of the multiple meanings of transness,

62 Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and It’s Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). - 26 - highlighted succinctly in the tension between trans as promise and trans as threat. From there, I shift to an exploration of the logic of (and vehement resistance to) transracial identity. These two approaches to trans identity, as a promise and a threat, inform my approach to Butler’s novel, which thematizes concerns about identity in future generations as well as the potentials and perils of metamorphosis.

My third chapter concerns the entertainment industry. “Becoming Deviant:

Difference in/and Cinema at the Dawn of New Media” argues that the overlapping discourses of politically-minded cinema intersect with the growing cultural influence and buying power of minority communities at the close of the twentieth century to produce new incentives around representations of cinematic types that had been historically taboo.

The debut films for directors Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow) and Dee Rees (Pariah) were celebrated not only (or even, we might add, primarily) for their aesthetic achievement but also for their representations of marginalized figures: the Asian

American leading man in Better Luck Tomorrow and the young black lesbian in Pariah. I argue that these films were so successful in part because they merged two distinct cinematic genealogies, the history of the teen film and that of the independent feature, at a moment where both found themselves desperate for the novelty and innovation that difference could provide.

Chapter 4 centers on a technology with no real historical analogue. As recently as thirty years ago, the idea that the “internet” would fundamentally upend the daily experience of living would have seemed like the work of particularly hackneyed science fiction authors. Today, it hardly even seems worth pointing out how omnipresent the

- 27 - internet, and the suite of digital technologies it authorized, have become in the lives of most citizens of the global North. “Becoming Digital: Imagining Sex and Adolescence in the Information Age” begins with a history of the public/private collaborations that transformed the remnants of underdeveloped military technologies into the backbone of a cultural revolution. I read Sarah Schulman’s novel The Child as a prescient indicator of the kinds of concerns about information, access, and intimacy that will come to define the era of the World Wide Web. Moving beyond moral panic and insisting instead on sympathy, understanding, and compassion, I argue for placing Schulman’s novel alongside radical feminist thinkers like Gayle Rubin in its insistence on de-emphasizing sex and celebrating queer forms of relationality. I end the chapter with an exploration of a software program that raises profound and troubling questions about the value of childhood, the global distribution of technology and fantasy and the material inequities reproduced by the so-called “digital revolution.”

In lieu of a conclusion, or rather in acknowledgement of the reality that the story of difference and identity in the American project is far from over, I end with an

Epilogue. “The Struggle is Long(er)” asks how an exhaustive (exhausting?) history of the civil rights movement threatens to undermine that most American notion of progress, even as it presents new opportunities for coalition building.

Writing about the figure of youth, and of youthful rebellion, in American culture,

Gary Schwartz suggests that images of adolescence always reveals something about the nation at large: “Youth culture reflects the tensions between what adults prefer to believe about themselves and how they actually go about preparing young people to take their

- 28 - place in society. What we, as adults, see in the youth culture tells us things we would prefer not to know about ourselves.”63 This project insists on revisiting the messiness of youth, the indecisiveness, the uncertainty, the failures and shortcomings, in the hopes of uncovering new strategies for the future. In that way, I’m less invested in what we prefer not to know about ourselves, opting instead to search for the things we never should have forgotten.

63 Gary Schwartz, Beyond Conformity or Rebellion: Youth and Authority in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 13.

- 29 -

Chapter 1: The Academy: Becoming Excellent: Inventing the “Good Minority Student” in Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez and Rigoberto Gonzalez’s Butterfly Boy: Memoirs of a Chicano Mariposa

“The academy never stood apart from American slavery – in fact it stood beside church and state as the

third pillar of a civilization built on bondage”

- Craig Steven Wilders, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities

“What is the university, until we arrive? Is it where the teachers of children receive their training? It is

where the powerful become more powerful. It is where the norms of this abnormal power, this America,

receive the ultimate worship of propagation. It is where the people become usable parts of the whole

machine: Machine is not community.”

– June Jordan, Civil Wars

The classroom is among the most central of motifs in the coming of age genre.

Literary historian Marianne Hirsch reminds us that alternate etymologies of the original

German term bildungsroman point to, among other ideas the “novel of education.”1 She describes the crucial role education, and more importantly educators play in the genre, arguing that “educators serve as mediators and interpreters between the two confronting

1 Marianne Hirsch, "From Great Expectations to Lost Illusions: The Novel of Formation as Genre." Genres 12.3 (1979): 293-311.

forces of self and society.”2 It should come as no real surprise, then, that coming of age literature is rife with scenes that play out in the classroom, from Benjamin Franklin’s early realization that the schoolhouse couldn’t contain his outsized ambition to Holden

Caulfield’s insistence that his failing grades reflect only the idiocy of his instructors.

Distinct though they may be, even these two examples gesture toward the work that formal education does for the coming of age narrative. It marks the adolescent’s entry into formal society while also establishing a set of conventions s/he must learn to overcome to become a fully-realized individual. Implicit in this assumption is that all adolescents will have access to classrooms; that they will all share in the collective experience of being instructed in the conventions of proper citizenship.

Of course, we know that this is a fallacy. From the earliest days of American literature, Frederick Douglass recalls his master’s horrified reaction to learning the mistress had been offering him lessons in reading and writing: “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world.”3

A half century later, Native American author Zitkala- S̈ a would take to the national lecture circuit to denounce the evils of the charity-run “Indian boarding schools,” recounting stories of a site of daily traumas and micro aggressions where every aspect of the girls’ culture, including their non-European hair, was subject to violent regulation:

2 Ibid., 298 3 See Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (New York: Penguin, 2014), 34. 31

I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of

the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids.

Then I lost my spirit. Since the day I was taken from my mother I had suffered

extreme indignities. People had stared at me. I had been tossed about in the air

like a wooden puppet. And now my long hair was shingled like a coward's! In my

anguish I moaned for my mother, but no one came to comfort me. Not a soul

reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for now I was only one

of many little animals driven by a herder.4

In many ways, this trend persists throughout the work by writers of color. Richard

Wright’s Black Boy presents the classroom as a space of intimate violence and often unjust judgment while Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man depicts the university as a sideshow of exploitation that serves to entertain wealthy benefactors. Taken together, these works paint a fairly clear picture of a social institution marked by inequality in everything from access to distribution of resources.

Still, as Franco Moretti will remind us, the bildungsroman as a genre owes much of its formation to formal state-run education and other similar social programs which mark the dawning of the age of so-called “modernism.”5 I’ll return to Moretti in greater detail in the next chapter, but for our purposes here it may be instructive to keep in mind the fundamental role that both education (in the abstract sense of the term) and formal schooling (by which I mean concrete social institutions) play throughout the genre.

4 Zitkala-S̈a, American Indian Stories, (Washington: Hayworth Publishing, 1921), 24. 5 For more on this point, see Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 2000). 32

From the earliest days of American literature, patterns begin to emerge. We can detect the advent of two distinct literary genealogies: white American literature which takes largely for granted that its protagonists will have access (and indeed obligation) to formal schooling (at least among the boys and young men),6 and Ethic American literature which understands knowledge as a kind of dangerous power,7 the secrets to wielding which are locked behind a seemingly impenetrable door. Given this history, this chapter marks out what might be considered the earliest of many rather seismic shift in the production of identity in post-war America.

As I argued earlier, the modern nation state as we know it is born out of the conflict of World War II. Few institutions offer as explicit and stark an image of that change as the American university system. Between the GI Bill (formally known as the

Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944), with its guarantees of educational access for all returning servicemen and women and the Supreme Court decision in Brown V. Board which mandated a legal end to segregation particularly in public institutions, the second half of the twentieth century comes to be obsessed with the quest for a newly created type

6 About this point more should probably be said. Any history of privilege that attempts to treat whiteness as monolithic will surely miss more than it enlightens. While it is undoubtedly true that educational access for women remained a highly contentious issue throughout the early 20th century (a sentiment which persists in many places today), between home tutoring and the advent of “girls schools,” white society at least nominally offered educational opportunities for women outside of untrained tutors and mission work. For further reading on the particular position of women within the classic (which, for our purposes, means mostly white) Bildungsroman period, one would do well to look to Eve Komfield and Susan Jackson’s "The Female Bildungsroman in Nineteenth-Century America." The Journal of American Culture 10.4 (1987): 69-75, or Lorna Ellis’s Appearing to Diminsh: Female Development and the British Bildungsroman, 1750-1850. Bucknell: Bucknell University Press, 1999. And, of course, I’m partial to Susan Fraiman’s Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 7 Following the section we’ve seen, Frederick Douglass goes on to recount how his experience with his master was the first time he began to understand the true power of written language. 33 charged with remediating a history of racial injustice: the “good minority student.” At the same time, shifting national demographics re-introduce questions of language, border, and nation into the tricky calculus of identity. In what follows, I retrace the historical trajectory that led to higher education being imagined as a particular vital site for mandating social change. At the same time, I remain attentive to the demographic and political shifts that differentiate the experience of racialization in the moment following the classical phase of the civil rights movement.8 In folding Latino literature into a history of the long civil rights movement, I hope to suggest the affinities between the forms of non-whiteness that make the University such a useful site through which to critique the construction of difference. Overall, I am interested in understanding how and where the discourses of America’s superiority and its egalitarianism impact writers who come of age in a moment where there is a newfound institutional value to their being.

I begin this chapter by sketching out a brief history of the impact of Civil Rights discourse on education in the United States, and particularly on higher education. From the foundation-shifting decision in Brown to the emergence of the Third World Student

Movement, I want to suggest that some of the most immediate (and in many ways, longest lasting) effects of the Civil Rights moment were to be felt within the so called

“ivory tower.”

Resisting the impulse to pronounce the academy a great bastion of openness and liberal acceptance, I move next to consider the work of an author whose relationship to the academy in the nascent days of mandated racial inclusion perfectly indexes the set of

8 For more, see the Introduction. 34 ambivalences, misgivings, and uncertainties that continue to haunt the work of even the most established artists. Richard Rodriguez’s The Hunger of Memory: The Education of

Richard Rodriguez is an uncomfortable companion. His rejection of bilingual education and vehement opposition to affirmative action have rendered him something of a toxic commodity in certain intellectual circles. My aim here is not to rehabilitate his image, nor to reclaim him as some misunderstood folk hero of Latino culture. If anything, these

(rather profound) differences in opinion only serve to further highlight the oddity of the moments where it seems that, on some lower frequency, perhaps he speaks for far more than just himself.

I move next to a somewhat different take on the experience of being a “good minority student.” Rigoberto Gonzalez’s Butterfly Boy: Memoirs of a Chicano Mariposa is not a memoir that is overly concerned with classroom etiquette. While the perverse solitude of academic space is ultimately one of the things that (spoiler alert) drives

Rodriguez away, Gonzalez instead offers an archive of intimate encounters that violate the boundaries of family, nation, class, and community. Yet his memoirs are also a miseducation of sorts, an opportunity to reflect on the high personal cost of becoming part of such a highly selective group.

Taken together, these two texts also chronicle a critical moment in the development of the modern American university. From the early days of the Third World

Student Movement through the challenges and limitations that would threaten to unravel many of the identity-focused intellectual enclaves that emerged in its wake, this chapter asks what it means to have become “excellent,” as it ponders what we lost along the way.

To the Mountaintop: Civil Rights Discourse and the Modern University

“The court has found in our favor and recognized our human psychological

complexity and citizenship and another battle of the Civil War has been won. The rest is

up to us, and I am very glad…What a wonderful world of possibilities are unfolding for

the children.”

-Ralph Ellison

By the 1950s, school segregation had become one of the lynchpins of white supremacy in the US. While the Civil War and adoption of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments had granted nominal (if deeply begrudging) equality to people of color living in the rapidly expanding US national project, the century following found the nation doing very little to make good on its promises, indeed often rolling them back.

Without the mechanism of formal slavery to disenfranchise and dehumanize nonwhites, state and local governments turned to a patchwork of measures aimed at limiting everything from their interactions with whites to their basic ability to self-sustain. 1896’s infamous Supreme Court decision in Plessy V. Ferguson, where the court found in favor of the constitutionality of racial segregation provided that “separate but equal” accommodations were made for nonwhites, was in many ways, a profoundly unsurprising conclusion to decades of attempts to reinstate an informal race-based caste system.

As historians James Patterson and William Freeman note, curtailing access to education was an essential part of a larger project of maintaining the racial status quo:

“the system stigmatized [nonwhites], cut them off from avenues of opportunity, and in

36 most cases consigned them to inferior economic, social, and political class” (xvi). With their limited access to education, minorities were easily disqualified from employment not only in the formally segregated South, but also up in the ostensibly racially-tolerant yet perniciously “merit”-obsessed North. Moreover, denied access to formal education, nonwhites were (and remain) easier to disqualify from juries, less likely to be authors in the increasingly influential sociological work being produced about them9, and more likely to be taken advantage of by predatory lenders10.

Given this history, it is not difficult to understand the optimism surrounding the

US Supreme Court’s momentous decision in Brown V. The Board of Education.

Proponents of racial equality had long held that equal access to education was the primary obstacle limiting their full participation in society. The quotation that opens this section is taken from a letter Ralph Ellison wrote to a friend upon hearing that the nation’s longstanding policy of racial segregation in education was coming to an end.11 In it he portrays an optimism somewhat unfamiliar to this longtime reader. This is not the

Ellison whose Invisible Man will remain forever trapped in the sewers, syphoning off whatever light he can. This is something altogether more joyful, looking forward to a future in which the success of later generations can, perhaps in some small way, redress

9 As Cynthia Tolentino chronicles in America's Experts: Race and the Fictions of Sociology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 10 A dispiritingly transhistoric phenomenon, as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten remind us in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Autonomedia, 2013). 11 For more, see Alfred L. Brophy, “Invisible Man as Literary Analog to Brown V. Board of Education,” in Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to Invisible Man edited by Lucas Morel (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006), 119-141. 37 old grievances. Implicit in his optimism is a certain imperative. The “children” are obliged to make good on those possibilities, whatever they may be.

This moment has often been acknowledged as the first major victory in what would come to be known as the Civil Right Movement, a series of nonviolent uprisings and legislative changes that would dramatically alter the social landscape of the nation.

Of course, the actual history is much longer and messier,12 but 1954 serves as a useful moment to mark a shift in momentum from the side of the forces of segregation toward a move to consider inclusiveness an essential part of the national ideal.

Of course, establishing inclusiveness as a necessary attribute of a nation with such a troubled racial past would be no easy feat. The US Legal system, as many scholars have pointed out,13 is built primarily on precedence. The basis for many (indeed most) legal decisions is drawn from earlier decisions the court has made. In this way, the legal system can avoid continually adjudicating the same issues. In practice, this produces a system not inclined to easily reverse its earlier rulings, even those resulting from rather dubious reasoning. This meant that the legal justification required to overturn the longstanding “Separate but Equal” doctrine could be nothing less than a stunning show of force and resoluteness.

To understand that force, indeed to make any sense at all of the stunning certainty with which Brown was decided, a more global view is helpful. Legal historian Mary

12 For a not-so-brief primer, see Glenda Gilmore’s fantastic Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009). 13 For more on the importance of precedence in legal decision-making, see Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010) and also Brian Porto, May It Please the Court: Judicial Processes and Politics in America (New York: Pearson, 2000). 38

Dudziak has made a compelling case for thinking through Brown as a Cold War case. As she argues: “Cold war concerns provided a motive beyond equality itself for the federal government, including the president and the courts, to act on civil rights when it did.”14

Dudziak explains how Soviet propaganda around the world targeted US discrimination as proof of the inferiority of Western capitalism. The move to declare segregation, so long a legal and social bedrock of American life, un-American was also an attempt to rob the

Soviet Union of one of their more irrefutable points.

Yet, as Dudziak is careful to point out, while the nation was quick to embrace integration in principle, it remained significantly more reluctant in practice. Brown was unusual among legal cases in that it departed from the general principle that where there is a violation of rights, there must be a remedy. The remedy, in this case, was to come a year later in the much less-publicized decision Brown V. Board of Education (II). This case found the court divided about how best to implement the idealistic rhetoric they’d so forcefully committed to the previous year. They blinked. As Dudziak describes:

In the consensus narrative about Brown, the Court’s delay in ordering a

remedy is often seen as a statesmanlike effort to avoid racial conflict. The debate

focuses on whether the Court’s judgement on how to avoid conflict was correct,

and on how conflict shaped continuing desegregation efforts. But it is also true

that actual desegregation in southern schools was not essential to address

international concerns about the nature of a government whose constitution

appeared to accommodate segregation.15

14 Mary Dudziak, "Brown as a Cold War Case," The Journal of American History 91 no. 1 (2004): 32-41. 15 Ibid. 39

I rehearse this history for a few reasons. For one, it highlights what will become something of a recurrent theme throughout: the tension between America the idea and the reality of late-twentieth century living. It is often said that America is the “the land where dreams come true.” Perhaps a more appropriate way to put that might be to suggest that

America is best in our dreams. The national imaginary has been described as

“optimistic,” “future-oriented,” and “progress-driven.” Implicit in all these characterizations is the idea of the ideal; the nation in the future perfect where we will have overcome. I am not inclined to dismiss this optimism as entirely naïve but I want to avoid allowing it to cloud out troubling continuities and missed opportunities that might cut against the sense of progress. This history reminds us of the limits of a rights-based framework, even as it calls to mind the power of community-based organizing and grassroots resistance to social injustice. Untethered from its proper historical context,

Brown (I) threatens to become purely propaganda. Alongside Brown (II), they serve as a kind of metaphor for the question of national inclusion and a warning against accepting national(ist) rhetoric at face value.

The other reason is that this history helps us to situate education as one of the key cultural products, and indeed exports, of the burgeoning post-war economy. The international investment in Brown makes a certain sense when considered as a part of a larger imperial project of expanding into previously untapped markets around the world.

Just as the growth of the non-white consumer class within the United States helped to put pressure on the institutionalized forms of discrimination domestically, interests in

40 engaging with global markets outside of the purview of European colonialism also drove efforts to promote at least the appearance of equality internationally.

Of course, education has always been a patchwork of systems, approaches and methods of evaluation varying widely with geography and demographics. In some places, the Supreme Court decisions marked the first time non-whites would be admitted into previously all-white institutions at all.16 Yet even in places where segregation had never been the law, a culture of racial exclusivity persisted. Craig Steven Wilder has demonstrated how even the ostensibly culturally liberal ivy league universities were deeply involved in the growth and development of the transatlantic slave trade, providing both degrees to validate the credentials of future slaveholders as well as a series of intellectual justifications (from biological science, to social psychology, anthropology to economics) to defend the practice.17 Even long after many of these institutions abandoned policies formally excluding non-whites they remained far short of inclusive.

There exists already a long and complex critical literature archiving the often- violent struggles over school desegregation. My aim here lies less in revisiting this history, one in which the American South often figures as the antithesis of the cultural values of the postwar nation with its new hard-earned equality. Instead, I want to focus on a site where the struggle over integration was less about maintaining exclusion and

16 Peter Wallenstein, Higher Education and the Civil Rights Movement: White Supremacy, Black Southerners, and College Campuses (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2008) is a helpful guide to the experiences of students charged with being the first to integrate their schools, while Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California 1941-1978. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) offers a great overview of the formation of diversity-focused incentive programs. 17 For more on this history, see Craig Steven Wilders, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 41 more keyed toward managing inclusion. I suggest that just as the late 1950s and early 60s are marked by violent upheavals and pernicious scare tactics aimed at maintaining the total exclusion of nonwhites in some places, the period also saw the beginning of a certain discourse of inclusiveness that would find a way to use some (though, as Jasbir

Puar might say, certainly not all or even most) forms of difference to shore itself up against the critiques being leveled by the burgeoning social justice movement.18 In highlighting those institutions that worked to access the productive potential of difference, this chapter takes a somewhat different approach both to the story of school integration and to the larger question of its lasting impact.

Roderick Ferguson has examined the centrality of the university to the postwar project of national inclusiveness. Considering the university as not merely an extension of but in many ways an essential partner to the state, Ferguson suggests that the university was a key site through which capital was able to absorb the cultural shocks of the second World War and the scattered global military conflicts that followed: “If state and particularly capital needed the academy to reorient their sensibilities toward the affirmation of difference – that is, to complete the constitutional project of the United

States and begin to resolve the contradictions of social exclusion – then it also meant that

18 A brief pause is in order. In many ways, it feels increasingly naïve to think of American politics in the 1960s as deeply invested in social justice. Indeed, contemporary criticism seems to share a growing skepticism about the overall effectiveness of the so-called “Civil Rights Movement,” one that looks to the continued or growing inequality in everything from housing, to income levels, to personal health and sees unfulfilled promises and dashed hopes. While I wouldn’t dismiss any of those concerns, I am more interested in the myriad forms of political actors that began to come together in this moment under a singular call. For better or worse, it seems that “social justice” was that rallying cry. 42 the academy became the laboratory for the revalorization of modes of difference.”19 As

Ferguson explains, the academy became a key site for questions about social justice, the same questions that would animate much of the political unrest that characterizes the decade, in part because it was such a useful site for refocusing critiques away from calls for change to call for inclusion.

Ferguson describes how the postwar moment helped to establish a value in certain kinds of difference that was not lost on institutions of cultural power and authority: “From the social movements of the fifties and sixties until the present day, networks of power have attempted to work through and with minority difference and culture, trying to redirect originally insurgent formations and deliver them to the normative ideals and protocols of state, capital, and academy.”20 With its intimate relationship to other forms of capital, the university and the networks of cultural and social power it represents made sense as a key site of contestation for groups invested in social change. What those groups likely didn’t anticipate, as Ferguson suggests in his reading of Adrien Piper’s tragic mixed-media Self-Portrait 2000, was that “instead those systems would work to ensure that these crises were recomposed back into state, capital, and academy.”21

A Brief History of Excellence

19 Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 13. 20 Ibid., 8 21 Ibid., 6 43

Later in this chapter I attempt to trace this history, from the first feelings of cautious optimism through to the moment of critical self-doubt. In many ways, it is a circular history. Spiraling rather, perhaps, in that it ends somewhere both very similar to where it began and yet miles away. First, though, I want to unpack the key term that animates this cluster of ideas: excellence. Turning again to Ferguson we learn that

“somewhere amid the struggle over rights and inclusion, excellence emerged as a discourse that would try to reconcile the disqualifications of liberal democracy with the pressures of antiracism.”22 For Ferguson, excellence is an especially effective code-word in the era of inclusion in part because it manages to perfectly suture the discourse around personal responsibility and individual achievement to the logics underpinning racial discrimination. As minority groups increasingly pressured institutions of higher education to become more open and inclusive, excellence became the way of responding to those demands while keeping intact what Ferguson calls “racialized understandings of ‘quality education’.”23

Historian Clark Kerr details how this discourse of excellence emerged at a moment when the federal government had become, through grant funding, scholarship opportunities, and subsidized loans, the single largest funder of higher education. The imperative to produce verifiable proof of greater inclusiveness thus must be understood as strongly (if not necessarily chiefly) financial: “The federal government emphasized science and research, equality of opportunity, impartiality of treatment among the races,

22 Ibid., 76 23 Ibid., 83 44 and the innovative role of the federal agency.”24 During this period, excellence emerged as a key factor for determining which universities would grow and thrive and which would be allowed to languish.

Bill Readings explains how the post-war university came to rely on the concept of excellence to justify its rapid growth and expansion. In The University in Ruins, he argues that excellence has become a “watchword” for the modern university, a term that conjures primarily positive images even as it describes very little: “Today, all departments of the University can be urged to strive for excellence, since the general applicability of the notion is in direct relation to its emptiness…[T]he assumption is that the invocation of excellence overcomes the problem of the question of value across disciplines, since excellence is the common denominator of good research in all fields.”25

For Reading, this emphasis on the ephemeral concept of excellence is proof of the university further embracing a move toward corporatization, a move in which excellence

“functions to allow the university to understand itself solely in terms of the corporate administration.”26 Readings goes on to frame the issue even more starkly: “the appeal to excellence marks the fact that there is no longer any idea of the University, or rather, that idea has now lost all its content. As a non-referential unit of value entirely internal to the system, excellence marks nothing more than the moment of technology’s self- reflection.”27 For Readings, then, excellence emerges alongside the modern university as a technology for justifying growth and expansion and a logic for dictating accumulation.

24 Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 99. 25 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 23-4. 26 Ibid., 29 27 Ibid., 39 45

Yet, as June Jordan has suggested, excellence has never been a race-neutral category. In her 1969 essay “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person,” Jordan identifies how throughout American history the conventional language of merit-driven accomplishment has been a careful cover for destructive tendencies: “Efficiency, competence: Black students know the deadly, neutral definitions of these words. There has seldom been a more efficient system for profiteering, through human debasement, than the plantations of a while ago. Today, the whole world sits, as quietly scared as it can sit, afraid that, tomorrow, America may direct its efficiency and competence toward another forest for defoliation, or clean-cut laser beam extermination.”28 Though her focus her is primarily on Black Studies and the identity clusters that intellectual formation was conceived to address, her insights situate the problems facing Black Studies as part of a larger struggle against the racism of American capitalism writ large.

Jordan’s polemic, or “position paper,” as she calls it, does not merely take issue with the structures of valorization that dictate admission into the halls of American higher education, she rejects the very concept of individual success and personal wealth implied in the notion of the well-educated individual: “Prospering white America perverted, and perverts, the fundamental solace and nurture of community, even to the point of derogating the extended family discoverable among America’s white and black impoverished. As any college graduate can tell you, the extended family is ‘compensation for failure.’ According to these norms, success happens when the man and his immediate family may competently provide for greater and greater privacy. I.e. greater and greater

28 June Jordan, “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person,” in Civil Wars (New York: Touchstone, 1981), 26. 46 isolation from others, independence from others, capability to delimit and egotistically control the compass of social experience.”29 Jordan explains how the terms of success within the university are dictated with an eye toward producing a particular kind of citizen, and the excellent citizen has always been the one which displays the fewest traits associated with the pathologies of race.

Roderick Ferguson helps to situate Jordan’s article as a part of a larger archive of intellectual resistance to the cultural logics underpinning, among other things, America’s then long-standing engagement in violent conflict in Vietnam:

The war in Vietnam suggested that individual excellence was needed not

only in academy and government but in military operations as well. Such was the

wide and universal application of this ideal, which helped to constellate the

diverse arrangements of academy, state, and capital over the simultaneous legal

enfranchisement and affirmation of US minorities. This was the arrangement

presumed in Jordan’s use of that taken-for-granted, presumably insular,

supposedly abstract institution known as the American university. Through Jordan

we see the ways in which the American academy was a heteroglot institution,

bearing traces of various historical formations. Imprinted by these histories, the

category ‘excellence’…is haunted by the unacknowledged and matted itineraries

of race and administration…30

Ferguson underscoring of Jordan’s intervention reminds us of the connections between the rapidly expanding post-war academy and the histories of racial violence and

29 Ibid., 23 30 Ferguson, The Reorder of Things, 93 47 subjugation supporting that growth. The concept of excellence, with its connotations of successful assimilation and mastery of institutional protocols, cannot be divorced from the histories of racial pathologies long invoked to justify continued exclusion. As the proliferation of the discourse of excellence coincided with the expansion of opportunities

(even if only nominally) for women and people of color throughout the academy, Jordan demonstrates how the one phenomenon could be used to curtail the other.

Nevertheless, as Ferguson and Jordan both make clear, the modern university needed racial difference just as profoundly as it did excellence. If excellence was the internal logic (though increasingly devoid of meaning) dictating daily operations within the university, inclusion was the external justification offered to defend against increasingly vocal critics. The solution to the problem came in a patchwork of programs, directives, and incentives that tasked university recruitment and retention officials with locating and nurturing minority talent deemed worthy. The goal became to highlight the potential for excellence among certain minorities, while bolstering the university’s public face as bastion of liberal inclusivity.

Of course, as Jordan so forcefully reminds us, the minority student was never merely an idea. As convenient and versatile as the construct seemed to be on paper, it would require the participation of hundreds if not thousands of individuals who would be tasked with reconciling a long history of racial inequality while simultaneously (and constantly) proving their worthiness for inclusion. The daunting nature of this task was certainly not lost on writers of color throughout the period who turned to a range of outlets to express their frustrations.

Jordan makes no apologies for choosing Black Studies as her object of analysis for critiquing the politics of race and power within the academy. Yet, as Ferguson reminds us, the networks of alliances and coalitions that contributed to the critical momentum necessary to force a sea change (or at least the performance thereof) throughout higher education across the country represented a surprisingly broad range of stakeholders. Ferguson notes that while Jordan’s message may be addressed to Black

Studies and African American students, it also invokes the social problems and conditions of Puerto Rican students and gestures toward the larger Third World Student

Movement with its concerns about inequality of access to education and resources.

The Scholarship Boy: Assimilation and/as Achievement in Hunger of Memory

Of course, the postwar Academy doesn’t stop at desiring black students.

Following a series of shifts in immigration and labor policies,31 some of which we’ll return to shortly, the US found itself with an unprecedented amount of minority subjects.

Particularly along the coasts, in the places closest to major ports of immigration, the nation was becoming noticeably less white, a concern that was not lost on educational

31 The end of 1882’s Chinese Exclusion Act (repealed by the Magnuson Act in 1943) and the beginning of the Bracero labor program (started in August 1942) are both tremendously important milestones, though by no means the only ones. For more on the importance of World War II era immigration and cultural exchange programs and their long-term impact, see Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) and Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 49 administrators and university officials. The emergence of the “minority student,” a curious hybrid term that calls forth both a long history of racialized disadvantage and the privileged position of the budding elite, can be understood as a part of a larger cultural project of attempting to maintain the benefits of difference (racial pluralism, liberal inclusiveness, and cultural diversity to name a few) while protecting against the threat of becoming subsumed.

This reality was by no means lost on the early individuals called on to perform the labor of diversifying the academy. One figure in particular, though, managed to make a name for himself as a vocal opponent of the increasing efforts at diversification. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez is what novelist Zadie Smith might call a “difficult gift.” With its combative posturing against the evils of bilingual education and affirmative action, Rodriguez’s 1982 memoir has been largely relegated to the dustbin of

Reagan-era opportunistically xenophobic ranting.32 There is certainly something to that description. Nevertheless, with his earnest willingness to be frank about the personal struggles involved in becoming one of America’s “chosen ones,” I find in him something profoundly intriguing if not ultimately sympathetic.

Hunger of Memory has come to mean many things to many people. A collection of modified versions of previously published essays, some of which had already accrued

32 Tomás Rivera offers an example of the critiques most ethnic studies scholars made of Rodriguez’s work at the time, a criticism tellingly tinged with condescension: “…Richard Rodriguez reminds me of students I had in college in the 1960s who were embarrassed to organize themselves, who did not want to bring their parents to college to participate in college activities because their parents wouldn’t know how to dress, and students who hardly respected the few Chicano professors who were then around. Truly these students had the same type of colonized mind dramatized by Richard Rodriguez – honest, authentic, and naïve, particularly at this later date.” Tomás Rivera, “Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory as Humanistic Antithesis” MELUS 11 no. 4 (1984): 12. 50

Rodriguez something of a popular following as a prominent Latino (conservative) intellectual, the book follows a familiar rags to riches trajectory of the immigrant family who moves to the states and, through hard work and assimilation, manages to build a better future for their children. Of course, that future comes at a cost, one the book is only too happy to recount.

The narrative opens with a scene of alienation. Rodriguez is coming to terms with the realization that the public figure he has become: a man who not only hears, but has learned to repeat his name through an overly anglicized pronunciation that renders him

“Rich-heard Road-ree-guess.” Perhaps most surprising here is how candidly Rodriguez seems to understand the ways his work has been taken up by others:

I have become notorious among certain leaders of America’s Ethnic Left.

I am considered a dupe, an ass, the fool – Tom Brown, the brown Uncle Tom,

interpreting the writing on the wall to a bunch of cigar-smoking pharaohs…There

are those in White America who would anoint me to play out for them some

drama of ancestral reconciliation. Perhaps because I am marked by indelible color

they easily suppose that I am unchanged by social mobility, that I can claim

unbroken ties with me past.33

Hunger of Memory represents a response to these two poles. On the one hand, it is an earnest and genuine attempt to offer a thoughtful (if at times shortsighted or ahistorical) argument for nuance in our methods of racially-motivated social intervention. On the other, it is a rejection of a simplistic progress narrative that would find the immigrant

33 Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 3. 51 outsider folded neatly into the national community while sacrificing nothing of himself in the process (hence the drama of ancestral reconciliation Rodriguez refuses to perform).

Throughout the work, Rodriguez returns to a version of this argument veering back and forth between being perceived as a fraud at some times and a martyr at others.

Rodriguez rejects both of these designations, insisting that his is the noble (if only by virtue of its lack of glamour) pursuit of middle-class identity, or what he refers to throughout as a “public” identity. In his description, while the upper classes are often permitted to lead “private” lives, being middle class means living in a largely public world. More specifically, he describes: “Unlike the upper class, the middle class lives in a public world, lacking great individual power and standing.”34 This divide between the public and private person comes to define most of how Rodriguez understands everything from interpersonal relationships to public policy decisions. Throughout the text,

Rodriguez devotes much of his efforts to policing this distinction between public and private concerns.

It is this distinction between the public and the private self, or Rodriguez’s self- professed desire to maintain such divisions that prompts one of his most controversial chapters. Aria finds a young Richard Rodriguez struggling to adjust to life in English- speaking Riverside, California. The third of four children, Rodriguez immigrated with his parents and siblings to the US with the typical hopes of stability and opportunity. He describes their early years in America as a kind of utopic balance of private identity and public recognition: “In the early years of my boyhood, my parents coped very well in

34 Ibid., 4 52

America. My father had steady work. My mother managed at home. They were nobody’s victims. Optimism and ambition led them to a house (our home) many blocks from the

Mexican south side of town. We lived among gringos and only a block from the biggest, whitest house. It never occurred to my parents that they couldn’t live wherever they chose. Nor was the Sacramento of the fifties bent on teaching them a contrary lesson.”35

Alas, Rodriguez’s attempts to portray America as a land of “race” but not necessarily “inequality” quickly fall apart. After a brief mention of “those two or three neighbors who tried initially to make us unwelcome,” he goes on to describe how, despite all they managed to accomplish “any deep feeling of ease, the confidence of ‘belonging’ in public was withheld from both of them.”36 The reason for his parent’s inability to fully

“belong” in public space was simple: “In public, my mother and father spoke a hesitant, accented, not always grammatical English. And they would have to strain – their bodies tense – to catch the sense of what was rapidly said by los gringos.”37

For a young Rodriguez, the lesson here was clear: learning English is essential to full citizenship. At first, his own language skills weren’t much more developed, though an early intervention from a school instructor who recommended the parents encourage the children to use English at home helps to accelerate his progress. Within a few years,

Rodriguez is not only reading and writing in English, he has begun to earn a reputation as bright and bookish. Of course, all this new knowledge comes at a high cost: “But the special feeling of closeness at home was diminished by then. Gone was the desperate,

35 Ibid., 10 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 11 53 urgent, intense feeling of being at home; rare was the experience of feeling myself individualized by family intimates. We remained a loving family, but one greatly changed. No longer so close; no longer bound tight by the pleasing and troubling knowledge of our public separateness.”38

This discovery and ultimate embrace of the division between the public self and the private one for Rodriguez coincides with his acceptance into mainstream society as an exceptional figure. Perhaps more interestingly for our purposes, this moment of realization is prompted primarily by external concerns. When his teachers come to the

Rodriguez home and suggest that they would be better served by speaking English,

Rodriguez is unwittingly introduced to the first of many elements of his “ethnic” identity that he believes he must abandon to take up the mantle of “minority student.” For

Rodriguez’s critics, his rejection of bilingual education is often seen as an uncritically assimilationist move. Hunger of Memory suggests there might be a deeper, more ambivalent, project at work.

The billingualists [the supporters of bilingual education programs

springing up in schools throughout the 1970s] insist that a student should be

reminded of his difference from others in mass society, his heritage. But they

equate mere separateness with individuality. The fact is that only in private – with

intimates – is separateness from the crowd a prerequisite for individuality. (An

intimate draws me apart, tells me that I am unique among all others.) In public, by

38 Ibid., 22 54

contrast, full individuality is achieved, paradoxically, by those who are able to

consider themselves members of the crowd.39

Putting aside for a moment the somewhat regrettable idea that one must speak

English to represent American identity, I think it is also possible to read this passage as a remarkably frank and candid analysis of the racial politics of the US. Rodriguez adopts a markedly different tact than other writers of color at the time who believed that the best tact was to create spaces that would value their differences. Instead he opts for the somewhat more mercenary approach, arguing that the best strategy is to embrace the divide between the world of excellence and the place one calls home; becoming excellent is becoming estranged. This movement toward voluntary estrangement contributes to

Crystal Parikh’s argument for understanding Rodriguez’s work as a “parable of betrayal,” explaining that

the assimilatory betrayals of the minority neoconservative…must be read

as betrayals compelled by the structural configurations of race, ethnicity, class,

and diaspora in late-twentieth-century America. Moreover, these narratives,

although deeply invested in the historical and discursive formations of the nation-

state, remain open to the ethical “accidents” of betrayal that defer their closing,

thus wresting them open to the otherness— and to the obligations to otherness—

that such an encounter poses.40

39 Ibid., 26 40 Crystal Parikh, “Accidents and Obligations: Minority Neoconservatives and U.S. Racial Discourse,” in An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literatures and Culture (Bronx: Fordham University Press, 2009), 67. 55

Rodriguez eventually learns to embrace his dual identity (“The social and political advantages I enjoy as a man result from the day that I came to believe that my name, indeed, is Rich-heard Road-ree-guess”41) and moves on to find himself in a world under siege. A later chapter, Profession, describes his experiences in higher education during the apex of student-led activism in the 1970s and, far more controversially, his misgivings about affirmative action programs. A Mexican-born US college student in the early 1970s, Rodriguez found himself thrust into the middle of a heated conversation about race and the academy. The “resolution,” of sorts, to this conflict would come in the creation and promotion of the “minority student” a curious hybrid designed to appease the calls for both greater inclusiveness and a fundamental reconsideration of the terms for validation. For Rodriguez, though, the label would come to represent a “second-class citizen”-style position where every accomplishment and ambition would be met with skepticism, if not outright contempt.

He begins by lamenting his willingness to have participated in his own subjugation: “Fittingly it falls to me, as someone who so awkwardly carried the label, to question it now, its juxtaposition of terms – minority, student. For me there is no way to say it with grace. I say it with irony sharpened by self-pity. I say it with anger. It is a term that should never have been foisted it me. One I was wrong to accept.”42 At the heart of

Rodriguez’s rejection of the “minority student” label is his insistence that it was applied far too broadly. The well-educated son of financially comfortable parents, he argued that counting him among a kind of racial underclass disserved the goals of activists: “The

41 Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory, 27 42 Ibid., 153 56 policy of affirmative action, however, was never able to distinguish someone like me (a graduate student of English, ambitious for a college teaching career) from a slightly educated Mexican-American who lived in a barrio and worked as a menial laborer, never expecting a future improved. Worse, affirmative action made me the beneficiary of his condition.”43

My purpose in raising this is not to re-litigate the efficacy of affirmative action programs. Instead, I want to situate Rodriguez’s insights alongside the criticism from scholars like Ferguson and Jordan who took issue with the narrow goals of diversity initiatives. For Rodriguez, the label of “minority student” represented a disadvantaged position. The “minority student,” as he understood it, was to do the impossible task of both reminding people of the depth of social inequality and proving ultimately that even overwhelming odds can be overcome through hard work. The “minority student” for

Rodriguez, represents a kind of racial utopianism where difference becomes purely a positive reservoir for added value and never a potentially deadly liability.

He insists, instead, on foregrounding the messy materiality of being placed into that subject position. For all his analysis of the systemic factors which contributed to his perceived “mislabeling,” Rodriguez confesses that more than any sense of anger or outrage, he mostly feels guilt: “The fact is that I complied with affirmative action. I permitted myself to be prized.”44 He ends this section with an apology that highlights the feelings of shame and alienation that have so come to define his experience of becoming excellent: “You who read this act of contrition should know that by writing it I seek a

43 Ibid., 162 44 Ibid., 163 57 kind of forgiveness – not yours. The forgiveness, rather, of those many persons whose absence from higher education permitted me to be classed a minority student. I wish they would read this. I doubt they ever will.”45

Parikh’s concept of ethnic betrayal highlights the feelings of shame which already we can see underpinning the construction of the “good minority student.” It seems worth noting that even in this moment Rodriguez continues to insist on a distance between himself and the proper “minority student,” a distance which is determined for Rodriguez by the largely unspoken marker of class. Yet even as he insists on maintaining the division between the “rightful” recipients of affirmative action and economically valuable figures like himself, he betrays an understanding of how intimately intertwined both groups fates have become. For better or worse, he was to become the representative for a group to which he never felt he belonged (minorities) and, in so doing, would become even more alienated from the one he wanted so desperately to join (students).

Of course, shame, and particularly racialized shame is nothing new in the academy. Steven Selden chronicles how the American eugenics movement was spearheaded by a litany of prominent figures in higher education throughout the United

States.46 Selden explains how the key underlying assumptions of eugenics continue to persist throughout the academy, even as the discourse itself has been largely discredited.

Even in the assessment of students as “gifted,” institutions and their administrators rely on a series of assumptions that can claim as their origin the scientific racism of the early

45 Ibid., 164 46 For more on the eugenicist foundations of contemporary discussions about shame and identity, see Selden’s Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America (New York: Teacher's College Press, 1999). 58 twentieth century. Given the potential for being (mis)understood as a race traitor, for the good minority student, being labeled “gifted,” “accelerated,” or any of the other various monikers used to designate distinction also threatens to become a marker of unassimilable difference.

Rodriguez himself is no stranger to the shame of race. Only one chapter in his memoir, curiously titled Complexion, directly addresses his experiences of being a racialized body. Complexion is a deeply embodied chapter, tackling not only his memories of his budding racial identity but also the emergence (and ultimately frustration) of his sexuality. Unlike many coming-of-age narratives, sex is an incredibly minor part of Rodriguez’s story. The major moments of his life are dictated by religious milestones, academic accomplishments, and familial struggles. Consequently, it is all the more surprising how intimately linked his experiences of race and sexuality become.

He opens by describing the ambiguity his skin-tone often elicits among strangers,

“Have I been skiing? In the Swiss Alps? Have I just returned from a Caribbean vacation?”47 before explaining how, from a very young age, his mother impressed upon him the importance of skin tone:

“When I was a boy, the white summer sun of Sacramento would darken

me so, my T-shirt would seem bleached against my slender dark arms. My mother

would see me come up the front steps. She’d wait for the screen door to slam at

my back. ‘You look like a negrito,’ she’d say angry, soon to be angry, frustrated

almost to laughing, scorn. ‘You know how important looks are in this country.

47 Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory, 121 59

With los gringos looks are all the judge on. But you, look at you. You’re so

careless!’ Then she’d start in all over again. ‘You won’t be satisfied until you end

up looking like los pobres who work in the field, los braceros’”48

Interestingly, though, Rodriguez goes on to confess a deep fascination with those forbidden dark-skinned men: “They were the men with brown-muscled arms I stared at in awe on Saturday mornings when they showed up downtown like gypsies to shop at

Wolworth’s or Penney’s…Powerful, powerless men. Their darkness, like mine, to be feared.”49 These moments seems to open up both the possibility of racial identification and a kind of homosocial (/sexual?) community. Later, he goes on to describe even further the link between race and sexuality in his own life: “My first conscious experience of sexual excitement concerns my complexion.”50 This moment happens at a public pool as Rodriguez sits on the side watching his father prepare to dive into the pool:

“My mother, I noticed, was watching my father as he stood on a diving board, waving to her. I watched her wave back. Then saw her radiant, bashful, astonishing smile. In that second I sensed that my mother and father had a relationship that I knew nothing about.

A nervous excitement encircled my stomach as I saw my mother’s eyes follow my father’s figure curving into the water. A second or two later, he emerged. I heard him call out. Smiling, his voice sounded, buoyant, calling me to swim to him. But turning to see him, I caught my mother’s eye. I heard her shout over to me. In Spanish she called

48 Ibid., 122 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 132 60 through the crowd: ‘Put a towel on over your shoulders.’ In public, she didn’t want to say why. I knew.”51

This incident links shame, sex, and race for Rodriguez in ways that will continue to haunt his adolescence and early adulthood. Some critics have pointed to this moment, as well as his later musings on his failure to effectively perform machismo as starting points for a queer reading that might help to complicate the simplistic narrative of him as staunch conservative. Randy Rodriguez (no relation) argues for reclaiming Rodriguez as a (closeted) gay Mexican American author, an identity that, in his explanation, helps to make sense of the rejection of his work by critics and authors invested in projecting a strongly hetero-nationalist version of Chicano/Latino culture.52 I am less invested in making the case for Rodriguez as a queer author. I do however want to suggest that with its emphasis on shame, ambivalence, and the dangers and benefits of assimilation,

Hunger of Memory might usefully be considered a queer text, albeit one from a very particular historic moment.

In Hunger of Memory we see the story of one man’s struggle to balance the weight of history against the imperatives of living in late capitalist society. Ultimately,

Richard Rodriguez chooses to walk away from the academy: “The contradictions of affirmative action have finally caught up with me. Please remove my name from the list of teaching job applicants.”53 With the success of his popular press writings against bilingual education and affirmative action, he could afford to make that decision.

51 Ibid., 133 52 See Randy Rodriguez, “Richard Rodriguez Reconsidered: Queering the Sissy (Ethnic) Subject,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 40 no. 4 (1998): 396-423. 53 Ibid., 185 61

Consequently, his decision to walk away can feel less like a boldly triumphant stand for what’s right and more akin to cynical self-promotion. I want to turn next to an author who confronts some very similar feelings of ambivalence, shame, and alienation on the road to becoming “one of the good ones.” Yet where Rodriguez ultimately decides to reject the label of “minority student” outright, the author I want to focus on next is far more invested in turning that category on its head.

The March of the Monarch: Community and Kinship in Butterfly Boy: Memoirs of a

Chicano Mariposa

By the time I as a senior in high school, the other ‘el campo’ kids

acknowledged me as the smart one. ‘Schoolboy,’ they named me. I was the oldest

of the bunch. Most of the kids of ‘el campo’ dropped out of school by their

sophomore year, or were removed from school by their parents who needed an

extra body generating an income in the fields. At fourteen this was legal, as long

as the former student pursued an independent course of study. As the silent and

docile Schoolboy, I gained a level of respect and I wasn’t harassed on the bus. I

kept to myself, a book opened in front of me to give myself space and distance

from the ruckus.

At the high school I attended all the students were tracked according to

academic achievement. I was enrolled in most of the college prep courses; ‘el

campo’ kids were mainly taking basic ed, taught by men who also coached the

soccer, swimming, and football teams. Still, many of them struggled with the

work, and a few even came to me for help.54

There is a scene in Rigoberto Gonzales’s beautiful but devastating 2005 memoir where he begins to confront the reality that his position as privileged minority comes at the expense of other non-white bodies sentenced to far less desirable fates. As he moves further and further into the realm of academic recognition, he discovers the much desired

“space and distance” to reflect while coming to understand that this privilege always already bears gendered and racialized valences. The quest for space and distance becomes a central concern for Gonzalez whose memoir tells the story of an undergraduate summer spent trailing the path of the monarch butterfly from Riverside,

California to Zacapu, Mexico on a second-class bus with his estranged father. Along the way, Gonzalez devotes himself to a series of four deceptively simple sounding tasks: “I will not fight with my father./ I will not long for my lover./ I will forgive my father./ I will forget my lover.”55

The limited scholarship currently available on this work has tended to read it as a treatise on the violent imperatives placed on gay Latino male sexualities; constrained between a longing for sexual acceptance (that would necessitate being ostracized from one’s ethnic identity) and a desire for racial community. While these goals, or rather a series of failures to effectively achieve them, form the memoir’s narrative arc, there is a crucial strain of critique undergirding Gonzalez’s narrative that has largely escaped

54 Rigoberto Gonzalez, Butterfly Boy: Memoirs of a Chicano Mariposa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 10 55 Ibid. 63 critical attention. From a site of institutional privilege,56 Butterfly Boy offers a meditation on the deeply alienating process of becoming a racialized institutional subject. Coming of age at a moment when diversity, multiculturalism and inclusion emerged as key values both within the academy and in the broader corporate culture within which it is increasingly enmeshed, Butterfly Boy calls forth the histories of exclusion and marginalization that supply the conditions of possibility for the formation of a certain kind of “good (gay) minority student.”

Butterfly Boy begins with a break-up. After another night of fighting whose passion is matched in intensity by the subsequent sex, Gonzalez walks out on his lover, an older Mexican émigré with a preference for young, vulnerable men. This is not their first breakup and it will not be their last. But as he walks out of his lover’s apartment to head toward the bus station where he will meet with his father, Gonzalez describes the experience as one of moving between identities:

How quickly I slip from one world to another, I think on the bus as it

circles around the station in route to Highway 10. In Riverside I’m a college

sophomore majoring in the humanities and no one knows I’m involved with an

older man who makes love to me as fiercely as he angers me. In Indio I’m the son

and grandson of farmworkers who have never once hugged me, but whom I miss

terribly, especially when I need to run away from the man who tells me that he

loves me, he loves me, he loves me.57

56 Gonzalez is a multiple-award-winning author and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University. 57 Ibid., 8 64

This is only the first in a series of moments that find Gonzalez confronting the instability of his self-presentation. Moving from “one world to another” Gonzalez must navigate a social terrain striated by histories of racial, gender and class discrimination. Where UC

Riverside represents an anonymity that authorizes a certain kind of sexual freedom

(mainly the freedom to have violent, often drug-fueled sex), the agricultural labor sites that mark the stops along the bus route Gonzalez takes to visit his relatives in Zacapu suggest social spaces in which romance and freedom are not luxuries generally afforded.

Interwoven with his recounting of the bus trip home to Zacapu, Gonzalez also revisits the histories of racialized and gendered labor that contribute to his becoming a very particular kind of institutional subject. Set in the “present day” of 1990, Gonzalez links his story up with much older stories of violence, colonization and exclusion. He compares his family’s constant migration from town to town to the path of the monarch butterfly, a path guided as much by instinct as it is by a quest for available resources.

Early on, Gonzalez recalls his childhood move from Thermal, California to Indio,

Mexico as “[i]n response to a disconcerting succession of bad seasons.”58 These economic pressures only further exacerbated an already strained domestic situation:

“After a year and a half, no one had saved money and tensions were high, manifesting themselves in abusive encounters between adults, between children, and between adults and children. My grandfather, who acted the patriarch with relentless authority, was the main culprit.”59 Here the path of the butterfly becomes less a trans-historic act of unity with nature and more a highly contingent struggle for survival in the face of seemingly

58 Ibid., 31 59 Ibid., 74 65 insurmountable social and economic pressures. Gonzalez is careful to resist a narrative that would understand his grandfather’s abuse as proof of the innately more violent iteration of masculinity one should expect from non-whites. Rather he situates this violence as a reverberation of larger systemic oppressions committed against non-white communities regularly.

The question of history and the particular material realities that provide the conditions for different subject formations remains a central one throughout Butterfly

Boy. A 1984 report on the status of migrant farm labor throughout the world helps to situate the historical background for Gonzalez’s narrative:

The demand for fruit and vegetables expanded as industrial nations

experienced unprecedented economic growth and trade integration. Fruit and

vegetable production shifted from small family enterprises near major urban areas

to large and specialized farms. The major fruit and vegetable producing areas of

southern France, Israel, South Africa, Florida and California expanded in the

1950s and 60s, when family farmers where being pushed and pulled into

industrial jobs. Commercial fruit and vegetable farms dependent on hired workers

replaced family farms…As citizens abandoned seasonal farm work for industrial

jobs, the only persons who remained available for seasonal farm work were

citizens excluded from regular jobs and immigrants for whom an hourly farm

wage exceeded the wage for a day’s work at home.60

60 Phillip Martin, “Migrant Labor in Agriculture: An International Comparison,” International Migration Review 19 no 1 (1985): 135-36. 66

By the time Gonzalez’s family moved to California in the late 1970s, brown bodies had become thoroughly aligned with manual agricultural labor in the national imaginary. Yet as he discovers a certain aptitude for academic achievement, Gonzalez begins to appreciate that this marks him as somehow different. When as a fifth grader he wins the school-wide Spelling Bee, he recalls: “I was a celebrity for a few months and I basked in the attention.”61 Like Rodriguez, though, this attention comes at the expense of a heightened sense of alienation from his family who are not allowed access to the same spaces. “The thought of making my parents part of this project made me uncomfortable.

Neither of them would be able to understand what was happening.”62 Here, Gonzalez echoes Rodriguez’s sense of the separation created between his “public” and “private” lives by academic success.

This moment highlights an ambivalence that remains a constant strain throughout the memoir. On the one hand, becoming an institutional subject is a deeply validating experience for Gonzalez, proof that his love of language is not unrequited. At the same time, that validation comes at the expense of being made to constantly confront how his position is both authorized by his family’s manual labor and foreclosed to them because of that very status as manual laborers. When thinking back on a childhood that, while hardly economically privileged, did manage to include a trip to Disneyland, yearly presents for Christmas (instead of Mexico’s similar Three Kings Day) and weekly

McDonald’s visits among other ostensibly “Americanizing” gestures, Gonzalez notes how this privilege did not come cheap: “All this was thanks to my father’s new job as a

61 Gonzalez, Butterfly Boy, 83 62 Ibid. 67 construction worker, and to my mother’s decision to work in the fields, picking grapes beneath the scorching sun, against my father’s advice, as he cautioned her about her delicate health and weak heart.”63

Gonzalez’s text points to a system of tokenized inclusion that works to disavow racialized exclusion. As he moves through high school and eventually applies to and is accepted by UC Riverside, Gonzalez never loses sight of the narrow range of life choices available to him, even as one of the “gifted” minorities. During his first journey to the UC

Riverside campus this narrow binary becomes explicit: “I thought about how lucky I was to have gotten out of Indio. I wasn’t going to end up a farmworker after all.”64 This move, on the one hand, to force minorities and immigrant communities increasingly into lower- wage, higher-labor jobs while producing a gifted class of “special” minorities who can serve as cosmetic representations of diversity to disavow the racial disparities that continue to persist in an ostensibly “antiracist” moment would seem to be in line with what Jodi Melamed has called “neoliberal multiculturalism.”

In her article “Reading Tehran in Lolita,” Jodi Melamed describes neoliberal multiculturalism as “a signifying practice in which a language of multiculturalism dissimulates the racialized social and economic structure of neoliberalism.” She contends: “Race continues to permeate capitalism’s economic and social processes in neoliberalism. It organizes the hyperextraction of surplus value from racialized bodies and naturalizes a system of capital accumulation that grossly favors the global North over

63 Ibid., 77 64 Ibid., 161 68 the global South.”65 Yet at this moment where the official state discourse is one of antiracism, “a kind of multiculturalism codes the wealth, mobility and political power of neoliberalism’s beneficiaries to the just desserts of ‘multicultural world citizens.’”66

Melamed and Gonzalez similarly identify the processes whereby the production of a certain kind of good minority subject, preferably one with a certain distance from

“minority culture,” comes to stand in as representative of the improved status of nonwhites even while the actual material conditions for the vast majority of non-white bodies remain unimproved if not substantively worse. Thus, when Gonzalez notes how upon returning to Mexico after having lived in California for a few brief years “[He and his brother] had only been away from Mexico a few years and already we were considered foreigners – gringos, pochos, gavachos – Americanos,”67 he identifies the kind of cultural alienation constitutive of the process of becoming institutionalized minority subjects.

When his acceptance letter from UC Riverside arrives, it is in some sense his highly sought-after ticket “out.” What he finds on campus, though, is hardly a sense of inclusive community. Instead he moves from being “foreigners…Americanos” in one community to another where his sudden weight-loss only heightens his sense of alienation: “There was much speculation in the college dormitory about my condition: it was rumored I had AIDS, and some students subsequently ostracized me. I became depressed. Thinned down, I had moved from one dark legacy to another.”68 Though his

65 Jodi Melamed, “Reading Tehran in Lolita: Making Racialized and Gendered Difference Work for Neoliberal Multiculturalism," in ed. Grace Hong and Roderick Ferguson, Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 82-3. 6666 Ibid., 83 67 Gonzalez, Butterfly Boy, 123 68 Ibid., 153 69 initial arrival at UC Riverside coincides with images of “fickle birds that hop from one branch to another because there were plenty of directions to choose from,”69 before long

Gonzalez begins to understand that the history of racial discrimination will always inform his interactions with the world. While he is certainly afforded more choices than the younger el campo boys who were “tracked” toward vocational education or out of school entirely, even these increased options remain implicated in the production of a dichotomy between “good” minorities and “bad” ones.

Published more than twenty years apart and, Rodriguez and Gonzalez’s narratives share a striking number of similarities. Both tell the story of young Mexican-American men growing up in a house full of recently-immigrated, primarily Spanish-speaking relatives at a time when the nation was making a major push for Mexican inclusion, primarily in the underpaid labor market. Both men were beneficiaries of programs designed to increase minority representation in higher education, a part of a larger diversity initiative that would threaten to dramatically alter the makeup, demographically and intellectually, of the entire enterprise of higher education in the United States. Both confront this complex, perhaps untenable, position with a profound sense of ambivalence motivated at least in part by shame. Earlier I suggested that one explanation for that sense of shame may come from the history of the experiences of non-white students in the

American education system. Here I want to suggest a second possible explanation for the prevalence of shame in Gonzalez’s memoir, one that gestures toward a broader trend in the development of post-war American literature.

69 Ibid., 161 70

Butterfly Boy might also be productively thought as part of a tradition which literary critic Mark McGurl has named “the Program Era.”70 For McGurl, this designation names authors who were, in a very formal sense, trained and accredited by institutional

“creative writing.” He argues that this experience of institutionalization results in writings that share a few key aesthetic features which can be traced back to the specific techniques of the creative writing workshop. Well-worn injunctions to “Write What You Know”

“Show, Don’t Tell” and “Find Your Voice” become particular imperatives on writers who come to understand the vitality of their potential literary careers as being directly related to their ability to perform well in class. So, for example, the call to “Write What

You Know” leads to the codification of a kind of autopoetic self-reflexivity that became a central tenet of strains of high modernism from figures like Thomas Wolfe while “Show

Don’t Tell” comes to be aligned with a kind of Hemingway-esque minimalist first-person narrative style.

Among the most surprising of the features he identifies is the use of shame a literary trope, or more specifically, “how postwar American literature is driven by a dialectic of shame and pride, self-hatred and self-esteem- a dialect that is also, not at all coincidentally, at the heart of American educational theory and practice.”71 As McGurl explains, while the standard conventional understandings of guilt and shame arbitrarily divided them into internal and externally-produced affects, “this formulation runs the risk of missing how shame is a simultaneously external and internal phenomenon.”72 Shame

70 See Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). 71 Ibid., 284 72 Ibid. 71 comes to feature in the work of Program Era authors both as a reoccurring theme for the increased numbers of lower-middle class whites admitted post-GI Bill who felt themselves to be in constant danger of being exposed as frauds by the academy. It is also taught through formal features like the classroom workshop which competitively pits authors against one another. As McGurl describes:

On the one hand, nothing could be more constrained than the modern

American school, which, never mind the plight of émigré authors, is anchored K-

through-Ph.D. in the unbeautiful realm of social needs, hemmed in all around by

budgets and bureaucracy and demography. On the other hand is the shimmering

vision of self-realization-through-learning toward which it bends. We go to

school, or are made to go, to become richer versions of ourselves, however that

may be defined.73

McGurl is interested (at least in his discussion of shame as literary trope) primarily in middle-class white writers. Of course, we’ve seen how a similar sense of one’s self as a fraud waiting to be discovered exists even(/especially?) in the writings of exceptional minority students. Butterfly Boy refuses the narrative moment of pride. While the generic conventions of the memoir as form gesture toward the possibility of future success for our author, Butterfly Boy ends somewhere very similar to where it began:

Gonzalez will return to his lover and remain estranged from his father. Thus, ultimately, we see achievement (the achievement of desire?), sure. But that achievement is undercut

73 Ibid., 3 72 by a sense of repetition seems to refuse the idea of major change to come. Shame serves as a reminder of the high costs of becoming excellent.

There is, though, another way to read the text, one that finds meaning less in the overall structure of the narrative and more in the moments of queer kinship, however ephemeral and transient they ultimately prove to be. This mode of analysis might look to a moment toward the end of Gonzalez’s trip, after a falling out with his father leaves him resolved to head back to Riverside the next morning to articulate a theory of kinship and identity that cannot be easily reduced to a discourse of queer or racialized shame:

As a ceremonial farewell, I climb up to the roof of the house to watch the

dark clouds creep over the mountains for the last time. Every roof is used to hang

the wash out to dry…And across the street, the neighbor’s son is piling brick.

Each time he bends down to accommodate another pair, his head turns and we

lock eyes. He removes his shirt in a vain display of his torso, which is smooth and

fair-skinned – nothing like my lover’s body in Riverside. It doesn’t take much

coaxing to find myself on the rooftop across the street…Not a single word passes

between us when I remove my shirt, when I bring him down on top of me and slip

my hands on his hard crotch, when he unbuttons my jeans and pulls them down,

when we kiss, caress, and fuck with urgency because my hours in Michoacán are

numbered.74

Intimacy here links a diasporic community of queer brown bodies: los pobrés, the émigré and the good minority student bound together in a moment of utopian possibility that

74 Gonzalez, Butterfly Boy, 188 73 assuredly won’t last and is no less meaningful for it. Rejecting outright the tension of the future perfect, Gonzalez’s text stresses the value of the deeply uncomfortable here and now. The makeshift space in which this intimacy exists is in many ways the definition of precarity, yet it is also the only space where the continuum of queer male potential is unconstrained by the histories of class, labor, and education that define social existence in the linear world of what Jose Munoz has termed “straight time.”75

The Rise and Decline of Multiculturalism

Taken together, Hunger of Memory and Butterfly Boy tell a fascinating story about the history of multiculturalism within the American academy. Rodriguez, arriving during the early days of minority-focused affirmative action programs highlights the deep ambivalence many felt toward a solution that seemed ill-suited to addressing the underlying problem. Gonzalez, writing from a more contemporary moment when the academy had, by-and-large, moved away from the kinds of demographic-driven admissions standards and ethnic identity-centered intellectual enclaves, has a more introspective take, making the compelling case for a hybrid approach that can at least attempt to include but not subsume difference.

Both texts remind us of the importance of schooling in coming of age narratives, even as they highlight the profoundly decontextualized assumptions that so often accompany stories of students and schooling. By foregrounding the impact not only of race, but also of gender, sexuality, class, and language on the individual experience of

75 For more on Munoz’s concept of “straight time,” see Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

74 being made an institutional subject (for our purposes, a “good minority student”), these texts remind readers of the difficult, if not ultimately impossible, imperative at the core of contemporary fantasies of cultural assimilation.

Chapter 2: The Body Becoming Trans: Desire and Metamorphosis in Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites

“In recent decades, identity categories of all kinds have come to seem fragile and unsettled. The landscape

of identities has become much more complex, fluid, and fragmented. As new categories have proliferated

and old categories have come to seem ill-fitting, we face increasing uncertainties and ambiguities in

identifying ourselves and categorizing others.”

-Rogers Brubaker, Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities

“The term transgender, then, carries its own antinomies: Does it help make or undermine gender identities

and expressions? Is it a way of being gendered or a way of doing gender? Is it an identification or a

method? A promise or a threat?”

-Susan Stryker and Paisley Currah, Transgender Studies Quarterly (1.1-2) Introduction

A quick glance at the register of goods being transported to the ever-expanding

British Empire in North America and belonging to one mister Johnathon Winthrop, who would later become governor of the Massachusetts colony, reveals among his possessions to be: “Salt, cotton, tobacco, and Negroes.” These commodities were transported on the first recorded slave ship in US history: a vessel presciently named Desire.1 And the story

1 For more on this fascinating history, see Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013)

gets more interesting still. The first part of Desire’s journey found it ferrying to Africa the women and children who had been captured during the recent Native uprising, an event that would come to be known as the Pequot War. After decades of trying to turn the surviving captors of ransacked Native communities into slaves, British settlers abandoned the pursuit, deciding it was too dangerous to keep them in the colonies. They opted instead to round up the Native peoples and trade them into slavery in exchange for

Africans who would have no familiarity with the landscape and be less likely to escape or cause trouble. Thus from the birth of the American project, imperial exchange and colonial desire were inextricably intertwined, dual impulses of the burgeoning empire.

The aptly-named Desire highlights a vital linkage between the need for resources to build the colonial project and the myth of a cultural exchange that renders the interaction politically palatable to a national audience that imagines itself as “civilizing” the untamed world.

That this drama of American identity played out on the body has certainly not been lost on scholars of race and empire. Saidiya Hartman recalls the crucial labor the body performed as a metaphor for national identity. Writing about the persistent image of black bodies as alien, Hartman understands the trope as participating in a larger conversation about national belonging: “The body was pivotal in representing the transformation of the nation-state and citizenship instituted by the Civil War and

Reconstruction and manifested the fears of defilement instigated by the civil equality of

77 blacks.”2 Writing about the settling of the “mongrel land” that would become New

Mexico at the close of the nineteenth century, Pablo Mitchell contends that “central to this project of re-creating New Mexico's social structure, and transforming New

Mexicans into Americans, was the human body…the human body's entrances and exits, protrusions and blemishes, incapacities, shames, triumphs, failures, and desires together constituted an overlooked, yet absolutely critical, component of the creation of American colonial order in New Mexico.”3

We now know that chattel slavery would prove both politically and economically untenable over the long term just as the nation’s westward expansion would continue introducing new forms of difference into the social landscape. Throughout these changes though, the notion of a cultural difference that could be rendered as a kind of exchange value persists. The mid-to-late 19th century is overwhelmed with embodied anxieties about cultural difference and the inherent values and dangers of intermixing. From the obsession with miscegenation4 (understood as the process of mixing “distinct” genetic types) to the fascination with orientalism5 (with its emphasis on the alluring power of the exotically foreign), we can detect the emergence of a peculiar disjunction. It would be too simple to say that desire was a common thread of the discourse justifying colonial

2 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 165. 3 Pablo Mitchell, Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5. 4 For more on the complicated history of miscegenation in the US, see Peggy Pascoe. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 5 For a fascinating look at the everyday uses of Orientalism in American life, see Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). There’s also the classic, Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 78 expansion (at whatever cost). The truth is darker still: Desire named the powerful joint urges of repulsion and attraction. To speak of desire in the American context was to speak of an almost sublime capacity for motivation with an affective charge that can be deployed in any number of different directions. To wit, the same Desire which sold

Native peoples out of the American project forcefully injected African slaves into it.

Desire was a tricky beast.

It would be wrong to say that the problems endemic to desire were solved by the advent of nominal Civil Rights for nonwhite US citizens during the 1960s. But it is certainly true that post-60s America found itself faced with a new set of limitations and imperatives that dramatically upended the calculus of cultural exchange which had previously prevailed in race relations intimate and public. Pressures both internally, in the form of the burgeoning identity movements that would flourish over the next few decades, and externally, from their closest competitor in the race to declare a global superpower, the USSR, produced a climate in which inclusion and diversity became more in-demand than ever before. If desire in the antebellum period hinged on the ability to secure a privileged position for whiteness, its post-war iteration finds purpose in stabilizing a social order built on the myth of a diverse meritocracy.

This chapter considers the body as a key site for anxieties about the benefits and pitfalls of desire and the future of political affinities. The body has always been central to coming of age narratives, a truth tellingly revealed in everything from the use of the term prepubescent to describe the period before adolescence to the cultural obsession with

79 menses as the onset of womanhood.6 For communities of color, the body takes on the added dimension of serving as a nexus of historical assumptions, expectations, fears, and anxieties. Still between the advent of gender reassignment surgery on the one hand7 and the mounting data underscoring the speciousness of “race” on the other,8 by 1960, the body had undergone fundamental shifts in meaning and value that reinvigorated old debates about truth, meaning, and identity. While these debates proceeded along somewhat separate trajectories, it was perhaps inevitable that they would meet, and in so doing confound earlier notions of authority, autonomy, and identity.

I begin by revisiting the meanings, values, and assumptions associated with the body in the moment of its physical and social malleability. Throughout most of the history of the US national project, the body has been assumed to bear innate, intrinsic, and inalterable truth. As Hartman’s work reminds us, long before medical and political reasoning conspired to create the homosexual as type,9 the body and its fundamental difference were being offered as justifications for any number of atrocities committed in the name of the common good. Yet by the middle of the twentieth century, a changing social and medical landscape rendered the body and its attendant truths less an indisputable reality and more an avenue for self-expression. In thinking through changing

6 For more on this idea, see Laura Fingerson, Girls in Power: Gender, Body, and Menstruation in Adolescence (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). 7 An “event” bolded heralded by the popular press coverage of Christine Jorgensen beginning in 1952 and continuing throughout the decade. For a detailed biography of Jorgensen’s story that remains attentive to the broader political implications of her celebrity, see Richard F. Docter. Becoming a Woman: A Biography of Christine Jorgensen (New York: Routledge, 2008). 8 For an example of scientific challenges to the legitimacy of race during the period, see Frank B. Livingston, “On the Nonexistence of Human Races,” Current Anthropology 3, no. 3 (1962): 279-81. 9 A phenomenon which queer theorist Michel Foucault famously locates during the Victorian era. See Michel Foucault. The History of Sexuality: Volume I (New York: Vintage Books, 1980) 80 attitudes toward the embodied nature of truth and identity, I want to ask what new possibilities and limitations are created in this moment of transformation.

Taking a somewhat unexpected historical trajectory, I move on next to a contemporary conversation about the value, and the risks, of employing “transracialism” as an analytic approach. It is my goal here to resist the move toward either praise or condemnation and ask instead how the questions themselves betray their own sets of assumptions and limitations. I turn to both critical adoption studies and post-colonial theory to offer a bit of historical context for the term but also to help make sense of a contemporary controversy that threatens to expand the limits of the concept in some potentially profoundly discomforting ways. In the archives of radical lesbian feminist theory, I find precedent for the anxiety the term seems to provoke in so many.

The bulk of this chapter, though, is dedicated to an exploration of a text that is almost prophetic in its treatment of so many of these questions about the pleasures and perils of desire and transformation. Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites is a confounding novel on so many levels. As a coming of age narrative, it manages to be an almost pitch perfect example of the form while conforming to virtually none of its conventional expectations. As a sci-fi novel, it is unabashedly invested in interrogating how identities structure reality. As a work of African American literature published at the height of the craze for neo-slave narratives,10 it feels somehow not simply ahead of its time as much as operating on a different plane altogether. The novel, the second in a trilogy, tells the story

10 A craze which Butler herself spurred along with the publication of her earlier novel Kindred in 1979, but which had certainly not abated by the end of the following decade. 81 of a young man charged with being the bridge between two feuding civilizations who seem as unable to work together as they are certain to die alone. I turn to the work of

Afrofuturist thinkers and critics like Mark Derby, Alondra Nelson, and Ytasha Womack to provide a bit of context for thinking about the important work black science fiction does in producing and sustaining critical conversations around issues vital to the community. I also hope to demonstrate how Butler’s text anticipates both the desire for and the anxiety produced by subjectivities in flux.

The second half of the twentieth century looks very different than the first. As historian Mark Brilliant might suggest, The Color of America Has Changed.11 In what follows, I attempt to articulate a theory of what it feels like be a product of that change, to grow up in a house built on shifting sands.

From Truth to Metaphor: Gender, Race, and the Body in the Mid-Century Moment

We’ll dispense right away with direct analogies. Aligning the histories of race and gender is always a treacherous proposition. Cressida Heyes offers a thoughtful illustration of the limitations of approaches based on simplistic analogy:

This exercise in comparing and contrasting possibilities for race and sex

change reveals the complexity and distinctiveness of the genealogies of race and

sex themselves. It illustrates that both categories are undergirded by a plethora of

sometimes contradictory ontological assumptions, and maintain their social

11 See Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California 1941-1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) 82

meaning not because they are philosophically coherent labels that fit with unified

political perspectives, but because they are slippery, ad hoc, and available to serve

various rhetorical purposes depending on social contexts that are themselves in

transition. It also undercuts one element of feminist handling of the analogy

thesis—namely, the suggestion (implied or explicit) that race and sex change can

be considered equivalent without further argument, including for ethical

purposes.12

As Heyes and others have argued, while both categories find themselves subject to challenges to their fundamental realness, collapsing the two threatens to obscure more than it reveals. For example, while gender in the present moment is treated as a mark of bodily autonomy, a point underscored by the emphatic discourse of “choice” in debates over reproductive rights, race is presumed to be the product of generational inheritance.

Thus, while transitioning gender is commonly framed as an individual decision, transitioning race is typically perceived as a kind of betrayal. Curiously, though, it is gender more than race, that has managed to maintain its importance as a legal category in the age of “colorblindness” and “multiculturalism.”13

This debate, about the malleability of identity and the appropriateness of claims for belonging, has two clear antecedents. For one, it calls to mind debates about self- authorship and the individual as autonomous entity that are part and parcel with the larger

12 Cressida J. Heyes, “Changing Race, Changing Sex: The Ethics of Self-Transformation,” Journal of Social Psychology 37, no. 2 (2006): 278 13 A reality evident in the recent proliferation of so-called “Bathroom Bills,” which supporters have argued for as necessary to combat the evils of pedophiles exploiting loopholes in existing conventions which do nothing to verify the truth-value of the gender claim being implicitly made through restroom selection. 83 trend of postmodern thinking underway. Writing about the challenges to the conventional structure of society posed by the advent of postmodernism in the 1960s, Charles Jencks characterized the period as “a time of incessant choosing,” arguing that, in the shifting climate it was “not only the rich who become collectors, eclectic travelers in time with a superabundance of choice, but almost every urban dweller.”14 Political theorist Rogers

Brubaker connects this argument to current debates about the proliferation of identity possibilities in the post-60s moment: “As basic categories have become the object of self- conscious debate, critical scrutiny, strategic choice and political claims-making, they have lost their self-evidence, naturalness, or taken-for-grantedness.”15

Returning to our second epigraph, we might think of this as the genealogy in which trans possibilities represent a “promise,” or, perhaps even more the fulfillment of the promises of neoliberalism16 endemic to the period of mass de-regulation, divestment in public infrastructure and heightened focus on self-care.17 It is not a far leap from the claim for the body as property of the self to claims for the self as solely responsible for the body’s outcomes, the latter of which was slowly becoming a kind of political dogma

14 Charles Jencks. What Is Post-Modernism? 2nd rev., enl. ed (London: Academy Editions, 1989), 7. 15 Rogers Brubaker. Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 41. 16 My understanding of neoliberalism is indebted to Aihwa Ong’s description: “Neoliberalism is often discussed as an economic doctrine with a negative relation to state power, a market ideology that seeks to limit the scope and activity of governing. But neoliberalism can also be conceptualized as a new relationship between government and knowledge through which governing activities are recast as nonpolitical and nonideological problems that need technical solutions. Indeed, neoliberalism considered as a technology of government is a profoundly active way of rationalizing governing and self-governing in order to ‘optimize.’” Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 3. 17 For more on self-care as self-governance, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self (New York: Vintage Books, 1988). 84 among theorists and politicians on “both sides” of the American spectrum throughout the late decades of the twentieth century.18

The promise of self-definition is, we could argue, the promise of an escape from progressive history. That is not to suggest that trans identities are ahistoric, nor that they are historically novel.19 Rather it is to underscore the radical potentiality indexed in new modes of self-authorship. It is to suggest that the appeal of trans identity reactivates an older impulse toward movement, fluidity, and indeterminacy that both mirrors the logics of Ong’s flexible neoliberal citizens20 as it upends the terms of sociality which prevailed since the inception of the American project. “History is what hurts,”21 indeed.

The other intellectual tradition points toward theories of embodiment and identity proliferating concurrently throughout the work of women of color feminists, critical race theorists, and scholars of identity studies more broadly. In this lineage, identity represents a complex interplay of self-definition and public perception in which self-determination only goes so far. Barbara Smith offers a version of this argument in insisting on the importance of black subjectivity to conducting “Black Feminist Criticism”: “[S]he would think and write out of her own identity and not try to graft the ideas or methodology of white/male literary thought upon the precise materials of Black women’s art.”22 We can

18 For more on the bipartisan success of neoliberal thinking see Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003). 19 For more on the long and not uniquely Western history of trans existence, see Liesl Theron and Tshepo Ricki Kgositau, “The Emergence of a Grassroots Trans Archive,” TSQ 2, no. 4 (2015): 578-583. 20 See Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). 21 Frederick Jameson famously offered this succinct rejoinder to explain the appeal of postmodernism. For a thorough exegesis of Jameson’s materialist impulses, see Alexander Galloway, “History is What Hurts: On Old Materialism,” Social Text 34, no. 2 (2016): 125-141. 22 Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Literary Criticism,” The Radical Teacher 7 (1978): 23. 85 ask what the “precise materials” of Black women’s art consist of, but it certainly seems fair to suggest that Smith is arguing for the collective experience of historical knowledge and the importance of cultural inheritance in protecting and preserving the traditions through which difference accrues meaning.

In this tradition, it is not difficult to see how trans identity represents a kind of threat. Writing about how the move to abandon subjectivity just so happens to coincide with the moment where marginalized communities begin to insist on the importance of their own subjective knowledges and experiences, Barbara Christian connects the project of black feminist criticism to the broader goal of preserving the meaning and value of non-hegemonic identities: “I feel that the new emphasis on literary critical theory is as hegemonic as the world which it attacks. I see the language it creates as one which mystifies rather than clarifies our condition, making it possible for a few people who know that particular language to control the critical scene - that language surfaced, interestingly enough, just when the literature of peoples of color, of black women, of

Latin Americans, of Africans began to move to ‘the center.’ Such words as center and periphery are themselves instructive.”23

In this intellectual tradition, identity remains essential despite its persistent evanescence. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to discount these approaches, as many critical theorists are wont to do, as essentialist. Stuart Hall explains the complex work identity continues to do even as its founding precepts comes increasingly into question. In

23 Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique 6 (1987): 55. 86

“Who needs ‘identity’?” Hall argues for holding the concept of identity “under erasure,” a process he juxtaposes against the ahistoricity of abstraction:

Unlike those forms of critique which aim to supplant inadequate concepts

with ‘truer’ ones, or which aspire to the production of positive knowledge, the

deconstructive approach puts key concepts ‘under erasure’. This indicates that

they are no longer serviceable – ‘good to think with’ – in their originary and

unreconstructed form. But since they have not been superseded dialectically, and

there are no other, entirely different concepts with which to replace them, there is

nothing to do but continue to think with them – albeit now in their detotalized or

deconstructed forms, and no longer operating within the paradigm in which they

were originally generated.24

“Threat” in this sense comes from the potential of abstraction to erase the material histories of identity that produced both pain (“History is what hurts”) as well as invaluable knowledge and a sense of community borne through the common experience of adversity.

In this section I have attempted to articulate the key theoretical positions occupied by the two potential responses to trans identity, promise vs. threat, which Stryker and

Currah helpfully articulate. Of course, trans identity is no more constrained to the realm of theoretical abstraction than either of the distinct categories it is invoked to subvert.

Indeed, the intensity of the debate can only truly be understood by turning to the body

24 Stuart Hall, “Who Needs Identity,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, eds. S. Hall and P. du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), 2-3 87 and the implications for embodied existence posed in either interpretation. In the next section, I revisit the controversy around transracial identity as an opportunity to consider the implications of these debates in day-to-day living.

Transracialism: In Context

Two distinct yet interconnected points of departure may help to position us.

Multiracial Americans are at the cutting edge of social and demographic

change in the US – young, proud, tolerant and growing at a rate three time as fast

as the population as a whole. As America becomes more racially diverse and

social taboos against interracial marriage fade, a new Pew Research Center survey

finds that majorities of multiracial adults are proud of their mixed-race

background and feel their racial heritage has made them more open to other

cultures.25

That was the chief takeaway from a long-term study conducted by the Pew

Research Group. Yet for all its enthusiasm, coming as it did in June of 2015, the article was by then largely confirmation of a trend many had already begun to notice. Years earlier, in 2011 Susan Saulny writing for the New York Times, in characteristically understated fashion, reported that: “Census Shows Rise in Population of Multiracial

Youths” and two years before that in May of 2009 it was the Associated Press who declared: “Multiracial America is fastest growing group.” The AP story comes with the

25 Pew Research Group, Multiracial in America: Proud, Diverse, and Growing in Number. June 11 2015. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/06/11/multiracial-in-america/.

88 added benefit of a surprisingly revealing insight from William Frey, a demographer for the policy think tank Brookings Institute, who opines: “The significance of race as we know it in today’s legal and government categories will be obsolete in 20 years.”

Bombastic pronouncements notwithstanding, taken together, these stories describe a nation where racial identity is dramatically in flux if not fundamentally and permanently distorted. They convey a growing sense of racial identity as a social fiction, one that clearly still matters even as it fails to mean in any particularly coherent or specific way.

And their optimistic tones suggest a broader acceptance of this trend toward hybridity as not merely inevitable but also generally beneficial.

The other point involves an unexpected controversy that sparked a national debate which highlighted some peculiar alliances. In what was perhaps the most media exposure the organization had seen in decades, the National Association for the Advanced of

Colored People (NAACP) found itself in hot water when the chair of its Spokane,

Washington chapter was forced to resign after an interview with her parents in which they claimed she was a white woman “pretending to be black” went viral.26 Almost immediately, Rachel Dolezal became both a household name and a national punchline.

Her widely circulated (though frequently de-contextualized) sentiments that she

“identif[ies] as black”27 or that “nothing about being white describes who I am”28 became

26 There are certain terms that do valuable critical work even as they grate on the nerves and sensibilities of those who value precision and specificity. Viral is undoubtedly one. I’m not entirely convinced anyone has come up with a compelling threshold for how to know when an incident or piece of culture has circulated far enough quickly enough to be considered viral. That said, few others terms adequately convey both the speed and pervasiveness with which this story become a national conversation so for now we’ll live in its imperfections. 27 Rachel Dolezal, interview by Matt Lauer, The Today Show, NBC, June 16 2015. 28 Rachel Dolezal, interview by Savannah Guthrie, The Today Show, NBC, June 16 2015. 89 for some undeniable evidence of the politics of liberal tolerance run amok. Some of the harshest reactions came from communities of color who labeled Dolezal everything from a “fraud” to a “con” to “delusional” and even “pathological.”29

There is, of course, a long tradition of passing narratives in American literature generally and in ethnic literature in particular.30 As many critics have pointed out, these narratives were an ideal form for highlighting the essentially fictitious and profoundly contradictory nature of race. Over and over again, these stories offer protagonists who are either unaware of or intentionally hiding their “true” identity to underscore the idea that race is primarily if not exclusively a social reality (we are who we can convince others we are). And indeed, at first it seemed as though that was the comfortable pattern into which the Rachel Dolezal incident would fall. What made this moment unique, though, was Dolezal’s insistence on rejecting white identity, a move that her critics derided as cynical, self-serving and opportunistic.

These two archives throw into stark relief an anxiety about identity formation that is in many ways unique to the latter half of the twentieth century. They ask us to think both globally and locally about the meaning of identity at an historical juncture marked by an increased value in hybridity and flexibility.31 What’s more, they remind us of the

29 For a useful summary, see Natasha Noman, "14 Tweets About Rachel Dolezal That Reveal the Uncomfortable Truth About Race in America," Mic.com, June 15, 2015. 30 I don’t know if I could forgive myself if I didn’t mention Nella Larsen, Passing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929) here, but it does seem a little “on the nose.” See also William Dean Howell, An Imperative Duty (New York: Wentworth Press, 1892), James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (New York: Dover Publications, 1912), William Faulkner. Light in August (New York: Random House, 1932) and for good measure Imitation of Life, directed by John M. Stahl (1934; Los Angeles, CA: Universal Pictures), Film. 31 As we have already seen, flexibility in particular is a concept with a long critical history among theorists of neoliberalism. 90 fundamental messiness that attends any attempts to force race to cohere in specific ways.

They both represent individuals who are “performing race” incorrectly, at least by the standards that would have dictated the racial economy of pre-War America; multicultural citizens through their abandonment of discrete racial identities, Dolezal by virtue of her supposed “dishonesty,” Where these examples differ is in the way in which they have been received. One is presented as proof positive of the ascendancy of cultural liberalism in the American project, the surest sign that the future of the nation is a multicultural landscape of wide-open possibilities. The other offered as undeniable evidence that the trend of cultural relativism has gotten terribly out of control.

The Dolezal incident is also noteworthy in part for helping to broadly redefine a term that had long been in circulation, though put to very different use: transracial. This was much to the chagrin of those already versed in the world of adoption literature and discourse who were familiar with transracial having established the term years earlier as a way of describing the experience of children who are adopted and raised by parents of a

“different” race. Historically, this has predominantly been stories of black children adopted by white parents. Sandra Patton, a cultural historian focusing on adoption law, offers a helpful primer: “Transracial adoption first became a controversial issue in the early 1970s. A heated public debate occurred about the transmission of African American cultural identity to Black children adopted into White middle-class families. The central question in these debates was whether or not White parents were capable of teaching their children African American culture and history, inculcating them with the skills necessary

91 for Blacks to survive in the racially unequal United States.”32 Yet, as Patton notes, by the close of the century those attitudes had begun to shift: “While arguments against the practice continued to focus on racial identity, the political context of the 1990s had changed. Whereas in the earlier debate attention was focused on the importance of racial matching between children and parents, in the current political climate the debate has led to new federal policies promoting ‘color-blind’ adoptions by prohibiting the consideration of race in the adoptive placement of a child.”33

This history fascinates for a few reasons. First, it locates the term as an outgrowth of racial tensions and anxieties that begin to escalate immediately following the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement. Additionally, it gestures toward the shift I am suggesting from an understanding of difference as fundamental, innate, and unchangeable to something that is socially constructed, malleable, and negotiable. The “colorblindness” Patton describes can also be seen as a coordinated and concerted move to produce hybrid, or, in this case literally transracial (in the traditional sense?) families.

Similarities notwithstanding though, the etymological path connecting the transracial of adoption studies to the transracial of Rachel Dolezal is neither direct nor especially clear. Instead the concept takes a detour through a somehow even more politically treacherous corner of identity studies as sympathetic listeners and critical theorists alike (albeit for starkly different reasons) attempt to offer links between

Dolezal’s story and the experience of being transgender. Suffice it to say, the initial

32 Sandra Lee Patton, Birthmarks: Transracial Adoption in Contemporary America, (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 23. 33 Ibid., 24 92 reaction to the proposed comparison was swift34 and35 brutal.36 But why should it have been? Why is it that so many of the same critical minds who passionately advocated for the right of individuals to move beyond a binary “either/or” construction of gender seem completely unwilling to entertain even the notion that something similar might be possible (we won’t even dare suggest desirable) with race as well?

Post-colonial theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah once famously posed the question:

Is the post- in postmodernism the post- in post-colonialism?37 Broadly speaking, it was an argument waged on two fronts. First, there was the claim about historical co-incidence. Is it simply happenstance, Appiah queried, that both of these discourses, with their overt rejection of conventionally accepted codes and standards and their almost existential challenge to the very structure of social order, would arrive on the world stage at almost the same time? The second point he made was more fundamentally about the labor the modifier does for each term. Appiah describes the post- as a kind of “space-clearing gesture,” while noting that it was difficult, if not impossible to merely transpose the concept from one field to another: “…[post-colonial] artworks are not understood by their producers or their consumers in terms of a post-modernism; there is no antecedent

34 See Kovie Biakolo,"Being 'Transracial' Is Not a Thing So Let's Not Even Go There." Thought Catalog 12 June 2015. http://thoughtcatalog.com/kovie-biakolo/2015/06/being-transracial-is-not-a-thing-so-lets-not- even-go-there/. 35 Or Zeba Blay, "Why Comparing Rachel Dolezal to Caitlyn Jenner is Detrimental to Both Trans and Racial Progress." Huffington Post 15 June 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/12/rachel-dolezal- caitlyn-jenner_n_7569160.html. 36 Or Shannon Houston, "Of course Rachel Dolezal isn't black: Her sympathetic comeback media tour proves it." Salon.com 15 December 2015. http://www.salon.com/2015/12/15/of_course_rachel_dolezal_isnt_black_her_sympathetic_comeback_ media_tour_proves_it/. 37 See Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Post-Colonial?" Critical Inquiry (1991): 336-357. 93 practice whose claim to exclusivity of vision is rejected through these artworks. What is called ‘syncretism’ here is a consequence of the international exchange of commodities, but not of a space-clearing gesture.”38 Still, despite his misgivings, the space-clearing work of the post- remains difficult to deny. That is to say, while it would be a gross oversimplification to say that the two terms employ the modifier in exactly the same way, it seems equally problematic to broadly dismiss the potential connections there that seem so potentially generative. Perhaps the time has come to pose something of a corollary: Is the trans- of transgender the trans- of transracial?

The very question itself provokes a telling unease. Historically race has been used to justify any number of atrocities, exclusions, and micro-aggressions, everything from genocide and forced labor to discriminatory housing practices and restricted access to public space. Yet it is certainly true that gender has long been the justification for myriad injustices in its own right, unequal pay and the loss of political autonomy (especially though not exclusively in matters of sexual health) chief among them. Race, like gender, is increasingly understood to be a scientific fiction, a peculiar tool of the Enlightenment- era project of empire.39 Even still, race, as with gender, manages to inspire strong feelings of attachment, even among those who accept the claim of its fundamentally illusive nature.

Indeed, many of the critics who offered some of the most impassioned rejections of transracial identity did so on the grounds that such fluidity largely served as a way for

38 Ibid., 348 39 For more on this, see James Landers, Lincoln and Darwin: Shared Visions of Race, Science and Religion (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011) 94 an already privileged individual to claim access to even more space. Why, the argument seems to go, can’t people of color have identities of their own without having to construct them in relation to whiteness or worry that white people will simply co-opt those also. It is a compelling argument, but also a familiar one. It is, in fact, almost identical to the argument against transgender (transsexual, to be fair)40 identity by one of the most vocal early opponents, Janice Raymond. Her 1979 manifesto The Transsexual Empire: The

Making of the She-Male is a raw and provocative treatise against the medicalization, and by extension the malleability, of gender. Raymond has become something of a strawman villain in certain intellectual circles.41 But her work is also a reminder of the kinds of arguments that have longed been offered against hybridity and change.

Raymond’s main critique of transsexual identity stems from her perception of it as appropriative and deceitful. Consequently, she reserves her harshest critiques for MTF transsexuals who identify as lesbians. In a moment that sounds remarkably reminiscent of arguments that Dolezal was somehow appropriating blackness, Raymond complains:

“Transsexually-constructed lesbian feminists show yet another face of patriarchy. As the male-to-constructed-female transsexual exhibits the attempts to possess women in a bodily sense while acting out the images into which men have molded women, the male-

40 No, but really, let’s be fair. Raymond is talking very specifically about individuals (predominantly, though it stands to reason not exclusively, men) who undergo medical surgery to alter their gender expression. Of course, contemporary understandings of transgender identity incorporate a far broader range of gender identities and expressions, a reality which Raymond’s text does not explicitly address. 41 The introduction to her work excerpted in the Transgender Studies Reader doesn’t mince words: “Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire did not invent anti-transsexual prejudice, but it did more to justify and perpetuate it than perhaps any other book ever written.” See Janice Raymond, “Sappho by Surgery: The Transsexually Constructed Lesbian Feminist,” in The Transgender Studies Reader (Volume 1), eds. S. Stryker and S. Whittle (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2006), 131. 95 to-constructed-female who claims to be a lesbian-feminist attempts to possess women at a deeper level, this time under the guise of challenging rather than conforming to the role and behavior of stereotyped femininity.”42 She later goes on to explain that it is only because they can operate from the privilege of maleness that these individuals can so effectively perform femininity: “…the transsexually-constructed lesbian-feminist is able to deceptively act out the part of lesbian-feminist because he is a man with a man’s history; that is, he is free of many of the residues of self-centered, self-deprecation, and self-contradiction that attend the history of women who are born with female bodies all of which is communicated both subtly and not so subtly in gestures, body language and the like.”43 Fast forward to 2015 where the task falls to bloggers like Ellie Freeman to righteously proclaim: “Unlike many black Americans, Rachel’s family does not carry the trauma of slavery and institutionalized racism. Unlike people who are transracial, Rachel has not been physically torn between two cultures and denied intimate knowledge of her birth culture. Unlike people who are black and transracial adoptees, Rachel has not had to deal with both of these life-affecting changes at the same time.”44

Buried beneath the (questionable) statistics about the cost of gender reassignment surgery and ample invective about the kind of person who might be attracted to such a procedure, Raymond offers a surprisingly candid insight regarding the stakes of trans identity. In a section subtitled “Self-Definition,” Raymond grapples with the implications

42 Ibid., 131 43 Ibid., 133 44 Ellie Freeman, "Transracial Doesn't Mean What Rachel Dolezal Thinks It Means," Media Diversified. June 15 2015. https://mediadiversified.org/2015/06/15/transracial-doesnt-mean-what-rachel-dolezal-thinks-it- means/.

96 of a culture where all identity becomes mutable: “One should be able to make choices about who one wants to be. But should one be able to make any choice? Should a white person attempt to become black, for example? The question is a moral one, which asks basically about the rightness of a choice, not the possibility of it. Should persons be able to make choices that disguise certain facets of our existence from others who have a right to know – choices that feed off others’ energies, and reinforce oppression?”45 Framed as a question about moral rightness, and implicitly about the ability of certain groups to continue to exist and thrive, Raymond offers only one obvious answer. But it is a false premise, one that presumes the innate realness and fundamental coherence of the category in question. It is not merely that one does not necessarily “have the right to know” how others interpret their own identity, but also that no one expression, or set of expressions is any more “right” or “natural” than any other. Ultimately, Raymond’s mythic “real” lesbian feminist is every bit as imagined as the “real” black people who are supposedly done a tremendous disservice in having their universal experience of blackness co-opted.

To speak of transracial, then, is to speak of an identity that rejects the fixity of racial categories and insists that history need not be the limiting factor for imagining potential alliances. It is also to call forth the historical conditions that both produced race as a material reality and created the possibility for its subversion.

In his book Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities political theorist Rogers Brubaker explains how the emergence of trans as key inflexion point in

45 Raymond, “Sappho by Surgery”, 140. 97 conversations about both race and gender can be understood as part of a larger conversation about the shifting nature of identity: “It is part of a much broader moment of cultural flux, mixture, and interpenetration, as suggested by the burgeoning discussions of hybridity, syncretism, creolization, and transnationalism in the last quarter century. In this landscape of unsettled identities, sex/gender and ethnoracial categories have ceased to be taken for granted and have become the focus of self-conscious choices and political claims.”46 The contemporary moment is rife with claims about the value and nature of identity. While these questions certainly aren’t new, the return to the body as contested terrain in struggles over identity suggests something fundamentally different about the post-war moment.

Writing about the meaning of adolescence to the growing field of transgender studies, Gabrielle Owen offers a hopeful definition:

Adolescence functions simultaneously as a site of discovery and

disavowal, sustaining assumptions about what childhood was and what adulthood

should be, manufacturing narrative coherence for moments of arrival, and creating

distance for moments of contradiction, contingency, or change. The work of

transgender theory unravels adolescence along with fixed notions of gender

identity, sexuality, and selfhood. But trans embodiment suggests also the

possibility of reconstruction, revision, and remaking outside the developmental

imperative.47

46 Rogers Brubaker, Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 7. 47 Gabrielle Owen, “Adolescence,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1-2 (2014): 2. 98

In Union’s model for adolescence, I see the potential for both the promise and the threat of trans identity. In the next section, I turn to a coming of age narrative that predicts these anxieties and imagines them as the foundation for a new kind of social order.

“Did you think your children would only look different?”

Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series anticipates the fascinating shift in the nature of desire, from being predicated on absolute difference and impregnable boundaries to relying almost entirely on metamorphosis and mixture to define its future. A three-part saga that tells the story of the fall, revival, and reinvention of the human race, the three novels that make up this series, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago, are dense with ideas about the price of cultural exchange, the value of metamorphosis, and the curious space where overwhelming need becomes articulated as something closer to irrepressible desire. For my purposes I want to focus primarily on Adulthood Rites, the second in the series. Where Dawn follows the experiences of those who remember the world before its destruction, Adulthood Rites centers on a protagonist who must learn to exist in a place where he will forever serve as a reminder of an exchange that both parties desperately needed and (sometimes secretly wanted) but with which neither is entirely comfortable.

However, a bit of background is still in order.

The first novel in the series, Dawn, lays out the stakes. We are introduced to

Lilith, a Black woman living at the end of human history. The year is 1987 and the long- simmering “cold” tensions between the US and the Soviet Union have finally boiled over

99 into a hot conflict of the “scorched earth” variety. The warfare between the two sides leaves little to no inhabitable land for the few remaining survivors, so much so that the arrival of visitors from outer space goes largely unnoticed. It isn’t until centuries later, when the surviving humans are slowly awakened from their induced stasis that Lilith begins to realize the scope of what has happened. She awakens to find herself onboard a different ship hovering above Earth, surrounded by alien creatures with tentacle-like limbs and slithery grey sensory nodes covering their surface.

Her alien captor/saviors, the Ooankali, explain that theirs is a race of “gene- traders” who survive only through interstellar interbreeding. To satisfy their biological imperative, they comb the galaxies looking for other species to enter into trade with, an exchange that leaves both parties fundamentally and permanently altered. It is not an exchange without real benefits for humanity. In addition to rescuing the surviving humans from the nuclear wasteland the planet had become, the Ooankali also possess the ability to manipulate genetic structures. This ability allows them to seek out and contain

(if not ultimately remove) diseases and mutations that would normally prove deadly. For

Lilith, this means that her cancer, so long an illness and a burden in the old world, becomes one of her most compelling attributes.

Yet, for all the benefits of the exchange, humans have reason to remain skeptical.

For one, the Ooankali have forced the surviving humans to be sterile. Part of what drew the Ooankali to the humans in the first place was their dangerous unpredictability, what they euphemistically refer to as their “human contradiction”: their deadly combination of intelligence and hierarchical thinking. Jdhaya, one of Lilith’s Oankali guides, explains:

100

“Your [Human] bodies are fatally flawed. The ooloi perceived this at once. At first it was very hard for them to touch you. Then you became an obsession with them. Now it’s hard for them to let you alone.”48 Yet this same contradiction becomes the justification for refusing to allow humanity to continue existing autonomously. The Ooankali only awaken those humans they feel will be most receptive to their project which has meant a dearth of human-born males, a demographic judged to be the most volatile and unpredictable.

Lilith is charged with the unenviable task of convincing the surviving humans to work with their captor/saviors. It is a position which places her at odds with everyone around her. Her desire for human autonomy, or at least some semblance of it, puts her at odds with the Ooankali, who legitimately believe (and perhaps rightly so) that if let to their own devices, humans will destroy themselves and everything around them.

However, at the same time, Lilith’s willingness to work with the Ooankali in any fashion makes her suspect to the resistance-minded humans who would rather die than live in captivity. Nevertheless, even as they resent her willingness to be a part of the Ooankali’s

“gene-trading” project, the appeal of the strange, alien race is undeniable.

The Ooankali have three distinct genders: male, female, and ooloi. While all

Ooankali have the ability to perceive biochemistry down to a genetic level only ooloi have the ability to directly manipulate genetic material. This unique skill coupled with their ability to manipulate energy flows to produce sensations of intense pleasure make ooloi an indispensable party to everything from births, to healings, to sex. From her first

48 Ocatavia Butler, Dawn, (New York: Warner Books, 1987), 36 101 encounter with them, Lilith is thrown off balance by her own conflicted feelings of disgust mingled with perverse fascination.

Thus from the perspective of both the captor and the captive, Butler stages a drama of conflicting desire and cultural exchange that ultimately collapses the distinction between the two. From her first interaction with the Ooankali after being awakened aboard their ship, Lilith is given to understand the importance of exchange to her new captors. Not long after she is awakened she is takes an opportunity to inquire about her new situation, a conversation that doesn’t take long before turning to the topic of her new companions’ true ambitions. “We are as committed to the trade as your body is to breathing,”49 is the explanation offered by Jdahaya, one of the senior Ooankali. The

“trade” to which he refers is essential to the survival of the Ooankali, but it is also, crucially, profoundly pleasurable. For humans, the physical experience of being examined by their alien hosts is likened to an out-of-body orgasmic experience. For the

Ooankali, it is something deeper still: a necessity: “We were overdue for it when we found you. Now it will be done – to the rebirth of your people and mine,”50 Jdahaya goes on to explain.

In an attempt to bridge the two positions, Lilith manages to convince the Ooankali to allow her to start a new colony with a group of free humans away from their captor/saviors. The Ooankali modify her genes to make her stronger, better able to teach the newly-freed humans how to survive on their own, or to defend herself from them if

49 Ibid., 41 50 Ibid. 102 need be. Before long, the free humans aren’t satisfied with roaming aimlessly and they turn their attention to getting revenge on their captor/saviors. Lilith alone seems to truly appreciate how futile it would be to physically confront the Ooankali, and the humans only resent her more for being a voice of dissent. Eventually, they turn on not only Lilith but also Joseph, the man who had become her closest friend and companion. The free humans, now calling themselves resisters, attack and kill Joseph leading the Ooankali to decide to let the humans live in separate Ooankali-free villages, without Lilith. She, instead, remains behind to give birth to the next generation: the all-important constructs.

“That boy is to us what gold used to be”

Adulthood Rites follows the story of Lilith’s son, the first human-born male- gendered construct, Akin (pronounced Ah-keen). Chosen to be an ideal combination of human and Ooankali traits, Akin is human in appearance, though small for his age, with an Ooankali-like strength, speed, and sense of perception. However, from the outset, it is clear that while this combination is intended to be for his benefit, it is certainly not without its dangers. A discussion between Lilith and Nikanj, Akin’s third-gender ooloi parent, quickly turns to the risks inherent in his genetic mixture: “Physically, he’ll look his age until his metamorphosis. He’ll have to think his way out of any problems his precocity causes. That won’t do him much good with some Humans. They’ll resent him for not being completely Human and for looking more Human than their kids. They’ll hate him for looking much younger than he sounds. They’ll hate him because they

103 haven’t been allowed to have sons. Your people have made Human-looking male babies a very valuable commodity.”51

So from the outset Adulthood Rites presents liminality as a dangerous double bind. The combination of human and Ooankali traits that makes Akin so valuable to his community also makes him a particularly prized target for those who would do him harm.

Nevertheless, in spite of the risks involved, Akin represents the future of the human-

Ooankali relationship, as Nikanj makes clear when he informs Lilith: “We’ll allow more of them now. Everyone feels more secure about mixing them. Before too many ooloi could not perceive the necessary mixture. They could have made mistakes and their mistakes could be monsters.”52

Akin represents the final piece of a puzzle intended to solve the problem of the human contradiction while also bridging the gap between the old and new worlds. In many ways this makes his story not terribly unlike a long history of coming-of-age narratives in US Ethnic literature that highlight the trials of marginalized adolescents charged with the seemingly impossible goal of merging two distinct cultural identities.

But he is more than that. He is literally a kind of experiment, a real-world test designed to determine the viability of an entire family structure, which Nikanj alludes to when he explains to Lilith: “Trade means change. Bodies change. Ways of living must change.

Did you think your children would only look different?”53

51 Octavia Butler, Adulthood Rites (New York: Warner Books, 1988), 9 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 11 104

For most of his early days, Akin turns his heightened perception toward learning everything he can about his family and the surrounding village. While he is human in appearance, he is able to speak in full sentence and form complex thoughts almost as soon as he is born. It is a talent that, along with his alien-like long grey tongue, his male

Ooankali guardian quickly warns him against displaying overzealously: “[Humans] can be dangerous, Akin. Don’t show them everything you can do. But…hang around them when you can. Study their behavior. Maybe you can collect things about them that we can’t.”54

That experimentation takes on an added sense of urgency when a group of resisters decide to kidnap the human-looking infant. While Akin is out exploring with the newest addition to the community, with a former resister named Tino who hails from the town of Phoenix, one of the last surviving outpost of human civilization, he encounters a violent band of raiders. After brutally attacking Tino with one of the guns recently reintroduced into human civilization, the men turn their attention to the baby. Given that male-gendered constructs are an unprecedented commodity, it was probably only a matter of time until a group of resistance-minded humans discovered Akin and understood his potential value. This particular group wastes no time evaluating their catch:

The man holding Akin spoke up. ‘This kid is as human as any I’ve seen

since the war. I can’t find anything wrong with him.’

‘No tentacles?’ one of the four asked.

‘Not a one.’

54 Ibid., 15 105

‘What’s he got between his legs?’

‘Same thing you’ve got, a little smaller maybe.’55

Akin remains a convenient device to be deployed by both sides in the conflict throughout the novel. For the humans he represents valuable leverage. They understand the importance of male-born constructs to the Ooankali’s project and see in Akin their last chance to mount a meaningful resistance to their captor/saviors. For the Ooankali,

Akin is the ideal spy: small, unsuspecting, and, given that it was the human resisters who kidnapped him originally, above suspicion as a potential invader.

Following his capture, Akin becomes prized cargo for the traveling band of raiders as they make their way between the surviving human encampments searching for a potential buyer while trying to stay ahead of the Ooankali team that would surely be sent to search for the boy. Their journeys take them from village to village, confronting an array of attempts at rebuilding civilization. Before long, the raiders reluctantly arrive in the town of Phoenix: “The four resisters had been avoiding it, they said, because they knew it was Tino’s home village. The Ooankali would check it first, perhaps stay there the longest. But Phoenix was also the richest resister village they knew of.”56 Despite the dangers, the group makes their way into town, where they are greeted by the remnants of the initial survivors that Lilith had been charged with leading back to Earth years earlier.

In Phoenix, Akin finds people who are patient with him, even as his alien features ensure a constant unspoken distance. Yet he soon learns that humans do not require much

55 Ibid., 58 56 Ibid., 98 106 provocation to violently lash out. During his first night in town, a lively evening of drinking and bartering quickly turns violent: “The first shot startled him so much that he fell over. As he stood up, there were more shots. He took several steps toward the house, then stopped. If he went in, someone might shoot him or step on him or kick him… There was the noise of furniture smashing – heavy bodies thrown about, people shouting, cursing. It was as though the people inside intended to destroy both the house and themselves.”57 While this is certainly not Akin’s first exposure to humanity’s inclination toward violence, the seeming inevitability of it still startles him: “Akin screamed in shock and frustration and grief. When he came to know a man, that man died. His human father was dead without Akin ever knowing him except through Nikanj. Tino was dead. Now

Iriarte was dead. His years had been cut off unfinished…Why?”58

It doesn’t take long before Akin begins to see firsthand just how valuable he is to his captors. After the violent encounter between the people of Phoenix and the traveling raiders, Akin falls into the charge of Tate, a woman who knows Lilith’s story well having been one of the first humans selected to help rebuild civilization in Dawn. Much to his surprise, Akin’s family does not come for him immediately. Instead, he remains with the people of Phoenix where, before long, he encounters two other kidnapped construct children whose physical features are even less human-like. The two young children are already displaying signs of their alien-heritage, with small grey sensory tentacles sprouting across their bodies. For a small but rapidly growing portion of the human

57 Ibid., 107 58 Ibid., 110 107 community, this proves to be a bridge too far. Talk throughout the village quickly turns toward plans to rid the children of their alien features, with one villager in particular,

Neci, leading the charge: “‘They won’t feel much now,’ she said. ‘They’re so young…And those little worm things are so small. Now is the best time to do it.’ Stancio said nothing. ‘They’ll learn to use their Human senses,’ Neci whispered. They’ll see the world as we do and be more like us.’”59

This moment cements an insight that Akin had already begun to suspect, that alien difference both attracts and repels his captors and those passions can be directed to any number of ends. The same society which forced both Akin and other two constructs to be a part of their community, hoping to benefit from the difference they could bring also resents the signs of that difference with a visceral passion that subverts any attempts at rational thinking. Unsurprisingly, it does not take long until the two young constructs are forced to flee as the humans decide to follow through on their plans to separate them from their alien limbs. Akin offers to accompany them into the forest, before realizing that they stand a much better chance of escape without him. Before they part ways, the twins share with Akin what they have learned about human nature: “There kind is all they’ve ever known or been, and now there won’t be any more. They try to make us like them, but we won’t ever be really like them, and they know it.”60

The ambivalence of this moment highlights a central tension throughout the novel. The further into contact with human community Akin comes, the more

59 Ibid., 130 60 Butler, Dawn, 132. 108 sympathetic he becomes to their desire for self-determination. At the same time, he appreciates the possibility (and not-terribly-distant-past reality) that humanity unaltered is a precarious and potentially unsustainable project. This is about the time that he begins to understand his purpose: to be the ideal bridge to span the chasm between the two species:

“Who among the Oankali was speaking for the interest of resister humans? Who had seriously considered that it might not be enough to let Humans choose either union with the Oankali or sterile lives free of the Oankali? Trade-village Humans said it, but they were so flawed, so genetically contradictory that they were often not listened to. He did not have their flaw. He had been assembled within the body of an ooloi. He was Oankali enough to be listened to by other Oankali and Human enough to know that resister

Humans were being treated with cruelty and condescension.”61 To do this, Akin commits himself to learning everything he can about human communities during his time with the resisters.

The novel’s closing sections find Akin struggling to follow through on his promise to serve as an advocate for the interests of the resisters. His first hurdle comes from his young age. As Nikanj explains to Tino when discussing Akin’s penchant for wandering: “His human appearance is deceiving you. His twenty years are like…like twelve Human years. Less in some ways.”62 Akin quickly learns that, while he may possess more knowledge about the resister communities than any amount of genetic material alone could ever convey, he will remain a poor advocate for his cause until he is

61 Butler, Adulthood Rites, 159. 62 Ibid., 177 109 older: “When he was an adult, he could speak for the resisters. Now, his voice could be ignored, would not even be heard without the amplification provided by one of the adult members of his family.”63 After this revelation, Akin requests to be sent to live with the

Akjai, the oldest and wisest members of the Oankali species, while he awaits the metamorphosis his body must undergo to transform into its mature state.

During his time with the Akjai, the second, perhaps greater hurdle, becomes clear in the form of Oankali resistance to fully autonomous human communities. As the Akjai are quick to remind Akin, humans have already destroyed their own civilization once.

They go so far as to make the case that, given the nature of Human sociality, allowing them to live alone is anything but generous: “Understand that Akin, it is a cruelty. You and those who help you will give them the tools to create a civilization that will destroy itself as certainly as the pull of gravity will keep their new world in orbit around its sun.”64

Akin’s determined defiance should come as no surprise to students of the coming of age genre. The closing chapters detail his efforts to assemble the necessary resources and people to attempt to build a new human civilization with the begrudging acquiescence of the broader Oankali community. His quest leads him back to Phoenix where he discovers a town that has fallen into even greater disrepair from years of conflict, sickness, and scarcity: “There was trash in the street. Dead weeds, food waste, scrap wood, cloth, and paper. Some of the houses were obviously vacant. A couple of

63 Ibid., 186 64 Ibid., 234 110 them had been partially torn down. Others seemed ready to fall down.”65 He learns that

Phoenix has abandoned its pledge not to build firearms, a decision which only further reflects the increasingly desperate situation facing the surviving resisters. When he goes to find Tate to inform her that he has succeeded in pleading the case for a human community, he discovers that she too has fallen on hard times over the years.

His attempts to help her go awry though, when Tate’s husband Gabe, discovering the two lying unconscious with Akin’s alien tongue on Tate’s neck, rushes in to intervene: “Gabe’s interruption of Akin’s healing produced the only serious disruption in his memory Akin ever experienced. All he recalled of it later was abrupt agony.”66 This abrupt agony signals the beginning of Akin’s metamorphosis, a process that leaves him completely incapacitated for months. During this time, he is taken in by the surviving residents of Phoenix who share responsibilities for looking over while also debating amongst themselves about the implications of Akin’s offer to build a new human colony in space. By the time Akin’s metamorphosis is complete, most of his human-like features have given way to signifiers of his Oankali heritage. The implications of the change are not lost on Akin, who wastes little time directly confronting his newly compromised position: “Of course I mind. Oh, god. How many resisters will trust me now? How many will even believe I’m a construct?”67

Despite Tate’s best efforts to convince Akin that humans are better than the contradiction the Oankali’s define them through, before long a small group of resisters

65 Ibid., 241 66 Ibid., 251 67 Ibid., 260 111 turns on Akin and his defenders, setting fire to the house where Akin is recovering from his transformation. Undaunted, Akin gathers the humans who have agreed to participate in his experiment to rebuild humanity and together they take off for Mars leaving the town of Phoenix burning behind them.

The ending of Adulthood Rites is hardly satisfying. It fails (refuses?) to answer any of our questions about how successful Akin’s efforts will be or what kind of impact his final transformation will have, opting instead to close with a scene of our protagonist heading off into the great unknown. In part this is surely due to its position as the second part of a trilogy. But I also contend that the indeterminacy at the close of the novel serves a larger purpose. For one, it highlights the ways in which Butler’s novel marks a clear break from the cultural logics that traditionally determine the trajectory of the coming of age story. In The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, Franco

Moretti makes the case for narrative closure as a key component of the bildungsroman:

…narrative transformations have meaning in so far as they lead to a

particularly marked ending: one that establishes a classification different from the

initial one but nonetheless perfectly clear and stable – definitive, in both senses

this term has in English. This teleological rhetoric – the meaning of events lies in

their finality – is the narrative equivalent of Hegelian thought, with which it

shares a strong normative vocation: events acquire meaning when they lead to one

ending, and one only.68

68 Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, New Edition, (London: Verso Books, 2000), 7. 112

Still, Butler’s does not so much refuse to conform to the terms of the genre as articulated by its European antecedents as she does subvert them in some provocative ways. Moretti goes on to identify the central tension in the genre as that between “the ideal of self-determination and the equally imperious demands of socialization.” While this is true to a certain extent in Butler’s work, in Moretti’s thinking, these impulses are both driven by a desire for what he calls “the comfort of civilization”:

How can the tendency towards individuality, which is the necessary fruit

of a culture of self-determination, be made to coexist with the opposing tendency

of normality, the offspring, equally inevitable, of the mechanism of socialization?

This is the first aspect of the problem, complicated and made more fascinating

still by another characteristic of our civilization, which, having always been

pervaded by doctrines of natural rights, cannot concede that socialization is based

on mere compliance with authority. It is not enough that the social order is ‘legal’;

it must also appear symbolically legitimate. It must draw its inspiration from

values recognized by society as fundamental. Thus it is not sufficient for modern

bourgeois society simply to subdue the drives that oppose the standards of

normality. It is also necessary that as a ‘free individual’, not as a fearful subject

but as a convinced citizen one must perceive the social norms as one’s own.69

Moretti understands the bildungsroman as the generic form that most succinctly performs the work of bringing individual expression into line with social norms. In this schema, the “self-realization” at the culmination of most texts in the genre is merely the

69 Ibid., 16 113 realization of the individual as one among many. But how and where does this description apply when discussing a text which so thoroughly confounds conventional developmental trajectory. From a hyper-aware and articulate baby, Akin grows to be a predominantly human-looking male, before undergoing a metamorphosis from which he emerges more alien in appearance than ever before. But which of these stages would be his adolescence? And what is to be made of the false starts and moments of arrested development that reoccur throughout the narrative?

If Adulthood Rites makes for an uneasy contribution to the canon of the traditional bildungsroman, there is nevertheless another intellectual trajectory that may offer useful insights. Born out of attempts to merge studies of speculative fiction and race, the term

Afrofuturism was first used by critic Mark Dery in the introduction to his edited collection Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture where it describes “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture – and more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.”70 Initially offered as an antidote to the unchecked positivism of turn-of-the- century engagements with questions about the advent of digital technology and the racial myopia of public discussion about digital space and access, the scope of Afrofuturist inquiry quickly broadened to include attempts to think across diaspora, drawing connections between global variations on racialized futurity. While the majority of the

70 Mark Dery, introduction to Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 2 114 early work bearing the label was committed to examining science fiction and more direct engagements with technology, more recently critics like Alondra Nelson and Paul Miller have called for work to “explore futurist themes in black cultural production and the ways in which technological innovation is changing the face of black art and culture”71 more broadly.

Predictably, Butler’s work looms large in the critical tradition of Afrofuturism.

Yet, a surprisingly scant amount has been written on Adulthood Rites which tends to be treated as merely the middle part of a trilogy, if it is discussed at all. This is an approach perfectly exemplified in Bruce Clarke’s otherwise stellar chapter “Posthuman Viability” which places the Xenogenesis series into a genealogy of speculative treatments of the idea of posthuman metamorphosis. Clarke approaches metamorphosis narratives as typically falling into one of two categories: catastrophic examples which imagine the individual transformed beyond recognition and thus ostracized from the possibility of social belonging (the 1958 b-movie classic The Fly being a prime example) or “as with

Beast People in the The Island of Dr. Moreau, they emerge within an entire population, which must then grapple with a general and distributed corporeal transformation.”72 Both approaches have typically been preordained to failure by virtue of an unwillingness to reconcile a fundamental tension at the heart of Western (read: white, male) concepts of evolution:

71 Alondra Nelson and Paul Miller "About Afrofuturism." Afrofuturism. June 28 2006. http://afrofuturism.net/about/. 72 Bruce Clark, "Posthuman Viability," in Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narratives and Systems (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 159 115

But the possibility of this speculation simply reminds us how the limits of

Wells’s own conceptuality—and hence that of his dark avatars Dr. Moreau and

Prendick—were drawn by a theorization of evolution that remained conflicted

over the clash between, on the one hand, Darwin’s progressive intimation of the

nonessentiality of the concept of species, and the general and regressive anxiety to

salvage the notion of the sanctity and inviolability of the human from that

recognition. Although the transformations of The Fly update their technologies of

scientific metamorphosis, the fabulations that go by that name, so far at least,

have not escaped the general pull of humanistic anachronism on evolutionary

ideas.73

Yet in Butler, Clarke finds hope:

…her fiction is a meditation on evolution: the worlds she invented are

populated by individuals and groups placed under evolutionary pressures. Some

are human, some are mutant, and some are extraterrestrial. Still others are the

children of unions between humans and mutants, or humans and extraterrestrials.

Sometimes alone but typically in small groups, families or packs, her characters

have to carry the weight of evolutionary developments – the specter of deliberate

and inadvertent extinction, the divergence of natural or constructed variations, the

selection of hybrids or of the bearers of mutations, and the responsibility for

73 Ibid., 160 116

cultivating new evolutionary vectors through which a future can be purchased at

the price of irrecoverable loss and irrevocable change.74

While Clarke does not expend much time specifically on Adulthood Rites, he does offer a curious interpretation of the narrative labor Akin performs for the series overall, suggesting that “Butler strongly develops Akin’s position as a construct interspecies child for an allegory of adolescence in an interracial family.”75 Yet, as he goes on to describe, the novel doesn’t so much provide tidy narrative closure as it does shift ambivalently toward the unfamiliar at its close: “The arc of Akin’s narrative goes from Lilith’s womb to this second fetal period – his rebirth from the new gestation of his metamorphosis as an adult with an entirely Oankali body.”76 In this way the novel refuses to provide the tidy validation of the individual’s ultimate and rightful place within the social order. Akin ultimately undergoes so many changes and transformations that it becomes difficult if not impossible to map out the moment at which he arrives into full subjecthood, typically a prerequisite for the generic form. Moreover, by the end of the novel our protagonist is, in many ways, more isolated from society than he has ever been.

One interpretation for this lingering sense of isolation (indeed, the progressive vision) is that it is only step along the way to the inclusiveness and closure the third novel will provide. And if the third novel provided a tidy conclusion in which the humans and aliens learned to live happily together, it might be a compelling read. To be clear (spoiler alert) no such resolution is provided by the third novel which follows another of Lilith’s

74 Ibid., 162 75 Ibid., 183 76 Ibid. 117 construct children to the planet Akin helps to colonize a hundred years later where gene trading has become a common and accepted, if still unpredictable and potentially volatile occurrence. Another interpretation might hold that the anxiety and mistrust attached to indeterminate identities runs deeper than most people care to admit or acknowledge. At some fundamental level, Akin understands by the close of the novel what he had only suspected all along: that there was a real privilege to his familiarity that allowed him access that he will no longer have. Metamorphosis becomes both an inevitability and a liability.

Ultimately, I want to argue that Adulthood Rites anticipates the emerging value in trans identity, but understands this value as fundamentally ambivalent. That is to say, while Adulthood Rites seems to suggest that the future belongs to the metamorphized subject, it is clear that there are many dangers and pitfalls inherent in occupying that subjectivity. For Akin, the same quality that allows him to move so effortlessly between different groups and social systems also ensures that he will spend most of his life as a solitary wanderer. And here a broader problematic begins to emerge. We can think back to Rachel Dolezal, whose insistence on racial indeterminacy both authorized her ability to move between social spaces and ultimately produced her as the ultimate outsider. What, then, is the lesson about the value in trans identity in the contemporary moment?

We might argue that Butler is trying to have it both ways here. She does, after all, provide both a future determined by trans identity alongside the continued conflict and hostility between differing groups. It seems naïve and simplistic to suggest that metamorphosis is intended to (or ever really could) “solve” the problem of racial conflict.

118

But here is where the frame of Butler’s narrative becomes key. Recall that Dawn opens not so much with the chaotic (perhaps sublime) moment of contact between human and alien worlds, but rather with humans awakening to discover that this is their reality and has been for quite some time. In Adulthood Rites, the intensity of that conflict has become a receding memory. It is replaced by concerns about survival, endurance, and, dare we say, futurity. Butler’s work is often read as a metaphor for the middle passage, that fateful thoroughfare connecting the longest leg of the transcontinental project of white supremacy. There is much to that reading. But there is another fraught contact at the core of Adulthood Rites. Where Dawn emphasizes the stories of those who intimately remember the world before, Adulthood Rites offers a complex palimpsest of memories, erasures, and new beginnings that confound attempts at identification or clarity. While the tension between the desire for the lost human society of yore and the embrace of the unknown future are at the core of Dana’s story, Akin is among a generation whose allegiances are unclear and potentially persuadable in ways that could have potentially devastating consequences. But they are also a reality and a necessity nonetheless.

Perhaps it is the case that the anxiety provoked by indeterminate identity is the same as the one that compelled Akin’s human captures to regard him with such disdain.

In his difference, he represents not merely change but also a potential future in which the old ways of being have become obsolete. If the future is in becoming “trans,” what happens to those bodies who remain tethered to fixity? More pointedly still, we can ask, does the advent of the transracial portend the dissolution of the racial? And here again, the transgender analogy seems salient.

119

If we’re honest with ourselves, many of us in the critical theory community have expended perhaps a bit too much time and energy being dismissive about the conservative “slippery slope” arguments against social change. A common version of this ideology is to be found in former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum’s now infamous comment comparing gay relationships to “man on child, man on dog, whatever the case may be.”77 The absurdities here are plain to see. But the larger point, that an attack on the bedrock of the social order threatens the entirety of that social order, even the parts which make us most comfortable, is harder to ignore. And I’m reminded of Lauren Berlant’s

Cruel Optimism78 which tackles the kinds of affective attachments that tether us inexorably to those things which hurt us most. I wonder if the investments in racial fixity that underpin resistance to transracial anxiety aren’t merely echoes of that same affective attachment to the very real history of race and racialization of which no person of color living under white supremacy can hope to be unaware for long. While I appreciate the weight of those attachments, to imagine them to be enough to hold us down against the push and pull of history seems profoundly misguided. Because race was invented, the inevitability of its reinvention is its only certainty.

Butler offers a radical vision of the future, not by insisting on racial harmony (a la the sci fi utopianism of Star Trek) or whitewashing the future clean of any social

77 Rick Santorum, interview by The Associated Press. Excerpts from Santorum interview (April 23 2003). 78 Berlant is impressively (mercifully?) succinct on this point: “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project…These kinds of optimistic relations are not inherently cruel. They become cruel only when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.” Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 1. 120 awareness at all (the original Star Wars (1977), Blade Runner (1982), Tron (1982), etc.) but rather by using the messiness of massive social change as the starting point.

Metamorphosis in Butler’s universe is value-neutral, more inevitable than desirable. That transformation is significant is beyond question. What specifically it means for the future of the individual, the family, or society at large remains an open question. In this way, it is perhaps the perfect metaphor for identity in the second half of the twentieth century, unclear and ambivalent, heading toward a treacherous future with all the tools for unprecedented success or devastating failure already in hand.

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Chapter 3: The Entertainment Industry

Becoming Deviant: Difference and Cinema in the Information Age

“Virtually all movies begin as commodities made for a marketplace –

not just commodities, to be sure, but at least commodities.”

-Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics

“…[C]inematic processes govern (in the sense of exercising continuous sovereign authority over) the

selection of which images can appear and of what is likely to be perceptible in their appearance.”

-Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight

In hindsight, it seems almost inevitable. But surely it was not the plan of the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to find themselves at the center of a cultural firestorm in early 2016 when they released their annual list of nominees for the Academy Awards. The Academy Awards have always performed a peculiar kind of cultural work. Originally designed as the consummate industry insider award, the Oscars soon became a way of accruing prestige and respect from the broader public.1 In recent years, it has taken on the curious role of last line of defense against a

1 For more on the history of the Academy Awards, see James English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

broader film culture that is developing increasingly global tastes.2 Yet in 2016, the combination of an increasingly diversified film audience, expanding avenues for content, a culture of instantaneous and constant public feedback, and a history of increasingly successful social media shame campaigns produced just the right conditions for the explosion of a meme that would perfectly index so many of the critiques being leveled not only at film but at American popular culture in general.

#OscarsSoWhite was born out of a specific reaction to a lack of diversity among the nominees for the Academy Awards that year. But as more and more people began to weigh in, it soon became clear that the conversation was about so much more. Artists and filmmakers of color described their frustration with the feeling that their work and ideas, indeed the value of their worldviews, were consistently undermined. The most common response from (white, though not predominantly male) industry professionals was to suggest that the dearth of representation bespoke a larger lack of qualified minority talents at all levels. It is a sentiment perfectly encapsulated in Hollywood Golden Child

Stephen Spielberg’s response when asked during an interview to comment on the controversy: “But it's not just the Academy, and I think we have to stop pointing fingers and blaming the Academy. It's people that hire, it's people at the main gate of studios and independents. It's the stories that are being told. It's who's writing diversity — it starts on

2 A recent example of such posturing can be seen in the Academy’s reticence to include an award for Best Stunt Coordinator, a category which would presumably be dominated by the kinds of action-centric fare typically denied recognition. For more, see Alisha Grauso, "Hollywood's Stunt Community Fights for Oscar Recognition After Another Snub," Forbes - Media and Entertainment 24 February 2016. Web. . 123 the page. And we all have to be more proactive in getting out there and just seeking talent.”3

It is certainly an appealing answer. The search for “talented” minorities recalls the quest for excellence as the justification for expanding inclusion which was the central focus of our first chapter. The move to deflect responsibility for the lack of diverse representation from the people who create, distribute, advertise, and ultimately validate films onto those forcibly excluded from that process also has the convenient effect of making exclusion into the fault of the excluded foremost. But responses like these, with their insistence that there is simply no work by non-white artists to laud, also do the work of effortlessly dismissing the incredibly important, and increasingly valuable, talents that actors, writers, producers, and filmmakers of color have been bringing to film since its inception.

This chapter is not a historiography of the cinematic coming of age narratives by artists of color, though such a project is certainly long overdue4. Nor is it an attempt to offer a comprehensive account of the contributions of minority filmmakers to the canon of American cinema. Instead, I want to consider the moment where two cinematic genealogies that had long seemed parallel begin to bump up against one another in some surprising ways. I am interested in how the reservoir of cultural difference, long a source

3 Steven Spielberg, interview by T. Scott Feinberg, The Hollywood Reporter ‘Awards Chatter’ Podcast, February 11, 2016. 4 Youth Culture in Global Cinema, Eds. Timothy Shary and Alexandra Seibel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007) is a valiant effort, though it does trend a bit more toward international cinema than US-based minorities. 124 cinema has relied on in moments of exhaustion5, reinvigorates the medium itself with a sense of excitement and novelty as it rewrites the terms of representation for particular marginalized identities.

The coming-of-age narrative is easily one of the oldest cinematic tropes. But it isn’t until the postwar moment and subsequent development of technologies that would come to be icons of youthful freedom (cars, highways, drive-ins, high school dances, etc.) that the “teen film” would come into being. Catherine Driscoll offers a useful primer on the genre:

Teen film is generally thought more interesting for what it says about

youth than for any aesthetic innovations, and is represented as closely tied to the

historically changing experience of adolescence. There are certainly narrative

conventions that help define teen film: the youthfulness of central characters;

content usually centered on young heterosexuality, frequently with a romance

plot; intense age-based peer relationships and conflict either within those

relationships or with an older generation; the institutional management of

adolescence by families, schools, and other institutions; and coming-of-age plots

focused on motifs like virginity, graduation, and the makeover. Engaging with

teen film as a genre means thinking about the certainties and questions concerning

adolescence represented in these conventions.6

5 And here we could think of the history of Blaxploitation, Chick Lit films, or what B. Ruby Rich has termed “the New Queer Cinema” as all instances of a similar phenomenon. Indeed, media historian Thomas Doherty has argued for understanding the teen film as a specific version of the exploitation film. See Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 6 Catherine Driscoll, Film Genres: Teen Film: A Critical Introduction (New York: Berg Publishers, 2011), 1. 125

Driscoll goes on to make a claim for why the concerns of adolescence make for a uniquely strong fit with the technology of cinema: “Adolescence as an identity crisis bound to both emerging sexuality and training in citizenship was ‘discovered’ in the nineteenth century by new social sciences and new modes of cultural criticism at the same time as experiments with cameras and film were tending towards cinema.

Adolescence and cinema were in many respects new industries for the twentieth century.”7

Of course, as many critics have pointed out, the teen film is a slippery designation at best. Competing genealogies locate the genre’s origin anywhere from the birth of cinema itself8 to the shifting (and increasingly younger) film audiences of the 1950s9 to perhaps its most self-conscious moment in the 1980s.10 Yet despite their differing points of departure, most critics agree that the teen film has long been an important part of both the business of cinema and the proliferation of a uniquely American aesthetics of youth.

That is to say, just as teen films have been an important marketing strategy for driving business among filmgoers, particularly at moments when ticket sales are at their most precarious, they have also been an important site for coalescing a collective image of what adolescence is supposed to look like.

The most commonly-cited examples in the genre betray an unavoidable similarity.

From Rebel Without a Cause (1955) to Blue Hawaii (1961), The Breakfast Club (1985) to

7 Ibid. 8 See Timothy Shay, Teen Movies: American Youth on Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2005) 9 Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics 10 See Roz Kaveney, Teen Dreams: Reading Teen Film from Heathers to Veronica Mars (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) 126

Clueless (1995), the image of the ideal adolescent shifts significantly less than we might assume. It seems appropriate to suggest that the sense of coherence the genre conveys in the face of its wildly divergent individual expressions is due in no small part to the interchangeability of its leads. It is unfair to say that the whiteness of the teen film has gone unnoticed.11 However, in their earnest efforts to do justice to the history of the genre, many critical examinations have failed to account for just how rapidly that landscape is changing.

And the implications of this shift are profound. If the teen film has always denoted a set of aesthetic features, as well as a perceived audience or market, the changes to the genre and its specific forms at the close of the twentieth century can best be understood as part and parcel with the changes this project has tracked throughout. At the dawn of the twentieth-first century, film companies found themselves with a familiar problem. Shifting attitudes toward cultural consumption increasingly drive US audiences to alternatives to the movies with streaming services and personal electronic devices leading the charge. At the same time, a rapidly-expanding international market for cinema injects new value into characters and stories that were traditionally dismissed from the canon of desirable film types.12 The resulting efforts to address the demands of increasingly diverse audiences while still appeasing corporate investors are noteworthy both for what they maintain as well as what they alter.

11 Henry Giroux’s criminally under-cited Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today’s Youth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), questionable title notwithstanding, makes a compelling case for reading depictions of “urban youth” as reflections of conservative ideologies about race in the 1980s and 90s. 12 The runaway international success of the Fast and Furious franchise is often cited as prime example of this shift. 127

Director Justin Lin’s 2003 film Better Luck Tomorrow and Director Dee Ree’s

Pariah, released in 2009, are both films that would have been almost inconceivable in an earlier era. While both films fit (with varying degrees of ease) into the general mold of the teen film, they also serve as powerful reminders of a long history of exclusion that makes the appearance of their main characters an event in its own right. Still, if we are surprised by the very existence of these films at all (and I would contend that we most certainly should be), we should be even more taken aback by the changes to the methods of production and distribution that made both of these films not only possible but indeed necessary.

In what follows, I attempt to offer a theory of minority difference in cinema at the beginning of the twenty-first century that can account for the shifting attitudes and tastes that have come to define the present moment. I begin with a brief overview of the history of independent cinema with a particular eye toward how the medium has come to serve as a uniquely important outlet for traditionally marginalized voices. From there, I turn to the work of scholars in Asian American and African American Studies to establish a history of racial absence in cinema. My goal here is to understand the historical stakes for representation while also thinking through counter-archives that have long existed as ways to combat or critique those occlusions. I want to ask what it means to think of these two films, with their sexualized Asian American men and butch Black lesbians respectively, as deviant contributions to the archive of cinema history. I also want to think about the manifold kinds of cultural labor each film is being asked to perform as

128 they are called on to represent not only “independent” cinema, but also “Asian

American” or “Black” film as well.

I use this foundation to transition into a closer examination of each film.

Beginning with Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow, I am interested in how particular tropes of the teen film as genre take on new meaning when layered atop complex histories of racialization. More specifically, here I am interested in how myths of the so- called “model minority” inform the film’s approach to the high school setting and the conventional narrative structure of the genre. I make the case for understanding the film as a particularly pointed response to images of asexual, overachieving, and upwardly mobile Asian Americans that are so much the stock in trade of the genre at large.

Next I look to Dee Ree’s Pariah for new ways of visually representing gender, sexuality, deviance, and blackness. Where Better Luck Tomorrow makes most of its critiques of the teen film genre and film more broadly at the level of narrative, I argue for understanding Pariah’s key interventions in more formal and aesthetic terms. From the unconventional lighting choices to the loose narrative structure, Pariah makes a compelling case for a new way of seeing minorities in film.

In both instances, I attempt to merge an analysis of the films themselves with a history of their production and distribution to highlight the fundamental changes to the business of cinema that makes both films possible. Representing as they do the first feature film widely distributed by the newly formed MTV Films outlet (Better Luck

Tomorrow) and the first successful joint venture for Netflix’s filmmaker incubator

(Pariah) these films are as much testaments to the shifting calculus of the movie business

129 as they are a reflection of audience’s desires. If, as this chapter’s first epigraph suggests, all films are commodities, I make the case for thinking seriously about what capital wants and how exactly it moves in this moment.

Deviant Cinema – Independence and Difference

Much like teen the term independent has always had an abundance of meanings to the history of cinema. Indeed, while “independent” cinema has been around in some form or another almost as long as cinema itself, the term has undergone a series of shifts in meaning and usage over the course of the twentieth century that offer fascinating insights into the culturally labor it performs. Janet Staiger reminds us that in its earliest iteration in the 1890s “independent” was used to denote filmmakers operating outside of the three major producers of the time, Edison, Biograph and Vitagraph each of whom attempted to use their copyright to film technologies to prevent outside competition.13 It was during this early period that as Geoff King argues “the term ‘independent’ gained romantic connotation, signifying the brave efforts of rebels fighting against a powerful trust.”14

As many film historians have pointed out, this monopoly of film production by the different companies who owned the patents to particular cinematic technologies would not last long. By 1915, the patent companies would be declared illegal and dissolved. In their place would spring up the most streamlined and efficient (and mercilessly rigid) system of industrialized cultural production the US had ever seen

13 Janet Staiger, "Combination and Litigation: Structures of US Film Distribution, 1896-1917," Cinema Journal 23, no. 2 (1984): 41-72. 14 Geoff King, American Independent Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 15. 130 before. More words have been devoted to the strengths and limitations of the Hollywood

Studio System than seems possible.15 For our purposes it should be sufficient to note the standardization of the Hollywood Studio System, in which the means of production, distribution, and exhibition were all vertically-integrated into the same small handful of wealthy companies, created both a smaller number of potential venues for “non- mainstream” films as well as a need for a constant and steady supply of lower-budget, so- called “B” movies. During this period, from roughly the teens through the 1960s,

“independent” was typically used to describe the creators of the kind of “B” movie fare that was critically reviled even as it served a vital role in making cinema into a profitable industry.

During the same period, the term also accrued meaning as a way of describing the kinds of productions that were typically assumed to have a limited mainstream appeal.

The proliferation of so-called “ethnic” films, an umbrella term encompassing works created for and marketed toward specific socio-cultural demographics, also proved the value of creating content targeted toward a very specific audience.16 Of course, in each of these instances, the degree of distance between the major studio production and its

“independent” counterpart seems variable. And indeed, during this period, with the exception of imported foreign film and documentary films produced for non-commercial

15 Among the more noteworthy classics: David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), Davis, Ronald L. Davis, The Glamour Factory: Inside Hollywood's Big Studio System. (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1993), and Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). 16 See Yannis Tzioumakis, American Independent Cinema: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). 131 purposes (museum exhibitions, art galleries, etc.) very little that managed to find wide circulation did so without having to contend in some capacity with the standards and protocols of the studio system. Despite these limitations, a certain understanding of the meaning of “independent” in cinema during the Classical Hollywood era managed to cohere: namely that independent cinema is somehow distinct with regards to its production history (budget, use of sets vs. filming on location, quality of film stock), its aesthetics (non-standard filming and lighting techniques, unconventional narrative structure, potentially controversial subject matter), and its intended audience.

The dissolution of the Hollywood Studio System in the 1960s, combined with the proliferation of formal film school programs17 and national as well as regional film festivals throughout the US and Europe (primarily, though with respectable representation in Latin America, Japan, and Canada) specializing in “independent” works18 led to a period that many scholars regard as the birth of the “independent film scene.” While there had long been directors who worked at the margins of the studio system while remaining in some tangential relationship to one of the major studios,19 the success of films like John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1960) and Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider

(1969) made outside investors with no deep ties to the film industry more willing to take a risk on projects that seemed unlikely to meet the high bar of financial success necessary

17 While formal training in film production had been around in some capacity since the turn of the century, the 1960s saw the beginning of the four-year film school program designed in the vein of the more prestigious liberal arts program than the kind of vocational training that was common in most earlier institutions. 18 While the specifics vary from festival to festival, typically “independent” in this context means completed short or feature-length films that have not yet secured national distribution. 19 The careers of Charlie Chaplin and John Wayne are both examples of this approach. 132 to justify the budget of most major studio projects. Combined with the more marginal successes of artists like Andy Warhol and experimental filmmakers like Maya Deren and the growing popularity of exploitation films among younger audiences, “independent” films soon became in-demand. Geoff King offers an explanation for the rationale behind such a shift: “Association with ‘quality’, arty, edgy, or ‘cool’/alternative features is good for the image: that of individual executives with pretensions to something more than noisy blockbuster productions, and that of branches of large corporations often subject to criticism for their business practices and much of their not-so-creative output.”20

Independent cinema thrived in the gap left by the Hollywood Studio System. With the loss of a central authority to dictate which films played at what times in which markets, the opportunities for new actors to enter the scene dramatically increased. At the same time, “independent” cinema during this period was increasingly coming to be seen as a niche extension of the larger American film industry. Thus, just as the multiplexes were being overrun with such low-budget, controversial fare as Night of the Living Dead

(1968, dir. George A. Romero) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, dir. Tobe

Hooper), Hollywood was already hard at work figuring out how to capitalize on the situation, either through profiting off the distribution and circulation of independently made films (as was the case with Columbia Pictures and Easy Rider), or by adopting their aesthetic into more conventional studio fare (1973’s The Exorcist, dir. William Friedkin, is a prime example).

20 Geoff King, American Independent Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 46. 133

Still, even as the threat of incorporation loomed, the late 1960s-1980s saw a veritable explosion of independent filmmaking, both of the low-budget, exploitation- minded variety and of the quirky, prestigious, and serious sorts. The increasing popularity of film festivals ensured a steady supply of new filmmaking talents. It also created something of a self-fulfilling cycle as participation in one of the more prestigious festivals came to be seen as its own prize.21 At the same time, given its association with counter-culture, racial otherness, and all things generally considered hip, supporting independent film came to represent an important political stance against the growing cultural conservatism of the period. Yannis Tzioumakis explains: “With the major entertainment conglomerates tightening their grip on everything related to American cinema and with Reaganite entertainment defining mainstream cinema and reigning supreme at the box office, it became a cause for celebration when films that were financed, produced, and distributed outside the majors met with (relative) commercial success.”22

Of course, even relative success would not go unnoticed for long. In the 1980s, film studios busied themselves with trying to figure out how to cash in on the cache of

“independent” cinema. The runaway success of studios like Miramax and New Line, which managed to merge individualized, artist-driven productions with more commercially-minded fare, all supported by the marketing and distribution resources of a

21 Gregg Merritt recounts more than a few harrowing tales of the lengths to which some directors would go to ensure inclusion in highly-regarded festivals. See Gregg Merritt, Celluloid Mavericks: A History of American Independent Film (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000). 22 Tzioumakis, American Independent Cinema, 17. 134 major studio, forced many critics and creators alike to question exactly what the future looked like for a category of film whose identity is tied so intimately into its sense of its own autonomy.

The term ‘indie’ is useful not so much as an abbreviation for “independent,” which as we’ve seen can be applied to a broad and fairly disparate range of texts and actors, but rather as a specific iteration of independent filmmaking that names the period of the genre’s self-conscious recognition. In this sense, ‘indie’ represents the most recent stage in the history of independent cinema, the moment at which it becomes both a streamlined method of production and a set of aesthetic conventions in its own right.

Films like sex, lies, and videotape (1989, dir. Steven Soderbergh), She’s Gotta Have It

(1986, dir. Spike Lee), The Crying Game (1992, dir. Neil Jordan), and Clerks (1994, dir.

Kevin Smith), though distinct on the surface, all spoke to a kind of counter-cultural ethos, but also a potential for marketability that would come to be known colloquially as the

“indie” movement.

Michael Newman succinctly sums up the indie spirit: “Most centrally, indie cinema consists of American feature films of this era [from late 1980s through the first decade of the 2000s] that are not mainstream films. Its identity begins with a negative: these are not the films of the Hollywood studios and the megaplexes where they screen, and are generally not aimed at or appreciated by the same audience segments.”23 Jim

Hillier is more direct, highlighting the work the “indie” sector has done in terms of providing a platform for perspectives typically omitted, if not outright forbidden, in

23 Michael Newman, Indie: An American Film Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 2. 135 mainstream film: “It is to this ‘indie’ sector that we owe transformed representations of ethnic minorities – particularly African Americans (but also Hispanic and Chinese

Americans; the latter for instance in the work of Wayne Wang) – and of gays and lesbians, as well as experimentation with narrative forms and generic expectations – and sometimes all these combined.”24

Given this history, it does not seem a stretch to suggest that indie cinema is a kind of deviant cinema. We’ll recall “deviation” to describe the act of turning aside, or swerving, has been around since at least the seventeenth century.25 However, the nominal and adjectival forms have a somewhat more modern history where they are tethered inextricably to concerns about social norms and conventions. So, by the turn of the twentieth century, the term had become a catchall for “something that deviates from normal,” with all the attendant implications for identity and embodied experience one might expect.

To call independent cinema a kind of deviant cinema, then, is to name both its peculiar avenues of funding (either through legitimately independent, i.e. not affiliated with major film studios, sources or through peculiar partnerships with larger distributors) and distribution (through a circuit of small, regional film festivals or straight to video and increasingly streaming release) as well as the nontraditional characters and stories the genre tends to favor.

24 Jim Hillier, American Independent Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 3. 25 See "ˈdeviant, adj.". OED Online. January 2017. Oxford University Press. 136

Still, even as “indie” film garnered a reputation for itself as a cultural vanguard of sorts, it has never been able to fully escape the financial calculus underlining all large- scale commercial products. For all their talk of creativity, artistic freedom, and open expression, independent film producers and distributors operate within a global economy that is in no way immune to questions of audience, marketability, and return on investment.

In that sense, Better Luck Tomorrow and Pariah are profoundly revealing films, both in terms of their specific content and by nature of their very existence. As theorists of race and economics are quick to point out, Asian American men and African American women consistently rank about the bottom in even the most recent studies about desirability according to race.26 Of course the great irony is that this perceived unpopularity is only continually reinforced by the absence of both types from mainstream conversations about sex, intimacy, and desire. To understand the shift, we must first reconcile these distinct yet interrelated histories.

Modeling Minority in Better Luck Tomorrow

There is a scene in the hugely successful 1984 teen comedy Sixteen Candles

(directed by John Hughes) that finds the whole family, minus wayward teenage daughter

Samantha (Molly Ringwald at the height of her fame), heading off to a wedding.

Blissfully unaware of the wild shenanigans their home and daughter were subjected to the

26 Raymond Fisman and Sheena S. Iyengar, “Racial Preferences in Dating,” Review of Economic Studies 75 (2008): 117– 132, http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/emir.kamenica/documents/racialPreferences.pdf; and http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes .com/2007/04/13/single-female-seeking-same-race-male 137 night before, they take their seats in the car and back out the driveway. The family doesn’t get very far before Grandpa Fred calls out to Grandpa Howard to inform him that the foreign exchange student in Howard’s charge is prostrate in the front yard. Or, more specifically, in the spirit of the Reagan era he helpfully declares: “Hey Howard, there’s your Chinaman.” The family decamps from the vehicle to surround the body of the young man, unsure if he is alive or dead. Grandma Dorothy suggests holding a mirror up to his mouth, while Howard opts to feel his body for warmth. This startles back to consciousness a young man of Asian descent27 who goes by the name Long Duk Dong.

The family quickly realizes that Long Duk Dong (Duckie colloquially) is merely inebriated, at which point Duckie exclaims “Oh, no more yanky my wanky. The Dongle needs food!” before being overcome with fits of explosive laughter. The family briefly considers how best to respond before Howard takes the lead, asking about his missing car. Duckie’s response, to repeat the question back in his exaggerated accent before miming a car swerving off the road and crashing into a lake, is met with an audible gasp from Dorothy. Not usually prone to emotional outbursts, Dorothy is overcome, declaring

“Why you little scuzbag!” before kicking the young man on the ground and storming off.

It is a scene that is surprising for its banality, the sheer everydayness of its slights, and the overwhelming sense of normalcy that allows this sequence to cohere. With his feckless and yet still somehow predatory sexuality and brazen duplicity, Long Duk Dong is a familiar type repackaged for modern audiences. That he manages to so effortlessly

27 While Gedde Wattanabe, the actor who portrayed “Duckie” is Japanese-American, the character is intentionally of non-descript “Far East Asian” origin. 138 reiterate a long history of racist depictions of Asian otherness says volumes about the limits of the American film industry to escape its troubling past. But that he does so in a film that looms so large in the US cultural imaginary bespeaks a larger acceptance of the underlying precepts at work in the national joke of which Duckie is forever the butt.

Lisa Lowe has examined how the production of the “Asian American” subject was always a process in which race, class, gender, and sexuality became constitutive ideologies:

The economic contradictions of capital and labor on the national level, and

the contradictions of the political nation within the global economy, have given

rise to the need, over and over again, for the nation to resolve legally capitalist

contradiction around the definition of the Asian immigrant subject. The history of

the legislation of the Asian as alien and the administration of the Asian American

as citizen is at once the genealogy of this attempt at resolution and the genealogy

of a distinct ‘racial formation’ for Asian Americans, defined not primarily in

terms of biological racialism but in terms of institutionalized, legal definitions of

race and national origin.28

Lowe goes on to describe how the racialization of Asian Americans also ascribed gender to Asian American subjectivity: “…the administration of citizenship was simultaneously a ‘technology’ of racialization and gendering. From 1850 until the 1940s,

Chinese immigrant masculinity had been socially and institutionally marked as different from that of Anglo- and Euro-American ‘white’ citizens owing to the forms of work and

28 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 10. 139 community that had historically been available to Chinese men as the result of the immigration laws restricting female immigration.”29 Lowe illuminates how the arrival of

Asian subjects into the US national project was predicated on a fundamental and unassailable difference that would preserve them as a reservoir of racialized labor while simultaneously constricting their potential for growth or expansion. An unintended

(though by no means unnoticed) consequence of this approach became the assignation of a kind of de facto non-normativity to Asian being and living, in everything from food to entertainment to sleeping arrangements.

In a somewhat separate vein, David Eng suggests that the intersectional subject position of Asian American men makes for an ideal fit with conversations about cultural deviance more broadly:

Collectively, these numerous historical examples – of the legal definitions

of citizenship, of the economic imperatives of professions, of the institutionalized

production of social space – link racial, gendered, and sexual constructs.

Considered in relation to one another, they encourage us to understand that

critical discourses on ‘deviant’ sexuality do not affect merely those contemporary

Asian American subjects who readily self-identify as queer, gay, or lesbian.

Rather, discourses on deviant sexuality encompass a far larger Asian American

constituency whose historically disavowed status as full members of the U.S.

nation-state renders them queer as such.30

29 Ibid., 11 30 David L. Eng, Racial Castrations: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 18. 140

Eng’s suggestion that Asian American manhood represents a kind of deviance “as such” has become for many Asian American filmmakers something of a rallying point.

The 2006 documentary The Slanted Screen (dir. Jeff Adachi), for all the valuable work it does in archive a history of Asian American cinematic existence, is emblematic of a reactionary impulse toward hypermasculinity as counter to the denial of normativity. For her part, Celine Shimizu warns against merely slotting Asian American men into traditional male roles: “We need to beware that the representation and criticism of Asian

American men in the movies can also be straitjacketed into a narrowly circumscribed vision of masculinity, informed by a reactionary claim to male power and privilege.”31

Shimizu further unpacks how depictions of Asian American male sexuality in popular culture have been overdetermined by a discourse of “lack,” often with devastating consequences:

Too often, the perception of asexuality, effeminacy, and queerness as

racial emasculation is met with a demonization of difference and the valorization

of severely constrained genders and sexualities. The understanding of Asian

American female hypersexuality as companion to Asian American male

hyposexuality would describe the female as the one in an empowered position

over the disadvantaged Asian American male. This logic holds up only if we

subscribe to a normative sexuality that uses criteria that both Asian American

women and men ultimately fail to fulfill— for racial reasons.32

31 Celine Shimizu, Straightjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 6. 32 Ibid., 7 141

To counter this over-determination in mainstream outlets, Shimizu suggests looking to independent cinema as a “technology of ethics.” As she describes: “To approach film as a technology of ethics is to use [Emmanuel] Levinas’s philosophy of relating to the other. He describes the highest form of ethics as a responsibility to care for the other, but this does not necessarily always require mutuality; when caring for a young child, for example, the parent does not and cannot expect reciprocal treatment. Ethical

Asian American manhood rests in the awareness of one’s position of power so as to decenter oneself in questioning how one impacts others. If facing the other makes one aware of the ability to affect the other, I look to film as a technology for figuring ethical manhoods.”33

Better Luck Tomorrow is, for Shimizu, one such attempt to figure something we might call an ethical manhood through its attempts to speak back to the legacy of Duckie.

The first feature film from Director Justin Lin (who, in a rather telling turn, is routinely referred to as “The Asian American Spike Lee”), Better Luck Tomorrow represents something of a watershed moment for American cinema. As the moment most often cited for introducing “mainstream America” to Asian American film,34 it is simultaneously charged with articulating a distinctly “ethnic” vision while doing so in terms that

33 Ibid., 124 34 In fairness, this lauding usually takes one of two forms. Insofar as it articulates a forgetting of the long history of works by Asian American artists, including Wayne Wang’s first major studio release The Joy Luck Club (1993), I’ll have no part in that. But if in calling this film the introduction of Asian American cinema to mainstream America we intend to name the incredible amount of people who were involved in the film and have since gone on to success elsewhere in the industry while using that success to provide a platform for other upcoming artists, that seems fair. 142

“mainstream” America will recognize. Lin’s approach is to offer a film that deconstructs a beloved genre as it unsettles a deeply held national misconception.

The film follows the lives of four young men, Ben (our narrator and ostensible main character), Virgil, Han, and Daric growing up in Southern California in the early

2000s. Long-time best friends Ben and Virgil describe themselves as “the typical overachieving Asians,” by which he means they excel in school, participate in plentiful extracurricular activities, work part time jobs, and still find time to volunteer on the weekends. Though, lest we be misled into believing that all this effort is motivated by altruism, as Ben wryly points out early on: “Good grades just aren’t enough to get into a decent school anymore.” It is this moral ambivalence that allows Ben and Virgil to find release from the stress of their requirements in committing a string of petty crimes and acts of vandalism. They begin toilet-papering houses before graduating to buying and reselling stolen goods from local electronics stores with the help of Virgil’s older cousin

Han. Before long, Ben is recruited by Daric, a popular senior who is valedictorian and president of a number of student clubs, to participate in his scam of selling cheat sheets.

Because he can’t not overachieve, Ben learns that a cache of answer sheets covering most of the exams for the year is hidden away in the faculty office. He decides to hire another student to break in after hours and steal them before hiring Virgil and Han to join him and Daric in a cheat-sheet distribution ring. Meanwhile, as President of the

Academic Decathlon Team, Daric hosts weekly drill sessions which regularly devolved into evenings of teeming with binge drinking and sexual tension. After one session, the guys decide to head over to a party being held by some other students from their school.

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When one of the white partygoers calls them out, a fight erupts that ends with Daric pulling a gun.

This act of violence has the effect, perhaps somewhat less surprising given the peculiar (and unforgiving) calculus of “coolness” in most American high schools, of making the guys into underground celebrities. As Ben describes: “I was sure the cops were gonna come get us that morning. But, it never happened.” Invigorated by their dawning sense of invincibility, the guys move on to stealing computers from the school to sell on the black market and eventually into selling drugs, which they all promptly take to over-consuming as well.

Along the slippery slope to a committed life of crime, Ben develops a crush on

Stephanie Vandergosh, one of the girls at his school. When Stephanie’s older boyfriend

Steve (played by a resplendently reserved John Cho) discovers Ben’s crush, he invites

Ben to take Stephanie to the homecoming dance in his place. Though suspicious, Ben agrees, leading his and Stephanie’s relationship to develop. Soon, in another turn he was not expecting and cannot easily explain, Ben finds himself called upon by Steve to procure cocaine. When the two meet up for the exchange at a batting cage, they have a surprisingly revealing conversation in which Steve confides in Ben that he knows he should be happy with his privilege, but feels overwhelmed by all the expectations that accompany it.

Ben awakens on his birthday soon after to a cocaine-induced nosebleed. With that as catalyst, he resolves to get his life “back under control,” as he describes it. In practice, this means among other things disbanding their burgeoning criminal empire, a

144 proposition to which Virgil remains the lone hold-out. Convinced he can succeed on his own, Virgil attempts to keep the business going by himself, but is soon outted by his own boisterous braggadocio. This prompts his older cousin Han to take the blame for him thus trading Virgil’s punishment for his own, a burden which Han feels compelled to share at least in part by violently beating Virgil on his way out the door. Though, as Ben describes: “I think Han just wanted an excuse to beat the shit of him. We all kinda did.”

With the group unity rapidly fraying, the guys are all forced together in a tried- and-true staple of the teen film genre: the academic road trip, here to Las Vegas for the academic decathlon championship. Of course, the trip fails to solve their problems, and indeed only introduces new ones as Han and Virgil find themselves in a heated dispute over Virgil’s pulling a gun on the prostitute Daric hired for them to share. Despite all these distractions, their team wins the championship.

Back in Orange County, Ben and Stephanie attend the Winter Formal, where Ben is again approached by Steve. This time, Steve tells Ben that he has a proposition for a big score if Ben and his friends are willing to break into and rob Steve’s parents’ house.

Ben is reluctant at first but agrees to at least consult with the others. Han, Daric and

Virgil are enthusiastic about the idea, and indeed, want to go a step further. The foursome resolves to also beat and rob Steve, “to teach him a lesson” as Daric offers in a perfunctory attempt at rationalization.

The stage all set, the guys gather on New Year’s Eve to conduct their parallel heists, Steve thinking he will aid in stealing from his parents and profiting from the sale, and Ben, Han, Virgil and Daric all planning to rob and beat up Steve as well. When the

145 time comes to divvy up their take, Steve quickly realizes he has been crossed, and rushes to grab Virgil’s gun. In the ensuing struggle, the lights are disconnected and a single shot is fired. Having been posted outside as a lookout, Ben runs into the garage where the others are gathered, only to find Steve on the ground, restrained by the others.

Momentarily overcome, Ben begins lashing out violently, kicking and pummeling Steve until his bloody body lies motionless on the ground. Unfortunately for all involved, that is not quite the end, as Steve soon begins to twitch and gasp for air. This time it falls to

Virgil and Daric to do the dirty work with Daric soaking a rag in gasoline that Virgil uses to slowly suffocate Steve.

A very matter of fact conversation follows in which the schoolmate whose home they borrowed for the meet-up insists on an additional $300 to bury the body in his yard and the guys divide up the tasks of collecting shovels and moving the corpse. With their work complete, they all head out to a New Year’s Eve party where they quickly part ways.

Consequence arrives in many forms. For Virgil, an unsuccessful suicide attempt leaves him permanently brain damaged. This saddles Han with the responsibility of caring for his younger cousin, particularly as both Daric and Ben pull further away. Daric is resigned to a life of paranoia, living in constant fear that either Virgil or Han or both will tell their secret, if they haven’t already. Ben, for his part, resolves back into the same moral ambivalence that was his initial equilibrium. His relationship with Stephanie extending into a future marked by privilege but also incredible uncertainty, the film ends on a shot of Ben and Stephanie riding off into the horizon.

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In a short documentary made to accompany the wide release of the film,35 BLT:

Genesis, Vice President of MTV Films Michael Cole offers a fascinating glimpse into one version of “mainstream” America’s initial reaction: “When I saw Better Luck

Tomorrow, it was something that I instantly knew was perfect for our brand.” Of course, lest we think this was an exclusively aesthetically driven reaction, Cole goes on: “For

Asian American filmmakers we’re hoping that we can help blow the door open. And for us as MTV, we can’t afford to fail. This is the first movie that we’ve bought, and we’re not gonna fail; we’re gonna make this work.”

Fortunately for MTV, Cole would not have to do much work. A controversial

Sundance screening in which legendary critic Roger Ebert came to the film’s defense against arguments (offered by a white man, naturally) that the film was “bad” for Asian

Americans provided all the necessary amplification required for the film to become not just a buzzword around Hollywood but a political cause in its own right.36 It is only one among many almost sublime bits of irony that Ebert’s “bold” proclamation that Asian

American directors should be allowed to tell whatever stories they want without it becoming a political statement for/about their entire racial group was seemingly the springboard the film needed to become a cause célèbre for Asian American student groups around the country who organized bus trips and bought out theaters to support the film upon release.

35 In fairness, while that is certainly what ended up happening to the film, given that it was clearly in production long before the Cinderella-story that would follow the film’s acceptance into Sundance and subsequent distribution deal, it might make sense to think of this as more a parallel film project than a kind of promotional material per se. 36 The whole scene in chronicled in impressive detail in Leong’s documentary, BLT: Genesis, directed by Evan J. Leong (2002), Online. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT2LsWsw0bU. 147

Nevertheless, it is an irony undercut (if only slightly) by the reality that, with its emphasis on speaking back to the myth of the model minority in very pointed and personal ways, the film was especially serving a particular audience who had long been starved for alternative visions. Robert Lee offers an admirably succinct explication of the model minority myth’s history and function:

The representation of Asian Americans as a model minority, although

popularly identified with the late 1960s and 1970s, originated in the racial logic of

Cold War liberalism of the 1950s. The image of Asian Americans as a successful

case of ‘ethnic’ assimilation helped to contain three specters that haunted Cold

War America: the red menace of Communism, the black menace of racial

integration, and the white menace of homosexuality. In place of a radical critique

calling for structural changes in American political economy, the model minority

mythology substituted a narrative of national modernization and ethnic

assimilation through heterosexuality, familialism, and consumption. By the late

1960s, an image of ‘successful’ Asian American assimilation could be held up to

African Americans and Latinos as a model for nonmilitant, nonpolitical upward

mobility.37

As Lee and other critics have demonstrated,38 the assignation of “myth” to the discourse of model minority names the reality that, while Asian American subjects may indeed

37 Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 146. 38 For more on the specific history and implications of the model minority myth, also see Younmee Chang, Writing the Ghetto: Class, Authorship, and the Asian American Ethnic Enclave (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), Madeline Yuan-yin Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the 148 exist in a differential relationship to capital vis-à-vis other racial enclaves, and may even occupy a position that some see as preferable, “model minority” was never a moniker they themselves warmly embraced. Lin’s film takes this ambivalence a step farther, turning the stereotype into a powerful weapon to deployed against the system that insists on perpetuating it.

For this reason, the culminating scene is both shocking and not terribly surprising.

To be sure, the typical moves of the crime caper film, another genre from which Better

Luck Tomorrow borrows generously, suggest that something traumatic must occur before the conclusion. But Steve’s death is telegraphed much earlier on. As a wealthy, well- dressed, well-liked peer, Steve is the epitome of the type that all the other male characters struggle to reconcile themselves against. With the door closing on their life of crime and default outlet for their anxiety, killing him, painful though it may be, becomes necessary as a way of exorcising the expectations of achievement and success that they each find themselves incapable of critiquing in any other meaningful way. And to the film’s credit, it is painful, brutal, messy work to kill Steve. A narrative device that finds the film opening onto a scene of Steve’s phone ringing from beyond the grave underscores that this is not an experience from which anyone escapes unscathed, if they ever escape at all.

Far from a story of the self-sustainability of exceptional minorities, Lin turns the model minority myth into a source of raging anxiety that threatens to erupt into violent

Model Minority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), and Helen H. Jun, Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal America (New York: New York University Press, 2011).

149 action at any moment, a violence that was suggested earlier at the party when Daric pulls a gun on the aggressive jock and again later when Virgil pulls a gun on the sex worker in

Las Vegas.

The idea that in addition to being detrimental to the people within it, the model minority myth also weaponizes communities of color against one another is certainly not new. It is a point that Vijay Prashad underscores when he remarks: “I am to be a weapon in the war against black America. . . How does it feel to be a solution? Obviously it is easier to be seen as a solution than as a problem. We don’t suffer genocidal poverty and incarceration rates in the United States, nor do we walk in fear and a fog of invisibility.

To be both visible (as a threat) and invisible (as a person) is a strain disproportionately borne by black America.”39 For his part, Lin doesn’t just resist the move to employ the model minority discourse as a kind of “divide and conquer” strategy, he actually suggests that the specific pressures created by that approach make people more predisposed to the kind of ironic, uninvested detachment that defines so much of “non-mainstream”

America. Solidarity through detachment is a peculiar mode of approach, but Better Luck

Tomorrow seems to suggest that if attachment can only be achieved on capital’s terms, then detachment is a better approach.

Helen Jun makes a somewhat similar case for the work that detachment does in the film: “The cynicism implicit in neoliberal ideology is represented in the film as utterly pathological, leading to the messy murder and dumping of an Asian American male rival, compelling one of the characters, Virgil, to attempt suicide with a gunshot to

39 Vijay Prishad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000), 12. 150 the head.”40 For Jun, this cynicism is registered throughout the film via “the strategic instrumentalization of every aspect of social life,”41 a critique which calls to mind Ben’s earlier insight about college admission as his primary motivator for civic engagement.

Stopping short of celebrating the film’s upending of the logic of racial exceptionalism,

Jun does still leave room for the idea that “their masculinist reaction against a racialized

‘model minority’ discourse is the space where an interrogation of neoliberal principles emerges in the absence of a critical vocabulary regarding global capitalism.”42

I take this point about the limitations of Better Luck Tomorrow’s critique seriously. But I also want to suggest that there are perhaps more savvy projects at work in its form than this interpretation credits. With its sarcastic disposition, rejection of authority and the conventions of society, and innate understanding of the violent pecking orders that arise in contrived social circumstances, Better Luck Tomorrow makes a canny case for its inclusion in the teen film genre. The interest the film provokes seems to derive at least in part from its move to resist the obvious impulse to simply reverse the polarity of racial antagonism in the genre and present Asian American characters who imitate their generic forebears perfectly. Margaret Hillenbrand has identified this move as the film’s gestures toward parody and mimicry, contending that “a closer look at the film reveals that Better Luck Tomorrow is as much about the misappropriating potential of

40 Jun, The Race for Citizenship, 136. 41 Ibid., 137 42 Ibid., 138 151 parody as it is a study in plagiarism and ethnic forgetting.”43 Hillenbrand goes on to make the case for racialized parody as the central mode through which to approach the film:

Better Luck Tomorrow’s most obvious parodic move is to co-opt both

these genres—the teen flick and the gangster movie—and to rescript, recast and

reedit them for Asian America. This overhaul means transforming Asian

American high school students from extras into headliners, to the extent that there

are no Caucasians in leading roles whatsoever. It also involves a representation of

Asian American criminality that, from the voice-over to the details of the diegesis,

breathes real subjectivity into Ben and his gang. The result is an aggressive grab

on genre that transforms what [literary critic Stephen] Mamber terms 'faithful

appropriation" into ‘vengeful revisionism.’44

Tasha Oren reminds us of the impossible responsibility facing any film saddled with the unenviable task of being a “first”: “As much as Lin’s film represents a fresh and exciting moment for Asian American popular culture by virtue of its entry into mainstream consumer space, the strong responses the film has garnered speak to the weight of historical erasure and distortion, and the difficulties inherent in the project of extricating Asian American representations from the context of their cultural history.”45 I would argue that Better Luck Tomorrow succeeds in large part by refusing to take the bait. Rather than attempt to craft a “genuine” tale about the hardships or joys of Asian

43 See Margaret Hillenbrand, "Of Myths and Men: Better Luck Tomorrow and the Mainstreaming of Asian American Cinema," Cinema Journal 47 no. 4 (2008): 56. 44 Ibid., 61 45 Tasha G. Oren, “Secret Asian Man: Angry Asians and the Politics of Cultural Visibility,” in East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture, ed. Shilpa Davé, LeiLani Nishime, and Tasha G. Oren (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 338. 152

American life,46 the film leans on ironic detachment and parody to evacuate the terms of

Asian Americanness of any coherent sense or meaning beyond the logics of capitalist accumulation. The result is a film that is at once deeply self-aware and generically familiar enough to be palatable to a wide range of audiences.47

Choosing Families in Pariah

“All you ladies pop yo pussy like this/Shake ya body don’t stop, don’t miss/

All you ladies pop yo pussy like this/Shake ya body don’t stop, don’t miss/

Just do it, do it, do it, do it, do it now/ Do it good,

Lick this pussy just like you should”

Director Dee Rees’ 2011 drama Pariah begins with a scene that serves as palimpsest of the complex histories of gender, race, desire, and capital in the US national project. A few quick flashes of bodies in baggy clothing moving through densely packed space establish a sense of a city at night. More bodies shuffle over one another, as a voice repeatedly intones “IDs at the door, 18 to get in, 21 to drink.” Inside the space that could be any space, sound arrives before image as viewers encounter first the clear resolve of a woman’s voice set to a beat that begins as mere metronome before quickly expanding.

46 An approach, it should be noted, which Hollywood had tried and failed at in earlier moments. 47 As a side note that is not particularly germane, but absolutely worth knowing, the first big-money backer to support Lin’s film was MC Hammer. Strange times indeed.

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There is an unapologetic brazenness as she commands first the audience, then her partner, and ultimately both to submit to her pleasure. It is a rallying cry for intimacies premised on female enjoyment that makes for a somewhat uneasy fit with the images of busty, curvy, brown bodies on display. Dancing, with and without poles, for a crowd of female observers, they secure this place as queer in what film theorist Kara Keeling would call the “common sense” of cinematic language. But the butch/femme dynamic at work wherein the performers all perform femininity in traditionally recognizable ways while the patrons take on the masculine role of observers, also reifies a gendered distribution of labor that renders pleas for female pleasure politically neutral at best.

It is perhaps for these reasons that we are meant to find a certain kinship with our protagonist Alike (pronounced Ah-lee-kay) as the camera slowly pans from the gyrating body on stage to find her staring in terrified awe at the spectacle on display. Her misgivings about the scene on display telegraph clearly, so much so that she quickly decides to retire to a corner before giving up and deciding to head home. After some coaxing, she manages to convince Laura, her best friend and companion on the long bus ride home, to join her. As they wait outside for the bus to arrive, Alike makes a poor attempt to convince Laura that she had been hugely popular, leading Laura to chide Alike for her continued virginity. On the bus ride back, the two change out of their baggy clothes, a mix of oversize polo shirts, baseball hats, and varsity jackets that signifies hip hop culture specifically but also the tropes of masculinity more broadly. Alike arrives home first, where she is greeted by her younger sister who chastises her for staying out late at a lesbian strip club, a truth Alike prefers to keep hidden from her parents.

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This opening, with its frank treatment of lesbian sexuality as spectacle but not spectator sport, foregrounds a tension that runs throughout the film. It highlights an impulse to simultaneously celebrate and deconstruct an image in which so many have so much of themselves invested. At the same time, it also highlights the film’s many uneasy affinities with the broader teen genre. While the “coming out” narrative has a long and storied tradition within the canon of contemporary teen film (indeed, a few film studios seem to be devoted primarily to them), scholars working in the tradition of queer of color critique have long noted that the emphasis on heightened visibility and invocation of the

Christian tradition of confession have always rendered coming out a more palatable discourse in some circles than others. In that sense then, Alike’s confidence in her own sexuality is both a refreshing change of pace and a pointed commentary about the limits of cinematic language to account for black lesbian existence.

The major narrative moves that follow will be largely familiar to those with even a passing knowledge of most coming-of-age narratives. Still, even within the conventions of the genre, Pariah finds ways to interject its own perspective. A scene in which Laura teaches Alike the best way to wear a strap-on serves as a humorous reflection on both the gendered and racialized expectations of sexual performance as Alike is confronted with the prospect of donning not merely a prosthetic penis but a white one at that (Laura’s justification: “It was the only one they had left!”). In moments like these the film takes the familiar teen film trope of a protagonist who feels ostracized from the broader social world and filters it through a history of black female sexuality that underscores both their presumed hypersexuality as well as their erasure from the broader economy of consensual

155 desire. Unsurprisingly, Alike’s white penis is an uneasy fit. After another evening spent watching others fall so effortlessly into a relational dynamic that she cannot seem to master, she returns home and promptly decides to abandon it in a nearby dumpster.

Following this moment of discomfort, fate (with a helping dosage of parental intervention) conspires to throw Alike into increasingly closer contact with Bina, a girl from her school who also attends the same church. Though initially reluctant to spark up a friendship with someone her mother approves of, Alike and Bina soon find they have more in common than they expected. Alike falls hard for Bina, a sentiment she assumes is reciprocated when the two have sex after a party one evening. The next morning Alike attempts to coordinate the logistics of their newly-minted relationship only to meet with steely rejection from Bina who swiftly mocks the offer (“So what, we girlfriend and girlfriend now?”) before declaring that she’s not “gay gay.”

The insult of this moment is compounded by the injury of Alike’s disintegrating relationship with Laura whom she had abandoned to get closer to Bina. Additionally, after finally deciding to admit to her parents what they clearly already knew, Alike is disowned and forced to move out of her home. In this moment of desperation, she turns to Laura. In a move of meaningful reconciliation, the film ends not with the fulfillment of the romantic love plot, or with the satisfying resolution between feuding parents and children. In repairing the relationship between Alike and Laura, the film reclaims a sense of community that it had only gestured to before.

Writing about the 1996 crime saga Set It Off, Kara Keeling describes the work the two lesbian characters perform in helping to articulate the film’s common sense. For

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Keeling, Queen Latifah’s butch character Cleo and her femme partner Ursula work in tandem to recast a potentially problematic lesbian relationship in recognizably heterosexist terms: “Cleo’s apparent female masculinity alone is not enough to confirm that her version of black masculinity is consistent with the virulent (hetero)sexuality of ghettocentricity’s valorized thug. In order to establish and rationalize Cleo’s female masculinity, cinematic perception calls forth a black femme, Ursula.”48

Yet, while the role of the black butch in this schema is perhaps overdetermined by the legacies of black masculinity, as evidenced by Cleo’s spectacular martyrdom toward the end of the film, in Ursula, Keeling finds the potential for a more generative future.

Writing about the conclusion of the film, where Ursula is left alone to mourn the death of her lover just off screen, she names this moment the “black femme function”:

The black femme function points to a radical Elsewhere that is ‘outside

homogenous space and time’ and that ‘does not belong to the order of the visible.’

It is a capacity of affectivity; it is affectivity’s creative, self-valorizing capacity.

Because it can be harnessed to produce cinematic reality, the black femme

function is internal to the cinematic, never outside of it. It represents affectivity’s

capacity to disturb the reproduction of social life by insisting on the alternatives to

existing organizations of social life, even if those alternatives are deemed

irrational within hegemonic common senses, an insistence that upsets common

sense’s operative categories.”49

48 Kara Keeling, The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 124. 49 Ibid., 137 157

Locked forever into a relationality with the black butch, the black femme performs the work of actualizing the potential for queer forms of kinship and social life that resist the violence of hegemonic common sense. It is tempting to recast Laura and

Alike into this dynamic, particular given the film’s closing scene that finds Alike alone on a train bound for New York City and, we hope, a brighter future. But such a reading would fail to account for the incredible affective labor that Laura herself performs throughout the film.

Unlike Alike, Laura’s journey emphatically resists the conventional terms of progress. From the first scene of the film, we see Laura’s ribald confidence in contrast to the shame-faced restraint Alike displays. Throughout the film, Laura serves as a kind of guide to the world of black lesbian sexuality, a role she performs without judgement or condescension. We eventually learn that Laura is living with her older sister, both of whom have been disowned by their parents who live on the other side of town. She was forced to drop out of high school after her parents kicked her out of the house. Despite her reputation for hard-partying, Laura is committed to contributing financial to the household and still finds time to study at night for her G.E.D.

When, after months of study, Laura turns up at her estranged parents’ house to inform them of her accomplishments, she is met by only silence as her mother slowly closes the door in her face. Devastating though this moment is, it does not stop her from continuing to open her home to other young women in similar situations.

In many ways, Alike’s story is a story of black middle-class upward mobility that should be familiar to any students of 1980s-90s American popular culture. From The

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Cosby Show (R.I.P.) to Family Matters, Sister Sister to Moesha, stories about overcoming adversity to achieve success on capitalism’s terms proliferate. Though the film is careful to resist the politics of respectability that predominate in many of those narratives, it still manages to reinforce a certain narrative of the minority intellectual going off to the “good school” that raises issues of class and access that dampen the spirit of liberation the film so clearly aspires to.

But if Alike makes for an uneasy moral compass, in Laura the film offers a more useful invocation of the black femme function. Left behind in the great move to the big city, Laura will remain where she always was, and she will continue to be a generous guide to the curious but uninitiated and an open home to those in need. Laura is the film’s argument for chosen families, a term with a long and generative history in queer theory for describing social arrangements defined by openness and generosity in contrast to traditional family structures which have as their defining logic concerns about wealth and inheritance. Choosing family in Pariah means choosing alternative modes of kinship and survival even when those modes seem contrary to the impulses of reproductive futurity.

The film’s final words, a poem Alike delivers to her senior class, intercut with images of her boarding a train out of town, underscore this sense of the liberatory potential of new forms of being:

“Breaking is freedom/ Broken is freedom/ I am not broken/ I am free”

The new forms of being at work in Pariah’s narrative structure also frame the way in which the film is viewed. Among the many plaudits the film received upon its release, perhaps the loudest was for the cinematographic contributions the film made to

159 the lexicon of black bodies on screen. Director of Photography Bradford Young describes the impetus behind the film’s unique visual style: “Somehow without any real discussion, we [Director Dee Rees, Producer Nekisa Cooper and Young] knew that Paris is Burning was going to be a significant visual reference for Pariah…We weren’t about notions of

‘real time’ so we became mainly concerned with levels of impressionism in our visual style. Basically, how far could we go with coloring characters and spaces before it started to become distracting and take away from the narrative?”50

The move to align Pariah with another film that straddles and ultimately collapses the boundaries between blackness, queerness, and independence (in both the cinematic and the literal senses) is certainly telling. But, where Paris is Burning leans on its exaggerated color palette to accentuate the sense of glamour and drama in the ball scene,

Pariah uses color to more nuanced effect: “Early on in our process, Dee kept building on this idea that Alike was a chameleon; a young woman who constantly changes her physiological color to fit her current time and space.”51 Alike represents liminality.

Caught between the worlds of butch and femme, ghetto and middle-class, teenager and young adult, she conveys a kaleidoscope of potentialities. As Young describes: “Some of the blue and cyan used to paint Alike are about her being subterranean. The pink is about her virtues, and her innocence but it's also about her underdevelopment as a young woman, so when she strips that away we're left looking at a newborn woman sitting in a

50 Nijila Mumin, "Color, Light, and Depth: The Visual Aesthetics of Pariah." IndieWire. December 28, 2011. Online. . 51 Ibid. 160 pool of neutral (white) light. And this neutrality signifies the beginning of a new journey, a journey painted in new self-authorizing colors.”52

For his part, Young is clear about the moves Pariah makes to honor and participate in a critical conversation about cinematic representations of blackness: “Every frame and every light used to capture black bodies in film-time is a continuum of ideas

AJ [Arthur Jafa, cinematographer for Daughters of the Dust, among others] and Malik

Sayeed have been developing for decades. Pariah is a big homage to those brothers and all they've workshopped that has become culture. It would be impossible for me not do my due diligence when lighting black bodies because it’s part of that ethos, my ethos.”53

In a roundtable commissioned after the film’s release, a panel of black women film scholars considered what impact (if any) Pariah might have on the future of black independent cinema. While hopeful about the space the film opens up to create more mainstream acceptance of black lesbian identity, more than a few of the panelists were quick to note that in the transition from short film to feature film, something of the critical edge was sanded down. Jennifer DeClue, for instance, decries how: “The narrative differences and casting changes made between Pariah the short and Pariah the feature are indicative of industry demands for name recognition and universal appeal in this capital- generating artistic venture.”54

52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Kara Keeling, et al., "Pariah and Black Independent Cinema Today: A Roundtable," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21 no. 2-3 (2015): 429. 161

Jacqueline Stewart provides even more insight into the specifics of financing the project: “Dee Rees’s short version of the film was shown in about forty film festivals around 2006. And then she was able to secure a lot of support from various sources. She was a 2008 Tribeca Institute Fellow, a Sundance Institute Screenwriting and Directors

Lab Fellow. Her producer, Nekisa Cooper, got support from Film Independent where she was a Project Involve and Fast Track grant recipient, which provide a unique opportunity for underrepresented producers and filmmakers to shop their projects to industry people.

This is a film that also benefited from exposure through its Kickstarter campaign.”55

This Kickstarter campaign is particularly interesting, as it suggests an upending of the traditional system whereby studios decide (wildly guess?) from the top down which films consumers will respond to and make conservative investments based on those guesses. Kickstarter, by contrast, allows consumers to invest in the idea of work they would like to see completed. Still, perhaps the single most influential source of support came in the form of a Netflix-run film incubator project. As Jacqueline Alexander explains:

…Dee Rees was a recipient of a Netflix Find Your Voice Competition

grant. She cites this as being extremely important for developing a new media

strategy, a social media strategy. This strategy is crucial for the ways this film was

able to secure actual financing, and also for the way this project tapped into

existing and growing discourses of LGBT activism. Look at some of the things

that happened, for example, on the Pariah website. It became a place for people

55 Ibid., 429 162

to post videos about their own coming- out experiences. In this way, Rees and

Cooper clearly connected Pariah to the It Gets Better project for queer youth

happening during the same time. So the Pariah website is a combination of

‘support this film’ and ‘this is a safe space, a supportive space for you to articulate

your own identity.’56

“A Film of Our Own,” Indie Film as Activism?

“[I]n recent history we haven’t paid enough attention to some of the true realities of what

life is like for everyday Americans in our dramas.” – ABC Entertainment President

Channing Dungey

I want to end this chapter with another recent inflexion point in the ongoing conversation about the cultural value of difference. This time we turn to ABC

Entertainment President Channing Dungey (perhaps not co-incidentally the first black woman to hold the position) apologizing for the network’s lack of white representation. It is a sentiment that would seem almost comical at any other historical juncture. But by

2016, it named an uncomfortable and unexpected truth. Dungey’s statement highlights not only the falling out of popularity of stories about middle- and working-class white families but also a kind of fetishizing of minority difference that, given the history of vehement exclusion, should perhaps be met with more skepticism than it has.

Better Luck Tomorrow and Pariah are both films that succeeded in part because they managed to become causes. Supporting these films became about more than

56 Ibid., 430 163 appreciating them for their artistic merits (whatever that might mean). It became a way of speaking back to the long history of erasure, subjection, humiliation, and dehumanization that so often defines the US nation-state’s relationship to its non-white citizenry. It is not for nothing that both of these are films in which whiteness is relegated to the margins.

But lest we run headlong into an embrace of the new multicultural frontier, we would be careful to remember the stark rejoinder with which we began: all films begin as commodities; not just commodities to be sure, but at least commodities. The commodification of difference is one of the more pernicious expressions of the possibilities of the present age. But while the specific valuations are novel, the process of producing value from difference most certainly is not.

The promise of independent cinema lies in the new and surprising ways it allows for creators and consumers of culture to interface, not in its potential to liberate society from the problematic histories of injustice that have created the present reality. Surely any representative medium reliant on such significant financial support to survive can only hope to be so subversive, especially when deviance and subversion is part of the product it sells. In our effort to hold on to the promise of more thoughtful art, we have an obligation to resist falling prey to the siren song of progress through commerce.

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Chapter 4: The Internet

Becoming Digital: Imagining Sex and Adolescence in the Information Age

“When news of a massive illicit photo ring run by a high school football team in

Canon City, Colo., broke this week, parents around the country were left

scratching their heads. How could a scandal involving at least 100 students and

hundreds more nude photos go undetected for so long? The answer: photo

vaults.”

So began a front-page story of the November 7, 2015 issue of The Washington

Post with the rather titillating headline: “How Colorado teenagers hid a massive nude sexting ring from parents and teachers.” The article, but one among many published around the same time, highlighted the proliferation of so-called “ghost apps,” or seemingly benign applications designed to resemble everyday utilities (a calculator, or flashlight, for instance) that when prompted with the correct code unlock access to hidden information (messages, images, etc.) not otherwise accessible on the device.

These apps, the Post warns, have long been a tool of tech-savvy teens looking to subvert

parental authority and share forbidden information. Now they were at the center of one of the largest, though by no means the only,1 internet-inflected teen sex scandals in recent memory. Of even greater concern: the technology is only growing in sophistication. The article mentions that some developers have even have built in

“dummy storage” features allowing users to create a “fake” hidden account with no offending materials so that, as one online reviewer quoted explained: “You tell them the decoy password and it opens up to an entire set of fake secret photos so people lose their curiosity.”

This chapter charts the emergence of the “digital” as a mediating force in the trajectory of coming of age narratives at the close of the twentieth century and beyond.

It also foregrounds a question that has shadowed this project throughout. Here, we dive into the heart of the matter, the coming in coming of age, if you will. This Washington

Post article is fascinating for so many reasons. It highlights a distinctly moral panic around questions of access, intimacy, privacy, and autonomy in the era of networked interfaces. It suggests that the most effective strategy for policing digital behavior is to, in a certain sense, become digital yourself: “The solution…is for parents to get more familiar with smartphones and to scrutinize your child’s downloads.” Perhaps most interesting for our purposes, it trades on notions of childhood innocence and the

1 There are probably too many such scandals to do justice in list form. So, let’s be concise here. For a brilliant primer on the changing landscape of teen sexuality in the age of social media (by way of the Steubenville (Ohio) rape case), see Ariel Levy, “Trial by Twitter,” New Yorker (5 August 2013). 166 dangers of a rapidly encroaching (post?)modernity whose historical echoes recall not only the emergence of the contemporary adolescent itself but also the complex histories of race, gender, sexuality, and class (to name but a few) that shadow its development. As such, the article serves as a kind of doorway into a reality where the digital represents an uncontrollable frontier, a new domain in which childhood itself is under siege from the unrelenting forces of sexual liberalism and unlimited access.

How did we get here? Technological advances are certainly not new to human civilization. Neither, it should be noted, are concerns about the growing inability of parents to effectively maintain control of their domestic sphere in the face of oncoming modernity. And yet, somehow, the stakes seem higher. What is up for grabs in the anxiety the Post betrays is not merely parental authority but rather the very existence of childhood itself. While earlier moral panics exploited fear of producing a “bad egg,” so to speak, an individual who would never adjust to proper society, this moment raises the specter of a society so inhospitable to childhood that it ceases to exist outright. If modern childhood is a time defined by the myth of innocence, and particularly innocence in matters of sexual knowledge, as James Kincaid, Robin Bernstein, Henry

Jenkins and other have argued,2 the promise of unfettered access offered by the advent

2 For more on the cultural myth of childhood innocence, see James Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011), and Henry Jenkin’s “Childhood Innocence and Other Modern Myths,” in The Children’s Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 1-16. 167 of the commercially available World Wide Web threatens to disrupt that illusion permanently.

The matrix of desires, anxieties, hopes, ambitions, and fears indexed in the term

“the digital” form the backdrop for this chapter. First I aim to chart out a trajectory from where this project began to now. I return to World War II, or, more accurately, the post-War network of government and military agencies and academic institutions that are responsible for laying the groundwork for what would become the internet. I revisit this history for a few reasons. For one thing, I want to resist the move to imagine the digital as a purely an idea. Instead I insist that, far from being abstract or ephemeral, the key principals underlying the creation of the internet (and, it should be noted, any number of other technological advances) were derived from the logics of a militaristic warfare state, to return to James Sparrow’s term. Concepts such as decentralization, interchangeability and survivability, which would become integral to the development of the modern internet, also neatly mirror the logics of a nation with ambitious goals for cultural imperialism. Additionally, this history will be useful when I turn later to examine a project that began its life in the oft-overlooked corner of cyberspace known as the

“dark net,” an interface whose very existence is a relic of this earlier lineage of pre- world wide web digital possibilities.

168

With that foundation established, I move to think about the child, or perhaps more to the point, the construction of childhood in some potentially unsettling ways.

First, I consider a novel that raises profoundly difficult questions about the nature of adolescence, the limits of sexual desire, and the consequences of control. Sarah

Schulman’s The Child was originally written in 1999 but held from publication until 2007.

It tells the story of 15-year-old Stew who inadvertently sets off a firestorm in his community when his adult lover is arrested on charges of child abuse and statutory rape. But what begins as a relatively straightforward dispute over age of consent laws and their heteronormative application quickly takes a turn toward violence and chaos, leaving a trail of devastation and cultural mistrust behind.

Schulman’s novel serves as a cautionary tale, but also a call to rethink our approach to sex and sexuality, to resist the urge to fear the unknown. It also highlights how the growing economic inequalities that would come to define the period of mass de-industrialization alongside the explosion in wealth among the newly-minted

“creative class” in the US served as the foundation for a nationalist class-based political identity among working class whites. Furthermore, The Child gestures toward a shift back in the direction of the “radical”3 coalitional politics of thinkers like Gayle Rubin and

Lauren Berlant.

3 As the scare quotes might suggest, I intend for “radical” here to be more a way of marking a particular critical genealogy than as an evaluation of its political impacts. 169

From the literary, I move on to think about a more interactive approach to reimagining “the child” with the story of Sweetie, a virtual child (of sorts) raised in a place most parents hope their children will never see. A project developed by Children’s

Rights activist group Terre des Hommes, Sweetie lives in the so-called “deep web” or

“dark net” where she is designed to mimic all the behaviors of a “real” child in an effort to entice online visitors to provide her with enough information that they can be prosecuted by local law enforcement. As a pedophilia sting operation, the project was only minimally effective. But the questions it raises, about the ethics of virtual surrogacy for culturally taboo fantasies, the availability of some bodies more than others as reservoirs for said fantasy (it should be noted here that Sweetie is designed to resemble a young Filipino girl), and the unequal pace of technological development (both globally and locally) that makes such a distribution of fantasy not only possible but predictable, get to the core of the concerns that animate this chapter.

In keeping with our theme thus far, this chapter is less about being digital than it is about becoming digital. As such, it is invested in the false starts, frustrated potentialities and illuminating failures that define what some have termed “broken world thinking.” Here I borrow heavily on the work of media historian Steven Jackson who has argued for just such a methodology:

an appreciation of the real limits and fragility of the worlds we inhabit—

natural, social, and technological—and a recognition that many of the stories and

orders of modernity (or whatever else we choose to call the past two-hundred-odd

170

years of euro-centered human history) are in process of coming apart, perhaps to

be replaced by new and better stories and orders, but perhaps not.4

Jackson’s approach tempers this understanding of unraveling with what he calls

“a second, more hopeful approach”:

namely, a deep wonder and appreciation for the ongoing activities by

which stability (such as it is) is maintained, the subtle arts of repair by which rich

and robust lives are sustained against the weight of centrifugal odds, and how

sociotechnical forms and infrastructures, large and small, get not only broken but

restored, one not-so-metaphoric brick at a time.5

Broken world thinking moves away from the ideas of novelty, growth, and progress as the starting point for asking questions the nature, use, and effects of information technology. Instead it foregrounds erosion, breakdown, and decay as the key themes and problems for contemporary media criticism. But it also considers how those conditions produce the possibility for new forms of stability, novel modes of repair and a persistent (dare we say?) hope of restoration. We might even call it a fundamentally queer approach to media theory.

This chapter attempts to offer a theory of race, sexuality, and age at the advent of the digital era that attends to the productive failures driving so much of what is typically termed “innovation.” While no one factor determines the trajectory of that amalgam of

4 Steven T. Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kristen A. Foot (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), 221 5 Ibid., 222 171 experiences and expectations termed “adolescence,” this chapter contends that understanding the “digital,” in all its overlapping and competing interpretations, is key to making sense of the coming of age narrative at the close of the twentieth century.

A Quick Word About the “Digital”

Few terms have undergone as dramatic a transition in meaning since their inception as the keyword which animates our chapter. Originally derived from the Latin term digitus meaning finger or toe, digital initially referred to that which is done with one’s hands. These days, such interaction would most likely be labeled analog, a term which exists in direct contradistinction with contemporary evocations of the digital where it refers to information (usually in the form of signals or data) expressed as a series of binary digits. Curiously, given that it names a value that can exist anywhere within a given range, analog names an infinite scope of possibilities, where digital requires a finite spectrum of options. Additionally, as any vinyl record enthusiast knows, analog circuits are much more susceptible to outside noise.

I am compelled by the messiness of this etymology. It reminds us of the digital’s roots in the materiality of everyday living as it resists the move to understand the “digital revolution” as a field of wide-open potential. It also points to the other latent modalities of world-making that have always existed alongside the digital, and continue to appeal to us in moments where we become most concerned about what we’ve lost.

From a “Galactic Network” to a “Series of Tubes”

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The vast apparatus of military and industrial technologies left behind in the wake of the second World War provided the foundation for any number of post-war conveniences which became commonplace throughout the US in the second half of the twentieth century. From microwaves to duct tape, transistor radios to car tires, the postwar period was marked by the almost unfathomably pervasive redeployment of military technologies and the manufacturing infrastructure necessary to create and maintain them toward the purpose of meeting the civilian needs of an increasingly

“industrialized” society.6 In their own ways, each of these new technologies proposed exciting and potentially terrifying changes to society at large. We could think, for example of the frozen microwavable dinners’ implicit threat to domestic order or the synthetic oils and rubbers that enabled the expansion of the highway system and the growth of the early suburbs.

Our emphasis lies just a bit later on. As the memories of victory in World War II soured into the persistent paranoia that would come to define the so-called “Cold War,” both the US and their Soviet counterparts made a concerted effort to outmaneuver one another through robust investment in public/private research collaborations that would essentially reimagine the modern university as an extension of the research and development arm of the national military.7 Following the successful launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, Pres. Eisenhower announced the creation of the Advanced Research

6 For a fascinating history of the redeployment of military technologies as commercial conveniences see David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994). 7 For more on this point, see Rebecca Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). For a more global approach, see Naomi Oreskes and John Krige, Science and Technology in the Global Cold War (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014). 173

Projects Association, an organization tasked with formulating and executing research projects “to expand the frontiers of technology and science.”8 Armed with an intentionally vague yet lofty agenda and a formidable budget generously supplied by the

Department of Defense, ARPA set its sights on projects deemed so ambitious as to seem fantastical. Thus though collaborative research into the production of what would come to be known as a National (though sometimes Global or even Galactic) Information

Infrastructure, a project which would be a precursor to the modern World Wide Web, did not officially begin until 1966, the ideas driving its creation were very much a part of the impulse to expand investment in science and computer programming which began during the second World War and never truly abated.

By the 1960s ARPA was headed by a group of scientists who pressed the need for the creation of an interconnected network that would allow each of the distinct research campuses involved to share information and computer programs. The constant threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union also drove researchers to search for a technology that would be able to survive an attack that took a significant number of campuses out of commission.

The solution was to invest in a new technology: packet-switching.9 This new technology replaced the older mode of circuit switching which relied on a communication

8 For more on the creation of ARPA, see Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), and also Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top- Secret Military Research Agency (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015). 9 This information, as well as much of the detail that follows, comes from The Internet Society’s collaborative historical account. For more, see Leiner, Barry M., et al. "A Brief History of the Internet," 15 October 2012. Internet Society. Online. . Credit also to Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb’s oral history, See Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb, "How the Web Was Won," Vanity Fair (July 2008): 96-130. 174 between two direct points as with an analog telephone. In circuit switching, the two points of communication are directly connected in a way that precludes other data from accessing the bandwidth. Packet-switching, instead, sends information across a network of points opting for the quickest or most efficient path in each instance.10 By 1968, the researchers at ARPA had drawn up plans for an internetworked system that would connect its satellite campuses remotely.

The initial phase of the project known as ARPANET relied on the creation of

Interface Message Processors (IMPs) or small computers dedicated to being gateways interconnecting resources. The first of these IMPs were housed in research facilities at

UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. By the

1970s, the network had reached the east coast with the inclusion of IMPs in the

Cambridge, MA-based technology company Bolt, Beranek and Newman who had been integral to the decision to rely on IMPs to create the physical support structure for the network from the outset. Despite some initial reservations, the technology quickly caught on. In 1972, the project’s developers were moving to expand access to the newly created platform. At that year’s International Computer Communication Conference, a large demonstration of ARPANET was presented to the public, along with the introduction of the new “killer application,” electronic mail. By July 1975 there were over 50 dedicated

IMPs dispersed throughout the country.

10 If you’ve ever sent multiple emails to the same place only to have them arrive slightly out of order, you’re somewhat familiar with the distinction between the two approaches. 175

Of course, while the modern internet owes the creation of much of its founding technology to the original ARPANET project, in order to grow into the household phenomenon it would become by the close of the century, a few key changes had to take place. Chiefly, the modern internet necessitated multiple independent, arbitrarily- designed networks. This theory, an approach known as an “open-architecture network” would allow for a series of networks, each with its own unique protocols and user-facing interface, to connect to one another and share information and data in a process originally termed “internetting.” In order for the interconnected series of information streams to interact, a few key principles had to be observed. For one, each distinct network would have to operate on its own and no internal changes could be required of any network to connect to the internet. Also, crucially for our purposes, there was to be no global control at the operations level. That is to say, there would be no central authority charged with determining what content was and was not appropriate. As long as it was packaged in the correct file format, all information was to be treated (and distributed) equally.

It did not take long for other industries to realize the potential benefit of the new technology (and particularly the possibilities suggested by its killer app, electronic mail) for a wide range of fields. By the mid-1970s computer networks were being adopted anywhere funding made such large-scale investments possible. The Department of

Energy created MFENet for its Magnetic Fusion Energy researchers followed quickly by the Department’s High Energy Physicists cluster building a network of their own

(HFENet). NASA’s Space Physicists were up next with the creation of SPAN and soon thereafter a group of computer scientists inaugurated CSNET, a project funded in part by

176 the National Science Foundation. Not to be left out, private industry offered their own contributions to the growing obsession with networked infrastructure with AT&T investing in a UNIX-based (read: open-source) platform called USENET.

As many media historians have noted, with the exception of USENET (and another privately-funded platform called BITNET), all of the early networks were built by and for closed communities and offered little access to those on the outside. As a result, there was never much emphasis on the need to make the individual networks compatible from a user-perspective (i.e. users of MFENet could not necessarily access people or information housed on ARPANET). To solve this problem, researchers focused on designing a new network that would be open to all academic researchers, regardless of discipline. NSFNET, a project of the National Science Foundation was built to share a common architecture with ARPANET but provide user controls that would allow access to a far wider base. Additionally, the new infrastructure would receive a level of support government support far greater than any earlier endeavor.11

Nevertheless, if the internet was going to become a household phenomenon, it needed more than an open infrastructure. It needed private industry to invest in consumer products that would facilitate wider adoption. The only problem was also perhaps the most obvious one: the lack of a clear use for the internet. Early manufacturers struggled

11 So many interesting things to note: federal agencies agree to oversee the maintenance and repair of the physical trans-oceanic data cables upon which networked transmissions rely, thus granting them historically unprecedented amounts of “authority” over international waterways. This program also led to the creation of the Federal Internet Exchange and the Federal Networking Council, entities charged with managing interconnection points for the networks and coordinating data sharing respectively. This is also the team that would commission the 1988 report titled “Towards a National Research Network,” proposing among other things a high-speed infrastructure for network communication. This report would later be cited as an influence by then Senator Al Gore who “took the initiative” to fund its ideas. 177 to sell the public on the usefulness of networked devices, many of which were cumbersome or complicated to master. Recognizing the potential problem, in 1985 a group of DARPA researchers hosted about 200 professionals from different sectors of the consumer-products industry at a summit about the potentials and limitations of the new technology. The summit opened up a kind of feedback loop between research and development communities and product manufacturers that remains at the heart of what is most often termed “technological innovation” even today.

Following this summit, manufacturers began introducing a range of product targeted at non-specialist consumers that would allow for wider access and ideally generate a new crop of consumers for the burgeoning technology. In a longer history, the so-called “dot-com boom” of the mid-to-late-1990s can be seen better understood as the logical initial outgrowth of industries and cultural institutions all attempting to find best uses for the technology originally designed to facilitate the growth and survival of a massive military infrastructure.

From this brief history a few key ideas can be gleaned. For one, the early internet was designed with anonymity as one of its key principals. What began with the efficiency-driven mandate to send information along the fastest route arbitrarily selected became in practice an imperative to allow each individual piece of the infrastructure that makes up the larger network to remain autonomous and individuated. As we will see, this principal is key to the development of the anonymous deep web where many of the interactions labeled problematic congregate in virtual space. Additionally, the development of the technology required to create the internet highlights a long-running

178 interdependency between public and private institutions that implicates a far broader scope of actors and agencies in the expansion of the American national project. While this relationship is certainly not unique the creation of the internet, it does underscore the need for a cultural history of the technology’s emergence that can be more attentive to the importance of global factors in the development of a technology that is far too often conceived of as the first in a series of benevolent gifts given to society by generous and brilliant (and also primarily white) men. This history also returns us to an insight offered earlier in this project about the importance of the modern university as a tool for the growth of the nation.

With each successive generation there is a growing tendency to look upon the past as a

“simpler time.” If nothing else, I hope to stress that there was nothing simple about the creation of the internet. That it has become such a commonplace technology that we tend to not even recognize ever-increasing speed and efficiency as novel only testifies to the almost unimaginable success of an idea that sounds at the outset nothing short of crazy.

In the next section, I want to return to a moment just before the widespread acceptance of our newly-minted digital reality. My goal is to sit with and work through the anxiety that drove early opposition to digital technology.

I stress digital technology writ broad for a few reasons. Media historian Tom

Gunning reminds us that, sensational accounts aside, audiences didn’t actually run in fear from oncoming trains at the sight of the first projected moving images.12 Nevertheless, as

12 See Tom Gunning, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator," Art and Text (1989): 112-133.

179 he makes clear, that apocryphal story points to a larger truth of anxiety about change, fear of the future, mistrust of “innovation” and so much more. Something similar is at play at the dawn of the digital age. What we see, from parents concerns about violent video games to the creation of activist organizations dedicated to policing online chat behavior, is not so much a fear of the technology itself. It is instead a deeper struggle over the meaning of childhood, the limits of parental sovereignty, and the responsibilities of society at large to both protect and provide for its own.

The Child under siege

Sara Schulman’s novel The Child is a rumination on sexuality, temporality, and the places where the deep cultural anxieties that define them both meet. Originally written, or as Schulman describes it “ready for publication” in 1999, a myriad of structural upheavals in the world of book publishing as well as a growing cultural conservatism around issues of sexuality and age resulted in an eight-year delay in publication. When the novel did eventually reach readers in 2007, it remained a difficult sell with some reviewers lauding it for its “unflinching” bravery and others, like Caroline

Mann for the Library Journal Review declaring the characters “so unlikeable that it’s difficult to root for any of them.”13 In the afterword to the text, Schulman offers a few ideas for what might have contributed to the book’s polarized reception. She notes that many early prospective editors took issue with the novel’s presumed neutrality toward child sex abuse, a perhaps unsurprising objection to which we will return shortly.

13 See Caroline Mann, “The Child Book Review,” Library Journal Review (June 15 2007), 57. 180

She also suggests that some of the resistance to the novel could be understood as a larger resistance to lesbian literature in general. At every stage from creation to publication to promotion to reception, lesbian literature is stigmatized as “niche” material with a highly specific (and perhaps too small to be financially viable) audience. In the previous chapter, I further analyzed this creation of niche markets and the ways those markets come to inform the presumed desirability of certain life possibilities. Here, it will suffice to note that, as has been the case with most of the objects we’ve examined thus far, The Child is a part of an archive of counter-narratives produced at some level both for and against the goals of late capitalist American hegemony. As such, this novel is ideal for our purposes of attempting to think through the changes in cultural ideas about adolescence (particularly among those most vulnerable) during the dawning of the digital age. To think of The Child in this context is to consider not only the factors that contributed to its being held from print at the turn of the century but also those that allowed for its publication eight years later.

The Child is a novel about relationships (between lovers, between parents and progenies, between adults and adolescents, between individuals and institutions) and the impact of modernity on those ties. As such, it foregrounds questions about consent, control, exposure and access that are especially salient at the moment of the world wide web’s arrival as a major cultural force. Through its interconnected tangle of characters all drawn together by a conflict over sex and identity, the novel attempts to highlight the limitations of our current thinking about sex, identity, agency and childhood. At the same

181 time, it also gestures toward possible alternative forms of kinship and community that might resist the trap of normativity.

We open with a scene of childhood interrupted. Following a brief moment (thirty- seven years ago, as the narrative explains) where we are introduced to a young girl named

Eva riding the city bus alongside her mother, we shift ahead to find the same girl, now seventeen, departing from a different bus alone in the predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood of Chelsea where she is following in the well-worn, yet no less dangerous, footsteps of other young girls before her: “The girls at school openly told one another about this place, but all went there alone. No boyfriend accompaniment. No chum. It was widely understood to be a solitary endeavor rather than a secret…As required, Eva went while menstruating so that her cervix would be dilated and the Dalkon Shield easier to implant.”14 A bit further on, we learn that the procedure which Eva (and so many other young girls before her) underwent would be soon discontinued: “Eva carried that particular intrauterine device inside her body for three years and then had it removed.

Miraculously, no infection, no perforation, no pelvic inflammatory disease, no tragedy ensued. Now the Dalkon Shield is illegal and Eva is forty.”15 Forty-year-old Eva is introduced as an extension of her younger self: we encounter her in a medical clinic awaiting a consultation from an oncologist, an expensive visit which does little to assuage her fears that she may have cancer.

14 Sara Schulman, The Child (New York: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007), 10. 15 Ibid., 12 182

These opening scenes convey some of the major themes that recur throughout.

First there is the collapsed temporality of childhood. In the space of a few lines readers see Eva transform from young girl dutifully following her mother’s tutelage through the solitude of an adolescent spent navigating complicated questions about her own body and sexuality alone and finally into an adulthood that is defined in so many ways by the decisions and repercussions of adolescence. Already we can sense the importance of sexual knowledge in preventing self-harm as well as the tremendous pressure placed on adolescents to perform their sexuality in the most familiar and culturally legible ways.

Finally, this opening highlights the changes that would take place in the culture at large over thirty-seven years, foreclosing much of the public conversation about sex and sexuality that queer and women’s liberation movements of the 60s and 70s had opened up:

Later, people born in the suburbs would move to Manhattan. There they

would re-create the culture of gated communities, trading freedom for security.

The social contract would expire, and this clinic’s budget would be slashed, its

hours reduced. Finally, as gentrification scattered its constituency, the building

was closed down entirely and not replaced. The services were never duplicated.

The specter of AIDS overrode everyone’s anxiety about syphilis. Many former

clients died, poised vaguely in someone else’s memory.16

With this brief history, a final theme emerges, a consideration of the personal effects of broader social trends. Tethering Eva’s story to the history of not only New

16 Ibid., 10 183

York City but also the broader cultural changes that saw the large-scale government de- investment and subsequent strategic re-investment in urban population centers

(gentrification) as well as the public health crises that would cement conservative orthodoxy against non-heteronormative life choices foregrounds the often outsize impact these shifts typically have on populations already most vulnerable. Or, put another way, as much as this is a story about individuals, it is also a story about the collective narrowing of life choices in the US at the turn of the century.

The next chapter introduces what is perhaps the catalyzing relationship in the text: that between David and Joe, a couple in their late thirties living in the suburbs of New

York and Stew, the 15-year-old who visits them occasionally for companionship and sex.

For all the controversy their relationship will eventually cause, the first time they are introduced is an almost surprisingly uneventful affair. Stew arrives uninvited at David and Joe’s house where, after a little initial reluctance Stew is welcomed into their home and their bed.

This encounter leaves Stew feeling elated, invigorated, and invincible, so much so that on his way back home from David and Joe’s he encounters an older man at Grand

Central Station who he thinks is attracted to him. Stew follows the older man into the bathroom and attempts to initiate contact with him only to discover that the man is an undercover police officer who arrests Stew for public solicitation.

The relationship between David, Joe and Stew is compelling for many reasons.

For Stew, David and Joe are a source of mentorship and guidance, an example of how to live a queer livable life. David and Joe share their knowledge of queer culture, from

184 which porn films are worthwhile to how to survive being a sexual outsider in the hormonally-charged environment of high school. When Stew’s emotional frustration boils over into threats to run away from home, David is quick to remind him of the long- term implications of that decision: “If you leave home, you’ll be poor forever, right,

Joe?...You’ll peddle your ass and be totally fucked up.”17 While this advice is certainly not without an element of self-interest (David wants to avoid Stew attempting to move in with him and Joe) it also comes from a place of both genuine concern and relevant life experience. As queer men, David and Joe are able to provide knowledge and insight that

Stew’s own parents never could.

Of course, it isn’t the sage advice that ultimately lands David and Joe in trouble; it’s the sex. But part of what makes The Child so compelling is its refusal to draw a clean line between the two. The explicitly sexual parts of their relationship are almost indistinguishable from the more casual intimate moments as when a conversation about the hardships of being an outcast in high school segues into group sex:

I hated school,” Joe said, sitting down on Stew’s other side. ‘Everyone

called me fag. No one would stand up for me. No one. Let me tell you one thing,

Stewie. Fags have to stick together. Never squeal on another fag. Never. I hated

those kids, and I still hate every one of them. There is nothing bad enough that

could happen to them that would be too bad as far as I’m concerned.’

‘I want to kill them.’

‘No one is killing anyone, Stew.’ David said. ‘Open your coke.’

17 Ibid., 21 185

They sat on the sofa, drinking their cokes and watching Manrod in Space.

‘Hey Stallion.’ Dave rustled Stew’s hair. ‘Look at the gonzo on that one.’

‘Yeah.’ Stew said, putting his hand on David’s thigh and then on his

crotch. Joe put his hand up Stew’s shirt and touched his nipples. David and Stew

kissed. Stew unzipped his own pants, and Joe started sucking him off while Stew

kept his hand on Dave’s dick. The dialogue from the video was inane.18

In this moment, sexual contact is but one among many intimacies shared between the three. They also share their insecurities, their uncertainties, their frustrations and their fears. While the sex may be the only part of the relationship that Stew’s parents (and later the police and criminal justice system at large) can comprehend, it is far from the only impetus driving David, Joe and Stew together. It is a phenomenon that cultural critic

Gayle Rubin has called the “fallacy of misplaced scale,” one of what she identifies as the

“ideological formations whose grip on sexual thought is so strong that to fail to discuss them is to remain enmeshed within them.”19 For Rubin, the fallacy of misplaced scale is a corollary of sex negativity with particularly important implications:

Sex law has incorporated the religious attitude that heretical sex is an

especially heinous sin that deserves the harshest punishments. Throughout much

of European and American history, a single act of consensual anal penetration

was grounds for execution. In some states, sodomy still carries twenty-year prison

sentences. Outside the law, sex is also a marked category. Small differences in

18 Ibid., 22 19 Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge & K. Paul, 1984), 275. 186

value or behaviour are often experienced as cosmic threats. Although people can

be intolerant, silly, or pushy about what constitutes proper diet, differences in

menu rarely provoke the kinds of rage, anxiety, and sheer terror that routinely

accompany differences in erotic taste. Sexual acts are burdened with an excess of

significance.20

This excess of significance plays out here as readers might expect, at least initially. Upon learning that their 15-year-old son has been meeting adult men online for sex, Stew’s parents shift rapidly from outrage at their son’s disobedience to concern about how this will implicate them as failures at effective parenting: “‘How could you do this to your father?’ Brigid [Stew’s mother] yelled, brilliantly shifting the focus off herself. ‘Didn’t you ever think about him?’”21 For Stew’s parents, the intergenerational sex act becomes an emblem of their ineffectual policing of their child’s behavior. It also points to their inability to properly police sexuality more broadly in their own household.

The calamity that unfolds is compounded by a number of factors. Firstly, while

Joe has never been in trouble with the law before, David was previously arrested for a similar offense years earlier. When Stew’s parents eventually berate their son into revealing the names and address of the men, it doesn’t take long for the police to round them both up. Joe is released on bail and immediately seeks out a friend who can point him toward potentially sympathetic counsel. His friend introduces him to a mostly-retired civil litigator named Hockey, a man who just barely survived the AIDS epidemic that

20 Ibid. 21 Schulman, The Child, 34 187 took most of his friends and clients. Now living on with a complex medication regime and exhausted from a string of unsuccessful battles over welfare programs and access to social services, Hockey is reluctant to get involved in a controversial and possibly unwinnable case. It takes a bit of pleading from Joe to convince him. In the case Joe makes, a complex engagement with the idea of consent emerges:

‘The kid is fifteen.’ Joe said stepping toward him. Moving in.

Hockey could see it all before him, twirling and twisting in the sea of

unpopular causes and gray zones, ambiguous moralities that most people don’t

want to understand, and essential human contradictions. All he wanted was a

couple of condo closings and a few wills. That was enough for him.

‘The kid is fifteen,’ Joe said again. ‘He’s a gay kid. We met on the

Internet. No deception. He’s been over a few times to have sex, a real frisky guy.

The parents are a nightmare. The kids at school hate him. Now they’ve got Dave,

my boyfriend, in jail on child abuse charges, but the kid is not a child.’22

As we will see shortly, the question of consent gets to the heart of many of the issues motivating concerns about adolescence and sexuality. For now, it might be enough to note that even the sympathetic argument about “what Stew wants” cannot be easily divorced from issues of self-interest.

The second complicating factor comes from the increasingly strained family dynamic in the McCauley household. This is nowhere better displayed than in a moment

22 Ibid., 58 188 in which his mother, father, and older sister Carole all attend court-appointed family therapy with Certified Social Worker Daniel Wisotscky. It falls to Wisotscky to make explicit the connections between Stew’s perceived disorder and the rapid encroachment of modern technology. We are introduced to him newly discovering the depths of the perversions on offer through America Online, a project which he ostensibly undertook as research for the McCauley family’s case. What he finds alarms him with a fervor that almost demands further unpacking:

What Wisotscky found on the internet shocked him, in spite of his forty

years as a mental health professional and twenty years as County Family

Counselor for Van Buren Township.

The first truly upsetting thing that Wisotscky uncovered was the Hairy

Chest Page. This was a site for homosexual men, and, presumably, heterosexual

women, with advanced fetish compulsion toward men with hairy chests.

Wisotscky had previously been aware of a wide range of sexual fetishes, such as

‘pregnancy pornography,’ featuring pregnant models. He’d also discovered online

images of naked women shaving their pubic hair and ones of women being rained

on. However, there was a strange ironic stance to the Hairy Chest Page that he

found particularly grating: it had no shame. It was like making a fetish out of a

Bic pen.23

For Wisotscky, what is most alarming about the internet isn’t the perversions it has on offer but rather the banality with which they are presented, even normalized: “Wisotscky

23 Ibid., 64 189 noted that there was a new arrogance behind deviant behavior in the computer age. There was a flagrant ingenuity, almost a smirk.” When he next stumbles upon an image of a

“young male child orally sodomizing an adult,” his primary concern is for the potential of the image to “convince any child to participate, unwittingly, in the complex trappings laid by a pederast.”24

Wisotscky’s (mis)understanding of the potential dangers of digital technology becomes increasingly important as he comes to serve as both mediator and expert for the

McCauley family. He comes to serve as stand-in for a version of cultural conservatism that sees the proliferation of digital technology as sounding the death knell for common decency. It is an opinion that found vocal support throughout the so-called “culture wars” of the 1980s and 90s, a period that critic Lauren Berlant among others has called out for its pervasive focus on turning private lives into a space for public political intervention, or what she terms the “intimate public sphere.” As she describes:

During the rise of the Reaganite right, a familial politics of the national

future came to define the urgencies of the present. Now everywhere in the United

States intimate things flash in people’s faces: pornography, abortion, sexuality,

and reproduction; marriage, personal mortality, and family values. These issues

do not arise as private concerns: they are key to debates about what ‘America’

stands for, and are deemed vital to defining how citizens should act. In the process

of collapsing the political and the personal into a world of public intimacy, a

24 Ibid., 65 190

nation made for adult citizens has been replaced by one imagined for fetuses and

children.25

Berlant’s analysis of a forever future-oriented cultural politics is disturbing for a few reasons. For one, it locks the future into an image that can be imagined in the present, thus foreclosing all unfamiliar possibilities. We can see this logic at work clearly in

Stew’s case. An idealized vision of him as child in need of protection from the dangers of the world actually had the effect of preventing him from being able to experience things his parents did not already approve of. Under the guise of protecting future generations, increased public exposure to/of intimate life has actually produced greater amounts of surveillance and control resulting in a narrowing spectrum of possible life choices. Also of concern is the increased stakes for the performance of public intimacy. As Berlant suggests, what shifted during this period was not merely the exposure to issues once considered private or intimate, more consequential was the way in which those issues moved from the periphery of political identity to its core. As she notes, the consequences were material as well as ideological: “In the new nostalgia-based fantasy nation of the

‘American way of life,’ the residential enclave where ‘the family’ lives usurps the modernist promise of the culturally vital, multiethnic city; in the new, utopian America, mass-mediated political identifications can only be rooted in traditional notions of home, family, and community.”26

25 Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 1. 26 Ibid., 5 191

It is not difficult to make the connections between the politics of cultural conservatism in the 1990s and the emergence of a reactionary moral panic with the arrival of the commercially viable world wide web. As Wisotscky describes the internet even in its early days, what is on offer is unprecedented access to any number of topics typically considered taboo. For a society built in large part upon the authority of cultural gatekeepers, Wisotscky seems to sense how the internet represents an almost existential threat to the concepts of parental sovereignty and respect for authority. At the same time though, the internet proves to be an invaluable research tool for converting Wisotscky from out-of-touch elderly social worker into an expert authority on the perversions of the modern world. Inadvertently, our hapless social worker has unveiled one of the great paradoxes at the core of the digital age: the collapsing of public and private that made possible the creation of the infrastructure undergirding the world wide web also allowed for the proliferation of actors invested in policing personal affairs. While these two phenomena, the proliferation of the internet and the policing of intergenerational sex, tend not to be understood primarily in political terms, the advent of the digital age is marked by the way in which both of these anxieties overlap around issues of access, authority and autonomy, to name but a few. In many ways, then, becoming digital is a story about collapse, not between the “real” and the “virtual” as it is so often framed, but rather between the anonymity of privacy and the imperatives of surviving in an increasingly interconnected world.

Of course, as any number of thinkers will remind us, the encroachment of public policy into what had previously been considered the “private” sphere did not happen for

192 everyone equally. While communities of color had long been made to understand their private affairs as subject to very public forms of policing,27 this period marked a shift that found certain segments of white America now exposed to the same mechanisms. The

McCauley family’s therapy session reveals another important, and oft-overlooked, dimension of the emergence of the “digital age”: the beginning of a class-conscious, racially motivated identity politics among working class whites. Stew’s mother and father are among the remnants of a blue-collar white culture that saw individuals (usually, though not exclusively men) without higher education capable of commanding wages enough to support an entire family. The same hollowing out that left the urban core pockmarked by regions of targeted poverty under the guise of urban blight also produced losers among the white working class, particularly those low-skilled, poorly educated workers who had been the backbone of a manufacturing-based economy that was slowly displaced by managerial and service-focused industries. Thus, when Stew’s mother, in a fit of frustration, declares: “If I ever lost my job, I’d never find another one. Who wants an old hag who doesn’t know computers? I hate computers. They’ve ruined everyone’s life,”28 her frustration gestures toward a much longer and more complex history of economic abandonment, cultural alienation, and a general sense of being “overwhelmed by the new” that is at the core of a burgeoning class-based identity politics for working class whites at the close of the twentieth century.29

27 For more on this point, see Simone Brown, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 28 Schulman, The Child, 70 29 Again, a cautious nod in the direction of Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (New York: Crown Publishing, 2012). For a (minimally) less problematic take, see also J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper, 2016). For a 193

The fact that the McCauley family find themselves at the mercy of a court- mandated social worker only further underscores how politically vulnerable they have become. Stew’s indiscretions, which might have been dismissed as a “family affair” either in an earlier period or if the McCauleys were better able to afford legal representation instead find him and his family defenseless against a state that has very little interest in their own desires. Given this, perhaps a more generous read of Stew’s mother would see in her anger at Stew a kind of misplaced worry about the heightened vulnerability he risks exposing himself to by virtue of engaging in the kinds of private acts that draw such vocal public scorn. In this, she would be not terribly unlike the parents of young inner-city youths of color who berate their own children for wearing baggy pants or listening to loud music.

That comparison is telling, in part because it points to a new era in the history of race in America. If whiteness historically had been, by its very nature, a kind of universal norm, this new period is marked by a resurgent value in identity politics. The internet, while not the sole or even primary contributor to this phenomenon, was certainly an invaluable tool in accelerating the sense of the world as a loosely connected coalition of independent yet equally important interest groups all occupying the same basic space. Or, to put it another way, it is perhaps no accident that the logics of liberal multiculturalism mirror so neatly many of the early goals of digital technology, namely large-scale interconnectedness, open-access, and global integration.

perspective less effortlessly aligned with the goals of white nationalism, but also less contemporary, see Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1992). 194

And so we find another iteration of our core paradox: the spread of digital technologies makes possible the fracturing of old identity groups but it also holds the potential to catalyze new forms of community and connection. On one hand, this means that the presumption of privacy which used to apply almost without question even to most working class whites falls by the wayside in service of the larger goal of protecting the social collective. On the other, it makes socially taboo, even forbidden, connections

(say, the one between Stew, David, and Joe) not only possible but fairly convenient.

Unfortunately for the McCauley family, their woes don’t end with the therapy session. Things in the household continue to devolve as Stew becomes increasingly convinced with each interaction that his family members are searching for ways to get rid of him:

Stew knew they were sending him messages about how they were the real

family. Mom and Dad and Carole and her husband, Sam, and their little son,

Victor. There was no question about it. They were the ones that nobody tried to

get rid of, to kick out the door into juvenile hall, all the time pretending, they

didn’t want to, just had to. Once they got him out, they would never let him back

in. Then he’d have to peddle his ass and be poor forever.30

It doesn’t take long after this revelation before Stew decides that his only hope is to make his appeal to the only member of the family that he thinks isn’t already poisoned against him: his six-year-old nephew Victor. But Stew’s attempts to confide in Victor backfire dramatically when his off-the-cuff remarks about sex and sexuality leave his

30 Schulman, The Child, 115 195 nephew more confused than sympathetic. When young Victor later innocently exclaims that he and Uncle Stew have “a secret,” his sister Carole is quick to assume the worst:

“Don’t tell my child to keep secrets from me. What did you do to him? There is nothing my child can’t tell me. What did you do, Stew? Did you molest him? Oh my God. What did Uncle Stew do to you, honey? Tell mommy. Did he pull down your pants? Did he touch your penis?”31 It is worth pausing here just briefly to note how much of the panic in this moment hinges on the presumed loss of parental authority. Carole’s insistence that her child not keep secrets from her is as much about preserving her own role in the domestic arrangement as it is about protecting Victor, if not more so. We might argue that the threat Stew represents in this moment is less about sexual violence than it is about the potentials of sexual knowledge. It is interesting to note that in this moment, though, the two (sexual violence and sexual knowledge) become one and the same.

Alas, the downward spiral doesn’t end there. Stew is kicked out of the house immediately following this altercation. He spends the next night moving between park benches and unlocked rooms at the school before deciding to return home to confront his family. When he does, he is greeted first by his father who makes it clear that Stew’s sexual preferences make him a prime candidate for all nature of reprehensible behaviors:

‘I know you, and I know you are the kind of person who would hurt a little

child.’

Stew started to cry. ‘How do you know?’

31 Ibid., 131 196

…’Because Stew, you have secrets.’32

Next it is Stew’s mother’s turn to chime in, making it clear that his removal from the home is permanent. From there he heads to see the only other family he has, his sister

Carole and her husband and his nephew Victor.

What happens next unfolds almost as if watching a nightmare in slow motion.

Carole quickly notices her younger brother, dirty and disheveled, walking around the house. She shouts at him to leave, which he pretends to do before sneaking into the house through the garage. Once inside, he finds his nephew Victor on the couch “playing with his computer.”33 He locks all the doors into the house before attempting to confront his nephew but the interaction does not go as he had hoped. Instead of a cathartic confrontation in which he forces his cousin to confess to having gone along with a story he knew wasn’t true, Stew’s enthusiasm bubbles over into aggression:

Why was the kid [Victor] screaming? Didn’t he know that nothing

was happening?

Stew knew Victor was just doing this to get Carole to come into

the house. Victor was a squealer and a tattletale. He was just like the rest

of them.

‘Shut up, Victor. Shut the fuck up.’

Stew slapped him.

‘Shut up, you fucker.’

32 Ibid., 171 33 Ibid., 180 197

Stew put his hand on Victor’s mouth and squeezed it.

‘Shut up or I won’t have a home.’

Victor yelled, and now Carole was screaming from the other side

of the house. It was too late though. Why did Victor have to do that to

him? The little shit. Stewie hit Victor in the head.34

Before Carole can break through the glass window and into the house, the tragedy plays out as one might expect, with Victor becoming the next victim in a long cycle of violence.

That The Child is intended to serve as a cautionary tale seems a fair argument.

What exactly it is warning against, though, feels a bit more open to debate. Perhaps it is a warning against attempting to police childhood sexuality out of existence. At every level, from the police to his parents to the broader community, Stew was constrained by overbearing attempts to “protect his innocence.” A culture driven less by the imperative to preserve the illusion of unadulterated innocence (truly a telling term) has the potential to break the cycle of violence far too typical in the lives of sexual minorities, particularly in their youth.

Still, there remains another, perhaps thornier issue at the heart of the novel: the question of consent. I want to return now briefly to the scene examined earlier in which

Joe pleads with Hockey to take his and David’s case, laying out his understanding of the mitigating circumstances, which hinge primarily on the claim that, as Joe explains: “‘The kid is fifteen,’ Joe said again. ‘He’s a gay kid. We met on the Internet. No deception.

34 Ibid., 181 198

He’s been over a few times to have sex, a real frisky guy. The parents are a nightmare.

The kids at school hate him. Now they’ve got Dave, my boyfriend, in jail on child abuse charges, but the kid is not a child.’”35

The indeterminacy of the argument “the kid is not a child” highlights the thorny questions around consent at issue. It unsettles so much not only because it suggests the moral relativism of intergenerational sex (having sex with a kid is fine, where sex with a child would be clearly untoward). Perhaps more troubling is its implicit suggestion that

“kids” can and do enjoy sex. Earlier I suggested that childhood is typically thought of as a period free from concern about matters of sex or physical intimacy. Not only has this myth failed to withstand close scrutiny, 36 as we have seen, questions of desire and consent are tied inextricably to issues of access, availability and control. Perhaps consent is the wrong rubric through which to determine appropriateness given how many other factors delimit opportunity and influence decision-making. This is not to suggest that consent is not an important aspect of any intimacy, physical or otherwise. It is rather to question how consent so effortlessly becomes the bludgeon used against young people to deny them access to new experiences and encounters, especially those deemed undesirable by authority figures.

The Child presents us with another opportunity to return to Dave Chappelle’s provocative query: How old is fifteen, really? Is full emotional maturity a prerequisite for

35 Schulman, The Child, 115, emphasis added. 36 For more on the intrinsic queerness of childhood, as well as the figure of the queer child, see Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), and Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 199 consent? Is a lack of emotional maturity a justification for inappropriate behavior?

Stew’s predicament toward the close of the novel highlights the illogic that attempts, always unsuccessfully, to enmesh the child into the image of innocence until it emerges as fully-formed adult.

But what does it mean to suggest that “the kid is not a child”? What peculiar interstices are occupied by these strange creatures who exist in the world of adults but not exactly of it? What are the stakes for keeping youth asexual? What do we gain, but also what do we risk losing? Is there a comfortable future for us in a world where people are allowed to make the transition from child to adult along whatever trajectory they choose?

Or is the spectrum of possible options simply broader than polite society can (will?) make space for?

In the final section I sit with some of the practical implications of these questions.

If The Child is provocative in part for the kinds of questions it raises, where we end provokes with its potential answers.

The Virtual Child and Digital Fantasy

A bit of broken world thinking: what if the world wide web wasn’t designed primarily as a research tool? What if the early days of the internet were not necessarily characterized by a network made up of actors who could also be trusted to share the same basic research goals? Much contemporary criticism of the world wide web assumes some version of the same basic principle: that in its earliest iterations the technology that would become the commercially available world wide web operated as a network of like- minded and well-intentioned actors. In this idealized narrative, the theory goes that

200 nefarious actors, noticing the fundamentally egalitarian nature of the world wide web saw an infrastructure rife for exploiting to disseminate any manner of harmful materials to otherwise unsuspecting users. This telling has the added convenience of dovetailing nicely with a version of technological expansion that is all about opening access and expanding the base of shared knowledge.

The problem with this vision of the benevolent consumer-friendly world wide web is that it misses so much of what actually drove creation and innovation in earlier computer networking. Since its incipience, the commercially available world wide web has been trailed by a shadow network occupying the same infrastructure but with a very different set of goals in mind. The shadow network goes by many names: dark net, deep web, dark web.37 There are subtle and important distinctions between each of these terms but they all name a collection of networks designed to interface with the ARPANET anonymously. These networks exist alongside the rest of the content on the world wide web but can only be accessed through specific software or setups that allow users to hide their IP address. These networks are not inherently bad. Indeed, some have been used to allow whistleblowers to report information anonymously or to protect political dissidents from fear of reprisal. But they have also been a convenient tool for circulating any number of illicit commodities from narcotics to illicit media content to tools for computer hacking. As such, the dark net represents a kind of loose, un-federated vision of a global

37 For a thorough overview of the promise and the pitfalls of the dark net, see Jamie Bartlett’s The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld. Brooklyn: Melville House Books. 2015. 201 community united not by the altruistic pursuit of the common good but rather by a desire to exploit the existing shortcomings in a world where inequality is on the rise.

It should come as little surprise, then, that one of the chief exports of the dark net has been child sexuality. Whether in the form of videos that circulate on any of the hundreds of individual forums dedicated to child pornography or in the more intimate one-on-one chat sessions easily arranged by adults (primarily men) looking to pay for the companionship of children, child sexuality has been at the forefront of culturally taboo products the internet threatens to corner the market on providing. Also unsurprisingly, the patterns of sellers and buyers in this marketplace perfectly mirror the racial logics of capitalism familiar to students of the colonial project. The primary consumers for this product (insofar as such information is available) seems to be men from developed countries; the chief producers: poor communities of color.

A growing body of literature from social scientists as well as human rights- focused NGOs targets Southeast Asia, and specifically the Philippines, as in many ways the epicenter of the crisis.38 With a larger population that has fairly consistent and high- speed internet access relative to their general wages, the Philippines presents a perfect storm of technological access and heightened vulnerability. This stark set of conditions produced an environment in any number of novel forms of exploitation could arise. One such uniquely digital phenomenon is known as Webcam Sex Tourism (henceforth,

WCST) which is described by the children’s advocacy non-profit Terre des Hommes as

38 As early as 2008, this reality was beginning to coalesce into a national reputation as evidenced by Claire Sy Delfin’s article "Child pornography: Evil that preys silently on poor Filipino children." GMANews.TV 18 November 2008. Online. 202

“predators around the world offer[ing] payment or other rewards to view and direct children in other countries performing sexual acts in front of live streaming webcams.”39

In 2013, Terre des Hommes adopted a unique approach to combating what they saw as a pervasive and growing quandary of the digital revolution. Using a combination of computer modeling and reference photos of actual children forced into sex tourism, the group created a digital model of a young girl. A video from the group’s website provides a bit of insight into their goals: “The only way to stop predators is to patrol the places where they commit these crimes and to catch them in the act. And so we did.”40

Figure 1 - "Sweetie"

39 Terre des Hommes, "Becoming Sweetie: a novel approach to stopping the global rise of Webcam Child Sex Tourism," Public Report (2013). . 40 Terre des Hommes, “Sweetie: The Face of Webcam Child Sex Tourism,” (2015). Video. . 203

The virtual child Sweetie was somewhat effective at getting men to engage with her online. By the end of two months, the group had managed to identify over 2000 men who not only contacted Sweetie but also provided “her” with identifying personal information.41 Still, despite this success, a general inconsistency in laws regarding online sexual activity, particularly among international participants meant that the vast majority of the men were never even contacted by law enforcement.

I revisit this project for a few reasons. For one, it highlights a history of uneven development that betrays attempts to sell the internet as a great equalizing technology.

What we see instead mirrors patterns of development and distribution as old as the concept of international relations itself with the developing world being tasked with providing goods and services that are desired in the developed world but deemed dangerous or unfit to produce there. That these relations grow out of a power structure left behind in the wake of formal colonialism perhaps also helps to make sense of the second insight: while the figure of “the child” has some political salience internationally, it is at its most potent when invoked in service or protection of the white child. The widespread availability of child sex workers for the WCST industry highlights a stark racial and national disparities undercutting the political will to act for western subjects.

At the same time, that these images and concerns are circulating at all, both in the form of the informational YouTube video which has been viewed more than 5 million times and

41 The organization’s website offers a list of other accomplishments, See Terre des Hommes, “Sweetie – The Face of Webcam Child Sex Tourism,” https://www.terredeshommes.nl/en/sweetie-face-webcam- child-sex-tourism/. Though most of the items listed (4 million views for their YouTube video, half a million signatures for an online petition, etc.) would fall more under the somewhat more abstract rubric of consciousness raising. 204 in subsequent coverage,42 seem to suggest a cultural currency that attaches uniquely to stories that center around the figure of the child, wherever she may be.

But I think there is another angle that bears a bit of further unpacking. Perhaps one of the unintended consequences of this project is that it highlights the very real demand for child sexuality. The easiest answer, and indeed the one we have pursued almost exclusively, is to be appalled by this reality, sympathetic for the victims (and occasionally the adults who desire them), and unequivocal in our condemnation of their abuse of power. In Sweetie, we find the opportunity for a potential way out. If it were possible to provide people a virtual outlet for their fantasies, would we embrace it? What would be at stake?

It is a quandary that touches on so many of the issues which have become flashpoints in the conversation about growing up in the digital age. It forces a reconsideration of intimacy and attraction that raises some startlingly queer potentialities.

What does it mean to be attracted to code and algorithms, for example? It gestures toward the ethical question of stabilizing and normalizing a taboo fantasy. Should we as a society allow people to indulge in the fantasy of sexually assaulting a child? Can one sexually assault a program designed for sexual encounters? It runs the risk of reifying the racial division of sexual labor in the Western imaginary. Would users continue to prefer

Filipino girls, for example? Would the difference matter?

42 In addition to the video, the “Sweetie” project was covered by various news outlets before being featured in a segment on the Showtime series Dark Net, which describes itself as a documentary series that “explores that often disturbing darker side of the net.” 205

But perhaps most troublingly, it raises a terrifying specter; the specter of a future where people connect primarily if not exclusively online, where every conceivable perversion is a mere click away, where the image of the child itself becomes one more tile in the pornographic mosaic of modern deviance. And it is fundamentally this, the image of the future and, implicitly, the child who must be protected from it, that drives the vehemence of our opposition. To be clear, there have been any number of passionate advocates who have made the case for the devastating impact of child sex trafficking on living breathing human beings. Outside the realm of abstraction, there are certainly actual children who are harmed every day by the reality of the child sex industry. Additionally, there is no way to know if Sweetie would have been as effective a tool had the artifice of it been more clearly foregrounded. That is to say, tricking people into accepting a substitute is very different from getting them to prefer it. Advocates for children’s rights are also often quick to point out that many offenders started out only consuming digital images.

I take all these points very seriously. And yet I am left with the sense that there might be some value in pursuing this approach. The takeaway from both the Sweetie project and The Child seems to be a reiteration of a point that Gayle Rubin made decades earlier: “In Western culture, sex is taken all too seriously. A person is not considered immoral, is not sent to prison, and is not expelled from her or his family, for enjoying spicy cuisine. But an individual may go through all this and more for enjoying shoe leather. Ultimately, of what possible social significance is it if a person likes to

206 masturbate over a shoe.”43 Critics will no doubt insist that there is a distinction between masturbating over a shoe and masturbating over images of a virtual child. I am unconvinced. At their core, both are attempts to police the boundaries of appropriate sexual feeling, to delimit the range of possible options. And both hinge on the myth that not acknowledging a desire is the same as routing it out of existence.

Conclusion: Being/Coming Digital

So, what about the way we talk of child-loving? The talk is monster-talk,

first of all, talk that is busy rejecting the pedophile that it is, at the same time,

creating. It assembles in order to fling aside, imagines so that it might recoil in

disgust. That is not to say that pedophiles are imaginary, just that our discourse

creates a space for them, a space we can bet will not go unoccupied. It is clear that

we invest a great deal of cultural capital in the importance of pedophilia, though it

is not so clear why we do so.44

Few topics produce more discomfort in polite circles more viscerally than child sexuality. Parents prefer to imagine a world in which sexuality is something that happens only after a child has safely flown the nest. Non-parents squirm at the mere mention which seems by its very utterance to implicate them in a world impure thoughts and images. And yet, over and over again we are confronted with the stark reality that not

43 Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 280. 44 James Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3. 207 only do kids know about sex, they are deeply interested in it. As James Kincaid goes on to highlight:

By insisting so loudly on the innocence, purity, and asexuality of the child,

we have created a subversive echo: experience, corruption, eroticism…Defining

the child as an object of desire, we create the pedophile as the one who desires as

a complex image of projection and denial: the pedophile acts out on the range of

attitudes and behaviors made compulsory by the role we have given the child.45

This moment, with its prolific avenues for exploring content of every conceivable stripe, presents us with a unique opportunity to reconsider some long-held truisms about adolescence and sexuality. We can choose to continue living in the myth of sexual innocence and insisting on the successful performance of its expectations. Or we can try a different approach.

Over the last chapter, I’ve attempted to tie together some seemingly disparate threads, linking the research and development of the material infrastructure of the internet to both its primary consumer application (the world wide web) and its often neglected off shoots. Throughout I’ve been trying to ask what impact, if any, this new technology has on the way we think and talk about what means to “grow up” in the late twentieth century. The echoes between the declining fortunes of working class whites and the exploitation of children in the Philippines suggest a surprising interconnectedness. Both are stories about what happened after, about what the modern nation and the modern internet made of one another.

45 Ibid., 5 208

Between the onslaught of headlines proclaiming the terrifying ascendance of so- called “hook-up culture”46 and the only slightly less alarmist ones announcing the creation of life-sized robotic sex dolls,47 it is becoming increasingly clear that the stakes for intimacy have changed. How we respond to that change will say a great deal about whether we have learned from the mistakes of the past. In her book The Child in

Question, Diane Gittins makes explicit the links between the myth of childhood innocence and the violent reactions typically elicited by discussions of childhood sexuality: “If we define children as angels, we also create a need for devils, because those aspects of children and of ourselves that we cannot accept as good must be projected somewhere else. By doing this we project unwanted aspects of our selves on to others who are then stereotyped and scapegoated as Other.”48 Gittins reminds us that is easier to reject the legitimacy of certain forms of desire than it is to fully consider the implications of those urges. But she also reminds us that perpetuating this myth comes at a high cost.

Proponents of embracing new technology often over-promise on its potential to radically alter the landscape of the social world. It is certainly true that adolescents were

46 Quick sampling: Joseph Turner, “Rape and Hookup Culture Are Two Sides of the Same Coin,” The Federalist, June 28, 2016, http://thefederalist.com/2016/06/28/rape-culture-and-hookup-culture-are- two-sides-of-the-same-coin/., Kate Dwyer, “The Surprising Reality About Hook-Up Culture in College,” TeenVogue.com, Dec 9, 2015, http://www.teenvogue.com/story/hookup-culture-myth-dating-college/. “Hook-up culture is making women miserable, study finds,” Catholic News Agency, May 20, 2016. http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/hook-up-culture-is-making-women-miserable-study-finds- 74544/. 47 Another colorful smattering: Sage Lazzaro, “Will Sex Robots Destroy the Human Race? Experts Host a Tech Conference to Discuss,” Observer.com, August 12, 2016, http://observer.com/2016/08/will-sex- robots-destroy-the-human-race-experts-host-a-tech-conference-to-discuss/., Catarina Cowden, “The Sex Robot of the Future is Here and We’re a Little Scared,” CinemaBlend July 2015, http://www.cinemablend.com/pop/Sex-Robot-Future-Here-We-re-Little-Scared-72454.html., Eva Wiseman, “Sex, love and robots: is this the end of intimacy?” The Guardian, December 13, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/13/sex-love-and-robots-the-end-of-intimacy/. 48 Diane Gittins, The Child in Question (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), xvi. 209 having sex (and some of them with much older partners) long before the internet ever existed. Yet to pretend that there is nothing new afoot in the increased speed, ease of use, wide proliferation, and unfiltered access that have become hallmarks of the so-called digital age is to continue to misunderstand how questions about sex, desire, and intimacy remain so hotly contested. The advent of digital technology in and of itself neither creates nor solves these issues. But it has without doubt presented itself as the key terrain on which the battles will be fought.

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Epilogue: The Struggle is Long(er)

“Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes

through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals. Without this hard work, time becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time

is always right to do right.”

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Commencement Address for Oberlin College, 1965

“Sometimes it seems/ We’ll touch that dream/ But things come slow and not at all.”

Lauren Hill, Everything is Everything

There is an exhibit in the Columbus, Ohio-based Center for Science and Industry

(COSI) that haunts my imagination even in the quietest moments. Located on the first floor of the east wing now, the exhibit is one of only a handful that has followed the

COSI project since its opening in 1964.1 Progress invites visitors to experience

“generations of change in the blink of an eye” by wandering through a life-sized replica of an intersection in “Main Street America” circa 1898 only to turn a corner and find themselves “generations later – in that same town – in 1962.” The brick and wood

1 A project that has required moving the entire exhibit to two separate facilities over the decades.

aesthetic morphs into stainless steel, stagecoaches are replaced by gas stations, parking meters assume the posts once occupied by stables, and everywhere electricity abounds.

As COSI describes: “The march of technological innovation reshapes our lives, our cities, and our society. These changes may be difficult to detect from one day to the next. Yet in less than a century, they can make the familiar unrecognizable.”

“Stand on the corner of Hope Street and Fear Street in Progress and wonder: what will the future bring?” the exhibit invites. It is an invitation I can never resist. There is something almost unimaginably naïve in the fact that Progress’s narrative literally ends with 1962. It is a naivety further compounded by the reality that by the time the museum finally opened, two years after its narrative of progress crystalized into perfect stasis, the social unrest of the civil rights movement was reaching an early apex in its political power. COSI opened in March of 1964; by July, the Civil Rights Act would become law.

Yet from the moment it opened, Progress was already complete.

I have revisited this exhibit more times than I can recall and remain endlessly compelled by its dogmatic commitment to preserving its original vision.2 It is an emphasis that highlights for me the resonances between “progress” and “nostalgia” in the making of American identity that threaten to collapse the two. The further from the moment of Progress’s realization I find myself, the more I worry that something about it will change. Imagining a new Progress removes me from the comfortable space of critiquing Progress’s small ambitions and forces instead that I speculate about what

2 There is a banana in the mock fruit market from 1898 that still to this day bears the faint outline of the initials a friend and I obnoxiously carved into them on a school trip in fifth grade. 212 comes next. At the corner of Hope Street and Fear Street, the colliding potentialities of the future are neither obvious in their origin nor definite in their impact.

Imagining what comes next is always already an invitation to historicize the problems of the now as temporally contingent. The possibilities of progress lie in progress’s capacity to make meaningful change. But maybe, as COSI suggests, it is sufficient to merely see the changes around us and identify them as meaningful progress.

For what is “meaningful change” hinges on the meanings through which our individual understandings of experience coalesce. Or, put another way, one person’s progress is another’s nostalgia.

This project has attempted to unpack the potentials, as well as the limitations of nostalgia. I have highlighted the linkage between the specific technologies through which adolescent identity is constructed and the terminologies that name the moments of breakdown, erosion, and decay which reveal histories of difference that have so often overdetermined the phenomenological experience of becoming (or failing to become). In so doing, I hope to contribute to a growing conversation about the usefulness of the future, particularly in times of heightened precarity, and the lessons of the past.

It is not uncommon these days to here historians alongside scholars of ethnic and cultural studies refer to the present moment as “post-civil rights,” a term which itself threatens to betray a particular nostalgia for a narrative of progress that imagines the recent political past as necessary more impactful and activism-centered than the now. In one version of this narrative, the Civil Rights Movement reached it denouement in or around 1968, only to be eclipsed by struggles of identity politics that would dominate the

213 following decades and ultimately provoke the erosion of the broad-based coalition vital to achieving the movement’s lofty political goals.3 For others, the move to “post-civil rights” is less about suggesting that the movement is over than that its goals have become so widely dispersed as to no longer constellate under the moniker of “civil rights.” In the latter camp, we find scholars like Richard Iton4 and Brian Norman who, tellingly, employ the term teleologically more than discursively. It is this lacuna around the specific import of the “post-“ in “post-civil rights” that allows Norman, for example, to declare that

“[p]ost-civil rights writers draw on Jim Crow to tell us as much about our past as our present,”5 and “…post-civil rights [is] an era in which segregation is no longer the law of the land yet Jim Crow’s legacy persists, albeit in different and more subtle forms,”6 while maintaining that “…there is no bright line between pre- and post-civil rights eras.”7 What exactly it means to be “post-civil rights” remains unclear, beyond the periodization of civil rights as a phenomenon of the 1960s and 70s. Thus, everything created after 1960

(or 1970 in some variations) becomes de facto post-civil rights.

Lynn Itagaki forcefully underscores how the discourse of post-civil rights works to undermine the persistence of the struggle for meaningful equality:

The post-civil rights era promotes two dominant justifications for the

inequalities in the status quo: first, that people of color should wait for political,

3 A representative version of this argument can be found in Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009). 4 See Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 5 Brian Norman, Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 2. 6 Ibid., 3 7 Ibid., 6 214

social, and economic equality since they have not yet earned their full citizenship

rights; and second, that because the explicitly discriminatory laws of the Jim

Crow era have been eliminated, these same communities should bear the

responsibility for failing to benefit fully from the opportunities available to them

since the 1960s.8

In contrast to this approach, I have attempted to frame this project as an archive of adolescence in the long(er) civil rights movement. My gesture toward long(er) is intended to extend the logic of civil rights struggle which, even in its most ambitious historical sweeps, tends to imagine a clear break sometime at or around the end of the twentieth century.9 But I also want to acknowledge the feelings of exhaustion, fatigue, and burnout10 that have become constitutive components of the struggle for social justice and which would seem to be among the motivating factors driving the insistence on the tidiness of progress achieved in the realization of a post-civil rights moment.

Jacqueline Hall’s formation of the long civil rights movement is helpful for underscoring the almost dizzying array of interests and investments driving calls for social justice, inclusion, and exclusion throughout the twentieth century and beyond. It

8 Lynn Mie Itagaki, Civil Racism: The Los Angeles Rebellion and the Crisis of Racial Burnout (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 12. 9 It is this tradition that historian Nancy MacLean invokes in her recent work which capstones the movement the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency. See Nancy MacLean, “The Civil Rights Movement: 1968-2008,” Freedom’s Story, National Humanities Center. 10 My notion of burnout is also indebted to Lynn Itagaki’s work. As she explains: “Racial burnout refers to a contemporary political malaise affecting both the left and the right in regard to the apparent intractability of systemic racial inequalities. Burnout indexes a condition of generalized exhaustion and apathy that has come about, in part, as a result of the protracted inability and/or unwillingness of the U.S. nation-state to fundamentally alter conditions of racial injustice.” Itagaki, Civil Racism, 6. 215 both acknowledges the reality of the changing incentives for national participation as it refuses to suggest that any of the movement’s founding struggles can be located safely in the past.

Yet Hall’s approach is not without its detractors. Fellow historians Sundiata Keita

Cha-Jun and Clarence Lang debate the adequacy of Hall’s thesis “because it collapses periodization schemas, erases conceptual differences between waves of the [Black

Liberation Movement], and blurs regional distinctions in the African American experience.”11 They liken the approach to a vampire, arguing “This metaphor is apt because the vampire's distinguishing feature is not its predatory blood drinking. Rather, its distinctive trait is its undead status; that is, it exists outside of time and history, beyond the processes of life and death, and change and development. The vampire is thoroughly rootless and without place – it makes its home everywhere and nowhere.”12 I take this critique of the dangers of ahistoricism seriously. Nevertheless, I am uncompelled by their reductive conclusion about the “questionable interpretive insight”13 to be gained from a long(er) view of the civil rights movement. Moreover, I am oddly compelled by this image of vampirical historicizing.

Cha-Jun and Lang caution that this approach can easily lead to “‘fallacies of semantical distortion,’ muddying the meaning and concepts of ideas.”14 However this concern largely serves to highlight the limited range of actions and ideas that correspond

11 Sundiata Keita Cha-Jun and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” The Journal of African American History 92 no. 2 (2007): 265. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 266 14 Ibid., 274 216 to their notion of the “real” meaning of civil rights: “In political discourse, ‘civil rights’ refer to privileges the state grants its citizens and protections against unjustifiable infringement by either state or private citizens.”15 Ironically, even in this framework, it is difficult if not impossible to locate the precise moment at which the struggle for equality concluded.

A long(er) view of the civil rights movement helps to make sense of the constancy of student-led activism which has dominated the past few decades, from the DREAMers to Black Lives Matter, the Dakota Access Pipeline protestors to the student advocates against campus sexual assault, as it also helps explain the ongoing crises of urban blight and intentional neglect that have poisoned the water of Flint, Michigan, left the ghettoes of New Orleans to drown into the sea, and recast the cities of Detroit and more recently

Chicago in the national (white) imaginary as convenient shorthand for violence, corruption, and decline. A long(er) view turns away from progress narratives which rely on the logic of the “wave” to insist on a continuity that underscores fundamentally meaningful change. To take the long(er) view of the civil rights movement is, in a sense, to ask at what frequency the situation comes to register as event.16 By so doing, it confounds the temporality of the event and foregrounds the material exigencies of the situation. Arguing for the long(er) civil rights movement is, fundamentally, to argue that the situation in the American project which produced the demand for both social unrest

15 Ibid. 16 My understanding of the theoretical import of the “event” owes much to Lauren Berlant’s work. See Lauren Berlant, “Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event,” American Literary History 20 no. 4 (2008): 845-860, and also Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Obesity, Sovereignty, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry 33 no. 4 (2004): 754-780. 217 and nominal inclusiveness, a situation which scholars continuously misapprehend as the event of The Civil Rights Movement (note the proper nominal form), has yet to end.

If we are post-civil rights, then we must also admit that the civil rights movement failed. It failed to achieve economic parity across the distinct constellations of identity formations. It failed to integrate even the most public sectors of society. It failed to force the state to begin protecting and preserving the lives of non-white citizens as its own with any consistency or regularity. But if we are willing to accept that exhaustion, frustration, and burnout are constitutive impulses toward a movement for social change, indeed, they are the moments where we ask again and anew who we are, what we want, and what we are willing to sacrifice for it, then we can take heart not in the hope of success being just on the other side of the ever-receding horizon, but instead in the power of coalition to force change.

“Protest is the New Brunch,” or #StayWoke

This project has benefited from reaching its conclusion under the shadow of a resurgent white supremacism that threatens to abolish even the nominal totems of progress which social justice activists had begun taking for granted. The reality of the scheme of “re-greatening”17 America has made painfully clear that not only is the work of agitating for civil liberty far from over, but also there is no battle that cannot still be lost. It is in part this reality that informs my reluctance to embrace the discourse of post- civil rights. Surely we can’t yet be over what we’ve never had.

17 A term whose mind-numbing stupidity could not be more apt. 218

But the long(er) civil rights movement is not merely a rejection of the logic of the post. It is also an invitation to revisit the strategies of radical coalition building that have defined and determined the trajectory of social change throughout the late twentieth century. The long(er) civil rights movement stitches together the insights radical coalitional thinkers like the Combahee River Collective, Gayle Rubin, Gloria Anzaldúa,

Cherrie Moraga, and Audre Lorde among countless others whose work underscored the importance of intersectional analysis and collaborative agitation long before that specific terminology ever entered the lexicon of critical theory.

“Protest is the new brunch” has become a convenient shorthand for naming the explosive interest in discourses of resistance that followed the election of 2016.18 But it also names a mode of sociality through engagement that reminds us of Dr. King’s oft- overlooked insight: that progress is never inevitable, but always achievable if we are willing to do the difficult and often thankless work of remaining vigilant. This project has attempted to contribute to a counterarchive of resistance to the agenda of white supremacy that remains at the core of US identity, one that complicates our understanding of the meaning(s) of adolescence, the importance of difference, and the ideologies of social justice that define US life post-1960. If protest becomes the new brunch, if resistance becomes a part of our everyday experience of being and living in a nation with a past, present, and prospective future as bleakly xenophobic as the one we’re currently experiencing, we may yet find a way to resist repeating the mistakes of the past,

18 The term was first popularized on the politics and culture-focused podcast Art19, but has rapidly been adopted by a much wider range of activists and actors. 219 chiefly our tendency to accept marginal advances and trickle-down diversity in the place of revolutionary change.

King’s commencement address, prophetically titled “Remaining Awake through a

Great Revolution,” delivered the year after the advent of nominal civil rights enshrined in the passage of the Civil Rights Act, does not offer any easy answers for effecting social change. Nor, alas, will I. But if there is a lesson to be learned from the past, one could do much worse than to hear in his words a rallying cry: Stay Woke.

220

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