Tag Audrey Sprenger

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Communities Are Social

Aug 13, ’11 12:06 AM

Note: All the names in this story have been changed. But the photograph above gives a clue to the identity of one of the towns mentioned.

No matter how hard we labor to make our homes more permanent, more stable, we never can truly achieve this goal. Land claims and buildings and borders may bind us to the earth, but they only do so, precariously. Deeds change hands, architecture crumbles, territories expand and contract and the stories and maps we make of these things can easily be distorted or ignored. This doesn’t mean that our homes are something vulnerable or fragile, prone to destruction or easy to break, but rather, that they are something dynamic, something mobile, something temporary, something alive.

It is perhaps this fact of home’s transience, of home’s mortality, that draws us to other people, that binds us into what social scientists call a community, a common way of living, a common way of life, that works to starve or sustain us whenever our homes prove unable to provide. Communities emerge out of the everyday routines of our homes, what sociologist Robert Park would have called its social ecology, those parts of the earth where people have settled in so deep that that their presence there seems almost natural.

I learned this the winter backwoods of Manitoba doing ethnographic field research for the Canadian Forest Service. Here was where I was actually able to bear witness to the ideas of Robert Park happening. For it was in this place where people would gather together for a community social every time there was some significant shift in their home’s passing, like a wedding or a retirement party, a birth or a graduation or perhaps even more importantly, some kind of emergency or crisis.

That was the reason behind the community social I saw happen there. Money was needed after a house caught fire in Forêt Bleu. Maurice Normandin’s old place. Nobody was really sure how the fire started. Some thought that it was arson. That Yves Bernard was to blame. But it was hard say for sure. The house was old and weathered, long abandoned by its owner and marked condemned by the state so it just as easily could have caught fire by accident.

“You never know,” Berthelette Hiebert said to me the morning after it happened. We had both pulled off the road to see what was left of the half charred house. “It could have been the wood stove or a bad wire,” she said. “But it sure looks more like a lover’s quarrel to me.”

However it happened, it left Crystal Wannemaker without a chimney, without a stove, and only part of her living room floor. That’s what it said on the flyers anyway, the ones posted to every telephone pole between St. Marc’s and Fort McVey. Meet Your Friends! Help Your Neighbors! Come To This Winter’s First Community Social! Cheap Drinks! Dancing! More! The flyers were photocopied on yellow paper and pasted under the handwritten plea were three small faces, the school photographs of each one of Crystal Wannemaker’s three young boys.

The Women’s Guild of St. Margaret’s Church was sponsoring the social. Nancy Chambers, Dorothy Frank, Marjorie O’Keefe. The Women’s Guild of St. Margaret’s Church was always sponsoring some social. They had to. As long as they were raising money to help the needy or the poor, they could bully the Mill into employing a part-time priest. And as long as they employed a part-time priest, they didn’t have to attend the Eucharist in Falls Bridge, the only other place along the Ozhaa River where you could attend a Catholic Mass in English, rather than Latin or French.

So the house fire in Forêt Bleu served The Women’s Guild of St. Margaret’s well. They would rent out the Falls Bridge Hockey Arena, have their husbands cart over kegs of beer and cases of rye and vodka bought cut-rate from the Liquor Store in Poplar Falls, hire the arena’s hockey referee Buckle McGee to hire a few others to sell the alcohol and spin the records and unlock and lock the arena’s front door, and consider their good deed done. None of the women ever actually went to any of the socials they sponsored. The kind of people who actually attended such things weren’t exactly their kind.

Which meant practically everyone else living in or around Falls Bridge. Most forest dwellers wouldn’t miss a community social. Especially in the dead of winter, on a night when there wasn’t a high school or Junior League hockey game. Some drove in from as far as two hundred miles away, through very heavy snow. Truckers and cutters working out in the northern bush camps; kids off attending university in the city; relatives and friends from neighboring townships and Indian territories, so small they were marked by numbers instead of names. They’d all venture out to the hockey arena in Falls Bridge, arriving from every possible direction, entering the traffic of people who traveled much shorter distances. Six miles. Four miles. Two miles. From Fort McVey, from Bunk Town, from Poplar Falls; from St. Marc’s, from the Moor, from Forêt Bleu; a steady stream of logging trucks and pick-ups, making the dark of the early night bright with light.

By seven the traffic slowed and the parking lot of the arena became full, then overflowing, and by nine someone from one of the houses across the street called in the police, since skirmishes between boys from rival high schools kept brewing. Some were students at the public high school located right next door to the hockey arena; others were students at nearby private schools, L’École de St. Marc’s and Mitag Industrial and Collegiate. Insults were shouted in Mitagwa or English and then returned in French, and punches were thrown between cousins who attended different schools.

The two police constables who arrived didn’t have to do too much to stop the fights. Just make their way through the crowds and beam their flashlights onto faces, threatening to call the offender’s parents, a punishment, they assured them, far worse than arrest. They made several laps around the parking lot, ignoring the swarms of people huddled around Len Charles’ pick-up, as well as Len Charles himself, who sold zip lock bags filled with cheap marijuana and very expensive hash oil doled out in old Coke bottle caps. “Janet bringing the kids over tonight?” one constable asked the other, pulling off his gloves, then tucking them along with his flashlight under his arm so he could dig for a cigarette.

“Yeah,” the other constable answered walking towards one of the parking lot garbage cans that some kids were using to stoke a small bon fire. “You going to put that out when you’re done?” he asked them, leaning forward slightly to see what they were burning to make the flames. “Yeah, we’re watching it,” one of the kids answered. He held a cigarette between his second and third fingers and a bottle of beer between his second finger and his thumb.

Eight dollars bought admission into the community social, where alcohol tickets were sold at a table away from a makeshift bar, temporarily set up in the arena’s concession stand. One dollar bought a beer, two dollars a shot of whiskey, and for an extra fifty cents you could mix your beer or whiskey with Orange Fanta or ginger ale. You could also buy coffee at the bar and hot chocolate, slices of banana bread wrapped in plastic and hot peanuts sold in paper coffee cups. A line of people stretched out all along the length of the concession stand, five and six bodies deep, and every so often someone would ask Joss McAdams or Carmen McClean, the two young women working the stand for Buckle McGee that night, if they were going to plug in the hot dog grill or popcorn machine.

“You two going to be making hot dogs tonight,” a voice would ask every so often, more often then the time it took for the song coming over the arena’s sound system to change. “Grill’s broken,” Joss or Carmen would shout back, and then sometimes you’d hear one of them ask the other, “Did Terry ever go and get that marker so we could write-up a sign?” “You two making popcorn tonight,” the next voice would rise up. “Machine’s broken,” Joss or Carmen would shout back, and then again, “Where the hell is Terry?”

The arena became packed. People filled the Home Side and the Away Side. They leaned up against the scuffed up walls of the covered ice rink or sat on them with their legs dangling over the walls worn out ledge. They crammed the bleachers and the dance floor, teenage girls and young couples, fathers and their daughters, old marrieds and the occasional ten-year old boy, who would try to break dance or slam dance or slide on his snow-panted knees across the entire length of plywood dance floor.

Mothers gathered in the empty penalty boxes to chat and nurse their babies. Some old men got Buckle to open up the Coaches Office so they could smoke and play cards. And all through the night little kids chased each other in and out of the locker rooms, their screeches slowly subsiding around eleven, when their parents called it night, rounded them up, and then ushered them, bright-eyed and exhausted, out the arena’s front doors.

With every family’s exit, the social grew more raucous and the air more thick with hash smoke, especially after the Rob Roy and Queen’s Crowne Local closed and the hockey arena in Falls Bridge suddenly became the only place along the Ozhaa River that night where you could come in from the cold and get a whiskey or a beer. But by three o’clock all of the alcohol was sold, so again there was another exodus of revelers and for a few minutes people’s shouts and laughter echoed through Falls Bridge, which was dark and quiet with the sleepiness of night.

But by two o’clock every last one of them was rounded up as their parents packed up their belongings to leave, the bleachers and covered hockey rink slowly emptying. With every family’s exit, the social grew more raucous, and the air, more thick with hash smoke. By three o’clock all of the alcohol was sold, so there was another exodus of revelers, and by four o’clock Buckle McGee turned the music off and the lights up, a signal to the very last few people who remained, mostly young women in vinyl miniskirts and men in dark green bush boots who, even without the music and the darkness, lingered on the covered hockey rink to make out, where, just moments before, they had been dancing.

End Note: I have also written of the Canadian backwoods here.

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The Solitude Trilogy

Jul 31, ’11 1:42 PM

After he became heralded as one of the greatest pianists to ever play, Glenn Gould stopped performing live. Doing so just didn’t allow him to perfect the way he wanted to play like performing in a studio did, where he could go over the same measure of music again and again, capturing it on tape whenever he got it exactly right. The irony of all this was that even though he was obsessive about perfecting the way he performed, as well as how his performance would be heard, Gould would hum over his playing, a fact easy to hear on any of his stunningly beautiful recordings.

I love Gould’s humming almost as much as I love to hear him play, because, for me, it documents the exact moment he made his recordings, so even though I can play these recordings again and again, every time I listen to them it feels as if I’m hearing them for the very first time, up close and live. Listening to them, I get the very same sensation I feel when I’m listening to improvisational music being created spontaneously in a jazz or hip hop club or a street musician or poet performing in the street: That undeniable thrill of art being created in the moment, that undeniable thrill that that the artist is actually there.

Gould carried his ideas about the best way to perform and document his piano playing to another artistic medium: audio documentary making. In the early 1970s he created a series of three pieces for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about what he believed to be the essence of Canadian identity, a major topic circulating in Canadian academic, artistic and popular culture during that time. Titled The Solitude Trilogy, these documentaries were set in three places, the far North, off the coast of Newfoundland and on the Canadian prairies. Gould created them by recording ambient sounds in these places, interviewing a few of the people who lived there and then layering these sounds and interviews over one another along with pieces of found tape and other miscellaneous and often completely unrelated recordings.

Prior to making these pieces, Gould had written about hearing music in the everyday sounds and conversations he’d overhear just going about his day and in one of the stories told in the film 22 Short Films About Glenn Gould, he is shown having breakfast in a rural, road side coffee shop, listening in on all the din. But neither his writings about this topic nor this cinematic dramatization can compare to the beauty of the three documentaries he made.

In the first documentary in the series, titled The Idea of North, sounds of a train clattering are overlaid with the voices of nurses and Native people and road workers chatting as they return home from a brief visit to the nearest outpost of civilization, a one street town to the south. In the second, titled The Latecomers, the stories of two Newfoundlanders, one who was in favor of Newfoundland joining Canada in 1949 and one who was opposed, are edited together as if in conversation, their similarly accented voices separated by the sound of an enormous Atlantic Ocean crashing against the stone walls that protect their respective villages, which we learn would be close to one another geographically, if they weren’t built into the sides of two rocky sea-locked coves. The third, titled The Quiet In The Earth, fuses together a recording of a Mennonite preacher giving his Sunday morning service and a track of Janis Joplin sorrowfully singing have another little piece of my heart now baby, while church bells ring over a vast and barren prairie.

Like other documentary or sociological studies about North American communities, (such as the social ecological studies of the 1930s Chicago School of Sociology, Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown, or William Foote Whyte’s Street Corner Society), The Solitude Trilogy makes little distinction between the places it documents and the people who live there. However, unlike these studies, it makes no claims about its objectivity, accountability, certainty or truth. Even its authenticity is left as an ambiguous question. For as much as Gould was enamored by the idea that communities seemed to organically emerge from the world’s earthly terrain, he knew that his documentation of them were simply that, documentations, no matter how real the voices and sounds he recorded might seem.

It was a statement a kin to his decision to stop performing the piano live and like his decision an important reminder to all of us, that whether we are listeners of music or audio documentaries, (or, even readers of sociology for that matter), we have a choice as to whether or not we truly feel or believe the story the musician or documentary maker (or sociologist) tells us, that we alone hold the power to decide whether a story is the truth or a lie.

End Note: To view/listen to/read a recent community study, (“Welcome to Pine Point”, by Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons), which not only captures but elevates many of the theoretical and methodological qualities of Gould’s “The Solitude Trilogy,” click here.

End Note 2: To start exploring the differences between audio documentary-making and audio ethnography, click here.

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Where New York Stops & Bombay Starts

Jul 25, ’11 7:21 PM

Note: I went looking for Bombay in New York City last night inspired by Bombay V. New York, a brilliant on-going photo essay by Nisha Sondhe. An earlier It’s Not Rocket Science post on India is right here.

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Paradise At Home

Jul 23, ’11 5:10 PM

Dear Dr. Sprenger,

Thank you so much for your article Home Goings on The Sociological Imagination. As a sociologist who left her home in West Virginia many years ago, I have always carried the feeling of being misplaced or unsettled. While recently reading Alessandro Portelli’s book They Say in Harlan County, I was struck by his assertion that mountain people are homesick people. And I found an echo in your work. The truth of the matter is, that for many of us mountain people, no matter where we live, the mountains are home – true north, for better or worse. I have often longed, and feared, to return home; and my exile has lasted now nearly 20 years. Should the day ever come when I am privileged and burdened to return to my original homeplace, I am certain that my sociological imagination would find me adrift in a foreign country in spite of the comforting familiarity of people and place. Thank you again for such a thought-provoking piece.

– Lori Ann McVay, Ph.D
Queen’s University, Belfast

A Little More On Home Goings …

I was born in a small city in Ontario Canada, just north of Toronto and south of the Curve Lake Indian Reserve, but when I was seven years old my family started traveling to Florida every year. At first these were just ten-day or two week vacations during the school holiday Canadians call March Break and Americans, Spring or Easter Break, but within a one or two years, my parents bought a place near the beach and a large beauty salon in a strip mall and we started traveling there every two or three months, usually in the off season.

I remember going to Walt Disney World in early November when it wasn’t hot or crowded with tourists and my mom had to buy my brother and me thick, hooded Magic Kingdom sweatshirts since, to us at least, the Florida weather was so strangely cold. Soon, in addition to these trips, my parents started stealing a few days on the ends of our school holidays to make those visits longer and my mother, brother and I would head south for the entire summer, making what we once considered vacations seem more like relocations. By the time I was ten and my brother fourteen we had two sets of games and two sets of clothes, two sets of friends and two sets of favourite television re-runs, an Ontario set and a Florida set.

Finally, when I was I thirteen, my parents decided that in addition to the summer, we’d spend the school year there. By now they owned and operated four beauty salons and the Florida, which had once been a vacation destination to me, a paradise, was slowly losing its exotic edges and becoming my home. I remember that first year I started school in Florida. It was August, much sooner than the Canadian school year started and I’d wait for the school bus every morning roasting in the hip, back to school fashion of that fall, which was way too heavy and layered for Florida during that time of year.

Still, all the girls in my new school were over-dressed, just like in Ontario my friends and I often dressed a little too skimpy, our clothes picked to match what we read in Seventeen magazine more than the weather. (Though I’d never openly admit this to my mother, I remember freezing to death every single day of my Grade Seven winter, since I insisted on making a short, burgundy, fur lined corduroy jacket my winter coat that year. I wore it with a huge, burgundy tartan scarf, which I never wrapped around my neck, but left hanging open).

Overdressing was just the first step in my slow cultural transformation from a Northerner to a Southerner and it’s very important to note that in this cultural transformation I wasn’t alone. Many Ontarioians and northeastern Americans, (see Elizabeth Hay’s beautiful novel, Student of Weather, especially the character of Maurice Dove) have settled or made settlements in Florida, this utterly indigenous North American diaspora including once a year and seasonal tourists (sometimes called Snowbirds) and entire communities of families, who, often divorced or on their way to divorce, struggle to find their footing in sand rather than snow.

Since I was a little girl, these were my people, the kids I spent my school holidays and summers with on the beach and around the pool, my closest high school friends and their families, who like me were Northern kids transplanted to the South, all of us, as Elizabeth Hay would put it, at home on both northern and southern terrain. Though its taken my almost twenty years to realize this. For most of my adult life I’ve been looking for and writing about home in places often buried in snow: Madison, Wisconsin; Edmonton, Alberta; Winnipeg and Pine Falls, Manitoba; and Potsdam, New York, where, I’m very pleased to report that wearing one’s scarf untied and draped over a thinly insulated jacket seems to still be a fashion trend among Grade Seven girls — at least in 2007, the winter I lived there.

But what I’ve come to learn, however, is often the places where our homes lie, as well as our paradises for that matter, are often not where we think: For me right now, living in and around New York City, (so close to Ontario), seems slightly exotic to me and my quick trips to Florida to visit my mother, (the one landscape, which has stayed consistent throughout every winter of my entire life), slightly un-foreign. Leaving me to wonder if maybe I’ve made both places my paradise at home.

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Home Goings

Jul 21, ’11 11:03 PM

So entrenched in our most intimate yearnings, home often seems as if it were some universal truth, like it says in all those sayings, home is where the heart is, home is where you hang your hat, you would be so nice to come home to, there’s no place like home. But it isn’t, of course. Since like all universal truths, home varies across the smallest increments of time and space, manifesting itself into a symbolic meaning which some people acknowledge and others fight to escape, some feel controlled by and others struggle to achieve, that hard to grasp essence of identity, which differentiates who belongs in a place, who doesn’t belong, and who has the right to tell.

Many scholars have worked to understand how home is an epistemology or knowledge system. For most of the century, such analyses arose either completely outside or on the fringes of the academy, for example, the critical essays of novelist Virginia Woolfe, the ethnographies of novelist and playwright Zora Neale Hurston, the political philosophies of sociologist Franz Fanon, or the cultural analyses of literary critic Edward Said.

However, in the early 1980s, studying home in this way began to gather force within academic women’s studies departments. Theoretical essays by feminist, post-colonial and queer scholars, most notably bell hooks, Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty, Gloria Anzaldúa, Mary Louise Pratt, Adrienne Rich, Trihn T. Mihn-Ha and Clare Cooper Marcus, rigorously incorporated ideas from literature, history and social science to understand people’s homes in the context of migration and immigration, work and poverty, racial, ethnic, and linguistic inequalities, cultural loss and assimilation, as well as the politics of gender and sexuality. Several important anthologies were compiled, including Janet Zandy’s Calling Home, Becky Thompson and Sangeeta Tyagi’s Names We Call Home, Mickey Pearlman’s A Place Called Home, and Hazel Rochman and Darlene Z. McCampbell’s Leaving Home.

It perhaps goes without saying that studying home in this way has always had deep inter-disciplinary roots, ones that often reach far outside the academy and onto more political, literary and artistic terrains. However, it is also important to point out, that regardless of the discipline or medium through which it is expressed, whether memoir or poetry, ethnography or film, every critical analysis of home begins at the exact same starting point, the author’s (or scholar or activist or artist’s) sense of literal and figurative displacement. For example, the first member of a family to find work in the academy; the social scientist who pursues research away from the academy and out in the field; or the scholar settled far a field from the country of their citizenship, because of political exile or personal choice.

For some, losing one’s physical or symbolic footing means feeling at home in many locales, possessing what artist and art critic Lucy Lippard calls a multi-centered sense of place. For others, it means feeling homeless in every place, living as, what essayist Pico Ayer calls, a nowhereian. Either way, whether the author (or scholar or activist or artist) feels connected to the earth or disconnected, possessing many homes or no home, one thing becomes clear. It is the physical or psychic act of moving from one place to another which shifts the social sediment of the familiar to reveal the space where home exists, in between the desires of the self and the expectations of others, or what philosopher Gilles Deleuze would call the folds of society or the pli.

Poet and cultural critic Gloria Anzaldúa likens this sense physical and psychic displacement to living in a historical and cultural borderlands, namely the borderlands between Texas, the southwestern United States, and Mexico, the place of her birth, childhood and growing up. In her epistemology of home, these borderlands, (a social collusion of Native American, European and Mexican people), become a metaphor for her to rediscover the languages and stories of her past, (languages and stories, which sometimes makes her feel oppressed and alienated and other times comforted and proud), as well as for thinking about healing the social divisions and enmities which this, as well as other borders evoke, with their hostile definitions of us and them and their violent visions of insiders and outsiders.

For Anzaldúa, home is a state of being that we accumulate over time and know we possess, but can’t always name, even as it harms or protects us. Boundlessly protean, elusive, and ethereal, home isn’t something we can escape from or return to, like it says in all those sayings, but rather, something we create and negotiate, sometimes making it our most inescapable burden and other times our most saving grace.

Novelist and cultural critic Salman Rushdie says as much in his frame-by-frame analysis of the Hollywood film, The Wizard of Oz, arguably one of the most internationally known parables about what home means in the twentith century. Based on a series of children’s books by Frank L. Baum, the story of the film goes something like this: A girl named Dorothy longs to escape the drudgery, loneliness and confinement of her life by leaving her home in rural Kansas and going over the rainbow. This longing is suddenly and unexpectedly realized after an unusually forceful tornado carries her off to a fantastical world called the Land of Oz.

However, even though many of her longings become fulfilled in this place, she leads a life of adventure, she makes a gang of friends, Dorothy finds herself deeply homesick for the routines and people she left behind in Kansas. And so, after a very long journey and several tests of character, she decides to return home, a decision made possible through the magical power of a pair of ruby slippers, her recitation of a single phrase, there’s no place like home, and, perhaps most importantly, the sheer force of her own desire.

As she stands in Oz still awaiting her fate, Dorothy tearfully declares to a very powerful and kind witch that should she be allowed to return to Kansas, she will never travel any further than her own backyard. An unfortunate ending, argues Rushdie, since with this single scene an important message of the film becomes muted. He writes, The real secret of the ruby slippers is not that there’s no place like home but, rather, that there is no longer any such place as home, except, of course, for the homes we make, or the homes … made for us, in Oz … Which, is anywhere, and everywhere, except for the place from where we began.

It’s hard to say for sure where Oz is located, though, if we are to believe Dorothy, it may, in fact, exist. In the very final scene of the film, when her family and neighbors inform her that Oz was simply a dream, Dorothy argues with them by saying, but it wasn’t a dream, it was a place. And in the series of books the film was based on, Dorothy actually returns to Oz again and again after her accidental first visit, eventually choosing to reside there instead of Kansas. Rushdie builds upon this ambiguity to make his main theoretical point: That our homes are something we imagine, something we invent, and perhaps even more importantly, something we are always moving towards or going to, even if the distances we travel in physical terms are never very far.

Among some people in the southern United States, a homegoing is a funeral and I invoke this colloquialism here not so much to discuss the ritual where the living say good bye to the dead and the dead are laid to rest, but rather to think about the coupling of the words home and going. It’s a powerful pairing, one, which, draws to the surface what I would suggest is the most definitive quality of home: It’s uncertainty. Rare is the colloquialism, which does this.

As I pointed out earlier, most sayings and idioms about home cast it as if were something fixed or something constant, something we can rely upon or easily predict. Like a home front or a homeport, a hometown, a home team, a home plate, a homecoming. Even when our homes are broken, they still carry with them the implication that they once occupied some sort of location. But a homegoing is devoid of any endpoint. It doesn’t offer us any final destination. And so it lays bare a possible explanation as to why we so often labor so hard to pin down our homes and keep their edges from unraveling.

End Note 1: The image at the top is of me in my first home place: River Road, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.

End Note 2: I have recently incorporated the idea of ‘home goings’ in a more narrative work, right here.

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The Opposite of Crush

Jul 17, ’11 12:54 PM

Once, in my Introductory Sociology course, I gave a lecture about social oppression. It was fairly abstract. I didn’t talk about any specific kind of social oppression, like gender oppression or racial oppression or sexual oppression. I just talked about oppression, like what it is and how it works and what it feels like or rather what the philosopher Marilyn Frye says it is and how it works and what it feels like.

Using her classic metaphor I paraphrased that oppression was like, as Frye describes it, the wires of a birdcage, as she writes: Cages … Consider a birdcage … If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires … If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere … Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would gave trouble going past the wires to get anywhere …

There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way … It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment … It will require no great subtlety of mental powers … It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon … And on and on and on. You get the idea. Like I said, the lecture was abstract.

Following the lecture, two of the students taking my course left me a note, which wasn’t very abstract at all. It read, You’re sexually desirable, but a dyke for sure, too bad you’re a lesbian, what a waste, using very coarse and ugly expletives for the sexually desirable, dyke, and lesbian parts. Then underneath it read: She is as gay as they come carpet-muncher! seriously! Part of the note is posted above.

The first thing I thought when I read the note was that in all my years of studying feminist and queer popular culture I had never heard the word carpet muncher before. The second thing I thought was Oh my god, some student in my class today thinks I’m sexually desirable, how can that be, I didn’t even look that good today. Then, after these two initial thoughts, I gathered my books, walked down to my office, locked the door behind me and cried.

This wasn’t the first time someone called me lesbian. Once, in Grade Seven, three of my closest girlhood friends took it upon themselves to tell me I was gay, which at the time I found really confusing, since I thought you had to be a young, cute man to be gay, like Jack Tripper, the young, cute man who pretended to be gay so he could live platonically with two girls on the sit-com Three’s Company.

But it was the first time someone called me a lesbian where I couldn’t see where the words were coming from, where I couldn’t see their face. It was the anonymity of their hate that saddened and, in that moment that it happened, scared me, that made me feel the exact opposite of that slightly self-conscious feeling you might get upon learning that someone secretly loves you, that someone might secretly care.

That’s what a hate crime feels like when it happens to you: Like the opposite of knowing that someone has secretly made you the object of a crush.

To crush is, after all, to press. More from Marilyn Frye: The root of the word oppression is the element press … The press of the crowd … Pressed into military service … To press a pair of pants … Printing press … Press the button … Presses are used to mold things or flatten them or reduce them in bulk, sometimes to reduce them by squeezing out the gases or liquids in them … Something pressed is something caught between or among forces and barriers which are so related to each other that jointly they restrain, restrict or prevent the thing’s motion or mobility … Mold .. Immobilize … Reduce …

Which is why, I guess, its so important to name the places where hate comes from. To mark it and give it a name. Then we can start to figure out the dynamics of our own self-hatred and sorrow and fear, which, hopefully might lead to a better understanding of our self.

The sadness and fear didn’t last long, however, at least not in my memory. Since if there’s one thing I learned from Marilyn Frye (and from not caring that April Hamilton and Nan Crawford and Tracey Gilmore, those three girlhood friends of mine, said that I was queer), its that social oppression, as debilitating and burdensome as it may be, can also be defied.

So when people inevitably ask me after I tell this story: Did you ever figure out who the students were who wrote you that note, did you ever figure out their name? Or, sometimes even more boldly: Well, is it true what that note said, are you a carpet muncher, are you queer? I answer them exactly the same way I did when I posed those same very questions to my unidentified haters, who sat hidden in the crowd of students who made up my Introductory Sociology class that year: The answer to one of those questions is — yes.

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Living Above The Martinis

Jul 12, ’11 3:18 PM

For a year I lived above a pizza parlor, just like the sociologist William Foote Whyte did in 1936, the year he was doing field research for what would later become his famous urban ethnography, Street Corner Society. And every time I felt the heat of the pizza ovens seeping up through my kitchen floor I thought of him and the family who owned the pizza parlor he lived over. The Martinis, I think, was their name.

That, at least, was the name William Foote Whyte gave to them. All of the people and places in Street Corner Society were fictionalized. They had to be. Sociologists often change the names of their subjects in order to keep them anonymous, to protect their identity. This didn’t matter so much in the early, early days of the discipline when there weren’t actual people animating sociologists’ texts. In the early, early days, say, the late 1800s or so, sociologists wrote about things like class struggle or suicide or the iron cage of bureaucracy without an actual person, dead or alive, anywhere in sight. The one exception to this was Sigmund Freud, who often, in his studies, featured the stories of not only real live people, but sometimes, even ghosts, up close.

But all of this slowly started to change by the 1920s, especially for sociologists working in North America, who, from the very beginning insisted that their analyses be timely and rooted in the mundane circumstances of people’s everyday lives. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote The Philadelphia Negro, W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, Nels Anderson’s The Hobo and the Chicago School under Robert Park, jack-rollers and unadjusted girls, taxi-hall dancers and street gangs. From the very beginning, North American sociologists thought it was important to give their analyses a body and a voice and a few of these sociologists, Robert and Helen Lynd, for example, or Clifford R. Shaw, deliberately fictionalized the bodies and voices they wrote about, the Lynds creating “the X family” in their two classic studies of a small American town, Middletown and Middletown in Transition and Shaw, an entire case book filled with the life histories of an unofficial community of delinquent, juvenile boys.

This, I have to admit is what lured me into the discipline of sociology in the first place, this chance to tell stories about the world that may or may not be true. This is the promise that all sociologists make, whether they cast their stories in words or images, numbers or graphs. They all start from the earthly terrain of people’s everyday lives and struggles or, at least, the idea of people’s everyday lives and struggles, and then, to varying degrees of objectivity, accountability and certainty, try to figure out how these lives and struggles are lived. Social theorists match abstract ideas to places and people and their social problems. Survey researchers turn places and people and problems into populations, then samples. Social psychologists create natural, partly natural or simulated settings, where, just like on reality television, they document the ways people act or interact when they stop being polite.

Which brings me back to Street Corner Society and the very imaginative sociological imagination of William Foote Whyte. He was an ethnographer, which meant he created narrative analyses about the world told from the perspective of his own subjective mind. Much like the way I started this story about living above a pizza parlor, except for the ethnographer, every anecdote must be tallied and accounted for, should their analyses ever be challenged or maligned.

End Note: More on the “imaginative sociological imagination” is right here.

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Three Truths & A Lie

Jul 6, ’11 4:57 PM

I was never really very good at that game Three Truths and a Lie, the one where (when you’re a slumber party or living in a dorm) you’re supposed to tell four things about yourself, three true, one untrue and have people guess the untrue one.

I always play it with my students on the first day of any Introductory Sociology course, but often find myself slightly distorting both the truths and the lies. For example, I’ll say, for a truth, “My birthday is on May 4, the same day as the actress Audrey Hepburn. Which was a pure coincidence, but when I was in high school I started telling people that that’s the reason I’m named the way I’m named” — which if you believe the stories I tell here, is actually a lie, but makes, I would argue, for a near perfect Professor/Student anecdote.

My father always exaggerated, everything, to the point where already by the age of four or five I knew he couldn’t be trusted to get straight information on anything, whether it was the day we would leave for vacation or if some story he told me about his childhood was true. To this day I do not know the actual name of the town where he was born.

My mother, on the other hand, never exaggerates — anything; in fact, so seriously does she take the world that if she wasn’t so smart you’d think she was naive for the questions she asks about the veracity of the gossip in People magazine (is Jennifer Aniston’s daily snack really just a handful of almonds?), the right ingredients for a sauce, the books on quantum physics or calculus or Zen Buddhism she reads. I remember once, when she started taking courses at the local, fourth-tier, state university she’d call me up shocked about the room full of mostly 18 and 20-year olds with whom she shared the class, “Audrey, none of the students in the class seem to do the homework or read!” It took me weeks to convince her that the Professor didn’t expect she get 100 per cent on every quiz or test. “But it’s university! she’d say. “Aren’t we supposed to learn the material?”

Being raised by a chronic liar and truth seeker/teller has made me at different times both wildly imaginative and rigidly law-abiding. I remember in Grade Two, the teacher called my mother in for a meeting because the stories in my daily diary seemed too far fetched. I remember my mother, ever the (gentle) truth seeker/teller, asking me, “Can’t you just write that you wished the Prime Minister gave you an award in a piano competition instead of saying it actually happened?”

She panicked every time I became too submerged in some novel’s story and starting “living in the book,” actually worried that at the age of nine I needed therapy since I seemed preferred the divorced families of Judy Blume and Norma Klein novels to our own two-parent household (true) and at seventeen that because I loved Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar so much I should choose a university closer to home, in case I started considering suicide (untrue – by my senior year not only was I not suicidal, I was living as far away from the United States as I could possibly be — India).

But my father was different. He seemed to always want a better story than the one I had actually lived (when I received my undergraduate degree he told people I had already finished a Masters and claimed I was a Professor when I had just barely earned my Ph.D).

I know now that their two very different kinds of love, my father’s obscured by hyperbole, my mother’s salt of the earth, is the reason why today, as an adult, I make for a very good ethnographer, my chosen profession. Yesterday a colleague commented, “The way you live? Don’t you get exhausted? You make your whole life a field site.” I didn’t argue. Because with my little girl habit of making everything that happens to me a better or worse story than it was, while second guessing it a million times to ensure what really happened did happen, he was right.

End Note 1: During my doctoral dissertation defense, three of the four Professors sitting on my committee to decide my fate took serious issue with my assertion that everything an ethnographer does in a designated field site “counts,” whether it is asking a subject a question pertaining to the study or sitting alone, ordering a cup of coffee during a break, eating lunch. It was the one point I refused to concede.

End Note 2: The image above is a screen capture from a project I assign in my Introductory Sociology course, where, over the duration of a semester, students create Facebook accounts based on a person (or identity), which is their ‘social opposite;’ family, friends and other social networks for the person they create; as well as regular day-to-day social interactions. Students also use the personas they create to interact with one another, revealing their ‘true,’ identity at the end of the course. I based this project on the film Catfish (2010), a smart, deeply engrossing film, which not only documents the narrative process by which people tell truths & lies in their every lives, but in the process of documentary/ethnographic filmmaking itself.

End Note 3: For an excellent cinematic story about the ways a person’s first and last name has sociological meaning, see This American Life TV Episode 2.6, John Smith. Based on the article by Laura Blumenfeld (“The Life of John Smith”) it documents the lives of seven different people, all named ‘John Smith.’

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White Western Extra

Jul 6, ’11 4:56 PM

When I was twenty-one I moved to India for what was supposed to be a year, but I ended up staying much longer. For a while I lived in the seacoast town of Vishakapatnam, sometimes called Vizag, where herds of water buffalo roamed the beach. I then moved to the city of Hyderabad where, even though I never surrendered my North American clothes, I started to braid fresh flowers in my hair and wear henna tattoos on my hands and feet. At the time, along with my language skills, I thought it was evidence of my Indian assimilation, though I’d never say that today. Today, I’d say it was at most a temporary fashion statement, like how when I lived in the North Country I’d wear woolen toques and knee high boots and punctuate my sentences with French or the Canadian colloquialism “eh.”

I did my first ethnographic field research in Vizag on the South Asian social custom of dowry and took Telugu literature classes at Andhra University, getting up every morning at 6 am to study Hindi with a high school teacher who lived a few doors down from me across the street. She tutored little kids in English while she taught me Hindi. We’d sit on a wooden bench in her parlor drinking steaming chai made with water buffalo milk and in between gossiping in Telugu, I’d read from a children’s Hindi Primer reciting sentences like “See the red mango Mohan? Bring me the red mango,” while a gang of little kids sat beneath us, at our feet. “See Anil play cricket?” they read from their English Primer while I read about Mohan in Hindi. “Anil meets Mummy for tea.” Whenever one of the little kids would stop reciting and become distracted or fall asleep my Hindi Teacher would whack them on the side of their head with whatever she happened to have in her hand at the time, a dish cloth, a piece of her sari, and without so much as looking the offending student’s way she’d instead cluck her tongue and gesture with her eyes towards me. “T-cha, T-cha,” she’d say, her warning that I should ignore her sporadic acts of discipline and keep reading.

Besides my Hindi Teacher I made two very good friends in Vizag. A famous painter around 12 years older than I named V. Ramesh and a travel agent named Kip, who was just out of high school and a few years younger than me. Ramesh and I would go out every afternoon for fresh lime sodas or beers in one of the withered and worn out hotels that lined the city’s beach. A lot of Indian movies were filmed there, so we’d sit on the terrace and watch them rehearse dance sequences and dramatic, romantic scenes. I always hoped that if I hung around long enough someone on the film crew would ask me to be what they called a White Western Extra since once that happened to an American friend of mine. But no film crew ever asked. Not even when they filmed a lot of the exterior shots of a movie called “American Ahmaii” (i.e., “American Girl”) in Vizag on the beach.

With Kip I’d go out practically every night and spend time with his family, an endless network of brothers and sisters and cousins and aunts all waiting to immigrate to Australia. Kip was an Anglo Indian so he couldn’t speak Telugu or Hindi nearly as well as me and all the women in his family wore dresses instead of saris and watched Beta videotapes of British soap operas played on a black market tape player hooked up to his Aunt Emma’s colour TV.

After about a year and a half I moved to the city of Hyderabad where I continued my field research and literary studies and, for the very first time in my life, fell completely and utterly in love, the only way someone living on the other side of the world from their home can fall in love, especially if they are twenty-two or twenty three. His name was Avi, but he introduced himself by his last name, Jacob, so even though I always wanted to call him by his first name, I could never shake the habit of calling him by his last. Jacob was from the west coast province of Goa, a graduate student in Spanish literature, and never in a million years would I ever have met him had I not been living at the Hyderabad YMCA, a White Western Extra (or what the YMCA called a White Western Guest) among a dormitory full of “Young Christian Men,” most of whom were actually Muslim, but who still knew enough English and Telugu to shout out to me every time I walked past, “American Ahmaii, American Ahmaii, please baby, please baby, please baby, please, don’t you want to be my girlfriend, don’t you want to be with me?”

I didn’t. Not after I met Jacob, anyway. He lived in the room directly below mine. At least, he lived there until around two or three days after we met, when he gave up his room to a computer science student named Amitava and moved in upstairs with me. Which, didn’t last very long. Only two of three weeks. It was against the rules for an Indian to share a room with a Westerner, especially an Indian Boy with a Western Girl, so we moved to a little flat just underneath the Hyderabad Tank Bund, the only neighborhood in Hyderabad at the time where we could find someone who would rent a flat to a White, Telugu-speaking foreigner and an Indian, Urdu-speaking, Jew.

Our landlord was a fallen Brahmin named Sunnil, who loved our love and let us use his hot water heater for free. He painted advertisements for the movies, dashing out 7 or 8 huge, 20 and 30 and 40 foot billboards each week. He’d copy images from photographs torn out of very old issues American and Australian Magazines and brand new copies of Bollywood Screen. Sunnil always made the American actresses look fatter than they were in the photographs adding an extra chin to Julia Roberts or flabby arms to Meryl Streep. “I have to make them look more like Indian Movie Stars or people won’t see the movie,” he’d explained to me while he worked, adding to Demi Moore’s head more hair, turning the short haircut she wore in the film Ghost into a long flowing mane.

Every Thursday afternoon a team of boys would show up and carry the billboards away on their bicycles, hoisting them up high up into the air and then resting them flat upon their heads, balancing them as they rode away in tandem, as well practiced as any circus feat. And then, as if by magic, I’d see the billboard somewhere around town the next morning, Brooke Shields in Blue Lagoon, all tanned and glistening and fat, wearing a wet sari next to a billboard advertising Cadbury Fruit and Nut Bars, Marie Biscuits and other Commonwealth Sweets.

It’s been over fifteen years since I left India and over fifteen years since I’ve been back, and even though I remember every detail of my time there, what I ate and what I read, the exact cost of different brands of Indian washing soap, the sweet smell of the bus exhaust, it never is a landscape in my dreams. It’s as if the night I said goodbye to Jacob at the Madras Airport and boarded the plane that flew me back to the West, I lost my footing and my sense of what this terrain felt like beneath my feet. Madras. Bancock. Honolulu. Seattle. Tampa. With every airport I lost a little bit more of the Indian I thought I had become and with every airport it became more clear to me who I was and would always be to this place, regardless of what I wore or who I liked or even loved, a White Western Extra, a White Western Guest.

End Note: Since first writing this essay in 2005, I have gone back to India. Stories from those travels will appear here, in a future ‘It’s Not Rocket Science’ essay.

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When Sociology Was Cool

Jun 23, ’11 8:00 AM

I got my doctorate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the exact same place C. Wright Mills got his doctorate in sociology. I know this because we shared some of the same professors there and, even more importantly, because when I had to file a little index card in the Sociology Office with the title of my dissertation on it, I saw C. Wright Mills’ little index card with title of his dissertation on it, tucked away in the exact same metal box.

I couldn’t believe that it was there, that someone hadn’t taken it. Graduate students in sociology love C. Wright Mills. He, along with the 1930s Chicago School and Harold Garfinkel are the ones who lure us into sociology, who excite us with the idea that the modern world is this great mystery to be solved and that there is some measured, logical explanation as to why people treat one another the way they do.

C. Wright Mills was a genius at this. First, because he showed us how sociology could lay bare the secret workings of the world, and second, because he believed that everyone, no matter who they were or what their sociological imagination happened to be, had a place in this academic, scientific discipline. That their stories and ideas about the world and how it worked belonged there.

Few sociologists at the time believed this. In fact, in 1959, the year Mills’ third major work, The Sociological Imagination, was published, most sociologists were preoccupied with refining the methods, which would allow them to analyze and write about people’s lives with the least amount of error and greatest amount of certainty; a preoccupation, which left little time to worry about whether or not the things they wrote about were actually reflective of the ways people lived, let alone the ways people thought about the way they lived.

Mills staked his theories right in these complications and contradictions and with this effort challenged sociologists to not so much relax the methodological rules of their discipline, but to allow themselves a little poetic license. And as simple as this idea may seem, it was, for many sociologists, a revelation and a push to make sociology matter.

That, to my mind, is one of the few moments in the history of sociology when the discipline was made cool. That moment when C. Wright Mills told us that our analyses of the world should matter. That moment when someone took a picture of him driving his motorcycle to class.

End Note: Cool is a state of being, which describes the way a person represents themselves to the world. To be cool is 1) to be present in the day and to notice what’s happening around you 2) to search for and recognize beauty; 3) to express this beauty in words and images and especially sounds; 4) to be kind, open, generous and understanding to yourself, as well as the people you encounter, even those who may not be kind, open, generous and understanding towards you; 5) to not only exhibit grace under pressure in moments of extreme hardship or duress, but to figure out ways to survive and in some instances, even thrive in moments of extreme hardship or duress; and, finally, as in that late 1990s Keds Running Shoe Ad posted above, 6) a way to describe people, places and things that are “of the moment,” “hip,” and notably stylish. I would suggest C. Wright Mills worked to document 1-5 and was 6, especially in the famous photograph of him driving his motorcycle to class. Again, it’s right here.

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