Dissertation

Mansfield, Missouri, reminded me of how the past will not be banished. So many small, dying, basically dead towns in the Midwest looked like this. Where once-graceful, ornate courthouses and libraries— back when libraries meant something important, something civic— had been, if not torn down or boarded up, converted dozens of times over into shops and offices and apartments and barely surviving historical societies. There might even be the remains of an ambitious opera house. The nicest building in town was likely to be a funeral home. Main Street had been built broad, to accommodate horses, buggies, and hitching posts. And surely local efforts tried to preserve the “historic downtown” area. Surely there were sad little parades on Memorial Day or the Fourth of July. In Mansfield a few local “shoppes” offered “olde-fashioned ice cream” and “sewing notions,” but it looked like most of the money was flowing in and out of the paycheck advance and pawn shops. It was all claustrophobically familiar, but because I didn’t know how to explain this to Alex, didn’t know if our relationship— whatever it was— could sustain that kind of talk, I kept it to myself. Alex had grown up in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, where his point of reference was D.C. and the bustle of power it represented; he’d gone to Urbana-Champaign because his father had. He had no expectation of staying in the middle of the country forever. (140)

The Twenty-First-Century university was instrumental in validating Alex’s gentrified worldview, in Lee’s understanding, and in making him feel at home in academia. Describing the location of his prestigious M.F.A. program, she continues:

For the time being, Iowa City, with its multitude of coffee shops, vegetarian restaurants, and boutiques, with its writerly quotes embedded into the sidewalks, was a novelty. The Midwest itself was quaint and charming— two words that, to me, had come to signify a deception that went both ways: while the outsider might deign to peek in, the midwesterner knew the darker isolation that waited behind Victorian facades and re-created soda fountains. As we drove through Mansfield, Alex was startled, then fascinated, by signs that read Communities Against Meth and stores with names like Farm King and Smokes for Less. He had never really lived, and never would, in this kind of waning small town. (140-141)

In this passage, we are offered a glimpse at the constellation of social forces that create the contemporary Midwestern landscape. This is no story of nostalgia, insisting that once things were well-ordered, and now they are in disarray. Rather, there is a long history of disarray and dissatisfaction, which infuses the landscape, and which was actually the substance of Lee’s self-recognition in the Little House books. Here, literature is the site of both the veil and the lived experience that sees through it, and the official institution of literary criticism, the English department, seems to Lee to be ill-equipped to illuminate this crucial element.

While Hartman seeks her absent archive in the contemporary remnants of the Atlantic slave trade, Nguyen must linger in the contemporary Midwest in order to depict her vision. Kraus, in her autobiographically-inflected 2012 novel, Summer of Hate, looks to her intimate history with the U.S. prison system to understand the writing life in the Twenty-First Century. Like the novel’s protagonist, Kraus fell in love with a man who was sent to prison, and continued their relationship while he was incarcerated, learning much about the system as she struggled to show love to a man whose freedom had been taken from him. The book’s title is an intentional reversal of the nostalgic fantasy of the 1960s “Summer of Love,” with its fantasies of revolutionary communalism in art (315). In Kraus’s understanding, “love” today is most commonly shorthand for “ugly, mutual self-interest. Consumption a deux” (Heti). Truly reciprocal intimacy, that is, friendship in thought, requires autonomous thinking subjects with access to their own sedimented histories. These are taken from us, Kraus argues, both by gentrification and its institutional affiliate, the prison system.

In an interview for The Believer, Sheila Heti asks Kraus to describe the reading practices available to subjects of the contemporary culture industry, especially those who are denied representation in its stories. Heti says,

I keep having in my head this image of prisons—the prison of the art world’s institutions, the prison you experienced when no one looked you in the eye or said your name, and the imaginative prison of the working class without access to working-class history—

Kraus responds, “Yes. I guess for me the greatest injustice is to see people robbed of that interiority and process of association.” She describes the degradation of prison in terms of being taken away from access to the imaginative sphere, and, if one bypasses that, by sheer resilience, then of having the tools of self-fashioning required to actualize it being taken away, too. She continues,

For example, I was given a pen that they give out to inmates at the Greenlee County Jail, in Clifton, Arizona. And it’s thinner than a straw. You can’t grasp it in your hand. There’s no reason, security-wise, for the pen to be this shitty—it just is. You would have to hold it like a chisel, and even then you could barely write with it.

This prison, metaphorical and actual, is the “outside” of the art world, which is Kraus’s domain, hence her need to reach out to its limit. The prison is one “outside” to self-fashioning as I explore it in this project, and it is necessary to describe it, in order to contextualize the archive I have begun to assemble here. For people to find each other, they must also find themselves, and both of these processes are impeded by social forces like gentrification and mass incarceration.⁴⁶

The self-fashioning impulse takes on various forms in various gendered subjects, even when they share a high social status and degree of freedom. An exchange from Emily Gould’s novel Friendship illustrates the distinction between heterosexual men and women, as it emerges among New York City-based “creatives.” In this conversation, Amy, a writer, is surprised to learn that Jason, a magazine editor, gets endless enjoyment from reading his own work. He says,

“When I do a layout for the magazine, I want to look at it again and again. I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and flip through back issues to lull myself to sleep. It’s like: I exist, I exist, I exist.” Amy grinned. “I do that too, compulsively, but all I ever feel is disgust. Like, I exist, I exist  … ugh.” (167)

In response to her insecurity, Jason tells Amy that he finds her “youthful,” “impressionable” and “unformed,” which she takes as an insult, but also a truthful reflection of her relationship to her own work (168). What he sees as evidence of her incomplete development as an artist, I read instead as part of her striving to keep alive the relationship between herself and the world she encounters. For her, becoming a writer is not an attempt to answer all the questions she has about the world, but rather to articulate the sheer complexity of the web she encounters, so that she can face the present. While Jason takes satisfaction in representing high-class domestic spaces for an upwardly mobile readership, Amy worries that the social position she occupies, that of the downwardly-mobile woman over thirty, is of decreasing interest to any potential readership. The only person who really understands her, her best friend Bev, has recently decided to have a child and quit publishing to work in an upscale baby boutique. Without someone to share it with, Amy worries that her bohemian lifestyle is increasingly out of reach, both financially speaking, in her gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood, and in terms of the friendship in thought that she fears she has lost. Thus, when she sees her representations of the life she knows in her own work, she feels a sense of disgust, which is also a sense that the life she can put on the page is too “unformed” to achieve the market recognition of her male counterpart, or her heterosexually successful female friend.

Amy’s disgust with her own writing, like Kraus’s frustration with the crappy pen, represents the point at which self-fashioning becomes critical. Becoming conscious of our reading practices, that is, the interpretive mechanisms by which we encounter objects in the world, is the first step along the path to Cvetkovich’s radical self-possession. The physical and social environments we consciously inhabit form the pre-conditions for our ability to act in the present. In the contemporary cultural landscape, we require more than functioning pens in order to develop these interpretive practices, and thus the media-savvy fan comes to contain some of my utopian desires for contemporary criticism. The media-savvy fan, like Gould’s Amy, craves female friendship and readership, but, unlike Amy, she has found a network of women who offer just that. Fandom, especially women-centered media fandom, represents one particular incarnation of the possible formation of the gendered critical individual in conversation with like-minded others. In fandom, one learns to read carefully, paying attention to narrative, medium, genre, questions of cultural representation, and ideology. Because the stream of content available for analysis is constant, so too is fannish criticism, and so it becomes an immersive learning environment.

Fandom also offers endless opportunities for participants to try their hand at new expressive forms. The fan produces long- and short-form responses to the texts she grows to love and hate; she makes art and writes criticism for an invested audience. Through her contributions, her interactions with other fans become more intense. She finds friends in thought from different cultural backgrounds, different countries, and different educational systems. Each time she does, she arrives at a more expansive understanding of her own history of perception, which she translates onto her fannish persona or avatar. As she starts to inhabit her fannish persona more completely, she develops a fluency in the queer language of virtual friendship. Together, subsets of fans form an anarchic microculture within the broader subculture of fandom – they collaborate on art projects and awareness campaigns, some members meeting in real-life to actualize their friendships and romances. Such encounters transcend, if only temporarily, what is frustrating in encounters like Hartman’s, with Phyllis, Lee’s, with Alex, or Amy’s, with Bev – the lack of a shared, embodied interpretive goal. Although fans certainly disagree on individual points, their shared investment in friendship as a mode of critical development provides the basis for intellectual solidarity.

Given time, fandoms, like all friendships and relationships, fall apart. A new gathering place replaces an old one, leaving some members behind, and longstanding theoretical debates fizzle out into space, given new real-life concerns. Even in an inter-generational community, the young eventually replace the old, the media landscape expands and transforms, and the community takes shape in memory, as one part of each member’s individual worldview. Having seen the possibility of critical and collaborative transmedia storytelling, the fan’s insights enter into the language of the sedimented present, and so, then, do her critiques. Felicia Day is a case study of this transformation as one from fan to author. Day quit playing World of Warcraft in order to create The Guild, which required critical space and time in which to understand what she had gained from her time as a gaming addict. In The Guild comics, Day found a language in which to represent the “unformed” aspects of the fannish lifestyle as the components of a complex, gendered identity. Allowing oneself to remain unformed in the eyes of the dominant culture functions in The Guild comics as a ticket to one’s own subcultural history, one’s own self-understanding, and critical queer self-expression in the present. As Adorno argued during the heyday of counterculture, there is an infinitely progressive aspect to the separation of theory and praxis; then, as now, the drive to serious critical inquiry had to be defended, if thinking bodily was to become possible.

Georgina Kleege offers another particular embodied perspective on the process of coming to insight in a subcultural context in her 1999 book, Sight Unseen. Both a scholarly memoir and a contribution to the fields of film theory, visual culture studies, and disability studies, Sight Unseen tells the story of Kleege’s “coming out” as blind (5). She describes her approach:

I show first how the weight of negative cultural associations once compelled me to conceal and deny my blindness, and then how a precise examination of my visual experience, free of myth and misconception, has allowed me to accept blindness and acquire the skills of blindness, such as reading braille, as part of a new, blind identity...[s]ome general insight can come from introspection. I also hope to turn the reader's gaze outward, to say not only 'Here's what I see' but also 'Here's what you see,' to show both what's unique and what's universal. I invite the reader to cast a blind eye on both vision and blindness, and to catch a glimpse of sight unseen.” (5)

Kleege reminds us that, whenever we encounter an account of another person’s perceptions, we are invited to notice the gaps in our own. Rather than seeing them as “unformed,” we come to see our own perspectives as partial. In the context of disability studies, self-fashioning is always critical work, because it reverses the able-bodied assumption that the gaps are to be found and fixed in the disabled subject, rather than in the dominant culture. A book like Sight Unseen invites all seeing subjects to reimagine the whole history of our perception, offering us the opportunity to identify our own imaginative potential. This transformative process, if we learn to take it on when we encounter difference, cements our status as voracious readers in the contemporary cultural landscape.

Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 novel, A Tale For the Time Being, dramatizes the autobiographical form’s capacity to enable this kind of inquiry. Its central character, Ruth, is working on a memoir about her mother’s final years, which they spent together on a small island off the coast of British Columbia. Ruth and her geologist husband Oliver live on the island, and, while she writes, he works on large-scale public art installations that represent geologic time to an audience accustomed to the rapid pace of life in the Twenty-First-Century. There are two major relationships in the novel; one, between culture and nature, dramatized by Ruth and Oliver’s marriage, and the other, between women across generations, time, and space, dramatized by Ruth’s relationship with her mother, and also with Nao, a Japanese girl whose diary Ruth finds washed up on the shores of the Pacific.

The world Ruth and Nao inhabit in their reader-writer relationship is a damaged one. It has been damaged by environmental crisis, in the 2011 Fukushima Daichii nuclear disaster; financial crisis, especially the speculation that led to the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, which led to Nao’s father’s unemployment; and of course, historical crisis, especially, the political instability following September 11, 2001. As Ruth begins to intertwine her life with Nao’s, by reading her diary, and trying to piece the other fragments of her life together, she sees all these events in a new light, one united by the two women’s shared Japanese-American history. The process of reading Nao’s diary brings Ruth into the present, a process that she formalizes by reading only one day’s diary installments per day, and thus experiencing time virtually with the girl.

This practice of entering into the present is a spiritual metaphor for both Ruth and Nao, one that is undoubtedly influenced by Ozeki’s own status as Zen Buddhist priest. Nao spends a summer at her great-grandmother Jiko’s Buddhist convent in the hills, finding refuge from the damning logic of female adolescence in the present-focused practices of the spiritual life. The “outside” Nao encounters is, on the one hand, a rural escape from a media-saturated landscape in Tokyo, but it is also the new state of desiring life, as opposed to suicide, which dominates her thoughts in the city. Her melancholia is inherited from her father, who attempts suicide several times throughout the novel. Nao’s desire for life is not robust, even in the hills, but it is fueled by her desire to share her great-grandmother’s life’s wisdom, in the form of writing, which would be one way to redeem the pain she has suffered from living with her father’s instability.

Living attentively in the present by pursuing their questions about one another teaches Ruth, Nao, and their shared reader to honor the women from previous generations who have enabled our contemporary flourishing, and the upcoming generations who will benefit from it, knowing that we can witness only what is before us. And even then, we can only witness what is before us with the help of friends in thought, whether we find them washed up on a beach, assigned in a class, or in the complex media landscape of an MMORPG. Rather than the superficial solidarity we are asked to find with one another, based on our shared status as consumers of women’s culture, we can, with access to our sedimented history, find genuine solidarity based on our shared status as critical readers of the world we inhabit. In theory, that is, in our hard-won truthful insights about the world we share, which can, to paraphrase Adorno in “Resignation,” also be thought “in some other place and by other people,” we access the happiness of the gendered subject, and begin to think bodily (203).

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