Our Green and Pleasant Land

I wanted to post this before, but I spent a long time trying to find the tweets that inspired it.  No luck.  This wasn't the only one I saw, but it's the only one I could find.



I've seen a number of people saying that although the pandemic is terrible and it's hard having to shelter in place, it's still wonderful to be able to spend time with their families, to go for walks and talk to their neighbors (from a safe distance of course), to walk the dog, to pasture their souls for a moment.

This is true, and it's good, but it overlooks some things.  In Jake's case, I know he's a trust-fund baby (his own term) with a secure income, working from home.  The other tweet I recall was from a probably similar person, maybe not as well-to-do but still comfortable.  So my first reaction is that their comfortable retirement is supported by essential workers - truck drivers, supermarket workers, nurses and doctors, the restaurant staff supplying their takeout orders - many of whom are working extra hours, often at risk from heavy-breathing customers who think that "social distance" means getting in their face to let them know they're praying for them.  And then there are other people who have no income and are scrambling to find gig work to feed themselves and their families, knowing that if they get sick they have no insurance.  Jake knows this, but I don't assume that those who are celebrating empty streets being "reclaimed" by wildlife know it, or care.

So there's that.  It's true, Americans have lost the leisure time that is vital to healthy human functioning, as even white-collar workers and management are expected to be on call even when they're not spending too much time at the office.  Vast numbers of other workers have lost reasonably secure eight-hour-a-day jobs with benefits and had to cobble together a living from multiple part-time gigs.  Like the fabled boiled frog, incrementally rising capitalist abuse has crept up on them, and now perhaps they are seeing what they'd lost.  But the middle-class, no less than the rich, are always nervous that the proles will have too much free time, or freedom of any kind.

Will they remember it if and when "normalcy" returns?  I don't know.  It's often said that rebellion happens not when conditions reach rock bottom but when they improve a bit and people remember that things had been better and could be again.  Our oligarchs are consolidating their power as they loot the Treasury, so I'm not optimistic.  Trump and the elites of both parties certainly have no interest in any improvement for most Americans; often their fear leaks out in their talk about re-opening the economy.  Most people do want to work, but they don't want to be worked to death, as their masters would prefer.

One Foot in Front of the Other

I'll begin by quoting again this passage from Shin Kyung-Sook's novel I'll Be Right There, which I wrote about here.

I made the right decision to learn about the city by walking around it.  Walking made me think more and focus on the world around me.  Moving forward, putting one foot in front of the other, reminded me of reading a book.  I came across wooded paths and narrow market alleyways where people who were strangers to me shared conversations, asked one another for help, and called out to one another.  I took in both people and scenery.

This uncannily describes my peregrinations around Seoul for the past three and a half weeks.  I've spent a lot of time on buses and subway trains, of course, which are also full of people.  But more than during past visits I've walked around.  The autumn weather has been more comfortable for walking than the stifling, humid summer weather of my past visits, and I'm not worried about getting lost, as I used to be.  Which doesn't mean I can't get lost -- even born Seoulites do -- but I know that if I walk for a few blocks in almost any direction I'll come to a subway station, and from there I can get back to some place I know.

One of the benefits of my exploration has been interactions with people, despite my nearly non-existent Korean.  (I feel guilty, ashamed, and frustrated for not having worked on learning more.  I've resolved to do something about that.)  The easiest of these interactions is giving up one's seat to other people on the subway.  There are, as in other cities around the world, seats reserved in each car for the elderly, the infirm, and pregnant women, but they fill up, and people freely offer their seats elsewhere in the cars.  Even when I was a few years younger than I am, people offered me their seats, and though I sometimes resisted, if I was tired enough I would accept.  Soon I got into the spirit of it, and I had enough basic vocabulary to play the game.  "Sir [or Ma'am], sit!  Yes, sit!*  No no, I'm fine!  I'm only going to the next station!"  If someone older than I got on, I'd be on my feet (just as the others would), offering a space to them.

Now, for about the past week, this hadn't been happening.  There weren't any opportunities to play the game on the trains I was on while I was on them; no other seniors offered me a seat or needed one while I was there, there were enough seats for those of us who were riding.  But today it was different.  I was reading in my seat when an older heterosexual couple got on, and there was only one seat so I gave mine; I had to insist, but after one refusal the seat was accepted.  At the next stop a seat opened up opposite to where I'd been, so I sat -- but at the next stop I gave that seat to a young mother carrying her toddler son, and another seat opened up for a halmoni (grandmother) next to her.  We all beamed and nodded and thanked each other happily.  As we moved to the end of the line where I was bound, more seats opened up and the game was over for this ride; the young mother spoke to me, and her son was looking at me.  I said hello to him, and she said hello for him -- he was too young to speak, and probably wouldn't have spoken even if he were a year or two older, children are shy sometimes.  But then she was giving him some dry cereal to nibble on, and he held it out to me.  I thanked him but didn't accept it, not being sure I should.  He gave it to his mother instead.  And then it was my stop.

I've long wanted to live in Korea, and this trip has confirmed and strengthened that wish.  I think I could live comfortably here, and I think I'm going to take more serious steps toward doing so.  Of course, I must learn to have conversations in Korean.  If I could do that now, there would have been conversations on the train today, not just thank yous and head bows.  And those conversations must be in Korean, so that I'm the one who has to work harder to express himself.  (This is how I feel about conversations in Spanish with my Mexican friends.  They get to correct my Spanish, and they do.)  Still, those are better than nothing.  Today made me think of Andrew Ti's fury at Americans who'd use the few words of Chinese they know, because (he assumed) they hope to be told "THANK YOU FOR BEING ONE OF US."  Of course the same gesture can mean wildly different things depending on the person who uses it, but his interpretation made no sense to me two years ago and it still doesn't.  We are already "one of us."  The task and obligation is to make the connections that follow from that: to learn more of the other's language and culture, and interact on that basis.

Something more about that.  Today as I was crossing the street to the subway station in the district where I've been staying, a middle-aged man who was riding his bicycle in the opposite direction called out happily to me in English, "Hello, sir!"  I replied happily, "Hello, sir!"  "Nice to meet you!" he called as he rode past, and I replied in kind.  I'd have spoken in Korean to him if there'd been time, but he was gone.  I'd like to ask Andrew Ti about that.  Did this man use his few words of English in hopes I'd tell him "THANK YOU FOR BEING ONE OF US"?  I doubt it. Should I despise him for a racist shitbag who had no reason for tossing out his pitiful store of English at me?  (I just looked at Ti's tumblr for the first time in over a year.  It's gone way downhill, and Ti's become a rote Obamabot.  Kinda sad.)

This doesn't mean I think I can "be Korean." If I move here, gain fluency in Korean, even become a Korean citizen and adopt a Korean name (as a few Westerners have done), I'll still be an old white man from the United States.  Korea is still too 'racially' homogeneous to have many Caucasian Koreans, but I suspect that will change in the next generation or two, and then there will be black and South Asian and white Koreans, just as there are black and white and South Asian and East Asian Americans.  Belonging is complex, but I feel like an outsider in the US too, so being an outsider in another country won't be that different; belonging is something you make happen, in concert with the people you encounter and live among.

*Although manners and politeness as well as deference to the old are important in Korean culture, they aren't always expressed in the language as they would be in American English.  So one doesn't say "please" when inviting a senior to sit.  I've noticed that Korean (and Japanese) movies often put American-style politeness into the subtitles.  A child's answer to his parent may be translated as "Yes, father," when the original language has only "Yes" or a grunt, which can be transliterated as "Eung."  Manners are, remember, a social construction.

Longing for Community

Today at the library book sale I picked up a book called Confessions of the Critics, edited by H. Aram Veeser, published by Routledge in 1996.  Apparently it's a collection of writings by academic critics on the use of "autobiography" in academic criticism.  A number of people I like contributed, so I bought it.

I didn't even notice at first that Gerald Graff was one of the contributors.  I like Graff's work a lot, and I identify strongly with some of the things he wrote in "Self-Interview," like this:

Q. You became known as a polemicist in your early work, and now you're associated with the idea of "teaching the conflicts."  So would you say that combativeness is a deep personal motivation of your work?

A.  Partly but not entirely.  People think I must like conflict because I promote it as a pedagogical and curricular strategy.  In fact I dislike conflict as much as anybody.  In an odd way, my interest in conflict and polemics has always been tied to a longing for community.  I just don't think a democratic community can be sustained by papering over its divisions.  "Teaching the conflicts" for me is a way to get beyond the conflicts.  My assumption is that the more we avoid confronting conflicts the uglier they can only get [97].

Exactly: I could have written that myself.  I'd add that those who object to teaching the conflicts -- which is just another term for "critical thinking," which many people love to preach but not practice -- or who think I like to pick fights, love to see someone else get trashed.  It occurs to me that the difference is that I like to see debate, which ideally is a form of dialogue, while most people seem to prefer an unbalanced fight where a Good Guy (preferably from Our Side) beats a Bad Guy (from Their Side) into the ground.  This is something I ought perhaps to write about at more length someday, drawing on movies like Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, in which one character in an argument will deliver a line that in most movies would end the conversation -- but then the other character ripostes, putting the first character on the defensive, and they go back and forth for quite some time.  That's dialogue.

Later in "Self-Interview" Graff visits some of that same territory.

Q. Your call for community makes you sound at times like Jane Tompkins, who has been writing ... about the competitive individualism and lack of community in academic institutions.

A. Yes, and I share Tompkins' complaint up to a point.  But I'm not attracted to the kind of community Tompkins seems to want, which is emotional or physical rather than intellectual.  For Tompkins intellectuality -- argumentation, debate, analysis, reasoning -- seems to be inherently selfish, competitive, and antithetical to the emotions and the body, part of the problem rather than part of the solution.  For me the antidote to Damrosch's academic anticommunities lies in reconstruction rather than abandoning intellectual community, which need not and should not exclude emotion and the body.

Q. What about the view of some feminists that that model of aggressive argumentation is essentially male?

A.  It's interesting that those feminists don't hesitate to use aggressively "male" argumentation in asserting that view when it suits them.  Like Tompkins, such feminists (who do not speak for all feminists by any means) assume that community and intellectual argumentation are inherently incompatible.  As if to make the critiques of demagogues like Christina Hoff Sommers look respectable, this thinking produces touchy-feely classrooms in which students get in touch with their own "voices" instead of learning to analyze, criticize, or make an argument.  Teachers who practice this species of feminist pedagogy (which again must not be confused with feminist pedagogy as such) are in effect withholding from their students the cultural capital of argumentative discourse that they themselves command.

Q.  But haven't women's studies programs established alternative models of community to the isolation you attack?

A. They've made a start, to be sure.  But unless women's studies programs themselves are put into regular dialogue with other sectors of the university, they become another of Damrosch's anticommunities, closing themselves off from threatening outsiders.  It's unfair, however, to single out women's studies and other new "revisionist" fields for "separatism," since these new fields are merely copying the time-honored, respectable separatism of established academic departments, whose maxim has always been: consolidate your own turf and wall yourself off from anybody who might disagree with you.  In other words, my problem with the new politically oriented fields is not that they're acting like subversives but that they're acting like traditional academics [101-2].

He took the words right out of my mouth.

Everything You Know Is Wrong

I'm currently reading Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America, edited by Thomas A. Foster, published in 2007 by NYU Press.  Can't remember what led me to pick it up, but I did.  So far I'm having trouble.

Of course there's the ongoing refrain of "homosexuality" as a "modern" category.  For example, in Tracy Brown's "'Abominable Sin' in Colonial New Mexico: Spanish and Pueblo Perceptions of Same-Sex Sexuality":

In this chapter, I have been careful to use the terms "same-sex sex," "same-sex sexuality," and sodomy [no quotes for some reason] to discuss anal sex between men, however awkward or wordy these terms may be, rather than "homosexuality."  The term "homosexuality" denotes, as Richard Trexler and others have argued, a distinctly contemporary phenomenon: "the notion of a 'gay' lifestyle shared by everyone participating in homosexual behavior."  Serge Gruzinski argues that such a community may have existed in colonial Mexico City, but there is no evidence of the existence of such a community in New Mexico [53].

First off, I think Brown has confused "denotes" and "connotes."  The term "homosexuality" denotes eroticism, whether overtly expressed or not, between persons of the same biological sex.  As an umbrella term it includes not only "sodomy" but oral copulation, genital apposition or rubbing, mutual masturbation, erotic kissing, and a range of other erotic activity.  (I'm using "erotic" where most people would use "sexual," for reasons that I hope will soon be clear.)  It includes gendered, age-stratified, and "egalitarian" patterns of partnering, and it includes a wide variety of communities as well as isolated individuals with no access to communities of like-minded and -lusted people.  It includes conceptions of same-sex eroticism ranging from the innate to the situational to the commercial.  It has been used to refer to persons and patterns all around the world, and throughout history -- as well as to copulatory behavior and bonding in other animal species. To claim, as Brown and so many other scholars do, that it refers to only one twentieth-century pattern of behavior and feeling is to show that one has no idea what one is talking about.  Even in academic writing like the work assembled in Long Before Stonewall, those who define "homosexuality" that narrowly are usually unable to stick to their own definition -- see here, for example -- so I cannot see why this attempted distinction persists.  If it has any use at all even for this narrow band of scholars and writers, let alone their audience -- which it must, judging by its ubiquity among them -- that use must be something other than intellectual; I suspect it is mainly a genuflection to the discipline, to establish professional bonding.

True, in the US and Europe "homosexuality" has come to connote a specific mode of eroticism between people of the same sex, but that's a different issue.  It's not surprising that contemporary Americans would think of "homosexuality" in terms of stereotypes they have of homosexuals in their own time and place; most people probably do.  Look at this example from contemporary Nigeria, by Rudolf Pell Gaudio, a gay anthropologist who spent time among the yan daudu there:

The Hausa-language newspaper Kakaki, for example, had no trouble reporting on President Clinton’s ill-fated proposal in 1993 to permit gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the US armed forces, though the term the newspaper used for “gay men,” `yan ludu [literally, “sons of Lot”] conveys a negative moral judgment akin to English “sodomites.” `Yan madigo, the term used for “lesbians,” has more neutral connotations. Such translations occur in day-to-day conversations as well. In talking with Hausa friends I frequently found myself using terms like harka and dan daudu to describe gay life in the USA. I also heard such terms applied to me [Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City [Wiley-Blackwell, 2009], 281].

Or consider Graeme Reid, a white human rights professional who was promptly classified (and sometimes propositioned by black gents) in small-town South African terms as a lady even though he didn't wear women's clothes and makeup or style hair for a living as the classification lady requires.  So when Western academics think of "homosexuality" in terms of Lady Gaga CDs and U-Haul trailers, they are simply acting like traditional non-Western folk.  But as scholars it's their job to be aware of the wider world outside their personal experience, and to acquaint themselves with the history of the concepts they work with.

Second, "sex" and "sexuality" (let alone "same-sex") are also "distinctly contemporary" Western concepts, though even in academic use they're thoroughly confused and incoherent.  Usually they're left undefined, which doesn't help matters a whit.  As Wikipedia reports, many contemporary Americans don't consider oral stimulation of the genitals to be "sex."  Other surveys have found that many people don't consider anal penetration to be "sex." Brown, however, treats "sodomy" as uncomplicatedly "sex." The same goes for "man" and "woman," both of which are social constructions, but are commonly treated as uncomplicated commonsense realities.  These terms need to be defined in scholarly writing but rarely are.  To pick on one term and dwell on its modernity and cultural specificity, while ignoring the same dimensions of other crucial concepts in one's discussion, is poor practice, however widespread it is.  (As I recall, the Foucauldian independent scholar Jonathan Ned Katz admitted in his book Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality [Chicago, 2001] that he was leaving "sex" and "men" essentialized, but brushed the problem aside.)

Another contribution to Long Before Stonewall had more serious problems.  Ramon A. Gutierrez' "Warfare, Homosexuality, and Gender Status Among American Indian Men in the Southwest" immediately betrays some misconceptions about terminology, attributing "two-spirited persons" to "American scholars" (19), though that term was invented by American Indian laypeople and activists.  He seems to have no such reservations about the term berdache, which he seems to regard as unproblematic.  Then he writes,

When Spanish soldiers and missionaries first saw Native American men pressed into impersonating females, forced to perform women's work, dressing as women, and offering sexual service only to men, they asserted that these individuals were living in bradaje. Bradaje as a word was derived from the Arabic bradaj, which means male prostitute; hence the English word berdache.  Bradaje was something Europeans were quite familiar with in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, having inherited it themselves from East Asia and Islamic Africa where it was extensive. When they found men so employed in Florida and New Mexico, in central Mexico and in the highlands of Peru, they were not particularly surprised and described in a rather matter of fact fashion what they saw [20-21].

This is weird: I'm beginning to have more doubts about all the explanations I've encountered so far of the origins of the term berdache.  For what it's worth, I haven't seen (and can't find) any references to an Arabic word bradaj as an ancestor of berdache; there is some uncertainty as to whether the original was Persian or Arabic, but every source I've seen up till now agrees that the word was bardaj.  Gutierrez has evidently transposed some of the letters, and neither the editor nor any other reader seems to have noticed this.  Neither an online Spanish dictionary nor a big print dictionary I own includes the word bradaje -- or bardaje for that matter -- but I'll keep looking. 

The Arabic bardaj means "slave," according to most sources I've consulted, though Wikipedia says it means "captive" or "captured."  Okay, so slaves were often war booty, and they were often used sexually by their masters or prostituted.  It's easy to see how you could get from A to B, but Gutierrez seems to have garbled the itinerary.  His claim that the Spanish "inherited" the prostitution of boys from "East Asia and North Africa where it was extensive" is way off base, since boys (and girls) were prostituted in Europe as well; there was a long history of the prostitution of both sexes in classical Rome and Greece, for example. Gutierrez might have mentioned the direct influence of Arabic on Spanish language and culture during centuries of Moorish occupation, ending in 1492; but that's not what he wrote, and I see no reason to give him the benefit of the doubt.  I also have doubts about some of Gutierrez' translations from the Spanish, and about his use of Richard C. Trexler's controversial book Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas (Cornell, 1995), so his garbling of berdache makes me unwilling to trust anything he says about the institution.

Well, I've just begun Long Before Stonewall.  Maybe it'll improve.