Selection from “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities” by Eve Tuck, Harvard Educational Review, Vol 79, No 3, Fall 2009.
In part, a framework of desire can do all of this [complicate our understanding of human agency, complicity, and resistance] because it accounts for that which Avery Gordon (1997) calls complex personhood, which means that people
“get stuck in the symptoms of their troubles, and also transform themselves . . . that the stories people tell about themselves, about their troubles, about their social worlds, and about their society’s problems are entangled and weave between what is immediately available as a story and what their imaginations are reaching toward.” (p. 4)
Gordon (1997) describes complex personhood as “conferring the respect on others that comes from presuming that life and people’s lives are simultaneously straightforward and full of enormously subtle meaning” (p. 5). In my application of this concept as part of a framework of desire, complex personhood draws on Indigenous understandings of collectivity and the interdependence of the collective and the person rather than on the Western focus on the individual.
I have learned a great deal about complex personhood from my colleague, Monique Guishard, who tells a story about working with her youth coresearchers on issues of critical consciousness during the day, tracing the legacy of their mothers’ and grandmothers’ work for social justice (Guishard, 2009). Later, Monique accompanied the same youth coresearchers to stand overnight in a long line outside of a shoe store, waiting for the anticipated release of a new sneaker. Monique was taken aback by the irony of the situation: on the same day these youth were openly critical of corporate capitalism and globalization, they waited with hundreds of other youth and adults to purchase an item that represents some of the worst elements of global capitalism and exploitation. But she was even more taken aback by her youth companions’ awareness and ease in/side that irony. In a damage framework, one might surmise that, even when faced with options, youth are pliant to the consumerist status quo. However, in a desire-based framework that draws on the idea of complex personhood, we see that “all people remember and forget, are beset by contradiction, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and others” (Gordon, 1997, p. 4). We can desire to be critically conscious and desire the new Jordans, even if those desires are conflicting.
Within collectivity, recognizing complex personhood involves making room for the contradictions, for the mis/re/cognitions, usually in an effort to sustain a sense of collective balance. For tribal peoples, this can mean resisting characterizing one another in ways that tacitly reduce us to being either trapped in the irrelevant past or fouled up by modernity and by acknowledging that as twenty-first-century peoples, it is our collective duty to ensure that any and every member who chooses can engage in traditional sustenance practices, use science and Indigenous ecologies to understand the world around us, and attend relevant, respectful, and responsive schools. In sum, it is our work to afford the multiplicity of life’s choices for one another (Grande, 2004).
