#core research

[hai-gui]

Why call in?

tw: oblique references to eating disorders

Calling out and calling in are quite literally orientations. So why call in? The very point of the “outwards” orientation is to dispel that which is disgusting. When we’ve eaten something bad, something disgusting, our bodies expel it through vomiting (though does this work when we find necessary food disgusting and force ourselves to dispel it?). Taking in is a sign of necessity and eventual integration.

So when it comes to our community members, is it possible to call in and bring them in tighter while selectively expeling parts of them and behaviors of theirs that we find unsavory? The fear of the inclusion of those unsavory bits into the community is what drives calling out; when we call people in, is it that either we accept how the feel of the community may change through the acceptance of that which we find disgusting, or we enforce assimilation to the feel of the community as a condition of calling in?

[hai-gui]

The orientation of calling out/in

To call-out is quite literally to orient outwards, whether to defend a boundary or to expel something outwards. To call-in is to orient inwards, to bring inwards and perhaps to reflect inwards. This is why critiquing for the sake of critiquing--think Suey Park--is one of the surest ways of imploding a community: a performance of critiquing without real work changes the orientation with nothing to sustain a new affective flow.

[conversionprogrammedos]

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[hai-gui]

Kanye West & the emotional labor drain in community organizing.

I was reading an interview Ayesha Siddiqi gave to The Guardian (I’ll admit, I’ve got some career and brains envy going on), and in it mentioned her love for and defense of Kanye West. It got me thinking about my experiences with Kanye-like personalities, none of which ended well. Yes, it is important to demand “what you’re owed,” especially as a person coming from a marginalized identity. But when you demand that not from the institutions and structures of power that have contributed to your marginalization, but from the people who stand with you or whose backs on which you stand?

The central question I am asking here is why does so much of our community organizing and community identity revolve around megalomaniacs who insist on dynamics of domination? Kanye West is an example of this. He is a megalomaniac--yes, if he were white his body would be shielded from this term as his ambitions would be portrayed favorably, and that does not change the fact that he is a megalomaniac--and one of the leading women of color writers and thinkers of my generation went to great lengths to defend him. Siddiqi has great influence in pushing conversations in marginalized communities, and a defence of Kanye West has been a dominant conversation in People of Color communities. From my experience as a community organizer, one of the major walls we hit is the need to cater to egos. What I mean by ego is not the mutual buoying of self-esteems by connection with heritage and with others; what I mean by ego is the need to assert dominance over others within the community. Dominance and catering to someone else’s need to be dominant are immediate drains on emotional labor. As I’ve written before, power is a measure of how quickly privileged people can transfer their workload, and emotional labor is work. Thus engaging in these public figures as a way to define and patrol our community identity may not be productive work, but perhaps counterproductive.

Case in point: part of Kanye’s ego lies in the fact that his current partner is Kim Kardashian, a fact which he used to dismiss and shame Amber Rose, his ex-girlfriend who is a Black woman.

References

Ayesha Siddiqi’s interview with The Guardian: (x)

my previous post: (x)

[hai-gui]

Emotional labor.

In the last year, discussions of emotional labor have taken off in feminist circles online. In July, there were extended discussions on MetaFilter about emotional labor, and for a piece on the history of the concept of “emotional labor,” I recommend reading this.

I am interested in meshing emotional labor with Sara Ahmed’s concept of affective economies. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed draws upon Marxist theory to describe the work emotions do in society. Ahmed explicitly draws parallels between money and emotions: when emotions circulate amoung bodies, then there is an economy; where there is economy, that which is being circulated has currency and therefore value. With any economy, there are established sets of flows for the currency, and breaking out of established flows or establishing new flows is a challenge. It is no different in an affective economy.

Labor comes into the picture in that waged labor is traded for money in a monetary economy. Unwaged labor, such as emotional labor, is traded in a different economy for a different currency. In the case of emotional labor, it is traded in an affective economy. The affective economies that Ahmed describes in order to explain the work emotions do in society contain emotional labor, for emotional labor is the work each body does to maintain the established affective flow. Work is a form of energy, and each body has a finite amount of energy. Maintaining an established affective flow requires less energy and work than breaking out of an established affective flow--which is why assimilation is far easier to solidarity, and why so often in hetero relationships women find themselves burdened with the emtional labor even though they may have talked with their partners about parity of power in the relationship. Socialized cultural practices are not changed overnight.

With all of this said, there are limits to the framework of an affective economy. In a monetary economy, money is the equilizer that erases difference. A muffin, a pen, and a pair of socks can all cost $1; they all have equal value despite being very different objects. In an affective economy, different emotions work in different ways in different contexts and cannot be equalized in such a manner. As such, we can conclude that the value of emotional labor, depending on its context and the exact emotions being circulated, also varies.

References

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotions. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Hackman, Rose. "'Women Are Just Better at This Stuff': Is Emotional Labor Feminism's next Frontier?" The Guardian, 8 Nov. 2015. Web. 24 Dec. 2015.

MetaFilter threads on emotional labor, original: (x) (x)

MetaFilter threads on emotional labor, condensed: (x)

my previous post: (x)

[hai-gui]

An exercise.

Try the following exercise, something medical health professionals call Progressive Muscle Relaxiation (which is great for those of us with lots of anxiety): close your eyes. Ground your feet into the ground, nice and firm but without tensing up your calves. Do you feel how the ground or the soles of your shoes feel? Good. Now in your mind’s eye, picture your feet. Your toes. Start drawing your toes from the left pinky toe, moving inwards. What do you see?

It’s a lot harder to imagine your toes than you thought, right? On a daily basis, you can easily tell if there’s an odd blister or cut on one of them--basically you can tell when they deviate from the norm--but to picture them as they are is a very different exercise.

You move up your body, noticing sensations and temperatures and pressure points. (I’m fast-forwarding here.) Now we get to your hands, nice and loose and relaxed. Picture your left hand in your mind’s eye as it is. Try drawing it in your mind. How is your hand curled up? Which finger is more curled up than the rest? Is your middle more curled than your pointer? Is your curled up ring finger tilting slightly in?

You...can’t really tell, can you, without opening your eyes?

Throughout The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed draws from phenomenologists before her in establishing that how we move through the physical world, in our physical bodies, shapes our understanding of the social world. The example she uses is how when our bodies are at their normal state, we do not notice them. It is only when there is something that disorients--a pain or a pleasure--that parts of our physical bodies come into view. That is the same, socially: bodies that are socially deemed the norm (i.e. white, cishet, male, middle class and above, able) fade into the background. Other bodies are encouraged to fade into the background by replicating the affective economy of normal bodies; that is, they pass on the same emotions and “feels” as normal bodies.

I bring up the example of Progressive Muscle Relaxation to demonstrate how institutions may work, with thousands or millions of bodies at work in this one larger, cohesive body that is a separate entity from the parts that comprise it. This is an example that Sara Ahmed uses as well: certain oppressed classes are the hands, or the feet, or the back. Those of the “ruling class” are the head. The institutions that dominate our society are the body as a whole. The head is in control and keeps tabs on the other parts. All the parts work in tandem. When something goes wrong with the other parts, the head is aware of the situation, but the head is not truly aware of every curve, crevice, and line of the parts.The body as a whole is not completely aware of the space it occupies and the space its parts occupy in relation to each other. But this only leads to questions: social bodies have wills and desires, but do physical bodies? When we use these metaphors--feet and hands, or infections on the feet and hands, don’t exactly have wills and desires--there is an inherent disconnect. And what is the connection between the part and the whole? Can we articulate a line of thought that clearly begins from the part and ends at the whole, or starts at the larger body and narrows down to the part?

References

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotions. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

[hai-gui]

Space & force.

Space, in physics, is the relative positioning and direction of objects and events in a boundless three-dimensional way. From Newton’s three laws: an object in motion stays in motion and an object at rest stays at rest until there is an external force changing this inertia. Force is an interaction that will change the motion of an object. Work, a form of energy, is force multipled by distance.

This post has its roots in my personal life. Whenever I find myself with a new white, middle class, cishet boyfriend, inevitably things get difficult two months in when the honeymoon wears off. The relationship starts hurting and being hurtful. So often it comes down to an issue of space: they don’t realize how much space they occupy in the relationship and how because their privileges, which allow them to disproportionately occupy space, are energy-saving devices, I am expected to do most of the emotional labor. When they expand and demand that my boundaries be changed to accomodate them, it quite often feels like I’m being pushed into a brick wall. The contact hurts. The change to my boundaries from the interaction is bruising. The force they use is unexpected (well, not really), and the change in the affective flow of the relationship is unexpected (also, not really). I always push back; given that inertia always wins out, I cannot afford to let a precedence of their space-hogging take root. I will not let my work be taken for granted, I will not shrink my body so I take up less space, and I will use force through the force of my will. Then they feel hurt, as the motion of their body is changed in what is truly unexpected ways for them–for the men I’ve dated, this is the first time in their lives that in a relationship that their partner has articulated a demand for equity in emotional labor, space, and power. They then try to stick it on me: I am the willful subject who is the source of unhappiness. Using ideas outlined by Sara Ahmed in The Cultural Politics of Emotion and Willful Subjects, that stems from the fact that the body which disorients from the background–inherently mine, as the white middle class cishet male body is the cultural norm–is viewed as the source of the emotions that stick to it. These disorienting bodies are framed as willful.

The same could be said for when we fight with our own, why assimilation takes precedence within marginalized communities, and why solidarity is such hard work. When individual bodies try to expand, inevitably they will bump up against the bodies of others. There will be pain, there will be hurt: the affective flow of the community will be disoriented. However, because no body type is truly viewed as the cultural norm, the disorientations threaten our current notions of solidarity that are based on assimilation within a community. Assimilation is the process by which some bodies fade into the background and become the norm; each community has its norms, so to speak. So the line, get in line or get the fuck out, is repeated. The bodies that do not are disorienting, willful subjects that are deemed a threat to the community’s health, and are pushed out, much like how our physical bodies–a microcosm of bodies living in tandem–reject and expel things that are deemed not a part of it.

References

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotions. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Ahmed, Sara. Willful Subjects. New York: Duke University Press, 2014. Print.

[hai-gui]

Accessing pain.

In previous posts I’ve written about pain, how pain is binding, and the role of pain in solidarity. Pain is binding and necessary for solidarity, but there is also a question of who can access pain. Are white-passing people of color who are a legacy of colonialism and imperialism, and very often the sexual violence that accompanies the two, allowed to access that pain? Or does the whiteness of their physical bodies--which often translates into experiencing aspects of white privilege--override that right and the right to connect with their heritage?

References

my previous posts: (x) (x)