I am surrounded by people sitting in groups ignoring each other as they gaze into their phones posing for selfies and editing those selfies. Like a dozen or more people taking selfie after selfie. Also, I’m re-reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, the end of the first part and first half of the second part, where the students’ begin coming into their sexualities and coming to terms with gender. Classmates who were once competing for friends are now competing for lovers. It’s a weird situation though written with delicate care. Social reproduction, sexuality, and most importantly pleasure (and its corollary happiness) are all bound up in interesting and problematic ways in the novel.
The main characters can’t have children. They are ultimately nothing other than living organ donors. The issues become much more problematic as the book continues but we’re only up to the beginning of the second part. Social class enters soon when one of the characters begins wondering whether or not they’re all cloned from “human trash”. The novel is about how the narrator and her friends learn accept their situations and understand life.
Anyway, this issue of reproduction has been bugging me for two weeks as I closely read and reflect how to teach this book. My students are learning to think about these things right now for themselves, like the characters in the book. It’s why I thought the book would be engaging. It’s not something their other teachers would read with them. And quite frankly, at my school, the students are much more likely to still passively embrace being normal, achieving normality, being able to cope with normativity than they are looking to critically confront it. (We have students who are young social critics, don’t get me wrong. It’s that I teach at a highly ranked school and where the social pressures are cranked up to high and for what’s supposed to be the singular purpose of getting into one of the top three universities in Korea. So, it’s complicated. Many of my students are on a scholarship. They aren’t social elites who’ll benefit from legacy. This, for them, appears as the one opportunity to be successful.) So, how to address reproduction when it’s so present in a form of fluid ubiquity and so much a part of self-expression, like through the ubiquitous selfie, which is a big part of pop culture here.
Friends’ phones are more likely than not loaded with hundreds of selfies (not exaggerating) and each selfie has a narrative and a ready critique. and I am wondering about PRODUCTION, not looking to condemn or even criticize people having fun with their phones. In Never Let Me Go, the narrator and friends are encouraged to enjoy sex and sexuality because they cannot sexually reproduce. They are taught about safe sex and are basically encouraged to hook up as they please. So what’s that about? I think it’s important to address. That said, how do I address this in a classroom without resorting to scaffolds in social and sexual normativity that will imply normality no matter what I intend? It’s a pickle. I’m thinking of addressing what is reproduced in selfie culture as a parallel. Especially since I don’t really have a problem with people taking selfies. There are so many very bad critical representations of selfie culture here, especially coming from foreigners who whine about it non-stop.
Perhaps, I can have the students work in groups to discuss reproduction and what we’re taking pictures of and what we’re sharing with our friends and then explore that in conversation. Have them closely read this aspect of culture. I need not really participate because we can use the book as a weight to keep us grounded on an objective: coming to terms with what Ishiguro is getting at in the first and second parts of his novel and finding a way to articulate what we think about it.