Alex Campbell and Skinhead Authenticity

Campbell, Alex. “The Search for Authenticity: An Exploration of an Online Skinhead Newsgroup.” New Media and Society 8 (2006): 269-94. Print.

 

If something can be a mouthful or a handful, this article is a headful. It makes me feel so. Many. Things. Also, I have a strong jones to watch This is England again.

Basically, the author conducted an ethnography of a skinhead newsgroup to better understand how racial discourse works in that community—a community that, Campbell is quick to point out, is hardly monolithic. Indeed, among people who self-identify as skinheads, there are both explicitly racist and explicitly anti-racist groups, as well as what Campbell terms a “non-racist” majority that don’t go out of their way in either direction. One of the most interesting segments involves looking at how some of the members of the group carefully position themselves as non-racist in ways that still permit them to make racist statements, just, you know, without the label.

(Can I just say how much I love that at least in this community the skinhead epithet for racist skinheads is “boneheads”? A lot, my friends. Even as I recognize that the attempt to assign racism to someone-else-but-not-authentic-skinhead-and-therefore-not-us is problematic, I still love the term.)

Photo via slybaldguys, which is actually a fascinating juxtaposition: this is a forum for men who shave their heads, and the photo is linked in a comment thread about how NOT to be mistaken for a skinhead.

 

From the beginning, Campbell positions her study as a counterbalance to popular conceptions of both skinheads and of the internet itself. She first establishes that while popular discourse about the internet tends to hover in either utopian (it can solve all of our problems by making everyone equal!) or dystopian (omg it gives the bad people a way of connecting with each other and society will soon be blasted to pieces by a coalition of evil!), both of these are overly simplistic. More than that, Campbell argues that these are not just reductive visions of the internet but of the way that racial discourse works, portraying racism as something that occurs only in particular marked and overt ways.

In fact, Campbell says, because people know that actual racialized discourse is frowned upon, racial terms tend to be replaced with cultural ones—it isn’t African Americans that are criminal, it’s black culture, didn’t you know? Nevertheless, the cultural markers clearly stand in for racial ones, and this isn’t any less racist for all it attempts to couch itself in terms of culture and choices. Campbell also points to a shift in the way that racism manifests itself—where before races were put into a hierarchy and the discourse revolved around questions of eliminating the Other, now concern is more inwardly directed, fearing contamination of the self. Borders are more important than ever.

What this does, although this isn’t quite how Campbell frames it, is underscore the need for creating those boundaries within certain kinds of discourse. There can’t be an us until there is a them, basically, so much of the rhetoric is oriented toward marking who does and doesn’t belong.

Sound familiar? Truly, I cannot believe how closely this adheres to the work I’ve been doing on bro culture. Subculture associated with repugnant points of view? Check. Discourse that revolves around defining the boundaries of the group? Check. Emphasis on understanding how a particular group creates and polices “authentic” performances of identity? Check and check. Actually, if I’m smart, I’ll use this as a model as I revise the article going forward. I think that I can make a lot of the same arguments about the exigency of my study that Campbell uses to justify hers.

I particularly love the argument that she makes about how the fact that these utopian and dystopian visions are popular rather than scholarly actually makes them more important because they are the opinions of the people who are actually creating the discourse. Bravo! Just what I’ve always thought! Who cares what we think of these things in academia? What feminism and misogyny and racism and antiracism actually look like are being determined by the people who practice them on the ground, not in the ivory tower, so of course there are the manifestations we need to be looking at.

Anyway. I look forward to thinking about the kinds of synonyms that stand in for misogyny in my bro spaces, as well as how certain members create unassailable positions that determine the direction of acceptable discourse, as “Bill” does toward the middle of the article. Her focus on the more “innocuous” comments really provides a great model moving forward to see how these identities—publics, I might say—are performed and called into being one comment at a time.

 

“all women are crazy”

To the women saying things like “all women are crazy” and “girls are just stupid about relationships”: please, please stop.

I mean, no one should be saying things like that. But there’s an added layer of perniciousness that comes when women say it—it makes that discourse seem like the incontrovertible truth. If even YOU, a LADY, have to admit these things, they must be pretty undeniable, right?

When you say things like this, you aren’t just talking about “women.” You are talking about me. You are telling people that if they doesn’t like what I have to say, it’s okay to ignore it because my hormones or whatever are preventing me from interacting with them as a rational equal.

Knock that shit off.

Even if you don’t actually mean ALL women, even if you know that men, too, can be irrational and attention-seeking and have wackadoo ideas about relationships, when you say things like this, you are buying into and legitimizing a discourse that invalidates your own experiences. That is, you are saying that when you get upset about something, it’s not because it’s a legitimate concern but because you have a debilitating condition known as a vagina. Your audience has been informed by a reliable authority—you—that your relationship needs are unreasonable and irrational and therefore illegitimate. You’re giving people permission not to take you seriously!

Furthermore, using “crazy” to disenfranchise women depends on and reinforces the idea that people with mental illnesses are also incapable of having valid concerns.

Knock that shit off, too, please.

ENGL 584: Digital Portfolio

To fulfill the final requirements of ENGL 584: Literate Lives in Digital Times, I present my digital portfolio, wherein I collect my favorite elements from this blog and remediate them through a terribly coded website. I apologize in advance for the weird text wrapping; I don’t have the energy to go back and fix it.

Et voila!

literacy narrative: magentasaurus

I remember sitting in my grandmother’s bedroom the summer she died and reading to her from one of my many dinosaur reference books, pointing out the color-coded differences in the hipbones of those that stood upright versus those that walked on all fours. I remember going through the whole book and naming each dinosaur–not just triceratops and stegosaurus but iguanadon and plesiosaur. Ankylosaurus had a mace-like tail that would, I imagined, really hurt your ankle. Allosaurus was like a smaller version of the tyrannosaurus like my newborn sister Allison was a smaller version of me. This activity, I imagined, would entertain her.

I was four, okay?

Although I engaged in fantasy to a perhaps alarming degree in other aspects of my life, when it came to dinosaurs, I was just the facts, ma’am. When The Land Before Time was released that year, I doggedly corrected my friends: triceratops, not three-horn; brontosaurus, not long-neck.

My kindergarten teacher, who would later be suspended for hurling a book against the wall in his anger at a five-year-old, once scolded me for coloring a stegosaurus magenta. Our pictures were supposed to be realistic, he said. Not this pinky-purply nonsense. Resolutely filling in the tail spikes with “sunglow,” I told him what I had read: that nobody knew what color dinosaurs really were because they were extinct before people were alive and so no one had seen them.

He pulled my paper from beneath my crayon. We do know what colors they weren’t, he said.

He stepped away as I blinked back tears of outrage and dismay, then returned a moment later with a fresh coloring sheet.

You should choose one of these, he said, laying out before me a dingy assortment of grays, greens, and browns, peeled and fingernail-dinged and covered in vomitous little flecks from the other crayons. Realistic, he reminded me.

A few months later, of course, l learned to my horror that the brontosaurus was an impostor, had less legitimacy than even the long-neck. It never had a color. It never existed at all.

ENGL 584: Writing Process Video

Please pardon the weirdly intimate and breathy narration. I recorded the sound while my husband was sleeping.

five things about my body

i.

I like to write in bed, leaned back against a bank of pillows with my knees bent, computer angled from my hip to my thigh and warming my lap like a cat. Like Pigg, I have often drifted to sleep in this posture, or nearly, and more than once in a stupor I have simply shut my laptop and pulled it to my chest, letting the residual heat seep into my skin as my arms forget they are hugging something plastic. It is like falling asleep in the bath.

ii.

A student once raised her hand in my class to ask me a question, then a beat later, as I began to answer, pulled out her phone, chuckled at a text message, and commenced typing a response. I was irritated and told her so, and yet I have found myself reaching for my phone in the seminars I myself am taking, fully intending to respond to a text message as naturally as I pull my hair back when it is hot in the room, as naturally as I ask my neighbor if I can borrow a pen. Maybe the startled look came to my student’s face not because she was surprised at my pique but because she was surprised to find herself texting at all.

iii.

I read somewhere once that wrapping your body tightly makes it possible to exercise longer without getting tired; perhaps this is why I prefer to write when compressed. In the winter I tie a heavy throw blanket around my shoulders like a kid playing at superheroes. In the summer, when my unconditioned apartment is sticky with humidity, I simply choose a lighter blanket. My large cushioned headphones, which I often wear when writing even without music, squeeze the sides of my head gently and provide a sort of tactile white noise. Often in winter, but not only then, I wear a particular close-fitting red hat.

iv.

The following letters on my keyboard are visibly chipped away from use: E, O, A, S, D, C, N, space bar (right side only).

Even now, after twenty years of typing, I do it “incorrectly,” glancing at my fingers at the beginning of a phrase and using only the first three fingers of each hand plus the thumb for the space bar, working in spurts of spatial memory. When I use someone else’s computer, my fingers stumble on the unfamiliar keys.

v.

In preparation for Lauren’s activity for today’s class, I did my own version of a body biography, drawing only those parts that are inscribed by technology when I write. My fingers (which type) hang disembodied beneath my wrists (which rest against the edge of my laptop, and which therefore may contain the seeds of carpal tunnel). My palms do nothing; as far as my computer is concerned, they do not exist. The right side of my hair is there to be rubbed against my upper lip in a habit I have had since childhood; the left side of my face exists to be propped against the heel of my hand—ah so, wait, I do need my palm! Bit by bit, the missing parts of my body were sketched in as, with reflection, I uncovered how they function when I am writing, even if it is simply a matter of my stomach, cinched uncomfortably by my belt, strengthening my resolve to, tomorrow, go to the gym. I discovered in doing making this map how unaware of my body I am when I sit at my computer, how much of my remains uncharted by virtue of being taken for granted.

 

in authentic community

Studies like Yi and Hervela’s work with Elizabeth tend to focus on students who are using the internet to engage their literacy in interesting ways—students who keep online journals, or who write fan fiction, or who moderate MOOs or MUDs. But what about the rest? Will students who don’t engage in these kinds of online self-sponsored activities be comfortable publicizing their drafting processes?

Elizabeth herself seems mostly unremarkable in her habits, it’s true. But she also uses those online venues to create a space between herself and school; the self-sponsored writing is almost a way of writing over the enforced writing of her school experience. So, then, what to make of Yi and Hervela’s ending suggestion that these 1.5 students (and all student? I was unclear.) are best engaged by taking those wild horses of self-sponsored literacy and harnessing them to the academic plow?

It seems to me that certain barriers would have to come down in order for students and teachers to interact in what could legitimately be called a community. This would require an extremely decentered classroom with an instructor who is a counselor rather than an evaluator—otherwise, how is this not simply re-inscribing the classroom space online? How much is an act of composition really using the literacies of self-sponsored writing if it springs from a prompt?

In her chapter “When the Teacher Is the Audience” in Engaging Audience: Writing in the Age of New Literacies, Marie Paretti argues that no amount of decentering the classroom can create naturalistic writing interactions because no matter what, students know that when it comes down to it, the teacher is the one who gives the grade. Even in service-learning classrooms, where all writing directives are given not by the instructor but by a nonprofit that has “hired” the students, grades must be given, and so the students are split between trying to please their boss and trying to please their instructor.

Her suggestion is to drop the façade and to have the students write specifically for the audience of the instructor. In my BTW classroom, I have asked my students to interview each other for group leadership positions and provide me with recommendation memos, to write me book reviews assessing whether our texts should be in use the next year or not, and to write recommendation reports on topics that I “don’t have time” to look into myself. Besides actually getting some of my work done for me (!), it has put me in the position of authentically responding to their writing not as “a reader,” but as the specific intended audience.

I am not sure how this would play out in an online community, though, because I’m not sure you can prescribe community. As an instructor, I can provide a platform for interaction, but for it to be an actual dynamic community, surely that requires some investment on the students’ part. If you participate once a week, the night before it’s due, are you participating in a community, or are you participating in a ritual?

Even here, where I am not particularly concerned about how each post will affect my overall grade, I can find it hard to write authentically—which is why I tend to respond to one article at a time instead of conducting the summary/synthesis I would bring to a paper response. So, I’ll throw it out there to everyone else: Do you think there is a way to create a community that would allow students to explore their ideas in a naturalistic setting, or is asking them to explore these ideas in the first place already too much of a disruption? Further, based on Yi and Hirvela’s research, do you think that there is a specific role for or appeal to 1.5 students in this approach?

 

why I will wear purple, or, looking for the tit in titillation

I have been an active resister of Facebook “activism” in the past. I did not share my bra color last Breast Cancer Awareness Month, nor did I pornographically explain where I like to keep my purse this time around.

To be fair, I’m not a fan of “awareness” campaigns in general unless what people are being made aware of might have a specific impact. As I see it, breast cancer awareness can result in two types of action: increased research funding for treatment and prevention, and increased early detection through self-examinations and mammograms. A lung cancer awareness campaign might seek to dissuade people from smoking by showing the amount of tar and carcinogens contained in a carton of cigarettes. What exactly is a “save the boobies” campaign trying to do? Convince women with cancer not to get mastectomies?

Like “save the boobies,” the Facebook memes mentioned above use titillation as a rhetorical gimmick. In the first case women “confused” men by posting status updates containing only a color and then titillated them with the reveal that the colors described their bras.

What are those crazy dames doing? the gentlemen would ostensibly wonder. And the idea, I suppose, was that they would ask, and then the women would talk to the men about how breast cancer is the number one killer of women and even a small donation helps, etc., and then the men would, what, be more aware? I don’t know.

But what I usually saw was more along the lines of: Leopard, huh? RROWR!

From what I saw, this did not raise awareness of breast cancer. It just raised awareness of boobs.

The more recent campaign has even less connection to, well, anything to do with breast cancer. Currently, women are once again encouraged to “confuse” the menfolk, this time through what seem to be explicit sexual revelations—“I like it on the kitchen table,” they write, or “I like it by the front door as soon as I get home.”  “It” being their purse, of course, which, so far as I can tell, has nothing to do with boobs except that stereotypically people who have one have the other as well.

Breasts, both of these breast cancer awareness campaigns impress on us, are important because of their sexy sexy role in titillating men. And you should be aware that this is why we should save them from cancer. Right?

I mean, I suppose that while thinking up innuendo it might occur to some women to do a self-exam, and if that is the case that is excellent indeed. But really? Does anyone think that’s the strategy here?

Just as there is no critical mass of pink-beribboned items that causes them to transform into a cancer-fighting robot (esp. not when most companies eschew actual donation in favor of pinkwashing that gives the illusion of social conscience), there is no place you can put your purse to keep a tumor at bay—unless you are reaching into it to fund mammograms for those who can’t afford them.

All 500 words of that being said, I have received two different event invitations asking me to wear purple today, October 20, in memory of the six (so far) teenagers who have take their own lives after being bullied for their perceived sexuality.

I RSVPed yes to both.

Explicitly, the purpose of wearing purple is to honor the memories of these bullied teens and others who have suffered from the homophobic actions of people around them. Implicitly, though, it’s an awareness campaign. And where the breast cancer campaigns were silly because there was no sense of who was being made aware and what they were being made aware of, “Wear Purple Day” has the potential to directly impact the issue it is advocating for.

My breasts can’t see what color my bra is. Neither can cancer. In terms of actual concrete impact, this kind of activism is only slightly above “Let’s see if this dill pickle can get more fans than Glenn Beck.”

But you know who can see color? LGBTQ (or LGBTQ “seeming”) teens who may be considering suicide because they feel that everyone in the world is against them and there’s nothing they can do about it.

And you know who else can see color? Gay-bashing bullies who think no one is watching them, who think society is on their side.

And you know who else? All those people who offhandedly use gay-ness as a pejorative thinking that no one around them would be offended, who might nonetheless flush on meeting the eyes of a visually marked supporter of LGBTQ rights.

To be sure, other kids are bullied, even to the point of suicide. It is absolutely a tragedy that kids are bullied because they are poor or because they are overweight or because they are disabled or sexually active or a different race. But it’s important to recognize that in each case bullying is a symptom of a different social disease. In the cases of Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh, Justin Aaberg, Raymond Chase, Asher Brown, Billy Lucas, and Zach Harrington, it is a symptom of a culture that uses their identity as a pejorative; a country that tells both them and their bullies that in America, straight people LITERALLY abide by different laws than gay people; a vocal religious contingent telling them that even a compassionate, all-loving God can’t stand the sight of them and a media that makes sure that they hear this all the time.

Trying to change a general “culture of bullying” without addressing the forces giving it tacit and not-so-tacit encouragement in these particular instances is like trying to cure breast cancer by putting on a different-colored bra.

“Don’t let their deaths be for nothing,” says the introduction to “RIP: In memory of the recent suicides due to gay abuse, wear purple.” “Let it mean something, and let’s do something to change this country for once.”

Let me be clear: no amount of purple is going to change the country. But it can change how the country is viewed, both in terms of LGBTQ teens and in terms of America’s conception of itself. We can’t just view this as a visual moment of silence, a glib homage that can be paid and walked away from.

Regarding the suicides themselves, this kind of en masse visual activism has the potential to create performative change. If every person who felt sorrow at the suicides of these teens were to make that sorrow visible, it could tell other youth struggling with their sexuality that we don’t think they deserve to die for it.

The whole message hinges, though, on certain levels of participation and dissemination. If five million people were to wear purple head-to-toe, but only those five million knew why, the act would have little impact. Similarly, if everyone in America were to know about the plan, but only 250,000 were to actually wear purple, youth looking around for their now-visible supporters might come away even more discouraged than before.

If we seek to make invisible support networks visible to these youth, we have to make sure they know what they’re looking for. The boobylicious cancer campaigns have gotten considerably more media coverage, demonstrating, perhaps, that their strategy was savvier than I thought. All the purple in the world isn’t going to help if the kids we are trying to reach don’t know how to interpret it.

While it has its limitations, Wear Purple Day and its Facebook campaign showcase the potential of what I would call viral activism. I do wonder, though, whether this isn’t just a serendipitous rhetorical situation–it just so happens that in this case simply seeing a sign of visual affiliation can enact change in individuals’ lives. Today I am wearing purple, but it’s just as likely that next week I’ll be asked which baked goods best describe my ass.

customization, standardization, globalization, and you

I’m intrigued by the premise of Kalantzis and Cope’s article—that humanity has seen several globalization movements, and that IF we are truly in one now, the internet is creating space for rather than weeding out diversity. Beyond the unusualness of their claims, the vast historical approach used to support is is unlike anything I’ve ever read.

But haters gotta hate, and I do have some qualms about their claims.

Throughout, I wished for a timeline and a little more evidence for their sweeping statements about each globalization—not so much because I disbelieve them as because I was having some difficulty figuring out what they were referring to in some places. Perhaps because of this disorientation, when we finally reached the end and the explanation of why globalization is not the enemy of diversity, I wasn’t entirely on board.

My first problem is that Kalantzis and Cope seem to conflate customizability and diversity. Because there are “niche” markets, because people can make their own iPod playlists, because they can “participate” in their entertainment though video games, with players “inserting and recreating their identities in ways that are never precisely replicated from one person to the next,” diversity is being promoted? I’m not certain that a person’s ability to choose between “the big SUVs, the smart sports cars, the spacious family cars,” etc, is what is at risk in this situation. The definition of diversity being leveraged in this article seems to be rather narrow and class-specific.

Further, this idea that customizability automatically equates to freedom should not go unexamined. In his Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, Alexander Galloway critiques this kind of revering of flexibility. Even though it seems liberating, he says, flexibility is “one of the founding principles of global informatic control”—in order for flexibility to operate, there has to be higher degrees of standardization. That is, for an iPod to work, all files are required to be in one particular standard format.

If diverse technical systems are flexible enough to accommodate massive contingency, then the result is a more robust system that can subsume all comers under the larger mantle of  continuity and universalism. (100-101)

According to Galloway (and I find him convincing), flexibility is not the harbinger of diversity but the servant of standardization and globalization.

all your face are belong to us

Last summer, I applied to write background dialogue for the newest release from a local video game company. After making it through the first, resume-based round, I was sent about 8 hours of representative work to do as a sort of audition. In role playing games, there are a number of non-player characters (NPCs) that populate the world to make it feel complete, and those NPCs need to have preordained lines written to anticipate particular situations—when the player character runs into them, for instance, or when they watch someone get killed.

My assigned NPCs: “Black Male, Gang Member”; “White Female, Business”; and “Asian Female, Young.”

What.

I suppose that specifying that the first character was black meant that they wanted me to give him lines in African American Vernacular English. On the one hand, this certainly perpetuates the idea of speakers of AAVE as violent and ignorant, but on the other, I suppose it’s a reasonable considering the rest of pop culture representations of black gang members—would insisting on perfect Standard (White) English really be a move toward authenticity, or would it be a reflection of my own discomfort in speaking for black men? Assuming that there are characters labeled “White Male, Gang Member” and “Black Male, Business,” the game may not actually be equating black males with gang membership.

One difficult moment was writing the lines the guy says when he checks out a woman. Although I have hear a plenitude of shitty lines that I can draw from, I was concerned that by writing them I would be endorsing the behavior. To deal with my discomfort with both writing racially marked dialogue and endorsing the objectification of women, I came up with the following: “C’est magnifique, man. C’est fucking* magnifique.” It’s French! And it doesn’t mention any specific body parts!

As tricky as this was, the white businesswoman and “Asian Female, Young” were even more problematic to my way of thinking. I could never quite wrap my head around why it was necessary to specify “Asian.”

If they wanted an accent or a version of broken English, saying “Asian” lumps everyone together in one big oriental “me love you long time” Other. And if they didn’t, then by giving the race are they saying that there is some sort of discourse that needs to be racialized? Would a white businesswoman say things differently (or say different things) that an Asian businesswoman? How, exactly, are these overwhelmingly male video game programmers picturing this Asian female, young? And why young? Ugh, the heebie jeebies!
(Or, as a white female, am I remiss in attempting to de-racialize this? Isn’t it basically assuming a default linguistic whiteness?)

The closest I came to racializing my Asian character was in two of the three “flip off” lines, which the NPCs give to insult the PC. The first, “Your princess is in another fucking castle,” is sort of ambiently Asian—it is a reference to Nintendo’s Mario games, but the princess in those games is white. The second is much more explicit—probably too explicit from someone who was trying to get hired by these guys: “Oh really? A thing for Asians? Because I’ve never heard that one before.”**

In case it isn’t obvious, I did not get the job. And while I was disappointed not to have the income, I was also a bit relieved not to have to deal with these questions on a full-time daily basis for ten weeks.

In his critique of the video game Shadow Warrior, Jeffrey Ow describes a “yellow-faced cyborg terminator,” the white American video game player who tries on the identity of an Asian man while playing out the Aryan agenda of the Terminator. Shadow Warrior’s location in a foreign Asian city is vital to this argument because it allows the Terminator to effectively colonize the Orient of its white creators’ imaginations, while pretending to be a denizen that imaginary space. There are two big differences between what he describes and my own experience.

The first is that both Ow and Nakamura center their discussions of the internet and the other not just on race but on location. Part of what is being critiqued here is the idea that white Americans can understand other cultures simply by looking at a version of those places created by other white people for the purpose of selling a product. It’s the TOKYO EXPERIENCE, not the experience of being in Tokyo, and in order to sell, the TOKYO EXPERIENCE depends on a particular set of signifiers (that is, stereotypes) that the companies feel the public expects to see.

In this game, however, the setting is an American city, and the identity tourism is in many respects class-based rather than race-based. In the game, players control a gang leader recently released from prison and out for revenge, a violent fantasy that is far from the experiences of most of the game’s players. The exoticized Other in this case is local, but arguably just as foreign to the players.

The second difference is that the player character is unmarked by either race or gender; the player can select from an overwhelming number of options for skin color, body type, hair type, “ethnic” features, etc. In this case, the yellowface cyborg terminator is ME.

I had to ask myself whether writing this dialogue was really so different from writing dialogue for a black or Asian character in my own creative work. Wouldn’t that also be a form of blackface/yellowface? Truth be told, I haven’t ever gone there; it skeeves me out too much. But it’s a funny trap—if I avoid specifying race for my characters, am I defaulting to white? But wouldn’t racinating one character while not specifying for the (presumably white) others be marking that character as different?

In the end, I think that the context I am able to set in my own writing makes those a different set of problems. What I was being asked to write for this audition wasn’t just out of context to me; it would be out of context to the player as well. These little one-off lines help create a world, and every phrase reinforces the norms and conventions of that world.

*A programmer friend of mine told me there is no such thing as too much profanity in games like this. Possibly I didn’t get the job because I’m not very good at swearing.

**Let’s not neglect gender. Actions for the dude include threatening, taunting, fighting, observing, and watching TV. The actions for the women are overwhelmingly cowering and fleeing, but also include a hefty proportion of observing. They get to threaten, but only in a few lines. And oh! They also get to shop! And be taken hostage!