Exploring Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Studium, Punctum, and the Failure of the Photograph to mark itself as a sign

I have searched for many ways to depart on my own analysis of photographs, and the most reasonable starting point of discussion concerns my sensibilities and opinions of photographs in my own personal repertoire.  I do not care very much for photographs, and with thanks to Roland Barthes for offering and formulating a language around photographs, I have been able to determine why.  I despise having my photograph taken in many contexts; perhaps the only context where I feel slightly comfortable are in those instances where the photographer takes photographs of myself without my knowledge.  However, once I see myself on a piece of paper, rather, in a photograph, an eerie feeling, one of discomfort arises in me. The genre of the ‘portrait’ is one which I find myself most troubled by.  Nevertheless, I am intrigued, excited, and sometimes inspired by particular, individual photographs.

Like Barthes, I have chosen to provide an illustration, a photograph of my own, in order to deduce and demonstrate the distinction between the two ‘orders’ or ‘realms’ of the photograph, studium and punctum.  I must emphasize that the articulation of a distinction, or a fixation on the distinction between them, should not undermine their primary function in a photograph as operating in a relationship of co-presence (Barthes, 1980: 42). My example consists of a portrait photograph, one which depicts my grandmother and grandfather in each others’ arms at their own private camping location. I can only speculate as to when this photograph was taken.  This, for Barthes, represents a particular feature of ‘the photograph’ which sets it apart from other forms of art and media; a failure to mark itself as a sign; its nonfulfillment in telling the spectator the who, what, when, where of precisely what it is and what it shows; its noeme of this or that-has-been (Barthes, 1980).

I would like to reiterate that out of all of the photographs I have seen, most fall under the category of general interest, no interest, or result in me having little personal investment in them.  In a sense, for Barthes, this general interest in the photograph is concerned with studium (Barthes, 1980: 26).  Studium is described as the field in the photograph where, in as much as the photograph shows objects, it, along with the things shown, can be studied. Those things which are depicted by the photograph, in other words, everything in a photograph, can potentially be studied. In another sense, the photograph offers a datum, a “body of information” (Barthes, 1980: 26).  The photograph offers something existential; the moment in time where the objects were in front of the operator’s camera, where they were present in an existential sense.  Their presence in the photograph (once the photograph has been taken) is merely as objects of study in relationship to the spectator.

As a general description of the studium, it can be said that every photograph has studium in as much as the photograph always shows something or some things. Moreover, the studium is in the realm of the operator as it is a field loaded with objects, subjects, and things which were intended to be captured by the operator.  In other words, “the studium is ultimately always coded…” (Barthes, 1980: 51).  If I relate back to my own personal problem with photographs, my lack of interest or taking up solely a general interest in the majority of photographs, it is due primarily to the field of studium, which is of the order of liking.  This liking only produces somewhat of a desire, or what Barthes calls, a “half-desire” (Barthes, 1980: 26).  I do not invest myself in these photographs, nor do they invest in me.  I look at them quite quickly, and never find a desire or sense of loving toward them.  As I shuffled through a collection of my own photographs, many of these ‘types’ were skimmed over as though they could barely imprint themselves in my mind.  These photos have no punctum in them for me.

I would like to begin laying out Barthes proposition of the punctum with reference to his stance in Camera Lucida.  Barthes refuses to take an objective stance toward the photograph, as objectivity obscures some of the function of a photograph.  A subjective one is thus taken and Barthes’ observations are derived from this stance. I suppose that the function of punctum in a photograph would be obscured had he taken an objective approach to the photograph, however this is speculative.

Punctum is, for Barthes, the second element of a photograph which            is in co-presence with the studium.  It is an interpretive property; it is contingent upon the spectator, the subject gazing at the photograph.  It can also be described as the subjective quality of the photograph. Barthes describes the punctum as: “sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also a cast of the dice.  A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me” (Barthes, 1980: 27).  From Barthes’ initial description, it would seem that the punctum is necessarily something in the photograph that jumps out and pierces the spectator, however, it is a counter-intuitive concept as the punctum is a detail which reveals itself to a particular spectator due to their position as a cultural subject.  That is, by applying and projecting personal investments onto the photograph, the spectator finds punctum (Barthes, 1980: 55).  Furthermore, in contrast to the studium which is coded and intentional, the punctum is never coded and is unintentional in relation to the operator, the one who technically points and uses the camera to take the photograph.  Barthes (1980) illustrates:

 

Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly, intentional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful; it does not necessarily attest to the photographer’s art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object. (p. 47)

 

To refer back to my own photograph, the portrait of my grandparents shows them in each other’s arms.  I, as their grandson, somewhat know the who-what-when-where of the photograph as it was sent personally to me when they were on vacation in Arizona during the month of December. At any rate, that is not where my interests lie in this photograph.  I have carried this photograph in a frame for approximately thirteen years, and have always loved it.  The punctum for me is my grandfather’s facial expression, or more specifically, his lips.  His strong and perpetual reluctance to ever smile in his own portraits (I carry this same reluctance), for me, brings him to life in this photograph. Having passed away in 1999, this photograph, as did the photo of the woman in her Sunday best for Barthes, gives my grandfather, for me, “a whole life external to his portrait” (Barthes, 1980: 57).  For the purposes of this note, I will not continue describing my memories, sentiments, and longing for my grandfather’s presence, however, it is important to emphasize that his lips and expression is the punctum in the photograph for me. If I were to show this photograph to anyone else, most likely they would not take a great interest in it; they would not find punctum in it. Even if I explained to them what the punctum was for me, the explanation could not conjure up the same sensibilities required to add their own attachments to this particular photograph.  In a sense then, there is studium in every photograph to everyone, and there is punctum in every photograph, but not to everyone.  That is, this photograph has punctum for me, but most likely not to anyone else.  To emphasize again, the punctum is a subjective addition to the photograph, it is a very particular quality, or detail, that reveals itself quickly and pierces me.

Due to the scope of this note, it was not possible to delve completely into the ‘nature of the photograph’ as it relates to Death, authenticity, certification, and representation.  Nevertheless, in reference to punctum, I believe that Barthes would not have had the capacity to formulate a pedagogy and a language concerning punctum had he taken an objective approach.  Objectivity has at its base, detachment, an unwillingness to give in to bias, or to make bias known.  In a sense, punctum is dependent on personal bias or the subjectivity of the spectator, and without submitting to our biases, the photograph would not carry a cultural significance evidenced by the historical reliability, immutability, and permanence of the photograph in culture.

 

References

Barthes, Roland. (1980). Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang.

Cultural and Intersectional Analysis of Power: Gender, Race, and Class relations in “Strangers With Candy”

Popular television and media often perpetuates and reproduces racist, sexist, classist, and heterosexist ideologies without scrutiny.  For this report, I have chosen a television show which encodes gender, class, and race discourses in alternative ways.  I am investigating the television comedy series Strangers with Candy using intersectional analytic skills as well as the literature surrounding cultural representation in televisual discourses.  More specifically, this analysis pays particular attention to how identities are represented, constructed, and mediated in the visual and cinematic text through discourses.  Ultimately, this requires being attentive to how social relations are shaped by stereotypical identity narratives. As a cultural piece, this text uses dominant micro—representations of identity to ridicule oppressive systems of social power.  Moreover, by calling up these ‘familiar’ identity narratives meanwhile using parody and irony to ridicule these traditional conceptions of identity, the television show Strangers With Candy offers viewers multiple interpretations.
Providing an analysis of key scenes from three episodes, this paper argues that the television comedy Strangers with Candy is a complicitous critique of dominant systems of power in so far as it repeats dominant and hegemonic stereotypes of gender, race, and class identities.   At the same time as it calls these stereotypes up, it attempts to provide a window of critique for the viewer. Using parody and irony, the show is a satirical comment on these stereotypical representations of identity and subsequently exposes the oppressive qualities and unequal social relations produced by these dominant/subordinate systems of power in Western society.

Conceptual Framework
This paper draws on two primary and different theoretical areas: Stuart Hall’s lineage of work on cultural representation and feminist intersectional theory. This entails paying particular attention to the ways in which social relations are shaped, how they operate, and how they are being mediated in the context of the show (Hall, 1997).  It is also important to employ a comprehension of these visual images and narratives as loaded with representational scripts that can be read in various ways and from various frames of reference.
To contextualize the data for this paper, Stuart Hall’s works (1997) on cultural representation and televisual discourses are consulted. Hall explains: “Meaning is produced whenever we express ourselves in, make use of, consume or appropriate cultural ‘things’; that is, when we incorporate them in different ways into the everyday rituals and practices of daily life and in this way give them value or significance” (Hall, 1997: 3).  In other words, when we weave narratives or life stories through media, these narratives produce meanings by using cultural representations to signify and influence meaningful interpretations among viewers.  The production of meanings through cultural media(s) also regulate and organize our conduct and practices – they help to set the rules, norms and conventions by which social life is ordered and governed (Hall, 1997: 4).     What is important to remember for this particular analysis is the idea that meaning also gives us a sense of our own identities in relation to others. It allows us to reflect on who we are and with whom we ‘belong’, thus these meanings (produced through cinema) are tied up with ideas of how culture are used to mark out and maintain certain identities within and between groups (Hall, 1997: 3).  After reviewing this body of work, it is understood that within cinema: identities, peoples, the use of language, discourses, and other cultural scripts are used to ‘stand-in’ for and represent ideas about the broader culture outside of the media.  Moreover, televisual discourses are coded with meaning by show-makers, often encouraging a particular interpretation among viewers (Morley, 1992).  Hall (1997) and Morley (1992) offer us three positions from which televisual discourses are interpreted or ‘decoded’ by viewers.  The dominant-hegemonic position is characterized as operating inside the dominant code, thus decoding televisual messages in terms of a hegemonic position (Morley, 1992).  Second, a negotiated reading acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grant signification of discourse, while, at a more restricted and situational level, makes its own ground rules and operates with exceptions to the rule (Morley, 1992).  Third, the oppositional reading is exemplified by a viewer who recognizes the ‘preferred’ or ‘dominant’ code of the discourse but who chooses to decode meanings within an alternative frame of reference (Morley, 1992). This can also be articulated as the viewer ‘reading against the grain’ or recognizing key signs in the discourses which ultimately lead to an oppositional reading of the discourse.
Additionally, Hall illustrates the significance of the role of discourses in culture (1997: 6).  The discursive approach to understanding cultural texts is primarily concerned with produced meanings and the politics of representation. Hall (1997) refers to the discursive approach to analysis as means to understand how knowledge is constructed about a particular cultural practice or social topic. For the purposes of this television analysis, it is crucial to critically assess identity representations by examining the ways in which the televisual discourse portrays social difference and subject positions.  Some questions that I have raised are: Does the show use extreme stereotyping in order to perpetuate and encourage these stereotypes of identity? Alternatively, does it use extreme stereotyping in order to ‘call up’ these dominant ideologies for the viewer and subsequently attempt to challenge them?
As a complementary approach to cultural analysis, feminist intersectional analysis is also employed.  Stasiulus (2005: 36) explains intersectional theorizing:

Intersectional theorizing understood the social reality of women and men, and the dynamics of their social, cultural, economic, and political contexts to be multiply, simultaneously, and interactively determined by various significant axes of social organization.

Therefore, in order to provide an analysis of a cultural media script, it is crucial to understand the multiple ways that it may be interpreted, as well as the ways in which gender, race, and class operate as discourses to encourage a particular audience reading.

Data Collection
My data collection process involves pulling out quotes from specific scenes throughout three different episodes of the series.  Due to the fact that this analysis is focused on a cultural media text (TV series), a substantial amount of descriptive material is needed in order to translate the visual narrative into a textual analysis and also to provide an interpretation of the ‘data’.  The episodes A Price Too High For Riches, Feather In The Storm, and Let Freedom Ring were viewed several times. These three episodes were specifically chosen for analysis due to the fact that their central themes are focused explicitly within gender, race, and class discourses.

ANALYSIS/INTERPRETATION OF DATA

Episode One: A Price Too High For Riches
In the episode entitled A Price Too High For Riches (2000), the characters operate in relation to a central discourse of class. The episode begins when Jerry arrives at school at the same time as a rich girl named Melissa pulls over to park her expensive convertible car.  Other classmates run over to greet her excitedly: “Nice car, I can’t wait for your party.” Several classmates across the street jealously point out the expensive shoes Melissa is wearing while Jerry discouragingly contemplates her socio-economic position in relation to Melissa and the other “rich people.” At this point, Jerry’s social dilemma is presented as she becomes distraught by the fact that she is not as financially privileged as her other classmates. More specifically, this is where her classed identity and social position is measured in relation to others.
At this point, Jerry learns that wealth and the possession of these shoes (the episode refers to them “Flairs”) is the key to social acceptance and her ticket into the ‘elite’ class.  Moreover, Jerry later learns that she must find a way to own a pair of these shoes to be invited to Melissa’s party.  This is illustrated in a scene where Jerry confronts Melissa at school and asks her for an invitation to the party.  Melissa declines to invite her by blatantly stating: “Maybe if you can change into someone who can afford a pair of Flairs, then you can come to my party.”  Melissa then storms out of the room with her ‘wealthy’ entourage.
Once Melissa exits the scene, Jerry’s friend Orlando invites her to his party.  Jerry responds by calling him “Poorlando” and says that she will not attend because he is poor.  Bluntly, she says that she would rather go to Melissa’s party because she is rich. Orlando then tells her “Jerri, I don’t think you know what truly rich is,” and she replies, “well I know what it isn’t, and I’m looking at it.” This juxtaposition of rich/poor is a social commentary of class systems.  Not only does it illustrate the way class systems create dominant and subordinate social relations but it also emphasizes the extent to which these western constructions shape oppressive social experiences.  Jerri values Melissa over her only friend Orlando based on their financial privilege and classed identities.
Throughout the episode, Jerry’s social position is constantly compared to Melissa and other Flair-owners, and thus deemed subordinate.  She is overtly oppressed through dialogue in all of her social interactions and is relentlessly scrutinized for not owning a pair of Flairs. Jerri struggles as she ‘learns’ to measure her self-worth with her relative position in the socio-economic hierarchy.  Throughout the entire episode, Jerry struggles to find ways to make enough money to afford a pair of shoes as it would allow her to attend the party.  She threatens a girl in the washroom for money, deliberately falls down flights of stairs at school and unsuccessfully threatens Principal Blackman with a law suit, and even sells term papers to other students in order to make money.  Principal Blackman catches wind of her academic misconduct and informs her to “get a job like everyone else.”
The episode is scattered with moments where dominant representations of class identities are expressed overtly. The stereotypical representations of class identities serve to exacerbate and exaggerate the social outcomes of class divisions for the viewer.  For instance, the bell rings as Mister Noblet (played by Stephen Colbert) ends his history class by informing students: “Okay people, tomorrow we will continue our focus on the poor and why they are dangerous.”  Secondly, Jerry watches a Flairs television commercial where the advertisers state: “If you can’t afford a pair of flairs, you are a loser.”  The episode’s numerous overt statements about class call up dominant representations of identity and ultimately present them negatively through irony, parody, and humor. Furthermore, Jerri’s sadness and anger towards her situation indicates that these cultural stereotypes are portrayed as oppressive and discriminatory. In this sense, the viewer is positioned in Jerri’s oppressed narrative and thus opens up a window of critique against cultural stereotyping.
Near the end of the episode, Jerri ultimately decides to break into a local shoe store to steal a pair of Flairs.  While she does this, she looks at the camera and yells: “I want to party with rich people!”  The episode ends with a monologue from Jerri at the party: “Well I guess what I’ve learned this week is that you can be rich in friends, or family, or love, but the only thing that matters is being rich in money.  Oh and one more thing, the poor are a filthy thieving people. Goodnight.”  In the face of oppression, this monologue reveals her complicity with and ignorance of these systems of power.  Even though she points out how wrong and unjust they are, she still insists on maintaining them.  Moreover, this monologue makes a statement about how capitalism regulates social relations. This episode casts capitalism in a negative light by revealing her ignorance and complicity in maintaining these systems of domination and subordination.  By taking on the role of a subordinate class position, Jerri’s character provides a window of critique for the viewer, thus perhaps realizing that these class systems are oppressive.
When I watched this episode, I also asked the question: how do racial identities intersect with class identities?  In the episode, all of the people referred to as ‘rich’ happen to be white skinned individuals.  In contrast, people of colour are represented as ‘poor.’ Ultimately, class is racialized in the episode due to the fact that identities are not only represented in terms of their economic positions, but also in terms of their racial identities. White-skinned individuals in the episode are positioned in the ‘rich’ category while people of colour are represented as ‘poor’.  An important piece of the discourse is the fact that the characters point out racial difference.  The show does not simply represent racialized discourses, it has the characters point out their hegemonic and racialized relations and ridicules them by casting them in a negative light. The show’s persistence in ‘calling up’ or ‘pointing attention to’ in exaggerated ways also allows their socially constructed nature to be revealed to viewers, thus portraying them as unstable social categories. Furthermore, it allows viewers to see how capitalist discourses are influenced by racial stereotypes and racial categories.

Episode Two: Feather In The Storm
The episode entitled Feather In The Storm focuses on cultural standards of female beauty and how these standards are set by heterosexual male desire.  The representations of beauty in the episode reveal the extent to which women are made objects of male desire (Mulvey, 1975).  The episode commences when Jerri learns of a school-wide debate team tryout series.  The debate team recruiter and judge is Mister Knoblett (Stephen Colbert), therefore Jerri approaches him in his classroom to discuss her plans of trying out.  As Jerri enters the scene, the camera moves to her Knoblett and his large desk entirely covered in colossal bowls of deep fried foods and a deep fryer.  She tells him that she is interested in trying out for the debate team but he replies:

You don’t exactly have what I call a debater’s body.  Slim arguments come from slim hips.  Debating is more than just mental agility.  Ninety-five percent of debating is physical appearance.  It’s not what you say but how you look saying it. Look, you are welcome to try out for the team but I gotta tell you, at this weight, your arguments are going to come across a little puffy.

At this point, Jerri states “I don’t have a problem with my weight.”  “No Jerry, I have a problem with your weight. Understand?” he replies. “I understand,” Jerri says.  In this early scene of the episode, it has already become clear that body image, standards of beauty, and cultural ideas of ‘femininity’ and ‘feminine’ beauty come to the surface.  It also becomes the episode’s central discourse.  Mister Knoblett’s arbitrary decision to link the skills of debating to the feminine standards of beauty, including the double standard, goes to show how pervasive and stable the gender binary is within North American culture.  Also, when Jerri asks to have an onion ring, Mister Knoblett taps her on the hand and reiterates that she needs to lose weight to make the debate team. The juxtaposition of masculine eater and feminine non-eater in the scene coupled with the dialogue, calls up dominant and hegemonic ideas of masculinity and femininity; it makes them obvious.  However, Mister Knoblett’s arbitrary decision to make “slim” a prerequisite for debating, reveals how the gender binary operates in North American culture and destabilizes it in its ridiculousness and discriminatory nature.
The next scene shows Jerri opening her locker to obtain some items for her class.  One of Jerri’s classmate approaches her and they proceed to throw remarks at each other regarding their weight or ‘obesity.’  Her colleague is male, and appears to be at least three times heavier than Jerri.  He says to her “Let’s race! Last one to the caf is a big fat slob.”  The camera shows them running down the hall in slow motion for approximately ten seconds.  This mise-en-scene element of slowing down the camera adds an extra effect and emphasis on the race.  At this point, her friend wins and yells “I win, you are the big fat slob!” while everyone in the hall proceeds to laugh at her.  Jerri looks overwhelmed as she stands motionless.  She looks at the camera and says “I’m a big fat slob” three times.  Each consecutive time she states this, her facial expression turns into an increasingly ashamed grimace.  Even though her friend is many times larger, and appears to be the exaggerated representation of obesity, she ultimately loses the race.  This race could be interpreted as the double standard of feminine beauty in relation to male beauty.  No one scrutinizes her male friend for being obese but she is constantly being reminded that she is not skinny and beautiful enough for her fellow classmates.
In one of the final scenes of the episode, Jerri stands at the podium to make a rebuttal in the debate tryouts.  At this point, she has clearly lost a large amount of weight in a short amount of time and does not appear to be in healthy condition.  Once she finishes presenting her argument, she faints to the ground in front of classmates as well as Mister Knobblet, who is still eating in front of the class.  This scene ends when Jerri awakens from her faintness to be greeted by Mister Jellyneck, the school’s ‘sensitive art teacher.’ Mister Jellyneck informs Jerri that he has summoned her family to the school in order to discuss the issue.   Jerri’s stepmother exclaims, “We came as soon as we felt like it” and her family enters the scene.
Once her family has finished expressing their feelings toward the issue to Mister Jellyneck, they ask her: “Jerri, what is it you want?”  Jerri upsettingly replies “My whole life, all I have ever wanted was some attention. I mean, that’s the whole reason why I wanted to make the stupid debate team.” Mister Jellyneck then says “Go on Jerri, we’re listening.”  At this point, Jerri smiles and says “well…you…are all listening!” Her family yells “Yes!” Jerri’s epiphany is expressed as “Why, I don’t have to make the debate team, all I have to do is stare myself to the brink of death to get your attention! [laughter]”
In each episode of the show, Jerri learns a moral tale. In Feather in the Storm, she blatantly learns the cultural standards of feminine beauty.  Her narrative on the way to learning this lesson shows the extent to which this construct is not positive for women.  These hegemonic beauty constructs serve to constrain and negatively impact women’s lives.  The interesting point here is the fact that the show exaggeratingly reveals these constructs, along with their unequal social relations and negative lived realities.  Simultaneously, the episode portrays oppressive gender constructs as a means to offer viewers a window of critique, thus the opportunity to scrutinize and oppose them.  The episode’s juxtaposition of men as regulators and controllers of women’s bodies for their own desire with the degeneration of women’s health and sense of self ultimately ridicules these real social constructs outside of the cultural script.  However, there is an opportunity for the use of exaggeration and irony to run the risk of being interpreted literally.  In this case, the discourses are interpreted through a dominant-hegemonic frame of reference, thus reproducing and potentially reinforcing those ways of thinking and stereotypical notions of identity.

Episode Three: Let Freedom Ring
Let Freedom Ring, the third episode for analysis begins by showing an anonymous person spray-painting a racial slur (what is referred to as the “N word”) on the wall in the school’s main hallway.  Shortly after, students swarm around the word in shock while Principal Blackman orders everyone to head back to their respective classes.  The episode’s central plot is Principal Blackman’s search to determine the person who spray-painted this racially oppressive word.  Principal Blackman hires a friend and former councilor to aid him in his search for the culprit.  Throughout this search, the characters operate in explicit and implicit racialized discourses.
Paul, the first person to see the word on the wall is ultimately accused of spray painting it.  Jerri quickly befriends him in Mister Jellyneck’s art class: “Jerri, I’m worried everyone’s going to think that I’m the racist!” Jerri replies, “I can tell you aren’t a racist, and you know how? Because I’m not a racist, and that’s all that matters Paul, alright?” Paul then asks her what she is drawing, she says “It’s a Chinamen, the buck teeth make me laugh.” The contradictions inherent in Jerri’s response to Paul implies an interpretation of racial ignorance and a dominant-hegemonic or racist standpoint.  It becomes more clear throughout the episode that media professionals intentionally used juxtaposition and contradiction to cast racist discourses in a negative light.
Later in the episode, another contradictory and racist statement from Jerri is presented. Orlando, the only person of colour in the student community, and Jerri’s only friend approaches her to talk about the ‘incident’.  At this point, Orlando is upset and distraught by the racial slur and act of hate.  Jerri responds to Orlando by saying: “I don’t’ even know if racism exists anymore, but I do know this.  You are very small. You come from a country with a brutal and unforgiving penal system run by savage animals, much like Brazil. But you are my friend, and even if I’m spending more time with other people, it only means I’m spending less time with you, alright? Okay? “  Orlando replies, “Ok, Jerri.”
The use of irony in this scene presents Jerri as blatantly racist.  The juxtaposition of her telling him racism does not exist immediately before she judges his identity and self-worth based on racial stereotypes is an ironic statement.  The use of irony ridicules her ignorance of her own racism, and the racism of others around her.  She treats Orlando as ‘racialized other’ and ultimately silences him.  His agreeing response illustrates how powerful racism silences marginalized and disenfranchised individuals.  The use of irony
in colonial and racist discourse allows viewers to easily ridicule and critique the dominant-hegemonic viewpoint, thus encouraging an oppositional reading of the racial discourse.
In a later scene, Paul is invited to Jerri’s house to work on homework together.  Paul sees a bag with a black paint can in Jerri’s room and discovers that Jerri is the person who wrote the hateful word.  Angry with Jerri, Paul leaves her residence and the next scene begins with Paul being interrogated by Principal Blackman and the former councilor.  At this point, Jerri storms in the room and claims “I did it!” Paul asks, “Why did you write such a hateful word on the wall?” “I meant it to be a parable…a pun…a riddle,” Jerri replies.  Realizing that these are not legitimate reasons for her behaviour and act of racial violence she says to Principal Blackman, “Well I guess, and I’m just stabbing in the dark here, and I don’t want this to affect our relationship, but, I don’t like black people.”  She then turns to Paul and says “I’m so sorry Paul, I didn’t mean to hurt you.  I really care for you.” “I just find it odd that such a racist would care for a person of colour” Paul replies.  “I don’t, I care for you” Jerri says.  “Jerri, I’m a person of colour.” “What? Well…how?” Paul explains, “Both of my parents are people of colour, my white skin is just a recessive trait.”  Jerri concludes with “I guess I do like black people, it just took a white one to prove it to me.”  The former councilor, who is African-American laughs and says “Well Jerri, I guess it was a parable after all.” At this point, Paul, Jerri, Principal Blackman and the former councilor laugh hysterically with each other.
The episode Let Freedom Ring very clearly introduces a central and racialized discourse.  Moreover, it is an extremely offensive way for racism to be confronted in the school setting of the show.  Even though everyone participates in racist discourses throughout the episode, they all try to find out ‘who the racist is.”  Not only does this episode show the extent to which racism operates at many levels, it also reveals the ignorance and pervasiveness of racism and racialized discourses.  Even though the characters believe that they need to bring ‘the racist’ to justice, they all participate in racist conversations and discourses without confronting each other or calling themselves on their racism.  The episode makes many racial juxtapositions and uses irony to destabilize the idea that race is a fixed social category.  All of the characters come to be involved in the search for “the racist” but are all inherently racist themselves.  When the opportunity arises, characters never oppose Jerri’s racist comments.  On the surface this is problematic, however, it seems more likely that the episode is using this exaggeration to destabilize these hegemonic notions of racial identity.  Much like the other episodes which discussed gender and class, Let Freedom Ring offers viewers the chance to interpret how racism and racial ignorance operates in extreme ways.  By juxtaposing dialogue of ‘I am no racist” with the characters being blatantly racist, the episode ridicules and undermines their belief that they are not racist.  It does this by articulating what is “normally” signified, but actually means the opposite.  Therefore, the show’s use of irony (juxtaposition), and parody (exaggeration) of racialized discourse encourages viewers to decode within an alternative or oppositional frame of reference to the discourse.

Conclusions
As a comedy, the show Strangers with Candy calls up dominant and stereotypical representations of gender, race, class, and sexuality by placing its characters in problematic relationships that operate based on sterotypical classed, gendered, racial, and sexual identities.  At the same time as these characters operate to maintain these social hierarchies by taking part in white surpremacist, patriarchal, and capitalist diaogue, the characters undermine and destabilize these constructions through the use of irony, parody, and satire.  The show’s use of these literary elements and figures of speech allow viewers to interpret these discourses within an alternative or oppositional frame of reference.  Although Strangers With Candy could have represented identity in less offensive and oppressive ways, I argue that it exaggerates these stereotypes in order to have viewers examine and investigate their own racism, sexism, and classism.
Secondly, much like the typical early 1990’s popular “after-school special” theme, Jerri Blank (played by Amy Sedaris) is the central character who, in each episode, struggles to learn moral lessons.  Not only are they moral lessons, but each lesson is explicitly focused around issues of gender, class, race, and class systems.  By ‘debunking’ these identity stereotypes through Jerri’s moral narratives, the television show opens up an opportunity for the viewer to realize that identities are not static and fixed, but rather fluid and diverse.  Due to the fact that the viewer is encouraged to position themselves with Jerri’s narrative, the way her that narrative is constructed produces meaning and thus lends itself to particular positions or ‘readings’ among viewers.  The critical elements of this television show are:: Jerri’s complicity in stereotypical ideas of identity, her downfall as a result of ‘learning the wrong lesson’ of the moral tale due to this complicity, the constant reminder that social relations are hostile due to oppressive power systems, and finally, the relentless use of mockery, insult, and parody as a challenge to the contemporary dominant social relations in Western society.
In conclusion, the television series is a complicitous critique of white supremacist, patriarchal, and classist discourses.  However, complicitous critiques run the risk of doing nothing more than reinforcing and reproducing these stereotypes and oppressive raced, classed, and gendered discourses if viewers do not understand the use of irony, parody, or satire.  It does, however, offer and encourage viewers to interpret these discourses as oppressive, ridiculous, and wrong.  Therefore, uising Stuart Hall’s (1997) work on  encoding, decoding, and cultural representation, as well as feminist intersectional theorizing of race, class, and gender, Strangers With Candy is complicitous with dominant-hegemonic ways of knowing the world.  Furthermore, it is complicitous in so far as it attempts to call up stereotypical representations of identiy for viewers and subsequently encourages them to oppose these hegemonic systems of power and oppressive social relations.  On a personal note, I enjoy watching Strangers With Candy.  I do not often watch any television due to the recent onslaught of ‘reality’ tv and the flooding of ‘terror’ discourse on most networks which most definitely perpetuate racist, sexist, and classist ideologies.  The majority of these shows do not tend to be slightly critical or even offer viewers the opportunity to be critical.  For a queer person like me, Strangers With Candy is an exception as I find pleasure in televisual discourses which ridicule the systems of power which oppress, constrain, and marginalize individuals.

References

Daiva Stasiulis, Feminist intersectional theorizing. In Valeria Zawilski and Cynthia Levine-Rasky (eds.), Inequality in Canada: A Reader on the Intersections of Gender, Race, and Class Oxford University Press: Toronto, 2005, pp 36-62.

Hall, Stuart. (1997) The work of representation. In Stuart Hall (Ed.), Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. London: Sage Publications, pp 13-74.

Hall, Stuart. (1997) The spectacle of the ‘other’. In Stuart Hall (Ed.), Representation: Cultural representation and signifying practices. London: Sage Publications, pp 223-290.

Morley, David (1992) Television, audiences and cultural studies. London and New York: Routledge.

Media References

“A Price Too High For Riches” Strangers With Candy: The Complete Second Season. Writ. Paul Dinello, Amy Sedaris & Nicholas Stoller. Dir. Peter Lauer. Comedy Central. 3 July. 2000. DVD. Paramount Pictures, 2006.

“Feather In The Storm” Strangers With Candy: The Complete First Season. Writ. Paul Dinello & Amy Sedaris. Dir. Danny Leiner. Comedy Central. 28 June. 1999. DVD. Paramount Pictures, 2006.

“Let Freedom Ring” Strangers With Candy: The Complete First Season. Writ. Paul Dinello, Amy Sedaris & Mitch Rouse. Dir. Peter Lauer. Comedy Central. 21 June. 1999. DVD. Paramount Pictures, 2006

Premise reading of Gloria Anzaldua’s “La Conciencia de la Mestiza”: Life in the Borderlands

Throughout the duration of this course, we have explored many streams of feminist theory, some more historical pieces, and others more contemporary.  Gloria Anzaldua, in particular, is among the many feminist theorists that move into the realm o
f addressing post-modern identities.  In her articulation of a new emerging consciousness in La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness, Anzaldua posits the construction of identities as multiple, hybrid, and more specifically created as a result of the Borderlands.  This paper explores Anzaldua’s proposition of the new consciousness through discussions of the Borderlands and its implications for ‘identity,’ mediating social relations, revolutionary social change, and its wider relevance to feminist theory.
“From this racial, ideological, cultural, and biological cross-pollinization, an ‘alien’ consciousness is presently in the making — a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer. It is a consciousness of the Borderlands. (Anzaldua, 1987: 420)”

To begin to tease out the ideas inherent in this quote from Anzaldua, a description of the Borderlands is essential.  The Borderland is not completely physical, and not completely abstract.  It is any space where multiple identities, histories, and cultures overlap.  Moreover, the Borderlands are any space where those in the lower, middle, and upper classes approximate each other, where people of different races live together socially, and where cultures merge.  Furthermore, it is where cultures currently collide and is the result of the “coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference (Anzaldua, 1987: 421).” Anzaldua describes la mestiza’s internal conflict created by the convergence of cultures, ambiguity, and struggle in the Borderlands.  Often torn between incompatible cultures, la mestiza struggles to distinguish which collectivity that she belongs to. Torn somewhere in the mix between two or more histories, cultures, sets of values, and ways of being in the world, at different moments in time, la mestiza is forced to choose between them but is never quite a part of either; she is outside of culture.  This choice not only renders other parts of her identity and culture invisible, it positions her in one box, one category (defined by the dominant culture) into a dualistic Western way of thinking; either as oppressed or oppressor, on the offense or defense.
As a result of her gender, la mestiza is placed in opposition to masculinit. As a result of her sexual identity, she is placed in opposition to her racial identity. Moreover, her indigenous identity places her in contradiction to her Spanish identity. For Anzaldua, the new consciousness arising out of this struggle over borders creates a non-dualistic way of thinking and being.  This new consciousness transcends the boundaries constructed by Western myths such as: subject/object, white/colored, male/female, heterosexual/queer, etc, and is thus hybrid (Anzaldua, 1987: 422).  Anzaldua’s mention of identity as hybrid can be understood as similar to Donna Haraway’s (1991) metaphor of the cyborg for post-modern identity.   Both Anzaldua and Haraway argue for a cricual recognition among feminists of those instances and spaces where the boundaries embedded in binaries, established by dominant Western myth, are transgressed and breached.  This is a recurring theoretical stance in post-modern feminist writings: that revolutionary social change will only unfold through a ‘massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness. (Anzaldua, 1987: 422).
As was previously mentioned, the Borderland is a space where cultures collide, often with incompatible values, opposing histories, and contradictory experiences.  It can be difficult to be an individual, or member, of several social, classed, gendered, racialized groups but never feeling quite at home in either. An example of the contradictions of which she speaks is through a brief discussion of the identities of women of colour.  For instance, if an African-American woman advocates for women’s rights, does this mean that femininity and the struggle against gender oppression takes precedence over her racial identity and her struggle against colonization and racial oppression?  The inverse question can also be asked.  If an African-American woman of colour takes a political stance for the end of her racial oppression, does this mean that she devalues her experience as being oppressed by her gender identity?  Anzaldua makes a plea to feminists to bridge identities and to understand identities as always being constituted in the Borderlands.  The sorting out the contradictions embedded between these social identities requires a tolerance for ambiguity (Anzaldua, 1987: 421).  The new consciousness, through the transcendence of dualistic thinking, is capable of embracing these contradictions and creating new culture with ‘a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and the planet. (Anzaldua, 1987: 422).’ Creating this new culture requires a rethinking of the stances embedded in the oppressor/oppressed binary frame, that is, developing a consciousness which is neither against oppressive culture with rage, or in a state of defense in shame and silence brought on by the rejection of oppressive culture.  Moreover, Anzaldua proposes that we all live in the Borderlands; the space between being inside or outside of culture. Butler (1990) would perhaps use the language of not having to choose between being intelligible or unintelligible, as either being on the outside or inside of culture.
Anzaldua discusses the importance of shifting from a convergent thinking that is always attempting to move forward toward a single, unified, political goal to divergent thinking which embraces a whole, inclusive perspective (421) The new consciousness, similar to Haraway’s articulation of the cyborg (1991), is one which breaks down the convergent thinking of categories and dualisms and instead embraces difference, contradiction and partiality.  This is what makes Anzaldua’s argument strong, inclusive, and critical.  It is inclusive insofar as it understands identity as being beyond dualisms and Western binary constructs.  We all live in the Borderlands and instead of responding to the collision of culture by taking a stance on either side of the border, rendering us part of these Western constructs, we can include and embrace our identities as contradictory, different, and ambiguous.  This supercedes the need to identify either as oppressed or take on the position of the oppressor.
Like Haraway, Anzaldua goes against the current trajectory of feminism(s) and her aim is to redirect feminism. She uses some of Butler’s concepts and language of inside and outside of culture to contextualize the Borderlands as a space where cultures merge. Moreover, Anzaldua makes a plea for the recognition of the post-modern human. These feminist, post-modernist and post-structuralist theories are all working toward redirecting feminism to make it more inclusive.  They are inclusive in that they pinpoint or try to make visible a new consciousness that is freed from the power and value systems embedded in Western myths and constructs. Furthermore, through la mestiza’s ‘cultural baggage’, Anzaldua posits that a social revolution cannot emerge out of a totalizing force that unites all individuals, but only from a new consciousness predicated on the understanding of identities as partial, contradictory, and capable of transcending the rigid cultural boundaries placed superimposed on them.
Anzaldua also takes up masculinity as a fragmented identity and recognizes that new masculinities emerge out of the transmission of cultures in the Borderlands.  Masculinity is often essentially equated with men and Anzaldua disagrees due to the fact that it essentializes all men and pits them in juxtaposition to women. More specifically, she articulates how queer men illustrate the extent to which the boundaries between male/female and masculine/feminine have been transcended.  By embracing the ‘feminine,’ queer men illuminate the common problematic propensity within feminism to situate and categorize men and masculinity solely as oppressors or participating in a force of oppression.  Anzaldua also emphasizes the need for all racialized cultures to acknowledge and respect those who identify as queer as there is queer in all cultures (Anzaldua, 1987: 424).

Anzaldua’s understanding of identity as fluid and contradictory while emphasizing the intersections of race, class, gender within and between culture through the Borderlands shows the extent to which her theory of a new consciousness is heading in a more inclusive and holistic direction for feminism.  Moreover, like Butler (1990) and Haraway (1991), she is blatantly against the idea of an inner essence or an inner core identity and argues for a divergent way of thinking about identity as being constituted in a plurality of experiences, histories, and cultures. Identities, or people rather, learn to live in all cultures and in the Borderlands by not having to choose between cultures.  Her argument is such that the only way to revolutionize and create social change is if the individual and collective consciousness actively breaks down and uproots dualistic thinking (Anzaldua, 1987: 422).  As opposed to either being inside of oppressive culture or on the constitutive outside, Anzaldua understands identity as being completely immersed in the Borderlands, the space where cultures not only merge and collide but also where difference, diversity, and contradiction is celebrated.  The consciousness of the Borderlands neither knows or upholds boundaries. Ultimately, it is in a constant state of ambiguity, and this ambiguity must be tolerated.
Even though Anzaldua writes from a different place than other theorists like Haraway and Butler, it seems as though she influences and is influenced by their post-modern writings of identity.  This realm of feminist theory attempts to not only move feminism forward, but to redirect it in a more inclusive direction by addressing difference and drawing attention to the ways in which identities have shifted in the late twentieth century. Within this sphere of feminist thought, it is crucial for feminism(s) to embrace the contradictory identities and cultures that emerge from the Borderlands which are made visible only through seeing passed the dominant Western myths and constructs put in place by the pervasiveness of modernity. Only then can we see a way out of oppression through social revolution.  It has to occur between people and individual frames of consciousness; having a consciousness of the Borderlands.

References

Anzaldua, G. (1987). La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness. In W. Kolmar & F. Bartowski (Eds.), Feminist Theory: A Reader (pp. 420-426)

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. In W. Kolmar & F. Bartowski (Eds.), Feminist Theory: A Reader (pp. 496-504)

Haraway, D. (1991). Chapter Eight: A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology & Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Donna Haraway Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.  London: Routledge (pp. 149-182)

Premise reading of Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto”: Epistemology and the Metaphor of the Post-human

Donna Haraway’s ideas from her work A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology
& Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century  (1991) have been highly influential in contemporary feminist, socialist, scientific, and philosophical discourses.  Moreover, Haraway’s articulation and theorization of the cyborg is created and done through fundamental critiques of the epistemological underpinnings of socialist-feminism, radical feminism, and Marxism/Marxist-feminism. An important method of approaching theoretical works is to tease out the ideas or theories that inform arguments and theoretical stances.  Using premise as an approach to theory, this paper argues that Haraways’ critiques of Marxian, and feminist epistemologies are crucial in building her own theoretical positioning of the cyborg as a metaphor for the post-human.
It is important to commence with a brief exposition concerning Haraway’s delineation of three critical boundary breakdowns which make her argument for the cyborg possible.  The first boundary that is breached with the advent and advancement of twentieth and twenty-first century technologies is the often dichotomous distinction made between animals and humans.  Haraway uses the blending of animal and human bodily processes in medical technologies, the emergence of animal rights which illustrate that there are human affinities toward other living organisms, and the emphasis of human dependency on animals as a starting point to show how this boundary is breached.  These examples demonstrate how the boundary between human and animal is broken, and the distinction between them is not a clear cut line, but rather is a dynamic relationship consisting of the blending of both animals and humans.
Secondly, Haraway proposes that the boundary between organism and machine has been thoroughly breached.  Moreover, what she calls ‘pre-cybernetic machines’ (152) were machines that could mock human behaviour, but could not develop or establish its own autonomous functions.  A cyborg manifesto was written in the late twentieth century, and Haraway emphasizes that at this point in time, cybernetic machines are disturbingly autonomous.  The ambiguity as to whether or not these cybernetic technologies can be coded as natural, artificial, self-developing or externally designed illustrates how the traditional distinction between organism and machine is fluid, and not easily determined.  Ultimately, this argument proposes that the organism/machine binary is crossed or not as intact as we previously understood it to be.
Finally, miniature micro-electronic devices, microchips, and the pervasive portability of late twentieth century machines shifts our understanding of machines as simply physical.  “Miniaturization has changed our experience of mechanism (Haraway, 1991: 153).”  Surrounded by wireless internet, endless electromagnetic and electronic waves, and portable communication devices, coupled with increasingly miniaturized and portable technologies, the extent to which these technologies shape our realities can easily be taken-for-granted. The non-physical manifestations and implications of our technologies render them highly ubiquitous yet largely invisible.  Haraway asserts that technologies are beyond the realm of the physical, and the distinction between physical and non-physical is often taken for granted in the discourse of technology and science and thus must be understood as being capable of breaking down.

“Beyond either the difficulties or the contributions in the argument of any one author, neither Marxist nor radical feminist points of view have tended to embrace the status of a partial explanation’ both were regularly constituted as totalities (Haraway, 1991: 160).”

This is a passage from Haraway that deduces her critique of Marxian and radical feminist epistemologies.  I will go through to explain how she comes to this critique. Initially, Haraway critiques Marxist tools of analysis, largely on the basis that they are reductive in their analysis of the gendered division of labour.  Marxism, derived largely from the work of Karl Marx, is deeply interested, perhaps too deeply, in an analysis of social relations only in relation to means of production and labour in order to explain class structure. Class structure in Marxian analysis is understood only within this frame of the workers being subjects who are alienated from their labour.  She extends her critique by focusing more on the rise of socialist-feminism as a response to Marxian ignorance of gender relations inherent in class structures.  Even though she identifies as socialist-feminist herself, Haraway’s argument is ironic but important. Haraway asserts that socialist-feminism uses Marxian tools of analysis to advance a more comprehensive agenda and view of labour.  It did this particularly by including what some women do as work, namely the importance of social reproduction.  In turn, the glue that unifies women in a socialist-feminist frame is predicated on the Marxian ontological and epistemelogical structure of labour.  That is, to understand gender, women are seen only in relation to class structures, labour, and wages. As was previously alluded to, women’s ontologies in socialist-feminism is: subjects who are alienated from the labour they perform and produce. At the heart of this epistemology and ontology, Haraway argues, is a vision of unifying women through their experiences of being subjects who are alienated from their labour.  Haraway asserts that if the discourses of science and technology are taken seriously, that the totalizing tendencies of Marxism and socialist feminism to unify women’s experiences to create social change is dangerous.  The boundary breakdowns illustrate how the cyborg is partial, often having contradictory experiences, therefore, what is required of epistemology is not unifying experience, but being open to understanding partial and contradictory ones.
Haraway then makes an argument for the epistemological case of radical feminism stating that the subject who is alienated from labour in class structures, as is the case in Marxism and socialist-feminism, is replaced with a sex/gender structure.  As she relates her discussion to Catherine MacKinnon, Haraway asserts that within radical feminist epistemology, women are understood only through their ontology as objects of male desire or sexual appropriation. In this sense, radical feminism makes a different plea, one that looks toward a different goal or epistemological achievement.  Furthermore, it does this by replacing socialist-feminist’s structure of labour with a specific focus on sex/gender systems.  Different than unifying women in their relation to the self’s labour, radical feminist analysis unifies women’s experience in their relation to being an object of another’s desire.  For Haraway, this is somewhat even more dangerous; seeing women as objects erases women’s voices and agency in the social field.  Therefore, Haraway critiques radical feminist epistemology on the basis that at its origins, women are unified as objects of desire, thus totalizing experience and not allowing room for partiality; not allowing room for experiences which blur the boundaries of Western dichotomous constructions.
The Western constructions that I speak of are more clearly articulated in Haraways’ critique of ecofeminism(s).  Referring specifically to Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Susan Griffin, two of which we have explored in the course, Haraway claims that in their relation to the organic through ecofeminism and notions of feminist paganism, they reduce their vision of experience and bodies.   Ecofeminisms paradigmatic position props organism and machine up against each other and assumes that all organic realities are separate from those that are technologically implicated.  Moreover, Haraway claims that within this theoretical position, an oppositional ideology is created with regards to technologies. That is, embracing the organic creates an opposition toward technological and scientific discourses.  For Haraway, this is also problematic as it largely ignores how social relations are mediated by technology and science, not solely organicism (Haraway, 1991: 174).
Haraway’s previous explanation of the ways in which the boundary between machine and organism is breached further strengthens her critique of ecofeminism. Ontology needs to be understood as being influenced by relations and experiences constituted in the blurry area of this boundary.  Furthermore, her primary argument is that these social relations and experiences also need to be deconstructed or theorized while paying particular attention to how they are mediated by late twentieth-century technologies.  If the boundary between organism and machine is breached by the ‘nature’ (for the lack of a better term) of twentieth-century technologies relative to those developed by modernity, epistemology cannot rely on one or the other; machine or organism, but must be capable of illuminating experiences, pleasures, and power that arise out of those instances where the boundary is breached.
Haraway, with reference to Zoe Sofia, asserts that the hierarchical dualisms which construct and underpin discourse in the Western world have been ‘techno-digested.’ Dichotomies such as the private/public, mind/body, animal and human, organism and machine are all ideologically in question due to science and technology yet they are still maintained A struggle but important goal for socialist-feminists, among others, is coding the self that can be assembled and reassembled.  This point was articulated while utilizing what Richard Gordon has named ‘the homework economy.’  The homework economy includes the feminization of labour, the intensification of home-based and informal sector work, and the disproportionate representation of women in this economy.  For example, millions of women everyday work out of their own homes in the interest of corporate power and profits.  Not having to uphold worker’s rights or international human rights laws to women in the homework economy, corporate interests, with the necessary aid of science and technology, have been able to exploit women workers, particularly in the economic Global South, by blurring the boundaries of private/public and formal/informal sector labour.  Haraway’s illustration of the homework economy is quite predictable considering she identifies as socialist-feminist.  At any rate, a critical goal for feminists is to code the cyborg, that is, the post-modern human that is capable of being assembled and reassembled as a result of twentieth century technology (Haraway, 1991: 163).
That all being said, for Haraway, the cyborg is a by-product of modernity, mediated and constructed by technology.  Moreover, the cyborg is not binary, but hybrid. The boundaries breached by the cyborg must be embraced, not erased.  The technologies, communications, and micro-electronics of the twentieth century give the cyborg the capacity to transgress the boundaries constructed by Western myths, thus the self should be coded as partial and contradictory . There are significant and important powers, pleasures, and experience that arise and emerge from the cyborg’s ability to transcend those boundaries. This is a primary cause of concern for Haraway, which is why she ultimately critiques Marxian, socialist-feminist, radical feminist, and ecofeminist epistemological frameworks.  It is interested to note how Haraway does not completely deny the influence or gains made by these approaches.  She is quite appreciative and expresses being vitally indebted to writers, scholars, and theorists in these areas.  The claim that we cannot build effective theories of experience while largely ignoring the social relations mediated by and constituted in science and technology is a highly important and legitimate claim to make. Moreover, her criticism of critiques grounding a solid political epistemology is based on the failure of Marxist, socialist-feminist, radical feminist, and ecofeminist standpoints to recognize the post-modern human (cyborg) as hybrid and capable of partial and contradictory experiences. Haraway is fair in balancing the scales of appreciation and critique of these standpoints.  She critiques them (sometimes even from the inside, yet recognizes, acknowledges, and appreciates their efforts, initiatives, and gains made in social, political, philosophical, scientific circles.
It was the intention of this paper, considering the scope, to provide a premise reading of A Cyborg Manifesto while attempting to illuminate a few of Haraway’s critiques of Marxist, and feminist tools of analysis.  In turn, the articulations made in these critiques were fundamental for Haraway to create an argument for the cyborg as hybrid, partial, and contradictory.  It is agreed that the social relations mediated and constructed by late twentieth-century technology are often ignored or difficult to notice considering the tools that are available and accessible. One can only help wonder how Haraway’s influential manifesto will be contextualized with twenty-first century technologies, particularly in the age of post-modernity.

References

Haraway, D. (1991). Chapter Eight: A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology & Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Donna Haraway Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.  London: Routledge (pp. 149-182)

Butler and Halberstam on ‘Reverse Discourse,’ Resistance, and the Subversion of ‘Femininity’ and ‘Masculinity’

Gender identity, categorization, and resistance remain highly contested concepts and terrains within feminist theory and conversation.  Not only do theorists draw on others to make claims, they also use previous thought in order to formulate new theories and to support their own arguments.  This paper focuses primarily on a sub-chapter of Judith Butler’s seminal work Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), and Judith Halberstam’s sub-chapter of the influential work Female Masculinity entitled: Transgender Butch/FTM Border Wars and the Masculine Continuum (1998).  Moreover, this paper intends to contrast these two works by seeing Halberstam through Butler’s idea of gender as performative. Although Halberstam operates within the realm of Butler’s understanding of gender as performative, we can ascertain a fundamental disagreement between their attempts to discern how resistance can be formed against traditional understandings of ‘masculinity, ‘femininity’, and the female/male binary attached to them. More importantly, Butler ties herself to an understanding of gender through deconstruction and a move away from identification, meanwhile Halberstam believes that the diversification of categories of identification can create a Foucaultian ‘reverse discourse.’  This paper intends to explore these theoretical analyses of gender identification in order to trace not only the similarities, but also the differences between Butler and Halberstam’s approaches to resistance of compulsory heterosexuality, identification, and gender identities.
In order to gain a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding of Butler and Halberstam’s theories and works, it was essential to look toward other theorists and critics in assessing Gender Trouble and Female Masculinity.  Two critical texts entitled inside/out: lesbian theories, gay theories (Butler, 1991), and Gender and sexuality: critical theories, critical thinkers (Beasley, 2005) were utilized in order to contextualize Butler and Halberstam’s approaches and to also gain a broader sense of the thought behind their theories.  Moreover, an interview with Judith Halberstam entitled Masculinity without men (Gender Journal Online, 1999), was analyzed and proved to be quite useful as Halberstam explores her seminal work Female Masculinity.
Firstly, this paper does not intend on drawing a linear or concrete pattern of similarities and differences between Butler and Halberstam.  Due to the overlapping, interweaving, and complexity occurring between their thoughts and theories, it is essential to provide an argument that allows for flexibility as opposed to rigidity.  Having stated this, it is safe to remark that both theorists employ non-essentialist, non-natural perspectives of gender, masculinity, and femininity (Beasley, 2005: 238).  In addition, Judith Butler is a feminist philosopher and Halberstam is a literary scholar who writes primarily within queer and gender studies.  It is quite evident that this distinction underpins their writing styles, thoughts, and theoretical backgrounds.  That is, Butler tends to be much more abstract in her thought and dense in her writing, whereas Halberstam tends to be more accessible and ‘grounded’ or ‘materialist’ in her analysis of gender.
It is important to note that Michel Foucault’s influential thinking underpins their approaches to greater and lesser extents.  Even though they rely on works by other critical thinkers, I will focus primarily on a discussion of their relationship to Foucaultian concepts such as ‘reverse discourse,’ ‘internalization’ and resistance in order to propose a framework of Butler’s concept and subsequently expose the ways in which Halberstam draws on but still differs from Butler’s understanding of resistance.
Butler employs Foucault’s work on the ‘prisoner,’ ‘the body as prison,’ and panoptic internalization in Discipline and Punish in order to further radicalize ideas of gender.  In this postmodern understanding of the body, there is no true self or essential foundation where the inner core of the self rests. Kristeva and Young strengthen Butler’s argument as culturally-constituted taboos are inscribed on the body to create the ‘abject,’ the ‘other,’ who is ultimately bound by the boundaries of the body, established and “maintained for the purposes of social regulation and control (Butler, 1990: 499).” Following from this Foucaultian account of internalization which establishes the binary distinction of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ spaces of the body, Butler posits gender as a performance and enactment of power, rather than an expression of the ‘true self.’  Butler (1990) articulates:

Words, acts, gesture and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause (500).

For Butler, these enactments are and must be performative because “the identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means (Butler, 1990: 500).”  In turn, these acts and gestures create the illusion of a corresponding interior gender core, and she argues that this illusion is “discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality (Butler, 1990: 500).” Butler’s theorizing of gender in Gender Trouble (1990) destabilizes the notion of gender as fixed and the ‘self-evidence’ of the body as showing the essential ‘truth’ or ‘inner-core’ of gender.  Ultimately, this theory also destabilizes the gender binary female/male as natural, and in turn, Butler sees it as socially constructed and posits gender as performative.
Even though both Butler and Halberstam employ post-structuralist approaches to gender, Butler calls for the breakdown and deconstruction of identification and identity categories, whereas Halberstam looks at material-historical narratives and discourses surrounding lesbian feminism, female masculinity, transgender butch, and FTM transsexual.  Drawing largely on Jay Prosser’s work Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuals, Halberstam embraces identity categories, claiming that they are important in understanding and identifying the emergence of historical and contemporary identities in order to mobilize political resistance. In an interview exploring Female Masculinity, Halberstam (1999) states: “Unlike a theorist like Butler who sees categories as perpetually suspect, I embrace categorization as a way of creating places for acts, identities and modes of being which otherwise remain unnamable.” Although Halberstam establishes herself apart from Butler in this way of identification, Butler does acknowledge the political and material importance and implication of categories such as ‘lesbian,’ and ‘gay (Butler, 1991).’ Moreover, Halberstam (1999a; 1999b) is more interested in Foucault’s concept of ‘reverse discourses’ in order to mobilize resistance and ‘produce creative new forms of resistance by assuming and empowering a marginal positionality.’ In Border Wars, Halberstam is attempting to describe and explore transgender and transsexual narratives to prescribe broadly-based and more inclusive identificatory categories which reflect the real lives and historical/contemporary narratives of transgender, transsexual, FTM, and butch identities, and attempts to diversify the masculine continuum (1999a; 1999b).
In attempting to debunk ideas of transgendered and transsexual identities as ‘crossing borders,’ Halberstam states: “Obviously, the metaphor of crossing over and indeed migrating to the right body from the wrong body merely leaves the politics of stable gender identities, and therefore stable gender hierarchies, completely intact (1999: 560).”  Instead, Halberstam proposes that ‘female masculinity’ diversifies the identities of masculinity.  Her call for diversity, however, fails or falls short in addressing or escaping the gender binary.  Butler would argue that Halberstam’s diversification of masculinities, although progressive in so far as it establishes a theoretical space whereby masculinity is no longer only understood as exclusively associated with men/male bodies, is just creating a new, more diverse category which attempts to pinpoint and describe ‘femaleness.’  Moreover, Halberstam notes that ‘female masculinity’ is not only an attempt to diversify masculinity and ‘femaleness,’ but also tries to establish a Foucaultian ‘reverse discourse’ in order to form a political resistance to compulsory heterosexuality.  The difficulty in this statement is that Halberstam does not explain or explore how ‘female masculinity’ does this, and perhaps assumes that ‘female masculinity,’ in fact, creates a ‘reverse discourse.’
Ultimately, Butler and Halberstam disagree: Halberstam attempts to create a reverse discourse through the process of diversifying gender identification and categories, and Butler draws on Foucault’s work to construe resistance to power as resistance to identity itself (Beasley, 2005: 100).  In other words, Butler disagrees that resistance to power can be done through ‘reverse discourses’ vis-à-vis identification.  Butler argues this due to the fact that these forms of identification, no matter how diverse, are always charged with the regulatory regimes of male/female and the oppressive structures of heterosexuality that they intend to contest.  In other words, resistance to power or ‘reverse discourses’ cannot occur through the processes of gender identification, as identification relies on the gender binary male/female at its theoretical starting point and it does not escape compulsory heterosexuality at its frame.  On the other hand, Halberstam writes: “There is, Foucault suggests, a ‘reverse discourse’ in which one empowers a category that might have been used to oppress one – one transforms a debased position into a challenging presence.  As a reverse discourse takes shape around the definitions of transsexual and transgender, it is extremely important to recognize the queerness of these categories, their instability, and their interpretability (1999: 555).”  As was previously mentioned, Halberstam does not thoroughly explain how the definitions of transsexual or transgender are challenging or resistant, rather, it seems as though she assumes that they are, however, her explanation may be found somewhere throughout the entire work of Female Masculinity. Butler would argue that the positing of ‘female masculinity’ by Halberstam as diverse and resistant is still operating within the male/female binary.  Butler writes: “I’m not at ease with ‘lesbian theories, gay theories,’ for as I’ve argued elsewhere, identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression (Butler, 1991: 13-14).” In a sense, Butler construes Foucault’s concept of resistance through ‘reverse discourse’ as resistance to identification itself (Beasley, 2005).
In this particular section of Gender Trouble, Butler addresses and identifies drag as a parodic/pastiche performance which “plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed (Butler, 1990: 501).”  Drag ultimately imitates gender, and in doing so, illuminates how gender is an imitative performance itself (Butler, 1990: 501). Furthermore, in imitating gender drag denaturalizes and displaces the notion of an ‘original’ gender to be performed.  Drag simultaneously reveals the imitative structure of gender, and mocks the idea that gender has ‘an’ essence or originality (Butler, 1990: 502).  It seems that Butler argues that identity can be subverted and resistance created through performance or a series of repeated acts. Even though drag can be understood as subverting gender identity, for Butler it isn’t enough as it still runs the risk of being misinterpreted as subversion is contingent upon the reception and interpretation of the ‘audience.’  Butler (1990: 502) asks:

What performance where will invert the inner/outer distinction and compel a radical rethinking of the psychological presuppositions of gender identity and sexuality?  What performance where will compel a reconsideration of the place and stability of the masculine and feminine? And what kind of gender performance will enact and reveal the Performativity of gender itself in a way that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and desire.

Here, it is quite clear that Butler believes that it is in performance, acts, and gestures that the masculine/feminine, female/male, and traditional gender identities can be subverted.  In contrast, Halberstam believes that creating new, more diverse and inclusive ‘labels’ of identification for those who currently remain unnamed can generate ‘reverse discourses,’ and in turn, politically mobilize in order to facilitate resistance.  In all, their two approaches are derived from similar Foucaultian concepts, but ultimately propose different ways of creating resistance to compulsory heterosexuality.
Even though I have identified how Butler and Halberstam would disagree, it is important to note how Halberstam employs Butler’s proposition of gender as performative to formulate ‘female masculinity.’ Halberstam theorizes the ‘masculine’ as a category of identification, but does so by dislocating ‘masculinity’ from male/men bodies exclusively.  Butler’s previous work destabilizes the notion that ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ are inherently and unavoidably tied to women and men’s bodies respectively. Moreover, this theorization has reconfigured the understanding of masculine and feminine as mutually exclusive categories toward an understanding of gender identity as fluid and unstable. This has allowed theorists focusing on masculinity to sever the concept ‘masculinity’ from male bodies exclusively, which is precisely what Halberstam does in her theorization of ‘female masculinity (Beasley, 2005).’ That is, the severance of masculinity from solely male bodies reveals how Halberstam relies on and operates within Butler’s understanding of gender as fluid and not inherently tied to bodily corporeality and anatomical sex.  Moreover, it could be argued that Butler’s work on gender and the illumination of the male/female binary as a myth has created a theoretical space for theorists, such as Halberstam, to question and explore masculinities outside of the realm of the male body and within the frame of individual identification, which in emphasized in Female Masculinity (Beasley, 2005).
This paper has followed Butler and Halberstam’s discussions relating to Foucault’s concept of ‘reverse discourse,’ the subversion of gender and sexual identity in relation to compulsory heterosexuality, gender as performative, and the myth of male bodies as the exclusive terrain of ‘masculinity.’  It has argued that although Halberstam draws on Butler’s work, these two theorists disagree and provide a different standpoint in understanding how identity can either be subverted through deconstruction, performance, or the diversity of taxonomical or categorical identification.  Ultimately, both theorists offer valid rallying points for real people, namely queer, transgender, transsexual identities to potentially mobilize in order to create a force of resistance in the political, social, and cultural spheres of everyday life.  Lastly, both Butler and Halberstam have invigorated me to explore their ideas more fully with the hopes of applying them in my own life, perhaps as rigorously as they have inspired and enlightened queer theory from the early 1990’s to present time.

Note: I do not use a title page as I believe it is important to save as much paper as possible.

References

Beasley, C. (2005). Gender & sexuality: critical theories, critical thinkers. London: SAGE Publications.

Butler, J. (1991). Imitation and gender insubordination. In Diana Fuss (ed.), inside/out: lesbian theories, gay theories. (pp. 13-31). London: Routledge.

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. In W. Kolmar & F. Bartowski (Eds.), Feminist Theory: A Reader (pp. 496-504)

Halberstam, J. (1998) Transgender butch/FTM border wars and the masculine continuum. In W. Kolmar & F. Bartowski (Eds.), Feminist Theory: A Reader (pp. 550-561)

Halberstam, J. (1999) Masculinity without men: Interview with Judith Halberstam about Female Masculinity. Genders: Presenting innovative work in the arts, humanities, and social theories.  Retrieved 3 March, 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://www.genders.org/g29/g29_halberstam.html

Witness and the Impossibility of Forgiveness: The Case of Robert Dziekanski

On the day of October 14th, 2007, Robert Dziekanski passed away immediately after he was tasered at the Vancouver International Airport by a group of RCMP officers. Since the 15th of October, 2007, this event has been engrained in my own mind; my learning of it was initiated in a lecture discussing relations of power and the state. This form of police ‘brutality’ has come to take on a special significance for me, and I have wondered how to go about doing a critical analysis of this event. Having had my own personal altercation with the police, with regards to hate crimes, this atrocity resonated with my own personal experiences. This ‘tasering’ incident, along with its subsequent national discourse will be used as a discussion point; a point of departure in exploring some of the key theoretical concepts introduced in the works of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida.
In the aftermath of this event, some general questions have been posed and are intended, for the purposes of this paper, to illustrate the types of questions that are being addressed by the RCMP and the Canadian public. Should more stringent regulations be drafted for officers who utilize tasers to enforce the law?  How much power, in terms of weaponry, should the RCMP be granted when it comes to dealing with crime and criminal activity?  When is it acceptable to deploy tasers in order to punish? It is clear that the answers to these questions are only related to the event in the past tense; the atrocity and crime in which the state committed becomes masked and subsequently the state becomes acquitted from its own crimes.
In the following section, I will briefly explore some observations that I’ve made about the incident in order to shed some light on my analysis of image, witness and forgiveness. Firstly, Robert Dziekanski was traveling from Poland to Canada in order to start a new life with his mother in Kamloops. Robert and his mother had made arrangements to meet at the airport, however, separated by security areas, the two were unable to find each other at the busy airport.  Robert became agitated and was led into a secured area of the airport.  After waiting for over seven hours at the airport, without communication with anyone due to a barrier of language, (Robert did not speak English) Robert became even more agitated and disoriented (RCMP Watch, 2007). The video of the incident, which was later posted for public view on YouTube (2007), shows Dziekanski shoving a computer to the ground off of a table, placing chairs in front of the security door, and throwing a chair at the wall. This claim is also substantiated by a witnesses testimony in the CBC news article entitled: Taser Video Shows RCMP Shocked Immigrant Within 25 Seconds of Arrival (November 15, 2007).  RCMP officers were called in to calm Dziekanski down and attempt to diffuse the situation.  Within twenty-five seconds of their arrival in the secured area, without addressing Dziekanski in a common language for communication, four officers rustled him to the ground and tasered him up to four times. The video of the incident, which was captured by an eye-witness, Paul Pritchard, has since been widely distributed and accessible online on the popular website YouTtube. It is obvious that after they tasered Robert, they determined that his body was unstable and that he required medical attention.  In the video, the officers make no seemingly hasty attempt to call for medical aid. This leads into the fact that there are several discrepancies between the officer’s testimonies and the video which was released to the press and to the wider public by Pritchard.  Officers reported that there were three officers at the scene, however, the video shows four officers present.  Secondly, the officers reported that they had used two pulses of the taser on Robert’s body, however, in the video you can hear four taser shots.  Thirdly, the officers claimed to have rushed to seek medical aid for Robert, however, the video shows that they were quite calm and sluggish.  Although these points are up for public debate, these elements have breached a certain level of the public’s trust in state power and a skepticism as to the credibility of the RCMP’s to accurately reveal the ‘truth’ about what happened. With this report, I intend to focus on a particular event, namely the police brutality endured by Robert Dziekanski which led to his death in order to illustrate and illuminate three theoretical discussions, namely the exploration of the notion of ‘witness’ in relation to the state’s use of tasers to enforce the law in Canada, the notion of accountability with respect to image and the nature of the photograph, with regards to technology and taser use, and some of the ways in which forgiveness, in relation to state apologies is conditioned.
At this point, it is appropriate to do a critical analysis of the event in relation to the several truth claims that have been made. Since the word and notion of ‘witness’ is central to the construction and fabrication of the ‘truth’ about crimes that have been committed, ‘witness’ as it has been articulated throughout this course will be utilized.  Firstly, what constitutes a witness? What relationship does the subject or object require in relation to the event in order to be a witness?  First, the witness plays a role in truth-making by providing certain forms of evidence; evidence which typically comes in the form of language and speech, as is the case with a person’s verbal declaration of the truth about what happened, and writing, which is often deployed in the form of a letter, whether it be official or more casual.  However, there is reason to be somewhat cynical of these types of testimonies, particularly when it comes to crimes, evidence, and justice.  Verbal and written statements are produced by a subject, typically ‘after the fact,’ and are therefore subject to interpretation and erroneous in terms of the subject’s forgetfulness or recollection of how the event unfolded.  At any rate, these types of witness are only in the realm of the subject.  There are other types of witnesses, namely witnesses in terms of objects and mediums.
In the case of the incident at the Vancouver International Airport, a video camera played a significant role in the elucidation of the injustice endured by Robert Dziekanski.  Paul Pritchard, an eye-witness to the RCMP’s actions toward Dziekanski was asked by police to turn over the recording of the incident until all of the evidence was ascertained by the state. After forty-eight hours, police services returned Pritchard’s camera intact yet without the recording (reference article). He then had a lawyer support his case in ensuring that the recording be returned to him as promised (reference).
Reveals two interesting observations – the suppression of knowledge by the state via the construction of the ‘legitimate witness’. Pritchard’s verbal or written testimony could have been misinterpreted or deemed disputable, suspect, dubitable and therefore  could have been easily dismissed by police.  The video recording, however, is a series of images, similar to yet more complex than the photograph.  The video recording, as an object and medium, is the arbi function; like Pritchard himself, the video camera was an arbiter to the event.  However, without the video camera, Pritchard would have been an arbiter witness as a subject. That is, Pritchard’s testimony could have been taken as an interpretation of what happened, thereby suspect and easily ‘dismissable’ by state authorities.
In order to flesh out the reasons for the image’s believability and credibility, Roland Barthes Camera Lucida will be discussed in the context of witness. Firstly, as a series of images strung together, captured by the lens of the camera, a video camera is quite similar in nature to the photograph produced by a camera.  It can stand in as a witness even though it is an object, an apparatus.  The believability of the image and Paul Pritchard’s video recording can be attributed to the nature of the camera; the video, like a photograph, cannot be detached from its referent, that is, it is exactly what it represents (Barthes, 1981: 5-6).  Secondly, video images strung together delineate an existential moment in time, it is undeniable that the events unfolding before the lens happened, even though they are always in the past (Barthes, 1980: 4). The video camera ‘was there’ and captured exactly ‘what was there;’ it is an image without a code, a ‘natural’ kind of witness.  Societies investment in photographs and video is not surprising considering the image’s ability to eliminate interpretation and projection; something that speech or writing cannot claim to do.
In this course, the film Blow-Up (Antonioni, 1966) was screened with the intent to provide a visual illustration of some of the key discussions arising out of the notion of a ‘witness’.   Thomas, played by David Hemmings, is the quite arrogant protagonist of the narrative, whose life is consumed by his passion for photography. In Blow-Up, his most successful works are typically captured through the play of the camera in a seemingly random way.  I do not intend to describe the film in detail, however, what is important for discussion here is the comparison between Thomas’ experience with the camera as witness to a murder, and Paul Pritchard’s experience with the video camera as witness.  Thomas only realized, after the fact, through the development and voyeurism of the photographs, originally taken in the park, that a murder had taken place.  Even though he was physically an arbiter-witness to the murder, he could not claim that he had seen what had taken place.  It was the photograph, once it was developed, that showed him a dead body and a gun in the park. In other words, the camera, the object itself was the witness to the crime.  Similarly, Paul Pritchard’s video camera complimented his verbal and written testimony to what had taken place at the Vancouver Airport.  Moreover, the video camera provided an incontrovertible form of evidence against the state’s unjust actions toward Robert.  Finally, without the video camera, I propose that verbal or written testimony could and would have been suppressed or dismissed by the state in order to cover up their own crimes.  After all, as Derrida discusses in his essay On Forgiveness (1997), the state is in some way operating outside of the law in order to enforce the law.  Sovereignty, the state, is imbued with privilege and power which supercedes the law, which is made clear by the amount of tasering victims that have come forward to the media, to testify to their experiences with the law.
The internet, as a technological medium, has also come to play an important role in the realm of ‘witness.’  Once the video was disseminated online at the request of Paul Pritchard and Robert Dziekanski’s mother, a national-public and international discourse emerged out of this event.  The internet has allowed Canadians, as well as the international community (the internet knows no bounds) to become their own witnesses to the incident. It resulted in a public outcry for answers, accountability, and responsibility from the state in addressing issues surrounding taser use and the RCMP.  One of the recommendations put forth within this discourse is outlined in the Toronto Star article Crack Down on Tasers, Watchdog Tells Mounties (McCharles, 2008), it is that the state place a moratorium on taser use immediately.  Paul Kennedy, an RCMP watchdog, responded in a way which denied this as a good strategy to address taser use.  After the event, after the release of the video, and also following the public and federal government’s demands of accountability, the RCMP has gone through several steps toward reconciliation with Dziekanski’s death, namely: brief apologies to Dziekanski’s mother, an RCMP-led investigation into taser use, and policy changes in several forms. In other words, the state has undergone several different ‘transactions’ to make up for accountability, the public’s trust, and responsibility. How then do these actions contribute to the law of responsible transaction which Jacques Derrida proposes (1997)?  What does responsibility mean in relation to the event of which I have explored?
The state has undergone a review of its own activities, namely the frequency in which force and punishment have been deployed by officers via tasers in the past. In other words, the state does number crunching and goes on to compile objective, empirical evidence of its actions and reveals them to the public. Furthermore, Paul Kennedy, commissioner for public complaints against the RCMP, has recommended that the provision of tasers be limited to senior officers, or officers with “the maturity of judgement” (McCharles, 2008). Moreover, he has asserted that taser use be restricted to situations where suspects display “combative” behaviour and not the previous protocol of “passive” behaviour. Even though this recommendation has been made, many reports have surfaced in which officers have deployed taser weapons in situations where subjects exhibited very little or no assaultive behaviour at all.
Even though these transactions have surfaced in light of Dziekanski’s death by taser, they remain a diversion from the event itself. Moreover, these transactions are made with the intent to ‘acknowledge’ what happened to Robert Dziekanski, yet without an unconditional acknowledgement of the the injustice endured by Dziekanski. Nowhere, in any of the articles on the subject, have I read something of the sort, which leads me to believe that very little acknowledgement has taken place.  As a matter of discussion, if Derrida’s equivocal deconstruction of forgiveness articulates that true forgiveness can only occur in the face of the unforgivable, and can only take place between the perpetrators and the victims, the state has made a minimal effort in this case to work toward forgiveness.  Even still, could forgiveness, in its absolute or relative senses, be realized?
Forgiveness, for Derrida, has a dyadic structure, and should only occur between the individual perpetrators and the victim(s).  Moreover, Derrida (1997: 32) claims:
…each time forgiveness is at the service of a finality, be it noble and spiritual (atonement or redemption, reconciliation, salvation) each time that it aims to re-establish a normality (social, national, political, psychological) by a work of mourning, by some therapy or ecology of memory, then the ‘forgiveness’ is not pure – nor is its concept.

What does it mean then, when the RCMP re-directs its aims of forgiveness toward the public body, toward a social and political goal?  Surely, the representatives of the RCMP were not present at the time of the crime, nor have the more widespread witnesses in Canadian society (produced and mediated by the apparatus and an extension of technology) who have learned of the incident in the comfort of their own homes.
Derrida describes how human life, at its roots, has come to be imbued and encoded with sacredness by the Abrahamic-monothestic tradition (Derrida, 1997: 30-31). This sacredness of human life is central to the reasons why it is considered unforgivable to kill or murder another human life.  Forgiveness, in its purest and most absolute form is only a concept in relation to the unforgivable; “forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable (Derrida, 1997; 32). The murder, as I deem it, of Robert Dziekanski for illegitimate and irresponsible reasons does not excuse how it is considered unforgivable.  Perhaps this function of an unforgivable action by the RCMP is indicative of the expansive and numerous amounts of public concerns, complaints, and questions posed by the ‘people of Canada.’  If forgiveness must me nourished, maintained, and acknowledged between the perpetrators and the victim, in the case of Robert Dziekanski, forgiveness is forever thwarted and impossible.  His death leaves him no agency, and no room as a victim and subject to hold the power of forgiveness and to take the place of the one who is to forgive the RCMP officers who brutality attacked him on the day of October 14th, 2007.  If the victim has been killed, no amount of public apology which seeks to beg for forgiveness, either toward the Canadian public, toward Robert’s mother can bring him back to life to acknowledge the events that took place.
In this report, I have maintained that the event became a national-public discourse, thereby reorienting the discussion surround forgiveness and the police brutality endured by Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver International Airport.  This national discourse was largely produced and made possible by the arbiter witness of the video camera; the video image’s ability to delineate an existential moment in time, as something that definitely did happen, was crucial in elucidating the RCMP’s irresponsibility and unjust actions. The subject’s testimony with claims to being a witness, as someone having been there at that particular time, is considered suspect and can be easily supressed within the realm of juridical power.  State sovereignty, along with its power, is in some way outside of the law in order to enforce it, making writing and speech a dubitable form of witness and testimony.  Moreover, Derrida’s work on forgiveness shows that, in this situation, Robert Dziekanski’s death marks the death and endless inhibition of forgiveness.  Forgiveness cannot take place as the person who would have the power to forgive, and thus go about ‘forgiving’ can no longer acknowledge the events that took place, nor can he testify to his own downfall.

References

Barthes, Roland. (1980). Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang.

Derrida, Jaques. (1997) On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London and New York: Routledge.

Hall, Neal. (2008, May 23). RCMP has new Taser policy, inquiry told…Weapon can now only be used in cases of ‘active resistance’ instead of ‘passive resistance.’ Vancouver Sun. Retrieved from the World Wide Web: http://www.rcmpwatch.com/

McCharles, Tonda. (2008, June 19). Crack down on Tasers, watchdog tells Mounties. The Toronto Star. Retrieved on the World Wide Web: http://www.thestar.com/article/445834

Ponti. Carlo. (Producer), & Antonioni, Michelangelo. (Director). (1966). Blow-Up [Film].

Taser video shows RCMP shocked immigrant within 25 seconds of their arrival. (2007, November 15). CBC News. Retrieved from the World Wide Web: http://www.cbc.ca/Canada/british-columbia/story/2007/11/14/bc-taservideo.html

Witness blames RCMP, Vancouver airport for death of Tasered man. (2007, October 19). CBC News. Retrieved from the World Wide Web: http://www.cbc.ca/Canada/british-columbia/story/2007/10/18/bc-taser.html

YouTube. (2007) Robert Dziekanski tasered by the RCMP at Vancouver Airport. [Film]. Retrieved from the World Wide Web: http://youtube.com/watch?v=IPe_hf7aBXM