Friday, July 31, 2015

Cripping the Rainbow: Recoloring Depression Inside Out


"A strange blackness started to creep across the console like a dark, scary blob. 
'What is this?' cried Fear. No one knew"

Inside Out: the Novelization
Suzanne Francis
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Driving down the road with my partner and the girls, N. (5 years old) and C. (9 years old), the girls were going back and forth in the back seat about a much discussed topic throughout the summer of 2015: the new Pixar film, Inside Out. "What are your favorite emotions?" I asked the girls. "Anger!" N. replied. "Um, Sadness," C. responded after a moment. As a literary scholar, who thinks a lot about affect, but most importantly as a parent, I probed the girls for their reasons. This seemed to be a great opportunity to glean some insight on what's going on in the girls' respective heads these days while also practicing a form of close reading. "I like Anger because he is really LOUD!" N. responded quickly, mimicking his characteristic sudden shifts in volume. "CONGRATULATIONS, SAN FRANCISCO, YOU RUINED PIZZA!" she continued, repeating one of his memorable lines. "How about you?" I probed C. "Um," she responded, taking her time to think again. "I think Sadness is funny because... like... she keeps saying that things are going to end bad" C. explained. "Like when they are in the long term memories and Sadness tells Joy, 'You are going to get lost in there' and Joy says, 'Think more positively!' 'Okay,' said Sadness, 'I am POSITIVE you are going to get lost'" This was followed by a bout of giggles from both girls and a barrage of repeated lines from the film being played and replayed by both N. and C. for much of the ride home.

"Interesting," I intimated to my partner while the girls were distracting each other in the back. "At their best, I wouldn't pin either of them as those emotions and at their worst, I would probably reverse those," I speculated. Before I could read much further into the psychology of the girls' responses, my partner shrugged and replied, "Maybe. I think it is more a reflection of the girls' different senses of humor." A sagely response from a mom well attuned to the girls emotions, but also to all that makes them giggle, chortle, and bust a gut. Indeed, this observation explained a lot. At the age of five, nothing made N. squeal with joy more than sudden, surprising, and over the top expressions of emotion. One can always tell when a word, idea, or event catches N.'s fancy, because when one does, she can't get enough to repeating it with sudden bursts of loudness. C's sense of humor is much more muted, often coming in the form of a long story, with a hidden (sometimes cryptic) humor. A big fan of deadpan humor, myself, I've taken to sharing amusing observations with C, who, like her mother, can tell better than most people when I am obscurely making play; a most valuable trait. C. certain expresses a penchant for gross, downcast, even morbid jokes. In this light, Sadness's lethargy and pessimism is a reasonable match for C.'s mode of picking and poking at the world.

"What about you?" C. asked, crossing conversations. "What are your favorite emotions?" A fair response that might give the girls an equal opportunity to make what they will of our choices as well. "Well," I told them, uncertain how to explain the emotion that spoke most to me. "I would have to say that none of the emotions inside Riley's head were my favorite," I told them referencing the pre-teen main character from the film. Before the girls could think I was giving a non-answer, I continued. "What I mean is that the emotions I liked most were the brief glimpse we got to see inside the Mother's head," I told them. "Remember that? At the dinner table, the film suddenly jumps from Riley to her mom and then to her dad to see what they are thinking." I broke off as the girls started talking about the scene and the jokes that filled it. "What I liked most was how the Mother's emotions all seemed a lot more mellowed, nuanced, and mature. Anger wasn't out of control. Fear wasn't running around flailing. And Sadness was in charge, not Joy like in Riley's head," I said. "I guess that would be my choice. A more experienced, focused, and contemplative sadness." C. clucked a happy reply that I picked the same emotion as her. "The emotions in the parents' heads were more homogenous too," added my partner. "They looked more like the person and like each other. The mom's all wore glasses and the dad's all had mustaches." After all, the main emotions in the film are of a child's intense, inexperienced, and more indeterminate emotions; that can border at times as caricatures or more puritanical versions of themselves as the child is still discovering them and herself. That split the conversation again, as the girls started repeating lines from the emotions of other characters' heads (a dog, a clown, etc.), and my partner and I thought more about how our emotions develop over time and take on personal idiosyncrasies, especially after traumatic and transformative events; that is, if the grayness of depression doesn't shut everything down.


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As a traumatic emotional process, depression can be a positive transformative event in the development of emotional maturity. The key word here is, perhaps, "process." As an allegory, where each emotion is named and embodied, Inside Out presents the all too often assumed sentiment that emotions are a state of being. Sadness is sad. Anger is angry. So too are the people who are said to be disgusted or fearful. They are what they are, as though emotions were locations, categories, or entities that existed in a binary state. The crisis of Inside Out on the surface is the emotional trauma of a young girl moving. The twist and the foundational crisis is the emotional breakdown that happens when one emotion tries to make itself a static state of being rather than a process, a "move" to somewhere else. The choice, as in many narratives, is whether one will stay the same and die (literally or emotionally) or else change and live in a new way. While the physical move from Minnesota to California provides the context, the real drama begins inside Riley's head when Joy forces her hands to keep on the controls and not let the other emotions do their work. Laying in a sleeping bag, in an empty room, in a new house without furniture, memories and with a dead mouse, Joy (and Riley) are still trying to live up the demand (spoken by her mother but implicit throughout the film) to remain happy at all costs. "But think of all the good things that-" Joy begins, arguing for the controls. "No, Joy," Anger interrupted. "There's absolutely no reason for Riley to be happy right now. Let us handle this" (18). Despite being the loud, erratic source of humor that N. so enjoyed, Anger was also a powerful truth teller, which "helped Riley deal with all the injustices of her life" (60-61). Anger speaks the truth and the challenge that Joy and Riley will reject and bring about an emotional shut-down by trying to halt emotional processes and trying to insist on a fantasy that is no longer tenable over the real possibilities for change.

The secret hero of Inside Out is Sadness, who has the tools to bring Riley through the difficulties of moving and growing. Early on, the increased role Sadness will play as an archon and leader of Riley's emotions is forecast when the memories dominated by Joy begin to call to Sadness and turn blue. "Sadness!" Joy scolds. "You nearly touched a core memory." "Sorry," Sadness said. "Something is wrong with me. I feel like I'm having a breakdown." "You are not having a breakdown," insists Joy. "It's stress" (15). Of course, Sadness in this moment is reflective of the undoing of Riley's understanding of the world and her emotional processes. She is breaking down where she was, how she was, and who she was in order to make room for where she is going. Sadness would have proceeded to do her work if not for Joy stopping the emotional shift and denying it is happening. Indeed, Joy is also going through a personal breakdown of her own, especially a breakdown in control. Her need to dominate causes her to begin to tear apart and reorder the Headquarter's Control Console while the other emotions and Riley are asleep in order to prevent unhappy thoughts and dreams from doing their work (21). 

By not allowing Riley's mind to proceed through its prepared processes for a breakdown, through Sadness, Joy is breaking down the whole system of operations in her attempt to keep things the same. Joy's tyrannical fight against change and growth escalates when the overwhelming power of tears and Sadness marks Riley's first day at school causing a new Core Emotion to be generated. This is the first "blue" (or sad) core emotion and will begin powering a new characteristic of Riley's personality; supposedly a part to deal with loss and change. Denying the external and internal shifts, Joy pries open the Core Memory holder, grabs the new blue ball, and initiates a Memory Dump. Sadness tries to fight Joy for control. "As the two struggled for the bright blue sphere, they bumped into the core memory holder and all the core memories fell out!" narrates Francis. "Fear, Anger, and Disgust screamed as all the islands of personality went dark" (31). As the core memories, Sadness (the soon to be hero) and Joy (now revealed as the antagonist), are sucked away to be destroyed. Meanwhile, the whole system begins the process of going grey, dark, and shutting down all emotions. The demands of Joy, not Sadness, lead to depression.

The rest of the film may be described as either rising or descending action, brought on by the spiraling of Riley into depression which causes the emotions left to her (Fear, Disgust, and Anger) to further lose control, while Joy and Sadness wander aimlessly trying to get back to Headquarters as well as avoid fading away into oblivion. The inability to move through Sadness, the loss of memories due to the demand that Riley only think happy thoughts, and the rejection of breaking down, changing, and growing is embodied by the formerly rainbow colored control panel slowly growing dark and grey. "The whole console started to shut down," narrates Francis. "A strange blackness slowly crept across the console, like a dark scary blob. 'What is this?' cried Fear. No one knew" (109). The darkness suggests the unknowingness of the emotions experiencing Riley's depression. Not only is this a new event, but depression is represented not as an emotion or a breakdown of emotions but as an absence, a locking out, an static resistance to emotion. 

Emotions have color, I wrote in a previous piece. Depression is grey. Science tells us that in the "real" world, the world of physics and light, there is only gradation in brightness and wavelength. This is the bare existence that depression promises to see clearly. Yet for most sighted persons, this light is translated through the network of eyes and mind into color. The body transforms light and makes color of out it. Something new, nuanced, and personal comes from the greyscale of the world. The aesthetics of color are emotional because they are intimately us. This spiral of depression cutting off a person from their own abilities and transformation is fought by embracing the often discarded parts of our experiences. It is not until Sadness is allowed to return that the memories are seen in a new light. The past is not as perfectly happy as had been held. Sadness shows Riley that she has went through breakdowns, traumas, and changes in the past and can do so again. Only once the mind, Joy, and the ego lets go to the unknown, does color return in more subtle shades, and the world begins to be known in new ways. 


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Inside Out is an excellent text for examining the allegory as a preparation for medieval studies, Biblical exegesis, or any discussion that tends to use Disability as a metaphorical cultural sign. A significant challenge that allegory poses for the modern reader is what characters can or do represent. This is compounded by issues in reading a narrative for context and not merely for characters, otherwise one may overdetermine the meaning or significance of a figure because of their name. In Inside Out, Sadness and Depression are too often conflated, oversimplifying the character, story and emotion. "Sadness was Riley’s demon," writes Chelsea Mize. "Mark my words, anyone who has struggled with depression or other mental health issues will immediately relate to Sadness’ reluctant but ironclad hold on Riley’s brain" (Mize, Bustle.com 2015). This conflation of depression and sadness is repeated by Rachel Simon, another writer at Bustle of the same site (Simon, Bustle.com 2015), or Toni from Reclaiming Your Future (Toni 2015)At the same time, Mize, like Simon, casts doubt on whether the story is really about depression. For Mize, depression and sadness are locatable within a single persona not in the context or story. This reduction is instrumental, as it sets up Mize to discuss the demon that marks her as existing in an aberrant state. "What if it’s Fear that takes over and runs your emotional headquarters, his tyrannical reign leaving you a quivering shell of a person?" Mize asks. "Then you are probably like me... When I was in my first year of grad school, I was diagnosed with  Generalized  Anxiety  Disorder" (Mize, Bustle.com 2015). By overdetermining an emotion or pathology's ability to be totally embodied by an allegorical figure, a cursory reading of Inside Out's allegory can reinforce society's demarkation and isolation of those it views as mentally ill or mentally disabled.

A crip mode of reading relocates and rereads disability from the person into the social environment; a practice that can be extremely helpful in rediscovering the nuances of an allegory such as Inside Out. Referencing an Saturday Night Live short video satirizing the film, Britt Hayes calls out the class privileges written into the film that suggest a disabling logic that white bourgeois America instills in society in order to spur workers towards impossible goals of wealth and happiness. "Basically, Riley is suffering from an acute case of First World Problems," writes Hates (Hayes, Screen Crush 2015). Close reading the context and narrative structures that give further dynamic meaning to the characters, SNL and Hayes note that unattainable ideals propel the professional and emotional work of the film. The father is chasing a job that promises to bring him one step closer to success if he is willing to leave behind home and family to attend to financial investors. The mother is chasing a home and furnishings in the financially superior real estate of San Francisco rather than small town Minnesota. Yet this ideology was working on the Anderson family well before the move and the supposed start of Riley's breakdown, as Libby Hill attests in "I couldn’t be their “happy girl”: Pixar’s “Inside Out,” childhood depression and the emotional stranglehold of “Minnesota nice” When appearing pleasant at any cost is a defining cultural value, admitting you're unhappy is the biggest struggle" (Hill, Salon 2015). In the Salon article, Hill discovers the same narrative engines of impossible happiness at work in Inside Out in middle class midwest culture. By attending to the allegorical narrative for meaning rather than overemphasizing the names of characters, Hayes and Hill both suggest that it is Joy that is the antagonist and cause of Riley's depression, not Sadness.


By widening the frame for possible meanings in allegory, Inside Out moves from a text that reinforces disability into an engine for cripping the mechanisms of classism and an impossible capitalist promise of lasting ontological happiness. Indeed, the allegory works so well as to propel even those who vilify Sadness to end up in a less pre-determined, pathology. "[Riley] realizes [sic] that acknowledging sadness doesn’t make it stronger and that it doesn’t always need to be fixed but rather, it needs to be acknowledged and comforted so that the person can feel better themselves and not just because someone told them to feel better," writes Toni (Toni, Reclaiming Your Future 2015). "Inside Out teaches us to embrace sadness, not repress it; to let Sadness take the center stage rather than trying to push her to the side or put her in a space where you don’t have to deal with her. Sometimes the best way through the sadness is to dive right into it, the movie says, and once you allow yourself to accept those emotions, things might start to look up" adds Mize (Mize, Bustle.com 2015). Allegory can be reductive, as well as its readers, so it can be especially useful and effective for a narrative such as Inside Out to anticipate those who would want to see disability and mental illness embodied in a singular figure rather than a semi-visible social system. For them, Sadness (like disability) is an unfortunate reality that nonetheless can do some good if society is willing to suffer it and follow the stories it might tell. This is only a beginning, but sets readers off towards more complicated understandings of emotion, depression, and disability as social practices and processes that we move through and which may change even as we are changed by them. This brings us back to the conversation with the girls in the car. If we resist the predetermined meanings of people and feelings, how might we all evolve and grow? In this light, what might a mature Fear look like? Perhaps, he is a planner, an inventor, an investigator, an adrenaline junky, or a brave adventurer. What might mature Sadness offer? The list may include the power of mourning, empathy, tranquility, and perseverance. How about seasoned Anger? The idea of justice, discernment, drive, and even hope all come to mind. In each of these cases, depression can be used as a pivotal process in complicating and deepening each of these emotions.

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Saturday, July 11, 2015

The Corporate Sin of Racism with Rev. Rachel J. Bahr

Reverend Rachel Johannan Bahr

"The poet took the terror and turned it 
against itself. What was meant for fear 
he used to stir up faith 
in a different kind of future."

Strange Fruit

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Introduction to English Literature 1 
A Genealogy of Gender and Genre

In this course, we explore gender and genre through literature produced in and around the early British Isles, from the elegiac poetry of the Anglo Saxons to the Epic poetry of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In this survey of medieval and early modern texts, we trace how forms of narrative were informed by and acted on the construction of concepts of sex and sexuality. We study how debates around nature and nurture, essential and artificial, eternal and mutable came to produce later notions of transgender, queerness, disability, race, and religious difference.

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Corporate Sin

On February 19th, 2015, my course on a Genealogy of Gender and Genre hosted a guest lecturer, the Reverend Pastor Rachel J. Bahr, M.Div, who spoke on "Confession and the Corporate Sin of Racism." Corporate sin is defined by Francisco Cervantes, M.Div., as systematic social injustice in opposition to personal sin which is dependent on will and intent. "Corporate sin," writes Cervantes, "does not mean something that companies or corporations do (though they too commit sin). Corporate Sin has to do with our actions as a body of believers. It is a sinful act done by many to others" (Cervantes, A Catholic View). Like Cervantes, Rev. Bahr named racism in particular as a corporate sin prominent in contemporary American culture. One does not need to consciously think "racist thoughts" to participate in the corporate sin of racism. Because of its collective, systematic, and passive nature, corporate sin may be enacted even while holding counter-racist intents or without thought of any kind. Here, the sin is in social ideology, environment and action. Of course, personal prejudice and ill-intent still play roles but in this context they are instrumental to the wider injustice rather than being considered the beginning or the end. Personal and individual racism may be seen as the symptom of the problem rather the whole disease. As such, the reflection and response to such injustice requires a different kind of confession that turns from personal texts toward contexts.

Many of us have some sense of "confession" and "sin" but likely think of it in its contemporary context, as a personal admission of fault and culpability. This is seen today in Catholic confessionals and their secular counter-part: the psychologist's office. Here we are called to narrate our live in order to examine sins/pathologies which are supposedly diagnosed and rectified. We emphasized the pre-modern conception of sin as a collective rather than personal problem and confession as a "speaking-together" - how we act in and as society against justice and love. Rev. Bahr traced the roots of social justice from the practices of the People of Israel, the offering of sacrifices for the sins of a whole family, the Year of Jubilee where all debts and transgression are forgiven, and the practice of Prophetic Literature that reflects on moments when the community has worked contrary to Love and Justice. Next, Rev. Bahr discussed how confession began to shift in Christian communities in the 14th century during a series of outbreaks of the Plague. In order to make sense of why so many died while others were spared, sin began to be understood as unequally existing in certain persons more than others. The logic shifted from "sin is a product of community" to "sin as marking specific persons" through disease, disability, skin color, gender, and sexuality.

While the texts we would be studying in the next section of the course are drawn from a 14th century medieval context, the corporate sin and confession we are considering exist in a system that spans a time and place through a genealogy of thought and practice that isolates and eliminates communities marked with difference. These texts are drawn from John Gower's Confessio Amantis (in particular, "the Corporate Sin of Sloth in 'the Tale of Iphis and Ianthe'" and "the Corporate Sin of Pride in 'the Tale of Narcissus'") Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (in particular, "the Corporate Sin of Sloth in 'the Canon's Yeoman's Tale," "the Corporate Sin of Lust in 'the Pardoner's Prologue,'" and "the Corporate Sin of Wrath in 'the Wife of Bath's Prologue'"). How do examine the ethics of the these tales without victim blaming or repeating a violent prejudice by blaming marginalized peoples (women, eunuchs, mad, etc.)? This may require reading a text designed to villainize or terrorize against the grain to turn the terror against itself. On this day, we connected discussions of Love, Division, Creation, and Social Justice to the world of literature, film, and music, such as "the Hanging Tree" from the Hunger Games book and movie.  The call to remember lynchings as a call to action functions as a kind of "Confession in the Hanging Tree." Here, the hanging tree symbolizes the imagery of oppressed peoples being lynched for unfounded crimes, and the song ultimately calls for a revolution. Beginning with this popular and familiar text, Rev. Bahr turned the discussion towards the haunting classic song by Billie Holiday, Strange Fruit.



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Rev Rachel J Bahr
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Strange Fruit

How might we understand this in a contemporary context? Rev. Bahr also shared her work in the fields of womanism, queer and black liberation theology. Rev. Bahr turned the class discussion to the song "Strange Fruit" by Billie Holiday, based on a poem by Abel Meeropol, a teacher, and talked about the context in which this song was written. The students pointed out the obvious connection between the opening song, "the Hanging Tree," and Holiday's. Strange Fruit reminds us of the strange imagery of the lynched bodies of Black folks. "Southern trees bear strange fruit," sings Holiday, "blood on the leaves and blood at the root. Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze. Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees" (Holiday 1939). In both songs, the fruit spreads these seeds of hate, distrust, violence, and marginalization. These insidious seeds of violence that continues to grow even while seemingly dormant. Holiday's song, however, was tied to a specific hate crime when Black men in Indiana during the time of Jim Crow were suspected of a crime they didn't commit, were jailed and then released to an angry mob of over four thousand white folks, many of whom were Christians. In this context, the hanging of "strange fruit" either as violent lynching or as a genealogy of corporate sin stands in sharp relief next to two other trees in the Christian story: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Crucifix. 

The Salt Project's Emmy Winning film on the song "Strange Fruit" recasts this song in the Christian histories of creation, crucifixion, and lynching. The film begins with Genesis, imagining all Creation as a garden, where all life was made and flourished. Here humanity may be and know all things as good. The only commandment was that the humans were not to eat the "strange fruit" growing on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This fruit, the film articulates, was a new way of knowing and dividing humanity. "[The Humans] wanted to eat and discover truth of racism, pain, and difference of violence," explains the film in a brilliant song of biblical exegesis. "Apples don't do that. This was strange fruit. They saw themselves. Strange fruit. And the truth hit them" (The Salt Project). The forbidden knowledge was not only an object to be attained but a morbid way of knowing. Fruit after all is alive, it is digested, it is excreted, it spreads, and it grows. 

So too was the act of knowing where the self became defined through othering, setting others apart through difference and categories, the beginning of racism inscribed on the world through violence and pain. "They did not want this," continues the film's exegesis. "but it made them powerful; powerful enough to see their own pain, powerful enough to dish it to other. Fruit bears fruits" (The Salt Project). This act of original sin was not something merely spiritual, or physical, but a corporate act - a violent way of knowing that made the self powerful by subjugating the other. Sin of this sort breeds a genealogy of hate through systems of power-knowledge. The spawn of this fruit is what causes other trees to carry their own strange fruit. In Rome, racism and violence made the empire strong and brought the crucifix into being where Christ was hung. In America, racism and violence made the United States strong but hung countless black lives. "[Human's] became powerful enough to make their own 'southern trees bear strange fruit," continues the film. "Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze" (The Salt Project). Each one of these strange trees is bound up in one another, made to "speak together" by the scripture, song, and film in an act of Confession that looks beyond any specific individual to a collective struggle.



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Rachel Bahr
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Black Liberation Theology

Where then do these corporate sins and collective struggles call us to go? In response, Rev. Bahr pointed towards the work of James Cone's concepts of "Ontological Blackness" and James Foreman's "the Black Manifesto." Rev. Bahr recounted how she studied diligently under the scholarship of Dr. James Cone while in seminary. It is here, she attests, that she found Jesus' being was bound in solidarity with the oppressed, an inextricable relation that he maintained onto cross. Dr. Cone argued that slavery was the U.S. original sin, with over 400 years of Black people being oppressed and lynched, and segregated. In 2012, Dr. James Cone, preaching at the General Conference of the United Methodist Church in his sermon argues, "Despite the obvious similarity between Jesus' death on the cross and the Black people who have been strung up by their necks, relatively few people have looked at the deep similarities between the cross and the lynching tree" (Cone, "The Cross & The Lynching Tree"). The alienation that has developed between Christianity and the practice of social justice, contended the burgeoning liberation theology, was no accident. White Christian communities wanted a safe distance between the demands of their faith and the security of a prosperity built on the backs of racist systems of power.

According to Black Liberation theology, the central work of Christianity is offering a preferential option for the poor and marginalized. The project of such a theology is to turn the instruments of horror back on themselves by calling on those Church, political and academic authorities. "To create an antiracist theology," writes Cone, "White theologians must engage the histories, cultures and theologies of people of color. It is not enough to condemn racism. The voices of people of color must be found in your theology." (Cone, "Theology's Great Sin")In the particular American and European context, Black Liberation Theology presents "a profound critique of white theology that does not yet recognize its whiteness." ( J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement). This point was one the class was becoming increasingly attuned to throughout the semester. As Rev. James Ellis III writes, Black Liberation theology against "to hold white Christians and theologians accountable for their many atrocities committed against blacks under the guise of biblical orthodoxy" (Ellis III, "A Critique of Cone's Black Liberation Theology"). There is no studying scripture, theology, or literature without considering one's subjective and methodological position towards race; especially when the history of the practice works towards the exclusion and subjugation of people of color.

When Cone's argument on the ontological blackness of Christ was raised, the students were particularly curious. Rev. Bahr directed the students to read these blackness both through the twin lenses through which we read all the material in the course: historical and metaphorical. Cone writes, "Christ's blackness is both literal and symbolic... The least in America are literally and symbolically present in black people." (Cone, God of the Oppressed). Christ's skin color and other physical features marked him as part of a marginalized community in the Roman empire. Additionally, Christ himself practiced radical solidarity with the poor and marginalized. It is with the oppressed that Christ spent most of his time, did most of his service, and called on to receive preferential positions in society. In the American context, the alterity pressed upon persons because of physical features and the struggle of the oppress locate Christ with people of color. To find and follow Christ, then, Christians must exist in communion with the black community. This does not mean that a person is damned for having white skin, but if one aligns themselves with an oppressive white culture against the marginalized, one sets oneself against the way of Christ. The call of Christianity, according to Cone, is seek out communion and liberation among the black community. The work of medieval and American literature that places the emphasis of Christian back from a merely personal faith towards the corporate practices of sin and liberation is an imperative in the Church and all those who practice theology and biblical exegesis. 


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Reverend Bahr
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Rev. Rachel J. Bahr

The Reverend Rachel J. Bahr is currently Associate Pastor at the First Parish Congregational Church in York, Maine.
She earned a Master of Divinity form Chicago Theological Seminary and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Catawba College in Salisbury, NC. Pastor Rachel loves working with young people and has for much of her life (especially being a PK or Preacher's Kid). One of Pastor Rachel's fondest memories is of being baptized by the Power Team (if you don't know what the Power Team is ask her). She also delights in her two young daughters, Clementine and Elanora, who daily remind her to let go and be silly; God is sometimes speaking through fingerpainting little girls with mischievous grins.


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First Parish Congregational Church United Church of Christ
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Monday, July 6, 2015

The New Digital Humanities with M.W. Bychowski


"As tools come under the control of certain persons and not others... disparity develops over who can claim narratives 
of bodily stability and change"

Transliterature Online

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In honor of ThingsTransform.com reaching 100,000 readers

We are hosting a digital humanities forum
showcasing the work of other fantastic young DH scholars

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A History of Transliterature

Transliterature started as two blogs, one documenting the beginning of my graduate work as a Masters student and the second at the start of Ph.D study. The latter incarnation, which became the website you are reading today, aimed at being a public notebook where my various research, writing, and musings could be easily collected and archived. It was a pleasant surprise when my readership, which began in the low double-digits every month, started to incrementally expand. By the second year, I would get more readers in one day that I got in a whole month the previous year. These were no longer just passersby. 
I watched, part in horror, as I saw patterns in the readership. People hung around and came back again for more. Suddenly, I had an audience. My "public notebook" had a public. This meant people were interested in what I was doing in this corner of the internet and with that came an increased responsibility to make it worthwhile.

Over the years, I've taken steps to make the content and the presentation of the website more consistent, pleasing, and useful. Arriving at 100,000 readers, I work even harder to be of service to my growing digital community. This may be small potatoes compared to some the larger, more established scholars, more avid bloggers, and (to be honest) more gifted writers. But as in the classroom, I respect the precious time and attention of each person who turns their head to read or listen to what I am sharing. What this growth tells me is that people share an interest in what excites me (it is interesting stuff!), and that I am getting better at making this interesting stuff available, accessible, and contextualized. In this way, you, my readers, are not only helping to build the website but helping me to be a better digital humanist, scholar, teacher, and (I hope) writer. Thank you for that. And thank you for the many individuals in this community that continue to be my responders, questioners, challengers, teachers, editors, contributors, and friends. This is why I wanted to mark the jump into the 6-digits with a forum on some of the New Digital Humanists that inspire me to do well and do good. 

Now that you have heard from Tawnya Ravy and her Salmon Rushdie Archive, Derek Newman-Stille and his Speculating Canada, and Angie Bennett Segler and her Digital Piers Plowman, I wanted to share a few of the new things here at Transliterature Online and preview some of the things in the works for the future! All of these come in response to ideas and questions presented by my readers and fellow transliterati. A great benefit from more actively integrating Facebook and Twitter was that this increased the conversations between members of the community. Keep on talking, I'm listening! I'm very excited about where we are and where we are going. Let's keep our critical conversations going as we work to make the future that we want, to make Things Transform for the better.



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What's New?


The movement from Transliterature's longtime home on Blogspot.com to an independent URL, www.ThingsTransform.com, marked an extension that was already taking place in the project away from exclusively blog-style posts to hosting additional digital resources. This came in part in response to educators reaching out for more tools to use in the classroom as they began to assign Transliterature as required reading for their seminars. Furthermore, my consulting work continues to bring up interesting projects beyond or alongside academia. What this amounts to is a desire to be more accessible and useful to all those interested in these thoughts, methods and stories.


As an educator, I believe in the tenant: meet people where they are. This is what lead me to the digital humanities - to share my academic scribbles, remembrances, and flights of fancy with a public beyond my personal notebooks and immediate colleagues. The success of these musings has brought requests for the best ways for readers and fellow educators to adapt our online conversations to the classroom. This spurred the development of a pedagogy section to the website where I offer (1) terminology, (2) policies, and (3) introduction forms. Additionally, I share several lesson plans from courses I have taught on transgender, disability, and sexuality in the middle ages.


In the course of my curation of trans literature, I come up against the need for more narratives on transgender that connect the personal with the political. Evidence and discussions of critical topics that need to be addressed in literature are not yet present in public discourse. There are things I know from experience and from conversations within the trans community that are not published, archived, and authorized in scholarly dialogs. Towards this goal of adding narratives that illustrate, evidence, and entertain the details of trans living, I work to expand my memoirs. An added benefit of this enjoyable work is that I get to give honor to the many other persons and stories that have impacted my life. To be a trans person in society is to be a magnet for stories. In our daily goings, society makes us archives, storytellers and nodes for conversations. May discussing the text of my life point beyond me to the important things transforming in the margins.


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Coming Soon...


In the past two years, the Morpheus Database has built up an increasingly massive amount of data on transformation, transgender, and disability in literature. Last year, as part of phase II, the database expanded to include data drawn from non-fiction sources as well. This is key, especially in fields like medieval studies and identity studies where story and theory are inextricable. Furthermore, Mark II moved to a new home on Knack.com where the information could be added, edited, and read by a greater number of participants. At this point, however, this remains limited to a core team. In the future, I am already in conversations on ways to make the information more user-friendly and useful to the public. Mark III aims to provide more data-visualization, a searchable database, and distinct project areas where independent researchers would be able to participate in the building of our knowledge about transgender and disability in the middle ages.


One of the most frequent questions from casual readers to scholars interested in going further into transgender and disability studies is where to start reading. I've composed a few targeted bibliographies as part of my academic community and consultancy. This ran from taking pictures of my bookshelves to sharing more comprehensive lists. Soon I will compose a variety of bibliographies that will help newcomers and more experienced readers to find useful and interesting texts that will help them learn and communicate on these important issues. Let's read together!


In recent years, I've consulted for acting troupes, businesses, churches, and educators on how to build more accessible, welcoming, and critical spaces for a wider diversity of persons. Soon, I will be collecting and expanding this material into workshops on gender, sexuality, and disability. The new program will be geared to a variety of communities and workplaces. These, "Transform Talks" will be available on different levels to suit a host of particular needs. Short, 1-2 hour bootcamps will help orient staff, faculty, and minsters on (1) key language, (2) best practices, and (3) context and background in targeted communities. Longer day to weekend long seminars will also be available where team members can become better oriented and trained in diversity, including (1) getting to know important stories and histories, (2) workshopping situations, and (3) transforming social and physical spaces to be safe and fruitful for a wider range of lives.


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