The GW Digital Humanities Institute Defends Global Networks

"Yay #GWDH17! Memorable day 
of #Global #Chaucers & #Shakespeares: 
archives, ethics, translation, embodied 
poetics, motion X cultures @GWDHI"

@JonathanHsy

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The Ban

Do we send someone to push through protestors and fight the TSA to get our transnational scholars to the conference? Could we even get anywhere close? Would there still be a conference? These were all serious questions our conference committee (Jonathan Hsy, Alexa Huang, Haylie Swenson, and myself) were forced to consider late one January evening. The Muslim Ban had been announced earlier in the day, halting transport from seven countries but also slowing, stopping, and confusing travel of all varieties of people in the United States. Trump had signed the executive order with immediate effect but few knew exactly what to do or how to handle the number of situations with uncertain standings and outcomes. In response to the Ban and its damaging effects, protestors had gathered at major airports. What made the event stranger to me was that I was caught in the middle of it without knowing exactly what "it" was. In the days immediately prior, I had legally changed my name and gender marker at a series of government agencies across Illinois. During these personal life changes I was busy working on the conference website and following up with hotels for the various guests. Between getting my bags packed, grabbing food on way to the airport, then pushing through security, I had not given much to any attention to what was going on politically. I knew that Trump had signed a new executive order that was making a lot of people upset, but as in the campaign, the horrible news had all began to blend together. It was entirely possible some of this was bleed over from the news from the last few days of executive orders. It was not. 

The first sign that something was going on occurred when I was going through security. While I'm no stranger to strange and unnecessary interrogation from TSA agents on account of being transgender, this time I was being grilled not on who I was but where I was going and why. I was going home I told them. I live in Connecticut. Yes, I'm aware that my flight is going to Boston. Flights to Boston are three to four times cheaper than flights to Hartford, CT. Yes, that is outrageous. Yes, I do think it is a small airport in Hartford. Thank you, I am looking forward to seeing my family. No comment on whether or not I will have a good night. Once I got through to the other side of the TSA, I took a seat and opened my e-mail. Another urgent request for the website. As I paid for internet (the free 30 min was hardly enough to go through my e-mail and make replies) and got to work. After I made the changes, I turned on social media. Suddenly my unusual interrogation by the TSA agent began to make more sense. As I began to understand the gravity and widespread impact the Muslim Ban was successfully having I began contacting the other conference organizers. Over the night and for the next weeks were would monitor the situation closely. As stays were assert and the courts finally halting the ban for the time being, we began to be more cautiously hopeful that at very least the conference would still be occurring. Still, contingent plans had to been written up and a series of terrible scenerios imagined as we tried to prepare for the fallout our government's actions would have on our work and the intellectual community at large.

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The Global Community

Approaching the date, the significance of our Global Chaucer and Shakespeare conference took on a larger and more pressing significance. As the U.S. government warred with the Justice Department and the public over borders, the GW Digital Humanities Conference became living evidence on the importance of transnational networks that resisted, span, and destabilized borders. While most of the conference was carried out in English, once all the organizers and invited speakers were collected in the GW Gelman Library, our community consisted of over a half dozen nationalities and even more language groups, including a few dead languages. Counting those who participated in the conference online via live-tweeting (#GWDH17) the number of countries and language present cannot be readily tallied. What arouse in the subsequent conversations was not only a sharing of distinct cultural locations but a mutual sense of transnationalism. Michael Saenger interwove stories of his travels between the U.S. and England throughout the day's entertainment. Eve Salisbury discussed what it meant to teach students and work with speakers along the border of the United States and Canada. As borders become less permeable, the ability to slip into Canada to take a shortcut to the medieval conference in Kalamazoo, Michigan, becomes more perilous. Indeed, in the wake of the recent Ban and shift toward white nationalism in the U.S. government, boycotts of U.S. hosted international conferences are being planned. The American academics at the conference applaud the activism and wonder what effects such boycotts will have on these future conferences. For this weekend, however, we were all together to consider and plan how to use transnational technologies and humanities to build up global communities even as institutions assert greater divisions and borders.

Among the language groups in active use in the conference was American Sign Language (ASL) as translators and speakers addressed the audience in a variety of modes. Following the question of access, as well as Carol Robinson's discussion of "Chaucer and Shakespeare in the Deaf World: Transcriptions and Interpretations," Jill Bradbury added insights on how to make literatures like Chaucer and Shakespeare accessible to a wider range of audiences, especially among the Deaf community. Key to this discussion was the dialects and performances of sign language in different versions of Shakespeare. Those who attend to the American Sign Language translations the words being verbally spoken on stage will discover how much they add to and define the performance. When Shakespeare is done in part or entirely in ASL the plays take on new ranges of expression and meaning. ASL Shakespeare continually builds on the combined talents of performer and translator. Robinson affirmed how her students worked at the intersection of translation and adaption when creating American Sign Language versions of Chaucer's The Wife of Bath. Because ASL relies on embodied cues, each translation carries significant bonds with the performance. Certain gestures and facial expressions make the signs clearer or add further meaning. As a result, another person telling the same story in ASL would likely end up creating their own adaptation of the performance even as they stayed faithful to the same text. Indeed, when the conference broke for food, the conversation continued. I got to speak with Katherine Schaap Williams over salad and wraps on how disability and diverse embodiments interpenetrate all our global networks. While languages and codes shift, technologies are replaced by newer models, from medieval to modern society, history continues to play out the dialectical battle of access and boundaries. Out of this arouse a shared sense of the pressing need to be conversant in multiples historical eras, networks, and modes of communication.

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What a Transnational 

Chaucer and Shakespeare

Mean Here & Now

Following the insights from the World Shakespeare Bibliography Online (Laura Estill) on "What's In and What's Out," The Global Shakespeare Project (Alexa Huang) shared the roundtable with the Global Chaucer Project (Candance Barrington and Jonathan Hsy)resulting in some good-spirited competition and a sincere collaboration in asserting the transnationalism of these key literary figures. The entries in the Global Chaucer Project attest that the Canterbury Tales did not only travel across London but across Argentina and Brazil. Shakespeare not only spoke English and French but Portuguese and Spanish in Central and South American Dialects. By allowing Chaucer to become provincial in China or Russia, at home in their language and culture, his words become transnational. Of course, the challenge of curating such archives is determining "what is in and what is out." For Global Chaucer, this has more to do with labor and feasibility. In general, explained the directors, they do not say, "no." What they are more likely to say is, "how?" or "can you help get this done?" As a result, contributors take a hand in constructing the archive and not merely adding content to it. On the other side, Global Shakespeare admitted that due to feasibility issues, they are forced to be more limiting in what they will host. So many performances and adaptations of Shakespeare are made every year that archiving all of it with the limited workers and technology available would bring the network to a stand still. As a result, Global Shakespeare requires a performance to be released on television or film and available on an accessible recording. After all, said Global Shakespeare, there are other sites currently at work documenting and archiving other forms of performance. One archive does not need to do it all. In the end, the good is better than the perfect because it effects more change. By providing a growing range of editions for readers of Chaucer and Shakespeare to explore, more global adaptation, reading, and community will be produced by those who follow these authors as they migrate and find refuge around the world.

The roundtable concluded on a thread began in the insights of Fundación Shakespeare Argentina (Mercedes de la Torre and Carlos A. Drocchi), and the featured speaker and translator, José Francisco Botelho, who explored how Chaucer and Shakespeare became Brazilian in the process of making Portuguese editions of their works. For instance, common brown birds like larks do not mean the same thing in Brazil as they do in England, so other birds are named. The meaning of a play or the Canterbury Tales stays the same, says Botelho, only by changing some of the details. A lark becomes unusual and foreign if used in a Brazilian context. A common brown bird from Brazil on the other hand gives a sense of people on pilgrimage not too far from home. As a result, Canterbury begins to feel a bit more like it is located in some out of the way place in South America. Chaucer begins walking out of London and may find himself listening to birds and walking over a stream in Brazil. As a translator, Botelho finds himself having to make more alterations or additions to the text in Shakespeare plays because of their genre as a performance text. Consideration has to be given as to how actors might interpret the lines to make the most out of them for a local Brazilian audience. As much as he could, the translator would stick with a direct translation but often enough the meanings didn't have the same one to one connection as the words. Some direct translations would require a wider understanding of English culture, environment, and history in order to make full sense of them. These demands are less problematic in written texts such as Chaucer's. In Shakespeare's plays this additional historical context can be clunky. These changes were important, explained Botelho, "because jokes aren't funny if you need a footnote to explain them." 

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Thank You GW Digital Humanities

The Global Chaucer and Shakespeare Conference was a bitter sweet event not only because of its resistance to the wider U.S. political position but also because it signaled the last event Haylie Swenson and myself would be organizing for the GW DH Institute and GW in general. Both of us will be finishing our Ph.D's and moving on to other pastures by the end of the year. Speaking on our behalf, we are grateful for the fellowship of directors Jonathan Hsy and Alexa Huang, as well as the wider network of scholars, translators, and digital humanities the Institute has allowed us to engage as members. Moving forward, we will remain a part of the DH Institute's wider network but after this academic year will be less involved on the day to day work. Too often the value of day to day work is underrated and remembered only in recollection. Our heads are down and focused on the work in front of us. A lot happens over computers, skype meetings, and sitting around an Indian restaurant with invited guest. Personally, I'm grateful for the role each of those moments had in us laying the foundations of an excellent Institute, some cutting edge conferences, and in building up movements of resistance, reform, and revolution. Thank GW DH and let's keep this going. The work isn't done yet!

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Transphobic Technologies: Body Scanners and TSA Gatekeeping

"I am being held by the TSA in Orlando 
because of an "anomaly" (my penis)...
I am finding out this is completely routine 
for so many trans people."

Shadi Petosky

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Gatekeeping

"So why do you wear these?" asked a TSA agent as she held up a pair of my panties for anyone walking through the airport to see. Matching word to deed, the Orlando, Florida airport worker was pitching a barrage of prying questions as she prying through my personal belongings. She had just finished a thorough pat down, including multiple gropings of my genitals and ass. I was in the process of returning from a conference where I had given a talk on social discrimination experienced by the transgender and disability community. As I went through airport security, I experienced this gatekeeping first hand. After I passed through the body scanner and been groped by the TSA staff, they had pulled me aside to tell me that they would need to do a more thorough examination. It was then that I was brought to a semi-private area (a short wall that most people could easily see over or around) where a team of ciswomen unzipped my bag and proceeded to interrogate me on the contents. They had firmly silenced me throughout the unwanted touching of my body and the public display of my intimates through implicit suggestions that I was being considered as a potential terror threat. Immediately it became evident, however, that their questions had nothing to do with me being a potential threat to the general sense of security but me being an actual threat to the general sense of gender. My small bottles of fluids (sunscreen, toothpaste, etc.) did not gain any attention but my underwear, swim suits, and make-up were each questioned in turn. Each article seemed to be equally a puzzle and an assault to her because I owned them. What would have been a natural element of her life, as a cisgender woman, seemed out of place in my life, as a transgender woman. The implicit statement was not so much that she did not understand these instruments of femme life but that she was using them as an avenue to critique me.

"Do you date men?" she asked, beginning a line of questioning about my sexuality. "I have a girlfriend," I informed her. This seemed to make things worse, although it was hard to tell what I could say that would end this invasive situation in which she held me. "But if you date women," she continued, "why do you dress like a woman?" She was still fingering through my dresses and intimate apparel while she pushed me on my relationships. "Because I am a woman," I explained simply, "and they like to date women." The need to state the obvious facts of my life made it all the more clear to me that I was not only being targeted for being transgender but for being queer. Her fixation on my sexuality made it clear that she did not understand lesbians anymore than she understood transwomen in general. Nor could she discern the difference between gender and sexuality. "But wearing women's clothes, don't you get more attention from men?" she pushed. "Yes, I get attention from men, women, everybody," I confirmed. She did not catch my double meaning when I said "everybody." Despite her implicit trans- and homophobia, clearly she had found me in some ways overwhelmingly interesting. Had I felt free to push her back, I would have asked if she did not find her groping hands on my genitals, her thumbing through my panties, and her probing interrogation on my sexual habits to be a form of perverse eroticism. Could I make her understand that the targeting and treatment of transgender persons by the TSA constituted a kind of systematic sexual abuse and sexism.

Sexual abusers are not always so oblivious that what they are doing may be wrong. Throughout the TSA agent's investigation, her partner remained next to her, silent but evidently disturbed by the levels her associate was taking her invasion of my personal life. At certain questions she would roll her eyes or make a face, mostly for my benefit because her partner was not paying her any mind. When she started in on my sexuality, the silent TSA agent did make some disapproving noises. But the investigator would wave her off with dismissive phrases, "I'm just asking her a question," or "I just want to know." While the gestures from the other TSA agent were perhaps made to comfort me with signs of alliance, in many respects it only showed that what was happening was worse than mere ignorant curiosity. First, the TSA knew what they were doing was beyond the stated goals and methods for which the agency was founded. They have been called out by the trans community and by their own agents yet they continued to extend their reach. Second, not only was the TSA agent using her position of power to hold me still and silent but even someone who had a greater degree of power in the situation, another cisgender TSA agent, could not stop the invasive probing. Whatever the exact nature of the personal and professional pressure that came along with the questioner's dismissal of her co-worker, it was clear that there was a system of oppression backing up the abuse. Beyond the personal intents or pleasures of the agent, the TSA ideological gatekeeping machine not only permitted but used this agent as an instrument to enact anti-trans, anti-queer agendas. This was one way of showing the transgender community that an adversarial cisgender community maintains direct power over their bodies, possessions, and stories.

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The Case of Shadi Petosky

A couple years later, another trans woman, Shadi Petosky, was pulled aside by the TSA at Orlando Airport. While I had been silenced during my isolation and probing, Petosky took to twitter to live-stream events as they quickly escalated. Like me, the situation began with the body scanner, which signaled that it had caught a trans body, resulting in her being brought away by the TSA. "I am being held by the TSA in Orlando because of an "anomaly" (my penis)," reported Petosky at the start of her series of tweets. "I didn't know how to spell anomaly until today," she later admitted. Next, Petosky found herself brought to a private cell for containment. "The TSA has left me in a room alone. There is an officer holding the door," wrote Petosky. Once the TSA had her alone, they began directly policing her gender, insisting that she submit to their diagnosis of her sex as male. "TSA agent Bramlet told me to get back in the machine as a man or it was going to be a problem," continued Petosky's report. When Petosky refused to gender herself as male, the TSA then escalated the event by calling in a police officer who continued to press her to disclose her genital sex. "Cop asked me what sex I was. I told him I wasn't going to answer that question. I am complying but come on," wrote Petosky. Finally, but momentary, Petosky was released from the TSA but her trip and her possessions were totally undone. "I am through. It was about 40 minutes, 2 full body pat downs, fully disassembled luggage. I missed my flight," wrote Petosky. Having missed her flight because of the TSA, the agents returned to remover her. "A TSA agent is telling me to leave the airport," tweets Petosky while she resists, insisting to speaking to management. After being escorted out of Orlando Airport, security continues to berate her for complaining about her treatment. "They told me to get myself together, I am sobbing, not belligerent," she insisted. The airline eventually got a hold of her with a new flight but said that they were going to charge her $955 because she had missed her previous flight. "My point of listing the prices is not to get money. It's to show cost when the TSA detains trans bodies (Plus time, denigration)," Petosky  later explained to twitter. While she eventually got on a standby flight, Petosky could not escape further disciplining from airport and airline authorities. "I literally want to no lectures from American Airlines on how to travel while trans. I want the same privileges as cis people," concluded Petosky.

While Petosky's case with the Orlando TSA and airport staff became immediate news, largely because of her detailed and comprehensive documenting, nonetheless, her situation was not uncommon. "I am finding out this is completely routine for so many trans people," she admitted some time into the incident. Indeed, even the TSA responded stating that the event followed fairly standard protocol for handling such a transgender person. “After examining closed-circuit TV video and other available information, T.S.A. has determined that the evidence shows our officers followed T.S.A.’s strict guidelines,” wrote TSA spokesman, Mike England, in a press release. The Petosky case documents a system that is in place to mark and manage transgender persons as "anomalies." This language is weighted in many ways. Significantly, the TSA's primary purpose in the public eye is to stop and detain terrorists. By treating transgender persons in such a way, the TSA implicitly marks the transgender individual as in some way like a terrorist. By repeat enactment of these policies, the TSA effectively associates transgender with terrorism. Thus, the TSA calling the trans body an "anomaly" is a way to at once defuse and differentiate them for "terrorists" but to justify treating them as though they are or might be terrorists. Furthermore, through repeat use on transgender persons, the TSA teaches them and others to understand themselves as "anomalies." This is another way of calling transgender people, "freaks," "queer," "sick," "crazy," or "monstrous" but in a way that has not yet been deemed politically incorrect. Indeed, an effect of politically correct language is not the reforming of sexist or transphobic people and organizations but a mandate that they find new ways to enact marginalization in code or silence. While the TSA eventually admitted that "anomaly" might be an offensive term to use for a transgender person, in my experience its use has not stopped up until the current day. As with the agent who gaze discouraging looks to her partner, a few dissenting voices in the TSA is not enough to dismantle an enormous system of hate and oppression. 

The violence against the transgender community at airports is not something that can be changed individual by individual because it is written into the very technology and practice of gatekeeping. TSA body scanners embody the systematizing and dehumanizing of gender. The mechanisms no longer see particular humans but see the body as a normative (non-queer) normate (non-disabled) white figure that fits into one of two binary genders: the pink female mode and the blue male mode. The change from a more detailed body image was made to give its subjects a greater degree of privacy (i.e. so every tuck and fold wouldn't be visible to the TSA). Because of this loss of particularity, however, all bodies have been more overtly placed under what is supposed to be a universal representation of humanity. The TSA would likely argue that the choice of a binpedal figure is not meant to be ableist, that the choice of a white figure is not meant to be racist, that the more masculine figure is not meant to be sexist but all are meant to represent a neutral undifferentiated humanity. Of course, the presumption that a white cisgender ablebodied man is the standard and that all non-white, trans, disabled, non-male persons are divergent is the foundation of most racism, sexism, ableism, and transphobia. It is the goal of neutrality as the norm and the norm as neutrality that encourages hate more than systems that acknowledge the infinite diversity of bodies. Indeed, the binary reflected by the machine's two gender modes is just a reflection of this drive toward the universal singularity of man. Language itself evidences how wo-man is marked as the alternative to the standard man, the fe-male as the alternative to the standard male. The marking of transgender, intersex, and crip body as unacceptable anomylies is a direct extension of a system that marks the fe-male body as the acceptable anomyly of the male body. This manifold discrimination is evident in the TSA protocol that uses a cisgender woman to interrogate a queer woman for being transgender and a lesbian.

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The Real Cost of Travel

"I could cry from relief," I texted my fiance. "Yeah!!!" she replies with an expression of shared elation. Both of us felt the release of tension that built up each time I went through airport security. Some nights before a trip I would have trouble sleeping. The anxiety I felt was not for a single anticipated groping but the kindled flame of a nerve that had been scraped raw time after time. The fear I experienced was not so much of a future event that I would pass through but of a cycle wherein past traumas became a chronic present from which I felt unable to escape. As a result, I felt the pain before the TSA agents even touched me because it was not just their hands that I felt but the hands of dozens (or was it now hundreds?) that had repeated the same exercise of power across my body. Yet this day, for the first time in years, I had passed through the TSA security without getting pulled aside for genital groping. This privilege (as I had come to regard the freedom from assault) was not a matter of luck or a system that had learned its lesson. Rather, I had scrounged up the money to pay the system off. In what amounted to an authorized bribe of the TSA, I had sent the US government a substantial payment and submitted myself to a background check as part of signing up for the TSA Pre-Check system. The status came with several perks, including a shorter line, the ability to keep my shoes on through security, and the freedom to keep my laptop in its bag as it was x-rayed. But the most important benefit of making the payment to the TSA was that I would no longer have to go through body scanners. Because I generally pass as a cisgender woman on first and second glance, I can walk through a metal detector without the TSA agents ever knowing I am transgender. Without the body scanner to tip them off or trip the system, I could quite literally pass through the TSA gatekeeping.

On a political level, I am keenly aware that the only difference between me and the trans, queer, or crip woman or person of color being frisked down at the body scanner is about $100. I know the exact cost of this privilege. This arbitrary and exploitative difference does not diminish the suffering of those abused by the system of gatekeeping but further underlines how sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, and racism are enacted with razor thin rationale. If a trans woman is a terror threat until she slips the TSA a wad of cash, that evidences how the TSA never really regarded her as much of a security threat to start. Anyone could go through a background check but pressure is put on transgender and other marginalized peoples because they are the targets that our society wants to harass. Anyone could sign up for TSA Pre-check but I was given overwhelming reason. During a semester where I was flying from work to home, or work to conferences, nearly every week, I had a run where I was getting my genitals touched by the TSA once a week (sometimes twice a week) for ten weeks in a row. It forced me to say that I effectively existed in a chronic, sexually abusive relationship with the TSA. Thus, I was muscled and intimated and abused into paying off the TSA and submitting my background (the thing scanners couldn't see) for analysis. This is how the political is always personal. The battles over ideology occur across the bodies of the oppressed. Thus, on a personal level, I was desperate for the protection the TSA offered from their violence.

This protection is very contingent. It can be revoked or eschewed easily as my recent trip to England showed. TSA Pre-check saves me from the TSA's prying hands only on domestic flights. On this international flight, I was forced to go through the abuse all over again. As I spread my legs and listened to the TSA agent recite their lines about what they were going to touch and how (words I could now repeat exactly), I looked over at another security point where people were walking past the TSA without being scanned. Beside that security gate was a sign advertising an international version of the same security check and payments I made on a domestic level. The TSA agents and procedures were the same. I was the same person. But because of the terminal I used, my gender and my genitals were again a security threat. That is, unless I paid even more money and submitted myself for another round of probing I would fall back into mechanisms of abuse. That is the systematic nature of the TSA's violence against transgender persons and other targeted groups: the discrimination and assault is the normalized state of affairs to which vulnerable bodies will continually be returned, while the escape from this cycle of violence is only ever a temporary and contingent exception to the rules. As a trans woman, gatekeepers work to keep me in my place, so that the privilege of travel always comes with a cost and a precariousness that reminds me that the TSA's disciplining power is only momentarily withheld. That is Michel Foucault's understanding of power at its most efficient: discipline that functions without the need for actualization; that is, the power of fear that makes violence redundant. Another term for systems that function by instilling fear is "terrorism." So in short, by promising to secure the nation from terrorism, the TSA has taken on the role of terrorizing transgender bodies.

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Transgender Stories of Place and Travel

Loca Sancta: Becoming Foreign in Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives

Anti-Loca Sancta: John Mandeville's Second Pilgrimage

The Island of the Amazons: the Medieval Place of Transgender

The Island of Hermaphrodites: On Mapping Intersex & Disability

The Visibility of Transgender: A History of "Freaks & Queers"

Losing Home: the Rape of Transgender Lives in Exile & Pride

Reclaiming Home: the Pilgrimage of Transgender in Exile & Pride

Toxic Environments: the Place & Genre of Transgender Suicide Notes

Environments of Hate: the Anti-Transgender Politics of Bathrooms

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Digital Humanities: The Morpheus Database Mark 2

 

"Stablenesse in this worlde is ther noon.

Ther is nothing but chaunge and variaunce"

Thomas Hoccleve, My Compleinte

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The Morpheus Database (Mark 2) represents a second stage in the development of an interactive archive of transformation in literature. At this point, I begin Beta Testing the database by allowing online access to the information in order to assess the viability of the program in a more extensive and public mode. 

Over the summer I will be continuing to expand the current Literary Database and will then be adding a Critical Theory Database. While philosophy and art are inextricable, there are pragmatic reasons to follow conventions in genre to assist academics not fluent in literary practices and archives. This database will be more targeted towards the intersection of Gender and Disability in Medieval Literature, particularly those relating to Transgender Histories and Theories of Change.

Through testing and responses from users, I hope to significantly improve the method, analysis, and layout of the database towards the goal of a more permanent and useful resource in the digital humanities of gender, disability and change. The phase of testing represents a relation to public engagement and critique that I hope to demonstrate in my blog and other digital work. The hope of this is to continue the work of breaking open the academy from Institutions based on exclusionary evaluation methods, admittance, and codes of conduct that leave many brilliant minds outside the intellectual conversation.

Towards these goals, please check out The Morpheus Database and share your thoughts, questions and research!

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