The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award 2018 Seminar at CWRU

"Over the years, the Anisfield-Wolf canon 
has become a living, breathing community 
of thinkers, writers, and artists 
that spans continents, generations, 
and intellectual traditions."

Rev. Dr. Stephen Rowan

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How do we talk about racism? How do we talk about sexism? These were two of the questions that initiated the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award seminar at Case Western Reserve University. Following the seminar approach to general education, these questions would be answered through guided instruction and moderation from August to December. The goal was not only to help facilitate talk about racism and sexism but also to study the ways in which this talk already occurs. The challenge presented to students was to analyze and deconstruct the grammar and rhetoric of white supremacy. What are the images created and repeated? How are sentences structured to lead readers or listeners to certain conclusions? What are the nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives which act as dog whistles for attentive audiences? All this and more were on the table when we began our seminar.

The thesis of the 2018 seminar was that the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners could help answer the questions posed on racism and sexism. We began the semester with the Book Award winners in preparation for attending the Award Event in late September. In those weeks, students considered how the poetry of Shane McCrae taught readers how language bends and twists in order to reflect the tension between hate and love, captor and captive, identity and society. Next, the students weighed the importance of truth and hoax through Kevin Young's Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News. Bunk seriously engages what it means to be a "non-fiction" book in eras where various authors and authorities try to blur the line between fact and fiction, especially as it applies to the construction, exploitation, and oppression of racial identities. The fiction award winner, Sing Unburied Sing, written by Jesmyn Ward, demonstrates for students the ways that fiction can be used to speak of unspeakable traumas  and to embodied truths that are too often left dismissively abstract. Concluding this section with the majority of the class attending the Book Award Event was critical to bringing the texts alive in new ways by introducing the book's readers to the book's writers. Returning back to class, the following months were evidently impacted by the way that this event grounded the discussion of racism and sexism within real lives and social conditions.

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Beyond the 2018 Book Award Winners, the seminar invited the class to read important Anisfield-Wolf texts that take different perspectives on the questions and language of racism. Books by the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X began the analysis of the Civil Rights Movement, a scope which we expanded to consider the women of the civil rights movement as well. Books like Hidden Figures and the Gay Revolution filled in this picture in part, as well as additional texts that resonated with the Anisfield-Wolf mission, such as This Bridge Called My Back, Sister Outsider, and the writings of Angela Davis. These women writers gave insights into the ways that women were hard at work in the Civil Rights Movement as well as the distinct ways sexism was compounded and furthered with the racist rhetoric of white supremacy. Indeed, by adding the lens of gender, the reading of MLK and Malcolm X deepens by prompting audiences to consider how being heterosexual cisgender men of faith may have influenced the way in which these leaders encountered the world. This synergy not only expanded but also added dimensions to familiar view points on the Civil Rights Movement.

Towards the end of the semester, the training and texts of the Anisfield-Wold Awarded books were brought to task against literature that reflects or considers traditions of white supremacy. Guided by critical films and texts, the students engaged in their own independent research on specific white supremacy organizations around the United States. After presentations were made, in which the ideologies, cultural touch-stones, and grammar of the white supremacists were analyzed, the class proceeded to find ways that the Anisfield-Wolf Award books and their affiliates help to resist and dismantle these rhetorics of hate. Specifically, students rode the rails around Cleveland in order to see the murals based on Anisfield-Wolf Award Books which decorated the windows of the train cars. This mural project was generated through a partnership with Inter | Urban, the Cleveland Foundation, and the Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellows at Case Western Reserve University. Together, the students studied specific images by artists inspired by particular A-W Book Award winning books and articulated how they saw the art combatting or deconstructing the grammar of racism and sexism.

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As a scholar and instructor of Anisfield-Wolf Awarded Books, I am honored to introduce students at Case Western Reserve University to the canon of books that each attempt in their own way to respond to the questions: how do we talk about racism, and, how do we talk about sexism? In the last couple years, the class has been in high demand with spots filling up quickly and there always being an extensive wait-list. On the first day, I hear about what brings the students to the seminar and to Anisfield-Wolf Book Award archive. Some students come with already invested interests in social justice, racial equity, and feminism. Other students come to the class admitting that they come from homes and local areas were racism and sexism is rampant but discussing either is discouraged. In each case, I take my job seriously: to meet students where they are, equipping them with critical tools and books, and to help bring them into the ongoing discourse which the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards has promoted. By the end of the semester, I hear a myriad of ways that the students now feel not only better trained to engage these conversations and activisms but also feel connected to a wider community which these books have generated. For these reasons and more, I am grateful to see these students and the A-W community grow one year and one seminar at a time.

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Pedagogies of Survival: Teaching Trauma in Traumatizing Times

“Here begynnyth a schort tretys and a comfortabyl 

for synful wrecchys, wherin

thei may have gret solas and comfort”

The Book of Margery Kempe

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Compassion and Comfort

I ask only that we feel together for a time. I cannot tell you to imitate my method. I cannot tell you to imitate my feelings. I cannot fix this, these traumas new and old. I ask only that you listen for a time to my feelings and you feel your feelings alongside mine. If something I feel resonates with you, perhaps the sympathies will better us and strengthen us. I blush to say that our compassions, our feeling-together, may comfort us. By comfort I mean that fortification that being-together can give to those it connects. Comfort embiggens us so that we might together face the traumas which might crush us alone. Somehow, the comfort of feeling-together makes us a one that is more than two, yet bigger than one alone. I seek comfort that I might offer comfort, something I do not have on my own. I ask that we feel together because the feelings come without my asking, because I cannot ignore or avoid the feelings and so they must be faced. The seminar must go on, students and teachers must go on. Yet, how do we do this, yet remember as Edutopia does, "When Students Are Traumatized, Teachers Are Too." Many of us need more than a "pedagogy of trauma" but also "a pedagogy of survival" that will not only instruct our students but assist in a collective reclamation of life, power, and self.

This past week has been a representative embodiment of much of the work I struggle with this semester and other times in my work as a scholar, mother, and activist. This past week I have been tasked to teach trauma in a traumatic time to traumatized students. I take one this task as someone who has also struggled with trauma. How do I teach a seminar, "Beyond Male and Female: Histories of Transgender and Non-Binary Gender," discussing how bodies are stolen, imprisoned in mental hospitals, subjected to abusive conversion therapy, and pressed towards suicide in Dylan Scholinski's memoir, The Last Time I Wore a Dress? Can you possibly engage pain that students in the class not only understand but have experienced, and still feel? How do I teach my seminar, "Racism and Human Diversity: Medieval Narratives of Blackness," discussing how the trauma of slavery meets the horror of sexism in the stealing of bodies in Beloved by subjugation, rape, and torture? If each lesson plan has an arc, a beginning, middle, and end, where is it that I can bring my students? Certainly we do not live in a world without the ghosts and illness of white supremacy, racism, sexism, and their thieveries. And the text does not offer any such wholesale escape or escapism. There is liberation, there is hope, there is exorcism, but the scars and pain remains. I cannot tell the students how to fix trauma, where they might run to flee racism, how they might undo the knots of sexism and rape. I can offer them what teachers (including Dylan Scholinski and Toni Morrison) have taught me: how to survive, how to leave, and how to reclaim what has been taken, broken, killed. Yet this requires us to feel where and when we are, to feel where we and others have been, to feel together and find some strength which we might call comfort.

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Trigger Warnings

My students are tired, so tired, and the trauma we must discuss and share is triggering of wounds that have not scabbed. The rape, suicide, torture, death, and abuse of racism, gender, and disability that our texts ask us to feel-with is so heavy and our students are already carrying so much. The hope is that, even if the texts cannot lighten our loads, at least they can give strength through a shared affect and struggle. Yet these connects are hard and demand what Morrison calls a thick sort of love. These are connections that happen at the point of wounds and scars. When students ask to leave the room, I commend their self-preservation and self-care. When they return, I am grateful for their compassion. These are the skills that students have learned to survive trauma. These are good skills. These are lessons we need to share and on which we are trying to build. Comfort may help us survive but it is no guarantee. Some of us may break under the strain. These are the stakes of our learning about trauma and survival, these are the costs, and these are our hopes. Some view "trigger warnings" as extraneous to teaching, even antithetical to teaching because it seems to offer our students an "out" from dealing with difficult learning. I don't see warnings that way. I see the warning a part of the lesson. I see the warning as part of thinking about trauma. I see the warning as part of survival. I see the lesson as part of this survival. This is the lesson Denver learns in Beloved: if one can leave, sometimes one must leave. Students do not leave class because they are experiencing the lesson on trauma any less but because they are experiencing the trauma and the lesson that much more.

A dilemma in teaching about trauma is that trauma rarely exists within a discreet period of time or along a linear temporal frame. Trauma is less like a line than an organic vine with recursive bends back toward the points of unresolved hurt, away from points of pain, and run all through with a twisting anxiety. As instructors, we teach our students to be ever conscious about context, and so we must also be. This is another way that "trigger warnings" may serve as more than a deterrent or excuse. Trigger warnings is a way of acknowledging that traumas we have experienced may not be over simply because we have been able to show up to class. This week, as we discuss the KKK, slavery, the persistence of racism and its damage, white supremacists are once again marching. This week, as we discuss transphobia, the systematic isolation and exclusion of transgender, and the despair unto death felt by trans and other non-binary persons, the federal government works to take away job protections for non-cisgender persons. This week, as we discuss rape and the abuse of women, the same federal government makes it harder for such women (all women) to reclaim agency over their bodies and sexualities. This week, as we discuss violence and the hate that will not die, a mass shooting kills several dozens and harms countless. Do we offer our students escape and refuge? Or do we offer them a place to rally and resist? What if some students desperately need the former and other students are eager for the latter? What if we, the instructors, are feeling crushed under the weight our times? Our times can be poignant reminders of the lingering significance of texts and histories that may be decades or centuries old. Our times can also leave us speechless, unable to think or argue because we feel so much. Some lessons are meant to transport us somewhere, lead us to some conclusion. Some lessons are meant to help us sit exactly where we are, when we are, and help us to exist and survive together. Sometimes, a lesson is successful not because of what students walked away with but because students (and ourselves) were able to walk away.

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The Lessons that Don't Happen

This sum of trauma may be that the best lesson plan is sometimes the lesson that does not happen. There is power is being able to consider the people in the room, consider the time and context of the room, to consider the instructor in the room, and then change the lesson. What are some of these changes? What lessons emerge when we let go of the classes that won't happen? (Lesson 1) Students have more power than they may know. I have had classes where I've worked to help my students understand trauma in a text. Other times students understand this trauma uneasily well and the lesson becomes learning with them how to survive. Showing our students that we can change, change our directions, change our locations, change our plans, is a way of teaching them the lesson that things don't have to be this way. We have the power to adapt, evolve, respond to our environments. By listening to the students in the room, we teach (or remind) them about their own power. (Lesson 2) Remind students its okay to think with their feelings. At the start of my seminars, I tell my students that nearly all my classes teach the same three lessons but in importantly distinct forms, embodiments, and contexts: how to perceive power dynamics, how to affect/effect power, and how to wrestle with the ethics of power. Understanding that emotions are key to how social power functions and is manipulated, and affective well being is essential to ethical considerations, is a lesson students do not get enough. By acknowledging the struggle of working through pain and fear as well as the ethical role of compassion and comfort, we place our student's experiences in the center of a class, not somehow outside them at an impossible objective and amoral distance. (Lesson 3) The classroom is not the only place where learning and growth can happen. Again, sometimes the best lesson is the lesson not given, when we teach our students about the power to turn a class day into a mental health day: to get sleep, to take a long lunch, to lighten a crushing work load, to find comfort in their own way. As Edutopia succinctly writes, "Brains in Pain Cannot Learn." This may feel like giving up, giving students the day off, but in our humility we are reminding students of their own power to survive, enact self-care, and learn. 

In the end, a pedagogy of survival is not a lesson plan I can set in advance or summarize for those looking to imitate it. Trauma is like a cancer, a form of life that grows and changes. Likewise, survival requires adaptability and transformation in response to classroom environments and the lives that populate them. The lesson is to be able to let go of our lesson plans when our students and circumstances change. This does not mean that there are no ways forward. There are many ways forward. Which ways is best for you and your students greatly depends on who you are, where you are, when you are teaching, and what we all bring to the classroom. On each of my seminars, I ended the last class of the week by compiling lists of ways in which we can reclaim our power, our lives, and survive. We drew from their experiences and the text's offerings. Among the list was the comfort of writing, the comfort of reading, the comfort of sharing one's feelings with another. In its own way, this is a function or hope of www.ThingsTransform.com. This is a corner of the internet where we may share a corner of our minds and hearts. For that, I thank you. Thank you for feeling-together with me for a time. I do not know what it is you felt but knowing you are there gives me some comfort. Sitting alongside my self, I am not sure what lesson I walk away with, but I am grateful that tonight I can walk away from my work, leave it here, and go engage with the things that transform me.

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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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Transvestite Metaphysics in the Big Bang Theory (Pt 1)

"Good night, real Penny.
Good night, transvestite Penny"

The Big Bang Theory

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The following is a transcript of a paper,
"Transvestite Metaphysics: Quantum Entanglement and Natural Philosophy in 13th century Literature," delivered at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts 
in Orlando, Florida. March 18-22, 2015.

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Science vs Scientism

“Prepare to be terrified,” says Amy Ferrah Fowler when her quantum physicist boyfriend Sheldon Cooper resists attending a fund-raising dinner and glad-handing philanthropists (The Benefactor Factor, S04E15). “If you are unconvincing, this year’s donations might go to, say, the geology department.” “Oh no,” replies Cooper, “Not the dirt people!” “Or, worse still,” teases Fowler, pressing on the scientist’s fears, “it could go to the liberal arts” “No!” he exclaims. “Millions of dollars,” finishes Fowler, driving the phobia home, “being showered on poets, literary theorists and students of gender studies!” “Oh, the humanities,” Cooper shouts jumping up to defend the sciences' financial supremacy over those working on things like transgender in medieval literature.

This exchange from the CBS sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, humorously represents a real position, consciously or unconsciously held, by many in and about the sciences, which is that because of theoretical quantum physicists like Sheldon Cooper, working on so-called "Theories of Everything," Science is becoming able to not merely trump but replace liberal arts areas of studies including literature, philosophy, and theology. “I believe in Science,” is a thing many people un-ironically state when asked questions about meaning, creation, and existence in the universe. This is to say, science has shifted from being considered one mode of attaining knowledge among many, concerned with its own kinds of questions and methodology based on empirical observation, repeatable experiments, and collaborated theories into the chief authority on everything from gravity to gender. This fetishization of Science as a universal hermeneutic constitutes what CS Lewis calls "Scientism." Science comes to mean more than just a set of experiments but a supreme governing school of thought, authority and politics.

The distinction between Science and Scientism is critical because the latter too often holds itself up as the former. When he defined his own critics of Scientism, Lewis was careful to stress distinctions between scientists doing Science and any person transferring uncritical fetishism often associated with religion to Science. "It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real," writes Lewis in the Abolition of Man, "Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost" (Abolition of Man Ch.3). The movement from physics to metaphysics, done without care to understand the implications of statements about what is real, shifts scientific thinkers into the realm of questions and consequences they may not have the disciplinary training to understand. Approaching discovery and doubt with the sharpness to particularities that the scientific method demands, leaves open the library of knowledge to new ways of being in the universe. It is emphatically collaborative, looking to other studies, experts, and ways of knowing to add to its archive. It is the those who practice Scientism who are too quick to state what departments in a university and what genders are real enough to warrant inclusion in donor grants or theories of everything.

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Theories of Everything But...

While Cooper’s tyrannical Scientism is an extreme case not representative of diverse thinkers in the sciences, it rings true a truth that often goes unnoticed or uncommented on among those in the sciences: that scientific fact functions based on and replicates non-scientific political ideologies based on assumptions about race, disability, gender, and sexuality. Indeed, while science itself is too massive to be regarded as essentially sexist, certain scientific communities and ways of thinking, as represented on the Big Bang Theory, affirm many patriarchal assumptions about the body. Even after the introduction of more women into his group of friends, Cooper and company continually make condescending remarks about women, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons. With science being used to justify nearly every one of Cooper’s opinions and actions, one cannot assume that his views on gender exist without affecting his views in quantum physics as to what constitutes embodiment and reality.

A key example of how quantum physics becomes political is in Cooper & Company’s treatment of Transvestites - a form of gender the scientists use as a stand in for all gender queerness or diversity. The term is used by Bernadette, a microbiologist, to describe a portrait of the female lead, Penny, where she appears particularly butch. Mocking the Penny in the painting, Bernadette wishes it and her friend goodbye, “Good night, real Penny. Good night, transvestite Penny” (The Rothman Disintegration S05E17). It’s significant that the term transvestite has not been in regularly use since the 1980s due to its largely derisive connotations as since then feminism began to speak against such prejudice, pioneering of terms such as transgender. This shows the shared disregard for these progressive arguments in the humanities by the larger scientific community that reflects Cooper’s distastes for gender studies as a whole. The trans-ness of transvestism becomes opposed to realness. 

In many respects this comes not from a lack of physical knowledge about matter, but a lack of metaphysical understanding about the meaning of that matter. In Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Karen Barad argues for theories of everything that remain open to everything that may exist outside out the disciplinary borders of physics. "Matter and meaning are not separate elements," argues Barad. "Matter is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance, most evident perhaps when it is the question of matter that is in question, when the smallest parts of matter are found to be capable of exploding deeply entrenched ideas and large cities" (Barad 3). Only grasping the explosive power of cutting an atom will leave you with only half of the Atomic Bomb's power. You must, as Barad writes, grasp "fact and value" together. To ignore the social implications of nuclear science is not to be a good scientist but to justify a narrow-minded Scientism by claiming that science itself compels ignorance of politics. Indeed, when Pope Francis may his infamous comparison of transgender as being like an atomic bomb, he understood not only the matter that was being rearranged by trans science, practice, and medicine but the substantial effects on transforming the meaning of gender. To quickly determine what is real and not-real is not good science, but an anti-intellectualism propelled by a Scientism that does not want to meet the universe half way. This Scientism not only fears what it may discover in the universe full of transvestites and literary critics, but may be uncomfortable with the dangerous, violent, explosive effects of its own work beyond the scope of whiteboard.

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The Real and the Transvestite

In the scientist’s theories of everything, assumptions about what metaphysically exists, including gender, transgender women are simply not as real as other bodies, real women. This is an attitude reinforced throughout the show, especially through references to Cooper’s former neighbor, Louie/Louise, “the 200 pound transvestite with a skin condition” (Pilot S01E01). Note: when we encounter Louie/Louise, in episode 22 of season 3, the only “skin condition” we discern in him/her is that he/she is black (The Staircase Implementation S03E22). In any case, this emphasis of the pathological nature of Louie/Louise’s body reaffirms the unrealness or less reality of her trans embodiment. Without pausing to affirm, nuance or debate Louie/Louise’s gender, all the members of the group unanimously refer to their former neighbor as he. “He” kept his apartment “immaculate” we later find out, repeating and conflating yet another punch-line stereotype, this time about gay men (The Big Bran Hypothesis S01E02). Cooper knows this because he helped her install a webcam in her bedroom, contrasting the contained and disciplined sexuality of Cooper with the out of control sexuality and gender of Louie/Louise. The joke here depends on a public association with webcams in the bedroom with online sex work, where trans woman sell access to video of them revealing their bodies or sexual behavior to online viewers. Now of course she is a webcam sex worker (beside being a police officer)! Aren’t all trans people disease ridden prostitutes?

What does this lead us to believe about the Scientism of Cooper and company’s theory of everything is that just as the university funding can do without literary and gender studies, so too transvestite bodies do not exist (at least on the same metaphysical plane of realness) as properly governed female and male bodies. Indeed, transvestism is repeatedly compared against Penny's preferable cis-reality. In the pilot episode, when Leonard first sees Penny, the first thing he does is compare her to Louie/Louise. "Significant improvement to our old neighbor," says Leonard. "Yes, she is" affirms Sheldon (Pilot S01E01). From the start, there is a contrast between "real Penny" as defined by her cis-female body and "transvestite Penny," whether she comes in the form of a painting, Louie/Louise, or undesirably tomboy behavior. The prior is signified as real fact and the latter the work of cultural artifice. This demonstrates a queer uncanniness between the real and the transvestite Penny. Trans culture is used to police Penny's cis body. The power also works in the other direction. According to the logic of the show, the work of culture and clothing, the focus of Louie/Louise’s gender transitioning as a trans-vestite, does not change the ontological status of the body which wears it. In this quantum theory of everything, realness is on the side of Nature and the body, keeping the work of the humanities, clothing, and Nurture as an unnecessary, even pathological fantasy. Louie’s body is male and real, Louise’s clothes are trans and unreal.

The divide between Nature and Nurture, Matter and Meaning, is held up by Scientism against the Humanities and trans bodies as emblematic of the work of such extra-scientific social engines. It posits the scientist in the subject looking out the objects of study as he draws circles around the universe and determines what bodies and lives fit into his theory of everything. The Big Bang Theory acknowledges this own problem in its Pilot episode as a personal and professional exclusivity when Leonard tries to convince Sheldon to invite their new neighbor to dinner. "I think we should be good neighbors. Invite her over. Make her feel welcome" (Pilot S01E01). "We never invited Louie/Louise over" points out Sheldon. "And that was wrong of us," confesses Leonard, "We need to widen our circle." In this framework, Cooper and his scientist friends are in the center of the universe of what is determined to be real and transvestites exist on the margins or outside the circle of realness.  The problem then is twofold. First, how do we bridge this unscientific divide to reflect the quantum entanglement of matter and meaning, so as to "meet the universe halfway?" Second, how to we reconstruct a more just system of politics based on these world views where trans bodies are no longer on the outside of theories of everything but integral to understanding them? How do we bring a transvestite metaphysics into our scientific imagination? How does science become good neighbors with other bodies and disciplines? I propose that alternative models exist in the places that Cooper is so quick to defund: poetry, literary criticism, and gender studies.

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Part 2: Transvestite Metaphysics

in Roman de Silence

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