Monthly Archives: November 2015

The Apocalypse’s Apocalypse and Post-Apocalyptic Visions of Sunshine and Blessings

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This first ran at CiCO3.
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This posts stems from a conversation with Kyle Johnson after we watched Mad Max: Fury Road together. Thanks to Linda Quiquivix , Zoé Samudzi and William Copeland for feedback on the idea and draft to help make it vaguely coherent. In thinking about worlds I leaned heavily on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and Frank Wilderson’s Red, White and Black even where not cited directly. None of the above can be blamed for what follows. After completing the draft a couple of friends put me onto this great recent CBC conversation which also covers parts of what is below. Special thanks to Cass Chen who was a wonderful friend, host and conversationalist while I scribbled.

George Miller’s 2015 film Mad Max: Fury Road takes place in a post-apocalyptic Australia. Like most apocalypse/post-apocalyptic stories Fury Road comments on the present through envisioning a dystopic future. The film opens with news clips framing the violence to follow as descended from resource wars and global warming. Resource extraction and climate change are ready topics for exploring the end of the world and it is no surprise to find them as common topics for apocalyptic storytelling in cinema, novels, television and comic books. In settler colonies these stories comment upon today’s problems while neglecting to mention that another apocalypse, one suffered by the indigenous population, pre-dates the story. Exploring post-apocalyptic storytelling with this in mind challenges settler colonial normativity and further opens up the world’s end to decolonizing visions.

Ending Othered Worlds

>Fury Road, Brian K. Vaughn & Pia Guerra’s comic book Y: The Last Man and Robert Rodat’s tv series Falling Skies all offer different causes to the apocalypse. Fury Road is unspecific but points towards ecological destruction through climate change and resource wars. Y: The Last Man‘s apocalypse is an unspecified illness or curse that simultaneously kills all the mammals with a Y chromosome (in an unproduced script, Vaughn lays the blame with a U.S. biological weapons attack on China). Falling Skies‘s end of the world comes from extraterrestrial invasion.

Fury Road further comments on climate change and monopolization of resources as a means of centralizing authoritarian, patriarchal power. It follows a group of people through a mostly empty wasteland as they seek the “green place” while they are hunted by those who control the resources. Y: The Last Man narrates Agent 355 and Dr. Allison Mann as they seek to find a cause and cure for the plague that killed all terrestrial mammals with the Y chromosome but for Yorick Brown and his monkey Ampersand. The authors focus on patriarchy, Israeli militarism and market violence. While it is is a global story, it starts in the United States and most of its key plots points take place in three settler colonies, the United States, Israel and Australia, before departing to Japan and France later on. Falling Skies looks at the Second Massachusetts, an irregular militia comprised of survivors of the extraterrestrial Espheni conquest that killed 90% of Earth’s human population as they seek to overthrow Espheni rule and restore the United States. Falling Skies affirms American exceptionalism, laments how the U.S. strayed from the perceived ideals of early republic and takes a geocentric view of the universe in its firmly conservative critique of the present.

These stories offer three different critiques of the present from three different political views and are produced in three different mediums in two different settler colonies. Yet all are representative of a genre of post-apocalyptic storytelling that does not contemplate that the lost U.S. and Australian societies are premised upon settler genocides against the native populations. The closest any of the three comes and the closest the overwhelming preponderance of the genre come is when Y: The Last Man briefly discusses Israeli civil disobedience against Israeli bulldozing of Palestinian houses as part of developing the Israeli character Alter. One notable exception is Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto which engages a pending colonial apocalypse only to justify it. Another is District 9 where some references are made yet are mediated by the white South African hero.

Settler colonialism, the establishment of the stories’ lost worlds, is an anti-native apocalypse and, in the United States, Canada, South Africa, Brazil and Rhodesia, also an anti-Black apocalypse. The racializations of Black and native are mostly different but were simultaneously constructed through the same colonizing events. Both are products of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism builds the settler’s world – the anti-Black world – by destroying the native world and does so in a 1:1 ratio. Every acre created of coastal British/American Virginia is one acre less of Powhatan Tsenacommacah. Every dunam of Israel is one less dunam of Palestine. Settler colonialism through eliminating sovereignties and populations and creating regimes of gratuitous violence brings about the end of a world. It is sometimes even named as such as when Palestinians refer to the accelerated 1947-1949 period of Zionist ethnic cleansing and the establishment of the Israeli settler state as the Nakba (‘catastrophe’).

That we settlers comprise an anti-native apocalypse means that all our cultural production is apocalyptic, is the product of an ongoing apocalypse, including post-apocalyptic visions. John Grisham’s The Firm is an apocalyptic novel of legal corruption. Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” is an unrequited love anthem of the apocalypse. Strictly Ballroom is a film about apocalyptic cross-cultural and cross-class ballroom dancing and romance. Almost all of Danielle Steel’s opus are apocalyptic love story books. Only Miley Cyrus’ career of those four actually feels like a sign of the apocalypse but all are inherently apocalyptic as products of settler colonialism. What the intended post-apocalyptic stories Fury Road, Y: The Last Man and Falling Skies unknowingly narrate is a prior apocalypse experiencing an apocalypse itself, the apocalypse’s apocalypse. The destruction of the settler colony provides the post-apocalyptic wasteland the protagonists navigate.

Elizabeth Povinelli describes settler normativity as the “organization of sociality on the basis of the naturalness of a civilizational displacement.” Alternately put, anti-native genocide, quashing of native sovereignties and, in some settler colonies, African slavery are the fabrics that weave together and underline all settler colonial discourse and relations. Settler everyday life is the anti-native and anti-Black apocalypse but for we settlers, it is just life. In this read Furiosa and Max are settler revolutionaries fighting Immortan Joe and the settler capitalists over control of stolen Aborigine land and resources. This is why it is unsurprising that Falling Skies and Y: The Last Man both fail to engage the anti-native apocalypse despite making numerous references to the early U.S. republic, a time when even normative settler discourse knows (but always remembers to forget) that Indian Removal programs were aggressively underway in some way, shape or form.

It is hard to imagine dystopic settler stories being otherwise for settler colonialism, like all organizations of power, builds the world it inhabits. In settler colonialism’s world settler colonialism – the anti-native and anti-Black apocalypses – is near impossible to see as it is our very frame of reference. A challenging thing about normativity is it’s paradigm paradox: From what frame of reference can we observe our frame of reference? When settlers imagine the end of the world then, we imagine it as synonymous with the end of the planet or species and not the end of settler colonialism’s world. But stories consciously narrating the apocalypse’s apocalypse could describe the end of that world. They can offer a new frame of reference and play a role in subverting and disrupting settler colonial power and discourse.

The World is Ending! Hooray!

Settler storytellers explore all kinds of fascinating, entertaining and illuminating scenarios to describe the end of the world. The Terminator and The Matrix stories look to the artificial intelligence singularity. Deep Impact ends part of the world with a comet collision. The Walking Dead comic book, tv series and a long-running series of George Romero’s …of the Dead films narrate a zombie apocalypse. The Wayward Pines book trilogy and tv series look at apocalypse through divergent evolution and On the Beach‘s apocalypse happens through nuclear war. None of the above reflect on the anti-native and anti-Black apocalypses.

Potentially even non-anthropocentric ones can be told. For example there is Vitamin Z – a yet to be made film documenting the multiyear boon in slow-moving, uncoordinated, easily obtainable, though quite bitey, prey for carnivores and scavengers that follows the zombie apocalypse and restores their populations to pre-capitalist/pre-colonial population levels. I hope Keith David or David Attenborough is available to narrate!

But what about when the end of the world is the apocalypse’s apocalypse? Frank Wilderson notes that, “The Slave needs freedom from the Human race, freedom from the world. The Slave requires gratuitous freedom.” Indeed, settler colonialism’s world of dispossession and gratuitous violence not only can end, but should. Stories of the end of this particular world need not be burnt skies and genocide. In narrating the end of an apocalypse they may well tell the opposite: clean air, vitality and an end to gratuitous violence and suffering. The end of settler colonialism’s world can be sunshine and blessings, little children laughing and singing silly songs, lovers dancing or any other beautiful thing. These are legit post-apocalyptic visions when describing an apocalypse happening to a prior apocalypse when combined with Black and native liberation. So are ones less polarly optimistic or romantic.

The material world stories of the whole or partial end of settler rule in Zimbabwe, Liberia and South Africa are decidedly complicated and frequently tragic. Settler colonialism is not the only wronging world in play as Black feminism’s intersectional resistance teaches. Yet stories consciously telling the apocalypse’s apocalypse can offer a discursive break, a frame of reference separate from settler colonialism’s dispossession and gratuitous violence. As Frantz Fanon wrote, “To break up the colonial world does not mean that after the frontiers have been abolished lines of communication will be set up between the two [colonial and decolonized] zones. The destruction of the colonial world is no more and no less than the abolition of one zone, its burial in the depths of the earth.” Stories telling the end of this world can be part of the shovel.

None of this is to argue that post-apocalyptic and apocalyptic stories cannot be robot apocalypses, nuclear holocausts or extraterrestrial invasions. They are frequently insightful, critical, imaginative and even beautiful. But such visions can still adopt a frame of reference not dependent upon settler colonialism’s dispossession and gratuitous violence and recognize that the anti-native and anti-Black apocalypses have long been happening. In doing so stories of the apocalypse’s apocalypse can obliterate a world that has it coming.

You Can’t Fix Schools By Fixing Schools

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This first ran on Splice Today.
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Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, educational reformers have to recommend educational reforms. Even when educational reformers know for a surety that educational reform is not going to work, and won’t even address the problems at hand, they still have to recommend educational reform. It’s in their nature.

Kevin Drum provides a striking example of this in a post from last week. Drum is discussing M. Night Shyamalan’s recent book on education, I Got Schooled: The Unlikely Story of How a Moonlighting Movie Maker Learned the Five Keys to Closing America’s Education Gap.

As Shyamalan discovered (and as Drum reiterates), the startling truth about the problem with our school system is that there isn’t any problem with our school system. Or, at least, there’s nothing wrong with our school system for white kids. In fact, as Drum says, “If you compare American white kids to, say, Finnish or Polish or German white kids, we do just as well.” Shyamalan goes further, and says ” Our white kids are getting taught the best public-school education on the planet. ” The entire reason we score low on national comparisons is because we do such a horrible job of educating inner city minority kids.

The issue, then, is not that we don’t know how to provide good schooling, or that we have bad teachers, or that our system isn’t rigorous enough. Rather, the problem is that we practice what Shyamalan calls “educational apartheid.” For some people, we provide schooling as good as anywhere in the world. And then, for some people, we don’t.

So, what is the solution to this problem? How can we start to give the best education in the world not just to the privileged few, but to everyone? Shyamalan provides a handful of suggestions, which Drum puts in a handy bulleted list.

  • Get rid of the bottom 2-3 percent of truly terrible teachers.
  • Make the principal the chief academic and head coach. Let another person handle school operations.
  • Constant feedback to teachers and students.
  • Small schools (not small classes).
  • Increased instructional time. Extend the school day and do away with summer vacation.

Drum says that these recommendations all sound reasonable, given his reading on the subject. But he doesn’t point out the most interesting thing about Shyamalan’s 5 points, which is that none of them address the problem he’s identified in any way shape or form.

Again, that problem, as defined by Shyamalan, and agreed to by Drum, is that we practice educational apartheid. Some people get resources and some people don’t. And yet, this list says nothing, zero, zilch, about trying to reallocate resources. It doesn’t talk about segregation. It doesn’t mention racism. It’s just a list of ways to improve education across the board. Get rid of bad teachers, it says. But there are good teachers and bad teachers everywhere, while low performance only occurs in some places. Change the role of the principal, it says. But principal’s jobs are more or less the same all over; how then will this address disparate outcomes? And so on. If there’s no problem in one place, and lots of problems in another place, addressing structural reforms that apply to everyone seems like a distraction from the main issue.

That issue being, again, that we don’t have any trouble educating wealthy white kids. We have trouble educating poor minority kids. And the cause of that trouble is not that the poor minority kids have worse teachers. It’s not that their principals’ job description needs to be tweaked. The cause of that trouble is that we have created communities that are systematically segregated for the express purpose of ignoring them and the children who live in them.

To see the extent of the disconnect between Shyamalan’s diagnosis and his prescription, consider Shyamalan’s suggestion that one way to improve education is with small schools. Small schools have been tried in Chicago. One of my friends worked as a teacher in a south side neighborhood where small schools were mandated. But the city was not interested in actually building more schools in these communities; that costs money, and the whole point of segregating the city is so that you don’t have to give money to the groups you have marginalized. So instead of building more small schools, the city simply kept the same building and declared that there were four small schools inside it, each with its own principal and administration. Instead of a smaller school, you got more bureaucracy — and a balkanized student body, set up to maximize bullying, inter-school animosity and violence.

In short, you can’t fix apartheid by mandating cleaner jails. You can only fix it with freedom and equality. As long as America is okay with segregation and racism, any educational reform policy (like small schools) will founder from lack of resources and thoroughgoing indifference. Shyamalan and Drum show us that the problem with schools has nothing to do with schools. Since they’re both ostensibly writing about education, though, they’re reluctant to take the next step, and admit that the solution to the problems with schools won’t have much to do with education reform.

Should a Superhero Have a License to Kill?

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James Bond might not be a superhero, but he does dedicate his life to battling bad guys. Plus he has a codename: 007. Yeah, that means he’s just one guy in a league of 00s, so nothing unique—same as any Green Lantern in the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps. Maybe Earth-based agencies are different, but then that would strike Black Widow from the superhero census list too. Also, like Natasha, James has no superpowers, at least not compared to Thor or Superman. He’d make a pretty good match for Batman though. He even sports his own utility belt’s worth of Q-engineered supergadgets.

Mr. Bond also wields Dr. Who’s shapeshifting powers. I watched his edited-for-TV Sean Connery incarnation from my parents’ couch as a kid, and his Roger Moore from theater seats as an adolescent. I even witnessed his awkward Timothy Dalton stage while I was finishing college and his franchise was waiting for Pierce Brosnan to come-of-age too. But I have to admit Daniel Craig is the David Tennant of the Bond universe. I’m looking forward to seeing his current Spectre adventure.

The character struggled after losing his mission-defining Evil Empire, but Skyfall’s Judi Dench gave him back his raison d’être:

“I’m frightened because our enemies are no longer known to us. They do not exist on a map. They’re not nations. They’re individuals. Look around you. Who do you fear? Do you see a face, a uniform, a flag? No. Our world is not more transparent now. It’s all opaque. It’s in the shadows. That’s where we must do battle.”

Batman is all about shadows too, turning the darkness of his parents’ murders against the shady elements of murky Gotham. But, unlike a trigger-happy 00 agent, Batman would never kill anyone on purpose, right?

Well, actually the unlicensed Dark Knight racked up a Bond-level body count during his first year in Detective Comics. Not only did a holster hang from his utility belt back then, the batplane included a mounted machinegun: “Much as I hate to take human life, I’m afraid this time it’s necessary!”

DC editors reined in his homicidal writing staff after Batman #1, but even the comparatively wholesome Superman had a killing streak then. In June 1939, same month Batman was kicking jewel thieves off skyscrapers, Superman was dropping a mobster to an identical death. Granted, it wasn’t Superman’s fault he lost his super grip: “If he hadn’t tried to stab me, he’d be alive now.—But the fate received was exactly what he deserved!” Though what did Superman think was going to happen when he destroyed the Ultra-Humanite’s propeller mid-flight? The supervillain somehow escaped the crash, but no thanks to the death-indifferent Man of Steel.

Comic books usually protect their heroes from having to kill directly. In that same Action Comics, a rotating blade shatters against Superman’s impervious skull and slices up a nearby thug.  Or in another early Batman adventure, a “foreign agent” is accidentally impaled on his own sword, and Batman self-righteously declares: “It is better that he should die! He might have sent thousands of others to their death on a battlefield if his plans had been successful!”

If this makes your feel morally queasy, listen to Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko on superhero morality: superheroes are “moral avengers” who must kill criminals in order to show “a clear understanding of right and wrong,” even if that means violating the “pervading legal moral” code.

Mr. Ditko currently resides in the crazy-old-man dimension of the comics multiverse, because his Ann Rand philosophy isn’t a page in today’s superhero bible. Batman’s and Superman’s most recent film incarnations take little license with the Sixth Commandment. In fact, the plot of Christopher Nolan’s 2008 The Dark Knight pivots on Christian Bale’s Batman struggling not to kill the Joker—even though killing him is necessary to protect others and exactly “what he deserves.” And remember the fan outrage when Henry Cavill’s Superman snapped General Zod’s neck in Man of Steel? It was that or let the General’s laser vision slice up a family of cowering Metropolitans, but Superman’s super-wholesomeness got sliced up too.

Both Zod and Joker are weirdly suicidal supervillains, goading their arch-enemies into committing murder. But then that’s the point. Superheroes are supposed to oppose killing out of principle. So where’s that leave Mr. Bond?

We could say his license strikes the “super” from his heroness, maybe even replacing it with an “anti.” His comic book counterpart might be the Ditko-esque Punisher, a sometime supervillain depending on who’s penning the story. But in James’ defense, killing isn’t the core of his mission. It’s just the most efficient means for getting important jobs down. He’s paid to be indifferent to death.

And that’s the problem. I remember Roger Moore’s 007 dangling a “foreign agent” by his tie from the edge of a building. The thug had been gunning at him seconds earlier, so the scene meets the “what he deserved” test. But was it necessary? Couldn’t he have holstered his license and knocked the guy out instead of dropping him to his death? Sure, the guy was a cog in the Cold War wheel trying to squash Democracy, but did Roger Moore have to grin? Did the movie have to play the scene for laughs, toying with the villain’s tie as he quivered for life?

I don’t blame his character though. James Bond was designed to be a cold-blooded Cold Warrior. You could argue the hero type was a product of its times—and so a bad fit with ours. Connery, Moore, Dalton, they all performed indifference so their 60s, 70s and 80s audiences could forget about the nuclear arsenal aimed at their hometown theaters. Take Bond out of that context and he just seems callous. The same way the original Superman and Batman made more moral sense as their readers teetered on the brink of a Nazi-driven World War.

The current Daniel Craig incarnation fixes that. He still shows his killer license when needed, but he’s not indifferent about it. He understands what it means to take a life. Like the 2013 Superman, he only snaps a villainous neck when it means saving innocent ones. He takes no pleasure in it. If anything, that hint of inner turmoil makes him almost superheroic. He does the dirty work so no one else has to. He’s not a 00 by self-righteous nature, but by self-sacrificing choice.
 

Help Samandal Speak

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We are all reeling from the recent, devastating attacks in Paris that claimed the lives of too many and changed the lives of many, many more. The attacks were carried out on behalf of Daesh (ISIS), the chaos being another stake to further drive away reasonable discourse and chances at real communication. A day before these attacks, Beirut—with only a whisper in the media—suffered a similar fate at the hands of Daesh.

In the middle of this, a comics anthology with roots in Beirut and many ties to French-speaking Europe fights to keep its doors open, its mission is to open worldwide communication without national borders. They may buckle under the weight of censorship.

The irony here is notable, to say the least.

Samandal is a French, English, and Arabic language international comics anthology, in production for a decade. It is funded by the Belgian publishing house L’employé du Moi, the French Cultural Center in Beirut and the Belgian Ministry of Culture in Brussels, but it is on the brink of collapse due to charges that it has contributed to sectarian strife.
 

Samandal-7-cover

 
Back in 2009, Samandal released its seventh issue, titled “Revenge.” In this particular issue were two comics that, according to the comic’s editors, were taken out of context and reported to the Lebanese authorities.

In the first comic in question, “Lebanese Recipes for Revenge,”—created by Lena Merhej, who is also one of Samandal’s editors—common Lebanese phrases (analogous to English phrases like “go eat shit” or “buying the farm”) are illustrated literally. The phrase “May [God] burn your religion” is portrayed with a Christian and a Muslim being doused with gasoline and lit with a match.
 

Merhej-comic-scan

 
The second comic, created by Valfret, is titled “Ecce Homo.” It follows the story of a Roman centurion who has drunken sexual relations with a legionnaire. The legionnaire is killed by the centurion due to his own disgust, and the centurion then leads his army to a Christian sect in order to pin the murder on someone else. The very last page of this comic is a scene of a crucified member of that Christian sect, with the centurion thinking to himself, “It’s you who’s gay.”
 

Valfret-comic-scan

 
These two pages were flagged and investigated due to complaints lodged by unknown Christian figures, “expressing their disapproval concerning the publication of some comics … that are offensive to the Christian religion.” In an unusual move, three of the four editors of Samandal—not the artists who created the comics—were accused of wrongdoing. Take into consideration that Merhej is an editor herself, and things seem even more puzzling.

After several years of court cases, the results are not good. Samandal has been found guilty and must pay 30 million liras ($20,000) in damages, wiping out their savings and threatening them with extinction. Unless they receive an infusion of cash, their next book, Geographia, is slated to be their last. In response to this, Samandal has launched an Indiegogo campaign to fund the publishing of two more books. As of this writing, there’s still time to contribute, and plenty of money needed.

Why is this important?

Samandal is truly a worldwide institution. How many comics anthologies have you seen that are in multiple languages? It’s a fantastic microcosm of the alternative comics trend outside of the tiny, tiny American market. In the “Revenge” issue alone, I see contributors hailing from France, Belgium, Quebec, Lebanon, the United States, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.

I’m a big believer in open communication. In the face of such travesty, the way to truly “win” is by talking more, opening more channels, being more in touch with the world. Samandal has always embodied that universal spirit to me. What better time is there to reinforce that speech should remain free?

Please consider donating to the Indiegogo campagn and check out their website for more information on the case.

Lastly, here’s Merhej’s comic describing the scandal, in her own words. Take it away, Lena:
 

Merhej-explanatory-comic

Utilitarian Review 11/14/15

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Susan Kirtley praises Lynda Barry.

Me with a couple of hello songs for Adele.

Ng Suat Tong on Frazetta’s racist porn.

Chris Gavaler asks if Katniss Everdeen is a superhero.

Roy T. Cook on She-Hulk’s gender presentation.

Kael Salad on being a teacher and talking to students about pop culture you don’t like.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates for comics in early 1950; lots of EC here.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Playboy I wrote about

—why Bernie Sanders’ focus on private prisons is a distraction.

—the WFA getting rid of the HP Lovecraft statue, and why they should honor Octavia Butler instead.

At the Guardian I wrote about

—imperial idiocy in Narcos and Our Brand Is Crisis.

—Supergirl and how women aren’t allowed to enjoy superpowers.

At the Establishment I wrote about Britney, Taylor Swift, and selling your body vs. selling your soul.

On Splice Today I wrote about—

—how Katha Pollitt is happy to forgive mistakes of transphobes, less willing to forgive mistakes of trans activists.

—the Walking Dead, Spectre, and whether you should show the zombies mercy.

GOP lies about the economy and why many people don’t see them as lies.
 
Other Links

While I was sitting in the very same room with her, Tara Burns wrote up this interview with Margaret Cho.

From a bit back, this is a great piece by Dorian Linsky on the efforts to ban Birth of a Nation.

Zoe Quinn made a Lovecraft vs. Hitler quote game.
 

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A Good Holding Vessel

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Team Rocket

“Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.”
–Pauline Kael, I Lost It At The Movies

An epigraph beginning with the word ‘sex’ might not be an auspicious start for a piece about education, but Kael’s words have much to say to teachers. Beyond concepts, equations, and writing mechanics, teachers teach taste, whether they intend to or not.

Think back to your time in school. Can you remember the warmth and security of having your interests affirmed by your teacher? Can you remember the quick spin of doubt when your preferences fell short of his or her esteem? I remember feeling stomach sick when my seventh grade teacher implied that New York Times Bestsellers List did not mean the book was “good.” I wondered what my choice of The Dragonriders of Pern said about me. A student’s taste might be personal, but its expression is a public performance, and a form of mass communication. Carried books, branded t-shirts, and the music leaking from ear buds invariably broadcast a person’s taste to the people around them.

As teachers, we witness our student’s passions and refuges on a daily basis, with varying levels of sympathy and comprehension. Our authority complicates things. I remember how a boy’s eyes popped open wide when I admitted to playing Diablo 3. I relish students’ trust and delight when I talk about Pokémon with them. Is it for this connection that I converse enthusiastically about Marvel Comics and Harry Potter, even though I don’t actually enjoy these properties? (How often do their iconicity, film adaptations, merchandising, and release parties account for more of their popularity than the books themselves?) There are few things I enjoy more than great conversation. Better put by Hannah Arendt, “Gladness, not sadness, is talkative, and truly human dialogue differs from mere talk or even discussion in that it is entirely permeated by pleasure in the other person and what he says. It is tuned to the key of gladness, we might say” (Men in Dark Times, 15). When I share and respect the things my students love, I earn the privilege of being in class with them.

So what happens when the façade drops, and my students learn what I actually think about Guardians of the Galaxy or Diary of a Wimpy Kid? That Pauline Kael is my personal hero and favorite snark, not Iron Man? That I believe superhero comics embody America’s worst power-fantasies? That while I was a passionate Pokémon player up through college, I pale at Nintendo’s sorry attempts to justify the exploitation of its dog-fighting monster pets? Deep down inside me, I don’t like some of the things that adolescents like—including things I loved as a teenager. Everyone is allowed to have his or her personal taste, but I sometimes cringe that these stories could be counted as valid options. I sometimes see them as depressing manifestations of systems that tear people apart. At other times they seem like developmental stepping-stones, or an ice floe that thinkers eventually pass across and see through. I have become the no-fun schoolmarm pushing Nathaniel Hawthorne on the one hand, Ratatouille’s Anton Ego on the other, and maybe a faint echo of James Baldwin on a very good day.

Trying to protect this “key of gladness,” I resist sharing my killjoy opinions about a wide assortment of stories, united chiefly by their phenomenal popularity and marketing rollouts. There’s a time for soapboxing, for criticizing, and for bemoaning, and while these kinds of talk are necessary for survival, they don’t make me happy to be alive. They lack the ring of joy. I came to teaching because I associate school with this thrill of recognition, of “Yes! I see that too!” I have no affection for converting and being converted. I did not return to school to be a missionary of taste, or have my tastes disapproved of and changed.

I save my breath for niche blogs, and blissfully, for the company of my critic friends, ideally huddled around a few beers on a Saturday night. I support others in their resistance: “Harry Potter makes me feel weird too!” I am at home in our sardonic distance from these things—in the communal wondering what life is like for a creature trapped inside a tiny Pokéball. Or whether a student wearing a Slytherin Quidditch jersey is akin to her sporting the confederate flag of the Harry Potter world, in light of how the seventh book goes down.

As a teacher, I keep this thought to myself, and modulate my voice to bob and float with a student’s excitement about the work of J. K. Rowling. Yet I want my students to dig deeply into Slytherin House. Does it make sense for all the cruel and cunning children to be sorted together? Why aren’t there consistent resisters in Slytherin? Why does Hogwarts support a cabal of violent blood purists? As students dig, won’t they expose my preferences and prejudices against these books, so shallowly buried?

If I could change one thing about young adult novels, superhero movies, and video games, it would be to make their villains relevant. I suspect that the more popular a story-world is, the less its evil mastermind, empire, or force corresponds to our present-day equivalents. Players spend the Pokémon games fighting incompetent mafia groups bent on igniting an apocalypse and ruling over the remains of society. We know they are evil because they treat their Pokémon cruelly, but the games never address how the player’s relationship with Pokémon is substantially different. In Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, totalitarian authorities herd huge groups of dispossessed and hungry people into public squares to watch their district’s children murder each other, which is part of a national strategy to subdue revolt. How does this square with the reality that apartheid governments violently restrict the public congregation of oppressed people, who have a better ability to revolt when gathered together?

These fictions make mockeries of their villains, but they become fiercely popular ‘escapist routes’ for a reason. They are poignant metaphors for the experience of youth, even if they obscure how real boarding schools, criminal organizations, patriarchs, and dictatorships work—how power works. To students, bullies are a kind of dependable taxonomy, and they are institutionally supported. Students resonate with the experience of being pitted against each other for the entertainment of adults, and that this competition coheres a dystopic, divided nation. And everyone knows that superpowered people are too busy fighting each other to do anything about systemic injustice.

These are truths worth honoring, and can organically raise questions about what the villains mean. A friend pointed out that the Harry Potter books examine the paradoxical existence of Slytherin in the text, (but blink, and you might miss it.) The world of The Hunger Games descends into revolutionary chaos by the third book. Pokémon White & Black featured a compelling villain who wished to free Pokémon from slavery, and released his monsters after using them in fights. I wish these factors changed my mind and heart, but I also wish that these factors changed their stories. The Hunger Games sells itself upon the appeal of the tortuous games it pretends to decry. The Pokémon villain turns coat in the end, and celebrates the capture and keeping of sentient creatures. The villain always ends up being someone else—someone vanquishable. Why does our culture spends so much time hiding the hero’s complicity with evil, or tokenizing the struggle with inner darkness as one obligatory step in the ritualistic triumph over an external “Big Bad?”

If these stories are archetypal, so are the people who oppose them on the grounds of taste—and especially on the grounds of good taste. Consider the “Wicked Witch of West Harlem” in Walter Dean Myer’s Bad Boy, where “educated” Mrs. Dodson horrifies the young narrator when she condemns comic books as “a road map to the jailhouse.” Mrs. Dodson is evermore referred to as The Wicked Witch. Her complaints presage the words of Frederick Wertham, a psychiatrist and social justice crusader still demonized for his hatred of the violence in popular culture. You can’t spend an hour inside a comics convention without overhearing some fan or creator still trotting out insults at Wertham and his legion of church lady minions. We forget Wertham’s actual life mission to establish an affordable psychiatric clinic for black youth in Harlem, tucked away on a street that Myers likely dashed down, a Lone Ranger cap pistol in hand.

While I, with the best of intentions, complain about the villains and plot mechanics of my student’s favorite stories, about the banality of fighting Voldemort, I’m busy becoming a villain myself. A villain, at the end of the day, is someone who doesn’t see, and so profanes what is most meaningful in life. And if adolescents could ever be defined, they could be called people who have freshly seen truth. They might not feel passionate about every song they listen to, every book they read, or every stretch of road they drive, but some small collection of things has sung the song of their lives to them. Not every student will part their clasped hands to show their truth to their teacher, but when I’m lucky enough to be shared with, I want to be a good holding vessel. I don’t want to be locked out.

Queering the She-Hulk

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ShulkBobilloI was recently re-reading Lillian S. Robinson’s Wonder Women: Feminisms and Superheroes (Routledge 2004) and came across a striking take on the She-Hulk, which I had forgotten about since my last reading of the book. Robinson begins her treatment of the She-Hulk by reminding the reader of Judith Butler’s account of gender as “… a corporeal style, an ‘act’ … which is both intentional and performative, where ‘performance‘ suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning” (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge 1990, p. 130) and as “a stylized repetition of acts” (ibid, p. 140). Reflecting on the She-Hulk’s overt sexuality and instantiation of feminine stereotypes (e.g. fashion, flirtation), Robinson asks if John Byrne’s take on the She-Hulk amounts to a “gender performance that is at the margins and is transgressive of societal rules” – that is, if there is any way to understand the She-Hulk as transgendered. Her answer is no less interesting for its being negative:

Although not transgressive in this way, since she is, in fact, defined as heterosexual and female, She-Hulk performs gender precisely as the drag queen does and thus, like that other self-conscious performer, enacts a challenge to the fixed and rigidly anatomical definition of gender at the same time that she seems to confirm it… In encoding herself as so blatantly hetero-female, she shows that, in that identity, she has more in common with the drag queen than with the typical straight female – whoever she is. (2004, p. 102)

ShulkArmThe way to understand Robinson’s point, I think, is in terms of a kind of structural tension in the She-Hulk narrative. On the one hand, Robinson is no doubt right that “the invariable focus of the series is the She-Hulk’s body” (p. 102). On the other hand, however, the same transformation that gives the She-Hulk her power, and her powerful body, also transforms her from a “normal” non-super brunette into the iconic Green Giantess (for a more detailed discussion of super-heroine transformations, see this post):

… in a world where, let’s face it, huge bright-green chicks are not much in demand as beauty-contest winners or even Saturday-night dates, She-Hulk wows the men with a body that is the epitome at once of sexiness and super-heroic strength. (Robinson 2004, p. 100)

The question is: How can a character whose appearance is so far removed from traditional stereotypes of female attractiveness turn out to be the most desirable female in the Marvel Universe (as is claimed, for example, multiple times in the letters pages of Byrne’s run on The Sensational She-Hulk)?

Bobillo2Robinson’s answer, then, is this (I think): The She-Hulk’s obsessions with fashion, shopping, daydreaming about Hercules, and meta-fictionally titillating the reader on the pages of The Sensational She-Hulk are (or, at least, can be legitimately interpreted as) a conscious performance of stereotypical femininity (fictionally conscious, and fictionally performed by the She-Hulk; actually conscious, and actually depicted but not performed by Byrne). Although the She-Hulk, unlike Robinson’s imagined drag queen, is biologically female, like the drag queen her physique diverges from the stereotypes associated with “normal” or “desirable” female, and as a result she adopts extreme or exaggerated behaviors associated with feminine desirability in order to be identified (or at least associated) with desirability, heterosexuality, and femininity by the observer/reader. Thus, she is performing femininity as much as the drag queen is, regardless of her biological status.

She-HulkGratAlthough Robinson only addresses John Byrne’s run on The Sensational She-Hulk, the issue arises anew in Dan Slott’s more recent run on She-Hulk. This later series focuses on (amongst other things) the fact that Jennifer Walters is much more (hetero-)sexually aggressive when in She-Hulk form than when she is in her “normal” form (for a nice discussion of sexuality in Slott’s run, amongst other things, see this post by Osvaldo Oyola). The standard reading, I think, is that the increased aggressiveness, sexual or otherwise, is a part of the super-heroic transformation, on a par with her immense strength and near-invulnerability. But Robinson’s idea suggests another reading: that the increased aggressiveness is a performance (conscious or not) of hetero-femininity designed to counteract (in some sense) the stereotypically anti-feminine characteristics associated with the transformation (e.g. the physical power, the green skin and hair, the near seven-foot height).

Of course, I am not implying that this reading, based on Robinson’s (admittedly brief) discussion, is the correct, or the only, way to understand the She-Hulk. But I do find the idea that the She-Hulk is somehow performing hetero-femininity in a way that is closer to the performance of the drag queen than to the performance of the typical straight female (if such exists) to be a rather intriguing one. So, to end with a question, in the best PencilPanelPage tradition: How, exactly, does the She-Hulk perform gender?