A friend at the University of Missouri recently alerted me to what he thought was an ideal candidate for a post on our site. It involved a report in which a man who is said to have gone on “a naked rampage at [Boston’s] Logan airport” was identified by the media as “a Harvard student.” Continue reading “Policing Harvard’s Back Door”
Violence in the Everyday
As discussions and protests swirl around the United States following the recent Grand Jury decisions in several cases of police violence, Gyanendra Pandey’s discussion of violence, specifically in relation to South Asian nations, is applicable.
There is a violence written into the making and continuation of contemporary political arrangements, and into the production and reproduction of majorities and minorities, which I have called routine violence. The present study is concerned with the routine violence of our history and politics. It is about the enabling conditions of what is commonly seen as violence, but suggests that these conditions – political stipulations, history writing, the construction of majorities and minorities, the education of marginalized and subordinated groups and assemblages – are themselves shot through with violence (Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories 1).
Mayonnaise: What is It?
Have you heard about the court case over whether a product without eggs can be defined as mayonnaise? Continue reading “Mayonnaise: What is It?”
Identifying Identity: A Culture on the Edge Response to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s “Real-Name” Policy
A four-year-old post by Michael Zimmer has been getting renewed attention after Facebook’s controversial “real-name” policy came under scrutiny for disproportionately affecting certain communities: drag performers, doctors and mental health professionals, and political dissidents among them. While Facebook has issued an apology, especially to drag queens who found their stage names no longer accepted by the site, Mark Zuckerberg’s take on the issue of identity — and integrity, as articulated in Zimmer’s piece — piqued our interest here at Culture on the Edge:
With our own interests in code-switching, identifications rather than identities, and competing claims of legitimacy or authority, we think the emphasis on a single identity is ripe for analysis, so we have each offered a brief response… one being posted each day for a week. Continue reading “Identifying Identity: A Culture on the Edge Response to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s “Real-Name” Policy”
Us/Not Us
Not long after we came to the U.S. from Canada — specifically, moving from Ontario to Knoxville, TN, back in 1993 — we went out to eat to experience some authentic southern food for ourselves. While I’ll defer from talking too much here about the terrible let down that was the side dish that they called “hush puppies” (deep fried dough balls? Really?), what turned out to be even more memorable was the waitress who, likely hearing in our voices that we weren’t local, asked us, “Where y’all from?” to which we answered, “Toronto.” Continue reading “Us/Not Us”
My Left Foot
The other day in class I drew on an old example that I’ve used before, but which always turns out to be a useful way to illustrate the commonsense, philosophical idealism that we bring to the way we normally talk and think about identity — a commonsense approach that might be worthwhile rethinking when we move from simply proclaiming our supposed identity to studying how it is that we accomplish the work of identification in the first place. Continue reading “My Left Foot”
An Agonistic Affair
If identification is an agonistic affair — in which social actors continually define and redefine Self and Other while wrestling over competing interests, ranks, and domains — then negotiating what counts as a legitimate place for a date (especially when one party forgot it was Valentines Day and failed to make a reservation somewhere nice) might be as good a place as any other to try to see what’s going on when we try to ascribe an identity.
Setting a Limit
[Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 movie] “Stalker” is a film about a zone, a prohibited space where there are debris, remainders of aliens visiting us. And stalkers are people who specialized in smuggling foreigners who want to visit into this space where you get many magical objects. But the main among them is the room in the middle of this space, where it is claimed your desires will be realized…. [But] there is nothing specific about the zone. It’s purely a place where a certain limit is set. You set a limit, you put a certain zone off-limit, and although things remain exactly the way they were, it’s perceived as another place. Precisely as the place onto which you can project your beliefs, your fears,things from your inner space. In other words, the zone is ultimately the very whiteness of the cinematic screen.
– Slavoj Žižek, “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema” (2006)
The Situational Self
There was an interesting story on the radio the other day — looking at language (the so-called function or filler words (e.g., pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, etc.) in distinction from content words, i.e., the vs. school) as a way to understand identity. Continue reading “The Situational Self”
Just a few Notes
Know that image? It’s from the once popular Disney movie “The AristoCats” (1970) — take a look at the scene: Continue reading “Just a few Notes”