Tag Archives: equality

One Last Word on Atwood and Neuman

Posted on January 31, 2014 | Leave a comment

It took me quite some time to put my finger on what frustrated me about Neuman’s article “‘Just a Backlash’: Margaret Atwood, Feminism and the Handmaid’s Tale“, after all, I agree with most of what Neuman points out in her argument: Atwood’s female characters can be read as symbolic, the personal is political, in every dystopia there is an implicit utopia, and vigilance is the key to staying abreast of rapidly changing political climates and the only way to ensure the world remains safe and free for everyone.

However, there is something that frightens me about reducing characters in dystopic novels to mere symbols. One of the great powers of literature, as we learned last semester, is that it speaks to people’s imaginations, allowing them to put themselves in the shoes of the characters they read about and thus picture themselves in circumstances they had never before imagined. And certainly one of the greatest rhetorical devices in The Handmaid’s Tale is just that- anyone and everyone can relate to Offred. Through Offred’s eyes readers can see all the injustice that happens in Gilead: the commander’s insistence that Gilead has made a huge improvement in the lives of many, Serena Joy’s vindictiveness, the horrors of the Red Centres, the pain of losing loved ones and wondering every day if it is their faces that hide behind blood-stained sacks on salvaging hooks. Even after Offred ceases, as Neuman claims, to be vigilant, readers still share in the terrifying spectacle of the salvaging and experience a chill of fear when discovering Ofglen is no longer the Ofglen she ought to be.

One of the greatest weapons in a dystopia’s arsenal is reducing people to symbols. A child playing happily on a lawn is symbolic of the success of the regime, and of other children, all of whom are surely similarly happy under the government. Hung “gender traitors” or other enemies of the state are symbolic of the regime’s strength, and it’s capacity to destroy those who stand in its way. A pregnant woman in a red dress symbolizes hope that one day there might be a generation of children that no longer remembers infertility, families that never struggle to conceive. The problem with turning people into symbols is that it erases their individuality and denies them the chance to represent themselves as they see themselves. Reducing people to symbols robs them of their story.

The personal is political, but the political is personal too. Reducing Offred to a symbolic warning sign to those of us who become easily complacent in our (relatively) egalitarian times is a denial of her complexity, but it is worse than even that. Reducing Offred’s story to a warning robs the story of the same impact that reading is trying to create. The strength of Offred’s warning comes from her realness- through Offred we see that oppression happens to people like us, pedestrian, fallible, complacent, peaceful, intelligent and curious people who never see grey skies approaching in time to really save themselves. Offred’s complexity is what lends her story credibility, and her unique experience and individuality is what makes her pain unbearable to watch. In the end, a symbolic reading of Offred may be possible, but it also does the very thing that the Gileadian regime was trying to do in the first place: silence a unique voice by reducing it to one attribute of many.

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Look Mom! No Hyphen?

Posted on November 16, 2013 | 6 comments

After contemplating the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, discussing disencapsulation, reading Obasan and my fellow classmates’ blog posts about hyphenated identities, and considering the process of othering through the lens of District 9, I feel I’ve begun to sift through my ideas about race and ethnic identity enough to craft a single statement based on my emerging ideas: Race, cultural heritage and ethnic identities are complicated things.

The older I get, the younger I feel.  When I was young I assumed, as many of us do, that growing up would give me all the answers.  In my early teenage years I was passionate and vocal about a lot of social issues.  Race featured among them, but so did sexism, homophobia, ableism, and several others.  The world was black and white.  Injustice was everywhere and it was easy to point my fingers at it and say: “There! That is the wrong that needs fixing.  And this is what needs to be done.”

It doesn’t seem quite that simple anymore.  Injustice is ever visible and easy to identify.  A solution?  Not so much.  The complexity of identity isn’t reducible.  It’s easy to say “we’re all one race!  The human race!” or “We all have the same sexuality, we’re all into people!” or “Forget gender, we’re the same species after all.”  But it isn’t that simple.  Ignoring the things that make us different doesn’t make them go away.  In fact, ignoring the things that make us different is a way of dehumanizing ourselves that is even more despicable than focusing on our differences.  Instead of demeaning others by stripping them of their rights, we demean those around us by stripping them of themselves.  Things like our ethnic and racial backgrounds, our gender and sexuality, and our physical appearance and capabilities make us who we are.

No one is champion of their own destiny.  We are all products of circumstance, shaped by the invisible hand of random occurrence.  To disregard things like race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and our physical attributes is to deny the unique voice those things lend us as individuals.  Had Obasan’s Naomi been white, her story would not have been as heartbreaking.  Had District 9’s Christopher Johnson been a human, the movie would not have been as great a tale of injustice.

The trouble with these aspects of our hyphenated identities isn’t our acknowledgement of them- its the pretension that we can use them to define ourselves and each other.  No one is just “Japanese-Canadian.”  Naomi was a female-cisgendered (I think?)-introverted-able bodied-second generation-Japanese-Canadian, and even that is a reduction of her personality.  These strings of identifiers don’t tell us any more about a person than a photograph would; they are incomplete reflections of the inconceivable complexity that lies within a human soul.  To imagine that we can understand and categorize one another by the labels we adopt or apply to ourselves and our acquaintances is dangerously naive.

But more dangerous still is the unfamiliarity of the privileged with life inside the hyphen.  As Toni Morrison once said: “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”  I must confess, consciously thinking of myself as having an ethnic background feels strange to me.  But at the same time, how many of us honestly refer to or think of ourselves as able-bodied?  As able-minded?  I don’t think of my privileges as being some of my most salient attributes, but in honesty, they are.  I am the product of my labels as much as anyone is.

So what do we do with our labels?  They can’t define us, can’t explain us, can’t categorize us, but they do provide some background information for why we are the people we are. Should we hyphenate?  Should everyone hyphenate?  Or are our salient attributes visible enough that we need not share them through identifiers like “Japanese-Canadian?”  Is there a simple answer to any of these questions?

 

No.

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Subtle Elitism Embedded in Van Peer’s Argument

Posted on October 21, 2013 | Leave a comment

As much as I hate to be the keener with an extra post on her ASTU blog, it looks like that’s the way things are going to pan out- because  I’m hoping the post for the next deadline will be about Obasan, so this one isn’t going to be it.  On the other hand I still have one last point to flush out about Van Peer.

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I’ve really enjoyed reading Van Peer.  As a reader, I find his assertion of the importance of literature as an agent of social change and progress very compelling, and so academically I found it very easy to jump on the Van Peer bandwagon.  But after some closer reading and consideration of the in-class discussion on the stance he takes opposing romanticism, I began to notice a more sinister logic embedded in his arguments.

Although I wrote my summary on, in part, the danger of seeing literature as an entertainer and not an educator (a challenge to educational literature being, in van Peer’s vein of logic, a challenge to social progress and the advancement of human rights) I still strongly feel that van Peer is, in spite of his focus on enlightening encapsulated cultures, an elitist at heart.  Politically, he is for disencapsulation.  Socially, he supports encapsulation to a nearly archaic degree.  The canon van Peer holds so dear is exclusive and socially stratifying, undemocratic at the core and therefore, in opposition of the advancement of true equality.

I draw my claims about van Peer’s elitism from two main aspects of his argument.  First, his protest against Romanticism.  While the romantic movement in some ways diluted the educational impact of art, it was also a democratizing force in the art world, suggesting that art and its appreciation wasn’t something exclusive to the upper classes.  While van Peer might be right to question its effect on some of the effects it had on the quality of art, that doesn’t mean its effects on society itself were negligible.  Second, van Peer’s argument for the creation of social change through literature depends on the members of the encapsulated culture being the ones to read literature and shape change.  His argument completely ignores and undermines the valuable impact of the lower, or excluded classes and cultures as shapers and creators of social change.  Even when he addresses other publications outside of the category of fiction that shape society (like The Communist Manifesto) he isn’t adressing other, unwritten factors in cultural progress.

In short, van Peer isn’t writing from an inclusive perspective of society, but an exclusive one.  He isn’t writing a narrative from the perspective of the excluded as well as the encapsulated members of a society, but one from a strictly elitist perspective.  His words claim social progress, but it’s a progress that exists in legislation alone, not in thought or culture, and the bias of his argument shows that.  In van Peer’s article, there is no mention of the revolution of the masses and its impact on society after the industrial revolution.  There is no mention of the suffragettes or the Civil Rights Movement.  Van Peer spins a pretty narrative about Hard Times and how literature shaped the thoughts of the upper classes and says absolutely nothing about the lower classes.  The lower classes are as voiceless in van Peer as they are in the encapsulated worlds he writes of.  And that’s not really indicative of progress, is it?

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What Happens When Laws are Just but Unconstitutional?

Posted on October 4, 2013 | Leave a comment

When Martin Luther King penned his Letter From The Birmingham Jail there was little question on anybodies mind as to the inequality of people of colour and Caucasian individuals in the United States.  There were those in favour of the inequality and those opposed to it, but no one would call into question that the country discriminated against non-whites.  Race disparity was plainly visible in the world the Americans of the cold-war era found themselves in, from schools and drinking fountains to the courts and the voting booths.

So when the Voting Rights Act was instated, as the first legislation of the American government that focused on amending the effect of the prior laws regarding voting rather than changing their intent it made sense in its social context.  Though the bill was uncommon in form and intent as well as uncommon in that it was a legislation on voting made at the federal level rather than at the state level, it served an incontestable purpose: ensuring that the inalienable American right of equality was preserved at the voting booths.

This past June, a section of the Voting Rights Act was overturned.  The section in question required that election changes in nine states (including Louisiana and Texas) gain approval by the American Justice Department prior to enactment.  Chief Justice John Roberts, among others, suggests that due to recent voter turnout statistics in these states showing that a larger percentage of ethnic minorities attending the voting booths, these states can no longer be subjected to extra scrutiny under the VRA.  Any claims and complaints issued by individual members of these states against the state government will be dealt with on a case by case basis by the courts.

My opinions are fairly divided on the matter.  Intellectually, I understand that there are several legitimate claims that can be made against the VRA, not the least of which is its outdated status.  If recent statistics show that voter turn out has improved in states in the south, then they cannot possibly be held to the current level of scrutiny they are under.  The amount of power this lends to the federal government in a federation such as the USA is unconstitutional.

I recognise, of course, that it is no small thing to call the constitution of a great nation into question.  But one (perhaps heretical) question has plagued me since I began regarding law and society at the start of this school year: if laws are unconstitutional but just, then what is wrong?  Is the law wrong and the constitution to be followed?  Or is the constitution inherently flawed and therefore deserving abandonment?  Though the power of a constitution is perhaps not worth calling into question over one law, how many laws must challenge its authority before it falls?  I am willing to respect a constitution so long as it upholds the justice of the people it serves.  But when it no longer serves even that simple purpose, it no longer serves any purpose worth serving.  Order, safety, and even democracy are petty things to consider when the equality of human beings is at stake.  For true democracy cannot exist in an unequal society, and when democracy crumbles, safety and order are never far in its wake.

Fighting a constitution with a long history of upholding injustice may be an uphill battle, but in the words of Atticus Finch, in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird: “Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to win.”

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