Archives: Student Identity

Imagine Day and Volunteer Opportunities

Imagine Day is the largest on campus orientation day in Canada, welcoming over 8000 new students to the UBC Campus. It is held annually on the Tuesday following Labour Day Weekend; this year it was on September 2nd.  The purpose of Imagine Day is to orient students and get them acquainted on campus through tours lead by current UBC students. What follows is a pep rally that hypes students for the upcoming year to start a new chapter in their life for university. The final portion of Imagine Day is the ‘Main Event,’ which is held on Main Mall Street. where all of the UBC clubs are set up on tables for students to explore their options to get involved on campus.

For Imagine Day, I was not a participant, but a Squad Leader. A Squad Leader manages the Orientation Leaders who have a group of new to UBC students to lead around campus throughout the day. As a Squad Leader, my role was taken up the January before Imagine Day to recruit and train Orientation Leaders for September. On Imagine Day itself, I was a trouble-shooter who ensured transitions of the Imagine Day itinerary ran smoothly, a helper for the logistical aspects of Imagine Day, and I ensured that my group of Orientation Leaders had everything they needed for the day.

Imagine Day, for many students, is a new beginning and a mark of a new chapter of their life. However, for this paper, I will focus on my experience as being a Squad Leader. My experience as a Squad Leader was not great in terms of communication with the Orientation Staff. My group of Orientation Leaders was great and we got along well, but it was my experience in my role that I did not like. I don’t feel as if I learned anything new as my time as Squad Leader. Therefore, it made me wonder why I wanted to join in the first place. It was because I wanted more leadership experience. As mentioned in one of my previous blogs, I plan for the future and jump at opportunities that can help better my chances in getting a job. I thought that applying for the Squad Leader position would help me gain some more leadership opportunities on campus and help me expand my networks. However, I didn’t feel like I learned anything significant. It made me reassess my motives. Did I just apply for the sake of the job title? Am I only doing this because I feel like I’m doing something productive for myself?

To further answer my questions, I draw upon the Forbes article that speaks about paid and unpaid internships and their benefits. It discusses the individual’s choice in getting and benefitting from an internship, whether or not it is paid or unpaid.   The conclusion of the article is that “ultimately, the decision of accepting an internship is an individual’s choice made on its expected benefit” and that there should be no government interference on whether or not internships should be paid. Similarly, the Squad Leader position was like an internship in the sense that I thought I would gain from the experience.

 

To answer my questions above, it would be yes, I am because I’m trying to build my reputation of being an involved UBC student.  I want to show that I am a hard-working individual that is involved in various ways within the UBC community. But it is through the structures placed upon me, such as the current state of the job market, which motivates me to be involved and to take on numerous opportunities on campus. My role as Squad Leader was probably very helpful in the logistical side of Imagine Day, but the job description made it seem like I would be doing and gaining much more. In the end of the day, the reputation of the Squad Leader role as prestigious is what made me apply, rather than the actual duties (which is a little embarrassing).

No commentsAdd a comment

Autonomy in the Medical Profession?

This drizzly afternoon, I rushed to the bus loop from class in order to make it to a tour of a local hospital put together by a student-run club at UBC whose mandate is to help students in their process of pursuing a certain health profession.

We were met by two residents (graduated medical school students who have begun practicing in hospitals/clinics) at the lobby of the hospital.  Both residents are males in their fourth year of residency — one had a staff identification badge hang down his t-shirt whereas the other had a stethoscope around his neck and was dressed in a neatly pressed dress shirt.  Let’s call the former Jeff and the latter Ken.

In the past year and a half, after hurdles and hurdles of career choice challenges and changes, I developed an interest in becoming a doctor.  There are various reasons why I think may be a suitable career choice for me (without thinking about my uncertainty of my capabilities in the natural and physical sciences for now).  Amongst the passion of directly help people, the excitement for science, the ability to earn a living wage, and the respect, a big draw for me was the autonomy I perceived that a career in medicine would entail.  To put it into picture, I have been (day)dreaming about how nice it would be to be a family physician/GP and be able to focus my time, attention, and efforts on helping patients without having to worry too much about living up to the expectations of supervisors, following bureaucratic rules, and navigating professional relationships with co-workers.

Hearing from the residents today made me feel a little grey as while Jeff was showing us around and telling us about his experiences in medical school and being a resident at the hospital, these words he spoke jumped at me:

  • protocol
  • procedures
  • divided
  • paperwork
  • culture
  • process
  • system
  • adaptable
  • protected time

These are all words that I would say can be related to bureaucracy and more pertaining to your class theme, structure versus agency.  Jeff used the word “protocol” when he showed us around the maternal care room.  In the maternal care room, there is an apparatus that you use to revive a newborn when he/she stops breathing (please excuse my faulty explanation). When he explained this to us he pointed to the poster on the wall which states the protocol, or what procedures the doctor should follow in such an event.  He said to us something along the lines of, “It’s here because you won’t have time to think, they just want you to follow the instructions and just do.”  

In my next blog post, I will expand on my thoughts about agency, structure, and the process to a career in a medicine.

No commentsAdd a comment

Re-wording Kimmel’s Guyland: Institutionalized Masculinity for a Grade 7 Student

Every Monday morning, I get up early before attending our Sociology seminar class on Student Identity, to volunteer at my elementary school as a teacher’s assistant for my grade 7 teacher. Ever since I had started this volunteering position in October, I have recognized interersting things about the boy students in the class, throughout my two hours spent there.

My experiences in the past two months have been pleasurable and intellectually stimulating, simply by observing the classroom dynamics. During class time, I often witness the boys to be the students who are always tireless, vibrant, and the most spirited. In addition, the majority of the male students would also often raise their hands quickly to respond when the teacher poses a quesiton to the class. Moreover, it is often the boys who volunteer to assist the teacher move boxes around in the kitchen or to help transport some heavy textbooks from the library back to the class.

Moreover, in the two months, I could see the feelings spurring between a female student and a male student. From across the classroom, I can see them eyeing each other while the teacher lectures in front of the classroom. At worktime, as the girl works on her homework, the boy would take glimpses at her numerous times, and once the girl looks over, he quickly retrieves his glance. This would be the same for the girl as well. For instance, there was a time where the boy would get up from his seat to throw out a piece of garbage, the girl would pop her head up, as though she felt his moving presence. I could see that her eyes were following him. But once he turns around and walks back towards his seat, the girl would quickly look back down to her social studies homework. Talk about classroom romance!

From this, it is extremely interesting to me as it relates to Kimmel’s “Guyland” notion of Masculinity. His idea is rooted from the perspective that masculnity is socially constructed. Similar to the boys in the classroom at the elementary school, they reinforce what it “means” to be a “real man”. Clearly, it is suggested through their actions of carrying heavy objects and initiating to help the teacher out. Thus, these characteristics underline the masculine stereotypes: will-power and strength of men and that men are made to be team players. Kimmel describes that Guyland as a period between adolescence and adulthood (16 years old to around mid-20s). However in the case of this, the students are 13 year old gr 7 boys. As a result, Guyland doesn’t appear within a limited timeframe. In reality, it exists prior to 16 years old and is fluid between age groups.

In addtion, what I find also interesting is that there may be an aspect such that the boys in the class are complying to the masculine touches, in order to portray to the ladies that they have what it takes to be “the man”, or to be “manly”. In the case of the crush between the girl and boy, that specific boy more often than not that is the one who would raise his hand up to speak, the one who volunteers to participate in completing math questions on the whiteboard, as well, the one who offers to carry the heavy world atlases from classroom to classroom. Moreover, it is at this point that I recognize that  he is unaware of the implications of following such traits. Because masculinity is socially construcuted and is imposed on him, he does not struggle with his true identity and who he really is in an attempt to make themselves look “masculine” because he only sees manliness as the way to go. In other words, because individuals are born and brought up with the image of masculinity, we do not realize that we are following what society has created. In this case, the male student does what he does without his acknowledgement that he is complying to the social order and therefore, doesn’t realize the struggles of fitting into that category.

In contrary, our belief of masculinity is understood by the ladies as well. From what I see between the classroom lovebirds, I believe that it is due to the boy’s behaviors of masculinity, in which the girl is attracted to. With the boy taking the initiatives to respond to questions and hauling heavy boxes in and out, it shows that he is a team player and that he is powerful. Through this, with the help of social media today that reinforces the image of masculinity, the girl sees his actions as right and fitted, thus, increasing her liking towards him. As we can see, as Kimmel states that Guyland typically occurs at the age of 16, boys in fact adhere to this masculine ideal at an earlier age.

Alternatively, Kimmel raises that men also adhere to the “Bro Code” in which “a man’s ‘brothers’ are his real soul mates, his real life-partners.” In relation to thinking about the male students in the class, they often hang out together as a pack in order to, I would say, to put more emphasis on their “coolness” or tough mascunline traits. With this, it allows them to impose power among their other male counterparts in their class. In this case, this reinforce is created by their social in-group behaviors, without thinking the contrary, that can be seen as struggles.

Once again, it is because of the normality of what is means to be masculine, that these kids see these traits as the norm. Due to this idea, these elementary school student’s identities are standardized through the trope of what is means to be masculine by influences of the media and their friends. However in relation to me as an univeristy student majoring in Sociology, my ideas of such social constructions have been unpacked, therefore, I understand more of the truth that lies underneath the social beliefs. From this experience volunteering, I wonder every Monday how my identity would change if I were to just follow such constructions imposed by the world. In other words, how would my life be if I only followed what ‘femininity’ meant in society without the opporunities of being powerful and spirited, like the gr 7 student?

References:

Kimmel, M. (2008). Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men.

No commentsAdd a comment

Du Bois and The Student Identity

On November 13th, 2014 I attended one of the many protests students have been organizing in order to combat the proposed increases in fees international students would have to pay both for classes and residence. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to get out of being in the event but I knew that I was going to be able to use the event for one of the blog posts that I needed to write for this course. I found it interesting that the events on facebook were called #IAMASTUDENT, which I find an note-worthy tactic to advertise the event as integral to the student identity – but more so than this I find it interesting that in some ways this event was organized to ‘defend’ the student identity as a whole from external bureaucratic attackers.

I started the event expecting to understand what it was that these people meant and conceived the ‘student identity’ to be, but as soon as the speaker began her speech I was sent into a completely different trip. I don’t remember her name but she mentioned that she was not an international student and she was finishing up her studies this year so she didn’t fit the ‘prototype’ of the student that was affected by the fee increases. I remember that in her speech she acknowledged this fact but she mentioned that she was present at the event because she saw education as a right as opposed to a privilege and she was tired of the way the ‘school system’ was hitting people who had no choice but to be in it. Even though initially she just felt like another angry person who wanted to complain about being in school, what she said has stuck around in my head until today.

After I left the event I found that I ended up caring more about the speaker’s rant against ‘the system’ than I did about the raise in student fees. I felt she was complaining about being locked in for at least four years into a system that she felt she was compelled to bind herself to. I don’t know why she is in school (maybe her parents compelled her to do it, maybe she enjoys studying, or maybe she thinks it’s the fashionable thing to do) but I certainly understood her frustration about being here. I think that it is fairly common to hate on school because of the many assignments we need to finish or because we are taught by the media that students dislike school, but I certainly understood her frustrations.

I was lucky that this event happened very close to the time we talked about W.E.B Du Bois because in some weird way I feel like I’m able to relate his thoughts on what it was like to be a black person post-emancipation to being a student. Obviously I find it ludicrous to compare my position as a student to a black slave, but I found that some of the concepts Du Bois used in his essay The Souls of The Black Folk (1903) to explain his feelings on his identity could also be used to reflect on my identity as a student.

Du Bois describes prejudice as being “the natural defense of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime” (Du Bois, page 274). In some sort of way, by thinking that I needed to go to university in order to have a good life I feel like I was prejudiced against other paths of life that didn’t involve being here. I can totally see myself not questioning that the fact that life without a university education would be barbarous, uncultured and ignorant. Nowadays that I’ve learnt to be a skeptic and double question everything I do, or everything that I think about I can see just how prejudiced I started my university education.

I feel like I’m also able to use a second sight to understand the double consciousness I have like Du Bois did. Du Bois explained that he was able to find the division between the two consciousnesses he had by considering himself “through the eyes of others” (Du Bois, page. 272). Du Bois explained that he felt he lived in a world “which yielded no true self-consciousness, but only lets [me] see through the revelation of the other world” (Du Bois page 272). To me the two consciousnesses I have are the academic and prejudiced one, and the one that begs that I question everything I do before I get involved.

I feel like what I learnt out of going to the event and considering myself through how the speaker saw me (oppressed) and my subsequent reflections is that I’m truly divided on being here. Originally I thought that my ‘second consciousness’ would be the complete anti-thesis to my prejudiced side but now I am not entirely sure about it as I feel like the ‘second side’ that’s oppressed by the prejudiced side begs that I question more as opposed to taking action. I suppose that involving myself in this event served to help me question what I feel being a student means to me, and I’ve only come out more divided than I was before.

No commentsAdd a comment

Who am I not when I am?

I am always very reflexive (when the occasion calls for it — which is almost always, well, always) when I put myself into a discourse or a discussion. That means I am always, as I was trained to be, very aware of who I am and why my perspective would be what it is.  For example, this is something I wrote for one of my papers for a university theory class:

Before I proceed with my essay, I will first take this time to position myself socially and be reflexive about my specific background. I am doing this as an exercise to act on my awareness that my personal subject-position has an effect in the production of knowledge that I will be endeavoring.

I am a Third-Year Arts student at the University of British Columbia majoring in Sociology. I am a Filipino-Chinese male who, at the moment, resides in Canada with a permanent resident status.

I am writing this essay with two main agendas: to fulfill an academic requirement for my Sociology class, and to be socially relevant – I am writing to bring attention to the presence of taken-for-granted realities that are responsible for propagating and perpetuating the inequality and oppression very much present today.  (Arlantico 2013)

That’s the kind of awareness I have for my positionality — or, in other words, I am very much aware of the different identities I have and how they present themselves.  For the most part, I always try to be as exhaustive as I can be when I position myself. TRY being the operative word, which means there are identities I often leave out — either accidentally or intentionally.

However, in my two-year stay at UBC so far, I’ve been to two distinct events when I was (almost) completely ONLY ONE THING: a UBC Student. 

In September of 2013 I was a new transfer student to UBC — and of course, that meant I was attending Imagine Day. Imagine day was really fun. Tons of people everywhere, I get to see a really beautiful campus that I can call mine [sic], I’m meeting a lot of new and interesting people, and it marks a new chapter in my life.  I was still very aware of who I was throughout that day though — I was a transfer student, I was a sociology major, I am an immigrant, and I am visibly Asian — as excited as I was to use the hashtag #IAMUBC, I was completely aware that I am not JUST a student at UBC, I am more distinct than that.

BUT… this happened:

and this…


Yup. PEP RALLY happened at the end of the day. The Thunderbird stadium, which can seat about 3500 people, was full of loud cheers, music, and a lot of of other really REALLY happy noise! I was in a sea of people all cheering for UBC! There were different rousing speeches made by different pertinent people in the university whose pertinence did not matter as much to me as their very inspiring speeches on #IAMUBC and how WE are UBC! Then there was an alumnus who did spoken word poetry on getting a degree, a couple of musical acts followed, and a WHOLE lot of cheering happened. Every faculty had their own color, own cheer, and occupied a distinct space in the auditorium; however, there was no other competing feel in the air: WE ARE UBC STUDENTS AND WE ARE DAMN PROUD THAT WE ARE.

That was instance one. The first instance in my UBC stay where I was nothing else other than — I AM UBC.

Fast forward a full year and a month — October 2014, this happened:

AMS AGM 2014

 

For the first time in 40 years, we have quorum.

Because of the proposed increased international student tuition and residence fees, UBC students banded together to show that we are AGAINST IT. (If you want to know more about the proposed fee increases, here is an article on The Talon about it, here is an article on The Ubyssey on the international tuition fee increase, and here is one on the residence fee increase also from The Ubyssey). For the first time in 40 years, YES, FORTY years, the AMS held an AGM and we had quorum — which means any and every decision made in that meeting was binding, WHICH in turn means that the AMS can say that the decisions and stances agreed upon during the meeting are representative of the whole student body.

Could you imagine being part of that? I was overwhelmed by the overall atmosphere in that room. Students were politically active! It did not matter who you were, at that very moment, you are a UBC student standing up for yourself and your fellow UBC student!

At that moment, I was nothing else but a UBC student — I am a student, I want my voice heard, and I am voting on these issues!

Reflecting back, the 2013 Pep Rally and the 2014 AMS AGM were two instances where I was solely a UBC student — which means, those were two instances where I was completely devoid of any other identity and social position other than those afforded to me as a UBC student.

Putting the spotlight on something inevitably casts shadows on some other things. Spotlighting my identity as a UBC student effectively erased all my other identities — at least in the brief moments when I had the spotlight on that particular identity. Often it’s not really about identifying with multiple things; I suggest that tackling identities — whether it be in your daily life or in an academic paper or class — should always be done by looking at the context through which those identities arose.

What does this mean? It means individuals and their (well, OUR) identities are products of the tension between the social and the personal — or as CW Mills will put it, the public and the private. Basically, following Mills’ idea of how personal troubles and never detached from public issues, we can never see ourselves apart from the social context within which we stand. That context could be as constant as your personal family history (where you were born and where you were raised) to something as fleeting as which seat on the bus you took and who sat beside you.

What am I getting at? Two things:

1. Our identities are closely tied in with our lived experiences and the contexts within which those experiences came about and are rooted in. That means, our identities are formed and understood through different contexts, AND the different expressions of our various identities are also understood through different contexts.

2. Every time a specific – -or some specific — identity of ourselves take the spotlight, some other identities are muted. Often, this is based on the context within which you express that certain identity.

So the next time you start your statement with “I am…” think of all the “I am not…” that come with it.

References:

CW Mills, The Promise (1959)

No commentsAdd a comment

Goffman, Foucault, and a UBC Nerdfighters Event

In this second blog post of mine, I am going to write about a club event that I attended. The club is called the UBC Nerdfighters Club and the event was their Dead Poets’ Society Halloween Event.

So, Nerdfighter? What’s that? The UBC Nerdfighter Club describes their purpose on their Facebook page:

Our goal is to bring together the local Nerdfighteria community to decrease worldsuck and have some fun while we’re at it.

 DFTBA

Still confused? Let me unpack that for you. By the end of this blog post, I hope to give you a sense of what I’ve discovered the UBC Nerdfighters Club to be about and how club members use the club to negotiate their identity. I am going to unpack what it means to be a “Nerdfighter” in “Nerdfighteria” and, to do so, I am going to employ the theoretical help of Goffman’s (1961/2012) piece, Asylums, as well as Foucault’s (1975) piece, Discipline and Punish.

I did not have much of an idea of what a Nerdfighter was until I went to this club event. A close friend of mine had told me about the club before and had tried to explain what it was, what members did, and why they did it, but the terminology that she used to describe the Nerdfighter culture (i.e. “worldsuck”) threw me off a bit. I asked her to take me to a club event so I could see for myself what the club and its members were about… this led to us attending a Halloween event they named the Dead Poets’ Society (after the movie, I assume… although I have not seen the movie myself if I am being honest). The gist of the event was that, in gearing up for Halloween, we were all to meet up, eat a lot of sugar, and have a poetry circle of sorts where everyone brought some “spooky” material to read to the group.

When we walked into the room that the event was being held in, we were met by many rounds of “Hello!” from other club-goers. We all sat in a circle of chairs and helped ourselves to baked goods. We began the night with introductions. Going around the circle, each person was to introduce themselves by name along with a declaration of which Hogwarts House they were in (Pottermore-dictated or otherwise). Next, as per promised, everyone took turns sharing poetry. I heard everything recited from Edgar Allen Poe to J.R.R. Tolkien (recited poetry from a club member as well as an audio recorded version of Mr. Tolkien himself narrating it—both in elvish) to the “Monster Mash” (because, as club members voiced, no Halloween celebration would be complete without it). As the poetry began to taper off, the topic of viral Youtube videos came up and so our group watched some popular and comedic Youtube videos that, seemingly to me anyway, appeared irrelevant to poetry but nonetheless enjoyable. This soon led to a big group discussion on television shows as well as past/upcoming movies based on comic books, which led to a group debate on DC versus Marvel comic book characters.

At this point in the night, I was starting to get a good feel for the atmosphere in the club—it seemed that nothing was totally off-topic for them and everyone got caught up in the different fandom subjects with ample amounts of liveliness. It was at this point that I explained to everyone that I was new to learning what “Nerdfighteria” was all about and gave an open question out to the group to enlighten me and describe what the club meant to them. I explained that, to me, it seemed that if club members were interested in topics of sci-fi and fantasy literature and film (as were continuously brought into discussion), they could just as easily join the UBC Sci-Fi and Fantasy Club. I was confused as to how the UBC Nerdfighters Club was any different from this.

In answer to my questions, club members then pointed out to me that, actually, two executives of the UBC Sci-Fi and Fantasy Club were at the event too and that Nerdfighters had a distinctly different culture than just being interested in sci-fi and fantasy fandoms. A club executive explained that “Nerdfighteria” is a community (primarily an online community) stemming from the VlogBrothers, John and Hank Green. Basically, John and Hank Green are two brothers who post video blogs on Youtube. Their vlogs have gained popularity and have happened to intersect with many sci-fi and fantasy fandoms because of some of the content in the vlogs include John and Hank Green’s musings about their various fandom interests, however one club member explained to me that it was not just about the fandoms per se: “The cool kid in middle school that you never were—here, you’re cool.” Another club member added that the club was a place where anyone could come to be an enthusiast at, no matter what you wanted to be enthusiastic about. It was also explained to me that the club was about “doing good” by “decreasing ‘worldsuck’—things that make the world sucky” and “increasing ‘worldawesome’—things that make the world awesome.” I was told that increasing worldawesome is done in a couple ways. One of the most essential ways to increase worldawesome is by facilitating acceptance (acceptance of different likes and interests, acceptance of different ways of thinking, acceptance of different people). Another way to increase worldawesome is done through the number of projects that the Vlogbrothers have founded to promote charity and awareness to different causes—most notably, the Project for Awesome.

To give some theoretical backdrop for how I understand Nerdfighters to be constructing their identity, I will first introduce Goffman (1961/2012). Goffman (1961/2012) begins by writing on the characteristics of ‘total institutions’. He defines total institutions as structures of “residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals [are placed], cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life” (492). Goffman (1961/2012) points to mental hospitals and prisons as examples of total institutions. He writes that total institutions facilitate a “mortification of self”: “process of ‘killing off’ the multiple selves possessed prior to one’s entrance into the total institution and replacing them with one totalizing identity over which the person exercises little control” (492). Goffman (1961/2012) notes that, in these total institution settings, individuals who go against the administrative totalizing force often have their behaviour characterized as “acting out”—he emphasizes that this “acting out” is really just a way these individuals are attempting to preserve their self-autonomy and preserve their behaviours as of their own doing.

While he writes on how mental hospitals and prisons as total institutions shape the self through isolation, regulation, and formal administration tactics, these examples also shed light on the nature of the self as it is experienced in more “ordinary” civilian settings. He understands that an individual’s identity is something that is constantly being defined by the restrictions and freedoms that other institutions place onto the individual (Goffman, 1961/2012). He writes that “the individual… [is] a stance-taking entity, a something that takes up a position somewhere between identification with an organization and opposition to it, and is ready at the slightest pressure to regain its balance by shifting its involvement in either direction. It is thus against something that the individual can emerge” (Goffman, 1961/2012, p. 502). Goffman (1961/2012) specifies that “Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wider social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks” (502).

Quick to emphasize themes of opposition, Goffman (1961/2012) would help explain how the Nerdfighters find their identity in resisting the pull against the rigid boxes that society puts around what it means to “be cool” and what are the acceptable ways for an individual to “be”—behaviour, likes/interests, and otherwise. The idea of Nerdfighteria is a notion to extend acceptance to all individuals no matter where they come from, what they like, or how they think to oppose this totalizing idea that being cool is not to indulge in things that may be considered by larger society as being “nerdy”.

Foucault (1975) piece can also aid us in understanding this relation of power in Nerdfighteria as an aim to redefine what being nerdy entails. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1975) writes that power is a relation between the “powerful” and the “powered”. He writes that the relation between the two characterizes the following causal relations: if the powered disobey the powerful, the powerful punishment powered, and so the powered remain submissive to avoid this punishment. This internalization of discipline Foucault borrows from Bentham’s conception of the Panopticon.

Being a nerd is often denoted as an undesirable (sucky) status. Nerdfighter culture is a movement to reclaim the status and re-define what it means to be a nerd and re-define it as something that is awesome. In Nerdfighteria terms, Nerdfighters (previously, the powered) aim to reclaim the power by redefining what is “sucky” and what is “awesome” (“awesome” wields the power, “sucky” denotes non-power). Nerdfighteria attempts to break a setting that functions as both Panopticon and total institution.

John Green gives a simple definition of what it is to be Nerdfighter: “a Nerdfighter is a person who, instead of being made out of bones and skin and tissue, is made entirely of awesome.” I conclude on the note that, rather than fighting against nerds (as the name might suggest), the term embodies fighting FOR nerds and being “pro-nerd” by pushing against the bounds of worldsuck and redefining worldawesome as a push against totalizing social pressures and against these pressures that attempt to instill an internalized discipline.

 

…Lastly, what of the mysterious acronym “DFTBA”? It is the motto of Nerdfighteria meaning “Don’t Forget To Be Awesome.”

UBC Nerdfighters

References

Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish. New York: Pantheon, 622-636.

Goffman, E. (2012). Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. In S. Appelrouth & L. Desfor Edles (Eds.), Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory (2nd ed., pp. 492-502).  Thousand Oaks, California, USA: Pine Forge Press. (Original work published in 1961)

No commentsAdd a comment

“It’s all Greek to me” – “Doing Gender” at a Frat bids party

As the end of the “rush” period for most fraternities comes to a close, UBC’s Greek population is gearing up for its next big step in the initiation process. Aspiring members will be (or will not be) given ‘bids’ to their fraternity of choice. As a non-Greek member of the UBC population, I don’t normally have much involvement in this process, save for the fact that I have been invited to some “rush parties” along the way. This year, I was invited to what they boys were calling a “bids party,” where their aspiring members will be awarded bids before the official “bids day” which takes place at the SUB. The party was held on the Saturday night before the week of “bids day” so that the boys would have a heads up as to whether or not they would get their ‘official’ bids the coming week.

Having attended the party as somewhat of an outsider, it was interesting to observe the boys as they went through the process. It was apparent that the boys were desperately trying to radiate their most masculine features in order to impress both each other, as well as any girls that were in attendance. I found this display of gendered body language, attitudes, and actions to be very applicable to an article that I recently read for one of my sociology classes. West and Zimmerman’s “Doing Gender,” highlights some of the ways in which people interact with and “do” their gender in public environments. ‘Gender,’ according to this article, is described as the degree to which an ‘actor’ is masculine or feminine in comparison to the stereotypical expectations of gender.

As I observed the fraternity, it was extremely obvious that the boys were trying their hardest to meet the expectations of the stereotypical male. According to the article, individuals constantly perform scripts of their gender. After my initial connection of their actions to the West and Zimmerman article, this became somewhat comedic to watch. Most of the boys were buff, wearing tight fitting tops, and walking with straight backs to accent their muscular physic. As well, their language exuded what they probably associated with as being sufficiently “masculine” in order to keep themselves within the confines of what they were presenting as what fraternity members should look like.

This went on for an hour or two before the actual bids process began. Each of the aspiring members were called into a back room, where they would remain for approximately 10 minutes before being brought back out into the main room. When they re-entered the room, the members of the fraternity began clapping incessantly, and howling their fraternity chant to welcome their new pledge. I was informed that from the moment they received their bid, they became pledges, and would be made to prove themselves worthy and willing to become an official member of the fraternity, come “official initiation.”

For me, this party was an excellent example of West and Zimmerman’s theory of “doing gender.” Each member and aspiring member of the fraternity was an active participant in their gender in order to impress others and stay within the margins of the stereotypical “male.” My speculation for why the boys felt such a dire need to stay within this stereotype again follows West and Zimmerman’s theory. According to their theory, failure to properly ‘do gender’ is possible, and gender assessment and accountability are ever present. I think that especially for fraternity members, the idea of being evaluated based on how they measure up to the standards put in place for their gender category is very apparent, and constantly at the back of their mind. Overall, it was certainly interesting to observe this evaluation and presentation of gender from an outside point of view, and I wish the boys luck in their process of becoming members of their fraternity of choice.

West, Candace and Zimmerman, Don H. 1987. “Doing Gender.” Gender & Society 1(2): 125-51.

No commentsAdd a comment

Breaking A Norm

Time flies so fast without a hint. Our seminar is entering its second last week. For old time’s sake, I want to reflect on a little event that I created in this seminar at the beginning of the term.

I planned a norm-breaking experiment* with a friend, who was going to give a presentation to the SOCI 433 class with me. I told him that I want to break a norm by speaking Chinese in a class setting, and at the same time displaying important contents in Chinese, and he can do the same in Filipino, one of his mother tongues. (For those who are not familiar with the class, it is a student directed seminar on identity and structure. I am one of the four coordinators of this class. It has15 enrolled students, whose majors are sociology and political science; all of them are in second year level or higher. Every week, students attend two 1.5 hours classes, and one to three of them have to give a presentation on the assigned readings and facilitate a discussion afterwards.) Our presentation took place in the fourth class, when personal network was not well established between the presenters and the audience.

At the beginning of the presentation, I showed a PowerPoint slide with a rather long introduction of the reading and discussion contents in traditional Chinese. At the same time, I stood in front of the classroom, faced 14 colleagues, and talked in a serious tone about the contents in Mandarin for roughly one minute. Then my presentation partner at the back of the classroom began to speak fast in Filipino, with the long written Pilipino displayed in another PowerPoint slide. After that, we switch our language back to English. Before the class ended, we asked our colleagues to reflect on our behaviours and we debriefed on our experiment.

At first, I feel a little unprepared and uncomfortable, mainly because I had to start the presentation with Chinese. My nervousness affected my speech, making me unable to speak Mandarin as fluent as English. But as I continued talking, I came to an assumption that the contents were communicated to the audience, who remained silent but attentive. I somehow forgot the fact that all I said and displayed in Chinese would not be understood by the majority of the students. Later, when listening to my partner speaking a language that I am unfamiliar with, I was unable to capture any meaning, although I judged from the duration of the speech and the length of the written words that he was mentioning some important points.

Speaking in a non-English language in a sociology class was so unnatural that it seemed to be merely a performance. I had to control myself not to laugh at our pretentiousness. No one interrupted our speech or raised questions. When we finished this introduction, we suddenly spoke in English again, because we knew that English is the only language to sustain the operation of this class. At the end of the class, students reflected on our acts. A white female responded that at first, she expected us to translate what we said; then she came to question herself in her head why she should expect that. Another white female also reflected that she unexpected us to speak in non-English languages, but then she also realized that speaking English as a norm in universities is questionable.

By speaking non-English languages for a certain period of time without notifying my classmates, and acting as normal as I can, I intended to challenge other students’ expectation of receiving a presentation in English in a formal class setting. According to Neil Smelser, social norms are a set of mutual expectations of how to think and behave (as cited in Nick, 2002, p. 40). Their surprise would reflect that English is the normative language used in Vancouver’s higher education institutions like the UBC. Why is English the normative language at UBC? This question triggers a series of complex discussions about space, language, and identities of Vancouver. In brief, UBC is based on the unceded territory of the Musqueam community, but its official language is exclusively English, which reflects the white settler society’s identity control of communications and values over this public space.

As a Chinese, I share neither the indigenous identities nor the white settlers’ identities. Speaking my own language in a classroom, where communication in English is mutually expected, not only challenge the normalization of a white settler society’s language, but also challenge my legitimacy of speaking Chinese in public. Chinese characters and Mandarin represent my identities and values as a Chinese; they also represent knowledge and experiences that are required to understand the language. My location in the front of a classroom facing all students put me into a public space, and since I am one of the presenters, I became the center of the public discourse.

Occupying a foreign public space, being the central of focuses, and speaking in my mother tongue that few audience understood, make me a representative of a single unified identity and value as a Chinese. Yet as an individual actor in this experiment, I realized that communicating my Chinese identity and value to a public space outside China contains several barriers: the displacement of collective knowledge and experience relevant to China, the displacement of China’s cultural and political contexts, and the displacement of the audience that I can communicate.

* this experiment was part of the assignment of another sociology course that I enrolled in, which was a seminar on social movement.

Reference

Nick, C. (2002). Making Sense of Social Movements. McGraw-Hill International.

No commentsAdd a comment

The Interconnection between the Self and Society: My Experience at an Orientation Event

In September, I attended an orientation/ ice breaker event hosted by one of the largest social clubs in UBC. Prior to entrance, I had a stereotypical notion of the club as being composed mainly of a certain ethnic group with a certain outgoing behaviour. I could tell I was anxious and hesitant of my interaction with the group as I found myself constantly delaying my entrance, despite the friendly welcome from the executives. Hiding in the washroom for a few minutes, I convinced myself to enjoy the event and stepped outside. Thankfully, I encountered some of my classmates at the door who encouraged me to go in and participate in the activity. As we entered the lecture room, we immediately gathered together and talked about how awkward we felt at the event and how we did not seem to belong. It was not until we were separated by group leaders to our stationed groups that our conversation ended.

The event preceded with the hosts’ introduction of the club and some ice breaker activities. In the middle of an ice breaker activity, my classmate and I decided to leave the event as we felt uneasy in the group. Once we exited the event and walked toward the bus loop, we asked eachother the reasons to our anxiety within the group. For me, ethnicity was an issue because I did not classify myself as a member of the ethnic group representing the club. For my classmate, dress code was an issue as she felt she had not dressed appropriately to the standard of the group. For both of us, age was an issue because we felt too old to be involved in orientations, mainly held to recruit freshmen and newcomers to the club. This was a surprising investigation as both of us were completely unaware of eachother’s concerns of feeling different, nor were we discriminated by the members of the club. It was our own evaluation of ourselves, based on our presumptions of who or what is appropriate for the group, that placed a judgment on our belonging in the group. It was a personal trouble, according to C. Wright Mills, a trouble “occur[ing] within the character of the individual and within the range of his or her immediate relations with others,” a private matter. After realizing this, we decided to go back to the club and enjoy the rest of the event.  However, it was clear that our personal troubles had a connection with how we were socialized by society. From micro socializations such as forming lunch groups in school and intaking values taught by our parents to macro socializations such as historical values imposed by our culture and new values imposed by the media, we are socialized to identify ourselves in a certain way and expected to interact within a certain group. Therefore, we feel comfortable in partaking certain identities and groups, while it is difficult for us to interact with other groups, especially structured organizations such as clubs, without preconceived notions. The confined boundaries of relationships and identities held by individuals thus becomes a public issue; as Mills states that it occurs when “some values cherished by publics is felt to be threatened.. form[ed by a] larger structure of social and historical life.” On a broader level, this confinement leads to racism, classism, sexism, etc.

The social club I attended attempted to tackle this public issue by opening the club to a diversity of people to break preconceived notions of the club and to provide an inclusive space for all students in UBC. This was evident through their announcements in introducing their club, representation of executives (including one of the hosts and our team leader) of a different ethnic group than the majority makeup of the club. Everyone spoke in English, providing an inclusive space for people who did not speak the language of the group but spoke English. Dress code was not imposed and stationed groups were organized according to a random selection of alphabets. Individual choices for engaging/disengaging in activities were respected and everyone was encouraged to be themselves while still being accepted. However, despite the club’s efforts and claims to provide an inclusive space for all students, the type of clothing worn by executives and the series of sexually provocative cheers and games visualized an identity of the group in a certain way which portrayed an imagined community of who belongs and composes the group, affecting the ratio of students who ultimately decide to join the club.

Furthermore, by the dress code and attitude of the executives in leading activities during the orientation, social standards of executive behaviour are set and place limits on individuals when applying for executive positions, as they would have to prove themselves to be outgoing, to posess leadership qualities, to be able to laugh at and promote activities underlying stereotypical sexual and masculine/feminine orientations, and to be, or at least embrace, the culture of the dominant ethnic group. This is similar to how new fraternity boys had to prove themselves according to certain standards placed by senior fraternity boys, which emphasized the group’s definition of masculinity, during a rush event in Kimmel’s “Guyland.”

While at a broader surface level, the club seems very welcoming and inclusive to diversity, at a higher level of executive positions, there are more exclusive standards on behaviour and ideals; it is expected that a successful candidate would be able to conform to the group’s ideas and definitions in order to be accepted.

References:

Mills, C. W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959.

Kimmel, M. (2008). Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men.

No commentsAdd a comment

Seeking a Space, Performing a Space: Imagine Day at UBC

“On the first day of classes, campus is transformed and over 8000 new-to-UBC students and over 1000 faculty, student, and staff volunteers come together to welcome you to your new academic community and celebrate the start of the school year.” (Imagine UBC)

“The first-years are so unlucky, they get this cold and heavy rain on Imagine Day. Too bad for people at the booths. Who wants to be outside?” (talking with my friends)

Rain, rain, rain. As a featured outdoor event for new students (mostly first-year) to discover the student clubs and communities on campus, the Main Event seemed to have difficulties escaping the cold and heavy rain on the Main Mall on September 2, 2014.

Seeking a Space: Where is the Community I belong?

As a transfer student, that was my second school year at UBC, and naturally my second time being in the UBC Imagine Day. The Imagine Day description made I imagin that by connecting with the little space of a booth, I can later connect with a certain space on campus where I can call a community. This space could be a physical one (such as a club office or an event site) or/and an imagined one (such as a Facebook group, a friendship network), and it must be one where I feel comfortable revealing my identities (for example, a Chinese person) and behaving as myself. Yet my searching last year as one of the “new-to-UBC students“, I recall, did not lead to any fruitful outcomes.  I signed up for the Meditation Community’s email list, but I had schedule conflict with all of their events; I paid $10 for the membership of CSSA (Chinese Students and Scholars Association) but found it useless; several clubs that I signed up didn’t even send me any newsletters. Besides, what UBC described as  an “academic community” was largely absent in the Main Event, since nearly all the booths were presented by cultural, spiritual, and recreational clubs. Arts academic clubs, for instance, were told to present in the morning at Buchanan Courtyard, a space that was separated from where a wider audience located in the Main Event.

Wandering around the Main Mall among crowds of twenty-something-looking people, walking in and out among tents and booths, reading banners, signs and posters for information, writing down my name and email, talking or refusing to talk with others: I saw myself as one unit of complex identities attempting to build connections with other unites of identities.  Using Sherene Razack’s concept of linking bodies with space in Race, Space, and the Law (2002):

“[T]he symbolic and the material work through each other to constitute a space” (pp. 8). 

a space is not just an “innocent” space outlined by objects and people, it should be further analyzed as a social product (pp. 7). In other words, a space can be social, and its social meanings should be performed. In the searching of other spaces, bodies have to move, symbols and languages have to be shown, interpersonal interactions have to be performed (physically, verbally, emotionally). Occupying a bodily space in the Main Event, I saw myself entering, exiting, and re-entering different social spaces that were performed by groups of individuals with certain identities.

Performing a Space: A Chinese Community of What?

Redoing my searching this year, I tried to focus on one aspect that I was always interested in: the Chinese cultural clubs. Directly related to my identity as a Chinese student at UBC, I would like to use my perspective to briefly examine how a space is performed with social  meanings. How do these clubs represent themselves? What kinds of space do they create at UBC?

1. A Space of Language

A space can perform its social identities through verbal and written languages. It was easy for me to identify most of the Chinese cultural clubs by looking for signs and banners, since many of these material spaces were presented through Chinese characters. Interestingly, since modern Chinese have two written forms, some of the signs were in traditional Chinese, which was officially used in Hong Kong and Taiwan; some were in the simplified one, which was officially used in mainland China. This language difference not only showed the culture that the clubs intended to present, but also showed what audience these clubs were presenting to. Occasionally, I also hear Mandarin and Cantonese communicated between students. Building instant identity connections, language performs symbolic meanings through the material spaces; it also reflected the diverse cultural identities within the “Chineseness” of the clubs.

IMG_20140902_164751IMG_20140902_170747IMG_20140902_164730

[Language representation (top&middle: in traditional Chinese; bottom: in simplified Chinese).]

2. A Space of Racialization or/and Sexualization

Through asking questions to every Chinese cultural clubs I found, I noticed that the three most common events these clubs organize were parties, games, and ski trips. I imagined myself being in a club, a party room, and a Whistler hotel room, but I couldn’t imagine a conversation or a community. Once again, I found no way to seek an “academic community” among different Chinese cultural clubs. Moreover, I was shocked to hear some public announcements from two Chinese cultural clubs:

A male executive from one club spoke loudly to his surroundings: “….If you have yellow fever or Asian fever, this is the place for you.”

A male executive from another club said to the people who were passing by: “come for parties…… and get laid.”

Performing as representatives of their clubs, these two male executives presented their imagined community that I perceived as dangerous spaces. As a female I felt very uncomfortable with what these two particular clubs created within the public space of the Main Mall: the terms “yellow fever” and “get laid”, and the images (as show below) created a social spaces that was either racialized or sexualized, or both. The naturalization of the term “yellow fever” used in club promotion was especially problematic, since this term was profoundly based on western superiority and male domination. The term also brought me question the way non-white individuals use the racialized language in a predominantly white space. UBC is located in a white settler society, a space that is “established by Europeans on non-European soil”, as Razack explains (pp. 1). When naturalizing the term “yellow fever”, the male executive intended to attract non-Asian audience with racial/cultural preference to his imagined community. Yet he was completely ignorant of how the meanings and practices of this term do harm to an Asian female like me. I imagined that, if I were in a space that welcomes “yellow fever”,  my body would be realized mostly in terms of my race and my gender, and I would be expected to perform as a stereotypical Asian female who is submissive, reserved, and feminine. In no way I would feel safe!

CVC cute girlsHKSA party

Gendered and Sexualized texts and images.

Using Razack’s concepts of social space, when seeking a place with my identity as a Chinese person in Imagine Day, I observed how different Chinese cultural clubs perform their values and visions: first, symbolic performance, such as the banners with Chinese language; second, interpersonal performance, such as the public speech from executives. Notably, it was difficult for me to find a safe space among the Chinese cultural clubs that promoted parties as their main activities, because the way they performed their social spaces put me under the risk of being gendered, sexualized and racialized.

Reference:

Razack, S. (2002). Race, space, and the law. Toronto: Between the Lines.

No commentsAdd a comment