Jul 28, 2011
May 28, 2012
Mar 02, 2016
Mar 04, 2013
Jun 15, 2014
Mar 16, 2009

Gay Pride Exposes the Facial Mask

Homosexuality occurs across the rainbow of human cultures.  The same seems to be true of homophobia, except that the numbers are much larger.  Why are so many people troubled by this small constant in human variability?  There will be many sound answers accounting for a range of social structures and personality types, but sometimes an image comes along that reveals a deeper truth.

The real “threat” of gay life has nothing to do with sex, natural or otherwise.  The real problem is that it exposes just how much human nature is a contrivance–something that itself is not natural as other species are natural, but rather excessively given over to artifice, performance, and an often painful interplay of social display and self-consciousness.

And that’s why I love this photograph of two guys of a certain age at a gay pride parade in Bogota.  I assume they are wearing nurses’ hats, but I’m not going to speculate on that, although they should get some credit for the matching lipstick.  Gender trouble (alerting us to the fact that sexuality is performed rather than given), queering the standard categories otherwise in place with business suits and hospital uniforms, whatever might be the carnivalesque disruption of social categories underway here is only half of the story.  (An important half, as our management of the surface of things has enormous consequences in determining whether people will thrive or suffer, but not the point I want to dwell on today.)  The drama in this photo is all about the face.

Let’s spell it out: are they wearing masks?  They could be.  Especially the one on the right, as the smile looks somewhat frozen, as if sculpted in plastic.  And the headscarves could be hiding the rest of the trappings, whether Velcro straps or a loose fit at the back of the head.  But why the double mimicry of both age and a feminine profession–what kid would do that?  And the one on the left wears his face too well: the meaty heft to it, the tight creases of control between the eyes, and the delicious lift of the upper lip as if on the verge of a sneer–well, you can’t buy that.

The “naturalness” of the face is heightened by the way the black eyeglasses are perched awkwardly high up on the bridge of that considerable nose.  The rather large lenses seem small on that face, as if there only for vision but not really very good for that.  It starts to dawn that the make-up doesn’t extend only to the red lips and scarves, or to the silver ornament and the purple straps and the garish rose tint from the umbrella.

They are wearing masks–their faces.  Eyes look out from behind those facial masks just as they also look out from behind a pair of glasses.  Those faces, which almost could double as the conventional tragedy and comedy masks signifying the theater, suggest that these two individuals are old troupers in the play of life.  They have used their masks to fend off trouble, make their way in the world, express their thoughts and feelings, please, deceive, warn, and love.  Those faces carry scars and the knowledge gained, they are studied for intentions and more, and at last they will dissolve to black and become mere vessels emptied of consciousness.

Wonderful things, but in the end still masks.  And that’s the problem.  Human beings yearn to forget that they are creatures of their own making.  Too much responsibility, and not enough assurance.  Better, it seems, even for society to be ruled by nature, hardly a merciful sovereign, than to see it as a stage where one’s inner and outer selves will never line up exactly.

The gay pride parade may be a celebration of human rights, but it also is a reminder that everyone is queer.  That’s one more reason why we should be thankful there now are so many parades, and that everyone can attend.

Photograph by William Fernando Martinez/Associated Press; one of many in a slide show at The Big Picture on gay pride parades around the world.

 0 Comments

The Romance of Technology

According to NASA launch director Michael Leinbach, it is “the final flight of a true American icon.”  Whether or not the Atlantis Shuttle Spacecraft has achieved iconic status or not is open to question, but there can be no question that the national news media have treated the launch of STS-135 with an incredible nostalgia that has all but erased the most tragic moments in the thirty year history of the space shuttle program. Mention of the Challenger and the Columbia Space Shuttle disasters is there, of course, but as a footnote to the alleged successes of the program, rather than as a cautionary tale to our continuing flirtation with modernity’s gamble—the wager that the long-term dangers of a technology-intensive society will be avoided by continued progress.  And in its place is a romanticized tale–or rather, a romantic-technological optic–that casts our gaze first upon close-up images that underscore the sleek, powerful body of the shuttle itself, making it larger than life.  Having visually fetishized the technology, our gaze is then directed from a distance upon the enormity of the Shuttle’s power as it blasts off from the launch pad (see here, here, and here).

The photograph above, taken by NASA and duly distributed by the media,  is representative of this second moment in this optic.  Shot as a landscape, the spectator is placed directly on a horizontal plane in front of the scene, but of course at a distance that alleviates any of the risk of being too close to the blast.  The image itself is almost perfectly symmetrical, and in a manner that underscores the technological rationality of the scene itself: the shuttle and its tightly triangulated effluence divide the frame in half, with birds (nature at risk but not visibly harmed) on one side and closer to the viewer, a tower of some sort (part of the technology of control) on the other side and farther away from the viewer.  But note too the reflection of the flash of the discharge in the water that draws a line directly to the spectator in a manner that simultaneously connects and separates the viewer from the blast.

The identification between spectator and event is central to the romantic-technological optic and is evidenced by the very many photographs that feature families and individuals showing up to witness such events, as well as those that display people taking photographs of the event themselves. The sheer number of such images should clue us to the fact that there is something more going on here than simple documentation or reportage.  And of course there is, for the space program has always been driven by its status as a public spectacle, its romance animated by its connection to the myth of the American frontier and the individual(istic) pioneer willing to challenge the unknown.   And so the photograph below is perhaps the perfect marker of an Americanized, technological-romantic optic as the polished mirror of the glasses invites the illusion of a near perfect fusion of spectator and event as they appear simultaneously to reflect and absorb the image of the shuttle as it disappears into the clouds. The viewer may not be on the shuttle craft himself, but he is nevertheless cast as one with the project.

But there is more, of course, for the optic is tilted to a nostalgic past that reflects only the successes  of the shuttle program and represses any memory of its disasters.  And in this regard, notice how the photograph above seems almost to substitute for earlier photographs of individuals witnessing with horror the explosion of the Challenger as it took a similar trajectory towards the heavens.

One might understand why NASA would promote a romantic-technological optic as in its own best interests, but we should take care ourselves to avoid being too easily fooled into yielding to the unrelenting desire to beat the odds of modernity’s gamble. Or, at least when we take the bet, as undoubtedly we may need to do from time to time, we should do it with full recognition that the odds always favor the house and that the risks are not easily managed by simple remembrances of a past that never was quite as happy as we want to recall it.

Photo Credit: NASA; Scott Audette/Reuters.

 3 Comments

Sight Gag: The Media – Eyes Wide Shut

Credit: Stuart Carlson/Universal Press Syndicate

Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic, satiric, parodic, and carnivalesque performances that are an important part of a vibrant democratic public culture.  These “gags” may not always be funny or represent a familiar point of view, but they attempt to cut through the lies, hypocrisy, shamelessness, stupidity, complacency, and other vices of democratic life.  We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think might deserve a laugh or at least a wry and rueful look.

 0 Comments

Dirty Work and Combat’s Cyclical Seasons

By guest correspondent Jeremy Gordon

Seeing dirt in combat zones is nothing new.  In accounts of combat and its aftermath, terrain becomes a living entity, both working in terms of physical contact and mystical dimensions.  The grounds are alive, swallowing bodies in rice fields, suffocating men in trenches, and blinding convoys in deserts.  But they also offer places to cling to at the screams of a falling mortar round.  It is a sordid relationship, cyclical in nature, turning to dirt for safety and death, sorrow and elation of near misses.  There is a constant movement to and from the earth, going to it for safety and attempting to control its unruliness with concoctions and machinery, trying to keep tabs on it so it does note betray you.

Drawing lines in the sand with barbed wire is one such consistent method, as seen above.  The earth shakers on the highway in the background rumble by on pavement paying little heed to the mounds and bushes to the side.  Their pace is consistent as the space between the personnel carrier and the two other vehicles is fairly even, a measured and rational approach to traversing landscape.  They blur into the horizon with a linear direction and time.  The soldier nearest us wears no gloves, perhaps a sign of confidence and experience in the dirty work of war.  Not rushing, he bends over at the right distance so as not to be cut.  The gun is slacked on his back.  The pace and direction of the action is somewhat contradictory to the convoy, as there is a sense of care in the arrangement of the wire, a ritual that serves to form barriers between bodies and space, safety, and danger.  The wire then works as a frame, a barbed optic and cordoned view through which combat is expressed.

We might surmise that the optic changes post-deployment when treatments are scheduled and predictable, away from the dirt of the body, cleansed of pollution, pieces of trash stuck by barbs.  The move is away from the dirty work of war.  Maybe.

This image is part of a NYT slide show that accompanied a story about a veteran transition program training combat vets in organic farming.  Literally framed in terms of “dirty work,” the article cites a “veteran-centric” farming movement.  The “centric” thematic should not be ignored here, as now irrigation hoses, circular, yet tangled, frame our view of both men.  Soldiers still work to roll out and arrange, the optic is similar, but the relationship to dirt is much different.  The men maintain relaxed yet focused poses. The barbs are gone, but not the suspicion.  One looks directly back through the circle, the other ponders, arms folded, looking off to the distance with an air doubt.

The rural setting, tree-lined fields and fertile soil, its pace, and farming’s inherent concerns with seasons of circularity rather than linear narratives of completeness provide an optic through which we might reconsider hyper-rational cleansing narratives of post-combat trauma.  Here there is a circular patterns in which sorrow of death and joy of life are connected, where physical contact with dirt can be joined with mystical elements, linking bodily and soulful healing.

Such a cyclical approach to wholeness is not an escape from dirt but a shift in relation, from a season of wilting to a season of cultivation and rejuvenation.  Seeing the combat narrative this way then is not a story of Homer’s Odysseus and the treacherous journey from Troy to an end of the Odyssey, but an echo of the Hymn to Demeter.  Demeter was one of the earth gods in whose name a civic festival celebrating the cyclical nature of joy, sorrow, earth, agriculture, cultivation, and rejuvenation sought to change relationships to life and death, body and soul.  The earth, like Demeter, knows mourning and elation, and as such, rituals that joined these were deeply rooted in the rural, agrarian Mysteries of Eleusis, secret rites in which initiates’ were changed through experience of “kinship between soul and bodies.”  Rather than looking up, yearning to flee pollution and clean dirt from hands, changing our gaze only slightly reveals another optical style where unwinding wire brings us full circle, turning approaches to trauma to chances for labors of focused, relaxed, contingent, patient, and seasonal soiled work of rejuvenation.

Similus similibus curantur, loosely “relief by means of similars,” by means of unwinding coils of separation.

Photo Credits: Lushpix/StockPhotoPro; Sandy Huffaker/NYT

Jeremy Gordon is a graduate student in the program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University. He can be contacted at jeregord@indiana.edu.

 

 0 Comments

Do Space Scientists Dream of Cosmic Reproduction?

Individual scientists will dream of many things, but what are the collective fantasies that tie them to the stars, and us to them?  Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Gallactica, and other popular series were all structured by the discourse of empire.  Whichever side you, or the emperor, were on, the template was political.  Expansion was a given, hubris the constant danger, and some combination of classical virtues such as prudence and courage the key to winning in the long term.   But for all the superficial similarities involved in “the conquest of space,” that really wasn’t NASA.

Perhaps only now, with the last mission about to lift off, can the final veil be lifted off the dream.  This image, taken through the window of a passenger jet, shows the space shuttle Endeavor climbing above the clouds this May.  It’s consistent with the many, many other images of NASA lift-offs: the single line arcing heavenward, leaving behind only a pillar of exhaust, monument to the enormous energies needed to push 4, 640,000 lbs  above the earth.  (That’s orbiter, rockets, and fuel tank, fully loaded.  Now try jump two feet into the air.)  And yet this is a very different image from the typical launch slide show. We don’t see the massive machinery of the launch pad, the roaring flames of the rockets’ ignition, the gleaming machinery rising godlike into the sky, the puny spectators gazing upward as the craft curves away from the “surly bonds of earth” to a final, bright spark of visibility before it passes into space, that place where you will never go.  No, this image is much closer to something else:

My point is not to make a joke. Nor is it to state the obvious, which is that there always has been an all-too-obvious phallic dimension to the whole rocket thing.  (Something to which this post obviously is not immune.)  Perhaps the amateurism of the photograph can help, for the glare of the window makes the image seem a bit like a specimen under glass.  The shift in the spectator’s standpoint also matters: for once we are looking down on the launch, which also is placed against the wide horizon of the planet rather than above those few able to stand and look upward at Cape Canaveral.  These and other features of the image combine to miniaturize what had been a long-running media spectacle.  That change in magnitude allows a hidden drive to become visible.

Whatever the idea behind the space program, the dream never was to get most of us up there.  The “space truck to nowhere” made that realization all too clear.  Gravity is our lot.  But reproduction is not about getting most of the adults through nature’s bottlenecks.  Instead of conquering the stars, perhaps the real drive is to seed them.  Still all too masculine and likely to be doomed for that reason, but now at least one can grant that the humans really weren’t serving the machines.  The dream, the image suggests, was to get just one pod through to some unknown egg.  Humanity wouldn’t conquer anything, but if it was found by the right host, some version of the species could spread across the galaxy.

This rumination is crazy, of course.  But then the space shuttle program was crazy: an unbelievable feat of engineering that had minimal scientific value for the enormous amount of money expended.  Rather than letting it become merely a museum piece, perhaps photographs such as the one above can buy a moment’s reflection.  Even though the smart thing is to focus on living long and well on this planet, the space program’s inversions of magnitude can reveal not only the smallness and fragility of human life, but also how our primitive urges can lead to dreams of almost infinite extension.

Photograph by Stefanie Gordon/Associated Press.  It accompanied this essay in the July 5th New York Times.  The sperm diagram is from a histology course.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

 2 Comments