Pulses from the multitude: virtuosity and black feminist discourse

Using a dialogic format this conversation between two authors uses political theorist Paolo Virno's conception of the “multitude” to examine and compare two different arenas of black feminist protest that took place on social media in the latter half of 2013. As a performative article, it offers historical and theoretical background to the terms “multitude,” “public intellect,” and “virtuosic labor” in racialized capitalist formations, situating them to provide an alternative to the power of the State – an alternative that unlike the State does not claim to confer rights. The article looks at the Facebook response to a call from the Crunk Feminist Collective to white feminists to speak out on the verdict exonerating Trayvon Martin’s killer and offer counter images to those that describe Martin's killing as justified. It then looks at the public dialogue around the applicability of the term “feminism” to Beyoncé's self-titled “visual album.” Through aesthetic inquiry, the authors look at the form these examples of protest take to situate and propose the active viewing of these aesthetic forms by others on social media, as well as by the authors of this article, as a kind of virtuosic labor. The article concludes with a series of poems created using the “cut-up” technique designed to transmit feeling through subjective action and a task manifesto for white feminists to use as a guide.     

Sentinels for New South Industry: Booker T. Washington,Industrial Accommodation and Black Workers in the Jim Crow South

In 1912, “race war” broke out in Cuba. The island's hard-won independence, formally attained in 1902, had failed to deliver the “nation for all” that nationalist visionary Jose Marti and his largely black and mulatto following had aspired to. Instead white Cuban elites attempted to emulate the standards of “civilization” laid down by their North American counterparts, laying the foundations for a society in which blacks and mulattoes remained second-class citizens. Afro-Cuban war veterans, outraged at the government's failure to reward their sacrifices over many years, organized the Partido Independiente de Color, demanded their “rightful share” to the fruits of independence, and in 1912 led an armed revolt that was brutally suppressed by the US-backed government, at a cost of more than 3000 lives.     

Challenging the Biological: The Fantasy of Male Birth as a Nineteenth-Century Narrative of Ethical Failure

In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë portrays a fully realized heroine who challenges society's and fiction's conventional roles for women. In order to broaden her heroine's role, Brontë had to go beyond the genres open to her — the novel of manners, the Gothic, and the governess novel — to establish a new genre: the feminist fairytale. In establishing this genre, Brontë pinpoints Jane's specifically female dilemma: how to achieve intimacy and still maintain independence.

At once beautiful and terrible, sustaining and destructive, fire is the perfect element to convey a sense of Jane's often conflicting desires. Brontë carefully establishes hearth fires as an index to how included and “at home” Jane feels. Similarly, Brontë uses metaphors of self‐sacrifice and immolation to indicate times when Jane feels her independence is being threatened.

The hearth fires and the metaphorical fires are overshadowed by the “big” fires in the novel, but their consistent, unobtrusive use allows Brontë to reinforce her theme in the simple details of the story and to maintain an attention to craft that is too often undervalued or ignored.     

Editor's Introduction

This issue features some remarkably innovative work about issues of race, ethnicity, and power within the North American workscape. The racialization, ethnic disparagement, and general “othering” of economic competitors or political opponents has become an almost standard trope in 19th and 20th century U.S. history narratives. It comes as no great surprise, then, that Minnesota mining interests, when faced with the militant resistance of Finnish mineworkers allied with the IWW in 1916, should attack the denizens of the remote Iron Range as “Jackpine Savages,” stand-ins for the Sioux of an earlier era—both now equally reviled as “barbarians” who posed “the greatest menace to civilization.” More surprising, surely, is Gerald Ronning's discovery of the intricate ways in which the Finns themselves adapted their identities to the rhythms of the North Woods, in short turning the epithets of primitivism into a cultural badge of honor. Two essays offer provocative new takes on central themes of African-American history. In the first Brian Kelly insists that the “accomodationist” project engaged by Booker T. Washington and others among the educated black elite (those whom W. E. B. DuBois would christen the Talented Tenth) was less about a renunciation of civil and political equality and more about complicity with New South industrialists' quest for cheap labor. A class-based rapprochement between “race leaders” and “white elites,” he argues, accounts for a contemporary discourse of race pride and uplift on the one hand and disgust and even revulsion for “the masses” on the other. Criticizing an historiography of celebration, where every act of elite-led uplift is interpreted as “an important sphere of agency,” Kelly calls for more emphasis on the voices of black working-class dissent.     

Swampwalls: dark matter and the lumpen army of art

Dominant notions of contemporary art are being overturned not by some radical avant-garde theory or movement, but instead by an “uprising” from within the confines of the “art factory,” as well as by newly embodied instances of informal everyday creativity that high culture has long overlooked. Theorists Negt and Kluge might have described this insurrection as the partial unblocking of a counter-public or proletarian sphere: a realm of fragmented identities and working class fantasy generated in response to the alienating conditions of capitalism. A more specific cultural interpretation suggests this mutiny from within and assault from below is the irrepressible brightening of “creative dark matter:” that marginalized and systematically underdeveloped aggregate of creative productivity, which nonetheless reproduces the material and symbolic economy of high culture. The results are explosive, or at least potentially so as this long, pent-up shadow archive spills out into the once forbidden dwelling place of mainstream law and order and high cultural privilege. Meanwhile, a new wave of socially engaged art is thriving on the margins of the art world. Like an enormous production warehouse this “post-public” creativity is developing sustainable farming, reenacting historical labor demonstrations, providing public services lost to decades of deregulatory economic policy, and initiating local bartering systems and environmental cleanups. Its vitality is something Joseph Beuys could have only dream about. And not surprisingly even this “autonomous” and “Interventionist” art is selectively becoming part of the mainstream culture industry through what Gilles Deleuze describes as an “apparatus of capture.” Nevertheless, one result of this new confrontation reveals this vibrant imaginary “from below” is pushing artistic production, pushing also discourse, pedagogy and cultural institutions into radically re-thinking definitions and possibilities not only involving the possibilities of contemporary avant-garde art practices, but also about the very nature of creativity, democracy, and political agency more broadly.     

Marcia and erikson: The relationships among ego identity status,neuroticism, dogmatism,and purpose in life

Implicit in James Marcia's writings and in the many studies that have employed his measure of ego identity is the assumption that his four ego identity statuses are developmentally ordered along a continuum from “being identity diffused” to “achieving” an ego identity. In order to assess the validity of this assumption, hypotheses were generated and tested concerning the relationship between the above ordering and Erikson's writings regarding the role played in the process of identity formation by the following three variables: neuroticism, dogmatism, and a sense of purpose in life. If one assumes that Erikson's perspective is valid, then the results of this study fail to support Marcia's continuum assumption. While some of the identity statuses appear to classify persons in a manner consistent with Erikson's writings, not one instance of the postulated ordering of Marcia's four statuses is observed. It is concluded that Marcia's measure is not an adequate operationalization of Erikson's perspective on identity formation.     

Dis-Assembly Lines: gestures,situations, and surveillances

In “Americanism and Fordism,” Antonio Gramsci offers a brief meditation on the gestural performances of assembly-line workers who, rather than become subordinate to the disciplinary flow of the machine, cultivate perfectly timed gestures that allow workers to hide in plain sight: or, in other words, to inhabit the scene of management otherwise. Rather than extend Gramsci's investment in virtuosic, masterful performances of gesture, this article considers the potentiality of gesture through Lucille Ball's and Tehching Hsieh's performances of bad timing. As different as these performances are in terms of genre and historical situation, each uses gesture as a technique to performatively divide the labor process, producing fleeting temporalities of waste within rhythms marshaled toward production and accumulation. While it tracks the effects of these itinerant gestures, this article reconsiders the oppositions between productive and reproductive work, rationality and emotionality, and work and home that sustain Gramsci's theory, as well as how the collapse of such oppositions introduces alternative historical and artistic trajectories into theories of precariousness.     

Women,Wives and the Campaign Against Pit Closures in County Durham: Understanding the Vane Tempest Vigil

The majority of the women who campaigned to save the Vane Tempest Colliery from closure in 1993 were involved because of their political understanding and allegiances rather than as a consequence of their practical involvement in mining life. Even those women who were married to miners did not conform to the stereotypical conception of ‘miner's wife’. However, the supporting labour movement and the media persisted in conceptualizing the Women's Vigil through romantic and masculinist discourses of miners and mining communities which could only locate the women as ‘wives’, which confined the campaign within historical stereotypes no longer appropriate to the actual situation and which persistently set the idea of socialism against that of feminism. This not only situated the women's campaign as secondary and subject to that of the NUM but it also subverted the possibilities of the women fully articulating their own experience and understanding within the campaign. The situation was further complicated by memories of the miners' strike of 1984-5 in which women played such an important role. One aspect of this role, that of maintaining mining families in the face of hardship, continued to inform understanding of the women's role in the fight to prevent closure, although it was no longer appropriate.The Women's Vigil engaged with a much wider set of concerns and with a wider range of individuals and groups than did that of the miners themselves. There were serious possibilities for broadening the political campaign around the women's slogan of ‘Jobs, community and environment’ which were never fully exploited because of the difficulties of admitting that women could inhabit any position other than that of ‘miners’ wives'.This experience of the Vane Tempest Vigil indicates the significance and the centrality of gender issues within class based political action.     

Popular Sexual Knowledges and Women's Agency in 1920s England: Marie Stopes's Married Love and E.M. Hull's The Sheik

This article examines popular discourses of women's sexuality in 1920s England and argues that sex manuals like Marie Stopes's Married Life and sex novels like E.M. Hull's The Sheik, despite their adherence to status quo values, were liberating for women through their affirmation of women's sexual subjectivity. Stopes's enormously popular book contributed strongly to a new understanding of women's sexual drives as natural and autonomous. The changing attitudes were reflected in the numbers of postwar women who actively participated in the creation and consumption of popular sex-novels and films, exercising both economic and sexual freedoms at once. This article focusses on the film version of The Sheik, which experienced great success as part of this growing leisure market catering specifically to women's desire, and in particular on the figure of Rudolph Valentino as a “woman-made” man. The film's “crossed” representations of sexuality (the emancipated “flapper” and the effeminate yet virile “sheik”) challenged traditional notions of femininity and masculinity, and in doing so, were liberating for women consumers at the same time that they threatened the sexual identities of men.     

Inside the Home: Power and Negotiation in Filipina-Japanese Marriages

This essay examines the personal accounts of married Filipina-Japanese couples living in urban Japan to show how the women negotiate power and influence over their husbands. Centering on Filipino ideas about power and “America,” the article draws on various ethnographic vignettes that illuminate the Filipinas' cultural knowledge. By negotiating their relationships, Filipinas' marriages to Japanese emerge as ongoing processes rather than as a static institution in which the women are simply (oppressed) gender-role performers. While these women's struggles are not denied, their actions engender possibilities for the subversion of existing gender-national hierarchies. Belle faced Kawai. “I can't marry you.…I was raped by the son of a powerful man in my hometown. I'm no longer a virgin…” In tears, “Will you still marry me?” Kawai assured her firmly, “It doesn't matter.”     

Sex,Power and Ontology: Exploring the Performativity of Hormones

This paper contributes to the recent discussions about new materialism. It has been claimed that feminists should bring biology and the physiology of bodies into their analyses. Here, however, an ontological question is asked about these objects of study. The paper focuses on sex hormones. In feminist studies, the “sexing” of the so-called sex hormones is questioned (Fausto-Sterling 2000), and in the spirit of new materialism they are also rethought as provocations and global fluids that question any previously perceived constancy of individual bodies (Birke 2003; Roberts 2007). This paper draws upon these previous studies in order to propose a posthumanist performative approach to sex hormones, and continues by arguing for a further radicalization of their ontology. Karen Barad's notion of indeterminacy—meaning that the nature of an “entity” can be determined only within a specific research apparatus—is utilized. This paper thus explores whether sex hormones can, in some apparatuses, “enact” not only chemical processes, but also material-discursive processes, even affects.     

Surpassing the word: Aileen Wuornos

This article explores the dynamics of Richard Move's drag performance of the late Martha Graham. Drag dance is remarkably self-aware as historiography, and it employs a rhetoric of bodies becoming other bodies: channeling, paying homage, re-embodying, reliving, being possessed. This article argues that drag dance has a historical project for dance history; specifically, that drag bodies can become a new medium through which aesthetic/kinetic histories are transmitted. In the case of Richard Move, the exaggeration and excess of the ageing Martha Graham become modalities that align with the ‘wrongness’ of his body. This is drag dance as a strategy of re-embodiment after the original body has been lost, and Richard Move presents his performance as a ‘haunting,’ much like the feeling Martha Graham describes as the result of a dancer's “first death,” when she watches someone else dance a role she had originated. Ballets like Graham's Lamentation and Cave of the Heart give Move the opportunity to portray Graham's struggle to continue to dance after this “first death,” using drag as a strategy to show up the eerie perfection of voice against the hollowness of the ageing dancer's body. Combining vaudeville and séance, moving from the restless gay “underworld” of the Meatpacking District to the right to presume himself the heir to the mother of modern dance, Richard Move first embodies and then moves beyond Susan Sontag's camp “etc etc” of Graham's self-performance.     

Regendering the Rural: The Agricultural Training of Office Ladies in Hokkaido

This article investigates the gendering nature of depopulation and rural revitalization in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. After outlining the cultural politics of these twin phenomena, I explore them further through a case study of the depopulated community of Shintoku. By establishing the Ladies Farm School in 1996, the town hoped that the agricultural training of single urban women would eventually lead them to settle down as young (and productive) “farming ladies.” Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in the school, I examine how gender is contested and constructed by seemingly progressive changes in women's social status. The argument I make here is that we reconsider the sexual division of labor as a (historical) product of modernization, instead of interpreting it as a timeless cultural pattern. A society is deeply marked by the specific forms in which its labor power is prepared. —Paul Willis, Learning to Labour     

Chayanov and the economics of the Russian Peasantry

The years after 1900 saw the emergence of the “neo‐populist” tradition as a leading tendency of economic thought in the study of the Russian peasantry. By the 1920s Aleksandr Vasil'evich Chayanov had become one of the most influential spokesmen of this tradition. His school was dispersed in 1930. But in the Western study of modern peasantries, his work is once more increasingly influential. The article considers Chayanov's place in the development of economic thought and of political controversy, and tries to locate this in the context of the history of the Russian peasantry itself. Problems and theories in the allocation of labour supplies are particularly examined. Finally, we raise the question of ideology in economic thought.     

The centrality of labor time in South African gold mining since 1886

Labor time, as a dimension of South African mining labor history, has been ignored, both conceptually and historically. This article remedies this yawning gap by presenting primary and secondary evidence which demonstrates the centrality of labor time in South African gold mines since the discovery of gold in 1886. To this end, labor time is traced in two ways. Part I tracks industrial working time by tracing the length of the working day and week. Part II tracks the ever-increasing length of the African migrant labor contract. While industrial working hours remain remarkably stable for almost a century, the migrant labor contract systematically increases over a similar period. These two measures of labor time eventually coincide when the migrant labor system dissolves and black African workers take annual leave together with their compatriots across the racial divide. The explanation for the mining industry’s long struggle to both maintain relatively long working hours and increasingly maximize the length of the migrant labor contract is construed as completing the received wisdom of Harold Wolpe's much celebrated and criticized `cheap- labor' thesis. (Wolpe, “Capitalism and Cheap Labor Power.”)     

Chapter 7. “Learn What You Like and Like What You Learn”

Abstract

Mark Twain once famously quipped, “I never let schooling get in the way of my education.” Paul Simon, the American folk singer, begins one of his songs “When I think back on all the crap I learned at high school, it's a wonder I can hardly think at all.” These men could just have easily been discussing schooling in Ireland, for this is the way many Limerick children and youth felt about formal school life prior to their involvement with St. Augustine's Youth Encounter Project. But it is prior to their involvement.

This chapter provides a demographic profile of the pupils of that project and explores aspects of the day-to-day life of the project as a child and youth care intervention by examining some of the influences of risk replacement or resiliency projects that have influenced provision of services. This Limerick YEP attempts to alter the approach from one that is risk, deficit, and psychopathology-oriented to one that is protection, strength, and asset focussed. A question posed is, “Has the early intervention enrichment programme assisted the pupils to reintegrate successfully within the community?” By reintegrate I mean the ability to attend a regular school, hold a job, live again with their family and such things. This chapter also explores the establishment of the Youth Encounter Projects in Ireland in the context of an important but largely overlooked study completed by Egan and Hegarty over two decades ago (1984). No official review has been published since.     

Personal Narratives, Social Justice, and the Law

North American writer Joan Didion’s eloquent testimonial speaks to the significance of storytelling in our lives. Personal storiesmake our lives meaningful. Part of this is because our stories, wittingly or not, become the means through which we fashion our identities for listeners. Or, as scholars from many disciplines have argued, identity and selfhoodare narrative accomplishments. In this formulation, an individual constructs a sense of self by telling stories or “personal narratives,” which describe “the evolution of an individual life over time and in social context” (Maynes et al. in Telling stories: the use of personal narratives in the social sciences and in history. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2008, 2). While personal narratives contain unique autobiographical elements, the logics of storytelling and the values and beliefs of a particular time and place also influence the kinds of stories people tell. As feminist historian Mary Jo Maynes and her coauthors argue: “The stories that people tell about their lives are never simply individual, but are told in historically specific times and settings and draw on the rules and models in circulation that govern how story elements link together in narrative logics” (2008, 2). Put another way, even the most idiosyncratic story is always in some way social: what narrators decide to tell is often guided by the expectations of audiences (real or imagined); the conventions of various genres (such as life history or autobiography); as well as the broader cultural narratives located in particular historical times and places. In this light, personal narratives at once provide evidence of a storyteller’s viewpoint and experiences as well as the social and cultural milieu in which they live.     

Jackpine Savages: Discourses of Conquest in the 1916 Mesabi Iron Range Strike

A wolf ran along the swamp a bear rambled on the heath; the swamp moved at the wolf's tread and the heath at the bear's paws there iron rust rose and a steel rod grew where the wolf's feet had been, where the bear's heel had dug. (The Kalevala) In the summer of 1916, independent action on the part of immigrant miners on Minnesota's Mesabi Iron Range, the source of the bulk of the nation's iron ore and the taproot of the powerful Steel Trust, drew the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies) into a conflict with some of the nation's most powerful capitalists and employers. The Mesabi's mine-owners—led by the omnipresent Oliver Mining Company—had grown accustomed to an almost colonial dominance over the region after successfully breaking up earlier strikes led by the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). Acute demand for iron ore from Europe, the curtailment of European immigration, and an increasingly radical Range workforce seemed to bode well for the Wobblies' chances, however, and the existence of a vibrant socialist movement among the immigrants who lived and worked on the Mesabi Range, especially among radical Finns, held out a ray of hope and a possibility for success that IWW organizers simply could not pass up.     

Situational Analysis: Centerless Systems and Human Service Practices

Bronfenbrenner's ecological model is a conceptual framework that continues to contribute to human service practices. In the current article, the author describes the possibilities for practice made intelligible by drawing from this framework. She then explores White's “Web of Praxis” model as an important extension of this approach, and proceeds to offer Clarke's “Situational Analysis” as another fruitful tool for practitioners who seek relational ways of engaging with clients. With the example of a practice scenario, readers can consider the practical possibilities that open up with the shift in perspective invited by situational analysis.