verona cowboy

The day after listening to Will Stockton's provocative talk I watched Midnight Cowboy (1969) for my queer theory class. The film follows Joe Buck (Jon Voight), a young man from Texas who moves to New York City and hopes to become a stud. Dressed in a brand-new cowboy costume, Joe assumes he will have his pick of female clients, but soon finds that he is far more interesting to gay men. As he grows increasingly more destitute, Joe forms a close bond with Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a conman with a bum leg and poor health. The film ends with Joe cradling Rico, who has died next to him on a bus to Florida.

I watched this film with Stockton's presentation very much on my mind. In his talk, "The Fierce Urgency of Now," Stockton responded to and resisted definitions of queerness that operate primarily in the negative. Paying particular attention to the play's much-dicussed haste, Stockton drew our attention to the characters--the nurse, the friar, and Mercutio--who resist this haste and who caution against Romeo and Juliet's rush to legitimate their (heterosexual) relationship through marriage. Reading these figures alongside SCTV's "Sassy Gay Friend," Stockton proposes caution and patience as queer values, necessary correctives to a gay politics that is too invested in rushing into gay marriage.

Although his speech is slow, Joe, too, sometimes acts with haste. This is especially evident in his only financially successful encounter with a women. At first Joe struggles to achieve an erection, and it is only after his client teasingly accuses him of being gay that he jumps into bed with her, a hasty legitimation of his heterosexuality. And yet, in spite of this and other moments of haste, the thing that most struck me about Joe was his frequent displays of attentiveness. Joe notices other bodies, from Rico/Ratso to horses, homeless people and dogs. In this kind attention, Joe inhabits a slowness, a willingness to linger, that marks him as visibly and performatively different than the New Yorkers that surround him. Joe's tenderness is a kind of queerness.

Although Stockton's talk was very specifically a response to an essay in Shakesqueer written by Carla Frecerro, "Romeo and Juliet Love Death," I thought it also resonated with another essay in that same volume. In a reading of Henry VI, Part 3, called, simply, "Stay," Cary Howie argues that

standing still might be one strategy of resistance among the many that have been ascribed to, and embraced by, people and objects variously described as queer . . . To stay with a text like Henry VI, Part 3 [and here, I would add texts like Romeo and Juliet and Midnight Cowboy as well] is . . . to stay with one another, to acknowledge patiently what happens in the middle of things, where we are reading and living, singularly and in common, but also writing and fighting and waiting and dying; where one of the hardest things to do, but also one of the most necessary, is to resist the impulse to say what we will or will not become. (150)

In drawing my attention to the queer valences of patience and caution, Stockton's presentation alerted me to how the choices of certain characters--Joe Buck or Mercutio, Ratso or the Friar--to "stay" engender unexpected, queer, and ultimately hopeful forms of gentleness.

Possible Repercussions of Terminology

This is partially a response to some of the issues brought up by my fellow classmates, and partially my thoughts on what Stockton had to say during his guest lecture. It is difficult not to agree with his contribution to the opposition towards a fantasized heterosexual romance that Romeo & Juliet is taken granted to be. In pedagogical terms, high school education in both its fundamental teaching methods of literature, as well as obligations to state politics (in public schools) can be held responsible for why the tragedy is taken for granted in the way it is. This neglect, intentional or otherwise, of possible readings is nothing but a limitation of the possibilities that surrounds the production of knowledge, a rebuke of which Stockton's presentist approach assumes. The issue that most of my classmates raised in their blog posts seems to be around his specific application and defense of the term "queer," which poses the question: Where do we draw the line, or should there be a line at all?

 The reason why I signed up to follow a pursuit of literature is that uncomfortable lack of a specific answer that can be obtained through formulaic means, that there can be an exponential amount of possible meanings for a body of work. But what Stockton seems to improve and broaden with his presentist approach to the play, he seems to contradict or counteract with his defense of the "conventionally known application" of "queer." If we were to take "queer" as a term only associated with sexuality, then we accept a certain set of barriers around the amount of theoretical applications of the term, and that prison we fall into illuminates the problems that surrounds terminology. The work of many theorists have contributed to the idea of "queer" as a utopian term which is uniting instead of separating, a term that should be a show of how similar everyone can be (as Jake mentioned the all too familiar scene of a mother telling a child that they are special). Then I end up asking myself, if "queer" was to be strictly attached to the conventional understanding of homosexual, what will the plethora of other conditions that are victims to societal neglect be defined by? Must they also wait for a specific and conventionally understood term before they can achieve recognition? 

Trans / Figuring / Mercutio

"Is this the Real Life? Is this just Fantasy?" 

Freddie Mercury, Queen

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Turning Queer

Shall we "Resurrect Mercutio", as Will Stockton playfully insisted in his brilliant talk "the Fierce Urgency of Now" at the George Washington University guest-speaker series hosted by the Medieval Early Modern Studies Institute? What do we turn towards, turn away from, and (I hope) bring along with us as we enliven the body of Mercutio as gay?

In Stockton's invocation of Ressurection, the Catholic theology of a life-in-death, I would make sure to qualify that the doctrine insists upon three relevant points: (1) that there is no life without the body, (2) that it involves a death that is the definite slaying of a self (not simply the extraction of a spirit from a body), and (3) that there must be firm skepticism in the form or matter of the body's resurrection / reconstitution. In other words, if we are to "Resurrect Mercutio" then it is through a "Transfiguration." 

What we turn away from in this language is the desire and queerness as "just Fantasy." The mental, libidinal, spiritual, linguistic drives which posit a mind/body dualism is strictly opposed by such Catholic doctrine of the "Real Life" of a bodily Resurrection / Transfiguration. Indeed, with a present, secular queer audience (as Stockton directs us to), we cannot help but hear within "transfiguration" a "trans" figuration that retains that same sense of  the undone and remade body.

Stockton noted Mercutio's "trans" affinity when he referred to Romeo's fellow as "mercurial," a substance which because of my work on "queer objects" resonated with me both in the sense of inconstant bodies and particularly transgender lives. These indeed are turnings (the material turns & the trans turn), but although they move away from current gay experience, they nonetheless function in terms of a "queerness" that has existed and continues to exist independently from this context. Lynne Huffer in Mad for Foucault, makes a particularly articulate case for this trans-historical deployment of queerness:

"From the Middle High German quer, queer means oblique... from the Latin obliquus, slanting... Queer also means adverse --- from the Latin versus, a turning, the root that gives us perverse, perverted, pervert. The danger of the queer is that it can easily be re-turned against us: we can be recaptured and pinned down again in our perversions and our genders" (H 2).

There is also a presentist reason for queer/turn towards the trans. The Queer Alliance has already begun turning against itself. Stockton offers Mercutio us the "gay" partner which must be denied (and killed off) for a heterosexual marriage to proceed. However as Gay Rights approaches a time in which all states recognize gay marriage, than could this scene also play out the denial (or killing off) of the "trans" character as an ally which is no longer needed. Romeo sides with Marriage and the State, which as the Gay Rights movement continues to become instantiated into the State, appears to set them off against the still marginalized and elided trans community, a party of Mercutio's who must now step off stage. That is the body I offer here to transfigure and help to put into conversation with Stockton's reading.

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Mercury's Fierce Alchemy

As Mercury-Argosslayer, Mercutio embodies the God that is the crosser & marker of boundaries (Hermes, whose name means "a stone boundary marker"), a lover of Eros/Venus who mothered their feminized son, Hermaphroditus, and whose duplicitous/transitive quality quivers on the edge of sexual & gender distinctions. He embodies the planet that rides closest to the sun, who, again a partner of Venus, plays the role of dawn & dust stars, heralding the transition of time & fortunes (fools).

As Mercury-Quicksilver, we meet Mercutio in an object which we can more easily relate to, a thing which philosophers and poets (Shakespeare included) meditated on in order to understand the "trans" quality of the cosmos. It was regarded as the last vestige of pure chaos in the world after its formation, and thus possessed special powers of transformation, which is why alchemists traditionally prized it as the key to creating the Philosopher's Stone. It is "quick" silver, because it is alive and pregnant (feminized) with potentials.

Our accounts of mercury, here concur which the late medieval, early modern understandings of Mercury. Michael Sendivogius, in his Dialogue Between Mercury, the Alchymist, & Nature (14th century), testifies that, "[Mercury] is all things, who was but one; He is nothing, and his number is entire...He is a spirit, and yet hath a body; He is a man, yet as the part of a woman." Likewise, Bernard, Earl of Trevisan (late 14th century), writes that mercury embodies "living water" and "burning fire," resulting in a perfect mixing of the "Masculine, hot dry, and secretly informing" and "the Female... volatile, crude, cold and moyst" (B 139).

Shakespeare begins to think through a few of these alchemical questions in the words and sciences of Brother Laurence, the Apothecary  and Romeo; all of whom note that such duplicitous substances as mercury function here as a poison, there as a cure. Indeed, Romeo and Juliet is play invested in the paradox of substances, and to reduce these volatile ontological mixtures to mere linguistic or libidinal play is to skirt over the very embodied consequences and transformations undergone in their course. Mercutio dreams with his brain, not merely his mind, which leads us to ask: is it dysphoric?

As Mercutio, we meet Mercury has a tranny dream-weaver & sword-waver. Using the term "trans" I do intend to stress that what Stockton does not consider enough in his look at the (homo)sexual aspects of Mercutio, is gender. To speak only of Mercutio as a "sassy gay friend" is to proceed with a sense of knowingness about his gender. Indeed, if Mercutio is mercurial, we must regard him as "trans" or hermaphroditic. 

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Drag / Queen / Mab

Baz Luhrman in his production of Romeo + Juliet, chose to make Mercutio's gender and material fluidity explicit in his gender effeminate clothing which reveals his masculine body but covered over in soft white cotton, and in the key party scene presents him as an audacious drag-queen. This may, like Stockton's reading, have implications on Mercutio's sexuality, and certainly there are homoerotic tensions in the film with Romeo, but this too become reductive if we do not attend to the simultaneous or competing status of Mercutio's gender.

Indeed Mercutio's obsession with phalluses, particularly Romeo('s), Tybalt('s) --- yes, the parentheses are meant to suggest that the characters themselves are kind of dicks as well --- and his own sword/dagger may as well be evidence of a trans-gender/sexual longing either for or against his own genitalia (could we imagine him either as FtM or MtF?). In other words, when Tybalt asks if Mercutio "consorts with Romeo" and Mercutio immediately whips out "his sword," could this not simply be an assert to demonstrate or defend his sexuality, but also/alternatively an attempt to demonstrate or defend his gender?

Could the sword be an evidence of penis or else a stand in for the penis he does not otherwise possess? Could he "consort with Romeo" not as a man, but as a kind of trans-man that cannot persue an operation some centuries beyond him? (It is notable, however, that early modern physicians did believe that an inversion of genitalia was possible by other, primarily humoral, means). Could he be a hermaphrodite?

In Mercutio's famous Queen Mab speech, given in Luhrman's portrayal, in the form of a Drag Queen, he is as much the the servant as an embodiment of the fairy-dream-weaver. S/He (Mercutio as the Drag Queen Mab) is "the fairie's midwife" impregnating courtiers, lawyers, and ladies with dreams of "straight curtsies " "straight dream on fees," and "straight on kisses dream"  (I.iv.72-74). There is a straightness insistant here, but out of a kind of haste, trying, as much as possible, to take the quickest road between two points. Then suddenly she turns:

"She drives over a soldier's neck / And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats, / Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades, / Of healths five fathom deep; and then anon / Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes, / And being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two / And sleeps again" (I.iv.82-88). The soldier, like Mercutio himself, goes mad with the heat of passion, becoming a violent lover of pants and blades; in a later scene we will hear him complain on Romeo's breeches and blade. Yet this is not the last image we get of Mercutio/Mab, he leaves us again with the idea of the midwife: 

"This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,/ That presses them and learns them first to bear, / Making them women of good carriage" (I.iv.92-94) Mercury/Mercutio/Mab is a cross(dresser), a gate(keeper), and may very well serve not only as Romeo's consort, but also a bearer of his "dreams." These dreams may be homoerotic, of a feminine masculinity, or may be a child. If we take Mercutio as a mix of genders, a kind of hermaphrodite, a trans-body, he may very well be a she, capable of midwifing more than dreams. 

Indeed Mercutio is made of "Quick" (i.e. both "fast" and "pregnant") Silver -- and so we find that he is (1) overwhelmingly embodied, (2) slain many times in becoming new again, and (3) truly unknown to us. This very much speaks to the "trans" figuration of Mercutio, in his historical moment, in the text, and in the present, which remain perpetually changing and uncertain in its position to us. While I promised to make this figure legible, I embrace that a key part of what is being made clear is a definite sense of unknowingness about the past, present, and future of Mercutio's many bodies and lives.

From the Outside Looking In

Will Stockton's discussion, a response to Freccero's essay on Romeo and Juliet, and location of the queer in a play touted to be one of the 'straightest' plays, had many shining moments but what stood out the most to me was his discussion of anti-sociality and social resistance through alternate modes of community. The more abstract parts of queer theory is often difficult for me to wrap my mind around, but its practical application, and the way it unfolds in literature is, for me, usually got at through race theory and the way it intersects and functions along side queer theory. Race and queer liberation struggles, the way both theories are grounded in Other'd bodies unfold in similar ways (though certainly not the same -- and both face very different challenges).

Stockton's points on alternate mode's of community (monastic life, Romeo and Juliet's secret marriage, etc) and his discussion of the queer body as the necessary center for queer theory made me think of current discourse about communities made up of bodies of color, and the external and internal reactions to those communities, especially when a sizable portion of that community is veiled (or 'threatened' with being veiled). His resistance to (and I think Robert made a comment to this effect as well) the idea that the discourse of communities marked for death and suffering, and rushing toward that sort of misery as the only interpretation of anti-sociality really struck a chord with me.

That sort of resistance is important, I think, in the transformation of spaces that have the potential to be rife with misery into places of 'happiness' (and I would resist defining happiness as something that conforms to an easily recognizable form of the term to the 'outside') for its inhabitants. Like the Friar who's desire seems vegetale, whose satisfaction is not recognizable to us, finding alternate spaces and vehicles to express different satisfactions and happiness is necessary. And I'd argue that it's possibility is grounded in the body, and the space made up of individuals.

Like Kelsey, I worry about divorcing the term queer from the actual queer body, and believe that the discussions necessary to engage with the creation of anti social spaces, and their maintenance are easily muddled or lost altogether when the term becomes an all encompassing one.

On Swords, Stockton, and the Queerness of Romeo and Juliet

This past Friday, Will Stockton, a noted professor of English and author, gave an excellent lecture on "presentism" and the idea of reclaiming a sort of inherent homosexuality (or at least homo eroticism) in interpreting Romeo and Juliet. Professor Stockton used SCTV's "Sassy Gay Friend" as a way to look at the character of Mercutio who, being the voice of queerness, challenges the heteronormal urgency of the death drive in the play.  Mercutio thus represents an obstacle to the inevitable fate of Romeo and Juliet, and as such, must die before the relationship between the young lovers can reach its inexorable conclusion.

As evidence of Mercutio's homo eroticism, Professor Stockton draws on Mercutio's apparent obsession with penises ( particularly Romeo's) and by extension, the phallic symbolism of swords and sword fighting in the play. I remember at one point making an informal comment to Professor Stockton about the seeming universality of swords as phallic symbols in studies of Shakespeare, something I find a bit simplistic and trite; he agreed with me to a point, yet contended that "in Romeo and Juliet, they are."

I would argue they can be.

At this point, I would like to point out that I am not an English major, and about as far from an expert on interpreting Shakespeare's work as one can possibly get; however, I have been an instructor in Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) for 20 years, as well as a professional sword master for film and theater. Having had extensive exposure to the theory and practice of swords and their use, I would contend that while there is definitely room for a homo erotic interpretation of the sword fighting in R & J, it is in an inherent ambiguity on the part of Shakespeare in dealing with love and intimacy in general that makes the symbolism difficult to pin down. Herein lieth the queerness.

The play is fraught with oxymoronic language in regards to love and intimacy, a very nice discussion of which can be found here. I would assert that sex and swordplay in the play form two sides of the same type of paradox. In our modern world of guns and "stand-off" violence, we have lost a sense of the type of extreme intimacy involved in injuring or killing another person with a blade; the only other human interaction that physically and emotionally joins two people to the same extent within the context of a shared moment is intercourse. That said, it is telling, I think, that the difference lies directly in the idea that, unlike sexual arousal, killing is an act of intimacy that can be initiated regardless of the sexual proclivities of the people involved. This is the same notion behind the argument of why rape is not a "sex crime."

Therefore, I believe that while it is a valid point of study to discuss the possibility of homo eroticism and its implications in the use of "sword = phallus" in the play, we should be wary of simplifying things to the extent that we only focus on one side of the paradox. Shakespeare himself must have been aware of the homo eroticism, and quite probably wrote it into the theme of the play, but I wonder about whether he did it purposefully; there is something to the argument that Shakespeare may have taken certain steps to consciously avoid too strong an impression of homosexuality. The creation of "distance" between Romeo and Juliet is recurrent and very physical throughout the piece, which may be in part a reaction to the reality of Juliet's part being played by a young man. Even in Shakespeare's time, it is entirely possible that physical expressions of intimacy between two males on stage might have been disconcerting to a large portion of the audience. The most emotionally intimate scene between the characters occurs during the famous "balcony scene," where they also have the maximum physical separation. The most intimate physical interaction happens at the very end, with Juliet kissing Romeo's corpse, where they have the maximum emotional distance; Juliet kills herself immediately afterwards.

Thus, we can look at Mercutio as Professor Stockton's "Sassy Gay Friend" and the voice of "reason" in attempting to slow down the death drive, and that Mercutio's obsession with the phallic is a matter of reducing the "high minded" ideas of hetero-normal love to a base physicality. If this is the case, then Mercutio's personal sexual persuasion is not the central factor; the fact that he dies in an essentially impromptu sword fight initiated in a fit of emotional passion is. The pragmatist who scoffs at emotional intimacy in favor of the physical is killed in the most intimate way possible - physically "up close and personal" in a highly emotionally charged situation.

Mercutio may have been an obstacle to the death drive; but at the same time, he is an embodiment of the paradox of intimacy, and to focus on the homo eroticism does not do justice to the paradox. That said, I believe Professor Stockton is exactly right in the other direction - that to ignore the homo eroticism or to relegate the idea of homosexuality to an invalid anachronism does the play no justice either. The continued relevance of Shakespeare relies on our ability to understand the attempts to portray and reconcile the oxymora built into his creations, and the queerness of the relationships between opposing sides of the paradoxes. Whether it be love and marriage, life and death, or sex and swordplay, an understanding of not just sexuality but a greater idea of intimacy in general is the "glue" that both binds these themes together as well as confounds attempts to definitively dissect the disparate pieces into symbols.

The Riddle of Queerness Through Shakespeare

Before Will Stockton's presentation on Friday, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Romeo and Juliet has been interpreted many times as a queer play, as Stockton acknowledged, and I was curious as to how his reading would differ from the previous work on the subject. I was very pleased to see that his presentation was fresh and very engaging. The reading of not only Romeo and Mercutio as queer, but also Juliet, through her urgency, was extremely thought-provoking for me.

With the very quick speed of the play's plot having long been noted among scholars of Shakespeare, the interpretation of that timeline as queer was fascinating. The prevalence of sexual innuendo in the play has frequently led to interpretations of Mercutio as sexually interested in Romeo, but I had never been exposed to such a thorough examination of multiple characters in the text as queer. Perhaps it was also Stockton's use of the Sassy Gay Friend videos that drew me into his argument. The reading of the sassy guide as a combination of the friar and of Mercutio was fascinating, and on many levels, well-founded.

However, despite this incredible wealth of analysis and new ideas, it was something Stockton said at the end of his presentation which has remained on my mind since Friday. His reluctance to divorce homoeroticism from the term queer is extremely important, and I feel that more scholars of queer theory need to acknowledge the relationship between the terms.

As I've been exposed to more queer theory over the past few years, the increasing isolation of the term queer from its origins of homoeroticism and homosexuality have worried me. Even Mel Chen's writing, while extremely innovative, led me to resist agreement with some of her claims due to her extremely broad and abstract definition of queerness. For me, Stockton's discussion during the Q&A about the future development of the term queer was very refreshing to hear. At what point does queerness lose its influence due to its prevalence? If everything is queer, is anything really queer? Admittedly, this question is not a new one, but the consistent tendency to define queer in a broad manner suggests that this question has not yet been acknowledged as important by the majority of queer theorists.

If queer can be interpreted as simply anything that is non-heteronormative, then it seems that almost anything can be queer, as rarely do things truly adhere to such an abstract concept as heteronormativity. It is for this reason that the important connotations of queer with its history of homoeroticism are necessary to limit the loss of meaning for such a crucial term, but it seems this history is rapidly being forgotten in the world of academia. Does this mean that queerness will lose its influence for those who rely on the term? In academia, at least, that time seems to be worryingly near. Yet with scholars like Stockton reminding us that the terms should not be separated, perhaps the future of queer studies won't be so quick to forget its origins.

There is No Future in Romeo and Juliet's Dreaming

Will Stockton’s lecture last Friday, finely focused on the fierce urgency of “now”, shed a critical and queer light on Romeo and Juliet that my all-girls', conservative Catholic high school would never have imparted me with. I was particularly stricken when Stockton mentioned how the relationship of Juliet's urgency and a certain queerness drives the motives of the two. Ultimately, because the star-crossed lovers are doomed, they have “no future.” 

Once Stockton uttered those two particular words, I couldn’t help but immediately connect Romeo and Juliet’s demise to the blink-and-you-may-have-missed-it rise and subsequent fall of England’s monumentally influential Sex Pistols. Arguably one of the U.K.’s most infamous musical exports, the Sex Pistols’ rallying cry of “no future” embodied an entire generation of discontent, fueling anarchy against Thatcher’s England, and protesting the doom of a life constrained to industrialization -- stirred in with a healthy dose of angst and amplifiers, of course.

Contrary to popular belief, the Sex Pistols didn’t invent punk as a genre. White noise-addled freaks and Warholian performance troupe The Velvet Underground are traditionally deemed the godfathers of punk, and Iggy Pop’s band The Stooges are the forefathers (Iggy having popularized on-stage antics like stagediving, after all). But on an aesthetic level, the Pistols were the portrait of punk. As soon as the Sex Pistols left England, a sort of cultural anarchy in the U.S. happened, so to speak. Soon, kids from Atlanta to San Francisco began to bear characteristic spiked haircuts, adding safety pins to their tattered-to-perfection shirts. Bassist Sid Vicious was reported to be so terrible at performing his instrument, that his bandmates unplugged his amplifier during shows, keeping Vicious onstage merely for appearances’ sake. 

I’m speculating here, but I would venture to say that were he alive today, Shakespeare would have adored the Sex Pistols, who have a striking amount in common with the hopeless youngsters Romeo and Juliet. Perched at the helm of mainstream success and widespread cultural acclaim, the Sex Pistols released their only record, the no-bullshit Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, revered (or loathed, depending on your fancy) but a key component in early punk rock's sonic texts. Then, as quickly as they had risen, the Pistols plummeted. 

There are inevitable parallels between the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious -- half-perceived as a martyr, half-blamed for the mysterious death of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen at the Chelsea Hotel -- and Romeo and Juliet. Fresh from their hushed, adrenaline-fueled marriage, Romeo drinks a vial of poison and dies, thinking Juliet is dead. Upon seeing her lover lifeless, Juliet takes her own life with a dagger. Sid, perhaps stricken with grief, very possibly injecting his veins with a toxic amount of heroin -- passed just a few days later after Nancy’s death. To this day, the question remains: was Nancy’s death an impassioned crime fueled by love and hatred, a tragic, drug-fueled accident, or a suicide?

In his superb oral history of punk rock, Please Kill Me, famed rock journalist Legs McNeil interviewed members that were crucial to the formation of punk rock’s second wave, including Leee Childers, photographer and former manager of David Bowie. In the book, Childers comments on the mystique of Sid Vicious, implying that he may not have been as loyal to Nancy or as “straight” as he’d seemed. Vicious would purportedly sleep over and curl up in Childers’ arms most nights in England. Childers quotes, “I wish I had sex with him because I was attracted to him. Sid didn’t know what his sexuality was -- we talked about that a lot. I thought that he would have sex with me, but the next morning he’d freak out: “What have I done, am I a queer?” (264)"

The urgency of Romeo and Juliet as a queer tragedy comes full circle with the Sex Pistols’ sexual ambiguity. A queerness, like the questionable homoerotic relationship between Romeo and Mercutio, is pivotal in the Sex Pistols’ tale referenced in Childers’ account and Vicious’ penchant for shopping at sex stores, purchasing lubricant to style his hair into the characteristic mohawk and donning leather jackets garnished with S&M chains. The name itself, Sex Pistol, brims with queer connotations. As former Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren put it, the band’s name conjured imaginings of “a pistol, a young thing, a pin-up, a better-looking assassin.”

Much like Romeo and Juliet’s all-too-sudden but riveting tale, the Sex Pistols continue to be referenced in the canon of rock history for not only having one of the most short-lived and influential careers, but also possessing one of the most fascinating unanswered stories. The absence of a future for Romeo and Juliet echoes the sentiment of hopelessness penned by Johnny Rotten in the band's snarky hit "God Save the Queen", which features the spitting chorus, "there is no future / in England's dreaming."

Yet I often wonder how things could have been different for the Pistols. If their time hadn't have been as short, would they be remembered as vividly as they are today? Would Romeo and Juliet's star-crossed tale have been entirely valid if they had defied death, grown old together and fulfilled the ultimate fairy tale stereotype? Did the Sex Pistols have a future past 1979, or were they doomed to die with Sid Vicious and the '70s? Simultaneously, I ponder the same about Romeo and Juliet: could they have had a future after all, with better judgment and perhaps a bit more planning?

Too Tired To Move, or Being-In-the-Chair

"Being-in-the-armchair, if you will, is the precise inverse of being-in-the-world"

Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, 283

As much as I enjoyed and agreed with your book, Tim Ingold, I just have to tell you: I am too tired to move. 

It's been a long day in the archives, thumbing through books, reading essays, standing in front of a class and when I finally collapse into my arm-chair at the end of the day, I find out a terrible fact: I am not living.

Now, I will credit net-workers and mesh-workers that this is probably not what they mean when they say movement is life; i.e. to discredit the lives of the bedridden, recluses, the chair-bound, the amputees, the aged, the sick, the doubled-over, and those just too tired to move. If we are to follow the logic that agency is in the lines of effect, than the result of this mode of thinking is that those Beings-In-Chairs are relegated to the side-lines. It is in effect, what they are doing:

"Thus, if anyone retreats to the armchair, it is not the anthropologist but the ethnographer. As he shifts from inquiry to description he has necessity to reposition himself from the field of action to the sidelines" (243).

Well looks like I am not going to ever be an anthropologist! With my laundry-list of allergies, the special shoes I have to wear (because to walk-barefoot my flat-feet will cause me crippling pain after a short-period), as well as numerous time and financial hindrances that keep me from a life-on-the-move, I appear excluded in many ways from a kind of "being-in-the-world."

There is of course no escaping the mesh, the network, or lines of flight but such discourses continue to privilege those with high-mobility (social, physical, financial). The call to take a nature walk or to hug a tree, the people on the street and in general proliferate close proximate relations to as many things as possible plays well with those with the capacities to purchase these pleasures. For many of us, however, our environments (and our bodies) are more limited and more part-icular.

"Yet no particular - no thing, or happening - can have value and meaning in itself, cut out from the wider context of its occurrence." It is true enough in that all things come from, pass through, exist and open up to a wider world, but such a privileging of relations simply for the sake of relations, in turn profits those persons that can gesture to a wide context of events; whom by financial, physical and other social means are able to take in and touch more of their shared world (230).

Many of us are cut off in significant ways, made very particular by our bodies and our circumstances, and that context is important, but important just as much because of how we refuse and are refused in our relations. It is all well and good to speak of a "partial whole" but there is value and meaning in the part-qua-part, the part-icular, the part-icle, the things set a-part or de-parted from the wider world. Not everything can or wants to gesture back to the whole; the whole is often antagonistic to the part. The part is marginalized, made "the precise inverse of being-in-the-world" and set on "the sidelines."

Love binds us together (philia), but love can also set us a-part (agape) and can be keep us a-part jealously (eros). Ingold was right when he said that the "global environment is not one to which you or I or anyone else can relate. It is too big," but let us remember as we collect our partial-views, that it is even bigger for some than for others (96). Some are able to wayfare an environment and an ecology which includes mountains and rivers, but for some of us, being-in-the-chair is our world and our life. We are meaningful, valuable and alive no matter how little we move, how little we relate, however a-part or partial we are from the whole world.

You can dislike shoes, but some of us need them (50). You can rejoice at how plants can burst through pavement, some of us need paved roads and ramps to get where we want to go (124). You can leave your chair behind, some of us cannot (138).

Now, don't worry, you can go for a walk able-bodied eco-lovers! I agree with you that there is a lot of life to live out there on the road, but personally, I am just too tired to move right now.

Cultural Shakespeare

I attended the very last seminar in the Digital Humanities Symposium and it made me wish, keenly, that I'd been able to attend the rest of the panels. Sheila Cavanaugh and Kevin Quarmby gave an amazing presentation on their digitally dependent global Shakespeare program. A program that, because of it's rooting in technology, is able to travel all over the world. The discussion between Sheila and Kevin focused a lot on their programs in India and Morocco and the beginnings of programs they hope to offer to tribal universities in the United States.

What was most interesting to me was their discussion of the different ways Shakespeare was being reclaimed by the different cultures, and the way cultural discourse illuminates and redefines conversations about Shakespeare both in the American academic discourse among the students at Emory and the cultures abroad, who appropriate the text and translate it in meaningful ways. The interrogation of the text through differing cultural lenses and the subsequent performances that resulted add a layering to American academic understandings of Shakespeare, especially at the undergraduate level, that I think are often missing.

An interesting question was asked during the Q&A, that I think is worth dwelling on, and that Sheila and Kevin handled well. What happens when 'the Academy' enters spaces that are resistant to it, that have had (and possibly continue to have) poor experiences with exploitive presences? Their interest in opening conversation through the digital, as opposed to packaging Shakespeare, is refreshing and part of their success. Their continued focus on tailoring each program to the technological level available and their ability to not only make these programs work but open dialogue in interesting, explosive ways speaks volumes. 

Online Information and Interactive Academia

As someone who has just begun their higher academic career, I think it's time for me to come to a reluctant realization: the concept of academia is dead. I know how that sounds, but let me explain. It's clear to me, especially after attending the Digital Humanities Symposium, that the education I will be receiving over the next five years or so will only partially resemble that of the generations before me. Information is being spread and presented to those outside of the field, and this is undoubtedly a positive development, enabling those without the privilege of obtaining higher education to view information they may have once not been privy to. As much as I shy away from citing anything but books and articles, it's time to admit that the information on the internet is now, in many cases, sponsored by educational institutions or written by scholars, and has brought the realm of academic prowess into the digital age. With creatively enhanced websites and interactive experiences such as the Map of London project put together by Janelle Jenstad and the Melville Interactive Library created by John Bryant, it's clear that the days of examining information strictly on paper in dusty archives are long gone.

But if this is true, then what does it mean for those of us just getting started in the field? Will our future positions be jeopardized by this sudden democratization of information? The answer, in my opinion, is stuck somewhere between yes and no.

During the symposium on Friday, I was struck not only by the variety of speakers and their interests, but also by what that must mean for the internet itself. Considering that a small sampling of those using digital means to expand their interaction with texts had such a wide range of fields and information, imagine what must also be out there, just waiting for scholars and resourceful students to engage with it. The scale of the information present on the web is astounding, and more than a little intimidating. With so much information and so many reliable online sources, how is it possible to discern what's really relevant? 

In my opinion, this is one of the reasons that academia will never cease in significance. The long heralded concept of gated libraries and dark offices of knowledge is gone. Information is out there, for anyone with a WI-FI connection, and it's no longer gated, but has been thrown wide open. Universities and scholars, however, have not lost their relevance. Rather, by transitioning to the internet, the information, analyses, and insights they can present have simply changed audiences. You don't have to be a scholar to use JSTOR, you just have to be interested enough to want to spend the money. Online lecture series have been wildly popular, and bring in audiences of not only curious current students, but even those who have never stepped foot on a university campus. The importance of professors and universities has not been diminished through this open forum of information. They remain crucial to shaping the presentation and development of information, but the platform has simply changed, and the audience has widened. 

To connect this back to my initial statement, the classic idea of academia is unarguably disappearing more and more each year, as more and more information and interactive learning tools appear. However, it's still easy to see the influence that scholarship has, even in the digital world. Academia isn't going anywhere- it's just moving, to a brave new world of interactive websites and digitized data, open for anyone determined to learn. And in the end, isn't that what it always should have been?

Freelancing, Twitter and Veering

Last Friday afternoon, I attended Professor Jeff Cohen’s seminar at the Digital Humanities conference. Jeff began his lecture by pulling up the Twitter feed of the conference itself, with tweets grouped by the hastag #gwdh13. Although EBOV is my first real graduate seminar, and about Medieval and Early Modern Studies to boot, I never thought that Twitter would be utilized in the capacity of a conference, let alone the classroom. I didn't find the constant feed updates as much as distracting, but contributing to the conversation.

Twitter is certainly a medium that can be overwhelming from the beginning. But if you manage to sift through the millions of users, you have the incredible ability to aggregate writers, friends and news sources that are tailored to your most peculiar interests. With Twitter, we have the 21st century version of a highly individualized source of personalized journalism. 

I do a bit of freelance journalism on the side, primarily revolving around music and culture, for a variety of publications both based in DC and elsewhere, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston. In my time doing the freelance hustle Twitter has been crucial to network with other writers and editors. I’ve even pitched using tweets -- which editors love, because it's succinct -- and snagged writing and interview opportunities by simply answering a tweet or composing one myself.

I never realized how similar this notion could be applied to the conference or the classroom. In the same way that I tweet ideas and establish a rapport with writers and editors across the globe, most of whom I’ve never met in person, Twitter can be utilized to globalize the classroom, in a sense. It extends the conversation while establishing a community of bloggers, writers, listeners, and people that have an interest in the subject. Information and opinions have the chance to transcend the local and can be distributed widely and remotely, from either the Jack Morton Auditorium to someone who’s following the state of Digital Humanities all the way from say, Norway. 

What intrigued me about Jeff’s lecture in particular highlighted the dangers that this form of globalized information can cause. He brought up that blogs and Twitter can be complicit in forming micro-communities that can proliferate misogyny, and mentioned that he himself had been a victim of “blog stalking” (so creepy!). Twitter definitely lends itself to create antagonistic communities too, where people can egg each other on in unhealthy ways. 

One example is even within the network of music journalists who constantly bombard everyone’s feed whining about how journalism has already plunged into such an abyss that there’s no point in salvaging it. They victimize themselves or make fun of journalists altogether. Call it my naive youth or restless idealism, but I don’t think this is the case at all. The goal of journalism -- and Twitter, for that matter -- is to establish conversations, where people have the ability to connect about topics that transcend the physical sphere. And for that matter, I’ve unfollowed those naysayers. No matter how the media landscape may continue to shift, I firmly believe that good writing and thoughtful conversations will prevail.

In light of Jeff's Twitter discussion, I couldn’t help but think about our extensive conversations about “veering” in class. Twitter itself is definitely a human veer -- it veers from human interaction, where all you need is a stable Internet connection and an idea under 140 characters. In our desire to become more “connected”, are we ourselves losing our ability to connect with each other face to face? I can't possibly imagine a future where the digital classroom is the only classroom. It certainly supplements classroom discussion, but it's no replacement. When do our online personalities overtake our own personalities -- do we become a product of what we project, or vice versa? 

Digitizer Knot: Materialism and Medieval Texts

First of all, a disclaimer: I am not a complete Luddite; I have a Facebook account, and a page for my martial arts business, but in my pursuit for knowledge of things medieval, I have always found museums, libraries, and archives in the "real world" to be much more useful than a computer. I know there is a current push to digitize medieval manuscripts, and worry that I will be forced out of my comfortable (if moldy) cell and dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. 

When I first sat down at the Digital Humanities Symposium on Friday, I wasn't sure what to expect. Being a medievalist, it was difficult for me to conceptualize how digital media might be relevant to my research interests, outside of internet searches that mostly reveal websites in medieval history geared to the average 10 year old, or YouTube videos of people playing dress up and hitting each other with foam "swords."

As I listened to Elaine Treharne's keynote address, "Digital Text as Inhabited Object," I realized that I was not alone in my suspicions that the encroachment of the digital age represents a very real change (read: threat) to how medieval texts are even defined, much less studied. However, according to Dr. Treharne, as researchers, it is in our own best interests not to be "dragged" into the use of digitized versions of manuscripts. Rather, we need to direct how digital texts are used, what new technologies need to be developed, and what questions should be asked and answered.

First of all, we cannot dismiss the importance of a certain materialism as the essence of a medieval text; Dr. Treharne uses the term "plenitext" to describe this phenomenon. A text is more than simply the words on the page - it is the totality of the object, including the binding, the space it occupies, and the visceral relationship it has to the reader/ researcher. Yet, as J J Cohen has asserted, the academic environment is changing, and the power of collaborative education and research via digital environments is a key factor in expanding our understanding and knowledge base about medieval texts. 

How then do we rectify the gap between legitimizing digital representations of these texts and the physicality of the texts themselves?

To my mind, the answer lies in Star Trek, where computer technology has enabled people to interact with fully digitized environments via the "holodeck." Everything in the holodeck seems real, and has a tactile and visceral component, called up at will by engaging a computer program. I realize this sounds far-fetched and possibly a bit silly, but the important point here is to move forward into digitization with a long durée goal. New technologies are being developed constantly, and many are working to improve the quality of digital modeling and creating functional "objects" within cyberspace. If these were developed to the point of being truly interactive, only then might a digital projection of a medieval text have the same impact as the actual object.

Until then, I think it is of paramount importance that two concepts be established in working with medieval texts:

1. Medieval historians, academics and researchers should never be permitted to rely solely on digital versions of these works for their own publications, but be permitted to make use of digitization to forward knowledge to the rest of mankind. This should always include a caveat that digital representations are not the text itself, nor are they particularly accurate; they are simply the most efficient way to show something to a wide audience.

2. Digital constructs should not be legitimized in and of themselves. They are avatars - simulacra of existing works. One does not print out a picture of the Mona Lisa and manage to convince everyone that the printout is the Mona Lisa; while this seems self-evident, there is a real danger in losing the importance of a physical folio if digital representations become the norm. Just look at the decline of bookstores since the advent of the kindle for an example.

If we advance the digital age with those two points in mind, I think eventually it may be possible to direct the advancement of technology in a direction that will not only spark a more universal access and interest into medieval texts, but preserve the central importance of the physicality of the text themselves and their integrity.  Until that technology is fully developed, we must be patient, vigilant, and always looking forward, so as not to grow complacent with poor digital representations of these works of art simply because they are plentiful and easy to access.

Besides, I really want a holodeck.

Public Awareness and New Technology

This is the first blog post I've ever written, so I would humbly ask for everyone's patience and understanding. I had several thoughts on many of the different presentations, and it is difficult to focus on any one of them specifically. The keynote presentation by Elaine Treharne was a wonderful start to the event, especially with her statement that "we have to ask the right questions." The initiators of differing digital humanities projects bear quite a heavy burden, especially referring to the work of archivists and curators, since their jobs have changed from preservation and protection to creating systems by which anyone around the world can access their resources. This responsibility, and consequently power, only increases with the advancement in technology, and unless we are asking the right questions, our results can be relatively similar to those obtained through faulty science.

Katherine Rowe's application for Shakespeare's Tempest seemed to be the only project willing to collaborate with popular commercial devices, and the format they created can in fact enhance the reading experience of certain texts the way a physical print might not. One example of this is Milton's body of work and his meticulous structure (Acrostic rhymes in particular), which at times can lose its effect and go unnoticed due to page breaks at inconvenient times.

The one issue that struck me, in line with Gil Harris' mention of the sheer and overwhelming amount of digital humanities projects was the issue of accessibility, not in terms of hardware, but in terms of advertising and general awareness. I was surprised by the number of projects in progress as well as the variety of subjects from maps of medieval London to collections of Shakespeare performances from all over the globe. I am worried about the longevity of these projects as they seem to be directed only for humanities scholars and it doesn't seem to be at the point where people can come across these projects and websites easily, at least at their own leisure. I don't think I would have heard of these projects if I hadn't attended the symposium, or taken courses directed by professors who knew of them. I do believe that as long as there is a search bar, we bring our own contexts with us and can, eventually, find what we intend to seek through research. The issue is what we don't intend to seek and I guess my question is, how accessible are these projects to people who are completely unrelated to the fields under discussion? Could it be possible to somehow incorporate a feature similar to StumbleUpon for these projects?

On a side note, I was very interested in Sarah Werner's mention of Second Life and the possibility of creating libraries in a virtual space. There is a new virtual reality device in development titled Oculus Rift, that will be available for commercial sale. Even though it is being developed primarily for video game purposes, it can be adapted to create libraries in virtual space in which one can examine the folios or manuscripts in their original forms. We need to be updated on technological advances that are beyond blogs and social networking, and if the Oculus Rift device works as it is intended to, we need to find those "right questions" fast, because the world is changing faster than updates to websites. 

Image source: http://media.bestofmicro.com/Z/G/368044/original/rift-consumer-mockup.jpg

On Twitter (and its Discontents?)

Although the Digital Humanities Symposium hosted by GW this past weekend was about multiple aspects of the field—innovative applications like the gorgeous Tempest app, open source online projects like the Map of Early Modern London, as well as pedagogical endeavors like the Global Shakespeares project—I personally spent much of my time thinking about the role of social media, and specifically Twitter, in academia. As I’ve said a few times now, my recent acquisition of a tablet meant that this was the first time I’ve ever really been able to engage in the digital aspects of a conference. Throughout the two days I had Twitter open pretty much all of the time, and I was surprised by the complexity of my feelings about it. In his talk, nicely timed at the end of the first day of the conference (and readable here), Jeffrey Cohen made a strong case for “a nonhierarchical and wall breaching nomadism assisted by social media’s tools.” Although the bulk of his presentation was about his experience as a blogger at In the Middle, Jeffrey’s also projected a livestream of the #gwdh13 Twitter feed during his talk, highlighting the importance of this other form of digital conversation.

I certainly found myself experiencing a small version of this “wall breaching” at the conference. I am terribly shy, and the kind of small talky, in-person networking that happens at conferences (indeed, the very term “networking” itself) is the stuff of my nightmares. It was extremely gratifying, then, to find myself in conversations through Twitter that I would never have had the courage to initiate otherwise. Turns out, Twitter was also a lot of fun (!), a creative outlet and a way to pass an hour stuck at the registration table. Furthermore, Twitter helped me as a listener. I am an extremely visual learner, and I have a hard time at conferences where listening comprehension is the primary required skill. Twitter thus served unexpectedly as a kind of evolving handout, helping me to keep up with key points.

I also have some real reservations about Twitter. Some of its downsides have been nicely documented by others—for instance, see Ryan Cordell’s invaluable post on the ethics of Tweeting at conferences—but I think it’s worth raising a few more concerns. I’m uncomfortable, for instance, with the way Twitter encourages us to discuss a presentation as it unfolds. What do we lose, I wonder, when we articulate and—crucially—publish reactions to a presentation before it has finished? It reminds me of my worst weeks in seminar, when I haven’t managed to finish the reading and am trying to articulate something useful based on whatever I’ve managed to get through. This is probably really old-fashioned of me, but I also wonder: don’t we owe the speaker our undivided attention, or at least the simulacrum of our undivided attention? What is it like to speak to an audience that is scrambling, sometimes competitively, to share and analyze your every sentence? I also worry that the stakes of social media may be somewhat different for fledgling academics in ways that perhaps we haven’t totally thought through. Every time I tweet or post a comment on a blog I think, “Well, there goes my career.” Unfortunately, I think the same thing when I’m not tweeting or commenting enough, and that brings me to my final concern: to what extent is social media becoming mandatory, just another hoop to be jumped through for anyone who wants to have a shred of a chance at finding a job? Do we want that, especially when social media requires a certain degree of access to devices—like my own iPad mini—with serious environmental and human rights concerns attached to them? I bring up these issues not as a condemnation of social media, which I largely find to be everything Jeffrey says it can be, but as open questions. 

Creative Commons photo from here

Pluralities Abound: 2013 GW Digital Humanities Symposium

Screen shot of a search of the "#gwdh13" feed

Initially, the prospect of attending the Digital Humanities symposium was a daunting one for me (as I would probably consider my existence slightly more analog than digital). And although my mind is still reeling from all of the incredibly generative discussion that took place there, I have read back through my frantic notes and deciphered that what emerged for me from this symposium were three--slightly surprising--primary themes emphasized during nearly every panel: pedagogy, collaboration, and community. Whether or not panels were specifically addressing one of these topics (like "Digital Pedagogy," "Joint Enterprises," or "Transformative Media, Transforming Community"), every speaker seemed to somehow touch on all three of these ideas, as if you could really not discuss one without discussing the others when addressing the importance of digital projects. For me, I think the emphasis on teaching was perhaps the most surprising, as most might assume such established and technologically savvy scholars would not prioritize their teaching in such a way. But over and over again, presenters cited the potentiality of their projects in terms of being an asset in the classroom and beyond at all levels of education and teaching.

In the same vein, without working within the false dichotomy of "analog or digital," nearly all of the presenters stressed the importance of digital technology as tools to integrate into scholarship, rather than completely dismantling the institution itself. As Peter Donaldson and Alexander Huang discussed in their presentation on Global Shakespeares, the goal of their project is to eventually get to a place where there will not be a need to be any Shakespearean qualified as "Global." From the discussions generated at the symposium, this seems to be the ultimate goal of "Digital Humanities," to one day drop the "digital" and simply consider these projects, ideas and tools ones of the humanities. Plurality and multiplicity seem to be the constants of the symposium, providing various perspectives that more traditional modes of scholarship and reading cannot physically provide. I personally am most excited about getting my hands on those projects that provide multiple perspectives on and readings of a single text, like that of The Tempest App, the ever-growing Map of Early Modern London, and the forthcoming project Annotation Studio.

I think this aspect of digital humanities might be helpful for our own class discussion, specifically when considering pluralities of time and lived experience during a particular "time period." I was meaning to blog about this after our last class, but I am wondering if we can perhaps put more pressure on the idea that there is a singular medieval lived experience we are able to access and reference in comparison to our own modern lives (a singular idea that I also think we can trouble). Coming away from the symposium, I hope that our two-day immersion into the digital humanities can get us thinking further on this issue, as I think that it will prove helpful to keep in mind during future class discussions.

So as not to "hog" our class blog, I'll finish here, but I have further thoughts on the symposium (specifically on tweeting!) on my other blog. Here is the link in case you'd like to read it, and on a slightly tangential note, here is an article by Ryan Cordell on the problematics of tweeting and tweeting etiquette during conferences that might be helpful when thinking about the digital humanities generally.

Of Trolls and Critics

"Beowulf's Dragon, if one really wishes to criticize, 

is not to be blamed for being a dragon but for not being dragon enough"

"Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics"
J.R.R. Tolkien

The problem with Monsters, it seems is not that they are too Post-Human but that they are often far too Human. If the things we wanted to regard as Alien were more fundamentally different, our violence and exclusion of them would be less problematic. If Trolls were more different than their Critics, than Humanists and Digital Humanists might not get criticized in turn for their wars against them. Fortunately, or unfortunately, that is not the world they live in, no matter how new this one may promise to be.

J.R.R. Tolkien knew a thing or two about monsters and world-building: associating the former with Critics and the latter with "Sub-Creation". While the Oxford don might not have been able to operate a Google-Chrome Book, he certainly might have recognized the internet as a proliferation of technologies he already knew. We could extensively discuss differences between books and the world-wide-web, but in  important ways the community activities of writers & monsters, readers & critics, digital-humanists & trolls are extensions of one another. There is a danger in celebrating the "newness" of a Virtual Reality insofar as it blinds us to the ways in which re-inscribes long held power-structures, practices of marginalization and systematic violence.

The Digital World we are creating is a Sub-Creation; it is an extension from this World. As much as we would like to imagine it as an Edenic Paradise, whether or not it existed before us, upon our arrival we bring with us many of our old wars and ways of thinking. In dangerous ways, we build (or rebuild it) in our image. What do we already see reflected?

At the Inaugural Digital Humanities Symposium at the George Washington University scholars presented a host of building projects and how they dealt with getting rid of "bugs" and "trolls" to make way for desirable users and functions. Speakers at times spoke about their "troll-police" like knights-slaying-dragons, making the wild-web safe for civilized occupiers.

In Tech-speak, "Troll" functions as both a noun and a verb. What is a Troll? Well, someone that Trolls. What is trolling then? Well, someone that exhibits unacceptable behavior. A Troll, then, becomes anyone regarded as unacceptable. We haven't changed that much in our Monster Theory since J.R.R. Tolkien, or J.J. Cohen, first wrote on it, have we?

Now, you might say: but a Troll can be reformed! By deleting their comments and banning them from websites, we think we can slowly cultivate in them a sense that "their sort" of behavior must be suppressed if they are going to be integrated into civilized human society. In a performative space, defined by textual presence (defined widely) and interconnectedness, to be labeled a Troll is to be forced into either an integration into the human (the compulsory norm) or else an exile into digital oblivion.

That's not sensible, you might say, painting Trolls as some sort of endangered people. Aren't they just jerks that behave vicious, nasty and usually anonymously online? Shouldn't we want to get rid of them? Well, that depends on who gets to define who we are, who they are, and what exactly constitutes bad behavior. As for anonymity, we all too often come to know our Trolls far too well for comfort. Lumping all undesirables together does make it easier to eject them from our community, but doing so does not eliminate them from existence nor resolve our grievances.

In this way, we make Trolls by marking and ejecting them. In turn, as anyone that is deep in internet culture knows, plenty of people have begun to rally from these electronic margins and appropriate that name. Trolls organize and raid "civilized" spaces of the web, for fun, for revenge, for identity. Those that have internalized the feeling of being unacceptable and found an alternative community, proliferating in the margins with the sense that if they are predetermined as being inhuman, they might as well live up to the name.

That is one story, at very least. There are any number of other stories. Frankly, I don't know most of them and the worst part is, neither do you, neither do the people that block such persons from access to our special places of work. We don't know why they can't or won't or are unable (we might say "disabled") to conform and be productive on our sites. Any theory or story we might tell however brings us back to something that is getting clearer and clearer the more we live in a "new" digital world: it is an extension of the "old" world and that is a place full of people(s) we still don't understand.

The Digital Humanities does change things, certainly, and it changes us, but often only enough to make things unrecognizable. Increasingly I fear and witness a resurgence of prejudices and ideologies that attack or exclude people online in ways which reveal latent racism, sexism, ableism, classism and many other -isms (new and old). The proliferation of "Trolls" and other monsters on our borders should certainly clue anyone familiar with medieval monster theory (like our friend JRR Tolkien) that a resurgence of social divides and prejudices is also at hand.

To clarify, I am not so concerned about either the language or the identity of "Trolls" as I am concerned about how they work with the supposed digital anonymity that via screens and screen-names allow for us to battle and police one another. The Humanities has long devoted itself to dealing more peaceably and ethically with such conflicts, let us not become so blinded by the sparkly "newness" of the Digital that we lose what may be the best thing it offers: a sense of togetherness that only further implicates us in each other's actions and inactions across divides of geography, nationality, language, identity, gender, race, ability, class and other markers of difference.

Learning Objects

During our first seminar meeting we mapped out a great deal of space: ruminating over the topics we will consider, wondering how medieval and posthuman meet, considering what kind of ethos and community we want to cultivate, dwelling a little on the contours of the contemporary academy and the precarious place of those being trained within it, reflecting upon doing intellectual work as a public rather than solitary practice.

We also mapped the possible meanings of our four noun-verbs (environ, body, object, veer) and watched them converge in the word ... converge. We read some chapters about veering from Nicholas Royle's book, and asked if (as he claimed) only the living veer. Can the inorganic hold and foster that kind of swerve? Did a certain geological veer (for example) in the Preseli Hills call forth the construction of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain? We also contemplated veering as destructive force.

Object as a thing thrown in the way (ob + jacere) and a voice of dissent added some dissonance to our culminating task, communal construction of the seminar's learning objectives. We wrote them on scraps individually and then on the board without comment, thinking that rumination would come in time. These ended up being questions to follow and imperatives to ponder. I will transcribe them now. They're provisional. Now that they have been composed, what do you think?

Environ Body Object Veer: Learning Objectives
What do we do now? How do we explore blind spots? Add questions of aesthetics to arsenal. Further understanding of the relation between object and animal. Can we learn to "think medievally" and learn to appreciate/recognize literature as it applies to a different world view? How does "enchanting" / "magic" function nationally and globally? How do they intersect with other verbs/nouns? Continue what we started today. Can we eventually find other venues for the exploration of "veer"? How does the nonhuman impact creative endeavors? Literary ideas vs. consciousness? How do language and literature resist and/or generate veering? Professionalization. When is it useful to draw distinctions between living things (or things with DNA?) and non-living things? When is it useful to flatten the distinctions? How does the material world _____? How can we open ourselves to veer from our own expectations and intentions? Environ ourselves with both mind-warping discussion and disagreement?