Apollon eJournal, Issue X

Apollon

Undergraduate EJournal of Humanities at Fairfield University

Issue X

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What's in a Name? ap-ol-lon’ Our name at Apollon is derived from the Greek and Roman deity, Apollo, while the spelling more closely follows the Greek transliteration. Apollo is the god of music, poetry, art, light, and knowledge, making him one of the most complex deities in the Pantheon. In tribute to his multifaceted existence, our journal utilizes various media to create and reproduce knowledge within the humanities and to encourage critical thinking through multidisciplinary inquiry. With Apollo as patron to our musings and his Muses as inspiration for our content, Apollon seeks to provide our readers with thought-provoking, innovative ideas that explore the depth and breadthof humanistic inquiry.

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Our Mission At Apollon, we strive to publish superior examples of undergraduate humanities research from a variety of disciplines as well as intellectual approaches.

Our goal is to engage students in every stage of the process, beginning with student-faculty collaboration in generating undergraduate scholarship and finishing with the release of a polished digital journal. Apollon strives to take advantage of the unique opportunity of venturing into the digital humanitiesby engaging with image, text, sound, video, and a variety of presentation platforms in the process of showcasing the many species of undergraduate research.

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Our Team Dr. Shannon Kelley, Faculty Director Dr. Kelley is an assistant professor of English at Fairfield University. She received her B.A. from University of Louisville and her Ph.D. from Duke University. Her fields of research include lyric poetry, queer theory, literary ecocriticism, early modern culture, science studies, and Renaissance drama.

Megan Falvey, Staff Editor My name is Megan Falvey, a Junior at Fairfield University. I am majoring in English with a concentration in Teacher Education as well as minorsin Educational Studies, Spanish and Graphic Design. I am a member of the Sigma Tau Delta English Honor Society and I am an aspiring educator. I am so happy to be a part of the Apollon Editor’s team for Issue 10.From a young age, I have loved writing. Whether it bemy innermost thoughts tucked away in a journal or an academic thesis, writing holds a special place in my heart. I am grateful to be in a position where I can collaborate with fellow writers to create something special.

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Nicole Maher, Staff Editor My name is Nicole Maher, and I am a Junior at Fairfield University. I have a double major in Communication and English, with a concentration in Creative Writing. While I have always loved reading and writing, I did not truly explore these hobbies in full until I arrived at Fairfield and began taking Creative Writing courses.

Along with being an editor on the Apollon Journal, I am a member of the Sigma Delta Tau English honor society. Another way I express my creativity is through taking guitar lessons on campus. After graduation, I hope to find a career in publishing, particularly in children’s and young adults books.

Daniel Messier, Staff Editor My name is Daniel Messier and I am a Junior EnglishLiterature and Politics double major with a minor in music. I worked at the Fairfield University writing center as a tutor where I helped students through their writing process. I also worked as an Assistant Editor for Fairfield University's student newspaper The Mirror, where I published articles and worked on layout format weekly. I love to read and write and hope to have a career in publishing.

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Molly Ryan, Staff Editor My name is Molly Ryan and I am a junior at Fairfield University. I am a double major in English and American Studies with a minor in Peace and Justice Studies. I have been an avid reader and writer for as long as I can remember—I can even recall a few times I stayed up all night to finish a good book. I am also a member of the Sigma Tau Delta English Honor Society. I feel very fortunate to be apart of the editing staff for the Apollon. By working for the Apollon I hope to enhance my skills and further my experience in the field. After graduating, I hope to move on to Law school or find a career in the publishing sphere.

Kate Sandvik, Staff Editor I am a senior English major with minors in philosophy and education. I believe in the transformational power of language to heal and am passionate about art in all forms as energetic therapy.

I occasionally DJ a web radio show centered on the intersections of justice and music. Some of my favorite authors include Audre Lorde, Susan Sontag, and James Baldwin. When I am not on campus, you can find me at a local school working with amazing youth, practicing hot yoga, at the beach waiting for the sun, or walking my angelic dog wherever his heart desires. I feel grateful to work on the coming issue of Apollon and look forward to growth alongside my peers.

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Contents Free Markets or Free People: Amos A. Lawrence and the Limits of the Abolitionist Movement, Written by Catherine Devlin Pages 8-29 The State’s Construction Of Subjectivity: A Literary Analysis Of The Contemporary Narco-Novel Perra Brava, Written by Carla Graciano Pages 30-45 “What is this thing, Lord?”: Matthew O’Connor and the Queer Theology of the Catholic Church in Nightwood (1937), Written by Olivia Harris Pages 46-59 “I Deserve Everything”: The Role of Confidence in 21st Century Women’s Sports, Written by Sabeehah Ravat Pages 60-72 Misunderstood: A Cultural History of Eating Disorders in the West,Written by Meera Shanbhag Pages 73-87 7

Free Markets or Free People: Amos A. Lawrence and the Limits of the Abolitionist Movement Written by Catherine Devlin 8

Introduction Turning points make for appealing narratives. It’s satisfying to be able to point to a moment and say, “There. That’s when it all changed.” Amos Adams Lawrence (1814-1886), Bostonian textile merchant, indulged his inner story-teller when he described such a turning point, a moment of total reinvention, in a letter to his uncle: “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad abolitionists.”1 Eighteen years before this transformation, Lawrence toured the Southern United States, keeping a travelogue in which he appeared a largely disinterested, often racist observer of slavery who occasionally recognized individuals as evildoers but who refused to denounce the entire system of bondage.

Following his 1854 letter proclaiming an overnight change of heart, Lawrence channeled much of his energy and fortune into preventing the spread of slavery. From this narrative, Lawrence appears to have experienced a dramatic turning point. But, like much of history, his story is not so easily categorized. In reality, Lawrence’s shift towards abolitionism was quite unremarkable.

Like many Northern industrialists, Lawrence continued to have a multi-faceted relationship with the institution, criticizing slavery without recognizing his own dependence on it and opposing its spread on political grounds rather than championing the end to an unethical practice.

Lawrence’s eventual abolitionist reputation and his earlier disinterested or racist reactions to slavery are not, then, mutually exclusive or evidence of a complete personal transformation.

Rather, when coupled with a look at the society which formed him, they show a nuanced portrait of a man who was both culpable for profiting from slavery and admirable for trying to prevent its spread, a man who was both racist and a self-proclaimed abolitionist. The contradictions of Lawrence and his society are worth studying, not only as a means of understanding this time period and demographic, but as a case study which argues against painting history in broad strokes. Rather than praising people or regions as being heroic and without flaw, or condemning entire generations as evil beyond redemption, it is important to examine the nuances of a society in order to better understand its workings. Understanding such intricacies prevents us from 1

Robert K. Sutton, "The Wealthy Activist Who Helped Turn 'Bleeding Kansas' Free," Smithsonian.com, last modified August 16, 2017, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/wealthy-activist-who-helped-turn-bleeding-kansas- free180964494/#hva2twMOC03aLLtd.99.

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viewing current leaders or events as entirely good or evil. Lawrence, through his complicated relationship with slavery, challenges simplified narratives about Northern interactions with the institution and cautions us against viewing history in terms of good and bad, right and wrong, black and white.

Itinerant Industrialist: Amos A. Lawrence’s 1836 Trip to the American South On July 31, 1814, one of Boston’s most prominent textile families gained a new member.

Perhaps fittingly, Amos A. Lawrence’s birth occurred just a few days after one of the deadliest battles of the War of 1812, a war that killed thousands of Americans while giving “a tremendous boost to the cotton goods business.”2 The mood of ambivalence governing the domestic scene into which he was born, as his nation suffered and his family prospered, mirrors the position Lawrence would come to occupy in society. Throughout his life, he often benefited from practices that inflicted misery upon different sectors of the population, most notably the institution of slavery. While Lawrence ended his life a self-proclaimed abolitionist, he spent many years profiting from slavery without truly confronting its evils. Later in life, Lawrence would put much of his time and fortune into an effort to halt the spread of slavery, yet his early interactions with the system of human bondage seemed to have little effect on Lawrence’s actions. This can be seen most clearly during his 1836-1837 trip to the Southern United States. During these travels, Amos A. Lawrence’s mostly apathetic views towards slavery, a system from which he was benefitting as the son of a textile manufacturer, were occasionally punctuated by conflicting feelings as he recognized evils in some slave owners yet continued to view African Americans as inferior.

Lawrence’s early life was designed to prepare him for continuing his father’s financial success. He attended Franklin Academy in Andover, then Harvard University. His father emphasized the importance of his studies saying, “you ought not to feel that there is less for you to do, because I have the means of giving you a start in life; on the contrary, you ought to feel

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Barry Alan Crouch, "In Search of Union: Amos A. Lawrence and the Coming of the Civil War." (PhD diss., The University of New Mexico, 1970), [Page #], https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.bu.edu/docview/302529798?pq-origsite=primo., 21

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that your duties and responsibilities are greatly increased by this start, and to bring into use all your talents.”3 Shortly after graduating from Harvard, Lawrence began to take action regarding his career by embarking on a tour of the southern and western United States with the intention of establishing business connections. Amos A. Lawrence’s son later explained the trip: “[Lawrence] went in company with two business friends, on a journey through the West and South, to examine credits for Boston firms...and to make business acquaintances throughout the country.” 4 This account perhaps overemphasizes Lawrence’s business intentions. One of his “business friends” was John Dexter, who was “simply traveling for pleasure,” and while the trip was certainly partly a business venture, it also arose from Lawrence’s desire to “see a part of the United States he had never seen before” and to improve his health.5 An examination of Lawrence’s diary from this time reveals important insight into his early interactions with and reactions to slavery. Whatever his motives, Lawrence’s “Journey of 1836,” as he titled his diary, brought him face to face with the realities of slavery, leading him to occasionally recognize evils within the system yet primarily producing little more than indifference.6 Lawrence’s personal accounts of his travels reveal his general apathy towards slavery through frequent mentions of the practice as just another part of his Southern experience.

Lawrence’s diary reads far more like a travelogue, casually recording his travel experiences, than a societal analysis. Political observations are largely outnumbered by comments on his accommodations (“the boat trembles badly”) or evening activities (“great deal of drinking at the bar”).7 His sentences are mostly short and many are fragments simply listing the activities of the day. Scattered throughout these mundane observations are passing references to the presence of slaves in the states he is touring. For example, in Alabama he notes the “use of pepper in spirits here,” and then nonchalantly remarks on seeing “negro women belonging to plantation dressed well going in pairs to the market.”8 By the next sentence, he is back to his travel plans: “Start

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Ibid., 43.

William Lawrence, Life of Amos A. Lawrence: With Extracts From His Diary And Correspondence (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1888), 26.

5 Crouch, “In Search of Union,” 53.

6 Lawrence, Amos A. Ms. N-1559, Massachusetts Historical Society. Boston, Massachusetts.

7 Ibid, December 31, 1836, Jan 3, 1837.

8 Ibid, January, 3, 1837.

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from Montgomery at nine o’clock in the evening.”9 In one case, he describes “meet[ing] wagons full of negro children and women” just a few sentences before complimenting a restaurant for its “French clock” and “good dinner.”10 These brief allusions to slavery are interesting for two reasons. On the one hand, their placement as just another part of his day suggests that he is not profoundly moved by the slaves that he encounters. Rather, he assigns them the same level of importance or recognition as an unusual beverage or a pleasant meal. However, the frequency with which Lawrence chooses to record observing slaves suggests that they did hold some significance in his travels. He does not comment on passing white people, yet he often relates passing a group of African Americans, even if no interaction occurs. In this way, Lawrence shows that he is at least somewhat interested in the presence of slaves and considers them important to an account of his travels.

Occasionally, Lawrence reveals that he not only recognizes slavery as noteworthy, but even shows an awareness of the evils within the system. In one of his longest anecdotes regarding slaves, Lawrence tells of an African American man named Jim who lost both of his legs. Jim explains to Lawrence that “his master did not treat him well” and “one day he whipped him so severely” that he ran away, spent a frigid night in the woods, and “was found and carried home and his legs taken off at the stumps.”11 In choosing to take the time to document his interaction with this African American man, to write the man’s story rather than simply noting his appearance as a novelty, Lawrence shows that he has at least some concept of the horror and brutality demonstrated by slave owners. However, this account of exceptional cruelty might also suggest that Lawrence did not see all slave owners as worthy of blame. Lawrence establishes Jim’s story as more than just a routine anecdote by recording his name. This sets Jim apart from the many other unnamed slaves whom Lawrence references in passing, showing that he has somewhat of an emotional connection to Jim. Lawrence’s conflicting views towards slavery are once more made apparent. He pities Jim and criticizes this master who “did not treat [his slaves] well,” yet in portraying this incident as an anomaly, not a representation of most slave-owners, Lawrence 9

Ibid.

Ibid, January 10, 1837.

11 Ibid.

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denies the inherent evil of slavery. Lawrence’s account is that of a bad person, not an immoral institution.

Lawrence later criticizes slave-practitioners through his negative portrayal of a slave trader.

“This slave dealer lived in Virginia,” he writes, “where he raided negroes and bought them for the Southern market- a low trade even in the slave states.”12 Here, Lawrence not only condemns the slave trade, but tentatively begins to denounce slavery itself through the qualifier “even,” which suggests that slave states have lower moral standards than non-slave states. Lawrence goes on to suggest that the man knew his actions were deplorable saying, “he was a stout man of fifty with a bold look as though he was thinking that he was despised and meant to brave it out.” 13 In this way, Lawrence shows that he has some uneasiness regarding the slave trade.

Despite Lawrence’s occasional criticism of slave owners and traders, his diary reveals an overarching prejudice against people of color. In one account, Lawrence plays into the simpleminded, animalistic stereotypes of African Americans by describing an accidental encounter with a “negro making love,” giving no other context as to how he came about this intimate moment.14 If Lawrence was embarrassed at having witnessed this private situation, he relieves himself from guilt by turning quickly to racial stereotypes. Rather than leaving the couple or apologizing for his intrusion, Amos judges the people involved as wrong, feels entitled to scold them, and describes them in a belittling way. When Amos and his traveling companions “tell [the man] to desist,” he “grins and says ‘it is getting towards sunset... I can’t help it.” 15 This portrayal of an African American man who “can’t help” giving into his carnal desires perpetuates the bestial stereotype leveled against black men as part of the slave-owning mentality which excused subhuman treatment of slaves.

Lawrence’s racist tendencies are most obviously articulated when describing a trip to a market in South Carolina. Lawrence writes of the African Americans there:

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Ibid. November 9, 1836 Ibid.

14 Ibid. Ibid, January 10, 1837.

15 Ibid.

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“Some old black women were sitting around a fire with their pipes, talking and laughing.

The negroes seem very happy here…I conversed with an old negro who was brought from Africa...He says they live very well in the old negro country. They fight, but they are free. Says there are a great many in the city from Africa. I think the Africans half monkeys, he cannot speak more like a man than a monkey could if he should speak.”16 This quote is disturbing on a number of levels. The modern reader will immediately notice Lawrence’s racist comparison of African Americans to monkeys, largely due to this specific black man’s difficulty speaking English. With Lawrence’s education, which involved the study of Greek for eleven hours a day, he surely understood the difficulty in picking up a new language, especially as slaves did not have access to the best schools and private tutors a textile fortune could buy.17 Lawrence’s categorization of African Americans as not entirely human is indicative of sentiments towards black people throughout the Unites States’ history. The U.S. Constitution revealed the new country’s view of slaves as sub-human when it reduced them to “three-fifths” of a person for purposes of representation and direct taxes.18 Historian Edward Baptist explains that in order to maintain economic power, nineteenth century slave owners viewed their slaves as “disembodied, mechanical hands.”19 Over time, many Americans justified the oppression of black people by fabricating a bestial, sub-human reputation for African Americans, especially black men. Such an outlook led to the widespread acceptance of lynching following the freeing of slaves, as whites sought to re-establish a subhuman identity for blacks after they were no longer legally property.20 In categorizing Africans as “half monkeys,” Lawrence shows how the racist sentiments of nineteenth century Americans led to the perception of African Americans as not only inferior, but as less than human.

Lawrence’s interaction with slaves at the market further reveals his racism through his disinterest in understanding the perspectives of the African Americans he interacts with.

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Ibid., January 20, 1837 Crouch, “In Search of Union,” 53 18 U.S. Const. Art. 1, Sec. 2 19 Edward E. Baptist. The Half Has Never Been Told : Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. (ACLS Humanities E-Book.

New York: Basic Books, 2014), 142 20 The 13th, directed by Ava DuVernay, Netflix, 2016.

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Lawrence concludes that the black people are happy with their condition entirely through outside observations. Lawrence’s language admits his lack of evidence by saying that they “seem” happy rather than stating it as a definite fact, but in defining their emotions collectively and based on appearances he dismisses the varied and complex natures of the black people to whom he is referring. His rigidity in his assumptions is made clear by the fact that he wrote this entry after speaking to an African American man who directly told Lawrence that “they live very well” in Africa because they are “free.” Lawrence does not use this conversation to modify his views on the emotional well-being of slaves. Rather he chooses to record his initial impressions, suggesting that either his own inferences are more valuable than the testimony of a slave, or that African Americans are unable to recognize their own feelings.

In addition to the underlying racism revealed in the accounts of his 1836 trip, Lawrence’s later abolitionist identity seems contradictory in light of the benefits he received from the institution for the majority of his life. Historian Robert K. Sutton articulates this discrepancy in a Smithsonian article in which he explains that while Lawrence was later “as he wrote, ‘a stark mad abolitionist’…the fact that his business relied on the same people he was trying to free did not seem to bother him.”21 Anti-slavery or not, many Boston merchants and industrialists were economically and personally tied to the South.22 Just ten years after graduating from Harvard, Lawrence would find himself in charge of ten corporations and a textile firm worth $1 million in capital, a fortune only made possible through slave labor.23 Lawrence’s son suggested his father’s business needs blinded him to Southern immoralities stating that “his business acquaintance with Southern cotton-growers lead [sic] him to appreciate their side of the question, and to recognize the care that many of them took in the welfare of their slaves.” 24 This passage is immediately followed by a disclaimer that Lawrence was aware of the evils of slavery and accordingly took an “active interest” in Liberia and in slaves working to purchase their own freedom.25 Lawrence’s son probably mentioned his father’s connection to supposedly kind slave owners to clear his Sutton, Robert K. “The Wealthy,” Smithsonian.com Richard Abbott, Cotton and Capital: Boston Businessmen and Antislavery Reform, 1854- 1868 (n.p.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), 20.

23 Ibid., 24 24 Lawrence, Life of Amos, 74 25 Ibid.

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father’s name regarding his tight connection to the South. Whether Lawrence ever truly convinced himself that those he traded with were benevolent or not, the fact remains that his business was dependent on their slaves.

As an indication of Lawrence’s ability to ignore his business’ dependence on slavery, Lawrence’s diary reveals small ways in which he dissociated slavery’s products with slave labor during his 1836-1837 trip. For example, he says in South Carolina there are “no handsome houses except one or two plantations,” thereby glorifying the products of slavery without acknowledging the process that allowed these houses to be so much grander than their neighbors. 26 In Alabama, he describes seeing “cotton piled everywhere waiting for a rise in price,” and in this way connects the products of slavery with commerce without a thought as to how this commodity came to be.27 In personifying cotton, Lawrence gives this product of slave labor its own agency, while neglecting to note the people who harvested it.

Burns, Benefaction, and Bleeding Kansas: Lawrence as a Self-Proclaimed Abolitionist During his 1836 trip to the Southern United States, Lawrence was able to ignore the institution of slavery or consider it a novelty worth recording in a travel diary without additional contemplation. Later in life, however, Lawrence’s relationship with slavery was at the forefront of his mind. Whig views pertaining to slavery shifted and divided in the 1850’s as Congress debated the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The act had the potential to undo the Missouri Compromise by allowing new territories to vote on the issue of slavery rather than forcing them to adhere to the dividing line between slave and free imposed in 1820. Lawrence feared the shift in political power that new slave states would bring. Historian Albert J. Von Frank describes Lawrence, the “prince of Boston’s Cotton Whigs,” as “shaken by the Nebraska Bill out of his long policy of appeasing the slave power.”28 In an 1855 letter to General D. R. Atchison, a pro-slavery supporter 26

Lawrence, January 17, 1837.

Ibid, January 3, 1837.

28 Albert Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) 27

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of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lawrence writes, “the repeal of the law which secured this territory against the introduction of slavery, is considered by most men in the free states to have been a breach of the national faith.”29 Here Lawrence reveals his deep dissatisfaction with the act, as well as his belief in the uniformity of this opinion by claiming to speak for “most men.”

The Kansas-Nebraska Act deeply angered Lawrence to the point of a personal transformation regarding his actions towards slavery. When reflecting on this change, Lawrence declared that the arrest of Anthony Burns was its catalyst. “We went to bed one night oldfashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs,” Lawrence wrote to his uncle regarding Burns’ arrest, “and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”30 Burns was an escaped slave who had fled Virginia and gotten a job at a Boston clothing store. On May 24, 1854, he was found and arrested. While Lawrence had upheld the fugitive slave law in the past, even volunteering to help Marshal Devens arrest Thomas Sims in 1851, by 1854 Lawrence was no longer willing to appease the slave powers.31 The passing of the Kansas Nebraska Act during this interim had intensified Lawrence’s anger towards slaveholders. And he was not alone in being outraged at Burns’ capture. The city of Boston flew into righteous indignation. Seven thousand citizens attempted to break him out of jail.32 Abolitionist William Bowditch published a pamphlet detailing the injustice of Burns’ trial.33 Theologian James Freeman Clarke delivered a sermon at William’s Hall saying the city was shouldering a “weight of sorrow which death cannot cause.” 34 And the heir to the fortune of one of Boston’s most philanthropic families had just discovered his newest cause.

Philanthropy was among the Lawrence family’s defining characteristics. Lawrence’s father had retired at forty-five to pursue charitable work, and his uncle was distinguished as the sponsor of the single largest donation ever made to a college when he gave $50,000 to Harvard College

Lawrence, Amos A to David R Atchison. "Correspondence Between Gen D.R. Atchison and Amos A. Lawrence.” Liberator (18311865)26, no. 27 (1856):01 30 Sutton, Robert K. “The Wealthy,” Smithsonian.com 31 Von Frank, The Trials, 53 32 Ibid.

33 William Bowditch, The Rendition of Anthony Burns (Boston, MA: Robert F. Wallcut, 1854) 34 James Freeman. Clarke. Rendition of Anthony Burns: Its Causes and Consequences: A Discourse on Christian Politics, Delivered in Williams Hall, Boston, on Whitsunday, June 4, 1854 . Boston, MA: Crosby, Nichols, & Co 29

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in 1847.35 Amos A. Lawrence himself supported a number of charitable causes, from Massachusetts General Hospital to an Episcopal City Mission Chapel.36 Before his selfproclaimed transformation to abolition, he supported the colonization of Liberia by free African Americans.37 Indeed, Lawrence’s son, William, deemed philanthropy so central to his father’s character that he included “charities” as a heading in the table of contents of his father’s biography.38 While it is reasonable to assume that William would have wished to portray his father positively, he supports his claims by referencing multiple concrete causes supported by Lawrence. Other accounts of Lawrence’s life similarly emphasize his generosity. Professors Barbara M. Tucker and Kenneth H. Tucker Jr. use the subtitle “Manufacturing and the Moral Life of the Industrial Elite” for their section on the Lawrence family in their 2008 book Industrializing Antebellum America, where they say, “Amos Adams Lawrence grew up in a culture of philanthropy.”39 Prolific biographer William M. Thayer wrote a handbook for success in business and life using Amos Lawrence as a model: Poor Boy and Merchant Prince or Elements of Success Drawn from the Life and Character of the Late Amos Lawrence. Written five years after his death, this book exemplifies the high standard to which Amos Lawrence was viewed by his society. It was up to Amos A. Lawrence to carry on his father’s philanthropic legacy.

It was then not out of character for Lawrence to respond to his indignation at the Burns trial by seeking a charity to support his vision. Lawrence began by offering to pay for Burns’ defense. Richard Henry Dana Jr., Burns’ lawyer, understood the reason for Lawrence’s dramatically changed political views: “Men who would not speak to me in 1850 and 1851, and who enrolled themselves as special police-men in the Sims affair, stop me in the street to talk treason. This is all owing to the Nebraska bill.”40 Dana realized that Lawrence was moved not by

Sutton, Robert K. “The Wealthy,” Smithsonian.com Lawrence, Life of Amos, 53-54 37 Ibid., 53.

38 Ibid., viii.

39 Barbara Tucker and Kenneth Tucker, Industrializing Antebellum America: The Rise of Manufacturing Entrepreneurs in the Early Republic(New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 168.

40 Crouch, “In Search of Union,” 53 * Lawrence and Thayer differed in exactly what they perceived this task to be. While Lawrence saw it as a purely philanthropic endeavor, Thayer saw pecuniary potential in buying up and developing land with the intent of increasing property value (Abbott 29).

Lawrence’s arguments that Bostonian businessmen would respond more favorably to charitable projects than to land speculation eventually triumphed and the New England Emigrant Aid Company was marketed as a charitable institution (Abbott 30).

35 36

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the sadness of Burns’ case, but by his anger at the South because of the political implications of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Lawrence’s legal aid was to no avail, however, and Burns was returned to slavery.

Lawrence then directed his philanthropic intentions towards an effort being organized by Eli Thayer. Just days after Anthony Burns’ arrest, President Franklin Pierce signed Kansas and Nebraska into the Union, allowing each to determine its own stance on slavery. Thayer responded to this news with a plan to facilitate Kansas’ entrance as a free state by encouraging the emigration of anti-slavery settlers. Lawrence soon whole-heartedly adopted this task.* He became the treasurer of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, and when the funds he oversaw ran short he made up the difference from his own wealth. In a letter to his uncle, Lawrence admitted, “I send to Kansas every hundred dollars that I can get and which is not previously engaged; for that seems to be an immediate necessity and will not bear delay.”41 Lawrence’s dedication to the New England Emigrant Aid Company is more than just fiscally evident. In an 1855 letter to David Rice Atchison, Lawrence vehemently defends his work in Kansas. He criticizes interference from pro-slavery advocates who crossed the border to participate in elections outside of their own state, or who turned to violence over the question of Kansas’ entrance. He asks Atchison to “restrain [his] people from doing great injustice to actual settlers” calling such actions “so great an evil.”42 Whether Lawrence’s settlers, fully funded and sent with political intentions, can truly be considered “actual settlers” may raise some debate, but Lawrence insists that his only goal was to “let the fight be a fair one.”43 Like his anger at the Kansas Nebraska Act’s upset of Northern power, Lawrence was once more moved to action not by the immorality of slavery, but by the ostensibly menacing politics of slaveholders.

Lawrence’s commitment to the New England Emigrant Aid Company is further demonstrated by his reluctance to receive public credit for his efforts. He objected to Thayer’s report that the settlers hoped to name their new town after him responding in a letter, “my motives have thus far been pure and unselfish; and I wish them not only to be but to appear, so; this would 41

Lawrence, Life of Amos, 98 Lawrence, Amos A to David R Atchison.

43 Ibid.

42

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not be the case, should it be made public that the settlement had been named for me.” 44 This statement may have been intended to garner praise for his modesty, or it could be a genuine attempt to prevent the settlement from seeming like a publicity stunt. Either way, the fact remains that Lawrence hoped to sacrifice recognition for what he perceived to be the good of the cause.

In the end, Lawrence, Kansas was named after its primary financial benefactor and Kansas eventually entered the Union as a free state in 1861. Lawrence’s work to prevent the spread of slavery had, by this time, become one of his most fervent and costly endeavors.

Context Clues: Amos A. Lawrence as a reflection of his society The travel diary of a privileged twenty-two year old remains relevant because Amos A. Lawrence’s views reflected those of the society around him. Lawrence’s ambivalent reaction to slavery is indicative of how the Bostonian elite felt and acted towards slaves before, during, and after the Civil War. While the North is often hailed as the nation’s champion of racial justice, Northern views towards people of color were far from uniformly positive. Throughout the nation’s early history, and until abolition took effect, many Northerners profited greatly from slave labor. In the colonial era, slave-holding regions in the Southern colonies and British West Indies served as markets for Northern goods. Later, slave-picked cotton drove America’s industrial revolution. Many Northerners who did object to slavery used political and fiscal arguments rather than moral ones. In this way they failed to acknowledge the suffering of individual slaves and continued to center the dialogue around the best interests of whites. Those Northerners who may have privately acknowledged slavery’s wrongs were often silenced by their economic dependence on the South. Even after the war, Northern reactions to people of color were conflicted. Despite having just poured themselves into the fight against slavery, many Northerners romanticized the antebellum South. Much as Lawrence had done before the war, post-Civil War Northern travelers commented on field workers as an idyllic part of the Southern landscape, without recognizing past and current oppression.45 Lawrence’s diary, in all its 44 45

Lawrence, Life of Amos, 84 Nina Silber. The Romance of Reunion : Northerners and the South, 1865-1900. (Civil War America (Series). (Chapel Hill, NC:

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confusion and contradictions, mirrors his society’s similarly inconsistent views of and actions towards slavery.

Northern states are often perceived as, at best, critics of slavery and, at worst, bystanders.

Neither portrayal is fair. In truth, the North actively profited from and allowed for the continuation of slavery. The link between northern states and slavery is as old as the states themselves. New England’s early colonial economy owed much of its development to the plantations of the British West Indies. New England colonies sent more than 112 million feet of pine board to the West Indies between 1768 and 1772.46 They also supplied food, livestock, and lighting materials.47 Northern institutions, including Lawrence’s alma mater, Harvard College, profited from and even owned slaves.48 Northerners built the ships which carried cotton from plantations to markets.49 Northern banks lent Southerners money to buy slaves, and Northern companies insured these slaves once purchased.50 For Lawrence, however, it was the cotton industry that most powerfully united the North and South.† In a single decade, between 1830 and 1840, more than 100 million pounds of southern, slave produced, cotton was consumed by Northern mills.51 Amos A. Lawrence himself estimated that by 1850, New England mills consumed 150 million pounds of cotton a year.52 These staggering numbers reveal the tremendous extent to which the North and South were commercially dependent on each other. Cotton not only transformed the South’s economy, it changed the whole nation. Historian Edward E. Baptist explains how cotton’s effects on the United States, and the world, are almost impossible to exaggerate when he writes, “Cotton was

University of North Carolina Press, 1993) 46 Eric Kimball. "What Have We to Do with Slavery? New Englanders and the Slave Economies of West Indies." (Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, 2016: 181-94.), 187.

47 Ibid., 187.

48 Craig Steven Wilder. Ebony & Ivy : Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities. (First U.S. ed. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013) 49 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity : How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery. (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005), 14.

50 Ibid., 13. † The North and South were so closely united through the cotton industry that Northern textile mills even produced the coarse “Negro cloth” used to clothe slaves, which was then sold back to the South to be worn by those workers who had made its production possible (Farrow et al. 26).

51 Ibid., 6.

52 Ibid., 26

21

the most important raw material of the industrial revolution that created our modern world economy.”53 The Northern economy was built on slave labor, and therefore it cannot be extricated from the system of slavery. Amos A. Lawrence, as a leader and beneficiary of the textile industry, was part of this system before he began to publicly comment on slavery.

Lawrence’s transformation from author of a sometimes racist travelogue to active supporter for quarantining the institution of slavery may not reveal as large a personal transformation as one would expect. Rather, it was common for Northern industrialists to argue against the spread of slavery without delving too deeply into the institution’s morality or their own culpability in the matter. Many of those who did criticize the evils of slavery took a broad societal view rather than a look at the horrors slavery inflicted on an individual.54 This is not to say that there were no Bostonians who supported total abolition or who opposed slavery on moral grounds. William Lloyd Garrison, Arthur Tappan, Frederick Douglas, and many others used ethics to justify complete emancipation. However Amos A. Lawrence’s industrialist peers often opposed slavery more out of a commitment to free labor and a hope to improve their economy and society than a concern for the lives and welfare of those enslaved.55 During the Civil War, many of Boston’s antislavery advocates continued to take a practical rather than moral angle, arguing that freed blacks would be better workers and greater consumers of Northern products than slaves. 56 In his 1991 book Cotton and Capital, historian Richard Abbott argues that this tactic allowed abolitionists to be seen as practical and not overly idealistic. Abbott proposes that their argument that freed slaves would work harder without coercion and take advantage of opportunities such as education shows confidence in the potential of black Americans.57 That being said, defenses of abolition from Boston’s elite do not necessarily exonerate these Northerners from accusations of racism. It is true that Bostonian abolitionists supported education for all races, arguing that educated people are better workers and consumers, but such an argument makes sense in the context of Boston’s longstanding commitment to education. In 1830, for example, few states had 53

Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 113 Abbott, Cotton and Capital, 5 55 Ibid.

56 Ibid., 6 57 Ibid., 6-7 54

22

public schools yet 75% of New England was literate.58 Clearly, education was seen as, if not an inalienable right, then at least of the utmost importance. Abolitionist arguments supporting black education say as much about Boston’s belief in the importance of educated citizens as they do about attitudes towards freed blacks. Similarly, while some arguments extolled the potential of the black work ethic, this kind of rhetoric continued to ignore the inherent evil of the institution by suggesting that it was worse in relation to other possibilities rather than declaring it entirely corrupt.

While many of Boston’s businessmen did think that slavery was evil, they restrained from saying so due to their economic ties to the South. As previously mentioned, Boston had long profited from slavery. Economic and personal ties to the South prevented many from seeking abolition for fear that the agitation of it would disrupt the economy.59 During the debate over the annexation of Texas, those who did address the moral issue of slavery began to challenge the Bostonian elite’s claim to moral superiority. In 1836, as Lawrence traveled through the Southern United States, conservative Boston Whigs protested Texas’ annexation using political and fiscal arguments. More slave states would shift the Congressional power balance, they explained, and the South could block legislation which would benefit the North, such as protective tariffs. 60 Lawrence himself opposed annexation for this very reason.61 In contrast, anti-slavery Whigs protested the moral repercussions of allowing slavery to expand. While both strands of Whigs sought the same result, they worried about the opposite side’s tactics. Amos A. Lawrence’s uncle, Abbott Lawrence, worked on preventing anti-Texas advocates from alienating the South.62 Meanwhile anti-slavery Whigs criticized the more conservative Whigs’ appeasement of the South. Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner warned against the union of the “Lords of the Lash and the Lords of the Loom.”63 Such animosity amongst largely like-minded parties eventually resulted in labels for the two trains of thought: “Cotton Whigs” put economic interests before condemnation of slavery while “Conscience Whigs” were outspoken against slavery and largely 58

Ibid., 16 Ibid., 20 60 Ibid., 20 61 Ibid., 25 62 Ibid., 20 63 Ibid., 22 59

23

unconnected to the textile industry.64 Lawrence’s 1836 observations mark him as a Cotton Whig: he was able to politically protest the spread of slavery without having an emotional reaction to encountering the practice during his travels. In this way, his later actions to prevent Kansas’ entrance as a slaveholding state is not incompatible with his earlier apathy towards the experiences of slaves since his decisions were designed to protect his wealth and political standing.

The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) declared slavery illegal. It did not, unfortunately, end the debate as to what role black Americans would be granted in society. After the Civil War, many who had fought or supported the fight to free the slaves congratulated themselves on a job well done. But much like the arguments constructed earlier by Cotton Whigs, the plight of individual African Americans remained unanswered. Such a viewpoint is demonstrated in the travel journals of Northerners who visited the South following the Civil War. Historian Nina Silber examines northern perspectives of African Americans post-Civil War in her 1993 book The Romance of Reunion. Here, Silber shows how many Northerners originally blamed wealthy slaveholders for the war without indicting the impoverished whites who had fought on their behalf.65 This perspective mirrors Lawrence’s tendencies to blame individual slave holders for cruelty without condemning the entire system or all those who supported it, including his own comfort with racist narratives in the past. Later, many Northerners accepted a narrative which idealized the Southern aristocracy as a leisurely class who had ruled over their slaves benevolently.66 Like these later Northern visitors, Lawrence praised plantations and their owners for their elegance and refinement without crediting slaves and their labor. The arguments in favor of black entrance into society by post-war Northerners were muted by those who saw African Americans as “foreigners” who were best kept under the supervision of their former owners. 67 Viewing slaves as foreigners perpetuates the “otherness” narrative demonstrated in 1837 by Lawrence’s comment that a slave’s English sounded like a monkey. In both cases, slaves are

64

Ibid., 21 Silber, The Romance, 17 66 Ibid., 6 67 Ibid.

65

24

perceived as less American based on a situation over which they have no control. Post-Civil War travelers further repeated Lawrence’s pre-war views towards African Americans by treating these people as part of the scenery. In fact, “vestiges of the slave system” were on many northern travelers’ itineraries.68 Elite Northerners‡ wanted to see remnants of the system the country had just fought to end. In a manner similar to Lawrence’s, these encounters were often at a distance.

Also like Lawrence, post-Civil War travelers did not shy away from reinforcing black stereotypes through unflattering portrayals, often of workers they considered lazy.69 Such portrayals speak to the fact that African Americans continued to be treated with prejudice and detachment, even after being freed. In this way, Lawrence’s transformation is revealed to be less drastic than one might assume. It is very possible that Lawrence would have reacted to black workers in a post-Civil War trip in much the same way he did in 1836, despite his endeavors to prevent the spread of slavery. His racism was not necessarily tempered by his opposition to slavery.

This all matters when studying Amos A. Lawrence because he is not only a reflection of his society, he is its product. His seemingly dramatic transformation from an alternatingly apathetic and critical observer of slavery to a proponent of its containment makes sense within the context of his society. In short, Boston’s elite had far from clear cut views on slavery. They recognized its evils, but did not necessarily feel for individual slaves. This is reflected in how Lawrence abhors slave trade as “low” yet remarks on the lack of intelligence of individual slaves.

His later efforts to prevent the spread of slavery may have had very little to do with his encounters with actual slaves. While the Anthony Burns trial spurred his self-declared transformation, it was the Kansas-Nebraska Act which was truly behind this decision to take action. Just like the others in his city, Lawrence placed practical concerns (the repeal of the Missouri Compromise) over emotional ones. And, like other elite Bostonians, Lawrence recognized evils in the system even as he continued to act within its confines: he was able to feel pity for Burns even though just years earlier, under laws he respected, he was willing to aid in a fugitive slave’s capture. Lawrence’s 68

Ibid.,76 Silber notes that her use of the word “Northerners” refers mostly to those in the upper and middle classes, with some conclusions being most accurate as applied to upper-class men, as this demographic “set the dominant tone on the reunion question” (Silber 11).

Amos A. Lawrence was a member of this group, thus not only making these reactions relevant to the study of him, but also showing how Lawrence’s perspective would have been important in his lifetime, not only in hindsight.

69 Ibid., 81 ‡

25

transformation also seems less remarkable given that those who had fought or supported the fight to free the slaves continued to see African Americans as inferior. Northern travelers toured the South after the Civil War and described African American laborers as part of the scenery, just like Lawrence did in 1836. Three decades and 750,000 lives later, the country was forever transformed yet, in some ways, tragically unchanged.

Conclusion Later in life Lawrence would actively work to prevent the spread of slavery, yet during his 1836 trip to the American South, Lawrence’s diary reveals general indifference towards slavery, interspersed with anecdotes that reveal some recognition of cruel slave practitioners and other stories that point to his own racism. For the most part, Lawrence records his interactions with slavery much as he recounts other common occurrences. In a few cases, he shows some distaste for aspects of slavery, such as when he describes a particularly brutal slave master or a distasteful slave trader. In other instances, however, Lawrence reveals his own racism in his depictions of slaves as bestial and slow-minded. Lawrence’s relationship to slavery was complicated by the benefits his family derived from the institution. Lawrence’s fortune came from textiles, and he therefore made a living because of the cotton produced by southern, slaveholding states.

Lawrence’s diary shows how he separated slavery in his mind from its products by describing culpable individual behavior without indicting the institution itself. Amos A. Lawrence later accrued an abolitionist reputation.

This change was most strongly initiated by his political discontent at the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the ways in which it threatened to shift power away from the North. Lawrence responded through his funding of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which turned his anger into action as he worked to facilitate Kansas’ entrance into the Union as a free state. He put his whole self into this endeavor, declaring himself an abolitionist and writing sternly to those who opposed him. Yet Lawrence’s so-called transformation was far from drastic. His desire to halt the spread of slavery stemmed from political concerns rather than ethical ones, and he failed to recognize 26

his own financial gain from slavery. Other elite Bostonians and Post-Civil War Northern visitors to the South prove that Lawrence did not need to lose all racism to support abolition. But his fervor shows that he most certainly discarded his apathy.

History, especially at the primary and secondary school level, is often painted in broad strokes. It is, of course, easier to absorb information presented in a simple form, and in many cases getting the gist of a topic is enough. But a further examination of most things, history included, shows that little is clear cut. The past did not always have obvious heroes and villains.

Our nation has not always righted its wrongs. The winners of battles, both literal and philosophical, did not always speak for the majority. Thinking that the past can be viewed in such simple terms is dangerous for our future. Leaders will be viewed heroically, their flaws ignored, or hated for misguided actions without hope of redemption. If you were to read selected passages of Amos A. Lawrence’s diary, you would view him, unequivocally, as a racist. And he was. If you were to read his son’s account of his life, or stumble upon the papers of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, you would think him a great philanthropist and a champion of free-soil.

He was that too. Lawrence was at times racist, at times apathetic, and at times a self-proclaimed abolitionist. He grew up in a state founded on Puritan concepts of morality and made rich on the products of slave labor. Amos A. Lawrence’s account of his 1836 trip to the American South reflects his society through his differing reactions to slavery. When viewed within the context of his later abolitionist identity, Lawrence’s journal does not show a great personal transformation but rather the contradictions that existed within many Northerners of this time. The implications of Lawrence’s views and actions continue to be relevant when attempting to broadly categorize current or historical figures. Historians, and readers of history, must remember that real people, like Lawrence, seldom fit into broad generalizations. And if the paradoxes and complications that characterize human behavior mean that history is difficult to fit into tight narrative structures, then perhaps turning points are not so appealing after all.

27

Works Cited Abbott, Richard H. Cotton and Capital: Boston Businessmen and Antislavery Reform, 18541868. University of Massachusetts Press, 2009.

Lawrence, Amos A. Ms. N-1559, Massachusetts Historical Society. Boston, Massachusetts.

Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told : Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. ACLS Humanities E-Book. New York: Basic Books, 2014. Bowditch, William. The Rendition of Anthony Burns. Boston, MA: Robert F. Wallcut, 1854.

Clarke, James Freeman. Rendition of Anthony Burns: Its Causes and Consequences: A Discourse on Christian Politics, Delivered in Williams Hall, Boston, on Whitsunday, June 4, 1854. Boston, MA: Crosby, Nichols, & Co Crouch, Barry Alan. "In Search of Union: Amos A. Lawrence and the Coming of the Civil War." PhD diss., The University of New Mexico, 1970. https://search-proquestcom.ezproxy.bu.edu /docview/ 302529798?pq-origsite=primo.

Farrow, Anne, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank. Complicity : How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery. New York: Ballantine Books, 2005.

Kimball, Eric. "What Have We to Do with Slavery? New Englanders and the Slave Economies of West Indies." Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (2016): 181-94. Lawrence, Amos A to David R Atchison. "Correspondence Between Gen D.R. Atchison and Amos A. Lawrence.” Liberator (1831-1865)26, no. 27 (1856):01 Lawrence, William. Life of Amos A. Lawrence: With Extracts From His Diary And Correspondence. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1888.

Silber, Nina. The Romance of Reunion : Northerners and the South, 1865-1900. Civil War America (Series). Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Sutton, Robert K. “The Wealthy Activist Who Helped Turn ‘Bleeding Kansas’ Free.”

Smithsonian.com. Last modified August 16, 2017. www.smithsonianmag.com/history/wealthy-activist-who-helped-turn-bleeding-kansas28

free-180964494/#hva2twMOC03aLLtd.99. The 13th. Directed by Ava DuVernay.

Netflix, 2016.

Tucker, Barbara, and Kenneth Tucker Jr. Industrializing Antebellum America: The Rise of Manufacturing Entrepreneurs in the Early Republic. New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008.

Von Frank, Albert. The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Wilder, Craig Steven. Ebony & Ivy : Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: CATHERINE DEVLIN

Catherine Devlin is a sophomore at Boston University, majoring inhistory. She has conducted historical research both as a lead researcher for a long-form documentary project sponsored by a national NGO and a global media company, and as the recipient of an independent research grant from her university. She has also served as an intern at the USS Albacore Submarine and museum. InJune, she received a Gilder Lehrman History Scholar Award for excellence in American history and a commitment to public service,leadership, and community involvement.

29

The State’s Construction Of Subjectivity: A Literary Analysis Of The Contemporary Narco-Novel Perra Brava Written by Carla Graciano 30

Introduction Perra Brava, written by Orfa Alarcón, is a Mexican narco-novel that will act as the focal point of this essay. Perra most often translates to bitch or female dog, and most of the time women are the ones who are on the receiving end of this epithet. Brava means the one who is ready to fight, however, this does not mean the ‘fighting bitch’ or the one who is always fighting, but the one who has the attitude of a bitch and is willing to fight for what she wants and deserves. This title, then, exemplifies the type of literature that gives the reader a glimpse into what the narco world is like. In this essay, the narco-novel will function under a similar premise that is laid out by the sicaresca novel. Perra Brava further emphasizes the power dynamics of both intimate and public relationships. Focusing on Julio, the sicario,1 and Fernanda, his naïve girlfriend, the novel ventures to interrogate the nature of narco culture. At the same time, it uses a fictional framework to provide an ending that would not be possible in the real world as way of satisfying the falsely perceived reality of the narco world held by common readers. Although a face value reading may at first seem like a romanticization of the narco world, further inspection will reveal a critique of this culture by focusing on the actions of the main actors involved. Accordingly, in Perra Brava, Orfa Alarcón incorporates how subjectivity, sexuality, and identity have been manipulated (by the state) in order to manufacture a population that is unconsciously subservient to it.

Within Latin America, there are numerous countries that are continuously impacted by the War on Drugs, a campaign launched by the United States to combat drug trafficking. Considering the longstanding effects of this campaign that are still apparent today, this paper will focus on Mexico, their government, their politics, and drug trafficking through a close reading of Alarcon’s Perra Brava. The fact that individuals in an impoverished country choose to partake in the illicit trafficking of drugs is no accident, as people of such countries are often under certain social and economic constraints. In the case of Mexico, failed neoliberal policies, the expansion of globalization, and the economic crisis pushed the country over the brink—a response that was ultimately born out of desperation.

Background 1

As a sicario, he is the assassin for the cartel he is working for.

31

Before the advent of cartels in Mexico, Colombia was one of the first countries to have individuals establish illicit drug commerce as a legitimate organization, with cocaine as their primary source of trade. Though these operations were not recognized as legitimate by the Colombian government, they were validated through widespread production and consumption in and outside the country. However, government intervention in the realm of drug trafficking led to the demise of the Colombian drug organizations. Accordingly, Mexico was able to fill the power vacuum of the international drug business.2 At the same time, Ronald Reagan had just won the U.S. presidential election and was able to successfully launch the War on Drugs, which shifted the discourse surrounding the issue from the mere consumer to the countries where the drugs were being produced.3 However, this strategic enterprise “has helped consolidate the transnational drug trade” that the Mexican government is trying to stop in the first place. 4 However, the U.S. was not the only nation that attempted to engage the narcos in a war. In 2006, Mexican president Felipe Calderón, after having just been elected, passed aggressive policy that targeted some of the most powerful cartels in the country.5 Calderón was attempting to stop the proliferation of drug trafficking. What those good intentioned anti-drug campaigns and policies failed to recognize was that they were exacerbating the problem for the citizens trapped between the state that promoted those policies and the cartels who fought back. This led to the creation of a narco Mexican culture.

The Impacts of Power on Molding the Individual Illegal trafficking of drugs dictates how the everyday life of a citizen ought to be lived.

Culture can be the safeguard and only form of expression for a group of people. It can be influenced by politics or political ideologies, but there is always some truth that can be revealed as a criticism of what the social and economic conditions are for people. Because Mexico has some of the most prominent criminal organizations in the world, these groups have been able to 2

Howard Campbell, "Narco-Propaganda in the Mexican "Drug War": An Anthropological Perspective," Latin American Perspectives 41, no. 2 (2014): 60.

3 Cabañas, "Imagined Narcoscapes," 5.

4 Ibid., 3.

5 Campbell, "Narco-Propaganda in the Mexican "Drug War"," Latin American Perspectives 41, no. 2 (2014): 61.

32

infiltrate the most important aspects of society, including government, law enforcement, and schools. When the citizens interact with those institutions, it is likely that they are being exposed to some facet of the narco world without having to directly purchase or consume the drugs that are being produced. In some ways, the identity of individuals is molded by those outside interactions, and the way they come to express this is through music, film, and literature. With regards to literature, the sicaresca novel was popularized. They are a “new cultural form that seeks to explain the complexity of urban violence.”6 This cultural phenomena arose in Colombia, but the genre can be applied to novels that have derived from other places as long as they follow a formula in which “the assassin appears at the narrative center [but] the ultimate goal is to view mainstream society from a distance.”7 Thus, it serves as an attempt at framing what narco relationships might be like.

For the most part, assuming and believing that citizens, at least in democratic societies, are free to make decisions at their own discretion is easy. However, this claim dismisses any notion that the ways in which individuals act, if not predetermined, are heavily influenced by factors such as the state or society. Although individuals may not actively think about how the state interacts with them on a microlevel, it is evident that citizens inevitably fit a role that is in the best interest of serving the state and society. The effects of an authoritative figure of government can take the form of structural violence that oppresses the citizens who are most vulnerable.

Structural violence is manifested in and perpetuated by systems that are closely intertwined with the state, such as neoliberalism. Mexico’s shift to neoliberalism meant they would be on the same playing field as developed nations, so they instituted policies that promoted free markets with little government regulation. With the absence of regulation, there were not enough safeguards to ensure that the consumer was protected. Individuals were left to fend for themselves, and if they were not prosperous it became their fault. Neoliberalism, then, represents the shift of focus from the government to the individual, and it is the individual who needs to change their circumstances, and it is here where structural violence finds its breeding ground. The interconnectedness of the

6 7

Cabañas, "Imagined Narcoscapes," 11.

See above.

33

state and neoliberalism is important because they work together to preserve the stability and power of one another. One of the ways in which preservation can occur is through the restriction of behavior between laws, or the implicit fabrication of the perfect subject to the state. This happens, first, through the recognition of who can be a subject, and therefore a citizen, and then through the allocation of power to a certain group (often power that can be used over the group that does not have power) that will help in maintaining the order that has already been established.

Alarcón includes elements of violence and control utilized by those in power, both narcos and the government, to display how it can be transformative in both character and action on the individual level.

Women as Represented Subjects The novel is narrated through the lens of Fernanda, a young woman from Monterrey who comes from a troubled family. As the protagonist of the novel, she functions as a conduit through which power discourses are probed; because she experiences a significant change in attitude by the end, she ultimately comes to represent the discernable effects of being immersed in the realm of narcos. Before continuing with the discussion of Fernanda, however, it is important to begin with a brief analysis of the Mexican state and society to determine the kind of influence it had over the characters in the novel. Mexico, like most countries, is dictated by the patriarchy; men are the heads of government just like they are the heads of the household. The implications of this are that men control both the private sphere (the home) and the public sphere (society). Women are excluded from holding any power. This characterizes women as a group of people with less power and leverage in society, meaning that they cannot influence the very same structures that rule over them.

Furthermore, this structure of power is based on a specific identification of gender because power is allocated through that, which then determines who will be included as a legitimate member of society. This automatically creates the first system of roles in society that is attributed to how men and women should act. The representation of women becomes essential for the state because not only does it serve as a form of legitimacy, but it is also able to construct what it means 34

to be a woman under that system of government. Perra Brava establishes Julio as the man who sets the rules for Fernanda, who is able to show her off as a trophy, and who is able to elevate himself above the rest of his peers because of the power he holds. Conversely, Fernanda’s only choice in the matter is to obey whatever he says. Michel Foucault contends “that juridical systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent.”8 If the state did not produce its subjects in this manner, it would destabilize the framework that men have used to maintain their power in the first place. The effect of this, then, is that it creates a duality of power where men are the only ones authorized to exercise power while excluding women from that use, despite the fact that women are the ones who are at the receiving end of how that power is exercised. This power dynamic is able to be sustained because it is acknowledged and accepted by the subjects it was able to create since they (women) want to be represented and accounted for.

The way in which this representational framework is actualized is through the discourse that the state employs. In Mexico, political discourse is dominated by narcotics, more specifically, the “internal politics of drug gangs (narcos)”9 or narcopolitics. However, governments are not the only ones who have agency over their citizens. The group with agency is the one that has a better political strategy, and crucial for that strategy to work is a persuasive linguistic discourse. Narcos are effective because they are able to “generate a political or quasi-political discourse in the form of narco-propaganda”10 For example, they may blame the government for the terrible economic conditions, and then frame themselves as the ones who will bring economic opportunities to the country. Nonetheless, this discourse does not rise to the level of being a political ideology. The narcos of Mexico are not a political party, as the closest they get to the government is by being affiliated with them in illicit ways, i.e. ways that would deem the government corrupt. What the War on Drugs has revealed is that they are always resisting government authority.11 Because the consequences of neoliberalism consisted of destitution and economic catastrophe, drug trafficking was able to spread since it provided individuals with an easy avenue towards economic 8

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (Great Britain, Routledge, 1990), 2.

Melissa W. Wright, "Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide: Gendered Violence on the Mexico-U.S. Border," Signs 36, no. 3 (2011): 719.

10 Campbell, "Narco-Propaganda in the Mexican "Drug War"," 62.

11 See above.

9

35

opportunity. With the decline of the left-wing political parties and the rise of right-wing political parties, the narcos saw an opportunity to fill a power vacuum where they were able to create the perception of a legitimate source of resistance.

Furthermore, gender in the Mexican “government’s portrayal of narcos holds together around a binary of masculine rationality in contrast to feminine irrationality.”12 What is rational is what is considered practical under this new narco neoliberal economy, and what is practical is the active participation of men; men are the ones committing the violence, selling the drugs, and dictating who else gets to participate, whereas the irrational woman will have a more passive role of domesticity where she never directly participates but is still able to enjoy the monetary gain of her husband. This is the case with Julio, who reeks of money and blood while Fernanda is able to live without ever having to see any of the murders. This then perpetuates the idea the maybe the narco is the hero, because not having to see the crime provides the necessary tools to have a successful denial of a person’s wrongdoing.

Now, what this means for Fernanda is confusion, instability, and inadequacy. The analysis, then, has to focus on three levels of autonomy: the body, mind, and behavior. The novel begins with “Supe que con una mano podría matarme.”13 This first sentence represents Fernanda’s recognition of the physical power that Julio has over her body. In recognizing this, she simultaneously accepts her position as the subordinate. Ideally, any woman in her shoes could, at the same time, recognize that it might not be the healthiest relationship for her. However, in the same paragraph, Fernanda concedes any concern that may arise from knowing that she could be killed effortlessly by Julio. In fact, she says “Me excitan las situaciones de poder en las que hay un sometido y un aggressor,”14 and thus, allows the reader to then safely assume that she views the treatment of Julio as something positive. Her relationship with Julio serves as a reflection of her lack of power in society as a woman. It is clear that Julio, an abuser, feels sexual gratification from inflicting pain onto Fernanda and feels power when inflicting pain onto civilians or individuals who have wronged the narcos he works with. Further, Fernanda’s feelings of 12

Wright, "Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide," 721.

Orfa Alarcón, Perra Brava, (México: Planeta, 2010), 11.

14 See above.

13

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inadequacy stem from her relationships with her family, especially the one she had with her father, which also resembles a power structure similar to Julio’s. Growing up in a family where there was always conflict between her mother and her alcoholic father began to manifest an anxiety within her. Confusion from the role that she played in her family not as a daughter, but as a means to the desired ends of her parents to resolve the conflict is obvious when she tells us that her father would flood her with gifts and money as a way of expressing affection and love.

This behavior became normalized, ultimately reflecting the way Julio communicates his love for Fernanda—i.e., by buying her cars, clothes, houses, etc. For Fernanda, her relationship with Julio serves as a way to relieve the anxiety from the absence of her father. So, it makes sense as to why she is so inclined to have pursued someone like Julio.

The Birth of a New Self Fernanda’s gender identity and personality undergo a fundamental change of character because it is something that can never be subjective.15 The first stage of this transition begins when she directly interacts with the police. This is significant because police are the enforcers of the law, and without a law enforcement the state would not be able to exist. Upon finding the severed head in the back of the car, they could have taken her to jail, but it can be assumed that the reason why she ends up in the house of a politician is because Julio knows the right people.

Additionally, Fernanda is not the only one who experiences a fundamental change in character.

Julio goes from being a man that previously could not express how he feels to someone who is willing to say “perdóname, princesa”16 to Fernanda after she interacts with the police. Julio could have punished Fernanda for being so careless, but instead he shows the first signs of caring, which catches Fernanda by surprise, and it forces her to reject him, as that is not how the Julio that “she knows” would have responded.

With the drastic character change in both Fernanda and Julio, the dynamic of their relationship also changes. Their relationship was able to thrive and continue because it was

15 16

Butler, Gender Trouble, 141.

Alarcón, Perra Brava, 83.

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sustained by violence, dominance, and fear. The minute that Julio decides to show his affection for her, she is cold, bitter, and disconnected when his hands “empezaron a acariciar mi cuello en un acto de cariño que me hizo temblar.”17 There are three reasons as to why she wanted the tough, masculine man with the power that Julio originally presented himself as. The first reason being that in a society where her subjectivity is defined by the power structure of the state, she cannot bear making any decisions independently, as she does not have the appropriate agency that Julio does as a sicario working in the narco world. The second reason is that she needs someone to replace the role of her father figure that has created an empty gap inside of her (recall the dreams where all she sees is her father). The last reason is that she needed someone to maintain her security. At the display of his fondness towards her, he begins to concede the ideal standard of masculinity that had previously allowed him to contain any feelings of sentimentality from being expressed. Masculinity is the dominant gender performance in a “neoliberal social structure, which creates a social ecology in which men are driven to hypermasculinity, exaggerating the violent, authoritarian, aggressive aspects of male identity in an attempt to preserve that identity.”18 Participating in that hyper-masculine violence allows for the stability of the neoliberal and power configuration of narcopolitics to be perpetuated. When Julio begins to act in contrast to that model of violence, it signifies that Julio may be experiencing anxiety and disintegration from the identity that is used as a tool by the state, for he is no longer an adequate contender of that role when he forfeits his masculinity.

Through Julio’s growing weakness, Fernanda finds the necessary fuel to elevate herself to a higher status in relation to those in the community and in the cartel. She does so by using Julio’s prestige in the narco world. She knows that if anything happens, he will be there to pick up the pieces for her. She attributes this to the fact that she is Julio’s property; Fernanda has always acknowledged and accepted that her existence had been reduced to nothing more than property, so embracing this fact means that she can begin to focus on how to gain autonomy after it has

17

Ibid., 87.

Mercedes Olivera and Victoria J. Furio, "Violencia Femicida: Violence against Women and Mexico's Structural Crisis," Latin American Perspectives 33, no. 2 (2006): 106.

18

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been stripped away from her. In a way, she has transformed Julio into the instrument that will help her achieve her ends. Where Julio used to be the one who terrorized civilians in their neighborhoods, Fernanda has now assumed that role, as there begins to be a significant lack of violence for which she is still hungry, except now she can fulfill her needs as the one who inflicts that violence rather than the one who receives. Here, Fernanda does break what would be considered the normative way of behaving for a woman in a patriarchal society. This is the ultimate signifier that Fernanda has been reborn. It is at this moment that she steps into her body because she knows that “Sobre mí estaba Julio, y sobre Julio no había ley.”19 This marks the end of her transition into the being that has control over her thoughts and actions.

With her newly obtained self-determination, she can begin to exercise her authority in the public sphere. Fernanda’s first act of violence occurs as she is driving home from school with her best friend Dante. While they are on the road, another driver aggressively pulls over into the lane that Fernanda is driving on and cuts her off. She says that “la vieja con rulos en la cabeza haciendo jetas, manoteó y me indicó a señas que no fuera tan imprudente.” 20 In what seems like an unexpected fit of rage from such a minor (and common) interaction on the road, she begins to follow the driver who had cut her off. She removes her glasses so that she can “verla bien,”21 and in her head she is thinking, “Peugeot mata Atos, pero BMW mata Peugeot. En cuanto pude, con el semáforo aún en rojo, di vuelta.”22 As she is following her she turns to Dante, asks him to open the glovebox, and requests that he hand her what is in there, never specifying that it was a gun.

He hesitates before handing it to her, and once the gun is in her hands Fernanda quickly pulls up to the other driver, yelling at her to roll down her window. Once the other driver looks over, fear penetrates the driver, causing them to lose control of the car and crash into a tree. Dante, who has just witnessed everything, is left speechless, shocked, and confused. Despite everything that had just occurred, it is evident that Fernanda does not feel any guilt or remorse for what had just happened, even though she was the cause of the accident. The motives for why Fernanda chose

19

Alarcón, Perra Brava, 88.

Ibid., 107.

21 See above.

22 Ibid., 108.

20

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to harass the other driver are questionable; it was not about a bad encounter that she had with another driver. Recall that the first thing she mentions about the other driver is the type of car that they are driving. The models of the car are so significant for Fernanda because they represent class, power, and status, and she cannot think in terms that are not exclusively capitalist. In threatening and eventually hurting the other driver, Fernanda used the car (the material good) as a way to prove and legitimize that she had the authority to commit that sort of violence towards the other driver. In saying that the BMW beats the Peugeot, she is affirming the fact that people with material goods that are worth less than hers are not allowed to inconvenience23 her, as it undermines her sense of entitlement. The neoliberal society in which Fernanda subsists has forced “individuals to believe that their relative worth is reflected in their accumulation of wealth and capacity to consume.”24 Thus, Fernanda has a “self-worth that is highly dependent upon external praise and circumstances,”25 which has caused her discontent every time someone else neglects to show “respect” for her. Hierarchies do not allow for the existence of equality among individuals, especially when power is predicated off of wealth. Furthermore, it is the reason why Fernanda fails to understand why her behavior was problematic to begin with, because it is always under a competitive framework.

With her agency now secured, she begins to test and push the limits of her power. She calls el Chino, one of Julio’s workers, and tells him that she needs him “para un acto vandálico.” 26 When el Chino asks her what their endeavor is about, Fernanda responds with “Me quería robar una cosa,”27 but she further affirms that “Lo mío es mío, aunque ya no lo”28 then asks him if he will help her in seeking revenge and when he says no, she tells him to get out of the car. She then goes to burn the house of the woman that Julio had been having an affair with. On her way home, she thinks to herself “me sentía pura y simplemente la dueña absoluta de

23

It can be inferred that Fernanda perceived the behavior of the other driver as a way to elevate themselves above Fernanda, especially when the other driver looked at Fernanda is a disapproving manner, and thus, causing a disruption within Fernanda.

24 Tim Kasser, and Steve Cohn, and Allen D. Kanner, and Richard M. Ryan, “Some Costs of American Corporate Capitalism: A Psychological Exploration of Value and Goal Conflicts,” Psychological Inquiry 18, no. 1 (2007): 12.

25 Ibid., 13.

26 Alarcón, Perra Brava, 196.

27 See above.

28 Ibid., 197.

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todo: lo que yo quisiera, estirando la mano lo obtendría.”29 It becomes evident that Fernanda, from now on, will have to do more than just hurt people in order to be satisfied and accomplished; she will have to actually begin killing those who threaten her and, in a way, the blood of those who have died will be what resolves her own insecurities. At this point, Fernanda has instituted the politics of the narco into her thoughts and her actions where the only rational response is to take the life of those who owe her something. She then approaches the house and sets a fire that injured two adults and killed Julio’s son. When she confesses to Dante that it had been her who had set fire to the house, Dante tries to warn that “nadie se mete con el hijo de nadie,”30 although, like earlier, she fails to recognize that she has done anything wrong. Fernanda has internalized the narco ideology, taking it to the extreme where she commits an act of terror on Julio’s son.

Julio, having nothing more to offer, has lost the most important person in his life. Killing his child was essential for Fernanda to disrupt the power he still held over her.

Julio, upon hearing the news that his son has died, goes home to confront Fernanda. The necropolitical act upon killing his son was broadcasted on the news, essentially made public. It serves the purpose of revealing the identity of the victims to Julio but serves the greater purpose of instigating fear to the general community when the first thing they hear in the morning is that someone, again, has been murdered. She knows that Julio has all the strength to kill her with his bare hands, but she sees that not even he wants to touch her anymore. It now appears that Julio does not want to exercise any control over her, perhaps bending his sadist tendencies when he is overcome by other feelings and urges, those of care and love for his child. Ironically, it is Fernanda who threatens to hurt him. Julio asks her: “crees que yo soy como tú?” 31 In killing his son, she pushes Julio over the brink and, in the meantime, Fernanda knows that she has him “en la palma de la mano”32 because she has taken the only thing that Julio had ever really cared about.

This isolates him in a state of desperation and hopelessness where he realizes that there is no solution to his anxiety except suicide. Like in a cultural setting, where citizens in a group have

29

See above.

Ibid., 200.

31 Ibid., 203.

32 Ibid., 202.

30

41

some agency over expressing how narco discourse and actions have affected them (as a whole), this scene of the novel unveils how narco and necropolitics can affect an individual, pushing them to the extreme of thoughts, feelings, and actions. Fernanda is slowly getting closer to him, thinking it will be the last time she can touch him because she thinks that she is the one that is going to be shot, but as she takes the last step towards him, he shoots himself in the head, splattering blood all over her.

Julio had the power to kill Fernanda, but killing her would not have resolved his increased anxieties, especially as his masculinity has been further deviating from the cherished masculine standards. Knowing that he would not have been able to perform his assigned role, particularly because he was willing to love and care for a child in a way that he had not been able to express to anyone he had ever been intimate with, taking his own life was the only way he was going to be able to escape the constant pressures and expectations that he had initially executed so well.

From Narco to Narca: Conclusion Julio’s suicide at the end can be interpreted as the consequences of all the events that unravel throughout the novel. His suicide at the same time represents the values of both the narco realm in relation to neoliberalism and toxic masculinity and how upholding those values to the core of their reality. His suicide is the systematic failure of a state that forces its subjects to comply with its discourse on human relations, not just to one another but to themselves. Furthermore, as it unveils the inadequacies of performing the desirable subject of the state, with a state that flourishes and runs on a politic of death, perhaps Julio was just another subject that has been necessary in that reproduction of death, and the reason that Fernanda lives is because she is able to, not only play by the rules of the game, but win.

Lastly, this novel is a testament to how narco trafficking in Mexico has affected men and women alike. It reveals the failures of the state to find solutions to the problem and shows how this problem could be larger than what a state and its population can handle. What novels like these prove is that there is “epistemic and real violence [that] are centerpieces of drug trafficking

42

and its main representatives.”33 The line between what we know and what is factual has been blurred by both the dialogue and information that the state and narcos choose to engage in and expel. It is demonstrative of how it is not the fault of one singular group, but the product of a series of relationships and interactions. At the core, the battle between the state and the narcos has weakened the citizens trust and hope for the future as it perpetuates endless terror and brutality. Although narcoculture does not provide any solutions, it does provide some sort of criticism and insight into what it is like to live in a country where every facet of society has been polluted by money and corruption. In the end, the problem is not that the countries who are producing the drugs fall victim to the consumption of them; in reality, the consumers of those drugs who reside across borders are not the ones who are targeted. But if they were, it would become really hard for a business that relies on a neoliberal platform to subsist. The novel represents the struggle between those who are subjected to control of the narcos from two perspectives, that of the woman (who is also subject to societal norms) and of those working in drug trafficking. It is not a romanticization of narcos but is demonstrative of how cruel and destructive that world can be for everyone living in close proximity to it. Both Fernanda and Julio are testimonies to the influence and tragedy of a circumstance they may have been coerced into by the discourse utilized by them.

33

Cabañas, "Imagined Narcoscapes," 6.

43

Works Cited Alarcón, Orfa. Perra Brava. México: Planeta, 2010.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Great Britain: Routledge, 1990.

Cabañas, Miguel A. "Introduction: Imagined Narcoscapes: Narcoculture and the Politics of Representation." Latin American Perspectives 41, no. 2 (2014): 3-17. Accessed January 14, 2020.

Campbell, Howard. "Narco-Propaganda in the Mexican "Drug War": An Anthropological Perspective." Latin American Perspectives 41, no. 2 (2014): 60-77. Accessed January 14, 2020.

Deleuze, Gilles. Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty. New York: George Braziller, 1971.

Kasser, Tim, and Steve Cohn, and Allen D. Kanner, and Richard M. Ryan. “Some Costs of American Corporate Capitalism: A Psychological Exploration of Value and Goal Conflicts.” Psychological Inquiry 18, no. 1 (2007): 1-22.

Olivera, Mercedes, and Victoria J. Furio. "Violencia Femicida: Violence against Women and Mexico's Structural Crisis." Latin American Perspectives 33, no. 2 (2006): 104-14.

Wright, Melissa W. "Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide: Gendered Violence on the Mexico-U.S. Border." Signs 36, no. 3 (2011): 707-31.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: CARLA GRACIANO My name is Carla Graciano, and I am a junior at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I am a Political Science, Spanish, and Philosophy major and am currently working as a writing and Spanish tutor for both high school and college students. My literary and philosophical interests include James Baldwin,Gloria Anzaldúa, Foucault, and Deleuze.

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“What is this thing, Lord?”: Matthew O’Connor and the Queer Theology of the Catholic Church in Nightwood (1937) Written by Olivia Harris 46

Introduction The modernist novel Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) is a celebration of difference. Published in 1937,1 it precociously spotlights the voices of those who are often marginalized: homosexuals, women, Jews, starving artists, political activists, the working class.2 The story focuses on a lesbian love triangle in Paris: a publicist named Nora Flood has a romantic relationship with the callous and detached Robin Vote, who then is unfaithful to Nora with the sycophantic Jenny Petherbridge. To cope with the stress of Robin’s infidelity, Nora turns to Dr. Matthew O’Connor, a devout Catholic, transvestite,3 and unlicensed gynecologist. His gender identity and religious identity are inextricable—they intersect to construct his Otherness.4 As a result, O’Connor’s character can be interpreted as both a queering5 of the body and a queering of the Catholic Church. Djuna Barnes effectively queers the Church via O’Connor by first invoking the Tiresian archetype, subsequently constructing him as the epitome of the Other, and lastly incorporating Christian references and symbolism. The rhetoric of this complicated process can be explained using critical essays in the fields of literature, philosophy, and history. The implications of this process for Nightwood and society as a whole are illuminated by queer theology. Gerard Loughlin describes queer theology as an approach to Christianity that “serves those who find themselves and others to be other than the characters prescribed by an identity.”6 Although queer theology is a relatively new discipline, Nightwood can be interpreted as a precursor to this approach because the inextricability of O’Connor’s faith and gender expression

1

While Nightwood was first published in Britain in 1936, it was republished in 1937 in the United States by Harcourt, Brace, & Co. I used the 1937 pagination, including the foreword by T.S. Eliot, for this analysis.

2 On page 55 of Nightwood, Djuna Barnes proudly states that Nora’s salon was “the strangest in America.” The attendees are “poets, radicals, beggars, artists, and people in love.”

3 I use the term “transvestite” instead of the term “transgender” because the former is ubiquitous in the literary criticism of Nightwood.

Today, Matthew would be considered transgender—if given the option, he would want to live his entire life as female. He absolutely despises his male genitalia. However, in the 1930s, sex reassignment surgery was not widely available, so it’s possible that he didn’t even consider transitioning to a female full-time or adequately passing in public a possibility.

4 In this context, the terms “Other” and “Otherness” refer to the literary representation of marginalized identities as inherently outside the dominant society.

5 In this context, the verb “queering” implies the process of disrupting the heteronormativity—assumption of heterosexuality—of an object or space.

6 Gerard Loughlin, Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body (New York: Blackwell, 2007), 9.

47

challenges readers’ preconceived notions about God’s identity and suggests that queer people have special connections to God.

Matthew O’Connor as a Tiresian Figure & the Epitome of the Other A comprehensive analysis of O’Connor’s character is largely missing from literary criticism due to Nightwood’s unique focus on a lesbian love triangle. The scholars who have begun mapping the implications of O’Connor’s character rely almost exclusively on Barnes’s employment of the Tiresian figure.7 As a result, the literature emphasizes the aesthetics of O’Connor’s feminine gender expression while overlooking its intersections with his Christian identity. According to the cultural studies scholar Marjorie Garber, transvestism fascinates academics because of its visibility, and perhaps this is why so much attention has been paid to that aspect of O’Connor’s identity.8 Though useful for interpreting the feminist message of Nightwood, analyzing O’Connor’s transvestism alone leaves Barnes’s strong criticism of the Church undiscussed. The overlap of gender nonconforming expression and religious faith shapes O’Connor’s experience, and enables Djuna Barnes’s queering of Christianity.

Barnes encourages readers to associate Matthew O’Connor with the Tiresian archetype by characterizing him not only as a transvestite, but as a person who has experienced life multiple times. When discussing how he feels trapped in his current male body, he suggests that he has inhabited various bodies in the past. He demands, “Am I to blame if I’ve been summoned before and this is my last and oddest call?”9 Other characters throughout the novel perceive that O’Connor may have past lives. For example, a priest friend interrupts one of O’Connor’s

In the field of literary studies, transvestite characters like Matthew O’Connor are often considered Tiresian figures. According to literary critic Ed Madden, this term originates from an Ovidian myth in which a man named Tiresias experiences life multiple times as both a man and a woman. When the gods ask him whether men or women prefer sexual intercourse, Tiresias claims that women enjoy sex ten times more than men. Juno responds by blinding him, and Zeus ameliorates the damage by giving him the power of prophecy.

In modernist and postmodernist literature, authors who invoke the Tiresian figure are typically referencing two characteristics: Tiresias’s existence as both male and female as well as his prophetic powers (cf. Chapter 1).

8 Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Identity (Abingdon: Routledge, 1992), 149.

9 Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1937), 97.

7

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soliloquys to tell him he is a “‘man with a prehistoric memory.’”10 This statement implies that his past lives have given him a reservoir of knowledge from which to draw.

The priest grows frustrated because O’Connor tells disjointed and confusing stories constantly. The content of the stories, however, reflects the wealth of O’Connor’s lived—or imagined as lived—experience in multiple bodies. For example, at a large dinner party he claims he “‘was in a war once himself,’” where he learned that “‘there are directions and speeds that no one has calculated.’”11 While the spatial and temporal context of these events is unclear, O’Connor is using the fragment of a memory or fantasy to share insight with as many people as he can. Thus, O’Connor has a prophetic level of insight about human experience and interpersonal relationships that is typically associated with the Tiresian.

Even though O’Connor is a sort of prophet, Barnes also associates the Tiresian with despair and isolation. Ed Madden claims that the Tiresian is “a misery situated in the economies of the sexual order and the identities made available or denied to those who find themselves outside of socially prescribed roles and socially accepted constructs of desire.” 12 O’Connor’s sense of having lived multiple lives causes immense suffering, as evidenced by his statement that he “began to mourn for [his] spirit…[which] cast[s] a shadow long beyond what [he is].” 13 More broadly, the discord between O’Connor’s physical appearance and gender expression permeates the novel. One character noted upon seeing him in public that “his dark shaved chin was lowered as if in a melancholy that had no beginning or end.”14 Even though he is always emotionally available to the other characters and shares as much knowledge with them as he can, no one can fully comprehend his distress.

O’Connor’s distress stems from a sense of having lived multiple lives and his sense of living in the wrong body. As a transvestite, O’Connor is the Other among Others. He experiences debilitating gender dysphoria, finally disclosing to the protagonist Nora Flood when she comes 10

Ibid., 173.

Barnes, Nightwood, 25-6.

12 Ed Madden, Tiresian Poetics: Modernism, Sexuality, Voice, 1888-2001 (Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont, 2008), 192.

13 Barnes, Nightwood, 122.

14 Ibid., 117.

11

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upon him in drag that “it was a high soprano I wanted, and deep corn curls to my bum, with a womb as big as a king’s kettle, and a bosom as high as the bowsprit of a fishing schooner.”15 Instead of trying to empathize with O’Connor’s suffering, Flood simply responds by saying, “you are so like a child.”16 As he communicates his distress to her, Flood steers the conversation toward her own troubles with Robin Vote. Even though O’Connor serves as a confidante to the other characters in the novel, he cannot engage in meaningful discussion about his own identity with any of them. His subsequent isolation further reinforces his otherness.

Transvestites are so marginalized in daily life because they dare to challenge the socially constructed barriers between male and female. Marjorie Garber and Judith Butler posit that transvestites face an extra-concentrated form of oppression and exclusion because they pose a direct threat to the legitimacy of the patriarchy. According to Butler, gender “is a form of social power that produces the intelligible field of subjects.”17 Those who do not neatly conform to the socially constructed gender binary weaken the supremacy of patriarchal power because they exist outside of conventional classifications. Marjorie Garber concurs, stating that “transvestism is a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture: the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself.”18 Thus, transvestite identities directly challenge entire belief systems about how society should function. If there are more than two distinct and socially sanctioned genders, it is difficult to maintain patriarchal hegemony.

While the works of Garber and Butler were published long after Nightwood, Barnes’ portrayal of O’Connor also suggests that she viewed transvestism as a rejection of the socially constructed gender binary. However, instead of underscoring the nonconformity of his behavior as modern scholars might, Barnes focuses on the unusual appearance of O’Connor’s body. When Flood enters O’Connor’s bedroom, she cannot look away from his “head, with its over-large black

15

Ibid., 97.

Ibid., 141.

17 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), 48.

18 Garber, Vested Interests, 17.

16

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eyes, its full gun-metal cheeks and chin…framed in the golden semi-circle of a wig with long pendant curls that touched his shoulders.”19 She describes herself as feeling “dismayed” by his appearance.20 Flood expresses shock not at the social transgression O’Connor is committing, but at the nonconformity of his physical appearance. His cross-dressed body, as an expression of his gender identity, is a spectacle by which Nora Flood cannot help but be enthralled.

In Djuna Barnes’ historical context, this framework of conceptualizing difference as freakishness would be immediately legible to her audience. According to historian of American popular culture Elizabeth Grosz, freaks were understood in the twentieth century as “those human beings who exist outside and in defiance of the structure of binary oppositions that govern our basic concepts and modes of self-definition.”21 When talking about the Coney Island freak show, O’Connor himself says, “take away a man’s conformity and you take away his remedy.” 22 He uses the shock of seeing physically disabled bodies as evidence that the physical representation of nonconformity shocks society. Presenting a gender non-conforming character as a freak because of his failure to adhere to the gender binary is an early corollary to Butler’s and Garber’s later claims that transvestites challenge the social power of categorization.

One result of O’Connor’s extreme marginalization is his unprecedented ability to empathize with the other characters in the novel, all of whom are themselves Other. If Barnes’ novels are forays into what it means to be different, O’Connor’s experiences qualify him as a guide for the reader into the world of Nightwood. He knows more about Robin Vote, Nora Flood, and Jenny Petherbridge than they know themselves. It is no accident that this unparalleled ability to understand others occurs through the most marginalized character in the book: literary critic Sarah Hayden asserts that Connor’s “crossgendered sensibility is uniquely calibrated to channel the frequencies of the abjected bodies of the underworld.”23 Thus, Barnes explicitly links 19

Barnes, Nightwood, 85.

Barnes, Nightwood, 86.

21 Elizabeth Grosz, “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, edited

by Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 57.

22 Barnes, Nightwood, 155.

23 Sarah Hayden, “What Happens When a Transvestite Gynaecologist Usurps the Narrator?: Cross-Gendered Ventriloquism in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood,” in Cross-Gendered Literary Voices, edited by Rina Kim and Claire Westall (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 89.

20

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O’Connor’s unique gender presentation with a capacity to empathize with the experiences of oppressed individuals.

Queering Catholicism, Questioning Assumptions Many authors discuss Barnes’ use of the Tiresian as a purely feminist technique. For example, Nancy Bombaci claims Barnes deliberately “appropriated the prerogative of the fetishistic gaze associated with the masculine observer” in order to assert herself as a female writer and challenge dominant ideas about female inferiority.24 Ostensibly, Barnes’ motive for employing the Tiresian figure in Nightwood is to challenge male productions of the Tiresian around the same time. Male authors who incorporated Tiresian figures often used them to tap into “the developing cultural concern over sexual identity” and the perceived destruction of category that would follow.25 Barnes, on the other hand, presents the Tiresian O’Connor not as a dangerous threat to the social order, but as a “predicament” who suffers because of the social expectations of gender forced upon him.26 In so doing, she turns the dominant narrative that portrays gender variance as inherently negative on its head. Challenging contemporary masculine anxieties is thus one motivating factor in Djuna Barnes’ portrayal of O’Connor as a Tiresian figure.

Barnes goes a step further and uses the Tiresian figure to challenge religious epistemologies of sexual deviance. Marjorie Garber explains that allowing transvestites to express themselves freely would create unmitigated disaster for the Church. The Church has historically been permeated by the “general and pervasive fear of transvestism as a powerful agent of destabilization and change, the sign of the ungroundedness of identities on which social structures and hierarchies depend.”27 This view, which would have been commonplace at the time of Barnes’ writing, implies that gender nonconforming identities are deliberate transgressions across 24

Nancy Bombaci, Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture: Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2006), 49.

25 Madden, Tiresian Poetics, 33.

26 Barnes, Nightwood, 18.

27 Garber, Vested Interests, 223.

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important boundaries that protect society. The Tiresian figure, in all of its gender nonconformity, “interrogate[s] the relation of universalizing, normative, and disciplinary formations of cultural meaning to the particular embodiments of sexual and social marginality.” 28 The Tiresian dismantles the borders and boundaries of gender performance and acceptable sexual behavior. It asks why those barriers exist in the first place, and who exactly they are meant to protect.29 At the same time that O’Connor’s oppression enhances his gift of empathy, his exercise of it is that of a clergyman or priest. Barnes makes this comparison in order to further problematize the authority of the church. The literary modernism expert Alex Goody remarks that for the other characters in Nightwood, O’Connor “listens, much as a priest would, to the confession of central characters.”30 Even though Flood is a Christian, she often calls upon O’Connor for guidance about her deteriorating relationship with Vote. Because she respects his unfathomable depths of experience, she often asks him, “‘What am I to do?’”31 Flood trusts O’Connor to help her solve pressing spiritual and emotional problems the same way one would solicit assistance from an ordained priest.

Djuna Barnes furthers the associations between O’Connor as Other and O’Connor as priest through her representation of his living quarters. When Flood comes to see O’Connor for advice, she notices that his bedroom is almost like a sanctuary. However, it is a sanctuary to female iconography: “perfume bottles, almost empty, pomades, creams, rouges, powder boxes and puffs…laces, ribands, stockings, ladies’ underclothing.”32 In addition to collecting Catholic icons for religious rituals, O’Connor has also sanctified femininity and collected associated relics. In just one scene, O’Connor’s character “merge[s] the sacred and the profane, destroying the boundaries between the clean and polluted, the proper and the corrupted, masculine and

28

Madden, Tiresian Poetics, 19.

It’s not women or queer people.

30 Alex Goody, Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 191.

31 Barnes, Nightwood, 99.

32 Barnes, Nightwood, 85.

29

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feminine.”33 He creates a religious space that is designated for the discussion of queer relationships and shines a queer light on the physical space of the church.

By

effectively

queering

Christianity,

Djuna

Barnes

implicitly

criticizes

the

heteronormativity of the Catholic Church. Readers are shocked at Barnes’ connection between ecclesiastical godliness and an unlicensed gynecologist who pulls out his penis in church and asks, “‘What is this thing, Lord?’”34 Confusion about why she would draw this parallel creates the perfect niche for Barnes to challenge the Church’s regulation of sexuality and gender expression.

Queer Theology for a Queer Future While Barnes criticizes the Church, she makes O’Connor a devout Catholic. It is at first astonishing that she would give a faith in the Christian God to a character who is a symbol of cultural anxiety about sexual deviants—the epitome of the Other. After all, verses in Deuteronomy historically have been used to justify the repression and marginalization of transvestites when there was no codified law to do so.35 But Barnes is arguing that in spite of the Church’s repressive teachings, Christianity itself is queer. Furthermore, she uses O’Connor to express hope for a more progressive future, one in which the Church appreciates the rich experience of marginalized people and the insight they can provide to a church community.

The field of queer theology is dedicated to envisioning this same hope. While the discipline is relatively new, Nightwood shares many of its core tenets and can be considered a precursor.

One of the discipline’s major goals is to expose the queer underbelly of an institution that imposes

33 34

Goody, Modernist Articulations, 171.

Barnes, Nightwood, 141.

35

Garber, Vested Interests, 28-9. The Book of Deuteronomy is a book of the Old Testament (in the Christian tradition) or the Torah (in the Jewish tradition) which puts forth several stipulations about how adherents of the Judeo-Christian tradition should conduct themselves regardless of coexisting secular law. Deuteronomy 22:5 states, “A woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment” (King James Version).

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strict controls on sexuality and gender expression. For example, Marjorie Garber’s chapter “Religious Habits” in her book Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety mentions that despite the Church’s fear of transvestism, the attire of clergymen has often been associated with female dress.36 Additionally, according to the queer theologist Mark D. Jordan, “[i]n the Catholic Church, the priesthood has been assigned gender roles that mix or confuse ordinary gender expectations.”37 Both Garber and Jordan argue that not only is it unethical for the Church to limit freedom with respect to gender expression, but several of the Church’s traditions can be construed as queer.

Like the queer theology texts mentioned above, the novel explicitly refutes the Church’s authority as a social institution to set boundaries for sexuality and gender expression because of its inherently queer traditions. Although Flood initially expresses shock upon seeing O’Connor in stereotypically feminine clothing, she later comes to the realization that her horror is a cultural production. She remarks, “is not the gown the natural raiment of extremity? What nation, what religion, what ghost, what dream, has not worn it—infants, angels, priests, the dead.”38 Even though O’Connor destabilizes the gender binary by wearing clothes commonly associated with the opposite sex, Flood—who is also queer and Christian—begins to question who sets those boundaries and who benefits from their imposition.39 In addition to questioning the Church’s authority to police sexuality and gender expression, Barnes also compels us to meditate on the nature of God. The characters often express confusion about who God is and what he or she wants. This is an application of negative theology which many queer theologists use to create space for queer identities and expressions within the Christian tradition. For example, Susannah Cornwall compares the “unknowability of God” 36

Garber, Vested Interests, 211.

Mark D. Jordan, “God’s Body,” in Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body, edited by Gerard Loughlin (New York: Blackwell, 2007), 286.

38 Barnes, Nightwood, 86.

39 It’s also possible that Matthew’s portrayal as a Christian transvestite who deliberately adopts femininity is an argument for women’s liberation in the Church.

37

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expressed by negative theology to the “profoundly ineffable and indescribable nature of the manner in which human sex, gender and sexuality fit together.” 40 Even though O’Connor refers to himself as “‘a good man’” and a “‘lioness’” in the same breath, that does not necessarily mean that his fluid concept of self conflicts with his Christian identity. 41 Although the Church as an institution has historically insisted that gender identity be concrete and expressed in finite ways, Christianity as a relationship between God and the individual is largely undefined because God is unknowable.

It is this resistance to definition and evasion of clear language that makes Christianity so queer. As queer theologist Gerard Loughlin eloquently states, “even when theology was culturally dominant it was strange, for it sought the strange; it sought to know the unknowable in Christ, the mystery it was called to seek through following Jesus.”42 Jesus’ sexuality and gender expression are unknown, but we do know that as the son of God he was not averse to violating the social norms that organize society.43 The Church as an institution designates God as male, but that was done to establish his supremacy by giving him “the sex/gender that claims particular privileges and powers.”44 The ideal Christian must transcend the confines of categorization in the pursuit of divine truth.

In the radical act of expressing his gender nonconforming identity, O’Connor does just that. His transvestism enriches his relationship with God. While he is angry with God for not making him female at birth, praying to God enables him to voice feelings that Flood and the other characters cannot understand. He mentions the relief he feels after confession, going from a “soul in physical stress” to “forgiven.”45 He is even able to assign God a female gender as a method of redressing what he perceives to be the “mistake” of his male birth. 46 While the institution of the Church may marginalize him as a sinner, his inner religiosity provides him with comfort in a Susannah Cornwall, “Apophasis and Ambiguity: The ‘Unknowingness’ of Transgender,” in Trans/Formations, edited by Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood (London: SCM Press, 2009), 17.

41 Barnes, Nightwood, 172.

42 Loughlin, Queer Theology, 7.

43 Jordan, “God’s Body,” 285.

44 Ibid., 282.

45 Barnes, Nightwood, 33, 24.

46 Ibid., 159.

40

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harsh world. The traditions give him a sense of belonging.47 By facing existential questions about his gender identity, O’Connor revisits and strengthens his relationship with God.

Conclusion Most readers in 1937 would probably not associate transvestism with holiness, spirituality, or closeness to God. Djuna Barnes, however, creates a character that is both gender nonconforming and an observant Catholic. By constructing the queerest Catholic she can conceive of—one who is misunderstood even by his queer peers—Barnes suggests that there is something very queer about Christianity. Despite the Church’s obsession with concrete boundaries, Christian theology itself resists the barriers that define normal and abnormal, acceptable and forbidden, male and female. The queer theology perspective asserts that God is never truly knowable and cannot be contained by human inventions, including the gender binary.

Many scholars have investigated Barnes’ references to the Tiresian figure in O’Connor’s character. These insights are incredibly useful in demonstrating how Barnes appropriates typically male authorial styles to assert her own agency as a female intellectual. O’Connor delivers more than a feminist message, however. His character also critiques the Church for regulating sexuality and gender expression while Christianity is inherently queer. His suffering as a Christian within a heteronormative Church compels readers to dare to imagine a world where queer people are celebrated instead of ostracized by their religious communities.

Like later works in queer theology, Nightwood is a treatise on the need for a more progressive and inclusive Church. Djuna Barnes uses O’Connor’s character to implode our current notions of what a Christian is and who/what God is. By refusing to accept the social restrictions placed on him by society and even more so by the Church, O’Connor is not prevented from being a Christian. In fact, his gender nonconformity strengthens his relationship with God.

47

Ibid., 23-4.

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank G. Crites for their meticulous review of this paper when it was initiallywritten for ENGL 221H at UNC-Chapel Hill. I would also like to thank Andrew Richards for assistance in preparation of this manuscript, as well as my instructor, María De Guzmán, for her continued support throughout the writing and revising process.

Bibliography Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1937.

Bombaci, Nancy. Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture: Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006.

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. Abingdon: Routledge, 2004.

Cornwall, Susannah. “Apophasis and Ambiguity: The ‘Unknowingness’ of Transgender.” In Trans/Formations, edited by Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood, pp. 13-40.

London: SCM Press, 2009.

Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety. Abingdon: Routledge, 1992.

Garland Thomson, Rosemarie, editor. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body.

New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Goody, Alex. Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein.

London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Grosz, Elizabeth. “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit.” In Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, edited by Rosemarie Garland Thomson, pp. 55-66.

New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Hayden, Sarah. “What Happens When a Transvestite Gynaecologist Usurps the Narrator?: Cross-Gendered Ventriloquism in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.” In Cross-Gendered 58

Literary Voices, edited by Rina Kim and Claire Westall, pp. 74-92. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Jordan, Mark D. “God’s Body.” In Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body, edited by Gerard Loughlin, pp. 281-292. New York: Blackwell, 2007.

Loughlin, Gerard. Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body. New York: Blackwell, 2007.

Madden, Ed. Tiresian Poetics: Modernism, Sexuality, Voice, 1888-2001. Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp., 2008.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: OLIVIA HARRIS Originally from Chicago, Olivia Harris is currently a junior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she double majors in English and history with a minor in medical anthropology. Her academic interests include the history of American slavery, the history of science and medicine, medical humanities, disability studies, trauma studies, and gender and sexuality studies. When she is not in the library, you can find her visiting coffee shops in Chapel Hill, taking long walks in nature, andteaching adult basic education in the community. Back at home in Chicago, she has a Chihuahua named Andre, whom she rescued in 2014.

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“I Deserve Everything”: The Role of Confidence in 21st Century Women’s Sports Written by Sabeehah Ravat 60

Introduction Professional sport is one of the most highly consumed entertainment products in the world, making it both an accessible and unstable foundation for engaging in activism and championing sociopolitical change. Throughout its history, the foundation of heteropatriarchal white supremacy that sports is built on has been challenged, renegotiated, and reinforced. According to American sportswriter Dave Zirin, “sports is a contested space” (Jhally 2012) and this inevitably manifests in some of the most defining moments in struggles for racial integration, gay liberation, and gender equity. Sports and, perhaps more crucially, athletes become representatives of a unique platform of assimilation and resistance, of segregation, integration, and celebration on a global scale.

Professional sports has historically always centered white bodies as being worthy of success and accolades. White privilege speaks more to an individual experience, while white supremacy "encompasses economic, political, social, and cultural structures, actions, and beliefs that systematize and perpetuate an unequal distribution of privileges, resources and power between white people and people of color” (DiAngelo 2018, 56). Thus, while both white supremacy and white privilege are pervasive in professional sports globally, white supremacy is used here to allude to a more systemic exclusion, erasure, and violation of black and brown bodies in sports.

The notion of a “female athlete” remains a contested embodiment within a contested domain, continually being policed, fleshed out, destroyed, and reconstructed to denote what is considered both a female body and an athletic body. “Female” is often used to refer to someone who’s anatomical sex is aligned with perceived scientific boundaries of femaleness, while woman more closely relates to a person’s recognized gender identity. However, as Judith Butler (6) argues and as is true of intersex runner Caster Semenya, the distinction between sex and gender is both reductive and more malleable than is understood. The separation, in its inaccuracy and incompleteness, further serves to reinforce trans-exclusionary binaries in sport. Being female is about biology, mentality, history, and society all at once, while also potentially being void of any 61

number of those categories. So, if one “becomes a woman” (de Beauvoir 1973, 301) in much the same way that one becomes an athlete, then the identity of female athlete remains fluid and heterogeneous, a multitude of experiences and positionalities that cannot be monolithically constricted to a single manifestation. In this paper, the definition of a female athlete will be a person who identifies as a woman and is professionally employed in playing some type of sport, bearing in mind that this does not encapsulate the true nuances of femaleness or womanness that exists both within and outside of the sports world.

The manifestation and evolution of women’s professional sports around the world, as well as its ever-growing popularity, is perhaps one of the most distinct phenomena that represents the relationship between sports and activism. Because sports has been historically fashioned as a male and masculine-dominated culture, with phallogocentrism being consubstantial to dominant notions of strength, speed, and physical resilience, women’s fight to be included and recognized as professional athletes on the same level as their male counterparts remains an endeavor of social justice (Lemmon 2019, 238). In fact, existing as a professional female athlete in itself destabilizes heteropatriarchal notions of the strength, physical prowess, and intellectual discipline that is instrumental in sports.

When it comes to intersections of race and sexuality, professional women’s sports does more than simply push for gender equity; it helps to address and dismantle symbolic annihilation.

Symbolic annihilation, coined by researchers George Gerbner and Larry Gross in 1976, refers to the impact that lack of representation can have on the psyche, making people feel invisible and non-existent. By publicly embodying multiple marginalized identities in sports, women of color and/or queer women attempt to provide much-needed representation, while also subverting the stereotypes associated with these politicized identities. For Jennifer Doyle, while these “diverse figures” are exemplified and placed on a pedestal, the communities that reflect those identities and need that representation are often “dis-remembered” (422). Because the oxymoronic embodiment of “the female athlete cannot measure human capacity” (Doyle 2013, 421), these women are cauterized from the people they represent, dehumanized, and shaped as figurines to 62

be scrutinized. Thus, for female athletes to truly come to voice themselves and simultaneously give voice to issues of importance, they have to be much more intentional in taking control of their identities and their politics. In seeking to employ feminist tools that do not produce new forms of hierarchy and exclusion, decisive and unapologetic confidence becomes that much more impactful.

The gendered gap in confidence, a theory which implied that women in the workplace have less confidence than men on average, has been dismissed because of lack of sustained evidence to its validity (Zhao et al. 2005, 1270). However, new research shows that women are less likely to publicly display self-confidence due to the potential “backlash effect” that could impact their promotional opportunities and their professional relationships with colleagues and superiors (Lindeman et al. 2018, 222). Laura Guillen stated in the Harvard Business Review that “While self-confidence is gender-neutral, the consequences of appearing self-confident are not,” implying that women who explicitly show self-confidence are often received negatively and seen as less likable. In sports, women are seen as “excessive in physicality and temperament” (Doyle 2013, 420) and are pathologised and ostracized for it. However, female athletes are increasingly choosing to forgo the gendered pro-social (concern for others) requirement that often accompanies self-confidence and self-promotion, utilizing public displays of confidence in their abilities and achievements as an activist tool. Through the examination of US Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and USWNT player Megan Rapinoe, I will argue that public displays of confidence by female athletes are a central tool of activism within women’s sports, serving to queer the phallogocentric foundations of sports and renegotiate what it means to embody the identity of both a woman and a professional athlete.

Sparkly Gymnast Sticks the Landing and Sticks it to Her Doubters In October 2019, during an interview after winning her fifth all-round world title, U.S Olympic gymnast Simone Biles said: “I’m the best gymnast there is” (Armour 2019). While part of a larger statement that she made about double standards of confidence in sports and also 63

factually true (Roenigk 2019), this statement caused controversy with many media outlets labeling her as arrogant or questioning her credentials. This comes as no surprise considering that female athletes have to contend with being viewed as women before being seen as athletes (Trolan 2013, 216), which is an attempt to enforce and police femininity. This is an issue that is continually exacerbated by the coverage of women’s sports in the media.

In women’s sports, the degree to which athletes conform to societal expectations of femininity often precedes their athletic ability and their success (Trolan 2013, 218). This becomes especially true when race and, in particular, blackness intersect with the element of gender, in which the racialised construction of black women often positions them outside dominant and accepted boundaries of womanhood (Douglas 2002). Black women have historically been seen as less than human, as savages with unquenchable sexual desire or as objects on which sexual desire can be placed without consequence (Bennett 2018, 168). At the same time, gender segregation in sports dislocates black women even further because the black body has always been presented as “athleticism itself” (Doyle 2013, 420), with historical attributions of speed and strength to black bodies, but the female body’s capacity for athleticism continues to be exiled.

For those women like Simone Biles, who reject white-washing and being made racially palatable, who embody black femininity and feminine blackness, displaying confidence in one’s sporting ability and “sparkle” becomes a method of resistance.

During racial integration in various team sports, white supremacy was maintained by ensuring that leadership and power were limited to white players and never allocated to athletes of color, whether that be a captainship or simply commentators dismissing any cerebral aspects displayed by athletes of color (Jhally 2012). By participating in the solo sport of gymnastics, which has historically been dominated by white Eastern European athletes, Simone Biles prevents herself from being portrayed as simply a cog in a larger team machine. She succeeded in adopting an independent confidence that allowed her to construct a sense of personhood in her athletic embodiment that was not at the mercy of white teammates. In excelling as a soloist, and in displaying confidence in the intellectual discipline that it takes to achieve her physical 64

recognition, Biles has reclaimed and taken ownership of what it means to a self-sufficient black female body in professional sports.

At the age of 22, Simone Biles is the most decorated gymnast of all time, but her youth and small stature often lead to her being referred to as “girl” or a “little woman” and only being called by her first name. This is a common theme in women’s sports, with athletes being infantilized (Fink 2015, 334) by the media, regardless of how old the athlete actually is, how long they have partaken in professional sports, or how much success they have accumulated. Infantilization is a mode of re-establishing dominance. This tactic, portraying female athletes as small and unimportant, strategically re-centers male supremacy in sports. This becomes particularly complex for black female athletes, as black girls are generally “adultified” (Epstein 4) and viewed societally as less innocent than white girls of the same age. For Simone Biles, this creates a unique positionality where her race and gender interact with her professional athleticism, deeming her as too young to be respectable in terms of her success, but simultaneously not youthful enough to be an inspired prodigy of achievement. However, Biles expresses confidence in her current success of having more gold medals than her age (Bevan), reconciling this contested space of racialized youth as another platform for renegotiating norms of intersecting embodiment. As with both race and age being contested identities, sexuality is also integral in the scope of women’s sports in the United States.

Purple-Haired Lesbian Goddess Won’t be Silenced In the summer of 2019, soccer player Megan Rapinoe co-captained the US Women’s National Team to their second consecutive, and fourth overall, World Cup title in France. The entire US Women’s National Team (USWNT) roster’s confident demeanour and unwillingness to temper their behaviour opened them up to constant criticism throughout the tournament. Alexi Lalas described the team as having “embraced this arrogance and brashness of almost a bullyesque type of stance” (FOX Sports 2019), simply for the fact that they were goal-hungry and celebratory during matches. After the tournament, during the ticker-tape parade in New York 65

City, Rapinoe was filmed by a teammate saying, “I deserve everything” and that, along with her shock of lavender hair and unwaveringly loud political stances, made her a contentious figure in the media in the months to follow.

Megan Rapinoe’s confidence in her abilities and her right to own space in women’s soccer is unquestionable, but it is also not just limited to her professional life. As an out lesbian, she does not shy away from displaying her sexuality to the world, whether it be championing LGBTQ+ rights or simply showing affection for her girlfriend on social media. Furthermore, she continually emphasizes the LGBTQ+-affirmative space that women’s soccer holds, by categorically stating that “you can’t win a championship without gays on your team” (Church 2019) and calling for more effort to eradicate homophobia in professional sports across the gender divide. As an additional facet of her sexuality, Rapinoe also resists assimilation to the norm of feminine beauty that is often used as branding in sports media (Lobpries 2018, 5), opting for a more androgynous gender expression that inherently rejects male sexualization. By embodying the political positionality of queer, Rapinoe utilizes the radical potential imbued in queerness (Cohen 2019, 143) both as a justification for being confident in the first place and to fuel her confidence in how her identity, career, and activism intertwine and integrate into her public life.

Rapinoe, who is thirty-four years old, has had her age spotlighted in conjunction with every achievement she has earned this year, from World Cup Golden Boot Winner (awarded to the player who scores the most goals during the tournament) to FIFA Player of the Year. Rather than being infantilized, her age is often used to express surprise at her overwhelming success, which has been called out by comedian Leslie Jones as “ageist” (Thomas 2019). While Jones is not a professional sports commentator, she is an avid supporter of the USWNT and a prominent voice against ageism, particularly in terms of women. Though age is a consideration in most sports journalism, making Rapinoe’s age a focal point (Thomas 2019), as seen by a graphic under her Golden Boot achievement that read “Oldest player to win...” is a double standard that is starkly missing from coverage of men’s soccer. However, the media obsession with her age barely bothers Rapinoe, who maintains conviction in the maturity that her years of experience on the 66

national team has helped bring to her game and her contributions on the pitch (Thomas 2019). In showing self-assurance about her age, not as a challenge to be overcome, but as a natural and beneficial aspect in the evolution of her professional career, Rapinoe’s confidence subverts notions of women’s age being an inverse determinant of their worth or their success.

Sports has historically been a global institution that is pervasive in preserving whiteness and promoting white supremacy (Jhally 2012). Thus, Megan Rapinoe’s existence as a queer woman on the world stage cannot negate the role that racial privilege affords her in her activism and the way she chooses to use her platform. She was the first white professional athlete to kneel in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick in 2016 and still does not participate in the singing of the national anthem before matches. However, despite kneeling becoming ultimately banned by the US Soccer Federation, the professional consequences that Rapinoe has faced compared to that of Kaepernick were minimal and her career continues to flourish because of the protection and oversight that her whiteness affords her. Whiteness has remained central to the work that Rapinoe has been able to do, both in her public stance against her own federation for equal pay and in her viewpoint as an activist overall, something that she acknowledged in a recent acceptance speech: “I’m not going to ct like my whiteness has nothing to do with me standing before you now” (Glamour 2019). White privilege undoubtedly fuels her confidence, but, in a more nuanced way, Rapinoe uses her racial identity to further her activism. She harnesses the power that is allocated to her by systems that privilege whiteness in a continued attempt to renegotiate the discriminatory consequences of racial identity in relation to public displays of confidence in women’s sports and in larger societal contexts.

Perhaps nothing is more reflective of the self-assurance that Megan Rapinoe embodies than her now (in)famous goal-celebration stance. The cool, almost serene, open-armed pose is ironic in how self-contained and calm it is, while still gaining equal shares of euphoric support and confrontational dismissal, with claims that Rapinoe loves herself “too much” (Wallace 2019).

Wallace goes on to sum up the poignancy of the pose, saying, “In one gesture, the 34-year-old midfielder acknowledged her own greatness, embraced the audience, honored her team and 67

celebrated the joy of being at the center of a women’s sports team paving the way for gender parity in attention, respect and maybe even pay”. By taking up space while remaining collected, tranquil, and open, Rapinoe’s action did more than display the dominance of her team on the world stage; it inspired and encouraged women to ditch demure behavior in favor of owning their space without fear. In this way, the pose serves as a perfect amalgamation of how Rapinoe has utilized and nurtured her confidence as a player, woman, and activist to resist dominant notions of female embodiment and cultivate new modes of becoming.

Conclusion Sports is not remotely apolitical and is instead necessarily and inherently political. In fact, Dave Zirin argued that “sports forces people to confront issues and ideas that they would otherwise be mentally segregated from” (Jhally 2012), positioning sports as a catalyst for social and political revolution. This is especially true of women’s sports which, in its very existence, serves to destabilize and renegotiate the racist heteropatriarchal basis of professional sports. In asserting confidence in their talents and success, in being unafraid to demand the financial compensation their deserve, female athletes transcend social limitations in their gender performance and physical embodiment.

Flaunting one’s self-assurance has always been central to the personas of professional male athletes, from Muhammed Ali calling himself pretty to Zlatan Ibrahimovic commenting on how perfect he is. The escalation from confidence into arrogance is not just accepted as normal in men’s sports but embraced and encouraged. However, public displays of confidence by women are generally received negatively in professional spaces, affecting likability and even career development (Lindeman et al. 2018, 224). Intentionally choosing to be unapologetically confident in one’s talent, success, and identity can pose a professional risk for female athletes, while also exposing them to personal harassment. As such, displaying self-confidence in women’s sports is embedded with more widespread intention and consequence, serving to reconfigure societal understandings of gender discrimination in sport and female embodiment more ubiquitously.

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“The athletic figure is queer: it is elemental, fleshy, and intersubjective” (Doyle 426) and, when feminized or womanized even slightly, this figure’s potential for queerness increases exponentially. The female athlete engaging in women’s sports navigates exclusionary ideals of strength and speed, simultaneously enfeebling and augmenting the historical phallogocentric foundation of sports. When self-esteem and conviction are forbidden on the basis of gender identity, when their gender exiles them in sports, confident female athletes shift societal paradigms. In a context where women are expected to remain meek and submissive, female athletes fight gender itself by dauntlessly showing confidence like the men they are not.

The confidence that Simone Biles and Megan Rapinoe display is situated in being uncompromising in the way that they want to take up space. Their very existence in a landscape that has been built to continually deny them access for being black, for being lesbian, for being women, for not being those things “correctly” enough, simultaneously reshapes female embodiment and athlete embodiment. Theirs is not a reclamation of confidence, but a refusal to surrender the confidence in the first place. Their words and actions are provocative and poignant, but not confrontational. Both women initiate a challenge in the serenity of their confidence for those who dare to doubt their careers or dismiss their activism while inviting others to join their efforts. Amidst a community of other female athletes and their growing base of support around the world, Simone Biles and Megan Rapinoe publicly challenge the status quo of docile women by displaying confidence in both their intersecting identities and their ever-expanding accomplishments.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: SABEEHAH RAVAT

Sabeehah Ravat is a student at the University of South Florida.

Having earned her Bachelor of Science in Integrative Biology, Sabeehah is moving into the field of Women and Gender Studies to pursue her Master of Arts. Sabeehah’s research focuses primarily on the kinship dynamics experienced by queer Muslims, but she also enjoys cultural analysis of sports and popular media.

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Misunderstood: A Cultural Historyof Eating Disorders in the West Written by Meera Shanbhag 73

Over 30 million people in the United States are plagued by eating disorders, with at least one death related to eating disorders occurring every 62 minutes.1 These serious illnesses, which have the greatest mortality rate of any psychological disorder, are characterized by abnormal eating patterns. Of all eating disorders, the two most well-known are anorexia nervosa, which consists of severe restriction in calories to achieve weight loss, and bulimia nervosa, in which purging follows periodic episodes of binge eating. While the diagnosis of the first eating disorder, “anorexia nervosa,” was not coined until 1873 by English physician William Gull, “disordered” eating behaviors as per current medical qualifications—most notably, self-induced starvation, binging, and purging—have a history that extends long before that. Although many assume that eating disorders have remained constant over time, reflecting unchanging diseases, evidence shows that past cases of disordered eating were not linked to body image and beauty standards of thinness until 1980. The cultural connotations in earlier time periods of the refusal of food, binging, and purging were distinctly different than they were following the creation of anorexia nervosa as a diagnosis, and both are unlike our understanding of eating disorders today.

English physician William Gull named the first eating disorder, anorexia nervosa, a disorder in his 1873 journal article, “Anorexia Hysteria (Apepsia Hysterica, Anorexia Hysterica).” A century later in 1979, the British psychiatrist Gerald Russell coined the diagnosis “bulimia nervosa,” characterizing it in his paper as “an ominous variant of anorexia nervosa.”2 The year 1952 marked the creation of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a handbook published and updated periodically by the American Psychiatric Association that contains the criteria used today to diagnose mental disorders in the US. The third version of the DSM, the DSM-III, released in 1980 listed “Anorexia Nervosa” and “Bulimia” as mental disorders in a section entitled, “Eating Disorders.” The DSM-III-R (1987), a revised version of the DSM-III, later modified the diagnosis “Bulimia” to “Bulimia Nervosa,” the name Russell

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Eating disorder statistics. (2017). Retrieved from http://www.anad.org/education-and-awareness/about-eating-disorders/eating-disorders-statistics/ 2

Russell, G. (1979, August). Bulimia nervosa: an ominous variant of anorexia nervosa. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/482466.

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gave the eating disorder in his 1979 paper, with the criteria of the disorder altered to make it more specific.3 The current DSM-V manual continues to qualify anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa as eating disorders.

Today, the DSM-V, used to diagnose anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, lists the body image of the patient—for the former, a “disturbance in the way in which one’s body weight or shape is experienced,” and for both, a “self-evaluation [by the patient] that is unduly influenced by body weight and shape”—as part of the “diagnostic criteria” of both eating disorders.4 The idea that a distorted body image, as shaped by cultural standards of beauty, could cause disordered eating patterns is entirely absent from many past accounts of these behaviors, particularly in the period before 1873, a time when eating disorders were not a disorder. In fact, the possibility that an individual could starve, binge, or purge intentionally to lose weight did not exist. This paper focuses narrowly on the characterization and perception of disordered eating behaviors— specifically, self-induced starvation, binging, and purging—in three periods: before 1873, a time when the medical community did not consider eating disorders an illness; between 1873 until 1980, when physicians and mental health experts created the diagnoses anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, which were viewed as mental illnesses of any psychogenic origin; and after 1980 to the present, when the DSM classified the two disorders, respectively, as a specific category of mental illness called “eating disorders” linked diagnostically with a disturbed body image, hereafter called “beauty image,” of the patient.

Accounts of disordered eating behaviors according to current qualifications exist as early as 450-350 BCE, when doctors often suggested use of purging as a medical treatment. This idea stemmed from the common belief during that time period in the Humoral Theory, which stated that the four humors of the body —blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile —had to be in balance in order for an individual to lead a healthy life free of illness. The Humoral Theory is

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Plotkin, M. (2016, March 14). A brief history of eating disorders & binge eating disorder. Retrieved from https://bedaonline.com/abrief-history-of-eating-disorders-binge-eating-disorder/ 4 American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing.

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thoroughly described in the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of ancient Greek medical writings written around 400 BCE by various individuals whose identities are largely unknown. In the specific treatise called “On Ancient Medicine” that is part of the Hippocratic Corpus, the use of purging is suggested to clear “overflow of the bitter principle, which we call yellow bile.”5 During this time period, far from there being a link of purging behaviors to beauty image, there was not even a notion that self-induced purging could be a disorder itself. It was, instead, a treatment.

The possibility that purging could indicate a disorder is also nonexistent in other historical accounts of individuals who exhibit behaviors that would match more closely bulimic diagnostic criteria today. In his biographical book The Lives of The Twelve Caesars, the Roman historian Suetonius, in 121 CE, describes the binging and purging tendencies of Emperors Claudius and Vitellius. According to Suetonius, Emperor Claudius would “thoroughly cram himself” with food,” after which a “feather was put down his throat, to make him throw up the contents of his stomach,” while Emperor Vitellius would “always [eat] three meals a day, sometimes four” that he followed up with a “custom” of “frequently vomiting.”6 When describing both emperors, Suetonius does not focus on the disordered eating behaviors themselves. Instead, he emphasizes the general indulgence of the emperors by saying they are “chiefly addicted to the vices of luxury and cruelty,” which he views with disapproval.7 There seemed to be an association during this time period of binging and purging with the wealthy, who were likely the only ones that could afford to engage in such eating behaviors. While the eating patterns of the emperors could satisfy criteria of bulimia diagnosis today, the cultural meaning— or “thick description,” as the renowned American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz would call it—surrounding purposeful binging and purging in that time period was entirely different, which led to an assumption that they were not a disorder but a status symbol representing the rich.8

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Adams, F. (Trans.). (45n.d.). On Ancient Medicine. Retrieved from http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/ancimed.mb.txt Tranquillus, G. S. (121 C.E). The Lives of the Twelve Caesars (T. Forester, Ed.; A. Thomas, Trans.). Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6400/6400-h/6400-h.htm#link2H_4_0006 7 Tranquillus, G. S. (121 C.E.). The Lives of the Twelve Caesars (T. Forester, Ed.; A. Thomas, Trans.). Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6400/6400-h/6400-h.htm#link2H_4_0006 6

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Geertz, C. (1973). Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (pp.

3–30). Basic Books.

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Similar to binging and purging, self-induced starvation had an ascribed cultural meaning distinct from that in its association with anorexia nervosa today. While self-induced starvation in modern anorexic patients is associated with poor beauty image, many historical cases of this disordered eating behavior were linked to religion. The medieval Catholic saint, Catherine Benincasa of Siena (1347-80), has been the subject of modern discussions of anorexia nervosa for her extreme religious fasting.9 Although Benincasa displayed symptoms of the disorder in her refusal to eat and significant weight loss, her letters show that her reasons for starvation were to encourage self-discipline and moderation, which she believed would help her soul become closer to God: “there is more perfection in renunciation than in possession…. he [man] ought to renounce and abandon [his ‘riches’] with holy desire, and not to place his chief affections upon them, but upon God alone.”10 Benincasa even discouraged her friend whose fasting had caused her to become excessively skinny—a body that many anorexic patients would crave for—from continuing to fast, because she had lost the self-discipline that she was trying to attain through fasting. Voluntary self-induced starvation was a common religious and spiritual practice among religious women in the late Middle Ages and has been retrospectively termed by scholars as “anorexia mirabilis,” or “holy anorexia.” These women, like Catherine Benincasa of Siena, often believed that extreme fasting and ascetism imitated the torment of Jesus during crucifixion, and, in doing so, could purge them of sin, purify their body, and attain them salvation from God. Benincasa, indeed, begins each of her letters to others with an invocation to the crucifixion of Jesus—“In the Name of Jesus Christ crucified and of sweet Mary”—and, in one letter to Brother William of England, states that the “one's chief aim” through starvation “ought to be… to slay the will; [so] that it may seek and wish naught save to [nothing except to] follow Christ crucified, seeking the honour and glory of His Name, and the salvation of souls.”11 While there are parallels

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Rudolph Belle, for example, retrospectively applies the diagnosis of anorexia nervosa to medieval saints like Benincasa in his book Holy Anorexia, while Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast, and Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls, argue against doing so.

10 Benincasa, C. (2005, February). Letters of Catherine Benincasa (V. D. Scudder, Ed.; V. D. Scudder, Trans.). Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7403/pg7403-images.html 11

Benincasa, C. (2005, February). Letters of Catherine Benincasa (V. D. Scudder, Ed.; V. D. Scudder, Trans.). Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7403/pg7403-images.html

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between the behaviors of medieval saints like Benincasa and the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, none of them had the disorder because the cultural meaning ascribed to starvation in that time was different, related to religiosity rather than beauty image as it is today.

Following the Middle Ages, citizens of the Western world, between 1500-1700, began to challenge the Christian church and consider more scientific explanations behind worldly phenomenon. During this period, known as the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, came what some now consider to be the first medical descriptions of anorexia nervosa. In Phthisiologia, or, A Treatise of Consumptions (1694), physician Richard Morton details the causes, symptoms, and treatments for diseases of “consumption,” and discusses seeing two unique cases for the first time: a girl who suffered from a reduced appetite and “a Skeleton [body] clad only with skin” but without any typical fevers or coughs accompanying those symptoms, and a 16-year-old boy who suffered from significant weight loss.12 For both patients, however, Morton credited the starved state to “nervous,” or emotional, causes, naming the disorder causing their conditions “Nervous Atrophy, or Con[s]umption.”13 In the case of the latter, he attributed the weight loss specifically to “[s]tu-dying too hard, and the Pa[ss]ions of his Mind,” and consequently, “advis’d him” as treatment “to abandon his Studies, to go into the Country Air, and to u[s]e Riding, and a Milk Diet… for a long time.”14 The etiology that Morton gave and the treatments he prescribed for the inexplicable self-induced weight loss in the two patients suggests that physicians like him in that time period considered weight loss to be only a secondary symptom of a different disorder. The possibility of purposeful self-induced starvation for weight loss or beauty image, once again, did not seem to exist in that time.

The rise of scientific thought, as reflected in the first medical descriptions of anorexia nervosa by Morton, was nonetheless met with backlash from religious leaders, whose authority

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Morton, R. (1694). Phthisiologia, or, A Treatise of Consumptions. Retrieved from archive.org/stream/phthisiologiaort00mort#page/21/mode/2up 13 Morton, R. (1694). Phthisiologia, or, A Treatise of Consumptions. Retrieved from archive.org/stream/phthisiologiaort00mort#page/21/mode/2up 14 Morton, R. (1694). Phthisiologia, or, A Treatise of Consumptions. Retrieved from archive.org/stream/phthisiologiaort00mort#page/21/mode/2up

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to explain natural occurrences and behavior was being undermined. Hence, in the nineteenth century, the link between starvation and religion present in the late Middle Ages resurged, though in a slightly different way. While medieval saints like Benincasa starved themselves to attain salvation from God on a personal level, many Victorian “fasting girls” in the nineteenth century pretended to starve themselves in order to give off an appearance of being divine, essentially claiming that they could survive without food. In one key historical case, the “Welsh-fasting girl” Sarah Jacobs (1857-1869) put on a façade of surviving without food or water for two years. Dr. Robert Fowler, a physician closely involved in monitoring and treating Jacobs, described her as “very much devoted to religious reading” since youth, which was likely the reason she began her pretense of fasting: to convince the public of her divine status.15 Amazed by her apparent ability to survive without food, “hundreds” of “people came from all parts of the country to see Sarah,” leaving her with gifts from books and clothes to large sums of money.16 Even the parents of Jacobs became convinced that “she was supernatural” and “would not… die like the[ir] other children” because “the Lord would provide for her in a supernatural way.”17 However, emerging skepticism within the medical community led doctors to conduct a test in which nurses monitored the home of Jacobs to ensure she was not consuming food covertly. During this period, Jacobs, no longer able to sneak in food like earlier, became extremely thin and began having convulsions, indicating she was clearly malnourished. Nonetheless, she continuously declined food. Although she exhibited disordered eating behaviors to the public in her refusal of food during her feigned and actual starvation, those behaviors were not labeled a disorder. Instead, the secondary symptoms she experienced after excess weight loss led doctors to diagnose her with other disorders such as universal tactile Hyperaesthesia, which involves an excess sensitivity to stimuli all over the body, and hysterical epilepsy, which is characterized by idiopathic convulsions. None of the diagnoses that doctors gave Welsh referenced beauty image, a concept associated with anorexia nervosa and 15

Fowler, R. (1871). A complete history of the case of the Welsh fasting-girl (Sarah Jacob). Retrieved from archive.org/stream/b23982706#page/8/mode/2up 16 Fowler, R. (1871). A complete history of the case of the Welsh fasting-girl (Sarah Jacob).

Retrieved from archive.org/stream/b23982706#page/8/mode/2up 17 Fowler, R. (1871). A complete history of the case of the Welsh fasting-girl (Sarah Jacob).

Retrieved from archive.org/stream/b23982706#page/8/mode/2up

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bulimia nervosa diagnoses today. Though other Victorian girls made similar claims to surviving without food, the case of Jacobs is most famous because she was the only one who resisted intake of food until her death by starvation.

In addition to the fact that eating disorders were not a disorder during the era Jacobs lived, the view of an ideal body seemed to differ during that time. In the DSM-V, one of the three major criteria used to diagnose an individual with anorexia nervosa, besides a general disturbance in beauty image, is an “Intense fear of gaining weight or of becoming fat.”18 While individuals with anorexia nervosa today starve themselves because they consider a thinner body to be more beautiful, an 1869 article written in the British Medical Journal a few days after the death of Jacobs, describes how Jacobs, “In appearance… was decidedly pretty” prior to her starved state for “having a plump, ruddy face.”19 While the current DSM-V assumes that the desire of a patient to be skinny causes anorexia nervosa, this supposition is entirely absent from many past accounts of self-induced starvation, such as that of Benincasa and the Welsh fasting girl, an indication that definitions surrounding disordered eating behaviors are culturally grounded. In both cases, however, a poor beauty image or concern over beauty standards were not the cause of starvation behaviors.

The coining of anorexia nervosa as a diagnosis by Sir William Withey Gull, MD, occurred only a few years after the Sarah Jacobs died in December of 1869. While the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution laid the groundwork for scientific thought, the creation of the diagnosis of anorexia nervosa marked the beginning of a period after which medical explanations increasingly prevailed over religious explanations of behaviors like disordered eating patterns. In the paper Gull presented on “anorexia nervosa” in an address on October 24, 1873, he defined the condition as a “peculiar form of disease occurring mostly in young women… chiefly between the ages of 16 and 23” that is “characterised by extreme emaciation, and often referred to latent

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American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing.

19 The Welsh Fasting Girl. (1869). The British Medical Journal,2(469), 685-688. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25218005

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tubercle, and mesenteric disease.”20 Though he initially termed this “disease” as “Apepsia Hysteria,” he changed the name to anorexia nervosa in this paper because “Anorexia,” or loss of appetite in Greek, “would be more correct,” and “nervosa” avoids confusion of the “disease” with hysteria.21 Of utmost significance in this paper is his attribution of the etiology of the “disease” to “a morbid mental state” that “destroy[s] the appetite of the patient.” 22 For the first time, the behavior of self-induced starvation is considered a mental illness. However, the physician Gull does not consider either the desire of the patient for weight loss or a poor beauty image as the cause of their symptoms, perhaps because the view of a good-looking body during that time was “plump.”23 This word was used to describe the face of Sarah Jacobs (1857-1869) when she was “decidedly pretty” before starving herself.24 Hence, the cultural context surrounding distorted eating patterns, such as self-induced starvation, in the late 1800s is different than it is now, when anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are eating disorders linked to a distorted beauty image.

Following the creation of anorexia nervosa as a diagnosis, the assumption that anorexia nervosa was a mental illness of psychogenic origin, without association to beauty image, is evident in other articles written in the early 1900s. The physician Henry B. Richardson, for instance, diagnosed six patients in 1939 who suffered extreme emaciation with no known physical causes as having anorexia nervosa because, “Anorexia nervosa is diagnosed by the demonstration of the neurosis.”25 Many medical professionals searched for psychosomatic explanations for the refusal of food by patients with anorexia nervosa. In a 1937 paper called “Dreams in so-called endogenic magersucht (anorexia),” German physician Viktor Von Weizsäcker analyzed the dreams of patients during a restriction phase associated with anorexia nervosa and following periodic binges that he descriptively called “bulimia,” meaning excess appetite. He diagnosed the 20

Gull, W. W. (1997). V.-Anorexia Nervosa (Apepsia Hysterica, Anorexia Hysterica). Obesity Research, 5(5), 498-502. doi:10.1002/j.1550-8528.1997.tb00677.x 21 Gull, W. W. (1997). V.-Anorexia Nervosa (Apepsia Hysterica, Anorexia Hysterica). Obesity Research, 5(5), 498-502. doi:10.1002/j.1550-8528.1997.tb00677.x 22 Gull, W. W. (1997). V.-Anorexia Nervosa (Apepsia Hysterica, Anorexia Hysterica). Obesity Research, 5(5), 498-502. doi:10.1002/j.1550-8528.1997.tb00677.x 23 The Welsh Fasting Girl. (1869). The British Medical Journal,2(469), 685-688. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25218005 24 The Welsh Fasting Girl. (1869). The British Medical Journal,2(469), 685-688. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25218005 25

Richardson, H. B. (1939). Simmonds Disease And Anorexia Nervosa. Archives of Internal Medicine, 63(1), 1. doi: 10.1001/archinte.1939.00180180011001

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patients with only anorexia nervosa, though, since “bulimia nervosa” was not a disorder then.

Ultimately, he found themes of “‘disembodiment… and death’” in the dreams of the patients immediately following their food restriction and binging, and he concluded from his investigation that their refusal of food was due to a “longing for death.” 26 The Canadian psychoanalyst W. Clifford M. Scott attributed the lack of appetite in young anorexic patients to “complex emotional problems,” such as “earliest anxiety situations of a paranoid type” and, in older women, to sexual mishaps earlier in life.27 Neither of the physicians alluded to a desired weight loss of the patient or a distorted beauty image as a cause when searching for an etiology associated with anorexia nervosa.

The specification of self-induced starvation, binging, and purging from mental illnesses with any psychogenic origin to a mental illness caused by a disturbed beauty image is evident in the evolution of the DSM criteria for anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. In the first version of the DSM (1952), the terms “anorexia” and “bulimia” were listed as digestive symptoms meaning “loss of appetite” and “excessive appetite,” respectively.28 The DSM-II (1968) qualified anorexia nervosa as a diagnosis of a “Feeding Disturbance” under a section called “Special Symptoms,” but it did not designate the disorder as an eating disorder linked to beauty image. 29 The DSM-III (1980) was the first edition in which the designation eating disorder appeared, and even though it included both “anorexia nervosa” and “bulimia,” only anorexia nervosa was associated with beauty image.30 Seven years later, the link between bulimia and beauty image was made: a revised version of the DSM-III called the DSM-III-R altered the diagnosis “bulimia” to “bulimia nervosa” and added “Persistent over-concern with body shape and weight” as one of

Jackson, C. , Beumont, P. J., Thornton, C. and Lennerts, W. (1993), Dreams of death: Von Weizsäcker's dreams in so‐called endogenic anorexia: A research note. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 13: 329-332. doi:10.1002/1098108X(199304)13:3<329::AID-EAT2260130312>3.0.CO;2-R 27 Scott, W. M. (1948). Notes on the psychopathology of anorexia nervosa*. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 21(4), 241-247. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8341.1948.tb01174.x 28 American Psychiatric Association. (1952). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (1st ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing.

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American Psychiatric Association. (1968). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing.

30 American Psychiatric Association. (1980). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (3rd ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing.

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the four diagnostic criteria for the disorder.31 The DSM-III-R marked a critical turning point after which both anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa were qualified as a mental illness called “eating disorders” and associated with a disturbed beauty image. Therefore, historical accounts of disordered eating behaviors were not eating disorders as we define them today.

An examination of articles ranging from 1980, the approximate time when disordered eating behaviors shifted from being considered mental illnesses to a specific category of mental illnesses called eating disorders, to today shows how closely eating disorders —in particular, the most well-known anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa—were and continue to be linked to beauty image. In a newspaper article written in 1987, Vicky Cosstick, a facilitator of NGOs that focus on combating global issues from poverty to eating disorders, discusses the case of her friend, Judy. To Cosstick, Judy was a “typical anorexic” in that her “refusal to eat” arose out of a desire to “impress others” based on “her perceptions [that] their expectations of her” were to be skinny.32 As she explains, Judy would “describ[e] other, normal women as revoltingly fat (including myself [Cosstick]).”33 The distorted beauty image that can trigger many eating disorder patients, such as Judy, to engage in anorexic and bulimic behaviors today stems from a modernday cultural assumption that a thin body is the ideal and, in some cases, the standard of beauty.

An anonymous survey conducted in 2003 on 131 female beauty pageant contestants from 43 US states indicated that about half (48.5%) wanted to be thinner and 57% were attempting to lose weight. Furthermore, when provided a scale from 1-7 containing images of women with increasing body sizes, the contestants, on average, ranked their “current body size” the highest (3.75), followed by the “ideal size for a woman” (3.31) and the “perception of [the] size [a] pageant judge would select as a beauty queen” (2.63) (Figure 1). 34 Not only did the contestants

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American Psychiatric Association. (1980). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (3rd ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing.

32 Cosstick, V. (Summer 1978). Anorexia Nervosa. New Directions for Women, p. 9. Gale. Retrieved from http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/5K7721 33 Cosstick, V. (Summer 1978). Anorexia Nervosa. New Directions for Women, p. 9. Gale. Retrieved from http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/5K7721 34

Thompson, S. H., & Hammond, K. (2003). Beauty is as beauty does: Body image and self-esteem of pageant contestants. Eating and Weight Disorders - Studies on Anorexia, Bulimia and Obesity, 8(3), 231-237. doi:10.1007/bf03325019

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themselves believe that the ideal body for a woman was thinner than their own, but they also believed that the public felt the same.

This cultural assumption is, additionally, visible in a famous poem called “Ellen West” that Frank Bidart, a Pulitzer-prize winning American poet, wrote in 1990. The poem is based on a case account by the psychiatrist who treated Ellen West, a pseudonym for a woman (1888-1921) who suffered from anorexia, bulimia, and possibly other psychotic illnesses before committing suicide at age 33. Written from the perspective of Ellen West, the poem describes the tension West feels between her cravings for food and her desire to remain thin, which she views as “ideal,” and her desire to “defeat [the] ‘Nature’” that makes her gain weight. 35 While the poem does accurately describe some facts in the case history and the feelings of Ellen West, it also incorporates Bidart’s interpretation of what he considered the beliefs of West. Ellen West clearly had a fear of becoming fat and a desire to have a thinner body. As she herself stated, “If there were a substance which contained nourishment in the most concentrated form and on which I would remain thin, then I would still be so glad to continue living.”36 Bidart, nonetheless, assumes in this poem that part of her desire to be thin stems from the view of West that skinniness is “beautiful.”37 In one part of the poem, West describes that when she sees a woman “with sharp, clear features, a good bone structure” indicating she is thin, “She was beautiful.” 38 While both Bidart and Ellen West considered a thin body to be the ideal, Bidart assumes that West believed thinness is associated with beauty, which he projects onto Ellen West in his poem. This assumption that Bidart makes about Ellen West’s beliefs in the poem goes to show the beauty standards of thinness that are an integral part of modern Western culture.

Overall, a historical analysis of disordered eating patterns from before the first century until now shows how greatly the cultural connotations of those behaviors changed across time periods.

A single behavior, whether it be binging, purging, or starvation, received approval based on its

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Bidart, F. (1990). Ellen West. Retrieved from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48284/ellen-west May, R., Angel, E., & Ellenberger, H. F. (2004). Existence. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

37 Bidart, F. (1990). Ellen West. Retrieved from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48284/ellen-west 38 Bidart, F. (1990). Ellen West. Retrieved from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48284/ellen-west 36

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association with concepts ranging from wealthy indulgence and religion to mental illnesses associated with beauty image. Before 1980, historical accounts do not suggest any etiological link between the three behaviors of starvation, binging, and purging and beauty image, the basis upon which they are grouped together as eating disorders today. The cultural context emphasizing beauty image that led to the creation of eating disorders as a diagnosis was absent from the past, which led to an assumption before 1980 that self-induced starvation, binging, and purging for purposeful weight loss did not exist. For this reason, the diagnoses eating disorders cannot be ascribed to patients in the past who exhibited “disordered” eating patterns by current medical qualifications.

The changing cultural connotations surrounding eating patterns like starvation, binging, and purging can inform the treatments we administer in a particular time period to individuals exhibiting those behaviors. Individuals with identical eating patterns were often treated differently in the past or, in some cases, not treated at all because those behaviors were considered “normal.” As the medical community gained primacy over the religious community during the late nineteenth century, however, more behaviors began to be labeled as “disorders” or “diseases,” especially with the creation of the DSM. The medicalization of behaviors such as self-induced starvation, binging, and purging as eating disorders implies a loss of agency, or a cause of conduct beyond the conscious individual self. While this implication may mitigate blame of the individual for their behaviors, it also permits treatments like force-feeding of patients with eating disorders today against their will, in what is considered the “best interest” of the patient. Whether or not we choose to label certain behaviors as a disorder can thus affect the types of interventions today that are considered ethical.

In the words of Harvard medical historian Charles Rosenberg, “Even those contemporary Western notions of disease specificity that seem to most of us somehow right and inevitable… are… socially constructed, like everything else in our culture.”39 The well-known eating

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Rosenberg, C. E. (2003). What is disease?: In memory of Owsei Temkin. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 77(3), 491-505. doi:10.1353/bhm.2003.0139

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disorders, anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, are socially constructed, culturally influenced diagnoses, while, importantly, still real illnesses that take away lives every day. Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa in the DSM-V currently used in US are associated with a poor beauty image and rest on the assumption that individuals strive for a thin body, though this etiology for selfinduced starvation, binging, and purging and this standard of beauty, respectively, were not present across all time periods in the past. By extension, not all parts of the world today may have a poor beauty image as the most common cause of “disordered” eating patterns or a skinny body as the standard of beauty. The cultural history of eating disorders may lead us to contemplate the beauty standards we personally hold and perpetuate in our interactions, the cultural beliefs underlying our creation and explanations of diagnoses like eating disorders, and what behaviors we choose to label and treat as a disorder or disease.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: MEERA SHANBHAG

Meera Shanbhag recently graduated from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN with a Bachelor of Arts in Neuroscience and Medicine, Health, and Society, and a minor in Spanish. As an undergraduate, Meera was part of the College of Arts and Sciences Honors Scholars program. Through the program, she took an honors seminar called Cultural History of Disease with Dr. Arleen Tuchman that inspired her to research the cultural history of eating disorders.

She hopes to pursue a career as a physician, with special interests in providing care to individuals with eating disorders and improving healthcare for disadvantaged populations.

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