The Honors Undergraduate Research Journal - Spring 2019

The Honors Undergraduate Research Journal 2019

Joe C. and Carole Kerr McClendon Honors College University of Oklahoma Volume 18

i

Editor-in-Chief Zainab Sandhu

Assistant(s) Editor-in-Chief Emma Bachman Julie Bahr

Editorial Review Board Erika Moen Cade Bross Greta Fiedler Zephaniah Fleetwood Hannah La Mack Eleanor Mendelson Alex Parsells Julianna Schwab Mariam Shakir Safra Shakir Katherine Sloan

Advisors Dr. Robert Lifset Will O’Donnell

Cover Design Julie Bahr

Volume 18 2019 Norman, OK, USA Copyright Š 2019, The Honors Undergraduate Research Journal, University of Oklahoma. All rights revert to authors.

The Honors Undergraduate Research Journal is a publication of the Joe C. and Carole Kerr McClendon Honors College at the University of Oklahoma. The views expressed in THURJ are solely those of the contributors and should not be attributed to the Editorial Staff, the Honors College, or the University of Oklahoma.

ii

Table of Contents SLASH FANFICTION AND THE LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY

4

LEANNE HO

REINFORCEMENT LEARNING, NURTURING, AND THE EVOLUTION OF RISK NEUTRALITY

11

KEVIN ROBB

AN EXAMINATION OF POLICY IN THE WEST POINT QUARANTINE CASE

26

CONOR POWERS

PATRONS AND INDIVIDUALITY IN RENAISSANCE ART

34

NOAH BRIDGES

LEVERAGING PUBLIC OPINION FOR POLITICAL AND LEGAL POWER

42

LEANNE HO

FLIES AND DRUGS: ATTRACTION OF ADULT COCHLIOMYIA MACELLARIA (FABRICIUS; DIPTERA: CALLIPHORIDAE) TO NICOTINE AND COTININE

49

HANNAH BOWLIN

CHANGING WITH THE TIMES: THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE CUBAN REVOLUTION

56

ANNAPOORANI ASOKAN

METHOD IN BIOETHICS: THE FAILURE OF TOP-DOWN APPROACHES

66

JAKE DAVIS

SEPERATING GENDER DYSPHORIA AND TRANS IDENTITY THROUGH LITERATUR

73

LEANNE HO

TRUE ORTHOGRAPHY: FROM IRRELEVANCE TO SIGNIFICANCE TO EXPRESSION

83

EMMA GREENE

iii

Slash Fanfiction and the LGBTQ+ Community Leanne Ho Fanfiction is a genre of writing in which writers draw their inspiration, characters, and setting from preexisting material, commonly referred to as the “canon.” Scholars of fanfiction often compare fanfiction to historical traditions of classical epic poetry, which draw from ancient Greek and Roman myths, or medieval romances, which draw from Arthurian legend and other legends or historical tales.1 In these transformative works, authors reference previously established works that are well-known to the audience, using “sophisticated allusion and intertextuality to create new meanings.”2 Fanfiction certainly borrows from this literary tradition, but it also stands apart due to the attitude of fans toward the writing. Fanfiction authors and readers go beyond simply having knowledge of canon—most, if not all, have an unbridled love of the source material. A passion for canon is the primary force that drives a fanfiction author to deliver and fanfiction readers to seek “‘more of’ or ‘more from’” the canon.3 This phenomenon suggests that authors and readers develop a deep emotional investment in both the canon and fanfiction, beyond that of traditional transformative literature.

In addition to—or perhaps because of—their emotional attachment to canon, fanfiction authors are further distinguished by the ways in which they engage with canon, projecting their own meaning onto texts that are usually only meant for consumption. In Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Henry Jenkins argues that fandom, the larger community around fanfiction, is “a way of appropriating media texts and rereading them in a fashion that serves different interests.”4 As one fanfiction author explained, “We seek actively to construct our own identities, partly because there seems to be no other place available . . . The consumer industries increasingly appeal to the possibilities of investing in popular images, pleasures, fantasies, and desires.”5 In other words, fans are empowered by active engagement with media, while other consumers of media are passive. This distinction echoes the emotional investment that characterizes fanfiction.

Slash fanfiction, more often known simply as “slash,” is a subset of fanfiction that features “a romantic and/or sexual relationship between two characters of the same sex, usually male.”6 Male/male pairings are so overwhelmingly prevalent within slash that fandom has coined the term “femslash” to refer to slash fanfiction featuring a romantic and/or sexual relationship

1 Wilson, Anna. “The Role of Affect in Fan Fiction.” The Classical Canon and/as Transformative Work. Ed. Ika Willis, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 21, 2016. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

2 Wilson, Anna. “The Role of Affect in Fan Fiction.” The Classical Canon and/as Transformative Work. Ed. Ika Willis, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 21, 2016. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

3 Pugh, Sheenagh. The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context. Bridgend, Wales: Seren, 2005.

4 Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.

5 Grossberg, Lawrence. “Is There a Fan in the House?: The Affective Sensibility of Fandom.” The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. Ed. Lisa Lewis, 50-65. New York: Routledge, 1992.

6 Lee, Kylie. “Confronting Enterprise Slash Fanfiction.” Extrapolation, vol. 44 no. 1, 2002, pp. 69-82. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

4

between two female-identified characters. The term “slash” stems from an early fandom practice of using a slash mark (“/”) between character names to indicate a romantic and/or sexual pairing within a fanfiction. The opposite of slash is “het,” short for “heterosexual fanfiction,” which features romantic and/or sexual relationships between characters of different genders. A third category, “gen,” refers to fanfiction that does not feature any pairing. Throughout most of fandom, slash is far more popular than het or gen. A cursory examination of Archive of Our Own, a website dedicated to publishing and preserving fanfiction, reveals that in the Harry Potter fanfiction archive, over ninety thousand works of fanfiction are marked M/M, while less than sixty thousand are marked M/F and less than forty thousand are marked Gen. The first slash pairing was Kirk/Spock from the television series Star Trek.7 During the 1980s, fandom expanded to other properties within the genre of science fiction, such as Star Wars and Doctor Who and “the term slash was coined as a way to refer to same-sex romantic or erotic fanfic in general.”8 In the earlier days of fandom, fanfiction was distributed by way of selfpublished fanzines, but by the 1990’s, fanfiction had moved to the Internet.9 Thanks to the accessibility and ease of self-publishing on the Internet, “media texts with large, active fandoms (such as Supernatural, Sherlock, or Teen Wolf) have huge followings, with fans generating thousands of stories throughout the year.”10 According to Archive of Our Own, the most popular pairings in the fandoms listed above are Cas/Dean, Sherlock/Watson, and Stiles/Derek, respectively. This is consistent with findings in a 2013 study by an Archive of Our Own user, which found that Sherlock/Watson, Cas/Dean, and Stiles/Derek were the three pairings with the highest number of works posted on Archive of Our Own.11 Note that these are not merely the most popular slash pairings, but the most popular pairings overall, including het pairings. To take one example, the Teen Wolf category on Archive of Our Own contains about eighty thousand works of fanfiction, of which over forty-six thousand are tagged with Stiles/Derek. In other words, without even including same-sex pairings other than Stiles/Derek, at least half of Archive of Our Own’s Teen Wolf fanfiction is slash. This statistic is made more astonishing by the fact that there is no canonical confirmation of a relationship between these two characters. Although slash developed after the advent of het and gen fanfiction, it has quickly come to dominate fandom spaces.

This paper argues that the rise of slash fanfiction normalizes queer identities, relationships, and sex by celebrating homoerotic subtext and extending the character dynamics found in canon. Although a large fraction of slash fanfiction is written by straight women, who can unconsciously perpetuate homophobic stereotypes in their writing, slash fanfiction is 7 Penley, Constance. “Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture.” Cultural Studies. Eds., Lawrence Grossberg Cary Nelson and Paula Teichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 479–500. Web. Accessed 3 May 2017.

8 Webb, Erin. Slash as Genre, American University, Ann Arbor, 2012, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

9 Tosenberger, Catherine. "Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction." Children's Literature, vol. 36 no. 1, 2008, pp.

185-207. Project MUSE. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

10 Wilson, Anna. “The Role of Affect in Fan Fiction.” The Classical Canon and/as Transformative Work. Ed. Ika Willis, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 21, 2016. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

11 Toastystats. “[Fandom Stats] Which are the biggest ships on AO3?” Archive of Our Own. Web. Accessed 7 May 2017.

5

ultimately beneficial to the LGBTQ+ community because it represents and validates the experiences of queer people, especially youth. In addition, the community surrounding slash fanfiction promotes inclusivity and shame-free identity exploration.

A recurring theme in research on fanfiction is that fanfiction authors create new meaning where none previously existed; slash fanfiction is a prime example of this behavior. As Catherine Tosenberger explains: “This conception of slash as a space is, I believe, the most useful way of understanding it; what slash writers have done is to carve out a space for themselves where they are free to tell the narratives they wish, linked only by the common thread of queerness.”12 The emotional investment and active engagement that were discussed earlier are particularly pertinent in the context of slash fanfiction. In many cases, source material lacks queer representation, prompting fans to write their own representation and form their own interpretations of the text.

Although queer representation is generally not included in canon, many sources contain homoerotic subtext that provides fodder for slash fanfiction. One fanfiction author notes that observing and analyzing homoerotic subtext is a key component of slash: This kind of active watching is tremendously satisfying. It’s a lot of fun to study facial expressions, gestures, the actors’ use of props, physical proximity. It’s even more fun to read into them . . . I feel motivated to rewrite this text, to explore the relationships between the men, to fill in the gaping gaps in the characters’ private lives . . . The canon source is rich; there’s a lot to play with here.13 This author’s experience is representative of the way slash pairings are popularized within fandom. Very rarely is a pairing drawn from thin air. More often, slash pairings are formed from emotionally-charged relationships in the source material, even when those relationships are not explicitly romantic or sexual. These emotions are positive when the pairing is based on a close friendship, as is the case with Kirk/Spock in Star Trek. A large portion of slash fanfiction follows this model, with slash “removing the barriers blocking the realization of homosocial desire” and exposing “the erotics [sic] of male friendship, confronting the fears keeping men from achieving intimacy.”14 On the other hand, slash pairings can also form in situations of strong negative emotions. For example, slash pairings such as Harry/Draco in Harry Potter “generate an enormous amount of tension” due to the characters’ canonical enmity.15 Whether positive or negative, the emotions that drive homoerotic subtext form the basis for most slash fanfiction.

12 Tosenberger, Catherine. "Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction." Children's Literature, vol. 36 no. 1, 2008, pp.

185-207. Project MUSE. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

13 Lee, Kylie. “Confronting Enterprise Slash Fanfiction.” Extrapolation, vol. 44 no. 1, 2002, pp. 69-82. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

14 Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.

15 Tosenberger, Catherine. "Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction." Children's Literature, vol. 36 no. 1, 2008, pp.

185-207. Project MUSE. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

6

In addition to homoerotic subtext, audience response greatly influences the characters and situations found in slash fanfiction. The same author cited above indicated the importance of reader response, explaining that readers “read my stuff, they write me nice notes with feedback, and they like the sex, although fanfic readers much prefer sex inside an emotional context.”16 In other words, audience preferences directed authors’ decisions in writing slash fanfiction. Furthermore, since the reader would already be familiar with the character dynamic in canon, slash fanfiction would be a logical extension of that dynamic. Thus, drawing inspiration from homoerotic subtext fulfills the preference for sex within an emotional context, garnering a positive response from readers that reinforces authors’ choices. This reciprocal exchange is unique to fanfiction among literary genres, and is likely informed by the emotional investment and active engagement that characterizes the rest of fandom.

Since writers and readers are so intimately involved with the production and consumption of fanfiction, it would be amiss not to discuss the demographics of these populations. By and large, fanfiction—including slash fanfiction—is “written by straight women, although there are also lesbians and gay men.”17 Indeed, fan studies researcher Constance Penley remarked, “Slash is one of the most radical and intriguing female appropriations of a popular culture product that I had ever seen.”18 Various theorists have attempted to explain why straight women would write about male/male relationships. One prevailing theory is that slash fanfiction establishes a relationship between two equals by removing “gender as a governing and determining force in the love relationship.”19 As the argument goes, through fanfiction, women can explore equal relationships that they cannot access in reality. This explanation is problematic on multiple fronts; not only is it overly indulgent to straight women, but it also fails to account for the popularity of male/male slash over femslash.

A better explanation of slash fanfiction’s popularity might be that straight women fetishize male/male relationships, much like straight men fetishize female/female relationships in lesbian porn. This would explain the lack of femslash in fanfiction; straight women would want to write something that satisfies their own sexual preferences. This is a concern often raised by critics of slash fanfiction, who accuse authors of “co-opting images of male homosexuality in exploitative ways without engaging the realities of gay life.”20 Put simply, straight women want all the hotness of two attractive men having sex without any of the consequences. This refusal to engage in realities of gay life manifests in the way homosexuality is presented in slash fanfiction, as “something normal, as something sexy and loving. . .. The slash community takes this as a baseline given.”21 This embrace of homosexuality and homosexual relationships could be an Lee, Kylie. “Confronting Enterprise Slash Fanfiction.” Extrapolation, vol. 44 no. 1, 2002, pp. 69-82. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

Lee, Kylie. “Confronting Enterprise Slash Fanfiction.” Extrapolation, vol. 44 no. 1, 2002, pp. 69-82. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

18 Penley, Constance. “Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture.” Cultural Studies. Eds., Lawrence Grossberg Cary Nelson and Paula Teichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 479–500. Web. Accessed 3 May 2017.

19 Lamb, Patricia Frazer, and Diana L. Veith. “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines.” Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.

20 Webb, Erin. Slash as Genre, American University, Ann Arbor, 2012, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

21 Lee, Kylie. “Confronting Enterprise Slash Fanfiction.” Extrapolation, vol. 44 no. 1, 2002, pp. 69-82. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

16 17

7

attempt to celebrate queerness, but when propagated by heterosexual women, this misguided effort perpetuates homophobia by taking the eroticism of same-sex relationships out of context, erasing the real-life experiences of queer bodies.

Another example of homophobia that goes beyond simple ignorance is the trope of “I've never been with another man before.” More common in earlier slash, this declaration is “loaded with homophobic overtones” and, in the case of Star Trek slash fanfiction, the implication is that “macho Kirk is assuredly not the sort of man attracted to other men, but his connection with Spock is simply too transcendent to ignore.”22 By framing slash pairings as exceptions to heterosexuality, slash fanfiction authors imply that heterosexuality is the baseline for normative sexuality. Thus, this trope perpetuates homophobia by maintaining heteronormativity and invalidating non-heterosexual identities.

Another element of slash fanfiction that contributes to the stigma against same-sex relationships is the expectation of anonymity. This is especially impactful for women authors, for whom writing about sex is transgressive enough, and “to write about gay sex between men for other women seems startling and pathological.”23 For that reason, people who participate in fanfiction culture prefer anonymity, which makes reading, writing, and critiquing slash fanfiction easier.24 Penley remarks, “It’s one thing for your co-workers, domestic partner, or children to know you’re a ‘Trekkie,’ it’s another to know you’re a producer of pornography with gay overtones.”25 The implication is that writing slash fanfiction is something shameful that should be kept hidden. Yet, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy; it is hard to tell whether fanfiction is secret because it is shameful or shameful because it is secret. In support of the latter explanation, Lee argues that secrecy makes slash fanfiction feel “weird, perverted, or wrong.”26 However, despite arguments for potential homophobia, contemporary slash fanfiction can also empower queer people—especially queer youth. As the LGBTQ community gains acceptance in society, “both authors and characters may feel less of a need to have characters confront homophobia in themselves and others than in earlier fanfiction.”27 Younger writers, who were raised in an era of greater acceptance, may truly see same-sex relationships as a nonissue, a belief that is reflected in their slash fanfiction writing. In addition, tropes such as the “I’ve never been with another man before” situation take on a different meaning in newer slash fanfiction fandoms, due to the younger ages of the main characters. For instance, in Harry Potter slash fanfiction, it is “quite likely that a character's first sexual encounter with the same gender

22 Tosenberger, Catherine. "Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction." Children's Literature, vol. 36 no. 1, 2008, pp.

185-207. Project MUSE. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

23 Webb, Erin. Slash as Genre, American University, Ann Arbor, 2012, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

24 Lee, Kylie. “Confronting Enterprise Slash Fanfiction.” Extrapolation, vol. 44 no. 1, 2002, pp. 69-82. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

25 Penley, Constance. “Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture.” Cultural Studies. Eds., Lawrence Grossberg Cary Nelson and Paula Teichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 479–500. Web. Accessed 3 May 2017.

26 Lee, Kylie. “Confronting Enterprise Slash Fanfiction.” Extrapolation, vol. 44 no. 1, 2002, pp. 69-82. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

27 Tosenberger, Catherine. "Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction." Children's Literature, vol. 36 no. 1, 2008, pp.

185-207. Project MUSE. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

8

is also his/her first sexual encounter with anyone.”28 Thus, instead of enforcing heterosexuality, this trope normalizes non-heterosexual sex and identity. Through slash fanfiction, queer youth receive the representation and thoughtful story lines that their heterosexual peers have always had.

Another factor that indicates the normalization of queer relationships is the popularity of non-sexual subgenres within slash fanfiction. For example, the most popular tags attached to John/Sherlock fanfiction are “Fluff,” “Angst,” and “Romance,” while Cas/Dean slash fanfiction is most often tagged with “Fluff,” “Angst,” and “Alternate Universe” and Stiles/Derek have “Fluff,” “Alternate Universe,” and “Angst.” “Romance” is a self-explanatory category, but these other terms are unique to the slash fanfiction community. “Fluff” is a subgenre of fanfiction that emphasizes feel-good, romantic elements over plot. “Angst” features emotional turmoil, usually the result of one character pining for another. “Alternate Universe” is a story featuring the characters in a setting that is different from the setting found in canon. All these genres have one thing in common: they have nothing to do with sex. This is consistent with a 2016 survey of fanfiction readers, which found that the three most popular categories of all fanfiction, including slash, were “Fluff,” “Angst,” and “PWP,” which stands for “Plot? What Plot?” or “Porn Without Plot,” and refers to fanfiction that primarily focus on explicit sex scenes.

The popularity of non-sexual storylines in slash fanfiction has great implications for the normalization of queer relationships and identities. While critics of slash fanfiction may worry that straight women writers hyper-sexualize and objectify male/male relationships, these statistics tell a different story. Fluff, the most popular category in most slash fanfiction, is far more concerned with happy and healthy romantic relationships and non-sexual physical intimacy—cuddling, kissing, etc.—than it is with plot or with sex scenes. In fact, the most ubiquitous example of fluff is the “curtain fic,” so named because the characters in the featured pairing will do something domestic together, such as grocery shopping or buying curtains for a shared living space.29 By placing the emphasis on the ordinary components of a relationship, writers of fluff slash fanfiction normalize queer relationships and provide readers with a safe, domestic fantasy.

These trends in slash fanfiction are especially beneficial to LGBTQ youth. In a survey of young adult novels about gay and lesbian teens, Trites observed that these stories “privilege the discourse of homosexuality over the physical sexual acts of gay men, defining homosexuality more rhetorically than physically.”30 Later in the same book, she adds, “Denying the corporeality of homosexuality too easily divorces it from pleasure, which potentially disempowers gay sexuality.”31 Put another way, while slash fanfiction writers eschew sexuality politics in favor of 28 Tosenberger, Catherine. "Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction." Children's Literature, vol. 36 no. 1, 2008, pp.

185-207. Project MUSE. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

29 “Curtain Fic.” TV Tropes. Web. Accessed 7 May 2017.

30 Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2000.

31 Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2000.

9

steamy sex scenes, contemporary mainstream representations of gay and lesbian relationships do the reverse, to the detriment of queer sexuality. When media focuses on implications and consequences of homosexuality, the pleasure of homosexuality itself is ignored. Slash fanfiction addresses this issue by unapologetically placing homosexuality front and center and treating it as normal, through both sexually explicit content as well as romantic content devoid of political commentary. For young readers, this normalization of queerness can be immensely validating.

Therefore, adolescent fans can benefit from reading and writing slash fanfiction, especially in fandoms for youth-centric media such as the Harry Potter fandom. Slash fanfiction forms spaces “outside the classroom and beyond any direct adult control.”32 These spaces allow young readers and writers “not only to improve their writing skills, but also to explore discourses of sexuality, especially queerness, outside of the various culturally official stances marketed to them, and with the support of a community of like-minded readers and writers.”33 In other words, adolescent readers and writers can use slash fanfiction as an avenue to examine their own sexuality without hegemonic influence. In this case, traditional media is framed as the heteronormative and homophobia-perpetuating force, while slash fanfiction is outside of that cultural influence. Another important aspect of slash fanfiction is community, and it is beneficial to young fans to see and receive the support of an LGBTQ+-affirming community.

Ultimately, while slash fanfiction has the potential to perpetuate homophobia, changes in LGBTQ+ politics have created an environment in which slash fanfiction is empowering, not damaging, to the LGBTQ+ community. Through slash fanfiction, young LGBTQ+ readers and writers can find representation and normalization of their identities, relationships, and sex. This representation is difficult to find elsewhere, because even when non-heterosexuality is discussed in young adult literature, it is divorced from pleasure. Slash fanfiction allows queer people to fully express themselves without shame and with community support.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006.

Tosenberger, Catherine. "Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction." Children's Literature, vol. 36 no. 1, 2008, pp.

185-207. Project MUSE. Web. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

32 33

10

Reinforcement Learning, Nurturing, and the Evolution of Risk Neutrality Kevin Robb Abstract In artificial intelligence and machine learning, reinforcement learning (RL) refers to a type of iterative learning where each simulated agent receives feedback after each decision that helps it to improve its decision making algorithm. Necessarily, RL depends on agents being learning individuals, and when agents rely on their instincts rather than gathering data and acting according to that data, the population tends to be less successful than a true RL population.

“Riskiness” is the elementary metric for determining how willing to rely on learning an individual or a population is. With a high learning parameter, or learning rate, as we denote riskiness in this paper, agents find the safest option and seldom deviate from it, essentially using learning as a crutch to become a non-learning individual. With a low learning rate, agents ignore recency entirely and seek out the highest reward, regardless of the risk. We attempt in this paper to evolve this “risk neutrality” in a population by adding a “safe exploration” nurturing period during which agents are free to explore without consequence. We discovered the environmental conditions necessary for our hypotheses to be mostly satisfied and found that nurturing enables agents to distinguish between two different risky options to evolve risk neutrality. Too long of a nurturing period causes the evolution to waver before settling on a path with essentially random results, while a short nurturing period causes a successful evolution of risk neutrality. The nonnurturing case evolves risk aversion by default as we expected from a reinforcement learning system, because agents are unable to distinguish between the good risk and bad risk, so they decide to avoid risks altogether.

I. Introduction Reinforcement learning (RL) is the most fundamental method for evolving an intelligent AI system. RL involves each agent in a population making a choice at each trial and receiving some sort of feedback, which the system must then use to improve. The population will undergo many iterations, called “generations”, throughout which the AI will ideally improve and optimize its reward function. This method of learning does not involve any specific aid or supervision and does not necessarily include nurturing in any form. Niv et al.34 demonstrated that the RL model can be applied to animal behaviors and found a method for evolving the ideal learning rules to maximize reward in an uncertain environment. Their research set a basis for many future experiments with reinforcement learning, and their most relevant discovery to this paper is the 34

Niv, et al. 2002. "Evolution of Reinforcement Learning in Uncertain Environments." Adaptive Behavior 10, no. 5.

11

observation that RL causes risk averse behavior to emerge as the optimal strategy in a population.

Shah35 further demonstrated that RL without nurturing consistently causes the evolution of risk aversion, meaning the agents who choose the safe option outperform agents who choose the risky option, and as a result pass on their genes more frequently.

Risk aversion refers to the tendency of an agent to create or fall into a positive feedback loop in which the safe option is chosen the vast majority of the time, in order to keep receiving reward, even if the average reward for the risky option is higher; however, Roberts36 demonstrated that there is a threshold for the average reward difference, above which a population which formerly developed risk aversion will no longer always divert to the safe option, and may tend towards the risky option. Risk neutrality refers to a tendency to choose based on average or expected reward, rather than the actual probability of receiving zero reward from each option. Risk averse populations place more weight on recent results, and risk neutral populations place more weight on the overall trends of their results, rather than recency.

A risk-seeking individual would choose the risky option without regard to its average or expected reward, meaning even in a state in which the risky option has a lower average value than the safe option, if there is a wide enough spread such that its maximum value is above the safe option, a risk-seeking population could evolve. This type of behavior can take over a population if a few individuals get lucky with the risky option, and then multiply by more than a factor of two each generation (due to a large tournament size). We saw this occur in our early trials with a tournament size of five, but lowered it since we want to avoid this effect in our experiment and only promote the evolution of risk neutrality versus risk aversion. We explain how we plan to avoid this in the experimental design, section III.A relatively recent emergence in the artificial intelligence field is the introduction of nurturing, in forms such as direct supervision, education, safe exploration, etc. A virtuous cycle of nurturing and learning has been proposed, in which the evolution of nurturing promotes the evolution of learning, which in turn promotes greater nurturing, continuing the loop.37 In this paper, we are exploring the ways in which the addition of a safe exploration period may affect the evolution of a “learning parameter� which is correlated to the riskiness level of a certain agent. This learning parameter is described in more detail in the experimental design, section III. Safe exploration is a form of nurturing in which each agent is free to explore its options for a certain number of trials near the start of its life without any punishment; this allows it to alter expected rewards and learn a strategy which is likely to

35 Shah, et al. 2017. "Nurturing promotes the evolution of reinforcement learning in changing environments regardless of instincts." Adaptive Behavior.

36 Roberts, Steven A., and Dean F. Hougen. 2018. "Information and resource sharing in reinforcement learning agents dealing with risk."

37 Shah, et al. 2017. "Nurturing promotes the evolution of reinforcement learning in changing environments regardless of instincts." Adaptive Behavior; Eskridge, Brent E., and Dean F. Hougen. 2012. "Nurturing Promotes the evolution of learning in uncertain environments." Second Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning / Epigenetics Robotics Conference; Hoke, Bryan, and Dean F. Hougen. 2018.

"Nurturing Promotes the Evolution of Generalized Supervised Learning." IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.

12

lead to success once the safe exploration period has ended and fitness calculation has begun. It was shown by Hoke38 that the addition of a safe exploration period can cause learning itself to be more likely to evolve, so we are curious what effect safe exploration will have on a population with a set learning procedure and variable riskiness. Shah’s results39 indicate that nurturing promotes learning only in certain environments where it is desirable, which suggests that the effect of nurturing on a learning population is not always predictable. We hypothesize in our study that risk aversion will be less likely to emerge as the optimal strategy in the nurturing case, since the population will have time to learn that the risky option has a higher expected reward.

Conversely, it is not necessarily evident that risk aversion must evolve in any non-nurturing population. Roberts40 demonstrated that reinforcement learning with knowledge sharing causes risk neutrality to emerge in a population, rather than the risk aversion which prevails when each agent is on its own. This experiment suggests a basis for enhanced knowledge leading to a population drifting toward risk neutrality. Since safe exploration similarly leads to an increase in knowledge confidence, this follows the same line of reasoning as our first hypothesis.

II. Hypotheses Reinforcement learning has been shown to cause a drift toward risk aversion on its own, due to the impact each choice has on the continued success of the individual and the population.41 If this impact is removed for the majority of the individual’s lifetime with the addition of nurturing, it would follow that more risks could be taken safely, and risk aversion would not emerge until near the end of its lifetime, if at all.42 Consequently, a long enough safe exploration period could directly cause a population to become risk neutral. Thus, hypothesis 1 follows: H1: Reinforcement learning with nurturing in the form of a long safe exploration period leads to the evolution of a risk neutral learning parameter.

Accordingly, if our assumptions about the effect of nurturing are valid, the complement to hypothesis 1 should also be true, leading to hypothesis 2: H2: The absence of nurturing will cause the learning parameter to evolve to be risk averse.

38

Hoke, Bryan, and Dean F. Hougen. 2018. "Nurturing Promotes the Evolution of Generalized Supervised Learning." IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.

39 Shah, et al. 2017. "Nurturing promotes the evolution of reinforcement learning in changing environments regardless of instincts." Adaptive Behavior.

40 Roberts, Steven A., and Dean F. Hougen. 2018. "Information and resource sharing in reinforcement learning agents dealing with risk."

41 Niv, et al. 2002. "Evolution of Reinforcement Learning in Uncertain Environments." Adaptive Behavior 10, no. 5.

42 Hoke, Bryan, and Dean F. Hougen. 2018. "Nurturing Promotes the Evolution of Generalized Supervised Learning." IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.

13

It is not necessarily accurate to state that both of these hypotheses must be true or false together, because even if the learning parameter evolves in a direction that agrees with our first hypothesis, the addition of nurturing may have had a negligible impact on the actual evolution of the learning parameter. It should be evident in our results that the difference in nurturing between cases is the source of the trends we see in the evolution of the learning parameter, and the differences in the outcome of the learning parameter should be statistically significant.

III. Experimental Design At the start of each trial, every individual will be presented with a choice between three options, A, B, and C. Option A is the “safe� option, with a guaranteed turnout and a low average reward. Option B and C are the “risky� or “uncertain� options, with a 50% probability of turnout for both. B has a higher average reward than A, and C has a lower average reward than A. Each individual will evolve their learning parameter between trials using reinforcement learning, and this parameter will be used to evaluate risk and choose option A, B, or C during each trial. The learning parameter L will be in the range (0, 1). An L value of 0 describes complete risk neutrality, where risk, reward, and recency are completely ignored when making a choice, while an L value of 1 represents complete risk aversion, where only the most recent trial is considered. We expect that with an L value very close to 1, there will be no deviation once the safe option is chosen, regardless of the potential reward from the other options. At the end of each generation, a variety of data is written to a summary file, including the average, minimum, and maximum of all L values for the population, the average fitness of the population, and the ratio of choices made in favor of each option. There is also a graphing method which has various sets of outputs that are compatible for graphing; the output set is defined by parameters in the configuration file.

After w The individual will have N trials in which to acquire fitness before the next generation is formed. This resource gathering period will be called its “lifetime� for simplicity, although it is implied that the individuals in the nurturing case would persist for one more “lifetime� to provide the nurturing period for the next generation. The reward gained by an individual in a specified ith trial is represented by Ri. For our initial set of data, there will be 500 trials in one lifetime. The reward for all 500 will be averaged to obtain the fitness F for the lifetime of a non-nurturing individual, as in Eq. (1), and for a nurturing individual the total fitness F will be the average reward gained during the final 350 trials, ignoring the first 150, as in Eq. (2). /$0

đ??š"#"$"%&'%&(")

(12

14

566

1 1 = - đ?‘…( = - đ?‘…( đ?‘ 100 (12

(1)

đ??š"%&'%&(")

/$0

566

8/ (1 02

(10;2

4 1 = - đ?‘…( = - đ?‘…( đ?‘ 25

(2)

The procedure for an agent making its choice between options A, B, and C at each trial uses a Boltzmann algorithm. This algorithm uses an agent’s expected reward for each option to generate a probability of how likely each is to produce the greater comparative reward, and then boosts the chance of the agent choosing the option of greater expected value. For example, if the perceived chance of highest reward for {A, B, C} are {80%, 10%, 10%}, the agent is realistically more certain to receive a greater reward from option A (with 80% likelihood), so the algorithm makes it more likely that the 80% option is chosen (i.e., its chance of being chosen is greater than 80%). This method leaves a small chance of the lesser option(s) being chosen to prevent a ceiling or floor effect—becoming too confident in a single option, good or bad, and sticking with it for the rest of its lifetime—and to account for random chance in real evolution. The Boltzmann algorithm uses a temperature variable T in its calculations, representing how certain the individual is in its choice. A higher value of T represents lower certainty in expected rewards, and a T value approaching 0 represents complete certainty, and would cause the individual to pick whichever option has a higher expected reward 100% of the time. It would be interesting to scale the temperature variable throughout an individual’s lifetime, where it would start out high when an individual is young and does not have much sample data but would decrease and cause an agent to be very confident in its data by the end of its life. For this experiment, however, we will follow Roberts’ procedure43 and use a constant temperature value of T = 20, rather than scaling it with an agent’s lifetime. This is done with the intent of avoiding the introduction of confounding variables.

Each agent’s current expected reward values are used by the Boltzmann algorithm to generate probabilities and ultimately make each choice. Every time a choice is made, the expected reward for the option that was chosen is updated. The expected reward E is changed following the same update rule as used by Eskridge,44 in which a simple weighted average is calculated, using the learning parameter to define the weights. The learning parameter L denotes the weight of the new reward R just obtained, versus the current expected reward E0. This update rule is shown in Eq. (3). It is evident from this equation that an L value approaching 1 would place very little weight on previous data and all weight on the most recent result; conversely, an L value approaching 0 would have the opposite effect, where essentially no weight is placed on the most recent result, and previous data is carried through.

Roberts, Steven A., and Dean F. Hougen. 2018. "Information and resource sharing in reinforcement learning agents dealing with risk."

Eskridge, Brent E., and Dean F. Hougen. 2012. "Nurturing Promotes the evolution of learning in uncertain environments." Second Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning / Epigenetics Robotics Conference 43 44

15

đ??¸"=> = (1 − đ??ż)đ??¸2 + đ??żđ?‘…

(3)

There will be 500 generations in total, each containing 50 individuals. Each new generation will be formed with tournament-style selection, where two individuals of the current population of fifty are selected at random, and the member of that group of two with the highest fitness is selected to be copied to the next generation, allowing the same individual to be selected more than once, even in the same tournament. This tournament size is so low because a higher tournament size (tested up to five) disproportionately favors lucky risks from individuals, and causes all cases to regress toward risk-seeking individuals, as we discussed in section I. This process will be done fifty times to form a new population of 50 individuals. This formation method results in an individual’s selection likelihood being correlated to its end-of-life fitness and allows for a small chance of low-fitness individuals to also advance while maintaining a high probability of pruning off gene lines of low fitness. This selection method also removes the necessity of calculating a cost-of-living fitness and killing off low performing individuals, as the punishment for low fitness is simply that they are less likely to reproduce and pass on their genes.

Selected individuals will be assigned a random mutation value M from a normal distribution with mean 0 and standard deviation 0.05, so đ?‘€~đ?‘ (0, 0.05H ). The value of M will be added to L to generate the learning parameter value for the new individual, as in Eq. (4). The value of L will not be altered during an agent’s lifetime, and only changes due to mutations between generations, which is why we have a relatively small population size and a large number of generations. This method of evolution serves two important purposes: it simulates natural selection by eliminating individuals from the gene pool who significantly underperformed compared to the rest of the population, and it simulates the carrying capacity of the environment by maintaining the size of the population. đ??ż"=> = đ??ż#IJ + đ?‘€

(4)

Instincts are represented by the initial values of weights such as the learning parameter and anticipated values of options A, B, and C, which would affect risk evaluation by skewing the expected values of each option, altering the individual’s willingness to undertake risks. We anticipate that if the instincts for each individual in a population were independently random, the generational algorithm would cause the same effect as if all were initially average, and eventually weed out poorly performing genes. It would be interesting to see how a systematic initial instinctual preference in the population would affect the evolution of the learning parameter, and how it would distort the overall success of the population through several generations; however, in this experiment we will not perform tests with instinctual differences.

At the start of every generation, all expected values will be set to 100 to ensure that these values are learned every generation, and the individual’s performance will be based solely on their learning parameter value, rather than on any initial preference.

16

At the start of the first generation, the learning parameter of each agent will be set to 0.5, starting the individuals out with no risk preference. This will allow the parameter to dip towards 0 or 1 with equal likelihood due to random chance, and evolution will proceed further from 0.5 until a balance is reached. We hope to avoid a ceiling or floor effect, where the result of both the nurturing and non-nurturing case are so close to the same boundary (0 or 1) as to be indistinguishable. All values discussed in this section are represented in Table 1.

Setup Parameter

Value

Setup Parameter

Value

Initial Parameter

0.5

Number of Generations

500

Standard Deviation of 0.05 Mutation

Value of Choice A

100

Tournament Size

2

Value of Choice B

0 or 220

Num. of Nurturing Trials

0 (non- Value of Choice C (symmetric) nurturing)

Learning

0 or 180

150 (nurturing) Num. of Total Trials per 500 Gen. Num. of Agents per Gen.

Value of Choice C (asymmetric)

0 or 150

50

Table 1: The set of parameters which are used to initialize and run the simulation in both cases. The only difference in the non-nurturing case is that the number of nurturing trials is set to 0, while in the nurturing case it is set to 150. The value for B and C are a 50% chance of either 0 or the number shown. Notice the value for A is 100, which is higher than the average value of C (90 or 75), and lower than the average value of B (110).

The symmetric case refers to the average value for C being just as far below A as B is above A. In the asymmetric case, C is worse than this, so A is closer to B than C.

IV (a). Results (Two-State) Figures 1 and 2 represent our primitive data taken over fewer generations and trials than in Table 1, and in a two-state environment containing only options A and B. Contrary to what we expected to see from our results, there seems to be no definitive set of parameters for which the addition of nurturing causes a consistent change from risk aversion to risk neutrality. Our data showed a progression of the average learning parameter value that depended entirely on the random choices and rewards in the early generations, rather than the fitness calculation differences between the nurturing and non-nurturing cases. Ten runs of our simulation showed 17

five which approached 0 and five which approached 1. These runs are shown together in Figure 1, clearly demonstrating the random variations which in some cases cause the average learning parameter to fluctuate wildly throughout the dataset. This fluctuation and the aspect of randomness seem to be far less apparent and influential in the non-nurturing case than in the nurturing case. Thirty runs of the simulation are shown in Figure 2, and it is clear that there is almost no variation in the evolutionary process or the results. Every non-nurturing dataset resulted in an evolution of risk neutrality, even in runs which approached 1 in early generations.

When we increase the number of generations and trials (but keep the two-state environment), we see the results shown in Figures 3 and 4, where the results are opposite our expectations.

Figure 1: Our simulation, with the same parameters each time, produces results which essentially do not depend on the nurturing factor. Shown above are 9 nurturing runs, with average learning parameter plotted as a function of generation number. It is clear that these results are virtually random in their evolution.

Figure 3: Average L as a function of generation number. Thirty non-nurturing runs which are very random but mostly end up with an average learning parameter value around 0.2 (very risk neutral).

18

Figure 2: Thirty non-nurturing runs which for the most part show a consistent progression toward risk neutrality in every run. This is in opposition to the nurturing case, which has very indeterminate results.

Figure 4: Average L as a function of generation number. Thirty nurturing runs which almost entirely end up with an average learning parameter value around 0.8 (very risk averse).

We anticipated that the safe exploration period would allow a cost-free method for an agent to learn that the risky option B has a higher average value and should be the obvious choice, evolving risk neutrality. We also expected in the non-nurturing case that individuals who evolved risk neutrality would have lost too much fitness in the process of discovering the higher average value and would be eliminated from the population during tournament selection. What actually seems to occur is that individuals in the non-nurturing population who happen to get lucky a few times with the risky option make it through the tournament selection and are passed on multiple times, which snowballs each generation until the entire population evolves to be risk-neutral. In the nurturing case, some agents discover that option A is more reliable and have success choosing this safe option every time, whereas other agents discover that option B has a higher expected reward and have success with choosing this risky option the majority of the time. This effect causes a wide spread of the L values during any given generation, with an average that fluctuates around the center until dipping towards 0 or 1. Figure 5 shows the progression of this spread by displaying the 5 measures (minimum, first quartile, average, third quartile, and maximum) for L values for each generation in a data set for a nurturing case. These data are a clear indication of the lack of precision when compared to the non-nurturing data in Figure 6.

On an individual level rather than a generational level, the data also show unexpected trends. It is evident by the plots in Figures 7 and 8 that although a decrease in average learning parameter of the population does not change the average fitness by much, it is enough to noticeably increase variability in the spread of fitness values.

Figure 5: Progression of 5 measures for learning parameter in one nurturing case. Notice the wide disparity between the minimum and maximum values, as well as between the first and third quartile.

Figure 6: Progression of the same 5 measures as in Fig. 5 but for a non-nurturing case. Data spread is far more precise and finds the optimum learning parameter very early without much fluctuation.

19

Figure 7: Non-nurturing case. Gen 0 is all at 0.5, and all generations after steadily spread and move left.

Most agents quickly evolve risk neutrality (L→0) and the general spread remains the same for generations 50-200.

Figure 8: Nurturing case. In gen 50, most agents are consistently successful with risk aversion (to the right on the graph) but a few individuals obtain higher fitness by going left. By gen 100, these few have dominated the gene pool and nearly all agents are risk neutral, with the same spread as in Figure 5. The data in the nurturing case are sometimes mirrored from this plot, when risk aversion evolves.

In terms of expected values, the agents are calculating and updating their expectations as we would predict based on their actions, as shown in Figure 7. They are also changing their behavior to match their expectations, choosing option B more often the higher its expected value is. This makes sense given the Boltzmann algorithm we are using.

We originally thought all this to mean our hypotheses were wrong; however, we decided to try reducing the randomness and inconsistency before making any definitive claims about these results. This is why we introduced a third state, option C. IV (b). Results (Three-State) With all three states in play, the average between the two “uncertain” options (B: 110 and C: 90) average the same as the “safe” option (A: 100). This means that being random is not beneficial anymore, because being risky is on average the same as being risk averse, and is therefore deterred, because with no change in reward, individuals will want to decrease variability.

The graphs shown in Figures 9 and 10 each represent a single agent in a single generation.

This is the first iteration of our three-state environment. Ideally the estimations—an agent’s guess of how good each option is, recalculated after every trial—will each converge to their real mean values, but this does not happen successfully yet. Significant spikes and drops mean the agent has a high L and is very risk averse, whereas if the lines experience minimal change, the agent has a low L and is very risk neutral. As these two figures show, our results still oppose our hypotheses, but more importantly, the agents still fail to distinguish between the two “uncertain” options, B and C. 20

In the physical world, nurtured organisms (e.g., humans) live well beyond their nurturing period. For this reason, we increased the total number of trials to 500, leaving the nurturing period at 150 trials. This stretches the relative length of the nurturing period from 75% down to 30% of an agent’s life. This change causes nurtured agents to also evolve risk neutrality, and both sets of agents are more successful, as shown in Figures 11 and 12.

Figure 9: Non-nurturing case. Fitness and estimations as a function of trial number. 200 trials per generation. Fitness starts at 0 and steadily increases, while the three estimates stay clustered around 100.

Figure 10: Nurturing case. Fitness and estimations as a function of trial number. 200 trials per generation.

The flat segment of the fitness line is the nurturing period, wherein fitness is not tracked. This nurturing period lasts for the first 150 trials, and fitness increases for only the last 50 trials. Estimates B and C both shoot down to 0 near the beginning and stay there, while A stays flat at 100.

Figure 11: Non-nurturing case. Fitness and estimations as a function of trial number. 500 trials per generation. Fitness starts at 0 and steadily increases, while the three estimates stay clustered around 100, with B consistently above A, and C consistently below A.

Figure 12: Nurturing case. Fitness and estimations as a function of trial number. 500 trials per generation.

Nurturing period is the first 150 trials, so no fitness is tracked during this time, and fitness increases during the last 350 trials. Estimate A says flat at 100, while B and C both go down, and then B goes up again while C stays low.

21

The next development was the reintroduction of asymmetry to the states, but rather than in the two-state system, the safe option is favored over blanket riskiness, and even over randomness. We achieve this by lowering the average value of option C to 75, while leaving the average for B at 110. This means the average of B and C (i.e., what an agent would get if they are risk neutral but cannot distinguish between the two choices) is 92.5, i.e., lower than option A (100). Because it is lower, being risky is bad unless an agent can tell the difference between B and C. This is the key; option B choosers will end up with 110 fitness, which puts them at the top of the population, and therefore the B choosers will take over the gene pool with enough generations.

What we see in our final results (Figures 13 and 14) is that nurturing allows agents to learn to choose B and avoid C, evolving risk neutrality; however, without nurturing, agents avoid both B and C, evolving risk aversion and choosing A the majority of the time. This behavior satisfies both our initial hypotheses, and the environment fits our criteria, producing reliable and consistent data.

Figure 13: Non-nurturing case. Fitness and estimations as a function of trial number. 500 trials per generation. Negatively skewed asymmetry. Risk averse, as seen by the large spikes in estimations. This population ended closely gathered around a mean fitness of 100. B and C both spiked and then dropped close to 0 where they stayed.

22

Figure 14: Nurturing case. Fitness and estimations as a function of trial number. 500 trials per generation.

Nurturing period is the first 150 trials, so no fitness is tracked during this time, and fitness increases steadily after trial 150. Negatively skewed asymmetry. Risk neutral, as seen by small changes in estimations with each trial. This population ended very spread out around a mean fitness greater than 100. The three estimates stay clustered around 100, with B consistently above A, and C consistently below A.

V. Discussion Our final results with the simulation clearly support our second hypothesis, H2. Agents in the non-nurturing case are unable to distinguish between options B and C, so they develop risk aversion in order to skip both of these options entirely.

The story with our first hypothesis, H1, is a bit more complicated. Agents in the nurturing case are able to choose B while avoiding C and are thus able to evolve risk neutrality. However, this does not happen with a “long” safe exploration period, but rather happens with a short nurturing period lasting only 30% of the agent’s life. This is, as we discovered in the course of running this experiment, due to the simple statistical fact that a fitness collection period which is too short gives too much power to random chance, rather than actual decision-making, causing the large spread in the data shown in Figures 7 and 8. We initially thought H1 to have been proven false because of its underlying predictions about reinforcement learning, but it turned out to be false because of our requirement of a long nurturing period. A modified H1 which is supported by our experimental results would be as follows:

H1(modified): Reinforcement learning with nurturing in the form of a short safe exploration period leads to the evolution of a risk neutral learning parameter.

Moving on from our hypotheses, the situation our simulation models in our final setup can be described as a “fitness landscape.” This fitness landscape (Figure 15) has two optima in the learning parameter (L) scale, and which one gets settled by the population depends on whether nurturing is present. ● Risk neutrality is the global optimum, and can be found when the population has a low average L. This optimum has a small basin of attraction, meaning it is hard to find. ● Risk aversion is a local optimum but is less lucrative than the global optimum. It can be found when the population has a high average L. This optimum has a large basin of attraction, meaning it is easy to find.

Figure 15: Fitness landscape of our simulation’s environment. It is evident that the global optimum at L=0.2 is much narrower and is thus harder to find. The simulation starts at L=0.5, so agents will follow the upwards curve to the local optima at L=0.8; however, nurturing enables agents to experiment and dip into the global optimum’s basin of opportunity

23

This experiment has served to demonstrate the type of environment (i.e., fitness landscape and fitness function) that is required in order for a population to be able to develop risk neutrality and/or risk aversion, and for the insertion of nurturing to be able to make a difference to the results of the evolution. This will enable us to have some idea of what to expect when attempting to evolve a neural network for a specific purpose, and even allow us to guide its evolution by predefining a certain fitness landscape.

IV (b). Future Work The most significant work still to be done is to increase the number of choices available to each agent, as we did from two to three while refining this experiment. Being able to generalize these findings and this model to any number of choices would be outstanding, and this is what our primary goals with this project entail. It is also a subject of interest to make some choices become unavailable and reopen over the course of the agent’s lifetimes or across generations, to force adaptation and see how well a nurturing versus non-nurturing population would do in surviving the changes.

It would be feasible to put nurturing and non-nurturing agents in the same simulation, such that the two populations are opposed and must find separate niches to both survive. This would turn the competition from a data comparison into a real-time test of natural selection and would really reveal the intricacies of each group’s behavior.

In future experiments, it would be interesting to include additional factors for evolution such as instincts which carry over between generations, an initial instinctual preference, and varying initial values of the learning parameter within the same generation or different runs. We assumed in this experiment that variance in the first generation’s initial expected values and learning parameter would lead to the same progression as a population with each individual beginning with average values, given the same evolution parameters. A possible follow-up experiment would be to determine the accuracy of this assumption, and the conditions under which it fails. We wonder if a threshold exists for the variance in the initial instincts, and if it can pass a point after which its behavior is no longer predictable by our model.

We also assume that a significant difference in the initial average value of the learning parameter will affect the direction towards which it drifts through evolution (towards 1 for risk aversion or towards 0 for risk neutrality). This assumption was not relevant in this experiment, as we began each trial with the same learning parameter value which allowed a drift to occur in either direction, but this is something which could certainly stand to be challenged or proven in future experiments.

This experiment could be repeated with an aspect of variance in some of our parameters which remained unchanged throughout the entirety of the experiment, such as the standard deviation of the mutation value, the number of agents in a population, the tournament size, and the temperature value used in the Boltzmann algorithm. Specifically, we proposed in the experimental design (Section III) that this temperature value could be decreased through the duration of every individual’s lifetime, such that they become more confident in their answers as their lives go on. With this strategy, the temperature value would not undergo evolution, but rather would start at a constant value of 20 at the beginning of every generation, and would be decreased by the same amount each trial such that it will reach 0 in the final trial of every lifetime. Evolution with this sort 24

of condition would place disproportionate weight on earlier trials compared to later, as the expected values are less able to change later on in an agent’s life.

A different standard deviation of the mutation value would alter the weight of each specific generation, as the learning parameter would change more or less each generation, causing a general less or more drastic change of the average L value as generations proceed. Further experimentation could be conducted in which the standard deviation is changed between data sets, and there is a possibility of altering this value within a data set to simulate changes in the environment which either necessitate more rapid adaptation or constrict the population to less rapid adaption.

VII. References Eskridge, Brent E., and Dean F. Hougen. 2012. "Nurturing Promotes the evolution of learning in uncertain environments." Second Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning / Epigenetics Robotics Conference.

Hoke, Bryan, and Dean F. Hougen. 2018. "Nurturing Promotes the Evolution of Generalized Supervised Learning." IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.

Niv, Yael, Daphna Joel, Isaac Mailijson, and Eytan Ruppin. 2002. "Evolution of Reinforcement Learning in Uncertain Environments." Adaptive Behavior 10, no. 5. doi:10.1177/10597123020101001.

Roberts, Steven A., and Dean F. Hougen. 2018. "Information and resource sharing in reinforcement learning agents dealing with risk."

Shah, Syed Naveed Hussain, Ingo Schlupp, and Dean F. Hougen. 2017. "Nurturing promotes the evolution of reinforcement learning in changing environments regardless of instincts."

Adaptive Behavior.

25

An Examination of Policy in the West Point Quarantine Case Conor Powers Within the larger crisis of the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak, the quarantine of the West Point slum in the capital of Liberia is widely regarded as a representation of the worst sociological impacts such a epidemic could cause. The international media criticized the Liberian government for the draconian methods employed in its attempt to restrict the spread of the virus, while the residents of West Point were condemned for endangering themselves and their country through seemingly irrational acts such as the sacking of their community’s Ebola treatment center. The actions of both sides were taken as signs of “a feral city in which the logics of enlightened modernity had broken down”.1 However, this assessment is overly simplistic and far from the whole picture. It blames the conflict on the assumed ignorance or malice of those involved, but ignores the larger sociopolitical context of Liberia’s capital, Monrovia. Eruptions of mob violence are generally symptomatic of deeprooted tensions developed over time, and the unrest in West Point is no exception; the Ebola outbreak was only the tipping point that finally displayed this conflict on the world stage. Even in the relative calm of the disease’s aftermath, tensions are far from resolved. This paper will identify the roots of these tensions and their effects as the crisis ran its course with a specific focus on missteps on the part of the Liberian government in their attempts to halt the spread of Ebola. Additionally, it will examine the short term consequences of the quarantine, with a particular focus on the legitimization and expansion of the community sourced Active Case Finders and Awareness Team.

Particular attention will be paid to the team’s implications as an effective iteration of a people’s science of disease control, as defined by Paul Richards in his work on grassroots epidemiology.

Monrovia is a coastal city with a population of approximately 1.4 million inhabitants, nearly a third of Liberia’s populace.2 It has been the premier seat of national economic and political power since the American Colonization Society founded the republic as a place for former slaves freed in the United States during the 1820’s. Coastal patterns of settlement and a rocky relationship with native populations kept most American settlers clustered within the safety of Cape Montserrado on the land that would become Monrovia. From its foundation up to the present day, the capital has often been conflated with Liberia as a whole.3 Situated on a peninsula at the northern edge of Monrovia, West Point is the quintessential representation of the voiceless poor that have lived and worked there since its foundation. Established in the 1940’s by a group of itinerant fisherman, West Point is Monrovia’s oldest and largest slum with a population of roughly 60 thousand in early 2014.

Few residents hold official rights to their land; most West Pointers are impoverished squatters living in tin shacks resting on shaky ground, both legally and physically. Running water, utilities, and sanitation facilities are almost nonexistent, leading to serious health concerns even at the best of times. The slum has been a constant blight on Liberian urban renewal efforts; city officials have been perennially threatening to bulldoze the area to clear the way for redevelopment projects since the Hoffman, Danny. “A Crouching Village: Ebola and the Empty Gestures of Quarantine in Monrovia.” City & Society 28, no. 2 (2016). https://anthrosource-onlinelibrary- wiley-com.ezproxy.lib.ou.edu/doi/full/10.1111/ciso.12083 2 “Liberia” World Factbook. Last modified December 3, 2018. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the- world-factbook/geos/li.html 3 Ciment, James. Another America: the Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled it. New York: Hill and Wang, 2013.

1

26

1970s. These threats have understandably sparked resentment towards the government among West Pointers for decades, and distrust of Liberian officials is a commonly held sentiment. The reputation of West Pointers among general populace of Monrovia is equally negative; there has been an influx in ex-combatants from both sides of the bloody Liberian civil war in recent years, only adding to the slum’s reputation as a hub of criminal activity.4 Contrary to this popular characterization, a large number of West Pointers are legitimately employed throughout the city in retail and trades, their work taking them all over as fisherman, street vendors, and day laborers. At the time of the crisis, both the bad reputation and demographic facts of West Point likely influenced the government’s strict approach to the quarantine of the neighborhood.

Liberia’s encounter with Ebola began in the town of Foya when two locals contracted the virus on March 30, 2014. Soon they succumbed to their symptoms, and events spiraled quickly out of control. Just over a week later, the first case had appeared in Monrovia. The patient in question had been infected while aiding in the burial of her sister in Foya before returning home to the capital.

While the disease grew worse in neighboring Guinea, worries of a widespread Liberian outbreak were at first limited; in June, health advisors to the Liberian government believed that the crisis could be brought under control within two weeks.5 This lack of concern changed around midsummer, as the number of Ebola cases hit critical mass. In June, around a thousand people were infected across Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, but by August Liberia alone was reporting 300-400 new cases each day with no end in sight.6 In response to this, the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf administration declared a state of emergency under article 86 of the Liberian constitution, granting the president emergency powers and allowing the government to temporarily suspend the rights of its citizens. These powers were used to quarantine three of the earliest and hardest hit counties and mobilize military and police forces to assist medical personnel and keep order throughout the increasingly panicked country.7 Despite these measures, there was widespread anxiety that Ebola’s gathering momentum would not be stopped in time to prevent massive loss of life.

Liberia was in a delicate political position on the eve of this crisis. After almost two decades of civil war, which ended in 2003, the efforts to rebuild the nation had achieved only mixed results.

In early 2014, President Sirleaf was halfway through her second and final term as Liberia’s first postwar head of state, and she was working to assure a brighter economic and social future for her country. Liberia’s considerable foreign debt was forgiven under her leadership, and the federal government restored much of the infrastructure destroyed during the fighting. With an economy still devastated by war and UN trade sanctions, unemployment throughout the country was still a major issue. Corruption was a widespread problem, and alleged voting irregularities during Sirleaf’s reelection prompted fears of a return to factional violence.8 The psychological toll of war remained as large of a problem as the physical one: many who grew up during the war and fought as children

Hoffman, Danny. “A Crouching Village: Ebola and the Empty Gestures of Quarantine in Monrovia.”

Mukpo, Ashoka. “Liberia After Ebola: ‘The Human Suffering Changed Me.’” Africa Media Agency July 2017. http://amediaagency.com/liberia-afterebola-the-human-suffering-changed -me/ 6 “Bidding Farewell to an Unseen Ebola - End of a Thorny Journey.” New Republic Liberia, May 2015.

7 Hoffman, Danny. “A Crouching Village: Ebola and the Empty Gestures of Quarantine in Monrovia.”

8 Jones, Abeodu B., Svend E. Holsoe, Donald R. Petterson. “Liberia.” Encyclopædia Britannic. Last modified June 27, 2018. https://www.britannica.com/place/Liberia 4 5

27

were only then reaching adulthood, and few Liberians had escaped the brutal fighting completely unscathed, with thousands killed and even more forced into life as refugees or combatants.9 Likely fearing that an Ebola outbreak would crack the fragile foundations upon which Liberia was rebuilding, the government converted the only school in West Point into an Ebola Treatment Center (ETC), attempting to stem the tide of infection in the capital.10 Many in West Point resented this government incursion on their territory, and rumors spread that the Ebola outbreak was a hoax manufactured to draw aid money from sympathetic donor nations. The government attempted to allay these fears by reassuring the public that the center was for the benefit of the slum, but miscalculated the level of distrust among the residents. Suspicions only grew when cases were brought into the ETC from outside of West Point, and developed into outrage when West Pointers discovered that all cases in their local ETC were being reported as West Point Ebola deaths. To many this seemed like an attempt by the government to use Ebola death statistics as future justification to finally implement the campaigns of urban renewal that had threatened the slum for decades. This anger reached a breaking point around midday on August 15th, when hundreds of West Pointers gathered in front of the ETC and forced their way in, ransacking the outpost.11 Anywhere between 17 and 29 patients escaped or were carried away by family, and many supplies contaminated by the disease were looted from the center, opening countless infection vectors.12 This was seen as an indication that the government was losing control of their capital, an impression compounded on August 19th when they claimed to have retrieved all of the escaped patients and placed them in the John F. Kennedy Medical Center, a false claim refuted publicly by a doctor on staff at the center.13 On the recommendation of her military advisors, President Sirleaf began to consider a quarantine order targeting West Point. While this act has been linked directly to the riot at the ETC, many factors were considered that made quarantine appear to be the most prudent option in the eyes of the administration. Most pressingly, there was the reality that the lack of facilities and running water in West Point provided excellent opportunities for infection, and the fact that residents held a range of jobs across Monrovia meant the contamination of the slum had an outsized potential to spark a sharp increase in infection rates throughout the city.14 This was a serious risk for Liberia as a whole since Monrovia contained such a large proportion of the population, but the consolidation of political power in the capital meant that the personal risk to those in power likely motivated a more rigorous quarantine procedure as well. West Point’s reputation as a refuge for criminals and ex-combatants added impetus to the government crackdown, as worries spread that the riot at the ETC was not an isolated incident and that an Ebola infected West Point would be a recurring source of violent dissent if not subdued by force. Finally, the riot and scandals associated with it played a role in convincing Sirleaf that a strong response was needed in order to show that Liberia did have control over its people in times of crisis, a reassuring message for an international community deeply worried about Ebola’s spread beyond West Africa.

MacDougall, Clair. “When Liberian Child Soldiers Grow Up.” Newsweek Jul. 2013.

“The Battle Against Ebola in Liberia - Young People Played a Game-Changing Role.” Liberian Observer, April 2015.

11 Mogelson, Luke. “When The Fever Breaks.” New Yorker 90, no. 44, Jan. 2015, pp. 38–1. EBSCOhost.

12 McCoy, Terrence. “Why the Escape of Numerous Ebola Patients in Liberia’s Worst Slum is so Terrifying.” Washington Post Aug. 2014.

13 MacDougall, Clair. “Liberian Government’s Blunders Pile Up in the Grip of Ebola.” Time. Sep. 2014. http://time.com/3247089/liberia-west-pointquarantine-monrovia/ 14 Fallah, Mosoka P., Alison P. Galvani, Shai Gertler, Laura A. Skrip, Dan Yamin. “Quantifying Poverty as a Driver of Ebola Transmission.” PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases 9, no. 12 (2015). https://journals.plos .org /plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0004260 9

10

28

With these reasons behind her decision, President Sirleaf announced a quarantine of West Point that would begin on August 20th. Residents woke up on the morning of the 20th to find military and police units blocking off access to the rest of Monrovia. If West Point was quarantined to prevent further unrest, the presence of authorities had the exact opposite effect. Violent clashes between West Pointers and law enforcement broke out along the length of the cordon and only intensified as the West Point town commissioner, Miatta Flowers, attempted to escape with her family under military escort--a sign that the Liberian Government was truly abandoning West Point to its fate.15 In the ensuing riots, the government troops resorted to deadly force in an attempt to control the crowds. Officers chased citizens down with batons, and at least five West Pointers were shot, among them Shakie Kamara, a young boy not affiliated with the rioters and the single confirmed casualty of the fighting.16 While the quarantine was clear of violent conflict by the third day after its creation, its effectiveness did not improve. By shutting down the central market and restricting the movement of a neighborhood of fishermen and itinerant workers, the government effectively cut off the economic lifeblood that sustained the slum.17 Food prices doubled or tripled overnight, forcing many in an already impoverished area to go hungry. Government medical personnel who had been opposed to the quarantine predicted an intensification of infection rates within West Point, and supplies to stem the tide were not forthcoming. If the move was an attempt by the government to project the appearance of control in the capital, it was an abject failure; walls of homes bordering the cordon were knocked down to create paths of escape, and checkpoint guards were regularly bribed to let residents through. All indications showed that the cordon was porous and fruitless at best and downright harmful at worst. With these issues mounting, the Liberian government reached out to representatives within West Point to negotiate the end of the quarantine, a proposal that became reality on August 30th, ten days after the cordon’s establishment.18 While the quarantine of West Point proved to be the latest in a series of dangerous embarrassments for the Sirleaf Administration during the Ebola crisis, the negotiations that ended it were very fruitful. They would begin a new wave of emergency social organization in Liberia that would prove far more effective than the heavy handed methods employed by the government up to that point.

The negotiation produced two key outcomes. First, West Point agreed to become a self sufficient zone in the fight against Ebola: local volunteers would run all patient identifying, home quarantine, and contact tracing efforts without outside aid.19 Secondly, it brought together two of the key players who would help transform West Point’s self imposed self-sufficiency into a stunningly effective set of disease control measures: Mosoka Fallah, a former West Point resident and Harvardeducated infectious disease specialist employed by the Liberian Government, and Kenneth Martu, a passionate West Point representative who had been fighting the quarantine since before its inception.20 The latter already knew of an informal Ebola education group in West Point run by Archie

Alfred, Charlotte. “Shocking Photo of a Slum on Lockdown Amid Ebola Fears.” Huffington Post, August 2014. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/21/liberia-ebola-quarantine- photos_n_5696120.html 16 “Bidding Farewell to an Unseen Ebola - End of a Thorny Journey.” New Republic Liberia 17 “In Enforcing New Measures to Contain Ebola- Monrovia Paralyzed.” Inquirer Aug. 2014.

18 Hoffman, Danny. “A Crouching Village: Ebola and the Empty Gestures of Quarantine in Monrovia.”

19 Mogelson, Luke. “When The Fever Breaks.” 38.

20 “The Battle Against Ebola in Liberia - Young People Played a Game-Changing Role.”

15

29

Gbessay, a young man who had worked with his friends since early August to dispel rumors that Ebola was a hoax. Under the guidance of Fallah, Martu and Gbessay expanded this informal informational program, transforming it into a highly effective local disease control unit known as the Active Case Finders and Awareness Team (ACFAT), recruiting young men from each of West Point’s 35 blocks to serve as the operational arm of the organization. Before the quarantine was officially over, the methods that ACFAT employed were proving far more effective than past government interventions. By delegating tasks to willing volunteers, local recruitment circumvented issues of medical and government personnel being stretched over too wide of an area and sinking too much time into fact-finding and notetaking. These volunteers were local faces largely in good standing with the community, so the social networks within the slum worked for Fallah and no longer presented a unified front of resistance as they had previously.21 These measures were reminiscent of those detailed by Paul Richards in his examination of the people’s science of Ebola control, where experts and locals each contribute their own perspectives on the situation at hand to generate “novel shared knowledge”.22 This collaboration of scientific insight and localized implementation methods proved extremely effective in the West Point case. The slum was declared Ebola free five months before the rest of the country, and Fallah, Martu, and Gbessay’s system was soon exported throughout Monrovia and, subsequently, all of Liberia. Soon the country was the first of the worst hit West African nations to be Ebola free on March 27th, 2015; almost a year after Liberia’s Ebola nightmare had begun, it was over.23 24 What larger lessons can be drawn from the botched quarantine by Liberian forces and the successful application of a people’s science of Ebola control that followed? First of all, it is clear that the decision to quarantine West Point was rooted in the escalation of tensions between West Pointers and the government, which could have been defused in many instances if the government had paid attention to the fears present in the slum. This provides some lessons for the future, most importantly that a conciliatory hand is an important tool that can help to cut down on rising tensions.

If the government had recognized that the riot was an expression of the West Pointers concerns, however unruly, and moved the treatment center instead of cracking down on the population as a whole, further violence may have been avoided. Also, this is a strong argument for a government to get to know some of their most destitute populations. If representatives like Kenneth Martu, who took heed of the specific fears of West Point, brought those fears to those making decisions directly affecting the neighborhood, the shipment of outside cases to the West Point ETC may never have happened. The fact that the long term causes of the conflict included the West Pointers distrust of urban renewal programs highlights the need for more delicate and piecemeal attempts at improving the quality of life of those that live there instead of clearing the land for sweeping redevelopment that often leaves poorer residents in the cold. If this lesson is not heeded, and land dispossession efforts once again materialize, it is likely that mob violence will return to West Point. Most of all the quarantine showed the strengths of a people’s science of Ebola control, including a more sensitive and adaptable nature, local knowledge that the government lacked, and the use of inbuilt social Mogelson, Luke. “When The Fever Breaks.” 38.

Richards, Paul. Ebola: How a People’s Science Helped End an Epidemic. London: Zed Books, 2016.

23 MacDougall, Clair. “Liberia’s Military Tries to Remedy Tension Over Ebola Quarantine.” New York Times May 2015. 0 24 “Bidding Farewell to an Unseen Ebola - End of a Thorny Journey.” New Republic Liberia 21 22

30

networks as noted above. Beyond this, the organization of a people’s science of disease control in the form of ACFAT legitimizes a novel form of small scale democratic action that has major advantages over large scale government intervention when the enthusiastic cooperation of the local populace is of utmost importance. The role ACFAT played in ending the quarantine proves that small scale operations of the kind have unique social and logistical advantages. In summation, the quarantine and subsequent salvation of West Point is a wellspring of lessons for the future: the Liberian government should remember the effectiveness of addressing to the needs of its citizens and the possibilities inherent in a mobilized and motivated civilian force.

After weathering the storm of the Ebola crisis, Liberia looks to have a brighter future ahead.

Soon after the outbreak had ended, UN sanctions were lifted and peacekeeping troops handed control of all remaining security concerns back to Liberia, a welcome return to normalcy after years dealing with the aftereffects of the war. In January 2018, George Weah was sworn in as Liberia’s new president, marking the first time that power had been peacefully transferred between elected leaders since the 1940s.25 As for West Point, nine months after soldiers and civilians faced each other across the cordon line for the first time, they were facing each other on the soccer field in a conciliatory match meant to help both sides heal old wounds and move past the quarantine. The school that had served as the opening battleground in this crisis has been restored and reopened, its walls whitewashed and cleared of any sign of the disease that had dwelt within. Though the material infrastructure of the slum is still in shambles and the fortunes of its inhabitants have not changed, there is hope for a better tomorrow in the way the community banded together in West Point’s darkest days.26 At first seen as nothing but a risk for further contagion, West Point became Liberia’s salvation, a testament to the power of collaboration between expert and local knowledge.

25 26

Jones, Abeodu B. “Liberia.”

MacDougall, Clair. “Liberia’s Military Tries to Remedy Tension Over Ebola Quarantine.”

31

References Alfred, Charlotte. “Shocking Photo of a Slum on Lockdown Amid Ebola Fears.” Huffington Post, August 2014. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/21/liberia-ebola-quarantinephotos_n_5696120.html “Bidding Farewell to an Unseen Ebola - End of a Thorny Journey.” New Republic Liberia, May 2015. https://advance.lexis.com/document?crid=71cf8890-6c8c-492e-9972-4f983e6a 4dc&pddocfullpath=%2Fshared%2Fdocument%2Fnews%2Furn%3AcontentItem%3A5HXVBB1-DYR8-314D0000000&pdcontentcomponentid=8320&pdmfid=1516831&pdisrlapi=true Ciment, James. Another America: the Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled it.

New York: Hill and Wang, 2013.

“Ebola crisis: Liberia police fire at Monrovia protests.” Asia Monitor Aug. 2014. https://search. proquest.com/docview/1555704643?accountid=12964 Fallah, Mosoka P., Alison P. Galvani, Shai Gertler, Laura A. Skrip, Dan Yamin. “Quantifying Poverty as a Driver of Ebola Transmission.” PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases 9, no. 12 (2015). https://journals.plos .org /plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0004260 Hinshaw, Drew. "Ebola Crisis Raises New Security Concerns in Liberia." Dow Jones Institutional News, Aug 20, 2014. https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.ou.edu/ docview/2074989729?accountid=12964 (accessed December 13, 2018).

Hoffman, Danny. “A Crouching Village: Ebola and the Empty Gestures of Quarantine in Monrovia.” City & Society 28, no. 2 (2016). https://anthrosource-onlinelibrarywiley-com.ezproxy.lib.ou.edu/doi/full/10.1111/ciso.12083 “In Enforcing New Measures to Contain Ebola- Monrovia Paralyzed.” Inquirer Aug. 2014. https://advance.lexis.com/document?crid=9a3ab92b-f4c3-4526-b464898771d01960&pddocfullpath=%2Fshared%2Fdocument%2Fnews%2Furn%3AcontentItem %3A5CYS-4XJ1-JC86-C211-0000000&pdcontentcomponentid=8320&pdmfid=1516831&pdisurlapi=true Jones, Abeodu B., Svend E. Holsoe, Donald R. Petterson. “Liberia.” Encyclopædia Britannica Last modified June 27, 2018. https://www.britannica.com/place/Liberia “Liberia” World Factbook. Last modified December 3, 2018. https://www.cia.gov/library /publications/the- world-factbook/geos/li.html 32

MacDougall, Clair. “Liberia’s Military Tries to Remedy Tension Over Ebola Quarantine.” New York Times May 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/world/africa/liberiasmilitary-tries -to-remedy-tension-over-ebola-quarantine.html?_r=0 MacDougall, Clair. “Liberian Government’s Blunders Pile Up in the Grip of Ebola.” Time Sep. 2014. http://time.com/3247089/liberia-west-point-quarantine-monrovia/ MacDougall, Clair. “When Liberian Child Soldiers Grow Up.” Newsweek Jul. 2013. https://www.newsweek.com/2013/07/31/when-liberian-child-soldiers-grow-237780.html McCoy, Terrence. “Why the Escape of Numerous Ebola Patients in Liberia’s Worst Slum is so Terrifying.” Washington Post Aug. 2014. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ morningmix/wp/2014/08/18/why-the-escape-of-numerous-ebola-patients-in-liberias-worst-slum-isso-terrifying/?utm_term=.1cfaef415234 Mogelson, Luke. “When The Fever Breaks.” New Yorker 90, no. 44, Jan. 2015, pp. 38–1.

EBSCOhost, libraries.ou.edu/access.aspx?url=http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lib. ou.edu/ login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=100677471&site=ehost-live.

Mukpo, Ashoka. “Liberia After Ebola: ‘The Human Suffering Changed Me.’” Africa Media Agency July 2017. http://amediaagency.com/liberia-after-ebola-the-human -sufferingchanged-me/ “The Battle Against Ebola in Liberia - Young People Played a Game-Changing Role.”

Liberian Observer, April 2015. https://advance.lexis.com/document?crid=6f18e520c3f5-4383-846d501a44152bee&pddocfullpath=%2Fshared%2Fdocument%2Fnews%2Furn%3AcontentItem %3A5HXX-V9Y1-DYR8-316J-0000000&pdcontentcomponentid=8320&pdmfid=1516831&pdisurlapi=true Richards, Paul. Ebola: How a People’s Science Helped End an Epidemic. London: Zed Books, 2016.

33

Patrons and Individuality in Italian Renaissance Art Noah Bridges The patrons of art in Italy during the Renaissance were a new type of patron, distinct from any who had come before. Over the course of the Middle Ages, the primary patron of the arts was the Catholic Church. In an effort to promote orthodoxy and a universally consistent message, Church patronage had resulted in the creation of a uniform, homogeneous style of art that served to unite the Church across the disparate regions of Europe. Only with the emergence of a wealthy, varied merchant class in the years preceding the Renaissance would this paradigm of art patronage begin to change.

Indeed, this change began in the second half of the 11th century as the economy of Italy began to transform dramatically from a feudal, agriculture-based system to a mercantile, capitalistic economy. The port cities of Genoa, Pisa, and Venice built extensive trade networks that extended from Europe to China. Industry boomed throughout Tuscany and much of northern Italy; Lucca produced high-quality silk and Florence was a leading producer of wool products. Leading families in Siena and Florence accumulated massive amounts of wealth through papal banking. The rise of banking is symptomatic of and was essential to the economic growth that occurred on the Italian peninsula. Banks supplied the needs of business-owners and wealthy merchants by providing loans in the form of liquid assets, facilitating the exchange of currencies, and safeguarding large sums of money.27 This explosion of economic activity on the Italian peninsula resulted in the creation of a bourgeois, merchant class.28 As these merchants became wealthier, the balance of power shifted from the nobility and the Church and its monastic communities to these wealthy individuals.

Nowhere was this shift more pronounced than in Florence.

In 1293, Florence officially established itself as a republic. Merchants possessed a monopoly on political power in Florence since guild membership was required for one to hold public office.

Florentine guilds were groups of merchants and artisans that regulated business and provided protection for members. These guilds were remarkably diverse. There were 21 guilds, seven major guilds and 14 minor guilds, most with multiple professions represented within a single guild. These guilds served more as political entities than mercantile regulators, allowing members large amounts of freedom both in their business and personal lives. The impacts of this freedom can be seen in art patronage, since any merchant with sufficient funds could commission works of art. Individual merchants were responsible for commissioning a significant majority of Florentine Renaissance art, a stark contrast to the Venetian paradigm of art patronage. A more restrictive, aristocratic system of government limited the ability of individual Venetian merchants to commission art.29 Further, the art commissioned in Venice primarily served to elevate the aristocracy and Venetian Republic; those outside the nobility and government did not strongly influence the art.30 The freedom and security

Richard Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 412-14.

The Economy of Renaissance Florence, 3-30.

29 Edward Muir, “Images of Power: Art and Pageantry in Renaissance Venice.� The American Historical Review, Vol. 84, No. 1: 20-23. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1855658.

30 Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 247-49.

27 28

34

benefitted the artists themselves. More than simply creating greater demand for their work, the guilds helped guarantee that artists received compensation for their work and allowed individuals of all backgrounds to become artists (in the terminology of the time, artisans).31 Although the guilds provided their members with significant freedoms, political power was largely reserved for the wealthy, leading members of major guilds, leaving little political influence to the less wealthy merchants.32 Although wealth was essential to gaining and retaining power, the popolo grasso, the wealthy, influential oligarchy of Florence, was not guaranteed power on the basis of wealth alone; reputation could severely impact one’s political power.33 Cosimo de Medici, one of Florence’s wealthiest and most influential citizens, was exiled in 1433 on false accusations against his character.

Ultimately, the populace did not accept these rumors and Cosimo returned with great pomp and celebration five years later. His exile and return illustrates the ability of one’s reputation to provide protection from outside societal forces.34 Changing philosophical beliefs and the further accumulation of wealth by influential individuals led to wealth and reputation becoming inseparably linked. Humanists, such as Leornardo Bruni, drawing from philosophers such as Aristotle, promoted the virtue of wealth. Under this philosophy, possessing wealth was seen as both a responsibility and a privilege. The privileged wealthy were perceived as honorable as a direct consequence of their affluence, but they were also responsible for investing in ventures that benefited society. As a result of these essential investments in the common good, the status of the wealthy was further elevated.35 As this philosophy of the virtue of wealth gained prevalence in the late 1300s and early 1400s, many wealthy merchants in Florence began investing their significant resources in the creation of art. These merchants commissioned art because of its perceived benefits to both society and self.

Great art was thought to increase the status of a city and religious art was thought to improve the morals of society. This investment in art was not limited to individuals, as guilds and other organizations also commissioned art, as seen in the statues outside of Orsanmichele. Although group patronage resulted in many famous Renaissance works, most patrons in the Renaissance operated as individuals or as representatives of a family. For this reason, this paper will focus on works commissioned by either families or individuals.

Given the societal benefits attributed to art, commissioning artistic works improved a patron’s status in their city. Patrons followed two principal avenues to advance their standing using art.36 First, patrons commissioned works that served religious purposes. This was perceived as a pious act for several reasons. Commissioning a piece of art for the Church was perceived more as a gift rather than an investment since it did not materially benefit the patron (although it could be considered an investment in the afterlife). Commissioning religious art designed to further the Church’s message demonstrated the selfless, sacrificial nature of the patron and the value they placed on spiritual things. In a society where the Church’s influence was felt in nearly every public The Economy of Renaissance Florence, pp. 349-353, 361-62.

The Economy of Renaissance Florence, pp. 343, 347.

33 Patricia Lee Rubin, Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 39.

34 Christopher Hibbert, The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (London, England: Penguin Books, 1979), pp. 48-53.

35 Images and Identity, pp. 40-42.

36 Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance, Culture and Society in Italy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999), 98-99.

31 32

35

arena, it was essential to appear vested in common religious practices. Second, patrons commissioned works that improved their socio-economic status in the city by demonstrating their wealth in the art itself. In the early 1400s when merchants began heavily investing in the arts, merely being recognized as wealthy was inadequate. Patrons wished to be perceived as majestic, as though they inhabited a higher plane than those around them.37 Art was frequently used as a vehicle to communicate this magnificence to the populace, especially in Florence.

Although public image was the primary motivation driving patrons in Florence to commission art, commissioning art for one’s own private enjoyment also rose to prominence throughout Italy, specifically in regions outside Tuscany. Patrons in Venice, Urbino, and other cities regularly commissioned works simply for the sake of possessing unique and beautiful objects. The social elite collected works of art by the great artists of the day because of the value inherent in the works themselves.38 Art’s intrinsic value no longer stemmed from its functionality; its prestige gave it worth.

These three motivations for commissioning art – demonstrating one’s piety, emphasizing one’s stature in society, and reinforcing one’s perception of his or her own status and artistic taste – form the groundwork for understanding the role of patrons in the Renaissance. In contrast to the monolithic Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, the patrons of the Renaissance were formed from a diverse group of individuals. While it could be argued that the Catholic Church produced art with few stylistic variations, it is certain that these new patrons were the catalyst for the stylistic changes that define the Renaissance and ushered in modern concepts of art. These innovations were encouraged because each individual patron strove to demonstrate his or her uniqueness through the art they commissioned. Thus, although the motivations behind the production of art were similar from patron to patron, the art itself was stylistically varied and communicated the individuality of the patron. The patrons of the Renaissance were responsible for ushering in this new era of art, one in which the individual, whether patron or artist, could demonstrate their uniqueness.

The first motivation for commissioning art that will be investigated is that of demonstrating one’s spirituality. One of the greatest examples of a piece that accomplishes this goal is Gentile da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi. Palla Strozzi commissioned Adoration of the Magi in 1421 for the sacristy at Santa Trinitá in Florence. Completed in 1423, the painting is a continuous narrative that depicts the major events in the Magi’s journey to venerate the Christ-child. This piece communicates the piety and spirituality of the Strozzi through two primary avenues.

First, the original location of this work was a testament to the piety that the Strozzi family wished to present to the public. The construction and furnishing of the sacristy at Santa Trinitá was entirely funded by the Strozzi family, one of the wealthiest families in Florence at the time. In 1464, Bongianni Gianfigliazzi constructed a chapel in Santa Trinitá that was valued at roughly half the cost of his palace.39 It is reasonable to assume, given the importance of the project, that Palla Strozzi invested similarly significant resources into the sacristy’s construction. Strozzi’s contribution would demonstrate the level of importance he placed on spiritual things to all. The spirituality associated with this gift is accentuated by the fact that it did not directly serve the Strozzi family’s interests. In this respect it was posited as a “selfless” gift, further demonstrating the family’s devotion.

Images and Identity, pp. 36, 38.

The Italian Renaissance, Culture and Society in Italy pp. 99, 101.

39 The Economy of Renaissance Florence, pg. 382.

37 38

36

Second, the story of the Magi, the subject of the work, closely follows the narrative of the Strozzi patronage of the sacristy in Santa Trinitá. In the story of the Magi, three rich, foreign dignitaries hear of the birth of a new king who will be greater than all others. Because they wish to honor this king, they set out to find him with the intent of bestowing lavish gifts upon him. The similarities of this narrative to the story that the Strozzi family would wish to be associated with their donation to the Church are clear. A wealthy, influential family hears that the Church is in need of help in the funding of a new sacristy. Since they are devoted Catholics, they decide to give a lavish gift to the Church and fund the construction of the sacristy. Through these narrative similarities, the piety of the Magi, a central theme in the work, is commuted to the Strozzi family. Thus, the Adoration of the Magi serves as a powerful example of a work produced to highlight the patron’s piety.

However, despite the significant resources invested by the Strozzi family in the appearance of piety, this perceived righteousness was merely a veneer. During the Renaissance, the Catholic Church harshly condemned usury, of any and all forms. Palla Strozzi, as a member of a banking family, had garnered his incredible wealth through the sin of usury (charging interest on loans and credit extensions).40 The conflict between the appearance of piety and the underlying sins adds another layer to the motivations of patrons to commission religious art. Rather than merely projecting the appearance of piety, the patrons were also attempting to purchase forgiveness for their sins.

Another famous work that communicates the piety of its patrons is Massacio’s Trinity.

Completed in 1426, the work was commissioned by Domenico Lenzi. This piece is the first image one sees upon entering Santa Maria Novella in Florence, positioned directly in the worshipper’s line of site. This work focuses on communicating a spiritual truth, the Trinity of God, rather than on portraying an event. The spatial decorum and content of the work impart a sense of deep spirituality to the viewer. This spirituality is transferred to the patron through their inclusion in the work. There are only six figures in the Trinity, seven if one includes the Holy Spirit who is portrayed as a dove. The two figures at the base of the work are Domenico Lenzi and his wife. Since the patrons are the only lay figures in a work composed of saints and deity, their presence is noteworthy. Their inclusion in this spiritual image transfers spirituality to them by association. Additionally, the two patrons are seen to be kneeling before their patron saint, further demonstrating their humility and piety.41 The next motivation driving patrons to commission art was their urge to exhibit their wealth and status. This desire to create an aura of magnificence around them is clearly communicated through the art they commissioned. A prime example of this motivation is, once again, Gentile da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi. Although this piece is principally a religious work, it also expresses the Strozzi family’s status to the Florentine public. This is seen in several ways that were likely mandated by the patron.

First, directly behind the Magi, there stands a falconer (in Italian, strozziere) whose title recalls Strozzi family name and, by extension, the Strozzi’s role in the work’s creation. Without his great wealth, the sacristy, and by extension the altarpiece, would not exist. As such, his inclusion in the work emphasizes the prestige of the Strozzi family. Second, there is a startling amount of gold P. J. Jones, “Florentine Families and Florentine Diaries in the Fourteenth Century.” Papers of the British School at Rome, Vol. 24: pp. 186-190. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40310592 41 Ursula Schlegel, “Observations on Masaccio’s Trinity Fresco in Santa Maria Novella.” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 45, no. 1: 28, accessed 7 December 2018. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3048052 40

37

included in the painting. This work was commissioned in the 1420s, nearly 100 years after Giotto.

The inclusion of gold in paintings, a characteristic of Gothic works, was both expensive and no longer typical of all religious works. Palla Strozzi must have deliberately chosen to include gold in the work since, as patron, he was responsible for purchasing all the materials necessary for the work’s creation. Including gold in the Adoration of the Magi would have been extremely expensive; this expense would have been clear to any of the work’s viewers. More than merely demonstrating wealth, this inclusion helps surround the Strozzi family with an aura of magnificence and luxury. This impression is reinforced by the rich textures of the garments worn by the Magi. These textures are based on the popular materials worn by contemporary merchants, further emphasizing the splendor of the Strozzi family. Additionally, as spurs were associated with knighthood in Renaissance Florence, the spurs worn by the youngest Magi recall the knighthood of Palla Strozzi, granted him by the King of Naples.42 This further highlights the Strozzi family’s status in Florence. Through the stylistic choices and revealing details of the Adoration of the Magi, Fabriano communicates the luxury and magnificence enjoyed by the Strozzi family.43 The Adoration of the Magi demonstrates the wealth of a single family in a unique way; however, the practice of advertising one’s wealth through art was not limited to the Strozzi family.

This act was common to nearly all wealthy families in Florence. The most common method of communicating their status and wealth was the construction of massive family palazzi, or palaces.

These structures could take up entire city blocks and cost tremendous amounts of money.

Sometimes, in order to create enough space for the construction of a palazzo, the family would buy surrounding buildings that would be incorporated into the palazzo behind a unified façade.44 No expense was spared in the construction of these residences. Giovanni Rucellai, an important patron of the arts in Florence, clearly outlined his motivations behind commissioning his palazzo and other works around the city. In his mind, these works acted as a permanent memorial to his achievements and status in the city. This belief highlights the patrons’ goal of demonstrating their prestige and magnificence, not only in their time but also in ages to come.45 Despite the large number of private palaces in Florence, the family’s individual characteristics are clearly conveyed through the stylistic attributes of each palazzo. For instance, the Palazzo Medici, designed by Michelozzo di Bartolommeo and completed in 1460, uses uncut stones in the façade of the ground floor to recall the strength of Roman fortresses.46 This gives the structure an imposing presence, reminiscent of the Medici’s influence over Florentine politics. The interior courtyard of the Palazzo Medici presents a starkly different style than the façade. It borrows stylistic elements, such as Corinthian columns and a geometric pattern, from classical antiquity, while also incorporating architectural styles reinvented in the Renaissance, such as bounding arches. The courtyard may have contained Donatello’s bronze Judith and Holofernes and, according to Vasari,47 the David, both

Images and Identity, pp. 28-30.

Images and Identity, pp. 25-29.

44 The Economy of Renaissance Florence, pg. 379.

45 Frederick Hartt and David Wilkins, History of Italian Renaissance Art (Upper Saddle River New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2011), 243.

46 History of Italian Renaissance Art pp. 175-76.

47 Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (New York, New York: Trow Directory Printing and Bookbinding Company, 1896), 315-316.

42 43

38

widely recognized as symbols of the Florentine republic.48 These distinct sculptural elements of the courtyard highlight the Medici’s pride in their Florentine citizenship. Similarly to the Palazzo Medici courtyard, Palazzo Rucellai, designed by Leon Battista Alberti, draws inspiration from the proportions and ordered beauty of classical temples in its construction. The order and symmetry of the Palazzo Rucellai façade emphasizes Giovanni Rucellai’s identity as a humanist and scholar.49 These edifices call upon the visual language of antiquity to communicate the owners’ status and power in the city, doing so in a way that emphasizes the distinct characteristics of the families residing within the palazzo.

The majority of the art commissioned in Florence served a functional purpose. It elevated the status of the city, helped promote religious devotion, demonstrated the status of the patron, or did some combination of all three. However, there were individuals in Florence who collected art for the sake of their personal enjoyment. One such individual was Lorenzo “il Magnifico” de Medici. Most famously known as a collector of jewels and literature, 50 he also amassed an impressive collection of Renaissance painting and sculpture.51 This collection was not used to promote his public interests; rather, it merely accented his personal identity as a cultured man of the arts. This new interest in possessing art that rose to prominence during the Renaissance occurred for two reasons. First, as the status of artists increased, artists’ work gained an intrinsic prestige; essentially, the artist’s standing was transferred to the art itself. Second, possession of a unique work of art created by a famed artist helped strengthen the patron’s own sense of individuality. They valued acquiring and possessing unique, prestigious works that no one else could claim.52 Although it may seem similar to commissioning art to demonstrate one’s prestige in a public sphere, because these works were intended solely for the private use of the patron, they focus on the individual’s own sense of prestige rather than on public perception.

One of the best examples of a work that was desired for the sake of possession is Titian’s Venus of Urbino, commissioned by Guidobaldo della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. At the time of this work’s completion in 1538, Titian was the most sought-after artist in Europe. His clientele was international. He completed portraits and other commissions for many wealthy European merchants and rulers. Many of these patrons desired Titian’s works, not necessarily for any functional use, but for the prestige of possessing a painting by Titian. As with Titian’s international clients, Guidobaldo was interested in the Venus of Urbino simply for the sake of possessing a work created by Titian.

The Duke’s commissioning of the Venus of Urbino epitomizes the pursuit of art for the sake of individual status. Through his communication regarding the Venus of Urbino, Guidobaldo della Rovere reveals his impatience to take possession of the work. His primary concern was that Titian would sell the work to another buyer who presented an offer before the Duke could pay Titian, thereby depriving him of his prize.53 As the painting was intended only for the Duke’s private use, his

Francis Ames-Lewis, “Donatello’s Bronze David and the Palazzo Medici Courtyard.” Renaissance Studies, Vol. 3, no. 3: 237-241, 244, accessed 21 December 2018. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24409868 49 History of Italian Renaissance Art pg. 243.

50 The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici, pp. 168-69.

51 History of Italian Renaissance Art pp. 176-78.

52 Images and Identity, 61.

53 David Rosand, “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch” in Titian’s Venus of Urbino, ed. Rona Goffen (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 42.

48

39

desire for it was primarily rooted in its identity as a work created by Titian and, consequently, the prestige of owning such a work.

Another important aspect of Guidobaldo della Rovere’s pursuit of the Venus of Urbino is the desire to possess a unique piece of art. Although similar to other works such as Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, Titian’s work is a unique expression of his artistic creativity. Unlike other previous female nudes, the subject of the Venus of Urbino is awake and seems to be aware of the viewer, heightening the sexual undertones already present in the subject matter. Further, Titian’s chosen setting, a nobleman’s residence, serves to give the woman a distinct, if ambiguous, identity, whether as a bride, mistress, or courtesan. Guidobaldo’s possession of this unique work would heighten his own sense of individuality despite the fact that his ownership of the Venus of Urbino would not have been advertised. Given societal norms and its suggestive portrayal of a nude woman, Venus of Urbino was displayed in the privacy of the Duke’s studio, visible only to the Duke and his visitors. Given this circumstance, the painting’s impact was limited to Guidobaldo’s personal sense of individuality rather than the public’s perception of him.

Guidobaldo della Rovere pursued other works by Titian in addition to the Venus of Urbino.

He commissioned several portraits from Titian over the course of many years in addition to other notable works, such as Titian’s Woman in a Fur Coat.54 The pursuit of art from famous masters, particularly Titian, is a consistent theme in Guidobaldo della Rovere’s patronage of the arts. This motivation of commissioning works to highlight one’s status, as a man (or woman) of style and developed artistic taste, is an essential development in Renaissance patronage and one that highlights the patrons’ need to represent their own individuality.

Thus, the theme that connects the varied motivations of patrons to commission art is status.

Regardless of the art that was commissioned, during the Renaissance, status and reputation were the primary motivators for patronage. One’s individuality was expressed through displays of status that highlighted characteristics unique to the patron. The patrons in Florence commissioned art to improve their individual reputation, always incorporating unique details that separated them from others attempting to do the same. The patrons who pursued art for their own private use sought validation for their own perception of their status. Possessing unique works by the premier names in the artistic world validated their standing while simultaneously highlighting their own individuality.

In conclusion, although status is the theme that connects the motivations of the patrons to commission art, their status is communicated through the artists’ stylistic choices that highlighted each patron’s unique characteristics. The patrons’ desire for their unique characteristics to be manifested through art was the catalyst for artists to express their own unique style and artistic vision. The patrons’ role in facilitating this transformation of artistic expression cements their status as the individuals responsible for the genesis of the pivotal artistic period known as the Renaissance.

54

Titian, Woman in a Fur Coat, Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, site visited December 9, 2018.

40

References Ames-Lewis, Francis. “Donatello’s Bronze David and the Palazzo Medici Courtyard.” Renaissance Studies, Vol. 3, no. 3: 237-241, 244, accessed 21 December 2018.

Burke, Peter. The Italian Renaissance, Culture and Society in Italy. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Goldthwaite, Richard. The Economy of Renaissance Florence. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Hartt, Frederick and David Wilkins. History of Italian Renaissance Art. Upper Saddle River New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2011.

Haskell, Francis. Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.

Hibbert, Christopher. The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici. London, England: Penguin Books, 1979.

Jones, P. J. “Florentine Families and Florentine Diaries in the Fourteenth Century.” Papers of the British School at Rome, Vol. 24: pp. 186-190, accessed 10 January 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40310592.

Muir, Edward. “Images of Power: Art and Pageantry in Renaissance Venice.” The American Historical Review, Vol. 84, No. 1: 20-23, accessed 17 January 2019.

Rosand, David. “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch.” In Titian’s Venus of Urbino, edited by Rona Goffen, 42. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Rubin, Patricia Lee. Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Schlegel, Ursula. “Observations on Masaccio’s Trinity Fresco in Santa Maria Novella.” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 45, no. 1: 28, accessed 7 December 2018.

Titian, Woman in a Fur Coat, Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, site visited December 9, 2018.

Vasari, Giorgio. The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. New York, New York: Trow Directory Printing and Bookbinding Company, 1896.

41

Leveraging Public Opinion for Political and Legal Power Leanne Ho In the 18th and 19th centuries, both enslaved and free African Americans were at the mercy of an unsympathetic system of power, which would not grant or recognize their freedom. Many African Americans sought freedom through petitions to their local courts, and when they could not make the legal system work for them, they turned to other recourses, such as letters and autobiographies. In petitions addressed to the courts and letters addressed to political figures, African Americans of the 18th century made bids for freedom from slavery by incorporating Enlightenment values and implicitly leveraging the public sphere. Following the introduction of legislation regarding fugitive slaves and public obligation, African Americans in the 19th century began to explicitly address public audiences in arguing for freedom from slavery. By negotiating the evolving notion of the post-Enlightenment public sphere, African Americans of the 18th and 19th century protested fugitive slave laws by becoming their own advocates, as opposed to relying on the courts or political figures as mediators. Unlike early petitioners or letter writers, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs eliminated the role of the courts and political figures as intermediaries between African Americans and the public. Instead, they spoke directly to the public in their speeches and autobiographical works, calling upon a collective conscience that was bound by morality but not bureaucracy or individual reputation.

The earliest works of African American literature arguing for freedom from slavery, such as petitions, were written for private audiences rather than public audiences, which produced limited success. These petitions were addressed to government bodies in the hopes that the legal system would hear the complaints of slaves and grant them freedom. In one such petition from 1773, an enslaved African American named Felix addresses “Province of the Massachusetts Bay To His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, Esq; Governor; To the Honorable His Majesty’s Council, and To the Honorable House of Representatives in General Court assembled at Boston.”55 In other words, his explicit audience is the governor and state government of Massachusetts. As the petition continues, it grows clear that Felix has not considered any other audience. He writes, “We think Ourselves very happy, that we may thus address the Great and General Court of this Province, which great and good Court is to us, the best Judge, under God, of what is wise, just and good.”56 The effusive flattery is certainly a byproduct of this petition’s purpose: to get the courts to grant freedom to many slaves living in Boston. Yet, that flattery is also an indicator of the eminence of the courts. Felix considers himself “very happy” simply for the opportunity to address the court, implying that African Americans had limited recourses when it came to obtaining freedom from slavery.57 With a focus on the private instead of the public, Felix is forced to appeal directly to the individuals that were responsible for his oppression. In the end, early petitions were never consistently successful in meeting the goal of freeing African Americans from slavery or protecting the rights of free African Americans. The petitions were limited by the private nature of their individual appeals.

Aptheker, Herbert. A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: 1661-1910. Citadel Press, 1951.

Aptheker, Herbert. A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: 1661-1910. Citadel Press, 1951.

57 Aptheker, Herbert. A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: 1661-1910. Citadel Press, 1951.

55 56

42

Later in the 18th century, African Americans employed the format of letters rather than petitions, allowing them to leverage the political reputation of the letter addressees, incorporating those public figures into their argument and creating a stronger and farther-reaching impression on the public sphere. This development marked the beginning of a transition from private to public. In 1792, Benjamin Banneker drew on Thomas Jefferson’s political reputation as a defender of liberty, freedom, and equality in order to criticize his support for slavery as well as criticize the existence of slavery as a whole. In his letter to Jefferson, Banneker draws attention to Jefferson’s belief in liberty and natural rights, a system of values that would have resonated not just with the rational and Enlightenment-minded Jefferson, but also with Jefferson’s supporters in the public sphere. Banneker asks Jefferson to remember his reaction to British colonialism, saying: This, Sir, was a time when you clearly saw into the injustice of a state of slavery, and in which you had just apprehension of the horror of its condition. It was now that your abhorrence thereof was so excited, that you publicly held forth this true and invaluable doctrine, which is worthy to be recorded and remembered in all succeeding ages: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”58 By framing the American revolution as a “time when [Jefferson] clearly saw into the injustice of slavery,” Banneker frames abolition as a liberty-driven cause that aligns with Jefferson’s own values, which include a commitment to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”59 In other words, he forces Jefferson to take a stance; either Jefferson must admit that his support for slavery contradicts his values, or else he must concede those values altogether. Banneker also drops a casual but firm reminder that Jefferson “publicly held forth this true and invaluable doctrine” that states “all men are created equal.”60 This is Banneker’s appeal to his implicit audience—the public. Because the public sphere is familiar with Jefferson’s values, Jefferson is held accountable to those values. Thus, even though this is a private letter, Banneker is arguing his case to both explicit and implicit audiences. If this letter was only ever read by Jefferson, the contradiction of Jefferson’s values and support for slavery would simply be a matter of moral and ethical consistency. However, because this letter could be made public, it threatens Jefferson’s reputation as a leader in liberty and equality.

In this way, Banneker utilizes the public sphere and incorporates the addressee of his letter into his argument for the abolition of slavery.

The power of the public sphere only increased as the early United States passed various Fugitive Slave Acts that relied on public cooperation, making appeals to the public sphere more important than appeals to private entities. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 had two purposes: “first, to facilitate the extradition of fugitives from justice; and secondly, to assist the owners of slaves to recover their property without recourse to violence, and without breach of the peace.”61 In other Purcell, Sarah J. The Early National Period. Facts On File, 2004.

Purcell, Sarah J. The Early National Period. Facts On File, 2004.

60 Purcell, Sarah J. The Early National Period. Facts On File, 2004.

61 Johnson, Allen. “The Constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Acts.” The Yale Law Journal, vol. 31, no. 2, 1921, pp. 161–182. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/789306.

58 59

43

words, this law empowered slave owners to recapture their runaway slaves, which were considered escaped property, even in free territories such as the Northern states. However, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 still kept the task of recovering fugitive slaves in the jurisdiction of the slave owner. At first, this was fine, since “the lack of an organized abolition movement meant fewer slaves coming across the border and less popular outrage at the slave-catchers who would enter Northern towns and forcibly remove Blacks to Southern states and inevitably to bondage.”62 Put simply, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 faced no public backlash because fugitive slaves were not common enough to be a major issue in Northern public opinion and because Northerners did not have to enforce the slave act personally; they merely had to be complicit as it was being enforced. That was soon to change.

As the abolitionist movement grew, there was “an increase in both the frequency and severity of Northern reaction to the use of the 1793 Act by Southern slaveowners.”63 In1850, after pressure from the Southern states, Congress passed an updated Fugitive Slave Act, which involved the public by requiring Northerners to “deliver up” potential fugitive slaves to their owners for trial in Southern states.64 This meant Northerners entered a more active role in upholding slavery. Instead of merely turning a blind eye to slave-catchers, Northerners now had to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act themselves. And of course, most Northerners believed that “the negro slave had no chance to win his freedom in courts which were controlled by the slave-holding class,” meaning that by delivering fugitives to their owners, Northerners were almost certainly condemning them to slavery.65 This shift from private to public responsibility for slavery increased the importance of the public sphere, and African Americans reacted accordingly.

As the notion of the public sphere developed, African Americans began moving away from waiting for political or legal systems to enact change and moving toward creating social change through literature, especially oratory literature, which helped shift public opinion. African Americans began addressing the public sphere directly instead of petitioning courts or writing letters to individual figures. Printed literature already had “a privileged role in the formation of publics and counterpublics in the history of the US,” but African Americans adopted oratory literature to develop an anti-slavery movement.66 Speeches rely on “rhetorical, vocal, and performative aspects” which lend “a resemblance to drama.”67 Drama is more conducive to interaction than printed literature, simply because the author and the audience are forced to occupy the same physical space. Even when the author is not the performer, the act of drama requires the performer to embody the author, forcing the audience to engage with the author’s literature in a way that is impossible with the written word. With that in mind, it becomes obvious how oratory performances and speeches would contribute to the African-American fight for freedom from slavery. In listening to a speech,

Sebok, Anthony J. “Judging the Fugitive Slave Acts.” The Yale Law Journal, vol. 100, no. 6, 1991, pp. 1835–1854. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/796788.

63 Sebok, Anthony J. “Judging the Fugitive Slave Acts.” The Yale Law Journal, vol. 100, no. 6, 1991, pp. 1835–1854. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/796788.

64 Sebok, Anthony J. “Judging the Fugitive Slave Acts.” The Yale Law Journal, vol. 100, no. 6, 1991, pp. 1835–1854. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/796788.

65 Johnson, Allen. “The Constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Acts.” The Yale Law Journal, vol. 31, no. 2, 1921, pp. 161–182. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/789306.

66 Gustafson, Sandra M. “American Literature and the Public Sphere.” American Literary History, vol. 20, no. 3, 2008, pp. 465–478. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20492241.

67 Gustafson, Sandra M. “American Literature and the Public Sphere.” American Literary History, vol. 20, no. 3, 2008, pp. 465–478. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20492241.

62

44

audiences have no choice but to face the author and then to confront their own role in the problems the author expresses. Speeches are also inherently public, given to general audiences of ordinary people. Thus, due to a combination of genre-specific characteristics, “dramatic performance contributed to the formation of an anti-slavery African-American counterpublic.”68 In using speeches to express the need for freedom from slavery, African Americans made use of the public sphere.

Furthermore, speeches took advantage of the sense of individual responsibility in ordinary people, which was cultivated and strengthened by evolving notions of individual involvement in the public sphere and made more urgent by the Fugitive Slave Acts. Frederick Douglass capitalized on the public sphere when he spoke directly to the public in his 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” In this speech, Douglass uses second person pronouns and rhetorical questions to center his audience in the conversation on slavery, encouraging them to question slavery and fugitive slave laws. He starts by explaining: Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me.

This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.69 By employing second person pronouns—for example, in “your high independence” and “your fathers”—Douglass explicitly addresses the audience and reminds them of their responsibility for slavery.70 Douglass further emphasizes the divide between himself and his presumably white and free audience through repetition. He says, “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”71 The parallel structure in these two sentences heightens the audience’s awareness of their privilege in comparison to Douglass. The Enlightenment concept of the public sphere is dependent on individuals who are informed on social issues and engaged in discussion. By delivering his speech to the public, Douglass makes himself part of this discussion and appeals to the audience’s sense of social responsibility by making them aware of their complicity in the issue of slavery.

Furthermore, Douglass encourages audience introspection with rhetorical questions, such as “Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man?”72 His rhetorical strategy underscores the absurdity of slavery and again centers the audience. Instead of telling the audience what to think, Douglass creates space for the audience to reach their own conclusions in response to his rhetorical questions.

The idea of individual contemplation meshes with the notion of the public sphere, which values individual voices, something especially important after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which asked for individuals to cooperate with slaveowners.

Yet, the rise of African Americans in the public sphere was complicated by the tension not only between the private and the public, but also between the white public and black public, 68 Gustafson, Sandra M. “American Literature and the Public Sphere.” American Literary History, vol. 20, no. 3, 2008, pp. 465–478. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20492241.

69 Aptheker, Herbert. A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: 1661-1910. Citadel Press, 1951.

70 Aptheker, Herbert. A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: 1661-1910. Citadel Press, 1951.

71 Aptheker, Herbert. A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: 1661-1910. Citadel Press, 1951.

72 Aptheker, Herbert. A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: 1661-1910. Citadel Press, 1951.

45

especially when it came to taking ideas from the white public sphere and applying them to African American communities. In order to create meaningful change, African Americans needed to appeal not only to the public, but specifically to white liberal audiences. According to one historical scholar: “Black texts that mobilize dominant political discourses or literary conventions of the white public sphere should be read not as transparent transcripts of black thought but, rather, as indicative of two simultaneous processes of contention: first, continuing negotiation within black communities about how to develop politics and print practices faithful to collective experiences and useful to the advancement of black emancipation, and, second, negotiation with whites over access to the public sphere’s discursive and political resources.”73 Like the African American writers that preceded them, African American writers in the 19th century were hyperaware of their public audiences, both black and white, which affected the literary content of their works. This was especially true for African American literature that built upon ideas developed in the white public sphere. Instead of freely expressing themselves, African American writers had to conform to two sets of expectations: that of the black public, which expected writers to be authentic to black experiences and to advocate for emancipation, and that of the white public, which expected alignment with familiar discursive and political strategies. In short, African American writers of the 19th century had the complex task of combining black experiences with white literary forms in order to produce literature that appealed to both black and white public audiences and furthered the goal of emancipation from slavery.

One of the ideas developed in the public sphere was the Cult of Domesticity, which African American writers appropriated, expanded, and complicated by including African Americans, in particular currently and formerly enslaved African American women. The Cult of Domesticity was an emerging value system in the 19th century that encouraged women to live according to virtues of piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. This belief system was reinforced by literature such as sentimental novels and domestic fiction, both of which focused on women and their emotional landscapes. Although the Cult of Domesticity was created and enforced by White Protestant society, Harriet Jacobs expanded it to include African American women. Jacobs built upon the “Cult of Domesticity” when she wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which appealed to white Americans, exposed the horrors of slavery, and helped turn the tide of public opinion toward abolition. Jacobs used her autobiography to demonstrate that as a slave and a Black woman, she was excluded from the femininity and domesticity that was so easily accessible to middle and upper-class white women.

In this way, Jacobs complicated the evolving notion of the public sphere by injecting an intersectional perspective, both by complicating race with gender and complicating gender with race.

As the public sphere evolved, it was complicated by the introduction of individuals who were not white men, but that complication still facilitated African American appeals to public opinion.

Jacobs takes the concept of the Cult of Domesticity from the public sphere and uses it to complicate her experiences with race using her experiences with gender, thereby garnering sympathy from 73

Brooks, Joanna. “The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 1, 2005, pp. 67–92. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3491622.

46

white women. In regard to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, scholars argue that “Jacobs asserted her authorship in her subtitle, wrote in the first person, and addressed the subject of the oppression of chattel slavery and the struggle for freedom from the perspective of one who had been enslaved.

But in her title, she identified herself by gender, and in her text addressed a specific aspect of this subject.”74 Put simply, Jacobs was not interested in merely discussing the horrors of slavery. She took it upon herself to highlight the gender-specific horrors of slavery, from sexual abuse to the disruption of motherhood and femininity. This focus on gender-based violence allowed Jacobs to connect with the primarily white and female audience of sentimental novels.

After appealing to public opinion, especially that of white women, using the common ground of femininity, African American writers in the public sphere then distinguished their experiences from those of white women in order to seek further sympathy. Jacobs is careful not to conflate her experiences with that of white women or to allow white women to conflate their experiences with hers. She notes that black and white femininity, while related, are not the same. For example, Jacobs comments that for female slaves, “If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave.”75 Here, Jacobs takes something as simple and universal as beauty and explains how it affects free white and enslaved black women differently. Later, when she talks about engaging in a relationship with Mr. Sands in order to protect herself from her master, Mr. Flint, Jacobs “asserts liberty and autonomy as alternative values for slave women, priorities that supersede chastity and submissiveness.”76 In doing so, Jacobs leverages the ideas of the public sphere in favor of enslaved black women. By pointing out that enslaved black women cannot access the virtues of the Cult of Domesticity, Jacobs seeks support from her audience of white women, leveraging their outrage on her behalf toward the political and legal systems that Jacobs herself cannot change.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, African Americans had different ways of approaching the legal system and trying to make the law work for them. Earlier approaches were more focused on the private, addressing courts or political powers directly through petitions. When those approaches proved slow or ineffective, African Americans turned to recourses such as letters, which still explicitly addressed private audiences while implicitly leveraging the public sphere. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, public opinion was more powerful than ever, since the Act required public cooperation in order to be enforced. African Americans seized the opportunity to speak directly to the public through dramatic speeches, as in Douglass’s case, or through autobiographies, as in Jacobs’s case. These direct appeals to the public sphere shaped the legal and political landscape in a way that private appeals never could. By negotiating the evolving notion of the public sphere, African Americans of the 18th and 19th century used literature to spark an anti-slavery movement. The public sphere was far more effective and immediate than private legal channels ever could be.

Yellin, Jean Fagan. “Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative.” American Literature, vol. 53, no. 3, 1981, pp. 479–486. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2926234.

75 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. Classic Slave Narratives. New York: New American Library, 1987. Print.

76 Nudelman, Franny. “Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering.” ELH, vol. 59, no. 4, 1992, pp. 939–964. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2873301.

74

47

References Aptheker, Herbert. A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: 1661-1910.

Citadel Press, 1951.

Brooks, Joanna. “The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 1, 2005, pp. 67–92. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3491622.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. Classic Slave Narratives. New York: New American Library, 1987. Print.

Gustafson, Sandra M. “American Literature and the Public Sphere.” American Literary History, vol.

20, no. 3, 2008, pp. 465–478. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20492241.

Johnson, Allen. “The Constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Acts.” The Yale Law Journal, vol. 31, no.

2, 1921, pp. 161–182. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/789306.

Nudelman, Franny. “Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering.” ELH, vol. 59, no. 4, 1992, pp. 939–964. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2873301.

Purcell, Sarah J. The Early National Period. Facts On File, 2004.

Sebok, Anthony J. “Judging the Fugitive Slave Acts.” The Yale Law Journal, vol. 100, no. 6, 1991, pp.

1835–1854. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/796788.

Yellin, Jean Fagan. “Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative.” American Literature, vol. 53, no. 3, 1981, pp. 479–486. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2926234.

48

Flies and Drugs: Attraction of adult Cochliomyia macellaria (Fabricius; Diptera: Calliphoridae) to Nicotine and Cotinine Hannah Bowlin Abstract Blowfly (Diptera: Calliphoridae) attraction to decomposing matter sets the stage for the process of decomposition. The addition of chemicals such as nicotine and cotinine, a major metabolite of nicotine, to the decomposing matter could affect the estimation of the postmortem interval. In order to assess the attractive effects of nicotine and cotinine on adult Cochliomyia macellaria (Fabricius; Diptera: Calliphoridae), a forensically important blowfly, an experimental apparatus was constructed with a choice chamber and dishes of liver treated with varying concentrations of nicotine and cotinine. Although in a majority of the treatments, more flies landed on the untreated liver, the results indicated that nicotine and cotinine had no significantly different attractive effects on adult C. macellaria. However, a large number of flies never even landed, which suggests that the flies used in the experiment may not have been old enough or may not have had a high enough female:male ratio. If the results are reliable, then it follows that estimation of the postmortem interval start time is not affected by the presence of nicotine or cotinine.

Introduction Historically, insects have been utilized in forensic investigations, including cases with civil and criminal focuses. However, not until the 1990’s did the field of forensic entomology develop.1 One of the most crucial tools in forensic entomology is the postmortem interval (PMI), the time between the death and discovery of a body. The PMI is calculated using the age of dipteran fly larvae on the remains. Cochliomyia macellaria (Fabricius; Diptera: Calliphoridae), a type of necrophagous blowfly, is forensically important due to its large presence in the United States as well as its thoroughly documented life cycle and developmental rates.2 Also, C. macellaria are often present at carrion within minutes after sensing it.3 Therefore, new information about C. macellaria’s behavior and life cycle as it relates to their attraction to various substances is valuable in forensic entomology.

The methods blowflies use to interact with their environment mainly include olfaction and vision. The compound eyes of blowflies allow them to detect obstacles and derive information from their surroundings. Chemoreceptors on the antennae of blowflies detect miniscule amounts of

Catts, E. P., and M. L. Goff. 1992. Forensic Entomology in Criminal Investigations. Annu. Rev. Entomol. 37: 253–272.

Greenberg, B. 1991. Flies as Forensic Indicators. J Med Entomol. 28: 565–577.

3 Grassberger, M., and Reiter, C. 2001 Effect of temperature on Lucilia sericata (Diptera: Calliphoridae) development with special reference to the isomegalen- and isomorphen-diagram. Forensic Science International. 120: 32–36.

1 2

49

chemicals in the air called volatile organic compounds (VOC’s) that lead them to the carrion.4, 5, 6 Studies on the effect of various chemicals, or drugs, on the activity of different fly species have been performed and revealed significant variations, which indicates that estimation of the PMI for cases involving drugs needs to be explored in greater detail. Shelomi, et. al. found that N,N-Diethyl-metatoluamide (DEET), which is found in insect repellents, impacted fly attraction, oviposition, and development of larvae.7 This field study found that DEET delayed the behavior of the flies and altered their attraction to the carrion, which therefore affected the decomposition process. Zhu, et. al. determined the types of VOC’s released from fresh versus rotten liver that attracts C. macellaria, of which they preferred the rotten chicken liver.8 However, our literature searches provided very little information on the attractive or repulsive effects of other chemicals such as nicotine or its metabolite, cotinine.

Electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS), also known as electronic cigarettes or vapes, contain nicotine.9 About 75% of nicotine is metabolized into cotinine and while nicotine only remains in the body for about two hours, cotinine can remain in the body for about eighteen hours.9 As ENDS have been growing in popularity, details about the drugs’ effects on the decomposition process could be vital in criminal investigations such as overdoses due to the increasing likelihood of persons having the drug or its metabolites in their system.10 JUULs are one of the fastest growing vendors of ENDS. Specifically, the JUUL brand of ENDS sells two concentrations of pods: 3% which contains 23 mg of nicotine, and 5% which contains 40 mg of nicotine.11 Although research has been done on the attraction of flies to various chemicals, no literature was found during our searches that investigated the attractive or repulsive effects of nicotine or cotinine to adult blowflies. To assess the degree of attraction of adult C. macellaria to nicotine and cotinine, an experimental chamber was acquired, and mature flies were introduced into the chamber and given a choice of whether to land on untreated liver or liver treated with nicotine or cotinine.

Materials and Methods Apparatus and Materials Setup A batch of Cochliomyia macellaria (Fabricius; Diptera: Calliphoridae) pupae were collected from a colony at the Forensic Laboratory for Investigative Entomological Sciences (FLIES) Facility at Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA and reared to adulthood Brundage, A.L., Crippen, T.L., Singh, B. et al. 2017. Interkingdom cues by bacteria associated with conspecific and heterospecific eggs of Cochliomyia macellaria and Chrysomya rufifacies (Diptera: Calliphoridae) potentially govern succession on carrion. Annals of the Entomological Society of America. 110: 73–82.

5 Verheggen, F.J., Perrault, K.A., Caparros Megido, R. et al. 2017 The odour of death: an overview of current knowledge on characterization and applications. Bioscience. 67: 600–613.

6 Byrd, J. H., and J. L. Castner. 2010. Forensic entomology: the utility of arthropods in legal investigations, 2nd ed. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL. Shelomi, M., L. M. Matern, J. M. Dinstell, D. W. Harris, and R. B. Kimsey. 2012. DEET (N,N-diethyl-meta-`toluamide) induced delay of blowfly landing and oviposition rates on treated pig carrion (Sus scrofa L.). J. Forensic Sci. 57: 1507–1511.

8 Zhu, J. J., M. F. Chaudhury, K. Tangtrakulwanich, and S. R. Skoda. 2013. Identification of Oviposition Attractants of the Secondary Screwworm, Cochliomyia macellaria (F.) Released from Rotten Chicken Liver. Journal of Chemical Ecology. 39: 14.

9 Hukkanen, J. 2005. Metabolism and disposition kinetics of nicotine. Pharmacological Reviews.

57: 79–115.

10 National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). 2018. Tobacco/nicotine and e-cigs. .

11 JUULpods and E-Liquid FAQs - JUUL Support. 2018. JUULpods and E-Liquid FAQs –JUUL Support.

7

50

according to the methods used by Casey Flint (Personal Communication).

90 mm petri dishes were acquired and lined with a 10 cm x 10 cm square of Kimwipe. Calf liver was homogenized by blender, then poured into the petri dishes, with 25 grams of liver in each dish. 14 petri dishes of liver were made for 7 treatments with 2 dishes each. A control dish was included in each treatment. Treatment 1 contained two control dishes. Treatment 2 contained one control dish and a dish treated with a lethal dose of nicotine, 0.1625 mg. Treatment 3 contained one control dish and a dish treated with a 5% concentration of nicotine, 0.014665 mg. Treatment 4 contained one control dish and a dish treated with a 3% concentration of nicotine, 0.008435 mg.

Treatment 5 contained one control dish and a dish treated with a lethal dose of cotinine, 0.121875 mg. Treatment 6 contained one control dish and a dish treated with a 5% concentration of cotinine, 0.011 mg. Treatment 7 contained one control dish and a dish treated with a 3% concentration of cotinine, 0.006325 mg. The chemicals were added to the liver using micropipettes shortly before being tested and were mixed thoroughly with the liver. The calculations of amounts of nicotine and cotinine were based on approximated 3%, 5%, and lethal doses for an average human and adjusted accordingly for 25 grams of liver. The experimental apparatus included a 30 cm x 30 cm x 30 cm mesh cage in which the flies and treatment dishes were placed.

Experimental Procedure Approximately 50 adult flies housed in their original adult rearing chamber (mesh cage) were taken out of the incubator and placed into a temperature and light controlled room. The food and water sources were removed from the cage. The two liver dishes were placed into the cage. The number of flies that landed on each Kimwipe and each dish were recorded, and any oviposition activity was also recorded. After ten minutes, the liver dishes were removed. This procedure was repeated for the remaining treatments.

Results Experiments were performed assessing the level of attraction of Cochliomyia macellaria (Fabricius; Diptera: Calliphoridae) to liver homogenized with varying concentrations of nicotine and cotinine, and no significant difference was found in C. macellaria’s attraction to the different liver. In general, the flies seemed to prefer the control liver dish (Fig. 3). However, for some treatments, the flies seemed to prefer the treated liver dish (Fig. 3).

For each treatment, one treated liver dish and one untreated liver dish were introduced into an adult fly cage housing approximately 50 adult flies (Fig. 1). The number of flies that landed on each liver dish was recorded. For a majority of the treatments, the flies seemed to prefer the control dish, but in some treatments, the flies seemed to prefer the treated dish (Fig. 3). For the treatments where the flies seemed to prefer the treated liver dish, they did not favor nicotine or cotinine, as only one treatment for each had more flies on the treated liver. The control treatment data indicated that even when presented with two untreated liver dishes they did not have the same level of attractiveness. The middle quartiles of the values are similar, which would suggest that there is very little preference shown by the flies (Fig. 2). The range of values differs for each category, but the sample size for the nicotine and cotinine categories is very small (Fig. 2). However, the outcome of 51

an ANOVA test suggested that the flies’ preference for one liver dish over another was not significant when ι = 0.05 (F2, 25 = 0.813, p = 0.455).

Additionally, out of the approximately 50 flies present in the choice chamber for each treatment, between 28 and 42 flies never landed. This could affect the statistical reliability of the data gathered from this experiment.

Fig. 1. Image of experimental chamber (30cm x 30cm x 30cm) including liver dishes lined with Kimwipes and filled with homogenized liver. Approximately 50 adult C. macellaria are housed in this chamber.

Fig. 2. Comparison of number of flies that landed on the liver as grouped by type of chemical added.

In general, the middle quartiles are similar for each category, although the range of values differs substantially.

52

Fig. 3. Comparison of the average number of 8-day old adult C. macellaria flies that landed on the control liver dish versus the liver dish treated with nicotine or cotinine. In general, the flies landed more on the control dishes than on the treated dishes and concentration seemed to have little to no effect.

Discussion Our findings suggest that 8-day old adult Cochliomyia macellaria (Fabricius; Diptera: Calliphoridae) are not attracted to or repelled from liver treated with nicotine or cotinine. The data also indicates that a large proportion of flies did not choose to land on either liver dish. Although in a majority of the treatments more flies landed on the control liver, this difference was not significant.

Many factors may have affected the ability of the flies to sufficiently land on the liver dishes.

One possibility is the flies may have been too immature and were not yet looking for an oviposition location, or it was an unsuitable or undesirable location to oviposit.12 It could be that these young flies had underdeveloped mechanisms to detect attractive chemicals.13 Furthermore, the males used in this study, whether mature or immature, may not have had the capacity to detect attractive chemicals at all. Chaudhury et al. assessed the attraction of Lucilia sericata (Meigen; Diptera: Calliphoridae) to a known Cochliomyia hominivorax (Coquerel; Diptera: Calliphoridae) oviposition attractant using bioassays with procedures similar to those used in the current study.13 Chaudhury et al. found a significant difference between the ages of the flies and their landing responses, which could explain the lack of landing response observed in this study. Aak and Knudsen found that different species of flies have varying gender-specific responses to stimuli, possibly leading to the lack of landing response (Aak and Knudsen 2011).14 Yet another factor includes the presence of other species of insects already present at the scene of the remains. These other insects may affect the attractiveness of the remains and potentially affect the estimation of the postmortem interval (Martin and Verheggen 2018).15 However, if the results of this study are assumed to be valid, then this indicates that the presence of nicotine or cotinine in a person’s system at the time of death would not affect the attractiveness of the decomposing remains. The female blowflies looking for the optimal location to reproduce will not be deterred by the presence of nicotine or cotinine. In summary, the results of this study suggest that nicotine and cotinine do not have attractive or repulsive effects on adult C. macellaria. Based on these conclusions, the presence of nicotine or cotinine in a person’s system does not alter the postmortem interval estimation and no adjustments need to be made in order to calculate the postmortem interval.

12 Lima, T., and C. J. Von Zuben. 2016. Chrysomya megacephala (Fabricius) (Diptera: Calliphoridae) Oviposition Situation. Neotrop Entomol. 45: 612–617.

13 Chaudhury, M. F., J. J. Zhu, and S. R. Skoda. 2015. Response of Lucilia sericata (Diptera: Calliphoridae) to Journal of Medical Entomology. 52: 527–531.

14 Aak, A., and G. K. Knudsen. 2011. Sex differences in olfaction-mediated visual acuity in blowflies and its trapping. Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata. 139: 25–34.

15 Martin, C., and F. Verheggen. 2018. Behavioural response of Lucilia sericata to a decaying body infested by Entomology. 43: 188–195.

Behavior in Previous Oviposition Screwworm Oviposition Attractant. consequences for gender-specific necrophagous insects. Physiological

53

Acknowledgements A very special thanks to Dr. Heather Ketchum for her extensive help with this project and all her advice, and to Elise Hodges, Tessa Fungo, and Gautham for their invaluable assistance. I thank Casey Flint and Dr. Jeffery Tomberlin at the Forensic Laboratory for Investigative Entomological Sciences (FLIES) at Texas A&M University for their advice on how to rear adult flies and for use of specimens from their fly colony. I thank the University of Oklahoma Department of Biology for funding and materials. Also, I thank George Martin for his assistance with constructing experimental apparatuses, Elizabeth Cooley for her assistance with obtaining experimental materials, Dr. Mojgan Padash for allowing me to use her incubators, and Dr. Wendy Martin for allowing me to use her micropipettes. In addition, I appreciate Dr. Claire Curry for her assistance with statistical analysis, Dr. Amber Makowicz for her advice on experimental procedure, and Dr. Barbara Safiejko-Mroczka for her advice on working with nicotine and cotinine. Finally, I thank Evan Shrestha for assistance with editing this manuscript.

Works Cited Aak, A., and G. K. Knudsen. 2011. Sex differences in olfaction-mediated visual acuity in blowflies and its consequences for gender-specific trapping. Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata. 139: 25–34.

Brundage, A.L., Crippen, T.L., Singh, B. et al. 2017. Interkingdom cues by bacteria associated with conspecific and heterospecific eggs of Cochliomyia macellaria and Chrysomya rufifacies (Diptera: Calliphoridae) potentially govern succession on carrion. Annals of the Entomological Society of America. 110: 73–82.

Byrd, J. H., and J. L. Castner. 2010. Forensic entomology: the utility of arthropods in legal investigations, 2nd ed. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL. Catts, E. P., and M. L. Goff. 1992. Forensic Entomology in Criminal Investigations. Annu.

Rev. Entomol. 37: 253–272.

Chaudhury, M. F., J. J. Zhu, and S. R. Skoda. 2015. Response of Lucilia sericata (Diptera: Calliphoridae) to Screwworm Oviposition Attractant. Journal of Medical Entomology. 52: 527– 531.

Grassberger, M., and Reiter, C. 2001 Effect of temperature on Lucilia sericata (Diptera: Calliphoridae) development with special reference to the isomegalen- and isomorphendiagram. Forensic Science International. 120: 32–36.

Greenberg, B. 1991. Flies as Forensic Indicators. J Med Entomol. 28: 565–577.

Hukkanen, J. 2005. Metabolism and disposition kinetics of nicotine. Pharmacological Reviews.

57: 79–115.

JUULpods and E-Liquid FAQs - JUUL Support. 2018. JUULpods and E-Liquid FAQs – JUUL Support.

54

Lima, T., and C. J. Von Zuben. 2016. Chrysomya megacephala (Fabricius) (Diptera: Calliphoridae) Oviposition Behavior in Previous Oviposition Situation. Neotrop Entomol.

45: 612–617.

Martin, C., and F. Verheggen. 2018. Behavioural response of Lucilia sericata to a decaying body infested by necrophagous insects. Physiological Entomology. 43: 188–195.

National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). 2018. Tobacco/nicotine and e-cigs. https://www.drugabuse.gov/drugs-abuse/tobacconicotine-e-cigs.

Shelomi, M., L. M. Matern, J. M. Dinstell, D. W. Harris, and R. B. Kimsey. 2012. DEET diethyl-meta-toluamide) induced delay of blowfly landing and oviposition rates on treated pig carrion (Sus scrofa L.). J. Forensic Sci. 57: 1507–1511.

(N,N-

Verheggen, F.J., Perrault, K.A., Caparros Megido, R. et al. 2017 The odour of death: an overview of current knowledge on characterization and applications. Bioscience. 67: 600–613.

Zhu, J. J., M. F. Chaudhury, K. Tangtrakulwanich, and S. R. Skoda. 2013. Identification of Oviposition Attractants of the Secondary Screwworm, Cochliomyia macellaria (F.) Released from Rotten Chicken Liver. Journal of Chemical Ecology. 39: 14.

55

Changing with the Times: the New York Times and the Cuban Revolution Annapoorani Asokan Introduction In 1957, the New York Times published a flattering picture of a man in military garb and holding a gun. He looked determined, confident, and resilient. The man was none other than Fidel Castro, and the article accompanying the photo convincingly introduced his ideas and revolutionary movement to the international audience. Just three years later, the Times wrote that Cuba was suffering from “a communistic sort of totalitarianism,”1 and reported that Castro was sponsoring a “public burning of an effigy of President Kennedy decorated with a vulture and a Nazi swastika.”2 What happened in so short a time that caused such a dramatic change in what the Times published?

Popular media operates in different ways than does academic work. Scholar and former journalist William Ratliff noted that “columns on Cuba, true to the ways of journalism, have tended to follow events.”3 Thus, US media coverage of Cuba increased dramatically after major developments such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, and decreased when there was nothing “new” to report. The desire to captivate an audience’s attention meant that media coverage of Cuba focused heavily on Fidel Castro himself. Castro’s charisma and eagerness to talk to US journalists made him an easy and popular subject. The New York Times was the first to release stories on the Cuban Revolution and prolifically published news articles and opinion pieces on the subject. This newspaper’s prestige and influence on public perception of Cuba was unmatched by any other US publication; it sometimes reported news the US government was not even aware of.4 In fact, much of the current scholarly work on media coverage focuses on US journalists’ reporting on Fidel Castro. Leonard Ray Teel’s Reporting the Cuban Revolution: How Castro Manipulated American Journalists, Anthony DePalma’s The Man Who Invented Fidel, and William Ratliff’s The Selling of Fidel Castro are three examples of literature dissecting the relationship between Castro and media perceptions; they analyze Castro’s allure, his skill in creating an image for himself and Cuba, and the response of the US public. However, discussion of the US media coverage of Cuba as a whole is not well developed. Ratliff’s essay “The New York Times and the Cuban Revolution” briefly discusses the journalist Herbert Matthews’ articles on Cuba from 1957 onwards, but most of his essay focuses on the Revolution from 1971 to 1984; this is because the New York Times inaugurated their op-ed section, in which writers unaffiliated with the Times could publish opinion pieces in September 1970.5

Editorial Board, “The ‘Socialism’ of Cuba,” New York Times, May 2, 1961.

Tad Szulc, “Castro’s Regime Moves to Tighten Links to Soviet,” New York Times, April 30, 1961.

3 William Ratliff, “The New York Times and the Cuban Revolution,” in The Selling of Fidel Castro: the Media and the Cuban Revolution, ed. William Ratliff (New Brunswick: Transaction, Inc, 1987), 1.

4 Ratliff, “Times and Cuban Revolution,” 1.

1 2

5

David Shipley, “And Now a Word from Op-Ed,” New York Times, February 1, 2004.

56

The Cuban Revolution cannot possibly be separated from Fidel Castro, but this paper is more concerned with the actions, policies, and influence of the entire Cuban state. This paper asks: how did the New York Times’ coverage of Cuba evolve from 1956 to 1961? Four time periods are explored in-depth: initial reports on the rebellion in 1956, the re-entry of the 26th of July Movement into international news in 1957, the beginning of Castro’s government leadership in January 1959, and the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. This time period is particularly remarkable because in a mere five years, coverage on the Cuban Revolution changed from originally supporting the Batista government to having hope for the new revolutionary state to condemning Cuba, this time for its socialist and anti-American practices. Similarly, in the eyes of the US’s most respected newspaper, Castro went from an unknown and naïve rebel to a charismatic and benevolent Cuban patriarch to a despicable Communist dictator.

1956: 26th of July Movement returned to Cuba Despite leading a successful military coup and ending democratic elections in 1952, Cuban President Fulgencio Batista was embraced by the United States. US officials were thoroughly aware that the Batista regime was not democratic, but by the mid-1950s, “Washington’s early postwar policy of promoting democracy had been not simply forgotten but openly rejected, with Treasury Secretary George Humphrey telling the National Security Council that U.S. officials should…‘support dictatorships of the right if their policies are pro-American.’”6 Batista was quite friendly to the US, cooperated often and easily, and was stridently anti-Communist; he passed several decrees restricting Communist activities.7 However, some Cubans challenged the Batista regime. On July 26, 1953, Fidel Castro and a small group of followers conducted a failed attack on the Moncada Barracks, both in an attempt to start a revolution and in retaliation against Batista halting democratic elections.

Although this attack led to the imprisonment and exile of most of the revolutionaries, and hardly made international news, within a few years the 26th of July Movement returned. On December 2, 1956, 82 men led by Fidel Castro sailed from Mexico to Cuba on a yacht, with the intention of starting a revolution. Batista’s army easily overpowered the group, killing many, and Batista announced that Fidel Castro had been killed.8 In the days after the landing, the New York Times was condescending towards the revolutionaries. In the editorial “The Violent Cubans,” published two days after the landing, the editorial board wrote that the revolutionary violence “does not make sense to outsiders, but…Cubans risk and lose their lives in these adventures,” implying that Cubans had no reason to show dissidence and that their position was illogical. Labeling the rebellion an adventure erased the sincere reasons Cubans would want to overthrow Batista and rendered their actions meaningless.

The article derided the naiveté and foolishness of first alerting the Batista government of the invasion and then bringing such a small group of rebels; obviously, the “Batista Government was well set for the pathetic ‘landing’…with about forty young men acting as the invading ‘army.’”9 This statement 6 Lars Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: the United States and the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 55.

7 Schoultz, Cuban Republic, 56.

8 United Press, “Cuba Wipes Out Invaders; Leader is Among 40 Dead,” New York Times, December 3, 1956.

9 “Opposition Hunt Pressed in Cuba,” New York Times, December 4, 1956.

57

mocked the 26th of July Movement’s efforts, asking if they really expected anything other than their failure.

A later Times news article painted them as a weak movement that never had a chance, by pointing out that they only had five puny machine guns in defense against the “relentless attack” of massive government bomber planes.10 These articles and editorials focused on the Movement’s lack of preparation—they didn’t bring enough food and faced the “threat of hunger”—an attempt to discredit the seriousness of their cause and the intelligence of their leaders.11 The Times articles portrayed the Movement’s actions as futile and argued that they should stop bringing destruction upon themselves and others. A news article from a week after the landing listed some dismal numbers—25 rebels killed and 32 taken prisoner by the Army—and noted that they stubbornly continued to fight, even though the Batista government generously promised to spare their lives if they surrendered.12 The editorial board mused, “One cannot possibly see how Fidel Castro or anyone else is going to make” Batista resign and hold general elections.13 It is true that Castro’s group had been ambitious in their demands, considering that they were outnumbered and surrounded by Batista’s Army at the time. However, the New York Times had no faith in the 26th of July Movement because they did not yet recognize its appeal or Batista’s flaws. Like the United States government, the Times forgave Batista for the initial coup because he improved Cuba: “He has tried since to be a good President, and in many ways he has succeeded, but he is branded by that act of original sin.”14 The Times praised Batista’s economic policies, hospital and public health systems, and promotion of education.15 In fact, during Batista’s regime, Cuba really did have Latin America’s highest income per capita, lowest infant mortality rate, and second highest literacy rate.16 Therefore, it followed that the 26th of July Movement would never gain traction because the Batista regime was already satisfactory and far too stable to be shaken by a pack of naïve Cuban youths.

1957: Herbert Matthews rediscovered Fidel Castro Readers of the February 24, 1957 edition would have been astonished to see a striking photo of Fidel Castro spread across the front page of the New York Times, titled “Cuban Rebel Is Visited in Hideout,” especially considering that Castro was supposed to have died months ago. Castro’s reemergence was news not just to the American public, but also to ordinary Cubans, US politicians, and some members of the Batista government. New York Times journalist Herbert Matthews got the scoop of the year, as the first to announce to the world that Fidel Castro was indeed alive and that the 26th of July Movement was scoring victories with each passing day. Whereas 1956 editorials and articles had characterized the 26th of July Movement as weak, naïve, unprepared, and stubborn, R. Hart Phillips, “Rebel Surrender in Cuba Expected,” New York Times, December 8, 1956.

Phillips, “Rebel Surrender.”

12 R. Hart Phillips, “25 Cuban Rebels Reported Killed,” New York Times, December 10, 1956.

13 “Opposition Hunt.”

14 Editorial Board, “The Violent Cubans,” New York Times, December 4, 1956.

15 Associated Press, “The Power in Cuba,” New York Times, April 30, 1956.

16 Schoultz, Cuban Republic, 52-3.

Cuba was doing well compared to the rest of Latin America, but very poorly compared to the United States. To put things into perspective: Only 9% of rural homes had electricity, 80-90% of rural children had intestinal parasites from walking barefoot in animal feces, and only 2% of homes had running water. Its income per capita, despite leading Latin America, was only half of that of Mississippi, the poorest state in the US. 10 11

58

while portraying Batista as fair and powerful, Matthews reversed these Times trends with a series of three articles, two of which appeared on the front page.

Matthews initiated Castro’s worldwide allure through descriptions of his beliefs and background. He tapped into Americans’ fondness for rags-to-riches stories, describing how Castro’s father, a pick-and-shovel laborer, utilized his “powerful build, a capacity for hard work and a shrewd mind” to become a rich sugar planter and provide for his children.17 He then transitioned to Fidel Castro himself, saying, “He has strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore the Constitution, to hold elections.”18 This positioned Castro as a leader very much in line with American ideals, helping him become more sympathetic in the eyes of the American public. The description of a democratic leader was further enhanced by Castro’s rifle-toting appearance itself— rugged face, flashing brown eyes, tall stature—bringing him to heroic proportions.19 Matthews wrote, “It is easy to see that his men adored him and also to see why he has caught the imagination of the youth…Here was an educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage and of remarkable qualities of leadership.”20 With a description like this, it was easy to convince the American audience of Castro’s magnetism as well.

Simultaneously, the articles condemned Batista, setting a new precedent. Matthews carefully repeated all the narratives that Americans believe, such as how Batista improved Cuba’s economy and tourism, gained lots of US investment, and was loyally obeyed by the military and police. Then he shattered these positive characteristics by sharing that Batista was deeply unpopular within Cuba, and that most non-Cubans simply didn’t know about Batista’s brutality because of censorship. For example, Batista-led policemen killed and framed an innocent person every time an insurgent released a bomb, to make it seem like they were effectively stopping terrorism. In another example, a fifteen-year-old boy was tortured for 24 hours and then killed; when a deputy tried to publicize the names of the perpetrators, the deputy’s brother was hanged.21 These articles brought to light the corruption and violence of Batista’s regime, which even influenced the US government’s attitude towards Batista. Historian Lars Schoultz wrote that “the [New York Times’] journalism appears to have turned some heads, because at about this time the State Department began a slow reappraisal of Batista’s value to Washington.”22 Not only did this trio of articles show why the 26th of July Movement should be supported, it described the vast extent of participation. Phrases like “thousands of men and women are heart and soul with Fidel Castro” or “hundreds of highly respected citizens are helping Señor Castro” or Castro’s own words—“I have followers all over the island”—imply that most of Cuba fiercely supported the Movement.23 The last of the three articles was dedicated to the followers of the Revolution.

Matthews repeatedly described the different classes of society that united to support the Movement and stop Batista’s violence and corruption; the article stated, “the best elements in Cuban life—the unspoiled youth, the honest business man, the politician of integrity, the patriotic Army officer—are Herbert Matthews, “Cuban Rebel is Visited in Hideout,” New York Times, February 24, 1957.

Matthews, “Cuban Rebel.”

19 Matthews, “Cuban Rebel.”

20 Matthews, “Cuban Rebel.”

21 Herbert Matthews, “Rebel Strength Gaining in Cuba, but Batista Has the Upper Hand,” New York Times, February 25, 1957.

22 Schoultz, Cuban Republic, 65.

23 Matthews, “Cuban Rebel.”

17 18

59

getting together to assume power.”24 In stark contrast to the previous year’s articles, Matthews boldly claimed that the 26th of July Movement will win; he claimed that “[Batista’s] Army men are fighting a thus-far losing battle” and that “General Batista cannot possibly hope to suppress the Castro revolt.”25 In addition to building sympathy for the 26th of July Movement, the New York Times was responsible for establishing that Castro was not a Communist. In fact, Matthews assertively wrote, “There is no communism to speak of in Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement” in the second of his articles.26 Matthews was so confident in his assessment that even US officials were disarmed. One senator reflected, “Matthews’ stories that [Castro] was a Robin Hood helping the poor…caused the State Department to disregard the reports which they had about Castro being a Communist.”27 This set of articles presented Castro as favorable in multiple respects: he was democratic, not Communist; he stood for American ideals; and he was widely popular, partially due to his own strong leadership and partially because Batista was a flawed dictator.

January 1959: Castro’s regime begins On January 1, 1959, Cubans started the new year with a change of regime: Batista fled Cuba early that morning and Fidel Castro declared victory for the rebels. Early US reports of this transition were filled with uncertainty, as is expected with anything new. Times articles from the first week expressed relief that the “tyrant” Batista had finally left, openly condemning his “corruption, cynicism and police terror.”28 One editorial curtly stated, “Good riddance.”29 Almost all reports took a positive stance on the upcoming Castro administration. An editorial from the day after the regime change praised “the extraordinary young man, Fidel Castro, who fought against such heavy odds with such tenacity, bravery and intelligence.”30 This same editorial was so sympathetic to Cuba and the revolution that it criticized US actions, claiming that US foreign policy “built up an antagonism that will make the situation diplomatically difficult…Cuba will need our help desperately in these coming months and it must be given with generosity and understanding.” The New York Times strongly encouraged a moderate and thought-out response to the revolution and strengthening the US-Cuba relationship, which it noted had strategic importance.

The Times was friendly to Castro and his causes, attacking the US government for its hesitation. A news article built sympathy for Cuba by comparing the new government’s policies to President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program. It stated that the revolutionary government had goals that any American could support: providing education, low interest loans, electricity, roads, and water for all Cubans, urban and rural.31 The New York Times’ support of the new regime is evident in a report on Cuba’s postrevolution executions. The article stated that the rebel army had executed 75 informers, violent Herbert Matthews, “Old Order in Cuba is Threatened by Forces of an Internal Revolt,” New York Times, February 26, 1957.

Matthews, “Cuban Rebel.”

26 Matthews, “Rebel Strength.”

27 Schoultz, Cuban Republic, 65.

28 “Castro Wins,” New York Times, January 4, 1959.

29 Editorial Board, “A Cuban Dictator Falls,” New York Times, January 2, 1959.

30 Editorial Board, “Cuban Dictator Falls.”

31 “‘New Deal’ Aims Listed for Cuba,” New York Times, January 4, 1959.

24 25

60

police guards, and private soldiers who worked for a Batista supporter. Even this article did not condemn the killings; rather, it merely included a small section on US Senator Morse’s requests to end the executions. The Times didn’t condemn the rebel army for gunning down opposition elements, demonstrating its sympathy towards Castro’s administration.

The New York Times asked, “What kind of government will Cuba have and what will be its relations with the U.S.?” Matthews asserted now, as he did in 1957, that Cuba was far from Communism. He wrote confidently that “the Communist has no possibility of taking power”; he attributed Communist activism by Cuban college students to a desire to rebel, because at their age, “conformity has no appeal.”32 He was still sure that Cuban democracy was safe in Castro’s hands. A Times article noted that “some of his [Castro’s] pronouncements have had a Socialist tinge,” but quickly reassured the reader that “Castro has insisted that he is neither a Socialist nor a Communist.”33 Matthews was certain that Cuba would overcome any anti-Yankeeism tendencies it held and maintain a close relationship with the US. He said, “Cuba needs the United States and few Cubans would want to bite off their noses to spite Uncle Sam’s face.”34 This confidence was common: most US politicians in Washington thought that Cuba would be so poor and struggling that it would strengthen its relationship with the US out of need.35 Matthews was well aware of Cuba’s poor economic situation and had no doubt that its survival depended on the United States’ financial assistance. This sentiment was repeated in other Times articles.

April 1961: Bay of Pigs and a new Socialist state Cooperative relations between Cuba and the United States collapsed altogether in the spring of 1961. The final turning point was the Bay of Pigs invasion from April 17 to 20, 1961, in which 1,500 CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed in Cuba with the intention of starting an uprising and overthrowing the Castro regime. To the surprise of the US public and politicians, the invasion was a complete failure: Cubans near the landing site did not support the exiles and the Cuban military rapidly defeated the invading group. Mere days later, on April 23, Castro declared Cuba “a proud member of the international ‘Socialist’ community.”36 He later explained “that if the Cuban people formally wished to establish a Communist state on their island, it was their right to do so,” which also implied that any US intervention because of communism would be a direct attack on Cuba’s sovereignty.37 After an internationally publicized military defeat and the open declaration of Socialist membership, the US’s behavior towards Cuba changed dramatically and stayed hostile for the rest of the 20th century.

The New York Times maintained several major opinions in the weeks after the Bay of Pigs invasion and after Cuba officially embraced socialism. First, Cubans were in great suffering and danger because of Communist policies. Second, Cubans wanted US help and the US should support anti-Castro exiles or otherwise reduce Cuba’s communist tendencies. Third, the US should Herbert Matthews, “A New Chapter Opens in Latin America,” New York Times, January 11, 1959.

“Castro Wins.”

34 Matthews, “New Chapter.”

35 Schoultz, Cuban Republic, 86.

36 Max Frankel, “Cuba is Expected to Start Purges,” New York Times, April 23, 1961.

37 Szulc, “Links to Soviet.”

32 33

61

demonstrate to Latin America that capitalism is a better system than socialism, in case other nations look to Cuba as an example. These arguments are vastly different from the Times’ 1959 beliefs. The praising of Castro was replaced with discussions on the threat he posed and his violent policies. The original sympathy towards the Cuban revolution changed to hostility and a desire for urgent action.

The New York Times editorial board was highly suspicious of Cuba’s possible authoritarianism, writing that it had become “a dictatorial, powerfully centralized equivalent of a police state.”38 Thus, they believed that Cubans did not support the Castro administration, and that Cubans there would join the exiles “to establish a democracy with social justice.”39 These themes continued even after the invasion. The Times firmly believed that Cubans were in great danger. They stressed that the Cuban political climate and fear of arrest greatly affected the happiness of Cuban civilians: “Civilians are afraid to go into the street. When they leave for work, they are uncertain whether their families will avoid arrest during the day.”40 Most of all, this “despair runs deep” through the population specifically because of Castro’s policies: “Dr. Castro’s militiamen and the army’s intelligence agency continue to round up ‘suspects’ and to search homes. They seize as suspicious ‘evidence’ the possession of large amounts of money, what they consider excessive stocks of groceries, ‘questionable’ literature.”41 The Times was convinced that Cubans despised the Castro administration. An April 23, 1961 news article argued that Cubans wanted US intervention because they hated their regime so much. The Times wrote that “Dozens of Cubans here…feel that they will never overthrow [the regime]…unless the United States openly intervenes.”42 Thus, the New York Times transitioned from sympathy towards Cuba to certainty that Cubans are suffering under Castro’s rampant totalitarianism and overbearing police state.

In the days after the invasion, and definitely after Castro declared Cuba to be a Socialist state at the end of April, the Times called for the United States to take action. In its view, the Bay of Pigs was “a setback, but it is not the end.”43 In the two weeks after the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Times editorial board published five editorials on Cuba; this is a notably high number and demonstrates the significance of the defeat and of the declaration of socialism. The board was worried about both the strained US-Cuba relationship and the domino theory, in which Communism in one country would spread to nearby regions. They wrote that the biggest danger was “Cuba as a possible model for other revolutions”44 and worried that Latin American nations would forego the “better” Mexico and Bolivia models of revolution, choosing socialism rather than “a progressive form of capitalism with democracy and free enterprise” promoted by the United States.45 However, the board warned that the US should not opt for direct military intervention, even when its greatest goal was preventing other Latin American countries from undergoing a Socialist revolution. A military intervention would be “dreadfully wrong” and cause “grave political consequences; the blow to the moral standards and

Editorial Board, “The Lessons of Cuba,” New York Times, April 22, 1961.

Editorial Board, “The Landings in Cuba,” New York Times, April 18, 1961.

40 Frankel, “Purges.”

41 Frankel, “Purges.”

42 Frankel, “Purges.”

43 Editorial Board, “Lessons.”

44 Editorial Board, “A Policy on Cuba,” New York Times, April 27, 1961.

45 Editorial Board, “Socialism.”

38 39

62

principles by which we live; …the loss of needed allies.”46 In fact, the editorial board claimed that a military campaign would be appropriate only if Americans were killed in Cuba, if the Soviet Union set up missile bases in Cuba (or other USSR intervention), or if Castro initiated attacks.47 Interestingly, the New York Times pointed out past signs that Cuba would declare itself communist. For example, a May 2, 1961 editorial contended that the “description of the Cuban revolution by Premier Fidel Castro and his associates as ‘Socialist’ hardly comes as a surprise. The revolution had been evolving in this direction almost from the beginning, slowly in its first year, 1959, and rapidly last year.”48 A news article declared that Cuba’s communist party was “the only meaningful political organization allowed in Cuba since Dr. Castro took power in 1959.”49 These assertions are perhaps colored by hindsight, because 1959 articles were quite firm that Cuba was not communist; if this declaration was truly as unsurprising as the Times makes it sound, there wouldn’t be so many articles panicking over the future of US-Cuba relations.

Conclusion The New York Times played a key role in shaping the public images of Fidel Castro, the 26th of July movement, and the new Cuban government. Although it originally supported President Batista, by 1957 the Times parted ways with the United States’ attitude towards Cuba. The Times revealed the corruption of Batista’s regime while simultaneously endorsing Castro, to the extent that Washington began reconsidering their support for Batista. This newspaper was so trusted a source that US officials too believed that Castro was anti-communist. In 1959, after Batista fled, the Times celebrated the beginning of the new Cuban government and wrote that the US and Cuba should strengthen their relationship, especially since Cuba was financially weak. However, the relationship soured so much that the Times eventually adopted the US policy towards Cuba, advocating for indirect intervention and describing the atrocities of Castro’s government. This paper suggests that the New York Times and US foreign policy influenced one another; the extent of influence would be an intriguing subject to explore. The Times articles of the late 1950s and early 1960s reveal more than just US perceptions of Cuba. They demonstrate the uncertainty of the time period and the different ideas that the US public was encountering. The philosophies and experiences of the Cuban Revolution were new to the United States, and the evolution of the New York Times’ articles reveal the fluctuating opinions of the US public as the US grappled with an unexpected Cuban leader and revolution.

Editorial Board, “Policy.”

Editorial Board, “Policy.”

48 Editorial Board, “Socialism.”

49 Frankel, “Purges.”

46 47

63

Bibliography Primary Sources: Associated Press. “The Power in Cuba.” New York Times, April 30, 1956.

“Castro Wins.” New York Times, January 4, 1959.

Editorial Board. “A Cuban Dictator Falls.” New York Times, January 2, 1959.

Editorial Board. “A Policy on Cuba.” New York Times, April 27, 1961.

Editorial Board. “The ‘Socialism’ of Cuba.” New York Times, May 2, 1961.

Editorial Board. “The Landings in Cuba.” New York Times, April 18, 1961.

Editorial Board. “The Lessons of Cuba.” New York Times, April 22, 1961.

Editorial Board. “The Violent Cubans.” New York Times, December 4, 1956.

Frankel, Max. “Cuba Is Expected to Start Purges.” New York Times, April 23, 1961.

Matthews, Herbert. “A New Chapter Opens in Latin America.” New York Times, January 11, 1959.

Matthews, Herbert. “Cuban Rebel Is Visited in Hideout.” New York Times, February 24, 1957.

Matthews, Herbert. “Old Order in Cuba Is Threatened by Forces of an Internal Revolt.” New York Times, February 26, 1957.

Matthews, Herbert. “Rebel Strength Gaining in Cuba, but Batista Has the Upper Hand.” New York Times, February 25, 1957. “‘New Deal’ Aims Listed for Cuba.” New York Times, January 4, 1959.

“Opposition Hunt Pressed in Cuba.” New York Times, December 4, 1956.

Phillips, Ruby Hart. “25 Cuban Rebels Reported Killed.” New York Times, December 10, 1956.

Phillips, Ruby Hart. “Rebel Surrender in Cuba Expected.” New York Times, December 8, 1956.

Shipley, David. “And Now a Word from Op-Ed.” New York Times, February 1, 2004.

Szulc, Tad. “Castro’s Regime Moves to Tighten Links to Soviet.” New York Times, April 30, 1961.

64

United Press, “Cuba Wipes Out Invaders; Leader is Among 40 Dead,” New York Times, December 3, 1956.

Secondary Sources: Ratliff, William. “The New York Times and the Cuban Revolution.” In The Selling of Fidel Castro: the Media and the Cuban Revolution, ed. William Ratliff, 1-38. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1987.

Schoultz, Lars. That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: the United States and the Cuban Revolution.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Wallach, John. “Fidel Castro and the United States Press.” In The Selling of Fidel Castro, ed. William Ratliff, 129-56. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1987.

65

Method in Bioethics: The Failure of Top-Down Approaches Jake Davis Analytic moral philosophy has been integral to bioethics since the field’s inception in the 1970's. However, bioethics is an interdisciplinary field which, in addition to theoretical reflection, must apply its conclusions to the outside world through clinical ethics consultation and public inquiry.

Because of this, the type of theorizing that occurs in bioethics must be shaped by the constraints and practical necessities of these settings. These constraints include the need to reach clear and implementable conclusions about issues, often in the face of pluralistic disagreement. In this essay, I will argue that traditional “top-down” approaches to applied ethics fail to satisfy these constraints.

Consequently, top-down approaches are not appropriate for the methods of bioethics, inasmuch as bioethics operates in both clinical ethics consultation and public discourse.

Method in Bioethics Bioethics is a field characterized by many methodological approaches. John Arras (2010) taxonomizes approaches to bioethics into three types of orientations towards the role of theory in bioethical discourse.50The first category, “high theory”, includes extremely abstract and systematic normative theories, such as consequentialist or Kantian approaches, among many others. Another category, “anti-theory,” includes positions such as casuistry and moral particularism, which do not appeal to a larger ethical theory to justify conclusions about ethical matters. These approaches can be considered “bottom-up”, as they work from the “bottom” level of our judgements about particular situations or cases “upwards” to broader conclusions about ethics. In between these extremes are “theory-modest” approaches to bioethics, exemplified by the popular principlist approach advocated by Beauchamp and Childress in Principles of Biomedical Ethics.51 Approaches such as this engage in what Arras calls “mid-level” theorizing—they reason based on multiple shared principles or values to reach a consensus on the correct course of action, but do not attempt to reach the deeper level of philosophical justification characteristic of “high theory”. In this way, these approaches can be considered as “incompletely theorized agreements” designed to reach workable conclusions within the context of policy debate, clinical settings, or research.52 According to the perspective of what Arras calls “high theory,” applied ethics consists of the application of high-level normative theories to real-world situations. These normative theories differ in content—for instance, they could include consequentialist, Kantian, or natural law approaches— but are similar in that they are all abstract, systematic, and extremely parsimonious.53 They consist of a small number of general principles from which every other moral principle can be derived. For example, a utilitarian ethical system would judge the morality of actions based on the principle that good actions are those that maximize happiness and minimize suffering, while a Kantian system Arras, John. “Theory and Bioethics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 18 May 2010, plato.stanford.edu/entries/theorybioethics.

51 Beauchamp, Tom L., and James F. Childress. Principles of Biomedical Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

52 Arras, John. “Theory and Bioethics.”

53 Hoffmaster, Barry. “Philosophical Ethics and Practical Ethics.” Clinical Ethics, 1989, pp. 201–230.

50

66

would judge the morality of actions based on the principle that one should only act in accordance with maxims that are universalizable. Under this conception of applied ethics, the role of bioethics is to provide clear-cut answers to ethical issues in biomedical contexts by studying their empirical features carefully, determining the morally relevant aspects, and fitting these into the structure of a normative theory, which will yield conclusive and justified answers about what to do. In this way, this approach can be considered “top-down”—figuring out ethics on a “top” theoretical level, and then applying it “downwards” to empirical situations.

These “top-down” approaches encompass a wide variety of theoretical orientations and views about ethical issues on the level of application. Some examples of philosophers within the literature who utilize this sort of approach would be Peter Singer and R.M. Hare, who take consequentialist approaches to normative ethics, Alan Donagan and Alan Gewirth, who utilize generally deontological approaches to ethics, or Bernard Gert, who takes a natural law approach to normative ethics.54 None of the theories advocated by these philosophers are exactly alike in content or conclusion; however, they all share the trait of being derived from a small number of abstract principles which must be applied to specific empirical issues to yield conclusions about the ethically correct course of action.

The Settings of Bioethics Just as bioethics is conducted using a wide variety of methods, bioethics also takes place in a wide variety of settings, each with their own corresponding demands and subject matter. In order to frame a discussion of how the methods of bioethics are to be applied in these settings, it is necessary to have a working understanding of the scope of bioethics. However, the word “bioethics” is used ambiguously throughout the literature—it is used to describe several different types of activities.

Massimo Reichlin (1994) writes that three conceptions of bioethics can be found in the AngloAmerican and Italian bioethics literature, each corresponding to a different view on the epistemological status of bioethics.55 Similarly, John Arras (2003) argues that bioethics operates in three separate but overlapping domains, which roughly correspond to Reichlin’s account: bioethics as an academic pursuit, bioethics as clinical consultation, and policy-oriented bioethics.56 Following Reichlin and Arras, I will consider bioethics to be a composite of these three overlapping activities: academic moral philosophy, clinical consultation, and public inquiry.

The first domain of bioethics is as a type of applied ethics, where moral principles derived from abstract moral philosophy are applied to biomedical problems in an abstract, academic manner.

In this setting, academics are free to investigate ethical issues and connect them rigorously with theory. There is no need to work within pressing time-constraints or reach a determinate conclusion about issues—questions can instead be analyzed and left open. Additionally, there is no need at this level of bioethical inquiry to bend to the influence of pluralistic or political concerns; a theoretician may argue using any method they see fit.

Beauchamp, Tom L. “Does Ethical Theory Have a Future in Bioethics?” The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, vol. 32, no. 2, 2004, pp. 209–217.

Reichlin, M. “Observations on the Epistemological Status of Bioethics.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 19, no. 1 (February 1, 1994): 79–102.

56 Arras, John D. “The Owl and the Caduceus: Does Bioethics Need Philosophy?” The Nature and Prospect of Bioethics, pp. 1–42.

54 55

67

The second domain of bioethics is clinically focused bioethics. This domain is much less philosophical and normative than the first—rather than focusing on systematically uncovering abstract moral truths, it focuses more on resolving disputes about specific ethical cases related to the life sciences. In a clinical setting, bioethics consists of the use of concepts from moral philosophy, case studies, and methods from the bioethical literature to analyze clinical situations.57 This often takes the form of an ethics consultation, in which a clinical ethicist or ethics board is called on by a healthcare professional to review a case and give guidance in resolving it. These consultations take place in the context of actual cases, which are each unique and contain elements of uncertainty which may only be understood by trained professionals.58 Additionally, cases are time-sensitive and demand satisfactory resolution—they must be given something resembling a determinate answer.59 The third conception analyzed by Reichlin is bioethics as a broad and interdisciplinary public inquiry which is involved in political decision-making about bioethical issues. This view of bioethics is specifically focused on governmental and other institutional committees which aim to make decisions and create guidelines about bioethical issues, using experts from various disciplines to inform their choices. The demands of bioethics as a public inquiry pose specific methodological challenges for the field. This setting can put bioethicists in the role of policy analysts, in which they formulate and evaluate policies on various levels, ranging from individual hospitals and healthcare systems to regulatory bodies at the state or national level.60 In this domain, bioethicists must adopt methods of argumentation which are sensitive to the legal and political realities of ethical situations.

These often occur in a democratic context in which there is wide disagreement about the most ethical course of action.61 Additionally, these situations call for people affected by such policies to participate in the process of determining them—a need which has sparked a recent research program in bioethics which uses the methods of the social sciences to investigate public perspectives on such issues.62 The Indeterminacy of Top-Down Approaches One area in which top-down approaches to applied ethics fail to meet the demands of a practical context is clinical ethics consultation. In this type of interaction, an expert trained in ethical theory is called on by a healthcare professional to review a case and give guidance in resolving it. In this context, cases require clear answers under time pressure. Top-down approaches are not able to provide this type of response better than other approaches for multiple reasons. First, like many areas of philosophy, normative ethics is a field without consensus. Normative theories are hotly contested, and no systematic ethical theory has ever been widely accepted by the philosophical community. Furthermore, there is no clear direction or research program which shows promise of ever arriving at a consensus in this area. Given this epistemic situation, there is no more compelling reason, all things being equal, to accept an ethical claim made on the basis of a top-down ethical Ibid.

Zaner, Richard M. "Is “Ethicist” Anything to Call a Philosopher?" Human Studies 7, no. 1 (1984): 71-90.

59 Arras, John D. “The Owl and the Caduceus: Does Bioethics Need Philosophy?”

60 Ibid.

61 Kovács, József. “The Transformation of (Bio)Ethics Expertise in a World of Ethical Pluralism.” Journal of Medical Ethics 36, no. 12 (2010): 767–70.

62 Schicktanz, Silke, Mark Schweda, and Brian Wynne. “The Ethics of ‘Public Understanding of Ethics’—why and How Bioethics Expertise Should Include Public and Patients’ Voices.” Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 15, no. 2 (May 2012): 129–39.

57 58

68

theory than there is to accept an ethical claim made on the basis of another reason. Because of this, it is impossible for a top-down approach to reach a determinate answer about a clinical situation, simply because there is no antecedent determinate answer about the question of which normative theory is correct.

Additionally, ethical theories themselves are often ambiguous about their direct application to ethical issues, allowing for multiple interpretations. This makes it unclear exactly how they should be applied to particular situations, requiring the person applying the theory to exercise their own personal judgement regarding how certain ethical concepts apply to actual practice. To provide a few examples, in a Kantian context, it is often unclear what treating a patient as an end instead of a means would entail for situations such as physician assisted suicide or end-of-life care—in both of these situations, a patient or those acting on behalf of them may choose to end their life, either through an active intervention or the discontinuation of treatment. This conflicts with the traditional Kantian view of suicide, in which suicide is considered immoral because of the contradictory nature of an autonomous rational will destroying itself.63 However, it is unclear how a Kantian view would apply to patients who are not able to function as rational agents, such as those who are suffering from the later stages of Alzheimer’s disease or are in a state of brain death. Similarly, in a consequentialist context, it is potentially unclear how to quantitatively compare the various types of suffering that patients could experience as a result of the rationing of medical care.

Both of these sources—ambiguity and a lack of consensus on the level of ethical theory— contribute to the indeterminacy of top-down approaches to ethics. This aspect of top-down approaches is problematic in clinical settings, where ethics consultants or ethics boards are called upon to make time-sensitive recommendations about cases in the face of uncertainty. In these settings, a truly unbiased top-down approach would need to include the results of several different normative theories, each providing competing justifications for the best course of action. It would also need to outline multiple possible interpretations of these normative approaches, and show how they each lead to different conclusions about what is ethical to do in a particular situation. Such an analysis would likely lead to more questions than answers, which may be appropriate for a classroom setting, but would not satisfy the need for definite conclusions present in a clinical context.

One potential objection to this view would be to claim that in the absence of a systematic ethical theory, one is only able to reach biased conclusions about ethical matters. To put it another way, without an external structure to justify one’s ethical judgements, the only source which one may use to justify their positions on ethical issues is their own personal opinion. However, top-down approaches are also subject to this sort of bias and personal preference in a similar way—given our epistemic situation with respect to normative theories, the use of a top-down approach simply moves the problem of bias and personal preference up one level to the sphere of hotly contested ethical theories. To put it another way, judgements about the most ethical course of action in clinical cases made on grounds other than an ethical theory have just as much of a chance of being justified as judgements made without these grounds because bias can appear at the level of normative theory.

63

Cholbi, Michael. "Suicide." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 21 July 2017, plato.stanford.edu/entries/suicide/.

69

One might also object to my view by arguing that by abandoning the use of top-level ethical principles, we are conceding that it is impossible to achieve a consistent and systematic account of ethics. However, this response would fail to understand my argument—the argument that I have presented applies only to bioethics strictly inasmuch as it operates in clinical or public spheres. I have argued that given the urgency of practical concerns in these areas, it is not feasible for a top-down approach to be used as a method. However, this does not mean that there is not ultimately such an account of ethics, and it does not mean that philosophers should not discuss or propose such theories—it merely means that given the current epistemic outlook of these sorts of theories, they are only of limited importance for practical ethics.

Top-Down Approaches and Public Discourse József Kovács (2014) describes our contemporary public discourse as implicitly endorsing a normative ethical pluralism, in which “the values or goods legitimately pursued by human beings are plural, incompatible and incommensurable”.64 This sort of view does not merely state that pluralism about value is a descriptive fact about public life; instead it states that these plural values are “legitimately” pursued by human beings, and thus are equally valuable. Because these values are at times incompatible, it is impossible for every situation to allow for the different values of each person to be realized simultaneously. Consequently, decision-making processes which must weigh these competing values are unable to rely on a universally valid method of ranking and prioritizing them— instead, decision-making processes must rely on the process of democratic deliberation, in which all parties are allowed to have representation in the final decision made.

This view of normative ethical pluralism may or may not be ultimately true. However, regardless of the truth of this normative theory, our public discourse is structured around the assumption that the plural values of various people are legitimately pursued. Top-down approaches to ethics conflict with this. This is because the types of decision procedures inherent to most topdown approaches do not take into account the multiple competing values that people may pursue.

In the context of Kantian ethics, for example, people must follow the duties they are rationally obliged to follow regardless of what they actually value. In this way, a top-down approach to applied ethics conflicts with a pluralistic setting of public discourse.

Additionally, in my view, public bioethical discourse carries an ethical obligation to include input from those who might be affected by its conclusions; otherwise it risks the result of forcing decisions or policies on people who do not consent to them. Again, top-down approaches to applied ethics conflict with this obligation. The process of reasoning inferentially from a top-level normative theory is not democratic—in fact, part of the motivation for creating such theories is to find answers to ethical questions which do not depend on sociological considerations (such as public opinion). In effect, this leads to theories which dictate what is ethically correct without directly incorporating the desires of the people they concern.

One may object to this claim that top-down approaches do not take into account the desires of those affected by policies that might come about as a result of bioethical discourse. Such an 64

Kovács, József. “The Transformation of (Bio)Ethics Expertise in a World of Ethical Pluralism.”

70

objection could argue by way of counterexample: for example, preference utilitarianism, as defended by R.M. Hare, would argue that ethical deliberation should attempt to maximize the number of personal interests satisfied by an ethical action—by definition, this view would take the desires of constituents into account.65 However, although approaches such as this might include the desires of the public in their process of deliberation, the way in which they weigh and implement these desires does not depend on the preferences of the public. For example, in the case of preference utilitarianism, although this system takes the preferences of its subjects into account when setting up its calculus, the very process of maximization inherent to its calculus proceeds without the input of its subjects.

Conclusion In this essay, I have argued that top-down approaches to applied ethics—approaches which purport to apply systematic normative principles deductively to empirical situations—cannot work at the clinical or policy levels of bioethics. I have argued this for multiple reasons. First, I have argued that such normative theories have no advantage over other sorts of ethical reasoning because of the lack of a consensus about what is the correct normative theory. Similarly, normative theories are just as prone to ambiguity and bias in their application as other sorts of theories. This leads to an indeterminacy for top-down approaches to ethics, which is unacceptable for the urgent demands of practical ethical decision making in the clinic and in public discussion. Next, I have argued that the use of a systematic theory to reach conclusions about policy runs in conflict to the proper workings of a pluralistic democracy. This is because a systematic theory is incompatible with the pluralistic pursuit of many incommensurable and potentially incompatible values. Additionally, normative theories do not directly take into account the desires of those who might be affected by their conclusions.

It is important to note what I have not argued here. I have not argued that philosophers working within the theoretical domain of bioethics (as outlined by Reichlin and Arras) should not attempt to provide top-down justification for their ethical stances. Additionally, I do not hold that there is no use for philosophical methods or concepts at all in a clinical or policy setting—merely that a top-down approach in which philosophical theory directly and deductively determines public policy is not feasible. I also have not argued that such approaches to ethical theory will always be futile on the level of practical ethics—at some time in the future there may very well be a theory with the proper level of articulation to function well at the level of application. For now, however, such a theory is not in sight.

If we can’t rely on a systematic approach to determine the right thing to do in the context of practical ethical deliberation, then what other methods are available? Several alternative options have been articulated by philosophers who do not take a top-down approach, ranging from methods such as casuistry and particularism which eschew high theory entirely to mid-level methods such as Beauchamp and Childress’ principlism, which take a moderate approach to the application of

65 Hare, Richard M. "A Utilitarian Approach." Compiled by Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse. In A Companion to Bioethics, 85-90. Chichester, U.K.: WileyBlackwell, 2009.

71

normative theories to ethical questions.66 A comparison of these approaches to determine the most effective of them is beyond the scope of this paper. However, it is likely that one of these methods would provide a stronger foundation for moral philosophy as a practical enterprise than the topdown approaches which I have here discussed.

Bibliography Arras, John. “Theory and Bioethics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 18 May 2010, plato.stanford.edu/entries/theory-bioethics/.

Arras, John D. “The Owl and the Caduceus: Does Bioethics Need Philosophy?” The Nature and Prospect of Bioethics, pp. 1–42., doi:10.1385/1-59259-370-4:1 Beauchamp, Tom L. “Does Ethical Theory Have a Future in Bioethics?” The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, vol. 32, no. 2, 2004, pp. 209–217., doi:10.1111/j.1748-720x.2004.tb00467.x.

Beauchamp, Tom L., and James F. Childress. Principles of Biomedical Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Cholbi, Michael. "Suicide." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 21 July 2017, plato.stanford.edu/entries/suicide/.

Hare, Richard M. "A Utilitarian Approach." Compiled by Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse. In A Companion to Bioethics, 85-90. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Hoffmaster, Barry. “Philosophical Ethics and Practical Ethics.” Clinical Ethics, 1989, pp. 201–230., doi:10.1007/978-1-4612-3708-2_11.

Kovács, József. “The Transformation of (Bio)Ethics Expertise in a World of Ethical Pluralism.” Journal of Medical Ethics 36, no. 12 (2010): 767–70.

Reichlin, M. “Observations on the Epistemological Status of Bioethics.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 19, no. 1 (February 1, 1994): 79–102. https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/19.1.79.

Schicktanz, Silke, Mark Schweda, and Brian Wynne. “The Ethics of ‘Public Understanding of Ethics’—why and How Bioethics Expertise Should Include Public and Patients’ Voices.” Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 15, no. 2 (May 2012): 129–39. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-011-9321-4.

Zaner, Richard M. "Is “Ethicist” Anything to Call a Philosopher?" Human Studies 7, no. 1 (1984): 71-90. doi:10.1007/bf001

66

Beauchamp, Tom L., and James F. Childress. Principles of Biomedical Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

72

Separating Gender Dysphoria and Trans Identity Through Literature Leanne Ho NTRODUCTION Historically, medical practitioners have treated gender dysphoria as a medical disorder that defines transgender people, thus designating transgender people as abnormalities and using medicine as a tool to enforce cisnormativity and a binary view of sex and gender. Although transgender people in the United States have grown more visible and gained more rights over the last decade, institutional healthcare disparities remain. In particular, the medicalization of transgender identity has proven to be a double-edged sword. Treating gender dysphoria as a medical condition gives healthcare providers—who are likely to be cisgender—the power to police, reduce, and invalidate a person’s sex and gender identity. However, without an official diagnosis of gender dysphoria, transgender patients may not have access to the healthcare services they need. While there is danger in both over-medicalizing and under-medicalizing transgender identity, this paper argues that there is a third option: separating gender dysphoria and transgender identity.

By treating gender dysphoria and transgender identity as independent concepts, healthcare providers can allow their patients to identify however they wish, without needing to seek approval or validation through a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. In addition, transgender people should be allowed to receive hormone therapy, sex reassignment surgery, and other medical procedures without first having to prove their transness officially. In other words, transgender people should be respected and treated as transgender people without being forced to claim the misery and suffering of gender dysphoria. Some transgender people experience more gender dysphoria than other transgender people, and it would be a disservice to the entire community to assume that gender dysphoria is a marker of transness.

Transgender people are diverse and complex, because people are diverse and complex. The very existence of literature is predicated on the notion that different people experience the world differently. Literature allows readers to collect vicarious experiences, explore new emotions, and cultivate empathy for others. There is no universal narrative that neatly explains and solves gender dysphoria. However, by engaging with literature that explores sex and gender, healthcare providers can develop a more nuanced understanding of transgender people. Instead of generalizing all transgender patients into one cis-centric narrative—where transness is aberrant and gender dysphoria is a necessary and painful prerequisite to validating gender identity—physicians can view transgender patients as whole, complex people while also providing appropriate treatment to alleviate gender dysphoria if and when it is necessary.

Additionally, encountering literature centered on issues of sex and gender can improve individual physicians’ attitudes toward transgender people and help mitigate institutional healthcare disparities. At present, physicians without proper training can be woefully prejudiced or ignorant 73

towards transgender patients. These individual biases can accumulate to form structural inequities in healthcare. In reading about the experiences of transgender people, physicians can better confront their biases and assumptions and better empathize with their patients as they seek to provide appropriate care. With the skills and knowledge cultivated by the study of literature, physicians will hopefully be less likely to abuse their power and more likely to recognize the boundaries of medicalization. With that in mind, this paper examines several works of literature that center on transgender experiences and discusses how these works might equip physicians with the tools to provide more inclusive medical care for transgender patients. Because literature allows readers to recognize the plight of others, it is an ideal tool to get physicians to look at things differently and understand the complex relationship between transgender identity and gender dysphoria.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TRANSGENDER HEALTHCARE Transgender healthcare got its start with Magnus Hirschfeld, a German physician who challenged his peers’ notions of sex and gender and provided transgender people with the medical care they needed to physically transition. As early as 1918, he coined the now-antiquated term “transvestite” to describe transgender identity and offered hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery.67 While his contemporaries “aimed to ‘cure’ transgender patients of their alleged mental affliction, Hirschfeld’s Adaptation Theory supported those who wanted to live according to the gender they felt most aligned with, as opposed to the gender that their sex obligated them to abide by.”68 Much of Hirschfeld’s work was destroyed by Nazi book burnings in 1933, but his influence remained.69 American doctors such as Alfred Kinsey and Henry Benjamin drew inspiration from Hirschfeld’s belief that transgender people were not inherently flawed and in need of fixing.

Eventually, the medical community established a consensus that gender dysphoria was the problem, not transgender people themselves.

This shift in consensus was marked by changes in medical terminology around sex and gender. Transgender identity was first medicalized and recorded in 1968 by the American Psychological Association (APA), which invented the diagnosis “sexual deviations” in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.70 This diagnosis became “psychosexual disorders” in 1980, then “sexual and gender identity disorders” in the 1994 edition, and finally “gender dysphoria” in the most current edition, published in 2013.71 In 1990, the World Health Organization (WHO) developed International Classification of Disease, which listed several disorders related to transgender identity, including “transsexualism,” “gender identity disorder,” and “sexual maturation disorder.”

These classifications were important because they influenced the way physicians treated transgender patients. By listing transgender identity as a medical disorder, and especially as a mental Khan, Farah Naz. “A History of Transgender Health Care.” Scientific American. 16 November 2016. Web. Accessed 7 November 2018.

Khan, Farah Naz. “A History of Transgender Health Care.” Scientific American. 16 November 2016. Web. Accessed 7 November 2018.

69 Khan, Farah Naz. “A History of Transgender Health Care.” Scientific American. 16 November 2016. Web. Accessed 7 November 2018.

70 Love, Shayla. “The WHO says being transgender is a mental illness. But that’s about to change.” The Washington Post. 28 July 2016. Web. Accessed 15 October 2018.

71 Love, Shayla. “The WHO says being transgender is a mental illness. But that’s about to change.” The Washington Post. 28 July 2016. Web. Accessed 15 October 2018.

67 68

74

disorder, the APA and WHO framed transness as an abnormality, a disease that needed to be cured.

This definition enforced cisnormativity and othered transgender people by implying that cisgender people were the default and transgender people were a deviation from the norm. In practice, physicians could justify their discriminatory attitudes with institutional standards. Physicians are expected to be kind to patients and hostile to disease. By aligning transness more with disease than with patient identity, medical organizations such as the APA and WHO allowed doctors to treat transgender patients with hostility. In June 2018, the WHO announced that it would no longer classify “gender incongruence” as a mental disorder.72 Employing neutral terms such as “gender dysphoria” and “gender incongruence” allow physicians to describe a dissonance between gender and sex without turning transgender identity into a disorder. In effect, this new system of classification separates gender dysphoria or gender incongruence from transgender identity. However, for better or for worse, transgender identity is still regulated and legitimized by medicalization.

At this point, it might seem like medicalizing transgender identity created more problems for both patients and healthcare providers, but medicalization solved a significant problem: healthcare coverage. According to one study of the WHO’s decision to reclassify gender incongruence, the removal of all conditions related to gender identity might undermine access to healthcare services for transgender people.73 According to one of the authors on that study, without an official medical diagnosis that indicated transness, transgender people “wouldn’t have a diagnostic code that conveyed eligibility” for treatments that could alleviate distress related to sex and gender.74 In one case, the Internal Revenue Service attempted to challenge a tax deduction that a transgender woman claimed for gender reassignment surgery, but the physician consultant was able to use diagnostic criteria to justify the surgery’s importance.75 Access to transgender-specific healthcare is especially critical for vulnerable populations, such as the incarcerated. Some inmates are only able to receive hormone therapy “based on the fact that transgender identity belongs to a medical category.”76 Thus, since ignoring transgender identity would be damaging to transgender people, medical institutions must find ways to provide inclusive care to transgender patients. Most of the current issues in transgender healthcare focus on training physicians to navigate the complexity of sex and gender.

Over the past few decades, the evolution of diagnostic tools from organizations such as the APA and the WHO has illustrated the changing attitude of the medical field toward transgender identities. Terms such as “deviations” and “disorders” had negative connotations, suggesting that transgender people were abnormal. These terms were later replaced with terms such as “dysphoria” and “incongruence,” words that suggest a neutral difference within an individual instead of a 72 Pickman, Ben and Brandon Griggs. “The World Health Organization will stop classifying transgender people as mentally ill.” CNN. 20 June 2018.

Web. Accessed 15 October 2018.

73 Roble, Rebecca, Ana Fresán, Hamid Vega-Ramírez, Jeremy Cruz-Islas, Victor Rodríguez-Pérez, Tecelli Domínguez-Martínez, and Geoffrey M Reed.

“Removing transgender identity from the classification of mental disorders: a Mexican field study for ICD-11.” The Lancet Psychiatry 3.9 (2016): 850859.

74 Love, Shayla. “The WHO says being transgender is a mental illness. But that’s about to change.” The Washington Post. 28 July 2016. Web. Accessed 15 October 2018.

75 Belluck, Pam. “W.H.O. Weighs Dropping Transgender Identity from List of Mental Disorders.” The New York Times. 26 July 2016. Web. Accessed 7 November 2018.

76 Belluck, Pam. “W.H.O. Weighs Dropping Transgender Identity from List of Mental Disorders.” The New York Times. 26 July 2016. Web. Accessed 7 November 2018.

75

negative difference between an individual and society. This shift signified a changing attitude towards transgender people and a more nuanced understanding of sex and gender. Consequently, healthcare providers shifted the focus to a more pressing issue: transgender people’s struggle to navigate their sex and gender in ways that were sometimes inconsistent with their learned or assigned understandings of sex and gender. Instead of forcing transgender individuals to conform, the new medical language around transgender identity explores what that conformity means and why it came about in the first place.

CURRENT ISSUES IN TRANSGENDER HEALTHCARE Cultural perception of transgender people has grown more accepting over time, as trans people grow more visible and vocal. It is important to note that trans people have always existed and that attempts to suggest otherwise erase the truly noteworthy accomplishments of historical transgender figures, especially trans women of color. Before there was Stonewall, there were the riots at Cooper’s Donuts and Compton’s Cafeteria, both provoked by the policing of the LGBTQ community and especially of transgender people.77 Trans women of color have always been the foundation of the LGBTQ community; the famous Stonewall Inn riots were led by Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, two trans women of color who lived in Greenwich Village. The institution of medicine has struggled to keep up with societal change, but it has achieved important public health milestones in the 21st century. In 2005, California became the first state to mandate health care coverage for transgender people with the passing of the Insurance Gender Nondiscrimination Act.78 In 2014, the Department of Health and Human Services decreed that Medicare must cover the cost of sex reassignment surgery.79 Yet, it would also be amiss to say that this progress has always been linear or that transgender people are now fully accepted. Even though policies have mostly changed for the better, biases still exist, and thus, institutional health care disparities remain. For example, transgender populations experience “a disproportionately higher burden of mental health illness, including increased rates of depression, anxiety and suicide” as well as “notably higher” rates of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections, especially among transgender women.80 The problems start early, when young LGBT individuals are afraid to share their sexual orientations and gender identities with their healthcare providers due to fear of discrimination. According to one study, “this lack of communication is responsible for the poor therapeutic alliance, lack of appropriate illness-related education, inadequate scheduled screening for communicable diseases, and inadequate interventions to prevent STDs.”81 This fear of discrimination is not unfounded; according to another study, “negative attitudes toward and lack of knowledge about transgender health have manifested in reports of transgender people being denied health care or experiencing discrimination, including verbal and

“Milestones in the American Transgender Movement.” The New York Times. 28 August 2015. Web. Accessed 7 November 2018.

“Milestones in the American Transgender Movement.” The New York Times. 28 August 2015. Web. Accessed 7 November 2018.

79 Khan, Farah Naz. “A History of Transgender Health Care.” Scientific American. 16 November 2016. Web. Accessed 7 November 2018.

80 Dubin, Samuel, Ian T Nolan, Carl G Streed Jr, Richard E Greene, Asa E Radix, and Shane D Morrison. “Transgender health care: improving medical students’ and residents’ training and awareness.” Advances in Medical Education and Practice 9 (2018): 377–391. Print.

81 Hafeez, Hudaisa, Muhammad Zeshan, Muhammad A. Tahir, Nusrat Jahan, and Sadiq Naveed. “Health Care Disparities Among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth: A Literature Review.” Cureus 9.4 (2017): e1184. DOI 10.7759/cureus.1184 Print.

77 78

76

physical abuse, in health care settings.”82 The 2015 National Transgender Discrimination Survey found that one-third of respondents who had seen a healthcare provider in the last year had a negative experience, which included “having to teach the provider about transgender people in order to receive appropriate care (24%), being asked invasive or unnecessary questions about being transgender not related to the reason for the visit (15%), or being refused transition-related health care (8%).”83 Physician prejudice against transgender people goes unchallenged and unexamined by medical school curricula, which often does not address transgender issues at all. In a 2011 survey of 150 medical schools, “the median reported time dedicated to teaching LGBT-related content in the entire curriculum was 5 hours.”84 Upon closer examination of that same study, “the most frequently taught topics were broadly LGBTQ relevant, such as sexual orientation, HIV, gender identity, and safer sex; transgender-specific topics, such as transitioning and gender-affirming procedures or surgeries, were among the least frequently addressed.”85 Even in endocrinology, the specialty most likely to interact with transgender patients, 80.6% of physicians have never received training on the care of transgender patients.86 This lack of codified transgender health education directly contributes to a lack of awareness, knowledge, and skills among physicians, not only for transgender-specific medical procedures, but also for primary care interactions with transgender patients.

In addition to discrimination and ignorance, policies protecting transgender patients have recently been threatened. In April 2018, the Trump administration announced plans to roll back a 2016 law passed under the Obama administration, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability in “any health program or activity” that receives federal financial assistance, as well as any health insurance marketplace.87 This law applied to all health insurance plans as well as any physicians or hospitals that participated in Medicare or Medicaid, and it was instrumental in ensuring access to healthcare for transgender people across the nation. In October 2018, the Trump administration released a memo urging government agencies to define “sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with … Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.”88 Although many doctors will likely continue treating transgender patients with respect, this change emboldens discriminatory healthcare providers to “misgender their transgender patients or give them a roommate of an inappropriate gender when they’re in the hospital. Doctors could even refuse to

82 Dubin, Samuel, Ian T Nolan, Carl G Streed Jr, Richard E Greene, Asa E Radix, and Shane D Morrison. “Transgender health care: improving medical students’ and residents’ training and awareness.” Advances in Medical Education and Practice 9 (2018): 377–391. Print.

83 James, Sandy E., Jody L. Herman, Susan Rankin, Mara Keisling, Lisa Mottet, and Ma’ayan Anafi. The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey.

Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender Equality, 2016.

84 Obedin-Maliver, Juno, Elizabeth S. Goldsmith, Leslie Stewart, William White, Eric Tran, Stephanie Brenman, Maggie Wells, David M. Fetterman, Gabriel Garcia, and Mitchell R. Lunn. “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender–Related Content in Undergraduate Medical Education.” The Journal of the American Medical Association 306.9 (2011): 971-977. Print.

85 Dubin, Samuel, Ian T Nolan, Carl G Streed Jr, Richard E Greene, Asa E Radix, and Shane D Morrison. “Transgender health care: improving medical students’ and residents’ training and awareness.” Advances in Medical Education and Practice 9 (2018): 377–391. Print.

86 Davidge-Pitts, Caroline, Todd B. Nippoldt, Ann Danoff, Lauren Radziejewski, and Neena Natt. “Transgender Health in Endocrinology: Current Status of Endocrinology Fellowship Program and Practicing Clinicians.” The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. 102.4 (2017): 1286-1290. Print.

87 Pear, Robert. “Trump Plan Would Cut Back Health Care Protections for Transgender People.” The New York Times. 21 April 2018. Web. Accessed 7 November 2018.

88 Green, Erica, Katie Benner, and Robert Pear. “‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration.” The New York Times.

21 October 2018. Web. Accessed 7 November 2018.

77

treat a transgender patient outright.”89 In short, healthcare for transgender people today can be incomplete, damaging, or altogether absent, thanks to a combination of ignorance and discrimination. There is an urgent need to train physicians to empathize with transgender patients so that they can decrease bias, eliminate ignorance, and fight back against dangerous policy changes.

THE FUTURE OF TRANSGENDER HEALTHCARE THROUGH LITERATURE Incorporating literature that highlights transgender people’s stories into medical education could help mitigate individual prejudice and institutional health care disparities. Personal, emotionally-driven narratives can improve physicians’ attitudes toward transgender people and ultimately generate better health care. Recognizing transgender people as people outside of their medical diagnoses is the first step to separating gender dysphoria and transgender identity. Medicine can define and describe gender dysphoria, but literature breathes life into the experiences of transgender people. By reading about transgender people, physicians can better confront their biases and assumptions and better empathize with their patients. Through literature, a reader can recognize the plight of someone who may not have the same life experiences as the reader does.

Literature is an ideal tool for physicians to understand the complex relationship between transgender identity and gender dysphoria.

There is already proof that literature is a useful tool for exploring issues of gender and sexuality. At Georgetown University School of Medicine, the novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides is a critical component of Human Sexuality education. Before accepted students step foot on campus, Georgetown requires that they read this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an intersex man named Cal who is raised as a girl. When the new medical students start school, they “write a reflection on the book and attend a panel discussion that includes a primary care physician, an ethicist, a psychiatrist, and an endocrinologist, exploring the complexities of gender and sexuality both within Middlesex and beyond it.”90 By combining technical education with literature, medical students humanize intersex patients and see them as complex people, not merely as a collection of diagnoses and conditions. In the case of Middlesex, the protagonist is Cal, not his gene mutation. The success of Georgetown’s Human Sexuality curriculum can be extrapolated to other texts that amplify the voices of transgender people.

The short stories discussed in this paper are drawn from the 2012 anthology The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard, which consists of stories written by transgender authors and featuring transgender characters. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to cover all of the narratives included in the anthology, the two examples that are analyzed here can be a starting point to understanding gender dysphoria and transgender identity. In “Other Women” by Casey Plett, the main character’s gender dysphoria manifests as anxiety about other people misgendering her. In “To the New World” by Ryka Aoki, the main character has a complex relationship not only to gender but also to race, producing a double burden of dysphoria. Both narratives illustrate different ways in which transgender people experience gender dysphoria, and by reading these narratives— Khazan, Olga. “Why the Trump Administration’s New Gender Definition Worries Doctors.” The Atlantic. 23 October 2018. Web. Accessed 7 November 2018.

90 Marchalik, Daniel. “Teaching LGBT Issues in the New Era of Medical Education.” Slate. 5 February 2016. Web. Accessed 7 November 2018.

89

78

alongside other narratives, since these are far from encompassing—physicians can better understand their transgender patients as whole, complex people, for whom gender dysphoria is just one aspect of their lives.

While transgender healthcare is mainly concerned with gender dysphoria as it relates to hormone therapy, sex reassignment surgery, and other medical procedures, it is important to note that gender dysphoria is not limited to physical appearance and biology. Sophie, the protagonist of Casey Plett’s “Other Women,” experiences gender dysphoria in response to being deadnamed— being referred to by the name she was given at birth, which is inconsistent with her gender identity.

After a visit at her grandparents’ house, Sophie comments, “My old name, which I hate hearing, is Leon. I’ve started to get this weird visceral reaction every time I hear it. Or even see it on a piece of mail or something. Too many bad memories, I guess. Not of anything specific, just unhappiness. Boy body. All that.”91 In this excerpt, Sophie explains that while her gender dysphoria is related to her former “boy body,” it is more closely linked to the “bad memories” and “unhappiness” she felt at the time.92 This diverges from the stereotypical narrative of gender dysphoria and transgender people, in which their bodies are the source of pain and suffering. Here, Sophie makes it clear that her dysphoria is a consequence of the circumstances surrounding her body, not necessarily her body itself. By describing her response to deadnaming as a “weird visceral reaction,” Sophie reclaims her body and her bodily reactions, ultimately underscoring her transgender identity and separating it from gender dysphoria.93 She is not transgender because she experiences gender dysphoria. Rather, she experiences gender dysphoria because she is transgender. Her dysphoria is not a flaw in herself but rather a flaw in a society that cannot accept her. Hopefully, physicians who read this short story will understand the importance of using a patient’s correct name and pronouns.

Gender dysphoria can be even more complex for transgender people who also identify as people of color, indicating the importance of intersectionality in medicine and patient care. In Ryka Aoki’s “To the New World,” the main character, an Asian American trans woman named Millie, experiences dysphoria in relation to not only her gender but also her race. Aoki introduces Millie as she struggles to style her hair, writing: “Dammnit! I thought Asian hair was supposed to be easy. Millie Wong was on the verge of tears. Tangled and frizzy... shouldn’t it be long and straight? She yanked at her brush. Maybe it was some hidden genetic female thing: her sister had perfect hair, and her mother, too.

You’re so stupid! You don’t even pass to your own hair! You clumsy tranny freak.”94 In this passage, Millie experiences gender dysphoria in the form of frustration that she cannot “pass,” a term for being generally perceived as the majority identity. Examples of passing include black people passing as white, queer people passing as heterosexual, and transgender people passing as cisgender. However, in this context, Millie is not simply concerned with passing as a cisgender Léger, Tom and Riley MacLeod. The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard. New York City: Topside Press, 2012. Print.

Léger, Tom and Riley MacLeod. The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard. New York City: Topside Press, 2012. Print.

93 Léger, Tom and Riley MacLeod. The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard. New York City: Topside Press, 2012. Print.

94 Léger, Tom and Riley MacLeod. The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard. New York City: Topside Press, 2012. Print.

91 92

79

woman. She also worries that she cannot pass as Asian, because she has “tangled and frizzy” hair, unlike her sister and mother with their “perfect hair.”95 In this story, Millie’s hair is a symbol for both her gender and her race. Yet, her dysphoria is intersectional, meaning that it is not merely a combination of gender dysphoria and race dysphoria. Intersectionality conveys that Millie’s struggle exists at the intersection of her identities as transgender and Asian. In this story, gender dysphoria and transgender identity are shown to be distinct because Millie is a multifaceted person with complicated, interwoven identities. Physicians reading this story should note that transgender patients are not all the same and that some transgender patients have struggles compounded by other identities.

CONCLUSION The protagonists in Casey Plett’s “Other Women” and Ryka Aoki’s “To the New World” experience gender dysphoria in different ways. In “Other Women,” Sophie’s dysphoria is provoked by others, and the source of her discomfort is the circumstances in which her body exists, not her body itself. In “To the New World,” Millie’s body is the site of dysphoria and frustration in regard to both gender and racial identity. Both protagonists have complex relationships to gender dysphoria, but both protagonists experience their transgender identity independent of gender dysphoria. In reading these narratives, as well as other narratives that center on transgender people, physicians can better comprehend the complexity of transgender identity and gender dysphoria.

Although the history of transgender healthcare has been marked by ignorance and oppression, there is hope for the future. Literature cultivates understanding, which can help mitigate some of the current challenges that transgender people face in healthcare. Through exposure to transgender characters in literature, individual physicians can develop the skills and knowledge to engage with their transgender patients. This empathy will hopefully also drive physicians to push back against institutional healthcare disparities and discriminatory practices. Transgender people should not have to claim misery and suffering or conform to a cisgender-controlled narrative of gender dysphoria simply for the right to exist. Separating gender dysphoria and transgender identity will help foster trust and mutual respect between transgender patients and their healthcare providers.

95

Léger, Tom and Riley MacLeod. The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard. New York City: Topside Press, 2012. Print.

80

Works Cited Belluck, Pam. “W.H.O. Weighs Dropping Transgender Identity from List of Mental Disorders.” The New York Times. 26 July 2016. Web. Accessed 7 November 2018.

Davidge-Pitts, Caroline, Todd B. Nippoldt, Ann Danoff, Lauren Radziejewski, and Neena Natt.

“Transgender Health in Endocrinology: Current Status of Endocrinology Fellowship Program and Practicing Clinicians.” The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. 102.4 (2017): 1286-1290. Print.

Dubin, Samuel, Ian T Nolan, Carl G Streed Jr, Richard E Greene, Asa E Radix, and Shane D Morrison.

“Transgender health care: improving medical students’ and residents’ training and awareness.” Advances in Medical Education and Practice 9 (2018): 377–391. Print.

Green, Erica, Katie Benner, and Robert Pear. “‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration.” The New York Times. 21 October 2018. Web. Accessed 7 November 2018.

Hafeez, Hudaisa, Muhammad Zeshan, Muhammad A. Tahir, Nusrat Jahan, and Sadiq Naveed. “Health Care Disparities Among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth: A Literature Review.”

Cureus 9.4 (2017): e1184. DOI 10.7759/cureus.1184 Print.

Khan, Farah Naz. “A History of Transgender Health Care.” Scientific American. 16 November 2016.

Web. Accessed 7 November 2018.

Khazan, Olga. “Why the Trump Administration’s New Gender Definition Worries Doctors.” The Atlantic. 23 October 2018. Web. Accessed 7 November 2018.

Léger, Tom and Riley MacLeod. The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard. New York City: Topside Press, 2012. Print.

Love, Shayla. “The WHO says being transgender is a mental illness. But that’s about to change.” The Washington Post. 28 July 2016. Web. Accessed 15 October 2018.

Marchalik, Daniel. “Teaching LGBT Issues in the New Era of Medical Education.” Slate. 5 February 2016. Web. Accessed 7 November 2018.

“Milestones in the American Transgender Movement.” The New York Times. 28 August 2015. Web. Accessed 7 November 2018.

James, Sandy E., Jody L. Herman, Susan Rankin, Mara Keisling, Lisa Mottet, and Ma’ayan Anafi. The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey. Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender Equality, 2016.

Obedin-Maliver, Juno, Elizabeth S. Goldsmith, Leslie Stewart, William White, Eric Tran, Stephanie Brenman, Maggie Wells, David M. Fetterman, Gabriel Garcia, and Mitchell R. Lunn. “Lesbian, 81

Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender–Related Content in Undergraduate Medical Education.” The Journal of the American Medical Association 306.9 (2011): 971-977. Print.

Pear, Robert. “Trump Plan Would Cut Back Health Care Protections for Transgender People.” The New York Times. 21 April 2018. Web. Accessed 7 November 2018.

Pickman, Ben and Brandon Griggs. “The World Health Organization will stop classifying transgender people as mentally ill.” CNN. 20 June 2018. Web. Accessed 15 October 2018.

Roble, Rebecca, Ana Fresán, Hamid Vega-Ramírez, Jeremy Cruz-Islas, Victor Rodríguez-Pérez, Tecelli Domínguez-Martínez, and Geoffrey M Reed. “Removing transgender identity from the classification of mental disorders: a Mexican field study for ICD-11.” The Lancet Psychiatry 3.9 (2016): 850-859.

82

True Orthography: From Irrelevance to Significance to Expression Emma Greene As humanity progressed linguistically and socially from its humble origins, there arose a desire to create a form of record that was more durable than the spoken word. Written language evolved as a means of overcoming the evanescence of spoken language.96 With the further progression of communication and technology, it soon became beneficial for a region to develop a standard language. Such a language would necessarily include features such as uniformity and resistance to change, supraregionality, and codification, and these features would extend to both spoken and written language.97 English underwent this sequence of language development. After the codification of written English, a stigma arose surrounding departure from the language code, creating an idea that one’s orthographic practices directly reflect intelligence. In modern-day America, however, deliberate misspellings have become popular in self-identification. In this manner, orthography has evolved over time: from irrelevance, to significance, to expression.

The English language’s chaos began with the Norman Conquest in 1066. Prior to this, the Anglo-Saxons used Old English, which was standardized. But when the Normans took control, they changed the language of all legal documents to French. As a result, English decreased in importance, and regulation of English waned.98 Many English words were re-spelled according to French orthographic conventions, thanks to the linguistic influence from the Normans.99 This trend was further complicated by the fact that many English speakers started spelling words in their language according to their own local pronunciations.100 Years later, when English became England’s dominant political language again, these dialectical variations in orthography caused widespread confusion.101 The fourteenth century saw the development of local written standards in response to this predicament.102 As literacy increased throughout the country during the Early Modern English period (1500-1700), debate arose over how to teach spelling to children when there was no established spelling system. There was a desire to standardize the spelling system so that there would be nationwide consistency in and control over how children were taught to spell. Two main orthographic theories governing spelling reform emerged during this time. The first was to develop a system of spelling that adhered closely to pronunciation.103 This was based on the idea that spoken and written language were two sides of the same coin, so orthography should be a “mirror of speech.”104 The second theory, which was ultimately victorious, was to create a spelling system tied to etymology. Unfortunately, these reformers were often wrong in their assessment of words’ etymologies, so the new spellings they proposed were often not related to the actual etymologies of

Ehlich 1983: 100.

Horobin 2013: 36.

98 Horobin 2013: 77.

99 Fischer 2001: 303.

100 Horobin 2013: 77.

101 Horobin 2013: 82.

102 Upward 2011: 78.

103 Horobin 2013: 109-10.

104 Hodges 1972: 1090.

96 97

83

the words.105 Additionally, the spellings of some words were changed to match the spellings of other words with similar pronunciations, regardless of whether the two words had similar etymologies.106 The effect of these changes was a widening gap between pronunciation and orthographic representation. They also mutated English into a “polysystemic” or “hybrid” language of Anglo-Saxon English, French, and classical Greek and Latin.107 Another catalyst for orthographic reform was the desire to give the English language prestige through standardization. Reformers thought that because English did not have the consistency of Latin or Greek, it was viewed as chaotic and disorderly. They failed to realize that since Latin and Greek were dead languages, they were not subject to the constant stage of change in which all living languages are held. As a result, English spelling was standardized while its pronunciation continued to evolve so that the gap between spelling and pronunciation has only widened with time.108 The most significant instance of this happened simultaneously with language reform; the Great Vowel Shift, which took place at the same time as spelling reform, drastically changed the pronunciation of English vowels such that they hardly matched their recently standardized written counterparts.109 Throughout the second half of the 17th century and the first half of the 18th, the “ascertainment” or “fixing” of English continued as reformers continued to attempt to standardize “correct” written language.110 The spread of printing technology soon after crystallized the new spellings, and thus the chaos of English orthography was sealed.111 However, efforts to simplify English spelling would continue, albeit unsuccessfully, throughout the 20th century.112 For the rest of the 18th century, the focus shifted from reforming the spelling system to solidifying the newly approved spellings in an attempt to avoid further “corruption.”113 Dr. Samuel Johnson, a famed linguistic authority of the time, was a staunch supporter of this new purpose: In adjusting the ORTHOGRAPHY, which has been to this time unsettled and fortuitous, I found it necessary to distinguish those irregularities that are inherent in our tongue, and perhaps coeval with it, from others which the ignorance or negligence of later writers has produced.

Every language has its anomalies, which, though inconvenient, and in themselves once unnecessary, must be tolerated among the imperfections of human things, and which require only to be registered, that they may not be increased, and ascertained, that they may not be confounded: but every language has likewise its improprieties and absurdities, which it is the duty of the lexicographer to correct or proscribe.114 As spelling reform was completed, orthography quickly came to reflect the intelligence of the writer. In the mid-18th century, Lord Chesterton, a patron of a new dictionary, wrote the following to Horobin 2013: 111.

Horobin 2013: 114.

107 Fischer 2001: 304; Upward & Davidson 2011: 8.

108 Horobin 2013: 110-11.

109 Horobin 2013: 158.

110 Upward & Davidson 2011: 298.

111 Upward & Davidson 2011: 158.

112 Horobin 2013: 171.

113 Horobin 2013: 144.

114 As cited in Horobin 2013: 144.

105 106

84

his son: “I must tell you that orthography, in the true sense of the word, is so absolutely necessary for a man of letters; or a gentleman, that one false spelling may fix ridicule upon him for the rest of his life.”115 Whereas once spelling was only important for those involved in formal or legal matters – men – in this era, the new standards for spelling excellence were extended to women and children as well. In fact, special efforts were made to ensure that women knew how to spell, as their “lower intelligence” could more easily lead to spelling mistakes.116 A 1977 journal article extolling the benefits of teaching spelling effectively stated that “it’s time that we let children in on the secret that writing is the important thing and that correct spelling is a courtesy that we will take care of before a piece of writing goes anywhere important.”117 Similarly, correct spelling came to represent intelligence, moral character, and “general trustworthiness” during this period, and this perception has persevered.118 This marks a key shift in the regard of orthography. Before, orthography was simply a means of representing spoken language through writing; now, “orthography stands for linguistic form, for regularity, for authority, for systematicity.”119 A sociolinguistic prejudice began to develop against those who misspelled, showing “how the establishment of a standard spelling system and its association with education and other social accomplishments enabled writers to employ nonstandard spellings as a badge of provincialism and social inferiority.”120 For example, Pip in Dickens’s Great Expectations and Squire Western in Fielding’s Tom Jones were both branded as inferior and backward through the use of nonstandard spellings (misspellings) to represent their speech.121 This type of writing where orthography reflects actual pronunciation is known as eye dialect, and can be used to indicate “if the character is from an inferior social class, if he is of an ethnic minority, if he is foreign, rustic, or ill-educated, or if he is from a few choice locations (chiefly Texas and the Bronx).”122 This is the case regardless of the fact that these eye dialects are likely more similar to the reader’s own dialect than the etymology-based spellings that were standardized before the Great Vowel Shift.123 But most literature accepts this illogical and unjust connection between spelling and status in what is called “the paradox of eye dialect: a misspelling which actually approximates the standard pronunciation of a word represents ignorance, while a correct spelling which is phonetically incomprehensible represents normality.”124 In a 2000 study, participants were given excerpts from literature written in eye dialect to read aloud. The results showed that when the lines spoken by a character contained non-standard orthography, participants viewed that character more negatively.

In response to later questions, they associated these characters with stigmatized groups: Southern, Black, rural, uneducated, low social status.125 There is undoubtedly a connection between orthography and how a speaker is perceived.

As cited in Horobin 2013: 1.

Horobin 213: 153-55.

117 Hillerich 1977: 307.

118 Horbin 2013: 3.

119 Jaffe & Walton 2000: 582.

120 Horobin 2013: 161.

121 Horobin 2013: 161-62.

122 Walpole 1974: 193.

123 Chapman 1988: 40.

124 Walpole 1974: 193.

125 Jaffe & Walton 2000: 572-76.

115 116

85

In recent years, this orthographically-based prejudicial framework has given way to a new form of social rebellion. As one writer observed, “This highly literate society sometimes produces a sub-text [sic] by which it deconstructs itself.”126 When the rules are so highly regarded, flouting them means more than just disobedience – it’s a deeper form of expression. Typos are usually simple mistakes, not worthy of further thought. But deliberate misspellings require further semantic analysis on the part of the reader – is the writer trying to convey something special or significant? Or is he just bad at spelling?127 These misspellings are not mistakes but rebellions.128 The misspellings referred to here have primarily been created since typing and texting became common forms of written communication. They are mainly abbreviations, including replacing letters with numbers (“gr8” instead of “great”), relying on the pronounced names of letters (“cu” for “see you”), abbreviating a phrase with the first letter of each word within (“btw” for “by the way”), and dropping letters (“pls” for “please”).129 Research has not yielded any evidence that misspellings such as these will transfer into more formal modes of writing, but this “playful experimentation” may help improve literacy and increase awareness of language and linguistic structures.130 Additionally, analysis of slang used in electronic media has shown that these creative new words may not be used primarily for ease or speed of typing. Some slang words like “phat” (“fat”) are longer than the words they replace. But an important observation here is that they often make use of English morphological, syntactic, and phonological rules. For example, the word “phat” replaces “f” with “ph”, a digraph that is often used to represent the /f/ sound in English. Cases like this imply that these deliberate choices to play with orthography are somewhat reasoned.131 To this point, slang misspellings are often used to enact an informal register.132 In fact, this is not a recent development; even as spelling reforms were being carried out in the 17th and 18th centuries, misspellings were employed purposefully in certain situations. Although the new spelling regulations were highly regarded in public, private writings were not held to the same lofty standard: “rather [than] being a marker of literacy or education, non-standard spellings in private letters seem to have been considered a marker of relative formality.”133 Common slang groups people into shared subcultures and allows them to express frustration with a system they oppose: “The perpetrators of deliberate misspelling will not be classed as deliberate spelling reformers. Rather, they are making a mute appeal against the authority of an educational system in which orthography is still honoured [sic].”134 H.G. Wells wrote about the versatility of orthography in emotional appeals. Further, deliberate misspellings are also quite common in other areas of society, such as in baby names and brand names. Distinguishing a person or brand with a unique spelling expresses individuality and creativity and can potentially evoke specific thoughts or feelings.135

Chapman 1988: 42.

Chapman 1988: 42.

128 Horobin 2013: 223.

129 Horobin 2013: 212.

130 Horobin 2013: 220.

131 Horobin 2013: 222.

132 Horobin 2013: 223.

133 Horobin 2013: 157.

134 Chapman 1988: 42.

135 Horobin 2013: 224-25.

126 127

86

Eye dialects are relevant here, too. While they are often used pejoratively, they can be freeing, allowing people to be their true linguistic selves through written expression that more closely matches their speech patterns: “Modern sociolinguistics research into the use of non-standard orthography suggests that such spellings are often employed for their unique capacity to capture the ‘authenticity’ and ‘flavour’ [sic] of speech, as well as for their potential to challenge linguistics hierarchies.”136 Writers as far back as Chaucer and Shakespeare have made use of eye dialects to build representations of their characters.137 On the reverse, the tightening of spelling regulations can feel like a constraint on personal creativity; in the Czech Republic in the late 20th century, orthographic reform was viewed as suppression of discourse and manipulation of expression.138 Of course, this more positive attitude towards the orthographic creativity the English language affords is not universal. Current arguments for spelling reform are based on the fact that English spelling has many inconsistencies, a significant difference between the English writing system and a more phonetic one. However, there is no definitive evidence that languages with more phonetic spelling systems are easier to master overall.139 Every language has easier- and harder-tolearn aspects that vary based on the learner’s first language and other linguistic experiences; spelling is just one of the aspects of English that is more challenging for most prospective speakers. Some languages have a one-to-one correspondence between spoken sounds and written letters, but English orthography has a fifty percent redundancy rate – in other words, half of the letters in the average English word could be removed without causing significant difficulty in understanding the word.140 And yet the letters in English are both redundant and too few; there are many sounds present in the English phonetic system that are not represented in the writing system.141 This is because English spelling is more based on sequences of sounds than on single sounds, an orthographic style that makes English unique. Further, English orthography is virtually standard – it does not vary with dialectical pronunciation, as some writing systems do. Indeed, English is also unique in the richness of its orthography, which incorporates not just phonemes but also morphemes and etymology.142 Those who turn to lexicographers for support in the area of orthographic propriety may be surprised to learn that because of the complex history of English spelling, many words have no clearcut right and wrong spellings. The “authoritative” decision on how to spell a word is often “arbitrary and provisional.”143 Dr. Johnson – the same linguist who wanted to prevent further corruption of orthography and was also the publisher of one of the first major dictionaries – wrote that the “correct” spelling of a word was often chosen “by accident.”144 Thus, many of the spellings we consider undeniably correct today were not actually chosen based on any real linguistic or historical criteria. This has become even more true as English has not naturalized or standardized the spellings

Horobin 2013: 223-24.

Chapman 1988: 40.

138 Bermel 2007: 299.

139 Horobin 2013: 238-29.

140 Fischer 2001: 305.

141 Chapman 1988: 40.

142 Hodges 1972: 1093-94.

143 Horobin 2013: 166.

144 As cited in Upward & Davidson 2011: 299.

136 137

87

of borrowed words over the past few centuries, mainly in an effort to preserve their “exotic” quality.

Borrowed words may be spelled according to their original language or according to an English speaker’s semi-phonetic representation of the word. This has led to even more orthographic diversity and variability, especially in words borrowed many years ago that have become commonplace.145 Most criticisms of the English language’s irregular orthography draw from the idea that written language is just a visible form of spoken language. However, this is incorrect. Our brains connect the writing and speaking systems of English, but they are processed separately.146 In fact, written language (which is not the same as “writing” or the “written form of a language”) is an entirely separate entity from spoken language.147 Writing, or the textual representation of spoken language, is not a determinant of the structures of written language: “It is only through the consciousness of people that written language is influenced by writing.”148The challenge of orthography, then, is to strike a balance between “accuracy to the mouth and intelligibility to the mind,” in the words of author Andrew Robinson.149 This disunion is felt in the orthographer’s attempt to find the most useful spelling of a word, but also in the alphabet itself, the collection of the most basic units of orthography: Its purpose is to reconcile two antagonistic pulls: to have as many symbols as necessary to represent its language as accurately as possible; and at the same time to restrict its symbols to ensure easy learning, easy writing and easy reading.150 It is clear that written language is not a straightforward construction. It has been described as a “system of secondary symbolism” with abstract motives: “The complex quality of written language may mean, in fact, that writing is a separate linguistics function, differing from speech in both its structure and its mode of functioning.”151 Another linguist succinctly stated this as “arbitrariness squared.”152 Because of the lack of natural connection between the speaking and writing of English, the role of the brain in reconciling the two is vital. For those who grew up juggling these two systems, changing practices of English orthography at this point would require a significant amount of mental rewiring.153 As English orthography has evolved, its uses and implications have evolved as well. From the relative insignificance of spelling, to a judgment of inferiority based on spelling technique, to freedom of personal expression through the manipulation of spelling, orthography has had a prominent role in discussions of the English language over time. Ultimately, the dictionaries that generations of lexicographers have worked so hard to perfect are not the final authorities on language or its orthographic representation, for “dictionaries do not make decisions about what is correct usage,

Upward & Davidson 2011: 233.

Fischer 2001: 309.

147 Ludwig 1983: 33-34.

148 Ludwig 1983: 40.

149 As cited in Fischer 2001: 309.

150 Man 2000: 107.

151 Martlew 1983: 259-60.

152 Walpole 1974: 191.

153 Fischer 2001: 309.

145 146

88

but instead reflect the ways in which the language is changing.�154 English orthography is living and changing, and the modern-day orthographic creativity labeled as misspelling is perhaps just the start of orthography realizing its true purpose as a form of human language.

References Bermel, N. (2007). Language, Power and Social Process: Vol. 17. Linguistic authority, language ideology, and metaphor: The Czech orthography wars. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter.

Chapman, R. (1988). We gonna rite wot we wanna: The appeal of misspelling. English Today, 4(2), 39-42. https://doi.org/:10.1017/S0266078400013341 Ehlich, K. (1983). Development of writing as social problem solving. In F. Coulmas & K. Ehlich (Eds.), Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs: Vol. 24. Writing in Focus (pp. 99129). Berlin, Germany: Mouton Publishers.

Fischer, S. R. (2001). Globalities: A history of writing. London, United Kingdom: Reaktion Books.

Hillerich, R. L. (1977). Let's teach spelling - not phonetic misspelling. Language Arts, 54(3), 301-307. Retrieved from JSTOR database.

Hodges, R. E. (1972). Theoretical frameworks of English orthography. Elementary English, 49(7), 1089-1097. Retrieved from JSTOR database.

Horobin, S. (2013). Does spelling matter? Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

Jaffe, A., & Walton, S. (2000). The voices people read: Orthography and the representation of non-standard speech. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4(4), 561-587.

Ludwig, O. (1983). Writing systems and written language. In F. Coulmas & K. Ehlich (Eds.), Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs: Vol. 24. Writing in Focus (pp. 31-43).

Berlin, Germany: Mouton Publishers.

Man, J. (2000). Alpha beta: How 26 letters shaped the Western world. London, United Kingdom: John Wiley & Sons.

Martlew, M. (1983). The development of writing: Communication and cognition. In F. Coulmas & K. Ehlich (Eds.), Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs: Vol. 24. Writing in Focus (pp. 257-275). Berlin, Germany: Mouton Publishers.

Upward, C., & Davidson, G. (2011). The Language Library: The history of English spelling.

Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Walpole, J. R. (1974). Eye dialect in fictional dialogue. College Composition and Communication, 25(2), 191-196. https://doi.org/:10.2307/357177

154

Horobin 2013: 214-15.

89

About the Executive Board Zainab Sandhu is a junior microbiology major from Norman, Oklahoma. She has served on the THURJ executive committee for the past three years. Besides THURJ, Zainab serves as president of PreMedical Women’s Society, on the executive board of the Muslim’s Student’s Association, and as a member of Integrity Council. She also does undergraduate research, studying the antibiotic producing capabilities of Myxobacteria predator-prey interactions and volunteers for the Women’s Resource Center. After graduation, she plans on attending medical school.

Julie Bahr is a sophomore from Brownsburg, Indiana, majoring in English and Environmental Sustainability with a minor in Spanish. She currently serves as the Vice Chair of Publicity & Design for OU’s Green Week, the Public Relations Director for Circle K International, and a review board member for The Aster, OU’s literary & arts magazine. After graduation, Julie hopes to pursue a career in environmental conservation or policy. When she isn’t reading or writing, Julie enjoys spending time outdoors and tending to her burgeoning plant family.

Emma Bachman is a sophomore studying Civil Engineering. She has previously served as a review board editor on THURJ.

About the Authors Leanne Ho is majoring in English Literature with a minor in Social Justice. Through their involvement with the Honors College, Gender + Equality Center, and the Point Foundation, Leanne has advocated for inclusivity both on campus and in their community. Ultimately, Leanne hopes to earn an MD/MPH and work as a clinical researcher and educator. Although their primary focus is transgender and gender non-conforming health, Leanne plans to maintain an intersectional focus that dismantles the race, class, and gender disparities in healthcare. In their free time, Leanne enjoys climbing, writing poetry, and eating brunch.

Kevin Robb is a sophomore at OU studying math and engineering physics. On campus, he is involved with Sooner Competitive Robotics, the Society of Physics Students, and the OU Programming Team.

He also works as a campus tour guide. He plans to attend graduate school for computational physics, after which he hopes to work on particle physics research and become a professor. He also considers himself to be a lifelong artist, and in his free time, likes to make penwork and pixel art.

Conor Powers is a freshman political science/anthropology major from Milford, Massachusetts. He is an active member of the Honors Book Club program and volunteers as a barista at Second Wind Coffeehouse on Campus Corner. Besides these activities, he enjoys reading, listening to history podcasts, and travelling whenever and wherever he can. In the future, Conor is looking forward to attending the Honors at Oxford program and serving as a tutor in the Honors Writing Center, and hopes to go on to study political science with a focus on political theory at the graduate level.

90

Noah Bridges is a sophomore pursuing a dual degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering and Mathematics. He grew up in an athletic environment, instilling in him a love of fitness. He now coaches 6-8 classes per week at Koda CrossFit Norman, and chances are you'll find him there, either training or coaching, if he is not studying or in class. In his free time, he enjoys reading novels and researching current events while drinking espresso. He hopes to leverage his love of health, fitness, and math to pursue a career in healthcare, focusing on improving the quality and efficiency of care available to all.

Emma Greene is a senior Linguistics and Chinese double major from Richmond, Virginia. She is also a Computer Science minor, a Global Engagement Fellow, and a member of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. After she graduates in May, she will enter OU's MA program in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. She then hopes to continue her linguistics education or teach English around the world. When she's not learning about obscure languages or commenting on people's accents, she enjoys swimming, cooking new foods, and playing board games.

Hannah Bowlin is majoring in Psychology and Chemistry with minors in French and Communication.

She plays the French horn in the OU Sooner Campus Band, and is a member of OU French Club and the Acts of Kindness Association. Currently, she has no clear plans for what she will be doing later in life, but she hopes to have a career that she is passionate about and one that allows her to help others. In her free time, she enjoys traveling, cooking, and figure skating.

Annapoorani Asokan will graduate Summa Cum Laude from the University of Oklahoma in May 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts in History and a minor in the Medical Humanities. She is currently an officer for the Honors Student Association, researches in a biochemistry lab, and recruits high school students as a Student Ambassador. In her free time, she enjoys cooking (with varying degrees of success) and playing board games with friends. Upon graduation, she will join UT Southwestern School of Medicine in Dallas, TX. She hopes to use her experience with the humanities to become a more compassionate physician.

Jacob Davis is a junior from Sherman, Texas pursuing a double major in Biochemistry and Ethics & Religion, as well as minors in Spanish and Medical Humanities. At OU, he has been involved in The Oklahoma Group, the FYRE research program, the Medical Ethics and Issues Discussion Panel, and the Medical Humanities Scholars Program. In his free time, he enjoys playing the piano, cooking, and working as a volunteer barista at Second Wind Coffeehouse. Jake plans to attend medical school after graduation.

91