VOL. CLXXIV NO.141
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2017
HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE
Three professors under criminal investigation for sexual misconduct
CLOUDY HIGH 50 LOW 42
MIRROR
PSYCHOPATHS: A Q&A WITH JANINE SCHEINER PAGE M3
TTLG: THE GREEN MASK PAGE M4
‘HOW I VIEW MYSELF’: QUEER VISUAL CULTURE PAGE M5
PHOTO ESSAY: MASQUERADE PAGE M6
ERIN LEE/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF
Three psychology and brain sciences professors are on paid leave while they are under criminal investigations for allegations of sexual misconduct.
By THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF Three professors are alleged to have engaged in sexual misconduct and are being investigated by law enforcement, College President Phil Hanlon wrote in a campus-wide email Tuesday mor ning. T he
New Hampshire Attorney General’s office, the Grafton County Attorney’s office, the New Hampshire State Police, the Grafton County Sheriff ’s office and the Hanover Police Department have all launched criminal investig ations of the professors. Psychology and brain
Students begin work on Hartford trail By LEX KANG and MIKA JEHOON LEE The Dartmouth
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sciences professors Todd Heatherton, Bill Kelley and Paul Whalen are on paid leave and their access to campus has been restricted, College spokesperson Diana Lawrence confir med on Oct. 25. Lawrence said the professors were being investigated by the College for “allegations of serious
Five students enrolled in Engineering Sciences 89, “Engineering Design Methodology and Project Initiation” have started engineering work on a project to build a walking trail connecting the Latham Works Lane neighborhood with downtown White River Junction. ENGS 89 and ENGS
90 are the first and second unit of a two-term course sequence, respectively. Jessica Link ’17 Th’18, who is enrolled in ENGS 89, said students taking the course every year collaborate with communities in the Upper Valley on projects. Since the start of this term, Link said she and her classmates have been working with community organizer Cat Buxton to come SEE TRAIL PAGE 2
misconduct.” “It is important to remember that investigations are ongoing, with no official findings yet produced,” Hanlon wrote. “However, we take these allegations very seriously and are pursuing our own independent investigations in coordination with law
enforcement officials.” The College is cooperating w i t h l a w e n f o rc e m e n t officials, Hanlon wrote. “I want to say in the most emphatic way possible that sexual misconduct and harassment are unacceptable and have no SEE INVESTIGATION PAGE 2
NOVEMBER RAIN
ERIN LEE/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF
Hanover has seen cloudy and rainy weather over the past few days.
THE DARTMOUTH NEWS
PAGE 2
Three professors investigated by law enforcement for sexual misconduct FROM INVESTIGATION PAGE 1
place at Dartmouth,” Hanlon wrote in his email. “Such acts harm us as individuals and as members of the community.” I n a p r e s s r e l e a s e, N e w Hampshire Attor ney General Gordon MacDonald ’83 wrote that the office “engaged in a dialogue with Dartmouth” following The Dartmouth’s Oct. 25 reporting that the three professors were on paid leave and learned that the College had received allegations of sexual misconduct. Associate attorney general Jane Young said the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office became aware of the allegations “late last week.” She said the College had not reached out to the Attorney General’s office regarding the investigation prior to the Attorney General’s office contacting the College. In conjunction with other law enforcement agencies, the Attorney General’s office has decided to conduct a “joint criminal investigation into this matter,” MacDonald wrote. “At this time, we have no basis to conclude that there is a threat to the general public,” MacDonald wrote. Attor neys representing Heatherton wrote in a statement sent Tuesday after noon that Heatherton immediately cooperated with Dartmouth’s investigation and “continues to do so to this day.” “Dr. Heatherton is confident that he has not violated any written policy of Dartmouth, including policies relating to sexual misconduct and sexual harassment. He has engaged in no sexual relations with any student,” the statement, signed by Julie Moore of Employment Practices Group and Steven Gordon of Shaheen & Gordon, read. According to the statement, the attorneys learned Tuesday that the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office has yet to receive any information from the College.
The attorneys have also repeatedly and unsuccessfully reached out to Dartmouth to determine whether the investigation relates to an “out-of-state incident about which Dr. Heatherton was previously questioned.” Heatherton has continued to meet with his current graduate students and advisees, and his year away from campus is related to a Senior Faculty Grant for a yearlong sabbatical, which began on July 1, before he learned of the investigation, according to the statement. In a phone interview, Moore said the allegations against Heatherton are unrelated to the investigations of the other two professors. The Employment Practices Group beg an for mally re presenting Heatherton on Oct. 26 and is not representing Kelley or Whalen. Re p re s e n t at i ve s f ro m t h e G r a f t o n C o u n t y A t t o r n ey ’s office, the New Hampshire State Police and Dartmouth Safety and Security declined to comment. Emails seeking comment were sent to the three professors. Students, faculty and staff can speak to counselors through the College’s Counseling and Human Development office and dean on call. Safety and Security can help community members find assistance 24/7 at (603) 646-4000. Free and confidential services for victims of domestic and sexual violence in the Upper Valley are available through WISE and its 24-hour crisis line at (866) 348-9473. Anyone with information about these allegations is urged to contacttheNewHampshire State Police at (603) 4198014 or New Hampshire Attorney General’s office at (603) 931-9570. For tips, please email editor@ thedartmouth.com.
CORRECTIONS We welcome corrections. If you believe there is a factual error in a story, please email editor@thedartmouth.com for corrections.
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2017
Hartford trail construction begins FROM TRAIL PAGE 1
up with an engineered design plan for the proposed trail. According to Link, her group has spent a lot of time mapping surfaces to help reduce flood risk of the trail. “We are doing a lot of mapping ... and seeing if the amount of runoff that would come from an intense rainstorm would ruin that trail, cause erosion,” Link said. Eliza Hoffman ’17 Th’18, who is also taking ENGS 89, said the engineering students have been actively conducting field work for the project. “We are doing surveying of the riverbed to essentially creating a hydrological model, so we can look at the river flow at different points in the year and different frequencies of flow,” Hoffman said. “We have had beautiful weather to get out there, so that has been nice.” L i n k s a i d s h e h o p e s th e engineering design plan can give the White River Junction community a good start on constructing the trail within the next few years. In addition, Hoffman said this project will help her group gain hands-on experience in what they have been learning in the classroom, which she believes is very important. “It is a very real-world kind of situation, we are consulting for our client, who in this case is
a community group,” Hoffman said. “Gaining that relevant work experience before we graduate is really important.” Buxton said she decided to work with Dartmouth students after her colleague at the Thayer School of Engineering recommended them to her. She added that some phases of the project have turned out to be more complicated than expected, but their difficulty has motivated and appealed to students. “[A few phases] are more complicated, what we found to big problems were actually a part of what made it exciting for student engineers because they don’t want to take on a project that isn’t challenging,” Buxton said. “So our project provided some good challenges for them.” According to Link, this trail has been proposed for about 10 years, but it has been on hold for various reasons such as insufficient support. Buxton said that the neighborhood could not afford the high cost of hiring engineers. However, there has been community-wide support to obtain grants to fund the project, and after applying to have the walking trail project become a student project for ENGS 89, Buxton received a fee waiver. As a result, the engineering services provided by Link, Hoffman and their group members is free of charge.
According to Buxton, the Hartford Riverwalk, the proposed walking trail, will facilitate community members’ access to the confluence of the White River and the Connecticut River as well as recreational opportunities downtown. Hoffman added that it would beneficial for residents in the White River Junction to be able to explore natural spaces much more easily. Buxton said many residents in the White River Junction, especially business owners near the White River, support the project. However, she said that there is a landowner who is not supportive of the project. She said there is a possibility that the trail could circumvent the landowner’s property, but the landowner’s concerns could become a future challenge if the original conceptual plan ends up being implemented. Hoffman said the people that her group members have spoken with have been largely supportive. She said her group is aware of the landowner “who is less than enthusiastic about [the proposed walking trail],” but that they will be more focused on the engineering aspect of the project. Hoffman added that her group will work on the walking trail until the end of this coming winter, after which White River Junction will be responsible for finding contractors who would be willing to work on the project.
MIR ROR 11.1.2017
PSYCHOPATHS: A Q&A WITH JANINE SCHEINER | 3
TTLG: THE GREEN MASK | 4
'HOW I VIEW MYSELF': QUEER VISUAL CULTURE | 5 SAMANTHA BURACK AND TANYA SHAH/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF
2 //MIRR OR
Editors’ Note
Mirror Asks: Halloween Edition STORY
ELIZA MCDONOUGH/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF
Happy Week 8, Mirror readers! This week, your esteemed editors arrived at Robinson Hall fully prepared for Halloween celebrations. Annette, May and Lauren thought long and hard about what they wanted to dress up as this year, when photo editor Tiffany realized that the answer had been staring them in the face all term long: intrepid EIC Ray Lu ’18. Tiffany quickly set to finding the most embarrassing photo of Ray available on the internet (it was his portrait for his “First Team” column back during sophomore summer) and blowing it up so big on Microsoft Word that she had to hide behind the column in KAF to avoid public ridicule. At 12:04 p.m., May sent a text to Tiffany asking her whereabouts, only to receive the following response: “I’ll be at KAF in 15. I’m printing out Ray.” Tiffany proceeded to cut out the large copies of Ray’s head and tape them onto Popsicle sticks to create makeshift masks, while Lauren, Annette and May harassed the collective three Sig Eps that they know for house gear. (May, ingenious as she is, decided to tape a paper sign that read “Doucheland” on her shirt to mimic Ray’s Deutschland jersey.) As you may have guessed, the theme for this week’s issue of the Mirror is “Masks.” The issue explores the term in its various iterations, featuring a column on sustainable fashion, a Q&A with a psychology professor on psychopathy and sociopathy and a profile of a course on drag visual culture. We hope you enjoy the issue!
By Mirror Staff
What’s the best Halloween costume you’ve ever worn? Maria Harrast ’21: In second grade, I was Katara from the TV show “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” Zachary Gorman ’21: When I was 10 I didn’t originally plan on dressing up for Halloween, but I changed my mind at the last minute. The only “costume” left at the store was a plain orange mask. I was Carrot Man that year. Lauren Budd ’18: In fourth grade, I was the Mona Lisa: I wore a picture frame around my body with a background hand-painted by my artist grandmother and black clothing. Runner up: when I went as the house from Up. Cristian Cano ’20: This is gonna sound really nerdy. One time I dressed up as an alkane molecule for an inside joke ... my chemistry teacher in high school didn’t get it. Eliza Jane Schaeffer ’20: This year, I was the gold standard. I wore a gold dress and wrote “standard” on my chest. Annette Denekas ’18: Honestly tonight’s costume from production is right up there. Lauren, May, Tiffany and I dressed up as our shining star idol, editor-in-chief Ray Lu ‘18, masks, SigEp sweatshirts and all. May Mansour ’18: I was Amy Winehouse for Halloween this year, but I suspect that my best will be the one I wear next year. I plan to go as Frida Khaled (a hybrid of Frida Khalo and DJ Khaled), decked out in a flower crown, unibrow and red lipstick for Frida, with an Adidas track suit and gold chains for Khaled. Do you have any hidden talents? MH: My arms are double-jointed. ZG: I don’t have any hidden talents. I don’t have any non-hidden talents either. LB: I do a great Adam Levine
follow @thedmirror 11.1.17 VOL. CLXXIV NO. 141 MIRROR EDITORS LAUREN BUDD ANNETTE DENEKAS MAY MANSOUR EDITOR-IN-CHIEF RAY LU PUBLISHER PHILIP RASANSKY EXECUTIVE EDITOR ERIN LEE PHOTO EDITORS ELIZA MCDONOUGH HOLLYE SWINEHART TIFFANY ZHAI
impression (ask my fellow editors). CC: I can braid hair pretty well — but if you know me well, it’s not really a hidden talent. EJS: I’m really good at diagnosing myself with terminal illnesses via WebMD. AD: I used to play piano and sing in high school, but sadly do not have the time (and probably the skill) to do that anymore. MM: I asked Lauren and she says my hidden talent is poetry. Have you ever tried to cover something up only to have it backfire and the truth revealed? (Low stakes — no need to get super deep/personal). MH: I wanted my sister to believe her Elf on the Shelf was alive, so I wrote her a letter the first night and pretended her elf wrote it. After that, my sister wrote a letter every night, and I had to keep responding until Christmas. LB: When I was 4 or 5, I was dying to help keep the secret of what my mom had gifted my dad for his birthday. I did a great job until the day of, when I walked up to him in the morning and exuberantly announced, “You’re gonna love your new set of golf clubs!” EJS: When they were 4 and I was 6, my brothers and I ate ALL of the candy my mom had bought to hand out on Halloween while she was taking a nap. I tried to tell her that I had no part in it, but she didn’t believe me, probably because the fact that the three of us had managed to finish an entire punch bowl’s worth of candy was already stretching the rules of science. MM: I am perpetually late to everything. Since allowing my friends to track me on Find My Friends I have been caught lying about being “omw” when in reality I am in my bed binge-watching Big Mouth on Netflix waiting for my muscles to
finally atrophy. If you could embody anyone in the world from any time period for a day, who would it be and why? MH: I’d want to be my mom on her first day of college to see how different it was from my own experience. ZG: I would be President Chester A. Arthur so that I could do something to make him less forgettable. LB: Michelle Obama. Or I would infuse my youthful energy into Ruth Bader Ginsburg to give her a boost for the next several years. EJS: I would be Trump because I would love to know what it’s like to have so much unfounded selfconfidence. AD: Ellen Degeneres — I absolutely love her and her show and her dancing and her jokes and her Facebook memes. MM: I’ll keep it contemporary and say Misty Copeland. I can’t imagine what it must be like to move so gracefully. If you had the power of invisibility, what would you do with it? MH: I would sneak onto planes and travel the world for free. ZG: I would work for the CIA as the greatest spy of all time. LB: Get some goddamn peace and quiet. CC: I’d be a ghost for Halloween! EJS: I would stand behind the guys who work the stir-fry/egg stations at Collis. I feel like that would be good people watching. Also I want to know what they talk about/what’s the DDS gossip. AD: I would cut the Collis line during pasta rush hour. MM: The biggest impediment to traveling is airfare, so I would hop on airplanes and travel for free.
Unmasking Psychopathy: Q&A with Janine Scheiner STORY
MIRROR //3
By Annie Farrell
Janine Scheiner is a psychology professor currently teaching Psycholog y 52.01, “Developmental Psychopathology,” a course that introduces childhood psychopathology from a developmental perspective. Since 1989, she has worked as a clinical psychologist, conducting psychological assessments and providing consultants for families. This week, the Mirror interviewed Scheiner to unmask the sociopathic and psychopathic condition. What is the distinction between a sociopath and a psychopath? JS: There is no distinction. They are the same. They are two different terms for the same problem. What are the characteristics of a sociopath or a psychopath? JS: A lack of empathy for others and a belief that the rules don’t apply to them. How does one diagnose a sociopath or a psychopath? JS: Based on their history. There are some norm reference instruments, too — for example, Hare’s Psychopathy assessment. You can actually scale the number of deviant events against their history and the quality of their intrapersonal relationships, and so it is mostly through history that we are able to establish that this trajectory for psychopathy exists. Since diagnosis is based on history, how early can you diagnose a sociopath or a psychopath? JS: Eighteen. The diagnosis does not pertain to anyone under 18. The diagnosis for someone who behaves that particular way but is younger than 18 is called conduct disorder. That has the same qualities ascribed to it as adult psychopathy, but they are kids so the language is looser to allow for resiliency and developing out of that trajectory. How many sociopaths and psychopaths are undiagnosed? JS: I think what your question really means is: Are there people who are out there who are psychopaths who are functioning in ways where we don’t know that they are psychopaths? That’s absolutely the case. Many of them are very successful. People think that if you are in jail it’s because you are a psychopath, but actually if you are in jail it’s because you are disenfranchised. You don’t have the money for a lawyer, and you’re usually high in both anxiety and depression and also have some of the manifestations of psychopathy but not necessarily what we think of a classic psychopath. You have probably been following what has
been happening in Uber and the #MeToo campaign, so you can start to imagine that some of those individuals like Harvey Weinstein might be considered sociopaths or psychopaths, right? But because they are successful, they were sheltered. Yes, there are psychopaths that are running corporations potentially, but because of their resource base and their sophistication at managing the system, they don’t get arrested. So they are not identified as such. W hat are the causes of sociopathy or psychopathy? JS: We don’t know. We know that physiologically, psychopaths are different. They have what we call the callous-unemotional trait, which is that they are unable to empathize with other people’s perspectives so they are interpersonally exploitative, and they tend to be Machiavellian in the way they approach things. That’s one characteristic. Another characteristic would be cruelty and aggression, but it is mostly the callousunemotional piece that seems to be a driver. Physiologically, when you look at the brain, the amygdala, which is the thing that fires when you are anxious, is smaller in a number of people with psychopathy. So there also may be a biological vulnerability to psychopathy when there’s reduced volume of the amygdala. What research is currently being done on sociopathy or psychopathy? JS: We are always trying to treat them. Right now, we are looking at restorative justice models because we haven’t really had a lot of luck just warehousing people. If you are talking about what do we do with people in jail, we deal with almost always their co-occurring substance use or mental health issues — a lot of times both. If you are just dealing with a straight up sociopath, we tend to just hyper structure those individuals and we don’t really know what to do to create that empathic connection. Restorative justice models have become more popular. Those are models that seek to bring the community together and for the individual to engage in a process of reparations and apologizing for what they have done. I think especially using that model with younger kids who have conduct disorder before they crystallize fully into adult psychopathy, that can be useful. I think restorative justice models can be helpful, and of course, if we could figure out a way to increase the activity of the amygdala somehow, that could also potentially increase the capacity for empathy, but we don’t know how to do that at all, yet. Why do you think sociopaths
or psychopaths are so often portrayed in horror films and fiction? JS: Because in order to engage in those horrific acts you have to be pretty blunted emotionally. They are choosing people where it could read as possible based on people who have done such things in the past, like Jeffrey Dahmer, who ate people that he killed. Somebody like that has to have just an incredible numbing process internally so that they are so unemotional that they are able to do these egregious things. The rest of us couldn’t conceive of it. Just thinking about it makes us want to vomit probably. So that is why they choose those people. Also, Charles Manson is another example of a guy who besides being, I think, clearly psychotic, just was very callous, very unemotional, killed people, talked about it the way we would talk about the ice cream flavor we chose. That does tend to be the prototypic presentation of a sociopath. To be fair, that is true, except that some of them work for IBM, some of them run major conglomerations. Maybe they are not eating little boys, but maybe they are sexually abusing women. Do you think there is a
problem with portraying these conditions in horror films and fiction? JS: The problem with horror films is when scary things are connected with sexual behavior. That happens a lot in horror films: Teenage girl makes out with teenage boy, then a scary thing happens. What I don’t like personally is the linking of violence to sexual arousal in horror films. If they left out the sexual piece, I think it would be much healthier. I think some people really like scary films, and that’s cool. I don’t think they’re aggrandizing Jason with his hockey mask. I think people are afraid of that. When horror films conflate, as they often do, violence with emerging teen sexuality — and they do that a lot — I think that is not healthy. I think that can create an unhealthy message in society to confuse sexual arousal with fear. That’s a big problem, but that’s not one people talk about just about ever. How do these conditions relate, if at all, to borderline personality disorder? JS: Well, they are different disorders. With borderline personality disorder, the problem is difficulty modulating emotions. Sociopaths are actually quite different because they generally
do hyper-manage their emotions. If you are a successful sociopath, you are not blowing up and going crazy. Those are the people that are in jail, but they are not good sociopaths because they get jacked up and dilated and dysregulated. If you study real sociopaths — like this guy who killed a bunch of sorority women — very calm. I would say that although people think of borderlines as just a mess emotionally, it’s not the case that they are going to be planful, proactive murderers, typically. They are going to commit more crimes of passion. Crimes are planned when you are a sociopath. Is there anything you would like to add? JS: I think the main thing that I want to say is what is interesting about this topic is we can’t predict violence. The one question you didn’t ask me about is: How can we tell when someone is going to be violent? The answer is: We can’t. We cannot predict violence. That’s really frustrating. We can’t tell who is going to be the next person to shoot a bunch of people in Las Vegas. I think that’s a really scary thing for people. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and length.
4// MIRROR
Through the Looking Glass: The Green Mask COLUMN
By Madison McIIwain
It’s 9:55 a.m. and you’re dashing to your 10A on a Thursday morning. The clothes you grab from your closet (or your floor) are probably the last things on your mind. When you bought that Patagonia last year, the company’s “1% for the Planet” partnership probably was not your motivation. The fact that it took 4,000 liters of water to produce those jeans you slipped on is likely not at the forefront of your mind during your light jog to class. However, maybe these truths should be. I am guilty of caring little about the origins of the fabrics and brands I put on my body if I think it looks cute, but let me take a moment to look at some fashion facts. Shockingly, the fashion industry is the second largest polluter in the world, second to the oil industry, according to high-end retailer Eileen Fisher. Surprisingly, women wear a garment an average of seven times before getting rid of it. Unfortunately, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that 15.1 million tons of textile waste was generated in 2013 alone. With the rise of fast fashion brands like Zara and H&M, millennial consumers are buying more garments, but wearing them less often. We used to purchase quality over
quantity, but social media and our need to share everything may have placed pressure on us to always look on-trend. The industry, and our tendency to perceive fashion as something purely to consume, perpetuates a wasteful mindset. The look and feel of clothes is integral to the fashion industry. However, in focusing our purchasing power solely on the external fashion factors, we subtly contribute to the interior industry’s unsustainability one t-shirt at a time. At Dartmouth, we promote a similar mask of sustainability involving our social habits. As a campus, we rally around environmental initiatives and would be remiss to not share our concern for climate change to our peers. During First-Year Trips we take careful time to “leave no trace,” yet amidst the rush of our daily Dartmouth life make careless environmental faux pas such as throwing plastic into the Collis compost bin. This façade of concern often deteriorates amongst an individual’s actions, becoming merely a “Green Mask.” When assigned a wearable architecture project for my Architecture I class this term, I knew I wanted to build a piece completely made out of objects found on campus to highlight the fashion industry and Dartmouth’s tendencies to put on this Green Mask. One central social space at Dartmouth where we hide behind our masks is within the Greek system. In spite of my desire for a less polluted planet, I consistently c o n s u m e fast fashion. S i m i l a rl y, I am guilty of carrying around my reusable S’well bottle by d a y bu t playing pong with 11 plastic cups and four beers by night. When asked, one fraternity b r o t h e r estimated that his house goes through 2,700 beer cans in a week. In a 10-week term, that is 27,000 cans. Combined with an estimated cup usage of 62,500 per term per basement, I wondered; is COURTESY OF MADISON MCIIWAIN there a better
COURTESY OF MADISON MCIIWAIN
system? In order to challenge this notion of our Green Masks, I aimed to create a garment made out of found objects. After wandering around campus in search of the right piece of trash, I settled on pong cups. Applying my minor in human-centered design, I worked through an iterative process with both my professor and T.A. on the best way to apply this medium. After many failed cup creations, I finally produced an oscillating cup skirt that built organically on top of the pre-existing cup shape. By cutting a Dartmouth pong cup down the middle, one creates a “half ” cup, which forms the right amount of movement for a wearable piece. I collected and cleaned approximately 200 cups from fraternities and sororities. The initial skirt turned into a wedding gown. The decision to make the piece full body was in an attempt to emphasis the sheer number of cups found the morning after a night out. Aside from the faint scent of Keystone, the dress became a column-style gown with a woven corset I dubbed “Cup Couture.” Once lightly spray-painted, so as to not make it opaque, the dress was ready to be modeled. My professor pointed out that the column skirt style is emblematic of the columns we see
across our campus architecture. I would take that one step further and relate the column in the skirt to the columns of values we hold in our lives. How might we further place value on the pillar of sustainable actions in our lives? Kegs are 100 percent reusable and hold approximately 165 cans of beer. Instead of the 594,000 cans (22 houses with basements multiplied by the 27,000 above estimated number of cans) of Keystone a term we consume across campus basements, how about utilizing 22 reusable kegs over a term for each basement? One pair of jeans can take up to 4,000 liters of water to produce. Instead of expecting new jeans for the season, we can buy vintage, give old jeans back to Madewell to receive $20 off our purchases, or go to H&M, who currently sources 43 percent of their cotton, the core material for denim and many sweatshirts, via sustainable means. The clothes we wear do matter and can make a difference. If sustainability and climate change are issues we as Dartmouth students and consumers in the modern economy truly do care about, we need to take off our Green Masks and act like it.
MIRROR //5
‘How I View Myself’: A Profile of “Queer Visual Culture” STORY
By Jaden Young
“I’ve really always liked a degree of ambivalence in texts,” women’s, gender and sexuality studies professor Gabriele Dietze said. “I think if you are looking to something which is not organized by binaries — gender binaries or epistemological binaries — you learn, you find some kind of tension. I like to use a queer lense to open my own perception and open the perceptions of the students.” Dietze’s course, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies 65.04 “Queer Visual Culture,” attempts to give students an opportunity to develop that queer lens. Taught at the 10A hour this term, the course asks students to take a critical eye to films and television shows about queer characters, incorporating historical context and queer theory. “The idea was to go through a history of queer movie culture,” she said. “Every week has an organizing principle; one goes about the closet, the other goes about drag queening, or the dangers of transgender hate crimes, another on AIDS — I try to address a combination of historical and content-driven questions.” Dietze also makes a point of introducing intersectional perspectives into the course. “I appreciate Professor Dietze for doing that,” Carlos Tifa ’19 said. “There’s a [lot] of intersection between queerness and race and queerness and class. I feel like that’s something the queer community can benefit from, seeing things from an intersectional gaze.” The course covers a range of films and television spanning from the start of the 20th century to the present, incorporating critical readings on queer theory. Films and media featured in the course include “Paris is Burning,” “Orange is the New Black,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope,” “Interview with a Vampire” and “Brokeback Mountain,” among others.
Through it all, though, Dietze tries to keep the course’s look at queer visual culture grounded in reality. “I try not to teach a narrative of progress, and the students are not eager to buy a narrative of progress,” she said. “We try to look into moments of resistance, of fantasy, even of beauty, which can be in very reactionary texts as well, especially if it’s dealing with a long repressed minority.” For Dietze, her motivation for creating the class was to give students an important, queer critical lens to apply to popular culture. “I think the students sharpen their critical possibilities because they are forced to look into stuff which is partly mainstream, partly resistant,” she said. “They get more critical of popular culture artifacts.” To Tifa, who identifies as queer, the lure of the class lay in the promise of understanding representation. “It’s learning about my culture, and that’s something I love about the class,” he said, “We started off with something I didn’t know I was going to like, the foundations of the homosexual and how the word was conceived, and we watched German silent films. When you think German silent films, you don’t think queer, but apparently the first queer movie was a German silent film because of the sexual revolution that happened during the Weimar Republic era. It sets a foundation for the class to talk about contemporary queer issues.” In a class of only 10 people, discussions are intense and personal. “The movies encapsulate things that people in our class are going through,” Tifa said. “Most people in that class are queer-identifying; we have been through those tough times that we see displayed on the screen, so a lot of the class
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is personal experience, which I love hearing and she said. “The last class I had, it was a majority learning from. Even though we’re all queer, we all straight people looking for information — ‘What come from different places, we all have different about this queerness? We don’t understand.’ Now, experiences of being queer, and the class helps everybody knows in this class, in a way, what queer explore that.” is, and some — not all — identify as queer. The For Dietze, that exchange of knowledge was consciousness about what queer is is very much especially important to meaningful discussion. there more than it was three years ago.” “If the course is doing well, you can develop The class changes, too, depending on where something with the students and you can learn she teaches it. a lot from them,” she said. “I learn a lot from “I taught part of the class in Switzerland, them. They see things I never would’ve thought which is quite different,” Dietze said. “There is of myself.” a climate in the university where you are not so Some the films covered in the class have outgoing. The answers were very reluctant and depictions of violence and hate that are investigative, more modest in their reactions. Not difficult to watch, and are different in quality, but very all too real. Images like the “Even though we’re much scaled-down.” violent murder reenacted Like any good class, Dietze’s in “Boys Don’t Cry” or the all queer, we all come current version has left homophobic language in from different places, students with as many “Dallas Buyers Club” can questions as answers. we all have different be tough to swallow. For “We’ve been having the the class, feeling safe to talk experiences of being discussion, are queer films about the difficult subjects queer, and the class for queer people? Or is it is vital. for the straight gaze so they “If you hear a certain helps explore that.” can understand queerness?” thing in a film, you’ll feel Tifa said. “I think that’s affected, but you know something that’s become -CARLOS TIFA ’19 people will feel the same more prominent as the weeks way around you,” Tifa said. go by. What is queer visual “It’s sort of like standing in culture? Who is it for?” solidarity. “We’re all there under the same mission But Tifa has found an affirming takeaway. to understand queer representation in the visual “I love being queer,” he said. “I appreciate form and we’re there to support each other when who I am as a person more seeing how we are we have these difficult conversations.” portrayed in the media, feeling like I don’t fit Dietze has taught versions of this class before, those stereotypes, I surpass those stereotypes. sometimes in different countries, and has found This class has given me a confidence about how new class responses and discussions each time. people may view me and how I really don’t care “I had taught it at Dartmouth two or three how they view me because at the end of the day years ago, and the funny thing, it was different,” what matters is how I view myself.”
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Masquerade PHOTO
By Saba Nejad