Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 29 (Studies in Symbolic Interaction)

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Richard Bradley

Department of History, Central Methodist University, Fayette, MO, USA

Tonya Davidson

Department of Sociology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Norman K. Denzin

Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

Mark W. Dirsmith

Smeal College of Business and the Social Thought Program, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA

Carolyn Ellis

Department of Communication, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

Alice A. Filmer

Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

Lesa Lockford

Department of Theatre and Film, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA

Barbara Woods McElroy

Sigmund Weis School of Business, Susquehanna University, Selinsgrove, PA, USA

Denise A. Menchaca

Independent Scholar, Seguin, TX, USA

Ronald J. Pelias

Department of Speech Communication, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, USA

Phillip Vannini

School of Communication and Culture, Royal Roads University, Victoria, BC, Canada

vii

CORONARY EPISTEMOLOGY: OR WHAT IT TAKES TO KNOW THINGS BY HEART: IN HONOR OF RONALD J. PELIAS’ CONTRIBUTIONS TO QUALITATIVE COMMUNICATION RESEARCH Alice A. Filmer The First International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry took place at the campus of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), in May 2005. At the invitation of the conference organizer, Norman Denzin, a special panel was formed to recognize the recent publication of A Methodology of the Heart: Evoking Academic and Daily Life, by Ronald J. Pelias (Pelias, 2004). The distinguished panelists were four of Pelias’ colleagues: Carolyn Ellis, Denise Menchaca, Lesa Lockford, and Norman Denzin. A day earlier, many members of the audience had also attended one of the congress’ featured panels entitled ‘‘Performing Autoethnography.’’ This session, chaired by Pelias, had standing room only, and showcased performances by three of his current doctoral students at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (SIUC). That these performance studies scholars had reached the hearts and minds of those present was evidenced in the passionate responses to each presentation, and the audience calls to Pelias Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 29, 3–7 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(06)29001-X

3

4

ALICE A. FILMER

and his students to share this methodology widely and make it a more visible presence and practice within qualitative research circles. The first time I met Ron Pelias was in Atlanta, Georgia, at the 2001 annual convention of the National Communication Association (NCA), when I participated in a Performance Studies Division panel that included two doctoral students from the Institute of Communications Research at UIUC and two of Pelias’ students from the Department of Speech Communication at SIUC, where Pelias teaches. For the first time at an academic conference, I read aloud and sang an autoethnography about the tragic deaths of my older brother and my father. Too nervous to look at my audience, I closed my eyes while singing the song I wrote about familial love and betrayal. Upon finishing my presentation, I looked up and was met by the understanding and comforting gaze of a man in the second row, a man whom I now know is Ron Pelias. At every NCA convention and qualitative research conference since then, I have made it a practice to attend the performance panels presented by Pelias’ students. I have never failed to walk away feeling deeply moved and more aware of the complexities of human experience: the constraining forces of fear, the contradictions and power of love, and the yearning for meaning, justice, and hope. The centrality of heartfelt emotion integral to this method of research – that ‘‘ethic of care and empowerment’’ that Norman Denzin speaks of – produces a variety of knowledge that I call ‘‘coronary epistemology.’’ This collection of essays illustrates and celebrates a variety of approaches to qualitative research practiced by scholars who are keen on ‘‘knowing by heart.’’ In her essay, ‘‘The Emotional Life: Honoring Ron Pelias,’’ Carolyn Ellis – sociology and communication scholar at the University of South Florida – takes us directly into Pelias’ work by borrowing the narrative structure he employs in Chapter 12, ‘‘The Critical Life,’’ of his new book. Written in the second person, this autoethnography is a reflection on the author’s thoughts and activities from a short distance in time and space. Stepping back just slightly, ‘‘I’’ narrates ‘‘you’’ in an intimate relational dance that’s akin to talking to one’s own image in the mirror. This account allows for a kind of meta-self-consciousness, a witnessing of oneself from a more detached, less central point of view than the first person provides. Ellis masterfully imitates the form that Pelias has chosen, inserting her own story within his frame. The narrative comes across like a journal entry made at the end of the day, a personal inventory taken after the fact, yet written in the present tense. In a parallel move, the dialogue sections within the story turn past-tense discussions with third parties into present-time conversations with yet another second person; in this case, ‘‘s/he’’ is brought into closer proximity as ‘‘you.’’

Coronary Epistemology

5

So now, ‘‘you’’ represents both ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘s/he.’’ Playing around this way with temporal treatment and experiential boundaries provides an approach that diminishes the discreteness of identity between writer and reader, researcher and subject, knower and known, heart and mind. An invited participant, who regretfully was unable to attend the conference, Denise Menchaca contributes her essay, ‘‘Pentimento, Permission, Poetry, and Pelias: Declaring my Heart,’’ to this published forum. A former doctoral student of Professor Pelias at SIUC and now an independent scholar working in Seguin, Texas, Menchaca has written performatively and autoethnographically for several years. Similar to Carolyn Ellis, Menchaca chooses to honor her mentor by imitating the structure of yet another chapter, ‘‘Making Lists: Life at the University,’’ writing her own story into the framework that Pelias has built. Moving from her experiences as a graduate student to her position as a junior faculty member, Menchaca tells us what she has learned and observed about life in higher education. ‘‘Today I told them y that performative writing saved my academic life. Had I not stumbled onto performative writing, I simply wouldn’t have stayed in the academy.’’ The kind of permission and guidance that Ron Pelias has given his students comes through clearly in this essay where Menchaca’s expertise and aesthetic in performative, autoethnographic writing allows her to imitate her teacher’s theme and then make variations upon it. The lessons and observations she makes as a new professor about the lessons and observations made by a seasoned professor before her are a theme echoed by the next panelist, another of Pelias’ former students. Lesa Lockford, Professor of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, titles her composition, ‘‘Etudes: Lessons from the Heart of Ron Pelias.’’ Each section begins with a definition of terms and an illustrative example of something learned from Pelias. Following her opening Prelude, she moves into a section called Fugue: ‘‘An imitative polyphonic composition in which a theme or themes are stated successively in all of the voices of the contrapuntal structure.’’ As if she has anticipated the melodic themes voiced by her fellow panelists, Lockford takes her own turn at performing the lessons of which she speaks. To illustrate one of Pelias’ teaching points – that ‘‘genre encourages procedure by setting expectancies in place’’ – she invokes the classical fugue form to set up what follows in the remainder of the piece. The thematic development is carried out in three Etudes, lessons that traditionally teach a point of technique, but always with an aesthetic sensibility. Drawing on material from three chapters of A Methodology of the Heart, Lockford engages Pelias’ writing in each Etude and demonstrates on the page what she has learned from her mentor: that to

6

ALICE A. FILMER

teach is to show, to point out, to indicate, to guide, and to hope ‘‘that at some time down the road our students will hear the meanings in our poems.’’ Offering artful, gentle direction is indeed the basis of Ron Pelias’ approach to teaching and scholarship. As evidenced by his own and his students’ work, poetry proves a powerful method for research and pedagogical purposes. Falling into step with Pelias and other scholars who privilege what the heart can teach us, Norman Denzin, Professor in the Institute of Communications Research at UIUC, too seeks a ‘‘dramatic, performative poetic’’ writing form. In his panel presentation, ‘‘Indians in the Park, Part Two,’’ Denzin, like Lockford, taps into another musical metaphor when he creates ‘‘a chorus of discordant voices’’ to present a bricolage of materials pertaining to the history of Native Americans and Yellowstone Park. In this performative text, he moves across multiple genres of writing – excerpts from his personal history, official and unofficial government documents, scholarly articles, and popular culture texts – with the aim of opening up a space in which historically disconnected voices begin to speak to one another. Denzin displays in his text a methodological tendency to play around with temporal realities, much like Pelias, Ellis, and others: ‘‘In bringing the past into the autobiographical present, I insert myself into the past and create the conditions for rewriting and hence re-experiencing it.’’ Denzin affirms that a methodology of the heart allows us to ‘‘learn how to love, to forgive, to heal, and to move forward.’’ But, by the end of this excerpt from ‘‘Indians in the Park’’ (Denzin, 2005), he also acknowledges that to embark upon such a journey of emotional, social, historical, and political healing is not without its own perils: ‘‘y [T]o forgive is to risk letting everything fall apart y and can there ever be any hope of healing?’’ Those scholars bold enough to have taken up the challenge to intervene affectively in the production of knowledge within the academy understand only too well that, in the production of knowledge, to practice a methodology guided by the heart requires great courage and strong allies. In response to these four scholars, who honor his work through their own performative interventions, Ron Pelias reflects on each of their writings in turn. He marvels at Carolyn Ellis’ innovative teaching and writing, while being reminded of the personal and professional costs involved in being a ‘‘vulnerable observer’’ (Behar) of so much pain and sorrow: ‘‘I watch [Ellis] break my heart.’’ In Denise Menchaca’s work, Pelias recognizes a keen ability to notice what is happening underneath and beyond the visible: ‘‘As she demonstrates in her dissertation y noticing is not just a matter of seeing; it requires an entering.’’ He acknowledges what Lesa Lockford has

Coronary Epistemology

7

accomplished in her book, Performing Femininity: Rewriting Gender Identity, in which she ‘‘is willing to put her body forward, to stand in as a witness, to allow her own identity to become an excavated and contested site.’’ And in Norman Denzin’s scholarship, Pelias is ‘‘stunned by [Denzin’s] ability to enter another field, to mine its resources, and to make its language his own y [and realizes] how much he was teaching me about the potential of my own discipline.’’ In each of the texts, Pelias rediscovers the power of automethods and finds a community of scholars who understand that devotion to literary craft, passion, empathic awareness, and an eye for social justice are paramount to good writing. Coronary epistemology is not to be dabbled in lightly; it can be produced only by scholars willing to conduct research that takes risks and commits itself to the inclusion of emotion alongside critical thinking, that is, research grounded in a methodology of the heart.

REFERENCES Denzin, N. K. (2005). Indians in the park: Part II. Paper presented at the first international congress of qualitative inquiry, Urbana, IL. Pelias, R. J. (2004). A methodology of the heart: Evoking academic and daily life. New York/ Oxford: AltaMira Press.

THE EMOTIONAL LIFE: HONORING RONALD J. PELIAS Carolyn Ellis You wonder: What does it mean to live with an emotional spirit, a spirit that cares about what others are feeling, that feels with and for them, a spirit that is ‘‘helplessly attached to being human’’ (Pelias, 2004, p. 141). To discover the heart of such questions, you follow Ron Pelias’s lead and track your day. You wake up in the morning with a dog in your arms. Buddha, your Rat Terrier puppy lies stretched out, tight against your body, her head cradled by your forearm. You lie still, absorbing her warmth, but not still enough. Sensing you are awake, Sunya, your Australian Shepherd, jumps on the bed, ready to play. Awake now, Buddha licks at the sleepers in the corners of your eyes. You don’t object until her tiny pointed tongue suddenly darts deep into your right nostril. ‘‘No, no, not the nose, anything but the nose,’’ you say loudly, giggling, an open invitation to both dogs to lick your face. Unable to breathe, you gently push them away. The dogs chase each other through the house, Buddha nipping Sunya’s legs, rugs flying in the air. Giving up on sleep, Art rolls over, and says, ‘‘Good morning.’’ You curl back under the covers, tight up to your chin, and sigh happily. ‘‘It’s time for mornin’ lovin’,’’ you announce. Upon hearing your words, the dogs stop in their tracks and bounce back in bed landing this time on top of Art. After some kisses, Buddha ducks under the covers between you and Art, and Sunya takes her place at the foot. Art scoots Buddha behind his legs and inches his body across the Tempur-pedic mattress to form one final morning Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 29, 9–15 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(06)29002-1

9

10

CAROLYN ELLIS

spoon with you. He gently kisses the back of your neck. All four of you lie there quietly for another 15 minutes, breathing in the new day. Ah, wonderful. This is absolutely the best part of life. You get out of bed, noting the stiffness in your knees and lower back. After pulling a long t-shirt over your otherwise naked body, you walk into the enclosed backyard with the dogs. You admire the pink Jacobina, the ever present and colorful crotons, and the new bright red bromeliad. You move in to the bathroom, take out the night guard that prevents grinding your teeth, and brush for a full minute. You put saline into your dry eyes, remember to take your calcium and rub your compounded bioidentical hormonal cream into the fatty layers of your body. You resist the urge to evaluate your new wrinkles and body fat. They couldn’t have changed that much during the night, you assure, stealing a glance at your unremarkable body. You stretch to the ceiling and reach down for your toes, your body more limber now. Feeling good about the day, you get into the shower and savor the hot water splashing against your muscles. In the kitchen, you grind coffee beans, being careful to include only one scoop of caffeinated coffee among the eight cups of hazelnut decaf. As the coffee brews in the carafe, you go outside and locate the New York Times and the St. Petersburg Times among the tall St. Augustine grass. Sunya perches on the windowsill and barks while Buddha zigzags at full speed around the yard, sniffing the path of a night stalking animal. Oh, to have the nose of a dog, you think; better yet, the energy of a puppy. You breathe deeply, happy to live where the sun always shines. ‘‘Boodie, come,’’ you command in your take-no-nonsense voice. Buddha turns on a dime and flies up the sidewalk to your side. She loves to please you. You like that in a dog. When you re-enter the house, Sunya barks and jumps, greeting the two of you as though you’ve been away on a long trip. After watching while Sunya gulps and Buddha eats, piece-by-piece, the California Natural dog kibble covered with hamburger, you yell, ‘‘Treats, treats,’’ in your high-pitched doggy talk voice. With a finger brush covered with chicken flavored doggie toothpaste, you move slowly toward the dogs. Skeptical of your definition of the situation, Sunya stays just out of arm’s reach and Buddha rolls onto her back, resisting and giving up at the same time. You sip the freshly brewed coffee after inhaling the luxurious aroma. Sitting now at the counter with both newspapers, you experience the splendor of having a career that allows you to start the day slowly. You like that in a job. Art comes in from his shower, kisses you on the cheek, and gets lost behind the sports page and Times editorials. You read the front

The Emotional Life: Honoring Ronald J. Pelias

11

page, feeling depressed about Bush’s latest decisions, the attacks in Fallujah, the number dead. You devour the details of the local killings, without taking in any of it too deeply. You wonder why reading the newspaper is so relaxing, especially given the content. You pour a second cup of coffee. You and Art eat cereal – grape nuts, flax seeds, and granola. It is then that you talk and anticipate your day. You finish dressing, searching for and finding among the hundreds of earrings decorating your bathroom wall the perfect pair for your black shirt with silver buttons: the long, dangling, sterling silver earrings made over a rubbing of an actual petroglyph. The dogs follow you to the door and sadly look into your face. ‘‘Bye Art. Bye dogs. I’ll be home tonight,’’ you reassure, as you juggle student papers, hot coffee, tennis shoes for walking, and your tofu-burger lunch. ‘‘Bye,’’ Art responds with no affect from his loft hideaway, where he already is typing furiously. You get into your politically incorrect silver Mercedes sports car and drive to school. You turn the stereo up loud and sing along with Ray Charles and Michael McDonald. ‘‘Hey, girl, I want you to know, I’m going to miss you so much when you go y .’’ As you pull your car into a spot near the Communication building, you think how fortunate you are to have easy parking. You pick up your mail and chat with the front-office receptionist. Hearing your voice, the office manager comes to give you a hug. The graduate secretary yells as you pass her office, ‘‘Hey, where’s my hug?’’ Though you are in a hurry to get to work, you listen and offer advice as she fills you in on her love life. You think how nice it is to work with people you like. In your office, you read and reply to e-mail, cursing the spam and appreciating the many friendships you maintain on-line. Feeling guilty that it’s noon and you haven’t yet prepared your class, you rationalize that e-mail qualifies as work. After all, already today, you have responded to several manuscripts for your book series. You try to offer helpful comments and point out strengths even when you don’t accept them. Sometimes what you say leads to more follow up work than you’d hoped. Your face lights up when you see a note from Art, which says how much he appreciates you. You like that in a man. You forgive him his abruptness when you left home this morning and write back a love note, being careful this time not to send it to the whole department. Looking at your watch, you decide to microwave your tofu burger. That, of course, means a trip down the hall and numerous conversations with students. You think the informal talk is part of what makes the department an inviting place to work. You eat your burger standing up while you

12

CAROLYN ELLIS

discuss Ron Pelias’s A Methodology of the Heart, the book assigned for your afternoon ‘‘emotions class.’’ The stories resonate with the students and they tell you they’re glad to be at University of South Florida (USF), where they can follow their heart and voice, and feel sheltered from some of the loneliness and depression of the critical life. Back in your office, you think how Ron is one of three or four academics in the world with whom you feel so closely identified. The two of you share the goal of bringing heart to academia. You love how vulnerable he lets himself be in his writing, how insightful he can be in a few words, how sometimes you feel he must have been walking around in your skin, living your life. You think about your favorite Pelias pieces, the ones where Ron writes vulnerable stories you can’t help but enter, how you can’t help but compare your life to his even when you haven’t shared his experience. You think about how students respond to the impasse in Ron’s relationship with his son in ‘‘For Father and Son.’’ Some readers want to fix the relationship; others want to cast blame; the most astute are intrigued by the complex patterns that take over interactions – contradictions from which it appears almost impossible to escape. Many find vestiges of their own relationships on the pages and, in their reading, come to view their own patterns from more than their usual monocular and self-serving view. Ron does that to you. In his poetic and performative voice, he promotes a relational worldview. You feel what his son might feel as well as what Ron feels. He casts no blame and refuses the martyr role too. He offers no easy way out of trouble and confusion. As you enter Ron’s story, you think deeply about your relationship with your first husband’s daughter, who lived with you when her father was dying. You step outside your defenses, your yes–buts, and peek back in. You question some of your own communication choices and understand better the structural constraints for which no one was to blame. You both wanted a special place with Gene, especially when he was dying; you know he felt pulled to provide that place for both of you. You remember Bateson saying that relationship controls individuals, not the other way around. ‘‘Did it help you or improve your relationship with your son to write this story?’’ you once asked Ron. ‘‘Writing it helped me to cope better with that relationship and the pain it evoked and come to a better understanding, particularly of my own failures.’’ ‘‘Reading it helped me too. Though I can’t change my interaction with Gene’s daughter now, who committed suicide, I have more positive memories of us together. Did you intend this story to be hopeful in any way?’’

The Emotional Life: Honoring Ronald J. Pelias

13

‘‘I hoped the piece would stir a cathartic response in my audience, even though the title indicates there is no catharsis.’’ ‘‘It did for me. Is there anything in A Methodology of the Heart you wish you hadn’t written?’’ ‘‘Sometimes people say they don’t understand how I can write so revealingly about myself, especially about my body. There’s nothing in the book about myself that ever occurred to me not to say. But the tricky part is when I start implicating other people. Anne Stevenson (2004) says that it’s all right to take the skeletons out of the closet as long as the flesh is off. I try to make sure the flesh is always off, but I’m not so sure about the story of my son. I see him so seldom, and when we talk, usually it’s in times of crisis. So there hasn’t been a good time to sit down and talk about this. I think he’d probably just say, ‘I don’t care, man’.’’ ‘‘Or maybe he’d realize how important this story is to you and then try to use it against you. You know, look what you did to me.’’ ‘‘Maybe. Anyway, this was the piece I most needed to tell. Unfortunately, the relationship continues to deteriorate.’’ ‘‘Are there stories that shouldn’t be written?’’ ‘‘Probably so. Another question might be whether there is any time that’s not good to write.’’ ‘‘Has there been for you?’’ ‘‘No, I try to write every day. A good day for me is when I give myself the chance to write. I get really grumpy when I’m not writing.’’ ‘‘I can go for weeks without writing. Some days I don’t want to write, and now sometimes I find that I can’t write things I thought I wanted to, like about our three dogs we had to euthanize last year.’’ ‘‘That sounds like a readiness issue. Sometimes I’m not ready to write a particular piece yet. Take ‘Remembering Vietnam,’ for example. It took me thirty years to write it.’’ ‘‘That’s also one of my favorites. It’s in a league with The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (1998).’’

As you spoke, you thought how you could not imagine going to war. You could not imagine Ron on a battlefield. You could not imagine war. But in reading Remembering Vietnam, you do imagine it, you imagine it and live it in the space of those 13 frighteningly full pages. ‘‘When I write, it allows me to put things away, let them go. It works, as Frost (1958) says, as ‘a momentary stay against confusion’.’’ ‘‘Writing allows me to put things together in a way I can live with,’’ you replied.

14

CAROLYN ELLIS

Back at your desk now, you read and compare your writing to Ron’s. Some of his chapters play with structure, while others play with words and form. ‘‘I often start with structure,’’ he had told you in another conversation. ‘‘I’ll decide I want to write a piece using a certain frame. Until I’m happy with the structure, I can’t proceed with the content. The frame allows me to gather the details.’’ ‘‘I always start with content, with story,’’ you had replied. I gather through remembering/recreating what happened. Writing usually is a serious way of working through something painful in my life. ‘‘I see you as writing out of a narrative logic. There is an accumulation of incidents that are part of a larger story that you have worked out. When I pick up your work, I’m always ready for a good story.’’ ‘‘And with yours, I might get a story, a poem, a list, who knows.’’ ‘‘For you, it seems writing is narrative.’’ ‘‘Yes, emotional narrative.’’

Now preparing for class, you think that Ron’s vulnerability lies in his body. Not a surprise, given that he is a performer. He displays and examines his body with all its flaws and scars, encouraging people to remember emotion in their bodies. For him, the body reveals emotions. For you, the emotional narrative reveals the body. In both cases, the result may be the same. At the end, Ron falls on his knees and cries at the Vietnam memorial upon seeing his old friend’s name; at the end, you fall on your knees, remembering in every crevice of your body the love of animal companions lost: Lost, between your knees a little body sleeping, Lost, on your lap snuggling while you cried, Lost, in the yard retrieving a tennis ball and tugging on the rope toy, Lost, in the softness of fur under your hand, Lost, in the sweetness of kisses on your face, Lost, in the digging of graves, thinking how deep and how long, Lost, the energy ever present, now gone.

Both of you feel and tell stories, remembering in your bodies, and reacting against the harshness of the critical attitude on which the academy prides itself. You, like Ron, want to build people up, not beat them down. You, like Ron, want to guide them more than critique them. You, like Ron, want to deal with people on an emotional level in terms of what matters to them.

The Emotional Life: Honoring Ronald J. Pelias

15

You, like Ron, hope to offer up an alternative way of being and feeling in academia. You, like Ron, ‘‘want a scholarship that fosters connections, opens spaces for dialogue, heals’’ (Pelias, 2004, p. 2), that is met with ‘‘critical compassion’’ (Pelias, 2004, p. 13). You, like Ron, want to change hearts for the better, and you know that rarely happens through criticism (Ellis, 2002). You look at your watch, surprised that the time has gone by so quickly. You rush off to class to talk of love, memory, and vulnerability in the academy. You rush off to connect heart to heart. Wouldn’t it be fun, you think, to write a story called ‘‘The Emotional Life.’’

REFERENCES Ellis, C. (2002). Being real: Moving inward toward social change. Qualitative Studies in Education, 15, 399–406. Frost, R. (1958). It takes a hero to make a poem. Claremont Quarterly, Spring. (Taped conversation between Robert Frost and British author Cecil Day Lewis, broadcast on the BBC on September 13, 1957). O’Brien, T. (1998). The things they carried. New York: Broadway Books. Pelias, R. (2004). A methodology of the heart. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Stevenson, A. (2004). Writing as a woman. In: D. Gioia, D. Mason & M. Schoerke (Eds), Twentieth-century American poetics: Poets on the art of poetry (pp. 327–341). Boston: McGraw Hill.

PENTIMENTO, PERMISSION, POETRY, AND PELIAS: DECLARING MY HEART Denise A. Menchaca For Ronald J. Pelias

PENTIMENTO Today, I told them y1 y that having left Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (SIUC) in June of 2002, I now have moments of sincere longing for the people and the place that gave me permission to grow into my own, for allowing freedom and giving encouragement to be independent and strong, a scholar with voice. It was a place that reveled in its students’ successes and craved their growth, generally speaking. I left in 2002 ready to face the academic world and all of its challenges. But, there is very little that can prepare one for the adult playground of academe for it is a yard that can be fraught with cattiness, passive aggression, and manipulation that is sycophantic at best and soul compromising at worst.

Today, I told them y y that in Ronald J. Pelias’ essay, ‘‘Making Lists: Life at the University,’’ he enumerates some of the lessons and observations he has made over his multiple years in higher education. He imparts his sage wisdom to new graduate students and, in turn, teaches them about academic culture. I remember taking that introduction to graduate studies course the first semester of my doctoral program. Ron taught it. I remember sitting in class shocked by the beautiful and beastly practices that constituted the life of a scholar in academe. I wondered: ‘‘Do I belong here?’’ Of course, who doesn’t wonder that in the Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 29, 17–21 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(06)29003-3

17

18

DENISE A. MENCHACA wake of faculty ‘‘doing their job,’’ reminding graduate students how little they truly know? I had those moments of doubt, too, but the doubt that pressed at the time was whether or not I wanted to romp in an academic park where the see-saw wanted to buck you and the merry-go round caused severe vertigo to one’s sense of self. It was a park carpeted with river rock and ‘‘red crusher,’’ not refreshing, cool Bluegrass; it was xeriscaped, needing no attention because little could grow without willfulness to spite the climate. My impressions of academia were altered that day in graduate seminar. I had to consider what I wanted and what obtaining a PhD would mean in terms of the politics of everyday life in a place where ‘‘resource management’’ often brought out the base in people. Those weren’t make-believe tales Ron acquainted us with, they were cautionary ones designed to deconstruct any notions naivete´ might hold about higher education and its practices. Racism, sexism, and, most definitely, classism were all doing fine and well in the academy, tucked neatly away in the creases and folds of ambiguous tenure requirements, unfair divisions of labor, and competitive self serving. Of course, the academy is also plump with potential, full as a tick, for exploration of and excitement over ideas and culture. It is a place distended with possibility, glutinous with hope. After all, there were alternatives. There had to be.

Today, I told them y y that I sat in The Kleineau Theatre for the final professional seminar of the school year. It was the last Friday of the spring 2001 semester and I was glad to be finished with the press of all that had to be done in too short a time. I don’t remember many details about that afternoon – who I sat next to or what questions were asked of the speaker – but I do remember the quiet that settled over the place: all sat mesmerized by a methodology of the heart, a different way to do scholarship, one requiring vulnerability and insisting the human body be present. The heart was declared that day, the heart of Ronald J. Pelias.

Today, I told them ... y that at the time, I had been a member of SIUC’s Department of Speech Communication, as a student (both undergraduate and graduate), since fall of 1993. I transferred from a large, urban junior college in San Antonio, Texas to the unknown solace and earthiness of southern Illinois and completed my undergraduate and graduate education at a university I had never known of until my ex-spouse declared its virtues. I unknowingly started down a road that, in time, would cross the path of my doctoral mentor. Oddly enough, a working class, Mexican–American girl from south Texas, would meet a white, middle class, man teaching in the Midwest and who unknowingly would change her life.

Today, I told them y y that the etched surface of a life can be amazing, a gorgeous patina of age and experience. But, what bleeds through to the surface from underneath or in front of from behind can be just as mesmerizing, just as charming as a heartfelt embrace between old friends.

Pentimento, Permission, Poetry, and Pelias

PERMISSION Today, I told them y y that performative writing saved my academic life. Had I not stumbled onto performative writing, I simply wouldn’t have stayed in the academy. I would have left after my Master’s degree and pursued chef school, instead. But, during the final weeks of the final class of my Master’s program, Performance Methodologies, Ronald J. Pelias introduced us to performative writing. My entire world changed. ‘‘You mean, I can write with emotion? I can research that which really interests me and write up my findings, considerations, and conclusions in a manner that doesn’t die on the page?’’ I blinked wideeyed. ‘‘You mean, I don’t have to pretend to be a social scientist when what I really want to be is a social researcher?’’ ‘‘You mean, I can use poetry, and dialogue, and metaphor to write up my research and I need not apologize for it?’’ Oh, my. How my life turned on a pin in that moment.

Today, I told them y y that I spent the next few years working on my scholar’s craft. I wrote performatively and autoethnographically and grew engorged with passion and need for expressing scholarly inquiry in this particular way. I had been given permission by those established few in the field and by the countless others in the academy who wanted to write about lived experience, culture, and performance in a manner that engaged with the closeness and vulnerability that only compassion could allow.

Today, I told them y y that permission is a powerful thing. It allows one to play by the rules even if it means stretching them. It also allows one to play by a different set of rules. Of course, keep in mind that this often maddens rule-keepers.

POETRY Today, I told them y y that along with Ron’s lesson, a hesitation: I worry I’m leading students down the wrong path.

Today, I told them y y that I stood in amazement a few years later

19

20

DENISE A. MENCHACA as a colleague told a story about a graduate student who turned in a poem instead of an essay. Everyone in the small circle laughed but me. Audacious! For them poetry would never be scholarship.

PELIAS Today, I told them y y that I am thankful to have had the guidance and care of a heartfelt advisor. That his love and hope for the field and his compassion for people always made for gentle, indelible encounters.

Today, I told them y y that I am so very relieved that the heart is alive and beating in the academy, and that there are a brave few who declare their hearts on a regular basis.

Today, I told them y y that despite some of the nasty things that happen when damaged people populate the halls, there is still flesh there, a beating heart, capable of feeling the very pain it has lobbed at others.

Today, I told them y y that if they didn’t want to write performatively or autoethnographically that was okay. But, never fault others for being heartily moved to do so.

Today, I told them y y that if they ever truly give of their hearts, they will know it and so will others. But, also know that not everyone is a kind steward.

Today, I told them y ... that it was okay to shelter their hearts; to give it refuge when necessary; to cuddle it close; to coo it a lullaby of comfort; to protect it from the elements; to hide it away until

Pentimento, Permission, Poetry, and Pelias

21

it was strong enough to go outside and play in rough-hewn academic parks. I also told them it was okay to take the necessary time to heal. Heartbreak is nothing to be ashamed of. We are, after all, only human.

NOTE 1. This essay is inspired by Ronald J. Pelias’ ‘‘Making Lists: Life at the University’’ in A Methodology of the Heart: Evoking Academic & Daily Life, Walnut Creek, CA, Alta Mira Press, 2004.

E´TUDES: LESSONS FROM THE HEART OF RON PELIAS Lesa Lockford Prelude: ‘‘A piece or movement that serves as an introduction to another section or composition and establishes the key, such as one that precedes a fugue’’ (Dictionary.com, 2005d).

I place my fingers on the keyboard, poised to compose. It is a familiar pose: seated; leaning forward with the weight of thought; inclined in body and attitude; fingers feeling keys with certainty, with habituated destinations, keys I am said to know ‘‘by heart.’’ But is this second nature knowing hewn from the heart or merely an exercise of habit? As I place my fingers on the keyboard, poised to compose an essay from the heart, an essay of appreciation for my teacher, mentor, and friend, Ron Pelias, I pause to recognize the habits of my training, the habits that come with graduate degree programs. I pause too to recognize the distinctions between training and teaching, training and educating. To train is denoted as the ‘‘bring[ing of a] (person, animal, etc.) to desired state or standard of efficiency y by instruction and practice.’’ (The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1976, p. 1230). It etymologically derives from words that mean to ‘‘draw out’’ or ‘‘draw along,’’ ‘‘to pull,’’ ‘‘to induce, convert y , and to treat or manipulate in order to bring to a proper or desired form’’ (Barnhart, 1988c, p. 1157). Composing the scholarly essay is for us academics, a ‘‘desired form;’’ it is a skill we develop during graduate training. So too is reaching for the dictionary, a skill we habitually use in our attempt to grasp knowledge. Or is it really credibility we seek rather than knowledge, Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 29, 23–31 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(06)29004-5

23

24

LESA LOCKFORD

by means of association with definitional power? The dictionary with its infallible truth, its certainty, gets it right. Our training teaches us to seek what is right, the right word, the right form, to hit the right key. But hitting the right key is not as simple as striking the right note, or finding the right form, or the correct definition. Fugue: ‘‘An imitative polyphonic composition in which a theme or themes are stated successively in all of the voices of the contrapuntal structure’’ (Dictionary.com, 2005c) .

Ron Pelias notes in his book, A Methodology of the Heart, that ‘‘genre encourages procedure by setting expectancies in place. [He goes on to state that] Writers and readers understand that to call forward a form is to signal that certain tactics will be deployed’’ (Pelias, 2004, p. 11). Let me further Ron’s point by urging a consideration of how methods of instruction, like literary genres, set expectancies in place. Once upon a time in another lifetime, I spent two and a half years training as an actor at a well-known school of dramatic art in London. The school has a reputation for launching some of the best and brightest careers on the British stage. Each week my classmates and I engaged in various forms of vocal and physical training as well as lessons in interpretation and acting. Our physical training was primarily divided between two teachers whom we met three times a week, each. Madame Fedro was a diminutive septuagenarian of uncertain nationality who never seemed to remember that she had already told us the last time and every time we were in her class that she danced with the Ballet Russe in the famous Green Tables. What she lacked in memory she made up for in inspired intensity. Despite her age her eyes pierced our body casings where they then liberally gazed upon our naked souls. There was no disputing that she knew much more about each of us than we did ourselves. We strutted around her studio, learning the proper way to hold a fan in a Restoration comedy and how to curtsy before a monarch. Of course the forms our bodies took were subject to her scrutiny and correction and indeed, our expectation was that the right form was what we should be striving to achieve. However, as I look back upon it now, I realize that what she was really keying into was our breath, the resonances of our wills, the harmonics of our beings. She studied how and with what we filled the bodily forms she set for us, not just that our bodies hit the right pose. We feared and loved Madame Fedro. We feared and loathed the other teacher who was charged with our physical training. Ruth-Eva was an Austrian martinet; she seldom smiled; she never wavered in the certitude with which she governed her class. With her rolled Germanic ‘‘Rs’’ and the riding crop she held as she pointed out

E´tudes: Lessons from the Heart of Ron Pelias

25

our failings at the bar, she was too much of a stereotype to ever be interesting enough for fiction. For two and a half years, three times a week, we went to Ruth-Eva’s studio. For two and a half years, three times a week, we did exactly the same routine, every lesson. It never deviated. Never. The accompanist sat at a piano at one end of the mirror-clad studio and there, at Ruth-Eva’s command, he would sound out an unrelenting list of e´tudes by Chopin, Satie, Mozart, and Scarlatti. To this day I cannot hear ‘‘Gymnope´die’’ without feeling compelled to do the Ruth-Eva routine. For two and a half years, three times a week, we would rise on our toes, point and flex, point and flex, then run around the hall of mirrors, all 15 of us cavorting around the studio in a polyphonic imitation of our taskmaster. Our mirrored reflections in the studio mirrors, multiplied into endless mirrored repetitions in the glass. We hoped to get it right, or at least we hoped we would fly under Ruth-Eva’s radar. Every lesson, the same routine. Every lesson sounded our discord in its unrelenting regularity. Ruth-Eva never deviated, even when Gerard, a particularly effete young man in my class, became ill and vomited right at his place at the bar. Gerard was summarily dismissed from class, and we merely continued the routine, each of us simply leaping over the vomit on our circuit around the studio. After six months of the same routine, we gave up hoping something new would be added and we gave up speculating on just what use her class was to our development. What value did it have? We dare not ask. We presumed we were being trained to be better actors, but just how Ruth-Eva’s endless repetition of the same moves to the same music helped, we didn’t know. With each lesson our ambition was to strike the right pose. More often than not the lesson we got was how our gawky 20-something-year-old bodies fell short of this objective. Ruth-Eva’s riding crop was there to correct us, to marshal us into line, to make us rigidly adhere to the desired form. We never hit the right key. We were never disavowed of our expectation that if we just did it right, if we just imitated the pose or the right techniques correctly enough, we too might have a celebrated career on the British stage. The poetics of movement were there in Fedro’s lessons, but the form of instruction set expectancies in place. We adhered to a simple instrumental logic borne of our faith in the institution’s record. Such instrumental rationality seems misplaced to me now for a place that was meant to teach us to be artists. The reliance on instrumental rationality I had thought was more the province of the social sciences. After I left the artistic pursuit of acting, I turned to the more social– scientific pursuit of a graduate degree in communication, and there under the tutelage of Ron Pelias I finally found the poetic heart I sought. Through

26

LESA LOCKFORD

him I learned that the skills and techniques borne of training were just that – skills, habits, techniques with which to practice the poetic, with which to sound out what matters, and with which to use as one means for discovering the harmony in our hearts with that of our students. Skills are what we have; they are only part of what we are. The scholarship of Ron Pelias, and in particular the book we honor today, is work that seeks to make our humanness central to our disciplinary discourse and our pedagogy. The lessons my teacher taught me are many and live in me and in my work, but here let me point to three I take from his book. E´tude: ‘‘A composition featuring a point of technique but performed because of its artistic merit’’ (Dictionary.com, 2005b). E´tude #1: The Mirror Lies

In Pelias’ chapter ‘‘Mirror Mirror’’ he engages in a dialogue. There his body discourses with his reflection in a mirror. He describes himself thusly: A person with large facial features y frog-eyes, and black and gray crabgrass hair y His face is round, fat really y a thick neck, rounded shoulders and a small chest accentuate his potbelly. y Below the waist – athlete’s foot, trunklike legs, and an unremarkable penis (Pelias, 2004, p. 40).

My quote, although abbreviated from the original, nevertheless demonstrates the unblinking treatment Pelias gives us of his physical form. But the mirror will not let him go so easily. The mirror demands him to be accountable for his actions. The interrogation continues without pause; the mirror will not see the body before it. It does not understand that breathing, feeling, intuiting have their places in academic performance. The interrogation ultimately builds into an oblique disavowal of the very type of accountability the mirror seeks. The interrogation prompts us to consider how it is that we can come to some truthful assessment about the value of our lives and work as educators? In an age where accountability is the watchword of administrators, trustees, even parents, we are continually prompted to provide the ‘‘evidence’’ of our effectiveness. Assessments, standards, examinations that make certain claims about our effectiveness certainly persuade that we are effective. And who can reasonably argue with evidence that demonstrates what works? However, Pelias’ lessons at his mirror imply that the truth reflected in our mirrors may not reflect the truth we seek. Educational theorists, Blake, Smeyers, Smith, and Standish (2000) claim similar ground when they say, such evidence-based educational policy saves us from thinking. Talk of what works, in short, risks leading to short-term solutions for problems which may not, in the terms in which they are conceived, be problems at all.

E´tudes: Lessons from the Heart of Ron Pelias

27

Being a question wholly about means, such talk forecloses on questions of the ends which are proposed. The bland confidence that ‘what works’ labels unassailable educational good is one of the most worrying signs of the moral voice in which education now founders. What if literacy or other strategy ‘worked’, raising [students’] reading scores, but at the cost of ensuring that few of them ever read for pleasure or ever thought very much again? (xiii–xiv)

How then can we come to know the value of our work? I learn from Pelias that the value of our work is not a matter of certain findings or indisputable evidence. Indeed, Pelias suggests that the road to a meaningful truth is a murky path occluded by the lack of clear answers. He urges us to consider how our effectiveness as teachers is a felt knowledge; it is found in a song lurking largely unheard in the sigh of our students yet felt somehow in the depth of their sinews. It sings there and summons knowledges deep, yet known. Pelias reminds me that our effectiveness as teachers occurs in ‘‘remember[ed] moments as pure as communion, when body and soul were one’’ (Pelias, 2004, p. 43). Pelias teaches me that our flaws and shortcomings are what are starkly revealed by the tools of our measurement. Pelias teaches me that the value of our work exceeds the documentation that can be produced by those tools’ distanciated voyeuristic gaze. E´tude #2: When You Pin It Down, You Kill It

Pelias teaches me to remember how knowledge is not reducible to a system of classification to which some would direct us. There is more to the butterfly than its carcass on a pegboard with its name and type appended below it. Amassing such typological knowledge has its rigor to be sure; but as Joanna Frueh would have it, such scholarly enterprises often amount to little more than ‘‘rigor mortis’’(Frueh, 1996, pp. 3–4). In our compunction to possess knowledge, to pin it down, we stop its wings. In the chapter ‘‘Always Dying: Living between Da and Fort,’’ Pelias captures and releases meanings. Here through the textual oscillation of the indexical and the evanescent, the present and the absent, the there and the gone, he beats a contrapuntal rhythm that evokes the heart of being and the rhythms of an educator. To educate is derived from the same etymological root as ‘‘to educe’’ which means to ‘‘direct the flow of (a stream)’’ (Barnhart, 1988a, p. 315). The stream that Pelias would direct us to is the Heraclitean impermanence emblematic of being. He bids us to be aware that it is in the temporary stasis of the here and the now, in the gone-before-we-know-it that meaning is made. He directs us to seize, however momentarily, the lessons from our

28

LESA LOCKFORD

own lives as we teach those under our charge. He does not presume our comfort in this understanding, rather he knows how it will unsettle. He says There. It is all about loss. Everything is dying. First there was God, then the author, and now the subject. All that is left is an inaccessible is. Everything slips away y There is no holding on. This lesson never settles y We never get it right. (Pelias, 2004, p. 102)

And so the lesson of being is that we can never get it right, if getting it right means holding on, holding it down. The paradox of always dying is that it teaches us to live now, to make meaning in the moment. Pelias rejects the nihilism that relentlessly seems to encroach upon contemporary culture and academe. As Nietzsche did, Pelias urges us toward a recognition that being requires commitment and openness to what really matters in life. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche argues for a ‘‘formula for greatness in human being y : that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity’’ (Nietzsche, 1967, p. 714; Blake et al., 2000, p. 75). Consequently, we learn that ‘‘the things around us are wonderful because they are fragile’’ (Blake et al., 2000, p. 75). Living is rife with uncertainty and change. Once we allow ourselves to embrace uncertainty, however clumsily, as an inescapable facet of living, what we encounter can take on a new significance. Pelias teaches me to direct my attention to the flow of the stream and to thereby come into ‘‘a better attunement with the world’’ (Blake et al., 2000, p. 75). E´tude #3: To Teach is to Show

In the chapter entitled ‘‘The Poet’s Self,’’ Pelias takes us on a journey that locates the poetic every day. He gives context to some of the sources of his everyday inspiration. The chapter thereby evokes a method of writing urged by writer Kim Stafford among others, namely to listen to the muses among us. He describes a hike he takes with his daughter through the hills and summer heat of southern Illinois. They happen to see a tree growing in the unforgiving terrain of a crag of rocks. He shifts then from his prose description to a poem about the tree. The end of the poem goes as follows: I stopped with my daughter, Amazed, wanting not to miss The chance to reach down beyond rock, to be rooted in the moment, and say just the right thing. I wanted her to understand

E´tudes: Lessons from the Heart of Ron Pelias

29

the miraculous, the will to live against all odds, the beauty of thirsty belief. ‘‘Look’’ I whispered. (76)

Later, when Pelias shows the poem to his daughter, she says ‘‘That’s nice, Daddy.’’ Pelias says, I do not know if she heard what I was trying to say (Pelias, 2004, p. 77). The etymological roots of the word ‘‘teach’’ date back to about 1290 and derive from the sense of ‘‘that which shows or points out, [an] indicator, [or] index finger’’ (Barnhart, 1988b, p. 1119) In Pelias’ ‘‘Look’’ and his uncertainty as to how his daughter heard his poem, I see most vividly the heart of a teacher. In an essay entitled, ‘‘The Heart of a Teacher,’’ Parker Palmer has said that ‘‘We teach who we are’’ (Palmer, 2005, p. 1). To be sure, we only point to that which we find has meaning, relevance, and resonance to our lives. Pelias teaches me to remember that we can only point. No amount of discourse or outrage that our lessons have fallen on deaf ears will make our students value what we do. We can only do as Pelias does with his daughter, and that is to ‘‘hope’’ that at some time down the road our students will hear the meanings in our poems. The pointing index finger, the showing, is a method of instruction that sets up very different expectancies than that of a trainer who would draw along, pull, induce, and manipulate a person or animal or student to standards of efficiency or to a desired form. Whether directing a flow of the stream or being the person who points out and shows, the educator or teacher engages in a gentler process than a trainer. Pelias teaches me to reign in the trainer in my pedagogy. He shows me how to teach. It is in that pointing that we hit the right key. Coda: ‘‘1. Music. The concluding passage of a movement or composition. 2. Conclusion or closing part of a statement’’ (Dictionary.com, 2005a).

I stand before you as one of many who have been blessed to be Ron Pelias’ student. I, like so many others, have been privileged to argue across his desk on many occasions. I, like other students, have laughed there and cried there. Like his other students, I could not miss feeling the presence of his capacious heart. It is always present, always open. A lot of us are former Pelias students. Perhaps his legacy is in our work; perhaps you can see there the influence Ron has had. But mostly I know that there is no mirror I can use to adequately reflect his influence upon me or upon the field of ‘‘performance

30

LESA LOCKFORD

studies.’’ The effectiveness of Ron’s scholarship and pedagogy is in its affectiveness on his readers and his students. I stand before you as one of this panel charged with the task of citing just what makes Ron’s work worthy of honoring today. Can I categorize it? Is there a typology to use? What arguments will persuade? But there is no pinning it down. The beauty and meaning of Ron’s work is not something one grasps by holding it still. I cannot use evidence to persuade you rhetorically. I cannot argue dialectically to bring you to a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt. And there is certainly no certain scientific proof (see Taylor, 1998, p. 8). Rhetorical, dialectical, or scientific means will not convey the poetic knowledge at the heart of his work. John Senior notes that poetic knowledge, which unsurprisingly is the least prized mode of knowledge formation in the education context is ‘‘where truths are grasped intuitively as when you trust another’s love’’ (quoted in Taylor, 1998, p. 8). Ron’s scholarship is paradoxically potent because of its ineffability. I stand before you as someone who wants to show you a man who lives the academic life with heart. James Taylor notes the near impossibility of living such a life ‘‘in a highly industrialized, technological society based on the idolatry of materialism’’ (Taylor, 1998, p. 174). Kim Stafford points out how the educational institution itself poses challenges. He says ‘‘a college is a strangely industrious place. y It is strangely debilitating to be surrounded by people who know, experts’’ (Stafford, 2003, p. 99). The arrogance of knowing, the arrogance that lies at the heart of such certainty is the villain in Pelias’ work. Pelias notes that it is in the students that he didn’t reach, the classes that didn’t gel that ‘‘rub against moments of success’’ and which are the ‘‘humbling correctives to [his] arrogance’’ (Pelias, 2004, p. 109). But it is with Pelias’ work that I find the pause I need to stop my occasional and my institution’s continual demand for certain knowledge, for postures of certainty. His scholarship and his pedagogy is often my humbling corrective to arrogance. I cannot presume to know that everyone will find Pelias’ work worthy. I can only point and whisper, ‘‘Look!’’

REFERENCES Barnhart, R. K. (Ed.). (1988a). Educate. Chambers Dictionary of Etymology (p. 315). Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. Barnhart, R. K. (Ed.). (1988b). Teach. Chambers Dictionary of Etymology (pp. 1118–1119). Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. Barnhart, R. K. (Ed.). (1988c). Train. Chambers Dictionary of Etymology (p. 1157). Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd.

E´tudes: Lessons from the Heart of Ron Pelias

31

Blake, N., Smeyers, P., Smith, R., & Standish, P. (2000). Education in the age of nihilism. London: Routledge Falmer. Dictionary.com. (2005a). Coda. Lexico Publishing Group, LLC, 26 June, 2005. http:// dictionary.reference.com Dictionary.com. (2005b). Etude. Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. 3 May, 2005 http:// dictionary.reference.com Dictionary.com. (2005c). Fugue. Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. 3 May, 2005, http:// dictionary.reference.com Dictionary.com. (2005d). Prelude. Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. 3 May, 2005 http:// dictionary.reference.com Frueh, J. (1996). Erotic faculties. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nietzsche, F. (1967). In: W. Kaufman (Trans.), Ecce Homo in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (2000 pp.). Introduction by Peter Gay. New York: Modern Library. Palmer, P. J. (2005). The heart of a teacher: Identity and integrity in teaching, 12 May. http:// www.newhorizons.org/strategies/character/palmer.htm Pelias, R. J. (2004). A methodology of the heart: Evoking academic and daily life. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Stafford, K. (2003). The muses among us: Eloquent listening and other pleasures of the writer’s craft. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Taylor, J. S. (1998). Poetic knowledge: The recovery of education. Albany: State University of New York Press. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (1976). Train. In. J. B. Sykes (Ed.), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (6th Ed., p. 1230). Oxford: Oxford UP.

INDIANS IN THE PARK: PART II Norman K. Denzin I want a scholarship that fosters connections, opens spaces for dialogue, heals y I want to write from the heart (Pelias, 2004, p. 2).

PROLOGUE THE CAMERA EYE (1)1

Introduction: Narrator-as-Dramatist – Narrator-as-Historian ‘‘Indians in the Park, Part II’’ is excerpted from a longer co-performance text, a four-act play of sorts, also called ‘‘Indians in the Park’’ (Denzin, 2005). The text can be performed on a simple set, around a seminar table, or from a stage in front of an audience. A series of images should be projected overhead, against a full-size screen, necessitating the presence of audio and video equipment. To the side of the stage, stands a large roving spot light, called the ‘‘Camera Eye’’ which moves from speaker to speaker, returning always to the narrator. The longer text enacts a critical cultural politics concerning Native Americans and the representations of their historical presence in Yellowstone Park and elsewhere. With Pelias (2004), I seek a writing form that enacts a methodology of the heart, a form that listens to the heart, knowing that ‘‘stories are the truths that won’t stand still’’ (p. 171), and that in Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 29, 33–44 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(06)29005-7

33

34

NORMAN K. DENZIN

writing from the heart, we learn how to love, to forgive, to heal, and to move forward. In bringing the past into the autobiographical present, I place myself into the past and create the conditions for rewriting and hence re-experiencing it. History becomes a montage, moments quoted out of context, ‘‘juxtaposed fragments from widely dispersed places and times’’ (Ulmer, 1989, p. 112; Benjamin, 1969, 1983). Following Pelias (2004), Du Bois (1969, 1989, p. xxxii), Dos Passos (1937), and Ulmer (1989) I move across and among several writing styles, genres, and representational-performative forms, some borrowed from Dos Passos, including, news of the day (NEWSREEL), and the Camera Eye.2 Words and quotations, visual texts, historical advertisements, maps, and photographs are performance vehicles, ways of ‘‘revealing and evoking the character of the person who spoke [or produced] them y they are not an end in themselves’’ (Smith, 1994, pp. xxiii–xxiv). With Anna Deavere Smith (2000), I seek a dramatic, performative poetic, a form of performance writing that includes excerpts from personal histories, official and unofficial government documents, scholarly articles, and popular culture texts. The history at hand is the history of Native Americans in two cultural and symbolic landscapes, mid-central Iowa in the 1940s and 1950s, and Yellowstone Park in the 1870s. Quoting from multiple texts, including personal autobiography, popular culture and history, and scholarly discourse, I attempt to create a chorus of discordant voices (and images) concerning Native Americans and their place in Yellowstone Park, as well as in our collective imagination (Spindel, 2000, p. 8). I read Yellowstone, America’s first national park, metaphorically. In and across the discourses that historically define the Park, are deeply entrenched meanings concerning nature, culture, violence, gender, wilderness, parks, whites, and Native Americans (Haines, 1996a/1977, 1996b/1977; Bartlett, 1985; Schullery, 1997a, 1979, 1997b). I situate these voices and discourses in my own biography. The presence of Native Americans in the collective white imagination is almost entirely a matter of racist myth, shifting meanings of the color line, the Veil of Color (Du Bois, 1989, pp. xxxi, 2–3), theatricality, and minstrelsy (Crue, 2002; Spindel, 2000). Call this critical race theory and critical pedagogy (Denzin, 2003) confront Yellowstone National Park and its histories. As a child I lived inside this white imaginary. I played dress-up games called ‘‘Cowboys and Indians’’. I watched ‘‘Red Rider and Little Beaver’’ and ‘‘Lone Ranger and Tonto’’ on Saturday morning American television. On Saturday nights my grandfather took me to western movies – Shane,

Indians in the Park: Part II

35

Stagecoach, Broken Arrow, The Searchers – at the Strand Theatre in Iowa City, Iowa (see Denzin, 2001).

ACT ONE Scene 1: Sacagawea and other Myths NEWSREEL 1 Voice 1: Horton Keeping the Legacy Alive. Two hundred years ago the Corps of Discovery, led by captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, struck out from the Falls of Ohio, near Louisville, Kentucky, to explore the newly acquired territory of the Louisiana Purchase. Their 8,000 mile trek took them through perilous, forbidding country by canoe, horseback, and foot. Lewis, the party’s scientist, and Clark, its surveyor, mapped geological features and fixed the longitudes and latitudes of the rivers and plains. Lewis described or preserved specimens of some 178 plants and 122 animals – the majority asyet unknown to science y None of this, of course, would have been possible without the aid and assistance of the Native Americans they met [nearly 50 tribes in all] along the way. Their Shoshone guide, Sacagawea, a 15-year-old girl, proved indispensable (Horton, 2003, p. 90).

Voice 2: Sceptic This is revisionist white history!

Voice 3: Slaughter Sacagawea is elusive,

36

NORMAN K. DENZIN fictive, mythic and real. She is the Indian princess required by myths of discovery and conquest (Slaughter, 2003, p. 86).

Voice 4: Spindel If we do a census of the population in our collective imagination, imaginary Indians are one of the largest demographic groups. They dance, they drum; they go on the warpath; they are always young men who wear trailing feather bonnets. Symbolic servants, they serve as mascots, metaphors. We rely on these images to anchor us to the land and verify our account of our own past. But these Indians exist only in our imaginations (Spindel, 2000, p. 8).

Scene 2: Park Performances THE CAMERA EYE (2) Narrator Staged performances based on lore and myth from Hollywood Westerns, and Wild West shows represent and connect Indians with war bonnets, horses, Western landscapes, parks, wilderness, tourism, nature, and danger (see Janetski, 2002, p. 119; also Spindel, 2000, p. 8). These representations simultaneously place Native Americans within and outside white culture, hence the phrase, ‘‘Indians in the Park’’. Parks are safe places, sites carved out of the wilderness, and other spaces, where whites go to view and experience nature and the natural world. Indians are not part of this cultural landscape. The ‘natural world’ they inhabit is outside the Park. It is a wild, violent, and uncivilized world.

Indians in the Park: Part II

37

Scene 3: Indians and other Wild Beasts Voice 5: Langford The story of Indian murders and cruelties would fill volumes y The region of the Yellowstone y was inhabited by wild beasts and roving bands of hostile Indians (Langford, 1972, p. xxiv, xxvi).

NEWSREEL 2 Voice 6: Janetski During the 1920s, native peoples were invited to participate in official Park events y Inviting Shoshone and other native peoples to the Park from which they had been systematically excluded was consistent with the national trend to associate Indians with parks and wilderness. Superintendent Albright sought to involve Indians in Yellowstone in what might be called performances. In 1925 he invited a group of Crow Indians into the Park to assist I in rounding up the Yellowstone Bison herd. The Indians wore ‘ancient hunting costumes and rode bareback’ attracting tourists who watched the riders chase bison through the Lamar River Valley (Janetski, 2002, pp. 120–121).

38

NORMAN K. DENZIN

ACT TWO Scene 1: Grandma’s Indian Story CAMERA EYE (3) Voice 7: Narrator-as-young-boy When I was little, in the 1940s, living in south central Iowa, my grandmother would tell stories about Indians. She loved to tell the story about the day a tall Indian brave, with braided hair, came to her mother’s kitchen door and asked for some bread to eat. This happened when grandma was a little girl, probably around 1915.

Voice 8: Grandmother This Indian was so polite and handsome. Mother said his wife and children stood right behind him in a straight row. The Indian said his name Was Mr. Thomas. He said that he and his wife and his children were traveling to the Mesquaki Reservation near Tama, Iowa, to visit relatives. Mother believed him. He said that they had run out of money, and did not like to ask for hand-outs, but this looked like a friendly farm house. Mother said

Indians in the Park: Part II

39

it is a crime in this country to be hungry! I believe that too!

Voice 9: Narrator-as-young-boy Grandma’s mother said everybody knew where Tama was, just about 75 miles north of Lone Tree, which was the closet town to the farm.

Voice 10: Narrator-as-adult Lone Tree. This is ironic, now that I remember. My mother, grandma’s daughter Betty, died in a nursing home in Lone Tree in 1994. Though I never saw mother there, she and George, my step-father, moved back to Lone Tree in 1992 to be near the family farm house where grandma’s mother had her visit with Mr. Thomas in 1915.

Scene 2: Narrator: Quick Aside: The Chicago Anthropologists NEWSREEL 3 Voice 11: Foley The University of Chicago sent thirty-five anthropology students to the Mesquaki settlement from 1948–1959. Professor Sol Tax y created a field school for training anthropologists (Foley, 1995, p. vii).

Scene 3: Mr. Thomas and the Mesquaki Reservation CAMERA EYE (4) Voice 12: Grandmother-as-young-daughter Mother made lunch for Mr. Thomas and his family. They sat under the big oak tree in the front yard and had a picnic. Later, when they were leaving, Mr. Thomas came back to the kitchen and thanked mother again. He gave her a small hand woven wicker basket as a gift. I treasure to this day this basket. It has become a family heirloom.

Voice 13: Narrator-as-adult When grandma told the story about Mr. Thomas she would go and get the basket and show it to me.

40

NORMAN K. DENZIN

Voice 14: Narrator-as-young-boy When I was not yet 10 one Sunday mother and dad took my brother and me to Tama, to the Mesquaki Reservation, to see a Pow Wow.

Narrative aside [This would have been about the time Sol Tax’s anthropology students were really getting set up to study the community. But I did not know this at the time.] I wondered if we’d see Mr. Smith, if I would even recognize him if he was there. It was raining. The sky was dark gray. The road was muddy. We drove down a lane to a large fair ground and parked in a back row with other cars. We walked through the mud, past teepees to the center of a big field. Indians in costumes with paint on their faces, and long braids of hair were singing, and dancing. Some were drumming and singing. At the edge of the field

Indians in the Park: Part II tables under canvas tents were set up. You could buy trinkets, moccasins, beaded purses, and belts and wooden flutes. In another area a family was making and selling Indian fry bread. Dad bought some fry bread for all of us, and bottles of cold Root Beer. We took the fry bread and popped back to the dance area and watched the dancers. Then it rained, some more and the dancing stopped, nd we got in the car and drove home.

Voice 15: Narrator-as-adult Today a local travel company organizes overnight bus trips for senior citizens from Champaign, Illinois to the big casino on the reservation in Tama, Iowa.

Scene 4: Made-For-TV Indians Voice 16: Narrator-as-young boy The next time I saw an Indian was the following Saturday night when grandpa took me to a movie at the Strand Theater in Iowa City and we watched Broken Arrow with Jay Silverheels, Jimmy Stewart, Debra Paget, Will Geer, and Jeff Chandler, who played Chief Cochise. Those Indians did not look like the Indians on the Tama Reservation. They rode horses, carried spears, had bows and arrows, and tomahawks. I thought maybe it was just a different time and a different place. That is those were the real

41

42

NORMAN K. DENZIN Indians in the movie, because they were from the Wild West and they were in a movie. The Tama Indians were less real, they kind of looked like everybody else, except for the dancers in their costumes.

Voice 17: Foley 1 ‘‘The Chicago anthropologists studied the assimilation process, how the Mesquaki were absorbed into white culture’’ (Foley, 1995, p. 6).

Voice 18: Foley 2 Kids were told to stay away from ‘those Indians’ y it was a dark, scary place full of violence y I heard many scary stories about the settlement, but one version told by a white woman married to a Mesquaki stands above all others. Her scary story was about a white boy who got castrated for messing around with an Indian woman (Foley, 1995, pp. 3–4).

Indians in the Park: Part II

43

Voice 19: Narrator as Writer It saddens me to hear a story such as Foley’s, Is it true? because, because if it is to forgive is to risk letting everything fall apart and can there ever be any hope of healing?

NOTES 1. THE CAMERA EYE is Dos Passos’s term, referencing a third-person perspective or interpretation of the events at hand. I am using the camera’ eye to reference both first- and third-person interpretations. When connected to the narrator it is first-person. 2. The NEWSREEL is also Dos Passos’s term (and method) for incorporating current events, and newsworthy items into his text. It could also be called NEWS, or NEWS or MEDIA STORY/EVENT.

REFERENCES Bartlett, R. A. (1985). Yellowstone: A wilderness besieged. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Benjamin, W. (1969). Illuminations (Trans. Harry Zohn). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. Benjamin, W. (1983). N theoretics of knowledge: Theory of progress. The Philosophical Forum, 15, 1–40. Crue, C. A. (2002). White racism/redface minstrels: Regimes of power in representation. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Denzin, N. K. (2001). Cowboys and Indians. Symbolic Interaction, 25, 251–261. Denzin, N. K. (2003). Performing [auto] ethnography: The politics and pedagogies of culture. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Denzin, N. K. (2005). Indians in the park. Qualitative Research, 5(1), 9–33. Dos Passos, J. (1937). U. S. A.: I. The 42nd parallel; II. Nineteen nineteen; III. The big money. New York: Modern Library.

44

NORMAN K. DENZIN

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1969). Darkwater: Voices from within the veil. New York: Schocken (Originally published 1920). Du Bois, W. E. B. (1989). The souls of black folk. New York: Bantam (Originally published 1903). Foley, D. E. (1995). The heartland chronicles. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Haines, A. L. (1996a). The Yellowstone story: A history of our first national park, volume one, revised edition. Yellowstone National Park: The Yellowstone Association for Natural Science, History & Education, Inc (Originally published 1977). Haines, A. L. (1996b). The Yellowstone story: A history of our first national park, volume two, revised edition. Yellowstone National Park: The Yellowstone Association for Natural Science, History & Education, Inc (Originally published 1977). Horton, S. (2003). Keeping their legacy alive. Illustrations by Jack Molloy and John James Audobon. Audobon, March, 90–93. Janetski, J. C. (2002). Indians in Yellowstone national park, rev. ed. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Langford, N. P. (1972). The discovery of Yellowstone Park. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press (Originally published 1905). Pelias, R. J. (2004). A methodology of the heart. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Schullery, P. (Ed.) (1979). Old Yellowstone days. Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado. Schullery, P. (1997a). Searching for Yellowstone: Ecology and wonder in the last wilderness. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Schullery, P. (1997b). ‘‘Introduction: 1: Mrs. George Cowan, 1877.’’ pp. 1–2. In P. Schullery, 1979a (Ed.). Old Yellowstone Days. Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado. Slaughter, T. P. (2003). Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on men and wilderness. New York: Knopf. Smith, A. D. (1994). Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. New York: Doubleday. Smith, A. D. (2000). Talk to me: Listening between the lines. New York: Random House. Spindel, C. (2000). Dancing at halftime: Sports and the controversy over American Indian mascots. New York: New York University Press. Ulmer, G. (1989). Teletheory: Grammatology in the age of video. New York: Routledge.

ON BEING READ Ronald J. Pelias I want to start by citing myself, not because what I said previously was particularly profound or clever, not because the wise and gentle souls who have offered their essays have misread my work and I want to make corrective, and not because the paper titles that carry my name justifies such an act of hubris. In fact, to cite myself before I get to the citation I’ve been discussing, I’ve argued in A Methodology of the Heart that you should, ‘‘Quote yourself only to point out the error of your earlier thinking’’ (p. 144) and, quite honestly, I have no intention of doing that here. Nevertheless, I still want to start with an ostentatious and embarrassing self-citation. I once wrote, ‘‘Be grateful when, correctly or not, you are quoted’’ (p. 144) and as I write at the end of this public act of citation, I am indeed grateful and humbled. I am thankful to Norman Denzin and Alice Filmer who made this collection of papers possible. When Norman asked me who I would like to have write in addition to him, I was thrilled that he wanted to be a part of this collection, that he had read A Methodology of the Heart. I cannot imagine a reader I would like to have more than Norman. The others who were so generous to offer their words came to me without doubt, without second thoughts. Carolyn Ellis not only edited A Methodology of the Heart for the AltaMira series in autoethnography but she also has taught me much of what I know about automethods through her own wonderful work, including her most recent book, The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography (Ellis, 2004). Lesa Lockford, my friend and colleague, carried the burden of looking at my earlier drafts, pointing out with gentleness and care my clunky sentences and my particularly dumb ideas. Denise Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 29, 45–49 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(06)29006-9

45

46

RONALD J. PELIAS

Menchaca was my doctoral advisee. My history with her, however, goes back to her undergraduate days. I’ve had the joy of watching Denise gain power and grace with each degree. And now, I watch her amazed at what she accomplishes. What each of these individuals share is that they are for me the readers I most desire, the readers who, if I allow myself such an indulgence, I most enjoy imagining that they are turning my pages, and the readers whose assessment I most value and fear. I did not arrive at this place by happenstance; I was called forth by their work on the page, by their eloquence, passion, and commitment. Lesa Lockford begins her book, Performing Femininity: Rewriting Gender Identity, with these sentences: Even in the beginning it always required thinking twice. The beginning was a June morning in 1958. Seven-and-a-half months into her pregnancy, my mother fell down a flight of stairs after watching Perry Mason on television. That night her water broke and I came kicking into the world, literally kicking, for I was born breach. (Lockford, 2004, p. 1)

These opening sentences place me in the hands of an accomplished writer, one who is in command of language, one who knows how language works, how it can work for her. The first line, ‘‘Even in the beginning it always required thinking twice,’’ intrigues, pulls me forward. I am already in the web of her tale, wondering what beginning, what requires thinking twice. The ‘‘always’’ stands not only as a marker of time but also a scholarly attitude that refuses any easy answers. The sentence, to use Austin’s (1962) familiar label, is a true performative; it accomplishes what it says. I am already thinking twice, already prepared for the subject of the book, a rethinking of gender identity. The opening line gives way to the concrete. I learn that, ‘‘The beginning was a June morning in 1958,’’ that there was a birth, the author’s birth, a premature birth, a breach birth after her mother’s accident of falling down the stairs. And I am told all this happened after her mother was watching Perry Mason on television. Perry Mason, for those of you who may be too young to remember, was a courtroom drama that always had a turn at the end, that always pulled you into the mystery, that always required thinking twice. I am also given the cliche´ metaphor of ‘‘came kicking into the world,’’ only to have it transformed back to the literal. In doing so, I am forced to see the worn dramatically visible again, encouraged to think twice about what had been forgotten. This careful unfolding of details moves me into the story she wishes to tell, a story that stands as a metaphor for the stance she invites me to assume, a stance that asks me to think again, as her mother had to do after first seeing her daughter’s bruised, discolored, and misshapen body, about my views on femininity. Equally important, this opening tale

On Being Read

47

locates Lockford as the autobiographical I, the author who is willing to put her body forward, to stand in as a witness, to allow her own identity to become an excavated and contested site. This opening story is the beginning of her longer tale that is written on and through the body. And I am ready, eager, to hear what is to come, convinced in just a few sentences that this author knows what she is doing, that this author’s willingness to give herself up will benefit us all. And after I read the final page, I am left more convinced than ever that my initial assessment was right. Reading Carolyn Ellis’s The Ethnographic I, I meet an ideal teacher. This is a teacher who knows her subject. She has at her command the history and foundational logic that informs her work, marshals the citations that prove her points, and recognizes the theoretical implications, including the risks, of what she argues. This is a teacher who knows how to guide her students, how to get the best from them, how to get them ready to do their own work. This is a teacher who is innovative, insisting that a textbook can take the form of a novel, and proving it on every page. But most of all, this is a teacher who lives in and with passion. I marvel at her willingness and ability to be present to her students, to treat each interaction as a space for genuine exchange, to reside in the emotion of the moment. She models the teacher I want to be while reminding me of the costs – loosing students because they are unable or afraid to enter unfamiliar territory, the collapsing of one’s personal and professional life, the emotional exhaustion of attending to stories of pain and sorrow. Not only does she model what it might mean to be a passionate teacher, she creates an emotional space for me to enter. I follow her students, saddened by their disappointments and personal struggles. I celebrate their victories, often found through the power of their stories. I worry about some, troubled that they might not find their way and I am confident that some have discovered a strategy for dealing with life’s tragedies. I watch Ellis maneuver their tales so that I might be with them, sensing their pain and their joys. I watch Ellis, to use Ruth Behar’s (1996) happy phrase, become a ‘‘vulnerable observer,’’ positioning herself so that I might overhear, learn, and experience the lives of others. I watch this vulnerable observer being exposed, open to emotion that gets to the heart of the matter. I watch her follow the advice she offers to her students: ‘‘To be successful, researchers have to be comfortable with emotionality – their own and others’’ (p. 136). I watch her break my heart. Perhaps Denise Menchaca’s greatest ability resides in her ability to notice. As she demonstrates in her dissertation, ‘‘‘The Soul Is a Mexican Reality’: A Performative Autoethnography that Explores the Influence of Our Lady of Guadalupe on Performing Mexican-American Identity in (Un)Familiar

48

RONALD J. PELIAS

Territory,’’ (Menchacha, 2003) noticing is not just a matter of seeing; it requires an entering. She writes: I have a dear friend, a gentle man who is large as a bear and who knows the pain of being pulled here and there. He is often frustrated by what he argues are the splinters of crossclass identity. He is a working class man with middle class guilt. He knows that the art of subtlety can kill, a passive aggression that surprise attacks. He walks in fear of such guerilla warfare, sensing its presence despite its invisibility. (p. 6)

Menchaca works by ‘‘sensing presence despite its invisibility.’’ She has the keen sense of knowing what is happening underneath, beyond the apparent, beyond the trivial. She is willing to linger, to stay in place until she finds what or who is there. Even strangers gather her attention: As I continue to head south in I-55, I come upon a beaten, old pick-up trucky While I consider whether to follow at a distance or to pass with quick caution, I notice that the truck is packed to over full, chair and mattress tied down with grizzled rope. It plods along, inching toward its destination y As I pass, I look over to catch a glimpse of the driver, curious as to who is hauling this burdening load. The wrinkled round faces of both the driver and his passenger (his wife, perhaps?) are unmistakable and unexpectedly mine: the caramel brown of Mexican complexion, an unmistakable mestizo hue y They seem displaced, this elderly couple quietly making their way through Missouri. Their license plate is Illinois, but are they heading south, like me. To where, I wonder. What brought them here? Again, I wonder. Are they going home? (pp. 32–33)

It is the time to wonder, the pause for connections, and the continual commitment to learn that takes Menchaca’s work beyond the ordinary. Menchaca reminds us that looking is not enough; it requires a delay to discover the invisible. Her example challenges us all to stop in order to move on, to postpone in order to enter with genuine regard, to defer in order to open one’s arms. Menchaca teaches us the significance of empathic noticing. Norman Denzin arrives at whatever moment is now, always urging us to take the next step toward social justice. He calls us forward as a ‘‘moral community’’ who must ‘‘enact an ethic of care and empowerment’’ (Denzin, 2003, p. 105). This motivating ethic drives his search for interpretive critical methods that can make a difference in the world. In 2003, he turned to performance, my academic home, with his book, Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture. I was stunned by his ability to enter another field, to mine its resources, and to make its language his own. I was even more stunned when I realized how much he was teaching me about the potential of my own discipline. Performance has a long history of claiming it as a transformative practice, of situating itself as an art that allows us to see ourselves in a new light. Denzin takes such claims a step

On Being Read

49

further. He invites us to view all performance as ethnographic, as a critical pedagogy designed to foster new understandings for a new world. Denzin does not stop with his eloquent manifesto; he puts on display his own performative writing. For me, the most compelling is Chapter 10, ‘‘Cowboys and Indians.’’ It tells the sad and disturbing story of cultural oppression, pulled together by country and western songs, childhood memories of cowboys and Indians learned from the media, the debates concerning the University of Illinois mascot, Chief Illiniwek, alcoholism – his father’s, his own, and its presence for Native Americans, and the Festival of Nations celebration in Red Lodge, Montana where Chief Big Day and his family, including his four grandsons who wear Shaquille O’Neal basketball shirts, do a war dance. I find this tale so engaging, in part, because of how Denzin situates himself – he is implicated in this postmodern cultural mix, caught by problematic cultural habits and practices that he wishes to deconstruct. In short, he turns himself into an ideological subject so that we might engage in moral dialogue, might enact an ethic of care. What these four scholars teach me is that writing without a devotion to the literary, to craft, is merely a series of pronouncements, that writing without passion, no matter how technically efficient, is sterile, that writing without empathic noticing is, at best, solipsistic and self-indulgent, that writing without an eye for social justice is blind. These authors tell me where the power of automethods can be found. They tell me why we must write. And knowing what they have given me, I am honored and privileged to have them attend to my meager offerings.

REFERENCES Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Behar, R. (1996). The vulnerable observer: Anthropology that breaks your heart. Boston: Beacon Press. Denzin, N. K. (2003). Performance ethnography: Critical pedagogy and the politics of culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Lockford, L. (2004). Performing femininity: Rewriting gender identity. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Menchaca, D. (2003). The soul is a Mexican reality: A performative autoethnography that explores the influence of Our Lady of Guadalupe on performing Mexican-American identity in (un)familiar territory. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

RACE, ROMANTICISM, AND THE CONTOURS OF CONFEDERATE IDENTITY Richard Bradley In 1862, a Confederate officer, Jo Shelby, and his men were deep in enemy territory, waiting to cross a river. While they were waiting for transportation, a member of their party, one Jake Connor, passed the time by softly singing a song. Years later, well after the war, they all remembered that moment and the words to that song. The song was called the Fallen Dragoon. Dragoon was a seventeenth century term from the English civil war for a cavalryman. The song also used another outdated English military term, vidette. A vidette was a mounted outpost who rode in advance of an army. Because the lyrics of the Fallen Dragoon are fairly significant, both for the men who were there, and for my analysis, I’d like to begin by quoting a few stanzas of this ballad: Rifleman, shoot me a fancy shot Straight at the heart of yon prowling vidette; Ring me a ball on the glittering spot That shines on his breast like an amulet. Ah, Captain, here goes for a fine-drawn bead; There’s music around when my barrel’s in tune. Crack went the rifle, the messenger sped, And dead from his horse fell the ranging dragoon.

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 29, 53–62 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(06)29007-0

53

54

RICHARD BRADLEY Now, rifleman, steal through the bushes and snatch From your victim some trinket to handsel first blood – A button, a loop, or that luminous patch That gleams in the moon like a diamond stud. Oh, Captain, I staggered and sunk on my track As I gazed in the face of the fallen vidette, For he looked so like you, as he lay on his back, That my heart rose upon me, and masters me yet. Yet I snatched off this trinket, this locket of gold; An inch from its center my lead broke its way, Scarce grazing the picture, so fair to behold, Of a beautiful lady in bridal array. Ha, rifleman, fling me the locket! Tis she, My brother’s young bride, and the fallen dragoon Was her husband. Hush, soldier, was heaven’s decree; We must bury him here by the light of the moon. Edwards, 1993

This paper will elaborate on some themes implicit in that song about murdering your brother in war. Because the men listening to that song were Missourians. And although other border states such as Tennessee saw warfare between pro-northern and pro-southern factions, the animosity and hatred in Missouri between brother and brother was sui generis (Fellman, 1989). It began before the war on the plains of Kansas, and it continued well after the war, most famously with the guerilla wars of Frank and Jessie James. What’s more, the men listening to that song were Missourians from a region called Little Dixie. Little Dixie was a long strip of deep southern culture and society laid across the center of a geographically and culturally mid-western state. And the men of that region called Little Dixie, were primarily responsible for making Missouri such a dangerous, violent place, before, during, and after the civil war (Schroeder, 1968). In this paper, I will briefly discuss my research into this region and its connection with the formation of identity. I have selected Little Dixie in Missouri because I think that an analysis of this region can help to illuminate, not only issues related to the formation and transformation of western identity, but because I think that the relationship between the men of Little Dixie and the rest of the state can serve as a sort of microcosm of the identity politics of the entire civil war. And I think that one man, a cavalry general named Jo Shelby, in many ways personifies the traits I see in Little Dixie. I will draw upon his life repeatedly to illustrate some of my

Confederate Identity

55

more abstract points (O’Flaherty, 2000). I will begin by defining my terms. Just what is Little Dixie? Little Dixie is a region along the Missouri river stretching from Clay county in the west to around Howard, Boone and Callaway counties. After Louisiana purchase in 1803, but more particularly after the signing of the treaty of Ghent in 1815, Americans from different regions began settling in Missouri. The Little Dixie area was settled largely, but not exclusively, by immigrants from Kentucky and Virginia. The southern immigrants to Little Dixie brought with them not only their society and culture, but also their economic system. And all three were predicated on race-based slavery. They settled along the Missouri river in the center of the state because in those days the only good, cheap form of transportation was water transportation. Christopher Phillips, in his important biography of Claiborne Fox Jackson, has shown us that contrary to popular belief, although the citizens of Little Dixie brought their southern institutions with them, they did not initially see themselves as southerners. In the beginning, they saw themselves as westerners – westerners who were opening the Louisiana purchase territory (Phillips, 2000). And during this period Missouri was the far western frontier. So these southern immigrants, primarily from Kentucky, the previous far western frontier, came to the new frontier. Indeed, the name Little Dixie was not applied by them to this region until much later. The initial name they had for it was the Boone’s Lick; named after the quintessential westerner, Daniel Boone, who, like them, left the old frontier in Kentucky to come to the new western frontier in Missouri. After all, even when Boone and his men carved out the Wilderness Road, which became the highway of western expansion, they did so with slaves in tow to hew their wood and draw their water. There was no initial conflict between their identities as westerners and their identities as slave owners (Faragher, 1992). The question I am concerned with is how were these westerners transformed into southerners – southerners not only at war with the rest of the state – but also southerners at war with the rest of the north? How was their southern identity formed? The answer of course, is connected not so much with slavery, as it is with opposition to slavery. When their northern brothers – brothers in the sense of that opening song – tried to take away their status as a slave state in the Missouri compromise conflict of 1820, the stage was set. When these same northern brothers tried to block slavery from spreading to Kansas, a region they saw as rightfully their own, the process began in earnest. Closing off Kansas to slavery, they thought, would box them in between two non-slaveholding Northern states,

56

RICHARD BRADLEY

Illinois and Kansas, and would also destroy their status as western pioneers. If western pioneers could not bring their slaves with them, what would that do to their status? Well, for one thing it would close them off to the land opportunities offered by Manifest Destiny. To these men, this was an insult. They were the agents of Manifest Destiny on this continent. And this brings us to the first of many paradoxes connected with these settlers. And the paradox is this: To maintain their identity as westerners, they constructed a new identity as southerners. So these men began to construct a new identity, a southern identity. And whereas writers, such as Phillips, focus on the political events that drove this process, I am more interested in the psycho-dynamics behind the creation of a southern identity in the heart of America’s middle west. When you look at the problem from a psychological point of view, a whole variety of questions are raised, questions which have a much wider applicability. Before I sketch out some of my initial attempts at answers, I would like to first survey some of the questions. First of all, what is identity and how is it formed? How and when does identity become collective? What is its relationship with external political events? What is the difference between the southern identity of a Missourian and the southern identity of, say, a Mississippian? Or to put it another way, what does southern identity mean to men born and raised in the mid-west? What kind of south did they, and do they still today, identify themselves with? While the project is large, it is possible, at this point, to sketch some initial answers. First of all, according to one of the leaders in the field of narrative psychology, identity is a series of stories we tell about ourselves. Dan McAdams says that ‘‘Each of us comes to know who he or she is by creating a heroic story of the self.’’ This simple formulation can be helpfully complicated by a closer look at different typologies of identity (McAdams, 1997). With those typologies in mind, one of the first things that we notice about the creation of southern identity in Missouri is that it was primarily a negative identity that was being created. Citizens of the Boone’s Lick transformed it into a place called Little Dixie. And they defined themselves negatively in relationship to both their slaves and their northern-oriented neighbors. I will examine each in turn, starting with slaves and moving on to the other immigrants to Missouri. Race is the key to understanding what came to be called Little Dixie. Hegel taught us that self-creation is at least in part the process of social opposition and conflict. Southern identity in Missouri was formed, in large part, by ideological interpretations of the master/slave dichotomy, in both a

Confederate Identity

57

practical and Hegelian sense (Hegel, 1977). For example, the key figure for this analysis is the Confederate general, Jo Shelby. Certain details of Shelby’s biography better illustrate the connections between race and negative identity. For example, when Shelby was 11 years old, he was given a personal slave named Billy Hunter who was also 11 years old. For the rest of his life, Jo Shelby never went anywhere without Billy Hunter. Billy Hunter was called, without irony, his shadow. From then on, where ever this little boy went, doing the things that boys and teenagers did, he saw his shadow self. Billy Hunter helped to dress him in the morning and take off his clothes at night. He was always there. When he began to form a conception of self, who could Shelby have seen himself as if not as Billy Hunter’s master? Thus in the formative years of his development, Shelby had no choice but to define his personality negatively, that is, in contradistinction to that of his slave (O’Flaherty, 2000). But just as the men of Little Dixie defined themselves as being everything that their slaves were not, they also defined themselves in opposition to the other white immigrants to the state who felt that they did not need the labor of slaves to support themselves. Sometimes these men were in the same towns of Little Dixie. Contiguous to Little Dixie was string of primarily German settlements known as the Missouri Rhineland. Missourians in the Rhineland did not have to create a new cultural identity, they carried their old one with them from Germany; and the cultural identity of the German Missourians was quite different from that of the Little Dixians. And the image of the German ‘‘foreigners’’ of the Missouri Rhineland formed another whetstone against which the identity of the men of Little Dixie was sharpened. By unconsciously shaping and distorting an image of un-American personality and behavior, Missouri slave masters helped, at the same time, to create a model for how ‘‘real Americans’’ and ‘‘real men’’ should behave, both in the larger social and the more intimate familial sphere (Parrish, 1973). But few acts of creation can be entirely negative. There were also positive examples that were drawn upon. But forming a southern identity in Missouri before the Civil War was no easy thing. What we today know as southern culture centers around myths of the ‘‘Lost Cause’’. Obviously those myths could not solidify until the cause was lost. Therefore, the Missourians of Little Dixie drew upon vague and hazy memories and traditions of old England. They knew that the current conflict with northerners was somehow connected with the English Civil War of the 1640s. In that war, the gallant cavaliers fought for King Charles against the

58

RICHARD BRADLEY

merciless Puritan roundheads. The Cavaliers, upon losing to the Puritans, migrated to the Chesapeake, primarily to Virginia. There they began to create a distinctive southern culture. The Puritan roundheads, before the Civil War, had been harried from the land, and had founded a settlement called the New England (Taylor, 1979). Some scholars see a resurgence of that old conflict in the fights between Loyalists and Patriots in the American Revolution (Phillips, 2000). Now in the 1850s and 1860s, their descendants were once again at war. And in that conflict, they drew upon memories and traditions which were very old. The song The Fallen Dragoon, quoted earlier, was actually written during the English Civil War, well over two hundred years before that Missouri confederate sang it to his fellow soldiers on that riverbank. For them it was another battle in the same war. So the men of Little Dixie knew that they were Cavaliers, or had come from men who were Cavaliers. And a Cavalier was a noble knight of some sort. But just what noble knighthood meant for nineteenth century Missouri farmers was not really very clear. But earlier in the century, there had been a romantic revolution. And this romantic movement had created a beautiful ideal type of what those noble knights of old were like. Sir Walter Scott and his novels had been particularly helpful in creating a romantic cavalier ethos. For example, Jo Shelby was born in Waverly, Missouri; a town named after a Sir Walter Scott novel (Osterweiss, 1964). According to this model, the cavaliers were bold and reckless, but chivalrous. They had an ideal of honor and courage that they were willing to die for. And, as knights, they were gallant and true for their virtuous maidens. Richard Lovelace, a real Cavalier, was often quoted. In his poem, To Lucasta, Going to the Warres, he said, ‘‘I could not love thee, Dear, so much, loved I not honor more’’ (Auden, 1957). Shelby’s battle dispatches were written by one of his officers, a man named John Edwards. And more than one reader in the dry and dusty official records of the rebellion has remarked that moving from the standard battle accounts that fill most of the volumes to the dispatches of Edwards is like suddenly finding oneself transported from the civil war back into a Sir Walter Scott novel. For example, the story of Jake Connor singing The Fallen Dragoon was written by Edwards. Edwards introduces the singing of The Fallen Dragoon as follows: ‘‘No one slept. Home, and a thousand sweet familiar fancies, filled every heart. The night was delicious, and the gigantic cottonwoods threw far out upon the river great shadows that lay so quiet and still it seemed a sin to vex the silence with a whispered word. But the reckless soldiers were gay, and very unromantic. Jake Connor was called, the inimitable

Confederate Identity

59

Irish delineator, the universal chief of all serenading parties, the most debonair flirt who ever forced a smile or won a heart, and the men around him gathered for a song’’ (Edwards, 1993).

Reading battle dispatches like that, one can be forgiven for mistaking these nineteenth-century Missouri bushwhackers for Robin Hood and his merry men around a campfire in Sherwood forest. And the fact that these men blurred those same distinctions is fairly obvious to anyone who reads any of those reports. So in the process of creating a southern identity the men of Little Dixie also created a simulacrum, in the theoretical sense. That is, they created a copy of a reality that never existed in the first place (Baudrillard, 1994). And these romantic self-perceptions led to an exaggerated sense of ‘‘southern honor’’ that lay at the root of Little Dixie identity and behavior. The simulacrum of a romantic identity of which there was no real original, led to the formation of a uniquely American aristocratic warrior culture. And Jo Shelby was a perfect exemplar of that new culture, riding into battle with his trademark black hat and huge black plume, Shelby had a selfconfidence and a swagger that drew men to him. Asked why he first followed Shelby, one of his men said, ‘‘Because he looked like somebody.’’ And in battle, he was somebody. Although he had no formal military training, he made himself into one of the great cavalry generals of the war. And although his deeds were little known outside of the state, because of the less vital nature of the fight in the western theater, they were long remembered within the state, particularly in Little Dixie (Edwards, 2002, p. 98). And the intersection of negatively formed identity with this romantic ideal goes a long way toward explaining why the Civil War did not really end in Missouri in 1865. Because, as opposed to other soldiers of the Confederacy, Missouri confederates had no sympathetic state to return to. They had fought their brothers in the state, had been defeated and driven out. They had tried to transform the entire state into Little Dixie, but had failed. Therefore, for them to return home and give up the fight was to resign themselves to live in shame. Accordingly, Jo Shelby, unlike most of the other officers of the Confederacy, refused to surrender to the Union, even after the cause was officially lost. His romantic voice piece, Edwards, penned a proclamation entitled ‘‘To the Men of Shelby’s Division.’’ The Proclamation was short: ‘‘Soldiers! You have been betrayed! The generals whom you trusted have refused to lead you. Let us begin the battle again by a Revolution. Lift up the flag that has been cast down and dishonored. Unsheathe the sword that it may remain unsullied and victorious!

60

RICHARD BRADLEY If you desire it, I will lead; if you demand it, I will follow. We are the Army and the Cause. To talk of surrender is to be a traitor. Let us seize the traitors and attack the enemy. Forward for the South and Liberty!’’ (Edwards, 2002, p. 312).

He took his entire division down to Mexico to jump into another civil war. The French Emperor Napoleon III had tried to install one of his worthless Hapsburg cousins, Maximillian, as king or emperor of Mexico. The native Mexicans rose up to overthrow him. Shelby and his men did not fully comprehend the situation, although they thought it sounded like a good fight for them to be in. But on their way through Texas, they still weren’t really sure which side they were going down to fight for. They decided that they would take care of that little detail once they got down there. On that trip down, Shelby and his men caught a group of robbers who had stolen a huge amount of money from a local bank. Although he and his men were broke and nearly starving, he insisted that they return that money. His argument was simple: He said, ‘‘We are the last of our race. Let us also be the best.’’ Before crossing the Rio Grande into Mexico, they staged a solemn ceremony. They took Shelby’s famous black plume, placed it in the center of their confederate battle flag, put some rocks on top of it, and sank it to the bottom of the Rio Grande River so that it could never be surrendered. Once inside of Mexico, his men voted for which side they would fight on. Being true cavaliers to the end, albeit more along the lines of Don Quixote than Ivanhoe, they voted to fight for the doomed French puppet, Maximillian. Emperor Maximillian, King Charles I, Good King Richard, by that point were probably all jumbled together in their minds. At any rate, they were once again cavaliers in the service of a troubled king. And as with King Charles I in the original English Civil War, the king that they were fighting for was hardly worthy of their bravery. Even Maximillian knew he was doomed. He wrote a pathetic letter back home to his mother in Austria, broaching the idea of leaving the country while he was still alive. His mother wrote back saying, ‘‘Hapsburgs never abdicate.’’ So he stayed, and died. And his cause died with him (Osterweiss, 1964). So they lost, just as the original Cavaliers lost. But in losing so gloriously, and with such e´lan, they helped to create a new set of myths – the myths of the Lost Cause. And these myths morphed with the earlier romantic myths to create a new simulacrum, this one with a firmly American basis. They helped to create southern identity as we know it today, especially for the men of Little Dixie. In the process of trying to live up to a suspect simulacrum, they had created an even more powerful mythos. In fact, after the

Confederate Identity

61

Civil War, the romantic underpinnings of their identity became even more important for them (O’Flaherty, 2000). Jo Shelby, one of the patron saints of the Lost Cause in Missouri, lived to be one of the most popular men in Little Dixie after he returned from Mexico. Indeed, he became one of the most popular men in the state. Because after the war, the men of Little Dixie, true to their negative identity to the last, still continued their war to make Missouri a confederate state, at least in historical memory (Leddy, 1865). In the late nineteenth century in Missouri, one of the most popular songs was a tune called Shelby’s Mule. The first couplet of the last stanza is quite revealing: ‘‘Some say our state did not secede, but let me tell you now That if she did or if she didn’t, we’ll have her anyhow.’’ (22)

Shelby himself never accepted that new identity. He later became a federal marshall and used his position to appoint African–Americans to some of the first law enforcement positions in the history of Missouri. But for his men, including Edwards, what the later Shelby believed was beside the point. He was more useful to them as a symbol. And using Shelby and other icons of the Lost Cause, these men completed the transformation that had begun on the plains of Bleeding Kansas. They took the foremost western territory of the Louisiana purchase and changed it from the vanguard of western expansion into a strange, and imperfectly formed copy of the old south in a place you would least expect to find it; a region that still today goes by the name of Little Dixie.

REFERENCES Auden, W. H. (Ed.) (1957). Elizabethan and Jacobean poets: Marlowe to Marvell (p. 354). New York: Viking. Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation (Translated by Shelia Faria Glaser). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Edwards, J. (1993). Shelby and his men (p. 53). Waverly, MO: General Joseph Shelby Memorial Fund. Edwards, J. (1993). Shelby and his men (p. 87). Waverly, MO: General Joseph Shelby Memorial Fund. Edwards, J. (2002). Shelby’s expedition to Mexico: An unwritten leaf of the war (pp. 98, 312). Fayetteville, Ark: University of Arkansas Press. Faragher, J. M. (1992). Daniel Boone: The life and legend of an American pioneer. New York: Henry Holt.

62

RICHARD BRADLEY

Fellman, M. (1989). Inside war: The guerrilla conflict in Missouri during the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller, with Analysis of the Text and Foreword by J. N. Findlay. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Leddy, J. (1865). ‘‘Shelby’s Mule’’. In: J. Whistletrigger (Ed.). Civil war songs from the western border. Big Canoe Records: Booneville, MO. McAdams, D. P. (1997). The stories we live by: Personal myths and the making of the self. New York: Guilford Press. O’Flaherty, D. (2000). General Jo Shelby: Undefeated rebel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Osterweiss, R. G. (1964). Romanticism and nationalism in the old south. Gloucester, MA: P. Smith. Parrish, W. E. (1973). History of Missouri: 1860–1900. Hamden, CT: Archon Books. Phillips, C. (2000). Missouri’s confederate: Claiborn Fox Jackson and the creation of southern identity in the border west. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Phillips, K. P. (2000). The cousins’ wars. New York: Basic Books. Schroeder, W. A. (1968). Spread of settlement in Howard county, Missouri, 1810–1859. Columbia: The State Historical Society of Missouri. Taylor, W. R. (1979). Cavalier and Yankee: The old south and American national character. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

THE CHANGING MEANINGS OF AUTHENTICITY: AN INTERPRETIVE BIOGRAPHY OF PROFESSORS’ WORK EXPERIENCES Phillip Vannini ABSTRACT This paper contributes to the symbolic interactionist literature on authenticity and the self by drawing from ethnographic research conducted with 46 faculty members at an American public research university. I offer an analysis of the changing meanings of professors’ sense of self across careers, ranks, and hiring cohorts and I suggest the following: (a) professors’ experiences of authenticity and inauthenticity remain similarly frequent throughout their careers; (b) professors’ concept of true self changes considerably from the time they are hired to the time they retire; (c) younger professors need to face different demands and challenges than older professors, as they need to adapt to a different academic social world marked by new practices and conventions surrounding tenure, research, teaching, and service.

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 29, 63–90 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(06)29008-2

63

64

PHILLIP VANNINI

Academic work is undergoing dramatic change. Massive enrollment shifts, controversial public funding allocation policies, higher scrutiny from both the government and public opinion, deeper and more troublesome connections to the private business sector, professors’ salary deflation, downward hiring trends, and increased administrative control have caused a considerable erosion of faculty power and resulted in lowering job satisfaction for some professors (see Altbach, 1997; Bowen & Schuster, 1986; Clark, 1987, 1997; Gould, 2003; Levine, 1997; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Smith, 2000; White & Hauck, 2000). With decreases in autonomy from both external agencies and internal organs, continuous attacks on the tenure system, erosion of collegial spirit, and growing resentment toward careerism and blind specialization present conditions and future prospects for the professoriat appear problematic. Notwithstanding all this, many professors still feel that theirs ‘‘is still the best damn job in the world’’ – as one senior faculty member interviewed for this study put it. The question of why professors find satisfaction in performing their work in the face of mounting difficulties is the object of this paper. The basic argument I advance is that even though there exist various sources of both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation connected to varying degrees of work satisfaction, the emotional experience of authenticity1 works as an important source of motivation for professors. While my focus here remains on professors, the arguments I develop can also be easily extended to other professions and identities, as well as related areas of interest for symbolic interactionist theory and research. My specific goal in this paper then is to contribute to the existing symbolic interactionist literature on authenticity, and in particular to provide analysis of original empirical data on the changing experience of authenticity over the career life course of university professors. The concepts of authenticity and inauthenticity have long suffered from lack of clarity. Over the past two decades, however, a number of important works informed by the philosophy of American pragmatism have shed light on the concept of the true self and the emotional nature of authenticity. Namely, Holstein and Gubrium (2000) have posited that authenticity is the result of discursive practices of the narrative self, while Gecas (1986, 1991) and Erickson (1995) have respectively grounded authenticity in the realm of motivation and emotion. Despite such conceptual advances, however, no empirical studies that have made use of these existing theories have yet appeared. In an attempt to provide empirical corroboration of existing symbolic interactionist theory on authenticity, the present study draws from ethnographic research conducted at the university I fictitiously named Mountain State University (MU).2 I conducted this ethnographic research for my

The Changing Meanings of Authenticity

65

doctoral dissertation and given the breadth of my research I need to limit my focus here to the analysis of how professors’ sense of self changes through time, with a focus on change across individual careers and on differences across ranks and hiring cohorts.

THE CONCEPT OF AUTHENTICITY IN SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM The concept of authenticity has a cumbersome baggage in the humanities and social sciences. Indeed, an important and widely recurrent criticism of the concept of authenticity is that it is difficult to define and that it suffers from inextricable ties to various ideologies and philosophies. Two recent books have surveyed the history of philosophical, psychological, and sociopolitical theory on authenticity (see Ferrara, 1998; Golomb, 1998). It is well outside the scope of this article to review this literature. It would be just as distracting to review the history of authenticity in sociology. In sociology, authenticity has meant many different things to different scholars (for a review see Holstein & Gubrium, 2000), but what has been constant about it has been the scarcity of empirical attention dedicated to it – in large part because of the difficulty inherent in its operationalization. Within symbolic interactionism, authenticity can be understood as the emotional experience of being true to one’s self (see Denzin, 1984; Erickson, 1995; Gecas, 1986, 1991, 2000; Holstein & Gubrium, 2000; Turner, 1976; Turner & Schutte, 1981). Authenticity is neither synonymous with sincerity – as sincerity entails being true to others – nor with the metaphysical and ethical notion of being a ‘‘True Self.’’ Rather, for symbolic interactionists, authenticity is the feeling that one’s conduct is congruent with the meanings and values important to one’s self. In contrast, inauthenticity is the emotional experience of being untrue to one’s self. When we understand authenticity in such pragmatist fashion we can empirically study it as a phenomenological experience by gaining access to people’s experience through introspective methods, such as phenomenological (Turner & Schutte, 1981) and/or narrative in-depth interviewing (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000). My primary interest here is to analyze authenticity ‘‘at work,’’ that is, in the social context of work – a context which lends itself well to the study of authenticity (e.g., Hochschild, 1983). How does authenticity ‘‘work’’ then? Professors, just like many other workers, need to deal with questions of authenticity just about everyday of their lives. For example, faculty may have to

66

PHILLIP VANNINI

decide whether to pass or fail a student, whether to accept or reject a manuscript for publication, whether or not to edit a paper in a certain way in order to please an editor, or whether or not to consent to the department chair’s latest request. All such decisions require professors to reflect on and negotiate among competing values, goals, ideals, and identities. I refer to the complex of such values, goals, ideals, and identities as self-meanings or self-values. Self-meanings are generated and continuously reshaped throughout the socialization process. It is throughout our continuous socialization that we select from potentially infinite numbers of disconnected experiences a few personally significant ones and incorporate them into somewhat coherent and meaningful accounts. These accounts often take the form of self-stories – stories rich with meanings, values, ideals, goals, and identities that individuals use to construct a sense of self, a ‘‘self that we live by’’ (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000). Self-meanings give individuals a sense of continuity through time and a sense of identity. Thus, even though individuals undergo change throughout their lives, and even though they adopt multiple identities, it is through their evolving, storied self-meanings that they are able to live with a sense of identity and continuity – however fluid and multifaceted (Denzin, 1989; Holstein & Gubrium, 2000; Maines, 1993; Maines & Ulmer, 1993). Through stories we construct valued meanings for our experiences, create order among experiences and their meanings, and organize self-meanings into identities (Denzin, 1989; Holstein & Gubrium, 2000). Through narrative, we also strive to cohesively organize systems of values, space and time, identities of others, and relatedness of actions across contexts by creating themes, plots, and drama (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000). Emotions are embodied feelings ‘‘that arise from emotional and cognitive social acts that people direct to self or have directed toward them by others’’ (Denzin, 1984, p. 49). Along these lines, Erickson (1995) and Gecas (1986, 1991, 2000) describe authenticity as the emotional response to individuals’ reflective assessment of the meaning of their own conduct and being. In other words, authenticity is a feeling in relation to the meanings and values attached to the self. Gecas has convincingly argued that authenticity plays an important motivating function for the self (Gecas, 1986, 1991). For Gecas, whenever the self acts in congruence with its values, the positive experience of authenticity takes place. Authenticity is not the only source of motivation for the self, however. For Gecas (1986, 1991), the self-concept works as a motivator through the interplay of self-esteem, self-efficacy, and authenticity. Feelings of low self-esteem and low self-efficacy are unpleasant experiences, and so is the experience of inauthenticity. Individuals will then tend to be positively motivated by feelings of authenticity and negatively

The Changing Meanings of Authenticity

67

motivated by feelings of inauthenticity. The question of how authenticity will motivate an individual over time is left, however, relatively unexplored in Gecas’ (1986, 1991, 2000) work. The combination of Gecas’ theory of authenticity with Holstein and Gubrium’s (2000) conceptualization of authenticity as narrative practice seems therefore quite apropos. Questions may arise regarding the compatibility between the kind of symbolic interactionism practiced by Gecas and by Holstein and Gubrium, with the former being commonly associated with structural symbolic interactionism, and the latter being commonly associated with a biographical/ narrative and ethnomethodological/discursive conceptualization of the self and social interaction. I believe, however, that Gecas and Holstein and Gubrium share a common view of the phenomenological nature of authenticity. Holstein and Gubrium (2000, p. 70) for example, argue that the self is ‘‘a particular set of sited language games whose rules discursively construct the semblance of a more or less unified subjectivity centered in experience’’ (emphasis added). Gecas (personal communication, 11/10/2002) is also adamant that authenticity can best be understood by accessing individual experience from a phenomenological perspective. A similar conclusion is also reached by Erickson (1995), who bases her conceptualization of authenticity upon two premises. The first premise deals with the intensity of the experience of authenticity: authenticity is not a mono-dimensional concept, and therefore not a universalistic condition. For Erickson one can experience authenticity or inauthenticity to varying degrees because authenticity is a local, changing practice, and a lived, embodied emotional experience. Her second premise deals instead with the existence of a true self for each individual: authenticity presupposes a self that remains somewhat consistent and stable across situations, without implying reduction to oversimplified, unchanging structures. Erickson (1995) also bases her understanding of authenticity in the work of that avatar of postmodern theory on identity and the self that is Erving Goffman. Erickson remarks that Goffman believed that feeling ‘‘unruled, unreal, and anomic’’ occurred when actors violated long-standing commitments to particularly meaningful self images, and ‘‘felt-identities’’ (Goffman, 1963, p. 135). Erickson’s point here is that emotions are central to the development of the self and her attention to emotionality plays a crucial role in the development of a symbolic interactionist theory of authenticity. In sum, authenticity may be a feeling associated with being true to one’s self, but we must not rely on assumptions which render such self static and the act of ‘‘being true to it’’ stifling, and that is why studying authenticity over biographical time, as I attempt to do here, is extremely important. Take

68

PHILLIP VANNINI

for example the worklife of faculty members. Professors change identities, as well as institutional, disciplinary, and sub-disciplinary affiliations; they play differing roles from the classroom to the lab, from the faculty meeting room to the office; and often they even become radically different from what they used to value as they receive tenure, age, and retire. In a sense professors, like all human beings, derive their uniqueness and complexity precisely from this tension of becoming.

METHOD The main research question of this paper is: How do professors experience authenticity and inauthenticity across their careers? Furthermore, I ask: Are there differences among professors’ experiences of inauthenticity and authenticity across rank and hiring cohorts? Data for this study come from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 46 faculty members employed at MU during the academic year 2002–2003. MU is a mid-size public university currently classified by the latest Carnegie classification system as a doctoral/research university-extensive. I obtained lists of faculty members employed in three departments in each of three academic fields: psychology, political science, and anthropology in the social sciences; physics, chemistry, and biology in the natural sciences; and English, music, and philosophy in the humanities. I then selected randomly two names from each of the following three categories: assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor. Whenever a department employed limited term, part-time, or adjunct faculty, I also made a list of all such employees and drew randomly one name from the list and proceeded to contact him/her via e-mail. In total I made contact with 62 faculty members, 16 of whom declined my request, because of lack of time or because they were on leave and out of town. The final sample included 40 tenured or tenure-track professors and 6 instructors. All interviews took place in professors’ own offices or labs and lasted in length between 1 h and 1.5 h. Approximately three-fourths of professors interviewed were men, and all but one was White. I taped and transcribed all interviews. The semi-structured interview protocol included questions meant to gather background information (about rank, age, length of employment, etc.), questions meant to solicit answers in narrative format (e.g., ‘‘could you tell me the story of how you chose to become a professor?’’), questions meant to investigate the ruling relations of academic work,3 and questions drawn from Turner and Schutte’s (1981)

The Changing Meanings of Authenticity

69

measure of ‘‘true’’ and ‘‘false’’ selves. Slightly modified in terminology from the original, I posed the latter question(s) as follows:4 ‘‘I’m very interested in understanding what it means to you to be authentic (or inauthentic), or true to your self (or untrue), in the context of your work. Can you tell me some personal stories of times when you felt that you were being authentic (or inauthentic), true (or untrue) to your self, in the context of work? What was it about your experience on each of those occasions that made you feel you were true (or untrue) to your self?’’ I also asked a variety of questions and probes that allowed me to gather data pertinent to the research aims of this study (e.g., ‘‘What has changed in the way you value your work from the time you started to today?’’; ‘‘Are there episodes that significantly marked your career and that you believe have changed who you are, as a professor and as person?’’ etc.). In order to analyze the data for this paper, I utilized the research strategy of interpretive biography (Denzin, 1989) and engaged in open coding first and subsequently in focused coding of transcribed interview data. Interpretive biography is informed by both phenomenology and narrative/constructionist ontology. As Denzin has remarked, while it is necessary to keep firmly in mind that any gaze into the subject’s inner life is mediated by various processes of signification, we must keep in mind that as interpretive biographers we need to ‘‘study real people who have real-life experiences in the social world’’ (Denzin, 1989, p. 14). People have experiences that are mediated through language, but are nonetheless embodied. Experiences compose the realities of a life, the moments during which we meet, confront, interpret, and make sense of events. Of course, experiences vary in degree of intensity. Some experiences may be routine, habitual, and therefore they may demand little attention. But other experiences are particularly revealing and problematic as they signify a dramatic moment of revelation and/or insight. These experiences are called epiphanies, ‘‘interactional moments and experiences which leave a mark on people’s lives’’ (Denzin, 1989, p. 70). Epiphanies are of particular interest to interpretive biographers (Denzin, 1989) and throughout my coding of the data I focused closely on linguistic descriptions of epiphanies.

DATA AND INTERPRETATION I present my analysis in two separate parts. In the first part, I analyze a variety of epiphanies and their connection with experiences of authenticity. In the second part, I address the issue of how experiences of authenticity vary across rank and department.

70

PHILLIP VANNINI

Epiphanies My interpretation of the meanings of epiphanies begins with the story of Frank. I met Frank in his office on a summer afternoon, late in the twosemester long interview process. After walking into more than 40 academic offices, no amount of visual chaos could surprise me anymore. Papers, boxes, books, and anything that dust can call home seem to reach a utopian state of symbiotic harmony in professors’ offices. Frank’s office, instead, was the perfect antinomy of my expectations. His workspace was vast, spotless, tastefully decorated with prints and posters from all over the world, and enriched by a majestic piano and a serene view over the rolling hills surrounding the campus. It took little time for Frank to find comfort with my presence in his room. Despite his age of 47, as we began to speak, I learned that his career as an academic had only recently begun: Interviewer: How did you choose to become a professor? Frank: With regard to other things that I wanted to do, I had already done them to my satisfaction. I taught high school for five years and I was very successful. The idea of singing for a living kept floating around in my head. But I left high school partly due to burnout, and partly because I wanted to explore singing for a living. That led to a period of finding out how difficult that was. I did however do that for a few years, and got a still clearer idea of how difficult the profession was. While that was going on I missed the education-part of me. So eventually I went back to school and got a Master’s when I was in my mid thirties. But then I found out that a Master’s degree is not going to get you anywhere. So I looked for another high school job, and taught in different high schools for six years and once again very successfully. And by that I mean that I took a program and made it one of the best, if not the best in the state. Then our daughter was all grown up, ready to go on with her own life, and our financial condition was such that I could have pursued my singing career if I had wanted to. And by that time I was burned out on teaching. So I gave myself five more years, as a second try with professional singing. By the time the fourth year rolled around I had figured out that this was not what I wanted to do with my life. So at that point I thought that it would be better to work at the college level than at the high school level. I was tired, I guess, of living a very isolated and very alienating life that the singing career demands and I missed educating students, and conducting, and interacting with people. What drew me to college teaching was the thought that I could teach, but also that I could perform. And I was right, this job fits me, it’s a great match (Assistant Professor, Humanities).

Frank’s story – only reported in part here, obviously – was rich with twists and turns, with dead ends and sweeping vistas of future possibilities. Such twists and turns corresponded to epiphanies; complex emotional and cognitive experiences that are marked by deeply introspective reflections on the relation between the self and its lifeworld (see Denzin, 1989). In simpler terms an epiphany is a clear and often sudden manifestation of meaning, an

The Changing Meanings of Authenticity

71

intuitive grasp of reality through a revelatory and striking event, and an illuminating discovery. An epiphany is also an interruption of continuity, dissolution of habit, and the birth of something new. Epiphanies can be more or less abrupt, more or less emotionally intense, but all epiphanies lead people to problematize the self and its lifeworld, and whenever pragmatically possible they lead people to change. Epiphanies can therefore be understood as significant points in time along the trajectory of self-meanings. Frank’s epiphanies marked his existential readjustments between high school teaching, professional singing, graduate school, and academic work. Each epiphany in Frank’s narrative marked a turning point (see Denzin, 1989); a point when values, goals, and identities undergo re-evaluation. Turning points are essential for our understanding of authenticity across the lifetime. For example, for Frank the academic environment is ideal because it ‘‘fits’’ him as a perfect ‘‘match.’’ Through this narrative Frank therefore managed to present himself as someone who feels authentic in his current work activities (see Gecas, 2000). The entire narrative segment reported above is then to be interpreted in relation to the statement by Frank in the last line. The valued endpoint in Frank’s story indeed is that he is seemingly happy where he is now, and all episodes leading up to this valued endpoint are assigned meaning in relation to the epilogue of the story. This is an important point to consider in relation to the narrative study of authenticity: a storyteller’s experiences of authenticity and inauthenticity will mark his/ her positioning in relation to other characters and events present in the story. I will continue to give attention to stories’ valued endpoints in relation to authenticity later, but for now it is important to continue to reflect on epiphanies and turning points. Because meanings and values are attached to the self throughout the entire life course, by studying individuals’ stories we should be able to learn about their changing sense of true self. For this reason I found it important to ask professors about how and why they chose their job, and how their feelings about their work and occupational identity had changed over time. Professors’ responses indicate that they entered their careers in one of the three ways: as a calling, as an accident, and by default. Analyzing these three paths in detail allows us to understand the relation between epiphanies and authenticity better. Career as a Calling Professors, who made the conscious and firm decision to study and teach in their field of interest and to become academics very early in their lives, told stories marked by such qualifiers as ‘‘fateful,’’ ‘‘destined,’’ and ‘‘determined.’’

72

PHILLIP VANNINI

These narratives resembled epic sagas in which a protagonist’s life is informed by a ‘‘mission’’ or ‘‘calling’’ to become the man or woman that one is truly meant to be. For example, as a professor in philosophy told me: ‘‘I didn’t choose it [this life and career], it chose me.’’ In relation to authenticity, ‘‘career as calling’’ narratives are informed by a unique positioning of the author/protagonist. In all of these stories, the endpoint is established first through statements like, ‘‘This is who I am and who I’ve always been, and that is why I’ve lived my life that way.’’ Through such positioning, these professors manage to discursively establish a true self that transcends the immediate circumstances of their occupation. This is a ‘‘vocational’’ true self then, whose biography is marked by a progressive and linear movement toward becoming what one was meant to be. The following excerpt, for example, shows that such a mission can begin at a very early age: I’ve always been very interested in science and astronomy. I was four years old when I decided I was going to be an astronomer (laughs), seriously (Instructor, Natural Sciences).

Authenticity, as an experience, works as a revelatory force, as an inspiration, and as an existential quest. Claiming knowledge of one’s true self, like this instructor did, is also a way of claming authority over how a life story can be told and what its meanings are. In this sense authenticity can work both discursively as a frame for interpreting a narrative and phenomenologically as a source of motivation and as an emotional experience. Examples of this abound. For example, several would-be professors grew up in families of academics where they were weaned on science, politics, art, or literature. As young children they became interested in what they saw their parents practice and what they valued, and some of them, like this political scientist (see the following excerpt), later on in life even coauthored academic work with their parents: My dad and my mom were both professors, my father was a political scientist like me. I grew up during the Vietnam War, and my family was very active in opposition to the war. Normally families would load up their kids in a car and go for a picnic, and instead we got loaded in a car and went to a demonstration. It was the normal thing for me to become a political scientist (Professor, Social Sciences).

The key statement here is to be found in the last sentence; the normal thing to be/become an academic is normal because through her interpretation of her life story and through her interpretation of her experiences this professor manages to normalize a childhood spent at political rallies instead of picnics

The Changing Meanings of Authenticity

73

or theme parks. Such claim is an agentic act of self-positioning and also a creative act by which a narrative endpoint is established. Interestingly enough, there were no clear epiphanies in these narratives because there were never major significant turning points in these professors’ biographies. In these stories authenticity was always seemingly taken for granted because self-meanings and values were never problematized. In these stability narratives, therefore, the experience of authenticity and the sense of a true self hardly underwent any change. Career as a Default By comparison epiphanies were quite a common occurrence in many other professors’ stories, whether the trajectory toward academia was accidental or whether their decision was in part a default option. Professors who chose academia by default, after suddenly realizing that no other options were feasible for a career, experienced gradual epiphanies, or in other words slow revelations. The following excerpt is a good example of a gradual epiphany in a career by default narrative: Between my junior and senior year in college I worked for a chemical company and I found out I didn’t like industrial research the way it was structured, because it’s bottom line driven. If you get on a problem and you find that you’re not making much progress and the costs go up, it is no longer economically feasible and they drop it almost immediately. So it’s really frustrating because you can’t complete what you started. I didn’t want to spend my life improving a corporate coffin. I didn’t want to have to do what someone else told me that I had to do. For example, I visited Proctor and Gamble, and throughout the visit I was taken to a secluded lab area where I would do some of my work. This area was protected and gated and you needed a pass to get in. So I asked ‘‘how do you do work here at night?’’ And I was told I couldn’t; no one could come in after six. You know, I do my best work at midnight, or on Saturday mornings; why would they not take advantage of that? I was told it just was not the way things worked. I decided that I did not want economics to structure my life like that; I did not want economics to structure when I can have ideas. Here I can come in at any time I have an idea that I want to work on. And besides, here there is an element of intellectual freedom. You have the freedom to choose a problem and the freedom to find the way to solve that problem (Professor, Natural Sciences).

This professor’s story had much in common with other natural science professors’ work experiences in the corporate world. The endpoint of such stories always had to do with competing values: in the business world, the ultimate value is monetary profit, whereas in the academic world, the ultimate value is the accumulation of knowledge. Such stories about the corporate world allowed professors to position themselves against the values of greed, wealth, and the private property of knowledge while also allowing

74

PHILLIP VANNINI

them to constitute a sense of self built upon the values of freedom, independence, and creativity. Career by default narratives always weaved competing accounts of a protagonist (the authentic self) and an antagonist (the inauthentic self and the conditions limiting the expression of authenticity) struggling with each other until the authentic self finds emancipation through a gradual epiphany. If career by vocation narratives are stable and progressive, career by default narratives are just as progressive but highly unstable, marked as they are by numerous turning points and various experiences of inauthenticity. The following narrative excerpt is a good example of the struggle for emancipation I just mentioned: I was an attorney; I practiced law for three years. I hated practicing law. I always had an academic interest in law. I recall a couple of instances when I was doing research in the library for my firm. I’d be alone in the library and I’d get caught up in the research and all carried away. So I’d go on and read about issues that interested me but had nothing to do with my client. Of course you spend most of your life dealing with other attorneys, and as an attorney you’re a hired gun doing other people’s work. So, I had an interest in law but I didn’t want to do other people’s work, I wanted to pursue my own interests. Academia had always been in the back of my mind. I had always had the idea of influencing public debates and being a public intellectual, and I always liked teaching. So eventually it all happened (Assistant Professor, Social Sciences).

It would appear then that inauthenticity is a necessary biographical condition for future experiences of authenticity in such unstable narratives. Turning points, in such stories, mark experiences when inauthenticity becomes so unbearable that a person has to implement change. In other words, in narrative/biographical patterns marked by instability, two things must occur for the experience of authenticity to be possible: either conduct has to change (as the previous two examples showed), or self-values have to change in order to realign themselves with existing and continuing conduct. We can see examples of the latter in the following section. Career as an Accident MU faculty, who chose academia by accident, found themselves ‘‘on the spot’’ at some point in their life and ‘‘fell into it’’ or got ‘‘suckered in.’’ These professors were usually engaged in something else when an opportunity to work in academia came along. Their narratives detail how external forces put them in the conditions where they had to make a choice of either accepting a new identity or sticking to the old one. Accepting a new identity constitutes an ‘‘involuntary’’ epiphany, as the next two excerpts show: I kind of fell into it. My parents really encouraged me to go to grad school but I just wanted to be a ski bum. I really was a ski bum for quite some time, actually. So, I

The Changing Meanings of Authenticity

75

thought I was going to do just my Master’s, I mean, I was completely clueless, and when I arrived in my department everybody assumed I was going do my PhD. I really had no idea at the time what a PhD was, but I was told that as a PhD student I’d have a semester paid for in Paris and I thought, hey I’ll do a PhD! (Professor, Social Sciences).

An involuntary epiphany is an epiphany nevertheless. For example, by finding out that graduate studies would give her an opportunity to travel and have a good time, this professor realized that she could pursue her lifestyle and enjoy her passions. But whereas a conventional epiphany is one in which the self agentically comes to the realization that a new course of action is necessary, an involuntary epiphany is one in which a new course of action has already taken place, and after being ‘‘suckered in’’ or having ‘‘fallen into it’’ all one has to do is sail along the new current and enjoy the ride. Take for example the next excerpt: here too a career is chosen by accident and here too the story’s protagonist simply needs to realign her selfvalues with the new course of events: I was a philosophy major as an undergrad. I did awful. I was a horrible student, I almost flunked out. I didn’t have the grades to get into grad school, so I went into the domestic peace core and they sent me to the Texas-Mexico border, where I met my husband. And I worked there doing economic development with impoverished people and it occurred to me that nobody really knew how to do anything. The program was very poorly planned and I thought that the only way you could know what work was to be done was to understand the culture, and that was anthropology. I wanted to do applied anthropology but I got suckered into the academic life because my father was a professor, and my mother was a professor, and my husband was a professor. What I specifically want to do is make students aware of cultures that are different from theirs, and to make their approach to people that are not exactly like them more humane. That’s my primary goal in doing what I do (Assistant Professor, Social Sciences).

To maintain a sense of coherence, this professor found herself embracing certain aspects of the profession (teaching and service) while distancing herself from others (research). And this is obviously an important characteristic of academic work: while a professor may feel authentic about one aspect of work, it is possible that other aspects will be sources of discontent and inauthenticity. Life stories may become quite complex as a result. While a narrative account of an aspect of work such as teaching and the related identity as teacher may be marked by a Panglossian sense of progression, another thread in the narrative may be marked by a continued downward slide. In relation to authenticity this is possible because the sense of self is always contingent and situational and because emotional experiences are naturally complex and even contradictory. Different identities and different values do compete over the definition of the situation and whenever such competition exists the emotional experience of authenticity may be muted

76

PHILLIP VANNINI

and ambivalent. Because the concept of the true self (advanced by Holstein & Gubrium, 2000; Erickson, 1995) is contingent, situational, and based on local discursive practices, it is still possible to make sense of experiences, such as the one discussed next, that are fragmented and potentially contradictory. Consider the following excerpt from my interview with Frank: Frank: I used to think of myself as y ok, I’m a teacher, but when I’m conducting I’m a conductor, or when I’m singing I’m a singer. I think the older I got, the more those three areas have become integrated. They are aspects of the same job, of the same self. They are different, but they are aspects of the same. When I sing, I need to be very selffocused, very self-oriented. But when I teach I need to be very other-oriented. You see when I teach the goal is to get them, the students, to communicate to the audience. When I sing, the goal is to communicate to the audience, there is no middle-man. Interviewer: But, which one is your real self? Frank: You see, that’s a great question and one that I have wrestled with to a great extent. I don’t think any one aspect is more authentic than the other. I think, however, that if I spend too much time doing one or the other, wearing just one hat and ignoring the others, then it is frustrating. I need to go back and forth. My personality is such that I need to go back and forth. I need to be alone, and absorb, and reflect, and then I need to get into a group situation. I think it depends on each person, I tend to be very pragmatic about this, I mean it’s my nature and I’ve always made the choice to be myself.

Much like Frank, other individuals can experience authenticity in diverse situations without being incoherent. Erickson’s (1995) remarks on the transsituational nature of authenticity, and especially her Goffmanian emphasis on the multi-faceted nature of the self and felt-identity are here clearly illustrative of how this can be possible. Authenticity is an embodied, complex emotional experience, and just like all emotional experiences it works by giving our sense of self and our self-narratives a sense of continuity. In sum, authenticity as an emotional experience informs our life stories, and in turn our storied collection of experiences and their interpretations will inform our continuous emotional connection with our lifeworld. Authenticity as Motivation Let us turn back to our reflection on the valued endpoints of professors’ stories. As I briefly discussed earlier, my data showed that values such as knowledge, freedom of intellectual expression, discovery, and creativity are undoubtedly important to most professors. Throughout their narratives in fact professors tended to select events relevant to the endpoint of their occupational choice; endpoints which emphasized the importance of such values. For example in one of the excerpts reported earlier I discussed the

The Changing Meanings of Authenticity

77

story of a political scientist who found his previous work for a law firm increasingly intolerable and also found his decision to work in academia a logical consequence of his stance on the value of autonomy. But in other professors’ narratives as well a state to be reached (freedom and autonomy) and one to be avoided (dependence and lack of control) were always present. And such states, or valued endpoints, were always connected to the goal of feeling authentic. Professors’ paths leading to academic work showed that what all professors come to embrace is the academic lifestyle. All of the professors I interviewed claimed to value freedom, and also argued that freedom is institutionalized in academic work (at least ideally) through regulations on academic freedom and in general through the very culture of the professoriat. Because professors find the value of freedom to be important for the definition of their true self, and because freedom is very important for the definition of academic work, circumstances that lead to the sacrifice of professors’ freedom are also circumstances that lead professors to experience a friction between their self-values and their conduct. The value of freedom and related feelings of authenticity, therefore, not only function as structural conditions of work but also as a source of authenticity and motivation, as the following excerpt shows: What has really brought me to the academic career is the autonomy and independence that it gives you. I hated being told when to be in the office, when to be in places. I’m just not that type of person; I don’t think most academics are. Yeah, autonomy and flexibility are very important: I get to choose what I want to study, I get to choose when I want to do it, for the most part, and I like the idea of tenure. You have a lot of things within your control (Assistant Professor, Social Sciences).

Freedom has many different meanings that range from freedom of speech and thought, to freedom of creative expression, and even to freedom of going to the office or lab whenever one pleases. The value of freedom, in all its meanings, is important both for the definition and realization of professors’ true selves and for the definition of academic culture at MU and presumably at other universities as well. Seemingly, the benefits of working in an environment where freedom is so highly valued even offsets the relatively low pay that most professors receive and the large amount of work they perform, as these excerpts show: Academia fits my life really well. It’s a heck of a lot of work, and it’s a heck of lot of stress, but it allows me to y , well, it fits my personality, the academic freedom that we have, and the freedom that we have to structure our time, and I’ve always been someone who works very well on my own, and structure myself. And I love to travel, and being

78

PHILLIP VANNINI free to take summers off or travel for conferences is really nice (Associate Professor, Social Sciences). I found that I liked the lifestyle. I wanted to have a job that would allow me to continue learning for the rest of my life, and a job in which I would have freedom to pursue my interests without asking for someone’s permission. The academic lifestyle is absolutely my ideal (Professor, Social Sciences).

Many of the professors I interviewed expressed similar feelings, the freedom ‘‘to be left alone’’ to pursue what they find meaningful and valuable. In other words, being free from close supervision and control allows professors to dedicate themselves to the pursuit of their interests and to feel authentic. In fact, professors are not simply interested in learning or in diffusing knowledge; many professors are very passionate about their work. Passion shapes their work as much as it shapes their identity; it drives them to work 60 or 70 h a week for a relatively modest salary, and it drives them to read thousands of books and articles throughout their careers, or to fight with colleagues over a seemingly inconsequential matter at a faculty meeting. Such passion is a very important component of professors’ intrinsic motivation to perform their work. In summary then the link between freedom, passion, authenticity, and motivation works as follows: data showed that professors find the values of freedom, independence, discovery, creativity, and intellectual expression highly important for the definition of their true self. Such self-meanings have led them to choose to work in academia. Because the academic lifestyle allows professors to be congruent with their values, professors feel authentic while performing their work. And because authenticity is a positive emotion, professors feel content in the performance of their work even in spite of decreases in extrinsic motivation. Changes in Self-Meanings across Careers What kind of changes in relation to authenticity do professors experience through their careers? Interview data showed that experiences of authenticity are equally common throughout a career. In other words, there are no data to support the contention that authenticity would be more or less common as faculty age and retire. Narratives do show, however, that professors continuously negotiate and redefine what they value as well as the meanings they assign to their true self. Data also show the following: whenever self-meanings and self-values change, professors also change their conduct to feel authentic. And whenever professors cannot change their conduct – for example, because of structural limitations – experiences of inauthenticity will occur. For example, when I spoke to Jane – who, as a

The Changing Meanings of Authenticity

79

young instructor had a lowly and tenuous part-time appointment in the humanities and a part-time appointment in the social sciences – I learned that she had recently realized that the academic world had come to resemble more and more the corporate world that she had left in disgust. In the recent past, Jane had turned to radical progressive politics for the definition of her political identity, and as her values changed so did her views of the meanings of academic research and teaching. In other words, as her self-values had changed, she felt that she had to quit her academic job because it made her feel incongruent with her true self. Indeed Jane explained to me that she was getting ready to leave academia because she had never felt so inauthentic: In a truly public education is where I wanted to be, in various kinds of teaching positions, from K-12 to the university; I wanted to be responsible. Like I said, I tend to be far more left than even some of my colleagues, I believe that the state has the responsibility to fund education for everyone and I believe that my central responsibility, through critical pedagogy, is to lead my students to question social inequalities. But given the direction that the university and higher education are taking, and given the position of the humanities, I feel that at some point I have to be a salesman for my discipline. Take all these grants that are made available to various professors in this school, the various Boeing grants, and Microsoft grants, it seems that corporations want us to train better workers for them, and where is the place of the humanities in all of this? You know, you feel like you have to justify your existence. And it bothers me, you know, I mean, I feel like I should be able to talk about what I do, but to sell it, or to justify your existence, you know, that bothers me. That’s why I’m leaving. Screw marketability, I’m just going to do what I love.

Jane’s clash with the changing structure of higher education is important because her decision to quit rather than feel inauthentic supports Gecas’ (1986, 1991) conceptualization of authenticity as a positive motivation and inauthenticity as a negative motivation. Self-meanings change irregularly throughout a professor’s career, but a certain imposition of regularity comes from the practices that universities adopt that segment the occupation of professors. For traditional faculty a career has at least four important institutional turning points: hiring, tenure, the promotion to full professor, and retirement. With each turning point, self-meanings can potentially become incongruent with a professor’s new institutional roles and responsibilities and lead to experiences of inauthenticity. But are such institutional turning points significant? Consider the tenure process, for example. Interviews with MU faculty showed that for faculty currently employed as full professors, tenure turned out to be relatively inconsequential, as the following excerpt illustrates: I’ve changed in the sense that I’ve started to write more books. In the past I’d write more articles than books, because, you know, that was the requirement. But everything else is

80

PHILLIP VANNINI just the same. If I wanted to coast, I could. But why? I like what I do (Professor, Social Sciences).

Writing books instead of articles may seem like a significant change to external observers, but it was not so for this professor. As she explained, she found that not much had changed with her receiving tenure because the intrinsic motivation she derived from research and teaching had always been the same. For other senior professors’ tenure was also relatively insignificant as it led to no major change.5 However, growing older – regardless of institutional qualification or formal career stage – seemed to lead many professors to adapt some new values. The volume of publications, for example, becomes less and less meaningful as time goes on. There is an insignificant difference, professors explained, between 40 and 45 publications, for example, so after a while many professors feel it is more rewarding and authenticating to pursue more meaningful goals, such as research that can actually make a difference. For others the change in self-meanings occurs within the realm of teaching, as this excerpt shows: My goal at this point is to continue to make contributions to the field, and to do a good job at prepping graduate students to enter their careers. It’s more gratifying for me to hear that a graduate student of mine has been accepted into the graduate school that he wanted to get into, than to get a letter in the mail that says your paper has been accepted. For example I had a female student last year who wanted to get into the graduate program at a very good school and she thought that she had no chance whatsoever. It turns out that she called me on a Sunday, at home, and she said to me that she was just on the phone with that university, and she was incredulous that this had happened. That’s a lot better than a publication; at this point in my career that’s more gratifying (Associate Professor, Social Sciences).

For others, feelings of satisfaction and authenticity may come from contributing one’s time and energy to the improvement of one’s department or college. Some tenured professors in fact choose to become chairs or administrators in the years before retirement. I became very interested into administration and I had always been interested in helping people more than in my own projects. Working as a chair, and being a very otheroriented person, I had a very difficult time getting many me-oriented professors to see that their egoism went against the interest of the department as a whole. For me it’s less of what I’m interested in than a synthesis of what everybody is interested in. [ y ] So my inclination to be expressive and to allow for my individual expression, you know, that essential core value for my self is there in everything that I do. It’s there when I play in an orchestra and it’s there when I do administrative works. You know if you’re simply dealing with a budget, if the budget is just there, it’s meaningless, and you can’t advocate for it, you can’t even feel good when you get an addition to it (Professor, Humanities).

The Changing Meanings of Authenticity

81

Finally, for others change in self-values will lead to feelings of inauthenticity mixed with apathy and alienation. Some faculty members grow ‘‘out of it’’ as they age because their passions wane and they feel that ‘‘writing yet another piece isn’t going to make any difference’’ – as Mark, an associate professor in the humanities, put it. Mark’s feelings of inauthenticity came not only from having to occasionally publish research to appease colleagues, but also from having to ‘‘baby-sit 20-year olds’’ in the classroom. A change in conduct (for example, by moving on to another less undesirable job) seemed unreasonable to Mark, as he neared retirement. No matter what the extent of the self-change is, my analysis leads me to suggest the following: (a) the true self undergoes constant negotiation and redefinition as the values and meanings associated with it change over the life course; (b) values and meanings associated with the true self are especially liable to change at institutional turning points, that is, when the social roles of a person change, or when the expectations and norms inherent in these roles change; (c) at such institutional turning points authenticity continues to work as a positive motivational force and inauthenticity as a negative motivational force. Therefore, individuals will either accept or reject the new institutional definition of the situation to make it congruent with their true self, or will accept or reject the values inherent with their new role in relation to what makes them feel authentic; (d) the discursive construction of a true self – based on the trans-situational emotional experience of authenticity throughout the life course – will continue to inform how individuals (professors in this case) make sense of their past, present, and future; (e) however, changing the self may be across biographical time, narrative events, and characters will still be plotted coherently and reinterpreted in relation to changing self-values and meanings. In sum, by looking at professors’ occupational narratives we have learned that their self-meanings do change, but the frequency and intensity of experiences of authenticity does not, because their conduct continues to adjust to their new self-meanings.

Occupational Structure and Authenticity At this point we need to address one important and final question. It would seem obvious that recent changes in the occupational structure of the professoriat and in both the culture and structure of higher education are affecting professors’ experience of authenticity. In the following section I continue to examine my data in search of answer to the question: Are there differences among professors’ experiences of authenticity across rank and

82

PHILLIP VANNINI

hiring cohorts? Are there differences, for example, between instructors and associate professors, or between tenured and untenured faculty? And are there differences between professors in their sixties and professors in their thirties? In what follows, I switch my attention away from both phenomenological description of experiences of authenticity and inauthenticity and from interpretation of individual biographies, and instead turn the focus on my analysis of the occupational contexts of authenticity to understand differences and similarities across individuals. There exist important differences between professional expectations for younger and older professors and between untenured and tenured faculty. The following two excerpts, the first by a young instructor and the second by a senior professor, summarize some of the differences: Academia is really weird in how it is administered. You have the old guard and the old culture with an old concept of tenure and then you have the new guard in the administration that came in during the 1980s, with this sort of yuppie mentality and these business rules, but then they don’t fully go by the business model, you still have the tenure system and all these old rules (Instructor, Humanities). For me it’s been a good career on the whole. I think that the people that were here early had a bit better situation. I’m just worried about the people that are coming in. The squeeze is becoming tighter and tighter (Professor, Natural Sciences).

At MU those faculty members who received tenure in the 1970s or earlier had to deal with different expectations and fewer pressures than younger professors now do. Back in the 1970s, budget crises had not ‘‘strangled’’ the university yet, as some senior professors remarked. With ‘‘the squeeze becoming tighter and tighter’’ from the years of the Reagan administration onward, universities have become more careful about giving out tenure, promotion, and even hiring tenure-track faculty. As a consequence, younger professors (most of those who are currently working as assistant professors) are aware of the higher expectations that are in place. Stronger institutional pressures sometimes lead younger professors to conformity to institutional norms, and thus in some cases to conduct incongruent with self-values. For example, in order to secure publications or grant support, an assistant professor might have to put teaching aside or might have to significantly alter one’s favored research program; and this might lead them to experience inauthenticity. A clear example of how expectations operate differently nowadays comes from looking at the tenure process. Currently at MU there are two types of socialization for tenure: implicit and explicit. Explicit socialization is typical of recent years, and it occurs when a department chair and/or tenure committee explicitly tells an assistant professor what the expectations for tenure

The Changing Meanings of Authenticity

83

are. Departments that opt for an explicit socialization also often tend to provide the tenure-track professor with a variety of employee-friendly services to guide the new professor through the process. For example, a department may match the tenure-track professor to a senior mentor or even to a tenure committee made of three senior professors who dispense advice, counsel, and guidance to the novice. Implicit tenure socialization is more typical of the past. Department chairs in the past tended to be more vague in communicating expectations for tenure and they relied on the awareness that: ‘‘academics just knew, because it was part of the culture’’ as a professor put it. Therefore, older faculty received minimal communication regarding tenure expectations, while young professors are now being ‘‘babied’’ as a department chair put it. But together with advice and counsel, younger professors also receive considerable pressure from their tenure advisors/committees. Generally, interview data show that current tenure-track faculty members at MU are pressured to publish more, to publish more in ‘‘leading’’ academic journals, to spend less time with teaching-related tasks, and to apply for more external grant support than their senior colleagues. Over the 6- year-long tenure track these demands regularly lead professors to feel stress and at times inauthenticity. In contrast, not many current senior professors admitted having experienced great stress, pressure, demands to conform, and consequently many inauthentic moments on their path to tenure, as the following excerpts show: Back then tenure was a fairly routine thing. I wasn’t even aware of being voted on. My chair called me and said you got tenure (Professor, Humanities). I remember worrying a little bit that I’d get tenure and worrying a little bit that I’d get promoted to full professor. But it was so long ago, that frankly it’s a different system than it is now. If you’re speaking to younger professors, assistant professors, they’ll tell you that the way the university works now, the tenure process is so rigorous and so demanding and I’m not sure that the things we look for ensure that we make the best possible decisions. This university is so stuck in a rut in finding evidence in certain kinds of publications, and in certain kinds of pieces of evidence that will swing the power whether that person should be tenured. So, it creates an artificial atmosphere in which you really don’t find the best qualities of someone who can be a really brilliant teacher and really inspire students and really make this university a world-class institution and a teaching institution, which ought to be two of our main objectives (Professor, Chair, Natural Sciences).

With decreasing funds and mounting skepticism toward the economic feasibility of the tenure system, an increasing public demand for accountability and higher productivity, and the high volume of PhDs seeking employment

84

PHILLIP VANNINI

(see Altbach, 1997; Levine, 1997), universities like MU can now afford to raise tenure expectations and impose new and greater demands on young professors. New demands and the younger people who face them, however, now coexist in the same workplace along with the older faculty who benefited from a less demanding system, and this is often a source of friction between junior and senior professors at MU, and in higher education in general (Levine, 1997). While all departments these days push younger faculty to work harder than their older colleagues did before tenure, many departments at MU also have the ‘‘dead-wood’’ problem: professors who have gotten tenure and are no longer productive thus making it difficult for departments and colleges to have the monetary resources to hire new, more active, and productive younger faculty. I mention the ‘‘dead-wood’’ problem here because it is also closely related to the role that instructors have begun to play in the contemporary American university, and also at MU. The hiring of instructors not only gives universities the economic flexibility that they need to deal with shrinking resources (in part caused by salaries going to professors who abuse the tenure system), but it also creates a highly hierarchical system in which tenure works as the main discriminating factor. In such system some instructors feel they end up publishing three times as much and teaching twice as much while receiving a third of the pay that some of their senior colleagues receive. This state of affairs leads to some instructors’ feeling contempt toward the institution, as well as alienation, exploitation, and inauthenticity. Through their stories many young MU tenure-track professors – currently in their thirties – told me they feel that tenure would be a highly desirable state of things for them because they believe it would give them the stability that senior professors have. Stability for them translates into a more relaxed work environment where they feel they can dedicate themselves to the pursuit of their values, passions, goals, and ideals without having to worry as much about conforming to institutional demands. Young professors who have just earned tenure clearly feel the relief, as the following excerpts show: Once I got tenure it felt liberating in the fact that I felt more comfortable (Associate Professor, Natural Sciences). After I got tenure I felt like I wasn’t forced to do this by the system, I felt like I was doing this because of my values, or work ethic, or whatever (Associate Professor, Social Sciences).

But while it is fair to say that current MU assistant professors feel more pressure to publish research than assistant professors did 30 or 25 years ago,

The Changing Meanings of Authenticity

85

it would not be accurate to say that current MU assistant professors have fewer occasions to feel authentic than current senior professors. In fact, the data show that while young professors on a tenure track need to deal with the demands of a tenure-track position, tenured professors need to deal with the increasing demands and responsibilities of a senior professor. Senior professors are often asked to dedicate more time to institutional governance, and for those faculty members who view themselves as dedicated researchers and/or teachers, having to spend time away from research and/or teaching may cause them to feel inauthentic. Beside administrative duties many senior professors feel they have the responsibility to serve the university, the community in which they live, or the larger community of intellectuals with whom they interact, and as a result the time that they can freely dedicate to the pursuit of their passions, goals, and values may decrease. However, it is a mistake to suggest that tenure always results in a decrease in academic pressures, as the following excerpt shows: Demands have increased as my career has gone on. Some people have taken tenure as a sign that they could relax and they have done that. I’m not like that. Because I love to do research and I love to play with discovery. And then there is a whole bunch of stuff that is quite positive. You get invited to lectures and conferences, you get invited into governmental committees, you know all these things put you in the spotlight and they’re ego-massaging (Professor, Social Sciences).

So far, I have mostly looked at tenured and tenure-track faculty, but do all instructors feel underprivileged and marginalized? Judging from my sample, instructors are a very diverse group and it is almost impossible to come to general conclusions about them collectively. There are at least two groups of instructors: instructors who have chosen their position willingly, and those who find themselves to be ‘‘stuck’’ and in desperate search of something better. Much of the literature on faculty portrays instructors as marginalized, alienated victims of a system that has spun out of control, but at MU the majority of instructors feel quite true to themselves in their occupational identity because it was their free and conscious choice to work as instructors. Happy in their basements, where their offices are usually located, many instructors at MU in fact want nothing to do with the ‘‘rat race,’’ the ‘‘publish or perish,’’ and the ‘‘business’’ world typical of the ‘‘upper floors.’’ These instructors were perfectly true to themselves in the context of teaching, and while spending time with otherwise neglected undergraduate students, writing letters of recommendation for them, and helping freshmen and sophomores catch up on their homework. After working in their position for anywhere between 4 and 12 years, these instructors showed mixed

86

PHILLIP VANNINI

feelings about the idea of tenure, as the following exemplifies: That’s a double-edged sword. The tenure track is a nightmare, in a lot of ways. There is security in it, and at the same time there are a lot of advantages to my current job in that I don’t have to do committee work, I don’t have the tenure bear on my shoulders. Sure on the other hand I could be fired, but why? The department needs me. No one wants to teach the classes I do. So in a sense they need me and they leave me alone to do what I do because nobody is interested (Instructor, Natural Sciences).

The case was different, however, for two instructors who did not make the conscious choice to take limited-term appointments. These instructors felt they had found themselves in a position in which they had the choice between abandoning academia altogether or taking a temporary position. While they admitted that choosing to work for a university was a decision motivated by their long-term values, they also complained that they regularly felt under-appreciated, underpaid, and overworked and very much ‘‘stuck.’’ This sense of being stuck came especially from the realization that the large amount of classes they had to teach prevented them from conducting research, something they felt they need to do in order to make themselves marketable for tenure-track positions. In conclusion, there are important differences between younger and older faculty at MU. Younger faculty members who want to achieve tenure have to meet higher demands than their older counterparts did. Nevertheless, for younger professors expectations are clearer, more explicit, and more strongly internalized than they were for their older counterparts. Therefore, even though they may have to bow to institutional pressure more frequently than their older counterparts did, they are also more aware than their older colleagues were that this is now part of common set of conventions and practices in the contemporary academic social world – and thus less of a cause for inauthenticity. On the other hand, older professors commonly experience moments of inauthenticity too because they need to meet several demands of their own, mostly dealing with having to perform more and more service and institutional governance as years go by – tasks that most MU professors do not value highly. Differences in terms of authenticity between younger and older professors and among ranks thus originate as a result of different practices and conventions existent in the contemporary social world of academia.

CONCLUSION My goal in writing this paper was to apply the diverse body of theory on authenticity built by Gecas (1986, 1991, 2000), Holstein and Gubrium

The Changing Meanings of Authenticity

87

(2000), Turner (1976), Turner and Schutte (1981), and Erickson (1995). Despite their differences these authors believe that a symbolic interactionist approach to authenticity must encompass a phenomenological and interpretive analysis. Following the research strategy of interpretive biography, (Denzin, 1989) I have attempted to apply symbolic interactionist theory in order to analyze authenticity as the emotional experience that professors perceive when acting in congruence with their self-values. My research has shown that self-values are extremely variable over the life course, but despite such variability, professors manage to maintain a sense of biographical coherence that allows them to make sense of their present, past, and future in relation to their sense of true self. The narratives of the professors studied also indicate that the true self works as a source of motivation, by influencing how professors will define their work situation and therefore how they will act as a consequence. By analyzing epiphanies I also suggested that moments of intense inauthenticity tend to constitute turning points in professors’ narratives. And finally, I have demonstrated that professors’ narratives, while similar in structure, vary widely in content. I explained this variation by contextualizing professors’ stories within the recent history of MU and higher education in general. Throughout the pages of this paper I have argued that for the self to experience authenticity what is needed is not a metaphysical notion of the ‘‘true self’’ but instead a pragmatic view of the reflexive self’s ability to define its own authenticity. In doing so, my argument has been in line with the work of Turner (1976), Hochschild (1983), Erickson (1991, 1995), Gecas (1986, 1991, 2000), and Holstein and Gubrium (2000). Such social psychological and symbolic interactionist conceptualization of authenticity has allowed me to ground authenticity not in ideology but in phenomenological experience, and precisely in the experience of being true to one’s self. Such experience, as I explained, is the feeling that one’s self-values are congruent with one’s conduct. The value of this conceptualization resides in its pragmatic simplicity but also in its breadth. In fact, because individuals may assign different meanings to their selves, the sociological study of authenticity becomes a true exercise in understanding people, their feelings, and their conduct rather than an act of moral judgment. Such conceptualization, as explained earlier, also allows us to see authenticity within everyday contexts of concerted action, thus enabling us to focus not on microdynamics exclusively but instead on the meso domain of sociological analysis. There is wide consensus that academia is undergoing a variety of crises. Among the most widely lamented are the crisis of freedom of academic expression, the crisis of the tenure system, the crisis of academic

88

PHILLIP VANNINI

administration and academic leadership, the crisis of the humanities, the crisis of teaching, the crisis concerning the student population’s level of preparation, the crisis in the public worth of the university, the crisis of intellectual leadership, and of course a plethora of financial crises. There is also a wide consensus over another fact of academic life: there are fewer and fewer material rewards available for the professoriat. Long years of schooling lead to years of uncertainty at worst and a middle-class salary at best. To boot, academics are generally right when they complain they are overworked, under-appreciated, and misunderstood (whenever at least someone deigns to listen to them). As limited term and part-time appointments grow in volume, and ‘‘traditional’’ tenure-track faculty careers rapidly become a minority, even the old certainties of tenure seem to fade away. So, with all these problems, why is authenticity in the academic world important? Because professors love their work due to the intrinsic pleasure they derive from it. Their intrinsic motivation stems from their love of freedom to pursue what is meaningful to them. Hence, studying the meanings that individuals give to themselves in relation to their work, or lifeworld, is important for our understanding of their social worlds. Professors who feel authentic will be prone to carry out good work, that is, to teach with care and passion, to pursue difficult research questions, to recreate an institutional environment that fosters the pursuit of knowledge in an effective and responsible way, and to provide society with direct benefits. Conversely, professors who feel inauthentic while performing their work would instead be prone to perceive the meaninglessness and uselessness of the academic world, would become estranged from themselves, would neglect students and public alike, and would not serve in the quest for knowledge that is beneficial to our society. If indeed professors are witnessing some level of erosion in autonomy and self-control over their work performance, capacity for self-monitoring, internal motivation, professional commitment, and sense of community it is easy to foresee that at least some of them will be experiencing more and more often feelings of inauthenticity. Whether people perform face work on an airplane cabin – like Arlie Hochschild’s flight attendants – or in academic offices, classrooms, and hallways, their experience of authenticity defines their relation with their colleagues, superiors, clients, subordinates, and themselves. And whether it is emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983) or restrictions to one’s academic freedom, occupations make demands that push workers to question their personal values, ideals, goals, and motivation. How workers will negotiate with personal and institutional pulls and pushes will ultimately define the nature of their occupation and their own experiences at work. In an

The Changing Meanings of Authenticity

89

occupational culture that puts the highest premium on freedom and intrinsic motivation authenticity cannot be anything but the most important aspect of work. Whether professors will have to yield even more freedom to various institutional forces, and whether authenticity and intrinsic motivation will continue to play an important role in the definition of the occupational culture of faculty will ultimately depend on how well they will utilize their own power to negotiate with the changing growing concerns of American higher education.

NOTES 1. As I further explain below, from a symbolic interactionist perspective we can conceptualize authenticity as the feeling of being true to one’s self (Erickson, 1995; Gecas, 1986, 1991; Turner, 1976; Turner & Schutte, 1981). 2. Mountain State University is a fictitious name created to protect the confidentiality of those employed by it. 3. My investigation of ruling relations – which draws from the analytical framework of institutional ethnography – is treated in a separate publication (identifying reference). 4. This question was asked twice. At first it was asked in relation to authenticity and being true to one’s self and later it was asked in relation to inauthenticity and being untrue to one’s self. 5. There is an important difference between older and younger professors as I will discuss later.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT I am immensely grateful to Viktor Gecas for the help, advice, and support provided throughout the entire process of conducting and publishing my dissertation research.

REFERENCES Altbach, P. (1997). An international academic crisis? The American professoriate in comparative perspective. Daedalus, 126, 315–338. Bowen, H., & Schuster, J. (1986). American professors: A national resource imperiled. New York: Oxford University Press. Clark, B. (1987). The academic life: Small worlds, different worlds. New York: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Clark, B. (1997). Small worlds, different worlds: The uniqueness and troubles of the American academic professions. Daedalus, 126, 21–42. Denzin, N. (1984). On understanding emotion. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Denzin, N. (1989). Interpretive biography. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

90

PHILLIP VANNINI

Erickson, R. (1995). The importance of authenticity for self and society. Symbolic Interaction, 18, 121–144. Ferrara, A. (1998). Reflective authenticity: Rethinking the project of modernity. London, New York: Routledge. Gecas, V. (1986). The motivational significance of self-concept for socialization theory. Advances in Group Processes, 3, 131–156. Gecas, V. (1991). The self-concept as a basis for a theory of motivation. In: J. Howard & P. Callero (Eds.), The self-society dynamic: Cognition, emotion and action (pp. 171–188). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gecas, V. (2000). Value identities, self-motives, and social-movements. In: S. Stryker, T. J. Owens & R. W. White (Eds.), Self, identity, and social movements (pp. 93–109). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the management of a spoiled identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Golomb, J. (1998). In search of authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus. London: Routledge. Gould, E. (2003). The university in a corporate culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hochschild, A. (1983). The managed heart. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Holstein, J., & Gubrium, J. (2000). The self we live by: Narrative identity in a postmodern world. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Levine, A. (1997). How the academic profession is changing. Daedalus, 126, 1–20. Maines, D. (1993). Narrative’s moment and sociology’s phenomena: Toward a narrative sociology. The Sociological Quarterly, 34, 17–38. Maines, D., & Ulmer, J. (1993). The relevance of narrative for interactionist thought. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 14, 109–124. Slaughter, S., & Leslie, L. (1997). Academic capitalism: Politics, policies, and the entrepreneurial university. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University. Smith, C. (2000). Market values in American higher education. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Turner, R. (1976). The real self: From institution to impulse. American Journal of Sociology, 81, 989–1016. Turner, R., & Schutte, J. (1981). The true self method for studying the self-conception. Symbolic Interaction, 4, 1–20. White, G., & Hauck, F. (2000). Campus Inc.: Corporate power in the Ivory Tower. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

STIGMA AND THE SINGLE GIRL: PERFORMING GENDER, SEX, AND THE CITY$ Tonya Davidson ABSTRACT In this paper I analyze Sex and the City as performances of contemporary post-modern culture of femininity and engage in a multi-modal, semiotic reading of their socio-cultural significance. In particular, I argue that the same discursive formation underlies the ideology of the show: a discourse largely coinciding with the Standard North American Family Code (Smith, 1999) and therefore a discourse that stigmatizes single women and reinforces the value of marriage as both symbolic and material capital. Drawing in part from Goffman, I argue that an oppositional reading of the show also yields another interesting connotation: the show offers its viewers techniques and scripts of stigma resistance.

$

Tonya Davidson is not usually so preoccupied with being single. If she could choose to be a Sex and the City character it would be Carrie because Carrie is so cool and witty and she’s a writer. Tonya is currently in a Doctoral program at the University of Alberta.

Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Volume 29, 93–116 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0163-2396/doi:10.1016/S0163-2396(06)29009-4

93

94

TONYA DAVIDSON The fact is sometimes it’s really hard to walk in a single woman’s shoes, that’s why we need really special ones now and then to make the walk a little more fun!  Carrie, ‘‘A Woman’s Right to Shoes’’

I am a big fan of Sex and the City (SATC). If I could I would wear a flashy SATC t-shirt y but of course SATC would never make t-shirts-too tacky! Instead on occasion I order fancy martinis, and in the vein of my SATC muse Carrie Bradshaw (played in the show by Sarah Jessica Parker), I feel the urge to ponder: ‘‘In a city like Victoria y’’ As a single, twenty-something woman living in urban Canada SATC is nothing but a fantasy world for me, however this fantasy is a somewhat realistic progression from my childhood dream of getting married on my parent’s farm, wearing a gown with a kitten and puppy applique´d on the bodice and inviting my whole 4-H club. Although I don’t plan on ever owning $40,000 in shoes or ever being mistaken for a high-class hooker, my plan of living in a classy one-bedroom apartment in Ottawa’s Upper West Side (OK, there is no Upper West Side in Ottawa, it’s Elgin Street y) and typing my dissertation on this laptop while looking out over a fantastic city skyline, then taking a break to dance, drink, or ponder about life, love, and everything in between is in part inspired by SATC – and this I think is a largely realistic dream. It is sad to plan your nuptials when you are single. But, to dream of a nice home, good friends, and a generally happy and exciting life is something you can actually plan on achieving. Popular culture creates and defines subjects; much like SATC defines – at least in part – me. The creation of the single female subject in popular culture has an impact on the lived experiences and identity-creation processes of us single women. Popular culture can contribute to the definition of single women as pathetic spinsters or swinging glamorized singles, for example. ‘‘The gendered identity is an interactional production’’ (Denzin, 1992, p. 29) created and recreated through the interaction of various discourses and interpellation of various ideologies (Althusser, 1971). ‘‘Emotional codes, specific to each gender, are learned as language is acquired. These codes interact with the sexual selves and sexual identities that circulate in the various arenas of popular culture in everyday life’’ (Denzin, 1992, p. 29). At 24 and single, I have a happy and fulfilling life. In 2004, the assumption that I should by now be married or at least seriously engaged has largely subsided. In fact, this past summer while I was writing this paper, I went to two weddings and both the times there were no comments or

Stigma and the Single Girl

95

suggestions that I must try to catch the bouquet – leading me to believe that maybe singles aren’t as stigmatized as I had originally thought. Or perhaps, all of my relatives are likewise fans of SATC and can appreciate that my situation as a swinging single in the metropolis of Victoria, BC is far from dire! Despite this, I am still surrounded by not-so-subtle suggestions that eventually to not become sad, a man is necessary. Need evidence? Turn to ‘‘The Life Channel’’ or to shows like ‘‘The Wedding Story,’’ ‘‘The Bachelor,’’ ‘‘Newlyweds y’’

MANLESS IN NEW YORK CITY Being single is not easy. Never mind the pain of doing housework all by yourself; singles outright suffer from lack of social acceptance. Today, the media have a fundamental role in shaping this stigma. Dominant culture and the media construct ‘‘singlehood as characterized not only by the absence of a healthy relationship, but also implies that one has no agency, that one is being acted upon, rather than acting’’ (Zajicek & Koski, 2003, p. 400). But the media are not alone in making our life less pleasant than our fantasies. Consider this: singles pay more taxes, we get more nosy inquiries into our love lives – often by quite distant acquaintances, we are required to sit beside and appease the crazy elderly relative at weddings, and as the worst offence we are totally uninvited to gatherings where an even-number is required (the exclusive couple parties). This state of things leads one Carrie Bradshaw to ask, ‘‘When did being alone become the modern day equivalent to being a leper?’’ SATC acknowledges this stigma of single women and the symbolic capital associated with marriage for women. The series focuses on the lives of four trendy women living in New York City, women who despite their successes deal with issues of single stigma every day of their life. The show’s protagonist – Carrie Bradshaw – is a New York Star sex columnist. Carrie has as her muses her three close girlfriends Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), and Samantha (Kim Cattrall). Miranda is a witty, cynical lawyer. Charlotte is a hopelessly romantic art dealer, and Samantha is an older, unapologetically promiscuous self-employed public relations woman. Ever since its first airing in 1998 on HBO, SATC has been a unique pop culture phenomenon. As observers have pointed out ‘‘Few TV series have had such an impact on our contemporary culture as Sex and the City’’ (Akass & McCabe, 2004, p. 2). SATC has found its way onto the cover of Time magazine, and even prompted Time’s editors to headline ‘‘Who Needs a Husband?’’ SATC constitutes an innovation in the world of television

96

TONYA DAVIDSON

because it celebrates women, single and independent (see Kokoli, 2003). A rarity on television: a growing trend in society. Erving Goffman’s work on stigma is instrumental in understanding how single women are pathologized. However, Goffman’s work neglects to analyze that ways in which the stigmatized resist their stigmas. For example, ‘‘Goffman’s implicit theory of resistance and agency is relatively weak compared to his analysis of the conservative tendencies of social hierarchies’’ (Branaman, 2001, p. 118). Meanwhile, feminist studies have overwhelming overshadowed stigma theory (Rogers, 2003, p. 73). This paper contributes to the growing literature on feminist applications of stigma theory (West, 1996) and stigma resistance (Zajicek & Koski, 2003, p. 400). We can understand stigma resistance by referring to Dorothy Smith’s notion of ideological code, which she describes as ‘‘a schema that replicates its organization in multiple and various sites’’ (Smith, 1999, p. 159). Smith explains that ‘‘The Standard North American Family’’ (SNAF) is an ideological code in this sense. The code is a conception of ‘‘The Family’’ as a ‘‘legally married couple sharing a household’’ (Smith, 1999, p. 159). To understand how ideological codes are continuously reproduced in our culture it is useful to draw from Pierre Bourdieu’s (1979, p. vii) concept of ‘‘symbolic capital’’ and the accumulation and activation of ‘‘habitus.’’ Bourdieu defines habitus as ‘‘a system of durable, transposable dispositions which functions as the generative basis of structured, objectively unified practices.’’ The SNAF code has long held a strong ideological grip over social relations in the Western world. These discourses are reinforced through behaviors, speech, the interaction order, and visual culture which make up ‘‘habitus.’’ In Western society, the married couple is still upheld as the foundation of a healthy society, and marriage is understood as central to female identity. The ideology of marriage is reinforced through interactions which stigmatize the single. And because marriage is central to female identity, single stigma is more profound for women than for men. Zajicek and Koski (2003, p. 400) for example have argued that ‘‘at some point, single never-married women may be stigmatized because of the dominant construction of women as needing male partners.’’ Brogger (1987, p. 117) has also remarked that, ‘‘for the man marriage is a runway, for the woman, a landing strip,’’ alluding to the central importance of marriage to female identity. Unsurprisingly, I am not that interested in marriage. However, I do feel slightly cheated. Marriage is the one event that guarantees you mention in the old high school gossip mill. And weddings guarantee you a party and an

Stigma and the Single Girl

97

evening full of people telling you that you’re gorgeous and giving you things. Despite the extraordinary things I do as a single person, I am cheated of the party and of the appliances. On SATC there is one touching scene in ‘‘Attack of the 5’10 Woman’’ when Carrie is distraught after reading Mr. Big’s wedding announcement in the newspaper. Charlotte reassures Carrie ‘‘you don’t have to prove anything. You are stunning and intelligent and funny, and what she [Mr. Big’s wife] is married. That’s all!’’ Carrie laments for all single women whose generally well-developed self-esteems are affected by this idea that success for women is tied to marriage. Single stigma is reinforced in many romantic comedies. When Tom Cruise pleads to Renee Zellwegger in Jerry McGuire with that famous line, ‘‘you complete me,’’ I am deeply saddened and dismayed. In ‘‘The Agony and the Extacy,’’ Carrie gets an ad for a dating agency to which Miranda comments: ‘‘Single SINGLE? You don’t even have a nameylook at this: ‘don’t let your soulmate slip away!’ Soulmates only exist in the Hallmark aisle of Dwainury Drugs y it’s still looking outside yourself like you’re not enough.’’ That’s right, single women are perceived as if they are incomplete until a Jerry McGuire comes along, the fact that they are beautiful, intelligent, and funny is secondary. A moral experience occurs when individuals learn of their stigmatized state (Goffman, 1963). For little girls playing with Bridal Barbie, for teen girls spending their allowances on the Prom issues of Teen magazine, and for the thirty-something Bridget Jones’ who spend their disposable income in the ‘‘self-help/ how to find a man’’ section of Barnes and Nobles, single stigma avoidance is not a moral experience but rather an intrinsic aspect of learning how to be a woman. Of course, the problem of ‘‘single stigma,’’ as embodied by the women of SATC, is shaped by class and racial situations. In the 1960s, Betty Friedan dared to name the ‘‘problem that has no name,’’ namely the oppressive lives of White domestic women. As hooks (1984, p. 2) remarked ‘‘Friedan never wondered whether or not the plight of college-educated, white housewives was an adequate reference point by which to gauge the impact of sexism or sexist oppression on the lives of women in American society.’’ Johnson (2002, p. 25) writes that third-wave feminist dialogues, surrounding enjoying and creating positive, unoppressive sexual relationships, is the ‘‘newest incarnation of the ‘problem that has no name.’’’ For her ‘‘Betty Friedan’s code for housewife malaise in the 1950s hints at the emotional distress Gen-X feminists feel, a product of being caught between phases of social change, lodged between the idea of liberation and its incomplete execution’’ (Johnson, 2002, p. 25). Focusing on sexual relationships, and the

98

TONYA DAVIDSON

stigmatization surrounding singlehood as today’s ‘‘problem that has no name’’ perpetuates feminist focus on the interpersonal problems of privileged, largely White women. SATC’s Charlotte is continuously struggling to avoid spinster stigma and achieve the romantic dream. In the episode ‘‘The Baby Shower’’ we can see the most obvious of female stigma avoidance traditions: the hope chest. Charlotte pulls out of her hope chest things she stored away as a child that were to be indicative of her future: a pillow embroidered for her future daughter, a photo of her future husband, city home, and summer house. When childhood is so clearly shaped by the SNAF, it is no wonder that women like Charlotte grow up to read books like ‘‘Marriage Inc.’’ to try to achieve this ideal. In another episode ‘‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful,’’ Charlotte becomes so absorbed in the idea of ending her singleness that she visits a tarot reader with only one question in mind: ‘‘when will I get married?’’ to which the reader replies: ‘‘you’re a strong, independent woman with great success in your future, but I do not see marriage.’’ Having internalized single stigma and romantic lore so well, Charlotte is devastated and responds: ‘‘What? How can you just say something like that? What about my feelings?’’ She then proceeds to visit another reader who cracks an egg with no yolk and bluntly states: ‘‘you will never be married, you are cursed, but don’t worry, for $100 we can remove it.’’ It is at that point that Carrie’s voice-over concludes: ‘‘She simply refused to believe she would never get married. All she could do was to continue believing and it would happen.’’ Hall (1980) explains that there are three basic ways in which cultural productions can be interpreted. The dominant reading accepts the hegemonic position. For example, the SATC women are frivolous, bratty, shoe-obsessed women who are ultimately sad because they are single. An oppositional reading leads to a ‘‘struggle in discourse’’ (Hall, 1980, p. 61). Reading SATC as the representation of four women who are rejecting the notion that to be a single woman is to be pathetic and sad, opens up dialogue in discourses surrounding femininity. Finally, a negotiated reading recognizes the dominant position, but also allows for exceptions. Throughout my fandom of SATC, I most often had an oppositional reading of the show. SATC is such a fresh, intelligent, and unique representation of single women in a TV world dominated by shows like ‘‘Everybody Loves Raymond.’’ While on SATC there are hailings of the hegemonic discourse ever so often, these too are candid representations of what it is like to be single in a world of marrieds. It is hard to be a self-assured singleton all the time. Even in the final season when they all have men, they do not for a moment dismiss their single lives or their urban families.

Stigma and the Single Girl

99

In the current social order, it is taken for granted that women desire to marry. It is then reasonable to suggest that through a dominant reading of the show the constant goal and object of the four women’s attention is in attaining a man. Dominant readings of SATC abound. Critic Billen (1999, p. 47), for example, describes the female protagonists of SATC as ‘‘four thirty-something women charging around Manhattan looking for scalps of rich men. Jobs, families and even friendships are all secondary to them’’. Merck (2004, p. 61) even goes as far as to suggest that because of the sexually explicit nature of the show, the four women are merely gay men in drag: ‘‘Sex and the City makes its women not the fantasy partners but the fantasy equivalents of metropolitan gay men.’’ This is ludicrous and offensive to me. Reading the SATC protagonists as ‘‘gay men in drag’’ is consistent with the dominant patriarchal culture which insists on the ‘‘silent image of woman still tied to her place as the bearer of meaning, not the maker of meaning’’ (Mulvey, 1982, p. 413). The reality is different: ‘‘The notion that these women are merely the products of the gay male imagination is premised on a fairly conservative and essentialist notion of identity: that there is a gay male perspective (read promiscuous) and a straight female perspective (read: prudish) and there shall be no blurring between the two’’ (Henry, 2004, p. 80). A dominant reading of the show, operating within the SNAF ideology also emphasizes how these women are in constant search of a man, and are therefore incomplete and an indication of feminism’s failure. As Stacey D’Erasmo (in Shalit, 1999) suggests: ‘‘The new single-girl pathos seems more like a plea to be un-liberated and fast. These characters really do just want to get married; they just don’t want to look quite so naı¨ ve about it y The new single girl, tottering on her Manolo Blahniks from misadventure to misadventure, embodies in her very slender form the argument that not only is feminism over. It also failed: look how unhappy the ‘liberated’ woman is! Men don’t want to marry her!’’ Sigh y! What we have here, following Goffman (1963, p. 5), is a case of blaming the stigmatized; about whom we ‘‘construct a stigma-theory, an ideology to explain his inferiority.’’ For those who agree with D’Erasmo there is a great wealth of folkloristic and mythological material handy to explain why single women are inferior. A reoccurring single woman fable told to warn women that living alone could have gruesome results, is the story of the old spinster who died alone in her home, and because no one noticed her she was consequently eaten up by her cats. In ‘‘Four Women and a Funeral’’ this fable is told to Miranda as she moves into her new apartment. As her neighbor informs

100

TONYA DAVIDSON

her: ‘‘Ruthie kept pretty much to herself, never married, she died in there you know y Oh yes, it was a week before anyone noticed she’d passed. Rumor has it her cat ate half her facey’’ In this episode Miranda ends up confronting the pitied single-woman mythology. Later that week, Miranda starts choking on her take-out Chinese food, which prompts her to alert Carrie: ‘‘I’m going to die alone Carrie.’’ That night, as the narrator informs us: ‘‘Miranda wasn’t okay; she went to bed hungry and locked her cat in the kitchen for two days.’’ Later, when Miranda has a panic attack she tells Carrie to take a good look at her face ‘‘because at my funeral there will only be half of it. I will be dead and my cat will be happy and Charlotte will be picking up men at the next gravesite over.’’ In another episode, ‘‘Anchors Away,’’ Carrie meets an old spinster-type character at the ‘‘singles counter’’ of a deli. The spinster sprinkles lithium on her ice cream and warns Carrie: ‘‘I used to be like you, then I broke up with this guy, this was 1982 y I thought somebody better was coming along, never happened.’’ Despite their successes, their power, and their extravagant lifestyles, for all the single women of SATC at times the ultimate icon of success seemingly remains the New York Times wedding section, as Carrie quips: ‘‘The single women’s sports section y.’’ For instance, the four women of SATC find it infuriating that, despite having successful jobs, stable friendship networks, and their own homes, because of a missing ring they are deemed socially inadequate. As Carrie notes: ‘‘as progressive as our society claims to be, there are certain life targets we are all supposed to hit: marriage, babies and a home to call your own.’’ Failure to reach these targets has the potential to overshadow all other successes. For instance, Miranda once muses about how her ex-boyfriend Steve has easily got a date after their recent breakup: ‘‘a thirty-four year old guy with no money and no place to live, because he’s single, he’s a catch. But, a thirty-four year old woman with a job and a great home, because she’s single, it’s considered tragic.’’ To be stigmatized, branded as a single person, is to be exposed; ‘‘the stigmatized is a person who can be approached by strangers at will, providing only that they are sympathetic to the plight of persons of his kind’’ (Goffman, 1963, p. 16). At an engagement party in ‘‘The Agony and the Extacy’’ Miranda is asked: ‘‘are you seeing anyone special lately?’’ to which she replies: ‘‘no, but I have been seeing a lot of unspecial people.’’ In that same episode she runs into an acquaintance on Wall Street who offers her 2 cents on Miranda’s situation: ‘‘well you know he’s out there don’t you, you just haven’t found him yet.’’ Goffman also identifies the professionally stigmatized as those who use their stigma as their primary source of identification (Goffman, 1963, p. 27).

Stigma and the Single Girl

101

Carrie, as the New York Times’ sex columnist is a perfect example of this. Charlotte’s frequent use of self-help books is another example. Charlotte in fact has made stigma aversion her profession. Throughout the series Charlotte employs all strategies imaginable to procure a husband: she hosts a ‘‘used date’’ singles party, she seeks set-ups from her married friends, and she follows all the rules of charm and impression management that she has learned. In the episode ‘‘Drama Queens’’ she comes to brunch with her latest tool, the book: ‘‘Marriage Incorporated: How to Apply Successful Business Strategies to Finding a Husband.’’ In ‘‘Cover Girl,’’ Charlotte is even once alarmed by her very own intensity when – after buying ‘‘Starting Over, Yet Again’’ through an online retailer (after feeling too ashamed to buy it in person at the bookstore) – she gets an e-mail list of other books in which she may be interested, including: ‘‘Lonely Women: No Men,’’ ‘‘Love Hurts: You Don’t Have to,’’ and ‘‘Reservations for One.’’

STRATEGIES OF STIGMA RESISTANCE On one hand it seems as if the foursome thoroughly enjoy their single and ‘‘deviant’’ lifestyles, but on the other it is also obvious that the SNAF ideology hails them as frequently as they feel the urge to order a Cosmo. The performance of self for single women involves a constant oscillation between stigma resistance and stigma acceptance. Denzin (2001, p. 135) that it is imperative to understand performance as ‘‘struggles and interventions.’’ Ann Branaman explains that while Goffman identified two responses to stigma; a primary adjustment, co-operating or accepting stigma, and a secondary adjustment, a distancing from the stigmatized identity, ‘‘usually individuals adopt a middle position’’ (Branaman, 1997, p. lx). For Goffman (1963, p. 320), self definition was ‘‘a stance-taking entity, a something that takes up a position somewhere between identification with an organization and opposition to it.’’ The complementary four characters in SATC represent the spectrum from mostly accepting (Charlotte) to fully rejecting (Samantha) single stigma. It is my hunch that the majority of SATC fans, much like myself, prefer to situate themselves in line with Carrie – who is constantly struggling with herself and her abilities to be ‘‘Single and Fabulous?’’ However, the complexity and delight of the program is that all four characters demonstrate constant struggles within themselves, constantly redefining their personal positions toward single stigma. Stigma resistance, therefore, is often a complex struggle for them. Zajicek and Koski identify that a single stigma resistance strategy is to embrace

102

TONYA DAVIDSON

singlehood by recognizing the benefits of the situation (Zajicek & Koski, 2003, p. 394). The women of SATC embrace their single status and resist single stigma by recognizing the benefits of a single lifestyle, by employing humor, by shopping, and by nurturing their own stigmatized group (their ‘‘urban family’’ in other words). For example, in the episode ‘‘They Shoot Single People Don’t They?’’ after Charlotte laments being alone, Samantha – the expert at embracing singlehood – offers this advice: ‘‘Oh Charlotte, sweetie, we’re all alone even when we are with men. My advice to you is to embrace the fact, slap on some armor and enjoy men but not expect them to fill you up, except when, you know y’’ In this episode Carrie ponders whether people would rather ‘‘fake it’’ than face being single. After considering the possibility of ‘‘faking it’’ and observing others ‘‘faking it’’ to avoid single stigma, Carrie decides that: ‘‘instead of running away from the idea of a life alone, I better sit down and take that fear to lunch y so, I sat there and had a glass of wine alone, no books, no friends, no man, no armor, no faking.’’ At other points in the show, this type of courage is unnecessary as the four women acknowledge the legitimate benefits to being single. When Carrie is in a serious relationship with Aidan, she begins to realize what it was about single life that was so appealing to her. In ‘‘The Good Fight,’’ Carrie admits that living with Aidan is difficult because she misses her ‘‘SSB: secret single behavior,’’ things you only do when you live alone and no one else is around, for her it is eating a stack of saltines and jam, standing up in the kitchen reading magazines. In ‘‘All that Glitters,’’ on a Saturday night, Carrie wants to go out dining or dancing, but Aidan wants to order in KFC and watch a game on TV. Carrie manages to negotiate her couple life with her single life and goes out dancing with Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte. Samantha’s character is the most adamant about rejoicing in her singleness. In ‘‘The Baby Shower,’’ after going to a baby shower full of mothers who had disparaging remarks for the single women, Samantha asserts, ‘‘I refuse to feel inadequate’’ and proceeds to throw her own theme party ‘‘I’m not having a baby shower.’’ In ‘‘Evolution,’’ answering to Carrie’s question, ‘‘have New Yorkers evolved beyond relationships?’’ Samantha replies, ‘‘Relationships have been on the decline ever since women have left the cave, looked around and realized that it’s not so hard.’’ I, like the SATC women, and despite myself, am often hailed by SNAF, especially after weddings. I have once proclaimed ‘‘you know what? If I’m not married by the time I’m 40, I am throwing a huge party and wearing a huge gown and registering for appliances at Sears.’’ Whenever they hear this, my single friends cheer in agreement and ask if they can wear a tacky

Stigma and the Single Girl

103

dress with puffy sleeves to my party. However, after weddings, with all of the tearful speeches and the glorious exhibitions of love, my tune has the tendency to change. It is then that I want to be a part of that darn SNAF – that glorious institution that has diamonds instead of membership cards. The negotiation in the show matches the negotiation in my life. At times, when I am exploring some obscure part of the world solo, I feel that as a single woman the world is my oyster. At other times, after spending time with glorious couples like my parents, I find myself humming ‘‘when I’m 64’’ under my breath and appreciate what marriage can be. An oppositional reading of SATC leads me to recognize the many ways in which the SATC characters recognize and resist aspects of single stigma, which are integral to the SNAF ideology. Contrary to viewing the SATC women as pathetic examples of how feminism has failed, this reading demonstrates how women have the ability to make many more choices about their lives. One of these strategies of stigma resistance is humor. ‘‘Women learn from an early age that making other women laugh is more than an acceptable idea – it’s a good one. y It is no secret to women that women have a sense of humor. Yes, women’s lines have always gotten a laugh – but only in secret’’ (Barreca, 1991, p. 103). Bahktin (1965) argues that comedy is inherent in the spectacle of carnival, because comedy represents an alternate world. Comedy is a second life epitomized by play, almost a world upside down, which acts as a temporary form of resistance (Bahktin, 1965, pp. 3–11). Bahktin also believes that folk humor is marked by a deep cultural uniqueness, which has gone largely unexamined by academics. Women’ use of humor has even been more neglected. For Barreca (1991), making a joke is an aggressive act in which women are not supposed to engage frequently. For men, having a sense of humor has meant being able to tell a joke. But for women to have a sense of humor has meant that they were required to laugh at men’s jokes. When women’s humor has been eventually shared with men, men have often not considered women funny because women and men have different perceptions of humor (Akass & McCabe, 2004). SATC brings women’s secret humor out in the open. As a consequence, it is not surprising that male audiences have a different appreciation of the program. While for men to refer to women’s body parts as melons, udders, or any number of meat cuts is acceptable and usually gets a chuckle, calling a man’s penis a gherkin y now that just isn’t funny! (Apparently y) In her study of SATC audiences, Deborah Jermyn found that the show was ultimately ‘‘for women,’’ and that ‘‘while men may well watch it, enjoy it, or try to ‘learn’ from it, their engagement with it was of a fundamentally different nature’’ (Jermyn, 2004, p. 211). Exposing the wit and humor that

104

TONYA DAVIDSON

women have – as SATC does – always shared is both a resistant and an aggressive act. As active agents of comedy ‘‘humor is used to undercut female investment in patriarchal fantasies’’ (Akass & McCabe, 2004, p. 185). This undercutting of the patriarchal ideals is set-up in the show’s opening credits. In the opening credits, Carrie is walking the streets of New York wearing a tutu, at the last moment a bus, which adorns a billboard of her in her ‘‘naked dress’’ passes by and she gets splashed by mud. Therefore, while Carrie may be invested in the very phallocentric ideology connoted by her ultra-feminine tutu, it is also true that her cartoonish behavior will allow us to laugh at this ideology. ‘‘Carrie follows a script for a role produced in fantasy, and in the process has fun playing with familiar constructs that define the woman as ideal. The comedy works by juxtaposing the two classic patriarchal fantasies of virgin and whore – fantasies that are projected onto women, and in doing so, introduces us to the raw material which will be used time and again throughout the series to create humor’’ (McCabe & Akass, 2004, p. 178). The women of SATC also employ the grotesque through their use of fashion, and through fashion they manage to perform a spectacle of themselves. Mandy Merck argues that SATC thrives on camp aesthetic (Merck, 2004). Camp is a carnivalesque form of play and performing gender. As Merck (2004, p. 58) suggests: ‘‘visually, the show’s costuming duplicates the effect, with Carrie’s frequent lapses into fashion victim-hood (high heels, big hair and bright colors on a small frame) and Samantha’s constant sexual assertion (high heels, big hair and bright colors on a large frame) moving critiques to compare them to transvestites.’’ Indeed fashion in SATC has been identified as the show’s absent–present fifth character (Bruzzi & Gibson, 2004). While SATC has spawned many fashion trends, the costuming on SATC is first and foremost meant to create a distinct spectacle. For example, commenting on Carrie and Miranda’s fashion choices for a church visit Bruzzi and Gibson (2004, p. 124) write: ‘‘Their idea of what Manhattan high society regards as appropriate for such an occasion looks as if they had raided a dressing-up box.’’ The quartet dresses (in their minds) appropriately for all occasions. When Carrie visits her boyfriend ‘‘Mr. Big’’ after his return from Paris, she sports a French beret, and after he has a hospital visit she shows up in a candy stripper’s costume. To attend the Scottish Highland Fling, Charlotte has a tartan dress specially prepared. Playing with fashion as spectacle in SATC relieves viewers from the veritable stress of fashion in the real world. Through comedies like this, women ‘‘can reflect the absurdity of the dominant ideology while undermining the very basis of its discourse’’ (Barreca, 1991, p. 319). And similarly, Bruzzi and Gibson (2004, p. 126) argue

Stigma and the Single Girl

105

that through the SATC fashion ‘‘the series further challenges the supremacy of conventional, elegant femininity, and so the spectacular is utilized to support radical and alternative attitudes.’’ As a viewer, the fashion is at times hilarious, but always intriguing and delightful. Furthermore, the show’s humor is centered around the four women laughing together–a definite act of ideological transgression: ‘‘anytime a woman breaks through a barrier set by society, she’s making a feminist gesture of a sort, and every time a woman laughs, she’s breaking through a barrier’’ (Barreca, 1991, p. 182). The consistent depictions of the SATC women gathered together at a restaurant, bar, or one of their homes laughing together is a validation of this thesis. Comedy has a transformative quality in that it allows for an alternative reality. For example, Carrie – in reply to a man’s advance to woo her onto a trip to Venice – jabs: ‘‘I heard it was sinking!’’ In another episode Samantha decides that men with numbers after their names are really no good in bed, to which Miranda replies ‘‘imagine Henry XIII?’’ and Carrie retorts: ‘‘you give him head, he cuts yours off !’’ Watching SATC in a woman-only setting is also liberating in that it is acceptable to laugh at what to men ‘just isn’t that funny.’ The four SATC women also do not shy away from making spectacles of themselves. For example, Miranda gets braces and hides under a bed, Samantha dies her pubic hair and becomes ‘‘Bozo the Bush’’ and gets kicked out of the Playboy Mansion, Charlotte accidentally proposes to Trey, and Carrie falls on her face on a fashion show runway. As Mary Russo argues, ‘‘while women are constructed as spectacle in our culture, they are forbidden from ‘making a spectacle’ of themselves’’ (Rowe, 1995, p. 50). Making a spectacle, and adopting a grotesque aesthetic as humor, allows women to have a temporary means of resistance from the standard order. Although they are willing to make spectacles of themselves, their humor does not rely on self-deprecation, the most traditional form of women’s humor (Barreca, 1991). In fact, women’s self-deprecating humor corresponds with the patriarchal tradition of using women as the objects of humor. ‘‘Cathy’’ comics are a classic example of a single woman using self-deprecation against herself and thus deligitimizing her situation and her agentic self. When in the SATC episode ‘‘Cock a Doodle Do,’’ Miranda comments that ‘‘the only thing sadder would be if I had a Cathy comic tapped to my fridge.’’ Carrie energetically rebuts: ‘‘never say Cathy comic to me again!’’ Carrie and Miranda know that picking on yourself like that is not that funny. In sum, the SATC women are confident in their ability to make jokes and selfassured enough to risk making spectacles of themselves and thus able to create humorous situations without constant self-deprecation. Through their

106

TONYA DAVIDSON

humor the realities of their lives are lightened up. In this way, humor is an aggressive and effective stigma-resistance strategy. The glamour of the single girl is embodied in her consumer power. Shopping was one of the earliest ways for single women to occupy a public space without scrutiny; ‘‘the mall is where women can be public, empowered, and free, and can occupy roles other than those demanded by the nuclear family’’ (Fiske, 1989, p. 271). Shopping also was and is a means of resisting the spinster stereotype by claiming instead the ‘‘glamour girl’’ social identity. SATC is indeed synonymous with conspicuous consumption. The clothes, shoes, vacations, and martinis are what make watching SATC both a guilty and delicious pleasure. One reading of the prevalent images of shopping women is that women are only conceived of as consumers as opposed to producers. I give credit to this reading, but part of me, through an oppositional reading, views shopping as a form of resistance to the SNAF ideology which condemns single women to stay at home alone with their cats. I am not alone, of course, in embracing this idea of shopping as resistance. Third-wave feminists like Senna (1995) and Steenbergen (2001) feel the same. In the words of Naomi Wolf, this ideology of ‘‘More for women’’ is an economic ‘‘more’’ which is expressed through consumer power (Wolf, 1993, p. 138). In this sense the high-style, high-power, high-income women of SATC are easily turned into third-wave feminist icons. For sassy singletons, shopping is a demonstration of self-reliance, capability, and distinction through the acquired habitus. Zieger (2004, p. 98), for example argues that SATC ‘‘represents women fashioning public identities through consumption,’’ what she refers to as a do it yourself (DIY) citizenship: ‘‘This kind of citizenship differs fundamentally from that defined by the classical sphere. This kind of citizenship is not enacted through the bodiless, abstracted rituals of voting and debating that are central to democracy classically conceived, but instead through merely becoming visible to others as a self-styled individual consumer.’’ SATC participates in both definitions of citizenship, but its real narrative momentum derives from the self-fashioning and refashioning that shopping offers to the DIY citizen (Zieger, 2004, p. 98). This DIY citizenship is evident in ‘‘Anchors Away,’’ a post-9/11 episode, when Carrie encourages the other women to do their patriotic duty and ‘‘throw some much needed money downtown.’’ The point here is also that shopping single women differ from their married counterparts in their unapologetic ability to devote all of their spending power on themselves. In ‘‘A Woman’s Right to Shoes,’’ the viewers can appreciate conspicuous consumption as a valid means of creating identity. After her

Stigma and the Single Girl

107

shoes are stolen at a baby shower, Carrie is ‘‘shoe shamed’’ by the hostess who, after offering to pay her for the stolen shoes, refuses to pay the full $485 value. In response, Carrie refuses to feel guilty; after the wedding present, and various baby gifts are distributed. Carrie argues: ‘‘in total I have spent over $2,300 celebrating her choices and she shamed me for spending a lousy $485 on myself!’’ In this episode we see how shoes and shopping are central to the single-woman identity. In discussion with Kiera, the baby-shower hostess, Carrie argues: ‘‘You know how much Manolo’s are, you used to wear Manolo’s,’’ to which Kiera replies, ‘‘sure before I had a real life, but Chuck and I have responsibilities now.’’ Much of the series humor also centers around this idea of consumption and single-woman identity. In one episode, Carrie is mugged by an astute criminal who demands by name her Manolo Blahniks. In another episode, Samantha is kicked out of a Playboy Mansion party after accusing a Bunny of stealing her fake Fendi. In another episode Charlotte engages in a peculiar relationship with a shoe salesman with a fetish who gives her free shoes because he loves her feet. The unapologetic consumption on SATC is one of the aspects of the show that propels it fully into the realm of fantasy world. Just yesterday I learned who Alexander McQueen is and all of my knowledge of Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik comes directly from this show. However, I enjoy the spectacle of consumption on SATC in the vein of Naomi Wolf’s ‘‘power feminism.’’ Although their extravagance is ridiculous and environmentally irresponsible, it makes me happy to see women doing what they want with their money and enjoying life so unapologetically. They exemplify the thirdwave feminist notion that beauty (especially one’s own) should be embraced. Feminism is shrouded in so much guilt that it is refreshing and empowering to see women ‘‘owning it,’’ that is, enjoying their successes, being beautiful, witty, and sassy. Women are so conditioned to give up their time, their resources, their emotional energy. While it’s not a problem seeing highpowered men in power suits flaunt their wealth, when it comes to women they are condemned as frivolous or worse yet examples of ‘‘feminism’s failure.’’ Which leads Elaine Showalter to declare, ‘‘if you want to deconstruct my feminist criticism, go right ahead. But you’d better not sneer at my angel backpack or step on my blue suede shoes. I’ve paid my dues dressing ‘feminist’ and now I’m going to wear what I like’’ (Showalter, 1997, p. 92). Yes, SATC exists within an elitist world but I’m going to enjoy it – the fashion and the fantasy and not apologize – it’s TV. Consistent with all complex and contradictory aspects of third-wave feminist cultural production and consumption, the pleasure of this program – its

108

TONYA DAVIDSON

unabashed consumption, is also its most problematic aspect. Upholding shopping as a form of stigma resistance upholds and reinforces the most antiquated forms of power inequities. Danzy Senna writes that ‘‘the power feminism phenomenon represents not a ‘new school’ in feminism, but rather a very old school imbedded in whiteness, privilege, ‘beauty’, and consumerism of which the mainstream media has always been in favor’’ (Senna, 1995, p. 17). While enjoying their economic freedom, ‘‘power feminists’’ and the SATC women, neglect to acknowledge the non-white women that facilitate their ‘‘empowerment.’’ Senna describes, ‘‘[i]n Manhattan, I see playgrounds filled with black and Latino women caring for white children. The white women who employ these women are busy working on their careers‘thinking like winners’ as Naomi Wolf prescribes’’ (Senna, 1995, p. 17). This is evident on SATC, besides Maria, Samantha’s Latina lover, the only reoccuring non-white women on SATC are Miranda’s immigrant laborers; Magda her housekeeper and the unnamed Asian baby nurse. Within the SATC rubrics of empowerment, whiteness and class are consistently unproblematized. A home of one’s own is the ultimate symbol of sassy single-woman habitus. In fact, the apartments on SATC are what I most envy and crave. Home is such an essential definer of one’s happiness. I love seeing the SATC women interact with their homes – especially Carrie. Her apartment is so busy and eccentric and indicative of a full, exciting life. Seeing them all in their homes alone (albeit gorgeous homes in fantastic NYC) makes living single look good. A home of one’s own roots you in one space and declares that you are not waiting for a man to settle down with because this is your life now and it is already valuable. To buy your own home is to invest in yourself and your own future as a single woman. While many aspects of their fabulous single lives such as the many random dates to the opera and the numerous club openings I know are not my style, a cute flat with bay windows overlooking a park makes me shiver with single-woman glee. In the early twentieth century, there were no apartments available to rent for single women (Israel, 2002). When housing did emerge for single women it was largely in the form of restrictive boarding houses with controlling landlords. Therefore, while shopping is a means for women to gain access to public space, control of private space in terms of home ownership is an important aspect of symbolic capital for single women. Today, single women are the second largest group of homebuyers (Sealey, 2003). Much before home ownership becomes possible, young women are very emotionally attached to their homes, specifically their bedrooms. Whereas young women are more restricted than young men to stay indoors, they can use

Stigma and the Single Girl

109

private spaces such as their bedroom to experiment with more ideologies of gender identity than men can (Harris, 2004). SATC demonstrates how the sanctity of the girl’s bedroom is consistent in adulthood, as these single women embrace and are passionate about their own private spaces. In ‘‘Hot Child in the City,’’ after a tryst with a potsmoking cartoonist who lived with his parents, Carrie is seen with her friends smoking pot in her apartment and listening to records with her voice-over narrating: ‘‘sometimes it’s important to have a thirteen year old moment remembering a simpler time when the best things in life were hanging out listening to records and having fun with your friends, in your very own apartment.’’ Similarly, in ‘‘Models and Mortals,’’ after contemplating on the symbolic capital accredited to models, Carrie decides she has her own valuable capital when she states, ‘‘beauty is fleeting, but a rentcontrolled apartment overlooking the park is forever.’’ In pursuit of the ultimate single-woman habitus – her own apartment – Miranda confronts single stigma. In ‘‘Four Women and a Funeral,’’ the real estate agent asks her twice: ‘‘just you?’’ and ‘‘such a big apartment for one person’’ to which Miranda replies: ‘‘I have a lot of shoes.’’ Later, the mortgage broker asks: ‘‘And the down payment’s coming from your father?’’ In ‘‘Ring a Ding Dong’’ Carrie faces a tragedy when, shortly after breaking up with Aidan, she finds out that he is selling her apartment, and she is in no position to buy it. In this episode, Carrie’s attachment to the apartment in which she has lived for a decade becomes very apparent. At the end of the episode, a newly separated Charlotte offers Carrie her engagement ring as a down payment. At that point Carrie’s voice-over states: ‘‘Charlotte had taken her painful past and turned it into my hopeful future.’’ While the painful past is a souvenir of a failed relationship with a man, the hopeful future involves one woman and her apartment. SATC provides its viewers with alternative scripts of social relations by providing positive images of single successful women. Symbolic capital is always related to economic capital (Bourdieu, 1977). In this sense, their success at being single is obviously intrinsically tied up with their financial success. This is one of the key reasons why feminists are wary of heralding these women as feminist icons, resistant of the idea that one can shop their way to empowerment. However, despite the fact that these women are cultivating and accumulating new forms of cultural capital, they are also importantly validating new forms of social relations that go beyond capital. An obvious critique of the revolutionary potentials of SATC is that the show deals almost entirely within an upper class, heterosexual, white world. Charlotte is the most blatantly classist of the four. While always dating nice,

110

TONYA DAVIDSON

Presbyterian men (until she met Harry), Charlotte has lamented of her boyfriend who liked to grab his balls in public: ‘‘I don’t get it! He’s from a good family, he went to Brown! Why does he do it?’’ and of dating an uncircumcised man: ‘‘he’s a nice WASP-y guy, what went wrong?’’ In ‘‘The Caste System’’ Charlotte asks Miranda how she can date Steve the bartender: ‘‘honestly how can you be serious about a guy whose whole livelihood depends on tips?’’ leading Carrie to ponder: ‘‘how different was New York from New Delhi, had we replaced a class system with a caste system? And if so, can one date outside one’s caste?’’ The SATC dating world is also very white. Of the 87 men that the four women sleep with in the six-year running of the show, only two of the men are non-white. Samantha has a black boyfriend for almost all of one episode (‘‘No Ifs, Ands or Buts’’) before his sister Adina cuts in and tells Samantha: ‘‘I have a problem with my only brother getting involved with a white woman.’’ It is in this one episode that issues of race are touched upon. In season six, Miranda dates Dr. Robert Lees for a while before she realizes that she is truly in love with the bartender, father of her baby – Steve. Although they explicitly lead straight lives, the show does not ignore the possibility of other sexualities. In fact, each of our four characters has their own lesbian experience. In ‘‘The Cheating Game,’’ Charlotte is befriended by a bunch of ‘‘power lesbians’’ who buy art from her gallery. Charlotte unfortunately only has these new friends for about a week before it is discovered that she is a ‘‘clit-tease’’ and therefore no longer invited out. Meanwhile, in ‘‘Bay of Married Pigs’’ at a company softball game, Miranda’s coworkers mistakenly set her up with a lesbian. After clearing up the confusion, Miranda enjoys the game with Sid, and is shockingly invited to diner at her boss’s with Sid. It turns out that Miranda’s boss’s wife had wanted to ‘‘add a lesbian couple to their social circle.’’ At such point Carrie’s voice-over states: ‘‘as she rode between floors Miranda realized how much easier her life would be if she were in a couple, any couple.’’ Carrie’s interactions with people of other sexual lifestyles is the most disappointing. For example, in ‘‘Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl,’’ Carrie is dating a bisexual man. She cannot really accept his bisexuality and says to her girlfriends: ‘‘I’m not even sure bisexuality exists, I think it’s just a layover on the way to gaytown.’’ Then, her ‘‘bi-boy’’ invites her to a party which involves a little game of spin the bottle. Carrie ends up having to kiss Dawn (played by singer-songwriter Alanis Morrisette) which she cannot handle and she ends up making a mad dash for the door. Samantha, the woman who does not do relationships, is the one woman to have a lesbian relationship on this show. In season four, she dates Maria and viewers become privy to one of the very few female

Stigma and the Single Girl

111

ejaculations ever to be seen on TV. In sum, despite their realities as primarily straight women, the show at least acknowledges the prevalence of other sexualities.

FINALE SATC is a constant love story; a story in which four women seek and revel in love and security. But in contrast to hegemonic discourses on heterosexual romance, the women of SATC find love and security in their friendship with one another, not in relationships with men (see Jermyn, 2004; Henry, 2004). The central relationships in SATC between the four women exemplify what Goffman (1963) defined as another aspect of being stigmatized: the belonging to a group of likewise stigmatized. For example, in ‘‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’’ Carrie restarts a relationship with Mr. Big and gets into a fight with Miranda. Near the end of the episode we hear Carrie’s side of a conversation on a payphone. Carrie utters: ‘‘I know things have been weird between us lately, but I really need to talk, will you meet me at our place in like fifteen minutes?’’ As we watch her arrive at a Chinese restaurant, one might assume she is going to meet Mr. Big, but true SATC fans are not surprised when sitting there to meet her is Miranda. In that episode Carrie’s closing voice-over narrates ‘‘and finally, the most important break-up rule, no matter who broke your heart, or how long it takes to heal, you’ll never get through it without your friends.’’ At Miranda’s mother’s funeral in ‘‘My Motherboard My Self,’’ Miranda is forced to acknowledge her singleness even in this time of grief. She ponders: ‘‘everybody’s very concerned about me because I’m here alone. I didn’t realize I needed a date for my mother’s funeral.’’ But in fact she is not alone. Carrie, Samantha, and Charlotte are all at the funeral, and at a particularly touching moment, when the family follows the casket out of the church two-by-two, and Miranda is walking alone, Carrie notices and joins her. In every situation where the women might possibly feel alone, the show reinforces that they have their family. The popularization of the urban family concept is the one aspect of the show to which I can truly relate. I imagine that many fans watch SATC with their own urban families. There are probably groups of young singletons everywhere in which there is invariably a quirky Carrie, a conservative Charlotte, as well as the inevitable arguments over who is more like Samantha and who is the most cynical like Miranda. SATC is very much a family show, a show to watch with your urban family, to bond over the

112

TONYA DAVIDSON

funny moments and discuss the issues that arise (men who can’t deal with women’s success, cancer, funky-tasting spunk – all important issues). In my own little urban family our favorite episode is ‘‘The Baby Shower.’’ There is a scene where Laney steals Charlotte’s baby name. Samantha finds out and with such assertion says to Laney ‘‘you Bitch’’ and storms out of the party with Charlotte. We love that scene. It is recreated often. Their everlasting friendships are so endearing and inspiring that my friends and I can say to each other: ‘‘look if you don’t find Mr. Right or Mr. Big you know you’ve already got me.’’ SATC is a public demonstration that being single does not equal being alone. When my friends and I slip off to Montreal for a ‘‘SATC weekend,’’ or sip martinis together and adopt the lexicon of SATC, we are enshrining a new discourse: that single can equate being hip and happy. A negotiated reading of SATC recognizes and applauds the women’s agency and resistance to single stigma, while acknowledging that the show does at key moments occasionally hail the SNAF ideology. For example, in ‘‘Where There’s Smoke’’ Charlotte claims that women like firefighters ‘‘because women just want to be rescued.’’ But at this point Carrie’s voice-over commentary alerts us: ‘‘there it was – the sentence independent women in their thirties are never supposed to think, let alone say out loud.’’ And subsequently Carrie replies to Charlotte: ‘‘Charlotte honey, did you ever think that maybe we’re the white knights and we’re the ones that have to save ourselves?’’ At which point I (and singleton viewers everywhere) stand up and cheer. However (there had to be a however, eh?), later in that episode, after being pursued by a man at a bar on Staten Island, Carrie runs to catch the last ferry. She misses the ferry, and in classic fairy-tale fashion as she loses one Jimmy Choo shoe, off to her rescue is the man that had been pursuing her all night. There, the dominant ideology is restored and I groan (just a little bit). But it is not over. In the very next episode, ‘‘Politically Erect,’’ it is with classic SATC humor that the fairy tale is destroyed as the rescuer is ultimately dumped for requesting to be peed on during sex: a classical resolution between the triumphant onset of singlehood, and the classic romantic tale. To which I laugh – rescuing prince politician – come on! In another example, the women are on a getaway to Atlantic City in ‘‘Luck be an Old Lady.’’ In this episode, Carrie is determined to invest in and embrace her female friendships (at this point singletons cheer!). She says to Charlotte: ‘‘Why don’t we just skip all the drama and enjoy each other’s company?’’ However, shortly after that triumphant declaration we see Carrie sitting alone on a bench eavesdropping on an elderly couple. In that

Stigma and the Single Girl

113

instance, despite her resistance moments earlier, she is interpolated by the nuclear family ideology, and her closing monologue states: ‘‘then again maybe there are some things worth gambling on.’’ It is constantly exhausting to be happy as a singleton in a world of married privilege. Circumstances that lead me to engage in a negotiated reading abound. While the SNAF ideology is frequently hailed, it is also just as often object of vengeful satire. For example, in ‘‘Anchors Away,’’ Carrie finds herself in quite a romantic situation: stuck in the rain with a stranger (with cheesy French film music playing in the background!). Hailed by romance Carrie addresses the stranger: ‘‘well, I guess we aren’t going anywhere for a while. I love the way the rain smells. If this were a French movie we’d fall in love and get married.’’ But when the stranger fails to comment Carrie flounders: ‘‘I was just pointing out how romantic this would be in the movies, I don’t want to marry you y ok I do, no come on I’m kidding we just met, let’s wait five minutes. No really I don’t even want to get married, I was engaged last year and if I didn’t want to marry him.’’ Romance ideology is also object of satire in ‘‘Plus One is the Loneliest Number.’’ That episode opens with classical music playing and Carrie’s opening monologue: ‘‘There is one day when even the most cynical New York woman dreams of all her life. She imagines what she’ll wear, the photographers, the toasts, everybody celebrating the fact that she’s finally found y a publisher, it’s her book release party.’’ The opening satire, however, later yields to Carrie’s lament – at her very own book release party – she is feeling incomplete without a man: ‘‘I’m lonely. I am. The loneliness is palpable.’’ However, at the end of the episode, while Carrie has not connected with Jack Berger, she has made a friend in the limo driver who buys her a hot dog, Carrie comments, ‘‘all I could think was, who needs a Berger when you can get a fabulous hot dog for 75 cents, or free. Then again, maybe there’s something to knowing they’re out there’’. It is possible to be happy, single, and still hopelessly romantic. Even in the sixth and final season, when all of the women have secured steady men in their lives and it would seem that all possibilities of an oppositional discourse have disappeared, the negotiation and emotional struggle continues unabated. In the second from last episode Carrie is in Paris with her boyfriend Aleksander. In what appears – at least superficially – to be a romantic happy ending to a fairy tale, Carrie is seen wandering the streets of Paris alone, sighting a group of four women out to lunch. It is at that moment that Carrie is found to long not for a man, but for her urban family, which she has lost. It is also in the same episode that back in New York Mr. Big meets Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha and asks them if Carrie is happy or if he should go to Paris and bring her back. Subsequently,

114

TONYA DAVIDSON

in the final episode as Carrie walks the streets of Paris contemplating her new life, she smiles at a family – thus leading me to imagine that she is smiling at her own future. However,