Gender, Humor, Literature, Merced Seminar in the Humanities, Performance, Shakespeare

Early Modern England’s Social “Bag of Tricks”

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by Dorie Perez

“I’d sit at the back of the room to present this paper,” said Rhea Riegel, a doctoral student in the Interdisciplinary Humanities graduate group and a 2014-2015 Center for the Humanities Graduate Fellow, “but that’s not what a real trickster does.” Real tricksters, like the infamous literary figures Puck from the plays of William Shakespeare and Robin Goodfellow, the archetype that Robin Hood is based on, do their dastardly deeds with an eye towards the future. Riegel says they offer an example of alternative behaviors where social change fosters a rethinking of social roles during moments of upheaval. Tricksters do the important work of challenging or, invariably, reinforcing social roles and morays that the public must then reproduce.

Riegel’s work on Early Modern English literature includes the literary canon of Robin Hood, known to 17th Century readers as Robin Goodfellow. Robin Goodfellow’s “punishment” for bad behavior is to reset “wrongs” – lecherous uncles are whipped and bawdy women dunked in duck ponds to the delight of spectators learning a collective lesson. Humor itself is seen by scholars like Riegel as setting up social conditions for commentary or a rethinking of codified relations. The types of humor that tricksters use are up-ending, but not the full satirization of current events that the modern reader may be accustomed to. Satirical activism as a brand of humor is distinct from situation comedy. Whereas satire disrupts, comedy reaffirms social “truths”. Allegorical tales of lessons learned – Robin Goodfellow punishes rather than scolds, acts rather than relays messages like angels and other divine messengers – making his role in Western literary tradition social rather than based on religious canon or politically attuned to current events of the Early Modern era. His actions serve, in the Foucauldian sense, as correctives of behavior, a task seen as a shared social responsibility.

Another trickster figure Riegel centers her study on is that of Moll Cutpurse, a composite character purportedly based on a real figure in history who challenged gender norms by dressing in masculine clothing to trick unsuspecting targets. Cutpurse becomes the embodiment of changing gender norms during a period of intense social upheaval. The events of the 17th Century in England were incredibly disruptive; the English Civil War, religious strife among warring Catholics and Protestants, the Great Fire of London and the death of Charles I on the orders of a newly-empowered Parliament served as unsteady social ground to negotiate. Trickster figures flourished in the work of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries as ways to reorient audiences to a dynamic reality of changing norms they would then need to make sense of.

Literature, Merced Seminar in the Humanities, Television

Monsters and a “Good Old Fashioned Apocalypse”

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by Marieka Arksey

The word monster, deriving from words meaning reveal or display, is appropriately chosen by David Castillo of SUNY Buffalo as a vector through which to explore the social, political, and economic contexts producing horror fiction throughout the past 400 years.  In the 17th century, monsters were associated with aberrations of the natural order, health and the authority of rulership.  Yet despite the fear they inspire, monsters are also the subject of curiosity; beings that embody the liminal spaces between certainty and doubt, apprehension and fascination.  As this liminal entity and as a representation of the human body in an altered state, they are ideal forms through which to explore forbidden or taboo subjects, and for creating a mirror upon which the less desirable aspects of our selves are reflected.

Castillo argues at a recent Merced Seminar in the Humanities event that death, while a trans-historical source of anxiety, is reflected and reshaped in historically specific modes, providing revelations and warnings that are both enduring and are themselves historically specific. He proposes that social-historical and political readings, and feminist and psychoanalytic approaches are ultimately complementary.

Castillo frames his argument around two main categories of monsters: vampires and zombies – both of these requiring deaths as part of their transformations, embodying a loss of identity, engaging in mass human predation, and both being very much liminal beings in that they are ‘undead’.  While other monsters surely exist which provide a lens into humanity, few contain the supernatural elements that make vampires and zombies as malleable in their role as horror fiction characters.  He then focuses on the recent zombie phenomena in Spain as an example of this localized use of ‘monsters as display’.  Using these examples, Castillo asks three main questions:

  1. What do monsters reveal about us?
  2. What do they warn us against?, and
  3. Why is it that people are naturally drawn to reading books about dystopian societies?

Striking similarities between the vampires and zombies who take humans en masse to be their sustenance slaves.  Today, both vampire creation and zombie creation are often made possible by a viral infection, both feed off humans, and both require the death of the pre-vampire or pre-zombie for their transformation to occur.  But where the two still differ is in that no one desires to become a zombie.  As Castillo points out, zombies have no soul.  Their rise to power is aimless. They have not been romanticized and made attractive in the way that vampires have.  They are just a mass of decaying flesh.  And yet, more people in America at least seem to be willing to consider the actual possibilities of zombies (in the way that they are portrayed in fiction) over that of vampires.  The term “Zombie apocalypse” exists throughout our vernacular; “vampire apocalypse” does not.  This distinction is worth exploring and goes some measure to explaining why in Spain, Castillo’s case study of the phenomena of the rise of monster fiction, zombies have become the monster of choice.   It also leaves questions that may prove interesting to explore:  Why aren’t vampires being popularized in Spain in the same way that zombies are?  Zombies and vampires appear to be equally popular in North America right now, but this does not seem to be the case in Spain.  Following that this speaks to different and very historically specific social and cultural conditions in Spain than in North America, what does this say about modern Spanish perspectives of the future?  What does this say about modern American perspectives?  Are we just dealing economic situations, or is there something else within our cultures that had led to the disparate uses of monsters as cultural mirrors?

The tension between fear and curiosity, constructions of identity and otherness and our exploitation of these groups, are, as Castillo discussed, justification for the mass murdering of groups that threaten our status quo, and the loss and attempted regain of control are recurrent themes.  The numerous ways in which zombies can be created and can manifest appears to make them more ideally suited than other ‘undead’ monsters to revealing the changing anxieties we have and mean that they have been, and likely will be, an enduring form of monster across all genres.  Fantasist thinking about ourselves and our survival skills is empowering to societies that are anxious about how disconnected we are despite (and because of) our dependence on technology and is argued to be one of the roots to movements such as the ‘tiny house movement’, ‘going off the grid’, and the ‘backyard’ or ‘urban farming movements’.  His article leaves us asking ourselves: what would you do if you could start over, and, more importantly, would you be able to survive?

 

Global, Merced Seminar in the Humanities, Philosophy, Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective

Unto This Last: Marxism, Debt, and Usury

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by Mario Sifuentez

During his visit to campus this spring, David Palumbo-Liu discussed his article “All That is Sold Melts into Air (Again)” with faculty and students. He urges us to shed the shackles of an old morality in order to rid ourselves of the pressing guilt that we feel when we owe money. He argues that this guilt clouds our understanding of what exactly happened during the 2008 meltdown and offers instead a countermorality, that is based on a different sense of morality and justice.

This version of capitalism positions the proletariat as owing future labor to their capitalist overlords and that alienation of wage labor has now become an alienation based on debt. Debt follows us everywhere; it is ever present in our minds, in our labor, and most importantly in our credit score. The credit system is alienating because it eliminates a material good and replaces it with something ephemeral and intangible, it replaces it with distrust and suspicion on the side of the lender, which in turn makes the borrower feel untrustworthy.

In the case of the 2008 meltdown, the borrower, large corporations, escaped the scrutiny precisely because they are not people, they cannot feel alienation, they are not moral beings, and they cannot be held accountable. In the end we pay for their debts twice over in the form of taxes and services not rendered.

So what do we do? Palumbo-Liu reintroduces the notion of a countermorality, one that creates a “whole new social imaginary” that invests heavily in a new kind of language and new kind of vocabulary. One that allows us to reinvent, explode, and construct new meanings for ourselves and places the blame squarely on the shoulders of the one percent.

In reflecting on Palumbo-Liu’s article, I am reminded of Stephanie Black’s fantastic 2002 film, Life and Debt. In the opening sequence, three Rastafarian men sit around a fire discussing the morality of lending money with high interest rates and the indebtedness that has been forced on Jamaica. They read from Exodus 22:25 “If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury.” The Quran similarly tells us in 2:275 “Those who charge usury are in the same position as those controlled by the devil’s influence. This is because they claim that usury is the same as commerce. However, God permits commerce, and prohibits usury. Thus, whoever heeds this commandment from his Lord, and refrains from usury, he may keep his past earnings, and his judgment rests with God. As for those who persist in usury, they incur Hell, wherein they abide forever.” Ancient Hindu and Buddhist text also demean and condemn usury.

This reminds us of three things: first, that loaning and borrowing money are not immoral per se but the act of usury is really the problem. Lending and borrowing money of course are an ancient practice that predates capitalism. So does usury but capitalism’s original sin is normalizing usury in the everyday lending practices of institutions.

Second it reminds us that the United States established this world wide financial system after the Second World War. The United States and its global lenders, the IMF, the World Bank, and the Inter American Development Bank have been turning the Darker Nations into the Poorer Nations for over half a century. The austerity programs that have been enacted on the U.S. populace might be a case of the chicken coming home to roost. Capitalists have long provided a cheaper and more affordable way of life for Americans at the expense of the former colonies around the globe and are now looking here as a place to continue the gouging. For as Palumbo-Liu’s reference to Marshall Berman reminds us, “the only activity that really means anything to the bourgeoisie is making money.”

Finally, I concur with Dr. Palumbo-Liu that the solution might be as simple as refusing to pay our debts. And as difficult as creating a new morality that forces us to talk about debt and debtors in a different framework. But I want to suggest that perhaps we should look to an ancient morality that while perhaps not as radical as Marxism does resonate with more people all over the world. The wrath and the vocal support that Pope Francis recently incurred because he dared to suggest that all foreign debt should be forgiven is indicative that this sort of morality appeals to a wide swath of the darker nations and makes capitalists quite nervous.

 

Global, History, Merced Seminar in the Humanities, Politics, Religion

Persianate Universal Histories Turned Upside Down

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by Kit Myers

With “Breaking Historiographical Boundaries: Early Modern Persianate Universal Chronicles,” Sholeh Quinn turns upside down the traditional way of examining universal histories of the Ottoman and Safavid empires. Most scholars have inspected these historiographies separately because this is still an emergent area of study. In particular, scholars have often been concerned with the last section of chronicles covering the newly established empire. Quinn’s presentation and broader research, however, turn way from atomized analysis of dynasties within this distinct genre toward an approach that investigates the entire chronicles in a comparative fashion.

Quinn’s paper illustrates the fruitful insight gained from—and broader importance of—comparative work. Such an approach makes us consider what part of the picture have we missed, and in what ways do our assumptions get turned upside down by using such an approach? Quinn’s preliminary research considers both the structure and content of four Persianate universal chronicles under the Ottoman and Safavid empires: 1) Mawlana Shukrullah’s (1459) Bihjat al-tavarikh, 2) Ghiyas al-Din Muhammad Khvandamir’s (1524) Habib al-siyar, 3) Yahya ibn ‘Abd al-Latif Husayni Qazvini’s (1542) Lubb al-tavarikh, and 4) Muhammad Muslih al-Din Lari Ansari’s (1566) Mirat al-advar.

Her analysis of universal history reveals that the four chronicles share numerous sectional and elemental components. Historians included portrayals of creation, biblical prophets, pre-Islamic Persian kings, the life of Muhammad and his immediate successors, subsequent dynasties, and lastly, the current dynasty. In looking at these universal histories, Quinn found that they were even less Ottoman- or Safavid-centric than anticipated. Thus, Quinn argues that they should indeed be considered universal histories rather than dynastic. Despite what one might expect, the authors of these universal histories did not explicitly disparage pre-Islamic figures and rulers. Instead, they narrated a shared or “universal” past, placing Islamic history within a larger historical context. Similarly, the authors were not simply Ottoman and Safavid historians because they in fact had varying roles for multiple dynasties, and thus, they were more accurately Persianate historians.

Indeed, the narratives are not entirely independent historiographical accounts but rather closely related and sometimes overlapping variations, revealing low and porous historiographical boundaries. Yet, Quinn’s close reading of the universal histories—such as the way in which Kayumars, who is said to be the first Persian king and first human, was included in the four texts—also illustrates that historians were not merely copying the first chapters of prior universal histories. Historians worked from previous sources but also inserted their own perspectives, making minor to significant revisions of prior accounts. Without a comparative analysis, scholars could easily miss the ways in which historians recorded universal chronicles that possessed shared and divergent pasts. What becomes clear is that studying universal chronicles not only requires understanding the historical context but also historiographical context.

 

 

 

Borderlands, Humor, Literature, Merced Seminar in the Humanities, Movement, Politics

Troubadours and the Production of Early Chicano Literature

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by Dorie Perez

Pulling from a historically oral tradition, Chicano Literature sought to create and analyze texts of the Chicano cultural output that advanced during the social movements of the 1960s and into the 21st Century. Attempts to codify the literature of Chicano Studies into its own canon often sought to legitimize its study by turning oral tradition into the written word, the medium used most by the Humanities. This process of making “legible” work from Chicano scholars previously unrecognized by the academy framed such work as both cultural expertise and political argument.

The Center for Humanities’ final seminar for the Fall 2014 semester was led by Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez who presented his paper “Of Modern Troubadours and Tricksters: the Upside-Down World of José Inés García”. Martín-Rodríguez writes of the work of Chicano scholars in the 1980s to reclaim their discipline’s written past by doing literary “recovery,” looking for the beginnings of a Chicano movement found in works previously ignored in the development of the canon. Thus, literary histories of previous scholarship are vital to work to shift the analysis of academic literature away from its Eurocentric focus. The medium of such critique was the novel and social history, yet other genres such as poetry, letters and humor are where social commentary from the fringes are best received.

Understanding poetry as a medium – short pieces with big impact – is central to the analysis of José Inés García, whose work has been virtually ignored by Chicano scholars. In the vein of recovery and through the poetry, Garcia’s work is identified by Martín-Rodríguez as significant to the development of Chicano literature, voicing issues of identity and social tension that would serve as the core ideas of subsequent Chicano authors. This recovered history is remarkable – very few copies of García’s work exist. Other poets like Bartolo Ortiz and José Díaz from the same time frame (early 20th Century) often used self-publishing to produce their work, sold door-to-door by authors eager to seek an audience within their own community. The entrepreneurial schemes to get their work read and published show the innovative ways in which this early cohort sought recognition. Calling himself “El trovador moderno,” or the modern troubadour, García’s writing extended to journalism. He edited El Progreso and La Cronica, local Spanish-language newspapers in the American South West.

The inversions that make José Inés García’s work so compelling are contextual as well as literary; García suffered an accident in mid-life, leading to permanent blindness that did not hinder his work as editor, translator and poet in New Mexico. He was also raised Protestant in an ethnic enclave of New Mexico, something of an outlier in traditionally Catholic Hispanic circles. His winking inversions continue in his focus on trickster figures, a literary trope used often to make light of intercultural tensions and difference. The transformation of gender roles happening during a time of social upheaval also captured his attention, producing several works that play on themes of gender. Given such topics, the early date of such work remains significant in its analysis of social change. Martín-Rodríguez was able to capture this recovery, adding to scholarship on forgotten figures central to Chicano Literature’s literary corpus and style.

Language, Merced Seminar in the Humanities

Rethinking The Patient-Doctor Dialogic

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by Dorie Perez

The interaction between a patient seeking medical care and a doctor seeking to understand both the biomedical and human-emotional imperative behind a sick person’s quest for help is no small thing. For the second-to-last seminar in our series, Dalia Magaña presented her linguistic study of the doctor-patient interview. 23 Spanish interviews in the United States between a doctor and patients seeking to address the problem of mental illness were used as her data.

These medical encounters are compounded by issues of cultural competency, agency, and the creation of identity around health diagnoses. Magaña applies linguistic analysis to these encounters on two fronts: 1) language that reflects interpersonal shifts in the medical interviews and 2) trans-cultural strategies utilized to accommodate or fill in the gaps of non-English speaking patients. The cultural context and social expectations of the patient are central to the medical experience, especially as previous studies have shown that patients seeking care with providers in their primary language almost always get a better quality of care. Such documented disparities in care are also compounded by the specific health needs that the larger Latino population in the U.S. face, such as diabetes and high blood pressure and the issues of accessibility that such medical care necessitates.

The situational dynamics of the interview itself must also be considered within its cultural context. Magaña focuses her analysis in this chapter on register – the field, tenor and mode of interactive language. The language’s utility itself, explicitly as the practical use of particular words and phrases, is the other fundamental part of her analysis. She argues that it is this situational analysis of language, not just the cultural context specific to the biomedical encounter, that can lead to an increased understanding of what makes a more efficient, situationally-attuned medical visit and thus, better health outcomes overall.

As there are no book-length linguistic works on doctor-patient interactions on Spanish spoken in the U.S., this paper offered a detailed description of the language (using Register Theory), with a significant emphasis on trans-cultural interactions. Jargon-heavy discussion mystifies treatment for patients afraid to seek clarification and reinforces the social differences between patients and the doctor. The burden is placed on the doctor to make discussion of their work less technical, removing the trappings of specialized technological discourse that are so celebrated in the biomedical field. The social agency of the doctor bears the responsibility for creating, through language, an informal atmosphere. According to linguistic and social theory literature, fostering such an engaged exchange encourages patients to speak freely. In this moment, the dynamics of the dialogue between patient and doctor privileges the patient.

In these interviews, the subversion of traditional hierarchies of power, reflected in the social status of medical doctors and the specialized medical knowledge they embody, happens due to the fact that patients spend the majority of the medical encounter talking about their own experiences. This emphasis on the patient’s lived experience is significant and necessitates the employment of trans-cultural strategies by the doctors. Each encounter is timed, and most of the encounter spent talking is done by the patient who uses this interaction to clarify their positionality by expressing what’s important to them in a time of medical crisis. The interview is bounded in other ways, with limited interruptions by the doctor as well as informal language used to put patients at ease add to the strategic component of such encounters. Magaña’s use of register theory is helpful here as it is topsy-turvy in the variables it considers important in an interview, identifying how linguistic choices that both patient and doctor make to convey their experiences and knowledge can be empowering.

Anthropology, Global, Merced Seminar in the Humanities

Ritual Spaces: the Caves of Belize

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by Dorie Perez

In the Maya tradition, caves were believed to be the entrance to the underworld, where people could make offerings to gods for rain, better harvests and health. Building on advancements in archeological scholarship on the Maya that had archeologists shifting focus away from large-scale built monuments to smaller areas of ritual practice in the 1990s, Marieka Arksey, a 2014-2015 Center for the Humanities Graduate Fellow, centered her study on three years’ worth of empirical fieldwork in the jungles of Belize. A fourth-year doctoral student in the World Cultures graduate group, she has focused on the ritual practices of the Terminal Classic Maya outside of the entrances of caves as a way of creating a more naturalized sacred site than the monumental temple structures being erected in the same time period.

Cave mouth

 

 

Mouth of cave site at Las Cuervas, Belize where Arksey did her work (2014).

 

The built environments of large-scale civic centers were translated to the spaces outside of caves as exceptionally potent places for communion with the forces that were thought to give life to ancient Maya societies. Arksey’s study shows that the discovery of man-made modifications to the areas directly outside of caves made them look more ordered and utilitarian. These modifications were created to look natural and occurring spontaneously, as though stemming from the cave itself, making clear the importance of the naturalistic aesthetics of the cave even as they are reformed through human interaction. Using fragments of ceramics, obsidian, chert, quartz, jute, and speleothems  to show that ancient rituals did indeed occur here, and type-variety analysis of the ceramics to place the age of modifications to the Terminal Late Classic period (between 700 and 950 CE), she is able to make an argument that these spaces have been created specifically for an extension of the rituals  taking place inside the caves.

Cave site map Belize(1)Map of archeological sites in Arksey’s doctoral research (2014).

Arksey argues that the ‘collapse’ of the Terminal Classic Maya in the Southern Lowlands likely involved a loss of faith in the ruling elite and led to the adaptation of rituals in and around caves to offset that loss of faith.  If rituals taking place within caves were failing to provide sought after results, elites would begin to use open spaces outside of caves for the first time in order to allow for much more public observation.  This adaptation of ritual may have allowed them to better appease their followers. Arksey showcased visual evidence of modern rituals still occurring outside some sites by modern Maya in Belize, reinforcing her argument that these sites are still recognized as cosmologically and historically significant and adding to the literature on the Maya response to cultural disruption.

Site shovel map

Arkesy’s presentation touched on interdisciplinary questions about cultural conception, the use of physical space and the significance of such academic work in relation to the history of the field of archeology itself. Sholeh Quinn, Associate Professor of Iranian History, added a layer of nuance in her role as discussant – the cultural output of the Maya and the significance of the work on cave rituals understudied in that area of Central America was emphasized as an important point of analysis that furthers the understanding of ancient cultures as systematized human reaction to a changing world.

 

Global, Language, Politics, Uncategorized

France Turned Upside Down

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by Susan Amussen

I have been following the coverage of the shootings in Paris at Charlie Hebdo and the aftermath somewhat obsessively. But The New York Times headline jumped out at me.[1] We have spent the last year and a half in our seminar examining the idea of the world upside down in multiple forms. A few times we have approached the pain and grief that caused this exclamation, but as in most academic contexts, we tend to distance ourselves from it. It also stood out because when weighing whether to choose this focus for our first two-year cycle, I made the decision when I heard a reporter after another tragedy – the shootings of school children at Newtown, CT, in December 2012 – say, “The world is upside down.”

In sixteenth and seventeenth century England, the period I study, the phrase and concept of a world upside down has many uses. It’s used in comedy, in lawsuits, in politics. The idea of inversion, a world upside down, is everywhere. It happens when women boss their husbands around, when inferiors challenge their betters. Witches turn the world upside down, but it is not used for the impact of war, or natural disaster: these are visitations of God. The death of a loved one is a source of grief, but it is not evidence of an upside down world. An upside down world is, instead, the result of human beings who disrupt the natural order.

The two recent uses I’ve highlighted suggest that we don’t use it now for everyday life, but to respond to tragedies and disasters. An upside down world comes from crisis – events that turn our lives upside down. We may not have the same vision of a hierarchical society that made the world upside down so potent an idea in the seventeenth century, but we do have a sense of how life ought to go. The first page of the google books search for the term includes a book on children in war zones;[2] another on “the global battle over God, truth and power;”[3] one on the work of William Golding;[4] and one on globalization.[5] Globalization and war are turning things upside down. The last year of results for the phrase from The New York Times includes a book review that notes that Primo Levi “said that the concentration camp was ‘a world turned upside down,’” but also trailers for movies where love turns someone’s life upside down. [6]

It appears that we have come – at least in advanced industrial societies – to be insulated from certain kinds of tragedy. We don’t expect people to die young, or terrorists to shoot things up. We even seem to think that war is an anomaly. And those things now upend our understanding of the world, and force us to see things in a new way.

But the movie trailers which talk about people’s lives being turned upside down by love remind us that it is not only disasters that change how we see the world. And it raises a question for each of us to ponder: what have been the events, experiences, or maybe ideas that have changed the way we see the world?

[1] Erlanger, Steven. “Days of Sirens, Fear and Blood: ‘France is Turned Upside Down.’” The New York Times. 9 Jan. 2015. Web. 9 Jan. 2015.

[2] Neil Boothby, Alison Strang, and Michael Wessells, Eds. A World Turned Upside Down: Social Ecological Approaches to Children in War Zones. (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2006).

[3] Phillips, Melanie. The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power. (New York: Encounter Books, 2010).

[4] Crawford, Paul. Politics and History in the Work of William Golding: The World Turned Upside Down. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002).

[5] Jones, R. J. Barry. The World Turned Upside Down? Globalization and the Future of the State. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/books/review/martin-amiss-zone-of-interest.html accessed Jan. 15 2015: other references included a discussion of the Hunger Games, the Syrian war, and film reviews.

Global, Humor, Merced Seminar in the Humanities, Performance, Politics, Religion

Humor and Transgression in Mexican Stand Up

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By Dorie Perez

Dr. Raquel García, a newly minted doctoral graduate visiting Merced from our sister UC campus, UC Davis, presented work that was part of her recent doctoral defense and long-standing research project. She writes about the political nature of Mexican comedy as something transgressive, a newly popular form of entertainment that comes to Mexico by way of the traditional North American comic’s role as entertainer-come-social commentator. Yet the tropes of stand-up comedy that many American audiences are familiar with – the Jerry Seinfeld-style routine of humorous critique offered up to a crowd looking for both commonality and shocking amusement- are new to Mexican audiences, even in the boundary-pushing performance arts community within Mexico’s cosmopolitan districts. It is a testament to cultural diffusion and the growing space for social critique in a country with strict rules about private and public spheres that stand-up’s popularity as a medium is growing.

García identifies several key elements at play in her analysis. García discusses the role of performance as its own manifestation of transgression from socially-accepted norms in Mexican society. The play-acting, the “just kidding!” qualifiers that comedians add to their politically astute analysis of historical inequities in Mexican society are indeed played for laughs, but their meaning is clear. A strong critique of the role of political and governmental corruption in everyday life, including the dominant power regimes of the narcotic-trafficking cartels that run great swaths of Mexico’s countryside are main targets, even as the comedians themselves equivocate their jokes as mere humor. Comedians Horacio Almada, Manuel Nava and Jürgen Scritto are included in García’s analysis, and her observation of their practice adds an ethnographic layer of analysis to the discourse they have created that reads as a new modality of resistance. All three comedians are centered in Mexico City, and they maintain a social media presence as a way to both reach out to transnational audiences and re-inscribe their work as social commentary meant for both the Twittersphere and the political landscape they live in as Mexican citizens.

In a heavily Catholic country, Almada’s humor that centers on the dogma of the Church and its frequent hypocrisies is a high wire act, yet the responsive nature of his audiences (seen as Youtube footage in García’s presentation) shows that he’s struck a vein of truth that many share and are even eager to have deconstructed. In a passionate fury, he acts out both the argument of the devoted and that of the priest admonishing his flock, asking about heaven and hell and wondering where he will go if he refuses to commit murder but misses Sunday mass. García includes this bit as a moment signifying the comic’s role as arbiter of truth, or rather, a shared frustration, that many social-media savvy, contemporary Mexicans enact within the confines of a more traditional society. Through comedy, García  argues, the pressure valves of duty and propriety are released for both Mexican audiences and a socially-aware comic eager to showcase his vision of the world gone topsy-turvy.

Fashion, Gender, Merced Seminar in the Humanities, Movement, Politics, Religion, Shakespeare

“Unquiet Women” and the Act of Subversion

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by Dorie Perez

The subtle differences between the terms inversion, subversion and perversion, presented by seminar discussant Matthew Kaiser, are usually glossed over in speech, terms used interchangeably to mean “othering” or change as a process of fragmentation. The idea of inversion as a movement, often smaller-scale acts than violent political upheaval, is an interesting take on social change and something Susan Amussen presented in her analysis of Early Modern historical works in late September 2014.

Amussen presented what will be one chapter of a book tentatively called “Turning the World Upside Down: Gender, Culture and Politics in Early Modern England,” which builds on the work of her late husband, the historian David Underdown. Continuing the topsy-turvy theme of the Merced Seminar in the Humanities series for Fall semester 2014, she writes of “unruly women” and other deviants who dared to challenge convention in Elizabethan England. “Mannish-women and womanish-men,” patriarchs that failed to uphold their place as lord and master, among other kinds of usurpation of male authority were targets of John Swetnam, a pamphleteer in 1640s England whose social critique often morphed into full-scale misogyny. Pamphlets were the blog post of their era, read and responded to by intellectuals of all stripes; Swetnam’s back and forth argument with other writers, including quite a few female intellectuals, has held up as an example of the transhistorical tension between idealized expectations of womanhood and the subversive play of gender politics in an increasingly changing world, continuing today unabated.

The global social politics of the Early Modern era were present in the Shakespearean play The Taming of The Shrew (1592), a prime example used in Amussen’s analysis of subtle inversions of gender roles that fueled a discourse of inversion from within a dichotomized world of male/female, rich/poor, and young/old – dichotomies first discussed by Mikhail Bahktin in Rabelais and His World (1965). A royal (or rather, royal-adjacent) sex scandal involving the dissolution of Frances Howard’s marriage to the Earl of Essex in 1613 and subsequent remarriage to the Earl of Somerset fueled fears of subversive female comportment, especially when the perversions of witchcraft were said to be involved. Witchcraft, excessive interest in fashion and makeup, as well as sexual desire, were acts by women to subvert their roles at home, in the streets and at Court. Dress was the process by which identity was encoded, and through that signification, the inscription of idealized roles and behaviors. Any subversive activities strayed into the grey area between the normative and empirical Woman, according to a Foucauldian analysis, destabilizing social norms by way of inversion, perversion and subversion.

Dress, and therefore, womanhood, came under intense scrutiny in the Jacobean literary landscape, where any sense of otherness – foreign silks, mystical allusions, ostentatious luxury- was regulated by social stratification. Yellow hoods, and the color itself, were the sign of prostitutes and other fallen women, using the identifiers of the day as an inverted ladder to another social role available to them. The gender boundaries Amussen analyzes are clearly bounded entities regulated by social interaction and royal decree, yet somehow simultaneously inverted on a daily basis in regular acts of autonomy. They, in turn, set the stage for social relationships and tensions that then spill into the geopolitical arena. Amussen’s analysis ultimately concerns these genre-crossing “disorderly women” and their “failed patriarchs,” by whom social norms were transgressed, even as they worked to upkeep them.