Since the radio in my car broke a year ago, I find that I can't get enough of this format. In one hour or less you can learn something new with few to no commercials. It's the perfect format for great storytelling. I bank This American Life episodes like currency for long drives: 6 TAL's and I'm in Cleveland or back to Chicago. A week wouldn't be worth living without Pop Culture Happy Hour, Planet Money, How Stuff Works...don't even get me started on Serial and what that did for my love of 1) journalism 2) Sarah Koenig and 3) GREAT, HONEST storytelling. With these and a whole host of others (maybe I'll make a big list below of my favorites) I move myself thoughtfully and meaningfully from Point A in Edgewater to Point B in Bronzeville and beyond. Without them, It would literally be radio silence.
I'm also well aware of the clear emergent NPR pattern here. There is a staggering world of podcastery out there to be explored, but NPR is my peeps and so, when in an episode of PCHH they tell me to check out Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me or Radiolab or The Moth or Freakonomics, I do it. Why go any further when my intelligent, liberally minded folks at NPR keep churning out excellent listening material.
Thus I stumbled upon Invisibilia which is my new, absolute favorite thing. In the intro they say it's a exploration of the invisible forces that shape our lives. In other circles I run in, we call this Sociology. Anyway, I've been powering my way through their inaugural season this past couple days and they hit on all the obvious forces you might imagine: computers in our lives, thoughts, something they call "entanglement"--their topics are oddly esoteric and real at the same time. So when I was listening to the podcast on "categories" and our need for them, my ears especially perked. This is so sociological in concept but their treatment of the idea completed freaked me out. Let's say it was, in no way, sociological.
Since I started studying culture, I have fascinated on the conundrum of categories: we need them but are also changed and developed by them. Developmentally, there's a fine line between using them to help us make sense out of the world (and so they serve us) and falling into the trap of being defined by them (which is where we start to serve them, reinforce them, and come to be slaves to them). In no way is this not a daily activity; categories always work on us as we use them ourselves to comprehend the world around us. If I think too long about this, I start to feel claustrophobic. It raises questions like: To what degree am I free to determine who I am? To what degree can I break free of categories? Why do I feel so comfortable relying on categories? What are the real consequences of these categories? Heady questions and we see some of the disturbing answers around us every day.
What worried me a bit about invisibilia's treatment of categories was that they lumped comprehensive, biological categories and social categories into the same pot. For example, their treatment of the topic suggested that categorizing an object, like a coffee pot and coming to understand its similarity in function to other kitchen appliances, is the same as categorizing the social particulars of people. In other words, gender, race, and class were likened to those characteristics exhibited or observable by people for use in comprehending what another means in the context of life. In other words, they ended up talking about stereotypes and how different individuals manage or cope with living in between opposing stereotypes.
Their first story was of a man/woman ghost-named Paige, because of a hormonal disorder reported experiencing a "flip" experience of gender. That is he/she would feel a distinct moment in time when "something inside of him/her" changed and all of a sudden the man would "flip" into "woman" mode and then later "flip back" to man mode. To be clear, he exhibited male sex characteristics and biologically showed no signs of hermaphroditism or any other biological "causes" of this (although later, they would determine he had a massive hormone imbalance which caused the usual physical symptoms of lethargy, weight fluctuation, etc). Primarily, this was strictly about his behavior and the "flip" he described was between the polar opposite gender constructs: he would go from being what he described as a "reserved, not talkative, somewhat impulsive" guy who liked to go to the gym into a "chatty, emotionally open, feminine" version of himself who felt and reacted to the world differently. Psychologists ruled out any notion of "disorders" like multiple personality disorder or schizophrenia (good grief). He just said he felt different. At the end of the story, having gone through a painful divorce at the hands of a wife who couldn't deal with his category-hopping, he finally decided to pursue gender-reassignment surgery to become a female full time.
Admittedly, the whole time I listened to this story I felt very mixed emotions but perhaps not typical ones. This case was mystifying because, in my mind, this was a social struggle. Biology could provide no answers, psychology finally provided at least a group of others with a shared experience and (what I consider) a weak link to some kind of hormonal imbalance. But as he talked I just kept thinking, "This is a guy's guy who feels like he wants to act like what he think a woman acts like and he doesn't feel free to do it." I was sad he had to appeal to biology and/or "science" to validate his feelings, I was sad his wife couldn't handle living with a man who wanted to be chatty, more emotionally open, and probably, all things considered, a better partner than he'd been before. I was very conflicted about his choice for sex-reassignment surgery, not that he chose it, but that he himself couldn't imagine being a male and exhibiting "feminine" or "womanly" characteristics.
Of all the social categories, I think gender (and it's power) is possibly the most difficult to 1) comprehend and 2) circumvent or change in real life. It's cool right now to be a gender-bender when it comes to sex. That's even a turn-on because it feels edgy and possibly somewhat risky (see anything Miley Cyrus has done to get more attention over the past years). But when it comes to life, most are generally not comfortable with direct challenges to gender norms. My biggest concern, though, is when knowledgeable, socially conscious media sources make mistakes like they did here. GENDER IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT. People make it, we use it, we adjust it, we negotiate its meaning. It is not "caused" by biology or or psychology although it is informed by both. Instead of focusing on the questions and reactions I had--which were primarily of the context of this man who felt so out of place in his own body because of the way others interacted with him about it--they chose to focus on him as a psychological abnormality, thus making the problem one of chemistry and not society. Also, thus making the problem one of an individual trying to respond to static, unchangeable categories instead of what it actually should be which is the ways in which those categories are challenged, negotiated, and can and do bend.
When do we start framing this question in terms of how Paige himself and other people using traditional gender expectations changed the trajectory of this man's life?
The second story the presented called "Children of the Dirt" just made me want to scream. You can check that out and ponder it on your own if you choose.
There's another post in here about the role of trusted creators of information morphing seamlessly into creators of bad "knowledge," but I left this podcast which I still love for its willingness to step into really difficult questions and topics feeling let down in the storytelling. If we're going to open the window to talking about this difficult "invisible" forces--all of which are socially constructed and maintained--then we have to responsibly discuss them correctly...and know the basic difference between psychology and sociology...and know the difference in the framing of these difficult topics.
Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller, call me. I'll catch you up.
No comments:
Post a Comment