marissapaul

[marissapaul]

1/6 day 12: Pop Culture & Spiritual Feminism

our last day! it's only fitting that we end with an anzaluda reading. i enjoyed the discussion of fear in the interview we read today. specifically, the way that fear has been drilled into people growing up today. fear that if we don't or can't work that we won't be able to live anymore, fear that modern medicine has become inaccessible, fear that there is nothing we can do to escape capitalism. yet, as always, we are given actionable feedback. for it is possible to overcome that fear, it is possible to subvert capitalism, maybe not in its entirety, but in important and meaningful ways. from our readings earlier this semester talking about the economic shift to capitalism and the idea that capitalism necessitated a managerial class that was going to be willing to exploit others around them. i grew up with parents who were willing to do just that. and they spent my teenage years training me to do the same to those around me. but as i have wound my way through college and academia i have been able to find the root of those fears that my parents had instilled in me about not making enough money, not being in a lucrative enough career, etc. and now that i understand the economic system i live in, i know what place i want to occupy within or rather, outside of it.

i know that macklemore has an iffy reputation for it was certainly unfair and racially-motivated that he won the grammy over kendrick lamar, but i generally feel that macklemore has been aware of his privilege throughout his career, even if he continues to benefit from being white in a historically black profession. this song is all about unpacking his role as a white rapper and what it means to be privileged. there is one line in particular that goes "but the one thing the american dream fails to mention is i was many steps ahead to begin with" that quote has stuck with me even as i have grown past his liberal politics into leftism and liberationist politics. because that line is true of me as well. i may not have my mom's money anymore, but that doesn't change the fact that i did grow up with it, i went to a nice school, i have a jeep wrangler which is a vehicle that is commonly recognized as a marker of middle/upper-middle class status, and even though i am living paycheck to paycheck now, i have a college education and in four months i will have a masters degree. i may be queer and autistic but above all of that i am white and i grew up rich and that has set me many steps ahead. as i have become aware of my place in the world and how it actually functions and the ways in which the neat and orderly life of the suburbs is only predicated upon the suffering of others, this lyric stays in my mind to both ward away fear, and to remind me that even in my current situation where i am living off of a TA stipend, i have been given so many resources that have put me far ahead of those who weren't able to access those same resources and education that i have been gifted with. i refuse to be a part of that managerial class that abuses the people around me when i will always be far closer to poverty than i will be to the mounds of wealth that capitalism seeks to hoard for like fifty people out of a billion. i refuse to lead with anything other than love and empathy. and for that i have lost the financial support of my parents, but i am no longer afraid of not making enough money to live as they lived. for i do not want to live anywhere near the life they live. the world i envision is a fundamentally and drastically different one from the false comfort they enjoy.

the anzaluda interview also offered some solid closing insights on herbal medicines, this quote from page 224 in particular stood out to me, "if you take medicine for example, the man is always putting down herbal remedies because they're too available to everybody. because if you find out you can heal yourself on your own, without him, he's out of the job" that is such a powerful quote. and it wasn't until this class that i could appreciate the fullness of it. i grew up in and around the medical field (my first two years in college i was doing pre-med to be a pediatrician, and i grew up in and worked in a pediatric practice in houston, which is a city that is lauded for its medical facilities) and while i have found myself unpacking the white supremacist structures i grew up with over these past few years, this was one aspect of my childhood that i had yet to reckon with. so i am really thankful that we have repeatedly taken a look at alternative forms of healing including herbal remedies. i grew up hearing so much about the marvels of modern medicine, as if the people we have been studying haven't been healing each other for hundreds and thousands of years. of course, advancements have been made, but they remain inaccessible to the working class and so what advancements have really been made? healing through white institutions has only grown more and more inaccessible. even just having a baby in a hospital has become a truly tremendous expenditure. so of course people are turning to alternative medicines. medicines that the highly processed medicines we buy at the grocery store are based on, which is all predicated on stealing from indigenous healing knowledge. i am always trying to deconstruct what i grew up with, and i have the large swaths filled in, i am just now on a journey to deconstruct all the little pieces that may not show up in my daily life. i am thankful that this is a piece of that journey that we were able to look at in depth this semester.

there were two quotes from the forewords we read that stood out to me. the first is "I have heard from people that the book has helped change some minds (and hopefully hearts as well), but it has changed no one more than the women who contributed to its existence. It has changed my life so fundamentally…” and this is really how i feel about my thesis. all around me and throughout the past two years i have heard again and again that everybody hates their thesis, and that this is just a stepping stone to the "good" scholarship that you might create ten, fifteen years in the future. but i refuse to think that way about my thesis. i love my thesis. and while i hope that it might be useful to me, it has been useful me and to those that have worked on it with me and for that i am thankful. it has helped me and my friends work through our gender and sexuality and the ways we think about building community, it has introduced one of my advisors, dr. johnson, to transness in a depth that he hasn't studied before, i hope that dr. skidmore has been able to learn from me in the process of mentoring me, i know that she is proud of me and happy that i am here and so at the very least i have that aspect. there are so many people who have contributed to the creation of my thesis, all of whom have been changed by it and for that i am thankful no matter what happens and no matter how many or few people read it or draw strength from it. i, and those around me have benefitted from it and for that i love my thesis and look upon it with kind eyes and a kind heart.

the second quote is, "And yet to act is not enough. Many of us are learning to sit perfectly still, to sense the presence of the Soul and commune with Her. We are beginning to realize that we are not wholly at the mercy of circumstance, nor are our lives completely out of our hands." i think this is a really powerful statement for academics. we get so good at dissecting things and understanding why things shake out the way they do and the historical context of it and etc. etc. but we have to learn to be still. who knows if i will make a field-changing intervention, what i do know is that i am now able to sit still. i am able to commune with my soul and understand her without trying to logic and rationalize her thoughts. i may not make a lot of money, but i am far happier than my mom has ever allowed herself to be. for i grew up in the same economic system, but i have learned to sit still and from sitting still i have gained an optimism that i might live differently and outside of the constraints of capitalism and white supremacists structures. i will certainly always be less financially well-off than her. but i have my soul when she sold hers long ago so she might enjoy the luxuries of hoarded capital. if there is one thing that i have learned from history it is that history has not been a linear march towards liberation and progressivism. things ebb and flow, but people like me have always lived and loved and it is from them that i draw strength to live queerly. i live in a state that actively targets trans folks, yet i am not entirely a victim of circumstance. i have agency. i can live with love, kindness, and empathy and that is perhaps the most radical thing i might do in this life.

i hope that one day my mother can learn to sit still.

[marissapaul]

1/5 day 11: Botanicas & Alternative Medicine

i was fascinated reading about the brazilian leaf houses. i am reminded of what an interesting historical moment we are living in. i decided to go to google to look up some casas das folhas in brazil. most of them don't have websites, a lot of their comments say that they communicate to customers over distance through whatsapp. i then went looking for reviews of different shops, most people just gave five star reviews and left no notes, but some left short affirmations like "great". there was one in particular that stood out to me, a woman that had visited wrote "wherever i go i am attended" and i think that is a really powerful statement. i think an american understanding of stores has been so messed up by corporations and white supremacist ideals of politeness/customer service/the customer is always right. i don't know that i often feel attended to in stores, especially in places like target or walmart or at the grocery store. and that is to no fault of the employees just to be clear, they are not getting paid nearly enough to do one bit more than their contract requires, but seeing other forms of running shops is liberating. growing up i would hear all the time "well that's just business" and i think that is a sad way to organize society. consumerism has bastardized what, at its core, is a beautiful system of exchange. one person cannot produce everything they need to live, and so we must rely on others. i would much rather rely on a shop where i feel attended to, where both parties respect the exchange that is happening because it is a real and genuine exchange of things that sustain life, not mind-numbing purchase from a corporation that cares less about taking care of you than they care about taking care of the workers that allow them to function. i hope that wherever my life takes me i am able to attend to others in genuine and uplifting ways.

i was also struck by Voeks' discussion of non-endemic plants. i read some ecological histories last spring as part of an atlantic history class and they were tough reads. i think that more often than not we see non-endemic species of flora and fauna being brought over with, if not outright malicious intent, a clear disrespect for the ecology of the americas. indigenous controlled burns, knowledge of herbal remedies, and a deep deep respect for the land and life we have been given were all bulldozed over as europeans sought to terraform the americas into what it had become today. they sought to conquer the continent, not live in sync with it. so i was overjoyed here to read about so many species of plants that had been brought over from africa for spiritual purposes, and with immense respect for the flora and fauna that already existed there. indeed, the knowledge required to comprehensively grow, harvest, and activate these plants is immense and it is absurd that that knowledge is seen as a not legitimate form of knowledge. Voeks talks about how there were over two hundred species that these people would have to work with each day, each requiring different words, care, and attention to grow to their fullest potential. that is beautiful. and in a country dominated by big pharma, it is no wonder that more and more people in the united states are turning towards these other forms of healing that are curated with intention, something that a corporation could never do. (well, they intend to make as much money as possible, but that isn't being intentional in the way that i care about, i care about being intentional about leading with love).

of course, we see in spiritual merchants that these modes of knowledge production and of healing have not been allowed to flourish without militaristic intervention from the us state. it is no secret that the united states has again and again quite literally bombed and burned down economically independent black cities and establishments. that is true here, but beyond just the economic aspect, the targeting of hoodoo business was targeting knowledge. of more authentic and liberating forms of knowledge that threaten to tear apart a fragile an unnatural system of white supremacist thought.

i also want to very quickly talk about wakanda forever again. as i was reading through the sacred leaves of candomble i was struck by the following, "over the centuries, while observers marveled at the wealth of medicinal knowledge retained by the indigenous population, most denied entirely the legitimacy of african ethnomedicine" p. 141. a common criticism i see of the movie is that it feels a little suspect that marvel is putting out a movie where africans and indigenous americans were fighting each other. i of course can understand this sentiment, but i think it flattens out what was a very real exploration of inter-diaspora conflict that ryan coogler was going for. there is a very real history of fighting among the diaspora just as there is conflict between different marginalized groups. of course in an ideal world, the multi-racial proletariat would all work together, but that is not the reality of how things have played out across history and so i really appreciated wakanda forever's exploration of that, i thought it was really powerful. BIG SPOILER AHEAD, but the movie literally ends with shuri and namor (as representatives of wakanda and talokan) breaking the cycle of trauma and violence against one another that the surface world (colonizers and white supremacists) want to keep them in. i am interested to see where black panther 3 goes, but ryan coogler has laid the groundwork for wakanda and talokan to work together in decolonizing the world and i think that leaves a lot of beautiful places where he can take the story.

iris lee's vast and varied artwork and the spiritual meaning behind it is incredible and i thank isis for sharing it with us.

[marissapaul]

1/4 day 10: African-American Hoodoo

so i have an odd connection to make today. while working through the readings i was reminded of the song playing during the opening montage in the video game "dead island". the song is a fictional one performed by the dead island character, sam b. the song is called "who do your voodoo" which when said out loud serves as a double entendre. after doing some digging, it would appear that the fictional character of sam b is from new orleans and that his name might possibly represent baron samedi, a loa in haitian vodou though this is not confirmed canon. perhaps the most interesting part of his character's backstory is that he is the only character that calls the zombies that constitute your enemies in the game "zombies" instead of mean names. due to a scarcity of lore about the character, we don't have much more information than what i have presented, especially about his relationship to hoodoo and vodou.

i was able to find this interview with an artist named josef "J7" lord who was the creator and performer of the song. the questions the interviewer ask are interesting and could have led to good conversations about zombis and hoodoo but josef's answers don't seem to exhibit a real connection to the spiritual belief systems, he seemed to be more concerned with making sure his portrayal of "horror core" was correct. the developer of dead island is currently working on a proper sequel to the game where sam b will be featured again, i hope we see his lore fleshed out and we get to see a more thoughtful connection to the cultural touchstone from which the character was created.

conjure, obeah, and hoodoo are interesting departures from the spiritual belief systems we have talked about thus far. and while there are certainly many shared similarities, i was drawn to the idea that these were much more personal affairs. because the practice of these was banned, there was not as much space for group gatherings and ceremonies a la haitian vodou or santeria. still, these systems of belief are rooted in pragmatism. people would engage with these beliefs when they had a specific thing they needed accomplished, and there wasn't a pressure on personal moral failings, instead the onus was placed on the ill will of others causing harm. i don't have as much insight on today's readings as this is all new to me, but i am now really interested in the politics of dead island and where the developers' headspaces were while creating the game. the game clearly capitalizes on the zombie and hoodoo trend so i think it might be a fun side project to do a deeper dive and find more interviews with developers talking about their philosophy when creating the game.

[marissapaul]

1/3 day 9: Esperitismo

growing up in the southern baptist church i was never given a satisfying answer to why other religions were wrong and how baptists knew that theirs was the right one. i can't remember specifically what i was told when i would raise those questions, but i know that none of them ever satisfied me. the voice in my head was always skeptical that out of the thousands of belief systems baptists knew for sure that theirs was the objectively correct one. i do remember being told to have faith, and that faith in god is what gives us strength, but i never had access to that strength. with what i have learned in this class, i can say that it is because i was not being offered anything of substance. the endless bible studies and church services did not offer me tangible and actionable insights with which i could better my situation, or work through trauma. at my church in particular there was a heavy emphasis on prayer, and while i know that it can be liberating for some to talk to their higher power, such was not the case for me. that prayer that i was offered did nothing to stop abuse from my parents, it did nothing to stop kids at school from calling me slurs, it did nothing to help my interpersonal relationships with those that mattered to me. and that's because it wasn't designed to do that. unlike these spiritual belief systems that were very much so rooted in the day-to-day experiences of practitioners, and providing them with actionable paths towards healing, evangelical christianity had little to offer my little queer self.

when reading about espiritismo therapy i was drawn to a number of things. the first is that its main imperative is to find the cause, and to try to get the 'intranquil' spirit to leave its victim. that is quite actionable. instead of praying with no tangible plan for healing, these spiritists would try to understand the root cause of strife and then actively try to work on fixing that strife. something that i have been thinking about recently is how misconstrued i was when being taught about other belief systems when i was a child. like from my current vantage point, whether or not i believe in supernatural forces is not all that important to me, what i do believe in is the insights that other humans have offered me through their spiritualities. i may not imagine my mental illness as a tangible, malevolent spirit that has invaded my body, but the image of that helps me in identifying why i am feeling the way i am feeling and i am thus able to make changes to clear up my energy. when i was growing up i was definitely taught that spiritual beliefs like the ones we are learning about this semester were non-objective - as if evangelical christianity is the objective and cosmically-ordained truth of the world. but decolonizing my thinking has allowed me to draw strength from things like espiritismo which are very real forms of knowledge and very helpful tools/blueprints for navigating the universe.

the second thing that i was drawn to is this quote from page 230, The diagnosis of a Spiritist is similar to that of a psychiatric diagnosis in the search for a category to describe a client’s state that would lead to a method of treatment, but it differs in one important respect: “In spiritism, clients do not play an active role in providing the diagnostician with information about their symptoms. It is the diagnostician’s duty to uncover clients’ symptoms” as a result, this also shifts the locus of responsibility away from the individual and to the spirit realm. the individualistic aspect of evangelical christianity is such a constricting force. when the bad things that are happening to me were seen as a moral failing of my own, i felt so much pressure when i couldn't identify what exactly my moral failing was. this was especially compounded as a child with undiagnosed autism because up until recently i could not hold two things to be true in my head at the same time. i was a very black and white thinker and ambiguity was not my friend growing up. this would get me stuck in just the absolute worst perseveration loops. i could understand that the kids at school were making fun of me for being queer and for thinking differently, but i could not understand how it was my own moral failing that led them to put that bad energy on me. and my religious leaders had nothing to offer me than homophobia and further rejection. there were systems far bigger than me at play. and it was not a moral failing that i was not accommodated in a society that was built to deliberately exclude people like me. i think this is the saddest part about growing up in the baptist church. there were so many other modes of spirituality out there that my parents could have turned toward in order to help me (and themselves) navigate strife, yet week after week and night after night i was sent to a hostile space where i was told that the abuse i was receiving was because of my own moral failing. i think that this spiritist approach is far greater and more accommodating. it acknowledges that some things are just bigger than us, but that the way through is community and ancestry and spirituality, and not pulling myself up by my metaphorical bootstraps.

i also loved this quote from 235, Spiritist practice prefers the idea of “healing” (sanar) rather than “curing.” “‘Healing’ means accepting and living with wounds as well as changing the perceptions of distress” i absolutely adore this way of thinking. trauma does not permanently leave us. in my teenage years my parents went in search of curing my mental illness. they medicated me, and sent me to psychiatrist after psychiatrist, and they sent me in-patient again and again all in an attempt to cure whatever was making me unable to function like they could. but that is not how healing from trauma works - not to mention that it wasn't going to be possible to heal while abuse was still actively happening. i didn't need a cure, i needed to heal. and i wasn't given space to do that until i was able to take that space for myself. in the words of the wise kacey musgraves, "healing doesn't happen in a straight line" it is a messy and often convoluted process, the grief and trauma ebb and flow but now, thanks to dra. sotomayor, my curadora, i have been able to move in the direction of healing in tangible ways that have dramatically improved my quality of life and mental health. i am forever indebted to scholars like dra. sotomayor and my advisor dr. skidmore who were pioneers of changing what academia can be. history doesn't have to be stiff and elitist. it can be emotional and healing and beautiful.

a great song for healing.

[marissapaul]

final project and reflection

so i really enjoyed this project. i was quite anxious for it at the beginning for a number of reasons, but as i got going i came to love and appreciate it. as a trans person i don't like audio projects or talking out loud as that is one of the ways in which i show up that can be othering. i don't necessarily have dysphoria about my voice, in fact i quite like it, but there is always a worry in the back of my mind that my voice doesn't match what people might be expecting when they see my name. but as i got going i really got into the groove of talking, or at least as much of a groove as i can get into as someone who far prefers writing over talking. nonetheless, i had a really great experience with this. the other thing i was anxious about is that i don't have a ton of experience analyzing and critically engaging with art. i'm still new to that aspect of life, i got some practice with it in undergrad and again in the latina feminisms minimester class where i reflected on an art exhibition called "mapa wiya (your map's not needed)" which is an aboriginal art piece that was on display at the menil in houston where i saw it.

this is the title piece of the exhibition and i like it a lot. the exhibition is all about land back and reclaiming indigenous modes of knowledge. it rejects the artificially created borders and lines that colonizers drew up and gets back to indigenous understandings of geography, space, and of living. but beyond that, i didn't have much experience with this, and coming from a world where i was taught that you were either born with the "art gene" or you weren't and that it was just an intrinsic talent and not something that artists spend years and decades meticulously honing. but through dra. sotomayor's classes i have come to deconstruct that way of thinking, in fact i consider myself an artist now, i consider my thesis to be art, i consider my very amateur paintings to be art, i now see art as the ways in which i communicate with the world. throughout my years on this earth i have collected words and frameworks and lenses through which i have come to understand the universe and my place in it and i view the things i create as art that shares those lessons that i have learned with others.

so as i started this project i entered with that mindset, but i was having trouble sifting through the artists and their art to find something that really resonated with me and that i could speak on with the lessons of this semester and i eventually discovered renee stout's "when 6 was 9" exhibition and i fell in love. the exhibition is all about imagining the otherwise, especially when the physical world we live in and reality we endure is too much, she is telling us to turn to the imagination. and she isn't just asking us to imagine, she's asking us to bring about that imagination in our own lives, and i think that is really powerful. we have seen time and again this semester how the spiritual systems we have been learning about are based in the here and now realities of their practitioners and that is what renee is offering up in this exhibition. though the focus is imagination, it is through imagination that she is leading us towards liberation and towards actualizing that world that we imagine, a world post-capitalism, imperialism, racism.

i really got into a groove towards the back half, i am not always the most clear speaker, i much prefer writing as i have spent far more time honing my writing voice than my speaking voice - for reasons mentioned above - but i enjoyed this. my throat is a little dry from talking more than i have in quite a while, but i am happy with what i have shared with the class and the world should they happen upon this link. this exhibition will absolutely remain in my mind as i go forward in life and in my academic journey in much the same way that mapa wiya has stuck with me for the past three years. i am beyond thankful for this opportunity to explore academic conversations in new and exciting ways that i definitely don't get to engage with in my history classes. i ended my latina feminisms blog with the missive, "let us go forth and create" and i am happy to report that i have. since that time i have written all three chapters of my thesis, i have gone on to paint a number of things including this super awesome mickey mouse painting that i'm proud of that i'll show below. so i suppose i don't have as clear a missive this time, but i would say lead with love, empathy, and imagination.

[marissapaul]

12/23 day 8: Vodou

today i want to look at the legend of korra in thinking about the days' readings. i recently rewatched the show and i love how much we got to see of the spiritual world in it. the christian creation story was never super fascinating to me, but i love learning about other creation stories and modes of spirituality and the avatar universe is a great touchstone for that for me (i was also a rick riordan kid so you can see the common theme of my life's journey). in thinking about the show in relation to today's readings, i think that the show does a really good job of blending the spiritual and physical realms. there are times where korra loses the ability to bend the elements or can't enter the avatar state and it is because her energy is being blocked either physically or mentally but most often mentally. this is especially prevalent at the beginning of book four. we see her years long struggle with identity that results in real and tangible effects on her life. this is what i really love about the different spiritualities that we are studying in this class, tangibility and holistic healing. in many ways, book four of legend of korra is just an artistic exploration of what happens to your real world and your physical body when you do not take care of and be kind to your mind. korra is the most powerful human because of her intimate connection to the spirit world and because she can draw on the strength of the spirit world. but she is not all-powerful, and can lose that power or see it weakened. in book four we really see her have to grapple with her mentality. in book two she has to literally maintain the balance between the spirit and material worlds and she can only do that if she is in tune with each and with herself. i love the medium of animation. it allows for such beautiful explorations of real and tangible emotions and as we have seen, the avatar universe has really resonated with kids who don't always fit in growing up. (unlike james cameron's white savior avatar).

i love that vodu places an emphasis on intuition rather than rational intelligence. i have been trying to live this way for the past two years and it has led to a much happier and healthier outlook on life. i have learned to trust vibes a lot more and to listen to my body and the world around me. i eat when my body tells me i am hungry, and if my body feels unsafe around someone i honor that and set boundaries. this goes back to what i have talked about in previous posts where i am much more open to spirituality now. instead of overadjusting into science as my lens for understanding the world, i lean into what my body, mind, and the world around me are telling me. and i can only speak for myself, but this has made me vastly healthier.

i think that today's readings resonate with me because they were all borne of inbetweenness. inbetween free and enslaved. in between africa and a new world. inbetween indigineity and african tradition. inbetween indigineity/african tradition and european religious beliefs. inbetween the material and spiritual. growing up queer and autistic that inbetweenness really resonates with me. i can understand searching for a sense of belonging in a world that is cruel to you. of course not to the same level of enslaved Black and indigenous people, but i live under the same white supremacist system that seeks to homogenize and clearly demarcate. i think this is also why i have become so much happier embracing ambiguity. growing up with undiagnosed autism and being visibly queer, for so long i went in search of language to help me describe what i was feeling internally. and the language that i found was binary and incomplete. i found the term gay, but that wasn't right, i found the term trans, but that wasn't right, i found pronouns that more closely align with my gender identity, but those too weren't right. in the past two years i have come to embrace ambiguity and the understanding that terms and identifiers are never going to fully encapsulate the nuances of my lived experience. i use she/they pronouns publicly but neither of those terms fully encapsulates my gender identity. i use all sorts of gendered terms to refer to myself including some that are traditionally male. i heavily relate to stone butch lesbians, but not holistically because i love wearing dresses presenting more femme at times. these are all partial pieces of a puzzle that make up my entire being and so i have stopped searching for the exact right term to describe myself, and have instead started gathering an archive of words and media and art that help me outwardly present my inner self. and that is what i love about these creole religions. they lean into that ambiguity and are not only open to change, but welcome it. and thus learning about them has provided me with more of those puzzle pieces and terms through which i much understand and express my inner self.

i was happy to see us talk more about spiritual healing again today. the readings today laid things out very clearly, explaining that there has been a rise in non-traditional healing as a result of rising medical costs and an inability for modern medicine to heal in the way that these spiritualities are - especially in terms of psychiatric healing. more people are going in search of this holistic and tangible healing. i am writing from the positionality of someone who is able-bodied so my experience is of course heavily influenced by that, but having the resources to genuinely and lovingly take care of my mind has also made taking care of my physical body much easier. i do not find myself paralyzed for weeks by anxiety, literally unable to leave my bed anymore and that physical benefit to my life was only made possible through the immense mental and spiritual work that i have done. i can wake up and brush my teeth and shower regularly and work out without doing so in pursuit of some insane and unattainable body type, i can eat freely and whenever i am hungry. these worlds are so intimately intertwined and i think that that is exactly what makes these spiritual belief systems so powerful.

i also really loved how the readings speak to shortcomings of the contemporary church and how vodu and vodou tangibly address those shortcomings. these spiritualities are "continually evolving in response to the socio-economic milieu and the psychosocial needs of its practitioners" (p. 87 in Vodu of the Dominican Republic) evangelical christianity remains wedded to the myth of the american dream and to capitalism. and thus it can't really address the material woes of a hurting congregation because they do not believe in a fundamental reorganization of society so that it might benefit all humans rather than like fifteen absurdly wealthy men.

i watched this documentary over the summer and found myself deeply hurt about my upbringing in the church in new ways. the documentary is focused on hillsong which is much more a corporation than a church. and it is hillsong who produced all that catchy contemporary christian music at the turn of the millenia. but they did so in pursuit of building an economic empire. hillsong recognized in the late 90s that people were growing disillusioned with the church (for all of the reasons laid out above) and so the church did shift. but it didn't shift to building itself out so that it might provide a place of tangible relief and healing for its congregation, it shifted to building a media empire built on trendy, secular-adjacent music in order to actively abuse its congregation who came in search of meaning and left with lighter wallets. i think that is evil.

we're now solidly into the course and i love how much the readings build on each other each day. i find myself coming back to the same topics but in new ways, with new language to describe my thoughts. i want to return now to the power of drumming. and i actually want to talk about mumble rap. i am a part of that weird generation of people from the late 90s that don't fully relate to millenials or gen z, but have borne witness to both. thus, i grew up inbetween the eras of lyrical and mumble rap (though this is a vast oversimplification of rap history) so i know people on both sides of the cultural/generational divide. the tired argument goes that mumble rap is not as legitimate as lyrical rap or that mumble rap doesn't take talent and that it's basically just a hard beat and a bunch of gibberish. that is of course, not all it is, but even if it was, is that bad? i say no. mumble rappers grew up on lyrical rap and draw inspiration from it and move the culture forward. but even if mumble rap is just a phenomenal beat, is that not music enough? is that not spiritual enough? in the context of this class i would posit that an incredible beat is absolutely enough to constitute a great song. i frequently listen to music in other languages that i don't understand, but vibes transcend languages. the vibrations of love far transcends even my ability to capture it in the english language. sometimes sounds and instrumentals are even the best way to transmit a vibe or certain energy.

i feel that way about mah's joint by jon bellion. in the documentary where he talks about what it was like to make this album, jon talks about how he didn't have the words to say all that he wanted to say on the topic of his grandmother's dementia so he just sung without words. the song is eight minutes long and the vast majority of it is instrumental and wordless singing and yet the song is so powerful. the back half of the song is just a sonic meditation on dementia and that's all it needed to be. i'll post the documentary below.

my last very brief thought that hasn't fully developed yet is that the zombie apocalypse media trend of the early 2010s could have been so much more powerful/meaningful if they had leaned into their actual roots.

[marissapaul]

12/22 day 7: Syncretism and Cuba

so i of course have to start of with something tangentially related to the day's readings. this is orisa from the video game overwatch. i didn't make this connection yesterday, but reading The Blood of Mothers i was reminded of her and i remembered her being from numbani, overwatch's representation of a utopian african city. i did a little more digging online and it turns out that she was named after the yoruba orisha's but the relation kind of stops there. her values and backstory are pretty watered down and generic, her wiki page just says that she is devoted to "honor and duty" which could mean any number of things. and unlike my digging on far cry 6 yesterday, the discourse surrounding orisa's yoruba inspiration was not nearly as pleasant nor did it feel like people felt authentically represented. this is not necessarily surprising as blizzard has a notoriously not great work culture

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/08/06/blizzard-culture-sexual-harassment-alcohol/

but on to today's readings! i particularly enjoyed The Blood of Mothers. I have become interested recently in corporeality in history and talking about people's relationship to their body and lived experience and this is a solid addition to the toolkit. it also feels like a lot of atlantic scholarship in the past twenty years that has given considerable attention to the ways in which Black women especially were in such a liminal space as their bodies were so important for labor and for reproducing and they were pseudoscientifically presumed to have higher pain tolerances which made them "ideal" candidates for medical experimentation and the rigors of childbirth. yet they were simultaneously made out to be an incorrect example of femininity. these women were simultaneously integral to the truly immense wealth that was procured through the slave economy, and somehow not important as people. this is the conversation that The Blood of Mothers talks to, and i appreciated reading this particular aspect of it. i think that it was specifically positioning reproduction:fertility & transformation:witchcraft which made this piece so powerful for me. transformation being analogous to witchcraft makes so much sense to me. we've spent a lot of time in this course looking at the ways in which colonial authorities and white supremacy have tried to control witchcraft, and if you just swap out "witchcraft" for "transformation" right there, the picture becomes abundantly clear. change is dangerous to an institution that is precariously balanced upon a pseudoscientific and hateful interpretation of the universe. and that is what witchcraft is, change. making new. adapting. creating out of whatever materials have been given. in a history course we might spend time each week talking about our definition of witchcraft. we often do this over the course of the semester as we work towards our historiographies, and i think this might be a useful practice for me going forward in these reflections. witchcraft can be so many different things, but it is - at least in part - change. i will keep coming back to this with a willingness to adjust and add and... change with new information.

i also thought it was really interesting to learn about how important post-menopausal women were to the economy of yoruba especially as a figurehead and overseer. i tend to enjoy bottom-up histories so that is typically what i read but what i read is always from a post-contact perspective so it was interesting to read what was not really a top-down history, but yoruba society was just structured so differently than anglo society that i found it really interesting to read about these women who were at the top, figureheads and negotiators that kept the economy of yoruba alive and thriving.

but then we also see how this relationship to the mother's relationship turned inward when it came to the new world. if witchcraft is about change, then the way these women changed their circumstances was through infanticide and voluntary abortions. going back to what i talked about in previous posts, freedom looks different for everyone. and freedom can be asserted in different ways by different groups. for enslaved Black women, who were so so so vitally important to the system of slavery because of their ability to reproduce an exploited labor force, infanticide and abortion was one way in which they were able to assert their freedom. and yet they did not turn these relationships inwards only, they began creating new types of community. the article talks about this horizontal refabrication of disparate west african people and heritages into a common/allied heritage of those who survived the middle passage. community adapted. it no longer made sense to organize community in the way that these individuals had organized in their homes. and this all goes back to the importance of these west african spiritual traditions being rooted in the here and now, concerned with the material reality of its practitioners. for what is a set of spiritual beliefs if not a blueprint for how to live in the world. and when your spirituality is connected to the corporeal, we see that really powerful transformations are able to happen.

this is a video essay about wakanda forever and its depiction of grieving and an african spiritual tradition. in particular, he talks about community grieving and the idea of a spiritual totem that communities can draw strength from (the figure of the black panther is a spiritual totem) but he goes on to talk about how it is actually community that provides the power to the spiritual totem and thus the totem is self-reinforcing. i clung on to a particular quote from the video that goes, "so long as there's a village, there will always be a totem" it really perfectly encapsulates the power of community and the importance of intentionally building community that is able to lean on one another for strength. because (SPOILERS AHEAD) wakanda does not stop functioning in the year between t'challa's homegoing and when shuri takes on the mantle of the black panther. of course that whole time the country was looking to the black panther for strength but the black panther was not there. what was there was a bunch of wakandans who uplifted one another and kept the country moving forward and so the totem of the black panther really actually was there the whole time because it is every wakandan that believes in the power of the ancestors and in the black panther to protect through which the black panther has power as a spiritual totem. if y'all couldn't tell yet, i'm a big fan of community and it is the central focus of my thesis.

In anything we do, 

If we do not guarantee the place of women

That thing will not succeed. 

[Ifá says,] “we should acknowledge the power    of women,” 

[And that,] ‘‘if we acknowledge their power, 

The world will be peaceful.”

i love this poem from page 26 of Hidden Power. humanity has structured society in so many different ways over its 260 century journey and it is so wonderful to see a structuring of society that pays clear attention to the power of women in real and tangible ways. "nana bakuu is the courage and accomplishment of women, sublimed to the form of an orisha" p. 68.

one of my biggest gripes with evangelical christianity is that it is so person-centric and not focused on tangible ways that people might make their life better. and i think that is deliberate. being told to pray on something does not tangibly change the reality of your life. but all of these here-and-now religions we have been studying couple the idea of prayer with tangible action, and that is what makes them so powerful. in fact, that coupling of tangible action actually makes the act of praying more meaningful. because speaking to a community-based support group (alive or otherwise) that is going to then tangibly help you with your situation is so powerful. spirituality as we have seen it presented in this course is not abstract and unreachable. it is tangible and powerful. and i like that kind of spirituality.

[marissapaul]

12/21 day 6: Orisha/Orixa

when doing today's readings i thought of far cry 6 which is a video game that came out last year. the game is set on an island that is called yara, but it is clearly meant to be an analogue for cuba. i thought of the game because as i was playing through there were a couple side quests and collectibles that i thought i remembered being spiritual and so i did a little internet digging and the spirituality displayed in the game is actually based on santeria, you can see that the link above is actually from r/santeria or the reddit forum about santeria. they changed the names of everything in the game but reding through this thread, written by practitioners of santeria, they seem happy with the representation though some mentioned wishing that they had kept the real names of the orishas. i think it would be cool to know who at ubisoft pushed that particular aspect of the game and what kind of research and development went into implementing it? was it created by emic or etic artists? i would love to see a report on this. the soundtrack of the game was also heavily influenced/created by cuban rappers so the two songs we got to hear today sounded familiar. in fact, major lazer is credited on the soundtrack of the game. we love to see representation that affirms those who are being represented.

i was also thinking about how candomble and santeria are here-and-now belief systems. when you look at what they stand for it is a lot of stuff like mutual aid, preventative medicine, and fostering community. this is is all super similar to current day leftist praxis and so it makes clear sense to me why colonizers would feel so threatened by these religions. their core tenets were incompatible with capitalism. i also think back to our earlier discussions about the shift from feudalism to capitalism and how that shift required turning the body into a machine i.e. the human body being the first technological development of capitalism. this is much the same. the enslaved persons that were being brought over were not blind to what was happening to them, they knew their situation intimately and for the ones that came from africa, they were able to pull from a vast number of belief systems that they then adapted to their current reality. and if we're getting super technical, these religions and their tenets of community and mutual aid were incongruent with the desired outcome of the middle passage: social death. so of course they were targeted by colonial authorities. for much in the same way that multi-racial coalitions terrify capitalists, the belief systems and strength of spiritual systems like candomble and santeria were similarly terrifying. my friend actually talked about this in her thesis which was about haiti and she talks about just how on edge white people were leading up to the haitian revolution. they knew their position was untenable because of the kinds of thoughts and practices coming from enslaved persons, maroon communities, and free Black people. those who have the ability to imagine the otherwise terrify those who wish to maintain the status quo.

it was also interesting to learn how practitioners appropriated the different catholic saints so that they might practice in safety. again, this is a tangible example of just how acutely aware the subaltern are of their realities. i love the recent shift in scholarship that writes about the subaltern and diaspora in the ways in which they created and loved in spite of their situation. and i don't mean this in the toxic way that puts the onus of earning freedom on the marginalized, i mean it in the way that freedom means different things for everyone. enslaved people in the atlantic might not have been thinking about john locke and white thinkers who justified the american revolution as a revolution for just white people, but they were certainly aware of their reality and they had their own thoughts, beliefs, and spiritual systems from which they drew strength. and so we have an outpouring of scholarship that examines resistance and freedom in a new light. historians have moved from looking at big moments like the haitian revolution, to looking at the very important and intimate histories that led to a world in which the haitian revolution could take place. and through this we are able to write people into a history of liberation that is less concerned with whether or not a movement was an explicit success or failure, for life is rarely - if ever - that black and white.

lastly i want to spend a little time with candomble medicine. for it too is a much better example of how to do medicine than our current system. the united states lauds itself as a leader in medicine yet for all of its medical advancements, those advancements remain inaccessible to large swaths of americans. not only that, but doctors are often treating symptoms rather than the root cause of things. shoutout to doctors of osteopathic medicine. regardless of whether or not you believe in a spirit world, the preventative practices of candomble just seem like a more authentic way to handle the body. listen to the body and react to what it is telling you. of course, part of the american healthcare system is taking away agency from people who are coming into doctors offices trying to explain the way they feel and they get brushed off because they're women or trans or Black or poor or disabled so not only are doctors not helping people towards holistic treatment that takes their spirit and mental health into account, but they often aren't even treating the symptoms. in much the same way that i can understand why white people were so afraid of those who imagine other ways of living and organizing society and community, indigenous medicine must be scary to big pharma and the medical industrial complex writ large. because if you look at the history of many popular medicines today, they are derived from plants that indigenous people have been using for centuries. white supremacy has optimized medicinal herbs and tinctures to the detriment of appreciating holistic treatment and the beauty of how life on this planet is able to nurture and take care of other life. how awesome is it that there are plants that can ease headaches and stop the spread of infection and numb physical pain. life takes care of life, but modern medicine neglects that aspect of healing. i greatly appreciate today's readings and the past readings that have showed us just how important healers (and curadoras as Dra. Sotomayor uses the term) are in the process of holistic healing of the mind, body, and soul. and not just how important they are, but we get a view of tangible ways that we might implement these systems in our own lives.

this post is a little shorter than usual. i honestly don't have much more that jumped out to me. this is a new topic to me so i don't have as many cultural touchstones so i am interested to see what my classmates have taken away from today's readings.

[marissapaul]

12/20 day 5: Modernity and Dis-Membering

i'm going to start off with an album recommendation again. i find that i have been more intentional about the music that i listen to this past year. i respond deeply to music and it has the power to guide and exacerbate the mood that i am in. before i recognized this i would feed into manic spirals with a bunch of sad music, but now that i am aware of it, i am able to set soundtracks for my life based on the mood i'm in or the mood i'd like to achieve. anyways, this is the album that felt right to listen to while doing the readings for today

since we're reflecting on spirituality in this course (especially Black and African) this felt like a good album to put on. kpop has burst into the mainstream in recent years and with it has come conversations about cultural appropriation and how kpop is just Black music and performance from the early 2000s turned up to an 11. because of this, and because kpop artists aren't always aware of this intellectual legacy, there have been some not so great and outright anti-Black moments in kpop but RM is a strong example of how to take inspiration from Black artistry without appropriating it or being disrespectful. if you take a look at the features on this album there are people like erykah badu, anderson paak and it is because RM really is about the culture. he is a lover of art and the meaning behind art and he does so in such a respectful way and i think he is a great role model for other kpop artists. the album was released recently and it is a meditation on his twenties which are drawing to a close. it's about his connection to art and color and community and growth and friendship and himself and it's just a great listen.

anyways, to the topic of the day! i really enjoyed today's readings, they were right up my alley as a historian so i found some comfortability in reading through them. penalizing vodou was a particularly powerful piece because it hits on a lot of important topics for me. the first is the demographic makeup of the gendarmerie (military personnel). you can tell a lot about a state's (in the macro sense) intentions by the way that they structure their institutions. for this force to consist of military leaders, enlisted, and just generally uninformed white dudes, we are able to clear that the United States' intentions were violent from the beginning. in the same way that police in the united states are instigators and make every situation more tense, we see the same thing happening in the united states' imperialistic endeavours. sending a cop to someone's house while they're having a manic episode isn't going to deescalate things with empathy and understanding, it's going to put the person on even higher alert. the same thing happens with the policing of religious practices. you wouldn't send a policemen to a church to make sure things are running smoothly, so why would you send a military man to a foreign nation if your intentions are not violent.

i thought it was interesting that the soldiers stationed in haiti prided themselves on supposedly being able to distinguish between ritual and secular drumming. this is, of course, an invisible enemy. in the same way that queerness or leftist thought does not have a phenotype, the cadence of drums can be any number of things in any number of situations. but an authority figure claiming that they can distinguish between the two allows for them to police with supposed legitimacy and there were almost assuredly cases where they raided a secular gathering that they interpreted as religious and vice versa.

i was more interested in part two of the chapter which described the material effects of such policing, and the ways in which practitioners of vodou got around the system. it made me think of this tik tok that i saw earlier

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRq2c1JE/

the video is a popular disabled creator stitching a video of a woman trying to get her tubes tied and being questioned about it by her doctor. the creator stitching the video goes on to lay out how much of the american healthcare system is based on eugenics and that if you're a black woman wanting to get your tubes tied, that if you just tell your doctors that your family has a history of disability that they will consent to the surgery so quickly. we see this same thing happening on haiti in this book. and this haitian tradition of gaming the system was by no means a new one, it is the same strategy that enslaved persons working in haiti used to subvert white surveillance far before things coalesced into the haitian revolution. but here i thought it was interesting that white authorities would seek out religious leaders for positions of power because of how much sway they already held in the community but then that pursuit of unearned access to a community got thrown back in their faces. chef's kiss. i think this also makes clear the complicated nature of social change. in this case, it was important that practitioners of vodou had people in the system as a stopgap and safety measure. even though the goal is liberation and a world in which they might practice without fear, it was important to have people in positions of power within the existing power structures so that they might protect while they worked towards a greater liberation.

midnight scenes got me thinking about my own place as a historian of gender. in the reading the author talks a lot about how vodou was, in part, what formed an evolving justification for white supremacy. "individually and collectively, public voodoo narratives evinced for white publics the primitive, oppositional blackness on which constructions of their own racial identities relied" (p. 769). this is not my first encounter with this type of idea, my mind is drawn to Edward Said's Orientalism, L. Heidenreich's Nepantla Squared, Kathleen Brown's Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, and Natalie Molina's Fit to be Citizens? which tell a similar story of othering. for in order to assert white supremacy, they have to denote something as less than and this has happened in so many ways across so many countries and ethnicities. Orientalism is about the creation of a "western" identity, Nepantla Squared is about the creation of whiteness and gender norms, Good Wives is about colonial gender hierarchies in which white women found themselves significantly higher on the totem pole than Black women (enslaved or otherwise), and Fit to be Citizens? is about the los angeles health department in the 19th century and the ways in which they decided what was a healthy body through violence against chinese, japanese, and mexican immigrants, and endemic indigenous people/californios. i appreciate this new piece of the puzzle and it has been this academic journey that has changed the way i position myself as a historian. when i first got to grad school i wanted to be a strictly transgender historian but when i unpack why i want to write about transgender people it is because i am in love with the ways in which they exhibit/feel/perform gender outside of the normative. but as i began to get more pieces of the puzzle, i began to realize that the ways in which non-white texans were racialized and used to create a normative ideas of gender against which 'proper' white masculinity and femininity could be constructed. there is complication with using anachronistic terms here, but "cisgender" Black and brown folks have been living non-normative gendered lives since the age of exploration and far before. i love each of the books mentioned above for similar reasons that i love transgender historical subjects and thus i have begun to view myself as more of a historian of gender rather than as a historian of transgender people.

sacred crimes was particularly powerful for me. i love the sound of music and i love performance and i think the exploration of what makes something a secularized performance rather than the real thing was so interesting. the line "sacred performance involves the rehearsal of function rather than form" stood out to me in particular. i think that is a really powerful line. this is kind of the artist's story in a sense. i am learning to research and write and paint so that i might create better art. i am interested in sharpening my ability to express the human condition. i am much less interested in crafting an empirically true (again, doesn't exist) and technically perfect thesis, and i am not interested in painting perfect replications of what i see in the world. i am interested in capturing the essence of these things and i am interested in the tools i need to more authentically capture such essences so that i am not just able to create one great thesis, but that i might go forward in life creating a multitude of things. i do not chase the next great intervention in the field of gender history, i chase the tools that will help me more authentically talk about my historical subjects, and in that pursuit i have created far more than i did when i was chiefly concerned with writing the next historical intervention.

"in folkloric renditions of these events...there is little incentive to improvise in an immediate, divinely inspired way. what happens instead is that the songs and dances are transcribed into rehearsed memory, usually becoming more static with each rendition" (p. 119). for me, art has become about making sure that i do not become static. when i paint i have a vision in mind, but i let my hand and the page guide where the painting goes. for i am not imitating something that i have seen before, even in my mind's eye, i am creating something new with the tools i have gathered. and each painting is a new tool or lesson that i might continue to iterate on in the next.

i am reminded of this virtual concert that jon bellion held.

each of the songs that is performed here exists on record already. he spent years meticulously crafting each song, tweaking things to be just right so that he might release Glory Sound Prep and it might be as close to perfect as possible. but he doesn't play the songs here like they sound on the album he put out. each is an entirely new rendition of what were already sonically and musically and lyrically incredible songs. but jon has grown since he put those albums out. he has a bigger toolkit and has lived more life and experienced those emotions in new and beautiful ways. and so the music is familiar to those who have spent hundreds of hours listening to it, but he freestyles the arrangement, the pacing, all of it. and so his fans got to hear something that they knew, but in a new and powerful new way. this is by far the greatest concert that i have seen live or otherwise. and it relates so intimately to the lessons of sacred crimes. we can't remain static, we learn to paint or create music or write so that we can tap into the spiritual, not so that we can create an unattainable perfect piece of art.

[marissapaul]

12/19 day 4: Witches & The West

i listened to M. Sague's album while reading for today. i love listening to non-english music. i'm a big fan of k-pop (twice is my ult if any of you are into kpop) and i just listen to a large amount of music that isn't in english in general. i think that music is able to tell a story regardless of whether or not i understand the words. in fact, i make note to not look up translations for the non-enlgish songs that i listen to because these songs all have a story to tell me and i don't think that i need to know exactly what they are saying to draw strength and knowlede from them. Miguel's album is definitely being added to the rotation. he mentioned in his talk that he was not formally trained musically, and i think this album is a powerful testament to why formal training doesn't always matter. it can be nice to understand music theory and why certain notes and chords make us feel a certain way, but this is a genuinely great album and it came not of eurocentric music study, but of an indigenous tradition from which Miguel draws strength. i think that is what i am most reflective about today, unpacking the idea that science and technology are how we know things about the world. that just simply isn't true. the taino belief in a 260 century long story of humanity is proof. of course human technology has seen an explosion over the past two centuries, but that doesn't mean that humans knew nothing of the world for the past two hundred thousand years, most of which remain hidden to us (in large part thanks to the culturicide that took/is taking place at the hands of colonization/imperialism). in fact, humans knew quite a bit about the world around them and i think it is so powerful to pull from non-european and non-scientific understandings of the world. just to be clear, i'm not anti-science in any way, i just recognize that the science we have today is not empirical, it is heavily biased, and it was created through culturicide and racism. but as i find myself growing older, i find that i draw infinitely more strength from the past than i do from the pursuit of empirical truths about the world.

there is something so powerful about a 260 century long journey. as i've said before, i grew up in the southern baptist church and until i reached high school i was one of those kids who thought that the world had really only been around for two thousand years. and not only was that such a short amount of time, but we were separated from most of that history by the atrocities that occurred throughout the medieval ages, early modern era, the age of exploration, settler colonialism, chattel slavery, and jim crow. up until college i was also one of those kids who thought that racism was solved by the civil rights act of 1964. this left a forty year history that i found myself to be a part of. i find it so powerful then, that indigenous people had such a large (and ironically, more empirically true) vision of the past. drawing from the strength of 260 centuries rather than forty years of supposed peace is something that i wouldn't have been able to fathom a decade ago. but i am a part of a much longer history than that. i have found comfort and meaning in queerness through history, through knowing that for thousands of years there are people's whose brains were just a little different, people who loved different, lived different. and that is beautiful. i carry on that beauty. we have been given these forms so that we might be stewards of the universe we find ourselves in and i think that is so beautiful. the way the shamans are described in the caney circle entries affirms this. of course i do not mean to apply anachronistic terms to historical figures, and i certainly do not claim to be a shaman or anything of the sort, but there are clear and strong parallels between how shamans are described here, and my own autistic journey. sensing from childhood that i was different, artistic talent, being right-brained (and masking for twenty years as a left-brained person) are all things that i relate to. i also meditate and practice breathing, i drum, and i have been known to partake in consciousness-expanding substances. and thanks to today's readings, i have a new cultural touchstone from which to draw from when describing my experiences and the way my brain works either outwardly, in my academic writing, or in personal journaling.

this is a super awesome song from the wakanda forever soundtrack. it was made in collaboration with the adn maya colectivo rap group who rap in their indigenous language as a way to keep that culture and language alive. i really appreciated the exploration of indigeneity in wakanda forever. it was always going to be hard to create a movie that was going to be as good as the first black panther, but ryan coogler knew from the beginning that he wanted to take this direction. in fact, he even remade the character of namor into an indigenous one in order to tell an even more complex story about diaspora wars, the subaltern, and colonization. in the movie we get to see the pain of people being subjeted to small pox, to having their land stolen, and to not being able to die and be buried in the land they once called their home. but the movie doesn't dwell on that pain like movies with white directors love to do. the movie goes on to show how Talokan (analogous to Mayan people) went on to create beauty and safety in spite of what colonization had forced upon them. and i don't think it is totally correct to call namor the villain of the movie. his motivations are valid, and ever since reading American on Fire by Elizabeth Hinton, my view of violence has changed dramatically.

in the book she explains that it was not destruction of property by the hands of black revolutionaries that was violent. theirs was merely a measured response to the violence that they had subjected to. the police state is violence, the american judicial system is violence, the suburbs are violence, stop and frisk is violence. demanding to not be treated in such a way is not violence. so going back to wakanda forever, i don't think it is correct to call namor an absolute villain. in fact, the end of the movie is literally these two parts of the diaspora coming to the realization that they should not be fighting each other, because that just perpetuates cycles of violence and subaltern in-fighting that the bourgeois class depends on. they instead realize that should be united against the white supremacist systems and institutions that created such a world in the first place. and they come to this realization through the use of consciousness-expanding drugs and a connection to the ancestral plane! i think this is such a beautiful film and i was only able to enjoy it so deeply because of the learning that i have done in the past few years about the subaltern and colonization and the atlantic world and enslavement and non-white spirituality.

and that is why i love academia. it gives me the language and tools i need to understand the world around me, the media i am consuming, the art i come in contact with, and the different modes of being that i am exposed to. i am forever indebted to my WGS professors that have given me space to understand that it is not absurd to talk about wakanda forever in conjunction with my academic journey. the third chapter of my thesis is about transgender childhood and i close the chapter with an m'baku from wakanda forever, "the world has taken too much from you for you to still be considered a child" and my advisor loved it! but that is not a decision i would have made even six months ago. but that movie was one part of an archive/toolkit that i have assembled in order to construct my thesis, and it isn't silly or non-academic to acknowledge such.

[marissapaul]

12/16 day 3: witches & the west: capitalist transitions

as a historian of the 19th and late 20th century i have a fair amount of experience with studying large scale economic shifts i.e. the shift to monopoly capitalism at the turn of the 20th century and then the turn of the 21st century shift to neoliberalism and globalization, but this is new territory for me. by the 1800s capitalist project of settler colonialism and the slave economy were well underway. of course, i was aware that capitalism and racism developed alongside one another, and that capitalism necessitates racism, and i was aware of the role that ireland played in the introduction of a racial other, but this was a much deeper dive into the shift from fuedalism to capitalism and i enjoyed it.

i want to spend time with corporeality first, since it plays a large role in today's readings. i was drawn to the line "we can see, in other words, that the human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism" (p. 143). that is such an interesting claim to make, one that i largely agree with. to me this chapter brought up the idea of "social death" from atlantic studies. the idea of social death was presented as a way to emphasize just how brutal the middle passage was in the atlantic slave trade, and what enslavers were hoping to accomplish. more recent historians have moved away from the term as a finite one, and more as a representation of what enslavers tried to do. because, as we see in the book's brief discussion of the caribbean, slavery and racism and white supremacy are not stable or preordained systems. in fact, they are quite instable. and while we didn't get particularly satisfying conversation about how successful capitalism was in turning bodies/minds into machines, i am sure this is something we will see as the course progresses. it is certainly true that no technology is perfect, and thus neither would this attempted hijacking of the human body be. nonetheless, i really appreciated this expanded discussion of alienation from one's body. marx was notoriously blind to women in his writings so while i think he came up with some great conversation starters, i am thoroughly interested in scholarship that pushes marxism forwards.

also in "the struggle against the rebel body" was a discussion of how magic kills industry. before reading further and seeing that there was an answer in the coming pages, my thoughts turned towards disney. i have such an odd relationship to disney and it all relates to this idea that "the revival of magical beliefs is possible today because it no longer represents a social threat" (p. 143). anyways, let me just explain my disney take, which of course is not mine alone, and is heavily influenced by the following media, the first of which is a documentary about the disney channel theme and the politics of citation and legacy, and the second is about andor, a recent star wars production that had an anti-capitalist message.

disney's legacy is a complicated one. it is a mega corporation that engages in monopolizing media. in the age of its acquisition of ip's like star wars and the marvel cinematic universe disney they have monopolized the vfx market, dramatically overworking and underpaying vfx artists who are responsible for the visual wonders of the mcu. every move that the corporation has made over the past decades has been in pursuit of more money and more power. yet there is a magic to disney at least for me. i have such fond memories of watching disney/pixar movies on vhs, of seeing the lion king musical, most of the tattoos on my left arm are inspired by disney creations. because while disney is in pursuit of money, the people storyboarding and animating these movies are very often working class people. the people doing the labor of filming, editing, and producing movies, of making disney parks an immersive experience are working class. and thus their world view slips into their work and so we live in this world where one of the biggest media monopolies on the planet is producing shows like andor which lean into anti-capitalism, and movies like wakanda forever which have real and important things to say about grief, and movies like luca which is almost assuredly about two gay italian boys falling in love. these stories have meaning to me, because the people that worked on them did so with love and with the perspective from which they create art. so while disney as a corporation is abhorrent, the workers of disney are able to create magic. and i think that magic can still be subversive and powerful. just look at the context surrounding the release of the first black panther movie. the movie was released in the wake of trump's election and amidst a rise in public-facing alt right violence. and in that moment, ryan coogler and the cast and crew were able to create such a beautiful cultural touchstone for the Black diaspora.

sociologists in recent years have begun to talk about the outcomes of social movements rather than if they were objectively successful or not. i think that we should apply the same kinds of thinking to magic and to art that is created even for corporations. the black panther may not have convinced its entire audience to join in the fight against colonialism and towards black liberation but it was a piece towards creating a culture in which the 2020 black lives matter movement would be a significant demonstration of multi-cultural and cross-racial alliance - something that has been historically incredibly difficult to organize. indeed, today's readings talk about this as early capitalists were well aware that in order to justify the existence of a lower working class, they were going to have to divide up the proletariat, and thus we end up with race-based slavery. this is not a short fight, and changing hearts where we can is sometimes all we can do as we work towards liberation.

i just read a great book, border bodies by Bernadine Hernandez, which expands on the concepts presented in today's reading. in this book Hernandez explains that mexicanas/chicanas were not only integral to capitalism because of their ability to reproduce, but also because the act of sex was actively utilized (forcibly) for building a capitalist economy. this happened through the leveraging of daughters as economic capital via marriage, through sex work, and through debt peonage in the 19th century in greater/northern mexico. would definitely recommend for people invested in borderlands studies.

i don't have as many cultural touchstones to point to for today because this is new territory for me so i'll just offer up this album to the class, as it is what i listened to as i read and reflected for today.

[marissapaul]

12/15 day 2: opening wounds

in thinking about performing an identity of an Other (and i really like the way that Fusco capitalized Other, to me it feels synonymous to capitalizing the b in Black, it is a reclamation of a culture and an identity and a way of being) my mind is drawn to a particular video essay by my favorite youtube essayist, F.D. Signifier.

F.D. is awesome, he's at the forefront of Black gender discourse, he has an academic background but fell disillusioned with academia and found he could make a bigger difference (and more money) on youtube. but this particular essay is about selling Blackness. and in F.D.'s summation, this is what dave chappelle does. he explains how dave lost sight of what had made him famous and what had garnered so much support for the Chapelle show, and that one day dave looked out into his audience and realized that it was no longer Black people in the audience or laughing at his jokes, it was white people. dave was performing Blackness for a white audience, and this is where his descent into transphobia and bigotry began. this is of course a far oversimplified version of both the video and of chappelle's life, but the main idea is that Black people who "make it" have to sell a part of themselves in order to do so. but the video is not just a critique of chappelle, it is a meditation on how, in some ways, F.D. is doing the same thing. of course, F.D. is a proponent of firmly leftist thought, and so the ways in which he sells his Blackness is different, but F.D. reports struggling with this aspect of his work. the majority of his audience is Black, but there is a significant number of white people who watch him and because this is his job, this is how he makes money and supports his family, he is in some ways selling Blackness and Black culture to be consumed by a white audience. Most of F.D.s video essays are about media and dissecting it through a Black lens and through a gender studies lens and so by him sharing his experience of what it was like growing up as a Black boy and then man, he is sharing/selling that part of his world and of his connection to Blackness. it makes for a weird relationship to his white audience. and of course his audience tends to be more left-leaning, it isn't like the people he is talking to are the same people who gawked at Fusco's performance (though there is certainly some overlap), but the same principles apply. He is making Blackness legible and accessible to a white audience, and there are things that have to be taken into consideration when doing so. he has to think about the impact of his words and how they might be twisted and deliberately misconstrued, he has to worry about critiquing Black figures and Black community for fear white people weaponizing those critiques against Blackness wholesale.

i find myself grappling with Fusco's claim that "human exhibitions exist in more benign forms today - that is, the people in them are not displayed against their will." my immediate reaction would be that these displays are not benign any more today than they were 400 years ago, they simply manifest in new ways, ways that are just as harmful to marginalized people. i would point towards the idea that people existing under capitalism are not always doing so because they consent to it. workers are not fairly consenting to poverty wages because if they stop working they die. they are forcibly part of a system that is the same system that justified and required chattel slavery to function. the methods may be different, but wage slavery and chattel slavery serve the same system of economic and societal organization.

i spend quite a bit of time thinking about the politics of archives. as a queer historian it is a necessity because queer people do not show up in traditional archives in the same ways as affluent cisnormative/heterosexual white people have. the archival silences are deliberate and thus we must create our own archives. but we must create these archives with intent. it is not enough that we have our voices added to the official archives, we need to think of new ways to archive ourselves and our lived experiences. this is something that i have been eminently cognizant of as i have constructed an archive for my thesis. the bulk of my thesis is informed by narrators whose oral histories i spent time earlier this year recording. i recorded interviews with limited interjection on my own behalf, and just let trans people talk. and the words that they spoke were beautiful. i am still working on tightening up my analysis, but in two out of three chapters, my advisor was just blown away by my primary sources. they are by far the best part of my thesis, for i think everyone has something beautiful to say, and i am able to give the opportunity for people who don't see themselves represented in popular history or k-12 history in Texas to share those words. because their lives and their philosophies matter. but the archive i have curated (and i will return to this idea of a curator as Dra. Sotomayor framed it because i think it is brilliant) does not stop there. it includes newsletters from a houston-area trans outreach group from the late twentieth century which were only available to me thanks to my proximity to trans community in houston - the newsletters are held in a storage unit just inside the 610 loop, it is nothing fancy and there is certainly no clear process for accession and cataloguing because this was a community project. i also pull from early internet blogs of Monica Roberts, a Black trans Houstonian. and i pull from tik tok and twitter and facebook and instagram. i have quotes from tik tik, boom and from wakanda forever. i have created a new archive, one that is seen with increasing legitimacy (with a heavy scoop of skepticism) among the field of history. my work is new and different and beautiful because it is, from the ground up, constructed in a radically different ways than white historians ten and twenty and thirty years my senior. archives are so important. and even non-historians curate archives of what matters to them. an archive is a folder of memes on your phone that make you laugh, it is a memento bucket of items from your childhood, it is a finsta where you might post and preserve yourself more intimately, it is your favorites folder on youtube. we all create archives of our human experience and that is beautiful. i try to do it with intent.

in regards to religious freedom and reparations, i dislike the idea of neutrality. it does not exist. in the same way that empiric truths of our universe are similarly nonexistent, neutrality is a myth of white supremacy. laws are not neutrally enforced, they are only neutrally enforced if you think that white is normative and everything else is different. but white is not the baseline human experience, it is not cosmically-ordained neutrality. a law preventing people from practicing animal sacrifices or taking peyote are only codified because that is what white society has deemed that their interpretation of the world is the objectively true and correct one. that situation is by no means neutral, it is actively violent against those whose interpretations of the world lie outside what is deemed normative. i tried to find the tik tok but was unable (i should have done a better job curating) but one of my favorite tik toks was an indigenous american person talking about how when he looks at mount rushmore, he sees it in a fundamentally different way than the white people who created it and who come to visit it. where white people see a memorial of triumph over an untamed land and the supremacy of an american way of being, this person saw a violent bastardization of the land that we have been gifted stewardship of. the mountain in his eyes was not an obstacle. mountains were not an obstacle to manifest destiny, they were one part of a beautiful earth that we are the stewards of. they were not something to be cut through and conquered, they were something to be protected and cherished and admired.

in the spirit of making new types of archives, this is a clip from dimension 20, an actual play dungeons and dragons show where the dungeon master, brennan lee muligan delivers a poignant but hilarious monologue about how laws are just threats of violence made by the dominant socio-economic class in a given nation.

lastly, i want to return to the idea of a curadora/curator as a type of healer or facilitator of a healing process. i absolutely love this idea, and it is certainly the role that Dra. Sotomayor has played in my own journey. as i mentioned in my bio, i was able to take a class with her on latina feminisms in may of this year and the class was structured in much the same way with anzaldua's idea of engaging with information in multiple ways. in that class i got to submit a painting as a legitimate form of reflection on the day's readings and that was truly one of the most liberating experiences of my academic career. what i am doing is art. i am creating for other humans. i am curating a particular story about the ways in which transgender houstonians have created community and a home and a sense of belonging in the most anti-trans state in the nation. but i am not in pursuit of some objective history about trans people in houston, i am in pursuit of recording this particular way of being in the world so that others might be able to draw lessons from it in the same way that i have. trans houstonians have left an indedible mark on my life and the way that i live in the world and i think the tools they gave me might be useful to other people. and in that way i am a curator of healing. i discuss childhood trauma, transness, taking children seriously as historical subjects, Blackness, undocumented people, neurodivergent people, and more. in each of these i have found a blueprint for how to live in this world with love and i find myself curating that blueprint so others might learn from it. and in that way i am a historian of the academy, yes, but i am contributing to something so much bigger than just the pursuit of academic and true knowledge. i, at least i hope, am a curator of healing, as my mentors - academic and otherwise - were for me. we can only begin to create our best work once we acknowledge who we are and what biases and experiences we bring to the table. in a lot of cases, that means working through trauma. but working through that trauma does not just benefit us in our personal lives, but in our academic lives as well. for these are not two different lives, they are two aspects of the same life and they bleed into one another.

i'll close with this clip from trevor noah. in it he describes finding a "life-life balance" rather than a work-life balance, because life doesn't stop when you are at work, you don't stop being a human at work. we must embrace that and tap into that and draw strength from it. my work is only what it has become because of the immense curation towards healing that has been invested in me and it would be disingenuous to not just acknowledge that in my scholarship, but lean into it. timestamp is 2:40

ah! quick addendum that i forgot to write about earlier. i also love Dra. Sotomayor's discussion of thinking about how words are arranged on a screen in the same way we arrange paint on a canvas. i had never thought critically about it before, but this is the reason i type in all lowercase if i have the option to. in much the same way that people joke about gay people being not being able to sit in chairs the right way or how we don't like overhead lights because they are too bright, i type in lowercase because uppercase letters are often too "bright" for me. there is a crunchiness and rigidity to starting each sentence with a letter that is louder than the rest. when i write i want people to take in the entirety of what i'm saying. an indented paragraph and capitalized letter signal that this is the important part of what you're about to read, but it's all important. the middle of a journey is just as powerful as its beginning or end. and by writing in all lowercase i have a more even template upon which i might emphasize some words or ideas that don't belong at the beginning of a sentence or paragraph. i write in all lowercase because it feels nice to my brain. it's a gentler way to write in the same way that light from a lamp or from a window provides a gentler environment for learning in a classroom.

[marissapaul]

12/14 day 1: assumptions and stereotypes

i suppose day 1 is as good a day as any to reflect on my spiritual journey. i have a relationship to spirituality that i don't fully grasp yet, but it's something i have been thinking about more and more in recent years. i grew up in the southern baptist church (i'll name drop, it was bear creek baptist church in katy, texas) and it was a miserable experience for queer person. you all have heard this story before, evangelical christianity has historically been not the kindest space for queer individuals. me and my other visibly queer friend (who grew up in the same church) were constantly on the receiving end of bullying and even death threats from members of the church. but being raised in the church was not all bad. because my parents decided to raise me in that particular church, and my best friend's parents decided the same (we lived in different parts of houston and likely wouldn't have otherwise met) i was also exposed to queer ways of being. that friend was my first exposure to modes of living outside of the church that i was raised in. he introduced me to new modes of sexuality and sexuality, of media, of enjoying art, and in doing so he set me on the journey i currently find myself on.

after coming out publicly i left the church i grew up in, for my safety i really had to. and for a while i held bitterness in my heart towards both religion and those that practiced it. not only did i grow up in the baptist church, but i grew up in an upper-middle class white family from in the suburbs of houston. my childhood exposure to what life could be and what life should be was so tightly constricted. it was the white picket fence and the four-person nuclear family and the heterosexual relationship and christianity and a lack of care for your neighbors in pursuit of personal glory. i didn't yet have the words and tools to advocate for myself and for other modes of being, but i knew that my mom's dream for my life didn't fit with what i was dreaming about: dragons and science fiction and kissing other girls and magic and superheroes and the hit fox television show glee. but those didn't fit into the spiritual framework that had been forced upon me in my childhood. so for a while i rejected religion as i had no touchstone for spirituality other than evangelical christianity and that wasn't vibing with me. in search of truths about the world i overadjusted into the only other thing i knew, science. but this was a white supremacist science, a science borne of experimenting on enslaved women and on black and brown children and of eugenics and the supposed empirical justifications upon which the western white supremacist world has built an "other" against which their superiority might be measured. and so for a while i took the stance of the pessimistic athiest decrying religion and its practitioners, thinking them foolish for having faith in something that couldn't be proven, not realizing that the form of science i believed in was itself far from empirical truth - if such a thing even exists.

at this point i must explain that my mom separated me from any family history i had. growing up i had no access to family outside of the nuclear, no grandparents, no aunties and uncles, no intellectual or spiritual tradition/legacy. and as we all know, white is not a culture. i had nothing in the real world to turn to in order to get me through the most excruciating years of my life. so i turned to the otherwise. and i did not yet have the language to so eloquently explain this connection, but this is the reason i spent my childhood with my nose buried in as many books as i could get my hands on. it was my way of imagining the otherwise, a world where my queerness might not just be okay, but also a source of strength for both myself and those i was in community with. i found spirituality in alagaesia and in charlie bone's world and in the hyperion cantos.

and i found spirituality and meaning in music.

i found it in the orchestral swell of luxury and the lyrics "please don't let my soul drown in luxury"

i found it in wonderland

i found it in community and in something bigger than what i alone had to offer the world

and i found it in the cosmos

i have found it most recently in scholars writing from lived experiences far different from my own. i don't have a label for my spirituality, but i draw from the stages of grieving and healing represented in conocimiento, i draw from nepantla and from the idea of a world weave which i can give into and imbue with love, i draw from anzaldua and from the west africans in kevin dawson's undercurrents of power who found the strength to outwit american slavery through water. training as a historian has put me in close proximity to so many new (to me) ways of being, of loving, of putting good out into the world. i take care to not appropriate, but appreciate, and respectfully draw meaning from the writings and musings and artistic expressions of those who have imagined an otherwise. it is there from which i draw my spirituality.

i write this after years of therapy and reflection, but i truly have an open mind and heart going into this course. there would have been a time where rudy's practice of santeria would have been incongruent with my small and inflexible world view, but that time is long past and i look forward to learning from him and from each of the expressions of life we will encounter in this course.