Space--Male Privilege--Gender Guilt(?)

Any jogger knows what to do when he sees a strange dog on the next block: cross to the other side of the street and walk. Similarly, when we are out at night, we know to stay under the streetlights and on well-walked places. We know these things because we have a developed understanding of space and how we behave within it--so much so that it seems intuitive. We don't often, however, know or recognize that we have this awareness. When we interact with space, we generally do so on auto-pilot, without really noticing what we are doing or even that we are doing anything.

My most recent research has centered on the ways in which we "read" space and how, thus, space is textualized in ways that both encourage and constrict movement, empowering some people in particular spaces while restricting others.

When presenting this research recently, a fellow graduate student asked me about the gender differences in the particular space I was researching. How do women view the space, and do they move differently through it? Because my own research focused more on class (a different form of Other), I really had no data to answer this question. But it was a great question; no doubt women perceive the space differently than men, and it's reasonable to suspect that these perceptions influence the way women move through and interact with the particular space.

Then, a few days ago, I caught myself doing something interesting. I was leaving campus rather late on a cold day, which means that there weren't many people walking around. As I walked across an empty parking lot heading back to my car, a woman got out of a car further down the lot but directly in my path. I did something very interesting without really thinking about it in the moment: I changed my path. 

As soon as I had done it, I realized what I had just done. I had diverted my path to keep from walking too close to a woman in an empty parking lot in the twilight of a cold day. I had done this because I realized that crossing the path of a relatively large man in a black coat in empty parking lot was going to make her very nervous. I would have never done this to avoid another man; to do so would have been a sign of weakness--the weaker primate making way for the stronger. This, on the other hand, was a curious bit of chivalry, one that had happened naturally and, I think, was borne out of my recent hyper-awareness of space.

The incident also made me realize that feeling comfortable in public spaces is yet another male privilege that I have enjoyed and also completely naturalized. I've seen scores of news stories and public information campaigns advising women on how to protect themselves from predators. Included on all of these lists is an awareness of space. Know who is around, know what kind of area you're in, look for escape routes, and on and on. I, however, have never been taught any of these things (except for some versions of this in the police academy, but these were taught in and on very different terms).

What this means is that I have been allowed to blithely move through space with little awareness of how my presence in that space effects others. This means that everywhere I've ever gone where there has been a women present, she has had to pay close attention to me and she has had to adjust her movements accordingly. I, on the other hand, have been free to disregard her presence or even fail to notice her presence at all.

I've asked my wife before what it's like to be a woman in public--does she live with the knowledge that every man she passes looks at her? Does this bother her? Does she eventually just get used to it? Again here, I am made aware that women have had to think about how to handle me, though I have never been taught to be aware of my effect on them.

I'm not exactly exactly sure what I'm suggesting? Am I saying that men should stop staring at women in the mall? Absolutely! Am I saying that we should divert our paths in empty parking lots to stay away from women, thus protecting them from being uncomfortable with us? I'm not sure. I am aware that such extreme chivalry might be another form of sexism, based on some ingrained assumption that woman is a frail species that I must protect, even from the psychological effects of my presence. At the very least, I'm asking to be made more aware and for other men also to be more aware of how we ourselves interact with and are part of space, and how that effects others--others of different races, classes, genders. That doesn't mean that we must carry guilt simply for being born as we were; it's not my fault that I was born a white male to a middle class family. It does mean, though, that I should be aware of what it means to others that I am what I am, and how my presence in a space necessarily influences that space.

The Rhetoric of My Office

This year, for the first time ever, I have my own office at the institution where I teach. Having to choose things to hang on the walls and deciding which books would need to come from home to sit on the bookshelf in my office was a new experience for me. So, as I added things over the course of the first semester, I became aware of just how conscious I was about the choices I was making (I don't know why that should have been surprising to me, but it was). Mainly, I was aware of how aware I was (meta-awareness?) about what these choices would communicate about me--my preferences, philosophies, and even my teaching style. My office is, as it turns out, a rhetorical device. This, I admit,  rather juvenile realization was re-enforced when a student came into my office for a conference, sat down on my hand-me-down love seat, looked around for a few seconds, and said, "I'm judging you by the things on your office." It is (and I told him so) appropriate for him to have done so. This is because my office communicates definite messages, some purposeful, some haphazard, about me as a teacher and as a person.

There are relatively obvious, and certainly purposeful messages being communicated through the things I've hung on the walls. I expected these things to be an expression of the way I see the world, the things I care about, and ultimately the ways that I wish to be viewed. These include Warhol themed nick-knacks like a calendar with a Warhol quote and Campbell's soup cans designed after the famous Warhol paintings (an interesting inversion in which the actual Campbell's soup brand drew inspiration from an artist who drew inspiration from their own graphic design). I added these art themed elements to go along with the one wall hanging in my office that I didn't go out and find, which was a poster print of a Kandinsky painting. I chose this poster out of a stack of things hanging around which had been abandoned by previous faculty. These things included a lot of classical themed stuff (Shakespeare stuff, mainly). I chose the Kandinsky piece because I prefer the modern over the classical, the pop over the cultured, the deconstructive over the refined. I added to these pieces a Dali style melting clock I bought at Hobby Lobby, so that my office is full of references to Modern art.

In addition to these, I hung a TOMS shoes flag (which the company smartly includes in the purchase of every pair, with a note encouraging buyers to take pictures with their flags in the exotic places where they where TOMS shoes. A bit of marketing brilliance). I also have a concert poster from a Cake concert, which is printed using vegetable based dyes on recycled paper, and which explicitly says so on the bottom of the poster, a Kurt Vonnegut themed piece of graphic art, and a poster sized copy of the mural at 826 Valencia, a youth literacy center in San Francisco. These all operate to give the office a sort of pseudo-hispster vibe which is in keeping with the way I see myself and wish to present myself--a hopefully unpretentious, socially aware hippy type guy, disguised in preppy clothes.

Of course, these things aren't very big and the office is actually, despite all these accoutrements, relatively sparse. I haven't changed the wall color, so the office is a drab, institutional off-white. The pictures on the wall are of relatively uniform size and are hung in a more or less straight line around the office, and I have, for a member of the English faculty, relatively few books on one rather cheap book shelf (which was already in the office when I moved in). I have only 45 of my own books in my office, all of them Comp/Rhet themed. This is compared to the many hundreds I have crowding our office at home. I also have a couple binders of research articles and some small books left on the shelf by a previous tenant. Though these decisions were not purposeful, they do communicate an understanding of my own position. I am contingent faculty, on contract for one semester at a time. Though the English department and I are happy with each other, and don't plan to break up any time soon, it is nevertheless possible that any one semester could be my last (especially since we keep getting our budget cut). And even if I remain on board, the university could hire a tenure track faculty member who needs the office, and so I could be shipped down the hall to share with another adjunct. So it would be rather presumptuous, and possibly a waste of time to pound too many holes in the walls or to haul too many books up the stairs. These decisions were not really purposeful, and so perhaps they're not strictly rhetorical, but there is a clear connection between these decisions and my own understanding of who I am. Thus, understanding my position provides a proper lens for understanding my decorating decisions.

This piece admittedly serves little particular purpose other than giving me something fun and interesting to think about. But it does provide an example that indeed there are many texts that can be analyzed outside of those we think of an technically and traditionally academic. Indeed, applying this type of analysis to other, larger forms of space commonly reveal important lessons about the politics of space, the symbology of urban/suburban design, and the assumptions that guide the way we live and move in our environments. These types of analysis, in short, teach us a great deal about ourselves.

Electoral Maps and Visual Rhetoric

Maps were very important Tuesday night. A ubiquitous feature of network coverage of elections is the large digital map, coded with the now definitive red and blue. As networks reported races and results, they invariably used touch screen maps to zoom in on states to look at county by county results. As the evening started shaping up, analysts used maps to explain scenarios that would get each candidate to the magical 270. So, as important as maps have become in these discussions, it is smart to examine these maps. They are, despite seeming to be object graphs of voter behavior, discursive in nature, and thus worthy of analysis.

The rhetorical nature of these maps is evident in the fact that, in the morning after the election, my Facebook news feed was full of this map:

This map seems to be an objective graph of how each county voted. Surely, there's no way to spin this map; it simply is what it is. Yet, it's not surprising that this map was being shared by my Republican friends, rather than my Democrat friends. The attractiveness of this map to my Republican friends is simple to explain: it contains a lot of red. The implicit argument, then, is that a huge section of this country is conservative, or at least Republican, and last night's results are a product of those slightly-less-American coasts. I had one friend even make the comment that "ninety percent of the country is red." But of course, square miles don't get to vote: people do. In this way, this map, as a graphic representation of the electorate, is a bit misleading.

Here is a different picture of the country:

This Rorschach Test looking map is a map of the United States, distorted to account for population. It is a county map, like the one above, except that the sized of the counties is adjusted so that they reflect population rather than land area. The colors on this map reflect the election results, by county, of the 2004 election (here is the county map from 2004. It looks nearly identical to 2012). This map is topical rather than topological.

On this map, the red isn't near so overwhelming. And, obviously, the blue is much more prominent. As one of my students said of this map, "this map is a lot more magenta." The highly divided nature of the country is much more evident in this map, and it is easy to see that the population centers of the country  are solidly blue.

The point here is that no piece of information, even a seemingly objective map, is devoid of rhetorical construction. The way that a map as a graphic representation is constructed, presented, and passed around must be interpreted. These two maps contain different assumptions about the information they present, and thus imply different arguments about the political picture of the United States. Understanding these may greatly inform our understanding of the nature of the electorate and last night's results.

Here's one more, just for fun. What are the [barely] implicit arguments imbedded in this graphic?