Pink-garbed people under pink lights. It's a female experience. Depression and anger. (And guilt). Klugherz and her entourage of dancers and performers express women's frustration with this emotional content and the ways in which women who express it are then blamed for their own condition.
Then the terrain changes. The troup speaks of being trained to comply, specifically being trained as females to accommodate. And bad things happen, a combination of ratcheting up the ickiness of the things you're expected to comply with and sudden exposure to things you weren't expecting or ready for, but for which a lifetime training in being amenable and cooperative didn't prepare you to cope with or avoid.
And then you get the message that either you're being ridiculous to complain about it or that it didn't happen at all.
Through personal vignettes and opportune echoes of phrases we've all heard on the news-channels, we're reminded again of Brett Kavanaugh, Harvey Weinstein, and the primordial clash of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. There are viscerally personal stories told, stories of violations and betrayals. Mothers, boyfriends, doctors, teachers, acquaintances and strangers, and how they've contributed, either by committing gross invasions or by participating in the denial and erasure. The whole of the piece is far greater than the mere sum of its parts because it's a cumulative experience.
Diane Roo Carroll, Anna Zekan and Irene Morawski join Alice Klugherz in the leadoff performance, using dance to highlight the emotional substance of what Klugherz narrates about being depressed and angry.
The voice of Marlene Nichols introduces the #metoo element with Klugherz and Cynthia Xavier using movement and posture to illustrate her story. Lenny Langley weilds a mean utility-light and Anna Zekan walks us a transfixed deer caught in it as the women explain the general phenomenon of being caught and paralyzed by the situation, setting the stage for the narratives that follow.
Susan O'Doherty, Shari Rosenblatt, Irene Siegal, and Klugherz herself relate their specific stories of encountering these sexual intrusions; they peel themselves to the raw reactive cores, exposing their uncertainties and the self-doubts and self-recriminations as well as the fury at what's been dealt to them.
Themes emerge: we see how people cope by so often treating the occurrence as a dream or bottling it up as a vague half-remembered thing; there is little opportunity to name things, to speak them out loud, when they are so seldom spoken of and when there is no one to whom one can speak them; and the social pressure is to push down on one's feelings, to deny and erase; and there is once again the "weather thing", learning to regard these behaviors of men as if they were as natural and as inevitable as rainstorms. Marlene Nichols rhetorically asks, "What kind of New Yorker would I be if somebody copping a feel on the subway left me devastated, you know?"
And finally, of course, internalizing it, Blaming one's self for what happened, and experiencing it as unanchored random despondency and misery and fury.
DePression Pink is not set in chronological order. It starts with the depression and anger and then sifts through what precedes it, what causes it. And yet that's the cognitive order, sure enough. It's the order in which a person coming to grips with all this is most likely to process, recognizing the incapacitating emotional states and recovering the awareness and memories of the violations later.
Towards the end of the piece, the performers offer a sentiment I have to dissent with: "If they wanted something mutual", they declare, after indicting the perpetrators of these intrusions, "they would have it". Those of you who follow my blog will already recognize that I have said all along that there are problems for the male person who does indeed want something mutual. It isn't set up that way. This is not, however, any discredit of the message rendered by DePression Pink; if anything it is a concurring statement about how things are structured. It's the same phenomenon, this polarization. One audience member commented on the combination of the sensual/sexual women in some of the dance pieces, dancing in celebration and freedom, and these awful stories, and the significance of juxtaposing them, that they are both part of women's reality. This dynamic, in which sex is pursued in a predatory way by males, in which female people are treated as prey... this is woven into our cultural understanding of what the genders mean, of what it means to be a woman or a man. If there are women who do not readily see any corresponding validity to a male complaint that we're situated to behave in a sexually invasive way or else be relegated to the sexual sidelines, they might more quickly recognize it in the social condemnation of women who are so brazen as to pursue their own sexual interests instead of waiting passively to comply with some male's initiative. They might recognize it in the litany of names that get applied to women who act with sexual autonomy.
Alice Klugherz says, near the end of the piece, "I am going to cross out what I've written, and write it again and again, until it says what I want to say". She seems to have honed her voice to a very effective edge in DePression Pink.
DePression Pink was performed November 29 and 30, and Dec 1, at University Settlement in the Lower East Side of New York. Video footage of the performance is pending and when it becomes available I will edit this blog post to include it.
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Showing posts with label like the weather. Show all posts
Showing posts with label like the weather. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 4, 2018
Monday, November 12, 2018
Almost Quit My Job...
I have a temporary job working at a Montessori School. Not in the classroom but in the office, where interaction with the children isn't really an expected part of my job. But we're understaffed. The other day, the teacher in the classroom for 3 to 6 year olds needed a bathroom break and there was no teacher's assistant to cover, so I was asked to step in. Except not quite exactly step in. "Just stand at the entrance to the classroom until she gets back", the administrator told me. "I don't want to send a man in with the children, some of the parents won't like that".
I fumed while I waited there, not liking this. (The children know me from the front office; they're alert and bright and know all the adults by name from early September on. They called to me from within the classroom and asked why I didn't come on in). So I stood there doing a slow burn, and rehearsed telling my boss I was unwilling to work there any more because of this.
This, by the way, is what dysphoria is for me. For other gender-variant people, misgendering may occur when people use the wrong pronoun, or when they are referred to as "male" when they identify as "female" or vice versa. In my case, I consider myself to have both a sex and a gender, and don't have a preferred pronoun; I don't mind being referred to as male because I am male, and most of the time being referred to as a man doesn't provoke my ire, either, because in most cases the person speaking isn't using it offensively, just ignorantly. But when I get lumped in with other men, with my attributes extrapolated from what is known or thought of men in general, and distinguished from women, that's misgendering and I hate it personally and viscerally and with shocking pain, personally affronted by it.
When the teacher returned, I stalked down to the administrator's office. "You told me to wait outside the classroom because the parents would not like a man being in the classroom with their children. So you would not have said the same thing to a female office worker if she was asked to cover?" I crossed my arms, already preparing my I-quit sentence within my head.
"I am not willing to expose any of the men who work for me to the horrible attitudes of some of these parents", she replied. "Let me tell you about Brian. He was a student here, honor student, really nice boy. I had him working in my office for awhile when he was a young adult. One day the police showed up and demanded to know if I had Brian Jones working here, because they needed to arrest him on suspicion of child molestation. He would never do such a thing, everyone who knew him agreed with that. What had happened was the children were playing flag football during gym class and one of the girls lost her flag from where they tuck it in, in the back of their shorts at the waistband, you know, and she had trouble reaching back there to get it back in, so he helped her. But her mother heard that there was a man working with the children and she asked the girl if he had ever touched her and she had no idea what her mother meant by that. Anyway, I'm not willing to put you or any other man in that kind of situation".
Hmmph.
That does put a different spin on things. If she had said "I am not willing to expose my children to any risk of sexual misconduct" or "I am not willing to expose my school to the risk of such accusations", I would have been so out of there. Because my maleness doesn't make me a threat to children and I'll be damned if I'll tolerate that kind of insinuation. But she'd couched it in terms of the risk to me of being targeted by that kind of bigotry.
Oh, it's still the wrong answer. There exists what I call "The Weather Approach" to social problems. Someone addresses all the incoming women students on campus and warns them not to dress revealingly or to be out unaccompanied by themselves, because there's a risk of rape, and in doing that they are treating the behavior of the men on campus as if they were the weather--no responsibility for their own behavior, so those who might get exposed to it have all the responsibility of dressing for it and carrying an umbrella. We don't expect the weather to develop a consciousness of how it treats the people it rains on, so it makes rational sense to tell people to take the weather into account and plan accordingly. But men are not the weather. Neither are bigoted parents with sexist attitudes. So it's the wrong answer. Ideally she should have spoken to me about what I might be exposing myself to, risk-wise, but not acted so as to protect me without my having chosen to be protected.
The "Weather Approach" always tends to be complicated and convoluted. Does a parent of an oppressed and vilified raise his children to be free and untrammeled and unimpeded by societal labels, or to be savvy and wary of racists and haters?
I listened and went back to my desk, still employed there at least for now.
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I fumed while I waited there, not liking this. (The children know me from the front office; they're alert and bright and know all the adults by name from early September on. They called to me from within the classroom and asked why I didn't come on in). So I stood there doing a slow burn, and rehearsed telling my boss I was unwilling to work there any more because of this.
This, by the way, is what dysphoria is for me. For other gender-variant people, misgendering may occur when people use the wrong pronoun, or when they are referred to as "male" when they identify as "female" or vice versa. In my case, I consider myself to have both a sex and a gender, and don't have a preferred pronoun; I don't mind being referred to as male because I am male, and most of the time being referred to as a man doesn't provoke my ire, either, because in most cases the person speaking isn't using it offensively, just ignorantly. But when I get lumped in with other men, with my attributes extrapolated from what is known or thought of men in general, and distinguished from women, that's misgendering and I hate it personally and viscerally and with shocking pain, personally affronted by it.
When the teacher returned, I stalked down to the administrator's office. "You told me to wait outside the classroom because the parents would not like a man being in the classroom with their children. So you would not have said the same thing to a female office worker if she was asked to cover?" I crossed my arms, already preparing my I-quit sentence within my head.
"I am not willing to expose any of the men who work for me to the horrible attitudes of some of these parents", she replied. "Let me tell you about Brian. He was a student here, honor student, really nice boy. I had him working in my office for awhile when he was a young adult. One day the police showed up and demanded to know if I had Brian Jones working here, because they needed to arrest him on suspicion of child molestation. He would never do such a thing, everyone who knew him agreed with that. What had happened was the children were playing flag football during gym class and one of the girls lost her flag from where they tuck it in, in the back of their shorts at the waistband, you know, and she had trouble reaching back there to get it back in, so he helped her. But her mother heard that there was a man working with the children and she asked the girl if he had ever touched her and she had no idea what her mother meant by that. Anyway, I'm not willing to put you or any other man in that kind of situation".
Hmmph.
That does put a different spin on things. If she had said "I am not willing to expose my children to any risk of sexual misconduct" or "I am not willing to expose my school to the risk of such accusations", I would have been so out of there. Because my maleness doesn't make me a threat to children and I'll be damned if I'll tolerate that kind of insinuation. But she'd couched it in terms of the risk to me of being targeted by that kind of bigotry.
Oh, it's still the wrong answer. There exists what I call "The Weather Approach" to social problems. Someone addresses all the incoming women students on campus and warns them not to dress revealingly or to be out unaccompanied by themselves, because there's a risk of rape, and in doing that they are treating the behavior of the men on campus as if they were the weather--no responsibility for their own behavior, so those who might get exposed to it have all the responsibility of dressing for it and carrying an umbrella. We don't expect the weather to develop a consciousness of how it treats the people it rains on, so it makes rational sense to tell people to take the weather into account and plan accordingly. But men are not the weather. Neither are bigoted parents with sexist attitudes. So it's the wrong answer. Ideally she should have spoken to me about what I might be exposing myself to, risk-wise, but not acted so as to protect me without my having chosen to be protected.
The "Weather Approach" always tends to be complicated and convoluted. Does a parent of an oppressed and vilified raise his children to be free and untrammeled and unimpeded by societal labels, or to be savvy and wary of racists and haters?
I listened and went back to my desk, still employed there at least for now.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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