[-empyre-] Michele on Bare Life and Exposure

[M White <mwhite@michelewhite.org>]

I am looking forward to participating in this dialog.

Giorgio Agamben's conception of bare life, or life
exposed to and closer to death because of inaccessible
social and political powers, provides further
opportunities to consider the position of politically
empowered and valued subjects, how "masterful"
positions render others as less important, and the
ways socially produced identity positions--including
class, gender, race, and sexuality--organize
individuals in relationship to different degrees of
bare life. The following considerations of New
Orleanians suggests how communities and governmental
structures can situate individuals in relationship to
bare life and the ways these culturally devalued
bodies may gain power by rereading, manipulating, and
diminishing other individuals. Such behaviors
encourage a combination of Giorgio Agamben's and Roger
M. Buergel's considerations of bare life with gender,
feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories.

I should note that I am writing this while looking out
on the lush greenery and vernacular architecture of my
New Orleans neighborhood--in what I am constantly
reminded is "hurricane season." The news provided a
constant countdown to the season--"it's 30 minutes
until hurricane season"?and reminded viewers of bare
life (past and future) and erased it because nothing
happened when the clock struck. My mostly air
conditioned view is punctuated by the sound of nail
guns, the strained bodies of workers fixing my
neighbors' and landladies' homes, and a series of
fears that none of "us" want to fully mention or
explain but that we constantly talk about. This view
is also fairly recent to me (I moved here in July
2005, evacuated, moved some more, and returned). As
the following critique may show, it is not that easy
to be Orleanianeanian (particularly someone who both
lives in and is sometimes critical of the city) while
caught between the bare life of communities, the drive
of individuals to regain power by regulating who can
speak, and the constant articulation of
"realOrleaniansanians. Ironically, during a diversity
conference in New Orleans last month, I was chastised
and encouraged as a "visitor" to be more sensitive the
city and the struggles and pains of New Orleans.

As grrrl grrrl and an academic, I have been using the
phrase "big hard" to represent themythosmythos of New
Orleans as the Big Easy and the current struggles that
all residents and evacuees face with navigating an
infrastructure that is still partially broken and
continues to fail on a regular basis. The big hard
also represents the struggles residents face when
correlating the media production of New Orleans with
the diverse places we live. What is also hard about
New Orleans is how easy it is to forget our recent
losses and pasts when eating at a terrific restaurant
(yes we have tons of restaurants but find difficulties
in staffing them because of the expenses and limits of
the housing market), listening to some jazz, or
admiring the glorious architecture in neighborhoods
that have not flooded. It is difficult to correlate
the everyday shifts between individuals'
experiences--although these shifts are to different
degrees-- with the big hard, bare life, and situated
pleasures and rewards. I also use the phrase "the big
hard" in order to represent how empowered
masculinireinstitutedituted with popular media
indications that women are simply the object of the
gaze and are stupid when they willingly exchange views
of their bodies, or "flash," for cheap beads in the
French Quarter and other New Orleans locations. Such
narratives displace the ways women visually boast
about their place in a visual economy of looks by
acquiring and displaying large numbers of beads. There
are also other gendered narratives at work in New
Orleans' tourism districts and such festivaMardi Grasi
Gras. Men parade through the French Quarter with
gigantic bead balls that they buy from
vendors--visually boasting about their masculinity.
However, this gendered performance is quite different
thamasculinitiesnities that are produced when poorly
paid men, who come to New Orleans at their own expense
to document women flashing for beads, fail to achieve
the large sums of money in the video industry and the
sexual appeal that they dreamed of. The tourism,
gender, and sexuality play in the Quarter, as my
colleague Vicki Mayer has suggested, is quite
different when the position of these flash producers
is acknowledged.

Bare life is also an apt phrase when considering
individuals who had to stay in New Orleans and
outlying areas during the hurricane and the more
devastating flooding because of health problems,
poverty, lack of notification, unavailability of
transportation, and experiences with many unnecessary
and expensive evacuations. The car culture and wealth
of somOrleaniansanians have created a system in which
there is no mass transportation for the more
disenfranchised citizens to use in evacuating. Bare
life represents the struggles and dismissals, from a
media culture and country that have questioned the
viability, costs, and time taken bOrleaniansanians
trying to rebuild their homes. Yet, bare life also
represents the experiences of the underpaid or even
unpaid, undocumented, and uninsured workers who are
rebuilding New Orleans and many other cities. These
individuals are mutually dependent but they do not
receive equitable rewards or similar cultural and
community positions for their work. While New Orleans
is currently relying on a huge influx of workers from
Central and South America to rebuild, the US federal
government mostly ignores these workers and is
developing further legislation that can be
usexpulsexpulse them from the "country" once their
work is done. In most cases, these workers have not
been invited into our social fabric and are imagined
as temporary visitors. The bare life and struggles
oOrleaniansanians have created an even more temporary
and outcast society. There are clear hierarchies and
power structures among these arrangements.

With the flooding of New Orleans and extended
evacuation after hurricane KatrinaOrleaniansanians
faced the challenge of articulating their place and
identity from somewhere else.
Evacuatedisempoweredowered New Orleans residents
established place-based connections and provided
assistance by using the NOLA.com forums, which are
associated with the area's Times Picayune newspaper.
Posters to the NOLA.com forums worked to save
individuals and update residents. However, these
posters also used newfoundwfound authority to
articulate a posting ethos. They indicated that only
New Orleans residents could understand the city and
only positive comments were welcome. Concerns about
the environment, current governmentNOLA'sNOLA's
infrastructure were discouraged. Critical commentary
about the city was countered by indications that
individuals should stop posting, were traitors, and
should not live in NOLA. There were also suggestions
that people who had made no "positive"
contribution--and such individuals were often
associated with housing projects and assumed to be
black--were no longer welcome in New Orleans. Through
such posts, placrefiguredigured in an area that
appeared otherwise desolate by stripping some
individuals of the ability to talk about New Orleans
as home and as an aspect of their identity. The
vibrancy and value of New Orleans communities was
articulated by negating the worth of other lives and
opinions. Place is formed and the city of New Orleans
is reconstituted in these settinexpulsingulsing
different opinions, alternate visions of the city, and
the "other." 

The comments on the NOLA.com forums suggest the
difficulties in speaking of and from a place after
media representations and individuals have fixed its
meanings. When people ask me about the city, it is
always difficult to imagine how the varied cities that
exist, those that can now only be imagined, and the
nostalgic visions that we still hold can satisfy their
ideas about this place that we call New Orleans. The
media exposure of New Orleans has not
allowedisempoweredowered to speak since those figured
as the most abandoned?the dead and babies?can only
speak in ways that are structured and produced by the
medBuergel. Roger M. Buergel intriguingly suggests,
"absolute exposure is intricately connected with
infinite pleasure." To further understand these
connections, considerations of the array of bodies,
looks, and forms of exposure that produce these
pleasures are needed. Looking and being looked at can
be satisfying. However, extreme and long lasting forms
of pain also accompany such things as regulating
stares and medical gazes. Exposure should be
correlated to the histories of visibility and
invisibility that different cultures and individuals
face. Individuals that are described as CEO, tenured
faculty member, citizen, adult, artist, or married are
likely to associate exposure with different pleasures
and risks than those felt by the undocumented worker,
adjunct, "alien," juvenile, fan producer, and sex
worker. I am interested in considering the different
ways that bodies are put on display, the various
demands for exposure, and what it means when people
decide or are forced to become visible in the world.
Culture does not understand the flash of women's
breasts, men's breasts (that are supposed to be called
something else), and men's penises to have the same
meanings. In future posts, I hope to consider
questions of exposure and pleasure in relationship to
feminist film theory, the feminist "sex
debates,postcolonialdies, postcolonial theory, and
queer studies.