autotune the neighborhood

The entire internet has sent me the link to this video, which is a pretty great autotune of clips from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. I'm always happy to see Mister Rogers getting some attention these days - he and his program deserve it. I especially like this because, though it may be a bit hokey, I like the metaphor of the garden of your mind/imagination. This may be because I love gardens, or it may just be because it's a good metaphor.

I think the queer subtext of the program is especially conspicuous in this video, which also makes me happy.

And, as always, check out the comments on youtube (this is not a thing I say often). I think the user comments for videos of Mister Rogers are fascinating in their sincerity, their affective honesty, and - perhaps most of all - their general kindness/civility. Very, very few people get weird or nasty in comments about Mister Rogers, and as the internet has shown us over and over and over, people get weird and nasty about everything, all the time. Yet Mister Rogers - even in autotune form - manages to suspend the nastiness and pettiness.

Attitudes are caught, not taught - it's one of the program's philosophical catchphrases. You can see the contagious nature of Mister Rogers' kindness in the youtube commenters' responses.

kick start my heart

Kickstarter is a good way to get things funded. I am all for funding creative projects. I just want in on that action for my dissertation.
I tried looking for kickstarted dissertations and found a couple, both music-related.

I've read the Kickstarter rules before, and I don't think I could get my dissertation on there "legally."  This despite the fact that my dissertation engages directly with the following:

• Popular Culture
• Disneyland/Disney history
• Mister Rogers' Neighborhood
• Toys and Play
• Space and Place
• Queerness
• Masculinities
• Reception studies/fan culture

 Not to mention the fact that the Mister Rogers work I'm doing is essentially the only such work that has been done.
There's broad crossover appeal here: Disney nerds, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood fans and sentimentalists, anyone with an investment in challenging traditional models of masculinity, anyone with an investment in making the world safe for little sissy boys, anyone invested in the possibilities that play can engender.

But, you say, what does anyone get from donating to a dissertation kickstarter?

Well, the knowledge that they are furthering scholarly study of important aspects of life. But more importantly, by helping support my dissertation they would be actively supporting making me a teacher/professor.  And my pedagogical aims are queer-positive, child-positive (in a non-sentimental way), intent on interrogating conventional attitudes about everything, organized largely around helping my students learn to see and read and think and write in a critical way. Short answer: my pedagogical position is: QUESTION EVERYTHING.

Alas, kickstarter's rules of engagement seem to prohibit me from using them as a way to pay my bills and buy groceries through the summer dissertation-writing season.
It's too bad there's no way to reach out beyond super-official channels for funding for academic projects. There are big important fellowships, but not everyone can get one of those - they are limited editions. Money for the sciences seems to flow like water, but in the humanities - you're on your own to peck and scratch for pennies. You know that awful scene in Ellison's Invisible Man, early on, when the men throw pennies on the electrified floor, and laugh and laugh as the black boys fight each other, while getting shocked, to pick up the pennies? That's kind of what the funding situation is like over here in the humanities. It's much less physical, of course, it doesn't have quite the same ring of horror that Ellison's does, but it's an emotionally brutal, scroungey, and painful contest just the same. And most of us come up emptyhanded, or with maybe one penny to our names.

And when we leave our institutions, hopefully with dissertations in hand and PhD appended to our names, we may very well be saddled down with so much student loan debt that it will be decades before it's paid off.
And there are fewer and fewer jobs every year, paying less, for those of us who have knocked ourselves out to write dissertations and become good college professors.
Kickstarter, come on! Cut the scholars, the academics, in on your crowdsourcing financial wizardry.

boys who want to dance

Over the winter break, I went home where there is cable television. Somehow, my mother and I ended up watching - late at night - part of a marathon of the execrable "Toddlers & Tiaras."
The show is one I have seen once or twice before; when it first appeared, I made a point of seeing an episode or two, since it falls right within my purview as a person interested in representations of children (and sexuality, and exploitation of children, and on and on).

A kind of slack-jawed, horrified inertia kept us watching through glitz-girl tantrum after tantrum, but the remote was poised to switch it off when a new episode came on. But hold that thought! Because this upcoming show includes a previously-unseen entity in the show: a Pageant Prince.


The boy in question is 7-year-old Brock, from podunk-nowhere, and he is fabulous (in every sense of that word).  Brock just loves to dance - he says he's a diva, he loves the sparkle, he has two American Girl dolls who are his friends when no real friends are around (he brings the dolls to at least this one glitz pageant). He shows off some fierce jazz hands, and informs the camera that he wants to go on Broadway.
His mom - despite the fact that she dresses up Brock's very small sister in those heinous pageant dresses and makeup - seems to be great. She says that she and his father support Brock 100% (I wish we could see the father, to be honest). This - the dancer, the pageant boy, the drama queen who loves the spotlight - is Brock, his mother tells us; it's who he is and they love him, and anyone who has a problem - well, they don't need to be around us.

Of course most of the clips of the mom's interview are defensive-seeming, especially all strung together; the show makes it pretty clear that Brock is "unusual," that we are seeing something different that needs to be explained and justified in great detail. Yet we also see Brock onstage, being introduced (he's the only boy in the entire pageant) in a suit with sparkly lapels, and then dancing - his real passion is dance, and his mom tells us his routines are partly planned, partly improvised. Watching him, in black dance pants and a red sparkly tanktop, dancing surprisingly expertly (most of the "toddlers" are rather dreadfully awkward and stilted in their own dancing), my mom said: "he's the most natural of all of them. He's probably the happiest of all those kids, too."

And I think she's right. The pageants are kind of horrifying in eight thousand ways - and the way they sexualize very little girls is just one of those ways - but for Brock, they seem to function very differently. Instead of transforming, as the girls seem to, from fairly normal, un-forced, natural little kid to tarted-up performing monkey, for Brock, the pageant seems to be the place where he gets to be not just himself, but rewarded and applauded for being himself. He wins as pageant King, of course, because he's the only boy competing for the title, but he ALSO wins in the overall pageant categories: he gets Best Personality.

I don't know how long little boys can compete in pageants. I don't know at what point Brock's love of dancing will be overpowered by social and cultural disapproval; the episode mentions that he is teased for doing dance.  In another ten years, or six years, or four years, I hope Brock is still dancing and being himself, however that manifests, and that his folks are still 100% behind him. But I also know that Brock and his family appear to live in a midwestern, rural-ish town - places not known for being especially welcoming of any kind of deviation from gender norms or sexuality.

Watching Brock was a delight, and it was also a reminder of why I want to do the dissertation I'm struggling to write and complete. The world I live in is pretty well-packed with boy dancers and queer-friendly folks and lesbians and effeminate men; it can be easy for the urgency to fade from my project. And it isn't that I think my dissertation will make the world safe for little boys who want to dance (although if it did! if it could!), but my dissertation will allow me to teach ranks and ranks of undergrads that little boys who want to dance are pretty great. And that difference doesn't, and shouldn't, imply hierarchy.

I'm trying to write a conference paper proposal about my Mister Rogers' Neighborhood work, and I'm playing around with some of my ideas about representations of masculinities. And, I think because of seeing Brock, I am thinking more centrally about that episode (#1484) in which Pittsburgh Steeler Lynn Swann meets Mr Rogers at Swann's dance studio. Because Lynn Swann, football hero extraordinaire, also danced ballet. And had danced ballet for years and years. He arrives at the studio in his football gear, then removes it and explains the padding and protective gear; then, in black dance pants and a tshirt, begins working on a routine with the other dancers in the studio, under the watchful eye of a rather flamboyant ballet master. Meanwhile, Mister Rogers is telling us at home how wonderful it all is. And Lynn Swann is talking about how much he enjoys dancing, and how it has also helped him with his football.

This episode aired in 1981.
Thirty years later, poor Brock's mom is still having to explain her little boy's love of dance and glitz and sparkle, and his love of dress-up (he was Dorothy for halloween three years in a row, and tells us "I think I was a pretty cute Dorothy" [note: he was. there are photos]).

Mister Rogers worked very, very hard to make the world safe for little boys who want to dance. And I need to work very, very hard to make sure the world remembers that now; I need to work very, very hard to make sure that this aspect of Mister Rogers' legacy is remembered AND continued.

Ah-ha moment, courtesy John Hench

 

from the back page of John Hench's Designing Disney: Imagineering and the Art of the Show. 

quote on the illustration is not attributed to anyone else, so I assume it's either Hench or Walt Disney himself.

Why Mister Rogers Matters

A lot of academics spend a great deal of time trying to explain why their scholarly work matters. I know I spent a lot of time - and still do - trying to justify my ivory-tower life: what does reading and writing have to do with anything in the Real World? How is this not a relentlessly selfish pursuit?

First: because I teach. The activist angle of teaching was first made clear to me at Georgetown, by my brilliant and wonderful advisor. She said: "yes, these kids are privileged [and at Georgetown, almost quadruply so] but they are also the people who will be in charge of corporations and companies. They'll be in politics and positions of power. And if you can introduce to them now some of these ideas [any activist/progressive/radical ideas], it may affect the way they do their business in future."

Teaching is, or can be, activism, and my teaching often is. This is good, and it's the main thing I do, day in and day out, to make sure my work actually does something.

The second thing I do - and what I'm writing about now - is scholarly work on things that matter. Things that can actually make a difference in the way people understand themselves, or others, or the world around them. I made a decision in my first year in Pittsburgh that I was going to consciously write in clear, legible prose; I jettisoned the obfuscating and tortured jargon and construction of so many literary theorists. If a roomful of PhD students can't make sense of a phrase from Frederic Jameson, how in gods name can the "workers," the disenfranchised, the disaffected, make sense of it? And if it's all just babble to the elite, how can it be anything but condescending, self-congratulatory largesse?

So structurally, linguistically, theoretically, I choose the pragmatic and readable.
The topics are even more important.
My dissertation is, ostensibly, about imaginary/imaginative play spaces in children's media, and the way these spaces enable and encourage radical play, difference and experimentation (specifically with gender and sexuality, but with other aspects of life as well).
Really, though, what I'm writing about are places where it's okay - even great, even better - to be different. To be yourself. Places where you, in whatever form you feel like expressing yourself, are safe and loved and admired and respected.
The ultimate of these is Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, a show which seems to have made worlds of difference in the lives of scores of children (and their families). I've spent considerable time in the archives, reading viewer mail, and the love and affirmation these kids (and adults) feel for and from Mr Rogers is staggering. Almost every letter is a tearjerker. Almost every letter mentions, at least once, Mister Rogers' mantra of "I like you just exactly the way you are."

How rarely are we told this?

Lesley Kinzel, the astute and incisive writer of Fatshionista, writes back in response to the appalling burst of suicides from young gay kids in recent weeks - the most dramatic and spectacular of these, of course, being the death of Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi. Lesley writes, in an effort to support those kids who are bullied and hurt and abused and sad and lonely:

So instead, I’ve written what I would have liked to hear, back then, in my darkest adolescent moments. I am touched by people every day who tell me that the things I write here — even the things I am convinced no one will relate to, that I believe are too specific or too raw or too me — that these things help them. That hearing it helps people to know that they’re not alone. Thus, I’m hoping that this will likewise speak to some of you.
You are okay.

She's doing the work of Fred Rogers here, whether she means to or not. We should all be doing the work of Fred Rogers: reminding each other that yes, YOU are likable and lovable; that you make each day a special day but just your being you; that there is no one else in this world exactly like you, and that that adds to the glorious variety of the world. That I like you just the way you are.

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood is off the air in most districts now, except perhaps on weekends; in Pittsburgh, home of the program and Fred Rogers, it's still on daily. It's dated, sure; there are no cellphones, no iPods, no laptops. No networking, except through Mr McFeely's speedy deliveries. No Facebook, except all the real friends who visit each other, both in Mr Rogers' neighborhood, and in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.

There's nothing like this on tv now, where educational children's television is all about skills acquisition, and not about emotion.  There's no Mister Rogers, showing up every day at the same time - as he promises at the end of every episode - to say "Hi neighbor. I like you!"

The letters in the archive come from parents, from children of all ages, from adults, from the very elderly. Everyone you can imagine writes to Mister Rogers, and they all say, in varying ways, the same thing: we love you, Mister Rogers, because you love us. We need someone to tell us, every day, that we're okay, and mean it. We feel better about our abilities and disabilities, as children, as mothers, as friends, as siblings, as fathers, as retirees, as very elderly single women with no families, because of you. We are able, because of you, to go out into our worlds as happier, more confident people, willing and able and actively doing things to make the world a better more interesting place.
So writing about Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, for me, is activism. It's me saying: LOOK! Look how much we needed Fred Rogers. Look how much he - just one guy, on a low-budget public tv show - was able to do, for so, so many people. Look how little he had to do, to do so very much.
It's saying, Fred Rogers wasn't a saint. He was a very, very good man with powerful motivation and a message that we all need, that we all know we need. If he could do it, so can we all. There's nothing so extraordinary, after all, in that show: bringing in something new to look at and think about. Going on a visit to an everyday place: a music shop, a restaurant, a dance studio, a potter's workshop, a shoe factory. Saying: sometimes it's really hard, isn't it? and you get angry, or sad, or confused, or scared. And that's okay, because I like you when you're angry, or sad, or confused, or scared. Because I like you, just exactly as you are.
Because you make every day a special day, by just your being you.

Because every one of us is important and meaningful and real and human. Always, every day, even when you're scared, or angry, or confused, or hurt, or sad. And you contribute to the infinite variety on this planet, the infinite variety that makes the world so very interesting and fun and curious and amazing. Losing even one person from that huge mosaic of difference makes the whole thing a tiny bit less bright and shiny.

It's so incredibly easy, to do what Fred Rogers did. To listen, to be there, to say: I like you, just as exactly as you are. To say, with words and actions: I care about you, because you're you, you're a person who is unlike anyone else in this world world.

To say, and mean it, that You make every day a special day, by just your being you.

and that's why i'm writing my dissertation.

Magic Kingdom in miniature, OR how my inside mind sees the world

Since one of my dissertation "texts" is Disneyland, I spend a fair bit of time thinking about/reading about/looking at images of Disney parks.  Disney (big corporate monster) launched a blog of their own this fall, and one of the earlier posts on it was this amazing little video of the Magic Kingdom in Florida. It's done using tilt-shift photography, which I have researched and still don't quite understand (my technical cognition skills are terrible). I don't really need to know how they do it, though; the result is awesome. What tilt-shift does is create the illusion of miniaturization - the scenes shot through the day look like they are happening inside a model Magic Kingdom, a tiny, miniaturized version of the real thing. 

The tilt-shift world basically looks like an elaborate dollhouse or model train set come to life. It's amazing and neat and fun, and is worth the two or three minutes of your life it takes to watch the video. Obviously, it's a promotional tool for CorporateDisney, but it's also a very interesting and accurate reflection, I think, of what the Magic Kingdom really is.

Walt Disney was heavily influenced, in his invention and planning of Disneyland, by miniatures: model train sets (he was an avid train nerd), dollhouses and other miniature sets from various fairs and expositions, Colleen Moore's famous dollhouse. He commissioned Disney Productions artists to craft him a series of small miniature dioramas, and at one point contemplated a kind of peep-wall for his park, in which guests would look through a peephole into one of his elaborate miniature sets.

When the park was constructed, it was built to a reduced scale; the buildings are all something like 4/5 of "real" buildings. Walt Disney even describes Main Street as specifically toylike, and goes on to say:
"the imagination can play more freely with a toy"


I've been interested in toys and play worlds, academically, for some time now (and I've been interested in toys and play world personally for my entire life). The rendering of the Magic Kingdom in tilt-shift photography transforms the park back into its originary form: the miniature. It's a lovely visual way of encapsulating my Magic-Kingdom-related dissertation ideas, as well.


and - hmmmm. I detect a paper (conference paper? or dissertation smidgen?) in the works here.

how to bring your kids up gay

I plan to revisit Eve Sedgwick's excellent essay soon - "How to bring your kids up gay" - but I know that, as awesome as it is, it won't answer my ongoing dissertation dilemma: how to think about/read/imagine gayness or queerness in a young child.

I hate to go to psychology for answers, though I imagine all kinds of studies have been done. Young children play at heterosexuality all the time -in all kinds of pretending games like playing "house" and the far more risque playing "doctor," or that old standby "i'll show you mine if  you show me yours" (both of these latter experiments at straightness I know only through rumors that assume the quality of urban legend, though I have no doubt millions of little kids are doing both, probably right this second).

Freud tells us a fair bit about the sexuality of children, though he does let them (and us) off the hook with that whole "latency" thing, but even Freud has his limits of usefulness.

I wonder about the frequency of same-sex/gender pretend-play; how often do two little boys play "house"? When I personally was a small child, I was friends with twin boys who used to LOVE coming to my house to play "house" with our toy kitchen and play food. But since I was the girl in the mix, it wasn't "house" with two daddies. Now that I think about it, I have NO IDEA how that triad arranged itself, and it probably doesn't bear thinking about too closely. Fortunately, I refuse to use myself as an informant; my own memory - everyone's memory - of childhood is simply too unreliable.

The "doctor" and reciprocal exhibitionism is, I think, more a sign of curiosity about sex difference, rather than a sign of sexual interest. Two little boys don't have much need to do a reciprocal show and tell; they already know what's what. It's the anatomical difference that's interesting, not the promise of some kind of voyeuristic pleasure.

There are plenty of anecdotes from gay men, reflecting on their early recollections of their own gayness; many report knowing that something was queer at a very young age. But what that queerness is seems to vary, or to be vague and unspecified.

So how to think/talk/write about queerness in the young child? I'm not even sure I know how to do a search for that kind of material without running smack into a whole lot of psychology work, which I really, really want to avoid. I need a model of talking about the unknown, which makes me think I need to go back to things like David Halperin's How to do the History of Homosexuality. 
I don't need evidence to write about queer children watching television; this much I know.
But beyond that?
It's a puzzle, but a directed and fairly specific puzzle, which is relief in this dissertation wilderness, where I am having to slog through the vast unknown of a very large, under-utilized archive and a severely undertheorized set of texts.