Some meandering and undertheorized thoughts about birds, gender, race, and class

I've been thinking lately a great deal about the politics of gender and expertise in online birdwatching exchanges. I've approached these questions from position which is immanent to them, that is I understand myself to be a birdwatcher - however much a novice I am to many of the imperatives of that practice. So I don't presume any particular expertise, but I also implicate myself, to some extent, in the logics I am critiquing.

Although sometimes a solitary activity, birdwatching is also a deeply social one, and its sociality - or at least the immediacy of its sociality, appear to have been changed significantly by internet-age communication technology, although i'm a bit skeptical of the facile technological determinism such a claim would imply. Contemporary birdwatchers make exhaustive use of email lists to notify each other of rare and unusual sightings. On Facebook groups, they discuss (and dispute) bird identification, spread news of sightings, discuss trends, mobilize for purposes of wildlife conservation, habitat protection, and socialize. In future posts, perhaps I'll get into the major critiques of conservation of wildlife and habitat as a distinctly conservative and indeed, some argue, racist and classist form of activism. Here, I'm more interested in thinking about the ways in which mechanisms of expertise and knowledge operate through an often gendered lens.

Birdsplaining, to steal a mode of neologizing from a well-read Rebecca Solnit piece, is ubiquitous. (Bird-related mansplaining might be a more accurate transmutation, but it doesn't roll off the tongue quite so easily.). Birdwatchers are, that is, constantly explaining things to each other in a variety of formats and fora, constantly evaluating and assessing each other's knowledge almost as often as they assess and evaluate the identification of particularly tricky species of birds. Although birdwatching depends heavily on an ethos of charity and mutual aid, an ethos motivated in no small part by anxieties over the social reproduction of the hobby and/as an environmentalist practice with an instrumental relationship to the preservation of the environment, and although most birdwatchers I've met have been deeply generous with their time, their car seats, and their knowledge, it is also a sphere in which anxieties over elitism, distinction, access, and propriety are omnipresent. Well-rehearsed debates concern alleged differences between the field habits of birdwatchers and of bird photographers, the ethics of playing recordings in the field, of reporting owl sightings or baiting owls with live mice (generally understood to be a big no-no), and the sanctity of private property, whose observation is less an objectivist fetish of individual ownership than it is an anxiety over continued access to rare birds in non-public places. There are guardians of these practices, collectively designated ones and self-designated ones, just as there are people who are collectively celebrated as experts, as authorities, as gurus, and people who understand themselves as such and wish to be recognized as such.

On state email lists like Massbird, posters run the gamut from people who rarely birdwatch beyond their backyard to world travelers and renowned naturalists like David Sibley, principal author and illustrator of the celebrated line of field guides. There are dedicated birders of all ages, college students and twentysomethings and pensioners, proletarians and hedge fund managers. You can birdwatch with a pair of sixty dollar nikons and do it pretty well, or you can buy $2500 Swarovski Optik Swarovisions, spend another three thousand on a spotting scope and eyepiece, and twenty five thousand on a DSLR and lenses. You can burn through gas tanks and plane tickets chasing rarities or confine yourself to wherever public transportation will take you. Some of the gradients of power are premised on experience - how many birds has a birdwatcher (or birder, a distinction I will get to in a bit) seen? How many years has she been birding? How familiar is s/he with the birds of a given area, their locations, habitats, behavior, movements? Other gradients may be similarly rooted in experience but also dependent on forms of knowledge obtained through more traditional means which depend on access to forms of Bourdieuean cultural and academic capital: knowledge of ornithological terminology and controversies, writing style, grammar, spelling, and punctuation in posts to email lists and Facebook groups; ability to explain the identification of difficult species to others; ability to identify and name subspecies - which most field guides don't explain, and so forth.

I feel that I should again note the tremendous generosity that birdwatchers often show each other. In the year or so that I've been regularly birdwatching, I've been the recipient of such generosity on many occasions. A half dozen or so people picked me up during my long walks through the Parker River national wildlife refuge, offered me rides to the train station, and sometimes helped me find birds. In Central Park, a spring migration "hotspot", several very experienced birders helped me find several dozen species i'd never seen before. So birders help each other. They help each other break their own big year records, they help novices to see and identify new species, they share knowledge, time, automobiles, optics, and advice. During the year that I lived in Massachusetts, when I first encountered many of the social aspects of the birdwatching community, I wondered about the racial limits of the incredible generosity folks were showing me. Had I been a young African American man walking along a lonely dirt road adjoining a swamp, I'm sure I would have had a more difficult time getting rides, from the almost universally white motorists who drive the six mile stretch between Sandy Hook State Park and the PRNWR visitors' center, in winter one of the best places on the east coast to see Snowy Owls (don't get me started, though, on the fetish of the white bird, a fetish I think is less the product of birdwatchers than of a more generalized racial nomos.) Not all of the birders I have met are white. The NYC birding scene has a lot of East Asians, and a very small number of Latinos, South Asians, and African Americans. But, despite the widespread commodification of birdwatching as part of the broader expansion of ecotourism globally and within the US, to birdwatch is often to make use of public and private spaces in ways which non-birdwatchers may at first find suspect - parked cars along the sides of roads in rural residential or agricultural areas alight suspicions that racialized bodies may be less able to defray than might white men and women, and access is not the only problem. During the summer after my first year of college I had a low-paying job netting and banding birds on Northern Arizona's Mogillon rim. It tempered my enthusiasm for birdwatching for a while, in part because I didn't know what I was doing, and in part because of what I read as problematic racial dynamics between a few of the white deputy project leaders and some researchers and volunteers from Colombia, Peru, and Argentina. I've noticed similar logics in things I've heard white birders say since I found my way back, ten years later. In a world where "race" is still, for some, a synonym for "subspecies" and a long-tailed duck remains an "oldsquaw", birding can at times become a distinctly if unintentionally racial project, linking discursive whiteness to the North American wild, positing a chthonic spiritual connection to the natural world in spaces that are always already mediated not only by human labor (one of the great insights of Jeffrey Kimball's film Birders: The Central Park Effect) but also by the traces and continuing presence of colonial appropriation and racial genocide. I think about this a lot in relation to places like the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge, on the U.S.-Mexico border, where birdwatchers have struggled with jingoists and the federal government over the impact of border militarization, yes, but which stands too as monument to the ways in which the state values migratory birds far more than migratory people on land carved from the country from which many of the refuge's treasured avian vagrants and many (human) migrants originate during a mid-eighteenth century war of conquest for the expansion of the slave power in North America.

Class distinctions matter too, determine, to some extent, auto- and other forms of mobility, and in multiple senses, what it is that birders see when they see birds.there is a gulf between the $50 pair of Bushnells and the far more expensive Carl Zeiss HD binoculars that come with names like victory and conquest which make clear the connections between the birder gear market and hunting, manhood, "the two fisted birder" against the feminized and ridiculed figure of the birdwatcher, a name some are actively trying to reappropriate) and, (maybe this is a stretch) the neocolonial logics which make possible and undergird ecotourism's geography of difference, its relation to what Anibal Quijano has termed "the coloniality of power."

But I said I was going to talk about gender - itself a problematic proposal for birdwatching, where gender is so often presumed to be a biological fact that can be recognized by plumage, brood patches, and in-hand measurement. Female raptors and falcons and owls, after all, are always much larger than males of their species. Gender is often treated, at least for birds, for the ornithological gaze, as something that can be empirically known and mapped on to particular bodies through a correct alchemy of observation and, if necessary, manipulation. But bird gender is more metaphor than anything else, a metaphor for all the stories we tell each other about human gender. In so many of the ways naturalists discuss avian mating behavior and reproduction, they construct a representation of bird domesticity, of the nest as a humorously atavistic mirror of the nuclear family. The male brings home the bacon (or bugs, squirrels, fish, pigeons, nuts, seeds, etc) while the female incubates and protects the homebound offspring. The transposition of the narrative tropes of the bourgeois nuclear family as framing mechanism for bird reproduction seems to me an even stronger indication of the social construction of avian gender than the extant examples of "reversal" (e.g., phalaropes, in which the "male" raises the young after the more colorful "female" does a dance to "attract" "him" or transgression - The periodic stories of "gay" zoo penguins, which insert their subjects into a deeply homonormative recapitulation of said bourgeois domesticity.* To talk about gender in birding milieus is to talk about people, people who engage in spectacular macho bullying like the anonymous individual who emailed a member of the Massbird list a couple weeks ago to accuse her of being a phony and in the lower echelons of the Massachusetts birder hierarchy; people whose gendered entitlement to confirmation of their own expertise goes undiagnosed and uncontested, people who post exasperated grandiose self-aggrandizing comments on Facebook pages and email listserves; people who attempt to represent and practice birdwatching as exercise in mastery/masculinity and therefore as an exercise in commodity fetishism, the bird as a "tick" on a list.

I don't want to essentialize a gender binary where one is fluid and permeable. But there is something interesting about the anxieties which surround birdwatching's apparent passivity, it's closeness to but not conquering of, and therefore it's deeply feminized -in an admittedly essentialist characterization of femininity- relationship to nature, one which both renders women birders somewhat invisible except as a testament to American Exceptionalism (i.e. in conversations about how historically male "twitching" is in the UK) and devalues the labor they perform which sustains birders' organizations and bird populations (keeping and watching feeders, for instance.). These gendered conflicts limn -and police- the boundaries between citizen science and hobby, academic ornithology and Internet nerd trollwar. I suspect that I am not the first to have written on this subject. I will likely have more to say on the subject later.



*The queer theorist and historian Lisa Duggan defines homonormativity as "a politics which does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption."

Subprime Student Debt

Some 33% of the U.S.' student debt, explains this Wall Street Journal article about a new TransUnion report, is now held by people whom the rating agencies classify as subprime borrowers.  This is debt that may never be repaid.  A third of subprime student debt - one ninth of the U.S. total student debt, was 90 days or more past due in March of last year, the article notes, a nine percent increase from a 2007 figure.  Student debt, a ubiquity across much of the  U.S. student and professional population, is only likely to continue to grow as the gap between the rising cost of tuition and declining real wages expands.

Why are TransUnion, Fitch, and Moody's interested in, and rating, student debt?  Because of the market in Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities, (SLABS,) the trade in securitized student debt.  The prospect of a market failure akin to the one spurred by the collapse of the subprime housing debt market five years ago has led many to invoke the specter of another bubble.  But, as Malcolm Harris has argued, perceptively, student debt, as one of a very few types of debt from which their can be no legal release, is, like court-imposed criminal penalties and child support, in something of a class of its own.  As Harris notes:

Besides, no interested party cares if student debtors pay up soon; they will have to someday, and the longer it takes them, the more interest accrues, the bigger the haul. In the meantime, markets and investors are empowered to just pretend the money is there anyway.

Thus, the metaphor of the bubble is problematic.  Harris suggests that this subprime will yield no burst, but instead will slowly "fill with value from the bottom," in the form of commdified labor extorted from borrowers by a mixture of state and non-state forms of coercion.  "Assuming current rates of repayment and issuance," Harris concludes, "the $1 trillion outstanding total will double within a decade. And short of suicide, expatriation, or revolt, there’s not much 37 million American student debtors and counting can do about it."

If there's good news, it's that the beginnings of that revolt may be underway.  In the last few years organizations like the Edu-factory collective, the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, and now Strike Debt (which has a meeting this comming Sunday from 2-4 PM at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan) have staked out the lines of an incipient debtor revolt.  How this revolt develops, and what other forms it generates are, as always, up to us to determine.

Is This What Democracy Looks Like?

None of you know this, but there are several unpublsihed draft posts for this blog i never finished.  I have been otherwise ignoring it though, I admit.  But I've been doing some other writing elsewhere, cranking out a dissertation chapter draft, co-writing an essay for an edited volume (more on that in a future post,) and writing an essay on occupation and student struggles for this e-book dossier on the Occupy movement edited by Rana Jaleel, A.J. Bauer, Cristina Beltran, and Andrew Ross and published in cooperation with the Social Text collective.  Many other friends and comrades contributed to the volume, and I urge anyone still aware of this blog's existence to check it out.

Today's destruction of the Occupied Wall Street library in Zuccotti Park echoes the $2m spent by Jean Quan to brutalize the Oakland commune on the same day that budgetary considerations forced the closure of four schools - to whit, attacks by the repressive state apparatus on Both the disciplinary institutions of the Ideological State Apparatuses [/Althusser] AND the attempts to create radically counterhegemonic spaces of knowledge production within social movements and liberated spaces. There may be some irony in this unwilling commonality, but maybe it's more useful to think about this as a particularly revealing moment in neoliberalism's attempt to violently reconstitute itself in the wake of the ongoing crisis, in which the state can only return to its monopolies of violence and property destruction, can only attack sites of social reproduction - hegemonic and counterhegemonic, can only foreclose possible futures through nightstick and pepper spray, in a doomed attempt to hold ground in the present. The system is about to die, hella hella occupy

In leiu of something more substantial, links to my three guest posts at Marc Bousquet's blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education in reverse chronological order.

This week's Campus Occupations Intensify on #occupycal, #occupyharvard, and the relationship between university occupations and racialized and gendered service labor.

From early October, Inside The Crackdown at Occupy Boston

and from September, Wall Street Occupation, Day 3

If you aren't following me on twitter, I've been livetweeting general assemblies etc.

"They say America First, but they mean America next."

In an effort to better understand the political context of U.S. higher education institutions in the early 1940s for the chapter I'm revising now, I turned yesterday to labor/social historian Stephen Norwood's recent The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower (Cambridge University Press, 2009).  Norwood's book is an accessible account of the entanglements between university administrators and the Nazi regime at Harvard, Columbia, the Seven Sisters, and in German departments across the U.S.  There is much in Norwood's account which readers unfamiliar with the story of the pro-fascist leanings of much of the U.S. academic and financial elite in the 1930s will find shocking.  Harvard President James Conant and Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, were both deeply antisemitic and endeavored to build institutional relationships with the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy, even as both carried out increasingly brutal actions against unionists, communists, and, in the former case, German Jewry.

Norwood ably and convincingly documents the relationship between the U.S. elite university in the 1930s and the ideological projects and diplomatic missions of the nazi state.  But 80 pages in, I feel like there are some blanks i need filled - Norwood doesn't really historicize or explain the fascist sympathies that seem to have been almost universal at Harvard and slightly less so at Columbia due in part to the larger number of Jewish students at the latter.  He doesn't really explain the class structure or the relationship to the state and/or society of any of the institutions he examines.  Though his expose is valuable for historians of higher education, I want to suggest that some gestures towards broader conclusions would have greatly enhanced his text.  So would an introduction laying out the stakes, scale, and scope of these transoceanic fascisms and their importance for U.S. politics, knowledge production, and the history of universities.

Need to cut this entry short to run to campus.

Via Really Open University, London Metropolitan University is Occupied.

Statement

A certain area of the Tower Building in Holloway Road is being currently occupied by students in protest against Vice- Chancellor Malcolm Gillies’ decision to axe 70% of courses- including Performing Arts, Philosophy and History.

Gillies’ decision came as a shock a couple of weeks ago. None of the university teaching staff was consulted about the cuts. A majority of the excellent, dedicated tutors are under imminent threat of losing their jobs.

Students already enrolled on the courses face an uncertain future. There have been rumours about transfers to other universities with which WE DO NOT AGREE.

This statement is our call for help to save our university, our future and our dreams: to keep London Metropolitan University open to everyone, regardless of their social class, wealth and chosen subject of study. The purpose of this occupation is to present the Vice-Chancellor with our demands

Demands

1. Meeting with Vice- Chancellor
2. Transparent process and direct communication
3. University management goes back to HEFCE to renegotiate repayment terms
4. Vice- Chancellor to accept proposals put forward by staff in HALE
5. University retracts decision of cuts of ALL courses
6. Students on existing courses which are being deleted, WILL NOT BE TRANSFERRED.
7. Free access IN and OUT of the Occupation
8. No student is victimized following action taken to occupy the space.

Website: http://www.wearelondonmet.wordpress.com