April 26, 2019 Arts & Culture Reframing Agnes By RL Goldberg A 1958 case study is widely believed to be “the first sociological case study of a transitioning person.” A new documentary short, premiering at Tribeca, finally allows Agnes to speak in her own words. Kristen Schilt. Photo: Dan Dry. In October 1958, a nineteen-year-old woman called Agnes approached the psychiatry department at UCLA, having been referred there by a physician in her hometown. “She was tall, slim, with a very female shape,” the sociologist Harold Garfinkel noted. “Her measurements were 38-25-28. She had long, fine dark-blonde hair, a young face with pretty features, a peaches-and-cream complexion, no facial hair, subtly plucked eyebrows, and no makeup except for lipstick.” Agnes arrived at UCLA seeking genital surgery for her self-described intersex condition. According to Agnes’s self-reporting, though she had apparently been born a boy, female secondary sex characteristics began to spontaneously develop during puberty. Extensive physical and endocrinological testing revealed her to have no obvious intersex condition; all the same, Agnes’s physical appearance assured doctors that she was, in fact, female. So Agnes became a patient—and subject—of Dr. Robert Stoller and Harold Garfinkel. At the time, Garfinkel was writing an ethnomethodology of how individuals make accountable aspects of daily life and interactions—that is, how individuals might give an account of their interactions. While doctors determined whether Agnes was an acceptable candidate for surgery, conversations between Agnes and Garfinkel were recorded and formed the basis of Garfinkel’s chapter “Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an ‘Intersexed’ Person Part 1*.” This article is widely believed to be, in sociologist Kristen Schilt’s words, “the first sociological case study of a transitioning person.” Read More
April 26, 2019 Arts & Culture Clarissa Dalloway Is a Virgo By Alex Dimitrov and Dorothea Lasky Cover design by Oliver Hibert. In late November 2016, the poets Alex Dimitrov and Dorothea Lasky decided to bring their shared love of astrology and poetry to the world, and Astro Poets was born. They’ve since amassed hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers for their sharp, snappy takes on the signs, and this November, they’ll release their first book together, Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac. To celebrate the reveal of the book’s cover, Dimitrov and Lasky read the charts of some of literature’s most beloved (and reviled) characters. Aries: Janie Crawford (Their Eyes Were Watching God) Janie Crawford is the quintessential Aries: resilient, determined, and ready to take control of her own destiny. Taurus: Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice) Elizabeth Bennet will marry for love, and she doesn’t care if that goes against convention, and she doesn’t care whom she’ll disappoint. She is the epitome of a Taurus: strong-minded and endlessly passionate. Read More
April 25, 2019 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: An IV Dripping into Something Already Dead By Kaveh Akbar In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. © Ellis Rosen. Dear Poets, I’m a young artist and writer—twenty-two, just graduated, and starting out on a professional career. I’m having some success: a few group shows, a couple publications, and a few readings in small spaces. For this, I am incredibly grateful. I try to celebrate these accomplishments and not continue to fall into the trap of berating myself for “not doing enough.” That being said, last night, a close friend and I read at an event to which four people showed up, the host of the series included. I got a lot of apology texts, and I understand. I, too, have had hard days and not been able to show up for other people. But the number of these excuses, and the silence, from a great number of other close friends has been a little disappointing. I’ve got a few solid friends that are forever supportive, but they’re spread across continents now. I am grateful for all of these people, too, but how do I celebrate my accomplishments when the people around me don’t seem interested in celebrating with me? Sincerely, Forced to Toot My Own Horn Read More
April 25, 2019 Arts & Culture What the Scientists Who Photographed the Black Hole Like to Read By Rebekah Frumkin On April 10, 2019, an international team of scientists working on a project called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) released an image of a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87). Several years in the making, the image was created from data compiled by a number of telescopes spaced across the planet. The EHT team is a large and diverse group, including many early-career Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers from the U.S. and abroad. Rebekah Frumkin spoke to nine of those scientists, all in their twenties or early thirties, about what they like to read, how the black hole is like a work of art, and their advice for writers depicting black holes in their work. (Image: © EHT Collaboration) What kind of fiction or poetry do you like to read, and how has it influenced your research? Sara Issaoun: I like science fiction, the kind that either drifts toward realism or toward whimsy. I’m a big fan of Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is probably a classic for most astronomers. Daniel Palumbo: It is difficult for me to choose a particular genre of fiction, so I’ll just pick a recent favorite: Blood Meridian. I find insurmountably evil villains incredibly compelling, though the horror of this book is at times physically painful to read. In science, the situation is the opposite—astronomy is difficult not because of some malicious actor, but due to a cold, uncaring complexity with which humanity contends, largely for the joy of discovery. Michael Janssen: I like to read science fiction novels, for example Isaac Asimov. I want to really understand how our world and the universe work, and what mankind is capable of through technological advancements. Andrew Chael: I pretty consciously try to take Shevek, the main character of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, as my model for how to act as a physicist. While his physics are a little iffy—or maybe just beyond our current understanding—his approach to research, teaching, and discovery is fundamentally generous while still being influenced by his personal ambition to go further than others have gone. The Dispossessed also points out that all science, even physics, is shaped by its social and political context. Read More
April 24, 2019 Arts & Culture Waterman Redux By Anthony Madrid Waterman at Cornell, 1926 There are times I am facetious in these articles. It’s not always perceived. Therefore, allow me to take a moment to clarify my last piece about the limericks of the poet Paul Waterman. I do not actually think Waterman was crazy, and neither do I think all, most, or even any of his limericks are gibberish. They all make sense. They’re obscure, that’s all. He was eccentric, that’s all. My first piece was written at an early stage of the Waterman Renaissance. It’s been three weeks; much has happened. As you can see from the photograph above, an image of Waterman has surfaced. He is roughly twenty-three years old in that picture. His dates are now known to be July 3, 1903–February 17, 1987. He went to Cornell on a scholarship. For a great many years he owned a small farm in a town called Maryland, New York. He had a twin brother, John Waterman, whom he outlived by twenty-five years. And he is now known to have published ten books, all of them poetry, all of them printed at his own expense: Boy for a Blonde (1932) Cabin for Two (1934) —twenty-one-year hiatus— Love to the Town (1955) —eight-year hiatus— The Limerick Trilogy: Mad Land of Limerick (1963) Those Brats from Limerick (1964) Five Lines to Limerick (1965) Four Books of Haiku: Wee Wings (1966) Brief Candles (1967) Whimseys [sic] (1968; second edition 1973) Thus and Now (1974) Read More
April 24, 2019 Arts & Culture The Roots of a Forgotten Massacre By Julián Herbert In 1911, some three hundred Chinese immigrants were murdered in the northern Mexican city of Torreón. Afterward, their bodies were mutilated, looted, and dumped in a mass grave. More than a century later, a fog of confusion and denial surrounds the massacre. Misinformation and racism abound, and the residents of Torreón remain reluctant to discuss the event. In his new book, The House of the Pain of Others, Julián Herbert sets out to investigate this forgotten atrocity. Below, he examines the roots of anti-Chinese racism in early-twentieth-century Mexico. Torreón in 1911. Public domain. Most historians—including both the most scrupulous, such as Chao Romero, and the less rigorous, for example, Juan Puig—take for granted that in Mexico there was a clear correlation between attitudes toward the Chinese diaspora and social class. They establish the notion that Sinophobia arose informally among the poor after the Torreón massacre in 1911. They then theorize that ideology evolved, became formalized, and contaminated the middle class through a sort of anti-Chinese conference (attended mostly by small-business men) that took place in Magdalena, Sonora State, on February 5, 1916. Romero suggests these developments were never supported by the ruling class. This reading of the situation systematizes the historical discourse but does not reflect reality. Its first fallacy is that a minority ideology, originating among the poorest people in the country, ascended the social ladder at a speed greater than that of any other revolutionary concern (democracy, agrarian and constitutional reform, and so on); I don’t find this particularly convincing. The description also implies that the transnational dimension of the diaspora had no Mexican equivalent: that the anti-Chinese sentiment of the East Coast middle and upper classes and California labor groups did not take root in Mexico during the final third of the nineteenth century. That seems implausible. Many of the first engine drivers to cross López Velado’s “Sweet Nation” (“the train rolling along the track / like a child’s Christmas toy”) were white, English-speaking, and unionized (and very well paid: they earned two hundred pesos a month—between ten and twelve times the minimum wage in La Laguna, and equivalent to approximately 20,000 pesos at current rates). Influential Mexican families (some represented by rich agriculturalists, such as the Maderos in La Laguna, and also the Creels, the Lujáns, the Terrazas, the Mendirichagas, the Gómez Palacios, and the Lavíns) sent their offspring to study in the United States, showing a particular predilection for such cities as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. In 1896 Coahuila gave scholarships to five graduates of the state teacher training college to undertake specialist studies in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. At least one of those youths—Gabriel Calzada—was from La Laguna, had lived for a time in Torreón, and was extremely close to Francisco I. Madero: some of the letters he exchanged with the spiritualist president have been preserved, and oral tradition has him as the style editor of Madero’s The Presidential Succession in 1910. Read More