Halloween is a scary time (for those outside the dominant ideology, for those on the unfortunate side of power dynamics). I (We? No, too many variants in that we. Only common in our antagonist …and even I am only implicated indirectly) spend the days leading up to the 31^st much the way my cousin taught me to behave while passing a graveyard – by holding my breath.

Halloween in contemporary culture is deeply entrenched in capitalism. Halloween itself seems to be historically rooted in the celtic practices on the day preceding the festival Samhain. It was believed that on the day preceding Samhain, the deceased returned (as ghosts). Because of this, people would leave food and wine on their doorsteps and, if they left their houses, they would don masks so that they would also be mistaken as ghosts. There are other similar practices that have also contributed to our contemporary iterations of Halloween, but this one is what stuck to the dominant ideological formation and found itself being articulated and transformed throughout the middle ages – such as the interruption of the church, transforming the celtic festival into All Saints Day and the evolution from leaving out food and wine to ‘souling,’ a practice in which peasants would beg for food and would pray for people’s dead relatives in exchange. According to what history tells us, these traditions were revived by celtic immigrants in the 19^th century. However, it wasn’t until the 1950s that Halloween became a family affair and an occasion for elaborate costuming and candy-giving. Since this time, though, Halloween seems to have continued on this path, becoming the second most profitable holiday after Christmas.

What does it mean then to have a business model based around the concept of dressing up? What sorts of costumes get made? What are “the characteristics of the […] ideal user” (Latour 301)? Perhaps, more importantly for me, what happens for the non-ideal users?

The types of Halloween costumes that people buy (or create) tend to “come in three categories: scary, funny, or fantastical” (Wade). Halloween costumes, if one only looks around, also seem to be an exercise in exaggeration. The superhero costume, for example, falls quite firmly into the realm of the fantastical [though some certainly have aspects of the scary, where villains are concerned, or funny where certain characters (Deadpool?) are concerned]. The superhero is, themself, an exaggerated human possessing super strength, abilities, physique, wit. What does it mean then that these costumes (often with built-in abs) are prevalent? Perhaps this type of costume (and the figure of superhero in pop culture) speaks to the sorts of iterations of self that are to be aspired to in accordance to the discourse of the dominant ideology. What is to be desired, what is desired by the majority and then reinterpreted back into what is to be desired, is this physical exaggeration of self, is the “pinnacle” of human evolution. But then whose pinnacle? According to whom? What is the presence of built-in abs on a costume teaching a child to feel about their body? The ideal user of this costume isn’t meant to ask these questions, though; the ideal user subscribes and “accept[s] or happily acquiesce[s] to their lot” (Latour 307).

So what happens when you aren’t the ideal user? What happens when you are not in the position intended for articulation, not the intended “cab” for the “trailer,” as Stuart Hall describes it (in terms of an articulated lorry) (53)?

Well, from the perspective of the insider, from the perspective of the person on the inside of the dominant ideology, it is the job of the user to become ideal and anything outside of that is a failure on the user’s part. When we speak, for example, of “historical” and “cultural” costumes, it is clear from the articulations of the costumes themselves (the intended facsimile versus the materials used versus the “liberties” taken in design) that they are not intended for those who have knowledge of such things, not intended for those who can see their breakages. Even the pictured models betray this point. For good measure, here are a few popular examples of costumes on a costume website:

(complete with confederate flag on the hat!)

“What’s the big deal?” the insider asks. “It’s just a costume. It’s funny,” he says.

And yes, he does say this. In response to the recent attention a BC Halloween store received for its costumes’ trivializing of Indigenous cultures, the owner Tony Hudgens response was: “It is not our intention to offend any race or creed. We would like to stress that as some Halloween costumes might come across as controversial, our intention at Halloween Alley is to celebrate life (Halloween Style!), and have fun with our friends and families during Halloween festivities.”

But oh, Tony. Tony Tony Tony… Gentle, innocent, Insider Tony…

Your intention (if we are to take you at your word) and the costumes are not isolated things. As with what Hall claims of Baudrillard’s argument about the implosion of meaning, your desire to have this simplistic fun also “rest[s] upon an assumption of the sheer facticity of things: things are just what is seen on the surface” (49). To you, dear Tony, your bottom line and the use by the dominant culture is more important than those who are harmed by these iterations and by the intended articulation of the dominant subject donning such a costume.

Have you even listened to the voices of those who you are attempting to clumsily represent? Look, Tony…

You see, the costume may have certain properties that grant it certain agencies on its own, but it exists, as with all things, “in a particular formation […] in relation to a number of different forces” (Grossberg 54) . Even if the costume has “no necessary, intrinsic” belonging, it still has a meaning (it exists within the systems of ideology and language …from which nothing can entirely escape) and this meaning “comes precisely from its position within a formation” (54). You see, you cannot simply have a costume of an indigenous dress, intended for the dominant (thus white settler) consumption void of its existence in relation to the genocide of indigenous and first nations people in Canada or the erasure of indigenous and first nations languages and cultures in the name of assimilation. In the same vein, it is not okay for Miley Cyrus to continue sporting dreads and it is not okay that I used to have my ears spaced to 00g. The narrative of activism around cultural appropriation works in direct relation to the theory of articulation and assemblage. Tony, Miley, if you were to accept that “contingent relations among practices, representations, and experiences […] make up the world” and that these articulations have a “structured and affective nature,” (Slack 126), I’m certain that you would start to see how the things you do are harmful and, maybe, how you could make them better.

With these issues in mind, I’d like to return to a different sort of ‘funny’ (offensive) costume. For now, let’s call these the ‘drag as joke’ costumes. These are the costumes, usually intended for cis d00ds, that involve over-accentuated breasts, a wig, and some sort of mock-sexy get-up.

note the description here…

Unlike drag (which I’ll admit has some of its own problems in its contemporary manifestation), it is not a parody of traditional gender roles and presentation, it is not a social commentary, it is not connected to a history of activism and oppression in its own right, and it doesn’t attempt any sort of artistry. Simply put, it is not trying to be part of that conversation. These costumes, as actants, are not seeking these assemblages – but they can’t entirely escape them, either. As such, the person donning these costumes is presented with a contest of “the different regimes of truth in the social formation” (Grossberg 48). In order to assert the power of the dominant ideology, the actor exaggerates the drag to obscene and ‘comical’ levels. They perform a parody – both of drag itself and of the traditionally-gendered female subject – in order to reassert the power of the dominant ideology of the m/f binary, constructed around and constructing our arbitrary ideas regarding genitalia and gender. In making this performance a joke, they also make femininity, drag, and transgressive gender performances/identities a joke, thus reasserting the power dynamic within those articulations.

I believe that this sort of costume and the ideas around it play a significant role in this year’s ‘hit’ costume. It’s received a good amount of backlash yet it’s still one of the top selling costumes and has sold out in many stores…

To the Insider, this costume probably doesn’t seem that different to the ones depicted earlier… and in a sense, that’s true, because those earlier costumes are still contributing harmful ideas to this cultural assemblage. At the same time, however, it is drastically different.

For those of you out of the loop, Caitlyn Jenner came out this past year as a trans woman. Now, of course, there have been plenty of (ok, not even close to plenty, but definitely ‘some’) trans women in the media (srsly, mom, have you never heard of Laverne Cox?) recently who could have easily ‘represented’ the trans community, but Caitlyn’s class status, whiteness, and age all worked together to create maximum visibility. This visibility, however, also made her the easy target of the dominant ideology’s ‘jokes.’ We see this manifesting here in the creation of a costume marketed primarily to cis men. Now, what does that do? Well, in the first place, by making it into a costume, it delegitimizes trans identities, it converses with the discourse that asserts that ‘gender’ is what is assigned at birth and that there are no deviations (this also erases intersex identities and discounts the extensive variation in hormones and genitalia that actually exist). Further, by marketing the product to cis men, by treating cis men as the ideal user, it undermines the process of self-identification for trans folks and asserts, in line with the dominant ideology and narrative of ‘trans deceit,’ that trans women aren’t really women and that, consequently, trans folks of all sorts aren’t really what they say they are.

It is for this reason that, at Halloween, I hold my breath. Now, if you’ve made the unfortunate mistake of interpellating me according to the articulations presented by the dominant ideology, you probably don’t get it. So I’ll just say this: clothing (‘costumes,’ if you will), behaviours, assigned genders at birth, sexual attraction/orientation, hair style/length, and names are all singular elements within assemblages. None have the inherent agency to gender anyone or anything – they only do so when articulated within the dominant ideology. If a self-identified man wears makeup, it does not change his gender – that makeup is merely the “trailer” to a different “cab” than what you were expecting. In the same way, those who – insofar as gender is concerned – have no “cab,” can pull at any “trailer” without it needing anything more – they “need not necessarily be connected to one another” (53).

The difference though, I think, is that it is up to the person affected by the assemblage and made an Outsider by the dominant ideology to choose when these things are ok (for themselves alone).

Works Cited

“‘Racist’ Halloween costumes should be pulled from shelves, says B.C. man.” CBC News. CBC/Radio-Canada, October 27 2015. Web.

Grossberg, Lawrence. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (1986): 45-60.

Johnson, Jim [Bruno Latour]. “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer.” Social Problems 35 (1988): 298-310.

Slack, Jennifer Daryl, and J. Macgregor Wise. “Articulation and Assemblage.” Culture + Technology: A Primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. 125-133.

Wade, Lisa. “Racist Halloween Costumes.” The Society Pages: Sociological Images. W. W. Norton & Company, October 29 2009. Web.

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The Postdoc Day IMMERSe event at U Waterloo last week gave me a chance to present in front of and listen to presentations from games scholars doing work all over the network’s six schools. As I mentioned in my last weeknote, the meeting was not something I was originally meant to present at–I was sent mainly to network, listen, and maintain continuity for Concordia’s node. However, an unexpected turn of events brought me to UW toting a presentation to give on behalf of our own postdoc Rob Gallagher, who couldn’t make it. I was a little blindsided by the whole thing–I thought it was going to be a meeting around a table, and when I arrived I learned we were talking in front of an audience in a small theatre. The talk I gave, however, is probably the least interesting thing I can bring back from the event. Anyone who’s read my writing on this site in the past is well versed in the IMMERSe work we’ve been doing over the past year. Instead of rehashing any of that, I’ll write here about the other presentations I heard, as best as I can recall them.

After Neil Randall got up and made some opening remarks about the genesis of the network, the first presentation of the day was delivered by Amanda Phillips, the incoming postdoc at UC Davis. Like me, Amanda has a background in English lit, and the work she’s concentrating on at Davis speaks to that. Their focus seems to be on gender, race, and sexuality in games. The team is interested in games as civic technologies, how they can be used to communicated meaningful themes (currently they’re developing games about fracking, queerness, urban datascapes, and feminist game studies) and as pedagogical social justice tools in the classroom: Phillips herself has led a class on game design that did four weeks reading theory and six weeks building prototypes of games that looked at stuff like nuances of domestic violence (Tethered: two players tethered together in a maze, one of whom can drag and damage the other) and IF on same-sex relationships in an LA urban gangster sort of context (Love like a cholo: a dating simulation). Surprisingly, though it was an English class, the students didn’t need to be taught a lot of the technology (this resonates with the class Darren Wershler taught this spring in which students were expected to play in Minecraft). She’s currently planning a social game jam for the fall (another possible point of overlap with our node and something I need to tell Carolyn Jong about when she gets back in a few weeks).

Besides this work, UC Davis seems to be a great place to go if you want to look at performance studies stuff incorporated with game studies–one project mentioned was data mining Beckett, another was Play the Knave, where you animate theatre using the  Kinect–not only acting, but also lighting and staging (all this is based on the Mekanimator technical platform). The node is relying on UC Davis’ many theatre connections, particularly Shakespeare (they have ties to both Stratford and the Folger Shakespeare Library). They’re also doing some work on medievalism in gaming, another obvious point of connection between our two teams, and something that may be of particular interest to Stephen Yeager.

But the most fascinating work seems to be Amanda’s own project, one which takes a deep look at the politics of motion capture and how it impacts facial expression. The racial politics of performance are embedded in all video games, even those that claim to allow you the freedom to make your own character. Phillips noticed that the subjects used to exhibit facial capture technology are often women and people of colour, an observation that led her to Facegen, the 3D modelling middleware by Toronto-based developer Singular Inversions that supplies a lot of the facial modulation stuff in video games, including Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles. Based on Amanda’s research, the sliders you can use to customize your avatar’s face at the beginning of the game are connected to each other in ways that normalize race and gender–so for example, if you slide more towards female and you get more East Asian aspects. The implications of this study are huge and immediately many more questions open up. And obviously, the area of identity performance in TES games is interesting and relevant to us over here, especially Carolyn’s work into gendered bodies in Skyrim mods.

Amanda didn’t miss all these clear connections and potential collaborations either–I gave my presentation right after she gave hers (she wasn’t there physically, but rather telecommuted), and before the rest of the presentations had even finished she sent me an email basically identifying all the same things I’ve elaborated above. It looks like there may be room for our nodes to communicate with each other really effectively and get some cool work done in the coming year.

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From: “How to Type – By the Touch System”, published by the Toronto Printing Plant of Underwood Elliott Fisher

Demonstrating Gender

Navigating gender/gendered discourse in the context of typewriter history is problematised by the extreme degree of uncertainty and ambiguity which prevents any neat demarcation of the subject. We might hurtle down several (roughly) parallel paths, considering a history of gendered writing (Kittler 186), of gender-coding machines (Keep 405), of the variance between popular representation and lived experience (Keep 410), or of shifts in the labourer’s access to the processes of production (Gitelman 206). Moreover, as emphasised repeatedly (Gitelman 208; Keep 405; Kittler 183), a slippage occurs from the very onset of any investigation into “typewriters”: do we mean the machine or the operator? The two cannot exist in isolation – the machine cannot operate itself, and being a typist is predicated on working “with” a typing-machine (c.f. Heidegger, in Kittler, 198). Thus, unpacking how gender operates with and around typewriting must necessarily begin with an admission that the familiar male/female binary is already mechanically complicated.

Identifying the typist as a “new species”, with a sort of “natural destiny” (Kipling, in Keep 401), complicates reading the typewriter as an emergent feminist by joining the bodily (female) and the machine (typewriter); efforts to categorise, understand, and demark the limits of the typewriter all point towards the typewriter’s role as transformative (Gitelman 185), transgressive, and nebulous. The role of the gaze (in relation, variously, to the machine, workers/work-space, and mass media), is paramount: “the fear and fascination” (Keep 401) about identifying the female as feminine, rather than unsexed (402), or mechanical (Gitelman 203, 208), was assuaged, in large part, through visual confirmation/creation of the type-writer girl as profoundly (if not pornographically) corporeal, human.

Despite the gaze and attempted control of hegemonic patriarchy, the typewriter was yet able to “[resist…] subjection” (Keep 418) and literally work “from within the structure of exploitation” (420) – particularly in remaining “in constant flux” (419), being both visible and viewing, mechanical and sensuous, and resisting an easily identifiable (and thereby controllable) subjectivity. The most dangerous position for the typewriter is one of repose – “becoming” (ibid.) “with” the machine, and casting off the antiquated conception of the female as having “limited physical resources” (402) allows for a freer subjectivity. One mode of achieving this floating subjectivity is in maintaining the initial, fundamental ambiguity in “typewriter” – we mean to stray into the realm of the post-human, to sustain a (pre-electric) cyborg-process, to be the machine and the operator!

Liminality, Touch-Typing, and Positioning the Typewriter

In considering the visual dynamics of typewriting, two distinct economies of gaze are readily identifiable: that of the body of text produced (by means of a visible or invisible inscription process), and the scopophilia in watching the typist. Relevant to both of these foci is the positioning of the typist’s body proper, with attendant implications of desire, both for economic efficiency (in the case of concrete typed copy) and, more humanly physical, the employer’s desire of the typist herself. In both cases, the typewriter hovers between granting clear images, providing visual confirmation of (re)productivity, and maintaining non-visual/non-physical (mechanical) process. Here, Lisa Gitelman’s formulation of the upstrike typewriter as a “black box” (Gitelman 204) is useful, taking the device as “not a public or a human matter, only a secretarial and technological one” (ibid.); the typewriter is at once private, mysterious, and profoundly industrial – in its adjectival signification “secretary” is rendered mechanical. As with Twain’s typesetter who “composed as he composed” (ibid.), the typewriter typewrites… And yet, the black box is not without a certain appeal, its own “seductive enigma” (Keep 401), maintain by obscuring processes (the real) enough to be suggestive, tantalising.

The sensuality of the typewriter is so pronounced, so inextricable from the any mention of the technology, that the machine itself becomes invested with a “new”, potentially unsettling, cyborg-allure. Typewriters(’)/bodies were never free from scrutiny and control – when not observed they self regulated, with body, body type, and fashion dictating their successful entry into and negotiation of the workplace (see Keep, throughout, but especially 404-405, 410; Gitelman 207, 211-212). This is, in fact, in keeping with the assertion that “media is message” – rather than obsess over what is arguably peripheral (the operator’s sartorial deportment), aesthetics takes a turn towards the (non-human) technologic.

This move towards the beauty of the machine is manifest in cover image of the above Underwood pamphlet: being the cover to a brief practical manual on touch-typing, the only suggestion of anything organic, much less human, in the image is the decorative (and, it should be noted, useless) ribbon in the cover’s lower right quadrant. Juxtaposed with the “objective” photographic reproduction of the Underwood typewriter, the hand-drawn ribbon, coupled with the skewed angle of the “card” which it superimposes, softens the manual’s presentation, suggesting that the “black box” which looms in the background can be rendered a touch less daunting. However, this does not connote any precedence being granted to the human operator; indeed, the pamphlet devotes its first sections to a schematic of the device, subsequent to which, the human-typewriter may be addressed. When the human does enter into the manual, it is in a shape subservient to the machine (see Figure 1, above), placed to promote efficient production, and accuracy when working the keys. That which is stereotypically identified as sensuous (the typist) is here transformed into the profoundly sensible, placing the limbs not to stimulate human response, but to kinetically translate energy into the smooth functioning of machined parts. Similarly, there exists an unresolved binary complication on the cover of the Royal Typewriter Company’s user’s manual for the “Gray Magic” typewriter:

Cover to the user’s manual for the Gray Magic (Quiet De Luxe) Portable Typewriter, Royal Typewriter Company. Circa 1949.

Notwithstanding the attempt at visual subterfuge in the richly coloured background of the pamphlet’s cover, and the effort made to add a sense of chromic brilliance to the words “Gray Magic”, the machine itself remains mercilessly matte gray. How then, would this machine’s practical metal casing interact with its operator’s potential desire to appear distinguished, stylish? Would investment in a (not-too-intrusive) desk bibelot or nattily put together suit provide the balm for the bland aesthetics of the machine proper, or were the two more mutually reinforcing, with the machine throwing the typewriter’s own attractiveness into sharper relief (inviting the male gaze only to reject it in favour to ministering to the machine)? What, moreover, of the purported impulse to “wear “rational” dress” (Keep 407)?

With this last query, we return to the Underwood touch-typing manual, more specifically, the brief notations made on the booklet’s back:

With hand-written inscription of measurements.

Inscribed, rather ironically, in pencil, are a series of measurements (bust, waist, hips, and lengths) for a set of woman’s clothing. While it is impossible to directly relate this “markup” (see Andrew Stauffer’s work with nineteenth century marginalia) with typewriting, that a typewriting manual be at hand, and deemed an acceptable surface upon which couture might be inscribed reinforces a reading of the typewriter as always-already in flux, perforating and changing female subjectivity at all levels…

Works Cited

Gitelman, Lisa. “Automatic Writing.” Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Keep, Christopher. “The Cultural Work of the Type-Writer Girl.” Victorian Studies 40.3 (Spring 1997): 401-427.

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. [1986] Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Writing Science. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

— Christopher Chaban

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