Monday, May 4, 2009

Legitimation of the Everyday

This week's readings (and the blog entries of my classmates, in particular) focused my attention to one aspect of the everyday--legitimation. The U.S. is rather intensely committed to any number of processes of legitimation (or criminalization) of human activity, as can be seen in the Inda and Shah pieces. We are a nation of exclusions and inclusions, a binary of us/them. This can be seen in our school playgrounds, our airport waiting areas (ever notice how "like" people tend to cluster together in those places?), in music videos, in our responses to issues of gay marriage, etc. into infinity.

I had a form of this concept in mind over the past few weeks due to some of my students who have been penning responses to selected writings of Teddy Roosevelt. In some of these pieces Roosevelt asserts that people who want to be called Americans have an obligation to "be American," in the sense that they should lay aside prior cultural/national allegiances in order to become "Americanized." My students have been voicing amazement that immigrant rhetoric can be traced as far back in American history as Roosevelt's time.

What I have come to realize throughout this semester is that the everyday is unfailingly tied to processes of legitimation. As a minority, I have come to expect certain processes that demand I legitimize Connie's Everyday to other people. As a woman, I expect to have to legitimize my stance on child-rearing, marriage, interactions with other women, etc. As a college student, I expect to have to legitimate my positions on topics about which I knew little before my years of higher education. As a doctoral student, I expect to have to justify my areas of professional focus to colleagues, mentors, and even my family.

Heck, I even find myself legitimating the weeks I've spent away from my Weimaraners back home in North Carolina--TO those two dogs, mind you. As I prepared to walk into the airport yesterday to board a plane back to the desert, I found myself explaining to those two unhappy faces WHY I had to leave and exactly when I would be back home. Now, I'm the first to admit that I tend to treat my dogs as if they are people, but I would argue that this isn't the real reason I took time to legitimate my activities to a couple of dogs. Rather, there is an ineffable human need to locate, identify, quantify, and legitimate our ordinary existences. We seem to feel a need to create a position for ourselves that is justified and appropriately contrasted to some level of the non-legitimate. WHY we feel this way I cannot begin to conjecture. But what I do know is this: Human beings are not alone in positioning the everyday in relation to others. We can trace similar processes in the activities of animals and their relationships to other beings and the landscapes which they inhabit. Perhaps then there is an everyday that transcends species--the writings of Donna Haraway would seem to offer ample evidence of this position. Haraway suggests that the everyday of humans and dogs frequently intersect in ways that argue against strict lines of them/us experience, as the contact zones where species meet are themselves argument against hard and fast rules of human and animal engagement. Yet she also argues against simply "celebrat[ing] complexity," asserting that we should instead "become worldly and [ . . . ] respond" (When Species Meet, 41).

This, then, is my final thought on the current semester of learning: Although Haraway's discussion relates very specifically to dog/human interactions, I think there is much insight in her comment above. In a practical sense, this thing we term the "everyday" is itself less a celebration of complexity as it is a system of actively encountering the world and responding to those encounters. This process of response is what creates our everyday--both those parts of our everyday that we control ourselves and those parts that represent the responses of those around us. We cannot, in any real sense, "make" an everyday as individuals, except in isolation from others (and I'm certainly not advocating the hermit route); rather, we make the everyday collectively and collaboratively--humans, companion species, other species, all of those living forms that impact, support, complicate, and enrich our everyday experiences.

It's been a pleasure exploring ideas with all of you this semester. Best wishes to each of you in your future work and beyond.

Connie

P.S. I am thoroughly jet-lagged as I write this, so please excuse any rough wording!

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