TECHNOLOGIZING THE TALE

JASON WALLIN
TECHNOLOGIZING THE TALE
1
Virtuality... gives you everything, but at the same time it subtly deprives you
of everything. The subject is realized to perfection, but when realized to
perfection, the subject automatically becomes object, and panic sets in.
(Baudrillard, 2002, p. 180)
“They are just there, like objects, for the hero to rescue from danger”
A fecund seduction of the wor(l)d unfolded from a conversation between myself
and my students regarding the privileged and marginalized in fairy tales.
Precipitated by a student's observation regarding the marginalized position of the
feminine in a number of fairy tales that we “read” as a class, our conversation
considered those images disclosed as “reserve” or “stock,” a Heideggerian notion
referring to objects in the world disposed of alterity, commodified and integrated
into the flattened surface of technology (Heidegger, 1977).
Our conversation turned to the positioning of the feminine in the narratives we
studied, extending into the world in an embodied and (re)membered way. “Girls
are always waiting to be saved,” Jenny blurted, continuing, “they are just there, like
objects, for the hero to rescue from danger.” A chorus of affirmation erupted
amongst her classmates. Kelly turned to meet her words, “In Cinderella,” she
paused, “It seems like her only goal is to get married to Prince Charming, it’s sad
that she’s portrayed as being so shallow.” “It’s like Cinderella is so helpless, but if
you think about Snow White or Little Red Riding Hood, it’s the same,” Tommy
interjected, extending the positioning of Cinderella into a wider narrative body.
“Rapunzel too,” Mark erupted, “she gets trapped in the tower, and she just has to
wait for the man.” “It’s even like Brittany Spears,” Jenny recounted, “saying that
women should be looked at as puppets or slaves, as though we need to be saved
and controlled.”
As a site of economic and ideological valuation, the fairy tale has today
collapsed into a field of ambient consumerism, deployed virtually as a signification
of social mobility and diffuseness. This article attempts to explore the virtual coopting of fairy tale narrative as intimately tied to the tenets of capital accumulation,
circulation and positive appearance. Against this, the rereading of subjectivities
within fairy narrative explores the im(possibility) of radicalizing the sign in an era
of technological immersion.
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1
Portions of student dialogue herein have been previously published in:
Wallin, J. (2002). With Descartes: A meditation on pedagogical anxiety. Early
Childhood Education, 35(1), 41-45.
Educational Insights 2006, Vol. 10 : 2 (November)
TECHNOLOGIZING THE TALE
Binary Opposition: The Metaphysics of Presence
Fraught with dis-ease, our conversation evoked the image of the feminine as
“stock,” as a positioned present-at-hand commodity (Heidegger, 1977). Entering
into a discursive space of metaphysical critique, our conversation bore resemblance
to Derrida’s extension of Heideggerian Destruktion a n d Abbau, the double
movement of destruction rebuilding; deconstruction.
Derrida’s critique of the Western metaphysical project pivots in part on the
notion that Western thought is motivated by polarities or binary oppositions.
Binary logic, according to Derrida, not only foregrounds the formulation of
Western philosophical discourse, but plunders everyday thought, locating and
motivating the coordinates of our experience (Derrida, 1972). The polarities
good/evil, being/nothingness, first world/ third world, presence/absence,
accumulation/lack, truth/error, identity/difference, mind/matter, man/woman,
soul/body, life/death, fit/unfit, culture/nature, and speech/writing do not stand as
symmetrical relations. The terms of the binary, as opposed to merely functioning
oppositionally, are arranged in hierarchical order, 'priorizing' the first term
temporally and qualitatively (Derrida, 1972). The hierarchical structure of binary
logic therefore privileges “unity, identity, temporal and spacial presence over
distance, difference, dissimulation and deferment” (Derrida, 1972, p. viii). As a
sign, the feminine becomes possessed in its distance to the present (in this case,
perhaps the presence of the phallus), wherein Derrida's notion of presence bears
close relationship to Heideggerian Being; the revealing of the world as present-athand (Heidegger, 1962). Derrida reads the present-at-hand in the immediate,
privileged term of the binary, hierarchically enframed against the marginal, and
reproduced as cultural ‘reality’ (Derrida, 1972).
With the in(filtration) of technology into all cultural spheres, the reproduction of
the ideal by way of the model dominates the cultural technoscape (Postman, 1992).
Cultural investment in the notions of identity and unity of meaning have
increasingly been motivated by the media, or projected via mass polling. Along
this line, McLuhan’s (1964) assertion that “the medium is the message” eerily
alludes to the proliferation of code as a means of revealing the world and
‘enframing’ our discourses (p. 7). The active privileging that seemed to emerge
through our reading of fairy tales as the marginalization of the feminine
proliferated everywhere, in media portrayals and on the internet. It also seemed to
fit as a codified sign; “When they show girls in those fashion magazines, they are
so skinny,” a student creating a collage commented to her peers. “Let me see,” her
friends chimed in. “She’s not that skinny!” one of the girls scoffed.
The idealized signs of Western Culture which pass as ‘natural,’ as present-athand, have invaded all cultural spheres, constituting an immediately accessible
‘reality’; “a natural fact of the real world rather than something that we have
learned to see as natural” (Davis, 1993, p. 7). From the journal entry of a student:
“If you don’t wear certain clothes, like Gap and LaSenza Girl, if you don’t like
[certain celebrities] like Brittany Spears, Christina Aguilera or Hillary Duff, you’re
not considered cool.” As another student succinctly commented in a journal entry,
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WALLIN
“In the fairy tales we read, the princess had to look pretty for the prince, [she] had
to wear the right gown, shoes and had to have her hair looking just right— the
prince never seems to fall in love with the ugly girl.” In this reading, the ‘natural’
signs espoused via both fairy tale narrative and the media are shaken, opening the
possibility for the question: “What’s going on?” In the case of our fairy tale
conversation, the disruption of the familiar seemed to require attention to the
absent, that which had prevailed not.
(I’m a) Slave 4 U
Some years ago I noticed how many false things I had accepted as true in my
childhood, and how doubtful were the things that I subsequently built on
them and therefor that, once in a lifetime, everything should be completely
overturned. (Descartes, 1993, p. 18)
I filled the board with notes as my students fervently engaged in a discussion
surrounding a troubling dialogue that occurred a week prior. Partly by student
request, I shared the lyrics to Brittany Spears’ “(I’m a) Slave 4 U” (2002) to the
class, reading them concomitantly with the audio version of the song. Reading the
lyrics, not to extend vocabulary and not as a mini-lesson on punctuation, provided
the opportunity to read its discursive terrain into our dialogue.
Students immediately pointed out lyrics such as “I’m a slave (It just feels right)
for you. (It just feels good),” connecting them to Jenny’s comment a week earlier.
The positioning of the female in the fairy tales we had read were a palimpsest to
the “Slave 4 U” lyrics. “Brittany Spears sings as though all women are supposed to
be passive objects,” Rebecca wrote in a later journal entry. Another student drew
from her lived experience, “I have a friend named Kristen, she thinks that she’s fat,
so she’s going to go on to her own little diet so she’ll be skinnier… and more
beautiful.” The fairy tales we read weeks earlier again appeared as a spectre in our
conversation; emerging as if in a palimpsest: a manuscript written on more than
once, bearing the traces of earlier writing. “When Britney Spears sings ‘I want to
do what you tell me to,” a student recounts, “it reminds me of a helpless princess,
waiting for her hero.” “When Britney Spears says that she is leaving behind her age
and her name, I think that she must have [amnesia], sort of like Snow White,”
another student avers. From the Greek palimpseston: scraped again, the palimpsest
bears the trace of its absented other. “It may be depressing to discover how subtle,
how invisible, how pervasive, and h o w much our own are the discursive
mechanisms and structures through which we have learned to know our place and
remain within it” (Davis, 1993, p. 8).
The ‘Liberation’ of the Narrative
Throughout sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe, the fairy tale was produced
for the consumption of the aristocratic elite, constructing a commentary on
normative behavior and the exercise of power as governed by a seemingly
unbreakable and reciprocal symbolic order, as in the Middle Ages. It was such that
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TECHNOLOGIZING THE TALE
the play of power between fairy tale characters reflected a civilizing process
devolving on notions of class and sex. During this period, fairy tales functioned to
entertain the aristocracy, but in this same gesture, the fairy tale embodied
subversive symbolic traits as “secular instructive narratives,” explicating potential
abuses of power and authority (Zipes, 1997). Institutionalized as a genre, fairy tales
throughout the seventeenth century proliferated into such cultural spheres as the
ballet, opera and court festival (Zipes, 1997). Yet, as Baudrillard (1993) traces in
Symbolic Exchange and Death, the period stemming from the Renaissance to the
Industrial Revolution marked a significant shift away from the symbolic, instead
becoming dominated by the counterfeit, manifest in the ‘false’ image. With the
accretion of bourgeois order and the birth of fashion, the sign eclipsed its symbolic
obligation, liberated into a field of connotation as the signifieds of production,
status, wealth and eminency (Baudrillard, 1993). The Renaissance also marked the
“destructuration of the feudal order,” in the “emergence of overt competition at the
level of signs of distinction” (p. 50). The counterfeit appears within the liberation
of the sign, emancipated from symbolic duty, yet reproducing the image of the
symbolic through falsification. The fairy tale in late eighteenth century Europe
similarly became “freed... to expand its form and content” (Zipes, 1997, p. 65).
With a shift in the means of production and a growing demographic of literate
citizens, the fairy tale, once produced exclusively on behalf of the adult aristocracy,
became available to all citizens, including children. Fairy tales continued to carry
civilizing narratives, extending the vision of the aristocracy into broader society:
Mme. Le Prince de Beaumont’s Magasin des enfants (1756) used
approximately ten fairy tales, including “Beauty and the Beast,” to instruct
young girls in how to domesticate themselves and become respectable young
women, attractive for the marriage department. (Zipes, 1997, p. 65)
The early nineteenth century marked the autonomy of the fairy tale. In a
developing free market system, the fairy tale increasingly came to be viewed and
packaged as a household commodity. In this movement, access to the fairy tale,
with its enunciations on gender behavior, the nature of the child, power and success
became a connotation of status and integration into ‘high’ culture.
The symbolically bound fairy tale of the Middle Ages turns toward increasing
commodification throughout the Renaissance, packaged and marketed as a
household good, ‘liberated’ into the free market system as fashion— as a sign of
social mobility and diffuseness (Zipes, 1997). “Under the sign of the commodity,
all labor is exchanged and loses its specificity— under the sign of fashion, the
signs of leisure and labor are exchanged” (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 88). The
institutionalization of the fairy tale shifts again in the nineteenth century, amid the
mass industrialization of European society under the sign of technological progress
and serial differentiation; “the very possibility of two or n identical objects. The
relation between them is no longer one of an original and its counterfeit, analogy or
reflection, but instead one of equivalence and indifference” (p. 55). The nineteenth
to early twentieth century marks a period in which the free market supersedes
social power— the accumulation of signs no longer directly correlates to social
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position, but instead to money and the commodification of objects in the world.
Fairy tales throughout this period became inscribed within the rhetoric of the
marketplace and subsequently, within the code of technology; as Postman (1993)
elucidates, “the trivialization of significant cultural symbols is largely conducted
by commercial enterprise” (p. 165).
With the development of animation technologies, fairy tales turned cinematic,
most notably so under the supervision of Disney Studios which, during the 1930’s,
conservatively recast the fairy tale as a signifier of the Disney corporate logo(s):
What was important for Disney was not the immediate contact
and personal
of a storyteller with a particular audience to share wisdom and induce
pleasure but the impact that he as a creator could have on as large of an
audience as possible in order to sell a commodity and endorse ideological
images that would enhance his corporate power. (Zipes, 1997, p. 87)
As during the Renaissance, a period in which the fairy tale was introduced to
children, the corporate mindset of mid twentieth century industrial America came
to view the child as a consumer, readily ‘absorbable’ into the free market system.
The notion of the child as consumer during this period adopts a double meaning;
not only is the child viewed as the consumer of the film, s/he is concomitantly
viewed as a consumer of peripheral goods surrounding the film. The critical
difference between the Renaissance and the Industrial model devolves in part on
the ability of the technology of the latter era to disseminate ideologically laden
images to mass market audiences. Whereas the Renaissance retained a notion of
the original and the false (semblance and reality), industrial America no longer
reflected an investment in the original per se, but instead, defined the sign in
relationship to signs of the same mass produced series (Baudrillard, 1993).
With receding concern for the original, mass produced signs appeared
repeatable, systematic and universally inscribed under the commercial law of value
(Baudrillard, 1993). The decade between 1920 and 1930 observed the development
of a market dedicated to the control of children’s aesthetic and consumer interests.
Hollywood Associates, in collusion with the Modern Merchandising Bureau,
sought to conceptualize the children’s film industry within the free market model,
‘producing’ story ideas and scripts in order to maximize the potential for “lucrative
product tie-ins” (Zipes, 1997, p. 91).
Inception of the fairy tale into the cinematic frame ‘mutated’ the genre,
‘whitewashing’ its symbolic radicality under the commercial law of value. Not
only does the cinematic frame dictate a divisive space between subject and object,
it acts to commodify the sign by liberating it from reality and inserting it into a
field of consumer exchange predicated upon the purely aesthetic valuation of the
sign; “The movie appeared as a world of triumphant illusions and dreams that
money could buy” (Mcluhan, 1964, p. 12). The reduction of the sign to its
singularly aesthetic existence runs parallel to the evacuation of its conflicted
meanings, the byproduct of which is the propagation of elevated models masking
the presence of a basic reality (Baudrillard, 1993).
Disney’s animated features throughout the 1930’s (en)acted the fairy tale genre
as a format inscribed within a cinematic code; “serial production gives way to
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TECHNOLOGIZING THE TALE
generation through models... since all forms change from the moment that they are
no longer mechanically reproduced, but conceived according to their very
reproducibility, their diffraction from a... core called a model” (p. 56).
There is... a structural rigidity about the Disney animated features that has
grown increasingly obvious as the years have passed. The editing principals
applied to Snow White were those of conventionally well-made commercial
film of the time. There was nothing particularly daring about the way it was
put together, its merit was based on other skills. In general, a scene would
open with an establishing or master shot, then proceed to an intermediate
shot, then to close-ups of the various participants, with conventional cutaways to various details of scenery or decor as needed. (Schickel quoted in
Zipes, 1997, p. 93)
Binary Logic and the Cinema
In Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema (1975), film theorist Mulvey reads the
binary oppositions narcissism/desire, looking/being looked at, active/passive,
masculine/ feminine as central to the cinematic code. Mulvey (1975) suggests that
popular cinema functions in collusion with the patriarchal unconscious, producing
and (re)producing the male gaze fetishistically, combining the “spectacle and
narrative.... The presence of woman [as] an indispensable element of spectacle in
normal narrative film" (pp. 383-384). As such, the spectator is compelled to
identify with the patriarchal "fetishistic scopic drive" (Mulvey, 1990, p. 35):
"Traditionally, woman displayed [cinematically] have functioned on two levels: as
erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the
spectator within the auditorium" (Mulvey, 1990, p. 19).
Cinematic looking imposes scopic boundaries upon the spectator, establishing
the forbidden and private— signs of lack, which are fetishistically appropriated as
fantasy. Mulvey theorizes that the position of women as lack in popular cinema
becomes resolved along two strategies; either the female character is investigated,
excavated— demystified— or— through the disavowal of castration anxiety (lack),
women become fetishized, resulting in sign overvaluation: hence the cult of the
‘beautiful female star’ (Mulvey, 1975).
Fairy tales in the cinema, encoded within the metaphysics of the frame, ally the
spectator with the male protagonist and connote the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of
women (Mulvey, 1990, p. 19); “Snow White just lays there, poisoned, and all the
dwarves can do is just look at her,” Jennifer points out. Amanda interjects, “In the
movie Cinderella, well, she never looks at the camera, she is there for you to look
at!” Arranged in accord with the optic drive, signs circulate not for the purpose of
expounding meaning, but for their connotative and aesthetic play, marking the
commercial value of the sign as spectacle.
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INTERLUDE
“It’s the stories themselves that are difficult,” Wendy offers. “If only the story was
[different], if only they could change.” Our readings turn toward an ever-increasing
awareness of idealized images in popular culture. A student who cut out and
stapled a picture of Rapunzel Barbie to the wall instigated a conversation
surrounding her body, her material worth and her commitment to “having fun and
doing everything.” “How does she afford all of those things?” Dan asks. “I don’t
know,” Becky responds sarcastically; “I think she’s a movie star, or is it rock star?”
“She’s also a scientist and an astronaut and has her own ranch!” Maria adds.
Technologizing the Tale: Rapunzel Barbie
The following day several students urge me over to the computer to show me
Mattel’s official Barbie website (www.barbie.com). On the barbie.com website
(2002), Barbie is recast as a virtual actress into the role of Rapunzel. Prompts guide
the user through an interactive story board.
Upon loading, each frame of the story board
appears cloaked in day-glo flowers which
the computer’s operator has to cast-off with
a mouse-correlated magic wand (Figure 1).
The story of Barbie Rapunzel unfolds with
Rapunzel being introduced, inextricably
being confined to a tower, rescued by Prince
Stefan and finally, by marrying and having
four designer children. At a mouse click,
Rapunzel speaks, “Fairy Tales do come
true” (www.barbie.com).
In an extermination of substance, Mattel, Figure 1. Let down(load) your
in collusion with the Disney corporation cast
hair.
the virtual in the role of the virtual, synchronizing history and domesticating the
fairy tale narrative by offering it up as a calculus of commodities, of objects
liberated from reality, colonially redeploying the privileged fantasy of ageless
bodies, nuclear families, limitless material acquisition and unhindered optimism.
Whereas cinema creates the conditions for both scene and spectator, the
computer screen immerses the ‘subject’ in an “umbilical relation,” a sublime
transmogrification predicated on the seemingly infinite ability to modify and
manipulate computer images in real time (Baudrillard, 2002, p. 177). Interactive
and ‘user-friendly’ media functions to abolish the distance between spectator and
scene; integrating the ‘subject’ cybernetically into a code determined a priori. In
this manner, it is the code which determines function, reducing the ‘user’ to a
servomechanism, a reflex arc in a chain of programmed eventualities; “we become
what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us” (Mcluhan 1964,
pp. xi-xii). McLuhan alludes to a version of the ‘real’ inscribed under the sign of
technology, and today, we see the proliferation of this radical assertion: The
products of machines are machines; “padded out, face-lifted... stuffed with special
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TECHNOLOGIZING THE TALE
effects,” the outgrowth of machinery marks the excavation of embodied symbolic
relationship replaced with the cold mechanized violence of technology as a type of
genetic code, controlling the image from the inside while perpetuating the illusion
of “free mental space” (Baudrillard, 2002, pp. 178-179).
The televisual medium is not regarded via “the cinematic gaze,” but rather,
through the schizophrenic ‘zapping’ of perpetual, ecstatic exchange. “Zapping
allows the viewer to construct a viewing experience of fragments, a postmodern
collage of images” (Fiske quoted in May, 2001, p. 71). In zapping, the television
viewer surrounds her/himself with disparate images voided of symbolic radicalism,
a postmodern bric-a-brac of consumable, present-at-hand images extending into
other televisual mediums such as “personal computers, video games and automated
machines” (Fiske quoted in May, 2001, p. 71). “One could say that television is
the base structure for the current state of visual culture. Its fragmented and
repetitive design offers a viewing situation intended to be internalized by a series
of disconnected ‘glances’ (May, 2001, p. 68). It is scarcely shocking to imagine
pedagogy in similar terms of ‘zapping’ and ‘disconnected glances,’ for the work of
schools has long been intimately tied to a register of technological precision and
the clonal logic of repetition, perfection and immediacy.
Barbie.com collapses scene and spectator, integrating the two not only within
Mattel’s orthodox capitalistic discourse, but also within the limits of the code. It is
within this code that the disappearing subject identifies with a multiplicity of
identities, enacting a version of ‘reality’ in which the individual is seemingly
liberated from social constraint, ‘free’ to manipulate and modify ab extra; yet, the
circumlocutionary logic of technology demands the immersion of the ‘subject’ in a
‘reality’ of objects evacuated of alterity. In this immersion, the ‘spectator’ realizes
her/himself within an ambient code, amid objects ‘liberated’ from their symbolic
function. “It’s just fun,” Susan asserts, “you can do whatever you want— decorate
your room, dress Barbie different ways— you can even send a Barbie card to your
friend.” In this gesture, the ‘subject’ disappears into the cold technological genetic
code, immersed concomitantly in a ‘reality’ of infinite possibility and total, zerodegree deprivation.
MyScene.com Barbie is recast, both aesthetically and technologically,
redeployed as the cast-off skin of the corporate logo(s). Barbie is no longer
enframed as a pink corvette driving princess (a la Disney), but the re(vamped)
version of princess— (a catch-phase emblazoned across tee-shirts everywhere)
that cool and dejected adjunct of consumer royalty. Mattel’s MyScene.com Barbie
has become a savvy, street smart cynic, replete with ‘chunked,’ Christina Aguilera
styled hair, designer wardrobe and of course, flawless cyberflesh. Barbie’s scene
includes her immersion within an ambient field of consumption, accessing the
uber-trendy of contemporary consumer culture: yoga (because the instructor is
cute), CD shopping (of course for Justin Timberlake’s newest release), meeting
friends for Sushi and going for coffee (in the preferred ‘East Village’). The
persistent presence of cellular phones, make-up compacts and designer outfits
constitute ‘the look’ of Barbie’s scene, ‘installing’ the ideal within the field of
technological disclosure. In this manner, Barbie’s look has exceeded simulation via
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WALLIN
cosmetic surgery, leaving the silicon laden wandering in disbelief,
anachronistically out of touch with technological models of perfection. As an
ahistorical, instantly circulable form, cyberflesh has become the model; “and it is
the body’s resemblance to the model which becomes a source of eroticism and
unconsummated self-seduction” (Baudrillard, 2000, p. 55). The model as spectacle
includes society, controlling it through the abstraction of the sign from reality,
thereby offering it as a spectacle of mobility and social diffuseness. Situationist
Debord theorizes the Society of the Spectacle as complicit in the proliferation of
capitalism (Debord, 1999, pp. 95-96):
Within capitalist-based societies all of life presents itself as an immense
accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved
away into a representation... a social relation among people, mediated by
images. The spectacle... is a world vision, which has become objectified.... In
all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or
direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of
socially dominant life. (Debord, 1999, pp. 95-96)
Hyperreal aesthetics have rewritten the human body into its most excessively
idealized forms, playing upon an abstract code of plasticized Barbie-like sexuality.
A similar metaphor can be applied to the work of many modern schools. Under
black-line lessons, recast for no audience in particular, a binarized present reaches
a fevered pitch. The worksheet becomes the real, part of a critical code that
privileges correctness and the minimization of ambivalence. Yet, even in the face
of undecidability, the will to epistemological certitude motivates a ‘fixing’ and
naming. This naming, not only produced in self-referentiality, but consumed in
sign appropriation, spares the subject from the void, the unknown.
Heideggerian Destruktion is reread in Derrida’s deconstructive project as the
viral supplement to Dasien— Derrida’s sign— an a priori, and tyrannical
therebeing. The destructive portend of symbolic exchange derails the
production/consumption of presence as a “repetition which itself requires the labor
of signs... but the thing itself, the world delivered by signs always hangs around...
signs both mediate and block, refer and defer, and they do so in one tangled,
textual operation, so that at one and the same time they skew our contact with
things” (Caputo, 1987, p. 191) Herein lies the strange attractor of the logos. At the
bottom of an illustration depicting Barbie’s image crossed out in favor of a ragged,
sullen figure (demarcated with a check mark) one student writes:
If you try to count on Barbie or try to make yourself like her, that’s just dumb
because Barbie is just a toy... she should not rule your life. If you want to
look like Barbie, you would have to become anorexic, and that would be
terribly unhealthy, you might even die. Never count on Barbie because if
your mom was a toy she could not make you dinner or clean your room...that
would not be good at all!
Another student, commenting on the image of Barbie as a role model, drew two
figures at the bottom of his page. One was an image of a crossed-out doll, in gown
and high heels, with the caption, “This is what Barbie thinks she looks like.”
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TECHNOLOGIZING THE TALE
Beside it, a sullen figure with tattered clothing and snake filled matted hair, reading
“This is what Barbie looks like.” The depiction of a stereotypical image of evil,
“women which be commonly old, lame, bleary-eyed, pale, fowl, and full of
wrinkles,” marks not only the privileged status of the ‘good,’ but the fallen status
of its ragged, despised other (Barstow, 1999, p. 16). If Barbie is not Good (AisA),
her identity is clear, she must be disclosed under the sign of evil— as a witch.
The forms of (dis)closure that have provided the coordinates of our reality are
installed a priori, disseminated via the media and often perpetuated by the
'technologization' of public discourse. In education, the humanistic notions of male
and female identity under the “traditional binary understandings of these and other
related terms,” are often espoused indirectly, through both common talking and in
the absention of alternative discourses (Davis, 1993, p. 10); “And is it not that
today, we are approaching a homogeneous threshold” (Zikek, 2003, p.3)?
INTERLUDE TWO
Based on a trend in their journal entries, I invited students to consider
reconceptualizing some of the fairy tales we had discussed by privileging what had
previously been marginalized. The class became very excited at this prospect,
throwing out ideas immediately. “The princess saves the prince from the dragon,”
one student offered, while another suggested “no, no, the princess saves the dragon
from the prince.” More story ideas are
considered, “Little Red Riding Hood knows
the trick that the Big Bad Wolf is playing,”
and “Rapunzel doesn’t want to be saved
from the tower, she’s playing a game of
chess with her pet mouse!” Students laugh
with joy at the mere idea of how the stories
might be different, that the stories might be
subject to a rebirth (?) (Figure 2).
Several weeks after students began the
process
of
reconceptualizing
the fairy tales, we had an
Figure 2. Sleeping Beauty
opportunity to share our writing, and did so excitedly,
not knowing where this foray into alterity might lead us. Students began to share
their stories, and one by one, they were read. They were wonderful tales of
adventure, monstrosities and triumph, and yet, they did not sit right with me. The
initial critique that had driven the project was absent yet again. What we had
seemingly grasped not three weeks ago had poured from our hands like quicksilver.
The stories had fallen back into the very same categories and structures that we had
sought to rework. Princes still saved princesses. The princess still sought to be
married after all. The monster was ugly and unfriendly, waiting to be impaled upon
the long sword of some fantastic (male) hero. Where had our troubling demon
gone, the one that had seduced the wor(l)d, the one that had tempted us “beneath
the surface of our cracking civilization” (Summers, 1992, p. 95)?
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“What happened?” I ask my class. “Why did our stories turn out as they did,
even after the conversation that we had?” “It’s always been that way,” one student
states flatly. “It’s what we live every day,” another succinctly adds. It is the latter
comment that haunts me, reminding me of the ever-present pull of the logos, the
recognizable, the surface. That our project, which was conceived in earnest could
be plundered by an implicit adherence to a model bespeaks a play of power, which
not only functions at a metaphysical level, but as an existential reality as well.
REFERENCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Postman, N. (1992). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. New York: Vintage Books.
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Zizek, S. (2003). The cyberspace real. Retrieved October 22, 2003 from http://www.mii.karumea.ca.jp/`leurers/zizek`cyberspacereal.htm.
AFFILIATIONS
Jason Wallin, Ph.D. Student & Killam Scholar
Department of Secondary Education
University of Alberta
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