Contested Spaces & Vulnerablity
Dogs, tanks, bikinis, peanuts - things of that nature.
A few years ago, I taught a class called “Contested Spaces.” It was one of my favorites to teach, but in a way most of the classes I teach are about contested spaces, because most of the classes I teach are about settler colonialism, mostly.
Two things from our local listserv made me think. One was from someone complaining about cars going too fast on the road where she walks her dogs. The other was from someone encountering loose dogs on another road.
People should drive responsibly. People should make sure their pets do not harass strangers. Two things can be true. In one instance, the issue is the vulnerability of dogs to cars, and in the other, the vulnerability of people to dogs. In both cases, the writer is using their own vulnerability to assert some kind of control over the space in question. There is, then, a way that a real or perceived vulnerability can give someone a kind of power by claiming a risk of harm.
In a different context, it reminds me of a different kind of negotiation. If it is nice out, and I have time and a book to read, I will sometimes go outside and sit and read in various spots on the campus where I work. There are times where spots I might favor are out of the question because there are undergrads laying out and tanning. If you are familiar with Clemson, one of the spots this happens is the Carillon Garden. It is a small oval lawn with benches around the perimeter. It’s a nice spot be use you can usually sit so you have the sun coming over your shoulder for reading. But sometimes, I arrive, and there are students tanning on this lawn, and I find another spot, because as an older man, it would feel creepy for me to post up right by where there were undergrads in bikinis. In essence, the sun worshippers control the space by (something like) the vulnerability of themselves. If they were wearing shorts and a t-shirt, I would not the need to move along.
As I think on it, controlling space b/c of real or perceived vulnerability is essential to how power works. To choose a different kind of example, there is a law — Meghan’s Law — that says that registered sex offenders cannot live within X distance of a park. The logic is that kids congregate in parks, and it would be easy pickings for a sex offender. It is not clear to me how a distance of X yards works to deter a sex offender, but one effect is that neighborhoods will create a pocket park, and force sex offenders to move away, or often to become homeless. Prison Land describes this dynamic in detail.
This process can play out on an individual level. Some years ago, a guest arrived in our house for the first time - a friend of a friend. She walked into the kitchen, grabbed a cast iron skillet off of the rack, and asked the assembled company “has anything with peanuts ever been in this pan? My wife is very allergic.” This was the 4th of July, and we were having our 4th of July party, and she said this to a room of people who were probably drinking beer and watching Wimbledon, who mostly ignored her, but it was an effort to control the space she had entered by making rules to defend her spouse’s vulnerability. This effort was not particularly successful, there are situations where this kind of vulnerability can garner power to, for instance, veto this or that restaurant, b/c of a lack of trust of their willingness to take their allergies seriously.
Violence is bad. People should drive safely, control their pets, not creep out sunbathers, and respect allergies. As I think about how US culture has produced settler innocence as a thing over four centuries, I think a bit about how vulnerability — Mary Rowlandson, a housewife and mother on the fringes of the Mass Bay Colony settlement, for instance — creates a presumption of innocence, which can, in itself, be a source of power. It is a Hot Orwell Summer, and I am not trying to say that war = peace, or vulnerability = power, in every instance. The next Tiananmen Square, IO am gonna bet on the tank, not the guy with the briefcase. That said, it has been an interesting exercise to see when these dynamics are inverted.