Via Racialicious, I found this article at the L.A. Times, regarding Edith Isabel Rodriguez’s death at the Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital:

… the existence of a security videotape showing the woman writhing for 45 minutes on the floor of the emergency room lobby and the public release this week of two 911 calls in which witnesses unsuccessfully pleaded with sheriff’s dispatchers for help.The case — first reported by The L.A. Times — has crystallized people’s fears that even in their most desperate moments, the emergency system won’t take them seriously.

Indeed. Though it’s interesting that the LAT story, as well as others I have looked at, take the angle that Rodriguez’s death is about a failure in the U.S. healthcare system. I won’t dispute that, but it is also important to recognize that this isn’t something that could “happen to anyone”; it’s not, as Arthur Caplan is quoted as saying in the article above, about “a kind of morality tale of a society gone cold.”

The story of Edith Rodriguez’s death is a story about how people of color are treated in the American healthcare system, a system whose structural brokenness amplifies the moral and ethical emptiness with which many blacks and Latinos are treated in American social systems. That system, it is safe to say, has always been cold as ice.

You can hear the emptiness in the calls made to 911, as Ms. Rodriguez was writhing on the hospital floor, bleeding and vomiting. And you can also hear the callers hearing it– which makes an understatement out of the LAT‘s assessment of the situation as “crystallizing” people’s fears. It didn’t “crystallize,” i.e. make apparent or bring into focus. It was merely a repetition of the too-real surreality people face everyday.

Even if you’ve heard the report discussed on TV, this one is worth listening to. Many of the accounts are quite edited and I’m not even sure where CNN gets their transcripts from; they’re barely related to the original text. An abridged transcript follows (my emphasis in color):

Operator: What’s your emergency?

Caller: There’s a lady on the ground… and we’re here in the emergency room .. and they are overlooking her.

Operator: Well, what would you want me to do for you, ma’am?

Caller: Send an ambulance out here to take her somewhere where she can get medical help.

Operator: OK, you’re at the — you’re at the hospital, ma’am. You have to contact them.

Caller: They have — they have a problem. They won’t help her…

[...]

Operator: … This line is for emergency purposes only. This — 911 is used for emergency purposes only.

Caller: This is an emergency, mister.(crosstalk)Operator: It’s not an emergency. It is not an emergency, ma’am.

Caller: It is.

Operator: It is not an emergency.

Caller: You have to see how they are treating her.

Operator: OK. Well, that’s not a criminal thing. This line, 911, is used for emergency purposes only.

Caller: It is an emergency.

Operator: … life threatening emergencies. It’s not. OK?

Caller: May God strike you too for acting the way you just acted.

Operator: No, negative m’am. You’re the one.

The painful quality of this conversation. It begins with the Kafkaesque surreality of this interaction as a scene of fundamental non-communication: “It is an emergency”; “It is not an emergency,” and it deepens the symbolic weight of an already tragic death.

There is something important in this conversation about recognition, about who has authority to understand a situation, and who has the power to ignore or negate that authority. I hear this in the ways the first caller signifies the power dynamic she is experiencing. You can hear her holding her voice, trying to sound knowledgeable and official as she talks to the operator, but also using language that signifies her awareness that she and the woman dying on the floor are fundamentally unrecognizable as subjects: “they are overlooking her.” And the caller knows whom she is talking to. “This is an emergency, mister.”

He hears something in her voice too. Is it race? What in her voice tells him that he really doesn’t have to listen? That this person has nothing relevant to say or cannot possibly know what she is talking about? Maybe it’s by virtue of where the call is coming from, a poor city hospital, an emergency room qua primary care facility, supposedly filled with people lacking wherewithal, lacking knowledge.

His condescension, cloaked and bathed in protocol, is in the “OK, you’re at… the hospital,” and his authority is implicit in the “OK. Well, that’s not a criminal thing“– which comes in response to the caller’s insistence that she who is present, not he who is not, knows and understands what is happening in this moment. Speaking on the problem of representing traumatic events, the holocaust scholar Dori Laub once noted that many situations we might think of as crises in witnessing– meaning that we aren’t getting testimony that really presents an event properly– instead constitute crises in listening. People are signifying, but we don’t recognize it, and thus don’t hear it.

I am not suggesting that the operator should be anything but official and professional, but here there is something specific in that tone. It’s hard to hear it if you aren’t used to hearing it. The caller is familiar, and it sets her off.

I am sure the 911 operator was shocked when the curse came: “May God strike you too for acting the way you just acted.” Her “too” is broad, aligning the operator with the dominant power structure that has brought them all to this tragedy. Who knows what race he is, but the operator is speaking through and for a kind of power. Tellingly, after her curse his diction switches more fully into a language of structural authority, “No, negative ma’am. You’re the one.”

10-4 ma’am. I don’t hear you.

I am reminded of when I was in labor with my son (you know, the one stolen by Sanjaya Malakar’s sister). It was after midnight on a Sunday, and the anesthesiologist, white and grumpy, was clearly irritated with my needing him, or rather, needing my epidural. He was cold and rough with me. Not rough like mean but rough like I was meat, which is worse.

The nurse, who was black, noticed this, and said something like, Marisa here is a professor at [insert fancy college name here]. It is silly, but this is information I often withhold unless relevant. I dislike giving some people the pleasure of “knowing” me, when otherwise I might well be, let’s say, invisible to them. The nurse, meanwhile, deployed it, thus assuring me better treatment.

It worked: thus informed, that ass stopped in the middle of what he was doing (i.e. preparing a needle for my spine), walked around the bed, held out his hand and introduced himself. In my affiliation I had suddenly flashed into subjecthood, transformed from she who required no recognition into she who was someone to know. To care about. To connect with.

Needless to say, we didn’t hit it off. I think my disinterest in him stressed him out.

Christina Olivares

I find this one difficult to work out: If you have never boxed, or done some sort of martial art, it might be hard to understand how such activities aren’t quite about violence. But in this post that boundary around violence is difficult to identify, since part of what I’m thinking about is a kind of self-defense (which thus assumes violence). I’m not saying, for instance, that I believe that all women should box, or that knowing how to fight would necessarily alleviate women’s vulnerability to domestic abuse. But there is something to be said for the psychological effects of imagining one’s self as able to hold one’s own. It’s an effect on the mind developed through the disciplination of the body.

“Disciplination,” by the way, is just fancy for “what we put our bodies through” in order to achieve some kind of effect. Disciplination makes comportment– or what my grandparents refer to as “how you carry yourself.” So learning a new sport or a new style of dance involves disciplination. We simply use the fancier word when describing such activities as also having psychological effects. The philosopher Iris M. Young has this beautiful essay called “Throwing Like Girl,” and in it she talks about a moment when she realizes that there are all these things she never learned to do with her body because she was a woman, and that “being a woman” was explicitly tied up in having a limited physical relationship to her body. It’s not that girls can’t throw; it’s that girls never learn to throw. We don’t teach girls to throw because girls can’t throw; girls never learn to throw. There is no such thing, really, as throwing like a girl. Oh, unless “girl” just means “badly.” Language is a bitch, huh?

It’s really quite amazing to think about. If I throw a ball at you, will you duck or catch? How much is that reflex guided by your training? How much is your training justified or strengthened by what do you think you should do? Or what you have always done? Who are you anyway?

Comportment is fascinating, especially coming off of a semester of teaching classes like “Girlpower” and “Racial Passing.” Passing is all about understanding comportment, and knowing how to adjust one’s bearing in such a way that people take you to be a certain kind of person. Two of the best examples of passing through comportment I can think of are Will Smith’s character in Six Degrees of Separation, and Kevin Spacey’s character in The Usual Suspects. (Although I guess these might also be examples of how vexed relationships between the real and the imaginary can be: remember when Denzel told Smith to use a body double for kissing a man, b/c it would ruin his career?)

But anyway, race and gender passing are usually about conscious decisions, while comportment is mainly unconscious, much in the way being “who we are” is an unconscious performance (for instance your regional accent or your gentle manner). But sometimes things happen that make you suddenly aware of “who you are.” Someone tells you that you don’t sound black, or look Jewish, or sit like a man. That moment of being told who “you” are is called an interpellation, and it speaks to how identity requires both our own actions and other people’s explicit recognition thereof. (If you’re interested in thinking about what this means for gender performance, you should check out the Chloé A. Hilliard article I mention in “all lesbians are sneaky.”)

So back to boxing and blows, to subjects and objects, and to the complications of our relations therein. Three powerful readings: In her post on CnS, Olivares has all these important things to say regarding boxing in relation to her own femininity through boxing. Then I saw a post over at a cat and twenty, picked up via Objectify This. Both women riff on how often women apologize, “I’m sorry this,” “I’m sorry that.” Apologies for imposing. Apologies for taking up space. Apologies for making people deal with themselves, and then watching their struggle.

1. So here’s Olivares. I don’t want to reproduce too much here, because I’d really like you to read the women above for yourself:

on the train to the gym this morning i realized that it was fear that kept me rooted & accepting of my teammate’s blows. not about being quick. i’ve just been trained to sustain blows. when i was little – the one time i evaded my father’s heavy hand, perhaps at 7 or 8 years old, i felt, for the first time in my life, not fear, but contempt for him as i spun to the other side of the kitchen – and he, shame? either way, when he caught me by the arm a second later, it became the worst beating of my life. for future (inevitable, i was a back-talker) punishments i never resisted, partly to not bring worse punishment, but partly, it must’ve been, so that i would never have to feel contempt for my father. fear was preferable to loathing. fear made it my fault; loathing, his fault. and so i’ve trained myself to not duck blows.

2. From a cat and twenty:

… she was sorry. she knew enough, even drunk to the point of unconsciousness and physically incapable of movement, that she was sorry about something. because we always are. we are always supposed to be.

you know what i wish? well, i wish a lot of things, really, chief among them being that men would stop hating women so goddamn much. because it’s not our fault. whatever it is that actually drives that misogyny, whatever fear is actually coiled up at the bottom of that vast heart of darkness, it is most definitely not our fault.

but barring these impossible dreams, you know what i wish? i wish that we would stop apologizing. it’s not easy – we’ve learned to say “i’m sorry” to try to preempt the whipping, or to lessen the lashes, or just to quiet our own minds while it’s happening. we’ve learned that “sorry” helps us survive. but i wish we could start fighting back, just a little, in little ways.

3. And finally, two scenes from Karyn Kusama’s Girlfight. The first is when Michelle Rodriguez’s Diana gets into a fight with her abusive father, and beats him. The second, which you can catch a glimpse of in the clip below, is when she hits her sparring partner. Hard. Then she apologizes. Her trainer admonishes her “don’t be sorry. Don’t ever be sorry.”

I could problematize this by emphasizing that the “don’t be sorry” implores women to be like oppressors. But here, I really don’t think it’s about apologizing, about proper conduct in the interest of ethical relations. This is about a state of being: Don’t ever be sorry.Though there are dangers. On top of her father, subjecting him to her blows, there’s this moment when Diana seems to see her abusive father in herself. By virtue of her position over him, she suddenly sees him as her abused mother, which makes her… Multiple subject positions, multiple significations: It’s hard not be sorry– in every sense of the phrase. Hard not to apologize for living while female, and then hard not to be a sorry ass punk… So much work.

To end, a Madonna video, “What It Feels Like for a Girl.” I have some feelings to smash out. The ending doesn’t bode well (nor does her English accent!), but afterwards I always feel strangely fine, being left to the work of recuperation.

But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading
cause you think that being a girl is degrading
But secretly you’d love to know what its like
Wouldn’t you?
What it feels like for a girl?