Critical Queer and Disability Theory in the Secondary English Classroom

for English Education Comprehensive Exam, 2024

Critical Queer Theory in the ELA Classroom

There are two senses in which ELA pedagogy can be queer: in one sense, we might study texts featuring queer characters or themes; in the other, somewhat more abstruse sense, it is queer to look at a text slantwise, focusing on violations of social normalcy and norms (especially, but not exclusively, sexual or gender norms) within the text – to look at the text with the queer lens. I would maintain that both senses are good and desirable, and an intersection between the two – looking slantwise at texts featuring queer characters – is best of all.

Queer pedagogy calls for queer readings […] in at least two ways: incorporating texts about and from the perspective of queer subjects, and reading queerly. The mainstream curriculum already includes, or at least allows for including, plenty of texts written by and about queers; it is just that we read them ‘straight.’ If reading queerly is seeking out the queer or potentially queer meanings in a text […] then reading straight is reading around queer meanings and seeking out meanings that support normalcy. […] Queer educators […] need to notice what it is that reading straight has prevented us from knowing, and invite the queer subtext back into our readings. (Shlasko, 2005)

Queer theory, and pedagogy in reference to queer theory, is a relatively new phenomenon. As recently as 2005, queer theory was “often discussed not as a discrete theoretical model, but rather as an indeterminate and shifting set of theoretical possibilities. […] Queer pedagogy, like queer theory, resists stable discrete definition. […] Queer pedagogy is a queer thing to study, and so only a ‘queer lens’ will suffice to examine it.” (Shlasko, 2005)

Texts With Queer Content

As a matter of definition, queer is anything that stands outside the ‘normal’, chiefly, but not necessarily exclusively, in terms of gender and/or sexuality. “As a subject position, queer describes people whose gender and/or sexuality fall outside of cultural norms and expectations. It describes one’s location relative to those norms, or perhaps, one’s status from the point of view of the normal as an outsider.” (Shlasko, 2005) For the purpose of this paper, the entire long and ever-growing alphabet soup (LGBTQQPIA23NF[1]… etc.) of sexual and gender identities is included within the umbrella of this sense of queer.

Some teachers, especially newer or pre-service teachers, may “believe that teachers must be neutral and apolitical” (Bach, 2016); the prima facie response could be that the identity of a substantial portion of one’s students is not a political matter, states which ban discussion of such subjects (Parental Rights in Education, CS/CS/HB 1557, 2022) notwithstanding – but my position would target the premise itself: there are certain political matters that secondary school teachers are not only permitted but expected to address and to equip students to come to a socially just personal position on: is, for example, a social studies teacher covering the 20th century expected to remain neutral and apolitical on the subject of the social pros and cons of Nazis and Fascists? Is a science teacher expected to remain neutral and apolitical on the subject of intelligent design, whether humans have landed on the moon, or whether the Earth is flat? Is a math teacher expected to acquiesce in the name of neutrality and apoliticality to a student who insists that π is equal to exactly 3 (Bible, 1611)? There are some few political subjects where there is an objectively correct and good position, and the existence, identity, validity, acceptance, and welcoming of queer students is one of them.

It is good and important to include texts featuring queer characters and themes in the ELA classroom – “Given the number of studies that indicate the importance of including these titles in secondary schools as a way to validate and explore students’ sexual orientation and gender expression, meet curriculum standards, and address bullying, these books belong in secondary classrooms”. (Bach, 2016) “The absence of school-based supports such as inclusive curricula is associated with school climates more hostile to [queer] students.” (Schey, 2021)

In the 1990s, students might have had access to “historical texts detailing Nazi medical experiments; ‘scientific’ information in biology class asserting that homosexuality was genetic, and neither unhealthy nor voluntary; literary images of depressed and alienated gay people much older than myself; […] Ellen DeGeneres’s (1997) (finally!) coming out episode.” (Shlasko, 2005) Today, fortuitously, “adolescents have access to a wide range of books that feature LGBTQ and gender variant themes and characters.” (Bach, 2016) “Each of these genres of gay/lesbian representations has multiple messages, and will have different meanings for different students.” (Shlasko, 2005)

That said, “research continues to suggest that teachers are reluctant or unsure how to incorporate these LGBTQ-themed texts into their classrooms, other than as independent/out-of-school reading.” (Bach, 2016) I would answer to such teachers: the most productive way to read a queer text is queerly (subsequently proceeding to read straight texts and the world queerly, too).

Queering the Text: the Queer Lens

“Queer pedagogy […] pulls from queer theories and ‘requires something larger than simply an acknowledgement of gay and lesbian subjects in educational studies.’” (Bach, 2016) “As a politic, queer challenges the very idea of ‘normal.’ […] As an aesthetic, queer looks for and enjoys potentially subversive content in cultural texts of any media. […] The text itself is not queer. Rather, it is one’s reading of the text as politically radical that ‘queers’ both text and reader. We might say, one is reading (or listening, or viewing) queerly.” (Shlasko, 2005) “One of queer pedagogy’s purposes is to interrupt ‘familiar patterns of thinking’”. (Bach, 2016)

Queer pedagogy beyond simple representation and inclusion is important for, among other things, the inclusion and uplifting of queer students. “To tell students that, ‘It’s okay to be gay’ is dishonest, and transparent in its dishonesty. After all, we do not tell them that it is okay to be heterosexual. The very pronouncement of tolerance assumes an underlying intolerance. […] Furthermore, simply to tell students that they are okay belies the lived experience of queer kids who feel themselves violently excluded from the realm of normal. They know very well that something is not okay.” (Shlasko, 2005)

Moreover, “If we stick to representations that are unthreatening to the norm, we only reinforce the legitimacy of the boundaries that continue to keep some people on the outside.” (Shlasko, 2005) Inclusion is “not only un-queer but actually […] anti-queer.” (Shlasko, 2005)

Teachers can “engage students with textual representations of diverse and norm-disruptive sexualities and genders in ways that work against normative and oppressive discourses, practices, and systems which produce and regulate sexuality and gender”. (Helmer, 2016) Teaching the queer lens can “disrupt[] cisheterosexism and, in turn, invite[] youth to disrupt further.” (Schey, 2021)

The queer lens is thus not just about queer representation and inclusion. To read with a queer lens is to read queerly, to queer the text and the self, to internalize the queer. In the same sense as reading with the feminist lens opens the mind to issues of gender, or reading with the Marxist lens opens the mind to issues of social class and wealth, reading with the queer lens opens the mind to the possibility that there might be more to the world than the normal, especially (but not exclusively) when it comes to gender or romantic or sexual attraction.

Critical Disability Theory in the ELA Classroom

In discussing the critical lenses in pedagogy in ENG694, we only looked at most of the important theories and lenses, but there's at least one important one that we conspicuously left out: the lens of disability.

Disability studies is of universal import: every human being is fated to become disabled (if they don't die first). As far as I can reason, the only form of oppression more universal within humanity is ageism (everyone was once an oppressed youth, and everyone will eventually be an oppressed elder if they don’t die first). In my life in particular, my partner is physically disabled, and I've got approximately three minor mental disabilities myself, so it's relevant to me already. Moreover, every teacher will, in their time, teach countless students with mental or physical disabilities – and will therefore have classrooms full of abled students with disabled classmates, abled students who can be persuaded, through the magic of the lens of disability, to better put themselves in the shoes of said disabled classmates.

Where an aspect in queer pedagogy and the queer lens is on queering the text and the self, the disability lens can have more to do with abled students becoming aware of the struggle of navigating in an uncaringly ableist world while disabled. The “responsibility [is] on able-bodied people to pay attention to how disabled people have to navigate the spaces being afforded to them, including […] educational spaces.” (Stewart & Way, 2023)

“‘Disability encompasses a broad range of bodily, cognitive, and sensory differences and capacities’ but also […] ‘the meanings we attribute to disability are shifting, elusive, and sometimes contradictory’ […] disability and education need to be understood intersectionally.” (Stewart & Way, 2023) “As a pedagogical application, [disability-centered, culturally sustaining pedagogies] incorporate the experiences, texts, podcasts, artwork, and activism of disabled scholars of color, poverty scholars, and community activists, highlighting educational inequities to center the lives of students.” (Kulkarni, Miller, Nusbaum, Pearson, & Brown, 2023)

Disability Topics and Texts

There is a “massive diverse array of imagery related to people with disabilities.” (Nocella, 2008) Disability is common in texts, and, almost as commonly, a shorthand for – i.e., occurs in a character in conjunction with – something else, usually something negative – villains are disabled more often than heroes.

Disability can, most obviously, include physical disability, such as, most commonly in popular media, missing limbs – e.g. Star Wars[2] (Lucas, 1977-2005), How to Train Your Dragon (Sanders & DeBlois, 2010), Harry Potter (Rowling, 1997-2007), and virtually any media focusing on pirates.

In online discussions of tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, debate periodically raises its head about the validity of adventurers in wheelchairs – a play option made possible by a fan-made item supplement (Thompson, 2020), popularized by a variety of Actual Play series – The questions on each side of the argument are something like: is it unreasonable to expect ADA-accessible dungeons (in the fictional game-worlds our characters inhabit)? or is it unreasonable to expect disabled players to never want to play characters who are like themselves?

Disability can also include mental disability, which is perhaps more common in the traditional literary canon – e.g. Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck, 1937), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Kesey, 1962), and Flowers for Algernon (Keyes, 1966).

What, one might ask, of mental illnesses, such as sociopathy and/or psychopathy? Are they disabilities to be accommodated? What does it say about us as a society that ‘he's a psychopath’ is so often used as the entire characterization of a villain – e.g. the Joker from DC comics and movies (Finger, Kane, & Robinson, 1940)?

The lens of disability can lead one to ponder subjects that may prove important in social and legal spaces – is genetic discrimination, as one sees in Gattaca (Niccol, 1997) or X-Men (Kirby & Lee, 1963), fair and reasonable, or is it good that laws have been passed prohibiting it, or should those laws be strengthened?

What of people with increased ability relative to human average, such as in superhero media (including, again, X-Men (Kirby & Lee, 1963))? Is it fair that Michael Phelps is some sort of super-powered swimming mutant? Should such people be brought down to human average – or even, should everyone be brought down to a minimum, so that everyone is truly equal, as in “Harrison Bergeron” (Vonnegut, 1961)?

These Theories in My ELA Classroom

One core element of my personal teaching philosophy has to do with holding a line of defense against an epidemic of harmful and hateful misinformation, by teaching critical literacy to today’s young people; moreover teaching them to apply critical literacy to all texts, defining texts as broadly as possible: each book, story, or poem we read in English class is a text, of course; every movie, television show, or anime that a person might watch are texts; news media is a text; televised sports are texts; when you’re watching YouTube, TikTok, or Twitch, and the Algorithm draws you ineffably into a dark pit of questionably hateful politics (Ribeiro, Ottoni, West, Almeida, & Meira, 2020), you bet your sweet bippy that’s one or more texts; this goof standing at the front of your ELA classroom trying to teach you critical literacy, that’s a text; the self is a text, on whom the eye of critical literacy can very well be turned; the world can profitably be treated as a text, which overlaps critical literacy with social studies and science (without the teacher expressing any judgements or assertions about the authorship of that particular text, of course).

Each lens serves to view each text in a different way, and when the lenses are turned on the text of the self or the text of the world, an increased understanding of truths about the self or the world can be attained.

When the critical queer lens is turned on texts, the self, and the world, some students might come to realize things about their own genders or sexualities that they had not previously understood; certainly may be brought to greater understanding of queer peers; and everyone can just inherently benefit from contemplating the rejection of societal norms, even if one does not actually end up rejecting them.

Similarly, a disabled lens can bring students to understand more about their own minds, may bring better understanding of disabled peers, and may lead to slightly better lives for the disabled among us – in my experience, many problems faced by disabled people result less from overt ableism than from people simply not thinking (which, of course, has ableist results). The classic example is the maintenance guy who chooses to shovel snow off the stairs before shoveling the ramp, not pausing to think that a shoveled ramp is usable by all students while shoveled stairs are usable only by able-legged students. Perhaps if the maintenance guy had studied critical disability theory in his ELA classes, he would have paused for that thought.

Works Cited

Bach, J. (2016). Exploring queer pedagogies in the college-level YA literature course. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(6), 917-932. doi:10.1080/01596306.2015.1071758

Bible (King James Version ed.). (1611). Church of England. Retrieved from https://www.bible.com/bible/1/1KI.7.KJV

Finger, B., Kane, B., & Robinson, J. (1940, April 25). Batman. DC Comics. DC Comics.

Helmer, K. (2016). Reading queer counter-narratives in the high-school literature classroom: possibilities and challenges. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(6), 902-916. doi:10.1080/01596306.2015.1120943

Kesey, K. (1962). One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Viking Press & Signet Books.

Keyes, D. (1966). Flowers for Algernon. Harcourt, Brace & World.

Kirby, J., & Lee, S. (1963). The X-Men. Marvel Comics.

Kulkarni, S. S., Miller, A. L., Nusbaum, E. A., Pearson, H., & Brown, L. X. (2023, July 11). Toward disability-centered, culturally sustaining pedagogies in teacher education. Critical Studies in Education. doi:10.1080/17508487.2023.2234952

Lucas, G. (Writer). (1977-2005). Star Wars, Episodes I-VI [Motion Picture].

Niccol, A. (Director). (1997). Gattaca [Motion Picture].

Nocella, A. J. (2008). Emergence of Disability Pedagogy. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies(6), 77-94.

Parental Rights in Education, CS/CS/HB 1557. (2022, July 1). Florida. Retrieved from https://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Bills/billsdetail.aspx?BillId=76545

Ribeiro, M. H., Ottoni, R., West, R., Almeida, V. A., & Meira, W. J. (2020, January 27). Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube. Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 131-141. doi:https://doi.org/10.1145/3351095.3372879

Rowling, J. (1997-2007). Harry Potter (Vols. I-VII). Bloomsbury.

Sanders, C., & DeBlois, D. (Directors). (2010). How to Train Your Dragon [Motion Picture].

Schey, R. (2021). Fostering Youth's Queer Activism in Secondary Classrooms: Youth Choice and Queer-Inclusive Curriculum. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 64(6), 623-632. doi:10.1002/jaal.1150

Shlasko, G. (2005). Queer (v.) Pedagogy. Equity & Excellence in Education, 38, 123-134. doi:10.1080/10665680590935098

Steinbeck, J. (1937). Of Mice and Men. Covici Friede.

Stewart, F., & Way, L. (2023). Beyond boundaries? Disability, DIY and punk pedagogies. Research in Education, 115(1), 11-28. doi:10.1177/00345237231160301

Thompson, S. (2020). The Combat Wheelchair. Retrieved April 3, 2024, from https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sirEGlUeANviDstyZMpVUDf-KVqyhs40/view?usp=sharing

Vonnegut, K. (1961, October). Harrison Bergeron. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Good Knowledge and Evil Power in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

for Hauntology class, 2023

A Word

In Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the protagonist Oscar de León reads and writes genre fiction (Fritz) and specifically seeks to become known as a “Dominican Tolkien” (Díaz), and references to and concepts from genre fiction frequently find their way into the text through the words of Yunior de las Casas, the narrator (and diegetic writer of the book). In that nerdy spirit, channeling J.R.R. Tolkien as Díaz habitually does in this text, I shall begin by inventing a word – which does, admittedly, channel the linguist aspect of Tolkien, while Díaz tends to channel other aspects of the Professor’s work (Schulenburg; Sepulveda; Tait).

I shall borrow a concept from genre fiction where living beings – typically, but not exclusively, villains – control, or attempt to control, the dead, or the undead, to their own purposes. In genre fiction[1], this is typically referred to as necromancy, which is, it turns out, too etymologically imprecise for my purposes.

-Mancy, typically, refers specifically to divination or telling the future, from the Ancient Greek manteía, prophecy. Necromancy, then, is, most strictly, learning about the future by asking the dead (the Greek prefix necro- referring to death) about it – which is perfectly in line with, or perhaps even relies upon, the conception of ghosts as atemporal beings who begin by returning, for whom “time is out of joint” (Derrida). Hereafter, I will use necromancy exclusively to refer to divination by means of ghosts.

Which does, of course, leave a bit of a lexical gap. Control of the (un)dead for purposes other than divination is a concept found in genre fiction, and which I will explore here, and, having excluded it from the scope of necromancy, we require a term for it. By analogy with theurgy and thaumaturgy, I will pull out the suffix originating from the Greek érgon, meaning work, and refer to control of the (un)dead for one's own purposes as necrourgy.

This invention of a word is not simply a gimmick of pedantry; by extracting works of power and control from the traditional word and depositing it in a new one, I leave knowledge as the sole domain of necromancy. In relation to this text, there is a real distinction to be drawn, one which few observers have recognized: in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, it transpires (with some potential twists) that the work of necrourgy, in the form of fukú in the text, is the domain of villainous characters; necromancy granting knowledge, in the form of zafa, is the domain of heroic ones (or at least the less actively villainous).

The Fukú

"No matter what you believe, fukú believes in you." (Díaz 5)

Running as a theme through The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the fukú, described on the first page as “generally a curse or a doom of some kind”, originating in Africa, “carried in the screams of the enslaved” (Díaz 1), delivered to the Americas by Christopher Columbus: “a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles […] it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since […] we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not.” (Díaz 1-2).

Regarding the fukú as a ghost, as something dead or undead, is perhaps to blur concepts together that would be better off left unblurred. One might more reasonably describe it as a sort of black magic, an evil entity or sorcery, not necessarily related to the dead in particular. Blurring this concept so, so soon after being so pedantic as to invent a whole new word to satisfy my gratuitous pedantry, admittedly appears inconsistent on my part.

Still, the fukú is described as an almost consciously malevolent entity, “a demon” (Díaz 1) among other things, and as a Faceless Man who appears several times over the course of the text. Moreover, humanity has never been particularly fussed about the taxonomic classifications of spirits – peruse the etymology of ghost and behold the breadth of what its linguistic ancestors and close relatives have meant, from demon to human to angel and everything in between (Harper, Etymology of ghost).

Even setting that all aside, the fukú is, in the first sentence of the text, described as “carried in the screams of the enslaved [and] the death bane of the Tainos,” (Díaz 1) so it certainly may have something to do with somebody having died.

Even speaking of the fukú is dangerous. "To say [the Admiral's] name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours." (Díaz 1) This taboo avoidance calls to mind the linguistic origins of bear – the original European name of the bear may have been arkto, but fell out of use and was forgotten in Germanic languages: bear comes from proto-Indo-European terms meaning brown or wild animal, because to say the brown one's true name was to invoke its terrible coming. (Harper, Etymology of bear)

The fukú was “[a]lso called the fukú of the Admiral [Columbus] because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite ‘discovering’ the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing […] divine voices.” (Díaz 1) Did Columbus deliberately, fumblingly invoke or attempt to harness or deploy the fukú? Or was he simply a sort of bystander, Patient Zero in a plague of dooms?

The fukú is deliberately harnessed and employed by Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, president of the Dominican Republic 1930-1961, “our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator” (Díaz 2). Or, more specifically, “[n]o one knows whether Trujillo was the Curse's servant or its master, its agent or its principal, but it was clear he and it had an understanding, that them two was tight.” (Díaz 2-3)

Shit was so tight that many people actually believed that Trujillo had supernatural powers! It was whispered that he did not sleep, did not sweat, that he could see, smell, feel events hundreds of miles away[2], that he was protected by the most evil fukú on the Island. (Díaz 226)

(Yunior does, at least once, describe the harnessing of the fukú as “the necromantic power of El Jefe” (Díaz 158), but this is presumably because he is not so linguistically precise or pedantic as I am choosing to be.)

Anyone who opposed Trujillo wound up encountering a terrible doom, up to and including U.S. President John F. Kennedy Jr, who allegedly green-lit Trujillo’s assassination (which assassination perhaps incorporated Trujillo himself into the fukú, a ghost to haunt future generations), and was promptly assassinated himself two years later – not by “the mob or LBJ or the ghost of Marilyn Fucking Monroe [or] aliens or the KGB or a lone gunman [or] the Hunt Bruthers of Texas or Lee Harvey or the Trilateral Commission” (Díaz 4), but by the fukú of Trujillo.

The character Abelard, grandfather of the eponymous Oscar, is made subject to the fukú: "Most of the folks you speak to prefer the story with a supernatural twist. They believe that not only did Trujillo want Abelard's daughter, but when he couldn't snatch her, out of spite he put a fukú on the family's ass. Which is why all the terrible shit that happened happened." (Díaz 243)

On the other hand, Abelard is thought to have constructed a book describing Trujillo’s control of the fukú – “an exposé of the supernatural roots of the Trujillo regime! A book about the Dark Powers of the President, a book in which Abelard argued that the tales the common people told about the president – that he was supernatural, that he was not human – may in some ways have been true. That it was possible that Trujillo was, if not in fact, then in principle, a creature from another world!” (Díaz 245) – and to have been made a target of the fukú because of that.

Either way, Abelard is arrested by Trujillo, and “[a]las, the grimoire in question (so the story goes) was conveniently destroyed after Abelard was arrested. No copies survive.” (Díaz 245) In fact, none of Abelard’s books or publications, not one trace of his handwriting, was allowed to survive, a sort of damnatio memoriae executed by Trujillo or by the fukú or both.

In, among other places, chapter Six, Oscar’s lifelong depression, which drives many of his actions and the plot, is attributed to having inherited the fukú on Abelard (Díaz 263-307).

The Zafa

“Even now as I write these words I wonder if this book ain’t a zafa of sorts. My very own counterspell.” (Díaz 7)

The antidote to the fukú is the zafa. In its primary sense, the word zafa itself suffices – “anytime you mentioned or overheard the Admiral’s name or anytime a fukú reared its many heads there was only one way to prevent disaster from coiling around you, only one surefire counterspell that would keep you and your family safe. […] A simple word[:] Zafa.” (Díaz 7)

That this sole practical protection against fukú would be a word is in line with traditional conceptions of the supernatural as being linguistic, or language as being supernatural – for example, going back in Christianity to the first passage of the book of John, where “the Word [logos] was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1), or, for another example, the entire intertangled cluster of etymology leading to English words like grammar, glamour, and grimoire, through words signifying concepts pertaining to words, learning, incantations, and magic spells (Harper, Etymology of grammatical).[3] In the text, it turns out that in practice the zafa is more consistent with magic as knowledge and magic as story than magic as language – a subtle distinction, to be sure, and applying such clear distinctions to something so woolly as magic may be foolish.

In this sense, prima facie, the zafa is on the same order of magic as the fukú: a deliberate invocation of supernatural powers, albeit protective instead of harmful – where “[f]ukú works in an active fashion” (LeBlond), zafa is protective and reactive.

More specifically, throughout the book, the actual zafa that appears, most commonly taking the form of a golden mongoose, trends towards the necromantic, not the necrourgic. The mongoose does not typically defend against the fukú directly; more precisely, it grants knowledge of how to defend against the fukú.

A turn of wit allows Abelard to protect his daughters from Trujillo for a time: cleverness inspired by “a Numinous Being.” (Díaz 223) The golden mongoose comes to Oscar’s mother Beli after she is beaten by goons in a cane field, and leads her to safety. (Díaz 149-150)

Oscar’s great-aunt, La Inca, receives several messages and instructions from her late husband in dreams, instructions which serve to counter the fukú. One instructs her to find Beli; another reveals that she should send Beli to New York for safety (Díaz 157).

Oscar’s sister, Lola, is said to congenitally have the ability to harness supernatural powers for knowledge: “For as long as you've been alive you've had bruja ways; even your mother will begrudge you that much. Hija de Liborio she called you after you picked your tia's winning numbers for her and you assumed Liborio was a relative.” (Díaz 53)

The golden mongoose comes to Oscar, as Oscar is about to jump to his death from a train bridge onto the highway, and may be what guides him to fall on a concrete divider, instead of into traffic, saving his life (Díaz 190-191).

Indeed, Oscar himself is a ghost haunting the text – he never speaks directly, and his story is (necromantically) told after his death by others, chiefly by Yunior. Through writing the book (in part for Oscar’s niece, who is presumably subject to the fukú), Yunior conjures Oscar’s spirit as a guiding, storytelling, informing zafa against the fukú that “just happens to be the one that’s got its fingers around my throat.” (Díaz 6) Yunior – and Oscar – take the role of heroes, invoking zafa with their writing (Mahler).

In nearly all cases, the power of the zafa comes in the form of knowledge granted by – or anyway acquired from – the spirits – necromancy. In one of the few cases where the zafa does something other than grant knowledge, La Inca prays so hard for Beli to recover from a beating that it works: “Through the numinous power of prayer La Inca saved the girl's life, laid an A-plus zafa on the Cabral family fukú (but at what cost to herself?).” (Díaz 155) I feel it would be not entirely honest to claim the zafa merely vouchsafed methods of healing to La Inca which saved Beli, so this stands as a counterexample to my assertion.

This necromancy of the zafa occasionally fails, or is incomplete, as in the case where the mongoose tells Oscar, “— — —” (Díaz 301), cases of páginos en blanco explored satisfactorily by other authors (O'Brien).

One might observe that Trujillo’s powers are described as possibly also having included uncanny knowledge – “that he could see, smell, feel events hundreds of miles away” (Díaz 226) – but I would contend that Trujillo’s powers of knowing were more likely purely mortal – after all, the “[d]ude had hundreds of spies whose entire job was to scour the provinces for his next piece of ass” (Díaz 217), and his non-ass-oriented spy network was even more extensive – “he had a Secret Police that out-Stasi’d the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone, even those everyones who lived in the States […] you could say a bad thing about El Jefe at eight-forty in the morning and before the clock struck ten you’d be in the Cuarenta having a cattleprod shoved up your ass.” (Díaz 225)

Other Considerations

One other noteworthy point of intersection – be it similarity or opposition – between necrourgy and necromancy in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is that the mongoose usually seems to come to people willingly, bestowing its wisdom unsolicited (La Inca’s days of prayer for a zafa notwithstanding), while it is left deliberately unclear whether Trujillo is master of the fukú, or works in tandem with it, or even works subordinate to it: “[n]o one knows whether Trujillo was the Curse's servant or its master, its agent or its principal, but it was clear he and it had an understanding, that them two was tight.” (Díaz 2-3)

One might also observe that the zafa usually plays a reactive role, helping mortals defend against the depredations of the fukú (in literature, a tendency more traditionally reserved usually for heroes), while the fukú more actively seeks to bring about its victims’ doom (actively seeking change being a tendency reserved more usually for villains). And yet, the fukú can also be defensive or reactive, as, for example, when it retaliates against Kennedy for his role in the death of Trujillo (Díaz 3-4), so this is not a particularly strict dichotomy.

Works Cited

Bethesda Game Studios. "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim." Bethesda Softworks, 11 November 2011.

Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx. Routledge, 1994. Print.

Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007. Print.

Fritz, Robert K. "Gender and Genre Fiction in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." Chasqui 48.1 (2019): 206-223. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26795323>.

Harper, D. Etymology of bear. 6 October 2022. 3 March 2024. <https://www.etymonline.com/word/bear>.

—. Etymology of ghost. 7 December 2018. 25 March 2024. <https://www.etymonline.com/word/ghost>.

—. Etymology of grammatical. 7 December 2020. 26 March 2024. <https://www.etymonline.com/word/grammatical>.

John. "John." The Bible. King James Version. n.d.

LeBlond, Lisa. "From Plátano Player to Questioning Chronicler—Historiography in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (2023).

Mahler, Anne Garland. "The Writer as Superhero: Fighting the Colonial Curse in Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 19.2 (2010): 119-140. <https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2010.494928>.

O'Brien, Sean P. "Some Assembly Required: Intertextuality, Marginalization, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 45.1 (2012): 75-94.

Schulenburg, Chris. "Nerd Nation: La breve y maravillosa vida de Óscar Wao and Life in Tolkien’s Universe." MLN 131.2 (2016): 503-516.

Sepulveda, Fremio. "Coding the Immigrant Experience: Race, Gender and the Figure of the Dictator in Junot Diaz's "Oscar Wao"." Journal of Caribbean Literatures 7.2 (2013): 15-33. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/43672608>.

Tait, Connor. "There and Back Again: Tolkien's Work in Diaz." ENG621 at Buffalo State University. Buffalo, 14 December 2023.

Student Engagement and Motivation in the Secondary English Classroom

for English Education Comprehensive Exam, 2024

The Problem

A core element of a well-managed, productive, and engaged classroom is well-motivated students. There are, according to my classes, two kinds of motivation: intrinsic motivation – wanting to do the thing for the sake of doing the thing, because the thing is inherently desirable (also called, in the literature, autonomous motivation) – and extrinsic motivation – willingness to do the thing for a desired external reward or to avoid an undesired external consequence (also called controlled motivation).

A student’s intrinsic motivation generally has more effect on their engagement, productivity, self-efficacy, and generally doing the thing; their extrinsic motivation has less effect, to the point sometimes of having virtually no significant effect at all.

The core conundrum that arises is this: the forms of leverage available to teachers work almost exclusively on students’ extrinsic motivation and hardly at all on their intrinsic motivation. How do we, as teachers, square this circle? What tools are available to us to increase intrinsic motivation, or, failing that, at least to make extrinsic motivation more effective?

What Is Motivation?

It’s more complicated than the above-described two-factor schema, of course – “high-school students possess complex motivational characteristics” (Xie, Vongkulluksn, Cheng, & Jiang, 2022); “Achievement motivation is not a single construct but rather subsumes a variety of different constructs like ability self-concepts, task values, goals, and achievement motives” (Steinmayr, Weidinger, Schwinger, & Spinath, 2019).

The aspects of motivation are more finely divided out by Kosovich et al. (2015): assessment of ability to do a thing – i.e. whether one can do a thing now (ability) and whether one will be able to do the thing in the future (expectancy) – is termed expectancy; assessment of value expected to be derived from the the thing can be split out into intrinsic value (the thing is inherently enjoyable), utility value (the thing can help achieve other short- or long-term goals), and attainment value (the thing can affirm an important aspect of one’s identity); cost reflects any negative aspect of doing the thing, e.g. time and/or effort required, opportunity cost, boredom, or negative psychological states induced by struggling or failing at the thing. Expectancy and value are positively correlated with one another, and with positive educational outcomes; cost is negatively correlated with all three things (Kosovich, Hulleman, Barron, & Getty, 2015).

It appears that classroom motivation is influenced by at least five factors: the learner, the educator, the course content, the teaching method, and the learning environment. (Kong, 2021)

The Impact of Motivation on Learning

Student interest in education has a positive effect on learning: “It is extensively approved that learners who are actively participating in the learning progression and take interest in their academic education are more likely to achieve higher levels of learning.” (Kong, 2021)

As a subset of that, it is pretty consistent that student motivation correlates with academic outcomes – highly motivated students tend to be highly successful in school (Steinmayr, Weidinger, Schwinger, & Spinath, 2019).

As a subset of that, high intrinsic motivation is strongly correlated with student success. According to Kaiser, Großmann, & Wilde (2020),

high-quality learning can only be achieved if the learner experiences a sense of self-determination. Self-determined learning (e.g. based upon intrinsic motivation) leads to a sense of well-being and contentment during the learning activity, a higher degree of learner engagement, and better performance outcomes. By contrast, learning processes that learners perceive as being controlled by others are connected to less contentment, less engagement, and a relatively low level of performance. (Kaiser, Großmann, & Wilde, 2020)

This reiterates the problem: intrinsically motivated students are more equipped to learn and to succeed at learning than extrinsically motivated students.

Techniques for Already Motivated Students

When students are already intrinsically motivated, clear and comprehensible instruction improves student outcomes relative to muddled or unclear instruction – but it has no significant effect on unmotivated students. (Bolkan, Goodboy, & Kelsey, 2016)

Similarly, when content and lessons are ‘gamified’, using principles of game design, it can increase learning… but primarily among students who are already intrinsically motivated. “[I]t is not a simple ‘gamification increases engagement’ relationship. Gamification impacts students with different types of motivation differently. […] it is particularly effective for students who are intrinsically motivated, particularly either by a motivation to know or a motivation towards stimulation. […] Overall, the results suggest that gamified learning interventions have a larger impact on students who are intrinsically motivated.” (Buckley & Doyle, 2016) Thus, gamification, while potentially good practice, doesn’t much help to improve intrinsic motivation.

Relevance of Material

Johansen, Eliassen, and Jeno establish that when the content being covered is more personally relevant to a student, that student’s motivation increases (Johansen, Eliassen, & Jeno, 2023). This seems straightforward, but in tension with the student’s interests are the texts the curriculum demands be covered – which the teacher does not necessarily set themselves – and the interests of every other student – even assuming a teacher who can bring themselves to be interested enough in subject matter that interests any given student to plan lessons about it.

The fact that choice of content influences student motivation – when the content being covered is more personally relevant to a student, that student’s motivation increases – seems, prima facie, challenging to use in the classroom. The curriculum may call for specific texts, with the teacher having limited control over it; a text that interests one student may hold no interest for another student; and a text that interests many students may hold no interest for the teacher, and it is, of course, challenging for a teacher to devise compelling lesson plans for content that is uninteresting to themselves – I find myself able to find a shared interest or two with most individual Gen Z students these days, but what tends to interest most of them – sports, dance TikTok, rap music, etc. – is usually difficult for me to bring myself to share. Still, I can usually count on a fair degree of success when using pop music for an anticipatory set.

One good solution to this, of course, is a decentralized inquiry-learning-based curriculum where each student pursues their own content interests, as propounded at length in the Buffalo State English Education program. This doesn’t help me as much if I end up in a position where I have no influence over the curriculum, though aspects of decentralized inquiry learning can be deployed even in the absence of curricular control.

Teaching Style

According to Zou et al.,

teachers' motivating styles can be divided into two orientations: controlling and autonomy‐supporting. The controlling motivating style is one in which teachers exert pressure on students to think, experience, or behave in a particular way, while the autonomy‐supporting motivating style is one in which teachers use noncontrolling methods to reduce pressure on students, and support students' autonomous development. […] Autonomy‐supporting classroom activities can improve students' perception of classroom teaching and can increase students' motivation and learning ability. […] Particularly, as for student psychological needs, experts agreed on the destructive effect of yelling, unfair punishments, abusive language, and criticism of fixed qualities, while the benefits of helping students find ways of monitoring their own progress and empathy for students. (Zou, Yao, Zhang, & Huang, 2023)

The obvious conclusion for a teacher to draw is that they should teach autonomy-supportingly, not controllingly, and definitely without yelling at, screaming at, ranting at, verbally abusing, punishing unfairly, or criticizing fixed qualities of students.

Juxtaposing good and bad and very bad methods of teaching in this way could lead to a misapprehension: so long as I’m not screaming at the students, I’m fine, right? Wrong! Students do need to, ideally, be supported and given tools to succeed, not just not yelled at.

Unfulfilled basic psychological needs, like perception of autonomy, perception of competence, and perception of relatedness, can negatively affect motivation (Kaiser, Großmann, & Wilde, 2020). “[W]hen students feel controlled, their intrinsic motivation is weakened, while their extrinsic motivation is strengthened.” (Zou, Yao, Zhang, & Huang, 2023) Conversely, fulfilling these psychological needs can positively affect motivation:

To enable students to experience autonomy, competence and relatedness, a context should be created in which students’ actions result in the desired outcomes […] this means that students are provided with tasks […] that help them to reach the learning objectives […] By doing so, students get the opportunity to determine their actions (autonomy) and be effective (experience competence). […A] teacher can create the right conditions by providing appropriate help to students. Help contains the provision of resources to obtain the learning objectives, and information on how to apply those resources, like strategy explanations and meta-cognitive or self-regulatory suggestions. Providing help to students will empower them to act autonomously and effectively (experiencing competence). Moreover, as they experience that the teacher cares about them, it contributes to students’ feelings of relatedness. Feedback that provides information on how to proceed […] has proven to be effective. […] Teacher classroom practice in which constructive feedback [i]s provided [i]s associated with higher student perceptions of autonomy and competence. (Leenknecht, et al., 2021)

Other supports for motivation include: providing choices; taking student preferences and interests into account; explaining a rationale of why the material is important; giving opportunities for students to ask questions. Meanwhile, use of uninteresting activities can thwart motivation. (Patall, et al., 2018)

Teacher-Student Relationship

Much of the academic literature suggests that the teacher-student relationship mediates student motivation, making it a key to teaching, in this matter as it is in so many matters. On a basic level, it contributes towards the student’s need for relatedness, as mentioned above.

Zou, et al. (2024), among others, have found that the teacher’s intrinsic motivation for teaching correlated strongly with their students’ intrinsic motivation for learning, with the arrow of causation pointing from the former to the latter.

Students who believe that teachers are intrinsically motivated to teach are more willing to explore new skills and learn more than students who believe that teachers are extrinsically motivated to teach […] a teacher's motives for engaging in instruction can provide cues related to teachers' displays of positive affect and autonomy supportiveness, which can provide contextual cues that positively influence motivational orientations of students. Additionally, teachers' own motivating style and personality traits that involve control have been found to lead to their tendency to adopt a controlling motivating style. (Zou, Yao, Zhang, & Huang, 2023).

Henry & Thorsen (2021) finds self-disclosure – teachers telling students about themselves – can improve teacher-student student relationship and increases student motivation:

While some strongly-endorsed reasons are instrumental, and relate to the content of learning, for example clarifying learning materials and providing real-world examples, other purposes are relational and aimed at developing positive teacher–student relationships and creating a comfortable classroom environment. Generally, students are aware of teachers’ self-disclosures and recognize their value in creating a climate conducive to communication. Students often see beyond the personal stories teachers tell, interpreting their self-disclosures as attempts to be honest and open about themselves, to make personal connections, and to create an open and positive learning environment. (Henry & Thorsen, 2021)

Henry & Thorsen are, to be sure, looking at ENL teachers in Sweden, but this seems like a finding that could plausibly be consistent between disciplines and across oceans.

Impact on My Teaching

These findings reinforce the understanding that teacher-student relationship is paramount and fundamental in virtually every aspect of teaching. I shall henceforth redouble my efforts to quickly learn every student’s name and general interests and attempt to make connections by being authentic and (within reason) open about myself.

Luckily for my students, my motivation for teaching is largely intrinsic, which should correlate with them ending up intrinsically motivated. I enjoy teaching, I enjoy it for its own sake as well as believing it is inherently a good thing, and the motivation of money is, while not entirely unimportant, secondary.

Moreover, my teaching style tends not to be very controlling, though I could stand to do better at encouraging and helping students to autonomy.

Works Cited

Bolkan, S., Goodboy, A. K., & Kelsey, D. M. (2016, April 2). Instructor Clarity and Student Motivation: Academic Performance as A Product of Students’ Ability and Motivation to Process Instructional Material. Communication Education, 65(2), 129-148. doi:10.1080/03634523.2015.1079329

Buckley, P., & Doyle, E. (2016, August 17). Gamification and student motivation. Interactive Learning Environments, 24(6), 1162-1175. doi:10.1080/10494820.2014.964263

Henry, A., & Thorsen, C. (2021, January 2). Teachers' self-disclosures and influences on students' motivation: A relational perspective. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 24(1), 1-15. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1441261

Johansen, M. O., Eliassen, S., & Jeno, L. M. (2023). "Why is this relevant for me?": increasing content relevance enhances student motivation and vitality. Frontiers in Psychology, 14(1184804). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1184804

Kaiser, L.-M., Großmann, N., & Wilde, M. (2020, November 21). The relationship between students’ motivation and their perceived amount of basic psychological need satisfaction – a differentiated investigation of students’ quality of motivation regarding biology. International Journal of Science Education, 42(17), 2801-2818. doi:10.1080/09500693.2020.1836690

Kong, Y. (2021, October 22). The Role of Experiential Learning on Students’ Motivation and Classroom Engagement. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 771272. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.771272

Kosovich, J. J., Hulleman, C. S., Barron, K. E., & Getty, S. (2015). A Practical Measure of Student Motivation: Establishing Validity Evidence for the Expectancy-Value-Cost Scale in Middle School. Journal of Early Adolescence, 35(5-6), 790-816. doi:10.1177/0272431614556890

Leenknecht, M., Wijnia, L., Köhlen, M., Fryer, L., Rikers, R., & Loyens, S. (2021, February 17). Formative assessment as practice: the role of students’ motivation. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 46(2), 236-255. doi:10.1080/02602938.2020.1765228

Lin-Siegler, X., Ahn, J. N., Chen, J., Fang, F.-F. A., & Luna-Lucero, M. (2016, April). Even Einstein struggled: Effects of learning about great scientists’ struggles on high school students’ motivation to learn science. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(3), 314-328. doi:10.1037/edu0000092

Patall, E. A., Steingut, R. R., Vasquez, A. C., Trimble, S. S., Pituch, K. A., & Freeman, J. L. (2018, February). Daily autonomy supporting or thwarting and students’ motivation and engagement in the high school science classroom. Journal of Educational Psychology, 110(2), 269-288. doi:10.1037/edu0000214

Steinmayr, R., Weidinger, A. F., Schwinger, M., & Spinath, B. (2019, July 31). The Importance of Students' Motivation for Their Academic Achievement – Replicating and Extending Previous Findings. Frontiers in Psychology, 10(1730). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01730

Xie, K., Vongkulluksn, V. W., Cheng, S.-L., & Jiang, Z. (2022). Examining High-School Students’ Motivation Change Through a Person-Centered Approach. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(1), 89-107. doi:10.1037/edu0000507

Zou, H., Yao, J., Zhang, Y., & Huang, X. (2023, July 28). The influence of teachers' intrinsic motivation on students' intrinsic motivation: The mediating role of teachers' motivating style and teacher-student relationships. Psychology in the Schools, 61(1), 272-286. doi:10.1002/pits.23050

Welfare of Zoo Bears

for Animal Welfare class, 2017

Introduction

Positive welfare is a concept of welfare that goes beyond simply preventing negative experiences and outcomes (as some concepts of welfare do, for example the Five Freedoms, of which four are “freedom from” things considered bad) and is concerned instead (or additionally) with maximizing positive experiences and outcomes – positive welfare is concerned with pleasure, not just the absence of suffering.

Positive welfare can generally be measured similarly to negative welfare, but may be a bit more difficult to measure in some cases. Stress hormones are fairly straightforward to detect (for negative welfare), as are pleasure hormones (for positive welfare). Abnormal (e.g. stereotypic) behavior is an easy indicator of negative welfare, and play behavior is an indicator of positive welfare. It’s fairly straightforward to set up a system to test whether an animal chooses to pursue or avoid a thing, indicating positive welfare (if they acquire a thing they seek) or negative welfare (if they are subjected to a thing they seek to avoid). An animal’s environment need only be compared to their habitat in the wild to determine its naturalness (positive welfare) or lack thereof (negative welfare). On the other hand, disease, injury, and premature death are fairly easy to detect, but the concept of positive welfare in these areas poses a challenge, although good and consistent reproduction can be an indicator of positive health welfare.

This paper will assess the situation of bears in zoos and make recommendations for their positive welfare. I will be dealing with the extant species of bear (family Ursidae) other than polar and panda bears – among other things, the former has unique thermal and swimming requirements and the latter has unique dietary requirements and are notoriously fussy (especially in the realm of reproduction), whereas the other six are broadly more similar to each other in terms of welfare needs – specifically: the brown bear (Ursus arctos), the Asian black bear (Ursus thibetanus), the American black bear (Ursus americanus), the sun bear (Helarctos malayanus), the sloth bear (Melursus ursinus), and the spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus).

Research Summary and Analysis

Are They Healthy?

In negative terms, a healthy bear is one that is free of disease, injury, premature death, hunger, pain, and so on. But in terms of positive welfare, we can do better than merely that (although positive physical welfare is a bit more difficult to conceptualize than positive mental welfare). Bears should be fed a diet fit for their nutritional needs, not too much and not too little, and should be able to get a sufficient amount of exercise. Good reproduction is an indicator of good health, as is an appropriate weight (not too heavy, not too thin), a long life, and certain behavioral indicators, such as play (Held & Špinka, 2011).

Most bears have better lifelong health (e.g. sloth bears reproducing better, as in Forthman & Bakeman, 1992) when raised by their mothers, as opposed to those raised by human caretakers. However, there is a tradeoff in allowing bears to raise their own young – some mother bears may cannibalize their offspring, and bears who have been eaten as cubs tend to show poor welfare indeed.

Ambient noise is a rarely-considered aspect of welfare, but its effect on mothering behavior has been studied in sun bears by Owen, et al. (2013). In short, loud ambient noise increases mothering behavior, and is probably energetically costly during a time (cub-rearing) when there is little energy to spare.

A nutritionally healthy diet is important. Most bears in the wild eat more plant than animal matter and are opportunistic omnivores, eating anything from leaves, roots, and berries to insects, carrion, fresh meat, and fish; sloth bears in particular are adapted to be myrmecophagous. For a more natural and healthy diet, bread should be minimized; plants and meat or fish should be maximized.

Do They Feel Well Mentally?

It is important to keep bears entertained and active and displaying directed behaviors (indicating good mental welfare), rather than bored and passive and displaying stereotypic behaviors (indicating poor mental welfare). For this purpose, a variety of enrichment can (and ought to) be used (Shyne, 2006).

Feeding enrichment is among the most-studied forms of enrichment for bears. For Kodiak and grizzly bears (two subspecies of brown bear), ice blocks and “fishcicles” (whole mackerel or salmon frozen into ice blocks, sometimes with “layers of peanuts, apple pieces, raisins, peanut butter, and grape jelly, as well as scattered peanuts, bread, raisins, and sunflower seeds”) are a common (and apparently effective) form of enrichment, causing the bears to be more active and spend less time engaging in abnormal behaviors (Forthman, et al., 1992; McGowan, Robbins, Alldredge, & Newberry, 2009). Similarly, logs filled with honey are effective at reducing stereotypic and abnormal behaviors in sloth, American black, and brown bears, as is hiding food throughout an enclosure for bears to search for and collect (Carlstead, Seidensticker, & Baldwin, 1991). Offering food at unpredictable times is also effective enrichment in spectacled bears (Fischbacher & Schmid, 1999) and sun bears (Schneider, Nogge, & Kolter, 2014). Throwing food from the visitor area is suboptimal, seen to cause stereotypy in brown bears (Montaudouin & Le Pape, 2004); food should instead be hidden around the exhibit.

As with physical health, human-reared sloth bears tend to exhibit worse mental health than mother-reared bears, including self-directed and stereotypic behavior (Forthman & Bakeman, 1992). Male brown bears orphaned at an early age have been observed engaging in abnormal apparent fellatio behavior with each other, further suggesting that remaining with their mother for at least the first year of life is important for the lifelong mental health of a cub (Sergiel, et al., 2014).

Do They Live A Normal/Natural Life?

Female sloth bears are most social when exhibited with a familiar male and least social when exhibited with other females (Forthman & Bakeman, 1992). Social activity is often considered good for mental welfare (and as a practical matter exhibiting bears together decreases the total enclosure space required), especially in bears who have grown used to the presence of conspecifics (Mattiello, et al., 2014), but bears in the wild are famously solitary – considered the most asocial of the carnivorans – so for maximum naturalness, they should perhaps be exhibited alone and introduced to one another only for breeding.

Bears naturally range across a wide territory, so bear enclosures should be as large as possible – it is recommend that a single bear be housed in an enclosure of at least 2,500 m2, with an additional 1,000 m2 for each additional individual (Maślak, Sergiel, Bowles, & Paśko, 2015). Barren indoor enclosures are terrible for the bears, increasing stereotypies significantly – enclosures should be outdoors, but with ability to get away from inclement [M5] weather (Tan, et al., 2013). Slightly better is the common style of enclosure in older zoos: a small concrete area with a pool, with a moat separating the bears from visitors. This is insufficient [M6] – bear enclosures should provide opportunities to express natural digging, climbing, and tree-rubbing behavior; to wit: dirt and trees should be available (Maślak, Sergiel, Bowles, & Paśko, 2015).

Conclusion

One flaw with many areas of research on bear welfare (a flaw that almost all articles cited in this paper share) is small sample sizes: most studies are of only a handful of individuals at a single zoo; even the largest study is only a review of all of Poland’s zoo bears, which is still not very many animals. Unlike herd animals, who are kept in large groups that allow many animals to be studied, bears are usually kept alone or in pairs, only a few at each zoo, making it difficult to achieve high sample sizes in studies of zoo bears.

In some ways, recommendations about positive welfare are difficult to disentangle from recommendations about negative welfare. Increasing positive experiences in an area will tend to correspondingly decrease negative experiences in that area.

For maximum positive welfare in zoo bears, my research turns up three primary recommendations: outdoor enclosure space should be maximized, and enclosures should be fitted with dirt, trees, and pools rather than bare concrete; food should be varied, suitable to the bears’ natural diet, and presented interestingly (within logs or ice blocks, or hidden throughout the enclosure); cubs should be kept with their mothers for at least a year.

Food enrichment is the easiest and most achievable of these recommendations. All one needs to turn boring fish into entertaining “fishcicles” is a bucket, a hose, and a freezer. Hiding food throughout the enclosure may occupy a bit more keeper time than simply throwing the food to the bears, but is worth it for the animals’ mental health.

Keeping cubs with their mothers is sometimes risky, but for the lifelong health (mental and physical) of the bears, it is probably worth the risk except when the danger of cannibalism is very high.

Maximizing enclosure space and switching from bare concrete to dirt and trees will be the most difficult proposal for many zoos to enact. Zoo space is quite often simply limited, and increasing space for bears will decrease space for all the other animals. Moreover, even redesigning an exhibit without expanding it can be expensive, beyond the budgets of many zoos. Still, this should be done whenever space and budgets permit.

Works Cited

Carlstead, K., Seidensticker, J., & Baldwin, R. (1991). Environmental Enrichment for Zoo Bears. Zoo Biology, 10, 3-16.

Fischbacher, M., & Schmid, H. (1999). Feeding enrichment and stereotypic behavior in spectacled bears. 18, 363-371. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1098-2361(1999)18:5<363::AID-ZOO1>3.0.CO;2-H

Forthman, D. L., & Bakeman, R. (1992). Environmental and Social Influences on Enclosure Use and Activity Patterns of Captive Sloth Bears (Ursus ursinus). Zoo Biology, 11, 405-415.

Forthman, D. L., Elder, S. D., Bakeman, R., Kurkowski, T. W., Noble, C. C., & Winslow, S. W. (1992). Effects of Feeding Enrichment on Behavior of Three Species of Captive Bears. Zoo Biology, 11, 187-195.

Held, S. D., & Špinka, M. (2011, May). Animal play and animal welfare. Animal Behaviour, 81(5), 891–899. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.01.007

Maślak, R., Sergiel, A., Bowles, D., & Paśko, Ł. (2015, October 9). The Welfare of Bears in Zoos: A Case Study of Poland. Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, 24-36. doi:10.1080/10888705.2015.1071671

Mattiello, S., Brignoli, S. M., Cordedda, A., Pedroni, B., Colombo, C., & Rosi, F. (2014). Effect of the change of social environment on the behavior of a captive brown bear (Ursus arctos). Journal of Veterinary Behavior: Clinical Applications and Research, 9(3), 119-123. doi:10.1016/j.jveb.2014.01.002

McGowan, R. T., Robbins, C. T., Alldredge, J. R., & Newberry, R. C. (2009, October 8). Contrafreeloading in grizzly bears: implications for captive foraging enrichment. Zoo Biology, 484-502. doi:10.1002/zoo.20282

Montaudouin, S., & Le Pape, G. (2004, September 30). Comparison of the behaviour of European brown bears (Ursus arctos arctos) in six different parks, with particular attention to stereotypies. Behavioural Processes, 67(2), 235-244. doi:10.1016/j.beproc.2004.02.008

Owen, M. A., Hall, S., Bryant, L., & Swaisgood, R. R. (2013, December 17). The influence of ambient noise on maternal behavior in a Bornean sun bear (Helarctos malayanus euryspilus). Zoo Biology, 33, 49-53. doi:10.1002/zoo.21105

Schneider, M., Nogge, G., & Kolter, L. (2014, January 9). Implementing unpredictability in feeding enrichment for Malayan sun bears (Helarctos malayanus). 33, 54-62. doi:10.1002/zoo.21112

Sergiel, A., Maślak, R., Zedrosser, A., Paśko, Ł., Garshelis, D. L., Reljić, S., & Huber, D. (2014, June 4). Fellatio in captive brown bears: Evidence of long-term effects of suckling deprivation? Zoo Biology, 33, 349-352. doi:10.1002/zoo.21137

Shyne, A. (2006, April 19). Meta-analytic review of the effects of enrichment on stereotypic behavior in zoo mammals. Zoo Biology, 0, 1-21. doi:10.1002/zoo.20091

Tan, H., Ong, S., Langat, G., Bahaman, A., Sharma, R., & al., e. (2013, April). The influence of enclosure design on diurnal activity and stereotypic behaviour in captive Malayan Sun bears (Helarctos malayanus). Research in Veterinary Science, 94(2), 228-239. doi:10.1016/j.rvsc.2012.09.024

“Constantly Leaning Over to Whisper Discouragement”: Depression as a Haunting, in Contemplation of Lincoln in the Bardo

for Hauntology class, 2023

Depression as a Haunting

Depression is a haunting: a ghostly, uncanny force that bedevils and confuses the mind. George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo inspires and can clarify this metaphor – I call it a metaphor although, as we will see, there is a certain extent to which I mean it literally, not just metaphorically.

In Lincoln in the Bardo, the eponymous bardo is a sort of pre-afterlife, where ghosts dwell until they are freed of their burdens and can move on to whatever comes next[1]. In the bardo, depression is a spectre: a haunting of the mind. I argue that this is an apt metaphor (if metaphor it be), that it is true in life as well as in the bardo, and I observe that it carries through Lincoln in the Bardo in several aspects.

Depression is unheimlich – it is quite the opposite of “intimate, friendlily comfortable; the enjoyment of quiet content, etc., arousing a sense of agreeable restfulness and security” (Freud 198); there is an “uncanny effect of […] manifestations of insanity” (Freud 201-202), of which depression is a subset; “an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced […] when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes […] The infantile element in this, which also dominates the minds of neurotics, is the over-accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality” (Freud 221) – depression frequently whispers messages that are at odds with observable reality: most sufferers of depression are probably not unloved nor unlovable, yet this is a common delusion smuggled into the brain by depression.

The ghostly characters of Lincoln in the Bardo “narrate themselves into existence” (Vorbeck). Depression, too, narrates itself into existence – it’s a story that tells itself in the sufferer’s brain. Part of the point of cognitive behavioral therapy is to stop allowing depression to narrate itself into existence.

I’m not saying that depression tends to correlate with belief in ghosts – although that turns out to be true (Sharps) – nor that depression causes one to become haunted by literal ghosts – an assessment of stories where that occurs are beyond the scope of this paper – but that depression is a spectre.

Spending Many More Words on Tim Midden Than Saunders Does

One ghost in the bardo is described as having “always gone about dogged by a larger version of himself, that was constantly leaning over to whisper discouragement to him” (Saunders 257), until he is freed from this burden by exposure to President Lincoln’s mind. The ghost in question, Tim Midden, is himself haunted by a spectre[2]: of depression or self-doubt or self-abnegation.

Ghosts in the bardo seem to operate in accordance with the traditional conception of ghosts as possessing physical manifestations of their psychological attributes in life (and/or at their moment of death) – see, for example, A Christmas Carol’s ghost of Jacob Marley, and the ghosts on the street that he shows to Scrooge, all (literally) wearing chains that they (metaphorically?) forged in life, through such things as their greed and lack of charity (Dickens).

Bevins, for example, has slashes on each wrist representing his manner of death, and countless sensory organs (eyes, ears, noses, etc.) representing his desire to experience – which may have been a feature of his entire life, or it may be only representative of his last thoughts, as, in his last seconds, he changed his mind about killing himself, because there were so many things he still wanted to experience. Similarly, the ghost of Hans Vollman possesses a tremendous phallus, representing the fact that he died just as he and his wife were on their way to the bedroom to have sex for the first time, and thus left permanently in suspense, his final carnal desire unfulfilled.

Thus, as Tim Midden’s ghost is hounded by depression, self-doubt, and self-abnegation in death, we can safely presume that he was hounded by these same things in life, or at least at the end of his life (perhaps, like Bevins, he killed himself – but unlike Bevins, did not at any point change his mind about it).

Depression, Clinically

To get a clear definition out of the way, the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders describes depression in terms of depressive episodes (and the frequency thereof), with the symptoms of such including: feeling sad, empty, or hopeless; diminished interest or pleasure in activities; decrease or increase of appetite or weight loss or gain; insomnia or hypersomnia; uncontrolled or slow movements and thoughts, or feelings of restlessness or being slowed down; fatigue or loss of energy; feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt; diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness; recurrent thoughts of death (not just fear of dying) or of suicide (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).

Some of these symptoms describe some of the ghosts of Lincoln in the Bardo – most of the ghosts single-mindedly focus on one activity to the exclusion of all others, instead of showing diminished interest in activities – but many are negated by the staunch inability – or refusal – of the ghosts to understand their status as ghosts. Indeed, the ghosts cannot – or do not – have any thoughts of death, despite being dead. Shaimaa Gohar would argue that most of the ghosts are powered by their fear of death, their fear of moving on (Gohar) – but a fear of death, being more or less reasonable, is explicitly excluded from the DSM-5’s symptoms of depression. It is convenient that I am not claiming any of the ghosts (aside from Tim Midden) are depressed, because I would certainly not be able to defend that claim.

All we know about Tim Midden is that he had “always gone about dogged by a larger version of himself, that was constantly leaning over to whisper discouragement to him” (Saunders 257). This pretty clearly qualifies as at least one of DSM-5’s depressive symptoms – feeling sad, empty, or hopeless, or feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt – so I’m comfortable diagnosing him with depression given that the one sentence is all we learn about him, making it likely all that is important to know about him, or else the author would have told us something more important in that precious throwaway sentence about Tim Midden. This is fine; he only exemplifies my claim, he does not provide a foundation for it.

The symptoms of depression given in DSM-5 can also be symptoms of haunting by a ghost, but are not consistently so, and anyway the key similarity is the persistence. Ghosts, traditionally and in most recent spectral fiction, stick around until their unfinished business is concluded[3], or, in the case of Lincoln in the Bardo, until they have accepted their status as deceased, set aside their unfinished business, and are ready to move on; similarly, depression sticks around forever.

Depression and grief are distinct, although the two often overlap, so they need to be disentwined.

Depression involves endless feelings of, among other things, “hopelessness and helplessness which lacks a justifiable cause”, and is sometimes more severe and usually lasts longer than grief; grief, on the other hand, though its symptoms resemble depression, is seen as “a natural consequence of a loss”, and moreover does not typically last forever (Parker). In comparison to depression, grief is more literally – though not fully unmetaphorically – a haunting by a deceased person.

Many characters in Lincoln in the Bardo are haunted by grief. Bevins, for example, killed himself because (as it turns out) his lover Gilbert broke up with him, claiming it was because he wanted to live in the closet, then was seen with another man, laughing at (it seemed to Bevins) Bevins (Saunders 326) – heartbreak being more like grief than like depression.

Similarly, President Lincoln does spend the text struggling with his grief about his son’s death – “a vain and useless grief” (Saunders 308) – but also with depression. The two phenomena are so intertangled in the President’s mind in this text that it may be impractical to try to differentiate them, but an attempt will be made here nonetheless.

Scrutinizing Lincoln’s Hauntings

In the context of scrutiny of this text, President Lincoln is, of course, two distinct but related entities: the real person who presided over the actual United States, and the fictional character based on that actual President (although the fictional Lincoln is presented as real through excerpts from ostensibly historical texts, half of those texts are themselves invented by Saunders (Moseley)). Here, we are considering primarily the proposition that depression is a haunting, through the lens of Lincoln in the Bardo, so the fictional Lincoln of the text is of foremost concern. The main reason we might be inclined to consider the actual historical Lincoln here is insofar as our understanding (and Saunders’s understanding) of the actual Lincoln can inform our understanding of the fictional Lincoln.

The actual historical Lincoln is known to have had depression, and at times took pills for it that probably made it worse (Shenk). He certainly also had his share of sources of grief – sons kept dying on him, plus of course the countless dead of the Civil War.

Correspondingly, Lincoln as portrayed in the text seems to have both depression and grief. He is certainly stricken with grief at the death of his son – his choice to haul Willie’s body out of his “sick-box” (Saunders) and hug it is a pure expression of this grief. Meanwhile, the descriptions of his sadness rang true to me as descriptions of depression: “Oh, the pathos of it! – haggard, drawn into fixed lines of unutterable sadness, with a look of loneliness, as of a soul whose depth of sorrow and bitterness no human sympathy could ever reach. The impression I carried away was that I had seen, not so much the President of the United States, as the saddest man in the world.” (Saunders 201) He "did not wish to live. Not really. It was, just now, too hard. There was so much to do, he was not doing it well and, if done poorly, all would go to ruin. Perhaps, in time (he told himself) it would get better, and might even be good again. He did not really believe it. It was hard. Hard for him." (Saunders 343) Lincoln’s general sadness, as described in several places, could be equally plausibly attributed to grief or to depression.

President Lincoln’s depression originates, according to some theorists in the text, with his tremendous capacity for empathy – “Lincoln had the tenderest heart for any one in distress, whether man, beast, or bird […] He had a great kindness of heart. His mind was full of tender sensibilities; he was extremely humane […] He was certainly a very poor hater” (Saunders 284);

His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated (Saunders 303-304)

At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end, the many losses we must experience on the way to that end. […] We must try to see each other in this way. […] As suffering, limited beings – […] Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces. […] His sympathy extended to all in this instant, blundering, in its strict logic, across all divides. (Saunders 304)

As it turns out, this allegation is plausible. Within a moderate range, depression is negatively correlated with both higher-than-average empathy (Hoffman) and lower-than-average empathy (the mechanism here is less clear) (Cui); it is, all in all, negatively correlated with moderate empathy, but positively correlated with very high and very low empathy. Depression can be caused by deeply feeling the suffering of one’s fellow persons, as in Saunders’s Lincoln; depression can also blunt and reduce capacity for empathy (Tully).

I would compare this correlation to Reverend Everly Thomas, who, though he initially fled his ultimate fate out of fear of the bad afterlife, has since dedicated his existence in the bardo to empathetically tending the flock of ghosts.

Depression as the Entanglement Phenomenon

The phenomenon that entwines the ghost of Willie Lincoln, as it previously entwined the ghost of Elise Traynor, is of note – “The roof around him had liquefied, and he appeared to be sitting in a gray-white puddle. […] From out of the puddle, a vine-like tendril emerged. […] If Miss Traynor’s case was any indication, this tendril would soon be followed by a succession of others, until the boy was fully secured (Gulliver-like) to the roof. […] Once secured, he would be rapidly overgrown by what might best be described as a placental sheen” (Saunders 110-111). The description of the next stage of the phenomenon will sound familiar to anyone who has suffered depression: “The sheen then hardening into a shell-like carapace, that carapace would begin to transition through a series of others […] the more perverse the carapace, the less ‘light’ (happiness, honesty, positive aspiration) would get in” (Saunders 111). Depression is a force that entraps the mind and prevents such ‘light’ from getting into it. This phenomenon can, therefore, be doubly likened to depression – it ensnares and prevents light from entering, even beyond the usual effects of haunting.

The phenomenon pursues Willie until he escapes it by entering the chapel – the chapel, then, is some space safe from depression (or at least from one level of depression). For some, religion can, indeed, provide relief from depression; for some, there is medication, or therapy, or both; being surrounded by friends helps some, by a natural environment helps others; the treatments available for depression are myriad, and as varied in effectiveness.

This phenomenon is initially mysterious, but is eventually explained to itself be formed of ghosts: “comprised of people. People like us. Like we had been. Former people, somehow shrunken and injected into the very fabric of that structure” (Saunders 267), “compelled” (Saunders 267) to take the form of a prison for other ghosts – some sinful people, it turns out, are relegated to this as punishment. Depression, in this analogy, is a ghostly force, insofar as it is a force made of ghosts – Willie is haunted, if ghost-on-ghost conflict can reasonably be described as one haunting the other.

Moreover, the entangling phenomenon is specifically an evil ghostly force, insofar as it is made of specifically evil ghosts. Discussion on whether evil forces can, in principle, be good if turned to good ends are beyond the scope of this paper – I am treating the entanglement phenomenon as evil because it is made of evil ghosts in the most simplistic sense, as if evil is an elemental force – so, the same sense as observing that an ice cube is wet because it is made of water. All of this simply serves the purpose to imply, transitively through the metaphor, that depression is an evil force.

How Far Does It Go?

As mentioned above, depression is unheimlich, and both depression and ghosts each narrate themselves into existence.

Depression, in a sense, is not a thing – or at least it’s more an adjective than a noun. Depression does not exist as a phenomenon per se – the term ‘depression’ describes only a nexus of symptoms (adjectives and verbs) that tend to coincide with one another and respond collectively to treatment, i.e. a category more than a thing (this does, of course, describe most diseases, especially those whose causes are unknown).

Similarly, in the case of haunting, the effects of a ghost are much more observable than the ghost itself, even setting aside the question of whether ghosts do or do not even exist in real life. In Lincoln in the Bardo, ghosts may (or may not – they may be deluding themselves) have some effect on a living person’s personality when they occupy the same physical space as that person. But certainly, they somewhat exist as entities in the text – "If what you say is true -- who is it that is saying it? […] Who is hearing it? […] Who is speaking to you now? […] To whom do we speak?" (Saunders 297). A ghost’s effects on the world constitute a haunting, while the ghost itself is only liminal, midway between existence and void (Ní Éigeartaigh). Outside of this text, ghosts are traditionally hard to perceive; a poltergeist, for example, cannot be seen, but the objects it throws across the room can be.

President Lincoln, in Lincoln in the Bardo, is haunted by depression, by grief for his son and the dead of the Civil War, by the ghost of his son, by the other ghosts of the bardo. Although we attempted to disentangle grief from depression earlier, it’s certainly easy to treat this agglomerate as one huge messy haunting by a bunch of things, indistinguishable and individually unplaceable.

So it is that haunting and depression have a great deal of similarity, ghosts/haunting are on a similar level of thing-ness to depression, and Saunders’s President Lincoln is haunted by both depression and ghosts and distinguishing the two would get messy. All of which leads to this: I don’t, in the end, mean that depression is entirely figuratively a haunting – I mean it literally (at least insofar as a haunting by anything is literal).

Works Cited

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