SuperChunk

Some fun news: We had an assignment in my Law & Culture class (see below) due last week, and the professor excerpted a few of our responses and distributed them to the class (and not because they were bad) and mine was one of them! It was pretty cool.

Here is the assignment:

Week One: Dignity and Personhood
Assignment: Write a description of your idealized self. It can be in the form of a super-hero or an imaginary being. What qualities in yourself would you want to enhance or eliminate? What extra powers would you want? Would they be physical or mental? What would you want to accomplish that you cannot in your ordinary state? To what extent would your enhanced attributes involve powers over other people?

Because of logistical issues, we didn't actually have this prompt when we did the assignment (it was posted late), so all we knew was that we had to design a superhero self and describe what aspects of our identity this would mean idealizing, and what aspects it would mean euthanizing.

If you're curious, my superhero power was HIV immunity. I tried to make two arguments, one being that HIV immunity would effectively mean the euthanizing of my homosexual self (I argued that "gay" and "infectable" are still understood as so synonymous that one can't be gay if one can't be infected); I also argued (much more problematically, in my opinion) that because being HIV-positive creates an identity category for positive individuals that functions like race but supersedes basically ethnic racial categories, to be HIV-immune would be to preclude the possibility of an idealized above-race self...I tried to hint that there would be a feedback exaggeration of our race-based identities if we weren't capable of latching-on to superseding identity categories (many of them, I think, related to illness or disability), but I didn't get into the whole thing because we only had like 2 pages! The part she excerpted was the second argument, about HIV and categories of race, and I'm kinda foolishly proud that mine was the longest excerpt out of all the ones she made :)

If you're interested in our assignment for this week, here it is:

Week Two: The Comic Codes
Assignment: Write a reflection about the interrelationships among notions of privacy, ownership and freedom of expression. After having submitted your paragraphs on super-heroes, a surprising and significant number of you emailed me shortly thereafter, asking me not to share this or that piece of it with the class. A variety of reasons were cited: fear that some detail would identify you, or would embarrass you, or reveal some family secret or betray the confidence of others. Later in the semester we will revisit those fears and concerns in the context of emailed communications where no detail is ever erased but stored somewhere--on your hard drive or in cyberspace. For now, ask yourselves what do you fear most about strangers' knowing your most closely held secrets? Or even just your casual thoughtless jottings? (You don't have to put those secrets in print, just think about what they are.) What's at stake in feeling silly or betrayed or revealed? Economic prospects? Dignity? Popularity? Desire to be liked or loved? What is it you fear most about being characterized (or caricatured) at the hands of others? What kinds of rules, if any, do you think might fairly or legitimately deal with that concern? Style your concern first as an issue of privacy or freedom from intrusion(and from whom); secondly as a matter of control or ownership (as in property); then thirdly as a limitation on the ability of others to represent you without your permission.

VC