The Ghost Reader in an Indigenous New Media and Culture Course
Joe Sussi, University of Oregon, and Ashley Cordes, University of Oregon
The Ghost Reader: Recovering Women’s Contributions to Media Studies highlights the importance of refuting the misunderstood assumption that men have made the most significant contributions to the field of Media Studies. A complication of this assumption is needed to more generously understand, one, the complex system of power that underlies the production of knowledge and, two, how an uncritical evaluation of this assumption only further entrenches disciplinary knowledge within a discipline's own, what the Métis feminist science and technology scholar Michelle Murphy calls, “regime of perceptibility.” For Murphy, “regimes of perceptibility” concern the means that knowledge is created around a set of questions and assumptions that obscure and make other perspectives invisible, known as “regimes of imperceptibility.” The tension between perception and imperception frames every discipline wherein every methodology creates ontological and epistemological blinders. Considering this tension allows for us to analyze how identity and positionality, including gender, race, and sexuality, may implicitly and explicitly inscribe themselves onto questions presumed to be unimpacted by such categories. Critics of revisionist history often fail to understand how considering the impacts on positionality are not rewriting history just for the sake of it, but are critically evaluating how the very processes of knowledge formation has come to be, including for what reasons and under what circumstances have power dynamics informed such formations. The Ghost Reader will be included in our course material for the class “Indigenous New Media and Culture” and has inspired a Wikipedia entry assignment that centers Indigenous women, two-spirit, and non-binary identifying scholars and their contributions to Media Studies and a discussion of revisionist history projects.
In The Ghost Reader what becomes apparent is how many women critically reflected upon and denormalized Western categories of gender and race embedded within each respective scholar's own disciplinary methodologies. Many of the scholars explored in The Ghost Reader actively resisted their discipline's own constructed “regime of perceptibility.” The work of anthropologist Eleanor Leacock, in particular, marks a significant step in questioning the grounds on which heteropatriarchy constructed gender categories. Leacock shows that many scholars in the West argued that the subordination of women was “natural” due to partial and false observations of Indigenous communities being patriarchal. Leacock’s own research demonstrates these observations to be incorrect, revealing to Western scholars that, in fact, many Indigenous communities in North America and Africa are matrilocal. Furthermore, Leacock revealed how anthropological research questions and findings were informed by patriarchal interests in maintaining power through processes of Modernization. The Ghost Reader offers the opportunity for students in the classroom to question how fields of study construct their own disciplinary blinders and how feminist scholarship has resisted these boundaries. Leacock is also credited with creating a stepping stone toward developing ethical and reciprocal research relations with the subjects of her research. With that said, these advancements also reveal how even critical feminist scholarship reinscribed settler colonial power dynamics within settler-Indigenous relations through extractive research practices.
It is on this subject that we feel The Ghost Reader will contribute to our course material for the class “Indigenous New Media and Culture.” We start by asking how certain “regimes of perceptibility” have excluded women Indigenous scholars and their contributions to Media Studies. We will have students follow the work of The Ghost Reader, through a designed Wikipedia writing assignment where students can work on creating new entries focusing on Indigenous women, two-spirit, and non-binary identifying scholars and their contributions to Media Studies. To begin the assignment, we will have students read the entry on Eleanor Leacock as a preliminary investigation into how Leacock’s research “on matrilocality and indigenous [sic] societies [critiqued] the prevalence and primacy of male dominance, colonialism, and capitalism, in order to illustrate how these organizing structures work in tandem to undercut women’s autonomy” (143). Leacock presents an interesting case study for our class to consider. Her positionality and politics within the field of Anthropology marginalized her voice and threatened her ability to contribute to the field. Leacock’s observations and findings, as groundbreaking as they are, emerged out of the now highly criticized methodological approach to ethnographic field research that situated Indigenous communities as exotic and primitive. As a class, we hope to discuss this complicated and continuously in-process conversation of how knowledge production, even those that contributed to important causes such as destabilizing gender roles, is embedded within structures of power. To investigate this sometimes uncomfortable line of thinking, students will be presented with considering the contributions made by Leacock in relationship to the way she, too, instrumentalized Indigenous communities.
This conversation and analysis of Leacock’s work will lead students to research Indigenous women who have contributed to Media studies and create their own Wikipedia entries. Afterall, it should be underscored that Indigenous peoples have been theorizing and expressing media and technological ingenuity since time immemorial. To end the activity, the class will engage in reflection and further discussion regarding potentials that arise when creating revisionist histories and more inclusive biographies for online encyclopedias.