In our last class we talked about
the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley is how when things get more and more
realistic, they become creepier when we know that they are a simulation. At the
bottom of the two different lines on the graph, moving and unmoving, there are
corpses and zombies. Both of those are supposed to make a person feel very
uncomfortable because they have an exact resemblance to the human body, while
not doing what a human is supposed to do. So this has a lot to do with race and
sexuality because when people see a different race or sexuality simulating
another one, it makes them feel uncomfortable because we know it’s a
simulation. An example of this is with the couples that changed clothes for the
different pictures. In the second picture we would automatically feel a little
unsettled because the couples had completely reversed normal gender clothes and
we know that it is a simulation of what a normal heterosexual couple does. I
had a nagging question throughout all of this talk about feeling uncomfortable
with a simulation. So if it is natural to feel uncomfortable with a simulation to
close to the real, then is it natural to feel uncomfortable with the
transgender on the bus? I kept thinking about that, knowing the answer was no,
but I couldn’t think of why until now. The whole concept stems
from our idea of what a “normal” and “real” person or couple is, and how they
should act. So we wouldn’t feel uncomfortable with the transgender on the bus
next to us, if we didn’t know that he was doing something different than what
our accepted social constructs of what a man is supposed to wear. Because he is
simulating what a “real” woman is supposed to wear, while also obviously being
a simulation it makes us uncomfortable. But if we had no pre conceived notions
about what a woman was supposed to look like than it wouldn’t make us feel
uncomfortable.
I think that this is easier to see and
understand than the race part of the uncanny valley. I’ve never felt unsettled
if somebody “simulates” to be like another race and come really close to it. I
understand culturally how, like the example Dr. Johnson used about “act like
us, but not too much” but I don’t think I’ve ever seen somebody be weirded out
by acting too much like another race. I
guess if it came to what it was in the book that we talked about Black No
More and people were switching race without a way to tell what they used to
be, people would lose their ability to discriminate. I would think that society
would find some other random thing to discriminate against, because I feel like
people are always searching for ways to find people similar to you and make
outsiders of those who aren’t.
Matt,
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you that the only reason that encountering a transgender individual in real life would give you the experience of the uncanny is because our society is one founded on the ability to quickly define and categorize everything, labeling things either normal or abnormal. Categorizing necessarily entails using a strict set of rules to quickly evaluate everything from objects to people. When someone appears to meet all but one or two of the criteria that we have for categorizing them, we have the experience of the uncanny because we were almost "fooled" into categorizing them one way (male or female) but were stopped short when they failed to pass one aspect of the test. Perhaps people could challenge that feeling of discomfort that they might feel around transgender folks by training themselves to constantly critique what society tells them to understand as normal.
As proof that sex and gender are not naturally binary, I recently learned of a recognized third gender called Hijra. Hijra is recognized as a third gender in certain subcultures in parts of India. When first researching the concept, I found myself thinking that Hijra individuals were approximating femininity and femaleness (whatever that means). That just goes to show how, to your point, our society boxes us in to thinking that a person has to fit neatly into one of two categories.
For more information, go here: http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2013/11/12/bangladesh-third-gender-hijra-to-be-recognised-in-official-documents/
I think it is interesting to wonder whether or not our feeling of the uncanny about transgendered individuals is “natural” or if it is something we have been conditioned to feel. I have struggled with the uncanny ever since I first studied it in my English Junior Sem class because originally I thought it did not affect me very much (the twins in The Shining never kept me up at night). But when we looked at the idea of the uncanny valley, it started to make a little bit more since to me. Naturally, I am frightened by corpses and I would be terrified to wake up with a zombie next to my bed. The logic behind putting them in the lowest part of the valley made a lot of sense to me. But back to transgendered individuals, I think we would all be lying to ourselves if we said we did not get ever a little bit of the feeling of the uncanny when encountering a transgender individual and I think I am only now beginning to understand that the feeling of the uncanny is not so much up-in-arms terror but more of an uneasy feeling one gets when looking at something not quite “real.” We are conditioned to see gender as a binary and to identify individuals as either male or female, and it is understandable that our “natural” (and I am using natural because we have been conditioned to believe it is natural) response would be confusion and a slight uneasiness. Maybe one day it will not be like this, but for now it is something we must try to overcome.
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