Cheryl Quimba

May 4, 2005

Klein

Who We Are: Issues of Identity and Difference in Auto-Ethnography

In Michael Renov’s essay, “Domestic Ethnography and the Construction of the ‘Other’ Self,” found in the Collecting Visible Evidence text, Renov uses a thought taken from theorist Stephen A. Tyler in his own discussion of post-modern ethnography. Tyler speaks of this new ethnography as being situated opposite from the scientific rhetoric of traditional ethnography, and Renov, using this as a springboard for his own discussion, writes that in this post-modern ethnography “’evocation’ displaces representation.” (141). In this paper I also take this notion of “evocation” and use it as my own starting point in investigating identity as it is presented and explored in auto-ethnography, a type of documentary film that falls under the category heading of domestic ethnography, and involves documenting the self or the social group of whose membership a filmmaker uses to identity the self. My interest lies in this concept of evoking identity when presenting the self, and how exactly this evocation is an appropriate method of tackling issues of identity, alterity, and intersubjectivity, when examined within the ethnographic discussion of constituting the self in relation to an “Other.” I chose three films to use as texts to study, Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied, Sandi DuBowski’s Tomboychik, and Su Friedrich’s Sink or Swim, all of which are auto-ethnographies that endeavor to present the self, directly as well as via a familiar “other”—family or a group to claim membership to—in an attempt to explore identity, and “evoke” the self, rather than represent it. All three of these films undertake unconventional documentary voices and formats, using their distinctive styles to further illustrate that each filmmaker is extending a personal offering towards the “truth” of his or her identity.

In the same aforementioned essay, Renov writes, when speaking on ethnographic film, “There can be no pretense of objectivity” (142). Marlon Riggs’ 1990 film, Tongues Untied, seems to ground itself firmly on this statement by asserting throughout the work that the film is, if anything, an intensely subjective piece that must claim aloud its own subjectivity. The film consists of historical footage of civil rights marches, demonstrations and parades of black gay men holding banners stating “Black men loving black men is a revolutionary act,” shots of Riggs himself and other men reciting poetry into the camera, a barbershop quartet-like group harmonizing for a song, scenes of drag queens walking down the street overlaid by the singing voice of Billie Holiday, and long cuts and explanations of “snapology” and vogue-ing.

Throughout the film the haunting chant, “brother to brother,” is echoed. This statement is offered up front, and reinforced throughout the film, as the striking declaration of who is speaking here, and to whom. Riggs firmly situates the film inside this scope, so that identity, his own and the group identity of black gay men living in America, must be looked at through this lens. Riggs uses an insider/outsider dichotomous looking in a radically different way from traditional ethnography. Rather than drawing the border at the line of homosexual men, or at the line of black men, Riggs recognizes that the “inside” is much more complex than overlapping circles of identity. An “outside” seems to be erected in the film, at least initially, with the cropped shots of mouths spitting out “homo” and “queer” and other homophobic, and racist, epithets at the camera. These hateful mouths come together to form an “outside” made up of language, with Riggs and other black gay men receiving their words from the center, themselves extending what can be seen as the most appropriate response to such repugnant language—poetry.

It is the spoken word poetry interspersed throughout the film that can be taken as the work’s strongest element of identity evocation. Poetic language, at its best, approximates the experience of being, and Riggs, rather than stating outrightly what living as a black gay man means or stands for, chooses instead to convey what his existence feels like. The sequences on “snapology” and vogue-ing fall under this as well. The use of the body to communicate multitudes non-verbally illustrates how much feeling and thought can be exchanged through bodily performance for the sake of an aesthetic, similar to what happens with poetry. The pieced-together style of the film further illustrates this notion of evocation—Riggs is offering a sense of identity as dynamic, something that should be shown in a variety of angles and through a wide range of voices. In this way, Riggs shows that he is defined against the “other” of white America, and the “other” of heterosexuality, and even the “other” of other black gay men, while he himself is an “other” to all of those categories as well. This thread of intersubjectivity runs throughout the entire film, evoking his identity and the collective identity of black gay men, in all its rich complexity.

Sandi DuBowski’s 1993 film, Tomboychik, offers another example of an auto-ethnography that weaves in and out of the border drawn between self and a familiar “other.” The film takes on DuBowksi’s grandmother, Nana, as its central subject, although it returns continuously to the topic of sexual identity, and Dubowski’s, the filmmaker’s, sexual identity in particular. The fifteen-minute film begins with a shot of Nana posing for the camera with a wig on. More wigs are brought into the scene and, when the camera changes hands at Nana’s request and DuBowski is being filmed, there are two and then three wigs atop his head, two belonging to his grandmother and one of his father’s. The dialogue during this scene consists mostly of Nana commenting on how “adorable” DuBowski is, and how he would make such a pretty girl.

The film is composed mainly of this kind of dialogue, with DuBowski and Nana moving in and out of conversation on gender identity and sexual identity. Nana recounts that she was a tomboy growing up, wearing pants instead of dresses, and tells of how she used to fight and run as fast as boys. DuBowski’s mother, Nana explains, could lift hundred-pound sacks of sugar up over her shoulder without help. It becomes clear that a common line is attempted to be drawn, through the generations, of gender transgression, and DuBowski seems to be trying to trace it down from his grandmother to himself. “It is a search,” as Renov writes of Tomboychik, “for the roots of DuBowski’s sexual identity by way of the memories of his forebear,” and Renov continues by stating that these valuable exchanges between the DuBowski and Nana are possible because this is an “’insider’ discourse” (147).

This “insider discourse” immediately draws the inside/outside line around the circle of the family. What is interesting to note in this film is how this line intersects and overlaps with other lines ostensibly drawn, such as the lines between “boy” and “girl,” “gay” and “straight,” and even “me” and “not me”—there is a moment in the film when Nana sees herself on screen as says, “That’s not me. Is that me?” This subject-object switch happens throughout the film, and on occasion we see DuBowski through the shaky lens while Nana is at the camera.

This intersubjectivity deals with the issue of identity in a way that never attempts to lay any labels or conclusions out concretely. Again, identity is something that is evoked rather than strictly represented. The wigs at the beginning of the film hint at the performance aspect of identity, and though gender and sexuality are talked about anecdotally or jokingly throughout the short piece, we never hear it stated that DuBowski is gay. DuBowski seems to be attempting instead to offer a rough sketch of his grandmother as a funny, quirky woman who is in her own way gender-transgressive, and that he stands on both the “inside” and the “outside” of this. The title itself, Tomboychik, a melding of two colloquial gender labels, and purposely misspelled, contends that this film should be taken as an offering of identity as it moves in and out of borders, unable to extend anything that can be regarded as strict representation.

Sink or Swim, Su Friedrich’s 1990 documentary, is anything but strict representation. The film takes on the unusual format of twenty-six segments, each titled with a letter of the alaphabet running in reverse order, beginning with “zygote.” The footage is entirely black and white, and is both archival (news clips, shots of amusement parks, parades, pageants) and taken from home videos. The film follows the trajectory of Friedrich’s family history, and is narrated by a young-sounding girl who always refers to herself as “the girl.” The rest of the family remain nameless as well, and are referred to as “the father,” “the mother,” “the brother,” etc. The film takes on a narrative-like style as the voice recounts stories of events that took place in Friedrich’s life, beginning with a seemingly-happy childhood of playing and vacationing, and developing into a story of a family unraveling as the girl tells the story of her father leaving, and of her mother having a kind of emotional collapse as a result.

The most striking feature of the film is the unusual juxtaposition of image and what is being said. There is a scene of a female bodybuilder pageant while the girl narrating speaks of listening to Greek myths told to her by her father, and shots of circuses and parades accompany stories of her mother crying about the father’s absence and the consequent strains on the remaining family members. I find that it is through the putting together of these seemingly disjointed elements that the film operates more as an evocation, rather than a representation, of identity. The story-like, and even dream-like, style of the film operates much in the same way memory does—nonsensical and unstable, based more on the feeling of the experience than what really happened. Identity, in this way, is constructed out of memory, and obviously in a father-daughter relational way. Friedrich, in this film, draws a line around the family so that she is on the “insider” side, but there is also a pervasive sense of alienation surrounding the girl, so that we see that she is perhaps even “outside” the “inside” she has drawn.

Renov writes that Sink or Swim “functions as a kind of ethnography—instructive and generalizable—for the way in which it exceeds the bounds of family portraiture” (145). Friedrich’s film, then, is not only a personal home video of sorts, but a narrative of the breakdown of family, in a broader sense, as well. The shots of the parades, parks, circuses—the scenes of the familiar—serve to this end. We recognize these locations from our own childhoods, and it is this familiarity that positions us as viewers on the “inside,” while remaining on the “outside” of the particularity of the Friedrich family. Su Friedrich herself is portrayed as unstable, constantly teetering in and out of her father’s good favor, and in and out of her identity understandings in turn. As her father develops from a nurturing into a menacing into a less harmful figure in the girl’s life, Friedrich must re-evaluate who she is relationally. This instability of identity is manifest in the format and style of the film, illustrating in its multitude of location shots, and bizarre juxtapositions of image and narration, that identity, as documented in auto-ethnographic film, rests in and out and on top of the lines drawn to define it.