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Sensory Ethnography Lab :: Harvard University

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Sensory Ethnography Lab :: Harvard University

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Sensory Ethnography Lab :: Harvard University

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The work produced through SEL in film, video, photography, phonography, and installation has been presented in universities and academic conferences across the world. It has also been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, documenta, the Whitney Biennial, MoMA, British Museum, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, the Berlin Kunsthalle, London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, Shanghai Biennale, Aichi Triennale, PS1, MASS MoCA, MAMM Medellin, and the Whitechapel Gallery.

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It's OK For Boys To Cry, But Only If They Do It In The Right Way : Shots - Health News : NPR

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It's OK For Boys To Cry, But Only If They Do It In The Right Way : Shots - Health News : NPR

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We may be more accepting of boys who cry, but only if they cry in the right way, Hanna Rosin suggests. The norm for male behavior may be stuck in a place that isn’t doing boys much good.

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Public Ethnography: Making Research Popular on Vimeo

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Public Ethnography: Making Research Popular on Vimeo

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Public Ethnography: Making Research Popular

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What is public ethnography? What do public ethnographers hope to achieve? What are their challenges? In this video by Gemini Award winner, UBC and Capilano University faculty Dwayne Beaver,  public ethnography and its multiple variations--from visual ethnography, to action research, collaborative ethnography, sensory ethnography, narrative scholarship, multimodal ethnography, and much more--are the subjects of reflection of delegates of the 2012 Victoria, BC, Public Ethnography conference.

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Ethnography and Speculative Fiction | Ethnography Matters

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Ethnography and Speculative Fiction | Ethnography Matters

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Editor's Note: In this third post in our "Ethnography and Speculative Fiction" series, Clare Anzoleaga (@ClareAnzoleaga) from Fresno City College and Porterville College discusses the potential of fictional accounts of ethnographic work. In doing so, she complements the piece by Anne Galloway and the article by Laura Forlano: this time it's less about design or design fictions and more about writing. More specifically, she highlights the rhetorical possibilities of such approach for understanding knowledge and shared meaning.
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In 1991 famous ethnographer, Dwight Conquergood, published a piece titled, "Rethinking Ethnography." One important point from this piece deals with the ethnographer's challenge to appropriately convey the experience of the "Being There" of fieldwork with the rhetorical final product of the "Being Here." It begs the question: What rhetorical/communicative strategies should we use to adequately tell the story of a culture? This came into play a bit further for me the other night when I had a dinner party for some colleagues. One of the topics we playfully debated had to do with whether ethnography should reside in the field of Communication theory or not (to me, this is a no-brainer). Ethnography is Communication because whether the researcher is in the field talking to people or at their laptop storifying analysis, one of its intents is to elicit a communicative and performative response. Ethnography sends a message through the form of a story either through text, performance, images or all of the above. This got me thinking, however, about this article on speculative fiction and ethnography that I was writing for ethnographymatters.net. While many speculative fiction writers have been incorporating the practice of ethnography into their work, few Communication scholars incorporate speculative fiction into their ethnography. Thus I began to wonder about Conquergood and his discussion on the rhetorical possibilities of ethnography and the differences between a researcher who writes ethnographic, peer-reviewed journal articles who uses speculative fiction, and a writer who uses ethnography as a way to write in the genre of speculative fiction. In this essay, I direct my focus of inquiry at some of the benefits and challenges of the ethnographer in the field of Communication who uses speculative fiction in their research. While my focus is oriented in the field of Communication, I acknowledge these concepts are also applicable to the broader work of any social researcher.

I should start with making two distinctions here first. On one hand, there is the question of where and how ethnography, which weaves in speculative fiction scenarios as part of the ethnographic analysis, is being produced in such scholarly fields as Communication. I ran a quick keyword search of "ethnography" and "speculative fiction," at " Communication & Mass Media Complete " and found no journal article or book results on this matter. This means there are few ethnographers in the Communication field who are currently producing peer-reviewed journal articles who use speculative fiction in their storified analysis (but I hope they start soon, ahem!).

Visions

I imagine that in the field of Communication (or any field in the Humanities), ethnography written with speculative fiction would exist as a type of storified analysis. The data that had been gathered in the field would depict a present or future where the rituals, feelings, and performances that had been documented originally would come alive through aesthetic stories of dystopian futures, horrors, or any other genre-specific speculative fiction narrative. As a Communication scholar, I see this new genre as an offshoot, extension, or evolution of ethnography as a way of addressing the ever-important concept of the "evocative" detail (Ellis, 2009). I see this rhetorical strategy capable of conveying meaning and emotions just as leading Communication-based ethnographers like Carolyn Ellis, Art Bochner, Shane Moreman, Kurt Lindemann, and Robin Boylorn are writing today. Furthermore, one of the main benefits of a speculative fiction narrative in ethnography offers ways into the forecasting of a possible future that may or may not happen. I think this strategy should be used more. As an ethnographer, we should use our unique position and the insight we obtain from the field to report, celebrate, or warn what we interpret in the making of what is to come. While ethnography is a useful method for gathering, coding, and analyzing data, incorporating speculative fiction can give the researcher the ability to talk about the possibilities of what might happen in an informed yet creative and entertaining way. It is a rhetorical platform to suppose, postulate, predict, or otherwise caution our readers on what the ethnographer sees could potentially be problematic or unique for that culture in the future.

And then there is the other hand, where ethnographic speculative fiction is not written with a scholarly intent but is published more widely and reaches more speculative fiction fans. In this scenario, the stories being produced here would be about character(s) writing and conducting ethnography, as they say in Star Trek, to "explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations." On this side of the coin, speculative fiction writers like Ursula K. le Guin, Michael Bishop, or Gene Roddenberry have been incorporating the stories of the practice and product of ethnography into their works of speculative fiction for decades.

So I write this essay from the position of inquiry as a mother of five with a Masters degree from the field of Communication. I also write from a position of speculative fiction fan who grew up in a home where the parental units were die-hard Trekkies. I also have a hard time with disciplinary and genre boundaries in general, so in many ways, I feel strongly connected to works of scholarship that do not adhere to traditional epistemological ways of knowing as a general rule. Ethnography to me is appealing because as a rogue methodology in the social scientific sense, it pushes boundaries toward new phenomena by which to explore how we understand cultural value, ritual, and performative meanings.

Epistemology

For those of us who write ethnography, it is widely known that the truths we encounter and write about will never have a capital "t" in its purest, most-reducible sense. Ethnography written as speculative fiction fits smoothly into this understanding of interpreted truth-painting. It is an analytic approach which interprets data collected from the field and reimagines that data through narratives of fantasy, horror, and utopian/dystopian adventures with academic theory. One foundational ethnographer out of the field of Communication, H. L. (Buddy) Goodall, reminds us that non-traditional scholarship should work at incorporating new methods. Goodall said it is a "myth to assume that our field - or perhaps any of the humanities fields - has a common literature, much less a common theoretical or methodological ground" (2000, p. 196). Ethnography written as speculative fiction therefore is one effective way to expand how we produce theoretical/methodological foundations. It provides us with a platform where epistemological understanding of everyday life can be reconstructed and explored without the confines of space and time. As a sub-genre of ethnography, it has limitless possibilities by which to understand how emerging social conditions and hierarchal power function together and in spite of one another.

This genre also creates a space for traditionally overlooked voices and narratives of a given culture that have been silenced or objectified. Sarah Amira de la Garza says a text should have the look and feel of the culture it describes and its "shared systems of meaning" (de la Garza, 2004, xv). When united, ethnography and speculative fiction offer better ways to understand morals and lessons of many cultures as they might exist in the future as a result of current political, educational, religious, or familial policies and norms of which they are encountering at their particular intersection of life. It is a way into wondering and discussing how cultures might evolve and develop and naturally includes people who have been ignored by previous scholarship.

Dimensions

One other exciting idea about ethnography which is written with speculative fiction is its potential to move away from traditional scholarly avenues (such as published papers sitting behind an expensive pay wall) and into the hands of the public. From an individual standpoint, a writer could use their ethnography to depict a future where the concerns they have in the present (and are gathered from the field) evolve into a diabolical situation in the future. As Soyini Madison says about critical ethnography, it is a way to begin to "probe other possibilities that will challenge institutions, regimes of knowledge, and social practices that limit choices, constrain meaning, and denigrate identities and communities" (Madison, 2005, p. 5). This artifact then provides a glimpse into the individual's personal fears and concerns from an informed, yet researched perspective. It allows the writer the benefits of positionality by which to tell the story of concerns and fears while reporting on an injustice, and how that injustice might manifest in the future as they see it.

Of course this does not just apply to one scholarly camp, but should be applicable to all. As an ethnographer in the field of Communication, I imagine my work being published at such places that anyone can access the work for free with certain keyword searches at Google. Furthermore, ethnography as a storified and theoretical analysis of culture naturally belongs on coffee tables in households and doctor's offices across the globe. This type of scholarship brings subjective ways of knowing and theory to areas of our culture that have been traditionally excluded from academic conversations. We need to imagine and then produce theory of which the final resting place is not locked away in a database, and not written in code that only a certain group of elites can understand, but of work that produces valuable information that is easily accessible to all. The means to writing and sharing new methodological approaches does not have to move from the top of the hierarchy chain downward; our audience is everyone. As ethnographers, we should set an example by writing our own transparent scholarship. Stories of emerging social phenomena that affect us all should be in the hands of the public, and ethnography written as speculative fiction is one effective means for doing so.

Ethnography as speculative fiction must contend with challenges of legitimacy. The lessons in ethnography, whether it was written as a traditional first or third person narrative, poem, or speculative fiction, however, can all interpret data based on events, feelings, and emotions that quantitative methods cannot offer. Any genre of narrative should be considered for ethnographic strategies as it effectively storifies multiple perspectives of people over long periods of time. Furthermore, using speculative fiction provides the researcher with the ability to critique current social constructions by imagining the future and then offering up that hypothetical end result to the reader.

Speculative fiction connects data interpreted in the field without the confines of space and time. Returning to Buddy Goodall for a minute, he reminds us that "facts are interpretations" (Goodall, 2000, p. 92). If we embrace the concept that truth is hard to reducibly measure and pinpoint given the multiple possibilities of human standpoints, the use of ethnography as speculative fiction is likewise a natural fit for the scholar.

This new and exciting genre has great potential for bridging the worlds between academia and the public. Through fieldwork, coding, and finally analytical, storified strategies, this ethnographic method should continue to develop and evolve in effective ways. While hard science confines a researcher to strict guidelines, methods like ethnography which use speculative fiction as part of their storified analysis present unlimited rhetorical possibilities for understanding knowledge and shared meaning. Writers who produce speculative fiction who use ethnography have known this for a long time now. To further my cause, I think I'll show the latest Star Trek movie to my colleagues the next time they come over for dinner.

References

Conquergood, D. (1991). Rethinking ethnography: Towards a critical cultural politics.
Communication Monographs, 58, 179-194.

De la Garza, S. A. (2004). María Speaks. New York, N.Y.: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.

Goodall, H. L. (2000). Writing the New Ethnography (Ethnographic Alternatives). Lanham,
Maryland: Alta Maria Press.

Madison, D. Soyini. (2005). Critical Ethnography: Methods, Ethics, and Performance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Check out past posts from guest contributors! Join our email groups for ongoing conversations. Follow us on twitter and facebook.

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Editor's Note: In this third post in our "Ethnography and Speculative Fiction" series, Clare Anzoleaga (@ClareAnzoleaga) from Fresno City College and Porterville College discusses the potential of fictional accounts of ethnographic work. In doing so, she complements the piece by Anne Galloway and the article by Laura Forlano: this time it's less about design or design fictions and more about writing.

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Genre-bending, or the Love of Ethnographic Fiction | Savage Minds

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Genre-bending, or the Love of Ethnographic Fiction | Savage Minds

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[Savage Minds is pleased to run this essay by guest author Jessica Falcone "Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies." (Ursula K. Le Guin 1969: ii) as part of our Writer's Workshop Series. Jessica Writing Ethnographic Fiction "Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth." (Le Guin 1969: iv) is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Kansas State University. She is the author of numerous articles on transnational Tibetan Buddhism, religious activism in diasporic Hindu and Sikh communities, and anthropological theory. She has won awards from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology for her ethnographic fiction, and from AIIS for her book manuscript Battling the Buddha of Love: A Cultural Biography of the Greatest Statue Never Built .]
I like to slip Ursula K. Le Guin into my syllabi as often as possible. I have used her work in my "Futurity" course, my "Utopias" class, my "Anthropology and Literature" course, and my "Ethnographic Methods" course. She is best known as a celebrated science fiction writer, but she also writes essays, realist fiction, experimental ethnographic fiction, children's lit, anarchist social theory, and more. Even when (especially when?) weaving yarns about aliens, she is writing about us, about humanity, about power, gender, identity, and cultural mores. For an anthropologist attentive to the beating art of ethnography, Ursula K. Le Guin's work is a softly uttered challenge about the complex nature of truth, and a whispered promise about the potential of fiction as a means of approaching it. Ever wonder what the "K" stands for? Kroeber, the "K" stands for Kroeber.

Ursula K. Le Guin's father, Alfred Kroeber, considered the first ethnographic novel- Bandelier's "the Delight Makers" (1890) - a successful and faithful representation of the Pueblo culture the author had studied; he called the novel, "...a more comprehensive and coherent view of native Pueblo life than any scientific volume on the Southwest" (1922:13). Although ethnographic fiction has a long and storied history in anthropology, it remains marginalized, perhaps even stigmatized.

I see myself as an ambassador for ethnographic fiction, albeit a poor one, perhaps. It is a nigh endangered species within our disciplinary ecosystem, and I myself have done precious little to rail against that trend. While I worked towards tenure, I published just one book chapter with pretensions to ethnographic fiction, and although it's destined to only ever be read by about a dozen people max, it is my most beloved text-baby. It is the true story of a giant statue in Bodh Gaya, India, which was cancelled, shifted, or interrupted, depending on who you ask and when. My narrative tacked back and forth between straight ethnography and (crooked?) ethnographic fiction. Since the piece was quite deliberately modelled upon Bruno Latour's "Aramis, or the Love of Technology," I titled it "Maitreya, or the Love of Buddhism," and called it a work of "social scientifiction." I would argue that my creative licenses made my product more compelling, and more achingly true. And if the piece succeeded at all, it was because of the fictions, not despite them.
Reading Ethnographic Fiction "Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!" (Le Guin 1969:iii)
In genre-normative ethnography, one can't invent dialogue or scenarios that never were; one can frame, but not fashion. If I want to relate a conversation, I have to go back to my carefully typed transcripts. In our genre-normative writing culture, there are conventions that require diligence and care. As I write ethnographic fiction, I can transgress those conventions. I can flagrantly put real people in an imaginary situation to envisage an event that probably did not happen. I can construct hybrid people out of a multiplicity of known entities. While I acknowledge that there is something deeply unsettling about the liberties that we take in ethnographic fiction, it can be as profoundly liberating at the same time. And it doesn't just feel good, it can be valuable. It can achieve things. For example, even my some of most stubbornly science-minded students admit that the ethnographic fiction interludes of Karen McCarthy Brown's "Mama Lola" enhance the value and integrity of her ethnography.

I welcome genre-bending and ambiguity, but I do have a stodgy streak. I may revel in a beautifully crafted lie as much as anyone, but I like to know when I am being lied to. I strongly prefer (demand?) for ethnographic fiction to be labelled as such, whether in the title, preface, introduction, footnotes, or main text. I wouldn't want ethnographic fiction to sneak up on me. In "Maitreya or The Love of Buddhism," I gave my readers a roadmap; if a section was prefaced with "And thus have I heard..." (a Buddhist literary trope), then it was ethnographic fiction. I feel that ethnographic fiction ought not try to hide in the guise of conventional ethnography for therein lies madness. Therein lies the rupture of a sacred trust. Therein lies the specter of Carlos Castaneda.

While our post-1980s anthropological writing culture is willing and able to embrace our conventional ethnography as "partial fictions" (Clifford) and "faction" (Geertz), there is a very clear implicit boundary between "making" and "making up" (and both of those theorists defined their terms as reflections upon the former as opposed to the latter). But is the difference really so clear cut? If all of our writing actually sits somewhere in between the poles of fact and fiction, then all writing is just a particular vintage of "faction." When Geertz used the word "faction," he meant for it to expose the inventive work of "making stuff," but not "making stuff up," but there are those on the other side of that line who would lay claim to the phrase. And that line-that all important line separating "making" from "making up"- it's elusive, impossible, and humming with movement. Somewhere in that nebulous center lies the kind of careful inventions that even the most dogmatic genre-normative ethnographer may engage in: the self-conscious veiling or massaging of details to protect the confidentiality of informants. And as for the far ends of our faction spectrum, I am not sure if it's even controversial to suggest that there is little (if any) writing on the extreme of either end. Facts are always still fashioned, and fictions are always still cultural.

My deep appreciation for ethnographic fiction notwithstanding, I don't pretend to have a handle on precisely what it is. Is it ethnographic fiction just fiction by a trained anthropologist? Yes, but isn't it also a creative form of ethnographic writing that transcends disciplinary borders? And if yes, then what is the difference between ethnographic fiction and very thickly described fiction (think: Orhan Pamuk or Edith Wharton)? In their respective treatises on ethnographic fiction, both Langness and Frank (1978), and Schmidt (1981), included the novelist (and non-anthropologist) Chinua Achebe in their broad surveys of what counts as ethnographic fiction. I would certainly consider some of Ursula K. Le Guin's work ethnographic fiction. And then there is the question of what differentiates ethnographic fiction from creative non-fiction (think: Susan Orlean), or "new journalism" (think: Hunter S. Thompson)? This particular hue upon the faction spectrum is crowded indeed.

Even the broadest definitions of ethnographic fiction tend to meet the following criteria: 1) it is a narrative nurtured by lived experience (one's own, or someone else's as gleaned through research, perhaps participant observation); 2) it is unfettered from the bonds of the precisely experienced and observed. Unfettered. I linger on that word. Unshackled, open, free.

During the Society for Humanistic Anthropology's member meeting at the AAAs in 2014, I led a discussion about a dilemma facing the ethnographic fiction award's selection committee: we've started getting more submissions from non-anthropologists. It has improved our (still low) applicant yield, but is a pool of writers from all walks of life good, bad or neither? Some members suggested closing the contest to all but professional anthropologists, but others fought for inclusivity. Defining an "anthropologist writing fiction" under those conditions would be a difficult task itself: would a student taking anthropology courses be thus excluded?; would someone with an anthropology PhD teaching in a religious studies or criminology department be thus excluded?; as a non-academic, would Zora Neale Hurston's ethnographic fiction endeavors have been thus excluded? If ethnographic fiction is not just creative writing by anthropologists, then does anything go?

We settled on a compromise of sorts. This year we have asked applicants to submit a short essay accompanying their ethnographic fiction that theorizes what ethnographic fiction is and how their submission fits into the genre. Ethnographic fiction is messy, so we have invited others to get down and dirty in the mud to wrassle the vagaries of genre-bending along with us. We don't care if a submission comes from Stephen King or Stephen Tyler, so long as they are willing to take their wobbly seats at the Mad Tea Party and work the riddle that may have no answer.

*

Bandelier, A.F. 1890 The Delight Makers. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.

Clifford, James. 1986 Introduction: Partial Truths. In Writing Culture. James Clifford and George Marcus, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Falcone, Jessica. 2012 Maitreya, or the Love of Buddhism: The Non-event of a Giant Statue in Bodh Gaya In Enlightening Bodh Gaya: Contested Histories of a Sacred Buddhist Space. Geary, David et al, ed. Routledge.

Geertz, Clifford. 1988 Works and Lives: the Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Kroeber, A.L. 1922 Introduction to American Indian Life. Ed. Elsie Clews Parsons, B.W. Huebsch, Inc.

Langness, l.l. and Gelya Frank. 1978 Fact, Fiction and the Ethnographic Novel, Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly, 3, 1-2:18-22.

Latour, Bruno. 1996 Aramis, or the Love of Technology. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Leguin, Ursula K. 1969 The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Walker.

McCarthy Brown, Karen. 2001 Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Updated and Expanded Edition). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schmidt, Nancy. 1981 The Nature of Ethnographic Fiction: a Further inquiry. Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly. 6(1):

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Genre-bending, or the Love of Ethnographic Fiction

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Savage Minds is pleased to run this essay by guest author Jessica Falcone "Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear.

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The Good Men Project - The Conversation No One Else Is Having

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The Good Men Project - The Conversation No One Else Is Having

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Visit Gear Hungry for a great range of gadgets and gifts for men.

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The Good Men Project - The Conversation No One Else Is Having

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Visit Gear Hungry for a great range of gadgets and gifts for men. Visit AmoMama to find out the latest gossip about your favorite celebs! Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll Advanced Writers offers a vast range of professional writing services for busy students. Have a timeshare you don't need or can't afford?

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Cheer Up! The Vulnerable, Weeping Man Is Back in Style

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Cheer Up! The Vulnerable, Weeping Man Is Back in Style

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A few weeks ago Matt McGorry, actor and male feminist du jour, shared a photo of himself crying. "Who needs bravado when you've got vulnerability? Being a 'real man' is being true to yourself," McGorry wrote in the accompanying tweet. Hashtagged #FindYourMagic, McGorry's tears were manufactured for a new Axe campaign.

Axe and its European iteration Lynx are best known for their hyper-masculine ads, crafted to promote scents that were designed to be aggressive, assaulting unsuspecting olfactory nerves with the potent smell of manliness. The Axe brand eventually became somewhat of a punchline, and as such, the company has recently tried to change its image. Their new campaign, titled Find Your Magic, is an eager attempt to shed its reputation as the soap of choice for bros who loved I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Instead of lauding hard abs and hot women, Axe's rebranding attempts to serve up a new kind of masculinity-a kind that prioritizes authentic individuality and expression over overt power and straight seduction. "Who needs a six-pack?" the voiceover in a social media-focused Lynx campaign asks, emphasizing that the new masculinity is better defined by abstract concepts like "protest," "moves," and, most importantly, "feeling."

The campaign, an ad executive told Adweek, is an attempt to "liberate guys from pressure and bullshit." Though the connection between liberation, empowerment, and consumption is spurious to its core, the signal of Axe's rebranding campaign comes through clearly enough: the era of the hyper-masculine bro is dead. Performative vulnerability is in. Even Tucker Max has been converted.

Drafting McGorry for this campaign was perhaps a stroke of genius. The Orange is the New Black and How to Get Away With Murder star is the prototype of vulnerable masculinity in the twenty-teens: he is sensitive, is unafraid to publicly express his feelings, is a feminist, reads the right books (we know because he Instagrams them) and has the right politics. He knows the right words and concepts; he can and will tell you all about intersectionality, for one. McGorry's Twitter and Instagram feed create a tightly constructed narrative that reiterates, over and over, that he "gets it." His particular display of vulnerability-shedding tears over the ghost of brands past-signifies that he's a male feminist, perhaps the epitome of a "male feminist," in that his very woke tears are a branding tool for Axe.

And McGorry isn't alone. Pop culture is flooded with vulnerable men, particularly of the celebrity variety. They usually-and vocally-feel an affinity for things like Bernie Sanders, social justice, the environment, and their mom. You'll find them on lists like "26 Times Celebrity Men Stood Up For Feminism." This vulnerable masculinity resembles "traditional" masculinity most strongly in the way it's a consciously rendered performance, one that fits with contemporary mores. It purports to balance strength, that age-old requirement, with gendered softness. These men cry without being weak; they are vulnerable without being penetrable; it's an iteration of masculinity that draws on the benefits of feeling without being subject to the gendered critique of emotional expression.

With this new masculinity, Chris Pine can weep at the Oscars and still helm a major action franchise; Drake's self-aware sensitivity cuts to the core yet he's still sexually potent; Wil Wheaton posts expressive black and white selfies, captioned with descriptions like "Moody," and yet remains the hero of fanboys; Mark Ruffalo contemplatively stares into the distance, signifying emotional depth, but he's still Bruce Banner; John Boehner can openly weep. Once celebrated for his authenticity, the vulnerable, crying man is now financially viable. It's an elaborate performance deeply tied to the market; tears are manufactured for the brand they best serve.

The publicly vulnerable man isn't exactly new. He is, unsurprisingly, an invention of the theater. Birthed by Shakespeare, the word "vulnerable" first appearance in the final act of Macbeth (1605). Macbeth, who has murdered nearly every character in the play, uses the word as a sort of "your mom" taunt in his final battle with Macduff. "Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests," Macbeth says. "I bear a charmed life which must not yield to one of a woman born."

Despite his "charmed life," Macbeth is politically spent by the time he's saying this. His kingdom is adrift; he's friendless. He's finally offed a few pages later. Shakespeare's first use of the word set a precedent for its loaded, uneasy implications: "vulnerable" is an insult that men would throw when their own grasp on power was uncertain in itself.

But for centuries, the idea of vulnerability was separable from what we now think of as vulnerability's natural expression: weeping and crying. These actions were not always linked to the physically vulnerable, politically at-risk man. In fact, weeping men were very much a part of a public culture well until the mid-nineteenth century.

In her essay "What Happened to the Manly Art of the Noble Weep?" Sandra Newman traces this long, damp history of male tears. From Homer's Illiad and well throughout the eighteenth century, men publicly cried over politics, religion and romance. "How good are the tears, how sweet the dirges, I would rather sing dirges than eat or drink," Euripides wrote in The Trojan Women (415 BCE), making clear that crying was more pleasurable than an indulgent feast.

Then, beyond the ancients, religious ecstasy provided another good reason for men to cry. The vulnerable male body was of central importance to the Catholic Church: the flesh "profits nothing," and the male body, broken and pierced, was the primary site of divine reflection. St. Augustine spilled tears of confession and religious enlightenment; medieval knights displayed authentic tears as part of elaborate courting rituals. As Newman points out, no one thought the tears of playboy-turned-saint Augustine were emasculating. Rather they were evidence of true religious conviction. For at least a couple of centuries, everyone agreed: as long as men wept authentic tears, then they were welcome to do so.

Crying, then, was part and parcel of an accepted performance of masculinity. Changing definitions of gender-ever slippery as they are-determined the person, place or things that could prompt a manly tear. If religion, music and love were longstanding, accepted sites of weepy expression, then by the eighteenth century, poetry and nature were added to the catalogue too. The Romantic poets and painters were epic weepers; they seemed to cry at nearly everything, from death to slightly dilapidated abbeys. In fact, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelly wrote with a kind of soulful longing about their tears; mournful expression was valued as a great interpretation of the sensitive poet's soul, and, in the cult of sensibility, vulnerability reigned supreme.

In one of Wordsworth's earliest poems, "On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress (1786)," he recounts his broody, rhyming delight at witnessing the tears of another:

She wept.-Life's purple tide began to flow
In languid streams through every thrilling vein;
Dim were my swimming eyes-my pulse beat slow,
And my full heart was swell'd to dear delicious pain.

"Delicious pain," is a resonate phrase. It could practically be the cri de coeur of the Romantics, artists who believed that sensibility and suffering were themselves heroic. Wordsworth's eyes welled at the very witness of pain while Keats conjured up the "wakeful anguish of the soul," like manna from heaven's "weeping cloud." Shelly, meanwhile, mourned the death of Keats by ordering "melancholy Mother," to "wake and weep," while simultaneously cursing "invulnerable nothings... like corpses in a charnel."

As male artists became more and more committed to tearful reflections, vulnerability extended beyond watery eyes and emotional display. The body, like the soul, was subsequently made overtly penetrable. In his 1844 self portrait, the French Realist Gustave Courbet depicts himself wounded by a sword, bleeding, suspended somewhere between sleep and death. Here is the vulnerable male artist in all of his proverbial glory: emotionally injured and dripping in blood, his vulnerability authenticates his artistic identity. Vulnerability reaffirmed the male artist's ability to move back and forth between intellect and emotion without being beholden to either; it reified an old notion that art was a man's game.

At the time, Courbet's overdetermined depiction may have marked the temporary death knell of the outwardly vulnerable man, as the Victorians would soon ask for propriety in the public sphere. The Victorians allowed male tears in private, in their valued domestic spaces; they also remained deeply invested in sentimentality, permitting men to shed tears of moral feeling. A male critic could weep over moral lessons drawn from Charles Dickens' Old Curiosity Shop and a judge could famously cry while listening to testimonies of grisly murders or sentencing a young woman to death. But ultimately, the Victorian era would neatly connect crying with the unnecessary expression of emotion.

Prior to the intervention of Charles Darwin, the outward expression of feeling had been believed to be a divine gift-a higher expression of the soul that self-evidently separated man from animal. In Darwin's hands, however, crying, like all emotion, was merely part of the evolutionary process, a natural development of communication. Darwin's " philosophy of weeping," which he wrote about in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal (1872), suggested that tears were the leftovers of an inherited habit-something that was useful to infants and our ancestors, but served no real purpose for modern adults.

"Englishmen rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief; whereas in some parts of the Continent the men shed tears much more readily and freely," Darwin wrote. Crying, then, was for women, babies, and the French. By the end of the nineteenth century, vulnerability wasn't a question of culture, it was one of biology.

In turn, industrialism seized on and exploited the unemotional man. Mid-nineteenth century factory managers encouraged their employees to quit the with crying; strong and robust men, after all, increased productivity. "The new manliness," Tom Lutz writes in his Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears, "encouraged men to curb their emotional expression." Unblushing, heterosexual masculinity was useful for both corporate profit and the decades of combat that would follow the Industrial Revolution. The poet of sensibility gave way to some of the most enduring stereotypes of masculinity: the rugged hyper-individualist, the alienated writer, and the emotionally repressed marketplace man. The great irony, of course, is that Don Draper is his own capitalistic invention.

The crying man never truly disappeared; he just became subject to market forces and scripts of gender that regulated his excess. Sure, a man could cry over death or a football game, but the tears were subject to a Protestant ethic of gentlemanly restraint. Those who showed too much vulnerable emotion-particularly over the wrong things-were subject to censure, a means of hemming in the ever-shifting, ever-important boundaries of gender.

In 2007, these boundaries were tested virally when Chris Crocker posted his "Leave Britney Alone!" video on YouTube. In the video, Crocker, a self-described "sobbing teen lady," engages in a semi-satirical performance in which he melodramatically defends Britney Spears' disastrous MTV Music Awards performance. Replete with mascara-filled tears and theatrical delivery, Crocker's video was purposefully unmasculine-so much so that its parodic intent was seemingly lost on a large portion of the internet.

One newspaper compared the "narcissism" of Crocker's video with the "self-gratification on the scale of an armed sociopath walking onto a campus." Leave Britney Alone had crossed a digital line of sorts: Crocker's excess was offensive because of what it rejected. His self-conscious performance seemed to engage with an artistic subculture that valued the subversiveness of queer (male) vulnerability, while mocking the language of male fandom, whose strict code positions true loyalty as something that shows up mainly in intricate, often arbitrary knowledge of a subject. Men, this code says, show appreciation in the "rational" display of encyclopedic knowledge rather than "irrational" feeling.

Later on, the good cry Michael Jordan had at his 2009 induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame also went viral. The moment, captured in all of its weepy excess by AP photographer Stephen Savoia, was perfect for an online atmosphere engaged in an ambiguous exploration of masculinity, excess and vulnerability-one that would both celebrate and be deeply embarrassed by Crying Jordan, and has continued to do both for years. Part of the humor perpetually elicited by Crying Jordan is a transgression of boundaries. Men are generally allowed to cry about sports, but there is a kind of restraint expected in both fan and athlete, admirer and admired.

Crying Jordan has subsequently been turned into countless gifs, his head superimposed on nearly anyone who has massively and publicly messed up. The comedy is in the indulgence: too many tears, too much emotion, and too much embarrassment.

Photographer Sam Taylor-Wood's series, Crying Men (2002-04), offered a parallel examination of these dynamics in a set of tightly focused and framed images of male celebrities crying. Laurence Fishburne, Daniel Craig, and Robin Williams all sat for Taylor-Wood's camera, teasing out the dichotomy between the "artifice inherent in acting and the release of what is inside all of us." Critics struggled with Taylor-Wood's series, unsure of what to make of such a close examination of male vulnerability. An uncertain critic wrote in the Telegraph:

They show us people in whom popular culture has come to invest an almost saint-like significance. These men are icons, worshipped by many for their talent, their looks, their success. Partly because of their fame, they have gained a meaning beyond their physical presence.

Reduced to tears, their grief has an authority we would not necessarily grant to anonymous individuals. With her stark and simple images, Taylor-Wood is seeking to bestow on her sitters a spiritual significance born of their celebrity, akin to that of the crying saints in Medieval and Renaissance art.

Unable to make sense of modern masculine men openly weeping, the Telegraph critic resorts to history, to crying saints, whose vulnerability seems authentic and appropriate. It's a strange capitulation to history-a return to the idea that emotional and physical vulnerability could be inherently separated, and needed to be, at that. The truth is, as Taylor-Wood's project acknowledged implicitly, that grief and sadness are universal. Nonetheless, male tears are perpetually read as transgressive: we interpret emotion based on the identity of the body that weeps.

In the twenty-first century, we explore male vulnerability in twenty-first-century ways. Thinkpieces and videos ask no one in particular, "What Makes Men Cry?" More recently, pop psychology and scientific journals have dedicated a sizable number of words to decoding male tears. Crying, some studies suggest, is not just good for the soul, but leads to longer, healthier lives (perhaps unsurprisingly, the 19th century saw a spate of scientific studies concerning the physical benefit of male tears as well).

These pieces are haunted by a phantom-the "real man" who never cries. These paragons of masculinity, the narrative goes, are in need of some emotional release; buying into stereotypes frays at their psyche and hurts their health. But this script can't be rewritten with dispassionate medical advice; such a massive edit requires a familiar point of departure. Thus, in the language of the Internet, simple actions like manly tears became heroic, and sexualized. Crying men were recast from "wuss" to "badass," and shedding a few tears could help a bro get laid. Gender, tears, and vulnerability thus found its necessary semantic bridge in sexual heroism: what was "woke," in other words, was automatically " bae. "

There's a certain unconvincing posturing in all of these arguments. Crying is inevitably framed as an iconoclastic, damn the man, tear down the establishment kind of act. Yet the crying men ask to retain their establishment potency; they ask for their emotional expression to be seen not as mundane, but heroic. And so traditional masculinity remains both a straw man and an unchallenged, ahistorical script. Queerness and gender fluidity still have no place in the celebration of male tears. The new masculinity shows solidarity with nothing but itself.

Where does this leave women? Women are allowed to cry, the narrative goes-and men should be granted the same cultural permission. But this isn't exactly true. Women are not allowed to cry as much as they are expected to cry; to be ruled by an excess of emotion and governed by irrational expression rather than rational ideas. The stereotypes are familiar: crazy ex-girlfriends, trainwrecks, the hot mess. Women's crying is still tethered to its stigmas and stereotypes; men's tears get to remake themselves, combining vulnerability and potency in ways that are continually validated, continually new. Male tears have been constructed to survive their own critique.

As male tears abound, it seems worth asking, for whom exactly is the renegotiation of the publicly vulnerable man for?

If, as historians of emotions have argued, that the stereotype of the stoic, tearless man was an invention of capitalism, created for the purpose of lining the pockets of industrial tycoons and underpinned by nationalism, then who does the new vulnerability serve? Perhaps some idea of authentic individuality, which is, not coincidentally, what brands want right now too. Matt McGorry's teary tweet-his performance of a vulnerable "real man"-was done for the sake of giving Axe a makeover. Which came first, brand or tears, is hard to say. What exactly is "real" about the new vulnerable "real man" is even harder to identify.

Nonetheless, the model is solidifying. Earlier this month, Vanity Fair jokingly labeled male tears the "hottest trend in movies." The New Yorker celebrated the vulnerable masculinity depicted on Outlander and The Americans. The script of manhood is being rewritten. Male tears are no longer the mockable stuff of ironic misandry: for the first time ever, masculine vulnerability has the power to sell on a large capitalist scale.
Illustration by Jim Cooke

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Cheer Up! The Vulnerable, Weeping Man Is Back in Style

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A few weeks ago Matt McGorry, actor and male feminist du jour, shared a photo of himself crying. "Who needs bravado when you've got vulnerability? Being a 'real man' is being true to yourself," McGorry wrote in the accompanying tweet. Hashtagged #FindYourMagic, McGorry's tears were manufactured for a new Axe campaign.