LABORING FOR THE MOTHERLAND: A MOTHER-ARTIST-RESEARCHER-TEACHER’S RECONFIGURATION OF THE STATE-SPONSORED TRANSNATIONAL TEACHER By Rebekah R. Gordon A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education—Doctor of Philosophy 2022 ABSTRACT LABORING FOR THE MOTHERLAND: A MOTHER-ARTIST-RESEARCHER-TEACHER’S RECONFIGURATION OF THE STATE-SPONSORED TRANSNATIONAL TEACHER By Rebekah R. Gordon This arts-based inquiry explores historical and contemporary configurations of state-sponsored transnational teachers, or those who teach overseas in programs that are financially and/or programmatically supported by their home government. In the U.S., some examples of state-sponsored transnational teaching programs include the Peace Corps, the Fulbright Specialist Program, and the English Language Fellow Program. Standing on feminist grounding, I draw upon maternal concepts from the field of mother(hood) studies to frame my exploration and to interrogate and disrupt the patriarchal systems in which state-sponsored transnational teaching is situated. More specifically, I extend a/r/tographic methodology to include my identifications and embodied perspectives as a mother-artist- researcher-teacher. My proposed methodology of m/a/r/tography affords me the opportunity to think intergenerationally about the ways that orientations, collective body memory, family histories, and national legacies relevant to state-sponsored transnational teaching are passed down. By using epistolary narrative and creative non-fiction, I reflect on my own experiences as a mother, as a daughter, and as a former state-sponsored transnational teacher who labored for her motherland. To analyze these personal experiences, I adopt a diffractive approach in which these experiences are viewed through one another as well as through additional sources of data, including interviews with other state-sponsored transnational teachers, letters from my mother, photographs and images, poetry, film, children’s literature, and other forms of scholarship. The use of a diverse and wide-ranging set of scholarship is an attempt to not only spark creative connections between seemingly disparate sources of data but also inspire more accessible and humanizing ways of doing research and re-imagining (teacher) education that welcomes processes of re/dis/orientation. Copyright by REBEKAH R. GORDON 2022 To Ann and Ophelia—thank you for continuing to shape me into the mother I am un/becoming. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................................................... vii CHAPTER ONE: CONCEPTION ........................................................................................................................ 1 Prelude ...................................................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction .............................................................................................................................................. 5 Un/becoming a Mother-Artist-Researcher-Teacher................................................................................. 6 A Mother-Artist-Researcher-Teacher’s Methodology .............................................................................. 8 Intergenerational M/a/r/tographic Methods ......................................................................................... 11 M/a/r/tography as a Diffractive Methodology ....................................................................................... 14 CHAPTER TWO: ORIENTATION .................................................................................................................... 17 Prelude .................................................................................................................................................... 17 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 19 State-sponsored Transnational Teachers ............................................................................................... 21 Missionary Teachers ............................................................................................................................... 23 Colonial Teachers .................................................................................................................................... 24 Volunteer Teachers ................................................................................................................................. 27 Domestic Educational Imperialism ......................................................................................................... 29 Interlude.................................................................................................................................................. 32 Orientation to the Fellow Program ......................................................................................................... 34 Intertwining Histories of Arrival .............................................................................................................. 37 CHAPTER THREE: LABOR ............................................................................................................................. 40 Prelude .................................................................................................................................................... 40 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 44 The Female Frontier Teacher and the Feminization of Teaching in the U.S. .......................................... 46 Diplomacy: Protection and Promotion of the Motherland .................................................................... 50 Interlude.................................................................................................................................................. 53 Citizen Diplomacy: The Gendered Labor of Not-Quite Diplomats .......................................................... 55 Emotional Labor: A Shared Aspect of the Institutions of Teaching and Diplomacy ............................... 59 State-sponsored Transnational Teachers and the Performance of Emotional Labor ............................ 61 “Highlighting” Everyday Emotional Labor............................................................................................... 63 Lingering Questions ................................................................................................................................ 71 CHAPTER FOUR: BODIES ............................................................................................................................. 73 Prelude .................................................................................................................................................... 73 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 77 The Body Politic: Individual Bodies vs. Collective Bodies ....................................................................... 79 Photo Interlude ....................................................................................................................................... 83 Encountering Bodies: The Political and Self-conscious Nature of the Meeting of Physical Bodies ........ 84 Interlude.................................................................................................................................................. 90 Body Memory ......................................................................................................................................... 93 Emplacement .......................................................................................................................................... 96 v “Where the Land Meets the Body”: Performing Citizenship .................................................................. 99 CHAPTER FIVE: MOTHER TONGUE ............................................................................................................ 103 Prelude .................................................................................................................................................. 103 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 106 A Brief History of the English Language and Language Ideologies in the U.S., Part I ........................... 108 Interlude................................................................................................................................................ 111 A Brief History of the English Language and Language Ideologies in the U.S., Part II .......................... 112 The English Language and the U.S. Empire ........................................................................................... 113 Photo Interlude ..................................................................................................................................... 115 The Birth of TESOL and the Roots of its Bodies of Knowledge ............................................................. 116 Interlude................................................................................................................................................ 119 Bodies of Knowledge and Bodies in the Classroom .............................................................................. 123 Poetic Postlude ..................................................................................................................................... 128 CHAPTER SIX: BIRTH .................................................................................................................................. 129 Prelude .................................................................................................................................................. 129 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 131 Lessons Learned .................................................................................................................................... 131 Re-imagining Teacher Education, Public Diplomacy, and the Art of Human Interaction ..................... 137 Epistemological and Methodological Contributions............................................................................. 143 REFERENCES .............................................................................................................................................. 147 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Ophelia’s Hypothetical Birth Announcement………………………………………………………………………..… 41 Figure 2. “The New School-mistress” (1873)…………..…………………………………………………………………………..… 49 Figure 3. Fellow Program “Highlights Form”…………………………………………………………………………………..……… 68 Figure 4. Visual Depiction of the King’s Two Bodies from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651)………………… 81 Figure 5. “Looking at You Looking at Me Looking at You”……………………………………………………………..….…… 84 Figure 6. “Making the Strange Familiar”………………..…………………………………………………………………….……… 116 Figure 7. “Masking Identities”…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 122 vii CHAPTER ONE: CONCEPTION Prelude March 6, 2020 Dearest Ophelia, I made mistakes. I didn’t catch you when you rolled off the unevenly-sunken-in sofa. I didn’t stop Mario in time from piercing his claws into your delicate skin. I didn’t wait until the recommended-six months to start feeding you prunes and mashed avocados. I didn’t take you for a walk outside every day like I promised I would. And I didn’t write you any letters. Until now. My mom wrote her first letter to me 11 days before I was born and faithfully did so on (most of) my birthdays. I remember sneaking into her room to hold the security-lined envelopes up to the light, but all my attempts to decipher her words were in vain. She said I could open the letters when I turned 18, but sentimentality wasn’t exactly a priority when I entered adulthood. The less time I spent in that mustard-yellow house on 3005 Eagle Avenue, the more distant those memories of yesteryear became. But after 34 years, I finally opened that first letter. In it, my mom wrote, “Always remember that we wanted you very much and will love you no matter what.” So, I start this first letter to you by telling you how much you were wanted. The best way I can do that is through a story. The story of your conception. Over two years. 26 months. 112 weeks. 784 days. 18,816 hours. 1,128,960 minutes. 67,737,600 seconds. Okay, wait. More than 67 million seconds? This probably only means something to number-crunching, former mathletes. My parents still proudly display a MATHCOUNTS trophy in my childhood bedroom, yet I cannot fathom time measured in seconds. But how can I express the time it took? How can I boil down countless moments of heartbreak into the small, innocuous number two? How to conceive of time? Any woman attempting to get pregnant is hyperaware of her cycle. Average of 28 days. 4 weeks. Once a month. Ovulation on day 14. Give or take. Wait for that 0.8-degree Fahrenheit increase in basal body temperature. Remember that sperm live up to 5 days but know that there are only 24 hours of ovum vitality. And only an instant to conceive. Sperm meets ovum. Bam! Zygote. We had at least two that I know of. The perks of living in China include cheap pregnancy tests readily available at every corner pharmacy. My initial embarrassment of buying tests by the dozen lessened as I patronized a different shop each time I needed to restock my dwindling supply. I cannot count the number of sticks I peed on. Eventually, I fine-tuned the technique by peeing into a shot glass and delicately dipping the litmus paper just deep enough to commence the absorption process. One, one thousand. Two, one thousand. Three, one thousand. Pull out. Why bother pissing all over my fingers when I could be more civil about it? But what kind of civil woman pees in a shot glass, washes it, and returns it to the cupboard? Sometimes I watched as the magenta stains danced across the narrow strip. Other times, I left the bathroom and paced erratically around our tiny apartment. Always alone. Traditionally, conception takes two, but this felt like a one-(wo)man job. If he knew I was this obsessed, he’d tell me to relax. “We’ll figure it out,” he’d say. I still hate that phrase. 1 The cheaper the test, the longer the wait. My frugality trumped my impatience. 5 to 15 minutes. Check at 5 minutes. Remind self not to be upset. There’s still a chance. Pace some more and return in 10 minutes. Remind self not to be upset. Fuck that. I am upset. Again! Well, there were those two times I was not immediately upset. The second pink line may have been as faint as that red wine stain I’ve been (re)scrubbing out of my favorite shirt for years. But it was there. I had to squint. I had to hold the stick at just the right angle, in just the right light. But if I tilted my head 20 degrees to the right, it was there. I didn’t tell him. I wanted to be sure. I had to travel to Guangzhou for work, so it would give me time to plan the perfect announcement. Nothing cheesy like sticking a Chinese mantou (steamed bun) in the oven or hiding a stick covered with urine in a spot he’d be sure to look and touch. No, he deserved better. We deserved better. We had been trying for over a year. I couldn’t contain my excitement. Somehow, I let it slip to my boss. And then that zygote slipped. So much blood. Worse than the heaviest period of my life. But not at first. I Googled “spotting in early pregnancy” and prayed that the muddy stains in my now-ruined and not-easy-to-replace-in-China underwear just meant that I was among the 7-24% of women who experience this and go on to have healthy pregnancies. As the bleeding increased, so, too, did my panic. God knows that the correlation between anxiety and number of absurd internet searches is as positive as any pregnant woman’s First Response test. BabyCenter. Netmums. The Bump. They all claimed to have the answers I sought. And answers were what I needed. I couldn’t stop reading. Blog post after blog post. Every success story gave me a glimmer of hope. Every heart-wrenching loss made me seek more success stories. A vicious cycle within my cycle. The researcher in me sensed the subjectivity of those anecdotes, yet objectivity could never appease my emotions. As much as that first loss gave me hope—I could conceive—I became more convinced that my body was not capable of feats as wondrous as pregnancy. And it wasn’t just in my mind. My body was sending me messages loud and clear. 40 days. Feels like a long time when you’ve sworn off chocolate or sex for Lent. Feels even longer when you’re menstruating continuously. After that chemical pregnancy in Guangzhou, I figured it would take some time for my body to regulate and return to my (mostly) reliable 28-day cycle. I ignored the spotting for a week or two but started growing concerned when it had been over a month and I had ruined all of my not-easy-to-replace panties. Getting “my problem” checked out in China was the last thing I wanted to do. My previous experiences at these confusing and insensitive institutions reminded me to avoid revisiting at all costs. But the cost was high. Wreak havoc on whatever viability was left of my reproductive organs or suck it up and be the worthless center of attention? I opted for the latter. Oxymoron or not, public Chinese hospitals are places where foreigners are inspected by doctors and passersby alike, yet none of that attention exudes an ounce (or a milliliter) of compassion. Thank God for Grace. The wife of my Chinese supervisor accompanied me from place to place in that sterile-feeling but not-so-sterile Ninth People’s Hospital of Chongqing. 2 ☑ Go to check-in window. ☑ Shout description of “my problem” for all to hear. ☑ Keep composure when all heads turn and stare. ☑ Go to payment window. ☑ Repeat description of “my problem” and pay necessary registration fees. ☑ Breathe and attempt to remain calm. ☑ Walk outside to a much older building housing all things gynecological. ☑ Wonder to self, “How could I ever do this without Grace translating and navigating?” ☑ Sit in waiting area. ☑ Ignore Grace’s jokes that I might be pregnant. If only she knew. ☑ Follow doctor to room filled with people. ☑ Feel grateful for wearing skirt. ☑ Try to muster self-worth after doctor shoves hand inside of me with no warning. ☑ Go back to sit with Grace. ☑ Act as if I have not just been violated. ☑ Repeat process with another doctor. ☑ Replace hand with ultrasound wand. ☑ Walk back to the main building. ☑ Go to payment window again. ☑ Shout all of the tests performed and medications needed. ☑ Pay for services and meds. ☑ Walk outside and take receipt to pharmacy in yet another building. ☑ Receive box of unknown meds. “Don’t worry. This will help.” In the end, I never found out what might be wrong with me. “No translation.” Miraculously or just coincidentally, I stopped bleeding after taking some traditional Chinese medicine. I mixed the fish-food granules into boiling water twice a day. After just two days, my body regulated. But I was far from trusting it. I continued tracking every possible symptom or sign of my reproductive cycle but pretended that it wasn’t the only thing on my mind. I decided to train for a marathon instead. What else besides running for hours could take my mind off the emotional suffering? I wanted to feel the pain in other parts of my body because my heart and uterus had taken too much. I was convinced that my body was flawed. And that it was my fault. Too many one-night stands? Too many precautionary doses of Plan B? Or the pelvic inflammatory disease that went undetected for so long? I knew the numbers: for every bout of PID, a woman’s risk of infertility increases by 10%. Surely, I was not one of the lucky ninety. All those attempts at preventing pregnancy temporarily must have resulted in preventing pregnancy permanently. Despite a looming sense of futility, we kept trying. In the parenting world, people love to say, “the days are long, but the years are short.” In the parent-to-be-or-not-to-be world, the opposite is true. I hated typing those panicked texts: “Babe, where are you??! I told you to come home early tonight–this is our fertile window!!!” 3 I would lay awake in bed imagining what he could possibly be doing that was more important than making a baby. Little did I know how therapeutic those nights out were for him. We all have our own ways of dealing with infertility and he’s not much of a runner. Like perfectly balanced triple scoop ice cream cones longing to be devoured, those once-a-month nights hastily melted into sticky puddles of fruitlessness. The days were short. But, oh, did those two years drag on. 26 months. 112 weeks. 784 days. 18,816 hours. 1,128,960 minutes. 67,737,600 seconds. As your grandma reminded me in that first letter she wrote before I was born: There will be good times and bad but that is what life is about. We will make mistakes along the way and hopefully learn from them. I just want you to know that God is always there for you if we may not be and he chose us to be your parents on earth. How lucky we are! We have been given the pleasure to watch you grow and change and become a special person as each of us are. When I walked over the pedestrian bridge to the library last month, I saw the Red Cedar flooding yet again. A tear streamed down my cheek as I thought about the world I brought you into. But you are here for many reasons. Stopping that river from continuing to flood each year might be one of those. I can’t wait to find out what the others are! Love always, Mommy 4 con·cep·tion /kənˈsepSH(ə)n/ n. the action of conceiving a child or of a child being conceived n. the forming or devising of a plan or idea Introduction It’s hard to believe that two years have passed since I wrote this first letter to my daughter. Little did I know that writing that letter in my arts-based research course about conceiving Ophelia would lead to another conception: the formulation of ideas, ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies for this dissertation. Admittedly, the process of conceiving (of) a dissertation is almost as emotionally draining as creating human life. Well, at least for me. Potential ideas for this milestone have been brewing in my mind for years. After all, most applications for doctoral programs ask for a research proposal or statement of research interests. As I envisioned this next chapter of my life more than five years ago, I shared my desire to evaluate the effectiveness of short-term teacher professional development programs, particularly transnational ones sponsored by the U.S. government via public diplomacy initiatives, like those of Peace Corps, Fulbright, and English Language Programs, where teacher participants are tasked with being “representatives and cultural ambassadors”1 of their country. Considering that I had been a state-sponsored transnational teacher2 for four years’ prior to beginning my doctoral program, my proposed topic made sense. Certainly, my time as a U.S. Department of State English Language Fellow in Ethiopia (2013-14) and China (2014-17) impacted me deeply. When I wasn’t attempting to conceive a child, I taught English language courses to undergraduate students majoring in business English, English education, and related fields. I also traveled to other cities to facilitate professional development workshops for K-16 instructors, to teach in 1 English Language Programs, n.d.-a 2 State-sponsored transnational teachers is a term that I created to refer to teachers who teach overseas and are supported programmatically and/or financially by their national government (see Chapter Two: Orientation). 5 the English Access Microscholarship Program, and to be involved in various U.S. Embassy programming, like American cultural events, writing contests, or college application preparation workshops. But it wasn’t these instructional activities in and of themselves that I have become interested in. For me, the experience of being a state-sponsored transnational teacher runs much deeper than the classroom; yet, if someone would ask me about my time living and working in Ethiopia or China, I’d be quick to mention the dilapidated state of my Ethiopian classroom or the ambitiousness of my Chinese students. I would pair these outward phenomena with sociohistorical explanation of why things were the way they were. These informative details usually satisfied inquisitors, but such minutiae did not reveal what it felt like to be a state-sponsored transnational teacher laboring for her country. Thus, I seek to explore the embodied experiences of state-sponsored transnational teachers in and out of the classroom. I invite others into conversation about the sociohistorical realities that have shaped Americans’ orientations about teaching the foreign Other,3 and how the labor of state- sponsored transnational teachers has been and continues to be racialized and gendered. By centering the state-sponsored transnational teacher’s body and its reconfigurations, I hope to shed light on the complex negotiations that occur between state-sponsored transnational teachers and those whom they encounter, including the students in their classrooms. Standing on feminist grounding, I mobilize maternal perspectives and metaphors as well as my own experiences as a mother to situate and interrogate state-sponsored transnational teachers’ labor within patriarchal institutions. Un/becoming a Mother-Artist-Researcher-Teacher The past four years of being immersed in coursework and scholarly conversations have exposed me to various ways of thinking and being in the world. With each exposure to new epistemologies, 3 “Other” is intentionally capitalized to disrupt practices that marginalize foreigners into an invisible common noun rather than a proper noun (e.g., Asian Americans, French, Chinese, etc.). A similar movement to capitalize “Black” and “Indigenous” has seen moderate success as large news outlets have changed their conventions (Apperson, 2020). 6 methodologies, and theoretical frameworks, my research ideas have shifted. Although I sometimes felt like Eric Carle’s The Mixed-up Chameleon4 by taking on identities that mirrored my professors, peers, or other scholars, it has been my process of un/becoming. The slash ( / ) used in un/becoming “suggests that unbecoming is also becoming, and becoming is unbecoming.” The slash does not represent “a transition between two states of being, but rather a perpetual displacement of a static identity.”5 Indeed, my identity was perpetually displaced throughout graduate school. A pivotal moment of un/becoming occurred when my daughter, Ophelia, was about six months old. I had survived my first year of the program while pregnant, so I figured that I was ready for the challenges that would come with year two and a newborn. Two months into the semester, I broke. I called my sister from the parking lot outside of Erickson Hall. “I just can't do it,” I sobbed. “I'm a terrible mother, an awful student, and a shitty wife. I'm just not good at anything.” Between daycare drop-offs and pick-ups, household chores, middle-of-the-night nursing, bottle sanitization, diaper changes, and office pumping sessions, I had little left to dedicate to my studies. As much as I wanted to drop out of the program, I took a professor’s advice to enroll in just one course the second semester of my second year. To me, this was a failure. Un/becoming. My decelerated pace meant that my already-long five-year program might become even longer. People had told me that “grad school is your own journey,” but I didn’t believe it until I was forced to reconsider my priorities. What actually mattered to me? Who did I want to un/become? Postpartum depression made these difficult questions to answer. Most days, I believed that I didn’t love anything, except Ophelia (and sometimes not even her). It felt as though my life mission was solely to protect and raise my daughter. Even though we spent over nine hours apart most weekdays, she was always on my mind and drove all my decision-making processes. Feminist philosopher Sara 4 Carle, 1998 5 Knight et al., 2005, 256 7 Ruddick describes this labor as maternal work, or the commitment to meeting the demands of preservation, growth, and social acceptance of a child.6 Stumbling upon Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace allowed me to verbalize what I had been experiencing as an exhausted but committed graduate student mother. While part of me felt perpetually scatterbrained and not cut out for the rigors of academia, Ruddick reminded me that “mothers must think.”7 She further explains that “Daily, mothers think out strategies of protection, nurturance, and training. Frequently conflicts between strategies or between fundamental demands provoke mothers to think about the meaning and relative weight of preservation, growth, and acceptability.”8 Although I didn’t see the immediate connection between my maternal thinking and my scholarly work, Ruddick’s words began to smother my feelings of unproductiveness and inadequacy. Once I began to see my ways of living and thinking as a mother as an asset, I wondered how this might influence my work as a researcher. At first, I latched onto Cheryl Matias’ term motherscholar9 which intentionally omits a hyphen between “mother” and “scholar” to highlight the inseparable nature of these two identifications.10 Yet something was missing. Motherscholar accounted for two dominant sets of identifications and practices but overlooked other salient aspects of my self(ves) and the methodological “lifestyle”11 I aspired to. For this reason, I was intrigued when I encountered the arts- based research practice of a/r/tography. A Mother-Artist-Researcher-Teacher’s Methodology At first, I was put off by the two slashes in a/r/tography because they felt pretentious. Was it really necessary to mutilate this word and render it indecipherable without an accompanying 6 Ruddick, 1989 7 Ibid., 23 8 Ibid., 23-24 9 Matias, 2011 10 I employ the concept of identification rather than identity to highlight the continual construction of how one is defined by self and others (Dunn, 1998) 11 Vellanki and Fendler, 2018 8 explanation? But the more I read, the more I realized the symbolism and function of those punctuation marks. In short, a/r/tography is a living inquiry and form of self-study that “lingers in the liminal spaces between a(artist) and r(researcher) and t(teacher).”12 Described as a methodology that leverages artistic and textual understandings and experiences, a/r/tography challenges the boundaries between creating, researching, and teaching. Building on the work of Deleuze and Guattari,13 a/r/tography recognizes the rhizomatic relationality of one’s identifications and practices. Like crabgrass growing in all directions, the knowledge and living practices of the artist-researcher-teacher are connected so complexly that there are no clear beginnings or endings rather middles or in-between spaces that are dynamic.14 Thus, the slashes literally and metaphorically make space for the consideration of the in-between. “But I’m not an artist.” Academia’s imposter syndrome epidemic had infected me. I figured that a/r/tography was meant for art educators and “real” artists. Although I took every art class my high school offered and long considered becoming an art educator, I hadn’t identified as an artist in years. With Ophelia’s arrival and the demands of grad school, my artistic endeavors paused. However, my attempts to conform to what I perceived as the social norms of academia brought me little joy. Thank goodness for the select few professors who saw the repressed artist in me. I may not have been actively producing art, but I never lost my desire to create and re/imagine. Thus, I was drawn to a/r/tography’s potential to “challenge, provoke, and frustrate the desire for one, final, stable, or fixed meaning.”15 Neilson offers the concept of scholartistry to embrace artists’ ability to “subvert the ordinary and see the extraordinary.”16 In this way, “scholartists bring to inquiry the artistry of their imaginative powers in the literary and visual arts.”17 Adopting a perspective of 12 Springgay, Irwin, and Kind, 2005, 902 13 Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 14 Irwin, Beer, Springgay, Grauer, Xiong, and Bickel, 2006 15 Irwin, LeBlanc, Ryu, and Belliveau, 2018, 50 16 Neilsen, 1998, 274 17 Neilsen, 2002, 212 9 scholartistry allows me to explore the entanglements of state-sponsored transnational teaching and motherhood in a manner that is not linear or confined to prescriptive practices. Adopting a fluid methodology like a/r/tography makes it possible for me to explore my experiences as they un/fold. As Springgay, Irwin, and Kind explain: A/r/tography is a living practice; a life writing, life creating experience into the personal, political, and professional aspects of one’s life. Through attention to memory, identity, autobiography, reflection, meditation, story telling, interpretation, and/or representation, artists/researchers/teachers expose their living practices in evocative ways.18 Returning to the newfound centrality of my identification and practices as a mother, I propose m/a/r/tography, or a mother’s a/r/tography, to acknowledge the entanglement of this identification with my artist-researcher-teacher self. Just as the identifications of artist, researcher, and teacher are contiguous and none are “privileged over another as they occur simultaneously in and through time and space,”19 I contend that those who do motherwork20 should equally leverage the insights and perspectives embedded in their practices of mothering. Although maternal work may parallel the work of teachers, artists, and researchers, the act of explicitly recognizing it as another interrelated dimension creates room for disruption and opens us to the “unknowable” and the “incomprehensible”.21 M/a/r/tography extends the relational aspects of a/r/tography to include maternal subjectivities. Mother is not a single, static identification. As Juhasz explains, maternal subject-positions include: a mother-who-is-a-daughter in relation to her own mother; a mother-who-is-a-daughter in relation to her child; a mother-who-is-a-woman in relation to the social world, where she functions as lover, worker, political being; a person of a certain gender, sexuality, class, and race: a mother-as-her child’s Fantasy of Motherhood (the capital M Mother) in relation to herself as lowercase mother, the everyday woman who mothers; a mother-as-her-own-Fantasy of Motherhood, in relation to her lowercase self; a mother in relation to her child.22 18 Springgay, Irwin, and Kind, 2005, 903 19 Irwin, Beer, Springgay, Grauer, Xiong, and Bickel, 2006, 70 20 Patricia Hill Collin’s (1994) term motherwork acknowledges that the labor of caregiving is not performed just by biological, cisgender, or heterosexual women. 21 Springgay and Freedman, 2012, 6 22 Juhasz, 2003, 400 10 In this way, not all a/r/tographers will identify as m/a/r/tographers, yet m/a/r/tographic work is accessible in that we all have had the experience of being mothered whether by a biological mother, father, or other caregiver. As highlighted by my references to “conception” throughout this chapter, I deploy metaphorical thinking to connect the familiar concept of the mother and her labor to the state-sponsored transnational teacher who also works within the confines of patriarchal institutions. Stemming from psychoanalytical thought and practice, metaphor is a powerful linguistic and cognitive conceptual system. Defined as a device for seeing something “in terms of” something else, metaphorical thinking is part of our daily lives.23 Furthermore, “metaphor is the glue that links disparate aspects of human mental life, over time and across different contexts, enabling us to construct cohesive personal narratives that give meaning to past and present experience.”24 The integration of metaphor throughout my work is an attempt to explore the unspoken connections between mothers and state-sponsored transnational teachers in hopes of better understanding of each group’s desires, orientations, practices, and experiences. Intergenerational M/a/r/tographic Methods Throughout this dissertation, I use epistolary narrative as a form of m/a/r/tographic life writing and as a feminist intergenerational practice. The genre-bending possibilities of epistolary narrative provide an avenue for introspection across time and space.25 Although letter writing itself is often considered a disembodied practice in which the respondent and the receiver are temporally and physically separated,26 it can be used as a medium to share personal embodied experiences as demonstrated in this chapter’s prelude. Through the literary arts of letter writing and creative non- 23 Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, 5 24 Bornstein and Becker-Matero, 2011, 172 25 Channa, 2017 26 Stanley, 2015 11 fiction, I’m able to “integrate knowing, doing, and making through aesthetic experiences that convey meaning.”27 I also use epistolary narrative in this work as a motherline that connects generations of female kin through life stories.28 It wasn’t until last year that I discovered a family motherline. As mentioned in the prelude, my mother wrote her first letter to me eleven days before I was born. She told me about the world she was living in and how excited she was to meet me. She continued to write letters to me each year on my birthday, although she skipped a few years and stopped altogether when I was in high school. The letters were each sealed in an envelope and stashed away in my baby book that she kept on a shelf in her bedroom. She promised me that I could open them when I turned 18, but as a busy, self- occupied young adult, I forgot all about them. After Ophelia was born, my parents brought a box of my childhood stuffed animals. Buried in the bottom was my rose-covered baby book. Finally, at 34 years of age, I opened the first letter my mother wrote to me. I immediately recognized the tidy, slanted handwriting. I loved reading that letter, but part of me was disappointed that it wasn’t longer. I wanted to know more. It was then that I realized I hadn’t scrawled more than a few sentences in Ophelia’s baby book. How would I continue this intergenerational motherline and share my thoughts and desires with my daughter? Writing letters to my daughter allows me to look toward the future by reflecting on the past. As I envision my hopes for Ophelia and the world which she and so many others are forced to call “home,” I interrogate my past and present worldviews, or orientations. Sara Ahmed defines orientations as “how we begin, how we proceed from ‘here.’”29 She argues that such beginnings are passed down so that “we inherit the reachability of some objects, those that are ‘given’ to us, or at least made available to us, 27 Springgay, Irwin, and Kind, 2005, 903 28 Lowinsky, 2009 29 Ahmed, 2010, 236 12 within the family home.”30 And so, I pen these letters not just to provide Ophelia a tangible object encapsulating my espoused orientations but to reflexively re/define what those orientations are. In this way, my process of un/becoming through this work reconfigures my orientations, and subsequently, those which I pass down to her. Thus, I write to Ophelia to not only preserve memories but also to show my “commitment to and practice of acknowledging and articulating the many struggles, pressures, and conflicts involved in the complex embodied experiences of feminist motherwork”31 as well as the embodied experiences of state-sponsored transnational teaching. But I’m not just writing to Ophelia. While the letters are addressed to her, she may never read them. The publication of this work, however, makes it “decidedly feminist: the private becomes academic and political.”32 Recently, our private lives have been simultaneously centered and overlooked with the COVID- 19 pandemic. As our personal lives are on full display in Zoom meetings, we remain isolated and more closed off than ever before. This moment of reckoning creates an ideal space for pushing the “private” into “academic and political” realms. By making the private public through the sharing of motherlines, we might develop “a life-cycle perspective and a worldwide view of interconnectivity with each other, with others, and with the world . . . to create inspiring mothering perspectives and practices countering those prescribed by the patriarchal institution of motherhood.”33 Furthermore, by leveraging the matricentric feminist concepts of “agency, authority, authenticity, autonomy, and advocacy-activism,”34 I hope Ophelia, I, and others can re/imagine the patriarchal, oppressive structures and practices still present in the curriculum of motherhood and institutions that teaching embodies. 30 Ahmed, 2014, 99-100 31 Green, 2018, 15 32 Acevedo-Zapata, 2020, 419 33 Green, 2018, 10 34 O’Reilly, 2016, 69 13 M/a/r/tography as a Diffractive Methodology In short, I view m/a/r/tography not only as a methodology that allows me to fully bring my self(ves) into this work but also as an array of fluid practices that disrupt the masculine and patriarchal norms of academia.35 This work is unabashedly self-reflective and as Carl Leggo laments, “It is not easy to write autobiographically, especially in the academy, especially with honesty about many issues, including experience of failure, fear, and frustration.” He further argues that: We need a different culture, a culture that supports autobiographical writing that is marked by an understanding that writing about personal experience is not merely egoism, solipsism, unseemly confession, boring prattle, and salacious revelation. We need to write personally because we live personally, and our personal living is always braided with our other ways of living—professional, academic, administrative, social, and political.36 I believe that m/a/r/tography makes this kind of personal, relational work possible. While I focus on my own experiences as a mother and former state-sponsored transnational teacher, I have been in conversation with other former state-sponsored transnational teachers. By speaking one-on-one with six alumni of various state-sponsored transnational teaching programs, I have come to understand and interrogate my own experiences more deeply. I have made the intentional decision to not include their stories. Those are theirs to tell. Even after seven in-depth interviews with the one of the teachers, I didn’t acquire the same amount of detail that I have about my own experiences. More importantly, I could not feel their experiences the way that my body still feels and remembers my own. Consequently, this work is not meant to be generalizable, rather it seeks to capture the “radical specificity of lived experience,” through autobiographic work that engages in the “exigence, fluidity, and particularity of living.”37 My lived experiences of un/becoming do not speak for all mothers nor all state-sponsored transnational teachers, yet they can reveal nuances of each group’s culture. 35 Cannella and Perez, 2012 36 Leggo, 2008, 90 37 Sotirin, 2010, 2 14 While I use the word “reflection” throughout this work, the metaphor of diffraction more aptly conveys the critical consciousness of my reflective and reflexive processes.38 In physics, diffraction is the bending of waves as they encounter objects. This metaphor applied to methodology can be understood as a “bending” of research conventions. In this way, I view my inclusion of epistolary narrative and personal narrative in the form of vignettes as diffractive, or disruptive to dominant modes of knowledge production. Vignettes, in particular, “can provide important opportunities for researchers to explore the socially situated nature of behavior.”39 Additionally, Barad’s understanding of diffraction in research as a means of reading sources of data “through one another”40 provides basis for my process of using interview data, letters from my mother, letters to my daughter, poetry, novels, children’s literature, film, photographs, and other scholarship to make more explicit my own entanglement of memories, identifications, orientations, and histories. With that said, it’s important to acknowledge my positionality which inherently shapes my outlook on the world. My particular identifications give me access to certain perspectives while blinding me to others. Some of my social positions, like my whiteness, my cisgender and heterosexual orientations, my middle-income socioeconomic status, my able-bodiedness, and my level of education, privilege me. But some of my positions, like my womanhood and my status as a mother, marginalize me. These intersecting identifications create my own unique entanglement of power, privilege, and marginalization.41 While I stand upon the shoulders of the giants who came before me, I endeavor to exploit my own privilege to push methodological and conceptual boundaries so that, perhaps, others who don’t have the same advantages, don’t have to push as hard. 38 Haraway, 1997 39 Jenkins et al., 2021, 976 40 Barad, 2011, 445 41 Crenshaw, 1990 15 In sum, the conception of this dissertation comes from a desire to honor my lived experiences as a mother-artist-researcher-teacher (m/a/r/t) and leverage those identifications, practices, and in- between spaces to reflect on and more deeply understand the work of state-sponsored transnational teachers who labor for their motherland. I believe that “knowledge production is never a process of discovering or uncovering pre-existing facts about the natural or social world but is, rather, part and parcel of the world’s own becoming.”42 My hope is that when people encounter this work, they see the messy, dynamic processes involved in un/becoming. I invite the reader to join me in embracing reparative reading practices which allow us to approach potentially flawed work with grace. This ameliorative kind of reading makes room for surprise and wonder while countering the paranoid reading practices that often accompany the consumption of scholarly texts.43 After all, conception isn’t easy. I struggled for over 2 years. 26 months. 112 weeks. 784 days. 18,816 hours. 1,128,960 minutes. 67,737,600 seconds. 42 Jenkins et al., 2021, 976 43 Sedgwick, 1997 16 CHAPTER TWO: ORIENTATION Prelude November 29, 2021 Dear Ophelia, I’m always telling people that I wish I could freeze your three-and-a-half-year-old self in time since you say the “darndest things.” But I can never remember any on the spot, so before I forget, here’s a conversation from last night: “Mommy! One of the cats is trying to take that thing off your desk!” you reported between labored breaths. “What thing?” “That thing! You know, the one that makes your vagina stronger.” I couldn’t help but smile and feel proud that you used anatomically-correct vocabulary. The phrase “stress incontinence” in my previous day’s explanation of the dildo-looking device may not have fully registered, but you clearly got the gist. My mother didn’t tell me about her incontinence when I was a child, but I think you ought to know. If you someday choose to birth a baby, odds are it’s going to be pretty big. You and Aunt Leah may have “only” been nine and ten pounds, respectively, but I was 12 lbs 3 oz! We make big babies in this family. And big babies have a way of wreaking havoc on vaginas. I had heard of episiotomies and vaginal tearing, but I assumed the postpartum body bounced back quickly. Surely, mine would. I had run a full marathon just a year before you were born—I was arguably in the best shape of my life before gaining 70 lbs during my pregnancy with you. Rather than scare myself with too much information and set potentially unrealistic birthing expectations, your dad and I took a one-and-done labor class. We went to the two-hour “Labor Like a Rockstar!” workshop and giggled as we practiced various laboring positions and breathing exercises. I’m sure the instructor told me to start doing Kegels, but I didn’t. Perhaps ten thousand Kegels could’ve prevented the downfall of my pelvic floor, but I try not to live with regrets. Instead, I have chosen to live with a damaged body in the name of self-sacrifice and saving face. I wrote off the leaks at the trampoline park as a typical consequence of jumping repeatedly while contorting one’s body into atypical positions. But when the coughing started and turned into bronchitis, I could no longer ignore the fact that my body had changed. My toned muscles were now covered by a soft roundness. My once-sun-kissed skin was now stark-white save for the mauve lines marking your former dwelling place. And my bladder lacked its taken-for-granted support and control. My garage sale copy of an early edition of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” didn’t prepare me for such physical changes, nor all the other aspects of becoming a mother. I wish someone could’ve 17 communicated just how formative this period of development and transition would be for ME rather than solely prepare me for YOUR development and transition. Thankfully, I recently stumbled across the concept of “matrescence” (muh-TRE-sense). A medical anthropologist named Dana Raphael coined this term to denote the pivotal changes that occur after becoming a mother, akin to periods like pubescence and adolescence. She describes matrescence as: an experience of dis-orientation and re-orientation . . . in multiple domains: physical (changes in body, hormonal fluctuations); psychological (e.g., identity, personality, defensive structure, self- esteem); social (e.g., re-evaluation of friendships, forgiveness of loved ones, gains in social status, or loss of professional status), and spiritual (e.g., existential questioning, re-commitment to faith, increased religious/spiritual practices). I’ve been oriented to give you everything. It took the humiliation of frequently wetting my pants as a thirty-five-year-old to dis-orient me from the path of intensive mothering and aspiring to be “the good mother.” I know now that caring for you includes caring for myself. I’m not yet sure what re-orientation entails beyond squeezing this cat-attracting phallus, but I’ll be sure to keep you updated! Love always, Mommy 18 o·ri·en·ta·tion /ˌôrēənˈtāSH(ə)n/ n. training or preparation for a new job or activity n. the particular interests, activities, or aims of an organization or business n. a person's basic attitude, beliefs, or feelings in relation to a particular subject or issue n. the determination of the relative position of something or someone (especially oneself) Introduction The first draft of this chapter opened with personal narrative about my developing orientations to the ideas of service and diplomacy. I wrote about my experiences volunteering as a young child via church-sponsored activities and as a teenager with secular organizations. I speculated that these experiences influenced my choice to study education and become a teacher. I had been oriented to a life of service early on and this seemed to be compatible with my empathetic nature and desire to give. As complete and relevant as my writing may have been about the personal histories that led to me becoming a U.S. Department of State English Language Fellow, something was missing. As I thought and read more deeply about the concept of orientation/s, Sara Ahmed’s work sparked the “aha moment” I needed. As she explains, orientations “are about how we begin, how we proceed from ‘here.’”1 She argues that our orientations matter and shape the world as we know it since certain bodies are in certain places which allows them to encounter certain objects. Ahmed further argues that our orientations are passed down; she says that “we inherit the reachability of some objects, those that are ‘given’ to us, or at least made available to us, within the family home.”2 She employs the metaphor of a well-trodden path to highlight how others’ past journeys influence our own: When we see the line of the ground before us, we tend to walk on it, as a path clears the way. . . Lines are both created by being followed and are followed by being created. The lines that direct us, as lines of thought as well as lines of motion, are in this way performative: they depend on the repetition of norms and conventions, of routes and paths taken, but they are also created as an effect of this repetition.3 1 Ahmed, 2010, 236 2 Ahmed, 2014, 99-100 3 Ahmed, 2006, 554-555 19 Thus, if we are to phenomenologically investigate an object, Ahmed suggests attending to its background, including a temporal dimension of its “intertwining histories of arrival.”4 In my previous attempt of writing this chapter, I focused too much on myself and brushed over the generations who came before me. I am not just Rebekah Gordon, born to Greg Gordon and Ann (Sherfinski) Gordon, as my newspaper birth announcement states. I am the descendent of white German and Polish immigrants who settled in the U.S., specifically in central Wisconsin. As I explore and extend my family’s motherline, I must recognize the many distant women, mothers, and teachers whom I’ve never met and how the paths they’ve tread led me to my past and current orientations. But what exactly is the “object” of investigation here? Although my overall focus is on state- sponsored transnational teachers, I see their experiences, including the acts of teaching and representing their home nation overseas, as the intersecting objects of interest. These acts are what state-sponsored transnational teachers are oriented toward through their individual and collective histories. Many researchers have explored the motivations behind students’ decisions to enter the profession of teaching,5 but we know much less about how students become oriented to those motivations. I aspired to be a teacher because of my desire to give of myself. But how exactly was I oriented to a life of service? While there are innumerable points of entry into the construction of transnational teachers and their orientations, I trace several threads, or paths, in hopes of making some sense of the manifold narratives that inform and have made transnational teaching a possibility. Rather than strictly follow chronological events of transnational teaching’s lineage, I instead focus on its genealogy. As Brent Davis argues, the metaphorical potential of genealogy is built on critical moments and breaks rather than 4 Ahmed, 2010, 240 5 Brunisma and Jansen, 2010; Fokkens-Bruinsma and Canrinus, 2014; Hanushek and Pace, 1995 20 linear events.6 To this end, I focus on several critical moments in the making of the U.S. citizen transnational teacher.7 State-sponsored Transnational Teachers Before exploring these paths, I must explain exactly what I mean by state-sponsored transnational teachers. I found it necessary to create this term to not only fill a gap but also highlight a central element of these particular teachers’ role: diplomacy. When I was a U.S. Department of State English Language Fellow (“Fellow” from here on), the saliency of my role as a “cultural ambassador”8 and “representative”9 of my country was something I couldn’t shake. As I searched for studies related to teacher participants in such educational exchange programs, I noticed an inconsistency in the terms used to refer to this group. Some scholars reference these teachers by using the name of a specific program, like “Peace Corps teachers,” while others use more generic terms, like “guest teachers,” “visiting scholars,” “international teachers,” or “exchange participants.” Avoiding the exclusivity of the former terms and the inclusivity of the latter terms, “state- sponsored transnational teachers” encompasses all those who teach overseas and are supported programmatically and/or financially by their national government. I deliberately chose to forefront the descriptor “state-sponsored transnational” rather than use phrases like “teachers who teach overseas and are sponsored by the government” to emphasize the complex relationship between these teachers and their national government. I adopted “state- sponsored” from Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt’s discussion on transnationalism10 since it names the 6 Davis, 2004 7 With the U.S. being such a young nation, its citizens were hardly the first to teach overseas. However, the focus of my exploration here is on American teachers since the notions of “nationality,” “citizenship,” and “representation” are tightly bound within the construction of state-sponsored transnational teachers. 8 English Language Programs, n.d.-a 9 Ibid. 10 Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt, 1999, 220 21 government as a sponsor as opposed to a leader (state-led transnationalism11) or dominant entity (state transnationalism12). Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt explain that state-sponsored transnationalism began as “governments realized the importance of their expatriate communities and sought to circumvent or co-opt their initiatives.”13 Furthermore, the concept of transnationalism encourages us to recognize how complexly and fluidly state-sponsored transnational teachers transcend physical and imagined borders. Using the descriptor “transnational” instead of “international” is a concerted effort to highlight the: condition in which, despite great distances and nothwithstanding the presence of international borders (and all the laws, regulations and national narratives they represent), certain kinds of relationships have been globally intensified and now take place paradoxically in a planet- spanning yet common – however virtual – arena of activity.14 In the case of state-sponsored transnational teachers, transnational activity includes not only movement between the home and host nation but also contact with state-sponsored transnational teachers in their host country and other countries around the world (a sort of diaspora15 network). Economically, state- sponsored transnational teachers are often paid in their home (U.S.) bank account yet make transactions in their host country.16 Ties to social networks also exist across both the home nation, the host nation, and beyond. These circumstances begin to highlight the complexity of state-sponsored transnational teachers being both “here” and “there.” 11 e.g., Margheritis, 2011; Tecle, 2012 12 e.g., Caggiano, 2018; Chin and Smith, 2015 13 Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt, 1999, 220 14 Vertovec, 1999, 447 15 Diaspora refers to people who originate from the same geographic location but now reside elsewhere. 16 The English Language Fellow Program and some of the Fulbright programs make payments directly to American participants’ U.S. bank accounts. It is the participants’ responsibility to determine how to best navigate the transnational nature of their financial situation. 22 Missionary Teachers In the case of expatriate teaching initiatives, Christian missionaries seeking to convert the foreign public were some of the first Americans to teach outside of U.S. borders.17 Charlotte “Lottie” Moon is one notable example of an American missionary teacher who tread a line of thought and motion that would be followed by many others, myself included. In 1873, she joined her sister in China as one of the earliest single woman Baptist missionaries.18 Although she had served as a teacher in the U.S., she grew tired of teaching at a girl’s school in China. She wrote to her supervisor that: Under no circumstances do I wish to continue in school work, but I long to go and talk to the thousands of women around me. . . If I am to devote myself to evangelicalistic [sic] work in the city and country I must be free from the school.19 Her desire for more freedom and power in her role as a single female missionary was finally realized after 12 years of service when she moved to a rural district of China. Rather than live with a missionary family headed by a man and interact with only Chinese women, she worked independently to evangelize both men and women in the area. She ended up staying in China for 39 years and died en route to the U.S. on a steamship.20 Some may regard Lottie as a selfless saint who served God and fought for the rights of female missionaries, but the orientations that were passed down to her and that she passed on to others had dangerous ramifications. She held explicitly racist views as is evident in statements like, “Where the Caucasian goes he carries energy and an inferior race [the Chinese] is aroused by the contact”.21 Modernist, colonial ideologies that conceive “a hierarchy of cultures” and position the West as more 17 For the sake of brevity and context-dependent analysis, this discussion is limited to U.S. citizens although they were hardly the first to send teachers overseas. 18 International Mission Board, n.d. 19 Nettles, 2005, 387 20 Sullivan, 20011 21 Nettles, 2005, 368 23 advanced in terms of a perceived linear development were also apparent in her description of Chinese schools: The city schools have teachers trained in mission schools & they follow Western methods. The country school has an old-fashioned Chinese teacher. The only modern things in his school are Christianity & geography. You will say that the former is not modern & I admit your criticism. However, it is modern in Ma Shia, the village where I have the school.22 While Lottie’s ultimate goal may have been to evangelize the local people, her orientations toward her role as a missionary and toward the foreign Other reflect sentiments of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny which prevailed the latter half of the 19th century and remain alive today. We often think about the separation of church and state as being a key element of American society, yet many aspects of the church and state have and continue to intermingle. For example, American exceptionalism, or the perceived uniqueness and authority of the U.S., has religious roots; many Americans believed that the birth of the nation and its rebirth after the Civil War indicated that the land and its people were chosen by God.23 Furthermore, many Americans thought it was the country’s destiny to spread its “virtues of good government and the hardware of progress,”24 including Christian morals and values, to the rest of the world. In this way, “manifest destiny created the sentiment that would underwrite governmental policies of expansion.”25 Colonial Teachers At the end of the 19th century, the U.S. continued its efforts to dominate and assimilate foreign Others. The 1898 Treaty of Paris marked the end of the Spanish-American War and the beginning of reinvigorated U.S. expansionism through imperial and colonial rule. With the supposed goal of spreading democracy, freedom, and civilization, the U.S. exerted its power over foreign citizens around the globe. 22 Moon, 1906 23 Scott, 2013 24 Davidson, 2005, 158 25 Graebner, 1968, lxviii 24 While missionaries, mostly Protestant and Catholic, continued to teach overseas during the 20th century, another group of transnational teachers emerged: colonial teachers.26 Jonathan Zimmerman defines colonial teachers as those who taught in government schools the first few decades of the 20th century in the annexed territories of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa, the Canal Zones, and the Virgin Islands. He opens his book, Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century, by describing the voyage of the U.S.S. Thomas which set sail from San Francisco Bay to the Philippines in the summer of 1901. Aboard the ship were 526 teachers, 346 men and 180 women. Most of these Thomasites,27 were young, white, middle class, and inexperienced.28 So was I. But why did the U.S. government sponsor its citizens to teach overseas in the first place? After the U.S. gained territories through annexation and purchase at the close of the Spanish-American War, pacification, or “the action of bringing peace to a place or ending war in a place, often using military force,”29 was the call to order. In addition to the use of militaristic power, the U.S. attempted to pacify Filipinos through President William McKinley’s policy of “benevolent assimilation.” This policy proclaimed that all who “co-operate with the Government of the United States . . . will receive the reward of its support and protection.”30 One of these purported “rewards” was the creation of a system of free public schools that used English as the language of instruction,31 hence the perceived need for “native”32 English-speaking American teachers. I can’t help but wonder if my use of the gray elephant WubbaNub pacifier with Ophelia was a vain attempt to assimilate her into the kind of baby society had oriented me toward. Non-colicky. Calm. 26 It could be argued, however, that missionary teachers, American Indian boarding school teachers, and others were all tied to the project of U.S. colonialism. 27 Karnow, 1990, 196 28 Zimmerman, 2008 29 Cambridge Dictionary, n.d. 30 McKinley, 1898 31 See Chapter Five: Mother Tongue for further discussion 32 The word “native” is in quotation marks to signal opposition to standard language ideologies and hegemonies that position only those born in “core English speaking countries,” namely, the U.S., Britain, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand as “native” (Phillipson, 1992, 17). See also Chapter Five: Mother Tongue. 25 Seemingly happy. Just as I suffocated her cries in the name of benevolence (and to preserve a sliver of sanity), Americans used the trope of “linguistic unification”33 via English language instruction to suffocate Filipino voices and orientations. Osborne explains how concepts of nationhood imported from Europe led to American expansionism policy touting English as a supposedly neutral medium “for ushering the Philippines into a state of immanent democratic self-governance.”34 To this end, the U.S. spent $105,000 USD, or the equivalent of $3,266,340 USD in 2020, on the Thomas expedition alone.35 The government was not only a financial sponsor of these colonial teachers but also a sponsor of literacy. Deborah Brandt highlights the economic value of literacy in her definition of sponsors of literacy: “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress or withhold literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way.”36 In the case of colonial teachers who used English as a medium of instruction and taught English language as a subject, the U.S. sought to gain control over the citizens of its newly acquired territories via linguistic and cultural erasure. As one Thomasite teacher wrote, “the intention of our government is to do good out there: to restore order in the country, and to fit the people to govern themselves with wisdom and justice.”37 Whether or not the U.S.’s true intention was to eventually allow Filipinos to govern themselves, colonial teachers were eager to “put a human face on America as it assumed new powers and prominence on the global stage.”38 During this period, Zimmerman noted that colonial teachers generally supported the notion of American exceptionalism and were ready to spread “‘civilization’ in the ‘tropics.’”39 33 Osborne, 2021, 581 34 Ibid., 582 35 “Thomasite,” n.d. 36 Brandt, 1998, 166 37 Knapp, 1902, 5 38 Zimmerman, 2008, 3 39 Ibid., 4 26 Enthusiasm was not enough though to overcome the challenges faced by colonial teachers in and out of the classroom. Such challenges included language barriers, tropical diseases, conflicting curricula, typhoons, pedagogical and disciplinary differences, and feelings of futility. As one of only a few Black American colonial teachers,40 Carter G. Woodson explained that American teachers in the Philippines “entered upon their task by teaching the Filipinos just as they had taught American children who were otherwise circumstanced. The result was failure.”41 By the 1940s, most colonial teachers had returned to the U.S. since the Philippines gained its independence in 1946 and other territories, like Hawaii and Puerto Rico, adopted policies that favored locally-born teachers over mainland U.S. teachers.42 Volunteer Teachers In addition to missionaries and colonial teachers, Zimmerman delineates a third category of teachers who taught overseas during the 20th century: volunteers. He defines volunteer teachers as those who “crisscrossed the globe after WWII under the auspices of secular agencies.”43 Perhaps most notable, the Peace Corps was established in 1961 after John F. Kennedy gave an impromptu speech at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor just an hour down the road from where I now reside. To a crowd of 10,000 students who had gathered on a brisk October evening in 1960, he asked: How many of you who are going to be doctors, are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete. I think it can! And I think Americans are willing to contribute. But the effort must be far greater than we have ever made in the past.44 40 According to Zimmerman (2008), Woodson was one of seven Blacks out of 800 American teachers in the Philippines in 1903. 41 Woodson, 1933/1990, 152 42 Zimmerman, 2008, 16 43 Ibid. 44 As cited in Peace Corps, n.d.-b 27 Indeed, the effort “to utilize education and youthful idealism to assist developing nations”45 took off in the mid- to late-20th century. Zimmerman notes, however, that post-WWII teachers were much more critical than pre-WWII teachers about the U.S.’s imperial endeavors.46 The act of teaching English outside of the U.S. was thinly veiled cultural imperialism, or when “the values, practices, and meanings of a powerful foreign culture are imposed upon one or more native cultures.”47 In the case of volunteer teachers, English was taught in former U.S. territories, like the Philippines; countries colonized by non- U.S. actors, including many African nations; and countries that were deemed economically disadvantaged. Zimmerman explains that consensus and certainty about American goals and ideals “fell apart in midcentury, when American teachers began to ask whether their circulation was the ‘right’ one—and whether they owned the right to promote it in other places.”48 This lack of consensus and uncertainty didn’t stop U.S. efforts to spread the English language and American culture and values. As an early 21st century state-sponsored transnational teacher, I questioned my role, too. What gave me, a fresh master’s graduate, the right to promote “best language teaching practices” to veteran teachers in contexts which I hadn’t spent any significant amount of time? A nation as powerful as the U.S. backing, or sponsoring, my teaching did. And it didn’t hurt I was white. Sara Ahmed argues that “colonialism makes the world ‘white’, which is of course a world ‘ready’ for certain kinds of bodies, as a world that puts certain objects within their reach. Bodies remember such histories, even when we forget them.”49 45 Rury, 2016, 169 46 Zimmerman, 2008, 201 47 Tomlinson, 2012, 3 48 Zimmerman, 2008, 9-10 49 Ahmed, 2007, 152-153 28 Domestic Educational Imperialism I must not forget the history of domestic terror carried out by my kin that made teaching the foreign Other a seemingly necessary task and viable career. While dabbling in expansionism and imperialism overseas, the U.S. used processes of erasure and elimination to dominate the Indigenous peoples of this land as well as freed and enslaved Africans and their descendants. The dehumanizing practices of American Indian mission and boarding schools as well as the “mis-education”50 of Black Americans in the name of nationalism are emblematic of the colonial narratives informing and framing the U.S. citizen transnational teacher. In my research of American Indian mission schools, it didn’t take long to discover how my orientations were likely shaped. Just 28 miles from my childhood home stood one of at least 11 American Indian boarding schools in Wisconsin.51 Reverend T. M. Rykken wrote in 1920 that Bethany Indian Mission was established near Wittenberg, Wisconsin in the 1880s by Norwegian Lutheran immigrants who “brought with them deep religious convictions and a determination to spread this most blessed heritage to those less fortunate.” The “less fortunate,” in this case, were neighboring Winnebago, or Ho-Chunk peoples who had lived in the area known as Móogašuc for generations (current day Green Bay, Wisconsin).52 When donations could no longer fully support the Bethany mission, the school was taken over by the government in 1895 and became an American Indian non- reservation boarding school referred to as the Wittenberg School. The evangelical work of Bethany Mission continued in nearby sites until 1955.53 Although I couldn’t find information about the exact textbooks used at the Wittenberg School, McGuffey Readers were the predominant educational resource of the time. In the mid-1800s, the 50 Woodson, 1933/1990, 1 51 Volpenhein, 2021 52 Wisconsin First Nations, n.d. 53 The Historical Marker Database, n.d. 29 readers began as a resource to meet the perceived needs of the time: national unity and civics training.54 The readers were steeped in themes of patriotism, nationalism, and imperialism inundating students with “American” ideals while erasing their Indigenous knowledge and histories. The following excerpt from the Fifth Reader of 1857 highlights this ideological content: Be it then the noblest office of American eloquence, to cultivate, in the people of every state, a fervent attachment to the union . . . Nor is this all. Let the American orator comprehend . . . that the Union is the property of the world . . . that it is destined to shed its glorious influence backward on the states of Europe, and forward on the empires of Asia . . . Be it then the duty of American eloquence to speak, to write, to act, in the cause of Christianity, patriotism, and literature, in the cause of justice, humanity, and truth.55 Typically, only half of the school day was spent in the classroom reading texts like these, while the other half was devoted to manual labor.56 In line with schooling for the purpose of “social efficiency,”57 male students worked on the farm and female students focused on “everything that pertains to general housewifery.”58 Not only was this a source of free labor for the schools but the Superintendent of Bethany Mission Schools and the government-sponsored Wittenberg School wrote that it was also: a correct and proportionate combination of industrial and intellectual training . . . Since the tilling of the soils seems and is the inevitable outcome for the Indians . . . the sooner love and interest in products of the ground can be awakened and implanted in the minds of these youths the sooner will this great question of the solving of the Indian problem be furthered and brought to a satisfactory conclusion.59 While instilling patriotic views and necessitating manual labor as preparation for predestined paths, American Indian mission and boarding schools simultaneously stripped away the cultural and linguistic identities of their students. Richard H. Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 54 Vail, 1911 55 As cited in Skrabec, 2009, 223 56 Vaisvilas and Volpenhein, 2021 57 Labaree, 1997, 42 58 Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1896, 405 59 Ibid. 30 Pennsylvania is remembered for his saying, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”60 The horror of this dehumanization was a source of pride for Axel Jacobson, the superintendent quoted in the previous paragraph. In his writing, Jacobson recounted the story of a boy re/named Tom. After pleading with the boy’s father, “a typical, full-blooded Indian” called Old Man Bear, Jacobson persuaded him to bring his nine-year-old son to Bethany. “I personally took Tom, after the father had left,” wrote Jacobson, “down beneath the maple trees and clipped his head close, cue and all. After this I had him remove his buckskin clothes and don others.” Tom would become a star pupil who played the brass horn “much better than a white man.” Jacobson proudly claimed that: Tom learned to know what Christ had done for him, and was baptized and confirmed at our school. When thru here, he went to the Carlisle Indian School, making a splendid record. At the outbreak of the Philippine War, he was sent as a leader of a small military band, and stayed two years. He was honorably discharged, appeared at our office one day, and was exceedingly glad to be back here.61 The government-sponsored Wittenberg School closed its doors in 1933. When I recently visited the site, I found two well-manicured baseball diamonds occupying the land. No physical trace of the institution exists, not even the historical marker which has gone missing.62 In this way, settler colonialism “covers it tracks and operates toward its self-supersession.”63 But “bodies remember such histories, even when we forget them.”64 Through processes of re/dis/orientation and un/learning triggered by this inquiry, my body is beginning to remember the thousands of American Indians killed and buried unceremoniously near boarding schools throughout this country and beyond.65 60 Volpenhein, 2021 61 Wisconsin Genealogy Web Project, n.d. 62 The Historical Marker Database, n.d. 63 Veracini, 2011, 3 64 Ahmed, 2007, 152-153 65 Hundreds of bodies have been exhumed from the land surrounding various boarding schools in the U.S. (Trafzer at al., 2006). As recently as 2021, the remains of more than 600 Indigenous children were located in the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan, Columbia, Canada (Morris, 2021). 31 Interlude January 12, 2022 Dear Ophelia, You’ve become very fascinated with babies recently. We talk a lot about babies since your father and I are trying to make another one. Well, technically it’s not just us trying. We went for our first IUI (intrauterine insemination) on Monday. After months and months of no luck with Clomid and Ovidrel, our OBGYN suggested that we see a fertility specialist. If we make a baby this cycle, it will be the result of at least two other people’s physical efforts: the lab tech who washed your father’s sperm and the nurse who used a catheter to pump 3.4 million of the “good enough” sperm into me. As you so confidently talk about Daddy’s “sperms” and Mommy’s “eggies,” I pray that we don’t disappoint you again this month. While there are plenty of things about pregnancy and childbirth that I don’t look forward to, your future sibling will be worth it. After all, you were more than worth the two- year-plus wait. Did I ever tell you about when you finally arrived? For now, I’ll skip the details about tripping on the sidewalk, the Foley bulb, the intravenous Pitocin, the epidural, and the full hour of pushing after being in the hospital for almost three days. As soon as the delivery doctor caught you in his hands, I started crying. The wails emanating from somewhere deep within my chest were a mix of joy, fear, excitement, and exhaustion. You were placed on my chest for your first nursing session and one hour of skin-to-skin contact. Within another hour or so, we were wheeled from the delivery ward to the make-shift maternity ward (Sparrow Hospital was under construction at the time). Since you and I both appeared to be “doing well,” you were allowed to stay in the room with me 24/7. My orientation to motherhood was beginning! Before you get too excited, there wasn’t actually much of an orientation. I was only in the hospital for two days after you were born; then it was time to pass my lift bed and your rolling bassinet on to the next recently acquainted pair. You wouldn’t believe how much they crammed into those two days though. You’d think after completing the most physically demanding event of my life, I’d be allowed to rest. No such luck. The interruptions came at least every hour. Wellness checks for you and a few afterthoughts for me. “Is she latching on?” “How many times did she nurse?” “Which side?” “Any wet diapers?” “What time?” “How long did she sleep?” “Did you do more skin-to-skin contact?” “Did you swaddle her properly?” “Did she feel warm?” And before leaving, they’d ask once again, “Have you passed solids yet? We can’t discharge you until you’ve had a least one bowel movement.” Then there was the paperwork. Forms for your birth certificate. Insurance verification. Information packets about sudden infant death syndrome. Pamphlets for local pediatricians. Warnings about co- sleeping. Packets about breastfeeding. Visits from the lactation specialist. Demonstrations of how to bathe a baby without wetting the umbilical stump. Requests for professional newborn photos. And the list goes on…I was too tired and dis-oriented to remember them all. I finally pooped and was sent home less than 48 hours after you were born. 32 How should one interpret such an experience? It was pretty clear to me that a precedent had been set: TAKE CARE OF YOUR BABY AT ALL COSTS, INCLUDING YOUR OWN WELL-BEING! I had seen my mother dedicate her life to me, and my grandmother dedicate her life to my mother. I can assume that my great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother, and so on, did the same. My formal orientation to motherhood at the hospital confirmed the informal orientations that had been passed down to me. Now it’s time for me to forge a different path. It’d be easier to just follow the well-trodden path, but that doesn’t make it right or best. I want you to not have to choose between a child and a career, or worse yet, choose another life over your own. It’s okay to want it all. To have it all. But we need to find a way to do so without sacrificing ourselves and our well-being. Let’s fight for a society that makes this not only possible but encouraged! Thanks for giving me the opportunity to be dis-oriented. Love, Mommy 33 Orientation to the Fellow Program Are you looking for a new challenge or life changing career move? Enrich your TESOL career by teaching English in new contexts and gain unique international experience through the English Language Programs. If you are an experienced TESOL educator with a graduate degree in English language teaching, you can apply for paid teaching projects developed by U.S. Embassies around the world.66 A “new challenge” and a “life changing career move” that was “paid”? How could I say “no” to such an invitation? As much as motherhood has been a life-changing and re/dis/orienting experience for me, so too, was the Fellow Program. I can still recall the eagerness I felt when I first read the blurb above in an email sent by my master’s program coordinator. As much as I had been thinking about applying for the Peace Corps since undergrad, I was attracted to the Fellow Program since it was specifically TESOL- related and was supposedly “the premier opportunity for TESOL professionals to impact the way English is taught abroad.”67 I scoured the English Language Programs website for as much information as I could find about this potential opportunity. The stately design of the website branded with the eagle-laden national coat of arms of the U.S. neither impressed me nor deterred me. You see, for most of my life, I thought I was apolitical. I was turned off by politicians whom I saw as stuffy white men in navy suits. But I wasn’t politically neutral (if there is such a thing)—I attended anti-war protests with my mother in middle school and my hand-sewn messenger bag was covered with pinback buttons screaming, “SAVE THE PLANET” and “GIVE PEACE A CHANCE!” I clearly had beliefs that were politically charged, yet I had decided that politics weren’t for me. I figured I was meant to just be a teacher, not a political figure. Despite being educated at one of the top teacher preparation programs in the country, I was not oriented to see my position as a teacher as one that had political implications. Thus, I came to the English Language Programs website with a naïvety regarding the political nature of teaching. I read that Fellow program participants are “representatives and cultural ambassadors of the United States and, 66 English Language Programs, n.d.-e 67 Ibid. 34 through a unique cultural exchange, they support the U.S. Department of State’s public diplomacy mission abroad,”68 but I didn’t know exactly what that meant. What was my government’s public diplomacy mission? This should’ve been the point where I did my homework. I knew roughly what public diplomacy was, but I figured that it was a secondary aspect of my role as a Fellow; first and foremost, I would be a teacher. Once I found out that I was matched with a project in Ethiopia, I spent my time reading about the country and its education system as well as memorizing basic Amharic phrases. I assumed that I would learn everything I needed to know about public diplomacy and my role as a Fellow at the pre- departure orientation in Washington, D.C. A few weeks before I was set to leave for Ethiopia, I gathered with dozens of other Fellows at the fancy Omni Shoreham Hotel which is known for hosting “presidents, world leaders and inaugural balls, making it a true landmark in our nation’s capital.”69 Our ceremonious orientation was spread out over three information-filled days, yet I learned little about how to actually be a representative and cultural ambassador of my country. There was the obvious—don’t do stupid things that make Americans look bad. Other than that, the messaging seemed to me to read: “You are an adult, do what you think is best. Oh, but please put this disclaimer on your personal blog so that folks know that what you think is best is not the official view of the U.S. government.”70 As a renewing Fellow, I attended the orientation multiple times, to the point that they now blend together in my mind; however, I will never forget one particular session that was just for Fellows who would be going to African countries. This was during my first pre-departure orientation, so I listened carefully to my peers who were renewing Fellows. One Fellow who had been in Mozambique 68 English Language Programs, n.d.-a 69 Omni Hotels and Resorts, n.d. 70 The disclaimer that the Fellow program requests is, “This website is not an official U.S. Department of State website. The views and information presented are the English Language Fellow’s own and do not represent the English Language Fellow Program or the U.S. Department of State” (English Language Programs, n.d.-b). 35 shared that he and his partner returned from a trip to have all of their clothing and many other possessions stolen, presumably by the house help or someone else who had access to their apartment. Of all the things I could’ve remembered from orientation, this stuck with me. When I finally arrived at my site in rural eastern Ethiopia after two days of international travel and two days of post-arrival orientation at the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa, I was shocked to find an elderly woman in my university-provided living accommodations. My survival Amharic was not sufficient to communicate with her, so my Ethiopian counterpart explained to me that Almaz was the house help. While I didn’t have to hire her, she had already cleaned and prepared the guest house for me and had experience working with other foreign visitors at the university. At first, all I could think about was the story from orientation. It seemed like a bad idea to have someone I didn’t know or trust accessing my living space. I figured that I didn’t need someone to clean up after me or cook my meals—I had been living on my own for several years at this point. When my counterpart sensed my hesitancy, he told me that Almaz only charged about $25 USD per month for her services and that we could do a one-month trial. I agreed knowing that she likely depended on this meager salary. Yet all I could think about was potentially losing the few clothing items I had brought along or my emergency stash of cash. “How could I replace my clothing in a place that had so few shops and so few things in my size?” “How would my mother know what to pick out and send to me?” “How long would it take for a package from the U.S. to arrive?” “What would I wear in the meantime for teaching?” “How would I pay for anything if my debit card and my emergency stash suddenly went missing?” While I was busy thinking about how to protect my belongings, Almaz was handwashing my clothes, baking bread for me from scratch, buying vegetables for me from town, removing rats from the guest house, cutting the long grass outside with scissors, and slaughtering her one-and-only prized chicken to make me doro wat. 36 Intertwining Histories of Arrival Reflecting on my initial discomfort with Almaz has been a discomfort of its own. It’s not just that I recognize the vanity of caring so deeply about replaceable things, rather that I succumbed to the orientations that had been passed down to me. And it wasn’t just the story at the pre-departure orientation from the previous generation of Fellows. Growing up in a predominantly white town with white parents who grew up in the same town with parents just as white oriented me to fear and question the intentions of the foreign Other, especially those who are Black or Brown. While my schools didn’t use McGuffey Readers like many American Indian boarding schools,71 the textbooks of the 1990s and 2000s weren’t a whole lot better. As Harvard historian, Donald Yacovone states, “Even when textbooks are accurate, teachers have to be willing to teach it [the truth about slavery and white supremacy].”72 No matter what my teachers did or did not teach me, they undoubtedly impacted the way I see the world and my place within it as a white, middle-class girl from central Wisconsin. As Zimmerman argues, “all education contains an element of imposition, insofar as it seeks to refashion students in ways they might not endorse or even recognize.”73 I’m ashamed that it’s taken me so long to begin to recognize the ways my developing mind was “refashioned,” or re/oriented, by my teachers, my family, and American society. Let me be clear that I am not the victim here. Though orientations may have been imposed on me since birth, I have always had the privilege of choosing my path or forging a new one. As Karl Marx writes, “human beings make their own history, but they do not make it arbitrarily in conditions chosen by themselves, but in conditions always already given and inherited from the past.”74 For better or worse, I inherited conditions that made it possible, even lucrative, for me to become a state-sponsored 71 Coleman, 1993; Goodburn, 1999 72 Srikanth, 2020 73 Zimmerman, 2008, 10 74 Marx, 1996, 32 37 transnational teacher. Others, like Tom and his classmates at the Wittenberg School, were forced to march down a finite number of paths and had to risk much more to resist and subvert such oppressive lines of thought and motion. Throughout this chapter, I have attempted to highlight several critical moments in U.S. history that paved the way for the existence of the modern-day transnational teacher. Though not exhaustive, I hope these stories reveal the complexity of the “intertwining histories of arrival” of transnational teachers, including my own. I have not done the genealogical digging to see whether I’m biologically related to Lottie Moon, any of the Thomasites, or any of the faculty from Bethany Mission and the Wittenberg School. But it doesn’t matter. Blood or not, they are my kin and each of their stories stirred something within me. I felt our connection and began to see how I, too, was entangled in our nation’s ideologically-saturated domestic and international affairs. I’m not here to say that all transnational teaching is inherently evil, but I do believe it is necessary to unravel its tangled histories which are chock-full of colonial, imperial, and nationalistic ideologies and practices. I wish I had done so more diligently before beginning my fellowships in Ethiopia, and subsequently, China. If I had done such research, my processes of un/becoming and re/dis/orientation would have unfolded in a different way—akin to the butterfly effect, it’s difficult to imagine exactly how my experiences in Ethiopia and China would have been impacted by increasing my self-awareness and educating myself earlier on. Perhaps I would have chosen not to participate in the Fellow Program. Admittedly, I came to the table with motivations fueled by white savior complex, or the “confluence of practices, processes, and institutions that reify historical inequities to ultimately validate white privilege.”75 While I may have positioned myself to be a learner throughout my experiences as a 75 Anderson, 2013, 39 38 state-sponsored transnational teacher, I was simultaneously positioned as an “expert”76 who might “help” the foreign Other learn English, improve their curriculum and pedagogical practices, and better understand the U.S. and its citizens. But were these alleged objectives just a façade for my country’s ongoing “benevolent assimilation”? As I reflect on my personal histories through the histories of teachers who came before me, I question my “big-hearted” nature and my desire to give. Until now, I thought these were innate traits, perhaps further cultivated by being raised Catholic and volunteering in the community from an early age. In college, I had a magnet on my fridge with Gandhi’s quote, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” It was easy for me to accept such an orientation, that I could make a difference in the world, and teaching seemed like the perfect career to put that mission to the test. The irony is that Gandhi didn’t utter those words.77 The closest thing he said which may have later been co-opted was: We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.78 If only this quote had been before my eyes every time I reached for a bite to eat, perhaps I could have started this process of re/dis/orientation much earlier. Even when my mind forgot the “intertwining histories of arrival” that shaped me into who I am and oriented me toward transnational teaching in a particular way, my body did not forget. But Gandhi’s words give me hope. I can still change myself and the path that I choose to walk. Ophelia, and generations to come, will not have to forge this path themselves although it will take time for this path to become as well-trodden as the ones I initially walked. I am still, and always will be, un/becoming. 76 The label of “foreign expert” is used in China for foreign professionals who do specialized labor (The State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 2014). 77 Quote Investigator, 2017 78 Ibid. 39 CHAPTER THREE: LABOR Prelude November 20, 2021 Dear Ophelia, As I left the house an hour ago, you asked me, “Mommy, where are you going?” “To the coffee shop to do some work.” “But why aren’t you working in your room?” Yesterday, I moved Grandma Lorraine’s antique desk with the claw feet to our already-cramped bedroom. After dealing with the pandemic for a year and a half, you’d think I’d be prepared for uncertainty, but when Miss Amy told me that she and a couple of kids tested positive for COVID, I knew what that meant. No writing for two weeks. While I was quick to equate “no daycare” with “no writing,” I knew that I needed a makeshift hideaway where I might be able to hear my own thoughts. After a stagnant summer and a sickness-filled fall, I had finally started writing again. Moving my desk from its south-facing window in the living room would deprive me of the sunshine I so desperately need this time of the year, but Virginia Woolf was right. A woman needs a “room of one’s own to write.” Preferably one with a door that locks. While I could have attempted to work in my bedroom this evening, the noise cancelling headphones I ordered have not yet arrived. As a self-identified mother-artist-researcher-teacher, I feel like a hypocrite for not being able to do scholartistry with my child around. And it doesn’t comfort me that I’m not alone. If I read one more article about how women, particularly mothers, are disproportionately impacted by the stay-at-home realities of the pandemic, I will lose it. Where’s all the literature about fathers, workplaces, and the nation stepping up to the plate? It’s true that I chose motherhood—not all women do, but I’ll save reproductive rights for another letter. However, no one prepared me for what it would really be like. I’ve seen Auntie Leah become a mother four times over and I even lived with her for several months after Jeriah was born. I knew it would be hard. But I guess I naively thought the joys of becoming and being a mother would somehow cancel out the demands. Of course, there are joys. Oh, so many joys! I can’t even come close to describing the love that I have for you. If birthing you meant that I would slowly wither away and be devoured by pyjama sharks, I would still choose to do it for those few short moments together. Fortunately, human mothers do not usually suffer the same fate as octopi, yet much of our labor remains unseen, unappreciated, and undervalued. The very labor I went through to bring you into this world is barely recognized. While I don’t think I should receive a gold medal like Kazakhstani mothers who birth seven or more children, I do wish there 40 was more acknowledgment of what women physically and emotionally go through during pregnancy and labor. Few care to hear anything beyond “mother and baby are both doing well.” With all of the ado after your birth, I never reported your arrival to the local newspaper. If I had, the announcement would have read something like this (see Figure 1). Figure 1. Ophelia’s Hypothetical Birth Announcement Ophelia Frances Kakuba Mark Kakuba and Rebekah Gordon of Lansing, Michigan are proud to announce the birth of their daughter, Ophelia Frances Kakuba. She was born at 7:17 p.m. on Monday, May 15, 2018, at Sparrow Hospital in Lansing. She weighed 9 pounds and was 20.25 inches long. Paternal grandparents are Godfrey Kakuba of Kampala, Uganda and Frances Mukasa of Mityana, Uganda. Maternal grandparents are Greg and Ann Gordon of Wausau, Wisconsin. Great-grandparents include the late John and Kabali Mukasa ofherfinski of Mukono, Uganda, the late Seredi Kakuba and his living wife, Miliyonsi, of Namisambya, Uganda, the late Hubert and Mary Sherfinski of Wausau, and the late Elwood and Lorraine Sagstetter of Rothschild, Wisconsin. Notice how men are recognized first? Paternal before maternal. No mention of the labor either. I’m sure if there was, it would say something like, “Mark valiantly held Rebekah’s left leg for the whole hour of pushing. He even worked up the courage to watch the entire process which culminated in him announcing, ‘It’s a girl!’” Welcome to our patriarchal society, little girl. The “modern” world in which we live is still rife with traditional beliefs and practices that put men before women as well as those who transcend this binary. We speak of forefathers when discussing the birth of this nation and bat an eye at the women who birthed, nurtured, clothed, and fed those men. You see, this division of labor started very early on and as they say, “Old habits die hard.” My role as a mother in the contemporary U.S. may seem more equal to that of your father. You see him doing the dishes, right? He fixes things around the house sometimes and cooks at least several times a week. We both go to work. 41 But it’s what you don’t see. I didn’t see it either for a long time, but I felt it. The “mental load,” or cognitive labor, which includes the anticipation and planning of household and parenting needs, is mostly invisible and mostly borne by women. My mind is constantly thinking about what needs to be done. Every time, I walk into any room in the house, I do a scan to see what is present and what is missing. I note what needs to be done based on that analysis. Tasks are ranked and prioritized. I ever-so- slowly make my way down this list that never seems to end, only repeating itself: • Make breakfast • Replace missing pantry items at Aldi • Drop you off at daycare • Clean litter boxes • Check email • Order more litter on Amazon • Take the meat out to thaw for dinner • Vacuum crumbs off the floor • Order more vacuum bags • Wash clothes • Put away clothes already on the drying rack • Fix broken handle on dresser • Write a note to buy socks at T.J. Maxx • Call doctor to schedule wellness check • Settle previous bill while on phone • Check email • Log in to credit card sites and pay off balances • Transfer money to Sweet Pea savings account • Look up summer camp information • Pick you up from daycare • Pay Miss Amy for weekly daycare services • Check Google Fi balance • Send complaint email to Google Fi • Order screen protector for the one that broke weeks ago • Check email • Remind Mark that meat has been thawing for 8 hours • Return overdue library books • Put in request for important book for dissertation • Tell you to brush her teeth • Send birthday card to Grandpa • Wipe toothpaste mess that you left behind • Call Grandma • Search for affordable waterfront AirBnbs for family summer vacation • Check email • Schedule playdate with Daphne • Water the almost-dead succulents (who kills such low-maintenance plants?!) • Pack things for daycare • Check to see if stove is turned off • Set morning alarm 42 • Rotate mattress • Check email • Get oil changed • Replace filter in humidifier • Declutter • Donate clutter to thrift store • Go to gym • Scrub the shower • Clean the oven • Pay rent • Dust • ... • ... • ... [Fall asleep with phone in hand] And to imagine that some women do this with multiple children and somehow find time to dust and actually rotate their mattress! We just keep giving. Whether it’s a limb, a tentacle, or our own sanity. So, to answer your question, Ophelia, I’m not working in my room because you are on the other side of the door. If I hear you trying to get Daddy’s attention, I will add items to the list above and re-prioritize. Getting you to calm down about your broken wand from the dentist will suddenly take precedence over this dissertation. I trust your father. I know he takes great care of you, but I just can’t disconnect. The labor of motherwork rarely, if ever, ends or turns off. I try to ignore its demands when there are other fires to be extinguished, yet there you are. Always at the front of my mind. Sometimes I reminisce about life before you. I miss the days of hours-long bike rides. Unscheduled lovemaking. Movie marathons for entire weekends. Spontaneous adventures spurred by deeply discounted fares. An almost non-existent mental load. But then the guilt rushes in. What kind of mother would I be if I walked away from the burdens of motherhood to enjoy such indulgences? This predicament is so poignantly captured in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s adaptation of The Lost Daughter. While on a working holiday, middle-aged professor, Leda, relives memories of being a young mother struggling to manage both her academic work and the responsibilities of having two young daughters. We learn that she chose to leave her family for three years to independently pursue her own interests. Throughout the film, she agonizes over this decision and describes herself as an “unnatural mother.” I’ve seen countless movies with fathers who leave, so why did this strike me so viscerally? Because I understood Leda’s story. I am living it. Yet something deep within me made me judge her harshly. It was easy to think that Leda made a bad decision and that I would never do the same. And that is the patriarchy speaking through a supposedly feminist mother. Never underestimate the reach of invisible structures, dearest Ophelia, and your power to dismantle them. I must remind myself daily. “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” – Audre Lorde Love you forever and always, Mommy 43 la·bor /ˈlābər/ n. work, especially hard physical work n. workers, especially manual workers, considered collectively n. the process of childbirth, especially the period from the start of uterine contractions to delivery v. work hard; make great effort v. (of a woman in childbirth) be in labor Introduction In the words of Sara Ahmed, “If the conditions in which we live are inherited from the past, they are ‘passed down’ not only in the matter of bodies, but also through the work or labour of generations.”1 In the previous chapter, I highlighted some of the ways that white American bodies, like my own, have been oriented to view, interact with, and “teach” the foreign Other in domestic and international contexts. In this chapter, I delve deeper into the “work or labour of generations” of state-sponsored transnational teachers. Who are these teachers? What exactly do they do? And how have orientations about their roles been “passed down” and reinforced? To answer these questions, we need to first situate this discussion within the patriarchal landscape that has long dominated the U.S. (and the globe). Philosopher Kate Manne explains that within a patriarchal society: women are expected to give traditionally feminine goods (such as sex, care, nurturing, and reproductive labor) to designated, often more privileged men, and to refrain from taking traditionally masculine goods (such as power, authority, and claims to knowledge) away from them.2 We see misogyny, male privilege, and male entitlement at play when women continue to be sexually objectified in the media and everyday conversations; when men like Brett Kavanaugh can receive some of the highest accolades when there is damning evidence of sexual assault; when women in Texas do 1 Ahmed, 2014, 99 2 Manne, 2020, 11 44 not have control over their own reproductive rights;3 when women are catcalled for simply walking down the street; when men “earn” $1.19 for every $1.00 that women earn;4 when men feel the need to exert their power through “mansplaining”; when women at companies with fewer than 50 employees are not legally guaranteed to any paid or unpaid maternity leave.5 I could go on, but suffice it to say that patriarchal ideologies and values have not disappeared even though they remain invisible to many. Ruptures in the operation of such a well-oiled machine, like those experienced during the recent COVID- 19 pandemic, expose the gender inequities that still exist in our homes and workplaces.6 It’s important to note that gender inequities are just one of many injustices in American society. After all, COVID-19 was not the sole pandemic of 2020. The “twin pandemics” saw the U.S. not only reckoning with community health but also the perpetual racial violence and unrest against Black, Brown, and Asian bodies.7 March 13, 2020: Breonna Taylor shot five times in her own home by police. May 25, 2020: George Floyd suffocated by white police officer. March 16, 2021: Six Asian American women shot at a spa in Atlanta. July 2021: Highest monthly total of apprehensions and expulsions at the U.S.-Mexico border since 2000.8 September 17, 2021: Three Latino men attacked by white man who said, he “hated illegal Spanish people.”9 And the list goes on . . . While the focus of this chapter on gender may overshadow race, sexual orientation, dis/ability,10 class, and other identifications, my intent is not to minimize their relevance. Throughout the chapter, I attempt to address, albeit briefly, the intersectionality, or compounding effect,11 of some of these other social identifications. 3 Hyatt et al., 2022 4 Barroso and Brown, 2021 5 U.S. Department of Labor, 2015 6 O’Reilly, 2020 7 Cook-Sather and Mawr, 2021, 6 8 Gramlich, 2021 9 As cited in Sager, 2021 10 “The use of the term disability (spelled without the slash) suggests that a person is represented, or identified, by what they cannot do, rather than what they can do” (Rausch, Joseph, and Steed, 2019). 11 Crenshaw, 1990 45 While social identifications, such as gender, have been considered social institutions in their own right,12 I am framing diplomacy and education, or more specifically, the practices of diplomatizing and teaching, as gendered social institutions. Jonathan Turner defines a social institution as: a complex of positions, roles, norms and values lodged in particular types of social structures and organising relatively stable patterns of human activity with respect to fundamental problems in producing life-sustaining resources, in reproducing individuals, and in sustaining viable societal structures within a given environment.13 Thus, I view diplomatizing (e.g., negotiating, representing, promoting, relating) and teaching as sets of practices that have been normalized and are expected behaviors of practitioners to reproduce democratic citizens and sustain patriarchal values and structures. Furthermore, I adopt feminist scholar Adrienne Rich’s view that social institutions are not simply sets of rules and behaviors, they are also experiences. She explains that motherhood, for example, is: the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children; and the institution, which aims at ensuring that that potential—and all women—shall remain under male control.14 This notion of experience makes room for potential. Despite the oppressiveness of institutions which “are often entwined with the state,”15 an individual’s private experiences can be spaces of resistance and empowerment. In this way, institutional framing of social practices, like diplomatizing and teaching, can be beneficial “in drawing attention to its multiple features—ideology, practices, constraints, conflicts, power—and affirming its complexities and multifacetedness.”16 The Female Frontier Teacher and the Feminization of Teaching in the U.S. When I think about my favorite (and least favorite) teachers, they are almost all white females. When I look around at the pre-service teachers with whom I work, they are almost all white females. But 12 Martin, 2004 13 Turner, 1997, 6 14 Rich, 1976, 13 15 Martin, 2004, 1258 16 Ibid., 1264 46 teachers in the U.S. did not always look like me. During the early part of the colonial era in the 17th century, schooling outside the home was generally limited to boys who were taught by male teachers.17 The focus of their schooling was on moral and religious education using the Bible and other religiously- oriented texts. However, as informal “dame schools” in women’s homes began to rise in popularity, so too, did the number of female teachers.18 It was during the common school movement from about 1830-1860 that teaching became a predominantly female, and subsequently, undervalued profession. As Friedmann argues, “It’s the feminization of any work that allows us to pay lip service to its importance and then ignore its material conditions completely.”19 With the efforts of legislators like Horace Mann, schooling was to become a public responsibility of the state to unify the American people and bring about social, political, and economic development. The success of the common school reform led to an increased demand for teachers.20 With the changing labor market brought about by the Industrial Revolution, men were leaving teaching to pursue more lucrative careers. But women were happy to answer the call for more teachers as employment opportunities for females outside the home were limited; these circumstances led to women working for much lower wages than their male counterparts.21 Teaching was deemed appropriate for women who were believed to have an innateness for nurturing and caregiving. Such maternal rhetoric described as the “motherteacher” ideal, touted that “teaching and mothering were much the same job, done in different settings.”22 17 Tyack and Hansot, 1992 18 Rury, 2016 19 Friedmann, 2019 20 Ibid. 21 Kaufman, 1984 22 Goldstein, 2014, 18 47 Catherine Beecher worked alongside Horace Mann to promote teaching as the perfect fit for women. In 1823, she established the Hartford Female Seminary to prepare girls to become teachers and later created “a sort of prototype of Teach for America” in 1847.23 Over the next ten years, her Board of National Popular Education trained and sent 600 young women24 to the “West” frontier (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee).25 These domestic “missionary teachers” reflected the Lady Bountiful archetype. As Meiners explains, “the white lady teacher is charged, implicitly, with colonizing her ‘native’ students and molding them into good citizens of the republic”26 through her purity, selflessness, and goodness. A hand drawn illustration from an 1873 issue of Harper’s Weekly depicts this idyllic pure, white “motherteacher” (see Figure 2). This relatively early process of sending teachers to “educate” others in the name of national priorities marked teachers, particularly females, as potential agents of labor for the state. In Helen Harper’s words, “Embodied, she [white lady teacher] was the sponge or mediating agent between the subaltern and the colonial state.”27 Conveniently, these efforts were a convergence of “personal and national goals” since many women were seeking ways to extend their influence outside the private sphere of the home.28 The so-called “republican motherhood” that expected American women to “teach their children moral principles of American democracy”29 was spreading into the public sphere “without disturbing the dominance of the patriarchal authority.”30 23 Goldstein, 2014, 29 24 Kaufman, 1984 25 Goldstein, 2014, 29 26 Meiners, 2002, 87 27 Harper, 2000, 132 28 Grumet, 1988, 40 29 Rury, 2016, 46 30 Grumet, 1988, 40 48 Figure 2. “The New School-mistress” (1873)31 In this manner, teaching was feminized not only through the increasing number of female teachers but also through the shifting norms, values, and patterns of behavior that re/gendered teaching. The prototypical teacher of the late colonial era and beyond was pure, selfless, nurturing, and sympathetic toward state initiatives. Such feminine characteristics are in contrast to “the traits of strength, power, autonomy, independence, and rationality, all traditionally associated with masculinity and the male sex.”32 While more and more women entered the profession of teaching, they remained 31 Image adapted from the Library of Congress Online Catalog (LC-USZ62-104627) print image originally by Brownscombe (1873). 32 Cassidy and Althari, 2017, 3 49 subordinate to male school principals, administrators, and policymakers who held the power to make decisions regarding public education.33 At the beginning of the 19th century, women accounted for only one out of ten teachers, but by the end of the century, seven out of ten teachers were women.34 More than a century later, the teaching force in the U.S. remains feminized; as of the 2017-18 schoolyear, 76% of all K-12 teachers were women. Gender disparities within the profession linger; women are more likely to be early childhood and elementary educators (89% female, 11% male) whereas men are more likely to be high school teachers (60% men, 40% women).35 The teaching force remains predominantly white as well with 79% of all public school teachers identifying as “non-Hispanic white.”36 And so, Lady Bountiful lives on through “well-intentioned,” “big-hearted” white women like me. Diplomacy: Protection and Promotion of the Motherland Compared to education, the institution of diplomacy has been more discrete in its path of feminization and the co-option of women’s labor for purposes of national interest. Although the U.S. has been negotiating with other countries since its inception, it wasn’t until 1917 that diplomacy was officially institutionalized with the establishment of the Committee on Public Information. Interest and efforts in public diplomacy, or “the promotion of the national interest by informing, engaging, and influencing people around the world,”37 has ebbed and flowed, peaking during times of tension and crises (e.g., WWI, WWII, the Cold War, 9/11).38 Public diplomacy is consequential work that is carried out through a variety of means. Snyder argues that “policy means nothing if it cannot coherently reach the public,”39 hence the government’s 33 Tyack and Hansot, 1992 34 Navarre, 1977 35 National Center for Education Statistics, 2020, 9 36 Ibid., 3 37 The Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World, 2003, 13 38 Rugh, 2014 39 Snyder, 2013, 7 50 effort to inform, engage, and influence the foreign public through listening (gathering information on foreign public opinion), advocacy (actively promoting a policy or idea), cultural diplomacy, exchange, and international broadcasting.40 According to journalist and war correspondent Edward Murrow, “the real art in this business is not so much moving information or guidance or policy five or 10,000 miles. . . The real art is to move it the last three feet in face-to-face conversation.”41 We often think about official diplomats, such as ambassadors, as those who do the work of moving information and policy those “last three feet.” The U.S. Foreign Service has been a notoriously male-dominated organization since its inception. As of 2018, females still made up only about 35% of the Foreign Service workforce yet accounted for almost 70% of the positions at the lowest ranks (Foreign Service Officer, Secretary in the Diplomatic Service, or Consular Officer).42 These demographics match global trends which reveal that women occupy only 15% of ambassador appointments worldwide.43 Again, it’s not just gender/sex composition that genders an institution. Historically, the environments of diplomatic institutions have been homosocial and masculinized.44 Since diplomats represent their nation, it makes sense that they have been gendered in ways that reflect the personification of the state. As Tickner explains, “states perform as masculine protectors, thus enabling them [to] gain legitimacy from domestic audiences and respect from international ones” as they “fight for the defense of the ‘mother’ country.”45 With gender hierarchies that privilege “strong,” masculinized bodies over “weak,” feminized ones, the U.S. has gained and retained its image as a world superpower. However, the use of 40 Cull, 2008 41 Whedon, 1963 42 Congressional Research Service, 2021, 12 43 Towns and Niklasson, 2018 44 Aggestam and Towns, 2018 45 Tickner, 2018, 24-25 51 masculinized power in international relations and foreign policy is not always desirable since it can be perceived as threatening. Towns describes some feminized figurations of the diplomat that counter the stereotypically-masculine ones: the “soft” non-fighter, the relationship builder, the gossip, the cookie- pusher, and the fancy Frenchman.46 She argues that these figurations mark a shift in the gendering of diplomacy which now is beginning to make room for “feminine” alternatives to “masculine” uses of force. Joseph Nye’s distinction between hard and soft power in politics can be useful in conceptualizing how countries and their agents interact and relate to one another. “Hard power” often takes the form of coercion and force through militaristic action and sanctions whereas “soft power” stems from “the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies.”47 Although these three sources of soft power overlap and are gendered in varying ways, culture is perhaps the most widely recognized. The term “cultural diplomacy” refers to the soft power use or exchange of cultural products (e.g., fine arts, pop culture, television) as well as cultural ideas, values, and traditions to promote national interests.48 Cultural diplomacy initiatives leverage activities such as art exhibits, film festivals, concerts, athletic events, and exchanges; these initiatives can be state-sponsored or the work of private citizens and organizations. A classic example of cultural diplomacy is the U.S. government’s efforts to co- opt the clout of Walt Disney’s brand in Latin America in the 1940s. Through the Good Neighbor policy, the U.S. supported Disney in his production of multiple films for Latin American audiences in hopes of making democracy, capitalism, and other U.S. values more attractive.49 46 Towns, 2020 47 Nye, 2004, x 48 Academy for Cultural Diplomacy, n.d.; Krenn, 2017 49 Barros, 2016; Prieto, 2012 52 I am most interested in the exchanges aspect of cultural diplomacy, specifically educational exchanges, since this is where we can locate state-sponsored transnational teaching, or overseas teaching positions that are financially and/or programmatically supported by teachers’ home nation. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the Peace Corps is arguably the most familiar U.S. state-sponsored transnational teaching program although there are numerous others, including the English Language Fellow Program that I was part of, the English Language Specialist Program, the Fulbright Specialist Program, the Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms Program, and the Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching Short-term Program.50 In fiscal year 2019, the U.S. spent $701 million funding these and other exchange programs through the Bureau of Educational Cultural Affairs.51 Interlude Before arriving on campus and meeting Almaz in the university guest house, I had a post-arrival orientation at the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa. I was eager to learn more about the context in which I’d be living and working since this information was sparse at the pre-departure orientation in Washington, D.C. The Ethiopian driver who picked me up at the airport and dropped me off at the Addis View Hotel informed me that he’d pick me up at 8:00 am the next morning to take me to the embassy. When we arrived at the embassy the following day, the driver dropped me outside of the heavily secured building. After waiting in line for a few minutes, the local guard said, “Passport, please.” My jaw dropped. I had completely forgotten to bring it. Worried about my belongings being stolen, I had left my passport, laptop, and emergency cash in the hotel safe. It seems so obvious to me now that I would have needed identification, but at the time, I had never been to an embassy. I didn’t know the rules. 50 U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, n.d. 51 U.S. Department of State, U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, 2020 53 I was so embarrassed that Semira, a local staff member who dubbed herself my “Ethiopian mother” had to drive me in her personal car back to the hotel to retrieve my passport. Despite the delay entering the building, I was not late for the security briefing that I was supposed to attend. A recently-arrived Fulbright Scholar, three new Foreign Service employees, and I crammed into a small conference room to listen to a white man in a suit review pertinent country information using slides that had far too many words. Jennifer, the Fulbright Scholar, and I quickly realized that this orientation was not meant for us. After almost every statement, the presenter would glance over at the two of us and say, “Well, not in your case.” It would go something like this: “And here is the list of minimum safety features your home or apartment must have: a fence or wall around the entire compound, barbed wire on top of that fence or wall, a deadbolt lock on the front door, and a safe haven within the building. We also recommend hiring 24/7 gate security. We have a list of locals we can recommend.” Jennifer and I glanced at each other doubting that our accommodations would be so luxuriously equipped. “Well, not in your case,” the man directed at us. “To be honest, I’m not sure what your housing will be like. If you don’t feel safe, let your superior know.” I’d discover a few days later that my provided accommodations were not fenced, did not have barbed wire, did not have deadbolt locks, did not include a safe haven, and surely violated a myriad of other housing requirements for U.S. diplomats. But Jennifer and I were not diplomats. We knew that, but no one really knew what to do with us. We were not employed by the U.S. government, yet here we were, lumped in with the others. We were all sent to the security office to receive badges which were needed to enter the embassy more easily in the future—no passport needed—and have access to the commissary. Snickers, Jack Daniels, and canned pumpkin, oh my! 54 The woman at the window of the security office asked me what my position was. I told her that I was an English Language Fellow and she just stared at me blankly. I followed with, “It’s kind of like Peace Corps.” She made a few phone calls, took my photo, and handed me a yellow badge. After placing the lanyard with the badge around my neck, I noticed how people walking by would glance at it. I was a new face and they were trying to peg me. Was I new high-ranking official? Or was I just another lowly consular officer putting in my time? My badge apparently revealed that I was somewhere much lower on the totem pole. I could feel the hierarchy around me as I ate lunch in the embassy cafeteria with the Public Affairs Officer who oversaw English language programming in the country. I remember telling myself, “I never want to work in the Foreign Service if this is what it’s like.” Maybe I should’ve thought about that before joining a government-sponsored public diplomacy initiative. Citizen Diplomacy: The Gendered Labor of Not-Quite Diplomats What I was feeling in that cafeteria and continued to feel throughout my time as a state- sponsored transnational teacher was the result of not quite being a private citizen nor an official diplomat. I was asked to represent my home country and serve as a cultural ambassador in a program associated with the U.S. government, but for better or worse, I did not have the title or employment status that would provide me certain protections and privileges. The term that most closely captures my liminal status as a state-sponsored transnational teacher is “citizen diplomacy.” Malek defines citizen diplomacy as, “unofficial, state-funded contacts between people of different nations, as opposed to official contacts between governmental representatives. . . It can involve interchanges of people through student or faculty exchange programs.”52 Citizen diplomacy is not performed solely by teachers although they are my focus here; 52 Malek, 2013 55 other citizen diplomats include students, artists, medical personnel, musicians, scientists, athletes, authors, celebrities, and development workers. In his book, Peace Corps and Citizen Diplomacy: Soft Power Strategies in U.S. Foreign Policy, Stephen Magu argues that such peer-to-peer exchange is a soft power tool that is “growing in importance as an augmentative pillar to traditional US foreign policy.”53 He further argues that the Peace Corps and similar exchanges can impact relations between leaders and nations. For example, recipient countries of Peace Corps Volunteers vote congruently with the U.S. at the UN General Assembly in 75% of the cases he studied. Taking the Peace Corps as an exemplar, we can see how citizen diplomacy has been and continues to be gendered. The organization was conceived and established in 1961 in “an elite world of white masculine politics.”54 I recently came across an obituary for Douglas C. Kelly who grew up in Lansing where I now live. The headline of the brief write-up stated, “Man Who Inspired Creation of Peace Corps Dies at 92.”55 This white man who attended a private liberal arts college and was a member of the Washtenaw County Democratic Party executive committee reflects aspects of Robert Dean’s description of the “imperial brotherhood” that influenced U.S. foreign policy in the mid-20th century. He argued that the Peace Corps “provided a public theater of masculinity for left-leaning liberal internationalists in the Democratic administration.”56 It comes as little surprise then that the Peace Corps was male dominated in its infancy. Its “racialized, gendered vision of modernity that linked economic integration to freedom, frontier masculinity, and global brotherhood”57 attracted young white men who were eager to join John F. Kennedy and Robert Sargent Shriver’s volunteer organization.). Although there were some female 53 Magu, 2018, 4 54 Kallman, 2019, 568 55 Stanton, 2022 56 Dean, 1995, 259 57 Geidel, 2015, xix 56 volunteers in the early years of the program, they did not serve the same purpose nor receive the same recognition as male volunteers. In her book, Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties, Molly Geidel explains how female volunteers were viewed only as useful in domestic spaces and as symbols of America’s innocence. While many women joined the Peace Corps to gain independence and escape their looming confinement in the domestic sphere, they often found themselves relegated to the same roles overseas. Female volunteers became frustrated in their inability to effect change in the public sphere with one volunteer writing that she had “no tools, not even seeds, to distribute. I truly had nothing more to give than myself.”58 And give of themselves, they did. Female Peace Corps Volunteers were not only sexualized in materials from and about the Peace Corps but also in the ways they were perceived by their home and host nations. Geidel found at least 14 novels written in the 1960s featuring female Peace Corps Volunteer protagonists. These characters personified the script which emphasized females’ desire for independence but only within a landscape dominated by men. A Ghanian newspaper published a piece, albeit satirical, with “guidelines to the seduction of U.S. Peace Corps volunteers” who pine for the “long, naked spheres” of African men.59 Geidel explains that: In different moments, the female volunteer symbolized a young, naïve America desired by the entire world; the aspirations for freedom of newly independent nations, to be contained by a developmental romance with responsible and tough American leaders; and a symbol to the persistent idea of American innocence, a location where the violence inherent in the development mission could be exposed and countered.60 But this “seduction-for-development framework”61 has led to harassment and violence, especially against female/feminized bodies. This darker side of the Peace Corps’ history and current reality has 58 As cited in Geidel, 2015, 101-102 59 Geidel, 2015, 88-89 60 Ibid., 73-74 61 Ibid., 101 57 been formally acknowledged with the establishment of the Peace Corps Sexual Assault Advisory Council in 2011.62 In the next chapter, I will discuss further how bodies, particularly female/feminized ones, are seen, policed, and violated as state-sponsored transnational teachers serve as embodiments of their nation. For now, I want to focus on how the gendered logics of foreign policy and international development trickle down to the roles of those who labor for their motherland. A visual example of this division of labor can been seen in photos of volunteers in the Peace Corps Volunteer magazine and related paraphernalia throughout the 1960s. The cover of a non-fiction book about the Peace Corps published in 1963 depicts men playing basketball, serving as doctors and agriculture specialists while the only female volunteer is portrayed as a “motherteacher.”63 In this manner, male volunteers are associated with physical and specialized labor in predominantly male spaces whereas female volunteers are associated with domestic and caregiving labor in predominantly female spaces.64 Even though white female volunteers were afforded a certain extent of “male” privilege due to their race,65 they were still constrained to certain kinds of work, especially that which depended on emotional labor. The Peace Corps has followed the “feminization of development” trend that has seen an increasing number of females involved with international development.66 In the 1960s, almost two- thirds of volunteers were men; as of 2019, 65% of Peace Corps volunteers were female.67 The type of work that volunteers do has also shifted with the majority of volunteers now laboring in schools (42% of volunteers work in education, 20% in health, 12% youth development, 9% agriculture, 8% community 62 Peace Corps, 2016 63 Kittler, 1963 64 Geidel, 2015, 77 65 Kallman, 2019 66 Kallman, 2019, 571 67 Peace Corps, 2019 58 economic development, 7% environment, and 2% Peace Corps Response). In this way, we can see how more women are performing work for the motherland that requires emotional labor. Emotional Labor: A Shared Aspect of the Institutions of Teaching and Diplomacy Sociologist Arlie Hochschild is credited with coining the term “emotional labor” in her 1983 book, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. In the preface, she explains that she was motivated to research how people manage emotions after growing up with parents who worked for the U.S. Foreign Service: At the age of twelve, I found myself passing a dish of peanuts among many guests and looking up at their smiles; diplomatic smiles can look different when seen from below than when seen straight on. Afterwards I would listen to my mother and father interpret various gestures. The tight smile of the Bulgarian emissary, the averted glance of the Chinese consul, and the prolonged handshake of the French economic officer, I learned, conveyed messages not simply from person to person but from Sofia to Washington, from Peking to Paris, and from Paris to Washington. Had I passed the peanuts to a person, I wondered, or to an actor? Where did the person end and the act begin? Just how is a person related to an act?68 When I read this paragraph, I couldn’t help but think of my experiences as a teacher. I’ve always told people that I have my “teacher personality” and my “regular Rebekah personality.” While I try to be my authentic self in the classroom, I’ve always felt that there is a performative aspect to the work which Hochschild captures above. As a public school teacher, for instance, you are not just an individual actor with your own agenda, you are also an agent of the state and the nation as a civil servant; thus, teachers are expected to promote democratic values and ethics while following federal and state mandates, namely standardized assessments, state standards, and sometimes prescribed curriculum. In a similar vein, I was not just a private citizen when teaching overseas, I was a U.S. citizen who was expected to be a not-quite diplomat who promoted U.S. culture and values. The exact methods of citizen diplomacy may not have been spelled out to me, but I knew that relational work was central. I was placed at particular institutions in Ethiopia and China to create and 68 Hochschild, 1983, xvii 59 sustain relationships with locals to contrive amicable environments for the U.S. Embassy and other American entities to start and continue doing their desired work. I was never directly told to form a relationship with a specific person, but my daily activities constantly required me to do so. The labor that went into forming and maintaining these relationships with students, colleagues, and other locals required a large emotional investment. As Hochschild explains, emotional labor is when paid work: centrally involves trying to feel the right feeling for the job. This involves evoking and suppressing feelings. Some jobs require a lot of it, some a little of it. From the flight attendant whose job it is to be nicer than natural to the bill collector whose job it is to be, if necessary, harsher than natural.69 The notion of “paid work” has been debated by many with the concept also being applied to unpaid labor, like caregiving and household chores. No matter the definition used, Hochschild argues that women do more emotional labor than men,70 hence, the gendered nature of emotional labor and careers that rely on it. For teachers, emotional labor is a significant contributor to emotional exhaustion, and subsequently, burnout and attrition.71 As Hargreaves explains: Teaching involves immense amounts of emotional labor. Not just acting out feeling superficially like pretending to be disappointed or surprised, but also consciously working oneself up into a state of actually experiencing the necessary feelings that are required to perform one’s job well—be these feelings of anger or enthusiasm, coolness or concern.72 With the onslaught of major events and tragedies in the U.S., like some of those named in the introduction of this chapter, teachers now face even more pressure to perform emotional labor. Dunn points out that the emotionally draining work of teaching on “days after” tragic events is crucial to making space for equitable and humanizing dialogue,73 yet this additional emotional labor compounds 69 Beck, 2018 70 Hochschild, 1983 71 Keller, Chang, Becker, Goetz and Frenzel, 2014; Teven, 2007 72 Hargreaves, 1998, 840 73 Dunn, 2022 60 teachers’ already-demanding responsibilities. This increase of emotional labor affects teacher morale and can lead to teachers’ decision to leave the field of teaching.74 State-sponsored Transnational Teachers and the Performance of Emotional Labor State-sponsored transnational teachers not only perform this labor with their students in the classroom75 but often with others outside of the classroom as well. For me, the teaching aspects of my work as a Fellow were not too surprising. I was used to dealing with cultural and linguistic differences, plagiarism, student motivation, and other stereotypical language classroom issues. My familiarity with such challenges didn’t necessarily mean less emotional labor, but I knew, more or less, what to expect. However, the emotional labor that I performed outside of the classroom was relatively new. I felt a lot of pressure to be a middlewoman between my home country and my host country. I was not just an intercultural translator who explained particularities of my home country’s language and culture, but also an intermediary who attempted to harmonize conflicting beliefs without fully revealing my personal views. There were more simple situations like when people would ask me, “Do you own a gun?” or “Why are Americans so fat?” I could explain these topics by sharing my own opinions and experiences, to some extent, wrapped neatly in relevant sociohistorical context. “No, I don’t own a gun. My family and I really don’t like guns at all, but the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives Americans the right to bear arms, or own guns, if they want. This amendment was created so that Americans could defend themselves against unlawful violence, should the need arise. How does this compare to the situation here in China?” But then there were the more difficult situations. Sometimes I was caught in positions that made me feel like I had to choose, or at least perform, my allegiance: home country or host country. 74 Dunn, 2014; Dunn and Downey, 2017 75 See Chapter Five: Mother Tongue for further discussion of classroom labor. 61 After living and working in China for almost three years, it was not uncommon to hear my colleagues say, “Well, you know how it is here.” I did. Politically, the U.S. and China are on very different pages. I was told to never talk about the “three T’s”: Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen. I was warned that my classroom, and nearly every street corner, probably had CCTV. I was informed that each of my classes had “class monitors” who were members of the Communist Party and would likely report any “sensitive” class discussions. I was told to obey Chinese laws since the U.S.’s influence in legal matters only reached so far. I knew all this, but it didn’t make it any easier. I had watched Locked Up Abroad and had heard about worse case scenarios. While I was a Fellow in southwestern China, I remember receiving a WeChat SMS about an American who needed help paying for legal fees. Former Ball State University football player Wendell Brown who was working as a youth coach was charged with intentional assault after an altercation at a nightclub. A Chinese man accused him of injuring his eye which had to be removed. Wendell claimed he raised his arms in self-defense after a bottle was thrown at him. He said, s/he said. With a 99.9% conviction rate in China, the odds were not in Wendell’s favor.76 He was sentenced to four years in prison but was released in 2019 after serving three years.77 Luckily, I did not have any legal run-ins, but I did find myself in situations where I wasn’t sure how to perform as an American not- quite diplomat. 76 Shih, 2018 77 Liu and Givetash, 2019 62 “Highlighting” Everyday Emotional Labor78 In both Ethiopia and China, I purchased a bicycle since cycling is near and dear to my heart. While I agree with Hemingway that “it is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best,”79 it was Susan B. Anthony who more accurately stated that cycling: has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. . . It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent. The moment she takes her seat she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood.80 So true. I rode by myself to not only get to places I wanted to go but also to get away from it all. After all, the reach of the patriarchy transcends oceans and national borders. By the power of my own two legs, I could climb the surrounding mountains and pedal down roads that few foreigners had ever traversed. Although I sometimes worried about having mechanical issues in the “middle of nowhere,” I preferred cycling in places where I didn’t have to dodge traffic or be ogled at. On a particularly steamy day in April, I decided to try a new route from my university-owned apartment in southwest China. After meticulously mapping out my itinerary using Google Maps satellite images, I set out on my way. “Make sure you take an extra bottle of water, babe,” Mark advised as I carried my Giant road bike down the three flights of steps. I only had one bottle but packed some yuan knowing that I could find a mom-and-pop shop even in the most remote area. I took the familiar route out of town to the south and smiled as the speed of my bicycle created a much-welcomed breeze. I stopped along the way to take photos and check my map to make sure I was headed down the right one-lane country roads. 78 “Highlighting” is a pun based on the “highlights” I was required to write for the Fellow Program. 79 White, 1967, 364 80 Bly, 1896, 10 63 After ten miles or so, I reached an area I had never been. The mountains rolled around me and unruly jade-colored grass surrounded muddied ponds and traditional homes with tiled roofs. I wanted to take more photos, but that would mean losing all of my momentum and the self-generated airflow that was keeping me cool. The urge to stop grew stronger with every curve. Each landscape seemed to be more stunning than the previous. Suddenly, I had to hit my brakes as I rounded the next corner. Cabbages were strewn about the road. Further ahead, I saw a mangled bicycle on the roadside and what appeared to be a body. I hopped off my bike as quickly as possible and ran to the body-shaped mass. It was an elderly man, probably a local farmer transporting his harvest. Even though it was sweltering, he wore a long-sleeved shirt, black slacks, and he had a green, military-style jacket draped over his waist. One black dress shoe lay next to his body alongside a rice sack that had housed his bulky cargo. As I leaned in to see whether or not he was breathing, I noticed the beads of sweat along his hairline. After what felt like an eternity, I saw his back rise slightly. He was alive. I muttered some of the few Mandarin words I knew, “Lǎofū, hǎobùhǎo [old man, are you good or not good]?” No response. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t call 119, China’s emergency number, since I didn’t speak enough Mandarin to communicate where I was and what was going on. Instead, I dialed Keegan, my American friend who had lived in China for over ten years. He advised that I flag down the next car that came along. I didn’t know how long this would take since I hadn’t seen many vehicles on this rural stretch. “Should I try to give him water?” I asked. As much as I instinctively wanted to help, I had heard stories and seen firsthand China’s “bystander effect.” In situations where an injured person needs assistance, others are hesitant to step in fearing liability. Good Samaritans have been blamed and held legally responsible for “causing” harm after an incident as well as for the original injury. People have gone as far as saying that “it is better to hit to kill than to hit and injure” since the former likely results in 64 a one-time payment for funeral expenses whereas the latter may result in a lifetime of paying for the injured person’s care.81 In this moment, I wondered what would happen if I tried to give the man water and he somehow choked on it. Or if someone came along and saw me beside him, would they think that I had caused his crash? If I had called the Embassy’s emergency line instead of Keegan, I believe they would have advised me not to intervene. If he and his family or the police pressed charges against me, I’d have a 99.9% chance of being convicted and held liable. Before I could make my decision about the water, I could see a vehicle rounding the bend. I stepped into the middle of the road and began waving my arms. A small, beige bus stopped at what was surely a shocking sight to them. The spandex, sunglasses, and helmet could not obscure my almost-six- foot frame or tawny curls. My perceptible foreignness indicated that I did not belong here. All 15-or-so passengers disembarked as I tried to explain the situation at hand. A younger passenger told me she was a teacher, and we were able to communicate in English. “He’s alive, but he needs water and shade,” I implored. The group gathered in the road in front of the man, but no one immediately stepped in. After looking at each other and looking at me, a woman from the group went to the man, picked up his green jacket, and held it above him as an improv shade. Another woman grabbed a bottle of water from the bus and poured it gently on his face and into his mouth. I stood back and watched the scene unfold. The teacher turned back to inform me that they had called 119 and that someone was on their way. I knew it was time for me to leave. Of course, I was curious to know if the man would survive and how the situation would conclude, but it wasn’t my place. There were now people more capable than me to assist. 81 Sant, 2015 65 I share this story not as a display of my valor or empathy, but as an illustration of how emotional labor is not confined to the classroom for state-sponsored transnational teachers. Foreigners whose Otherness is as visible as mine was in China are “always on the clock.” Always representing. Even though I didn’t wear a fancy suit with the Stars and Stripes pinned to my lapel, I embodied my country. When these passengers on the bus saw me, they saw something more than me as an individual. The way I performed didn’t just reflect my desires and values but also those of my nation. If we believe that orientations are passed down through the bodies and labor of those who came before us, my motivation to assist and intervene was not mine alone. How can we disentangle the altruistic intentions of state-sponsored transnational teachers from the imperial, paternal roots of such endeavors? In the moment, all I wanted to do was help this man. I had been taught the “Golden Rule” of doing unto others as I would have them do unto me. I grew up in a place where this mentality was the social norm. But the same was not true in this context. While my gut reaction was to be angry with the passengers when they didn’t jump right in to assist, I had to stifle my ire. The emotional labor of attempting to evoke certain behaviors in them while minimizing my own feelings was one of my perceived roles as a not-quite diplomat. Rather than behave exactly how I wanted to, I had to consider what my home country and what my host country would want me to do. Then, I had to tactfully negotiate those potentially competing expectations to promote certain ideals of my motherland knowing that my labor would likely be unrecognized, unappreciated, and undervalued. No one knew about the labor I performed that day, save for Mark and Keegan, until I penned the story here. On the other hand, potentially hundreds of people read about the more traditional labor I performed as a state-sponsored transnational teacher. The day after that bicycle ride, I led a writing workshop and essay contest for high school students at the Chongqing public library. It was these sorts of events that the Embassy and Fellow Program staff liked to hear about. 66 We were asked to write “highlights” about our work as state-sponsored transnational teachers. At the pre-departure orientation, examples were shared with us complete with instructions of how to take worthy photos: include faces, not backs; capture action, not passive audiences; ensure high-quality resolution; obtain consent whenever possible from everyone visible in the photo. These highlights and photos would then circulate the Public Affairs section of the local U.S. Embassy as well as relevant circles in Washington, D.C., and some of them would make their way to the English Language Programs website. Through these exemplar highlights available to Fellows, I was oriented toward the program’s values and its expectations of me. When I wasn’t sure about the kinds of projects to initiate at my placement or how to spend my $2,200 allowance for program activities, I looked to my peers and alumni. I scrolled through the featured highlights on the program website and read carefully through the email newsletters routinely sent by program staff. To me, they screamed: “Look at all this good we’re doing in the world!” and “Here’s exactly how we are spending government dollars, and subsequently, changing lives!” Here's how I mimicked this practice (see Figure 3). 67 Figure 3. Fellow Program “Highlights Form” Highlights Form Name: Rebekah Gordon Participant type: English Language Fellow Activity Title: Fellow and PCVs Co-lead Two-Day Essay and Poetry Contest in Honor of Earth Day at Chongqing Library Please use the words “Fellow” and “English” in the title if possible. Activity Location: Chongqing, China Activity Start Date: 04-15-2017 Activity End Date: 04-16-2017 Which U.S. State Department initiated programs or products were associated with this activity? (In addition to English Language Fellow or Specialist Program) Materials from the American English website were used during the poetry writing workshop, including poems from the “Poetry” page that were written by English speakers from around the world (https://americanenglish.state.gov/resources/poetry#child-1773). The EducationUSA website was also shared with the participants as a useful source for information about the process of applying to American universities and studying abroad. e.g. Fulbright ETAs, English Access Microscholarship Students, E-teacher program, MOOC Camp, American English website, ECA English teaching materials, etc.) Activity Description Describe the activity (who, what, where, when) - what did participants learn, how was the activity conducted, feedback from participants, etc. The 3rd annual Chongqing Essay Contest was held this past weekend at the Chongqing Library. Around 50 local high school students participated in the two-event focused on celebrating both Earth Day and National Poetry Month. On the first day, the Public Affairs Officer from the US Consulate-Chengdu delivered the opening remarks. The students then worked with English Language Fellow, Rebekah Gordon to master the basic terminology and structures of poetry in a 90-minute workshop. The first day finished with the students spending 60 minutes writing an environmental poem and brief explanation of their poem. All of the poems were judged and given feedback by Gordon and two Peace Corps Volunteers. On the second day of the event, students received another interactive poetry workshop from Gordon focused on creating erasure poetry from newspaper articles. Finally, the winners of the contest were announced and given prizes. The top two winners were both from Chongqing Nankai Secondary School receiving a Kindle Paperwhite and DVD set, respectively. Altogether, sixteen students received prizes and all participants received a certificate. The library staff 68 Figure 3 (cont’d) were grateful to co-host the event again and look forward to continuing this strong partnership in the future. Activity Significance: Why did you do this? What was the value of the activity? What are the expected outcomes? This event was co-sponsored by the Chengdu Consulate and the Chongqing Library to encourage students to learn more about poetry, Earth Day, Chongqing Library resources, and the English language. Students were also introduced to various resources from the American English website as well as EducationUSA. We expect that students will be more excited about learning English and potentially studying in the U.S. after graduating high school. We also hope that students will be more likely to visit the Chongqing Library again. Quotes about the activity In your own words (or words of a participant), tell us your impressions of the activity in short sentences. We may use these quotes for our website or other promotional materials. Please include 1-3 quotes. 1. “I learned so much from the poetry workshop. Thank you for taking the time to read my essay and give me feedback.” 2. “I had a lot of fun this weekend. Will you be having another essay contest next year?” Number of Foreign Participants: 50 Key audience 1: secondary students Percentage of audience: 100% Key audience 2: Percentage of audience: Key audience 3: Percentage of audience: Percentage male: 45% Percentage female: 55% Did you collaborate with any other organizations (U.S. Government or local organizations) to carry out this activity? Yes Mention if you worked with an American Space, Corner, IRC, local university, NGO, Teacher’s Organization, etc. If yes, what organization(s)? The Chongqing public library, the Chengdu Consulate, and Peace Corps What was the budget for this activity? Total = 261 USD • Transportation for me and two PCVs to/from library = 54 USD • Amazon Kindle (prize) = 120 USD • 3 DVD sets (prizes) = 62 USD • Snacks/drinks for essay reviewers = 25 USD 69 Figure 3 (cont’d) What materials did you use for this activity: Self-created PPTs, self-created handouts, pencil and paper, poems from “Poetry” page listed above, screen and projector, prizes as listed above (including copies of Activate Games for Learning, American Rhythms: Sing Out Loud, and Celebrate! Holidays in the U.S.A.), certificates for each participant (printed by Chengdu Consulate). Were materials used or distributed at this event? Were there any U.S. Embassy materials-- English Teaching Forum, print publications, etc. How did you recruit participants for this activity: The participants were recruited by the staff at the Chongqing public library. Do you have any photos of the activity? Yes (embedded and attached). If yes, please attach them to the email. Caption for photos: English Language Fellow, Rebekah Gordon, reviews essay one-on-one with Chongqing secondary student. 70 Lingering Questions How did I, Lady Bountiful, impact the “natives” in my overseas community? How exactly did I extend the reach of my motherland? When writing highlights, not only did I have to boast about the work that I had performed, but I also had to describe its impact. Quantifiable impact was emphasized through the sharing of the number of participants, demographics of the participants, the number of hours of interaction with participants, and the amount of dollars spent. This is exactly the kind of information that fuels a neoliberal machine—how can we get the most out of the least amount of money? The addition of a participant quote or photo attempted to humanize this mechanized process. I felt like a fraud when filling out highlight forms. How could I possibly know the impact my interactions had on the folks with whom I met? Years later, I’m still figuring out exactly how these interactions impacted me. As with teaching, the measure of such impact is nearly impossible to fully encapsulate in numbers or even words. Sometimes we learn, many years down the road, how we may have impacted a student. But usually, we do not. When we focus on the seemingly tangible, what are we missing? I think about all the highlights I never wrote. The emotional labor that was spent daily to perform in a certain way, to represent my motherland. The situations where I surely impacted people, for better or for worse. The situations where people surely impacted me, for better or for worse. If I hadn’t been standing in the middle of the road that day waving my arms, I don’t know if that bus would’ve stopped. I don’t take credit for saving the man’s life nor for the passing of China’s Good Samaritan law just six months after that incident.82 But I do wonder about the unaccounted value of the everyday labor of state-sponsored transnational teachers. As I look back at the highlight I wrote for the essay contest, I can’t help but think of Ophelia’s hypothetical birth announcement. Both use templates to publicly share particular details which, in turn, 82 Kwok, 2017 71 perpetuate the gendered nature of social institutions and practices. While birth announcements reflect patriarchal aspects of the institute of motherhood, program highlights reflect patriarchal aspects of the institutes of teaching and diplomacy. The feminization of these social institutions has led to the invisibility of their laborers—this labor may not be seen, yet it is essential for sustaining the patriarchy. While women and others with less power remain at the bottom of the hierarchy, men and others with more power continue to benefit from the labor of those beneath them. If women from around the globe had earned minimum wage for the unpaid housework and caregiving they performed in 2019, they would have made a total of $10,900,000,000,000—that’s 10.9 trillion dollars!83 What about the labor of citizen diplomats, including state-sponsored transnational teachers? 83 Coffey, 2020 72 CHAPTER FOUR: BODIES Prelude February 22, 2022 Dear Ophelia, It’s Twos-day! 2-22-22. That’s a lot of 2s, huh? Two twos is how long you’ve been gone. Your five-day daddy-daughter trip will soon be coming to an end. As I try to focus on my dissertation and accomplish as much as I can while you are away, I am haunted by you. There you are when I step on the blushing pink Crayola cap that we had presumed missing after fruitless searches. There you are when I open the fridge and see your plate of half-eaten, now-rock-hard chicken nuggets. There you are when Chester and Charlie step on your toys in the middle of the night and trigger Peppa’s British accent, “If you jump in muddy puddles, don’t forget your boots!” There you are when I stumble over your salt-stained winter boots each time I head out the side door. There you are. Type 4B kinky strands of you strewn about the apartment. Flakes of you floating in the air, only illuminated when the morning sun pours through the crack of the bedroom curtains. There you are. I love every bit of you, dead skin cells and all, and I am trying to teach you to do the same. But how do I teach you to love your body when I struggle to love my own? Whether I like it or not, my behaviors influence yours. I see it in the way you subtly shrug your shoulders when you’re unsure and the way you announce, “That’s all!” when you’ve finished explaining something important. Just. Like. Me. Such mimicry is endearing but also utterly terrifying. At almost-four-years-of-age, just how much of my self-shaming have you picked up on? While I haven’t witnessed you doing or saying any of the cruel things I do or say about my body, are you thinking them about your body or other people’s bodies? You are far beyond what psychologists call “self-recognition.” By 18 months of age, most children realize that they are beings separate from their caregivers and their environments. This self-recognition solidifies into “self-awareness” or “self-consciousness” by about three to five years of age. At this point, children not only recognize their name, face, and body but also gain a sense of self-image. This is the moment when we realize other people see us.1 I don’t remember coming to this realization as a young child, but oh, do I feel it ‘til this day. Just typing the words “self-consciousness” and “self-image” sends shudders down my spine. As a female-identifying person in this male-dominated world, I have spent far too much time being self-conscious and worrying about my self-image. I know it’d be so much easier if I just didn’t give a flying fuck about what other people think and how they perceive me, but I just can’t shake the pressure to control my seemingly unruly body. I think feminist author Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett captured this patriarchal burden perfectly when she wrote: My full-time, unpaid, job is managing my appetite, and in between that I write for the Guardian. I so want to become a refusenik . . . But I know that when this article is published, I won’t focus 1 Berman, 1989 73 on the career high of having a feature published in a national magazine. I’ll focus on the photographs, and how much I hate them. And I’ll think of all the other girls out there hating theirs – on Facebook, on Instagram, everywhere – and ask myself: how long are we going to put up with it?2 I’m not ready to give up the possibility of re-orienting myself and the deeply entrenched beliefs I hold. I need to do this not just to be kind to myself but to others, including YOU! I knew it was high time for a change when my judgment of female bodies was cast on you. As you know, you were a big baby. Since birth, you have literally been off the charts. After each of your doctor’s visits, I’d be sent home with a little index card recording your stats: height, weight, and head circumference. I felt proud that you were always in the 90th-plus percentiles. Big like your mother. But at some point, “big” didn’t feel like something to be proud of. At your three-year wellness exam, everything was going smoothly—you wore a gown for the first time and let the doctor check your ears, eyes, heart, lungs, and reflexes you never knew existed. When I didn’t receive a little index card at the end of the appointment, I asked the doctor if he could write down your stats. This is something that I had been keeping track of in your baby book, just like my mother did for me. As he wrote down your numbers, he said, “Oh, yes. I’m glad you asked about this. I wanted to show you her growth. He pointed at a graph on his laptop that showed a steadily climbing line. Near the end of the line, the slope increased fairly dramatically. The doctor put his finger on this part of the graph and told me that he was a bit concerned about the increase of your weight in proportion to your height. He left the room and came back with a colorful handout touting the “3-2-1-0 protocol.” He explained to you that each day you should eat at least 3 fruits and vegetables, have no more than 2 hours of screen time, exercise at least 1 hour, and avoid sugary drinks and snacks. This triggered so many things inside of me. Who was he to call my daughter “fat” (without actually uttering the despicable word)? Didn’t my own pediatrician mention similar things to me at my 6th grade sport’s physical? Was he trying to send you down a lifelong spiral of self-loathing and yo-yo dieting? I just wanted to tear up that paper and steam out of the examination room. Instead, I went home and talked to Daddy about it. We decided to tape the 3-2-1-0 reminder to your bedroom door. They are, after all, healthy reminders with no mention of weight. Perhaps it’s the numbers that bother me so much each time I walk past your room. It takes me back to days of counting calories and grams of fat. Weighing myself multiple times a day. Tracking the number of minutes I exercised. Scrawling all of this information in my school planner. If 1 lb. equals 3,500 calories, it should be just 2 more days until the red line on the scale hovers over a smaller number. A better number. Someday you will learn these supposedly innocuous formulas in “health” class. Of course, being healthy is a great goal, but how do we separate health from notions of physical beauty? In a world where we still refer to store aisles and entire departments as “Health & Beauty,” we have a long way to go. We need to stop using “health” as a guise for the unhealthy things we do to our bodies and expect others to do to their bodies. 2 Cosslett, 2014, para. 39 74 I wonder what my mother thought as she recorded my height and weight in my baby book. Did she begin to worry when my weight started to increase more rapidly than my height? Did she compare my stats to my sister’s or her own? She missed a couple of years along the way, but the last entry reports that at 11 years of age I was 5’4” and weighed 130 pounds. While it’s interesting to see these numbers, what good does it really do? I don’t need another reminder that I was and still am bigger than most of my peers. You know, baby books started as a way to not only record developmental milestones but also celebrate the fact that infants were more likely to survive. As infant mortality declined and consumer culture grew at the end of the 19th century and throughout the 20th, the baby book rose in popularity.3 Parents were encouraged to weigh their babies regularly to identify fluctuations that might indicate the need for medical intervention.4 Naturally, this practice lent itself to the judgment of bodies, and subsequently, identification of practices that ensured the taming of “unruly” bodies. Although we still have a scale tucked away in our bathroom cabinet and you will still be weighed at your future wellness examinations, you now know why I’ve decided to stop recording your physical stats in your baby book. There are so many other wonderful traits about you that are much more worthy of recording. Like the way you make up lyrics to familiar tunes to dictate what you are doing. Like the way you stick your tongue out the side of your mouth when you are concentrating on a demanding task. Like the way you sleep in child’s pose when you’re overtired. Like the way you press your body against mine and caress my arm when you’re allowed to sleep in Mommy and Daddy’s bed. All the little and not so little things that you do with your body, consciously and subconsciously, that make you unique. That make you Ophelia. And so, I close this letter with a poem by Ethel Lynn Beers from the mid-1800s. In “Weighing the Baby,” she reminds us that our bodies are merely vessels for housing our souls: How many pounds does the baby weigh— “Baby” who came a month ago? How many pounds from crowning curl To rosy point of the restless toe? Grandfather ties the kerchief’s knot, Tenderly guides the swinging weight, And over his misty glasses peers To read the record, “only eight.” Softly the echo goes around; The father laughs at the tiny girl, The fair young mother sings the words, While grandmother smoothes the rumpled curl. Stooping above the precious one, To fold a kiss within a prayer, 3 University of California Los Angeles Library, 2014-2021 4 Warner, 2017 75 To whisper softly, “Little one, Grandfather did not weigh you fair.” He did not count the baby's smile, The love born with the helpless one; He did not weigh the threads of care Of which a woman's life is spun. No index tells the mighty worth Of a little Baby's quiet breath, Or heart-beat’s ruddy metronome, Uncounted till it stops in death. Nobody weighed the baby's soul, For here on earth no weights there be That could avail. God only knows Its value through eternity. Only eight pounds to hold a soul That seeks no angel's silver wing, But shrines itself in human guise Within this fair and helpless thing. O, mother, sing your merry note! O, father, laugh, but don't forget From Baby's eyes looks out a soul To be in Eden’s light reset!5 Love you always, Mommy 5 Beers, 1879, 134-135 76 bod·y /ˈbädē/ n. the physical structure and material substance of an animal or plant, living or dead n. a collective group; a group of people who have joined together for a particular reason Introduction In the previous chapters, I have attempted to capture aspects of my embodied experiences as a state-sponsored transnational teacher. It was not unintentional that I provided details about the people, spaces, and objects my body encountered and how it felt to be in my body at particular moments. These details were not only included to contribute to the richness and evocativeness of my writing, but also to express my deeply visceral way of being in and engaging with the world. I am not alone in this way of being in and engaging with the world—our bodies are of “central importance . . . in everything we experience, mean, think, say, value, and do” and “meaning and thought are profoundly shaped and constituted by the nature of our bodily perception, action, and feeling.”6 Thus, the inclusion of corporeal details of my experiences has allowed me, and hopefully my readers, to more deeply understand how explorations of embodiment support meaning making of past experiences. When we think about our individual bodies, however, it is nearly impossible not to consider other people’s bodies. Bodies are relational in the sense that we come to understand them by encountering others’ bodies. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporéité, or intercorporeality, suggests that “the experience of being embodied is never a private affair, but is always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and non-human bodies.”7 He uses the example of a handshake to illustrate how bodies interact in ways that are simultaneously about “my body” and “other bodies.” When I shake your hand, I feel myself being touched by you while also touching and feeling you.8 6 Johnson, 2017, 1 7 Weiss, 1999, 5 8 Merleau-Ponty, 1968, 142 77 Through a handshake, I may come to know something about my body in relation to yours. My hands are large (because yours are small). My hands are warm (because yours are cold). I am more nervous than you (because my hands are sweaty and yours are dry). Coincidentally, citizen diplomacy has been described as shaping U.S. foreign relations “one handshake at a time.”9 In a similar vein, Edward Murrow stated that “the real art” of public diplomacy happens in “the last three feet,” or face-to-face conversation between citizens of different nations.10 Both of these statements recognize the impact of people-to-people exchange. The meeting of bodies. Although I have attempted to capture aspects of embodied experiences in my narratives of struggling with infertility, being pregnant, un/becoming a mother, attending orientation in Washington D.C. and Addis Ababa, encountering Almaz’s racialized body in the guest house, finding the elderly man who had fallen off his bicycle in China, and exercising and being harassed in Ethiopia, this chapter explicitly explores the state-sponsored transnational teacher’s body and how it may be re/con/figured in various spaces. More specifically, I reflect on how the nation may be embodied by state-sponsored transnational teachers who labor for their motherland. To this end, I discuss several relevant conceptualizations of the body in relation to the state-sponsored transnational teacher and the practice of citizen diplomacy while reflecting on some aspects of my embodied experiences as a Fellow in Ethiopia and China. As a feminist mother-artist-researcher-teacher, I adopt a material feminist conceptualization of the body that “considers the mind, brain, flesh-and-blood body in the ways we experience the world.”11 Such an approach is in opposition to Cartesian mind/body dualism which inherently privileges the male- associated mind over the female-associated body. Alternatively, feminist theory of the body offers us a chance not to abandon “the terms associated with the subject’s psyche or interior . . . Rather, they can 9 Citizen Diplomacy Alliance, 2018 10 Whedon, 1963 11 Springgay and Freedman, 2012, 8 78 be remapped, refigured, in terms of models and paradigms which conceive of subjectivity in terms of the primacy of corporeality.”12 Since bodies are at the center of this exploration, I begin with a consideration of how bodies have been conceived of. The Body Politic: Individual Bodies vs. Collective Bodies I have been checking the news more frequently on my phone to follow the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine that began on February 24, 2022. As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy continues to appeal to NATO for a no-fly zone over his country, his rhetoric exudes an air of global responsibility. In his emotional live video-delivered speech to the U.S. Congress on March 16, 2022, he said: Today, the Ukrainian people are defending not only Ukraine, we are fighting for the values of Europe and the world, sacrificing our lives in the name of the future. That’s why today the American people are helping not just Ukraine, but Europe and the world to give the planet the life to keep justice in history. . . I am addressing President Biden, you are the leader of the nation, of your great nation. I wish you to be the leader of the world; being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.13 As he shared a video of the violence being inflicted on individual bodies in his country, viewers were meant to feel a sense of shared responsibility—the collective duty of a global community. Zelenskyy reiterated this notion in his use of “we,” “our,” and by calling Biden “the leader of the world.” Listening to Zelenskyy’s address activated my sense of belonging to a global humanity hypothetically led by my country’s president. In this way, I imagined being a part of something larger than my individual body, larger even than my nation. Benedict Anderson argued that “nation, nationality, [and] nationalism”14 are difficult to define, so he re-conceptualized nation-states as “imaginary political communities” that are “imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”15 By “imagined,” Anderson meant that members of a nation only have 12 Grosz, 1994, viii 13 Edmondson, 2022 14 Anderson, 1983/2006, 3 15 Ibid., 6 79 an image of their community since they can never feasibly meet all of their fellow-members; their community is “limited” because it will never include all of mankind so long as there are other nations; and it is “sovereign” since the nation has its own authority. Anderson added that “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”16 Zelenskyy’s proposed alliance of Europe, the U.S., and other Ukrainian allies spans beyond national borders yet aligns with Anderson’s characteristics of an “imagined political community.” As I, and thousands of others, booked “dummy” AirBnb reservations to financially support Ukrainians we’ve never met, the sense of comradeship was undeniable. My individual body joined others to “enflesh” a collective body, so to speak. Besides imagined communities, the body politic metaphor conjures associations of how we think and feel about individual bodies and collective bodies. The physical body as a depiction of a polity, like a city or state, has roots in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy.17 Extending Christian metaphors of the body of Christ (i.e., corpus mysticum), the body politic (i.e., corpus politicum) was used to describe monarchies in England during the Tudor period (1485-1603). The King was said to have “two bodies”: a body natural and a body politic. The body natural was the King’s mortal body and the body politic was the “Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government.”18 The King’s two bodies were said to form one indivisible unit although the body politic was superior to the body natural since it could outlive mortal bodies. During the 17th century, philosopher Thomas Hobbes revived the metaphor of the body politic through the publication of his book, Leviathan. His conceptualization of the body politic as artificial 16 Anderson, 1983/2006, 7 17 Musolff, 2010 18 Kantorowicz, 1957/1997, 7 80 rather than natural garnered both support and critique.19 Perhaps most notable though is the frontispiece of his book which was designed in tandem with engraver Abraham Bosse. The image depicts a large, crowned figure, presumably a king or monarch, whose torso and arms are made up of hundreds of bodies—bodies of the individual citizens or polity members (see Figure 4). These members have their back to the viewer indicating their relative anonymity in relation to the sovereign king; furthermore, their heads are angled toward the king’s face as they figuratively “look up” to him.20 Figure 4. Visual Depiction of the King’s Two Bodies from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) Note. Imaged adapted from the public domain image of Thomas Hobbes’ frontispiece of his book Leviathan; engraving by Abraham Bosse.21 19 Herzogenrath, 2010; Olsthoorn, 2021 20 Laws, 2021 21 Bosse, 1651 81 While absolute monarchies may mostly be a phenomenon of the past, the metaphor of the king’s two bodies lives on. Even in a democracy where multiple governing officials are elected by the people, we still have collective bodies composed of individual bodies. Political parties are collective bodies. State legislatures are collective bodies. The nation, too, is a collective body. Although these collective bodies can be quite divided at times, it doesn’t minimize their presence; rather, difference seems to reinstate a desire for “unity.” In today’s political cartoons, we see the U.S. personified, or embodied, in caricatures of Joe Biden, Uncle Sam, Lady Liberty, and even Captain America. So, when I stumbled across the Leviathan frontispiece, it wasn’t a stretch of the imagination to see myself as one of those tiny bodies. An individual body constituting a collective body. A state-sponsored transnational teacher laboring for her motherland. The very names of some state-sponsored transnational teaching programs signal the existence and importance of collective bodies in public diplomacy initiatives. Like the U.S. Marine Corps or U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Peace Corps uses the French word for “body” (corps) in its name. The Peace Corps has been referred to as an “army”22 of volunteers. Such descriptions insinuate a collective fight for development in the explicit name of “Peace” with undeniable imperialistic underpinnings. As a participant in the English Language Fellow Program, I was constantly reminded of my group membership each time I was referred to as a “Fellow.” The Old English roots of “fellow” (fēolaga) translate to “one who lays down money in a joint enterprise.”23 Although I did not make any direct financial contributions to the Fellow Program, I laid down my time, my earning potential, and perhaps most importantly, my body, for this U.S. public diplomacy “enterprise.” 22 Kiger, 2010; Santamaria, 2014 23 Lexico, n.d. 82 Photo Interlude When I knew that the elderly man who had fallen off his bicycle was in safe hands, I walked back toward my bike to my start the long journey back home. In what was becoming a familiar move, people began taking photos of me without asking if it was okay to do so. This happened on the subway, in my classroom, around my neighborhood, in the supermarket, and even in a gym locker room! Sometimes people were discreet as they pointed their camera phone at me and pretended to be typing a message or playing a game. Other times, people were blatant in their actions, like the woman pictured here. In jest and in a subtle act of resistance, I pointed my camera back at the woman rather than posing. I decided to press the shutter to capture an image that would help me remember this strange, emotional day. Perhaps she was thinking the same thing (see Figure 5).24 24 See Chapter 3: Labor for the accompanying narrative and further discussion of emotional labor. 83 Figure 5. “Looking at You Looking at Me Looking at You” Encountering Bodies: The Political and Self-conscious Nature of the Meeting of Physical Bodies At this point, I’d like to discuss physical bodies as literal points of contact between people since such encounters with others lead to the self-conscious examination of our own bodies according to how we imagine that they perceive us. Based on our perceptions of how we are being perceived, we may reconfigure our bodies in acts of resistance and empowerment. My individual body, which is inherently part of many collective bodies, is the one that others encounter and through which I encounter others. As Mary Louise Pratt explains in her concept of “contact zones,” we interact in “social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.”25 While Pratt focused on discursive 25 Pratt, 1991, 34 84 interactions that occur in contact zones between speech communities, it is through our bodies that we are able to express ourselves verbally and non-verbally. The bodies through which we express ourselves are not identical vessels—they are marked and inscribed in various ways. Certain aspects of our identities, like race, gender, nationality, class, religion, and sexual orientation may be more or less visible than others. Thus, before we ever open our mouths, our bodies speak for us—or rather are read by others—whether we want them to or not. As a tall, white woman, my body visibly stood out and was read by others in Ethiopia and China. In Ethiopia, children would point and yell, “Faranji! Faranji! [foreigner]” when they saw me, usually quickly followed by, “Money, please!” Without me uttering a word, my body was read as “foreign” and “wealthy.” In China, I was often called, “lǎoshī [teacher]” by strangers. Without first ascertaining my nationality or mother tongue, my body was read by others as that of a, presumably transnational,26 teacher. Speaking in these situations provided others additional “bodily text,” likely confirming assumptions about my gender, home language, and nationality. In this way, my individual body was perceived as belonging to various collective bodies: the expatriate community, the U.S. citizenry, the (“native”27) English speaking community, a (relatively) high socioeconomic class, the female-identifying population, and white people, to name a few. If bodies are the physical point of contact between people, skin is the literal and metaphorical border. Our skin is a “boundary-object” that exposes and (dis)connects us to others. In their edited book, Thinking Through the Skin, Sarah Ahmed and Jackie Stacey argue that skin is a border that feels. Furthermore, they contend that “the skin, as bodyscape, is inhabited by, as well as inhabiting, the space of the nation and the landscape” and that “the skin is not simply in the present (in the here or the now); 26 “Transnational” here signals “the multiplicity of migrants’ involvements in both the home and host societies” (Glick Schiller et al., 1992, ix). In this sense, transnational teachers are both “here” and “there.” 27 “Native” is in quotation marks to disrupt colonial ideologies that link “native speakerism” and idealized language forms to nation and race (see more in Holliday, 2005 and Chapter Five: Mother Tongue). 85 in so far as it has multiple histories and unimaginable futures, it is worked upon, and indeed, it is worked towards.”28 Skin can be read through its color, its textures, its cleanliness, its markings, and the extent to which it is covered or exposed. In this way, our physical exteriors disclose information about ourselves, including the collective bodies to which others believe we belong. Gazing at and being gazed upon is a natural consequence of bodies meeting. As humans, we are continually surveying our surroundings, including the people whom we encounter. The instinctual action of our orbital frontal cortex “is what allows us to quickly size up a situation without consciously contemplating every detail.”29 The danger in such a carnal process of surveillance is that implicit biases can reinforce already-existing social and cultural biases. To decomplexify the world around us, we hastily categorize others as they hastily categorize us. In this manner, “every body is simultaneously a subject and an object.”30 The very notion of intercorporeality suggests that not only are we simultaneously subjects within our own bodies and objects as our bodies are viewed by others, but also that this dual existence causes a circular process of embodied interaffectivity. We begin to think about ourselves and shape our emotions according to what we believe others may be thinking and feeling about us based on the way we read their bodies.31 This cyclical process is highly subjective yet central to our self-awareness and self-image. After we discover that we are beings separate from our caregivers and our environments in early childhood, we soon come to another important realization. Berman explains: The shock is not that an Other exists, but that you realize that you are an Other for other Others. What now opens up, and deepens until age eight, and is something you are condemned to deal with the rest of your life, is that an interpretation can be put upon you that is antagonistic to what you feel about yourself.32 28 Ahmed and Stacey, 2001, 2 29 Kaplan, 2016, para. 9 30 Grumet, 2003, 249 31 Fuchs, 2017 32 Berman, 1989, 36 86 In his play No Exit (French: Huis Clos), Jean-Paul Sartre breathes life into the Self/Other dichotomy described by Berman above. The three protagonists in the play find themselves locked in a room together for eternity. They come to realize that their punishment in the afterlife is not the torturous devices they had once imagined, rather “hell is other people”33—they are condemned to a perpetual struggle of seeing themselves through the consciousness of others. Seeing oneself through others isn’t inherently negative—we may actually come to see better versions of ourselves through what others project onto us. However, the problem lies in the fact that we cannot control others’ thoughts and perceptions. No matter our efforts, our essence is fragmented into countless manifestations, so that “there is no one essential self or one essential me.” Furthermore, we are “denied the right to hierarchize these different judgments according to their truth.” While we might like to “deny some looks, and hold on to others, . . . the gaze of the other makes it evident I do not get the final word.”34 The truth is that we can only control our own thoughts about ourselves and about others. Even if we can only control our own thoughts, that doesn’t stop us from trying to influence others’ perceptions of us. After all, our affiliation with various collective bodies, has political implications. If I am perceived by others as being white, I may be afforded certain privileges. If I am perceived by others as being female, I may be denied certain privileges. In this manner, the manifold perceptions of our bodies by others creates an intricate web of intersectional identifications where both privilege and marginalization can be compounded.35 Thus, the body and the ways in which it is read, are inherently political. 33 Sartre, 1944/1989, 45 34 Söderquist, 2021, 506 35 Crenshaw, 1990 87 The prospect that every person encounters and perceives us in a different manner creates space for contestation over who we are, and subsequently, how much power we have in relation to others. Grosz contends that: As a socio-historical ‘object’, the body can no longer be confined to biological determinants, to an immanent, ‘factitious’, or unchanging social status. It is a political object par excellence; its forms, capacities, behaviour, gestures, movements, potential are primary objects of political contestation. As a political object, the body is not inert or fixed. It is pliable and plastic material, which is capable of being formed and organised.36 The “pliable” nature of the body is “capable of being formed and organised” not only by others but also by ourselves. Since “the skin is not like a mirror, it does not reflect the truth of the inner self,”37 we can modify our bodies in an attempt to better communicate our internal convictions and desires. Through re/con/figuration of our bodies, we can signal our compliance with or subversion to social and cultural norms. In other words, we can attempt to control how others read our bodies even if we can’t control their thoughts. Attempting to control how others read our bodies is a daily practice for many of us. While there are more permanent modifications we can make to our bodies through tattooing or cosmetic surgery, for instance, we have countless opportunities throughout the day to shape how we might be perceived by others. From the clothes we choose to wear to the distance we choose to stand from others to the hair styles we sport to the expressions we wear on our faces to our posture to the language we choose from our repertoire,38 we are consciously and unconsciously displaying ourselves in particular ways in particular contexts for particular reasons. Considering that the gaze of the other is a mechanism of power and control, the modification of bodies can serve as a form of protest. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault 36 Grosz, 1987, 3 37 Ahmed and Stacey, 2001, 6 38 “Repertoire” is concept that focuses on the universal features of language that transcend manmade linguistic boundaries; rather than conceptualizing languages individually, a linguistic repertoire allows for holistic consideration of all language skills and resources a person has. 88 notoriously contrasts disciplinary power with torture and forms of punishment.39 Fendler defines Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power as: the kind of power we exercise over ourselves based on our knowledge of how to fit into society. We discipline ourselves on the basis of messages we get from society – knowledge, rewards, and images – of how we are supposed to live. We try to be normal by disciplining ourselves even in the absence of threats of punishment.40 Mechanisms of disciplinary power, like surveillance and normalizing judgment, contribute to the domination and social control of certain bodies by other bodies.41 Consequently, the body can serve as both an instrument and a target of power.42 The female body, for example, has long been an object of processes of domination and control” as it is perceived as “mysterious, unruly, [and] threatening to erupt and challenge the patriarchal order.”43 Under the patriarchy, the ideal female body is attractive, fertile, healthy, obedient, joyous, and youthful. While many women strive for these ideals, others intentionally resist and subvert them. Through body modification, such as tattooing, scarification, and piercings, some women assert control over their bodies in a process of self-reclamation.44 Others use their bodies as sites of protest through corporealization, such as those who were involved with the 15-M, or Indignados (Outraged) movement in Spain. The messages on T-shirts, the words scrawled on skin, the accessories worn, and the choreographed movements and performance of protesters are all forms of corporealization, or the embodiment of consciousness. Martín Rojo explains that: by corporealization, the body politic is opened up and takes in any space, whether public or personal. The human body is configured as part of the protest and as a space of representation that bears the given demand or criticism as it moves through the city.45 39 Foucault, 1975/1977 40 Fendler, 2014, 44 41 See Chapter Five: Mother Tongue for discussion of the notions of disciplinary power and control in relation to linguistic ideologies and classroom practices. 42 Foucault, 1975/1977; Grosz, 1994 43 Davis, 1997, 5-7 44 Pitts, 2003 45 Martín Rojo, 2014, 633 89 In this manner, protesters used their bodies to open up a realm of “creative politics and personal experimentation."46 Whether part of a larger political movement or not, body modifications are a powerful means of shaping how one’s body, and subsequently one’s affiliations and values, may be perceived by others. State-sponsored transnational teachers are not exceptional in the ways that they shape their bodies to be read by foreign Others. Interlude “There are many potentially stressful things that could happen during your fellowship in Ethiopia, like frequent power outages, homesickness, civil unrest, cultural barriers, etc. So, how do you usually deal with stress?” “Exercise. For me, moving my body and getting fresh air is the best way to clear my mind and deal with stressful things. I love bicycling, running, hiking, and pretty much any sport. For this reason, I try to do some sort of workout every day.” Although my response during my Skype interview with the staff at the U.S. Embassy-Addis Ababa was not false, it was not 100% transparent. Yes, I have come to appreciate the psychological benefits of exercise, but my main motivator has been about the physical shaping of my body. The rational part of my brain knows that such extrinsic ambitions are vain and don’t usually lead to long- term success, yet they continue to drive me. Immediately after I met Almaz at my accommodations in Ethiopia, I asked my counterpart about the university’s gymnasium. He informed me that there was a small gym just down the hill from the guest house where student athletes and some staff worked out. He pointed to the building and said I’d be welcome to use the facilities. Later that afternoon when I was left on my own, I wandered around campus to get my bearings. The building housing the workout facilities was locked. I peered through the 46 Taylor, 2011, 97 90 smudged glass and could make out several treadmills, some free weights, and a couple of exercise machines in the cramped space. I returned early the next morning to find a group of about eight young men lifting weights. As I walked through the door, I immediately felt out of place. The room became quiet as everyone’s eyes scanned me from head to toe. Although the men were wearing equally revealing clothing, I suddenly felt underdressed in my form-fitting tank top and spandex capris. The mirrors around the room reminded me that I was the only female in this space. “Selam,” I proclaimed while timidly waving my hand. “My name is Rebekah, and I am a new teacher here. Is it okay if I use one of these treadmills?” One of the young men glistening from the already-humid morning air walked toward me and directed me to the dusty treadmill in the middle. “I think this is the only one that works,” he informed me. He plugged the cord into a nearby outlet and the red dots on the screen’s hypothetical track lit up. As I shuffled through the settings, all eyes remained on me. I acted as if I did not notice their stares and focused my attention on the screen. As the speed of the treadmill increased, my gait transitioned from a slow walk to a jog. With each pounding step, my body weight shook the treadmill, and the treadmill seemed to shake the entire room. I kept my eyes peeled on the red dot making its way around the ovular track. I couldn’t bear to make eye contact with those who were observing my body. Did they notice the way my cellulite rippled from the pressure of each stride? Did they notice how much taller I was than them? Did they notice the way my breasts subtly attempted to escape their bondage? Did they notice how my frizzy ponytail swung rhythmically from side to side? Did they notice how white my skin was? Did they notice the beads of sweat soaking through my racerback top? Did they notice that I was trying not to notice them noticing? With few words exchanged, my foreign body had announced itself. 91 After making the acquaintance of some of the other exercisers, I began to feel more comfortable in the highly visible space of the university gym. I appeared to become less of a novelty the more regularly I visited. But when the only working treadmill no longer powered on, I had to change my routine. At first, I was excited about jogging around campus. What better way to explore my surroundings than on foot? I could bring my camera, stop along the way, perhaps even talk to some locals. Once I actually headed out the door and strode past others who weren’t exercising, I realized that this would be like that first day in the gym. After a few months in-country, I had grown used to people staring at me, pointing, even shouting things. “Faranji!” “You! You! You!” “Obama!” Sometimes I would ignore the attention. Other times I used it as a catalyst for friendly banter. It all depended on my mood and the context. As I ran past the main campus buildings and headed toward the university’s greenhouses and research farms, I smiled and waved to the students who appeared to be watching me. The groups of students dwindled as I neared the tree line demarcating the southern edge of campus. The orange dusty road turned to rough pavement dotted with blue and white auto-rickshaws transporting students to and from campus. Women of all ages walked along the side of the road with yellow plastic jerry cans carefully balanced on their scarved heads. Young boys and elderly men directed herds of sheep, goats, and gaunt cattle around oncoming traffic. I focused on my breathing as my initial burst of energy began to fade. I started re-considering my decision to run so far. My lungs still had not fully acclimated to the elevation and the intense 92 sunshine melted my midwestern stamina. Before I could decide whether to start walking instead of jogging, I felt something hit my chest. I looked down and saw a frothy mass sliding down my already- moist skin. I had been spat on. I turned my head over my shoulder to remind myself of who I had just run past. There stood a man of at least 60 years of age draped in light-colored garments. He carried a wooden cane, perhaps a shepherd’s hook, and had a bright-orange beard presumably dyed with henna. I didn’t know what to do in that moment. I didn’t want to stare, so I turned my head back around and kept on running. I wanted to shout, to scream, to raise my fist, to express my disgust and anger. But I didn’t. Tired as I was, I ran the entire way back to the refuge of the guest house without smiling or waving at anyone else. I closed the door behind me, removed my tank top, and used the damp fabric to wipe away the remaining viscous residue that had settled at the bottom of my sports bra. I took a cold bucket bath and cried. When I told another foreign teacher about what had happened, she said, “Ugh, I’m so sorry. But at least you weren’t ejaculated on like the Peace Corps Volunteer in Assela.” Body Memory Writing this chapter has forced me to recall some uncomfortable moments. Besides being spit on, I was grabbed by the shoulders, slapped on the buttocks, and sexually rubbed against multiple times by strangers during my ten months as a state-sponsored transnational teacher in Ethiopia. The feeling of being violated does not just disappear. While my mind has been able to temporarily repress some of these encounters, my body has never forgotten. 93 My skin, as a “boundary-object,” exposed me and (dis)connected with me others.47 As Jay Prosser argues, “Skin re-members, both literally in its material surface and metaphorically in resignifying on this surface.”48 I do not have any physical scars or markings from these incidents, but I remember them in the way I carry my body. My experiences sometimes feel petty compared to the rape, torture, and significant harm inflicted on others’ bodies, yet I cannot forget how my body was abused. For me, these were traumatic experiences although I wrote them off as mere annoyances at the time. Thomas Fuchs contends that traumatic memories are one of six forms of body memory, the others being procedural, situational, intercorporeal, incorporative, and pain memories. With some overlap, these kinds of body memory “are an essential basis of our experiences of self and identity”49 and operate in ways that influence our present behavior. Others refer to body memory as implicit memory,50 or somatic memory,51 to explain how emotions and memories can be retained and relived through the physical body. Fuchs argues that it is through body memory that our physical bodies become inscribed with the “norms and rules of culture”52 to create our individual habitus, or socialized habits, dispositions, and ways of acting. This embodied process is more about knowing how rather than knowing that. Through pre-reflective intercorporeal interactions with caregivers and purposeful mimicry through incorporations of others’ behaviors, children shape their own bodily actions. As a result of these intergenerational processes, we come to realize our intentional arc, or what is within the realm of possibility for our bodies.53 47 Ahmed and Stacey, 2001, 2 48 Prosser, 2001, 52 49 Fuchs, 2012, 9 50 Levine, 2015; Schacter, 1987 51 Rothschild, 2000 52 Fuchs, 2017, 3 53 Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2010 94 When I think about my individual habitus and how it has been and continues to be shaped, I must consider the numerous collective bodies to which I belong. Fuchs’ notion of collective body memory suggests that our habitus: is formed by the continuous sedimentation of shared experiences into the body memory and embodied personality structure of the individual. . . Though the individual is the carrier of the habitus, it has been acquired in shared interactions and hence always remains implicitly related to actually present or imaginary others.54 Thus, my belonging to collective bodies, tangible or imaginary, has predisposed me to interactions with particular individuals. It’s perhaps easiest to surmise the influence my nuclear family has had on my ways of being in the world. As I reflect on my experiences as a mother and as a state-sponsored transnational teacher, I’ve been in close conversation with my own mother. I’ve asked her questions that have arisen since taking on this reflexive work. As I’ve thought about my whiteness and how my body encountered Brown and Black bodies during my time as a state-sponsored transnational teacher, I’ve asked my mother about her own encounters with People of color to better understand the lineage of my orientations. She shared with me that she doesn’t remember interacting with any People of color in her central Wisconsin hometown. It wasn’t until she moved to Washington, D.C. at the age of 18 to be a nanny that she had her first interaction with a Black person. So, what might this familial history mean in terms of my body’s habitus? If body memory “enables the lived presence of the past, thus establishing, as it were, an immediate communication between different times of one’s life” and if “collective body memory extends this communion to the ancient times of the group as a whole,”55 what legacies of the past is my body carrying? Consciously and unconsciously, I have observed my mother and the nuances of her body, and subsequently, incorporated some of her movements, postures, gestures, and gazes into my own 54 Fuchs, 2012, 346 55 Fuchs, 2012, 345 95 repertoire of bodily possibilities. My mother did the same with my grandmother, and my grandmother did the same with my great-grandmother, and so on. It doesn’t take long to trace our embodied family memory back to times of settler colonialism, chattel slavery, cultural imperialism, and Jim Crow. And so, I’m left wondering to what extent collective body memories have shaped my interactions with the people whom I encounter, and likewise, how their own family and collective body memories shape their interactions with me. What “unspoken stories passed down from flesh to flesh”56 do each of our bodies carry? Emplacement A discussion of bodies would be incomplete without a consideration of space and place, especially when transnational bodies or transnational contexts are involved. The concept of emplacement is useful in exploring the entanglement of the mind, body, and material world. Howes explains that “the emergent paradigm of emplacement suggests the sensuous interrelationship of body- mind-environment” where the “environment is both physical and social.”57 Human geographer, Nigel Thrift, adds that body awareness must include attention to body “a-where-ness.” By this, he means that “embodiment is a set of spatially and temporally distributed series . . . it consists of the differential flow of a particular kind of constantly moving carnality.”58 This perspective acknowledges the dynamic nature of space and place which are constantly un/becoming as human and non-human bodies encounter each other. The influence of such a dynamic context can override our body memory and individual habitus at times. As Sara Ahmed argues: ‘doing things’ depends not so much on intrinsic capacity, or even upon dispositions or habits, but on the ways in which the world is available as a space for action, a space where things ‘have a certain place’ or are ‘in place.’59 56 Puwar, 2021, 11 57 Howes, 2005, 7 58 Thrift, 2004, 126 59 Ahmed, 2007, 153 96 Undoubtedly, our personal identifications and affiliations with particular collective bodies, which are closely linked to our habitus, affect our likelihood of being in certain spaces. My race and nationality, for example, may have caused me to feel out of place in Ethiopia and China at times, but it was my whiteness and U.S. citizenship that allowed me access to those spaces. My white privilege afforded me the opportunity to go to college and gain particular kinds of experiences that made me a strong candidate for the English Language Fellow Program, and my U.S. citizenship made me eligible to apply.60 Additionally, my relatively young age and able-bodiedness surely contributed to my comprehensive Health Verification Form61 being cleared by program authorities. Consequently, some individual bodies are more likely to access certain spaces according to the collective bodies to which they belong. The temporal and spatial aspects of emplacement allow us to consider sociohistorical and geopolitical influences and how they may impact the interactions between state-sponsored transnational teachers and those whom they encounter. In terms of temporality, we each carry bits and pieces of history into the present moment which have been passed down through orientations and body memory. Finlay agrees that “environments shape and are in turn shaped by their inhabitants, in which people express structured advantages and disadvantages of surrounding past to present contexts.”62 Thus, the encounters between state-sponsored teachers and others in transnational spaces are situated in a complex entanglement of intersectional identities, family histories, and national legacies that we must not only acknowledge but familiarize ourselves with. In terms of spatiality, the geographic placement of state-sponsored transnational teachers is intentional although teachers themselves may never know why they are sent to a particular site. As 60 The English Language Fellow Program website lists U.S. citizenship, a graduate-level degree, and at least five years of teaching experience as minimum requirements for application. Preferred qualifications include experience living abroad, leadership skills, experience with teacher training, and 8-10 years of full-time EFL/ESL classroom experience (English Language Programs, n.d.-c). 61 English Language Programs, n.d.-d 62 Finlay, 2021, 97 97 discussed briefly in the Labor chapter, state-sponsored transnational teachers serve as informal intermediaries between their home government and their host government and its citizens. In a less formal but perhaps more authentic capacity than official diplomats,63 state-sponsored transnational teachers are expected to build relationships with locals to “promote world peace and friendship”64 and foster “mutual understanding”65 between citizens of the U.S. and other countries. Through these means, the U.S. aims to enhance its national image and reputation.66 Due to the varying relations that the U.S. has with other countries, there are particular spaces that are more desirable for the placement of state-sponsored transnational teachers who have the potential to change others’ views of Americans and Americans’ views of others. Geopolitics, or the political power associated with geographic spaces, is a useful concept for thinking about the relations between countries. The U.S. aspires to improve its image and relations in particular geographic areas for militaristic and economic reasons as well as other national interests. I was never told directly by the Fellow Program why I was placed at the agricultural university in eastern Ethiopia beyond the supposed need for language teaching capacity development. An Ethiopian counterpart with whom I taught English to local youth on Saturdays informed me that our weekend teaching purposefully targeted disadvantaged students who might otherwise be compelled to join extremist groups in the area. The hope was that learning English would provide these students access to other perspectives, like those found in online U.S. new sources. When I thought about my role in this alleged strategy, I began to see how my body was a pawn in a game that I wasn’t directing. Rather than feeling like a key player who is made aware of the game 63 The citizen-led nature of citizen diplomacy contributes to “much of its legitimacy and impact” since there is a “belief that the messages being conveyed are authentic and untouched by government officials” (Tyler and Beyerinck, 2016, 524) 64 Peace Corps, n.d.-a 65 English Language Programs, n.d.-f 66 Simonin, 2008 98 plan and then carefully coached, I felt like a tiny chess piece on an oversized board only aware of what was immediately in front of me. A survey of Peace Corps Volunteers similarly indicated that most reported not fully understanding their role in terms of big-picture public diplomacy goals.67 So, while the geographic placement of state-sponsored transnational teachers may be tied to macro-level foreign policy goals, the micro-level, everyday interactions of citizen diplomats, like state-sponsored transnational teachers, matter since they are where foreign relations are actualized. Such performances of bodies co-create spaces in which the complex entanglement of mind-body-place-history is confronted and negotiated. “Where the Land Meets the Body”68: Performing Citizenship In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Jaques infamously states, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.”69 This metaphor of performance for the everyday interactions between people alludes to the critical role of time, place, and audience. Similar to the notion of emplacement, performance as a conceptualization of how bodies interact allows for the adoption of an ecological perspective. Rather than solely focus on micro-level interactions, the metaphor of performance broadens our view to include an analysis of the structures and confines in which these encounters are situated (i.e., the setting). For state-sponsored transnational teachers, there are implicit expectations of performing one’s citizenship while living and teaching overseas. The Fellow Program, for example, states that participants are “representatives and cultural ambassadors of the United States.”70 But how exactly does one perform in ways that “represents” their nation? It is this question of representation that led me to this chapter’s exploration of how citizen diplomats embody the nation. 67 Madeley, 2010 68 Borrowed from Ferguson’s (1994) book entitled, Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body. 69 Shakespeare, 1599/2003-2022, 2.7.1037-1039 70 English Language Programs, n.d.-a 99 With nationality being closely tied to citizenship, contestation over one’s rights, responsibilities, and privileges as a citizen can become synonymous with one’s sense of nationality. As a U.S. citizen, I’m entitled to certain rights, like the freedom to express myself and the right to vote for public officials. At the same time, I’m responsible for paying taxes, obeying local, state, and national laws, and supporting and defending the Constitution, to name a few.71 My own sense of nationality includes some of these legal stipulations as well as perceptions about the imagined political community to which I belong. I say “perceptions” since it’s not feasible for me to actually meet and get to know all of the members of a large collective body, like a nation.72 It’s easy to assume that members of a collective body share a commitment to particular values and ideals, but the reality is that collective bodies are imagined. I can imagine that my fellow American citizens value multiculturalism and support immigration based on my understanding of our community’s commitments, yet some members disagree based on their own understanding of our community’s commitments. Continuing with the example above, when someone encounters me and learns that I am a U.S. citizen, do they read my body as one belonging to a community that supports immigration or one belonging to a community that opposes immigration? Just as individual bodies can be read in a multitude of ways, so too, can the collective bodies to which we are presumed to belong. When people read my body in a certain way, they are inherently reading my affiliation with collective bodies in a particular light. Based on how I perform as well as their own orientations and histories, they will make certain judgements about those affiliations. As Mountz argues, the individual body can be “a location from which to understand the collapsing and constructed scale of the global and geopolitical as intimately lived. The body, then, functions as scale and site upon which ideas, ideologies, and politics are performed and made meaningful.”73 71 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, n.d. 72 Anderson, 1983/2006 73 Mountz, 2018, 762 100 When I think back to being harassed in Ethiopia, I am left contemplating the relationship between individual bodies and collective bodies. To what extent was my body seen as representing America? White women? English speakers? Transnational teachers? Was the violence I experienced directed at me or at the collective bodies to which I was presumed to belong? Or are they one in the same? In terms of embodying the nation, the land/body trope posits how women’s bodies, in particular, may be metonymically parallel to land. Tommaso explains that “the land and the body are both spaces over which a dominion has been exercised, and if they are controlled or ungoverned, they become a metaphor of order and peace in one case, or a symbol of promiscuity and irregularity in the other.”74 Was my body seen by some of the people I encountered as something to conquer? Was a slap at me a slap at America? White woman? English speakers? Transnational teachers? Any or all of the other communities that I and others imagined I belong to? Of course, I will never know for sure how others perceived and judged me because of the “impossibility of inhabiting the other’s skin.”75 But as Sartre would likely argue, that doesn’t stop me from trying. In the moment and after the fact, I have spent much time peering into the looking glass held up to me via others’ reactions to my body. After being spit on, for instance, I was forced to think more deeply and critically about how I was presenting my body and how others might read my body in this specific context. This reflection led to many conversations with locals and other foreigners about cultural and religious norms, women’s rights, cultural appropriation, and nuanced history of the region where I was living. Ahmed describes such processes of bodily dis/orientation that occur when we are seen as being out of place as “being stopped.” She argues that “stopping is an action that creates its own impressions. 74 Tommaso, 2005, 274 75 Ahmed and Stacey, 2001, 7 101 Who are you? Why are you here? What are you doing?”76 This “phenomenology of ‘being stopped’ might take us in a different direction than one that begins with motility, with a body that ‘can do’ by flowing into space.”77 In this sense, it’s the moments of discomfort produced by what others signal to us about what our bodies “cannot do” that have the potential power to open up new ways of thinking and behaving. Physical and mental un/becoming, or re/con/figuration. This chapter’s examination of various conceptualizations of bodies has taught me that my embodied experiences and re/con/figurations cannot possibly represent the experiences of all state- sponsored transnational teachers. The ways in which bodies are encountered is so contextual and dependent on the individual and collective identifications and histories of those bodies involved. What we can surmise from this examination though is the central role the body plays in encounters between people and the complexity of reading inscriptions on others’ bodies. Consequently, when we think about how state-sponsored transnational teachers’ bodies are read and re/con/figured, there is a: need to think of bodies as sites of performance in their own right rather than nothing more than surfaces for discursive inscription. Discourses do not simply write themselves directly onto bodies as if these bodies offered blank surfaces of equal topography. Instead, these concepts and ways of being are taken up and used by people who make meaning of them in the different global contexts in which they operate.78 With this acknowledgement of individuals’ potential for agentive action, the next chapter will explore how state-sponsored transnational teachers position their bodies in the classroom via particular linguistic ideologies and language teaching practices which can be a source of oppression or empowerment. 76 Ahmed, 2007, 161 77 Ibid. 78 Dowler and Sharp, 2001, 169 102 CHAPTER FIVE: MOTHER TONGUE Prelude April 4, 2022 Dear Ophie, So far, I have been calling you “Ophelia” in all of these letters. But did you know that you have more nicknames than I can keep track of? “Ophie” is probably the most common since you use this to refer to yourself and you now write O-P-H-I-E on every piece of artwork you create. We also call you, “Ophie Bum Bum,” “Stinkerface,” “BooBoo,” “Oph,” “Ophie-ba-Bophie,” “Bubba,” “Mama,” “Bah-bo,” as well as generic terms of endearment like, “Pumpkin,” “Sweetie,” and “Honey.” I’m sure many of these names will disappear as you mature and as you and your friends create new ones based on inside jokes and experiences that I may not be a part of. No matter what you decide to call yourself, I wanted to be sure you knew the story of your name. As I wrote to you in your first letter, conceiving you felt like nothing short of a miracle. After 26 months…more than 67 million seconds of concerted effort, you were created. I couldn’t believe my eyes when a second pink line appeared on the home pregnancy test that I had bought on a whim. The campus health clinic made me pee on another stick to confirm your existence and recommended that I see an OBGYN as soon as possible given my history of infertility. At just 7 weeks pregnant, I was given an early ultrasound to ensure that you had attached yourself properly and were growing as expected. Daddy came with me to this appointment, and we were both so nervous. We held our breath as the transvaginal ultrasound wand scavenged for signs of your presence. “There we go,” said the technician who took a screenshot of the black cavity that was supposedly my uterus. She pointed to the still image on the computer monitor and said, “This is the fetal sac.” She rotated the wand to get a better angle and announced, “We have a strong heartbeat!” Tiny as you were, there was movement as your fetal pole pulsated before our eyes. At this moment, Daddy and I noticed that the song “Ophelia” by the Lumineers was playing quietly through the overhead speaker. I looked at him with teary eyes and said, “If we have a girl, I think we have to name her Ophelia.” I had heard the song countless times and enjoyed its catchy chorus, but for whatever reason, Ophelia was never a name that made it onto the list I discreetly scrawled in the back of my planner. You were meant to be an Ophelia. Not Shakespeare’s Ophelia who goes mad and drowns after heartbreak, rather Ophelia “the helper” as the Greek roots of your name allude—“ophelos” (οφελος) meaning, “help, succor, support.” While I couldn’t have predicted the vital role you’d play in dealing with our second bout of infertility, you have helped me in so many ways. Most importantly, you’ve helped me become a mother…or perhaps I should say you are helping me become a mother. Always un/becoming. Speaking of names, did I ever tell you how I received the nickname “Rebekah Goodwell”? Grandpa Greg coined this moniker after I “corrected” his grammar one too many times. You see, he has a tendency to use “good” as an adverb, as in, “the car battery is running good” or “she did real good in the game.” As 103 someone who’s learned about “recasting” in language pedagogy courses, I’ll reply to him with, “it’s running well,” or “yes, she did really well, didn’t she?” I emphasize the word “well” to be sure he notices the changes I’ve made to his utterance. I’m not exactly sure when I became an officer for the grammar police, but I’m guessing it started when I was in college. My parents’ speech never bothered me growing up. It wasn’t until I traveled outside of the Midwest and interacted with folks from around the globe that I even noticed that my family had its own language. I’ll never forget the summer I spent in France after my second year of college. I was teaching English to French youth attending “American Village” summer camp in the rolling countryside near Lyon. After meeting the other American teachers, the group agreed that I had the strongest accent. I was shocked— how could I have a stronger accent than Katie? Her Texan drawl was impossible to miss. I laughed off the comments about my speech in the moment, yet I could not stop thinking about why my dialect was so distinct. Was it the way my “Os” lingered just a little bit too long? Was it the way I said “pop” instead of “soda”? Or was it the way I said “BAYG (be:ɡ)” instead of “BAG (bæɡ)”? Suddenly, my sense of normalcy disappeared. My privilege of being an English speaker no longer fully shielded me in the multi-regional, multi-national context I inhabited that summer. Upon returning to the U.S., I began listening carefully to others’ speech to see how mine might differ. I didn’t want to be thought of as the-girl-from-central-Wisconsin-with-the-really-strange-accent. My roommate, also from Wisconsin, pointed out how I said “GRAHJ (ɡraʒ)” as one syllable instead of “ga- RAHJ (ɡəˈraʒ)” and “JEN-yu-airy (ˈʤɛn juˌɛri)” instead of “JAN-yu-airy (ˈʤæn juˌɛri).” I began to make a mental list of everything that I said “incorrectly.” When I went home for winter break, I realized where my language “impairments” had originated. My mother who had taken me to numerous “GRAHJ” sales every summer and talked about my birthday in the month of “JEN-yu-airy” was the culprit! I had picked up these nuances from her, not my father who used more “standard” American English pronunciation of these particular words. And what did I do? I started “correcting” her. I explained to her how others had made me aware of these “errors” and that she should change the way she speaks if she wants to be taken seriously. You see, Grandma Ann never attended college and didn’t have a degree to “speak” for her abilities. I thought I was somehow enlightening her with this knowledge that I had acquired in the great big world. As I recently read Ian McEwan’s narrative about his aging mother, I felt much shame and guilt in my efforts to shape my parents’ language. After sharing some of his mother’s life history and some of her unique ways with words, he explained: As the dementia empties her memory, it will begin to rob her of speech. Already there are simple nouns that elude her. The nouns will go, and then the verbs. And after her speech, her co-ordination, and the whole motor system. I must hang on to the things she says, the little turns, the phrases, for soon there will be no more. No more of the mother tongue I've spent most of my life unlearning.1 1 McEwan, 2001, para. 28 104 I hope it’s not too late to embrace my mother tongue that I was once so ready to leave behind. I don’t want to be known as “Rebekah Goodwell” the rest of my life. I don’t want to be remembered for trying to snuff out my parent’s unique ways of being. Erasing their language. Our language. And so, I write this letter not only to record some of these family language histories but also to reflect on the beauty of language. It’s okay for languages to evolve—they are dynamic and reflective of a society, after all. But as we officially add “selfie” and “chillax” to dictionaries, what other words, gestures, enunciations, pronunciations, tones, and grammatical structures might be fading away? Dearest Ophelia, not only is your name full of meaning and an accumulation of histories, so too, is your language. Our language. This meaning is not just found in the definitions provided by Merriam- Webster—it is found in our family’s history. Someday, you may grow to hate the way I say, “Ope!” every time I make a mistake or the way Daddy’s blend of Ugandan, British, and American English presents itself in his pronunciation of “schedule” and “paper.” But remember Gloria Anzaldúa’s words: “Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself.”2 I hope that you find that pride more quickly than I did and that no one will ever take it away from you. Love always, Mommy 2 Anzaldúa, 1987, 59 105 moth·er tongue /ˈˌməT͟Hər ˈtəNG/ n. the language which a person has grown up speaking from early childhood n. the language used by a mother Introduction Most of the personal narratives I have shared thus far about my time as a state-sponsored transnational teacher in Ethiopia and China have taken place outside of the classroom. Perhaps this makes sense since I only spent a couple of hours in the classroom a few days per week as a Fellow. Compared to my Ethiopian and Chinese counterparts, I was assigned a light teaching load. Teaching English language courses to undergraduate students majoring in business English, English education, and related fields was my primary duty. My secondary duties included traveling to other cities to facilitate professional development workshops for K-16 instructors, teaching in the English Access Microscholarship Program, and being involved in various U.S. Embassy programming, like American cultural events, writing contests, or college application preparation workshops. Although my personal and professional experiences as a state-sponsored transnational teacher span far beyond the four walls of a classroom, it is necessary to examine how I performed my role as a language teacher. This was, after all, my “primary duty.”3 Expanding on the ideas previously discussed, this chapter takes a deep dive into the embodied teaching experiences of state-sponsored transnational teachers. Each time they walk into a classroom, they are not entering as empty vessels; rather, they carry an entanglement of intersectional identities, family histories, and national legacies. Language identities, practices, and ideologies are one aspect of this entanglement particularly relevant to state-sponsored transnational teachers and the labor that they perform. For some, this labor includes teaching English as a subject. For others, it includes using 3 According to the English Language Programs website, “Fellow primary duties often include teaching undergraduate language and methodology classes” (English Language Programs, n.d.). 106 English as a medium of instruction to teach other subjects or using English as a language of communication outside of the classroom. For the sake of brevity and to draw on my own experiences, I will focus on those who teach English as a subject although the ideas discussed may be applicable to other state-sponsored transnational teachers and citizen diplomats. With teachers’ bodies often at the literal front and center of the classroom, the body is relevant to any conversation about teaching. Students “spend a great amount of their school day gazing at the fleshly bodies of their teachers who ‘perform’ subject disciplines in classrooms. Teachers remain, as it were, bodies of knowledge, the sites and sights of authoritative and educational display.”4 Shapiro further explains how physical bodies become sites/sights of knowledge: Ideas have a ‘social materiality’ presented in forms of thinking and being; they are ‘enfleshed’ in ideologies, and historical and cultural forms of subjectivity. Enfleshment is conceived here as the mutually-constitutive aspect of social structure and desire. Discourse is the materialization of those symbols in our social structures and in our bodies.5 Thus, discourse, or linguistic and semiotic means of communicating and constructing experiences, cannot be separated from matter, or the bodies, objects, and spaces around us. The ways that we speak, move, and perform, or engage in practices, are directly connected to our bodies of knowledge. Building on the material feminist conceptualization of the body introduced in the previous chapter, I adopt a material-discursive approach to emphasize the inseparability of discourse and materiality.6 This approach is useful in the exploration of teachers’ classroom experiences since materiality is not just about ‘things’ but also about ‘doings.’ Highlighting Barad’s notion of material- discursivity,7 Orlikowski and Scott argue that “practices [emphasis added] are constitutive of the world” and cannot be detached from “bodies, spaces, and objects.”8 Consequently, teaching practices are 4 McWilliam, 1996, 340 5 Shapiro, 1999, 42 6 Barad, 2007 7 Ibid. 8 Orlikowski and Scott, 2015, 698 107 enactments, or performances, of specific discourses and bodies of knowledge. By situating state- sponsored transnational teachers’ performances within socio-cultural-historical context, “performativity offers a way of understanding how the world is constantly being made and reconfigured in material- discursive practices.”9 In short, this chapter aims to uncover some of the discourses and bodies of knowledge that materialized in my teaching as a state-sponsored transnational teacher through analysis of personal narratives and discussion of language ideologies, policies, and practices throughout U.S. history. A Brief History of the English Language and Language Ideologies in the U.S., Part I Long before the arrival of the English language,10 several hundred Indigenous languages were spoken in what is now the U.S. Onoñdaʼgegáʼ (Onondaga), wá꞉šiw ʔítlu (Washo), Shiwiʼma (Zuni), ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᐏᐣ (Plains Cree), Hasí:nay (Caddo), Čitimaaša (Chitimacha), Lakȟóta (Lakota), Báxoje-Jíwere- Ñútˀachi (Chiwere), and Uqautchiq Iñupiatun (Eskimo-Aleut), to name a few. It’s impossible to know exactly how many languages once flourished on this land since it was the white man who identified, categorized, and hierarchized Indigenous languages to control and subjugate, rather than to preserve and celebrate. In short, settler colonialism led to the violent death of millions of Indigenous peoples and many of the histories and bodies of knowledge they carried.11 And so, the very roots of the English language in the U.S. are steeped in a history of erasure and elimination.12 The arrival of British settler colonists throughout the 17th century brought about communities of English speakers to North American soil.13 At that time, there were a variety of dialects of English 9 Orlikowski and Scott, 2015, 700 10 I use the phrase “the English language” to differentiate the language from the people of England. As discussed later in the chapter, there is not a single English language, rather many World Englishes (Kachru, 1984). 11 Mignolo, 1992; Wilson, 1998 12 The U.S. was not the first country to use the English language, nor the first to promote its spread around the globe, however, I will not cover the entire history of the English language and its use in/by other “core English speaking countries,” namely, Britain, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand (Phillipson, 1992, 17). 13 Bailey, 2004 108 represented amongst the settler colonists as well as other European languages (Danish, Dutch, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Swedish),14 many African languages of enslaved peoples, and countless Indigenous languages of American Indians. In order to communicate, the various speakers borrowed words from each other’s languages resulting in the creation of pidgins and creoles.15 Despite this linguistic diversity, multilingualism was not necessarily embraced. Monolingual ideologies, or the belief that a single language should be used amongst a particular group of people, proliferated as settlements began to consolidate and push westward. Romaine explains how an “unbroken chain of English-controlled settlement, extending from the Penobscot in Maine to the Altamaha in Georgia” formed by 1750.16 The dialects of Colonial English spoken in this expanded settlement were “to become American speech.”17 Reflecting again on Catherine Beecher’s Board of National Popular Education,18 we see how teachers were implicated in the spread of these Colonial English dialects. Lady Bountiful archetypes, or “motherteachers,”19 from New England were sent to the “West” frontier (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee)20 in the mid-1800s to mold children there “into good citizens of the republic.”21 This “molding” began a process of standardization to a particular variety of English at the expense of other dialects and languages. At the same time this standardization was beginning, subsequent waves of immigration led to further linguistic diversity in the U.S. The first wave of immigration included mostly northern Europeans, whereas the second wave of immigration after the Civil War included more Scandinavians and southern 14 Romaine, 2008, 168 15 Winford, 2012 16 Romaine, 2008, 164 17 Ibid. 18 See Chapter Three: Labor 19 Goldstein, 2014, 18 20 Ibid., 29 21 Meiners, 2002, 87 109 Europeans.22 Before the Civil War, there was relative tolerance of non-English and plurilingual23 practices in public schools. In Ohio, for example, German-English bilingual schools thrived in the early 19th century with state legislation requiring instruction in German if requested by parents.24 In this manner, language ideologies of those in the majority or those who had power were reflected in language policies.25 Unfortunately, such plurilingual education policies were short-lived. After the Civil War in the late 19th century, xenophobia and an alleged desire for national unity reinvigorated monolingual ideologies resulting in a rise of English-only education policies. Stemming from the European nation state, the notion of ‘one nation, one language,’ reflected a colonial approach of domination with a façade of social and political cohesion. A shared language was imagined to coalesce all of the peoples within particular geographic borders. My home state of Wisconsin, for example, passed the Bennett Law in 1889 requiring that all major subjects in public and private schools be taught in English.26 Although the Bennett Law was repealed after two years, language of instruction policies have continued to be debated; as recently as 2020, senators in Wisconsin (and many other states) have introduced bills to make English the official language of their state.27 While immigrant languages other than English were being suppressed, the U.S. government began actively destroying and exterminating Indigenous languages. In 1868, the Indian Peace Commission recommended that all American Indian children be required to go to school and that instruction should be in English because “their barbarous dialects should be blotted out.”28 The 22 Rumbaut and Massey, 2013 23 I intentionally use the term plurilingual as opposed to multilingual to recognize the dynamic and fluid process of drawing upon linguistic resources from one repertoire (García and Sylvan, 2011) even though many pedagogical models conceptualize language practices to be more static and compartmentalized. 24 Ramsey, 2009 25 Noam Chomsky argues that “questions of language are basically questions of power” (Chomsky, 1979, 191). 26 Multilingualism and Education in Wisconsin, n.d. 27 S.B. 739, 2020 28 Indian Peace Commission, 1868, 44 110 processes of “linguistic terrorism”29 that ensued at missionary schools and boarding schools are alluded to in the picture book, When We Were Alone, by David Robertson.30 Interlude Ophelia grabbed the gold-covered book from one of the bookshelves in the children’s section of our campus library and skipped over to me. “Mommy, will you read this to me?” she asked between heavy breaths. Neither of us knew what the book was about until I started reading the sorrowful story. A little girl, Nósisim, asks her grandma, Nókom, why she does certain things. Nókom responds to each of her questions with an answer related to her time at an American Indian boarding school as a child: “Nókom, why do you speak in Cree?” I asked. Nókom said, “Well, Nósisim…When I was your age, at home in my community, my friends and I always spoke our language. But at the school I went to, far away from home, they wouldn’t let us speak our words. All the children used their strange words, and we didn’t understand them at all. Our voices blended together like a flock of crows.” “Why did you have to talk in their language?” I asked. “They didn’t like that we spoke our language,” Nókom said. “They wanted us to talk like everybody else. But sometimes in the summer, when we were alone, and our teachers weren’t anywhere around the place we were, we would whisper to each other in Cree. We would say all the words we weren’t allowed to say so that we wouldn’t forget them. And this made us happy.” “Now,” Nókom said, “I always speak my language.”31 After reading the book, Ophelia asked why I was crying. I asked if she understood what we had read. She knew that Nókom liked having long hair and wearing colorful clothes. She also knew that Nósisim was a very curious girl. But the book was vague in its historical references about why Nókom had such terrible experiences at school. 29 Anzaldúa, 1987, 58 30 Robertson, 2016 31 Robertson, 2016, 13-18 111 I tried my best to give her an explanation that she might grasp as a three-year-old, “You know how Daddy speaks Other languages? Like when he’s on the phone with Grandma Frances? There are some people who believe that they shouldn’t use Luganda.” “Why?” “Because they think that English is the best language. But it’s not. All languages are beautiful and important. Don’t you love hearing Daddy read you stories in Luganda? Like the one about Nakuya losing her tooth?” She nodded her head and smiled, “Can I pick out another book now, Mommy?” She didn’t ask to bring the book home like many of the others we read that day. Perhaps she didn’t want to be reminded of things so horrendous. She may forget for now, but someday, her body will remember, too. A Brief History of the English Language and Language Ideologies in the U.S., Part II On January 2, 1968, almost exactly 100 years after that Indian Peace Commission report that announced the “need” for linguistic erasure, the U.S. passed the Bilingual Education Act as an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Although there had been some earlier efforts to put an end to linguistic segregation and English-only policies,32 this amendment was the first federal policy directly aimed at linguistically diverse33 students. The act provided funds to schools serving linguistically diverse students, but the transitional and vague nature of the policy meant schools implemented a variety of practices, many of which were not equitable and many of which did not include students’ mother tongues.34 Since the passing of the Bilingual Education Act, the U.S. has seen legislation and policy supporting both monolingual ideologies and plurilingual ideologies. The rulings of Lau v. Nichols (1974), 32 Meyer v. Nebraska, 1923; Mendez v. Westminister, 1946; Brown v. Board of Education, 1954 33 “Linguistically diverse” is another assets-based term used to refer to those who are plurilingual. 34 Brisk, 1981; Mavrogordato, 2021 112 Serna v. Portales (1974), and Aspira v. New York (1974) all declared that bilingual education was required in certain circumstances for certain students. The Castaneda v. Pickard (1981) case was particularly important in establishing the need for more detailed and prescriptive pedagogies and practices for linguistically diverse students rather than leave such important decisions to other stakeholders who may not be as knowledgeable about second language acquisition theories and bilingual pedagogical models. However, during this same time period, English-only advocacy groups undergirded by monolingual and standard language ideologies began to flourish. U.S. English, founded in 1983,35 and English First, founded in 1986,36 were and continue to be a part of the English-only movement. As Gándara et al. note, “the antibilingual and antimulticultural tenor of the times continued to build through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, with increasing immigration, rising numbers of ELs [English learners],37 and a ‘close the borders’ mentality gripping the nation.”38 Groups, like U.S. English and English First, support hegemonic legislation and initiatives that prioritize English over any Other language in the supposed name of nationalism and unity.39 Consequently, the monolingual ideologies present at our country’s founding centuries ago continue to influence education policy and practice. The English Language and the U.S. Empire Monolingual ideologies have not only had an impact domestically but also globally. As Spanish grammarian Nebrija wrote, “Language has always been the companion of empire.”40 Thus, as the U.S. 35 U.S. English, 2016 36 Tatalovich, 2015 37 Although the term “English learners” is used in many official and legal capacities, it is a deficit-based term that focuses on what students do not have rather than highlight the many linguistic resources and skills that they do have. 38 Gándara et al., 2010, 26 39 An example of this type of policy is Proposition 227 sponsored by Ron Unz that required all children in the state of California to be taught English using English (Schmid, 2021). 40 Nebrija, 1492/1946, 24 113 has sought to expand its power and territory, the English language and monolingual ideologies have been used as tools of domination. Motha explains that: The spread of the English language historically accompanied colonial endeavors, as colonists sought to acquire territory that didn’t belong to them and to kill, displace, or control the people who lived on that land. The insertion of English into the mouths and hearts of the population was often an inherent part of the project, although it represented itself rather as a project of discovery, exploration, civilization, progress, and munificence.41 If we look again at the Thomasite teachers and the colonization of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War,42 we can see how the English language was used to oppress Filipinos and has contributed to today’s status of English as a neoliberal global language and “an enduring structure of coloniality.”43 On the surface, English was said to be part of the U.S.’s “benevolent assimilation” touted by President William McKinley; by using English as the medium of instruction and as a “democratizing mechanism,”44 the U.S. claimed the Philippines could become a self-sufficient nation. In reality, however, imposing the English language was a method of cultural, political, and linguistic erasure aimed at disempowering Filipinos. Many Filipinos recognized the U.S.’s underlying ambitions of political control and exploitation and resisted American policies. Not wanting to lose their cultural, political, and linguistic identities, Filipinos took part in individual and collective acts of resistance. Collectively, the Philippine-American War represented a national opposition to U.S. occupation. Individually, some Filipinos refused to learn English while others reappropriated the language to their advantage. A group of Filipino nationalists, for example, wrote a letter in English to challenge the American rhetoric of “benevolence” by pointing out its contradictory policies.45 41 Motha, 2014, 27 42 See Chapter Two: Orientation 43 Hsu, 2015, 125 44 Ibid., 131 45 Ibid., 137 114 Although the Philippines gained independence from the U.S. in 1946, the effects of American colonial rule and the imposition of the English language linger to this day. As Hsu explains, “colonial English instruction at the start of the 20th century has had persistent effects in determining labor in the Philippines in the 21st century.”46 Because of their knowledge of English, their Americanized accents, and their willingness to work for lower wages, Filipino’s are highly sought-after overseas workers as well as domestic workers in call centers. The U.S. now “imports” Filipino teachers to deal with labor shortages in schools, mostly in low-income urban areas.47 Rather than feel supported by the country that shaped their education and language, Filipino teachers in the U.S. experience racism, linguicism, and other forms of marginalization. In this way: structures of coloniality . . . maintain both neoliberal practices of global English and English-only in the U.S. They also serve to highlight the violent invisibilization of American colonial history when it comes to the contemporary language classification policies as applied toward many Filipino immigrants . . . in the domestic U.S.48 Thus, the proliferation of English globally “reinforces colonial divisions of power and racial inequalities, in cultural and economic domination, in heritage language loss, in the extinction of less-commonly spoken languages and their inherent epistemologies, and in inequitable distribution of global wealth and resources.”49 Photo Interlude During my first week as a state-sponsored transnational teacher in Ethiopia, I began imposing my bodies of knowledge about teaching before I even met my students. Rather than asking someone about why the desks in my classroom were all in a haphazard pile, I re-arranged them according to what I thought I knew about education spaces (see Figure 6). Though I felt rather accomplished in the moment, I feel uneasy today looking at these photos. I wonder what opportunities and possibilities were 46 Hsu, 2015, 139 47 Bartlett, 2014 48 Hsu, 2015, 140 49 Motha, 2014, xxi 115 lost when I took it upon myself to assimilate this space into something familiar to me, a white mostly- monolingual American. Figure 6. “Making the Strange Familiar” The Birth of TESOL and the Roots of its Bodies of Knowledge When I decided to study in a TESOL master’s program, I was naïve about the history of the field I was choosing to go into. After teaching conversational English classes in a South Korean high school for two years, I had decided that I wanted to expand upon my degree in special education and learn more specifically about teaching English as an additional language. I was so focused on the micro-levels of language, like form, function, and relevant pedagogical strategies, that it became easy to brush over the macro-level structures situating and influencing language teaching. My program wasn’t particularly critical either; we were prepared to be practitioners who improved students’ English language proficiency, not practitioners who questioned the underpinnings and implications of the very field in which they sought employment. Although the practice of Americans teaching English as an additional language is as old as the U.S., it wasn’t until the 1960s that TESOL, or teaching English to speakers of Other languages, was recognized as a profession and official academic discipline.50 The related field of applied linguistics, 50 Gray, 1997 116 which focuses on applying structural and functional linguistics to second language teaching, took off about a decade earlier.51 An increasing number of refugees, immigrants, and foreign students coming to the U.S. created a demand for more TESOL professionals. The number of foreign students in the U.S., for example, doubled from 1955 (34,232) to 1965 (82,045) and continued to increase after that.52 Additionally, U.S. policy at the time, including the National Defense Education Act of 1964 and the Bilingual Education Act of 1968, supported capacity building and professional development of TESOL teachers.53 Both disciplines had domestic and international facets. It just so happens that one of the first disciplinary conferences on the teaching of English as a second language took place at my husband’s alma mater, Makerere University, in Uganda in 1961. According to Phillipson, the Makerere conference is famous for canonizing “the 5 tenets” of English language teaching: English is best taught monolingually; the ideal teacher of English is a native speaker; the earlier English is introduced in schools the better the results; the more English is taught the better the results; if other languages are used much, standards of English will fall.54 Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson explain that these tenets have become “a prescription for academic, educational and linguistic imperialism” and that they have legitimized a “structure in which it is mother tongue speakers of English who have determined what English should be taught and how it should be learned throughout the world.”55 As a mother tongue speaker of English, I determined what English was taught in my classes in Ethiopia and China as most other state-sponsored transnational teachers do. And so “the 5 tenets” live on 60 years later. But which dialects or forms of English are taught throughout the world? Many learners strive to master standardized forms of English, namely, Standard American English and Standard British English 51 Grabe, 2012 52 Gray, 1997, 74 53 Ibid. 54 Phillipson, 1986, 242 55 Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson, 1989, 462 117 (also known as Received Pronunciation). This became very apparent to me when I was teaching in China. Curiously, some of my students spoke with a Standard American English accent and others with a Standard British English accent. When I asked a student about her British accent, she told me that the American vs. British distinction didn’t really matter—the important thing was to have a “pure” accent and not mix the two forms together. This standard language ideology was illustrated each time I was asked to be a judge at English speaking competitions. At first, I thought these would be exciting opportunities, but I quickly grew to despise these public displays of global English hegemony. Sometimes students prepared lengthy monologues, but other times, they were asked questions that they had not prepared for in advance. I was struck by the creativity of some students’ unrehearsed responses and rated them accordingly. However, when it came time to share our scores with the other judges and choose the winners, my scores were frowned upon. The Chinese judges knew that we were supposed to choose the person with the most “native-like” pronunciation no matter the content of their response. I was bothered by this because I valued the ability to think critically and creatively to create a coherent discourse whereas the Chinese valued the ability to speak with a standardized accent. Such “pure” accents were seen as valuable in terms of the students’ future social capital, cultural capital, and economic power. Just as I focused so narrowly on how to teach the micro-level forms and functions of language during my master’s program, so too, did many of my colleagues and students in China overlook some of the macro-level issues tied to English language learning, particularly as it applies to the Chinese context. For example, the heavy focus on learning standardized forms of English comes at the cost of little or no space created for learning and maintaining any of the 120 languages besides Mandarin Chinese represented in China, many of which are endangered because there are so few speakers.56 Motha reminds us that an exclusive focus on micro-level features of language “has contributed to the 56 Zhang and Ma, 2012 118 invisibility of the [English] language’s complicated history” and makes it possible for teachers and learners to avoid engaging “with the broader social, racial, economic, and political implications of their practice.”57 In this manner, the neoliberal global market for English perpetuates its colonial legacy through its façade of neutrality. When English language teaching is seen as “a race-neutral, apolitical, ahistorical endeavor in which learners work to produce appropriate sounds, master correct grammatical structures, and acquire larger vocabularies,”58 we can avoid the painful truth of our colonial past and its present- day legacies. At least for some time. Interlude Based on my own language learning experiences, I have been oriented to particular bodies of knowledge about how to teach or learn an additional language. In elementary school, I attended a magnet program that was housed at a predominantly Asian school. My community received many Hmong refugees after the Vietnam War, yet I interacted with very few of them in and outside of school. My class in the magnet program had only one Hmong student and we were not taught about Hmong language or history. Instead, we took French lessons once a week. I remember enjoying these lessons as they provided a chance for me to take on a new persona. During our first class, we were given a list of common French names and were asked to pick one out for ourselves. I chose “Sophie.” ~ When I was teaching as a Fellow in China, I had a first-day-of-the-semester routine. Since I typically had 25-50 students in each of my classes, I needed a quick and reliable way to take attendance. I remembered a professor in my master’s program swore by name tents made from cardstock. I couldn’t manage to find any heavy paper in my shared office space, so I used my personal money to buy different 57 Motha, 2014, 2 58 Ibid. 119 colors of cardstock for each of my classes from the little stationery shop across from the university gate. Prior to class, I’d cut the paper in thirds and pack some wide-tipped markers in my tote bag. I would arrive to the classroom before the students, so that I could project a slide that read, “Welcome! Please take a piece of paper, fold it in half, and write your English name on one side and your Chinese name in pinyin59 on the other side.” As students walked in, I’d explain the instructions verbally and show them my name tent as an example. I’d usually end up describing what was meant by folding paper “hot dog style” versus “hamburger style.” That was a sure way to lighten first-day jitters. After my first semester teaching in China, I knew that my students had a wide array of English, or Anglicized, names. Some of them had received their English name many years ago from a cherished teacher while others didn’t have any English name or wanted to choose a new one. I was never sure how to properly select a name when students asked me to help them decide. I’d usually throw out a few contemporary American names or direct them to a list of popular baby names online. During the last semester of my third year in China, I was going through my first-day routine as usual. While students were making their name tents, I circulated as best as I could through the cramped classroom. The tables and chairs were bolted to the floor in rows with one aisle down the center. I could readily chat with the students seated near the aisle, but it was more difficult to chat with the students near the wall without talking over all the other students in that row. As soon as I noticed that someone had finished making their nametag, I walked over to their table, read their name aloud, and attempted to memorize anything unique about their appearance. Freckled skin. Wire-rimmed glasses. Asymmetrical haircut. Banana-shaped pencil case. Royal blue Nike Airs. Gap between front teeth. “Eva. Eva. Nice to meet you, Eva,” I said extending my right hand while soaking in her persona. 59 Pinyin is the official romanization system of Standard Mandarin Chinese characters. This phonetic alphabet is useful for beginning learners, like me, to be able to read Chinese without memorizing thousands of characters. 120 “Beckham. Beckham, you must be a soccer fan, huh?” I assumed. He gently shook my hand and nodded his head. I stepped across the aisle to introduce myself to the neighboring students but paused upon reading the pink name tent set directly in front of an innocent-looking boy with a bowl cut that appeared to be self-inflicted. I re-read the neatly penned script to be sure. “Lucifer,” I muttered, unsure of what to say next. We shook hands and I cracked a joke about my class being “a living hell.” No one laughed. I spent the next sixteen weeks reluctantly calling Lucifer by his chosen name. And I've spent the past five years reflecting on my decision to do so. Because I could not stop thinking about my former naming practices when I was a Fellow, I was motivated to do a research project exploring the naming practices of Chinese teachers who are living and working in the U.S.60 By hearing these teachers’ stories and decision-making processes related to naming, I learned just how complex and personal naming processes are. After having Ophelia and experiencing the thoughtful and deliberate process of naming one’s child, I felt extremely guilty about never learning my Chinese students’ given names. Although I had them write their Chinese name in pinyin (the romanization of Chinese characters) on the back of their name tent, I only used that side to match their name with the attendance list. I am so ashamed to say that I don’t remember any of my Chinese students’ birth-assigned names. I assumed that they each had an English name and that they wouldn’t mind me using that name in class. And I didn’t bother asking them if that was okay. This was one specific way that I drew from my bodies of knowledge regarding language teaching practices that perpetuated colonial legacies. I erased aspects of my students’ identities through the almost-exclusive use of English in my classroom (see Figure 7). The playful reappropriation of Anglicized 60 Gordon, Barros, and Li, 2020 121 names, like “Lucifer,” may have been an act of resistance61 through which he and others could perform their citizenship. Stroud explains that: Such a contested semiotics of bodies in or out of place may be potential sites of insurgent, novel and unpredictable acts of citizenship where individual and interpersonal experiences in what is considered to be appropriate practices in place are revealed, negotiated, contested and re- imagined.62 While I used to think that the use of English names was an appropriate TESOL practice, Lucifer and others dis/oriented me with their negotiations, contestations, and re-imaginations of this practice; their behaviors forced me to begin a process of re/orientation to different bodies of knowledge, and subsequently, different teaching practices through the re/con/figuration of my body. Figure 7. “Masking Identities” 61 Edwards, 2006 62 Stroud, 2016, 12 122 Bodies of Knowledge and Bodies in the Classroom As I reflect on how I taught English as an additional language, I’m able to see more clearly how I’ve been oriented in ways that mirror some of the histories, policies, and ideologies discussed thus far. The bodies of knowledge that I encountered throughout my life as a white, mostly-monolingual speaker of Standard American English have shaped my language ideologies and teaching practices. These bodies of knowledge from which my teaching practices materialize are not neutral or value free. As McLaren argues: Knowledge is never pristine and odor-free; it is always tainted and sometimes it stinks; it is enfleshed within systems and structures of domination, within criss-crossed vectors of power and asymmetrical relations of privilege. The map of knowledge is never clean, but always cross- hatched by lines of forces.63 The bodies of knowledge that have influenced me must be situated within my own privileged experience. Despite taking French classes for over five years, I can only string a few simple sentences together. I was able to enjoy being “Sophie” once a week in elementary school because I knew my home language and culture were not at risk of being erased. Once that 40-minute lesson was finished, I returned to my comfortable position as a speaker of Standard American English. I didn’t need to learn another language to gain social and cultural capital or economic power. I already had it. This privilege of being a “native” speaker of English has carried over to my teaching. In the fields of TESOL and applied linguistics, there has been much research over the years comparing “native English speaking teachers” (NESTs) and “non-native English speaking teachers” (NNESTs or non-NESTs). I remember learning these acronyms during grad school. I also remember that we did not fully unpack the use of the word “native” and the ‘us vs. them’ ideology inherent in the prefix of “non-.” We came to the “nice” conclusion that NESTs and NNESTs each have their strengths and their weaknesses. We definitely did not address “monolingual naivity [sic] (or monolingual stupidity), which is a hallmark of many 63 McLaren, 1999, xi 123 dominant Western groups, [and] may prevent an awareness of language in general and of the importance of the mother tongues in particular.”64 My mostly-monolingual stupidity allowed me to have some amount of language awareness but little appreciation for the value of mother tongues. My prior studies in French and my immersive experiences in Japan and South Korea provided me opportunities to feel what it’s like to be a language learner. I knew firsthand what it meant to positively or negatively transfer structures from one language system to another.65 I knew that there were plateaus in language learning. I knew that it was really nerve-wracking to have to speak unfamiliar words in front of others. I knew that learning an additional language was not easy. But I didn’t know just how important and valuable mother tongues, or home languages, are, especially in the language classroom. I didn’t fully realize the crucial need for valuing home languages since I was in a position of linguistic privilege; my mother tongue was already valued by society, so I couldn’t fully comprehend the threat of having one’s language and culture stripped away. Furthermore, my master’s program reinforced monolingual ideologies and the prestige of English. I remember learning the acronym “TEE” in one of TESOL education courses. It stood for “Teaching English in English.” Without questioning the politics of this monolingual practice, we were taught that TEE was a great strategy for providing learners an immersive environment that exposed them to as much target language input as possible. At the time, it made sense—classes are short, maybe one or two hours, so why not take advantage of that limited time to use English to the maximum extent? Plus, if I wasn’t a proficient speaker of any of my students’ home languages, how would I really incorporate them into my teaching? 64 Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson, 1986, 465 65 Cummins, 1980 124 My physical body carried these monolingual bodies of knowledge into my classrooms and professional development workshops in Ethiopia and China. I can’t remember any lessons or workshops in which I explicitly planned for students or teachers to use their mother tongues; however, there were instances where home languages were used to translate my instructions or the lesson content into English. In fact, I encouraged this because I wanted my learners to understand as much of my teaching as possible and participate fully. But the reality was that I leveraged this sort of translation to continue teaching in English. When I think further about how these bodies of knowledge materialized in my classroom through my body’s con/figurations, I recall another practice in addition to my first-day-of-class naming routine that highlights my perceived need to promote English-only policies and pedagogies. The practice of assigning group monitors in “cooperative learning” structures relied on power dynamics that positioned me as an authority figure and English as a hegemonic lingua franca. I was oriented to this particular practice by my Fellow Program colleagues. In China, there was a high demand for Fellows to visit various schools around the country to share “best practices” in English language teaching. For this purpose, we were asked to create a “menu” of workshops we could offer so that the embassy could share them with these schools and let them select what they were most interested in. Although I had done some teacher professional development the prior year in Ethiopia, I did not have a full repertoire of workshops to offer. For this reason, I paid close attention to my colleagues who had been in China for some time. Based on purported principles of cooperative learning,66 one of my colleagues introduced Chinese educators and me to a strategy aimed at increasing student interaction and autonomy. After being divided into small groups, each student was to be assigned a role. While these roles were flexible, it was suggested to assign a volume monitor, a participation monitor, a timer, 66 Cooperative learning strategies are aimed at using active learning and cross modeling to increase student- student interaction and enhance the acquisition of knowledge and skills (Dansereau, 1988). 125 and a language monitor. This structure was supposed to encourage a “healthy” level of noise in the classroom with each student participating in on-topic conversations in English only. While this may not be an inherently oppressive pedagogy, without critical discussion of the potential dangers, it can perpetuate the hegemony of English. The idea of students surveilling each other appropriates disciplinary power to achieve control. As discussed briefly in the previous chapter, disciplinary power stems from societal messages about how we are supposed to live.67 For this reason, we discipline ourselves based on the bodies of knowledge we have acquired about the world in which we live as well as mechanisms of disciplinary power, like surveillance and normalizing judgments. Rather than me circulating the classroom to ensure that everyone was participating and staying on task, the students could do this themselves with this “cooperative learning” strategy. Many students liked having this perceived sense of control. And herein lies the danger. In China, I had students from some of the 56 officially recognized minority groups.68 While I wasn’t directly told who these students were, I could sometimes tell from phenotypical features or their names on my attendance lists. Uyghur and Tibetan students, for instance, do not usually have a three- character Han Chinese name. At the time, I knew that many of the students from minority groups had not studied English for as many years or as intensively as most of the Han Chinese students. Since some students from minority groups continue learning and maintaining their home language in school, Mandarin Chinese is an additional language, and English is another additional language that is subsequently introduced.69 For this reason, it was not uncommon for students from minority groups to have lower English proficiency levels. These students, in particular, could have benefited from the inclusion of home languages in the classroom. 67 Fendler, 2014; Foucault, 1975/1977 68 Guo, 2020 69 Zhu, 2014 126 Translanguaging pedagogical practices, which encourage and leverage the flexible use of plurilingual resources, could have not only assisted my students in learning English but also in affirming their cultural and linguistic identities.70 Without knowing who spoke languages Other than Mandarin Chinese as well as the relatively low number of students from ethnic minority groups (Han Chinese constitute approximately 90% of China’s population),71 it may not have been feasible to group home language speakers together in my classes. However, the fact is, that I didn’t even try. I never asked my students about their home languages and made the false assumption that most, if not all, of them spoke Mandarin Chinese as their mother tongue. In this way, my bodies of knowledge, which were rife with monolingual and standard language ideologies stemming from the U.S.’s colonial and imperial history, materialized through my words, my movements, and my teaching practices. And so, the never-ending processes of re/dis/orientation and re/con/figuration that were triggered in Ethiopia and China have me working to overcome the “monolingual stupidity”72 that was impressed on my body by virtue of my nation’s and my personal history with languages. Learning to embrace my parents’ and my own language quirks is just one small step in this process. Coming to terms with the harmful practices I inflicted on Others and learning to disrupt them is a much larger step. Since I don’t have a feasible way to get in touch with the hundreds of students I taught in Ethiopia and China, I’d like to use this platform to formally apologize. As a teacher who claims relationship building to be at the center of my teaching philosophy, I did a horrendous job of building those relationships ethically and equitably. My focus on teaching the nitty gritty aspects of language informed by colonial rhetoric overshadowed the possibility and potential of using my privilege and classroom space to interrupt ongoing processes of domination and erasure. I’m forever grateful to my students, including Lucifer, who weren’t afraid to question and resist my practices. I’m sorry for not noticing and acknowledging 70 García et al., 2017 71 Guo, 2020 72 Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson, 1986, 465 127 your courage sooner. Because of you, I strive to do better. As I continue navigating my own processes of re/dis/orientation, I will invite others to do so, especially the pre-service teachers with whom I work. Poetic Postlude “the name of the game” what’s a teacher to do? be Frank and say, “Lucifer, how are you?” a Galaxy the Rainbow of my Soul call you Dolphin? am I here to patrol? oompa, loompa. . . . . . Lemonpa? is that right? Ice isn’t cold so, a name out of spite? he’s not Single Sheep ain’t sheepish at all just fantasy? no detail is too small I wanna know why did you choose Ascend? what led you up? a whim, a passing trend? gospel or Lore? they say Cairo dreams of pharaohs Lucretia saw the art Adelson loves Adele Cerulean feels blue Billion’s got high hopes but all this chatter of names not yours I’ve missed the point and continued the wars but you pushed back first unseen taught me to do better to kill this machine 128 CHAPTER SIX: BIRTH Prelude April 14, 2022 Dear Ophelia, Yesterday, we went shopping at Aldi after I picked you up from daycare. Their “special buys” aisle was full of candy, toys, and other Easter surprises. Of course, there were items that caught your eye—you’re really fascinated with plastic eggs and love that you can hide treasures inside of them. You asked me to buy you many things and I suggested adding them to your birthday list. For now, you were okay with this, but one day, you will realize that there isn’t actually a list. On the drive home, you told me that you were excited for your birthday which is exactly one month and one day from today—May 15th. “Do you know what ‘birthday’ means?” I asked while peering at you in the rearview mirror. “No. What is it, Mommy?” “It’s the day you were born—the day that you came out of Mommy’s vagina—and we remember this day each year. Just like we remember things on other holidays.” “I was a good baby, wasn’t I?” “You were the best. You still are.” For you, there’s probably not a whole lot to remember about your birth. As you grow older, you will remember the other birthdays, perhaps the parties, the cake, the friends and family—but you will never remember your actual birth day. In a previous letter, I wrote to you briefly about the long process of being induced on Mother’s Day and going through an almost three-day labor. It was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. At one point, I told the attending nurse, “I’ve run a full marathon—I thought my body could do anything . . . ahhhhhhhh!” The screaming wasn’t as cliché as what you see and hear in the movies, but it did help . . . temporarily. The epidural was much more helpful. Despite the discomforts, the pain, the impatience, the constant interruptions, the probing of my body, your birthday will always mean so much to me because it is the day you made me a mother. As I’ve been re/dis/oriented to motherhood by you, Grandma Ann, and many others, I’ve learned how to re-prioritize what is most important to me. I’ve come to view the world differently—it is no longer a place in which I live, it is a place in which you live. A place where you will thrive and struggle. A place that I want to make better for you. Although this is the last letter I’m writing to you as part of my dissertation, I do intend to keep up the practice. I’m not sure how often or what form it will take, but I want you to have a record of some of my thoughts even though they are ever evolving. I rather you know the truth, mistakes and all, than risk 129 losing traces of our motherline which reflects our heritage and lives through our bodies. Perhaps my letters will inspire you or push your thinking in the way my mother’s letters did for me. If nothing else, they have offered me space to unleash, revel, divulge, awaken, imagine, and un/become. You know, when I first read my mother’s letters, I wished that they were longer. If you someday wish the same, I want you to know that it’s taken me a long time to write these. Every once in a while, the words just seem to flow out of my fingertips, but that is not the norm. Writing for me is a process of healing not without its own pains. One thing that slows me down is my choice of words. Not only am I a perfectionist by nature, but I also know the power of words. I grew up hearing and chanting, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me!” But why? Words do hurt. Words are weapons. I remember word-for-word almost every nasty thing people have said to me or about me. Years later, I can feel the pain produced by certain words used in certain situations. As a language teacher, I have become very aware of the power of words. The way a synonym can change the entire feel of a phrase. The way the mispronunciation of a word can change the meaning of an utterance. The way a word changes completely based on context. The way a word can linger with you. The way a word can irk you. The way ill-considered words can sting. The way intentional words sting even more. Although I can’t spend so much time thinking about my words when I’m speaking, I use writing as my space of heightened thoughtfulness. If you ever read my entire dissertation, you’ll notice that I include many footnotes to rationalize why I’ve chosen to use certain words that are not well-known or commonly accepted. The same is true here—I want to convey my thoughts to you as poignantly as possible while avoiding words and phrases that might be harmful. I realize that this is a really controlling process. Perhaps that’s something I like about writing. Being able to control something in a world where so much feels out of control. While I may be able to control my word choices, I cannot control how others interpret and react to them. And this is the scary part. I don’t know how you will react to these words if you ever choose to read them. Just know that they were carefully written with you in mind. As you grow, I control you less and less. As a baby, I literally controlled the positions of your body to ensure that you were comfortable and safe. As a toddler, I attempted to control some of your movements when you overestimated the capabilities of your developing motor skills. As an almost-four- year-old child, the word “control” no longer feels appropriate. It’s not my job to control you rather to guide you. And I hope you will let me know me when I’m overstepping that guidance. As Grandma Ann used to tell me, “Your wings are growing. It’s time for you to fly.” Love always and forever, Mommy 130 birth /bərTH/ n. the emergence of a baby or other young from the body of its mother n. any coming into existence origin; beginning Introduction Here we are at the end of my dissertation and I’m talking about birth. In a move analogous to graduation ceremonies being dubbed “commencements,” the completion of this work signals a beginning. A birth. The thoughts that once existed only in my mind can now go out into the world on their own. Though I will miss nurturing them, it’s time for them “to fly.” And so, reader, I invite you to join me on a journey of reflection as I recall what I’ve learned through this process of inquiry. Then, our journey becomes forward-looking as I imagine how the lessons I’ve learned could breathe new life into teacher education, public diplomacy, and more generally, the ways people position themselves and encounter others. Finally, I share my thoughts on the potential epistemological and methodological contributions of this work. Lessons Learned While I hope that each reader has learned something unique about themselves and their orientations through reading this dissertation, I’d like to share some of the ways that my own thinking has shifted through this rhizomatic1 process of diffraction.2 By centering the entanglement of my mother-artist-researcher-teacher identifications, perspectives, and experiences and by engaging forms of layered consciousness, I have attempted to examine historical and contemporary configurations of state-sponsored transnational teachers. In short, I sought to explore the embodied experiences of state- sponsored transnational teachers in and out of the classroom; the sociohistorical realities that have 1 Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 2 Haraway, 1997 131 shaped Americans’ orientations about teaching the foreign Other; and how the labor of state-sponsored transnational teachers has been and continues to be racialized and gendered. By centering the state- sponsored transnational teacher’s body and its reconfigurations, I hoped to shed light on the complex negotiations that occur between state-sponsored transnational teachers and those whom they encounter, including the students in their classrooms. Standing on feminist grounding, I mobilized maternal perspectives and metaphors as well as my own experiences as a mother to situate and interrogate state-sponsored transnational teachers’ labor within patriarchal institutions. When I began this research process, I had no idea how central Sara Ahmed’s work would be to my theoretical framings and analyses. The more I thought about her conceptualizations of orientations,3 embodiment,4 and whiteness,5 the more I realized how these concepts undergirded my experiences as a mother and as a state-sponsored transnational teacher. The historical exploration of missionary teachers, colonial teachers,6 and American Indian boarding school teachers in the Orientation chapter, forced me to recognize the parallels between their labor and my own. I hadn’t considered before the connection between my Catholic upbringing, the labor of missionary teachers, and my choice to be a state-sponsored transnational teacher. I didn’t think my decision to teach overseas had been impacted by a parochial lineage. This research, however, has reminded me of the brief call for alms that often occurred at the end of mass. It also wasn’t unusual for photos of missionaries and their local environments to be printed in our Sunday bulletin. Surely, these words and images impacted me more than I’d previously realized. My research on American Indian boarding school teachers has been particularly haunting. Although I knew about the atrocities that occurred at these boarding schools, I never realized just how 3 Ahmed, 2010 4 Ahmed, 2007; Ahmed and Stacey, 2001 5 Ahmed, 2007 6 This is a distinction Zimmerman (2008) makes although the labor of all of these teachers is connected to colonialism. 132 close to home it was happening. The proximity of the Wittenberg School to my hometown made me connect on a visceral level to Ahmed’s words: “Colonialism makes the world ‘white’, which is of course a world ‘ready’ for certain kinds of bodies, as a world that puts certain objects within their reach. Bodies remember such histories, even when we forget them.”7 Seeing photographs of the Wittenberg School and visiting the site upon which it once sat roused something that had been suppressed deep within my body. The world was ‘ready’ for my white feminized body to teach the foreign Other domestically and transnationally. Furthermore, after learning about the Thomasite teachers in the Philippines, I began to understand what Ahmed meant by “intertwining histories of arrival.”8 It was not just my Catholic upbringing and exposure to missionary work that oriented me to the possibility of transnational teaching. It was not just my whiteness. It was not just my settlement on the land of omǣqnomenēwak (Menominee) and ᐅᒋᑉᐧᐁ (Ojibwe) peoples. It was not just the influence of my parents and their orientations. It was all of these and so much more. I will likely never uncover all the complexities of this entanglement, but I now realize the intergenerational genealogy9 of my orientations. It’s easy to think that I’m nothing like my grandma who made blatantly racist comments, but I’ve inherited many of the same privileges that she and the generations before her had also inherited. These privileges have led to the “reachability of some objects, those that are ‘given’ to us, or at least made available to us, within the family home.”10 In this way, becoming a state-sponsored transnational teacher was not just possible, it was a distinct path trodden by folks who looked, sounded, and behaved a lot like me. 7 Ahmed, 2007, 152-153 8 Ahmed, 2010, 240 9 Davis, 2004 10 Ahmed, 2014, 99-100 133 My exploration of the racialized and gendered labor of the institutions of teaching and diplomatizing helped me gain more nuanced insight into how our patriarchal society continues to shape and exploit the work of women, especially those who perform emotional labor. As Kate Manne explains: women are expected to give traditionally feminine goods (such as sex, care, nurturing, and reproductive labor) to designated, often more privileged men, and to refrain from taking traditionally masculine goods (such as power, authority, and claims to knowledge) away from them.11 We saw this expectation of “giving care” materialized in the archetype of Lady Bountiful and the myth of the “motherteacher”12 throughout the 19th century. As men moved on to more lucrative and powerful careers during the Industrial Revolution, women assumed the left-behind role of the schoolhouse teacher. And this feminization of teaching remains today since “the conditions in which we live are inherited from the past, they are ‘passed down’ not only in the matter of bodies, but also through the work or labour of generations.”13 In the case of diplomacy, a gendered hierarchy of labor also exists. Most official diplomats, such as ambassadors and chargé d’affaires, are men.14 Their masculinized labor of defending the motherland15 is highly visible and valued whereas the feminized labor of state-sponsored transnational teachers is mostly invisible, save for quantifiable data sent to Washington D.C. in the form of “highlights.” State-sponsored transnational teachers perform the labor of “promoting” the motherland and her supposed values on a daily basis through emotional labor, or “trying to feel the right feeling for the job”16 in and outside of the classroom. Because this work in undervalued, state-sponsored transnational teachers do not have the same affordances and protections as official diplomats. Their close proximity to and frequent interactions with the foreign public increase state-sponsored 11 Manne, 2020, 11 12 Goldstein, 2014, 18 13 Ahmed, 2014, 99 14 Congressional Research Service, 2021; Towns and Niklasson, 2018 15 Tickner, 2013 16 As cited in Beck, 2018 134 transnational teachers’ likelihood of being violated.17 In this way, we see how state-sponsored transnational teaching is situated within national and global patriarchal systems fueled by misogyny, male privilege, and male entitlement.18 The emphasis on embodiment and careful consideration of the re/con/figurations of the state- sponsored transnational teacher’s body throughout this work has opened my eyes to the influence my physical body and its bodies of knowledge have had on my interactions with the foreign Other. By thinking about my body on an individual scale and a collective scale, I realized how individual bodies can be “a location from which to understand the collapsing and constructed scale of the global and geopolitical as intimately lived. The body, then, functions as scale and site upon which ideas, ideologies, and politics are performed and made meaningful.”19 Considering the body as both matter and metaphor has helped me come to understand my encounters with Others’ bodies as well as my own individual and collective bodies more deeply. Connecting to the ideas in the Orientation chapter, my embodied analyses have helped me see how orientations can be ‘passed down’ via collective body memory20 and the formation of the individual habitus. In this manner, orientations evolve from “unspoken stories passed down from flesh to flesh,”21 and these orientations materialize through our bodies. For this reason, awareness of our bodies must include attention to body “a-where-ness” 22 since the spatial and temporal situating of our orientations and embodiment impacts their materialization. The notions of orientation, collective body memory, and the spaciotemporal situating of identities contributes to our understanding of why certain bodies are more likely to aspire to be teachers. 17 Geidel, 2015; Kallman, 2019 18 Manne, 2020 19 Mountz, 2018, 762 20 Fuchs, 2012 21 Puwar, 2021, 11 22 Thrift, 2004, 126 135 In short, the examination of various conceptualizations of bodies has taught me that my embodied experiences and re/con/figurations cannot possibly represent the experiences of all state- sponsored transnational teachers. The ways in which bodies are encountered is so contextual and dependent on the individual and collective identifications and histories of those bodies involved. What we can surmise though is the central role the body plays in encounters between people, in and out of the classroom, and the complexity of reading inscriptions on others’ bodies. Consequently, when we think about how state-sponsored transnational teachers’ bodies are read and re/con/figured, there is a: need to think of bodies as sites of performance in their own right rather than nothing more than surfaces for discursive inscription. Discourses do not simply write themselves directly onto bodies as if these bodies offered blank surfaces of equal topography. Instead, these concepts and ways of being are taken up and used by people who make meaning of them in the different global contexts in which they operate.23 I explored these performances and practices of state-sponsored transnational teachers’ bodies in the classroom in the Mother Tongue chapter. By tracing the genealogy of monolingual ideologies in the U.S. and beyond, I was able to more fully comprehend how I adopted mostly-monolingual orientations and practices while living in multilingual contexts domestically and internationally. I also realized how much standard language ideologies have impacted me and the hegemonic spread of English globally. Through the materialization of these orientations in my classroom naming practices and “cooperative learning” strategies, I was likely passing these same orientations to the students and teachers with whom I worked. In this way, my language teaching became a tool of re-production and erasure. Some, like Lucifer, resisted my imposition of ideologies and practices, some of which have Christian roots, through their own processes of subversion and reappropriation much in the same way that many Filipinos resisted the U.S.’s colonial policies of “benevolent assimilation.”24 Overall, this examination of language ideologies and practices revealed how much I was oriented to the belief that a 23 Dowler and Sharp, 2001, 169 24 Hsu, 2015 136 language teacher’s role should revolve around the form and function of language. I now realize that the macro-level socio-historical, political, and economic influences and impacts of teaching and learning English are necessary to teach alongside micro-level content. Re-imagining Teacher Education, Public Diplomacy, and the Art of Human Interaction Learning the aforementioned lessons has been a mere snippet of my processes of un/becoming through re/dis/orientation and re/dis/configuration that were triggered during my time as a state- sponsored transnational teacher in Ethiopia and China. Although there were many other personal stories I could’ve shared or other data sources from which I could’ve drawn, there are important implications from my observations and reflections of these particular snapshots. In this forward-looking discussion, I invite others to envision with me specific ways that this research might inspire us to re- imagine teacher education, public diplomacy initiatives, and the “art” of ethical and humanizing interaction with Others. I embarked on this journey anticipating that state-sponsored transnational teachers25 would be at the center of my research since I had conceptualized and thought about this term for quite some time. In some ways, they were at the center of this research. In other ways, the topics explored and the issues raised apply to all teachers whether they teach domestically or overseas. All teachers enter their classroom with particular orientations about Others. In U.S. public schools, more than half of students identify as Hispanic (27%), Black (15%), Asian (5%), Indigenous (1%), or two or more races (4%) as of the 2017-18 academic year, yet the teaching force remains predominantly white (79%).26 The U.S. teaching force also remains feminized with 76% all K-12 teachers identifying as female.27 Consequently, the notions of the foreign Other, Lady Bountiful, and the “motherteacher” ideal are not just overseas 25 Teachers who teach overseas and are supported programmatically and/or financially by their national government (see Chapter Two: Orientation). 26 Schaeffer, 2021 27 National Center for Education Statistics, 2020 137 phenomena. For this reason, the implications of this work in terms of teacher preparation should consider all pre-service teachers whether they plan to teach outside of the U.S. or not. As I continue to un/become a language educator through my own processes of re/dis/orientation and re/dis/configuration, I advocate for the creation of space in which pre-service teachers can grapple with their own orientations. While some of this work might be accomplished through critical historical and contemporary analyses of education, colonialism, imperialism, and hegemonic ideologies in the U.S., other aspects of this work must be centered around pre-service teachers’ unique intersectional identifications. One potential activity might revolve around pre-service teachers investigating their home communities through archival research, genealogical research, interviews with community members, conversations with relatives, or other processes of gathering information relevant to their orientations about education, teaching, and interacting with Others. By carefully unpacking the histories, ideologies, and practices of schools and teachers in a geographic area with which they are familiar, they may have visceral experiences that trigger re/dis/orientation. Additionally, pre-service teachers should be encouraged to embrace discomfort and seek out experiences that might continue to trigger processes of re/dis/orientation and re/dis/configuration. Recently, I participated in an immersive experience for pre-service teachers to Dearborn, Michigan which has the largest concentration of Arab Americans.28 Knowing that many of these pre-service teachers grew up in predominantly white suburbs and rural areas of Michigan, the co-trip leaders included information about discomfort during the pre-trip orientation. We shared Alasdair White’s Comfort Zone Model which uses three concentric circles to represent levels of anxiety while performing tasks. The inner most circle is the “comfort zone,” the next circle is the “optimal performance zone,” and the outermost circle is the “danger zone.”29 Ideally, the most personal growth will happen in the 28 Arab American National Museum, 2022 29 White, 2009, 3-4 138 “optimal performance zone” where optimal levels of anxiety cause arousal and boost performance. After sharing this model, we had the pre-service teachers recall past experiences that took place in each of the three levels. Then, we asked the pre-service teachers to think about how the co-leaders and other participants might be able to support them to optimize their growth during our trip. This activity allowed us to preface the psychological importance of putting oneself in potentially uncomfortable situations and strategies for growing from those experiences. Similar activities could be useful in inviting pre- service teachers to critically engage with and interrogate their own orientations. In terms of orientations to teaching, teacher educators could adopt the practice of “curating difficult knowledge” to encourage pre-service teachers to critically examine the roots of their bodies of knowledge. Simon explains that such “curation” offers: multiple, conflicting perspectives on historical events resulting in narratives whose conclusions remain complex and uncertain. As a consequence, such an exhibition might require some visitors to re-think their expectations, demanding they complicate their desire for relatively straightforward and conclusive ways of telling a story.30 In this way, monolingual and standard language ideologies and their historical underpinnings could be the center of conversation before introducing the value of translingual ideologies, practices, and other critical pedagogies. Again, it’s not just state-sponsored transnational teachers who might benefit from a consideration of how their own language ideologies materialize in the classroom. With the rising number of culturally and linguistic diverse students in the U.S., all pre- and in-service teachers could likely benefit from an interrogation of their orientations so that their teaching does not re-produce and perpetuate monolingual and standard language ideologies. While teachers may need to prepare students for assessments which use Standard American English, they could accompany this instruction with conversations about language ideologies. Explicit discussion about the beauty and value of all 30 Simon, 2011 139 linguistic and cultural resources could be used to counter the hegemony of English that still exists in many state standards and school practices. In this manner, teachers can foster the growth of “resourceful speakers who are able to use available language resources and to shift between styles, discourses, registers, and genres.”31 This “utopia of interknowledge”32 would make space for students’ “learning [of] new and less familiar knowledges without necessarily having to forget the old ones and one’s own.”33 A more critical and humane orientation toward languages and cultures might be fostered when we are more conscious of the very words we use to talk about language teaching. As Pennycook points out, the very name of the field of “TESOL” others people who do not speak English.34 This sort of ‘us vs. them’ or ‘native vs. non-native’ language continues to position English as the ideal and all other languages as Other. Efforts of re-naming the field can be seen in the use of World Englishes (WE)35 and English as an International Language (EIL). The former recognizes the many forms, or dialects, of English rather than talking about English as a single entity, namely, a standardized form. In a similar vein, EIL attempts to disrupt the notion of learning standard American and British forms of English. After all, most people who speak English as an additional language do so with other people who also speak English as an additional language. Using these alternatives will hopefully raise awareness of the value of difference rather than standardization. As I think about state-sponsored transnational teaching and its purported role as a public diplomacy initiative aimed at fostering mutual understanding, I imagine new forms of relation into which current programs could metamorphose. Rather than continuing to match applicants with already- determined projects, like the Peace Corps and English Language Fellow Program currently do, projects 31 Pennycook, 1994/2017 32 de Sousa-Santos, 2016, 297 33 Ibid. 34 Pennycook, 1999 35 Kachru, 1984 140 could be co-developed by participants from the U.S. and cooperating partner countries. A grassroots or bottom-up approach to planning could work toward equalizing power differentials between Americans and those with whom they partner. Besides creating a sense of shared ownership, by including citizens from cooperating partner countries in all phases of project development (planning, implementation, reflection), more authentic needs analysis could be performed with their insider knowledge of a particular context. Part of the planning process might also involve critical conversations about the role and politics of English and other languages in that particular context. In this way, English language teaching should not be the driving force of these transnational partnerships. I envision more community-based projects that embrace translingual forms of communication to accomplish agreed upon goals related to education or other sectors. One possibility is to use language exchange rather than one-way teaching of English as a means to foster dialogue about educational challenges in each country and brainstorm possible solutions together. Ideally, programs would be true exchanges in the sense that U.S. participants would visit partnering countries and vice versa. This sort of overhaul of state-sponsored transnational teaching programs is aimed at positioning everyone involved as co-learners rather than perpetuating global hierarchies and inequalities. If the true goal of these public diplomacy initiatives is to “promote world peace and friendship”36 and foster “mutual understanding”37 between citizens of the U.S. and citizens of partnering countries, I believe this kind of re/orientation toward ethics of pedagogical care and shared responsibility would enhance the development of both. The deep connections and humanizing relationships hopefully created through the co-planning, co-implementation, and co-reflection processes could set a precedent for how we might interact with others in more ethical and globally-sustaining ways. We can also begin to better 36 Peace Corps, n.d.-a 37 English Language Programs, n.d. 141 recognize the emotional labor of such work when we have open and honest dialogue regarding each person’s involvement in the project. Through storytelling and sharing sessions, we can understand more about each other and our work than regimented “highlight” templates allow. As I reflected on the ways my body was encountered by Others when I was a state-sponsored transnational teacher, I found myself wishing that people could have seen me as I saw myself. Rather than see my white skin, my large body, my curly hair, and the numerous collective bodies to which I was perceived to belong, I wished people could have seen my soul. As I thought about how we might connect soul-to-soul with Others whom we encounter, I realized that it may never be fully possible. In I Sing the Body Electric, Walt Whitman writes, “And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?”38 He insists that the body and soul are so complexly intertwined, that we cannot have one without the beauty and nuances of the other. Perhaps he's right. If I erased my body, what would be left with which to encounter others? How might I materialize my orientations and perform my compliance to or resistance of the global politics around me? Without our bodies, we might not face the moments of discomfort that lead to our re/dis/orientation and re/con/figurations of our bodies; we might become stuck in our current orientations and positionalities. Instead of wishing my body away, I invite myself and others to learn about our differences—and to value those differences—cultural, linguistic, religious, political, or otherwise. With better understanding of Others’ “intertwining histories of arrival,” 39 we might be able to approach encounters with more kindness, humility, grace, empathy, sensitivity, and vulnerability. Germano, for example, argues that: . . . even if only badly learned, a language has something to tell about people different from yourself. . . When we learn languages, or teach them, we need to believe that that difference counts in the world, that it reflects fundamental differences among people . . .And just maybe our clumsy steps with a language as far away from English . . . can help us embrace the idea that 38 Whitman, n.d., line 8 39 Ahmed, 2010, 240 142 there are people out there who are fully human and still not us. . . The badly learned languages is at least a short message from the Other Tongue: ‘The world isn’t just like you.’40 Learning bits and pieces of another language is especially important for monolingual speakers who embody aspects of the notion of ‘one nation, one language’. If we think about state-sponsored transnational teachers and any other citizen as embodying their nation, we can see the potential for re- making nations, or imagined communities, as we see fit. The nation is, after all “no more and no less than what . . . we . . . make it, iteratively, continually, performatively.”41 Thus, through re-imagined ethical and humanizing encounters, we can begin to perform, and materialize, different ideologies than the ones often present in today’s public diplomacy and development initiatives. Epistemological and Methodological Contributions If you had asked me two years ago about my looming dissertation, you would have been told that I was planning on doing a multi-sited ethnography to follow several state-sponsored transnational teachers from the beginning to the end of their overseas teaching sojourn. At that point, I was still determining how I might make that work reflexive enough to not only consider my position as a researcher but also to explore how my orientations of state-sponsored transnational teaching shifted as I carried out the ethnography. However, the realities and travel restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic unfolding in early 2020, squashed the feasibility of that proposed project. As state-sponsored transnational teaching programs evacuated all their participants and put future projects on hold, I needed to pivot. First, I thought that I would still follow several teachers who were doing virtual exchanges instead of the traditional face-to-face, in-country programs. Then, I thought that I would interview program alumni who were back in the U.S. And then, I was very unsure about what to do. It was through 40 Germano, 2004, B16 41 Medby, 2018, 118 143 this messy process of un/becoming during an unprecedented moment in history that I decided to push the boundaries that I had initially felt confined to. To grapple with the questions that had been on my mind and fully bring my self(ves) to this research, I settled on the project that you see before you. So, in this final section, I speculate on the epistemological and methodological possibilities arising from this m/a/r/tographic42 inquiry which leveraged epistolary narrative, creative non-fiction, and data from various media and genres, and utilized diffractive processes of analysis to explore my lived experiences and the liminal spaces within and between my mother-artist-researcher-teacher self. This work is decidedly feminist and aims to make the private not only public but also “academic and political.”43 In my mother’s words, “giving wings” to this work has been intentional from the get-go. While it’s been nerve-wracking to think about such personal work being out in the world for anyone to read and critique, that was the point. If I don’t share this work with others, I’m at fault for not doing more to disrupt some of the harmful ideologies and practices perpetuated by the patriarchal institutions of academia, motherhood, teaching, and diplomatizing. Instead, I stand on feminist grounding to push back against the convention of bracketing [oneself]44 in academic work. Practices that exclude researchers, especially women, from naming themselves as epistemic authorities leads to the production of knowledge that does not represent alternative cognitive styles. When Sara Ruddick reminded me that “mothers must think,”45 I knew that I needed to bring my identification as a mother to this work. If not, my maternal perspectives and ways of seeing the world and making meaning would remain invisible. As a white mother whose intersectional identifications position me in a relative position of power, it was important to me to exploit my own 42 A mother’s a/r/tography or a mother-artist-researcher-teacher’s living inquiry of the rhizomatic in-between spaces. 43 Acevedo-Zapata, 2020, 419 44 Husserl, 1913/1931 45 Ruddick, 1989, 23 144 privilege to push methodological and conceptual boundaries so that, perhaps, others who don’t have the same advantages, don’t have to push as hard in the future. Rather than simply reflect on my past experiences, the diffractive m/a/r/tographic methodology I deployed allowed me to consider those experiences through a more critical and layered consciousness. Not only did I read my experiences as a mother and as a state-sponsored transnational teacher “through one another”46 but also through additional data sources, including interview data, letters from my mother, historical documents, photographs, film, poetry, novels, children’s literature, film, and other relevant scholarship. Although the wide-ranging scope of data sources made it difficult to hone in on a single type of analysis (e.g., discourse analysis, literary analysis, visual analysis, narrative analysis), it made it possible for me to personalize my research process. Through the inclusion of my mother’s letters, for example, I was able to more deeply connect with Sara Ahmed’s notion of orientations being inherited, or “passed down.”47 Epistolary narrative, or letter writing, was a powerful method for me to think reflectively, reflexively, and diffractively. It was through the composition of each letter to Ophelia at the beginning of all chapters that assisted me in formulating the broader metaphors from which each chapter is based. In this manner, epistolary narrative paved the way for my conceptual and theoretical discussions. Additionally, epistolary and personal narrative were therapeutic means of expressing myself, exploring past emotional experiences, and reflecting on my continual un/becoming. My expansion of a/r/tography48 to include mother’s voices, perspectives, and ways of being invites other mothers to embark on journeys of self-study. I hope that my inclusion of maternal concepts and perspectives can expand the reach of the nascent field of mother studies.49 While my work doesn’t 46 Barad, 2011, 445 47 Ahmed, 2014 48 Irwin and de Cosson, 2004 49 Kawash, 2011 145 neatly align with previous studies in the field, it shows the transdisciplinary possibilities of mobilizing a maternal lens from which to view various phenomena. Everyone has an experience of being mothered whether by a biological mother, father, or other caregiver. For this reason, the inclusion of maternal perspectives can be a humanizing approach not only for mothers to bring themselves to their research but also for others to connect to the scholarship in meaningful ways. Such connection through honest and vulnerable storytelling has the potential to increase our awareness of difference, and hopefully, trigger ongoing processes of re/dis/orientation and re/dis/configuration. And so, I’d like to end where it all began—with my mother’s letters to me. My discovery of this motherline50 not only motivated me to extend that female lineage to my daughter but also triggered my own re/dis/orientation and led me here—to the birth of this dissertation. On the day before my fourth birthday, my mother wrote: When you “grow up” you say that you want to be a mailperson who delivers the mail. Let’s wait and see. . . In 1989, there still was no cure for AIDS, cancer, diabetes, M.S., cerebral palsy, and the war on drugs continues (coke, crack, ice). Try to always be in control of your own body and mind NOT to let a drug CONTROL you! It is such a waste of such a beautiful resource. The “iron curtain” or “Berlin Wall” was taken down Dec. 1989. What a historic moment—to see freedom for many people. I just hope that what you are learning today will benefit you as you become a teenager, adult and elder. Be kind and gentle, patient, understanding, caring, loving, judging no one. Be happy! I love you so much my darling, Mommy51 50 Lowinsky, 2009 51 A. Gordon, personal communication, January 12, 1989 146 REFERENCES 147 REFERENCES Academy for Cultural Diplomacy. (n.d.). What is cultural diplomacy? What is soft power. Institute for Cultural Diplomacy. https://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/academy/index.php?en_what-is- cultural-diplomacy Acevedo-Zapata, D. M. (2020). 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