And that's what really interests me. You are like a neon sign blinking all night outside the cultural studies department that says, "This is a female graduate student's rational response to the current economic and cultural climate. Deal with it."
You know, when I was young in the South there were sharecroppers. These were people who always owed. The idea of owing your crop to the landowner was really frightening. Those sharecroppers would be working all winter and spring on credit from the landowner in the hopes that in the fall they could pile up enough tomatoes and spinach and green beans to come out a little ahead for the year, until borrowing again in the winter. That idea just terrified me. It was, as I understood it as a young boy, slavery lite. It was an attenuated form of servitude that had grown up around what was in many cases only a technical prohibition against slavery.
So when you say, rather offhandedly, that most graduate students end the summer with credit card debt, it reminds me, more than anything, about the relations we workers have with owners. We have been transformed into sharecroppers.
And what could the landowner do if the sharecropper failed his obligations? He could put that sharecropper out of his house! He could put him off his land! The sharecropper and his family would be unhoused, in the rain, in the heat, living in the forest then, stealing chickens, made into nomads, hill dwellers, nonpersons -- the rural equivalent of what we urbanites refer to as homeless.
What else could the landowner do? Well, he might take that sharecropper's daughter for his pleasure and, if the sharecropper was white -- for sharecropper relations existed between poor whites and rich whites as well as between whites and blacks -- he might give that sharecropper's daughter to one of his sons to scrub and cook and make babies. It was de facto slavery.
So what we have to do, we cultural workers, having seen that we, too, are sharecroppers, is grab whatever equity we can grab, and turn it into working capital -- for example, if we own houses we have to make our houses into factories that make and sell cultural goods. And if the only equity we can control is cultural, then we use that cultural equity to do the same thing. Luckily, we cultural sharecroppers, many of us, are rather good with the Internet. So we can use it to get our tomatoes to market. That is the future I foresee, a future of "cottage industries," of former sharecroppers becoming net producers, finding legal protection in corporate structures such as the useful and relatively inexpensive LLC structure.
In fact, my whole homeownership thing began not with any sentimental belief in the "American dream" but with a foreboding sense that the left had failed to provide us cultural workers with any tangible protection against the predations of real estate speculation and the flows of borderless capital, and that we therefore needed land and/or capital or we would be pushed out of our city, evicted, made de facto refugees. So we used what meager access to capital we had -- through our middle-class families -- to buy a house. And then we used the equity from that house's rise in value to fund a restructuring of it into a productive facility, basically a school and factory, or a cultural goods distribution venue. We were looking ahead, trying to understand our situation and its dangers. Who was empowered to send us into the forest? Who was the landowner in this situation? What could we produce? And that is where we are at now. We are cultural workers who have incorporated in order to reap the benefit of our cultural productions. We are the new capitalists.
We owe. But we also produce.
We plan to expand this factory. It is very small right now. It only produces a few things. But it can produce more. Of course, having a little factory, or even a big factory, does not make you safe. Governments and armies can always take your factory away. That is what happened to my wife's family in former Czechoslovakia. Soldiers took the factory. That is what happens. But at least while you have a productive capacity you do not live in quaking fear of the landowner's footsteps.
Ours was a rational response to a growing threat. And so is your decision to be a stripper. I suggest that you think of your ventures in these terms. For these are the options the culture and the market have given us.
So in your case, working as a nude dancer makes all the sense in the world. And I think the logical next step is to own the means of production, that is, create a combination strip club and cultural studies foundation, where the neon sign outside says, "XXX Cultural Studies -- the XXX productive force of the XXX 21st century." Tall enough to be seen from the interstate, it would alternately flash, "Naked Girls! Books! Naked Girls! Books!"
And the first study you need to fund, I think, is a careful look at the lap dance itself, specifically how the lap dance is, as I understand it, the very legal definition of not sex, and yet looks far more like sex than sex itself. How is that? I just find that rather peculiar and certainly worth whatever time a grad student could spend on it.
I also have always liked the idea of a library with plenty of bouncers.
Step Right Up, Folks! Getcher Genuine Homemade Cultural Products Right Here!
Climb up on the truck and pick one out: "Since You Asked," on sale now at Cary Tennis Books: Buy now and get an autographed first edition.
What? You want more advice?
About the writer
Cary Tennis is Salon's advice columnist.
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