anthropology, spider-man, talking stages and .... more !!

 “I belong to that classification of people known as wives.”

According to researchers Sarah Gelman and Meredith Meyer at the University of Michigan, in an article from the National Library of Medicine, categorization is a process spanning all of child development, beginning from as early as 3-4 months of age, until they are able to categorize by language at around age 3. It’s not hard to find examples of this: from the very beginning, the rather boring one offered by Gelman and Meyer is that of an infant separating peas from carrots on her dinner plate; then we have them slowly growing conscious of society-oriented categories like race, gender, and sometimes, class; the more harmless and sometimes very regionally-topical distinctions between March birthdays, summer birthdays, or MSU versus University of Michigan fans; and then in middle school, the YA-media obsession and insistence of lunchroom cliques, the jocks, the nerds, the Plastics, the theater kids; so on, so forth.

Categorization is an instinct we learn from an early age, long before it morphed into a rhetorical mode or an English vocab quiz term; and it may be the most primitive and fundamental one of all. It’s a survival mechanism: the code behind pattern recognition, a way to organize our past experiences and apply them to new, unfamiliar situations; think of our early ancestors identifying which berries are safe to eat or which tools are best fit for cutting meat versus breaking bones. 

In Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, categorization is identified as one of the mechanisms that allowed the human species to, as he puts it, dominate the planet; through the creation of the “imagined order.” —The most obvious of which include social hierarchies, gender roles, the caste system, these systems of organization that brought structure into the fluidity of human society. But I see categorization as an even broader term: it is the fundamental transaction of language. Defining a word is an act of classification, and thus whenever I use language, anywhere, at all, it is an act of translating—categorizing—the world I experience under a linguistic construct. It is a contract. One that the human species collectively bought into, to create more elaborate categories such as currency, the concept of nations, corporations, and human rights.

The ingenuity of the human race, says Harari, is that we accept these imagined fictions as reality.

*

“‘I hate the A.M. I hate the P.M. I hate labels. I’m not a hero, because calling yourself a hero, makes you a self-mythologizing, narcissistic autocrat.’

‘I thought you hated labels?!’

‘I don’t believe in consistency.’”

—Hobie Brown & Miles Morales, Spider Man: Across the Spider-Verse

the goat !

I asked Google for the difference between ‘category’ and ‘label,’ to which the response was a whole lot of nothing. I feel like I’m diving into a pile of nothing-burger-ness the more I think about this question: but my tentative, muddy verdict is that ‘category’ leans toward the act of molding, like a sieve or a river parted into two, while ‘label’ just makes me think of stickers slapped on someone’s forehead. Which is to say: categories are created, labels are assigned; and frankly, whatever that means.

An interesting comment I found on a Google Help post on the difference between categories and labels in Gmail: “You can create your own labels, but you can not create more categories.”

The Handmaid's Tale (2017)

I find it interesting that a basic feature of dystopian worldbuilding seems to be societal labels taken to the extreme. In The Handmaid’s Tale, women are classified, from highest to lowest, as Wives, Aunts, Handmaids, Marthas, Econowives, Jezebels, and Unwomen. The social hierarchy of “The Giver,” a bleak, dystopian novel, sorts society into the “Council of Elders,” Citizens who are Nurturers, Doctors, and Instructors, Birthmothers and Laborers, and The Elderly. Veronica Roth’s Divergent series divides society into five factions of Abnegation (the Selfless), Erudite (the Intelligent), Dauntless (the Brave), Candor (the Honest), and Amity (the Peaceful). Those who do not fit into these molds—the factionless—are shunned and live in poverty. 

As these stories caution us, extreme classification becomes conformity, the loss of individuality, when societal rules turn from loose scaffolding into prison bars. It’s ironic that our most divine fantasies as a species seek to rebel against the very thing that allowed human society to exist in the first place. —I would put my money on this paradox as the one that defines mankind, if there were to be such a thing. Marxism—dream of a classless, stateless communist society. MLK’s dream of a colorblind nation. Every revolution in human history under the slogan of equality. Truthfully—is categorization just a shade of inequity? Every diplomat or politician or world leader ever, seeking for the proletariat class to look past those uneven hills of status, and a never-ending word vomit of alliance, togetherness and unity.

*

“AMY: Maybe we don't see those things as important because people don't write about them.

JO: No, writing doesn't confer importance, it reflects it.

AMY: I don't think so. Writing them will make them more important.”

—Jo & Amy March, Little Women (2019)

Here is the other epigraph I considered for this section:

“So what are we?”

—Me to my spectacular failed talking stage, never

Once, I found myself staring outside the car window at the half-abandoned, half-renovated buildings outside; and I decided rather anticlimactically that existence was a compromise; and then I wondered if I would rather be nothing at all.

It’s a rather dramatic way of saying that I do not like the idea of limitations, of structure, and most of all opportunity cost: because to exist as anything will necessitate eliminating that it could be what is equal and opposite. I am a perfectionist, and I struggle with the notion that nothing can be everything at once. All this to say: when we categorize, and more broadly, use words at all, and give something we notice in the world a constructed form to inhabit—it is no longer free.

Mathematical, physical models can only succeed in depicting what they are created to depict; from a different angle, it will be completely wrong. To translate the spherical Earth onto a two-dimensional map requires an element of distortion. Categories are models, maps, analogies, and approximations, because they are all done from one vantage point: which is why contradictory categories can exist and be simultaneously valid. The duality comes from the exploitation of the loophole that such representations of reality will always have a certain margin of error: a marred facet of the truth. There is perhaps a reason that the Divine in many human traditions is formless, infinite, immaterial; that we define what is both literally and metaphorically above us as something that eludes definition.

"It hurts to be something, it hurts
to be nothing with you"
Laufey "Promise"

But those definitions, classification, and structure are, too, the power of the tangible: surely you cannot argue that it would have been the best course of action to decline structure in its entirety, and just exist in wordless soup? Which is to say: if we do not have definitions and classifications, there is nothing we can build upon; wheels need friction to move. If your relationship has no label: how do you break it off? The question that angsty modern-age pop has and will continue to beat to death: is it a breakup if nothing existed in the first place? If we do not have categories—we can, technically, grasp nothing in our mind.

Words are the building blocks of reality. (I conflate classification and definition; I treat them as one and the same—language is just an example under that umbrella.) All of our reality is about articulation; think of an internal monologue, think of those emotions that exist in Japanese but not in English; and a more grounded example, I will only notice a rhetorical choice after I have learned about it through studying our English vocab. Albert Einstein’s quote, that “imagination is more important than knowledge,” is frankly, a lie; if you do not have the words for something, you will simply never know it.

And more than that—language is not just transcription, not a detached rendering of reality, but an active force in shaping the things it corrals. Words of affirmation, for one—the psychologists that swear by it. Relationship labels for another. Why names sometimes shape personality traits; if you label someone something, assign them some classification all their life, will they not begin to believe, internalize and conform to it? There is a reason that “spell” is both a magic spell and the spelling of a word, the word “grammar” the source of “grimoire,” meaning “magic book” for a magician’s manual: at its core, every word is an incantation. Harvard linguist and TikTok social experimentalist Adam Aleksic says that “magic was thought of as accessible through language.” The Bible, Genesis 1:3—“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” I think, therefore I am; I speak, therefore it is.

*

“You will notice I have chosen to use ‘folx’ instead of ‘folks’ because it is a gender neutral term created by activist communities, and I would like to honor everyone who reads this book. Replacing the ‘ks’ with ‘x’ allows for every reader who has never been seen before to see themselves in here. We’ll capitalize Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color, and Folx of the Global Majority because I believe it is important to center the voices and lives of those who have been marginalized, silenced, and purposefully left out of our history for so long. I am building solidarity in the language I choose.”

—Tiffany Jewell, This Book is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on how to Wake Up, Take Action, and Do the Work; Author’s Note

I did not grow up in a woke household. My first introduction to transgender issues and gender-neutral bathrooms were through my parents’ animosity. When a friend came out to me in 6th grade, I did not, mentally, take it well. I discovered the book in the epigraph of this section when it was handed out as a reading for the youth council of a nonprofit I was a part of. I thought it frivolous. I still think of a line from a YouTube video I encountered years and years ago, called “36 STUPID FEMINIST QUESTIONS ANSWERED,” (“trigger warning: this video contains feminism”), where he asks if there is such a lack of women in STEM, shouldn’t the women in the video have studied math or engineering, instead of degrees in Gender Studies?

It’s probably ironic, then, that I discovered creative writing—which is the most “woke” space that I know. The literary magazines I read, the writing programs I’ve done are where I’ve met the sorts of people that would give my parents each an aneurysm: gender non-conforming, neurodivergent, people of all races and colors; well, actually, and boarding school white people. All right: I’m still a perpetrator of racial profiling. I used to confuse—and especially in my friend circles where we are (glaringly) all a predominant race—this type of classification as wit.

Anyway, I talk about this a lot, I realize. The other contradiction I think of most often is the fine line between category and stereotype. When is it wit and when am I being complicit in real harm? —Where does prediction become bigotry? The classification most inherent to our society: “us” versus “them.” Research shows that infants already demonstrate a preference for what is similar to themselves. So cliques form, and parties, and we flock toward where we can be homogeneous, and in class we go around the circle and try to find three things in common with each other.

We spend all our lives defending and trying to dismantle things we never chose: race, gender, class, religion. We inherit labels and their connotations. I still think of the Unmarked Woman; but that is all of us, we are walking sets of data points, we are breathing piles of implications. Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley said that to be is to be perceived; or, to be subject to thousands of drawn assumptions per second under the eye of an outsider. Those signals coagulate under labels. Which, when we level them on someone else, unload the association baggage also.

Some time ago, I read an article about Latin American activists advocating for a gender neutral article; in Spanish, and many other Romantic languages, all nouns are divided into masculine or feminine. It was in a similar vein to the gender-neutral of LatinX as opposed to Latino or Latina. There must have been backlash at the toppling of convention; but maybe the problem was why this classification was so embedded in the first place. We pattern-recognize those opposite pairs: positive and negative, black and white, Yin and Yang. But if you create a binary system, your hand is forced into using those same rules in the name of balance—which one could argue, then becomes a contrived construct itself.

I’ve strayed into interesting waters to write this piece. I still, often, get uncomfortable at challenges to the status quo. I still think about language that way: our realities, both internal and external, operate fully within its bounds, confined to those arbitrary rules that make up the default settings of our existence. Something I think of often on gay marriage, spoken by someone who I unfortunately cannot remember by name: once interracial marriage was taboo. Maybe one day, we will be able to see gay marriage, and these contemporary contentious issues, differently as well.

To be careful with our words, and our categories.

Classification is about automation. To simplify by smoothing nuance: a tug-of-war between the satisfaction of efficiency and the frustration-knots of precision. The same people who argue against the persecution of themselves will in turn perpetrate that of others. Focus the camera on one subject and blur the background as compensation. So: the subconscious is a delicate thing to dismantle. We are fighting for friction against the streamline. Against the generalization that becomes of probability and for the texture that is technicality. Be less reflexive, I mean. Take the refrigerator apart and put its compartments back together. I think maturity is pulling the loose thread of the metaphorical sweater, pulling a fist to the Jenga tower. Our end Platonic state is one of structure-fluctuating, chosen chaos.