an alternative reading
if you haven't read kenji yoshino's covering: the new assault on our civil rights, read it.
the book reveals legal injustices that are red-in-the-face enraging, but constantly overlaid with a poetic narrative of the beauties of individual nuances--those idiosyncrasies that make us fall in love--creating one of the oddest emotional juxtapositions i've experienced in a book.
the majority of the book is about queer covering, but it has chapters on cultural and gender covering as well. people can't be fired for being black, but they can be fired for wearing corn-rows. a woman can't be fired for being gay, but can be fired for marrying another woman (because it's "flaunting" her gay identity). in summary: it's okay to be, it's just not okay to express it.
what yoshino doesn't include, perhaps because he's a lawyer trained in rhetoric based in legal argumentation rather than, say, semiotics, is "speech-acts"--speech that is more than words and is, in fact, an action--like the words "i do" in a wedding or "guilty" in court. speech-acts have material affect and therefore, as some argue, not all speech should be free because they can do actual harm to individuals, or as the Constitutional law scholar Stanley Fish claims, 'we don't have free speech and it's a good thing.' The current legal disposition towards speech is that it is opinion or superficial expression of thought that is part of the democratic process. In this instance, all speech and expression is therefore a choice, and if it's a choice, you don't have to do it at work and an employer has a right to fire you for it. If we understand that some speech includes speech-acts that aren't mere superficial expressions of opinion but have material affect and effect on how we are defined and identified, and even inherently woven into the fabric of that identification--and here i'd like to introduce an idea called "culture-acts" or perhaps even "identity-acts"--then negating certain forms of expression isn't negating a person's choice, it negates a person's identity. to summarize one of yoshino's primary contentions: how can ethnicity be protected if it's not allowed expression? The identity-acts line of argument would instead ask: does culture, by definition, exist if it isn't expressed? he does touch on this point, but i think borrowing the speech-act concept from literary theory could have added a significant chapter to his book.
At another point in the book he writes that he isn't against all forms of covering, but only coerced covering. I'm having trouble with that statement because as I consider all forms of covering, by definition, to be coerced. The very term 'covering' implies reluctance, otherwise it wouldn't be covering. For example, if you're not embarrassed about having brown eyes and you're wearing sunglasses, this isn't covering, it's just wearing sun glasses. However, if you're ashamed of having brown eyes and you're wearing sun glasses, then it's covering. Covering, then, would only seem to occur when, in fact, it was socially or otherwise coerced. Or perhaps I just completely misread his argument since I read the book primarily between locations on my commute on the train. I think one reason law will have difficulty absorbing the concept of 'covering' is because it has difficulty dealing with 'intent' and privileges, very highly, direct and documented action. Yoshino seems to be trying to rescue his concept of 'covering' from the realm of 'intent' and doing his best to reframe it to fit the language and system of law. It's not decisive or uncontestable, but he does a surprisingly good job.
Although the social issues moved me, as expected, nothing in the book moved me so much as Yoshino's narratives of his life and the people in them. He was torn between his love for literature and law (well, not so much law), but he took the latter path. I know those forks in the road well. His love for words is evident on each page--some even exquisite. One person he writes about, staggered across chapters through the book, is his friend Jane--a Korean American literature student going to med school who obsessed over poetry with him late into the night.
He ends the book, once again, with Jane. She is adamant about getting a tattoo because of a poem she fell in love with--a poem that makes salient her own conviction to never cover her true passions as she enters the world of medicine:
Janet and i fought over the tattoo. I told her she had misconstrued the nature of time. In thirty years, I said, she would be an entirely different person, but the tattoo would still be there to embarrass her. Who was she, at twenty-four, to bind that future self? Janet responded that I was the one who had misconstrued time. She agreed that over the next years, she would change, that she would have to change. Yet she said if her future self was embarrassed by the scar, she wanted it to be embarrassed. She was entering a time in her life when her commitment to poetry would become more endangered than ever [med school where she'll be inundated with an entirely different social ideology in regards to professionalization that's not necessarily or even remotely tied to medicine], and she wanted to protect that commitment by writing it on her body. If she became a doctor who stopped reading and writing poetry, she wanted to hear the reproach of this younger self. My mistake, she said, was that I assumed people got wiser as they got older.
So the star is still here, on her wedding day. I still dislike tattoos. Except this one, which I love out of mind.
it is her blind, beautiful courage not to ever cave under the forces of covering that makes her keep her tattoo--the type of courage that is often only found in youth. her foresight regarding the tugs of social performance in her future is astounding. It may seem odd that he would end his book on covering with these two paragraphs, but after thinking about the book, I realized that Covering isn't just about each person's right and struggle to maintain the "blue star," but also Yoshino's own uncovering of his love for Jane. I know this sounds crazy, but if you reread the last few pages again, it is there: a love that is beyond bodies, his being "snagged" on superficial forms, his near incomprehension of her beauty and his inability to feel it, a soul-mate he has found whose female body precludes him from ever joining.
I'm fully aware that i'm writing from the position of a straight male living in a hetero-normative environment that all too often would LIKE to believe that gay men, deep inside, could love a woman if she were the right woman, but I'm also very aware that this is as naive as thinking a straight man just hasn't met the right man--which actually is an opinion that might have a little strain of truth, but that's another discussion. Anyway, what I'm trying to defend is, the pull of regret and sadness is there. He obviously sees Jane as "the one," but the impossibility of that love is why I almost wept at the end of the book. Covering is Yoshino's way of uncovering this truth, and he wove this disclosure in a way that could have only been done by someone with a poet's heart. It is about being true to ourselves. It is about love. It is about our rights. It is about impossibility. It is a love letter.
the book reveals legal injustices that are red-in-the-face enraging, but constantly overlaid with a poetic narrative of the beauties of individual nuances--those idiosyncrasies that make us fall in love--creating one of the oddest emotional juxtapositions i've experienced in a book.
the majority of the book is about queer covering, but it has chapters on cultural and gender covering as well. people can't be fired for being black, but they can be fired for wearing corn-rows. a woman can't be fired for being gay, but can be fired for marrying another woman (because it's "flaunting" her gay identity). in summary: it's okay to be, it's just not okay to express it.
what yoshino doesn't include, perhaps because he's a lawyer trained in rhetoric based in legal argumentation rather than, say, semiotics, is "speech-acts"--speech that is more than words and is, in fact, an action--like the words "i do" in a wedding or "guilty" in court. speech-acts have material affect and therefore, as some argue, not all speech should be free because they can do actual harm to individuals, or as the Constitutional law scholar Stanley Fish claims, 'we don't have free speech and it's a good thing.' The current legal disposition towards speech is that it is opinion or superficial expression of thought that is part of the democratic process. In this instance, all speech and expression is therefore a choice, and if it's a choice, you don't have to do it at work and an employer has a right to fire you for it. If we understand that some speech includes speech-acts that aren't mere superficial expressions of opinion but have material affect and effect on how we are defined and identified, and even inherently woven into the fabric of that identification--and here i'd like to introduce an idea called "culture-acts" or perhaps even "identity-acts"--then negating certain forms of expression isn't negating a person's choice, it negates a person's identity. to summarize one of yoshino's primary contentions: how can ethnicity be protected if it's not allowed expression? The identity-acts line of argument would instead ask: does culture, by definition, exist if it isn't expressed? he does touch on this point, but i think borrowing the speech-act concept from literary theory could have added a significant chapter to his book.
At another point in the book he writes that he isn't against all forms of covering, but only coerced covering. I'm having trouble with that statement because as I consider all forms of covering, by definition, to be coerced. The very term 'covering' implies reluctance, otherwise it wouldn't be covering. For example, if you're not embarrassed about having brown eyes and you're wearing sunglasses, this isn't covering, it's just wearing sun glasses. However, if you're ashamed of having brown eyes and you're wearing sun glasses, then it's covering. Covering, then, would only seem to occur when, in fact, it was socially or otherwise coerced. Or perhaps I just completely misread his argument since I read the book primarily between locations on my commute on the train. I think one reason law will have difficulty absorbing the concept of 'covering' is because it has difficulty dealing with 'intent' and privileges, very highly, direct and documented action. Yoshino seems to be trying to rescue his concept of 'covering' from the realm of 'intent' and doing his best to reframe it to fit the language and system of law. It's not decisive or uncontestable, but he does a surprisingly good job.
Although the social issues moved me, as expected, nothing in the book moved me so much as Yoshino's narratives of his life and the people in them. He was torn between his love for literature and law (well, not so much law), but he took the latter path. I know those forks in the road well. His love for words is evident on each page--some even exquisite. One person he writes about, staggered across chapters through the book, is his friend Jane--a Korean American literature student going to med school who obsessed over poetry with him late into the night.
He ends the book, once again, with Jane. She is adamant about getting a tattoo because of a poem she fell in love with--a poem that makes salient her own conviction to never cover her true passions as she enters the world of medicine:
Janet and i fought over the tattoo. I told her she had misconstrued the nature of time. In thirty years, I said, she would be an entirely different person, but the tattoo would still be there to embarrass her. Who was she, at twenty-four, to bind that future self? Janet responded that I was the one who had misconstrued time. She agreed that over the next years, she would change, that she would have to change. Yet she said if her future self was embarrassed by the scar, she wanted it to be embarrassed. She was entering a time in her life when her commitment to poetry would become more endangered than ever [med school where she'll be inundated with an entirely different social ideology in regards to professionalization that's not necessarily or even remotely tied to medicine], and she wanted to protect that commitment by writing it on her body. If she became a doctor who stopped reading and writing poetry, she wanted to hear the reproach of this younger self. My mistake, she said, was that I assumed people got wiser as they got older.
So the star is still here, on her wedding day. I still dislike tattoos. Except this one, which I love out of mind.
it is her blind, beautiful courage not to ever cave under the forces of covering that makes her keep her tattoo--the type of courage that is often only found in youth. her foresight regarding the tugs of social performance in her future is astounding. It may seem odd that he would end his book on covering with these two paragraphs, but after thinking about the book, I realized that Covering isn't just about each person's right and struggle to maintain the "blue star," but also Yoshino's own uncovering of his love for Jane. I know this sounds crazy, but if you reread the last few pages again, it is there: a love that is beyond bodies, his being "snagged" on superficial forms, his near incomprehension of her beauty and his inability to feel it, a soul-mate he has found whose female body precludes him from ever joining.
I'm fully aware that i'm writing from the position of a straight male living in a hetero-normative environment that all too often would LIKE to believe that gay men, deep inside, could love a woman if she were the right woman, but I'm also very aware that this is as naive as thinking a straight man just hasn't met the right man--which actually is an opinion that might have a little strain of truth, but that's another discussion. Anyway, what I'm trying to defend is, the pull of regret and sadness is there. He obviously sees Jane as "the one," but the impossibility of that love is why I almost wept at the end of the book. Covering is Yoshino's way of uncovering this truth, and he wove this disclosure in a way that could have only been done by someone with a poet's heart. It is about being true to ourselves. It is about love. It is about our rights. It is about impossibility. It is a love letter.