Thick: And Other Essays, by Tressie McMillan Cottom. Chapter titled Dying to be Competent, pages 73 – 98
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, by Audre Gerladine Lorde. pages 49 – 55
Thick: And Other Essays, by Tressie McMillan Cottom. Chapter titled Dying to be Competent, pages 73 – 98
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, by Audre Gerladine Lorde. pages 49 – 55
In Thick: Dying to be Competent, Tressie McMillan Cottom vividly explains the importance of one’s perceived credibility in society and the deadly effects that discrimination can have on populations in the United States. As Cottom explains on page 88, services critical to life, like healthcare, food, or education, exist within bureaucracies that require those being served to present as competent. Otherwise, bureaucrats disregard the wants and needs of those supposed to be served, believing they know better than those being served. As Cottom rightfully points out, being perceived as competent in a racist, sexist society is mostly not possible for those closer to the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy, contributing to disparities in health, food security, and education.
At the same time, I believe another example of the kind of barrier to competency Cottom discusses is the issue of language. Despite not having an official language, a requirement of being competent in the United States may be speaking English. Those with difficulty speaking English can be treated differently than others, creating disparity in outcomes in health, education, and many other areas. Speaking a language other than English in the United States can come with stereotypes such as being uneducated, from a foreign country, or from a low socioeconomic background. A great example of how speaking English is a requirement to be considered competent in the United States is the SAT or ACT, where each test requires students to have a strong understanding of English to consider them ready for college. Despite the many assumptions made about test takers by the SAT and ACT, it is not uncommon for high schoolers or adults to treat the SAT or ACT as a measure of intelligence. Another example of language being a barrier to competency is how some parents bring their children into government buildings to translate documents and speak with government officials.
“Dying to be Competent” skillfully ties together the incapacities of capitalism and mass consumption with the pervasive isms that root themselves within American systems. Cottom uses her experience in the healthcare system to highlight the trivial nature of consumption and advancement in a society that places so much value on unearned attributes, noting that assumptions about the lowest threshold of someone’s identity are often the defining factor in treatment. This worldview offers a number of questions, but some of the most interesting revolve around education. When I read her essay, I immediately thought of my status as a student, since popular culture tells us that getting a degree from a good school is a worthwhile endeavor, but neglects to mention if it serves some groups better than others.
Perhaps the most provocative section of Cottom’s writing is the end, in which she states that groups “only differ in how they can afford to lie to themselves about [their incompetence].” From this, I wonder, what lies do people like me tell themselves? Who are those lies serving? What does real “competence” mean in a society that seems to infinitely exceed its threshold of such?
The chapter “Dying of Component” from the book “Thick: And Other Essays” is a tragic and disheartening endeavor that no one should face. A mother losing her child based on racial prejudice about black women’s health. This racial prejudice revolves around the assumption that black women don’t need as much care compared to white women which can lead to denial of acceptable care from the nurses or flat-out neglect of issues with the patient. As shown in this chapter, the results can be deadly and/or traumatizing for the child and mother.
Being a black woman nothing in the chapter “Dying to be Competent” came as a surprise to me. However, it was tragic to hear another story about the misconceptions of black women being a contributing factor in the high birth mortality rate. Tressie Cottom’s story exemplifies how insignificant she was in the medical professional eyes. Specifically when she had to sit in a chair for hours bleeding and receiving no help as if it was a simple nosebleed. It is frustrating to hear stories like this, even when you pay lots of money to be protected and cared for only to be neglected and receive subpar care. Like Serena Williams recalled in the chapter she had to explain she was famous in order for medical professionals to believe she was in pain and needed further care. Her story of having to overcompensate reminds me of when when I was younger my mother told me I have to work three times as hard as white kids to get what I want in life and I never forgot that.
I take great pride in being “competent”. In high school, I jokingly labeled myself a slut for productivity to one of my friends, and even though I was 14 and trying to be funny, there’s a lot of truth to it. I put a lot of work into most every assignment I do, I’m on several club leaderships I have 4 jobs, and I sleep less than I should. I have 500+ connections on what Cottom describes as “the dumbest of all the dumb websites”. There is something I get, like a little rush, from being productive, and by nature of being productive being perceived (or at least I’d like to think so) as “smart” or “good” or “worth something”.
From all this, Cottom’s “Dying to Be Competent” resonated and made me deeply uncomfortable. The quote, “it is the nature of global capital and inequality to make us structurally incompetent. For black women, racism, sexism, and classism have always made us structurally incompetent. To a black woman living global inequality and technological change, the competency trap is a cumulative multifold iron cage of network effects in oppressive regimes”, sparked a great deal of thought. Though not all of Cottom’s identities apply to myself and my whiteness affords me a great deal of privilege in the described multifold iron cage of oppression, I am not immune to being used as a weapon of capitalism, where the work I do, even if it is clean in regards to ethical implications, may well be used to perpetuate the myth that human worth is strictly dependent on productivity.
The imagery of the multifold iron cage reminded me a lot of Patricia Hill Collin’s Matrix of Domination. Though Kimberly Crenshaw is traditionally credited with the “invention” of intersectionality, PHC’s piece is pretty foundational to the theory, essentially asserting that forms of oppression don’t stack but rather intersect. Using myself as an example, as queer disabled woman, I don’t experience homophobia, ableism, and misogyny independently, but rather, as much as my identities are all connected within me and cannot be easily extrapolated from one another, these oppressions are also all interconnected. When she describes the iron cage of oppressive effects, Cottom is essentially harkening back to this, with the additional assertion that these are all bound by capitalism, such that no matter what degree of productivity and competency is achieved, for those who hold identities outside of those which society privileges most highly, our identities render us structurally incompetent and always seen as less. My soc theory professor, Karla Erickson, recently posited that no one is entirely privileged or entirely oppressed—we all hold so many identities that no one person can hold no privilege or alternatively be completely unminoritized. By that logic, though some, as Cottom mentions through her description of the medical and reproductive racism experienced by black women/those capable of giving birth, are much more readily rendered structurally incompetent, none of us can ever truly achieve this impossible ideal.
After this reading, I am left wondering, who would I be were I not under capitalism? Would I still be a “slut for productivity”? How would I relate myself to work and labor? Would I still find value in the undying drive to be “the best” or would I contextualize myself more deeply in terms of my best? In what spaces might I belong, and would I feel the need to fight to be there? I don’t know how to answer these, but I have a sneaking suspicion that if I were to dive into them, I might not like my answers as they relate to the life I currently lead. Here, I find myself thinking back to Lorde’s erotic (which I won’t go into that hard because I’ve done some analysis of it in a different class earlier this week), and where I am finding, or if I am finding, my yes. I have a great enjoyment of competence and productivity, but I dream of more than labor, and my yes certainly lies somewhere beyond what I can contribute to a capitalist landscape. For me, and for the rest of us, finding that yes and tapping into the erotic the powers at be try to rob us of is the most powerful tool there is for challenging the confinement of the iron cage.
I really appreciated the analogies Cottom used in the section of Thick we read. It is easy for me to understand the enormous inequalities, such as the difference in child mortality and pregnancy-related deaths of black women mentioned in the piece, but it is a lot more difficult for me, who is incapable of experiencing such bias, to contextualize these inequalities in lived experience. I didn’t find that to be a problem here. Cottom shared an extremely personal story that demonstrated exactly why these inequalities exist. She suffered brutal mistreatment by our healthcare system because, as she says, “everything… had filtered me through assumptions of my incompetence” (p. 85). There was a fundamental distrust in Cottom to accurately or properly describe her circumstances, illustrated clearly by a long wait in a “general waiting room,” abject dismissal of her labor pains, and even her being directly blamed by staff for the loss of her child despite the fact they shrugged her off at every opportunity. I also appreciated how Cottom put the concept of black women as “superwomen” into words to illustrate how a black woman must conform to a very specific set of characteristics or behaviors in order to be “seen” even in the most basic way.
I also felt I resonated well with the second reading. Though I know I cannot connect with it like those in its intended audience, several of my friends have gone through similar psychological/philosophical transformations like the one urged here, and have relayed firsthand the satisfaction and liberation that comes with fully acknowledging all parts of who they are. They also tend to experience this liberation spiritually as well, and the security they feel due to this acknowledgement allows them to open their mind to all sorts of different ideas they had never before considered. I also liked the acknowledgement of the erotic as a “true knowledge,” and feeling being the “nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge” (p. 51). I only truly realized this year that I had internalized and applied to my own life the themes of rationality, emotionlessness, and robotically meeting expectations that are so present in college. Rarely did I seek to explore and express my emotions or what they meant. Instead, I used reason to erase them and deny to myself the only things I could truly know. Rationality would never direct me towards the things that bring us our greatest fulfillments, as it would weigh the pain I would feel upon my failure or loss of these things against the possibility of my happiness with achieving them. But embracing this non-rational knowledge has left me with the understanding that such pain is worth the risk if I can feel to the fullest extent I am able to, and feel as close as possible with who I am.
In the reading of “Dying to be Competent”, we see Cottom’s experience through her pregnancy, and this is a disappointing and sad reading to read. It’s hard to believe that people have to be “competent” in order to be able to have people notice them and respect them. Reading about how “black women are 243% more likely to die from pregnancy – or childbirth-related causes than are white woman”, is so shocking to read after hearing the experience of Cottom. She even mentions how she has “competence”, but due to her race, she was shut down, showing how even if you have competence, if you are lower in the hierarchy of society due to race, ethnicity, or appearance, you can be easily shut down and rejected of assistance. This reminds me of a quote I can’t remember exactly, but it went along the lines of “You should be compliant with what you receive, as even getting anything is better than nothing.” I feel like there are so many reasons why Cottom did not get the attention she should’ve received as there is the possibility that the doctors were thinking along the lines of “Hey you are here and we received your call and giving you attention, please wait and we can do a check up on you”, where they have disregarded her comments and did very minimal checkings. Or even how Cottom mentions just because she is black she won’t be of the highest concern in the hospital. I feel like “competence” shouldn’t even be a consideration of how they should be treated, as that is just absurd to do such things when their job is to help those in need. I also wanted to mention how Cottom mentions the idea of consumerism, and how they are just capitalizing on those in need by creating technology that is specific to them with the idea that it benefits them first. I feel like this ties in with the disability reading, where the AAC is much more expensive than common products, such as phones and iPads, with the intention of helping the problem but also making a profit out of it.
I believe this is the second time I have ready Lorde’s words on the erotic. She makes excellent points on how we treat the female form as both more sexual and lesser, simultaneously. As if the connection of emotion and enjoyment is scandalous and to be hidden in the bedroom. Emotion is often seen as a feminine trait, which can often be detrimental to patriarchal men too, and Lorde plainly explains how in work, which I would argue in the U.S. at least, women find themselves without the ability to emotionally connect and enjoy their work. She puts this under the umbrella of the erotic. This concept of love and emotional connection. I think in some ways this is connected to our historical patriarchal views of many fields of work as male dominated emotionless, “logical” (in the sense of devoid of emotion) spaces. I think this idea of the erotic brings up a lot of questions about the mental health aspect of how we interact with work and spaces and truly connect to what is going on around us.
In Cottom’s essay, it started off with the innocent dreams of a young girl and transitioned into the author’s critique of networking and the perpetuation of inequality through social media, and then quickly turned an even darker corner towards healthcare inequality. I knew as soon as the author mentioned she had been turned away from the ER with blood spotting because the was fat that the story would not end well. The racial inequality in our healthcare is deeply rooted, and so is the poor treatment of overweight women. I have even heard it claimed that racism is a primary reason we never implemented universal healthcare. I must admit though that I have done little myself to validate this claim. The feeling of competency follows throughout Cottom’s essay though and served as a reminder to me that this is not my experience and likely never will be because of my privileges. However, it is my responsibility in my position to understand, validate, and push for change alongside voices like Cottom’s in my position of privilege.
Competency, Capability, Craftsmanship, these are the kinds of things my Dad praised growing up. He often says that he just wants his children to be Happy, Healthy, and Productive. These obviously aren’t inherent things and he really wanted us to be able to work at them. They’re pretty subjective measures regardless, but this is literally the main thing that he wanted for my brothers and me. I imagine that the doctors in the piece “Dying to be Competent” thought themselves to be very competent, which is probably why they found it so easy to discredit and dismiss the words of Cottom. Their insistence on their own credibility is ultimately what decreased it in the end. I wish this story ended with some way of conferring the consequences of their arrogance back onto themselves, but instead, Cottom was left to deal with their mistakes.
Is the erotic part of the solution here? If these doctors were to truly feel the weight of the situation I can imagine that there could be hope for them to demand more of themselves in the future. That isn’t a satisfying resolution in the slightest, but in any piece of media that I have encountered that covers professions that involve death (Scrubs, Hit Monkey, etc), there is always some discourse about the numbness that it brings. There is also some praise towards those in these kinds of professions that fight against this numbness even though it is hard to feel the emotions brought on by grave situations. The optimist in me wants to say that the presence of the erotic could have prevented Cottom’s situation, but I know it’s not that simple.
When reflecting on the global capitalist agenda and the American healthcare system, the unequal treatment of Americans due to their racial or ethnic identities and backgrounds is still very prevalent in both. Tressie McMillan Cottom mentions how global capitalism needs racism to continue to function, and that is why it is so difficult for these inequalities to cease. This was very striking to me because I had never considered that it was a factor that was holding us as a society back from progressing more quickly toward antiracism. Society needs people whom it deems incompetent to consume what it puts out, and it is all in the name of generating more capital; when it comes to making money, there seems to be a trend of people’s human rights and fair treatment being disregarded and ignored. When considering that this is the reality, it is natural to wonder how different society would be toward racial and ethnic groups that are treated as “other” if capitalism was not as important to socioeconomic status.
Before Lorde’s essay, I was under the impression that the pornographic and the erotic were the same. But knowing now that the erotic is the pornographic’s it is natural to wonder how to prioritize experiences that promote both positive feeling and sensation rather than just sensation.
Cottom illustrated the lack of support for black women in the United States through her experience. I was shocked when I read “Black women are 243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy- or childbirth-related causes than are white women”. Even though the United States is the most developed country in the world, the healthcare system is as good as in other developing countries for black women. The unequal medical treatment based on racial prejudice must be changed.
The reading delves into the intersection of structural incompetence, race, gender, and the effects of neoliberal capitalism. The author recounts personal experiences, notably a traumatic pregnancy and childbirth, to illustrate how the assumptions of competence or incompetence are shaped by societal expectations tied to race and gender. The concept of controlling images, where stereotypes limit agency and representation, is explored in-depth, emphasizing how black women can be perceived as superhuman and incompetent based on societal contexts. Also, it critiques the healthcare system’s treatment of black women and the ways in which status hierarchies influence interactions and decisions. The author highlights that despite educational attainment, social status, or even celebrity, black women are often subjected to assumptions of incompetence, leading to dire consequences like higher maternal mortality rates. The narrative connects these observations to the broader issue of neoliberal capitalism’s exploitation of structural incompetence to drive consumerism and maintain power imbalances
From school to work, eroticism would be considered a disruption in many cases throughout my life. In my educational background, the teachers would try to avoid students falling in love with each other even in high school. Since the emotional variation may interrupt students from getting good grades. People especially those who view external products as more important compared with the internal feeling would prefer to get rid of the erotic to show how good they are at sticking with their work and not be disrupted by love and erotic. In the early times, under a man’s view of the men-dominate age, women, who were considered as part erotic, were objectified and considered either as the trophy or the reason for failures. When it comes to pregnancy in the workplace, this natural thing also becomes a big barrier for women to get a good job, and obtain their competent position. With larger physical and social barriers in learning and working, people with the status of women are stuck in the lower place of the social hierarchy and find it harder to go up with the stereotypical opinions and the mainly men-dominant society. As mentioned by Cottom (2018) “These gradations of difference are meaningless if the question is which consumption status group has power over their political incompetence.” The disadvantaged groups find it harder to reach competence in an unequal and non-neoliberal society.
Cottom’s chapter shows that in addition to the practices present in the medical field that are rooted in false biological beliefs historically used to justify slavery, there’s an additional layer of “competence” Black patients—in this case, a Black woman—are forced to think about due to implicit biases. Her statement of “nothing about who I was in any other context mattered to the assumptions of my incompetence” was frustrating (89). Why should a patient’s own competence even play such a part in their health diagnoses?
The blame placed on Cottom for “not saying anything” when she had was cruel. Cottom had spoken up and bled through a chair only to be dismissed (how is bleeding through a chair merely spotting) by healthcare professionals who she should have the privilege—that so many others have— to just trust. But due to their own biases, they doubted her competence, misdiagnosed her, and blamed her when they were the ones who failed to further pursue why a pregnant woman was in pain. Additionally, the rudeness of the anesthesiologist and threat to deny her an epidural was vile. What else, other than one’s bias against Black women, would compel them to tell someone in extreme pain to lessen their reaction? In what case would someone give birth in silence? Why must she be conscious of how others feel when she’s giving birth and these people are the ones supposed to be taking care of her?
Concerning the second reading, Lorde made the important distinction between eroticism and pornography. Because of the conflation between the two terms in present day, people often forget or don’t know the difference between the two. I think it was especially clarifying to define pornography as suppressing true feeling while eroticism does quite the opposite; rather, we become more in tune with our true feelings and thus have more creative power and power to demand change.
“Dying to be competent” showcases the harsh reality and truth about being considered competent in a racist, classist, and sexist society. By giving her devastating and heartbreaking testimony, Cottom demonstrates to the audience that more often than not, the hierarchy of diffuse status characteristics overpowers any status characteristics that people have earned in the eyes of institutions such as the American Healthcare System. Furthermore, Cottom ties this idea to the principle of capitalism, given that networks of capital work most efficiently when your lowest status characteristic is assumed. Besides, structural incompetence generates more sophisticated goods that serve as tools to reinforce the dynamics of power.
Cottom says, “When my daughter died, she and I became statistics.” I feel that this is a really powerful sentence that highlights the value of human life given by bureaucratic institutions that are allowed to put a price tag on a human life depending on their identity. It’s quite frustrating to realize that at the end of the day, what you have achieved and built doesn’t really matter; you will forever be a number to all these bureaucratic institutions whose purpose is none other than to grow and produce revenue from the “incompetence” of people.
“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” provides the reader with an informative definition of what erotic really is and why its association with pornography is completely wrong. However, there is a reason why this association is so common, mainly because it has been purposely misnamed by men to use against women. I thought that Lorde does a phenomenal job tracing back the origin of the word erotic and describing it in a simple yet powerful way that is easy for everyone to understand—an empowering feeling full of life-force.
First and foremost I want to give credit to the readings in the first week and in particular the readings for today, excerpts from Thick: And Other Essays and Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Today’s readings in particular were both informational and highly engaging they were, and as stated by many, gave evidence to how difficult the cuts made in the course reading list were.
The first reading, Dying to Be Competent by Tressie McMillan Cottom encapsulated so much in only twenty pages. The initial Analysis of competency in the Neoliberal world had a dynamic of experience and reality that seeped through the pages. In particular, the analysis on LinkedIn which then was extrapolated into the world of competency was brilliant. “We are individuals with the ‘freedom’ to be anxious as we please” provided a swift dissection of the false promises made by the neoliberal world. I expected a similar level of examination to continue; I did not expect the vulnerability and pain that followed. Cotton’s story of losing a child was personal and it offered the preceding section a new connotation. It gave a new cruelty to the fight for competency–especially for black women. The facts provided in accordance with her story put death at the forefront of a circumstance, pregnancy, that in a just world would certainly result in life. It was a sad but true reminder that “frictionless living is the promise of neoliberal capital—that is, if you are on the winning side of power” (p. 95, 2018).
My view of exotic prior to today’s reading very much fell in line with one of purely sexual tone. I never thought of erotic as being the complex emotion that it is described to be in the second reading. Nevertheless, I valued the contrasting analysis between the erotic and the sexual/pornographic. Like the first reading, I thought the emotionless neoliberal society was exposed to its greatest capability. Again, the neoliberal removal of feeling and understanding from eroticism falls in line with my own preconceived notion. Comparing feeling and deep emotional cohesion to pornography could not be a further juxtaposition, yet it was very easy to digest. The porn industry is historically one of extreme abuse in every form, and in particular to women. It is the perfect blend of patriarchy, objectification, and the faults of capitalism. Thus, the spin of erotic nature from this egregious tone to one of empowerment and strength was a well-applied and intellectual reversal. It gave license to a new version of the word and a lesson in that “erotic feelings must be recognized. The need for sharing deep feeling is a human need” (1978, p. 3 (this might be specific to the pdf I downloaded)).
I think it’s almost impossible to talk about gender without talking about gender and/or sexuality without talking about race, class, disability, etc. And the way I see this manifest is how Cottom theorizes this idea of “competency.” I have been roped into many conversations by wealthy, white, men on this campus and beyond, tasked with defending something I am involved with (UGSDW, Res Life, Rosenfield Commitee, being from the Bronx, etc.) And these conversations always feel like some game or activity for them, some opportunity to express their intellectual prowess, or “competency,” and in some cases reveal my suspected lack thereof.
Cottom’s account of medical racism resonated as well. I remember having debilitating jaw pain throughout my junior year of high school, and seeing 3 separate doctors, all male, who all swore my pain was due to stress and teeth grinding. I was in pain for months before a female doctor of color finally listened to me and did an x-ray, where she found I had impacted and infected molars that needed to be removed immediately.
Martínez-Patiño’s article was unsurprising but disappointing. Women of color are constantly tasked with defending their femininity, their pain, their existence, an impossible task, and even after “proving” this arbitrary worth, are labeled as incompetent and inferior regardless. Several female Black athletes have had their sex questioned/speculated because they look “suspiciously masculine.” Ideas of femininity are rooted in patriarchy and white supremacy.
Finally, I love Lorde and I love reading Uses of the Erotic. Like Caitlin mentioned, pornography and eroticism are mutually exclusive. Pornography fetishizes, voyeurs, and lends itself to performance, whereas eroticism is driven by the protagonist. It empowers the body in a way that pornography degrades, and that is because eroticism deals with the soul and personhood as an extension of the body.
nder, and other prejudices act and got me thinking about my moms. I’ve heard countless stories of their experiences managing an (majority male) IT department and as a lawyer, that would never have happened if they had been white males. It doesn’t matter that they have degrees from very elite schools and years of professional experience. But it also got me thinking about their experiences raising me and my sister. For the first several years of my life my mom wasn’t able to legally become my mother because of peoples’ fear that gay people couldn’t be good parents or that they would corrupt their children with gayness or something. I know this doesn’t exactly fit with the ideas in the piece, but I think it’s a very connected effect and it’s just what came to my mind.
As for Lorde’s essay, I will admit that there are some parts that I don’t completely understand like how work should be erotic, but I think she’s using a very specific notion of the erotic and that difference itself is something that I don’t think I completely picked up. It just seems like the erotic is almost substituting for deep joy? But she also definitely classifies it as something within “the sexual.” The reference to “building up bookshelves” being an erotic experience especially confused me so this distinction was something I was hoping class discussion would help me understand a bit more.
I just want to add that maybe the point with the bookshelf is that the erotic is unique to every person and that’s why it seems confusing to me, but I still think I’m not understanding something about how she conceptualizes that term and would appreciate clarity.
Just like most readings this week so far, Cottom’s essay “Dying to Be Competent” was eye-opening and at the same time deeply disturbing and hard to read. It talks about the difficulty of having multiple identities that are looked down upon and mistreated in society, and about how in capitalism competency is ironically perceived based on how a person appears instead of their actual credentials or educational background. Despite having a proper education, a happy marriage and basically everything that is universally regarded “competent”, Cotton was still disregarded based on her gender and her racial identity, with her pain underplayed by medical experts, her words blatantly ignored by the system and her life put at risk in moments when she needed the most support. It pained me to read the story about what she had to go through and how she sounds so calm even when she told the story of how her child passed at birth, and it pained me even more to know that this is the norm in all sectors, and that even someone as famous and widely acclaimed as Serena Williams also had to prove herself so people could look beyond her identities. I think it’s interesting because I’ve read and heard so much from members of underprivileged groups in society, but it still surprises me every time how society finds so many ways to discriminate and deprive them of basic human decency.
While I was aware of the systemic problems Black women face in the healthcare system, it’s difficult to wrap my brain around the nightmare situation Cottom and countless others went through during pregnancy. I can’t imagine having to prove that my pain is valid while going through it; having to keep composure in the hopes that somebody will take you seriously, only to be shut down for because of your immediately identifiable physical traits. I thought a lot about her points about living in a neoliberal landscape, where in order to maintain our systems hyper-obsessed with efficiency, we have to boil everyone down to their immediate, identifiable identities. Anybody who does not meet the demands of what a Black woman “needs” to be in our society is deemed unproductive, or “structurally incompetent” as Cottom says. I thought about Britney Wilson’s experience with Paratransit: both women, educated and successful, were boiled down to their Blackness and their womanhood in times of crisis because that is what is immediately seen. But I don’t want to boil down their struggles into the “easy answer” of racism and sexism being necessary for global capitalism to progress. It’s much harder to accept how much we rely on these controlling images in our daily lives.
During Lorde’s reading, I had to stretch my own interpretation of “erotic” quite a bit. But I think both readings pick up on similar themes: in our society where we are obsessed with efficiency, we are expected to fully embrace our work culture and deny ourselves, specifically our emotions. Women are denied passion because of the immediate expectations of women in our society. Being quiet, being submissive, and being emotionless are traits valued in women by our culture. To be passionate is to be irresponsible or immature. I thought her distinction between the erotic and the pornographic was especially interesting, as passion is denied in all aspects of life except in our own bedrooms. I think that I and many other men need to reevaluate how we view passion and how we restrict it in our culture.
Pleasure and the erotic are rarely considered outside of their prescribed position within sexuality, and are often bastardized, as characterized by Lorde in her description of the diametric opposition of pornagraphy and the erotic. As defined by Lorde, the erotic is not interchangeable with the sexual. The erotic is often sequestered within the sexual, but “the need for sharing deep feeling” can be found in much more. “The personification of love in all aspects”, the drive for pleasure. What is it in these concepts that is inherently sexual? A deeper consideration reveals that it is not the sexual that envelops pleasure or the erotic, but rather that the sexual is only a small part within the pursuit of pleasure and the erotic.
The specific framework of competence put forth in Cottom’s piece reifies the continued relevance of Patricia Hill Collins’ controlling images. Additionally, the account of Cottom’s trauma at the hands of the racist American medical establishment conceptualizes a danger that is often ignored or taken for granted by white/ able-bodied/ thin (etc.) women.
The Lorde reading confused me at first, until I finally understood what she was talking with “the erotic”. The idea of the erotic as the capacity for deep satisfaction, feeling, and joy, and the capacity to share that joy, spoke to me. At the present, religion does not hold the same meaning it did for me when I was growing up. For the past few years I’ve been struggling to figure out why I bother with being alive; why participate in an existence full of unjustice and liberal hierarchies where so little of my time is my own and I cannot predict when or how often or how much I will have to suffer. Philosophically, existence seems to me to be inherently masochistic. Those who don’t exist don’t feel, so suffering is only something that happens to those who continue to exist. The erotic is a novel idea for me, but already I feel as though it helps me to understand why I feel so paradoxically committed to life in a world which causes so much grief: because I have had those moments. I am familiar with the erotic. I know what it is to feel that deep sense of joy and share that connection with others and I am intimately aware of my own capacity for feeling, and that alone does more for me than religion ever could. Suffering is so transient when compared with the erotic; it is so quickly forgotten that any negative effect it has on my will to live cannot possibly compete with the way my experiences of the erotic push me to continue on and search for opportunities to feel that passion and share it with others.
I especially enjoyed Cottom’s text for today. False meritocracy is really perpetuated in our times, especially over platforms like LinkedIn. Oftentimes, what people don’t see or consider is that conventionally successful people on these platforms likely had significant advantages that they were born into. I distinctly remember how my public high school was right across the street from this expensive private school. Everything was gated off, and all their facilities looked much nicer than ours. They sent kids every year to every top school imaginable, while my school was far behind them academically. I always envied those kids, who were right across the street, who received specialized tutoring and resources. There is something so cruel in how many systemic structures perpetuate societal inequalities. Healthcare, the education system, they are all designed in such a manner so as to cater to the most privileged and wealthy, rather than those who need it the most. I can hide much of my identity, a lot of it is quite invisible, but for others like Cottom they must endure discrimination with no chance of reprieve. So you keep your head down and you put the work in working class, but no matter what, those more entitled peers will always outpace you because they are given so much more. It really is disheartening, and it is damaging that people’s accomplishments are taken at such face value, when we should be congratulating the quality and amount of the work put into it. My take on this is not directly a reflection of Cottom’s heartbreaking story. Rather, I am trying to extrapolate the concept of systemic inequality and understand it through my own experiences.
I felt as though one of the most powerful aspects of this piece was the sudden transition that Cottom makes between the two focuses of this essay. She begins with a discussion of her idea of “competence,” which she sees as a modern neoliberal sentiment of controlling every baseline aspect of her life. For the modern, middle class, “competent” American, one can focus only one comforts of life like when to go to the beach or who to connect with on LinkedIn.
After introducing this concept, however, she very quickly pivots to an incident that upset her understanding of her own competence. After her baby dies during child birth and she is given unacceptable healthcare, she realizes that she can’t be competent. Despite her education and class, she is still a Black woman in a racist American healthcare system, which led to a disastrous pregnancy outcome as many other poorer Black women have suffered.
The transition between a discussion of LinkedIn to a fatal pregnancy is shocking, but the effect is that it communicates the shock the Cottom lived through, falsely believing she would receive competent care. What her story reveals, as we discussed with Dr. Tatum’s book, is that the racist and sexist American healthcare system cannot be fixed by an outward presentation of competence. Since when she needed help the most, the veil of competence was removed to reveal an ugly underbelly of doctors and nurses that intentionally or not, ignored and even gaslighted her because she was Black.
Lorde’s essays most resonate with me because I come from a Southeast Asian culture where a lot of gender- and sexuality-related matters are not at rest, and prejudices and biases can be found everywhere from online to your own family. It’s firstly interesting to me that while Asian parents may usually want their daughters (regardless of age) to wear non-revealing clothes (aligning with the idea of the erotic somehow being perceived as inferior or superficial and need to be suppressed), I have heard on occasions phrases like “You don’t need to study. You just need to be pretty and marry a billionaire”, which is completely contradicting to think about. With that in mind, it is also interesting to think about how the suppression of the erotic might have different underlying reasons from, say the Western culture. To find light-hearted reasons, maybe the suppression of the erotic is, in the parents’ minds, to instill “traditional values” and keep their children safe in a environment where enforcement of laws are lax and non- law-abiding behaviors are profuse among teenagers. To find worse reasons though, perhaps the suppression of the erotic for women stem from the misogynistic ideas of feudalistic era in Vietnamese history, where women were considered to have no value and need to stay “pure” for their husbands.