A presentation after Trump's election for dystopian literature class looking at social movements, our course readings, prep for next week's quiz and a bunch of other things.

1. DYSTOPIA, ART &
REVOLUTION
Right now! Also…The Circle (also our quiz, also your
final)

2. Dystopian literature
■ Speculates on possible outcomes from current conditions
■ Provides commentary on current social, economic and other realities
■ Satirizes the human condition
■ Examines the human condition
■ Represents the ongoing struggles of different societies and people overall to maintain
individuality and human kindness in the face of equally human desires for power and
control
■ Sends a message about the dangers perceived by the author and others

3. Utopians GoneWrong
■ As the Commander notes in The Handmaid’sTale, better for some always means worse
for others
■ The societies in the dystopian novels all have utopian premises—someone believes
society has been improved (“MakeAmerica Great Again!”)
■ We learn that the society isn’t so great through living it via a hero/anti-hero/victim of
the new society
■ So one question to ask is what was the intent of those who changed society? And what
was the perception of those who fought?
■ But first, what’s happening right now in the real world?

4. Social unrest: on the streets and through
art

12. Art and Social Movements
■ Art (representation through aesthetic means) is clearly an element
■ What role does it play?
■ Presentation of issues (known as framing)
■ Drawing people/involving them (known as mobilizing)

13. Art & Social Movements
■ What role does art play? Different theories include:
■ Can be used to maintain or promulgate ideas (propaganda)
■ Can be used to unsettle/challenge society
■ Can just reflect society as it is
■ Frivolous/entertainment

14. Art & Social Movements
■ Raises awareness
■ Prompts debate
■ Goes beyond cognitive effects to:
■ Provide emotional reassurance
■ Reinforce values
■ Create a sense of community/solidarity
■ Create venues for dissemination
■ Raise money/resources

15. Culture Jamming
ADBUSTERS
#Occupy Buy Nothing Day digital detox etc

16. Culture Jamming
■ Yes Men
■ Spreading the word
■ And let’s not forget the Guerilla Girls

17. Art meets Social Cause
■ Ghost Bikes
■ CultureStrike
■ God Bless Graffiti Coalition
■ Critical Resistance
■ Local Projects
■ Puppets

18. Shifts in Economy
■ America’s decline as a superpower: dollar no longer strong; no longer leader in
technology; shrinking power for world trade
■ Rising deficits, in large part due to the cost of military actions
■ Evidence that the US is slipping into a worse depression than the 30s

19. What to do, what to do
■ The Movement Action Plan
■ A framework, written by Bill Moyer in the late 1980s, widely used by groups to
delineate the path of social movements.
■ Describes eight stages of a social movement, and the roles of those participating in
them.

20. Expanded into book form

21. MovementAction Plan

22. MAP plan describes two views of power
■ Power Elite:
• Relatively few elite at the top, controlling government, laws, social norms, the mass on
the bottom
• Power flows from top to bottom
• Social change happens by the masses appealing to the elites

23. People Power
■ Holds that power resides with the populace
■ And that even power elites’ power is dependent on agreement and cooperation by the
people
■ Under MAP, people power is the model for social movements
■ In other words, the effort isn’t to convince the top to change, but to educate and
mobilize the people.

24. Source of Power in Social Movements
■ A strong sense of right and wrong
■ An understanding of the world largely through
symbolism

25. The Struggle
■ Is between a social movement and the power holders for the
trust and belief of the general public.
■ Power holders want the public to believe they are acting in
the best interest of the public
■ The social movement wants the public to realize that’s not
true.

26. The Challenge
■ So a social movement’s challenge is to win over the majority
of the public
■ This is done by showing that the movement’s values
resonate with the symbolic values of the public.
■ Those values could include: human rights, democracy
freedom etc.

27. Stage One: NormalTimes
■ Even if conditions are bad, policies are maintained and most
people are unaware that the basic values they hold aren’t
being upheld.
■ Opposition to conditions are ridiculed and efforts are
ineffective

28. Stage 2: Proving the Failure of
Institutions
■ The movement proves to the public that policies are violating
their beliefs and values.
■ Public movements often spurred on by anger at hypocrisy.
■ This requires the movement to do its homework, to provide
proof, and to use all the standard avenues at its disposal.

29. Stage 3: Ripening Conditions
■ Growing awareness and discontent
■ Growth of local groups, a wave of grassroots opposition
■ Longer-term trends that worsen the situation, like a tanking
economy, loss of jobs, gun violence, student loans, you get
the idea

30. Stage 4:Take Off
■ Trigger event that highlights the
problem itself
■ Followed by social protest
■ Can be planned; can be by
accident.

31. Stage 5: Identity Crisis
■ Movement’s hopes turn to
despair
■ Faith that success will
happen falters
■ Perception that power-
holders are too strong
■ Perception that their
efforts have been pointless

32. Stage 6: Majority Public Support
■ Winning over the majority opinion of the population
■ Grassroots movement is needed: ongoing low-intensity local organizing
■ Massive public education
■ Coalition building
■ Re-use of public forums of expression and regular conduits, keeping the
issue in the spotlight

33. Stage 7: Success
■ Turning the tide
against the power
holders, either
through:
■ Dramatic showdown
■ Quiet showdown
■ Attrition

34. Stage 8: Continuing the Struggle
■ Celebrating the success
■ Following up to make sure the laws actually are
followed/changes implemented
■ Working toward new goals in the existing movement
■ Fostering new issues
■ Going beyond reform to actual systemic change.

35. How did you learn about an issue about
which you now care?
■ What did you do then?
■ What did you want to do?
■ What do you feel are your options?
■ What are the obstacles?

36. Dystopic Parameters & Quiz Review
■ A figurehead or concept is worshipped by the citizens of the
society.
■ Citizens are perceived to be under constant surveillance.
■ Citizens live in a “dehumanized” state.
■ Conformity among citizens and assumption that individuality
and dissent are bad.
■ An illusion of a perfect utopia
■ —Read, Write, Think.org

37. Quiz Review
■ Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
■ First in a trilogy, followed by year of
the flood (2009) and Maddaddam
(2013)
■ Humans’ disregard for nature: GMOs
■ Trauma in the individual life wrought
on the world
■ Sex trafficking/ pornography/violence
in video games
■ Isolation and community
■ A figurehead or concept is worshipped
by the citizens of the society.
■ Citizens are perceived to be under
constant surveillance.
■ Citizens live in a “dehumanized” state.
■ Conformity among citizens and
assumption that individuality and
dissent are bad.
■ An illusion of a perfect utopia

38. Consider the “future” in the novel
■ Jimmy and Crake live on the CorpSeCorps compound. Current parallels? (keep in mind
Atwood wrote this book in 2003).
■ Apparently no government, only corporate surveillance.Any current parallel to that?
■ Jimmy and Crake spend a lot of their time online in some form, and searching for
hidden/dark web content.What about today?
■ How do you think their environment impacts Jimmy and Crake’s stance toward life?
What about today?
■ The game "Extinctathon" plays a foreshadowing role in the novel. Jimmy and Crake
also play "Barbarian Stomp" and "Blood and Roses."What comparable video games do
you know of?What do you think about virtual violence?Are there advantages?Are
there disadvantages?

39. Post-Humanism
■ Posthumanism considers the possibility that historical
phenomena (such as advances in technology or
discoveries about animals) are leading to
fundamental changes in the human species and its
relationship with the world.

40. Post-Humanism
■ It thus involves radically rethinking the dominant, familiar humanist
account of who “we” are as human beings. According to the humanist
model (a clear and influential example of which can be found in the
seventeenth-century writings of Rene Descartes), the figure of the
human has a natural and eternal place at the very center of things,
where it is clearly distinguished from machines and animals, where it
shares with all other human beings a unique and universal essence,
where it is the origin of meaning and the sovereign subject of history,
and where it acts according to something called “human nature

41. Post-Human
■ ” For humanists, “Man,” to use the problematic gendered term often
employed in accounts of “the human condition,” enjoys a position of
automatic and unquestionable hegemony. “Man” is the measure of all
things. Posthumanism, by way of contrast, begins with the recognition
that “Man” is not the privileged and protected center, because humans
are no longer – and perhaps never were – utterly distinct from animals
and machines, are the products of historical and cultural differences
that make any appeal to universal human essence impossible… —The
Encyclopedia of Literary and CulturalTheory

42. Posthumanism + gender
■ As we’ve discussed, binary gender tends to categorize people into roles, and roles tend
to create hierarchies, aka power structures and oppression
■ Traditional feminist thought focuses on that oppression, on patriarchy and its
consequences
■ You could argue (and many have) that this traditional feminist lens is at odds with
third-wave feminists, queer theory and the like because the latter groups are less
concerned with oppression and more concerned with identity politics than with
identification of oppressive structures.
■ Transhumanism is more concerned with the fusing of thoughts regarding biological
determinism with the advances of technology and science. In other words, what can
science and technology bring to the desires of the post-binary world?

43. He, She and It
■ Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke
Award for Best Science
Fiction in the United
Kingdom (1991)
■ Author Marge Piercy
considers herself a political
writer. She is a poet, novelist
and memoirist; she’s written
43 books (by my counting)
■ Her novel, Woman on the
Edge ofTime (1976) explores
comparable science-fiction
and feminist motifs

44. Cyborgs as a construct for exploring
identity
■ In Donna Harraway’s essay,The Cyborg Manifesto, she defines the cyborg thusly:
■ “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of
social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our
most important political construction, a world-changing fiction.The international
women’s movements have constructed ‘women’s experience,’ as well as uncovered or
discovered this crucial collective object.This experience is a fiction and fact of the
most crucial, political kind.”

45. Cyborgs and women
■ June Deery argues in part that “cyborgs might resemble or identify with” women and
visa versa in the novel.
■ Yod’s position in society is comparable to women in patriarchal society: he has to close
read other’s reactions, he isn’t paid for his work, he’s compared to a sex toy by a
character
■ He ultimately rejects his own technological/weaponized role/ aka masculine role

46. Brave NewWorld by Aldous Huxley
■ Reflects fears about the role of technology
over society (even though mostly all they
had were cars and the radio)
■ State control versus people’s willingness to
be controlled
■ Consumerism
■ Squashing human instincts toward love and
art with mind control and drugs
■ Control over sexual norms and
reproduction
■ Caste society
■ A figurehead or concept is worshipped by
the citizens of the society.
■ Citizens are perceived to be under constant
surveillance.
■ Citizens live in a “dehumanized” state.
■ Conformity among citizens and assumption
that individuality and dissent are bad.
■ An illusion of a perfect utopia

47. 1984
■ “Every line of serious work that I have written since
1936 has been written directly or indirectly against
totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I
understand it.” —George Orwell, ”Why IWrite”

48. 1984
■ Constant surveillance
■ Thought crimes
■ Control through language
(newspeak)
■ Control through fear
■ Doublethink (hypocrisy)
■ Erasure of the past (memory hole)
■ Control over love, sex, reproductive
freedom
■ A figurehead or concept is
worshipped by the citizens of the
society.
■ Citizens are perceived to be under
constant surveillance.
■ Citizens live in a “dehumanized”
state.
■ Conformity among citizens and
assumption that individuality and
dissent are bad.
■ An illusion of a perfect utopia

49. The Circle
■ Dave Eggers, founder of McSweeneys, which publishes
The Believer
■ Author of at least 10 books, novels and otherwise. Fiction
author and journalist
■ Social activist
■ His work has been nominated for the National Book
Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics
Circle Award, and has won the Dayton Literary Peace
Prize, France’s Prix Médicis, Germany’sAlbatross Prize, the
National MagazineAward, and the American Book Award.
■ Founded 826Valencia, a nonprofit youth writing and
tutoring center in San Francisco’s Mission District

50. The Circle and 1984?
■ War is peace. Freedom is
slavery. Ignorance is
strength.
—George Orwell, “1984”
■ Secrets are lies. Sharing is
Caring. Privacy is theft.
—Dave Eggers, “The Circle”
“Sharing is Caring is Sharing,” Betsy Morais, Oct. 20, 2013The NewYorker

51. The Circle and Brave NewWorld?
■ The Circle is Brave NewWorld for our brave new world — and
let’s be frank: Aldous Huxley’s classic is no model of
understatement, either. Now that we all live and move and
have our being in the panopticon, Eggers’s novel may be just
fast enough, witty enough and troubling enough to make us
glance away from our twerkingVines and consider how life
has been reshaped by a handful of clever marketers.” —Ron
Charles, WaPo, Oct. 1, 2013

52. The Circle
■ What’s the concept?
■ How does surveillance play out?
■ How are the characters
dehumanized?
■ How is conformity represented?
■ What is the illusory nature ofThe
Circle?
■ A figurehead or concept is
worshipped by the citizens of the
society.
■ Citizens are perceived to be under
constant surveillance.
■ Citizens live in a “dehumanized”
state.
■ Conformity among citizens and
assumption that individuality and
dissent are bad.
■ An illusion of a perfect utopia

53. The Circle
■ The characters…thoughts on Mae?
■ Obviously, a story about the dangers of technology...what
about sex and technology?
■ What is the role of family in this society?
■ What statement is the book making about identity?

54. Coming up…
■ Next week, final reading quiz plus movie
■ The week after that isThanksgiving
■ The week after that (Dec. 2) Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
■ Dec. 9, class is a SURPRISE
■ Finals week, Dec. 16.We will not be meeting but your final papers are
due

55. This is weird
■ “The image of a DonaldTrump supporter has long been
considered the face of an angry white man. But it was white
women who pushedTrump to victory. According to CNN’s exit
polls, 53% of white women voted forTrump – rejecting the
possibility of a first female president. In interviews, white women
saidTrump’s record as a businessman and his policy positions
resonated with them more strongly than Clinton’s candidacy as a
woman.They downplayed his behavior to varying degrees and
saw Clinton’s flaws as more troubling.” —UK Guardian, Nov. 10