“Speaking moistly”

On April 7, 2020, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau inadvertently offered one of the simplest explanations of how transmission of 2019-nCoV most likely works. Standing in front of his home at Rideau Cottage, our dashing young PM was pressured to answer questions about wearing masks, a precaution that seemed to most of us like a no-brainer.[1] In fact, Trudeau was the first world leader to have a personal brush with the virus: his partner Sophia Gregoire Trudeau was felled by the virus after visiting the UK in mid-March, requiring the entire Trudeau family to quarantine. Canadians had become accustomed to seeing the PM in front of Rideau Cottage at the then-daily governmental updates, and many anxious eyes were glued to their streaming devices to learn how Gregoire – and indeed our collective selves – were faring in a global health crisis.

Trudeau’s top public health officials were in lockstep with the American public health leaders and the World Health Organization in abjuring universal use of simple face coverings as a means of disease suppression, despite the obvious role that masks had played in rapid control of the virus in Canada’s friends, Taiwan and Korea.[2] Hoping to leave no light between the official view and his own, formed no doubt from his own close encounter with the virus, Trudeau said: “I am not a medical expert…. If people want to wear a mask, that is okay . . .  masks help prevent you from breathing or, or, or speaking, uh, moistly on them.” In the context of increasingly bizarre political news from the US that defied our political logic and the daily barrage of “big data” to sift through in order to make sense of the medical drama, Trudeau’s words were astonishingly simple, and they might not have counted as a gaff except that the PM registered his own discomfort at giving us the bad news about our saliva. With an ever-so-slight a shake of his head, he smiled charmingly and said, “What a terrible image.”

Nestled between the terrifying pictures of desperate patients dying in the hallways of maxed-out Italian emergency rooms and the heartbreaking videos of family members supporting frail elderly relatives through the glass panes of long-term care facilities in Quebec, a little flying spit hardly registered on the terribleness scale. While perhaps a little queasy-making to the Anglo Canadians, “moist speaking” was far from the most horrible thing we were seeing on our screens.

Media commentators were quick to describe Trudeau’s moment as cringeworthy, another gaffe laying bare the absurdity of this latest iteration of the excessively handsome and groovy Trudeau dynasty. Within less than twenty-four hours, Canadian musician and political satirist Brock Tyler (known as anonymotif) released an autotuned version of Trudeau’s off-the-cuff remarks, which was immediately followed by more than a dozen remixes in multiple genres, from ska to classical.  With varying attention to the complexity of the question of uncontrolled spit, most used visceral and all-too-familiar images bare-faced women receiving fluid from the mouths of men who apparently delight in intermingling their fluids and their words.[3]

Feminist theory has contributed indirectly and directly to our evolving understanding of the pandemic that now engulfs us. Without decades of women’s studies courses, feminist theory-based scholarship, and, more importantly, multiple forms of activism by bodies occupying the space “female,” media commentators would likely have been less quick to recognize the significance of gendered leadership as a factor in how well COVID containment measures achieved success. Intersectional feminist thinking laid part of the foundation for pointing out the anti-Asian racism at the center of the blamestorm about the origins of COVID-19. Antiracist and womanist feminisms made it possible to press hard on questions of the uniquely crushing impact of the pandemic on women of color, who disproportionately occupy the lower ends not only of jobs in general but of social reproductive labor in particular.

In this short essay I want to turn feminist theory’s lens away from those most disadvantaged in the epidemic to focus instead on those perpetrators who possess very specific forms of privilege, if not always individually, than indirectly as members of a power-holding group. That is, I want to think about a masculinity that understands itself to be largely uninfectable, or, if infected, cares little about its infectiousness. In some ways, my discussion here parallels more than a century of legal debate about birth control and abortion, which has usually focused on a woman’s control over her own body. But, as reactionary men’s movement activists point out, that debate is also about the control of men’s body fluids. While control of men’s semen and control of their spit have parallels in the larger question of men’s ability to impose themselves in others’ spaces, I want to focus on the relationship between speech and the presumption of masculine invulnerability and nonculpability.[4] In order to make clearer the broad legacy of dangerously, even murderously, uncontained “moist speech,” I want consider the different valences and directionality of spit, returning at the end to consider how we, as feminists in the university system, might confront masked assumptions about the power and conditions of speaking freely.[5]

Transgressions

Growing up, we all knew that there was something problematic about allowing moisture to leave our mouths. In school, we were often divided by the capacity to control our spit. Those of us with speech impediments were sent off to speech-therapy classes to reduce the sibilance of our Ss, the pop of our Ps, the lack of buzzing in our Vs, all in hopes of making us spitters more “normal” by reducing the spray of our speech. (Reread that sentence out loud and you’ll remember which group you were in.) A few kids had speech problems that exceeded the capacity of speech-therapy group work, and they were banished to “remediation,” never to be seen again. It was not lost on all of us that among the differences that caused their disappearance was their lack of ability or will to keep their saliva contained.

As much as we disliked speech-therapy class, this fluid-containment bardo at least meant we would eventually go back to the classroom of the “normal.” Still, we never escaped the stigma of our trips to speech therapy class and even after we were deemed “cured,” we dreaded the moments when we had to read out loud in front the “the others.” Even if our speech now varied little from theirs, these other kids knew who had been taken out of class for correction, and they made fun of us, taking great delight in imitating us by emitting copious amounts of saliva. But their mock slurring and spitting was virtually indistinguishable from their inadvertent spitting when they loudly taunted kids who were smaller or weirder or simply available for their rage. Bullies’ uncontrolled release of spit was not deemed an impediment in need of correction, indeed, until we named them “bullies,” these children were seen as having a natural reaction toward the offensiveness of nonnormalcy, and their victims were seen as hypersensitive, feminized in their victimization by classmates who were masculinized by their assumption of the bully role.

The power structure of this feeling has a history.

Legally spitting mad

From the 1840s, through the 100 years of attempts to pass a federal antilynching law in the US (finally passed in 2019), through to the present, organized racist violence was justified as a response to an underlying provocation. Lynching—a collective, extrajudicial (though barely so, since police and municipal officials were and are not uncommonly participants) act—is the most often cited form of white violence against Black and other persons of color. However, before the conceptualization of “hate crimes” as we know them today, white men frequently escaped punishment for individual acts of violence against Black persons by claiming that such person had said something offensive or had looked at a white person in an unacceptable way, triggering emotions that “normal people” assumed were not only natural, but justified “defensive” physical violence.[6]

Underwriting the collective, intentional, and spectacular violence of lynchings, as well as the anonymous retaliations that sometimes made their way into criminal courts, was the sentiment among white people and their governments that there was nothing wrong with the ongoing slaughter of persons with skin tones – and sometimes cultures – different than their own. The fact of unchecked lynching and the knowledge that imperceptible breaches of the color line could be met with violence built up a conviction among white people that a particular type of anger—their murderous rage—was within the range of acceptable human emotions. The way to signal the first emergence of that emotional display was to hurtle words with such velocity that spit literally flew from the mouth. This was no uncontrolled release of saliva but rather a form of speech that was by default protected under the law. But only for white men: from the mouths of Black men, “spitting mad” was a form of criminal assault on the hearer; from the mouths of white women, “spitting mad” was, indeed, a form of madness, a sign that emotions had gone entirely out of control. Black women dared not spit or seem mad at all, hence the popularity of the smiling domestic, the Black body that was very near but reliably self-contained. The media coverage of the current convergence of a viral pandemic and a pandemic of state-sponsored violence against Black and Indigenous people and other people of color suggests that not much has changed.

Brett Kavanaugh and white men spitting

I could select from an entire, if uncatalogued, history of the power of white men spitting, but a recent and widely televised pre-COVID example will make my point. In the course of defending his fitness to serve as a justice on the US Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh’s face was a study in the display of white male emotions, by turns innocent and authoritative: he was a man of lifelong spotless character, a learned man who not only grasped the history of the law but had the gift of assigning guilt impartially. When asked to give an account of his past behavior (not just his alleged sexual assaults but also his admitted drinking), Kavanaugh became teary-eyed, and his manner of speaking moistened, upwellings that did not signal loss of control (apparently boys do cry), but rather, suggested that there were no words to express his sadness at being so deeply misunderstood.

This display of white male privilege contrasted sharply with the undercurrent of violence in his responses to female senators, whom he persistently interrupted as if they were small children. Acting with the confidence that this kind of threat from this kind of person remains allowable under the law, his voice got louder, his face reddened and grew crinkly, moisture condensed into saliva: Kavanaugh was spitting mad.

Photo by Mobilus In Mobili

Pedagogically speaking

In May or so, when we looked back over the disaster of our transition to online teaching,  university teachers began to make predictions about the fall. Among the possibilities my colleagues posted to our old-school faculty list-serv were plexiglass-encased podiums, students forced to present certificates of noninfection, and the universal donning of The Mask. On the West Coast, as least, the financial rescue plan for our financially insolvent universities has been to import large numbers of East Asian young people as students, especially, for the last decade, from mainland China. As faculty working in West Coast spaces now figured as the east side of the Pacific Rim, we are accustomed to facing a classrooms with students (almost always “Asian”) who have elected to don masks. The universal masking option should have been seen as the quickest, cheapest, and easiest to implement route back to the financial stability that “butts in seats” affords. Despite this norm, one of my (white) male colleagues wrote (I imagined with a sigh), “Well, I hope they don’t expect us to teach in masks!”[7]

This horror at the idea of masking did not seem so different from the refusal that we critiqued when world leaders (including the man leading our cousins to the south) demanded that everyone around them – but not themselves – exercise any and all precautions against transmitting 2019-nCoV. Apparently, the professoriate also retains the right to speak moistly, while students must risk catching any of the many germs that necessarily fly out of our mouths intermingled with whatever wisdom we are imparting on a given day.

The faculty horror at masked teaching partly hijacked one side of the larger debate among disability activists about how to balance public health requirements without increasing the burden on those who already bore the weight of ableist urban design. They reoriented the valid concern that masks make it difficult for others to intercorrelate our moving lips moving and our uttered (but potentially undiscernible) words. There was a rapid slide to the idea that absent the ability to scrutinize the lower half of our face, our students’ learning experience and ability to make sense of our lectures would be diminished below the threshold of “higher education.” The idea that the face naturally signs and reduplicates meaning is only a short step from the idea that the face naturally signs emotion, the very assumption that underwrites the violence threatened in white male expressions.

Toward a grammar of unmasking

I return briefly now to anonymotif’s spoof of Prime Minister Trudeau. The quickly produced autotune video included sidebars of the PM’s two signers as they quickly considered how to render “speaking moistly.” In the several forms of sign language (in Canada, American Sign Language [ASL] and Langue des signes québécoise [LSQ] are both required), highly trained signers use facial movements not as “natural emotional expressions,” but as grammatical elements in a language system. To those with no understanding of ASL and LSQ, these facial movements seem to be “mere” emotions weirdly connected to hand signs. But facial movements are very precise and technical nonmanual markers whose use can dramatically change the meaning of a manual sign. In order to comprehend sign languages, the reader must intercorrelate the manual and nonmanual markers. Expert signers must detrain the reflexive, culturally specific, even idiosyncratic range of facial expressions and replace these with the precise and linguistically prescribed movements that make for grammatically accurate and syntactically pleasing speech.

There are complex cultural and philosophical issues one might elaborate here – are there any “real” emotions? how do we come to decode facial signs? is any decoding universal? – but for my purposes here, I want to zoom in on the brief pause that occurs as the two signers register the PM’s uncertainty about his new locution, one that was soon to enter the Canadian lexicon. I compared the YouTube clip of the press conference with the deconstructed version produced by anonymotif, and I believe he misunderstands their pause as their expression of distaste for the idea/image they were now tasked to render in ASL and LSQ. Instead, I read the moment as one in which both the PM and his two signers drop their on-stage professional presentations as they instantaneously understand the stark clarity of the PM’s words. Unlike the reporters, who seemed to disavow the dangerous and inherent moistness of speech by deeming the PM’s advice a cringeworthy gaff, the signers’ wholly embody the concept and feeling of this lifesaving explanation of transmission, and in languages that do not equate speaking forcefully with speaking moistly, they signed this newly spoken idea with dignity and seriousness. Until he uttered his disclaimer, the PM spoke nakedly as someone who suddenly recognized his privilege as one-who-does-not-have-to-be-concerned-about-spitting-on-others. For a nanosecond, he realized that he had been spitting on us.

We still live out this legacy of universalization of the white male point of view and the naturalization of their emotions as reasonable (if the opposite of their much-valued rational), a legacy of suppressing the speech of those deemed “particular,” not to mention colonizing their lands, cultures, and bodies.[8] Demanding that white men wear their masks has proven difficult, as ongoing antimask protests reveal, even as they include other-than-white-men asserting this white male privilege. Most academics gleefully poke holes in the arguments that refusing to wear a mask is a justified assertion of personal freedom, but in what ways do we remain complicit in prioritizing of the moist speech of those who have long been spitting on others?

Photo by gerrypopplestone

Read the other symposium essays

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. Practical Reason. Stanford University Press. Stanford: California.

Patton, Cindy. 1989. “Power and the Conditions of Silence.” Critical Quarterly 31(3):26-39.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1988. “The Privilege of Unknowing.” Genders, no. 1: 102-24.

Wittig, Monique. 1992. “The Point of View: Universal or Particular?” In The Straight Mind and Other Essays, 59-67. Boston: Beacon.

Acknowledgements

I want to that the members of the Tuesday Morning (Virtual) Study Hall for cocreating a space for writers from many different walks of life to keep the words flowing.

[1] Georgian Revival historic site, Rideau Cottage was built in 1866-67 and has housed a continuous stream of Empire dignitaries, including Governor’s General and various British royalty. Because the usual prime minister’s residence – 24 Sussex, also built during Ottawa’s building boom that accompanied nationhood and the official residence of prime ministers since 1951 (indeed, the childhood home of Justin) – was in need to drastic repairs, Trudeau became the first Prime Minister to reside in Rideau Cottage. While comprised of twenty-two rooms on two stories and set in a pastoral eighty-eight acre park, the youthful Trudeau seems to be marking a new era of modesty in the same way that his father symbolized “grooviness” and a bright future for the Baby Boomer generation.

[2] Canada’s relatively new Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, was appointed in 2017. Having spent a lifetime as the object of Canadian racism, she was now grappling not only with the new virus but equally with the rise in anti-Asian racist attacks by white people who believed Asians don masks out of some tribal and irrational fear. The World Health Organization (WHO) changed its position on masks on June 6, 2020, and the US, with no clear national stance on mask use, slowly mandated their use in particular kinds of places.

[3] For the original video, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eySDeBdqxGY.

[4] I was making final revisions on this essay just as the super-spreader president of the United States declared himself cured of COVID and, not only that, more potent for the experience. (No doubt this was the steroid rage speaking.) Despite the WHO and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urging an abundance of caution in determining the endpoint of an individual’s infectiousness, Trump’s doctor equivocally declared that he was no longer considered capable of infecting others. (I note that the science of COVID is very young and it is not clear how a doctor makes such a determination in general or in any individual case.) In his first rally back on the campaign trail, he declared that he wanted to hugs and kiss everyone, not only revealing his refusal of responsibility for the probably dozens of people he had infected but also daring others to allow him to continue his rampage.

[5] Very early in the AIDS epidemic, I wrote a short essay called “Power and the Conditions of Silence” (1989) in which I considered the “silence = death” posters as well as then–hotly debated questions about the different models of power that underwrote ideas like “coming out” for gay people and “telling it like it is” for Black radicals. I reinvigorate that line of thinking here, as I nod to Eve Sedgwick’s insightful and crucial “The Privilege of Unknowing” (1988) as I show “unmasking” to be the doubled privilege of unknowing.

[6] Homophobic violence has the same history. The so-called “homosexual panic” or “gay panic” defense relied on jurors to sympathize with a supposedly heterosexual man’s (and in some cases woman’s) natural and uncontrollable panic if they were solicited by a “homosexual.” Not until 2014 did the first US state amend its criminal code to outlaw this defense (also now used to defend perpetrators of violence against trans persons), and only seventeen US states have made this change.

[7] What my colleagues understand about this I do not know. Having lived and taught in Taiwan intermittently for twenty-five years, I am not only accustomed to donning a mask for the bulk of the cold and flu season but I feel quite naked when I come back to the sneezing and sniffling of white people in North America.

[8] Here I am invoking Monique Wittig’s discussion of “the universal and the particular” (1992) and also Pierre Boudieu’s arguments about the “state mind” as a positioning capable of perceiving and acting on “behalf of the whole,” (1988) the very definition of the mission of disembodied public health. There is no space here to extend Wittig’s dissection of the “straight mind,” that Western Enlightenment assumption that the white heterosexual male position is universal while all others are particular. Nor have I space to develop Bourdieu’s idea that this “universal” point of view also has with it an affect that nonuniversal points lack.