I currently have an essay– the precursor to a book project– that I’m having trouble getting traction with. I’ve been looking at the current draft (it’s been through a great deal of revision) and I thought today I’d share a polished snippet of it.
If you’re an editor somewhere and want to see more, hit me up #anyonerepectcultureoutthere
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*Someone Once Told Me the Mirror Has Two Faces*
I first aired of my own disapproval of the fact that Blizzard Entertainment created a fictional race, the Tauren, that are half-human and half-cow borrowing heavily from Native American Indian culture, in a discussion of American Indian Studies with a fellow mixed-blood scholar. This scholar, lost to me now in the stream of time that sweeps up all of us as we negotiate the academy, insisted that my belief in mixed-bloodedness, that there exists in me a Cherokee and a “Caucasian,” was untenable. He asserted I was Cherokee or, as he once yelled at me while debating, I was “not.”
I see little value in his anger at my attempt to stake out an identity space, but I do understand his positionality. The identities we wear are dear and fit us so snugly that maintaining them often means entering uncomfortable territory. For me, the Tauren remain both a pointed symbol of a clear problem and a personal reminder of a constant internal debate. The Tauren are certainly not unique among game races—or even among fictional races— in adopting from real world racial traditions; this happens with other races in the World of Warcraft and has happened in fantasy and sci-fi since the very beginnings of the genre. What is different about the Tauren is not just their appropriation: it’s their hybridity. No other race in the World of Warcraft is a mixture of man and cattle, of a person and a “thing” raised ostensibly to be herded, milked or eaten. There is embedded in the idea that one is “part cattle” a profound insult that can only be truly recovered and understood by a people who were paraded by men with guns from their homes to reservations shaped like fields and left to graze in relative disrepair.
No, the Tauren are not unique. They are in themselves a hybrid argument, a mixture of homage and horror that might delight some while angering others. The question I keep asking myself is this: can one be Tauren and not be part cattle? Is a Tauren a cow? Is a Tauren “not?”
No one has yelled that answer at me just yet.