Blog #1 (9/23/18)

I chose this picture taken by photographer Wing Young Huie. The photo was posted to the album titles “We are the other” and was taken at Blue Ox Coffee Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2012. This album is host to many pictures of men and women holding up a sign, each saying something different.

The image contains a middle aged man, Hai, holding up a sign that says “When I come the US, I don’t have nothing. With my bare hands and hard word, I now own two barber shops”. The picture also shows the background that Hai is standing which is a coffee shop that many people seems to be busy in, living their day to day lives. This picture grabbed my attention because of what the sign said. Whoever wrote the saying is obviously very uneducated and not from the United States. The grammar is very wrong, along with the sentence structure used.

The sign proves to the viewers that Hai is a literal alien. He is not from the United States which makes him alien. Being an alien differentiates him from the fellow people in the coffee shop and all other Americans. He is separate from them which portrays the concept of “othering,” literally.

Huie posted to his blog that the woman standing to the left of Hai in the coffee shop is the manager Melanie. The day this picture was taken was the first day that Melanie and Hai ever spoke. Hai had been witnessed throwing rice at pigeons and sweeping the street at the same corner outside her coffee shop since it was opened, seven months prior. These actions taken by Hai also serve to further alienate himself from the other passerbyers on the streets. It is not very often that you will find a man sweeping the sidewalk of 38th street in Chicago. Also, people in American will feed birds bread, rather than giving rice to pigeons. By Hai partaking in these actions, and him being an alien to the United States serve to differentiate himself from the rest of the American people.

Atwood in, The Handmaid's Tale, also portrays the concept of ‘othering’ in a similar matter. In her novel, handmaid’s are subjected to many non-human type ordeals. They are forced to each wear the same outfit and to hide their bodies and faces when walking out in public. This further objectifies them to being used as solely sexual objects and not actual human beings. Handmaids in the society of Gilead are seen as one of the lower social classes. They do what they are told, when they are told to do it. By forcing them to each wear the same bright red outfit, they can be spotted by anyone and differentiated from their fellow citizens.

The handmaid's, including the main character Offred, are subjected to this concept of ‘othering’ through each of those ways. By making them each wear the same thing, any other person walking along the streets could tell what social class they are in. In today's society, it is quite a bit harder to tell what social class someone is in based primarily off of their clothing. Both the handmaid's from the novel, and Hai from the photograph are 'others' due to the background and their present actions in the society they live in.

Huie, Wing Y. Untitled . Minneapolis, 2012.