Repost: The crisis of cursive
Gruesome Details
With Republican calls to “bring cursive back” even as they seek to close schools, it seems a good time to reshare a newsletter I originally published in February 2023.
It was hard for me to wrap my mind around the cultural panic of cursive. Cursive, the penmanship style of joined letters, is said to be on its way out in many modern-day school curricula. And conservatives are pushing back. Since 2019, states such as Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin have reintroduced cursive instruction or made it mandatory. I have no horse in the cursive debate. But I did find its prominence interesting.
There are, of course, legitimate calls from educators to continue cursive instruction. For now, let’s set those aside and talk of why conservatives, specifically, have taken it on as a hobbyhorse. Fox News has covered cursive breathlessly. And, with the way handwriting has risen to the fore as conservatives ramp up their attempts to destroy public education, it seems worth talking about.
Of course, cultural panics ginned up by conservatives never make sense on their face. But, outside of vague “kids these days” posturing, I couldn’t figure out what was behind the cursive crisis. As has been true all month, Michel Foucault had the answer.
In Discipline & Punish, Foucault traces the start of the prison. As part of this run up to the creation of the prison, Foucault points to other forms of institutional control, not the least of which is the school. He writes:
“Disciplinary control does not consist simply in teaching or imposing a series of a particular gestures; it imposes the best relation between a gesture and the overall position of the body… A well-disciplined body forms the operational context of the slightest gesture. Good handwriting, for example, presupposes a gymnastics—a whole routine whose rigorous code invests the body in its entirety, from the points of the feet to the tip of the index finger.”
Considered this way, cast as one of the great signifiers over control of children’s bodies, cursive fits into the other wars raging on schoolhouse grounds. The trans panic and cursive lay upon one unbroken line. The belief that underlines it all is those controlled as children are more easily contained as adults. Power over someone’s mind starts in their smallest finger. The debate seems to make this clear.
The world has changed profoundly in the thirty five years I’ve been alive and most of this change has happened on a plane of bodily autonomy. Growing up in the height of the Bush aughts, my body was something for someone else. You kept it thin, to fulfill the standards of various industries and the persistent assumed male gaze. You kept it virginal, to fulfill the standards of the religious right (whether or not you were right or religious). “Slut”, a useful and oft-deployed insult, packed more than a punch. I know girls slapped with the label who had their lives temporarily ruined. I know the girls I called “sluts.” I know how pervasive it all was.
It seems as if every white-coded cultural institution wants to force us “back” to some mythical past in which the strictures of gender fit comfortably on everyone’s shoulders. It isn’t only overt fascists demanding and plotting and legislating. It is in the tiny things, like the rise of our jeans. As Jess Sims wrote for Harper’s Bazaar: “As a millennial woman still reckoning with the aftermath of Y2k body discourse, I say to [Gen Z]: Wear your low-rise jeans, girlies; it’s your time to shine. All I ask is that you honor your body, love yourself, and, please, don’t bring back layered polo shirts; none of us can survive that.”
I’m not as optimistic as Sims, due to the short memory with which humans are cursed. From time immemorial, we’ve been demanding to go back, even if we’re not sure where that destination is. My favorite examples of this are in the Miss Marple series by Agatha Christie. Everyone is constantly complaining about the “fast” post-war period. (They are also being racist—it is a Christie book after all.)
It is easy, when pushed to go back, to try to pin down the “back” to which fascists are speaking. As Stephanie Coontz lays out in the introduction to her book The Way We Never Were, “back” is a place with which we’re not familiar:
“While there are a few modern Americans who would like to return to the strict patriarchal authority of colonial days, in which disobedience by women and children was considered a small form of treason, these individuals would doubtless be horrified by other aspects of colonial families, such as their failure to protect children from knowledge of sexuality.”
We have no idea where we’re going, but that doesn’t stop us from trying to get there. Trying to pin down a place that never existed is a waste of our time.
Perhaps, the best route we can take is to treat any attempts to return, to preserve, or to revive formerly mainstream cultural artifacts with a large measure of suspicion. Any incursion on the present by the past (real or imagined) is one too far. Perhaps, like Lot’s wife, we have to keep moving forward, without ever looking back.