Caroline Levine, Letter from Wisconsin

Friday, March 4, 2011

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[In this post, Caroline Levine, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, writes about the on-going demonstrations and rallies in Madison, Wisconsin.]

Three views from the ground in Madison
Written by Caroline Levine (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

I. Personal
Born in 1970, I and my classmates missed the sixties. My schoolteachers and college professors never tired of reminding us of this. They were frustrated with what they saw as our passivity and complacency. Why weren’t we more riled up? I loathed Reagan and George H W Bush, who presided over my coming of age, as much as the next left-leaning teenager. I certainly wanted change, as did many of my friends. And yet, the radical political groups I knew seemed powerless and puny in the face of huge forces that dwarfed their efforts—trickle-down economics, global capitalism, nonvoting minority groups, reactions against sixties cultural politics. I couldn’t imagine how you sparked a movement that mattered, and I was annoyed that our elders blamed us for being born too late, for feeling helpless and hopeless.

The last few weeks in Madison have changed me. They haven’t changed my deep feelings of helplessness—I still worry that worse times are around the corner, and that we can’t do much to forestall them—but now, for the first time, I understand the feelings of the generation that taught me. I’ve been to seven rallies since Valentine’s Day, each one bigger than the one before. The first one, a small group of graduate students and faculty, marched on the State Capitol—a ten- or fifteen-minute walk from the campus. At first we felt too embarrassed to chant, most of us, and chatted about the gloomy state of the state instead, as we walked disconsolately along the sidewalk.

When we got to the Capitol itself, the graduate students led us inside, and there something felt a little different. First of all, it seemed surprising that no one had stopped us, a thousand or so people, as we crammed through the revolving doors. Then the students’ chants echoed off the walls, filling the space, and we all joined together in the center of the domed building. An electricity seemed to unite the space. The Capitol, a neoclassical building that is usually hushed and populated by a few tourists and some hurried-looking legislative aides, felt vital in a way I’d never imagined. “Whose house?” we chanted. “Our house!” I have done some writing about large modern democracies, where people who share a government never meet. Usually I experience democracy as an abstraction, mediated in troubling ways by newspapers, television and the web. But in that moment the people seemed to become a dynamic and pulsing reality—and I felt, for the first time, like a part of a living body politic.

The next days brought bigger rallies. On Wednesday, on the steps of the Capitol, we were joined by union leaders, nurses, and a lot of undergraduates. On Thursday the sixteenth, Madison schoolteachers called in sick in such large numbers that schools had to close. Teachers from around the state poured in with signs. “Milwaukee math teacher teaching civics lesson today.” “If you can read this, thank a teacher.” “100% of teachers have more education that Scott Walker.”

We sent up a huge cheer as firefighters in full regalia—exempt from the Governor’s plan to end collective bargaining—joined us in a gesture of solidarity. Over the next few days, corrections officers and electricians and teachers and graduate students called each other “brothers and sisters.” They crafted sincere and witty and rousing and absurd signs: “Enjoy your weekend? Thank a union!” “I protect your family from the criminally insane.” “We’re just trying to have a society here.” “Do YOU plan on shoveling the roads?” “Scott, this relationship really isn’t working for me.” “There’s still good in you (Sky) Walker.” One of the most moving sights I have ever seen was the inside of the Capitol building looking like a carefully crafted work of collective art, its whole interior covered with lovingly hand-made signs.

There is always something slightly comic to me, an East Coaster, about mid-Western politeness, but the thorough absence of any threat of violence or even rudeness made huge crowds of chanting, marching, outraged radicals immensely fun. People brought their kids; cops passed out food and water to the protesters. Friends saw each other and stopped for lunch at a local Himalayan restaurant, only to return for more chanting and marching.

My seven-year-old son came along with me to a couple of the big rallies. He’s a dedicated fan of Harry Potter and Star Wars, and I was surprised to realize how much these have taught him about politics. Not just about good and evil, but about democratic processes: in Star Wars, the Jedi support an elected legislature against the encroachments of a greedy empire, and in Harry Potter Dolores Umbridge suspends established procedure—including freedom of speech and assembly—for the sake of her own authoritarian rule. My son really does understand the problem of power grabs, and he was more interested in the nitty-gritty of state politics than I’d expected. But it wasn’t just a civics lesson that I wanted for him. I had a powerful desire for him to feel that passionate, electrifying, peaceful oneness with a living crowd.

For the first time, then, I think I understand what motivated my teachers’ frustration with us, the non-protesting generation. It wasn’t just reproach at our inactivity: it was that we were missing out on a precious experience of solidarity we couldn’t grasp or imagine. They weren’t just disappointed in us, that is: they were disappointed for us.


II. Statistical
Of course, throughout the past few weeks, it has been impossible to forget that we protesters do not speak for the people as a whole, that folks who strongly disagree live alongside us in significant numbers. I have a bad habit of reading the comments sections after online news stories, and I have been astonished at the venom being spewed at lazy, greedy teachers (I didn’t even know that feeling was out there), the contempt for firefighters who allegedly retire to six-figure salaries after developing carpal tunnel syndrome (wait, aren’t they heroes?), and the assumption that it’s the corrupt unions who are bleeding the tax-payers dry.

I felt nervous when I went out for breakfast in a western suburb of Madison where people move when the city schools get too “diverse” for them (even progressive little Madison turns out to have white flight). My son was flashing his “Derail Walker” button, and I warned him that someone might yell at him, or at me, because they disagreed with us. He seemed unruffled—when the Force is with you, you’re not thrown by a little shouting—but I realized that I have a desperate desire for civil, productive, and rational public dialogue, and that in my lifetime that has seemed increasingly out of reach. I worry that protests don’t always help that ideal along, since they solidify a sense of us against them.

So call me naive, but I have also spent the past few weeks wondering how we might talk to those who disagree with us. For now, we’ve lost some major battles in the rhetorical war: the right has hammered away at their message so long and so consistently that the option of raising taxes on the wealthiest quartile is off the table completely. Walker gets away with the claim that only drastic cuts to education, health care, and environmental regulation can balance the state budget in these hard times. How could we intervene in that?

Part of the problem is, of course, money. The billionaire Koch brothers who poured millions of dollars into conservative coffers in this last election know that people are swayed by advertising—even though each of us thinks that we ourselves are immune. By putting their money into elections, the wealthy reap double rewards: more power than other citizens over electoral outcomes, and easy access and influence over the government that takes power. That’s why Common Cause, which works to keep money out of politics, seems to me to be one of the most important organizations out there. (In fact, I’m going to stop writing and send them a donation right now.) Unions, for all their problems, are one of the few organized interest groups in US politics that represent middle- and working-class people. Their financial contribution is minuscule compared to corporate donations, and they have dwindled terribly in size over the past few decades. But they are among the only counterweights to corporate power over government that we have. My brother, who runs the non-profit organization CIRCLE, has some wonderfully lucid arguments on this topic.

But if we had the floor and could speak loudly and publicly, what would we say? What arguments would work best?

I have been thinking, first of all, about how we might answer the opposing side with hard numbers. The state might be “broke,” as the Governor likes to say, but taxes in Wisconsin are regressive: families in Wisconsin making less than $20,000 a year pay 9.2% of their income in combined taxes, while families making $388,000 or more pay only 6.7% of their income in those taxes. We could also argue that trickle-down economics has not actually spurred our economy in the past thirty years, but instead has allowed economic inequalities to grow. We can always point out that despite budget problems in Wisconsin, the Republican-controlled Legislature approved $48 million in tax breaks in January 2011 for health savings accounts, which are tax havens for the top income earners (the average annual income of HSA participants was $139,000 in 2005). We can mention that there are over 100,000 millionaires in Wisconsin, and ask whether it seems fair that the poor and the middle class should make all the sacrifices.

III. Historical
For the far right—the Tea Partiers—these arguments wouldn’t make much of an impact. For them, economic equality takes a back seat to what they call “freedom.” It seems only right to them that people who earn money in a tough, competitive marketplace should be rewarded for their efforts, not penalized with taxes. In their view, unions are corrupt special interests who protect mediocre workers and fat benefits packages at the expense of the very struggling taxpayers who keep the economy going. Any regulation of business slows growth, they feel, and it’s just a reality that some people will be altogether left behind. Either they can compete with workers in the global South at sweatshop wages, or they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The new legislation proposed in Missouri to change child labor laws suggests that a return to the economic scene of the nineteenth century—where children provide cheap labor instead of requiring expensive schooling—might not be anathema to conservatives.

Now, I’m a nineteenth-century scholar by training, so I know something about what the world looks like under a booming free market society with comparatively little government regulation. Victorian England was something of a Tea Partier’s dream. But would conservatives really want to live there?

Consider the following. Smart industrialists in the nineteenth century were keen to hire the cheapest workers, and they found that children could operate most machinery just as well as adults for a fraction of the cost. Children as young as 4 or 5 could be expected to work a day that lasted 16 hours. Since there were no laws regulating workplace safety, it was common for workers, overcome with exhaustion, to fall over into the machines, their limbs crushed, their bodies mangled. Employers were not liable for these accidents. No worker was entitled to paid or unpaid leave of any kind, and new mothers usually found themselves having to return to factory jobs 2 or 3 days after giving birth.

Since there was no government regulation of food, vendors mixed grain with chalk and alcohol with turpentine. Canny purveyors of pepper mixed the genuine spice with dust swept from warehouse floors, and quite a lot of gin, on examination, was found to contain sulphuric acid. Patent medicines containing any mixture of herbs and minerals—including arsenic and morphine—were available without restriction. It was common practice among poorer mothers to give opium to babies to make sure that they would stay quiet all day while they worked. Countless infants died from overdoses.

If you were unlucky enough to become disabled, or lucky enough to grow old, you relied on the generosity of family members. Employers had no obligation to workers as they aged, and often left them to die on the streets after years of service. Those workers shrewd enough to invest their earnings for the future quite often found that they had been swindled, since proponents of the free market objected volubly to all government efforts to intervene in financial transactions, including fraud.

Without a public sanitation infrastructure in place, newly crowded cities saw repeated cholera and typhoid epidemics that swept away lives by the tens of thousands. The average urban life expectancy dropped. A boy born in Liverpool in the 1850s could look forward to seeing the ripe age of 26. Unable to rely on a public education system, Britain’s poorest families sent their children to work to cover the costs of keeping them. Half of England remained illiterate until late in the century, which meant that there was little way for the indigent to pull themselves out of poverty.

So devastating were these conditions that the public pressed Parliament to intervene. In 1833, the “Short Time Committees” succeeded in limiting the workday for children between the ages of 9 and 18 and abolishing labor altogether for those younger than 9; after mid-century the government started to regulate food quality and the sale of poisons; and by the 1870s the nation had begun to invest in compulsory public education and clean water.

These reforms were expensive. And in fact free market capitalists fought even the tiniest regulatory moves, predicting economic catastrophe. They also warned of moral decline, arguing that people would grow irresponsible as they acquired the habit of looking to the government for help.

Neither the moral nor the economic arguments have gone away. And now they’ve developed such force that the clock is turning eerily backward. Do we really want to go back to 1850? That question seems like an argument for knowing a little bit about history. And the answer would require investing in education, which apparently, for now, is off the table.

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4/19 lecture, Martin Manalansan; A Response
Siobhan Somerville, “I also feel like I’m free”: Disaffection, Alienation and Sexual Politics

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

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[Below is the text from Siobhan Somerville's response to Martin Manalansan's April 19 lecture, "Travels of Disaffection: Labor, Affect and Migration"]

“I also feel like I’m free”: Disaffection, Alienation, and Sexual Politics
A Response to Martin Manalansan’s “Travels of Disaffection”


Written by Siobhan Somerville (English and Gender & Women's Studies)

I’d like to thank Martin Manalansan for this wonderful paper and Lauren Goodlad and the Unit for Criticism for the invitation to comment on it.

In this incisive paper, Martin persuasively combines his reading of the film Paper Dolls (Bubot Niyar, dir. Tomer Heymann, 2006) with research among the film’s audiences in order to make a broader critique of the assumptions underlying much scholarship on gender, labor, and transnational migration. As Martin so astutely points out, much of the “chain of care” scholarship implicitly renders caregiving and domestic labor as (heterosexual) women’s work and relies on unexamined assumptions about the presumed affect of those caregiving subjects. His emphasis on the ways in which the strategic performance of “disaffection” might be understood within these economies of gender and labor opens up compelling new ways to understand, in his words, the “messy micropolitics” of survival.

Keeping my focus on the film Paper Dolls, I’d like to approach this set of issues briefly from another angle, one that I hope complements the work that Martin has done here. I want to consider how we might situate these questions about gender, labor, and affect in relation to debates about transnational migration and the production of lesbian, gay and transgender identity and culture within neoliberal economies.

In many reviews of the film Paper Dolls, critics repeatedly remark on the ways in which Israel’s apparent tolerance for lesbian/gay culture seems to compensate for the workers’ precarious job security and the drudgery of their actual workdays. A reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, for instance, remarks that “the transsexuals enjoy a more liberal atmosphere in Israel in contrast with that of their native country,” an interpretation echoed by reviewers for The New York Times, The Denver Post, and Film Journal International, to name just a few that I found in a relatively quick search. This is by now a familiar, if problematic, story, one that posits transnational migration as an escape from traditional, repressive models of gender and sexuality and as an opportunity to experience the sexual and gendered freedoms afforded by the presumed modernity of economically privileged nations.

We should, of course, be skeptical of this narrative. Yet this very story is spoken by some of the film’s subjects themselves, such as Jan, who says, “I only got a taste of this kind of life in Israel. I couldn’t dress like this in the Philippines. Earrings, dyed hair, makeup, lipstick. It’s forbidden. My father wouldn’t let me. He’d beat me. . . He doesn’t like homosexuals. Neither does my mother.” Sally, who, as Martin notes, becomes the emotional anchor of the film, offers a slightly different take, emphasizing that she expected Israel to be more, not less, repressive than the Philippines and that she has been pleasantly surprised at Israeli attitudes toward gender and sexuality.Attending an Israeli gay pride parade, where she is surrounded by rainbow flags and fellow revelers, Sally says: “We thought Israel was a sacred place, that everything is closed, people are religious, primitive. It’s very surprising that there is a Gay Pride Parade. I also feel like I’m free. I can do whatever I want.”

Sally’s sense that in Israel she is “free” is, of course, a fantasy, perhaps a necessary one, given the restrictive terms of her employment and immigration status, but also the ways in which gendered norms are policed within Israeli culture, including Israeli gay and lesbian culture (which itself cites transnational gay and lesbian culture). The filmmaker, Tomer Heymann, confronts his own anxieties about gender as he engages with and eventually befriends members of the Paper Dolls. He admits openly that he associates femininity with shame and, at one point, invites members of the Paper Dolls to perform a makeover on him, complete with make-up, wig, and dress, so that he can experience femininity firsthand. While he attempts to confront his own gender anxieties, Heymann also includes an extended conversation with a racist and transphobic cab driver, who spouts a string of hateful and violent opinions about his experiences with Filipinos both in Israel and the Philippines. Such scenes disrupt any easy celebration of gay, lesbian, or transgender “freedom” in Israel.

As the filmmaker himself begins to grow fond of the Paper Dolls and defend them against such hostility, he attempts to facilitate their dream of performing at one of Tel Aviv’s biggest and most happening nightclubs, TLV, setting up an audition for the troupe at his own mother’s house. While the promoter agrees to book the Paper Dolls, he does so on terms that undermine the group members’ relationship to each other and to their performances, terms that also reveal the limited possibilities for participating in what passes as gay and lesbian culture in the clubs. First, he eliminates certain performers, like Jan, whom he does not consider “professional.” Second, he insists that the Paper Dolls perform in costumes of his choosing, not in their own makeup and costumes (which sometimes feature the exuberant use of materials such as beanie babies). What he chooses, without explanation, is that the Paper Dolls perform as Japanese geishas. Here, I’m interested in how we might link this scene with the disaffection that characterizes Jan’s workplace performance, which Martin intriguingly sees as a potential basis for a new mode of activism and politics. How might we understand the politics of affect – or lack of it -- that the Paper Dolls perform as they are literally alienated in the process of becoming racialized and feminized commodities within the Tel Aviv club scene? The imposition of the figure of the Japanese geisha serves to discipline the Paper Doll’s more ambiguous gender and cultural references, which are on display in their own performances. (It’s worth noting that their earlier audition for the promoter had featured a performance of the Hava Nagila, a performance that toys not only with gender authenticity but also Israeli cultural authenticity.) Indeed, the filmmaker uses parallel editing in the club scene to contrast, on the one hand, the Paper Dolls’ enforced feminization and orientalization and, on the other hand, the unclothed muscular masculinism of the other dancers that night.

Whatever the promoter’s intentions and whatever the Paper Dolls’ affective response, the nightclub episode ends up successfully policing the material boundaries between immigrant and Israeli. As one of the Paper Dolls explains, “After our performance at TLV we realized that we should stay within our own community. We should give up the dream of performing in those big places. It’s not for us.” In this refusal, I’m left wondering how the politics of gender and race in the club end up echoing the state’s attempt to control the movement and potential integration of the immigrant workers into Israeli life. How does gay and lesbian culture – in its own modes of commodification – draw on the language of “professionalism” as a way to reinscribe normative gender differences and to exclude those who cannot or will not inhabit those norms?

As a coda to this response, I want to briefly refer to the film’s own coda, in which we learn that three of the Paper Dolls have subsequently moved to London, where they continue to work as caregivers for elderly Jewish patients. They also continue to perform, now as “Paper Dolls from Israel.” What do we make of the fact that they bill their act this way and not as “Paper Dolls from the Philippines”? To what extent do they perform or reject origin narratives as a way to mark their own relationship to transnational migration, histories of labor, and belonging? And, finally, if these workers function as an “affective wall” between Israelis and Palestinians, how does that function itself migrate transnationally, either through their embodied labor or through the film itself?
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4/19 Lecture, Martin Manalansan: "Travels of Disaffection:
Labor, Affect, and Migration"
Guest Writer: Chase Dimock

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

posted under , , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism

[On April 19, 2010 the Unit for Criticism hosted "Travels of Disaffection: Labor, Affect, and Migration," a lecture by Martin Manalansan, associate professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies. Siobhan Somerville, associate professor of English and Gender & Women's Studies, responded.]

Paper Dolls and The Global Heart Transplant: A Few Reflections on Martin Manalansan’s “Travels of Disaffection: Labor, Affect, and Migration”

Written by Chase Dimock (Comparative & World Literature)



Manalansan injected his lecture for the Unit for Criticism with the tone of an intervention into the increasingly heteronormative perspective of recent scholarly work published on gender and migration. Specifically, he questioned the “chain of care” paradigm, which he defines as
A linear concatenation of bodies and feelings propelled by the migration of Third World women to the First World. Third World women are torn away from their biological families and forced to leave their children in the care of poorer women in the homeland, to take care of the progeny of modern working mothers of the first world.

In their 2003 book Global Woman, Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild argue that this chain of care results in a “global heart transplant,” where the domestic labor of these third world women is uprooted from their native land and relocated in the first world where their employment as care workers takes on the function of surrogate or supplementary mothers, wives, daughters and other affective, pseudo-familial roles.

Manalansan placed this unquestioned equation of care work with the affective assumptions of femininity under a queer critique, speculating, “What if we include such queer creatures as gay men, single and married women with no "maternal instinct," and transgendered persons into the mix? How can we queer this particular migratory diaspora without dismissing the struggles of some of its constituents?”

In search of an alternative framework for conceptualizing this “chain of care,” Manalansan pointed toward Tomer Heymann’s 2005 documentary Paper Dolls. Filmed originally as a 6-part program for Israeli television and then distilled into a feature-length documentary for the film festival circuit, Paper Dolls follows the life and labor of five transgender migrant workers from the Philippines who, by day, work as caregivers for elderly Orthodox Jewish men and, by night, perform drag shows in a troupe known as Paper Dolls. In his analysis, Manalansan focused specifically on the contrasting personalities of two laborers: Sally, who exhibits the expected "feminine" traits of a care giver--maternalism, geniality and an emotional bond with her client--and Jan, whose more "masculine" appearance and manner suggest a lack of emotional attachment to her client.

Siobhan Somerville and Martin Manalansan


What I found most interesting about Manalansan’s analytical approach toward the film was the importance he placed in the audience’s reception of the documentary. Manalansan organized a focus group of Filipinos in both New York and Manila and recorded how they reacted to the starkly contrasting figures of Sally and Jan. The focus group identified Sally as an affirmation of the naturally caring Filipino disposition, describing her as a Bakla man with a female heart. Manalansan accounts for this interpretation based on the profound investment that Filipino culture has in the image of the Filipina woman as an embodiment of care and nurture. This investment extends to the Filipino government that has turned the migrant Filipino careworker into a global ambassador of Filipino values and culture, mandating that all care workers complete a level of training before they work in a foreign nation.

In opposition to Sally, the focus group members found Jan to be disingenuous and unfriendly, questioning why he would go into the field of care work if he found no joy in it. Yet, members of the focus groups also pointed out that Jan exhibited a high level of skill and professionalism and defended his right to keep his job based on these merits.

Manalansan isolates Jan as an embodiment of “disaffection,” a perpetual emotional distance from his work which allows him both to perform his work at a high level of skill and to cope with the isolation of being a migrant worker functioning under government prescriptions that mandate specific conduct from a foreign labor force. Were either Sally or Jan to be fired by their client, they would be deported from Israel in spite of the productive labor they invested or any personal or professional bonds and identities they had forged in the process.

Thus, Manalansan put forth disaffection both as a way of 1) questioning the presumed affective nature of care work and 2) exploring how the forces of global capitalism and state power force migrant laborers, who are barred from full integration into the state, to disidentify with their migratory setting and cultivate a detached care for the self.

I was most struck by the pronounced masculine and feminine encoding of the “domestic” versus the “professional” which attempts to navigate the liminal space between the public and the private sphere that care workers inhabit. Although Sally’s “feminine” disposition toward her work better embodies the cultural ideal of the care worker, the affective bond she exhibits with her client tends to obscure the fact that she is a paid laborer and not the “adopted daughter” that we are inclined to read her as.

Conversely, Jan’s more “masculine” demeanor demystifies the sentimental interpretation of the relationship between pure laborer and client reinscribing the latter as professionalism. Jan’s lack of “domestic joy” reminds the viewer that although care workers labor in someone’s home, they are paid employees and should be entitled to the full array of labor rights regardless of how happy or affectionate they appear to be. Historically, domestic workers have been on the bottom end of advancements in labor rights. For example, Angela Davis argues that African-American women benefited less from the implementation of labor laws in the 20th century because these laws only recognized labor in the public sphere of private corporations and ignored the fact that a large proportion of the labor force worked in private homes and, thus, were presumed to inhabit the domestic sphere. Because they performed gendered labor seen as a supplement of a woman’s domestic role, they were relegated to the vicissitudes and abuses of patriarchal control over the domestic sphere.

Jan and Sally’s elderly clients do not fully embody the typical image of patriarchal control over the private sphere because of their infirmed state. Instead, the Israeli government inhabits this patriarchal position, enforcing certain norms of care and thus attempting to establish a uniform relationship between careworker and care recipient; a contractual relation enforced by government and enacted in a private home. With this in mind, I wonder how Manalansan’s queering of the chain of care, which focuses mostly on the queerness of the providers of care, may also extend to a queering of the recipient of care. The two elderly men depicted in Manalansan’s presentation are both alone, inhabiting a space outside the heteronormative nuclear family. Whether they have outlived their wives and lost contact with their next of kin or never decided to have a family, their elderly and infirm state has placed them in a queer position in which they inhabit the solitude of an atomized individual, but lack the requisite ability to take care of themselves which we typically assume of individuality.

These men rely upon the state to provide migrant labor in order to fill roles that the heteronormative family structure failed to fill (i.e., retirement plan of having one’s children care for you). The state intervenes to supplement the absent heteronormative family with pseudo-familial care performed to the state’s specifications. Just as Sally, Jan, and the other migrant care workers feel the constant presence of governmental standards influence their professional and personal identities, so too have the identities of their clients been shaped by the enforced norms of the Israeli welfare state.

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