women's studies

The Women's Studies Program Not Taken

Posted by Kochanie | Tags:
Thu, 2008-06-05 07:08


Image: Girl by Stream by Flickr user Wisconsin Historical Society, used under Creative Commons License

In his book, Coming to our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness, John Kabat-Zinn describes this revealing scene of a group of very busy adults.
I once led a mindfulness workshop at a business conference in Chicago. About fifty people in suits showed up. I opened our time together by suggesting that we simply sit together for a few minutes with no instructions and no agenda. I suggested that we let go of whatever expectations and stories we were bringing into the room about the workshop and why we were there (after all, something brought them there, no one was in the room by accident), put down our coffee cups and newspapers, and just take a few minutes to allow ourselves to feel how things were for us in that moment, however they were. A few people started crying. In the conversation afterward, I asked what the tears were about. One executive said, “I never ever do anything without an agenda.” Heads nodded in agreement. Just the words, “let’s sit without an agenda,” were liberating, releasing dammed-up feelings of grief they didn’t know they had.

The people in that conference room may have been masters of hiding those damned-up feelings of grief from themselves, but I wonder how successful they were in hiding them from their children. When the topic of teen suicide is discussed, the causes typically cited are drugs, the influence of fatalistic song lyrics, bullying and the never-ending pressure for grades. One cause that is often ignored is the despair that young people experience when they look at the lives that their parents lead. A teenager will hear his father angrily rehash the office politics, see the weariness in her mother’s face from the long hours at the job, mark the hours his parents spend staring vacantly at the television, and ask, “Is this what my life will be like?”“

That sense of despair is what I recalled when reading a post written by Her of Desire X entitled, Generation-Y. Coming of age in the late 1980’s, Her is, by her own account ...a woman without a generation. Or maybe just without a cause. The radicalism of the 1960’s came to Her in a watered-down version from teachers, erstwhile hippies, who

...waxed poetic about Abbie Hoffman. Our response, isn’t Abbie a girl’s name? The Black Panthers, The White Panthers. Was it the Chicago Seven or Eight? Had to remember that for the test.

In this post, Her gives us a snapshot of her mother who, in her own rebellious youth, was anything but watered-down.

My mother drove across country in a VW bus packed full of hippies, Grace Slick’s White Rabbit blaring out of the window, scaring all-fuck out of the Provincials, swearing that the only way to truly change the world was to get naked and perform an impromptu, ad lib, acid induced version of Major Barbara on the courthouse lawn, and then get arrested for public indecency and inciting a riot. When her father drove cross country to post her bail he found that she had changed the name of the father in Major Barbara to his name. He looked at his daughter, standing in a holding cell with her hippie friends, wearing only a jacket that someone had given her and, staring straight into her eyes, said unflinchingly, ‘I do not know this woman. This is not my daughter.’ She swore she had seen the world with New eyes through a glistening ball of liquid on the end of a medicine dropper. She marched on Washington. She went to Woodstock. She was turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.

It is that firebrand quality that Her treasures in a friend destined for Berkeley and a major in Women’s Studies:

I loved her because she loved my mind. I adored her because she called me brilliant. She was a radical, a rebel, a warrior: a simulacrum of my mother in her youth.

When Her announces that she wants to attend Berkeley, her firebrand of a mother objects, calling the university ...Berserkly from the drugs and craziness she had experienced there during her past.. But Her is determined. She begins writing a paper that will not only cure her generation of complacency, but her mother as well.

There were also some old photos of her tucked haphazardly into shoe boxes and pushed to the back of her closet. One in particular had always been my favorite, she was smiling, dressed in hippie beads, a brown mini-skirt and moccasin boots, her long blond hair a tangled mess. A too-big Army camouflage jacket was draped over her small shoulders. She had a joint in one hand and was making a peace sign with the other. She was beautiful, angelic, but her eyes were fierce, intense. She was happy. When I see this photo I’m always reminded of Raymond Carver’s Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year. I’ve wanted my whole life to meet this girl. To know her. To be her friend and companion in chaos.

But when Her’s mother reads the paper, Her does not catch a glimpse of that beautiful girl in the photograph. She is face to face with a woman who is ..pleased. Not excited, not enflamed. Her does not go to Berkeley:

Life took some turns for me that sent me in other directions.
I won’t rehash it. What followed has already been written.
The Church of Coke Whores 1
The Church of Coke Whores 2

Be warned. The Church of Coke Whores offers only one sacrament: Extreme Unction.

I referred to Her’s mother as a firebrand, which is defined as someone who deliberately foments trouble. But it is the word’s second meaning that I had in mind: a piece of wood that has been burned or is burning. How long can one woman remain on fire if she does not have the support of others? For many of the women who came of age in the sixties, who were responsible for raising children in the seventies and eighties, there was little support for that rebel flame in the home or the corporate workplace or the university. Little support but a ready supply of misogyny, as the poet Sharon Olds found when, in the ninth month of pregnancy, she arrives for the review of her dissertation. The men who will review Olds’ dissertation may have been so courteous as to offer a pregnant woman a seat on a crowded subway train. But they show no such compunction for the jabs they deliver to Olds’ other child, the one she fleshed from experience and learning.

When I walked into the seminar room
with my dissertation, our son floated in out
before me, treaded water in,
almost nine months old, upside-
down, sucking his thumb. My advisor
had called my thesis original,
richly metaphorical, and so
free of footnotes—I secretly thought
I might win something. But he didn’t show up,
and the Chair of the Department had a pillar of mail
and a wastebasket by his leg — for two hours,
he disemboweled. Two other men were
muttering to each other out the sides of their mouths
and doing their hard har, har,
har. I cited my advisor for his
encouragement, I described the yards
of file cards, the research, but after five minutes of their
jokes and smirks, I saw they meant
to flunk me. I drew my powers together,
120 pounds of me,
40 of the pregnancy
and 7 of my baby. Two hours later,
they asked me to leave the room for an interval
and they voted: Fail, Fail, Fail,
Fail, and You Can’t Do That—
the one woman. When I lumbered back in,
our son’s sweet palate may have wrinkled up
at the taste of fear’s sour effluent—
who was polluting his waters? (Rip)
They wanted (Rip) a dissertation
absolutely new, without one
word (Rip) of this one—except
“the” was all right, and “and.” How much
time shall we give her, gentlemen? How about
—nine months? Har, har
har. My cervix bent, for a moment,
with intimate, private hurt. I said,
Thank you. I thought, if you have hurt my child,
if you have curdled my milk with that, I will find you, and I will kill you.
And at that, my son’s hair stood
on end, in the saline.

“The Defense” from Blood, Tin, Straw by Sharon Olds

I do not know if this scene is what Her’s mother imagined when she read that fledging dissertation. But she had learned that an impromptu performance of Major Barbara could not change the fact that the world has little use for firebrands or brilliant girls. Perhaps being pleased rather than enflamed was the way that Her’s mother tried to protect her child. Unfortunately, there is no way to protect a child, except to show her how to recognize danger, when to pick her battles, and that being a good little girl is the worst danger of all.

References:

Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness, by John Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., Hyperion, New York, 2005. ISBN: 0-7868-6756-6 (Quoted text: page 447)

“The Defense” from Blood, Tin, Straw by Sharon Olds, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2001. ISBN: 0-375-40742-2 (Quoted text: pages 8-9)

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If We Had Ham We Could Have Ham and Eggs, If We Had Eggs

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2008-01-17 20:32

Oh, and while I go (unfairly only for the most part) picking on Slate’s XX-Factor, and since I’m enjoying the heck out of my women’s studies course, I ought to mention that Juliet Lapidos has a post up titled “Women’s Studies, the Bane of Feminism?”

In college, I steered clear of the fringe, identity-focused courses. I figured I could learn about feminism or African-American history through conscientious professors in mainstream departments. Plus, it bothered me that gender and/or women’s studies classes were populated entirely by women and gay men, and Af Am classes almost entirely by black students. The demographics seemed like an admission of defeat…

Source: Julie Lapidos, XX-Factor

This is one of those situations where someone’s conclusion can be 100% logically correct, and even mildly agreeable, but not very helpful. (See also the impeccable but not terribly useful logic of “if we had ham we could have ham and eggs if we had eggs.”) The quibbles being that, oh, say, not all professors in mainstream departments are conscientious and not all women’s studies students (nor, for that matter, all professors) are women.

I do know that I’m getting some benefit from it, as I’ve mentioned. Although to be fair to Lapidos that might qualify as preaching to “our own.” But I wouldn’t say the surprisingly high-to-me mix of Asian, Pacific-Islander, African, Latin American, inner-city, lower-socio-economic-status, and traditional/conservative-religious women in the class necessarily count as “our own” either but they’re doing pretty well. Nor am I sure sure the other men, many of equally diverse heritage, who make up, oh, roughly 20% of the class fit the standard description either. And they’re doing pretty well too. And I, who in an only slightly different universe might have been one of those “conscientious professors in mainstream departments,” know a lot of… stuff… about women in history, politics, arts, science, and letters… but I’m still learning all kinds of stuff.

Yeah, over time, I think that having specific separate women’s studies and/or gender studies departments is a bit of a temporal coincidence. Come back in 100 years and see if, like, say, the once-new discipline of statistics, most women’s studies topics haven’t become intradepartmental rather than interdepartmental. But, for that matter, there still seem to be degree programs in statistics. So there must still be some use for separate departments and/or departmental subspecialties after all.

—-

Oh yeah, one of the cool things I learned this week: the earliest school of feminism, today known as cultural feminism but also known, sometimes derisively, as “difference feminism” or “exceptional feminism” tends to focus heavily on how women are different from men. Especially in the 19th Century, when it began, but also sometimes today, cultural feminists argued that women’s “better qualities” such as greater temperance and moral fiber made them as suited or even better suited to run things. Notice, however, that anti-feminists spend their time making near-identical arguments only with the arrows pointing the other way. By focusing on differences cultural feminists benefit everybody including men by calling out variation that, evidently, had been denied, ignored, or overlooked back when conscientious but untutored professors roamed the Earth.

And then, I learned, there’s (Classical) Liberal Feminism, which, almost opposite to cultural feminism in focus if not degree, tends to reflect upon the similarities between men and women and to agitate for equality of pay, legal standing, and political and social rights.

And yes, sometimes, like their anti-feminist counterparts, some of the more privileged and/or less-well-informed classical feminists wax about and advocate for recognition of the natural superiority of their gender — many nominally radical “rad-fems” are really cultural feminists. Nor is every liberal feminists hunky-dory either — Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse, a political conservative, is nevertheless a liberal feminist who will tirelessly fight to make sure the law makes no gender distinctions… when it forbids homeless and millionaires alike from sleeping under railroad bridges.

Anyway, you might find some cultural feminists who think patriarchy should be replaced with matriarchy, but you’re not likely to find many classical liberal feminists who do. And if you had a third hand you’d say on the other other hand real radical feminists, the branch Twisty Faster and I seem to be most drawn to, disagrees with many priorities of both cultural and classical-liberal feminism.

And the point of highlighting such contrast-y schools of feminism? You’d probably already worked this out for yourself but if you were one of those people who said you disagreed with “Teh Feminists” you’d almost certainly talking through your hat since, in fact, large groups of feminists often disagree with feminists!

Update: Just to be clear, by highlighting divergent schools of thought (cultural vs liberal) or even greater divergence between individuals within such schools (Ann Althouse vs. Renegade Evolution vs. Hillary Clinton within liberal feminism) is not intended as a criticism! And if one is going to find that much diversity outside of academia it would be a little startling if there was less diversity within academia. Furthermore, since it’s entirely possible I wasn’t clear about this earlier, with so much diversity within the topic it seems extraordinarily difficult for anyone less closed-minded than Mike Huckabee to disagree with all of either feminism or women’s studies.

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Illustrative Women's Studies Joke

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2008-01-15 19:23

Ok, so here’s a joke. It’s about the women’s studies class I’m taking. It’s quite an old joke considering how relatively new the field of Women’s Studies is. Here goes.

So there was this old hillbilly lived way back in the woods and made his living chopping firewood and selling it to the flatlanders who drove up on the weekends. His real name was Howard Jackson Oliver but everyone called him Uncle H’aird for short. Well one day Uncle H’aird rode his mule wagon into town to get a new axe since his old one had been sharpened so many times it had gone out of balance.

Well, there Uncle H’aird was looking at axes in the hardware store and a new salesman came over and said “Uncle H’aird, you still cutting firewood with an axe? Why don’t you buy one of these new chainsaws?”

Well, Uncle H’aird said he thought he did pretty good with his axe, like he’d always done, and so he didn’t think he needed any new chain saw. The salesman asked “Well how many cords of wood are you able to cut a day with one of your axes?” Uncle H’aird allowed as to how if his axe was sharp and balanced he could cut twelve to fourteen cords a day.

“Twelve cords a day?” Said the salesman, “Why if you bought a chain saw you could easily cut twenty a day!”

Well, it didn’t take long after that for Uncle H’aird to buy a chain saw, load it onto his mule wagon, and head back home up in the woods.

Two days later, though, he showed back up in town with the chainsaw on his mule wagon and he told the salesman he wanted his money back. The salesman asked why and Uncle H’aird said “Yew said I could cut twenty cords a day and I barely cut eight! I want my money back.”

“Now calm down, H’aird” says the salesman. You got to give it a little time to get used to it. You might get eight cords the first day but you just need practice. Give it a week and then we’ll talk.”

Uncle H’aird figured that sounded like there must must be some sense in it so he got back on his mule wagon and headed back up to his home in the woods.

A week later there sat the salesman and wouldn’t you know it, here comes Uncle H’aird on his mule wagon looking awful! His hair all stringy and his hand blistered and raw, his clothes in tatters and his hat stained all the way to the brim with salt from sweat. And he gets down off his mule wagon and he picks up his chain saw and he limps over to the salesman and drops it at his feet and says “Ah gave it time like you said, and I practiced, like you said, but try as I might I never was able to cut more than fourteen cords in one day and that’s just about kilt me. I want my money back and I want my old axe back.”

Well the salesman felt pretty bad but he also felt like maybe something was wrong with the chain saw so he bent over, picked it up, set the switch, checked the spark, primed the fuel, grabbed the starter cord, tightened the fuel trigger with his index finger and did a perfect drop pull.

Well the chainsaw started right up with a roar and Uncle H’aird stepped back, scared to death, and said “what’s that noise?”

Now that might not sound like a women’s studies joke… and truth be told as far as I know no one else ever has, and maybe ever will claim it is. Except me. Because every day when I come home there’s something else I’ve learned — a new concept, new vocabulary, word about research, or new-to-me ideas that keep making me want to say “what’s that noise?!?!” Because I feel like I’ve been sitting at home reading and blogging about stuff for years, and, like Uncle H’aird, I do ok — I can recognize right from wrong, I can see directions society could go in that would defuse tension, increase truth, justice, liberty, and equality, and I can think of maybe fun ways to think about it. But it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that human factors researchers and instructional designers long ago demonstrated that individuals gathering information mostly on their own tend not to choose the, um, most direct path through the material. And that’s fine, really. Seriously! But then when you do get someone to point out prominent landmarks and answer questions it really helps pull a lot of stuff together.

Update: Anyway, I happen to think I’m not alone in this — sure, it’s possible for people to figure out a lot of stuff on their own, and when you look at some of the work that, say, Betty Friedan or Germaine Greer produced with very little formal infrastructure to support them it’s not like you can’t do anything. But check out this post and conversation in comments about why the allegation that men won’t ever take hormonal contraceptives for themselves because, in effect, it would be so easy to just lie instead. Again, chances are you could separate wheat from chaff in their on your own, but a solid foundation in, oh, say, women’s studies, would give you not only critical skills (which you might get elsewhere) but also an informational infrastructure and a rich theoretical framework in which to question whether the effect of predominantly anti-feminist narratives about men and women merely enable men to behave irresponsibly or whether they actively coerce men to select dishonesty over integrity.

In other words I’m not the only man, let alone the only person, who might react with the same startled “what’s that noise” when someone actually fires up women’s studies instead of just wearing you out with how you heard you’re supposed to use any other kind of saw.

I’m starting to love that joke about Uncle H’aird.

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Oh I Forgot to Mention...

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2008-01-08 08:19

I’m going back to college for a quarter, taking among other things, a women’s studies course and intro to human sexuality. It’s 15 hours in all and, since its my first trip back to college in 22 years, it may take a day or two to adjust. :-) (Thank goodness I decided not to add calculus as well!)

Anyway, while I don’t think my overall posting rate will decline much there is going to be a bit of a dip. Ok, ok, so mostly I did the wrong 30 pages of reading last night and had to read the right 30 pages this morning. That technically puts me ahead of the curve for this afternoon but I’m grumpy about it.

Ok, ok, I’m also grumpy because even though I mostly worked on (cough) the internet for 20 of the last 22 years since graduation I, um, had a hard time figuring out the on-line interface to the class assignment areas. Why can’t kids these days just feel lucky being able to type their papers a line at a time on teletype terminals and print them on industrial-sized paper-feed printers? And not have to be able to read a yew-are-ell correctly. :-)

I’m totally psyched about my professors, though, and so far the other students seem perfect. I’m really looking forward to formalizing the stuff I’ve been picking up haphazardly all these years. I’m not going to blog specifically about school, and obviously not at all about real people in my classes. But just getting my brain stirred like this is bound to shake new stuff loose. (Example: noticing oddly off-base gender assumptions in reading that, a decade or so ago, was consciously very progressive. The content makes hitting bumps worth it but it really shows how fast things are moving.)

[Note: I’m also a week behind in responding to comments. And that’s now only a week. I’ll feel better about posting new stuff when I’m caught up with comments. I appreciate them all. Especially the nice distillation Sugar Mag, Holly, and P. Burke have been coming up with in comments on the last couple of posts. —fl]

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