Tag Archives: being the change

fighting anecdata with anecdata

08 Saturday Sep 2012

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So I’m in the middle of reading a review copy of Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men and the Rise of Women, which … with a title like that, you really can’t expect much, right? And your suspicions would be confirmed. But one of the truly annoying things she’s doing is profiling hetero relationships in which everyone is miserable.

And portraying all men as dunderheaded two-year-olds.

I HATE IT WHEN JOURNALISTS DO THIS.

You’d think, reading books like this (or, ahem, The Secret Lives of Wives) that not a single happy experience was being had in the world of hetero relations since, oh, I don’t know, V-J Day. Or possibly since women got the vote. Or maybe around the time Mary Wollstonecraft penned Vindication.

So, more or less in self-defense — or, more to the point, in defense of the many awesome non-abusive, humanly-flawed-yet-engaged-with-life men I know and love — I’ve compiled a list of men in our cohort (the “end of men” cohort, in which dudes are apparently, “obsolete”) by way of giving them all a massive shout-out for general awesomeness and, well, disproving Rosin’s hysterical claims that the world is rapidly devolving into a dystopic “matriarchy” (I swear, if she makes this claim one more time in the pages of The End I may emit a tiny shriek of despair).

Aiden is a passionate social justice activist working at the Durham County Library.

Brian, my brother, a middle school art teacher, free-lance illustrator, and graduate student, married to my sister-in-law Renee, a landscape painter.

Brian, my boss’s boyfriend, who’s the IT guy for a school, is training to be a voice actor, and moonlights as a musician.

Collin, my friend Diana’s boyfriend and all-around awesome person who works in digital archives management (and in his spare time does things like cook gourmet meals, build letterpresses, and send us cute pictures of bunnies).

Dan, a former Library Assistant at the MHS was just promoted to Assistant Reference Librarian; he enjoys cycling and soccer in his free time.

Drew has spent the last ten years working in computer programming and web design.

Eric, my friend Molly’s husband, just finished his PhD while parenting full-time and is looking for professional work (also while parenting an infant and six-year-old) alongside his wife.

Erik, Hanna’s best friend from High School, became a father earlier this year; he bartends while his wife works as an accountant for the state.

Henry works in IT and in his spare time enjoys hiking and traveling with his librarian wife.

Jeremy, my former colleague at the MHS, moved on to a position at LibraryThing and handles user communications and outreach, as well as spear-heading their project cataloging famous peoples’ historical libraries.

After completing his library science degree, Jim is working as a documentary editor and considering renewing his dedication of music.

My dear friend Joseph is a plant breeder who’s just sent his first book to press and completed the first round of paperwork to begin nation-wide trials for an ornamental corn hybrid. He’s also thinking about fostering rescue kittens when he finishes the process of buying a house.

Josh, Hanna’s acupuncturist, also teaches yoga and meditation while his fiancee works in a hospital.

Patrick, husband of Bethany, is completing a PhD in Philosophy and Mathematics, after extensive graduate work in both the US and UK.

Nate currently works at CostCo while pursuing documentary film-making; his wife teaches English and is completing her first YA novel.

I’m sure I’ve left someone out, so … feel free to fill in the gaps in comments! Please. And I promise a more coherent review of Rosin’s work once I’ve actually had the patience to finish it.

in which I write letters: dear alma mater … again

06 Thursday Sep 2012

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Diane De Young
Associate Director of the Hope Fund
Hope College
PO Box 9000
Holland, MI 49424-9000

4 September 2012 

Dear Ms. De Young,

Thank you for your recent letter alerting me to the upcoming Hope College Phonathon. I am writing to explain why I will not be contributing to the campaign; you are welcome to share my reasons with whomever might benefit from this information. 

As I’m sure your records indicate, I attended Hope College from 1998-2005, graduating with a BA in Women’s Studies and History (double major). During my seven years at Hope, I formed lasting relationships with my faculty mentors and received what I would consider a superior college education. While at Hope, I benefited from merit and need-based scholarships, as well as the tuition benefit awarded to children of Hope College employees (my father is Mark Cook, director of the Hope-Geneva Bookstore). The quality of my Hope College experience was part of what enabled me to make the most of my graduate education at Simmons College, where I completed an MA in History and an MS in Library Science. Today, I serve as the Reference Librarian at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and this past March I had the rewarding experience of returning to Hope College as a guest speaker at the Women’s Studies Celebration. I was recently asked to provide a letter of support for Dr. Jeanne Petit as she is considered for promotion to the rank of Full Professor, a request it was my pleasure to fulfill.

However, as a woman who will shortly be marrying my girlfriend of the past three years here in Massachusetts, I am a Hope College alumni who feels unwelcome and unloved by the institution as a whole. In April 2010, as the Board of Trustees was revisiting their support of the current Institutional Statement on Homosexuality, I wrote to then-Chairperson Joel Bowens and explained that until Hope College alters its position on human sexuality to be affirming of all a full range of human orientations, identities, and desires, I will not support the college financially. I cannot in good conscience send money to an institution that does not recognize the legitimacy of my primary relationship. I will speak up whenever given the opportunity — such as during fundraising campaigns — against the actions and words of the Board, and of Hope as an institution, that continue to create a hostile environment for faculty, staff, students, and alumni who are not straight or do not believe that non-straight sexuality is immoral.

I will continue to speak highly of the faculty who mentored me, and provide what support I can to individuals and programs that are welcoming and affirming to all (such as the Women’s Studies program). Yet I will not be participating in the Phonathon, in the Hope Fund, or any other fundraising campaigns until Hope College as an institution recognizes and affirms the lives of those of us who find joy and meaning in same-sex relationships.

I look forward to watching Hope’s progress toward a more inclusive future, and hope that someday I will be able to respond to your requests without reservation.

Sincerely,

Anna

Anna J. Cook (’05)
# Xxxxxxx Xx. Apt #
Xxxxxxx, MA
02134

booknotes: the radical doula guide

21 Tuesday Aug 2012

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I don’t actually remember how I first happened upon Miriam Zoila Perez’ blog Radical Doula, but it must have been fairly early on in the site’s existence since she and I have been active in the feminist blogosphere for about the same amount of time (since 2007). I’ve been a virtual observer/admirer as Miriam has taken her radical doula journalism from its earliest personal musings to a much more high-profile presence in such spaces as Feministing and RhRealityCheck — although I still have particular place in my heart for her earliest, most personal, internet home.

It’s with a great deal of affection and feminist pride, then, that I’ve followed updates these past few months concerning Miriam’s first book: The Radical Doula Guide: A Political Primer (self-published, 2012). I was able to support its creation in a modest way by contributing to the kickstarter campaign at IndieGoGo which raised over $4,000 in seed money for the project, and as a thank you gift for that contribution I received an advance review copy of the finished publication in the mail last week.

\o/

And it did not disappoint. Miriam’s 52-page “political primer” discusses the political nature of what she terms “full spectrum pregnancy and childbirth support” — a concept that covers not only childbirth and postpartum doula work, but also abortion and miscarriage doula care, a relatively new service some trained doulas are offering. There are books and training workshops available for learning doula techniques, and The Radical Doula Guide doesn’t seek to replicate those resources. Instead, Miriam offers some reflections on how doula work intersects with political systems: “a starting point to understanding the social justice issues that interface with doula and birth activism” (4).

In four brief sections, Miriam acts as a tour guide through different aspects of full-spectrum doula care and brief analyses of three broad categories of intersection between pregnancy and politics: “bodies” (race, gender, sexual orientation, size, age, and HIV/AIDS), “systems” (immigration and incarceration), and “power” (class and intimate violence/abuse). Using these broad categories with the more familiar nodes of inequality as sub-categories draws our attention back from specific issues to think in more expansive terms about the ways our bodies and lives are policed within society in both informal and formal ways. And specifically, how those constraints shape the experience of pregnancy and parenting.

Miriam is particularly eloquent on the difference between politics and personal agendas. For as she points out, to practice as a doula means leaving one’s own agenda at the door — but it should not mean leaving behind one’s mindfulness of how political circumstances shape the experience of the pregnant person you’re working with. You may believe, for example, that having a C-section is unnecessary while the person you’re supporting wishes to have one. It’s not your job to convince the pregnant person not to have a Cesarean — but it is appropriate to suggest resources for informed decision-making (especially if you’re concerned about pushy medical staff).

This guide would be a great starting point for further discussion in a reading group or classroom setting; I definitely felt like the brevity — a definite strength in many respects — bordered on too brief at times. I imagine that folks new to social justice terms and concepts, or skeptics who need convincing that these issues matter might be frustrated. However, that is not Miriam’s main audience. As a “primer” pointing outward to further exploration, The Radical Doula Guide is lovingly crafted and inspirational. It’s definitely a must-have for any (personal or institutional) collection with a focus on reproductive justice issues.

The Radical Doula Guide is available to order online at WePay for $12.00 per copy (and discounted rates for orders of 10+).

booknotes: confronting postmaternal thinking

31 Tuesday Jul 2012

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I’ve been threatening to write a review of Julie Stephens’ Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care (Columbia University Press, 2012) for over a month now but for some reason my thoughts will not gel. It’s a slim book that is trying to do lots of cultural work, pulling together threads of philosophy, political science, history, memory studies, feminism, and ethics. I had very intense reactions while I was reading it, but those reactions feel … half-digested still. In another six months or a year I may have to go back and give it another pass. A second reading might help clarify my reactions. In the meantime, here are some of my initial impressions and reactions.

  • As I said in my review of Love the Sin, Julie Stephens, in Postmaternal, is likewise critiquing our neoliberal conception of who gets to be a citizen, and who is a good citizen. She is particularly interested in the way care-giving and caregivers are tolerated only insofar as they manage to fit the norm of a citizen-worker. For example, she observes that workplace concessions to working parents — and especially working mothers — are often designed to streamline women’s return to full capacity as workers, to make invisible their care-giving responsibilities, rather than restructuring work and the workplace to accommodate care-giving cycles in family life. Her reflections on the role of  “worker” and the role of “mother” experience unstable moral and market values reminded me of Katha Pollitt’s reflections on how “stay at home mom” and “welfare queen” are two class-based conceptions of the same care-giving responsibilities, dependent on economic resources. Ultimately, care-giving in our society is an activity one only gets to perform if either a) it’s a monetized activity, or b) one’s obligations as a worker-citizen are met by one’s self or a proxy (e.g. husband). 
  • Stephens has made a deliberate choice to focus on care-giving as “women’s work,” a position that reminded me of the way in which Carol Gilliganrecognizes care and empathy as universal human abilities that have, historically, fallen to women in patriarchal culture. I was intensely uncomfortable with this choice — something I’d like to think about more deeply. While I understand her decision not to erase the way our culture genders care-giving, I’m less comfortable with the way respect for historically-feminine care-giving to an emphasis on gender difference. For example, she argues at one point that “the only way to address this failure [of neoliberal societies to account for the necessity of care] would be to reinvigorate the strands of feminism that are attuned to gender difference” (137). I can’t underscore enough how uncomfortable this makes me, and I think there are ways to address the erasure of the bodily aspects of care (e.g. breastfeeding, pregnancy and childbirth) Stephens is concerned about without gender essentialism — a type of feminism I would really rather not see revivified. Which brings me to my next point:
  • In writing about possible policy- and personal-level solutions to the modern-day marginalization of care — solutions that do not rely on the gender binary — I wish Stephens had referenced more queer activists and theorists, such as legal scholar Nancy Polikoff, whose work moved beyond the theoretical to lay out very concrete suggestions about how law and public policy could support and respect networks of care. And birth activist Miriam Perez, whose recent piece on trans birth parents suggests ways to take into account the embodied aspects of nurture without falling back on binary notions of gender.
  • I found Stephens’ use of oral history and memory studies literature an intriguing approach. In what I think is one of the strongest aspects of her analysis, Stephens examines the way mid-twentieth-century feminist activism around maternal and care-giving activities has been erased from cultural memory. She uses oral histories with “second wave” feminists as a way to recover these narratives and explore how their activism was never solely about getting ahead in a man’s world and rejecting the mother/motherhood/maternalism (as backlash culture has often argued). “[My] interviews [with “second wave” feminists] depart from culturally prevailing assumptions about work-centered feminism. Unexpectedly irreverent attitudes toward paid work are expressed,” she writes (91). I wish she had lingered a bit more on this relationship between feminist activism and how feminist activists remember their own life choices (and imagine the life choices of previous generations).
  • Building on these oral histories and the notion of a  forgotten politics of the maternal, Stephens argues that non-market relationships and care-giving are primary sites of moral and ethical development and action. Postmaternal is, in part, a call for neoliberal Western cultures (Stephens is Australian, and her sources are primarily Australian and American) to re-assert non-market values into political culture, reclaiming care as a non-marginal, legitimate activity even if it is not contributing to the national economy. As she writes,

“What a culture chooses to remember and forget has decidedly political character. In the deep discomfort surrounding the maternal in feminist reminiscence, it is possible to see a glimpse of an alternative politics where human dependency and vulnerability are imagined as the primary connection between people, not market performance” (70).

This assertion of an “alternative politics where human dependency and vulnerability are imagined as the primary connection between people,” and the connection Stephens draws between that political imagination and feminist activism is the strongest part of her argument. In revisiting/revising feminist collective memory to re-center a politics of care (which has always been present, but often actively forgotten) is what I would consider to be vitally-important work. And I hope to see her build on this aspect of her thesis — while perhaps letting go some of her reliance on gender essentialism as the path to that politics of connectivity.

I don’t think gender essentialism needed. I think we can honor the embodied experience of persons, even birth-and breast feeeding parents, without linking embodiment and the bodily aspects of care to femaleness and womanhood — at least in any more than an historical sense. I don’t believe there is anything wrong with acknowledging the historically-feminine nature of caregiving; I do believe there is something harmful about basing present-day efforts to re-center care on gendered notions of women’s particular abilities and priorities. I am hoping that we can use Postmaternal as a building block toward a more inclusive, more caring future — without relying on beliefs about gendered bodies and identities that have troubled our past.

All in all, I’m really glad I read Stephens provocative book and I’m looking forward to discussing it with friends — I’ve already promised to lend my copy to Molly (of first the egg) and I’m looking forward to what she has to say after reading it!

rambling thoughts on identity, relationships, and fan fiction

28 Thursday Jun 2012

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warning: navel-gazing ahead!

For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we, as a culture, conceptualize identity — particularly sexuality as part of identity — and how it relates to our real-life experiences in relationships: how our understandings of self shape the possibilities we see for relationships, how relationship experience shapes our notions of identity, and what stories we tell each other about how sexual identity and relationship inform one another.

These aren’t new thoughts for me, but being engaged to Hanna — planning our marriage, talking to other people about the cultural and personal meanings of marriage — brings me back once again to the twin topics of identity and relationship. Being engaged — actively defining our relationship to the outside world — also prompts me to notice more keenly the stories we tell, as a culture, about sexual identity and relationships. In this instance, the way in which sexual identity and relationships are theorized in erotic fan fiction (which, many of you know, I read regularly and passionately).

There’s a lot of fic out there in which character X discovers they are attracted to character Y who is of the gender they didn’t think they had the hots for and ohmygod identity crisis ensues! This is a plot/relationship narrative that — just like any other dramatic tension — can be handled really well or handled really poorly. But I’m less interested in the deftness, in this instance, than I am in the assumption that experiencing desire for someone of an unexpected [insert identity characteristic here] stops the desiring character in their tracks because their feelings of attraction don’t match up with their self-understanding.

On the one hand, I completely understand that sometimes, falling in love “against type” so to speak precipitates re-evaluation of who you thought you were or what it is you understand yourself to desire. I won’t lie: falling in love with Hanna required (or at least prompted) me to think more seriously than I had before about how my sexuality worked. I’ve written about this in the past (see here, here, and here). Sexuality is one thing in the singular, another thing in the relational.

So, yeah, there was adjustment.

But here’s the thing that I’ve been thinking about lately: my sexual identity in the abstract was most urgently important before Hanna and I were actually in a relationship. I worried about how to convince her with evidence that no, really, I thought she was hot. I worried about what might count as evidence of same-sex desires in the past (which, in turn, could be brought forth in support of a pattern into which Hanna-desires fit neatly, rather than being the exception to the rule). I worried about whether I was worrying too much about marshaling the evidence and therefore reading back into my personal history sexualized feelings that hadn’t been there at the time (“did I like her, or like- like her?”).

Basically, I worried a lot.

There was massive angst.

I wrote my own life into an angsty, identity-crisis fic to which, appropriately enough, there was ultimately a solution in the form of sexytimes.*

Here’s the “on the other hand” thing, though. The moment — and I’m talking the moment — we touched in a way that undeniably conveyed to each other “I want to get in your pants as quickly as possible”?

Worry totally gone.

In that moment, I had absolutely all the evidence I needed that whatever-and-whoever-the-hell-else I might be interested? I was interested in Hanna.

End of story.

Well, okay, not totally end of story. ‘Cause within that story I got to think a lot about what sex meant to me, and what I enjoyed, under what circumstances, the space between fantasy and real-world interaction, all of that. It’s an ongoing conversation. And a really hot one.

(Have I mentioned intellectual stimulation is a turn-on for me?)

But the question of identity became kinda … irrelevant. Actually, super-irrelevant. Because no matter what I chose to identify as, whatever I called myself, in whatever contexts I named myself, in practice I was Hanna-sexual. As in, sexually attracted to Hanna. All the other attractions I may or may not have moved into the realm of “theoretically interesting but not that practically relevant.”

Because I could have said I was doorsexual and still when I put my hands on Hanna I would have wanted her.

And in my book, experiential evidence trumps theory every time.

So when I read these fics in which character X is enjoying sex with character Y — and I mean seriously enjoying sex — yet simultaneously freaking out because this isn’t sex they should be enjoying? I think about the issues we’ve created for ourselves by imagining that sexuality and sexual identity is the quantifiable, identifiable, constant thing.

That we can, that we should, understand what we want prior to actually having it, prior to coming across it in the wild, this beautiful, breath-taking being in our path. Prior to knowing and being known, in that moment of intimacy, of home-coming (or, conversely, that moment of escape-from-the-body, of clarifying distance; sex is, after all, what we make and want of it).

What I’m saying is: Aren’t we simply what we are?

And if we stumble into love, into desire, into oh god you feel amazing under my hands and please never stop touching me there does it really matter so frickin’ much to our notion of the self whether or not the body, the person, in question is the same shape as the last body, the last person, who felt this way under, within, around us?

At what point in our history did the body of others become so central to the constitution of ourselves? Because that’s how the think of sexual identity these days — it’s about the self, yes, but it’s about the self in relation to the bodies that one finds desirable. It constitutes the self in some pretty fundamental ways but pre-emptively narrowing who we imagine ourselves capable of getting down and dirty with.

As I type this, my internal antagonists are arguing with the words on the page, pointing out how much all of this is colored by my subjective experience of fluid, person-centered sexual attractions, and my claustrophobic reaction to closing doors of possibility when there’s no imminent need to do so. So obviously this is only my own particular reaction and all, but really … why do we make it so difficult for ourselves?

Wouldn’t it just be easier if instead of an existential crisis, falling in love with an unexpected person was more like, “Oh, you mean I like this too? That’s cool.”

*Someday, maybe I’ll write it into an actual smutty fic. Hanna and I keep threatening to do this in turns, but so far neither of us has made the time to follow through and do it.

welcome simon!

12 Saturday May 2012

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In the wee hours of the morning, my friend Molly — after long hours of labor — gave birth to her second child, whom she, her husband Eric, and son Noah have given the name Simon.

via

Here at our house we kept Molly, Eric, Noah, the home-birth team, and as-yet-unnamed Simon in our thoughts throughout yesterday. The candle burned strong and bright from the moment I heard from Molly her labor had commenced until right about the time Simon was born.

As I said on Twitter this morning:

welcome to the strange and wonderful world, simon child of molly and eric, sibling of noah. always look for the helpers – we’ll be there!

booknotes: families apart

26 Thursday Apr 2012

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The University of Minnesota Press was kind enough to send me a review copy of Geraldine Pratt’s fascinating study of migrant domestic workers and their families who have traveled from the Philippines to Canada as part of Canada’s Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP). Families Apart: Migrant Mothers and the Conflicts of Labor and Love (University of Minnesota, 2012) is the result of Pratt’s collaboration with the Philippine Women Centre of British Columbia. With the assistance of the PWC, Pratt identified and interviewed twenty-seven families: mothers (the primary LCP participants), children, and sometimes partners, who have emigrated to Canada in hopes of economic and social mobility. Families Apart draws on these interviews, with analysis and reference to the relevant bodies of literature, to explore and theorize the long-term effects of the LCP on family relationships.

I came at this book from several perspectives: that of a former care provider (though in very different circumstances from those of the LCP participants), that of a family member, that of a feminist, and that of an oral historian. I want to talk briefly about each of these lenses through which I considered Pratt’s work, and suggest that her research is of potential worth to those with a personal, as well as academic and political, interest in the intersection of family with wage-work and caregiving labor.

Pratt overtly encourages self-reflection in her readers, many of whom she presumes will be white, middle-class academics like herself, whose experience of parenting and family life is, materially speaking, worlds apart from the experience of the participants in her research interviews. Throughout Families Apart, she tries to break down the barriers to empathy and suggest that cross-class, cross-cultural experience of familial bonds of affection and care can help those outside the LCP program understand the trauma of separation and conflicting responsibilities and desires expressed by those who are (or have) lived through it. Pratt juxtaposes, for example, images of her own child (with his permission) and testimony from immigrant children recalling the trauma of their mothers’ departure. Through such attempts at self-conscious narrative voice, Pratt pushes us not to imagine the families whom she interviewed as “others” whose emotional attachments are somehow qualitatively different from our own due to race, class, or culture. Instead, she argues, the pain of long-distance parenting for both adults and children is a point of connection.

This thread of Pratt’s book prompted me to think about how our culture values separation and togetherness in family life. I read Families Apart long before the campaign-related kerfluffle over how parenting and work are valued in our society, but Katha Pollitt’s ever-articulate analysis of the Ann Romney/Hilary Rosen dust-up could be read alongside Pratt’s trans-national analysis as an example of how the relative value of wage-work and family care shifts in relation to social status:

The difference between a stay-home mother and a welfare mother is money and a wedding ring. Unlike any other kind of labor I can think of, domestic labor is productive or not, depending on who performs it. For a college-educated married woman, it is the most valuable thing she could possibly do, totally off the scale of human endeavor. What is curing malaria compared with raising a couple of Ivy Leaguers? For these women, being supported by a man is good—the one exception to our American creed of self-reliance. Taking paid work, after all, poses all sorts of risks to the kids. (Watch out, though, ladies: if you expect the father of your children to underwrite your homemaking after divorce, you go straight from saint to gold-digger.) But for a low-income single woman, forgoing a job to raise children is an evasion of responsibility, which is to marry and/or support herself. For her children, staying home sets a bad example, breeding the next generation of criminals and layabouts.

Substitute “welfare mother” with “LCP worker” and this equation of worth applies. Women participating in the LCP program are caught in a double-bind of judgment. Expected to give up their personal and family lives in order to care around-the-clock for another family’s children (traveling halfway around the globe to do so, often not seeing their own children for years at a time), they are judged by their families and society at large for abandoning their children. Their often-crucial financial support for the family back home often comes at the price of losing their partner and the alienation of their children. Pratt skilfully navigates the gendered dimensions of the LCP program, exploring the differing expectations of maternal and paternal care while not ignoring the real psychic pain for all concerned when a parent is absent for years of a child’s life.

Families Apart echoed certain themes explored in Schalet’s Not Under My Roof which I read shortly before Pratt’s study. I’d argue that both books take a cross-cultural look at how we constitute families and value different types of families (and different types of family members) unequally. Notions of “good” and “bad” mothering (or fathering), what is a family unit deserving of respect, how young people should behave in relation to their parents — who is the proper person, parent or otherwise, to care for a child and help them grow into an adult who can participate meaningfully as a grown-up person in society.

Finally, as a practitioner of oral history, I really appreciated the sections of Pratt’s book where she stepped back to examine the process by which she and the PWC made the materials collected during research accessible in a variety of venues: through a multi-media exhibition, in theatre performance featuring monologues crafted from the interviews, in ongoing collaboration with the families whose stories Families Apart documents and synthesizes. Researchers within the social sciences and humanities whose research intersects with human lives are engaged in an ongoing discussion about the ethics of such work, and how to document without exploitation. I believe that Pratt’s work is a valuable contribution to that professional conversation. While she herself is the first to argue that the social inequality between herself and the LCP women she collaborated with cannot be erased or overcome by this work alone, I’d argue that her example is a useful one for all those planning future collaborative projects to examine and learn from.

Anyone who wants the chance to think anew about how we value families (and what families we value) in our North American culture of inequality should definitely check out this book.

Cross-posted at The Pursuit of Harpyness.

girl talk 2011 [web video]

19 Thursday Apr 2012

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I meant to get a book review up today, but it’s been one of those weeks. So here, instead, is a six minute introduction to Girl Talk 2011, the spoken word event that seeks to bring together queer cis and trans women in dialogue (via Whipping Girl).

In their own words:

Queer cisgender women and queer transgender women are allies, friends, support systems, lovers, and partners to each other. Girl Talk is a spoken word show fostering and promoting dialogue about these relationships.

You can check out the full playlist at YouTube.

"have a moment for gay rights?"

12 Thursday Apr 2012

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via ACLU

Last week outside Trader Joe’s I was accosted by charity muggers from the ACLU. 

This happens regularly in Coolidge Corner and I generally ignore them across the board. I make it a rule not to support any organization via street harassment, even if they’re a group with a mission I support. (And yes, I have, in fact, been a card-carrying member of the ACLU when personal finances allow).

But anyway. Last Wednesday was the day the federal appeals court in Boston heard oral arguments against the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). And the chipper young woman in the ACLU vest was asking passers-by if they had “a moment for gay rights?” so I thought perhaps they had some sort of petition to sign vis a vis the whole DOMA-is-stupid-not-to-mention-unconstitutional thing. So after the internal debate while grocery shopping (“you should just suck it up, self, and be a good citizen and a social person for once”) I actually stopped on my way out of the store and volunteered to hear what she was about.

“So do you have a petition you want me to sign or something?” I asked.

She seemed surprised I was even stopping, but gathered herself together and launched into what the ACLU was about, as an organization, and specifically some of the things they were doing to support queer folks who’d been discriminated against because of their sexuality. It turned out she didn’t have any sort of petition to sign, but was just trawling for donations.

“I’m asking people to make a donation of $29 dollars today for each of the twenty-nine states where it’s legal to discriminate against someone due to their sexual orientation!” she wrapped up with a note of breathless relief in her voice that I’d actually let her finish a thought.

“Well, I don’t give out my financial information on the street,” I tried to break it to her gently, “But I’ll definitely keep you guys in mind.”

“But you’re behind what we stand for, right?” She asked, anxiously.

“Um –sure!” I said, shook her hand politely, and headed off down the street.

It took me most of the walk home to realize what was the most frustrating and surreal part of the interaction. It was that the young woman in question was pitching her persuasive skills at someone she presumed to be straight. Did I stand for “gay rights”? Well, yeah, actually, I’m pretty into having equal civil rights. The whole reason I’d stopped to speak with her in the first place was that I’d been thinking about DOMA that day. Because the fate of the Defense of Marriage Act has a direct effect on my life. Because Hanna and I are talking about getting married and even though we can do that perfectly legally here in the state of Massachusetts, as far as the federal government is concerned (taxes, social security benefits, etc.) we won’t be a family unit.

So I’m not behind the idea of “gay rights” as this abstract great-good-thing that all card-carrying members of the ACLU should, you know, be in support of because it’s the right thing to do. (Though I’m behind it for that reason too). I’m actually in support of it because it’s about my equality of personhood before the law.


I’m not pissed at the young woman I spoke with (well, not much). She’s getting paid probably minimum wage (if she’s getting paid at all) to stand on the pavement and harass people at rush hour for what is probably an incredibly, incredibly low rate of return. And I’m sure whatever job training she received was cursory at best.

But I do find it note-worthy that the ACLU spiel is constructed in such a way that assumes the person to whom the spiel is pitched is outside the group of interest. I think I would have been less irritated by the encounter if I’d been told, “Here’s what we’re doing to support your right to equal protection under the law, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.” If you’re standing on a street corner flagging people down, you can’t actually tell whether they’re gay or lesbian, bi or poly, trans, genderqueer, or otherwise. Whether their sexual practices put them at risk of arrest, whether they’re afraid to us public restrooms, or whether they’ve got two partners waiting at home, only one of whom they could legally marry — even in the state of Massachusetts.

So a tip to all you charity muggers out there? Keep in mind when you ask the question, “Are you for gay rights?” The chances are at least one in ten (more of you count family members of queer folks who identify as straight) that the person you’re talking to isn’t a supporter of gay rights ’cause it’s a trendy liberal cause, but because it actually has an effect on their quality of life.

I’d say, just assume everyone’s queer until proven otherwise. It might actually up your success rate.

Cross-posted at The Pursuit of Harpyness.

why I think porn can be positive

25 Saturday Feb 2012

Posted by in think pieces

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So I realized, after writing three mammoth posts about how wrong I think Gail Dines is regarding the inherently alienating nature of pornography, that I hadn’t actually spent a lot of time talking about why I find her analysis troubling. I talked in general terms about the sexual subcultures and sexually-explicit materials she was choosing to ignore. But I didn’t talk about why I think sexually-explicit fiction and images can be enriching rather than soul- and society-destroying (as Dines understands them to be).

So this is the post where I talk about why I read and write porn.

Back in the fall, I wrote about the pleasure of porn over at The Pursuit of Harpyness in a book review of the anthology Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica. And to open this post, I want to quote from a couple of passages in that review. Because they pretty much get at the heart of why I think it’s important — vital even! — to represent sexuality and sexual activities in our material culture.

There’s no simple answer to the question: “What am I looking for in porn?” At least, no simple answer for me. Sometimes, I’m looking for erotica that tells me stories about pleasure wholly unlike anything I would ever want in real life: dom/sub relationships, bondage, sensory deprivation, pain. In real life nothing turns me off faster than feeling trapped and out of control of my bodily experience; in erotica few things turn me on more quickly or reliably. Yet catch me on the wrong day and a story about BDSM is going to make me feel claustrophobic — and what I want more than anything is an established relationship, early morning kissing fic in which (as Hanna and I like to put it) “everything is gay and nothing hurts.”

… The joy of knowing and being known. This is my current answer to the question of “why erotica?” I’ve realized that my favorite stories — trappings aside — hinge on that moment of radical acceptance when two (or more) people become, metaphorically and actually, naked before one another — and all of the terror of rejection or fetishization, of being judged and found wanting, washes away in tenderness. Whether it’s an anonymous fuck or a thirty-year relationship, whether being known means being suspended in mid-air and spanked or demands languorous love-making at dawn (or both!), relational sex involves stripping ourselves bare, making ourselves vulnerable, being brave enough to expose our humanity in the presence of someone(s)-not-us.

You can read the whole thing over at Harpyness.

Our culture has an impoverished vocabulary for pleasure and joy. It’s true that we also struggle to put unspeakable pain and grief into words — and people have argued, in fact, that certain types of trauma are literally beyond the act of speech, that is beyond the ability to communicate, to connect, to understand. Due to some personal experiences in my teen years, I did a lot of thinking about the language of trauma and grief and how creative acts, how the creation of art, can help translate the unspeakable into (forever imperfect) speech.

And all of that was incredibly important, and needful. But eventually I noticed something equally troubling — and that was our similar struggle to put unspeakable pleasure and joy into words. What I find almost more troubling, in fact, is the way in which our inability to articulate love, connection, and ecstasy, doesn’t get the same attention as our struggle to articulate the pain, rage, loss, and cruelty. We privilege suffering in artistic expression, while trivializing joy. Yeah, I know this is an over-generalization, and I’m not out to play oppression olympics: both pleasure and pain are fundamental experiences of being human, and both deserve our attention. But since I first started noticing our discomfort with speaking of pleasure and love, I’ve been wondering about the discomfort and its cause. Why are positive experiences somehow less captivating to our cultural imagination than trauma? Is it simply a collective desire to process the fact we’re all walking wounded? Is it that joy and pleasure seem self-evident while grief and pain demand explanation? Do we resent the evidence of other peoples’ pleasure, while seeking solace in other peoples’ pain? Or is there something more self-punishing going on — guilt and shame over experiencing functional relationships, embodiment, contentment, grace?

I realize at this point you probably think I’ve strayed from the topic of porn. But bear with me. Because, see, I’ve been thinking these past two weeks about this moment in the porn debate where Gail Dines, attempting to locate the blame for sexual violence in sexually-explicit material culture, said, “When men become murderers and rapists and bachelors you are compelled to look to the culture for understanding unless you want to go down the hopeless route of believing that men are born wrong” (emphasis mine).

“And bachelors.” In the same breath as “murderers and rapists.”

Keep in mind that I’m coming at the notion of porn as a genre expressing the full range of human potential when it comes to sex. So obviously, yes. There’s going to be pornographic material out there I find troubling. There’s a lot of crap in the culture at large I find troubling. But I think that one passage tells me what a yawning chasm exists between how I think about the possibilities pornography represents and what Dines imagines when she hears the word “porn.” Basically, she thinks that the people who engage with erotica are people who have failed. She understands them as alienated beings, perhaps reaching for human connection but in ways that are fundamentally destructive to creating and maintaining that connection.

She thinks the language we have for sex is the language of violence and alienation. She thinks the only language for sex we have is the language of trauma.

And on that slim spit of land where Gail Dines and I actually agree? If that actually is the vocabulary of sex that Dines has at her disposal? I also think that’s a pretty shit state of affairs.

So I read (and write) porn because I don’t want our vocabulary of intimacy to be limited to loneliness and destruction. 

I read (and write) porn because in my experience, erotica is where people are willing to get naked.  They get naked about what makes them feel connected. They get naked about what it feels like to be a body, grounded in the sensations of touch, taste, hearing, and smell. They get naked about pain and pleasure, and the delicate line that wavers between the two. They get naked about desire, love, want, about what makes us brave enough to open ourselves others, emotionally, physically, what allows us to trust. They get naked about the small details of another person’s being-in-the-world that break your heart.

Sure, there’s shit porn out there. Just like there’s shit detective fiction, and shit made-for-television SyFy original movies. But the best porn? The stuff I’ve discovered and go back to again and again? Yeah, it totally makes me wet in the knickers. Yeah, it makes me hot and cold and so turned on I can’t breathe. Sometimes it also makes me weep for what it struggles to say about connection and disconnection, about feeling lost and coming home. It’s a whole universe of visual and verbal solutions to the struggle we have, in our collective culture, talking about intimacy, vulnerability, nakedness, humanity, and love.

We laugh, as writers of fan fiction, about the tropes and the memes and the win-every-time formulas for getting each pairing together. But at the end of the day, I’m always bowled over by the specificity of another person’s vocabulary for lust and love. Even if it’s not my own, even if it’s the last thing I’m ever going to think is hot, it’s a pleasure to know what other people find pleasurable. Read fan fiction long enough and — far from the commercialized, plasticized, one-size-fits-all Gail Dines imagines to be our only shared vocabulary for sex these days — you discover even in the bad stuff there’s details that will expand your world.

The erotica I read actually works in direct opposition to the messages of sameness Dines believes porn, as a genre, propagates.* The porn I read and view tells me over and over again: Someone out there finds that sexy. Far from making me judge everyone I see by some corporate definition of “sexy,” pornographic materials have opened me up to a world in which virtually everything is sexy to someone. A world in which, as I walk down the street, I can feel myself being less judgmental of peoples’ bodies, less worried for them that they’ll experience rejection — because I know, somewhere out there, there’s someone who sees them as beautiful.

My engagement with erotica is deeply, deeply informed by my feminism and my spiritual practice. I realize that I bring myself to pornographic materials and their potential just as much as Gail Dines does. What I hope, though, is that this sort of feminist, lovingkindness-informed approach to pornography and sexual discourse can begin to offer the anti-pornography folks a new vision for an ideal world. One that isn’t predicated on the eradication of porn but on the creation of awesome porn. One that’s predicated on generating a rich vocabulary of love and lust, of sex and intimacy, of fucking and bondage, of a little pain with your pleasure (if that’s the way you like it), and sexual, sensual variety. As a writer and reader of smutty stories, I’m proud to be involved in co-creating that future.

As a writer and reader of smutty stories, I think that future is a helluva lot closer to now than Gail Dines seems to think.

*Mainstream porn does, often, reify these notions of sexy sameness. As researcher Anne Sabo recently pointed out at her New Porn By Women blog, pornography conveys cultural messages both positive and negative, as does all media. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there is much about the mainstream conception of human sexuality, on the political left as well as on the political right, that I find shamefully lacking. But porn as a medium can assist us in insisting on the truth of human sexual variety. We can use it, are using it, to set the record straight (er … queer?).