Tag Archives: children

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.

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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!

maurice sendak: first memories

08 Tuesday May 2012

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When I got to work this morning, my Google Reader was rapidly filling with blog posts about the death of author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, at the age of 83.

I don’t have any big thoughts about Sendak and his the power for good his work was in the world, so instead I thought I’d share with you a couple of Sendak books that aren’t as well known and are, in fact, two of his works I remember best from early childhood.

Before I was born, my parents adopted a golden retriever named Satch (after jazz musician Louis Armstrong, whose nickname was “Satchmo”). This was one of the books they had in their collection of dog care manuals, and I remember really loving the comic-strip layout, as well as the adorable and mischievous pup.

This lushly-illustrated story with text by Charlotte Zolotow and illustrations by Sendak relates the quest of a child to find the perfect gift for her mother. I remember Mr. Rabbit feeling slightly threatening, even though he’s kind and helpful, perhaps because he is more adult-sized in the illustrations than child-sized. Yet overall, it’s a quiet low-key story with a sweet resolution, and a rhythmic feeling to it that was incredibly soothing when I was small.

Just looking over Sendak’s bibliography of works reminds me how much of my childhood library was touched by his work. So thanks, man, for making my world that much more vivid and Truthful.

Cross-posted at the corner of your eye.

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.

booknotes: not under my roof

17 Tuesday Apr 2012

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9780226736198Ever since I heard about Amy Schalet’s research and her forthcoming book, Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (University of Chicago Press, 2011), I’ve been eagerly waiting to get my hands on a copy. Thus, when Not Under My Roof came out earlier this winter, I had ordered it from Amazon and read it before the month of February was out.

And I’ve been waiting ever since then for inspiration to strike vis a vis how to review the book. I’m not exactly sure why. It’s got a whole host of things that usually cause an explosion of thoughts and words in my head: human sexuality, cross-cultural analysis, discussion of cross-generational family relationships, overall encouragement to re-examine our historical-cultural assumptions that a particular set of events or circumstances (in this case coming of age and emerging adult sexuality) just is a certain way. If you want me to experience the scholarly equivalent of an orgasm, throw an articulate article or book in my direction that suggests some naturalized assumptions about sex or gender are actually historically contingent. Not Under My Roof has all the above covered, in spades.

But mostly, it made me incredibly sad. Sad because the mainstream culture of the United States — as well as the institutions and state apparatus that support/are supported by that culture — is failing us abysmally when it comes to parent-child relationships and the incorporation of sexuality into family life and society. This isn’t news, but it’s still kinda hard to have a book-length reminder of how badly we fail at this. Schalet’s research looks at the negotiations between parents and teenage children over sexual activity and relationships in the United States and the Netherlands. My marginalia, particularly in the U.S. sections, consisted of a lot of “so sad!” and “key disconnect” and sad faced emoticons.

Schalet, a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, conducted her research in the U.S. and the Netherlands (where she had spent part of her childhood) during the mid-to-late 1990s. She conducted qualitative interviews parents and their adolescent children in a number of different suburban and urban locations in both countries, focusing on white, middle-class families as her research sample. While she acknowledges the limitations of her research population, she argues that these middle-class families are also a key demographic in the development and maintenance of cultural norms.

What she discovered is that, in the Netherlands, adolescent sexuality — particularly in serious relationships — is normalized by both parents and the wider society (culturally and institutionally). As a result, even when conflicts or anxieties around teenage sexual behavior emerge, families negotiate solutions that tend to integrate the children’s sexual relationships and emerging adult life into the fabric of the family and society as a whole. In the United States, by contrast, adolescent sexuality is dramatized as a dangerously out-of-control physical and emotional experience that will signify a break from the family of origin. It is simultaneously a facet of independent adulthood and an activity which threatens a teenager’s ability to reach successful middle-class adult independence.

Schalet broadens her examination of adolescent sexuality to look at how these differing concepts of teenage sexual desires and behaviors both reflect and inform our divergent understandings of adolescent development and adulthood cross-culturally. In the Netherlands, Schalet argues, adulthood — particularly young adulthood — is not understood to constitute economic self-sufficiency or emotional distance from one’s family of origin. Dutch teenagers are expected to develop a self-determination within emotionally close family and social circles, rather than in opposition to them. While American teenagers are expected to be rebellious, incommunicative, out of control, hormone-driven beings, Dutch teenagers are assumed to be self-regulating individuals who will gradually assume responsibility over their social and sexual lives as they are able.

The Dutch framework is not without its troubling aspects, as Schalet points out, specifically the lack of language with which to articulate and grapple with unequal power within relationships (parent-child, a couple of differing ages or class standing, sexism within dating relationships). However, overall health indicators suggest that the Netherlands is modeling a much more successful way of supporting teenagers’ development than is the United States. One of the most fascinating aspects of Schalet’s interviews, I thought, was the widespread helplessness expressed by American parents and children when it came to cultural views of adolescent sexuality and parent-child relationships. Parents and children alike often expressed unhappiness with the status quo, yet were equally at a loss when it came to effecting meaningful change in their own family lives or in society at large. By conceptualizing American teenagers as hormone-crazed beings incapable of rational thought, parents either threw up their hands or resorted to an authoritarian rules-based approach which they acknowledged their child would likely evade or otherwise thwart. Children, in turn, expressed a desperate desire for adult support, but could not picture integrating their sexual selves into family life either through conversation about sexuality or by bringing a partner to their parents’ house.

The title, Not Under My Roof, refers to the scenario Schalet presented to each of her interviewees: “Would you (or your parents) allow your child’s significant other to sleep over?” Across the board, Dutch parents answered in the affirmative, though with some qualifications concerning age and nature of the relationship — older teenagers and “steady” boyfriends/girlfriends were much more acceptable than were sleepovers requested by younger adolescents and relationships deemed more casual. Dutch boys were also more likely to report being comfortable with bringing a significant other to stay overnight than were Dutch girls (who generally preferred going to the house of their partner).* However, every single American parent rejected the idea of “the sleepover,” conceptualizing the economic dependency of adolescence as mutually exclusive of (acknowledged) sexual activity — even as they articulated a certain fatalism that their children were likely engaging in sexual activity elsewhere. Teenagers in the States were, likewise, unable to imagine being openly sexually active or to communicate with parents about their lives as sexual beings.

I feel like I should put some of my personal cards on the table here and acknowledge that my upbringing was much more like that of the Dutch teenagers than the American ones. I never brought a partner home to stay overnight as a teenager quite simply because I wasn’t sexually active at that point in my life. My siblings romantic and sexual relationships were integrated into our family life in various ways, and my parents were always vocal about the fact that if any of us were to need a private space for sexual exploration, our bedrooms were available — and preferable — to more public, clandestine locales. Unlike many of the American parents Schalet interviewed, my siblings and I are welcome to bring our partners home and to share a bedroom with them. In contrast, Schalet’s interviewees often persisted in rejecting their children’s sexual selfhood up to the point of marriage and/or simply believing that a child’s sexual relationships, even as adults, belonged outside of the family home. This seems to mirror the reflexive disgust many adolescent and adult children express when asked to contemplate the sexual lives of their parents — something I find at best puzzling and at worst disturbing (surely we should be invested in supporting our parents’ sexual well-being just as we ask them to support ours?).

Which is where the sadness of this book comes in for me: The entrenched helplessness of Americans across the generations when it comes to communicating more effectively and positively about our sexual hopes and fears, about the quality of our relationships, about what we need to foster health and well-being in our sexual lives. The Dutch families don’t have it all worked out, certainly, but through Schalet’s eyes they certainly seem to be light-years ahead of our dysfunction. I really wish Americans would start to take the lessons of other Western nations to heart and do better by our youth. Instead, as a society, we seem determined to move by inches into ever-increasing moral panic, non-communication, and policing.

I very much hope that Schalet’s book will make its way into the hands of policymakers, parents, and sexual health professionals and that it will encourage us collectively to re-examine our assumptions about adolescence, sexual well-being, family relationships, and our conception of successful adult development. I can’t say I’m very hopeful about large-scale change, but perhaps Not Under My Roof will — if nothing else — encourage individual parents and their children to assert their independence from normative cultural pressures and create more functional, integrative, patterns of family communication and togetherness.

*As a side-note, this book was frustratingly heterocentric, though that seems to have been the “fault” of the families interviewed rather than Schalet’s process. She deliberately asked all questions in a way that left the sex/gender of the child’s partner undetermined — and virtually all parents, with the exception of a couple of Dutch parents, presumed straightness in their children. Virtually all of the youths Schalet interviewed, likewise, were either paired with an other-sex partner or identified future partners in other-sex language.

I’d love to see a follow-up study that deliberately sought out families with youth of wide-ranging sex and gender identities and experiences. I’d be really interested to see how or if parent-child interactions change when queer sexuality enters the picture. How do parents conceptualize their queer childrens’ sexual lives? How do parental fears about youth sexuality shift when pregnancy prevention is no longer a concern? Are young people more or less likely to bring same-sex partners home? We may think we know the answers to these questions … but I’d be really interested in the results of a deliberate cross-cultural study.

to me, being "progressive" actually means supporting family diversity and resource equity — not just putting the kids in public school

17 Friday Feb 2012

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So Dana Goldstein has a piece over at Slate.com about how “progressive homeschooling” is an oxymoron because parents who remove their children from the public school system are thumbing their noses at civic responsibility. She argues that: 

[Liberal homeschooling and unschooling] is rooted in distrust of the public sphere, in class privilege, and in the dated presumption that children hail from two-parent families, in which at least one parent can afford (and wants) to take significant time away from paid work in order to manage a process—education—that most parents entrust to the community at-large.

The idea that education outside of school is the sole province of crazed Christian fundies and upper-middle-class elites would certainly surprise my partner, whose family lived below the poverty line for much of her childhood and yet still chose to home-educate her until ninth grade. It would likely also surprise the family of my best friend growing up, whose mother was a divorced parent who worked part-time and yet still homeschooled her two daughters throughout their childhood. The notion that homeschooling requires “at least one parent … to take significant time away from paid work” to function would surprise another friend of mine whose parents both worked from home and thus shared the parenting and income-earning responsibilities equally when their children were young.

I realize that anecdotes do little to refute data, and it is certainly irrefutable that financial and cultural resources (i.e. social privilege) confer choices.  The ability to sit down as a family and co-create a home life that runs counter to the dominant culture is, no doubt about it, much, much easier when (and therefore, more prevalent in families where) you’re not juggling multiple minimum-wage jobs, worried about losing your mortgage, or wondering whether you can afford to get that needed root canal. This ability to not only name our desires but also (at least to a point) act upon them is a function of class privilege, and in evidence among families where children attend public school as it is among families who make other arrangements.

Sure, there are homeschooling families who are privileged assholes (I’ve met some of them), but privileged assholery is not a symptom of home-education. It’s a symptom of, well, being a privileged asshole.

See, I think Goldstein’s argument about how education that takes place outside of school (whether we call it “homeschooling,” “unschooling,” or something else entirely) is crap progressivism turns family diversity into a proxy for talking about class. Because class is really hard to talk about in American culture. We don’t want to talk about the unequal distribution of economic resources, and how we’ve lost the war on poverty (or just surrendered to it). We cling to the notion that education (via public schools, or charter schools, or elite prep schools, whatever) is the pathway out of that inequality when, in fact, better distribution of economic resources is the pathway out of that problem.

Maybe schools should be better. I’m not, as a person who grew up outside of school, opposed to that. My siblings both made use of the public high school in our town. A lot of families I know who have engaged, or currently are engaging, in some type of home-based education avail themselves of the public school resources they pay taxes to support. Home-educated kids often go to colleges, some of which are state-supported. Goldstein sets up a world in which there are two oppositional communities: families who use public schools, and families who home-educate. This simply isn’t what the world looks like. While I don’t necessarily fault her for this outsider’s assumption — much of the literature in the lefty home-education movement does see institutional schooling as fundamentally flawed and/or inhumane — that narrative ignores the reality that these two populations are flexible, fluid, and inter-twined to a high degree.

Since homeschooling families stopped living in fear of prosecution if they were discovered by local authorities, many kids move back and forth between out-of-school learning and institutional learning. Whether it’s participating in extracurricular activities, attending one or two classes a term, going to school for a year or two to try out that way of life, or some other creative option, civic involvement in the form of using public school resources is often a daily reality for home- and un-schooling families these days. There are public school teachers home-educating their kids, and former unschoolers teaching in public schools. Goldstein’s all-or-nothing argument values rhetoric over reality.

That’s the “we’re more normal than you think” point. Now I want to make the “why are you scapegoating our non-normative lives?” one. Goldstein’s argument is that all “good” or truly progressive families should support the public school system by sending the school-age members of the family to school. Because:

Government is the only institution with the power and scale to intervene in the massive undertaking of better educating American children, 90 percent of whom currently attend public schools. (And it’s worth remembering that schools provide not just education, but basic child care while parents are at work.) Lefty homeschoolers might be preaching sound social values to their children, but they aren’t practicing them. If progressives want to improve schools, we shouldn’t empty them out. We ought to flood them with our kids, and then debate vociferously what they ought to be doing.

I agree with Goldstein that high-quality socialized childcare and education should be available to families that want them. And I imagine that a majority of families would take advantage of those resources, if the continued feminist-led campaign for affordable high-quality daycare is any indication. The life choices of middle- and upper-middle-class families who have viable options suggest that few families these days would opt for full-time parenting and out-of-school learning for their youngest members. So I don’t think full-scale flight from institutional schooling is any realistic vision of America’s future. As much as it might personally pain me to say it, unschooling will never be a majority family-life choice.

But neither will polyamory, or open marriage. And data suggest that even acknowledging human sexual variety (and right-wing fears to the contrary) the majority of households in our country will never be headed by couples, threesomes, or moresomes of the same sex and gender identity. Dykes To Watch Out For is (again disappointingly!) the wet dream of our future utopia only in my little corner of the universe.

Yet I doubt Goldstein would argue that supporting the ability of people to form consenting, mutually-supporting relationship agreements of whatever kind works best for the folks in question is not a “progressive” (dare I say liberal? leftist? radical?) value. If families work best when they are organized to meet the needs of their constituent members, then it seems common-sensical that there would be no one-size-fits-all solution to dependent care-giving, to wage-earning, to physical home arrangement, to negotiations over who does what, when, where, and with whom.

In fact, it seems fundamentally non-progressive to argue for a one-size-fits-all model for parenting and education — which is what Goldstein is essentially doing when she argues that good liberals should all use public schools. How is that different from the conservative argument, all evidence to the contrary, that children thrive best in a two-parent household in which one parent is a man and the other is a woman? How is that different from the argument mothers are innately suited to care for dependents? How is that different from asserting that the heterosexual dyad is the only type of union that should be recognized by the sate?  It’s not. It simply replaces one restrictive notion of good parenting with another. Instead, we should be recognizing that “good” parenting, and meaningful education, will inevitably have as many embodied forms as there are human beings to embody them.

I’d argue that, rather than re-hashing the tired argument that non-school-based learning is inevitably the preserve of the elite, we should be asking ourselves how to more equitably share our resources so that all families will have the highest degree of agency to decide how to put together the activities of parenting, employment, and learning. Bickering about which site for learning is optimal for most obscures the reality that no single site of learning will ever be optimal for all. It also perpetuates the myth that public school education can fix the problems of inequality — when, in fact, only fixing the problems of inequality will fix the problem of inequality.

Don’t make children and parents whose lives are atypical scapegoats for a society that has failed, en masse. to deal with its issues of class privilege.

booknotes: deviations

10 Tuesday Jan 2012

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For the past couple of months I’ve been making my way through Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Duke University Press, 2011), an anthology of writings by anthropologist and feminist theorist Gayle S. Rubin whom I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t actually know anything about before I stumbled upon the advance review galleys of this book. Rubin  is a cultural anthropologist whose research delves into the history and culture of urban sexual subcultures, particularly BDSM communities. As a newly-out lesbian in the 1970s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she designed her own Women’s Studies major at the University of Michigan and became active in the Women’s Movement and also the Gay Liberation Movement. In the late 70s and early 80s — in part because of her academic research into BDSM — she drew the ire of anti-porn feminist activists for her insistence that (wait for it) not all pornographic materials are inherently degrading to women. Yeah, I know. The more I read about it, the more it seems like the early 80s must have been a really weird time to be a self-identified feminist. Not to mention one who was also a lesbian and open about her s/M desires and practices.

Deviations is arranged in chronological order, beginning with Rubin’s first attempt to construct a theory of gender relations rooted in anthropological methodology — “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” written and revised between the late 60s and early 70s and first published in 1975. It is very much an artifact of its time and to be honest I bogged in this piece for the better part of a month after joyfully burning my way through the eminently readable introduction. Perhaps recognizing the opacity of “Traffic,” Rubin includes a piece reflecting back on the writing and reception of the original piece and includes it in the anthology — something she does several times throughout the book to great effect. After “Traffic” and its contextual essay comes a much more accessible piece on the English author Renee Vivien, originally written as an introduction and afterward to a new edition of Vivien’s A Woman Appeared Before Me, which is a fictionalized account of her tumultuous relationship with fellow author and outspoken lesbian-feminist Natalie Barney.

By the late 70s, Rubin was deep into the ethnographic research for her dissertation on the gay male leather bars of San Francisco, for which she received her PhD in 1994 from the University of Michigan. The majority of pieces in Deviations, therefore, wrestle not with the politics of gender or specifically lesbian-feminist history, but the politics of sexual practices, sexual subcultures, and the relationship between feminist theory and practice and human sexuality. As someone who is, like Rubin, committed to understanding the world through both a feminist and queer lens, I really appreciate her determination to remain engaged in feminist thinking and activism even as she was reviled by certain segments of the feminist movement for her “deviations” in sexual practice, and her openness to thinking about sexual subcultures that — for many in our culture, even many self-identified feminists — elicit feelings of disgust and generate sex panics. While the “porn wars” of the 1980s are largely a thing of the past, feminists continue to find sexuality, sexual desires, sexual practices, and sexual fantasy (whether private or shared via erotica/porn of whatever medium) incredibly difficult to speak about. Rubin calls upon us to think with greater clarity about the politics of sex, and how we police other peoples’ sexual activities, many of them consensual, simply because we find them distasteful.

Particularly controversial, I imagine, are Rubin’s writings on cross-generational sexual activities and children’s sexuality. Coming out of the BDSM framework, Rubin foregrounds the basic ethic of consent and argues that children have just as much right to consent to sexual activities as adults. Furthermore, within the framework of 1980s anti-pornography legislation, she emphasizes the difference between fantasy/desire and reality/action (that is: depiction of non-consensual sex in the context of a fantasy does not equal non-consensual sex and shouldn’t be treated in the same fashion). This leads her to speak up in defense of adults who express sexual desire for young people (but don’t act on that desire), and also to suggest that not all instances of underage/overage sexual intimacy should be treated as sexual abuse or assault. Read in tandem with Rubin’s insistence that we take children seriously as human beings with the right to sexual knowledge, this advocacy is clearly not a call to minimize the trauma of sexual violence (at whatever age) or a glossing over of age-related power dynamics. “The notion that sex per se is harmful to the young has been chiseled into extensive social and legal structures,” she writes, “designed to insulate minors from sexual knowledge and experience” (159). Like Judith Levine in Harmful to Minors (2002), Rubin argues that our cultural insistence on keeping young people separated from sexuality and sensuality — with a vigilance that often spills over into panic and hysteria — does little to protect them from sexual violence and exploitation while cutting them off from the means to conduct their own (safe, consensual) sexual explorations or name and resist the violence and exploitation that may come their way. Sexting panics anyone? The Purity Myth?

Overall, I highly recommend Deviations to anyone interested in the development of feminist and sexual political theory and practice over the last forty years — if nothing else, Rubin’s bibliography has already given me a handful of other thinkers whose books and articles I wish to pursue.

Cross-posted at the corner of your eye and The Pursuit of Harpyness.

multimedia monday: "but mary his mother she nurses him / and baby jesus fell back to sleep"

17 Monday Oct 2011

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When we were small, my mother sang us an alternate version of the Christmas carol “Away in a Manger” because we were upset by the factual error of a baby who supposedly didn’t cry (being the eldest of three, I knew what a lie this was). In our version, Away in a Manger went like this:

Away in a manger,
No crib for His bed
The little Lord Jesus
Laid down His sweet head
The stars in the bright sky
Looked down where He lay
The little Lord Jesus
Asleep on the hay
The cattle are lowing
The poor Baby wakes
And little Lord Jesus
What crying he makes
But Mary his mother
She nurses him
And baby Jesus
Falls back to sleep
Needless to say when I joined the Holland Area Youth Chorale as a teenager and tried to insist on singing the song my way it didn’t go over so well. Not just because it was “non-traditional” but because there was nursing! And probably some blasphemous implications that baby Jesus wasn’t a perfectly angelic being.  But also nursing! (This was the same youth chorale that had issues with the word “breast” in a song about a robin. As in the bird.)

Our contemporary, American culture is so freaked by breastfeeding and I don’t really get it. I’ve known enough folks for whom nursing didn’t work that I know better than to be all “breastfeeding is the only responsible way to feed your infant” about it. But I also don’t understand the politics of disgust and outage that surround nursing in public places.  What is particularly fascinating is to realize how recent a development this is (or rather, how recently the pendulum has swung back from the free-to-be-you-and-me 1970s). Gwen Sharp @ Sociological Images posted clips from Seseme Street recently that depicted women matter-of-factly nursing infants on screen. Here’s one of them:

wee ones ftw [two articles]

23 Friday Sep 2011

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There’s been a lot of talk in the mainstream media in recent years about child-on-child bullying. Rightfully so, in many cases, since kids can be as cruel as adults and often their cruelty goes just as unchecked as the cruelty of grown-ups. As a culture we’re still enamored with the myth of childhood innocence (and its doppelganger the narrative of childhood depravity). Children are either seen as beings of sweetness and light to be sheltered from the reality of the adult world or they’re seen as barely-civilized monsters a la Golding’s Lord of the Flies — ready to devour one another (and probably the adults around them) at a moment’s notice. We are both terrified of, and disdainful toward, young people.

Between these two poles of “good” and “evil” it can be very difficult for us to see young humans for what they are: people with a wide range of experiences and behaviors. People who can grow and change and respond to their environment in the same way adults do. Sometimes their learning happens at the encouragement of adults. Sometimes kids learn incredibly well without adult management and, in fact, can teach us a thing or two about what it means to be decent human beings.

To whit: two recent articles that have come across my dash in which the young people behaved in a significantly less bigoted and freaked-out fashion than the adults. First, a recent article in Bitch magazine by Avital Norman Nathman, Pink Scare: What’s Behind the Media Panic About ‘Princess Boys’? (Summer 2011). In discussing the panic over boys who express and interest in “feminine” activities, clothing, and toys, Nathman quotes a mother who was harassed for letting her son choose accessories seen as “girly” by other parents:

“I picked up Dyson from gymnastics and some parents spoke about his pink butterfly backpack,” she recalls. “A mother: ‘What a shame that mom buys girls’ stuff for her son.’ A father: ‘I’d never allow my boy to be anything but a boy.’ Then the son asked Dyson, ‘Where did you get that backpack? I like butterflies.’ As Dyson answered, the father grabbed his boy [away]. Kids are not the problem.”

You can read the full article over at Bitch Media. In our rush to explain children’s behavior with theories of gender or innate evopsych proclivities (“human beings are just naturally selfish creatures”) we forget that from the moment they are born children are steeped in a dense network of relationships in which human behaviors are modeled for them. It’s a wonder, really, that despite adults cueing children so relentlessly that pink butterflies are for girls there are kids with a strong enough sense of self to disregard those messages and simply express an delight at something they like.

Similarly, via Jos at Feministing, we have the story of a 10-year-old trans girl who has been accepted as no big deal by her age-mates while the adults around her totally spaz. While parents went ballistic and called the child a “freak,” demanding she play on the boys’ sports teams and change in a private bathroom, the kids seemed completely chill. As the girl told her local news outlet, “They haven’t really said anything … my friends stick up for me and say ‘he feels like a girl so he can be on the girl’s team.’ ” Jos writes of the story:

I hope it’s clear that the acceptance she’s felt from her peers is much more important than the specific pronoun they use. Yes, language matters, but I know I greatly prefer the support I get from a friend who genuinely accepts me as myself, even if they’re not up on all the lingo, to someone who talks the talk but doesn’t ultimately treat my identity as valid.

So I just wanted to take a moment this Friday to give a shout-out to the wee ones of this world who are refusing to cater to adult anxieties and instead continue to interact with their friends (and, hopefully, relative strangers too!) with kindness, generosity, interest, and enthusiasm. It’s people like you who give me hope for the future of this planet — no matter how young in years you may be.

articlenote: setting the record straight

09 Friday Sep 2011

Posted by in think pieces

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Thanks to a recent issue of Education Revolution E-News, I was alerted to the existence of the Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning, a free online resource for scholars in the field and interested others. Yay! More stuff to read! The journal has been going since 2007 and all five of the annual volumes to-date are available in HTML and PDF form. Yes: I’ll be working my way through the back catalog.

But today, I want to highlight an article from the current issue: “Setting the Record Straight: Interviews With a Hundred British Home Educating Families,” by Paula Rothermel (JUAL 5, 2011: 20-57). I was super excited when I saw this article because it sounded very much like the type of research I thought about doing back in 2006, when I applied for a Marshall scholarship to do an independent research project in England under the supervision of Professor Clive Harber. The scholarship didn’t come through (obviously), but I’ve remained interested in research on home education and Rothermel’s comprehensive study of the styles and outcomes of home-based education does keep cropping up. On my reading list is her recently-available e-book Home Education: Rationales, Practices, and Outcomes (Thesis UK, 2011), which is an in-depth exploration of home educated based on interviews done with one hundred British families who had chosen to homeschool in some way, shape, or form. “Setting the Record Straight” (html, PDF) is a summary of the findings from that project, and Rothermel makes a few really interesting initial observations. Continue reading →

30 @ 30: school [#8]

07 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by in life writing

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When it comes to school, I did things somewhat backward. In that, as a child, I didn’t go to school … and then, as a grown-up, I spent about twelve years (give or take) in institutions of higher education. As a student.

As regular readers of this blog know, my siblings and I were home educated from birth to college (in my case) and high school (in my siblings’ cases, part-time and full-time respectively). You can read more coherently about that experience, from my perspective in an interview I gave last December. I’ll try not to repeat myself here.

What I’m going to talk about in this post, specifically, is what “school” meant to me as a child, and then what it was like to be a student as a teenager and young adult — when I hadn’t grown up learning to conceive of myself in that way. And then what it was like to graduate from college, be a not-student briefly, and then return to student life as a graduate student (briefly: fucking hard).

So to begin: When I was a child, I thought not attending school was normal. Well, no. It’s not that simple. I understood — from the questions I got from grown-ups, from the stream of children walking to the neighborhood schools (Catholic and public), from the basic fact that children in books almost unerringly attended school — that school was something many children did. But when my mother asked me, once, when I was about five how many children I thought homeschooled I told her after a moment’s reflection that “about half” seemed a likely number.

This probably, in all fairness, reflected the statistics in our immediate circle of acquaintances. But obviously was not reliable data for the population more generally.

School, to me as a child, was something that other children did. And I honestly never thought about it much as an activity I could, should — or might want to  — engage in. It sounded boring, and required getting up early leaving all the projects I had going at home in order to do other projects. That seemed inconvenient at best, and threatening at worst. I remember being pissy about the crossing guards who were stationed at the street corners in my neighborhood before and after school, and for the children going home at lunch — I used to defy their instructions on principle because I wanted them to understand they couldn’t control me because I wasn’t one of “their” kids.

I was a pain like that, growing up.

I liked being the one in charge.

So school, until I was seventeen, was this thing I didn’t do. Couldn’t possibly fit into my busy schedule, which included stuff like volunteering at the local history museum and working part-time at a children’s bookstore, writing novels and traveling with family. At the time my schooled friends were taking the SATs and applying to colleges, I was seriously on the fence about even going to college at all. I was thinking about alternatives like full-time employment and apprenticeships. But thanks to my dad’s job I was able to enroll in a first-year writing course without matriculating, and since my career options at the time included “novelist” as well as “bookshop owner” and “museum curator,” I figured that was a good a place as any to try this school business and see if there was anything to it.

I fell instantly and utterly in love. With the class, with creative writing, with my professor, with the campus events we were required to attend as part of our coursework (film series, symposia, guest speakers), with being part of a larger conversation. I loved the routine of getting up on those autumn mornings, going for a run, getting ready for work, and then walking the six blocks to campus for my 8am class before turning up for my shift at the store. Yes, I struggled over assignments. Yes, I was terrified of failing at this school thing. Yes, I inevitably came across as weird and probably more than a little threatening to my fellow first-years who turned up in their pyjama pants, bleary-eyed from late night socializing or early-morning athletics training.

But that first year of college (I took first-year college writing in the fall of 1998; Christian feminism and creative nonfiction in the spring of 1999) was also utterly exhausting. The 1998-1999 school year was a politically charged year on campus, about which I’ve written before.  I found the semester schedule a roller coaster ride of intensity and deadlines and never-enough-time-for-a-job-well-done. I couldn’t imagine how students were able to complete the work for four or five courses at a time, when the hours it took for me to complete the reading and writing for one or two courses felt like a full-time job. I hated having work graded (and actually requested that faculty refrain from marking my work with a letter grade during those early years). I hated the apathy and/or competitiveness of my peers.

College did get me to places like this
(Coniston Water, Cumbria, England, 30 March 2004)

I went back. For seven years, I went back. But while there were things I loved about college I can’t say I ever found the point of equilibrium between these two poles of ecstasy and despair. I threatened to drop out of school literally every semester I attended. All through undergrad, and then again in graduate school. It was always a deliberate decision to walk back in the door the following term.

It’s hard to talk about why the experience was so difficult for me. Yes, it got better. And yes, there were always reasons to stay: amazingly dedicated, energetic, and insightful professors; articulate, thoughtful, and generous fellow students; resources to pursue the ideas that galvanized me; opportunities to travel, to present papers, and connect with fellow scholars and like-minded folks. When I talk about the poisoned feeling in my bloodstream whenever I’m in institutional spaces of education, I know it hurts a lot of people near and dear to me, who are doing good work in those spaces, and who have found a home there — for better or worse. I’ve learned over the years to make it as personal an observation as I can, though obviously my critique of institutional schooling is broader than a simple “I don’t thrive there.” I think many people don’t thrive there, and yes, I have a problem with that. But many people do … so I don’t know what to do with that.

When I returned to grad school in 2007, after two years of incredibly freeing non-school life, I was taken aback by how much I resented the return to academia — even as I was excited about launching my library science career. My emotional, mental and physical health had almost immediately improved when I graduated from college in 2005: I’d started sleeping better, eating better, feeling more energetic and experiencing a stronger libido; my mood felt more stable and positive, even in the face of uncertain job prospects.  And my first year in graduate school (combined, to be fair, with a cross-country move) brought on nausea, shortness of breath, weight loss, and other symptoms of fairly extreme anxiety.  As early as the road trip out to Boston, I was already writing in my journal about the misgivings I had about returning to school and the feelings of claustrophobia and regression they engendered. I felt like I was returning to being a teenager again, somehow erasing the experiences of the intervening decade.

It was not a good feeling.

This was hands-down the best part of graduate school,
apart from meeting Hanna there.

I got through it. I’m not sure, yet, whether to look upon graduate school as an improvement on undergrad or vice versa. Without the economic luxury of being a full-time student (as I had been in undergrad), I was forced (and intentionally chose) to maintain a life outside of school that was ultimately much more meaningful than what happened inside the walls of Simmons, both professionally and personally. I will be forever grateful to the Simmons dual-degree program for making the space I needed to begin my research on the Oregon Extension; at the same time, the project itself was borne out of the way in which my psyche responds to institutional education — as a coping mechanism to help me exist in a hostile environment. But I left graduate school no more enamored with the structures of school than I had been in college. And while the sea-change in well-being post-graduate school hasn’t been as marked as it was after I finished my BA, I have noticed a definite turn for the better when it comes to my own emotional and mental stability, my energy level, and the juggling act of work-life balance that follows us everywhere. As the students flood back into Boston this fall and classes begin again, I am unambivalently thankful not to be in their midst. Even as I make plans to pick up my research and writing once more.

For the first seventeen years of my life, school was simply something that didn’t apply to me. For the past thirteen years, it’s been an inescapable part of where I wanted to go and how I had to get there. Now, I have the chance to exist on the outside again. I think, though, the scars will linger. And I mean that in a positive as well as negative way: scars as markers of how experience changes us. It will color how I study and think about education and learning, about schooling and unschooling. It will inform how I think about the ways in which we, as a culture, choose to organize human life and make sense of our existence.

Many people in my life maintain, with great personal conviction, that I will make my way back to the classroom again — either as a student or as a faculty member. I myself am far from sure. For the first seventeen years of my life, I explored the world without the framework of school. I’m kinda looking forward to getting back into that rhythm, seeing how the old clothes fit.