Tag Archives: random ranting

the universal is specific and the specific is diverse

14 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by in think pieces

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , ,

(This is an expanded version of a Twitter rant I went on this morning.)

This morning on Facebook a friend shared, critically, this story at the Guardian about a crank objecting to the pleasure others’ find in diverse literature:

Campbell had said that “there are so few books for queer black boys, but there are just too few books for all our marginalised young people”. Rosoff, author of How I Live Now and other bestselling titles, responded that “there are not too few books for marginalised young people. There are hundreds of them, thousands of them”, and that “you don’t have to read about a queer black boy to read a book about a marginalised child”.

“The children’s book world is getting far too literal about what ‘needs’ to be represented,” wrote Rosoff. “You don’t read Crime and Punishment to find out about Russian criminals. Or Alice in Wonderland to know about rabbits. Good literature expands your mind. It doesn’t have the ‘job’ of being a mirror.”

On the commute to work I couldn’t stop thinking about this notion that advocates of diversity are being “too literal,” and that what we expect is “a mirror” in literature that maps one-to-one against our own personal life experiences. I kept thinking about how, elsewhere in the Guardian piece, the Ms. Rosoff is quoted as saying (in response to social media pushback:

I really hate this idea that we need agendas in books. A great book has a philosophical, spiritual, intellectual agenda that speaks to many many people – not just gay black boys. I’m sorry, but write a pamphlet about it. That’s not what books are for.

This framing of increasingly-diverse participation in the world of literature and public speech as agenda-driven and somehow antithetical to “Good literature [that] expands your mind” is a tired, reactionary position. And it tells us far more about the speaker than it does about the individuals who are busily creating an ever-more-diverse literature that fully represents our human experience is all of its’ myriad universal-yet-specific particulars. Continue reading →

writer, respect thyself [rambling thoughts on undervaluing scholarly labor]

26 Saturday Oct 2013

Posted by in library life

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

To interrupt the recent run of photo and video and cat related posts with something a bit more library-professional about the place, I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the tendency of many historians, both amateur and professional, to undervalue their intellectual labor.

Amateur writers do this by, well, framing their labor as “a labor of love”: something they’ve undertaken in their own time, funded out of their own (often shallow) pockets, because of their passion for a particular historical story and their desire to share it with the world. Professional academics do this by, well, framing their work within the context of their academic careers: emphasizing the often grim realities of contracting faculty salaries, vanishing funding in the humanities, and the “non-profit” (at least for the author) structure of most academic publishing. 

Neither of these frames are factually incorrect. We are often underpaid professionals who continue to do the work we’re qualified to do out of personal passion and a belief that what we research and share with the world matters in some “greater good” sort of way.
Yet practically, this attitude toward our own work erases the necessity of, well, paying rent. It also colludes with a culture that equates cost with value to erase the work that goes into our creations. By romanticizing the historian (or any other intellectual or artist) who labors with little expectation of financial solvency, let alone reward, we contribute to a culture that devalues what we do. A culture that allows the institutions that employ many of us to pay wages that leave us perpetually financially insecure.
I have a couple of good blog posts on this subject — by people more eloquent than I — that I’d like to share, but first let me describe the situation that sparked these reflections.
As Reference Librarian at the Massachusetts Historical Society, one of my primary responsibilities is facilitating all of the requests for images of material in our collections for use in publications and other projects like documentary films, exhibitions, websites, and so forth. It’s one of my favorite parts of the job: it allows me to stay in touch with what use people are making of the resources we make available, and increasingly means (as I pass the six-year mark!) that I see researchers whom I worked with at the beginning of their project finally completing their PhDs or winning a book contract or having an article accepted for publication.
(via Massachusetts Historical Society)
Images you can pull off our website, are available to re-purpose in certain exempt contexts — classroom lecture, conference presentation, personal blog — free of charge. The image above is a letter I wrote about for our February 2011 object of the month series.
For made-to-order high resolution images (the file type most professional projects require) incur fees. We charge for this service along two scales. There are reproduction fees, which cover the cost of the labor in producing the image; people are required to pay this fee regardless of how they are using the image — even if they’re just going to hang it on their bedroom wall. Then there are licensing fees, which are charged based on the nature of the publication; we license the images we create that people go on use in their own creations as a way to earn some income from our own creations (the digital reproductions of material in our collections) and pay not only staff salaries, but also for the ongoing care and keeping of these valuable historical documents and artifacts. 
This can be expensive. Images cost $45-60 per file in reproduction fees, and anywhere from $0-450.00 per image in licensing fees. If you are an author seeking to use multiple images in your forthcoming book this can add up fast. I’ve worked with several authors in the past year who, despite small academic press print runs, have faced over $1,000 as a quote for obtaining the images they would ideally like to use. Our fees are steeper than some independent research libraries charge, but also more sensitive to the scale of individual projects than others. In short, we’re balancing the desire to provide access with the need to pay our staff for the work that they do and all of the not-inconsiderable overhead of preservation, storage, and security.
While most people understand this, I do have the occasional individual who tries to haggle with me to get the prices reduced or eliminated. They cite a series of potentially mitigating factors: their relationship with the Society, the fact that they’re paying out of pocket for the images, the fact that they’re retirees on fixed incomes, that they’re academics on tight incomes, that other institutions have offered them lower rates or waived the fees, that the author will not be making only — sometimes, in fact, they’re losing money — on this project, and so forth. 
I’m sympathetic. I really am. I also understand completely when people decide they can’t afford our prices and seek cheaper images elsewhere — I likely would in their shoes if the cost was prohibitively high. I wish them the best and honestly mean every word that I type. 
But having had several exchanges along similar lines in the past few weeks, I’ve been wishing I could have slightly more meta conversations with some of these people. “If you’ve spent ten years writing and researching this book on your own dime,” I was to ask them, “why for all that you hold holy have you signed a contract with a for-profit press that is requiring you to pay upfront for all of the production costs?” 
Or, sometimes, when they get sniffy about how steep our fees are, I want to lean a little heavier on the words labor and staff time in my replies. “Why,” I want to ask them, “do you feel entitled to obtain something from us for free, even after I explain to you that creating this product takes the time and effort of half a dozen people who work at our library?” 
In these exchanges, I sometimes see an altruistic competitiveness creep in that’s really unattractive: I’ve labored over this work for years without complaint, expecting little reward, some people seem to imply (likely not consciously), and because I’m not benefiting financially from this project — in fact, I’m losing money! — you should be likewise generous to the cause of History and give these images to the project for free. 
Sometimes, there’s even the implication that we’re somehow holding these digital photographs hostage, selfish money-grubbing institution that we are.
The librarian part of my soul certainly kens this argument. If our society was structured differently, with robust socialized funding for cultural heritage institutions and a guaranteed national income for all citizens that provided me and my family (and everyone!) with food security, housing security, and healthcare, then I would absolutely advocate we digitize and make freely available the images our scholars want to use. They are smart, articulate, energetic, diligent, and prolific people — and the wide range of stories they come up with to tell using the rich materials in our collections are part of what make my job a daily joy. 
But we don’t currently live in that world, and in the world we do live in we should not undervalue our own already culturally devalued work by setting ourselves up pre-emptively as martyrs.
Think carefully before you give your work away, particularly to others who will make a profit from it. 

Even if you decide to give your own work away, recognize that this does not give you the right to expect others to provide you goods and services for free. Factor in that even on projects you are doing for the pleasure of the work, you will need to pay people fairly for the work they contribute.

Sometimes people will charge what you feel is too much for their labor or products. It’s certainly fair to decline their goods and services and go elsewhere. If they care about keeping your business, or if too many people decline what they offer because the price is too steep, they will probably decide to lower their prices. 
What you should never do is try to shame or guilt scholars or artists for earning a living doing the work that they love. 
You also shouldn’t be ashamed or feel guilty for trying to earn a living doing the work that you love. 

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got as an early professional was to be sure to not undervalue my work, and to charge an hourly rate for free-lance research that, at the time, seemed scandalously high to me (used, as I was, to student stipends). But the higher hourly fee we negotiated demanded that both my employer and myself take the project seriously as a professional endeavor. In the two years since then, I have given several colleagues who asked me for free-lance advice the same nudge: “Ask for what you feel would make the job worthwhile,” I tell them. Or, “Think about what you believe your time is worth, and then ask for a third again more.”

I also remind them to calculate in any expenses they may incur on their way to completing the job they’re being asked to do: transportation, equipment, service fees, etc.

My current free-lance rate starts at $25.00/hour, exclusive of expenses, though I do negotiate based on the nature of the project. I always advise emerging professionals who ask what to charge that they should never accept less than $15.00/hour for their research or scholarly work.
I promised you links. 
Writer John Scalzi has an excellent round-up of posts he wrote about how to spot an exploitative book contract (and why he would never sign one). If you read only one of the posts, I would recommend “New Writers, eBook Publishers, and the Power to Negotiate“:

People: Unless the publisher you’re talking to is a complete scam operation, devoted only to sucking money from you for “publishing services,” then the reason that they are interested in your novel is because someone at the publisher looked at it and said, hey, this is good. I can make money off of this. Which means — surprise! Your work has value to the publisher. Which means you have leverage with the publisher.

And on a more academic note, Sarah Kendzior asks at the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Should Academics Write for Free?“

Academics entering the media world tend to move from one exploitative arena (low-wage academic work) to another (unpaid freelance writing). But writing must never be an act of charity to a corporation. Ask for what you are worth—and do not accept that you are worth nothing. Insisting on payment for your labor is not a sign of entitlement. It is a right to which you are entitled.

We all labor for free, at times. I’ve been writing this blog on an unpaid, voluntary basis for over six years; I won’t be stopping any time soon. Yet I’ve just spent three hours writing this post. That’s $75.00 I owe myself. I also write book reviews, for free (or in exchange for a book). This fall I’m working on a series of seriously under-paid encyclopedia articles, which I chose to take on for the experience. I will probably negotiate for better terms next time, or decline the next call for authors that comes my way.

There is nothing intrinsically bad about voluntarism. But it does not follow, therefore, that there is something intrinsically virtuous about volunteering your time (or asking another person or institution to volunteer their labor and resources) rather than asking for recompense.

Think carefully about how, why, for whom, and on what terms you will labor for free.

And respect the right of others to determine for themselves how, why, for whom, and on what terms they will do the same.

to want them, to be them, or both? [perspectives in porn]

12 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by in think pieces

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

So last week I reviewed an anthology of essays on pornography, and kind of in passing I asked why we generally assume that people watch porn because they want to fantasize about having sex with the people the camera’s gaze is trained on. That is, in porn marketed to men who like having sex with women, female actors take center stage and male performers are assumed to be exchangeable stand-ins for the Everyman Viewer. Women are cast with an eye toward what body types producers imagine their Everymen want to fantasize about exchanging bodily fluids with.

I don’t understand where this narrative assumption comes from.

Is that actually how the majority of people watch porn?

Because that’s certainly one perspective to take when consuming erotic material: the “would I wantonly ravish this person?” perspective. However the viewer/reader assesses the sexual attractiveness of a given performer/character (visual presentation, sexual style, aspects of character, voice, etc.), that question certainly informs how you enter into the fantasy of the pornographic scenario. If the answer to the above question is yes! it becomes easier to understand the motivations of the ravishers as depicted in said piece of smut. It’s easier to get drawn into the story, just as it’s easier to get drawn into any work of fiction when you care about the character’s well-being, or want to know what happens next.

I get that. There’s a reason I’m drawn to some relationships in fan fiction and not others; some character dynamics just don’t do it for me. Others do.

But I find this an unsatisfying and incomplete assessment of how people (read: “men” in most discussions about pornographic film) interact with porn. Why? Because it’s not the only way I — as a consumer/creator — interact with sexually-explicit material. And it’s not the only way people interact with fiction generally. We know this. And yet, somehow, when the question of sexually-explicit material is on the table all of our wisdom about the viewer/reader and their complex interactions with what they watch and read flies right out the window.

To whit, when it comes to porn, despite the fact I’m a voyeur by definition (reading/watching the characters/performers interact in sexual ways without literally being involved with them) my pleasure is often less contingent on the question “would I wantonly ravish this person?” than it is on the question “if someone ravished me in this fashion, how might it feel?” Or, “is this dynamic between them an arousing one? how is it making the actors/characters feel? why is it making them feel that way? The sexual activity depicted doesn’t have to be something I’d definitely find pleasurable in real life, but a successful pornographic or erotic narrative will encourage an imaginative connection, prompting me to explore how such an activity could be pleasurable to the performers/characters in question.

Like any good work of fiction, pornography and erotica asks us to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes (or, you know, lacey knickers). And learn something meaningful or moving while we’re there.

So all of this leads me back to the question: Rather than assuming people sexually objectify the performers in porn, why don’t we wonder to what extent they’re identifying with them? After all, we’re human beings watching (or reading about) human bodies experiencing sexual pleasure. Doesn’t it make sense that we’d — at least to some extent — imagine ourselves into their situation as much as we might imagine being the person sexually stimulating them?

I look at this image and I feel the water washing across my skin (via)

I haven’t watched much moving-image porn, so perhaps the descriptions I’ve read of pornographic films are giving me the wrong impression here? But when I read synopses of films, I’m definitely aroused most often by imagining myself in the role of the performers whose pleasure is visible on screen. Like, if the film is going to show me a woman giving a man (or woman) a blow job, and it’s the giver’s body and facial expressions and responses we’re seeing, isn’t that the person we’d be likely to identify with — not the disembodied dick (or clit) that appears as a prop on the screen?

And no, I don’t think the answer can be as simple as “but dudes can’t/won’t imagine themselves into the position of a female performer because their bodies are different!” because I read plenty of erotic material in which the only bodies involved are male bodies and I definitely successfully identify with those characters. So I think we’re too quick to assume that anatomical body difference is a barrier to imaginative involvement.

Maybe it’s partly a (socialized or innate) gender thing? Recent studies have suggested that men and women generally interact with porn in different ways, with men being less flexible in what types of erotic imagery arouse them (women appear to be catholic in their tastes: it doesn’t generally matter whose bodies are depicted, or even that they be human bodies — if sexytimes be happening, our pleasure centers light up). But I’m tired of the simplistic assumption, without research to back it up, that men only interact with porn in a way that interprets the (female) actors depicted on screen as objects rather than subjects. At the very least, I’d imagine it’s likely viewers of pornography — just like readers of fiction or viewers of any other genre of film — switch imaginative perspectives, so that response to a question about who is being observed and who is being identified with would change over the course of the viewing/reading experience in complicated, unstable ways.

I’m continuing to think about this question while reading Laura Kipnis’ Bound and Gagged (1997) and Linda Williams Hard Core (1989) this month. They’re both fascinating studies which have much to recommended them, though some of the debates they engage with are certainly dated. Still, on the watch for questions of perspective both authors seem only to nod in passing to the idea that male viewers might be watching the bodies in screen in less-than-straightforward ways. Williams, for example, seems to assume that heterosexual male arousal in reaction to viewing an aroused male body would be an experience of homosexual desire, rather than, you know, a response to the arousal of a body the viewer could imagine being. So it’s clear that even the leading thinkers in this field have taken this question somewhat as read.

What are your experiences with sexually-explicit material? To what extent do you find yourself wanting to be and/or wanting to have the individuals depicted or described? How does the voyeurism of engaging with other peoples’ (fictional or performed) sexual intimacy pull you in as an observer-participant? Do you tend to identify with all of the characters in a scene, or specific characters? To what extent does body type and physical sex contribute to your choice of character with whom to identify?

I’d love to hear your thoughts; if you want to share anonymously the form should allow for that — and I’ll try to monitor the thread carefully so that anon comments don’t end up in the trash if they are actually legitimate contributions (95% of my “anon” comments are just straightforward spam).

fighting anecdata with anecdata

08 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by in think pieces

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

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.

thought for the day: why are we still framing the conversation this way?

15 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by in think pieces

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, ,

So I was going through my Google Reader feeds just now, from the last couple of days, and a lot of people seem to be talking about the possibility of male-female friendship like it’s suddenly 1989 again and we’ve decided that When Harry Met Sally is once more culturally relevant.

The question being, as always, “Can men and women be friends or does sex/sexuality inevitably get in the way?”

Here’s my thing about that question. Two things, actually. The question “Can men and women be friends?” assumes a) hetero-universality and b) that the possibility of sexual desire precludes a relationship that doesn’t involve sexual activity.

Speaking as someone who experiences the possibility of sexual attraction across genders, if I ruled out friendship sans sex with anyone who I could envision sexual intimacy with, then wow I’d be shit out of luck when it came to friendship. Because, surprise! The type of people I tend to get along with as friends are also the type of people I’d be most likely to be open to sexual intimacy with.

Obviously, it’s a moot point since I’m in a committed, monogamous relationship with Hanna. So sex with anyone else simply isn’t on the table any longer. But the same could be said of any person in a committed relationship — are you supposed to cut yourself off from friendship with any person you’d theoretically be willing to have sex with, simply because the possibility of sex and friendship don’t mix? That isn’t practical and doesn’t even make sense?

And think about what it’s saying about peoples’ ability to keep it in their pants and, you know, practice fidelity to the ground-rules of their primary relationships! That somehow the very presence of sexual attraction makes rational thought and decision-making evaporate? That you experience the possibility of sexual attraction and whist! — all prior commitments and promises out the window! Erm … really?

I get why, in our aggressively gendered, heteronormative culture it feels like “common sense” to assume homosociality and heterosexuality naturally go hand in hand. That your friendships will be primarily with people of your own gender (to whom you’re not sexually attracted in any way) and that your sexual intimacy will happen with a person or persons of another gender (the gender toward which you experience sexual attraction). But that formulae simply doesn’t work for people who are gay or swing both ways. As someone who experiences desire toward people with female bodies, I nevertheless have friends with female bodies with whom I manage not to have sex.

I’ve also managed to be naked in a locker room, in communal showers, skinny dipping, and co-sleeping with female-bodied people without engaging in sexual intimacy. Given cultural taboos, I haven’t done the same with male-bodied persons, but I’d wager the experience would be similar. That is, it’s not about the shape of the body in question or the gender identity of the person embodied, but about the context of our relationship and what we’ve mutually decided it contains. If sex isn’t part of our intimacy, we somehow (!) manage to not go there.

Granted, I’m not one of those people who experiences sex-exclusive attractions. Maybe if I only found women or men attractive, it would be easier for me to form platonic friendships with people of the gender which I wasn’t sexually interested in, and save the gender I was for flirting and sexytimes? But I can’t help feeling like the assumption that it’s an either/or (friendship OR sex) proposition hurts even the people who experience those more exclusive desires.

Thus ends my thought for the day.

thoughts on reading and shame

05 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by in think pieces

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

,

via the Londonist

Yesterday, I was standing in a coffee shop near work waiting for my morning latte and reading Shaping Our Mothers’ World: American Women’s Magazines by Nancy Walker (University of Mississippi, 2000).

“Oh! Are you working toward your PhD too?” came the excited voice of a colleague, also waiting in line.

“Oh — no,” I responded, startled. “I mean, I have my Master’s in History, but — no, I’m just reading this. It’s in my time period but — no, I’m just reading it for fun. Because.”

“It’s so nice to see people reading books like that for pleasure,” she continued. “So often when I’m on the T or standing in line I see people reading romance novels or stuff like that.”

“Well, those can be fun too!” I blinked, thinking, Well, I did spend three hours last night reading fan fiction erotica …

“Yes, well,” she retracted slightly, “I personally like to read detective fiction, that’s my habit.”

I mumbled something encouraging about supporting reading generally, and ducked away to grab my bagel sandwich.

Then later in the day, this post by friend Shoshana @ Walk the Ridgepole caught my eye:

About half the adult customers buying The Hunger Games are still acting embarrassed about reading a YA novel. I’ve seen virtually none of that shamefacedness from the customers clamoring for Fifty Shades of Grey. Not that the latter group (which I’m sure overlaps with the first) should necessarily be embarrassed; from what I know about it, I think I’d have some issues with the dynamics of Fifty Shades, but to each his/her own. Still, it’s odd to realize our culture has reached a point where reading about sex in public is largely okay, but reading a novel (in this case, a critically acclaimed novel) originally marketed toward teens is still something to be ashamed of.

You can read the whole thing here.

Why do we ascribe moral weight to the act of reading? As a librarian, I know, I’m supposed to champion reading per se as though it can make you a better person. And while I believe that participating in artistic and cultural activities can deepen our experience and promote well-being, I don’t actually believe that reading in and of itself is somehow morally superior to having lunch with a friend, playing World of Warcraft, sketching in the park, or blogging.

On the other hand, I do believe the act of reading — when done for the pleasure of it — should be celebrated as one of the joys in life. We don’t need to justify reading by reading only “worthwhile,” morally-upstanding texts. Reading just is.

Yet the act of reading — something that in the past was vilified as a suspect, erotic activity (especially for women) — has been turned into a virtue in our modern-day educational realm. And I think that’s where we run into trouble. Okay, yes, we’re a print-based society and literacy is highly correlated with social and economic efficacy. But I hate how we’ve not only deified the act of reading, but further turned reading into a hierarchical activity in which some kinds of reading are more virtuous or worthy than others.

“Adult” novels are more virtuous than “young adult” or “kiddie lit” — at last if you’re a grown-up human being. Similarly, we have so-called “genre” fiction (shameful) and “literary” fiction (laudable), “real” fiction (legit) and fan fiction (not, in fact, “actual”). And swaths of fiction — for example romance novels — that are coded as guilty pleasures, something we all indulge in but speak about like a group of self-loathing women gathered around a pan of brownies. Why is it such a shocking or shameful thing to read romance novels, fan fiction, mystery novels, denigrated-category-of-choice for pleasure?

I’m not arguing, here, that doing something “for pleasure” of “for fun” means we aren’t allowed to critique a specific example or trend in the written word and its effect on the well-being of ourselves and society. My point is that — assuming our reading habits aren’t actively harming others and/or we’re involved in ongoing analysis of the messages said literature is conveying — we should never have to apologize for reading in genre X, on topic Y, or literary medium Z. I don’t want my nonfiction reading to somehow grant me an aura of respectability over the person three up from me in line at the coffee shop who’s tossed Best Lesbian Erotica 2012 in her purse this morning (full disclosure: sometimes, I am that person) or even, let it be said, the young man across from me on the T who’s engrossed in Eclipse (yes, male-identified folk do read Stephanie Meyer). Critique specific content all you like, but no literary form exists that deserves wholesale derision as being lesser than.

I just want my reading to be, and for all of us to acknowledge the written word, fictional and non-, genre or not, amateur or professional, for the pleasure it is.

I (heart) dahlia lithwick (again) + rant re: healthcare oral arguments

28 Wednesday Mar 2012

Posted by in media

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

via @eskenosen

On the way to work this morning, Hanna and I were discussing how utterly nonsensical and frustrating the anti-healthcare folks are. First they didn’t want government-supported, single-payer healthcare. So the Obama administration patched together something using private insurers. And now they’re pissed about that. Dahlia Lithwick, as usual, highlights the inanity:

It’s always a bit strange to hear people with government-funded single-payer health plans describe the need for other Americans to be free from health insurance. But after the aggressive battery of questions from the court’s conservatives this morning, it’s clear that we can only be truly free when the young are released from the obligation to subsidize the old and the ailing. Justice Samuel Alito appears to be particularly concerned about the young, healthy person who “on average consumes about $854 in health services each year” being saddled with helping pay for the sick or infirm—even though, one day that will describe all of us. Or as Justice Antonin Scalia later puts it: “These people are not stupid. They’re going to buy insurance later. They’re young and need the money now.” (Does this mean that if you are young and you pay for insurance, Scalia finds you “stupid”?)

Read the whole thing over at Slate. Emphasis mine.

Apart from everything else that’s angry-making about the healthcare “debate,” I’m particularly appalled by the endemic ageism and ableism embedded in these arguments about how we shouldn’t have to pay for what other people need. As if those “others” (the sick, the infirm) aren’t actually us. And will never be us. Or, once we become the other we’ll be left out in the cold to cope with our ill-health all on our own.

Say what?

The argument that young people don’t need healthcare services implies that youth per se = healthy. This is an idealization of youth that runs rampant in our culture, and it’s poisoning our collective consciousness by encouraging us to imagine that to be young is in itself a protection against ill-health. This is nonsense. I know plenty of young people, myself and my partner included, who need not only preventative care (so we hopefully won’t need more expensive care later), but also actual expensive care. Being young doesn’t protect you from physical infirmity, both organic and accidental. Young people get cancer. Young people have thyroid disorders. Young people get infections. Young people break bones, are involved in traffic accidents, must cope with sports injuries. Young people need dental work done, require eye care, need regular reproductive health check-ups (I just made my annual pelvic exam appointment last week).

This Friday I’ll be celebrating my 31st birthday. I know very few of my peers who haven’t already, in their relatively youthful lives, had need of medical services for all of these things. And who haven’t avoided desperately-needed medical care because they were temporarily un- or under-insured and couldn’t afford to pay out of pocket for that care.

As Lithwick points out, even if we experience a relatively healthful youth, we will all one day age and become infirm of body. There is a stunning arrogance and lack of self-awareness to the suggestion that those “others” who get sick and need medical care are the ones who much bear the burden of procuring those services. Seriously: Do certain Supreme Court Justices / conservative lawmakers actually believe they will never become ill/sustain an injury/need end-of-life care?

Once again, I am reminded of historian Gerda Lerner’s observation that “All of us, ultimately, will join one of the most despised and abused groups in our society–the old and the sick.”

There’s a conversation to be had about the financial burden of healthcare services, and whether the cost should be as high as it is. But that conversation should be separate from the conversation about individual healthcare needs, because when it comes to health, like our environment, we’re all in this together. There is no way to escape sickness, there is no way to prevent death. We will all experience physical suffering. We will all need medical care. And there is absolutely no way to reliably predict who will need what services and when.

It frightens me that the supposedly wise persons on the Supreme Court seem to have forgotten their own mortality.

on the one hand yes … but also, no.

21 Tuesday Feb 2012

Posted by in think pieces

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Back in January, someone on my Twitter feed reblogged the following message from Dr. Ruth:

click through for original tweet

And I definitely have my friend Minerva to thank for the fact that this set alarm bells off in the back of my skull (thanks M.!). Because I think I understand what Dr. Ruth is getting at here, since she couches it in terms of a “vow”: that making an abstinence pledge or the like might not be the best way of facilitating human sexual intimacy and connection. Drawing a hard and absolute line around yourself and saying “I will remain pure and purity equals not having sex,” might be disappointing to a lot of folks. And I appreciate that she softens her position by acknowledging that not everyone is looking for a partner (“and that can be sad”). So yes, kinda sorta, … but also no.

No, because Dr. Ruth is making some pretty sweeping assumptions about relationships here — namely that “not having sex means not having a partner.” Wait — what? Did you just say — oh, yes. Yes, you did.

*headdesk*

Because me, with no formal training in the relationship advice arena, can think of a number of ways in which “not having sex” can co-exist with “having a partner.”

1. Two or more people who identify as asexual and are comfortable with no sexual activity (or exclusively solitary sex) forming a partnership.

2. The person who doesn’t want sex (either because of identity or other factors) partnering with one or more people who
     a) are content to enjoy solitary sex in the context of the monogamous relationship;
     b) are content to enjoy sex with those in the poly relationship who enjoy sex, and non-sexual intimacy with the person who has chosen to abstain;
     c) or form a negotiated open relationship in which the sexually-active person can have relational sex with other partners, in addition to maintaining their partnership with the non-sexually-active person.

And in addition to this, of course, there’s the many ways in which non-partnered people can have rich relational lives. (And I say this as a joyfully partnered person). They can join religious orders, co-housing and communal societies, nurture their relationships with extended (blood or chosen) families, and generally practice really good friendship skills. Having a “partner” isn’t the only way to be in relationship, any more than being sexually active is the only way to be in a partnership.

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

17 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by in think pieces

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

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.

in which I write letters: tattoos aren’t body vandalism

03 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by in think pieces

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , ,

Dear Ms. Khoury,

A friend of mine brought your opinion piece, “Why Put a Bumper Sticker on a Ferrari” (The Spectrum 2/2/2012), to my attention yesterday. I appreciate that you are trying to encourage women to celebrate their bodies as they are, without need for adornment. However, I’m troubled by the way you target women specifically, by your argument that tattoos are “vandalism” of the body, and by your assertion that “nothing [productive] comes out of getting a tattoo.”

As a thirty-one-year old woman who made the decision to have my first ink done about a year ago, I’d like to share a very different perspective on body modification and meaning with you. While I don’t believe that being a person with tattoos is in any way superior to being a person without them, I also don’t believe that people (of any gender!) usually choose ink out of body insecurity or in a vacuum of meaning. On the contrary, you only have to follow the Tumblr blog Fuck Yeah, Tattoos! for a few days to witness the incredible breadth and depth of the individual stories behind peoples’ tats. I’d encourage you to check some of those stories out. And while you’re at it, I highly recommend the indie romantic comedy Tattoo: A Love Story (2002). It’s cheesy, yes, but the best part about it are the sequences in which real people tell the stories behind their own tattoos. The person who recommended the film to me was a lesbian in a long-term relationship who got her first tattoo done in honor of her sixty-fifth birthday — hardly someone performing for hetero male attention.

While we’re talking about hetero male attention, I’d like to take a moment to note that I’m very troubled by your framing of body art as a particularly troublesome trend among “ladies.” If the body is, as you write, “the temple [we’ve] been blessed with,” doesn’t that go for male-identified folks as much as it goes for female-identified ones? I would argue that your emphasis on women’s beautiful form, specifically, while ignoring male bodies reinforces our cultural obsession with gender difference — imagining that women’s bodies are somehow public property (expected to be pleasing in the eyes of others) while men’s bodies aren’t a subject of social debate — at least not where decoration is concerned.

As for myself, I tell the story behind my own tattoo on my blog. In the past year, I’ve also written a post about the evolution of my views on body modification. I share your concern over the fact that some peoples’ body modification seems to come from a sense of self-hatred, insecurity, and the desire for conformity or performance for others, rather than self-knowledge, body acceptance, and self-expression. However, as I’ve grown older I’ve come to believe that we are only really in a position to understand the motivations of one person — ourselves. Unless someone tells you the story behind their own physical appearance, you can’t tell by looking at them whether their tattoo is the result of thoughtless whimsy or the manifestation of months — or years — deliberation.

for example go read the story behind this tattoo

I would argue that even those tats acquired in haste — ill-considered, possibly regretted, maybe images or placements their owners feel are a little tacky now — are part of a life story. I know a number of people who have tattoos they commissioned in their teen years which they are now re-working ten, fifteen, twenty years later to invest the ink with new and different meanings.

I’d encourage you to spend some time exploring the myriad reasons why people across time and space have found body modification meaningful. I certainly support your right to celebrate your body as it is, and to choose not to alter it with piercings, tattoos, or any other form of more permanent decoration. I believe that every human being is forever and always beautiful, regardless of how closely they adhere to any one culture’s normative standards of beauty. I believe all human beings have worth, even when they feel (or are deemed by others to be) “ugly.” And that includes people who’ve chosen tats to help them express, to themselves as well as others, who they are in this world we share.

Thanks for taking the time to hear another person’s viewpoint.

Sincerely,
Anna