Monthly Archives: July 2009

Reprint: Against Powerpoint, and in defense of Luddite tendencies

Posted on by

An old rant of mine from March 2006. My teaching style has not changed, nor have my views.

Warning:  this post may be less restrained than some (and I might even swear).  I’m not unhappy, just in a kind of ornery mood.  (It might be because I’m sitting here in my sweat.  I went running at the Rose Bowl tonight for over an hour, came home and found that a water main had broken up the street.  No shower for me.  If it isn’t fixed soon, I’ll have to make a late night trip to the gym in order to bathe.)

Today, we had our monthly noon Social Sciences Division faculty meeting.  As usual, I stayed quiet, though I perked up a bit during a brief discussion of the new Internet filters.  (All of my colleagues are adamantly opposed.)

But then we launched into another discussion about creating "smart classrooms."  This has nothing to do with real teaching, mind you.  A "smart classroom" is one filled with all sorts of technological gizmos:  DVD players, wireless Internet access, various modern projectors, and lots of something called Power Point.  I am now convinced I am the only tenured professor in America under 40 who has no idea what Power Point is.  To me, it sounds like a basketball term (wasn’t Magic Johnson kind of a "power point" guard at 6’9"?).  Anyhow, my colleagues all seem to be busy showing videos (or DVDs) and creating fancy Power Point projects for their classes.  It all sounds dreadfully dull, and I’m just not interested.

I show — maybe — one video a year.  When I first started teaching, I showed a lot of them — largely because I was afraid I wouldn’t have enough to say.  Now, God help me and my students, I have plenty to say.  I know damn well that my students spend enough time interacting with technology outside school; the last thing they need is to sit mutely in front of a TV screen.  I’m not saying that videos don’t have their place — in an art history class, I would imagine that they would be essential, but too often I think they (and all the other fancy-shmancy stuff) are just cover-ups for mediocre teaching.

I am sick and tired of having folks with doctorates in education (Lord help us) tell me that "lecturing is an outdated teaching style."  Well, it’s still a damned effective teaching style if it’s done well.  I put a lot of time and energy into crafting articulate, interesting, lectures, largely because I believe that for most students, it remains the most effective and memorable way to learn.   I do invite discussion and debate in some of my classes, and I welcome questions — but I cling tenaciously to the old-school notion that my job is to be an interesting, compelling, and provocative deliverer of information.   (And along the way, raise up young feminists and pro-feminists.)

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged

“First, Last, Security Deposit”: Women’s savings, feminism, and the steps to getting a room of one’s own

Posted on by

This summer session in my women’s history course, I’ve been more conscientious than usual about suggesting proactive solutions for young feminists to use as they navigate their way through a difficult and misogynistic world. I’ve got a compendium of tips, all of which ought to be collected into a single blog post at some point. But one suggestion I’ve made repeatedly, and which I’ve seen proven useful again and again, is that young people of both sexes (but especially young women) set aside money for themselves.

It comes from something I heard years ago from a feminist colleague of mine. She remarked, apropos of nothing that I can remember, “You know what freedom is? Freedom is having first, last, and a security deposit.” (Most landlords require a first month’s payment and a last month’s payment in advance before renting an apartment; most require a security deposit, often equal to another month’s rent.) For young people living in unhappy home situations with repressive parents, or for women in abusive relationships, the ability to leave and begin a different life is tied to access to money. Feminists rightly celebrate the importance of “choice” and “autonomy”, but we must always acknowledge that it is far easier to exercise these two fundamental goods when one has resources over which one has direct control.

This is not a new point, of course; Virginia Woolf said as much in her indispensable “A Room of One’s Own.” Some years, I’ve given my students excerpts from Woolf to read; many identify all too well with the famous point about Shakespeare’s sister. But whether they read it in Woolf or hear it from a professor or pick it up from their friends, it’s vital — particularly for those from families with few resources — that women start putting aside money that will be theirs and theirs alone. Perhaps, yes, money with which to rent a room of one’s own; perhaps money with which to buy a car. Perhaps money with which to take a life-changing trip abroad. The freedom to become who one was called to be is considerably easier with money of one’s own.

This all sounds obvious, of course. But for many of my students, setting aside even small bits of money is very difficult. The “pleasing woman discourse” is pervasive, and it makes it all too easy for whatever amounts of spare cash are accumulated to be offered to the invariably needy and demanding multitudes that surround far too many young women. In some families, young women are expected to contribute to their parents’ rent and to the grocery money; for many of my working-class students, particularly in the current Great Recession, living at home is as much about helping their family survive as it is about remaining under the control of overly-watchful parents. Continue reading →

Reprint: Feminism, Food, Sex, and Pleasure

Posted on by

Another reprint, this one from November 2006.

In recent years, as I continue to fiddle with my women’s studies syllabus, I’ve moved away from emphasizing certain themes and towards others.  One theme that has become more and more important to me: tracing the cultural history of women’s shame in America, particularly in regards to sexual pleasure, food, and other "selfish" desires.

I’ve emphasized this many times before, but my students are, overwhelmingly, non-white.  They are, overwhelmingly, first-generation college students.  And in my women’s studies class, overwhelmingly female.  But whether they are black, Latina, Asian, Armenian, they’ve almost all been raised with one enormously important — and colossally destructive — discourse: pleasure comes with penalties.

I tend to focus on the close relationship between attitudes towards eating and attitudes towards sex, largely because they seem so often to be inextricably linked.  The pleasure of food is our first pleasure; when we were tiny infants, it was what we screamed for and it was gave us comfort and delight.  Long after many of our other appetites may have faded, we will still take pleasure in what we eat.  (I’ve spent a lot of time with the elderly; my experience has been that in nursing homes, the subject of lunch tends to dominate conversations.)  Throughout our lives, in groups or alone, eating has the potential to be one of our greatest physical delights.

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged

Declaration of Sentiments day

Posted on by

It is July 20, the 40th anniversary of the moon landing (which my two-year-old self watched on television, according to my mama, but which I do not recall), and the 161st anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Sentiments (and its accompanying Resolutions) at Seneca Falls, New York.

I’ve been teaching women’s history at Pasadena City College for a decade and a half or so, but oddly enough, today will be the first time I’m teaching my History 25B course on July 20 itself. It was only a couple of years ago that I added women’s history to my summer course repertoire; the last two July 20ths fell on non-teaching days. So today, on what promises to be the hottest day of 2009 so far, we’ll be gathering in my classroom at noonish to celebrate the day on which the feminist movement in the United States began.

It’s always tough to date the moment a revolutionary movement got underway. We mark our nation’s independence with the signing of that famous declaration in July 1776, but the revolution itself had begun more than a year earlier. The French date their revolution from July 14, though the key Oath of the Tennis Court fell nearly a month before. The civil rights movement tends to be commemorated each year around the birth of Dr. King, and not on the anniversaries of the March on Washington or the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The same ambiguity is present in American feminist history; we could look at the founding of the New York Female Moral Reform Society, or the beginnings of labor organizing in the textile mills, or to the birth of Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, or any of a dozen other key figures in the fight to win equal rights for women.

Yet there had never been anything quite like the Seneca Falls Convention, this first great gathering of women (and a handful of male allies) committed to gender justice. And in its sweeping and brave condemnation of existing power structures, in its clever homage to Jefferson’s 1776 document, and in its firm insistence that men and women are radically equal in their worth and ought also be equal participants in every station of life, the Declaration of Sentiments stands alone in its significance. The rights that American women have today — the right to vote, to be educated, to own property, to exercise sovereignty over their own flesh — trace themselves back to July 20, 1848. The status of American women, like the status of African slaves in this country, was little changed by what happened in the rebellion against Great Britain; it would take other documents and other wars to expand the electoral franchise and the right of self-determination to all.

When we gather today, we’ll read some excerpts from the Declaration of Sentiments. Some students will share about what feminism means to them, and about all that we still have left to accomplish. We’ll eat and drink and raise a glass of something legal to our foremothers who gathered in that small town in the Finger Lakes region of the Empire State 161 years ago.

And by God, all who come into my classes will remember the date July 20 for a very long time.

Friday Random Ten: once in a summer season edition

Posted on by

These are getting rarer and rarer, but I thought I’d offer an FRT for the hot months. These were the ten tracks that came up when I hit random shuffle on my iTunes this morning.

1. “Banks of Marble”, Leo Kottke and Iris DeMent
2. “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her”, Mary Chapin Carpenter
3. “Angel from Montgomery”, John Prine
4. “Living of Love”, Avett Brothers
5. “Hardest Time”, Los Lobos
6. “Follow the Lights”, Ryan Adams
7. “Lucky”, Radiohead
8. “Foolish Games”, Jewel
9. “Hard, Ain’t It Hard”, Weavers
10. “The Last Snowfall”, Vienna Teng

Bonus Track: “Quite Early Morning”, The Mammals

Thursday Short Poem: Dameron’s “No Longer Ashamed”

Posted on by

My friend Emily has turned me on to the poet DeLana R.A. Dameron, whose How God Ends Us has won the South Carolina poetry prize and is one of the best first offerings I’ve read in a while. This brief one is from DeLana’s own website. And oh, how much so many of us know (or knew, when we were younger) about being “confident in invisibility” and being a “stone statue” when the lights are on.

No Longer Ashamed

In the daylight, under the open glare
of the unshaded bulb in your apartment,

I straddle your lap. It is hot for February.
Down to tank top and bare feet you brush

your hand against my forearms, shoulders,
chest. Despite desire, I am a stone statue

in the garden. The only times we’ve come
to this place is under the cloak of night

oh inscrutable night I bloom under
without pause, without question, confident

in my invisibility. You reach with cupped hand
to a breast as if to hold water. You ask
if you could see me. I am a small sip falling

To go anywhere and do anything: more notes on marriage and class

Posted on by

In Monday’s post about the bitter loss of shared dreams, I didn’t address the issue of class and status brought up by the original posts from which I quoted. Several of those who commented did bring up issues of dating outside one’s SES (socio-economic status), and I wanted to return to that aspect of the issue.

I’m married today to a woman who is, on both sides of her family, the first to graduate from college. My wife grew up poor, the daughter of an Afro-Colombian mother with a third-grade education and a father who, for all his kindness and good intentions, was hardly a reliable or consistent presence. Starting when she was eight, my wife worked with her mother cleaning houses and offices before and after school, enduring racial abuse. Her mother, who eventually made a small living as a seamstress, stressed education as the key to rising out of poverty, and my wife embraced that. Somehow, my mother-in-law found the money to buy soccer uniforms, to pay for dance lessons, to pay for the tools that my wife could use to begin her climb into a different social and economic world. My wife worked hard, won scholarships, took out loans, and eventually graduated with honors from the University of Southern California before heading into what has been a very successful career in business management. From both an ethnic and socio-economic standpoint, our backgrounds are worlds apart.

Like many immigrants who are part of the first-generation to “make it”, my wife supports (and now that we are married with completely blended finances, we support) a very large number of people within an extended family who have been less fortunate than ourselves. We send money to our Colombian relatives, paying for medical operations and schooling and clothes. We support cousins in this country as well with little bits here and there. We’ve recently moved to a larger house, not least because we are moving my mother-in-law in. My mother-in-law will get to spend lots of time with her adored granddaughter, and we can provide for her. My wife was and is her nest egg, and my beloved has always known and cheerfully accepted her responsibility to repay her mother’s years of backbreaking work.

This is not how I was raised. In WASPy families — OKOP — ageing parents do not move in with their children. They move into retirement communities with multiple levels of care, gradually becoming more and more reliant on professionals until they slip gently — or sometimes, not so gently — into the next world. I’ve grown up hearing from my mother, my grandmother, and countless other relatives the insistence that “I will not be a burden to my children when I’m old.” My own Mama has carefully designed her finances and her insurance policies to provide for the maximum degree of autonomy and comfort when the time comes. Heck, in our family when mothers come to visit, they stay in a hotel even when a guest room is ready and furnished; such is the near-reverent respect for “not causing an inconvenience.” It seems cold to outsiders, I suppose, but not to us. And of course, it is economic privilege and a social ethos of individualism that undergirds this way of life.

So we know in our household that we will care for my mother-in-law for the rest of her life, but we will not have the same responsibilities with my own mama. We know that we will be giving financial help to many members of my wife’s family, but unless some stunning reversals of fortune come along (heavens forfend), we will not need to do so for mine. There is no resentment, of course. Privilege is not virtue, after all, and in our home we know the difference. The fact that our respective families have different histories and different levels of resources is hardly an obstacle to a successful marriage. My wife and I both derive great pleasure from being able to share what we can with those who need it, and there is absolute unity in this regard. Continue reading →

Reprint: Daddy Crushes and the longing for mentors

Posted on by

Summer posting is still slow. Here’s a reprint from June, 2007.

I’ve written a few times about student crushes and their meaning, starting with this post that still gets loads and loads of hits from search engines. My basic thesis:

There’s an old axiom in pop psychology: we don’t just get crushes on people whom we want, we get crushes on people whom we want to be like! Students don’t get crushes on me because they want to go to bed with me or be my girlfriend or boyfriend; they get crushes on me because I’ve got a quality that they want to bring out in themselves. They’re externalizing all of their hopes for themselves. And rather than encourage the crush to feed my ego, my job is to turn the focus back on to the student, encouraging him or her to take their new-found curiosity or enthusiasm or passion and use it, run with it, indulge it, let it take them places!

One thing I’ve really started to notice in the last two or three years is an interesting, satisfying shift in the way that some of these crushes seem to play out. Something shifted in my relationships with my students right around the time I became old enough to be their father. The crushes that students got on me — and the way they made those crushes known — were qualitatively different when I was 30 than they are today at 40.

Leaving me out of it, I know that some student crushes on their teachers are explicitly sexual. But most really aren’t, even if they appear externally to be motivated by physical desire. Young people, you see, have a good vocabulary for sex. Romantic longing and sexual fantasy are part of the discourse of most college students. But we don’t have the same vocabulary for wanting a mentor, or even a father-figure. When a 20 year-old college student says of her professor, “I think he’s hot”, her friends may or may not agree — but they understand her frame of reference. They’ll likely take what she says at face value.

But what if that same gal told her friends “I really want him as a mentor”? It’s likely she’d be teased; “Yeah right, you want him as a mentor! Puhleeze! Can’t you be honest about it?” We live in a culture that insists on eroticizing our desire to be guided and cared for to such a degree that it is assumed that anyone who insists that his or her longing to be nurtured isn’t sexual at its core is, well, lying. As a result, we don’t have a way to let young people ask to be mentored, guided, even loved in a safe, non-sexual and yet intimate way.

Talking about sexual desire also sounds so much more adult than talking about a desire for a father figure. We live in a culture where many young people see lust as evidence of maturity. Saying about your teacher: “I want to do him” makes you sound grown up, aggressive, sophisticated, a “together woman.” Saying about that same person, “I want to spend time with him, he’s kind of like a Dad to me” may seem — to peers if not to the young woman saying it — like evidence of immaturity. “What, you’re still not over your father issues?” Too often, I think the vocabulary of erotic desire masks something else, something more tender and raw. Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged

Sonia’s choice: of David Brooks, Barack Obama, the Supreme Court nominee and male privilege

Posted on by

I have mixed feelings about David Brooks, the erstwhile conservative columnist for the New York Times. And I have mixed feelings about his column this morning about Sonia Sotomayor. Brooks, noting the oft-retold story of Sotomayor’s rise from humble origins to a Supreme Court nomination:

It’s the upward mobility story — about a person who worked hard and contributes profoundly to society, but who also sacrificed things along the way.

As you read the profiles, you can almost draw a map of her relationships during each stage in her life. In some areas, her relationships are thick and fulfilling, but in others, there are blank spaces….

As an adult, the profiles describe her as upbeat and social, leading walks to Brooklyn, hosting poker parties, serving as godmother to many children. Yet over the years, she has been remarkably honest about the costs of her workaholism.

Her marriage broke up after two years. She was quoted as saying, “I cannot attribute that divorce to work, but certainly the fact that I was leaving my home at 7 and getting back at 10 o’clock was not of assistance in recognizing the problems developing in my marriage.”

Later, during a swearing-in ceremony in 1998, she referred to her then-fiancé, “The professional success I had achieved before Peter did nothing to bring me genuine personal happiness.” She addressed him, saying that he had filled “voids of emptiness that existed before you. … You have altered my life so profoundly that many of my closest friends forget just how emotionally withdrawn I was before I met you.”

That relationship ended after eight years, and her biographers paint a picture of a life now that is frantically busy, fulfilling and often aloof. “You make play dates with her months and months in advance because of her schedule,” a friend of hers told The Times.

Brooks’ point is a fair one: we live in a closer approximation of a meritocracy than at any time before, where a Latina from the Bronx can, through hard work and brains, rise to the top. This is a good thing. But as we have opened the doors of the Ivy League universities to the Obamas and the Sotomayors, we’ve also created a culture of exhausting workaholism which leaves little room for balance or enduring intimate relationships. When only a member of the male WASP elite could get into Harvard and climb to a Supreme Court nomination, the chances were good he would have a wife who sublimated her own ambitions to his. (In a not-so-distant past, he would probably be able to afford servants, too.) Men of that world surely worked hard, but it was the labor of others that allowed them to enjoy leisure, marry, and have children while climbing into the rarified air at the very top of the social ladder. As the sons and daughters of the lower middle class have, like Sonia, made it to the top, they have found it far more challenging to “have it all”. The old saying that a woman of color would have to “work twice as hard and be twice as good to be taken half as seriously” still carries the sting of truth, and Brooks points out the cost of this.

Where I take issue with Brooks is with his suggestion that this burden falls equally on men and women:

This isn’t the old story of a career woman trying to balance work and family. This is the story of pressures that affect men as well as women (men are just more likely to make fools of themselves in response, as the news of the last few years indicates). It’s the story of people in a meritocracy that gets more purified and competitive by the year, with the time demands growing more and more insistent.

His parenthetical point is well taken, but it seems false to suggest that men have the same trouble striking a work-life balance, or finding partners who will be patient with their workaholism. Think of Sotomayor’s fellow baby boomer and fellow first-generation Ivy League lawyer, Barack Obama. The Supreme Court nominee edited the Yale Law Journal; the president of the United States was president of the Harvard Law Review. Both were pioneers. Barack Obama married a woman with a marvelous education, and that woman chose, in the end, to sublimate her career to his. In the end, the future president did not have to choose between his public ambitions and his private longings. By all accounts a devoted husband and a wonderful father, Barack Obama is not unlike other men of his and Sotomayor’s generation: hardworking, tremendously ambitious, and able to find a brilliant and devoted wife who, despite her own considerable professional achievements will, when the chips are down, put her aspirations aside to support her spouse. Continue reading →

Divorce, break-ups, and the bitter loss of shared dreams

Posted on by

Via Amber, a blog post at the Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Steve McNair story. The comments selection is particularly remarkable, and Amber notes that at one point, Coates asks:

I have an open question for readers: the person who broke your hearts the hardest, whom it took you the longest to get over, were they higher on social and economic ladders than you? Or were they lower?

Amber follows up with a question of her own:

Part of the trauma of losing a relationship is the trauma of losing the imagined future with that person. One can mourn that miscarried future, and whatever security it might have brought, without reducing the beloved to a meal ticket or a leg up the social ladder. Does this reflect your experiences?

And it’s got me thinking: not about the sad McNair story, but about the ways in which heterosexual romance in this culture is so wrapped up in aspirations and dreams, in issues of class and status. I’ve touched on this before; I’m hardly the only person to point out that we train aging men to seek out younger women as evidence of continued virility and prowess. But this sense that a particular romance opens a door to previously unattainable possibilities seems more widespread than just the older man/younger woman dynamic. It may not be universal, but it’s common enough to be nearly so. For a great many of us, a serious relationship serves to provide security, opportunity, and hope for what could not otherwise be achieved. And indeed, as Amber suggests, the grief we often feel at the end of a relationship is less over what was actually lost and more over the loss of the great cavalry of dreams we had (often unconsciously) marshalled. In other words, we mourn for what might have been at least as much as we do for what actually was. Continue reading →