the feminist librarian

two recent and unrelated news items on which I have thoughts

2012-01-26T08:24:00.000-04:00

random pretty thing (via)

1. On Cynthia Nixon and choosing one's sexual identity. According to Cassie Murdoch @ Jezebel, actress Cynthia Nixon said some things about choosing her current partner, another woman, which have irritated other people also in same-sex relationships. In response, Nixon told the New York Times:

Why can't it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we're just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don't think that they should define the terms of the debate. I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didn't realize I was gay, which I find really offensive. I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men I've been out with. [NYT]

"Why is [choosing] any less legitimate" is my favorite line from this quotation, because regardless of where we, as humans of all sexual persuasions, fall on the innate/culture continuum vis a vis our own personal sexual desires, I think it's really important not to throw fluidity, change, and personal growth over time under the damn bus. By limiting "legitimate" or "authentic" sexuality to that which is fixed, innate, and ostensibly knowable from birth, we demand certainty on an issue which -- for some if not most -- is far from certain, or perhaps serially certain -- we know ourselves, and then we know ourselves again in a new light. Both equally true.

And, of course, even if you want to argue that sexual attractions/desires are innate and fixed, sexual identities and the language we use for them, are creations of culture -- so, yes, actually, we all of us "choose" to be "straight" or "gay" or "lesbian" or "bisexual" or "asexual" or "queer" or whateverthehellother label du jour we decide to slap on ourselves. Underneath those words are actual corporeal human beings, with attractions and desires no one can wrest from us or know better than ourselves -- but we do choose to politically identify with language. We choose to affiliate, organize, categorize. And we'll probably choose at some point to re-categorize human sexuality in new ways.

So I'm glad Ms. Nixon isn't letting people bully her into silence or repentance on this point for the sake of political expedience. That would make me sad for the future state of discourse on human sexuality.

2. On parents, children, and workplace negotiation. A friend of mine linked to an NPR story yesterday, on Tumblr, about parents advocating on behalf of their adult children with human resources representatives at their childrens' workplaces. I was thinking about this one on the way to work today, because I come from a family where -- okay, this hasn't happened and likely won't ever happen -- but where when I was growing up my parents often asserted their right to participate in discussions about (for example) our medical care, even when doctors thought it was "hovering." My parents were always clear to ask us, as their children, whether we wanted their support -- and backed off the moment we asked them to. But that experience has led me to be wary of cultural outrage over "helicopter parenting" and other family systems that Americans read as intrusive. Because things aren't always what they seem on the surface. Two thoughts:

a) Sometimes, tag-teaming is an important function of families. Sometimes, even grown-ups need the support of other grown-ups to self-advocate, particularly around things like healthcare? I can be as simple as calling to report a spouse is too ill to be at work that day, or it can be more complicated -- like asking a family member to attend medical appointments with you. We can't all operate in isolation 100% of the time, and while I have no idea what the particulars of these HR situations might be, I hesitate to be judgy. Yeah, it could totally be an overbearing sense of entitlement. But it might also be desperation and/or simply family groups operating to support one another. Which leads me to:

b) This seems outrageous to us because we've decided as a culture that it's outrageous. Think for a moment about arranged marriages. In cultures where extended families facilitate marriages, parents and other adults are involved in something (courtship) which we, in America, have decided is essentially a private matter between the two people directly involved. Parents getting involved in their child's courtship decisions (e.g. a partner asking the parents' permission before proposing) is seen as intrusive. But seen in a different light, it's not intrusive, it's expected, and serves a purpose. We might, as a society, decide we dislike the purpose it serves -- but that's neither here nor there. By analogy, it would be interesting to back up and consider how multi-generational involvement in workplace situations operates. What perceived problem is this involvement seeking to remedy? Is it serving a function that, until now, has been met in some other way? Why has the old way stopped working, or why do people perceive it to have ceased working?

These are the things I think about on the way to work.

booknotes: the lives of transgender people

2012-01-24T05:47:00.000-04:00

I was super excited to get my hands on an advance review copy of The Lives of Transgender People by Genny Beemyn and Susan Rankin (Columbia Univ. Press, 2011) a couple of months ago. Lives is being touted as a unique and much-needed large-scale study of the identities and experiences of trans* individuals as described in their own words through an online questionnaire and qualitative email, phone, and in-person interviews. Beemyn and Rankin gathered data from 3,474 individuals via the questionnaire, and followed up with over four hundred of those respondents for more lengthy interviews. By encouraging interviewees to articulate their own identities outside of pre-determined research categories, the authors allowed their subjects to provide a rich and nuanced picture of the lived experience of being someone who experiences life outside the sex and gender binaries mainstream culture assumes are innate and largely inflexible. Most studies examining the lives of trans* people to-date, as the authors point out, have focused on the life experiences of people who identify as transsexual; an overwhelming majority of those studies focus on the experience of trans women (women assigned male sex/gender at birth). As the authors point out, this renders invisible those people who do not fall into neat, polarized gender categories (trans* or otherwise). Often, as documented in books such as Brainstorm and Sexing the Body, this stems from the research community seeking discrete identity-groups they can control and measure for difference. It also comes from researchers' own unexamined assumptions concerning sex and gender difference, assumptions which are then reinforced by the results of studies that have been designed (in part) by jettisoning the data from individuals who don't fit into the pre-determined sex and gender categories.

The Lives of Transgender People can be read, in part, as providing a model for a much different way of exploring trans* experiences -- one which honors the myriad expressions of sex and gender which the human organism manifests. "Throughout the book, we use the language of the survey participants to honor their voices and their own self-descriptions," write Rankin and Beemyn, insisting that we, as readers, pay attention to the richness of the gendered experiences described by the people who shared their stories (36). Lives seeks to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, synthesizing the data collected in a number of different ways that suggest some patterns to be found in trans* experiences, often differentiated by other variables such as age cohort, race, economic status, and so forth. Particularly useful was the researchers discussion of gender identity and expression, given their insistence that trans* identities and experiences not be simplified the better to accommodate researchers desire for tidy data. They discuss in great detail their decision to identify four basic categories for analysis: trans men (assigned female at birth, self-identity male), trans women (assigned male at birth, self-identity female), "female to different gender" (FTDG) and "male to different gender," (MTDG) which allowed them to honor the current identities of respondents which don't fit into the mainstream system of binary gender. Further chapters discuss race, sexual orientation, and age as variables which further complicate the project of identifying any stable sense of trans* identity or experience.

The researchers, both of whom work in higher education, are particularly interested in age and generational differences as a factor, and put forward some tentative observations concerning the difference in reported experience across generations. For example, older respondents were more likely than younger ones to identify as cross-dressers, while trans men were statistically more likely to be significantly younger than trans women. They also spend a great deal of time was also spent on identifying recurring "milestones" of gender identity development as articulated by the study participants. Much trans* research to-date has focused on modeling the "stages" through which individuals go on the journey to identifying themselves as transgendered, and the authors of Lives offer the more flexible model of "milestones" (which may or may not be relevant for a particular individual) as an alternative model for understanding the process of self-realization.

I hope that in the years to come Lives will be a rich source of data for activists, theorists, and policymakers, as well as one possible model for doing research on sex and gender that allows us to collect meaningful data without depending on the binary male/female, man/woman dichotomies that continue to unhelpfully reduce the variety of human experience to the inflexible straight-jackets of innate gender difference.

first, we'd actually have to find a pro-choice politician ... [blog for choice 2012]

2012-01-22T08:06:00.000-04:00

For previous Blog for Choice posts see 2011, 2010 and 2008. This post has also been cross-posted at The Pursuit of Harpyness.
Thanks to all the Harpies who contributed to the discussion that led to this post.
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The theme for the 2012 Blog for Choice action day is "what will you do to help elect pro-choice candidates in 2012?" Which frankly is something I don't have a whole lot of energy to blog around.

Bad feminist activist me.

I've voted Democrat in every election since I could vote, so it's not like I can make the radical decision to start voting "pro-choice." And I'm not a big political organizer, so door-to-door canvassing is pretty much out. And to be be perfectly honest, most of the politicians out there aren't speaking my language anyway. I talked with my mother on the telephone last Sunday and she asked when my partner and I were going to make plans to move to Canada. It was a joke, but only quasi in jest, since my mother and I -- though not identical in our political thinking -- share a politics that's to the radical left of the Obama administration, and certainly shares little in common with any of the Republican candidates.

So how do you go about taking action to "help elect pro-choice candidates" when, essentially, you don't feel there are any pro-choice candidates?

via

You work to change the culture. Which sometimes has the feeling of being that dung beetle from Microcosmos. It's a long, slow slog and you're probably never going to get the majority of folks to agree with you. At least, I know I'm not. If I woke up one morning and the majority of Americans suddenly shared my priorities for health and well-being I'd be flabbergasted, gobsmacked, and tongue-tied -- not to mention bewitched and bewildered. But, you know: Not going to happen. And I accept that -- or, at least, have learned to live with it the way one learns to live with a bum knee.

And this isn't even a question of "feminists" vs. "everyone else" 'cause it's clear that self-identified feminists are anything but 100% unified on the question of abortion, on the question of reproductive rights and justice, on the question of what "pro-choice" politicians should emphasize. When I asked Harpy readers to describe their ideal pro-choice politician, here are some of the responses I received:

Drahill: "The first thing I’m going to look at is whether they support policies that make it easier to be a mother...to be pro-choice, a candidate needs to support comprehensive maternity leave reform, favor WIC, favor food aid for mothers, favor comprehensive healthcare reform, favor reforming housing laws to make it easier to own a home and stay in your home, favor educational reform to make it easier for women and children to go to school, be invested in promoting preventive and mental health services… you get the idea "
BearDownCBears: "My fellow Americans, as of this morning I have exercised extraordinary executive privilege by dissolving the United States Congress and establishing martial law. All private insurance will be nationalized and reorganized and doctors’ medical debt will be socialized to make up for the lower compensation they will receive. Publicly funded parental leave will be instated and an abortion clinic will be available within every 100 miles."
baraqiel: "Pro-choice has to come with pro-the ability to make choices to be meaningful ... for example, pro-comprehensive sex ed (required in public schools, private schools, homeschooling…). Pro-education about contraception and access to contraception. Pro-enthusiastic consent."
Jenn_smithson: "I want a candidate who understands that the right to control my own body is the foundation of all other rights ... Any candidate who is prochoice needs to not only understand this but needs to articulate it as well. My rights are not a bargaining chip, full stop, and I’m sick of them being treated as though they are.
BeckySharper: "It’s essential that we keep the church, the state, and everyone else OUT the business of policing women’s uteri."

While I won't replicate the whole conversation here, since it went to 50+ comments, the salient difference that emerged in our own little corner of the feminist blogosphere was the divide between those who focus on abortion rights qua abortion rights and those who see the issue of abortion access as part of a much larger, densely interwoven, set of issues surrounding reproduction, family formation, and human rights. This exchange captures, in a nutshell, the larger disagreement:

mischiefmanager argues that:

Historically, the term “choice” was used by women’s advocacy groups to avoid the loaded word “abortion.” If you want to expand it to mean other things, that’s your own personal interpretation. Check the websites of pro-choice groups and you’ll see that although safety net questions are sometimes discussed, the focus of their work is on keeping abortion legal and accessible. That’s hard enough these days without bringing anything else into the equation.

to which Drahill responded:

Pro-Choice, now, is a political slogan. That does not mean that’s what pro-choice SHOULD mean. It sounds better and softer than “pro-abortion rights.” Let’s face it. Just as pro-life sounds nicer than “anti-abortion rights.” But that’s what they are, and I don’t see how you can argue otherwise. I’d really suggest you take up reading some blogs (seriously, Womanist Musings) that address pro-choice as reproductive justice. Because that is all about helping women in whatever choice they make. In reproductive justice, if a woman who wants to parent has an abortion because she fears not being able to find a place to live, the movement is regarded as having failed her. Because the movement did not fight for her choice and what she needed to exercise it. That’s why just defining pro-choice as abortion rights is easier – because once you look at reproductive justice and what it means, it’s so HUGE it can feel hopeless. But I think we still have an obligation to those women who want to parent. It’s thinking about all the women you DON’T see at the clinic and their families.

So on the one hand, we have folks who argue that "pro-choice" equals eliminating legal barriers to reproductive care and abortion specifically. So: focus on keeping abortion legal, obstructing fetal personhood amendments, keeping Planned Parenthood and other women's health clinics open, and critiquing the misinformation campaign of Crisis Pregnancy Centers. All of this is important, obviously. Yet in my mind it stops short of what a robust "pro-choice" agenda should look like, because it does nothing to address pre-existing inequalities. Keeping abortion services legal, safe, and available across the nation is awesome and important -- but that alone doesn't ensure that those without resources or with constrained autonomy (prisoners, minors, women in the military, trans* folks, women of color, immigrants, those with limited financial resources, disabled women, queer women ... the list could go on and on) will be able to access those clinics.

We always have choices, but our ability to make meaningful choices is limited by our material circumstances, by knowledge, and by fear. Some choices are over-determined by the systems (sociocultural and material contexts) in which we live and deliberate. As Talk Birth so eloquently argues, in a recent post on birthing and informed consent:

While it may sound as if I am saying women are powerlessly buffeted about by circumstance and environment, I’m not. Theoretically, we always have the power to choose for ourselves, but by ignoring, denying, or minimizing the multiplicity of contexts in which women make “informed choices” about their births and their lives, we oversimplify the issue and turn it into a hollow catchphrase rather than a meaningful concept.

Women’s lives and their choices are deeply embedded in a complex, multifaceted, practically infinite web of social, political, cultural, socioeconomic, religious, historical, and environmental relationships.

And, I maintain that a choice is not a choice if it is made in a context of fear.

(via Molly @ first the egg)

I'm with Drahill and others on the discussion thread, then, when I argue that to be "pro-choice" in our world can and should mean actively fostering an environment where women will be trusted to make decisions, and have the material ability to meaningfully act on the choices they make. Our material resources -- as individuals, as a society, as a globe -- are not infinite. Many people on the comment thread pointed this out, and I agree. Yet our ability to prioritize, to re-shuffle the cards and place human health, well-being, and individual agency at the top of our list of what government at its best can ensure for its citizens ... that is endless and constant. To return to the rhetoric of "choice," we -- as a society -- have chosen to prioritize certain types of activities (wars of aggression, banking, environmental plunder) over others (sustaining human and environmental well-being). I believe as a society we aren't hostage to those previous choices -- though some of the consequences will continue to ripple for generations to come. We can make new choices, and craft new priorities.

That's what I will continue to push for in 2012: The ideas of those people -- inside and outside of the political machine -- who want us to build a future in which all human beings will be able to make meaningful choices about their lives, their families, and their futures.

live-blog: caitlin flanagan on WBUR

2012-01-20T19:18:00.000-04:00

via

I got home from one of those days in which I was dashing hither and yon doing work-related stuff and found what I really wanted to do was listen to Caitlin Flanagan fulminate in front of Tom Ashbrook and the ever-articulate Irin Carmon on On Point (WBUR). Basically, I listened to the episode so you don't have to. Here's are my "live blog" responses to the conversation.

For more considered reviews of Flanagan's Girl Land see here and here, and while you're at it read Amanda Marcotte's reflections on this same interview over at Pandagon.

Update: Irin's own reflections on the interview, and Caitlin Flanagan's concern trolling of Irin's girlhood, can be found here.

1:57 - Caitlin Flanagan (CF): "Across time and culture there are certain things about [female adolescence] that are constant." Wait, what? People making claims about anything being "constant" across time and culture is a huge red flag in my book. Especially when it's something as historically situated as "adolescence" which, as historians of the family will tell you, is an invention of modernity.

2:48 - CF: "[Adolescence is an] emotionally exquisite experience." For all girls? Fess up to the fact that you're talking about yourself, not everyone. At least, I think she was talking about herself? It was confusing. The rose colored glasses were coming out big time here. And I speak as someone who was pretty happy with my life between the ages of twelve and twenty.

3:32 - But then she acknowledges that teenage/adolescent period is a twentieth century phenomenon. So she's already contradicting her argument about things being constant "across time and culture."

4:25 - CF is wishing to bring back "protective" mechanisms for girls. She keeps saying "girls" when she's actually talking about teenagers. Children are not being discussed here.

4:48 - CF talks about how teenagers today are "steeped in pornography," "sexting" and "hook-up" culture. She's using the language of moral panic here, which is particularly interesting given the recent data which suggest that the people doing the most "sexting" aren't teenagers, but adults.

5:46 - CF presents princess culture as innate girlhood, rather than culturally shaped. She should do her homework and read Peggy Orenstein's book Cinderella Ate My Daughter (or listen to this 40 minute interview) about how princesses are being relentlessly marketed to girls.

6:29 - Tom Ashbrook (TA) uses the phrase "time immemorial." Oh, Tom, please. She doesn't need help universalizing this supposed phenomenon.

6:52 - Only six minutes in and I'm already hating the erasure of boys. What about boys who are "drawn to romance"? I knew boys who loved Austen novels and who were sweet and nurturing and interested in sustaining meaningful relationships (of sexual and non-sexual kinds) throughout adolescence. It makes me sick that the only way CF can picture cross-gender relationships is to sexualize them, and the only way she can contain those scary sexualized relationships is to require them to be "dating" relationships.

7:25 - CF: "All she's thinking about is attracting the attention of other boys that she knows." So ... when teenage girls experiment with gender presentation and dressing up and sexuality, it's all about male attention? What year is it again, and what rock have you been hiding under?

7:40 - CF: "She's opened up to a world of sexual threat" ... but not joy also? Developing sexuality is going to be entirely framed by fear and threat? "It's almost not politically correct to admit that it is [threatening]." Oh kill me now. Seriously? The "politically correct" card is such a lame disclaimer to play. Way to make me stop taking anything you say after said disclaimer seriously.

8:05 - CF: "It has been through the ages" again with the universalizing. SO WRONG.

8:30 - TA asks what would be an ideal world [for "girls"] in CF's eyes, and uses nice qualifiers. Specifically asks for her opinion, not as if she's an expert. CF looking for "protection."

9:20 - She keeps circling back to the Internet. Seriously. Like it's this totally overwhelming thing we as human beings don't mediate as users.

9:45 - Are girls not capable of making their own rooms a protected space? She keeps talking about how adults have to force their daughters into using their rooms as retreats, when shouldn't the daughters themselves be making that call? My parents weren't forcing me to spend hours and hours in my room reading novels and exchanging (totally private, emotionally intense) letters (and later emails) with my closest friends. Why do parents need to enforce this, if it's what girls want? She doesn't explain this disconnect.

10:08 - CF: "The school day is so intense for them" - girls specifically? And again, if adults are able to make this space for themselves, why can't teenagers, if they need it. If CF walks away from "the Internet" when she's overwhelmed, can't she just model good self-care to her children?

10:48 - CF [about college students having mementos of childhood in their dorm rooms]: "Men in college don't have that"? On what basis do you make this assertion?? Have you looked at any young man's life recently? It makes me wonder how much you know about your own sons, because the men in my life are all over the treasured memories of their childhood. It's equal-opportunity nostalgia in my own social circle.

11:13 - CF: "There's no more dating as we knew it" and therefore girls are totally at risk. Again, I wonder where is the trust that young women will make the world the way they want it? Where is the agency? Dating was somehow this magical land of unicorns and rainbows, and this new land of (allegedly) no dating is a nightmare that is being forced on girls? I think straight women might have had something to do with the evolution of hetero courtship?

11:57 - TA acknowledges "pushback" from feminists (thanks TA!), asks is this "just life" that you're protecting girls from? Good question!

12:27 - CF talks like there's only "two schools" for raising girls/children -- either you're totally controlling or totally permissive. Her language is one of moderation, as if she's offering an alternative to all-or-nothing, as if she wants the gains of the feminist movement without the ... well, it's unclear what, but whatever it is, it's BAD THINGS ... but her word choices are all those of moral panic over SEX and girls and SEX.

12:41 - CF talks about "imperatives of male sexuality" which is such a total red flag to me. It's gender essentialism and it's bioreductive bullshit. As an example of the loaded language: girls are now "servicing boys"?! TA pushes back on her equation of "freedom" with "oral sex" (and oral sex that is about "servicing," making it sound like sex is something girls do to comply with manly sexual urges when they're forced to do so by this awful new freedom thing).

13:50 - I find myself wondering why CF things "support" for girls and young women equals "protection" and control?

15:00 - Again, she's promulgating a very extreme duality here, despite her tone of moderation: either parents "protect" their girls by limiting their girls' access to avenues of exploration, or they're pushing their (unwilling?) daughters into having wild, meaningless sex with bestial boys.

15:39 - A call-in listener introduced as Vica observes that a "dichotomy has been set up" by Flanagan, and that as an Armenian immigrant who's done cross-cultural research on women, she questions whether freedom is a bad thing. "I've had the freedom to explore," she says, observing that her mother gave her the "same sorts of freedom that she now gives my little brothers." She points to the risk of socializing women into fear, inferiority.

18:02 - Another listener, Caroline, starts out on a good note: "I've found it impossible to actually shield her... you have to talk to them about it." She argues it's important to find "talking opportunit[ies] with your daughter" ... "you have to equip them" for going out into the world. Then, she describes going through her daughter's computer history to check for porn access. What. The. Fuck. Invasion of privacy. Not okay.

20:41 - CF: "I think everything that Caroline said is fantastic" ... says all parents should be asking their daughters "what are you going to require in a boy?" (God she's so relentlessly heteronormative) ... "[Boys will do whatever it takes to get access to female companionship and ultimately female sexuality." UM WHAT? FUCK YOU. If girls don't hold high expectations, "that's what you'll end up with." Basically, if partner mistreats you, it's all your fault for not demanding better treatment. Places girls in the role of the gatekeeper. She totally needs to ~~hook up with~~ got on a date with Iris Krasnow.

[Irin Carmon joins the program]

23:44 - Irin Carmon (IC): "We need to talk more about how we're raising our boys and not have such a low opinion of them" ... "there's only so much you can protect girls" and so it's important to model critiquing the culture, for both girls and boys.

25:04 - IC: "I don't recognize the girl land CF describes" ... Irin's teenage years were a "fertile time" for her, recognizing that she was lucky to be in safe, supportive community of people. It was okay to talk about sex, to have Instant Messager in her room, etc.

26:17 - IC argues that the real question is "how do you create a dialogue around sexuality that's about knowledge and not shame" -- and how do we bring boys into that dialogue. I love her talking point here, and how it relentlessly calls attention to the fact that CF is relentlessly focused on policing girls' lives, even as she places the main threat for girls on the shoulders of over-sexed boys.

26: 56 - CF: "I'm the last person to demonize boys" (you smarmy snake-oil saleswoman). Yet she goes right on to say that boys will "follow cues" that girls give them (what are they, pets?). "Boys will be thrilled with hook up culture," with "pornified culture." Like, all boys? All boys are totally interested in sex the way it's depicted in mainstream, mass-marketed porn? Why exactly do you think boys are "thrilled" with hook-up culture? Because they're led by their dicks? And what their dicks want is access to pussy 24/7? Please check your research, listen to some actual boys and men (and the researchers who listen to those boys and men) and then we'll talk. 'Cause that's not what I'm hearing. I happen to think men and boys are just as varied in their sexual desires as women, and that it's irresponsible to start any sentence with "Boys will ..." if it's going to end with a generalization about sex or relationship desires.

28:04 - IC: "I feel like you're conflating pornified culture with safe sex education." AMEN.

29:40 - TA questions CF about her argument that the shift from boy/girl dating (in her idealized past) to group activities (which makes it sound like group sex, but I think she means, like, people hanging out together in friendly ways?) hurts girls. What I'm struck by is that back in the very period she's idealizing (the 50s!), adults were concerned about the very opposite trend. The worry back in the 50s and 60s was that teenagers were doing too much pairing off, when really they should be hanging out in groups and dating around before "going steady." Really, I wish she'd done some basic research. Like, any research. At all. Into this period she's supposedly harkening back to.

29:46 - CF on IC's adolescent boyfriends: "They didn't really treat her very well..." Oh. My. God. is she concern trolling!! Poor Irin apprently needs to be "treated nicely," to "find a way that boys would treat her kindly." It's like we're supposed to train boys like circus animals or something. Jesus H. Christ.

31:42 - IC (kicking ass, as usual): "Frankly, my adolescence was fine and so were some of the growing-up boys that I dated" ... "I feel really okay ... I feel fine about it because I was in a community of really supportive parents" ... We're not doing girls any favors "if we lock them up in their rooms without an internet connection."

33:05 TA asks CF point-blank: "Is that really the measure of a good adolescence, if you had a boyfriend in high school?" THANK YOU TA.

33:25 - IC: our job is to help teenagers to be "resilient in the face of humans hurting each other." Because sometimes people are shit even when we do everything right. Newsflash Ms. Flanagan! Women and girls (some of whom aren't that kindly themselves) can't domesticate the entire world and make sure no one ever, ever gets hurt by exuding perfect femininity. Or something.

34:55 - CF: "Talking about date rape is almost useless now because kids don't go on conventional dates"??

35:20 - IC likes TA's question about what makes a good adolescence: "I emerged feeling happy and connected and with healthy relationships" ... and while she says "date rape" as a term is problematic, it's because (duh) the qualifier makes it seem like there's gradations of rate. "What we should be talking about is sexual violence" full stop.

36:32 - IC: "My job to actively critique and push back on" the assault on women's rights. To ask "how do we send girls and boys out into the world ... with the resilience to respond" to corrosive messages about what it means to be masculine and feminine, and to be in relationship with one another?

Again, I find myself wondering where, in Flanagan's view of the world, is the trust that young people will know their own limits? Will grow and learn about themselves? Will say "no, I've had enough," or "that's not for me"? Why are parents depicted as the enforcers?

38:58 - CF: "If you're in a marriage and you're raising children that is the model they will follow." Um ... what about abusive families? What about kids who don't want their parents' marriage? What if a girl likes her dad, but actually wants a different sort of man as a sexual partner or ... gasp! ... a woman? Or both?

39: 35 - TA pushes back against CF's characterization of IC's childhood (THANK YOU). Again, CF uses loaded language like "unfettered" and "untrammeled" when talking about access to the Interwebs. "Parenting a teenager [is hard] ... now we need to be as vigilant and hardworking as when they were toddlers."

41:31 - CF: girls are asking "am I capable of being loving and loved by an adult man." ... um. hello? queer women? TA pushes back on the privilege bleeding all over this portrait of family life and CF places responsibility on the wife to keep marriage intact (I'm telling you: Flanagan needs to shack up with Krasnow and they can totally get off one one anothers' view of wifely responsibility).

42:08 - IC: CF has "nostalgic ideas about family" ... while she had a great two-parent home growing up, what "if one of my parents had happened to be abusive," or "incarcerated"? "You're setting up a value 'what do nice girls do'" as if they can create that whole world around themselves. Yet often things happen to us that are beyond our direct control.

43:48 - CF is pretty clearly blaming women for marrying jerks, arguing that we engage in "magical thinking" about how easy marriage is, and become "self-defeating" (I'm telling you: Krasnow/Flanagan is all I can see now, and I totally wish I could erase that from my brain).

44:28 - TA: "I don't know who's describing [marriage] as a crap shoot ...". I love how he's trying to be impartial, but is so clearly skeptical of Flanagan's hyperbole.

45:06 - CF: "It's a hardship to be raised without a father." And ... we're out.

Yeah, I know. It was a little like shooting fish in a barrel. But I had a glass of wine and needed to unwind for an hour. No need to thank me :).

Thankfully, no actual adolescent girls were harmed in the making of this blog post. Or boys either. Or folks who haven't decided what their gender is. I hope Flanagan's sons find their own way in the world, and learn to make up their own minds about what it means to be a guy. 'Cause frankly, their mother's picture of manhood is depressing as hell.

new fic: snogging on the verge

2012-01-19T06:48:00.000-04:00

Tom Branson (Downton Abbey)

I have a new Downton Abbey fic up at AO3 featuring Tom Branson and an original character I made up so Tom would have a boyfriend. Hanna said if I was going to steal Sybil away from Tom and give her to Gwen, I had to write him a sweet boyfriend to fill the gap. So I have. At least, I wrote him a boyfriend. The "sweet" part is more a matter of personal opinion.

So if Sybil/Tom is not your OTP and you're looking for some Downton Abbey m/m that doesn't involve the creepy Thomas Barrow (though, okay, I admit I'm kinda hoping Doctor Clarkson sorts him out), have fun!

Title: Snogging on the VergePairing: Tom Branson/Thaddeus Miles
Rating: Teen (AO3)/PG-13
Word Count: 7,494
Summary: When a young American on a walking tour of Yorkshire twists his knee on the grounds of Downton Abbey, Tom Branson finds himself experiencing certain desires he knows are dangerous for a young man in his position.

It's part one of a three-part (thus far) story arc I'm calling "Just a Little Love Song." And it more or less fits into the 'verse I've created for Sybil and Gwen in How She Loved You.

at the end of SOPA blackout day, I leave you with this

2012-01-18T21:47:00.001-04:00

Via my sister Maggie.

notes on reading "the secret lives of wives"

2012-01-17T06:38:00.000-04:00

Over the weekend, I read an advance review book from LibraryThing called The Secret Lives of Wives: Women Share What It Really Takes to Stay Married by journalist Iris Krasnow (Gotham Books, 2011). Hanna wasn't happy with me since I spent most of Saturday ranting at the book. I find this satisfying; she finds it anxiety-producing. At least when I use words like "heteronormative" and "shallow bitch."

I'll be writing a review of this book, where I try to be slightly more measured in my criticisms. You know: balancing those out with the fairly innocuous observations Krasnow makes about what it takes to maintain strong interpersonal relationships with those truly heinous arguments grounded in gender essentialist bullshit. But for now, I thought readers of the feminist librarian might be amused at the notes I took in preparation for writing said review, scrawled in the front and back cover of the book. So here they are verbatim:

Inside the front cover:

no brownie points for
heteronormativity
evopsych bullshit
gender/sex essentialism
focus on women -- makes it women's work
-- p. 66, p. 119, p. 135-36, p. 138, p. 202-08 HARMFUL, p. 219.
concern trolling -- p. 37, p. 12
"secret"
"surrender"
"males" and "females"
"divorce epidemic"
"me decade"
not getting [that] this book isn't universal!!!
describing physical appearance --> [ran out of room; continues below "points for" list]

points for
acknowledging agenda, limits [of study]
no one-size-fits-all, to a point
self-responsibility for happiness
outside relationships
aloneness = positive
"who are you beyond Mommy?" (101)
activity, engagement, etc. duh
p. 198 friendship

[no brownie points for, cont'd]
"gay best friend" stereotype
feminist hate-ons
privileging marriage relationships
not recognizing economic privilege
-- travel, house, etc. professionals. p. 140
negotiation isn't possible? wtf?
all couples w/kids?? -- p. 145
Depression-era idealization

*compare to marriage across cultures book*

Inside the back cover:

relentless heteronormativity -- relentless
"need"
"essential"
good marriage = lasting marriage
marriage vs. dating, no other options
"women need marriage" O_o ... (p. 8)
"marriage = sex" O_o ... (p. 9)
better than the crazy therapy lady?
evopsych bullshit ARGH
p. 57 aloneness + self-awareness (duh)
p. 40 network of support and fulfillment (duh)
reading this book made me so grateful for my parents
any dads as primary parent??
p. 257 ARGH

gender essentialism
oppositional binary
ageism - against youth, against age
tokenism

So there you have it folks. That's the raw material from whence my review will spring. Although I admit to being puzzled by a couple of these notes myself (who the heck is "the crazy therapy lady" I was thinking about??). Still, I hope you enjoyed this rare opportunity to observe the inner workings of a book review in process. It's a public service after all: I read books like this so y'all don't have to!

booknotes: post-holiday round-up

2012-01-12T08:00:00.000-04:00

It's that time again! Time for another round-up of books I've been reading that for some reason or another haven't made it into a post-length book review. Most of these, let me be clear, deserve a full-length review. Many of them are well-researched, well-argued, or otherwise lovely reads. I just don't have the temporal time/space to write them all up. So here's everything that's fallen through the cracks in the past few months.

Corey Robin | Fear: The History of a Political Idea (Oxford U.P., 2004) and The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford U.P., 2011). I first heard of Corey Robin thanks to an episode of Amanda Marcotte's RhRealityCheck podcast in which she interviewed Robin about The Reactionary Mind. I was impressed with what he had to say about gender and power, so I hunted up his books and got reading. Fear was the volume that came in first at the library. It's dense political history and theory, examining the theorizing and deployment of fear in the political realm from the Thomas More to Hannah Arendt and into the twenty-first century. Robin's core argument is that politicians (left and right) have positioned fear as an external threat to civil society and democracy and therefore obscured the way in which fear is deployed within our society to keep power hierarchies in place (e.g. in the workplace, in race and gender relations, through law enforcement, etc.). The Reactionary Mind is a collection of essays -- many which began as book reviews in publications like The Nation and The London Review of Books -- that explore specific reactionary thinkers. I'd recommend dipping into Robin's work with Reactionary and then moving on to Fear if you're really intrigued, since Reactionary is certainly the easier (though no less insightful) read. My favorite essay in Reactionary might just have been the one on Antonin Scalia in which he observes:

Scalia’s mission, by contrast, is to make everything come out wrong. A Scalia opinion, to borrow a phrase from Margaret Talbot, writing in the New Yorker, is ‘the jurisprudential equivalent of smashing a guitar on stage’. Scalia may have once declared the rule of law to be the law of rules – leading some to mistake him for a traditional conservative – but where others look for stabilising checks or reassuring supports, Scalia looks for exhilarating impediments and vertiginous barriers. Rules and laws make life harder, and harder is everything.

David K. Johnson | The Lavender Scare: Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004). Following footnotes from Corey Tobin's Reactionary Mind, I stumbled across this detailed and well-constructed history of the McCarthy era purge of non-straight civil servants. Johnson's book documents the way in which fears about national loyalty and psychological fitness blended together in the Cold War era and led to a mass expulsion of queer folks from the government (often destroying careers, precipitating family fissures, and causing psychological and emotional trauma on the way by). What surprised me was the relatively relaxed attitude Johnson describes toward sexual deviance immediately prior to the 1950s, when few feared loss of their job or social ostracism for homosexual identity or behavior.

Paul Russell | The Unreal Life of Sergey Nobokov (Cleis Press, 2011). Cleis Press sent me a review copy of this densely atmospheric historical novel, which attempts to reconstruct the life of Sergey Nobokov, the obscure younger brother of novelist Vladimir Nabokov of Lolita fame. I admit a certain amount of dubiousness when confronted with a historical novel that attempts to piece together the life of an actual historic person -- particularly when the person in question was homosexual. The temptation for presentism (reading our own expectations onto the past) is always a danger, and often intensifies when we're talking about the act of "recovering" queer history. The novel is also forbidding in that one anticipates, from the opening pages, Nabokov's inevitable death at the hands of the Gestapo. To be honest, I've rather bogged in the middle (though I mean to go back!) just because midwinter is not really the time to be reading about the inevitable demise of a forgotten gay man under the Nazi regime.

Patricia Faith Appelbaum | Kingdom to Commune: Protestant Pacifist Culture Between World War I and the Vietnam Era (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2009). Hanna found this one for me at the Harvard Book Store off Harvard Square. It's a meticulously researched study of pacifism during the first half of the twentieth century, focusing -- as the title suggests -- on the influence of mainline protestant culture on the ways in which pacifism was articulated and enacted by women and men across the United States (and to some extent internationally as well). I'm only up to roughly the start of the Second World War thus far, but am finding it very readable history. I'm particularly interested in her focus on material and "folk" culture as a way of practicing and passing along traditions of Protestant pacifism, even in more secular pacifist communities and activism.

Joseph Cummings | Ten Tea Parties: Patriotic Protests That Time Forgot (Quirk Books, 2012). This early reviewer book from LibraryThing that is a lesson in "read more than the title when requesting your advance review copies." I thought the book was going to be about ten unique protests that time forget; instead, it was about ten pre-revolutionary protests about tea and import taxes. Which, okay, if your thing this might be fun. Cumm ings has an engaging narrative voice and it looks like he's done a credible amount of background research. His scant two-page bibliography is made up of secondary resources, however, and the lack of even end note citations is frustrating to those of us who like our quotations sourced!

Jeffrey Weeks | Making Sexual History (Blackwell, 2000). Following citations from Gayle Rubin's Deviations, I tracked down this retrospective anthology of British historian and theorist of sexual politics Jeffrey Weeks' essays on historical conceptions of human sexuality. This is a lively and articulate -- if somewhat theoretically dense -- collection which provides a solid picture of the work of historians of sexuality since the 1960s, and also reflects back on the work of sexologists from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the long legacy of their contributions to research and cultural perceptions of human sexuality and how it is organized. Weeks was one of the pioneering scholars to retrieve the study of sex from the realm of nature/biology (where it was assumed to be ahistorical) and asserted the importance of understanding how human sexuality itself -- not just our understanding of it -- is shaped by culture.

Christopher Turner | Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011). I was only able to get through about half of this ambitious history of psychoanalyist Wilhelm Reich's work on human sexuality before the library demanded it back. However, the half that I did read was a thoroughly researched examination of Reich's approach to psychoanalysis -- one which placed orgasm at the center of both psychological and political health. Since Reich had only just arrived in America when I had to interrupt my reading, I remain dubious concerning the title's claim (that Reich precipitated the sexual revolution in the U.S.). Nevertheless, Reich's insistence that sexual pleasure was healthy and to be encouraged -- and his placement of pleasure close to the heart of humanity's essential character -- becomes central to a number of post-WWII psychoanalytic and cultural currents that I am interested in (he was connected to, among others, A.S. Neill, Fritz Perls, and Erich Fromm).

Rachel Maines | The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins, 1998). Um ... are you sensing a pattern in my recent reading yet? Pursuing research for an MHS "object of the month" essay, I checked out this slim volume on the medical treatment of women's sexuality through electromechanical technology. It appears to be the only book-length work on this subject to-date, and although I found some of her arguments about male physicians and their power to be slightly simplistic, on the whole she avoids turning this into a narrative of male physicians vs. female patients, or husbands vs. wives, and instead offers a nuanced argument about the displacement of female sexual pleasure from marital intimacy to the doctor's office due to what she terms the "androcentric model" of sex that insisted intercourse to male orgasm was sex, and women's needs (clitoral stimulation anyone?) outside of those activities were excessive and therefore a medical issue for which one sought treatment from the professionals.

booknotes: deviations

2012-01-10T08:00:00.000-04:00

find table of contents here

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.

movienotes: calamity jane

2012-01-06T05:52:00.000-04:00

Calamity Jane (Day) and Wild Bill Hickok (Keel)
via

Cross-posted at the corner of your eye.

When Hanna and I were visiting her folks back in December, we decided to watch the old VHS copy of Calamity Jane (1953) starring Doris Day and Howard Keel that we found in their video collection. In our defense, may I point out that a) we love making fun of crap movies, and b) Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was a childhood favorite of Hanna's, and c) when I was about eight the original Broadway cast recording of Annie Get Your Gun starring Ethel Merman was where it was at as far as I was concerned. I was the proud owner of a vinyl record (my very first!) and would make my best girl friend at the time play Frank Butler to my Annie Oakley as we sang, "The Girl That I Marry" and "Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better." To this day, I feel our relationship fell apart at least partially because she wanted a girl who was "soft and pink as a nursery" while I was more of a "Doin' What Comes Natur'lly" kinda gal.

Anyway, so we decided to watch Calamity because of these things. And obviously we were anticipatory of the cringe-inducing depiction of Native Americans, the weak plot (this was no Deadwood), and to some extent the weak music and lyrics (Sammy Fain and Paul Webster are no Irving Berlin). What we didn't anticipate was the lesbian (sub)text and the total confusion in the heteroromance department.

See, here's the deal. As the film opens, Calamity Jane and Bill Hickok are pals living and working in Deadwood. They clearly see one another as besties, a situation which lasts through to the end of the film where their platonic friendship is required to morph into a romantic one in order to satisfy the demands of the marriage plot. Until the last-minute deus ex machina, however, Jane overtly professes desire for Lt. Danny Gilmarten (Philip Carey), stationed in Deadwood, and simultaneously acts out a courtship and marriage scenario with the other leading lady, Katie Brown (Allyn McLerie). Katie is a dance hall singer/stripper who Calamity Jane brings to Deadwood from Chicago to help the local saloon owner satisfy his customers. While Katie's role in the movie is very obviously scripted to teach Jane how to be feminine, their relationship plays out as a romance from the very start. When Jane goes to meet Katie backstage in Chicago, Katie first reads Jane's body language and dress as male, and reacts as if Jane is a male intruder. Even after Jane clears up the misconception, the two continue to act out a butch/femme dynamic as Jane shepherds Katie to Deadwood (protecting her from hostile Indians), defends her honor at the saloon, and invites Katie to move in with her. The two set up housekeeping and Katie invites Jane to learn how to behave like a "proper" woman. Interestingly enough, despite Jane's transformation from "one of the boys" into a feminine girl, she persists in wearing her buckskin outfit in all of the scenes not focused on her transformation -- her femininity doesn't require skirts.

The romantic cross-currents in the film are terribly confused -- in no small part because the Jane/Katie pairing follows the classic girl-civilizes-boy courtship arc, except that the two characters are both women. The two are initially at odds, but find aspects of the other to appreciate, and settle into a domestic arrangement. Obviously, however, the film-makers needed the marriage plot they'd initiated to end in heterosexual marriage. So: re-enter Hickock and Gilmarten, who come to the women's idyllic cabin in the woods to woo (you guessed it) Katie Brown. Katie, knowing Jane desires Danny, resists initial advances but accepts an invitation to a local ball on the condition that Jane be invited as Bill's date. At this point I count three romantic triangles: (1) Katie and Jane in rivalry for Danny, (2) Danny and Bill in rivalry for Katie, and (3) Bill and Jane in rivalry over Katie.

Obviously, the solution would be for them all to move to Planet O. But barring that, the scriptwriters obviously felt they needed to resolve the plot in a timely and heterosexual manner. So Katie, despite earlier protestations, takes up with Danny at the ball -- causing Jane to storm off in jealousy. Jane later confronts Katie in the midst of Katie's stage show, demanding that she leave town. Bill helps Katie make Jane look foolish (in order to teach her a lesson) and then at the eleventh hour professes his love for Jane. Jane, having resolved her jealousy by transferring her affection for Bill, rides off to collect Katie from the departing stagecoach and the two straight couples have a joint wedding just before the credits roll.

The essential confusion of the show's narrative, I feel, can be summed up in an an exchange between Bill and Jane in which Bill suggests to Jane that her rage at Katie is caused by "female thinking," which clouds her rational mind and stops her from thinking clearly. Since the ostensible thrust of the narrative to that point was to move Jane from an essentially masculine position to a feminine one (from which she can be paired with Bill), the last-minute accusation of too much femininity highlights the nonsensical nature of the plot. Only by reclaiming her active, masculine position in the narrative (riding off in her buckskin to retrieve Katie from the retreating coach), can Jane reclaim her honor and win her place by Bill's side ... even as all of the cues of the narrative put her and Katie together as a butch/femme couple.

In short, don't watch Calamity Jane for the music, the Wild West themes, or the heteroromance. Instead, watch it for the lesbian relationship hiding in plain sight. As Hanna put it, "This isn't subtext, this is just plain old text."

new blog launched: the corner of your eye

2012-01-05T08:00:00.000-04:00

I warned you it was coming, and now it's here! Hanna and I have started a new joint review blog, the corner of your eye* , which can be found at corner-of-your-eye.blogspot.com. or via the link on the left-hand sidebar under "find me elsewhere online."

the corner of your eye

I know, I know ... like either of us have scads of free time going to waste. But none of our existing online spaces are really dedicated to arts and culture reviews per se, and we thought it might be fun to experiment with joint blogging. Really, it's pure indulgence for us both in terms of letting us opinionate about the books, movies, and television shows that occupy so much of our discretionary time (when we're not writing fan fiction or trawling the interwebs).

Our goal is to put up two posts a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I'll likely be cross-posting some content here, particularly when the creative juices are running low.

We're still tweaking the visual look of the blog, so please feel free to comment re: accessibility and all the rest.

*bonus points for anyone who can identify the allusion

e-reading: the pros and cons

2012-01-02T08:39:00.000-04:00

this is my new favorite picture of geraldine

Welcome to 2012!

The past week has been full of reading and writing, much of which I'm planning to share with you eventually (a lot of the writing was in the form of reviews of the stuff I'd been reading -- it all gets a little circular). In the meantime, I thought I'd kick this year's worth of posts off with a few musings on that perennially-hot topic of e-books.

I want to preface this post with the disclaimer that while I prefer, on the whole, to read books analog, I am not into the doom-and-gloom prognostications of those who rend their clothes and gnash their teeth over the rise in popularity of digital reading. So while I'm presenting this in a pro/con format I remain agnostic on the general principle of e-books as a thing in the world. Basically, I'm the biblio equivalent of an omnivore: I'll read wherever, whenever, whatever, as long as it captures and holds my attention.

So: e-reading.

About six months ago, I downloaded Adobe Digital Editions in order to read advance review e-galleys of forthcoming books on my laptop. Using the interface is my first sustained interaction with "e-book" reading -- as opposed to reading online content which we're used to reading on the computer (i.e. this blog). More on that later. But reading books I'd normally read in actual physical paper-and-glue-and-ink form in digital form has given me a chance to think in a more concrete way about reading digital vs. analog texts, what I like and don't like about the experience, and where I'd love to go from here.

The Pros

Price. I already have a laptop, so downloading the software from Adobe incurred no additional expense. Since I'm reading e-galleys for the most part, those are also free. I have only actually purchased one e-book so far (a Laurie King's short story) but do notice that e-book versions of texts are often significantly less expensive than their analog counterparts. So, assuming one has the budget to purchase and maintain a laptop, tablet, or other e-reader device, I can see where the financial incentive to adopt e-book reading might come from. I'm also grateful for the way the low overhead of producing e-books and e-galleys has made publishers more open to providing advance review copies to bloggers and other reviewers who previously might not have been considered worth contacting.
Speed of Access. It's great to be able to download a galley or e-book and begin reading immediately, I have to say. If an e-version is going to get me an advance review copy of a book I'd otherwise have to wait six months to read, I'm totally down with all the other inconveniences entailed.
Compactness. So I don't really have any portable devices (I carry my netbook to work sometimes, but as Hanna and I walk daily the two miles to work and back and I have to carry lunch, etc., plus there might be errands to run on the way home, I usually think carefully about whether the additional 2-3 pounds of computer is worth it. But I can see the appeal of e-readers for people who want to pack 5-10 titles (or more) and have some options for their lunch-time reading. Similarly, I can see how e-readers appeal to minimalist folks who are looking to strip down their material possessions ... though I personally feel no living space is quite complete without the teetering stacks of library books and the overflowing bookcases stacked with $1 cart finds.
Environmental considerations. I haven't actually looked for any sort of analysis of the "green" rating for various e-reader devices, or the cradle-to-grave environmental impact of electronic vs. analog books. However, if a compelling case could be made that e-reading was somehow less environmentally wasteful than traditional book production, it would be a point in favor of e-books.
Co-sleeping. The backlit screen of the laptop makes it a convenient choice for reading when Hanna wants to get to sleep before I do at night. I can cuddle up next to her and finish a chapter or read some fic without having a bedside light on. Obviously there are solutions to this problem for analog books as well, but it's a nice perk with digital reading.

The Cons

More time staring at a screen. I don't obsess about the number of hours a day or week I stare at a computer screen (it's 10pm and I'm blogging, for goodness sake), but during the weekdays especially when I spent 7-8 hours at work per day working heavily with computer interfaces, I resent coming home at night and remembering that the book I was in the middle of reading requires that I spend more time looking at a screen. I find I put off reading my electronic books until the weekend, and even then sometimes drag my feet.
Marginalia. God, I'm addicted to taking notes -- particularly in non-fiction books which I plan to review or otherwise interact with intellectually. And yes, ADE and other interfaces have highlight/comment/bookmark/sticky note functions. I AM NOT CONVINCED. I have yet to find an electronic interface that allows me to scribble notes, underline, annotate, argue with, and generally synthesize my reading experience to the same degree that a plain old pencil or ballpoint and a pack of post-it notes does. This is a serious downside (for me) with the e-reading experience.
Accessing Endnotes. ADE, at least, doesn't have any sort of dynamic way to access references in a work. Again, this is largely a non-fiction problem, but I love being able to flip back and forth between end-notes and the body of the text (I love footnotes even better for ease of reference). The clumsiness of the interfaces I've encountered basically mean I avoid moving back and forth through the text in significant ways because it's difficult to get back to where you were. This leads to a thinner reading experience, since I'm interacting less with the various portions of the book and thinking less about how they're related.
Physical time/space experience. This is a very specific-to-me sort of complaint, but I read and relate to books in a very physical fashion. When I need to access a particular passage I remember it in a physical way -- I remember where it was located on the page, at what point in the text, etc. The book as object is an integral part to how I access the information contained within it. And I find that without that physical object, I digest and retain the information within the e-book with much more difficulty. I'm open to the possibility of re-training myself, but for now ... it's really an inadequate way for me to encounter important texts.
Attention Span. I'm not into the moral panic over digital devices and how they're changing our brains in horrible ways OMG!! (I'm overdue to write a ranty post about that ...) But I do notice for myself that certain kinds of reading are much better done away from the computer and its associated distractions -- the constant compulsion to check email, check Google Reader, Twitter, etc. All of the internet reading I do is, I believe, important in its own right. But it requires a different sort of attention and interaction than book-length works of fiction and non-fiction. And reading in a digital interface cues the short-form attention span part of my brain to activate.

What I'd Love to See

So, overall, right now, I find e-reading to be a highly second-rate experience compared to analog books. I'm still more likely to tuck a print book into my bag for reading at lunch, or over coffee in a cafe, or to request a print advance review copy of a book if given the option. Even at reduced prices, I don't find e-books worth the cover price over an actual physical print book at this point -- even setting aside the worrying "who owns a book that isn't really a physical object" question such a purchase raises. Here are the improvements -- including a couple of fantastical ones -- I'd like to see when it comes to digital reading in the years to come:

Interactive references. Seriously. Wikipedia already does this, and I know other web interfaces as well, where the footnotes are hyperlinks or pop-out text bubbles, anything so that you can access a person's sources without scrolling to the end of the damn book and back.
Better marginalia options. On the one hand, I love the speed of keypad typing but with marginalia I'm old-school and like that pencil in my hand so I can triple-underline and put in as many outraged exclamation points as I so desire. Also happy and sad faces. Any successful e-reader is going to have to allow me to doodle in the margins of my reading matter, and access said doodles at a later date in order to write those oh-so-serious reviews.
A screen that didn't tire my eyes. Computer screens are getting so much better, and I know the Kindle and other custom e-readers are way better at this than a simple netbook ... but as helpful as the light from the computer screen is in bed, the light from the computer screen is also a pain in the ass (or, more accurately, the eye). Half my wearyness for looking at the screen comes from the light. So obviously, the less overtly computer-like a reader screen can be, the better.
The ability to transform e-reading to print and back again. Obviously, there are times when e-reading is the most efficient option, and times when print is best for the situation at hand. I personally would love some sort of book-like Teselecta to come along allowing me to turn print books into e-book and digital reading matter into print depending on the most appropriate form for the occasion. I'd love, for example, to be able to turn my favorite fan fiction stories into anthologies to flip through on the T or cozy up with in bed.
An object is an object is an object. There's something about books qua books that I find to be not only pleasurable on sensual level (ah! the smell and feel of a well-made book!) but also integral to the intellectual act of reading and integrating what I've read. I'm not sure how e-books are going to offer a workable alternative to my physical-object-as-intellectual-reference way of taking in and retaining knowledge, but in order for me to make the switch from primarily analog to a higher proportion of digital books, a solution will have to be presented.

Have any of you used digital readers? If so, what kinds and what have your experiences with them been? What do you love and/or hate about them? What do you find easy and/or difficult to read in digital form? Share away in comments.

looking back/looking forward (from where we are now)

2011-12-31T07:06:00.000-04:00

it's been a busy and oft-times exhausting year!

Over the past couple of weeks I've been feeling more aware and more thankful than usual of all the ways our life feels more settled than last year and -- while still containing its stresses -- just generally better on the well-being front. So here are a few notes on what happened in the Cook-Clutterbuck household this year.

The Good:

Last December I completed my library science degree which, hooray!
On the first Monday after New Years, I began my full-time position at the MHS.
Hanna took the leap of leaving a workplace that had been steadily eroding her health -- a particularly brave move given the current economic climate -- and has been rewarded by steady gainful employment at the Center for the History of Medicine and the related Medical Heritage Library with a fine group of fellow archivists. As I type this, she's looking forward to two more years of grant-funded archival processing and digital projects.
I've been blogging at The Pursuit of Harpyess since January 2011, an opportunity that has led to slightly more active participation in the feminist blogosphere than I had the energy for during graduate school -- and certainly kept me more engaged during my first year of post-grad employment than I might otherwise have put in the effort to sustain.
I finished my thesis in May 2011 and brought my graduate school career to a thankful close.
Also in May, I finally had a chance to take Hanna to visit my hometown in Michigan.
With neither of us in school, we've had more time to settle into life here in Boston, which appears to involve a lot of coffee shops, used bookshops, libraries, and hosting dinners for a few close friends.
2012 will mark the fifth year of living in this apartment and neighborhood, both of which we're pretty happy with. We keep talking about moving at some point (a bigger kitchen would be nice; and space for more bookshelves), but thankfully moving isn't an urgent need.

The Not-So-Good:

In the event anyone wants to know, depression still sucks. I'm so, so thankful for Fenway Health and the wonderful medical and mental health care providers we work with there. And I am continually amazed at Hanna's strength and patience, with her willingness to put one foot in front of the other (particularly on the hard days), and her determination to hold onto hope we'll build a life worth sharing.
While Hanna and I are more securely situated than many vis a vis our employment and financial stability, carrying a joint burden of some $160,000.00 in student loans -- even if they're our only form of accumulated debt -- is a vulnerability we're just learning to live with. Even as we scrabble around to start long-range savings and consider the possibility of paying for things like travel abroad or a mortgage. I'm thankful the issue of educational debt continues to be a topic of conversation and concern on a national (and international) level, since it's not going to get better without significant structural change.
Given our limited ability to travel, living far away from family and close friends continues to suck. We've got loved ones in Texas, California, Oregon, Michigan, and Maine. All of whom are missed dearly. Social media helps, but I don't think I'll ever get used to the distance between us.

The Possible Future:

Thanks to Hanna's continued employment in the Harvard University library system, she'll be eligible to take a history seminar in the spring, virtually free of charge (hooray!). While they don't offer courses specifically in her area of interest, Irish history, she plans to enroll in a course on intellectual history that she hopes will give her a chance to continue her research on the history of Irish nationalism.
I'm working on a paper for the New England Historical Association and the MHS on a 1914 case of alleged sexual assault here in Boston documented by the New England Watch & Ward society as part of their ongoing efforts to eradicate vice.
In March, I'll be traveling back to Michigan (hopefully with Hanna for company!) to take part in the celebrations marking the 20th anniversary of the Hope College Women's Studies program, of which I am a proud graduate.
Hanna and I are knocking around the idea of starting a joint review blog, tentatively titled stuff + things, which will roll out in January. Watch for further details coming soon.
As if that weren't enough, I'm still working on oral history transcription and hope to start posting final versions of interviews on the project blog later in the new year.

I'll obviously be writing about all of this as time and energy allow, so stay tuned ... I look forward to sharing all that's to come in 2012 and beyond.

quick hit: belfast project oral history lawsuit

2011-12-29T22:10:00.003-04:00

via

Earlier this year, the British Government requested the audio recordings and transcripts of interviews from a Boston College-based oral history project documenting the history of conflict in Northern Ireland. The oral history narrators who participated in the project originally granted interviews on the condition (agreed to in writing) that the interviews remain sealed until after their death. English officials are arguing that the interviews are required as part of an ongoing criminal investigation and claiming that the United States government is under treaty obligation to obtain the materials from BC and hand them over.

After initially resisting the request, Boston College appears to be on the brink of complying with a Judge's order to hand over select interviews. This decision not only represents a breach of promises made to human beings whose lives (and the lives of countless others) will now be under renewed threat, but will have a widespread chilling effect on the practice of oral history in situations where, perhaps, the oral historical record is particularly vital: sites of conflict where normal modes of documentation are lost or never created.

You can listen to an interview with the former director of the Belfast Project, Ed Moloney, on WBUR's Radio Boston.

You can read more about the lawsuit at Boston College Subpoena News (a blog set up to follow the story, which is unaffiliated with BC), as well as access many of the publicaly-available legal documents related to the case.

Neither the Oral History Association nor the American Historical Association have weighed in on this issue recently -- at least that I can find -- although the AHA did acknowledge back in May that the issues are "murky" and raise complex ethical questions about the practice of oral historical research.

wishing you a restful holiday

2011-12-24T11:41:00.001-04:00

via

As I write this post, Hanna and I are listening to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols broadcast from King's College, Cambridge, England and eating cornmeal molasses pancakes. I put in my last hours of work for 2011 yesterday afternoon at the MHS and now both Hanna and I will be on holiday until January 3rd -- all, the luxury of slightly anachronistic academic schedules! Later this afternoon we might wander down to the Boston Public Garden to check out the Christmas bustle before returning home to prepare cinnamon pull-apart bread for Christmas morning and possibly a screening of White Christmas.

And then possibly reading some picture books before bed. Because I don't know about you, but Christmas isn't really complete until you've read your favorite Christmas stories. Such as:

The Conscience Pudding, by E. Nesbit (available as a free audio file from Librivox!)

The Story of Holly and Ivy, by Rumer Godden, illustrated by Barbara Cooney

Child's Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas, illustrated by Edward Ardizzone

The Tomten and the Fox, by Astrid Lindgren (see illustration above)

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, by Barbara Robinson

What are the favored Christmas and/or winter holiday stories in your house? Share them in comments!

Schaerer family Christmas tree (Dec. 2003)
photograph by Anna

Best to you and yours this season, and warm wishes for the turn of the year.

~Anna

booknotes: the lesbian fantastic

2011-12-22T06:07:00.000-04:00

Back in October's batch of LibraryThing Early Reviewer books, I won Phyllis M. Betz' The Lesbian Fantastic: A Critical Study of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Paranormal, and Gothic Writings (McFarland, 2011). The Lesbian Fantastic is the third volume Betz, a professor of English literature, has written for McFarland examining genre fiction written by lesbian authors (a slippery category that I'll talk more about below). The previous installments in the series look at lesbian detective fiction and lesbian romance novels.

At a slim two hundred pages, including chapter notes, bibliography, and index, The Lesbian Fantastic -- as the subtitle claims -- takes on the ambitious task of exploring the history and themes of fantastical literature written by and about lesbians. The brevity of the volume is, indeed, one of its problems, since each aspect of fantastical literature Betz covers (science fiction, fantasy, paranormal, and gothic) could take up a book of its own. I was certainly thankful that Betz refused up-front to play genre border patrol and police the boundaries between, say, "gothic" vs. "paranormal," but that decision left her with a vast landscape of literature to summarize, analyze, and place in some measure of socio-historical context. The inevitable result is that corners are cut and I was left wanting a meatier discussion on many fronts.

Likewise, Betz fails to strike a comfortable balance between examination of lesbian authorship, readership, and the lesbian as character in fantastical literature -- whether or not that character is written by a self-identified "lesbian" or otherwise non-straight woman author. All of these aspects of genre fiction by and/or about lesbians would have been fascinating subjects to explore in-depth, but given the length of their treatment in this study, I felt all three topics came away muddled and short-shrifted. Was this book a study of lesbian authors? Not entirely -- in part because not all authors' sexual orientations are known and/or fit into modern-day identity categories. Betz also weaves back and forth between writing narrowly about lesbian-authored works (however she defines them) and women generally and authors in the genre generally. Was this book about lesbian readers? That category, too, suffers from a high degree of volatility ... are we talking about readers of fiction involving lesbian characters? Readers who identify as lesbian? Who engage (or have engaged) in same-sex relationships? Who experience some measure of same-sex desire? While categorization is always going to be somewhat arbitrary for the sake of a study such as this, I would have appreciated a clearer sense of whom Betz herself is including under the umbrella of lesbians who read genre fiction, and what her sources are for those voices.

Finally, Betz could have used a good editor with knowledge of the genre who might have caught, for example, the fact that China Miéville does not identify, as far as I know, as a lesbian or a woman. Or could have gone over the manuscript and deleted the repetitious author introductions (Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland is re-introduced almost every time it appears).

Overall, The Lesbian Fantastic is a book on a fascinating and potentially rich (and heretofore under-studied) topic that suffers from over-vague parameters and a frustrating simplification of lesbian identity. I think Betz' subject might have been better served had she chosen to focus on the treatment of lesbian/queer characters in fantastic fiction. In that context, she could have constructed some interesting compare-and-contrast arguments about lesbian characters in genre fiction generally versus genre fiction written by lesbian writers and/or for a lesbian/queer audience. Or, she could have focused more specifically on queer female readership and fandom, discussing the genre fiction pitched specifically to non-straight readers and the ways in which those readers interact both with "lesbian" genre fiction and its mainstream counterparts. Reader voices are notoriously difficult to locate and analyze, but online forums and fan-created transformative works (fan fiction, videos, art, etc.) have made the possibility of hearing the reader's voice in much more depth.

The Lesbian Fantastic will be useful to other scholars in the field who will, hopefully, take Betz's arguments in more complex directions.

new fic + nano recap

2011-12-20T08:32:00.000-04:00

via

I've put off writing a recap of National Novel-Writing Month because, sadly, a brutal migraine caught up with me over the Thanksgiving weekend and put the kibosh on meeting my (until then quite reasonable) personal goal of 25,000 words for the month. Still, I clocked in at just over 20K.

But meanwhile, thanks to participation in NaNo, I made writing erotica a top priority in November and completed a ~13,000 installment of my ongoing How She Loved You series featuring Sybil and Gwen from Downton Abbey. I finally had a chance to take Hanna's beta suggestions into account and code the piece for AO3 this past weekend.

So if fic be your thing, head on over and check it out:

Like Sorrow Or a Tune
by ElizaJane
Fandom: Downton Abbey
Pairing: Sybil/Gwen
Summary: Six scenes that trace the contours of Sybil and Gwen’s relationship from the first morning after to the night of their reunion in London, in the flat where they will make their home. This is the inevitable “five times” fic. Five times Sybil and Gwen parted before dawn and one time they didn't have to.

Now I should head back to reading Gayle S. Rubin's 1980s essays on the porn wars, which I have to say are an incentive like few other things to get into the business of writing and reading smut. Because really, people, really. Politics of disgust like crazy and that's just not cool. Life is short. Write good porn.

in which we write letters: stop SOPA

2011-12-18T12:17:00.001-04:00

via

Depending on your level of involvement in things internet-political and techy, you may or may not be aware of the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) now making its way through congress. Introduced by representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), this bill mandates widespread monitoring of internet activity and has the potential to cause the internets as we know them to be fundamentally altered as blogs and other social networking sites are shut down for supposed acts "piracy." You can read more about the act at the Organization for Transformative Works, TechCrunch, and the American Library Association. The letter Hanna and I sent to our representatives is heavily cribbed from the ALA talking points.

Find your U.S. Representative here.

Find your U.S. Senators here.

18 December 2011

Dear Representative Capuano,

As librarians, bloggers, and registeredvoters in Allston, Massachusetts, we are writing to ask you to voteagainst the proposed Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), H.R. 3261.

This bill, if it becomes law, willcause a widespread “chilling effect” on use of the Internet forcommerce, communication, and participation in democratic society. Thebill strikes at copyright protections currently granted to librariesand educational institutions by creating the possibility of criminalpersecution of institutions and institutional representatives. foronline streaming and other use of online resources in library andclassroom space. SOPA's requirements to monitor internet trafficviolate free speech and privacy protections and may create new formsof government surveillance of private activities within and outsidethe United States. The predicted consequences of SOPA arefar-reaching. If passed, the potential for new jobs, innovative newventures, and economic growth will be stifled.

Citizen engagement in online spacesdepends on the ability to share and discuss a wide variety of mediacontent across multiple social networking and other Internetplatforms. SOPA will effectively shut down the vibrant creativity andvital political discourse that has been made possible by the WorldWide Web. On behalf of ourselves, our online community of bloggers, and our library patrons, we ask you to vote against H.R. 3261, and supportalternative ways for protecting legitimate copyright interestsonline.

Sincerely,

Anna J. Cook & Hanna E. Clutterbuck

booknotes: one and only

2011-12-15T06:43:00.000-04:00

Cleis Press recently sent me a review copy of One and Only: The Untold Story of On the Road and Lu Anne Henderson, The Woman Who Started Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady on Their Journey by Gerald Nicosia and Anne Marie Santos (Berkeley, CA: Viva Editions, 2011). Here are a few thoughts.

In 1978, Beat biographer Gerald Nicosia had the opportunity to interview Lu Anne Henderson twice – once her a hospital in San Francisco, when she was recovering from surgery, and shortly after her release when she invited him to the house where she was recovering for a lengthy recording session. Over thirty years later, One and Only brings us these oral historical narratives in the form of heavily edited autobiographical vignettes. The sections of One and Only drawn directly from the interviews are framed by Nicosia's contextual commentary and supplemented by other historical material about the Beats and their milieu – including a number of photographs and an essay by Henderson's daughter, Anne Marie Santos.

I have, I will admit upfront, never been drawn to the Beat movement either in terms of its literary output or its place in American twentieth-century history. I have had passing acquaintance with its main personalities and the echoes of their work in 1960s and 70s cultural critiques. But I come to this work largely without preconceptions about the personalities of the individuals or the nature of the relationships between the main players. Therefore I'm not the best person to comment on the contribution this autobiographical narrative adds to the field of Beat studies. What I would like to talk about is the way in which Nicosia frames the oral history, and how one might approach reading the text with a skeptical eye -- yet still gain a valuable personal perspective on some fairly iconic historical people and events.

Nicosia's introduction does not inspire confidence in One and Only either as a work of oral historical scholarship or as a meaningful portrait of Lu Anne Henderson and her experience of mid-century American bohemia. Nicosia leans heavily on qualitative descriptions of his subject that came across in my reading as tasteless objectification – he introduces her as “beautiful fortyish woman” who has a certain “homespun charm” and retains “touches of … charming innocence” (24; 33). Given his position as a younger (at the time) man requesting an interview about Henderson's life and sexual relationships, I find the focus on her simultaneous sensuality and almost childishness to be a little creepy.

Nicosia walks a fine line between asking his readers to recognize Henderson's agency – even as a fifteen-year-old teenage girl, she situates herself as a person who made choices about how to live her own life – and eliding the power dynamics borne of age and gender. While still a young man when he married Lu Anne, Cassady was in his early twenties, with more travel experience and a stint in the military under his belt. While not all such relationships need be inherently exploitative, this dynamic is never unpacked either by interviewer or interviewee. While Lu Anne's interview emphasizes their shared youthfulness and complicity in continuing to live in or on the edge of poverty, readers can't help but observe how Henderson is often forced into the position of providing for her husband and his friends, by hook or by crook, as in 1946 when Neal and Lu Anne, newly wed, arrive in New York City:

It was up to me to support us, so I found a job at a bakery. I had just gotten the job that morning, it was my first day, and Neal told me to steal some money! We didn't have a penny, and Neal told me, like, 'Bring some money home!' Well, the woman who ran the bakery caught me [and] dismissed me. It really put me through a traumatic experience (67).

Henderson passes over these incidents with a light touch, often turning them into amusing anecdotes. Similarly, she glosses over the emotional and physical abuse threading through her relationship with Cassady and, later, Kerouac, and subsequent husbands. “Neal was not a violent person,” she observes at point point, and then immediately qualifies this by saying, “except with me. And when Neal would hit me, that was simply emotion” (87).

Nicosia acknowledges that Henderson herself had an agenda in granting him an interview, as did he in seeking her out. She was unhappy with contemporary accounts of her place in the constellation of Beat relationships, approached the interview as an opportunity to correct historical memory. He was collecting material for a biography of Kerouac eventually published in 1983 under the title Memory Babe. To a great extent, Nicosia's focus on the high-profile male personalities in Henderson's circle persists in One and Only. He observes with unselfconscious approval that “Unlike so many of the other women who have written about Kerouac, [Lu Anne] resists the temptation to shift the focus of the story from Jack (or in this case, Jack and Neal) to herself” (27). In the context of a biography of Kerouac or Cassady, such an on-task informant might be an asset to the researcher – in the context of a book that places Lu Anne Henderson front and center, the observation tastes a bit sour on the tongue. Really, Nicosia? You make it sounds like Henderson's life story is only valuable to the degree she keeps herself in the background and focuses on the menfolk in her life? I really hope you didn't mean that the way it came out.

Despite my (many!) frustrations with the framing of Lu Anne's narrative by Nicosia, there will likely be value to Beat scholars in the publication of Henderson's perspective on the oft-chronicled historical events that inspired On the Road and other Beat works. Until now, the interview was unavailable to the public, for reasons Nicosia doesn't elaborate on – only hinting that he was “forced” to bring a lawsuit in order to open the archive. I certainly found Henderson's narrative compelling, and while her portrait of life on the economic and cultural edge was at times heartbreaking, I think it's an important antidote to those who might romanticize the outsider while forgetting the real material and social costs of socioeconomic and philosophical marginalization ... even if some aspects of that marginalization are, at least partially, by choice.

I look forward to seeing what future scholars do with the published work as well as the raw interviews, which I hope will be made available to scholars and the general public for research purposes.

from the neighborhood: christmas tonttus

2011-12-14T06:52:00.000-04:00

This past weekend, Hanna and I were up in Maine celebrating an early Christmas with the folks. This involved a lot of good food, a Christmas carols service at nearby Colby College, and the creation of our very own tonttu for the apartment. Tonttu are Finnish house spirits that Hanna's mother learned about from her Finnish parents and grandparents. Here are some photographs that we took of the process of making two tonttus. It took the better part of Sunday morning.

these fellows were our model tonttus

here are some of the supplies Linda provided

We started with a base of cardboard, Styrofoam, and felt

all self-respecting tonttus need hats

Mine is on the left, Hanna's is on the right.

Hanna named hers Ibrahim; mine is named Helga

We brought them back to Boston on Monday to grace our Christmas shelf

While tonttu is the Finnish term for house spirits, some of you may be familiar with the Astrid Lindgren picturebooks which tell the story about a gentle tomten who cares for a family farm in Sweden. This is essentially the same folk character, though seen through the lens of a slightly different Scandinavian tradition.

I hope all of you are finding small and pleasurable ways of preparing for the holiday season ...

multimedia monday: purity myth trailer

2011-12-12T05:59:00.000-04:00

Via @courtwrites (and lots of others by now, but that's where I first saw the link!):

The Purity Myth Trailer from Media Education Foundation on Vimeo.

I read and reviewed Jessica Valenti's Purity Myth when it first came out back in 2009 and in my opinion it's the best of her published works to-date. I'm definitely going to check out the documentary version.

See also: my review of Hanne Blank's Virgin: The Untouched History.

four years ago today: "personal canon"

2011-12-11T10:32:00.000-04:00

It's been awhile since we did one of the four years ago today flashback posts. So here's a fun one I pulled from the Gmail archive. My friend Joseph and his brother had generated lists of the top ten novels in their "personal canon" and Joseph emailed to ask what mine would be. After some thought, this is what I came up with. Looking it over today, I can't say there are any huge revisions to this list.

From: Anna
To: Joseph
Date: Tue, Dec 11, 2007 at 10:22 PM
Subject: Re: Personal canon of books

Hiya,

My canon is decidedly more "lowbrow" and than yours, but I am squelching my impulse to apologise for it on Nick Hornby's firm orders (even though he loves Dickens' and writes tedious novels about men who refuse to grow up, so I am not sure how much I trust him . . .)

I have artificially controlled against all non-fiction and children's literature (well, below the teen level). Not sure if that's quite what you had in mind, but there we are. I discover my criteria are a) enduring "good read"--something I will go back to over and over again, as well as b) things that have had deep impact on how I answer the question, "how to live?" . . . these categories don't always overlap. There are books that have had great impact on how I think about the world, but which I've only read once . . . and books that I read habitually, but that I don't really think of as life-shaping in any explicit way. Maybe they're just sneaker at it? And of course these change over time . . . I was just thinking today how His Dark Materials has really grown on me over the years. And even though I have issues with some of his didacticism, his theological imagery really speaks to me. And, I mean, who could resist the idea of a reversal of the whole Genesis/Fall/Eve story? (Um . . . wait . . . that's right . . . a LOT of people ;) ).

via

That long introduction completed, here are my nominations. The top ten in a strictly alphabetical order. I figure once you make top-ten I'm not going to be judgmental. ALTHOUGH I do sometimes find myself paralyzed by the question of which book I would become if I were a character in Fahrenheit 451 . . . possibly a clear indication of how troubled I actually am :).

Top Ten:

1. E.M. Forester. A Room With a View.
2. Shirley Hazzard. The Great Fire.
3. Haven Kimmel. The Solace of Leaving Early.
4. Robin Lippincott. Our Arcadia.
5. Michelle Magorian. Not a Swan.
6. Robin McKinley. The Blue Sword, et al.
7. Audrey Niffinegger. The Time-Traveler's Wife.
8. Dorothy Sayers. Gaudy Night.
9. Martin Cruz Smith. Rose.
10. Tom Stoppard. Arcadia.

Some possible future candidates/honorable mentions:

Isabel Allende. Daughter of Fortune & Portrait in Sepia.
Jane Austen. Persuasion.
A.S. Byatt. Possession.
Sheryl Jordan. The Raging Quiet.
Laurie R. King. The Beekeeper's Apprentice, et al.
Barbara Kingsolver. Bean Trees.
David Levithan. The Realm of Possibility.
Gregory Maguire. Wicked, Son of a Witch
Philip Pullman. His Dark Materials.
Margaret Whelan Turner. The Thief, Queen of Attolia, King of Attolia.

Anna

booknotes: when we were outlaws

2011-12-08T06:39:00.000-04:00

In many ways, Jeanne Córdova's memoir, When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love and Revolution (Midway, Fla.: Spinster's Ink, 2011), couldn't be more different than the last memoir of the 70s I reviewed here at the feminist librarian: Patricia Harmon's Arms Wide Open. Harmon's memoir told the tale of a self-trained hippie midwife who moved with sons and male lovers through several different rural communes before entering medical school for formal nurse-midwifery training. Jeanne Córdova, by contrast, spent the 1970s in the Los Angeles area free-lancing as a journalist and activist in what were then referred to as the women's and gay liberation movements. A self-identified butch, she came of age as part of the lesbian bar culture of the 50s and 60s, then discovered gay liberation and feminism in 70s. Córdova was the founding editor of The Lesbian Tide newsmagazine and the human rights editor of the L.A. Free Press, interviewing radicals on both the left and the right on the run from the law. As she observes in her introduction, "this memoir visits many outlaws, some freedom fighters, and a few who would be called terrorists ... I needed to know and sort out these outlaws in my mind in order to discover the perimeters of my own moral compass ... Outlaws takes place at the intersection of shadow and shade that differentiate between persona and principle" (vii).

Yet I found myself, while reading Outlaws, thinking often of Harmon's memoir and the parallels between both works in scope and tone. And in the relationship (in text, at least) between the authors and their own personal and political pasts. Like Arms Wide Open, When We Were Outlaws seeks to tell a specific slice of the authors life, rather than starting with childhood and moving through the years in an orderly progression. Both authors chose, as their time-frame, the turbulent years of the 1970s when the heady, optimistic social change movements of the late 1960s led to more complicated lived realities for those who championed leftist causes and a counterculture way of life. Córdova focuses on her life and work between 1974-1975, with some flashbacks and flash forwards to help us make sense of the dense web of associations -- political and personal -- that characterized that time, both for Córdova specifically and her fellow activists in what was then called "the Movement" more broadly. Like Arms, Outlaws gives us an in-the-moment perspective on the life of someone struggling to live out her political convictions in her personal life. For Jeanne Córdova this means an up-close, and in many ways unshrinking, view of her involvement with lesbian separatist politics in relation to the gay liberation movement more broadly. It also means intimate portraits of her trial-and-error practice of open relationships, as she paints a portrait of her involvement with two women -- the long-term relationship in which she and her partner have negotiated non-monogamy, and the quickening of an intense love affair with a fellow activist that threatens the stability of her more permanent ties.

It has become a commonplace, since almost before they began, to identify the leftist social movements of the 60s and 70s as enthusiasms of youth, as romantic idealism (or destructive self-absorption, depending on your political persuasion) that necessarily gave way to realistic politicking and material concerns. In some ways this is true. Many of the individuals who populate When We Were Outlaws are young adults in or just out of undergraduate or graduate school programs, young professionals or struggling under-employed twentysomethings. They don't (yet) have dependents to care for, and are geographically mobile, often living on the economic edge. They're at the point in their lives where they're developing a sense of what kind of life they want for themselves and those they care about -- what kind of work they find meaningful, what values they hold dear, what kind of relationships they want to build and maintain. Often, their answers (however tentative) to these questions are at odds with the answers their parents or the activists of the previous generations gave.

Yet despite the youth (and youthful perspective) of its protagonist, I would argue that Outlaws pushes us to re-examine our assumptions that the moral dilemmas and vision for a better future that Córdova and her cohort were immersed in are solely the province of the young -- impetuosity that will necessarily give way as one grows into more seasoned adulthood. One of the most interesting narrative threads in Outlaws traces the relationship between Córdova and her political mentor/substitute parental figure Morris Kight. Kight was a mover and shaker in L.A. gay political activism, someone with whom Córdova worked closely and fell out publicly over the place of women in the gay liberation movement. Their differences aren't so much conservative elders vs. radical youth but something more complicated -- a difference in experience, of power, of privilege. In the very personal (yet also political) struggle between Kight and Córdova we can see all the complications inherent in working for social justice, complications that don't get, well, less complicated -- or less relevant -- as we grow older.

Córdova reflects back on her younger self with a sometimes-critical, yet always compassionate eye. While the narrative style is "novelized memoir" (to use the author's own choice of phrase), one nevertheless gets the sense that the author both knows well her protagonist's faults and cares very deeply for her younger self, no matter how flawed her present self may find that person of the past. "I was not born knowing how to love," is how she open's her introduction. "It came to me late in life" (vii). In the pages of Outlaws we see her be cruel to lovers, ideologically ruthless, politically short-sighted, and cripplingly addicted to booze and prescription drugs. At the same time, we see a heart-breakingly young woman who's been physically evicted from her childhood home (for bringing home a lover), is living with serious and intermittently-treated depression, experiences chronic under-employment, and who nonetheless is working hard to build a meaningful life for herself and a better future for us all. Whether you agree with the young Córdova's means and visionary ends doesn't necessarily detract from the import of such a closely-rendered self-portrait.

I suspect we're only in the early years of a richly textured new wave of 70s-era autobiography which will shed new light on the particularity of growing into adulthood during a period when even the most fundamental of questions concerning how we organize our personal and political lives seemed to be in real, material flux. I am also happy (quite selfishly, I admit!) about the way these personal perspectives will provide unique, and accessible, primary source material for historians of the period, even while many historical sources remain in private hands (and therefore often invisible-to-researchers). Córdova's memoir would provide a rich jumping-off point in a course that sought to explore this era in all its rich historical realities -- and I hope it prompts many readers to re-examine what they think they know about the political contours of the decade.

This review was made possible by the generousity of Lynn Ballen at Spinster's Ink who provided me with an advance review copy of the book. The book is available now for purchase online or at your brick-and-mortar bookstore of choice. You can read more about the memoir and its author at www.jeannecordova.com.

from the neighborhood: athan's bakery

2011-12-05T08:00:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, Hanna and I branched out from out usual weekend haunts to try out a new spot for weekend brunch: Athan's Bakery in Washington Square, Brookline. It turned out to be a great place for people watching, reading (Hanna: Freud's collected letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Anna: The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin), and nursing our morning espresso. Here are some photos I snapped while we were there.

The front room, full of sunshine and sugary things.

Cookies sold by the pound

Not exactly breakfast food, but ...

There were lots of students with laptops working away

Hanna's left arm, lovely earrings, and
new-hairstyle-in-progress

Abandoned coffee cups at the espresso bar.

third thoughts: conversations about sex + identity

2011-12-04T09:27:00.000-04:00

As promised, here are some "third thoughts" about my participation in Holly Donovan's comparative research on social interactions between straight and non-straight folks in urban and rural areas.

For my first thoughts and second thoughts, if you haven't already seen them, follow the links.

To read more about participating in Holly's research project, check out her call for participants (PDF). If you live in the Boston area and identify as queer in any way -- or know someone who is and does -- do check the project out; she's still actively searching for participants. She mentioned particularly needing to hear from non-academics and people who hail from working class communities.

So. Now that the "signal boost" portion of the post is complete, on to my own further reflections.

we sat down to talk over coffee at Pavement Coffeehouse

Even though Holly indicated that the second-round interview typically lasts about thirty minutes, she and I talked for a good hour and a quarter (are you surprised? if you know me, you aren't surprised). Here are a few things that Holly's response to my project journal (see second thoughts) prompted in my own thinking.

Holly noted several times the way in which my journal observations "emphasized the positive." She was actually pulling that phrase from a section in my journal where I talk about a tricky interaction with someone who was kinda luke-warm about the lesbian relationship thing. I was describing how I chose to emphasize the positive with them, verbally pointing out the steps this person made toward acceptance and thanking them for being willing to acknowledge my relationship with Hanna. We talked quite a bit about this, both as a conscious strategy for interactions with a potentially hostile environment, and also as something that simply is for me when it comes to my queer identity.

Let me try to explain (warning: it's a work-in-progress). As I've talked about in the previous posts -- and as should be overwhelmingly evident from everything I write about sexuality and relationships on this blog -- I experience my sexuality, sexual orientation, and sexual relationships in a really enthusiastic way. Because my sexuality is fluid in many respects, you could say that I didn't really have a sexual orientation/identity until I was in a relationship of my choosing. A relationship which I entered as an adult who was enthusiastic about being partnered with this particular person (Hanna). Prior to that moment of becoming part of a couple, I was sort of a blank slate, socially, for other people to read whatever the hell orientation they wanted to onto me. It wasn't an active component of my self-presentation until I wanted it to be.

So basically, by the time my sexuality became visible and people could react to it in more public settings (outside of conversation with intimate friends), I had pretty clear convictions about what was and was not out of bounds, and how I wanted to handle any resistance to who I am, who I'm with, and how I choose to enjoy my sexuality. I have two basic ground-rules for myself about handling less-than-optimal social interactions:

1. I won't be dishonest about who I am. This is largely pragmatic, since I'm terrible at dissembling. But it's also a decision rooted in my personal ethics. Since I can remember, the way my family (and later I, as an individual) chose to live has made some people uncomfortable -- even angry. If I had grown up trying to manage other peoples' discomfort about my non-conformity it would have been a losing battle before it began. Aside from the fact that managing other peoples' emotions is a) doomed to fail, and b) the worst energy sink ever. So I just won't. I am who I am, and if that's a problem for someone then we're probably going to need to figure out how not to be in much contact, or simply put on our grown-up pants and deal with the fact we have differences.

2. Whenever possible ignore the negative crap and give a shit-ton of positive reinforcement for anything constructive. This strategy, too, stems from my childhood ... where I realized somewhere along the line that I could use my time/energy critiquing institutional education or I could focus on the instances of high-quality mentoring and learning where and when I saw them happening. I like this approach because it doesn't allow the opposition to frame the debate, and it allows you the freedom to focus on building the sort of future you want rather than constantly re-hashing how less-than-ideal the present it.

"Ignoring" the negative crap doesn't mean pretending it isn't there, or letting it go without noting it and pointing out it's not cool. But I when it comes to people-to-people interactions, particularly, I'd rather spend my time giving positive feedback for the good and a cool reception to the bad. The less attention unhelpful interactions get, the better.

So "emphasizing the positive" is both a manifestation of the social privilege and aspects of my personality that made growing into my adult sexuality and sexual relationships overwhelmingly positive* and a conscious political choice for how I think I'll best be able to use my limited energies and resources to effect change in less-than-optimal social situations.

Holly was interested in my reflections (which I wrote about at the end of my second thoughts post) on getting something out of living on the cultural margins. In addition to what I'd already written in that earlier post, we discussed how the experience of choice and agency which I describe for myself -- of being drawn toward non-conformity -- is different from the language of being "born this way," and then pushed to the margins by others who reject who you are. I actually don't see myself as choosing marginality (though existing on the margins feels familiar). What I experience myself choosing is the situations that will best allow me to flourish, that will best support my well-being as a person. Given the culture in which we live, I've discovered that these happen to be marginal spaces. It's been an incremental journey in a lot of ways, wherein I made a series of decisions about this and not that when have led me to a place very different from the majority culture. I didn't choose sexual fluidity and desire, didn't choose to fall in love with another woman, but I chose to recognize and honor that sexuality, that love, and make a space in my life for those desires and that relationship. I don't feel shoved unwillingly out of the mainstream -- I feel like I chose (am in the process of choosing) the life that works best for me and my partner, and the mainstream has sort of parted ways around us. It's not really here nor there, to me, whether or not my life path is ever "normal" or acceptable in the eyes of the majority.

Holly observed that I wrote comparatively about my experiences in Boston and in Holland, and asked how things would be different (in relation to sexual orientation) if I were living in Holland rather than Boston right now. I wrote comparatively about Holland and Boston in my journal in part because I know Holly's study is looking at regional differences and queer-straight social interactions in urban vs. "rural" locations. So it's not like I spend a lot of time comparing the two places specifically in relation to queer issues. But when she asked about what would be different, my first thought was It's less tiring to be myself here. Less tiring, because less oppositional. When I lived in Holland until 2007 I wasn't visibly queer, but I was more or less myself in politics, interests, and values. And living out those values, expressing those interests and politics, just took a lot of work.

Or, at least, I learned to expect that when I opened my mouth (or when people with similar values opened their mouths) it would trigger the angst and the anger and the defensiveness and the soul-searching re-evaluation of values and yadda yadda yadda ad nauseum. Who I was and what I believed caused people existential angst and precipitated crises. It got really tiring. And boring.

So when I picture being in Holland now, on the one hand it would be awesome to be closer to the friends and family I know and love there. But it also just sounds like a lot of work: work to find a queer-friendly therapist, work to find a doctor who's cool with lesbian sexuality, work to advocate for same-sex spousal benefits (which, you know, currently illegal in my home state). All of which are just givens most of the time here. And that's on top of swimming up stream against the gender essentialism and anti-feminism and opposition to social welfare and any number of other issues that aren't directly tied to sexuality but are nonetheless about who I am and how I want to live.

I know plenty of friends and relations who manage to live and even thrive in that environment -- and part of me is envious that they've managed to build lives in a hostile climate. But I did that for 26 years and it's really nice not to have to right now.

As I myself observed in second thoughts, Holly noticed how many of my intellectual and social interactions concerning sexuality center around reading and writing (on- and offline). She asked what I look for in my reading and interactions in these areas. I didn't have any ready answer for her, other than that I've found the resources I do consult mostly by link-hopping and footnote following ... I identify a resource I do like, and mine it for further reading in whatever way it appropriate to the medium. I follow the network, whether it's a blogroll or a bibliography. At this point, I have enough sources of information that I can sit back fairly passively -- skimming my feeds, reading book reviews, taking note of workshops and presentations -- and monitor the flow of sexuality information that's being generated and analyzed by the people whose ideas and opinions I care about.

What sort of people are these? Well, I actually think a good list of criteria can be found in a post I wrote over at Harpyness about sexuality education and things I wish I'd known when I was younger about human sexuality. Those five things are a pretty good outline of what I'm currently interested in exploring, and the sort of attitudes about human sexuality I gravitate towards. I generally look for writing on human sexuality that's descriptive rather than prescriptive -- I like reading about how humans behave and why, and what they do that fosters well-being, rather than about how we "ought" or "should" behave according to some external set of rules (religious or otherwise). I prefer research and writing on human sexuality that doesn't presume human sex and gender are oppositional and binary, and it's probably redundant for someone who's titled their blog "the feminist librarian" to say she wants her resources to demonstrate feminist awareness and to critique systems of oppression that constrain our ability as individuals to experience pleasure and wellness.

I don't really care how the individuals behind these sources of information identify sexually. I follow blogs and read books by people whose own experience of human sexuality ranges across the queer spectrum as well as falling squarely within heteronormative boundaries. I'll talk and think sex with people who are asexual, poly, abstinent until marriage, gay men, trans* folk, hetero married, celibate due to religious vocation, etc. At rock bottom, my only criteria are that a) you acknowledge and embrace human sexual diversity, b) believe there is no one-size-fits-all approach to sexual ethics, c) but take sexual ethics seriously as a topic of conversation; d) that human sexuality, to you, is seen as a potential source of human pleasure and connection; and obviously e) you enjoy exploring both your own experience of sexuality and the cultural narratives we've constructed around those personal experiences.

*I've been thinking since we talked about how my cisgender presentation made my smooth (sexuality/sexual identity-speaking) adolescence possible. In part because I'm reading a book right now about the lives of transgender people and the gender policing they experienced as teenagers. As a girlchild with parents who worked not to gender stereotype, I was given wide, wide latitude to be a person first and a girl/woman second. Feminism also granted me license to be myself, however I wanted that to manifest. This, in conjunction with simply taking myself out of the active dating/partnered pool, made a buffer for my sexuality to develop and space for me to discern what I wanted on my own terms. This deserves its own post ... so I'll see what I can do in the near future.

second thoughts: my "sexuality and society" journal

2011-12-01T07:20:00.000-04:00

This is the second post on my participation in a Boston University study of urban and rural queer folks and their social interactions with non-queer folks. You can read about my initial interview with researcher Holly Donovan in the first thoughts post I wrote back in October.

This past Monday I sent Holly the journal I'd been keeping since our initial meeting. I'm not going to make the journal publicly available because I wrote it for Holly's research specifically and also because it contains details about my interactions with third parties that can be kept anonymous in the context of a PhD dissertation where I'm not identified -- but not in this blog space, where I'm pretty transparently me.

Journaling. I used to do a lot of it, but the demands of the past few years and my own shifting priorities have caused me to stop keeping such a detailed and in situ account of my daily life. So it was kind of a familiar novelty (to coin a term) to find myself keeping a daily journal again. Journal writing is liberating in that the pressure to have finished and connected thoughts is erased -- at least for me. In this case, I was writing on a particular theme: my social interactions and the way those interactions did or did not actively engage my gender identity and sexual orientation. Yet I still felt that I could keep notes that were in bullet-point format, with sentence fragments and open-ended observations.

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What were some of those observations?

I spend more time thinking and talking about sexuality than I do sexual orientation. A significant portion of the notations that I made in my journal had to do with conversations I had with friends, family, my therapist, my colleagues, people online, with authors (via reading their work), about human sexuality. I spend a significant portion of my waking time thinking about human sexuality because it's one of those things that makes me happy to ponder. I did this before I found language to articulate my own sexual identity as such, and before I was in a sexually intimate relationship with anyone. I love that I move in circles where sexuality is part of casual conversation, and that our conversations are often intellectually stimulating, enthusiastic, and joyful rather than full of shame and angst. Yes, we all have emotional and physical struggles that sometimes need conversation to work through -- but I'm grateful that that is only part of the discourse surrounding sexuality that I am a part of.

I don't feel in physical or emotional jeopardy in the spaces I live, work, and move through around Boston. This is a complicated one with lots of layers of class, race, gender presentation, and the rest tangled up in it (as I observed in my first thoughts post). But keeping my journal these past three weeks reinforced the fact that there are no spaces in my daily life where I feel the need to self-censor the fact I'm in a lesbian relationship. My colleagues know, my family knows, our friends know, our bank knows, our doctors know. We hold hands on the walk to work, we doze on each others' shoulders on the T, kiss goodbye when parting at our favorite coffee shops. We've never experienced anything stronger than a glare from a random passer-by (and even then, perhaps they were just having a bad day?). I don't know if it would be different if we lived in West Michigan. I know when we visited Holland last spring I felt comfortable behaving in public the same way we do in Boston -- but Hanna points out that I have a talent for ignoring negative vibes. So perhaps if we lived there full-time, we'd have more run-ins with homophobic weirdos. Like I said, I don't know all the factors at work here -- but I'm glad that our social experience has been so positive.

A significant part of my social interactions, particularly around sexuality themes, take place through reading and blogging. There were a number of entries in my journal that began with phrases like, "Received and advance review copy of ... on trans* sexuality today" or "Wrote a blog post about forthcoming collection of erotica ..." or "Finished writing 3K words of lesbian erotica ...". Outside of my professional writing and reading, a significant portion of my intellectual exploration right now has to do with sexuality -- and a lot of that takes place in conversation (see observation one, above) and through reading articles, books, and blog posts, listening to podcasts, and engaging in discussion in comment threads. A lot of this is mutually reinforcing, since the more I read and review work in this area the more likely I am to get offers of advance review copies, virtual book tour requests, and other quasi-professional offers in a similar vein. I welcome these engagements with open arms because it's stuff I love to talk and think about. I do think it's note-worthy that I feel comfortable making this a quasi-professional part of my life, and that I feel comfortable pursuing it online in ways that are tied directly and openly to my actual identity.

And, as something that came to me toward the end of my journaling (though I've thought about it before), I get something out of existing on the margins of heteronormative society. That is, there are material ways, obviously, that Hanna and I (and our other non-straight friends) experience discrimination based on our sexuality, or relationships, and our gender expression. And I didn't, obviously, choose to be attracted to Hanna because being in a lesbian relationship would be transgressive. I just desired her. But I made choices about following through on that desire, about building a life with another woman, and part of the reason is that I like living on the cultural* margins. I feel comfortable and energized here. I feel less claustrophobic. I feel like choosing to live my life in some basic, categorical ways that disqualify me from the norm give me freedom from other peoples' expectations that I will conform to mainstream expectations of femininity, or American middle-class ambition, or heterosexuality. I think (and this is a very tentative hypothesis) that perhaps growing up home-educated, in an era when that was far from mainstream, primed me for feeling most at home in spaces that folks around me considered "weird." And so I think I gravitate toward people who are willing to think and live outside the boxes. It feels familiar and it feels good to exist in that space.

I think that's counter-intuitive for a lot of folks, who assume that non-normative relationships and/or a "weird" sexual identity would be cause for anxiety and stress. I remember the transition being somewhat stressful -- going from thinking of myself as "mostly straight" to thinking of myself as bi/fluid/lesbian/queer. But it was actually an incredible relief in a lot of ways to feel I had legitimate feelings of attraction that would support moving into queer spaces and identifying that way socially. Because those spaces called out to me as welcoming psycho-social spaces for years before I felt I had enough evidence of my own sexual desire to claim them as my own. I know this sounds kinda backward to many folks for whom sexual orientation/identity works differently or more decisively. But for me, that seems to be path I needed to take.

I meet with Holly this evening to do a follow-up interview, based on my observations in the journal. If any new insights crop up during our conversation I'll be back with "third thoughts" on this process.

*And I choose the word "cultural" deliberately here because I realize that the aspects of my self and my values which are marginal to the mainstream are largely self-chosen rather than imposed upon me. In terms of my race, my able-bodiedness, my socioeconomic status, etc., I'm far from existing on the material margins of American society.

booknotes: see me naked

2011-11-30T09:49:00.000-04:00

One of the books I consulted for my thesis was Amy Frykholm's Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America (Oxford U.P., 2004). In Rapture, Frykholm traveled around the nation interviewing readers of Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series, exploring the effect of rapture narratives in Evangelical culture. Frykholm -- who grew up Evangelical and now attends an Episcopal church -- studies her former subculture with a keen and empathetic eye. In her latest book, See Me Naked: Stories of Sexual Exile in American Christianity (Beacon Press, 2011), Frykholm turns to personal narratives of sexuality, embodiment, and Christian spirituality. The slim volume contains nine profiles of Protestant Christians struggling in various ways to integrate their physical, sexual selves with their concepts of Christian "purity" or righteousness.

As much as possible, Frykholm backs away from any larger-scale analysis in the interest of allowing her subjects to make meaning of their own lives. However, it seems clear that all of her interviewees have struggled to integrate their sexual selves with their theological beliefs. Some because they experience same-sex desires, some because they're struggling to live up to demanding Christian ideologies of chastity or modesty, some because anything associated with bodily desires became the enemy.

One of my favorite essays was less about sexual activity or relationships, per se, than it was about our sense of embodiment and the sensual experience of being and expressing oneself in flesh. "Monica" recounts her experience of attending a life-drawing class while studying abroad -- an experience that challenged her understanding of propriety and ultimately helped her re-evaluate her expectations of what beautiful bodies should look like and how women's bodies should behave. At first repulsed by the normal-looking nude model (to the point where she almost dropped the class), Monica perseveres and eventually exhibits her drawings in the college library upon returning to her home campus:

Monica heard two things in the comments [about her art show]. She heard the same fear and revulsion that she had experienced in herself when first encountering the model. It was a disgust that human beings exist in this form ... she also heard in the comments that Christianity and nakedness were incompatible -- that somehow being clothed and being Christian were necessary to each other (84).

At that point in her own journey, Monica has grown enough to be critical of these assumptions, and by the end of the piece has challenged herself to volunteer as a nude model for community life drawing classes -- an act of bravery that seems to be very intertwined with her developing sense of spiritual practice.

What I think may surprise non-Christian readers of these narratives is their familiarity: in many ways, the discomfort with embodiment is a malaise that is more American than Christian, though obviously practicing Christians will express their struggles in theological language. The individuals here struggle with unrealistic beauty standards, with the commercialization of sexuality, with questions of attraction and desire and what their bodies want versus what they're being taught they should want by their parents, youth leaders, peers. The process of coming into one's own bodily self and finding a voice for our desires is rarely an easy one, regardless of the faith tradition we're raised in.

On the other hand, See Me Naked does put those struggles in a particularly Christian theological and social context, and illuminate some of the ways Christian language -- particularly theology which seeks to construct rigid definitions of "right" and "wrong" sexual expression -- fails believers. Reading stories about young women starving themselves to the brink of death in the name of "modesty" and young men told their interest in pornography was sinful, brought to mind the recent post, How Modesty Made Me Fat, by Sierra of No Longer Quivering in which she writes:

Modesty made me “fat” because it defined my relationship with my body in terms of appearance. Not action. Not gratitude. Not the joy of movement. Just appearance. It also defined my relationship with men as one of predator and prey. It was my job to hide from men so that their sex drive would lie dormant, like a sleeping wolf. But if that wolf ever awakened, it was not because it had been sleeping for a long time and its circadian rhythm kicked in, or it was just naturally hungry. It was my fault because I had done something to “bait” the wolf. Just by being visibly female, or by moving in “unladylike” ways. You cannot consider women full human beings unless you recognize that their lives do not revolve around the male sex drive. Modesty is a philosophy that dehumanizes. It incites constant fear and vigilance in one sex while excusing the other of all responsibility. It’s immoral."

See Me Naked offers similar examples of the way in which our religious language falls perilously short in its ostensible effort to increase well-being for all. Naked tells stories of women starving themselves close to death for the sake of being pure, stories of women and men who feel lost when faced with the task of integrating queer attractions with their Christian faith, and stories of men who are taught to hate and fear their feelings of sexual desires as something inherently impure or incompatible with living a righteous life.

At the very end of See Me Naked, Frykholm does offer some reflections on an alternative ethic of sexuality, one that I think is worth contemplating whether or not you're interested in the explicitly Christian language in which she couches her suggestions. "True, deep, real pleasure is an avenue to the Holy," Frykholm writes. "Through discernment, wonder, and aliveness we will know what real pleasure is ... and when we sense true pleasure, we will trust it and be able to act bodily in it and with it." She recounts the counsel of a parent to her soon-to-be adolescent daughter, "Your body will know more pleasure than you can even now imagine. You are going through a period when your body is going to learn to feel pleasure, and you will be amazed" (176) While I'd argue that children, too, have the bodily capacity to feel pleasure -- though of a different kind than adults -- I like this invitation to an emerging teenager to embrace that part of her growing-up. Too often, we're quick to associate teenage embodiment with danger, not pleasure. As Frykholm says, "We all know that puberty, adolescence, adulthood are not solely about pleasure ... But pain we know well. Pleasure we sometimes need help attending to" (177). Such an invitation crosses the boundaries of faith traditions and is a reminder to us all how much better we could be, as a culture, at living embodied and joyful lives.

Cross-posted at the oregon extension oral history project blog.

harpy fortnight: season of thanks

2011-11-27T07:15:00.000-04:00

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I'm finally getting around to posting a round-up of Harpyness posts for the first time since October 2nd. Sorry folks! But it's actually been kinda a slow season for everyone over at TPoH, so the links haven't been accumulating too fast. Here's what I got for y'all:

I finished up live-blogging Jessica Yee's Feminism For Real anthology with the following installments:

I wrote about travel yearning and nostalgia for place when hunting around in my photograph files made me unexpectedly miss living in Aberdeen with a vengeance.
I read and reviewed Tristan Taormino's latest erotica anthology, Take Me There, which features trans* and genderqueer characters. I used the post to muse about the what I look for in my erotic fiction.
I invited folks to join me for National Novel-Writing Month and asked what other creative endeavors they enjoyed during their leisure time.
I shared the audio of NPR's Talk of the Nation discussion of sexuality education.
I posted Jay Smooth's TEDx talk on how to have constructive conversations about race and racism.
and I had a small rant about why folks who hate on social media as time-wasting activity are letting new technologies blind them to the way that people are continuing to connect with one another over the same everyday things we human beings probably always have.

I think blogging will likely continue to be sedate through the holiday season, as we all balance our personal, professional, and online priorities. As always, you're welcome to hop on over to Harpyness to check out all the conversation in situ there.

thank yous: thesis edition

2011-11-24T06:48:00.000-04:00

Maggie + wood stove (October 2004)
photograph by Anna

One of the most enjoyable parts of writing my Master's thesis was pulling together the acknowledgments. Since it's unlikely everyone who appears therein will read the thesis in full [PDF], I'm reproducing the acknowledgments here.

It should go without saying this is far from everything I have to be thankful for this year, but it's a damn good starting place.

May your holiday weekend be peaceful and content, wherever and with whomever you may be.

As a reader, I often turn first to the acknowledgments when evaluating a book. It is here that one gets a true sense of the solitary author working in a densely-woven web of social and intellectual relationships, one that often fades into the background with an author’s solitary byline. For while it is accurate to say that I crafted this thesis myself, and that the analysis herein is my own, the thinking and writing I have done over the past three years would not have been possible without the myriad conversations, generous support, timely encouragement, articles and books shared by my friends, family, and colleagues. As my partner, Hanna, points out, “alone” is not the same as “lonely,” and although I have written this work alone, many, many people deserve the credit for making sure that I seldom felt lonely or worked in intellectual isolation.

O.E. class of '75

Without my oral historical narrators, of course, I would have no primary source material to analyze and thus no story to tell. My gratitude belongs first and foremost, then, to Sam and Pat Alvord, Randy Balmer, Doug and Marj Frank, Mark Evans, Anne Foley, Alison and Phil Kling, Rebecca McCurdy, Sogn Mill-Scout, Paul Norton, Jim Titus, and Randy Wright for sharing their memories of the Oregon Extension and the contents of their personal archives. Particular thanks are due to the folks at Lincoln for hosting me during my research trip in March, 2010, when we recorded the majority of our oral history interviews. Thank you also to Doug Frank and Sam Alvord giving me access to administrative records and personal papers from the early years of the program; to alumni Phil Kling, for sharing notes, papers, and other ephemera from his student days; and to Alison Kling and Jim Titus for generously sharing their photographs from the early years.

My thesis advisers, Laura Prieto and Sarah Leonard, have been invaluable and professional support throughout the research and writing process. It was my [admissions] interview with Laura back in July 2006 that convinced me I would be able to complete the research I had in mind under the auspices of Simmons' History Department. She has been unfailingly supportive throughout my tenure at Simmons, giving my research notes and early drafts careful and insightful readings. Any remaining weaknesses in my thinking and writing are, needless to say, my own responsibility. Sarah, meanwhile, deserves particular thanks for allowing me to hijack her seminar in Modern European History in order to write a paper on American psychologist Carl Rogers, one of the influential educational philosophers whose work inspired the Oregon Extension's founders. Her passion for intellectual history and the dedication with which she approaches her vocation are almost enough to make me reconsider the teaching profession.

Boston skyline across the Fenway Gardens
(December 2007)

I would like to remember the late Allen Smith who developed and taught a course in oral history at Simmons Graduate School of Information and Library Science, and whom I was privileged to study under during his final semester of teaching. His work at Simmons College paved my way with the Institutional Review Board, whose familiarity with oral history research saved me the anxiety and frustration many oral historians face when applying to do human subject research. I also wish to thank Gail Matthews DeNatale, oral historian and former faculty member at Simmons, whose experience and advice helped to shape my thesis proposal in its early stages.

Reaching backward in time to my undergraduate years at Hope College, I wish to recognize my colleagues on the Aradia Research Project, as well as the Aradians themselves, who served as my hands-on introduction to feminist-minded oral history and ethnographic research and who encouraged my enduring interest in the experience of those who live in intentional community.

The outstanding faculty of my alma mater, Hope College, were in many ways responsible for taking the enthusiastic autodidact I was at age seventeen and encouraging me to direct and hone that passion into something I could honestly consider a craft and a vocation. Poet and creative writing teacher Jackie Bartley first opened the door to creative nonfiction to me, suggesting that dedicated research and analytical writing could use the power of the particular to connect us to the universal. It was Jackie who first suggested I consider attending the Oregon Extension. Thanks is also due to Lynn Japinga for introducing me to oral history methods during a summer spent transcribing her oral history interviews with Reformed Church clergy, as well her determination to offer classes in feminist theology in an often-hostile academic environment. Without her introduction to religious history, I might not have paid such close attention to the nuances of
religious thought and practice at Lincoln. My undergraduate adviser, historian Jeanne Petit, taught my first history class (20th Century American Women’s History) and was the first to suggest I consider graduate school. She has since become a colleague and a friend. I must also extend my gratitude to Natalie Dykstra for her friendship and enthusiasm, for her love of Boston, and for teaching a course on autobiography that was – hands down – one of the most electrifying intellectual experiences of my college career. Her training in the interpretation of personal narratives has stood me in good stead throughout the research and writing of this thesis.

Former colleague Jeremy Dibbell
(December 2007)

I must recognize my colleagues at the Massachusetts Historical Society, particularly past and present members of the Library Reader Services department, who have been unblinking in their support of my research – including covering for me while I spent two weeks out West doing fieldwork. It is impossible to say how grateful I have been these past four years to work at an institution that recognizes my labor as an historian as well as a reference librarian.

I would like to thank colleague Aiden Graham for offering to loan me recording equipment, and for timely technical advice including helping me figure out how to wiretap my phone for long-distance interviews. Thanks, also, to Linnea Johnson and the GSLIS Tech Lab for the loan of a netbook that would otherwise have cost me hundreds of dollars this poor graduate student didn't have. The Simmons College Student Research Fund, likewise, awarded me a travel grant that helped alleviate the financial burden of my fieldwork in Oregon. Valerie Beaudrault’s assistance in the Office of Sponsored Programs ensured that my application for funds was complete and submitted in a timely fashion.

My father and mapmaker extraordinaire, Mark Cook, is responsible for the beautiful customcreated maps that grace the pages of this thesis: without him, my visual representations of the Oregon Extension as a geographic place would have been awkward and, in all likelihood, inaccurate. My mother, too, has my undying gratitude for first introducing me to the work of John Holt, Ivan Illich, A.S. Neill, and other activists in the free school movement of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as to the history of intentional communities and their intersection with child-rearing and educational practice. Moral and intellectual support and good-humored camaraderie came in full measure from two founding members of the Secret Feminist Cabal, Ashley Minerva LeClerc and Laura Cutter, and from fellow oral historian, kick-ass librarian Diana Wakimoto. Y’all rock.

A slightly different form of support came from Geraldine, the feline member of our household, who took a keen interest in my work and sat on my notes, on the keyboard, and occasionally on my hands in order to ensure that work never took precedence over chin-scratching and the dispensing of kitty treats.

Finally, a few words for Hanna, who stoically endures my mania for American countercultures, Christian subcultures, and the history of utopian thought. Thanks for flying solo for two weeks while I was off collecting interviews in Southern Oregon, for taping useful PBS documentaries, for forwarding promising book reviews, for teasing me about garish 1970s cover art. Thanks for the proof-reading, the cheer-leading, the bottomless supplies of tea, wine, and baked goods. Thank you for letting me cry on your shoulder and for pointing out (quite rightly) that if I didn’t finish this project I would always wonder.

Thanks for helping me keep it all in perspective.

I moved to Boston in 2007 to write this thesis, not fall in love. I found you here, sweetheart, so in the end I did both.

nano update: week three

2011-11-22T10:34:00.000-04:00

I'm closing in on my own personal goal of 25,000 words for the month of November, folks! On this Tuesday before Thanksgiving, my official count is 18,444 and the only thing standing between me and completion is the complete sixth season of Doctor Who (I KNOW) and a Tofurky with orange-cranberry relish.

I had Hanna beta the impromptu Breakfast in Bed Challenge from last week and posted that to AO3 on Friday night, so you can go read All That the Garish Week Hath Scattered Wide if you want canoodling and nakedness and a pesky cat.

The five-times-plus-one fic is done but for the second half of the sixth part, which Hanna said on the walk to work yesterday was much to complicated a math problem for early in the morning. With the NaNo word-count whip behind me, it's by far the lengthiest installment of my Sybil/Gwen series to-date. But I also happen to be rather fond of it, and the plottish bit finally, finally gets them to London which is definitely where I wanted the series to take them.

Hanna has requested that I create Branson a boyfriend, since I've taken Sybil away from him. So that will obviously have to be done at some point. My first foray into m/m erotica? We'll find out the limits of my smut-writing abilities!

chai rose water cookies

2011-11-19T08:27:00.000-04:00

Last May when Hanna and I were in Holland (Mich.) I ordered a drink at lemonjello's that was a chai latte with a shot of rose flavoring. Heaven on earth. The problem is, rose flavoring is a rare offering at coffee shops and not the sort of thing that's easy to find at grocery stores, even a number of our favorite specialty shops here in Boston. But this morning Hanna and I were in Harvard Square for coffee and window shopping + actual shopping and I found rose water at the fabulous Cardullo's. So tonight we decided to make cookies using rose water, and found the following recipe on the Food Network website. We followed it with slight tweaks, so here is the altered version:

Ingredients

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons ground ginger
2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup packed dark brown sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
1/4 cup canola oil
1 tablespoon rosewater

Instructions

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit

1) Combine flour and spices in a bowl and set aside.

2) Cream butter and oil and brown sugar, mix in rose water.

3) Add dry ingredients 1/2 cup at a time until fully incorporated. Cookie dough will be crumbly, like a dry pie crust dough.

4) Use hands to form walnut-sized balls of dough and place on a cookie sheet roughly 2 inches apart.

5) Bake for 15 minutes and use spatula to transfer cookies to wire rack for cooling.

Serve with warm milk and/or chai tea.

congratulations doctor jay!

2011-11-17T21:32:00.001-04:00

Joseph Tychonievich, Ph.D.
(taken May 2005, wearing my hat)

Earlier today, my friend Joseph successfully defended his PhD dissertation in horticulture, plant breeding, and plant genetics before his advisory committee at Michigan State University. We're drinking a fine zinfandel tonight in his honor. Congratulations!

Verbena bonariensis with bronze fennel
photo by Joseph

nano update: week two

2011-11-15T11:19:00.001-04:00

So they have the widgets up this week, but I'm not sure I'm all that thrilled with them. The color scheme is unimpressive. Still. Here ya go. As of this morning I have 13,880 words written toward the official goal of 50,000 and my personal goal of 25,000.

I like the screenshot a bit better. Perhaps I'm just vain?

This past weekend, I wrote a 3,300 word "plot? what plot?" bit of fan fiction at the request of a friend of mine, which accounts for a fairly large chunk of the total gain made. I'll probably edit it tomorrow evening and post it to AO3 if anyone is feeling deprived of Sybil/Gwen smut and wants something to look forward to for mid-week. It's about as plot-what-plot as I think I'll ever be capable of writing. Let's just say it involved doing some Google searching for the date upon which the zeppelin raids began on London (to ensure that leisurely morning sexytimes wasn't historically inaccurate) and to verify the name an inception date for Sylvia Pankhurst's East London Federation of Suffragists (yes, the acronym really was ELFS).

Happy writing everyone!

booknotes: women in lust

2011-11-13T08:00:00.000-04:00

Today, I am participating in the virtual book tour for Women in Lust, a new erotica anthology edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel and published by Cleis Press. I've written straightforward reviews of erotica anthologies before, as well as using them as starting-points to muse about erotic writing more generally. This time I wanted to mix it up a little and followed up on Rachel's offer to connect the virtual tour bloggers with anthology contributors for an e-interview.

Writer Donna George Storey was gracious enough to take the time to respond to my emailed questions with her thoughts about writing erotica professionally and what power erotica has to inform our lives. I hope you find her responses as thought-provoking as I did.

Without further ado, here's Donna.

“My desire made me more interesting to myself.”

an interview with Donna George Storey

Anna: You describe yourself as an academic turned erotic fiction writer. Can you say a little bit about how you made that shift? What prompted you to begin writing erotica, and then to make it a part of your professional life?

Donna: As far back as I can remember, I’ve loved to lose myself in a good story and dreamed of writing my own fiction. However, I also internalized society’s messages that few writers make a living from their passion and most become staggering alcoholics, so it was safer to channel my love of words into an academic appreciation of the works of accepted “great authors.” The exoticism of Japanese literature, and the challenge of simply reading those intricate Chinese characters, kept me enthralled for a while, but deep down I felt I was ignoring my true calling. I finally found the courage to write seriously when my first son was born, and I took a temporary break from teaching—which ended up being permanent. Motherhood is supposed to drain you of all erotic and intellectual energy, but for me the opposite was true.

Donna's collection of erotic literature and reference books related to Japan.
Photo by Donna George Storey, used with permission.

From the start my stories flirted with sex, but it took about a couple of years of practice before my stories were so steamy, I could no longer submit to proper literary magazines. Yet I found being a “bad girl” immensely liberating to my creative spirit. In spite of the erotica revolution in the 1990s when many talented authors and editors like Susie Bright and Maxim Jakubowski proved that stories with erotic themes could be smart, thought provoking and artistic, many people still assume sexually honest writing has to be poorly written, the kind of thing you hide under the bed. My goal is to write stories that challenge that stereotype, stories that respect the complexity of the pleasures of body and mind. Few mainstream authors are comfortable writing about sex in a way that celebrates its positive aspects (notice how often sex is coupled with punishment, betrayal, violence or other negative consequences in mainstream culture). There are many erotica writers who do it bravely and beautifully—but we need more. It changed my life and opened my senses in ways I’d never imagined, and I highly recommend it to everyone!

Anna: The story included in Women in Lust, "Comfort Food," uses recipes and cooking as part of the seduction -- and the end goal of the seduction, even. Can you talk a little bit about why you chose to write a piece centered around preparing and eating food? What was the immediate inspiration for this particular story?

Donna: When I’m not writing erotic stories, I love to cook, although I spend even more time salivating over beautiful cookbooks, a sort of culinary porn. As I considered your question, I realized that my stories are also like recipes in that I’ll take an image that intrigues me and mix it together with a childhood memory, a touch of a lifelong hobby, and a few juicy tidbits from friends, then add a cup of my own libido to finish it all up. “Comfort Food” is somewhat different from the common sex-and-food story involving lovers smearing whipped cream all over each other--which is fun, but messy! In keeping with the female empowerment theme of Women in Lust, the story deals with a middle-aged woman’s fascination with a young chef and his secret pudding recipes. He poses a challenge for her, but of course she gets everything she wants in the end.

There’s one line in this story that’s a particular favorite: “My desire made me more interesting to myself.” One of my many discoveries as an erotic writer is that sensual pleasure doesn’t have to be confined to the genitals. Appreciating the sweetness of a ripe berry can be equally bewitching. Yet enjoying food without guilt is as frowned upon in our society as enjoying sex without guilt, so that parallel also drove the story. Last but not least, anyone who has a passion is very sexy to me, and good cooks by definition care about what they do. Cooking is a form of communication, and I swear I can taste the love and dedication or lack thereof. I once had an absolutely amazing dish of butterscotch pudding at a fancy restaurant in San Francisco called Fifth Floor. I didn’t ask for the recipe, but I wish I had.

Anna: When I write about erotica and pornography as a blogger, I often get comments asking me for reading/viewing recommendations that are "women friendly" or "feminist." Where do you go for good-quality erotic literature? Any suggestions for my readers about places to seek out reading matter?

Donna: Yes, I definitely have some recommendations. Cleis Press and Seal Press publish smart, well-written and very hot anthologies that celebrate female pleasure—anything edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel, Violet Blue and Alison Tyler are sure bets. Online magazines are a great place to sample different authors without commitment. Clean Sheets (www.cleansheets.com) tends toward the literary, you can always count on good, sexy writing. Oysters and Chocolate (www.oystersandchocolate.com) is edited by two wonderful women, Jordan LaRousse and Samantha Sade who embrace all varieties of stories. Since I began writing, I’ve come to appreciate the sensibility an editor brings to an anthology. It’s more than just fixing typos.

Anna: One of the things I'm fascinated by as a reader/amateur writer of erotic fan fiction and original erotic stories is the relationship between peoples' sexual identities/experiences and the type of erotica they write or choose not to write. For example, there are straight and bisexual, even lesbian, women who write/read almost exclusively m/m erotica. I'm curious whether you write exclusively female/male erotica or whether you write other pairings (or groupings), and why you choose to write the pairings (or groupings) you do.

Donna: I’m fascinated by the same relationship myself. Interestingly enough, the second most common question I hear after “are you published?” is “are your stories based on real life?” I actually do make use of material from my experience for many of my stories, but I take a lot of liberties with the facts, and none are strictly memoir. No matter how realistic, erotic stories are fundamentally erotic fantasies. Even if you aren’t peeping into the author’s actual bedroom, you are definitely getting a peek into her imagination and what really turns her on. In a way, my readers are more intimate with me than many of my lovers have been.

When I write, I’m aiming to get at the hidden truths of sexuality, which is why I write mostly what I know, heterosexual sex, and why the wilder couplings are often explicitly presented as fantasy rather than reality. On the other hand, it’s a big turn on to write and read about something you would never, ever do in real life. That’s the power of fiction, to try on different lives. So I have also written stories way outside of my experience. I’ve noticed a trend of scenarios where a woman sleeps with two men, her maidenly reluctance completely overcome by her lover’s insistence that she enjoy sex with a hot stranger. How can she say no to the man she loves, especially if he’s ordering her to be a slut? It’s the perfect way to have your pudding and eat it, too.

Yet, I value authenticity and honesty in erotica. I’d rather read a story written by a lesbian that gives me insight into her sensibility and experiences than something churned out by a guy who’s getting paid a penny a word for some hot girl-on-girl action. Perhaps it’s my grounding in 70’s feminism, but part of me feels it’s a violation for a straight person to impersonate someone with a different orientation unless they approach it with great respect and sensitivity. GLBT voices have been silenced for so long, it’s time to celebrate the chance for those who’ve been marginalized to tell it like it is.

That said, I have written a couple of lesbian stories that seemed to pass as believable. My favorite is entitled “Ukiyo,” about a Japanese literature professor who takes a jaunt through Kyoto’s pleasure quarters with a colleague as an honorary man and finds herself becoming intimate with a female dancer. I drew upon my own genuine curiosity and attraction to women, as well as a few actual drunken nights in Japan where my usual inhibitions were especially soft. There was enough truth and genuine desire, I suppose, that Susie Bright chose the story for Best American Erotica 2006.

Anna: Are there any particular tropes in modern erotica that you wish would just go away?

Donna: I do have a particular pet peeve, which also happens to be a very common scenario in erotic fiction. You lock eyes with a stranger at the bus stop or in a club, immediately retreat to an alley or public restroom, and have the most mind-blowing sex of your life without a word spoken. I understand why this sort of zipless fuck is a popular fantasy—seduction is hard, knowing someone intimately is harder--but this particular type of story leaves me cold, bored, and unable to suspend disbelief. I like to be warmed up first, even in fiction.

Anna: What are some of the things you wish we would see more of in erotic writing?

Donna: What I’d really love to see more of doesn’t have to do with a particular theme or kink, it’s about who writes erotica and why. Until I started writing erotica myself, I thought of sexually arousing material as “out there,” images created by Hollywood or the porn industry, or naughty letters in Penthouse. But writing erotica encouraged me to pay attention to my sexual response and my lover’s in a whole new way. It was a tremendous awakening and took us to a new level of intimacy and enjoyment. I realized how much sexual power and creativity was within me, not out there.

Donna George Storey
Photo by Laura Boyd, used with permission

The stories that blossomed from my imagination were an education as well. Because of my writing, I’ve come to realize that sexual fantasy is not just a straight reflection of what you desire, it’s like a foreign language you have to decode. Getting turned on by being dominated, as in the example above where the husband commands the wife to sleep with another man, does not mean you literally like or want to be dominated in all aspects of your life. I now read this fantasy of mine as a way for my libido to borrow power relations in real life, where a good woman is only allowed to be sexual in relation to a husband. But then something cool happens in my heated brain—the authority figure is transformed into someone who now allows and insists on pleasure. The same is true with exhibitionist fantasies, which are really about showing a hidden sexual self, not breaking genital exposure laws. Sexual fantasy might seem taboo and outrageous, but at the heart is permission and acceptance of one’s eroticism. That discovery has been very reassuring for me. Even if you aren’t into this kind of analysis, just paying attention to what turns you on is fascinating. How do you set up a gateway into your erotic world? What point in the story is the climax? How are figures in the real world transformed? (You’d never recognize my high school principal!)

As for the why you write, there’s lots of emphasis on publication as the test of a “real” writer, but the most meaningful erotica can be a private gift to yourself or your lover. So, yes, I’d love to see more people exploring their erotic imaginations and writing lots of hot stories. The world would be a much better place for it.

WOMEN IN LUST: You can read more about the Women in Lust anthology, and find excerpts of several stories contained therein, at the anthology website as well as purchasing copies from a variety of online booksellers including Amazon, Powells, or Cleis Press.

AUTHOR'S BIO: Donna George Storey has taught English in Japan and Japanese in the United States. She is the author of Amorous Woman, a very steamy novel about a woman’s love affair with Japan (check out the provocative book trailer). She’s also published over a hundred literary and erotic stories and essays in such places as The Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, Women in Lust, Best American Erotica, The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, and Penthouse.

Cross-posted at The Pursuit of Harpyness.

nano update: week one

2011-11-09T10:34:00.001-04:00

The NaNo site doesn't have word count widgets this year, so I resorted to a screenshot this morning. I'm actually further along than I thought I'd be at this point -- so yay?

I've been working on two new installments of my How She Loved You series (posted at AO3), which is Sybil Crawley/Gwen fan fiction series building loosely on the events from season one of Downton Abbey and, you know, inventing liberally thereafter. I'm currently about 5K and three sections into a 5+1 fic ("Five times Sybil and Gwen parted before dawn and the first time they didn't have to"), a piece about Sybil painting Gwen's portrait, and a longish plottish piece filling in Gwen's back story (complete with Tragic First Love).

Hanna, as usual, has demanded there be orgasms at regular intervals for both main characters, so for those of you yearning after femslash rest assured that this is Porn With Plot and/or Plot With Porn on an installment-by-installment basis.

Any of you participating in National Novel Writing Month? How'd the first week go for y'all this year?

from the neighborhood: gratuitous cat blogging

2011-11-07T10:10:00.000-04:00

Photos selected by Hanna. Cross-posted at ...fly over me, evil angel ....

Cat picspam!

nanowrimo 2011 commencing in 3...2...1...

2011-11-01T07:01:00.000-03:00

Today is November 1st and thus the beginning of National Novel Writing Month 2011. As I wrote at The Pursuit of Harpyness last Thursday, I'll be participating this year for the second time (my first year being 2009).

For those of you unfamiliar with National Novel Writing Month, basically it's an opportunity to join thousands of other amateur fiction writers in solidarity as you try to write 50,000 words of fiction between midnight on November 1st and 11:59pm November 30th. A lot of people attempt a full-length novel, but me I've got some fan fiction planned and maybe some non-fanfic erotic short stories I've had kicking around for a while in the back of my brain. We'll see. I'm not particularly gunning for the full 50k, but I'd like to contribute as many words as possible to the overall pool of creativity the event sparks. So ... the upshot is that y'all may not be seeing so much of me between now and the end of the month. My goal is to keep writing at least one post a week here at the feminist librarian -- either a book review or a "thirty at thirty" post. I've already got a virtual book tour event later in the month that I'm committed to (Rachel Kramer Bussel's new anthology Women in Lust!) as well as a couple of advance review items I want y'all to know about (Gayle S. Rubin's collection of essays, Deviations, and Jeanne Cordova's memoir When We Were Outlaws). So look for those reviews in upcoming weeks. I'll also continue posting links at the feminist librarian reads and writing at least one post a week over at The Pursuit of Harpyness. Hanna and I also continue to post three fan fiction recommendations per week at everything is gay and nothing hurts. Plus, obviously, harassment by email is always an option for those of you who miss me!

In the meantime, I hope all of you have a cozy and creative November -- and we'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming sometime around December 1st.

multimedia monday: "automobile row"

2011-10-31T08:00:00.000-03:00

Hanna and I live in the Allston neighborhood of Boston, just west of Boston University's main campus. Commonwealth Avenue stretches from Kenmore Square (near Fenway Park) to Boston College out in Newton. We live in an apartment building sandwiched between Comm Ave to the north and the town line of Brookline to the south, and the neighborhood in this little documentary is one through which we walk and ride the "T" on a regular basis:

The Kenmore Square building that now houses Barnes & Noble at BU was home to a dealer of Peerless automobiles. The Star Market by Packard’s Corner was once a Chevrolet dealership. And in between lay more than a mile of storefronts selling cars, parts, and accessories or repairing cars. In the 1920s there were more than 100 such businesses on and near that strip of Comm Ave. Downtown Boston had its “Piano Row” and its “Newspaper Row.” This was Boston’s “Automobile Row.”

Watch this video on YouTube

The article which accompanies this video is quite interesting in its own right. I'm really impressed by the research that went into making the video -- obviously a few people spent some time in the BU college archives! -- and the way in which the historical images were edited into the present-day footage.

first thoughts: being interviewed about sexuality + society

2011-10-28T06:29:00.000-03:00

On Wednesday evening I sat down for two hours to speak with Holly Donovan, a PhD candidate in Sociology at Boston University. Holly is conducting interviews with LGBTQ-identified folks in the Boston area as part of her research on sexuality, religion, and community. If you identify as queer and live in the Boston area, check out her call for participants, which she asked me to pass along. For me, it was a unique opportunity to be on the opposite side of the microphone: usually I'm the one asking the life history questions!

tea is essential for good conversations

For the next three weeks, I'll be completing phase two of the project -- keeping a journal of observations and thoughts about my experience of being queer in Boston -- but for now, I thought I'd share some initial reflections about our conversation.

Life narratives are inherently chaotic on the first go-around. Unless you're focused on a very specific aspect of your life (and even then, as my OE oral history project shows, things can get out of hand very quickly) it's fairly impossible to tell a linear story that encompasses all of the salient details of what goes into making a person. Even with the keywords "sexual orientation," "religion," and "social interactions" that's a hell of a lot of territory to cover! I found myself skipping around a lot in time and missing stuff that was probably important. I woke up around 3am on Thursday morning and was mentally adding things to the "remember to tell her next time ..." list.

My sexual orientation isn't a primary identity category for me; being in a sexual relationship was much more of a turning point. This might seem weird, given the amount of time I spend thinking and writing about human sexuality -- but I think that's kinda the point. In my own personal life, there's feminist politics (of which rights for non-straight folks were long a part of my political interests), there's queer and sexual history (which I'm engaged in as a scholar), and then there's the whole my-life-as-a-sexual-being thing. Which is awesome. But doesn't really have so much to do with orientation as it does with physical experience, with relationships, with how I understand my sexuality as it relates to my ethics, my body, my interactions. In that space, I don't think of myself as someone with a sexual orientation or identity -- I just think of myself as (enthusiastically!!) sexual.

I don't socialize in primarily queer spaces. Since one of Holly's questions is about the interactions of queer-identified folks with straight-identified folks, I thought a bit before we sat down about my circles of friendship and the primary spaces where I socialize -- both in person and online. Online more than in-person spaces are, I would say, "queer" (inasmuch as "queer" overlaps with "feminist," which it sometimes does and sometimes doesn't). But my circle of friends is pretty sexually and gender diverse, and they often overlap. That is, when Hanna and I get together with friends we don't have our "gay" friends and then our "straight" friends. We have friends. We don't socialize in spaces that are organized around sexual identity (i.e. gay bars or lesbian book clubs). Possibly because neither Hanna nor I were ever in search of an active dating scene? And I don't think either of us has ever particularly yearned for the type of social solidarity of "safe" space that gay neighborhoods or social clubs might provide. The one exception to this is our health center, which we picked in part because of its history in LGBT health activism.

This isn't exactly news, but opposition makes me feel defiant and irritable, rather than judged and cowed. When people are cranky about lesbian PDA, I have the urge to be more publicaly affectionate, not less. I'd argue that both my family background and my long-time singleness both contribute to this. By the time I entered into a relationship, I was much more confident about my presence in the world than I would have been in my teens. You don't like what you see? Suck it up and deal.

I also don't have reflexive fear about my physical safety, which is probably a whole tangle of social privileges I've experienced throughout my life: class, race, gender presentation, and so forth. Which ties into the idea of straight privilege that I've been turning over in my mind for a while now:

"Straight" privilege. I've put "straight" in quotation marks 'cause I don't think it's a function of being straight so much as being read as straight. Regardless of my own actual sexual desires, about which I didn't speak about much growing up (except to very close family and friends) I was read as straight, as a single straight woman. I grew up assuming I had just as much right to be in public spaces, to be open about my relationships (sexual or otherwise), to speak up for my politics, as the next person. I think this is a function of race and class too. I've heard bi and fluid women talk about this in terms of their relative comfort level at being visibly queer in public relative to a partner who's been in lesbian relationships longer -- that a woman who's moved through the world in straight relationships for a number of years has come to expect the right to openly acknowledge her partner, the right to kiss him or hold hands or cuddle in public and not only receive little negative feedback but actually get positive social responses. And therefore there's less reflexive reserve, because they haven't had to build up that mechanism for self-protection.

My family isawesome. Holly kept asking about negative social aspects ofbeing out, and I couldn't think of any. Yes, the obviouspolitical/legal discrimination. But in terms of my family acceptingmy chosen partner on equal terms with my siblings' partners -- thatwas never a question. The fact she wondered if we were treateddifferently in my family actually took my by surprise. I mean, I gotwhy she asked (I probably would have, being in her shoes), but thatsort of behavior is so out of the realm of the way my family operatesthat I felt at a loss to explain why that just was never an issue.

My co-workers are awesome. I knew that already, but hadn't really articulated it before talking with Holly. I've never felt unsafe about being openly in a lesbian relationship at work, either with my immediate colleagues or with the higher-ups in the organization. Hanna is my emergency contact, the secondary beneficiary in all my benefits paperwork, if we were married she'd be able to sign on under my health insurance plan, and so forth. People ask after Hanna and there's no indication that they think of our relationship as any more or less significant in terms of workplace socialization than any of the straight partnerships that come up in daily conversation.

Choosing Hannachanged my relationship to West Michigan. Before Hanna and Igot together, I could picture moving back to Michigan if the rightjob came open ... I know how to survive as a political and socialminority there (that was the story of my daily life as a child andyoung adult) but I wouldn't ask someone else to live with that sortof hostility on a daily basis. Well, that'severything from my notes thus far. Now I have three weeks ofjournaling and a follow-up interview. I'll be back mid-November with"second thoughts" and possibly "third thoughts"as well!

from the archives: historical games of telephone

2011-10-26T14:01:00.004-03:00

I don't have the mental oomph this week for a thirty at thirty post, so I thought instead I'd offer you a little anecdote from the Reading Room of the Massachusetts Historical Society. It's a fascinating example of how historical sources can be unreliable, and knowledge with think we all know turns out to be factually far more complicated than it appeared at first glance.

via

Yesterday afternoon I took a call from a researcher who was looking to source a quotation about Horace Mann. The researcher gave the quote to me over the telephone as follows

Education really consists of a student on one end of a log and Horace Mann on the other end of the log.

The researcher wanted to find out who had said this. I took their contact information and this morning when I was in the Reading Room I spent some time digging around to see what I could find.

My first stop was the online version of Bartlett's Quotations, to look up any familiar quotations with "Horace Mann" in or associated with them, since this was my one concrete lead. (The MHS does, in fact, hold a large collection of Horace Mann papers, but since this was a quotation ostensibly about Mann rather than by Mann, I set aside the possibility of wading into those waters until later. Turns out this was a good call!). Bartlett's didn't yield anything. So I decided to begin by verifying the wording of the quotation via that wonderfully inexact crowd-sourcing tool known as The Internet.

I navigated to Google.com and typed in "education really consists of a student on one end of a log" and hit search.

Yes, Librarians do it too, and yes sometimes it can actually be an incredibly powerful entry-point for research of this kind.

What I discovered from scanning the first page of results for this phrase was that it wasn't Horace Mann whose name was most frequently associated with phrases along these lines, but a man named Mark Hopkins, who was the president of Williams College (Williamstown, Mass.) from 1836-1872.

Re-running my search with the "education..." phrase and "Mark Hopkins" took me to a Wikiquotes article on education, where the quotation is given as: "My definition of a University is Mark Hopkins at one end of a log and a student on the other," and the attribution is described thus:

Tradition well established that James A. Garfield used the phrase at a New York Alumni Dinner in 1872. No such words are found, however. A letter of his, Jan., 1872, contains the same line of thought.

I now had a tentative identification for the individual named in the quotation as well as a possible identification for the individual who had spoken the words.

via

A search in Google Books and the Internet Archive for various combinations of keywords from the above yielded some fascinating permutations of the elusive quote on education:

The January 1902 issue of the Western Journal of Education contains an address by one E.F. Adams in which he claims, “When President Garfield said that when Horace Mann was on one end of a log and himself on the other there was a university he expressed the spirit of the old education” (p. 18).

In a 1966 issue of the education magazine Phi Delta Kappan, Arthur H. Glogau again attributed the quotation to President Garfield and writes “Garfield once said that a rotten log, with Mark Hopkins on one end of it, and himself on the other, would be a university” (Vol 48, p. 404). The date for the quotation is given in this instance as 1885.

Mark Hopkins was one-time president of Williams College and apparently a former professor of Garfield’s. In a footnote concerning Hopkins in The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, the editor formulates the quote as: “The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student at the other” (p. 266).

Since none of these sources either quote Garfield directly or provide a citation to his own writing or speeches, I turned to our own catalog, ABIGAIL, and called for a biography of Garfield from our reference collection.

Unfortunately, this didn't exactly clear up the mystery.

Robert Granfield Caldwell’s James A Garfield: A Party Chieftain (1931), attributes the quote to another secondary source, B.A. Hinsdale’s President Garfield and Education (1882), and phrases it: “Give me a log hut, with only a simple bench, Mark Hopkins on one end and I on the other, and you may have all the buildings, apparatus and libraries without him” (p. 185).

This citation appears to lead us back to a 4 February 1879 speech by Garfield before the National Education Association, the full text of which is reproduced in the Hinsdale publication. You can read it online at the Internet Archive. In his NEA address, Garfield articulated the idea in this way:

If I could be taken back into boyhood to-day, and had all the libraries and apparatus of a university, with ordinary routine professors, offered me on the one hand, and on the other a great, luminous, rich-souled man, such as Dr. Hopkins was twenty years ago, in a tent in the woods alone, I should say, ‘Give me Dr. Hopkins for my college course, rather than any university with only routine professors’ (338).

So now I have four dates upon which this sentiment was supposedly expressed (1871, 1872, 1879, and 1885) and as many venues (New York Alumni dinner, private correspondence, NEA address, and an unknown context for the 1885 attribution).

What I find fascinating about all of these "quotations" is the aspects of the story that remain roughly constant: the presence of Hopkins, the image of one mentor and one student in dialogue, the language of wood: a log, a log bench, a rotten log, a tent in the woods. My speculative guess, based on the information I have in front of me, is that this was a well-worn anecdote that James Garfield told about his former professor in a number of settings, and that the image was such a striking one to his contemporaries that it was picked up and repeated over time with slight variation, like that game of telephone you're forced to play as a child at birthday parties where you whisper a message from ear to ear around the circle and see whether the end result bears any resemblance to the original phrase.

So there you have it: an hour or two in the life of a reference librarian.

four years ago today: "something like the five stages of grief"

2011-10-24T10:55:00.000-03:00

Part of an ongoing series of posts highlighting primary source material from my first semester at Simmons during the fall of 2007.

From: Anna
To: Janet
Date: Wed, Oct 24, 2007 at 2:51 PM
Subject: Mid-week touchstone

Dear Mum,

I'm sitting at the Mass Historical Society desk for the afternoon. Being here reminds me of all those hours I spent in middle school doing "homework" in the Holland Museum lobby, waiting for tourists to appear :).

This is my second full day at the MHS. This morning, I was photocopying papers, I turn to the next paper, and what do I see? A letter from M. Cary Thomas -- turn of the century woman scholar, educated at Johns Hopkins, founder of Bryn Mawr college -- written in her own hand when she was president of Bryn Mawr! Oh. My. God. It's so surreal just to find something like that, and know once she was holding it, and then find myself putting it on the photocopier!

at the front desk of the MHS (October 2008)

It's strange and not at all comfortable (given my personality) to be a novice at this job. I have certain skills to draw on, of course, but there is so much to learn in terms of the conventions of an archives versus a bookstore or library or museum. Particularly, there is so much more need to monitor the documents, since they are moving around the building -- rather than in stable exhibits -- and are one-of-a-kind, extremely rare items. So I am learning new procedures as well as the usual learning of everyone's names, and where the bathrooms are located, and how to use the email system, etc.

I am enjoying it, although it's been a rough few days physically, which puts a damper on my mood. While usually my cycle isn't particularly taxing, it can be a bad combination if I'm already weary (which is just the general state of things this fall . . . I know it will be got through, but annoying while it lasts). Headaches, which lead to Excedrin which leads to insomnia, etc. Yesterday, I intentionally drank coffee like a fiend in the afternoon to keep myself going through my book review assignment (more below), so today I'm feeling rather hung over (and it's a long day, with class this evening from 6-9). Whine whine whine.

I wrote this book review, which for some unknown reason (or reasons) I've been dragging my heels about for three weeks and absolutely panicked about finishing. I think it became a convenient locus for my anxieties. For a few days, I couldn't even think about the project without panicking and/or falling asleep (which is my physical defense mechanism--I literally can't stay awake). And then, it came down to last night, when I was pretty willing to just blurt on paper and print it out to turn in. I didn't even really proof it. Oh, well. Not my finest scholarly hour, but I sort of feel like I can afford to have an off-semester as I'm getting adjusted. I can't imagine (my own hubris, I know) that an "off" semester will be anything worse than "B" work. And I know my history class -- where I put my best energy -- will be a clear "A" (again, hubris) so I'm not too anxious in terms of keeping my scholarships.

I was thinking last night (haha) that my approach to academic projects is something like the five stages of grief: (1) I have totally unrealistic self-expectations about what I can get done and what I want to get done (denial); (2) when it becomes clear that I'm not going to get my ideal project done, I start resenting the project and the professor, and castigating myself for the unrealistic expectations (anger); (3) I debate internally with myself over what sort of project that's less-than-ideal I can get done, and maybe argue with the professor about altering the assignment (bargaining); (4) if none of these approaches work, it's time to start despairing about the entire educational system and wondering what I'm doing there, and imagining I will never complete the assignment and probably drop out of school (depression); (5) finally, when I get tired of feeling crummy and/or it gets down to the wire, I finally give up on the ideal project altogether and just patch something together (acceptance).

The book I had to review was actually quite interesting, so I'm not entirely clear why I got hung up about it. It was on the history of passports, and there's lots to say about the history of identity papers, and how they relate to actual persons, and how they connect persons to governments. Part of my problem was no doubt lack of FOCUS, which is usually provided for smaller assignments by class discussion and course readings--but in this case the assignment was poorly written and I just got off on a muddled foot.

I think, in general, it's been like pulling teeth intellectually to focus on abstract intellectual ideas right now, with so many external changes going on. I've never been good at focusing in the best circumstances, which for me means an utterly non-distracting environment (why I can't study in libraries, ironically enough, since they're not spaces I can take for granted and ignore). Well, right now, my whole world is a distracting environment! So I feel lucky when I manage to have a more or less coherent thought that's defined enough to put into a short response paper :).

I had coffee with Hanna Monday night -- her initiative!! -- which was really good, I think, and have "dates" scheduled with both her and G for next week. I realized that, even though I treasure the alone-time, I can get too wrapped up in my own self-critical monologues re: my graduate work, etc., when I spend every moment I'm not in class or at work by myself. It's easy for me to forget that fellow students can actually bolster my mood and energize me (as well as reminding me how unrealistic my expectations for my own work might be :)!) since 90% of the time, they aren't very helpful. But a few well-chosen comrades can make a difference.

Happily, my own well-chosen comrades (H and G) are going to be in the same history class next semester, and have convinced me to be in it as well . . . so hopefully the collaborative energy will be exponentially enhanced :). G is also taking oral history, which I will be doing as well, so I'm looking forward very much to the spring. I'll probably panic when the time comes, and go through the predictable cycle (see above) anyway, but right now I can idealize things to my hearts content!

I really hope you and Dad are able to make a trip to Boston in the spring. I'm already haphazardly collecting little things to do . . . eg the Wednesday morning art tour at the MHS, which I was given privately today, and very much enjoyed; and a visit to the Brookline Booksmith, my favorite independent bookstore so far . . . apart of course, from showing you my own spaces, and the museums and lovely parks that abound. Hm, and places to eat! I walked past a pub this afternoon called "The Foggy Goggle" which I think is just begging to be tried!

I was asking Dad about filling my levothyroxin prescription online; I may at some point soon ask if you could pick up a refill at Model Drug (where my current prescription is), unless it seems easy to get a new prescription from Krayshak's office. Dad says it shouldn't be difficult to send it out here. And I'd reimburse you, of course.

North Hall, Simmons Residential Campus

Tonight is the first game of the world series, so the neighborhood is going to be bustling! Since I'm on foot, I don't anticipate much trouble, and I live just far enough away that the noise doesn't wake me up (living on the res campus, I think, insulates me from the street just enough).

That's about all the news around here . . . I'm going to sign off and see if I can catch up on a couple of other emails before the end of my shift,

Love,
Anna

booknotes: october round-up

2011-10-21T06:06:00.000-03:00

I've been reading lots lately, without a lot of time to write substantial review posts. So here's another one of those massive "stuff I've been reading" posts that I find myself obliged to write several times a year. Alpha by author because I'm organizational that way at times. It's the librarian thing.

Eagleton, Terry. Why Marx Was Right (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). So I've read a bit of Marx and generally think of myself as a socialist-minded leftist -- when I think of myself in those types of political terms at all. But I'm not really all that clear about what makes Marxism unique among all of the other theories and practices of socialism and communism that exist in the world. Which is where Eagleton's theory-heavy but still readable primer on Marxism was worth the read. Also he works in the phrase "a pathological obsession with penguins" and explains why this is perhaps not relevant to the class struggle. Mr. Eagleton, sir, I'd say you win all the things if this turn of phrase didn't seem ill-conceived given the subject at hand.

Hale, Grace Elizabeth. A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love With Rebellion in Postwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Hale's history explores the different conduits by which white middle class Americans came to identify with "outsiders" between the 1950s and the 1980s, beginning with the publication of Catcher in the Rye and ending with an examination of Randall Terry's anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue. I found a lot of interesting stuff here, particularly Hale's inclusion of conservative as well as liberal sources -- white Civil Rights activists and folk musicians are well-trod ground, but the Jesus freaks are an under-explored phenomenon. My one frustration with Hale's treatment is that she tends to talk in broad general categories -- i.e. "white middle class Americans" and "outsiders" without acknowledging that despite economic and racial privileges, not all white, middle-class folks were appropriating outsider identity -- there were a lot of ways to experience marginalization in postwar America, and I feel those complications get short-shift. I would also have been pleased to see more in-depth discussion of the process by which flirtation with outsider identity prompted many white and middle-class people to actually become marginal outsiders in deed as well as word. Still -- a truly thought-provoking recent read.

Maguire, Seanan. Rosemary and Rue (New York: Daw, 2009) and A Local Habitation (2010). Rosemary and Habitation are the first two volumes in a series of novels about changeling October "Toby" Daye, San Francisco-based private investigator and knight pledged to Daoine Sidhe Duke Sylvester Torquill of the Summerlands. You can tick off a lot of urban fantasy boxes for this series, and in addition to the satisfaction of the familiar Maguire consistently digs a little deeper into her stories and characters than strictly demanded in one's popcorn fiction. There are no easy answers few heroes or villains without a whiff of moral dubiousness. I already have the third installment on order at the Brookline Public Library!

Moreno, Jonathan D. The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2011). This was an advance review book I snagged via Early Reviewers on Library Thing. Moreno is a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, and I suspect this primer was meant to serve as a classroom text, introducing students to key controversies at the intersection of biology (particularly human biology) and politics. It suffers from many of the shortcomings that other such introductory texts suffer from: summary treatment of thorny questions due to space limitations, a limited number of citations, and strongly-worded assertions meant (I assume) to provoke discussion for which scant evidence is given. I felt like the book suffered from poor organization -- the text seemed to jump back and forth between historical narrative and issue-based sections, with little transition. The brevity of the text itself might be offset to great effect by the inclusion of a narrative bibliography or "further reading" section, neither of which were in evidence in the uncorrected proof. I'd argue that more valuable contributions to the field have been made by such authors as Michelle Goldberg (The Means of Reproduction) and Debora L. Spar (The Baby Business) -- though granted, my knowledge in this area leans heavily toward reproductive technologies as well as the broader the right to bodily autonomy and health decision-making.

Priest, Cherie. Hellbent (New York: Spectra, 2011). I reviewed Bloodshot earlier in the year and was excited when the second installment of the Cheshire Red Reports so close on the heels of volume one. Hopefully there will be many more to come! Hellbent follows the continuing adventures of vampire and thief-for-hire Raylene as she and her chosen family of misfits hustle to keep themselves safe and financially stable in the midst of growing tensions in the vampire community and the appearance of a mentally unstable witch. Totally anticipating volume the third.

Smith, Christian. Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). Now over a decade old, this book contains an analysis of over 100 lengthy interviews with self-identified evangelicals from across the nation in which the interviewees were asked to articulate their beliefs about Christian faith and practice as it relates to American political life and culture. Smith's analysis of the data feels slightly heavy-handed in the "Evangelicals are not all close-minded bigots!" direction, but the data and first-person narratives will still be useful to people seeking to understand the worldviews of American evangelical Christians in the mid-1990s.

Sonnie, Amy and James Tracy. Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times (New York: Mellville House, 2011). Sonnie and Tracy have taken on the ambitious project of documenting the experiences of a number of white working class community organizers in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City during the 1960s and 70s. They set out to challenge the common assumption that poor and working-class whites of the era were knee-jerk racists who felt efforts to end racial discrimination translated into loss of (white) jobs in already-struggling urban areas. “These men and women understood that ending racism was not a threat or an act of charity,” they argue, “but a part of gaining their own freedom” (5). The extensive research represented in this book is a valuable contribution to the scholarship in this area, and I found it particularly interesting to read in tandem with A Nation of Outsiders, since Sonnie and Tracy chronicle many of the same events, but from the perspective of the outsiders themselves -- rather than those who sought to romanticize them.

Taormino, Tristan (ed.). Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica (New York: Cleis Press, 2011). I wrote a review of Take Me There over at Harpyness; you can also read an interview with Tristan Taormino at Lamda Literary. Erotica anthologies are always particularly tricky to review given that the unevenness of any anthology is compounded by the very personal nature of ones likes and dislikes when it comes to sexually explicit material. Suffice to say, there were some stories I liked, some I didn't, and I'm looking forward to further expansion of the subgenre. In the meantime, may I recommend Julia Serano's "Small Blue Thing," "Now, Voyager" by Rahne Alexander, "The Visible Woman" by Rachel K. Zall, and Patrick Califia's "Big Gifts in Small Boxes" -- all of which can be found in Take Me There.

30 @ 30: on vacation [#11]

2011-10-19T08:43:00.000-03:00

So last week Hanna and I took a few days vacation around the long Columbus Day weekend. Back when I asked for the time off from work -- I think sometime in mid-June -- I had the vague idea we might have the energy and disposable income to spend a few days in Vermont, just the two of us. We like Vermont. But hotels are expensive, and car rentals are expensive, and someone has to look after the cat, and even if none of that had been an obstacle what it turned out we both kinda sorta really wanted to do with our five days of not working was stay at home and do nothing.

Breakfast at Crema Cafe (Harvard Square, Cambride, Mass.), July 2011,
photo by Anna.

Well, not nothing. We spent a lot of time being cosmopolitan and sitting in coffee shops reading and drinking espresso and cafe au lait and eating brioche.

We were brave and tried walking somewhere new -- out to Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge -- which is the first landscaped cemetery in America, consecrated 1831, and had fun taking pictures of headstones.

Anna checks the map in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, October 2011,
photo by Hanna.

We read about Charles Darwin and Hillbilly Patriots and biopolitics.

We applied (and were accepted!) to become reviewers for Library Journal.

We wrote fan fiction about Dean Winchester and Castiel and about Sybil Crawley and Gwen.

We had a friend over to watch (a disappointing installment of) Inspector Lewis and baked a pumpkin pie.

Apple pie and beer, October 2011,
photo by Anna

We stayed up until midnight and slept in until quarter of nine in the morning.

We took afternoon naps on the living room couch.

When I returned to work on Thursday my colleagues asked how the vacation was and did we go to Maine. "Actually," I confessed, "We stayed at home and made no plans and that was exactly what we needed." My co-workers were totally on board with this idea.

What struck me last week as I was thinking about our approach to this latest vacation is how it is the complete opposite of how I understood vacations as a child. When I was young, the above activities (except for naps, since I was not a nap-taker) would basically have described my everyday life. Stay up late reading, wake up to muffins or pancakes around ten, do more reading, maybe go for a walk or a bike ride, ram around outside with siblings or friends for a few hours, go back to reading, maybe some food at some point, a trip to the library.

Pippi Longstocking and Mister Nielsen
via

There's a great story in one of the Pippi Longstocking collections in which Pippi (in my child's mind possibly the ur-homeschooler) becomes jealous of her friends Tommy and Annika because they get summer holidays and Christmas vacation at school. She figures if she attends school then she, too, will get the holidays that her friends seem to enjoy. Obviously her attempt to become a "normal" child is short-lived and the moral of the story is that she's really better off living her own kind of life and doing what she wants to do rather than trying to be someone she's not. As a kid, I thought this story was hilarious because it was obvious (to me) that not going to school meant that you could have "vacation" (that is, school-free days) all the time.

Storm clouds over the horizon (Bend, Oregon), March 2007
Photo by Anna

As a child, vacation-vacation meant travel. We went on vacation every spring to a tiny cinder block cottage on the shore of Lake Michigan, where we got to sleep in bunkbeds (!), toast marshmallows over the bonfire (!!), spend all day wet and sandy on the beach, and poke at antlion sand traps with twigs.

As a child, vacation-vacation meant flying to Bend, Oregon, for a month to stay with my grandparents and explore the high desert. It meant taking the overnight train from Bend to San Francisco to visit our aunt and ride the trolley cars. It meant my first solo trip by airplane to spend a month of summer with a friend of mine who grew up on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

As a child, vacation meant, in the immortal words of Toad, "The open road, the dusty highway, the heath, the common, the hedgerows, the rolling downs! Camps, villages, towns, cities! Here to-day, up and off to somewhere else to-morrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement!"

Vacation sometimes still means travel, now that I'm an adult, but of course travel now requires effort in a way that it didn't when I was small. As a child, I remember being responsible for, you know, creating a travel journal and some sort of packing list. Preparation for trips meant reading novels set in the locations where we'd be traveling, and saving up spending money for souvenirs. I didn't have to worry about such pesky details as driving routes, airplane tickets, hotel reservations, and train schedules.

Drover's Inn, West Highlands, Scotland, May 2004
Photo by Mark Cook

Not that trip planning can't be fun -- sometimes planning travel (as Alain de Botton once observed) is more than half the fun. I remember the thrill of being in my teens and developing enough independence that I could plan and execute solo vacations (perhaps the topic of another "thirty at thirty" post). But I find, as an adult, that travel is no longer synonymous with vacation the way it once was. Instead, the two have developed along often-overlapping yet distinct pathways in the geography of my (our) life.

Travel usually must take place during vacation, but is not the whole of it.

I think in my thirties I would like to develop more fully the art of non-travel vacation time. I don't want to be one of those people who needs to go off to the White Mountains with no laptop or cell phone in order to stop checking my work email. And I don't want to fight the persistent, nagging feeling that I had during graduate school that time spent not working should translate into time spent doing other "productive" activities, the sort of activities that "count" in whatever complex internal matrices of value I have constructed for myself.

I think my parents, what with the home education and through continuous personal example, have given me some good tools for this. The experience of home education really blew open the myth that unstructured time isn't worthwhile, and similarly gave me the distance from mainstream expectations needed to respond to all assertions of value or non-value with an interrogative "why?" So doing nothing in lazy? Why? So in order to be a valuable citizen you need to be "productive"? Why? What is productive? Who says? Why should I believe them? Convince me.

Take your time off from the "have tos" of daily adult life seriously, people. I know some of us have more luxury to do this than others -- believe me, I never realized how amazing paid vacation can be until I started earning it -- but I hope that everyone in our productivity-obsessed culture can learn to appreciate the art of down time a little bit more. In ourselves, and in others.

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

2011-10-17T08:20:00.000-03:00

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:

hip hip hooray for the birthday girl!

2011-10-14T07:32:00.000-03:00

Coming out of self-imposed radio silence to wish my kid sister a Happy 24th Birthday today! I have it on good authority (er, her own) that she will be celebrating at one of these three tasty-sounding restaurants down in Austin, Texas.

Maggie (November 2008)

Many happy returns of the day and, yes, your birthday present is, actually, on its way through by pony express. You should see it out there on the frontier sometime before Christmas.

Love, your sister,
Anna

on vacation [back next week]

2011-10-09T06:58:00.000-03:00

Hanna and I are taking some time off this week to enjoy autumn and make space for a stay-at-home vacation for just the two of us. So I won't be posting my regular round of posts this week, but never fear! I'll be back on the 17th and up to my usual shenanigans.

Middlesex Fells Reservation (October 2007)

I'll be back with news of this year's NaNoWriMo, book reviews, more installments of thirty at thirty and silly cat pictures per the usual. Until then, hope you all have a lovely Columbus Day weekend and week ahead.

happy adoption day!

2011-10-08T10:40:00.000-03:00

One year ago today, Geraldine came to stay with us. This was the first thing she did after recovering from the car ride by peeing under the bed:

It's still one of my favorite kitty photographs, and one of Geraldine's favorite lookout spots.

Over the passed year Gerry has gone from being a cranky and standoffish cat to being a cranky and invasive-of-personal-space cat. She's still only grudgingly a lap cat -- and even then only for very short periods of time -- but nevertheless manages to be very present in our lives whether it's underfoot while we're making human food in the kitchen (you never know when kitty food might fall from the sky!) or hogging half the couch (it might be a three-cushion couch, but is clearly only made for one human + cat) or announcing her desire for breakfast at two in the morning by climbing onto my chest and delicately pressing her claws into the hollow between my breasts.

sleepy kitty (photo by Hanna)

There are times -- usually during said 2am "feed me! play with me!" sessions -- that I feel having a three-year-old cat is much closer to having a human three-year-old than Hanna ever thought we'd be. Albeit a three-year-old that doesn't need us to be able to afford childcare or a stay-at-home parent! But (much like, I imagine, like parenting ... though obviously to a lesser degree) she's become an integral part of the family. We're ever so glad she came to stay.

ficnotes: in the beginning there was the word [massive fic round-up]

2011-10-07T07:22:00.001-03:00

I started this post a few weeks ago, when Hanna found a Mycroft/Lestrade fic written entirely in fictional texts. One word: Adorable. This got me thinking about a number of other fics ("Mystrade" and otherwise) that have used love letters, texts, electronic communications, poetry, and the old-fashioned love-letter as means for their characters to finally, finally connect the dots.

So as my gift to you for this three-day weekend, here's my round-up of fic that uses text-based communication as the wooing-method-of-choice. I threw in a few biblio-centric fics because, well, how could I not?

via

Title: Told In Texts
Author: et_cetera55
Pairing: Mycroft/Lestrade
Rating: PG-13
Why should you bother?: This is the fic Hanna found -- the rare story told entirely in dialog (er, text messages).

Title: TBA
Author: blooms84
Pairing: Mycroft/Lestrade
Rating: Gen
Why should you bother?: Notebook!porn is all I'm sayin'.

Title: In which Anthea is helpful and Sherlock discovers the truth
Author: blooms84
Pairing: Mycroft/Lestrade
Rating: Gen
Why should you bother?: Part of the "Anthea Takes Control" series, which is enjoyable in its own right. I'm growing to enjoy the subgenre of "Sherlock reaction" fics that belong to the Mycroft/Lestrade fandom. Plus Anthea-is-a-ninja is always a joy to behold.

Title: Please Confirm You Are a Human Below
Author: mesmiranda
Pairing: Mycroft/Lestrade
Rating: PG
Why should you bother?: Mycroft courts Lestrade by taking control of various technological interfaces and also competes for attention from the DI with Lestrade's cat.

via

Title: and stand there at the edge of my affection
Author: coloredink
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: Gen
Why should you bother?: Sherlock thinks asking John to help him write a love letter is the logical solution.

Title: Pieces of Eight
Author: sheffiesharpe
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Rating: Explicit
Why should you bother?: Sherlock doesn't understand why John enjoys re-reading Treasure Island and tries to get John to explain. Things take a turn for the decidedly-less-literary. It's still bibliophile porn, though.

via

Title: Doing Things the Old Fashioned Way
Author: Sarren
Pairing: Lewis/Hathaway
Rating: Mature
Why should you bother?: Hathaway helps Lewis set up an online dating profile which leads to questions of sexual orientation and, well, other things. "Well, I guess they could fill out two profiles," Hathaway said, his voice oddly neutral. "Is that what they want me to do for them?"

Title: Punctuation Series
Author: dogpoet
Pairing: Lewis/Hathaway
Rating: Gen, Explicit (six parts)
Why should you bother?: The summary for the first fic reads, "He’d never even noticed apostrophes before he met Hathaway."

via

Title: Texts From Last Night: A Ridiculous SPN Text Comedy
Author: Xela
Pairing: Dean/Cas
Rating: Mature
Why should you bother?: A series of drunk texts from Dean leads Sam on a morning-after hunt for his brother and Castiel ...

Title: Comment Fics: "Untitled Dean/Cas" and "Wrong Number"
Author: twfftw
Pairing: Dean/Castiel
Rating: PG-13
Why should you bother?: twfftw's fics are hilarious, usually Dean/Castiel relationship fics from the point of view of a long-suffering Sam. In "Untitled Dean/Cas" Sam and Gabriel text back and forth about how clueless Dean and Cas are about their desire for one another. In "Wrong Number," Dean sends a text to Sam that seems meant for someone else ...

Title: Things Dean Winchester Loves
Author: everysecondtuesday
Pairing: Dean/Castiel
Rating: R
What should you bother?: Because of Castiel's indecision re: whether Dean loves the Impala or pie more, and how Dean answers the question when he finally finds the list and adds his own commentary.

Title: Four Things Not to Do With a Cell Phone
Author: the_trepverter
Pairing: Dean/Castiel
Rating: PG
Why should you bother?: "Technology is so very frustrating to Cas."

Title: Bible Study
Author: Misachan
Pairing: Dean/Castiel
Rating: Explicit
Why should you bother?: Um ... it's Castiel seducing Dean over the phone using the Song of Songs. What's not to like?

Title: The (Mostly) Accidental Courtship of Dean Winchester
Author: everysecondtuesday
Pairing: Dean/Castiel
Rating: R
Why should you bother?: Okay, so I cheated a little with this one in that it's not exactly text-based communication. But Cas tries to communicate with Dean via translating angel texts for him. It's not his fault that Dean doesn't get the hint, is it?

via

Title: Paper Monsters [work-in-progress]
Author: Clocks
Pairing: Charles Xavier/Erik Lehnsherr
Rating: Explicit
Why should you bother?: Because Charles gets fucked in the library up against the selected works of H.P. Lovecraft.

Title: Perfection
Author: orange-crushed
Pairing: Charles Xavier/Erik Lehnsherr
Rating: PG
Why should you bother?: When Erik struggles with nightmares, Charles reads him Origin of Species to soothe the night terrors away.

there is no femslash on this list (argh!)
but I promise to write some about these two soon!

And if fic is your thing, a reminder that Hanna and I -- along with our other fic-loving friends -- have our fanfic tumblr everything is gay and nothing hurts up and running. This week's theme was kittens! So if you want regular fanfic recommendations, please stroll on over and join the party.

our bodies, ourselves @ forty (+ me!)

2011-10-05T07:54:00.000-03:00

(photo by Hanna)

The feminist classic, Our Bodies, Ourselves, turns forty this year and has just been issued in a revised edition that was multiple years in the making. How do I know this? Because I got to be a part of the process! Long-time readers might remember when I posted a call for participants in the revision process back in January 2010. Well, in addition to broadcasting the call I also submitted my own name to the editors and was invited to join them in a virtual focus group discussion on intimate relationships. This conversation eventually turned into the "Relationships" chapter in the new edition, and many of the passages that didn't make it into that chapter have been used in other sections -- I found bits and pieces from my contributions in the chapters on sexual orientation and on sexuality, for example.*

my contributor's copy, signed by the editorial team!
(photo by Hanna)

I don't think I can adequately convey to you how proud I am to be a part of the OBOS project. My mother's battered copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves was my constant companion through adolescence and, among other things, was my first exposure to explicitly feminist analysis, my first exposure to the idea of same-sex relationships, and my introduction to masturbation and how to do it. One of the first things I did when I moved out to Boston in 2007 was to visit the Schlesinger library at Radcliffe and browse the records of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective -- the group that put together the first mimeographed edition of OBOS back in 1970. It's an incredible honor to have had the opportunity to add my perspective to the myriad other voices that have been part of this international endeavor throughout the past forty years.

It's so strange to see your own words on the printed page...

This past Saturday, women from around the globe gathered here at Boston University for a symposium in honor of the new edition. I wasn't able to make the gathering because of a scheduling conflict (and, frankly, because it sounded like a long day with too many new people to make small talk with!) ... but I'm looking forward to checking out the web video of the talks once those go up online. If/when they become available, I'll be sure to post a link here!

Here's hoping that OBOS (and I!) will be around in another forty years to celebrate eighty incredible years of women teaching and learning one another about their bodies, their sexuality, their relationships, their value, and their lives.

Update: Thanks to OBOS for mentioning this post in their introduction to the Relationships chapter online! Welcome to anyone who's come to visit the feminist librarian via their link. You are most welcome.

*It's standard OBOS practice to keep all of the in-text quotations anonymous in order to protect contributors' privacy. For the "Relationships" chapter we all chose pseudonyms; if you know me and you care to figure it out you'll be able to identify me through my bio at the beginning of the chapter.

from the neighborhood: shirley moves to maine

2011-10-03T06:13:00.000-03:00

This passed Saturday, Hanna and I drove up to the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens to visit with her mom and dad. Linda was exhibiting at the Maine Fiber Arts Showcase. It was a rainy afternoon, but luckily the fiber arts event was inside the visitor's center.

As usually happens when we visit with Hanna's parents, we drove north with things to give/return to them and they met us with more things for us to take south again ... a new sweater for Hanna, the tam that Linda knit me for Christmas and finally blocked, and what Hanna has termed "the rudest thing ever":

Kevin with the rude squash (photo by Linda)

In exchange, we finally allowed Shirley -- the stuffed sheep from Michigan that we gave Linda for her birthday in July -- to move to her forever home in Maine.

Shirley and Linda at Linda's display booth (photo by Anna)

The garden is impressive in size and scope, although we didn't get a chance to see much of it in the rain. One section is the fairy house village. I think this is where these magical creations were headed:

fairy houses in the garden library (photo by Anna)

a fairy castle? tree house? (photo by Anna)

Shirley got a bit chilled (photo by Anna)

When we got home, Geraldine was pissy because we had left her alone all Saturday -- but she was somewhat mollified by the four new rag rugs we brought home, courtesy of Linda. Rag rugs are clearly for kitties to sleep on, not for humans to place their feet.

enigmatic cat is enigmatic (photo by Hanna)

Cross-posted at ...fly over me, evil angel....

harpy fortnight: not-back-to-school edition

2011-10-02T00:39:00.000-03:00

steampunk wings by lachwen

Anyone else psyched it's October? Autumn leaves! Apple sauce! Hot cocoa! Acorn squash!

*cough*cough*

In any event, here's what we were up to during September over at The Pursuit of Harpyness.

I continued my series on Jessica Yee's Feminism For Real which several folks have encouragingly told me is thought-provoking and useful to them. This month we covered:

2011-09-06: So What if We Didn't Call it "Feminism"?!
2011-09-15: Two Poems by D. Cole Ossandon
2011-09-20: Fuck the Glass Ceiling!
2011-09-27: Feminism and Eating Disorders

I also wrote, as usual, on other related and not-so-related topics:

2011-09-08: Help Me Harpies! Alternative Living in the City
2011-09-13: Reader's Choice: Ms. Magazine's Best Feminist Nonfiction
2011-09-14: Quick Hit: Yes to Gay YA
2011-09-22: Quick Hit: Julia Serano Blogging Again!
2011-09-29: What's Missing From Sex Education?

Other Harpies have written about the abortion story arc in Grey's Anatomy, the anxieties of self-promotion (or self-advocacy), reflections on the Racialicious roundtables on interracial dating, and an ode to a CEO who understands the delicate balancing act of work and family life.

As always, hop on over to Harpyness to join us in the conversation(s).

booknotes: premarital sex in america

2011-09-30T08:31:00.000-03:00

It's not that I had terribly high expectations for a book titled Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think About Marrying (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Because seriously: "premarital"? Particularly when the authors -- sociologists Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker -- acknowledge in their introduction that by "premarital sex" they actually mean sexual activities undertaken by an "emerging adult" (ages 18-23) who is not married, and that by "young Americans" they actually mean people who are cisgendered and straight. In other words, the very framing of this book-length study by the title alone suggest that what readers will get is a familiar story re-packaged as a ground-breaking assessment of how "contemporary shifts in [sexual] market forces ... have dramatically altered how [heterosexual] relationships are conducted" (as the jacket copy claims). As I said: not that I had terribly high expectations going in.

The thing is, this book could have been a successful and insightful analysis of 18-to-23-year-old heterosexual attractions, identities, and practices. With a mixture of quantitative and qualitative analysis (national data collection and 40 in-depth interviews), the authors could have offered new ways of understanding heterosexual sexual practices in young adulthood. They could of provided us with an in-depth exploration of the individual and cultural values, social pressures, and practical concerns that lead to those practices. They could have taken the opportunity to counter moral panic about changing sexual mores with data that show, for example, that college sexual cultures are much more relationship-based than a freewheeling marketplace of hook-ups. In fact, occasionally, Premarital Sex in America seems poised to take on this role of reality-check for media moralizing: marriage doesn't mean the end of one's sexual happiness (p. 174: "marriage tends to be good for emotional intimacy as well as sexual intimacy") and the so-called hook-up culture (p. 106: "casual sex from hook-ups is rare by comparison, suggesting that popular perceptions of the depravity of the 'hook-up culture' may be somewhat overstated"). So despite initial trepidation, I was ready to give this book a reasonable change to prove my pre-conceptions wrong.

The problem can be boiled down to two systemic (and, I would argue, inter-related) issues. First, the persistence of the authors in leaning heavily on unexamined assumptions about what is "just a fact" or "inescapable" (they actually use both on p. 22) as well as the use of terms without specific definition -- they never indicate, for example, how they determined the sexual orientation of their interviewees (identity? practice? desires?), and later in the book divide respondents into "reds"/conservatives and "blues"/liberals without detailing the criteria by which they sorted these groups (political affiliation? beliefs about sex? upbringing? religious practices?). They "explain" many of the assumptions I found problematic by relying heavily on shakey theories of innate gender difference (see here, here, here, and here) and the perennially popular theory of "sexual economics" in which men are the lustful consumers of sex which women "sell" for relationships.

I obviously don't have any first-hand experience in this heterosexual "marketplace" in which we ladies are selling the sex we don't want for the emotional intimacy men reluctantly give in exchange for booty ... but can I just say, on behalf of the many women and men I know who swing that way: EW. Not only is this theory an impoverished way of thinking about human sexuality, it has absolutely no explanatory power for peoples' motivations to get into sexual relationships. Because if dudes are all about getting it off, hello: you have two hands and lots of (supposedly equally horny) fellow dudes who could help you out. If sex is just sex and the relational context in which it happens is meaningless, then what benefit would men have in seeking out women to be sexually intimate with? Zilch. The authors of this book actually say this at one point, when discussing pornography: "If porn-and-masturbation increasingly satisfies some of the male demand for intercourse, it reduces the value of intercourse, access to which women control" (246). You can only capture and keep a man by bartering sex in exchange for intimacy -- if your fella has access to sex all on his ownsome, then tough. In turn, if women aren't that into sex and want emotional intimacy -- why bother with the work of selling sex in exchange for (presumably reluctantly-expressed or faux) emotional intimacy or relational stability when you could meet your emotional needs elsewhere -- say with family members or close friends? -- and avoid the trouble of putting out?

So basically, you could bother to describe heterosexual interactions in terms of economic transactions, but it's not going to help you explain why men and women continue to seek each other out for long-term intimate relationships. In fact, the theory of sexual economy these authors put forward argues against hetero sex being at all rational as a way of meeting our emotional and physical needs -- unless you happen to want to procreate (something they barely touch on within the text). It's irritating and unsatisfying and, aside from everything else, makes me wonder why anyone who believes hetero sex works like this enjoys being heterosexual.

I'd point out that another gaping hole in the theory of sexual economics these authors put forward is that they argue it's just the way humanity operates ... except they fail to take into account queer folks relationships, which are also part of humanity and are an interesting control group for the power of their pet theory. For example: if women barter sex for relational intimacy, then what happens when two women are in a relationship? Why hello, "lesbian bed death" the theory that will never die! Except ... plenty of women in same-sex relationships are getting it on together ... are we selling each other sex (that we don't want) in exchange for emotional intimacy (that we already have?). You can see how it starts to get ridiculous damn fast.

Obviously, once someone's overall framework for analysis fails to impress, the little shit begins to grate on one's nerves. So for the sake of relieving my spleen I'm going to bullet-point the smaller issues I had with how the data was presented and analyzed:

The use of "virgin" to mean "person who hasn't had vaginal intercourse." First, I'm skeptical that all of the studies from which the authors drew data defined "virgin" in exactly this way, and second ... really book? really? We're going to reinforce the idea that sex = tab A into slot B one more frickin' time? Particularly when in the same breath, practically, you go on to talk about "virgins" who've engaged in oral and anal sex?
Lack of transparency in data. So I realize I'm hypercritical of data because, well, I'm suspicious and I've been trained by good friends and colleagues that way. But when you start telling me things like what the average number of sexual partners for X group over X period of years is ... and then tell me you're relying on self-reporting ... I'm tempted to throw out the data. Unless you're going to tell me how you asked study participants to define "sex" and "partner" and whether you asked them to keep track over a period of months or years, or whether this was data based on recollection, etc.
Describing people as "attractive" without qualification. Especially when you're two men describing your college-age study participants as "attractive 20-year-old women." Just: EW. But beyond that, the assumption that attractiveness is some sort of objective, measurable quality and that it exists on a static scale rather than being deeply subjective and situational.
Suggesting sexual "mystery" is better than reality in relationships. Again, a symptom of seeing sex as transactional: men, it seems, are most interested in sex they think they desire but must pursue. So the "easier" women are to fuck, the quicker the relationship is to "age" and grow stale. Additional negative points for working in sentences like: "It's a classic tale that characterizes billions of sexual relationships in human history" (80). Naturalizing something by making it seem historically inevitable = no cookies for you!
Failing to define "pornography." Yeah, it becomes clear that they (like so many other critics) mean commercially-produced videos and photographs. But that's no excuse for laziness in reporting. Since they seem to have assumed everyone was on the same page about what pornography was, they accepted the reporting on their interviewees concerning the effect "porn" had on their relationships and sexual desires. A much more interesting conversation could have been had if they had probed a little more deeply into their subjects engagement with erotic materials on a broader scale (I bet at least some of the young women they interviewed are writers and readers of slash fan-fiction, for example). Instead, we just got the tired scare story about how mainstream video pornography is creating unrealistic expectations in men concerning women's bodies and sexuality.
Failing to delve beyond the most obvious analysis of their data. This happens repeatedly, so I'm just going to give one example. In a section on negotiating unwanted sexual practices, the authors report that the top "unwanted sexual request made by men of women is for anal sex" (the top unwanted request by women of men is for cunnilingus). It becomes clear that what they mean is men are requesting penis-in-anus sex, though they don't articulate this. No mention is made whether they asked the men (or women) about penetrative anal sex to stimulate the prostate, which is something I don't think they count as "sex" because they suggest that "there is no biological basis for preferring anal sex to vaginal sex" ... a statement that would only make sense if they were thinking about stimulation of a penis. They go on to argue that men are only asking to perform anal sex because they've learned it's part of the sexual script from watching pornographic films. They also accept without further analysis women's self-reporting that they just don't like anal sex, full stop, without exploring in what contexts it was tried (i.e. did the partners have lube? did they prep adequately? was there coercion? did they try a second time, with better results?). Precision counts people!
"Intercourse is more satisfying than masturbation" (157). Written in a section headed "Semen: An Antidepressant?" So ... yeah. I just want to point out -- AGAIN -- that reducing sex to penis-in-vagina intercourse is a big problem in this book. I also think there is something deeply troubling about the idea that solitary sexual activity is and unsatisfactory substitute for relational sex. Not because it isn't for many people (though I'm going to go out on a limb and say that for some it likely is) but because masturbation isn't a substitute activity. It's a parallel or complementary sexual activity. We do it, and enjoy it. We get different things out of it than we get out of partnered sex. Many women in The Hite Report and Our Bodies, Ourselves, among other texts, report very distinct types of orgasms (both pleasurable) from self-stimulation and partnered stimulation.
Characterizing a relationship that ends as a relationship that "failed." Relationships can be formed for many reasons, and as long as they were mutually-satisfying for all the people involved for the duration of the relationship, there's no reason why the fact the relationship ended means the relationship failed. It's true that many relationships do come to an end because one member or both stops being satisfied. But "end" doesn't automatically mean "fail."
Emotional health is a woman thing. Again: seriously? Yeah ... they're serious. Not only do they bring up the correlation between abortion and depression (without clarifying it's a correlation and not necessarily causation), as well as a throw-away mention of the correlation between same-sex activity and poor mental health outcomes, but they out-and-out argue that women's emotional health is the only story that matters: "the central story about sex and emotional health is how powerful the empirical association is for women--and how weak it is among men" (138). They explain this using the theory of "natural" gender differences which, since the data to support this theory is shite, isn't really an explanation at all.

By way of a conclusion, Renerus and Uecker offer to dispel "ten myths about sex and relationships" for which the evidence "just isn't there" (242). Some of these are fairly value-neutral -- for example the first one is the myth that "long-term exclusivity is a fiction," when in fact only about 12-13% of American adults followed in a longitudinal study reported cheating on their partners. But others are off-the-wall wacky, such as the assertion that "to call the sexual double standard wrong is a little like asserting that rainy days are wrong" (243), or their suggestion that women control men's sexual impulses by playing hard to get: "If the average price for sex should rise, men's sexual behavior could become subject to more constraints" (245). Their sexual economics lens for viewing human relationships, oddly enough, leads them to espouse a deeply conservative and moralizing tone when it comes to suggesting how we can effect change in sexual interactions.

Finally, as I argued above, the theory of a (hetero)sexual economy that pervades the analysis in this book is deceptively simplistic in its power to "explain" human interactions. Instead, it could more aptly be understood as a compelling set of metaphors for a specific type of sexual scene -- say a fraternity party or a singles bar. Because, as reviewer Evan Hughes notes, "shaky when you examine it closely, the sexual economics theory in its broad outline seems almost trivially true: it describes what we know but does little to explain what we do not understand." Because the economy is so compelling as a metaphor (at least to Regnerus and Uecker), they fail to ask any new questions of their material, instead regurgitating outdated gender stereotypes in place of fresh insight.

Cross-posted at The Pursuit of Harpyness.

30 @ 30: reading [#10]

2011-09-28T07:27:00.000-03:00

I was going to follow up last week's "work and vocation" post with a "work and money" post ... because I feel like I still have some things to say about work and class-based experiences of work and vocation, and what it means to have income and economic agency ... but all that's going to take a bit more brainpower to formulate than I have at the minute. So we're taking a time-out this week with a lighter topic: reading!

It probably hasn't escaped you that I'm fond of reading. What with being a librarian and all. Reading, even more than writing, is probably in my blood given that I'm the daughter of two English majors and grew up in a home that -- I'm speaking literally here -- had books in every room.

But what I've read has, for obvious and not-so-obvious reasons, changed over the years. The part of me that's prone to list-making and historical chronicaling (in my parents' attic, I have lists of "books read" stretching back into my early adolescence) enjoys taking note of trends over time and speculating about what this means about the sort of person I currently am, used to be, and will become.

books read so far in 2011 (goodreads)

This year, for example -- as evidenced by my GoodReads list, at right -- I've been reading a lot of nonfiction in the areas of history, sexuality, and politics (big surprise, I know). The two years before that, unsurprisingly, were even heavier in history given all the background research I was doing for my thesis. Still, I read lots more non-fiction these days, even sans graduate school, then I did as a child and into my teens. Oh, I still read fiction -- mostly genre stuff (fantasy, science fiction, mystery) and fan fiction, truth be told -- but to be honest? I never made the leap from middle grade/young adult fiction to adult literature.

Like, okay, yes. I can get sucked into a modern novel but it usually has to have some sort of supernatural or historical element -- if you can squeeze in some of both, I'm totally there. Think Camille DeAngelis' Mary, Modern, a modern-day Frankenstein in which a geneticist clones her grandmother in the basement and it all goes wrong. Or Martin Cruz Smith's Rose, a historical novel/mystery/romance in which an American explorer down on his luck gets hired to investigate the disappearance of a vicar in Wigan, Yorkshire. Or Audrey Niffenegger's now-famous The Time-Traveler's Wife, which not only involved time travel by the landscape of my childhood -- how could I escape getting sucked into that? And well-written sexytimes will never go amiss.

I'd say, on the whole, that these recent titles are a fairly accurate representation of the type books that I read these days:

last fifteen titles read (goodreads)

I actually learned to read "late," according to a lot of school-based expectations. I was about six years old, between six and seven. I wasn't much into practicing at reading (practicing at anything, really) and found
those beginning-to-read books mostly boring, unless I happened to like them for the story rather than the repetitive words. I must have been rehearsing on some level, though, because what I remember is the day I pulled The Best Christmas Pageant Ever off the shelf and discovered the words on the page made sense.

That obviously wasn't the beginning of my love affair with reading, given that my parents read to us regularly and continued to do so long after we could read for ourselves -- family bedtime stories didn't stop until I was into my teens. But being able to read on my own meant more books. I used to go to the library, check out a stack of novels -- I'm talking 10, 12, 15 books at a time -- and read through them in an afternoon.

Ah, happy memories.

I have to say being able to read like that was a big incentive not to go to school, like, ever. Because going to school would have meant not being able to spend the day reading. And seriously: who would want that sort of fate!

Of course, as a college student and graduate student reading (and writing) were a major part of what I did, what I was expected to do, in school -- so the conflict sort of faded away. Though there were always types of reading that waxed and waned during term-time. New fiction, for example, rarely got a look-in while my stand-by favorites became battered from the constant emergency comfort reading.

I was introduced to the world of advance review copies as a teenager when I worked at a children's bookstore. We used to circulate the ARCs among the staff and eventually got to take them home once they'd outlived their usefulness. Again at Barnes & Noble free pre-pub copies were a regular and delicious perk of being on staff. I love the element of surprise in advance review copies: they're unknown quantities, particularly if by unknown authors, which hold the promise of being brilliant gems as well as dreadful mistakes.

One of the best things about being a librarian (and, really, a blogger) is that they give you books for free. In the past five years I've been offered advance copies and electronic galleys of really interesting stuff that I might otherwise never have read -- in part because I offer to review stuff on the internets, and in part because I am a librarian which is a professional credential that opens doors.

It's like crack for bibliophiles: come work for us and we will give you free books to read!

Um, sure! Where do I sign!

Georges Island (Boston Harbor), 2007

When I learned to read, reading was still something you did offline. In that, there actually wasn't an online -- or at least, not an online for people like me (and probably you). I didn't have a personal email address until ... 1997ish? College. I was in college before the internet was a reality in my life. Which I'm sure to some of you makes me seem like an infant just out of diapers and to some of you makes me seem ancient.

Anyways. The point being, this reading-shit-online is still a new development for me. I'm still getting used to counting the reading I do online as reading, in fact, despite the reality that maybe 50% at least of the reading I do during the course of any day is now online or in electronic form: e-books, PDFs, etc. We pre-'net generation types are used to thinking about reading in terms of books finished, or pages read. According to GoodReads I've read (for example) 59 books and 16,710 pages so far this year. But that doesn't include all the fan fiction I read, or the blog posts I take in, or the journal articles I read for work and pleasure.

I downloaded a PDF file of one of my favorite fan works a few weeks ago and the PDF was over 200 pages long. That's a respectable novella-length story. Just sayin'.

For those of us interested in chronicling our reading habits, how do we document that sort of thing? How do we leave a record of online materials read and digested -- how do we leave traces of our textual influences? It's an ongoing question.

Hanna and I argue about whether things like fan fiction actually "count" as "reading" (of the legitimate vs. non-legitimate variety). If you read this blog regularly you probably know where I come down on the issue of categorizing things as "legit" or not. It's a friendly debate (although she absolutely draws the line at audiofic, since apparently fic-on-tape is the final straw!) and an apparently insoluable one, for now.

I'm not sure if all this online reading has altered the way I read. I find it more difficult to get lost in a book these days -- the sort of uninterrupted reading sessions I had as a child and adolescent which involved resurfacing at 3am bleary-eyed and a little bit nauseated from the virtigo. I remember distinctly half a dozen specific books over which I made the concious decision to read until they were finished, even if it meant falling asleep at 5am. Because the story simply couldn't wait.

I don't do that so much anymore, but I don't know how much of that is the (supposedly) shortened attention span created by extensive internet connectivity and how much is the training I had as a college student -- that dual-consciousness of both reading a book and analyzing it. It's hard for me to turn that part of my brain off now, even when I'm reading a ripping yarn. I don't think it necessarily detracts from the experience of the story, though it does mean I need to be sure to keep multiple books on hand for when distraction rears its head and I need to switch genres for a bit.

All things considered, I'm more inclined to blame it on school and work (both of which demand constantly-divided attention) than the medium of the internet per se. If blame even needs to be considered as an option, seeing as I'm still reading and enjoying it -- which frankly is all that matters to me.

four years ago today: "I'm gloating to you because I wouldn't gloat to anyone else."

2011-09-26T07:46:00.000-03:00

From: Anna
To: Janet, Mark
Date: Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 11:43 PM
Subject: Welcome home!

Hi Mom and Dad,

Well, I'm hoping that you're both so preoccupied with besting each other at cribbage that you won't bother to check email until you get home [from vacation] this weekend. I'm trusting that Brian and Toby [the cat] didn't murder one another in your absence . . .

Whew, it's hot and humid here! We are having Indian Summer with a vengeance and the dorms are insufferable. I still haven't caved and bought a fan, which means I get by with cold showers and sleeping naked on top of the sheets. It's working in the short term, but if this lasts through the weekend, money may have to be found, regardless of future job prospects, for a small fan.

I had my first [Department of Conservation and Recreation] internship session today . . . what fun! B, my supervisor, is a Simmons grad whose specialty is digitization of visual records (photos, art, etc.). Until last year, she worked at Harvard on a number of different projects. Now she's the plans archivist for the DCR's Office of Cultural Resources (or OCR, god do people love their acronyms!). They have a giant basement with all those cabinets with the big file drawers for maps and plans. I'm working with a subset of the collection of land plans that the DCR inherited from one of its predecessor departments, the Municipal Parks Commission (you guessed it: MPC). I am starting with the earliest plans, which date back into the 1890s, and many of which come from the Olmsted firm. The plans are deteriorating and Judy would like to apply for a grant to have conservation work done on them -- which can cost as much as $500/sheet. Like buying reproduction wallpaper for the Cappon House. So my job is to organize the plans and enter data on each plan into an Excel file (which I will design as I go along) that will serve as an index of what they have for people who need to use the information currently, as well as provide information for writing the grant proposal.

MPC plan detail (Sept 2007)

The maps are very cool! And it's easy to get sucked into wanted to know the whole story about them. Already, I'm thinking about side-research projects into the history of public parkland, landscape architecture, not to mention the history of the maps themselves and the conventions they follow. The little directional markers alone are beautiful. (I will try to stay in everyone's good graces so that, when you guys come out here, Dad, I can take you down for a private tour! Provided you don't need a homeland security background check :) . . .)

section of the Charles River Reservation plans (Sept 2007)

I helped lead discussion on postmodernism and history today. I felt it went so-so, though Laura (prof) was encouraging overall. People struggled with the readings. But we did manage to have a discussion, so that in itself felt like a success :). I got my second response paper back (with my second "check-plus," which is the highest of her pass-fail marks) . . . I'm gloating to you because I wouldn't gloat to anyone else: she made it a point to say in class that she's being stingy with the marks because it's her job to teach us something in the class, and we have to start somewhere . . . so that if we found ourselves in possession of one of the few check-plusses she handed out, we have something to feel proud about. (A +! +! +! +! . . .) She put it nicer than I just did, but you get the point. I had to be careful not to laugh. Seriously, though, she wrote "absolutely elegant -- you express your sophisticated level of thinking beautifully." Aww . . . crush just got a little bigger :).

I'm gingerly making inroads on the friendship front with several colleagues in that class. Lola (not to be confused with Laura the prof) was my discussion co-leader and we had a lively meeting Monday night to come up with our questions. She's a graduate of Smith College, in history, worked as the curator of a small house museum for several years, is now back in school. Her adviser at Smith was Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz who is like my women's history idol . . . one of the people who I was soooo disappointed doesn't teach at a graduate institution. I very immodestly squealed (yes, I did: "Ohmigod! You had Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz as your thesis advisor???!!!") when she mentioned it in passing. And I'm persisting in making contact with G, although I'm not exactly sure what footing the friendship will take at this point (still trying to figure out: interested in guys? girls? both? neither?). He's got a cultural studies/gender studies background and is really interested in themes of resistance and social change. I sent him a rather long email this evening continuing our classroom conversation of this afternoon, and fingers crossed it won't scare him away!

I also have a group of students that I'm doing a hands-on archive project with in Archives class (we take a practice collection and have to "arrange and describe" it, and produce a "finding aid," which is like a detailed catalog entry -- as I explained to one girl, think of it as the cross between a card catalog record and an index or detailed table of contents - -that researchers use to figure out what an archives holdings are and whether they would be useful). I think it's going to be a fun project -- we're organizing the papers of a woman who was in the army as a dietitian during WWII and an alum of Simmons.

I started preliminary research on my chosen topic for my archives paper, a short paper due in late October about an issue in archival theory/practice. I chose the interaction between feminist theory/methods and archival practice. I went to the librarian and she was very nice but suggested I had picked perhaps too narrow a topic, on which there really wasn't anything written yet. I said, "Well, I guess I've found my niche and it's not even the end of my first month here!" Unfortunately, I won't be able to, you know, write a body of theory and publish it in peer-reviewed journals in time to write a paper for class in which I referred to my own scholarly research :). So I am left piecing together stuff in innovative ways (what's new?) . . . N (librarian) was a little bit nudging me to consider re-orienting my topic slightly, but I wasn't giving in. I mean, it's only a 5-7 page paper for gods' sake, I think I can manage to write a literature review of what's out there in that length of text without exhausting my argument.

For my history paper (roughly the same size), I'm supposed to take a primary document to analyze; I chose something from the Oneida Community which touches on gender and education and communitarian values . . . so there's plenty to sink my teeth into. I was tempted by a more contemporary memoir on 1980s feminism that I stumbled into on one of the databases, but it felt a little like cheating (too recent) so I let it pass.

[You can read the paper that resulted here at Simmons' Essays and Studies literary journal]

I did, however, sign up for a series of lectures/discussions hosted by the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Schlesinger Library called the Boston Series on Women and Gender in History: four times over the semester they get together and discuss a paper (as yet unpublished) with the author and a "commentator" over dinner. $20 for the whole series! It would have been obscene to pass it up, especially since the topics are all awesome. Unfortunately, the first two conflict with my History class, but I'm going to try and squirm out of one class, since the topic is gender in the Vietnam era and I just can't miss it.

view from Spectacle Island (Sept 2007)

Well, I really ought to get to bed. Early day at work tomorrow . . . and then a packed weekend of reading, so that I can frivol on Sunday -- fingers crossed I have time to visit the Harbor Islands, and then I'm, watching The History Boys over a bottle of wine with Hanna [yes, this was more me-style flirtation] -- and then my [job] interview with the MHS on Monday! Send lots and lots of good karma waves in my direction. Natalie [a friend and former MHS research fellow] is in town and she is going to put in a good word as well (she assures me this is kosher).

Lots of love . . .
Anna

wee ones ftw [two articles]

2011-09-23T05:47:00.000-03:00

via

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.