baby steps by my alma mater

I've been critical of my alma mater, Hope College, here on this blog in the past -- particularly when it comes to the institutional refusal to affirm the queer faculty and students on its campus. I stand firm on my pledge not to support the college financially until such time as its anti-gay policy changes.

However, I do also believe in giving shout-outs to those at the college who aren't letting the official policy stand in the way of affirming the humanity and equality of those of us in the Hope College diaspora who happen to be queer.

In that spirit ...

When Hanna and I sent out our wedding announcements in late September, I sent one to the Hope College alumni office; friends and family members were betting on whether or not the announcement would run in the alumni magazine's list of news from graduates (births, deaths, marriages, advanced degrees, and so forth) that fill the back of each issue.

They had about even odds for and against running the notice at all.

But I got the latest issue of News From Hope College this weekend and there we were on page 27.

Of course, as there is a "Marriages" section of the News, the announcement would have more appropriately gone there since, you know, we got married.

But I imagine someone had to fight to put our "union" in the magazine at all, and I'm all for recognizing baby steps when they're taken in the right direction.

So thank you, Hope College alumni office -- you exceeded my fairly jaded expectations. You're not going to single-handedly woo me back into the fold, but I do appreciate the acknowledgement that Hope alumni are here (and queer) right in the pages of the News from Hope.

in which I write letters: dear alma mater ... again

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

4 September 2012 

Dear Ms. De Young,

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,

Anna

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

a few thoughts on my historically-specific perspective on getting married

Yesterday, I finished reading an advance review copy of Michael J. Klarman's From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage (forthcoming from Oxford University Press, Oct. 2012; review to come). A legal historian, Klarman explores the history of litigation and legislation around gay and lesbian marriage from the 1970s to the present. Reading his historical account prompted me to think about the historical context in which I came of age and into my sexuality and sexual relationship, and how this colors how I think about same-sex marriage particularly, and even more specifically how my historical context shape the decisions Hanna and I have made. Here are my thoughts, in roughly reverse chronological order.

1) I'll start with the fact that we can get legally married in the specific time (2012) and place (the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) in which we have come together. Massachusetts recognized in same-sex marriage as legal under the state constitution in 2004 (Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health) and our ability to become, legally, wife and wife, on the state level is normal here. While DOMA still prevents us from being recognized as married nationwide, we will be treated as spouses at the state level. If I hadn't moved to Massachusetts from Michigan, I would be unable to legally wed without traveling. And given that neither of us are involved in a religious community, we likely would not be planning a private (non-legally-binding) commitment ceremony.

2) I've experienced nothing but welcoming acceptance of my relationship with Hanna since we got together in the summer of 2009. The only direct bigotry I've encountered has been online; I've been comfortable being open about my relationship at work, in public, on both sides of the family, in my home town, blogging, etc. I actually dealt with more directly-homophobic statements and actions before I was visibly queer (see below) than I have in the past three years. This is in part a matter of geography, in part a matter of the circles in which I've been moving, and in part a macro-level cultural sea-change in which anti-gay animus is becoming less acceptable by leaps and bounds, at least in the public square.

3) Marriage equality was part of what brought me to Massachusetts. One of my first memories of driving into Boston in the summer of 2006 -- when I interviewed at Simmons -- was getting turned around and ending up in Harvard Square across from Zero Church Street, where they had a huge banner across the front of the First Parish Church proclaiming support for marriage equality. Even though I understood my sexuality to be primarily hetero at the time, I immediately felt a sense of expansiveness -- the ability to be more at ease in the political climate here than I had felt back in Western Michigan where I was reminded daily that my views about human sexuality were at odds with the dominant culture.

lesbian recruitment party, summer 2005

4) I had long-term, same-sex relationships modeled for me. I had friends whose relatives were in same-sex relationships (some of whom had had commitment ceremonies, some who hadn't). Through my undergrad women's studies program (oh the irony) I was introduced to lesbians in committed partnerships and had a chance to think about what it would be like to build a life for myself with another woman. I am a person who experiences my sexuality in very contextual ways, and while I don't discount the notion that having been born in a different time or place I might have fallen in love with a woman without such models, the fact that I knew that lasting, committed same-sex relationships were a possibility by example helped open me to an awareness, a receptivity, that it could be possible for me as well.

5) In my early twenties, I wrote letters to the local newspaper speaking out on topics like abortion and gay rights. I always got incredibly bigoted responses in print (though my friends and relations were supportive). I remember particularly writing in as "a young straight woman" in defense of the summer gathering for gay and lesbian families that happens annually in the little town of Saugatuck twelve miles south of where I grew up (in the "reddest" county in the state of Michigan). In my letter I thanked the newspaper for doing a favorable piece on the camp and preemptively addressed the haters by pointing out that same-sex parents gave me hope for the future. Again, I think it's note-worthy that even in an incredibly conservative corner of the Midwest, I was participating as a presumptively straight person in normalizing queer families.

That is, I didn't think "gay" and imagine that being a lesbian would mean custody battles and depression and suicidal impulses. I thought it meant family camp and lesbian communes and sprawling poly households, not unlike the life I was already starting to envision wanting for myself, even if I thought my primary partner would likely be a man.

5) My best friend came out in 2001. I'd say this moment was the start of my serious self-education on issues of human sexuality and the history of homosexuality and the modern gay rights movement. I was twenty and while he wasn't the first queer person I knew personally, he was the first person I knew intimately and felt more for than a general political commitment in favor of equality. My sense of radical acceptance (borne out of innate stubbornness and feminist theology) and my life-long commitment to fairness had always drawn me toward LGBT rights -- but suddenly it was personal. And I discovered my ability to be fiercely political.

7) Because of the college where I went to undergrad, issues of sexuality and gender were deeply intertwined, and both were morally-fraught religious concerns. This deserves its own post (or several), but suffice to say that my introduction to feminist politics as a college student came in the form of a raging controversy my first year at Hope over what and how the chapel program was teaching students about human sexuality generally and homosexuality specifically. My women's studies faculty were committed Christians and vocal queer allies, and so my trial-by-fire education in organized protest was around these issues. I was able to think deeply about sexual morality, gender and sexual identity and expression, sexism, and homophobia in the midst of a group of LGBT-friendly Christian folk who helped me articulate passionate responses to the homophobia and hate we were experiencing in daily ways on campus.

In effect, I had a queer community around me long before I understood myself to be queer.

8) In the mid-90s, the AIDS quilt came to town. Its stop on national tour was organized, in part, by the gay deacon at my church. In appointing him to an ordained office, the church had broken with the denominational position (which remains in place today) that homosexuality is sinful. Twice during my adolescence, the church went through a contentious period of "dialogue" on the issue and members left the church in protest over the deacon's ordination. While I don't remember much about the AIDS epidemic, I do remember the viewing the quilt with my family and others from the church and city when the sections were on display at one of the area high schools. Rather than AIDS being interpreted to me as "the gay disease," it was simply a deadly illness, like cancer, that killed people and left behind grieving partners, parents, siblings, children.

9) Our Bodies, Ourselves (and feminism!) contextualized being in lesbian relationships as one life path for women to pursue, both sexually and in relationship with one another. In my adolescent reading about the 70s feminist movement, I encountered primary source documents about lesbian activism, lesbianism as a political decision, and same-sex relationships. While I wasn't politically active on these issues until college, these texts prepared the ground-work for understanding human sexuality more expansively, and lesbian relationships as a viable option, long before I was aware of resistance to homosexual identity and relationships in my community.

10) The earliest memory of I have concerning same-sex sexuality is at age eleven when two friends of mine, over for a sleepover, were giggling together over the word "gay" and I asked my mother what it meant when they refused to tell me. It was obvious from their behavior they thought the word was a naughty one (one girl was from a conservative Wesleyan household, the other a Mennonite). My mother's factual explanation (along the lines of "someone who falls in love with a person of the same sex") put gayness on the radar but confirmed that I need not be alarmed about it. Since there were lots of ways in which my family's values differed from those of our friends and neighbors, I assumed this was just one more thing to add to the list!

I'm sure there are other ways in which my life has shaped how I think about lesbian relationships, lesbian identity, and the viability of marriage as an option for Hanna and I. For starters, the fact that we've both remained unmarried until we were over thirty, and don't plan on having children are also deeply historically-contextual options/decisions. In the 1910s we might both have been college-educated library professionals in a "Boston marriage," but it would not have been legible to the world at large as a marriage.

We often think of ourselves as historical actors, with the ability to defy social norms and break new ground. And we are. But they manner in which we defy society, and the norms which we are countering, are historically dependent. And self-aware historians, such as myself and my beloved, are no more exempt than anyone else.

(As usual this "few thoughts" post became much longer than I envisioned it!)

"how women's studies mattered in my life": a panel discussion

via the Women's Studies Facebook Page

On 6 March I participated in a panel presentation/discussion at my alma mater Hope College in celebration of twenty-plus years of women's studies at the institution (the interdisciplinary minor was formally established in 1992; students had been forming "contract" majors and minors since the early 1980s).

I'm really hoping the college will make the panel discussion available via web video so I can share it with all of you, since the other panelists all had fascinating stories about their coming to feminism and its integration into their personal and professional lives. The questions from the audience were engaged and the panelists answers were diverse and thoughtful. I was honored to be a part of the evening.

At the beginning of the session, each panelist was asked to speak for about ten minutes on the topic "how women's studies mattered in my life." Here's what I had to say.

Tonight, I’d like to share some thoughts about three aspects of my life as a feminist, and how feminism and women’s studies have affected my life. The first is how feminist ideas and politics have brought to my personal relationships, the second is how I incorporate feminist thought and practice in my intellectual and professional life, and third, some thoughts about how I’ve grown as a feminist since graduation.

I’m sure most of the people in this room have a story to tell about their coming to feminist ideas and a sense of how those ideas could help them make sense of their own lives and the world around them. In my family growing up, feminist understandings of gender equality and individual self-determination were more or less taken for granted, and I felt an affinity with feminist activists in history for as long as I can remember. My sense of contemporary, feminist political awareness -- the realization that there is still feminist work to be done -- came gradually as I struggled during my childhood and adolescence against prejudiced notions of what children and young people are capable of. As I grew from being understood primarily as a child to being understood as a young woman, rigid conceptions of sex, sexuality, and gender came to the fore -- particularly in peer relationships and in church. I had support in my immediate family to push back against restrictive notions of gender and sexuality -- but it was feminism as a philosophical framework and as a community of practice that gave me the support outside my family to articulate and honor my own experiences and desires.

Since my teens, feminism (conceptually) and feminist spaces (materially) have been a space for me to break open ‘common sense’ definitions of love, relationships, human sexuality, and community. Feminism has connected me to global, trans-historical network of people who work not to pass judgment on relationship diversity. We’re all imperfect at this, it’s true, but at least within feminist spaces there is usually a common ground to talk about how monogamy and non-monogamy, parenting and not-parenting, queer and straight relationships, long-term and more casual sexual relationships, can all be ethical, meaningful, and healthy.

Feminist spaces encouraged me to ask “does it have to be this way?” over and over and over again. Even when I didn’t think I had the right to identify as queer (more on that in a minute),  my ties to feminist and queer thinkers and activists became a way for me to explore the possibility of sexual intimacy and family formation in ways that didn’t make me feel claustrophobic or filled with rage. That instead filled me with hope and desire, with expansive generosity, with the sense that there was enough creativity in the world to ensure that everyone’s relational needs could be met -- and exceeded.

Feminism encourages me to take ownership of my sexuality and learn how to take pleasure in my body in a culture that is hostile to our embodiment. Being a self-identified feminist is obviously not an instant cure for body insecurity, for fear of being the wrong size, the wrong shape, the wrong kind of beautiful. But in my experience, a feminist analysis of our culture’s narrow expectations of beauty, sexuality, and health give me an edge in asserting my right to be at home in my physical self. My knowledge and confidence about my body, and the pleasure I can experience as an embodied person, has been hard-won in a lot of ways. And wouldn’t have been as possible, or as rich a journey, without feminism in my life.

My feminism, at Hope College, wove back and forth across the boundaries of personal and academic life. On the one hand, feminist analysis was a way for me to understand the political upheaval around religion and sexuality I experienced here at Hope (in the late 90s). I was politically queer long before I was sexually active, in a same-sex relationship, or had to grapple with how to label myself in a world that demands sexual identification. By the time I entered into my first relationship -- with a lover who happened to be a woman -- I had a rich history of engagement with feminist and queer literature, political activism, and support networks to draw upon. That history made transition from thinking of myself as “mostly straight” to thinking of myself as someone who was in a lesbian relationship remarkably easy. And I owe the Women’s Studies program at Hope for at least some of that.

In an academic and professional sense, the exploration of gender and sexuality in historical context is at the heart of what I do as an historian. The Women’s Studies program here at Hope was my entre into thinking about women’s human rights as they are connected to broader socio-political struggles against racism, homophobia, economic inequality. Academic feminism is often criticized for being abstract, privileged, and out of touch with the urgent political engagement needed in “real” peoples lives. And I think that’s a critique worth listening to (if you haven’t already, check out the anthology Feminism For Real edited by Jessica Yee). But in my life, college classrooms became one of the places where I wrestled with notions of privilege and with the complicated histories of oppression. And in part because of that, my scholarship will never be entirely divorced from my political or personal selves.

It was through the Women’s Studies program that I became involved in my first full-scale oral history research project, published and presented original research, and began my research on the history of mid-twentieth-century countercultures -- an interest I carried with me into graduate school an pursued for my Master’s thesis. While my work as a reference librarian isn’t explicitly related to feminism, gender and sexuality, or social justice issues, I went into library science because I see facilitating equitable access to information as a feminist activity. I get asked a lot whether my “dream job” would be to work at a library with collections more in my field of interest -- but I actually prefer (perhaps because of my experience as a liberal growing up in West Michigan?) to work in spaces where feminist-oriented research remains, to some extent, counter-cultural, an exercise in reading against the grain of our collection strengths and thinking about how to come at things slant-wise. To find evidence of gender and the erotic in unexpected places. My years at Hope College taught me that radical ideas and non-normative experiences can be found virtually everywhere.

Political activism in the classic sense isn’t my day job -- and that’s okay with me. Post college, the space for feminist thought, discussion, and networking that’s worked best for me has been the virtual world of Internet. Blogging provides me a way to interact with others over issues of gender, sexuality, and social justice in a way that help me avoid burn-out. If I’m having a shitty week, or I’m busy at work, or I can feel myself getting wound up over a really emotionally-fraught issue, I can walk away and engage in self-care -- calm down, re-group, and re-engage. On my own blog, I write as much as I want about the issues I’m passionate about, and no one can dismiss me in conversation or bully me into silence by saying “oh, don’t take it so seriously!” or “you think too much.” I’m sure there are people out there who believe I do take things “too seriously” or think “too much.” But I don’t have to allow them to comment on my blog, and regardless of how loud they shout online, they don’t control my online space -- I do.

Blogging has also put me in the way of opportunities to participate in feminist scholarship and activism -- I’ve done author interviews, attended conferences, been a research participant for a number of studies on human sexuality -- one on religion and use of sexually-explicit materials among women,  one on the personal experiences of queer individuals interacting with straight folks and mainstream culture. In 2009 I had the awesome experience of participating in the revision of the relationships chapter of the latest edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves.

Women’s Studies and feminism was a generally positive, inclusive space for me while I was at Hope. Since graduating, I’ve met a lot of folks for whom feminism and Women’s or Gender Studies programs were not welcoming. People who experienced feminist spaces as exclusionary because of their gender identity, their sexuality, their family lives, their concerns about race or class inequalities, their physical or mental health concerns … I’m sure some of you could add to this litany. My partner was told she couldn’t be a feminist because she liked the Terminator movies, and that she was a bad lesbian ‘cause her best friend was a guy.  I believe those people were wrong, but that doesn’t erase the fact that the language of feminism was used, in those instances, as the language of exclusion.

This doesn’t mean I’ve stopped identifying myself as a feminist. In fact, it’s made me more vocal about what I believe feminism is and can be. It’s made me more likely to speak up when I hear people using feminism as a tool to create and enforce us/them, insider/outsider hierarchies. At the same time, over the last ten years, I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that feminism, for some people, will never signify intellectual and emotional support for their being in the world the way it does for me. And that that’s okay. I believe feminism is -- at its best -- for everybody. But I also believe there are many pathways to a more loving, equitable world. As long as I see folks living out the values I name as “feminist” then I’m happy to count them as allies and co-conspirators.

Cross-posted at The Pursuit of Harpyness.

"how I set out to become a librarian...": lis career talk

Van Wylen Library (Hope College, Holland, Mich.)

As promised, here's the report from my presentation on 5 March at Hope College on how and why I became a librarian, what I do as a reference librarian, and further resources for exploring librarianship as a career. Since the talk was thirty minutes long, it's a bit unwieldy for a blog post. Instead, I've made the talk, PowerPoint, and resource list available on a new page -- librarianship links -- where you can download the talk script and slides as PDF files and review them at your leisure.

I was kindly introduced by Priscilla Atkins, poet and head of reference and instruction at Hope's Van Wylen Library. She put together my intro with help from Jackie Bartley, my very first creative writing professor at Hope -- the one who inspired me to pursue non-fiction rather than fiction writing, and who could not have been a better entre into liberal arts education. Jackie was also at the talk, as were about a dozen former faculty of mine. I don't think I've given or accepted so many hugs in the space of an hour since I stopped "passing the peace" at church in the mid-1990s!

There were also about a dozen librarians-in-the-making in the audience, which was gratifying to see.

You can access the resource handout I made, the slides, and the talk in PDF from here.

On Thursday, I'll be posting the text from my talk from the Women's Studies panel discussion, "How Has Women's Studies Mattered in My Life."

observations II

1) Had a lovely evening on the Women's Studies panel with fellow Hope College graduates Janet Swim ('83), Anne Lucas ('96), and Susan Kioko ('09). It was humbling to hear how other people have gone on to make use of their feminist coursework in fields as diverse as environmentalism, legal aid, and nursing. They filmed the discussion and I'm hoping it will be available online at some point. You'll see it linked here if it is! I was impressed by the quality of questions from the audience, and the thoughtfulness of all the panelists' answers.

2) While we're on the subject ... if you haven't already signed Bridget McCarthy's petition to the Board of Trustees regarding Hope's institutional statement on human sexuality, stop on by Change.org and add your voice to the multitude!

3) In a post-presentation haze this morning, everything felt a bit flat -- but biscuits, lemon curd and onion relish from The Biscuit restaurant helped! Also pledging to support Miriam's Radical Doula Guide project at IndieGoGo.

4) Now time for a nap before going out to Grandma's to watch Desk Set this evening.

the feminist librarian is off to michigan!

So it's that time of year again, and Hanna and I are off to Michigan for a week of vacation (for her) and vacation/work (for me). I've been invited to give a couple of presentations at my alma mater, Hope College, one on my life as a feminist and one about my life as a librarian. As my friend Molly pointed out on Twitter recently, I have a whole blog to pillage for subject matter!

lemonjellos (holland, mich.), May 2011

Seriously, though. If you're a Hope College community member, I'll be on campus Monday, 5 March, 4:00pm, in the Granberg Room, Van Wylen Library, to give a talk on my emerging career as a professional librarian. Then on Tuesday, 6 March, 7:00pm, I'll be part of a panel of Women's Studies Program graduates discussing how the program affected our lives and our work. The Tuesday event is part of a longer program celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Women's Studies program at Hope.

that would be me on the left, circa 2005

This is my first real visit back on campus since graduating, and while I have a contentious relationship with the college as in institution, I'm looking forward to getting a sense of how current students and faculty are feeling about the direction of the college and the role of feminist thought and practice in that space.

I'll be taking lots of notes and look forward to sharing my reflections and experiences with y'all upon my return. In the meantime, I anticipate posting will be light-ish while we're on the road.

booknotes: clover adams

It was nearly a decade ago that I first started hearing from a former professor (turned good friend) of mine about her latest research project: the study of a set of photograph albums at an archives in Boston, albums created by a 19th century female photographer named Marian "Clover" Hooper Adams. At the time, the friend -- Natalie Dykstra -- was in the process of applying for an NEH fellowship to spend her sabbatical at the archives -- the Massachusetts Historical Society -- to work with the albums and develop a book-length project that would consider the photography of Clover Adams as autobiographical texts. Texts that might, in some way, help us to understand how Clover understood her own life, her work, her marriage to historian Henry Adams, and the factors that led to her decision to end her own life at age forty-two by drinking chemicals used in the development of her photographs.

Since then, I've had the privilege of drifting on the periphery of Natalie's research and writing of the manuscript which became Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life (Houghton Mifflin, 2012). It is, in part, because of her connection with the Massachusetts Historical Society that I considered relocating to Boston, that I applied to work at the MHS, and her friendship has been a sweet thread of connection between my previous life at Hope College/in Holland and my world here in Boston. Over the past four years I've worked with Natalie in my reference librarian hat to track down details related to Clover's childhood and coordinated the provision of photographs by and of Clover will appear, in all their visual splendor, in the pages of her biography.

This is all by way of saying that I approach this review with a far-from objective sense of propriety when it comes to the work of a friend, and the opportunity to see the life of an overlooked female photographer -- whose work is preserved at "my" library -- brought into the open and shared with the world in such an eloquent way.

So, you know, take my praise for what it's worth and form your own opinions of Natalie's work at your leisure. But having read the advance review copy over the Christmas holidays, I do want to share a few notes on what about Natalie's work -- and Clover's life story -- particularly moved and impressed me. Because I do, in my professional historian hat, think Natalie's done something remarkable here.

Clover Adams' story presents a number of dilemmas for the modern biographer. In the socioeconomic sense, she was a daughter of privilege, born to a Boston family with economic resources and social and political connections. Her mother was a poet who moved in Transcendentalist circles with the likes of Margaret Fuller and the Peabody sisters. Her father's family, the Hoopers, had made their money in business  during the previous century, and Robert Hooper (Clover's father), with whom Clover remained close, received his medical training at Harvard and in Paris. In marrying Henry Adams, Clover became part of one of the most high-profile American families of the period; she and her husband maintained multiple residences, traveled abroad, and moved through the upper echelons of American and European society.

Yet at the same time, there were limits to what privilege could bring to Clover's life in terms of health and well-being. Her mother died of tuberculosis when Clover was a young child, and the aunt who cared most directly for Clover thereafter eventually committed suicide. Mental health struggles seem to have haunted the Hooper family, and if read in a certain light Clover Adams appears to be one long narrative of health struggles for which contemporary late-nineteenth-century medical, religious, and philosophical frameworks had no useful remedy.

In addition, Clover contended with the fact that she was a girlchild, and later a woman, in a world that offered a limited number of options for women to craft satisfying lives for themselves. The majority of women were, of course, caught up in surviving class and race inequality. However, even those who, like Clover, didn't face immediate material dilemmas, were nonetheless constrained by social expectation to pursue a limited number of professional and relational pathways. While Clover seems to have settled into her marriage with Henry Adams quite happily and voluntarily, her married life was colored by the couples' inability to communicate some of their deepest needs to one another. That the two never had children also appears to have haunted Clover on some level, though I appreciated that Natalie takes note of this factor without dwelling on it extensively.

Clover's photography, taken up in the final years of her life, remained an amateur endeavor in part because of the status of photography in the art world and in part because of the fact that Clover was a woman. Both she and Henry expressed ambivalence over her creative work and its place in their lives, and eschewed opportunities which might have brought her more attention for her work.

All of these aspects of Clover's life -- her mental health, her marriage, her work, and her place in society -- are interesting to a modern audience in part because Clover's struggles feel like very relevant in our current society, roughly a century and a quarter after Clover's death. How we understand -- and cope with -- mental illness is still a live question.The benefits and limits of marriage as an institution -- and as a primary relationship -- are under intense discussion. The role of work and creative expression -- particularly in the lives of married and mothering women -- is still a subject of public debate. It would be all too easy to map our current understanding of all three of these subjects backward onto Clover's life (what is known in the historical profession as "presentism"). We're shown the pain of Clover's depression without any sort of narrative pressure to diagnose cause or condition: her mental landscape is described most often in Clover's own words. Natalie doesn't back away from the loneliness and disconnection that, in the end, resided at the heart of the Adams marriage. Yet she manages to show Henry Adams at his most vicious (I felt real flares of anger at him while reading) without laying the blame of Clover's suicide at the feet of her husband.

At the same time, while skillfully avoiding the trap of presentism, Natalie also refuses to absent herself -- as a biographical narrator -- from the storytelling endeavor. Having spent literally a decade with Clover's story she has much to offer us in terms of synthesis and analysis. I didn't finish the book wishing that Natalie had shown less partiality for (and more critical analysis of) her subject. She really manages to do the balancing act of letting us see Clover's life as it was lived and understood in broader historical context, not just through Clover's own meaning-making mechanisms.

Speaking as someone who is intensely interested in the history of feminism, gender and sexuality, I find Clover's story compelling on a number of levels. Natalie explicitly avoids the language of gender theory in her storytelling. Which is not to say she ignores the way in which Clover's lived experience was shaped by her womanhood -- far from it. But Natalie has the grace to let Clover's life be -- as much as possible -- her own. And Clover herself doesn't seem to have understood her life through the lens of gender. Other women of her era did (though they would have used the word "sex" rather than "gender"). The years between Clover's birth and death were active ones for women's rights agitation, and Boston saw its fair share of feminist activism. While feminist analysis would likely not have saved Clover from the depths of despair, I found myself wondering if Clover's ability to anchor herself -- in her marriage, in her art, in her social connections -- could have been aided at all by the friendship of women (or men) who outspokenly advocated for her right to be (and be seen) as an artistic individual, out beyond the confines of the domestic sphere. I found myself wondering how Clover and Henry's expectations of the roles played by husband and wife contributed to the silences in their marriage, and whether more radical friends might have encouraged them to re-consider their assumptions and move past what seem to have been baffling obstacles to marital connection and contentment. This is something that Natalie hints at, but for the most part leaves for the reader to piece together as they will.

courtesy of the MHS

Last week, when I arrived at work, I found that the sign advertising upcoming events had been switched out to showcase the opening of our next exhibition -- guest curated by Natalie -- which features Clover's own photographs. The image chosen (see right) is a striking photograph taken at Smith Point (Mass.) is a group portrait of Miriam Pratt, Alice Howe, and Alice Pratt, discussed in chapter fourteen of Clover Adams ("At Sea"). It is not, Natalie writes, "a straightforward portrait intended simply to capture the likeness of three specific women. Instead, Clover carefully stage-managed the composition, creating a mood not of friendship and connection but of lost possibility ... the women are connected neither to one another nor to the sea, which might otherwise open up their visual world" (150). Despite Clover's own ambivalence about the public exhibition of her work during her lifetime, I am proud of Natalie for bringing her photography out of the archive and into the public eye. For helping us to understand Clover's creative work not only as the art it surely is, but also as a visual voice communicating a particular woman's understanding of her world in a form that will long outlive its creator.

Clover Adams will go on sale on February 8th. You can pre-order it now through a variety of venues, or put it on hold at your local library.

Natalie, I'm so, so proud of you!

perhaps we overthought this?: preliminary reflections on higher ed, queer folks, my alma mater

So I just finished reading the executive summary (PDF) of Campus Pride's 2010 report on the status of higher education for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. I'm hoping to get my hands on the full report, but I can't afford to purchase it for the $25.00 cover price at the moment, and it's proving a little tricky to inter-library loan. So for the moment, the executive summary's all I have to work with. Along with this really interesting interview on NPR with lead author Sue Rankin, which is what tuned me into the report in the first place (audio + transcript available at NPR).

This report has been getting a lot of media attention following the suicide of Rutger's student, Tyler Clementi, who was apparently the subject of bullying and harassment by fellow students in part because of his same-sex relationships. It is surprising to many people -- across the political spectrum I gather -- that college campuses in general might be hostile places for non-straight and gender-non-conforming. On NPR Sue Rankin herself put it this way when interviewed by Morning Edition's Ari Shapiro (emphasis mine):

Prof. RANKIN: One of the major findings that was surprising to me, actually -after 33 years of doing this - that one-third of the students, faculty and staff that participated indicated they had seriously considered leaving the institution.

SHAPIRO: Is that a result of bullying or just a place where they don't necessarily feel comfortable being themselves? How does that play out?

Prof. RANKIN: We identify it as being climate. And climate includes things like discrimination and harassment. We asked not only what they experienced but how they experienced it. An interesting piece that complements, I guess, this particular unfortunate event at Rutgers, is that a lot of this is now happening in cyberspace, which may lead to the possibility of them being outed and then harassed in some way.

SHAPIRO: What are the other consequences of this kind of bullying?

Prof. RANKIN: We find that there are higher depression rates among LGBT students who don't have support on their college campuses.

SHAPIRO: You say LGBT - Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender.

Prof. RANKIN: Yes. We find that students who are out in high school are actually returning to a more closeted space when they come to college. They have to...

SHAPIRO: Really?

Prof. RANKIN: ...yeah - reopen those doors for themselves, because they're afraid of what may happen if they have a roommate who is not supportive. So the importance of having visible resources on a college campus to assist students, I think, is tantamount. And right now only 7 percent of our institutions offer that.

SHAPIRO: Only seven percent of colleges have resources for lesbian and gay students?
Prof. RANKIN: That's correct.

You can read the rest of Rankin's interview at NPR.

Since I haven't yet read the full report, I will simply offer a couple of tentative observations based on the executive summary.

The first is that, as regular readers of my blog will know, I have first-hand experience with campus climates that are hostile to queer students. Many of the folks who are active in trying to change the climate on Hope's campus, as well as more distant observers of the anti-queer bigotry there have operated under the assumption that much of the hostility stems from the religious beliefs of influential members of the community and the Reformed Church of America (RCA), the denomination out of which the college originated and still maintains close ties. While the expression of and explicit justification for anti-gay sentiment on campus at Hope is unquestionably religious in its nature, this report is a caution not to treat Hope College as some sort of ultra-conservative outlier, completely out of touch with the mainstream world of higher education.  On the contrary, it appears from the personal stories and statistics in the report that Hope College's struggles with harassment, bullying and other subtle forms of hostility and non-support for non-straight, gender-nonconforming folks is (sadly) much more mainstream that it would be nice to believe.

The second is the emphasis the report places on both the intersectionality of marginalization (non-straight, gender-nonconforming students who were not white, for example, experienced greater degrees of harassment and reported overall higher levels of negative experience than their white counterparts) and the importance of not becoming wedded to rigid identity categories when researching, reporting, and attempting to mitigate the negative campus climate for queer folks.  As the authors write in their executive summary when suggesting future "best practices":

In the demographic section of the monograph we discuss the power of language in the LGBTQQ community and, therefore, encourage the use of language that extends beyond the binaries in all of the recommended potential best practices. As reflected in the results [of the survey], many participants did not fit the socially-constructed definitions of gender identity, sexual identity, and gender expression. Their comments suggested they are either pathologized or forced to develop a "different" sense of identity. In shaping our outlook, language instills and reinforces cultural values, thereby helping to maintain social hierarchies. While definitions facilitate discussion and the sharing of information, terminology remains subject to both cultural contexts and individual interpretation. As a result, the terminology that people use to describe themselves and their communities is often not universally accepted by everyone within these communities. Therefore, our overall recommendation is that we value the voices of those within our campus communities and use language that reflects their unique experience (p. 15 of the summary).

As a feminist activist and scholar of feminist and sexuality activism, I deal with the thorny question of identity language all the time. It is easy enough to respect the identity language people choose for themselves (just ask and honor their preferences!); it is much more complicated when one is trying to understand how collective identities emerge and transform over time.  One of the questions I ask myself often is whether collective identities always, by definition, end up excluding and/or marginalizing people. That is, can they only exist by virtue of defining themselves against other collective identities?  Hanna often argues this position, and I am hard-pressed -- when looking at identity communities in practice -- to disagree with her.  Human groups too often base their collective self-understanding on exclusion. 

I don't, however, believe this is necessary for forming a meaningful sense of self-in-relation-to-others, and I see the way forward (towards creating a less hostile climate for non-conforming folks) as being a path towards community identity that is based on inclusion and the honoring of individual experience and voices, rather than exclusion and the silencing of individual self-understanding.  I'll be interested to see, when/if I get my hands on the full report, where CampusPride's researchers go with this issue of language, identity, and community.

alma mater musings: individuals + institutions

This past week, I had an exchange with one of my faculty mentors from undergrad who is currently collecting stories from queer students and allies about their experiences at Hope College (for previous posts on this topic go here). A group of faculty are hoping to collate these narratives and take them to the Board of Trustees on October 10th as part of a presentation on the hostile climate for non-straight folks at Hope College, in hopes that personal stories will help reshape the discussion around homosexuality on campus.

At first, I didn't really think I had much to say beyond what I already put into my letter to the Board of Trustees. But since writing that letter in April I've been doing a lot of thinking about Christian higher education and about the intersection of organized religion, personal faith and values, and formal learning. This is going to be a rambling sort of post, but I wanted to share some of my in-process musings. I welcome responses and further thoughts in comments!

One of the things I think we often overlook when we view institutions like Hope College or Calvin College or even Patrick Henry College from the outside is that even the most close-minded institutions can be sites where individuals learn, grow, and can even become subversive. Sometimes, that subversive impulse is born of resistence to the oppressive nature of the institution and the subculture within which that institution is situated. But I don't believe that's the whole story. Often, some parts of the institution or the subculture themselves enable that growth and change within individuals who care to take advantage of it.

To take an obvious example, young people who grow up within the Christian subculture learn at a very early age what it means to move between cultures: their own and the dominant American culture. They learn the positive aspects of being bicultural, of having a critical perspective on mainstream values and beliefs, of being an outsider who belongs to an identity community. They know how to speak what my mother used to call "God talk" and they know how to edit those references out of their vocabulary when they know such language won't help their cause. All of these skills and experiences are transferable to other sub- and counter-cultural experiences -- including the experience of belonging to feminist or queer identity groups. To many of us, feminism and a more open concept of sexuality are, in fact, extensions of the values we saw modeled within some Christian communities. I know that, when I first discovered feminist theology as a first-year college student the possibility that Christianity could be reconciled with the values I held as a feminist brought me closer to religious faith than anything before or since. I came closer that year to joining a church than I had in all my years of teenage involvement with organized religion.

The fact that the values of feminist theology were viewed with skepticism by some and outrage by others within the college community was incredibly alienating to me (as a seventeen-year-old) ... and yet at the same time, it was Hope College that had, however imperfectly, exposed me to those ideas in the first place. I was instinctively feminist before going to college -- in my auto-didactic way I knew my feminist history -- but it was at this religiously and politically conservative institution that I actually found the thinkers and activists of who helped me clarify those instincts and turn them into both meaningful scholarship and daily action. I was being marginalized by some people within the school for ideas and values I had been invited to explore by others at the same institution. Complicated? Complicated.

As I wrote in response to my friend's email,

It was through Hope College that I was able to explore political feminism, feminist theology, non-straight sexuality, and connect with folks like Linda and Denslow [members of Aradia]; to ground myself in a network of intergenerational feminists who experience sexuality in myriad ways. It was an integral part of my growing into myself and arriving in a place where -- when I decided to explore my own sexual desires and seek out sexual relationships -- I was open to being with those human beings who turned me on, regardless of gender. Hope as an academic institution (and more precisely the faculty I worked with there) gave me a place to develop the intellectual and political framework to articulate myself and from that position of strength enter into a relationship that (ironically!) Hope College officially does not condone. It is sad, to me, that I can't really celebrate that learning experience with Hope as an institution because it is a type of learning that isn't valued -- it doesn't fit within the narratives of alumni achievement. The most valuable gifts that my Hope College education gave me are the things the college likes to keep at arms length. And I feel like that's their loss.

And then in a follow-up email,

My experience at Hope has given me a uniquely personal perspective on the way individuals negotiate their personal life stories within religious and educational institutions ... The fact that students and faculty at a socially and religiously conservative institution like Hope can manipulate the learning experiences in liberatory ways contradicts (in my opinion) the mainstream narrative that tends to downplay individual agency within religious/educational institutions and focus on the official message or the stories told by people with structural/social power and authority (usually not where the most interesting stuff is happening!). The complexity of the real lived experience is a difficult one to get across to people who haven't grown up in that environment or been required to develop those skills for subversion.

[Since graduating from Hope, I have become more] aware of the complex sociocultural and structural reasons students choose to attend the institutions they attend (church connections, family relationships, friendships, finances, geography, etc.) and how so often those initial choices they make cannot begin to reflect the people they become during their tenure as students. It seems to me (idealist that I am!) that it is the responsibility of a college like Hope to acknowledge that even students who may come to the college as religiously conservative straight folks could discover their sexual fluidity or finally come to terms with their orientation during their time at Hope. And I think Hope College would benefit (as both an institution and as a community of individuals) from being the sort of environment where that personal journey was embraced as a mark of individual strength, openness to change, opportunity for developing personal ethics around sexuality and political identity. Right now, the institutional position seems primarily to be one of fear, which in turn communicates to students that exploration, questioning, and change are threatening to both personal and social well-being. Hardly an attitude conducive to meaningful learning!

I am reminded of a post by Sharkfu at Feministing on the complicated balancing act of being involved in religious institutions with which you do not wholly agree. Such relationships can often be a constant re-negotiation, an assessment of whether the benefit of being involved with the institution outweighs the cost of membership (both to the self and to society). From the outside, it is all too easy to condemn people who stay affiliated with such institutions, since it is difficult to see the complexity of the relationship that person has had with that community, with that space, with those ideas, over time. And I would like to emphasize once again: I don't mean this in a purely negative way. Yes, sometimes being part of a subculture can cloud your perspective, isolate you from ideas and people that might otherwise give you a more meaningful life. But sometimes, those same subcultures can be the doorway (however inadvertently) into those very same ideas, into those very same communities, that "officially" the subculture/institution/community is attempting to police, control, or even eradicate.

In other words: while the social structure and official position of Hope College as an institution is homophobic, judgmental, and I would even say violent and anti-Christian ... for an individual person? The space created by that structure existing, and the opportunities (intellectual and otherwise) that reside in that space, could well be the doorway they needed in order to discover a much more exhilarating, loving, hopeful, potential-filled sort of world.

Such liberating potential doesn't in any way erase or mitigate the violence wrought by the official position of the college on human sexuality any more than the existence of pro-queer Catholic groups, liberation theology, and Catholic reproductive justice advocates erases or mitigates the homophobia and sexism of the institutional Catholic church. It doesn't absolve the individuals supportive of the official position from their participation in that act of violence. It does, however, suggest that such violence is also tangled up with much more nuanced interpersonal relationships. That an official institutional stance -- once you zoom it at a higher resolution -- is riddled with tiny fissures. Fissures that represent opportunities for people to grow and change, and become themselves far beyond the wildest imaginings of the college administration.

Right now, it seems like the college officials fear that wildness -- I do hope they come to embrace it for the hope and joy it can represent. Best wishes to all the folks at Hope College who are trying to help them see that possibility.

^{*Image credit: Nykerk Hall, Hope College, Holland, Michigan. Image from Hope College Public Relations (they keep this up and eventually I'm going to run out of scenic campus shots and have to start in on the student facebook photos ;)!).}

alma mater update: in other unsurprising news...

Here's the promised update re: Hope College and its Institutional Statement on Homosexuality, which I wrote about on Thursday.

The group Hope Is Ready, which has been one of those petitioning to have the statement withdrawn by the Board of Trustees, shared (through their Facebook page; apologies if this means you can't follow the link) the following letter from Hope College President James Bultman yesterday afternoon.

May 7, 2010

Dear Members of Hope is Ready:

Thank you for your interest in Hope College and for the time and effort committed to sharing your concerns with the Board of Trustees. Your insights were helpful in our discussions. Those elected to hold the college in their trust have thoughtfully, thoroughly, and prayerfully considered your petition.

Relative to your petition, the Trustees have taken these actions:

1. The Board of Trustees denied your request to remove the 1995 Institutional Statement on Homosexuality

2. The Board of Trustees appointed a Trustee committee to expand the college’s 1995 position statement in the larger context of all human sexuality in such a way that the Hope community is called to a renewed encounter with the clear, demanding, and healing biblical witness regarding human sexuality.

The college’s current position on homosexuality is based on its interpretation of scripture. It is recognized that well-intentioned Christians may disagree on scriptural interpretation. Still, humbly and respectfully, the college aligns itself in its interpretation with is founding denomination, the Reformed Church in America, the orthodox Christian Church throughout the ages, and other Christian colleges and universities.

On behalf of the Hope College Board of Trustees, I thank you for your concern for the college we love and respectfully ask that you accept these decisions in the spirit with which they are rendered.

Cordially,

James E. Bultman
President

In short, it basically says nothing that hasn't already been said, and the fact it was up on the web by 2:33pm yesterday afternoon makes it pretty clear that the Board of Trustees didn't spend much time deliberating on their course of action.

Sad, despiriting, but unsurprising.

I'll be thinking today about all those folks in the Hope College community -- many of whom I've known my whole life -- who do not think this way, and who work hard everyday to make sure the official college position is not the only one that gets heard.

I said in my letter to the Board, and I'm going to repeat it here: to tell any person that being sexual and making positive, fully consensual, sexually intimate connections with another human being is destructive to their spiritual well-being is an act of violence. To codify such a belief in an institutional statement makes it institutionalized bigotry, giving that belief the authority of college administration that has the power to materially effect the lives of students and employees.

I absolutely believe that such an act of violence runs counter to the Christian message that we are all called to increase joy, practice love, and work toward wholeness in the world. I don't see how this decision by Hope's Board of Trustees does any of that. So it sure as hell doesn't seem very Christian to me.

^{*image credit: Hope College Voorhees Hall, made available through the public relations office website.}

in which I write letters: dear alma mater

Today, the Board of Trustees at my alma mater (Hope College) convenes for its spring meeting. On the agenda is the Insitutional Statement on Homosexuality (PDF), written by the college president in 1995 and formally adopted by the board in 2001. The statement basically affirms the position of the Reformed Church in America which condemns homosexual "acts" while "affirming the responsibility of Christians to be fair to and accepting of persons with a homosexual orientation" (yeah, don't ask; I'm not sure how they expect anyone to actually carry this off).

Anyway, the Hope LGBT Alumni Association called on folks to write the Board a personal letter opposing the statement and calling for its repeal. And because I enjoy writing letters and welcome any opportunity to get up on my soapbox and declaim on issues near and dear to my heart, I jumped at the chance.

And because it's a shame to share self-righteousness with only the Board of Trustees when you can spread it around the internet, I'm posting it here. I'll let y'all know what happens in the weeks to come!



Anna J. Cook (’05)
XX Xxxxxxxx Xx Xxx #
Allston, MA 02134

16 April 2010

Joel G. Bowens, Chairperson
Hope College Board of Trustees
c/o Office of the President
141 East 12th Street
Holland, MI 49422-9000

To the Board of Trustees:

I am a third generation alumna of Hope College, a 2005 graduate (summa cum laude) in History and Women’s Studies, and daughter of Mark Cook, Director of the Hope-Geneva Bookstore. I was born and grew up in Holland, only blocks away from the Hope campus, and there are many reasons I am proud to recognize Hope College as part of my heritage.

Since I am also a feminist and in a committed relationship with another woman, the college’s Institutional Statement on Homosexuality is not one of them.

As I know that the Board of Trustees plans to review the Institutional Statement on Homosexuality at its May meeting, I would like to take this opportunity to share with you some of my experiences at Hope College as a non-heterosexual student and as someone who believes non-straight sexuality is completely compatible ethical sexual practice.

I started taking classes in the fall of 1998 as a seventeen year old, eager to explore the brave new world of higher learning, creative writing, and political engagement. In the fall of 1998 Hope College hosted a Critical Issues Symposium on “Feminism and Faith” that was, for me, an initiation into a world of scholarship that spoke directly to my values: I was introduced to a community of scholars and theologians who believed deeply in equality, justice, and the glorious chaos of human existence. In the wake of the Symposium, throughout the 1998-1999 academic year, various speakers came to campus to talk about human sexuality. During that time I witnessed first-hand a great deal of hostility, both among students and on an institutional level, to those values of equality and justice and to the acceptance of human diversity.

I thought seriously after that first year about leaving Hope and transferring to a more welcoming campus. To be honest, despite generous tuition benefits, I would probably not have stayed if it had not been for the Women’s Studies faculty who gave me the space to explore the world of human sexuality and human rights without limiting the possibility of sexual morality to heterosexual relationships. I will be forever grateful for that space in which the faculty at Hope encouraged me to develop my scholarship and articulate my values. Yet it was always clear to me that those values were not in line with the beliefs held by those who formulated institutional policy. The stories I hear from family and friends still involved on campus indicate to me that this situation has not materially changed.

As the Board revisits its support of the Institutional Statement on Homosexuality, I urge you to consider the possibility that a same-sex sexual relationship offers us manifold opportunities to bring joy, love, and well-being into the world – as does any sexual relationship between two enthusiastically consenting individuals. I would encourage you to imagine that Hope College’s role as an institution of higher learning, in the context of the Christian faith, could be to encourage its students to explore their sexual values and ethical sexual practices regardless of the gender of those individuals engaged in any particular sexual activity. This, it seems to me, would be a much more life-affirming than to sit in judgment, suggesting that non-straight people who act on their sexual desires, regardless of ethical practices, are unchristian and therefore marginal members of the Hope College community.

I cannot hope that by writing this letter I will be able to persuade any of you, single-handedly, that non-straight sexual intimacy is no more or less sinful than heterosexual sex. Nor can I claim to understand the myriad pressures that are brought to bear on the Board of Trustees by certain stakeholders to reaffirm the condemnation of a certain proportion of its student, faculty, staff, and alumni population (not to mention their families and friends) for the nature of their love relationships and sexual practices.

Speaking for myself, however, I would like to make it clear to the Board that unless the atmosphere at Hope regarding human sexuality demonstrably improves, I will not support the college as an institution, financially or otherwise. I was clear about that upon graduation, and I am even clearer about that now. I will not support an institution that does not recognize the legitimacy of my primary relationship and continues to create a hostile environment for faculty, staff, and students who are not straight or do not believe that non-straight sexuality is immoral. This makes me sad, since some of the most dedicated faculty and highest-quality teaching I have ever encountered have been at Hope College. However, in the end I am unwilling to support the institutional marginalization of some in the Hope community just for whom they have fallen in love, or share sexual intimacy, with.

To tell any person that being sexual and making positive, fully consensual, sexually intimate connections with another human being is destructive to their spiritual well-being is, in my opinion, an act of violence. To codify such a belief as an institutional statement makes it even more destructive, as it is amplified by the position of authority a college administration holds over its students and employees. I believe such an act of violence runs counter to the Christian message of increasing joy, love, and wholeness in the world.

Ultimately, you may well choose to uphold the current institutional policy. However, it is my hope that before you do, you reckon with the pain and alienation you have caused (and will continue to cause) some within the Hope College community by doing so.

Respectfully submitted for your consideration,

Anna Jane Cook
Allston, MA

^{*image: Hope College Arch, made available through the public relations office website.}

holland, hope, and homosexuality: some reflections

Just before Christmas my friend Rachel sent me a recent column by screenwriter Dustin Lance Black about his experience filming in Holland, Michigan (my hometown) and being invited to speak at Hope College (my alma mater). As I wrote here in October, Black was extended and invitation to speak at the college and then the invitation was withdrawn by the administration. Later arrangements were made for Black to speak at an off-campus venue.

Black's column, reflecting on his experience in Holland and at Hope is clearly written in a well-meaning spirit of reconciliation in a situation where hurt feelings abounded. It is also written from the personal perspective of an outsider who visited Holland for a short period of time to do a specific project and became tangled up in one chapter of the ongoing saga that is West Michigan's religious, social and political conservatism. More specifically, he walked into a situation colored indelibly by Hope College's struggle to decide where it stands in relation to the Reformed Church in America, a denomination currently divided (as most mainline Christian denominations are) in regards to their official stance and everyday practice concerning sexual orientation.

Unfortunately, I think Black, with the myopia of a visitor -- misses the mark when it comes to understanding the particular context for -- and history of -- his own slice of experience in West Michigan and with Hope College. He characterizes Holland (a metropolitan area of roughly 95,000) as a "small Midwestern town" and describes his encounters with the local populace as if his presence was somehow a catalyst for the city and college to wrestle with issues of sexual orientation that they had heretofore complacently ignored. "I don’t think the town was homophobic," he writes, "I think they had simply never discussed gay rights openly before, and here I was, an interloper, threatening to thrust this hot-button issue into their community."

Well . . . yes and no. Clearly, I have my moments of profound antagonism toward the conservatism of place and people that characterizes the West Michigan region. There are reasons I felt it necessary to become a self-identified feminist, reasons that I decided to move elsewhere for graduate school, and reasons I will think long and hard before supporting my alma mater financially or otherwise. There have been times when I experienced the majority culture of West Michigan like a physical weight on my chest, an asthma attack waiting to happen.

Yet on the other hand, I think it's important -- and I speak here as a feminist, as someone who's bisexual and in a same-sex relationship, and as a Midwesterner -- to resist the easy dichotomy of "Midwest" versus "coast," and "small town" versus "urban" that become stand-ins for talking about political and social conservatism and liberalism. West Michigan was where I became the person I am today partly in spite of yet just as much because of the people around me: West Michigan's politics and majority culture are conservative, but that conservatism does not thrive in a vacuum free of liberal, leftist pushback. West Michigan conservatism is perennially contested by those who disagree with the premises of a conservative Church and Republican party politics. (Consider, for example, that my senior project in the Women's Studies program at Hope was a multi-year group research project on a predominantly lesbian, feminist organization and community that thrived in West Michigan during the 1970s and early 1980s.) I would argue that Black served less as a catalyst for new awakening and more as the latest spark to reignite the antagonism between these two indigenous forces: dominant culture and counter-culture.

Those outsider-sparks can serve as personal awakenings, sure: it was a similar series of events in 1998 that were my own adult initiation into the world of feminist and LGBT politics -- but I think the important thing to remember is that even if the immediate impetus for such community reflection comes from outside, myriad resources with which to challenge the conservative status quo are rooted deep in local, Midwestern soil.

I grew up a crazy-ass liberal in what (as Black points out) is the most Republican-leaning county in Michigan -- yet I found a tenacious network of like-minded folks within that community who have helped me to grow, often to thrive, and always to explore a world beyond the boundaries of fear-driven, narrow-minded conservatism. And many of those people hail from (and continue to live in more or less uneasy relationship with) the very groups of folks that Black imagines to be so well-meaning yet clueless about queer politics. Among the folks who helped me grow into the woman I am today are Holland natives, Hope College faculty and staff, and deeply religious folks whose Christianity informs their political liberalism.

And those folks deserve to reside in the "small Midwestern town" of our collective imagination just as much as (if not more than) those who resort to fear and exclusion.

Quick Hit: Congrats Arin!

Back in October I wrote a post venting about the immaturity exhibited by the administration of my alma mater over a student-issued invitation to screenwriter Dustin Lance Black to speak at the college in conjunction with a screening of his film Milk. Via my Dad (and our hometown newspaper) comes the news that after a long delay and a change of venue, the talk will be held at an off-campus location.

Hope College is not involved with the event.

“Although the college did not choose to invite Mr. Black to speak in an open forum on campus, the film ‘Milk’ raises a variety of moral and social issues and questions,” school spokesman Tom Renner said. “Many of these and other challenging issues have been and will continue to be discussed in a variety of college courses and in other events on campus.”

Hope College student Arin Fisher is among those in the grassroots group Hope Is Ready, which is sponsoring the event.

“Hope Is Ready is just a group of concerned students, faculty, staff and community members who want Hope to know that we as a community are more than ready to discuss questions about the LGBT community, the church and any other relevant issue,” Fisher said.

I'd just like to say congratulations to my sister Maggie's friend Arin (quoted above), whom I know has been working hard for this all semester long. Hope College is a better place for having you there, and I hope at some point down the road they recognize that!

Hope you all have fun at the screening.

not cool, alma mater: a bit of a rant

My alma mater, Hope College, has been making minor waves in the news recently due to the administration's unwillingness to approve an invitation by students to screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (who won an Oscar last year for Milk) to join in a roundtable discussion on human sexuality. Since Hope is a college with strong ties to the Reformed Church in America (RCA), and the denomination -- like most Christian denominations -- is currently split over the issue of homosexuality, this not really a surprise to anyone who knows the campus: the invitation was bound to be controversial.

Since the late 1990s (as I was starting to take classes on campus as a teenager), sexuality and gender in the context of Christianity have been a flash point at Hope, much like they are in the wider culture. During the 1998-1999 academic year, when I was taking first-year courses in English and Religion, the campus was rocked by explosive debates over feminism, sexuality, and the place of Christianity in higher education. My own adult political awareness -- the decision to identify myself politically as a feminist, and my engagement with the politics of human sexuality -- has its roots in that formative adolescent experience. Thankfully, as a seventeen-year-old, I saw faculty, staff (including my own father) and students speak out forcefully against bigotry at the same time that I was witnessing the intolerance that characterizes certain conservative Christian worldviews.

The exhilaration and pain I experienced that school year of 1998-99 profoundly shaped my relationship with Hope: from that point forward, I knew that however supportive and intellectually challenging my professors were (you were awesome, folks!), Hope College as an institution was not interested in championing an open and affirming vision of Christianity or of a broader human community. Because of that, the school has never truly earned my trust or my allegiance. In conversations I've had this week with my sister (a current student) and some of her friends, I can see a similar trajectory in the growth of a whole new generation of students.

I know first-hand how painful and personal the politics of these denominational and institutional conflicts can be, and I recognize the powerful sway of conservative donors and the strength of religious convictions -- even when I believe those convictions to be theologically misguided and inhumane. It's complicated, and I'm usually the first to admit that. But damn, Hope. You guys gotta learn. And you really need to quit hiding behind the waffling of the church and the fear of losing donors. 'Cause you're sure as hell losing future donors now. Not to mention doing a patently crap job of modeling civil discourse and educated, educative discussion.

How old are we -- two? Is it impossible to imagine students having thoughtful conversations about issues they have deep personal convictions or questions about? If they can't have those conversations on a fucking college campus where can they have them, exactly? Can we please exhibit some mature behavior here and demonstrate that thoughtful people can disagree without chewing each others' arms off? And can we please, please pause for a moment to consider what sort of message non-conversation is sending? Possibly (shock! horror!) recognize that certain members of the Hope College community, past and present, have felt "hurt and marginalized" by the institutional reluctance to have open conversation? Not talking does not make the scary bad feelings go away. It just puts them (all too often) on the shoulders of people with less political and financial clout. Which is not an unexpected tactic, but still deserves to be called out and identified as the sort of immature abuse of institutional power it is.

I've been thinking a lot this week about the folks I know who continue to work and learn in that sort of environment, and I'm sending good vibes their way. I learned ten years ago that I, personally, have limited energy for front-line action in these sorts of political and educational battles. But I deeply respect the people -- including many friends and family -- who have the guts to keep on speaking up day after day after day in less-than-perfect situations, doing their best to make the next day a little bit better. So thank you all for being there for me, when I was a student, and to all of you -- faculty, staff, and students alike -- who are continuing to make Hope a place where marginalized folks who are there can, despite the odds, find emotional and intellectual support, and forge a worthwhile learning experience for themselves.

To the folks who didn't, and aren't, I realize this probably means little to you, but you are on my shit list and I will see to it in my own behind-the-scenes way that you have as little power to fuck with peoples' well-being as possible. End of story.

Womyn's Land in the NYT

I don't have time right now to write a longer reflection on this article in the New York Times about lesbian communities and women-only land -- but I wanted to post a link to it because it quotes my women's studies professor and from undergrad, Jane Dickie, with whom I collaborated on an oral history project involving a group of women who have ended up living on a women-only land trust in Missouri.* As Joseph (who forwarded the link to me) says, "it's the first time I've ever read the NYT and gone, 'Hey! I've met that person!' and it is kind of a strange feeling."

Miriam, over at feministing, has already posted her reflections on the story and on the phenomenon of lesbian communities. If I have any Big Thoughts after sitting down to read the piece, I'll be sure to follow up with a "take two."

*You can read about the research project we did in the essay "The Heirs of Aradia, Daughter of Diana: Community in the Second and Third Wave" published in the Journal of Lesbian Studies (vol 9, no. 1/2, 2005) also published as Lesbian Communities: Festivals, RVs, and the Internet, edited by Esther Rothblum; also in "Responding to Aradia: Young Feminists Encounter the Second Wave" by Leslie Aronson, Adrienne Bailey, Anna Cook, Jane Dickie, Bethany Martin, and Elizabeth Sturrus, published in Iris: A Journal for Women (issue 47, Fall/Winter 2003).

Image from Hawk Hill Community Land Trust, Missouri, Summer 2005 (personal photo)