once again upon a listserv: some follow-up thoughts about #thatdarnlist

Note to non-archivist/librarian readers: this blog post is largely professional insider discussion and, while it may be interesting to some of you it will likely be tl;dr for many others. You have been warned!

a radical feminist cabal (via)

In the three weeks since I published my post about professionalism, privilege, and power, discussing the Archives & Archivists listserv, I’ve had further interesting adventures -- both inspiring and dispiriting -- around what I wrote, how I wrote it, and the manner in which it was shared. Having (mostly) weathered that storm, I offer a few further thoughts about what went down, and how, and the manner in which I’ve chosen to participate in this conversation moving forward.

My last substantive listserv email on this subject went out to the listserv on June 5th and can be read here. The two listserv threads to which that message refer can be read in their entirety here and here. What I would like to share in this post are two items of gratitude, four items of critical reflection, and finally an invitation.

For those wishing to skip straight to the invitation, please see my sounding of interest.

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1) I am grateful to connect with so many likewise-minded and open-minded librarians and archivists since writing my initial post.

A huge big thank you to every individual who linked to, retweeted, liked, commented, emailed, and otherwise showed support and understanding for my arguments around these issues. I tried to thank as many of you as I could directly and personally. As I remarked to one man who spoke up in support, I may not “need” defenders but it is awfully nice not to feel alone in my perceptions or isolated in speaking up. Those who could not speak in public spaces, but did so in private, also counted in this way.

The outpouring of thanks I received from people (a majority women, but also men) who have experienced or witnessed professional bullying and marginalization in our field confirms my own perceptions that this is not an isolated “bad apple” situation. Instead, it is a community-wide, cultural problem that requires a collective response. I have been thinking about ways to continue the conversation with all of you (more below), hopefully calibrated to give particular support to those with the fewest emotional or professional “spoons” to give.

2) I am grateful for my co-workers and supervisors who value my attitude, approach, and contributions.

I want to particularly thank the individuals at my workplace, including people to whom I report as an employee, who have supported me and affirmed my right to speak up. It was a sweet victory, I’ll admit, to be explicitly thanked for the professional manner in which I conducted myself. Some of my detractors have suggested my employer should be ashamed of my behavior; instead, I am proud to work at an institution where challenging my profession to do a better job at being inclusive and social justice oriented is valued. As a supervisor, I have tried to foster a workplace culture of engaged professionalism and passionate advocacy. I also demand that all of my staff, regardless of their age or professional status, be treated with respect as human beings and archivists/librarians. I thank my mentors for modeling and making this possible.

3) “Benign neglect” is not benign. It’s just neglect.

Moving on to more critical points, I’m going to begin by reiterating that abdication of responsibility for a situation is, in fact, an active decision for which a person or group bears responsibility. When individuals are being bullied, harassed, condescended to, discounted, or otherwise marginalized, “benign neglect” is not benign. It’s just neglect.

In this situation, we had a group of people, the Dissenter(s) and Supporters, explaining that situation Q wasn’t working for them -- for a variety of intertwined reasons. Then we had a group of people whose response could be summed up as “I like things the way they are,” or “The way things are works for me.” There is nothing wrong with that experience; it is yours. Yet it does nothing to address the issue, which is that the status quo isn’t working for other people. Yes, your experience is part of the picture. But it’s not the only, most important, or truest perspective on the situation. Even if situation Q is the most ideal world you can imagine for yourself, I believe the fact that it is not working for someone, perhaps actively injuring them, should be of concern. To you.

But it became clear over the course of the situation that the majority of those speaking up within the listserv forum do not feel that way. I hope (suspect) this is not true of the over six thousand subscribers, the majority of whom are lurkers.

IMPORTANT: If you’re one of those concerned individuals, please take the time to comment on the SAA draft Code of Conduct before comments close on June 22nd. This Code of Conduct is a formal statement that SAA does not condone, among other things, “abusive verbal comments,” “deliberate intimidation,” and “sustained disruption of talks or other events.” While not sufficient on its own, a Code of Conduct gives Dissenters and Supporters a framework for seeking redress. Even if you are not a dues-paying SAA member, you can email your comments and support for the CoC to saahq@archivists.org.

4) As I predicted in my original post, the dynamic of bullying and exclusion did repeat itself again … the following week, and again … the following week.

Following my post, which was eventually circulated to the listserv by X himself, we had an “on list” discussion that basically replicated the original discussion. Only with a few extra juicy contributions from “professionals” accusing me of gross impropriety and paranoid delusion. This time, I was cast in the role of Dissenter (with some excellent Supporters). Once again we had Fixers, Defenders, Concern Trolls, Drama Queens, and Shamers all piping up in the more or less predictable pattern.

As I prep this post to go live, I'm watching the cycle unfold all over again.

My central takeaway from the experience is therefore that I learned nothing new that I hadn’t learned from last time; the “discussion” only served to further reinforce my judgments regarding the collective will to change that I had made earlier. As I wrote on Twitter:

@DerangeDescribe @herodotusjr @adr @Dont_Read_AandA the sad thing is how each retaliation re: my #thatdarnlist post reinforces my argument.
— feministlibrarian (@feministlib) June 13, 2014

This dynamic also reinforces my point (perhaps not as clear as it should have been in the original post) that the individual I called X is not personally the core problem here. I have some issues with his attitude and actions, but his behavior causes problems not primarily because of how he behaves but because of how the community incorporates -- dare I say centers -- him and others with a similar M.O. Again, this is not a "bad apple" situation, but a community culture issue.

5) It is not my job to educate the (obviously reluctant) list community on the dynamics of social inequality. 

I've had some people encourage me to approach SAA about collaborating on a fix to this situation. I gotta say, my feels at this point are that I'm not feelin' it.

(via)

On the one hand, I’m an inveterate Meddler. As my wife can tell you, someone punches down and she glances at her watch to start counting down the seconds until I can no longer help myself. That’s how this whole kerfluffle started, after all. Last year, I subscribed to A&A after years of just skimming the archive because someone was being a bully and I couldn’t let that sort of nonsense stand. I waded in this time around because of more or less the same dynamic. And I know I’ll be wading in again (and again, and again) in future.

But ultimately, the suggestions that I “reach out” to SAA or otherwise labor in a more formal capacity to change the situation leave me pretty skeptical. There are people who do this sort of training for a living; I am not one of them. And, as the Code of Conduct demonstrates, we’re not reinventing the wheel here. I refuse to fall into the trap of what might be called “teaching up,” or buying into a framework that requires the oppressed to educate the oppressor before those in power consider the need for change. I shouldn’t have to “ask” or offer my labor in order for education and change to happen. It should be (and hopefully is) happening from within.

6) Which brings me to the point that all of this is, in fact, emotional/mental/physical labor. Professional labor.

I’m aware that throughout this debate I’ve chosen (and it’s been a conscious choice) to play according to the rules of a politics of respectability. There’s a reason my boss got praise for my professionalism from others in the field, and that’s because I exerted a powerful lot of will over my desire to compose emails that were more along the lines of “I can’t even with this effing entitlement,” or “You, sir, are a paranoid dipshit.” This was exhausting. It cost me several sleepless nights (and the subsequent price of excessive coffee). I sat at my computer shaking with adrenaline, poured over every obsessively-crafted email and comment before hitting “post” or “send,” and had to keep going back after my words went live to re-read them and reassure myself I had said what I meant to say, the way I meant to say it.

Taking a page from Melissa McEwan’s recent playbook, I’m acknowledging (and will continue to acknowledge) this labor, and its unequal distribution along a number of vectors including gender. I’m going to go out on a limb here and speculate that I spent more time considering how to discuss my detractors' (and in some cases accusers') arguments than at least two of the more vocal individuals spent thinking about me as a human being and as a colleague. I am extremely lucky (see #1-2 above) to have allies, among them supervisors, whose trust in my professionalism I have earned. If I were someone more vulnerable, the accusations that were leveled against me within this professional community could have had real consequences for my career.

I don’t get the sense the individuals who clicked “send” on those emails or “post” on those comments actually thought about that -- except perhaps in the hopeful "she ought to be put in her place!" sense.

This highlights the dynamics (gendered and otherwise) at play here that I outlined in my original post. I -- the younger, early-career librarian, queer female blogger -- understand that my (professional) reputation is contingent on those with more power in (my professional) world “allowing” me to speak. I write, I revise, I document, I supply evidence, I qualify. While at least one of the men who disliked what I had to say wrote emails calling me a “radical feminist” (intended to be insulting but, um, it’s kinda right there in the name?), demonstrating poor reading comprehension and research skills, and suggested to a forum of six thousand individuals in my field that I had leveled baseless accusations of “moral impropriety” against X -- a (deliberate?) distortion of my argument.

Emails to which he signed his own name, job title, and place of work.

My point is that while I was up sleepless at 2am wondering if my carefully worded emails or carefully personal blog posts were going to upset someone, somewhere, whose opinion I care about -- or whose opinion may have professional consequences for me -- or who might decide to take out his anger against me in more personal ways -- this individual felt comfortable writing a troll-worthy rant about my “Soviet” politics and sending it tied to his real-world identity to a listserv at least nominally administered by his national professional organization. With (apparently) little or no fear of the consequences.

If that isn’t evidence of structural, socialized entitlement I’m frankly not sure what is.

7) The Amiable Archivists' Salon

Which brings me to the seventh and final thought I would like to share with you. And that is something most of you reading this post already know. Working for a more just, kind, inclusive, world (or profession) is work. It’s emotional work, it’s political work, it’s physical work.It takes spoons. Sometimes we have ‘em, sometimes we don’t. And it’s important to know how and when to use the spoons you have to give. So I've been thinking about how I want to use the spoons I have for this particular situation.

After reflection and discussion, I’ve decided I would like to establish an Amiable Archivists’ Salon*, a discussion and support group for those experiencing marginalization within the profession. The listserv lurkers who’ve contacted me more often than not express feelings of intimidation and isolation -- not just on the list, but in their chosen feel more broadly. I would like to do what I can to address that, building ties among us that can hopefully lead to more effective profession-wide intervention and cultural change. I'm a meddler (see #5) and I know I'll keep wading into this situation and trying to make it better, but I'd really rather not do it alone -- or fearful of being "the only one."

If you are interested in participating in these discussions, please fill out this brief ten-question survey to let me know who you are, what issues you want to see addressed, and what your goals for the group would be. If I receive six or more responses by July 1st I will contact the potential participants by email and together we can decide next steps.

*h/t to my wife, Hanna, for what I feel is a suitably "tea time & teach-ins" nom de groupe.

once upon a listserv: thoughts on professionalism, privilege, and power [#thatdarnlist]

Thank you to all whose thoughts helped form this post. 

Coincidentally, this is the 1200th post to go live at the feminist librarian. I've learned a lot from this idiosyncratic labor of love. It's been great to have y'all along for the ride.

(via)

So a thing happened last week on one of the professional listservs I subscribe to. While I’m relatively new to this listserv, having been subscribed for roughly a year, I’ve been around long enough to know this is not an isolated happening in this particular online community. Similar incidents, involving many of the same players, have happened before. More importantly for this blog post, this thing that happened follows a wider pattern, one that will be familiar to most folks guilty of “blogging while female” or “blogging while queer” or “blogging while [insert marginalized identity group here].” As a veteran of the feminist blogosphere (at seven years and counting the feminist librarian is firmly middle-aged in Internet time) I’ve seen it happen before in other forums, and will no doubt see it again. It’s a worrying pattern, a pattern of unethically leveraged power and privilege, and I believe strongly that it needs to be named as such.

Thus, this post.

I’m going to tell the story of what happened without naming names or linking to specific emails in the listserv archive. Those of you interested in reading all 91 emails in the thread can find the archive here. Scattered additional responses can also be found seeded through the listserv archive from May 19 through May 23. Many of you will have already followed the exchanges in real time. Even so, I have chosen to describe what happened in archetypal terms because my goal here is not to reopen/rehash the details of specific exchanges. Rather, I hope to point out how the dynamic at play is a familiar one to many of us, particularly those of us on the receiving end of its toxic effect, and to bear witness to the way its poisonous effect ripples out under the guise of “professional” interactions.

Simply put, regardless of specific individuals’ intent, the net effect of the interactions that took place has been to reinforce the status quo of social privilege for some and marginalization of others. Because that’s how structural prejudice works. The net effect of this particular incident (as in previous iterations of the same) has been to reinforce the status quo through a discouraging pattern of behavior, one that is identifiable to us in the “blogging while…” crowd. 

And it’s a pattern that, in this community, has been repeatedly denied, ignored, minimized, and obfuscated throughout the interaction, by multiple people who should know better (or should know enough to listen to those who do know better).

I write this post from my own relative position of privilege in the world of librarians and archivists. Although I am an early career professional I have a secure, full-time position. Many of the individuals I’ve interacted with via email in the past week have expressed legitimate fear of going “on record” about the situation due to the fact that they’re currently job seeking or otherwise job-insecure. I write this post on behalf of all of them (and with their anonymous editorial guidance) because I am in a position to do so while they are not.

That acknowledged, back to our story.

There’s a professional listserv. It’s a profession in which women are the majority, yet in this online forum, an “unmoderated” email list sponsored by the national professional organization, a single mid-career, male contributor -- we’ll call him X -- dominates. In a recent quantitative analysis of the top fifty contributors by volume to the listserv, over 45% of the emails are generated by X. The majority of his contributions are what’s known colloquially as “linkspam” -- links to online content relevant to the field, offered up with little or no contextual explanation. 

(As someone who habitually tags, and religiously reads, “linkspam” lists made by my favorite bloggers, I recognize the value of curated links lists. However, there are legitimate views across the spectrum from “always love ‘em” to “always hate ‘em.” And content value can, and should, be separated here from the size and shape of one’s digital footprint.)

In addition, X also has a history of responding authoritatively and dismissively to the concerns of younger, primarily female, professionals who bring issues to the listserv for discussion. Time and time again, he positions himself as the arbiter of what is and is not accepted professional practice. So, as is often the case in online forums, this individual has become, over time, a sort of shorthand for those frustrated by both his specific behaviors and also what his continued presence exemplifies about the community in which he thrives.

Last week, as happens occasionally, a person spoke up, on the list, questioning this dynamic. 

Does anyone else find the dominance of this one individual annoying? the Dissenter asks (the Dissenter happens to have male name, though his student status marks him as an individual in the early stages of his career). Perhaps we could manage this individual’s participation such that he did not dominate the list, leaving space for others to meaningfully participate?

This opening salvo prompts three groups of listserv participants to respond:

1. The Fixers. These individuals offer individualistic solutions to the Dissenter’s problem: “If you don’t like X’s contributions, the delete button is always an option!” Regardless of tone -- condescending or supportive -- the problem with this type of response is that it places the burden of managing what is a community-wide issue on the person who has identified it, not the community as a whole. Too often, the “fix” serves to further isolate the Dissenter, and others like them, from the community rather than providing a way to increase participation.

2. The Defenders. These individuals categorically deny that the Dissenter has a point, asserting that X’s contributions bring much value to the list; over time, these assertions grow ever more fulsome. X labors tirelessly on behalf of the profession yet gets only criticism in return! X is generous with his wisdom and you ungrateful children fail to recognize its worth! 

This type of response works to turn a discussion that should be about how to share community space (recall our original request: “could we manage this person’s participation … leaving space for others to meaningfully participate?”) into a discussion about the value of X’s contributions (and, implicitly, X as an individual). This is a common dynamic in social justice circles, where raising questions about structural discrimination all too often results in defensive reactions by individuals and their protectors who make it personal (“But she doesn’t have a racist bone in her body!” “But he grew up poor!” “I couldn't possibly be anti-gay, some of my best friends are lesbians!”).

This defense of the status quo, in turn, prompts...

3. ...The Supporters of our original Dissenter to speak up, adding their voices and perspectives to the discussion. Yet they’ve already learned, by watching how the Fixers and Defenders responded, to speak up in careful and conciliatory terms: “Oh, no, we aren’t questioning the value of X’s participation -- indeed, we find much of value in his perspective! We are only asking for a little more room at the table.” This apologetic approach, while (sometimes) effective in protecting the Supporter from accusations of unprofessionalism, of personal attacks, of mean-spirited snark, unfortunately also undermines the Dissenter/Supporter position by turning what should be non-negotiable expectation of respectful, welcoming behavior that is the responsibility of all community members into an “ask” which the powerful within the group can grant or deny.

Eventually, after a period of silence, X himself steps into the fray. Notably, he chooses to do so not in response to the (male) Dissenter but in specific response to a female Supporter, a young professional. This is a woman who has articulated clearly how his dominance on the list has the effect of silencing others, and who has offered several community solutions which could potentially meet the needs of both Defenders and Supporters. In mansplainy tones, X ignores her community-based solutions and goes full-on Fixer, suggesting the issue is her (and others’) ineptness with technology rather than his manner of participation in the shared space of the online forum.

If only these children would shut up and sit down until they learned the proper skills to participate on my terms. It’s simple, really.

Another key feature of these interactions is that X has a habit of responding to criticism “off list,” via direct email. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, he may be unaware of how this action comes across to the (often young, female) recipients of his unsolicited emails. Rather than being some sort of polite follow-up, it’s a bright red flag for any woman with experience “blogging while female.”

Rule number one for many female bloggers is to never, ever let conversations move out of the public realm. For most of us, uninvited contact by men attempting to continue public debates (particularly disagreements) privately is a power play. In our experience, men who angle for private discussion are angling for the upper hand, in a space where we a) won’t be able to draw on others’ support for our position, and b) where the evidence of whatever harassment, manipulation, or abuse they engage in will be out of sight. For an older male colleague to take a disagreement with a young woman in the same field “off list” is an isolating maneuver, whether or not it’s intended as such. Most of us have learned the hard way not to engage, or to take our responses back to the public realm, rather than let backchannel condescension escalate into harassment, stalking, or worse.

(I drafted this post before the #YesAllWomen hashtag went viral on Twitter in response to the misogynist motivations of the Isla Vista shooter, but this safety-first approach to online communication with men we don’t know fits into the category of experience #YesAllWomen seeks to highlight: the ways in which we perceived-female persons negotiate the world ever-mindful of the potential of gender-motivated violence.)

Meanwhile, of course, the discussion around X and his place on the list continues. Even as the Fixer, Defender, and Supporter emails continue at a steady clip, The Feels reach new levels of intensity and spawn a second layer of response:

4. The Disaffected. The Disaffected contributors position themselves above The Feels, intermittently pointing out to the group as a whole how petty their concerns about community behavior are, suggesting that the dissenters/supporters are simply making a mountain out of a molehill.

Since some people on Twitter raised this concern, I want to explicitly acknowledge here  that walking away from a community debate/discussion/argument you are not able to participate in (for whatever reason) is a form of self care and never needs justification. You get to set boundaries for yourself, full stop.

The Disaffected, however, are not engaging in self care (or not only that). Instead, they are Making A Point by walking out in a huff. This trivializes the concerns of the Dissenter and Supporters by sending the message that their concerns are unworthy of serious consideration, or the labor (emotional or otherwise) that it will take to address them.

5. The Concern Trolls, meanwhile, similarly position themselves as the group with a more mature perspective, over and against those who are absorbed in petty or narcissistic concerns. “Why are you all wasting time on issue Y when WORLD HUNGER” goes the concern troll’s argument. “Why are you arguing amongst yourselves when federal funding for our profession is on the chopping block?!”

Such arguments will be familiar to anyone who has ever discussed modern American feminist politics, where this gambit typically takes the form of “Why are American women complaining about [equal pay, sexualization, street harassment, reproductive rights] when women in [Sudan, Iraq, China, Ukraine, Indonesia, Cuba] don’t even have [clean water, voting rights, contraceptives, are dying of AIDS].” This is a false dichotomy in which situation B is thrown up as if in competition with situation A for attention. Both A and B can be (and usually are) important. In fact, they are often interconnected. Discussing or addressing one does not equate to ignoring the other.

In this instance, how we behave toward one another as colleagues within a given professional community is intimately entangled with how we engage in growing and advocating for the profession as a whole, how effectively we are able to do our jobs, and how we mentor those who will be future leaders in the field. How we treat one another speaks volumes about how we treat those we serve professionally (or, you know, ask for funding from). It’s not a distraction from substance; it’s substantially about who and what we are as practitioners of our craft.

6. The Drama Queen. You know that guy (and yes, it’s pretty much always a guy) who stands ready to cry “censorship!” or “It’s a free country!” in any Internet context in which requests for comment moderation or policies regarding participation are under discussion? Yeah. We had that guy.

7. The Equal Opportunity Shamers. Late in the game come the Shamers, who take it upon themselves to blame and shame all participants in the debate for behaving badly. As is typical, the Shamers wait until enough mud has been slung and hurtful words exchanged that they can point to “bad” behavior on both sides and ignore the substantive issues even as they ask (or require, if they have the power) that everyone be civil.  In this instance, they invoked “professionalism” and the listserv Terms of Participation to issue general slaps on the wrist for those who, in their estimation, were contravening both.

This post facto moderation tactic does a couple of tricksy things in aid of perpetuating the status quo.

First, Shaming blurs the distinction between the Dissenter and their Supporters and the individual(s) whose behavior was initially being questioned. The Shamer slaps them collectively on the wrist for uncivil behavior, acts as the tone police, or uses a variety of other tactics to imply or even outright assert that naming the offense is as bad as -- if not worse than! -- the offense itself.

Such an approach is one I’m very familiar with engaging with anti-marriage-equality folks in the blogosphere, where identifying anti-gay speech or actions as, well, anti-gay will bring out cries of intolerance when comments calling queer folk child abusers are overlooked as normal or negligible (#YesAllQueers).

Second, this false equivalence of behavior has the effect of ensuring that the individual(s) whose actions have been questioned continue to believe in their rightness, while the individual(s) who have raised the questions are quashed. This is because, in the type of scenario I’m talking about here, X  began the day in a position of social privilege, and X’s challengers began the day in a position of relative vulnerability. Professionally vulnerable people who find their professional behavior under question will, quite sensibly, withdraw from the discussion. Professionally secure people will shrug because, I was only defending myself from my accusers, after all, and everyone knows how much value I bring to the table.

While seemingly neutral, treating all people the “same” with their admonishments, the Shamers’  tone policing that fails to engage with the dynamics of privilege and power is anything but neutral. Instead, it ends up serving the already powerful and doing nothing to protect the already vulnerable.

To put it another way, what we saw last week was a highly influential man who had his position at the center of a specific social group challenged by younger, less-influential (and mostly female) individuals who are also part of the same group. He, and perhaps more importantly his supporters, dismissed their concerns. They used the discourse of professionalism and the rules for participation in the forum to enforce the status quo rather than to address structural inequality.

An opportunity was lost, and we are all the poorer for it.

I’m telling this story because this pattern will be repeated, but it doesn’t have to be. Instead, as a professional community, we could decide that it matters to us that all of our colleagues -- no matter how young, structurally powerless, or socially vulnerable they are -- feel welcomed to participate in the listserv of our profession.

We could decide it matters to us that a single individual, no matter how well-respected and valued by members of the community, takes up as much (virtual) space as he does, and we could ask him to take a step back and listen for awhile, instead of perpetually dominating the conversation. (I offer this as a voluble talker and writer who is no stranger to being asked to step back and let others’ speak.)

We could decide to value, encourage, even demand, broad-based participation and open-ended conversation rather than instructional, condescending responses. 

We could decide to cultivate playfulness, humor, nerdiness, cooperation, encouragement, and speaking truth to power in ways that "punch up" rather than "punch down." And we could decide that these things were not incompatible with being professionals.

Yet for now, we appear to have decided that not hurting a single, powerful professional’s feelings and/or not asking him to modify his participation within the community is a more valuable goal than the goals above. 

We’ve decided that giving one person a national, sponsored platform on which to disseminate his opinions in an endless stream, and in a manner that drives some of our fellow practitioners away, is more important than fostering meaningful conversation and networking for all who serve our professional goals.

On the afternoon of the day I began drafting this post, X made a contribution to the ongoing debate that I believe brings the arc of this particular story to an all-too-familiar close. Following the intervention of the Shamers, which effectively shut down the possibility of challenges by the less powerful, X saw fit to suggest that more profoundly alienating, more profoundly “abusive,” than his own behavior, is the behavior of those who post to the listserv with too little or too much of the previous messages in the thread left at the end of their emails.


Because at the end of the day, who’s the real victim here? One way or another, apparently, it’s got to be him. 

Lesson learned, I guess.

I hope, in future, we revise the curriculum.

presentation @ boston college

On March 29th I attended the Biennial Boston College Conference on History of Religion and presented a paper that tried, for the first time, to offer up some analysis regarding my current project. A big thanks to the conference coordinators for a great experience!

This project is, broadly, exploring the ways in which the Christian left negotiated sex, sexuality, and gender during the thirty year period between 1960 and 1980. Narrowly, for this paper, I looked at a ten-year period of the Methodist publication motive for clues regarding mainline Protestant conceptions of gender and sexuality. As I've mentioned before in this space, I'm particularly interested in what the magazine had to say about sexuality because after breaking with the church, the publication's final two issues focused on the topics of gay liberation and lesbian/feminism (their terminology). Rather than seeing this break as a natural, inevitable conflict between a traditionalist anti-gay church and more radical youth activists, I am asking why Christian left theology ultimately failed to provide a hospitable atmosphere for meaningful, nuanced discussion about queer sexual morality.

At least, that's what I'm fumbling my way toward asking. I'm not sure how close this one conference paper gets to that goal -- but it is a start. So for those who've been following my research this past year, I offer this work-in-progress as a reward.

Access the PDF online via Google Drive.

I'd also like to give a shout-out to my two excellent and inspiring co-panelists, Trevor Burrows (Purdue University) and Casey Bohlen (Harvard University), both of whom are working on aspects of Christian faith and political action during what we might term the "long Sixties" -- looking back into the 1950s and forward toward the 1980s.  I look forward to watching their progress as scholars and writers in the field.

booknotes: the accidental diarist

The latest issue of NEHA News (PDF) arrived in the post earlier this week. Actually, four copies arrived because for some reason Hanna and I are listed on the membership rolls twice each and can't get the organization to fix the glitch.

Anyway. I have a review therein of Molly McCarthy's most entertaining new monograph The Accidental Diarist: A History of the Daily Planner in America (University of Chicago Press, 2013)*: 

For nearly two decades, I have habitually carried a day planner in which to note future tasks and appointments, track expenses, and mark the passage of time. At the end of every year, I add the used-up planner to a box in the back of my closet before opening a fresh volume and starting anew. Until reading Molly McCarthy’s The Accidental Diarist, I had never considered this habit in historical context. Now I have. 

In five thematic chapters, loosely arranged in chronological order, McCarthy (Associate Director of the UC Davis Humanities Institute) explores the development of the modern day planner from early Colonial almanacs to the advent of the Wanamaker Diary in 1900. Combing through centuries of daily records kept by American men and women in pre-printed “blank” books, McCarthy documents the way in which Americans learned to use almanacs, diaries, and planners to both reflect on the past and plan for the future. She argues convincingly that the daily planner was a training ground for modern ways of organizing life. 

Read the full review at the NEHA website.

In the interest of full disclosure, Molly McCarthy is a former MHS research fellow, although her residence at the MHS was before my time, and I assisted her on obtaining images of materials at the Society to illustrate the book. Her project is, I would argue, an excellent example of the work historians can do with the seemingly opaque objects of history that, when put in context, are much more revealing than they first appear.

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

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

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

Neither of these frames are factually incorrect. We are often underpaid professionals who continue to do the work we're qualified to do out of personal passion and a belief that what we research and share with the world matters in some "greater good" sort of way.

Yet practically, this attitude toward our own work erases the necessity of, well, paying rent. It also colludes with a culture that equates cost with value to erase the work that goes into our creations. By romanticizing the historian (or any other intellectual or artist) who labors with little expectation of financial solvency, let alone reward, we contribute to a culture that devalues what we do. A culture that allows the institutions that employ many of us to pay wages that leave us perpetually financially insecure.

I have a couple of good blog posts on this subject -- by people more eloquent than I -- that I'd like to share, but first let me describe the situation that sparked these reflections.

As Reference Librarian at the Massachusetts Historical Society, one of my primary responsibilities is facilitating all of the requests for images of material in our collections for use in publications and other projects like documentary films, exhibitions, websites, and so forth. It's one of my favorite parts of the job: it allows me to stay in touch with what use people are making of the resources we make available, and increasingly means (as I pass the six-year mark!) that I see researchers whom I worked with at the beginning of their project finally completing their PhDs or winning a book contract or having an article accepted for publication.

(via Massachusetts Historical Society)

Images you can pull off our website, are available to re-purpose in certain exempt contexts -- classroom lecture, conference presentation, personal blog -- free of charge. The image above is a letter I wrote about for our February 2011 object of the month series.

For made-to-order high resolution images (the file type most professional projects require) incur fees. We charge for this service along two scales. There are reproduction fees, which cover the cost of the labor in producing the image; people are required to pay this fee regardless of how they are using the image -- even if they're just going to hang it on their bedroom wall. Then there are licensing fees, which are charged based on the nature of the publication; we license the images we create that people go on use in their own creations as a way to earn some income from our own creations (the digital reproductions of material in our collections) and pay not only staff salaries, but also for the ongoing care and keeping of these valuable historical documents and artifacts. 

This can be expensive. Images cost $45-60 per file in reproduction fees, and anywhere from $0-450.00 per image in licensing fees. If you are an author seeking to use multiple images in your forthcoming book this can add up fast. I've worked with several authors in the past year who, despite small academic press print runs, have faced over $1,000 as a quote for obtaining the images they would ideally like to use. Our fees are steeper than some independent research libraries charge, but also more sensitive to the scale of individual projects than others. In short, we're balancing the desire to provide access with the need to pay our staff for the work that they do and all of the not-inconsiderable overhead of preservation, storage, and security.

While most people understand this, I do have the occasional individual who tries to haggle with me to get the prices reduced or eliminated. They cite a series of potentially mitigating factors: their relationship with the Society, the fact that they're paying out of pocket for the images, the fact that they're retirees on fixed incomes, that they're academics on tight incomes, that other institutions have offered them lower rates or waived the fees, that the author will not be making only -- sometimes, in fact, they're losing money -- on this project, and so forth. 

I'm sympathetic. I really am. I also understand completely when people decide they can't afford our prices and seek cheaper images elsewhere -- I likely would in their shoes if the cost was prohibitively high. I wish them the best and honestly mean every word that I type. 

But having had several exchanges along similar lines in the past few weeks, I've been wishing I could have slightly more meta conversations with some of these people. "If you've spent ten years writing and researching this book on your own dime," I was to ask them, "why for all that you hold holy have you signed a contract with a for-profit press that is requiring you to pay upfront for all of the production costs?" 

Or, sometimes, when they get sniffy about how steep our fees are, I want to lean a little heavier on the words labor and staff time in my replies. "Why," I want to ask them, "do you feel entitled to obtain something from us for free, even after I explain to you that creating this product takes the time and effort of half a dozen people who work at our library?" 

In these exchanges, I sometimes see an altruistic competitiveness creep in that's really unattractive: I've labored over this work for years without complaint, expecting little reward, some people seem to imply (likely not consciously), and because I'm not benefiting financially from this project -- in fact, I'm losing money! -- you should be likewise generous to the cause of History and give these images to the project for free. 

Sometimes, there's even the implication that we're somehow holding these digital photographs hostage, selfish money-grubbing institution that we are.

The librarian part of my soul certainly kens this argument. If our society was structured differently, with robust socialized funding for cultural heritage institutions and a guaranteed national income for all citizens that provided me and my family (and everyone!) with food security, housing security, and healthcare, then I would absolutely advocate we digitize and make freely available the images our scholars want to use. They are smart, articulate, energetic, diligent, and prolific people -- and the wide range of stories they come up with to tell using the rich materials in our collections are part of what make my job a daily joy. 

But we don't currently live in that world, and in the world we do live in we should not undervalue our own already culturally devalued work by setting ourselves up pre-emptively as martyrs.

Think carefully before you give your work away, particularly to others who will make a profit from it. 

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

Sometimes people will charge what you feel is too much for their labor or products. It's certainly fair to decline their goods and services and go elsewhere. If they care about keeping your business, or if too many people decline what they offer because the price is too steep, they will probably decide to lower their prices. 

What you should never do is try to shame or guilt scholars or artists for earning a living doing the work that they love. 

You also shouldn't be ashamed or feel guilty for trying to earn a living doing the work that you love. 

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

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

My current free-lance rate starts at $25.00/hour, exclusive of expenses, though I do negotiate based on the nature of the project. I always advise emerging professionals who ask what to charge that they should never accept less than $15.00/hour for their research or scholarly work.

I promised you links. 

Writer John Scalzi has an excellent round-up of posts he wrote about how to spot an exploitative book contract (and why he would never sign one). If you read only one of the posts, I would recommend "New Writers, eBook Publishers, and the Power to Negotiate":

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

one thousand eight hundred and twenty days [2007-2012]

This weekend marks the end of my fifth year in Boston, and it's become something of a tradition since I began this blog to post some thoughts about where I'm at in my relationship with the city and the grown-up life I'm building for myself here (see previous installments one, two, three, and four).

Five years. Half a decade. While I'm under no illusions that such a period of time makes me a New Englander, it does mean that I've lived in Boston for enough years that the geography of the city is populated with personal memory and meaning. Hanna and I are making certain pathways and places our own. And at some point during this year, I realized that I'd stopped asking myself where we might move next in the national sense (San Francisco? Portland, Oregon? Chicago? Vermont?) and instead begun thinking about where our next household might be in terms of Boston neighborhoods. I walk through the city now and think to myself, "Could we live ...?" "How far from the grocery store is ...?" "Does the bus run ...?"

More about that in the months to come, I imagine, since after six years (for Hanna, at least; four for me) in our current apartment we've pretty much decided to start looking for a new place in the new year. We'd like a place better set up for an old married couple (rather than two roommates) and kitties, and we're finally in a stable enough situation financially that we have some flexibility when it comes to paying a little more for extra space or a garden in which our cats can cavort in safety.

But that's all in the future. (And the 70+ moving vans I've counted in our neighborhood this morning are enough to make you want to stay put permanently!) This is a moment for reflecting back on how much change has passed through my life in the previous five years (aka two hundred and sixty weeks, aka one thousand eight hundred and twenty days).

My, it's been a busy half-decade!

• House and home. 
• [2007] I started out my Boston adventure living in a tiny dorm room at Simmons College. While not inadequate (and I appreciated pre-assigned housing as someone moving from out of state), it was only the second experience I'd had living in a dormitory -- the other being when I studied abroad in 2003-2004 at the University of Aberdeen. I had not anticipated how moving into a dorm and starting graduate school was going to make me feel immature and trapped, rather than ripe with possibility. It was not the best psychological twofer ever.
• [2012] Since moving in with Hanna in May of 2008, I've been living on the border of Allston and Brookline here in the Boston metro area, roughly three miles from the MHS. We walk to work most mornings and often home again as well, through several of our favorite city neighborhoods. Over the past four years, we've shaped and re-shaped our apartment from being a space for two roommates into being a family home -- not to mention eeking out space for about 800 books! As I wrote above, we're slowly making the Boston area our habitat for at least the next five-to-ten years. Which is a much happier, healthier state of mind and place of being than I was right after the move.
• Relationships and romance.
• [2007] As I've written about extensively in other posts, I came to Boston with a (romantic) relationship history of nil and no friends in the area, other than the few contacts I'd had with Simmons students in preparation for my move (Hanna being one of them!). It was the first major move away from my hometown, away from my established support network of family and friends. And during the first twelve months of my time in Boston I was majorly stressed -- as in panic attacks, nausea, and extreme sadness over the geographic distance from loved ones. I wanted and needed, to leave West Michigan -- but the transition was not an easy one. 
• [2012] Since then, obviously, Hanna has happened! In ways that have been fairly extensively documented here (are you all tired of wedding-planning posts yet?). So in five short years I went from being single to nearly-married, and from being non-directionally sexual to being in a lesbian relationship. Both of which have had fairly major effects on how I organize my self-understanding and relational life. In addition, Hanna and I are slowly-yet-steadily building a network of friends near and far: People we go to the movies with, have over for dinner, who kindly watch our cats and pick up the mail when we're out of town for the weekend. People we blog with, email with, host while on visits from afar. This is a major part of what makes Boston start to feel like home.
• Learning and schooling.
• [2007] As most of you know, I moved to Boston for graduate school -- like so many other people who relocate here! For most of my five years here, I was enrolled at least part time in the Simmons library science and history program. It had its highlight and lowlights, as chronicled on this blog. I'm super-proud to have completed my Master of Arts in History through documenting the founding and early history of the Oregon Extension program, and my Master's degree in Library and Information Science opened the door to my current work as a reference librarian, which really was my career objective when I started the program (inasmuch as I had one). So while I found the process psychologically and emotionally exhausting, and perhaps not as intellectually stimulating as I'd hoped, it did position me to move forward outside of the academy as a scholar.
• [2012] Five years later, I'm no longer in school -- and so pleased about that state of affairs. I've come to the conclusion over roughly eleven years in formal schooling (1998-2005, 2007-2011) that institutional education is not healthy for me, despite the fact I perform well therein and many of its resources are useful for my intellectual explorations. So I completed my Masters degrees back in January and May of 2011 and have no plans to return. Meanwhile, I am committed to being a working historian as well as a reference librarian: learning, for me, has never been bound by the schooling. So we'll see where the next five, ten, fifteen years takes me!
• Work, work, work.
• [2007] I moved out to Boston with the promise of financial aid and a part-time position at the Barnes & Noble store in Boston's Prudential Center (an internal transfer from the store where I had been working in Michigan). It became clear almost immediately that the $9/hour they were paying me -- while a raise from my hourly wage in Michigan -- could not cover Boston expenses. So I began looking for other work, particularly pre-professional library work. I interviewed at a few places with no success before landing a position as a library assistant at this place called the Massachusetts Historical Society, which caught my eye in the job postings because I'd heard my friend Natalie talking about her research there. This October 12th will mark my fifth anniversary as a member of the MHS staff.
• [2012] I had other jobs as a graduate student, of course (we all juggle multiple things to make ends meet): teaching assistant at Simmons, archives assistant at Northeastern, internships. It was good experience, but the MHS has always been my professional home. As I'll be writing about more extensively soon, I've recently accepted a promotion from Assistant Reference Librarian to Reference Librarian, a position left open when a colleague departed for the wilds of Rhode Island. The folks I work with have been unfailingly supportive in my professional endeavors and I'm looking forward to a part of the team for years to come.
• Writing of many kinds.
• [2007] I started this blog in the spring of 2007 to chronicle my graduate school and relocation experiences. As I remarked in an email to a friend recently, I'm a compulsive self-chronicler (an observation that will come as a surprise to no one reading this post). When I'm not blogging I'm journaling or emailing or jotting down notes for future projects. I think better with a pen or pencil in hand; this has been true pretty much since I learned how to write (though I was a bit of a late bloomer in that regard). 
• [2012] Nine hundred and ninety blog posts later, I'm still writing, writing, writing: blost posts, fan fiction, academic papers, post-academic papers, emails, journal entries -- even documentary film scripts! Looking ahead to my sixth year as a Bostonian, I'll be completing a free-lance documentary film project with my friend Heather, which involves charting a family's genealogy in video form; I'll be forging ahead with my research on Nellie Keefe; I'm musing about a collaborative project on sexual fluidity with a couple of friends; I have half a dozen fan fics (Supernatural, Downton Abbey, Upstairs, Downstairs) waiting for completion, and I've been enjoying my gig as an occasional blogger at In Our Words. 

Shorter me: I'm becoming (have become?) the Crazy Lesbian Librarian Cat Lady of my dreams! Also, Elizabeth Brown.

grownups by xkcd

I'm looking forward to sharing the next five years -- at least! -- with all of you right here at the feminist librarian. My internet home.

blogging at In Our Words: to be and to have (a wife)

lesbianweddings.tumblr.com

This week I have a guest post up at In Our Words on why I wanted to get gay-married:

I've learned that being public about our relationship matters to me. That naming has power. I relish naming her my girlfriend my partner my future wife in conversation with others. I want (need?) everyone to know we are a social unit, and exactly what kind of unit we are.

It matters to me that bystanders be in no doubt that we are in each other’s pants on a regular basis, thank you very much, and they will just have to deal. Because the public sphere is mine as much as theirs, and I’m not backing down from making promises to be and to have before witnesses. By just being who we are, building a life together, we change the meaning of marriage – I believe for the better. And that's an act to be proud of.

So as a queer feminist and historian, I see marrying my fianceé as both an intensely personal act of commitment and also a deeply political act: inventing the future we're hoping for. Becoming Future Wife's Wife is a material statement that we have the right to act on our desires, to form families that work for us, and to name our relationships with the rich weight of history behind us, if that language feels right to us.

You can read the whole thing over at IOW. It was a surprisingly difficult piece to keep on focus with, and I'm still not entirely satisfied with the end result -- but I learned some stuff about how I think and feel writing it, which is always the ultimate goal! That, and encouraging others to reflect as well. So I hope folks find it a thought-provoking read.

"in their graves because of false modesty"? [neha spring 2012]

This past Saturday, I presented a paper at the spring meeting of the New England Historical Association (NEHA) at Rivier College in Nashua, New Hampshire. You can check out the full text of the presentation here: "In Their Graves Because of False Modesty?": An Allegation of Sexual Assault in Boston, 1914-1915 (PDF, via DropBox).

The paper was my first attempt to pull together a research project I'm working on into a coherent narrative. The research concerns a mysterious deposition I stumbled upon in the Godfrey Lowell Cabot Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society. As I write in the opening paragraphs:

Mediated, it is true, by the framework of legal testimony, the narrative voice of the deposition is nevertheless an active one. [Nellie] Keefe [the deposed] describes herself purposefully seeking medical treatment and intervening in that treatment when it goes contrary to her expectations. She positions herself as a consumer of medical services, with the ability to select a treatment plan with which she feels comfortable, rather than the passive recipient of medical care with which she is uncomfortable -- from a medical professional whose authority she should not, or cannot, challenge. She evokes the spectre of sexual aggression by describing how Dr. Underhill “turned the light out [and] inserted his finger in my vagina,” yet ultimately circumscribes Underhill's actions by indicating that she successfully ordered him to stop.

To the modern reader, the deposition feels both remarkably contemporary, yet also deeply embedded in an historically-specific set of social and medical expectations surrounding patient-doctor interactions. While Keefe's self-reported actions make clear that she was dissatisfied with Underhill's professionalism, she also indicates that Dr. Underhill was similarly dissatisfied with her performance of the role as patient. “During the treatments he would pull the blanket off me and I would pull it on again and he would pull it off again leaving me stark naked,” she testified, vividly illustrating the battle between patient and doctor over the circumstances under which Keefe's treatment should proceed. Keefe was clearly unhappy with Dr. Underhill's methods, yet returned to his office multiple times to try and negotiate a more satisfactory interaction. What appears at first to be a straightforward account of a doctor's unprofessional conduct is, I would argue, a more complicated document containing multiple and uncertain meanings.

You can download the full paper from DropBox.

Like my past appearances at NEHA, it was great to spend a morning talking history with a diverse and encouraging group of practicing historians from all over New England. I particularly enjoyed the presentation of my co-panelist Allison Hepler (University of Maine, Farmington), whose research into the life of "Communist hussy librarian" Mary Knowles not only paralleled my own project in unexpected ways, but also gave me a certain amount of professional pride (who wouldn't want to be known as a "Community hussy librarian"?!).

While we had very little time for Q & A at the session, I had warm words of encouragement from folks for the continuation of my research. What questions and reflections I did field helped clarify how I might move forward from here. I'm particularly motivated to explore the network of female friendships and associations that seem to be such a central part of the Keefe-Underhill case. Time to roll up my sleeves and get to work exercising my reference and historical research skills!

review of "hillbilly nationalists"

I have a book review of  Amy Sonnie and James Tracy's Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times (Melville House, 2011) in the Spring 2012 issue of the newsletter of the New England Historical Society (NEHA). Sonnie and Tracy explore, through oral history and archival research, the history of working-class white activism, primarily in the Chicago area, during the 60s and 70s, with an emphasis on the alliances between poorer whites and non-whites to work for social change.

The co-authors of Hillbilly Nationalists have taken on the ambitious project of researching and describing the under-documented efforts of white, working-class community organizers in the urban North during the 1960s and 70s. Sonnie is an educator, librarian, and author who co-founded the Center for Media Justice; Tracy is a social justice organizer in the San Francisco Bay area who focuses on issues of poverty, racism, and the environment. Drawing on extensive archival research and over sixty oral history interviews, these two practiced scholars map out the short-term politics and long-term effects of inter-racial community organizing in the era of Black Power.

Read the rest in the PDF newsletter, which you can download from the NEHA website.

"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.