"All you fascists bound to lose: I said all you fascists bound to lose"

The women of the internet are tired, and I'm tired too.

Tired of the judgement and action of bystanders (which is to say, people who don't know shit about us and our lives).  Here, "The day I was almost arrested for having an autistic son," by Marie Myung-Ok Lee.

Tired of advice that does not fit our situations: here, from Black Girl in Maine.

Tired of wondering how it could possibly still be true that so many people reduce the worth of women to our physical bodies.  Here, Rebecca Traister's "I don't care if you like it."

Tired of having to worry that we are feeding the problems of judgement and disrespect when we celebrate our own lives.  Here, "Inside" from Breaking into Blossom.

Tired of the institutional and structural failures that allow women's bodies to be brutalized and are then unable to offer comfort to the victims or sanction to the victimizers.  Here: (a warning that if you have not read this article, it is devastating), "Reporting Rape, and Wishing She Hadn't" by Walt Bogdanich.

In all these discontents, I hope I sense a new wave of women's activism coming on strong.

"In her kiss I taste the Revolution"

This is the only back-in-the-day photo I can find (weirdly cropped to protect the innocent).  The year was likely 1997, I remember buying this dress at the Salvation Army-at least I treated it as a dress.  It was like a tiny lampshade, and my friend put a tuck in the back for me so it would fit.  I was into wearing white fishnets, and if you could see my shoes they would be super chunky.

B and I recently watched the documentary The Punk Singer about Kathleen Hanna and Riot Grrrl.  I really enjoyed all the performance footage, which definitely makes it worth watching.  As usual, I'm annoyed that a film that spends some time reflecting on the problem of stars within social movements would choose to feature random quasi-celebrities who had nothing to do with Riot Grrrl reflecting on Riot Grrrl, rather than some of the rank-and-file.  I also don't like it when RG retrospectives present the '90s as a vast wasteland for young feminists.  RG was something new and exciting, but existed within and alongside a variety of other feminist politics (in my humble opinion).

B's critique of the film was that the filmmakers could have make a much more explicit connection between "trashing" and other negative forms of internal policing within feminist groups in the 1970s and disputes about stars and media coverage within RG. B wrote her senior thesis in college on RG, and she wrote this paper about the Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band, which you should read.  And then you should listen to the CWLRB singing "Papa Don't Lay that Shit on Me" here.

After we watched The Punk Singer, B and I were inspired to bust out some of our old records, and reminisce.  It was really fun.  I am eight years older than B, which is at least a generation in music time.  B grew up in the Pacific Northwest listening to gansta rap, while I grew up in the Northeast listening to punk.

B listened to Dr Dre, Ice Cube, and The Coup, and then branched out to Ani DiFranco and Elliott Smith.  The first album I ever bought was Roxanne by The Police and the first show I ever went to was  The Ramones (at the UNH student union).

At some point our music histories intersect.  I bought the Bikini Kill/Huggy Bear album, I think, while I was living in Seattle in 1993.  I loved that album, but I don't think I realized that it was a thing?  I don't know, my memory is so bad.  I think I probably found out about RG by reading an article in the New York Times-clearly I had my finger on the pulse.  B started listening to RG bands and going to shows while in college in the late 1990s, and then got really into Sleater-Kinney (and couldn't tell me precisely how many times she saw them-because I fact check these posts like crazy).

I realize I don't know exactly what was so appealing about this music for B.  For me, it was years putting up with jackasses at shows, being expected to hold the coats, and the casual and not-so-casual misogyny of the punk/hardcore/ska scenes.  And it was also never seeing women on stage for those shows.  It was so great to see and hear women making loud, aggressive music.

 Videos I've watched while writing this post:

Hole's "Pretty on the Inside" on college radio late in 1991 blew me away when I heard it on college radio in 1991.  I had never heard a woman make music that so represented the roiling and seething that I felt on the inside (which is not to say anything about the people who made that album).

Lone Justice, "Ways to Be Wicked," I've always like country music, but I was embarrassed to admit it in the 80s.

I had roommate who was super into SubPop, and I liked this song by a band I'd never heard of called Nirvana.  Nirvana, "Negative Creep."

My other roommates were super into Throwing Muses, and I haven't heard this song in twenty and some years.  It bringing back some memory that I can't quite retrieve.

Trigger Warning

For the past little while, academics have been getting snarky about trigger warnings.  Exhibit A is Laurie Essig's piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education linked here.  Essig complains "It was my duty, apparently, to make sure no one was ever disturbed by my class." And she's also pissed that students didn't laugh at her Abu Ghraib joke.  Around the same time, Oberlin released institutional guidelines about classroom materials that should have a warning, and then backed down on those guidelines: coverage here.

As a college lecturer for some number of years, I do understand faculty discontent on the subject.  Faculty meetings, random service, mentoring, prep, research, incomprehensible administration, and then you have an 18 year old complaining that you're a jerk because you taught standard texts in your field.  It's understandably a "how long was I in school and how much debt did I rack up for this?" moment.

That said, I think I'm with the students on this one.  I've taught many classes about horrifying topics, and I've never had a student complain about the way I presented those materials.  I've rarely censored my choices (I thought about assigning the novel Precious one semester, but decided I just couldn't stomach it).  Instead, my classes are generally one long trigger warning-that is an extended meditation on what it means to read and think about painful topics.  

One the first day of class, I usually talk about how personally painful it can be to study topics like racial discrimination and violence.  How, as a scholar, I find the need to balance empathy with the people I study (trying to imagine what they thought and felt) with the protective qualities of intellectualizing when feeling the pain of my research starts to weigh on me.  I encourage my students to both try and feel what they study at an emotional level, and understand that sometimes, particularly in heated classroom discussion, they need to set that emotion aside and speak from the head.

Texts and topics I've warned my students about reading include, but are not limited to: Native American genocide and removal, anti-gay propaganda, Lincoln's speeches, Civil War poetry, lynchings, most topics in African American history, the books Native Son, The Street, The Women of Brewster Place, and Narrative of Frederick Douglass.  As I've grown as a teacher, I've done more work to prepare students to engage with the painful themes in these texts.

I don't necessarily seek to protect my students from pain, rather I want to prepare them to sit with that pain.  I want to encourage them to develop a radical empathy.  For me, that is the point to teaching history to future doctors, teachers, government officials, and lawyers.   I encourage my students to see history as a discipline that teaches humility, as we see very smart, well intentioned people make choices that sometimes have terrible unintended consequences.  As we study history, we have the privilege of see the past from multiple points of view, and understanding history from the point of view of historical losers can teach us empathy.  I hope that those perspectives with make my students more complex and compassionate thinkers in their professional and personal lives.  

I like to think that my students have been willing to engage with difficult materials because I've made my classrooms a place where that discussion is always on the table.  I can't fix the individual traumas that my student bring the classroom, but I can make my classroom a reasonably safe place to wrestle with pain.  In one of my first years teaching, I assigned a group of students to watch a viciously anti-gay propaganda video and analyze if for the class.  None of those poor gaybies complained, but if they had they would have been right.  Not that I had given the assignment, but that I hadn't given them any preparation for what they were about to see and what they should do with their feelings.  I came to my own realization of my error after seeing their presentation about the video, and it changed the way I taught.

For me, the point is to channel students' pain as they encounter painful subjects into reflection.  There are students who will not be able to engage with some materials because they bring experiences that make that engagement too difficult.  Now, if a student is unable to engage with topics of racial violence and discrimination, they probably should not take an African American history class, but if they don't want to look at a lynching photo (which has happened) or don't want to read a chapter in book with a rape scene, that is not a problem for me as an instructor.  It's easy enough for me to find work arounds for those students.  I think the most problematic issue with trigger warnings, is that they may discount the everyday triggers that people with PTSD or other trauma disorders may experience, and they reduce and simplify the complexities of trauma.  And, there is little I can do protect students from those everyday triggers.  

“You know what’s worse than images of torture? Being tortured.”   That was Laura Essig's Abu Gharib joke.  I think that some of the young professors who are most dismissive of trigger warnings are operating under a very old school model of education.  If one chooses to pour knowledge into students, who am I to say that's wrong, but professors in that mode need to expect push back.  Student have been actively fighting to engage in the classroom since sometime before, say, 1968, and I see the current discussion of trigger warning as an extension of that fight to be in a conversation with faculty.  Personally, I don't particularly want to encourage students to see terrible images and then "put on their big girl panties" and push their emotions away.  I want them to be moved and horrified, and to say "a person did that to another person."  That's the lesson of history.  If they don't like what I assign.  If they think my class is turning into trauma tourism.  If they think I'm too glib or the text don't add to their knowledge, I want them to say that--preferably in class and to my face--so that we can have a discussion about it.  At the beginning of each semester, I tell my students that our class is now an intellectual community.  We need each other, we learn from each other, and that's why I require attendance.  If I truly expect students to contribute to the classroom, I also need to be prepared for their critiques of me.  That's not to say that I will always find those critiques compelling, but I do need to engage with them.

[Aside: A story from an older faculty member: he was teaching at a big state school in the late 1960s.  One day in a big lecture class a hippie girl raised her hand and he called on her.  She said, "This class is a bunch of bull and you are totally out of touch man! " He replied: "Young lady, if you are going to say something like that you need not raise your hand first."]

In closing: the kids are alright.

Hello to all that

We got a Zappos box today, and I realized I've been railing about gender, culture, and children's shoes (excuse me: boys shoes and girls shoes) for three years now.  First it was the shoes of a non-walker.  And then it was the kittycat shoes.

And now all these shoes, mostly from grammy, are getting a little small.  We've pretty successfully avoided pink: there are "beaver shoes" (Oregon State), "Thomas shoes" (I'm not really sure how tweed Toms became Thomas shoes, but I guess they are her most British shoes), shoes that have no name, and "pink shoes." The pink shoes are actually red shoes, and although LB is still a little weak on colors, the pink shoe designation is clearly aspirational.

And so we come to this year's pair of kittycats.  LB reviewed her options and decisively chose these shoes.

Pink kittycats.  When I opened the box, I thought perhaps a flock of tiny princesses would fight their way out.  So far, no, but I'm sure they're lurking somewhere nearby.

The Word that Shall Not Be Spoken

There's one word I heard a lot this week that I will not type for fear that it has some Voldemort-type properties.  There was also a lot of online conversation about the lines between cultural exchange and cultural appropriation, like this piece on Jezebel (interesting links and comments also), and this piece on Slate.  The author of the Slate article, Tressie McMillian Cottom, also wrote this academic looking article about Country, Hip Hop crossover and representations of black women's bodies.  I haven't read it yet, but it looks really interesting and hopefully it will answer so many questions that I've been kicking around as I listen to the country station.

At our house, M.I.A.'s "Bad Girls" has been in heavy rotation at our house (LB says "Play again? Play again?"), a year after everyone else.  When it came out, the video for the song was heavily critiqued for its orientalist imagery.  Here's a nice balanced discussion.  Video aside, M.I.A. is ethnically Tamil, Sri Lankan, raised largely in London performing music rooted in Black America.  And she does it well.  So does M.I.A. have credibility because she's good, because she's not performing class, because her body is covered, because she is brown? (I'm not even trying to have answers to all those questions.)

And then there's this monstrosity (below).  I think what I said when I watched this with B was "is this performance art or something."  I don't even understand how Lil' Debbie manages to fit so many offensive images into one video, but she does.  I need to keep this one on file for future exhibit As about race, gender, sexuality, and cultural appropriation.

This one's for you Mr. Thicke

Strangely, these cards are courtesy of my Father in Law, who was given a stack of them by a feminist friend some decades ago.  I guess he never got around to handing them out.

This weekend I got around to watching the video for "Blurred Lines" (explicit version).  It was almost like Thicke took a Women Studies 101 class, read a little feminist theory, and then set out employ every concept and action critiqued by feminist theorists.  Also, I hear he stole that song from Marvin Gaye.

I guess everyone but me has been busy making a "Blurred Lines' parody video.  I wouldn't call this queer burlesque version a parody, but maybe it will help clear your mind after watching the original.  And if you want to be disturbed all over again, you can watch this (clean) version done by kid performers.  B and I are probably on the fairly permissive side when it comes to toddlers and media, I don't expect that we will change that much as LB gets older (and, yes, this will likely lead to some uncomfortable parent conferences).  But, I think we might need to have a rule that LB can't perform the "clean" version of any song unless we're willing to listen to her sing the explicit version all the way through at least once.  Cee Lo Green's "Fuck You" would probably get green lighted, "Blurred Lines" would certainly not (and neither would Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night," partying until you black out set to an uptempo beat-not cool my young friends).