Thoughts on Gendered Language Use in the Classroom

October 22, 2024 in Education, Feminism, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

Two gendered restroom signs, slightly askew in space

I try to create an inclusive space when I teach, and that means everything from learning my students’ names (even when there are a lot of them!) to not having policies that would make people feel unwelcome (like, I don’t require students to ask me to leave the classroom for any reason; I figure they’re adults, I should treat them as such, plus such a policy might single out students with a disability or medical condition requiring them to stand and stretch their legs or visit the bathroom regularly).

This sense of trying to be an inclusive teacher also extends to how I use language, and how I encourage my students to use language in their writing and speaking. And here, too, my goal of teaching critical thinking skills creeps in, as it often does, because it turns out that being attuned to social justice concerns (those foregrounded in inclusivity practices) also correspond with acknowledging the complexity and diversity of the world around us, and responding with curiosity and empathy rather than trying to wedge everyone and everything into narrow boxes.*

All of this is why I don’t use “male” and “female” as nouns, and why I’d encourage others to give it some thought as well.

 First, the history of these words makes it clear that they have a very specific meaning and narrow usage, which I don’t think should be generalized to “hello, I am addressing a group of humans outside of a medical/reproductive context.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “female” popped up in European languages in the 1300s to mean “A person of the sex that can bear offspring; a woman or a girl.” In addition to the noun usage, female also has an adjective meaning: “That belongs to the sex which can bear offspring (contrasted with male); characteristic of or relating to this sex.” And while I’m less upset by the use of the word as an adjective, it still has that icky reproductive-connotations thing going on. And for what it’s worth, I’ll point out that there are way more entries under the adjective section of the word than the noun section of the word.

Second, I believe addressing people as males and females is potentially exclusionary. I look at all the wealth of information we have about different genders (there are more than two!) and sexes (also more than two!) and I think, why would I address people using binaristic language that’s bound to leave someone out? Maybe someone in my classroom is intersex, trans, or non-binary. Remember, according to some research estimates, around 1.7% of people have an intersex condition and around .5% of the U.S. adult population is trans so combining those facts and knowing that if I teach around 100 students every semester means I’m gonna choose less exclusionary language, even if it only helps one person in one hundred. Not all of these identities are visible to the naked eye, either, so it’s entirely possible that there are others in my classroom who don’t know they’re intersex yet (I mean, I haven’t had karyotyping done, have you?!), or they’re exploring their gender identity, or…there are so many possibilities, I’d rather err on the side of being more inclusive.

Third, as Carrie Cutler points out in a Slate article, “female” is often an adjective used to manage the meaning of a noun…when it’s assumed the noun is a broad category that usually includes men. So we’d say “female scientist” because upon hearing “scientist” one might assume we were talking about a dude scientist. And something about that just sets my teeth on edge, that we have to keep specifying that it’s a woman doing the job that used to be only done by men, and we still need modifiers to do this work instead of just assuming that women can be included in the catch-all profession of scientists.

Fourth, there are some, uh, connotations. In the Slate article linked above, the author points out the use of “female” in song lyrics (which I shan’t reprint here) to refer to sexually available women. And I think this is an equity issue: women are often discussed in terms of their sexual availability and desirability to men (let alone how we might feel about ourselves or one another!), and until men undergo the same level of objectification women do, I’m gonna be a little prickly about it. Not that feminism should be a tit-for-tat leveling of the playing field so everyone gets equally dehumanized, but these discrepancies bother me, since I don’t think any gender is more sexually anything than another.

As one researcher in STEM writes, this has professional implications too: “In a work setting, would you refer to the Vice Chancellor as a girl? Probably not, because we are accustomed to being respectful to people in senior positions. So should we extend that respect to women in other roles as well? (hint: yes)”

Some scholars go so far as to argue that gender difference (often expressed in terms of sex difference) exists in the first place to police who has access to power, and honestly, I’m not far away from this stance myself. In Sex Is As Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity by Paisley Currah, for example, it’s argued that:

In European, and, later, American legal traditions, gender difference was codified in laws designed to limit the rights and resources available to white women. From coverture to inheritance laws to the inability to vote to exemptions in the criminal sphere for marital rape, the law’s distincions illustrated how deeply patriarchal norms were incorporated into state structures. (20)

Oh, but that’s all changed, we’re sooo much better, yay feminism has done its job, you say? Currah (and I) would disagree: “gender subordination remains one of the organizing principles of domestic life, the workplace, and cultural production” (24). Why on earth would I use binaristic language that supports this historical and ongoing suborbination?!

Finally, there’s the question of audience. When I’m addressing my college students, I don’t really need to say “Greetings, males and females, today in class we’re going to read…” because drawing attention to my students’ (presumed) biological sex is simply not relevant in most if any classroom settings. Is it relevant in other settings? Gotta say, I’m drawing a blank. The 2024 Paris Olympics brought the debate about biological sex traits in elite sports to the public stage, and I mostly don’t feel qualified to weigh in on it (see my response here); yes, there tend to be some distinctions between the bodies of cis men and those of cis women in terms of muscle growth, metabolic functioning, and so on, and in certain sports those differences may matter. However, I know from research (and honestly, having a lot of trans friends, whom I appreciate sharing their experiences with me) that the human body is extremely malleable and responsive to hormonal interventions, so I don’t see it as my place to weigh in on this except to urge us all to remember that bodies have so much diversity and variation beyond the element of sex, it just doesn’t make sense to me to make it a really rigid distinction unless the athletes in that sport agree on it. (and please recall, one of the boxers who fought Imane Khelif was basically like “yeah, whatever” when her biological differences were brought up, so if athletes within the sport aren’t bothered by it, I don’t see why non-athletes should be bothered by it).

Hm, okay, when are other contexts where we might wanna say “males” or “females”? Do I ever want to signal something that feels very womanhood-specific to my fellow females? Not really, because I don’t care to enter any debates on how we’re defining femaleness and womanhood. For example, if the connotation of female relates to reproductive bits, are we still calling cis women who’ve had hysterectomies females? What about trans men who started out with that kind of anatomical equipment but ditched it? I don’t see a need to get into the weeds with this sort of thing, so I’ll say what I mean: “Ugh, I’m on my period and it sucks, who can relate?!” and that gets the job done in my opinion. Or if I want to talk about experiences of having my worth tied to my perceived beauty or sexual availability, then I’ll address fellow women, noting that this leaves room for people to weigh in whether you’re cis or trans, because trans women are women and they’ve had many of the same experiences as me, whereas some people who started life with XX chromosomes and a uterus might have had similar experiences at first which then diverged if/when they transitioned to something less binary or something more masculine. I think my choice of language lets people opt in or out of these kinds of conversations as they choose, and I’m okay with that.

At the end of the day, I’m not the language police. I’m not here to grade you on every single aspect of language use, though I will point out places where I think there’s room to grow in terms of word choice, nuance, and so on. If this is a language choice that you are consciously making and you’re aware of all its implications and you still want to run with it…you do you! We can have one conversation about it in class (which has already happened this semester) and that can be it.

Also, language is constantly evolving! Maybe in 5 years this conversation will be completely irrelevant for whatever reason. That’s fine too. I’m going to make the choice that makes the most sense to me right now, based on what I know and on my desire to signal to the broadest audience possible that yes, you belong here in my classroom, and learning is for everyone.

Defending gendered language that reinforces a binary is a weird hill to die on in my opinion, but whatevs.

 

*Bit of a rant here and I didn’t want to derail myself while still getting to my main point, but holy crap, fascist and bigoted and authoritarian belief systems are so lazy. Like, they are utterly devoid of both critical thinking skills and empathy, both of which absences annoy me to no end, I mean, at least pick one of the two to go with?! Every -ism or -phobia out there is rooted in essentialist thinking, generalizations, and stereotypes that are simply not true, and if the people believing these things took like 2 seconds to look at history or at the variety of cultures and human variation around the world they’d see the mounds of evidence disproving their irrational and mean-spirited beliefs, but I guess they’re not gonna do that because a) it’d take some effort and b) they’d have to admit they were wrong, and nobody likes that, especially when you’ve made your whole identity into hating some group you think takes away your power. Oh honey, late-stage capitalism has already done that, you really think we queer people are somehow outdoing corporations in making your life miserable?! There would be far more sparkles involved if we ran this shitshow!

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For F*ck’s Sake, Treat Women Like People

September 16, 2024 in Feminism, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

It is an astoundingly simple proposition, and yet here we are.

I shared this blog post about the men who dislike women and how we can tell on my Facebook page, and immediately, friends and acquaintances leapt in to discuss it. Most women were like “yep, that tracks.” Some men were like “Wow, I’d never thought about it that way before,” and I thanked them for taking the time to read it, because really, what system of oppression (and patriarchy is one among many) incentivizes those with power and privilege to actually sit and ponder it? Very few if any.

Then there were some men who wanted to add nuance. Which, sure, nuance is great!

But I noticed at least some of the comments came down to the following: Well, I do like women and enjoy their company, but I don’t act as though I do, because I don’t want them to get the wrong impression (that I’m flirting, that I’m available, etc.). And on the one hand, this is totally valid, because not everyone is available for every romantic configuration at every moment, and no one should have to be – so if people are assuming you are, and that’s making it weird, then yes, dispel that assumption with whichever tools you have at your disposal! And the guys on my Facebook page were respectful in their discussion, so this isn’t aimed at them as much as the general responses I see to this conversation.

However, something strikes me as odd about this idea, that men must manage women’s expectations by acting in unfriendly, antisocial, and even cold ways.

I figure that every single one of these men has social interactions that don’t revolve around the premise or promise of courtship without making it weird. They manage to have daily interactions – from the friendly to the mundane – without making it about sex.

How, dear reader, is such a thing possible?

These men are interacting with other men (and apologies for the assumption of heterosexuality here, it’s among the patterns I noticed in commenters on my post).

In the social world, men interact with other men as part of business transactions, while shopping, while dining, while doing a whole ton of activities. And unless I am missing out on some rad gay subtext happening 24/7 in mainstream social spaces, most of these men are probably managing to do so without hitting on or being hit on.

This is what most of us women want: we want to be treated as human, as a whole-ass person who can have conversations and manage business transactions and throw parties and play sports. If (presumed straight) men can manage to interact with other (presumed straight) men and have a friendly chat while doing whatever other task brings these people together in that moment, why would such a thing not be possible when interacting with women?

And yes, this is a throwback to feminist scholar Catherin MacKinnon’s classic “Are Women Human?” essay, wherein she repeatedly asks the titular question while listing numerous well-documented and sadly common instances of violence against women (rape, assault, domestic violence, street harassment, labor and sex trafficking) and asking why, in each instance, these aren’t framed as horrific human rights abuses to be battled but rather are seen as unfortunate things that simply happen repeatedly to women, as if by complete happenstance.

So I don’t mean to conflate the human subject with the masculine subject; culture has already done it for me! Hence I am borrowing some useful shorthand.

The scenarios men seem to be playing out are ones where they want to avoid inappropriate types of social conduct (wherein sexual availability is falsely presumed), and so refusing to engage with women is the way to go.

Now, I will grant that some men might hesitate to fully engage because they know many women are hit on, preyed on, objectified, and the like, which is an especial bummer when we’re just trying to live our daily lives and suddenly have to live with the reminder that some people see us as walking sex banks (don’t be that guy! Or gal, on the occasions when it happens!). Some men know they occupy tall and large bodies, and want to avoid coming across as threatening. That’s legit too.

But overall, I see some troubling assumptions embedded in these conversations, and so I feel compelled to reminder y’all: WOMEN AND MEN ARE NOT SEPARATE SPECIES!!!

And the really problematic theme I see embedded above is that men apparently feel they need to treat women differently than they’d treat a “regular” person (a.k.a. a fellow man)…because they are worried that women will treat them differently (as a sex object, a conquest, and so on).

Here is where my irony-meter goes through the roof: my good dudes, while this may seem like a problem to navigate when you encounter sexually aggressive women, this too is a symptom of patriarchy. Many women are socially conditioned to pursue higher-status male partners because we goddamn know we’re paid less, and we’re not gonna get maternity leave in this hellhole of a country, and nobody is going to protect us from all the horrific kinds of assaults visited upon women (and often in much worse ways upon women of color and trans women) unless we explicitly recruit those people to our sides by, I dunno, putting a ring on it or whatever. And don’t get me started on how domestic spaces are often even more dangerous for women; I’ll drag out my favorite terrible stat from the CDC about how half of American female homicide victims are killed by present or past male partners.

Feeling like someone doesn’t respect your boundaries or consent, hence you need to put up barriers that make you seem rude or cold or misogynist? That’s a patriarchy problem, because patriarchy teaches that sexual conquest = status, mostly for men, but women are starting to be able to take advantage of this attitude too without the only option being slut-shaming.

Feeling crummy and like someone only wants you for your money? Granted there are greedy people out there of every gender who are just assholes regardless, but, and say it with me: That’s a patriarchy problem, because Western women for centuries couldn’t own property because we WERE the property, and so snagging a man was the most reliable way of guaranteeing one’s quality of life. (brief addendum to remind that the transatlantic slave trade also made people into property, with ongoing consequences even today in terms of generational wealth disparities, state criminalization and violence, and so on; these facts can be discussed in conjunction without detracting from the severity of one another because white supremacy and patriarchy enable one another, and hopefully drawing attention to one starts to poke holes in the armor of the other)

Feeling like it’s more respectful to engage with a woman’s partner socially before engaging with her socially? That’s a patriarchy problem, because it classifies women according to their relationship to the nearest man, making men the gatekeepers of women’s ability to have a social life, just like men have long been the gatekeeper’s of whether women could enter male-dominated fields, or get medical procedures like hysterectomies, ands so on.

And of course—of friggin’ course—the irony-meter is going off when men say things like “it’s really uncomfortable to have women sexually pursue me and treat me like a conquest when I’ve already said I’m married,” because that is an experience women have all the damn time. Yes, it genuinely sucks! People shouldn’t do that to other people! It’s rude! But the overall pattern that exists in this world is one where men relentlessly pursue women, up to and including throwing harassment and violence into the mix, and so when a dude experiences this treatment from women, it is by definition and by the weight of empirical evidence a less common problem, hence not the one I want to devote extensive resources and bandwidth to. Again, yes, very crappy to experience that, but as I’ve pointed out above, these are patriarchy problems, as well as individual-people-being-assholes-regardless-of-gender problems.

One of the reasons why we keep having these damn conversations, and keep trying to explain using clear language what it’s like to be a woman stonewalled by men, or talked over, or whatever, is that by the very definition of being marginalized and socially oppressed, we cannot get our oppressors to listen to us. This is true for pretty much every social justice issue; this is why bystander interventions matter; because dudes are more likely to listen to other dudes than to listen to women, since women are presented as lower-status, less-intelligent, far-more-likely-to-be-hysterical irrational beings who are mostly good for having sex and having babies. We are constantly gaslit about our own experiences, social and professional and medical and more.

So yes, we need dudes tuning into these conversations and realizing “huh, yeah, that’s problematic” and speaking up when they see this behavior from other dudes. Because they’re more likely to be listened to and believed than we are.

If my tone is off-puttingly aggressive, please consider that a) tone policing is bullshit, and b) many of us women have experienced these frustrating dismissals a ton, and we’re tired of being polite about it. It sucks to feel sidelined and dismissed, and my guess is that a lot of dudes can relate, perhaps because racial or class-based discrimination has factored into your lives. So even if gender discrimination is still something you’re trying to wrap your head around because you haven’t experienced it much, chances are good that in this shitty racist and classist society, you’ve been put down for a trait that is not your fault, that is some arbitrary nonsense, and that hurt. The parallels don’t always function 100% but hopefully you see what I’m getting at—being judged and treated differently for an inborn trait suuuucks, and by being a dude who listens to women when we have these conversations, you have the chance to make a difference and stop perpetuating those small acts of bigotry and prejudice that add up and make things shittier.

To conclude, for fuck’s sake, please treat women like people. Don’t make it weird by assuming that you need to jump through all these bizarre hoops in order to fulfill the minimum politeness required in social interactions. Just, like, talk to us like human beings!

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A Concise and Snarky Guide to Writing Academic Book Reviews

September 11, 2024 in Academia, Writing | No comments

A series of books with colorful spines stacked to form a rainbow pattern

I’ve been writing book reviews for over twenty years now, but when I began, I didn’t really know what I was doing. So to help my colleagues who are newer to this area of academic writing, I’ll share what I’ve learned over the years!

This blog post is structured in the way that makes most sense to me: understanding what academic book reviews are, who their audience is, how they should be structured and styled, and miscellaneous concerns (which are range from the amusing to the deeply ethical). Also, putting this up front so nobody misses it: this is unpaid labor, unfortunately, but you should at least get a free book out of it. If someone’s asking you to write a book review but not making sure you’re getting a copy, what even?!

First, why do book reviews exist? Well, nobody has time to read every new book that comes out in their academic discipline every year. Even the superstars who can hyper-focus don’t manage it. So it’s helpful when academic journals – and I think every major academic journal does this, someone please correct me if I’m wrong – have a section where they publish reviews of major books that have come out in the last few years. And here’s another unfortunate caveat: academic publishing is sloooow, so sometimes a book isn’t reviewed til after it’s been out for a while, and if the journal is held up in getting the most recent issue out (which happens a lot, say, during/after the major disruption of a global pandemic), a book review may not appear for a while, up to 3-5 years after a book’s publication. So it’s not a perfect system, but it’s what we’ve got.

Who is the audience for book reviews? Mostly fellow academics, but as the ivory tower crumbles, we get a whole bunch of people in our audiences who are alt-ac or part-time or some flavor of adjacent to academia, so we can’t necessarily assume only a specialist audience. Plus, gatekeeping is stupid, so we will get lay experts and folks who have put in the time and work to learn how to do research in a given field, whether or not they have degrees in that field.

Because we expect a disciplinary specialist audience for book reviews – or readers who are close enough, or adjacent or interested for other reasons – the tone and style of book reviews tend to be on the slightly formal side, with jargon allowed if it’s commonly used in the discipline. So for example, I’m one of the book review editors at Marvels & Tales, which is the premier North American journal of fairy-tale studies, and hence I expect my readers to have some sense that fairy tales go deeper than Disney, to know what I mean when I refer to structuralism or the ATU index, to know the names and contributions of a handful of major scholars, and so on. And if they don’t know those things, I expect them to be proficient enough researchers to learn them on the fly, in case anything in a text isn’t quite making sense to them.

Otherwise, we tend to prefer clear, direct language; since book reviews don’t have a single overarching idea or argument or thesis statement like academic articles do, you don’t need to get into the convoluted phrasing that many academic authors churn out. Tell the reader what the book’s about, how well you think it accomplishes its aims, in which contexts it might be useful, and you’re basically good to go. This can generally be done in around one thousand words, which is handily enough what the suggested word count at my home base journal is.

How you structure a review is somewhat subjective; commonly you’ll see an opening paragraph describing the premise of the book, some middle paragraphs going through the book chapter by chapter or topic by topic, and a concluding paragraph or two talking about the book’s strong points, flaws, and/or potential uses. But I’ve seen reviewers choose to go through a book’s points in terms of themes or arguments instead of chronologically, and that’s fine too. Sometimes it helps to add context, like if you know that the author has recently pivoted in their career from researching X thing to researching Y thing, or if you know that a book covers a controversial topic in a field.

Speaking of controversy, how blunt should you be if you don’t like the book or disagree with its premise or findings? Well…it’s unlikely that a complete pile of trash will make it through the academic publication process, since that takes years and will have multiple sets of eyes on it. But it does sometimes happen. If you think a book is legit terrible, you can always contact the review editor and be like, “is this book even a suitable fit for your journal? my impression was…” or whatever. Even if a book is not your cup of tea, it probably wouldn’t have been published if it had absolutely no merit, so your job is to locate those good things and mention them.

An academic book review, however, needs to do more than summarize. This is not just your high school book report genre; yes, you should include some summary so your reader gets a sense of what the book is about in case they haven’t read it yet, but you need to also do the brainier heavy-lifting to identify the significance of this book in a larger academic context. Here are some topics you may want to touch on your book review:

  • How well the author is positioned to write this particular book (what are their credentials? have they published in this area before?)
  • What the author is using as evidence, and how they obtained it? (if analyzing, say, a collection of fairy tales, as happens often in books we might review for Marvels & Tales, when/where was the text published, and in which language, and if not in English, who translated it? if the book’s author did their own fieldwork to collect/obtain cultural data, what are the details of that situation?)
  • Which methods and/or theories the author is bringing to this project (major trends in fairy-tale studies, for example, have included structuralism, feminist theory, queer theory, disability studies, Marxist/cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and more recently, critical race theory)
  • What the author’s main claims are (a.k.a. their thesis statement or central argument; what is the point of this book, what is their “go big or go home” moment, etc.)
  • What the the book’s contribution is, or how we might conceive of its overall significance (is it a new translation of an important text or something more minor, or perhaps the only translation that exists in a given language? is it the first book applying X theory to Y topic? is it poised to become a foundational text in a certain subfield, or does it continue a conversation that a foundational text began?)
  • In which contexts the book might be used, or might prove useful (is this something you’d assign in a college course? or is it more likely to gather dust on your bookshelf until you need it for a super specific project?)
  • And, specifically continuing to think about which kind of college course this might be useful in, are you thinking more of a general, “intro-to-???” course, or more of a specialized course for majors, or even graduate students? If you don’t feel prepared to address this, consider whether that’s because you’re out of touch with something you should perhaps be in touch with in order to be a good fit for this review, or if this is legit an academic gatekeeping issue because despite having one of the best educations in your field you’ve never been given the chance to supervise grad students (*stares in yes, this is meant to sound like something I’m personally upset about*), you can always ask a colleague who’s more in touch with that experience for their thoughts on it

Finally, you may get lucky and score a book that doesn’t relate to anything political or controversial, but that seems unlikely in this current world. Journal editors may reserve the right to tone down incendiary language, or ask you to reframe your comments. Commenting on outright misogyny, racism, etc. is usually acceptable, and if you want to get a bit sassy with your tone, I know that I as an editor am fine with that choice. But again, be aware that there’s often a lag between the submission of your review and its appearance (possibly up to a year or two or more, thanks to academic publishing moving soooo sloooow), so a clever remark about a current event may end up not-so-current once your review goes live.

This may sound like a lot, but don’t be intimidated! As my co-editor at Marvels & Tales, Julie Koehler, points out, book reviews can be a great first publication for newer scholars simply trying to get used to getting published. The process is very similar (being in touch with editors over email, revisions, etc.) and this can still go on your CV, so you can get acquainted with the process and get a nice-looking publication out of it. This familiarity with the process might help you be less freaked out when it comes time to try to submit a journal article.

Staying on that topic for a moment: we editors are only human, so please give us grace, and we’ll try to extend the same to you. If you find you absolutely cannot complete a book review you agreed to do, please get in touch! We can have you mail the book back to us and we’ll find another suitable reviewer. Even though it feels crummy to have to back out of an agreement, please don’t wallow in shame and ignore our emails. And I’ve been on both sides of this; I currently owe two reviews to two different journals and they might be, errr, three-ish years overdue, which I definitely feel crappy about, but none of the editors have reached out to reassign the book or be like “wtf, mate?” so I am gonna try to buckle up and get them done over winter break (which, granted, is what I said last year). So…we know stuff can get weird, it’s fine, just keep us posted and let us know if an insurmountable obstacle arises so we can make another plan if need be.

Seriously, we’re not here to be downers or gatekeepers. However, with academia trending towards contingent labor rather than full-on tenured professors, it’s becoming a strange situation. Like, in my NTT (non-tenure-track) position, research and publishing are not technically even in my job description…so I guess I do them for funsies because I’m an overachieving masochist? And service at my university “counts” for more in my job evaluations than service to my discipline more broadly, so this time-consuming review editor job I’ve taken on…basically does not “count” for my actual-pays-the-bills job, unlike for my tenured colleagues who teach lighter course loads (for more money!) since they have research and publishing expectations built into their jobs.

In my own field of folklore studies, we have spent a long time (seriously, decades) bemoaning the lack of professionalization of the discipline, but ironically, can we really call ourselves professionals if we literally can’t make a full-time living doing our jobs? As I point out in my article “Theorizing from the Margins” (Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 58, No. 3, 2021), this tension has rather sobering implications: “Putting the burden of service to the discipline on those who are not employed fulltime within the discipline—and in the US context especially, where lacking full-time employment might mean lacking health care—is an odd contradiction at best, and an unethical, exploitative practice at worst” (105). So uh, be nice to us because we’re canaries in a very concerning coal mine.

A couple of miscellaneous considerations as I wrap this up:

  • Whoever wrote the book you’re reviewing might, gasp, read the review! This point hit home for me recently since my own books are now being reviewed, and I have been abjectly grateful at every kind word tossed my way, whereas critiques have hit me pretty hard…I guess I’ll develop a thicker skin regarding this kind of thing with more experience! Just something to keep in mind as you pen your own reviews.
  • We book review editors… hm, how do I say this… don’t have any real power. Or influence. Or anything beyond the ability to write some emails and get presses to send out free books. We don’t have any sway with our own press, like the ability to tell when exactly an issue is coming out, or to get deadlines moved. So you can ask us when your stuff will appear in print, but we legit don’t know, and we can’t do much about how slowly academic publishing moves.
  • Academic publishing is exploitative and relies on free labor and I seriously don’t know why I keep doing it so, like, while I give good research/writing/editing advice because I’ve been at it for 20 years, maaaaybe take some of this with a grain of salt and try to make better life choices while you still can, kids!

I hope this was useful! I really do think book reviews are a great way to get more involved with your field or one you’re getting better acquainted with, as a scholar or aspiring scholar or other category of (hopefully healthier) human entirely. And if you’ve never published anything before and want to give it a shot, despite how broken academic publishing is (did I mention the whole “expected to work for free” thing?!), book reviews are a pretty chill way to do so.

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Stop Asking Teachers When School Starts for Us

August 29, 2024 in Academia, Education | No comments

A stick of books by a beach shore.
Photo from Unsplash by Link Hoang.

We get it. You’re a well-meaning friend, acquaintance, or family member who is curious about how our lives are going or wanting to know when we’ll be more or less available to hang out. Perhaps you’ve got your bowl of popcorn out, preparing to watch the demise of American education (especially higher ed) and you want to know when it’s okay to tap out for a bathroom break, so you don’t miss anything spectacular.

But please, stop asking us when school starts. It’s tantamount to a personal attack at this point.

See, for many of us teachers, summer break is when we can relax and breathe again. I know I went a bit feral this summer, letting my side shave grow out and barely wearing makeup (which is worth mentioning since, without makeup, my face looks like that of a hungover 15-year-old; hardly ideal for a college professor).

Many of us are returning to hostile work environments: we can’t say gay, we can’t respect students’ pronouns and nick/names, we are told to arm ourselves because gun violence is *shrug* inevitable in schools. Granted, some of us face hostile environments at home as well, so I suppose for some teachers, returning to school in the fall is a relief.

Plus it’s not like I laze around eating bon-bons in the summer; first of all, they would definitely melt all over me in the Indiana summer heat, which is made both worse and weirder by global warming. Second, I’m pretty much always working (writing, dancing, etc.), I just get to eat lunch at home instead of meal-prepping for a week’s worth of lunches, and that is a special summer-time joy for me, since I also delight in visiting my local farmer’s markets to pick out fresh produce to cook throughout the week.

The rhythm of summertime life allows many of us the rest we so desperately need, as so many teachers are teetering on the edge of burnout. It’s been worse, of course, in the pandemic, with the pivot to online teaching (and I swear, if anyone says “pivot” to me in a regular conversation I might just scream, that’s how sick of it we are), along with the larger emotional loads we carry when our students need additional help figuring out things that are more intuitive in IRL settings, and the expectations that we do more with less that, well, teachers have basically always had put on us.

And I’m in higher ed, where at least I don’t have to buy crayons for my students out of pocket (but I’ve watched my mom and countless other teachers do so over the years). We have, however, been informed that due to budget cuts we will be responsible for moving the trash from the bins in our offices to designated trash cans around campus. This is not hugely burdensome – which I can only really say because I have minor invisible disabilities, which is not true for all my colleagues – and hopefully this new policy will lead to many riffs on the “taking out the trash” jokes; maybe while taking out the trash we can also take out neoliberalism and the eagerness to embrace AI? (my new fave rant on the matter is here, I don’t know who this person is other than a data scientist but I love their brain)

Thus, any reminder that school is starting soon is also a reminder that we teachers are tasked with the gigantically important job of helping guide our culture’s young, while not given adequate pay or supplies or support to fulfill said task. It’s a reminder that our time without grading papers and checking for plagiarism is over, and if there were ever an onerous task, trust me, it is having a policy stating that AI use in the classroom is plagiarism, but still knowing I’ll need to enforce this policy, which both is an energy drain for me and something that feels like quite a failure, given how I try so hard to give extensions on papers when requested and assert to my students that I want to read their thoughts, not stolen words that have been sifted through a mediocre sieve, like the crappiest confectioner’s sugar to go atop the world’s worst cupcake. That I still have to eat, because it’s my job.

You could contribute to these reminders, or you could just say that you hope the semester starts off well for us, and perhaps leave some wine and chocolate at our doorstop while you’re at it, since between the low pay most teachers see and the continuing attacks on academic freedom at all levels of teaching, we’re gonna need it. I’m not saying I’ve been having increasing panic attacks leading up to the start of the semester, but I’m not not saying it either.

So, thoughts and prayers please…or not, because I’m an atheist-voting, agnostic-leaning Jewish-flavored human. Let’s go with tots and pears instead, because I am a very food-motivated critter, like many both domesticated and undomesticated creatures.

Or, maybe things will be okay. I lost my ID on campus a few days ago (darn those dresses with pockets that are not very deep!), and was emailed the next day to let me know that someone found it. I met some of our incoming students and they are inquisitive, lovely humans. I am working with colleagues to design some new courses that will address lesser-known aspects of history and culture while teaching critical thinking skills, and those are some of the things I love most about my job, seeing the students reach those “aha!” moments about how complex culture is, how important it is to do good research, how much we all have yet to learn about this ridiculously cruel and and wondrous and multi-layered social world we inhabit.

In case you’re wondering, today’s the first day of classes for me. So wish me luck (and again, not gonna say no to wine), and wish all the other teachers and learners and support staff and really everyone in education good luck as well. Help us do our jobs by not traumatizing us with reminders about our jobs, maybe instead using that energy to vote in people who trust teachers and understand that there is something worth saving here.

See you on the other side of the semester, and solidarity to you, my fellow teachers.

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In the Olympics and Elsewhere, Patriarchy, Misogyny, and Racism Misdirect Our Rage and Fear

August 2, 2024 in Feminism, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

Image of the Olympics rings imposed over the Eiffel Tower

If you look at news headlines or social media, it might seem that trans athletes have come out of nowhere at this year’s Olympic Games to violently pummel women.

Except that’s not what’s happening. At all.

First, I find it a bit odd that people who formerly didn’t give a shit about women and women’s sports are suddenly rallying to this cause. In just the U.S., “men received $252 million more in athletic scholarships than women” and athletes with other aspects of marginalized identities face even larger barriers. According to the Women’s Sports Foundation:

“Girls and women of color, those with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ athletes consistently receive less access to sport than their peers.

  • Girls at high schools where the majority of students are Black and/or Hispanic have only 67 percent of the opportunities to play sports that their male peers have, compared to their counterparts at heavily white schools, who have 82 percent of the opportunities that boys do.
  • And while women make up 44 percent of all NCAA athletes (compared to 15 percent in 1972), only 14 percent of female NCAA athletes are BIPOC.
  • In addition, of the more than 15,000 high school students who participate in adaptive sports, only 44 percent are female.
  • In a recent study,  77.6% of LGBTQ students avoided school functions, 71.8% avoided extracurricular activities, and 25.15 avoided school athletic fields or facilities because they felt unsafe or uncomfortable.”

Further, I’ve trained with boxers, and part of the sport involves getting hit. Sometimes in the head. Sometimes quite painfully. So it just shows me that people who know absolutely nothing about boxing are seeing footage of women boxing for their first time ever, and losing their minds about how violent it is. That is…just how the sport is? And there are rules to protect people as much as possible. And none of those rules were violated here.

You also may have noticed that whenever an athlete’s gender is called into question, that athlete is not white. Related to the above paragraph, it seems a lot of white people are conditioned to absolutely freak out when it looks like a white woman is being assaulted by a person of color. Which, yes, nobody should be assaulted! But in a sport where we see women of color getting ahead of their white peers, and suddenly it’s only women of color whose gender identity is being called into question? That speaks of the intersection of racism and sexism.

South African athlete Caster Semenya went through this. As ESPN documents in a history of gender tests in the Olympics, Indian athlete Santhi Soundarajan also went through this, and was disqualified. Both are poor women of color.

So, too, is Imane Khelif, who is certainly not trans (which is illegal in Algeria, among other reasons). This next bit gets a bit convoluted so please bear with me.

The IBA – International Boxing Association – filed a report saying that both Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting “did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential” and this confidential test “conclusively” that “both athletes did not meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors.”

Which sounds kinda official, but then again, what kind of testing was it? Did they conceal this information to protect the athletes’ privacy, or because their testing standards were perhaps not as rigorous as they might otherwise be?

Further, the IBA is currently discredited in the eyes of the Olympics. The International Olympics Committee (IOC) announced that it’s no longer recognizing the IBA due to issues like lack of financial transparency and not following procedures to ensure its integrity.

So in light of this, it does not seem like we should be listening to the assertions of a discredited organization, meaning, it doesn’t matter what (unspecified) testing these two athletes went through, if the Olympics Committee is like “nah, they are not trustworthy.”

In fact, the Olympics Committee has stated:

The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure – especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years.

And this part is worth focusing on, because Khelif has competed in the Olympics before…and lost. According to the sports website Give Me Sport, Khelif has suffered losses at both World Championships and Olympics Games, notably losing to Irish boxer Amy Broadhurst, who said: “Personally, I don’t think she has done anything to ‘cheat’. I think it’s the way she was born and that’s out of her control. The fact that she has been (beaten) by 9 females before says it all.”

If her fellow athletes are saying she’s not unbeatable, then maybe we should listen to the people who know their sport.

Indeed, according to the National Organization for Women, trans women have been allowed to compete in the Olympics since 2004, and not a single one has medaled. That kinda destroys this narrative about trans people coming to sports to dominate and humiliate, doesn’t it? Not that Khelif is trans, but some ignorant people are saying that’s the case.

Because in athletics, a wide range of variation is allowed, as long as it’s not due to gender differences, apparently. The classic example is Michael Phelps, who according to the Washington Post has a disproportionately large wingspan and double-jointedness along with a different production level of lactic acid that allows him to dominate his sport…and his physical differences are celebrated, yet those of Caster Semenya and other more gender-ambiguous athletes are not?

In case you need a brief lesson on anatomical sex, it is not as binary as we’ve been led to believe. According to the Intersex Society of North America, there are a variety of conditions we might classify as having indeterminate anatomical sex, whether that’s seen in chromosomes or hormones or reproductive and pleasure anatomy. Some people have mosaic genetics, with some of their cells having XX and others having XY chromosomes in them. In all, around 1 in 100 people have some form of intersex display, whether it is medically knowable or so subtle that it has escaped notice until now, or ever.

I’ve never had genetic testing, and I doubt that you, dear reader, have either. The question of determining one’s biological or anatomical sex is so much more complex than it appears at first, and squeezing the amazing diversity of natural human variation into binary boxes is a clumsy method at best.

The science is complicated here too. I’d recommend talking to someone with a PhD in this stuff if you can get your hands on them, or reading some Anne-Fausto Sterling, a widely recognized expert in the field. If you don’t want the incomprehensible jargon, well first, I think you’re missing out on a chance to learn that the natural world is inevitably more wondrous and uncategorizable than we make it out to be, but I guess you can learn about the most relevant implications of all this in a Scientific American piece on sex testing in the Olympics and other elite athletics.

And beyond the physical attempts to categorize an individual’s sex, there are, of course, people who are gender-non-conforming in a variety of ways, whether they are transgender, or cisgender but leaning non-binary, or intersex and learning that a gender was arbitrarily imposed on them at birth to make them seem more normal (there is a horrifying history of surgeries and other interventions on intersex babies before the age of consent, which you can read about here and elsewhere).  And in case it needs to be said, gender-non-conforming identities are valid. They’re not sick or deluded, nor are they inherently predatory. We can and should allow gender non-conforming and trans athletes to compete in their chosen categories because they are – like Michael Phelps – just a normal human variation on the spectrum of what we generally see humans being and doing, sometimes a bit more towards the end of the spectrum, but rarely the ridiculously stark differences transphobes make them out to be.

As noted above, fellow athletes who have faced Khelif are like “yeah whatever, I’ll box here, it’s fine,” for the most part. Let the athletes make these decisions for themselves, in conversation with scientists where necessary…but again, the scientists are probably going to roll up with 100+ slides of a Powerpoint deck to explain why this is so damn complicated, and they won’t have concrete answers either, so let’s just go with the “trust athletes” angle I’m suggesting here, yeah?

Finally, to the title of this post: we are being sold a narrative that some men are so into the idea of hurting and violating women that they will put on dresses and try to pretend to be women to do so.

This is not what’s happening. It has never been what’s happening. Men violate women with impunity, without donning skirts, all the fucking time. According to the CDC, 41% of women experience intimate partner violence in their lifetimes. Do you seriously think that the perpetrators need to pretend to be women to get away with it? They get away with it—in homes, in bedrooms, in workplaces—all the fucking time. This is a worldwide problem; the UN states that one in three women have been subjected to physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetimes. It happens everywhere in the world, all the damn time, and it is primarily being performed by cisgender men (those assigned male at birth, who continue to live as men).

Patriarchy misdirects us, though. Patriarchy says it’s only a handful of bad men committing such crimes, which cannot logically be true given the upsetting prevalence.

Misogyny misdirects us too; it says women are weak and must be protected from those bad men, or worse, those bad men who think they are women and use those disguises to gain access to women-only spaces like bathrooms and women’s sports.

Racism gets in on it as well, telling us that women of color are unnaturally masculine, needing policing, fit only for hard labor, not deserving of protection.

I get that a lot of women fear sexual violence; I do too, I have a “rape schedule” of when and where I do and don’t walk alone, just like my female college students do.

But if you are a woman who’s afraid, and you’ve allowed yourself to become afraid of trans people, or of women of color who seem a bit too masculine, then you have been sold a package of bullshit, because patriarchy and misogyny lie to us, and tell us to look around for convenient scapegoats that are already marginalized, instead of looking the actual problem—patriarchy—in the eye and refusing to hold men accountable for their abusive behaviors (not all men, obviously, but enough men that it’s a continual concern of who we can trust not to rape us when given the chance).

If you never gave a crap about women’s sports til now, you are responding to sexist and racist dog whistles about who the real threats are. Please read up on the history of gender testing in sports, and on how complex biological/anatomical sex actually is, and the harassment of women of color who excel in athletics and elsewhere and are then taken down a notch. Please listen to actual trans and gender-non-conforming people talking about their lives, because mostly they want to exist in peace and they are not the predators they’re made out to be—which, again, if you are paying attention, is exactly the same rhetoric that was weaponized against us gay/bisexual people from a few decades ago. Almost like it’s a convenient way to marginalize and oppress a group as it starts to gain equal human rights.

(oh, and credit where credit is due: women of color have been leading these discussions for a long time now, and for example, Imani Gandy has shared a lot of valuable resources on Twitter that I benefited from in composing this post; this tweet of hers said it best: “None of this hullabaloo is about protecting women. It’s about reifying gender roles and femininity.” Yes, yes, a million times (unfortunately) yes; cisgender women are already being stopped in bathrooms and so on because we don’t look feminine enough, and other similar nonsense things are happening, so a lot of this fuss is indeed about patrolling womanhood, which is discriminatory and gross)

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Thinking about Gender & Harm in Relationships (yes, this is about the recent accusations)

July 7, 2024 in Feminism | No comments

A person wearing a blank white masking, holding a finger in front of their mouth to indicate silence.

Caveats and trigger warnings are in this paragraph; read or skip as desired. This piece is mostly written about instances where (presumed cisgender) men assault (presumed cisgender) women, but of course there are other forms abuse can take. There are more than two genders and more than two sexual orientations, but again, the bulk of the evidence points towards men being the perpetrators of sexual violence (and other forms of violence) towards women, so that is what I’m focusing on here. This post mentions domestic violence and gaslighting but does not go into detail about any forms of abuse.

As I write this, another prominent man is being accused of sexual assault (you can likely fill in the blank whenever you’re reading this, which is one of the points of this piece: harassment and assault are pretty ubiquitous).

This piece is not about the truth behind said accusations; I rather like the framing here, Someone you care about was just outed as a sex creep: a beginner’s guide, which counsels patiently listening in order to learn and understand more.

Rather, I am trying to work out the following argument for myself while sharing it with an audience, in case it’s of any use to y’all: why does it matter, or why should it matter, that a public figure quite possibly has abusive or exploitative sexual relationships? Why should anyone care? And I also want to explore the implications for women in particular, because so many of these conversations revolve around consented-to sex.

In the recent example on my mind, a few of Influential Man’s (IM’s) past partners have come forward stating that he acted in non-consensual ways during their relationship. Some people’s response is to shrug it off and state that sometimes people hurt each other in relationships, that’s normal, that’s just life.

While I’m not a philosopher, I’m deeply curious about what’s going on here and why we should care—whether we should care at all. I do read a fair bit of feminist philosophy these days, and so I’m going to bring some of those sources to bear on this topic.

As Amia Srinivasan writes in The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century: “Sex, which we think of as the most private thing, is in reality a public thing” (xii). By this, she refers to the gender roles we learn and project onto sex in terms of who deserves pleasure, who must be the most giving, and so on (surprise, these are highly gendered roles). But I think this phrase also applies to the kinds of sex that are legible as deserving of privacy or not. If you’re having sex in some kind of culturally legible relationship (probably heterosexual, probably monogamous, probably not transactional in the sense of being sex work), then what happens for you sexually is deemed to be your own business.

In other words, the sex we have in relationships is seen as private, even as the gender roles we are socialized into quite publicly dictate how the sex we have privately should look.

What makes sexual assault accusations tricky to navigate, in part, is this cultural sense that what is perceived as being private should stay private. Trying to take private business public feels off, because it goes against this cultural logic.

Why, then, should we care about what happens privately between two people?

If I try to put this in the most neutral terminology possible, this is what I end up with: a person has repeatedly hurt someone close to them, either intentionally, or by simply being ignorant of that person’s consent, comfort, and boundaries. Maybe they even got off on abusing that person’s trust (though I must say, all the sadists I know are quite careful to ensure that their partners are a) masochistic and b) consenting).

If we put this scenario in any context outside the bedroom, it sounds a bit different: “Yeah, Joe is a nice guy, but he has tortured the last few pets he’s had.” “Oh I’m still friends with Brad, he only harasses his coworkers.” “My cousin Finn is so much fun when we go out, unless you’re working at the places where we party, then he’s kinda a dick.”

If we swap the category of “person they’re in a relationship with” to “any other type of human” then this framing gets real concerning real fast. Saying that someone’s a decent person except to One Type of Person sound pretty bad. Especially if that type of person is, like, historically marginalized. “Oh yeah, he’s a good guy, except to Black people…except to Native Americans…except to…” you can fill in the blank as you chose.

So why is it different to be like “Oh yeah, he’s a good guy, except to his partners” when his partners are mostly women? How does this not leave us with some sort of conclusion that this person views women’s experiences as less important, less worth prioritizing, than their own? How is that not a tad bigoted or even perhaps dehumanizing?

The issue is magnified when I put it like this: a person with large amounts of social and/or economic power has repeatedly hurt someone close to them, either intentionally, or by simply being ignorant of that person’s consent, comfort, and boundaries.

This is…concerning. Because one of the slippery things about this current round of Influential Man accusations is that they were in a consenting relationship…but one person having significantly more social power than another is definitely a form of power, and it can be make saying “no” that much harder. One party having more power than the other can create its own coercive context, even if everyone technically counts as a consenting adult.

I’m not alone in wondering whether the power disparity of gender roles in a patriarchal/misogynist society like ours counts as a coercive context, especially when it comes to public discussions of when things go wrong. In Srinivasan’s words:

The question, from a feminist perspective, is why sex crimes elicit such selective skepticism. And the answer that feminists should give is that the vast majority of sex crimes are perpetrated by men against women. Sometimes, the injunction to “Believe women” is simply the injunction to form our beliefs in the ordinary way: in accordance with the facts. (10-11)

False accusations occasionally happen. This case—whichever one we’re on, as of when you’re reading this—could turn out to be one of those, or not. As The Jennifer Conspiracy reminds us in their Medium post linked above, when it came to the allegations against George Takei: “Fandom was heartbroken by it, but over time as more information came out, it became clear that it was very likely not true. This is why it’s so important to keep paying attention no matter how you feel about the potential validity of the accusation upon first hearing about it.”

I think I’m inclined to view this phenomenon as a metonym for problematic sex, much in the same way that Srinivasan suggests that feminists in the 1980s and 1990s collectively lost their shit over pornography:

The intensity of the “porn wars” is more understandable when you bear in mind that porn came to serve, for feminists of an earlier generation, as a metonym for “problematic” sex in general: for sex that took no account of women’s pleasure, for sadomasochistic sex, for prostitution, for rape fantasies, for sex without love, for sex across power differentials, for sex with men. (35)

Perhaps these discussions of whether Influential Man did it, and whether or not and how it should matter, are ways of talking about so many of the other issues women feel silenced on…at least when it comes to being heard and seen by their male partners. Domestic violence rates remain high. My female friends keep getting assaulted. If no one will listen when we talk about what happens to us, maybe they will listen when we use public figures to have a very similar conversation. Again, Srinivasan says it best:

Men have chosen not to listen because it has suited them not to do so, because the norms of masculinity dictate that their pleasure takes priority, because all around them other men have been doing the same. (21)

To paraphrase from one of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits, “Welcome to Hell:”, when asked why they didn’t say anything about the constant harassment: they definitely did! for hundreds of years! but, like, no one cared!

To again return to the question of why we should care about strangers’ sex lives (because mostly we don’t, and when we do, it can be deeply invasive and bad; see, like, all of American history with sodomy and contraception laws and all that nonsense, which I discuss in my book Sex Education 101), I find it telling when we suddenly care and want to discuss all the details we have and don’t…when it’s an Influential Man perpetrator. Would we have cared about the women coming forward otherwise? Would we have even known who they are?

(and for fuck’s sake, people, stop with the “why is she only coming forward now” nonsense—you’ve seen how the collective treats those making accusations, right?)

The extensive pondering of what might have happened in these relationships, how bad his actions really were, seems to result in a punitive shitstorm for the women coming forward, while the men mostly wriggle free from lasting consequences. Again, there are exceptions, but it’s a pretty damn noticeable pattern.

And looking at all of this stuff, it seems to me that one of the messages to women is that when we consent to sex, when we are in a relationship with a man, we are consenting to potential harm. And yeah, people in relationships are gonna hurt each other no matter what, blah blah blah, that kind of truism is both true and vague enough to not really be helpful. And yeah, there are always exceptions to the pattern I’m focusing on here.

Because the more I look at these instances, regardless of which Influential Man is being accused today, the more I see the subtext of what we’re asking the women: “But what did you think would happen? Why are you surprised you got hurt? Why are you even talking about it?”

This pisses me off because not only is it some gaslighting bullshit, but it also, as noted above, presumes that when women are in relationships with men, some hurt is inevitable, and it’s pretty one-sided (again, FFS, not all men, I know). American culture (and perhaps Western culture more generally) continues to view women as human givers, in Kate Manne’s terms: as humans who owe their sexual, domestic, emotional, and/or reproductive labor to the full human beings who inevitably happen to be men.

Not only that, but as I noted above, the abuse rates keep climbing—and by golly, by gosh, who are the men abusing these women if they’re not Influential Man #1, Influential Man #2, Influential Man #3, and the rest of the Influential Men we like? If being a (heterosexual-ish) woman means entering a social contract that our consent and our pleasure don’t matter as much as men’s do, are we supposed to only date Influential Men because they can clearly never be abusers?

There is no good conclusion to this post because there is no good conclusion to this topic—another year, another Influential Man dealing with sexual assault or harassment accusations, another very public debate about what actually happened, another bout of grappling with what this means and why we should care and so on. I’m a teacher, so I believe we are innately capable of learning, but I don’t know that rehashing these conversations will do us much good until roughly half the population learns that the other half deserves to have their consent taken seriously (with apologies for the binaristic phrasing, but again, that’s the pattern I’m talking about here and it’s the pattern the bulk of the data points towards as being a huge problem).

At risk of sounding hideously second-wave-feminist, women aren’t just sex objects, passive partners in sexual interactions that, while consenting, don’t really matter apart from their presence. And until we figure this one out—and inform men that yes, abusive or otherwise shitty behavior in the context of a relationship does actually count in the real world—we’re just going to keep having the same conversation over and over again.

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My Folklore & Resistance Roundtable Talk

July 25, 2022 in Fairy Tales, Folklore | No comments

This is basically a word-for-word transcript of my talk at the Folklore & Resistance Roundtable put on by the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic. And you can watch the entire roundtable on YouTube now, too!

Before I begin, I’d like to deliver a content note for discussion of some topics revolving around bigotry and violence, though not in any graphic detail. And I’d like to thank my dad for giving me the inspiration for this talk during a recent conversation.

As Sandra Dolby writes in Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative: “It is the folklorist’s charge to identify and describe tradition in the materials and processes of nonprofessional, everyday activities” (120). In my remarks, that’s exactly what I intend to do, utilizing the personal narratives shared during the closing remarks of the January 6th Committee Hearing that met on July 12. I plan to refer to folkloristic scholarship on personal narrative, as well as feminist scholarship on entitlement, with a few nods to my home base of fairy-tale scholarship.

I plan to argue that folk narrative is a tool, and tradition is a resource, for helping us think about social justice issues. This is coming out of some of my recent scholarly work on the seemingly unconnected topic of gender transition in fairy tales, as when contemporary fairy-tale retellings focus on either more magical or more social transitions for their transgender protagonists. These tales are, admittedly, a minority, and in an era of commodified, Disneyfied, heteronormative happily-ever-afters, it might seem incongruous to focus on the fairy tale’s liberatory potential. But that’s exactly what a lot of us assembled here today do: we look for the glimpses of emancipatory ideas in the traditional materials that surround us.

As folklorist Henry Glassie states, “tradition is the creation of the future out of the past” (176). So it’s not surprising that I’m observing a lot of trans and genderqueer authors using tradition—this case fairy tales—as a resource from which to draw as they create their futures. Tradition gives us tools to explain who we are and what our values are, and to then converse with others on that very topic.

Personal narrative sits at a weird junction in this conversation. By definition, personal narratives are unique to the individual telling them, but also patterned by culture, because it is culture that tells us what makes a story and indeed what makes a good story. Personal narratives are shaped by the twin laws of folklore, tradition and variation, as much as any other genres we might study, though they often skew more towards the individual and variation than group and tradition. This genre hasn’t received a ton of attention in folklore studies, though of course I’m still working on a more comprehensive bibliography of work done since my mentor at IU, Dr. Dolby, was teaching and writing there.

On to the texts.

Representative Stephanie Murray: “This isn’t about promoting ourselves as Individuals. It’s about protecting the country we love. And it’s about preserving what actually makes America great: the rule of law, free and fair elections, and the peaceful transfer of power from one elected leader to the next. But if I may say a word about myself and why I’m proud to serve on this committee, I’m the only member of this committee who was not blessed to be born an American. I was born in Vietnam after the Vietnam War, and my family and I fled a communist government and were rescued by the US Navy, and were given sanctuary in America. My patriotism is rooted in my gratitude for America’s grace and generosity. I love this country. On January 6th, four decades after my family fled a place where political power was seized through violence, I was in the United States Capitol fleeing my fellow Americans.” (NPR Transcript of the Hearing)

Representative Bennie Thompson: “I am from a part of the country where had it not been for the federal government and the Constitution my parents and many more Americans like them would have continued to be treated as second class citizens. The freedom to be able to vote without harassment, travel in relative safety, and dine and sleep where you choose is because we have a government that looks over the well-being of its citizens.” (NPR Transcript of the Hearing)

These two personal narrative texts utilize what I’m terming specificity rather than specters, punching up rather than punching down, and obligation rather than entitlement. These stories are rooted in the personal and familial experiences of their narrators; they happen in specific times and places, rather than invoking the specter of whatever latest fear is haunting us. This makes personal narrative contrast with conspiracy theory or fake news, which as genres purport to deal in specificity, but instead give us specters: unreal manifestations that prey on our fears without any substance to back them up. These narratives identify real injustices, and instead of punching down and mocking or harming those victimized by injustices, they point out the power imbalances at work, thereby subtly punching up instead.

I’d like to talk about three axes:

  • entitlement vs. obligation
  • punching up vs. punching down
  • specificity vs. specters

I follow feminist philosopher Kate Manne in thinking through entitlement as a pressing inequality issue. While Manne looks at it through the lens of misogyny, her insights apply here. In her recent book Entitled, she writes of “traditionally feminine goods (such as sex, care, nurturing, and reproductive labor)” that men feel entitled to take, and which women must act entitled to give (11). Problems arise when this interaction is not followed to the letter. Manne writes: “When a woman fails to give a man what he’s supposedly owed, she will often face punishment and reprisal—whether from him, his himpathetic supporters, or the misogynistic social structures in which she is embedded. What’s more, within this system, women are often unfairly deprived of their genuine entitlement to both feminine-coded and masculine-coded goods” (11-12).

I quote at length to distinguish between what Manne describes as unjust entitlement and genuine entitlement: the entitlement of the oppressor to undeserved goods and opportunities versus the entitlement of the marginalized to deserved goods and opportunities. This latter, genuine entitlement I am calling obligation. We obligated to care for one another within a fair society, just as we are obligated to care for the earth we inhabit. Community is a network of intertwined obligations, in a good way, not a bad “Ugh, I have to do my chores” way.

My thinking on entitlement is shaped, again, by fairy-tale discourse. My colleague Linda Lee (in conference papers) has explored an interpretation of “Beauty and the Beast” tales wherein the Beast is entitled to Beauty’s affection and love as a means of disenchantment. This is unjust entitlement, and using a fairy-tale lens can help us identity the underlying dynamics when it comes to entitlement.

Fairy tales also provide a view into what I’m terming punching up versus punching down, or in other words, being aware of who’s actually impacted by the discourse and how much power they have. Fairy tales so often ask us to empathize with the downtrodden protagonist such as orphaned children and abuse victims…but sometimes they don’t. What are we supposed to do with protagonists like the servant in the Grimms’ “The Jew in the Thornbush,” who happily tortures people, including a Jewish man? Clearly, fairy tales are not paragons of social justice, but through fairy tales, we can learn to hone our sense of when the tale is asking us to empathize with those who have more or less power in a given instance. It benefits us to combine this knowledge of narrative structure with an awareness of historically excluded and oppressed populations, so that we don’t accidentally laugh at jokes that punch down. When we use our cutting wit, we should use it instead to punch up, to critique those with power who are choosing not to share it, or to actively abuse it.

Unfortunately, this last example, and it’s certainly not the only antisemitic fairy tale out there, shows that tradition is not always a resource for good. Storytelling alone will not save us. As my colleague Kristi Willsey points out in her research on the personal narratives of veterans, “your personal stories are the currency by which you access care, and other people’s lies could, like counterfeit coins, cheapen or dilute your truth” (504). If some stories contain useful truths, others are explicit lies. And as Kate Manne pointed out in the first chapter of Entitlement, the personal narratives that competed during the Supreme Court hearing to confirm Brett Kavanaugh let the abuser’s narrative triumph over that of the abused. Sharing her story did not necessarily help Dr. Christine Blasey Ford persuade those making the decision, and it might have even endangered her. So even though I think hewing close to personal narrative is overall a good move these days, it is not guaranteed to save the day. And thus even those of us who are dedicated story lovers and storytellers must maintain skepticism and sometimes even distance from the notion that stories will always triumph. Context matters too.

One potential takeaway is that you can use these three concepts to analyze narratives that come your way, whether their source is a friend, a news station, the internet, pop culture, or what have you. You can look for how much the speaker or protagonist expresses entitlement or obligation: are they demanding goods and services to which they are truly entitled, like, from a universal human rights framework? You can examine the power structures inherent in the world their story has created, and try to ascertain if they are punching up or punching down. And finally, you can interrogate the specificity of the characters and experiences from the narrative. Is some speaking from personal or familial experience? Or are they invoking the specter of the Other, which can take any form depending on someone’s worldview. The threatening yet always unspecified Other might be immigrants, Jews, transgender people…take your pick. The current moral panic on “grooming” children is a great example of this. The fear, as I understand it, is that openly queer people are grooming children to be just like them, or be the perfect, I’m not really sure. But the question is, who are “they”? Like, can you name a single person doing this? If the answer is no, we’re probably in moral panic territory. And pointing this out won’t necessarily win you any arguments with fanatics, but it could help grant clarity to observers, and position you as an ally for any marginalized groups listening in.

Bouncing between personal narrative and fairy tale, I have argued that tradition is a resource that people use to stake a claim to valid human rights obligations, but sometimes people twist narrative to their own ends, using it to punch down rather than punch up. Hopefully you can use my three-part analytical tool—entitlement vs. obligation, specificity vs. specters, punching up vs. punching down—to try to identify these themes when they emerge in narratives close to you. And on a closing note, I’m sorry I’ve had to say “punching” so much in this talk, because I’m a pretty nonviolent person and clearly I mean it metaphorically, but I also think it’s helpful to remember that some of the social injustices here are enacted on bodies in very real, physical ways. When we think about resistance, and folklore and resistance, we must remember that for all the folklore is often trivialized and marginalized, the stakes are often very high. So whatever your chosen weapon is—analytical words, persuasive words, creative works, and more—come ready to fight. Because those who would deny us our basic human rights sure as hell are.

Works Cited:

Dolby Stahl, Sandra. Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative. Indiana University Press, 1989.

Glassie, Henry. “Tradition.” In Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture, edited by Burt Feintuch. University of Illinois Press, 2003. 176-197.

Manne, Kate. Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women. Crown, 2020.

Willsey, Kristiana. “‘Fake Vets’ and Vital Lies: Personal Narrative in a Post-Truth Era.” Journal of American Folklore vol. 131, no. 522, pp. 500-508.

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I’m Blogging Over At Patheos Now!

March 22, 2016 in Uncategorized | No comments

Can you tell I’m excited about this? I totally am!

I now have a blog at Patheos, titled Foxy Folklorist (based on my tongue-in-cheek Twitter handle). You can check out my introduction post here. We’ve gone ahead and imported all my archives from here over to there, with a redirect for a good chunk of them (if not all…yes, I’m still figuring out how this all works).

I’m still deciding if I’m going to keep blogging here or not; maybe I’ll use my personal site as a way to write on topics that aren’t related to my career as a folklorist, since they want me for my folklore expertise. Then again, being a folklorist has irrevocably shaped how I think about and do things. I’ve already got my doctorjeana.com site for blogging that’s specifically related to sexuality studies and my sex education career so… yeah. Can I mix metaphors to ponder having too many blogs in the fire? Or in the kitchen?  Still mulling this one over.

Anyway, I just wanted to give readers a heads-up that the bulk of my folklore blogging will now take place at Patheos, and while I’m still retaining this site as a “find me on the internet” hub, I don’t expect to be blogging here as much.

Workaholic Missives: Work Hard, Play Hard

February 29, 2016 in Observations | No comments

One of my “play hard” moments, on an aerial hoop at Cirque Indy.

Welcome to the next installment of my Workaholic Missives post series, wherein I talk about my philosophy behind work/life balance (or lack thereof, as some would have it).

I know it’s trite, but I try to live by the phrase “Work hard, play hard.” I like the website Get Bullish’s take on this: “If it isn’t extremely productive or extremely pleasurable, just stop. Either eat something healthy that takes five minutes, or have a huge decadent meal with friends for two hours. Either go to the gym and work every fucking muscle in your body like an Olympian, or stay home and find someone to make out with.”

Basically, the idea here is that if you’ve got limited time in which to be awesome, either spend it being as awesome as possible, or recharging as aggressively as possible. I know, the idea of recharging aggressively seems weird to some, but that’s how I’ve been exploring work/life balance in the last few years, and I’ve really enjoyed it. This blog post shares some of my strategies for making it work.

As a freelancer, I run the risk of always working. There’s always another proposal to write, a blog post to pitch, or a project to write, revise, etc. I know this is ingrained into me by academic culture to some degree (see my post on normalized weekend work at Conditionally Accepted), but I’ve also had to navigate the “you should be working more!” ethos of freelancing. Piling one on top of the other has not necessarily been that healthy for me.

Luckily, I’m all about the self-care interventions. And sometimes that means aggressive self-care: taking a weekend off to travel because I’m on the verge of burn-out, or scheduling a massage after a lunch date but right before a work date followed by rock climbing (a.k.a. last Tuesday). I take care to always meet my commitments to others, backing out only when it’s really dire, but I match that persistence with a commitment to myself as well: to engage in what is healthy and pleasurable as much as I can possibly fit in, justify, and/or afford.

The “work hard” part of the phrase means that I try not to waste time on things that are not-work, assuming that I have the energy and the mental focus to put in good work. Since I do a range of activities in my freelance life, it could mean deciding whether I have the attention span to do something related to a college class I’m teaching (lesson planning and grading papers tend to take the most focus, whereas small tasks like recording attendance are less strenuous) or whether I should do something on social media that’s less obviously related to a project I’m on, but could help promote my work in ways that might be fruitful later. It could be the difference between “work on my book proposal while I’ve got the brain power for it” and “send out inquiries about a performance opportunity for my dance troupe because those are halfway scripted already.”

The “play hard” hard of the phrase means that I take my relaxation seriously, and I try to fill it with activities that not only recharge me, but about which I’m passionate. That can be a tricky balance: for instance, I truly love dancing, but sometimes I’m just too tired from all my other stuff to really make a serious go of a night out dancing. So it might mean practicing at home a little bit, followed by watching performances by some of my favorite dancers, in order to get that creative charge going. When I’m totally worn out and can’t brain anymore, then I’ll do something low-key that I still really love, like reading a novel or spending time with someone I care about. Watching trashy TV tends to fall pretty low on the list… yes, even I have a few guilty pleasure TV shows, but I tend to combine them with social time (my life partner and I have a list of shows we’re working our way through) or with introvert time (like if I can write in my journal or knit while watching a show).

On the flip side, the “play hard” aspect means that if some relaxation or social activity doesn’t really appeal to me, and I don’t have a good reason to do it regardless, I’m probably going to turn it down. My free time is too limited for me to spend it in an activity that doesn’t serve me.

So, yes, I’m very mercenary in how I make my choices with my free time, in large part because of this need for balance that I perceive. On that note, time to make a shopping run for a dinner party, before working out, before a lunch date, before teaching a dance workshop, before spending the rest of the day working on grading and writing. Like ya do… if you’re me.

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How Not To Be An Ass While Studying Fairy Tales

February 18, 2016 in Fairy Tales | 9 comments

Painting by Edwin Henry Landseer, in public domain. You get the reference, I hope.

Welcome to another tongue-in-cheek post about folklore studies pet peeves. This one is about how to approach the study of fairy tales from a perspective that is, well, not dick-ish.

First, we have to clear up the misconception that just because something is in public domain, or has been widely experienced, it doesn’t mean that everyone’s qualified to talk about it in a scholarly fashion. I’ve found this phenomenon occurring about folklore in general (see my blog post on the topic) and also about fairy tales specifically. So, even if you’ve seen every Disney movie and even started to poke around the scholarly web a bit (not that there’s anything wrong with, say, SurLaLune and Dr. Ashliman’s folk-texts, but they’re starting points for further research the same way Wikipedia is), please consider taking some of the suggestions in this blog post.

Next, please be aware of existing folklore scholarship on fairy tales. As my colleague Will Pooley points out, “folklorists are THE experts on oral narratives, such as fairy tales.” We’ve “developed tools and methods for studying this material, but the clickbait stories about ‘myth’ and ‘fairy tales’ often ignore this expertise, preferring dramatic accounts of undiscovered materials.” So I guess it’s not a big surprise, given this reporting trend, that a lot of folks come away with the impression that you can blithely say whatever you want about fairy tales and folklore.

For example, I wrote about hearing a conference paper on “Cinderella” that ignored all existing folklore scholarship on the tale type. This exemplifies my two previous points – someone thinking they’re qualified to present scholarship on fairy tales because I don’t even know why, and ignoring existing folklore scholarship – but in addition, the author got defensive when I politely pointed out that maaaaybe their methodology needed some work.

Snark aside, here are some ideas for how to not draw the ire of folklorists and fairy-tale scholars if you want to come play in our sandbox.

  • Cull the phrase “the original” from your language. Just do it. In a handful of instances, we can identify the first time a fairy-tale plot or motif appeared, as is the case of Hans Christian Andersen’s literary tales (because his “The Little Mermaid” was the first text with its particular synthesis of mermaid motifs from legend, fairy-tale elements like the quest for love, and so on, and it went on to inspire future versions). But mostly, because of the dense interconnection between fairy tales and folklore/oral tradition, it’s impossible to say when a given tale was the ACTUAL first time something appeared, and not just the first time somebody happened to write it down.
  • Be aware of some of the main methods and theories for studying fairy tales. If you are absolutely undeterred from studying origins, for example, make sure you’re familiar with the historic-geographic/Finnish method. If you’re into structuralism, read Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (bonus points for chasing down Bengt Holbek’s simplification of Propp’s 31 narrative functions into 5 moves). Learn what a tale type is. For psychological approaches, get your hands on some of Alan Dundes’s work, because while he’s biased toward the Freudian side of things, he’ll at least mention some of the Jungian stuff out there (I summarize some of the symbolic approaches to fairy tales in my master’s thesis). Max Lüthi’s work does a great job explaining the literary and stylistic qualities of fairy tales. For Marxist approaches you’ve GOT to read Jack Zipes, and for feminist approaches, Donald Haase’s edited volume is a fine start. Heck, we even have digital approaches to fairy tales these days!
  • Make sure you cite existing fairy-tale scholars and scholarship. That includes those of us still alive and kicking, not just references to the greats of the last century. Pick a handful from this list, and acquire their books and articles (many are available in the journal Marvels & Tales, which you can buy issues of or read online from a university computer): Jack Zipes, Donald Haase, Maria Tatar, Cristina Bacchilega, and Marina Warner. Some of my colleagues are doing great work editing and making accessible the work of others, like Pauline Greenhill, Jill Terry Rudy, and Kay Turner, with their own work appearing too in excellent volumes like Transgressive Tales and Channeling Wonder. There are some folks in my cohort of younger scholars doing great work as well. Not all of us have books out yet, but look for our blog posts and journal articles: Claudia Schwabe, Christy Williams, Veronica Schanoes, Linda Lee, Adam Zolkover, Brittany Warman, Sara Cleto, and, of course, myself. Most of these are my American colleagues; I could go on about fairy-tale scholars and folklorists in other countries!

These are just the suggestions off the top of my head; I’m sure I’m forgetting some folks who should be included. The field of fairy-tale studies has a centuries-long history, with its own internal vocabulary, paradigms, and debates. If you plan to play in our sandbox, please familiarize yourself with our history. It’s only polite… and it makes you that much more likely to be taken seriously by us.

Fairy-tale scholarship is a thriving, complex, wondrous field. It is at once highly intellectual and confoundingly creative. We’re working at the intersections of folklore, pop culture, and literature, and with theoretical concerns ranging from psychological symbolism to feminism to aesthetics. If you want to come play with us, please do – but tread as respectfully as you would if interacting with actual fairies. I’m not saying we’re quite that temperamental, but, well, we also get cranky when people come uninvited into our territory and starting flinging their uninformed selves around.

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