academe

Next weekend I have a unique opportunity to reflect on how I’ve grown since my graduation from Muskingum College—now University—in 1991. My husband Nikhil Deogun and I will be delivering the undergraduate commencement address.

Needless to say, it’s an honor and a privilege, but also a big responsibility. After all, we want to impart wisdom, right?

We’ve had fun thinking back on the people we were 21 years ago, and the unexpected paths we’ve followed. We want to give the graduates advice about how to navigate those unexpected turns themselves, about how to find love, follow their professional dreams, and make a difference.

For me, the question of making a difference has also come from some unexpected places. Here’s a sneak peak at some of my thoughts for the Class of 2012:

I’ve learned that through mothering I can make my mark on the world as much as—and maybe more than—at work. Let me be clear: I love my work at the National Women’s Studies Association and find it meaningful. Highlights of my working life include planning a yearly national conference that features cutting-edge feminist scholarship. I’m also a leader in conversations about women’s issues outside of higher education: in 2010, I organized a meeting at the invitation of the White House Council on Women and Girls to discuss how feminist academics could help shape policy initiatives, and I recently attended a Department of Education-sponsored discussion about applying classroom learning in community settings.

Yet I’ve discovered that motherhood can sometimes be richer ground for expressing my feminist values, and for cultivating parts of myself, than the workplace. Our children, Maya—who’s 11—and Sameer, who’s 9—really want to make the world a better place. More important, they take action to make a difference. For example, Maya teamed up with friends to sell hot chocolate at our local sledding hill to raise money for a neighborhood soup kitchen. Sameer has spent time serving meals in a Newark homeless shelter. Of course, they’re normal kids who sometimes spend too much time watching Teen Nick and absorbed in their iPods. But when they notice inequality they ask questions and they want to do something about it.

Here’s the lesson I’ve learned: while you’re busy building your career, don’t forget about opportunities at home, whether those come in the form of parenting or other non-work pursuits. It really is true what you’ve probably heard from faculty already: you want to be a well-rounded person.

Now GWP readers, what advice do you have for the class of 2012? What unexpected discoveries have you made looking back on your life over five, ten, or 20 years?

What Would Simone de Beauvoir Say? Bringing Up Bébé by former Wall Street Journal reporter Pamela Druckerman is the latest addition to books that highlight our cultural obsession with motherhood, or the failings of American mothers.  Even if you haven’t read the memoir you probably know the gist of the story given the raft of media coverage: after some time spent living in France where she gave birth to two children, Druckerman concludes that French women are superior mothers because they have time for themselves and their children are better behaved compared with her American counterparts.

Plenty of critics have taken aim at Druckerman’s argument but few have spent much time discussing the differences between French (read “extensive and nationalized”) and and American (read “few and individualized”) social supports for mothers and families aside from a quick mention before they move on to tackle other aspects of her narrative.

Surely it’s not so easy to dismiss these massive differences and the social conditions they create for mothers in their respective countries.  As a feminist, I want to focus on these structural problems and solutions, not toss them into a “by the way” paragraph.  I agree with my fellow GWPenner, Deborah Siegel, who argues here that we still need to demand some form of national childcare and better work-life options.

Work v. Motherhood Again New research in Gender and Society finds that most moms would work even if they didn’t have to.  According to Karen Christopher’s findings, mothers said they found more fulfillment in paid work than in parenting, and most women (regardless of class, race/ethnicity, or marital status), said they would work even if they didn’t have to.

Mother-readers, does this ring true to you?  Don’t get me wrong: I love my work at the National Women’s Studies Association.  At the same time, I don’t want to have to rank-order work over my role as a mother.  To me this sounds like an either/or choice that we should refuse.

Feminist Ryan Gosling Okay, this isn’t about motherhood, but Feminist Ryan Gosling falls squarely into the “and Feminism” portion of my roundup.  I love Danielle Henderson’s take on “feminist flash cards.”  I also love that Danielle is a graduate student in Gender and Women’s Studies.  I think you’ll love her work and her sense of humor, too!  Check it out and then post a comment here.

Just off the plane from a fabulous trip to Atlanta for the National Women’s Studies Association Conference.  Thought I’d share my opening remarks from Girl w/Pen’s session, “Gone Virtual: Opportunities and Challenges for Feminist Scholar-Bloggers.”  Thanks to everyone who came and participated in the Roundtable, and to those who weren’t able to be there, I hope these postings help!

It’s an honor to be here in real space with these women with whom I share a platform virtually.  A bit about the history of Girl w/Pen: In 2007, when my first book (Only Child) came out, and then my second (Sisterhood, Interrupted), I started a blog.  It’s mission morphed as I did, becoming eventually a group platform designed to “bridge feminist research and popular reality.”  Today, we are a collaborative blog of 10 scholar-bloggers across disciplines–all of them what I would call “engaged scholars,” women who are not only modeling something important for their students (namely, engagement in a more public form of dialogue) but reinventing what it means to be a feminist scholar along the way.  They’re going to share with you how blogging for a larger audience impacts their research, their writing, and their teaching, and how collaborative blogging can serve broader feminist goals.

But first, a quick comment about why it’s particularly interesting and important to be blogging NOW.  The blogosphere is remaking the media.  It’s part of media, sure, but it’s also proactively shaping, often, what becomes news.  I’ve recently teamed up with The OpEd Project and have been teaching seminars with them.  A big part of what we talk about there is women’s imperative to contribute to public forums and public debate given our woeful underrepresentation in the nation–indeed, the world’s–most public and prominent thought leadership forums.

How many of you blog?  How many of the rest of you would like to blog but feel you have no time to?

My hope, by the end of our session this morning, after hearing what these scholar-bloggers next to me have to say about it all, is that the question becomes not how can I possibly add blogging to my already packed life but how can I not.

Panelist introductions:

Heather Hewett is an Assistant Professor of English and Women’s Studies.  Her work has been published in a range of academic and popular venues, including Women’s Studies Quarterly, Women’s Review of Books, Brain, Child, and in several edited collections, including Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. She writes and edits the “Global Mama” column for GWP.

Veronica I. Arreola is the assistant director of the Center for Research on Women and Gender and the director of the Women in Science and Engineering program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A veteran blogger, her own blog, Viva la Feminista, is where she discusses the intersection between feminism and motherhood. She holds a bachelors degree in Biological Sciences and a masters in Public Administration, both with concentrations in Gender and Women’s Studies. She began work on her Ph.D. in Public Administration last year.  She writes the Science Grrl column at GWP.

Alison Piepmeier directs the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the College of Charleston, where she’s an associate professor of English.  Her most recent book is Girl Zines:  Making Media, Doing Feminism (NYU Press, 2009).  She’s a member of the NWSA Governing Council.  She writes the Body Language column at GWP.

Allison Kimmich has led the National Women’s Studies Association since 2004.  Most recently she has guided the Association’s Teagle-grant funded research on women’s studies and civic engagement.  She holds a PhD in women’s studies from Emory University.  She writes the Girl Talk column for Girl w/Pen.

Kyla Bender-Baird is a Doctoral Student at the CUNY Graduate Center where she focuses on sociology of gender, embodiment, and the law.  Her book, Transgender Employment Experiences, was released this fall by SUNY Press.  Prior to returning to graduate school, Kyla worked at the National Council for Research on Women where she served as the managing editor of their blog (among other things).

And I’m Deborah Siegel. (Bio and all that stuff at www.deborahsiegel.net)

A quick note about how the blog itself works: We’re each “editors” and welcome guest posts that fall under the broad rubic of our particular columns.  We also welcome guest posts on other topics as well.  (See the guidelines, and use our contact form to get in touch with our fellow blogger and webmaster Avory Faucette!)

FROM THE HANDOUT…

CHECK OUT PANELISTS’ COLUMNS AND SAMPLE POSTS
SCIENCE GRRL / Veronica Arreola Can We Whistle Stereotypes Away?
BODY POLITIC  / Kyla Bender-Baird Love Your (NonNormative) Body – a dialogue with Kyla and Avory
GLOBAL MAMA / Heather Hewett Maternal Health, One Year Later
GIRL TALK  / Allison Kimmich The Other Sex Talk
BODY LANGUAGE / Alison Piepmeier High Expectations
MAMA W/PEN  / Deborah Siegel Midlife Mama Asks Whether We’re All Too Isolated to Fight the Pink-v.-Blue Battle Outside Our Homes

OTHER VENUES WHERE GIRL W/PENNERS BLOG
Baxter Sez
Ms. Magazine Blog
The Pink & Blue Diaries
Viva la Feminista
The Real Deal

There are rare moments when I read an article or listen to a recording and can’t form words to respond. Today is one of those moments and it is because you really should just listen to this recording for yourself. It’s that perfect.

The NYTimes invited four women who are at the top of their respective fields of science in for a roundtable discussion. They shared their thoughts about:

Differences between men and women in science:

TAL RABIN: Even when we do make it to the conferences, I think that there is still something different about the way that we promote ourselves.

I remember standing next to one of my co-authors, and he was talking to some other guy, and he was telling him, “I have this amazing result. I just did this, I just did that.” And I was sitting and thinking there, what result is he talking about? Until he got to the punch line. It was a joint result. It was a result of mine also. I would have never spoken about my result in the superlatives that the guy was speaking about it.

MS. KOLATA: What would you have done?

DR. RABIN: I would have said, you know, “I have this very interesting result, and we achieved very nice things.” But not “This is the best thing since we invented the wheel, and here it is.”

Having a family:

MS. KOLATA: It must be exciting for your children to grow up with a mother who has such passion for what she does.

DR. APRILE: It depends on the child. The second of my daughters used to say, “Mommy, why can’t we have dinner at 6 p.m. like everybody else?” They finally accepted these crazy hours that I had to live with.

Asking where the women are going:

DR. KING: I think the choke point is going from a postdoc to an assistant professorship to a tenure-track position. In my experience the largest remaining obstacle is how to integrate family life with the life of a scientist.

What they would say to their daughter about going into science:

DR. RABIN: The truth is that I feel differently. I think that the life of a scientist is a fantastic life. I think it is exciting because every day there is something new that you can go and think of. There are challenges, no doubt, and the times when you can’t solve things. So I think it is all a wonderful life. And not to mention even things like time flexibility, traveling around the world, meeting a lot of exciting people. I think that these are fantastic jobs.

This is the type of conversation I would have KILLED for as an undergraduate. The one faculty member I tried to have this conversation with rebuffed me. She was pretty old school, couldn’t go to Harvard with the men and it took me awhile to figure out why she wouldn’t address the gender issue. I don’t blame her either. When you build up a defense mechanism, it is hard to let it go.

What I love about the conversation are the differing opinions. As I tell my students, there are no firm answers. You gather up all the data you can and make the best decision you can. From this conversation, one can see that difference decisions all lead to some awesome science making.

We were interested to read Pamela Paul’s list of academic blogs, “Big Blog on Campus,” in The New York Times Education Life section this last Sunday.  We felt her list of seven blogs that have achieved “blogosphere fame” didn’t reflect the much wider diversity of academic voices that populate the blogosphere.  In fact, with the exception of one female blogger and one collective blog, the rest on the list are penned by white men.  In the spirit of expanding this list, we are starting a list of academic blogs (not just feminist blogs).  This is very much a work-in-progress; please let us know about others in the comments!

Feminist Law Professors

Sociological Images

Mama PhD

The Feminist Wire

Tenured Radical

Scholar as Citizen

A blog-friend (i.e. someone I know only because we read each other’s blogs) posted this last night, and I had a look. It’s a post about the fact that PBS News Hour has started a six-part series called “Autism Now,” and the series was at least partly inspired by the fact that host Robert MacNeils’s grandson Nick has autism.

After watching the first part of the series, I shared this with blogger Melissa:

Okay, so here’s a quick comment based on having watched only a tiny bit of the PBS clip. It troubles me a bit how autism is framed here as (mostly? entirely?) a medical condition–worse, as a medical problem. It strikes me as troubling, like Nicholas is now defined not as a person but as a used-to-be-person-now-tragedy.

The clip starts by explaining that they’re going to explore “how Nick was transformed from that healthy boy to Nick today.” Nick’s mom, Alison MacNeil, describes seeing a very young Nick exhibiting behavior that is often affiliated with autism. “I had this sinking feeling in my stomach,” she explains, “because I knew something was wrong.” At one point MacNeil interviews his granddaughter, Nick’s ten-year-old sister, and she shares with him, “I hope that [Nick] gets healed soon.”

MacNeil notes his own painful feelings at the challenges he has in connecting with Nick. He frames his relationship with Nick as strange, so different than his relationship with his children and other grandchildren. These are valid feelings for MacNeil himself to be grappling with, but the show seems to suggest that the pain results from Nick’s “abnormality,” not from MacNeil’s need to reframe his expectations for his grandson. Further, he describes his admiration for his daughter and son-in-law’s “patience and courage,” and he seems impressed that his son-in-law comes home from work every day and spends 90 minutes riding the bus with Nick. The show, then, seems to be characterizing autism in two ways: as an illness that must be understood by medicine and healed, and as a tragedy, a tragedy that makes the parents heroic. Nick isn’t okay as he is today. He’s not normal. He needs to be fixed. Thank goodness that Alison and Dave are so patient and courageous.

As I wrote to Melissa, I find this troubling. I don’t have a child with autism, so I can’t speak to that experience on a personal level, but this show strikes me as participating in the sort of dehumanizing rhetoric I often see in public discourses around children with cognitive disabilities.

As good timing would have it, I watched the first part of the series last night, after I got home from a graduate class in which we’d been talking about autism. We were discussing public representations of autism and the cultural work various representations are doing. We had a look at Ari Ne’eman, the first openly autistic Presidential appointee ever. In an interview with Wired magazine, he advocates neurodiversity, a framing of autism and other cognitive disabilities not as deficiencies, defects, or tragedies, but as different ways of being. He explains,

There’s a strange idea out there that neurodiversity advocates think that autistic life is all flowers and rainbows, but I don’t know anyone who thinks that way. Most of us have had deeply personal experiences of social isolation, bullying and abuse, lack of support, discrimination, and plenty of other problems. But it’s much more productive for us to focus on how we can improve people’s lives than to keep presenting people as pitiable burdens.

No more pity. It doesn’t help anybody.

Ne’eman has received a surprising number of hostile responses to his appointment to the National Council on Disability, responses that seem in part to be based on his perspective on autism. As one of the people in class last night observed, “Changing our culture to accommodate people with autism is much more immediate and pragmatic than all these efforts to find a cure for autism. Maybe that’s why it’s threatening: it’s saying that the mainstream culture has to change, rather than saying that people with autism have to be different, or disappear.”

I don’t mean this post in any way as an individualized critique of the MacNeil family. The family clearly loves Nick and advocates accommodations and support for him—and for them—and this show is certainly meant to raise awareness about autism. But the show itself strikes me as an example of how easily (even unintentionally) autism and other cognitive disabilities can be framed as tragedies to be mourned, and/or conditions that are unacceptable and need to be fixed. I’d rather see more public emphasis on neurodiversity, on changing our society so that we can accommodate and support as many different types of people as possible.

With a heavy heart, I write in honor of two women who spent much of their time writing and thinking about motherhood.

Two weeks ago, feminist philosopher Sara Ruddick (1935-2011) passed away.  The author of the highly influential Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, Professor Ruddick focused attention on the day-to-day activities of mothering (a practice she did not restrict to mothers).  In her obituary, New York Times reporter William Grimes writes that she

developed an approach to child-rearing that shifted the focus away from motherhood as a social institution or biological imperative and toward the day-to-day activities of raising and educating a child. This work, she argued, shaped the parent as much as the child, giving rise to specific cognitive capacities and values — qualities of intellect and soul. Doing shapes thinking, in other words.

He quotes Andrea O’Reilly, scholar and founder of Demeter Press and the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, on the impact of Ruddick on the study of motherhood.  Professor O’Reilly cites Maternal Thinking (along with Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution) as “the most significant work in maternal scholarship and the new field of motherhood studies.”  In 2009, Demeter Press published an edited collection of essays, Maternal Thinking: Philosophy, Politics, Practice, that explored the impact of Ruddick’s book on maternal scholarship.

Her ideas influenced many fields.  On the Feminist Law Professors blog, Pace law professor Bridget Crawford writes that Ruddick’s influence “was seeping into feminist legal theory” and provided the groundwork for much “contemporary legal scholarship on caretakers and vulnerability.”  Her loss is felt by many of us who have been deeply influenced by her thinking about mothering.

Although I did not know Sara Ruddick personally, I did know Jessica Nathanson (1968-2011), a contemporary and a Women’s Studies colleague who passed away earlier this week.  Jessica was an inspiring human being.  She was a smart, creative, and accomplished professor, writer, and blogger, and a generous and committed mother, friend, and activist.  She fought breast cancer with an indomitable spirit.

I first met Jessica at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, where she was an active member of several groups, including the Feminist Mothering Caucus.  She always had an incredibly thoughtful and perceptive answer, whatever the question.  (And as a newcomer to the Feminist Mothering Caucus, and later as a co-chair, I asked her many questions.)  Over the years, we had several opportunities to talk about mothering, research, creative writing, blogging, teaching, job searching, and trying to fit it all in.  But, I now realize, not enough opportunities.  Nowhere near enough.

Jessica thought a lot about motherhood, parenting, and work.  She co-edited a book with Laura Camille Tuley, Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the “Experts,” published by Demeter Press in 2009.  Her book gives voice to mothers who contest what “experts” have to say about motherhood and mothering.  I reread her essay this morning and was brought to tears by her voice: smart, honest, and fierce.

Jessica wrote her essay, “What Mothers Don’t Say Out Loud: On Putting the Academic Self First,” when her son was 2 ½–a time in her life when she was finishing her dissertation, interviewing for academic positions, and starting her first full-time job as a professor of Women’s Studies and Director of Women’s Studies and the Women’s Resource Center at Augsburg College.  In her essay, she writes honestly about the conflict between her need to live an intellectual and creative life, and her need to be close to her young son.  She writes movingly about the pull of her body towards her son, about his need (at times his demands) for her body, and about the embodied dimensions of mothering young children: the physical intimacy of hugging, breastfeeding, and simply being near one another.

But she also claims her own need to write, create, and teach.  While the “struggle for a life of the mind” can be difficult and exhausting, it’s also essential.  The ability to continue creative and intellectual work sustains us; it is what enables us to parent.  She realizes that

If my academic self struggles for a life of the mind, and my mother self is rooted in a contested body, then allowing myself to be an academic mother helps to resolve this split.  It also makes me a better mother.  Teaching and research give me a creative and intellectual outlet.  Because I am engaged in activities that support my selfhood, challenge my intellect, and provide a creative outlet, I can come back to mothering refreshed and energized.  If I can live my own life for part of the day and then spend time with him, I can really be with him, and enjoy him, and be a better parent to him.  I am not an engaged mother when I don’t have this time.

Her call at the end of the essay speaks to me now, from the moment she wrote down these words to the present moment as I read them, thinking of her and her family and all the people who knew her, learned from her, and loved her.

We need to speak this truth to ourselves and to each other: the sacrifices involved in motherhood do not need to be complete and self-annihilating.  Putting the academic self first is not selfish.  It is an honest investment in mothering.

Jessica, you are deeply missed.

I often write here about the girl in my life, my daughter, Maya.

Today I want to focus on girls nationally. The National Women’s Studies Association convened several girl-serving organizations at its 2010 conference, and learned, among other things, that the organizations wanted to broaden the audience for disseminating research and information about their programs.

To that end, NWSA created a research roundup. Some highlights:

• 90% of Girls For A Change participants know they can create change in their communities, they can and will use those skills to create change in their own lives
• The Girl Scout Leadership Experience curriculum is designed so that girls learn to advocate for themselves and others, locally and globally
• Hardy Girls Healthy Women offers a strength-based approach to working with girls and is grounded in a review and critique of resilience literature for its over-emphasis on the individual and lack of attention to relationships and environments
• Smart-Girl is a program that works with 8^th grade girls in Denver, Colorado; a program evaluation shows that participants had increases in science grades and overall GPA

Even this brief overview points to some effective strategies for serving girls: we can teach girls to take leadership and translate their ideas into action.  We can create sustaining, respectful spaces for girls to engage and learn.  GWP readers, what has worked for you?  What other girl-serving organizations do you know?

You’ll also find highlights from girl-centered presentations at last year’s NWSA conference, with topics ranging from public education to food and sexualization.

This promises to be a growing area in NWSA.  The conference proposal submission deadline has been extended until February 21, 2011. Plan to come and find out the latest in the world of girls and girls’ studies!

For this month’s column, I had the pleasure of emailing with Chris Bobel, Ph.D. about her new book which deftly tackles a taboo topic.

——————————————-

You explore new feminist activism that focuses on menstruation. Historically, how have feminists viewed menstruation, and why menstrual activism now?

The issue of menstruation has not been a top feminist priority, though, since at least the 1970s, a few bold feminists have recknoned with socio-cultural and political dimensions of the menstrual cycle. I argue that the menstrual taboo–which impacts us all, even feminists–often puts the issue off-limits. In mainstream culture, the only menstrual discourse that gets any play is making fun of women with PMS. I studied menstrual activists who want to widen and complicate the conversation. Menstrual activism is part of an enduring project of loosening the social control of women’s bodies, moving women’s bodies from object to subject status–something absolutely foundational to addressing a range of feminist issues, from human trafficking to eating disorders to sexual assault.

What do you think of Kotex’s new ad campaign “Break the Cycle,” which lampoons traditional menstrual product ads?

The new campaign could be a game change, but I’m doubtful. First, the campaign only works as long as the menstrual taboo persists; otherwise, their frank talk doesn’t stand out, does it? While I can join in the joke of the industry poking fun at itself–and I love the message of “no more shame”–in the end, it’s the same, just repackaged.

Second, I resent this campaign for exploiting shame to sell product for nearly a centuray and then exploiting THEIR overdue pronouncement–“enough with the euphemisms, and get over it”–to sell product.

Also, you’ve got to wonder if not only Kotex but their whole industry is now pulling out all the stops to try to hold onto its market share as menstrual suppression drugs–like Seasonique and Lybrel–are gaining interest.

So, what do you think of pharmaceutical industry arguments that support these menstrual suppressants?

Their quasi-feminist arguments co-opt feminism to push drugs. Big Pharma is marketing suppression as a ‘lifestyle choice’, but what most don’t realize is that “menstrual suppression” is actually cycle-stopping contraception that does not only reduce or eliminate menstrual bleeding but also suppresses the complex hormonal interplay of the menstrual cycle. We don’t yet have adequate data to really show if this is a safe long-term practice for otherwise healthy women. Check out this position statement.

Furthermore, ad campaigns represent the menstrual cycle as abnormal, obsolete, and even unhealthy. These messages underscore that women’s natural functions are defective, dysfunctional and need medical intervention. This can lead to negative body image, especially in young women. How is this feminist? ‘Choice’ without good, fact-based information based on thorough medical studies isn’t real choice, and a campaign that exploits women’s negative attitudes about their bodies isn’t feminist either.

Your work uses menstrual activism as an analytical lens through which to view continuity and change in the women’s movement, from what some call the “second wave” of feminism through the “third wave.” So, given that the ‘wave’ distinctions are not without controversy among feminists, what do you see as setting third wave feminism apart? Is it truly unique, or is it merely a label that recognizes the next generation?

There’s a lot of continuity between the waves–mostsly in the tactical sense. Today’s feminist blogs are yesterday’s zines, which reflect earlier mimeographed manifestos; radical cheerleading recalls street theater and public protests, like early second-wavers at the 1969 Miss America pageant. Second-wavers practiced what third-wavers call DIY (Do It Yourself) healthcare when they modeled pelvic self exams. But, most third-wavers depart from most (but not all) second-wavers by troubling the gender binary. For example, the radical wing of menstrual activism movements reers to “menstruators”, instead of assuming that everyone who menstruates gender-identifies as a woman.

Tell me more about that!

Most assume that a female-bodied person, with breasts and a vulva, is a woman, and usually that’s true. We also assume that menstruation is a near-universal experience for women. Radical menstruation activists question these assumptions. Menstruation is not and has never been EVERY woman’s experience. Women don’t menstruate for lots of reasons, and they don’t menstruate their whole lives. Also, some transmen and intersex people DO menstruate. So, equating menstruation with womanhood is problematic. Saying “menstruators” makes room for more people, more experiences. This linguistic move is boundary smashing, inclusion-in-action and bodes well for feminism’s future.

But, you’ve written that menstrual activists are not successful at all attempts at inclusion.

The first face of the feminist movement may have been white and middle class, but poor white women and women of color across the class spectrum have always been there, often toiling in relative obscurity. This could be the case with menstrual activism, too. However, I’m a white, privileged academic, and this biases my world view. I looked for women of color doing this work and found a few. But, was I looking in the right places? Was I using the right language? One activists of color said that I was likely missing Black women because I wasn’t clarifying how race and gender intersect in menstrual health. Also, menstrual activism is risky business for all, and especially for women of color, whose bodies have been denigrated throughout history. Taking on the menstrual taboo can make others see you as nasty, gross, improper…and if you’re already struggling to be accepted and taken seriously, then why go “there”?

Well, I and many other women’s health activists appreciate that you ‘went there’!

——————————————-

For more on this topic and her research, check out Chris’s new book — New Blood: Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation (Rutgers University Press, 2010), previewed in the Our Bodies, Ourselves blog and in a provocative article in the Guardian last fall.

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

For those who care about the po’ biz, as the “business” side of the poetry world is sometimes called, the details of who gets published, how, when, and why, often seem to be of utmost significance. Although this might be a small subset, it’s heartening to see how many others are tracking and fighting for better gender parity within publishing now. And for those who like to dig into gender theory, especially the exploration of what Helene Cixous coined “l’ecriture feminine,” it’s gratifying to know these debates are still active. Finding a book that addresses all of these issues serves not only as an exemplar of hybridity but also as a daring act of new publishing practice.

Feminaissance: A Book of Tiny Revolts, edited by Christine Wertheim, just out from Les Figues Press, serves all these purposes. For one, it acts as a journal from the conference of similar name (Feminaissance: A Colloquium on Women, Writing, Experiments, and Feminism) held in 2007 at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. For another, it offers not only innovative writing from intriguing poets, but each offers commentary about what it means to be a woman writing now. Some essays grapple with Cixous’s idea of l’ecriture feminine and what it means to “write as a woman”; some offer a meta-level response through the work itself.

“Another anthology of women’s writing!” is how Wertheim wryly starts out her dedication, followed by the inevitable rhetorical question, “Don’t we live in a post-gendered, post-subjective age where isolating the work of specifically defined groups is outmoded?” Her answer comes in the book’s subtitle, taken from contributor Dodie Bellamy’s piece that “grand revolutions are passé” but, as Bellamy writes, “tiny revolts” are still necessary. Wertheim offers that this book is meant to serve as a “display of the many different avant-garde experimental, innovative and conceptual modes that women themselves conceive.” Issues explored include “whether there can be specifically ‘feminine’ forms of text; the economic position of women as writers in the academy and marketplace; mothers, real, symbolic, and imaginary; questions of aesthetics and representation in relation to women’s work” and more.

While all of these questions are vital, and the work of Les Figues is both exciting and crucial, the volume itself requires either a natural ADD-like ability to accrete meaning from scattered forms, or earnest retraining in how to read a text, an admirable challenge, but one that most readers are not likely to bother with. I applaud the subjects addressed in this volume, and the quality of deep thought that most (but not all) offer in their responses, but the material book’s construction, an act of innovative publishing, made it difficult to absorb the texts.

Each page in Feminaissance is divided into three sections, with the author identified in a tiny vertical byline in the page’s margins. Until I caught on to this, I kept trying to read down the page, puzzled by the glitches in sequence.  As the publishers and editor write in the forward this allows for “multiple reading strands on each page” and “uses the space of the page as a visual arena for a public conversation.” By allowing, as they write, for “multi-vocality” they enable different styles of reading, both discursive and narrative as well as, they write, and “a more poetic meditation.” I admire this, but also found it detracted from the power of the authors.

The contribution most compelling to me is one that rippled before the book came out, stirring new controversy into a sadly evergreen debate. The essay “Numbers Trouble” co-written by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young was published, post-conference, in the Chicago Review. Their essay was a response to a previous article (Jennifer Ashton’s “Our Bodies, Our Poems” published in American Literary History) which contended, (in brief summary), that gender parity is no longer an issue within publishing, writing programs, etc., and that commitment to a “notion of difference” is essentializing and regressive. Spahr and Young confront Ashton’s notions of parity by literally counting pages and the result is dismaying. Things are, in fact, worse than they thought in terms of female representation in literary journals. (Much of this debate, including Ashton’s rebuttal, is collected at this site by scrolling down to “Gender.”)

When they published their essay the poetry world bristled at claims of sexism. I find their research admirable and their outrage constrained, given their findings. The essay authored just by Spahr (“Gender Trouble” a nod to Judith Butler’s book) is also a lucidly sobering recounting of gender performance and politics inside the creative writing program Spahr attended from 1989-1995, with its concomitant issues of power around gender representation within academe, (“the heroic male literary tradition”) mentorship and publishing, and then, full circle, who gets hired to start the cycle over again. Spahr and Young’s essay canvasses the whole of the book, in a two-line couplet-like form that looks like a running headline. Intrigued, I paged onward almost as if gleaning a story from a flip book, but couldn’t take in their whole meaning until I printed the essay whole.

The mix of poems included is admirable, although some are less successful than others. I found Wanda Coleman’s poem “Rape” (which I heard her read at the LACE book party) to be baffling to comprehend in tone. The essay by poet Tracie Morris (“Embracing Form: Pedagogical Sketches of Black Women Students Influenced by Hip Hop”) was especially interesting for its intersectional address of race and gender, as well as interplay of music and poem, with reference to contemporary performing artists and her breakdown into “craft specifics.”  Some of the more innovative styles, such as work by publisher Vanessa Place, and certainly, editor Christine Wertheim’s visual poems, are an acquired taste, undoubtedly most appreciated by those fully engaged in avant-garde aesthetics. I had the pleasure of hearing Wertheim “read” one of her poems at the book’s debut and her vocalizations were astounding, but without this rendering, the poem’s dimensionality on the page loses a reverberation of meaning.

“Where are the Whitmans? The Steins?” asks Lidia Yuknavitch in an epigraph. This is a book ripe for a graduate school classroom and I wished I had a cohort of poets and academics to hash through it with, particularly to discuss the issues raised around gender identity, essentialism, and how l’ecriture feminine can be understood currently, nevermind is bounded by race, class, and other markers. It is successful in drawing attention to critical issues, both theoretical, aesthetic, and practical, about women’s writing. What it is not is easy to absorb, something I don’t think its editor or contributors will mind in the least.