community

This post is crossposted at She Writes.

This month I was a nominee in Babble’s Moms with Clout contest.  In the end, Sausage Mama won, not me.  But the whole enchilada got me thinking: What is “clout”?  And why do so many women have trouble owning theirs?

My dictionary defines clout as “power and influence.”  Synonyms include “pull,” “authority,” “sway,” and “weight.”  In the public sphere, traditionally, clout has been gendered male.  To an overwhelming degree, it still is.  (See the depressing stats here.) Women, however, are mixing it up.  At social networks like She Writes, where authors promote one another and not just ourselves, at game-changing initiatives like The OpEd Project, where established thought leaders help fellow female experts embrace their expertise and get heard, “clout” is being redefined as something more communally achieved.  But even in the push for collaborative clout, and particularly among women, the tension between the one and the many remains.

I know this tension personally.  I experienced it this past month as I emailed my friends to ask for their vote, then opted against posting the request at She Writes or at my group blog,Girl w/Pen.  It just didn’t seem Girl w/Pen-y (or She Writes-y) to promote myself just for the sake of winning an iPad 2 (the prize).  I meticulously checked to see if any other of the 30+ nominees were She Writes members, so that I could shout us out collectively, as my colleagues in leadership at She Writes and I agreed that that would be the right way to do it.  But since they weren’t, I let it go.

In the end, I mildly regretted not saying something about it in the forums available to me—forums, heck, I’ve helped create.  I admit: I wanted that iPad!  I would have put it to good use, downloading e-books and apps and learning about the new forms all our books might take as I work toward my new project (The Pink and Blue Diaries).  But as early as day 2 or 3 of the contest, I quickly learned that I didn’t want it that bad.  Just as I couldn’t bring myself to harass my non-She Writes friends and followers more than once (ok, twice), I felt that promoting myself here for commercial gain would compromise the spirit of the community.  It felt like a conflict of interest, you know?

And that, exactly, is the problem.  Not just my problem, but women’s more generally I fear.  Are women collaborative, at times, to a fault?  In putting the community above ourselves, are we losing out on opportunities to enhance not merely our pocketbooks but our careers?  After all, winning a contest like this one is not just about winning an iPad.  To say you’ve won a contest breeds…clout.

And why should we care about clout?  Love it or hate it, fact is if you want to be a successful writer these days, clout matters.  It’s no longer the merit of our work but the reach of our platform that gets us the goodies.  Clout has been a social media buzzword for “influencer” or “community leader” for a while, but interestingly, now it’s also a website, complete with metrics and scores.  Klout.com measures “overall online influence” through an algorithm that determines exactly how much influence someone has over their social networks.  In a Klout score, numbers mean nothing; “true” influence means more.  (Come on, you know you want to, so go for it: check your Klout score here.) Will publishers start looking up our clout scores, like they look up our previous book’s sales in Book Scan?  Who knows.

In the meantime, I am not alone in my hesitation.  But nor do I necessarily think that’s a good thing.  In an article for a Canadian parenting site, top blogger Ann Douglas explores the dark–or rather, the ambivalent side–of making the top “mommyblogger” lists, while Catherine Connors of Her Bad Mother notes in a post at her own blog that top blogger and clout lists can be a source of bad feeling in the mom community, leaving those not listed feeling badly.  “I think, to that extent, they’re a little problematic,” Connors says, then adds: “I think it’s interesting that we worry about…whether feelings get hurt and the community spirit gets undermined—when this kind of discussion would be pretty much unthinkable in almost any other sphere.  Does anyone talk about Forbes business rankings making men feel bad?”

Um, no.

And that brings me back to my main concern: I was flattered to be nominated in Babble’s “Moms with Clout” contest.  In the end, I couldn’t do what it takes.  I find it interesting—and problematic—that I am so comfortable writing this post after the contest is over, revealing my ambivalence, but wasn’t comfortable asking for your vote.  Either I am being too ladylike, or simply not woman enough.

Attention GWPenners in the NYC Area: Join me, She Writes, and The OpEd Project for a joint Happy Hour in Manhattan on Sat. April 16! And for a break from all that clout-making and clout-sharing, come recharge at the mini-retreat I’m leading for writing mamas with Christina Baker Kline on May 21 in Brooklyn.

The peculiar drama of my life has placed me in a world that by and large thinks it would be better if people like me did not exist. My fight has been for accommodation, the world to me, and me to the world.

–Harriet McBryde Johnson, Too Late to Die Young

I’m gonna sit at the welcome table,
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table one of these days,
Halleluia!
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table,
Sit at the welcome table, one of these days.

–Traditional spiritual

“The Welcome Table” is a song that my daughter has been able to sign along with for months now. As many readers already know, Maybelle has Down syndrome. She was born in 2008, into a cultural moment that was ready for her in ways it would not have been even a few decades earlier. In one of my classes recently, a student shared that forty years ago, her sister was born and her mother was told to institutionalize her. A few decades later, shortly after Maybelle was born, I was told, “The College of Charleston is starting a college program for people with intellectual disabilities!” It’s a very different world.

And yet it’s still a world in which many people have a hard time seeing my daughter as fully human, and a world in which many people believe they ought to have prenatal testing so they can be sure their pregnancies won’t result in the births of people like Maybelle. As Harriet McBryde Johnson notes, it’s “a world that by and large things it would be better if people like me [and Maybelle] did not exist.” I know that the stigma surrounding—and, indeed, creating the meaning of—disability persists. I’m aware of it now in a way I wasn’t before Maybelle entered my life. Watching her sign this song recently, I felt how much I want Maybelle to be part of a community where, as one young feminist scholar puts it, “We [can] bring our whole selves to the table.” I want her to sit at a table where she’s welcomed, recognized as a valid and valuable person, and fully included.

I’ve just finished teaching Johnson’s memoir, Too Late to Die Young. Every time I read this book new parts jump out at me, and as I prepared for class last week, the passage quoted above got caught in my head and hasn’t left. Johnson explains that her “fight has been for accommodation.” She makes this point as she recounts an extended dialogue with Peter Singer, a philosopher who argued—kindly, but distressingly and persistently—that people with disabilities, people like Johnson, live lives that are “worse off” and therefore they should be eliminated before (or shortly after) birth, or allowed to commit suicide later. When many of Johnson’s activist cohort criticize her for talking with Singer, she notes that he’s not any more a monster than most of the people she encounters in her life.

One of the moments of real controversy to disability activists is when Johnson sits down beside Singer for a meal. This is during her visit to Princeton, and they dine with students who ask Johnson questions about, essentially, why she deserves to exist. At one point Johnson’s elbow slips, and she’s unable to feed herself. She needs an adjustment. She writes, “Normally I get whoever is on my right hand to do this sort of thing. Why not now? I gesture to Singer. He leans over and I whisper. ‘Grasp this wrist and pull forward one inch, without lifting.’ He looks a little surprised but follows my instructions to the letter.” Some disability rights activists saw this as a flawed endorsement of the humanity of a genocide advocate. Johnson, though, recounts this moment in her book with a kind of wry tenderness.

Interestingly, Singer himself reminisces about their meal, and about his assistance to Johnson, with a similar tenderness in the eulogy he wrote about her for the New York Times. He writes that Johnson’s description of their meal “suggests that she saw me not simply as ‘the enemy’ but as a person with whom it was possible to have some forms of human interaction.” And he identifies her as a person whose “life was evidently a good one.” What happened at their meal was that Johnson brought her whole self to the table, and by doing so, she endorsed Singer’s full humanity, as well. Having a meal together, sitting side by side at the same table, made that possible.

Early in my career at the College of Charleston, Johnson sent me an email, alerting me to the fact that the Women’s and Gender Studies Program I was directing was hosting an event at a venue that was inaccessible to people using wheelchairs. I was a good enough feminist that I recognized the need for a basic level of accommodation, so I made the change. It was a first step for me, a moment when I committed to spaces that were accessible: we’ll have plenty of tables for everybody!

Now, six years later, I’m moving beyond that initial understanding of accommodation. I want accommodation to mean that we are reimagining our communities in significant ways, that we are conceiving of our world as made better—richer—more wonderful by the inclusion of all kinds of diversity, including the diversity of physical and intellectual disabilities. I want us to bring our whole selves to the table, one table that everyone has the chance to sit at, a table where we’re all truly welcome.