Archive: 2011

From the UCLA Center for the Study of Women:

Thinking Gender is a public conference highlighting graduate student research on women, gender and/or sexuality across all disciplines and historical periods. We invite submissions for individual papers or pre-constituted panels on any topic pertaining to women, gender, and/or sexuality. This year, we especially welcome feminist research on: gender roles in relation to marriage, parenting, or being single; critiques of biosciences and biotechnology as they pertain to fertility, sanitation, and/or medical experimentation at a local, national or global level; mobility as duress or success–for example, in relation to migration, immigration, or upward or downward economic mobility; life stage issues, such as aging and girlsʼ studies; and feminist storytelling or research in modes such as oral histories, graphic novels, theater, comedy or other inventive expressions.

CSW accepts submissions for both individual papers and pre-constituted panels from all active graduate students. In order to give everyone an opportunity to present, we do not accept submissions from people who presented at Thinking Gender in the previous year. Also no previously published material is eligible.

Students proposing individual papers are to submit a cover page (provided on our website), an abstract (250 words), a CV (2 pages maximum), and a brief bibliography (3-5 sources), for consideration. All components are to be delivered in one document and labeled according to the submission guidelines found on the CSW website. For panels, a 250-word description of the panel topic is required, in addition to the materials that must be provided for individual paper submissions. For a more detailed description of submission guidelines, please visit:
http://www.csw.ucla.edu/conferences/thinking-gender/thinking-gender-2012.

Send submissions to: thinkinggender@women.ucla.edu

Deadline for Submissions: Monday, October 17th, 2011 at 12 noon


Conference to be held on Friday, February 3, 2012
UCLA Faculty Center

Event is free and open to the public, but please be aware that there will be a $30 registration fee for presenters, to cover the cost of conference materials and lunch at the Faculty Center.

The following is the third installment of “The Next Generation” column, featuring young feminists under the age of 30 who are not yet established in an academic career.  If you fit this description and are interested in writing your own take for us on bridging feminist research with popular reality, please submit your idea and a little about yourself via our contact form.
Popular democracy movements in autocratic Middle Eastern regimes have captured the world’s attention this year, and subsequently have forced Westerners to reconsider their perceptions of the Middle East. Scenes of brutality that might otherwise have been successfully hidden by leaders desperate to stay in power are instead available for global consumption on sites like Youtube. Various blogging platforms and other forms of social networking like Twitter and Facebook provide activists with the means to report on the realities of life under Saleh, Gaddafi and Assad in the absence of a free press. But the same factors (ease of access, popularity) that allow new media to be used as a tool to advance the work of marginalized activist communities also mean that it is easily hijacked by privileged voices.

For Westerners involved in social justice movements, this is just one thread of a difficult conversation as they attempt to discern their appropriate role as allies to Middle Eastern activists. The accessibility of social media makes it far too easy to participate in activism on a superficial basis, and for allies with academic backgrounds in area studies, international relations or a related field, it can be all too easy to mistake a university education for substantial experience. The combination of these two factors can inadvertently result in a destabilization of the very movements Western allies seek to support.

This misguided intervention is illustrated particularly well by the controversy surrounding Tom MacMaster, author of the blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus.” MacMaster spent years developing the character of Amina Arraf. Amina purported to be an out Muslim lesbian residing in Damascus, Syria, and a supporter of the opposition to Syria’s current president, Bashar al Assad. Later, Amina’s “cousin” reported that the woman had been arrested by forces loyal to Assad. But her online identity had begun to unravel as journalists in the region proved unable to verify her identity, and on June 12th the Electronic Intifada linked her identity to Palestinian solidarity supporter Tom MacMaster. MacMaster eventually admitted the hoax, and in a phone interview with the Washington Post, MacMaster described his motivation for adopting the persona of a queer Arab woman as a sort of writing exercise, a desire to prove his creative worth by taking on “the challenge of being someone who isn’t me.”

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Body Politic is a new co-authored column at Girl w/ Pen on queer bodies, law, and policy.  Avory will be writing this column along with Kyla Bender-Baird, our newest editor.  Kyla is a writer, researcher, and activist currently pursuing her Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center.

KYLA:

When interviewing self-identified transgender people for my book, Transgender Employment Experiences, I had several conversations about the intersections of visibility, passing, and discrimination.  These conversations were particularly striking in regards to transmen who transitioned from a highly visible, queer identity to a passing male identity (whether or not that’s how they experience their gender).  These experiences illuminate how privilege works and underscore the importance of providing protection for gender expression in addition to gender identity and sexual orientation.

Visibility was a key element in the interviewee’s stories of harassment.  For instance, Carey—a queer white transman in his mid-20s living in New York—had this to say during our conversation: “A lot of what being trans is, especially if you go on hormones and have surgery, is becoming an identity that, although it’s a stigmatized and oppressed identity, it’s not a visible identity anymore.”  Carey was far from alone in this analysis.  Several of the folks I interviewed brought up how their experiences of harassment related to how visible their trans and/or queer identity was. Dante, a queer South Asian transman in his early 30s also living in New York, reported that he experienced more harassment as a butch than as a transman.  Dante now passes as a gender normative, non-trans man whereas before his gender expression as a butch signaled “difference” and triggered harassment.

From these experiences, a strong connection between visibility, homophobia, and harassment can be drawn. As trans men’s identities became less visible, they faced less harassment. Being able to blend into society, therefore, sometimes protects one from discrimination. Professor Kristen Schilt’s research on trans men in the workplace confirms this trend: “as they become men, some FTMs in blue collar jobs report that their work relations became more collegial than they were when they worked as ‘butch’ women.”  Schilt attributes this change to the movement of trans men from a stigmatized identity (butch) to a valued and privileged identity (man) with many workplace benefits. While I agree with Professor Schilt, I would like to push this analysis further, suggesting that it is the move from gender nonconformity to gender normativity and thus the erasure of a visible queer identity that also leads to the lessening of harassment.

The trans women I interviewed also reported on the relationship of harassment and visibility, only they used the language of “passing.”  For instance, Zoe—a straight white trans woman in her 50s living in Texas—reported instances of harassment, which she attributed to her “unconventional gender presentation.”

While harassment caused by a visible, non-normative gender or sexual identity can happen to folks anywhere in the gender galaxy,  the experiences of the transmen I spoke with are particularly telling due to the interplay of gender identity and sexual orientation and how changes in these identities were followed by changes in visibility and subsequently occurrences of harassment.

All but two of the people I spoke with on the trans feminine spectrum transitioned from a straight male identity to a female identity; one experimented with a gay male identity prior to transitioning and the one bigender-identified person still maintains a masculine presentation on some days. For those on the trans masculine spectrum, the transition was from a lesbian or bisexual female identity to a more masculine identity. The affirmed gender identity and sexual orientation of the participants on the trans masculine spectrum post-transition was split between three straight men and three queer transmen. Thus, participants on the trans masculine spectrum articulated not only their experiences with transphobia but also homophobia—particularly pre-transition.  Chris and Courtney, both young white straight trans men living on the east coast, related their experiences of homophobic harassment prior to transitioning or coming out as trans. Going from a visible lesbian identity to an invisible straight identity has decreased the homophobic harassment both men have faced. Their experiences demonstrate that it is often the visibility of queerness that triggers harassment.

The centrality of visibility in the experiences of trans, queer, and gender non-conforming folk confirms the importance of including gender expression in legal protections as it is often gender expression that triggers harassment and discrimination.  The interplay of gender identity and sexual orientation also confirms the importance of working in coalition for broad social recognition.  Our social movements must reflect the complex identities of the people they claim to represent if we are to make any progress.

AVORY:

What you’re saying about queer visibility here really strikes home for me, and I do think that a lot of it stems from the professional context, what’s seen as “professional.”  Of course, that varies from workplace to workplace, but most of what I’ve read in international law publications about workplace discrimination, and what I’ve seen among peers, really boils down to perception rather than a professed identity.  If someone is perceived to be queer (gender-wise or sexuality-wise), there seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to push that person out of the professional circle, to stigmatize queer presentation as unprofessional.

Saying that someone is “unprofessional” can be a convenient mask for discrimination.  It disproportionately happens to people who present a certain way—visibly queer, not conforming to gender norms in terms of hair and clothing, but also “punk” or “urban.”  There’s a clear intersection with class and race.  While it’s reasonable to set a dress code for a professional environment, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that’s gender-neutral.

Legal protections against discrimination get at the heart of the problem with “unprofessional” serving as a proxy for “queer in a way that makes me uncomfortable.”  If an employer wants to claim that disciplinary action is being taken due to a violation of professional standards under the kind of protections you’re talking about, that person can do so, but has to prove that the standards are actually reasonably related to a business interest—not just arbitrary discrimination based on “non-conforming” gender expression. These laws are a definite step in the right direction against workplace discrimination based on queer visibility.

KYLA

I’m so glad you brought up dress codes!  In the fall of 2007 (yes, the very weekend that the first trans-inclusive ENDA was split into two bills), I attended HRC’s Out for Work conference.  During the conversation, several young, visibly queer students repeatdely brought up concerns about how to navigate conservative workplace dress codes while still maintaining their queer identity. For them, their identity was written on their body.  But how would that work in the job search process?  Unfortunately, panelists skirted the issue by pointing to all the companies listed in HRC’s annual Corporate Equality Index.  This oversight continues to haunt me. In fact, I write about it in my introduction to the section on dress codes in Transgender Employment Experiences.  In addition to passing laws and policies, we also need to do a better job as a community of helping each other navigate these often hostile spaces that don’t deal well with visible “otherness.”

Note: This post originally here on kveller.com, a new site offering “a Jewish twist on parenting, everything a Jewish family could need for raising Jewish children–including crafts, recipes, activities, Hebrew and Jewish names for babies…and advice from Mayim Bialik.”  We reprint it today, a few days later, in honor of Labor Day!

Sept 1, 2011

For those not in the know (and until yesterday, I counted myself among you), today marks the first day of a new month on the Jewish calendar: Elul.

The morning begins like any other: our toddler twins wake up screaming, I change diapers, prepare breakfast, play with them, get them dressed, call my parents so that they’ll Skype with them while I shower and give me time to actually wash my hair.  As I get the computer ready and open the door to the bedroom, wherein our linen closet lies, to find a towel, I realize that this morning is not like all others.  It’s the first of Elul.

I enter the bedroom and find my husband Marco wrapped in the tallis my parents bought him for our wedding, and my father’s tefillin (phylacteries).  Two Judaic reference books lay open on our bed, illuminated by the glow of his iPad, which is on.  It’s his first time laying tefillin, and he’s trying to follow the rules.

I’ve come in to hustle him into the shower—I need to get ready before the babysitter arrives so I can start my workday on time, he needs to shower first and get out the door!  But seeing him dressed in the regalia of full Judaic manhood stops me in my tracks.

“Oh—I’m sorry,” I murmur, slightly embarrassed that I’ve walked in on him this way.

He looks up from the texts.  I notice a YouTube video streaming on the iPad: How to Lay Tefillin. “This is going to take some time,” he says.

I restore his privacy by closing the door.

In the Hebrew calendar, Elul is the twelfth month of the year.  In Jewish tradition, it’s a month of repentance and preparation for the biggest holidays of the year, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  The word “Elul” is similar to the root of the verb “search” in Aramaic.  According to the Talmud, the Hebrew word “Elul” is an acronym for “Ani l’dodi v’dodi li” which means “I am to my Beloved as my Beloved is to me” – a line often recited at Jewish weddings.  In this case, the Beloved is G-d.  Put it all together and during this month of Elul, we’re supposed to search our hearts and draw close to G-d in preparation for the big holidays, on which we are judged and atone.

I’m moved by Marco’s embrace of the rituals.  Just one Elul ago, he dipped in the Upper West Side mikvah in the presence of three rabbis and officially became a Jew.  His becoming a Jew is the most romantic thing I’ve ever encountered, on so many levels.  He did it so that we could raise our boos as Jews and he would know what to do.

But on this particular morning, this first morning of Elul, I’m cranky.  Either I didn’t get enough sleep, or the sleep I got was interrupted, I’m not sure.  After Marco emerges from the bedroom, I’m still compulsively pestering him to hurry.  I can’t seem to stop myself, even though I’m aware, now, that this day is special for him.  But it’s also now become stressful for him: Since the time spent on davening conflicted with his getting ready for work, he’s made himself late.  He already feels rushed so he lashes out at me, a rare occurrence.  I breathe tightly and murmur “f*ck you too,” under my breath.

“F*ck you too,” echoes a sweet little voice.  Baby Girl.   My crankiness breaks and I walk into the bathroom, where Marco is now showering, to share.

My Beloved and I share a chuckle.  We remind ourselves how careful we have to be with our words around here these days.

And how careful, I’m reminded, we should be with each others’ hearts, too.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“I know,” he says.

He tells me how Baby Boy had spotted him from the hallway when he was busy donning the tallis and tefillin, and laughed.  “I think he thought it was funny,” Marco says.

“He’s not used to seeing you that way,” I say.  “Or maybe he thought it was Hallowe’en.”

Frankly, I can relate.  I’m not used to seeing my mod, handsome Puerto Rican husband wrapped in the accoutrements of a traditional Jew.  When he first told me he was interested in learning how to lay tefillin, I rolled my eyes.  We’re not Orthodox; we don’t keep kosher; Marco grew up Roman Catholic, for Chrissake.

But seeing him there this morning, hands and head bound by the leather straps my great grandfather, an immigrant from Russia, gave to my father when he was bar mitzvahed at thirteen, I’m humbled by the extent to which Marco’s conversion has prompted my own remedial education as a Jew.  What I’m learning is not knowledge, per se, but practice.  We’ve started playing a recording of the bedtime sh’ma for the babies before they fall asleep.  We light candles and eat challah, which Baby Girl affectionately calls “agah”, on Shabbat.  We observe all the holidays—even the minor ones with names I used to mix up, like Tisha Ba’av and Tubishvat.   To the extent that we can, we’re creating a life lived in sync with the Jewish seasons.  It’s given our life beautiful new grounding amidst the swirl of potty training, jobs, earthquakes, and hurricanes too.

Later this morning, Marco leaves for work.  The boos Skype quickly with my parents and I get my shower.  I feel repentant.  Even if I don’t get to shampoo.

K’tiva VaHatima Tova, a todos.  And Marco: may the search find you, and your heart, renewed.

I loved doing dot-to-dots as a child. There was something grand about linking all the tiny dots together to reveal a bigger picture. As an adult, I still love dot-to-dot, but now I attempt to link various “dots” into larger pictures that reveal cultural trends and ideologies.

This week, a number of “dots” sat scattered across my computer screen, in the form of various posts and podcasts, waiting for me to have time to more thoroughly connect them – the wonderful “Letter to Bella” post from Ms. Blog, Are Boys Natural Born Killers?, a podcast about war and gender, the “Born to Breed” interview with author Vyckie Garrison, news about JC Penney’s t-shirt “Too pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for me” t-shirt, and, as I am about to head off to Forks, Washington to speak at Stephenie Meyer Day, a number of Twilight related posts.

When the metaphorical dots between all these pieces are connected, the picture I am left with is one of a world that has definitely not gone “beyond pink and blue” (to borrow the title of another Girl with Pen column).

As Melissa Wardy points out in one “dot”, her post to the young Bella, “grown ups try to fit kids into little boxes that are labeled ‘Boy’ or ‘Girl’, and then they only let certain colors or ideas into each box.” As Wardy further points out, four year olds are sadly more likely to “know that girls can like or do anything boys can” than their grown up counterparts.

This claim was confirmed by heated comments in my War Literature class last evening. I had students listen to one of the dots coloring my desktop, the podcast Are Boys Natural Born Killers?, which includes Professor Joshua Goldstein, author of War and Gender, talking about the fact that boys are not “natural warriors” and that the only biological claim that seems to hold up this widely held cultural view is their propensity for more upper body strength. Though the entire podcast emphasized that gender is constructed and downplayed biological essentialism, the one comment made by Goldstein about upper body strength was latched onto. One student, for example, insisted men are built to fight whereas women are not. In this “Me Strong, You Weak” debate, I found myself thinking back to yet another dot, to the “Born to Breed” piece I had read earlier in the week.

In the piece, Vyckie Garrison, a former member of the Quiverfull movement, talks about the growing religious movement and its grounding in the belief that “the husband is the head of the household and the wife is the submissive ‘helpmeet.’” As Garrison documents, “A Quiverfull daughter is taught from a young age that her purpose in life is to serve the man whom God has placed in authority over her,” as well as to have as many children as possible. As such, “Her education is geared toward developing domestic skills–college is generally considered unnecessary and even dangerous for her spiritual well-being.”

And this brings me to Twilight, that oh-so-popular saga that has the heroine Bella (who shares no resemblance to the blue-shoe-wearing four year old feminist Bella above), giving up college to marry Edward and bear his vampire/human baby.

As I argued in my piece Wed, Bed and Bruised but Certainly Not Equal, the romanticization of sexual violence that texts like Twilight entail is part and parcel of the continuing inequality of our society. But, as lamented in “In Defense of Twilight,” this type of criticism is, like, a major bummer. The author writes: “Have you noticed Twilight gets attacked a lot? It gets attacked by men & feminists all the time & also by other fandoms. The latest thing I’ve heard is how Twilight romanticizes “domestic violence” & supports “inequality.” What a downer!” What a downer indeed. Far better to take the view enthusiastically supported by the author of the post that “It’s a love story and nothing more.”

Supportive of this enthusiastic love of love is the tendency to frame females and males as entirely opposite species, as in the post “Julia Jones Calls ‘Twilight’ Wolf Pack a Boys’ Club.” Author Brooke Tarnoff starts her gender essentialist piece with the following: “You might think you understand the plight of a woman in traditionally male-dominated fields — but none of them have anything on Julia Jones.” Suggesting that being an actress playing the lone female werewolf in an otherwise all male pack is far more heinous, say, than being the only female soldier in your regiment or than a lifetime of butting your head against the glass ceiling, Tarnoff’s piece not only brushes off male domination as something to joke about, but is also grounded in the “opposites attract” type of mentality that keeps heterosexism firmly in place.

The actress Jones, discussing her time working with the “ wolf boys club” notes “I kind of got to a place where I felt like I… know how to think like a guy,” which, Tarnoff suggests, entails learning “how gross they really are.” While admittedly this is a light piece joking about having to deal with “male talk” when one is the only female on the job, it nevertheless reflects a deeper issue – the still widely held belief that men and women naturally think, talk, and act differently – a belief that belies the social construction of gender and acts as if other markers of difference – race, class, sexuality, and so on, don’t matter.

This belief is echoed in the last weekly news story in my dot-to-dot puzzle – the JC Penny t-shirt that reads “Too pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for me.”

Like four-year-old Bella who is told blue shoes are not for her, like the Quiverfull movement that claims men are meant to lead and women to breed, like the male student that suggested women are weak, like the Twilight texts and the surrounding fan culture that tends to frame males as “wolfish boys” and females as selfless romantics, this t-shirt echoes our continuing entrenchment in the gender binary.

Strung together, all these dots show one big, ugly patriarchal picture.

Thankfully, some of the dots – for example, the stories about the feminist actions that resulted in the JC Penney shirt being pulled, muddle this patriarchal image, making it less stable.

Let’s hope we can keep connecting the dots in order to show how everything from the gendering of children to the upswing in religious fundamentalism is colored by the sexism of our culture. Further, let’s not forget how important it is to forge our own dots — our own points of connection — so as to create a new, more inclusive societal picture for the benefit of us all.

 

 

Confession: When I saw the teaser Bisexual Men Do Exist, Study Finds on the New York Times home page last week, I laughed.  Bi erasure is a real, frustrating cultural phenomenon―at times it seems that we are simply incapable of imagining more than one kind of erotic desire happening in a human being at the same time―but there was just something about seeing that featured on the website for the paper of record that seemed ludicrous.

Unfortunately, it’s not really a laughing matter.  The study in question follows a 2005 study that was unable to show that bisexual attraction exists in men, and the current study supposedly provides reassuring proof that such attraction can be found.  How?  Well.  Porn.

For the methodological issues, see this piece in the Guardian.  More generally, I would just point out that it’s silly to base an answer to whether a sexuality exists on whether a sample of men who claim that sexuality experience erections in a lab setting while viewing a narrow range of pornography.  I found it interesting, especially, that the pornography was either male-male or female-female―while heterosexual porn would make it more difficult to know which actor the subject was reacting to, I find it a bit problematic that we seem to be operating on the “men who like women enjoy watching lesbians having sex” assumption.  Of course, we’re also ignoring the possibility that bisexual men might not be turned on by the sex acts being portrayed, the actors, the scenario, or any number of other factors.

The big thing that bugs me, though, about research like this, is that it’s so incredibly reductive about sexuality and claimed sexual identity.  Amy Andre put it beautifully on the Bilerco Project:

Bisexual identity is as much about language as it is about sexuality. If someone says he is bisexual, he is bisexual. He is bisexual as soon as he says he’s bisexual, because that is the word that he uses to describe his sexuality. As long as the word bisexual has been accessible for people to use to describe their sexuality, there have been men who did so.

It is crucial for researchers and academics to understand that someone is a given sexual or gender identity because they say so.  Studies like this get away from the fact that people experience their sexuality in a myriad of ways, which makes sexuality interesting.  Bisexual people may be attracted to a narrow group of people in a given gender, or may experience attraction to one gender differently than the other.  They may claim an identity for political reasons, or based on past experience.  They may tend to be sexually attracted to one gender more quickly (for example, watching porn) and develop attraction towards a member of the other gender more slowly, through getting to know a person.  (Of course, I’m leaving out a big chunk of people here that identify as neither male nor female, and I cringe using terms like “the other” gender, but I want to respect the use of the term bisexuality here.)

These studies are just as silly as the ones that try to claim some evolutionary or biological reason for how men and women relate to one another.  Sometimes, searching for deeper meaning in a scientific way is actually incredibly limiting.  The reporting of a study like this in the media further contributes to narrow ideas of what sexuality means and what possibilities are available.  It creates a self-reinforcing narrow idea of sexuality, and turns bisexual people into the unicorns of the LGBT movement.  It doesn’t really do a service to anyone.

Who are bisexual men?  Men who say they are bisexual.  Period.

 

The following is the second installment of “The Next Generation” column, featuring young feminists under the age of 30 who are not yet established in an academic career.  If you fit this description and are interested in writing your own take for us on bridging feminist research with popular reality, please submit your idea and a little about yourself via our contact form.

[Note: a version of this piece was originally posted at NCRW’s The Real Deal blog]

This summer I had the opportunity to participate in a webinar narrated by Terry O’Neill, the president of NOW, entitled “The Budget Deal is a Feminist Issue.” The webinar discussed how Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) 2012 budget deal would cut several social services on which women depend disproportionately. Programs on the chopping block included Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Planned Parenthood and other family planning clinics, Pell grants, job training, Head Start, childcare programs, and WIC nutrition programs. Women depend predominantly on most, if not all, of these programs.

After O’Neill gave her presentation, she opened the floor to questions. I asked if any of the Ryan cuts would impact girls and teens, and she explained that it would cut family planning clinics like Planned Parenthood, which also offer services like mammograms, STD and HIV screenings, Pap smears, and other tests that can help save women’s lives. “That’s appalling,” she said.

All in all, I greatly enjoyed the webinar. (I told my friend about it and she told me, “You’re probably the only teenager on the planet who enjoyed hearing a presentation about the budget.” She’s probably got a point there.) In a personal correspondence, Anita Lederer, the NOW field organizer, asked if everyone could speak to their representatives, host a letter-writing campaign, or demonstrate in a rally against cuts. As the “super committee” makes its decisions on deficit reduction, and as we go into the next budget cycle, it is critical that young feminists continue these actions and oppose cuts that will disproportionately harm girls and teenagers.

While I absolutely loved the webinar, it bothered me a little bit that O’Neill felt the only way the Ryan budget would impact young women was by cutting family planning. Girls do have interests other than sex, after all. I know that I care about getting a college education, which could have been impossible if the Ryan cut on Pell grants had gone through. I also care about Medicaid cuts, since they could financially affect the family of a friend whose sibling has special needs. These are just a couple of my concerns – every young woman would have different worries.

It also bothers me that O’Neill didn’t even address the impact of the Ryan budget cuts on younger women in her original presentation, which is why I made sure to ask about it. I know O’Neill is of the baby boomer generation, and I would venture a guess that the vast majority of NOW members are as well, but isn’t it important to include people of all ages? Feminists go to extreme efforts to include gays and lesbians, people of color, the disabled, etc. Shouldn’t they consider it a primary goal to include younger feminists? We are the next generation, and if they don’t encourage us to join the movement, it will wither away and die.

I’ve noticed similar attitudes with other feminists—this is far from limited to NOW. I have been excluded because of my age in many different feminist forums, and that really bothers me. Why are younger women ignored? Aren’t we just as important as older feminists, if not even more so? We’ll be continuing the legacy of this generation’s feminists, keeping the movement alive. It is absolutely imperative that we are encouraged to attend, included in, and feel welcome at feminist events. If older feminists don’t include our concerns without being asked to do so, no one will want to accept the feminist torch when we’re adults, and all the work they accomplished will go to waste.

Feminists, please: think about about the budget, and make sure the people around you are aware of how detrimental cuts in social services, education, and entitlement programs can be to women and to the country at large. While you’re at it, make sure to inform the young people around you. They have brains and will understand the importance of the budget, once someone takes the time to explain it to them. Don’t discount the next generation of feminists. I happen to think that we’re pretty cool.

Talia bat Pessi is a teenage Femidox (feminist Orthodox) Jew who writes the blog Star of Davida. She also writes for various other feminist and women’s news resources. After high school and college, she hopes to get a JD/PhD in women’s studies and go into labor law, specializing in workplace discrimination and sexual harassment.

Is the legality of abortion in the U.S. a moot point if too few ob-gyns are willing to perform the medical procedures?  A recent post on FREAKONOMICS inspired me to find out more about a new article in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology titled “Abortion Provision Among Practicing Obstetrician-Gynecologists.”

This group of researchers mailed surveys to practicing ob-gyns and reported on the data from 1,800 who responded. The article’s main findings are as follows: “Among practicing ob-gyns, 97% encountered patients seeking abortions, whereas 14% performed them.” Their analysis of the data revealed that male physicians were less likely to provide abortions than female physicians. Age was also a factor, with younger physicians being more likely to provide abortions.

The new article’s abstract states, “…physicians with high religious motivation were less likely to provide abortions.” I wonder if the large numbers of ob-gyns who do not provide abortions speaks to moral judgments that this medical procedure is a sin. So, the legality of abortion may be rendered pointless by physicians who may be making decisions based on religious doctrine? Access to abortion remains limited by the willingness of physicians to provide abortion services, particularly in rural communities and in the South and Midwest.” Does a woman’s geographic location doom her to restrictions on her ability to obtain a medical procedure that is protected by law?

During my study of women and men living with genital herpes and HPV/genital warts infections, I coined the term moral surveillance practitioner to describe the doctor-patient interaction style of health care providers who conveyed a sense of disapproval, judgment, condemnation, and even disgust to their patients who had sought their sexual health services.  In the case of STDs, these practitioners tended to blame their patients for having contracted a medically incurable infection because of their own “bad” and sinful sexual behaviors.

It would be interesting to see if a companion study to the newly published one, perhaps a qualitative interview study, would reveal a more nuanced understanding of the attitudes and values that ob-gyns hold about their female patients who seek abortion services.  With women’s physical and/or mental health often hanging in the balance of the ability to receive a legal abortion, we deserve to know more about the large number of ob-gyns whose moral opinion may be taking precedence over their ethical obligation to, in the words of the Hippocratic Oath, “First, do no harm”…in this case, to do no harm to their female patients who may be harmed by not having a medically safe, legal abortion.

__________

Note: If you’re curious about physicians’ insights and experiences in providing (or not providing) abortion care, then check out two recent books: Carole Joffe’s Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us and Lori Freedman’s Willing and Unable: Doctors Constraints in Abortion Care. And, for more of the latest research on reproductive health care and policy, explore the work of UC San Francisco’s reproductive health think tank ANSIRH.

Call Center/Wikimedia Commons

Last Thursday in downtown D.C. I joined a large crowd of union members from Communications Workers of America–members of many other unions were there, too, in solidarity. And, after 45,000 workers had been in strike for two weeks, on Saturday, as reported by Steve Greenhouse in the NYTimes, things changed a little bit:

Leaders of the unions that have been on strike against Verizon Communications announced on Saturday that they were ending the walkout even though the two sides had not reached an overall settlement for a new contract.

For now, no more picket lines. Workers start back tonight (evening shift) under their old contract. Reports say the negotiations will continue to be contentious. At the picket line I listened to speakers who focused attention on the experience of call center workers and some of their concerns.

Unless you are a customer service or call center worker yourself, there are a few things you might not know about the job, but they will help you put the Verizon strike into focus. And might help you recognize how punitive, short-sighted, and, well, disgusting, the stance of Verizon towards its own workers is.

Call center work is very stressful. I’m not talking about the stress workers experience from occasionally cranky, impatient, or rude callers. As my sister-in-law Shannon says, they call it “work” for a reason. But call center work has become like an “electronic assembly line” complete with extensive digital surveillance, monitoring, and measurement–especially measurement of those things that are easy to measure. Workers are scheduled literally every second of their work day, with very tight bench marks for how long they are staying on a call, their sales quotas, et c.

The dilemma is well described on a “working at Verizon” Jobitorial website. A worker in Tennessee writes,

My main complaint with the company is that there is no fine line between customer service and performance measures. You can’t help a customer when you have too keep calls a certain length every time so that you can meet your calls per hour, and working in financial services, you have to collect money on the account too.

What’s harder to measure are things like stress response–but these conditions produce stress responses like illness and excessive turnover–which influences bottom line and, dare I say it?, quality of life.

Ten years ago the Verizon workers’ union, the Communications Workers of America, negotiated a stress reduction package to create a “win-win” solution around the high-cost of stressed out working conditions. To reduce stress, workers were guaranteed up to 30 minutes per day to follow up on paperwork and to call back customers over their open cases. Workers and the company both feel better when they are empowered to deliver good quality service for the company. If a worker was doing her job well, she was guaranteed a limit to how frequently her calls were monitored.

There are many more details to the stress reduction package, but you get the picture. The stress reduction package was negotiated based on the premise that workers who are less stressed are more productive. Productivity numbers aren’t available, but the rate of turnover in non-union call centers is 100 percent; the rate at stress-reduced call centers is much, much lower, per CWA research economist Debbie Goldman. And company profitability has been outstanding (see below).

These are a few examples of the one hundred items that Verizon has sought to strike from the Verizon workers’ contracts. There’s no rationale, no discussion provided.

I focus on the scenario for the call-center workers today because these workers are disproportionately women–68 percent according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. These workers have limits on mandatory overtime (that is, when an employer unilaterally requires extra work hours)–absolute limits, but also the right to say no when they have a family reason–things like childcare or elder care responsibilities. Verizon wants to rescind these limits. The CWA had previously negotiated the ability of people to take personal time off for a few hours, such as when a child is sick; this too is on the chopping block. Don’t even ask about health insurance or leave policy.

On August 19 the CWA released a statement: “A recent analysis by Morgan Stanley shows that Verizon’s net income from ongoing operations was $13.9 billion in 2010. That’s up more than 16 percent from 2007.” They asked “Then why is this very profitable company demanding cuts in compensation of $20,000 per worker per year?”

So, yet another case of corporate greed. That’s disgusting. But going down the list of demands from Verizon, the cuts to quality of life, stress reduction, and just simple, professional respect for workers, that is not just disgusting, it is shameful.

To support these workers, go to Verizon Strike Donation site.

-Virginia Rutter

The following is the first guest post in our new “The Next Generation” column, featuring young feminists under the age of 30 who are not yet established in an academic career.  If you fit this description and are interested in writing your own take for us on bridging feminist research with popular reality, please submit your idea and a little about yourself via our contact form.

Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar. (Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks.)
Gloria E. Anzaldúa


I first delved into anthologies as an earnest teen combing the “Women’s Studies” section of the woefully-understocked local library. The few books with subtitles like: “Real Girls Tell Their Stories” were an enticing draw—an accessible bridge between the voices of young women in the YA section and the more dense, demanding academic writing on the shelves. In anthologies, professional and ‘amateur’ writers commingled, their only requirements that their piece adhere to the theme of the book and that they write from the heart. Though some pieces were well-researched, footnoted and produced within the context of an academy, some of the best were the uncensored thoughts of authors.

Through “girls,” I branched out to “women”—women writing about having children, about marriage, domestic life, queer women, women of color. I searched for years for a copy of This Bridge Called My Back, the groundbreaking anthology edited by the late Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, before finally being rewarded with the challenging, thought-provoking, and touching book that other anthologies so lovingly describe it as.

Learning how to read academic writing is a challenge, with a liberal arts education or without. Anthologies may be published less frequently, but their style lives on in the accessible, democratic “call for submissions” of the vast blogosphere.1

Anthologies are the bridge we build: the most direct bridge between writer and reader, and a bridge to new concepts. In the introduction, you get the condensed version of the topic. In the ensuing essays, you get the unfiltered perspective of people who actually live the experiences they are writing about: something of a rarity in traditional academic writing.

To get started, pick an anthology with a title and cover that resonates with you. Remember, this is a guide for beginners. Unlike most books, you’re not obligated to read the whole thing. Yes, a committed reader (or someone who feels guilty if they abandon books midway through) may plow through the whole book, but even then one is not obligated to read essays in order. In a good anthology, at least, a diligent reader is rewarded with opposing viewpoints and entries that titillate, resonate, force one to reexamine beliefs or form new ones.

At the very least, anthologies serve as an accessible, enlightening, and even enjoyable bridge into topics or groups of voices with which one is not familiar. Pick one up, flip through, and enjoy!

Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation
Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme
YELL-Oh Girls! Emerging Voices Explore Culture, Identity, and Growing Up Asian American
Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology
That’s Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation
The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader
The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage
Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class (Live Girls)

1.  Penelope Engelbrecht, “Strange Company: Uncovering the Queer Anthology,” NWSA Journal 7:1 (Spring 1995).

Cornelia Beckett is a young feminist writer, activist, and student at Smith College. Her own work appears in a feminist anthology called Click (Seal Press). She has also contributed to the NARAL Pro-Choice Maryland Blog and thefbomb.org.