This is Alison Piepmeier, recovering well from brain surgery, and planning to be back on Girl with Pen really soon.  In the meantime, I’m delighted to introduce you to this month’s guest columnist, Eliza McGraw, writer, mother, and great friend of mine.

Earache

I’m here in Charleston, South Carolina visiting my pal Alison Piepmeier, whom you all know from her blog here on Girl with Pen.  Theoretically, I am helping her, Walter, and Maybelle out, given Alison’s recent brain surgery.  And I am bunking with the baby and did just now make some pumpkin muffins, but I am not sure that I am helping as much as I am just, as always–we have been friends since 1994, when we met in graduate school, I just have avoided putting my education to the same kind of productive use that Alison has–enjoying being with Team Biffle-Piepmeier.

To be here for the week did, however, entail a thorough job of organization on my part.  I live in Washington, D.C., and am a freelance writer.  I also am the primary caregiver, driver, cupcake-maker, room parent, tutor and hockey mom to my 6 and 8-year-old children.  My days are happily complex so the list on instructions I left behind–also known as “the matrix”–included such entries such as “Wednesday–bring in a green food for St Patrick’s day,” “Thursday:  put Simon’s lacrosse shorts in backpack,” “Friday is P.E. day–Macie
in sneakers.”  It had a long list of contact information for the many family members, friends, and neighbors who knew I’d be away, permission slips for various pickups, and a refrigerator roll call so my husband Adam would know what I had made to eat.

On Monday, I received an email from Adam inquiring when the pediatrician’s office opened, since Macie (my 6-year-old) had an earache.  We’re not an earachey kind of family, as a rule–no tubes, no audiologists–so I was concerned.  Macie has also wound up in the hospital more than once, so any time she develops the slightest sniffle, I get a little anxious.  Also, it was only day two.  Things were already falling apart already?

Adam is an architect, and while it’s not as if he were expected in the OR momently, he was supposed to be at work with roll of drawings spread out on the desk (my mental image of architectural design), not heading out to the pediatrician’s.  If you looked at the matrix, there was no mention of “Take Macie to pediatrician.”  (If there had been, I would have written, “Remember insurance card and to stop for bagel on the way
home at bagel shop on Connecticut Avenue.”)

Even knowing that Adam, eminently competent and adaptable, had Earache 2010 covered, I felt like something was a little off all day as I played with Maybelle, went to the grocery store with Alison, and generally existed here in Charleston, 539 miles from the situation room at home.  When I called and heard Macie crying in the background (over Adam’s shouting from the front seat “She’s fine!  We’re going to get medicine now!”) I experienced that sensation that makes you realize why people say hearts “sink.”  Even once I received the update that Macie was at my mom’s and tucked under the same animal-themed blanket I used to curl up with when I felt sick (nosebleed stains, 1970s brown and orange zebras) while watching Mulan, I felt like I should have been with her.

But as the day wore on–hearing Macie’s voice be a tad bossy about which of the previews she deigned amusing enough to watch reassured me that her health was stabilizing–I realized I only sort of felt that way.  I missed her, and hated to think of her in any kind of pain.  But I was glad to be here, with Alison, Walter, and Maybelle.  I learned that is possible to be in the right place, even if that place is not with my own children for a certain painful moment, the one thing even I never planned for.

This month BODY LANGUAGE welcomes Suzanne Kelly, writing her first guest post for Girl w/Pen!, as she takes to heart the literal matter of body language.

Suzanne teaches in the Women’s Studies Program at SUNY New Paltz.

A few weeks ago, scanning The New York Times for something weighty, I fell upon feminist science writer Natalie Angier’s thoughtful retelling of a new study in the burgeoning field of embodied cognition. The study revealed how our ability to process information is not a function of the brain alone, but of language’s perpetual play with and through our bodies as a whole. Angier explained how when study participants were asked to think of a past event, for example, they consistently “leaned slightly backward,” and when they were asked to envision what was to come, “they listed to the fore… ”subliminally act[ing] out metaphors in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time.”

That “the body embodies abstractions the best way it knows how: physically,” as Angier put it, that it literally “takes language to heart,” comes as no surprise to me. When I’m writing and it seems as if the words won’t budge, I’m also often crumpled up at my desk – legs tucked under, torso rounded. If I stretch, realign, and maybe go for a run, the flow usually returns. When my ideas are at their stickiest so too, it seems, is my body.

That our thoughts, however intangible, are more than the sum of what goes on inside our skulls is also hardly a revelation to those of us who have long positioned the body’s knowledge at the heart of feminist theory and practice. Still, studies like this (and brilliant writers like Angier who are skilled at bringing their importance to light) always give me hope, especially when they’re given voice by the mainstream media. Might this be a sign of a new legitimacy of the body, one from which feminism could no doubt benefit?

I have written elsewhere about the value of “the sensuous classroom,” of education that takes seriously the presence of the body. If our “bodies embody abstractions…physically,” as this study suggests, what do we learn, not only from our own bodies, but from being in and around the bodies of others? In thinking about the transmission of ideas and the potential for changing consciousness, what is lost, for instance, in teaching Women’s Studies classes on-line, engaged in conversations about bodies, while removed from each other’s? How do we significantly combat unattainable body images, or think seriously about questions of disability, when our bodies are not part of the venue?

These same questions hold for our activism, as well. Would consciousness raising groups have proved as powerful had they happened on cell phones? What did those women’s bodies communicate to one another that gave them the courage to leave unhappy marriages, end the cycle of violence, and love other women? That enabled them to fight for legal abortion, childcare, and better wages?

Because body centered issues remain central, if not heightened, feminist concerns today – from the image of the female body, to eating disorders and the foods around which they revolve, to abortion and contraception, to health and its care, to intimate partner violence, rape and sexual assault, and, of course, to sex itself – it seems more vital now than ever for us to place our bodies front and center, to give them substance in our conversations as well as in our collective actions.

Of course, as we speed toward a near-virtual future and as our physical distance from each other exponentially grows, it becomes more of a challenge to find ways to speak, to share, to formulate conversation, to engage thought and transform it into action – in the flesh. But we can do better.

No doubt, our bodies know it.

Over the holidays I had several seizures, which led to me being diagnosed with a brain tumor. It’s a low-grade glioma, which is the good news. It’s smack-dab in the middle of the language center of my brain, which is the bad news.

I tell you this in part to let you know why I might not be around for the next few months. I’ll be having brain surgery in February, and I expect at least six weeks of recovery, time in which I’ll be exhausted and may not be up for blogging. I hope to bring in some fabulous guest bloggers for those weeks.

The other reason I’m sharing this, though, is because having a brain tumor in the language center of my brain has raised a lot of hard questions for me, questions that relate to the theme of this column. I’m an academic, a scholar who writes books and teaches classes. I’m the mother of a young child who is doing great but who needs more help, intervention, and encouragement than a typical child. My Ph.D. is in English. I have been a ravenous reader and passionate writer since I was a little, little kid. Potential damage to the language center of my brain feels like something that threatens the heart of who I am. Who will I be if I don’t have the fluency or facility with language that I have right now? I’ve been poking around in the academic world of disability studies for the last several months, but this diagnosis brings disability even more intimately into my life. It’s not only someone I love who’s experiencing life with a disability (my daughter); it may well be me.

Indeed, no matter what the long-term effects are (and the prognosis actually looks quite good), I certainly will be living with disabilities for the weeks and months immediately following the surgery, as I’ll have brain swelling that will lead to some language difficulties and motor function challenges. I’ll have a kind of insider’s perspective on disability.

Who will I be? It’s an academic question as well as a deeply personal one. I can go around and around in my mind, wondering–imagining what it would be like not to be able to talk off the cuff about feminism with the same ease that I do now, or to hear a sentence and not to be able to understand it immediately.  These aren’t effects that the neurosurgeons have promised; in fact, one of the frustrations has been that they can’t tell me much.  We’re very much in a wait and see mode.  One friend pointed out that this may be a great opportunity for me to learn that who I am is not the same as what I do, but she was quick to add that this life lesson is no justification for a brain tumor.

It’s really weird for me to think about so many characteristics of my life—characteristics which in some way feel transcendent or inherent—as being tied to a physical organ. It gives body language a whole different meaning.

As a Women’s and Gender Studies faculty member, I’m hyper-attuned to representations—of beauty, of consumption, of masculinity—in the world around me.  As the parent of a daughter with Down syndrome, I’ve become equally attuned to representations of people with disabilities.  Now that we’re well into the holiday season, I’ve been interested to see how children with disabilities appear in all the holiday-themed programming and advertising, if they appear at all.

The big problem is that kids like my daughter rarely show up at all in mainstream media.  Holiday specials pass by, one after the other, and my husband and I find that we’re searching increasingly desperately for disabled characters.  “Oh,” I said the other day while listening to the Muppet Christmas CD, “I think Animal is a person with special needs!”  He doesn’t speak clearly, he obviously has some behavioral challenges, including difficult controlling his emotions, but he’s a beloved and valuable member of the rock band Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem.  It’s occurred to me that we may be able to use Rudolph as a role model in the future, as well—his community initially interprets his difference as abnormal and undesirable, but they come to see it as a talent and a benefit.  But in terms of actual human beings, the representational terrain is fairly bleak.

There are exceptions.  Toys R Us, for instance, has a catalog specifically for kids with disabilities—kids that they kindly, but awkwardly, call “differently-abled.”  Whoopi Goldberg and a child with Down syndrome are on the cover, and all the toys in the catalog feature kids with various disabilities playing with them.  The toys are described in terms of their educational and/or therapeutic potential:  for instance, the Fisher Price “Go Baby Go! Crawl-Along Drum Roll” is marketed as providing gross motor, tactile, auditory, visual, and thinking stimulation.  I do appreciate that, since Biffle and I are eager for Maybelle’s playtime to be stimulating, and we are often on the lookout for toys that will help her in one or another of the areas we’re working on in therapy.

But the fact that kids like Maybelle only appear in the “differently-abled” catalog is distressing.  These kids are all in their own catalog, even though all the toys are the same as the ones in the regular Toys R Us lineup.  As one of my colleagues pointed out, “If you want to know who a society doesn’t value, look at who they segregate.”  So, while I’m very glad that Toys R Us is documenting the existence of disabled kids—not just kids with Down syndrome but those with autism and a range of physical disabilities, as well—I do wish that these kids were fully included in all their marketing, so that their catalogs would help make these kids’ full inclusion in society at large seem normal, desirable, even unremarkable.

My book, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, has just been released. More about that later, but for now I wanted to let those of you in the NYC area know about an upcoming book event:

Girl Zines at Bluestockings

Saturday, Dec. 5, at 7 p.m.

Free!

I’ll do a brief reading from the book, and then fabulous zine creators Ayun Halliday, Victoria Law, Jenna Freedman, and Lauren Jade Martin will read from some of their zines.  Someone from BUST will also be there.

Here’s how Bluestockings is advertising the event:  The East Village Inky… Mend My Dress… Dear Stepdad… I’m So Fucking Beautiful… In the past two decades, women have produced 1000’s of unique zines which serve as engaged and tangible evidence of the third wave feminism. Join Alison Piepmeier for a reading and discussion of her book “Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism,” which explores these quirky, personalized booklets and the meaning of being a revolutionary girl.

I would love to see Girl with Pen readers there!

By now you might have heard that the popular TV series Glee recently aired an episode entitled “Wheels,” which was all about disability. It was a mixed bag. For the most part it was better than the sorts of cloying, sentimentalized depictions of disability on television–shows often advertised as “a very special Punky Brewster” (or whatever).

The main premise is that one of the regular characters, Artie (played by Kevin McHale), uses a wheelchair, and is going to have to find his own way to a glee club competition because the school district doesn’t have any accessible buses. The episode starts with Artie being framed by an individualized rhetoric of triumph over adversity–Artie is used to overcoming obstacles, Artie doesn’t mind–but it quickly undermines these messages. Artie does mind, and for most of the show the nondisabled glee club members are required to get around in wheelchairs. This of course is a learning experience for them, and it has the effect of visually challenging the normality of bodies not in wheelchairs for the show’s viewers. The show ends with a wheelchair dance number that’s nicely done, and is a lot of fun.

So there are good things about this show. But I had a number of problems with it, too. The most obvious problem is that it became the disability episode. Not only do we have Artie and his wheelchair, but we have two characters with Down syndrome. And while I am delighted to see actors with Down syndrome on any mainstream TV show, these two characters were used in problematic ways. The first, Becky Johnson, played by Lauren Potter, tries out for the cheerleading squad and is accepted. The good aspect of this is that she’s pushed really hard by the coach, who says that Becky wants to be treated like the other cheerleaders: she refuses to coddle her because of her diagnosis. The bad aspect is that she’s terrible, just terrible. She can’t do even the most basic things that the rest of the squad does.

And the worst aspect of the inclusion of the characters with Down syndrome is that they’re ultimately used, as the New York Times Arts Beat blog argues, “as a prop in the continuing humanization of [cheerleading coach] Sue Sylvester.” We find out that the coach let Becky onto the squad because her older sister (played by Robin Trocki) has Down syndrome, and we find this out when Sue visits her sister and reads her Little Red Riding Hood. Again, a mixed bag: many folks in the world have people we love with disabilities, and it’s nice to put that message out there. The scene with Sue and her sister was trying to be very loving and affectionate, and it sort of worked, but sort of verged into that cloying, a very special Glee kind of place. Is it sweet that Sue was reading her sister–her older, very clearly adult, sister–Little Red Riding Hood, or was it infantilizing of the sister for the sake of making Sue seem sweeter?

Ultimately the show can’t fully escape from the individualized triumph over adversity rhetoric that permeates a lot of mainstream treatment of disability. Near the end of the show, the character Kurt, as part of another plot line, tells his dad, “Being different made me stronger.” In some ways this is the message that the show leaves with its viewers, and it’s a message I have strongly mixed feelings about.

My current favorite thing on the internet is the show Smart Girls at the Party, created by Amy Poehler, Meredith Walker, and Amy Miles.  This isn’t a new show—it’s been online since late 2008—but I’m just now finding out about it.  The show’s mission statement is to “celebrate extraordinary individuals who are changing the world by being themselves.”  And the people they celebrate are girls.

The eight episodes that make up the first season feature girls who dance, do yoga, and have rock bands, girls who write stories and garden, and girls who are sisters.  My favorite episode features Ruby, who is a feminist.

Ruby is adorably goofy.  She giggles, scratches her nose, draws a picture called “Make Your Mind Crazy,” and apparently can’t skateboard at all.  She enthusiastically explains feminism and sings a song she wrote—she is loaded with self-confidence and extraversion.  But she’s not the only kind of girl featured on the show.  Eleven-year-old Valentine is quiet and thoughtful as she explains her passion for community gardening.  Ten-year-old Kenaudra seems almost shy as she describes her praise dancing, but she leads the adult women in a dance.

It’s no surprise that this great idea has come from Amy Poehler, who is one of my favorite famous feminists.  In an interview with BUST magazine in 2006, she was talking about media representations of girls and women, and she said—among other fabulous things—“I’m over the weird, exhausted girl.  I’m over the girl that’s tired and freezing and hungry.  I like bossy girls, I always have.  I like people filled with life.  I’m over this weird media thing with all this, like, hollow-eyed, empty, party crap.”  So she’s created a show that highlights girls who are filled with life.  You can see that Poehler and her co-hosts, Walker and Miles, work hard to create a comfortable atmosphere for the girls so that they can express all their incredible funkiness.

These are amazing girls, but not because they’re, for instance, award-winning dancers or published writers.  This is not a show that seeks out The Most Amazing Girls in some competitive way.  Instead, Poehler interviews ordinary girls and through the interviews lets the girls reveal their thoughts, interests, and talents.  As a viewer, you’re struck by how cool these girls are—but not in a way that makes them out of reach.  This is part of what makes the show special.  Watching it, I think, “I know girls like that!  They should be on the show!”  And I hope that girls who watch it might think, “I can do that!  That’s like me!”  It’s inviting rather than distancing.  It’s creating a sense of community and a sense of possibility, as well as validating girls for the ordinary things that make them special.

The show’s website has a casting call for season 2, so if you know a girl who is changing the world by being herself, encourage her to submit her information to Smart Girls at the Party.