I can’t remember the last time I wanted to like a nonfiction film as much as I wanted to like Girl Rising. It promised to shed light on many of the issues I feel most passionately about: girls, education, gender-based oppression, and social inequality. Focused on the lives of nine girls around the world, the film’s creators paired nine women writers with each girl in order to write their story. A different American actor then narrates each story: Meryl Streep, Salma Hayek, Cate Blanchett, and so on. The roster of writers included several of my favorites (Edwidge Danticat, for one). So did the actors.

Perhaps predictably, I didn’t love it. I did like parts of it—I was moved by many of the stories and the way several of them were rendered into prose, and I left feeling with a much better sense of the complexity of the challenges facing these nine extraordinary girls. But while the film succeeded in places, it failed in others.

Let me start with what the film does well.

As Natalie X. Baker points out in Bitch Magazine, the strongest part of the film is its exploration of the “bravery and self-determination” possessed by all of these girls. Although they face significant obstacles, these girls aren’t victims. Here are some details from a few of their stories:

• Fourteen-year-old Senna lives in poverty in an Andes mining town in Peru. Named by her father after the heroine of Xena: Warrior Princess, she discovers Peruvian poet César Vallejo and memorizes his poetry, which she reenacts with passion at school competitions.
• On the streets of Kolkata, India, eleven-year-old Ruksana paints pictures and attends school. Both her parents work wherever they can and insist that both of their daughters will complete their education and go on to a better life.
• In Freetown, Sierra Leone, sixteen-year-old Mariama attends school, hosts her own local call-in radio show, and dreams of becoming a scientist.
• Eight-year-old Wadley survives the earthquake with her mother in Haiti, but they have to relocate to the Carradeux tent camp in Port-au-Prince. Although her mother can no longer afford the school fees for her daughter, Wadley pesters the teacher until she relents and lets Wadley join the class.

Like many other viewers, I found these individual stories far more compelling than what came in between: mostly, stark statistics narrated by a solemn Liam Neeson. I didn’t mind the inclusion of the actual statistics (which do provide a broader picture) as much as the mode of presentation: important facts about girls and education are presented on charming posters held by a beautiful and diverse assortment of girl child models cavorting in the fields. From garbage dumps in Cambodia to the pages of a Garnet Hill catalog.

These precious scenes on the hillside feel like ads. And they are: they are selling the issue of girls’ education. In contrast, the stories about the nine girls are moving. Even when they do not unfold in realistic modes, they generally convey a sense of the girls’ lives.

I just alluded to the fact that many of these stories push at the boundaries of documentary storytelling with playful artistic and poetic flair. Some viewers do not like this. Natalie Baker, for example, criticizes the film for letting the writers take “linguistic liberties in translating and transforming each girl’s story.” She would rather the girls speak for themselves, instead of hearing the girls’ stories as they have been shaped and crafted by writers, and then spoken by actors.

In principal, I agree with Baker—allowing subjects to speak for themselves can be crucially important for informing our understanding and knowledge about their lives and the conditions in which they live. But for some reason, the writerly interventions of Girl Rising didn’t bother me so much. For one, I trusted many of these writers, most of whom were born in the countries in which their subjects live, and many of whom have spent years navigating the tricky ethical territory of writing about others. I also liked the result in many (though not all) of the stories. And importantly, I had a sense of the process. At the beginning, the film explains that each writer spent time with her subject and then did her best to render the girl’s experience in a form that captured the truths of her life. Girl Rising isn’t “straight” documentary, and it doesn’t present itself as such.

All nonfiction is crafted, including “straight” documentary and personal narrative. So I took these stories as stories, based on each writer’s understanding of her subject. That said, I did prefer the way some of the writers approached and crafted their subject’s story more than others; some of the narratives deeply moved me, while others felt overwritten.

A larger problem emerged when stories were reenacted. In general, the girls were played by themselves—so, for example, the character of Wadley is played by Wadley, and presumably some of the other characters in her story are played by those people. But I’m pretty sure that the earthquake scene wasn’t actual documentary footage but rather a reenactment, and it seemed to me that there had to be other actors—in her story, perhaps, but also in others. (The film does tell us that the two girls who live in the Middle East, one in Afghanistan and one in Egypt, were played by actors in order to protect the girls’ identities.)

I’m not a fan of this kind of docudrama, most of all because the film didn’t signal when we were viewing reenactments. As a result, I sometimes wasn’t sure what I was watching: was it “real”? was it fiction? The film crossed some kind of line without informing me. As a result, I had difficulty gauging my emotional reactions.

If part of the success of a documentary (or of any film) is how well the story is told—how it impacts us emotionally as well as intellectually—Girl Rising failed when I didn’t know whether I should laugh or cry.

In case you hadn’t guessed, Girl Rising is a film with high production values, expertly directed by documentarian Richard Robbins, and backed by what appears to be a fair amount of money (Intel Corporation is one of the “partners” of 10×10, the “global action campaign” that produced the film, along with The Documentary Group and Paul G. Allen’s Vulcan Productions). This is neither an indie film nor the Women Make Movies documentaries that I frequently show in my Women’s Studies classes. Rather, it’s a new kind of collaboration that brings corporate money to documentary/narrative filmmaking and social issues.

This kind of collaboration generates the money and resources that documentary filmmakers, nonprofit organizations, and social programs need. But it also means that Girl Rising is part of Intel’s program of Corporate Social Responsibility. So should it really come as a surprise that the film’s good intentions get mired in what Natalie Baker calls “cinematic chivalry”? That it leaves out feminist activism on girls’ issues in these various locations? That it lacks any kind of structural analysis, as articulately pointed out by an anonymous commenter over at Bitch? (Never mentioned, for example, are the neoliberal economic policies that have contributed to the existence of school fees in countries like Haiti, or the behavior of multinational gold mining companies in countries like Peru.)

I’m not condoning these omissions. I’m just pointing out that Girl Rising isn’t about economic or political revolution. It attempts to do one thing, and to do it well: to give names and faces and stories to an issue—girls’ education—that is precisely the kind of issue that many people agree with in the abstract but which has failed to become a priority for individual governments, the United Nations, development and human rights organizations, and private foundations. 10×10 wants us to put girls’ education at the top of our list, and they want to make an impact on policy makers and donors—as well as girls in the U.S. And girls and their mothers might well constitute a major portion of the viewing audience. (While I think my nine-year-old daughter is still a little too young to watch Girl Rising, I do wonder whether the film might be particularly well-suited for middle and high school students.)

Which brings me to my last point: the film’s assumptions about its subjects and its viewers. Clearly, girls in the U.S. will be among its viewers. But what about the girls who struggle in this country? We all know that there are groups of girls in the U.S. who face extraordinary challenges in attending and graduating from school. Where are these girls? Don’t we do ourselves a grave disservice by perpetuating the idea that only girls who live elsewhere need help? How hard would it be, really, to include one segment focused on the life of one girl living in this country? That would go a long way towards breaking down the us/them binary that troubles so much U.S.-based activism—and might bring a sense of urgency to the social inequalities affecting girls’ lives here at home.

Girl Rising will premiere on June 16 at 9pm EST on CNN.

The Equal Pay Act turns 50 on Monday, June 10, 2013 and the Council on Contemporary Families has convened an online symposium representing the latest thinking from pre-eminent work-family scholars, business people, and advocates for low-wage workers and unions.

In one of the ten briefs, CUNY’s Ruth Milkman reports how labor unions—and women in them—spearheaded the campaign for the Equal Pay Act, even though they made up only 18.3 percent of members at the time. If unions had had their way the language would not have been “equal pay for equal work” but “equal wage rates for work of comparable character on jobs the performance of which requires comparable skills.” Milkman explains, this was “wording that would have forced employers to pay women in traditionally sex-segregated jobs as much as men with comparable skills in traditionally male occupations…. Given the pervasiveness of job segregation by gender, this weakened requirement for equity ensured that the law had a far more limited impact.”

How are women in unions doing? Today, women make up 45 percent of all union members, but union membership rates have declined: In 1960 one in four workers was in a union; today, that is down to about one in ten, reports Milkman. The historic decline hit private sector unions, where male unions used to be strong, first and hardest, says Milkman. But “starting in 2011, a wave of state-level legislation weakening collective bargaining rights for public sector workers has directly targeted teachers and other unionized female-dominated occupations.”  This attack is a real problem since women union workers earn an average of more than $5 an hour more than nonunion ones and have more benefits and job security as well—and nonunion workers in unionized fields benefit from this advantage.

As a public sector worker–a professor at a state university–and a proud union member, I say thanks labor movement!

For other NICE WORK posts on women in unions, read unions matter to women, waiting for superwoman, and woman’s nation = workers’ nation.

In February 2013, I gave a TEDx talk at TEDxWindyCity about the gendering of childhood in the earliest years of life.  TEDx events, for those who may not know what the “x” stands for, are independently organized TED-like experiences created in the spirit of TED’s mission, “ideas worth spreading,” only at the local level. So, in an auditorium along the frozen shores of Lake Michigan, I stood on a stage before a sold-out crowd of 650 smart Chicagoans, said things like “gender binary”, and wore a pair of mismatched pink and blue tights.

Preparing for and delivering this talk were some rather peak experiences this year.

I’ve since received many questions about the process: “Did you audition, self-nominate, or get tapped?” “How long did it take you to prepare?” “Did you receive training?” “How’d you do it without notes?” “Where’d you get those tights?” (A: I made them.)

There’s a real hunger, I’ve learned, to know more about what goes on behind the scenes. And I’ll tell you. But first, please know that like many public thought leadership forums, women could afford to lean in here a bit more. When speaking to my authors group back in New York City, Kelly Stoetzel, Content Director and curator for the mothership TED said that women turn down invitations to speak at TED with far greater frequency than do men. If the phone rings, lady readers, and it’s TED calling, promise me one thing before continuing to read this post.  Promise me you’ll say yes.

But you don’t have to wait for the phone to ring to speak at a TEDx event. Unlike TED, which invites its speakers, TEDx events are fully planned and coordinated on a community-by-community basis, and the organizers often outline their submission process clearly on the event’s site.

TEDx talks can lead to TED invitations. They can lead to media appearances, speaking engagements, and books. Regardless of doors opened and views accrued, preparing for and giving a TEDx talk is a valuable experience in and of itself.

I say giving this talk changed my life because it did.  It got me out of a writing rut and pushed me into multimedia. It ushered me into a new city and gave me a local calling card (I relocated from New York last July). And it taught me that I could experience more joy while giving a talk than I ever knew was possible. That’s right, people. Joy.

Much of the joyfulness I attribute to the organizers. (Shannon Downey of Pivotal Productions, you are a one-woman bundle of brilliance.)  A team of 20 volunteers (aka the Dream Team) did a seamless job producing the event, and co-sponsors included the Museum of Science and Industry and the Ravinia Festival, which catered a mid-day indoors picnic on astroturf. Ten speakers shared the stage with dancers, poets, and a comedic duo. The audience, too, was key. Everyone there was interesting. The mood was one of mutual inspiration and support. TEDx events are a reflection of their organization, and this one was tops.  Not every event will explode with this level of creativity and be this well organized, but the trick is to make the most of it, whatever the production level, because one TEDx can also lead to the next.

Here’s how mine went down:

July 2012: A friend sends me a call for speakers for TEDxWindyCity. The theme is “contrast.” I have girl/boy twins. I write about gender. I decide to propose a talk that brings to life key research about the gendering of childhood in the earliest years of life. With help from a filmmaker friend (who also happens to be a girl/boy twin mama), I prepare the requested 2-minute video submission using a 500-word script, an ultrasound video, and some stills.  I write a short proposal explaining how, adhering to the TEDxWindyCity Commandments, I intend to inspire listeners to think beyond convention; innovate by unearthing the studies that turn previous findings upside down; revolutionize the way listeners think about not only the gendering of the tiny, but the gendering of the adults who shape them; move listeners by speaking very personally about my experience as a new mother of boy/girl twins who, after years of studying and writing about gender in theory, suddenly found herself in the belly of the beast and questioning her core beliefs; influence by launching a Pinterest board in which I ask followers to post a photo of a young child breaking or upholding a gender norm; entertain with a brief slideshow; and, above all, inform. I explain that my inquiry is part of a larger project, I explain who I am, I send a few links related to the project and to previous talks and videos, and I attach a few testimonials attesting to my speaking skills.

September 2012: I’m accepted. (I think: Huzzah! Then: Oh lord, what have done?)

October 2012: I stall. Or, put another way, I try to figure out a talk that will also help me think toward the book I’m (slowly) working on. I end up going in circles, trying to do too much at once.

November 2012: I receive an email from the organizers:

As you know your TEDx talk needs to tell a story or argue for an idea.  I need you to please submit to me the title of your talk + in 5 sentences or less the thesis statement/main point of your talk.  You can find a million examples on TED.com

I’m reminded to think short, and think pithily. I come up with the following: “Learn, from kids, to embrace paradox and get out of your gender binary zone.”

December 2012: I’m freed, now, to write the talk. I come up with a simple three-part structure, and working backwards from that tagline, I pull together a narrative that interweaves my personal story with research from various fields. I get feedback from my writers group and other trusted advisors.

January 2013: I send my draft to the organizers. I have a month left to revise. The organizers hook us up with a webinar called “The Foundation of Great Presentations,” with Doug Carter and Brian Burkhart of Square Planet. From them, I learn the importance of knowing what I want my audience to know, feel, and do.

Afterwards, I receive an email from Doug:

Remember, this is an ALL IN proposition—you’ve only got one shot at this. There are no “do-overs” like we had when we were kids. No late night cramming on February 22nd hoping that it will magically sink in. You HAVE to work at it to be the best you can possibly be.

I’m inspired to go all in.

February 2013: I revise and revise, tightening and cutting wherever I can. My graphic designer husband (convenient, I know) helps me refine the slides, which I’ve by now come to realize need to be just as concise as the words.  A few weeks before the event, the organizers host a pre-show gathering so the speakers and Dream Team can all meet and greet. I spend the last week memorizing my talk, getting it down to just notes on one page, and eventually to notes on a single note card. I practice, practice, and practice some more. I video myself doing it once. The day before, I do a full run-through on stage. The event takes place. I go second and get to enjoy the rest of the day. Everyone does a great job. In the lingo of TEDx, we killed.

The talk resulted in views and media (like here and here).  Ink Factory Studio graphically recorded my talk (see below).

This all, of course, was well and good, but most importantly, for me, preparing for and delivering the talk led to a loosening up.  Mixing up the visual and the verbal felt playful and expansive at the same time that it pushed me to be precise.  And now, I think I’m hooked.

To find a TEDx event to apply to near you, click here. http://www.ted.com/tedx

Watch the talk:

Visit the Pinterest Board, Tots in Genderland (and hey, if interested in becoming a pinner, drop me a line!)

Got questions? Please leave them in comments or tweet me (@deborahgirlwpen) and I’ll try my best to answer. Even if they’re just about the tights.

This week, Gender & Society released a study, “Engendering Racial Perceptions: An Intersectional Analysis of How Social Status Shapes Race,” that shows that we pile on a set of descriptions—like single, mother, and welfare-dependent—to build our most persistent stereotypes. This valuable study demonstrates intersectionality plainly enough to share with my students and broader audiences who want to understand why inequality persists even as things continue to change. When I teach this I’ll use Lisa Wade’s recent Soc Images post on managing stigma where she discusses intersectionality and the photo posted you can see below.

Researchers study what shapes racial classification. In a novel study that looked back at how survey interviewers racially classify people over the course of their adult lives, sociologists Andrew Penner (University of California-Irvine) and Aliya Saperstein (Stanford University) discovered that from one year to the next some people’s race appeared to change. This change occurred when the interviewer in one year wrote down one race, but in the next year the interviewer wrote down a different race. Penner and Saperstein call these changes in classification “racial fluidity,” and the researchers wanted to know what affected how a person’s race was perceived.

Drawing on nearly 20 years of longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), the researchers found changes in racial classification occurred for six percent of people each year; over the course of the study, 20 percent of those interviewed switched racial classifications at least once. Importantly, these changes did not occur at random. The fluidity was related to both social status and gender.

Penner explained:  “We often talk about racial stereotypes as affecting people’s attitudes in the sense that knowing a woman’s race can change what you think about whether she is on welfare. Our study shows the opposite also happens–knowing whether a woman has ever received welfare benefits affects what you think about her race.”

How did the study work? NLSY interviewers spent time interviewing subjects about a range of issues like their job, their living circumstances, and their relationships. At the end of their meeting, interviewers wrote down whether the person they had just interviewed was white, black, or other. In most cases, the interviewer did not know specific details of the subjects’ ancestry or how they would have racially identified themselves. Each racial classification provided a window into how that person was likely to be perceived and treated by other people. The changes the researchers detected allowed them to look in on those perceptions.

“Instead of adjusting our stereotypes to fit the world around us,” Saperstein explained, “people are more likely to adjust their view of the world to fit our shared stereotypes.”

How did being a man or a woman make a difference? The study found that men and women had similar levels of racial fluidity overall, and some factors, such as where the people lived, resulted in similar changes for both women and men. All else being equal, people were more likely to be classified as white and less likely to be classified as black if they lived in the suburbs, while the opposite was true for people living in the inner city.

However, other factors that triggered changes in racial classification differed by gender. In particular, poverty made men and women less likely to be classified as white, but the effect was stronger for men. Penner explains, “This is consistent with traditional gender roles that emphasize men’s responsibility as breadwinners, so that poverty changes how men are seen more than how women are seen.”

On the other hand, women, but not men, who have received welfare benefits are less likely to be seen as white and more likely to be seen as black, even though the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimated that in 2010 70% of welfare recipients are not black. Penner continues, “This result speaks to deeply entrenched stereotypes of ‘welfare queens’ originally made popular by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Knowing that a women is on welfare triggers a racial stereotype that isn’t triggered for men.”

Consistent with other widespread stereotypes, being a single parent affected a woman’s likelihood of being classified as white more than a man’s, while having been in prison affected whether men were classified as white but not women. To make the point, Saperstein wrote a blog post at Boston Review, “Can Losing Your Job Make You Black?”

“Not all of our stereotypes about social status are related to race or gender, or a combination of the two, and our results reflect that complexity” Saperstein said. “But, overall, it is striking how consistent the patterns of racial fluidity are with societal expectations about what white people or black people do, and even what we expect of white women compared to white men.”

What to make of this?  People often wonder why inequality is so persistent despite many societal changes. The study found that gender and social class play a part in racial perceptions, but the key to the findings is that, when it comes to creating a mental picture of a person, these factors are not separate from one another. Penner and Saperstein found that racial stereotypes are reinforced through combinations—or intersections—of positive or negative statuses. The intersection of race, gender, and social class plays a key role in why these stereotypes—and the inequality that stereotypes support—are so challenging to erase.

As University of Massachusetts sociologist Joya Misra, editor of Gender & Society, comments, “What is brilliant about Penner and Saperstein’s study is how it shows us that race is malleable – how we see other people as white or black is affected by what else we know about them. Yet even how we racialize someone draws on stereotypes that reflect both gender and race.”

The study is based on analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a national longitudinal survey collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The data covers years from 1979 through 1998, the most recent years in which interviewers recorded their racial classification of respondents.

Having written about sexually transmitted HPV (human papillomavirus) for 13 years, I’ve been waiting for the day when  celebrity would lend his or her fame to spotlight the realities of HPV infection, especially of HPV-related oral cancers. My hopes were that big news could bring about big change.  Today is that day, but it remains to be seen if it can be long-needed catalyst for change.

When news first broke, about three years ago, that Michael Douglas had oral cancer, my gut instinct was that it had been caused by HPV, likely one of the same types of HPV that has been causally linked to cervical cancer. The mucus membrane tissue of mouth and throat are similar to those of genital skin, so researchers have known for some time that, like herpes, HPV could be transmitted oral to genital, as well as genital to oral.

Back in 2009, the research findings were already clear: oral transmission of cancer-causing HPV means that almost all of us are more likely at risk than we are safe from risk.  For my 2010 feature article in Ms. Magazine, I focused on the importance of not only educating the public about HPV-related cancers in men but also about the HPV-oral cancer link. In addition, I advocated for the need to destigmatize all STDs: my research and book have shown that STD stigma makes it more likely for at-risk/infected  individuals to put off getting tested and treated. STD stigma also makes it less likely for individuals to disclose their sexual health status to partners, placing those partners at greater risk for infection.  In addition, negative stereotypes about the ‘types’ of women and men likely to be infected distort our ideas of who is at risk.

I’ll wrap up this post with a call: for us to come together, to learn the facts and not be swayed by incomplete media coverage and confusing pharmaceutical claims.  We must support significant funding increases to investigate exactly how we can prevent HPV-related oral/throat cancers, which research shows to be steadily on the rise and more fatal than cervical cancers in the U.S.

Update (6/3/13): I was not surprised to read reports which broke today — that the actor’s rep is correcting one aspect of yesterday’s breaking news: “He did not say cunnilingus was the cause of his cancer.” All any cancer survivor probably knows is that his/her cancer was caused by HPV (viral tests and typing can be done in lab tests of biopsied tissue samples). Researchers have found that cancer-causing HPV can be transmitted to oral/throat area via oral sex. The point remains: Michael Douglas did a good deed by helping raise awareness that serious (often fatal) oral cancers can be caused by sexually-transmitted HPV which is likely contracted by oral sex….

Walking out of movies, I often disagree with the sentiments of the crowd. As they enthuse “That was so awesome!” and “Great action scenes!,” I silently bemoan the lack of female characters, the unnecessary booty shots (as in the recent Star Trek: Into Darkness), and the preponderance of blow-em-up-and-kill-em-dead scenes.

As I left the theatre following After Earth, the new Will and Jaden Smith movie venture, I disagreed with audience sentiment, but for different reasons. As I heard people complaining the movie was too slow, didn’t have enough action, that there wasn’t enough death, I was thinking about how great the father/son relationship was depicted, about the sister so strong she protects her brother even after death, about the tech-genius mom who lures her son and husband away from the warrior world of killing aliens.

My fondness for the film was not shared by those exiting the theatre with me – nor is it shared by other critics – at least none that have reviewed the film yet. Instead, the general reaction seems to be “yawn.”

Now, the fact some audiences judge how good a movie is by death count aside…what worries me about movies (and thrilled me about After Earth) circulates around the fact that most movies are still telling us the same old regressive, outdated, power-happy stories where men rule the universe and women get naked (or rescued). Even in futuristic, fantasy, sci-fi, super-hero and animated movies, where there is the possibility to rewrite what humanity, gender, race, existence and so on mean, more movies than not stick to the same script. Man is hero. Woman is in background. Person of color is villain. America is savior. “Others” whether they be aliens, monsters, foreigners, LGBTQ, or simply from a different neighborhood, are killed off or assimilated.

This is where After Earth is different. Yes, it has male heroes, but it also has female ones. The heroes are people of color. The “savior” is not a nation or even a planet, but a family that loves one another. There are some evil Others (ursa aliens) but the film shows that assuming evil/malice on the part of Others often is misguided – as when the young Kitai Raige (Jaden Smith) assumes the bird who will ultimately save his life is trying to kill him (this savior bird is a female while the evil ursa is a he – another nice flip of the usual script).

At the outset of the movie, we learn earth has been destroyed as images of destruction flood the screen. The images are not futuristic, but of present-day earth – humans attack one another, cars wash away in giant tsunami waves, animals struggle in the latest sludge dump from yet another mega-corporation. In contrast, the sleek world of Nova Prime (the planet humans have relocated to) looks like a lovely location kitted out by Ikea.

The United Ranger Corps (the new global military) could serve as an advertisement for diversity – they are male and female, racially diverse, differ in age and size. This future force is not your typical muscled-up, all-male fighting force. This might seem like a small matter, but how often are such filmic elite forces represented with the true diversity that makes up our world? Hardly ever. Further, how often do they not have guns? This military core does NOT have guns (nor the futuristic equivalent of guns). And this is exactly what disappoints many film critics.

While some grieve the lack of action scenes, referring to the “potential” for “intense action sequences” that bewilderingly are not taken advantage of (“it cashes in on only a few of them,”) others caustically lament the lack of guns, as here:  “the script …fails to explain why future warriors, whose technology allows for a ‘cutlass’ whose two ends morph into any type of blade the user requires, choose not to use guns or lasers against the mighty Ursa. One assumes it’s because somebody saw Darth Maul and thought his double-trouble light saber looked cool.”  Yeah, because choosing NOT to use guns is flat out CRAAAAZZZZY.

So, what did I, unlike other reviewers, like about this film?

For one, there is a powerful mother in it. She is not dead. She is not evil. She is not a cartoon of femininity. (Disney, I am talking to you.) No. She is smart, articulate, say-it-as-it-is woman. I would bet she is a feminist. She has no qualms about telling her warrior husband Cypher Raige (Will Smith) that he is failing as a father, informing him “that boy in there is trying to find you…he doesn’t need a commanding officer, he needs a father.”

And the fact the film is critical of Cypher for being such a gung-ho warrior, right down to mocking hyper-masculinity via his symbolic last name, Raige? Swoon. And that it ends with the battle weary Kitai telling his Prime Commander father that he no longer wants to be a Ranger but instead work with his tech-savvy mom? That when he says “dad, I want to work with mom,” Cypher responds “me too”? Double triple swoon.

Further, as my daughter pointed out on our drive home, the film showed heroes need more than strength and weapons – they need strategy and smarts and drive – and they need each other – as when Cypher and Kitai must help one another in order to survive, despite the animosity and hard-feelings that have built up over the years. These are no Iron Men or Men of Steel or whatever other HARD MALE super-hero you want to throw in the mix. No, they are neither uber-hard or uber-male. Rather, they are human. How sad that such a depiction is so rare in this genre of movie as to seem like a revelation.

More sad still is that reviewers are bewailing that Jaden is not ‘man enough’ to be an action hero, as in the New York Daily News review that quips “It’s not Jaden’s fault his voice is still a few octaves too high for an action star, but it doesn’t do him any favors when his character is lifted to the nest of a giant eagle that decides to mother him.” Ah, yes, how emasculating! A less-than-baritone voice and being mothered! What are these reviewers drinking? Straight testosterone with a chaser of misogyny?!?

Such critics do not mention the depiction of family relationships the film proffers. I suppose such matters don’t have enough “action” to be worthy of comment. But, the exploration of family the film offered included something not often explored in films – dealing with the death of a sibling. Young Kitai is still traumatized by watching his older sister Senshi (Zoe Isabella Kravitz) be brutally impaled by an alien, and his father still blames him for it. Said sister visits him in his dreams as he makes his dangerous trek across the now hostile earth, saving his life by waking him up when needed.

As for the father/son relationship at the heart of the film? While I was besotted by the crash scene in which dad Cypher helps the panicking Kitai breathe through his mask, I was equally enamored of the many other scenes that captured something that is not a mainstay of the big screen – a father’s love for his son. Here, and throughout, the film was refreshingly free of macho bravado.  In fact, the various nods to Moby Dick in the film hint that Cypher is debilitated by his own hunger for power, much like Captain Ahab and his relentless quest for the great white whale. (Moby Dick is the only “real” book the Raige family has ever seen in the post-book world of Nova Prime)

As with that literary classic, the film has its philosophical moments. Cypher’s refrain to his son is “take a knee” –  an action that calls for kneeling down to the ground to “root yourself in this present moment.” Intoning “recognize your power…this will be your creation,” Cypher is like a more serious, more male Oprah, cheering on his son with the power of now. In another part of the film, he echoes the sentiment that we create our own realities, noting that we are “telling ourselves a story.”

If there is truth in this idea, that we at least partially create our reality by the stories we tell ourselves, then we had better worry about the fact many film critics and film goers seem to want stories saturated with violence and action – where the violence should be action-packed and the action should be violent.

Films are telling us all a story, stories which shape our experiences of – and expectations about – reality. I enjoy stories like those told in After Earth – stories where parents love their children, where sisters protect their brothers, where giant mother birds morn the violent deaths of their baby birds so much that they turn to mothering a lost human boy on an inhospitable planet – a planet that became uninhabitable because of … you guessed it… violent action.

If you are a crazy peacenik feminist like me, with a soft spot for movies that value love and non-violence and collaboration and an image of the future that is not dominated by Tom Cruise or Chris Pine or Robert Downy Junior knock-offs, go see After Earth. If you want explosions and death and booty shots, well, I am sure there are plenty of summer blockbusters in the pipeline that will deliver.

It is wedding season, and a landmark year for marriage equality. Someone asked me what would be my feminist utopia for marriage, and I started thinking: Utopias are for Enlightenment thinkers, those expansive philosophers who made heady contributions… but who sometimes didn’t quite see around their own contradictions? Take Mary Wollstonecraft, 18^th century Enlightenment feminist polemicist. She had an essentialist streak that led her to argue that women needed to be better educated–to fulfill their duties as wives and mothers. For sure, the notion of a marriage between two men or two women was inconceivable because of the necessity of the natural roles in marriage. Despite her limits, I think Wollstonecraft captures some of my thinking about marriage and utopias via her two famous lines on the topic.

The first is in Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (1798). The protagonist Maria proclaims from within a violent middle-class marriage, “marriage has bastilled me for life!” This politically-charged allusion to the Bastille at the time of the then, still recent, French Revolution suggests that just as aristocracy imprisons peasants, marriage—and men—imprison women.

It is too boring to catalog the subsequent 19^th, 20^th and 21^st century complaints about marriage, one generation after the next finding novel or critical ways to look at marriage in terms of the extent to which it is an honored, covert bastille. There’s Friedan’s problem with no name! There’s the second shift for women in the workforce! Here’s the opt-out puzzle! What’s with the gender gap in depression among married people? Just today, the New York Times covered how marriage is a marker and maintainer of social class divides—more marriage for those with social advantages, and less for the rest. So, marriage even plays a role in replicating wider forms of inequality beyond gender inequality. Looking back at Wollstonecraft, I wonder how long it has been since anything new has been said by white middle-class feminists (like myself) who engage in critical thinking about marriage. It has been all imprisonment and limitations–with some bits of moving forward.

The second Wollstonecraft line appears in an earlier novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788), where she writes at the very end of a better world “where there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage.” The heroine was on her deathbed. Her utopia was heaven, where there is no marriage. Now that’s more like it. Well, except for the death part. This was Wollstonecraft’s proposed resistance to the silliness of women’s education, which failed to parallel the reason-based training of men. Education instead socialized women into mindless versions of wives and mothers that she wrote about in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)—a political treatise in response to Talleyrand’s 1791 remarks naysaying women’s education. Wollstonecraft ended up hating her earlier novel, but she still made a nice point about no marriage.

So what is my feminist marriage utopia? I don’t care if there is or there isn’t marriage; if it is available it should be available to all. In truth, I dislike it when people weirdly change their names. I don’t like the class and commodity fetish that weddings are. And the ceremonies, like when they bless fifty-year-olds to be fruitful and multiply, are embarrassingly heteronormative. But that’s okay. I also don’t like NASCAR, or football, or seafood, and these are things that other perfectly fine people do like.

What works better than a complaint about marriage (or a paean to it, for that matter) is a complaint about inequality, which seems always at the center of our repetitive critiques of marriage. And, with that, I’ll add a complaint about essentialism—or the belief that how your body was born or modified is sensibly linked to your lot in life.

A feminist utopia is one that does not tolerate inequalities, like the inequality of handing out informal and formal advantages based on preferences for some relationships over others. Today’s Times article, “Two Classes Divided by ‘I Do’” makes the point yet again—even if the conclusions folks draw from the classes divided is either “for marriage” or “against marriage.” Generation after generation, marriage plays a role in replicating inequality. A feminist utopia is one that would not put up with sneaky ways of embedding essentialism into our institutions. Marriage, as a cultural artifact of essentialism, does that a lot. It is baked into the cake.

In the wake of Angelina Jolie’s NYT op-ed about undergoing a preventive double mastectomy, many experts have weighed in — to critique, to analyze and to correct misconceptions.  I’m keeping this month’s column short to encourage readers to explore some well-researched analyses.  I’m particularly inspired by a past guest-author for this column, Gayle Sulik, Ph.D. (author of Pink Ribbon Blues and Research Associate, Department of Women’s Studies, University at Albany – State University of New York).  Sulik’s guest post for Scientific American is a must-read for those who have questions and concerns about what Jolie’s story may or may not mean for themselves and their loved ones.  If you prefer a podcast, then listen to KCRW’s interview with a panel of experts, including Dr. Sulik along with Alice Park (author of The Stem Cell Hope and health reporter for Time magazine), Joanna Rudnick (BRCA activist and documentary filmmaker), and Ellen Matloff, M.S., C.G.C. (Director of Cancer Genetic Counseling at Yale Cancer Center).

I leave you with this quote from Sulik:

…we all deserve quality information, evidence-based medicine, and access to comprehensive and coordinated health care that is free from conflicts of interest and the profit motives of commercial enterprises that are eager take advantage of our fears while selling us superficial “solutions” to our problems.

The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage: True Tales of Food, Family, and How We Learn to Eat
Ed. Caroline M. Grant and Lisa Catherine Harper
Boston: Roost Books, 2013, pp255

I begin this review with a confession: I live in Brooklyn, the east coast outpost of the current “foodie” movement. I live in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, have a plot in my local community garden, and shop at farmers’ markets. I try to cook seasonally appropriate meals, bake without refined sugars, and eat a lot of kale. I am white, of middle-class origin, and (very) over-educated.

Why do I tell you all this? I begin with this description because the majority of the stories in The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage are told from a specific location. It is an urban place, one full of farmers’ markets and locally-grown produce, of cage free hens and grass fed beef, of organic baby food and school cafeterias with yogurt bars (yeah, I was floored by that last one, too).

It is also a place where food is central to our lives. Indeed, few things in life are more personal and, as such, many of the stories in the collection exude such lovingness in their descriptions that I was extremely moved – and hungry! (In this sense, the fact that each short essay is accompanied by a recipe is a lovely feature.) I was particularly touched by Aleksandra Crapanzano’s essay on how appealing to the memories of food’s pleasures was way to forge a deep and meaningful relationship with her husband’s great-aunt. Elrena Evans offers an honest and brave reflection on coping with her young daughter’s “selective eating” after her own struggles with an eating disorder. Karen Valby’s essay on her mother’s struggle with manic-depression and the resulting chronic hunger of her childhood, reminds us not to assume that all suburban households are bastions of food abundance. Deborah Copaken Kogan and Paul Kogan, in the essay from which the title of the book was taken, offer a poignant reflection of how, over the course of a long-term relationship, gathering around food comes to symbolize much more than sustenance.

The book is divided into three sections, reflected in the title itself: food, family, and learning to eat.  That said, many of the essays cover all of the themes rather beautifully, and the thematic breaks seem to exist more for the sake of readability (though the last section – “learning to eat” is more highly focused than other sections on authors’ children). The essays themselves are all of a quite readable length, particularly for someone used to the essays in academic tomes. I found myself passing through several essays in quick succession. On the wittiness spectrum, I particularly enjoyed Jen Larsen’s piece “Food Hater,” Lisa McNamara’s “Pie-Eyed,” Melissa Clark’s “Rachel Ray Saved My Life,” and Phyllis Grant’s “Recipe.”

It is disappointing, however,that the collection is lacking in diversity of perspectives. The edited volume features only two people of color and one openly-gay author. In a land where one father decries his children’s lack of taste for foie gras and another describes PTA fights over food choices with dismissive hilarity (though I did deeply enjoy Edward Lewine’s essay) – what of parents in schools in which the majority of students receive food assistance and there are no yogurt bars in the cafeteria? Including the perspectives of people speaking from multiple locations would have deeply enriched the collection. As it stands, The Cassoulet Saved our Marriage  will most resonate with those located in the privileged places described at the start of this review, including, of course, my own beloved neighborhood in Brooklyn.

In the final chapter, author Thomas Peele recounts several meetings with San Franciscan chef Dennis Leary. Here, Peele describes Leary’s approach to food as one in which “[f]ood … is not an end to itself. It’s a beginning, a starting place.” And so I hope it is with this collection – a starting place from which other collections that cover the diverse experience of and perspectives on food will spring.

Gwendolyn Beetham is an independent scholar living in Brooklyn, New York. She currently manages the column “The Academic Feminist” at Feministing.com and is a regular contributor at the University of Venus. She has a PhD from the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics. Follow her on twitter @gwendolynb

Rarely a week goes by without a news story or blog post related to single-sex public K-12 education. Coverage often focuses on the ways in which girls and/or boys benefit from these settings and the ‘research’ that allegedly supports these claims. All this numbs the mind of someone who remembers the passage of Title IX and the hopes associated with it.

I grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s. Girls took home economics, whether we wanted to or not. Boys took shop classes under the same assumptions–one was for girls and one was for boys.  I didn’t question these assumptions, but I did wish I could participate in track and field; my only school sponsored ‘sports’ options were cheerleading and girls basketball. Cheerleading wasn’t much of a sport and girls basketball was full of rules about not running across center line and how many bounces were allowed when dribbling the ball.  My father helped me set up a backyard long jump and a ‘pole vault’ with an old mattress and a stick between two poles. It was fun, but it wasn’t ‘real.’

The passage of Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational program receiving federal financial assistance. Some exceptions were allowed for existing single-sex schools and for instruction in specific areas such as human sexuality and for contact sports. Feminists celebrated.  No longer could schools schedule classes in advanced English and physics at the same time and steer girls to one and boys to the other. No longer would it be legal to provide unequal school-sponsored sports opportunities. Best of all, gendered stereotypes limiting options for both sexes would diminish significantly as girls and boys were educated as equals in the same schools and classrooms. Or so we hoped.

Today the idea of restricting access to course offerings on the basis of sex is as old fashioned as separate job listings for men and women. Girls and boys increasingly see each other as equally capable of achieving in a wide range of fields. But continued advocacy for single-sex public education is ample proof of the strength of outmoded gender myths.

Rather than exploring the far more common similarities among girls and boys, many educators, parents, and policy makers have succumbed to pseudo-scientific theories of large sex differences in cognitive and emotional skills and learning styles. These theories have been debunked repeatedly. Nonetheless, many remain convinced that sex segregation is the best approach when it comes to the education of our children.

In fact, so many believe this to be the case, that in 2006 the Bush Administration’s Department of Education issued a new Title IX regulation which allows more single-sex options in public schools. This regulation is confusing but does require justifying single-sex instruction by showing that it addresses specific educational needs, objectives and opportunities not otherwise met in coeducational classes, and without limiting opportunities available to any student.  However, so far the largely anecdotal evidence cited for single-sex success has faded under more careful scrutiny. To date there is no convincing evidence that single-sex public K-12 schooling is superior to coeducation.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan recently addressed the American Educational Research Association Annual Conference in San Francisco. Reiterating his belief in the importance of research in formulating educational policy, he noted, “We need you, the researchers, to answer the question “which approach works better—this one or that one–and then we need to move forward informed by your answer.”

If current research on the shortcomings of single sex education is not convincing enough for Secretary Duncan and other education policy makers, if they still support public funding for single-sex approaches, then perhaps it is time for increased evaluation of these offerings.

Working with educational researchers around the country, The Feminist Majority Foundation has proposed suggested guidelines for schools considering or already implementing single-sex approaches in public K-12 schools. These have been submitted to the Department of Education for comment and adoption. The guidelines recommend careful planning and process evaluation as key aspects of single-sex programs. Such steps are critical to solid evaluations of outcomes. And only careful outcome evaluation can document whether single-sex approaches have succeeded in decreasing sex discriminatory education and attaining other stated education achievement goals better than comparably well funded, staffed and planned coeducational approaches.

Particularly in tight economic times, scarce public resources must be focused on effective, legally sound, equitable education–education equally available to all. If careful research and evaluation show some single-sex approaches meet these criteria, such programs should be promoted and replicated in appropriate settings. Any single-sex approaches that do not meet these criteria should be halted immediately.  With limited public funds and clear legal requirements to address, there is no more time for programs based on what people think they know. We need educational approaches grounded in what careful research shows is effective.