academe

Here’s what I had to say in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

I confess: I dread this time of year. It might sound strange coming from the executive director of the National Women’s Studies Association, but Women’s History Month reminds me of our education system’s failures.

I hope you’ll read the full op-ed, and especially my ideas for solutions, and let me know your hopes for this time next year.

Alas, it was snowed out last month… but it has been rescheduled for this Wednesday, March 31 at the CUNY Graduate Center. This time around, I’ll be talking about mothering across borders in a couple of recent films in addition to interviewing writer Amy Sohn. Other participants include Meena Alexander, Leah Souffrant, Stephanie Cleveland and others, in addition to organizers Pamela Stone and Nicole Cooley, who edited the Mother issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly.

Check out the program here.

For anyone in NYC this coming Friday, February 26: Women’s Studies Quarterly is hosting a day-long conference at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in honor of its Mother issue, featuring scholarship, poetry, and prose on mothers, mothering, and motherhood. Participants include Andrea O’Reilly, Meena Alexander, Miranda Field, Pamela Stone, Nicole Cooley, and many others. I’ll be talking with novelist Amy Sohn about “mommy lit” and her novel Prospect Park West over lunch. Hope to see you there!

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.

Here again with an announcement about a conference that looks fabulous: Mothering and Migration: (Trans)nationalisms, Globalization, and Displacement, in Puerto Rico between February 19-21. The conference is organized by the Association for Research on Mothering (ARM), a research organization based at York University, Ontario. The lineup includes scholars and activists from a wide range of backgrounds and locations. Alas, a lack of funding will prevent me from attending — but I invite any conference attendees to contact me about writing a short column to share their research with the GWP community.

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!

Difficult Dialgoues

Get the latest on girls and girls studies this week at the National Women’s Studies Association annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia from November 12-15.  The conference theme is “Difficult Dialogues,” and we expect our largest event in recent history.  On tap: more than 1,600 feminist scholar-activists gathering to exchange ideas in more than 300 sessions.

You’ll hear analyses of girls’ lives and experiences, including sessions like “Girls of Color and Performance Ethnographies” and “Voices of Girls in Urban Schools.”

And if you can’t make it you can find updates on our Facebook page or after the conference on the NWSA site where we expect to make a podcast of the Angela Davis keynote address available.

Wimpy Kids

You can also hit the newsstand and pick up the latest issue of Ms. Magazine where you’ll find my contribution on Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid book series.  My daughter Maya is one of my expert sources along with Sharon Lamb, Lyn Mikel Brown and Mark Tappan, who’ve just released Packaging Boyhood: Saving Our Sons from Superheroes, Slackers, and Other Media Stereotypes.

It’s always a treat to get quoted in a mainstream newspaper article that takes a critical look at U.S. norms and values. Fellow GWP editor, Shira Tarrant, and I were recently interviewed about trends in female Halloween costumes:

Talking with this reporter reminded me of a campaign launched on my university’s campus a few years ago by the student club Feminism Is. They created posters with the slogan “We’re not a trick or a treat!” to raise awareness at California Lutheran University about the importance of the messages being sent by the hyper-sexual costumes that had become popular among U.S. female college students. With too many Americans still unclear about the relevance of sexism in our daily lives, it’s vital that we mentor and teens/young adults who create feminist events and collaborate with reporters who are willing to ask questions like — Is dressing up “like a slut” for Halloween “harmless fun” or “demeaning”?  Kudos to writer Rhiannon Potkey and other journalists who are fighting the good fight!

Sticks and stones my break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

A rhyme I’m sure we’ll all familiar with, perhaps one that we hurled back at someone teasing us as kids. We teach our kids that words don’t hurt, when we know darn well that they do. And science has proved over and over that words impact the way that we take tests and perform in the classroom (anywhere actually). It’s called stereotype threat:

…the fear that one’s behavior will confirm an existing stereotype of a group with which one identifies. This fear can sometimes affect performance.

One recent study [pdf] on stereotype threat had women taking math tests and looking for the cause of poor performance due to the threat.

Because it is not enough to say we know stereotype threat exists and then lather women and other stereotyped groups with love. Why does a woman excellent in math crumble under the weigh of mentioning that “girls don’t do math” before an exam? It seems that our brains spend precious time and energy sorting out our feelings about the stereotype during the exam AND not just that, but it lingers. Thus if we fear the math in a class, say economics, we will fear everything that goes with economics.

We know that economics and statistics is far more than just algebra and geometry, but if that is our weak spot, we will focus so much on that, that we just might submarine our efforts. During graduate school the #1 class that caused students to flunk out was stats. During that year long course (two semesters!) I heard women say time and again, “I’m just not good at math.” My program had also experimented with teaching a math prep course using a computer program before the semester started. Despite the fact that I am a total math geek and my favorite class in high school was geometry (Mmmm….proofs….) and I have a bachelors in science, I was floored at how much basic algebra had rotted away over the years. I am pretty ashamed that I can’t just tell you what sine and cosine mean off the top of my head.

But here’s something I learned in my years working in a lab as an undergraduate: Scientists have reference books on hand. They aren’t doing science off the top of their brilliant heads. Yes, they have it pretty much in their heads, but when it comes time to do an experiment or calculate the frequency of fish fins flapping, they reach for a book or list of formulas. Scientists being pure geniuses is a stereotype!

Lesson? You do need to remember how to calculate wavelength during an exam, but once you get past that, you can whip out that formula sheet anytime. Yes, you will need to know certain things off the top of your head, but when you study the same molecule over 20 years, things will start to stick.

The next time you sit down at that math exam  and you start to sweat, stop and breathe. Remember that you are you. If you miss one problem, no biggie. No one is perfect. But do you want to spend your energy remembering that one jerk teacher who said you can’t do it or do you want to prove to yourself how much you kick ass? OK, so maybe love does have a place in killing off stereotypes.

Somewhere within my past year’s reading the book Maiden USA: Girl Icons Come of Age by Kathleen Sweeney came into my orbit.  It seemed ideal as I traced the history of girls onscreen, on television, and within other forms of media.  Yet I wish I could give Sweeney’s book a more enthusiastic thumbs up.  Listed as a “media artist and writer” Sweeney has taught at various colleges and been active in media training programs for girls.  Her book began as a “curatorial project of films and videos by teenage girls entitled ‘Reel Girls/Real Girls'” which premiered in San Francisco.

Sweeney casts a wide net and she ranges from exploration of the Riot Grrrl movement to a chapter called “Mean Girls in Ophelia Land” which tracks the rise and fall of the “mean girl” movement within popular writing as well as on screen.  She correctly identifies that for the most part the Teenage Girl, (as she capitalizes it) was a “passive helping noun linked to Daddies, Brothers, and Boyfriends,” until certain cultural zeitgeists began to shift. As cultural interest in girls gathered momentum, the growth of what Sweeney names a Girl Icon has grown.  Sweeney is right on point when she chases this emergence through the past almost 20 years.

The book moves at a fast clip – her quick categorizations of Neo-Lolitas, Career Girls, Geek Girls, Cyber Chicks, as well as Supernatural Girls, Amazons, and Brainiacs, among other labels, often struck me as too glib.  Her most intriguing point is what now defines an Icon in contemporary culture, as well as her reinsciption of the term into the word “Eye-con.”  Sweeney calls an “Eye-con” an “image scam that must be navigated and brought to awareness by analyzing and naming its syntax,” not unlike a stereotype.  Eye-cons do their most damaging work, she says, when viewers are unconscious of their influence.  Within the pantheon of the “Eye-con” is the “Girl-con” she says, which are “Icons of girlhood which posit girls as inevitable Victims.”  Examples are “anorexic adolescent models selling a form of starvation beauty.” Media literacy demands that viewers name the Girl-con and then look beyond to alternative role models as Sweeney says she wants to consider Girl Power Icons for the new millennium against a “backdrop of current and retro Girl Iconography.”  Her writing about visual representation and even semiotics is at its strongest when she is doing this kind of analysis.

Yet, while impressive in scope, the book’s very breadth also serves as its limitation as depth is sacrificed for a sweeping survey of the cultural landscape. Sweeney’s enthusiasm for her subject is most strongly felt when she describes her first-hand work with girls.  Her final chapter “Girls Make Movies: Out of the Mirror and Through the Lens” was the most intriguing to me.  Sweeney’s passion as an activist comes out as she describes some of the current programs working with girls to advocate media literacy and develop their skills.  She mentions Reel Grrls in Seattle, Wash., and GirlsFilmSchool in Santa Fe, N.M., among others.  The book’s list of resources is also wonderfully thorough. I suspect undergraduate students would enjoy having this book assigned for its abundance of popular culture references, generous use of chapter subheads and discrete categorizations.

By contrast, another book I came across during my research was Mary Celeste Kearney’s Girls Make Media which became indispensible to me for both its range and its depth.  Kearney is an academic, now tenured at UT-Austin and the book’s research is admirable.  Neatly divided into three sections “Contexts,” “Sites,” and “Texts” Kearney also traces girls’ historical participation with media.  She delves into girls’ entry into the web, also the impact of the Riot Grrrls, zine culture as well as independent filmmaking.  Her focus on what happens when girls take over media production is what makes this book compelling.  At the same time, she contextualizes the institutionalized practices that have keep girls from participating fully.

Particularly exposing is the deeply entrenched sexism in the field of filmmaking (the idea that cameras are too heavy for female techs to lug and “peer networks” or “structures of acquaintanceship” that boys use covertly, but effectively, advance their ambitions and deny girls access).  Kearney’s cataloging is vast and its impact is felt as she reveals just how much girls who make media have to say.  She includes writing about the need for single-sex media education but steps beyond it to show what girls really do when they’re given access to media tools.  Their work often centers around exploration of identity and re-inscription of messages about gender roles that crack open a universe of deeply felt and powerfully smart dialogues about what most girls experience but hadn’t yet had a place to express.

Some of the titles Kearney includes tell a whole story: films such as Taizet Hernandez’s “Are You a Boy or a Girl?” which explores “real-life gender-bending of a young female” or Hernandez’s film “We Love Our Lesbian Daughters,” which explores coming out experiences and Kearney says offers “A rare glimpse into the lives of queer young Latinas” but focuses on sexual identity over ethnic identity.  She groups films about sexual abuse such as “Love Shouldn’t Hurt” by Tamara Garcia or “It’s Never OK” by Arielle Davis, and includes a cache of films about the ubiquitous doll such as in Lillian Ripley’s “What if Barbie Had a Voice?” Just a fraction of other titles include: “Looks Like a Girl” which “broadens young lesbian representations beyond white, Anglo culture,” and “Body Image” by Mieko Krell, meant to “raise awareness about girls’ different relations to and strategies for negotiating dominant beauty standards.”

When exploring girls’ zines Kearney includes telling excerpts as this one from “Bikini Kill: A Color and Activity Book” about why female youth should enact social change: “To discuss in both literal and artistic ways those issues that’re really important to girls: naming these issues, specifically, validates their importance and other girls’ interest in them; reminds girls that they aren’t alone.  To make fun of and thus disrupt the powers that be.”  Even a smattering of the zine titles reads like a found poem: The Bad Girl Club, Bi-Girl World, Lezzie Smut, The Adventures of Baby Dyke, Geek the Girl, Angry Young Woman, Pretty in Punk, Housewife Turned Assassin, Angst Girl, Pixxiebitch, Ladies Homewrecking Journal, From the Pen of a Liberated Woman. The book’s website is also a wonderful resource as the power of the girls’ voices can be felt shouting through the distance.