The Feminist Wire comes through with a nice write up about academic labor. Here Paul Seltzer, a GW Women’s Studies major, articulates the painful implications of the academic culture which insists on students and faculty suffering in order to retain connection to the school.
Flexible instructors and flexible students, dependent upon the corporate university for a wage and a future, are those whose labors and bodies stretch to satisfy the requirements that would make them valued members of the university’s community, less at-risk to a budget cut here or a rise in tuition there. Flexibility means that when the corporate university applies such pressures, instructors and students will bend as much as they can so that they will not snap. Sure, I can teach another class for minimal pay. Sure, I will work freshman orientation in return for free housing. Sure, I will go into debt.
I observe in my own academic life that the credibility of the institution is used to help justify these kinds of decisions.
Dean Spade has great succinct answers in this four-question profile. One answer is about trans and hate crimes and becomes a lesson in pro-active intersectional feminism. As quoted in the McGill Reporter:
Hate crime laws that provide more resources to law enforcement and/or enhance criminal penalties have been critiqued by many trans organizations and activists because they do nothing to prevent attacks against trans people but they expand the criminal punishment system which is the most significant source of violence against trans people in the U.S. They build that system in our names, and that system has been growing rapidly for several decades, such that now the US is the most imprisoning country in the world, with five per cent of the world’s population and 25 per cent of the world’s prisoners. A trans movement that is really about reducing harm and violence to trans people has to be an anti-criminalization movement, and a movement that doesn’t just try to get the law to say something our lives are meaningful, but instead seeks to dismantle legal systems that are killing us.
The girl chewing on her lip was abused by a relative, according to police reports – someone she should have been able to trust. He’s not in the state any longer, but the criminal case is progressing slowly, so he’s not in jail, either.
He still terrorizes her at night, even though he’s nowhere near. She wakes, heart pounding. The nightmare feels real again. She never feels safe, even with her parents just downstairs.
The unruly-looking mob in her driveway is there to help her feel safe again. They are members of the Arizona chapter of Bikers Against Child Abuse International, and they wear their motto on their black leather vests and T-shirts: “No child deserves to live in fear.”
Thanks to the potent Feministingcolumn “Your daily feminist cheat sheet,” who recommended film critic Maryann Johansen who coordinates Flick Filosopher. The title of her article is: “a feminist film critic defends the Onion’s Quvenzhane Wallis tweet.” Her title is inflammatory, but I’m a little intrigued by the notion of some idiot was going to parade their shadow representation of feminism to justify calling a nine-year old kid a misogynistic insult.
I could not have gotten it more wrong. Turns out that Maryann Johansen is not only on-point, but seems to be the kind of really smart feminist critic who can help make oppressive discourse visible, able to be mocked and defeated. Thinking about it, the denigration of Quvenzhané Wallis is only visible because the insult doesn’t work against regular celebrity women — they are often called terrible names. Johansen explains that the Onion tweet is visible precisely because the message (hate women) has suffused mainstream culture.
That gets attention in a way that calling a famous adult woman the same thing never does. Because it’s clearly outrageous in a way that, apparently, isn’t quite so clear-cut when it comes to an adult woman. But she asked for it by wearing that dress. She’s an attention whore. She likes being in the spotlight. She can stop being famous any time if she can’t take it. We should see such rationales as ridiculous. We can see it when they’re applied to a nine-year-old. But we don’t see it in general.
What a smart argument. I still don’t see any need to defend the tweet. I’m not going to cheer on hatred of women in order to make hatred of women more visible. We work with the tools available to us. We read the signs available to us. We dismantle systems of oppression as they are described and spoken into being.
Pascal Robert reviews a new biography of Ella Baker (Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement by Barbara Ransby) and I’m convinced to go pick up the book. It seems fascinating to think about the inquiry into Baker’s challenges to the dominant communication and organizing styles of the civil rights leaders of her day. It seems valuable to explore and educate about the model of charismatic masculine oratory — the singular male leader inspiring the crowds.
What made Baker’s method of organizing both effective and revolutionary is that it completely dismissed the traditional paradigm of leadership that had plagued the black community from its earliest history in North America, stemming mostly from the black church: Charismatic masculine leadership based on oratory and exhibitionism. Baker believed in empowering the most common person, whether a sharecropper, teenager, or illiterate vagrant with skills to make demands on the political establishment. Baker believed that people did not need fancy leaders with degrees and pedigree to tell them what was best for them. She believed in giving people the power to choose their direction and make demands, and put pressure on institutions without depending on big shots with fancy suits. In her book, Professor Ransby notes:
“At every opportunity [Ella] Baker reiterated the radical idea that educated elites were not the natural leaders of Black people. Critically reflecting on her work with the NAACP, she observed, “The Leadership was all from the professional class, basically. I think these are the factors that have kept it [the NAACP] from moving to a more militant position.”
“Justice Scalia, I’m gay, and as somebody who is gay I find these comparisons extraordinarily offensive,” Duncan Hosie, a freshman at Princeton, said to Antonin Scalia on Monday.
I read this Amy Davidson short essay in the New Yorker and thought it was well written. But under the recommendation of Maria Bustellos in the RSS-essential Longreads I gave it a second read.
I appreciate the judicial history of anti-gay decisions framed in comparison to cultural change. I also like Amy Davidson’s tone, writing about the issue with sincerity and compassion, all while basically arguing Scalia is a prejudicial prick.
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I’m also retiring the #hashtag “homophobia.” It is often used to write about anti-gay discrimination, but it is a term which does not convey correctly what I mean. I can’t read the mind of the person who is discriminating, I can only judge the behavior.
The AP style manual is now much more clear on the subject:
phobia
An irrational, uncontrollable fear, often a form of mental illness. Examples: acrophobia, a fear of heights, and claustrophobia, a fear of being in small, enclosed spaces. Do not use in political or social contexts: homophobia, Islamophobia.
It also nullifies strategies for resistance if we choose to assume that actions against people (followers of Islam for instance) are driven by irrational therefore presumably ideas which can not be informed by teaching and/or rational discourse. I ain’t into that.
This is the University of Maryland’s Gamera II, a human-powered helicopter breaking a world record for human-powered flight.
Yep human -powered.
It makes me want to quit my job and start building my own Max-o-copter.
Of course yesterday while women scientists were helping to make the Gamera II fly for the extra couple of seconds it takes to break the world record, the European commission decided to unveil their “science: it’s a girl thing” campaign. I won’t insult you with a link, but it is a stunningly sexist take on why women might be interested in science. Pink clothes, music videos and lip gloss.
s.e. Smith has the insightful analysis of this video over at Tiger Beatdown:
This patronising, pathetic campaign in which science was swaddled in pink sparkles and packaged as something girls can totally do was ridiculous and self-defeating. The video focused entirely on fashion and cosmetics, and the organisation’s site was littered with pinkness and more cosmetics promotion, even though the actual profiles of real women scientists on the site focus on topics like veterinary virology and food security, all of which are fascinating and interesting and might attract interest from young women who would be totally turned off by the offensive framing, and thus are unlikely to see them.
Young women and girls do not in fact need everything to be wrapped in pink in order to be interested in it, nor do they need to see highly traditionalised performances of femininity to believe that something is ‘for them.’ In fact, for girls thinking about science, such displays could be a turnoff; maybe they aren’t interested in performing femininity, or they aren’t conventionally attractive, or, hey, they’re actually smart and independent enough to care about science regardless as to what scientists look like and what they wear in the damn lab, because they’re interested in the research, not the clothes.
In contrast to the human-powered copter, this misstep seems particularly noxious. Rather than simply including women in science projects, mentoring women, and encouraging all students to be inquisitive about the world around them, the desire to condescend helps to protect the sciences as the realms of sexism.
Humans are pretty awesome animals and when we get thinking creatively, wonderful stuff emerges. Cheers to those who believe that everyone is an intellectual. Cheers to those who trust and like women. Cheers to those who build flying machines without oil. And cheers to Zombie Marie Curie who told us all about this years ago . . .
I don’t have any particular expectations that an entertainment medium like rap music should be political.
All music speaks to the politics, ideology and identity of the forces that create them. In 2012 hip hop is a particular series of almost mockable ultra-capitalist tropes. It makes sense that right wing pundits would continue to amplify moral panic out of rap music because most of music and imagery is created to be increasingly outrageous.
The fun part is that twenty years of cultural saturation has shared the tools to make rap music with millions of young people. Quite a few of them grew up and made rap music. Some of them currently make excellent rap music.
I agree with El-P (shown here with Killer Mike). There is a lot of good rap music out there.
The people who make rap music have a certain investment in the art form. Stalley’s new video “Live at Blossom’s” from the Savage Journey to the American Dream mixtape is a good example of the internal reflection about materialism, violence and sexism in hip hop.
Edward Said would call this kind of poetic monologue autocritical. To encourage the listener to layer their own political awareness against books, movies, videos, songs, and unpack the politics represented in the media artifact.
Killer Mike’s rant rap is always excellent. You can basically buy anything he has put out or download any of his mixtapes and you’ll get something quite entertaining from it. Here Killer Mike represents his deep seated loathing for the Reagan era in “Big Beast,” a horror movie/jacker/gore fest. Assists from Bun B, T.I. and El-P in this almost ten-minute mini-movie. Not safe for work.
You could argue that the cannibalism of T.I. and Killer Mike is a thinly veiled mockery of consumers of violent hip hop. David Banner makes those arguments explicit, calling out rap music in a particularly dramatic fashion. Enjoy “Malcolm X” for that critical perspective on hip hop.
Hmmm. . . it does sound a little scripted. But I love the “shirtless Matthew McConaughey” line. Please don’t read the comments unless you would like to be enraged.
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Life of refinement 