Life and the Mind

…that you don’t know already. I’ll start with the serious and work my way to the more trivial.

1. I had an abortion when I was young. It was the right decision. And I don’t regret it. I say that to counter all of the angst from pro-life women who talk as if those of us who have abortions will suffer for the rest of our lives. I waited til it was the right time. I had three children, and I am not suffering. Oh,and it was performed by Doctor HM himself and then later in life I got to interview him as a journalist, which was a bit odd.

2. I am missing some organs. Tonsils and adenoids when I was young and then more recently my gall bladder. Now that was weird. Who’d have thunk that we have organs we don’t actually need? Apparently if I was to starve for a few weeks and then eat a buffalo, I’d need one but as a vegetarian with a steady income I don’t run that risk. And they took it out during day surgery and covered the incision with a band aid. No fuss, no muss, and no more pain.

3. My middle name is Jane, plain Jane. I never use it.

4. I lived for six months in New Brunswick. In between rugged Newfoundland and lovely Nova Scotia, my family moved to Saint John. I hated it and don’t much think about the time of my childhood.

5. Although I don’t own a TV and don’t even watch TV in hotel rooms I am serious sucker for British TV. It’s a good thing I don’t live there.

6. I have serious affection for gospel music. I am no longer a Christian but if there is music that speaks to me and makes me want to dance and sing, it’s gospel. My favorite church would have progressive lefty politics, old fashioned liturgy (no fire side chat sermons) and gospel music.

7. I read The Economist.

8. If I had two more girls I’d name them Gwen and Nora.

9. I plan to acquire two dogs–basset hounds maybe–on my return from research leave. I might name them Gwen and Nora instead.

10. I would secretly (not so secretly now) love to get hair and make up done, dress up in sexy clothes, and have photos taken. But I alternate the thought that it would be fun with that the thought that that would be vain and shallow. And I’m shy (which always tips the scale).

11. Once I get started, I can’t stop!

Thanks Sex Geek!

"I repent of my diets, the delicious dishes rejected out of vanity, as
much as I lament the opportunities for making love that I let go by
because of pressing tasks or puritanical virtue." Isabelle Allende,
from Globe and Mail, Thought du Jour, May 30, 2007.

I begin this post with a confession about the limits of reclaiming language. While I’ve been called "fat" and "slut" they are not words I’d ever use to describe myself. I listen with wonder and amazement when others take those hateful words back and make them fun. And I approve whole heartedly. But not for me. Too much bad history. They’ve never been words I’ve taken to my heart. On the body image front, I happily describe myself as big and strong (there’s a women’s weight lifting shirt I like: "You say BIG like it’s a bad thing.") and I think others are wrong to think of me as fat. They just aren’t comfortable with women’s athletic bodies (other than the ideal of the aerobics bunny or marathon runner). But I know lots of sexy fat women who are happy to call themselves "fat." (See the The Fat Femme Mafia skip rope in the park, for example. Ditto for "slut," a word I haven’t liked because it implies less than discriminating taste and I’m pretty particular in my attractions. Again, though I know lots of very cool people, some friends who call themselves "sluts" and I think more power to them.

But the above quotation made me realize how much the idea of "fat" and "slut" are connected. We are the girls who say "yes." We are the undisciplined ones who give in to our appetites. The ideal women–from heteronormative perspective–is one in control, who possesses the virtue of will power, who denies her desires. This isn’t a particularly original thought but I love the Allende quote above and it reminded me why people find fat women so threatening. It’s the power of yes. So, let’s raise a toast to the yes girls among us. Cheers!

I’m interested in children’s rights but also more generally in the
relationship between rights and value.  Many, or most, children’s
rights are justified in terms of the adult persons that the children
may become and the goods those adults lives may contain.  Perhaps the
most famous paper on children’s rights, "A Child’s Right to an Open
Future," makes this explicitly clear.  Our focus on children is largely
future directed. For the most part, I think this makes sense. But I
also think there is a danger in focusing too much on the future and
neglecting the goods of childhood. This is especially true if some of
the goods of childhood are valuable in their own right, and even more
so if some of those goods are incommensurable with the goods of adult
life.  (The moral philosopher Michael Slote makes this point but doesn’t develop it much
further.) Suppose, for example, there is no amount of good in the
future that could outweigh a childhood of suffering and misery. Let me
give two examples to illustrate this point. Both are areas in applied
ethics where this point makes a difference.
First, the literature
on a child’s right to good sex education is entirely adult-directed.
Sex education for children is justified entirely in terms of producing
mature and competent adult sexual decision makers. There is little or
no recognition of the positive role sex plays in the lives of
teenagers. We focus on protecting children from adults and on the adult
choosers they’ll become but largely ignore the positive aspects of teen
sexuality.  The dangers here should be obvious. The most important
strategic consideration is having one’s educational materials dismissed
as largely irrelevant. We also fail children if we cannot provide them
with the information they need. For philosophers, we also get it wrong
if we neglect those aspects of the good life that occur before adult
life begins.
Second, the literature on children and sport  likewise
focuses on adults. And this cuts both ways. Sometimes an appeal to a
balanced childhood is justified in terms of maximizing choices for
adult life. This is a common argument against children’s involvement in
one sport in a serious way. At other times the appeal to the adult
athlete the child could become were her potentially fully developed is
used to argue for children’s participation is seriously demanding
sports. Both arguments have in common that they ignore the goods that
occur within childhood.

Other examples?

I am in Chicago at the moment attending the Central Division meeting of the AMerican Philosophical Association and that’s about as exciting as it sounds. But some parts are more fun than others. Tonight I attended a great panel on intersex–organized by the Society for Analytical Feminism. The high point was talking to Alice Dreger. Who is Alice Dreger? She describes herself as a medical humanist, writer, speaker, patient adovcate, and a member of the
faculty in the Medical
Humanites and Bioethics Program at the Feinberg School of
Medicine of Northwestern
University in Chicago. She writes: "Most of my professional energies have gone to
improving the medical and social treatment of people born with
socially-challenging bodies, including people with intersex, conjoinment,
dwarfism, and cleft lip. I work with affected adults, parents, and clinicians to
make things better in the social and medical worlds. The question that motivates
me is this: Why not change minds instead of bodies?"
Dreger has published books on intersex but also more recently on conjoined twins. My interest is in children’s rights and sexuality and I did ask a couple of questions about that. More interesting were Dreger’s comments about gender, sex, and fun on the issue of why we make so much of gender. She urged us to think about the pleasurable aspects of gender, gender as connected to play. While that’s certainly true there is only so much room to play in the traditional sandbox. What’s galling about gender is when others think it matters and relate to me as a gendered person when I am in a context where I think my gender is irrelevant. Teaching is a good example. (An aside: favourite bad comment on teaching evaluations: "Prof Sam cares more about her children than she does about us." Of course I do you morons. There are 200 of you. I see you for 2 hours a week. It’s a 13 week course.) Or when I am forced to declare a sex when it really seems irrelevant. Does it matter that I am a woman driver? Why do we include that on drivers’ licenses at all? Gender would be fun if it were more fluid, if there were more categories, if it were optional and context dependent. So it’s not quite that I want to make less of gender. Rather I’d like to make more of it, more degrees, more categories, more room to play. We need a bigger sandbox. Oh, and Dreger sometimes pinch hits for Dan Savage, the sex advice columnist.

Contact: Laurel Mitchell, Co-Coordinator, The Miss G___ Project
Phone: (519) 719-2868
Email:
laurel@themissgproject.org

LONDON,
ON - April 8, 2007 - Many students at the University of Western Ontario
are up in arms about an article published on March 30th by the daily
campus newspaper, The Gazette, as part of its annual Spoof Issue. The
article depicts the London police chief (who is explicitly named)
dragging a prominent member of the UWO Women’s Issues Network (WIN),
depicted under the pseudonym "Jennifer Ostrich," into an alley to rape
her to "teach [her] a lesson."
   The article, titled "Labia Majora Carnage," was published anonymously under the pseudonym, "Xavier."
Students
angry and offended by the article have been mobilizing through letter
writing campaigns to The Gazette Editor-in-Chief Ian Van Den Hurk, the
university, and the media, and through a protest held on campus last
Thursday.
   Some students have also written to Police Chief Murray
Faulkner to ask him to make a public statement about his portrayal in
the article and his stance on violence against women. Faulkner couldn’t
be reached for comment.
   Most students believe "Jennifer Ostrich" to be a caricature of
Jenna Owsianik, chair of the Western chapter of the feminist group The
Miss G__ Project and an active member of WIN. She has also been vocal
about criticizing The Gazette, and in the October issue of the
Grapevine (another campus publication at Western), Owsianik wrote about
what she sees as The Gazette’s tradition of "negative sexual
stereotypes and sexist attitudes" — and cataloged the offenses.
   In addition to being angry and upset, Owsianik is disappointed
that this is the response to her criticisms and to the challenge she
issued to The Gazette and all student journalists in the Grapevine
article "to be more responsible." Though she’s not terribly surprised -
The Gazette has been brushing off her criticisms and making fun of her
and other WIN members all year - the severity and violence of this
article still shocked and terrified her.
   "I feel like I was raped by that article," Owsianik said candidly.
 
The article also satirizes "Katie Conservative," a pretty clear
allusion to WIN Internal Relations Manager and active UWO Conservative
Association member Kathryn Mitrow, who says that she is "appalled and
ashamed" by The Gazette’s actions.
   In a letter to the editor published in the April 5 edition of
The Gazette, graduate student Corey Katz takes issue with the Spoof
Issue’s jokes about rape, violence against women and homosexuality.
"These jokes are used every day to justify violence against women and
queer people. How many jokes like these has someone read, heard,
laughed at or told before they’re able to overcome their conscience
enough to rape or assault someone?"
   Recent UWO alumna and Miss G__ Project Co-Coordinator Sheetal
Rawal also thinks that the targeting of Owsianik in this article is a
way to silence activism about women’s issues on Western’s campus.
 
"For The Gazette to level a threat of rape at a student activist on
campus, one who has had the courage to speak out against the shocking
misogyny, homophobia, racism in the paper, as away to "teach [her] a
lesson," is highly irresponsible of a campus newspaper and absolutely
unacceptable," Rawal said. "This is hate speech."
   Rawal also said that she is "embarrassed" that, between this
and other events like the "Saugeen Stripper" issue last year, Western
is coming to known for its rape culture. "I refuse to allow for my
degree to read "Rapist University,"" she said.
Not all students are upset about it though, and even some of
those who are continue defend The Gazette’s right to publish articles
like this under freedom of speech.
   "Freedom of speech is a
fundamental pillar of our society, even if we don’t like it," Western
student Noah Desjardins wrote on the discussion board of a Facebook
group created around this issue. "Any restrcitions placed on it lead to
a slippery slope of censorship."
   Western student Fiona Martin thinks that freedom of speech should have its limits though.
 
"The debate continues on whether jokes against feminism are funny. Some
people think they are, some don’t. What is not funny is the verbal
attack against specific people that The Gazette article made. That is
hate speech," she wrote on the discussion board.
   So far, The Gazette’s only official response to the backlash
from the Spoof Issue has been "get over yourself." In an April 4
editorial they defend the "satire" of the issue, writing that those
offended should "know a joke when they see one."
   However, several students have been demanding more extreme
action, including calling for Van Den Hurk’s resign and the withdrawal
of student funding (through the University Students’ Council) to The
Gazette.
   Student Kate Barthes suggests that The Gazette’s funding be
revoked for one year, to match the USC’s actions against the Society
for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) when it was accused of hate speech
last year.
   Throughout all this, Owsianik has been told by several people to ‘take a joke.’
 
"That article was about me getting raped and liking it," she said.
"When you live your life in my body and experience the violence that my
body has felt, then you can tell me if satirical intention merits a
diffused reaction," she said.

If
you’d like more information about this topic, or to schedule an
interview with Laurel Mitchell, Jenna Owsianik or Kathryn Mitrow,
please contact Laurel Mitchell at laurel@themissgproject.org or (519) 719-2868. The editor of the Gazette can be reached at
gazette.editor@uwo.ca

The
Miss G__ Project is of concerned citizens working together to promote
equity in education, to combat sexism and homophobia through education,
and to encourage active citizenship. For more information please visit www.themissgproject.org.

I saw a really lovely documentary today, the world premiere of Immaculate Conceptions:  Inside A Lesbian Baby Boom. It’s a 40-minute documentary
by Irish/Canadian novelist (and my neighbour) Emma Donoghue. (In unrelated news,Emma will also be the guest editor of BEST LESBIAN EROTICA 2007, Cleis Press. I like that juxtaposition since it confirms that being a parent, or worse yet, a mother, doesn’t mean giving up on sex.) The blurb for the
show goes like this: " This eye-opening account of queer family-making in Ontario during the rapid legal reform and social change of the last six years features frank and funny interviews with 16 parents or would-be parents from London and Toronto, including Professors Arja Vainio-Mattila of Huron University College
and Chris Roulston of French and Women’s Studies (UWO)." For me, it raised lots of very interesting questions about gender and parenting which I am still mulling over in my mind.  I don’t want to spoil too much but I loved the scene in which a self-identified butch/femme couple grappled with the infertility of the femme partner and considered whether a butch could be a biological mother. What would that make her femme partner, they mused. Some of the couples had a dyke variant of gendered parenting in which one person did most of the parenting and stayed home, while the other person worked. Other couples were happy to embrace the roles of co-mother. "We’re both her mothers." As someone who has resisted many of the associations of "mother," it was interesting for me to see other people grapple with the term. My partner and I both say we’re parents. We talk about co-parenting. We use the phrase ODP–On Duty Parent–to talk about whose shift it is to bear the main responsibility of the children. (As in, said to friends, I can’t go out tonight because  I’m ODP.) But for us, as man and woman, we appear to fit into other peoples’ schema of roles and a decision for us to correct others about how we do things is always a choice. The lesbian mothers in this movie, by and large, don’t have the choice to blend. That said, I was amused to hear many say that when in parks with kids people just assume they are two women out with their children, who’ve left the men at home. I also liked the lesbian mum who co-parents with a gay man, the biological father of her child, whose grandparents keep asking when they’ll get married. The lens through which she’s seen is that of the single mother, with a different set of prejudices and problems. The documentary also provided lots think about in terms of sperm donation, parental rights, and the shapes and sizes of alternative families. I’m  planning to see it again at our local lesbian film festival later this month. But for now I’m off to another wine and cheese celebratory do related to my official role at this fine institution of higher learning. (Bring on end of term, NOW!) Sigh.

My little city has a Roller Derby Team team. Written up recently in Velvet Park women’s roller derby is back with a vengeance. I met members of our team, The London Thrashers, at the Velodrome where they practise after hours (no, not on the banked track, that would be lunacy, but rather on the concrete infield.) The 20-something year old women are a range of shapes and sizes, they sort of look like Suicide Girls, but tougher, less-waif and stray like. They have muscles along with their tattoes and torn fishnets. Fun fun. I’d love to watch sometime. I admire very much their physicality and the "tough broad" attitude, kind of combination of sex, sleaze, and sport. I’m often the only woman riding the track in a group of a dozen or so guys and so I sometimes stop and chat with the roller derby set. I told them I’d love to come watch but they tell me they need another six women (actually they said "girls" but I still haven’t quite gotten used to that as a word referring to adult females over the age of 18) before they can actually compete against another team. They asked me to join. I laughed and said ‘too scary." Then they laughed as I’d just been riding my track bike round at speeds over 40 km/her on a track banked in parts at 50 degrees. Scary is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. And for me it’s the physical aggression of roller derby which makes it a sport I can appreciate but in which I don’t want to take part.

As a philosopher I like hard questions. I like teasing away
all the easy stuff and getting to the conceptually difficult. But this
sometimes gets in the way of good teaching, I think. Or at least I worry it
leaves students with the wrong message, that certain questions are HARD when in
fact, for the most, they’re EASY. I just think the easy ones aren’t so much
fun, so intellectually challenging to think and talk about.
Examples of this problem came up yesterday in two different
class discussions.
The first case concerned Female Genital Mutilation. The
discussion arose in my Global Justice and Human Rights course after a student
presentation on FGM and human rights.. Yes, a truly horrible practice Yes, when
performed on young girls without anesthesia it’s especially evil. Yes, the
basis of the practice—a focus on female chastity, a denial of female sexuality,
sex defined purely as male sexual pleasure—makes it a particularly loathsome practice
for feminists to consider. Yet, I tried to get the class to see that these same
impulses exist here. I drew their attention to the rise of genital cosmetic
surgery in North America. Yes, you too can
have evenly pink symmetrical porn star perfect labia! A whole new area of the
body to be self-conscious and self-loathing about and the anxiety about which those
selling cosmetic surgery can exploit. It’s often packaged along with vaginal
tightening and in some cases reinstatement of the hymen for the perfect faux
virginal wedding night. Just try googlesearching (all one word, as my kids say it) The
Wonder Woman Package ™ if you’re curious for more details. Why be concerned?
Well, reduced sensation is listed as a possible side effect and again the whole
focus is on appearance and male sexual pleasure over female sexuality.

Now cosmetic surgery, think my students, is all about
choice. Women do it for themselves. They assure me that mostly OLD women, like
in their 40s (ha), have cosmetic surgery to feel better about themselves. Of
course there’s no coercion involved, no pressure, no need to look one way or another.
(I always find that one particularly ironic as I stare out at the sea of
largely indistinguishable faces, body shapes, wearing strikingly similar
outfits. Really? No pressure.)

But after some discussion, having made the point, that North
American culture is far from immune to coercive practices around female
sexuality, they now think that FGM is a hard case. FGM, again in its worst
version, performed on children without consent or anesthetic is an easy case.
It’s morally wrong. My point was only that there is a range from hard to easy
and that the values are part of all patriarchal cultures, our own included. We
don’t notice it, it’s the air we breathe, but it’s there and also worthy of our
moral scrutiny.

The other case was kidnapping, sex trafficking and the
global market in girls for sex. The numbers are truly horrific. But it’s easy
to see what’s wrong and why. Global markets, child exploitation, and violence
against women. The hard question is the nature of sex work itself. Under the
best circumstances, in the best of all worlds, is it a practice about which we
can feel good? Why not? One common argument is that sex is close to the core of
my identity and it’s wrong to alienate that for money. But surely that can’t be
right! I’m an academic. I get paid for thinking, reading, and talking. My
mental life is on the auction block. The academic job market may be
exploitative but no one thinks the work itself is morally problematic because I
sell that which is closest to my sense of self. So it’s not, I think,
intrinsically problematic. Yet the culture, the laws, and the practices which
surround sex work are problematic. And talking to my students about this
distinction is interesting.  Worry though is
that they leave with the view that all questions about sex work are hard. They’re
not. The sexual exploitation of girls is wrong and that’s easy. But because it’s
easy, it’s not a particularly intellectually challenging problem even if it is
very serious real world important political problem.

As feminist academics, our angels dancing on the heads of
pins are a bit different. My angels are idealized liberated women in an
egalitarian society and I wonder not how many could fit on the head of a pin
but whether they would sell sex….

That’s a hard question but sadly given the horrible world we
live in most of the important questions are easy. I guess I can wish for that:
a world in which the hard questions were more pressing and the easy ones were
all solved.

I think I have one of the best jobs in the world and I am shocked at how much my colleagues complain about academic work to their students. It has an effect. We have a captive audience and people listen to what we say and take it seriously and not just in the "will it be on the exam?" sense. Today I had a young woman in my office telling me she loved philosophy but didn’t want to get a PhD. Despite a fascination for metaethics, she was convinced that she ought to study law. Why? Because she heard female faculty members talk about how stressful, how busy, and how underpaid academic work is. I get red in the face angry whenever I hear this. It just isn’t true. Take the underpaid complaint. I heard this as a student too and I thought faculty members barely scraped by. I came from a working class family so I knew what badly paid meant. I figured faculty members must have inherited their houses and supplement their meagre incomes with family wealth. I was shocked and appalled when I found out the truth. University faculty members are not badly paid. Most of our salary information is public so I am not telling tales out of school here. Starting salaries for tenure track faculty range from $60 to $75 thousand a year. Many of my colleagues, whose salaries are public info thanks to my province’s "sunshine law" earn over $100,000 a year. Again, that’s not badly paid. My salary puts me in the top 5% of women’s incomes. Yet, we are a whiney bunch. We tend to look at those who make more and think we’re badly off but really that’s just utter rubbish. Daycare workers are badly paid but university faculty members are not.     Stressful? Well, sure there is a rough patch pre-tenure. Publish or perish is all too true. And the demands of teaching can be hard too. But once we have tenure we have more independence and freedom than most professionals. Academic freedom is a tremendous amount of job security too. And while I do work long hours, for the most part it’s work I love: reading, writing, talking to students, thinking. My children when they were young practically lived on campus. We have good campus daycare and summer camps. The environment is much like a giant park. What better place to raise kids? I don’t teach in the summer and though I need that time to get writing done I have a good two months when my classes are done and my children are still in school. Of course, I hate it when people presume I have summers off. That’s not true at all. I have papers to write, graduate students to supervise, and classes to plan. But it is true I work at my own pace. The work is very flexible which is both a blessing and a curse. The upside? I can grade papers on the beach. The downside? I grade papers on the beach. It’s not just a job, it’s a lifestyle, an identity and that’s both the best and worst side of life as an academic. Whenever  I feel a complaint about my work starting to surface I compare my life to two other sorts of working lives I know. There are women in my family who wait tables for a living. That’s hard work. That’s badly paid and stressful, hard to do with kids. Academic work is not. But I also look at my female friends who are lawyers and I think about the hours they work, the clothes they have to wear, and I don’t envy them the money they make. So I talked to this young women about her choices and her reasons, and I hope I was able to help dispel some of the myths about academic work.

Just got this email from the conference organizers so my planned road trip to Syracuse is off, I think.
                           

Profs. Judith Butler and bell hooks regret to inform us that
they will be unable to attend the "Feminism, Sexuality and the Return of
Religion" conference to be held at
Syracuse University April 26-28,
2007 (http://thecollege.syr.edu/admin/pcr-conference/)
Prof. Butler is sending us her paper which will be read at the conference and
followed by general discussion. We are presently seeking a replacement for
bell hooks and hope to have an announcement soon. Any questions or request
for refunds based on this development should be directed to Elizabeth Kad (emkad@syr.edu).

Linda Alcoff and Jack Caputo