Life and the Mind

One of the areas I work in as an academic is children’s rights. It’s no
surprise that the topic interests me. That’s in large part due to the choices I
face on a daily basis as a parent of three children. One of the joys of being a philosopher is being able to change areas as one’s life interests change. In my work on feminism and death I note that it’s similarly no surprise that some of the bets known feminist philosophers, the same women who once wrote about the ethics of marriage and the just distribution of household work and childcare have now turned their attention to aging and death. Baby boomer 2nd wave feminists have aged and so have their interests. Given that I’d
like to write more personally about some of the areas I do research in
and also extend some of my personal interests into my academic work,
writing more personally about parenting seems a natural thing to do. But when I
set out to do that I get stumped. It’s not that I don’t have a lot to
say. The problem is saying it while respecting my children’s rights to
not have their lives shared with others without their consent and
involvement.

At 8, 10 and 14 my children have the rights to privacy that prevent me from using them as philosohical or conversational fodder. Here’s one example that will help make this clear. I have lots of feminist friends who as parents have gender typical children. They exclaim that their boys emerged from the womb loving trucks, mud, and guns, that their girls dress in pink, play princess and collect dolls. They act surprised that their feminism seems to have had no impact on their children’s gender orientations. Not me. Not my children. I’m the feminist parent with gender atypical children. To call them budding gender outlaws would be an exaggeration but only one conforms to anything like a gender stereotype. I have one son for whom I’m in fact an inadequate feminine role model. He wishes I had fluffier, fancier, sparklier, shinier clothes! In the morning he hauls out towering spiky heels for me and tries to put glittery make up on my cheeks. The first time he saw drag queens in a pride parade, he looked on in awe and said, "Why don’t you dress like that mom?" Long ago he learned that dressing for school was a matter of compromise-safety and fitting in versus personal expression. We have had one appointment with a not unsympathetic teacher who said she’d protect him from bullying because she understood that his problem was "just like any other disability." Grrr. These days he has better teachers, more confidence and more support. I find myself torn between two thoughts. One: I’m glad he’s our child. Two: It’s no surprise that he’s our child. The first thought regards his gender orientation as luck, as if he fell from the sky, born that way, as the old argument for toleration goes. The second thought gives us some causal role in who he is and how he expresses himself. Probably the truth is somewhere in between.
But enough of that. I began this entry to explain why you don’t hear much of my children’s lives on my blog. I then proceeded to break all my rules to make the point. If there were a way to talk about parenting without talking about them, I would. It’s not that I don’t think a lot about parenting and that my children don’t play an enormous role in my life. I do and they do. But I can’t talk about that without failing to respect their privacy. When they are old enough to tell their own stories or to  comment and protest, maybe. But for now I’ll return to talking about my life and ideas, leaving them slightly off stage.

Friday October 20th the Australian band FRUiT will be playing Hugh’s Room in Toronto. It will be fun to see them with a real audience in an actual bar with a dance floor. I first saw them perform in the basement of our local public library with an audience of 12. While I appreciated their energy and ethusiasm, and the intimate contact with the band, I am looking forward to seeing them perform to a sold out house in a big city.

In my life the 30s were an intense period of academic work–publish or perish. I didn’t perish. I put my head down, worked very hard, prospered and now have tenure. Yippee.  It was also a time of having and raising small children. I loved it all but when I looked up somehow I had turned 40. I decided that the 40s were to be the decade of rediscovering fun, of trying new things, and of pushing some boundaries.

These past two weeks I’ve tried two new very fun activities: one fast, one slow, both requiring trust. Both also required a significant degree of physical fitness and there is no way I could have done them in my 30s.

Last week I passed Track 1 at the Forest City Veldrome. Never has anything gone from being terrifying to being fun so fast. Adrenaline junkie that I can be, I fell in love. Track bikes are fixed gear, no brakes. There’s no freewheel on a fixed gear–you can’t coast. Remember riding a tricycle or a fitness club spin bike? It’s like that but really fast. Whenever the bike is moving forward, your legs are  moving in circles. Bike messengers like these bikes for control and for simplicity. Me too. I commute on a fixed gear (with brakes) but it’s not the bike that made the experience, it’s the track. The track itself is wood, banked at 50 degrees round the turns and is very short. It’s like riding inside a wooden goldfiah bowl. But once I learned to look away from the wooden wall of death it felt just fine.
Actually it felt better riding behind other people because I knew that as long as I kept up with them, and they didn’t slide down the wall, I wouldn’t either. What prompted this? Well, it’s part of my philosophy of learning to appreciate what my small city has to offer and we have a velodrome, one of only a few in Canada. A few of my bike club friends are avid track cyclists and this summer I read One Gear, No
Breaks : Lori-Ann Muenzer’s
Ride to Belief, Belonging, and a Gold Medal and felt inspired. Muenzer won her olympic gold in her late 30s, twice as old and nearly twice the size of some of her opponents. In the photos in the book she looks fast and powerful. (An aside: That book makes no mention of LM’s personal life or sexual orientation. I was left guessing. That’s in sharp contrast to Lance Armstrong’’s It’s Not about the Bike which talks lots about his marriage.) I don’t know if I’ll ever race on the track but for sure I will do some recreational riding there. Maybe a time trial. Certainly Track 2. Bring on the adrenaline.

So that was the fast. Here’s the slow. This week I went canoe camping in the interior of Algonquin Park. You know, the great Canadian experience of packing everything into watertight bags, loading up the canoe, shoving off and sleeping in a tent under the stars listening to the loons. My friend L has been doing this for years and when she offered to have me tag along I couldn’t resist the chance to try this with an experienced outdoor enthusiast as my guide. I watched in admiration as L deftly hoisted our canoe upon her head and carried it away from the rental desk.
I confess I was a bit nervous when the nice woman at the Parks Canada desk asked for our tent and canoe calour in case they had to come looking for us! The many bear warning signs led to some additional jitters. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not a city girl. I’ve camped and I’ve canoed. But never together.
Wow. It was an amazing weekend. The fall colours were beautiful. I saw beavers and an orange frog. We didn’t quite manage to get our food 15 feet off the ground hanging between trees (L and I discovered that we both throw ike girls) but we did put lots of hours in paddling and loved our high rocky camp with its view of Ragged Lake. We also loved our longer day trip into Big Porcupine Lake, leaving our stuff back at our  camp on Ragged so portaging  was easier. Here are some additional thoughts and reflections:

• What on earth were Parks Canada staff thinking when they made the camp site signs red and the portage signs yellow? Look at the blazing fall colours and ask yourself just how well you think they’d stand out. Blame our aging eyes but we kept wishing for colours not found in nature for the signs. Neon pink anyone?

• With each portage the more fit our travelling compantions seemed. We started out with some mixed groups, families, seniors but by the third portage the only people we met were very fit young men, swathed in brightly coloured gortex, festooned with bear bells, so that when they ran (yes, really, ran) from one end of the portage to the other they looked and sounded like Santa’s elves. L says she gets lots of admiration for going in on her own which is what she does usually but even so we saw no other women there without men. I was struck by two thoughts ill at ease with one another. I found myself regretting how much fitness and ability limited who could see and appreciate this beautiful wilderness (not at all wheel chair accessible!) while at the same time greedily appreciating the peace and quiet and relative solitude.

• As for my own fitness, I was struck once again with the realization that being able to do this sort of thing is why I work out indoors at all. I am not a fan of indoor exercise for its own sake–my travelling companion’s excellent Bodyflow classes aside–I do it so that I can make trips like this one and enjoy myself. I loved the paddling and the hiking and definitely hope to go back. I was so very glad that L offered to share this part of her life with me.

I will try to be as OUT as I can be in the university context. Not "out as possible" since it’s hard to work sexual orientation into every conversation, I don’t like wearing buttons, and I’m a shy sort of person to start.
This year was my first year in the local Pride march and I marched under the Pride Western banner along with grad students from the English department  working in the field of queer theory. In a lovely guesture which tied academic work with the Pride event they handed out photocopied snippets of queer literature. I was struck though that there were no other faculty members there. Even if the banners hadn’t read "Queers and Allies" I still know lots of people who could’ve marched. One faculty member said he didn’t want to make a spectacle of himself though I saw him cardiganed and bespectacled on the sidewalk waving in support. I’ve been in Pride events before, Toronto mostly, but here it’s small and conservative enough that I think quiet bisexual me can make a difference. Hell, there were protestors. At four or five points along the parade route. And some of their signs actually connected to themes that I care about in my academic work. I had just organized a conference on alternative family values and so the protestors with signs that read "Stay Away from Our Children" struck home. I thought after I could have said, "Yes, if you stay away from mine." Once again, I suffer from esprit de l’escalier. There was also a completely ridiculous banner with a photo of an angelic baby and then two families, one white, happy, het mom and pop; the other two hairy gay men in small amounts of leather and nothing else. The text read, "Who would make better parents for this child?" Who knows? Maybe the bear couple are elementary teachers having a wild night out. Maybe the het parents are pedophiles. Who knows really without more information?
So I will try to get involved with the student Pride organizations even if we won’t quite know what to make of each other. Some of them strike me as very conversative. Business students, law students with bright careers ahead of them, they don’t want to be involved in anything too militant. Some of them think the word "queer" is off-putting. Personally I think Pride Western  sounds like the name of the alumni asociation. But nevermind. They also wonder why I care when I am involved in a heterosexual relationship. I correct them. "If you mean a relationship between two heterosexuals, then mine isn’t a heterosexual relationship." Maybe I should start a faculty/staff/student bisexuality group on campus. It would be odd, though perhaps not unexpected, if ours turned out to be the wilder campus organization.

September
and back-to-school are the real beginning of a new year for me. In that spirit
I’ve been making back to school resolutions. Here is one more.

This year I
resolve to dance more and care less about what my students think.  Saturday
night I spent the late hours of the evening enjoying the last student-free
night (well, not quite, there were of course students there but still nowhere
near as many as there will be soon)  at
our local GLBT bar. This being a small city there is only one mixed bar, no
women’s bar, and that’s both a good and bad thing. The good news is that
everyone is welcome. The age range is amazing, from teens trying to sneak in
with fake ID to sixty year old members of long established couples. 40-something me fits
in. In a small space, they cram in pool tables, space for chatting, space for people watching and a good-sized dance floor. I also love that I can dance away without worrying about people looking at me.
I’m shy and nervous in the bar setting and it takes a bit for me to relax but
when there are 6’5 drag queens in gold sequins and stunningly beautiful young
men and women dancing on elevated platforms I can’t imagine anyone really
notices me. The bar has a warm comfortable community feeling—all welcome,
including on the weekend, curious straight folks or visitors who just like the
atmosphhere for dancing. It has a very predictable playlist, a mix of trendy dance tunes, old disco, and pride anthems. It’s also extremely visible. The front of the bar opens on to the street and the rainbow flag flying as well as the patrons who spill out on to the street to smoke make it quite clear what the club is about. While most everyone agrees that the club’s very open and explicit presence is a good thing it hasn’t always been safe for its patrons as this 2002 article  tells us.
Safety and the oh-so predictable music side, the other worry for me has always been that I can’t  really escape the student population. This year I resolve to care less about gossip and to enjoy the company of the GLBT students without worrying so much about the lines between faculty and students. I remind myself that they have much more interesting people to talk about than me. The problem is though that I was one of those undergraduates who speculated constantly about her professors’ love lives and had crusuhes on almost all of them, at one point or another. It was only when I realized I could BE a philospher, I didn’t have to be a philospher’s girlfriend, that the fantasies stopped. It should have been a clue that in these fantasy relationships with my profs what we did was stay up all night and talk about ideas and arguments! Of course, there are prudential reasons for not relying on students for friendship and companionship that I don’t think the students ever quite understand. They are often only here for a year or two and then move on, mostly to larger more exciting cities (and who can blame them?). As a younger faculty member I found most of my friends among the grad student populations–we were all close to the same age–but having to make new friends each year is tough and as I’ve settled in I’ve found friends from other departments. And some of these friends will even join me for a night out dancing.

Bi Bash 2006: A Celebrate Bisexuality Day
Cabaret

Join the Toronto Bisexual Network for a kick-ass party for bisexuals
and our
admirers, showcasing local bi talent and performances celebrating
bisexuality.

*Burlesque * Drag * Spoken Word * Musical Performances * Raffle Prizes
*

Saturday September 23, 2006
NOW lounge, 189 Church St, Toronto
Doors 7:30, Show 8:00

Cover: $3-5 sliding scale

This is an all ages event. Please note that there will be adult content
in some
performances.

Brought to you by (with proceeds benefiting):the Toronto Bisexual Network , email info@torontobinet.org, phone (416) 925-XTRA x2810

Sponsors: Sherbourne Health Centre and Coalition
for Lesbian
and Gay Rights in Ontario
Media Sponsor: Xtra

Celebrate
Bisexuality Day is an annual international
event, held on September 23 of each year, aiming to promote bi
visibility and
celebrate the wonderful diversity of bisexual lives.

I’ve just received an invite to a feminist conference as part of my membership in the group Feminist Ethics and Social Theory . It’s the first time I’ve encountered an academic feminist conference with such an exclusionary policy. I’m not welcome on a few counts. The conference Women’s Liberation Now is only interested in liberating some women it seems. From their website:
"Who is this Conference Intended For?

This event is for feminist women-identified-women of all ethnicities, classes, and sexual orientations. We discourage trans advocates, trans-identified people, pro s/m, and pro-prostitution advocates from attending. We do not think you will enjoy the retreat much, anyway."
I have written to the list saying it doesn’t strike me as particularly ethical or feminist. I am curious to see what the organizers say. Of course, given the description I don’t want to go so exclusion isn’t really the point here. It’s not as if the problem with the meetings of racist organizations is that they don’t invite or welcome people of colour. The problem is the assumptions and beliefs that ground the group’s existence. Now I’m not suggesting these women not meet. I hate it when criticism is automatically heard as censorship. It’s that they do it under the banner of "women’s liberation" that galls me and that it’s posted on a feminist ethics list serve. And besides how many  men’s clubs said that women couldn’t be members but it was okay because they wouldn’t like it much anyway?

Update: The preliminary conference program includes a workshop called ""What role, if any,
should transsexuals play in the movement?" How could such a workshop possibly take place without the active participation of trans people and their allies?