Life and the Mind

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.