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Posts Tagged ‘feminism’

Read this blog post I found. Read it immediately.

Dec 9th, 10 / 0 Comments

here’s a post from SpiltMilk called Who hears you, when you speak about rape?

I have nothing more to add except to tell you that it’s a brilliant, beautiful post that you should read immediately. The first part is below. Click on the link at the end to read the whole thing.

**Trigger warning for discussion of rape and rape apologism. Please note also that the comments may be triggering.

Here’s the thing.

Julian Assange. Rape charges. Rape apologism. Rape jokes. Rape myths.

A lot of people have written many interesting things about this so I’ll direct you to some of those. (edit: here is another particularly good piece). I’m not going to be so coherent.

I only want to say this: whatever you say about a rape, any rape (or alleged rape, let’s be clear, because I am well aware that Assange may be innocent — or fictional rape, for argument’s sake, because whether the rape actually occurred or not is not relevant to this point) can be heard by others. It can be heard by others who have been raped, or who will one day be raped, or who may have raped someone, or may rape someone one day. And you, when you are speaking or writing or tweeting or commenting on Facebook or blogging or muttering under your damn breath on the train, need to take responsibility for that.

Here’s why.

Say you’re watching the news, and the story of Assange’s arrest comes on, and you say to your spouse, or the cat, I don’t care who, pffft, what a CIA conspiracy, there’s no way he’d ever rape anyone and your thirteen year old daughter hears you. What does she learn?

Say you’re at the pub, and you say to your colleague, those women just felt pissy when they found out he’d slept with both of them. That’s not called rape, it’s called regret and the woman serving you your beer was raped two weeks ago but has been too afraid to report it because… [click here to read the rest]

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Is androgyny in academia a deal-breaker?

Aug 20th, 10 / 2 Comments

file under: let me in, coach–I’m ready to play

Earlier this summer, I got my hair cut very short in what can accurately be described as a boy style. I know this because after the haircut, I was immediately and consistently mistaken for a boy.

I was surprised and thrilled to be mistaken for a boy, for reasons that are sort of hard to explain. I enjoy performing gender in ways that confuse people. I love seeing a boy with my face when I look in the mirror. I’m not trying to ‘pass’ as a boy, and most people figure out quickly enough that I’m actually female. But I love that moment of fumbling. I love that double-take. I love it even when I cause myself to do a double-take when I’m brushing my teeth or checking my hair.

Even though I love my boy cut, I’m considering growing it out. It has been suggested to me, more than once, that a masculine haircut will make it hard for me to do my job.

If you’ve read my blog, you know I’m an educational researcher–a doctoral student in a Learning Sciences program at Indiana University. This means I work with teachers and administrators, and it means I present research at conferences directed at educators and at researchers. Ultimately, it means that I will be facing a hiring committee whose job it is to decide whether I can or will be allowed to do my job. I take my work extremely seriously, and I’m extremely ambitious.

But I’m also deeply political. I believe that my work, my words, my actions, and my body are sites of local and global battle toward a more just and equitable culture. The political life is a life of struggle, large and small. It can be no other way.

The question, then, becomes: On which combinations of struggle should I focus my energy and time? If it’s true that, as others have suggested, teachers are less likely to respect me, less likely to take me seriously, if I present with an androgynous hairstyle, am I doing more harm to myself and to the educational issues that matter to me than if I fought the gender battle in different ways? If my physical appearance makes me less likely to attain a tenure-track job, am I simply fighting the wrong battle?

Of course, these questions assume that something as trivial as a haircut can make me lose the respect of academics and the attention of educators. I suppose the jury’s out on that one, although at least on the academia front there’s some evidence that appearances and gender performances do matter, and more than we would like. (There’s this article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about why the writer didn’t trust that a [male] academic who wore an earring could possibly serve as a university president, and of course there’s continued evidence that academics who exhibit visible symptoms of femaleness such as breasts, ovaries, or a woman’s name are less likely to get tenure, get published, and get promoted in academia.)

Which is sort of fine by me. I’m basically not happy unless I’m fighting something, and the institutionalized gender biases of academia are pretty much right where I plan to land a sustained smackdown.

What makes me worried, though, is the possibility that I will struggle to gain teachers’ respect and attention. So far, none of the people who have warned me about teachers not taking me seriously have actually been teachers, so I’m not sure if there’s just a general assumption that educators are conservative without evidence to support this assumption. Or maybe some teachers and some administrators really would be taken aback by an androgynous researcher.

What do you guys think? Should I be worried?

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film review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire

Aug 1st, 10 / 3 Comments

Still from The Girl Who Played With Fire The Rejectionist offers a powerful and persuasive feminist critique of Stieg Larsson’s series of mysteries starring Lisbeth Salander. Actually, “critique” is probably too mild of a term; it’s more accurately a “complete smackdown.” She writes:

There are some problems with Dragon Tattoo, and let’s talk about the main one: There are a lot of dead ladies in this book. Literally: hundreds. There are other beefs I have with Dragon Tattoo, on the level of Literature: the plotting is sloppy; the sentences are decidedly unlovely; the villainous family is SO BAD they are Nazis AND serial killers (yes, plural) AND rapists (yes, plural) of their sisters/daughters/many murder victims. But the bottom line is not so much that of a Reviewer, but that of a Lady: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo creeps me the fuck out. In my gut, right there, the place that is like GET ME OUT OF HERE AND FIX ME A DRINK AND START TELLING ME ABOUT UNICORNS AND KITTENS OR SOMETHING. The novel’s original title in Swedish was Men Who Hate Women; but reading the book, you start to get the feeling it’s not a polemic so much as a manual….

People who write about dead ladies make a shit-ton of money (see: Patterson, James; Cornwell, Patricia; Koontz, Dean; &c ad nauseum). Even more people want to read about dead ladies than want to write about them; which, as a lady, stresses me out. I like murder mysteries and I like thrillers. But I am getting fucking tired of those stories revolving solely around rape and torture. Packaging that nastiness up as feminist is icing on an ugly cake. There are men who hate women: I am aware of this. Anyone who has ever tried living as a woman is aware of this. I don’t need a ten-page explicit rape scene to bring this point home; I need only to leave my house.

I have not read the novels, but I’m certain The Rejectionist’s assessment is accurate. In general, her critique holds for the film adaptation, as well: women’s mutilated bodies are paraded across the screen like cattle at the 4-H fair; women are in constant danger at the hands of men; and Lisbeth is victimized so frequently and so brutally that she seems to accept her role as victim even while she is fighting back.

ON THE OTHER HAND:

Lisbeth, we learn, lives her life at the mercy of men–men who hate her, men who are simultaneously repulsed by and attracted to her, men who want to humiliate and control her. This is, as The Rejectionist points out, not an uncommon theme in the real world, either; men who hate women exist, and they exist in great number; and they will, if given the chance, wield their hatred against any woman they can. This is simply a fact of life for Lisbeth, and has been since her childhood. And yet–this is the important part, so pay attention–and yet she forges a life of her own choosing anyway.

Lisbeth has been declared mentally incompetent, which means she is given a guardian who has the legal right to make all decisions for her. Lisbeth’s guardians are men; and in the opening scenes of Dragon Tattoo we learn that her newest guardian does, indeed, hate women. He immediately demonstrates that she is at his mercy by taking total control of her finances and declaring that he will give her a small allowance for living expenses. Yet she finds a way–watch the movie to find out how–to take back some control, to gain access to her finances, which to her, equates to her (relative) freedom.

Lisbeth is commonly physically attacked by men, who see her as an easy victim because she is small and looks vulnerable. She simultaneously accepts her victimization as a fact of her life and resists her victimization, not only physically fighting back but throwing up the very landscape of her body as a carefully guarded terrain. She wears black; she has pierced her face; she holds her lips pinched closed. Men who hate women may very well invade, but they will know that they are not welcome; and if they invade she will resist with every last inch of herself.

Lisbeth is a woman who is at the mercy of men who hate women, and yet without breaking free completely of these men–that would be unrealistic–she finds a way to craft an independent life, to make choices about how to live, to extend the walls of her cage. That may not be the kind of feminism that makes us feel good–it may leaves us wanting to wash our eyes out with mouthwash–but to refuse to call it empowerment is to refuse to acknowledge the empowerment tactics of millions of women for whom men who hate women and also have total control over women is a constant, inescapable fact.

There you have it: the film adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo offers a complicated example of a sort of shadow feminism.

I do not feel the same about the sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire.

cover art for The Girl Who Played With Fire In this film, the hero Lisbeth Salander, whose very body is a fortress designed to turn away men who hate women…well, in this film, the body of Lisbeth Salander is offered up for the camera to devour with its emphatically male gaze. In her first appearance in the film, Lisbeth is naked with her back turned to the camera. The camera takes the opportunity to travel down her dragon tattoo-decorated back, over her tan lines and down her backside before heading back up again. There’s a sex scene early on which pairs Lisbeth up with a hot Asian chick; the scene is dutifully recorded in minute detail by the voyeuristic camera, which hovers to one side like a guy just waiting for his chance to jump in.

This sort of thing peppers the movie, breaking up the lengthy graphic scenes in which women are brutalized by men until they are rescued by other men. And then, of course, there is the half-hearted attempt at social commentary, with a plotline about journalists investigating a sex trafficking story in which girls and young women are sold into slavery and subjected to the whims of–you guessed it–men who hate women. The young reporter who breaks the story explains that these girls can’t hope for protection from the law because “they’re just not a priority.”

When the police start poking around, the journalists decide not to hand over their research because, as the editor Mikael Blomqvist explains, the lives of the young women may be placed in danger, and they must be protected at all costs. It’s a nice gesture, but sort of contradicted by the fact that as soon as this plot point serves its purpose (which is to put Lisbeth in danger at the hands of even more powerful men who hate women), the plight of the trafficked young women is completely dropped, never to appear again. It’s almost as if they’re just not a priority to the producers of this film.

Who cares, right? It’s just a movie. It’s just entertainment. Feminists need to loosen up, right? Why does it even matter?

I saw The Girl Who Played With Fire with five friends whose physical appearances announce, more or less, that they will not be at the mercy of any man, thank you very much, least of all men who hate women. We’re talking shaved heads. We’re talking tattoos. We’re talking long strides taken in comfortable shoes.

As I walked with my friends to our seats, I saw a young man watching us. After we passed his row, I watched him lean over to his girlfriend, whisper in her ear, and point to us.

“How do you know what he was saying to her?” one of my friends asked when I told them later about this dude. I know; I just know. I could tell by how he was watching us. I could tell by the dickish little smile pasted across his smug little face.

And that’s why it matters.

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on learning how to STFU

Jun 3rd, 10 / 5 Comments

I argue with people. A lot. Sometimes I raise my voice and shake my fists while I’m arguing. I say inflammatory things and I swear a lot. Often, I’m told, I seem very, very angry while I’m arguing. This is usually because I am very, very angry.

I get mad because there’s a lot to get mad about. I argue because certain issues matter to me. And I say inflammatory things sometimes because I’m impulsive, and I’m impulsive because the things that make me mad pop up spontaneously and unexpectedly. If you’re not mad, after all, then maybe you haven’t been paying attention.

I’m also a woman, by the way, and one who was successfully inculcated into a cultural belief system that prefers its women to STFU. Good job, patriarchy: You did your job well. I want people to like me. I don’t like making waves. And I hate making people mad.

But I’m also doing my damnedest to kill that part of me that wants to be seen as cute and polite and deferential and modest. I’ve written before about the challenges of choosing this path; over in that blog post, I wrote this:

If you’re a woman and you want to be heard, especially in academia, you have to knock on every door, announce your presence to everyone, and holler your qualifications at everyone in earshot. And if you do it right, people will hate you.

I’ve been thinking recently about the extent to which “doing it right” leads to silencing of other people or groups of people. I’m such an enormous loudmouth that I suspect that, for example, my presence in an argument means other women in the room are less likely to be heard. When I speak to my experience of prejudice or oppression, I always run the risk of silencing someone whose experience is different from mine. I understand oppression from the perspective of a queer woman, but as a white, thin, able-bodied queer woman I often speak from within the tower of privilege that comes with these features.

So how do I balance my desire to kill the deference I was enculturated to embrace while still knowing when and how to STFU and let others speak?

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how to make like an ally

Apr 11th, 10 / 0 Comments

You read Sady Doyle’s blog Tiger Beatdown, right? Everybody reads Sady Doyle’s blog Tiger Beatdown. If you’ve never been to this site, may I suggest you leave my blog immediately in order to immerse yourself in the glory and ladyrage that is Tiger Beatdown? Here, I’ll even do something I never ever do: I’ll give you a link to her blog that takes you directly away from my blog and deposits you at her blog, which if you haven’t read her blog is actually where you belong anyway.

Today I want to direct your attention to the most recent Tiger Beatdown post, which is about feminist allies and offers a nice description, in the person of one Freddie de Boer, of how not to be an ally. Freddie, it appears, is Sady Doyle’s enemy in the worst way: He explains that, as a feminist man, he’s tired of being silenced by feminist women who purport to have more right to speak about sexism than he does!

Well, Sady gives ol’ Freddie a glorious smackdown, which I’m sure he has already interpreted as yet another example of why we shouldn’t let ladies speak their minds. In the middle of her smackdown, Sady offers up what I consider to be most excellent advice for anybody who wants to serve as an ally to a marginalized group. I’m going to include an abridged version of her advice below, though this should in no way hinder your intention to read the entire post in its gorgeous entirety.

Sady writes:

A common phrase, which just about every ally has ever heard or been instructed to heed, is, “if it’s not about you, don’t make it about you.” That is: If someone is describing a gross, oppressive behavior that some people in your privileged group engage in, then there is no reason to get defensive unless you personally engage in that behavior, in which case you need to stop complaining about your hurt feelings and focus on how quickly and completely you can cut that shit out. And rushing to the defense of people who do engage in the oppressive behavior, even if you don’t engage in it, is not acceptable, because you’re showing solidarity with your privilege, rather than with the people who are being hurt or oppressed. There is no better way to announce that you seriously don’t care about racism than to leap to the defense of some racist-ass people and ask people of color to stop talking about them in such a critical tone, for example.

To illustrate what the ally behavior Sady describes above actually looks like on the ground, I want to tell a story about my friend Adam, in whom I recently–and unexpectedly–found an ally.

I have a history of being a woman, and I also have a history of being involved in romantic relationships with women. I talk about the first thing all. the. effing. time. I haven’t done much talking about the second thing, though I’m proud to announce that I’m getting better at talking about it.

I was out with a group of friends a few nights ago and decided to talk about it. Specifically, I decided to talk about my tendency to judge people who affiliate with organizations that make it their business to try to keep gay people as unhappy and unable to live freely and without risk of personal or psychological harm as possible. (I do not accept ignorance or political apathy as an excuse, in case you were wondering.) Uproar ensued around the table, which was filled with people who to my knowledge did not have any history of dating people of the same gender. Everybody wanted to weigh in on whether I was right or wrong to judge others. Everybody wanted to weigh in on whether I was being closed minded. Which was fine with me, really. These guys are my friends, and they seem to like me an awful lot, and I wasn’t mad or upset or anything. I was interested in learning how each of my friends (some of whom belong to their own marginalized–or even doubly marginalized–groups) understood the notion of marginalization. I was intensely interested in fighting about this issue for as long as they were willing to fight.

But Adam, who I believe to be a straight white man, did something I didn’t expect: He acted as my ally. He participated in the conversation, but he mainly did so to help me to clarify my stance and open up space for me to speak. He did this so gracefully and so intelligently that I assumed he agreed with me but only later realized I actually don’t know his opinion on my stance toward people who affiliate with anti-gay organizations. I don’t think he ever weighed in.

Adam is a classmate, and he’s near the end of his graduate career. In class, he’s kinda pushy and extremely talkative; he tends to dominate discussions and it’s sometimes hard to get a word in. But on the other hand, he knows an awful lot about his field and has a lot to say about it.

So I know Adam can dominate a conversation, which means that in Friday night’s discussion, he chose to stand back in order to give me more room to speak.

This is Adam:

Adam knows a thing or two about how to listen. Adam is an ally. I didn’t thank him on Friday night, so Adam, consider this my thanks.

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why I am not a constructionist

Apr 6th, 10 / 15 Comments

and why you should expect more from my model for integrating technologies into the classroom

I recently showed some colleagues my developing model for integrating computational technologies into the classroom. “This is,” one person said, “a really nice constructionist model for classroom instruction.”

Which is great, except that I’m not a constructionist.

Now, don’t be offended. I’ll tell you what I told my colleague when she asked, appalled, “What’s wrong with constructionists?”

Nothing’s wrong with constructionists. I just don’t happen to be one.

a brief history lesson
Let’s start with some history. Constructionism came into being because two of the greatest minds we’ve had so far converged when Jean Piaget, known far and wee as the father of constructivism, invited Seymour Papert to come work in his lab. Papert later took a faculty position at MIT, where he developed the Logo programming language, wrote Mindstorms, one of his canonical books, and laid the groundwork for the development of constructionism.

Here’s a key distinction to memorize: While constructivism is a theory of learning, constructionism is both a learning theory and an approach to instruction. Here’s how the kickass constructionist researcher Yasmin Kafai describes the relationship between these terms:

Constructionism is not constructivism, as Piaget never intended his theory of knowledge development to be a theory of learning and teaching…. Constructionism always has acknowledged its allegiance to Piagetian theory but it is not identical to it. Where constructivism places a primacy on the development of individual and isolated knowledge structures, constructionism focuses on the connected nature of knowledge with its personal and social dimensions.

Papert himself said this:

Constructionism–the N Word as opposed to the V word–shares constructivism’s connotation to learning as building knowledge structures irrespective of the circumstances of learning. It then adds the idea that this happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity whether it’s a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe.

Examples of constructionist learning environments include the well known and widespread Computer Clubhouse program, One Laptop Per Child, and learning environments built around visual programming tools like Scratch and NetLogo.

why I am not a constructionist
Constructionism is really neat, and some of the academics I respect most–Kafai, Kylie Peppler, Mitch Resnick, Idit Harel, for example–conduct their work from a constructionist perspective. A couple of things I like about the constructionist approach is its emphasis on “objects to think with” and some theorists’ work differentiating between wonderful ideas and powerful ideas.

Constructionist instruction is a highly effective approach for lots of kids, most notably for kids who haven’t experienced success in traditional classroom settings. But as Melissa Gresalfi has said more than once, people gravitate to various learning theories when they decide that other theories can’t explain what they’re seeing. Constructionism focuses on how a learning community can support individual learners’ development, which places the community secondary to the individual. I tend to wonder more about how contexts support knowledge production and how contexts lead to judgments about what counts as knowledge and success. If it’s true, for example, that marginalized kids are more likely to find success with tools like Scratch, then what matters to me is not what Scratch offers those kids that traditional schooling doesn’t, but what types of knowledge production the constructionist context offers that aren’t offered by the other learning contexts that fill up those kids’ days. I don’t care so much about what kids know about programming; I’m far more interested in the sorts of participation structures made possible by Scratch and other constructionist tools.

If you were wondering, I’m into situativity theory and its creepy younger cousin, Actor-Network Theory. So what I’m thinking about now is what sorts of participation structures might be developed around a context that looks very much like the diagram below. Specifically, I’m wondering: What sorts of participation structures can support increasingly knowledgeable participation in a range of contexts that integrate computation as a key area of expertise?

why I’m mentioning this now
My thinking about this is informed of late by what I consider to be some highly problematic thinking about equity issues in technology in education. A 2001 literature review by Volman & vanEck focuses on how we might just rearrange the classroom some to make girls feel more comfortable with computers. For example, they write that

to date, research has not produced unequivocal recommendations for classroom practice. Some researchers found that girls do better in small groups of girls; some researchers argue in favor of such groups on theoretical grounds (Siann & MacLeod, 1986, Scotland; Kirkup, 1992, United Kingdom). Others show that girls perform better in mixed groups (Kutnick, 1997, United Kingdom) or that girls benefit more than boys do from working together (Littleton et al., 1992, United Kingdom). Other student characteristics such as competence and experience in performing the task seem in any case to be equally important, both in primary and secondary education. An explanation for girls’ achieving better results in mixed pairs is that they have more opportunity to spend time with the often-more-experienced boys. The question, however, is whether this solution has negative side effects. It may all too easily confirm the image that girls are less competent when it comes to computers. Another solution may be that working in segregated groups compensates for the differences in experience. Tolmie and Howe (1993, Scotland, secondary education) argue strongly for working in small mixed groups because of the differences they identified between the approaches taken by groups of girls and groups of boys in solving a problems.

For the love of pete, the issue is not whether girls feel more comfortable working in small groups or mixed groups or pairs or individually; the issue is why in the hell we have learning environments that allow for these permutations to matter to girls’ access to learning with technologies.

Also, just for the record, the gender-equity issue in video gaming cannot be resolved just by building “girl versions” of video games, no matter what Volman and vanEck believe. They write:

Littleton, Light, Joiner, Messer, and Barnes (1992, United Kingdom, primary education) found that gender differenc
es in performance in a computer game disappeared when the masculine stereotyping in that game was reduced. In a follow-up study they investigated the performance of girls and boys in two variations of an adventure game (Joiner, Messer, Littleton, & Light, 1996). Two versions of the game were developed, a “male” version with pirates and a “female” version with princesses. The structure of both versions of the game was identical. Girls scored lower than boys in both versions of the game, even when computer experience was taken into account; but girls scored higher in the version they preferred, usually that with the princesses.

I don’t think that the researchers cited by Volman and vanEck intended their work to be interpreted this way, but this is exactly the trouble you get into when you start talking about computational technologies in education: People think the tool, or the slight modification of it, is the breakthrough, when the breakthrough is in how we shift instructional approaches through integration of the tool–along with a set of technical skills and practices–for classroom instruction.

Looking at my developing model, I can see that I’m in danger of leading people to the same interpretation: Just put this stuff in your classroom and everything else will work itself out. This is what happens when you frontload the tool when you really mean to frontload the practices surrounding that tool that matter to you.

This is the next step in the process for me: Thinking about which practices I hope to foster and support through my classroom model and deploying various technologies for that purpose. I’ll keep you posted on what develops.

One last note
I’ve included here a discussion about why I’m not a constructionist along with a discussion of gender equity issues in education, but I don’t at all want anybody to take this as a critique of constructionism. I declare again: Nothing’s wrong with constructionism. I just don’t happen to be a constructionist. Also, I think a lot of really good constructionist researchers have done some really, really good work on gender equity issues in computing, and I’m just thrilled up the wazoo about that and hope they can find ways to convince people to stop misinterpreting constructionism in problematic ways.

References, in case you’re a nerd

Joiner, R., Messer, D., Littleton, K., & Light, P. (1996). Gender, computer experience and computer-based problem solving. Computers and Education, 26(1/2), 179–187.

Kafai, Y. B. (2006). Constructivism. In K. Sawyer (Ed.), Handbook of the Learning Sciences (pp. 35-46). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Kirkup, G. (1992). The social construction of computers. In G. Kirkup and L. Keller (Eds.), Inventing women: Science, gender and technology (pp. 267–281). Oxford: Polity Press.

Kutnick, P. (1997). Computer-based problem-solving: The effects of group composition and social skills on a cognitive, joint action task. Educational Research, 39(2), 135–147.

Littleton, K., Light, P., Joiner, R., Messer, D., & Barnes, P. (1992). Pairing and gender effects in computer based learning. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 7(4), 1–14.

Papert, S., & Harel, I. (1991). Situating Constructionism. In Papert & Harel, Constructionism. Ablex Publishing Corporation. Available online at http://www.papert.org/articles/SituatingConstructionism.html.

Siann, G., & MacLeod, H. (1986). Computers and children of primary school age: Issues and questions. British Journal of Educational Technology, 2, 133–144.

Tolmie, A., & Howe, C. (1993). Gender and dialogue in secondary school physics. Gender and Education, 5(2), 191–210

Volman, M., & van Eck, E. (2001). Gender Equity and Information Technology in Education: The Second Decade. [10.3102/00346543071004613]. Review of Educational Research, 71(4), 613-634.

my model, in case you were wondering

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on sexism and gender performance: it’s the bathrobes that’s outrageous?

Mar 14th, 10 / 2 Comments

There’s a nice little conversation going over at really? law? about masculinity, gender performance, law school, and competition.

The post, which was written by my sister Laura McWilliams in observance of International Women’s Day, describes her experience as a female law student. As she explains, her male classmates are the ones who shout her down, who silence her; she writes:

I can’t say for certain that this is about gender, but I can say that I’ve often been dismissed, insulted, or shouted down by men, but only once, since I started this thing, by a woman. Not every man has acted this way, but nearly every person who has acted this way has been a man.

She does add, however, that she hasn’t thought much about how men perform gender, and specifically about “the anxiety that comes with being a man and proving one’s manhood”:

I always separated in my mind the competition between men and women and the competition between men and men. One was about domination; the other was about bonding. Now I’m thinking that I was nowhere near right. The two are more mixed up than that. I’ve only recently begun trying to synthesize the two.

Men’s interactions are about performance–right?–in a way that’s different from how women perform. Men are constantly proving their gender, while women are forced to try to prove–I don’t know, their lack of gender?

The post has received several comments from male readers, and the set of comments by someone who calls himself “passer by” were especially interesting to me. He begins by arguing that women are far more competitive than men are:

I’d challenge the notion that males are more aggressive that females. And I have given it more than a passing thought. Both are more than capable of aggression, at equal levels.

Competitive? I’d say your (sic) wrong, sorry. Both men and women are competitive, but men more often acknowledge when they loose (sic), and let it go on the spot. Maybe with a bit of rude behavior, but that’s it. Women tend to find a way to bring it back around, go after revenge, and throw some vengeance in to boot.

This writer argues that women are more competitive, more vicious in their gossip, and more “catty”; in fact, he writes,

Cats are both masculine and feminine, but how many men do you know that are “catty?” How many men gossip in a way that undermine the credibility and reputation of women, or other men? Far more women tend to expend energy on such things.

Over the course of a multi-comment exchange between Laura and this commenter, she gently suggests that the “cattiness” label is part of how women are disempowered, then follows him as he changes the subject to sports, stereotyping of all men based on how a minority behave, and biological differences that he believes prove that men and women are just different–they just are. He writes:

Yes, environment plays a huge role. But any 8 year old can tell you boys and girls are born different, and anyone who has forgotten that fact hasn’t looked in their pants in far to long. To try to “discover” there are biological differences is a hysterical concept to me. It’s not news that sexual organs are the only distinguishable differences, so are hair patterns, hormones, and emergence differences that are apparent. To think that this doesn’t affect mood, attitude, aggression, and ultimately social perception is just naive.

Laura’s willingness to engage with this commenter, and to consider his arguments thoughtfully and carefully, led to a lengthy and perhaps productive conversation about gender. But I was struck by how hard Laura seems to have had to work to make this happen. The notion that “cattiness” is an apt term for women but not for men is just…well, it’s blatant sexism, is what it is. And the commenter argues that sports are to blame for turning men competitive, but somehow overlooks the inherent sexism in the fact that society “encourage(s) boys to play sports more than girls.”

Yet, by letting these comments pass, Laura makes it possible for the commenter to post an interesting argument: that all men get blamed for the sexist behavior of “a small minority”–in his view, maybe 20% of all men.

Which is a powerful point that’s well worth discussing. I’m not willing to go so far as to agree that sexism is only evident in 20 percent of all men, but it’s clear that not all men engage in sexist behavior, and that not all men who do engage in sexist behavior do so all the time.

The problem, really, is this: Even if less than 20 percent of all men engaged in sexist behavior, we still live in a culture that not only encourages but rewards that kind of behavior. Which means that this “small minority” has a distinct advantage when it comes to not only sports but education, work, and access to advancement opportunities.

Women and men alike should be outraged by this. It means that women and men alike are being forced to play a game that, all things being equal, they would probably choose not to play; it means that the rules of the game are being set by a small subset of our culture; it means that if you, male or female, choose to opt out, you’re setting yourself up to walk a rockier path than you might otherwise take.

Sam Seaborn: Where’d you get the bathrobe?
Carol Fitzpatrick: The gym.
Sam: There are bathrobes at the gym?
Claudia Jean ‘C.J.’ Cregg: In the women’s locker room.
Sam: But not the men’s.
C.J.: Yeah.
Sam: Now, that’s outrageous. There’s a thousand men working here and 50 women.
C.J.: Yeah, and it’s the bathrobes that’s outrageous.

From “The West Wing: Bartlet’s Third State of the Union (#2.13)” (2001)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOdrbf5sX_M&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]

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Blog for International Women’s Day: A call to end ‘horizontal violence’

Mar 8th, 10 / 1 Comment

This blog post is part of the call from Gender Across Borders for blog posts written in response to the theme of this year’s International Women’s Day.

About a month ago, I posted a review of And Then Came Lola, a film that ran as part of my city’s LGBTQ film festival.

In my review, I criticized what I saw as a heteronormative portrayal of lesbian sexuality: to wit, the more traditionally feminine a character was, the more heroic she was; and any character who stood outside of traditional notions of femininity was either a bad guy or played for laughs. I expressed concern that in treating sexual desire as the exclusive right of the traditionally beautiful, this film reinforces negative stereotypes of lesbians and of women more broadly.

Well. As you might imagine (and as I might have expected), I received lots of responses to this post, including a disproportionate number of personal attacks delivered in comments below the review and in personal emails. It was suggested that maybe I have a problem with lesbians, that maybe my own prejudices are clouding my judgment, that maybe I take myself too seriously. In fact, more commenters wanted to talk about what was wrong with me than about the content of my review–about whether I had a point worth discussing.

As we celebrate International Women’s Day with the theme “equal rights, equal opportunity: Progress for all,” I want to call for progress within the communities that comprise the women’s rights movement. We know that one highly effective strategy for doing away with a political point that threatens the status quo is to twist it into a question of personal character: She’s just a man-hater. He’s just a pedophile. She’s a hypocrite, a bitch, a traitor. We know this strategy is effective because it’s been used against us time and again. Yet we’re still so likely to pull out exactly this strategy if a member of our community says something we don’t agree with or don’t want to hear.

In lots of ways, it’s not really our fault. This is a divide-and-conquer tactic built right into the fabric of our culture to maintain the subtle balances of power. It’s also a tactic that has, for many members of minority groups, been highly effective in helping them to gain a voice, position, power. If you’re not an official member of the dominant group (which in America is largely comprised of middle- and upper-class, educated white men) you can always cozy up to the dominant group by acting in ways that show whose side you’re on. This is why we hear that women are so often each other’s worst enemies: If you’re a smart, ambitious, driven woman you can lessen the threat you pose to the status quo by helping to smack down other smart, ambitious, driven women.

But, wow, talk about trading off long-term change for short-term rewards. The Brazilian revolutionary Paulo Freire calls this “horizontal violence”: oppressed peoples “striking out at their own comrades for the pettiest reasons.” If you want a seat at the table, it may very well be faster and less painful to ingratiate yourself instead of shoving your way in; but on the other hand, you have no power to keep yourself at the table once you get there. If the dominant group ever decides you’re not docile or pretty or respectful or interesting enough, they can pull the table away.

On International Women’s Day, I’m calling for more attention to the long revolution, for more attention to the difficult and complicated work of building a movement based on solidarity, mutual respect and support, and making room for a variety of voices, interests, and needs. I’m calling for more attention to the ways in which we hurt each other, diminish the voices of our comrades, use any power we gain individually as a weapon against others who would like a little bit of power too.

I’m not calling for an end to disagreement or conflict within the movement toward equality; disagreement is useful, and conflict is inevitable. But I am calling for more introspection, for more thought put into why and how and where we disagree, into why and how and where we try to silence each other in the exact ways we find so despicable when it comes from outsiders to our communities and movements. I’m calling for all of us to examine our own behavior, our own attitudes, our own understandable struggles with power, beliefs, and attitudes about ourselves and about others who have joined with us to fight for progress and equality. I’m calling for more public generosity and private compassion. I’m calling for it from myself most of all, starting now and henceforth; but I do hope that you’ll join me.

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Blog for International Women’s Day

Mar 7th, 10 / 2 Comments

Monday, March 8, 2010, is International Women’s Day, and Gender Across Borders is helping to get the word out by asking people to blog on this year’s theme: “Equal rights, equal opportunity: Progress for all.”

Find out more at Gender Across Borders. Sign up to blog for IWD here.

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“Math class is tough!” a few thoughts on a problematic metaphor for learning

Jan 21st, 10 / 0 Comments

Academics, and especially academics who think about culture (which is to say, more or less, all academics), seem to really like metaphors and similes. Here’s one that made me mad this week.

Jim Greeno: Learning how to participate is like being in a kitchen.
Situativity theorist Jim Greeno, in “Number Sense as Situated Knowing in a Conceptual Domain,” considers how people develop conceptual models for participating in disciplinary communities (what he calls “conceptual environments”). He explains that

knowing how to construct models in a domain is like knowing how to work in an environment that has resources for a kind of constructive activity, such as a woodworking shop or a kitchen.

A shop or a kitchen has objects, materials, and tools that can be used to make things. Knowing how to work in such an environment includes knowing what objects and materials are needed for various constructive activities, knowing where to find those objects and materials in the environment, knowing what implements and processes are useful for constructing various things, knowing how to find the implements, and knowing how to use the implements and operate the processes in making the things that can be made.

In constructing conceptual models, the ingredients are representations of specific examples of concepts…. We can think of the conceptual domain as an environment that has representations of concept-examples stored in various places. Knowing where to find these, knowing how to combine them into patterns that form models, and knowing how to operate on the patterns constitute knowledge of the conceptual domain. The representations of concept-examples have to be understood in a special way. They are not only objects that are drawn on paper or represented in the mind. They are objects in the stronger sense that their properties and relations interact in ways that are consistent with the constraints of the domain.

This example would be fine if everybody agreed on a.) where everything belongs in a kitchen; b.) what everything in the kitchen should be used for; c.) what activities afforded by the kitchen are most appropriate; and d.) whether the kitchen is appropriately and effectively designed.

Let’s say, just for kicks, that the cabinets are made for glass and have been installed at just the right height for someone who is, say, at least 5 feet 9.2 inches tall. I’m 5’3″. If I want to get to the materials I need to, I’m going to need to find something to stand on.

If there’s nothing to stand on (and if most people who use the kitchen stand around 5 feet 9 inches, there would be no reason to keep stepstools or the like around), I might try to climb up onto the counters. I might try to find some sort of utensil–a spatula, maybe, or a wooden spoon–to help me access the ingredients I need. If I’m really desperate, I might try to throw things in an effort to shatter the glass cabinet.

To an outside observor, none of the above activities would appear appropriate in the kitchen setting. The spatula is made for cooking, not for prying open cabinets. And shattering glass cabinets–that’s just destructive.

You see my point, I hope.

Then there’s the unavoidable issue of choice of metaphor. Greeno offers a kitchen or a woodworking shop, which we might say is a nice way to offer one example for each gender! But though it’s true that Greeno doesn’t take it a step farther to prescribe who gets to enter which type of space, the gendered nature of the examples is undeniable. These examples are not neutral, just as the practices that occur in the examples are not benign, at least not always, and not for everybody.

Metaphors do lots of good work for us; indeed, it may be that our entire culture rests on a bed of shared metaphors. As Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O’Day write in their 2000 book Information ecologies: using technology with heart,

Metaphors are a useful form of shorthand…. But it is important to recognize that all metaphors channel and limit our thinking, as well as bring in useful associations from other contexts. That is the purpose of a metaphor, after all–to steer us to think about the topic this way rather than some other way.

What are you doing? Stop–stop throwing soup cans at the cabinets! You’re liable to break something!

To which you respond: I never liked tomato soup much anyway. And I sure as hell hate glass cabinets. Good riddance, you say, even as you’re being hustled out of the kitchen. Good–

And that’s when you realize they’ve shut the door behind you. Maybe even locked it. See what kind of trouble metaphors get us into?

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