"It's okay to be smart," says dad. 'Pfft, yeah right,' thinks daughter.

It still boggles my mind that women are underrepresented in university applied and "hardest" sciences (math/physics) programs. People love to ask me about this phenomenon, and love to lend their two bits of causal explanation. I never know quite how to package a brief response. My genius friend, Jill, in Vancouver, is interested in teaching math to young girls to combat this trend. Neat!

Today I'm looking at how girls fared in university science and math programs in Canada in the 1980s - a decade when women poured into paid employment and higher learning institutions in unprecedented numbers, but stuck to humanities, social sciences and professional programs. Women and Education: A Canadian Perspective, a collection edited by Jane Gaskell and Arlene McLaren (1987), features a 4-chapter section on women's access to education, covering adolescent females relationship to computers, women's enrollment in university science programs, and working-class female high school course enrollment. The writing is full of forecasting about the status of women in these disciplines... fun to think about what has happened in terms of graduate enrollment since!

As I try to understand conflating factors that affect women's relative absence in engineering classes today, I wonder how girls experience choosing not to take math in high school. One factor suggested to affect women's science enrollment in university is lacking the high school prerequisites. We can poke holes in this idea (women's lack of interest/aptitude begins early on, it's innate, blah blah), but interestingly, girls don't lag behind boys in math until age 15 or 16. This makes me think there's more to the socialization side. To be bold: I remember being good at math in high school, great even. I was upset with myself if I didn't get the top mark in the class. I won a math competition in grade 10 and didn't tell anyone but my parents, and I wasn't shy. I also won regional science olympics with a team of 3 others, and bragged about how I didn't have a clue what was going on and somehow the team pulled me through. This is not what happened. I bossed my team around to the finish line. I remember my behaviour before most math tests. I strolled in late, looked for a pencil and a calculator, giggled a lot, and claimed, "OMG, I'm going to fail." I usually aced it and didn't tell anyone except my rivals, to whom it was cool to be smart (true to stereotype, it turns out those "rivals" are kicking ass in life's cool lane now). In university, I loved chemistry and math, but abruptly dropped out in third year, likely because I was afraid of failure and intimidated by the competitive atmosphere at UBC. What gives?

In the 80s, some psychologists (Meece et. al, 1982) tried to understand why women enroll in fewer math classes, even though they fare better in the ones in which they do enroll. Meece proposed a model about choice and performance (great for my dissertation!) with two factors: 1) the person's perception of the value of the task; 2) the person's expectancy of success. She categorized four attitudes affecting perception of value: intrinsic, utility, cost and fulfillment. Meece and her colleagues go further to complicate the "expectancy of success" with factors like perception of self, sex-role attitudes, one's own goals and perceptions of socializers attitudes. I like research like this... work that attempts to critically operationalize things that are, of course, confounding and difficult to measure. I'm too lazy to do this. Good for Judith Meece. From here, we can design surveys, explore attitudes, uncover cultural discourses, and begin to ask new questions.

Now considering how the "ideology of woman" deflects girls away from focused attention in mathematics. When it's cooler to be ditzy than smart, how can we attribute some innate propensity to adolescents? Yet the stereotype lives on.

confronting positive eugenicism

"What are you going to do when you're done?" - the question most asked of and dreaded by students of all kinds.

Though I always respond, "I don't know," my academic convictions have begun to mirror my personal interests, making academia an attractive career option. The imbrication of personal/political/academic makes for a great road sometimes. Nothing like experiential knowledge touching theoretical joys touching political stakes to stay enthralled in the journey.

Contrarily, when writing literature is tied to writing the self, fielding critique becomes a challenging exercise in resisting feeling personally attacked. I'm discovering that this is not a matter of compartmentalizing work and life, academic and personal. In my project, they bleed from the same vein. The fact is criticism of my research is a personal attack of sorts and the issue becomes how to cope when compartmentalizing is not possible or desirable.

My work was recently criticized for echoing pronatalism - the kind associated with imperialism, racism and eugenics. This...is not good. I take this critique and ask myself: why am I fighting for the right to be supported to have children when we have a problem of overpopulation and environmental crisis on this planet? Appreciating this at a philosophical level, I still want to ask my questions about the structural disenfranchisement of mothers in Canada. Mine is not a "life or death problem" (though it is in the Foucauldian sense of biolife and Puar's reiteration of necropolitics), but it's discrimination nonetheless. And if the institution of the school is a central generator of power relations (see Discipline and Punish), is not this an important system to interrogate?

Consumed with finding a way to reconcile this, I shunned a lunch to dig through pronatalist policies from Nazi Germany (you know I'm occupied when I shun a lunch). I tried to understand how my work differs from or reproduces these discourses or both. Given its reputation for macho nationalist rationale, Nazi population policy seemed an apt historical example to explore. In 1988, Robert Proctor wrote a book with the Harvard University Press called Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Chapter 5 is on the control of women.

I knew the machismo ideology of the regime, but couldn't have imagined to what extent. Family policies from criminalizing the abortion of a "German" fetus as a "racial crime" (a crime for which violators faced imprisonment) to the Honor Cross for German Motherhood (dollars and public props for babies), all intentioned the mass production of potential Nazi bodies. Policies targeted fathers too. Loans amounting to a year's salary were given to husbands whose wives agreed to leave paid labour for domestic life. For every child born, the principle was reduced on the loan by one quarter. By 1938, all public officials (men) (including academics) were required to marry or resign. These are only a couple of the masculine workfarist policies. Texts around standards of beauty and womanhood circulating through policies, media and political rhetoric enforced momism to the max.

Canada was reputed for pronatalism too. Small anecdote: in 1926, Toronto millionaire, Charles Millar, promised $700 000 to the woman who would have the most children by 1936 (The winner had 26 children by age 40. Holy...eff). As staggering as these incentives are to me, what is just as fascinating is the host of parallels between blatantly racist natalist policies in wartime Germany and contemporary family policy. Rewarding "upper"-class straight motherhood of the desired race for nationalist rhetoric is the obvious intention of pronatalist policies in wealthy nations like France, Japan and Canada. How do I defend my right to be assisted in raising my own children in this context? Maybe I shouldn't be. Help me out, y'all.

writing the self: to list or to convey

To my frequent disgruntlement, my dissertation committee is made of three historians and a demographer. I picked these folks, and they're first-rate, but I'm not one of these, nor do I aspire to be. I don't seem to think like a historian, whatever that means. There is something about the way these disciplines enforce knowledge, though, that I lust after. I trust that this pool of expertise won't let me miss anything. They're badgers. I'm more of a pig.


So I'm reading a stack of stat-loaded and biographical Canadian history. En route, I've learned that history is a creative exercise in selecting moments and suggesting meaning. Even the most simple approach to meaning-making, chronology, is a subjective practice. For example, I've read several pieces on the same topic that highlight remarkably different occurrences. Exciting! (Aside, it bewilders me that history writing can be so dull given its creative potential...)


I was thinking about event-ness in history writing when I had a flashback to Ann Cvetcovich's An Archive of Feelings (here she theorizes trauma as our experience of daily minutiae rather than the aftermath of some sort of objectively inhumane experience. I comment on it here). In the context of history writing, what makes events phenomenal? I suppose events that affect a large group and shift cultural sands (thanks Paul) are worthy of attention, but if we're writing autobiographically, why the impetus to trace cultural signifiers? If the aim is to suggest meaning, perhaps many of us are being dishonest in our selections. What meaning is lost?


I remember drawing my life course on horizontal foolscap in elementary school. Major trips, graduations, injuries... I remember envying my friend Crystal's broken arm 'cause I didn't have much to write between ages 6-10. This week my mother asked me to write my paragraph for the family Christmas letter. The notable peaks and valleys that come to mind since last December are good meals and breakups. I don't think I can write that. Maybe "nothing happened," but I think I'll look back on this year as one of the most course-changing in my life.


Today I'm submitting a grant application for which I was required to write a professional biography. It reads similarly, with major gaps where some other candidate might write about encountering war or difference as monumental. I wanted to write, "One time, on a Montenegrin bus, I had this idea to 'clean up' the DTES with a sponsored indie rock concert and large buckets of paint. I leaned over to inform my travel partner, who was more educated and sophisticated than I (and I admired him immensely and still do), and he unknowingly pointed me to feminist standpoint theory in one fell swoop with: 'what makes you think its residents want you to paint it?'


That sentence absolutely changed my life. In the moment, I was choked. I thought he was being a cynical jerk and I started crying silently to myself because like all important lessons, his words burst my bubble and it was frustrating. It fit that I was a sheltered white girl traipsing through the war-torn lands of former Yugoslavia, but the experience had nothing to do with encountering difference.


I didn't write about a 20-year-old's conversation in a Montenegrin bus. Instead I listed my credentials and explained why I'm excited about them. I hope I gain the confidence to stop doing this, because I think interesting writing involves more than a mere piling of culturally remarkable signifiers. By fluke, this morning I read "Making History Relevant" (2011) by Margaret Conrad. Using the chronological approach, she hangs together strands of her childhood to detail her approach to wisdom and agency in a world of power struggles and uncertain future. She writes in minutiae: "once my mother told me never depend on a man"; "she was an avid consumer of the CBC... but not so much the Texaco-sponsored opera that aired on Saturday afternoons"; "he parked his truck near the university to eat his lunch, hoping I'd pass by." How wonderful! I feel like I know her. She makes transparent her winding path into academia.


Off to make lists of things one doesn't usually list. Oh, lotus-eating rainy mornings.

cleavage makes women hate each other. oh for goodness sakes.

I knew something would pull me from my blogging hiatus. It wasn't the omnibus crime bill, though note: I think this is one of the most terrifying pieces my generation has seen in Canadian policy. It was "How to lose friends and alienate people: Show cleavage, study finds." It made a U of O press release. The original study can be ripped here. Needless to say, Dar Williams (thank you, Erin) disagrees with its main finding: most women aggress against sexual rivals.

Hesitant to pay the article any credence, I avoided circulating and critiquing yesterday. Then I saw the headline on the front page of today's G&M print edition, complete with images of "confederate dressed conservatively" and "provocatively (sexy-thin)"...

You've probably all read it, but to summarize, the scorn of the sexy woman is ubiquitous among women, and showing too much cleavage is a surefire way to become ostracized. Of course this is not a new idea, and there are corresponding man discourses of peacocking, competition, etc. According to this perspective, grounded in evolutionary biology, we're all driven by our bodies, our bodies desire to mate, all human interactions in our modern world can be reduced to this. Given our genetic destiny, as the author of the study notes oh-so-rigorously, "we can't tolerate anyone giving the milk away for free."

Regardless of whether or not this perspective rings true in your imagination, this is just bad research (thank you Sasha, JoAnne). Women were secretly video taped to record their reactions to a provocatively dressed woman and a conservatively dressed woman entering the holding room. They were then asked to rank the women's "bitchiness." Because women were less likely to want to "be friends with" the provocatively dressed woman, introduce her to their boyfriends or allow him to spend time alone with her (pardon? "allow"?), "the sexy colleague was indeed seen as a sexual rival."

There are a lot of assumptions about women going on here. First, they are a unified brand of heterosexual. Second, they desire monogamous mating. Third, they have the same sense of what a monogamous heterosexual relationship should entail, including precariousness.

Then there are the methodological issues of accuracy and validity, and analytical problems. "Bitchy" is operationalized out of the sky, as researchers checked for "once-overs" and "death stares." I'm pretty shocked that this passed defense, never mind received SSHRC funding and was published. Not that I worship positivism, but this blog is more scientific. Perhaps it was the employment of a standardized emotion coding statistical model... argh.

The link between not wanting to be friends with someone and seeing them as a sexual rival is totally unintuitive to me. There are many people I don't want to be friends with, and I may make unfair judgements based on dress, but that does not mean I see these people as sexual rivals. [My problematic link would likely be between provocative office dress and naiveté, or, in the case of these images, disinterest in personality based on style of dress. Shallow, yes, but not related to sexual intimidation.] This assumption granted, my not wanting to be friends with someone certainly doesn't lend itself to the next hint at causation: sense of sexual rivalry = ostracize and avoid. My first reaction to women chuckling about wearing provocative clothing in the office is they are amused by her breaking a social norm. I might laugh myself, thinking hmm, you don't see that everyday. And of course I'd give her a "once over." It's tough not to look at cleavage. We've been socialized to see this as sexy, and it's not something you see very often in the office. I'd probably stare at it, but not while wishing the owner "death." Also, the women participants only scoffed once the "sexy" woman left the room, suggesting to me that she might not be ostracized if they were sitting in a group having a chat.

The second part of the study involved participants ranking women's "cuteness" and "sexiness" in photographs. Again, the sexy-thin and sexy-fat confederates (lots of crap research cited in the literature review about this distinction) were less likely to be friended by the participants and most likely to be isolated from meeting the boyfriends. My gut here is that of course I'd be less likely to introduce someone to my boyfriend if I weren't interested in being friends with her. This would not mean I viewed the voluptuous woman as a "mate poacher."

Even if this study were rigorous, it rests on assumptions about social behaviour that are seen as exclusively biological. There is no room for consideration of the social here. How is one-sided research like this still celebrated? I'll keep the opposite in mind when I write exclusively on the social. Further, even if there were a nuanced consideration of the social and compelling "evidence" that women ostracize "sexy" counterparts, I'd hope that this could also be situated in a broader socioeconomic context, possibly with a statement like, "Reportedly heterosexual women seeking monogamous partnerships appear to demonstrate aggression against women by whom they feel sexually threatened. This dynamic occurs within a condition where women are an economically disenfranchised group that are still required to rely on men (largely in heterosexual partnerships) for social capital, physical safety and economic stability."

Brief aside on the theme of intrasexual competition, I recall my reading of a girl peer in high school. She wore her uniform in a way that I have been socialized to understand as suggestive of her promiscuity. She made a lot of jokes about her sexual experiences, her hair was always perfectly straightened, her lips always glossy, she always smelled like vanilla, and she wore shiny coloured bras under her gym clothes. I remember wondering to myself if my boyfriend found her attractive. My guess was probably, but even in my 16-year-old brain, I didn’t seek to appropriate her look or keep my boyfriend away from her, and I certainly didn’t seek to ostracize her. I did, however, avoid being friends with her. I wasn’t interested in a thing she had to say, and I didn’t feel particularly comfortable around her. I assumed she didn't like me either. I think this distinction is lost on the researchers.

Usually I argue for more academic insertion into popular media. After all, folks are doing a lot of studying that can contribute to our understanding of the state of things. The other side of the coin, though, is the academy carrying a certain legitimacy that allows uncritical research to be fetishized. I hope readers view these cleavage findings with critical eyes.

lest we forget an unkept promise of peace

This Remembrance Day marks 10 years since our invasion of Afghanistan, and 5 years since our troops were redeployed to Kandahar province for Operation Archer. It's been 2 years since Defense Minister Peter MacKay silenced allegations regarding the torture of Afghan detainees, a scandal that slid under the rug of prorogation. 

November 11th is a problematic day for me. As a child attending independent religious schools in British Columbia, this day was majestic and somber. Visualizing death through violence was so intense for my kid imagination. The day was also exciting because it meant extra choir practices the week prior, the potential of a national anthem solo, and ducking class to rehearse for the ceremony. I loved the way the bright red poppy jumped off of my pressed oxford collar and navy vest. Days prior to the ceremony, we'd don extra poppies on our kilt pins until a teacher told us it wasn't suitable. For the ceremony, we pinned each other's poppies under our school crests on left lapel. We had to yank our Half Windsors up to the top button on this dignified occasion.

The ceremonies were haunting and strange. The blast of bagpipes pounding off gymnasium walls was anything but serene, though it served to drown out the chatter of children and stun us into solemnity. The pipes were evocative  - I felt something visceral because my heart and ears shook during that seemingly endless drone.

Now I object to wearing the poppy, and when asked if I'd like one, I explain why I intend not to wear it. War is the most profitable commodity of our age. How tragic would this be to the soldiers who died "for our freedom" and now lie in Flanders fields? 

My friends become defensive when I object to wearing the poppy. This isn't an off-the-cuff decision. I love the poppy. A sea of dark jackets with red decoration is so aesthetically pleasing, I want to paint it and sing. Further, a collection of human beings standing side by side in silence to commemorate the loss of life in defense of justice is possibly the most important reason for gathering I can think of.

The reason I can't participate in this commemoration runs deeper. Canadian history is full of blood, and we choose to celebrate a militarist victory instead of expressing remorse for our deliberate and systematic destruction of Aboriginal peoples in the name Manifest destiny - a cultural genocide that continues today with the murder of Aboriginal women on highways, in homes and in forests. If Armistice means stop fighting, why aren't we putting down our weapons? As C.L. Cook writes, "the concept of stopping that gravy train, if only for a single minute on the eleventh day of November, is something the war profiteers would rather no-one remember; it is not an acceptable concept. So instead, we remember the veterans, without whom this long and lucrative legacy of murder and misery made for magnificent profits for the few could not possibly be sustained."

We need to be critical about our choice to commemorate the last outpost of the lost Empire - our ceremonies and their grandiosity tell something critical about our values. I think it is easy to forget this as we go through the motions of annual tradition.

As I wrote in response to 9/11 anniversaries, I believe in the importance of commemoration. I believe in the vitality of collective public grief for fruitful cultural life. I think that moments dedicated to solemnity make the world a better, more empathetic place. The way we remember, though, is so rich for telling us what we deem worthy of meditation. Resisting the privileging of Remembrance Day over other days of commemoration is not a heartless and radical pursuit. It is recognition that Remembrance Day ceremonies, in conjunction with our militarist actions, mark a grave contradiction in our apparent preservation of freedom.

In grade school, the Grade 7 class traditionally recited Flanders Fields before the bagpiper receded. We raised our voices at, "We are the dead," and paused before quietly announcing, "Short days ago, we lived." What beautiful truth about the fragility of human life. As John McCrae's words leak through my brain upon the sight of poppies on bureaucrats, I insist upon hearing them for their true meaning.

"If ye break faith with us who die / we shall not sleep."

Wishing us all feelings of haunting as we recall the loss of life and our nation's unkept promises.

100 years of change, or 100 years of stay the same?

Under the thumb of my supervisor, I've been immersed in history texts all week. I litter the margins of my books with theoretical musings to resist floating in a cushy sense of chronology and causality. Rebellious am I.

I find reading history tedious, but constructive for taking future aim. People listen when you throw out an historical "fact." Rarely do I engage people who counter feminist positions with, "but so much has changed with regard to the status of women... feminism is unnecessary," or, worse, "but women have achieved equality now, so..." but I often take up backlash regarding women in Canadian higher education, as this phenomenon remains en vogue.

Indeed, one of the most striking features of Canadian universities at present is their feminization, even at the graduate level. This astonishing reversal from a man-dominated domain, occurring only over the past 30 years, undermines the question of women’s status in university education, as media and scholarly attention has turned to “poor boys” sympathies. In other words, in fearing the boys sliding down the academic pyramid, we're ignoring the real status of things outside of enrollment figures.

Fear mongering around women's unprecedented enrollment in formal education is alive and well. Exactly one year ago, Canada’s largest national-circulation newspaper (the G&M) published a weeklong series on the “failing boys” problem. Articles included “Failing boys and why we should care,” “The endangered male teacher,” “Are we medicating disorder or treating boyhood as a disease?” “Red-flagged as problem pupils, are boys misunderstood?” “Is affirmative action for men the answer to enrollment woes?” “We can’t tolerate failing boys,” “Are parents to blame [for failing boys]?” “Failing boys: What other countries are doing,” “Designated scholarships overwhelmingly favour women,” and finally, “Are we failing boys?” The series presented a number of concerns regarding the status of boys lagging behind girls in schools, but the overwhelming sentiments were that boys are victims of feminized pedagogies and this presents major concerns for Canadian society.

This moral panic is bewildering when put into context. Since progression to graduate and professional university programs reached gender parity in the 1990s, education theorists have questioned the problem of women’s access (usually measured by enrollment) as a valid measure of progress. In spite of women’s current high enrollment status, women still face issues of equal access to university in terms of field of study, time to degree completion, institution type, level of faculty appointment, pay equity, harassment, and classroom expectations. Further, university classrooms remain masculinist (for example, men tend to speak out more frequently in class and for longer periods, and women professors are expected to take on caring roles as discussion leaders) regardless of women’s dominance in numbers. Women’s increased representation on campuses has not been matched with equal rewards for their accomplishments, even within the Ivory Tower. The further you depart from the Tower, it seems, the worse it gets. Damn. Better stay put.

Today I'm reading the history of the University of Toronto and I'm jolted by how prevalent discourses circulating through women's position in academia in 1880 are still in motion. Women's acceptance into higher education has shifted dramatically, but some undercurrent around the appropriateness of female scholarship remains.

After the adoption of coeducation (in some programs) at U of Toronto in 1884, the "crisis of femininity" carried faculty debates and news stories. Anne Rochon Ford writes, "If women were too 'bluestocking' and serious in their studies, they were often viewed as being not feminine enough. On the other hand, if they were too involved in extracurricular nonacademic activities, they were seen as not taking higher education seriously." 

Have we done away with this sentiment? Of course we've seen empirical shifts in women's status, as well as attitudinal shifts among new generations of women and men. From my man friends, I field "you're too complicated" more often than "the blood in your brain will dry out your ovaries."

But in both the pragmatic and symbolic realms, I sense an undercurrent of femininity crisis. Current debates in the Globe and Mail suggest women are missing their callings as mothers because they've been brainwashed/manipulated/misled by second wave feminism. This biological clock talk is just a subdued version of the 1890 crisis of blood draining from ovaries. Over 100 years have gone by, and intellectualism still plays rival to giving birth.

It's discouraging to think that for all we've progressed, we have not made space in our imaginations or institutions for the feminine intellectual body. Ask an undergraduate student to draw a picture of "a professor" and students across genders draw men in lab coats. Sure, our medical journals no longer question the appropriateness of women's desire for higher learning, but our mainstream media certainly does.

In 1894, a woman student at U of T writes, "The boys reserve the front rows of benches for their sister students who often march down the aisle to the classic strains of 'Where are you going my pretty maid?' or in tones of deepest pathos, 'You are lost and gone forever, oh my darling Clementine.'" As a male friend of mine laughed at the ridiculousness of this, I recalled a moment from my undergrad. I remember my Econ professor telling me that a doctoral  degree is a liability to my financial capital and a swift knock to my social capital. I would graduate "poor, ugly and alone," he said. Hmph. A cocktail of naïvité, determination and pride propelled me forward and perhaps it still does.

As I move to reading about the recent historical situation of women in the Canadian academy, I'm learning that a generation of women professors who seem to "have it all" married their profs when they were graduate students. To me, this is a logical economic model. It's also an acceptable cultural script (aside from temporarily raised eyebrows at the "lecherous professor" among women faculty... which seem to reverse eventually). This tactic by young women is an important signal - women's opportunity still exists in a state of dependency that is not reciprocated by men counterparts.

"I Did It My Way": The Fetishes of Individualism and Parenting Science

Last night I dreamt that Stephen Harper's (imaginary) adult son was on a full overseas flight with me, and he insisted on lying down across 3 chairs. I woke up annoyed. The image of Harper - smiling face, waving hand, poppy on lapel - hopping off to Cannes for the G20 summit is plaguing my sleep!


Global growth is certainly on the tips of international tongues this week, while at home, we're sorting through "toughening up" on the completely non-existent "crime epidemic," sneakily capping immigration applications under the guise of lightening the applicant backlog, and burning government documents. Cue Hitler and Mussolini associations and Christy Clark's ignorant pontificating about babies and bath water.


Underlying the above rhetoric are wild individualism and questions of social responsibility, only intensifying as does our state of environmental crisis. It seems to be increasingly trickling out of colloquial speak as well. At a training clinic on Wednesday, a pack of us ran through Ottawa's Tent City during an Occupy General Assembly. One fellow runner's comments, celebrated by cheers and laughs in the group, were very racist and so irritatingly "I Did It My Way" that I lied and told him I had a tent out there just to shut him up. It served to lessen his cruelty, which was all I could hope for on our one-hour sweatfest. I was surprised at the politics of the bunch of outgoing, athletic professionals. We get along so well.


A friend of mine (friend used loosely) recently argued that attributing causality to problems of social stratification is a classic battle of competing ideologies. I actively listened to his points.


I can't accept this. I think my attitude is how wars happen (oops), but it baffles me when folks wipe clean a 50-year body of literature that demonstrates the impact of dominant cultural repertoires on differential advantages for children and adults. Kids don't cultivate talent or foster cognitive and social skills in black boxes. In this globalized world, how can we deny the impact of institutional infrastructure on our opportunity or lack thereof?


In 1959(1959!!), prominent sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote, "The life of the individual cannot be adequately understood without references to the institutions within which his [sic] biography is enacted." - The Sociological Imagination


It's silly to me that most neoliberal precepts deny our everyday performance within a cloud of in/formal institutions. Post-war/classical liberalism, while individualist/ableist in ethos, at least nodded to structural inequality. I asked to said loose friend, were you born understanding how to impress your date with your wine decanting skills? I think not.


He didn't get it.


I don't situate this line of thought within the broader nature vs. nurture hassle, though this often becomes the misguided endpoint of pub discussion. Mine is not an abstract philosophical consideration of human nature (though I'll go there...). To me, it's a simple and intuitive acknowledgement that we percolate in a kind of bureaucratic tank that enables "upward mobility" alongside "slipping through the cracks." If we can accept this, we can get on to bickering about how to address differential advantages to children - assuming we believe it's problematic.


Illustrating the structural perspective, Annette Lareau and her team at the Uni of Cali intensely observed 12 families (of upper-middle class or working class households) in their homes. They highlight three main ways in which social class affects children's lives: the organizational structure of daily life, language use, and interactions between families and institutions. Their findings are not staggering, but serve to reiterate the perceived value of cultivating a child that, I argue, has coalesced into a moralized science of modern day child rearing with little wiggle room. This science is grounded in neoliberal notions of responsible citizen and choice.


Lareau condenses her findings into two cultural logics of child rearing: "concerted cultivation" versus the "accomplishment of natural growth." In other words, "make sure your child has a sport and an instrument," versus, "make sure your child has enough to eat and graduates high school." Assuming a playing field of substantive inequality, Lareau observes middle class parents maximizing/juggling their child's structured interactions in extra-curriculars while working class parents struggle to put food on the table, clean clothes at the laundromat, and rely on a shoddy transit system to run errands.


I paraphrase the team's condensed findings in this handy little chart (as I self-loathe my impetus to categorize):

Typology of Child-Rearing Approach
	Concerted Cultivation	Accomplishment of Natural Growth
Key Element	Parent actively foster’s kids skills/talents	Parent allows child to grow
Organization of Daily Life	Leisure activities monitored by adults	Lots of “hanging out” with kin
Language Use	Reasoning and negotiations between kid and adults	General acceptance of adult directives by kid
Interventions in Institutions	Questioning of institutional authority by kid (as s/he has been trained to do)	Dependence on institutions, with corresponding sense of powerlessness/frustration/conflict
Consequence	Sense of entitlement	Sense of constraint

I guess the ideal would be to put the punks in piano lessons and swim club and dump them in the middle of the forest for 3 hours of afternoon chaos time. To my chagrin, what generally happens with such findings as the above is co-optation by socially conservative functionalists who interpret them to mean: we must groom our children into the left column to ensure upward social mobility. Admittedly, I'd probably do the same given the evidence. [Interesting aside, the kids on the left also fought with their siblings all the time and used the word "hate" regularly (and often to describe their siblings). The kids on the right laughed more.] 


But then we are complicit in this rewards system. For now, I depart from my insistence upon structural approaches to policy and leave with this question: which is the more ethical parenting style? One that resists systemic discrimination but results in a child's structural disenfranchisement? Or one that allows the child a sense of entitlement to the coffers of the state on the foundational exclusion of other children?


So help me, if I have twins, they're going to be lab rats.

uh uh oh, uuh uh oh uhn uhn

Last week, I was invited to appear on The Agenda with Steve Paikin to discuss "the end of marriage(?)" and "shifting gender power(?) with changing institutional trends(?)"... I have not been more excited since the opening weekend of Spice World. His show is one of the only broadcasts I watch regularly, and this theme runs my life.


We, the panel, were meant to react to Kate Bolick's latest, "All the Single Ladies," from the November issue of the Atlantic. I read the article until I had nearly memorized it, and scribbled all over two hardcopy editions. I have not been that ready since camping in the line of aforementioned film opening.


Also to appear on the panel was Danielle Crittenden, social conservative and anti-feminist journalist from Toronto, now based in Washington. She writes on how feminism is not only unnecessary but evil. Evil. Jeez, I thought I had my work cut out for me. For a taste of just what we're dealing with in Crittenden discourse, check out her vid on "How can I meet the right guy?" According to the book that brought her fame in 2000, feminism has produced confusion (fine), uncertainty (great!) and unhappiness (oh, come on...).


Sadly, as I was planning my jet down to Toronto, the producers cancelled my appearance (with a cryptic message). I have not been this disappointed since May 2nd! So to channel my sadness, I record my reactions to the article below.


I take much issue with the Beyoncé Knowles brand, but damn, her songs are catchy, and she's unquestionably talented. I feel similarly about Kate Bolick. Bolick's All the Single Ladies taps into the pulse of a cohort of women who are now overeducated, single, and unable to live the full awesomeness of the present because they fear the future. I have a number of critiques of how Bolick frames this general trend, but she nails the existence of the new dating desert for a slew of (predominantly white, upper-middle class) women (in Canada and the US). On countless "date-nights," I have sat across from women friends at the Manx and watched as they've nearly thrown their towels into their pints of organic ale while pondering this state of our dating world.


I refuse to participate in categorizing men into "deadbeat" or "player" the way Bolick does (although, according to my dad, I did this with confident poignancy when I came home from Grade 8 one afternoon). There are, of course, millions of men in this world (also, billions of fish in the sea, I'm told), and resetting the battle of the sexes this way is unnecessary. And it's just mean. And depressing...


But the new "dating gap" for those desiring heterosexual monogamy is real. Sociologists observe that when women outnumber men (see college campuses), women demonstrate increased promiscuity and, correspondingly, men are less willing to commit. Overall, net monogamy is low. On the contrary, when there are more available men, women hold more dating capital and net monogamy rises. This gives us an insight into preferred mating patterns that admittedly makes me cringe a little.


Save the complication of essentialist categories (of all of gender, sex and dating/mating style), to me, this makes sense, and imagining alternatives can't include resenting the behaviour of an entire gender (read: men). We're talking simple laws of supply and demand. 


Right?


And now for context. What makes this culturally fascinating is that women have not held this much human capital in the US/Canada since the dawn of the nuclear family (post-modernization, and especially since its intensification post-wwii). So why their social/dating capital so low? And why the assumption that educated women are searching for equally educated men? After all, this is not what men have done historically.


I attribute these trends to the cultural expectation of women's unpaid domestic labour and, at least in part, to the related straying from the Disney daydream to which we've been oriented. Willingness to perform unpaid labour makes women more attractive commodities to men. Sociologists Armstrong & Armstrong hit this home with their book title, Everybody Needs a Wife (which their publisher insisted they change to The Double Ghetto). Straying from cultural norms makes people uneasy, even if their personal and political convictions are intact. For example, family sociologists observe that even among women and men with self-affirmed feminist attitudes, both members of couples report dissatisfaction when women make more money, and these relationships are extremely volatile. Women feel they're under-benefitting and men feel emasculated. The relationship often ends in divorce. Enter the stabilizing phenomenon/stereotype of the attractive young woman with the rich man - these relationships are surprisingly(?) stable.


Well, frack. The idea that higher education makes a woman less desirable to (some) men is daunting. But what does it mean that we're afraid of this? The ability to connect egg with sperm during the fertility window is about as difficult as finding a late-night poutine in a Montreal/Ottawa clubbing district (read: easy). Achieving egg+sperm nuclear family with sperm that's cute, kind and educated (in feminist theory - this seems to determine equity in my relationships), on the other hand, feels like a crapshoot. This is the reality of the dating gap.


So, assuming we're looking for heterosexual nuclear families, we'd better get cut throat? Women of many political convictions have been writing books about what to do about this "mess" for the last several decades. Lower your standards and settle for Mr. Good Enough, says Lori Gottlieb in Marry Him. Have a kick-ass "single" life ("I can't mate in captivity"), says Gloria Steinem. Become a doormat, says Mrs. Crittenden-From.


Bolick offers plenty of alternatives to the nuclear family, including communal living, queer kinship structures and singlehood. I find this part of her article refreshing, as she reminds us that the nuclear family is our invention, and can thus be deconstructed. Where she falls horribly short, though, is in her unchallenged assumption that we participate in an either/or choice when the fertility window comes to a close. We are assumed heterosexual near-mothers, even though she admits at the outset that she does not define womanhood by motherhood. Apparently it's one thing to feel this way and another to be convincing and consistent about it. I empathize. We don't have a ton of language to describe womanhood outside of motherhood and domesticity. I can't think of any. Further, while acknowledging certain class elements of the phenom, Bolick closes without problematizing the notion of choice and who gets to make it - offering us the opportunity to ask questions. What are we so afraid of anyway?

Luxurious Hiatus, and Coming of Age with Avril Lavigne

After the heart-explosion-induced fatigue of last week, I took a 7-day hiatus from my computer. I read books and magazines, listened to the CBC, put ink on paper, ran along the river, visited the art gallery and made things out of pumpkins. Autumn luxury. New kinds of explosions!


Save email backlog, the week was exceedingly fruitful (and not just because of the pumpkin). Brainspace was open to consider themes for my comprehensive exams, and I became intrigued by the idea of a person's transformation into feminist thinking. Many feminist scholars (especially educators) write journalistically about a blurry time when they were becoming aware of themselves in an unjust world order. It's described as birthing or paradigm shifting, awakening, etc. The concepts of "process" and "becoming" and "embodiment" (of such processes) are big in feminist theory, and I can appreciate why. I can't recall how I thought before I had language to critique sexism.


Returning to my writing as a child, it seems I've always felt something about gender (journalling about not wanting to sign my name as the author of assignments as early as age 8 because I didn't want the teacher to know it was written by a girl). But I don't remember what it felt like to be me before I had words to articulate feminism. Do any of you? As Dorothy Smith remarks on her solidification of feminist identity, "I don't know who I was before I was Dorothy Smith."


The transformation is the fascinating thing about Women's/Gender and Feminist Studies as a (non)discipline. The goal to transform is overt, causing closet positivists to cluck their tongues at such biased theorizing. I'm so far gone into the vitality of feminism that I take the opposite stance - what better climate for theorizing than one where people wear their biases on their sleeves? It's forthcoming and rigorous in the deepest sense of the words. 


In keeping with my obsession with event-ness, I'm interested in pulling apart transitional moments that write feminism onto our brains/hearts. My perusal of psychology texts leads me to believe that these events are usually traumatic and usually related to the body. Like most women, I remember every single comment anyone has ever made about my body and every way my body has been touched, and I return only to the painful ones. My two jarring feminist turning points have to do with my bum. I return to them now to highlight how pivotal moments haunt us.


When I was 16, Avril Lavigne, Pink, Gwen Stefani and "dirrty" Xtina ruled the dance floor. At a college party, one of my then-boyfriend's older brother's friends commented on my baggy jeans: "What a waste those jeans are. You might actually have a nice ass under there." I was horrified and subsequently thought, why would I waste it? Why would I waste the opportunity to provide visual pleasure to a man? I don't think I wore a pair of jeans I could breathe in for 5 years after that. I literally thought to myself, there's a reason Britney is more popular than my fave rockstars combined.


When I was 18, a boyfriend commented on my running gear: "I usually like your fashion, but those pants don't do anything for your backside." The next time I wore those pants (on a run), I was dating someone else. I told him what my ex had said about the pants, expecting him to scoff in disbelief. Instead he said, "Well, I kind of agree. They make your bum look weird."


And these guys are nice humans.


I draw on these scars to reflect on how haunting is feminist transformation. Yesterday I pulled the pants out - hardly worn Nike dryfit cropped running tights, a gift from my grandmother for running in the rain - for morning training. I felt so uncomfortable in them, I stuck to the back of the pack so nobody could look at me. I took them off as soon as I got home, not able to stand the feel of them on my body alone in my apartment. I'm an object, even in my own eyes.


As I was tidying up, I thought I should just get rid of the pants like I did the Avril Lavigne jeans, but I'm keeping the haunted things. I pull sadness and anger out of them when I wonder about transformation and putting ghosts to good use.


Last Saturday, I had the pleasure of having afternoon tea with an elderly woman who has just been diagnosed with cancer. Ontario-born, world-traveller, never married, and drawn to the West Coast, this woman reminds me of my ultimate idol, Joni Mitchell. She wears fleece and thick wool socks. I felt myself relax around her as we talked about bohemian afternoons, relationships, orientations to ocean, the mossy dampness of Vancouver Island, marijuana, puppies, and what it means to face elderly life as a single person. She inquired about my current life stage. Our conversation went like this:


Me: "So in this phase of reading books, I feel like I'm being shaped and reshaped."
Suzie: "My stage of life is similar."
Me: "You mean... you feel like you're in transition?"
Suzie: "I'm always in transition."
Me: "Hmm... wow..."
Suzie: "All my life, in transition. Amanda, that's all there is."


Incredible. She leaned forward and stared right at me when she tossed up, "That's all there is," so matter-of-factly. We talked about our fears of self-betrayal, of living in contradiction, of feeling socially unaccepted at times, of constant pupation. Fantastic. This woman and the pants are my opportunity to think things through. And get ready, friends, because I'm about to ask you about yours :)

there's battle lines being drawn

We are in wild times. I spent this day listening, reading, writing and occupying and I nearly lost my mind. I cried in public, snapped at a stranger, ate half a jar of peanut butter and considered taking up smoking. I think I'm about done for the week.


To set the stage and hopefully make a point about Occupy Wall Street, my crazed mood is a conflation of the following variables. I woke up to Michele Bachmann's voice blaring out of my alarm clock. She was slamming Obama for putting the United States "in Libya" and now "in Africa." Holy geography blunder. She went on to demand that the United States hold countries like Iraq and Libya accountable for paying back what has been donated to them in foreign aid. Whaaa?


Following the morning news, I listened to a panel of the "1%" discuss the Occupy movement on the Current. Tremonti, try as she may, couldn't tame two of the men from spewing harmful neoliberal crap about how banks get a bad rap and activists had "better be careful" because "redistribution of wealth is bad for the economy." This threatening language went utterly unchecked. Terry Campbell, President of the Canadian Bankers Association, called the occupy protests a "random," "amusing," "naively misdirected" "waste of time." Campbell defended Jimmy Pattison for building his empire "from scratch" because he "made choices" and therefore shouldn't be "punished" for being rich. 


I expected a better takedown from Canadian media. The show ended with no critical stance, having only quoted one poorly constructed sentence from one protester. It made occupiers look like bored children, "straight out of Sherwood forest." I was disgusted.


After some work, I went to read at Ottawa's Tent City. I happened to be approached by a very misogynist occupier who is not representative of the 99%. He explicitly harassed me and several other women passersby. I tried not to become emotionally invested in his comments, but when he called out "you're just a woman with a small brain," I walked away in tears. What to do about this? Does an inclusive movement exile people?


I am trying to do some writing endorsing the Occupy movement and reflecting on what I perceive to be its major challenges (like true social engagement, as so far in Ottawa, it's a white man's class war, and the group needs to become more representative to be legitimated as the 99%). I'll save that for another day. What I argue here is that the aforementioned issues - reflective of colonialism, racism, classism, ableism and sexism - are collectively what "we" are fighting against, whoever "we" may be. Yeah, there's something happening here.

riff raff on events - a subjunctive mood

RACEDAY. I'm bundled on my balcony watching the sunrise as I hydrate. It's a good life. As I try to keep calm and read race strategies, I'm thinking on how I psych myself out. I don't want to think about it too much, though, lest it stop working!

This week I had the pleasure of giving a talk at U of Toronto on Events. It was a remarkably interdisciplinary panel with projects from Women's Studies (a discipline of non-disciplinarity), Geography and Forestry. I thought "events" a timely topic as Occupy movements sweep major cities across the world this weekend, especially as two of us discussed the media's role in shaping our reception of events as such. As the chair made reference to in his introductory comments, it's funny to have an event on events. Look how funny we are.

I was stimulated by both panelists, particularly by David Roberts' talk on what he terms "made-for TV planning," the "politics of urban knowledge creation." For his dissertation, he went to South Africa during the world cup (COOL. Why didn't I pick a topic that involves beaches?) to write on urban life versus television coverage of the event. I was biased toward his theorizing, which added to how super impressed I was. For most of us, the myth of neutrality of journalism has long been debunked. I think of journalism as possibly the most overtly political discursive construction available. But after a few days, on this raceday morn, David's talk has me thinking beyond the media construction of the events that are imagined for us (via boosterism, selected images, etc.) to the events we create for ourselves. Events on events. What's the difference?

On the event of the talk, for example, I prepared by making some notes on what I wanted to say, and then reading it in my head as I bounced about town with coffee in tow. I didn't do much that day except live in my imagination. The hour prior to the talk, I sat down with a large water and timed my head-reading. Then I had an apple. Then I talked. Headrush. After I had a beer. Done.

But then people in my life asked me how it went. Well, to communicate this and to make some sense of it for myself, I created a snapshot of what happened - some talking points - and relayed them as honestly as possible. "It went well. I was more nervous than I thought I'd be, but the words still came out. And rich discussion followed, so I felt satisfied. It probably went okay." But truthfully I don't remember how I felt about it. I barely remember what I said.

I remember feeling relaxed in the room prior to the event of speaking. The space wasn't very big and attendees could fit around a large boardroom table. In my imagination, I had pictured something like this, and had thus envisioned myself delivering the talk from seated position. But I was the last speaker of three and the others stood, so I when I got to the podium to arrange my powerpoint, I made a game-day decision to stand. Psych! As I rolled through my introductory statements, I felt myself becoming increasingly nervous. I was put off by this, which made it worse. I think I may have stopped breathing mid-sentence at some point. I may have almost died.

I'm recording this to consider the ways in which we distance ourselves from meaningful engagement with our human experiences. This is an old idea in memory work, but I ask, what is lost? Might there be something important to install about my nervousness in the room? About the pressure to stand? Politics of the people around me? Whatever? As I argue for consideration of sociopolitical context surrounding global events so that we might install richer historical narratives, I wonder what can be done to reflect on positionality in the mini-events of everyday life.

On this note, I go to a running event. I will panic when you ask me how it went.

magnificent anonymity: small comment on urban life

I'm in Toronto, blogging on the subway. This is awesome.

This week I’m staying with my now-ex-roommate and surrogate sibling, Ian, at the condo he and his girlfriend moved to just a few weeks ago. It’s up on Finch, which, to my surprise, still feels like a city. Save wider intersections and a noticeable proliferation of car culture, the sidewalks are still full of people, the subway goes here, and Korean food is open late. Toronto is big.

Contrary to the cold, hard, individualist reputation of big cities (usually promulgated by people who haven’t lived in them), I now find Toronto familiar and friendly. In fact, urban life here feels even homier to me than does small-place life. Avoiding becoming a combatant in the sustained urban versus rural conflict (or the Vancouver versus Toronto one!), I think there’s something about the anonymity and energy of folks in big cities that sparks rich interactions rarely found in smaller (maybe medium-sized?) places.

Tuesday I was sitting at the Green Beanery, bustling in the student hub of the Annex, when an older woman with a globe and mail tucked under her arm stopped by the table of two young women where one woman was trying to breast feed a seemingly perturbed baby. “Tickle the jaw,” she said, “sometimes it helps.” The women giggled over the fussing infant. I loved this. Advice from one mother to another, passed along orally in the local (fair trade, organic) café. Frack, public space is so important (even though cafes are technically privately owned, this is as close as we get on this city block).

Yesterday I was on the phone with a friend when a guy next to me overheard me saying I’m feeling munchy. While I was still on the phone, he reached over and offered me some dried cranberries. I don’t even like cranberries, but this gesture made me so happy!

Now on my way to the RCM atrium to spend a rainy day reading/gawking at the boots and piercings of music students. It’s my fave place in the world to hang out and pretend to be someone else (and visualize what my life may have been had a made a few different turns). I wish I had my flute case to set on the table so someone might talk to me about Verdi. Wishing everyone great chance encounters. Share an umbrella with a stranger!