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.