New Depths of Shallowness

Post-dated, March 26th.

Today I'm looking in/north at the Ottawa bubble from my sunny perch in Los Angeles. One observation brought to me by my hotel: USA Today is a different national paper than the Globe and Mail, that's for sure. It makes me more proud of our daily circulator than usual. 

Anyway, down to more cynical observations. As world leaders exchange sound bites about providing aid to Libyans, it’s time we took care of our own shallow democracy. In the midst of all of this parliamentary scandal and grotesque campaigning (did anyone see Harper singing/butchering Imagine? "And no religion too," my ass. Cue John Lennon throwing hissy fit in grave), we need to organize as activists around what is unethical. Shout-out here to the Slutwalk Ottawa taking place on April 10th, 2pm, Minto Park. 

This week I've been working on a literature review for my work on the status of women in Canadian universities. When I think about all of the ways cultural imperialism is trickling out of our nationalist discourses, I get disillusioned about using gender as a primary category or object of analysis in this work (especially about looking at the race/class/blue-eyed privileged subsection of Canadian women who take doctoral studies). How can we isolate gender in such a racist political climate? When I was 21 or so, a professor who I didn’t like very much was teaching a course I really didn’t like, and she prescribed Iris Marion Young’s “Lived body versus gender.” Looking back, I was too hard on this course material. I love it now.

Young (2002) illustrates how the idea of the lived body is appealing because it precludes an additive visualization of oppression ([woman] gender + [black] race + [queer] sexuality = triply oppressed) and blurs the lines between individual and group, implying the process of negotiating ourselves alongside and against our neighbours. In this imagining, bodies are arranged differentially according to capacities and desires, not according to definable and shared circumstances based on an arbitrary social category.

But she also says that we need to keep gender around to understand why and how women are more likely than men to be poor, and more likely to suffer violence and disease. No matter how we theorize, there’s real gendered stuff going on: see, the sexual division of labour, normative heterosexuality, a global culture of militarism (hyper-masculinism). I’m glad Young makes this point so clearly. Of course this appeals to me, as it provides some sick justification for my insistence upon studying “women” in my dissertation, not to mention I am preoccupied with questions of fertility, which conceptually link gender to sex. I’ll be the first to negate claims of a shared womanhood, but we may as well salvage gender as a category so long as it is imbedded in structural inequality. I’ll try to remind myself of this.

Back to it! Wishing students and professors everywhere the best of luck during this April crunch time! Excited to come up for air with some of you in a couple of weeks :)