Happy International Women's Day

March 8 is my favourite day of the year. I treat it like a holiday. This morning, I relished in a long shower, picked out a magnificent blouse, baked myself a single cookie, and took a rainy stroll to my familiar cafe for an Americano, which I now savour. 

International Women's Day is one of those exceptional events that is marked by humans all over the globe. Spawned out of socialist movements in the US and Western Europe, it spread quickly to Russia and the UN and is now a recognized holiday in places of which we Canadians may have a narrow perception: Afghanistan, Cambodia, China, Eritrea, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Russia, Uganda, and several others.

But like any rip in time, the "celebration," as March 8 is touted, is a charged one. For me, it is for reflexivity, celebration and mourning. While I swirl in the luxuries of my privileged class and race position, I take up the emotionality that fuels my work and relationships. For one day, my unique power and disenfranchisement are of central focus.

During our celebrations here in Canada, I'm cautious of the slippery slope of universalizing language, and frightened by the potential for turning inward to eclipse the unliveability of many women's lives. It is a peculiar sensation to be all of joyful, grateful, enraged, and sad, while women and girls will lose their lives today because of their gender.

Strange as well is the way I feel contrastingly about my position as a Canadian woman under Harper's majority government. C10, C30, the baiting of citizens as enemies of the state (foreign radicals, child pornographers), the robo-call scandal, and a particular set of budget cuts suggest a new regime under which women's rights stand to be undermined. Our rights have been won and can be lost, and many of "us" over here on this putative liberated continent would like to see women's rights kicked back a notch (see Sandra Fluke is a slut).

The release of the Kony 2012 video at the beginning of this week is remarkably apropos for reflecting on our relation to our own and "Other" issues. There is much to say on both the video and its reception, but for now I treat it as an opportunity for us to be critical of our own sense of universal ethics. To recognize the video as a progressive tribute to human rights is to be normal and safe. To be critical of the Kony 2012 campaign, we dare for our thoughts of moral behaviour to be far away from our familiar sense of ethics. At the risk of sounding critical for the sake of critical thought, what is endangered by international campaigns like Kony 2012 and IWD?

Moral philosophers (Adorno, Butler) point that our collective ethos is invariably conservative, and only once an idealization (a sense of nationalism, for example) loses its credibility can we stimulate conversations about nonviolent behaviour. Flipping this idea around, universal ethics are violent in that they only become known as enforced as "universal" when they are challenged. We can think about burgeoning resistance to our government of the day in this light: we moved along without climate justice in our frontal lobes until someone called us radicals, and now moral behaviour and what is "Canadian" is called into question. Adorno's account is useful for today's commemoration, as we consider how in our focus on "women" as a category, we are both solidifying and dissolving problematic narratives, as well as experimenting with moral behaviour.

And now I'm putting Adorno in one pocket and pop music and butterflies in the other, to stay alive in critical thought and full of determination. Happy International Women's Day!

Exams! Exams, exams, exams!

I’m in the middle of writing my doctoral comprehensive exams. In the email carrying the exam questions, my supervisor advised, “Enjoy this time. It won’t come again.”

So I will blog.

I’ve woken to memorable nightmares the last three early mornings: being caught breaking and entering, monster truck and jeep road accidents complete with human limbs busting through engines, and piles of perpetually rotten salmon. I’ve also been waking to thoughts of how to phrase particular sentences, how to structure essays, and how to invoke certain theorists to build new arguments (book-ended, of course, with, ‘Brilliant! I should write this down! No I will remember it. No, I should really write this down… I… hmmph… *snore...’).

While I’ve been tramping through the snowy Ottawa days with devil-may-care swagger, my psyche is punishing my suppression of stress with restless nights. I am well acquainted with this kind of stress; it is nestled in intellectual insecurity and reveals itself when I need to produce something. In brutally honest self-reflection, I ask the familiar question during these stressful times: “Who am I to assert my opinion on any given topic?” Damn, femininity. I curse you.

Heeding my supervisor’s wisdom, I will try to feel fortunate to be participating in this phase of study. I likely won’t have the luxury to sit at this blessed laptop and write without interruptions for a long time, if ever again. And, save images of rotting salmon and chopped up legs in fan belts, as I get into synthesizing material with the main aim of impressing the pants off of my knowledgeable committee members, I’m starting to feel like an expert of a tiny body of literature. This is a nice change for me, as my usual experience is fraught with “the more I know, the less I know” anxiety, which tends to be detrimental to my feeling of productivity and overall sense of wellbeing.

This may not be the merriest chapter of my degree, but I vow to skate on the canal, bake ravioli, snowshoe, see live music and visit my friends. I will preside over exam stress with levity and grace. 

Just don’t talk to me for a month. ;)

"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.