Thinking About Sandra Bland

I’ve heard the official report that Sandra Bland committed suicide.  As I struggled in disbelief with

this report, Ntozake Shange’s  choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide/When the 

Rainbow is Enuf” crept into my consciousness.  I saw Shange’s theater piece almost 40 years ago, moved deeply by her stories of seven African-American women who tell their stories of struggle and sorrow in a racist and sexist society.  The women keep on going because they find the rainbow by finding each other, by telling each other their stories and by discovering what they have been looking for within themselves. 

                What I know of Sandra Bland, I know from the news. What I know of her struggle and sorrow in a racist and sexist society, I know from the dashcam video. What I know of racism and sexism tells me that even if she did take her own life, it was not without provocation, threat, and menace.  Isolated, silenced, and in peril, the rainbow was not enough for Sandra Bland.

Addendum:
After I posted the above blog on July 24, 2015, I added a comment on facebook and am now adding here:
My words above do not clearly express that I believe Sandra Bland was murdered even if she took her own life. The history of African-American women and men dying when in police custody and the menace of the police officer seen/heard in the dashcam video are homocidal/genocidal.

  

She’s blonde, beautiful, and carries a GLOCK

“She’s my ideal woman—blonde, beautiful, and carries a GLOCK.” I almost sprayed my just-sipped iced tea over the table. I was at a meeting with a man who wanted self-defense courses in his community, especially for college women. 

I was reminded of that moment when I read the recent New York Times article “A Bid for Guns on Campuses to Deter Rape.”[1]  Lawmakers in ten states—Florida, Indiana, Montana, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming –have introduced bills to allow guns on a campus to stop sexual assault. Sponsor of the Nevada bill, Assemblywoman Michele Fiore said: “If these young, hot little girls on campus have a firearm, I wonder how many men will want to assault them.” (Schwartz 2015).  

For the moment, let’s set aside the blonde, beautiful, young, and hot remarks and focus on the argument that arming women is the way to stop sexual assault on campus. Jennifer Carlson (2014) says that confusing self-defense with gun defense limits women’s options, implies that “women must choose armed self-protection or no self-protection at all.”[2]

Imagine how different the conversation might be if instead of a focus on guns, it was on empowerment-based self-defense. What if the NY Times headline was: “A Bid for Empowerment-Based Self-Defense on Campuses to Deter Rape.” Imagine if being blonde, beautiful, young, and hot were not criteria for social protection or social vilification. What if the priority in legislation and news coverage was on empowerment-based self-defense programs built upon the idea that regardless of  age, gender, disability, race, sexual orientation, and social class people have the right to bodily integrity and the right to make decisions about how their own bodies are treated.

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[1] Alan Schwartz. 2015. “A Bid for Guns on Campuses to Deter Rape.” The New York Times. February 18. Retrieved February 19, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/us/in-bid-to-allow-guns-on-campus-weapons-are-linked-to-fighting-sexual-assault.html?ref=todayspaper

[2] Jennifer D. Carlson. 2014. “From Gun Politics to Self-Defense Politics: A Feminist Critique of the Great Gun Debate.” Violence Against Women 20 (3): 369-377.

Apparently, there is no age limit on street harassment

I remember the very first time I experienced street harassment.[1] I was 12 years old and attempting to do cartwheels on the front lawn of my grandmother’s house. With abandon and a lack of self-consciousness, I focused on getting my legs high in the air. A man in a passing truck whistled loudly and yelled at me. I did not understand the words he yelled, but understood that he had seen me in a way that I did not see myself.

                Here it is more than 50 years later and I just experienced street harassment.  This morning I left my car at a body shop a couple of blocks from my house and at 4:50, I was walking briskly to make it to the shop before they closed at 5 pm. A man driving by yelled at me, “Grandma!”  -amazing how much contempt his tone conveyed in shouting that one word.

                Although I have experienced street harassment over the years, what struck me today was the similarity with my first experience over 50 years ago. In both cases, I was fully and unself-consciously in my body, taking up my space with a clear purpose in mind. In both cases, I was acting without consideration for another’s gaze or judgment.  Although I imagine that neither harasser could articulate his motivation for yelling at a stranger, I think that the glimpse of a girl/woman fully claiming her body without consideration of how she was seen by others rattled their gender binary cages.

               

               

                 

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[1] Stop Street Harassment defines such harassment as “any action or comment between strangers in public places that is disrespectful, unwelcome, threatening and/or harassing and is motivated by gender or sexual orientation or gender expression.  Street harassment is a human rights issue because it limits women’s ability to be in public as often or as comfortably as most men.”  For more, check out http://www.stopstreetharassment.org/

Philomena: Victims and Villains

Spoiler Alert: I include details about the film Philomena. 

I just saw the Oscar-nominated film Philomena, the story of an Irish woman’s search for the son she had in 1952 as an unmarried teen. Disowned and abandoned by her family when her aunt realized Philomena was pregnant, she gave birth in Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea. In exchange for being taken in, Philomena was forced to sign adoption papers and to be an indentured servant in the Abbey for four years to pay off her debt. For three of those years, she saw her son every day in the children’s rooms at the Abbey. One day, without any opportunity for her to say goodbye, a man and a woman arrived and took her son.

For fifty years, the nuns of Sean Ross Abbey thwarted Philomena’s repeated efforts to find her son.  With the help of a journalist, Philomena eventually located him. Adopted by Americans, he grew up to become the chief legal counsel for the Republican National Committee during the senior Bush administration. He died from AIDS before Philomena learned who he was. Judi Dench is outstanding as Philomena as is Steve Coogan as Martin Sixsmith, the journalist who took on this “human interest” story when he was retooling himself after losing his job in the Blair administration.

The major villains in the film are the nuns of Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea. Most of them display little compassion for the children or for the mothers as teens or adults. Martin heard local gossip that the Abbey enriched its coffers by selling the children to wealthy Americans. This gossip provided an avenue of investigation for Philomena and Martin. When confronted about the obstacles the Abbey erected, an elderly nun passionately justified the cruelty toward the teen mothers, the forced adoptions, and the refusal to aid mothers and children in reuniting as the girls’ penance for their wanton expression of sexuality. 

If only the victimization of unwed teen mothers and their children was limited to Ireland, nuns, and the 1950s. By the time I was 15, I somehow already “knew” that getting pregnant was the ruin of a girl’s reputation along with her dreams.  That was the in US, in a predominately Protestant community, and in the early 1960s. I had heard whispers of “shotgun weddings” and of pregnant girls who were sent away to have babies and then forced to give them up for adoption.  According to the National Vital Statistics Report, prior to 1973, 20% of US babies born to unmarried white women were put up for adoption (less than 3 % by the mid-1980s).  Ann Fessler (2006) in The Girls Who Went Away documents the experiences of unmarried white girls encouraged to give away their babies and who social workers told they would forget. Like Philomena, none of the girls ever forgot.

As portrayed in the film, the sisters of Sean Ross Abbey were responsible for the forced adoptions, indentured servitude, and thwarting the efforts of mothers and children to find each other.  But, there is no way that the nuns were solely responsible for the hardships the girls and their children faced.  The lack of power invested in nuns and the scrutiny of their behavior means that the church hierarchy was complicit. Philomena’s family disowned her and abandoned her at the Abbey. I am certain that a driving force was the family’s fear of local gossip. I grew up in a small town where any stepping outside of the “lines” was fair game for gossip and teasing for decades after, so the threat of gossip kept many people secretive, silent, and conforming.  How ironic that girls who had taken no vows of chastity were held to higher standards of sexual conduct than priests who abused young people in their charge.

The possibility of being targets of gossip probably also affected those who adopted children. In the 1950s in the US, there was enormous pressure for adults to be “normal”--heterosexual, coupled, and parents.  I am not surprised that wealthy American heterosexual couples who were infertile would turn to adoption within and outside the US.  Surely also accountable were medical and scientific institutions for failing to develop safe and effective contraceptives and religious and governmental prohibitions against contraception and abortion.  

No institution—family, schools, or religion--provided effective sex education, resulting in many girls (e.g. Philomena) having no idea how sex and pregnancy were linked and denying them the opportunity to make informed choices about sex or pregnancy. More common was vague information about the relationship between sex and pregnancy that was incomprehensible to anyone who did not already have some understanding of the relationship. For instance, I recall my mother telling me: “Never let a boy touch you.” The “movie” that ran in my mind was being caught on the barbed wired fence at my Aunt Mary and Uncle Leslie’s farm,  having to decline help from a neighbor’s son, and waiting helplessly for someone other than a boy to come by to help extract me from the barbed-wire.

Philomena is a powerful story of the ways that institutions shape individuals’ lives and simultaneously portrays ways that individuals resist mistreatment and push for a say in their own lives.  Philomena expressed no regrets for the pleasures of her first sexual experience and chose to focus on love, not hate. Philomena reminded me of all who experience restrictive and unforgiving ideas about gender and sexuality—a commonality across decades between unwed teen Philomena and her in-the-closet son and shared with millions of people today.  The film also reminded me of the problem with pointing fingers—even if pointed in the right direction, our fingers are too short to reach the depths of responsibility and too few to identify all the culprits.

References

Fessler, Ann. 2007. The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade. NY: Penguin.

Ventura, Stephanie J. and Christine A. Bachrach. 2000. Nonmarital childbearing in the United States, 1940-99. National Vital Statistics Reports 48 (16): 1-40.

In Transition

I haven’t written anything for this blog since a couple of weeks before my mother died in May 2012.  I’ve done lots of other writing, but haven’t returned to this blog. I think I got stuck because I thought I should say something about my mother’s life before I started posting blogs again, but I haven’t wanted to use this forum in that way. But, I decided to get started with this blog again by writing one thing about my mother.

Trees in Transition

View from our kitchen window

One of the things I experienced in my conversations with my mom is that she seldom asked questions about my life or my thoughts. She was more interested in hearing about what was happening in my garden (The crocus came up earlier than usual), the park (We saw a fox when out on an evening walk), or incidents as I went about my day (while 25 people waited in line at the post office, several workers walked around but only one station was open). 

While there were times that I expressed frustration that my mother and I only made “small talk,” I’ve realized since she died that I miss those conversations. I see so many things in a given day that I would have enjoyed telling her and that she would have enjoyed hearing [for example the trees in transition in the above photo].

I’ve come to realize that my mother was very interested in my observations which heightened my mindfulness of the environment in which I live—an environment and life always in transition.

Can a Flawed Fictional Relationship Enhance a Real Relationship

I saw Five-Year Engagement last night. We recently saw Emily Blunt in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and were re-watching Freaks and Geeks with Jason Segel, so it seemed like a good choice for a rainy Sunday evening. Spoiler alert in the rest of the blog.

Premise
The premise is that Violet (Emily Blunt) and Tom (Jason Segel) keep postponing their marriage because of one thing after another, but they end up getting married after a five-year engagement.

Synopsis
Violet and Tom meet on New Year’s Eve and one year later are engaged. Violet aspires to be a college professor and Jason a chef. Jason is a sou-chef at a San Francisco restaurant when Violet is offered a two year post-doc at University of Michigan. He says he will follow her. He turns down a head-chef position at a new restaurant in San Francisco and takes a job at a local deli in Ann Arbor. Tom is unhappy, but assumes it is only a 2 year stint. Then Violet gets an extension on her postdoc with a potential assistant professorship down the road. Along with indiscretions with other people, their relationship becomes strained and Tom returns to San Francisco and Violet stays in Michigan. They eventually get back together to the delight of family and friends and finally get married.

Too Long
As we left the theater, I was certain the movie was 2 ½ hours long and that about an hour could have been cut. I was surprised to find out later that it was only 2 hours long! I think it felt so long because it was so wrong.


So Wrong
There were so many things wrong with how the movie portrayed two-career couples, academics, and science. For instance,

• Violet applies for a postdoc in another part of the country without discussing it in advance with Tom.
In past decades men made career plans without discussing them with their families who were then expected to adapt their plans, but a two-career couple in 2012? Violet and Tom had aspirations, but apparently never discussed the particulars with each other. Violet applied for a post-doc at the University of Michigan without discussing what it would mean for her, for Tom, and for their relationship. She waited to bring it up with him after she got the post-doc. Two-career couples talk about their career paths in advance and work together to lay the groundwork for both to have successful careers.

• Violet receives notice of her postdoc via snail mail in a large envelope with the University of Michigan logo. No phone interview? No on-campus interview? No email exchange? Nothing until the acceptance letter shows up? In 2012, email and other electronic communications are commonly used for communicating with people about a position and alerting people to academic awards. It is highly unlikely that anyone, anywhere gets a postdoc without screening, conversation, and email exchanges.

• In another scene, Violet stands patiently while her supervising professor reads an article (at least 25 pages) she had written! What academic has the time to stand while someone else is reading your work? Who has the time to read an entire article while the author waits for your remarks? This is NOT how effective academics seek or receive feedback. Drafts are sent in email attachments. Unless you are part of a face-to-face writing group, then most likely a person receives feedback via email. Even if a person dropped off a hard copy draft (in 2012?), an effective academic would not stand around while someone else read their draft.

• Without any agreed upon procedures or practice, Violet improvises her instructions to the subjects of the experiment. Further, she states the results of her research in absolutes and makes broad generalizations. Given that the principal investigator and his three doctoral students (including Violet) are all present to observe an experiment, it is hard to believe that they would (1) expend all these people resources by all being present and (2) would wait until the last minute to decide who is going to introduce the experiment to the subjects and not have an agreed-upon script. When Violet mentions the results, she states absolutes without qualifications or nuance. Her absolute statements about her data become one of the reasons she steps back from her relationship with Tom. So not only does she speak in absolutes, but also incorrectly generalizes from a group response to Tom. In experimental research, procedures are carefully planned and results are stated in relative terms; procedures are not developed haphazardly or spontaneously.

If you want to see the film, I recommend renting it so you can watch a scene, stop the DVD, and then discuss relationship issues raised by the scene. For instance,

1. When Violet tells Tom that she was turned down for a post-doc position at Berkeley, have a discussion about your dreams. Discuss what will help you reach them? What changes might this entail in your relationship? How you could you support each other in attaining your dreams?

2. When Violet learns that she has been offered a post-doc at University of Michigan and waits for Tom to come home to break the news to him, discuss how you prefer to get difficult news. Discuss strategies for how to problem-solve together if either of you were to get difficult news that would deeply affect your relationship.

3. When Violet stands patiently waiting for her supervising professor to read her paper, ask each other about ways that you waste time that is not productive, energizing, or rewarding (like standing around waiting for someone to finish reading something)? If there are those things in your lives, then discuss whether or not there are ways to eliminate those energy drainers. If they can’t be eliminated, then discuss how you could experience that time in a positive, energizing way.

Just some thoughts about how to make a flawed fictional relationship work to enhance a real relationship. Another option is to skip the film altogether and just talk.

I Am A Feminist Sociologist

In 1991, at a Midwest Sociologists for Women in Society (MSWS) panel on careers for women in sociology, I talked about “Redefining Success as a Feminist Academic.” Today, 20 years later I am on another MSWS career panel Career Stages: Issues and Transitions, with my focus on retirement.

From 1977-2006, I was a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Northeastern Illinois University. Beginning in 1988, I started teaching self-defense and also took on leadership for IMPACT Chicago. Since I retired from Northeastern in 2006, I have continued as the director of IMPACT Chicago and am still teaching self-defense. I have also had the opportunity to teach a graduate course once a year at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) preparing graduate students to teach their first sociology course (Colloquium on the College Teaching of Sociology) and co-authored a gender studies textbook with Michael Armato Investigating Gender: Developing a Feminist Sociological Imagination. Just as my life while I was a professor had many layers and complexities not neatly covered by my title, so is retirement multi-layered and complex. The label “retired” does not have much meaning beyond I am no longer employed full-time.

When reflecting on retirement as a career stage, I decided to return to the points I made 20 years ago when I was mid-career as a way to share my thoughts about retirement. This decision has come from my realization that what was success for me as a feminist academic is also success for me as a retired feminist academic.

We are more than our jobs.
No matter how wonderful and rewarding our jobs might be, we are more than those jobs. We need to have lives and interests beyond those jobs even while we devote ourselves to our work. This approach to life becomes very important when you are in a situation where you have retired and now have no job, but also if you are suddenly unemployed or have a job that you do not enjoy. The consistent thread for me is that I am a feminist sociologist; this identity is not tied to the particular job I have but to my life-long commitments and interests.

Life is a Process
When I started graduate studies in sociology, sociology was a male-dominated field and I, like many other female colleagues, had to navigate often hostile territory. Being hired in a feminist-friendly department like Northeastern did not protect me from challenges with the university and colleagues in other departments about how to carve out a feminist academic career. As chairs, deans, and college presidents came and went, I was constantly negotiating how to implement my commitment to being a feminist sociologist.

Figuring out how to be a feminist sociologist continues to be a process even after retirement. After all, most people expect retirement to mean that you give up the work you did when you were employed. I am no longer a professor but I’m still a feminist sociologist, so teaching, research, and service are still something I continue to do although I recognize that how I continue to engage as a feminist sociologist will change as aging continues.

Carpe Diem—an important part of this process is to seize the day because it is important for this very moment that you live your life to the fullest and in the way you want to be living. But ironically seizing this moment also means that you are creating pathways right now for your future. Your future is not something that just happens at some magical point, so make efforts to create paths that are taking you in the direction you want to go.

Take risks
Twenty years ago, I urged my peers not to get stuck in teaching and writing about the same things but to take risks by stepping into new areas of study, develop new courses, attend conferences, shake things up. Taking risks continues to be important in retirement. Given our financial and health circumstances, what is a risk for one of us may not be for another, but find a way to try new things, meet new people, and to step outside of your comfort zone.

Engage in collective action for social justice
Finding time for engagement in collective action for social justice is always a challenge but I needed that engagement throughout my career, no matter how small my engagement was, to feel like a feminist sociologist. As feminist sociologists, we have so much to offer and so much to gain by engaging in collective action for social justice. Retirement does not change what we have to give or gain.

In short, retirement is not an end nor a beginning but another direction and opportunity to be a feminist sociologist.