Via American Prospect: Barry Gewen, preview editor for the New York Times Book Review, said that the reason there are so few women reviewers is that apparently women are unable to write for general audiences on certain topics—military history is one that Gewen gave, but I suspect there existed latent and unspoken others in his mind. The Harvard Crimson has an article about the lecture in which Gewen said this (it took place at Radcliffe). Money quote:

A longtime editor at The New York Times Book Review said yesterday that his publication isn’t “doing the outreach they should” in order to recruit more women and minorities to the staff.

But preview editor Barry Gewen, who gave a talk at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, said he didn’t want to pursue potential staffers strictly for diversity’s sake.

“Looking for reviewers of a certain ethnicity simply because of an ethnicity makes me a little squeamish,” Gewen, a 17-year veteran of the Book Review, said.

Gewen has since apologized for these unfortunate comments and described it as a “Larry Summers moment”. What is amazing me, however, is not that he said it at all, but that someone in his position might still be clinging, however tenuously, to the silly and outdated notion that particular people simply can’t reach general audiences because of their identities. Do men really have nothing to learn from a woman author? Or vice versa? Or white people from black authors? What is a “general audience” anyway?

Frequently, when this kind of disgraceful statement is made, there’s a lot of furious backpedaling and “I didn’t mean it” and “I was taken out of context”. If that happens in this case—as it seems to be doing—it will represent yet another instance of a man in a position of intellectual power trying to protect that power from the evil interlopers that are somehow Not Like Him. This is, of course, morally and ethically reprehensible. Write to the NYTRB and demand that they disassociate themselves from Gewen’s remarks. Or better yet—especially if you’re a woman—become a book reviewer and write about military history. I bet there’s a general audience out there who’d love to read your perspective. You could make millions!

My entire academic career has been spent trying to imagine how feminists, queers, and trannies could embrace fluidity and diversity in a real way – a way that expanded our understanding of identity in a profound and transformational way, that did not simply assimilate differences of race, class, gender, ability, religions (and etc. etc. etc) into a preset category but rather adapted to those differences, shifting from within its liquid center. But to be perfectly honest, I never imagined so extensively as to actually conceive of a way that this would be possible. I’ve never reached the point at which I could believe. I’ve studied the shifts from second-wave to radical third-wave to post-colonial to gay to GBLT to queer to transsexual to transgender . . . and a feminists tossed out women of color and gays, and queers called gays sell-outs for marrying, and transexuals bitched that everyone else has always neglected their issues (all the while they were ignoring communities with much more gender diversity than theirs), I became unable to imagine that genuinely diverse communities could ever coexist and embrace their multiplicity, their variety.

Tonight my youthful exuberance for community was reinstilled at the L.A. Transgender Task Force’s “community dialogs variety show”, entitled “Fully Functional - Variety is a Transgender Disease”. The show, directed by Ryka Aoki de la Cruz, featured the “Fully Functional Players,” Charlene Mackenzie, Shauna Madrigal, Trystan Reese, Alexis Rivera, Skim, Lauren Steely, Jade Ross, Studs Clothing, DJ Trannity, Mr. Tuff N’ Stuff, with art by the renowned Trisha Van Cleef and others.

Besides making me feel hot and bothered, voyaristic, young, old, in love, close to tears, free, and elated, Fully Functional also fulfilled my wildest fantasies (minority identity fantasies). MTF transexuals of all races and ages, studs, femmes, genderqueers, heteros, butches, and entirely unidentifiable individuals all gathered in one room to exchange energy, music, poetry, comedy, dance, fashion, and love for four glorious hours. And on top of that, this diverse crowd made up our community. By the end of the night everyone seemed to know one another: we were all old friends – we had incredibly different lives and experiences, but we shared a deep connection that had been forged in another time and place, and it would remain despite our differences in the present.

It is difficult for me to recall exactly what happened in that space, but the feeling of hope is still with me. What is clear is that in that room no one was connected because we were all trans (or trans-loving), there was something much stronger than that among us. There was a desperation, a sense that many of us had been lost, searching for something; but there was a collective sigh as we realized, that we had finally come home.

http://www.myspace.com/skimmusic
http://www.myspace.com/tribeofthediasporas
http://www.myspace.com/studsclothing
http://www.myspace.com/jaderoxs

Revised version of something from my LiveJournal:

I’m a big feminist: it’s what I do. My boyfriend is a beer-drinking jock type. Since he and I have had such different experiences, we look at the world in very different ways, and we end up talking about stuff related to women and gender a lot. When you’re a smart, athletic, upper-middle class white guy, you’re not asked to think much about these things; when you’re a smart, socially inept, lower-middle class ex-stripper, you can’t help but think about them a lot. So the other day we were lying in bed talking about appearance and all that, and he said to me, “You know, you really don’t need to wear makeup.” And I started thinking about it, and I was like, what does that even mean? To need to wear makeup? Who needs to wear makeup? There’s a big disjunct here between semantic and propositional content: the words say that there is an actual imperative, a requirement that you wear it; that there is some sort of inexcusable absence if you don’t. The proposition, on the other hand, is taken to mean simply that you are unattractive without it.

What a ridiculous concept, that anyone should need to wear makeup. What a shock, to realize that there is in fact a tacit cultural mandate for women to be attractive. It makes me think of a blog that a friend of mine linked to a while back: it was some sort of fashion/clothing type journal, and in the linked entry, the author talked about how sometimes she wanted to make or buy clothes that she thought were really awesome, but that she knew didn’t make her look good. And she felt bad, like she was doing something wrong in not making the effort to be physically attractive. The money quote was “‘Pretty’ is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female.’” And I thought yeah, damned straight. But thinking about it, I realize that in a way, it is. It shouldn’t be, of course, and yet– on days I know I don’t look good, whether I’m exhausted or don’t feel like putting on makeup or just feeling ugly or fat, I make a deliberate effort to be inconspicuous; to wear bland clothes and call no attention to myself. And it’s not just that I don’t want my social group to see me looking bad: I feel the same way among strangers, people I know I’ll never see again. I feel like I should be pretty; I feel guilty for my failure to look better.

Thinking about it more, I wonder why things should be this way. There’s a biological element, yes: men, so they say, are visual creatures, so the laws of evolution or whatever mean that women want to look good for men. But I have never believed that biology is destiny, and I suspect that these days the social/cultural element has a lot more to do with it. Imagine all the money made in the fields of clothing, makeup, diet products, gyms, beauty magazines, cosmetic surgery, hair products and styling, razors, bath products, laser hair removal, spas, exercise videos… the list is endless. Now imagine the vast amount of time, energy and income women invest in looking good. It’s hard to avoid seeing that men are still more or less in power, and no doubt they’d like to stay there; as long as “women spend their lives trying to look good for men,” as CNN put it in a recent article (http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/02/14/love.science/index.html), they’re carrying a serious political handicap. Who was the feminist who said that it’s hard to save the world when you’re always hungry?

In the gym this morning, I was staring blankly up at the TVs, prepared to submit to the tyrannical rule of “Parental Control” — which, if you don’t know, is an entirely insipid MTV show in which parents pick boys or girls to go out with their children. It’s trash, sometimes offensive and always blatantly manipulative, but it’s background noise, and I’d rather watch that than depressing CNN Headline News first thing in the morning.

But on CNN Headline News was a story I couldn’t ignore. It was about the allegations of forced prostitution among Russian soldiers. Now, I’m not bothered by what a big deal they were making of this situation: it’s awful and needs to be addressed immediately. No one should ever be forced to have sex against their will.

The problem, rather, lay in the way that the anchor was talking about the story. I’ve seen many anchors talk about many stories, often about women being forced to have sex against their will. But I have never seen an anchor shudder the way this man shuddered when he talked about these soldiers’ ordeal. Not when discussing Guantanamo Bay. Not when discussing any of the “murdered white girl” cases that have popped up repeatedly. Not when discussing Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Kosovo, or Darfur.

As he was speaking, the faces of young white men flashed on the screen, and his voice shook with indignation that they had suffered the horror of forced prostitution.

I am horrified too. But is it so strange, so wrong, that I also feel angry that I had to watch this anchor’s indignation — his horror — about an act that happens to thousands of women day after day after day? That when this kind of awfulness is committed on people of color, it becomes less important to that anchor and his ilk? That when it is committed on women, no one even mentions it, just assuming that “that’s the way it goes”?

I don’t know. It angered me, a lot. I would like to see the men who forced these Russian soldiers into prostitution punished — but I would also like to see many, many other people punished, and unfortunately the former is likely to happen and the latter is not.

The fact that I am interested in feminism in the virtual world, a world that still seems like a sci-fi pipe dream, probably seems a little silly. Until you look at Second Life, or read this article on haptic gloves — gloves that recreate the feel of fabrics that one can only see in the virtual world.

It seems silly to think about it now. But within my generation’s lifetime, the purely representational world will be a reality, and I’m ready to start thinking about the implications of that world now. It doesn’t make any sense to me to wait. Whatever it is possible to make will be made — and that means that someday sci fi is bound to be reality.

Both the Harvard Crimson and the New York Times are reporting that Harvard is almost ready to name its first female president– Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, the dean of the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies, which emphasizes studying women, gender, and society.

That’s pretty damn awesome.

I say awesome with a caveat, of course. It strikes me as foolish to support a female candidate for any position– whether that be the presidency of Harvard or, as has been more commonly discussed lately, the presidency of the US– simply because of her sex. Leaders should be chosen on the basis of their qualifications, not any other criterion. While Dr. Faust seems like a spectacular candidate, I worry that Harvard might be attempting to redraw itself as more open to women in academia– particularly after former president Larry Summers’ much-maligned remarks on women in the sciences. Hopefully this was a small factor or none in their decision, and Dr. Faust is as qualified and ready to take the job as she appears to be.

With that disclaimer out of the way, though, I have to say that this seems like a very encouraging development. Academia is still surprisingly hostile to women, particularly in the sciences and the “older” humanities (such as history and my own field, classics). The new prominence this will give to women in academia must, I think, be a helpful force, particularly given Harvard’s clout in the research world. Harvard is still a very conservative school, both in its academics and in its politics, and I hope that having someone with a minority view at the helm will help them make some progress towards equality.

I don’t go to Harvard, and so the symbolic value of this change won’t mean as much to me as it might to a female Harvard student. However, this seems to offer the opportunity for both symbolic and real change in academia: symbolic, through the increased prominence of women in the academic world, and real, in Dr. Faust’s continued commitment to helping other women gain equality at one of the most prominent academic institutions in the world. Here’s hoping.

I’ve been hanging out on Second Life a lot lately. If you aren’t familiar with it, you should check it out — it’s the closest thing to real virtual reality that we have, in the sense of worlds contained in code, free social interaction, an economy that has nothing to do with physical goods whatsoever. I’m finding myself very interested in the gender dynamics therein.

For one thing, people’s avatars are sexed (not gendered) when you create them. One chooses to be male or female. That does not, however, prevent one from creating an avatar which expresses its gender in a non-traditional way: one can “cross-dress,” and in the virtual world it is often very difficult to tell a cross-dressing male avatar from a female one. One’s physical sex or gender does not, of course, determine one’s virtual sex or gender. If one takes a performative view of gender, then Second Life offers the most perfect possible “non-gendered” world. You don’t automatically perform a gender (unlike World of Warcraft, I haven’t noticed male and female sims behaving differently when they’re just walking around) and you can get animations that will make female sims dance, flirt, or talk like men and vice versa. On the whole, it is very easy to persuade someone that you are genuinely gendered male if you are female, or vice versa. (And not just gendered — even sexed. People assume that the two are the same thing, even on second life). You can also select formless avatars which do not betray gender, or animal-like avatars that display gender to a greater or lesser extent.

But Second Life is still a very highly gendered universe. Women are women, as it goes, and men are men. One of Second Life’s biggest industries is the strip club/dance club/casino, which are almost wholly unregulated (there are “PG” areas in which they cannot exist, but those PG areas seem to become fewer and farther between as days go by) and hire real people to use their avatars as dancers. This is the main way of making money in Second Life, at least for the unskilled, who have not learned or don’t want to use skills to create goods or have no capital to start a shop - “camping,” which entails hanging out someplace to make it look busy. Stripping is a higher form of camping: your avatar takes its clothes off for money. Yes, really. You can choose “skins” for your avatar that feature tattoos, piercings, freckles, birthmarks. There’s even a sex shop in the ancient Roman themed part of Second Life, called “Caligula’s Garden.” And the debauchery needn’t stop there — one can purchase animations that will make your sim do anything one can do in real life.

But what, in this Second Life world that is completely created out of performance — of “play” as some theorists would put it, the relations between people but never including the people themselves — are we to think of all this?

I’m honestly not entirely sure what I think of porn in the real world. I know that the porn industry is problematic in a big way, and I don’t know whether that can ever be divorced from the issue of porn. But no one in Second Life is producing porn (or stripping) because they are coerced into it. Second Life is a way of hanging out with your friends, essentially, if you are playing it casually — and if you aren’t playing it casually, you sure aren’t trying to make money by stripping. Rather, you’re doing the good ol’ capitalist thing of starting your own porno empire. Second Life removes many of the barriers to doing this, and more and more barriers have been coming down - for instance, you can now lease land without having a paid Second Life membership, dealing purely in Linden dollars. It’s possible that someday Second Life will be “real” enough that some people are driven to participate in porn for real-life reasons, but it’s not that way now.

And in reality, since people can play characters that are male or female regardless of their “real-life” gender, is there any coercion at all involved? I think not. At least, not within Second Life. It’s possible, no, certain that the outside pressures of our world likely impel more women to seek money in Second Life via stripping-camping jobs than they do men, but nothing within Second Life does so.

What I am worried about, though, is the question of how female sims are viewed. Perhaps real women will not suffer in-game from the ubiquity of porn, prostitution and stripping, because they are able to put on male sims. But that doesn’t change the fact that female sims will continue to be objectified. I’m not opposed to objectification on principle — I do it with men, to a limited degree, as I think we all do. We have to objectify people in order to get on with our lives; if I were concerned with every homeless person I saw, instead of objectifying them, I wouldn’t be able to walk down the street without helping each and every one of them and then I wouldn’t be able to go to school, work, or live my own life. But there is a degree of objectification which I find disturbing — a degree where it is difficult, genuinely difficult, to have the radical notion that “female sims are people.”

It scares me that I can imagine, at some point, a Second Life where there are only scattered pockets of the world where it is safe to wear a female sim — religious groups’ nodes, academic areas, Capitol Hill. I can imagine that I might not want to venture into parts (even most!) of Second Life wearing a female sim.

But then, what if men wear female sims as well, as spectators in these sleazy joints?

I’m not sure what to think. I’m not sure how gender holds up in a world that is entirely performative, like Second Life. I’m going to have to think about this a lot more.

This blog got started when Kate and I read an essay by Annette Kolodny, entitled “Dancing Through the Minefield.” We were both struck by the following statement:

The (usually male) reader who, both by experience and by reading, has never made acquaintance with those [unique literary traditions and sex-related] contexts — historically, the lying-in room, the parlor, the nursery, the kitchen, the laundry, and so on — will necessarily lack the capacity to fully interpret the dialogue or action embedded therein; for, as every good novelist knows, the meaning of any character’s action or statement is inescapably a function of the specific situation in which it is embedded. Virginia Woolf therefore quite properly anticipated the male reader’s disposition to write off what he could not understand, abandoning women’s writings as offering “not merely a difference of view, but a view that is weak, or trivial, or sentimental because it differs from his own.”

Sitting together, we exclaimed over how well it summed up what we had wished to tell people time and again. Upon reading Mrs. Dalloway in class and having to defend the story of a woman’s ordinary day, I wanted to say just this to my (male) detractors; I wanted to point out to them that their world view was necessarily different from mine simply due to the fact that I have been categorized as “woman,” with all its attendant duties and expectations, from the moment of my birth.

This is not to say that men do not have the capacity to understand a feminine view — quite the opposite. Women have been taught to understand a male view for time immemorial, in the ivory towers of this world. It is not to say that the female view ought to be privileged above the male, though there would be a poetic justice in that, after three thousand years. Instead, it is to say that men have the obligation to attempt to understand women’s writers and women’s concerns, and that we must recognize that as academics we do not exist in a genderless vacuum.

There are other important issues tied up in this too. Kate and I are classicists; we exist in a vacuum, all right, and that’s a vacuum in which there are no women. Medea, Electra, Helen, Antigone, Dido — these are the women we find in the classics. Occasionally a philosopher has a dialogue with a hetaera, a high-class prostitute, and that’s about the extent of our knowledge of a woman who might possibly have been a real person (and even then, a prostitute and a philosopher discussing the world was likely a rhetorical strategy). Historical women, like Cleopatra and Clodia Metelli, are reviled; the ones for whom the evidence is less biased, like Tullia (daughter of Cicero), are largely absent from scholarly work. In archaeological digs, women’s relics have been ignored, packed away in boxes because they are “insignificant.”

But the study of classics is important, and not only for old white men. I believe (and here I’m definitely not speaking for Kate; I have no idea how she feels on this issue) that one must understand the dominant culture before one can fight it. In certain circles, the circles that are often reviled by feminists as “academented ivory towers,” that means understanding classics. The Western canon that today includes so few women was created on a foundation of classical education. What’s more, the Roman empire provides an eerie foreshadowing of the modern U.S.A. (see Kate’s post on the Quiverfull movement). As Santayana said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

I hope we can remember it, and effect positive change using the lessons we learn. I hope we can somehow create not a feminist poetics but a female poetics, and also a female history, one which does not attempt to artificially inflate women’s influence on politics nor marginalize them but instead redefine, to some extent, what is important about history — what is worth our notice. Something that can stand along side men’s history and the male poetics that has historically been our outlook on literature. Something that, someday, will be unnecessary, as we move towards a holistic view of humanity.

Some minor edits to the site stylesheet this morning– author bylines will now appear at the top of the post as well as the bottom, and the header displays the blog’s title a little more prominently.  How exciting.

So, I have a confession to make: I like Tyra Banks.

Now, I don’t like the way she made her money, and I don’t like a lot of what she says on “America’s Next Top Model.” But I do like this video. She’s recently put on some weight (to reach the absolutely normal height and weight of 5′10″ and 160 pounds, probably size 9 or 10 jeans) and has come under a lot of fire for it — tabloids calling her fat and all. I quote her response to them:

To those who have something nasty to say about women who are built like me … women who have been picked on, women whose husbands put them down, women at work or girls at school – I have one thing to say to you: Kiss my fat ass!

Maybe her modeling has been partially responsible for little girls’ bad body image — but she’s got this one right.