We had one suggestion–and only one–from a student who suggested that next time we might consider offering the course with one man and one woman professor, instead of two women.  Right–because our male colleagues are just lining up to teach this course, and it will be soothing and more objective if a male professor is in the room.  (I occasionally get comments like this about the sex of book authors on my evaluation forms that went something like this:  “I thought that this course was biased because we read mostly female-authored books, but then we read some books by men that seem to agree with the women, so I guess the books in this class aren’t biased.”  I really must ask my male colleagues if they ever are informed that including women-authored books on their syllabi is reassuring because it means that the information presented by a male professor and male authors isn’t biased after all.)

A few students suggested that next time we don’t talk about rape so much, but then they didn’t like the one book we assigned that focused on married heterosexuality either.  But the truth is that none of the books in the history of sexuality are super-sexy, because the historiography of sexuality is very Foucaultian and is therefore about the distribution of and challenges to power, challenges that frequently hurt the challengers more than the reigning system of power distribution.  I think the students were surprised that studying sex could be so depressing, although I warned them from the beginning that I think I teach the most depressing courses in the Baa Ram U. history curriculum.

I think the problem is that most modern college students experience sex as liberating, and they don’t want to think about the constraints on sexuality or even the sexual abuse that was a much more widespread experience of most people transhistorically, even in the present.  (I know that’s how I would have thought about these issues as a 20-year old, so I’m sympathetic to this view.)  I get it that the class turned out to be kind of a bummer for them, even if the reading assignments hadn’t been so heavy.  (But quite frankly, the last thing I’d ever want to be accused of is a lack of rigor when teaching anything, let alone a pilot class on the history of sexuality.)

Fort Number Four, Charlestown, NH

Nick Kowalczk offers us a detailed look at historical re-enacting in “Embedded with the Reenactors,”  in which he ponders the fascination that some Americans have with reliving the bloody, imperialistic wars of the past.  I thought this article was noteworthy too because 1) they’re not Civil War reenactors, they’re  reenactors of the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), and 2) the Seven Years’ War guys (and yes, they’re mostly middle-aged guys, according to Kowalczk’s reporting and my own observations of all kinds of reenactors over the years) have been enjoying their 250th anniversary moment in the spotlight for the past few years. 

I found Kowalczk’s article fascinating, although it’s written in a more “new journalism” style that includes him as both participant and observer, and I kept wishing he would go deeper into some of the questions he raises about reenactors based on his participation in a battle of the Siege of Fort Niagara:

It’s not every 4^th of July you get to be around nearly 3,000 people inhabiting an amalgam of time, and especially in a place as lovely as Fort Niagara State Park. The water in Lake Ontario actually was blue. And the fortification, now known as Old Fort Niagara, has been well-preserved even though it was built by the French in 1726 and took a 19-day pummeling in July 1759, when a few thousand British and Indians out-maneuvered 600 Frenchman sitting pretty in a big castle protected by cannons and stone walls.

But being on the battlefield exactly 250 years later, I couldn’t help but imagine the 348 people who died and the many others who were injured or suffered. When they trembled for their lives could they ever have imagined that a bloodless, G-rated recreation of their deaths eventually would become someone’s hobby?  

Why bother with reenacting a 250-year old war, when Americans in 2009 can just go to Iraq or Afghanistan to see a bloody war for the empire up close?  Kowalczk doesn’t explore these questions, although for me as a seventeenth and eighteenth-century historian, they’re paramount.  It makes me wonder about the future of reenacting North American wars, when we have so many young vets with real-life experience in a war zone, many of whom are still coping with war-related injuries, disabilities, and trauma.

As it is in Kowalczk’s narrative, the reenactors seem a little strange, even almost “queer” for their love of reliving the past and their feelings of always being out of time in the present.  Sometimes his language makes the connection of reenacting as queer explicit, like when he writes about the importance of dress in reenactor events:  “Like drag shows, re-enactments hinge on sartorial panache.”  At other times, he emphasizes the man-out-of-time aspect of a reenactor’s life.  Here, he describes his main connection to the world of reenactors, a Kansas City man he calls “Old Hickory” because of his career as an Andrey Jackson reenactor and model:

He’s never been married or had children or pets. “I don’t think I’ve ever truly been in love either,” he said on the way to Niagara. These days he’s looking for an attractive, independent, middle-aged, single woman interested in history, who reenacts the 18^th century and sews. One imagines he may be looking for a while.

.       .       .       .       .

“In real life I’m just a wallflower,” he once confessed to me, before adding, on a brighter note, “but when I found reenacting everything changed.”

In 1992, at age 44, he took up black powder shooting and visited a War of 1812 site in Kansas called Fort Osage. There he met some F&I reenactors (anachronistic, yes, but who really cares), and he barraged them with questions. He bought clothes, a musket, and slept in his car at events. Some considered him “a suit” and “a mooch,” given his white-collar job and healthy diet, his constant requests for help and lack of handyman skills, but he paid those criticisms little mind. At events he was approached by the public, asked questions, even photographed. For the first time in his life he felt appreciated, like he had something to offer the world.

“Now when I’m in my street clothes I don’t feel like that’s my identity,” he said when I once asked him, Who are you outside of this?

In that conversation I drew a circle in my notebook and asked him to fill in the elements of his life — family, hobbies, friends, the job he’d quit, whatever — and to shade in the categories that involved reenacting. The exercise perplexed Old Hickory; he pushed my notebook away. “I don’t need to do that,” he said. “Reenacting is the circle. That’s it. There isn’t anything else anymore.”

Fort Number Four, Charlestown, NH

In Kowalczk’s telling, reenactors really are different from you and me, but does that explain the popularity of reenacting?  Some enthusiasts might make it their whole lives, but it strikes me that the desire to live in the past (if only on weekends and special occasions) is a wish more widespread among white men in particular than among others.  Something that I and others have observed before is that only some Americans romanticize the past, because the rest of us recognize how much more awful our lives would have been (holding race and gender constant).  For example:  Chauncy DeVega  at We Are Respectable Negroes wrote recently about a story in which a white woman expressed a wish to live in the time period in which Gone with the Wind was set, saying to her African American friend, “Wouldn’t you have loved to be there?”  Only after a few startled moments did the African American woman point out the obvious:  “Cindy, I would have been a slave.”  Romaticizing the past, like reenacting, is a White thing. 

Perhaps this is what makes me uncomfortable about reenactors–their interest in reenacting violent events (warfare, principally) which from the first Anglo-Indian wars of the seventeenth century through our modern wars, were either explicitly racialized wars (most Anglo-Indian wars, the Mexican War, and the wars waged by the Frontier Army against Native Americans) or wars that mobilized ethnic difference and white racism in the war effort (as in World War II and the war with Japan, the Vietnam War, and Iraq and Afghanistan). 

It’s not that reenactors have an uncomplicated view of the past–I’ve gone to several historical reenactments over the past 15 years, in every place I’ve lived, and for the most part I’ve been impressed with their research and knowledge about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  I’ve been to a reenactment of the Boston Massacre at the old Customs House in Boston; a reenactor camp in Eaton (near Greenville) Ohio, with a focus on the frontier wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (including reenactors for both the U.S. troops and Shawnee families); King George’s imperial troops and their Indian allies and enemies at a reenactor camp in Brooklyn, Michigan; black powder gun enthusiast-reenactors of the fur trade days here in Colorado; and I photographed some Seven Years’ War reenactors at Fort Number Four in New Hampshire when I was there to take some pictures for my book.  But while complex, their vision of history remains blinkered and segregated, not because they exclude reenactors of color now (they don’t) or because they themselves have explicitly racist motivations, but because of the stories they choose to tell, and the stories they’re leaving out.

Re-enactments of slavery times and of slave auctions have come in for both criticism and praise from all quarters–praise for their attempts to depict the history of slavery honestly, and criticism for being extremely (and some would say gratuitously) explicit.  But there are plenty of heroic moments in women’s history, African American history, Latin@/Chican@ history, and Native American history that aren’t being reenacted.  Might we see a future in which African Americans re-enact the major struggles and violent confrontations of the Civil Rights era?  Are there women’s groups who regularly dress up in hundred-year old clothing styles and re-enact the violent climax of the suffrage movement?  Personally, I would turn out as a spectator for these events–and I might even be persuaded to get into costume and participate myself–but who will play the thugs with the torches, guns, clubs,  firehoses, chains, and gavage equipment?  Will middle-aged white men be persuaded to cede the heroic roles to other reenactors?

If you have any interest in historical reenactors, go read Kowalczk’s article.  For all of my quibbles, it’s a really thorough overview of historical reenacting, and a rare view of reenactors doing something other than the U.S. Civil War.  He captures in many respects the regional flavors of reenacting that go beyond the Civl War-era.  Furthermore, his interest in masculinity and gender evident in this article aren’t accidental–Kowalczk has written elsewhere on these themes as in this essay, “Manhood, Lorain-style,”  about growing up in the Rust Belt and picking a fistfight to prove he wasn’t “gay.”  This essay might also be of interest to readers of this blog, so print up a copy or zap it onto your e-reader. 

Kowalczk concludes “Embedded with the Reenactors” with an explicit point about the gendered and even childish nature of the fantasies at work in reenacting.  He writes:

Among them was an attractive young mother with two little boys. One of them sat in a stroller and the other ran around pretending to be a soldier. Despite being in uniform, so to speak, I explained to her what I was doing and asked why she brought her family to a battle reenactment given the kind of message it imparts. She answered, “It’s just something to do. And this is what boys do anyway. They’re conquerors — they think they’re born to be conquerors. I used to get tired of them playing war games, but then I got tired of trying to redirect their imagination.” And together we watched her son pretend to kill an imaginary enemy as we walked off the battlefield.

The Aftermath

Later, and mildly depressed, I went to an ice cream shop inside the fort. As luck would have it, I sat beside two other mothers and their four little boys who were arguing. Naturally I eavesdropped.

They were civilians, and I assumed the mothers also had brought their children to foster an all-American, male fascination with fighting and war. But these boys didn’t care at all about the battles, the reenactors or the fort. Like the reenactors, but also unlike them, these children were somewhere outside of real life and real time.

“I’m Mario,” one of the boys yelled.

“No, I’m Mario,” another said.

“OK, can I be Luigi,” the third asked.

The whole thing went on for five minutes, until one of the exasperated mothers put down her fudge sundae and snapped. “Half a day! Just half a day,” she pleaded. “Can you guys please go one day without arguing who’s who in the video game world.”

Senator Ted Kennedy was of course notably silent through these hearings, because he had been a witness called at his nephew’s rape trial the previous summer. (That’s what Snarlin’ Arlen meant to imply when he said towards the end of the clip above, “Mr. Chairman I object to that. I object to that vociferously. . . If Senator Kennedy has anything to say, let him participate in this hearing.”)

Anita Hill looks so young and without defenses or allies in these old clips. She was unimaginably brave to endure this in public. Deborah Gray White suggests the powerful historical currents that Hill swam against 20 years ago in Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (2008):

Their particular history, the black woman’s history, was especially oppressive. [One author] alluded to its prohibitive nature when she delicately noted the “almost unmentionable history of the burdens of those soul-trying times when, to bring profit to the slave trade and to satisfy the base desires of the stronger hand, the Negro woman was the subject of compulsory immorality.” Sylvia Francoz Williams was even more direct. So painful was the wound of the black woman’s history, she argued, that “her detractors rely upon her not voluntarily reopening it, even to probe it for its cure.” Perceptively, Williams maintained that the black woman’s “sensitiveness on this point has been the greatest shield to the originators of the scandal,” 5.

I recall being in a graduate seminar that week in which the professor asked, “what do you think will be the historical legacy of the Thomas hearings?  Is this a turning point?”  Some students said that yes, the Thomas hearings would change a lot, and one third-year graduate student informed us that “I’m taking notes for future lectures right now.”  Perhaps unimaginatively, I answered “no,” mostly because for me, the Thomas hearings were about men closing ranks to trash a young woman’s testimony.  Secondarily, they revealed a continuing and disturbing white fascination with black bodies and black sexuality. I didn’t think the Thomas hearings would make the problem of sexual harassment go away, or even that there would even be a consensus that it was a problem at all.  Unfortunately, I think I was right.  In the past twenty years or so we have witnessed a fierce backlash against feminist efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to define rape and sexual harassment.  The 1990s and the 2000s have featured high-profile and successful efforts by men to redefine rape as consensual sex.

Perhaps one small thing has changed for the better, at least in the field of American women’s history.  Since the Thomas hearings, African American feminist scholars have developed a small but powerful bibliography on the rape and sexual trauma that was central to the process of enslavement in the Americas.  Before 1991, Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n't I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South(1985) was the only monograph on enslaved women.  But the ferment of the 1990s produced a growing number of young scholars who would write about the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality in slavery and in the post-emancipation United States in articles and books that put black women’s experiences at their centers. African American and feminist historians are now developing a historiography and a language with which to confront a history that is characterized by rape and other forms of sexual and family trauma. I wonder if there would have been the beginnings of this kind of history without Anita Hill’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee twenty years ago.

Here is a list of selected titles in my field that address sexuality in African American women’s history:

• Mia Bay, “In Search of Sally Hemings in the Post-DNA Era,” Reviews in American History, 34:4 (2006), 407-426.
• Daina Berry, “Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe”:  Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (2007)
• Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (2006)
• Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs : Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996)
• Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom:  Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004)
• Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations:  Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (2002)
• Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings:  An American Controversy (1998) 
• Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women:  Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004)
• Nell Painter, Sojourner Truth:  A Life, A Symbol (1996)
• Jennifer Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (2009)
• Wendy Anne Warren, “‘The Cause of her Grief’:  The Rape of a Slave in Early New England,” Journal of American History 93:4 (2007) 1031-1049.

Harris-Perry makes some really good points about the ways in which black scholars and pundits are challenged about their ideas when they dare to talk about racism.  In “The Epistemology of Race Talk,” she notes that (white) interlocutors meet conversations about racism with charges to “Prove it! . . .The implication is if one cannot produce irrefutable evidence of clear, blatant and intentional bias, then racism must be banned as a possibility,” and questions about her authority and expertise (“Who made you an expert? . . . It is as though my very identity as an African-American woman makes me unqualified to speak on issues of race and gender; as though I could only be arguing out of personal interest or opinion rather than from decades of research, publication and university teaching.”)  I’m very sympathetic to both of these issues, as they’re textbook ways to derail a blog conversation, as many of you probably already know!

But, I feel like Harris-Perry was unfair to Joan Walsh when in the same response she accused Walsh of using the “I have black friends” claim.  First of all, here’s what Walsh wrote in the first two paragraphs of her original response to Harris-Perry’s column (and I’m presenting them in full here):

The Nation’s most-read article this week is by my friend Melissa Harris-Perry, “Black President, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama.” Perry doesn’t mention any white liberals by name, nor cite polls showing a decline in support for President Obama among white liberals (as opposed to white voters generally, where his approval rating has dropped sharply). But her piece touched a nerve because of the widespread perception that white liberals are, in fact, abandoning the president.

I’m not sure how to argue with a perception, which is by definition subjective, but I’m going to try, because this is becoming a prevalent and divisive belief. When I say Melissa Harris-Perry is my friend, I don’t say that rhetorically, or ironically; we are professional friends, we have socialized together; she has included me on political round tables; I like and respect her enormously. That’s why I think it’s important to engage her argument, and I’ve invited her to reply.

Harris-Perry writes about the “black friend” claim:

2. I have black friends

Which brings us to a second common strategy of argument about one’s racial innocence: the “I have black friends” claim. I was shocked and angered when Salon’s Joan Walsh used this strategy in her criticism of my piece. Although I disagree with her, I have no problem with Walsh’s decision to take on the claims in my piece. I consider it a sign of respect to publicly engage those with whom you disagree. I was taken aback that Walsh emphasized the extent of our friendship. Walsh and I have been professionally friendly. We’ve eaten a few meals. I invited her to speak at Princeton and I introduced her to my literary agent. We are not friends. Friendship is a deep and lasting relationship based on shared sacrifice and joys. We are not intimates in that way. Watching Walsh deploy our professional familiarity as a shield against claims of her own bias is very troubling. In fact, it is one of the very real barriers to true interracial friendship and intimacy.

(The emphasis above is mine.  There is more under this point that bears reading–I’m just singling out the paragraph that identified Walsh personally and discussed the extent of their acquaintance.)

I may well be a (nother) clueless white lady, but I read Walsh’s opening apologia not as an “I have a black friend, so I’m not a racist” strategy, but rather as “I like this person and usually agree with her, so I’m a little uncomfortable in registering my disagreement on this particular issue now.”  As a blogger, I’ve done this, and by indicating that I like and respect another blogger and yet disagree on a particular issue, I’m just trying to keep everything nice and friendly.  But, I also concede that this may not be the most appropriate or relevant lens through which to view this exchange.  What do you think?  Should Walsh have just written her response without the second paragraph at all?  Is it a girl thing anyway to reassure someone that you really like them before you disagree with them publicly?  Is Harris-Perry being unfair in reacting this way, or is this something that white people need to think about more carefully before they publish stuff?

What’s going on here?  I genuinely want to know.  (Am I just a little too conflict averse, and too invested in everyone being nice and getting along?)  I wonder if my discomfort with this dust-up has something to do with the fact that women are so underrepresented as political commentators and journalists.  If two lefty d00ds mixed it up, would I care so much?

The last time I learned about the Columbian Exchange was in high school. Learning dates and the sequence of events, and getting familiar with maps and geography, was central to my high school history experience. As a history major in college the emphasis on maps, dates, and events diminished, as the work in primary sources came to the forefront.

I can’t imagine 1493will be much required in college history courses, as this type of historical narrative for a popular audience (written by a journalist and not a historian) probably does not conform to how postsecondary history is taught. This is perhaps too bad, as I just did not know most of the history of Columbian Exchange described in 1493.

Learning how to “do history”, to work like historians, is probably not a bad thing. But most history undergraduate students will not go on to graduate school. A book like 1493, a book with strong opinions and lots of dates, geography, people and events, might be an example of the kind of works we should make room for in our history courses.

Kim is probably right that a synthetic work aimed at a popular audience probably won’t be on a whole lot of college and university syllabi.  But why should books aimed at a general audience be taught by professional historians, when students might instead read a more challenging book with a professor on hand to guide them through it?  Students are perfectly free at any point of their college or post-collegiate lives to pick up a book like 1493 and read and enjoy it, just as Kim did.

Quite frankly, I don’t think I need to show my students how to read a book like 1493 or celebratory biographies of the so-called “Founding Fathers” by David McCullough.  (I think I personally might die of boredom–and my number-one criteria for selecting books for my syllabi is whether or not *I* think they’re exciting or interesting and can stand to read them again.)  Student can find and read the popular books on their own, and perhaps my former students will get a little more out of them because they’ve had to read other books about the eighteenth century by (for example) James Sidbury, Clare Lyons, Sharon Block, Kirsten Fischer, Jon Sensbach, and Annette Gordon-Reed.

Finally, I disagree with Kim’s construction of popular history versus academic history–a history “with strong opinions and lots of dates, geography, people and events” on the one hand, as opposed to the dull, primary-source based history that professional historians write and teach on the other.  (Wait a minute–I thought one of the problems with academic history is that it’s all just facts and dates and geography.  Clearly, history is too important to be left to the historians, but we’ll go with Kim’s complaint that there aren’t enough strong opinions, facts, or dates in academic histories.)  As I suggested above, strong opinions are central to my interest in books and in assigning them to students.  How much stronger an opinion can you find than (for example) Ramon Gutierrez’s forceful argument that berdaches are not early modern heroes of gay liberation but rather were more likely conquered enemies and victims of rape?  How about Annette Gordon-Reed’s awesome smackdown of the Thomas Jefferson biography industry of the past two centuries?  I don’t know what Kim read as a History major in college, but maybe he should have looked for more interesting or more challenging courses.

Kim should perhaps hie himself over to a history classroom at Dartmouth, where he is not a History professor but rather “the director of learning and technology for the Master of Health Care Delivery Science Program at Dartmouth College” and “has a Ph.D. in sociology from Brown University.”  I’m pretty sure that the History faculty over there would be surprised to hear Kim describe their work in these terms.  They probably think that showing students how to “do” history with primary sources is important for developing their students’ critical and literary faculties as well as central mastering the discipline even as an undergraduate major.

Why do we never hear calls for science faculty to ditch their lab sections?  Does anyone seriously think that books by Atul Gawande and Robert Krulwich should supplant the lab- and research-based curriculum in science department, in spite of the fact that few science majors will go on to earn Ph.D.s in their fields?  I mean no disrespect to these authors, whose work I enjoy.  But I don’t for a minute think that they are working scientists.  And if I were a student or a parent of a college student, I’d sure as heck want to be trained (or have my child trained) by a professional, not by a collection of popular books on the subject.

One feature of Ryan Lizza’s very good intellectual biography of Michele Bachmann from The New Yorker last week contains this curious explanation of her development as a politician:

The whole thing is worth a considered read, especially if you serve as a professor or advisor of graduate students and/or if you’re interested in dysfunctional departmental dynamics.  (Like most of us, she’s like a neurologist:  more certain on the diagnosis than on ideas towards a cure.)  While it won’t be a surprise to any nonwhite readers, perhaps some white readers will be taken aback by her frankness in discussing white privilege among so-called “white allies:”

Here’s what I want to say. I learned through these interactions that the vast majority of white people in the academy are absolutely clueless when it comes to race. Not race as some abstract category of analysis “out there,” but race as it is manifested daily in their/our own subject position and actions.

One archaeology colleague remarked to me at a cocktail party, . . . “Too bad for you cultural anthropologists. You should be like us in archaeology. We don’t have any race problems. Because all of our students are white!” I gamely tried to explain to this colleague that the absence of students of color in her program was actually a more profound sign of a “race problem” than any visible conflict could be, but she was unmoveable.

.       .       .       .       .       .      .       .       .      

Anyway, it goes without saying that graduate students of color so often feel heartbreakingly isolated in their departments and completely without a friend or ally. That when they try to talk to white faculty about race—not so much as an analytical concept, as a systematic source of blindness about how syllabi are written (ie, with exclusively white scholarship) or how classroom discussions are conducted (ie, when the tentative critiques of students of color are instantly and angrily shot down by defensive white students and faculty), they are met with on one end, bewilderment, in the middle defensiveness, and on the other end, hostility. That when they try to engage their white graduate classmates in a collective intervention, the white graduate students are often MORE defensive, angry, and hostile than the faculty members themselves, probably because of their own status insecurity.

(OUCH on that last point, as someone who was once a very defensive undergraduate and graduate student, and who struggles with defensiveness even today.)

I appreciated that cocktail party anecdote in the middle paragraph.  I’m sure that all of you white readers have been in on conversations with other white people in which you were presumed to be an ally with an essentially racist opinion or point of view.  (If not an ally, they didn’t think we’d ever tell on them, right?)  Do you think white disciplines and white departments really want to change?  What are effective strategies for making non-white students and non-white perspectives part of the way we do business? 

This is a question that feminists should be in sympathy with, because it’s undeniable that the influx of women into the academy is clearly linked to the production of feminist scholarship.  In my experience advising M.A. students, I’ve personally seen how gay graduate students have come up with fascinating questions and innovative ideas for coming to new conclusions in their research in the history of sexuality.  Our departments and our disciplines have a long way to go, but at least in the humanities departments I know of, they are much more inclusive of white women and white gay faculty and graduate students than they are of faculty and graduate students of color.

What do you think?

Every year some female graduate students tell me that they feel overlooked, marginalized, silenced in some seminars. They paint a picture of classrooms where the alpha males—so-called “theory boys”—are encouraged to hold forth in impossibly obscure language, but where their own interventions elicit no response. These women, in short, say that they are not listened to, that they are not taken seriously, and that they get the impression that their perceptions of the matter at hand are of no interest to anyone else. 

Such experiences tend to reproduce a particularly clichéd ideology in which theory and abstract thought are thought to belong to men and masculinity, and women are imagined to be the bearers of emotional, personal, practical concerns. In a system that grants far more symbolic capital, far more intellectual power, to abstract theorizing than to, say, concrete investigations of particular cases, these women lose out in the battle for symbolic capital. This is bad for their relationship to the field they love, and it is bad for their careers in and out of graduate school. This is sexism, and all this goes to show that sexist effects often arise from the interactions of people who have no sexist intentions at all.

But there is another side to this. Sometimes I have a conversation with someone who has been described to me as a theory boy. Then I invariably discover that the theory boy doesn’t at all sound like an intellectual terrorist. He is, simply, profoundly and passionately interested in ideas. He loves theory and precisely because he loves it, he has strong theoretical views.

Moi concludes that faculty play a critical role in encouraging dialogic conversation rather than monologic performance, and that “[s]ome of us—professors and graduate students—need to learn to stop being so touchy, vain and self-regarding, so that we can listen to well-founded criticism without becoming defensive. Others need to learn to become more assertive and how to stand their ground when their views come under pressure. We all need to care more about formulating our thought precisely and less about the impression we make on others.”  But the point about faculty leadership is key, I think–it’s fun to engage in a lively discussion with passionate students, but we need to consider why some may not want to engage in the conversation, and how we can ensure that the ideas of those students get a full and fair hearing.

Moi’s article struck me as relevant because I’ve had a few interesting conversations recently that suggest that faculty play a role in perpetuating this division by using different language and different standards in evaluating their women versus men graduate students.  First, a friend at another university remarked on the fact that one of the graduate students in her department is roundly praised as among the strongest and smartest graduate student in the program, but professors (including some from feminist scholars) also emphasized how they thought she needed to be more humble, to tone down her intellectual dominance, and to not think so highly of herself.  Maybe this is true–no one likes an a$$hole, right?–but my friend thought it was potentially a very gendered reaction to this student’s sex and clear feminist perspective.  Would a male student so highly rated be told to tone it down and to be more humble?   

Then last week, I had a telephone conversation with a former student who has just finished her first year in a doctoral program, and she reported getting almost exactly the same message, but this time directly from the faculty she’s working with.  This student has a Master’s degree already, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to them that she’s got some opinions about the kind of coursework that she wants to do or that she’s very adept at working with university faculty.  My former student has remarked on how submissive and non-confrontational student culture is at her new uni compared to Baa Ram U., so there is also the issue of institutional culture to consider here.  And yet, she is taken aback by the fact that her new proffies have understood her boldness and her confidence as a problem, at least initially.  They’ve permitted her to take a stronger role in her curriculum, but several have commented to her that they didn’t know what to make of her until they got to know her a little better.  It left me wondering:  would a male graduate student with her exact record of achievement be met with such surprise that he had his own opinions and shared them with his professors?

(N.B.:  I told her to get used to being called a pushy b!tch.  It’s just what happens when you’re a woman with an opinion, so do what you need to do for your education and don’t let it hurt your feelings.  I also told her that her program and her professors were commendably flexible when it counted, so she just needs to focus on her coursework and excel.  I’m sure she’d appreciate any other advice the rest of you might have for her in the comments below.)

Now, these stories amount to N=2 and they leave me with more questions than answers, so I want to hear from the rest of you–graduate students and faculty alike:  what have you seen and heard lately with respect to gender, graduate school, and the equitable or inequitable evaluation of men and women?  What about race or sexuality, or other aspects of students’ identities?  I’m teaching the introduction to graduate school course for our incoming Master’s students this fall, so I want to be extremely vigilant about evaluating all students fairly and equitably.  I agree with Moi that faculty have a critically important role to play in creating classrooms and grad school environments that encourage vigorous open discussions where everyone’s ideas get a critical but fair hearing and every student is evaluated on the strength of hir work. 

It’s fashionable to pretend that “the ivory tower” is a world apart from “the real world,” but faculty evaluations (formal or informal) have direct, material consequences for others:  the way graduate students react to the contributions of other students can either inspire their peers to further study and achievement, or it can disillusion and discourage them.  The way faculty evaluate first-year graduate students and react to their work inside and outside the classroom eventually will make it into letters of recommendation for further graduate study, for fellowships and prizes, and eventually for jobs.

Maybe it wasn’t all of a sudden–maybe it’s a process that has happened over the last few years, or maybe I was born this way, but I find myself wanting to align myself with the queer bloggers ever more closely.  The queer bloggers I read and feel a comradeship with don’t think that there is only one way to be a good lesbian or gay man.  They don’t police the language that other gays and lesbians use to write about or talk about their own experiences.  We sometimes disagree, but they don’t feel the need to lecture me about daring to write about queerness or question the authenticity of my queer sensibilities. 

Some of you heterosexualists, especially some of you who identify online as mothers:  not so much!  Quite frankly, I’m tired of my comments threads being jacked by people claiming to be mothers who are offended by this or that thing that I wrote about motherhood.  Although Historiann is not a blog about motherhood, I will talk about motherhood whenever I like because I am an American women’s historian, and motherhood is something about which women’s historians in general have had a lot to say.  Feel free to disagree with anything I write–but don’t bother with the complaints about “hurt feelings” and the insistance that your subjectivity is the only one that counts.

Dr. Crazy has written about the ways in which the interests and views of one subset of women–mothers–come to dominate conversations in the feminist blogosphere.  For example, conversations about improving workplaces for women come to be about maternity leave and child care, as though the careers of non-mothers are somehow perfectly free of institutionalized bias against all women.  She writes:

But don’t tell me what I should think or what words I’m allowed to use. Don’t expect me to believe that the needs of parents are somehow more important than the needs of other workers. Because I just don’t believe that.

Giddyap!

Some conversations here this summer have followed a familiar trajectory–like yesterday’s post in which I made an aside about how I didn’t think motherhood should qualify one for an exemption from jury duty.  The comments degenerated into accusations that I’m smug and not authentically feminist because I wasn’t sympathetic to the difficulties of finding child care, the frustrations of women who care for their own children, etc., when I thought it was clear that I criticized *one* woman in particular for mobilizing motherhood as a strategy for avoiding the responsibilities of citizenship.  (As I said in the comments there–I’m sure Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the mother of seven, is spinning in her grave!)

So if this is what some readers think it means to be an authentic straight mother/feminist  blogger, I want off this wagon train.  And if anyone asks, tell them that I just went gay all of a sudden! Now, which of you gay bloggers is going to fix me a drink? (I’ll bring the steaks, obvs.!)

My friend–also a white woman, also exactly my age, also middle-class, and also supposed to be a “nice girl” from the suburbs–told me a similar story about how at the conclusion of a two-year postdoc, she was introduced by the (male) director of the granting organization as someone who really “shook things up” around the place and got up in their grills about various issues.  What could she say after an introduction like that?  Once again, shutting up is the only way you can go.  You can’t argue with him without proving him right.

Now that I’m further along in my career, I don’t get called “willful” by the people I work with.  (My friend pointed out that “willful” is only an adjective she would use in describing a child’s behavior, not that of a colleague or a graduate student.)  These days I get called “intimidating” by some colleagues and my students.  I don’t think they mean it as an insult–I actually think most of them mean it in a complimentary way, so it bothers me less than being called “willful.”  But, still–there’s an implication that being “intimidating” is something unexpected or unusual.

*My memory of grad school is of a year of uninterrupted trauma and depression** followed by two years of increasing confidence in my work (and meeting Fratguy along the way.)  I took my exams at the end of my third year and then got the hell out of Philadelphia, and my life improved dramatically.

**Yes, “trauma and depression.”  What else can you call an exploitative and dishonest love affair, rumors circulated by my classmates who didn’t have fellowships (I was funded) that I was plagiarizing my own senior thesis for my first-year research paper, followed by actually being hit by a car after getting off a bus.  (I had to call a friend to come over and help me get undressed to get in the bathtub that night.  I couldn’t lift my left arm for months, but managed to get myself dressed and teach three T.A. sections the following day.)  I read all of Jane Austen’s novels that winter and cried randomly throughout the day–being an ordinarily very happy person, I was unable to recognize the signs of depression I was obviously manifesting.  Needless to say, I don’t remember having the time or energy to be all that “willful” with respect to my coursework and teaching assignments!