Historiann

I’m sure that if you care, you’ve already heard about the extremely strange racial tirade that has apparently ended (for now) Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s radio career.  This article by Mary Elizabeth Williams sums up Schlessinger’s angry outburst at a caller in which she screamed the N-word eleven times.  Joan Walsh at Salon writes that last night on Larry King, she announced that she’ll leave the airwaves when her contract ends at the end of this year because she wants to “regain [her] First Amendment rights.  (Check out those links–they include both audio and video richness for your full and complete understanding.  Go listen to the audio link in the Williams story–don’t miss the part where she says that it’s ironic that there are so many people complaining about racial discrimination when we have a black President!  Priceless.)

Walsh focuses on Schlessinger’s curious victimology and her willful misunderstanding of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and rightly so.  She writes,

Like a lot of right-wingers lately (see the so-called “ground zero mosque” demonizers), Schlessinger shows a poor grasp of what the First Amendment does. It protects us from government abridging our speech rights; it doesn’t protect us from other Americans deciding we’re racially divisive idiots when we use the word “n!&&er” 11 times in a a single exchange with one caller. . . .

Then there’s the claim [on King's show that] she can’t be “helpful and useful” under the current circumstances, which seems to indicate she can only be “helpful and useful” if she can use the word “nigger” 11 times in one of her rants without being criticized. Schlessinger has gotten away with being “helpful and useful” in all her homophobic, sexist, right-wing glory for almost three decades. It’s amazing this single run-in with American decency has finally made her retreat.

But this wasn’t Schlessinger’s first major on-air meltdown that p!$$ed people off– Continue Reading »

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I know this sounds like a dumb question.  Most of us have been answering this for at least a decade, with the rejoinder “of course not!”  For the past twenty years, we’ve seen a complex de-coupling going on between women’s history and feminism.  (This was of course one of the laments in Judith Bennett’s wide-ranging evaluation of the relationship between history and femnism in History Matters.)  Women’s history is a large and rich enough field that there are histories of women that aren’t particularly feminist, just as the history of women has expanded far beyond the history of just feminist women to include the histories of women who lived before the invention of feminism as a political movement as well as women who weren’t feminists or even worked actively against feminism.  (As an outsider to modern U.S. women’s history, it seems to me that histories of right wing women’s activism have been particularly hot in the past decade.  Those of you who work in the field should feel free to correct my impressions if necessary, and add your own thoughts about recent work in your field.)

But, I was wondering today about women’s history.  What would happen if we just stopped writing it?  Who in the larger historical profession would notice, or care, or complain?  As a colleague in my field remarked to me last year, there are a number of women’s historians in my generation who wrote their first books in women’s or gender history, but then have written (or are writing) something definitely not women’s or gender history for their second books.

Continue Reading »

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Writing about L’Affaire Shirley Sherrod and the $h!tstorms over ideological purity in the American Left and how it’s infected the Right, Tenured Radical then brings it all back to the world we know and love:

I would also observe that this is not just a political problem, it’s a cultural problem. It is the kind of $hit that occurs daily on blogs: blogger writes a six or seven paragraph essay, and some a$$hat latches onto a sentence out of context, gives it a hateful spin, and writes a “comment” that is actually just a personal attack intended to discredit the blogger wholesale. The idea? Who cares about ideas? You would have to read the whole post to grasp the ideas!!!! How much easier just to move on to the next blog, knowing that the writer is exactly the putrid idiot you knew s/he was before you started reading.

Ah, yes:  memories!  Click on over there for the Airplane joke, if not for the intellectual stimulation.

Another connection in all of this, as Knitting Clio pointed out in the comments over at Tenured Radical,  is how easy it is to demonize women, especially women of color (like those who speak just once hypothetically about wise Latinas, f’rinstance), and discredit them as authority figures, whether they’re merely self-published writers or members of the current Presidential administration.  Somehow it’s all too easy to believe that a woman needs to be disciplined or even humiliated for shooting her mouth off again, and it’s all too difficult to believe that she’s deserving of due process, a fair hearing, or even of a complete reading of her professional opinions and accomplishments.  Continue Reading »

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Go read this account of reading the reviews from a recent grant application, in which Female Science Professor was thanked for not including the fact of her sex in her BI (Broader Impact) statement:

In one review of one of my recent proposals, I was thanked by one reviewer for not mentioning myself or other women involved in the project as a broader impact. The reviewer was very happy to see that my proposal was therefore not obviously biased against men.

OK… you’re welcome.. but you know what? Even if I wrote in the BI section that the proposed research involved female investigators and therefore in some way helped broaden the participation of an underrepresented group, this does not demonstrate bias against men. It would be stating something that is part fact (I am the female PI whether I mention it in the proposal text or not) and part opinion (my involvement in research broadens the participation etc.); no men were excluded or oppressed to produce this proposal.

So the message is, “don’t tell us how we should think about your sex.  We saw your first name, we have our own ideas, and we can use that information however we like.  We don’t like having our privilege checked, don’t'cha know!”

This reminds me of reading the reviews of my NEH grant application (unsuccessful!) for my first book project, Continue Reading »

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Is anyone else skeptical of this current rash (h/t Corrente) of “is college really worth it?” (h/t RealClearPolitics) articles, now that women are the majority of college students, and black, brown, and first-generation college students are gaining more of a purchase in post-secondary education?  It sure seems like an interesting coincidence to me. Continue Reading »

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It’s Stampede season here, friends, and we’re all excited about rodeo days and the world’s largest Independence Day rodeo, right here in Potterville!  Heck’s’a'poppin’.

• First up, the hearings for Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court start today.  Tenured Radical has a nice round-up of her own, with some quality links for your enjoyment.  I liked this article by Deborah L. Rhode of Stanford University, “Why Elena Kagan’s Looks Matter.”  (Answer, paraphrased by me:  That ol’ devil, patriarchal equilibrium.)  Don’t miss the part in the article where she describes how hateful, anonymous insults about her looks after publishing an op-ed illustrated the point of her new book rather perfectly.  Rhode writes, “Yet pointing this out is likely to unleash the prejudices at issue. I got a recent taste after publishing an op-ed in The Washington Post. The editorial summarized themes from my just released book, The Beauty Bias, which documents the price of prejudice and proposes some legal and cultural strategies to address it. It was surprising to discover how many individuals were willing to take time from their busy day to send hate mail on the order of ‘I just bet that you yourself are one ugly c—.’ Some readers, annoyed that no author picture accompanied the article, felt strongly enough to do independent research. One explained: ‘knowing there had to be a reason why [you would write about bias] I looked you up in the Stanford Faculty Directory and then all the pieces fell together… I’m sure Stanford has to tie a bone around your neck to get even the campus dogs not to run away from you.’ Several hundred online posts following the article included more of the same. One reader proposed taking up a collection so I could ‘buy …a burqa: This would certainly improve the aesthetics around Stanford.’”  Lovely.  (Does the WaPo realize that comments like this reflect poorly on them?  Once again, and with feeling:  either moderate your comments or eliminate them!  Same goes for you, Daily Beast.  Why give these douchebags a forum when they can start their own damn blogs, for free?)
• Paul Krugman has some bad news for us all.  (Well, those of us who aren’t fabulously rich enough to eschew employment and live off of interest income, anyway.) Sucks for us, friends!
• Randall Stephens has some interesting reflections on Glenn Beck’s use of history and style of historical argumentation.  He writes, “Beck’s political grandstanding and maudlin theatrics are offensive enough. (I can think of no better ipecac for the typical humanities professor.) But it’s his ahistorical theories of the past that disturb me most. Continue Reading »

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As they say, get a dog.

Yesterday’s post about extramural job seeking  and institutional loyalty and your comments have got me thinking.  (Oh, noes!  Say it ain’t so, Historiann!)  Do we really owe our institutions loyalty?  I feel loyalty to my profession, as vexed as it is, because I think what historians do is valuable and worthwhile.  I feel loyalty to my friends and colleagues in academia, because we have to stand together in intellectual and professional solidarity in a world that neither understands nor appreciates what we do.  (I’m sorry if that sounds self-pitying–I don’t mean it to.  I knew what I was getting into 20 years ago–this is the United States of Amnesia, after all, and I am an Amnesian historian.) I feel loyalty to my students, about whom you hear very little on this blog because I have been entrusted with a part of their education, and I take the instruction and encouragement of young people very seriously.  But I don’t feel particularly loyal to the institutions that have employed me.

Given the realities of the academic job market in the humanities for the past 40 years, and the ever-increasing demands for winning tenure, it may even be reasonable to see ourselves in an adversarial relationship with our employers.  This changes with tenure, because tenured faculty are implicated in institutional governance in ways that junior faculty are not.  Maybe the absence of institutional loyalty on my part has to do with the fact that I’ve worked for institutions that deployed the rhetoric of loyalty selectively, when they wanted to extract more unpaid work out of the faculty, for example.  Then, we were one big “family,” but when I went to my “family members” for protection and redress from other “family members” who were treating me badly, I discovered the limits of that rhetoric on “family.” Continue Reading »

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For those of you following yesterday’s discussion about the so-called “paradox” between class privilege and rage, you might want to check out this week’s New Yorker (May 31, 2010).  Jonathan Franzen has a story, “Agreeable,”about a teen-aged jock in the 1970s who is raped.  In addition to a thoughtful exploration of how the girl would have experienced the rape and its aftermath, it is also a perfect illustration of how class works to suppress the reporting and prosecution of crimes by privileged men.

I will just add that I’m a huge fan of Franzen.  Continue Reading »

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I saw this article published Sunday about the murderer of University of Virginia student and lacrosse star Yeardley Love, and was puzzled by the headline that appeared to juxtapose the life of “privilege, [and] rage” he led.  The lede in the story then contrasts the murderer’s appearance on the links at an exclusive country club just hours before he murdered Love.  But, privilege and rage aren’t opposed to each other–in fact, they’re deeply intertwined in the lives of American ruling class men.  Consider please a few excerpts from the story, which look like textbook examples of how ruling class men presume to use other people, and women in particular, as part of their performance of dominance:

[George] Huguely[V] finished the eighth grade at Mater Dei School in Bethesda and matriculated to nearby Landon School, an elite boys’ private school. He did not want for confidence. Thrust into a football game as a freshman, he promised a coach he would make a big play — in exchange for a kiss from the coach’s fiancee, according to a Washington Post profile in 2006. Huguely promptly intercepted a pass, then walked off the field to ask for the fiancee’s number.

.       .       .       .      .       .      .       .      

Huguely also displayed an irreverent side. Once he stole his coach’s car keys from his office, pulled his car onto the lacrosse field and, from the driver’s seat, struck up a conversation with the coach. The team burst out laughing, according to Huguely’s account. Continue Reading »

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Via Inside Higher Ed, we learn that Sandra Soto, an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and a co-Coordinator of Chicana/Latina Studies at at the University of Arizona, was asked by her dean to deliver the faculty commencement address to the graduating class of 2010 for the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.  Towards the end of her speech last week, she addressed the punitive anti-immigrant and anti-Ethnic Studies legislation passed recently in Arizona, and was heckled, jeered, and booed, and has been receiving nasty and threatening e-mails ever since.  Reaction in Arizona to her commencement address has been heated.  “On a local television station’s comment board, several viewers suggested that Soto ‘return to El Salvador.’ (She’s actually from Texas, where her family has lived since Texas was Mexico, she said, and she’s not sure why she’s been identified as being from El Salvador.)”

There is a YouTube video of the controversial final 1/3 of her talk here, complete with cries from the audience, “this is America,” ”cut your hair,” and “bitch.”  After an official interrupts the jeers (at about 2:30) to ask for “civil discourse,” the crowd quiets down a bit.  At the conclusion of her short address, she was greeted with both enthusiastic cheers and loud boos.  The entirety of her speech, and some final thoughts of mine, are after the jump. Continue Reading »

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