Historiann

I’ve been thinking a great deal about the gendering of the internet, and the ways in which women’s blogs (and feminist blogs in particular) are subject to more intense and more personal attacks by male commenters on the blogger and other blog commenters than blogs by men or that don’t address feminist issues.  Since we’re all feminists here, we probably agree that men (in general) are much more presumptuous about monopolizing or claiming women’s bodies, time, and space (in general) than vice-versa, because that presumption is a large part of the definition of male privilege.  Although it’s no longer technically legal in most cases, male privilege thrives and it it enforced by many men, and women too (sadly).  And this presumption works in similar ways in the blogosphere, as it works in real life.

Historiann was forced to ban a commenter here a few months ago, and in order to clarify things I instituted some rules for commenting.  (Rules which were implicitly understood and observed by the rest of you as the rules of civilized discourse by all but the banned commenter, and an occasional troll here or there who never came back.)  Unsurprisingly, other feminist blogs suffer periodically (or chronically) from one or more presumptuous commenters who identify themselves as male and then go on to lecture the blogger (and/or fellow commenters) about what feminism is, what the problems with feminism are, why her post is totally wrong about X or Y, or her/their utter and complete misunderstanding that men are equally oppressed, etc.

The comments on this post at Echidne are very instructive about how some male commenters can be extraordinarily presumptuous (see the comments by “swampcracker” in particular).  The main techniques are these:  1) assuming that if someone makes a comment that doesn’t exactly describe his life or his point of view, that it’s totally without merit, and 2) being blithely content to jack the thread away from its original point to talk about the issue that he knows he’s right about, no matter what any other (women) commenters have to say about it.  (Other popular themes:  “I’m the father of daughters/a daughter myself,”  “My feminist friends agree wtih me”–a variant on the ever-popular “some of my best friends are feminists”–”I’ve been discriminated against too,” and the always popular tactic of writing longer, angrier, and more patronizing comments the more your comments are mocked or disagreed with.)  This was also a big problem over at Shakesville this spring, where comments on one post in particular about misogyny in the Democratic primary were taken over by men who apparently just couldn’t stand to let feminists talk it over amongst themselves.  Interestingly, I haven’t seen obnoxious or patronizing comments from men who identify themselves as gay–overwhelmingly, the problem commenters seem to be men who identify as straight.  (Maybe my gay men friends and commenters are just especially down with feminism, because they tend to be all scholars in the humanities, but I haven’t run into femophobic or antifeminist gay men on the feminist blogs.)

I guess my question is this:  since these guys can’t just agree to disagree, why don’t they start their own damn feminist (or antifeminist) blogs, if they’re such experts on feminism and gender issues?  Why bother feminist bloggers and their other commenters, when we clearly disagree?  Do you really think you’re so smart or so important that you’re going to change my mind about the most important intellectual issues in my life?  Yeah, nearly 40 years of life experience as a girl and a woman, and twenty years of academic training in American history, women’s history, and feminism, and I’m going to see the light because of an anonymous a-hole on the internet?

That seems to me to be pretty much the definition of male privilege on the world wide timewasting web–the earnest belief of random a-holes that their superior knowledge and rhetorical skills can change the minds of all of us silly, deluded women out there–but I’d like to hear from the rest of you about this.  What are your experiences as either a blogger or a commenter on blogs, and how do you think your sex (or perceived sex/gender identity) has affected the way you’re treated in cyberspace?  What are the other issues that come up for out gay and lesbian bloggers?  Do white commenters plague African American and Latin@ bloggers with patronizing lectures on race?  (I think I know the answer to that one, since so many WOC/POC bloggers moderate their comments…but I’d like to learn more.)  What have you seen or heard?  Sing it, sisters and brothers.

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As we here in Potterville pull on our boots and get ready for the big rodeo and ”western celebration” coming to town, I’m happy to report that a few of you are getting out of your towns to attend conferences and conduct some research.  Here are some interesting museums featured on a few blogs I read regularly:

• Anxious Black Woman is just back from the National Women’s Studies Association annual meeting in Cincinnati, and gives us a great report on the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, a new museum there.  I’m particularly grateful for her review, because Historiann lived in southwestern Ohio when this museum was being planned a decade ago, and she was a little skeptical of the concept.  (White people in and around Cincinnati are really into the Underground Railroad, and every little town has at least two or three mythological sites or houses that people commemorate as alleged stops on the UGRR.  Historiann was always suspicious that this was a means for white people to re-write the history of slavery and to cast their ancestors in heroic roles as slavery resisters, rather than in the much more likely role of slavery enablers, especially because African Americans were enslaved in southwestern Ohio, contrary to the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.  I lived in a town near the Ohio-Indiana border I’ll call “Boxford,” which likes to pretend that its proximity to the authentic Quaker town of Richmond, Indiana somehow retroactively turns all nineteenth-century Boxfordians into abolitionists.)  ABW’s verdict on the museum?  Disappointing in its interest more in masters than enslaved people and in its erasure of women, although the introductory movie was good.  (But go read her more thorough treatment yourself!)  The good news is that the NWSA itself was a great experience–I’m envious that I wasn’t there!
• If your summer travel plans take you to Cincinnati, the Cincinnati area has all kinds of new museums–for example, the Creation Museum of Hebron, Kentucky, just a few exits down the road from the Cincinnati airport, is another museum that was just under construction when Historiann lived nearby.  It’s a creationist extravaganza of imaginary natural history–tell them Bing McGhandi sent you!  Here’s a reality-based review of the CM.
• Professor Zero is in Lima (Peru, not Ohio!), and went to the Museo de Pedro Osma, which sounds like an interesting palace filled with colonial as well as twentieth-century art.
• Do any of you have recommendations for interesting fine arts, history, or other museums in your home towns (or that you’ve encountered on your travels) for summer vacationers? 
• Finally, for those of you in the academy who are public historians, or work with public historians, what’s your sense of public history’s relationship to non-public history (frequently referred to somewhat condescendingly as “academic history,” as though public history is an inferior intellectual pursuit)?  My sense is that there used to be more conflict or resentment among “academic” historians, but that these distinctions (well, snobberies, actually) are fading.  Is Historiann (who is not a public Historiann) overly optimistic?

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So much to blog about, so little time when one is writing pointless books about irrelevant (is it redundant to say they’re female?) people that will nevertheless destroy the historical profession!  Taking a break from my vulgar colonial schemes to corrupt the history and memory of the eighteenth century, here’s what I found recently in the twenty-first century:

• The pay gap in academia is worse at R-1s, and it starts at the moment of hire.  (Good news for those of you at SLACs, CCs, and regional universities!  Right?)  The intrepid Scott Jaschik reports that “[a]t research universities, even controlling for variables such as discipline and numbers of papers published and other factors, there is an unexplained 9 percent salary gap that favors men.”  Whoodathunkit?  Only everyone who reads Historiann.com!
• Teh funny:  via Notorious Ph.D., a blind-reviewer voodoo doll.  I’m going to buy two.
• Tenured Radical explains (with mostly small words that even the ig’nant can understand) why women’s history is important. 
• Another Damned Medievalist at Blogenspiel has two posts up about the Berks.  One features a primer about how to get ready for the 2011 conference, as well as some compliments about the conference.  (I am sure the 2011 Program Committee will be happy to build on the numbers of medieval panels, roundtables, and workshops featured in 2008!)  The other post, Transformative Conferences, features a discussion in the comments about the fracas at the panel in honor of Susan Mosher Stuard in Kalamazoo last month, when a man stood up to suggest that perhaps women’s history was too important to be left to women historians!  (As if!  Yeah, the men were going to get around to women’s history, when a bunch of women showed up and started making trouble and smearing menstrual blood all over the seats at conferences!)  Hey, medievalists:  I’ve been hearing whispers about this for weeks now–you have to let us Americanists in on the gossip, too!  (At least tell Historiann, who remembers Susan Stuard fondly from her undergraduate days, and whose BFF is a medievalist.)  I’m glad they did a panel in Stuard’s honor, and what a fitting send-off into retirement was the learned comment by the Venerable Bede there.  Nice work, dude!
• Brett Holman offers le dernier mot on this manufactured controversy at Airminded, which reminds me of that old bumper sticker:  “Against abortion?  Don’t have one.“  Don’t like women’s and gender history?  Then don’t do it, but STFU!  (It seems so obvious, doesn’t it?)  Thanks, Brett!
• 
• Knitting Clio schools Hendrik Hertzberg, and calls out a lot of the bullcrap prounouncements on African American history and American women’s history by the ig’nant class of elites who dominate our political discourse.  (That cowgirl knows her bullcrap!)
• Oh, and the sexy cowgirl picture?  This one is for commenter Fratguy, who I think has a little crush on the cowgirls here at Historiann.  Come and get it!  (Here’s a close-up; click the top one for a larger view.)

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Happy Juneteenth!  I want to follow up today on some of the dynamite panels on pre-emancipation African American women’s history I saw at the Berkshire Conference last weekend. 

Researching and Writing the Lives of Unfree Women, Friday June 13.  I reported briefly on this panel on Sunday, but want to follow up because it was so good.  The room was jam-packed, so that when Natalie Zemon Davis arrived after the session had already started, a thoughtful junior scholar gave up her seat so that NZD could sit.  Other senior scholars like Tera Hunter and Elaine Forman Crane were in Standing Room Only (although Historiann tried to get them to take her seat)!  The session was chaired by Annette Gordon-Reed, whose work on Sally Hemings (and new book on the Hemings family) is justifiably admired.  All of the presentations were interesting, but I thought that these were especially fascinating:

• Terri Snyder’s discussion of researching Jane Webb (ca. 1682-1764), a sometimes-enslaved, sometimes free woman of color in Virginia and her efforts to secure the liberty of her seven children
• Cassandra Pybus’s presentation on Mary Perth (ca. 1772-1800), an enslaved Virginia creole whose life she has traced to Nova Scotia (as one of the “Black Loyalists”) and then to Sierra Leone.  Pybus spoke of the frustrations of the gaps in the historical record, and her reluctance to “make it up,” although other panelists said that all history has gaps that must be reconciled, and so they’re perfectly comfortable with sketching out a series of possible scenarios in their writing.
• Sharon Wood spoke about Priscilla Baltimore (ca. 1801-1882), a locally famous St. Louis and western Illinois entrepreneur and alleged conductor on the Underground Railroad.  Wood’s presentation offered some insight into researching in local archives, and a guide for people interested in African American women’s history in the western U.S.
• Angelita Reyes gave a wonderful presentation on Vicey Skipwith (ca. 1856-1930), a woman born in Virginia in slavery, who became a landowner after emancipation.  Reyes’s work illustrated the sequential connections from freedom, to marriage, to property ownership, and thence to “respectability,” and brought it all home (literally!) with her work uncovering the Vicey Skipwith Home Place and getting it on the National Register for Historic Places and the Virginia Landmarks Register.  The preservation of material culture and landmarks like the Skipwith Home are vital to African American history, and was especially welcome at the Berks given our emphasis on public history in many panels, roundtables, workshops, and seminars.

This roundtable discussion was a clarion call to get back into the archives, particularly into the state and local archives, do some old-fashioned social history, and discover the lives of unfree and recently emancipated women in order to (in Pybus’s words) uncover the “specificity of African American lives.”  Many panelists gave high praise to the genealogists and archivists whose work has enabled their work tremendously.  The sources and stories are out there, and they are recoverable. 

Surviving Dislocation, Separation, and Sale:  Enslaved Women in the Americas, Saturday June 14.  V.P.Franklin chaired and commented on two papers, one by Jessica Millward (”Abandoned Lands and Abandoned Plantations:  Enslaved Women and Mobility in the Age of Revolution”) and Daina Berry (”‘Young Girls are First on the Stand’:  Enslaved Females and the Domestic Market.”)  There is no better evidence of the return of social history than Berry’s database of 81,000 slave valuations and her efforts to give us a nuanced portrait of the prices set on enslaved people according to age, sex, health, etc. in Antebellum slave markets.  Particularly interesting was her discussion of “fancy girls,” enslaved women who were used as sex workers, and of the self-mutilation (chopping off a hand or a foot) enslaved people engaged in as resistance, in order to decrease their market value.  

That’s all for today–if you saw these panels, please comment further.  If you saw other great African American panels, please report on those!  (I’ve heard that the discussion in Stephanie Camp’s seminar Sunday morning was terrific–but I wasn’t there myself, unfortunately!)  I hope you all honor our ancestors and enjoy a nice picnic today!

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Well, kids, I finally got away from my endless duties at Historiann.com HQ to see Sex and the City:  The Movie.  And, what can I say?  It was a two-hour-plus excursion to Candy Land for me.  It was also a damn fine character-driven comedy/drama–and how many of those are there out there that don’t star extremely unphotogenic men?  The four main broads in this movie looked like movie stars–and how many movies are there out there that feature adult roles for women in their 40s?  Be warned, if you haven’t seen it yet:  it’s a full three-hanky weeper, much to my surprise.  I’m not sure what the movie would offer someone who’s not already a fan of the show, with an extensive knowledge of each character’s back story, but that viewer is not Historiann.  Anyway, on with the review–spoiler alert!  Don’t click “continue reading” if you don’t want to know!

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Just to illustrate and amplify the point in the previous post, click here to find another shockingly offensive racist and misogynist image from the 2008 primary campaign (H/t Diary of an Anxious Black Woman.)  I won’t put that image on my blog–Anxious B. has a different position, but I’ve got a weak stomach for images that exploit lynching.  See also the commentary at Black Women Vote, and What About Our Daughters?

Are you back now?  Good.  Now, the individual who posted that image at the famous “liberal” Hillary-hating home base, DailyKos.com, meant to criticize people who are critical of Michelle Obama.  However, when you create a sexually and racially exploitative image in the course of criticizing other people for their racism and sexism, you’re replicating the exploitation, not calling it out.  Mmmmm…misogyny:  tastes great to supposedly liberal dudes!  And now, with extra racism!  (On what planet do people think this is acceptable?  Oh, yeah:  planet Wehatehillaryshe’sabitch.)  This is why misogyny is wrong, whether from the right, the left, or the corporate media, and whether it benefits “your” candidate or not.

Well, as Historiann predicted, it looks like Michelle Obama is being prepared for induction in the uppity candidate’s consort/First Ladies’ club, population 1.

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No matter how much academics in the blogosphere bitch and moan amongst themselves, those crazy, cockeyed, optimistic kids keep signing up for graduate school in ever greater numbers!  According to this report at Inside Higher Ed, ”More Historians on the Way,” based on this report by the American Historical Association, applications and enrollment in Ph.D. programs are up, but so is attrition from said programs.  Only 49 percent of graduate students have finished their degrees in under 10 years.

Historiann could have told you this was going to happen, as it has in every economic downturn over the past 20 years.  I started graduate school just before the 1990-91 recession drove up applications in my graduate department (Après moi, le deluge!), and I’m sure that the current recession is a good part of what drove applications up this year.  Twenty-two year-olds with liberal arts degrees look around and say, “whereas we used to be able to count on working at Whole Foods or Barnes and Noble with our B.A.’s while we decided what we wanted to do in life, now we can’t even count on getting a boring retail job.”  (Well, that was Historiann’s choice, anyway–while most of the rest of her generation became slacker baristas ca. 1990-94, and then became internet millionaires in 1998-99, she got a Ph.D. instead.)  Compared to unemployment, working in a library for five to ten years looks pretty good, and I’m sure most will stay long enough to get their Master’s degrees, and maybe even figure out their true calling.  And there are worse things than spending a year or two achieving a greater knowledge of history, even if you don’t become a professional historian, so long as you’re not racking up too much debt.  You’ll lower your lifetime risk of skin cancer, at the very least, and learn how to pronounce “Michel Foucault” the fancy French way.  (The only downside of graduate history education is that every U.S. Civil War buff at every party you’ll attend for the rest of your lives will find you and want to get your opinion on his pet theory on the Battle of Waxahatchmo Crick, even if you studied monastic communities in medieval Flanders.)

The author of the AHA report, Robert Townsend, will appear at the 2008 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women at our opening night plenary session, “The Changing (?) Status of Women in the Historical Profession,” Thursday June 12 at 7 p.m. at the Ted Mann Concert Hall on the campus of the University of Minnesota.  Along with Noralee Frankel (also from the AHA), he will provide the statistics, Paula Sanders will speak to best practices, Elizabeth Lunbeck will speak about women’s experiences in the academy over the past 40 years, and Muriel McClendon will address the experiences of faculty of color.  The session will be chaired by Mary Maples Dunn, a longtime member of the Berkshire Conference and whose professional interest in this issue over a nearly 50 year career as a faculty member and administrator is legendary.  Stop by to ask them some tough questions.  I’m not sure they’ll necessarily have all the answers–or the answers you’ll want to hear–but it should make for a lively conversation.  (See the links on the left sidebar for conference details and a PDF of the program.)

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Although they haven’t yet figured out how to “beat the bitch” yet, the misogynist troglodytes in the national media are busy roughing up Michelle Obama already.  Historiann has said all along that in the event that Michelle Obama and her husband are the only Democrats left standing after the primaries, that they’ll enjoy the Clinton treatment (ca. 1991-present) all the same.  (The Clintons aren’t uniquely divisive–they’re just uniquely successful in the Democratic party, which made them uniquely annoying to Republicans and right-wingers.)  Exhibit A, we have ex-liberal Mr. Christopher Hitchens, who has all of the drunken charm of Irving Kristol on PCP.  He’s been deeply, deeply troubled by Jeremiah Wright and his role in Barack Obama’s life.  Yesterday, Hitch picked his head up off of his keyboard long enough to type the following (h/t to Chet Scoville at Shakesville for warning us about this steaming turd):

All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?

This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it.

Inexcusable!  So Hitch hitched up his plus-fours, picked up a phone, and contacted people at the Obama campaign himself, right?  He, the only reporter tough enough for the job, demanded an interview with Mrs. Obama and asked her, right?

Um, well, no.  He simply continued to type along happily in his ignorance.  Why didn’t he ask this “inescapable” question?

(One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, “Keep my wife out of it,” or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse’s influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company—and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable—then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate.

Right.  And yet, apparently we’re supposed to believe that making up stuff in his head is credible journalism.  He apparently didn’t ask any questions or do any, you know, reporting, because he “picture[d]” in his mind that Barack Obama wouldn’t like the question, and then says that this phantom Obama in his brain ”either. . . is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.”  (Friends, I think we can all agree right now that Hitch needs help!  Remember, at this point, Hitch has done no actual reporting.  He hasn’t talked to anyone named Obama except an imaginary one.) 

Hitch did some reporting, didn’t he?  Well, to get to the heart of the matter, he did what all good reporters do when they have a question they need to ask a prominent public figure:  he looked up her Senior thesis in sociology from 1985, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.”  He then pronounces that “[t]o describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be ‘read’ at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any known language.”  What could he mean by that comment?  Ebonics?  Blinglish?  And isn’t it amazing that Princeton granted her a degree, and that she went to Harvard law school despite her poor communication skills outside of “any known language!”

Side note:  isn’t it funny how Republican politicians like George W. Bush–drunk until age 40– and Henry Hyde (he of the “youthful indiscretions”) get a pass on anything immoral, untoward, or stupid they did up until their early 40s.  And yet, somehow a senior thesis written at age 21 or 22 is supposed to be the dernier crie of Michelle Obama’s intellect, politics, and judgment?  We’re supposed to think that the fact that she wrote a senior thesis and graduated from Princeton is somehow disreputable, rather than commendable.  (Funny about that double standard, isn’t it?)  Women of color succeeding in the dominant culture’s institutions, and on the dominant culture’s own terms?  Very suspicious.  White men wasting their lives into middle-age with booze and girls–just high-spirited fun, you know, the kind that makes you think you’d like sit down and have a beer with the guy.

So, Hitch gives us the amazing revelation that “at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she’s much influenced by the definition of black ’separationism’ offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America.”  (Apparently, Hitch had to take a nap at that point–this is the only information he gleaned from consulting M. Obama’s thesis that he cites in the article.  He doesn’t actually say what the definition is, nor does he explain why this makes M. Obama a disreputable scholar or bad person today, beyond the fact that white people are supposed to be scared by the mere invokation of the words “Stokely Carmichael” and “Black Power” in one sentence.)  After that, we’re treated to a pointless anecdote about the last time Hitch saw Carmichael, in which he gets to scare white people again by saying “Louis Farrakhan.”  (Also, you’d think that Hitch would be about the last person to want to be held to this standard, because he used to be wrong about everything until 6 years ago, but now he’s got it all worked out–finally!) 

At the end, Hitch gets to the point of this ramble through his fevered brain and his vomit-stained copy of a 23-year old senior thesis:  “I have the distinct feeling that the Obama campaign can’t go on much longer without an answer to the question: ‘Are we getting two for one?’”  And, he helpfully reminds those of us who can’t remember 1992, “This time we should find out before it’s too late to ask.”  Because Bill and Hillary Clinton have been such a freakin’ disaster for their party and this nation, apparently, and there’s not enough hate in the world for Hillary Clinton.  And now it’s too late!  Too late, I say!

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Historiann has been thinking a lot about peer review lately.  It seems, as in the old nursery rhyme, that peer review is like the little girl with the curl right in the middle of her forehead:  When it is good, it is very very good, but when it is bad, it is horrid. 

At its best, peer review helps writers avoid making dunderheaded factual errors and points them to other sources to help bolster their arguments.  When it’s done by generous and intellectually engaged reviewers, it helps writers sharpen their arguments, tone down (or rev up) their prose, and to see more big-picture connections and implications of their work that even the writers couldn’t see until someone slightly more expert than they are pointed it out.  What’s not to like, with a fair and humane group of supportive senior scholars freely sharing their wisdom with their (usually junior) colleagues?  Furthermore, having one’s work reviewed by supportive senior scholars is a really great way of making new friends and influencing influential people.  I’ve had that experience a few times–and I’m truly grateful to the people who lent their time and expertise to make me a better historian.

Well, that vision of peer review is very much an ideal, in the way that a 2-2 load at a wealthy institution with brilliant students and lots of leave time is an ideal that most of us will never know outside of our dreams.  Peer review is fraught with opportunities for abuse, deception, and caprice.  And, when either getting or keeping a job is on the line, that means that the misuse of peer review is not just a playful game of Chutes and Ladders.  Here are some of the major problems I’ve seen firsthand or heard about from friends and acquaintances:

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Once again, via Susie Madrak at Suburban Guerrilla, see this post on gender and intellectual authority by Rebecca Solnit called “Men Explain Things to Me,” in which she describes the experience of being condescended to by a man who patronizingly referred her to a book that she herself wrote.  It took more than one interjection from her companion–alas, another woman–telling him that she wrote that book before he got it, and shut up.  The nut:  “Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.  Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.” 

Solnit writes of another instance, in which she was lectured by a man (incorrectly) about the irrelevance of Women Strike for Peace in the fall of the HUAC (House Committee on Un-American Activities).  This anecdote is kind of a two-fer:  a man dismissing a woman intellectual by asserting (falsely) the irrelevance of women ’s political activism in the Cold War.  Well done, Sir!  Or, as Solnit says, “Dude, if you’re reading this, you’re a carbuncle on the face of humanity and an obstacle to civilization. Feel the shame.”  Her essay will resonate with those of you who have been following the conversations here and at other blogs about bullying in acdemia.

How many of you have had this sort of experience–as a student, faculty member, or professional; in class, at an academic conference, or in your work environment?  I’ve been wondering about this issue in the blogosphere, especially surrounding Clinton v. Obama supporters and their blogs, but also more generally.  Women get pushed around and called names as women by men in the blogosphere on a regular basis.  Solnit writes only about gender, as though that’s the only operative variable when it comes to intellectual arrogance (or underconfidence), but it’s more complicated than simply gender.  Age and status seems to have put an end to most of the patronizing attitudes and comments that I was subjected to as a student in my twenties, although being in my thirties, having published a book, and being tenured hasn’t insulated me entirely.  (Age, of course, is something used against women on both ends–when we’re young, we’re patronized, and when we’re older, we’re dismissed as irrelevant and pathetic after age 50 or 55).  I’m sure that race is another critical variable in these intellectual foodfights.  Are faculty of color (men and women alike) more likely to be assumed to be students or staff by other faculty?  Do white men ”explain things” to faculty men of color?  Are white women just as patronizing as men to women faculty of color?  Does sexuality affect this phenomenon–are gay men patronized as much as women by straight men, for example? 

How about y’all?  And how has this experience changed (if at all) for you as you got older and achieved greater professional stature?  Are you seeing the down-side of “maturity?”

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