Archive for the 'Class' Category

Privilege conceals itself from those who possess it: of feminist epistemology, marriage, and “standpoint theory.”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 28, 2009
in Class, Family, Favorite Posts 2009, Feminism, Feminist theory, Race and Relationships
. 20 Comments

The discussion below this post has grown heated, with the topic of debate being less the original post itself and more feminist epistemology and what is sometimes called “standpoint theory.” SamSeaborn quotes Elizabeth Andersen, who writes:

Feminist standpoint theory claims an epistemic privilege over the character of gender relations, and of social and psychological phenomena in which gender is implicated, on behalf of the standpoint of women.

Sam wants to know how that impacts my marriage (which I labeled as “feminist”), but he also seems to be asking how this “standpoint theory” affects the role of male allies in feminist settings. Though he kindly takes me at my word when I note that I don’t go through my married life with an apology for being male always on my lips, he wonders how a male feminist cannot help but defer to what, according to Andersen, is the “epistemic privilege” of a woman’s perspective. Sam gets a vigorous, and to my mind, very effective response, from commenters Oldfeminist and Mythago, and I recommend folks check out the whole thread.

I may be the son of two philosophers, and I may have done a graduate field in medieval scholasticism many moons ago, but I am no theorist. Phrases like “epistemic privilege” make my head hurt, and I must bite back the urge to plead, “But I am a bear of very little brain.” I’ve labored through Cixous and Irigaray and Butler because they’re important and necessary, but feminist theory ain’t my bag. I defer to the many wonderful folks in the blogosphere whose intellectual capacities exceed my own, and whose talent for explicating in plain English the difficult philosophical nuances of feminist theory is infinitely greater than mine.

That said, I do have some thoughts on standpoint theory and its practical application.

Epistemology is the study of how we know things. In a relationship between two people who are of different sexes, classes, or ethnic backgrounds, it’s reasonable to assume that each person’s knowledge of the world will have been shaped in no small part by their status. Class and sex and race and faith are some of — but surely not the only — prisms through which we see and interpret the world. Patriarchy, the complex system through which male identity is privileged in an extraordinary number of ways, impacts everyone. Yes, as the famous phrase notes, it “hurts men too.” But one particular thing that patriarchy does is warp our understanding of everything around us, particularly things like power dynamics, sexuality, and how we communicate with one another. Feminists point out the deeply obvious: the class of persons most likely to be discriminated against by the system are also those most likely to be aware of the system itself. This “greater awareness” is the epistemic privilege to which Andersen refers.

Epistemic privilege means that in a heterosexual relationship, it is generally — though not universally — the case that the woman will see gender-based power imbalances more clearly than will her boyfriend or her husband. This isn’t because of “feminine intuition”, it’s because folks in an historically oppressed class are always required to be more aware of power dynamics than those who belong to the dominant group. The same epistemic privilege can occur in race and class relations, regardless of the sex of the people involved.

Obvious example: rape and parking lots. Both men and women are cognizant of the reality of rape, and most understand that it is men who generally do the raping and women who are generally the ones attacked. But because of his privilege, a man can walk into a parking lot by himself at night and forget about rape, because his maleness affords him the luxury of remaining unobservant of the possibility of sexual danger. A woman walking alone in a parking lot at night will have a different experience, rooted in her vulnerability as a member of a class targeted for sexual violence. Not only is she more vulnerable, but her very understanding of the issue is superior to that of a man walking in the parking lot. He has the privileged luxury of ignorance; she’s forced to reflect, constantly, on rape and its threat to her. That means that when the discussion of women’s vulnerability to assault comes up, women ought to enjoy “epistemic privilege” in the conversation. Continue reading ‘Privilege conceals itself from those who possess it: of feminist epistemology, marriage, and “standpoint theory.”’

To go anywhere and do anything: more notes on marriage and class

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 15, 2009
in Class, Ethnicity and Marriage
. 20 Comments

In Monday’s post about the bitter loss of shared dreams, I didn’t address the issue of class and status brought up by the original posts from which I quoted. Several of those who commented did bring up issues of dating outside one’s SES (socio-economic status), and I wanted to return to that aspect of the issue.

I’m married today to a woman who is, on both sides of her family, the first to graduate from college. My wife grew up poor, the daughter of an Afro-Colombian mother with a third-grade education and a father who, for all his kindness and good intentions, was hardly a reliable or consistent presence. Starting when she was eight, my wife worked with her mother cleaning houses and offices before and after school, enduring racial abuse. Her mother, who eventually made a small living as a seamstress, stressed education as the key to rising out of poverty, and my wife embraced that. Somehow, my mother-in-law found the money to buy soccer uniforms, to pay for dance lessons, to pay for the tools that my wife could use to begin her climb into a different social and economic world. My wife worked hard, won scholarships, took out loans, and eventually graduated with honors from the University of Southern California before heading into what has been a very successful career in business management. From both an ethnic and socio-economic standpoint, our backgrounds are worlds apart.

Like many immigrants who are part of the first-generation to “make it”, my wife supports (and now that we are married with completely blended finances, we support) a very large number of people within an extended family who have been less fortunate than ourselves. We send money to our Colombian relatives, paying for medical operations and schooling and clothes. We support cousins in this country as well with little bits here and there. We’ve recently moved to a larger house, not least because we are moving my mother-in-law in. My mother-in-law will get to spend lots of time with her adored granddaughter, and we can provide for her. My wife was and is her nest egg, and my beloved has always known and cheerfully accepted her responsibility to repay her mother’s years of backbreaking work.

This is not how I was raised. In WASPy families — OKOP — ageing parents do not move in with their children. They move into retirement communities with multiple levels of care, gradually becoming more and more reliant on professionals until they slip gently — or sometimes, not so gently — into the next world. I’ve grown up hearing from my mother, my grandmother, and countless other relatives the insistence that “I will not be a burden to my children when I’m old.” My own Mama has carefully designed her finances and her insurance policies to provide for the maximum degree of autonomy and comfort when the time comes. Heck, in our family when mothers come to visit, they stay in a hotel even when a guest room is ready and furnished; such is the near-reverent respect for “not causing an inconvenience.” It seems cold to outsiders, I suppose, but not to us. And of course, it is economic privilege and a social ethos of individualism that undergirds this way of life.

So we know in our household that we will care for my mother-in-law for the rest of her life, but we will not have the same responsibilities with my own mama. We know that we will be giving financial help to many members of my wife’s family, but unless some stunning reversals of fortune come along (heavens forfend), we will not need to do so for mine. There is no resentment, of course. Privilege is not virtue, after all, and in our home we know the difference. The fact that our respective families have different histories and different levels of resources is hardly an obstacle to a successful marriage. My wife and I both derive great pleasure from being able to share what we can with those who need it, and there is absolute unity in this regard. Continue reading ‘To go anywhere and do anything: more notes on marriage and class’

Of wise WASPs and wise Latinas: some thoughts on Sotomayor

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 10, 2009
in Class, Ethnicity and Teaching
. 9 Comments

I’ve been meaning to write about Sonia Sotomayor for weeks now, and have received two requests to do so.

As virtually everyone paying attention to the news knows, Sotomayor has been nominated by the president to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the retirerement of Justice David Souter. The confirmation process is revving up. And Judge Sotomayor is taking particular criticism for her oft-repeated remark that a “wise Latina” would often reach a better conclusion than “a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” The right has cried “racism”, and the National Review has lampooned Sotomayor’s Latina wisdom with a particularly unfortunate and bizarre cover.

There are nine judges on the US Supreme Court for a reason. (That number fluctuated a bit in the early years of the Republic.) One rather obvious, if unstated, rationale for having nine is that it is just about the right number to ensure that vigorous debate can take place amongst the justices. The presumption is that debate is necessary because no single judge, no matter how erudite and insightful, can arrive at the best conclusion on his or her own. The right outcome is arrived at communally, through dialogue and argument. And each justice brings to that argument his or her law clerks, his or her legal training, his or her philosophical orientation — and his or her life experience. The greater the diversity of life experience and perspective among the nine, therefore, the greater the chance that the most just outcomes will be reached.

I live and teach and work as a white man. A very particular kind of white man, too. My father was a European war refugee, my mother from an archetypally WASPy American family with roots on this continent stretching back to the mid-17th century. (I’ve written about those roots here and here). My skin color, my family history, my education, and my class shaped my world view; they helped make me who I am. So too did my own life experiences. I’ve been formed by privilege, yes — but I’ve also struggled with addiction and been hospitalized against my will many times. I’ve tasted a very particular kind of despair. I’m a more compassionate man as a result. One could say that — and on some issues I would say — that “a wise sober alcoholic with years of recovery” has a better perspective on some issues than someone who hasn’t had to walk down that particular road. And if there’s a court case dealing with issues of addiction, it might be helpful to have a recovering addict in the conversation. Continue reading ‘Of wise WASPs and wise Latinas: some thoughts on Sotomayor’

“Boob Wars”: reflections of a new father on breastfeeding, class, and feminism

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 16, 2009
in Body, Class, Money and Parenting
. 46 Comments

In the thirty years or so since I entered puberty during the Carter Administration, I’ve spent quite a bit of time contemplating women’s breasts — and my own (not to mention other men’s) fascination with them. But in the last few months, as a first-time father and partner to a breast-feeding mother, that fascination has morphed into a new kind of reverence. And I’ve become aware of what might, for lack of a better term, be called the “boob war” — a sub-conflict within the larger “Mommy War” that continues to rage, exasperating and frightening and dividing women. And into this fight comes a bombshell article in the new Atlantic Monthly: Hanna Rosin’s The Case Against Breastfeeding. More on the article later. (Cap taps, belatedly and with apologies, to Rod Dreher and to Scott.)

The term “Mommy Wars” generally refers to the public and private debates, common among the middle and upper-middle classes of the developed world, about what makes a “good” mother. For years, the chief front in these wars has been the battle over daycare and work outside the home, though other conflicts rage in areas like nutrition and natural childbirth. As a women’s studies professor, I of course had a professional acquaintance with these battles — but as a first-time father these past few months, I’ve gotten an entirely different perspective. As a man, my cultural and physiological privilege immunizes me from attack; yet as a devoted partner and father and feminist, I cannot help but be involved.

When we first announced to people that we were expecting a child, we got (along with the hugs of congratulation) many queries and unsolicited nuggets of advice. In particular, my wife was regularly asked about her plans for nourishing the baby; whether she intended to breastfeed, and if so, for how long. The merits of “pumping” versus “not pumping” were presented with bewildering detail; and, at least in our social circle, the evils of infant formula were repeatedly stressed.

We chose a midwifery team and a pediatrician based on recommendations from friends and a series of interviews (trust me, we were thorough in the latter). The pediatrician we ended up choosing is a delightful man, a fellow vegan with a prominent reputation as an opponent of a slavish adherence to the vaccine schedule and a proponent of both breastfeeding and attachment parenting. He charmed us with his attention and his devotion and his irreverance, as well as his conviction that child health and animal rights can be entirely compatible commitments. When we first met with Dr. G. weeks before our daughter was born, we also met with his professional lactation consultant, who promised to come in the hours after the delivery to help my wife breastfeed. It was clear that in this practice, formula at any time in the first six months — even the first year — was considered tantamount to child abuse. Continue reading ‘“Boob Wars”: reflections of a new father on breastfeeding, class, and feminism’

“People like you should be parents”: of Nadya Suleman, Alfie Patten, and well-meaning but problematic classism

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 17, 2009
in Class, Family, Money and Parenting
. 30 Comments

The octuplets born to Nadya Suleman came into the world on January 26, 22 days ago — and just three hours or so after our daughter was born. (And in Bellflower, a working-class Los Angeles County community some twenty miles away from us.) Our first child shares a birthday with the world’s first surviving group of eight babies born at once, and in the midst of all the hubbub and upheaval that goes with having a new addition, I’ve paid at least some attention to the coverage of Suleman and her (now) fourteen children. I’ve also noticed, more than I might otherwise, the coverage of the birth earlier this month of little Maisie in London — a girl whose father is apparently Alfie Patten, age 13.

Maisie and the Suleman octuplets have been welcomed into the world in the harsh light of the media glare and nearly-universal censure. The mental state of Nadya Suleman (a single woman who recently reported she has been celibate for eight years) and the foolhardiness of her fertility doctor have been much decried; Maisie’s arrival has been greeted with the not-particularly-original lamentation about how awful it is for “babies to have babies”. In the Suleman case, it’s that she’s had too many babies without a husband or the obvious means with which to provide for all of these children. In both the Patten and Suleman case, we’re dealing with folks who have been labelled “unfit” to be parents, and the orgy of hand-wringing commenceth.

I contrast these infamous stories with the reaction to the birth of baby Cerys, born as she is to a well-off, heterosexual married couple (husband in his early forties, wife in her mid-thirties). Baby Cerys was longed for and planned for and wished for, not only by her now-doting (if exhausted) mother and father, but also by an army of grandmothers and aunts and uncles and friends and cousins and even acquaintances. (One of our chinchillas, Ninotchka, regularly expressed enthusiasm by allowing my wife to hold her while she was pregnant, but only near the growing belly.) My growing family has been showered with love and with gifts and with warm words of praise, as if we have done something new and surprising and wonderful. Admittedly, many in my family “never thought they’d see the day” when the inconstant black sheep of his generation became such a devoted papa, but that surprise and delight at this change in me is only partly a reason for such enthusiasm.

My wife and I have been given a compliment many times in the past three weeks, sometimes with direct reference to the Suleman case. Both friends and family members have said to us: “You two are the sort of people who should be parents.” It’s a sentence loaded with meanings, only some of which may be intended by the many who have spoken and written it to us. What’s meant, at least by most, is that my wife and I are “ready” to be parents. We are in a stable relationship (married three and a half years, together for more than six). We are homeowners, employed, insured. We are certainly not young parents, but not so old that folks start to question whether we will be physically up to the challenges of raising small children. We are in good health physically, and at least for the past decade, mentally. We are planted in a strong and supportive spiritual community, and so on and so forth. And we’re feminists, which at least to a great many people is an encouraging sign in the parents of a newborn daughter.

It’s true that all of these things are helpful, though in and of themselves none of them are guarantors that we will be great parents. But I can’t help but hear a tinge of classism in at least some of the voices that have proffered this well-meaning phrase in one form or another. Though it is true that my wife and I are, of course, delightful human beings, I’m troubled by the implied comparison between us and the likes not only of Nadya Suleman or Alfie Patten, but all of the vast army of new parents who lack our educational background and financial good fortune. It’s hard to say “Hugo and Eira are the sort of people who should be parents” (the emphasis is generally the speaker’s) without wondering who it is that the person offering this insight thinks ought not to have reproduced.

Most of us think there’s something just a bit odd about Nadya Suleman. Most of us think having eight embryos implanted after having had six children is a bit unusual at best. And most of us think a thirteen year-old boy and fifteen year-old girl are woefully unready to be parents. But it’s not as if our sense of outrage and judgment is limited to the likes of these. The praise and encouragement lavished upon my wife and me is sometimes explicitly linked to a sense that we will have the resources to provide comfortably for Cerys and any other children whom we might have. Continue reading ‘“People like you should be parents”: of Nadya Suleman, Alfie Patten, and well-meaning but problematic classism’

“Backwoods Barbie” and white rural feminism: of Dolly Parton, 9 to 5, and Sarah Palin

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 15, 2008
in Class, Music and Politics
. 50 Comments

Last night, my wife and I took some friends of ours to see the new musical 9 to 5, written by Dolly Parton and based on the iconic 1980 film of the same name. Just last Tuesday, the show had its world premiere not on Broadway but here in Los Angeles; it will be moving to New York in early 2009.

We went for a variety of reasons, but mostly because all six of us, as different as we are, are devoted Dolly Parton fans. The part that Dolly made famous in the film is played by the wonderful actress Megan Hilty (who did a splendid “Glinda” in many productions of “Wicked”); Allison Janney (of “Juno”, “West Wing”, and “Primary Colors” fame) took over the Lily Tomlin part and acquitted herself very well. The music and lyrics, all by Parton, were accessible, memorable, and fun. The house was packed, and I feel quite certain the show will have a long and successful run here and elsewhere.

But I’ve written before about my deep fondness for Dolly Parton. Last night, watching the show — with its gently feminist theme of exploited working women rising up against a tyrannical and sexist boss — I thought of, you guessed it, Sarah Palin.

Virtually everyone agrees that Sarah Palin has, at least so far, helped the Republican ticket. Mind you, she’s got seven weeks to turn from an asset into a liability for John McCain, and I suspect that by the time we’ve made it close to Halloween, some of the initial enthusiasm for her will have subsided. That may be wishful thinking, of course — it’s also possible that her selection will prove the decisive factor in the election, and a galvanized conservative base will provide the GOP with the winning margin in November as a result. I certainly hope not, but I take that possibility seriously.

I don’t know who Dolly Parton is endorsing in this election. Dolly has always soft-pedaled her politics (though there is a very funny and vicious crack thrown at George W. Bush in the finale of “9 to 5″). Unlike her comrade-in-arms Emmylou Harris (whose advocacy for many social justice causes, especially veganism and animal rights, has made some of her right-wing fans squirm), Parton has carefully eschewed open involvement in the political arena. Dolly has legions of gay fans, whom she always warmly acknowledges — but she also has a strong fan base in southern and rural America. Including, one suspects, a great many voters to whom the selection of Sarah Palin was carefully calculated to appeal. Continue reading ‘“Backwoods Barbie” and white rural feminism: of Dolly Parton, 9 to 5, and Sarah Palin’

Cruelty-free means humans too: some thoughts on a more holistic veganism

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 02, 2008
in Animal Rights, Class, Food, Politics and Veganism
. 9 Comments

On some feminist blogs, there’s been good discussion about veganism and larger issues of race and class. Here’s Elle, BFP, and BFP again. The last of these posts deals with the much-ballyhooed “three-week vegan challenge” that Oprah Winfrey recently completed. There’s a lot of PETA-bashing that goes on, but that’s all-too-common on feminist websites, and I’m not interested in dredging up that old issue once more.

What is valuable in these posts is the discussion of whether or not veganism is, inherently, a cruelty-free lifestyle. Those of us who, like myself, don’t consume animal products in any form (food, clothing, etcetera) tend to describe our modus operandi as “cruelty-free.” When my wife and I were buying our new cars, we went out of our way to special order vehicles without any leather in the interiors whatsoever, a request that led to several months wait and not-inconsiderable expense. Of course, not only was our ability to make that choice rooted in privilege, in some sense it was imperfect — animal byproducts end up in tires and other places. We spoke to the car dealers about our desire to be “completely cruelty-free”, but we both knew as we did so we were pursuing an imperfectly attainable goal.

A vegan lifestyle, of course, doesn’t automatically mean an absence of connection to death. When even organic farms are tilled, little field mice are not infrequently cut to pieces. Most organic vegetables are grown with animal manure, usually collected from farms where animals are raised for meat. Trying to avoid all complicity with the machinery of death is, alas, nigh on impossible. Most vegans know all this, of course. They don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, however, and with the limited options at their disposal, they seek to exercise the best possible choices available in any given situation, recognizing that few if any choices they do make will be truly “cruelty-free.” Continue reading ‘Cruelty-free means humans too: some thoughts on a more holistic veganism’

Poor white boys: school leaving, male under-performance, and the disaster of masculine anti-intellectualism

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 23, 2008
in Class, Men and Masculinity, Race, Teaching and Youth
. 27 Comments

Regular reader Frederick often likes to send me “grist for the mill”, as it were, and last week sent me this Telegraph article: White working-class boys becoming an underclass. In one of those periodic reminders that the UK and America are very different indeed, the paper reports:

White teenagers are less likely to go to university than school-leavers from other ethnic groups - even with the same A-level results, according to official figures.

The gap is widest among male teenagers from poor backgrounds, raising fresh fears that working class boys are becoming the education “underclass” in England.

According to a Government report, just over one-in-20 white boys from poor homes goes on to university.

This compares to 66 per cent of Indian girls and 65 per cent of young women from Chinese families.

The full report is here, in a PDF file.

The causes of “male under-achievement” are many and complex, and this study does not concern itself much with them. But it does seem clear that whatever the matrix of influences that lead young men to underperform their female peers, feminism is unlikely to be one of them. The study notes that even among recent immigrant groups in Britain, groups in which it can be safely assumed that the Western model of liberal feminism has not yet been fully accepted, girls outperform boys:

Overall, 58 per cent of men from Indian backgrounds and 66 per cent of women go on to university. Among Chinese families, 60 per cent of boys and 65 per cent of women go to university.

Anti-feminist voices, under the guise of concern about the well-being of young men, suggest that contemporary pedagogy doesn’t meet the needs of boys, who aren’t suited to long periods of concentration. The underlying racism of that charge becomes apparent very quickly when one looks at the much-stronger performance of boys from, say, Indian or Chinese descent. For a very long time, white European men have questioned the masculinity of Asian men, seeing the latter as somehow more effeminate. When we posit the ability to concentrate and “do school well” as essentially a feminine trait, then bigotry and anti-feminism collude to explain why so many East and Southeast Asian lads are doing so much better than their white male counterparts. The implication is that Chinese and Indian males are “more like girls” than “real” (white) boys.

I do think we see a performance gap between boys and girls in many places in the Western world. Much of that gap is attributable, I think, to a kind of masculine anti-intellectualism that has developed in response to the relatively recent success of young women in school. In both British and American society we define masculinity as, first and foremost, the absence of feminine characteristics. “No sissy stuff” is the first rule of Western manhood. As long as girls were systematically excluded from education, boys showed great aptitude for intellectually rigorous activity. Once girls began to be admitted to the same schools as boys, and began to demostrate the same intellectual abilities, the life of the mind lost its exclusive masculine cachet.

Boys can sit still. Look at any group of young Marines on the parade ground; paying attention is something well within the range of masculine capabilities. “Boys can’t concentrate as well as girls” needs to go the way of “girls can’t understand science as well as boys”, discarded as a vile myth that shortchanges the full range of human potential with which each and every one of us is born.

The real problem, as I see it, is a culture of “masculine anti-intellectualism” that seems increasingly rife among certain sub-groups of young men. Young men, particularly in Britain perhaps young working-class white men, are more likely than their sisters to see little practical need for education. Too many of these young men under-estimate the value of education, and over-estimate their ability to “make do” on their own, perhaps by doing “a little of this, a little of that.” Many of these lads are filled with ambition, but with little sense of how vital formal education actually is to realizing that ambition. And too many of these young men are eager for a perverse kind of masculine distinctiveness with which to assuage their own anxieties. Dropping out of school to work gives them that masculine distinctiveness, particularly as school is no longer (as it once was) an exclusively male province.

Does everyone need a formal university education? Perhaps not. But I do lament the unwillingness of many boys to buckle down and work. Knowing that earlier generations of the be-penised and the be-Y-chromosomed were able to master complex material and learn by rote, I don’t accept that men as a rule can’t thrive as well as women in the contemporary educational model. The problem is a lack of strong male role models who value education, the problem is a culture that emphasizes to young men that anything of real importance lies in an arena from which women are largely excluded.

Of cell phones and the Pill, tuition and travel, wealth and diversification: some random economicky thoughts

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 08, 2008
in Class and Money
. 3 Comments

My splendid cousin Ted, a marketing major at CSU Chico, comments on the increasing recognition that the current economic slowdown impacts the poor and the middle-class more than the wealthy.

I recently made a presentation to my Sales Force Management class, where as I played the newly appointed V.P. of sales. I had to convince the CEO that we needed to switch from the low-end market for wristwatches( this is an arbitrary product that was assigned to me) to the high-end market, like Rolex and Bulova. The premise for my reasoning was mainly the impending recession that our country has fallen into, and that only the high-end market will stay profitable at a constant rate. This poses an interesting question of why do the the consumers with plenty of discretionary income continue to have some cash? How could the recession of an entire economy only hurt the low income citizens?

I’m not an economist; in our family, it’s my wife who manages both our money and, in her business management firm, other people’s as well. But I’m fortunate enough to go back and forth between very different economic worlds quite frequently. My students — and I am close to many of them — are, like so many community college students, economically very vulnerable. Most, however, are not homeowners; perhaps more importantly, most who live at home live in rentals rather than “owned” homes. In an odd way, many have been able to weather the worst aspects of the “credit crunch” because for them and their families, home-ownership is often an as-yet unattained aspiration. Though rents have not come down as fast as house prices, they have stabilized in Los Angeles County as the economy tries to absorb the massive increase in housing stock. Purely anecdotally, this has actually benefitted my students who live in apartments more than those whose parents recently (since, say, the run-up of the early part of the decade) purchased a home. In this sense, the “lower-middle” is getting squeezed more than the “bottom.” Continue reading ‘Of cell phones and the Pill, tuition and travel, wealth and diversification: some random economicky thoughts’

Sex worker bodies, farm worker bodies: a musing on agriculture, porn, and cheap grace

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 07, 2007
in Class, Food, Money, Porn, Veganism and Working
. 35 Comments

In the midst of the latest round of debates over sex here in the progressive blogosphere, I was struck by BrownFemiPower’s post about the kinds of oppression we sometimes ignore in our eagerness to focus on pornography.

I’m very very *very* tired of how sex work is framed as a labor issue by many anti-pornography activists–they chronically insist that porn is the worst worst worst job ever because it hurts females.

I hear this logic, and all I can think is, “Really?”

I’ve known women who have had to work 12-15 (or more) hours a day in 100+ degree heat with no breaks for water and no place to pee (I was one of those women). I’ve known women who have had to work on their knees the entire 12-15 hour shift (or in a squatting position), with a bag that digs into their backs and can carry 20-25 pounds of vegetables or fruits. I’ve known women who can not kneel at mass because their knees are so shot from the hard labor they’ve done most of their lives. I’ve known women who have worked in the fields since they were five or six. I’ve seen pregnant women, elderly women, young girls, disabled women all forced to walk up to two miles (after 12 or 15 hour days) to get back to their cars so they can go home.

I know women are being exposed to some of the most dangerous chemicals known to mankind. I know young girls are working in fields rather than going to school because their mothers aren’t being paid enough for the job that they do. I know women are being locked up and only allowed to leave the farms for up to two hours a week. I know women are working for wages that have not increased in 27 years. I know women who go to company doctors after exposure to pesticide clouds are being told that they have ‘female problems’ (rather than pesticide poisoning). I know women are giving birth to babies that die because of pesticide exposure. I know women are out digging ditches 20 days after they give birth. I know women are being sexually harassed by field bosses. I know young girls are being sexually harassed by field bosses. I know 90% of the female farmworkers in California say that sexual intimidation and harassment is a major problem at their jobs. I know women refer(ed) to a field in California as the “field of panties” because so many women were raped there. I know women are being threatened with guns by their field bosses.

At BFP’s, these last two paragraphs are filled with links that document what’s going on. Continue reading ‘Sex worker bodies, farm worker bodies: a musing on agriculture, porn, and cheap grace’

White men teaching feminism to women of color: a post about class, privilege, and the need for humility, curiosity, and flexibility

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 28, 2007
in Class, Ethnicity, Feminist Pedagogy and Race
. 19 Comments

With the re-emergence of the Full Frontal Feminism discussion this past week, I’ve been called to reflect on the challenges and privileges that come with being a middle-class, heterosexual, Christian white man who teaches gender studies. (I say “gender studies” because, even though PCC still has no such formal department, I teach courses on Women’s History, Men and Masculinity, Lesbian and Gay History, and “body” history.)

I’ve written about the problematic nature of my role as a man teaching feminism before. Here’s part of what I wrote three years or so ago:

I do acknowledge that having a man teaching women’s history to a class filled with women (and always at least one or two other men) is problematic. I know just how important it is that young women have feminist role models who, in both their work and their private lives, can live out feminist principles. But higher education is not just about providing role models! It is about the principle that knowledge itself has no sex, and that all human experience is equally worthy of study by all human beings. When we limit the teaching of women’s studies to women, we send the message that this subject is not, somehow, worth the time and attention of male academics. This does not mean that a male teacher confers a legitimacy his female colleagues do not — though some students may perceive it that way. But it does mean that it is immensely counter-productive to “ghettoize” (I use that term carefully) an academic discipline by suggesting that only some folks can teach it.

… “being a woman” does not guarantee compassion or empathy with other women! Women of color in the feminist movement have spent years having their concerns marginalized by their white, upper-middle class sisters. What makes a wealthy white woman more qualified to teach her Latina and African-American sisters than, say, a Latino man — or for that matter, a white man? Feminists who insist that the oppression of sex transcends racial and economic discrimination do a colossal injustice to the experiences of both men and women of color. My point is simple: if we are going to take a teacher’s sex into account, we must also take his or her race into account — and that sets up a slippery slope towards the extreme Balkanization of academic disciplines.

Of course, most of my critics in the “feminist/womanists of color” blogosphere haven’t said “Hugo can’t teach women’s studies merely because he’s a middle-class white Christian male.” Too suggest otherwise is to erect a straw-woman to knock down. What is clear is that my pedagogical decisions (like assigning Full Frontal Feminism in the way in which I did, and managing the discussion the way I did), combined with my maleness and my whiteness, raises a number of questions about teaching, feminism, sex, race, and power.

I don’t know what it’s “like” to be a woman. I don’t know what it’s like to grow up poor, or to grow up non-white, or to grow up in a religious minority. Sometimes, even in recent days, I’ve made the classic white male liberal mistake of trying to establish my progressive bona fides by the classes I took taught by radical women of color, or by talking about my marriage to a mixed-race woman. That’s a cheap and ineffective strategy, and it tends to infuriate the very people I’m trying to convince. I can recite the books I’ve read, I can name-drop until the cows come home, and it doesn’t change the fact that I’ve got a tremendous amount of white privilege.

I’m forty, older than most of the folks who’ve been involved in this debate. I’ve been teaching gender studies here at PCC since 1995, my third year at the college. And even after all this time, I know I still frequently “don’t get it”. Unlearning the acculturation to privilege is painful, it is hard, and the hardest and most painful thing about it is it never, ever ends. Every time I start to “believe my own press”, and begin to imagine that I have become a particularly enlightened being, a person who has transcended his class, his culture, and his sex, I am brought rudely back to earthly reality. I have a penis and a Y chromosome, I am melanin-deficient, and my speech and my bearing reflects a carefully-bred confidence that comes from privilege. Whether or not I think my sex or my race or my class matter, my students (almost none of whom share that particularly constellation of privileges) are likely to see me as a very familiar sort of figure: the older white man who knows a lot (or thinks he does) and is eager to enlighten them.

My women’s studies classes average 45-50 students now (before 2004, I taught in a smaller classroom and had only 30-35). I need to cover women’s history in America from the pre-Columbian era to five minutes ago, and I need to cover contemporary women’s issues — especially feminism — at the same time. I have 75 minutes twice a week in which to pull this off; I have no teaching assistants. The room is too crowded to have us sit in a circle, and the size of the class means interactivity will be severely limited. Lecturing, therefore, is going to be the primary pedagogical tool; that’s of necessity as much as of inclination. The students do write journals, they do initiate discussions from time to time, but most of the time, it’s me talking to them. I make my lectures as captivating as possible, and when I’m “on”, I’m a pretty damn good orator. Which is fine, except that having a middle-class white man strut and fret in front of a classroom that is made up primarily of first-generation female students of color doesn’t do much to undermine the patriarchy. The more I exhort, the more I inspire, the more I risk reinforcing something very traditional.

I can’t do anything about the size of the class. (Indeed, because it is a popular class, I was asked to consider moving into a larger lecture room that accomodates 150. I turned down the offer and asked for two smaller sections instead, and was told that wasn’t feasible.) And I can’t do anything about my maleness, my whiteness, or the fact that I grew up in Carmel, went to prep school (though I was kicked out!) and live a moderately comfortable life. But there’s still a lot I can do, even with the limitations of a large class size and my own privilege. And the chief thing I need to continue to do, and to get better at doing, is to remain teachable.

Actually, that’s not quite enough. As I was reminded this week, “remaining teachable” is essentially passive. It asks those who want me to change to do the work of teaching me. Perhaps it would be better to say that I need to work on three things in particular: humility, curiosity, flexibility. The arguments over Full Frontal Feminism haven’t changed my mind about the usefulness of the book as a highly accessible primer. But the arguments have reminded me to be a better listener to criticism, more humble about my role in facilitating learning, and to be more actively curious in seeking out alternative views to provide to my students. I need to better, too, about being flexible. Like most ageing academics, I get attached to the “way things have always been done”, and tend to be loth to update my syllabi.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I teach gender studies courses because I want to raise up young feminists. I want to inspire men and women alike to become informed agents of personal and collective transformation. I want them to reflect upon the past — and upon their own lives. I want the result of that reflection to be a strong sense of responsibility to themselves and to others. I want them to be committed to justice for the vulnerable and equality for all — but I also want them to begin to liberate themselves from self-doubt and self-loathing. I believe that personal happiness and public virtue are, in the end, deeply compatible (as a Christian who grew up listening to my mother’s lectures on Aristotle, I could hardly believe otherwise!) And in the end, I want my students to be happy, free, kind, independent, and good. That has been my goal for a very long time.

My male body, my family background, and my white skin have opened many doors for me. I cannot close those doors retroactively. I’m not ashamed of my masculinity, my heterosexuality, or my class. (See the OKOP post.) But I’m not inordinately proud of these things either. Privilege is not the consequence of virtue. It’s simply a fact, and it’s one of which I have to remain perpetually cognizant. Sometimes, privilege will blind me, and I will need help to see the right path. But in the end, privilege is both an advantage and an obstacle to good feminist teaching. And as long as I am aware that it is a double-edged sword, and as long as I remain committed with evangelistic zeal to my students’ growth, I’ll do a good job.

That is, if I work harder at humility, curiosity, and flexibility.

Teaching, teen moms, and false intimations of tragedy: a response to Will Okun

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 19, 2007
in Class, Parenting, Teaching, Youth and Youth ministry
. 39 Comments

This short Will Okun piece in the New York Times on teen pregnancy has gotten some strong reactions, here and here and here for starters. Okun teaches English in inner-city Chicago:

It happens too often. A female student approaches my desk, says “Mr. Okun?”, and and whispers the two words no adult wants to hear from a teenager: “I’m pregnant.” I want to scream, I want to cry, I want to shake her with anger. What have you done? Life is not hard enough already? Is it over, have you given up? What about finishing high school? What about college? What about your own dreams? What about enjoying the last of your own childhood? How can you parent a child when you are just a child yourself? How will you support your baby, how will you support yourself? Where is the man, will he be here next year? Will I see you and your baby coldly waiting alone for a city bus that will not come? Please look me in the eye and tell me you know what you have done.

Although her news disappoints me, I try to react without emotion or judgment. “What are you going to do?” I ask. But if she has already told me she is pregnant, we both already know. “I am going to have it,” she replies. I used to argue for abortion, which only enraged us both. At this point, what is done is done. All I can do now is offer her my unconditional support. I will give her a referral to counseling and pre-natal care and keep my personal frustrations and opinions to myself.

Inevitably, a few months later I will be invited to take photographs at the baby shower. I go because I like the student and I want to show that I support her and her family on this joyous occasion. But, in some cases, are we celebrating tragedy?

Well, Will, you get points for no longer “arguing for abortion.” (Just FYI, bud, there’s a rather nasty history of well-meaning whites encouraging poor women of color to have abortions. Glad you’re no longer one of them. Eugenicists are often well-meaning do-gooders.) But man, Will, you really don’t get it.

Let me be clear I don’t think teen pregnancy is a “good idea”. That said, I’ve spent more time than you might imagine with teenage mothers and their extended family. My wife and I have two nieces, both of whom became moms before they were eighteen years old. My wife and I will meet our newest great-nephew this coming weekend. Neither of our nieces are married to the fathers of their children. Both young moms are now living with relatives, both are working. And when it comes to parenting, my nieces are pretty damn good mothers. They are surrounded by a multi-generational community of experienced care-givers. Their children are not being raised in isolation, but with a surprising amount of community support.

I’ve been to baby showers for many a teenage mom in my day. I’ve also quietly helped pay for an abortion for a teenage girl who wanted one and who confided in me. Though I do everything I can as a mentor and a youth leader and a teacher to encourage a culture of informed decision-making (especially around sex), I understand that a very large number of teenagers are going to have unprotected intercourse for a very wide variety of reasons. And when some of them get pregnant, as they invariably will, there are no perfect options. Abortion is one choice (it was the one my girlfriend and I chose when we were teens with college plans). Adoption is another. And having the baby and keeping it is the third. Continue reading ‘Teaching, teen moms, and false intimations of tragedy: a response to Will Okun’

The “miracle cure” of marriage: responding to Kay Hymowitz and Brad Wilcox (again)

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 15, 2007
in Class, Favorite posts 2007, Marriage, Money, Politics and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 26 Comments

I’ve taken two days to write this post. I feel very, very strongly about it — more than about any post I’ve written in, well, at least a few months.

In the latest issue of First Things (not available yet online except to subscribers), W. Bradford Wilcox reviews Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age, the latest from conservative family scholar Kay S. Hymowitz.

I haven’t read Hymowitz yet, but I always seem to have a bone to pick with Brad Wilcox. I’ve taken issue with him in three separate posts: here, here, here. Wilcox is a Virginia Cavalier (and I have a soft spot for all things Charlottesville), and he’s an important family scholar in his own right. I agree with him on almost nothing, but admire his writing style.

Wilcox has this way of saying things that are so stunningly wrong that I leap up from the couch or chair or desk and start madly pacing about. From this month’s First Things review:

The rise of the marriage gap also reveals that a large minority of working-class, poor, and minority adults no longer “believe in marriage as an institution for raising children.” They have lost touch with a marriage orientation that requires them to keep an eye on the future, to work hard, to discipline their sexual (or at least reproductive) behavior, and to be discriminating in their choice of romantic partners. In making this point, Hymowitz provocatively turns on its head the standard liberal argument that the poor do not marry because they do not have good jobs, adequate income, and decent housing; instead, she persuasively argues that the disappearance of a marriage orientation—and the virtues and values associated with this orientation—among the poor and working class is a big part of the reason that they and their children are more likely to end up at the bottom of the social ladder.

I may be blaming Wilcox for Hymowitz’s sin, but his approval of her stance (the bold is mine) is clear. It’s like reading something from the Gilded Age of nineteenth-century social reform, when earnest upper-middle-class types tut-tutted about the licentiousness and immorality of the poor and the brown. The urban poor (particularly, I suspect, Wilcox and Hymowitz mean black and Latino people) have — get this — no work ethic and no sexual self-control. Why? Because the “po’ folks ain’t gettin’ married no mo”. Wilcox and Hymowitz, like most social conservatives, see marriage as the panacea for all social problems. Sexually frustrated? Get married. Worried about social security? Get married. Want to have happy children? Get married. Want to end global warming, cure the common cold, and hasten the return of the Lord? Get married. Continue reading ‘The “miracle cure” of marriage: responding to Kay Hymowitz and Brad Wilcox (again)’

Vulgar ostentation or justifiable pride: a reflection on hanging academic diplomas

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 08, 2007
in Class, Ethnicity, OKOP/NOKOP, Pasadena City College and Teaching
. 31 Comments

On Friday, I wrote in my post about the perceived preference for Ph.Ds at the community college:

I’m glad I have my Ph.D. (My diplomas are all in a box somewhere, mind you. Our Kind of People never put degrees on the wall, after all; it seems showy and aggressive.)

I’ve been thinking about this issue of not putting the diploma on the wall. One of my senior colleagues here is a woman from, as she describes it, “an Irish working-class family where no one went to college.” One of six children, she was the first in her family to receive a B.A., and after years of hard work, a Ph.D. Her undergraduate and graduate diplomas are framed and hang on the wall in her office. She does insist that her students address her as “Dr. Sullivan” (not her real name).

Dr. S and I are good friends, and after I got my Ph.D. in 1999, she said to me “Now you can hang a new diploma on your wall.” I told her I didn’t think that was going to happen. “Why not?”, she asked.

I told Dr. S (who, among other things, has expertise in sociology) that “in my culture”, “my people” tend to see the display of diplomas as “showing off.” Both my parents had Ph.Ds. from Berkeley; I have no idea where either one of their diplomas is hiding. For them, putting a diploma up in the office would have been like hanging a marriage license on the wall after getting home from the honeymoon! It’s one thing, I told Dr. S, to be privately proud of an accomplishment; it’s another thing to wave the proof of that accomplishment around.

I don’t know which football coach it was who said it, but some grizzled old veteran who counseled against exuberant celebration after a score always said “Act like you’ve done it before and intend to do it again very soon.” In other words, drawing attention to one’s academic accomplishments (and hanging diplomas on the office walll is certainly drawing attention) suggests that one views the acquisition of the doctorate as vaguely miraculous. It also, I told Dr. S, seemed to be inviting admiration. OKOP, I told her, are trained to downplay “that sort of thing.”

Dr. S and I were and are good enough friends to have this sort of “cross-cultural dialogue.” Dr. S wasn’t in the least offended by my reluctance to hang my various diplomas, or by my willingness to confess to her my reasons for keeping the damn things tucked in a drawer. But she also offered her own perspective:

“Hugo”, she said, “I don’t display the diploma to show off for myself. My mother and father worked terribly hard to put me through school. My husband sacrificed enormously so that I could work on my doctorate while our kids were small. No one in my family or my husband’s had ever gotten a Ph.D. before. And after all that collective effort, if I act as you do — as if a Ph.D. is ultimately not important — it makes it seem as if I don’t appreciate all that they did to help me achieve this goal. When my eighty-year old mother comes to my office, she gets to see that diploma and it makes her feel incredibly proud. Your mother, Hugo, already has a Ph.D, and though I’m sure she’s proud of you, she doesn’t need to see it the way mine does.”

Dr. S reminded me that the “OKOP dislike of ostentation” is in part a manifestation of privilege. When everyone in the family goes to college, and lots of people get Ph.Ds, and parents don’t have to work double shifts at the factory to pay for graduate school for the kids — then the newly dissertated and hooded ones can afford to be nonchalant and self-deprecating. Dr. S argued that in her case, as a woman from a working-class Irish Catholic background, she was both entitled to a greater degree of display and indeed required to “show off”. To do any less would be to disrespect the extraordinary sacrifice of her loved ones.

I’m also aware of something that Dr. S didn’t mention. We teach on a campus that has a high percentage of non-white students, as well as a majority of folks who are first-generation college students. These students need reminders that a Ph.D. is possible for them too. Those professors who hold the doctorate — and are themselves members of ethnic minorities or were, like Dr. S, first-generation college students — thus have, perhaps, an obligation to display the diploma in order to inspire the young.

I have another colleague in another department; like me, he holds a Ph.D from UCLA. He is also African-American, and he began his academic career right here at PCC. On the wall in his office, he has diplomas from each stage of his career in higher education, starting with the associate’s degree from Pasadena all the way up to the doctorate itself. Those diplomas, which hang behind his desk and stare his visitors in the face are not just there to swell his head — they are there, I suspect, to send a message to those students who look like him (but not like me) that academic success is possible for everyone if they work hard enough. Though I’ve never discussed it with this man, I suspect that this is his reason for displaying the evidence of his academic prowess so boldly. What OKOP sees as aggressive and vulgar showiness, others may see as much-needed inspiration for the next generation.

I know my diplomas are somewhere in a box in the garage. I last saw them in 2002, when I was packing up after my divorce. I have no intention of throwing them out, of course. But in all honesty, I’m not really sure what to do with them. I don’t want them on the wall in my home, or on the wall in my campus office. Perhaps I’ll just keep them tucked away forever, in the same sort of place where I keep old tax returns and insurance papers. But let me be clear that I no longer cast aspersions on those who choose to hang the evidence of their achievements for all to see. For some, perhaps, it isn’t ostentation or insecurity that drives such display: it’s the desire to honor all those who made the achievement possible. And it’s the desire to inspire a new generation to achieve similar goals. In the end, there’s nothing vulgar or showy about that.

Reprint: A long post on tradition, virginity, success, feminism, and a nonsensical double bind

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 15, 2007
in Class, Pasadena City College, Sexuality and Teaching
. 18 Comments

We’re in the last throes of summer, so I’m reposting some of my old favorites. This originally appeared on March 10, 2006.

Yesterday in my women’s history class, we began making our way through Joan Brumberg’s The Body Project.  I’ve been using the book for years and years, and it’s a huge hit with my students each semester.

It is Brumberg who first drew my attention to statistics about menarche, marriage, and the loss of virginity.  She points out that a century ago, girls menstruated for the first time at an average age of 16 and got married at an average age of around 21.  Today, girls menstruate at an average age of just under 12 and get married for the first time at just over 25.

(A quick note about statistics.  The problem with teaching statistics — especially with something like menarche — is that very, very few folks end up being "average".  Almost every girl seems to have a sense of herself as being "early" or "late"  — a Goldilocks effect, I suppose!)

Here’s where it gets interesting.  A century ago, the time between the onset of puberty and marriage was but five years; today it’s close to fifteen. If a contemporary young woman is trying to "wait" until marriage to lose her virginity, she is waiting — in a very real sense — three times as long as women did in her great-great grandmother’s era!   She’s got three times the frustration of coping with unexpressed sexual feelings and longings, three times as long to struggle to live up to a cultural and religious standard of purity.  Forget trying to live up to the standards of one’s ancestors; today’s young women who remain committed to virginity are trying to accomplish something that has, from a demographic and physiological standpoint, never been achieved before.

Continue reading ‘Reprint: A long post on tradition, virginity, success, feminism, and a nonsensical double bind’