booknotes: out in the country

Last week I reviewed Sarah Schulman's Ties That Bind which explored from a very personal perspective the ravages of familial homobigotry. This week I picked up and read Mary L. Gray's Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (New York University Press, 2009). Gray's ethnographic study of queer teen lives in rural Kentucky took place in the early 2000s and she published her book in the same year as Schulman. Both authors write thoughtfully about the importance of family in the lives of their queer subjects -- though from very different perspectives. Ironically -- given our usual narrative of urban tolerance vs. rural bigotry -- Gray's consideration of the place of family within queer lives is much more nuanced than Schulman's.

As a researcher, Gray came from a rural California childhood followed by an urban California adulthood working with queer youth organizations. Her exploration of teen lives in rural Kentucky was prompted by national attention on the ways in which the Internet and other media connectivity and queer visibility might work differently in the lives of rural young people rather than urban young people. As she (and others before her) have pointed out, much of our understanding of queer coming-of-age posits a rural-to-urban migration in which our queer selves are incapable of being fully discovered and/or nourished until we "escape" our hometown settings and find the LGBT community in physical locales -- gay bars, lesbian bookstores, gay ghettos, queer action groups. Pushing back against this assumption, Gray sought out youth who were either unable or uninterested in making such a migratory journey of self-discovery. How would young queer people without the resources or desire to leave rural life for the city construct a queer identity?

In Ties That Bind, urban-based adult writer Schulman struggles with familial rejection in the face of her queer activism and chosen family of fellow lesbian, gay, and other non-straight friends. Ties is firmly situation in the milieu of Gay New York, a landscape we all (at least think we) know well, and situates its lesbian protagonist (Schulman) as an adult who struggles to connect with her parents and siblings, but as an adult dragging them to therapy appointments or participating (or not) in rituals like the weddings of relatives. Schulman's pain is that of an adult attempting to reconcile with the failures of her parents' parenting.

In contrast, Gray explores the dense interconnectivity necessary for survival in isolated rural settings. Families of origin, she argues, make or break the experience of rural queer folk in communities where the familiar is often the key to acceptance. Straight family members can act as brokers for their queer youths -- turning the queer into the familiar, making one of "them" into one of "us". The most resilient teens whom Gray encountered were typically youths whose parents supported their identity explorations and attempts to build broader support networks: paying for internet or access to health services, driving them long distances to regional meet-ups, participating in protest actions, or other acts which communicated to fellow townsfolk that their child was not to be disavowed. The more vulnerable children were those whose families either could not or would not provide such support -- in part because, unlike urban queer adults, these youths could not take the city bus to the "gay" district or surreptitiously visit the "women's" bookstore.

In some ways Gray's work underscores the central point that Schulman makes: that queer family members can't just disown their families of origin -- no matter how anti-gay those families are -- and replace them with chosen families without consequence. For Schulman, those consequences are mostly emotional and psychological: the pain of rejection, the loss of future relationship. For Gray's teens, in addition to the emotional support (or pain) a family can provide (or cause) for their queer members in a hostile culture, families are also the gateway to material resources and community belonging. The visibility of queer culture in the media, and access to information -- plus the ability to connect to far-flung networks -- that the Internet provides cannot replace, for queer youth, the insulation that local relationships provide. Nor does an urban-oriented narrative of queerness reliably serve these young people as they work to create usable identities for themselves and their communities.

This was a useful read, one which I might pair with Pray the Gay Away (also about queer folk in the Bible Belt around Louisville, Kentucky) and Not in This Family (challenging the narrative of universal familial rejection of queer family members in postwar America).

booknotes: ties that bind

Me, footnote hopping. The story of my life.

I found Sarah Schulman's Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences (New Press/Perseus, 2009) reading The Tolerance Trap and requested it inter-library loan thinking it was going to be a study of the ravages of anti-gay animus within families. Instead, it is more of a philosophical-political reflection on the practices within families (and by extension within the wider culture) that create we queer people as a lesser group. Schulman draws powerfully on work done by feminist activists around domestic violence and the workings of other types of prejudice such as antisemitism to describe how queer family members are isolated and scapegoated within families -- and how the social systems these families are a part of support that violence through passive bystander behaviors. She illustrates a lot of her observations with stories about her own family's unwillingness to maintain positive connections with her because of her lesbian identity: parents who say in front of her that she was born "bad'; siblings who refuse to allow her contact with her their children.

Reading Ties That Bind was personally disorienting as an experience; I kept checking the publication date -- really? 2009? -- because so much of what she was describing felt like the climate of the 1970s and 80s rather than the early 2000s. Which is definitely a good reminder that our experience, as queer individuals, of homobigotry is far from uniform, and that our treatment at the hands of friends and family shapes how we interpret and react to the structural and more distant social inequalities that continue to color all of our lives. Because of my family's support, and because of the social norms of my immediate community (expecting nondiscrimination), when I do encounter erasure or hostility I experience it as a departure from, rather than a reinforcement of, the morality of my people. That is, not only do I believe that there's no reason to fear my sexuality would harm children, but all of my friends and family members would look at someone like they were right bastards for suggesting such a thing.

That kind of support, in turn, leads to resilience for those of us who have it: with our many-layered communities behind is, we aren't isolated in the face of structural discrimination or individual acts of bigotry. For those whose families do disown them, as Schulman points out, the recourse is the much more difficult and contingent road of creating your own support system from scratch, always with the voices in the back of your head -- the parental authorities of your childhood -- telling you how worthless, how lesser-than, you are. These messages, in turn, reinforce the messages of the dominant culture that continue to erase, tokenize, or segregate the narratives of queer lives -- treating them as specialist subjects, "adult" content, something uninteresting to a more general readership or audience. As Elizabeth of Spilt Milk pointed out just this past week, Western culture still resists the notion that queer lives are human lives and as such deserve representation within popular cultures, curricula, and as commonplace within society. This is, essentially, the same message Schulman sought to impart in 2009, and despite legal gains in the rights arena we haven't made much headway in queering the mainstream.

In short, check Schulman out if you'd like to be reminded that things don't inevitably get better, and that our survival and resilience as non-straight people still depends a frightening amount on contingencies such as what family we were born in, what location(s) we grew up, where we find jobs, and how mainstream our queer performances are (not to mention all the other intersectional aspects of self we juggle: class, race and ethnicity, gender, citizenship, religion, body size, dis/ability, etc. etc. etc.).

booknotes: jenkins, hellekson and busse on fandom

I've been on a kick lately reading about fanfiction and fandom -- it's what with that addictive habit of footnote mining we're taught to do in academia? -- which has been both inspiring and a little bit wistful in that the muse seems to have deserted me this year. Apparently I find time to write porn really easily when I'm procrastinating on graduate thesis revisions, but less so when I'm coping with family loss, moving house, and some major work responsibilities.

Not that I haven't been thinking about a Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries Jack/Phryne three-parter, and a couple of Doctor Who Vastra/Jenny one-offs. Not to mention the outstanding sections of my Eureka series "25 Ways to Kiss a Naked Man." I considered returning to that one back in the spring, but all I wanted to write was end-of-life fic involving hospice care ... which I know would have been good but for which people would hate me eternally, and for which my wife would probably have divorced me. So. There's that.

But in the meantime, I've been reading in the fan studies literature (it's a thing! a wonderful, glorious thing!). The two latest books I've read were both anthologies: Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (McFarland, 2006) and Henry Jenkins' Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York University Press, 2006). While both assembled by acafen -- fans who are also academics; academics who embrace their identity as fans -- and both well-worth the read, these are two quite different volumes.

Jenkins, whose seminal fan studies work Textual Poachers (1992) I have yet to read, is a skilled writer whose ability to own his expertise without appearing self-important is too rare and to be prized. Despite his renown in the field of popular culture studies, his work is approachable, readable even to those unfamiliar with every theorist or creator whom he cites, not to mention every popular cultural artifact. Fans, Bloggers, Gamers is a collection of essays written after Textual Poachers and before Convergence Culture (2006) and explore topics as diverse as women writing m/m slash ("Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking," with Shoshanna Green and Cynthia Jenkins) the anti-gaming sentiments that flowered after Columbine ("Professor Jenkins Goes to Washington"), and the experience of parenting a teenager who met and courted his first girlfriend online ("Love Online"). Each essay is prefaced by a short introduction/reflection on the context in which Jenkins produced the piece -- and how his thinking has changed (or not) since. I particularly appreciate Jenkins' ease with a mode of thought we would today identify as "intersectional." Perhaps born out of his use of framework that takes fan expression seriously, he is constantly working that tension between dominant-culture narratives and marginalized stories, and how the two interact. Whether he's looking at the queer community response to Star Trek's queer baiting ("Out of the Closet and Into the Universe," with John Campbell) or questioning our cultural obsession with teenage rebellion and dysfunctional teen-parent relationships ("The Monsters Next Door," with Henry G. Jenkins, IV) his perspective invites us to question conventional wisdom about cultural power and the limits of popular narrative.

Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet is an anthology of many voices, and one which is perhaps better approached as an opportunity to graze than a volume to be read from end to end. As Busse and Hellekson explain in their introduction ("Work in Progress"), this is an anthology in which one will find work by fans who are using their academic hats to theorize their fan works and experiences. Each reader will no doubt find particular essays which speak most powerfully to their own experience of fandom. In my case, I was particularly moved by Elizabeth Woledge's "Intimatopia: Genre Intersections Between Slash and the Mainstream," and "Keeping Promises to Queer Children: Making Space (for Mary Sue) at Hogwarts," by Ika Willis.

Challenging conventional wisdom that holds fan fiction erotica to be amateur contributions to the pornography or romance genres, Woledge makes a convincing argument for slash fanfic to be understood as part of a new "intimatopic" genre. "Intimatopic" fiction, Woledge argues, focuses on the development of intimacy between characters; it breaks the genre boundaries of romance fiction in going beyond the get-together plot, and breaks pornography convention by insisting that sex is intimacy first and foremost, even in moments of violence, casual connections, or other "plot what plot" narratives. She argues that in foregrounding character intimacy, writers in this genre challenge us to value the work that goes into building and maintaining intimate relationships. I admit that this framing of fanfic resonates strongly with my own experience as both a reader and a writer. When I write fan fiction I have an emotional agenda, at least part of which is making visible the labor that goes into establishing and sustaining sexual intimacy with another being.

Speaking of emotional agendas, Ika Willis, in "Keeping Promises," explores the queering of mainstream texts -- in this case Harry Potter -- and asks us to question the conventional wisdom that views slash as a form of self-insertion or wish fulfillment: inserting queerness into a heterosexual narrative as a form of "resistance." Instead, she argues, those of us who are queer read the narrative as we read the world around us: as a location in which queer beings exist, and are likely in the closet, in denial, or lacking the self- or worldly knowledge to act on their desires. In this reading, slash doesn't insert queerness into the text; instead, it inserts knowledge of queerness into the text, so that characters can act upon that new layer of information. While Willis is writing particularly about Harry Potter, her essay echoed a lot of more recent discussions about canon queerbaiting in television shows such as Supernatural, where one group of viewers brings their knowledge of queerness to their viewing -- and sees the signs of potential queer desire everywhere -- while another group (at times, frustratingly, those officially associated with the show), denies that there is any canonical ambiguity or room for queerness within character behavior or portrayal. "Keeping Promises" points out the way in which queer fans can bring their subcultural knowledge to the characters (in this case through fan fiction) and enable them to explore what, to us, is an authentic and legitimate part of human experience. As a bisexual lesbian fanfic writer I'm most definitely on a mission to do just this: offer up narratives of same-sex intimacy contained within the boundaries of canonical texts that don't otherwise overtly acknowledge its existence.

Take, for example, my Downton Abbey fic that offers up a moment of sexual intimacy between Isobel Crawley and Violet Crawley ("Between the Elements of Air and Earth"). On the one hand, yes, I wrote it as straightforward porn, because I wanted those two characters in all their respect-hate complexity to get naked and work it out. But part of the energy and passion I brought to that writing was my trifold mission to 1) get more women having sex with women into fan fiction, 2) get more elders having sex into fan fiction, and 3) push fan fiction erotica beyond the typical narratives of sexual intimacy -- narratives that rely heavily on normative, youthful bodies doing penis-centric things. Part of why f/f slash tends to be less explicit; as a culture we still have a difficult time answering the question "what do women do together in bed, exactly?" Consider the work linked above, and all of my other f/f slash, a response to that question.

Sure, on way of understanding "Between the Elements" would be that I inserted a lesbian sex scene (between two bisexual women, or at least women with bisexual histories) into the universe of Downton Abbey. But Willis is suggesting -- if I am reading her essay correctly -- that we could also argue that, like in real life, the lesbian and bisexual narratives were already there, in the closet, like they are for so many of us. And all they needed was the "Mary Sue" insertion of outsider knowledge or vocabulary to give it the opportunity to flower. And hopefully, of course (from the perspective of queer adults), the more queer narratives we encourage to flower, the fewer queer children will grow up without the knowledge or vocabulary to construct their own lives -- without the cobwebs of cultural demurral or denial, straightwashing and gaslighting still rampant (don't kid yourself) today.

So. Go forth and read Fans, Fan Fiction, and fan works themselves!

booknotes: fic

Because the Brookline Public Library is awesome (they even have an awesome box ... shaped like a TARDIS!) someone on the staff ordered a copy of acafan Anne Jamison's Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World (Smart Pop, 2013). And there I found it, sitting innocently upon the new books shelves (have I mentioned how much I adore public libraries' new books shelves? it's like browsing in a bookstore except you can take everything home for free!). I've found so much eclectic good stuff on the new books wall at Brookline over the past few years, and Fic is no exception. Jamison is a literature professor with a background in English literature and culture, 18th century to the present. As an academic whose scholarly interest is in participatory literary culture, it is no surprise that fanworks captured her interest. This volume is one part narrative history of fanfiction from its "prehistory" in the 1800s to the present, and one part riotous celebration of various fan cultures through both Jamison's own analysis as well as the contributions of fanfic and "profic" writers (at times one and the same!) and other acafen as well. Not quite an anthology, as Jamison's narrative is the "spine" of the text, the contributions by others dodge and weave within the volume providing alternative perspectives, counternarratives, "missing scenes," and many a reading recommendation for the fic-hungry fan.

Jamison uses the lens of several major fandoms to organize her work in roughly chronological order. After a brief sketch of fannish readers of the Romantic period, she begins with the worlds of Sherlock Holmes (19th century to the present), what many believe is the first modern -- and certainly one of the most enduring -- fandoms. She then turns to Star Trek as a way to explore pre-Internet fandom cultures, reaching back into Science Fiction magazines of the mid-twentieth century and forward into the increasing visibility of overtly sexual fanfiction, particularly Kirk/Spock slash as the ground zero couple of queering mainstream narratives through fic. X-Files and Buffy provide fertile ground for exploring how the 1990s expansion of public access to the Internet changed the social dynamics and dissemination of fan creations (as well as their more immediate access to the creators of the original shows around which the fans engaged). Harry Potter and Twilight offer two divergent perspectives on mega fandoms, one much more conscious of its roots in geek/nerd and fandom culture (HP) than the other (Twilight). Finally, sections on the relationship between fanwriting and publishing and current (circa 2012) trends in fanfiction creation bring our rollicking narrative to a close.

As Hanna is fond of pointing out, intellectualizing is an erotic activity for me -- which probably means I'm an acafan even though I don't actually study fandom in academic (would this make me an #altacafan?). If someone can give me a new set of conceptual questions to ponder about a given activity or body of work, I'll be pleased beyond words -- and that's more or less what Jamison provided with Fic. Hers is a thoroughly readable exploration of fandom from the perspective of an insider, yes, but not (I don't think; though I'm an insider myself) accessible only to those familiar with the landscape described therein. She also provides no pat answers to the thorny questions of, to take an example, copyright in the age of "pull to publish," or socioeconomic inequalities shot through our culture that are (unsurprisingly) replicated within fandom even as some fans use their fanworks to create counternarratives and "talk back" to the powers that be, whether the original creators, rape culture, the military in the era of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, or the whitewashed, able-bodied landscape of many mainstream, futuristic worlds (and, yes, sometimes fannish ones as well -- we, too, are hardly free from sin).

If I had any big, new insights while reading Jamison, I think it would be how much the fannish orientation toward one's favorite stories that ends in the production of fanworks is a deeply ingrained one. Most of the contributors to the volume articulated in some fashion having been a fanfic writer before they knew what that was or knew that others, too, did what these individuals felt the impulse to do. I, myself, have a similar "origin story," of responding to narratives in childhood with the instinctive reaction to create more or better or crossover or alternate universe. The altacafan in me is curious whether fan creators could be profiled in certain sociological or psychological ways in relation to the narratives we produce fanworks around. In other words, what is the impetus for us in "talking back" to the stories our culture provides us? What personality characteristics or other factors push us to talk back versus those who don't? There's a project I hope someone in fan studies is already hard at work sorting out. I look forward to reading their book when it's published and available on the new book wall at the Brookline Public Library.

In the meantime, go read Fic. And let it lead you to all the delicious fic that's out there to be discovered. (I have an annotated list.)

booknotes: hollowing out the middle

Footnote mining from Paying for the Party, I ordered Patrick Carr and Maria Kefelas' Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What it Means for America (Beacon Press, 2009) through ILL and read it last week. This slim volume is based on an ethnographic study Carr and Kefelas of three hundred high school graduates from a small, rural town in Iowa they call "Ellis." With a population of about two thousand, Ellis' economy is primarily agriculture and industrial; high school graduates who go on to college rarely return. Those who remain struggle with social isolation and financial solvency. Carr and Kefelas surveyed over three hundred Ellis high school graduates from the 1990s (who at the time of their study were about ten years out from the end of twelfth grade) and conducted approximately one hundred interviews of young adults who had either stayed in, left, or returned to their hometown. Hollowing Out attempts to describe the motivations and experiences of each group of individuals, and ends with some reflections on the role that social policy can (and cannot) play in supporting and reinvesting in rural life nationwide.

What Carr and Kefelas found was that high school graduates were tracked / self-sorted into a handful of broad categories: the Achievers and Seekers, the Stayers and Returners. Achievers were tracked from a very young age by their parents, school system, and socioeconomic status, to leave Ellis and attend a four-year college and possibly graduate school. Most will never return to live in their hometown, having built lives elsewhere with career opportunities and social connections. Seekers don't have the resources to attend a four-year college, even a good state school, and so often join the military; they will leave to explore the world, but have limited socioeconomic mobility and often struggle to find a place in the world beyond the armed forces. Stayers have dropped out of high school or obtained limited qualifications, usually struggle with un- or underemployment, wed and/or become parents much earlier than those who leave. They, and the Returners, often have negative perceptions of the world beyond their small town community -- either because they tried and failed to find a foothold there, or because they have no desire to leave the familiar. Returners are usually "Boomerang" individuals (often women) who may have relocated for an associates degree or attempted a four-year college education but never established connections that made them feel comfortable beyond Ellis. They can also sometimes be Achievers who, for a variety of individual reasons, return home (familial responsibilities, political ambitions, occasionally the right job at the right time). However, these "High Flyers" -- the ones so desperately sought by states with struggling economies -- are few and far between.

In the end, Carr and Kefelas encourage policy-makers to focus less on trying to lure these "High Flyers" back to their states, since individual motivations usually have little to do with initiatives to woo the Achievers into returning, and instead focus their resources on the Stayers and Returners who are already the backbones of their communities and remain an un- and undertapped social and economic resource.

The authors do, eventually, touch upon some of the non-economic reasons that Achievers and others who leave Ellis may resist returning -- reasons such as prioritizing racial diversity or acceptance of queer identity and relationships -- that I think should have been foregrounded a bit more. Granted, interesting work is currently being done to highlight the lives of queer folk in rural America. Rural Americans are not inherently more or less prejudiced toward Othered groups than urban or suburban Americans. However, smaller communities are often self-selecting and more homogeneous; they're also often extremely isolating for those who are somehow different, even if they (we) don't experience overt prejudice or violence. Simply put, it was harder for me, as a bi woman, to find potential female partners (and even potential male partners!) in a medium-sized Midwestern town than it is.

And now, as a married lesbian, I have structural as well as cultural reasons not to return to Michigan: our marriage would not be honored by the state government. So whenever I read about state campaigns for professional Michiganders to return and invest in the state where I grew up -- and which I continue to love in many respects -- I admit I'm not exactly feeling the love. Many of us Leavers have left precisely because our communities scarred us, deeply, and returning to live there would open old wounds.

But in the end, I was uneasy with the way in which the authors' solution seems to encourage a "circling the wagons" approach to social policy, where the parochial reasons that people leave certain communities are glossed over rather than challenged. I wanted them to dig more into the ways, for example, racial prejudice, the gendered division of labor in working class communities, or anti-gay sentiment not only drives Achievers away but harms those who stay behind. Not every person who embodies a marginalized identity (queer, physically disabled, non-white, Muslim, etc.) has the resources to "get out of Dodge" even though we may have strong push-pull factors to do so. While I'm comfortable with studies of rural America that ask us to reconsider our prejudices toward "hicks" living in "flyover" states, the fact that homogeneity was a fact of small town life the authors' touched on but never developed is something I found troubling.

Still, I'd recommend this book to anyone with an interest in how education and social policy reproduce class and cultural divides here in America. The personal narratives woven throughout the sociological analysis will resonate with many readers who grew up in rural or quasi-rural Midwestern communities (raises hand), and provoke reflection beyond personal experience toward broader social trends.

booknotes: paying for the party

Amanda Hess at Slate recently reminded me that I had meant to read Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton's longitudinal, ethnographic study of a cohort of undergraduate women, Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (Harvard Univ. Press, 2013). Armstrong and Hamilton's research team spent a year in residence at "Midwest University" living with a group of first-year women assigned to one of the school's party dorms; they continued to follow the cohort on their floor for five years -- the typical four years to degree and one year after. What began as a study of young women's sexual agency at a large public university quickly turned into a study of class, and how strongly pre-existing socioeconomic conditions in the lives of each student determined her trajectory through college and into her immediate post-college circumstances. Hess' article at Slate highlights some of what the research team did discover about the sexualization of college women during their work; Paying for the Party delves into the class issues that define many young women's path through university.

The central thesis of Party is that undergraduates at large state universities (the researchers hesitate to generalize from a single case study) are constrained by the available cultures of their schools -- and often the specific dorms to which they are assigned -- in ways that limit the ability of less privileged students to utilize college as a tool for class mobility.

What the researchers found was that the majority of students entered MU on course to take one of three readily-available "pathways" through the college years: the party pathway, the professional pathway, and the mobility pathway. The researchers acknowledge that other pathways exist, both at MU and elsewhere, but for the cohort they studied, these were the three dominant ways of approaching college. The dominant pathway was the "party" pathway; the elite and upper-middle-class women of the cohort arrived on campus with plans to strengthen their already-privileged social networks through the Greek system, tracked to areas of study that facilitated this way of life, and left college with low GPAs and degrees that would have been useless without their high-powered family connections and financial resources. Less privileged women who attempted to access the party pathway typically suffered a high loss of resources and low return. The party pathway also ruthlessly policed the performance of femininity according to a very specific set of elite standards which required money and time to cultivate and maintain.

In addition to the struggles of women on the party pathway who were unable to compete with the elite partiers in terms of time, resources, social connections, and conventional beauty, Paying for the Party also chronicles the way the party pathway culture encroaches on those beyond its borders. Even women who tried to follow the professional or mobility pathway found their efforts stymied by the dominant party cohort. The researchers argue that non-elite students need more robust support for non-party alternatives in order for college to be both cost effective and life enhancing.

There are limitations to the study. For example, I couldn't help but feel that even taking broad social categories into account, the party/professional/mobility pathways schema left out crucial segments of the undergrad population. Perhaps because the research team chose a "party" dorm, or perhaps because they were at a land grant research university instead of a liberal arts college, they failed to identify the pathway that I and many of my closest friends were on: What I might call the "how to live" pathway. This is the pathway that treats learning as a goal in and of itself, and self-knowledge -- as well as wider horizons -- as a valuable part of the college experience on par with skill acquisition/job training. And it's not a pathway exclusively available to the rich; I know students across the economic spectrum who used college as a step-stone to a meaningful life (not necessarily a well-heeled one). Armstrong and Hamilton hint at such rewards toward the end of the book when they profile a student who had limited economic resources, struggled in school, and yet one year after graduating is building a meaningful life for herself working as a ski instructor and living with her partner in the wilderness setting that drew them together.

They also suggest throughout the book that MU has other subcultures of students whose subcultures provide a robust alternative to the party pathway and help students succeed: the arts students, the African-American learning community, the LGBT group. But it seems that none of their cohort originally assigned to the party dorm found their way to these rich subcultures, a telling finding in and of itself that shows how segregated a campus can be, and how the crap shoot of first-year campus housing may make or break students. Particularly the most vulnerable ones whose families have little or no experience navigating higher education.

Despite the study's necessarily narrow focus on its original cohort, I highly recommend Paying for the Party to anyone interested in higher education, economic inequality, and the ways in which gender plays out in specific ways in both social class and college contexts.

booknotes: phyllis schlafly and grassroots conservatism

I'm back in encyclopedia entry writing mode this month, and one of the subjects I volunteered to tackle was the life and work of Phyllis Schlafly in 750 words. One of the things I have gathered from Donald Critchlow's excellent Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Crusade (Princeton, 2005) is that Schlafly herself would likely approve of this creative discipline. She has, after all, built a career out of voraciously consuming and digesting the work of conservative intellectuals -- and then translating them into a form easily communicable to the grassroots: speeches, pamphlets, articles, press releases, and runaway bestsellers.

Plus, did you know she comes from a family of lady librarians?

It is a mark of Critchlow's excellence as a biographer that he is able to humanize his subject and make her interesting and compelling to even this lefty feminist who categorically disagrees with Schlafly on almost every political and social issue she has ever engaged on. Critchlow's is an intellectual-political biography, touching on Schlafly's personal details -- family background, class status, marriage, children -- as background for the larger points he wishes to make regarding her public career. Schlafly, he argues, is both a driving force behind -- and emblematic of -- the grassroots political organizing that flourished in America's postwar years of supposedly "liberal consensus." A voracious autodidact and driven student from a lower-middle-class background (she worked night to put herself through college), Schlafly completed a Master's degree at Radcliffe in 1945 and took herself to Washington D.C. just as the Second World War was ending, landing a job at the fledgling American Enterprise Association (now Institute). By all accounts she had (and still has) a talent for digesting densely-written works of conservative political theory and translating them into vernacular, politically-motivating works. During the 1950s and '60s her focus was on anti-communism, fiscal conservatism, and national defense; in the 1970s she discovered (anti)feminism and turned from international concerns to domestic policy and cultural issues -- earning the hatred of many a committed feminist through her successful STOP ERA campaign, which killed what many had assumed was a foregone Constitutional amendment explicitly outlawing discrimination on the basis of sex.

I am too young to remember first-hand the bitter disappointment of the ERA's defeat, or the shocked sense of betrayal I think many American feminist felt when she discovered that not all women believed in feminist goals. Perhaps because of this, I have the emotional distance to appreciate the way Critchlow is not overtly partisan -- either for or against -- the Schlafly perspective. Instead, he clearly articulates how her work connected, and continues to connect, to the concerns and goals of the resurgent political and cultural right during the latter half of the twentieth century. I cannot say I share those concerns or goals, but perhaps I understand where they came from and how they came to be articulated a bit better than I did before.

My only disappointment with Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism is perhaps an unfair one -- that Critchlow only glosses events following the defeat of the ERA and Reagan's rise to the presidency in the early 1980s. Since Schlafly and her Eagle Forum continue at a tireless pace today, a deeper analysis of Schlafly's enduring influence would have been welcome. Too, I would have been interested in a more substantial tour of her opponents' (often muddled) rebuttals and (often failed) strategies. One comes away from Critchlow's examination with the sense that Schlafly was always effectively on-message. Surely even the most charismatic of public figures has an off day.

booknotes: otherhood

It's been awhile, what with one thing and another, since I actually did a book review post. I'm hoping to get at least one per week posted during the summer, so to kick us off here's this week's title: Otherhood: Modern Women Finding a New Kind of Happiness by Melanie Notkin (Seal Press, 2014).

I ordered Otherhood through inter-library loan after seeing it mentioned in positive terms in a piece on how the media fuels women's panic and self-judgement around pregnancy and fertility. From the gloss in the essay, I expected a study of women who found themselves single and/or childless as they reached the end of their fertility, and how they made peace with that circumstance. Perhaps it was poor or wishful reading on my part, because this book is not that book. Instead, this book is a hybrid personal memoir longform journalism piece in which Notkin seeks to connect her personal experience, and the experiences of her single, childless (but child-wanting) friends, to broader social and cultural narratives and trends about this demographic.

Apart from it not being the book I expected (which is hardly grounds for critique of the book it actually is), I had three major problems with Otherhood: its solipsism, its heterocentrism, and the way it embraced notions of gender complementarity and retrograde gender roles. All of these problems interconnect, because when one is writing about personal experience as universal experience, then obviously one's own wants and needs eclipse the diversity of human desire. There's nothing particularly wrong with Notkin yearning for a man willing to treat her to lavish dates, for example, but there is something very wrong about her making the argument that "we women" want a man who knows what kind of high-priced alcohol to order for every occasion. In Notkin's world of high-powered New York businesswomen in their late thirties and early forties, all women are straight, looking for male booty, looking for a man interested in a long-term relationship and kids, expecting that man to fit a very specific type of masculinity, and unwilling to revisit those expectations when the world doesn't deliver.

It's not that I think Notkin and company are "too picky" or "desperate" and that's what makes them unappealing. As someone who didn't date at all for the first twenty-seven years of my life, because no one I met piqued my interest enough, I hardly have a leg to stand on. It's just that I find Notkin's list of priorities for a partner kind of obnoxious, and I find it even more obnoxious that she assumes we all (as "women") share them.

Otherhood is also at war with its own thesis, which is that older single women (like Notkin) aren't waiting around for Mr. Right but are instead focused on living otherwise fulfilling lives, even in the absence of the partner and/or children they have always desired. Most of the narrative is, in fact, taken up with stories about she and her friends working their asses off dating one guy after another -- each of whom proves a disappointment -- and obsessing about their decreasing fertility. I finished the book feeling more than a little whip-lashed.

At its best Otherhood argues that, in the fullness of any single life situation, sometimes the price just isn't worth it. Even if you always imagined, and continue to desire, having children of your own. Notkin is trying to push back against the cultural narrative (of her elite circle) that single women nearing the end of their fertile years should just go it alone and get pregnant solo -- or else they're somehow less dedicated to their vocation as women than the ladies who freeze their eggs at twenty-five and start IVF at thirty-five whether they have a partner or not. There's some really interesting stuff to unpack there, in the cultural pressure of women to become mothers at any cost because somehow it is our ladylike destiny. But Notkin doesn't push her inquiry to the level where I would find it most interesting or pertinent -- the level where the gendered framework of dating and parenthood is, itself, called into critical question.

In the end, I felt sorry for Notkin and her circle of friends for the way in which their narrow view of "male" and "female" gender performance seemed to be limiting their ability to build authentic relationships that went beyond judging themselves and their partners in relation to socialized gender expectations. The dating dance they describe is one I never participated in with men -- or women for that matter -- and it doesn't sound like a very fun way to get to know someone. Notkin and her friends deride some of their potential dates for wanting casual hang-out time, or an evening in enjoying sex and a pizza -- the sort of get-togethers that sound pretty awesome to me. I finished the book wishing I could just get all the people therein (women and men alike) to just relax around one another a little more.

Reading Otherhood I felt a flood of gratitude for queer visibility. For all the talk of a "gayby boom," and the increasing normality of same-sex parenting, queer couples have a long and storied history of not parenting. Perhaps because our sexual intimacy doesn't bring with it the expectation of pregnancy -- because parenting must be deliberately pursued, often at a high price, and with legal and social roadblocks in our way -- queer culture doesn't demand that we make the pursuit of children a primary objective in life. Even before I felt able to identify as queer, I drifted toward lesbian and queer spaces for the alternate visions of family they offer up for consideration. These are visions I found world-expanding and life-affirming when I was "straight," and I wish that more women like Notkin (and perhaps the men she is struggling to connect with) would turn to these examples for a renewed sense of possibility.

In short? If you're interested in thinking about a life unpartnered and/or not parenting, ditch Notkin's side-swipes at "spinsters" and women who don't "keep up appearances" and go read some queer history instead. There's lots of inspiration out there, if you know where to look.

booknotes: the accidental diarist

The latest issue of NEHA News (PDF) arrived in the post earlier this week. Actually, four copies arrived because for some reason Hanna and I are listed on the membership rolls twice each and can't get the organization to fix the glitch.

Anyway. I have a review therein of Molly McCarthy's most entertaining new monograph The Accidental Diarist: A History of the Daily Planner in America (University of Chicago Press, 2013)*: 

For nearly two decades, I have habitually carried a day planner in which to note future tasks and appointments, track expenses, and mark the passage of time. At the end of every year, I add the used-up planner to a box in the back of my closet before opening a fresh volume and starting anew. Until reading Molly McCarthy’s The Accidental Diarist, I had never considered this habit in historical context. Now I have. 

In five thematic chapters, loosely arranged in chronological order, McCarthy (Associate Director of the UC Davis Humanities Institute) explores the development of the modern day planner from early Colonial almanacs to the advent of the Wanamaker Diary in 1900. Combing through centuries of daily records kept by American men and women in pre-printed “blank” books, McCarthy documents the way in which Americans learned to use almanacs, diaries, and planners to both reflect on the past and plan for the future. She argues convincingly that the daily planner was a training ground for modern ways of organizing life. 

Read the full review at the NEHA website.

In the interest of full disclosure, Molly McCarthy is a former MHS research fellow, although her residence at the MHS was before my time, and I assisted her on obtaining images of materials at the Society to illustrate the book. Her project is, I would argue, an excellent example of the work historians can do with the seemingly opaque objects of history that, when put in context, are much more revealing than they first appear.

deathtime reading list

On our drive to Michigan, I kept thinking about what I could do besides be here with my grandmother, as we gathered to help her through the final days of her life. And what I kept coming back to was reading aloud.

Ours has long been a family of reading together, and there is something about the experience of being read to that I think cues being cared for in a very deep part of our psyche or soul. It is also something that Hanna and I share; one of the most effective ways for us to help her back down from a bad spell of anxiety is to put on old cassette-tape recordings of her father reading aloud, like he used to do when she was small.

So when I got to Holland on Sunday morning, I stopped off at my parents' house before going to Grandma's and picked up an armful of books. Here is what I have read so far:

Springtime in Noisy Village by Astrid Lindgren

The Sailor Dog by Margaret Wise Brown

Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban

Miss Rumphuis by Barbara Cooney

half a dozen chapters from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

and the opening chapters of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader also by C.S. Lewis

The text probably isn't that important, though I've been conscious as I've been reading about themes of exploration and home-coming, of journeys into the unknown, and of familiar family tales. The act being read to has helped calm everyone through the ups and downs of this process.

It's made me think about what stories I will want for myself, someday, to help with the journey on.

random access blogging

Montague Bookmill, interior (December 2012)

I'm in the final stages of writing my conference paper, a week behind my self-imposed deadline. So no book review this week. I did, though, get a chance to read Violet Blue's Smart Girl's Guide to Porn (Cleis, 2006) this morning over breakfast, which I recommend for those interested in moving-picture porn. I personally have never done much with the genre, in large part because my interest in porn generally stops where the pay wall begins, and I'm not as willing to weed through the dross for the gold as I am with fan fiction. But Blue's slim guide is a great introduction and guidebook full of suggestions for getting the most, well, bang for your buck in a feminist-aware sort of way.

The reason I had Smart Girl's was that Hanna and I spent yesterday on a field trip to Montague Bookmill for lunch with friends, and then a subsidiary field trip to Brattleboro, Vermont, for weekly shopping at the Brattleboro Food Co-op. At the co-op, I spotted a gardening display featuring my friend Joseph's book on plant breeding!

It is so much fun to know people who write books and publish them.

Spring is just around the corner here in Boston. I feel I can say this despite the fact that I'm typing this hunkered down under two comforters and as many cats because today, for the first time since November, we were able go the whole day without turning on the electric heaters. A real milestone.

Plus, I went out yesterday in just a heavy sweater. Liberating!

(And I can tell I've reached adulthood because my major concern is not how early I can get away with running around barefoot, but rather whether or not warmer spring temperatures will balance out the cold-weather electric bills before a new twelve-month cycle of payments begins.)

The "not renewing" notice to our current landlords is sitting on the table by my messenger bag ready to go in the morning's mail. We have until March 31st to decide, but we talked it over on Friday and realized there was no point in waiting until the last minute: we know we're ready for somewhere new. My colleagues are all gunning for us to move to Jamaica Plain, a serious contender, though we're open to a broad swath of Boston within a three-mile radius of the Fenway where we both work. It's an adventure, our first joint search for a home. I think of it as our "going to housekeeping" moment.

Though of course this spring marks the sixth anniversary of my moving in to this space.

The longest I've lived anywhere except my childhood home.

The rest of the month is busy for us, with both of us attending (with duties) New England Archivists and then the following weekend me presenting at the Biennial Boston College Conference on Religion and History (that paper I'm a week behind in finishing). I'm looking forward to celebrating my birthday on the 30th as a way to mark the end of a hectic season!

I hope all of you are well; and to everyone whom I owe an email (there are about half a dozen of you, I know!) please know I haven't forgotten you and letters will be forthcoming once we're on the other side of conference sessions and such.

booknotes: new deal & american way of poverty

I read Michael Hiltzik'a The New Deal: A Modern History (Free Press, 2011) and Sasha Abramsky's The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (Nation Books, 2013) in tandem, leading to a very strange stereovision of America's twentieth-century successes and failures in delivering basic material security to its people. Hiltzik, whose reporting I first encountered last fall around the Obamacare rollout, offers us a detailed case history of the incomplete construction of America's social safety net, while Abramsky details the ways in which even that open-weave net has been slashed and burned since the 1970s. Taken together, the two volumes chart a twentieth-century history of callous uncaring for the economically vulnerable, with a brief burst of effort during the Great Depression, and then again in the postwar era when America's affluence made it seem, temporarily, like poverty could be eradicated without asking the other other half to give up that much, if anything. Did you know that during the Great Depression, relief workers were making the case that giving cash to people in poverty, no strings attached, was the most effective way to stimulate the economy and help them put their lives back together? And we act like we've just discovered that poor people are actually the experts on their own lives. Can you imagine a world where Richard Nixon floated the idea of a guaranteed universal income for every American? Because it existed. Briefly. It's both refreshing to recover these histories of (dare I say it) socialist activism in American life, and also a real downer to realize that in every era political realists tempered their radical inclinations to better the well-being of Americans because they knew they would only be able to win lesser concessions from those who held the political power (and financial resources).

Hiltzik's New Deal is straightforward political and economic history. In a sweeping chronological narrative he charts the Roosevelt administration's efforts to resolve the crises of the Great Depression (banking, housing, jobs, food) from Roosevelt's inauguration through to the eve of WWII. The story he tells is Washington-centric, a tale of New Deal politicians, those in their employ, and their adversaries. Those looking for a more grassroots narrative of the Great Depression and the effect of New Deal policies and programs should look elsewhere -- but Hiltzik does provide a useful sense of the real politik required to push through programs such as Social Security. While those on the left wanted guaranteed pensions for all elder Americans, the program as finally designed -- as we know it today -- tied payouts to lifetime earnings:

The program's near-total dependence on enrollee contributions has been both a blessing and a curse. (Economists consider the employer's payments to be employee contributions under another guise, on the theory that if the employer tax were not levied the money would flow to the workers as wages instead.) Although the contributory element makes the program's financing regressive -- that is, wealthier Americans pay a smaller portion of their income than lower-paid workers to support a program of broad social utility -- it has also helped protect it from political attack by giving its enrollees what appears to be a concrete stake in its survival (251).

In many ways, Saul Abramsky picks up where Hiltzik's narrative leaves off, exploring American poverty and economic insecurity as it has manifested since the mid-twentieth century and the War on Poverty efforts of the ebullient 1960s and early 70s. The American Way of Poverty is a difficult book to read, in that it ruthlessly reminds us that we are all one or two or a series of three, four, five, instances of bad luck of poor decision-making away from material ruin. In a society that has only ever grudgingly supported social safety nets -- and then only for the "deserving" poor. As the rich grow richer, we talk about slashing social security benefits, refuse to extend Medicaid to our nation's poorest regions, and continue to see the socialized guarantee basic material security (health care, food, shelter, education, and work) as the flower-strewn path to slothful dependency.

As someone who believes that a life lived in basic faith that human beings seek to be creative in community with one another (recognizing there will be a few who take advantage of this trust) far outweighs the toxicity of a life lived on the premise that human beings require shock prods and chains to squeeze labor and "productivity" out of their souls, I found Abramsky's reminder of how few Americans share my values possible to read only in small doses. Particularly (ironically enough) the final sections in which he offers solutions for the various problems of endemic poverty: a guaranteed minimum income, socializing the costs of higher education, reinvestment in Social Security, national healthcare, renewed support for unionization, a laundry list of practical steps toward a society oriented toward benefiting all not just the plutocratic few. That such a simple, modest list of steps toward the lessening of human suffering seems politically impossible leaves one with a creeping sense of apathetic despair.

I won't stop at the apathy, of course (I suppose maybe not "of course", but I've imbibed enough lefty theology in my time to believe that a meaningful life involves struggling for justice even when the possibility of success is vanishingly small). But it's shocking every time to re-realize how willing we are to throw some people under the bus so the "right" sort of people can keep on hoarding the resources for themselves. And how we narrate those acts of violence as inevitable, natural, as "freedom" and "choice," as the neutral forces of the universe, simply the way things are rather than the way we've decided things will be. Reading histories like Hiltzik's are a good reminder that our present has been shaped by our past, and that the past is made up of concrete actions taken up by human beings. Human beings who could have made different decisions, taking us along different paths.

We always have choices. I do hope that, collectively, we can make ones that benefit the vulnerable, the marginalized, the trapped, and dehumanized, so that they too are free to make meaningful choices about their own lives.

romance & inequality: migraine listening

I was going to write a joint book review this weekend of The American Way of Poverty and The New Deal: A Modern History, both of which I've read in the past month. But then I got socked with a two-day migraine, the kind that comes around about once a season and has me making friends with the toilet bowl, the ice pack, dark, dark rooms, and narcotics.

So writing didn't happen. But to distract myself from the pain, listening did.

I started with this most enjoyable hour of On Point discussing the romance novel industry. It had surprisingly little condescension, and although I would have liked some acknowledgement of non-hetero markets and amateur writers (*kof*kof*fanfiction*kof*kof*), overall it was a thoughtful reflection on the enduring popularity of narratives that center around relationship formation.

Then I moved on to Boston and socioeconomic inequality, which has been in the news a lot recently due to the nationwide media attention and due to the fact we have a new mayor (Marty Walsh) assuming office who was elected in part because of his working-class background and pledge to make Boston more affordable for those of us not in the 1%.

And finally, an hour of the Diane Rehm show devoted to gay rights in "law and sports" (an opportunistic conglomeration if I ever saw one!). I can't say I learned anything new during this hour, but did appreciate the articulate presence of the Department of Justice's Stephen Delery (emphasis mine):

REHM

10:12:01

And you have the National Organization for Marriage, Brian Brown, the group's president, saying, "The changes being proposed here to a process as universally relevant as the criminal justice system serve as a potent reminder of why it's simply a lie to say that redefining marriage does not affect everyone in society."

DELERY

10:12:37

Well, I do think, Diane, that, as the Supreme Court recognized in Windsor, the Defense of Marriage Act had real consequences for real people by denying a whole range of benefits to people in the course of many federal programs. Some of these programs are critical to people who need them for health insurance, for example.

DELERY

10:13:01

And so, if you look at what the agencies have done over the last few months, the same-sex marriages are now recognized for all federal tax purposes, including filing joint returns. Spousal benefits are now available to military service members who are serving overseas. Health insurance is available for same-sex spouses of federal employees.

DELERY

10:13:24

And citizens who are in same-sex marriages can now sponsor their spouses for immigration benefits. And the list goes on. All of these things are federal benefits, provided under federal law, and the agencies, like the Department of Justice, have concluded, following the Supreme Court, that the marriages that are lawful where they're performed should be recognized for these purposes.

I hope y'all have a good week ahead, and -- health willing! -- I'll be back next Monday with the promised book reviews.

booknotes: the hub's metropolis

Now that Hanna and I are new-apartment-hunting in earnest, my situational interest in the history of Boston's development has come to have immediate real-world applicability as we look across the landscape of our greater metropolitan area for areas that might be affordable yet still within the walkable urban core. My latest reading in this area was particularly enjoyable in this way, as James O'Connell's The Hub's Metropolis: Greater Boston's Development from Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth (MIT Press, 2013) ends each chapter with concrete, extant examples of each phase he writes about. Guidebook-style he describes three-to-five locations or routes whereby one can explore the  nineteenth-century country retreats of the Boston gentry, the postwar automobile suburbs, or the sites of "smart growth" and the greening of Boston in this newest phase of regional planning. O'Connell (and his ever-patient wife) might be the only people whose idea of a good time is to visit surviving examples of 1980s strip malls, but I enjoyed reading about his enthusiasm nonetheless!

The Hub's Metropolis sketches out, in roughly chronological order, the development of the Boston metropolitan region from 1800 to the present day, beginning when Boston was largely confined to the Shawmut peninsula and connected to surrounding villages in only tenuous trading and regional economic relationships. Prior to the railroad, people generally lived within walking distance of where they labored on a daily basis; deep into the twentieth century this held true for working-class families. (Only since the 1980s have the inner suburbs become locations for the impoverished and working poor who can no longer afford to live in the rapidly-gentrifying core of America's largest cities.) One of the most interesting tidbits of information I learned from O'Connell is that the human tolerance for a daily commute has remained more or less static at 45 minutes and urban historians can trace the growth of cities out from business nodes based on transportation options. When people generally walked to work, residences were within 2.5 miles of their places of business. When streetcars and trains, and later the automobile pushed outward from that radius exponentially as workers were able to travel further and further in the same window of time.

Of course, now we're coming full circle in the sense that "walkable urbanism" is the new hip thing. Hanna and I are both committed to finding an apartment within that 45 minute walking radius (for us 2.5-3 miles) from the neighborhood where we engage in our wage-work. Interestingly, we come to such a lifestyle from opposite ends of the spectrum: I grew up in a family where my father was a ten-minute walk from work and seek to replicate that sense of accessibility, while Hanna grew up an hour's drive from most amenities and never wants to return to such an extreme rural mode of life. We currently live in what used to be a streetcar suburb of Boston, about four miles out from the Statehouse on Beacon Hill; our neighborhood of Allston was developed in the early 1900s as the streetcars made it possible for middle- and working-class families to escape inner-city tenements for newer apartment buildings further away from the noxious industries that clustered around the waterfront (or put them within walking distance of Brighton's slaughterhouses and railroad yards). As we start looking at apartments within the old suburbs (Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, Brookline, Allston/Brighton) we'll be crossing paths trod by generations of Boston workers before us.

subject/verdict: stuff I've been reading in two-sentence reviews [no. 5]

Here's a peek at the books I read between mid-November and the end of the year. Exceeding my own expectations of finishing 2013 roughly 10% short of my goal of reading 104 books (two books per week), I actually came in at 102 by midnight on December 31st. Thanks to the polar vortex, I've started this year's challenge at a good clip -- more on the ones I haven't yet reviewed in March.

In the meantime, to wrap the previous year's reads, here are a handful of noteworthy titles (in alphabetical order by author).

Bronski, Michael. A Queer History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2011). Drawing upon several generations of historical scholarship on LGBT and queer history, Bronski traces the lives and experiences of queer Americans from early Euro-colonial history to the present. One of the things I particularly appreciated about his narrative is that it is not solely focused on sexual experiences or on the lives of high-profile non-straight and non-gender-conforming people -- rather, it seeks to approach a broader view of American experience through a queer lens.

Cain, Susan. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (Crown, 2012). Cain's work is a strong analysis of modern American culture as one which favors the strengths of a certain type of personality (here labeled "extroverted) and denigrates many of the strengths of another ("introverts"). Quiet is a good reminder to those of us who favor the quiet life to feel no guilt about working to organize our lives and spaces to play to our strengths.

DiCamillo, Kate and K.G. Campbell. Flora and Ulysses (Candlewick Press, 2013). I don't read as many middle grade & young adult novels as I used to when I was working in a trade bookstore (for shame), but happily a friend of mine has a seven-year-old son who is a voracious reader, and buying this novel for him prompted Hanna and I to read it -- and purchase a copy of our own! A delightful, if somewhat surreal, tale of a comic-loving girl, a poetry-writing squirrel, an errant vacuum cleaner, and a cast of family and friends.

Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking (Vintage, 2007). Didion's memoir about the sudden death of her husband received much well-deserved press for its finely-tuned analysis of the process of trauma and grief. What struck me most about Magical Thinking was Didion's internal conviction that death was something to be prevented and thus possibly, if the right combination of actions were performed, reversible.

Fadiman, Anne. At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays (Fararr, Straus, and Giroux, 2007). A dear friend of mine gave me this collection of essays as a present about five years ago, and I confess I only just this December got around to the act of reading them: they did not suffer for the wait! Fadiman is a master of creative nonfiction and her essays on everything from insect collecting to polar exploration, Charles Lamb to 9/11 to the joys of ice cream gave me pleasure to read and a yen to write deliberately once more.

Glaesser, Edward. Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (Penguin, 2011). Glaesser makes a compelling, if slightly glossy argument in favor of dense urban centers as catalysts for creativity and an energy-efficient way to house the world's population. While I agree with much of his argument, I do wish he had been more thoughtful in addressing how the needs of those for whom human density is a struggle will be met in a pro-urban future.

Hodges, Jane. Rent vs. Own: A Real Estate Reality Check for Navigating Booms, Busts, and Bad Advice (Chronicle Books, 2012). As Hanna and I dive into apartment-hunting this year, I borrowed this slim-yet-packed little volume from our local library. Hodges provides an excellent overview of the pros and cons of both renting and buying one's place of residency and when the time came to return this one to the library shelves I felt a lot more equipped to think about options than I had before I borrowed it! (P.S. She also has an excellent "further reading" list.)

Kimmel, Michael. Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (Nation Books, 2013). I'll admit that I read this book mostly because if you're in any field that touches on masculinity studies, Kimmel is someone whose work you need to be familiar with (full disclosure: I had a lovely lunch with him once, as an undergrad, when he was a speaker at our campus). AWM explores the perspective of the titular angry white dude whose sense of aggrieved entitlement is familiar to all who spend time on the internet; it provides little fresh insight to those familiar with the issues at hand, but does bring good research to the table for us to mull over in the years to come.

Liptak, Adam. To Have and Uphold: The Supreme Court and the Battle for Same-Sex Marriage (New York Times, 2013). This brief e-publication is an excellent summary, with some analysis, of last year's two same-sex marriage cases argued and decided before the Supreme Court. As someone who followed the cases fairly closely at the time, I can't say I learned a whole lot that was new -- but am still glad to know this source is out there in the event I need to refer back for details.

Mitchell, John Hanson. The Paradise of All These Parts: A Natural History of Boston (Beacon Press, 2008). A dollar-cart find, Mitchell's "natural history of Boston" is more familiar essay than scholarly history, with few source notes and a conversational style. Nonetheless, I found it a pleasure to read -- perhaps only in the way one can when a book charts the landscape which one navigates on a daily basis.

Morris, Theresa. Cut It Out: The C-Section Epidemic in America (New York University Press, 2013). The latest in a growing list of texts critiquing the American way of birth, Morris' insightful analysis of the c-section epidemic in the United States draws on qualitative interviews with parents who had just given birth, nurses, midwives, and doctors to argue that neither pregnant women nor medical staff are to blame for the trend. Rather, she convincingly asserts, institutional cultures and the insurance industry push hospitals to define risk in terms of risk-of-lawsuit rather than risk-to-patients, leading to a deeply concerning trend away from centering best practices on the health and wellbeing of the pregnant parent and infant themselves.

Walker, Lisa. Looking Like What You Are: Sexual Style, Race, and Lesbian Identity (New York University Press, 2001). Recommended by a friend, I found this a useful exploration of what it has meant in the late twentieth, early twenty-first century to perform lesbian identity visually and bodily -- Walker asks us to think about who is recognized (and trusted) as a lesbian, and why. As someone who has walked both sides of the queer-coded line (people have been both surprised I'm queer and told my parents they'd known all along [how could they when I didn't myself, right??]) I found this a thoughtful reflection on the boxes we attempt to put people into, and how human diversity defies such categorization.

And for a sneak peek at what I've been reading this year, you can always find my current bookshelf in "real time" and my complete year-to-date list at the GoodReads 2014 reading challenge.

What's on your (reading) plate this year?

booknotes: 'bi' and 'a woman like that'

While we were snowbound in Michigan, I had time to do quite a bit of reading. Two of the titles I read were A Woman Like That: Lesbian and Bisexual Women Tell Their Coming Out Stories edited by Joan Larkin (Avon Books, 1999) and Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution by Shiri Eisner (Seal Press, 2013). Separated by nearly fifteen years, and written for very different purposes, yet grappling with similar subject matter, it was interesting to read them back to back.

A Woman Like That is -- at the subtitle implies -- an anthology of personal essays by queer women describing their experiences of coming-to-awareness of their sexual selves. "Coming out" is a term we typically use for the process by which we (non-straight) people make public the shape of our sexual desires. While mainstream narratives generally pin-point a singular event ("When did you come out?") what most of the essays in A Woman Like That make clear -- and what most in the queer community already know -- is that to come out is a verb, a process, and myriad. Reading these pieces challenged me to consider my own narrative of sexual awakening, and asked me to consider how I would organize it biographically. Does one begin with romantic/passionate friendships in childhood? With the acquired vocabulary that allows you to name yourself, or proscribes that ability (more on this below)? With a sexual debut? The first time you employed the word (bisexual lesbian dyke queer) to describe yourself to a (parent friend lover colleague medical professional) or on (on a form the internet) or in (an academic essay a job interview a survey response)?

The women in A Woman Like That, whose essays are arranged roughly chronologically featuring stories from the 1950s to the 1990s, use a variety of these definitions of "coming out," often in combination. They describe childhood passions, first crushes, sexual initiations (good, not-so-good, violently non-consensual). They describe always knowing and coming to their realization later in life. They write a lot about the pain of living queer in an anti-gay world: of "reparative" therapies, of drugs, of physical abuse, of children taken away, of ruptured relationships, of fear and self-loathing. One of the things that startled me, in fact, and bogged me down in the reading, is how grim so many of these women's narratives were. Hanna and I joked, as I kept reading her excerpts, that it should have been titled "The Unhappy Dyke Book."

Still, as I said, the book made me think about the shape of my own story: the intense romantic friendships (same- and other-sexed); the inability to discern erotic from platonic attractions by gender in adolescence (I was told by multiple people "you'll know" ... what it turned out "I knew" was that gender was not a salient factor for me!); the internalized biphobia that caused me to de-legitimize my same-sex longings as invalid data; the sexual debut(s); the transition into a relationship, the describing of that relationship; the (mostly unruffled) reactions of people who found out I was dating a woman; the experience of getting married in a state where same-sex marriage is legally recognized.

Shiri Eisner, author of Bi would probably frown upon my brand of bisexuality. For one thing, I'm an "assimilationist" bisexual, perpetuating my own erasure by playing nice with the mainstream LGBT (or "GGGG") movement, by often using language like "lesbian" to describe myself (even though I am, in fact, bi), and by marrying Hanna ("even if one particular marital arrangement doesn't include any form of direct violence, marriage still constitutes symbolic violence against women in and of itself"). Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution challenges those of us with bisexual desires and identities to push for an end to bisexual invisibility, and to recognize the radical challenge the organization of our sexual desires pose for the sex, gender, and sexual hierarchy of what Eisner refers to as minority-world culture (more commonly known as Western culture).

In eight chapters, Eisner explores what bisexuality is, how monosexism and biphobia work, bisexuality and the concept of "passing" and social privilege, and the intersection of bisexuality and feminism, trans* activism, racialization, and the mainstream gay movement. Overall, despite the fact that I suspect Eisner would take away my bisexuality card if she could, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's accessibly written, deeply researched (I'm already mining its bibliography for further reading), and thoughtfully inclusive of many different peoples and communities.

At times I felt like the apparatus of inclusivity was top-heavy and slightly arbitrary. For example, Eisner had a habit of identifying authors' nationalities which didn't always seem any more relevant to the meaning of their work than, say, their marital status, or whether they were parents. Still, I think probably over-articulating subjectivity is probably better than assuming objectivity or universal applicability. The other stylistic challenge of the "big tent" work Eisner is attempting to write is the way the text sometimes got bogged down in enumerations of what could not be discussed, whom the next statements would not be relevant for, and whose voices might be in danger of erasure. As with the identity-markers, these provisos sometimes felt like they were undercutting the relevance of the forthcoming passages and/or assuming a readership that would be unable to discern for itself about whom the text was speaking. While I fully appreciate what Eisner was trying to do, I found myself as a reader getting impatient with too much telling and not enough showing ("I know that already! Get to the damn point!"). This is perhaps a personal limitation rather than an authorial flaw.

At the end of the day, I appreciate Bi as a call to stand up for bisexuality as an actual-factual way of being sexual in the world, and one which is not an attempt to cover one's homosexuality or seek to gain heterosexual privilege. As an adolescent and young twentysomething, I needed someone like Eisner to come along and point out to me that my erotic interest in people with male parts and identities did not trump my erotic interest in people with other parts and identities. For too long, I assumed that as a woman who was capable of sexual attraction to men, my only social recourse was a heterosexual relationship.

(Because statistically speaking, in my hometown, what were the odds of finding a woman interested in me. Because lesbians would all hate and be suspicious of me. Because I was sexually inexperienced and too stupid to tell the difference between platonic and erotic interest; once I had sex with a man I'd suddenly realize what made that different from my same-sex romantic friendships. Because "everyone knows" that bisexuality is just a phase and that bisexual women are flakey, indecisive, and deceptive. Because no one believed me when I said I didn't know what orientation I was. Because the default sexual orientation is always straight and monosexual.)

While A Woman Like That would likely only be of interest to people who like to think about the structure of coming-out narratives and about how the material experience of coming out has (and hasn't) changed since the mid-20th century, I'd argue that Bi is absolutely essential reading for anyone who cares about keeping their fingers on the pulse of queer activism. As we look beyond, around, and through the mainstream gay rights issues that have preoccupied the most visible activists and activist organizations in recent years (i.e. as "gay" people become more accepted to the extent that they look and act like hetero, gender-normative folks), we need to remain committed to gender, sex, and sexual diversity beyond the hetero/mono and male/female binaries that obsess Westerners and others across the globe. Bi offers up a robust toolbox of concepts for doing so.

blizzard of '14: black river books [photo post]

Yesterday, in an attempt to re-boot the vacation we're inadvertently having, Hanna and I took a small road-trip to South Haven, Michigan, to visit a bookshop Hanna found via the Internets.

Black River Books was well-worth the thirty-minute drive down I-196. Our outbound trip was punctuated by a stop at Uncommon Grounds, where we refueled with two French Giana lattes. 

We paused at the cafe's community bulletin board to wistfully gaze at the "for rent" advertisement featuring a three-bedroom house on offer for less than what we pay per month for our one-bedroom in Allston.

South Haven was quiet, still digging out from the beginning of the week.

Sidewalks clearly weren't a top priority.

Hanna and I were the only two customers at the bookstore, which made for leisurely browsing. The shop was clearly set up as a sit-and-read business, complete with coffee urns and comfy chairs.

Like all used bookshops worth their salt, Black River Books had stacks of overflow (neatly labeled!) on the floor and steps-stools for easy book access.

They also had two shop dogs, who snuffled us out upon entry and then curled up in their appointed locations by the shop counter, waiting for snack time.

I have to say that only in West Michigan are you likely to find a religion section subdivided by Christian theologian (and "Jesus" shelves alongside [Philip] Yancey and Matthew Fox).

Though to their credit they also had extensive LGBT and Sexuality sections, as well as separately-shelved erotica, clearly labelled and tucked away above the paperback mysteries.

In the Sexuality section, I was delighted to find a 1972, hardcover and full-color edition of Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex for which a review post will simply have to be forthcoming. Its loving sketchy drawings of the heterosexual couple enjoying intimacies of various configurations are as delightful as Dr. Comfort's opinions about things such as bisexuality are antiquated.

In any event, if you ever find yourself stuck in West Michigan for ten days longer than you anticipated in the middle of a snow storm, Black River Books is definitely a place we would recommend for a field trip!