tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7543830594641220982024-03-08T01:46:52.879-05:00Thoughts from a Feminist MotherTeacher, trainer, mother, time traveler, superhero // PhD Student, Language, Literacy & Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, studying history & social justice // she/her/hersJessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.comBlogger25125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-34794320820275838462022-04-26T21:09:00.000-04:002022-04-26T21:09:53.307-04:00Cultural Event 4: Indigenous Community Archiving and Collective Memory<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: right;"><a href="https://folklife.si.edu/Media/Default/Talk%20Story/ashley-minner-stained-glass.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="217" src="https://folklife.si.edu/Media/Default/Talk%20Story/ashley-minner-stained-glass.jpg" width="326" /></a></div>I attended <a href="https://my3.my.umbc.edu/groups/circa/events/104116" target="_blank">a UMBC-hosted panel</a> online earlier this evening. The first panelist, Ashley Minner (Lumbee), former UMBC Professor and now assistant curator at the Smithsonian <a href="https://americanindian.si.edu/" target="_blank">National Museum of the American Indian</a>, discussed her motivation to make archival materials she found about Baltimore Lumbee history available to other members of the Lumbee community. The new Ashley Minner Collection at UMBC (discussed further <a href="https://www.baltimoresun.com/features/newsmaker/bs-fe-newsmaker-ashley-minner-20220111-wrodjouvkfhtzjpsds3ntyjb34-story.html" target="_blank">here</a>) was founded to do just that; the second panelist, archivist Tiffany Chavis, did a lot of work to set up plans, a finding aid, etc., for that collection. Jessica Locklear (Lumbee), inspired by Minner, has begun to do similar work in Philadephia. One of the audio recordings she played during tonight's panel consisted of reminiscences of the American Indian Center there, which closed in 2004. Of particular interest to me was that it was often a site for activism, among many other uses.<p></p><p>Finally, Siobhan C. Hagan discussed how she helps communities preserve audio/visual records; the local records digitized through the organization she founded are freely available <a href="https://marmia.aviaryplatform.com/" target="_blank">at her company's website</a>. She also encouraged attendees to protect their own family recordings; for instance, <a href="https://memorylabnetwork.github.io/" target="_blank">Memory Labs in public libraries</a> enable digitization of otherwise short-lived home videos at low or no cost. She also encouraged folks to consider sharing those home videos, pointing out that the only results she could find for the search term "Native Americans" in <a href="https://www.homemovieregistry.org/" target="_blank">this public archive of home movies</a> were filmed by White people. Some of those films, she reported, even show nothing more than White folks attempting to appropriate Native culture.</p><p>A Community Digitization Day is planned in future; potential volunteers can sign up and get on a mailing list to receive more information about the Ashley Minner Collection through <a href="https://forms.gle/TqfBrPJuWaVHXfGw6" target="_blank">this link</a>.</p><p>[image from <a href="https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/native-curator-ashley-minner?fbclid=IwAR1w1jBQunCEqAzVRuaahDtFBcEK61xIk-SPpP3eJz3agYnop-jOdk15iAU" target="_blank">an article about Minner's new position at NMAI</a>)</p>Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-87588851046498033772022-04-26T00:45:00.000-04:002022-04-26T00:45:02.645-04:00Event & Project Plans<p><span style="background-color: white; color: #262626; font-family: "Open Sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">For the May 21st Save Our Block party, I plan to bring 5-6 family members with me. My parents will be visiting from California and haven't seen the films yet. My younger son (age 10) will be thrilled to get to play with the other kids himself. My older son (age 20) will probably be willing to supervise the kids, especially if I pay him -- but he likes kids anyway and cares about this campaign. I couldn't ask him about it before posting tonight, though, as he went to bed early. We'll invite his girlfriend too if she is home from college by then.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; color: #262626; font-family: "Open Sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiH4Wyr-ptLjij_UA7S69jDF8xhsiGYozUUaJzQE5lvn067sQE7kZXQKea1DcDLp2-7qWP5k3I9kvBo58PzKtIrOA3n15u7EmJc3Sefw6jGeEehDwtWXRJtWuOP1ucwt9lsbLSPmmnIrSpktDw_AkUqJDeLPQuMSLkxEQ0_ZijxcNzzJgWUJIZMkbtO8Q" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="4000" data-original-width="6000" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiH4Wyr-ptLjij_UA7S69jDF8xhsiGYozUUaJzQE5lvn067sQE7kZXQKea1DcDLp2-7qWP5k3I9kvBo58PzKtIrOA3n15u7EmJc3Sefw6jGeEehDwtWXRJtWuOP1ucwt9lsbLSPmmnIrSpktDw_AkUqJDeLPQuMSLkxEQ0_ZijxcNzzJgWUJIZMkbtO8Q" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">Mandatory photo with husband, kids, older son's girlfriend, Dec 2021</div><p></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #262626; font-family: "Open Sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I will share the event promotions, once they are available, through the GWST social media account.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #262626; font-family: "Open Sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://twitter.com/organizepopple1" target="_blank">The Save Our Block Twitter account</a><br /></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #262626; font-family: "Open Sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">On the day itself, m</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #262626; font-family: "Open Sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">y husband and I will help wherever we can. I could help with interviews. We could also bring some lawn games if that would be helpful. We could bring some food too -- maybe some cookies as an easy dessert -- if needed. I would like to be able to contribute in that way since I'll be adding half a dozen mouths to feed.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #262626; font-family: "Open Sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have also already contributed to this event as leader of the zine revision group project.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #262626; font-family: "Open Sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">This week, I need to shift that group to revising the Poppleton Plan pamphlet. I will be out of town and unavailable from Thursday evening through Monday (28 Apr - 2 May), though, and I won't be able to attend class the following Thursday (5 May) due to one of my children's health care appointments, so that will give others in the group the opportunity to step up more this time.</span></p>Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-91786799942851912702022-04-14T12:37:00.004-04:002022-04-14T12:37:48.249-04:00Cultural Event 3: Baltimore City Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation (CHAP) hearing, 12 April 2022<p>On Tuesday, 12 April 2022, at the monthly Baltimore City CHAP session -- the first held in-person since the pandemic began in the U.S. over two years earlier -- the first scheduled hearing of the afternoon involved the consideration of the Sarah Ann Street homes for Historic designation. Two excellent outcomes of in-person meetings: we were able to audibly applaud after others' public comments, and the developer, who is not in fact local at all, was not present.</p><p>I arrived a few minutes late to the meeting to find the room already so full that some attendees were forced to stand. A woman was delivering the staff report on the Sarah Ann Street alley houses; she indicated that they recommend approval to the next step in the consideration process, which would entail "a full and proper study" of the properties, because, as rare surviving alley homes significant to Black history, these homes qualify under criteria 1 and 3:</p><p>1. That are associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of Baltimore history</p><p>3. That embody the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction, or that represent the work of a master, or that possess high artistic values, or that represent a significant and distinguishable entity whose components may lack individual distinction</p><p>(<a href="https://chap.baltimorecity.gov/sites/default/files/CHAP%20RULES%20AND%20REGULATIONS%2012%209%2015_update%20with%20coverpage.pdf" target="_blank">Baltimore City Historic Preservation Rules and Regulations</a>, p.8)</p><p>She also mentioned that they had received 170 e-mails in support of this step, 168 of which also supported including the Eaddy home as well.</p><p>Eric L. Holcomb, one of the CHAP Commissioners, then explained that the Eaddy home was excluded because of the city's agreement with the developer, but several of the public comments that followed explicitly addressed that objection. Every single one of these public comments expressed support for including the Eaddy home in the study.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.baltimoresun.com/resizer/EgFwYRoaWUDT_mlbfUEAleXziS0=/1440x0/filters:format(jpg):quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/tronc/KMLAWURBFBFPJCQPTGIM6S6N74.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="556" data-original-width="800" height="556" src="https://www.baltimoresun.com/resizer/EgFwYRoaWUDT_mlbfUEAleXziS0=/1440x0/filters:format(jpg):quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/tronc/KMLAWURBFBFPJCQPTGIM6S6N74.jpg" width="800" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>(This photo appeared in the <i>Baltimore Sun </i>Tuesday evening as part of <a href="https://www.baltimoresun.com/business/real-estate/bs-bz-poppleton-chap-eaddy-20220412-wurmzp44lze3lhux3tb65x4ruu-story.html" target="_blank">an article about the hearing</a>.)</p><p>Johns Hopkins, Executive Director of <a href="https://baltimoreheritage.org/" target="_blank">Baltimore Heritage</a>, was signed up to speak first. He directly addressed Holcomb's objection, indicating that that hadn't precluded development elsewhere, the development is moving slowly, the houses need historical designation, and CHAP needs to serve people with their work.</p><p>Tony Scott, Executive Director of <a href="https://swpbal.org/" target="_blank">Southwest Partnership</a>, spoke about how the Sarah Ann Street homes and the Eaddy's home represent Black history.</p><p>Prof. Nicole King spoke to what history the homes offer together, Phoebe Stanton's documentation of these homes and her explicit appreciation of them, the relevance to Arabber history of the Eaddy home, and its representation of Black generational wealth building, which are all further reasons to save them.</p><p>Curtis Eaddy, Sr., spoke to what the family has put into this home.</p><p>Sonia Eaddy spoke of elderly displaced neighbors and her own lifetime of memories in Poppleton, illuminating the inseparable human aspect to history. This woman is a source of Baltimore history herself.</p><p>Ronald Miles pointed out that Sonia is "a human developer" too, not out for profit. He reminded the audience that the developer has missed his deadline. He described how, as a former city employee (1985-2000), he saw Poppleton neglected and the community excluded from rather than assisted in participation in this process of redevelopment from the beginning, as they should have been.</p><p>Carrie van Shefsky (name may be misspelled) read a letter from Scott Kashnow, Historic Preservation Committee Chair of Southwest Partnership, in support of a historic district for the whole "superblock," a word I learned from a later comment that day. Dictionary.com defines it as "an area of city land larger than the usual block, treated according to a unified plan," and the Free Dictionary.com defines it as "an urban area, usually closed to through traffic, which has interrelated residences and industries as well as commercial, social, and recreational facilities." This definition accords with and supports Prof. King's characterization of the connected block of land on which are both the Sarah Ann Street alley houses and the Eaddy rowhouse.</p><p>A reporter named Woods referenced the comment lament regarding Freddie Gray: "if only we would have known." He pointed out that CHAP has the power and opportunity to prevent <i>this </i>displacement and destruction.</p><p>John Murphy called the redevelopment "a gentrification scheme" and "a first-class tragedy," which, he argued, are reason enough to save the Eaddy home. He also related that the Sarah Ann Street homes had been designated for preservation in homeownership in 2006, and instead the city evicted the residents, who were renters--but those were their homes. He called for inviting them back, which suggestion gained substantial traction and interest from the CHAP board.</p><p>Blanca Gonzalez, who described herself as a representative of Baltimore, appealed to the CHAP board as elected officials to facilitate "development without displacement" because we "should appreciate the life of people and the community they create."</p><p>China Terrell, a Harvard-educated lawyer <a href="https://www.chinaterrell.com/" target="_blank">running for office</a>, pointed out that contracts "are made to be broken," which is why the developer has broken it repeatedly. She also mentioned the importance of building Black generational wealth, asserted that "historic preservation is about telling stories," and called for CHAP to "close the gap between the city's rhetoric and the city's action" and "preserve people in place."</p><p>Shannon Darrow, one of the authors in the book collection <i>Baltimore Revisited</i>, urged CHAP to "use historical preservation as a tool" to help Black families the way it has helped Whites.</p><p>At this point, Laura Penza made a motion to table the Sarah Ann Street homes proposal to the May meeting so that the Eaddy house can be reviewed by staff and added to it; she also called for the families previously evicted from those homes to be offered right of return to them. John Bullock, another Commissioner and a City Councilperson representing Poppleton, seconded the motion. Kate Edwards abstained because of her concern with the redevelopment contract, but all other Commissioners voted in favor. The board took a break, and the many people who had come in support of the Eaddy family and all of these homes gathered outside the conference room to enjoy the celebratory atmosphere. It is a victory.</p>Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-21077038210971433842022-04-11T23:46:00.003-04:002022-04-11T23:46:56.380-04:00Reflect on Next Steps<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://baltimoretraces.umbc.edu/files/2021/12/IMG_2221-300x225.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="300" height="225" src="https://baltimoretraces.umbc.edu/files/2021/12/IMG_2221-300x225.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><p></p><p>The mission statement for the final class project is as follows:</p><p><span id="docs-internal-guid-08d5c920-7fff-2550-0ce9-907eb991de8c"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">During Spring 2022, students in </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">AMST 380: Community in America</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> continued work on the <a href="https://baltimoretraces.umbc.edu/poppleton/" target="_blank">A Place Called Poppleton</a> project. Students updated the </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Save Our Block</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> zine and the </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Poppleton Plan</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for community-led development. We worked directly with Poppleton residents to document, analyze, preserve, and raise awareness about the stories of the Poppleton neighborhood and the movements to preserve a historic block and reopen an important recreation center. </span></span></p><p>My part in this project will include attending the 12 Apr 2022 CHAP hearing (tomorrow) to help add a brief summary to the zine, as well as the mayor's letter. I will also work with my group, individually and collectively, to revise the zine and the Poppleton Plan for clarity and concision. If we get the opportunity to do interviews as well, I will participate in that process to the extent that seems appropriate in consideration of my fellow group members preferences. As the only graduate student in my group, I see my role as facilitating the other students' interests in the project while also trying to keep focus on what Prof. King has asked us to do and ensuring the highest quality of the work in the end.</p><p>[Image from Fall 2021 class whose work we continue]</p>Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-42570691768798595162022-04-05T01:03:00.005-04:002022-04-05T01:04:34.595-04:00Cultural Event 2: Cathy Park Hong's visit to UMBC<p><i><a href="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1580788273l/52845775._SX318_SY475_.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="265" height="188" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1580788273l/52845775._SX318_SY475_.jpg" width="125" /></a></i>Writer <a href="https://twitter.com/cathyparkhong" target="_blank">Cathy Park Hong</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/cathyparkhong/status/1510023698971041792" target="_blank">visited UMBC Thursday evening</a> to discuss her Pulitzer-nominated creative nonfiction book <i><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52845775-minor-feelings" target="_blank">Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning</a></i>. Her interviewer, UMBC Media & Communication Studies professor Fan Yang, asked Hong to speak about significant moments from the book, such as the words "minor" and "reckoning" in the book's title, which enabled Hong to elucidate the multiple meanings each word encompasses and how they relate to the work she sought to do in the book. Hong also discussed the importance of inter- and intra-racial understanding and introspection to process the complex and layered implications (such as tokenism) of living with Asian American identities in a racist society.</p><p>Yang's approach to questioning, as above; the positioning of the speakers, who were seated in chairs on the low stage; and the substantial time allotted to audience questions facilitated an intriguing taste of the book for those who hadn't yet read it, some added meaning for those who had, and a wonderful sense of <i>conversation </i>between Hong and audience members.</p><p>I appreciated learning more about the perspectives of people different from myself, especially as I am myself raising a Korean American child and, because I have the benefit of positionality as an <i>intimate outsider</i> to DJ's adoption, I can take up -- and have taken up -- the otherwise neglected responsibility not only of his socialization as an internationally and effectively interracially adopted Korean American person but also of frank critique of all those processes as needed. Some of Hong's comments affirmed some of what I have recently said to DJ myself, although he wasn't as engaged in the recording as I might have wished. He is a 10-year-old, after all. At least he got to see a prominent Korean American featured at a public university event.</p><p>You can watch the recording here:</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXXDAmLloW8&t=400s" target="_blank"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yXXDAmLloW8" width="320" youtube-src-id="yXXDAmLloW8"></iframe></a></div><p></p>Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-86922823746263557582022-03-11T22:21:00.001-05:002022-03-11T22:21:20.915-05:00An Excerpt from My Article-in-Progress: "A Mom by Any Other Name: Fulltime Stepmoms, Adopted Children, and Invisible Families"<p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">In this autoethnography, I discuss my and other fulltime stepmoms’
experiences and perspectives</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> and the implications for
notions of who is family and to whom “belong” maternal rights and
responsibilities themselves. I also consider some of the challenges that come
with the particularity of my own situation as a fulltime stepmom to an
internationally adopted child.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 107%;">I have somewhat arbitrarily defined fulltime stepmothers as women who
live with their partner along with their partner’s child(ren) at least 2/3 of
the year for at least two years. Just like any other kind of mother, one does
not necessarily love the children from the first moment, and some adjustment
period is warranted. In many cases this period may require more than two years;
nonetheless, after two years we have achieved substantial understanding and
ability to reflect on our situations as necessary to my current project. Amy
Janan Johnson et al. would characterize us as either mostly residential or
fully residential stepmothers (130). I further note that in Jason B. Whiting et
al.’s ethnographic study of self-identified “Successful Stepmothers,” all had
been married for at least 5.5 years (99); these authors indicate that “research
suggests that it takes 5 to 7 years for a family to stabilize following a
remarriage” (107).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">In August 2021, I gained IRB approval, with the invaluable guidance of <a href="https://saph.umbc.edu/ftfaculty/person/rk71205/" target="_blank">Dr. Sarah Chard</a>, and interviewed three other self-identified fulltime stepmoms, whom I met through a social media group (of which I had been a member for almost 2 years), who meet my criteria, as above, and who volunteered to participate. I do not claim a representative sample and did not even collect demographic data. I was concerned that reporting with too much precision and detail would compromise my participants’ confidentiality; fulltime stepmoms’ situations tend to be unique as it is, in my experience. Instead, I just want more of our perspectives heard and realities recognized. I hope that other scholars are motivated to pursue further ethnographic research with this population.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjuOG4nw64mdHYr7R_uA4n0skKdrwjzlrTfHbTGLSVgwx6VRXuJ9pHQUEJ8nrmt9BVcqk9aJq_fRVXQoHIF2wywtzyAkNXb3WjBzhQ5_g5_eLCko_t0nss7zNh3_xURFqLeKkSJtXxjQJg9YIM_XmNIcZI46_G75Tae8GM7NYBU5C9jL6k6cOry5vpUaA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="960" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjuOG4nw64mdHYr7R_uA4n0skKdrwjzlrTfHbTGLSVgwx6VRXuJ9pHQUEJ8nrmt9BVcqk9aJq_fRVXQoHIF2wywtzyAkNXb3WjBzhQ5_g5_eLCko_t0nss7zNh3_xURFqLeKkSJtXxjQJg9YIM_XmNIcZI46_G75Tae8GM7NYBU5C9jL6k6cOry5vpUaA" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Johnson, Amy
Janan, Kevin B. Wright, Elizabeth A. Craig, Elaine S. Gilchrist, Lindsay T.
Lane, and Michel M. Haigh. “A Model for Predicting Stress Levels and Marital
Satisfaction for Stepmothers Utilizing a Stress and Coping Approach.” <i>Journal
of Social and Personal Relationships</i>, vol. 25, no. 1, 2008, pp. 119–142.
DOI: 10.1177/0265407507086809<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Whiting, Jason B.,
Donna R. Smith, Tammy Barnett, and Erika L. Grafsky. “Overcoming the Cinderella
Myth: A Mixed Methods Study of Successful Stepmothers.” <i>Journal of Divorce
& Remarriage</i>, vol. 47, no. 1/2, 2007, pp. 95-109.<o:p></o:p></span></p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><p></p>Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-13801430600500317502022-03-08T23:17:00.008-05:002022-03-08T23:18:50.470-05:00Cultural Event 1: Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation monthly meeting today<p><br />Today I (virtually) attended part of the <a href="https://chap.baltimorecity.gov/" target="_blank">Baltimore City CHAP</a> meeting. I was running late from a previous meeting and then struggled to log in, so I missed the first 8 minutes and stayed later to make up for it. The entire hour and a half that I was in attendance, the discussion centered on BGE's claim that, to maximize safety, they have to install natural gas components outside historic homes, which seems to have only become the case within the past couple of months. This installation represents, at the very least, aesthetic and very possibly structural integrity problems for these homes. Speakers included the commissioners, community members, and BGE representatives. I found the community members more convincing than the BGE representatives; I was inevitably thinking of my own recent experiences with BGE as I made that assessment though.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh5tn7or0yx7TQU_797nZVH-__f0AeHwF-pLMa7tzOi7XhzIx4qiNmc2SJVMFBMn07Iq_n2_IyrNFCxyI5Yf2ADkzY2H4EmjUtQU8G8-QT1eH-ADieP3yxxU16Y6yZD1Ojet3vrvagW1hXgcCNaAp0WNHBBZ2iVSr-Kja2QPN74qE2EYiXW1r7vzIiZQA" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="88" data-original-width="242" height="116" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh5tn7or0yx7TQU_797nZVH-__f0AeHwF-pLMa7tzOi7XhzIx4qiNmc2SJVMFBMn07Iq_n2_IyrNFCxyI5Yf2ADkzY2H4EmjUtQU8G8-QT1eH-ADieP3yxxU16Y6yZD1Ojet3vrvagW1hXgcCNaAp0WNHBBZ2iVSr-Kja2QPN74qE2EYiXW1r7vzIiZQA" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p>On 6 Oct 2021, Verizon, without notifying anyone (including <a href="https://www.missutility.net/maryland/" target="_blank">Miss Utility</a>!) ahead of time, sent contractors to dig up our and our next-door neighbor's front yards to hook up service for someone ... around the corner? (At least, the contractors claimed that they worked for Verizon. Verizon later claimed that they had no record of having sent anyone to do that work and could not identify these workers.) In the process they hit the gas main and caused a gas leak <i>in my front yard</i> but <i>didn't attempt to inform my family</i>, who was mostly home at the time. The fire department quickly arrived, followed by BGE, who checked near our front door (for leaking gas?) with some kind of gauge, which I witnessed thanks to our Ring doorbell system. BGE also called Miss Utility to report the emergency dig they had to do after the leak. After we all left, BGE turned off our gas, requiring us to call them to arrange an inspection to get it turned back on, which we did. Later, BGE informed us that whatever they did to turn our gas back on that day was temporary. They were going to need to make another appointment with us for another visit out here to fully repair the damage.</p><p>On 12 Oct, BGE made their third trip to our home in a week to explain that the repair that they still need to do is actually replacing our entire gas line because the current one is too close to the surface. Also it runs oddly diagonally across our yard. This project will involve ripping up part of our street and our yard, although they promise that they will fix all of it eventually. They will leave the old line where it is, but they will no longer use it at that point.</p><p>However, when a company came to do landscaping repair on the yards, as BGE had promised, they told us that they had not been told to do anything in our yard. We called BGE, who sent someone to our house again, unannounced, while I was in between back-to-back meetings. Their argument was that the ticket they'd given to the repair company included our yard, and that ticket was marked completed, so the landscaping company <i>must </i>have repaired our yard.</p><p>... Not everyone understands logic.</p><p>Of course, if grass doesn't grow in the spring, we can call BGE, and they'll get it fixed then, right?</p><p>A larger concern is the fact that <i>all the houses on our street were built by the same company around the same time</i> (in 1972). Shouldn't one at least <i>suspect </i>that their gas lines were also too shallow and in need of replacement then? Or are they really going to only do what they <i>saw </i>they have to do and not even check everyone else's? It seems, unfortunately, that the latter is the case. No one else's lines were replaced while the street was ripped up -- just ours. We did deliver a note to all of our neighbors urging them to consider demanding that BGE inspect their gas lines too.</p><p>The important takeaway for me, however, was that BGE is indeed more concerned with minimizing costs than with any sort of responsibility to the communities they serve. That is why I found the community members more credible.</p><p>Of course, I did not stay long enough to learn the outcome of the discussion, and I couldn't quite read the commissioners during the meeting well enough to determine where they seemed to be leaning on this issue. I realized when I looked up the above link for CHAP that it is part of the Baltimore City government. Consequently, I have to wonder how well they serve their intended purpose and the community members who come before them. How much power to supersede BGE does this committee have? How do commissioners get these positions? And do they typically go way over the planned times for discussions? If so, what happens to the discussions they don't get to when the meeting finally ends? Is there a risk that that may happen next month, when the Sarah Ann Street homes are on the agenda?</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgx6-9fx8Tt2lg70W97E-JPSOCHU2joGTqsQG3OkZXGtvs7osDmZFX7xsU-X4XPngxwEpfR3QeluB3FlmNIfYYFvE2-ivC6rVavZgTi9ybni9c0h1JU4W1lpGTiqWAn34PgFpgIP0LZ969CwYDYOeS_fmdpppTz3ePGVd0ylhWFIFK9e7EvPMihzuFRtg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="744" data-original-width="1262" height="335" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgx6-9fx8Tt2lg70W97E-JPSOCHU2joGTqsQG3OkZXGtvs7osDmZFX7xsU-X4XPngxwEpfR3QeluB3FlmNIfYYFvE2-ivC6rVavZgTi9ybni9c0h1JU4W1lpGTiqWAn34PgFpgIP0LZ969CwYDYOeS_fmdpppTz3ePGVd0ylhWFIFK9e7EvPMihzuFRtg=w568-h335" width="568" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p>Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-23514645436594075022022-03-04T23:20:00.002-05:002022-03-04T23:24:23.219-05:00The Politics of Community<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The "professional" media representations of Poppleton just don't focus on the stories coming out of the people in Poppleton. They are always a sidebar or an afterthought, typically not even mentioned by name. The journalists never ask hard-hitting questions of the developers, such as whether the cost of their "low-income" units is comparable to what the people they've displaced were paying for their preexisting homes or </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">where they are spending the public money they earn locally or </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">how they masquerade as locals to enable their own profit. The reporters never push back when the developers even lie outright, such as when Dan Bythewood claimed that they had doubled (!) the number of low-income housing units in Baltimore.</span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The phrase "community in transition" reminds me of relevant readings we did in <a href="https://ges.umbc.edu/dawn-biehler/" target="_blank">Dawn Biehler</a>'s Environmental Justice course last semester. Just hearing the phrase immediately makes wary the people likely impacted by any transition, and justifiably so. They will be understandably concerned that they retain what they need after any transition. </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another meaning of "transition" is, after all, death.</span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.livingfaithbaxter.com/wp-content/uploads/transitions.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="151" src="https://www.livingfaithbaxter.com/wp-content/uploads/transitions.jpg" width="267" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>Their concern is not cause to exclude them from the planning and the process, even though they may be reluctant. Rather, they must not only have a seat at the table but also a just share of the decision-making and change-making processes throughout. The Center West developers are not working with the existing Poppleton community at all.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I indicated in class, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">in the public documents for the Save Our Block movement, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I would like to see more emphasis on the issues. In addition to what I mentioned in class (reorganization and a bit of explicit articulation of the broader context of robbing Black families of community, stability, and generational wealth without in-kind replacement):</span></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'd like us to add the word "redlining" to the timeline in the zine.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I suggest we add a bit of emphasis to crucial words throughout so that they jump out at a reader just skimming the booklet.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Perhaps we could add a few adjectives.</span></li><li><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'd love to be able to do a bit of proofreading too.</span></li></ul></div>Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-86928108492389805182022-02-25T11:39:00.002-05:002022-02-25T11:39:14.555-05:00My PowerPoint presentation on a chapter of Baltimore Revisited<p>I read, summarized, and analyzed Joshua Clark Davis's chapter, "More Than a Store: Activist Businesses in Baltimore," from <i>Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City</i>, eds. P. Nicole King, Kate Drabinski, and Davis, Rutgers UP, 2019, pp. 118-127. Here, as promised, is my slide show from class yesterday, with links below each slide image:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhJBPoh7QBNrjdZAAiblsp5Ac4S-Lo6Szujqa1B3FZctABFWaYKShc9DNdzUfgh8QOrGXGphQHsnKNABq2-CoOABLxlz_WPHGdHbafkh57t2-Eb-7SIxMQRJ8mq9UMeSpjWaQqNyr8SpoOZk_PHQ4w-eMcwzcvD87AJCw0c9FInaaYBXWPCDU_w9aIjnA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhJBPoh7QBNrjdZAAiblsp5Ac4S-Lo6Szujqa1B3FZctABFWaYKShc9DNdzUfgh8QOrGXGphQHsnKNABq2-CoOABLxlz_WPHGdHbafkh57t2-Eb-7SIxMQRJ8mq9UMeSpjWaQqNyr8SpoOZk_PHQ4w-eMcwzcvD87AJCw0c9FInaaYBXWPCDU_w9aIjnA=w529-h297" width="529" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh0oN9lwfOjtDRRds1YHnokKcxYfNGQivDpEeha9RmbsDOKuT0-PO8g-Hgd9VXlWnSJiGrMuK6jk97lJG-iStK_KRW5qxJfL1Mc2Huf1ryP7ON_CIb1rnpgqgtaLzt434VZGiMt4S-oJ-J12Zy2a0Rau8O7mwrPda4TeciatRwa9PZW8jYCHrJ3lXrtxA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh0oN9lwfOjtDRRds1YHnokKcxYfNGQivDpEeha9RmbsDOKuT0-PO8g-Hgd9VXlWnSJiGrMuK6jk97lJG-iStK_KRW5qxJfL1Mc2Huf1ryP7ON_CIb1rnpgqgtaLzt434VZGiMt4S-oJ-J12Zy2a0Rau8O7mwrPda4TeciatRwa9PZW8jYCHrJ3lXrtxA=w534-h300" width="534" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/2/resources/769">https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/2/resources/769</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhnCj7HdmkcWhrw7vf-5tqKYC1HfkfPAO8--4ptWXy83f6a8ZvpM-M5S-O-meKzF6Alr_cEabjn2gJLS3pjzjNBMcpjFrr5i2uT3CukgwQCBzf7hhMKBiRUpUMfZr5nTTUMbeNPE3hl7qOfIkYAF2HbedLRMw8UMoG3_AexMKf03yonKZyJltTaVogGbg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhnCj7HdmkcWhrw7vf-5tqKYC1HfkfPAO8--4ptWXy83f6a8ZvpM-M5S-O-meKzF6Alr_cEabjn2gJLS3pjzjNBMcpjFrr5i2uT3CukgwQCBzf7hhMKBiRUpUMfZr5nTTUMbeNPE3hl7qOfIkYAF2HbedLRMw8UMoG3_AexMKf03yonKZyJltTaVogGbg=w531-h299" width="531" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhRQJxrHEmzgHIZ0LohQZDWU0x0SxmOYmvYK2kMfo1dTaeBAz-LGMU1m7FGzFSBD7DRXLV1b0UtDO3Pmfy3uz1jz3RJja9N-civG-SsWC4nHUxqr23dNdu_2zt95RLdgFTqooqmty9xD3pAr0ttl3EwgNYq2yYcWG_18A9oV05pa42VkQIDVxOeaLzqQg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhRQJxrHEmzgHIZ0LohQZDWU0x0SxmOYmvYK2kMfo1dTaeBAz-LGMU1m7FGzFSBD7DRXLV1b0UtDO3Pmfy3uz1jz3RJja9N-civG-SsWC4nHUxqr23dNdu_2zt95RLdgFTqooqmty9xD3pAr0ttl3EwgNYq2yYcWG_18A9oV05pa42VkQIDVxOeaLzqQg=w528-h298" width="528" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://everyonesplacestore.com/">https://everyonesplacestore.com/</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://redemmas.org/">https://redemmas.org/</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.taharkabrothers.com/">https://www.taharkabrothers.com/</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgO9iByhzoW-fjceN7ftmWTft_fO4d8q5QLu0SY3CR6Vn2yJ2ovvXeCMBM_xul_Sf-lrMrGFyigYI_QFDqL8Q1XRx4pQ_AJgkfoSj4foUsvU1baBxrSUmHMeiQqq7sA5LRP8hviaSjSHPIz3s_YsXOlMUP4sLz-8hNQc0omPPkOmE99CWEDmvtTt8DYTg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgO9iByhzoW-fjceN7ftmWTft_fO4d8q5QLu0SY3CR6Vn2yJ2ovvXeCMBM_xul_Sf-lrMrGFyigYI_QFDqL8Q1XRx4pQ_AJgkfoSj4foUsvU1baBxrSUmHMeiQqq7sA5LRP8hviaSjSHPIz3s_YsXOlMUP4sLz-8hNQc0omPPkOmE99CWEDmvtTt8DYTg=w526-h297" width="526" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh5EkXXJjSal_IZyBwcmxiCdc3NRfiTKmy-d0jSpswR3oJgsbeM2uUHaMk2mTmcody926CB4-yLf8Qfq7sL-seOoCo_q63a0hZw2CINv8rW1TxKUrDpXzidip-JA5RYLXePH-qxDayxGTpQ34ohIVfwt9-kjYvkivYn9fkhRoVybM9v0gqxqrfa8wRv7A" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="293" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh5EkXXJjSal_IZyBwcmxiCdc3NRfiTKmy-d0jSpswR3oJgsbeM2uUHaMk2mTmcody926CB4-yLf8Qfq7sL-seOoCo_q63a0hZw2CINv8rW1TxKUrDpXzidip-JA5RYLXePH-qxDayxGTpQ34ohIVfwt9-kjYvkivYn9fkhRoVybM9v0gqxqrfa8wRv7A=w521-h293" width="521" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEitHDBol8ghvs78dHv440iMGbvKxlZAbeR5Xeukj8W_aQ60XMhQnPuiFOD7bJquy2HQ9_qWF36lUo0FvlK4lpuMIJWBlLsPe3MxmresenNuUhaS83FpkCUClWut4Hta7V8D50PyCvPcDXCZlO-DA1aVTEvEiHMtHGMh2S2qYH6dVp8Izu9ojv3ufMw1CQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEitHDBol8ghvs78dHv440iMGbvKxlZAbeR5Xeukj8W_aQ60XMhQnPuiFOD7bJquy2HQ9_qWF36lUo0FvlK4lpuMIJWBlLsPe3MxmresenNuUhaS83FpkCUClWut4Hta7V8D50PyCvPcDXCZlO-DA1aVTEvEiHMtHGMh2S2qYH6dVp8Izu9ojv3ufMw1CQ=w519-h292" width="519" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiBNYLwyWd2IbMbwIksG5LnMe96Le8nihQ4-clH_mekHLMAVE_WMsKBI60Xdwpb8L7rZYQEacMgjauPCBfSJH51v3xP3Yey86GpfA02rKK4taFLiACKLMizry4lFrZpxmHMFt-h6onCj8iJR17NeUR8Zfm31QqyvIrglCru3AevtUsCJ5zeQtn5OCv_zg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiBNYLwyWd2IbMbwIksG5LnMe96Le8nihQ4-clH_mekHLMAVE_WMsKBI60Xdwpb8L7rZYQEacMgjauPCBfSJH51v3xP3Yey86GpfA02rKK4taFLiACKLMizry4lFrZpxmHMFt-h6onCj8iJR17NeUR8Zfm31QqyvIrglCru3AevtUsCJ5zeQtn5OCv_zg=w518-h292" width="518" /></a></div></div></div></div><p></p>Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-37273764494118003312022-02-18T17:36:00.003-05:002022-02-18T17:38:55.631-05:00Reflection on Community & Neighborhoods in Baltimore<div class="separator"><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"> <span style="color: #800180;">Here's a photo of</span></p><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><span style="color: #800180;"> my younger son DJ </span></p><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><span style="color: #800180;">taking riding lessons</span></p><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><span style="color: #800180;">at The City Ranch.</span></p><p style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img height="202" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/0vN8PbO21I9DyGUq_vi699ylMLXSlYv-SL6vUW9fj8A_jPo09WbD0CVj7AeNDOOZSa0M8EJAyrjxxJBnj3waFMikDsZA40iqrwh5SX2C36buiHKhTnE3oLNRZvlgtbMhMs1skDa7=w119-h202" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="119" /></p></div><p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Before this course, the only Baltimore horse folks I knew of worked at </span><a href="https://www.thecityranch.org/" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;" target="_blank">The City Ranch</a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">, a nonprofit horseback riding stable in Windsor Mill my family used early in the pandemic. </span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have learned, however, that Baltimore City has "arabbers," street vendors that sell produce from horse-drawn wagons. I love horses but had never seen nor heard of this tradition continuing here before this month! I am especially interested because both my mom's and my dad's families sold produce from roadside stands while they were growing up, and I don't know much about what that entailed either. I hope to get to learn more about this feature of Baltimore.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I did find <a href="https://folklife-media.si.edu/docs/festival/program-book-articles/FESTBK1987_20.pdf" target="_blank">a photo essay online at the Smithsonian featuring the arabbers</a>, but I have mixed feelings about it. The artist chose to use only black-and-white photos, which emphasizes the <i>pastness </i>of the traditional practice. Today, I would choose to use color to emphasize the <i>presence </i>of the arabbers, to recognize the character and charm of Baltimore City now.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">However, I currently feel more concerned with helping the Poppleton families who are at immediate risk of losing their homes.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I intentionally opted not to use the word "community" for the arabbers above because that feels presumptuous since I know so little about them yet. So far, the course has made me more conscious of the word and its possible implications.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the past 8+ years of living and working in and around Baltimore, I feel that I have gotten snapshots of the city without knowing much context or even the names of the neighborhoods I was in. I played coed flag football in a park near the industrial area by the waterfront. I taught test preparation at an all-boys Catholic high school, at the charter school on the grounds of Coppin State, at Notre Dame, and, frequently, at the Inn at the Colonnade just off N Charles St. Many of my LSAT students in the ND course were deeply involved in social justice work -- much more so than the students I encountered in LSAT courses I taught elsewhere. Just last month, I collected signatures at the bus stop by the nearby Mondawmin Mall to try to get a measure for a Baltimore Area Transit Authority on the ballot in Baltimore City this fall.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The students in that ND LSAT course became a community in ways I didn't see in any of the courses I taught in College Park, which often felt fraught with racial tensions. They quickly formed a study group and met regularly in addition to the class sessions. They celebrated together after they took the test. They became friends. One of them began sending me lengthy messages in the wee hours of the morning on LinkedIn as she tried to adjust to a new place and into her internship with <a href="https://innocenceproject.org/" target="_blank">The Innocence Project</a>.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">So in that sense, I now feel that a community must entail <i>more </i>than a place and an interest in common. It must include a sense of belonging, some fellow-feeling, as Tahira Chloe Mahdi defines in her introduction to her dissertation (<i>Membership vs. Being of the Community: A Qualitative Study of the Go-Go Music-Cultural Community</i>, UMBC, 2018). In particular, her discussion of community as filling a need (5) resonated with me, both in terms of my own example of a community, in my remembrance of this example, and in other communities I have encountered. I look forward to enhancing my personal understanding further as we continue to progress in the course.</span></span></p>Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-18983977497937825242022-02-15T12:21:00.000-05:002022-02-15T12:21:45.608-05:00Leading the Discussion<p><span face=""Open Sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: times;">In "Introduction to Racial Equity," the first chapter of his book <i>The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America </i>(Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Lawrence T. Brown offers a credible proposal as to how to achieve residential racial equity in the U.S. He uses Baltimore as an exemplar of extreme racial hypersegregation and posits that what works here would work everywhere. His main points are that equity cannot come to pass without historical understanding and full, intentional redress nor without "collective self-determination" (4) and "community ownership" in all local interventions (5). Most of the rest of this chapter consists of fruitful definitions of the terms he will use throughout the book as he outlines each aspect of his 5-step proposal.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: times;">I liked that Brown named the recent period of antiracist activism ("The Great Rebellion," 2014-2020, the first wave consisting of "urban uprisings from 2014-2017," and the second wave consisting of the protests after George Floyd's murder in 2020, p.10), although I think that it is premature to give an ending date to that right now. Nonetheless, I agree that it feels as though there has been increased activism in this moment, and it is consistent with my own observations in my dissertation research so far (in which I saw an uptick in news coverage of Native American activism in 2013 start to effect changes in cultural norms about racist language and imagery). His term will be useful for me in that work.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: times;">This discussion was on the page we are missing from our PDF. If you'd like, read it yourself, along with a useful definition of gentrification,<span style="background-color: transparent; text-align: justify;"><span style="color: #333333;"> on Google Books at </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333;"><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=jLQTEAAAQBAJ&">https://books.google.com/books?id=jLQTEAAAQBAJ&</a></span></span></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: times;">Questions:</span></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: times;">Brown is, as he writes, intentional about effective language use (15). He offers a metaphor of war in the introduction to this chapter, choosing words such as "invasion" and "war" to refer to both the depiction of Black migration by White elites and their response to it (3). Also, on the page that we're missing, Brown writes: "Historian Douglas Egerton called post-Civil War violence the 'Wars of Reconstruction' roughly covering the period between 1866 and 1876" (10). How does that historical contextualization make the epigraph, the Frederick Douglass quote at the beginning, and the Abraham Lincoln quote at the end, applicable to the entire chapter and the issues therein? What could you understand those quotes to mean, in other words, if you took them out of the context of the Civil War and applied them instead to Brown's call for following the required steps toward residential and educational racial equity? What do you think of war as a metaphor for redressing injustice, and, if your response to it is negative, can you find cause to reconsider your own response?</span></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: times;">Likewise, Brown mentions that he "use[s] hurricane categories as an analogy to describe metropolitan areas" in accordance with their level of segregation. How is this metaphor apt but also inapt for the causes and consequences of residential segregation? Why does word choice matter in a book like this one?</span></li></ul><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: times;">Here is a paragraph I found explaining more clearly those five Massey-Tannen dimensions of segregation, for those who are interested:</span></p><p style="background-color: white; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="color: #222222;">"</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; text-align: justify;">Conceptually, hypersegregation occurs when a group has high segregation scores on four or five different dimensions of segregation. The first dimension is evenness: the extent to which all the neighborhoods in a metropolitan area show the same distribution of groups as the total area. Thus, if an area is 20 percent black and 80 percent white, there would be no segregation if each neighborhood had that racial distribution as well. Evenness is measured by the Index of Dissimilarity . . . the most commonly used measure of segregation. The next dimension is isolation: the extent to which a group shares its neighborhoods with only members of its own group. While evenness looks at distributions across all neighborhoods in a city or metropolitan area, isolation provides the view from within neighborhoods. A group may live in only a subset of the neighborhoods in a city, but if those neighborhoods are relatively integrated, the group has contacts outside their group, and their segregation is not as severe as when their neighborhoods are occupied only by their own group. The third dimension, concentration, refers to the relative proportion of the total land area a group occupies relative to the group’s size. This dimension addresses the issues of crowding, population density, and the advantages associated with housing on spacious suburban lots. Centralization, the fourth dimension, measures how close to the central business district a group resides. In the past, the central business district was not a desirable place to live because of the presence of factories, and in more recent years it reflects the disadvantage associated with not living in the suburbs, where many jobs are now located. The last dimension of segregation, clustering, looks at whether the neighborhoods where a group lives are themselves clustered into one large area or are scattered throughout the metropolitan area. It addresses the aspect of whether a group member, regardless of the composition of their neighborhood of residence, interacts with nongroup members if they leave their neighborhood. In hypersegregated metropolitan areas, black neighborhoods tend to form large contiguous ghettos." ("Hypersegregation," <i>Sociology</i>, </span><span style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="color: #333333;"><a href="http://sociology.iresearchnet.com/sociology-of-race/hypersegregation">http://sociology.iresearchnet.com/sociology-of-race/hypersegregation</a>, viewed 15 Feb 2022)</span></span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; text-align: left;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Lato, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></p><ul style="color: #222222;"><li><span style="font-family: times;">Do you agree that what works in Baltimore, if also enacted locally elsewhere, would work to achieve spatial equity everywhere in the U.S.?</span></li></ul>Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-12642334113623311602022-02-04T18:20:00.000-05:002022-02-04T18:20:23.013-05:00Introduction<p>My name is Jessica Burstrem, and I am a second-year PhD student in the UMBC <a href="https://llc.umbc.edu/" target="_blank">Language, Literacy & Culture program</a>. I am interested in successful social movements. My dissertation will discuss the history of the 50-year Native American movement to get the Washington football team (now the Commanders) to change their name, with particular focus on the activists' final tactic of activist investing and the context of that moment when the team finally agreed. I hope to gather oral histories from participants in that movement. In return, I plan to ask potential narrators what they would like me to do with those stories so that I can serve their interests in addition to my own as I seek my degree.<br /></p><p>I expect that this definition will change this semester, but right now I would define a community as a group with something in common and a shared space of some kind in which to interact. (It is possible that the shared space could be all that members of a community have in common.)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg6-WcHlfNEmgGterffmXUlDma0rpULxckqnjWPdCEPUnbp_7aAsgFqz1mpxVVUsSQyyH_UxEi_fjbwc232tJ7WGZKEogbryWo3l6RuhlKiUdtVchOSLl3s3chBIIqn-1ysyVXA7fOdrEzZaj696UDCv7EGbAYMuLcLKpNfv6WjTOySnotQcLfbOD6bIA=s3264" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3264" data-original-width="2448" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg6-WcHlfNEmgGterffmXUlDma0rpULxckqnjWPdCEPUnbp_7aAsgFqz1mpxVVUsSQyyH_UxEi_fjbwc232tJ7WGZKEogbryWo3l6RuhlKiUdtVchOSLl3s3chBIIqn-1ysyVXA7fOdrEzZaj696UDCv7EGbAYMuLcLKpNfv6WjTOySnotQcLfbOD6bIA=w240-h320" width="240" /></a></div>As I mentioned in class, I rely on some online communities for support. Two of those are social media groups: one formed for primarily the GenX women of <a href="https://www.us.mensa.org/" target="_blank">American Mensa</a>, and the other a group of fulltime stepmoms.<p></p><p>The photo here is of my family: my husband Eric, my older son Alex (age 20), my younger son DJ (age 10), and one of my cats, Georgie (age 4). Alex is my biological son, and Eric is his stepdad. DJ is officially my stepson, and Eric is his adoptive father; DJ lives with us over 85% of the time. Prior to August 2021, it was nearly 95% of the time, and DJ's legal mother had never had more of a presence in his life than that. Since Eric and I got married in 2018 and throughout the pandemic so far, I have been DJ's primary caregiver. I am his first permanent residential mother, and it has long been true that there is no woman he has spent more time with than me.</p><p>But most people don't even recognize me as a mother to him. Further, most people, in my experience, are unsympathetic to mothers in general. I can go to my women's group for a lot of things -- advice, encouragement, accountability, a sounding board, a listening ear -- but not for most issues related to parenting, and what parenting groups I did have were not sufficient once Eric and I got married.</p><p>Therefore, a couple of years ago, in desperate need for a supportive group that I wouldn't have to educate in order to get a little commiseration and understanding, I sought out a fulltime stepmoms group on social media. I have never met any of these moms in person, although I did interview a few of them for a research project this summer.</p><p>While I have yet to find a community that can sympathize with my particular situation -- as a fulltime stepmom to an internationally adopted child of a different race and ethnicity from my own -- and that can therefore understand the particularities of those aspects of our situation, this community of women often fulfills some previously unmet needs for me. That's what we all do for each other.</p>Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-77732389186693157532013-02-12T23:38:00.000-05:002013-02-12T23:40:24.215-05:00Creative jewelry for the book, tea, and sushi loversCory is an Englishwoman who makes tiny detailed replicas of books, bookshelves, teapots, and the like to wear as jewelry. Some of my favorites:<br />
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<a href="http://www.etsy.com/listing/91567095/stack-of-books-book-dangle-earrings-by?">Stack of books dangling earrings</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.etsy.com/listing/121710594/harry-potter-bookshelf-necklace-book?">Harry Potter bookshelf necklace</a> <br />
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Incidentally, this particular item is featured in a contest right now. See the <a href="http://www.coryographies.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/february-giveaway-win-harry-potter.html">Coryographies blog entry about the contest.</a><br />
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There is also a graduation bookshelf necklace. See <a href="http://www.etsy.com/shop/Coryographies?ref=top_trail">her Etsy page</a> for the full selection.Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-25266199371682817192007-12-20T02:30:00.000-05:002007-12-20T02:32:36.017-05:00On ENCHANTED: Don't get your hopes up: It's still a Disney movieAs Deborah Siegel nicely details in <a href="http://www.womensmediacenter.com/ex/113007.html">her review of the movie</a>, it doesn't quite distance itself, in the end, from all - or maybe even any - of the problematic characteristics for which Disney movies are constantly - and rightfully - criticized in the academic world. I recognized that immediately when I saw the pivotal role that the Evil Stepmother was going to play. (And Jessica says to herself, "A-gain I think I'm watching a movie for fun, and it turns out to be homework.") A witchy mother - who, as <a href="http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=3339">Nick Schager astutely points out</a>, is also literally a monster during the movie, "an evil dragon lady borrowed from Sleeping Beauty (Susan Sarandon) who likes to pose as the old hag from Snow White" - seeking to keep her son from falling in love with another woman in order to keep all of the power for herself. Let's see, does that sound <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103873/">familiar</a>? Number One, portraying what you're seeking to mock does not usually effectively do so; in my experience, it actually enables you to more distinctly present the stereotypes that you have in mind - and thus, rather than really attacking them, actually makes those stereotypes more distinct for viewers. Number Two, I question why anyone thought that Disney was really seeking to mock any of those old ideas of theirs anyway. All that they do seem to be attempting, according to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/business/media/25steal.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin">this New York Times article</a>, is to find "new" ways to make money without hurting the rich old ways that they already have. As the caption there best describes, it's just another Disney movie with an added "modern touch" - but nothing is gone or has changed.Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-33855583636100681882007-11-29T01:19:00.000-05:002007-11-29T02:30:20.647-05:00Clearing some smoke from the Britney/K-Fed warsWhile looking for something else entirely tonight, I came upon <a href="http://www.usmagazine.com/node/8008">this site</a> asking viewers/readers to vote as to whether Brit or her new ex should get custody of their two kids (despite the fact that very few kids go 100% to one parent or the other, which fact is surprisingly obscure in this country: Even I, while pregnant, thought that I was deciding between parenting with my son's father's help or without it - but it never occurred to me that I might have to deal with something in between). While reading the comments, I found several remarks that merit comments of my own in response. They subtly demonstrate, I think, the depth and breadth of the absorption of mistaken ideas about parenting that have deep negative consequences in our lives. And actually, there were only really three of them:<br /><br />1. "Britney is the mother and she carried the kids for nine months, so she deserves the kids!" Um, why? It's not as though there's any other way that things could have come to pass (unless she used a surrogate). We need to stop buying into the idea that women are somehow inherently/biologically better at parenting than men - which all of the demonization of mothers and celebration of involved fathers these days seems to belie anyway and which doesn't jive with the contemporary realities of ultra-effective formula and the like either. If there's any scientific basis for mothers being better parents than fathers, it's impossible to separate it from the fact that mothers and fathers are SOCIALIZED to think so - thus likely making it a self-fulfilling prophecy - and/or that our society (sometimes combined with biology) simply FORCES mothers to do more parenting than fathers, which ultimately would still make mothers generally better at it simply due to their getting more practice.<br /><br />But of course, in order to do that, we would also have to get away from our similarly misplaced notion that biological "parenthood" a better parent figure somehow makes. In this world, having a role in the split-second creation of a child - which act we ought to know by now has nothing to do with one's ability to be an appropriate parent - nevertheless makes one woman and one man the only people entitled to any rights to and responsibilities for a child unless and until a ridiculous standard of proof to the contrary is met. For a country that stands behind preemption, we sure don't apply it to child abuse. As another commenter wrote, "Hell, neither one of those crazy bleep dip sticks need those kids."<br /><br />2. "No real man runs out on his pregnant wife for another woman." This perspective is just as problematic as the "welfare-reform" notions that involve coercing women into marrying or not divorcing their kids' fathers, even if those fathers are abusive, because either 1) the women have reached the imposed-from-outside limit of their temporary assistance or are otherwise being denied aid and can't survive without a second below-the-cost-of-living wage earner in the household, or 2) the government is going to deny them assistance UNLESS they do so. (It's easy to find sources to back me up on this issue, by the way. Try a Google search on "welfare" and "coerced marriage," for starters.) Why do we still have this bizarre notion that keeping families together (even when those families defy all of our idealisms as to what constitutes families) is the solution to the world's problems? Back when few had the opportunity to do anything else, the murder rate was higher than it is now. Why do you think that is? (Here's a hint: <a href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20000222/ai_n14291557">"THE DECLINE in marriage is having another unexpected effect on Western society - a decline in the murder rate as fewer husbands have fewer opportunities to kill fewer wives."</a>)<br /><br />3. And then we have the good ol' Selfish Mother myth:<br /><br />"Aren't the nannies going to raise them anyway?? In typical Britney fashion where was she on Easter?? Well,she was shopping and going to the basketball game of course (without her kids) maybe dad had them.... isn't this [what] any good mother would do on Easter?? (sarcasm)... How selfish can you be grow up Brit and put your kids 1st instead of yourself."<br /><br />Maybe they WERE with K-Fed. That's common among separated parents: One gets most of the "regular" time, the other gets most of the holidays - or they split them. And then what parent wants to hang out at home while her kids are gone? I had to take pains to distract myself while Alex, as a baby, was with his biological dad - especially because I had concerns about what kind of dad he could be.<br /><br />But what if they weren't? Must everyone see Easter the same way? Must a "good mother" be with her kids all the time - even if that means that such constant proximity makes her lose her mind and act like a "bad mother"? Why do we continue to criticize mothers for being away from their kids when, with incredible and yet unremarked-upon consistency, it's the stay-at-home moms (or the ones who "only" work part-time) who end up making the big headlines for killing their kids? Is getting away sometimes - or even regularly - really 100% NOT in kids' best interests?<br /><br />The other irony in that remark is that being rich is supposed to be the goal and the ideal in this country - especially if you're considering having kids (hence another comment that "she's definitely the better choice if for no other reason but her financial stability") - and yet it simultaneously assumes that the rich never raise their own kids and thus are "bad parents." In fact, in Britney's case, much the opposite has been evident. While she has made mistakes with her kids that have made major headlines (which have not always corresponded in magnitude with the magnitude of those mistakes), she's made them because she's been trying to take care of her kids herself, without a nanny doing it all for her. (I'm not <a href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4155/is_20060528/ai_n16435262">the first one to make that point</a>, by the way.)<br /><br />Bottom line, as far as I'm concerned: Ain't nothin' cut-and-dried here - as is pretty much always the case, I would argue - so the appropriate court decision wouldn't be either. As one family court judge said while my own kid's custody case was on the docket for the day: His goal is to make sure that no one goes home happy. And isn't that a good thing? At least the kids will always know that both parents were willing to fight for them when it came right down to it. And so will mine.Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-20746834927904472452007-09-17T19:53:00.001-04:002007-09-17T19:53:55.818-04:00BRAZIL, a prophetic 1985 film - in which a bad mother strikes again[first posted on my Gather.com page earlier today]<br /><br />Monty Python member Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil is uncanny in its prediction of the present. It depicts a totalitarian society in which the incredibly invasive Bureau of Information Retrieval "never makes mistakes" in pursuing terrorist suspects - or just those "selected for questioning" - who the movie shows us are usually if not always citizens and usually if not always die or otherwise disappear, regardless of their guilt or even their true identities. The main character, Sam Lowry, initially seems to be more aware of the problems inherent in his world than later, as he begins to haplessly destroy his own life and the lives of those around him in selfish pursuit of Jill, who resembles the woman of his idealistic dreams - literally. In that he is clearly influenced by the classic movies that hypnotize most of the members of this society into compliance with their horrific government.<br /><br />Meanwhile, his widowed mother, Ida, repeatedly tries to force her son into a relationship with her friend's ungainly daughter and into a promotion to Information Retrieval, neither of which he wants. She accomplishes the latter by "pulling strings," she says, but her power clearly comes to a large extent from her sexuality, even though her high-ranking husband is dead. She basically admits to sleeping around with at least one high-level government official, a man at least as young as her son, and her plastic surgeon, who ultimately makes her look so young that her son sees Jill's face instead of Ida's - and that's right after he makes love with Jill in his mother's bed (while she's wearing a blond wig that makes her look more like the damsel in distress of his dreams). "Don't call me that," Ida says, as Sam cries repeatedly, "Mother! Mother!" The obsession of, it seems, all matronly women in this society with plastic surgery and lingerie are meant to further illustrate the failures of this fictional world - but the trope that's used to do it, the Monster Mother (controlling, powerful, sexual, and self-absorbed) is nothing new. And the result - the destruction of her son and everyone connected with him - is common as well.<br /><br />[Another interesting sidenote: Sam's boss at the beginning of the movie is named Kurtzmann. I was instantly reminded of Kurtz from Heart of Darkness - but I also feel as though I've encountered another character named after Kurtz in my movie-watching of the past couple of years. Anyone able to help me with that?]<br /><br />The film, though reminiscent of other futuristic cautionary tales, such as Blade Runner, only partially succeeds, due, I suspect, at least to some extent to its perplexing inconsistencies in characterization. Those may be due to Gilliam's Monty Python roots: He sacrifices consistency for humor, but in consequence the plot suffers. Still, its prophetic qualities are fascinating. Of course, it was purportedly inspired by George Orwell's 1984, so that shouldn't be surprising either.<br /><br />My source for some of these details was Wikipedia.Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-32617667154705572532007-09-17T19:47:00.000-04:002007-09-17T19:53:06.938-04:00It's Always in the Title: Gregory Maguire's SON OF A WITCH[The first part of this article I posted on my Gather.com page last Wednesday.]<br /><br />Like Monster-in-Law, the bad J-Lo movie whose title explicitly replaces "mother" with her more common image in American culture, as I discuss in my thesis, Gregory Maguire's novel Son of a Witch - the sequel to Wicked, which made a splash as a Broadway play - implicitly suggests another name for the title character Liir's mom. Yet when we start reading the book - the series began as a clever interpretation of The Wizard of Oz - we realize that Liir is not even certain that Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, was indeed his biological mother, although he was apparently with her as long as he can remember from his childhood to her death. It is not until he joins the military (since he has nothing better to do and must eat and stay warm somehow) that he begins to criticize her as a mother (without still being certain of her actual maternity), partially in comparison with the stereotypically affectionate, good cook moms of the other soldiers - one of whom out of jealousy and spite he frames for a crime, the ramifications of which culminate in that soldier's suicide - but primarily because he feels his lack of education - in the traditional sense, yes, but even more in obedience (she herself was only obedient to herself, he notes), and most of all in how to be a man. Thus we hear the classic criticism of the single mother - the powerful single mother - from the character of a young man who was written by a man. Usually I find such illustrations penned by women.<br /><br />But Maguire does make a point of indicating that the witch - frightening for her power to use words to make things happen, we learn (and what of that wouldn't be frightening for any patriarchal society?) - was not hated and/or feared by all - that she even had allies and was respected by those who, after her murder at the hands of the feckless Dorothy, seem mildly interested in revenge. Yet those are all outsiders, marginal to society and suspicious to the civilized, the law-abiding, the religious - with whom Liir has taken up by the time he begins to criticize his mother. Mainstream society is not kind to mothers, we see.<br /><br />Elphaba was apparently not affectionate, not kind, not nurturing, not self-sacrificing, not involved - not maternal, Liir concludes, wondering if that alone might prove that she's not his mother - and further, she had green skin and a biting wit and enjoyed studying her spell-book late into the night. All inappropriate characteristics for an ideal mother. All she asked of Liir, we learn, was to keep himself safe. That alone might define an ideal mother from my own feminist perspective, though.<br /><br />The interesting thing is that - at least at this point in the story, about halfway through the book - Liir is an ideal American man: handsome, independent, reserved, somewhat intelligent, basically obedient, mildly ambitious. In fact, single mothers have a tendency to produce that type, I've found. They appreciate women because they've seen their contributions in a situation in which none of it can be appropriated to a man, and they know how to work and take care of themselves because they've had to.<br /><br />The Oedipus complex, on the other hand, can only arise when there's a man in a heterosexual relationship with a boy's mother to give the boy someone of whom to be jealous. (Or, as Hegel would have it, someone to Desire in hopes of fulfilling the boy's homoerotic Desire for recognition from the man.) Otherwise, the boy actually has his mother all to himself, as society idealizes. Granted, single mothers often work, but that keeps them from becoming as dependent on their children as the Bad Mother myth suggests - and really, despite the mothers most often demonized, it's only the stay-at-home moms who actually end up hurting their children (probably because they have no way to escape their postpartum depression and/or the endless, mindless drudgery of caring for young children). It's sadly ironic in retrospect that Mrs. McCann was celebrated as undeserving of losing a daughter because she's a stay-at-home mom (see my earlier post on the subject) - and yet now it appears as though she killed her daughter herself at the time.<br />[I'll directly explore Freud's take on the Oedipus complex someday soon, I'm sure. Now that I've finished Son of a Witch, though, I'll finish my discussion of this book:]<br /><br />Liir got worse before he got better. In line with Maguire's allegory for the United States government (he actually indicated in an interview that one of his inspirations for this book was the Abu Ghraib incident), the military influence in Liir's life causes him to commit the one act that he regrets more than anything else in his life. Then he goes through a frustrating period of hopelessness in which he denies his connection to and shared plight with the rest of the world. (Sound familiar?)<br /><br />It is only when he starts to follow Elphaba's example that he stops failing at every task to which he sets out - and angering Maguire's readers (or me at least!) with his stubborn self-absorbed careless inaction - and begins to succeed. Even after death, we learn, Elphaba is keeping alive many people's - and animals' - hopes for freedom from tyranny, whether as a symbol, through remembrance of her actions while she lived, or through those whom she knew in her life.<br /><br />Despite that glowing recommendation, Liir still appears to follow the typical path of the son of a Monster Mother: He cannot feel the way that he thinks that he should toward an attractive woman who might care for him in return. His body reacts as it should to bring about reproduction, but he cannot ever consciously follow through on that impulse. Instead, [Spoiler Alert!] he experiments in homosexuality with a man that he met in the military - in accordance with the typical homoerotic relationships that arise in such situations - and seems to be more sure of that identity in himself than anything else.<br /><br />Now don't get me wrong: I'm not equating having a homosexual son with being a bad mother. I'm getting to the point, in fact, where I think that raising a child who so clearly does not fulfill societal expectations would be the foremost indicator for me of success as a parent in this society. But I am seeing, over and over again, stories in which that first equation is being made. Perhaps Maguire only means it here as a further indicator of the damage that war can cause to those forced to participate in it, in a long line of similar texts including, for instance, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises - and indeed, the inability to function sexually is a common and documented effect of combat. Ultimately all that is certain, though, is that Liir himself does not feel entirely satisfied with his sexuality at the end of this story, and so neither does the reader - and thus we're left with that negative impression to apply where we will.Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-58705780478940381872007-08-07T07:29:00.000-04:002007-08-07T07:40:25.689-04:00Short reviews of some of the movies (relevant to mothering) that I've seen this year<span style="font-style:italic;">Thank You for Smoking</span><br />I enjoyed this movie's celebration of rhetoric, even though I find a little tiresome its typical idealized portrayal of a parent who sacrifices everything because he is unable to stomach a little bit of hypocrisy and/or contradiction, which as Sara Ruddick writes (in <span style="font-style:italic;">Maternal Thinking</span>, which I'm reading right now) is central to real parenting.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Sherrybaby</span><br />I really, really enjoyed this movie and would recommend it to anyone. First of all, it stars the ever-impressive Maggie Gyllenhaal. But it's a story of a formerly drug-addicted mother who gets out of prison motivated solely by her hopes for a close relationship with her daughter. She quickly discovers, though, that one cannot rely entirely on a child for one's sense of purpose - especially because children are often unpredictable. It's also a story of the many realities of our society that can keep a good person from always being good. And it's a story of a family who has essentially adopted this little girl and their legitimate concerns for her interests - and their own. I can empathize with both sides of this story, so I was ever-alert to any standard demonization of either the mother or the stepmother - but it really wasn't there. Neither character was perfect, and both were often sympathetic. The movie is an excellent exploration of the complications of parenting in the real world and how they simply cannot be simplified into "good" and "bad" or "right" and "wrong."<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">O Brother Where Art Thou</span><br />OK, George Clooney does not a convincing Odysseus make. In fact, the plot's resemblance to the original <span style="font-style:italic;">Odyssey </span>is skeletal at best - and thus sometimes simply frustrating, so it would be better to watch it without that expectation. It is, then, somewhat amusing. Its all-too-typical demonization of the wife/mother - a horrible debasement of the original, honored Penelope - further hurts the flick in my eyes, though. I wouldn't recommend it.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Donnie Darko</span><br />A professor in my new department thinks the world of this movie and recommended it to me. It was too weird for Dennis, but I enjoyed it once I realized that it was basically magical reality, like Salman Rushdie's work - and it packs an incredible emotional punch. It also demonstrates an awareness of societal constructions of ideal motherhood - which in this case particularly involve appropriate mothering behaviors, such as complete devotion, and perfect results in the children themselves - and subtly challenges them. I'll probably watch it again to take closer note of all of its nuances.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Dead End</span><br />I watched this movie thinking that it would be relevant to my mother-sons work, but the daughter's relationship with her father turned out to be the real focus. It was an enjoyable movie too, especially once I realized that, despite the frequent creepiness, I wasn't going to see anything truly nightmarish. It was always just suggested - sometimes rather humorously. The surprise ending also reminded me a lot of that of <span style="font-style:italic;">Donnie Darko</span>, since in both movies your entire understanding (or lack thereof) of what you've seen changes - and your confusion resolves itself - right in the last few moments of the action. To be honest, Dead End still leaves some questions in the viewer's mind - but I'd still recommend it.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Keeping Mum</span><br />With an all-star cast (including Rowan Atkinson of Mr. Bean fame; Kristen Scott Thomas; Patrick Swayze; and Maggie Smith, most recently known as Harry Potter's headmistress), this movie attempts to make what is quite serious - adultery, murder, and sermon-making - quite funny, with some success. If you take such things seriously, you might not be convinced, though. My husband certainly wasn't, and I had some trouble myself as well. It's also a little like <span style="font-style:italic;">Stella Dallas</span> in that it shows how even a well-meaning mother can do best by her daughter by absenting herself from that daughter's life. I suppose that if it had been about a murderous mother of a philandering son instead of a murderous mother of an adulterous daughter, it wouldn't have been a comedy in the first place.<br /><br />I've also watched most of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Inconvenient Truth</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Sicko</span> (<a href="http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977045324">discussed here</a>) recently, and even though they're unapologetically liberal in orientation, what they both show is that mainstream American movies that present a viewpoint outside the mainstream 1) get that viewpoint honest consideration among the mainstream population and 2) do so much more successfully than do books, speaking tours, websites, or any other form of communication. That directly confirms my ultimate argument in my Master's thesis: that without positive visual representations (read: in movies) of feminist and so-called "nontraditional" approaches to mothering, even - and primarily - mothers themselves will be unable to take such approaches without worrying about their standard negative connotations in society and probably reacting to such worries. Such evidence makes me feel triumphant.Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-52877281468612308172007-07-19T16:35:00.000-04:002007-07-19T16:43:49.575-04:00International Literature: SHALIMAR THE CLOWN by Salman Rushdie and ON BEAUTY by Zadie Smith<p>I recently finished an unabridged audio version of Salman Rushdie's <em>Shalimar the Clown</em>, wonderfully read by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0541902/" target="_blank">Aasif Mandvi</a>, which was my second Rushdie book. Between it and my first, <em>Midnight's Children</em>, I'm getting a sense of Rushdie's style: chronologically fluid, satirical, politically aware, epic, occasionally fantastical. Both books follow fictional characters through lives positioned, like Forrest Gump's, in places such as the former Bombay, Kashmir, and Los Angeles at significant moments in recent history. In <em>Shalimar</em>, that includes the German occupation of France during WWII, the Rodney King fiasco(s), various acts of extremist Islamic terrorism, and the destruction of the tolerant people and the beautiful land of Kashmir at the hands of India, Pakistan, and those terrorists. There are many far more in-depth reviews of his book available online - most of them somewhat critical of the book, which perspective I don't share. For my part, about the whole book, I will simply say that I loved it. I also love Rushdie's style, which reading two of his books has helped me better understand, and I will read more of his work as soon as I can. (I met him once, but that's a story for another time.)</p><p>My particular purpose in this post is to discuss my feminist perspective on certain aspects of the book. There is a moment in <em>Shalimar</em> in which the title character's mother, Firdaus Noman, blames herself for her son's anger, which begins when he learns that his wife has cuckolded him - although it should be noted that he had very early indicated to his beautiful Hindu future wife, Bhoomi/Boonyi Kaul, that he would be violent if he ever had reason to be jealous - and results in his murder, first as a terrorist and then as a vengeful husband, of countless victims across the globe. (By the way, I'm not giving anything away that you can't learn in either the most standard online review or the first few chapters.) Firdaus, however, tells herself, on recognizing her son's anger, that she would never be quarrelsome again. Yet another of her sons, Anees Noman, is essentially a hero in a brief but incredibly emotional part of this book - and even without that it's clear that what becomes of Shalimar (nee Noman Sher Noman) has little to do with his mother.</p><p>Rushdie demonstrates his awareness - and, I think, his disapproval - of the world's mother- and woman-blaming tendencies in this way in this book. Of course the adulterous Boonyi - and the consistently adulterous Max Ophuls (who, interestingly enough, shares his name with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Oph%C3%BCls" target="_blank">a real person</a>) - deserve blame for their dishonesty in those choices in this book. But the magnitude of events for which she is blamed - and, ultimately, punished - is way out of scope in terms of her error.</p><p>However, stepmother-demonization is also very present at times in this book, and Rushdie does not do anything that would cause or allow readers to question that. Max's wife, Margaret "Peggy/The Grey Rat" Rhodes, we learn, is (and always has been) frigid and barren - and also understandably bitter over her husband's incessant philandering. Impelled to some extent by a prophetic (and thus self-fulfilling) dream, Peggy connives to compel Boonyi into giving up her daughter, whom Peggy takes to America to raise by herself. When the inevitable questions arise, she lies to her "adopted" daughter as much as she can about the child's own origins, thus keeping her from her birth mother and almost entirely from her (thus beloved) father. Perhaps to some extent driven by those questions, Peggy ultimately becomes disinterested in the child, who as a teenager acts out in almost every imaginable way. It is only after Max's murder, when the daughter, India Rhodes (later Ophuls, nee Kashmira Noman) has already learned of her birth mother's identity, that Peggy tells her daughter a little of the truth - and provides a photo of Boonyi during her brief period of obesity. It is the only photo of her natural mother that India ever sees. The portrait of the stereotypical stepmother/single mother/nontraditional mother - from the barrenness and frigidity to the conniving, hateful, controlling, lying, unloving behavior related to "her" child, all of which is usually used to indicate unwomanliness and unfemininity - is unmistakable and disappointing.</p><p>By chance, the next long audiobook that I'm "reading" - and also vastly enjoying! - is Zadie Smith's <em>On Beauty</em>. I think that I read part of her <em class="moz-txt-slash">White Teeth</em> before, but I don't remember whether I ever finished it. Both <em>Shalimar</em> and <em>Beauty</em> feature interracial and adulterous relationships and are set both in and outside of the U.S. The days of "outsiders" not understanding the States are over: You'd never know that Smith and Rushdie weren't American citizens by the way that they seem to "get" the nuances of our culture. Rushdie has, of course, lived in the States, but <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zadie_Smith" target="_blank">Smith</a>, it seems, hasn't. <em class="moz-txt-slash">Beauty</em> is not postmodernist, like Rushdie's work, though; for instance, so far it's proceeded in chronological order. Intriguingly, it does seem to be a modern take on the themes of <em>Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?</em> which my mom and I saw, starring Kathleen Turner, in London last May. Academia, relationships, disappointment - it's all there.</p><p>There's a mother-son moment in the play, too: As I noted in <a href="http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&FriendID=49433321&amp;amp;blogMonth=5&blogDay=12&blogYear=2006" target="_blank">my blog after first seeing it last summer</a>, in <em>Virginia Woolf</em>, the wife expresses her awareness of the controlling mother/screwed up son ideology, even though neither is actually relevant to the woman's life, since she doesn't actually have a son. I'm only maybe a third of the way into Smith's book, but I've already found a mother-son moment here too: one of the main characters, Kiki Belsey, congratulates herself for producing "a young black man of intelligence and sensibility" - although she was then "mildly annoyed" to find that hers was not the only young Black man at the free Mozart concert (pt.1 ch.7). Smith goes on:</p><blockquote><p>Undeterred, Kiki continues her imaginary speech to the imaginary Guild of Black American Mothers: And there's no big secret, not at all. You just need to have faith, I guess. And you need to counter the dismal self-image that Black men receive as their birthright from America - that's essential. And I don't know, get involved in after-school activities, have books around the house, and sure, have a little money, and a house with outdoor--</p></blockquote><p>Despite the Belsey family's determined liberalism, they are not, as you can see, free from unfortunate biases. They are most of them a little racist toward Black people darker than the half-White Belsey children. Kiki is clearly a little classist. Jerome, the boy of whom Kiki was feeling so proud above, seems to take his mother's side when his father neglects her, but her daughter Zora blames Kiki for Howard Belsey's affair more than Zora blames Howard himself, citing Kiki's weight and non-intellectualism - and thus turning off a smart, handsome, talented young Black man who otherwise might have been interested in her. It's an interesting family portrait so far.</p><p>Incidentally, I'm apparently not the first to notice the connections between <em>Shalimar</em> and <em>Beauty</em>. <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?ean=9780679783480&z=y" target="_blank">Barnes & Noble Online</a> lists <em>On Beauty</em> as the book most frequently purchased by those buying <em>Shalimar the Clown</em>.</p>Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-73152353690548208372007-07-10T17:03:00.000-04:002007-07-10T17:06:06.977-04:00On feminism: How far we have and haven't come[<a href="http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977049216" target="_self">Originally posted on Friday on my Gather page</a>, where it's been rated 10/10 by 9 different readers and garnered 13 comments]<br /><br />Sometimes I take care of my husband, and sometimes my husband takes care of me. Usually it is I who takes the cars in to get the oil changed or other maintenance/repairs done. If I left it up to Dennis - as enviably undistractable as he usually is - it wouldn't happen in what I consider to be an appropriate time frame. I want my family to be safe. I want our cars to last. And heck, when I get offered a mystery shop and his is the only car that I could use, why not get it done, when it's ultimately for free? That saves us, as a family, money.<span class="t12"><span class="t13 lh18"><span class="articleText"><p>But when I mentioned to my mom that I was getting Dennis's car fixed one day, she was horrified. She had never done that for Dad - ever. If anything, she usually had him do it for her. She worried that I might be getting into the habit of doing for my husband. She worried that I might become a bit of a slave.</p><p>Her perspective initially surprised me. Later, I realized, though, that what the conversation demonstrated was the difference between the situation of my mom's generation of women and my own. Let me explain.</p><p>There was a huge debate on <a href="http://www.feministing.com/" target="_blank">Feministing</a> a little while back about women changing their names after marriage. I posted some excerpts from it <a href="http://www.motherblogs.net/jessica/723/The+Touchy+Subject+of+Names.html" target="_blank">here</a>. One of the points that came out of that debate, though, was the fact that - because feminists cannot choose to take their husbands' names upon marriage without feeling guilty, without feeling compelled to defend their decisions, without wondering whether they're just justifying a preference created in them by their socialization as women - women are not free from the influence of societal expectations on that subject. Until a woman can take her husband's name and it means nothing much different than keeping her own name (or until a woman can choose to NOT have an abortion, or until a mother can choose to NOT go back to work after the birth of her children, etc.), we are not free. We do not have free choice. Those are areas in which we haven't progressed enough.</p><p>But I do have some freedoms that my mom didn't: I can "do for" my husband without losing any of my sense of myself as a strong, independent, feminist woman. If anything, it actually shows my strength. Many women avoid taking their cars to repair shops because of the rampant sexism there. But in our house, I am the one who takes the cars in. I have enough of my own that I can afford to give some away.</p><p>I have seen men and women put forth the argument that women are privileged because they can play the gender card both ways: They can demand to be treated as strong when it suits them at some times, and they can demand to be treated as weak when it suits them at others. (The so-called Father's Rights movement is evidence that men can do the same, by the way.) I would argue that that's just more evidence of how far we haven't come: If women weren't still expected to be inherently weak and men weren't still expected to be inherently strong, we could all be both at various times - as is natural, after all - without it being so fraught with emotion and political import. And then maybe there wouldn't be women like <a href="http://www.americanpolitics.com/20020205Coulter.html" target="_blank">Ann Coulter</a> and <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2165447" target="_blank">Monica Goodling</a>, who play up men's power to furtively secure their own, meanwhile hurting, through their example, the chances of other women nationwide who are not so willing to set back the clock for their own private gain. They only get away with it because of patriarchy. If men are jealous, they should support feminism in its fight against such problematic gender expectations. If we ever get to a time when people of all genders can choose to be weak or strong without it meaning much either way, then we'll know just how far we've come. But that's hard to imagine, I know.</p><p>[A clarification that I posted in response to one of those comments:]<br /></p></span></span></span><span class="t12">I did not say that feminists are "feeling guilt about not changing your last name after marriage or guilt about killing your unborn babies"; rather, I said that they're feeling guilty about CHANGING their last names and/or KEEPING their babies because society is still so vociferous about those decisions that it's hard to know whether your decision in those directions is still actually your own. I made a decision to keep a baby myself, and as a result for a time I pointed out that one of the valuable things about legal abortion is that it enables keeping a baby to be a free choice rather than a choice between one's own life and death, and that makes it a lot easier to be a good parent during the tough times - such as the 24th month of interrupted sleep as a single student/parent. After all, most people are more likely to put their souls into the career of their choice than they would into work at gunpoint, just as most are more likely to enjoy making love than they would getting raped. But now I'm beginning to wonder whether my decision truly was free or whether I felt that it was the right choice because of all of the media-broadcast anti-abortion harping that I know I'd been exposed to even then. I resent that for clouding my certainty that where I am in my life today is where I chose to be - but really, I can't have that anyway, since I also know that part of why I am where I am today is because of my White heterosexual privilege. That's another way that we'd all benefit from true equality of opportunity: There'd be no reason to think that we'd gotten to where we are today because of anything other than our inherent abilities, our personal choices, and the equal opportunities that we all, as members of society, deserve. Oh, I'm dreaming now....</span>Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-24129840389575879012007-06-21T10:30:00.000-04:002007-06-21T10:42:30.946-04:00International Museum of Women Online Motherhood Exhibit and Online Film Festival Call for Submissions<span class="primary24"><span id="CallTitle">[I received an e-mail yesterday asking me to spread the word via my blog about some of the current features at the International Museum of Women. I was understandably excited to learn that, since their physical location is in San Francisco, I can visit sometime while in the area to see my mom and dad and some other family up there. In the meantime, as they requested, I copied this description of <a href="http://imaginingourselves.imow.org/pb/Home.aspx?lang=1">The Motherhood Project</a> from <a href="http://www.imow.org/index.php">their home page</a>.]<br /><br /></span></span><h1 class="greenTxtCopy">The Motherhood Project</h1> <p>Entries from more than 30 countries from women in their 20s and 30s compose our online exhibit dedicated to the sometimes joyous, sometimes mysterious, and sometimes complicated realities of modern motherhood. </p> <p>The exhibit runs March 8 through June 30, 2007 and will include contributions from journalists Lisa Ling and Marianne Pearl, Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan, author Rebecca Walker, activist Hafsat Abiola, comedienne Jenny McCarthy, actress Julie Delpy and Karenna Gore-Schiff.</p> <p>View what young women are saying through art and the written word and participate in the dialogue. <a href="http://imaginingourselves.imow.org/pb/Welcome.aspx" class="exhibits">Thank you for your submissions and keep joining the conversation.</a> </p><span class="primary24"><span id="CallTitle"><br />[Also as they requested, I copied the below information about their upcoming online film festival from <a href="http://imaginingourselves.imow.org/pb/CallForSubmissions.aspx?lang=1">their online call for submissions page</a>.]<br /></span><b><span id="CallTitle"><br /><br />Call For Submissions</span></b></span><span class="black12"><br /><br /><span id="CallDesc">Imagining Ourselves: Global Voices from a New Generation of Women</span><br /><br /><span id="Label10">Imagining Ourselves launched with a published anthology and an online exhibit on International Women's Day, March 8, 2006. The project received great acclaim and widespread media attention around the globe, from articles in Bombay's TimeOut Magazine to television coverage in Tijuana and numerous reports in the San Francisco media. Since then, we have reached out to a new generation of women on every continent, in four languages and through more than 100 global events and gatherings on the ground in over twenty-five countries. After the successful launch in March, 2006 we are extending the project until September, 2007 and will continue to explore different themes. Check out the descriptions of the [last of the] new themes....</span></span><br /><span class="primary14"><b><br />Film Festival</b></span><br /><span class="secondary12"><b>A cinematic experience online</b></span><br /><span class="black12">Take part in this unique experience – a two month film festival – online! This is an amazing chance for up and coming women filmmakers to have their work viewed by a worldwide audience. We are looking for all types of films – documentaries, short films, animation, music videos, basically any kind of film you can think of, they just have to be made by a female director. (Photo credit Shushan Avagyan)<br /><br />Deadline for submissions: August 7, 2007<br /><br /></span><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="449"><tbody><tr><td style="padding-bottom: 10px;"><span class="primary24"><b><span id="Label5">How to Submit your Work</span></b></span><br /><span class="black12"><span id="Label6">Get to know our online exhibit. Read stories, view artwork and film and listen to music and spoken word from the many young women from all around the world. Be Inspired. We look forward to hearing from you!</span></span></td> </tr> <tr> <td style="padding-bottom: 10px;"><span class="black12"><span id="Label7">Download applicant information here:</span><br /><img src="http://imaginingourselves.imow.org/pb/images/pdf_icon.gif" border="0" height="19" width="16" /> <a id="SubmissionFormPdf" class="primaryLink12" href="http://imaginingourselves.imow.org/pb/submissionform_eng.pdf?lang=1" target="submissionform">submissionform_eng.pdf</a> <span id="Label8">(245k)</span><br /><img src="http://imaginingourselves.imow.org/pb/images/word_icon.gif" border="0" height="19" width="16" /> <a id="SubmissionForm" class="primaryLink12" href="http://imaginingourselves.imow.org/pb/submissionform_eng.doc?lang=1" target="submissionform">submissionform_eng.doc</a> <span id="Label12">(778k)</span></span></td> </tr> <tr> <td style="padding-bottom: 10px;"><span class="primary14"><b><span id="Label13">Mail</span></b></span><br /><span class="black12"><span id="Label14">If you are submitting film or audio files or large artwork you should send these to us on a DVD or CD. Guidelines for format and length of media can be found in the application information, available for download above. You may send your applicant form by email indicating that you will be sending your submission by mail.</span></span></td> </tr> <tr> <td style="padding-bottom: 10px;"><span class="black12"><span id="Label15">Imagining Ourselves Team</span><br /><span id="Label20">International Museum of Women</span><br /><span id="Label16">PO Box 190038</span><br /><span id="Label17">San Francisco, CA 94119</span><br /><span id="Label18">USA</span><br /><br /><span id="Label11">Please contact us for street address if sending by courier.</span></span></td></tr></tbody></table>Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-74056092350716846352007-06-20T17:56:00.000-04:002007-06-20T18:02:44.897-04:00My Professional Perspective on a Book I Didn't Want to Write About This Way<p class="MsoNormal">I finished another book today: <i>The Last Assassin</i><span style=""> (<st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:state>: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2006)</span>, by Barry Eisler, my latest favorite fun-reading author (which is a very very very small group, by the way). <i>Assassin</i> is Eisler's latest book but one (<i>Requiem for an Assassin</i>, which I got signed while he was in town earlier this month). I was eager to read the new one, but I quickly realized that I'd missed the book between it and the one chronologically right before <i>Last Assassin</i> (<i>Rain Fall</i>, which was actually my introduction to Eisler's work) - and that's why I've just finished that missing link. Are you thoroughly confused? Amazingly enough, I'm not. I haven't even lost track of any of the protagonist John Rain's or the other characters' histories, even though I read them all in reverse chronological order (which was actually kind of cool too, and that's why I know that I'd love to read a prequel as Eisler indicated that he was considering writing at the book signing). [Too many gerunds!]<br /><br />Overall, I liked this new book. I cried three times, which is unusual for this genre, I'm sure (Rain is a "contract killer," as described on the book jacket). Eisler experiments with different voices in this book as well, switching from omniscient to Rain's perspective to that of a female lead, Delilah, and back again, and it's never unclear as to whose head we're inside at those moments. Rain demonstrates a lot of personal growth in this book too, which is pretty new for him and another demonstration of Eisler's expanding authorly skills. The (almost always - see below) delicious bites of Eisler's politics offered here and there still made me smile. His vocabulary will still send some people running for a dictionary, which also makes me smile. [Jessica, you're an elitist!] He remains an incredible author.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">[Please forgive me, Barry....]</p> <p class="MsoNormal">But <i style="">Last Assassin</i> was a little rocky going at first because it created some consistency questions in my mind. With persistence on my part, they resolved themselves, with one minor exception, which is what I discuss below. Besides that, a major one, which I already mentioned to Eisler in an e-mail yesterday, even though it's probably not news to him (nor is it likely all that important to him now, since <i>Requiem</i> came out on the NYT Bestseller List and all), was an error in the second chapter that changed a name from Delilah's history (Dov) to that of another main character (Dox) - and repeated the error thrice on those couple of pages - thus creating a historical romantic relationship that I knew had never happened (and that would have perplexed the hell out of a new reader of the series, since it kept me going for a while too). Once I resolved that in my mind, my concerns cleared up significantly.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">What remained, though, was a characteristic of Delilah, who is Rain's latest love interest, that I don't remember Eisler introducing in the previous books: her "periodic pouts and petulance," as first mentioned on p.26 (just a couple of pages after that other issue, by the way, which really increased the parallel universe feeling for me). This "inconsistency," as I'm calling it, may actually be more of a significant issue than I've indicated so far, though, since I got the sense from this book, more than from any of the earlier ones, that it was written more with Eisler's fans than with potential new readers in mind, as some of Rain's backstory wasn't even explained until the very end of this book, and some of it, though relevant to aspects of this story, not at all.<br /><br />Eisler clearly tries to make this new aspect of Delilah acceptable throughout this book, and it is certainly a consistent part of her character here. She is certainly somewhat justified in feeling the way that she does, too, and Eisler takes pains to show us that via her own justifications to herself, as well as her own self-criticism for allowing him to make her "sulk and pout like a schoolgirl" (93) [Blecch!] - all of which make her a very believable character, since I've had the same kinds of conversations with myself before too. As usual, Eisler does do an excellent job with the characterizations in this book. But I still feel that she is only being portrayed that way because she's female. It's a fact that everyone who's ever betrayed Rain in any of these books is female, although as he gets older he's rejecting them less wholeheartedly for it.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">An obvious example is Midori, another love interest of Rain's who plays a big part in this story because she is mothering their love child - a boy named Koichiro. As soon as I learned about that, at the end of the previous book, I felt a pang somewhere in my brain. A single working mother to a son: That sounds like homework! And indeed, there's a little of that here - hence this post. But Eisler is male, so - in accordance with the patterns that I've seen everywhere else - while he demonstrates awareness of the monster mother myth of which I wrote for my thesis, he is clearly less concerned about it than female writers and mothers to sons themselves always are. Rain refers to it first: "Maybe you should think about what something like that [an absent father] would cost him," he says to Midori (56).</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Rain himself grew up with an absent father, who died when he was eight years old. Rain considers that situation: "His loss and subsequent absence were the first and perhaps most significant of the scars that shaped what I became" - which, of course, is a killer (214). That statement alone makes Rain another of the countless examples present in Western fiction and mythology of men gone "bad" who were raised by single mothers. Eisler has rarely had Rain blame his own family for that, though. Rather, he usually blames his other "father," his country, which effectively betrayed him while he served in Vietnam - although even that's not entirely true, since it was only the evil ambition of one person who really brought about the events that contributed most to the original circumstances that led to who Rain is today. Thus the fact that Rain is now blaming his home situation for it - a mother is not enough to keep a boy from becoming a "bad guy," in other words - is even more indication of the power of that myth. Even though Rain knows that it hasn't been true in his own life, now that he's worried about his own son, he's falling back on those myths, perhaps because of his sense that the issue of a father's presence in a son's life is more controllable than corruption in government and war.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">That's a significant point: Instead of blaming single mothers and/or absent fathers for children gone awry, why not blame the system in which all of that takes place? I'll quote my e-mail signature again:</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size:10;">It is dangerous fantasy to believe that if 'they' can be identified and labeled, and then treated or punished, the nation will be somehow purified, made safer for the rest of us.... When in fact we need to examine poverty, racism, the paucity of meaningful work at a living wage, the lack of access to day care, antifeminism, and a host of other problems, let us not be diverted by 'bad' mothers. (Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky, <i style="">"Bad Mothers": The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region></i> pp.22,23)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>Meanwhile, what makes Delilah's "petulance" frustrating to me is that otherwise there is little differentiation between her and Rain and Dox, all of whom are essentially in the same line of work - and that portrayal is significant considering that Delilah's usual role in such work is as a seductress, which rarely involves actual killing - only information-gathering, as the reader learns in the previous book. That fact in and of itself could merit criticism, since it does separate her from the men with whom she works, but Eisler doesn't explicitly separate her in his treatment of her - he even has Rain describe her as "that man inside tonight" (241) a couple of times in the book, for better or for worse - so I'm not going to do that to him.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">It's also a mark in Eisler's favor that he acknowledges the existence of abortion as an option in this book. He still fails to have his character use it, though, as <i style=""><a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2168126">Slate<span style="font-style: normal;"> notes is common in the rare works within mainstream pop culture that acknowledge the legality of abortion these days</span></a></i>. (But I have to note: What about <i style="">Cider House Rules</i>? What about <i style="">Vera Drake</i>?) OK, it's a plot point, but this line of Midori's internal dialogue is just inflammatory:<o:p><br /></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size:85%;">The thought that she had nearly gone through with an abortion was enough to make her feel sick, as though she had once in a moment of weakness contemplated murdering her child. She would never have thought it possible, but she defined herself as this little boy's mother more than she had defined herself as anything else before.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Blecch again, several times over. Abortion makes one sick? A woman who contemplates abortion is only "in a moment of weakness"? Women who have abortions are baby-killers? The mother-identity supersedes all other aspects of women's selves? I considered aborting my son, and I don't feel "sick" looking back on it now. In fact, it recently occurred to me that the better decision would have been to abort him, as my mom begged me to do. I really can't explain why I chose as I did. Rebellion? Hormones? Exposure to anti-abortion rhetoric? I don't know.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">By the way, does that make my loving, intelligent mom like "the mother character [who] is explicitly positioned as a moral monster, a 'hissable villain'" in the movie <i style="">Knocked Up</i>, as also discussed in that <i style="">Slate</i> article? Here's more on that problem from <a href="http://unpretentiouslitcrit.blogspot.com/2007/06/knocked-up-knocks-women.html">another woman's blog</a>:<o:p><br /></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size:10;">The mom was presented as a castrating bitchTM who callously told her daughter that she only had one choice, and that the baby would be a nuisance--so the allegedly pro-choice person is actually anti-choice. When she described a family member who had an abortion and then had a 'real baby' years later, the detached way she spoke made members of my audience <i>audibly gasp</i>. They were gasping at the cruelty of the pro-abortion position. [emphasis in original]<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">If anything, though, it was my privilege, as an informed, well-educated White woman with highly educated, upper-middle-class parents that ultimately got me by - not our supposedly baby-loving society. I'm in a definite minority in terms of the breadth of my opportunities, throughout my life. And I also haven't found my identity as a mother more true or real than anything else - again, probably largely because of my opportunities (and determination) to be more than that, thanks to feminism. (That's only fair to my son too!) But Midori is a famous jazz pianist, so surely she has had some such opportunities too. Yet, Eisler writes, she's more a mother than anything else. Again, unnecessary. His self-definition as a conservative finally reared its ugly head, I guess. <span style="font-family:Wingdings;"><span style="">:-(</span></span><o:p><br /></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I can't end on this note. The only excuse that I can find to redeem Eisler for what he did to Delilah – even going so far as having her act the part of a thoughtless, plotting, cruelly jealous lover at one point as well (125) – is that in this book, he does it to Rain too. <i style="">Last Assassin </i>is the book where we see what happens to these characters when they can't help but have to operate in situations that are really untenably personal.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">I can't write off what he did to Midori, though. At least she's unlikely to be very present in the next story so that I can go back to reading for fun.</p>Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-22485912889008720742007-06-19T16:49:00.000-04:002007-06-19T16:54:56.466-04:00Quick Hit: What Else the Thomas Recall Reveals<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/business/worldbusiness/19toys.html?ex=1182916800&en=1f532ceb6a22d692&ei=5070&emc=eta1">Parents across the U.S. are up in arms about the latest toy recall</a>, which this time affects owners of Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends trains. I must admit that I felt some smug satisfaction at having known about the recall and responded to it, finding James and his coal tender in my son’s room and dispatching them back to the toy company, long before the news hit the rest of the country’s fan. (I subscribe to <a href="http://www.cpsc.gov/cpsclist.asp">the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s recall notification e-list</a>, so I know about a lot of recalls before those who rely on word-of-mouth … although somehow the pet food recall got under my radar until my dad e-mailed me about it.) What I have not previously considered, though, is how much my indulgence of my son’s Thomas habit supports underpaying workers in distant countries. For those who don’t know, even the smallest two-inch wooden Thomas engine is about $10 from most retail outlets (while the metal ones run closer to $7 each, I think). And yet, as mentioned in that article that I linked above, there are Chinese “workers who were paid about $150 a month to spray paint on mostly metal toy trains six days a week.” Since I’m sure that they’re painting more than 22 trains in those six days, they’re grossly underpaid for their work on these, quite frankly, ridiculously overpriced toys – especially now that I know that they’re imports from <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">China</st1:place></st1:country-region>. I am ashamed at my thoughtlessness … but, even though apparently as much as 80% of toys in the U.S. are also Chinese in origin, making it likely that most equally thoughtless parents probably have some in their homes, I’m not going to let myself off the hook because of it. I’m sure that there are plenty of beautiful American-made toys that I could have been buying for Alex. Now that I’m informed, I’m going to make a point of looking for them.</p><br /><p class="MsoNormal">(This is the first post that I'm publishing here rather than over on MotherBlogs. I'll see how it goes; then perhaps I'll move everything else here as well. In the meantime, please check out <a href="http://www.motherblogs.net/jessica">the rest of my blogs about feminist mothering</a>.)<br /></p>Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-69911147856082588332007-03-28T04:30:00.000-04:002007-07-26T03:20:45.262-04:00Reflection on the movie DANCER IN THE DARK (2000)Dancer in the Dark is an Oscar-nominated film starring Bjork as a single mother/erstwhile dreamer, afflicted with a genetic disorder that eventually makes her go blind, who immigrates to the United States, not in pursuit of the American dream or special treatment of any kind but simply because the surgery which can save her son from the same fate is only performed here. She must not let her son know about their condition, though, as worry makes it progress faster and might then prevent him from being eligible for the surgery. These circumstances, with a little "help" from a desperate man, all but prevent Selma, the mother, from succeeding in that ultimate goal. At the same time, the deep affection that a couple of colleagues cannot help but feel for this caring and incredibly positive person mitigates the impossibility of her situation. It's an excellent movie that you must see if you possibly can; it's available through Blockbuster Online, if you're a subscriber to that service.<br /><br />What I want to write about now are the American societal issues which contribute to Selma's tragedy in the film, which could thus even serve as a powerful - because totally subtle - commentary on those issues. First of all, there is anti-immigrant sentiment, which at the time manifested itself as anti-Communism but is clearly similar to the kind of anti-immigrant sentiment that we see today as well. Selma works in a factory for years - presumably for low wages and without health insurance, of course, which obviously contributes to her dilemma. She therefore must save every cent toward her son's surgery, forcing her to forego even buying him birthday presents - and yet preventing her from telling him (or, really, to be safe, anyone) why. Thus of course she is portrayed as a bad - even a selfish - mother as well. She blames herself anyway for choosing to have the boy, despite knowing that he would have this condition. No wonder her own progresses so quickly.<br /><br />Her only escape is her fantasy world, in which a famous dancer from her native country replaces her absent father and dance numbers, a la the Hollywood musical, pepper her daily life. Her fantasy world certainly gets her in trouble, but as it is clearly all that she has to help her cope with her very difficult life besides the distant specter of a better situation for her son - on which most real people could not psychologically survive, ideal of motherhood or not - one must forgive her that. In my opinion, the world that allows this woman's life to be this way is also responsible there.<br /><br />Meanwhile, the patriarchal expectations placed on Selma's neighbor and landlord, Bill (played by David Morse, whom I recognized from The Green Mile), to provide for and continue to impress his spendthrift wife get the better of him, despite a job as a police officer and an inheritance. Notwithstanding the fact that the movie presents his wife, with whom he shares no information about his troubles, as rightfully bearing the blame for his problems through the movie's completely unsympathetic portrayal of her after that point, this plot twist demonstrates the lengths to which a man can feel driven to go to remain a man in society's - and his loved ones' - eyes. In desperation and a few moments of chance, he uses his friendship with Selma and his consequent knowledge of her problems and plans to destroy her life and his own forever. Selma is left unable to be truthful in her own last desperate chance to attempt to achieve the only thing that she can for her son. It's certainly more dramatic than most mothers' day-to-day lives, but most mothers also know how such desperation feels. We as a society - as the United States of America - shouldn't allow anyone to feel that way so unjustly.Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-754383059464122098.post-11458688493747661432006-10-04T19:25:00.000-04:002007-06-16T19:38:56.094-04:00Patriarchy and the Family: The Birth of Pleasure by Carol Gilligan[I actually wrote most of this blog entry in June.]<br /><br />My thesis director mentioned that Carol Gilligan had done some work on mothers and sons; unable to figure out what on my own, I e-mailed her. She directed me to her recent book <span style="font-style: italic;">The Birth of Pleasure</span>, particularly the second chapter. There are, incidentally, only three chapters in the book, but in the end I read all of them, as I found the book as a whole relevant to not only my thesis but my relationship with my fiance as well. In fact, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Birth of Pleasure</span> provides insight into the entire patriarchal structure that affects (my) family life; I would like to share my thoughts on that here.<br /><br />First, re: my relationship with my fiance: Gilligan writes that women in relationships seek certain "resonances" if they are to speak freely (17): a sense of their confidant's understanding of and responsiveness to their ideas. For example, in the last chapter of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Birth of Pleasure</span>, Gilligan gives an example from the Michael Ondaatje novel <span style="font-style: italic;">The English Patient</span> in which a relationship ends - terribly tragically - because a man, Almasy, cannot provide the words that the woman, Katherine, needs to stay. Instead, she feels that "in his silences he had left" her. Katherine asks Almasy questions, looking for reassurance of his love for her that would come from his negative responses to them: "If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn't you?" "If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover? [...] Deny it, damn you." But he says nothing. Later, he realizes that it was those moments that caused their problems: "She had always wanted words. [...] She loved them, grew up in them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water" (182-183).<br /><br />In that respect, Katherine could be me.<br /><br />Gilligan also writes of Freud's work with his female patients and his insight into their<br />needs which, once met, solved their physical and psychological problems: Women need "a sympathetic sounding board" so that they can speak again with "a voice that had receded into silence" (225) at the hands of their gender socialization. Patriarchy, Gilligan explains, defines femininity as "a willingness to compromise oneself for the sake of relationships," as women do by lapsing into silence; girls, on the other hand, "are given more leeway with respect to femininity until adolescence" (17), at which point relationships become possible that would require it, according to that patriarchal definition of femininity.<br /><br />I actually wonder whether I ever underwent the break between my "true voice" and my "actual voice" myself, since I don't remember the shock that Gilligan describes as accompanying that break. Further, I don't accord with that patriarchal definition of femininity either. I do not often verbally compromise - "I don't pull any punches," as I like to say - nor do I often remain silent. As Jane Austen's heroine Elizabeth Bennet says, "I must speak as I find." And indeed, as is also the case for Elizabeth, those characteristics have interfered with my ability to maintain relationships with the men in my life. Their complaints have generally been not that I think that I am right most of the time but that I actually am. I have even had therapists "diagnose" me as such when I have sought counseling for problems in my interpersonal relationships.When I reflect on my childhood, I cannot find in it any marked gender socialization one way or the other. I deeply credit my parents for that, but - or perhaps I should say because - I have found it impossible to understand or respect mainstream - that is, patriarchal - societal notions as a result.<br /><br />Meanwhile, masculinity, according to patriarchy, is "an ability to stand alone and forgo relationships" (16), but boys' "initiation [...] into the codes of masculinity intensifies around the age of five" (17). Gilligan posits that boys' socialization takes place at an earlier age than girls' because of parental concerns about sons' "ability to hold [their] own on the playground" that their "expression of tenderness or vulnerability" would somehow threaten. Those concerns lead parents to encourage their sons to suppress such expressions, and thus parents impede their previously close relationship with their sons (16) - despite the fact that "One confiding relationship, meaning a relationship where one can speak one's heart and mind freely, has been found to be the best protection against most forms of psychological trouble, especially in times of stress" (15). In that respect, Gilligan's idea here reminds me of bell hooks's argument in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Will to Change</span>: namely, that men also need to be able to express their feelings and feel acceptance of them as well. Patriarchy, though, as Gilligan notes, is not a matter of "the oppression of women by men" but "literally [...] a hierarchy--a rule of priests--in which the priest, the <span style="font-style: italic;">hieros</span>, is a father. It describes an order of living that elevates fathers, separating fathers from sons (the men from the boys) and placing both sons and women under a father's authority" (4-5). And so "The opening into a confiding relationship is blocked by fears that if [one reveals] parts of [oneself] that are deemed unmanly or unwomanly, [one] will sacrifice the love and intimacy [one desires] so intensely" (143). Thus patriarchy oppresses all of us.<br /><br />Thank goodness that I read this book before my son turns five this fall!<br /><br />But really, Gilligan's book offers another description of how to enact feminist mothering of sons (and I'm proud to say that they're methods that I'm already enacting with mine): Don't shield your son from your feelings, and don't ask him to do the same from you with his, as either would place a barrier between you (16). And yet I worry that my control over my son's gender socialization is already slipping away from me. Lately I have noticed him expressing more and more awareness of what patriarchal masculinity forbids to him; he manifests that awareness by discussing what he wants to do with his future daughter (!), since he already feels that he cannot any longer want it for himself: He says, "I will buy her flowers," for instance.<br /><br />Alex has been in one kind of child care or another since he was six weeks old, so of course some of his socialization has come from those environments. And most of the time that child care has been unavoidable, particularly when I was working full-time during the first nine months of his life and then finishing my Bachelor's and working on my Master's degree much of the rest of the time. But now that we're living with Dennis, I could've managed to keep Alex at home for at least a year; delaying the rest of my graduate education would allow me to keep him home even longer. Would the sacrifice be worth it, though, or would his patriarchal gender socialization take place nonetheless - perhaps especially because to some extent it already has? Or would my keeping him away from "normal" gender socialization prevent him from functioning well in society, as is so often the case with home-schooled children? And, as suggested above, would that be a bad thing or a good thing?<br /><br />Of course, the ideal approach would be to enable my son to learn the "rules" of our world and also how to evaluate and resist them while not preventing me from living my life for more than just him - which would be part of my teaching of him about resistance to those rules. I worry about how possible such a feat can be, though - especially after reading this book.<br /><br />Gilligan tells of a patient, "Dan," who, every time he experiences pleasure, immediately afterward recedes into absence from relationship. "Maybe I didn't want it to last," he says. "I didn't know what to do with it" (41). In fact, Dan suggests "that he is more comfortable feeling miserable than he is feeling happy; to feel happy and open, he says, 'makes me feel vulnerable'" (43).<br /><br />Even after Freud realized what he did about women's needs, his own gender socialization interfered: He could not align himself with women against the rest of the profession and the world (227). He could not allow them their own knowledge. As a scientist and a man, he instead had to claim knowledge. He "aligns himself with Oedipus the king, the solver of riddles [...] the tyrant who usurps authority" - women's authority (228). "The enemy of freedom," Gilligan writes, "is not structure but totalitarianism, which sets out systematically to destroy freedom, co-opting voice and confusing language in a public enactment of terror" (233). She explains that "Both love and democracy depend on voice--having a voice and also the resonance that makes it possible to speak and be heard. Without voice, there is no relationship; without resonance, voice recedes into silence" (232).<br /><br />Gilligan calls it "the birth of tragedy": "The alignment of knowledge with fathers." At that point Freud replaces reality with fantasy, "the young woman speaking about her experience of an incestuous relationship with her father" with "the young boy, fantasizing about an incestuous relationship with his mother": the Oedipus myth (229). And perhaps it really is "only" myth, "only" fantasy, that manifests itself in so many representations of the Oedipus complex in literature and film - such as the story of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius' novel <span style="font-style: italic;">Metamorphoses, or The Golden Ass</span>, which Gilligan relates as follows: Venus, Cupid's mother, envious of the young woman Psyche's supposed resemblance to her, calls for Cupid, "and kissing him long and intensely with parted lips, she beseeches him in the name of the maternal bond to punish that 'defiant beauty'" by making her "fall in love with the most wretched of men. Cupid takes off for the high mountain ledge" where Psyche awaits, "but when he sees the beautiful and terrified young woman who looks like his mother, he predictably falls in love with her." But Psyche has to follow Cupid's rules that his relationship with his mother makes necessary: She cannot ever look at him or know his identity (23-24). (Can you imagine being expected to accept not knowing who your husband is - and that when you didn't even get to choose him yourself?!) When she finally does break his rule, he leaves her and returns to his mother (40). What a surprise.<br /><br />Ultimately, Gilligan sees the myth of Cupid and Psyche as revolutionary - even feminist - because in the end it involves the transformation of a world that otherwise forces "both men and women [to] suffer losses that constrain their ability to love" (46). However, it is Jupiter, "Cupid's father and the chief of the Olympian gods," who at his son's request creates "a world" in which he removes "the ligaments of patriarchy, making [Cupid and Psyche's] relationship 'no longer uneven' and freeing their love from the threat that Cupid will leave Psyche if she does not obey him" so that Cupid can have the woman of his choice (156). However, I must point out that these circumstances - that Cupid and Psyche's world is separate from the one in which patriarchy continues to reign supreme and that a male created this other world to serve another male, his son's, interests - do not bode well for Gilligan's definition of the myth as feminist. Further, Venus' order that Cupid make Psyche fall for "the most wretched of men" - which turns out to be himself - also accords with my understanding of society's attitude toward the sons of "controlling" mothers such as Venus, as I discuss at length in my thesis. Again, what a surprise.<br /><br />So Freud silences women, co-opting their voices and replacing their ideas with his own, replacing women's concerns with men's. As Gilligan explains:<br /><br /> <div style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size:78%;">Freud receded from the psychically intimate, pleasurable, and fruitful relationship that he had established with his women patients. The rush of discovery Freu<span style="font-size:78%;">d experienced in these relationships and the deep human sympathy he felt with the women had become associated with danger and vulnerability, including the risk of appearing gullible or intellectually naive in the eyes of fathers. With the death of his father, he became the father, identification replacing a lost relationship, and with this replacement, Freud became the hero of his own tragic story. (230)</span></span></span><br /></div> <span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size:78%;"> </span></span><br />Thus for men (and male gods), as well as women, it is the vulnerability that they dare not risk that keeps them from connecting with one another, from understanding one another. What is required to take that risk? Trust. Trust, Gilligan writes, makes it "possible to open oneself freely to another and to find the other again after the inevitable breaks in connection. It is the condition for living with change." And what, then, is required for trust? Words. Words that "hold a promise not necessarily to stay married but to stay in relationship" (232) - that is, "being in sync with another person," as distinct from "relationships" (9), which, as above, tend to instead entail "dissociation [...] the psychic mechanism that allows survival in patriarchy" (11). The promise is not "the goodness of the [person] or the relationship" though; rather, "it is the ability of the [people in the relationship] together to repair the breaks in their relationship," and that is what is necessary to build "a safe house for love" (31). The words that communicate that promise, Gilligan finds, are: "I will never lie to you, I will never leave you, I will never try to possess you" (232).<br /><br />And they are dangerous words. It is difficult to say such words knowing that there are reasons why you would leave someone: adultery, abuse - the other person's violation of those words. It requires trust to say them, as even an awareness of the implicit contract that they involve - that is, if one breaches the contract, then the contract is broken, and neither is bound by it anymore - doesn't reduce the fear of pain and loss that would come with that unbinding. Thus we have a vicious circle: We cannot trust without hearing and believing the words that we must trust one another in order to say. And if, like me, you do not pull any punches - if you do not compromise well because you have been hurt or even abused - these ideals are even more difficult to achieve.<br /><br />Then there is the story of "Phil." Phil is another of Gilligan's patients; he worried that giving <span style="font-style: italic;">himself </span>to his wife "Sonya," rather than just his financial support, as he explains, "would soften me, or maybe it would take the focus off my business. Most of our discussions, [...] she has been a great listener. She listened to me about the business a lot" (50). So Phil had bought into the patriarchal definition of masculinity. But Phil doesn't know what Sonya really wanted: him "being present, caring about what's going on with the family and with" her (50). Sonya explains further:<br /><br /> <div style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size:78%;">I really wish we could be best friends. That's what I think a marriage--a happy marriage--should be. . . . And a friendship to me is a mutual thing, so if one person starts acting weird, then the other person can say, you know, "What's wrong with you? What's going on?" Or whatever, and then you could readjust. But if that doesn't happen, then I can see that I could start walling off. (51)</span><br /></div> <br />And indeed Sonya did feel "that she could not speak and be heard" (51) - the patriarchal assignment for women - and thus, like Phil, she "began to wall herself off as well" (51). She had an affair - "the ultimate nightmare," Phil says, because it could have caused him "to never have the opportunity to show her how I really feel and to be a family man, to open my heart and to love her." But even to do so now, Phil "wants a guarantee that if he opens his heart to Sonya, she will open herself to him" (53).<br /><br />Dan and Phil remind me a little of some of the sides of Dennis that I've seen.<br /><br />Of course, the danger comes, as I've described here, from patriarchy, which, "by establishing hierarchy in the heart of intimacy, is inherently tragic." And then Gilligan offers a possible explanation for the pervasiveness of the Oedipus myth (or, as I discuss in my thesis, the Monster Mother trope): "like all trauma survivors, we keep telling the story we need to listen to and understand. At the same time, we look for ways to break what quickly becomes a vicious cycle" (7-8) - a self-fulfilling prophecy, as it were. Gilligan explains how Freud writes in his essay "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" that "we repeat a traumatic experience, or whatever version we tell ourselves of the tragic story" as "an attempt at mastering loss--the fantasy that it will come out right this time. [...] Knowing the end of the story, knowing the tragedy, we have vowed never to repeat it. And yet of course we repeat it over and over again, until we know it by heart" (163). Thus, Gilligan writes, love is "a courageous act," for:<br /><br /> <div style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size:78%;">To free love and pleasure from the trappings of a manhood or womanhood that holds them captive means to undo dissociation by risking association--knowing what one knows, feeling one's feelings, being naked in the presence of another by removing the protective clothes of masculinity and femininity, however they are culturally designed. (18)</span><br /></div> <br />And there is that risk again, that need for trust.<br /><br />At one point in the book, Gilligan quotes some advice that she gives to the father of a five-year-old boy that ultimately is, in my opinion, the crux of the whole book. She writes:<br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><br /></span> <div style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size:78%;"> If you are going to be open and in relationship, you are vulnerable. I mean, that's just it. The only way to stop, not be vulnerable, is to close yourself off. At that point, you're vulnerable to a whole set of other things. But in terms of the openness, the vulnerability, if you have that, then you can make some choices around it. Otherwise, if you lose that, you have no choice. (68)</span><br /></div> <br />Again, it is patriarchy, I note, that gives us no choice. So I don't really think that, as posited above, the Oedipus myth is meant to help us cope with a past trauma; rather, as Gilligan also writes, "the Oedipus complex is about: sexualizing the intimacy [between a mother and her son], placing it under taboo, linking freedom with leaving women and going off with men, and making any woman who resists this separation a virtual Jocasta, Oedipus' 'unspeakable mother'" - even though she also points out that really, "Jocasta didn't resist" that separation (74). Thus patriarchy created that mythical family's trauma, just as it continues to traumatize families today, as I've discussed here.<br /><br />Feminism, on the other hand, does allow the choice to stay in relationship. Or, as Gilligan puts, it, "love erodes patriarchy" (73). And that's why patriarchy finds feminism and the unfettered love that it advocates so dangerous. As Gilligan quotes from "philosopher and constitutional-law scholar" David Richards's <span style="font-style: italic;">Women, Gays, and the Constitution</span>, even two hundred years ago "feminism was more controversial than abolitionism" (14).<br /><br />Likewise, feminist parenting of sons is also controversial, particularly among parents themselves, as I discuss in my thesis. As Gilligan writes, "Within a patriarchal society and culture, mother and son are a potentially revolutionary couple. If the mother resists sacrificing her relationship with her son for the sake of his initiation into patriarchy, the patriarchal plot cannot go forward" (135). Gilligan also points out some of the ways that allowing boys to remain in relationship can feel dangerous when she shares Tom's story of his 5-year-old son Jake, whose focus on "what is happening emotionally in the room [...] is separating him from the other boys, and he is losing his position in the group" (66). It's the age-old question of whether it's in children's best interests to fit into a problematic society or to resist those problems and remain at the margins. When it comes to drugs, there's no question of where we as parents stand, but this matter feels different somehow.<br /><br />Gilligan also shares stories of the mothers of these young boys talking about<br /><br /><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size:78%;">the freedom they feel with their sons to feel their feelings, a freedom often signaled by a mother's discovery that her son can know her anger without turning on her or leaving her, know it as an emotion in the way they know her love. For a woman, for any woman living in patriarchy, it is extraordinarily freeing to go back or forward into a time when love is not split from anger, when the universe of emotion returns as a world in which she can move freely, where she is not bedeviled by a split between good and bad women, one loving, the other angry--images of women that are surreal, that come from the unconscious of men. Which may be why these mothers' experiences with their sons are so powerful--why Clara speaks of such intensity of feeling, real rage and also the most intense love--because it signifies such release. There is no way to love freely, to experience freedom in loving, when you cannot feel your feelings, and anger is just that, a feeling. (71)</span><br /></div><br />Women being free to engage in all of their emotions - even anger, which is usually unacceptable in patriarchal femininity - is one more danger though, as it violates the patriarchal definition of femininity as self-compromise, as above. "It is not surprising to discover that young boys can teach us about knowing and loving," Gilligan explains, as in interacting with them, "we remember what children see before they are taught how to see" (109). Mothers in particular can remember that, since they were adolescents when they were inducted into patriarchy, unlike fathers. A mother "in turning toward her son" is therefore "turning away from the values and the judgments of patriarchy" (72). Perhaps that, rather than society's disapprobation of such mothers' sons, is the real problem for patriarchy. Perhaps that is the reason for the Oedipus myth.<br /><br /> <div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:78%;">WORKS CITED</span><br /></div> <ul><li><span style="font-size:78%;">Apuleius. <span style="font-style: italic;">Metamorphoses</span>. J. Arthur Hanson, ed., trans. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.</span></li><li><span style="font-size:78%;">Austen, Jane. <span style="font-style: italic;">Pride and Prejudice</span>, 1813.<br /></span></li><li><span style="font-size:78%;"> Freud, Sigmund. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud</span>. James Strachey, ed., trans. London: The Hogarth P, 1961.</span></li><li><span style="font-size:78%;"> Gilligan, Carol. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Birth of Pleasure</span>. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2002.</span></li><li><span style="font-size:78%;">hooks, bell. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love</span>. New York: Atria Books, 2004.</span></li><li><span style="font-size:78%;">Richards, David A.J. <i style="">Women, Gays, and the Constitution: The Grounds for Feminism and Gay Rights in Culture and Law</i>. <st1:city st="on">Chicago</st1:city>: U of <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Chicago</st1:place></st1:city> P, 1998.</span></li></ul>Jessica B. Burstremhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11206140628965657727noreply@blogger.com0