women's studies

Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women

admin — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Sapphistries is an epic journey through real and fictional love between women. It is so epic that the author, Leila J. Rupp, had to coin a new term to describe this type of book. It is not just a history; it is an interweaving of prehistoric musings, fictional accounts that draw on suppositions of what it must have been like in times when no evidence was left of when and where these kinds of love was forbidden, right up to the modern day. I say these kinds of love because Rupp has effortfully but effectively convinced me that I need to know about the whole she-bang. It’s not easy to keep track of lesbians throughout history when people didn’t self-identify as such.

This book takes in the whole gamut of potential interpretations of women-loving-women: social males, women who live as men but retained their female identity, third and fourth gender identities, women passing as men, two spirits, secret weddings, school girls having accepted but secret relationships as a cultural yet unofficial rite of passage in various modern cultures... as a run-of-the-mill modern lesbian, I was a little overwhelmed. This varied interpretation of ‘Sapphistries’ is extremely broad, and definitely widened my perspective on what I think the author would like me to consider a part of my culture.

Primary and secondary source material across the span of human history is combined with fictional accounts throughout the book. I personally found the interweaving of fictional accounts and historical details a little too seamless at first. I had to flip back and forth a few times mid-tale to remind myself which was which, but I eventually got the hang of it and had a much better contextualized grasp of what I was reading. I thoroughly enjoyed the re-tellings and re-imaginings of ancient women-loving-women. With Rupp's first-person interjections and a storytelling tone, the book reads like a long and enjoyable university lecture delivered by a witty, warm, and knowledgeable teacher.

I would recommend this book for women’s studies, literature, queer theory, or history syllabuses. I even suspect it would make for an excellent module on its own, with some supplementary reading thrown in. It’s no coffee table book—this is some serious reading and I personally would want a sherpa to guide me through it the next time I read it.

Sapphistries is particularly invaluable for queer theory because of the vastly broad picture it presents of the grand scope of women who love women—regardless of whether they identify as queer or not. This book opened my eyes to the many positive and negative perceptions and lifestyle choices of those who were a part of ‘Sapphistry’ in the past, and I look forward to seeing how it informs future study and thought.

Written by: Chella Quint, March 21st 2010

The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy

admin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Paul Shankman

University of Wisconsin Press

What do Phil Donohue, a New Zealand ethnologist, three anthropologist husbands, and a small handful of Samoan girls all have in common? The answer is: Margaret Mead and their roles in a debate that has rocked cultural anthropology since 1983.

The Trashing of Margaret Mead is a fine, funny, discriminating, and at times quite disturbing book. At the heart of the so-called Mead-Freeman Debate was the veracity, meaning, and political uses of the data that Mead collected in 1925 during the ethnographic research that she conducted in Samoa. Her central finding was that Samoan adolescence did not require the storm-and-stress widely seen as part of adolescence, the volatility that characterizes “teenaged” behavior. Mead’s work framed the “nature/nurture” debate: is nature (e.,g. biology and hormones) ultimately responsible for sexual maturation and behavior, or is it nurture (e.g., gender relations and child-rearing)? Is male dominance hard-wired biologically, or can egalitarianism be taught? Freeman chose the former, Mead the latter.

The Trashing of Margaret Mead consists of fourteen chapters arranged into five parts. It is filled with salacious talk, iconic photos, back-channel communication, and an impressive attention to nuance and detail. The two chapters comprising “The Controversy and the Media” remind the reader of the huge splash made in 1983 in anthropology and wider circles by the publication of Derek Freeman’s book, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Relatively few people actually read the book, but stories about Freeman and Mead, often wildly misunderstanding and misquoting the latter, circulated in the pages of Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and most memorably in the telling by the author, Paul Shankman, on The Phil Donohue Show. Shankman shows with great gusto and clarity that U.S. media and many academics were predisposed to accept Freeman’s claims, however fraudulent.

Part two exposes Derek Freeman the man, but more importantly, the mind. At least once in the early 1960s, while working in Sarawak, Indonesia, Freeman went quite off the rails. In a museum there he once hacked off the phalluses of wooden statues carved by fine Iban craftsmen. Freeman’s instability is near legendary, and Shankman shows this to us with grace and skill by revealing the manic tenor of his writings and the increasingly nasty tone of his correspondence until the very day he died.

The four chapters in part three, “Sex, Lies and Samoans,” cover the life of and influences upon the young Margaret Mead, the conditions of her first fieldwork in Samoa, and the publication in 1928 of Coming of Age in Samoa, which was an extremely popular (and popularizing) book. These chapters read like a scholarly detective story of what the Mead-Freeman debate meant (and continues to mean) to Samoans, and of what Samoan thought, belief, and behavior are like in terms of sexual matters. Special commentary is reserved for the place of the "taupou system" in Samoa by and through which female virginity is valorized and idealized. As in most cultures, Samoan brothers want to have virginal sisters, but Mead, Freeman, and Shankman show that they often want also to get into the pants (or back then, under the grass skirts) of other men’s sisters.

Shankman also revisits the effects of cross-cultural contact with the American military during World War II upon Samoan beliefs and behaviors. Whereas Mead said that Samoans were largely egalitarian, easy-going, and not hung-up about sex, Freeman argued that Mead had gotten it all wrong, that Samoan culture was riddled by status differentials, prone to violence, circumspect with regards to sex, and also “rape-prone.” Freeman contended that Mead was hoaxed during her fieldwork by two Samoan girls who jokingly indicated their usual hunts and haunts for boys. Shankman shows that Freeman was mistaken, concluding that “Freeman not only misrepresented the historical work of others but neglected his own personal experiences in the islands during World War II and his unpublished work on the taupou system.” Shankman shows that Mead got it largely right and that Freeman got it sloppily and willfully wrong on many, many counts.

The Trashing of Margaret Mead should be used in college courses ranging from media studies to cultural anthropology to women’s studies to Peoples and Cultures of the Pacific. Graduate-level seminars could be wrapped around the many significant issues raised here. Shankman’s bulldog-like dedication for many years is as laudable as his prose style is engaging.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., March 8th 2010

A Place of Belonging: Five Founding Women of Fairbanks, Alaska

admin — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 09:00:00 +0000

By Phyllis Demuth Movius

University of Alaska Press

The thing I remember most about my brief visit to Alaska is that even in Anchorage, I could feel the lessening of human population as soon as I stepped off of the plane. It was palpable, the very lack of people, the beautiful expanse of green just across the water, and I found it soothing in such a deep, soulful way that I promised myself I would return.

Alaska is still a frontier in some real ways and within our collective imagination, although with modern conveniences it is nowhere near what it was for the five women whose stories make up A Place of Belonging. Each settled in Fairbanks between 1903 and 1923 and helped to build the still struggling frontier town.

Even today, if a girlfriend told you she was up and moving to Alaska, it might seem a brave and courageous thing to do. Despite what Sarah Palin did to its reputation, Alaska was and is a place of great freedom and empowerment for a lot of the women who helped to settle it and who live there today. When the settlers of Fairbanks were trying to find food and clothing to make it through an Alaskan winter, no one questioned the value of every single participant. And when stories of the suffrage movement were told by people coming from the lower states and Europe, these settlers shook their heads and legally empowered women years before the arguments had been quelled in more urban and purportedly intellectual communities.

A Place of Belonging has great academic value, both for women’s studies and the study of U.S. history, as it gives detailed accounts of the lives of these five very different women, citing correspondence and including over seventy black and white photos. Personally, I found it interesting and stimulating reading with enough narrative to entertain while documenting these inspiring lives.

Ms. Movius has an M.A. in Northern Studies from the University of Alaska and has published three other works on the territory.

Written by: Jen Wilson Lloyd, January 22nd 2010

Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness

admin — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:00:00 +0000

By Ariel Gore

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

This short but meaningful book is a smart combination of self-help, memoir, and academic study. Gore does not surmise a remedy for the blues, she does not use her life as an anecdote to overcome defeat or as a guiding light toward beatitude, nor does she use statistics and theory to expose her education. Instead, Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness is a collection of wise womanhood, the crannies of optimism that are too often ignored.

With eloquent emotional pacing, Gore forms a convincing argument that happiness, particularly among women, has been historically understudied and oversimplified in her academic field. She asks, “How is it that psychology— once envisioned as a great healing art—has gotten to this place where our neuroses are considered so much more valid than our resiliences?” Gore bravely takes on the secret of joy by combining her personal memoirs with history, science, and first person accounts of real women experiencing real happiness. Her words have the contagious effect of positivism without the obnoxious, evangelistic ethos found so often in the self-help aisle. As Gore says herself, “I don't like to think I'm uncomfortable around cheerful people, but there's something of a missionary vibe here that seems odd…”

Perhaps there are so many of these self-help books because their authors know it's not just the ideas, but the time spent thinking about and interpreting those ideas that can actually improve lives. Just like thinking about food can make you hungrier, thinking about happiness can make you happier. If an author can induce self-reflection, they have done their part. Certainly Gore has, as she encourages us individually to use our hearts and minds to actualize a new psychology of happiness.

Using what she calls a "liberation psychology forum," hundreds of women give verbal and written feedback on issues raised by Gore. Combined, these issues allude to the macro question left open throughout the pages: whether we, at this moment, are living our lives. If our answer is no, this book proposes joy as the powerful tool that can give us “the courage to make the universe we dream.”

What Gore does is play hostess at a dinner party with a dozen fascinating women. She introduces us, and in brief encounters we are told stories of happiness, unhappiness, success and defeat. Before you know it the party is over. You drive yourself home without turning on the radio, just thinking, and you lie awake at night because you feel joy—you feel alive.

Written by: Katy Pine, January 19th 2010

Black Male Outsider: Teaching as a Pro-Feminist Man

admin — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 23:16:00 +0000

By Gary L. Lemons

SUNY Press

In this compelling, readable volume that is part memoir, part classroom case study Dr. Gary L. Lemons employs the theme of moving from silence to voice, and what this means for anti-racist, feminist pedagogy. He eloquently writes about his experiences teaching and learning in majority white classrooms as a pro-feminist, African American man.

Filled with the citations from work that has inspired and supported his pedagogy—such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Marlon Riggs, and Patricia Hill Collins, as well as quotes from the many critical autobiographical writings Lemons assigned to his students—Black Male Outsider is a powerful memoir and teaching tool. He offers educators at all levels effective strategies they can adapt to their own classrooms to teach and learn across difference and is one of the most compelling books on this subject to come out in some time.

For thirteen years Lemons was a professor at a small, progressive, liberal arts college in New York City. His book highlights his classroom strategies to challenge students to confront the interrelated forces of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia, often through teaching black, feminist literature. He also highlights how he worked to encourage students to come to a deeper understanding of the ways white supremacy has shaped American culture. To further illuminate his path to being a pro-feminist educator, Lemons also delves deeply into his own personal history of growing up in Arkansas and surviving domestic violence perpetrated by his father.

Lemons, whose doctorate is in English literature, is adept with language, and he plays with it throughout the book. Unfortunately, his many italics, parentheses, and quotation marks—while making a strong point about how institutionalized power inhabits the very language we speak—become a distraction from his otherwise clear prose. They threaten to become too cutesy for the depth with which he addresses his subjects.

Fortunately, Lemons and the students whose work he quotes provide powerful examples and testimony of the possibilities teaching across difference offers. He demonstrates how one can find strength in difference that resists a banal, depoliticized celebration of multiculturalism. He also powerfully makes the case that men can and must be feminist advocates and allies.

As Lemons writes in the conclusion, his book "promotes black feminist memoir-writing pedagogy that opposes all forms of domination, and it promotes the critical necessity of one’s movement from silence to voice about the effects of its dehumanization—personally and politically." Lemons bravery in confronting the violence social injustices wreak on society in his teaching and in his writing will serve his readers alike and equip them with knowledge a theoretical framework in which they can formulate their own ideas of how to heal from the wounds of white supremacy in their own lives.

Written by: Eleanor Whitney, April 10th 2009

Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances

admin — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 11:13:00 +0000

By Aimee Carrillo Rowe

Duke University Press

In the past year, I’ve noticed a trend towards bashing the contemporary Women’s Studies programs of U.S. universities. Mostly, I’ve heard critiques of this brand of academic feminism coming from (perhaps not surprisingly) communities of radical feminists, many of whom do not identify as scholars bound by an institution or a set of initials after their names. Myself both in the radical feminist category and also the past recipient of a gendered bachelor’s degree, I can sympathize with the range of emotions this topic can elicit. Academic feminism is known to be heteronormative, able-bodied, overwhelmingly white, and preoccupied with the concerns of middle class women. Yet academic feminists also hold considerable power—institutional power—and like it or not, that weight can benefit untold women around the world if we harness the opportunities this visibility can provide.

In Power Lines, Aimee Carrillo Rowe invites us to first examine those literal devices. Sometimes strung across major traffic intersections, sometimes buried for miles, power lines are agents of connectivity. In the same way, feminist alliances—specifically transracial ones—are our conduits of strength. The ways that feminists form alliances can reinforce and reproduce existing power structures, and drawing on nearly thirty conversations with self-styled academic feminists engaged in transracial coalition building, Carrillo Rowe examines how these alliances can be built, sustained, and the reasons why they fail.

Identity politics can be rocky terrain—commendably informative, guilt inducing, and sometimes damaging for all if not pursued with humility and compassion—but Carrillo Rowe argues that feminist alliances across individual boundaries can provide a sense of belonging, herself a living example of overlapping and conflicting identities: “a queer woman of Mexican, Anglo, and Franco descent, raised in a middle-class military family in Southern California.” Now an Associate Professor at The University of Iowa (disclosure: the very university where I received the aforementioned degree), Carrillo Rowe is in the unique position of navigating her existing identities while adding an additional label: academic. But from within the ivory tower, her voice articulates how we can move beyond the frustration of one-dimensional education and into a better space to most effectively benefit the most women through our varied positions, inside and outside of academia.

Scholars who revere Chela Sandoval and Gayatri Spivak will find another kindred researcher in their midst—assuming, of course, that they didn’t already know and lovingly consume Carrillo Rowe’s work. This examination of race, class, academic feminist theory, and transracial parternships will inform the future of disciplines ranging from rhetoric to social work. Using philosophy and feminist theory, this complex analysis will inspire the apathetic and cynical to reexamine the value of academic feminism.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, December 26th 2008

Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction

admin — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 23:24:00 +0000

By Rosemarie Tong

Westview Press

Rosemarie Tong’s Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction offers a clear, thorough introduction to feminist theory. With detailed chapters on Liberal Feminism; Radical Feminism; Marxist and Socialist Feminism; Psychoanalytic Feminism; Care-Focused Feminism; Multicultural, Global, and Postcolonial Feminism; Ecofeminism; and Postmodern and Third Wave Feminism, the book presents even-handed coverage of the major schools of feminist thought.

The chapters are on average thirty to thirty-five pages long. The text is, thus, concise enough to be useful in survey or introductory feminist theory courses. The theoretical origins of each school thought are examined, and each chapter also considers supportive and opposing views in relation to the different ‘branches’ of feminism. As such, the book offers a useful dialogue that not only reveals the important contributions of these different feminisms (and the key thinkers from each branch), but also scrutinizes the unexamined assumptions and biases in each approach.

While portions of the book are dry and a bit tedious to wade through, this is understandable given the wide-ranging coverage and the textbook type format. It would be difficult for any author, even one as obviously well-versed in feminist theory as Tong, to share a history of feminist thought that didn’t sometimes tend towards an encyclopedic style. Moreover, even though the coverage of primary sources becomes wearisome at times (especially for readers already well versed in feminist theory), the comprehensive approach that considers the strengths and weaknesses of each theoretical branch is well worth wading through (and particularly useful for those new to feminist theory).

One area that seems missing in this revised addition is a consideration of transnational feminism. An overview of this branch, especially considering its current importance to the field, would have improved the chapter entitled “Multicultural, Global, and Postcolonial Feminism.” Another missing area of feminist thought is sexuality studies and queer theory. Given the explosive growth of these branches of thought, this seems an odd omission. However, in spite of these absences, the book is certainly a very useful introduction to feminist thought. In addition to being useful for survey courses in feminist theory, the book also serves as a great reference text to have on hand, especially given the excellent bibliography.

Written by: Professor What If, October 21st 2008

Southeastern Women’s Studies Association Conference 2008: Frontiers of Feminism at Home and Abroad (4/3-4/5/08)

admin — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 02:42:00 +0000

Southeastern Women’s Studies Association

Charlotte, North Carolina

Since its first meeting in Atlanta in 1977, the Southeastern Women’s Studies Association (SEWSA) has consistently been the most active of the regional organizations of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) and has served academics, activists, community leaders, and students as a source of professional inspiration, mutual support, a network of shared information and experience, and a connection to the emergence of global feminism. This year’s conference, held this past weekend in Charlotte, NC, may have been its most successful event yet, with more than 300 people registered and brilliant keynote addresses by bell hooks, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Cynthia Enloe, and Rosie Tong.

Fausto-Sterling, Professor of Biology at Brown University, gave the first keynote entitled “Not Your Grandmother’s Biology: Towards a New Science of Sex, Desire and Race.” Even as someone who never managed to look through a microscope successfully, and a bit baffled by her flow-charts and scientific lingo, I was nonetheless excited by her presentation on epigenetics, which I believe concerns how genes are expressed—that is, how the environment interacts with genes to make us who we are.

Her work reframes the old nature/nature duality with a much more complex picture of gendered identity. Perhaps most exciting of all was the sense she conveyed that a great number of profoundly important scientific discoveries are being made that will continue to enrich our understanding of ourselves.

The many panel presentations were consistently excellent. The papers revealed an intensely diverse and transnational scope, with relatively few of us still rooted in the Eurocentric tradition. The other development that struck me was a sort of “back to the future”—the re-energized emergence of a vocal LGBTQ Caucus; lesbian scholars and activists had been at the intellectual and organizational heart of SEWSA at its founding and had been less active in recent years, so the full and enthusiastic participation of the Caucus was exciting, indeed.

Enloe’s talk was brilliant, but agonizing: she personalized the suffering that the Iraqi War has perpetrated, both in Iraq and in the United States, and the extent to which almost all of us are forced to be complicit in its violence. She wove threads of connection between a mother in Wisconsin whose son was mutilated in Iraq and a hair stylist in Iraq who serves as a conduit for stories of kidnapping, rape, and unimaginable trauma.

The highlight of the convention for many of us was the presentation of bell hooks. In advance of her talk, the conference honored its revitalized Women of Color Caucus with a reception. Both the reception and her talk drew a tremendous gathering, rather remarkable, as Hooks noted, for a late Friday afternoon—and with Bill Clinton holding a rally in the building next door! Her message was one of love and reconciliation. Perhaps our most eminent African American feminist theorist, she is also—quite obviously—a warm and powerful teacher, and we were all eager students. Her talk theorized the importance of place, as signified by her own longing for her Kentucky roots in spite of its virulent racism and sexism, as well as the importance of place throughout the many travels that led her to New York.

For those who have felt despair at the current state of the world and frustrated by what seems sometimes the futility of our efforts to protest or advocate change, the conference was a reminder that there are many forms of activism and that our solidarity—in and because of our diversity—can offer us a sense of renewal and hope.

Written by: Rick Taylor, April 9th 2008

Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy

admin — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 11:51:00 +0000

By Candace M. Jenkins

University Of Minnesota Press

Why is contemporary African American literature — particularly that produced by black women — continually concerned with issues of respectability and propriety? Her first book, Private Lives, Proper Relations, Candace M. Jenkins looks at how African American writers express the political consequences of intimacy for the susceptible black subject. Jenkins argues that this fascination grew from recurrent beliefs about African American sexuality, and that it expresses a basic aspect of the racial self: an often unexpressed link between the intimate and the political in black culture.

Jenkins’s analysis of black women’s narratives — including Ann Petry’s The Street, Toni Morrison’s Sula and Paradise, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man — offers a theory of black subjectivity. Here Jenkins describes how the middle-class tries to save the black community from accusations of sexual and domestic oddity by embracing traditionally “normal” values and behavior. Unfortunately behind those efforts there is the implied “doubled vulnerability” of the black intimate subject: racial scrutiny and the proximity of human intimacy.

This book was not an easy read for me. I had a very hard time getting into it. I must say, however, that the content is illuminating and definitely worth the time invested if you stick with it. For anyone interested in Women’s Studies and studies of gender, sexuality and class in African American literature, particularly that of the 20th century, this book is for you. _Private Lives, Proper Relations _is a powerful contribution to the crucial effort to end the distortion still surrounding black intimacy in the United States.

Written by: Gina Hobbs, September 7th 2007

The Women of the House: How a Colonial She-Merchant Built a Mansion, a Fortune, and a Dynasty

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 22:10:00 +0000

By Jean Zimmerman

Harcourt

Margaret Hardenbroeck Philipse, the first woman to build her own lavish fortune in the New World, had the Midas touch when it came to trading everything from furs to slaves in seventeenth century colonial Manhattan, then called New Amsterdam. When Margaret arrived on a ship from Holland, she was only twenty-two years old, independent and determined to “squeeze the honey out of this land, to transform that honey into gold.” By the time of her death a few decades later, Margaret had created a vast real estate empire from Albany to Barbados, commandeered a fleet of trading ships that carried slaves, furs, tobacco, textiles and molasses, and set the tone for the dynasty to follow into the next century.

What’s most fascinating about the book – even more than the character portrayal of Margaret herself, which at some points verges on a clichéd portrait of obsessive greed, ‘workaholism’ and zero empathy for the exploited – is Zimmerman’s tight zoom into the cultural mores of the times. We learn in thrilling detail the progressive, permissive laws of the Dutch and their embrace of equal rights for women vs. the oppressive patriarchal English who later take over New Amsterdam without firing a single shot.

The wealth of historical detail continues as the book shifts to mini-portraits of the women, who follow in formidable Margaret’s wake, on the grand Westchester estate called Philipse Manor Hall: Catherine Van Cortlandt Philipse, who wed Margaret’s widowed husband Frederick and built a grand church; Joanna Brockholst Philipse, the ultimate political wife who married Margaret’s grandson, and Joanna’s daughter, Mary Philipse Morris, the “It” girl of the mid-1700s.

It’s the American dream with a feminist twist: spirit, determination, genius, resourcefulness, and setbacks such slave revolts and the American Revolution, after which the dynasty was tarred as Loyalist.

I wonder when I come upon an inspiring book like this, why still there is persistence to either not mention, or gloss over, the roles of women in American history whose contributions surpassed the traditional role of wife and mother. Margaret – twice married, a mother of five and a flinty woman, who created enough wealth to claim a place as the richest woman in New York in her time – deserves a prominent mention in American history books. Thankfully, Jean Zimmerman gives this incredibly remarkable and accomplished woman her due.

Written by: Cheryl Reeves, March 13th 2007