On classrooms, women, and rage (with thanks to Jo Scott Coe)

Now that most teaching in the Humanities and in K-12 is done by women, does this mean that feminist issues are bypassed in the classroom? Women have power, after all. We stand at the front of the room. We wield the chalk or the marker, and we wield grades, and signatory sheets on Ph.D. examinations.  We are, some argue, clearly in the post-feminist phase of education. 

Gender problems solved!  Hooray! 

But I’m seeing something different.  There is still – at least in education (and I suspect elsewhere) -- a persistent questioning of women in authority:  with the authorizing of women as agents of expertise, mastery, and judgment.  And those problems come – more often than not – from other women.   

I am seeing it come from younger women.  Whether these students see me as their evil mother, grandmother, or babysitter is unclear. But what is clear is the rage that I see many young women bringing into the classroom.  And it is sometimes directed against me personally.  Such a thing happened to me recently.  Twice.

Other versions of this story circulate. It isn’t always inter-generational.

A young female colleague has confessed to me that she has the same problem.  She has a female graduate student who persistently seeks to undercut her, subvert what she is doing in class.  She feels disrespected. She is disrespected.  She tried talking to the student.  The student had a fit and said she was being disrespected.  The result? Silence. The long-standing hate-filled, pursed-lipped silence between women. The power struggle that dare not speak its name.  Another instance of feminist solidarity broken apart, ruined, spoiled.  Tainted.

Who do we talk to about this?  Students have the ombudsperson.  To whom do female professors and teachers go?  We have no one. Are we being “harassed”?  Not exactly.  Are we being physically threatened?  No.  But my colleague and I are being undermined. What office do you go to for that? 

I don’t know how to begin, even, to talk about this semi-spoken rage, this Schopenhauerian ressentiment that circulates between women teachers, graduate students, and undergraduate students and that radiates outward to staff (an increasingly female cohort) – making education a practice in bitchery, incompetence, and denial.

But I want to name it. 

There are exceptions to this trend of course. Wonderful relationships that develop between women teachers, and women grad students, and undergraduates.  I work with an undergraduate staff person, whom I admire deeply.  I believe that we are good colleagues. 

But there are these other power-relations. 

And these ones are not good. 

I scan my student roster nervously.  I fear to see certain female names on it. 

And fear in education is never a positive thing.

I speak this fear because I do not believe it is necessary or inevitable; I address the problem of rage, in hopes that we can change the way we interact with each other now that we have – finally – managed to enter the corridors of power. 

I speak it because I think we can’t get to the next place – the next stage of freedom  (be it 4^th wave or 5^th wave feminism)– until we fix this unspoken, repressed and unaddressed problem in the ways that we interact with each other in the increasingly "feminized" but not yet truly feminist educational arena.

Barbé Maria Tirtov-Romanov Hammer, 1920-1999

Sonnet for the one

We did not hug or kiss much. We loved most when we shopped.
When I was fat, she bore witness in the dressing rooms at Saks;
I sobbed and screamed at shorts that would not squeeze on. I mopped
Up the tears. She sat and smiled like the Buddha, accepting. Back
At Schraffts I vowed to diet after a hot fudge sundae. “My last
One,” I declared. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not.” Then I got thin at camp.
She nodded, agreed it was probably smart, but she herself resisted
social svelteness, lounged luxuriant in folds of flesh at Bonwits, as I vamped
formal wear and blue jeans, coats, shoes, at Bloomies and I forget where else.
Oh yes, the GAP -- when my father died. She sent me there for a purple dress.
“Black is boring,” she said. “So expected.” Until her last year she pressed
Me to buy “a decent outfit” with her hard earned cash. The final gift felt
Extravagant: A pair of moss green shoes from France. She was generous –
I had forgotten that. Remember now the sizing of the love we shared. Enormous.

On professorial privilege

I feel so overworked and so under-appreciated (not to mention underpaid) at the university these days, that I tend to see the humanities professor – particularly a non-researching one, such as myself – as a low-level bureaucrat. We go to endless meetings, and as an occasional treat, we get to “entertain the kids” a bit like a clown at a birthday party. I don’t feel respected very much either. My students think I’m a weird older person (which is certainly true), and my colleagues think I’m a loser scholar who is now messing around with poetry and fiction, instead of doing what she’ is supposed to do (research) and really ACHIEVING something in THE WORLD OF IDEAS (sometimes, I think they are right).

Because life is hard in the academy, and it is really hard in the University of California system, and it is REALLY REALLY hard at the poor campuses (Riverside and Merced), it’s easy to forget that professors possess considerable privilege, and if they are white, upper class, heterosexual, able, and CIS (I just learned that term from my daughter [thanks to a wonderful former student for the spelling correction]), then they -- which means we -- have all of that privilege on top of the professor thing.

When you are a professor you convey mastery, genius, knowledge, expertise, and a certain scary something that means you are the authority (pronounced a la Eric Cartman) in the room. No one (other than a tycoon or another professor [especially in the sciences]) is going to fuck with you. It’s a little bit like male privilege, frankly, in so far as you get to swing your Lacanian knowledge phallus around the joint, or threaten to. And the threat is enough, generally, to create a certain awed hush, a reverent expectation, whenever you open your mouth to make a cultural pronouncement.

Folks, that’s power.

The fact of my own privilege was brought home to me last night, when I joined a table of high-school teachers and community college teachers all gathered to celebrate a mutual friend’s book publication. These teachers were all bright, attractive, younger, middle class and white.

And you know what? I scared them.

I scared them because they had learned already that I was OF THE UNIVERSITY. They were quiet. Until, I used the word ”bitch” and promised someone to guard his or her drink. Then the situation shifted.

Professors are rightfully busy and proactive in protecting their rights, fighting against tuition fee raises, and trying to battle for thinking in the increasingly commodified university. BUT, we usually forget and dismiss our sibs, our partners in arms, our -- in a very real sense – comrades in k-12, and in community colleges. Teachers regard academics as the enemy, because we often are the enemy. Or at best, we are semi-interested liege lords presiding over the lands supervised and tilled by our vassals and our vassals’ vassals.

I think we need to name the ways in which we are privileged, and begin the uncomfortable and necessary process of stepping away from that privilege, rolling it up into a box marked “HISTORY”, and moving on from it. So that we in education can all help each other, as well as model some actually progressive behavior for our students. So we can get some real intellectual work done.

on no news

There isn't very much happening right now. There is this silence, that isn't deafening -- a kind of pause, before life starts up again. I am not writing today, and I am not working much either. This afternoon I talked online with a small group of students about Haruki Murakami. Nothing earth-shattering happened, but it was a pleasing exchange. Today someone recommended a book. I went through the mail, and brought my husband a bagel. My daughter is sitting and drawing and writing. We are not talking. My husband wanted to eat by himself in his office. That felt fine.

Sometimes less is more, and sometimes, nothingness feels full. Last night it rained, and my husband said "can you hear it raining?" I couldn't so I stepped out of our bedroom door; we have a door now that opens on to the backyard. Our backyard isn't anything special, but I stood in the doorway and heard the rain. I'd heard it before. I will hopefully hear it again. But this time, I heard the silence between the raindrops, and in the space between the water, there was a sense of arrival on the edge of something that is beyond nothing -- where all opposites meet, coalesce and transform.

On Dangerous Teaching

Give me danger little stranger
And I’ll feel your disease

I feel every quarter that the classroom is becoming an increasingly dangerous place for me. Dangerous, existentially, politically and psychologically, although I realize that there are other more immediate dangers.

But this danger feels insidious.

Why? Because I no longer have confidence in the Socratic method. Dangerous because I no longer feel that (my) enthusiasm is enough to carry the weight of my students’ needs – needs that are amorphous and complicated. Their need to know grammar, their need to learn how to retain information. Their need to learn – in a very real way – how to think, how to argue, how to analyze. And most importantly, (or not) – my need for them to care about such things.

When I was a young teacher, teaching was about a solo performance: look at me! like me! think I’m smart! think I’m talented: love German, or French or Don Quixote. Now I know it is dangerous at worst and unproductive at best for teachers to seek “love” from their students. Adulation from a chair desk is the cheapest form of admiration. You are grading the person in that chair desk. Are you really going to grade them on how much they appear to love you? No. And what kind of love is that anyway? They don’t know you and you don’t really know them either. You know each other’s behaviors – your social performances in that panoptical space that is the classroom.

But I think my most recent fall from the grace of teaching was when a student informed me that I made it impossible to learn. I was and continue to be haunted by that assertion. Of course it was a terrifically “mean” thing to say to a teacher. But, the problem is: it may be true. It may be all my attempts to engage students through increasingly avant-garde, and unsocratic sets of interventions, are not engaging at all but just alienating (without the pedagogical effect that Brecht hoped for). Friends and family have urged me to forget this student’s statement – despite the fact that it was fairly recent. But I cannot and will not. Because isn’t it even more dangerous – for me and for the people I teach – that I deny all negative assessments, and insist uncategorically, as one colleague does repeatedly, that “I’m a good teacher”?

And so I return to the uncertain, treacherous place that is the classroom. This is not to say that this place is not interesting, compelling, and at times rewarding. But it sure feels scary. A tightrope, where the audience doesn’t know enough yet to decide whether they are with you, or not.

But

An audience that is also on tightropes, walking carefully, hoping to get through college, and not flunk, hoping to get a non-existent job that will pay non-existent benefits. Hoping that the acrobatics of college courses will open up opportunities. And with every step sensing that that reality is no longer viable. Yes, students walk the tightropes too, and the fall is longer. Deeper.

But cancel that. Today, right after I posted, I met a woman at the yarn store. Wearing cat eye glasses a hundred necklaces and a huge plastic cocktail ring, she teaches Communications at UCLA. Untenured.

I TELL THEM THEY DON"T KNOW HOW TO TALK, she cackles at me over enormous knitting needles.

"You terrify and confuse me," one student told her.

"Good," she said.

On Plates

In her first novel about amnesiac detective William Monk, Anne Perry describes scene after scene of complex formal dining among landed gentry, wherein everyone changes for dinner, and the women must be escorted into the dining room by a man. Shamefully, if not enough men were present, the women would have to walk in by themselves. In one particular scene, a gentrified but poor female visitor gazes at the linen, the silver cutlery, the side of mutton, and the empty conversation, as the invisible maids and footmen pass the food around. The protagonist looks down at her ornate china plate. Not knowing what safe subject to raise with her aristocratic hosts.

These descriptions make me think immediately – in a kind of BLINK reaction -- of my grandmother Stephanya Romanov standing triumphantly in her Southampton beach house and announcing “Soup’s on!” to me, my parents, and my grandfather.

You need to see the scene: my grandmother was about 4’’ 10” and she would be wearing a hand-me-up Snoopy sweatshirt that said TO DANCE IS TO LIVE (appropriate for an ex Ballet Russe dancer), and corduroy pants, that I think also may have been mine. She would be smiling her enormous smile --

After this announcement we would sit down to macaroni and cheese or hot dogs or hamburgers, or a truly weird chili-like concoction served on aqua colored Texasware plastic plates. It must be noted that my grandfather – who was the real Romanov (my grandmother being the descendent of some minor Russian aristocrat) – resisted this laissz-faire attitude somewhat. He typically wore a smoking jacket and a scarf stuck with a pearl pin to such meals. That was his idea of country-wear. And his George Harrison style Beatle wig. He was an artist, though, and could be eccentric.

I never entirely understood my grandmother’s fascination with the casual. My grandfather was a gifted dress designer and made all of my grandmother’s clothes. They lived in a Manhattan townhouse packed with chinoiserie, musical instruments, and books. They went to the opera and had sophisticated, artistic, bohemian (read, Gay and Lesbian) friends. They stayed out till all hours.

Yet, my grandmother lived for her Snoopy sweatshirt and pants, and walking her 3 dogs in the country. She loved her plastic plates. And she loved eating in the kitchen, where you could see wild swans in the distance honking in a pond across the road.

Reading Anne Perry, I think I get it. My grandmother was born in 1900. She must have known and attended the aristocratic dinners that Anne Perry describes. Her own mother was a feminist, a writer and a graduate of Wellesley. All that propriety. Formality. Not to mention corsetry. And of course, my grandmother’s mother couldn’t vote, and my grandmother watched her own mother opine at the table without a legal voice. It’s hard to remember that these freedoms for women are very recent.

So it makes sense that pea soup and mac and cheese would be glorious, and that a sweatshirt and a pair of pants would be pieces of clothing that would be fabulously, subversively comfortable, washable, easy to move in. Fun.

And plastic plates? Plates that were unbreakable, dishwasher safe, and equally important – something anyone could buy or afford. Not china. Not precious, and because of that, even more valued. Loved.

What are my favorite plates at home? And my husband’s? You know the answer. Those aqua colored Texasware plates that I inherited from my grandmother and brought out here to California.

Soup’s on, everyone!

Sock Legends

In the interest of world peace and harmony, I am sharing a story that was published in the Mochila Review in Spring 2009. Feel free to disseminate, but please credit me and the Mochila Review. Happy Rosh Hashanah and happy fall!


Once upon a time there was a little sock that lived in a sock drawer along with T-shirts and underpants in a blue dresser in somebody’s room. The sock had lost its twin long ago and, having no sibling to talk to, spent most of his time in the darkness of the drawer, listening to the other socks discuss the matters of the day.

A pressing issue among the sock population had become how the world was made and organized. The socks talked endlessly and sometimes so vehemently about this question that the drawer handles rattled and the T-shirts and underpants had to knock on the bottom and top of the drawer to ensure a little peace and quiet.

“Those socks need to learn how to get along,“ said the T-shirts to each other.

“Those socks certainly entertain high-falutin’ ideas,” observed the underpants.

“That’s because there are so many of them,” said the long johns, who had gotten thrown in the underpants drawer by mistake.

But it was certainly true that the socks argued a great deal about credos and creeds.
One corner of the drawer favored the theory of a One Sock Above All Others, who created sockdom, underpantsdom, and T-shirtdom. The OSAAO had decided that the socks were the chosen garments, perhaps because of their duality, and gave them special laws of conduct. Thus it was believed, according to this segment of the sock population, that the original socks had been created in a sort of divine factory by the OSAAO. The first socks were then forced to leave and travel—just how, no one knew—to the sock drawer itself.

The little sock listened to the stories of wandering and exile, of the attempt to create order out of the chaos of a drawer, and of the need for laws: All knee-highs together at the front; all crew socks at the back and pastels in the middle.
Orphaned socks, like our little sock here, were to be placed near the front but not quite, so they could wait and hope for the coming of their long-lost twin. Only then could they go out into the world like the other socks, who did (it must be admitted) exit the drawer from time to time.

Another group of socks fervently disagreed. These were the socks that lived at the opposite corner of the drawer. They maintained that yes, of course there was an Original Sock Creator, but there had been, and would be again, a Son of Sock, who taught that love was more important than rules and that believing was more important than doing. These socks got tangled up with each other and often ended up in a giggly pile that kept on saying how much they loved each other. Sometimes they even rearranged themselves into nonmatching pairs, and out they went in the world and sometimes did not, sad to say, come back at all.

These two groups argued a lot about the law versus emotion, about duty versus inspiration, and, often, the little sock did not understand what in the world they were talking about. Why did one side get so angry? (The chosen sock group.) And why did the other group go from sudden laughter to rage and then to abject tears when anyone disagreed? (The Son of Sock contingent.)

That’s when the third group showed up. The third sock consortium consisted primarily of tightly woven business socks. Adult-looking, they could be beige, argyle, black, brown, or blue, but rarely white, and almost never pastel. They congregated at the very front of the drawer, pushing hard against those who had come before, and they insisted—loudly—that they needed to be stationed there so as to be ready to make the Great Sock Journey. All socks must travel, the new arrivals said, to the place where the famous Sock Soothsayer received his written instructions, dictated directly from the Sock Maker Himself.

A lot of socks didn’t like these newcomers. The new business socks were quite aggressive, and they told the other socks they were stupid if they didn’t agree with them and that they were going to end up in the trash if they didn’t behave. On the other hand, they told wonderful jokes and were big huggers. If they liked you, they would say “SOCK!” and embrace you. After that they were always your friends.

The little sock didn’t know what to think. He had a feeling that believing was important, and he missed his long-lost twin, whom, at this point, he could barely remember. He decided, despite his doubts, to go on the Great Sock Journey, and when the Newcomers jumped into the laundry basket, he hid himself underneath a big argyle sock and jumped too.

Oh, dear! What a mistake, thought the little sock as he found himself immersed in freezing cold water and not in the usual hot of distant memory.

“That’s to protect our colors, foolish little one,” said Argyle haughtily. The little sock got thrown around in the agitating cold water. But along the way he met a kind T-shirt who swept him up in his shoulder.

“Just hang on there, young fella,” said the T-shirt. “I’ll protect you from the worst of the buffeting. Then we go into the driving desert, and we can talk as we spin around.”

And hardly had he spoken when they whirled madly in violent circles and then got tossed into a dry and hot enclosure.

This is like the original Sock Journey some of my people talked about, thought the little sock, and so he spoke to the T-shirt as they settled into a comfortable, warm spin.

“Oh ho,” chortled the T-shirt when he heard about the various sock disputes. “So this is what you all are caterwauling about in that overcrowded drawer of yours.” The T-shirt unfolded its neck so as to better enjoy the warm drying air.

“The difficulty with your view is that it places socks at the veritable center of the universe,” said the T-shirt, extending his arms and allowing the little sock to rest comfortably against the belly of the shirt.

“But it excludes everyone else. What of T-shirts? What of underpants?”

“Gosh,” said the little sock. “I never thought of that.”

The little sock was beginning to feel wonderfully dry, and as he nestled in the smooth cotton of the shirt, he asked his older acquaintance to share some other ways of believing.

The T-shirt—who had clearly spent much time in the great world outside—happily obliged.

“There are views of the universe that there were many makers, not just one, and many helpers, not just a son. Some say there was no maker at all and that the world as we know it—filled with drawers and textiles and water and heat—just happened. A kind of wonderful chance.”

That possibility frightened the little sock a bit. Could there really be no plan at all? He shared his fear with his new friend.

“So, what do I do now?” asked the little sock.

“I think,” said the T-shirt, “you just try to live well, behave kindly to others, and be happy.”

“And my twin?” asked the little sock.

“There, you have a real problem,” said the T-shirt, “and you may indeed decide that a quest beyond the limits of the laundry will be necessary. For that you will need to find a foot, and the foot will take you where you need to go.”

The air grew still. The little sock felt himself pulled out of the space. As he called good-bye the T-shirt called cheerily after him.

“Go forth, young sock.”

The little sock felt himself slipped around something large and fleshy, and he saw himself covering wriggling, wormlike monsters. The monsters waved to him, and he felt himself encasing a being larger than himself but still small.

Is this the Sock Maker? he thought, but no. And, yet, imagine the little sock’s delight when he heard a thunderous voice roar. “Mommy, here’s my missing sock!”
As the little sock looked sideways, he saw his long-lost twin covering a similar set of five monsters.

His twin smiled brightly as, above their heads, the old T-shirt stretched tight across a huge, flat expanse.

“Now, the adventure really begins,” the T-shirt shouted merrily.

And the three sallied forth, searching for their truths.