So today I, and by "I" I mean "Bitch," made her first public appearance, delivering a keynote address (ooh la la!) for an unnamed conference in a bucolic town where my graduate school friend owns a lovely (and huge!) old house with a backyard that goes down to a pretty little creek. Damnit. If I had to get a job in east nowhere, why couldn't it have been someplace with low housing costs and attractive quaintness?
Ah well. The conference was fun, and the other presentations really interesting--one was of a feminist videogame project that I sincerely hope the presenter copyrights and sells--and the q&a afterwards was low-key and friendly.
Oh, you wanna know what I said? Okay. Here it is. If you read the whole thing, there's a PK story at the end for you.
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I am not a scholar of feminism. I’ve never read Judith Butler, or Julia Kristeva, or Helene Cixous, whose name I’m probably not even pronouncing correctly. I’ve read a little bit of Gloria Anzaldua, but don’t remember it in detail, and I’ve only encountered bell hooks in passing. I’m not even all that up on the non-academic feminists: I’ve read some Friedan and Adrienne Rich and Virginia Woolf, of course, but really I don’t think I could pass in a Women’s Studies department.
Which makes me all the more pleased that you’ve invited Bitch Ph.D., who I refer to affectionately as “Bitch,” to deliver your keynote speech today. I started the blog in order to talk about my own reality as a feminist and a scholar, to work through some of the issues involved in being, not a Feminist Scholar, but a feminist scholar in the colloquial, everyday sense of the term. If I had known at the beginning that the blog would end up where it is, with about 4,000 readers a day, I don’t know that I would have had the courage to talk about my private angst in so public and anonymous a forum. I would have feared that the surprisingly rare trolls, who write things like “you don’t deserve to be teaching” and “you’re obviously a terrible wife and mother,” would have been the majority of my audience.
But in fact, that hasn’t happened; the trolls are surprisingly rare, and surprisingly easy to ignore, and in fact Bitch has become quite popular in feminist academic circles, and even outside of them. More important than the feared trolls are the readers who write to talk about their angst and ambiguity as women in academia, their own doubts about whether they belong, their own struggles balancing work and relationships, their own depression and stress, their own worries and realities. What Bitch has made me realize, and what I think she helps them to realize, is the truth of the second-wave feminist maxim, “the personal is political.” Real feminism, I think, has always recognized that the stories of real women’s real lives--the kinds of things that many people want to dismiss as “just your problem” or “oh, quit complaining,” or “you have it really good, you know, compared to coal miners/women in Afghanistan/Chinese sweatshop laborers” (and let’s not even get into the implicit classism and racism involved in trying to undermine feminism by pitting it against poor people or brown people)--real feminism has always recognized that these stories do matter, and that, when we tell them, we find out that it isn’t just our own, individual problem, that it isn’t just complaining, and that some of the difficulties we have actually have a lot in common with the difficulties of workers who don’t have many options for decent pay or safe working conditions, or with women whose social status is so low that they don’t have the right to appear in public. Those problems, like the problems feminism identifies, aren’t just personal; they aren’t just the result of “bad choices” or “the way things are” or “women’s need for protection.” Instead, what we begin to realize once we tell our stories is that we aren’t alone, that our experiences are shaped, in part, by social structures that we don’t control or even always see, and that these structures, which are after all created by people, can be changed.
Which means, of course, that another popular anti-feminist argument, that feminism portrays women as victims, is also untrue. If social systems, created by people, can be changed by people; and if feminism, by making us aware of these systems, also makes us aware that they can be changed; and if feminism also goes on to suggest and discuss and act on different ways of changing things, then obviously feminism isn’t about victimization. It’s about power and human agency. When people say that there are lots of different kinds of feminisms, they’re right: feminists don’t all agree on the shape of social structures, or which ones need changing, or how to change those that do.
What we have in common, though, is the belief that individual experiences, individual stories, matter. That people’s lives and problems shouldn’t be dismissed as “just personal,” because after all, we are persons; there’s no such thing as “just” personal in the world of people.
Which is why, obviously, Bitch--and here I mean the blog, not the persona--is so popular. Because really, of course, it’s a personal blog: it’s just one person’s, my, thoughts and opinions about this stuff. Sometimes it talks about these things in general terms, as I’m doing now; sometimes it tells stories that illustrate them (everyone seems to love PK); sometimes it talks about legislation or politics or cultural debates on issues that help shape the world in which stories and experiences happen. I think that, in many ways, Bitch’s anonymity--or perhaps I should say, pseudonymity--is a major part of the blog’s appeal, and of hers. As I said at the beginning, I don’t know that I would have started the blog if I’d known how large its audience was; but when I started it, I did so anonymously because I feared being “found out.” I didn’t want my colleagues to know that I was rethinking my job, or questioning my academic ambition; I didn’t want my family to know about my sex life; I didn’t want my colleagues to know about my sex life. But then the anonymity turned into something other than just a mask.
A few months into the blog,
Amardeep Singh, who keeps a blog of his own, said in passing somewhere that he didn’t want to know who Bitch was, because he preferred to see her as “everycolleague,” and I think that’s right. In the real world, the line between private and public thoughts, especially in the workplace, is fairly definite, if not always clear. But--and of course this is a feminist statement--that line is a false one: after all, professionals are people, and while everyone plays different roles at different times, all those roles are played by one person. Bitch exists to cover up my anxiety about the blurring of my own personal, professional and (as things evolved) political opinions; but because she isn’t a real person, she can be all those things at once.
Well, let me amend that. Part of my argument, of course, is that real people are all those things at once. What I mean to say is that the social structures we’re working and living in define “work” and “life,” or “personal” and “political,” like “private” and “public,” as separate spheres. So it can be very difficult to talk about these categories together, because we’re used to thinking of them as conceptually separate, even if we realize that in our own lives and stories, they overlap. As a persona rather than a person, Bitch *demonstrates* the overlap as well as talking about it, and I suspect that on some level that’s a big part of the blog’s popularity. It’s kind of amazing, if you think about it, to have the same blog linked by both mommy bloggers and the big boy political blogs. Which are, of course, virtually all written by boys--but that’s a different issue.
Or actually, maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s the same issue: if mommies are personal, and politics are public, then by extension the personal is feminine--which leaves the public, masculine. But the thing is, it isn’t that women are interested in the personal stuff and men the political; while it’s easier, perhaps, to associate “personal” with “women” and “public” or “political” with men, of course those terms aren’t essentialized like that. In fact, Amardeep Singh, who I quoted earlier, is a man. And there are, in fact, tons of men out there writing blogs more or less like mine, blogs that blend the personal and the public--especially academic blogs by junior professors.
Which I think gets at another important point about feminism. If blending the personal and the political, or the private and the public, is intrinsically feminist (and I think that it is), then the fact that men need to do it too, that male academics also feel this stress about whether or not they belong, whether or not they’re smart enough, whether or not they really want to be doing this, demonstrates the usefulness of feminism within the academy (and by extension, the world outside the academy). This is the kumbaya moment: feminism frees everybody! That’s a little bit of a joke, but I actually do believe it. If the world is divided into binaries, then one set of people might get the shitty end of the stick, but the other set is still holding a stick with shit on it. Maybe we should find another stick to play with.
But I’ve blathered on too long in these general terms. Having said that the appeal of Bitch, and the basis of feminism, is the personal story, let me share a couple with you. The first is on this question of academic angst; the second will be a PK story.
A few months ago, I went to another conference, the annual meeting of the professional society to which I (as opposed to Bitch) belong. I happen to really like this conference, and this year I was running a workshop about mentoring for the women’s caucus. A couple of nights before, over the wine and cheese meet and greet (or, as I like to call them, shmooze and booze), a friend of mine had introduced me to a friend of his. My friend, let’s call him Ted, had just taken a new job in order to be near his partner, who works in another state. His old job was one where he’d been really unhappy (though it was, within the terms of the academic hierarchy, a “good job,” which is to say, a research university with a fairly moderate teaching load). His new job was at a branch campus in a smaller state: again, in academic hierarchy terms, a “step down.” But he was really, really happy about the move.
His friend, let’s name him Ira, talked about a move he’d made, for similar reasons. Ira had gotten a job in a big state system; ten days before he moved away, he met a woman. They started doing the long-distance thing and after one year on the job, he quit and moved back to marry her. Everyone told him that he was committing career suicide by quitting a tenure-track job, but he did it anyway. He adjuncted for three or four years, and then wound up with another t-t job at a perfectly respectable urban university; he’s much happier with the students there than he was at his first job, the teaching load is better, and he’s really happy with his work.
So: two stories about things that aren’t “supposed” to happen. You’re not supposed to leave a “good” job for a “lesser” one; you’re not supposed to quit a job for a relationship, especially not a new one. I invited both of them to come to the women’s caucus workshop, telling them that in my experience, the women’s caucus workshop (being feminist and all) was always a fantastic panel precisely because it always addressed these kinds of personal / professional issues directly, and because the discussions were always well-attended, lively, and interesting. Ira said, “I don’t think we’re allowed to go to those, are we?” I promised to give him a feminist ghetto pass, and he laughed; as it turned out, he was presenting at the same time, but Ted did come to the workshop and said later that it was the best one he’d ever attended.
The final part of this story (and then we’ll get to PK). After the panel, I spotted a woman who I thought I’d earlier overheard someone addressing by name; if I had caught her name correctly, she was a woman whose work had been really important to my dissertation. I went over to her, asked if I was right about her name (I was), and thanked her for writing a great book that I’d found really useful in my own work. She said “thank you so much for telling me that. I published the book between jobs, and so I missed the conference that year and didn’t get a chance to hear how it was being received except by reading reviews.” I asked her, “between jobs?” and it turned out that yes--like the other two people in this story, she had left a “good” job without a safety net. Her situation was that her job was in a region where, because of her background and ethnicity, she felt really out of place; so when her husband, who also had a job at a university in that area, got a new position closer to "home", she quit, followed him, had a baby, wrote her book, and landed a new job at a good liberal arts college a couple of years later.
I confessed to her that I was thinking of doing the same thing. She asked me to dinner, and I asked if I could bring Ted; she agreed, and then Ted went to collect Ira, and the four of us went out for high-end Chinese food, over which we talked about the similarity of each of our stories, the way that the job/partner tension always gets framed as a “woman’s problem” (and yet, two of the people at the table were men), and the way that these stories never get told, so that people believe that it’s “career suicide” if you quit a tenure-track job, especially if you do so in order to follow a partner. I’ve had people warn me about this myself; and I’ve worried about it a lot. But after that dinner, I think I can say that, at best, it might be career suicide, but that obviously it isn’t a foregone conclusion. And that men as well as women face this decision. And that this “woman’s problem,” which is a real one, is a feminist problem: that is, it’s a “personal” problem that is created by social structures (“if you quit for your partner, you’re not really serious about your career”; “academic jobs are impossible to get”; “to get an academic job you have to be ready to move wherever the job is, and be happy about it”), social structures that affect both women and men--even if, because of other social structures (“women are private; men are public”) it’s a problem that women are more aware of, and perhaps more affected by, than men are.
At least, it’s a problem that we are more willing to talk about, or that we have created alternate structures--pseudonymous personae, women’s caucuses--in order to talk about. It’s no coincidence that the women’s caucus workshop was about mentoring: I had proposed the topic because I have always found the women’s caucus in my professional organization to be amazingly reassuring, kind of the way Bitch apparently is to a lot of people. And this is precisely because the old-school feminists who founded the caucus tell their stories. They put together workshops that are not on their “real” areas of expertise, but are about academia more generally. They deliberately refuse to pay attention to “who one is,” in the status sense that often goes on at academic conferences, where people will glance at your nametag and institutional affiliation to see if you are someone who is “worth” talking to, or if you’re just nobody. The women in my discipline’s women’s caucus glance at your nametag too--and then they talk to you even if you are nobody. In fact, they remember your name the next year. They sit at your table in the women’s caucus luncheon, solicit your ideas for next year, and put you forward to chair workshops when the idea is approved. And when you, nobody, email some of the most important women in your field to ask them to participate, they agree to do so immediately. And then you are one of them.
And this, I think, is a much better way of doing academic work than the more alienating, hierarchy-driven model that we’re all used to thinking of as "the way academia works." We object to it, but still feel is inevitable. But the point is, it isn’t inevitable: a group of friends who are annoyed by it can form a women’s caucus and start to talk about academia and ignore questions of “who matters” and “who doesn’t,” and listen to each others stories. And by doing so, they become more comfortable (and powerful, and influential) at their disciplinary conference--the women’s caucus workshop is always well-attended, and is always scheduled at the end of the conference for this very reason. And they change the structure of the discipline, by creating a space where anonymous nobodies can get together and tell their stories, and listen to the surprisingly similar stories of famous somebodies, and then go out to dinner to talk about things no one is supposed to talk about. The women’s caucus in my discipline has mentored me over the years in a lot of the ways that Bitch, according to some readers, mentors them: not directly or personally, in the traditional sense: but personally and through stories, in a feminist sense.
Which brings me to my PK story, and I promise to the end of this talk. As those of you who read the blog know, PK has long hair, and is often mistaken for a girl. I’ve also written about how he is starting to come home from school complaining that one or the other of the girls in his kindergarten class has said that “fingernail polish is for girls” or some such. I’ve caught him and one or two of the boys in his class chanting “boys win, girls lose,” and scolded them soundly. The point is, he’s at the age where kids start to notice and enforce gender difference, and so, we talk about it.
So yesterday, as I was walking him home from school telling him to hurry up because I had to leave to come to this conference, he told me that two of the boys in his class had somehow had Spiderman chocolates. And that the teacher’s aide had said, in passing, how lucky the boys were that they had chocolate that day. One of the girls--a little girl named Karen, who often got in snowball fights with PK after school this winter--had said, obviously in order to tease PK, that John and Simon had gotten Spiderman chocolates because they were boys. This was obvious, she said, because none of the girls had Spiderman chocolates, and PK didn’t have one either, because he has long hair and is therefore a girl.
“Aha,” I said. “So what did you tell her?”
“I told her that boys can have anything girls can have, and girls can have anything boys can have,” said PK. “And that if she doesn’t agree, she’s just wrong. And then I turned away.”
“Good for you!” I said.
PK looked puzzled. “Why is that good for me, Mama?” he asked.
Puzzled myself, I said, “because you were standing up for yourself.”
“No, Mama,” PK explained. “I was standing up for the boys. And,” he continued, after a pause, “the teacher, who said they were lucky to have chocolate.”
Now, as I interpret this little dialogue, PK is not reading the exchange with Karen about the chocolate the way I read it, which was as an attempt to tease him by calling him a girl. Surprisingly, he didn’t seem to be offended by that at all. I think it’s awesome that he didn’t, and I hope that the reason is that he doesn’t see being a girl as a bad thing (notwithstanding the “boys win, girls lose” chant). Instead, I think he saw Karen’s statement as implying that Spiderman chocolates are somehow inferior, because they are boy chocolates; and he thought, accordingly, that he was defending the validity of Spiderman chocolates, the good fortune of John and Simon in having them, and the good sense of the teacher’s aide in explaining that having Spiderman chocolates was a lucky thing.
And for all I know, that is what Karen meant. But the point is that, regardless of what Karen meant, that is how PK saw it. And his seeing it that way--and telling me the story about it--helped me see, yet again, the ways that feminism is helping him. And my listening to his story helped him see the important point at the heart of feminism: that his story matters. Because even though it is only a cute little anecdote about a kindergarten kid, it says something about the structures that little kid sees in his world, and the different ways that we can see those structures: as places where we can talk, and tell stories, and stand up for ourselves, and for little boys and girls, and for kindergarten teachers’ aides whose small but significant personal actions and stories create the world we live in. Because they matter.
Thank you.
(which btw I recommend to both women and men), I asked my chair to set me up with a research mentor. My university has no formal mentoring program for new faculty, and the chair was a bit taken aback, but after thinking about it, set me up with Cool Mentor, who is in my department but now has an admin. position. She's been great because, like me, she's a kind of "cut to the chase" personality, and she's very good at collecting my various goals and ideas and wishes into a coherent package and saying, "Ok, do this first because it won't take long and it'll set you up for that. The other is a long term goal, and you can start on it now by doing little things like if and it, but don't spend too much time away from the other, more important stuff." 
