Women & Royalty

As a follow up to the women & academia post a few weeks ago, I thought this story from NBC nightly news particularly noteworthy. We do not often think of western nations as the ones "behind the times," and even as someone who studies British Literature from the nineteenth-century, it honestly didn't occur to me just how outdated the rules of succession in Britain were.

Fortunately, they seemed outdated to someone and Parliament agreed. Today they have altered a more than 300 year-old rule so that now any first-born child of the current king and queen can inherit the throne, even if that child is a girl.

Peer Pressure

“Doubt requires more courage than conviction does, and more energy; because conviction is a resting place and doubt is infinite . ” John Shanley, Doubt

So I suffered from a case of good peer pressure today. I'll admit - I throw out half of the stuff I get in my mailbox, when I go down to the basement to actually check my mailbox that is. So when a fellow colleague asked me if I had gotten the invitation to the dinner following John Shanley's lecture, I truly wasn't sure whether I had or not. If I had remembered who the guy was, I probably could have done a clever word play on "I doubt it," but alas, I only had a blank, confused stare as a response. Apparently the English department response to this event was "low," which sounded like it must have been a bad thing and it sounded like maybe I was supposed to help correct this problem.

This was, delightfully, a case of good peer pressure. Shanley is an amazing speaker and storyteller. I had the good fortune to see a stellar production of doubt at Greensboro's Triad Stage (voted one of the top ten small theaters in the country!), so I was actually interested to meet the master mind behind the production. His entire talk was like one long poem: his voice and the words and images he used were like a symphony. Two of the many quotable lines from this talk: (from memory, so basically correctly quoted)

"To live is not enough, you must communicate you"

"Life is truly noble because life is truly humble"

The highlight of the talk for me was the moment Shanley started talking about how important doubt is to a genuine life and how unfortunate that most media productions do not allow space for doubt. "we are no longer affected by one another," Shanley says, citing those talk shows where people talk at each other, stating their views, but unwilling to permit the other's viewpoint to change their own or admitting they perhaps don't have it all figured out. As I cringe coming into the election year, I wish the candidates would watch Doubt and invite Shanley over for a chat; they could learn so much and possibly make an election year filled with engaging debates, change, and growth for our country. But, well, I doubt it.

Women & Academia

A good friend sent me the following article, and it brought to mind something that I inherently have to think about all the time: my position in the academy as a woman. Below are a few of my thoughts about the article. Reader warning: my comments won't make much sense unless you've read the article, and I did not offer any summary of it so you would have to go read it for yourself. I would love to hear what others have to say about the article, as well as other recent articles or blogs that address this issue.

Pre-Tenure Women

Half of me wants to stand up and cheer and say "you go girl! That’s right" and the other half of me wants to cringe at the potentially essentialist narrative of women being intuitive, relational, blah, blah.

Mostly, though, I wonder if abstracting yourself is such a bad thing? I actually love how the classroom and my research can help me block out everything else, especially if other areas of my personal life are going badly; or in a not-so-dramatic vein (read: emotional and feminine ha ha), I think abstracting yourself is also a form of diversifying, which I think is an important corrective to the old narrative that all a woman's value comes from her husband and kids (straight out of the 19c and still tenaciously holding strong!). I can't relate to the mother-of paradigm yet, but I know its really important to me that I exist in a world where whose wife I am is irrelevant. That is not to say that Justin himself is irrelevant, but just that my title "wife" doesn't matter, which is to say I am not limited to being defined as only a wife. Obviously I don't think one can completely abstract yourself from all the contexts that make up who you are, but there is a side of me that enjoys being a professional and only a professional while I'm in the ivory towers.

However, this does not mean I think one should have to create a persona devoid of all personal context in order to be perceived as a professional. Thus, I do agree with Clancy’s point about how its a shame we have to be wary of mentioning things about babies and blogs, those non-academic aspects of our lives, within the academic setting.

Clancy's battle cry is wonderful, but woefully untethered from reality. She asks: "So how does one be a radical when radical scholarship is hard to measure with current tenure criteria?" Which is a very good question, and the assumed answer, of course is "you can't." But I expected her to offer some suggestions for how we can. Instead, her answer is: "Be that radical anyway. Be the scholar you think you should be, bringing your whole self to the table, finding your passion and making it your scholarship, and having a plan that will help you become a leader in your field." To which she follows with how maybe getting tenure isn't all that important. This made me laugh out loud, as if the implicit connection here is "go ahead and be radical, but this means you won't get tenure."

I know most of my comments here seem against Clancy, but I'm actually pretty divided in my response: part of me feeling affirmed and encouraged, while the other part roles my eyes at the romanticized notion of "just do it." I think my hope is that conversations about women in the academy bring about more conversations about the academy itself.

Giving an Account

I felt weary walking home from work today, possibly because it was the end of a long week, but more than likely because I had spent the last couple hours engrossed in what just might possibly be the two worst aspects of the academic field: the job search and the tenure notebook.

Much to my delight, I had been asked to join a discussion panel about writing the teaching philosophy, one of the many documents compiled to send out with job applications. I could never have made it through the job search process without the advice of faculty and fellow graduate students, so I feel very strongly about passing along whatever wisdom I gained from my own experience. So I really was delighted to participate in this discussion, but was quite surprised when a few minutes into it I felt myself inwardly shaking and growing hotter by the minute. I had quite forgotten the anxiety of all that I went through just a short year ago, but like muscle memory all those anxious feelings welled up as I listened to graduate students' questions (which were my questions not so long ago) about how to construct a genuine picture of yourself within a limited word count and a rigid genre.

For some reason I decided it would be a good idea when I returned to my office to spend the rest of the afternoon perusing a tenure notebook someone had been kind enough to loan me as an example. I was astounded at all the different ways to account for your work as a professor. This has some positive ramifications I am sure, but it was with a sinking feeling this afternoon that I realized that every activity, every conversation, every email or note, every thought I have in my head has the potential to find its way into the Tenure Notebook. Which means that every activity, every conversation, every email or note, every thought I have in my head has to be held up for scrutiny to determine its use-value.

As I said, these two things - the job search and the tenure notebook - are to my mind the two worst aspects of our job. And I unfortunately stumbled onto them both in one afternoon, a friday afternoon seven weeks into my first semester as a tenure-track professor when I (along with all the other students and faculty) am feeling very, very tired.

So my goal this weekend (in addition to writing two conference papers that refuse to get written, figuring out my book order for spring classes, and creating the exam for wednesday's classes) is to focus on what I think are the two best things about this job.