Changing Our Tune: Happy Earth Day

Liz Stygar is both a graduate of the Women’s Studies Program and, now, a faculty member.  (She regularly teaches WMST/SOC 308, “Women, Gender, and Society,” one of the most popular courses in the program.)  Here, Liz suggests a soundtrack for this Earth Day, feminist hero Ani DiFranco’s “Which Side Are You On?”

Maybe you once read a feminist argue that if women ruled the world, we would live in a more peaceful place and we would have more connection to nature (hence, Mother Nature).  I’m going to argue the same point here.  I strongly identify as a feminist-environmentalist and I’m ecstatic to share a deeply thought-provoking musical call to political activism!

For well over a decade now I’ve been a BIG FAN of Ani DiFranco.

If you’ve heard of her, it’s likely you’re a fan as well (this is feminist blog, right!?!?)  If you’ve never heard of Ani, I’m thrilled to introduce you. I think of Ani as a political poet (AND she owns her own record label: Righteous Babe Records, seriously she’s an amazing feminist).

DiFranco’s newest album, Which Side Are You On? explores intersections of feminism, environmentalism and conservationism, and racial equality; of course, this album is highly political.

In this important election year, I’d like to share the goose-bump provoking title track from Ani DiFranco’s album, Which Side Are You On?  Here is a YouTube clip of the song as it sounds on the album, and a YouTube clip of her singing the song live.  Here too are the lyrics from her website.

The song’s chorus was originally written by Pete Seeger as a protest anthem several decades ago.  DiFranco wrote the verses to echo her sense of where the country stands at this moment.

The lyrics that best bring to light the intersection of feminism, environmentalism, and equality:

“lord knows the free market is anything but free it costs dearly to the planet and the likes of you and me”

“my mother was a feminist she taught me to see the road to ruin is paved with patriarchy so let the way of women guide democracy    and from plunder and pollution let mother earth be free    feminism ain’t about women that’s not who it is for it’s about a shift in consciousness that will bring an end to war so listen up you fathers listen up you sons and tell me which side are you on now”

“so are we just consumers or are we citizens are we going to make more garbage or are we going to make amends? are you part of the solution or are you part of the con? tell me which side are you on now”

“america who are we now our innocence is gone? forgive us mother africa HIStory’s done you wrong      too many stories written out in black and white come on people of privilege it’s time to join the fight   now   are we living in the shadow of slavery or are we moving on?”

Which side are you on?

Volunteering: A Place To Start

Patty Barney is completing a semester-long Women’s Studies practicum at Oasis Women’s Shelter.  As the adviser for her project, I’ve been following her expereince closely through the journal she has kept documenting the 200+ hours she has dedicated to victims of domestic abuse, and I’ve been impressed by the meaningful service she has been able to provide and by her own growing awareness of women’s issues.  Patty captures these parallels perfectly in her title, “A Place to Start”: for many women, Oasis serves as a crucial beginning for a new life.  As Patty notes here, Oasis has also served as a starting point her her own commitment to activism.

Picking up Issues in Feminism to merely fill a hole in my summer schedule was a turning point in my life.  In fact, it has been one of the most personally rewarding, yet unintentional moves I’ve ever made.  For the past two years Women’s Studies has challenged me to learn widely and to build knowledge through interdisciplinary study.  Examining women’s issues through a variety of academic perspectives has been both fascinating and valuable, but I found myself particularly drawn to the topic of violence against women.   

For my senior assignment and capstone academic experience I chose to volunteer at Oasis, a domestic violence shelter for women and children.  To be honest, I found it difficult to study on-going oppression and violence against women and not want to become an activist; for me it seemed to be the next natural step.  Choosing to become an advocate for women living in crisis cut straight to the heart of the matter: what kind of a difference could I make?

For someone who was so sure of herself, I was apprehensive about walking into that shelter and seeing what there was to see.  As it turns out, it was finding that these women were broken from the inside out that saddened me the most.  By the time a woman comes to the shelter she has used up almost all of her hope that things will get better and she has no place to go.  I went through a period where I wanted to fix all of their problems, but I didn’t take me long to realize that feeling sad wasn’t going to help anyone. 

Over the past several months I have become a Jane of all trades; I document services, process donations, answer the crisis hotline, and dispense medication.  But my favorite duty is transporting clients to job interviews or wherever they may need to go.  It gives me a chance to get to know the women by listening to them and hearing whatever it is they have to say.    

I am always astounded by how resilient and strong these women are.  They aren’t looking for my sympathy when they tell me that DCFS is going to let them see their kids not once, but twice this week, or how lucky they are that being sexually abused at 8 years old didn’t completely ruin their lives, or even that the food pantry had their son’s favorite cereal last week.  They are joyous over things that would surely crush me to smithereens.    

After a day at the shelter all of my petty, little bothers float away and I have a very clear vision of what is important to me.  Volunteering has strengthened me as a person, as a woman, and as a feminist.  My time at Oasis has not only bridged my academic and real-life experiences, but has empowered me in regards to making decisions about my career.  Some people wonder how I can work in a shelter, but they just don’t realize how lucky I am.

Note: Students interested in learning more about Women’s Studies practicums should contact Prof. Catherine Seltzer: cseltze@siue.edu

This Is What a Feminist Looks Like

Consuella Kelly has served as the Graduate Assistant for the Women’s Studies Program this year, taking on all manner of responsibilities.  If you’ve come to any of our events this year, you’ve met Consuella, almost always the first to greet you with a  smile.  At the risk of overloading her in the semester’s final weeks, I asked her to write a blog post reflecting on her experiences, and the result is a really wonderful discussion of how her understanding of feminism has evolved.  As Consuella writes here, “I came to understand that being a feminist is more about how you identify yourself, how you pay homage those who came before you, and how you choose to make a difference.”  Feminism as a movement embraces our individuality–the is part of what the “This is What a Feminist Looks Like” project articulates so well–and Consuella does a terrific job of capturing that spirit here.

For a very long time, I have identified myself as a feminist. From middle school through to my undergraduate years, being a feminist has always been about doing – being involved in some sort of activism that would draw attention to the issues. For me, that meant writing articles in the school newspaper, organizing roundtable discussions, involvement in protests, and challenging school politics. After graduating from school, in hindsight, I now realize that my involvement slowly melted away and with it my identification as a feminist.

Upon returning to higher education, I was no longer able to just brush the creepy crawly feelings away that I got when confronted with instances of inequality – gender, sexual, racial, etc – during my sabbatical from education. However, I do not want to make it seem like the occurrences increased, they had not, what grew was my awareness – and disappointment – with my inaction. I started to believe that I wasn’t a feminist. I subscribed to the narrow-minded way of thinking when it came to feminism. I thought that to be a feminist you had to act a certain way.

What I have learned in the past two years from professors, classmates, and, specifically, this program is that feminism does not have a fixed identity. It looks and acts like an individual. Meaning, the way feminism is practiced varies accordingly from person to person. Nevertheless, I sincerely thought that I had to be noticeably active to be worthy of calling myself a feminist and this is far from the truth.

At SIUE, I have met some amazing feminists who have reshaped this thinking and refocused my understanding. They have renewed and reinvigorated my belief in myself as a feminist. From their example, I came to understand that being a feminist is more about how you identify yourself, how you pay homage those who came before you, and how you choose to make a difference – no matter how aggressive or passive.

They taught me that I could choose to make a difference by doing something as brazen as burning my bra in the quad or something as simple as listening with an open-mind to those who chose to speak on the issues. I could choose to show my respect and admiration for the pioneers by creating a bulletin board honoring their contributions to the movement, and that I did not need to feel ashamed because I did not know all of their names. And, most importantly, I choose how I identify myself – I am what I say I am. Feminism is all about choice.

I choose to be a Southern Belle who wears low-cut tops and, sometimes, impossible high-heeled shoes. I am that “Bitch” who knows what I want, how to get, and I don’t have to make apologies. I am a proud African-American plus-sized Accessary (modern term for fag hag) who loves, promotes, and encourages equality for all. I am a feminist.

I would like to acknowledge the time, dedication, and compassion of those who have made such an impact on me during the last two years: Catherine Seltzer, Jessica DeSpain, Candice Love Jackson, Howard Rambsy, Jill Anderson, Eileen Joy, Valerie Volgrin, Carly Hayden Foster, Ruth Bell, Lydia Jackson, Patty Barney, Nicole Holmes, Kayla Hays, Katherine Wallace, Kayla Wilhelm, Christy Koester, Heather E. Smith, and Falon McCain.

“Slippery Issues”: Women’s Writing, By the Numbers

Today’s post is the work of Prof. Valerie Vogrin, Associate Professor of English.  She is author of the novel Shebang,  numerous essays, and an impressive collection of short stories, including “Things We’ll Need For the Coming Difficulties,” which won a Pushcart Prize last year.  If you’ve read Valerie’s work, you know that doing so immediately transforms you into one of her fans, and this post is no exception.  Here, she writes from the perspective of a writer, a creative writing professor, an editor (she is a co-editor of the literary magazine Sou’wester), and a feminist. 

In 2010, the organization VIDA : Women In Literary Arts, stirred up the literary world by tallying and comparing the rates of publication between women and men in a number of respected literary venues in the U.S and Britain, such as The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.  Recently, they released the numbers for 2011 .

You can study the pie charts at your leisure, but (SPOILER ALERT!!) overall the results reveal  an overwhelming disparity (that is, more than 2:1) in the number of pieces written by men, the number of book reviewers who are men, and the number of books by men that are reviewed as compared to women.  (A better reason for cancelling my New Yorker subscription than the piles of unread issues I accumulated last year would be their overall stats: 613 men; 242 women.)

Many women writers I know share a bifurcated response to these numbers. We think: this is not news and this is shocking.

The significance of these numbers has been vigorously disputed. Among the naysayers who suggest these numbers are misleading and/or dismissible, the chief complaint is that editors can’t help it if they get more submissions from men than women. (Though there are also claims that editors can’t help it if men are simply better writers than women!)

I’m chagrined to admit that I too was initially waylaid by the “number of submissions” argument.  As a creative writing teacher, I am well aware of the various societal reasons my female writing students might habitually undervalue their work (and many of them do) and choose to write almost exclusively from the point of view of male characters (and many of them do). So at first it made a sideways kind of sense that the problem – though societal – was nevertheless strongly linked to the submission practices of women.

I am still sorting through the avalanche of responses to the VIDA stats by writers and editors. One thing that stuck out, though, was the number of publications who reported that their editorial policies were “fair” because the male-to-female ratio of published work was the same as that of submitted work. (I hope those editors don’t hurt themselves patting themselves on the back!)

As Katha Pollit said last February, “Editors matter.” These naysayers and backpatters are being egregiously disingenuous in their characterization of editing. Editing isn’t passive. It is neither a rule nor best practices that editors must or should sit back and wait for good work to come to them. Or that editors then choose from the pool of submissions based on some objective standards of excellence. Hogwash!

I’m guessing there were very few women editors who didn’t hurry to check their own tables of contents after the VIDA figures were reported last year. (I did.) Certainly, in the wave of responses a number of journals proudly reported their own ratios.  (Though not nearly as many as whom explained why the numbers didn’t tell the whole story or who insisted that they were doing the best they could.) But I’d like to think that more and more these editors will not merely congratulate themselves for gender parity in their own journals.

I hope that all editors are inspired by those who take action. For example, Dinty W. Moore, editor of the online creative nonfiction journal Brevity, announced last fall that the September 2012 issue would be titled “Ceiling or Sky: Female Nonfictions after the VIDA Count,” a special issue guest-edited by Susanne Antonetta, Barrie Jean Borich, and Joy Castro  “that aims to go beyond  regretting the numbers and find work by women, including transgendered women, that will further the conversation.”

Next year, my creative writing colleague Stacey Lynn Brown will join Sou’wester as co-editor. I’m very excited to report that her very first suggestion was that we produce a special issue next Spring entirely devoted to the work of women (details to follow). Yet I don’t offer this information up in the spirit of self-congratulation, but of determination. I vow to continue to examine my own editorial mindset and reading prejudices. I vow to support the writing of women in as many ways as I can. I vow to persist.

Meanwhile, I’ve already cancelled my New Yorker subscription. I really just can’t have all those slippery issues gathering dust on the shelf beneath my coffee table.

Valerie Vogrin

Women and Responsibility for Health: Food, Physical Activity, and Feminism

  This post was contributed by Alison Reiheld, Asst. Professor of Philosophy.  Prof. Reiheld studies and teaches applied ethics, with an emphasis on medical ethics, and she is the organizer of “Medicine in Action,” a lecture series at SIUE that draws speakers from a variety of disciplines.  Prof. Reiheld’s blog post is concerned with another of area of interest for her, the ethics of caregiving and the  moral burden placed on women in American culture.  She recently spoke on issues of caregiving for the Women’s Studies Spring 2012 lecture series, and she shared an anecdote in which her family doctor congratulated her on her children’s healthy diet by saying, “Way to go, Mom!”  She objected to both the way the comment rendered her anonymous–”Mom” as opposed to “Alison” or “Prof. Reiheld”–and  assigned her full responsibility for all of her children’s choices.  She explores these concerns more fully in this post.

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Consider the new Kitchen Aid ad.  Notice anything?  The ability to make your own healthy food—made of quality ingredients and preservative-free—is emphasized.   Notice anything else?

With all the hubbub about obesity in America, there is a renewed focus on everything from increasing access to fresh vegetables to making sure that kids and adults get more physical activity.  Despite the many arguments that it is institutional factors such as access to poor nutrition and lack of access to physical activity at school, or built-environment factors such as outside areas in which it is physically unsafe to run or walk or play, the responsibility for health is placed intensely on individuals.  In part, this is because American society is highly individualistic.  This is part of the problem: that the responsibility for change is misplaced when it falls only on individuals’ shoulders.  Another part is upon whose shoulders it often falls.   Women—whether as mothers, wives, daughters, or partners—are far more likely than fathers to be held responsible for their family’s health status.  This is chronicled in a 2010 Time article called Lady Madonna and numerous other  sources.   Now think again about the Kitchen Aid ad.  Who are the only persons seen preparing food?  Adult women and young girls.  Men appear solely as consumers of the healthy, preservative-free, homemade food.

Consider now how truly misguided it is to place responsibility primarily on any individual, much less disproportionately on women.

Think first of physical activity. When parents allow children to play outside unsupervised, they risk being judged to be insufficiently careful with their children’s safety with respect to injury or abduction.  When they keep them inside, they can play with the children, let the children play on their own, or allow the children to take advantage of the many electronic entertainments available through computers and television.  Indeed, numerous studies of physical activity indicate that safety concerns—sometimes from violent crime and sometimes from biking, walking, or running being possible only in high-traffic areas—are a significant reason that adults do not get enough physical activity of their own, for both urban, suburban, and rural populations.  The problem here is a systemic issue with either crime or the built environment, not one that can be attacked by individuals and not one for which individuals can be held responsible.

Having briefly sketched the way in which women are held responsible for non-dietary aspects of the obesity epidemic, let’s consider food.  Food is a massively loaded topic for women.  No, this is not a pun—just Google “women dieting” and select Images to illustrate how loaded.   Overweight women seen eating apparently unhealthy foods are far more likely than overweight men or ideal-weight women to be publicly corrected for what they eat.  Remember the “stuff around the house” at the beginning of the Kitchen Aid ad: an ironing board and a stationary exercise bike, a canister vacuum in a closet whose door is being closed by a woman just as we move toward the kitchen?  And these aspects of how loaded food is with respect to gender don’t even address holding women responsible for the diet and health of their family members.  According to a 2000 article by Bianchi et al., a number of studies support the claim that married American women spend more time on housework compared to women who are not married, while most studies report little or no difference in household labor time between married and unmarried American men.  In fact, men living in couples—one presumes heterosexual couples but the research was not explicit—reduced their time in housework (Bianchi et al. 197).  In their original research, Bianchi et al. found that, “almost two-thirds of total housework hours are spent doing the core housework tasks of cooking and cleaning” which “all continue to be much more often the purview of women than men.” (Bianchi et al. 206)  And yet, children eat at least one meal a day at school, and spend half of their waking hours (nearly all their daylight hours) in school for five days a week.  Significant amounts of their lives—both respect to fitness and diet—are outside the control of their mothers.  Similarly, adult male husbands of heterosexual married women generally eat at least one meal a day separately from their wives and can, of their own free will, decide how to eat and whether to exercise.  Again it seems that no individual can be held wholly responsible for the diet of her family members.

And now, we see a pernicious angle of all these factors, one raised by the Kitchen Aid ad with which we began: marketing has picked up on this issue, and companies use these expectations to make sales, exploiting these burdensome gendered expectations to sell more items.  Americans need more physical activity.  And we need to eat more healthy good and less unhealthy food.  Maybe even more homemade food.  But it needn’t be women who are held primarily responsible for these.  And they needn’t be used to sell expensive gadgets with multiple purpose-specific limited-use attachments.    To unfairly gender such labor is one kind of unfairness, and one women have long born in the United States.  What’s worse, it ignores very real institutional and built-environment constraints over which women have no control.  If this is a moral demand made upon women, and environmental factors beyond women’s control are significant causes of obesity, then women are condemned to moral failure.  Such demands are thus doubly unfair: both unfairly born by women, and impossible to satisfy.  By all means, let us work for more exercise and better food.  But let US work for it, by changing our systems and culture, by distributing what individual responsibility is appropriate across adult members of society.

Watch out for these demands in advertising, in expectations, in relationships, in public health debates, in news coverage of stories, in doctors’ recommendations, and in general.  They cost us, in more ways than one.  They are common.  And pernicious.  And to be resisted.

Prof. Alison Reiheld

“I Think You Can”

Our blogger today is  Nicole Klein, Asst. Professor of Kinesiology and Health Education.  Prof. Klein’s research focuses on community health education, and she teaches courses in  community health education planning and evaluation, foundations of health education, women’s health, sexuality education and health behavior theories.  Along with Prof. Cathy Santanello, she was co-faciliator of the enormously popular talk last Fall, “The Nuts and Bolts of Human Sexuality: What Every College Student Should Know.”  Her blog post is grounded in a similar impulse as last Fall’s talk (as well as much of her work): to reject the sense of taboo associated with human sexuality–and women’s sexuality in particular–and to help people to understand their bodies and thus to feel a sense of greater empowerment.

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How can you tell if you have orgasmed? What exactly does an orgasm feel like?

Once a semester, students in my personal health class write anonymous questions on index cards about sex and sexuality. One of the most often asked questions is some variation of: “How do I know if I’ve had the Big O?” Those who have not achieved orgasm either through self-stimulation or with a partner used to be considered anorgasmic—as in, not orgasmic at all (in essence, broken). Now, however, the preferred term is “pre-orgasmic”—a much more sex-positive and reassuring term–sort of like The Little Vajayjay That Could. If this describes your little engine, I offer a few suggestions for getting past the plateau and climbing to an orgasm.

Go exploring–yes, masturbate. Touch things that like to be touched in ways they like to be touched. Not sure where to start? Try some erogenous zones—ears, nipples, clitoris, lips. Don’t pressure yourself. You don’t have to have an orgasm to feel good.

Forget the porngasms you may have seen—women orgasm in many different ways—quietly, loudly, using fingers, vibrator, showerhead, clenching thighs together, pushing against a pillow. There is no right way to have an orgasm.

Consider clitoral stimulation with a vibrator. Rest assured that vibrators have gone mainstream when a catalog targeted at the 65-plus crowd carries both the Terrycloth Pop-over Dress and the highly rated Butterfly Kiss Personal Massager (“I would buy this product again and again” writes “Happy”).

Want more information? Check out Betty Dodson’s classic book  Sex for One: The Joy of Self-Loving.

So, as we wrap up the month that encompasses Valentine’s Day and National Condom Week, rest assured that “I think you can, I think you can”.

Prof. Nicole Klein