Berks Highlights: There's Got To Be A Morning After (If You Can Make It Through The Night)

Sarah Palin is not at the Berkshire Conference

The sun is finally shining in Amherst, after a day and a night of severe weather that created delays, cancellations, and flights diverted to places like Syracuse.  Power was out for up to four or five hours in Massachusetts and Connecticut, but not at the air-conditioned opening reception last night, where we all treated each other to drinks purchased with the *two* free tickets that were stapled to the conference folder.  As most of us enjoyed ourselves at the opening plenary, dinner at Amherst Chinese (which can seat a large group if you are looking for a dinner reservation tonight) and the dessert reception, our sisters were fighting their way cross-country through a storm system that stretched from Chicago to Philadelphia.  Rumor has it that the heroic local arrangements committee was dispatching transportation to Bradley Airport in Hartford until 3 A.M.  Bleary-eyed latecomers nevertheless hauled themselves out of bed for panels beginning at 8:30 a.m.

Because of a variety of appointments, I didn't make any panels this morning, but the conference has a lively book exhibit and numerous common spaces in the Campus Center where knots of old friends are gathering, and editors chat up potential and signed authors.  Supported by the free WiFi, and surrounded by an invisible Bell of Silence, scholars are finishing up their comments and papers.  The coffee isn't perfect, but it's good.  All is well.

Cliotropic Tweets the Berks

By afternoon, I was ready for scholarship.  I started my Berks experience with "Queering the College Campus," which was a great pick, and was Tweeted by Shane Landrum here.  Two fabulous papers by Susan Freeman and Heather Murray made me believe that lesbian history is moving into a whole, new exciting register. Stephanie Gilmore linked the field to histories of sexual violence and the ongoing state of terror that is endured by contemporary GLBTQ students despite the broad-based "acceptance" of homosexuality among young people of all political and religious beliefs.  Given the Title IX suit at Yale, the activism at Dickinson against that school's ineffective rape policies, and the periodic scandals that erupt about fraternity and athletic team hazing, Gilmore's presentation on her new research about violence against LGBTQ students -- which connects homophobic violence to all three phenomena -- was particularly compelling. Athletic teams and frats are particular nodes for homophobic violence and harassment (pledge rituals include such tasks as "taking a picture of a faggot"), but Gilmore was persuasive that by focusing only on this we neglect the ways in which entire campuses and administration policies are complicit in maintaining sexism and heterosexism.  Gilmore's research argues that GLBTQ students navigate harassment and sexual violence every day, and that college administrations -- who proudly boast that such students are an aspect of campus "diversity" -- know this and do nothing to change it.   Administrators who she has interviewed, while they condemn violence against such students, vigorously resist the notion that they are capable of intervening in it.  One unintended outcome of the demise of in loco parentis policies (many of which were themselves sexist and homophobic) has been an insistence by student life professionals and administrators that such violence is a feature of "student culture" that only students themselves can change.  On the other hand, the same administrators will defend explicitly violent, sexist, racist and heterosexist rituals associated with student organizations because they and powerful alumni/ae insist that eliminating them will be disruptive to college tradition and memory (can you say Chief Illiniwek?)

Other panels that are looking good for a Radical sighting today are:

"Researching and Interpreting Feminist Activism of the 1960s abd 1970s:  An Intergenerational Roundtable," with Judy Wu, Ros Baxandall, Marisela Chavez, Amy Kesselman, Jessica Lee, Barbara Ransby and Sheila Rowbotham.  Cape Cod Lounge; and

"Plenary:  The Sex of Geopolitics," with Anjali Arondekar, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Geeta Patel, Carol Vance and Siobhan Somerville.  Bowker Auditorium.

Thanks to those of you who are introducing yourselves randomly:  keep coming up to say hi -- that's what the Berks is about, but it is particularly nice to see someone who says "Hi, I usually comment on your blog as....."  If you are reading this before 5:30 on Friday June 10, don't forget to show up to meet the bloggers at the Grad Lounge of the Lincoln Campus Center.  Although Historiann won't make it, there are confirmed appearances by Clio Bluestocking, Another Damned Medievalist, Janice Liedl, and Knitting Clio.

The Chaz Project: Gender, Celebrity And The Emergence Of An FTM Activist

Chaz Bono, with Billie Fitzpatrick, Transition:  The Story of How I Became A Man (New York:  Dutton, 2011).  244 pages.  Illustrations, index. $25.95.

Becoming Chaz (Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, 2010).  88 minutes.  Premiered at Sundance Festival and on the Oprah Winfrey Network (May 10 2011).

Famous people live in bubbles; the children of famous people also live in bubbles, and benefit much less from the experience.  Witness Chaz, the only child of Salvatore "Sonny" Bono and Cherilyn Sarkisian, otherwise known as Cher. One of the many criticisms that will doubtless emerge about Chaz Bono's revised history, one that centers his gender transition and his new life as an embodied man, will be some version of this: how can a person who has had access to every possible advantage represent himself as an average transman?  To this I have two answers:

Everyone's life is worth saving, no matter how rich his parents are, and;

One of the ways that rich people are different is that their books get published and distributed widely when other, equally good or better, books do not.  Get used to it.

Timed to come out together, Transition and Becoming Chaz, tell Chaz's story about his journey to a fully male identity.  They are part of an activist project, in which Chaz hopes to use his fame to reach out to other people who may be struggling with their own or a loved one's gender transition and promote tolerance towards queerly gendered people.  They are also a long-term public relations project, through which Chaz has struggled to represent himself rather than be represented by the tabloid press.  Together, for those of us who are more up to speed on trans politics and trans studies, these newly released accounts of Bono tell us less about the world of gender politics and gender transition technology than they tell us about the world of celebrity.

However, those who simply take celebrity for granted and know bupkis about transgender or transsexual lives may learn some things they need to know.  For example:

• Kids who grow up into people who want to transition have very active inner lives that are gendered differently from the way their bodies present.
• Puberty stinks even worse for trans people than it does for cisgendered people.
• People who transition from female to male may initially come out as butch lesbians (but not all butch lesbians identify as trans.)
• Parents often do not respond well to gender transition.
• Girlfriends who appear to be on board with gender transition can still be self-centered and mean.  Sometimes they bail out.
• Injectable testosterone works faster than Androgel.
• Lots of psychotherapy is recommended. 
• Having lots of gay friends doesn't necessarily make a person sophisticated when it comes to actually having a queer kid.  (Cher is an excellent example of this:  did I say that lots of psychotherapy is recommended?  And Sonny, who seemed not to care that he had a queer kid, then cosponsored the Defense of Marriage Act.)
• Having lots of psychotherapy, a big book contract, and the admiration of thousands of transmen doesn't mean that when people call you fat, weird and ugly; or make sexist, homophobic and transphobic jokes at your expense, it doesn't hurt.  A lot. (Editorial clarification:  Chaz has always been attractive, but in his new incarnation has an inner confidence and a sunny smile that makes him about as good or better looking as any other middle-aged Italian American guy.)

OK, so for those of you who knew fewer than five of the things I listed above, you should go read the book. If you have limited time, are only interested in the FTM part of Chaz's life story, and are curious about the nature of celebrity, I would say watch the movie.  The first two-thirds of the book are a revision of Chaz's coming-out-as-a-lesbian story (which someone of my age might recall was pretty awful) that accounts for his male identity.  It also includes a survey of Chaz's descent into drug abuse, which is a cautionary tale worth reading.  Having known several people who became addicted to drugs like Vicodin and Oxycontin, this actually can happen to anyone. Chaz was getting legal scrips for so much high-dosage Oxy that he had to go to a hospital pharmacy to get them filled, and even the pharmacists did not bat an eye, much less call the DEA or the California medical licensing board.

I am not sure whether it will matter to you, but:  there are better books about trans lives out there, and if you follow the links in this post, you will find them.  Chaz speaks only for himself but, in trying to reach a far broader audience (in what has to be a rudimentary general education project if it is to succeed in Omaha as well as in Los Angeles), the book tends not to be very aware of its own limitations.  Chief among these are the essentialist story it tells about gender, the book's main preoccupation; and its failure to address class, age and race.  Transitioning to a male body and a male social identity are quite different experiences for different people, as are the life histories that lead up to these transitions.  Although there are common themes, transmen have very different life stories, as do transwomen.  Generation matters: there are a significant number of people, particularly very young ones, for whom challenging gender as a system of power means living between or outside categories as a genderqueer person.  So Chaz's story is the 100-level course.  If you want the 200 level course, go to Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge:  2006); if you want a better memoir, and one that tells the MTF story where our heroine gets to keep the girl and the kids, my favorite is Jennifer Finney Boylan, She's Not There:  A Life In Two Genders (Broadway Books, 2003).

Which brings us to class.  While having access to lots of money hasn't made Chaz's life a happy one (one might argue the opposite, in fact), the book has nothing to say about the vast number of trans kids who are entirely without resources, even to feed, clothe or house themselves.  It is a sad fact that most people in America are poor, whether they are gender normative or not.  It is a sadder fact that vast numbers of gender non-conforming youth are bullied at school, abused by their families, and end up on the streets fending for themselves.  Many of these kids, particular male-bodied trans kids, are sex workers, as their foremothers were.

It is also the case that Chaz appears to be choosing trans children as his issue, having been a neglected and abused child himself, and it may be that as an activist he begins to hone in on the cross-class dimensions of this issue as well as the surgical abuse of intersexed children. Childhood was a bad time for Chaz, and while his boyishness is the part of that story that is central to the book, he was alternately cherished and neglected.  He  suffered emotional abuse from one nanny in particular, who terrorized him when his mother was absent for large stretches of time. While we don't get details about his upbringing that stray far from the gender story, Chaz seems to go out of his way to understand and account for his parents' lapses, and being a victim of the press himself, is probably kinder to them than they deserve. 

One result of parental neglect was that Sonny and Cher failed to notice that their child went to any number of schools but didn't really learn to do anything except to be a public person:  everything else he has taught himself.  In a way this doesn't seem odd, given Sonny and Cher's route to success.  Cher was singing professionally at 16 when she teamed up with her 27 year-old partner, and my guess is that one or both were high school dropouts. Chaz was repeatedly pulled out of school by Cher to accommodate her career, and allowed to make his own decisions about whether and where he attended school (this meant living in New York with friends and attending the High School for Performing Arts) by the time he was fourteen.  While Chaz returned to college in mid-life, his only real work -- other than three years of trying to break into the music business -- has been to use his celebrity to do political advocacy, mostly for GLBT rights.

Don't imagine that Transition will give you many insights into the inner life of a transman the way lesser-known, but more complex, autobiographies like Jamison Green's Becoming a Visible Man (Vanderbilt,  2004) and Max Wolf Valerio's The Testosterone Files (Seal Press, 2006) will.  The story Chaz has to tell is a carefully crafted one that is intended to educate, but not to reveal much about who he really is or what he really feels. Because of this, the most affecting moments are not in the book, but in Becoming Chaz when we watch Bono watching his mother in the well-orchestrated television appearances and interviews that are designed to voice her support for him.  And yet, even then, she can't seem to bring herself to refer to Chaz with male pronouns.  Like, ever.  Which is a little strange given the fact that she is an actress.  The expression on Chaz's face as Cher "forgets" her lines, over and over, is unforgettable, as is his rush to forgive her for doing so.  Nothing in the book is so ambivalent or complex as these moments when gender is temporarily displaced by the drama of the celebrity child.

Battle Hymn Of The Queer Tiger Aunt: Or, How Amy Chua Made Me Think About Feminism

The official logo of the Queer Tiger Aunt. Photo credit.

When I decided that instead of reading about Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother I would read the book instead, I did so for two reasons.  One was because I had become interested in the Orientalist tropes that she launched in her publicity piece, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" (Wall Street Journal, January 8 2011) and that white women then expanded upon here and other places.

The other reason was that I had some Audible credits to use, and was beginning my daily commute again.

Am I glad I did!  Here are some things I thought about by actually reading (listening to) the book, rather than basing my judgments of it on a few salacious quotes (or Janet Maslin's review, which has numerous factual errors in it):

• What it means to be the bridge between the immigrant generation and a generation which grows up in privilege and security;
• That someone in the world is thinking about what makes girls confident and strong, rather than viewing female success as a symptom of a society that hates boys;
• That someone other than me thinks that giving young people hundreds of prizes for small accomplishments does little for them except cause them to expect prizes at every turn;
• That one of feminism's central insight in the 1960s -- mothering is a job -- is also one of the great unresolved issues on the feminist agenda.  The institutional and social desire to pretend that motherhood isn't a job may be the single most critical issue to address if we are also to address women's equality as workers and citizens in this country.

 I can also now answer question The Los Angeles Times asked today: "What's Behind Our Obsessive Amy Chua Disorder?"  The answer, I think, is that mothering is more or less a cursed profession that is analogous to being a professional homosexual, which is what I do when I am not being a tenured college professor.  As with mothers, people always feel like they must have -- nay, have a right to have -- opinions about homosexuals, regardless of how silly or unwelcome those opinions are.  The less people know about real homosexuals, the more they feel like they have to have an opinion about us.  Of course homosexuals -- like Mommies -- also have opinions about themselves that have more holes in them than Swiss cheese.  Take the "It Gets Better Project," which is run by real homosexuals, and has a lot of terrific videos by homosexuals, transpeople, and some heterosexuals.  It's purpose is to cheer up young people who are at risk from harming themselves out of despair over their sexuality.  While the videos themselves are quite nuanced and interesting, the message the media is running with is that if you are a gay kid, things will get better when you grow up and are free from your parents and high school bullies.  This is a lie.  Actually, the outcomes of growing up are quite variable.  Sometimes things get better, but sometimes they don't.  Sometimes things get worse.  Being gay might become only one of your problems, since people suffer from things like poverty, illness and disability that have nothing to do with being gay.  Or sometimes they continue to suffer because they are gay!  

Similarly, from reading Chua and reading about her, I have discovered that there is really a struggle over what constitutes good motherhood which is not likely to make any difference to anyone.  I'm not involved in the Mommy Wars:  in fact, as I am not a Mommy, I have only heard rumors of them, not experienced them first hand.  As I understand it, they revolve around:

• Men who insist on mansplainin' about what constitutes good mothering;
• Women lecturing other women about what constitutes good mothering;
• Women's ambivalence about the act of mothering, expressed as hostility towards other mothers;
• Why and when we decided that men ought to be heaped with praise for any or all acts that are similar to mothering.

I speak to all of this as an outsider, not being a mother but rather someone who has put a tremendous amount of effort into being an eccentric but caring Queer Tiger Aunt.  I sometimes succeed at aunt-hood and sometimes fail, but one of the good things about being an aunt is that there are no rules on how to do it.  No one criticizes you for being a bad aunt.  The job isn't in demand.  Have you ever heard someone say:  "The clock is ticking:  I won't feel like a real woman if I don't become -- an aunt?"

To say I am a queer aunt is obvious on several levels.  As an aunt, one occupies a role from which critiques of what stands for normal parenting can be acted upon in a complementary and/or subversive way.  Hence, to be a truly productive and energetic aunt is to be queer in relation to some child or children regardless of whether you are a homosexual or not.  It beats being a mother with a stick, if you ask me.  It's not a job, as mothering is:  it's a vocation.  Assuming the mantle of Queer Tiger Aunt has an additional advantage.  Unlike a mother, an aunt can disappear for moderate periods of time to write an article, take a dramatic trip, go on a bender, or whatever, and the kids say:  "Wow, I want to be like her!"  Because you don't own them, you don't have to worry about abandoning the children because: the Goddess gave them parents.

A final note:  it seems obvious to me from observing the Chua controversy that there is no such thing as a good mother, just a lot of women claiming to be better mothers than each other based on some floating standard. That is something feminism also needs to deal with.

If You Can't Be Good, Be Careful: Or; Why Is It So Hard To Make Lesbian Movies?

If you want to read the glowing review of Lisa Cholodenko's lesbian family flick The Kids Are Alright go to A.O. Scott (New York Times, July 8 2010). Michelle Solomon, in The Guardian (July 23 2010), is slightly more reserved, dubbing it a "relationship movie" and noting that the high-profile actresses will allow it to "[avoid] being pigeonholed as a 'gay movie.'" (Thank god for this, that's what I say.) If you want to read the intelligent review by a queer scholar, that will actually get into it why this is a lesbian movie, go here for Jack Halberstam's "The Kids Aren't Alright" (bullybloggers July 15, 2010).

My review follows: it is a terrible, awful, embarrassing, piece of crap film. I could have had a better time had I saved $11.00 ($22.00 + dinner for two actually); spent the same two hours reviewing some critical, and hideous, months in my own life; and then had a friendly dinner with my companion where we reviewed vivid memories of my own bad decisions and personality flaws in action.

For those of you who would rather hear about the film, Halberstam (who has what I consider to be an admirably high tolerance, and a keen intelligence, for schlocky pop culture) provides a concise plot summary to anchor the analysis:

"The Kids Are Alright" is a soul-crushing depiction of long-term relationships, lesbian parenting and mid-life crisis. Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) are mushed into one category by their kids Laser (Josh Hutcherson) and Joni (Mia Wasikowska) who call them “moms” or “the moms.” The moms have merged into one maternal entity and although they have distinct personalities, their parenting function is depicted as one amorphous smothering gesture after another. The kids suffer through the over-parenting but crisis ensues when Laser decides to track down his sperm donor dad, Paul, played by Mark Ruffalo. Once Paul rides onto the scene on his classic black BMW motorcycle, bearing organic veggies and good wine, the cracks in the façade of lesbian domesticity appear and a rather predictable cycle of betrayal, infidelity and domestic upheaval begins.

I'm clicking "like" on this one, and the only place I would disagree with the review is that whereas Halberstam describes Jules as "dowdy" further down, that didn't bother me. Face it, at this age many of us are fighting dowdy. It did bother me that Jules was dorky, and I thought if she asked one of the other characters if s/he wanted to "process" something one more time I was going to scream.

Like the son Laser, who periodically asks questions that no one answers, I often needed more information, despite the fact that I am a practicing lesbian, hung my shingle in 1975, and have been in practice continuously since then. If Jules had a gardening business, why did no one take the opportunity to make a leering joke about mowing the lawn? Why did the "Moms" watch gay male porn -- and porn from the 1970s no less? Is Annette Bening's vulva located somewhere around her navel, as it appeared in the excruciating rug-munching scene? Why did Jules insult, and then fire, the Mexican gardener (who seemed handsome and sweet) instead of having an affair with him? How did Paul manage a restaurant if he was as stupid and disorganized as he seemed? How do heterosexuals keep from getting concussions from smacking into the walls and furniture? Should heterosexual adolescents be counseled to wear helmets during sex? Why is Julianne Moore in so many gay movies? Why did Nic think that her son skateboarding -- without a helmet -- was less dangerous than her daughter riding a motorcycle with a helmet? Should I quit my day job as a tenured professor and make myself available as a Hollywood sex coach/stunt dyke in case bad lesbian movies really take off?

You have time to make lists like this when a movie is really, really bad. So instead of reviewing "The Kids Are Alright," I would like to suggest a few plot changes that would have made it better.

1. If Paul, the sperm donor, had been gay. Then, when he started boffing Jules, they could have done a whole thing about why a gay man and a gay woman might find themselves attracted to each other, and avoided the un-tense tension of whether Jules had joined the other team. What would have made this even better is if Paul had had a boyfriend who didn't want children and had been adamantly opposed to Paul making contact with the kids, but Paul went behind his back to do it.

2. If Paul, the sperm donor, had been better looking and/or an interesting person. Sorry, I think Mark Ruffalo seemed abnormally physically gross. Fortunately, I had a local informant who has played for both teams, and she explained to me that heterosexual women are attracted to men who look dirty, smelly and ungroomed; and who say almost nothing when they speak. This piece of information is what twigged me to the fact that this was not really a "lesbian movie."

3. If Nic and Jules had been "Nick" and "Julie." Is there anyone but me who thinks this originally came in to the studio as a treatment about a heterosexual couple and the sperm donor, and Cholodenko made it about lesbians to get it produced? What would have been even better would have been if Paul had been gay, and Paul and Nick had an affair! Now we are getting somewhere.

4. If Paul were transsexual, and had only donated sperm to finance the transition to a life as Paula. At sixty dollars a pop this would have taken a while, but added to a small inheritance it might have worked. What would have then been cool is if Paula was a lesbian, and had affairs with both Nic and Jules, and Paula knew where everyone's vulva was, and could mow the lawn like nobody's business, and after the awkward moment of truth where the affairs were revealed Nic and Jules agreed this was a good arrangement because she had revitalized their sex life, and the kidz ended up banging their heads against the wall because all their stupidity and brainless interference with their parents' lives had only given them a third mom after all.

4. If Paul had not agreed to meet the kids, but actually was their neighbor, and had been part of their lives, and of the household, all along, and no one found this out until the end when Laser needed a liver transplant after falling off his skateboard. Here is where I have to ask you: in what legal world would a sperm bank take a verbal assent over the telephone from the sperm donor as a go-ahead to release contact information to the children? But putting that aside, what would have been cool about this is that it would have put the question front and center: why does it matter to know who your father is? And under what conditions do intimate bonds form between adults, and adults and children, that surpass the conventions toward which we are all encouraged to gravitate? (I just threw in the liver transplant thing for fun.)

5. If Nick and Jules had been gay men, and Jules was living with HIV, and the children went looking for their bio-mom and she turned out to be a closeted lesbian running for governor of California on a family values platform and had to decide whether to sue the Dadz for custody; kill the children to keep them quiet and continue with her life as a conservative; or have a change of heart, convert the Tea Party to a full GLBT rights platform; then become the first woman president of the United States and cause Sarah Palin to have a complete aneurysm. Do I have to tell you that we are now cooking with gas?

Please feel free to add your own plot suggestions in the comments section, or get on with your day, whichever seems more appropriate.

Uncivil Liberties: Teaching Evaluations and A Clarification

Courtesy of Margaret Soltan at University Diaries, who draws our attention to the recent exchange between Stanley Fish and Ross Douthat on this matter, I began thinking about teaching evaluations in a more orderly fashion than I have of late. My disorderly thoughts have been sparked by colleagues, several of whom are quite experienced teachers, receiving some of the rudest and cruelest teaching evaluations I have ever read at Zenith. Sexism is also on the rise, particularly among the students of younger, female faculty (who are also sometimes presumed to be adjuncts.)

I found these evaluations remarkable because my experience in the past has been that Zenith students often go out of their way to be charitable to someone they like and have empathy for, sometimes damning their professors with faint and contradictory praise as a result. The evaluations in question do the exact opposite: students going out of their way to slam the professor in a way that is obscurely connected to the matter at hand, sometimes perversely followed by comments that describe the class in quite thoughtful ways, making it clear the student got a lot out of the experience.

What has changed? We do teaching evaluations on line now; students do them in their rooms at whatever hour of the night they choose; and they must do them in order to get their grades. In other words, teaching evaluations have just become another $hitty chore that we drive students through with a stick. You might say: why not go back to doing them on paper, on the last class? The reason is, of course, that it was time consuming, wasteful, and expensive. As our registrar explained when we switched over to the new system, at the cost of no less than 10K a semester, the old system was badly flawed. Students often confessed to having collaborated as a class to turn in a group view of the professor, faculty often received their evaluations on the first day of spring classes (giving them no time to think about structural issues in their pedagogy), and envelopes full of evaluations that were to have been walked over by astudent were often found in the student center and abandoned in the dormitories.

So don't think we will ever go back to paper evaluations. The question is, what are teaching evaluations for? Are they intended to evaluate someone for tenure? (Yes -- and this was the issue that prompted the Fish-Douthat exchange.) Are they intended to help us become better teachers? (Yes, but if we don't trust them, how do we evaluate what they say?) Are they intended to help students think about what they have learned? (Maybe -- see Dean Dad about how students often forget what they have learned once the course is over.) The bigger question that Fish and Douthat raise is whether students ought to be the experts who are consulted in high-stakes evaluations of teaching.

If you ask me, one question that is not being asked here is: why do we consult students about the quality of the instruction without also consulting them on what they want to learn, why they want to learn it, and what its relevance to the larger program of study is? We ask them to enter into a conversation about teaching in the university without any instruction about what information we need, why or what constitutes responsible assessment of teaching (for example, "the professor was only interested in his own opinions" is hardly the point -- it is the student who ought to be interested in what the professor has to offer, and consider being less anxious about having her own views validated.) Furthermore, no one consults students about how they would like to be assessed and what they want to know about their own work. Grading can devolve into a grudge match between two teams with unequal power: in response, nationwide, faculty have thrown in the towel and inflated grades dramatically. We then get our students, and I suppose our self-respect, back by telling the press loudly that our students don't actually deserve the grades they are getting.

I Have Not, Nor Have I Ever Been

My last post about what I see as the pitfalls of academic celebrity drew some cheers; one caution (my beloved Western Colleague, she of the famous Tool Post, wisely suggested that I refrain from pissing in the wind); and one personally nasty signed comment (not, I might add, anyone mentioned in the post) which listed my numerous hopeless flaws and offenses to authority. I removed the comment (see sidebar for the comment policy), because if people want to write opinion pieces about my qualifications to walk the earth they are free to do it on their own blog -- but not on mine.

The style of the comment reminded me of the opening credits to a television show from my youth:

According to the writer, I am unlettered, unread, marginal to and ignorant about the world of queer studies, snide, have no queer vocabulary and wouldn't understand what I read even if I read it, and am a liberal. My readers can decide about all of these things on about the same basis that the commenter did. However, there was one damning accusation I wish to refute absolutely.

I am not, nor have I ever been:

A social historian.

Discriminating Tastes: What People Who Are Not Normal Might Know That You Don't Know

One of the things that prompting my last post about the restructuring of institutional benefits during a period of budget cutting was not, as some people assumed, that I think cutting faculty compensation is a viable way to save higher education. I don't. Rather, my concern was that the failure to address compensation inequities already in place means that in a period where we might potentially rethink and repair such inequities, many people, in the name of radical opposition to The Man, can only draw the wagons closer around what already exists. More progressive change, they argue, is unrealistic in a crisis, and must be put off to a distant future, when utopia will be possible. This is the pattern of debates over national health care, and it is a belief currently prevalent at private institutions that have done for the select few what the state refuses to do for everyone (hence supporting the following equation: salaried labor = health care = virtue.) Worse, in my view, is that periods of "reform" enshrine prejudices that, in turn, become the standard for what is "normal." This, as I discuss in that post, is one of the lessons of the New Deal.

That the current crisis might be related to structural inequities, and the skewed ethics that support such inequities, is hard for people to focus on (unless they are thinking about Wall Street) because they know best the world they already live in and take for granted. So imagine my delight when I discovered Richard Thompson Ford's excellent piece in Slate las Wednesday, A Primer on Racism: The Many Uses Of The Word And How Legit They Are. It is a must-read for anyone who enters the thorny waters of trying to talk openly about the question of bias, a conversation few people wish to have. (This is the vast majority of people, in my experience, progressive and conservative.) Ford usefully points out that the form of racism where someone will simply state, categorically, that white people are smarter, better, cleaner, more capable, or more law-abiding than people of color is rarely apparent nowadays, even though that is the stereotype invoked when the term "racist" is used. Being stereotyped, and stigmatized, is why people so resent and fear being labeled as racist, sexist or homophobic, and why, in turn they don't like to risk discussing discrimination at all.

So what, according to Ford, are we not talking about when we are not talking about racism? Most dominant, he argues, is institutional racism "when often the racial inequity is unintended" but the injustice is contained in "practices that contain built-in headwinds for minority candidates." Or we might be talking about environmental racism, in which the "headwinds" are toxic living conditions that are descended from segregationist practices and are perpetuated by the lack of political power that poor and working class people have. Ford also notes the importance of cultural bias and misunderstanding that is largely class-based and can function as an intra-group dynamic. He debunks the notion, loudly touted on the right, that “reverse racism" -- prejudice against white people - is an equally serious problem. Rather, he argues, bias against white people, as a group, is the property of the isolated cultural nationalist, and has only become imagined as a pervasive issue because of the political machinations of right-wingers seeking to mobilize white voters through fear.

While I would argue with or elaborate on some of these points, I thought this essay deserved attention for its clarity and thoughtfulness. It also caused me to think about encounters I have had in which people that I do and do not know well have felt the need to assert (for no apparent reason) that they are without prejudice and regard everyone as similar. However, the fact that I see race, gender and sexuality as live dynamics in our contemporary world demonstrates that I, myself, am bigoted or that any mention of these dynamics contains an implicit accusation of bigotry.

One underlying difficulty, from my point of view, is that people rarely speak honestly about the differences among us, actual and perceived. They like to discuss even less the power relations structured by differences, so they become hysterical very quickly, often lobbing defenses prematurely when no accusation of any kind has been made. For example, very few of the people I know are "homophobic" in the strictest sense of the term, even though they fear that I think they are. They do not fear what I am, they don't think that I am a sicko, they aren't worried about leaving the kiddies or wife alone with me, and many are actively educating their children to understand that queer people populate their world and need to be valued. I very rarely accuse someone of being homophobic, in part because people find it deeply shaming and it is a real conversation stopper, but mostly because what is going on is usually a great deal more complex in the way Ford points out.

And yet, when I come to a real difference of opinion with a person, s/he often finds it necessary to assert not only that s/he is not homophobic, but that s/he believes that I am just the "same" as s/he is.

This is where things start to break down. To my mind, one pernicious legacy of the social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s is the notion that the opposite of invidious hierarchy is the equality of similarity. Corollaries to this are the assumption of those in the dominant group that:

a) People in subordinate groups want to be similar to “normal” people in the dominant group;
b) That having technical access to certain privileges means that those privileges (and the institutions that grant those privileges) are consonant with broader notions of social, economic and cultural justice;
c) That equality exists when "we" all accept the notion, theoretically, that we are all the same and want the same things;
d) That a continuing suspicion of the dominant group by historically subordinate groups is unreasoning and without foundation.

Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor's much-discussed pronouncement about the insights of "a wise Latina woman" coming from the "richness of her experiences" were not misguided. A racial perspective does matter, not because it is information other people don;t have, but because it is a way of knowing the world that other people can acquire if they try. Instead of being derided and suppressed, Sotomayor’s insight needed to be amplified to take into account a peculiar modern condition where inequalities in the law have been, in many cases, overturned and exposed, but the society and belief systems that these old laws created has not.

Hence, people fear being called racist or homophobic both because it stigmatizes and mischaracterizes them as someone who is actively bigoted (as opposed to still learning), and because it makes them feel misunderstood: they sincerely believe in justice and equality. But what they often fail to understand is how the institutions they hold dear are, in their own minds, synonymous with what also constitutes a natural and normal world. And this causes them to miss what some of us believe are structural inequalities.

Take marriage. One of the things that worries me about gay marriage is not that a lot of gay people long to be more similar to, or even appear to be exactly the same as, straight people. That has always been true in one way or another. It's that gay marriage reinforces the falsehood that everyone has access to the same privileges if they are willing to make the "same" commitments. That marriage delivers only a simulacrum of similarity, even to straight people, and that there is no logical reason to make it a gateway to privilege, is a conversation that gay marriage has made it more difficult to have. Consequently, that marriage represents the pinnacle of ethical commitment to another person is an assumption by which the unmarried are stigmatized.

One might also point to loving commitments between children and adults, in which legal custody of a child is firmly viewed by most Americans as the greatest ethical commitment possible. Commitments outside that legal and/or biological relation, however deeply felt, are viewed as a degraded version of this bond. Again, let us look to gay and lesbian people who now parent. In this case, technical inclusion of non-traditional parents has allowed the institution itself to remain a socially, legally and economically privileged site. It used to be that gay people were all perceived as potential child molesters (that was homophobia); now we seem to all be, in the eyes of our friends, potential parents. This is not homophobia, but it's not progressive either: it means that queer people who do not own children are now subject to similar stigma that child free heterosexuals are, and their relations to children they love are not taken seriously as an ethical commitment.

What is really peculiar is that neither institution -- marriage or parenting -- is as accessible or as stable as straight people seem to think, much as economic mobility for people of color is not as simple as white people think. The great publicity attendant to lesbian parenting, and the great visibility of gay men and lesbians parenting in a few places, has somehow delivered the misimpression that the only reason many older queers didn't have children was that we were barred from doing so. Now that we are not, the reasoning goes, we can freely exercise what is a natural and normal desire for all (wo)men. Now this is a problem, in part because it leaves intact the notion that all normal people like children, and that wanting to parent is the natural way that all human beings will want to establish an intimate bond with a child. But it also occludes two facts of life for queer people who do wish to parent. One is that that there are huge hurdles -- medical, fiscal and legal --that face lesbians and gays when it comes to obtaining children, either by gestation or by adoption. These hurdles are faced by some heterosexual couples, but not by the vast majority of them. Second, many parents still lose custody of and access to their children because they are gay, lesbian and/or transsexual; and legally, a child can only have two parents, so that if all parties to the conception are known to each other, at least one person in the deal must agree to terminate and/or not seek custody. Furthermore, as my attorney recently explained, no adoption agency will knowingly and officially deliver a child into the hands of a queer person, although many agencies, domestic and foreign, operate on a "don’t ask, don't tell" basis, and individual judges will perform these and second party adoptions in jurisdictions that permit them.

The privileging of parenting has another effect that few people are aware of: discrimination in health benefits. In health plans such as mine, operated by Cigna, there are substantial allowances made for the conception and bearing of children. One of these is for fertility treatments, which are time-consuming, painful and expensive, and I am sure entirely worth it for people who wish to have children and have had trouble conceiving on their own. But what is explicitly excluded from our health plan is gender reassignment. Nominally, this is because there is some dispute as to whether wanting to change your gender is a "medical" condition. But I would also ask, if being infertile is the normal condition of your body, and you are otherwise perfectly healthy, what makes that a medical condition?

This kind of dispute is not about money, and it is not about personal prejudice, although such claims are easily made and believed. But the reason that is so is because of how institutions recognize the grounds for legitimate personal happiness, reward what they perceive as good decisions and by doing so, enshrine them as normal. And yet, just as one might argue that no one needs gender reassignment, it could be argued that no one needs a child. Now that we no longer farm the soil to sustain ourselves, saying that one "needs" a child expresses a complex set of desires that are social and emotional. In fact, much as a person born a man might wish to fulfill her felt destiny by becoming a woman, people born as children seek to live out a particular narrative of fulfillment and happiness by transforming themselves into parents.

How much more progressive and rational it might be to frame all of these things as desires that offer happiness and fulfillment, not to mention the possibility that one might be truly loved. For some people, it might be produced by having a child; for others, it might be surgical gender reassignment, the first stages of which are actually less expensive than a round of in vitro treatments. And for others, it might be getting their teeth straightened in middle age, anti-psychotic medication, or having a poorly repaired cleft palate remodeled by a skilled plastic surgeon.

I compare these things not to be absurd, but to provide graphic examples of how institutions structure inequities by judging some desires legitimate, figuring them as "normal," and persuading all of us that if we adhere to these values, and not ask for anything else, we can all be normal and happy. As Ford argues in his piece, old inequities have not disappeared, but we are in an era in which discrimination often presents as the absence of inclusion rather than the active determination to exclude. Hence, racism and homophobia, as concepts, no longer do the work we want them to do, particularly in progressive communities that have gotten the message -- but not quite.

"There You Go Again:" Republicans Condemn Sex, Slash Education Budget

Arguably, it was Ronald Reagan shaking his head in the middle of a presidential debate with Jimmy Carter as he chuckled ruefully, "There you go again," that created an emotional turning point in the 1980 campaign. It's what we remember, anyway, that and the explosive, derisive response from the audience as Carter stood there unable to respond. This moment became symbolic of what many voters, not just right-wing voters, had come to think of Democratic governance: that the same old strategies, strategies that had not yet resolved a single social problem, were being presented as if they were new and innovative.

Well, it looks like no one is immune from regurgitating old, tired solutions to economic malaise. Having, for almost three decades, tried to deflect attention from the damage their economic policies have had on the vast majority of Americans, Republicans are once again turning to the vilification of gay sex, and knowledge about gay sex, to divert us from their past and present incompetence. I predict that future historians will find documented proof that such attacks are cynically intended to deflect the public view from the real consequences that cuts in public spending will have on education more generally. And just to give you some perspective, dear reader: for the price of incarcerating twenty undocumented immigrants for a year, you could probably fund four women's studies programs granting the BA.

Attacks on women's studies, sexuality studies and queer studies in the Georgia public university system are but one example of an urgent issue that few journalists, politicians or academics, for that matter, seem to care about yet. In the face of declining state revenues, right wingers are once again "Mapplethorping" the public. They are shilling their ideologically rigid view that even more school privatization, and deep cuts in higher education, are an appropriate fix for a plunging economy that has been jointly devastated by pirate capitalists, corporate lobbyists, and decades of neoliberal fiscal policies. How can the dismantling of higher education be turned into a happy thing, you might ask? Because you can get rid of fields of knowledge that students don't need to know, and that might even harm them, like queer and feminist studies, while preserving the teaching of "universal values." And by doing this, you can divert attention from the real consequences to real people of policies that are turning our public universities into a simulacrum of the wretched, privatized Postal Service .

A faithful reader sent this clip from CNN.com about queer-baiting in Georgia:



For those of you too impatient to watch the video, Georgia Republican State Representatives Charlice Byrd and Calvin Hill, according to this website, have launched a campaign to rid the University of Georgia and Georgia State of faculty teaching a range of classes from queer theory to the sociology of sex. Public tax dollars, say these education-savvy lawmakers in an original argument, should not be going to faux scholarship that teaches students about immoral subjects that the public, in all its wisdom, would not support. Well good, because this is where the state of Georgia can really save the big bucks. To date, university officials are defending the right of the university system to hire and promote its own faculty, as well as the principle of academic freedom, without interference from the political classes. But of course, the legislature does pass the budget for these cash-strapped institutions. So administrators, in an old right-wing tactic, are being given the choice as to whether they will get back to the difficult matter of running the university or spend their time defending queer scholarship.

I find that administrators can be a weak reed at moments like this, but we'll see. And in case you are a reader from an effete, private Eastern institution, and you think that witch hunts against queer and sexual studies curricula cannot "happen here," think again. This article about Zenith, published by the Hartford Courant in May, 1999, ushered in what is known technically by administrators as a "s**t storm" about a class on pornography, taught by a tenured member of the faculty who was well-known on campus for her pedagogical rigor. In response to a vilification of the university that quickly went viral, otherwise sane Zenith administrators launched an unprecedented investigation into the course. Furthermore, when it was discovered that the faculty member who had taught the course -- an extremely shy and highly professional scholar, a popular and dedicated teacher who had worked at Zenith for over three decades -- had been awarded a coveted teaching prize prior to the scandal, all hell broke loose. Your very own Radical who, as a former recipient of the same prize, was on the committee, was pressured relentlessly (and unsuccessfully) to collaborate in an administrative decision (made where it was never clear, since no one would admit it and they sent a very polite and friendly bag man to try to talk me into it) to rescind the prize.

I don't say this to gin up old struggles which are long past, but as an object lesson to all: yes, it "can happen here," as the John Birch Society used to say, if it could happen at fruity-kazootie Zenith. Academic freedom, feminism and queers go on the block when the words "sex" and "education" appear in the same sentence: add a devastated economy, and it's all over, Baby Blue. And of course, in police states like Arizona, proposed cuts of $243 million will cripple the only education system Arizona has. And where do you go to make that kind of cut? Recent news items that show women's studies programs being targeted at Florida Atlantic and San Diego State University suggest that the first place Arizona administrators will go is to eliminate one of the most vibrant Women's Studies departments in the country, and one of the few that grants the Ph.D.

In conclusion, given the fact that the Right has been Wrong about pretty much everything in the last eight years, expect attacks on the intellectual classes, and on public funding for education to intensify, as conservatives haul out old strategies for obfuscating their incompetence and intensifying public ignorance. And expect those strategies to be aimed at women and queers first.

Big City Comes to the Radical: Notes on Shoreline, New York and Change Over Time (Also Known As History)

One feature of middle age for me is not just being able to reflect on my youth and see the turning points, but also to see turning points as they are occurring. Historians will recognize this as "periodizing," something we are taught to do when we prepare for our general exams as graduate students, and which is a traditional way of organizing historical knowledge: i.e., the Age of Jackson begins here, with this event, and ends here with this event. The events on either end are turning points in which something fundamentally changes, and that change is something that the Jacksonians perhaps did, or did not, perceive as something very significant at the time. So for example, probably everyone who was sentient and following politics knew that it was a Big Deal when Andrew Jackson successfully intimidated South Carolinians into paying federal taxes and resolved the Nullification Crisis in 1832-3 by threatening to deploy the greater military power of the State against the lesser military power of a state. But who knew that at the very same time immigrant white working class identities were consolidating around a contest over the exchange value of whiteness? And who knew that South Carolina would pick up exactly where it left off, twenty-seven years later? And get twelve other states to agree to their version of history?



So on the personal history front, when N. and I moved to Shoreline three years ago, and then subsequently sold our New York apartment, this was clearly a turning point, but I now know that we were not aware that we were participating in a larger process of Historical Change; nay, we were on the cutting edge of it.

This is what I knew at the time, other than that I was sick to death of commuting and could no longer live in two rooms with another adult: that there were all kinds of things to say about why one would regret leaving New York, and why one might welcome it. On the regret side, New York is:

1. Exciting.

2. A Metropolis of unparalled pleasures in art, politics, letters, food, parties, public transportation, and fun stuff to do.

3. Very gay.

4. Internationally and racially diverse.

5. The home to at least five top-flight universities, about a zillion archives and an outstanding, varied and public intellectual life.

6. A place where it is eternally possible to imagine that one might become rich and famous, either through conscious effort or by chance.

7. The home of my youth.

But on the debit side, and I would say this is a more general phenomenon you can read about in the newspapers, those of us who decide to leave -- particularly those of us who moved there in the first place to live the sophisticated, liberated life of our dreams -- recognize that New York is also:

1. Expensive. Easy to live in if you are doing something overvalued, like writing books about how to spend the year living on other people's garbage or selling antique Bakelite tchotchkes to the Rolling Stones, but hard to afford if you do something undervalued, like teaching or working with the disabled.

2. Increasingly geared to a homogenizing tourist market and the desires of very wealthy people.

3. Young.

4. A place where the bulk of full-time academics get paid less than many of us are paid elsewhere, for reasons that are a little mysterious; where the majority (as high as seventy percent) of faculty are contingently employed; and all faculty are at least as unhappy and complain as much as faculty elsewhere, if not more so, even though most of them either came to New York deliberately or refuse to leave to find satisfying work because they can't imagine living anywhere else.

5. Home to a gay and lesbian community that has no politics to speak of beyond marriage; is either in its twenties and utterly punked out, or older and consumed with insemination dilemmas; and manages to support exactly one lesbian bar in a city of many million people, probably 300,000 of whom are lesbians.

6. Home to a hospital system that is overly stressed and underfinanced, to the extent that taking your own life after a severe ankle sprain might seem like a reasonable alternative to going to an emergency room.

This is all to say that moving to Shoreline was a quite conscious turning point for me, in the sense that it was time to take account of the fact that most of the things I had gone to New York for were either Over, or I was Over Them. For example, it ceases to matter whether there are one or twenty lesbian bars (Shoreline has one gay men's bar, a gay men's bar that goes lesbian one night a month, and a pizza restaurant that goes gay one night a week) if you go to bed every night at 11:00. And if you leave New York, you have a great deal more money, so you end up going back to New York to do things you couldn't really afford before, like seeing concerts and plays.

But dig this. I noticed yesterday that New York is coming to Shoreline. For example:

This summer, three movies have been shot here, including one for which my nephew Von Liktenstein ( formerly known on this blog as Extravaganza, and known to his friends as simply Von Likt) has auditioned. Eleven movies and TV shows are waiting for permission to shoot here. This means that we have all the inconveniences of New York movie making as well, compressed into about fourteen square blocks. Many of my friends grump about this. However, since I put up with NYPD Blue in my New York neighborhood for over a decade, I am not fazed.

I was reading the New York Times today and discovered that the Lifetime channel is premiering a new television series tonight called State of Mind that actually takes place in Shoreline. The ongoing plot concerns what Shoreline is perhaps most famous for, other than Oligarch University, which is its vast community of psychotherapists. Tonight, in the premier, our therapist heroine discovers that her husband is having an affair with their couples' therapist. This is the kind of thing that could happen in New York -- or Shoreline, actually, since most days, in most parts of town, you could throw a stone in any direction and hit a squirrel or a therapist.

I realized yesterday that Oligarch, for reasons that are not quite clear to me since for many years they were happily engaged in offending a difficult but extremely wealthy alumni donor by their refusal to do this, has assembled quite the group of queer scholars. Yesterday at our neighborhood Farmer's Market (another feature of Shoreline Life that means we can be foodies too just like bourgeois folk everywhere), I ran into my old friend George Chauncey, who came to Oligarch from the University of Chicago last year, and who used to live in New York when we were both young and jobless. He was coming from Joanne Meyerowitz's house, which is right across the park from mine. Joanne and her partner moved here two years ago, from Indiana. But when I realized that I might be in the midst of one of those turning point moments was when a neighborhood friend, Patty, mentioned -- subsequent to me saying something typically snotty about gay marriage -- that a new Oligarch faculty member had bought the condo around the corner from us, and that he was against gay marriage too. Huh? Who? Well, it turns out, it's Michael Warner, who also used to live around the corner from us in Chelsea and worked at Rutgers. We actually thought he had followed us to our building on the Lower East Side, but later decided he just had a friend there. Clearly, however, he has followed us here, there is no question about that. And to seek a similar critical mass of queer scholars concentrated in the same way, you would have to go stand in the middle of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village.

So my current analysis is this: we left New York for Shoreline, only to discover that Shoreline is becoming a boutique New York. Isn't history strange?



(This picture of the Smoothie Factory, now condominiums, in the Wooster Square neighborhood of Shoreline, was taken by Steven Severinghouse. On the left, you can see a corner of the neighborhood train station, a five minute walk from our house, that takes you to -- New York!)

A Few Little Things, All Important, But None Important Enough for A Post of Their Own

What I had really decided to do today was work on a little talk I am supposed to give on Saturday about teaching Queer Studies for Zenith alums and parents of graduating seniors. In order that this not go into the category labeled No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, I determined a while back to use this presentation as an opportunity to write a short, pleasant article about building queer studies as a concentration in American Studies at a liberal arts institution that is unlikely to dedicate more than a line or so to any interdisciplinary field. Such fields rely on people trained in something else entirely switching over and becoming, shall we say, Transscholarly.

I don't emphasize Zenith's limited resources to be churlish: it is simply a Fact, and a Fact to be Dealt With as creatively and cheerfully as possible lest there be research I am unaware of concluding that griping is a major cause of gum disease in academics. As part of the power of positive thinking, said article will, I hope, go off to some smallish, likeable journal such as Radical Teacher, or perhaps a large-ish likeable journal that wil raise my profile in the field, like American Quarterly. Who knows? But the summer will start off with a bang, as the article goes whisking off into the ether, to return in six months as something foreign, destined for revision.

But now what I have done to myself is this. Instead of going to this event and doing it more or less off the top of my head -- or more accurately, from a set of notes jotted down that morning -- I have become ambitious, and hence, mulish about actually sitting down to work on it. Things fly in and out of my brain a mile a minute, things I could imagine finishing in a shorter period of time: submitting the project grant I had decided not to do; finish reading what I have come to call "my Beecher book" (see book advertised on the left), a project stalled by grading, but which will take only a little focus to accomplish; rip up the asphalt path to the front door and see if we have lovely nineteenth century stone underneath as others in the neighborhood do. Or blog.

So here are a few little things that have been rattling around on my virtual desk, with appropriate links:

Undine, at Not of General Interest has a great post comparing participation in conferences to broccoli. I agree with her completely, but would substitute parsnips for broccoli, as I have grown to love the latter, having become convinced by Dr. Andrew Weil that I would not get cancer if I made broccoli a regular part of my diet. I believe that parsnips prevent cancer too, and I like the way they taste, except that the house always smells faintly of urine after I cook them, so I buy them, put them in the fridge, and let them rot slowly instead.

Oh -- and no vegetable really helps you fight cancer in my world if it isn't organic. And conferences, as far as I know, are sometimes annoying but entirely non-carcinogenic.

I have been quite remiss in calling attention to this, but Tony Grafton had a nice piece in the AHA's monthly newsletter, Perspectives, about history bloggers. It includes some links to historians' blogs, including yours truly. Thanks, pal.

If you have no time to read the international news, and you want someone else who is smart and progressive to do it for you, check into this blog by a Zenith colleague of mine, Jonathan Cutler.

And while you are cruising about, check out this post about joining the AHA by squadratomagico. Probably the other medievalists know why she chose that name, but it's a great post in a great blog. Which reminds me: although I have some of the ambivalence about history's status as a discipline that squadratomagico does (based in part on my own interdisciplinary nature, and modern history's own professional past as an interdisciplinary mix of political economy, law, narrative history and economics) part of the reason I don't like belonging to the AHA is that it costs so damn much, and I only find about a third to a half of what is published in the American Historical Review relevant. Hence, I recycle it almost immediately, as I do all journals now because they are easily obtainable on the web.

BTW: I am sure the rest of the articles are relevant to other scholars in other fields. Or people who simply have More Time. Like graduate students or expectant mothers ordered to bed rest.

Sometimes I just throw the damn AHR away after skimming the book reviews, reading book reviews being the main way those of us with no graduate students keep up with what is being published. This makes me wish I could just read the AHR on the web in the first place and never have it come into the house at all. Perspectives, the AHA monthly newsletter, I am less ambivalent about because it is very short, but I would read that on the web too if they lowered my dues and my carbon footprint by witholding paper copies of everything they publish. Just saying.

Now I am going to save oodles of time, thus reserving those hours for productive work (on this topic, see a continuing series by Lumpenprofessoriat on the use-value of blogging) by just putting this post up without looking for amusing pictures.