Feminist Pigs

Children’s Gender Self-Determination: A Practical Guide

2012-02-16T12:34:00.000-08:00

So you want to have a kid, or you want to interact with kids, but you’re not a big fan of the gender binary and the 10 trillion ways children are asked to conform to it, nor do you like the way that gender identity is offered to children as the primary way to make sense of themselves, and you’re also irked by the fact that even the children’s books that emphasize gender nonconformity (like My Princess Boy) fail to distinguish between “girl’s clothes” and “clothes marketed to girls”? Ok, me too. Read on!

In FEMINIST PIGS, I’ve tried to argue for the importance of providing all children—not just those who “show the signs” of gender nonconformity—with the social, cultural, and political tools they can use to simultaneously work with and against the gender binary—a process I’m calling gender self-determination. Providing children with gender self-determination involves two efforts: 1) parents’ active cultivation of children’s familiarity with and appreciation for genderqueer imagery, language, bodies, politics, and subculture; and 2) welcoming children’s engagement with gender signifiers (gendered colors, toys, objects, images, feelings, and modes of relating) without “gender diagnosis,” or the imposition of meaning about what children themselves are signifying—about their identities or their nature.

To my mind, gender self-determination introduces children to the relational and culturally-embedded pleasures associated with gender play, without concretizing a gendered selfhood. It recognizes that neither children nor the world are “gender neutral.” Nor are any of our genders “independent” from the cultures in which we are located; hence I think the term “gender independent,” which is gaining some momentum in Toronto, is a great first step but cannot quite capture the project I’m interested in. Working for gender self-determination is about operating with the presumption that no single child has a greater innate capacity for gender creativity or fluidity or independence than another. All children have this potential, and therefore the project must not center on supporting “special children,” but on building a movement for all children’s gender self-determination.

But, as some thoughtful and pragmatic readers have pointed out, it’s challenging to implement these ideas in our interactions with children because the world presents us with obstacles at every step, because we have very few models for how to relate to children in genderqueer ways, and because the stakes and risks are extremely high (someone may very well call child protective services and report that you are enacting a queer “social experiment” on your child). So here are some guidelines, which I have developed in conversation with some brave and amazing parents, students, and friends.

1. Don’t refer to kids as boys and girls. Thankfully, many parents are starting to resist gender stereotyping and allow for cross-gender exploration, often in the form of providing children with “dress up” clothes that allow for a broader range of play (male children in princess gowns, girls in Spiderman attire, etc.). But the vast majority of parents unthinkingly refer to their children as girls and boys, and they do this several times a day without considering the ways this makes sex/gender the central component of how kids think of themselves, understand their social group, and view themselves through their parents' eyes. I can think of only two reasons to refer to children as if you know their gender identity. 1) You are doing some feminist/queer strategizing about how to combat the ways that children are diminished according to their perceived genders. 2) You need to talk about children’s bodies for medical or other practical reasons, which isn’t actually about gender anyway. If you need to talk about vaginas or penises, just do that. I have only once referred to my two year old kid, Yarrow, as “a boy,” and it was when a child at a park asked me, “is that a boy or a girl?” and I panicked. Later, I talked with the brilliant Kathy Witterick about how to handle this, and she suggested answering the question with, “that’s Yarrow.” Ah! So simple. You can also say, “that’s a question you should ask Yarrow,” which is a bit of a trick in my case since I don’t think Yarrow understands that question yet or has an answer. Nonetheless, it’s a good way to go with older kids because it allows them to answer for themselves and avoids treating the answer like it’s self-evident. Of course, you want to maintain your connection with the kids at the park, as they are part of your community. So I think the challenge is balancing, on the one hand, your obligation to provide your child with gender self-determination, and on the other hand, the importance of lovingly interacting with other kids for whom genderqueerness may be a new idea.

Similarly, when talking about more than one child, don’t call children “the boys” or “the girls.” Don’t use terms like “buddy” or “dude” or “precious” unless you use these words to describe all children, regardless of your perception of their gender, or unless you mix it up in a cool way (e.g., “princess dude”) or you alternate (e.g., call your kid “dude” on Tuesday, “princess” on Wednesday).

2. Queer your kid. Buy clothing or acquire hand-me-down clothing marketed to both boys and girls. If you have a child with a penis, do not refer to clothes marketed to girls, such as dresses, as “special” or “costumes” or “dress up;” this reinforces their strangeness or difference. Offering gender self-determination to children means trying not to impose on kids an adult relationship to gendered objects, even when those objects carry a lot of gendered baggage or associations for us (and clearly are situated within structures of gender oppression). Until your kid is old enough to create their own gendered style, aim for androgyny or alternate butch and femme aesthetics on different days. If your child has a vagina, the world expects long hair, so perhaps give this kid the experience of short hair before the weight of the gender binary comes crashing down in preschool. This, combined with pants, will mean that everyone will relate to your kid as a boy. You can go with that, you can mix it up, you can avoid the temptation to rescue your kid from what you might imagine is “misrecognition” – but you really have no idea what your kid’s gender is until they tell you, so I say just calm down, breathe deep, and observe. What you do know is that all children will encounter the gender binary soon enough, so what you can offer in the meantime is an early familiarity with gender fluidity.

3. Don’t diagnose your kid. Don’t announce that despite your best feminist/queer efforts, your child is simply “a girly girl” or a “boy’s boy.” Do not make up a narrative about your child’s gender, and do not believe that your child’s own gendered narratives are fixed or have the same meaning to your child that they have to you. Let’s say you have a child with a vagina who is obsessed with princesses. Avoid the temptation to say things like, “we’ve really tried to steer her away from princess stuff, but she’s just a girly girl no matter what we do.” If you have a child with a penis who turns paper towels into weapons at every turn, don't say, "gosh, I hate to admit it but I guess testosterone really does have all the effects they say it does!" This may shut down or misrecognize whatever queer or feminist meanings that could be present within princess play or paper towel aggression, and it also fails to recognize that your child’s gender will evolve over time and may be stifled by any worrying and labeling on the part of nearby adults. Redirect kids away from violence and towards human connection, but don't make any of it about gender.

4. Change the words in kids’ books. Rarely do I read a book to Yarrow without changing any of the words. While reading, I frequently change “he” to “she,” as the former is terribly overused in kids’ books as a universal pronoun to describe all animals and most people. I also will use “he” on one page and “she” on the next page to describe the same character, because, well, some people identify as both male and female. I change man/woman and boy/girl to “person,” “kid,” “the narrator,” “our protagonist,” “the soccer player,” etc. I change “girls’ toys” to “toys marketed to girls.” To introduce genderqueerness where there never is any, I sometimes refer to as “daddies” the people who appear to be mothers in a given story (I learned this from yarrow, who really likes to mix it up!). I know it seems stuffy to change the word “she” to a word like “protagonist” or to talk about marketing with kids, but I like the way it teaches kids that we default to gender when we really mean something far more specific or complex. And we also need to get clear with kids—and with ourselves—that the toys kids like don’t have essential gender characteristics.

5. When an important adult thinks they need to know your kid’s gender, ask why. It’s less popular these days for schools to gender segregate children or speak openly about children’s gender differences than it once was, but it is common for schools to proudly talk about the importance of “gender balance” as a form of diversity (i.e., “at our preschool, we are attentive to having an equal number of girls and boys.”) But we need to ask why this is important. To me it reveals that the school expects kids to have a clearly defined gender and that they think gender is revealing something important about who kids are. We need to push back on that idea. When I went to Toys R’Us and asked a salesperson where I could find a plastic pool and was met with the response, “for a boy or a girl?,” that was obviously ludicrous. But far more insidious are all of the medical records and preschool applications we have encountered which require us to label Yarrow as either a boy or a girl, and present this question as if it’s really fundamental to Yarrow’s well being. We’ve started asking, “do we really need to answer this question? And if so, why?” We’re often bullied into answering it, but at the very least we have raised the question.

This is a working document, and I’d love to know what other folks would add.

Now on with the revolution!

On French Parenting

2012-02-07T12:36:00.000-08:00

According to three recent books—French Women Don’t Sleep Alone, French Women Don’t Get Fat, and French Children Don’t Throw Food—the masses of failed American women have a thing or three to learn from the French about femininity and heterosexuality. At first glance these books appear to be covering a diverse range of questions about how to live, from what to eat to how to parent. And each is pretty intriguing, for a person who cares about keeping men in her bed, being thin, and teaching infants to suck it up and stop acting like babies (none of which have anything to do with me personally, or with my brand of feminism). But remarkably, each of these books also trace their steps back to the same basic value, a value entrenched in French culture and supported by French institutions: French women know how to prioritize their femininity, desirability, and their sexual partnerships with men. They do not “let themselves go” because they are busy attending to a child. They do not withdraw from the sexual marketplace once they turn 50 years old (even if they have learned, firsthand, that so many men are jackasses). They do not snack between meals—quelle horreur! And they expect to be met with scorn if they breastfeed longer than four months, pick up their children when they cry, take young children to restaurants, or fail to return quickly to work and to their pre-pregnant bodies. When compared to American women, French women work harder to perform femininity, are more agreeable when it comes to men’s incessant efforts to (hetero)sexualize public space, are more interested in sex throughout their life course, are more disgusted by fat bodies, are more willing to withhold food from themselves when they are hungry, and are more conscious of the fact that breastfeeding and other forms of baby-centeredness just aren’t sexy, not to mention the ways that these activities result in less “adult time” (i.e., time spent with husbands). And I haven’t even mentioned the French government’s subsidization of perineal therapy to get French vaginas back in action ASAP.

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, the best part of the French approach to parenting is that not only is it what’s best for adults, but it is also what’s best for children. And herein lies the seduction.

Every parent wants to believe that the way of life that meets their needs can and should also be what best meets the needs of their children. Parents who practice independent/boundaried/RIE approaches will tell you that children desperately want to be taught autonomy and limits. They will tell you that babies must learn to self-soothe, to put themselves back to sleep, to play by themselves, to cry out their frustrations without intervention, and to wait patiently for their needs to be met. Parents who practice more attachment-oriented approaches will tell you that babies desperately want security and connectedness above all else. They want a present and ever-responsive parent who provides the secure “home base” from which children can individuate at their own pace. As for me, I thought I fell into the first camp, but then I had a baby and found myself squarely in the second.

For the most part, I believe in relating to children's needs and dependencies the way I relate to those of adults. If adults cry, I respond right away. If adults need help, I help them. If adults are vulnerable, scared, going through a rapidly changing stage of life over which they have no control, I treat that with respect and care. I do not spend a single moment worrying that if I don’t impose withholding, futility, impermanence, and disappointment on my child, he somehow won’t learn these lessons. Life is harsh enough. We hurt ourselves. We get sick. People are mean, sexist, racist, and homophobic. Strawberries don’t grow in winter. Cats won't always let you pet them even when you are bursting with love. I hardly think I need to add to the mix messages like, “hey kid, you gotta cry in your room by yourself or else you’ll be a clingy, whiny 30-yr old.”

But is providing this kind of compassion, care, and nonstop service easy? No. sexy? Definitely not.

What if parents’ needs are fundamentally in conflict with young children’s needs? This is a hard pill to swallow, but I think it’s just true—at least in the beginning. Parenting is itself a structural contradiction, an impossible situation. It's a mess of competing needs and desires. Parents need sleep; babies need to be fed throughout the night. Parents need, or at least want and crave, a return to their lives as they knew them before having kids—their friendships, their partnerships, their sex lives, their bodies, their careers, their hobbies, their exercise routines, their creative outlets, etc. It is beyond reasonable to want these things. But adding a dependent human to your life changes up your routine, and it's really really hard. Being in deep, lifelong relationships with people—whether your partner, your friend, your parent or your child—involves some serious sacrifice. Relationships with young children, like relationships with the very elderly, or with people who are sick or dying or otherwise very vulnerable, are especially high maintenance. To think that somehow what you want will always be what’s “best” for the other people in your life—including the dependent or vulnerable people in your life—seems a bit egotistical to me. This doesn’t mean it’s not fair to intensely crave and fantasize about things like fuss-free evenings with silent children, an elaborate home-cooked meal, and a relaxing adult conversation with people wearing fashionable, stain-free clothing. Wanting these things is a fair human impulse; but it’s not a parenting philosophy in my book.

What’s tricky about “good parenting” is that people want to measure it by the outcome of the child’s life. Of course we all know lots of children who were spanked, formula-fed, sleep-trained, and raised on television and twinkies and who are now very happy and healthy adults. In fact, my favorite people in my life (I include myself here) faced hardship as children (for example, the loss of parent, a parent with an addiction, a neglectful parent, etc.). But assuming that these factors caused any particular adult outcome without very careful research is to make what we, in sociology, refer to as a spurious conclusion. It’s very difficult to know what effect our every parenting decision has on the many specific characteristics of our children, especially later down the road in their lives. Given this, I think the best we can do is offer to children what we offer to adults—a focus on children’s quality of life in the moment, the quality of our relationship with them in the moment, and the complex negotiation between two humans when one has more power and resources and skills than another. Of course we set boundaries when we need to. We preserve our sanity and comforts when we can and must. But pretending that we do this for the good of our children (other than in the sense that a resentful parent is a bad parent), doesn't feel honest to me. In our relationships with adult friends, we do not think to ourselves, “gosh, I really need to consider how I respond to Jane right now, because one indulgent wrong step and I might turn her into a impatient asshole in a decade or so.” Instead, in adult relationships, we try to do right by people in the moment, to respond to their immediate circumstances, and to offer the kind of care we would want were we in their shoes.

French parents may be sexy -- you know, in the way that lusty, self-centered people are sexy. Maybe I wouldn't mind having sex with a French hottie over 50. But I'm glad I'm not her baby.

Poly-blogamy

2012-01-31T13:38:00.000-08:00

In addition to my monogamous relationship with Feminist Pigs, I have started blogging over here too:
Social (In)Queery!

Check out the collaborative stylings of some queer sociologists with time on their hands...

Get Your Gender Binary Off My Childhood!: Children’s Right to Gender Self-Determination

2012-01-17T21:52:00.000-08:00

Childhood gender variance was a hot topic in 2011. Several major U.S. media outlets covered the story of Storm, a baby born in Canada to parents who decided not to declare Storm male or female in the hope that this would offer Storm greater opportunities for self-expression and gender autonomy [http://abcnews.go.com/Health/baby-storm-raised-genderless-gender-dangerous-experiment-child/story?id=13693760#.TxZPVhxWb1U]. Considerable coverage was also given to the founding of Egalia, a Swedish preschool in which children are not identified as boys or girls, but are referred to as “friends” and are addressed with gender-neutral pronouns [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/26/gender-bias-egalia-preschool_n_884866.html]. And just a few weeks ago, The Boston Globe covered the story of Nicole, a transgendered child of initially heartbroken, ashamed, and worried parents [http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2011/12/11/led-child-who-simply-knew/SsH1U9Pn9JKArTiumZdxaL/story.html?s_campaign=sm_fb]. Nicole’s parents—after a good deal of struggle—now embrace Nicole’s gender identity and are her outspoken advocates, their transformation due in large part to the support and guidance of a pediatric team at Children’s Hospital in Boston that works with transgendered adolescents.

As I read these stories, I was struck by what they reveal about the ways that transgender movement discourse is now being (mis)understood and operationalized by parents, doctors, and psychotherapists—most of whom have little or no familiarity whatsoever with trans, queer and feminist critiques of the gender binary. Borrowing on the increasingly popular hypothesis that sexual orientation is biologically determined, the dominant discourse on gender variant children is now firmly anchored in sociobiology and medical pathology. As Nicole’s benevolent doctor, Dr. Norman Spack, explains: “the issue is a medical one and…early intervention makes sense.” From this perspective, loving parents should recognize that transgender children are born with cross-gender identification. The compassionate and medically appropriate thing to do, according to Children’s Hospital, is to assist children in achieving the gender recognition they long for. This is especially important given the potential consequences of not doing so: depression, isolation, suicide.

Indeed, all children deserve the gender recognition they long for, and they should have access to the tools—medical, therapeutic, aesthetic, political—to achieve this recognition.

But this hardly means that boys who don’t identify with their gender assignment and who have a passion for princesses, for instance, are born with a pink princess fetish and an intact girlhood, nor does it mean that they have a medical problem. This is because genders and their signifiers are invented to begin with, and children learn about the genders available to them and their culturally and historically specific meanings and implications, and then they choose—under considerable pressure and depending upon their capacity for rebellion—from among these possibilities. Children are born with body parts, including penises and vaginas, chromosomes, and hormones that have varied, complex, and frequently misunderstood effects. And that’s all we know. That’s simply all we know about the sex and gender of babies and young children. If we want to let children “be themselves,” it would be hard to make a case for imposing or assuming anything other than this. When a child is born, we can note to ourselves, “well… let’s see… I notice my child has a vagina.” [See Dean Spade’s brilliant essay speaking to this point http://www.deanspade.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Purportedly-Gendered-Body-Parts.pdf] And then perhaps it would be wise to make queer/feminist plans to resist all the sexism and misogyny the world will likely direct at this vagina-possessing child. But calling this child a “girl” is already an imposition; this term presumes so much more than we know about the child. The moment we call this child a girl, we invite the world to see a pretty princess and to pretend that is who s/he always was. This point is something we teach in Women’s Studies 101, but it’s also something that even the best of feminists forget, and it’s certainly something that very few dare to actually apply to their parenting.

Unfortunately, the dominant discourse on gender variant children reinforces rather than challenges the gender binary. The Boston Globe’s story about Nicole, for instance, offers the following evidence that Nicole (born Wyatt) was a girl: she liked Barbies, pink tutus, and beads. She also felt like a girl, and wanted to be a girl. The problem lies with the first part of this formulation, and not the second. All children need to be able to like pink, tutus, and beads without this signaling anything about their gender. But all children also need to be able to say, “I want you to understand that I am a girl (or boy, or girl-boy, or a robot)” and have that identification respected. Being a parent has really highlighted this distinction for me. Providing your child with gender self-determination means making no assumptions about whether colors, objects, moods, feelings, or skills have gendered meaning for your child. It means that when your child says, “I am a boy,” you say, “Yes, ok. Just today? or all the time?” And you make it happen, depending on your child’s answer, and you are totally down if your child’s gender changes the next day, or if your child confidently identifies as trans and ultimately wants hormone therapy. But you do not presume that a love of trucks or pink means anything, unless your child says it does. The narrative so frequently put forward by parents of trans kids—“I knew my child was transgendered because s/he liked to play with xx toys and wear xx clothes”—does an injustice to all children, and to the project of gender self-determination more broadly. You only know your child is transgendered—or gendered at all—if they tell you so.

The fact that reporting on trans children like Nicole has been far more sympathetic than reporting on Kathy Witterick and David Stocker’s decision not to gender their child Storm is itself very telling. While it may be confusing and shocking for the general public to imagine raising a transgendered child, the story of trans children becomes relatable by making transgenderism analogous to medical disability. It’s less than ideal, but no one can help it, and thankfully there is a course of treatment to be pursued. But the idea that parents like Kathy and David would willfully choose to offer gender self-determination to their child is apparently an outrage. Kathy and David’s parenting has been subject to pathologizing and hateful commentary from expert psychologists concerned about Storm’s development. While Nicole’s parents are portrayed as compassionate and reasonable, Kathy and David have been depicted as selfish, deceitful, impulsive, and manipulative radicals using their child to enact a damaging social experiment. The experts are also concerned about Storm’s older siblings, whom they believe should not be expected to conceal “the truth” about Storm’s gender. Never mind that in the story about Nicole, it was Nicole’s twin sibling who was the first person in the family to name and accept Nicole’s desired gender; in the story about Storm, asking siblings to participate in the conscious project of decentering gender is tantamount to child abuse.

Most insidious in the reporting on Storm is the commentary offered up by more liberal psychologists claiming to understand the motivations behind these projects while nonetheless expressing concern about Kathy and David’s failure to respect the cultural importance of gender or to acknowledge the power of nature. For instance, psychologist Diane Ehrensaft, herself a parent of a gender variant child, is quoted in several articles expressing concern about Storm’s mental health (see http://www.parentcentral.ca/parent/babiespregnancy/babies/article/995112--parents-keep-child-s-gender-secret) Ehrensaft is author of Gender Born, Gender Made, a guide for parents of nonconforming kids. While ostensibly an advocate for gender nonconformity, she is also a proponent of the view that gender variant children are expressing a biological imperative and that parents have far less “control” than some want to imagine. In sum, children’s gender variance is to be embraced when it is congenital and immutable and medicalized, but it is suspect (and presumably the result of adult manipulation) when it is part of a conscious political project informed by decades of queer and feminist scholarship and organizing.

The media has accused Kathy and David of hiding the truth about Storm. But “the truth” reporters refer to isn’t simply whether Storm has a penis or a vagina (although this is about all Kathy and David can know of Storm’s sex/gender, as Storm is only 1 yr old). Instead, according to the Daily Mail, Storm’s parents are keeping “whether this baby is a bruising boy or a blushing girl…a secret.” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1389593/Kathy-Witterick-David-Stocker-raising-genderless-baby.html

But Storm is not living in seclusion; if you want to know whether Storm is blushing or bruising—or any other aspect of Storm’s personality—you could actually pay attention to Storm’s…personality! But again, because we use genitals as shorthand for a million things we want to imagine about children’s personalities, Kathy and David are accused of hiding Storm’s very selfhood, even though the only thing they are doing is not announcing what they know about Storm’s genitals. And indeed, this freaks people right out, far more than a story about a child trapped in the wrong body who—with the support of loving and normal, heteronormative parents—can be fixed by a host of doctors.

Clearly few parents have been as brave and committed to gender self-determination as Kathy and David, but we can all certainly move in this direction by being much more specific about what we know, and don’t know, about children and gender. As a parent of a 2 yr old with a penis, I can say that I just don’t know anything yet about Yarrow’s gender. I know Yarrow likes parks, his parents, sushi, cookies, puzzles, books, cuddling, pretending to be asleep, and jokes about people bonking their heads. And I’m pretty positive none of this has anything to do with his body parts or his future gender/s.

iMad: Maternal Flame Wars

2011-12-08T14:45:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, I posted the following question on a yahoo group for mothers of infants and young children in Los Angeles:

“OK, I know it's silly to imagine buying a $500 ipad for a 2-yr old, but we think he would really love the matching/drawing/counting and other educational games. We can't afford it, but the grandparents can... We also like the idea that it might draw his attention away from our phones. But $500? come on. Just on principle it bugs me. So... we started looking at the Leap Pads and the other cheaper, more indestructible alternatives but discovered that their applications are super corporate and brand-focused (i.e., selling kids on Elmo, Dora, Thomas, Disney, etc.). I am pretty committed to avoiding all of this branding. And last night we went to the apple store and found out that, indeed, the ipad comes with non-branded educational games, which is what we want. Has anyone found a cheaper kid-friendly tablet that comes with non-branded learning applications? thanks! Jane”

Several moms responded with information about tablets, and then I received this response (which I copy here with the permission of its author, who goes by the screen name “Bug”):

“More important than ‘electronic education’ is reading aloud to your child, allowing him free play with open-ended objects (play-doh, play kitchen, painting/drawing, etc.,) and providing situations -- especially outdoors in nature -- that allow him to be imaginative rather than imitative. IME as an elementary school teacher this is not a gift for your child, it's a detriment. It's not ‘educational.’ He would do better with $500 worth of Legos, or better yet the lovely wooden toys from Ostheimer. Developmentally children at that age benefit from touching, feeling and manipulating in three dimensions with real objects. Especially lovely real objects with texture (wooden car vs. matchbox car, for example). Games that are constructed by adults, with inflexible rules -- like computer/video games -- limit creativity and brain development in small children. They also do not allow the child to develop Executive Functioning skills, which are a key predictor to academic success. They create children who want to sit and be entertained, rather than engage and create. And there's tons of research about attention deficits that are created through screen time at an early age. And not to mention the overstimulation. An iPad is great fun for us adults and it sure is making App creators a lot of money, but in the words of another BBer, we all forget that we all built an independent relationship to learning before creating our relationship to technology. I don't see a benefit to a toddler (or, for that matter, an elementary student) ‘building computer skills to compete in the world.’ Critical thinking and executive functioning are qualities that can't be taught and are formed in these early years. Computer skills can be learned any time. A few related articles below. I also highly recommend the book The Plug-In Drug by Marie Winn.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/fashion/17TODDLERS.html?_r=2&em=&exprod=myyahoo&pagewanted=print

http://mariamontessori.com/mm/?p=1330

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/technology/21brain.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a2&pagewanted=print

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/technology/25brain.html?_r=1&ref=technology&src=me&pagewanted=print

http://www.slate.com/id/2288402/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/magazine/27tools-t.html?hpw=&pagewanted=print

Blerg. I was irritated. The information provided here is sound, so the critique of children and “screen time” is not what is at issue for me. Instead, I wondered about the thought process that leads women to offer other women unsolicited parenting advice. This happens all of the time, and in my experience, everyone complains about it but no one thinks they are the guilty party (of if they do, they have decided their information is so vital, they have an evangelical obligation or entitlement to share it. I have definitely been guilty of this myself, especially when it comes to telling pregnant women to work with a doula -- I'm almost religious about it.) But in this case, the level of detail was remarkable. Had we tried books? Ever thought about art? Perhaps we might consider taking our child outside? I couldn’t help myself. So I responded:

“gosh, i want to be honest and say that this is the kind of response that often

deters me from posting on BB. i often want to post a question, but i know if i

don't include volumes of background information (i.e., here's what we've already

tried, here's what we already know, here's the kind of response that will be

helpful, here's the kind of response that won't be helpful) then i must brace

myself for unsolicited and paternalistic advice about how i should be doing

things differently. so... here's the background:

1. i am also a teacher, as is my partner

2. my partner is also an artist. our child has made work out of play-doh, oil

pastels, charcoal, colored pencils, crayons, watercolor, plant and food dyes,

homegrown corn and beans, rocks, and leaves.

3. we are trained in permaculture and grow much of our own food. we bought our

house because it has very large backyard, where our child plays in heaps of

mulch, and eats the berries, tomatoes, and peas he picks directly off the vine

in our garden. he has a water table, a planting and seeding station, and

several glass jar terrariums. he has a wood playhouse, a compost heap he's in

charge of, and a chicken coop he helped to build.

4. we have multiple sets of wood blocks, wood trains, wood dolls, wood stacking

toys, wood matching games, and 7 wood puzzles. we have legos, bristle blocks,

magnetic blocks, rock collections, dolls, strollers, scooters, balls. our child

has about 300 books, which we began collecting for him before he was born. we

read in three different sittings each day (about 5 books per sitting)

5. we are lesbian feminists. we eat only organic food. our child loves tofu and

beets. we're raising our child to be gender-independent. he has been to three

protests in his first 20 months of life. he has occupied LA city hall. he

attends a montessori home daycare run by a feminist activist and poet

All of this is true, AND I would also like to get him an ipad. Jane”

Following this, Bug sent a personal message to me offline, apologizing for her tone. I also apologized; my tone had been a bit aggressive too. Subsequently, I received about 15 private messages from women thanking me for standing up to what they termed “sanctimony,” “arrogance,” and the ways women feel pressured to “provide parenting credentials.” Some women shared that they had felt shamed and “shut down” in similar ways, causing them to refrain from posting. One woman recalled a similar incident in which a mother posted that her child was having an adverse and frightening reaction to a vaccination, and did anyone have any advice about alternatives to infant Tylenol to help manage the reaction. This woman was bombarded with information about the dangers of vaccinations, including links to anti-vaccination websites. Her child had already been vaccinated.

A few other women on the list wrote public statements of support for Bug, and I am sure she received several congratulatory private messages as well. On list, opponents of toddler's iPad use explained that something as important as children’s health requires that women speak up and share their knowledge about risks to children, even if this means making other mothers defensive. One woman suggested that indeed we should provide our parenting credentials when we post online, otherwise we can expect “educated folk” to provide “other points of view.” iPad opponents also reminded me (and the close to 3,000 other mothers on the list) that the American Pediatric Association is clear on this issue: screen time of any kind, including television, is discouraged by pediatricians before the age of 2-yrs old.

But I was skeptical, not of the APA’s guidelines with which I was already familiar and for which I have a good amount of respect—instead, I was skeptical about whether all of this “good advice” stems from an altruistic concern for the children living in Los Angeles. Surely if the health of children in our communities is a priority for us, there are so many ways we as mothers can use our time to make an impact in children’s lives without judging, shaming, or shutting down other parents (to use the phrases shared with me by my comrades-in-shame). You probably already get the idea, but just to throw a few examples out there: We could work with organizations that assist and empower homeless or incarcerated or undocumented mothers; we could become involved in community organizations that work with abused children; we could work to end war or reform the foster system, the food supply, and public education—all of which I believe have greater consequences in children’s lives than early access to computers. And if doing these things isn’t possible, we can at the very least aim to build strong communities based on loving relationships with, and not judgmental assumptions about, other parents.

After reading Bug’s post, I also reflected on the fact that although so much buzz was created around whether or not to allow a 2-yr old to play with an iPad, the question I had posted just a few weeks prior—something to the effect of: “we want to start a family tradition of getting involved in some community organizing/volunteerism where it would be appropriate and not distracting to bring our 2-yr old and get him involved too, any ideas?”—this question received only one response, from a mom who admitted she didn’t have many ideas. This seems to me a reflection of a parenting culture far more focused on what kids should (or shouldn't) consume and far less interested in how kids might get involved in social justice.

I also thought, geez, this notion that we have a moral obligation to share “best parenting practices” with other mothers is quite a slippery slope. So I responded again, attempting to explain my point by offering an example of research-based information about children’s health that is accurate, but certainly not considered fair game to share with mothers who haven’t asked for it:

“For instance, if every time a mom mentions her husband or her heterosexual

marriage in her post (e.g. "where should the hubby and i go for date night"?), I

could ignore the content of her post and share some interesting research. I could respond with links to recent studies indicating that children raised in lesbian families have higher "social, school/academic, and total competence and significantly lower social problems, rule-breaking, aggressive, and externalizing problem behavior" than children raised by heterosexual parents. I could also cite research showing that children in lesbian families report a 0% rate of child abuse, as compared to the 26% of heterosexual families in which abuse is present. I could imply that she should dump her husband and become a lesbian, so as to increase her child's chances of psychological well-being.

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/126/1/28.full

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/10/lesbians-child-abuse-0-percent_n_781624\

.html

But that would be SO obnoxious, so simplistic, so uniformed of the details of

her life/marriage, so off-topic, so not my business and so not what the list is

for. So I would never do that. Jane”

Controversy ensued. The thread grew. Flames were thrown. Bug also responded again:

“I started with a place of believing that all on this list do want what's best

for their children, which is why I posted the information regarding child

development and screen technology even though it did not answer Jane's question, in her view. It's actually not just iPads at issue, it's computers, television and gaming gadgets. Unfortunately the data presented in the articles seems to be the same for all children, regardless of the gender makeup of their obviously loving parental pair, regardless of the parents' level of education, the number of protests

attended, or the number of organic eggs gathered by hand at home daily.

The tone of my original post -- for which I've apologized to Jane personally,

off list -- won't change the research, and it won't change the effects

technology has on developing neural pathways. The convenience of, and

appreciation we have for, the technology unfortunately won't change the

research, either. Feel free to shoot the messenger on this one, or cheer the snarky replies, but the bottom line is this: Involving young children closely with screen

technology has negative consequences that outweigh the perceived positives. The

research shows the consequences are long lasting and permanent.”

Yes, I see Bug’s point. And I am grateful for this exchange.

And, ultimately, all of this caused me to reflect on which "long lasting consequences" for children make their way into popular consciousness and the circuits of mother-to-mother advice (e.g., try natural birth! Breastfeed exclusively! No TV!) and which are almost unutterable (e.g., have you thought about the damaging effects of the gender binary on your kid? How are you celebrating queerness in your child’s life? What if the presence of sexism and racism in children’s daily lives is more damaging than formula?).

I also thought about my first six months as a mother, when I was on sabbatical from work, and when I left the house only to take walks or buy groceries or attend a baby class. It was a time when my life revolved around motherhood. I think, not coincidentally, it was also a time when I became obsessed with reading attachment parenting books and with assessing my own and other women’s “success” as holistic parents. I remember clearly the day that I got in my car to drive to work for the first time after that long stretch at home. I turned on Democracy Now, a radio news program, and within a few minutes I burst into tears because I remembered the world—and the world’s children—and I felt the relief of being released from my own self-pity and self-righteousness, which I have observed often go hand in hand in my life.

I also started paying attention to who the mothering experts are. The ones who write the best-selling books, like Dr. Sears, are mostly straight white men. And, while of course there are exceptions, in my experience the mothers most inclined to offer other women unsolicited holistic parenting advice are mostly straight, white, middle class women. Aside from the general issues of heteronormativity, racism, sexism, and class privilege that position these groups as "authorities," I also suspect that the expectation that one can make all the healthiest choices as a parent stems from considerable privilege, and my guess is that this framework, in itself, is fundamentally flawed because: a) health is really hard to come by in our damaged world, and b) whose definition of health are we working with?. Mother-on-mother judgments also seem connected to the kinds of unnecessary suffering that people with privilege produce in their lives. There is a lot to be said for joy in life, and many straight, white, middle class mothers I know are pretty exhausted and joyless, in part because they are spending so much time trying to be perfect, and are often doing this with little help from their husbands.

In the end, I bought an iPad for myself using my computing fund at work. Yarrow hasn’t seen it yet. I plan to use it for work, but someday soon I may just decide to take a peek at children’s apps. Only time will tell if Yarrow’s neural pathways survive L.A. smog, pesticides on restaurant food, lead in buildings, the obsessive-compulsive standardized testing of school children, and… my parenting. Let’s hope.

WILL TRADE PIE FOR QUEER STYLE CONSULTANT

2011-11-16T12:55:00.000-08:00

I’m a fan of radical disclosure, especially when it comes to information about how to achieve bourgeois forms of success. But this information—which includes how people acquire the money, jobs, friends, bodies, “beauty,” or style they have—is often deemed too private or particular to be subject to participatory democracy. Nevertheless, I often want to ask questions like: “where did you get the money for that?” or “how do you get your hair to do that?” or “how do you have a job, kids, and a clean house” or “where did you get those vintage pants I’ve never seen before?” or “how did you get promoted to full professor so quickly???”

I think it’s important to ask and answer these sorts of questions, not only because they expose the hierarchical, competitive, laborious, and often formulaic nature of “success” (including success at seemingly "personal" achievements like style or taste), but also because they unmask our investments in being special and autonomous.

[Example. Here is some disclosure about who cleans my house: I swore to myself for years that I would never, ever hire someone to help me clean my house. I did not want a life that I could not care for (or clean up) myself, and I also did not want to be yet another white woman employing a woman of color to do the culturally devalued but essential labor of the home while I went off to my more culturally valued and higher paid job. This promise to myself fell apart after a few years of living with Kat, who is impressively messy and incapable of cleaning, a situation later exacerbated by having a child (and six cats who like to shed hair and track litter and vomit throughout the house). Today, I pay someone to clean my house; my house remains relatively clean due to another woman’s labor. She works once a week in our home, and when I am not teaching on the day she is here, she cleans the house while I sit in my home office and prepare lectures or work on my book. A few blocks away, yet another woman is caring for my child during the hours of 9-3, so that I can (barely) sustain my career. I have tremendous gratitude for both of these women who make my life possible, and for whom I cannot help but have loving feelings (even as I try not to romanticize what is, on their end, employment). I am very conflicted about these “solutions” to the growing demands and mess of my life. I am conflicted because even as I try to ensure fair labor conditions, I know that my whiteness and middle class privilege are probably blinding me to some of the race and class dynamics that have defined domestic and childcare work in the United States (see, for instance, Mary Romero’s classic book Maid in the USA). I am also conflicted because, at some deep level, I have allowed my ideas about successful femininity and responsible feminism to get bound up with female self-sacrifice, self-sufficiency, and the appearance of ease. In sum, even though I know that all working mothers are “set up” in ways that often require us to hire other women to care for our children and/or home, I am still addicted to that feeling of being special (i.e., somehow capable of escaping this bind) and being autonomous.]

I say all of this as segue way into what I really want to discuss, which a bind of a totally different kind. I need some radical queer disclosure from other people. I need some help; basically, I need an intervention. I need a queer style intervention. Since becoming a mother I have been feeling like my queerness (as an aesthetic but also in some other ways too) has been slowing draining from my life. Pregnancy, new-mom-exhaustion, aging, the demand to be semi-professional for my job, having a kid who uses me as a napkin (or worse), the inability to leave the house at night, and the lack of time to go shopping or engage popular culture (let alone queer subculture), have interpellated me into J. Crew motherhood. I need queer Yoda. I need some queer disclosure about how we find and remake ourselves when we are lost.

No matter what I do to my hair, each strand shape-shifts back into mom hair. Or the hair of a news anchorwoman. Clothes that carry irony on other people ring out sincerity on me. My efforts to project radical feminist dyke somehow translate into soccer mom. I’m trapped in mom habitus.

This, to my mind, is a queer problem. My experience of it is one of bodily dysphoria. How I feel inside does not match my exterior, and I want an aesthetic that will better provide me with the kind of queer recognition that makes my life full, that makes me feel seen.

Is it really as simple as purchasing a tattoo and vintage glasses? That seems… dare I say, a bit scripted. But I am open to anything.

WILL TRADE PIE FOR QUEER, FEMINIST STYLE CONSULTANT.

Contact janew@ucr.edu

No One is Born Gay (or Straight): Here are 5 Reasons Why

2011-11-04T21:08:00.000-07:00

1. Just because an argument is strategic, does not make it true: Recently the Human Rights Campaign, arguably the country’s most powerful lesbian and gay organization, responded to Herman Cain’s assertion that being gay is a choice. They asked their members to “Tell Herman Cain to get with the times! Being gay is not a choice!” They reasoned that Cain’s remarks were “dangerous.” Why? “Because implying that homosexuality is a choice gives unwarranted credence to roundly disproven practices such as ‘conversion’ or ‘reparative’ therapy. The risks associated with attempts to consciously change one’s sexual orientation include depression, anxiety and self-destructive behavior.”

Yes, it’s true that straight people are more tolerant when they believe that gay people have no choice in the matter. If we are born gay, then we cannot change the fact that we are gay; we must live with this condition, and it would be unfair to judge us for that which we cannot change. By implication, if we could choose, of course we would choose to be heterosexual. Any sane person would choose heterosexuality (not so. see here: http://feministpigs.blogspot.com/2011/09/its-not-that-it-gets-better-its-that.html). And when homophobic people come to the opposite conclusion—that homosexual desire is something we can choose—then they want to help us make the right choice, the heterosexual choice. And they are willing to offer this help in the form of violent shock therapy and other “conversion” techniques. So I can absolutely understand why it feels much, much safer to believe that we are born this way, and then to circulate this idea like our lives depend on it (because, for some people, this really is a matter of life and death). Indeed, most progressive straight people and most gay and bi people--including Lady Gaga herself--hold the conviction that our sexual orientation is innate. They have taken their lead from the mainstream gay and lesbian movement, which has powerfully advocated for this view.

But the fact that the “born this way” hypothesis has resulted in greater political returns for gay and lesbian people doesn’t have anything to do with whether it is true. Maybe, as gay people, we want to get together and pretend it is true because it is politically strategic. That would be interesting. But still, it wouldn’t make the idea true.

2. The science is wrong (Part 1): People like to cite “the overwhelming scientific evidence” that sexual orientation is biological in nature. But show me a study that claims to have proven this, and I will show you a flawed research design. Let’s take one example: In 2000, a team of researchers at UC Berkeley conducted a study in which they found that lesbians were more likely than heterosexual women to have a “masculine” hand structure (http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/readings/homofinger/homo_finger.html). Presumably, most men have a longer ring finger than index finger, whereas most women have the opposite (or they have index and ring fingers of the same length). Lesbians, according to this study, are more likely than straight women to have what we might call male pattern hands. The researchers concluded that this finding supports their theory that lesbianism might be caused by a “fetal androgyn wash” in the womb—that is, when female fetuses are exposed to greater levels of a masculinizing hormone, it shows up later in the form of female masculinity: male-pattern hands and… attraction to women. But this study makes the same error that countless others have made: it does not properly distinguish between gender (whether one is masculine or feminine) and sexual orientation (heterosexuality or homosexuality). Simply put, the fact that a woman is "masculine" (itself a social construction) or has been introduced to greater levels of a male hormone need not have anything to do with whether she is attracted to women. We would only assume this if we had already accepted the heteronormative premise that masculine people (or men) are naturally attracted to femaleness and that normal (i.e., feminine) women are naturally attracted to men. Herein lies the bias. Many very "butch" women who are heterosexual (have you been to the rural South?) would like you to know that their gender does not line up with their sexual desire in any predictable way. And many very feminine lesbians would like you to know this too. The bottom line is that ideas about sexual desire are so bound up with misconceptions about gender and with the presumption that heterosexuality is nature’s default, that science has yet to approach this subject in an objective way. For a comprehensive examination of the flaws in the most widely cited research on sexual orientation, see Rebecca Jordan-Young’s brilliant book Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (Harvard University Press, 2011).

Ps: according this 2000 Berkeley study, I am not a lesbian.

3. The science is wrong (Part II): An even greater problem with the science of sexual orientation is that it seeks to find the genetic causes of gayness, as if we all agree about what gayness is. To say that “being gay” is genetic is to engage in science that hinges on a very historically recent and specifically European-American understanding of what being gay means. In Ancient Greece, sex between men was normative and widespread; it was considered the most praise-worthy, substantive and Godly form of love (whereas sex between a man and a woman was, for all intents and purposes, sex between a man and his slave). If men having frequent and sincere sex with one another is what we mean by “gay,” then do we really believe that something so fundamentally different was happening in the Ancient Athenian gene pool? Wow! How did Plato’s ancestors later develop all of those heterosexual genes? And what about native cultures in which all boys engage in homosexual rites of passage? Do we imagine that we could identify some genetic evidence of propensity to ingest sperm as part of a cultural initiation into manhood? What about all of the cultures around the globe in which male homosexual sex does not signal gayness except for under certain specific circumstances (e.g., you are only gay if you are the receptive sexual partner, or if you are feminine)? And while I am on this subject, what about the fact the United States is precisely one of those cultures? When young college women lick each other’s boobs at frat parties, or when young college men stick their fingers in each other’s butts while being hazed by their frat brothers, we don’t call this gay—we call this “girls (and boys) gone wild.” My point here is that a lot of people engage in homosexual behavior, but somehow we talk about the genetic origins of homosexuality as if we are clear about who is gay and who is not, and as if it’s also clear that “gay genes” are possessed only by people who are culturally and politically gay (you know, the people who are seriously gay). This is a bit arbitrary, don’t you think?

Just 150 years ago, scientists went searching for the physiological evidence that women were hysterical. Hysteria, by Victorian medical definition, meant that a woman’s uteruses had become dislodged from its proper location and was floating around her body causing all sorts of trouble—like feminism and other matters of grave concern. And guess what, they found the evidence, and they published books and articles to prove it. They also looked for and found the evidence that all people of African and Asian ancestry were intellectually and morally inferior to people of European Ancestry. Many books were published dedicated to establishing these obviously absurd and violent beliefs as legitimate and indisputable scientific facts. Similarly, the science of sexual orientation has a long and disturbing history. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was believed that homosexuals had beady eyes, particularly angular facial structures, and “bad blood.” Today, we apparently have gender variant fingers and gay brains.

Is it possible that people who identify themselves as “gay” in the United States (again, keep in mind that “gay” is a culturally and historically specific concept), share some common physiology? Perhaps. But even if this is so, do we really know why? Indeed, we may find (as Simon LeVay did) that men who identify as gay share a certain trait—a larger VIP SCN nucleus of the hypothalamus, for instance. But how do we know that this “enlargement” is a symptom or cause of their homosexuality, and not, say, a symptom or cause of their general propensity for bravery, creativity, or rebellion? In a homophobic culture, you need some bravery (and other awesome traits) to be queer. Perhaps these personality traits are what are actually being observed under the microscope.

And, of course, there is the time-eternal question: why aren’t scientists looking for the genetic causes of heterosexuality? Or masturbation? Or interest in oral sex? The reason is that none of these sex acts currently violate social norms, at least not strongly enough to be perceived as sexual aberrations. But this was not always true. In the 19^th century, scientists were interested in the biological origins of the “masturbation perversion.” They were interested because they believed it was pathological, and because they wanted to know whether it could be repaired.

At the end of the day, what we can count on is that the science of sexual orientation will produce data that simply mirror the most crass and sexist gender binarisms circulating in the popular imagination. This research will report that women are innately more sexually fluid than men, capable of being turned-on by almost anything and everything (hmmm…. other than in Lisa Diamond’s research, where have I seen that idea before? Ah yes, heterosexual pornography.) It will report that men are sexually rigid, their desires impermeable. It will tell us that straight men simply cannot be aroused by men and that gay men are virtually hardwired to be repulsed by the thought of sex with women. Regardless of what else we might say about the soundness of these studies, what is evident to me is that they have been used to authorize many a straight man’s homophobia, and many a gay man’s misogyny.

4. Just because you have had homosexual or heterosexual feelings for as long as you can remember, does not mean you were born a homosexual or heterosexual. There are many things I have felt or done for as long as I can remember. I have always liked to argue. I have always loved drawing feet and shoes. I have always craved cheddar cheese. I have always felt a strong connection with happy, trashy pop music. These have been aspects of myself for as long as I can remember, and each represents a very strong impulse in me. But was I born with a desire to eat cheddar cheese or make drawings of feet? Are these desires that can be identified somewhere in my body, like on one of my genes? It would be hard to make these claims, because I could have been born and raised in China, let’s say, where cheddar cheese is basically non-existent and would not have been part of my life. And while I may have been born with some general artistic potential, surely our genetic material is not so specific as to determine that I would love to draw platform shoes. The point here is that what we desire in childhood is far more complex and multifaceted than the biological sciences can account for, and this goes for our sexual desires as well. Some basic raw material is in place (like a general potential for creativity), but the details—well, those are ours to discover.

5. Secretly, you already know that your sexuality is a choice. Lots of adults worry that if we allow little boys to wear princess dresses and paint their nails with polish, they might later be more inclined to be gay. Even some liberal parents (including gay and lesbian parents) worry that if they introduce their child to “too much” in the way of queer material, this could be a way of "pushing" homosexuality on them. Similarly, many people worry that if young women are introduced to feminism in college, and if they become too angry or independent, they may just decide to be lesbians. But if we all really believed that sexual orientation was congenital—or present at birth—then no one would ever worry that social influences could have an effect on our sexual orientation. But I think that in reality, we all know that sexual desire is deeply subject to social, cultural, and historical forces. We know that if the world today were a different place, a place where homosexuality was culturally normative (like, say, Ancient Greece), we would see far more people embracing their homosexual desires. And if this were the case, it would have nothing to do with genetics.

The concept of “sexual orientation” is itself less than 150 years old, and almost equally recent is the notion that people should partner based on romantic attraction. Most of what feels so natural and unchangeable about our desires—including the bodies and personalities we are attracted to—is conditioned by our respective cultures. The majority of straight American men, for instance, will tell you that they have a strong, visceral aversion to women with bushy armpit hair. But this aversion, no matter how deep it may now run in men’s psyches and no matter how nonnegotiable it may feel, is hardly genetic. Up until the last century, the entire world’s female population had armpit hair, and somehow, heterosexual sex survived.

People like to use the failure of “gay conversion” therapies as evidence that homosexuality is innate. First of all, these conversions do not always fail; if you make someone feel disgusted enough by their desires, you can change their desires. Call it a tragedy of repression, or call it a religious awakening—regardless, the point is that we can and do change. For instance, in high school and early in college, my sexual desires were deeply bound up with sexism. I wanted to be a hot girl, and I wanted powerful men to desire me. I was as authentically heterosexual as any woman I knew. But later, several years into my exploration of feminist politics, what I once found desirable (heterosexuality and sexism) became utterly unappealing. I became critical of homophobia and sexism in ways that allowed these forces far less power to determine the shape of my desires. If this had not happened, no doubt I’d be married to a man. And if he wasn’t a complete asshole, I’d probably be happy enough. But instead, I chose to be queer for various political and emotional reasons, and from my vantage point today, I believe it to be one of the best decisions I ever made. [Does this mean that your daughter may decide to be a lesbian if she takes some women's studies courses? Yes. Whatcha gonna do now?!]

Perhaps most importantly, the fact that we choose something doesn’t mean that it is a trivial, temporary, or less a vital part of who we are. For instance, is religion a choice? Certainly it is if we define “choice” as anything that isn’t an immutable part of our physiology. But many religious people would feel profoundly misunderstood and offended if I suggested that their religious beliefs were a phase, an experiment, or a less significant part of who they are then, say, their hair color. Choices are complex. Choices run deep. And yes, choices are both constrained and fluid--just like our bodies.

Fall 2011

2011-10-28T14:00:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking we should just be more honest

About the mess of this space back here.

We’ll never be urban homesteaders

like that hipster couple in Echo Park

The ones who give talks about rooftop bee keeping

and grey water systems.

Instead we keep aphids, and the raccoons

who pull our cucumbers and watermelons off the vine, and

leave them lying there, half-eaten, because they weren’t ripe to begin with.

We find the wreckage in the morning and say,

“next time, we’ll pick them sooner, I guess”

We have sheet-mulched this plot of land a half dozen times

Because you read those books about permaculture

And I watched those documentaries about soil

And you made those beautiful drawings

And we rolled around in bed in the afternoon thinking about each other

And about the earth and the food and the baby we’d make, with worm shit and horse shit and

our love.

But the grass and weeds grow back after the first rain

and now we stare out at this bit of land, sprinkled with weeds and weathered toys and plastic chairs

strewn with empty buckets and the remains of crafts-gone-wrong

Native land that we hoped to nourish back to life

in part because we know what it once was

and what it has become

and we mourn quietly

“Next year, raised beds?”

But I’ve also been thinking that maybe I should be more gentle

About what I expect

Of this piece of land, and of ourselves

And even the raccoons

Because, they are, after all, raccoons.

Let’s just keep feeding them, ok?

And the possums too.

What kind of winter vegetables do you think they like?

I’ll say hello to the Black Widows

Yarrow will eat the strawberries with bugs

The weeds will cover us, the white fly will surround us

The chicken coop will not withstand the test of time

And none of this will matter to you, I know,

Because I will have decided to be happy.

maternal oversight

2011-10-24T13:34:00.000-07:00

Throughout my 20s, I ignored parents. I was obviously aware that people with kids were part of the social landscape, and I occasionally had thoughts like, “wow, that kid is really screaming. Who takes a baby on an airplane?,” but I never thought anything even remotely like, “if I have a kid someday, how precisely do I plan to deal with infant air travel?” Part of my disinterest in the details of being a parent stemmed logically from the fact that I did not plan to have a kid someday. It had nothing to do with me, so case closed. (Plus, I was busy performing in queer bars and other things that have very, very little to do with children). But even when the desire to have a child took me by surprise in my 30s, I wasn’t struck with a corresponding curiosity about the actual mechanics of caring for children. Kat and I talked at length about parenting theory. We agreed that we wanted to share equally in the work of parenting, that we would never hit our child, that we think childhood masturbation is A-OK, that we'd speak openly and regularly about feminism and racial justice, that we wouldn’t use “baby talk,” that we would do our best to never lie to our child, and other general guidelines of this sort. And when I was finally pregnant, we made the basic pre-baby preparations according to our hippie proclivities (we hired a midwife and doula, and we acquired cloth diapers and 4 different baby-wearing devices, we bought books about attachment parenting, and so forth).

But we—or more accurately, I—had very little practical experience soothing a writhing, screaming, purple newborn. And I definitely was not prepared for the extreme exhaustion, isolation, and self-neglect that I was about to experience. To be clear, I wasn’t a total novice. We had a 4 year-old neighbor we adored and with whom we spent a good amount of time. I also frequently held his newborn brother (though I would dutifully gave him back to his mom or dad when he started to cry). So, I was prepared, no?

The dominant school of thought about having children is that if you think you might want to have them but are worried about the details, you should stop worrying and just go for it. People who subscribe to this philosophy—in my experience, this group includes almost everyone who has kids, especially if their kids are now adults—will tell you that having a child is so rewarding and important, and that you cannot plan for the hard stuff even if you try, and that you never get what you expect anyway, so just dive in; you will figure out the details later. Let’s call this the “Just Do It” school of parenting. Sometimes parents will add some snarky comment like, “rest up now because you’ll never sleep again” [but such comments aren’t very helpful because no one who is sleeping believes that other people are being serious when they say they haven’t slept for more than a 2-hour stretch for several months. It’s hard to fathom this could be real; the United Nations calls that torture, so someone would intervene if that was really happening. And even if you do believe it, you can’t really prepare by banking sleep in advance; 12 hours of sleep today doesn’t translate into being happy with 4 discontinuous hours of sleep tomorrow.]

It’s probably not very helpful to say to someone planning to run a marathon, “wow. You are going to be really, really tired.” But what you could say is something more concrete: “you will need a balm to prevent chaffing.” Of course everyone is different, and some people like to jump in without thinking about the hard stuff in advance. But I like to visualize and emotionally prepare for major life challenges. So here’s the concrete stuff I wish I had known, or had done, before having Yarrow:

1) Enroll in an infant-care boot camp or apprenticeship: Before we had Yarrow, I wish I had made arrangements to really spend time with an infant; I’m talking about overnight, solo-responsibility, no-handing-the-baby-back-to-parents time with a baby. Back in the day, some lovely people who needed help did offer this, but I wasn’t interested or ready. And, to be honest, perhaps I never would have been interested because I couldn’t imagine what I stood to learn from spending time with someone else’s child. But, if I had participated in an infant-care boot camp of some kind, I would have perhaps saved myself from one of the biggest shocks of being a new parent, which is that I am deeply uncomfortable with daily, unpredictable, and inconsolable infant crying. I love it when adults cry; I feel closer to them and I appreciate the keeping-it-real quality of crying. But I am very triggered when babies cry. I associate their crying with physical pain and helplessness. And this isn’t all my projection. If you have spent considerable time with a baby you know that they are often in pain—gas pain, teething pain, car sickness, allergic reactions, and so on. And you also know that they are completely helpless to do anything about the pain they are in. It turns out that it is hard, both physically and emotionally, to be a brand new human. It hurts to poop, it hurts to grow, and it’s scary to be out of the womb. Babies scream and this is their birthright, but what we can’t know until we have spent a good amount of time alone with a screaming baby is how we might relate to this very vulnerable, raw, and painful stage of human life. For me, I learned that my entire body tenses, I start to feel anxious, and I just want to do anything—anything!—to make the screaming stop. One of the big lessons I needed to learn during the first year of motherhood—one that I only finally grasped by revisiting some Buddhist teachings—is that caring for a child means being confronted with the fact that the human experience is inseparable from suffering, even within the first days of life. Of course happiness is part of being a new human too, and joy starts to register when babies are a few months old. But before that, discomfort and crankiness are pretty central (especially for babies with colic, and their parents). I know this particular fact—and the crying that comes with it—isn’t triggering for everyone. But I suspect that, for most of us, living intimately with a newborn human will present at least one fairly major challenge, lesson, or trigger. We may as well get to know this part of ourselves before we have our own kids, and perhaps even if we don’t plan on having kids at all. Finding out who you are, or who you become, in relation to total human vulnerability, dependence, love, and pain is pretty deep. I wish I had explored it sooner.

2) Take a look at a post-birth vagina or cesarean scar (aka: develop a self-care plan): When I was pregnant, I read a million birth stories. I wanted a natural, home-birth, so I was especially interested in reading stories about labor pain and how to manage it. Kat and I took classes and read books to prepare for the pain, and I did my best to embrace pain as part of the natural birth process. But what I definitely did not plan for was the state that my body would be in immediately after giving birth, just when my new job as a parent began. After giving birth, my junk was swollen and torn and stitched beyond recognition. It took several months to recover. My gynecologist suggested I stay in bed and keep my legs together to allow the stitching to heal. This was, of course, impossible. I needed to change diapers and bounce Yarrow 24/7 on a pilates ball or he would cry all day (see #1 above). Hence, my stitches came undone repeatedly, and months after Yarrow’s birth, I was taking trips back to the hospital to have my unrecognizable vagina stitched up yet again. Urinary tract infections (from the catheterization) and hemorrhoids (from pushing) were also part of scene. I share these details not to be gross or to scare anyone, but to say that I wish I had planned for the possibility that I—and not just Yarrow—would need care following the birth.

In the first two months of Yarrow’s life, I knew that I needed rest and recovery, but I could not get it. I had several emotional breakdowns because I was simply so exhausted and there was no rest in sight. In talking with other women who have given birth, I can see now that my story is not unique. My post-birth experience felt particularly difficult at the time, but now I know it was actually quite ordinary as far as the extended embodiment of birth goes. For an idea of what a hard birth can look like, read here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/aug/18/baby-pregnancy-premature-birth. And yet, somehow, people choose to talk about how terrible labor pain is more than they ever discuss the weeks that follow the moment of birth— weeks during which mothers (and often babies) are in serious need of recovery. It never occurred to me when I was pregnant that I might feel too injured or already too depleted to be fully present for the experience of connecting with my baby. It never occurred to me that I would need a self-care plan.

Which brings me to my next point…

3) Arrange for as much help as possible: Some people have nearby family members who are actively involved in the care of a new baby. I have now come to believe that having relatives who want to help you raise your child is like winning the lottery—collective childcare changes everything. And while Yarrow has wonderful grandparents, they are neither close to us nor particularly interested in babysitting. And in any case, before Yarrow was born, I didn’t imagine that I would need much help. I am successful in my career, and somehow I thought this would extend to easeful parenting…. (nope!)

When Yarrow was two weeks old, Kat went back to work fulltime. I was nursing Yarrow through the night, often getting just a few hours of sleep, and by 6:00am, Kat was saying goodbye and on her way to work. Many mornings I cried because I was so exhausted and didn’t know where the energy would come from to make it through a day of bouncing, strollering, and trying to soothe Yarrow by myself. I also struggled for many weeks to figure out how to make food for myself while safely holding a wobbly-headed newborn (note: Yarrow screamed if I put him down), how to make coffee, how to shower, etc. I tried the wraps and baby slings that other moms raved about, but Yarrow wanted nothing to do with them (unless I was vigorously bouncing up and down—again, not easy to do while making coffee). So I also spent a lot of time wearing my pajamas and being hungry, dirty, and in caffeine-withdrawal. I began going to bed for the night at 5pm, so that I could (theoretically) sleep while Kat stayed up with Yarrow until 10pm, at which point I could expect little sleep from that point onward. I remember hallucinating in the middle of the night from exhaustion (though to be fair I also remember many sweet moments of watching the moonlight filter into the room, and just staring at Yarrow and Kat with gratitude). I was committed to exclusive breastfeeding, but I also needed sleep for my survival and sanity, and I couldn’t figure out how to pump enough to cover the bottles Kat would give Yarrow while I slept from 5-10pm. So, we had to supplement with formula—one of the first big compromises in what I am sure will be a long list of compromises to come. (goddess have mercy on me)

Today, from my vantage point as a relatively well-rested person, spending my days in a rocking chair staring into Yarrow’s eyes and taking occasional strolls around the neighborhood sounds almost delightful (I say almost because, well, I have a career that I also love). But, back then, I was so tired that I remember feeling like I had a terrible flu that wouldn’t go away, the kind that makes it challenging to sit up. I struggled to keep my eyes open and my head up. I fantasized constantly about naps. I had headaches and body aches from lack of sleep. I tried to nap when Yarrow was asleep, but he would only sleep while nursing, and it took me a few months to perfect the side-lying nursing position (where we could both be horizontal and sleeping).

This is all to say that I needed help. So that I could nap, eat, and shower. Some weeks into this exhaustion, some angelic person told me that I should consider hiring a post-partum doula. A what? I knew about birth doulas, but I had no idea you could hire a doula to come to your home, care for your baby while you napped or showered, care for you by making you a sandwich and an herbal tincture for your wounded vagina (see #2), and generally help you adjust to your new life as a parent. Totally revolutionary (and, by the way, something the French government provides to all new parents in France, free of charge). I will be forever grateful to Lauren, our post-partum doula. And to my friend Margaux, who often filled in when Lauren was not here. If you are reading this and you want to have a baby, and if you do not have a friend or relative lined up to be at your house for at least a few hours a day for the first several weeks of your baby’s life, I suggest making such arrangements. If you can afford to hire a post-partum doula (generally around $15/hr) for any amount of time, then go for it. If you cannot, and if you live in Los Angeles, email me at janew@ucr.edu and I will do my best to help you. And, at the very least, we should all be lobbying for doulas to be covered under the “public option,” should such a thing ever materialize.

4. Acknowledge loss: When we had Yarrow, we realized fairly quickly that we had gained much, but we had also lost much. Everyone talks about what is gained when you bring a child into your life, and those things have all been true and wonderful. But it seems to me that it would also be healthy to acknowledge loss in a mindful way—to talk with our friends and family about it in advance, to note what is lost, to honor it, and to know it will come back… in our retirement years.

When I became a parent, I lost the opportunity to be moody or self-indulgent, to stay up late knowing I could sleep in the next day, to take on new projects that would consume all of my time, to get drunk or otherwise unconscious without worry about someone needing me, to travel freely, to prioritize myself or Kat or my friends. I lost the experience of being outside at night (because we can only afford a babysitter so often, and Yarrow goes to sleep at 7pm, and I’m often too tired to do anything after that time anyway). I lost my energy, my memory, my concentration, my sense of humor, my Kegel fitness, and my high-femme gender. I lost the depth of my connection with my friends. This last loss was the hardest, and it put strain on each of my closest friendships. I couldn’t have any meaningful phone conversations while I was parenting, and by the time Yarrow was asleep, all I could think about was retreating to sleep and solitude. My friends, each in their own way, shared with me the sense that I was retreating from my friendships. They missed me and I wasn’t available. They were worried about the health of our friendships. After having a few conversations like this, I thought: “Oh, I see, they haven’t grieved yet.” Kat and I talked frequently about the things we missed (e.g., wouldn’t it be awesome if we could watch a movie in bed in the afternoon????), but it hadn’t occurred to me that my friends would need to grieve too. In the end, I tried to tell each of them something like, “I know our friendship is just a sliver of what it used to be and that this sucks, but I don’t believe this stage will last forever.” And, indeed, I am already getting better at finding a parenthood/friendship balance (or at least I hope my beloveds would say so!).

5. Recognize that some parenting philosophies make life harder (which doesn’t mean they aren’t worthwhile).

People’s economic situations, their bodies and health, the state of their partnerships (if they have them), their children’s bodies and health, and many other factors determine how challenging (or easeful) parenting will be. Our parenting philosophies—about which we have more choice than our children’s physical health, for instance—also produce very different experiences of parenting. I didn’t fully realize the extent of this when I was planning to be an “attachment parent.”

While I am glad that Kat and I have committed to co-sleeping, for example, we have made this choice not without considerable sacrifice. Kat and I still sleep in different beds; this is to say, we have prioritized Yarrow’s experience of sleeping with a parent over our desire to sleep together as a couple. We know many parents who practiced “cry it out” sleep training, and while we did not make this choice ourselves, it is pretty clear to me that these parents made a choice that has resulted in more sleep and intimacy and ease for themselves. Kat and I have followed our intuition in this case, which has led us to co-sleeping. But am I certain we have made the right decision for everyone involved? No.

To say that there are no shortcuts in parenting masks the fact that people parent in very different ways, and some parenting choices make life easier, while others make life harder. And since parenting is really, really hard as it is, there’s a lot to be said for ease. For instance, I labored unmedicated for two days, and then I got an epidural after our emergency transfer to the hospital. Indeed, the contrast between natural labor and laboring with the epidural made the latter feel like one of the most comfortable and relaxing experiences I’ve ever had. It was like getting a pedicure. I thought, “If this is childbirth, I could do this everyday!” I’m not advocating for epidurals. They don’t work for everyone, they come with countless risks, and they numb the birth experience. I’m just saying that epidurals radically alter a person’s sense of the difficulty of birth; they are an utterly miraculous shortcut. Formula is another example. If you breastfeed exclusively or find you cannot pump sufficient milk, this means that you cannot share with someone else the labor of feeding your little person, which means that you, as the breastfeeding parent, will do the lion’s share of the parenting in the beginning, especially in the middle of the night. Formula—which is a disgusting non-food that smells repulsive and will probably be banned by the FDA in a matter of decades—resolves this problem, and it is another miraculous short cut. Lots of people need to use it, and some of us choose to use it. I breastfed Yarrow, but we also supplemented with formula because I simply needed sleep. We took this shortcut, and I was profoundly grateful for it, even as I dreamed of more ideal, formula-free circumstances. The attachment parenting gurus would have us believe that the rewards associated with co-sleeping, exclusive and extended breastfeeding, stay-at-home infancy, etc, are so great that they outweigh the sacrifices, thereby making attachment parenting the most natural and easeful way to go. I am still a strong believer in many of the practices now called “attachment parenting,” but I am no longer operating under the illusion that it’s easeful. Kat and I do everything we can to be in loving connection with Yarrow, and to make a safe and peaceful home for him, and we follow our intuition about what this means. But we also often fantasize about what it is like for other parents, who have different intuitions about how to accomplish these things, and who, as a result, sleep together in the same bed.

Would I have done anything differently had I read this post when I was pregnant? Probably not (except hiring a doula!). The time in which one is anticipating their baby is such a beautifully hopeful and idealistic time; no one should try to ruin it. But perhaps I would have appreciated the opportunity to at least consider--and probably reject--the idea that I should hang out with a crying baby, or think about the needs of my future vagina.

I hereby invite all parents to share their own list of things they wish they had known or had done differently, if only so that I can compile them and plan my line of defense.

Queer Parenting for Heteros (& anyone else who wants to teach kids that being queer is awesome).

2011-10-05T11:07:00.000-07:00

I recognize that not everybody follows queer theory, so I want to start by saying that perhaps the most important thing to know about this field is that queer theorists have been fast at work defining and redefining the meaning of queerness over the past 20 years. Even though many people use “queer” simply as an umbrella term that is synonymous with LGBT, within queer theory, the term does not refer to an identity as much as to a particular mode of political critique and resistance, namely resistance to what Michael Warner called in the early 90s “regimes of the normal” (so this means all things oppressively respectable and appropriate, especially norms pertaining to gender and sexuality). Over the past two decades, queer scholars have been in conversation with one another about precisely what constitutes the “regimes of the normal” that queers are resisting.

So, for instance, Jack Halberstam has described queerness as living on the margins of safety and respectability and has therefore extended queerness to “sex workers, homeless people, drug dealers, and the unemployed.” Queer historian Lisa Duggan has suggested that to be queer means to refuse the hegemony of domesticity, marriage, consumption and aspirations to middle-class prosperity. Queer theorists like Lee Edelman, Heather Love, Jose Munoz, and Jack Halberstam suggest that being queer is to be tragic, or to fail, and that this is nothing to be ashamed of, as Halberstam explains, in a world that offers up people like George W. Bush as models of success. This turn to failure has been inspired in part by Quentin Crisp, the late gay writer, who was known to say: “if at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.”

So, in each of these cases, queer is delinked from both homosexual sex and lesbian or gay identification. Instead, queerness, as Foucault suggested, is more a “way of life” than a way of having sex, and this way of life is what has political implications.

But what, then, does all of this have to do with parenting? Well, a lot has been said and written about queer parenting in recent years, but most of this commentary ignores the opportunity to actually engage queer theory and instead simply equates queer parenting with LGBT people raising children. But what happens when we attempt to apply the insights of queer theory to our relationships with children?

At the very least, we can conceptualize queer parenting as a way of relating to children centered on two possible interventions (no doubt there are more, but I want to get this conversation started!): 1) first, delinking “mother” and “father” subjectivity from female and male bodies; and 2) second, cultivating children’s genderqueerness. The great news is that within this framework, all people—regardless of the kind of sex you have or with whom—have the potential to create, or join, queer families.

Delinking “Mother” and “father” from female and male

My partner Kat is a woman who is our child’s dad. Kat disidentifies with most of the gendered meaning assigned to motherhood, especially notions that equate motherhood with fertility, goddess energy, biological instincts, or the quintessential feminine. I am our child’s mother, and although I am also very critical of these notions, they are more incompatible with my political and theoretical orientation than with my gender presentation, which is—for better or worse—quite normative. The fact that Kat is our child’s dad is very challenging for most people, including (and sometimes especially) gay and lesbian people, who would like Kat to think of herself not as a dad but as a butch lesbian pushing the boundaries of motherhood. But why should the cross-gendering of parenting roles be so challenging or offensive to people?

The feminist movement has succeeded in disrupting the essential gendering of all other forms of work. Most people now acknowledge, for instance, that there are women who are doctors, and nurses who are men. But parenting roles remain deeply gendered and essentialist, such that female parents are always mothers, and male parents are always fathers. I understand “mother” and “father” as two distinct sets of job duties, stylistic approaches, or performative categories that should be available to all people regardless of sex or gender (akin to the way we now understand work and occupations). Cross-gendering the adult/child relationship (such as a child being raised by a female dad) demonstrates to children the social constructedness of gender in very practical terms, introducing them to a broader range of relational options for both female- and male-bodied people. It sets the stage for them to later choose, for themselves, from the conventions associated with mothering, fathering, or both.

Instead of flattening gender differences, queerness recodes traditional genders and celebrates their queer forms, such as transforming masculinity and femininity into butch and femme. Similarly, a queer approach to parenting recognizes differences that have long been associated with biological sex and detaches them from male and female bodies (some parents like to handle the sit-down emotional stuff, others prefer engaging kids in a series of physical activities; some want to parent fulltime, others find part-time parenting more enjoyable). So, while our ultimate goal may be to imagine parenting models that transcend the mother/father binary altogether, until we have achieved this total gender revolution, a queer approach recognizes that parenting, like all of our relationships, is gendered, and that we need not throw gender out of the picture in order to create just and fulfilling relationships with children. Instead, we need to be clear about what, specifically, we imagine are the unique contributions that femininity and masculinity bring to parenting, and then make those parenting styles available to all people (regardless of biological sex).

Cultivating Children’s Genderqueerness

The second principle of queer parenting centers on the importance of cultivating children’s genderqueerness, or their gender and sexual fluidity. The first part of this work involves simply refraining from imposing gender on children. I recall when I first met our neighbor and friend D., who is a lefty and dedicated stay-at-home father of two sons (J & C). At the time, the older son was a spirited 3-year old, the kind of kid who can run in circles for hours on end, and who liked to destroy toys, plants, etc. D told me the day we met, “J is a real boys’ boy” and went on to explain that J. had once tried to hit their family’s cat with a softball bat, and D., horrified, called a fellow stay-at-home dad for support. D was relieved when his friend told him, “look, this is really normal behavior for boys. J just has a lot of testosterone coursing through his system and he doesn’t know how to handle it yet.” D told me this entire story in front of J, who, as a result, heard his dad call him a “real boys’ boy with testosterone coursing through his body.” Of course another story that could have been told about J’s behavior is that older toddlers—regardless of sex or gender—have a lot of energy, are aggressive, like to break things, and don’t have a fully developed sense of the effects of their actions. Or yet another account could have simply emphasized that J—who is now a quite peaceful and more soft-spoken 7-year old—was a having a bad day when he picked up that softball bat.

Imposing gendered meaning on nearly everything that children do is a shockingly pervasive and, I think, very damaging, habit. D’s description of J as a “boys’ boy” is a phrase I have heard from mothers describing their male children as young as 7-months old, children who are doing things like throwing food, getting dirty, and banging on furniture (again, these are infant behaviors, not male behaviors). Kat and I have a male child (or, to be more precise, a child with a penis) who is a year and half old; his name is Yarrow. And we have observed as other adults explain his interest in mechanical objects or the pleasure he takes in organizing things as “boy behavior;” and we know that if he were perceived as a girl, the same behaviors would be filtered through that lens (just as gender is the interpretive lens that determines how we view adult women and men’s behavior as well). Strangers in the supermarket who observe Yarrow’s long hair and pink shoes tell us that he is a “such a pretty girl, and so well behaved.”

Yarrow, 1 1/2 years old

Allowing children to form their own relationship with gender means not imposing gender on them, and this is very hard to do in a gender binary world where there is no gender-free place that we can find and inhabit. So, one way to deal with this is to actually cultivate children’s genderqueerness, which means to make sure that children have as many gendered options available to them as you can possibly provide, with an emphasis on cross-gender possibilities. Many progressive parents take a kind of tolerant “wait and see” approach to their children’s gender and sexuality, wherein they basically produce a very normative gender socialization and presume their kids are heterosexual, and then wait to see whether their child manifests any signs of queerness, which they will attend to should the situation arise. But even though these parents are prepared to love their children should their kids someday present themselves as queer or gender variant, they aren’t actually communicating to their children that queerness is something worth celebrating now, as opposed to lovingly tolerating later. Queer parenting means that children are enthusiastically introduced to queerness and genderqueerness so they know that their parents really welcome any queerness that they want to explore.

Because heteronormativity and the gender binary structure all aspects of children’s lives (their toys, their books, their peers, their schools, their extended family), waiting to see how children unfold is basically defaulting to heteronormativity. This means that adults need to actively place queerness in their children’s paths—at least enough to equal the amount that children will encounter heterosexuality and gender normativity (which is A LOT!); otherwise, children perceive that being queer or cross-gender identified is not really an option, or at least not the preferable option. Queer parenting means that parents create a life for their kids that includes queer people, queer books, queer ideas, queer imagery, queer culture, queer music, queer narratives. And of course, heterosexual parents can do this.

Some people worry that this means pushing gay- or cross-gender identification on children, which is not the case. Instead, it looks like this: you and your child are playing with Ernie and Bert dolls (and if you have paid much attention to Ernie and Bert, you know they are two men who live together as life partners--you do the math...). While playing with Ernie and Bert, you don’t hesitate to insert their queerness into the narrative. Maybe Ernie and Bert are getting married, maybe they cuddle or kiss—whatever heterosexual love/romance script you would enact with your child as you play with dolls, why would you not also introduce its queer corollary? Another example: you are at Target buying clothes for a child too young to select his/her own clothes (pre-2 years old?). What do you know about your child’s fashion preferences? Probably nothing, or at least not much, if you have a 1-yr old child. What you do know is that your child has a vagina or a penis, but why let this fact determine which clothes you buy? Queer parenting dictates that you provide your child with the opportunity to be familiar with a range of possibilities: the full spectrum of colors, both dresses and pants, etc. Because if you only acquire pink or lavender or floral clothes for a female child, will it be any wonder if these end up being the clothes that she later reports are her favorite? They will be all she has ever intimately known, and it would take considerably more creativity or courage on her part to ask for a black hoodie (or conversely, for a boy to ask for a floral dress).

Introducing, normalizing, and celebrating queerness with your child is like introducing your child to a way of eating, or multiple languages, or a moral system that is important to you—you are cultivating a love of gender and sexual diversity in your child, because this kind of diversity is of value to you too. This is very different from telling your child that she or he is gay.

Raising children in queer ways need not have anything to do with the sexual identities of parents or children. Instead, queer parenting is about passionately and unrelentingly introducing children to queer ways of life, to the beauty and fun of gender exploration, and to the diverse possibilities of romantic and sexual partnership.

mint green: reflections on queer mommy

2011-09-28T16:32:00.000-07:00

Kat is Yarrow’s daddy, but I can hardly say the word daddy without thinking of queers in leather. In fact, Kat says I always say "daddy" with a bit of an English accent (I just now asked her to describe how I say it and she reports: “kind of like you’re English, but also like you’re in porn, a fake sexy voice from porn… it’s embarrassing.” Ok, so apparently it’s not hot. Which is fine, because the Brit porn voice in unintentional. I swear). Obviously daddy has erotic/double meaning not only for queers, but also for heteros (as exemplified by the popular hetero-porn refrain: “who’s your daddy?”) But the word is so infused with queer (gay/trans/butch) subcultural meaning that, at least in my own life, its transgressive potential is always close to the surface. With little effort I can shift my mental picture of the daddy from domestic diaper-changer to studs-and-leather-clad hottie.

But mommy or mama? Er…. No such queer figure. Yes, there are hot mamis and mommy tops and MILFs and the queers who love them, but the queer mommy is hardly canonical. She does not have a history, an aesthetic, nor an official place in most printed versions of the hanky code—although thanks to Tristan Taormino, the mint green hanky is on the rise. This invisibility reflects sexist currents within queer culture itself, namely the ways that queer theory has all too often aligned the feminine and the maternal with the non-queer, or the homonormative. As I have argued in my writing on “femme labor”:

Queer studies has embraced those utopic “ways of life” made most possible or necessary for masculine subjects—mobility, independence, extended identification with youth culture, grungy/alternative modes of consumption, risk-taking—and disavowed those ways of life made most possible or necessary for feminine subjects—reproductivity, caretaking, shopping, home-making, and safety-making. To investigate [femme labor] is to reconnect these two seemingly distinct cultural and productive spheres; it is to see the ways that the construction of the former (the queer) has depended upon the latter (the feminine)—even, and especially, for assistance in enhancing its capacity to reject the feminine upon which it depends. [you can find the full text in the journal Sexualities vol 13 n2, or the 2010 book Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care].

To be clear, and despite my theoretical position, I have never placed much stock in the political potential of mommies. The mommy figure has always seemed so overdetermined, so sentimental, so heteronormative and apolitical. Even as I know to be suspicious of queer theory’s disinterest in the mommy, I have struggled to figure out where or how to place her within the landscape of queer culture or politics.

But as you may have guessed, my own recent and reluctant occupation of this category has forced the issue. And once I really looked, I found queer mommy’s everywhere. And by queer mommies, I do not mean lesbians who are mothers. I mean queer heroes and queer outcasts, queer figures of all sorts—queers whose mode of resistance and subculture-making can be described as nothing less than… mommy.

Mommy Fiercest: One version of queer mommy that deserves far more attention is the house mother—exemplified by the “legendary mothers” who appear in the 1990 film Paris is Burning. Legendary mothers are trans women (and some genderqueer gay men) who rule over and protect their children, the queer kids who walked drag balls in NYC. But of course these mommies exist in queer spaces everywhere, not just urban spaces; they are the people who sustain, organize, and nurture intentional queer families. Their maternal power—the reason we are drawn to their bosom—is inseparable from their fierceness. If we are their children, we know they can and will stomp our enemies with their stiletto. These mommies are older. They are wise. They are gorgeous. They are protective and exhausted (because they have seen some crazy shit).

The Anti-Mommy: Then there is my friend Melissa, an extremely tall, fear-inspiring, and punk rock femme who dislikes, and wants nothing to do with, babies and small children. And yet, once those children turn into disaffected punk teenagers, Melissa lovingly kisses (or at least bandages) each self-inflicted little cut, each bloody new tattoo, each swollen piercing, and then offers to buy them their first pair of steel-toed boots. About nine years ago I was dating a punk FTM who was a good bit younger than I am, though he was well into the technical definition of adult. Melissa and he were good friends, in a mommy/boy way. I recall Melissa asking him very seriously if he would be interested in being adopted by her. He declined, but I thought: wow, he doesn’t know what he’s passing up. I knew she meant a lifelong commitment of her love (or at least until he was a total jerk). A few years later, Melissa told me that she had discovered a maternal character in popular culture with whom she actually identified. “Wow! Who?,” I asked. Wait for it…. “Hagrid.” Ah, yes. Hagrid. This makes perfect sense. Hagrid the giant who lives on the outskirts, who loves the giant spiders and the other horrific creatures, and who trusts that children can save their own world.

Madonnas and Mommy Monsters: And then of course there is Mommy Monster herself, Lady Gaga. Gaga isn’t just a sexy freak, she is a freak who wants to tell all the motherless baby freaks that they are good kids, and that she loves their paws just the way they are. Like Madonna before her, Mommy monster doesn’t want you to do your homework; she wants you to cover yourself in glitter and dance in a circle around her, believe in her, pray to her, watch her sacrifice herself for you. Sure, this kind of mommy is a bit of a diva who wants more from you than she can really give back, but isn’t this often true of mothers? Unlike the house mother who actually cares for you, or the anti-mother who somehow manifests maternal love despite herself, Mommy Monster is emotionally unavailable but all-powerful (kind of like God). Just thinking about her comforts you as you go to sleep at night. You think to yourself as you close your eyes: “somewhere out there, Mommy is covered in meat or bubbles, and is loving is me, just the way I was born.” And you drift off into a blissful queer sleep.

So, this is my short list. But I want more, more, more. Who’s your mommy?

Excerpts from the Motherhood Files

2011-09-20T12:24:00.000-07:00

January 16, 2010

Dearest Birth Coven,

Yarrow’s due date—February 12—is drawing nearer, my pelvis is opening, and I don’t want to do this in isolation from any of the three of you. M will be here in L.A., L will be in San Francisco, R will be in New Orleans [deserts meeting oceans; crisp, clean-air queer bacchanalia; beignets, bayou, and body-positivity—three perfect cities from which to welcome Yarrow into the world; I hadn’t thought of that until now.] Thank you so much for agreeing to be with me, in your own way and from your own place. I feel anchored by you. One of my favorite things about the birth is imagining the moment when Kat or I send out word to each of you that Yarrow is on his way.

You will get a call, or a text, or an email, depending on the circumstances, when we have confirmed that I am in labor. I’ve enclosed a candle for you to light at that point which will help me know that you are connected to me, that you are helping us welcome Yarrow into our lives and yours, and basically, that your candle is burning quietly and patiently as I take my time giving birth.

I’ve asked each of you to be in birth solidarity with Yarrow, Kat and I in different ways. I’m going to be in communication with each of you as the big day draws near, but I wanted you each to know about, and hopefully feel connected to, the rest of the birth coven:

M is holding down patience, nurture, and “trust of process” by baking an elaborate dessert of some kind that will take a few days to make, from start to finish. M’s labor will help me have a point of reference for the outer time limits of active labor. And, of course, it will provide us with a post-labor dessert. When I first suggested a 3-day cake, M—true to form—did some research and then proposed the Mount Everest of complex cakes, Julia Child’s wedding cake. I told her I couldn’t hang with how much marzipan it has in it, but I knew instantly that she was willing to go the distance. M, I trust you 100%.

L is already practicing endurance, focus, and embracing pain. She’s my pain solidarity. She is self-training for a half marathon (!!) that will take place on February 7th, and has already run 8 miles through cold and rain in Golden Gate Park, out to the chilly and beautiful coast. While running, she sings a breathy song that she has written for Yarrow and I, which I cannot wait to hear. L asked me if she’s still doing her job if she finds herself enjoying the run. I loved this, because it raised for me the possibility that I could actually enjoy labor, or some aspects of it, even as it is painful. As usual, L, your wisdom abounds. I’m aiming to go into labor on the 7^th!

R’s job in many ways is the least defined, because she is anchoring the part of my life that is always the least clear and most in-progress: willingness to surrender to something more powerful than myself, and something out of my control. It’s scary just typing those words because, oh, how I like to be in control! R will be doing some extended meditation throughout the labor, which I hope will have a kind of tonglen-ish quality of sharing with me something that she has in great abundance: a commitment to being present with what is, as it is. R’s asked me to say more about what I want this to look like, and I just don’t know. I’m just a seedling, R. Help me and love me.

I am so grateful for you and as I type these words and feel that feeling, a being inside me is kicking in participation.

LOVE and more soon from Birth HQ,

Jane

Ferbruary 1, 20101

Week 38: Reflections on exhaustion

Omg. Only two weeks to due date. Given this timing, I wish my thoughts revolved around the joy of birth and parenting, but I’ve definitely turned some kind of dark hormonal corner this week. I feel weepy and exhausted and drugged. My sensitivity to smell is back, along with some low-grade nausea. I can’t remember much of anything, including the words that might make for a more interesting blog (sorry…). I spent Wednesday in bed crying and listening to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” over and over again. My uterus and pelvis are certainly doing things, some of which are painful, but nothing is rhythmic or regular yet. I’m making some very weird/ugly craft projects out of glue, paper, and plants. My goal for each day is to attend to my work-related email, which has itself become overwhelming. I haven’t felt this knocked out since the first trimester, so I can only conclude that is my body adjusting to something new that’s happening in preparation for labor now. Despite all this, it’s still kind of romantic. I feel a bit like larva in a cocoon, or a hibernating bear. I will emerge soon.

Yesterday, M came over and saved me from what would have been another lonely bed day. We went to lunch at Larkin so I could have the mac n’ cheese I was craving and then came back to the house where she sewed a soft fabric cover for my birth ball. Sometimes it’s so good to be rescued. If you too would like to visit me, pull me out of bed, force me to bathe, and help me access food—please, please feel free.

At the start of the week, I was really excited about embarking on the full course of natural labor induction methods: massage, eating pineapple, long walks, black and blue cohosh, spicy foods, wine, sex. But now I’m feeling too tired to remember these things or do them. Yesterday I was even too tired to go to my beloved prenatal yoga class. Instead, I’ve basically put myself on voluntary bed rest. I feel buried under the weight of my bodily discomfort, which is a sad distraction from Yarrow and his arrival. Maybe all of this sleep/rest is an important precursor to labor? It certainly helps put a cap on any frantic housecleaning, hyper-organization, or general pre-labor anxiety I might otherwise be indulging. Some women say that the last few weeks are so uncomfortable that you start to beg for labor to begin, but I’m confused by this idea given how tired I am. Where will I find the energy for labor? Will it arrive when I need it? I’ve started to dream that I give birth in my sleep, which, like death, may just be the way to go.

What I learned from the 1^st trimester depths of exhaustion was: this too shall pass.

Of course people like nothing better than to tell pregnant women that it just gets worse, and that I’ll be even more sleep deprived when the baby arrives. I hate those people, they’ve been wrong about a lot of stuff so far, not to mention that I think there are qualitatively different kinds of exhaustion, and I may prefer the sleep deprivation kind to the pregnancy-induced kind. Women also like to complain to me about how boring, stationary, and restrictive breast feeding is, but the idea of spending my days in bed alternating between breastfeeding and napping sounds kind of great at the moment.

to end today's comments, i'm going to fake some energy that i don't actually

have: "YAAAYYYY BABY!!!"

More soon. Back to sleep,

Jane

February 6, 2010: Yarrow is born

Kat & I brought Yarrow Brig Ross-Ward into the world on Thursday February 4^th at 12:35pm. He weighed 5 lbs and 12.8 ounces at birth. Though the outcome is wonderful, our birth did not go exactly as planned. My water broke in the middle of Monday night, but I had no sign of contractions (this can sometimes cause concern about infection or fetal distress if a baby takes too long to be delivered after the membranes have ruptured). By Wednesday morning, our midwife became a bit concerned that I wasn’t having regular contractions yet, so we started a number of natural labor induction remedies: herbs, acupuncture, homeopathy, etc. That night, labor finally came on strong and our midwife Rebecca and doula Karen arrived at our house and began to set up for our home birth. At 10pm, I was in active labor and walking around our neighborhood with Kat and Rebecca; by 1am I was in the birthing tub and 5cm dilated with Kat and Karen pressing on my back as hard as they could to help relieve the intensity of the contractions; by 4:30am I had made it through transition and was ready to push Yarrow out. I can’t explain how strong the desire to push became. Every muscle in my body felt like it was working to push Yarrow down and out, and after pushing for about an hour, I was able to feel Yarrow’s head with my fingers. But after more pushing, and some unexpected gushes of meconium (fetal feces), Rebecca became concerned that Yarrow was not descending and that my waters had been broken for so long. She did a cervical exam and confirmed that he was close but just not progressing, and with all of the meconium that was emerging, she made the judgment call that we should transfer to the hospital. This was very, very hard for me. We were SO close to delivering Yarrow at home, but also the pain of resisting the urge to push and getting in a car and travelling to a hospital with a small head lodged in your pelvis is pretty hardcore. When we got to the hospital around 5:45am, I knew that interventions were inevitable, and I felt unsure whether I was going to survive. I begged for an epidural, which took what felt like forever to be administered. But finally, around 7am, I was pain-free and able to hear our back-up doctor present my options. He explained that I have a pelvic ridge that Yarrow simply wasn’t able to duck under by himself. I insisted that I would try anything (within reason) to still have a vaginal birth, so we attempted two vacuum assisted deliveries—neither of which worked—and finally had success with the forceps. During all of this, Yarrow’s heart rate and my blood pressure were at scary levels, and Kat did an amazing job of staying present and reassuring me that we were all going to be ok. And, indeed, we were. Yarrow stayed strong and came out beautiful and ready to be in our arms.

In the end, I feel like I had two births: one at home that was mostly powerful but calm; and one at the hospital, which was scary and out of my control. Of course I am very grateful for the technology and the medical team that made Yarrow’s birth possible, but I also remain acutely aware of the tremendous loss of autonomy and privacy one experiences when they need the services of the hospital. Kat (who had to wear a “visitor” tag), Yarrow, and I spent our first night together in a very busy hospital room, where Yarrow and I were subjected to many unnecessary and unwanted tests, exams, and “lessons” about how and when to breastfeed, why we shouldn’t co-sleep, which diapers are “best,” etc. We were so thrilled to be home on Friday, where we all got in bed, stared at each other with love and amazement, ate and slept.

Everyone is happy and healthy, and Yarrow is looking forward to meeting you soon.

Jane

March 2, 2010

I have good days and bad days. Yesterday was pretty good. It was a Monday, and I was still somewhat rested from the weekend. This morning was off to a good start. But by 12:30, Yarrow wouldn’t stop crying and it freaked me out. M and I tried the car, nursing, bouncing, and a walk in the stroller, and nothing worked until M vigorously bounced him and he started to mellow out by around 2:00. I could tell he was tired, but the crying was so hard for me. I’m still terrified of colic, and generally the crying makes me tense and anxious. Having M here kept me sane, and Kat is taking Wednesdays off, which will help get me through the next 6 weeks. Kat thinks my mood and my sense of whether I can handle things is directly related to how much sleep I am getting, which makes sense. I continue to think that the other hardest part is having no idea what is going to happen next. Will Yarrow get fussier, or more calm? When will he ever sleep for more than 2 hours? When will I have time to do anything for myself, or time with Kat? Are my feelings normal? Does it actually get easier, or just different? Why is this so hard for me? Did we make a mistake? I don’t have perspective today to give myself a pep talk. The best I can do is imagine myself as a baby, and then I feel clear that of course I cried (that’s what babies do) and of course I needed to be loved, and listened to, and made to feel safe. Weird, I know. But from this perspective I can see that Yarrow is normal and healthy and doing a good job. And maybe I am too?

October 14, 2010

It’s the night before my 37^th birthday, and the week has been great. Yarrow and I had a cuddly, sweet, and relaxing day. We played, we strolled, we went to music class, and we napped. He has the prettiest smile I’ve ever seen. And I could, and do, stare at his toes for hours.

October 16, 2010

Today: hot sex. Finally. Later spent the day at the Korean spa with mom. Yarrow is fast asleep in his bed. Wonderful birthday weekend. Kat bought me an oak tree swing, and Yarrow made me a painting.

October 17, 2010

Tonight Kat and I competed to see who could make Yarrow laugh the hardest. I think I won.

February 19, 2011

Oh lord, I’m tired. I’m certainly not going to try to suggest that I am as tired as I was in the early months. NOTHING will ever compare to that. But I do think there is a cumulative effect, a deep slow tired that grows with the ages, so that even 7-8 hours of sleep just can’t make up for the fact that the days are so long, and the nights are weird, and I never know when all hell might break loose, and I never got to recuperate from pregnancy, birth, the newborn period, or the colds and coughs that are starting to pile up. On a date last week, I told Kat that somehow parenting made me feel nomadic. She knew instantly what I meant. Our home is no longer our place of comfort or rest, but mostly a place of work and mess. I am grateful for our house, and far less concerned with how it looks, smells, or functions than I used to be. But this might partly be because it no longer feels like it’s mine. My home now feels like the little space on the couch I occupy after Yarrow goes to sleep, or my pillow, or Kat’s chest, or the internal space inside myself that somehow marches on.

April 10, 2011

It’s all going so fast, and I can already feel myself forgetting the things that defined our lives during the exhausting and amazing past year. Recently, we cleaned out Yarrow’s closet, and took a giant load of clothes, toys, and infant gadgets to a baby thrift store, and gave the rest away to a mom from Booby Brigade (the Yahoo breastfeeding group of which I’m a devotee). We gave away (or sold) items that I had come to associate with the most intimate feelings of Yarrow-love, not to mention items that have been soaked in my breastmilk or Yarrow’s spit up—the Bjorn, the boppy pillow, the breast pump, etc—and I felt sadness and longing, but also some strange pride and clarity that it was time to move on. I remember many months ago thinking to myself, “I’ll know babyhood is over when we get rid of the pilates ball” (where we once bounced Yarrow to sleep everyday and night, for hours upon hours), and a few weeks ago I deflated it and recycled it (the cats had punctured it, so it was worthless anyway). And so, we move on. Now life is filled with juice bottles and seaweed snacks, little orange shoes, small chairs pushed back and forth, pea pods in the garden, Legos and puzzle pieces and toilet paper strewn about the house, constant bruises and close calls with injury, tickling and toe kisses, driving in circles on the freeway because it’s the only way he’ll nap, bizarre sounds and spitty-squeally-words, diaper explosions that somehow end up with poop in Yarrow’s hair, and ever-increasing moments of just hanging out—reading, talking, cuddling. That last part is my favorite. And I love that I am getting so much better at just relaxing with the stage we’re in, and I’m knowing that I’m going to love what comes next too.

Feminist Foodways & Queer Eating

2011-09-10T10:56:00.000-07:00

It’s tempting to avoid writing about any subject I don’t have a good handle on. This is one of the pitfalls of this weird profession I’m in—it’s tempting to avoid speaking, sometimes even thinking, about something that is so complex it defies my silly attempts to be smart about it.

But thank god most of these subjects are also too important to be ignored. Plus, I need help thinking this stuff through. So this entry is about asking for people to help me work through some questions that I haven’t been able to answer for myself.

Feminism & Dieting

Food, fat, dieting, and body image were fairly central issues for me when I first discovered feminism, or at least when I first really committed to it. I will never forget the night in 1995 when I was sitting in a Carrows restaurant in Santa Barbara, with other UCSB graduate students I’d only recently met. I very naturally ordered something like scrambled eggs and half a grapefruit, adhering perfectly to my no-carb diet. Dieting, up until that point, was the air I breathed. My mother has been a champion dieter for most of my life and many of the women I knew at that time (especially in Santa Barbara) related to dieting as if it were a feminist act of self-love, one around which women should build female solidarity by offering their dieting sisters a well-deserved “You go girl!” (I suppose we might call this something like “Oprah feminism”) But not Rachel. Rachel—a more advanced graduate student and fierce feminist, and later the first woman I’d have sex with, and then, even later, my best friend—was sitting at that table at Carrows and was on high alert as soon as I ordered. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but it was something that communicated both, “why are you eating that?” and “I know why you are eating that.” Over the next few years, Rachel brought me up to speed on some of the feminist basics that my women’s studies and sociology courses had barely touched. It wasn’t enough to study global women’s movements or to “take back the night,” I learned from Rachel that feminism could (and should) also be about interrogating why I was withholding from myself the food I actually wanted to eat and why I was standing on the scale daily to determine how I should feel about myself that day (and what I could allow myself to eat).

This was a rough few years. Under Rachel’s tutelage, I stopped shaving my legs, but walked through the world feeling like an accidental, or at least reluctant, drag king. I loved lipstick, but every time I put it on I frowned in self-disappointment (“gosh, yet again I’m choosing to be complicit with the patriarchy” or “by doing this, I’m making women who aren’t wearing lipstick appear as though their lips are too small, or not red enough”). I threw out my scale, but fetishized the ones I found in other people’s bathrooms. I promised myself I would never diet again, but often tried to be sneaky by passing off “cleanses” and “health food plans” (“this isn’t about being thin, I just think maybe I could be allergic to gluten, or sugar, or dairy, or alcohol” and so on) as non-diets. Sometimes I would introduce what I imagined were simply healthy lifestyle changes, like, for instance, not eating anything two hours before going to bed. But even this is one of those insidious food rules that people take up with the more or less conscious hope that they will lose weight, or maintain their current weight. For me, it meant that many times I was sitting in bed, struggling to fall asleep because I wanted a snack and wouldn’t let myself have one. Beware food rules. They are diets too.

By the mid 2000s, queer theories of gender performativity trumped my feminist cultural politics of the body [a blog entry for another day…]. I was back to my lipstick-loving, leg-shaving, skirt-flaunting self [though if you know me now, you know that I mostly wear tank tops and flip flops because motherhood and LA heat have sucked the femme life-force out of me].

But thankfully I could not unlearn what I knew about the insidiousness of weighing, dieting, and self-evaluating. I still do not own a scale and I have not dieted since Rachel’s intervention in the mid-1990s, and these practices have been, and still are, crucial to my happiness, productivity, and self-care. I fall off the wagon all of the time, but I get right back on. All diets are a sham. Their effects never last, which means they do not work. They steal our time and energy (literally); they give us false hope that we can control our bodies and prevent them from changing. They reinforce the very inaccurate idea that thin means healthy (and fat = unhealthy), and that thin is better—morally, aesthetically, and every other way—than fat. And they have countless physically and emotionally damaging effects. Many new age, hippie, hipster, healthfood, slow food, ethical food movements have good impulses, like directing us away from corporate food that we now know causes cancer, but they are also very often diets in disguise. Anything short of eating what you are craving, when you are craving it, is a diet. The healthfoodification of the U.S., as much as I am grateful for elements of it, is among the great sexist tricks of the last 30 years.

Recently I noticed that I don’t spend much time talking about any of this beyond my circle of intimates, even though it’s related to one of my most life-changing decisions, and also has such crucial cultural and material implications for women’s lives. I’m not completely sure where this silence comes from. Perhaps because body image issues still carry the second-wave feminist stigma of being “white girl” or “middle-class girl” issues (despite countless studies demonstrating otherwise). They are also frequently treated as psychological (i.e. self-esteem) problems, rather than structural ones. And when they are articulated by feminists, all too frequently they are couched in very new age, essentialist, heteronormative logics about gender and bodies (perhaps the worst of which is some of the transphobic feminist discourse comparing sex reassignment surgery with eating disorders). I find that many women also relate to dieting as a fundamental right, akin to the right to have a safe and legal abortion—according to this logic, it may not be ideal (to diet, or to have an abortion for that matter), but it’s her body, her choice. My investment in protecting bodily autonomy makes this a pretty compelling argument.

And yet, recently this subject has been very present, not so much for me personally (though the pressures to diet during and after my pregnancy two years ago were incredible), but for the women students I encounter at UCR, where I teach. These are women, most of them women of color who are 18 and 19 years old, many of them queer, who go days without eating, who are told daily by their parents that they are fat (and therefore ugly), who “eat” only canned beverages or powdered substances that can be added to milk or water to achieve weight loss, who relate to dieting as an inevitable fact of their lives, and who look at me with disbelief when I suggest that this way of being is not the only option.

Feminist Foodways

For a long time now I have tried to practice feminist eating, organized around three principles (yep, you could call them rules, and I know I just said to avoid rules, but these rules are about saying yes to food, rather than no, which I think is a pretty crucial difference). I learned these principles from women in my life—Rachel, Helen, Melissa, Amory and others—and much of it is admittedly drawn from women’s food-related self-help, especially Geneen Roth (you can find her eating guidelines, which personally I think are still a little too directive, here http://www.freewebs.com/consciouseaters/)

1. Figure out what you are craving, find that food, and eat it. The media offers us a very warped relationship to food, one in which food is a guilty pleasure and charged with all sorts of drama. Feminist eating is not about removing the pleasure, but removing the drama (namely the guilt and judgment). This guideline is more challenging than it sounds. It means, at least when you first start practicing it, that you need to actually meditate on what food sounds good to your body. And then, whatever comes up, you go searching for it. Chocolate cake for breakfast? Great, go to the store, buy it and eat it. A platter of cheeses? An apple fritter? A bowl of rice and kale? Pizza and oranges? Sausage? Whatever it is, without regard for whether you “should” eat it (because it is high-calorie or unhealthy, because you have already eaten it for 2 days straight, or because it is a dinner food or dessert food and it’s 7:30am), you eat it. One of Geneen Roth’s principles is that people “overeat” because they aren’t eating what they actually want (she says: “you can never get enough of what you don’t want”). Just figuring out what we want to eat is a radical practice for many women, and the act of finding that food and eating it—very powerful.

2. Eat as much as you want, stop when you are satisfied/full. There is no “portion control” or food scarcity or food withholding in feminist eating (this, of course, only applies to people who have enough money to buy themselves some food; none of this applies when you are impoverished). Sometimes you eat an entire container of ice cream and a huge bag of potato chips (what some might call a “binge”) and if you are so full you feel like a balloon, you unbutton your pants and move on with your life. But most of the time this doesn’t happen, because when you know that you are not going to deny yourself the food you want—not now, not in 30 minutes, not tomorrow—there isn’t much reason to eat enormous amounts now. But again, sometimes it is pleasurable to eat enormous amounts, and when you feel like doing that, you do.

3. Keep going until you’ve developed a foodway. For me the concept of “foodway” has been a really useful counterpoint to the notion of “a diet.” A foodway is basically your culture of eating, but more precisely, it is a sustainable culture of eating that emerges when what you actually eat is aligned with what you crave. If you practice the steps above, you notice that your body has habits. For me, my foodway has, for years, consisted of sugar, fat, and carbs in the morning (chocolate croissants, brie on toast with berries, etc.), whole grains and vegetables for lunch (kale and brown rice) followed by a chocolate dessert of some kind or something salty like chips, fish protein and vegetables or a comfort food casserole for dinner, and again, some dessert. I also like chips and cheese as a late night snack. These are not rules, they are just the foods that I tend to want. If I have no judgment, this is what I crave, this is what I eat, and it’s completely sustainable. I know I have reached a sustainable foodway when I am eating in such a way that isn’t difficult; there’s no struggle to maintain it, no sense that I am denying myself something. Foodways also generally produce a “set weight,” the weight that your body achieves and generally maintains without any effort on your part. One sign that you haven’t yet allowed yourself to settle in to your foodway is if your weight fluctuates dramatically or frequently. In most cases, this means that you are introducing various unsustainable interventions (diets, “health plans,” extreme exercise, food rules). Of course, set weights also slowly increase over time as we age, so it’s important—though challenging—to accept this fact, and not introduce food interventions as this naturally occurs.

There’s a lot more that I could say about this, and I share it here only because it is the feminist background that leads me into the murky waters of queer foodways (is there such a thing?) and the questions that still remain for me about all of this…

Queer Foodways? Bodily Disidentification & Its Implications for Queer Eating

Last year, while reeling from the number of women students who had told me they were not eating, I finally raised the issue in my feminist theory course. Not so much from a place of teacherly authority as from a place of personal sadness, I said: “Look, one of the most important things that feminists can do is to love their bodies, now, as they are.” The students responded with nods of affirmation, but then two of my sharpest and most beloved students, Jackie and Sanisha, pushed back a bit. Jackie said, “But do you really think everyone should love their bodies as they are now? What about people with disabilities? What about trans people? It seems kind of paternalistic to tell people they should love their bodies.” Sanisha agreed, “I don’t want anyone telling me to love my body. If there is a part of my body I don’t love, those feelings are my business.” It’s not that I hadn’t heard the “back off, it’s none of your business how I eat or feel about my body” argument before, but somehow this really clicked at new level, and I thought about it a lot over the next several weeks. I do believe people should be supported to disidentify with their bodies, and to modify their bodies, if this is what emerges for them. I believe this for many reasons, not the least of which is that our culture assigns way too much gendered meaning to our bodies.

I thought about queer ways of eating, and about “butch diets,” which are wholly different monsters, often taking the form of coffee, cigarettes, drugs and alcohol instead of food. On the one hand, bigness and masculinity go hand in hand and masculine clothing leaves room for fat in a way that feminine clothing does not (hence, fat on butches is often less noticeable). But on the other hand, fat, a certain amount of it or fat in certain places, can also be feminizing, causing butches and FTMs I know to institute their own down low forms of diet (the aforementioned cigarettes instead of food routine, or the “I’m too butch to cook and take care of myself” routine, “so watch me waste away…”).

I thought about fat femme politics, and fat femme burlesque more specifically, which does the beautiful work of eroticizing fat, and in some rare cases, eroticizing eating. But for the most part, queers are still left with little information about actual practices of queer eating, which I think stems in part from the way that queer politics always takes a laissez-faire approach to people’s body practices (contrary to the ways that feminism gets all up in people’s bodily business).

So here’s my question: If, as queers, we support people to modify their bodies in order to achieve the kinds of recognition they long for in a gender binary world, does this principle extend to the ways that queers use food (or lack thereof) to modify their bodies? Do we only support people to modify their bodies in ways that are counter-hegemonic (like gender transition), or do we also support people to modify their bodies in precisely the predictable ways that capital wishes them to (diets, breast enlargement, makeup, etc.)? Do we make a political distinction between these practices? Are they all the same?

And what, if anything, is queer eating?

It's Not That "It Gets Better," It's That Heterosexuality is Worse

2011-09-01T13:12:00.001-07:00

A few months ago I facilitated a discussion about queer parenting at a Moms Club meeting in Altadena. The gracious hosts were a lesbian couple (the only other lesbians in the club--though I have been delighted to find out that many of the lovely straight moms in the club have far more complex sexual desires and histories than their hetero-married suburban lives might suggest, but this is a delicious subject for another post). So we arrived at the topic of children’s sexuality, and one of the lesbian moms in the room made a comment I have heard many times before, a comment that lesbian and gay people are perhaps more likely to share openly than lefty straight parents: “If I am to be totally honest, I would prefer, for our child’s sake, that he isn’t gay. We don’t want him to have to deal with the challenges that come with being gay.”

It is little wonder that parents—even (and perhaps especially) gay and lesbian parents—feel this way. We have been encouraged by the mainstream gay and lesbian movement to spread the word to straight people (and then internalize for ourselves) that being queer is very, very hard, and that this fact is very, very sad. One of the most popular gay and lesbian retorts to the homophobic assertion that gays should quit their shenanigans and choose heterosexuality is: “my god, don’t you think I would do that if I could? Who would choose a life of discrimination and homophobia? No rational person would do that, and ergo, I must have been born this way.” Blah, blah, blah. But despite the realities of homophobic bullying, violence, and discrimination (which I will speak to in a moment), this logic simply doesn’t ever ring true for me and I suspect it is more of a discursive habit than anything else. It certainly bolsters heteronormativity, by implying that heterosexual lives are free of gendered violence and suffering (which they are not) and by obscuring the profound forms of queer joy that accompany, and sometimes compensate for, queer suffering.

To return to the Moms Club meeting, I then asked my fellow lesbian mom, “But do you really feel that way? Do you feel like your own life has been so terrible that you wish your parents could have saved you from it? Do you feel that being straight would have been better for you?” The lesbian mom and her wife both smiled somewhat slyly, smiled at each other, laughed, and said: “no. I see your point.” I didn’t probe further, but what I imagined those sly smiles were reflecting was their instantaneous flashback-montage of their lesbian lives—sure, there was probably some trouble with family, jobs, etc., but there was also hot sex, protest marches, and freedom from some workaholic dude who doesn’t do the dishes and tells you how to spend your money. Ok, so this is projection. I have no idea what they were thinking, but the point here is that I suspect most adult queers love (the queer part of) their lives, even when they have been trained to rehearse a narrative about how hard and tragic it all is.

Let me be clear. Homophobic violence happens--to young people, to adults, to women, men, and trans people. It happens to straight people when they are gender-variant and/or are presumed to be queer. And it happens most harshly to queer people of color, and poor and working class queers. In all cases, it is tragic. The ideas that undergird the “It Gets Better” campaign—namely that queer kids can expect to grow up, make money, buy fine things, and discover their entitlement and civil rights— elide the race, class, and gender disparities that shape the lives of queer people (see Laura Logan’s excellent empirical documentation of this at http://thepublicintellectual.org/2011/07/18/the-case-of-the-killer-lesbians/).

But here’s the thing: gendered, classed, and racialized violence happens to straight people too, and in many ways, gendered and sexualized forms of violence and suffering are much more unrelenting for straight women. When I teach “Introduction to Women’s Studies” at UCR, I show a series of films about gendered violence and suffering: V Day: Until the Violence Stops, Dreamworlds, Senorita Extraviada, Tough Guise, Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus. These are films about the horrific violence (sexual, physical, emotional) that women endure at the hands of men and the state; about the incredible toll that masculinity takes on men’s bodies and mental health; and about the tedium and unfair division of labor that destroys, or threatens to destroy, an astounding number of marriages in the U.S. Even though I have seen these films a dozen times, I still cry when I watch them, and I have always assumed that I am crying feminist tears. I have assumed I am crying for women. But something shifted the last time I taught the course. After watching the films, rereading the numerous articles about gender oppression I had assigned, and listening to countless stories from straight women students about their shitty male partners, I got in my car and breathed a huge sigh of relief that I am queer. I went home and told Kat, “thank god we are queer.” And I realized that I was crying queer tears for straight people. All of a sudden it became clear to me. Their lives are very, very hard, and this fact is very, very sad. My god, I hope my son isn’t straight. Because who would choose that?

Being queer hardly means we are saved from state violence, sexual abuse, intimate partner violence, crappy relationships, or tragic breakups. But what being queer does mean is that we are, at the very least, immersed in a political subculture that does not normalize or celebrate these things. Our relationships, unlike straight relationships, aren’t presumed to be antagonistic, or in structural conflict from the get-go. We are not always already set up in such a way that someone risks being an old ball and chain, or a nagging wife, or getting trapped by an unwanted pregnancy, or needing to buy self-help books like He’s Just Not That Into You, or worrying about how to catch a man and keep him, or retreating to a manspace or sports cave, or becoming a husband-with-his-oh-so-important-job-he-can’t-be-bothered-with-parenting-or-housework, or needing to convince our dating pool that we aren’t bitches, whores, stupid, weak, or liars, and so forth.

Often anger is the dominant mode of relating to heterosexuality among radical queers. But might I suggest that it is more appropriate to worry about heterosexuals, to feel sympathy, to wish better for them, and ideally, to support them to do better and help them come up with a plan? It is time to reconfigure the direction of the “ally relationship,” such that queers become allies to the heteros down the street and in the supermarket, especially the women who may be experiencing just as much gendered suffering as we are, but without the hot sex, gay humor, political unity, or good music to which we have access. You can volunteer to help straight women at hetero resource centers--these centers go by names like “Moms Club.”

*This fall, I am teaching a course ("Critical Approaches to Heterosexuality") organized around this theme. For folks who might want to design a similar course (or just a section), the syllabus is below. I'd LOVE feedback, especially ideas about alternative or more readings I might use in the future.

Women’s Studies 128/LGBS 128:

CRITICAL APPROACHES TO HETEROSEXUALITY

Fall 2011

T/Th 2:10-3:30 Humanities 1503

Professor Jane Ward

Office: Interdisciplinary Building 2025

Email: janew@ucr.edu

Office Hours: Tuesdays & Thursdays 1-2pm and by appt

Introduction to the Course:

In 1991, queer scholar Michael Warner coined the term heteronormativity to refer to all of the ways that heterosexuality is taken for granted in both cultural and institutional life. To investigate heteronormativity is to place the spotlight on the specific ideas and practices that make heterosexuality seemingly ubiquitous and invisible, exalted and mundane, unchanging and universal, and, natural, normal, and right. In this vein, this course critically examines the late 19^th-century origins and 20^th-century evolution of the meaning of heterosexuality in the United States. We will undertake this project from a queer perspective that views heterosexuality not as a sexual “orientation,” but as a set of contested sexual, cultural, and political practices.

In contrast with a dominant script that celebrates heterosexuality’s apparent seamlessness and success, this course is also organized around the argument that heterosexuality—as a system bound up with misogyny and reliant upon the gender binary—is ultimately unworkable and in need of queer intervention.

The course is organized around three themes: 1) The Invention of Heterosexuality (weeks 1-3); The Failure of Heterosexuality (weeks 4-7); 3) Hope for Heterosexuality? (weeks 8-10). Welcome to the course!

Required Texts

1. Jonathan Ned Katz. 2007. The Invention of Heterosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (available on Amazon for $16, or used for less!)

2. Numerous Articles posted on Ilearn

See reading schedule below.

THEME #1: The Invention of Heterosexuality

Sept 22nd: Welcome and Introduction to the Course

Week One

The Heterosexual Is Born (9/27 & 9/29)

· Katz, Jonathan Ned. “The Genealogy of a Sex Concept.” (Ch. 1); “The Debut of the Heterosexual” (Ch. 2); “Before Heterosexuality” (Ch. 3)

Week Two

The Heterosexual Mystique (10/4 & 10/6)

· Katz, Jonathan Ned. “Making the Heterosexual Mystique” (Ch. 4); “The Heterosexual Comes Out” (Ch. 5)

Week Three

Keeping the Dream Alive: True Love, Romance, and Heterosexiness (10/11 & 10/13)

· Martin, Karin. “Hetero-Romantic Love and Heterosexiness in Children’s G-Rated Films” Gender & Society (2009)

· Collins, Patricia Hill. “Get Your Freak On: Sex, Babies, and Images of Black Femininity” in Black Sexual Politics (2004)

· Maher, Jennifer “What Do Women Watch?: Tuning In to the Compulsory Heterosexuality Channel.” In Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (2004)

· Brancato, Jim. “Domesticating Politics: The Representation of Wives and Mothers in American Reality Television.” Reality Television II · Film & History, Volume 37.2

THEME #2: The Failure of Heterosexuality

Week Four

He’s Just Not That Into You: The Heterosexual Contradiction (10/18 & 10/20)

Film: Dreamworlds

· Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex”

· Sedgwick, Eve. “Homosocial Desire” in Between Men

· Pascoe, CJ. “Compulsive Heterosexuality: Masculinity and Dominance.” Ch. 4 in Dude, You’re a Fag (2007)

· Excerpts from He’s Just Not That Into You, & The Game

Week Five

Gender Entrapment and Compulsory Heterosexuality (10/25 & 10/27)

· Richie, Beth “Introduction” and “Trapped by Violence.” In Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered Black Women. 1995

· Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” 1980

Week Six

Divorce, Violence, Bad Parenting, and Other Heterosexual Problems that Threaten the Sanctity of Queer Feminism (11/1 & 11/3)

Film: The Real Housewives of New Jersey

· Hochschild, Arlie. “Tensions in Marriage in the Age of Divorce” in The Second Shift (2003)

· Anderson, Kristin and Debra Umberson. “Gendering Violence: Masculinity and Power in Men’s Accounts of Domestic Violence” Gender & Society. 2001

· Martin, Karin. “Normalizing Heterosexuality: Mothers' Assumptions, Talk, and Strategies with Young Children" Gender & Society. pp. 190-207

· Kane, Emily. “’No Way My Boys Are Going to Be Like That!’ Parents’ Responses to Children’s Gender Nonconformity.” Gender & Society. 2006.

Week Seven

The Heterosexual Repair Industry (or “It Gets Better!”): Managing Hetero-Boredom, Hetero-Sexlessness, and Hetero-Antagonism (11/8 & 11/10)

Film: Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus

· McCaughey, Martha. “Homo Habitus: Evolution, Popular Culture, and the Embodied Ethos of Male Sexuality.” In The Caveman Mystique (2008)

· Carter, Julian. “The Marriage Crisis.” In The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940 (2007)

· Hochschild, Arlie. “The Cultural Cover-up” in The Second Shift (2003)

· Excerpts from Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus

Week Eight

Heterosexuality: Just Another Way of Having Homosexual Sex (11/15 & 11/17)

· Laura Hamilton, “Trading on Heterosexuality: College Women’s Gender Strategies and Homophobia” Gender & Society. pp. 145-172

· Benshoff, Harry “A Straight Cowboy Movie: Heterosexuality According to Brokeback Mountain.” in Hetero: Queering Representations of Straightness (2009)

· Ward, Jane. “The Elephant Chain.” In Not Gay 2012, Forthcoming.

THEME #3: Hope for Heterosexuality?

Week Nine

Heterosexuality’s Feminist Future (11/22, no class on 11/24 HOLIDAY)

· Risman, Barbara and Danete Johnson-Sumerford. “Doing It Fairly: A Study of Postgender Marriages.” Journal of Marriage and Family. 1998

· Shows, Carla and Naomi Gerstel. “Fathering, Class, and Gender.” Gender & Society. 2009.

· Schultz, Jason. “Getting Off on Feminism.” In To Be Real. 1994.

Week Ten

Heterosexuality’s Queer Future (11/29 & 12/1)

· Halberstam, Jack. “Pregnant Men, Heteroflexible Women, Butch Daddies and the Future of Gender.” 2012, forthcoming.

· Ward, Jane. “Queer Pedagogy and the Specter of the Maternal” 2011.

Butch Teachers, Dyke Dads, and L.A. Genderqueer Parenting

2011-09-01T09:38:00.000-07:00

How might we apply queer theory to parenting and other adult-child relationships? In a chapter titled “Queer Pedagogies and the Specter of the Maternal” (see link below, and how to purchase the book Maternal Pedagogies, Demeter Press, 2011), I discuss the importance of thinking about “mothers” and “fathers” as performative categories that can be taken up by anyone who feels drawn to them, regardless of biological sex. While the feminist movement has succeeded in disrupting the essential gendering of occupations, parenting roles remain deeply gendered and essentialist, such that female parents are almost exclusively mothers, and male parents are almost always fathers. It's high time we work against conceptualizations of “mother” and “father” that refer to sex categories (woman with child, man with child), and instead embrace a reimagining of mother and father as specific sets of job duties and stylistic approaches available to all people regardless of sex or gender. This cross-gendering of the adult/child relationship demonstrates to children the social constructedness of gender in very practical terms, introducing them to a broader range of relational options for both female- and male-bodied people and setting the stage for children to later choose, for themselves, from the conventions associated with mothering, fathering, or both. The article also briefly discusses when and why Kat and I founded the group L.A. Genderqueer Parenting.

http://www.demeterpress.org/MaternalPedagogies.html

What Happened to the Bisexual Movement, and Do We Still Need One?

2011-08-31T20:06:00.000-07:00

Why has the Bisexual Pride Movement gained limited momentum since the 1980s, as compared with lesbian, gay, queer, and transgender political projects? In the first portion of this talk I discuss the sociopolitical forces that have destabilized bisexual politics over the last three decades: from competing claims of bi invisibility and bi privilege in the 1980s, to the media’s characterization of bisexual men and women as predatory in the 1990s, to the rise of a bi-inclusive queer movement in the late 90s and early 2000s. In the second portion of the talk, I argue that bisexuals--along with lesbians, gay men, and heterosexuals--have much to learn from a new generation of genderqueer scholars and activists about the broader possibilities of sexual desire and fluidity.

Talk given on July 17, 2011 in Pasadena, CA, to the Los Angeles Bisexual Task Force.

ps: if you watch the video, you need to promise not to make fun of my bad hair.