Politically Correct

I've become sort of used to hearing people, often intelligent, fair-minded people, saying the phrase “politically correct” as though it's some awful bit of food, something nasty and rotting that's been foisted on them, constraining their speech and leaving a terrible taste in their mouths. How are we supposed to keep up with what they want to be called now? But I know [fill in the blank-women, black people, gay people, etc] who are just like that! Or, and perhaps the worst, can't you take a joke?

Here's the thing. I'm a straight, white, cisgender, middle class, citizen of the US. I have only minor, inconspicuous conditions (near-sightedness, for example), not the kinds that make life especially difficult or get me stared at. In other words, I've got heaps of social privilege. But I am also a woman, and that means that I am one of the many people for whom “politically correct” is personal.

“Hey, baby, why don't you smile?”

When the man who takes my bus ticket calls me “sweetie” and grins at me, I don't think how nice he is, or how old-fashioned. Instead, I realize that he is trying to make our relationship more intimate than it should be by using a cute nickname*, and I wonder whether he will try to “accidentally” rub a hand against my body as I walk by him. When I ignore a man on the street who looks me up and down and whistles, and he calls me a cunt, bitch, or cocktease, then I have reason to be even more wary of him than I am of ordinary strange men.

What these men do, what makes it so harmful (even if they don't touch me), is that they try to control me, expect me to accept or even like their come-ons, to appreciate the compliment of being hooted at and groped. And when I don't, when I act like an independent person instead of a body for them to enjoy, they get angry. They say vicious and disgusting things, they invade my personal space, and I always have to wonder whether they will assault me.

“You wanna hear a funny joke? Women's rights.”

The jokes are sometimes worse because they are more subtle and often come from people we know well. “When your wife leaves the kitchen to nag you, what did you do wrong? Made the chain to long.” “What's the worst part of getting a sex change from male to female? When they remove half the brain.” “What do you tell a woman with two black eyes? Nothing, you already told her twice.”

When your friend, your relative, or the guy at the bar or on the plane tells these jokes, he expects you to laugh, to agree, “Haha, silly woman belongs in the kitchen!” or “Yeah, women are dumb!” or “Haha, you hit her! What an unexpected twist!” If you don't, he'll say you have no sense of humor, that you take yourself to seriously, you humorless feminist. Guess what, world? I don't owe you appreciation when you objectify me on the street, and I don't owe you laughter when you make a joke that demeans me and makes light of violence. And saying “I don't mean anything by it” isn't really good enough, because you know what that tells me? That it really doesn't bother you that your behavior is hurtful. (PS. Guess what lack of empathy is a symptom of?)

The personal is political.

But what happens when I call these men, the whistlers, gropers, and jokers, “politically incorrect”? It sounds so innocuous, as if they had made a mistake on a government form or something. Perhaps half the problem with “politically incorrect” is that it waters down behavior that is offensive, hurtful, even dangerous, into something that's only technically wrong. Like parking in a no-parking zone instead of running someone over.

The thing is, this is not just about me and my experiences, and these behaviors are not just minor infractions. These men (especially the jokers) think of themselves as harmless. “Sticks and stones, right?” But there are consequences. What misogynist jokes and cat-calling do is normalize the violence and psychological abuse experienced by women on a daily basis. They say, “because you are a woman, I don't have to respect you. And it's okay for men to harass you, pay you less, grab you on the bus, rape you, or beat you. Because that's what women are for. It's what they deserve for being shallow, stupid nags.” And even if a joker doesn't consciously think that way, the attitude gets overheard, and repeated, and replicated in the behavior of other men and boys, who will insult, and harass, and assault women because they have learned by example that women don't deserve respect.

“Politically Incorrect” does not mean “Courageous, Independent Thinker.”

People use “I know it's not politically correct to say, but” to give their ideas the aura of difficult truths and exempt themselves from submitting to oh-so-controversial mandates like, “respect other people.”

What these people won't understand, what they really need to get on a personal level, is that their willingness to make fun of, say nasty things about, abuse, assault, or shun entire groups of people based on stereotypes does not make them brave. What it does is make them the kind of people we (women, people of color, people with disabilities, people with non-traditional gender expression, men who love men, women who love women, people with accents, and others) cannot trust. Because to them, we aren't really people.

That's the heart of “politically correct” for me. It means making an effort (and not a very strenuous one) to respect the humanity of those who have traditionally been made to feel less than human. Maybe it means changing the language we use to object to offensive behavior, because "politically correct" really isn't doing the trick. It certainly means calling out this kind of behavior in people around us, even if we do get called humorless feminists from time to time. I'd rather be called that than “sweetie” any day.

*A young feminist explains why terms of endearment can be problematic.

Love/Hate Relationship

I miss my students. Even though, when I had them, there were a handful that really tested my patience. I guess that is how it goes.

Plagiarism and Contextomy

These examples are random, and yet it pains me (as both a student and teacher of literature) that the trend toward plagiarism and "contextomy" -or, quoting out of context- is increasingly written off as no big deal by popular culture. No apology is provided in either of the following examples. The responses, from the offending parties, do not even offer so much as a "my bad." But I cannot help but question, "What happened to scholarship?" Or, at the very least, "What happened to pride in a job well done?"

Example 1: Plagiarism
Chris Anderson's 'Free' appears to borrow freely from Wikipedia and other sources

First of all, Wikipedia? Are you kidding me? But more to the point- even school children know that plagiarism equals failure.

Example 2: Contextomy
Ann Coulter takes all kinds of liberties with her direct quotes

Coulter's bigotry and hatred anger me to begin with. Regardless, I find it hard to believe that even she could convince herself that she accurately captured the context of this New York Times quotation. She clearly has an agenda, but the degree of false attribution here is remarkable! This is exactly the sort of "quotation" I warn students against. To be fair, Coulter's usage is much bolder than I've seen from students. Why? Perhaps they know I'll mark them down for inaccurate scholarship and weakening their argument. Although, I would like to believe it has more to do with self-respect. Ann's response to Fraken is a logical fallacy, as well. But now I'm depressed.

Odds & Ends

Hey, everyone~I'm alive! Mostly, anyway. I'm in between summer courses and about half a million other projects, but I feel so bad about neglecting our little blog, and I've been coming across some really interesting stuff lately, so I thought I'd give you all some things to read/think about.

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First up, from the British Museum website on the Parthenon sculptures (the Elgin Marbles, read more about the controversy's history here.) (emphasis mine):

"The British Museum....is a unique resource for the world: the breadth and depth of its collection allows the world public to re-examine cultural identities and explore the complex network of interconnected world cultures. Within the context of this unparalleled collection, the Parthenon sculptures are an important representation of ancient Athenian civilisation.

Each year millions of visitors, free of charge, admire the artistry of the sculptures and gain insights on how ancient Greece influenced, and was influenced by, the other civilisations that it encountered.

The Trustees of the British Museum warmly welcome the opening of the New Acropolis Museum which will allow the Parthenon sculptures that are in Athens to be appreciated against the backdrop of ancient Greek and Athenian history. The new museum, however, does not alter the Trustees’ view that the sculptures are part of everyone’s shared heritage and transcend cultural boundaries. The Trustees remain convinced that the current division allows different and complementary stories to be told about the surviving sculptures, highlighting their significance for world culture and affirming the universal legacy of Ancient Greece."

Can we just talk about the language here for a second? First of all, this emphasis on "world public" and "world culture"-could it be more paternalistic? This is the British Museum basically saying, "we have the authority to act as curators for the world, by which we mean all you puny countries we took stuff from during our years as a vast, evil empire, because we represent the whole world."

Okay, I may be embroidering a bit. But the sentiment is there-the idea that things that are important to humanity are better off with [Western, Anglo] curators so that more [Western, Anglo, or privileged] people get to see them. "World public"=people in or able to travel to England (therefore, people who either live there or have enough money/privilege to go there [which totally undermines this 'free of charge' thing they're so proud of]).

All this stuff about "transcend[ing] cultural boundaries" is really the British Museum's way of positioning themselves as having transcended centuries of imperialism, paternalism, and other forms of international conflict, even as they continue to exert imperialistic authority by refusing to return the sculptures. It's like people in the US who think it's okay to make racist jokes because having an African-American president means racism doesn't exist anymore. Teh logik it hurtz my brainz.

I haven't had a chance to see the sculptures [yet], but I hear they're pretty awesome, and it would be cool to see them without having to go to Greece. BUT, I do think that's where they should be [unless Greece decides to let them tour]. In case you couldn't tell. What do you think?

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Next, something less controversial. If you haven't already, check out this fascinating article by Lera Boroditsky of Stanford. A few highlights:

"Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello." "

Cool, huh? When I mentioned this to my mom (hi, mom!), she brought up the problem of people with no sense of direction, people who couldn't find their way out of a chalk circle with a map (hi, mom!). How would they cope in a culture like this? Is our ability to orient ourselves in the space we occupy inherent, or is it (as this article would suggest), cultural? How might it change the way you think about your house, your neighborhood, or your city if this was your way of understanding orientation?

"[W]e gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role."

Guess what? I'm weird. Some of you knew this already, but what you may not have known is that my visualization of time is completely wrong for my linguistic background. This, for comparison, is the average native English speaker's conception of time (note my mad MS paint skillz):

Time moves from left to right and top to bottom, just like the way we would expect to see text printed on a page. But in my head, time looks like this:

Completely reversed. I have no trouble using standard calendars, but in my head, time goes left to write and bottom to top, and it has for as long as I can remember. Same goes for months in the year-May is to the right of now, July is to the left. Plus, if you were to ask me to draw my week on a blank piece of paper (not a pre-printed calendar) the standard way, I would have to pause to reorient and "translate" my mental image into the left-right, top-bottom format.

(Interestingly, spans of years (ie. 1950-2000) are left-right in my head.)

I've done some searching, and it seems to be a pretty rare thing. I've read about a few native English speakers who picture weeks right-left, but few or none who picture their days bottom-top. How about you guys? Any guesses as to what it means?

One more quote from the article (which you really should read for yourself, because it's incredibly cool):

"Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a "key" — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal," "serrated," and "useful," whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny," and "tiny." To describe a "bridge," which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said "beautiful," "elegant," "fragile," "peaceful," "pretty," and "slender," and the Spanish speakers said "big," "dangerous," "long," "strong," "sturdy," and "towering." This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures). And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers. Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people's ideas of concrete objects in the world."

Since I've studied a few romance languages, this is something I've always wondered about. It has a lot of implications for how language is used/received in things like advertising, legislation, or literature.

For instance, if I read Baudelaire's "La Musique" in English, it seems either gender neutral or even masculine with its nautical images (a man at sea, the violence of a tempest), so that even a reading of the sexual imagery would be more inclined to consider the male body and the male experience. In French, though, it's full of feminine words: une mer (sea), ma étoile (star), la voile (sail), la toile (canvas), and la nuit (night) are all feminine, as is the title, which gives the poem a very different sort of texture. Obviously, even if the initial gendering of those words was neutral or arbitrary (another interesting question), the reception of them cannot be.

I'd love to hear some people with more experience in translation or comparative lit weigh in on this...

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Finally, other fun stuff I've marked as blogfodder in my Google reader:

DesignerMatt Dorfman's awesome wedding invitation.

Oddly modern-looking color photography from the turn of the century.

Marvel fails spectacularly to speak to its female fans.

And this. I have no idea what it is, but it's kind of fascinating.

On Labeling and Identity

I know our lovely little blog has been on hiatus a bit, but I'd like to initiate a conversation on identity, labels, and boxes. By "labels and boxes" I don't mean office supplies, but those organizing features that so many seem to need to fix to everyone in order to understand the world and put people in their proper category.

To begin, a some background and an anecdote.

As many of my fellow blogistas and those few that know my true identity are aware, I started dating the lovely woman named Teacher Poet about 9 months ago. This was the first female I had dated, and, of course, questions arose about my identity. Who was I? A lesbian? A bisexual? A heterosexual who happened to fall in love with this one woman? Over the course of these months we have been together, my particular philosophical/theoretical training (you know, feminism, gender studies, and the "posts:" post-modernism, post-structuralism) has caused me to shirk any kind of label in relation to my sexuality. This is because I look at most forms of identity as changing and in flux, and I don't think that who you date determines a thing about you. in other words, actions do not always equal identity (because how could they?).

Now, I do realize that not claiming some sort of label has all manner of implications for identity politics. We often need these labels in activism to decide who is marginalized, and therefore whose rights we are fighting for. You know, defining group identification and all that. In that case, I would gladly claim a label for a political purpose. If, for example, me standing up and saying, "I am a lesbian" gives me more, um, credibility (?) in fighting for gay civil rights to, for example, get married, then so be it. In general, though, I do not want to be referred to as a heterosexual, a lesbian, or a bisexual. Identity is in too much of a state of fluctuation for me to worry about such things. And what does it mean to be in one of those labels anyway? Again, we get into some complex issues regarding identity politics and tricky definitions.

So, recognizing that my decision to not claim any kind of label except in very specific cases has all kinds of implications and problems, I still stick behind it. If anything, the label "queer" fits very nicely, because from what I've heard it implies that you don't link sexuality to identity, you don't worry about which categories your behavior fits into, etc, etc, etc. That discussion is probably best for another time.

When I arrived at Cornfield U about 6 months ago, I was open about the fact that I was dating a woman to my fellow classmates, but I was also just as open about the fact that I do not like to claim labels for myself and why that was. Today, however, I discovered that despite the fact that I tell people why I don't want to be put in a box, they have put me in one anyway. I was just having an afternoon snack with a few girls in my program when they told me that they had told someone I was a lesbian (long story as to how that came up).

Now, let me make myself clear: I am not, not, not bothered by the fact that I was called a lesbian. What bothers me is that despite the fact that I have made it clear to these women that I do not claim a label (and WHY!) they still put me in a category based on the fact that I am dating a woman (a very wonderful and beautiful one, by the way :-)). They decided what my identity would be based on their own definitions. They put me in my proper box (and perhaps they did it because that is how they have to see the world. But why does it matter? It always makes me suspicious of people's motivations when they have to identify who's "gay" and who's "straight."). Part of me wants to say that perhaps we need a different classification system, one where there is a term that sums up my philosophy on identification and such. However, that wouldn't address the issue I am bringing up, would it?

My reason for posting this anecdote is to try and get a conversation going about identity and identity politics. I realize that I have raised many issues in this entry, and not all of them are particularly well fleshed out. How, for example, is my choosing to claim/not claim labels hurting/helping the LGBTQ community? How does this factor into identity politics? And am I just reading too much into all of this? :-)

Happy discussing.

Breathing Books

Hey, book lovers! Check this out:



Things - Edith Kollath Creates Books that Breathe from Bre Pettis on Vimeo.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Time to spend lots of money! No, the economy's not in great shape right now, and you've probably got a bit of debt piling up. Sure, the obsession with stuff has some serious consequences.

But did you know that you can do your bit to save the economy by buying stuff?

Of course, what you buy is almost as important as how much you spend. Make the wrong decision, and you could end up in the doghouse.

So, Target wants to make things a little easier by sorting their products into appropriate categories for the special people in your life:



So, a few of these "personalities" have pretty similar gender options ("Doting Grandma"/"Doting Grandpa" etc).

Others, however, have only rough equivalents. How about "Corporate Diva" and "Office All-Star," for instance? Here we have a woman's success as a personality trait, one with negative connotations of being arrogant, self-centered, and hard to get along with. The man's success, on the other hand, is attributed to skill. It also links him to sports at which he, presumably, also excels. But not like a diva; the all-star is the best on his team. We could also look at "Corporate" as an adjective implying the cold, cut-throat world of business and "Office" as a team-oriented space. It almost turns the "man as rugged individual, woman as social" on its head, except that it turns the woman into an aggressive loner (as women in the business world are often stereotyped to be).

Then we have "Nature Lover" and "Outdoor Explorer." Anyone else seeing hippy treehugger on one side and mountaineer on the other? That's encoded in the language. "Nature" implies a more subjective or experiential perspective, one which is frequently associated with positive things like harmony or order and gendered representations ("natural order of things," "Mother Nature"). "Outdoor," on the other hand, is equivalent to "wilderness," or that which is "outside" the limits of civilization. Rather than a place of order or harmony, it is untamed and dangerous. Of course, "Lover" is connected with emotion and peaceful co-existence, whereas "Explorer" sounds an awful lot like "conquerer" in connotation. So, women are in sync with the harmonic order of things, and men are brave conquerers of untamed wilderness. Yeah.

One more: "Domestic Goddess" and "Mr. Fix-it." The "Domestic Goddess" is not only responsible for the peace of the household; if we look at representations of goddesses in popular culture, she is also hyper-feminine and sexualized. She is like the 19th century ideal of the "angel in the house," a woman who is responsible for maintaining a peaceful home (so her husband has nothing to worry about there) and keeping her family morally upright. Compare to "Mr. Fix-it," who, by definition, appears when something goes wrong to make it right. He is the rescuer, the one who steps in when the poor female's brain has been overtaxed by problems like leaky pipes or squeaky doors. Notice how she maintains an aura or atmosphere of peace, whereas he takes an active role in fixing things that go all pear-shaped.

I want to emphasize the problem that these stereotypes create for everyone who doesn't fit traditional gender roles. By pigeonholing desires based on gender, companies define the limits not only of proper behavior but also of proper self-identification. A man should not want to hug a tree; a woman should not want to mend a flat tire. A "Guy's Guy" should want things to do with beer and meat, especially things covered in camo. By buying the proper things, by accessorizing one's gender identity, a person submits his/her/hir gender expression for the approval of the community. This system renders invisible those who either diverge from traditional roles for their genders or whose gender expression doesn't fit traditional categories at all.

And I didn't even go into the kids' categories...

What are your experiences with gendered marketing? Have you ever been "targeted" (or not) based on presumed gender (ie Facebook ads, telemarketers asking for your husband/father?) Ignored or assaulted by perfume spritzers in malls? Had salespeople recommend or discourage you from clothes based on (perceived) gender?