Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

idk im at the bit where the authors claim erdedy should have shared all the details of her investigation with phi kappa psi because she had no reason to believe they would not have acted in good faith and ... really?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/books/review/selfish-shallow-and-self-absorbed-sixteen-writers-on-the-decision-not-to-have-kids.html?smid=tw-share

" a morass of resentment, insecurity, longing and disappointment for those who don’t find the right man in time to mate (the terms “childless by circumstance” and “social infertility” have been coined to describe this group); an ungovernable tangle of anxiety, confusion and exhaustion for those who combat infertility issues with costly and invasive assisted reproductive technologies; and a pervasive fog of self-recrimination and angst for those who simply don’t know what they want. "

skim-reading this I initially mistook it for a description of those who do have kids; obv I am projecting a hell of a lot bc I read blogs about how parents find themselves feeling 'not cut out for this'

i got an email from statewide library org with this:

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y153/struggin/l1.jpg

immediately started writing a response to the guy who sent it, a reference librarian for the LDS church btw, pointing out that it was sexist ageist and disrespectful etc. then revised to say how it "could" be read the wrong way. now i feel like there's probably nothing worthwhile about pointing out possible negative interpretations in a dumb email instigated because i was offended by some typically tone-deaf thing sent from someone who works for the stupid church i hate so fn much. two hours gone. blechhhhhhhhhh. is it even objectionable in any way? i can't trust myself tbh.

it seems objectionable to me; my sister is a librarian... think I'll share with her.

thanks. this is what i'm considering sending in response but i'll have to sleep on it.

I’m looking forward to hearing more about this presentation. I just wanted to let you know that the promotional image in your email could be interpreted in an unfortunate way: the words could be read as a comment on the women in the photograph, not just the card catalog. I am sure that is not what you intended. I just wanted to pass this information along to you in the hope that you’ll consider it as you plan announcements in the future.

my thirtysomething librarian sister just wrote back "yeah, this is tone deaf" so there you go

Maybe if it were indicated that it's the librarians in the photo speaking, sharing the sentiment that they want/need better resources too? Could be like Married to the Sea speech bubbles or something.

agreed; the "we" doesn't read as the librarians, they read as "old resources"

yes. i asked a colleague and she also said it could have been intended that the pictured librarians are "tired of the same old resources". i think tone-deaf is the accurate read then.

i'm going to rewrite this imagining myself as a friend pointing out someone's innocent faux pas.

^did that as briefly as i could, he responded that it hadn't even crossed his mind, thanked me, nbd.

I feel like I've seen dozens of things like that in the library world--especially because young digital folks are always finding lol old photos whiles scanning images

yeah i feel like it's been a pretty common angle on the "web" in library world ... for 20 years. he's asking for new web resources but afaict the best "new" content out there is digitized old stuff. using the "old is tired" angle prob. not the best way to reach the special collections / archives people.

http://tableflip.club/

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/04/14/study-suggests-stem-faculty-hiring-favors-women-over-men

has this been posted?
http://www.laweekly.com/news/how-hollywood-keeps-out-women-5525034

She was struck by how Johnston "would just happen to be at lunch with one of the guys that was hanging out with guys, and [they] would all get to know one another and all of a sudden they're making Cedar Rapids" — a movie written by a man, edited by a man, directed by a man and produced by five men, including The Descendants director Alexander Payne.

While not criticizing the industry's propensity for male bonding, Lee said that for women, "It's much tougher to fall into those casual relationships that lead to something."
…
"People hate risking anything, and they think it's doing something wild and crazy to hire a woman," says one female director. She asked to remain anonymous, saying that if she were identified by name, "I have a feeling that all the companies that I've been dealing with will be really evil to me."

'Where's My Cut?': On Unpaid Emotional Labor

look at this bullshit

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/opinion/sunday/you-go-guy.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0

"opinion"

But emotional labor? Offering advice, listening to woes, dispensing care and attention? That’s not supposed to be transactional. People are disturbed by the very notion that someone would charge, or pay, for friendly support.

wait, what? this is why a lot of people pay therapists.

Yeah I don't get that opinion at all.

that's just one line, the rest of the thing makes a lot of sense
(although i can't say i love the hashtag)

not sure where to post it but i thought this article on spinsters was great

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/on-spinsters

These many magnificent spinsters and their unnamed sisters expand the range of femininity far beyond the familiar territory of the cute, cool, or easily commodified, and ignoring or shunning almost all of this classic spinster pantheon — as Bolick does — has political consequences. Above all, it domesticates the threat that the spinster poses to normative systems of love, sex, and power. There is a reason the word “spinster” has long been a queer-tinged insult with a straight-slicing edge — a reason why Katharine Hepburn, one of cinema’s great spinsters (Summertime! Desk Set! The African Queen!), was devastated in The Philadelphia Story when her ex-husband called her a “married maiden” and her estranged father called her a “perennial spinster.” Historically, spinsterhood has meant a kind of radical unavailability to straight men, implying either rejection of them or rejection by them or both.

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/happens-talk-salaries-google/

4 days ago
6
@EricaJoy's salary transparency experiment at Google

But emotional labor? Offering advice, listening to woes, dispensing care and attention? That’s not supposed to be transactional. People are disturbed by the very notion that someone would charge, or pay, for friendly support.

In context she's offering up that viewpoint as being RONG, if u read it.

lol

@ no one reading that but still having opinions on it

I love Herland, but my own favorite spinster manifesto (which doesn’t appear in Spinster) was written almost half a century earlier, in 1869. It’s a chapter in Louisa May Alcott’s misleadingly titled An Old-Fashioned Girl, a novel about being a youngish woman in Boston (which Bolick once was, but there the resemblance ends). Polly is an unmarried music teacher struggling with loneliness and depression; her friend Fan is an unmarried lady of leisure also struggling with loneliness and depression. When Polly suddenly becomes happier, Fan assumes her good mood must be because she’s falling in love with a man, but Polly corrects her: “No; friendship and good works.” Polly takes Fan to see her new spinster friends, whom she describes as “lively, odd, and pleasant,” and the young women share an improvised indoor picnic (“it’s so much jollier to eat in sisterhood”) and a riotous feminist discussion at the home of Becky and Bess, both artists, who are partners in a Boston marriage. As Polly explains, Becky and Bess

...live together, and take care of one another in true Damon and Pythias style. This studio is their home,— they work, eat, sleep, and live here, going halves in everything. They are all alone in the world, but as happy and independent as birds; real friends, whom nothing will part.

I love LOVE that book and that exact passage!!! Oh bless, bless her.

But as a spinster who craves connection and community above all and who has found it outside of the standard couple form, I’ve come to realize that I owe an immeasurable debt to the intersecting groups of people who have historically been barred from the privileges of marriage by law and demography, and have learned to create intimate lives apart from it. In other words, I’m indebted to queer people and to African Americans, and to all who have seen their loves and families treated as nonexistent or pathological, and who have had marriage used as a weapon against them or as a compulsory straight and narrow path to equality. These people are more than “awakeners”: they have done the hard work of loving and world-making in defiance of the powers that be, and all unmarried people benefit from their centuries of emotional and material labor.

Goddamn that essay is brilliant.

ya lots there v otm
slate review she links to is good too

what I don't get about the emotional labor article is why the author finds being an emotionally giving person so annoying.

She finds it exhausting. And asymmetrical in practice--women perform it, men benefit from it, it's basically invisible. That article is right on.

i way over-identify with that article because emotional labor was my life and major source of identity while i was in graduate school. it is not worth it, trust me.

or it's more like, it's work that needs to get done, but it's not valued or even seen. it's the same people always doing it, it's invisible to most people, and it takes a serious toll on the people performing it.

now i am obsessively summarizing an article whose meaning is entirely manifest. clearly it struck a chord.

EMOTIONAL LABOR: DON'T DO IT.

(or force people to acknowledge that it's a thing and make its practice more shared somehow.)

agree
i didn't need to read it to know it was true
esp difficult when someone is required to do emotional labor for money (like as a teacher or in another caring profession) and then do the same outside of work for free
as i said, i think the hashtag is crass but there's no arguing with the idea of unpaid emotional labor

yes i think being a teacher has something to do with how hair-trigger i am about this.

it's probably part of why you were drawn to the profession in the first place -- me too! it's just that it takes a lot from a person and there's a finite amount of caring pie to eat and if there's only one slice left, i'm probably saving it for myself because i need some care too.

#giveyourpietowomen

also i wanna say lauren chief elk is a rad writer and i like her ideas a lot

Almost every job where you care for others is paid poorly, whether it is physical or emotional assistance you are providing. My overly generalized, but most times valid, observation is that the more your job benefits a group of people that you can identify as individuals, and more tangible the benefits you provide, the worse your job is compensated. Doctors are about the only glaring exceptions to this rule.

that spinsterhood article is beautiful writing

Bolick goes on to ask,

You are born, you grow up, you become a wife.
But what if it wasn’t this way? […]
What would that look and feel like?

with dramatic line-drops between each question, as if she is blowing our minds; as if these exact questions haven’t already been asked and answered by generations of women for decades or centuries. I couldn’t help but wonder: why does Bolick’s account of women’s existence seem so much more archaic than a book published in 1936?

sly

Aimless did you read the article? The low wages of ppl in caring professions is not even remotely the point. That's obviously not news.

In this post-Obergefell world we need to reclaim these terms.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/science/chilly-at-work-a-decades-old-formula-may-be-to-blame.html?ref=topics

not sure if this is the thread for this, but this study has been tearing twitter apart today

chait's response. no fan of chait, but it seems pretty reasonable

i sometimes forget that air conditioning exists outside of supermarkets