Julie R. Enszer's Blog, page 37

Do you want a Job or a Calling?

I’ve been thinking recently about the first time I met nuns. Yes, Catholic nuns. It was in Detroit in the early 1990s. I suppose that I had met Catholic nuns earlier in my life, for instance, my Latin teacher in high school was a former nun (care to guess why? I do not actually know, but certainly can speculate), but in the early 1990s, I had the opportunity to work with nuns and have more sustained conversations and engagements with nuns.

I was working at the metro Detroit gay and lesbian community center and we were working on building support for gay and lesbian rights among religious communities. Today, this seems like a relatively easy project, but in the early 1990s, support for gay and lesbian people among mainstream Christian communities was tenuous at best, and for Catholics it was challenging. Yes, Dignity had been working within Catholic communities for a number of years by that point, and yes, Catholic communities in the city of Detroit in particular are very progressive. Still, the work was filled with difficult conversations.

The nuns embraced the difficulty of the project. I embraced the passion and righteous commitments of the nuns. Honestly, and without too much drama, working with Catholic nuns was the first time when I felt as though I saw and felt the presence of G-d. These women had clear principles that they could discuss with ease and convictions, but never with simplicity or blind faith. They thought deeply about everything. They acknowledged complexity and conflict. They respected conflict and believed in it. Mostly, they respected people, even people with whom they disagreed vehemently (often these were other Catholics and often these were Catholics with various hierarchal positions above them.) At the time, as a young woman trying to make my way in the world, this was deeply meaningful to me. Even as I think of it today, it inspires me.

More than the way that they approached working with other human beings and the conflict that invariably arises, I admired the nuns for their calling. Prior to working with nuns, I might have mocked having a calling as an idea with little relevance in the modern world. Meeting, talking to, and working with nuns, I came to understand that a calling is not necessarily divinely inspired. Rather, a calling comes from a deep and passionate set of convictions in the world; a calling is a response to a critical engagement with the world in which one learns about and analyzes the conditions of people’s lives, then comes to a series of shared insights about change and commits to working to implement those changes. Among nuns, I came to understand callings in a new and meaningful way.

I determined that I, like many of the nuns, have a calling and that I wanted to organize my life in a way that I could work to fulfill my calling. How I implement this conviction is different than how people do it in religious orders, but the principles are the same.

I have been thinking about these questions of a job and a calling lately during this period of transition in my life. The pull of a job, forty or forty-five hours a week to have a life, feed my family (a St. Bernard eats a ginormous amount of food, in case you were wondering), and seek happiness outside of work can have an intellectual and emotional appeal. After a number of years of working sixty and seventy hour work weeks, I recognize the toll it takes and wonder, is there another way to be?

Then I meet a group of people who live with a calling. The encounter was unexpected, but for a day and a half, I was immersed with a group of people who work at a calling. It reminded me of being in my twenties again, of being at the community center, of doing fundraising trainings for queer community groups (because we desperately needed resources), of working with nuns. And I know, while it is fine for people to have a job and a life organized around other passions, I have a calling, and I want to live the life of a calling.

Filed under: lesbian studies, progressive activism Tagged: activism, economics, feminism, passion, work

If We Believe in Change, We must be Willing to Change

This semester, I am co-teaching a one-credit class titled, Gender and Financial Well-Being. On Monday, we had a fabulous presentation about the gender disparity in retirement income and social security. The statistics are sobering, even for young men and women in college. I am not going to dwell on this issue right now; rather what I want to think about is a comment made by our presenters. When one student asked, what can we do to secure a good retirement. The usual, solid advice was offered (start saving immediately, don’t touch your retirement nest egg, save as much as you can), but it was prefaced with the statement, if you are able to get a job, followed by a reference to the very high unemployment rates for young people in the United States. I want to examine this exchange and then consider the meaning of change in our lives.

The clause, if you are able to get a job, considering the high rate of unemployment among young people between eighteen and twenty-nine, is a truthful statement. Unemployment is high for our recent college graduates. And the news that a college education does pay in the analysis of lifetime earning is only brief balm to the sting of the reality of unemployment. So on one hand there is this truthful statement that describes an overall reality facing young people today, and in particular the thirty young people gathered in this class.

On the other hand, there is the reality of being an individual sitting in the classroom. An undergraduate student at the University of Maryland, wanting, hoping, working, to have a life after graduation with a good job, and for many of them, particularly our women’s studies majors, a meaningful job. What is it like to sit in a class as an individual with all of these hopes and dreams inside of you, hopes and dreams that you nurture often in secret, wishing for things that many tell you are not achieve able by you, and be reminded of the external conditions of the world which suggest that your great hopes and dreams may never be achieved? How do we help students understand the collision between structural realities, and our feminist and politically progressive analyses of these structures, and their personal lives? How do we reconcile these different frames? How do we encourage some sort of optimism and belief that everything will work out in the face of data that tells us it might not and even that the odds are not in our favor?

Of course, I have a personal stake in this question as well, and it is not the first time I have had a personal stake in this question. I graduated from college in 1990, it was the Bush recession, then, the worst one that we had had since the Great Depression. Job opportunities for recent college grads were bleak. Moreover, in Michigan, it was clear that the automobile industry, which had been the mainstay of middle-class jobs, was forever altered. It was unclear that there was any sort of economic future for young people in Michigan. Many of my friends fled for Seattle and New York. I stayed and against the odds, against the economic data and statistics, I got a job that started in July of 1990. It was a new position at the battered women’s shelter in suburban Detroit. The next four or five jobs that I held were newly created positions. My professional career reflects economic growth in the non-profit sector in Michigan and Colorado and Washington, DC.

My professional life continues to be intertwined with broader economic trends. While my students may not see it, In 2013, I am in the same precarious position that they are. There is structural data that suggests, optimistically, the odds of getting a tenure track job for people in the humanities is between twenty and thirty-three percent. These odds are not in my favor. Increased use of adjunct labor in colleges and universities combined with economic uncertainty that keeps tenured faculty working well beyond traditional retirement age combine to create a dismal market for faculty college and university jobs. Increasing people talk about “altac” jobs, jobs outside of tenure track positions. Professional organizations prepare PhD graduates for positions outside of the academy. I cheer these conversations and these moves even as I have, so far, resisted applying for positions outside of the academy. If past history is a determinant of future behavior, my professional trajectory will be outside of the traditional, the expected. Even though I have yet to realize it.

These stories brings me to two paradoxes that animate how we can help young people understand their lives, their passionate dreams and aspirations, in light of current economic news and statistics. First, the economy is cyclical. I was one person amid a bleak economic picture in Michigan, but that bleak economic picture, while it never became a positive or booming picture, did change. I worked. Solidly. I have been employed continuously since 1990, and not incidentally, I have been employed continuously at jobs that have increased in responsibility and remuneration. Granted, I have never had a job that offered long-term stability in the ways that the “Big Three” did for my grandfather and my uncles (and do note the gendered references); I have never had a defined benefit pension plan in my work life. Yet, I also have never sought out such a job, enjoying the risks and non-monetary rewards of work in the non-profit sector. Generationally, I have adapted as a worker in the precarious economic climate that characterizes the United States today. I have a critical analysis of late capitalism in the United States, and I have adapted to be a productive and compliant subject of late capitalism. This adaptation and the paradox it embodies seems to be a crucial form of engagement in women’s studies classrooms. We must find ways to both allow students to hear and analyze data about our economic lives that is difficult and can be personally painful, (As often happens, one young woman cried in our class after the recitation of economic data that while abstracted in a structural analysis was deeply personal–and painful–for her.) and that recognizes that there are different individual experiences.

In addition to helping people recognize the paradoxes that exist between the structural and the personal, we must help students to understand the paradox between resisting, challenging, and working to change systems, including the economic systems that shape our lives, and being engaged, critical subjects. We can critique and we can comply, simultaneously and synchronously. Sometimes we do it with a critical awareness, other times, we are swept up in the structural motions without our knowledge. The cycles of growth and contraction that we observe structurally shape our working lives, often in ways that we are only aware of retrospectively.

These kinds of analyses, paradoxes in which truth exists in both locations and knowledge through historical analysis, are crucial parts of women’s studies and they are tools that can help students hear, understand, and appreciate structural information and data while simultaneously holding fast to and nurturing their own goals and dreams.

This type of thinking and analysis happens every day in women’s studies classrooms. Like Sarah Ahmed, I find feminists fundamentally hopeful and optimistic. We are able to hear, absorb, and analyze challenging data and information, offer visions for change, and then work to create the change we imagine. These are some of the gifts of women’s studies as a discipline, and these gifts are crucial to the young women and men in our classrooms today.

Filed under: progressive activism Tagged: economics, economy, teaching, Women's Studies

Queertopia 2 and AWP in Seattle

On Wednesday, I travel to Seattle, WA for the AWP conference. Ten thousand writers–poets, essayists, novelists, fiction writers, reviewers, and other wordsmiths–gathered in one city for four days of conference going, book fairing, off site readings, drinking, and general merriment. I will be there starting Thursday morning. My primarily hangout will be the table I am operating for Sinister Wisdom in partnership with A Midsummer Night’s Press. We are table N3. If you are attending, stop by and say hi. (If you are in Seattle, the book fair is open to the general public on Saturday, after much brouhaha, so stop on by for free on Saturday.)

On Friday night, I am participating in not one but two off site readings. First, at 6 pm, you can see me at Sibling Rivalry Press’s offsite reading, Everyone and Their Mother. The reading is at the Nitelite Lounge in Seattle. Join me.

Then I will high tale it from the Nitelite Lounge to Barnes and Nobles and read as a part of Queertopia 2. More information about the reading is here:

http://storiesandqueer.tumblr.com/post/76227529011/queertopia-2-readers

Outside of these formal commitments, I will be hanging out with my publishing buddy, hopefully cooking up some new ideas for the next year. I’m looking forward to a fun conference and to a good solid eight hours of travel which will include some great reading and writing, I hope!

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: AWP, poetry, Queertopia, readings, Seattle, Sibling Rivalry Press

Theories of Feminisms: A DOCC

What is a DOCC?

Alex Juhasz and Anne Balsamo designed, implemented, and taught the first “DOCC (Distributed Online Collaborative Course), a feminist rethinking of the MOOC” during the fall of 2013. A collective of over a dozen scholar/teacher/activists taught under the broad rubric of “Feminist Dialogues in Technology.”  You can see more about their experiment with the DOCC here and here.

The idea of a DOCC as a tool that critiqued MOOCs while still claiming the space of online learning for feminisms intrigued and inspired me.

I did what I too often do brashly and without thinking: I issued a call for a Theories of Feminisms DOCC.

Why a DOCC for Theories of Feminisms?

What inspires me about MOOCs is the large numbers of people participating in educational readings, discussions, and other types of engagements. This inspired me and reminded me about feminist activism from the late 1960s through the 1980s. Feminism as an idea and political practice inspired hundreds of thousands of women to meet, read, and think together to generate new understandings about our world and share them with other women. Thus, I see energy of MOOCs linked with the energy of feminism.

In teaching Theories of Feminisms to undergraduate students, I am also interested the ways that feminist theories are linked with a community-based movement of feminism and ways in which they are not. That is, when I first encountered feminist theory as an undergraduate the formation of feminist theories was intimately linked to a community-based, activist political practice. That is, feminist theory came out of women’s experiences with activist work. Here I think in particular of theorists like Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, bell hooks, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and others. Though even in the late 1980s, there was significant theory generated from academic locations, but the commitment always was that if the theory was important and vital, it was accessible to everyone, or at least every woman, and we should each read it, engage with it, and evaluate it.

In the years between my undergraduate education and my return to graduate school, it seems that more theory is generated from academic locations and less from activist or community locations. The advent of MOOCs—or the feminist response of a DOCC—seemed an opportunity to address and change these relationships to bring a different balance to the genesis, consideration, and relevance of feminist theory.

Perhaps a MOOC—or a DOCC—could be one of the catalysts for a renewed form of activist feminisms and reenergized engagements with the generation and circulation of feminist theories.

These are my secret, somewhat grandiose hopes for the DOCC. I wrote, inviting people to join with more circumspection. This from my initial email inviting people to join me in a Theories of Feminisms DOCC:

I envision this DOCC, or collaborative course, as an energizing and exciting opportunity for us as teachers to work together and share as well as an opportunity for students to expand their vision of the world and their sense of the opportunities for feminist collaboration.

Who is Involved?

Three people responded to the idea of a Theories of Feminisms DOCC and together we are teaching on this spring as our first experimental foray into building something meaningful.

The four of us are all situated at very different universities across the country. Agatha Beins is an Assistant Professor in Women’s Studies at Texas Woman’s University, Karen Leong is an Associate Professor in the School for Social Transformation at Arizona State University, and Sarah Whitney is a lecturer at Pennsylvania State University – Behrend. For this academic year I am a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland.

The formats for our classes vary: Sarah and I are teaching classes that meet face to face and have an online component; Agatha and Karen are both teaching online only classes.

What is Happening?

During the fall, the four of us met to formulate and develop what we would do with the inaugural class. We agreed on three elements for collaboration:

Google Hangout Groups for our students
Four shared or overlapping themes (Economy, Indigenous Feminisms, Immigration, and a Novel)
A shared assignment as a Class Wiki

Now we are underway in this first, experimental semester. This week the first google hangouts are happening with four or five students in each of the groups – two students from the University of Maryland, one from PSU-Berend, one from TWU and one from ASU. We are all eagerly awaiting student reports on these experiences. Already we know that students are learning a lot about the challenges of technology collaboration across multiple time zones.

As the semester unfolds, students will continue discussions across campuses, across time zones, and across academic locations. They will read novels and think about how novels posit feminist theory. Collectively, the four of us as professors will evaluate what works in this collaborative world and what does not—and we will imagine new modes of collaboration for the future.

What is Next?

I continue to hope to build a collaborative across multiple platforms for teaching Theories of Feminisms that reaches women outside of academic settings—working women, women in prison, retired women, women seeking feminism through a flickering computer screen.

What happens though will unfold in a collaborative way with the current cohort of professors and, hopefully, a future cohort of people interested in working together, thinking together, and teaching together as a strategy to energize our teaching and scholarship and as a strategy to provide more skills, tools, and knowledge to our students in their disparate, yet connected, locations.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: DOCC, feminism, teaching, Theories of Feminisms

What Do I Teach?

The more I teach, the more I face the existential question: what exactly am I teaching students? Do not misunderstand; I know my content well and feel confident as a content expert. I teach feminist and queer histories; I teach theories of feminisms and LGBTQ theories; I teach how feminist and queer artists and writers have used culture as a site for social change. It is not the content that makes me anxious. What makes me wonder about what exactly I am teaching students with a degree of uncertainty is the question of process: How am I teaching students? What will they remember years hence?

I have no delusions that years from now students will remember the nuances of Wittig’s argument that lesbians are not women. They will not remember exactly what Wittig wrote, to whom she was writing, and why it was so powerful for lesbian-feminists in the 1980s. They may remember, however, their discomfort with her assertion that lesbians are not women. (I sometimes imagine grown up students at a cocktail party twenty or thirty years hence meeting a lesbian of the future and asking her, so I remember this idea from my feminist theory class. . . .Wittig. . . oh, you haven’t read her? . . .ok, but well. . . .do you consider yourself a woman?) I want that discomfort with the idea to plague them a bit, a lot even. Mostly, however, I want them to remember what they do with that discomfort. This is the process of my teaching about which I am thinking, intensely. What I want them to do with that discomfort is sit with it. Examine it. Let it occupy them. I want the experience of being uncomfortable, of being discomfited by ideas, by words on a page, to be a natural and expected response of education. I want students to embrace the uncomfortable, to seek it out, to revel in it.

Let me step back for a moment. When I reflect on my own undergraduate education (as I have done here and here), what I remember is not the content of my classes, but the process, the tools that I gained as a person to make my way in the world. How did I learn those? How did professors teach them to me? Did they know that this is what they were teaching?

Let me begin with the tools. From my Women’s Studies undergraduate degree program, I learned:

As a human moving through the world, I have the power to be a creator of culture and meaning for other people like me.
Power surrounds us; we can use it and it can be used against us. We must always be aware of power, analyze it, and engage it strategically and effectively.
Institutional structures and power systems are both constructed by humans and greater than humans. We are called to change them—to hold them accountable to our visions—and to be accountable to them.
We are called to care for one another individually and collectively and we are compelled by our humanness to take action to improve the world in which we live daily and throughout the course of our life.
Anger is a powerful and important emotion but never more important than compassion, truth, and justice.
Systems, institutions, society, and people change. Being a part of that change is difficult and rewarding. It is where the action is. It is where I like to sit, even though it is uncomfortable.
Beauty is holy; language is sacred.

As a twenty year old, these insights were so vibrantly clear to me. I learned them from Women’s Studies’ professors. I want to teach similarly. I just am unsure if I am.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: teaching, Theories of Feminisms, undergraduate eduction, Women's Studies

Rad Jobs for Feminist Grads

Last week I wrote about what Women’s Studies meant to me as an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan. As a part of these reflections over the past few months, I have also realized that Women’s Studies also meant for me the capacity to be employed throughout my adult life. Although many people asked and continue to ask, “What can you do with a Women’s Studies major?”, for me, Women’s Studies was a degree with extraordinary flexibility and a compelling, creative, and engaging career path. Women’s Studies asks students to analyze the world in which we live and to strategize about how to make changes and address injustice. These are vital skills for the workplace, and the legions of Women’s Studies graduates offer further testament to not only the intellectual importance of the degree but also the economic opportunities it offers and creates.

As a result of my ruminations on Women’s Studies degrees, I have organized a panel this Wednesday evening for Women’s Studies majors, minors, and certificates at the University of Maryland and for all feminist undergrads interested in thinking about career paths after college. If you are around the College Park, MD area on Wednesday night – join us! It is an open forum for networking and community building. The full details are below.

Please share! (and repost!)

Rad Jobs for Feminist Grads/This, Too, Is Women’s Studies

THIS WEDNESDAY!

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

6-8 p.m.

0135 Taliaferro (WMST Multimedia Studio)

Featuring:

Kim Propeak, Policy Director, Casa of Maryland

Maddie Barnett, National Campus Organizer, Feminist Majority Foundation

Kathleen St. Villier, Scholars Program Manager, For the Love of Children DC

RSVP on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/events/400724120071243/

Filed under: Uncategorized

Forget the Odds, Imagine a New Future

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Atlas Odinshoot playfully reminded folks like me on the academic job market and people just finishing their dissertations that the “odds are never in our favor.” While I enjoy the popular culture analogy that Odinshoot offers, I am tired of creative cynicism and yearn for more wild imagination in our collective lives.

Yes, the job market for tenure-track academic positions is bleak, but more than a difficult job market, we face a failure of imagination—a failure to imagine and create a world where we can work and contribute the skills and knowledge gained through our research and teaching to broad public benefit. More tragic than academic restructuring is a failure of imagination, particularly for humanities PhD graduates. The humanities train people to value and cultivate imagination—and imagination is crucial to the future economic and civil environment of the United States.

Let me explain. The economy is changing—and will continue to change throughout our working lives. I grew up in Michigan. For my parent’s generation, with basic math and science aptitude and hard work, you could get a job at General Motors, Ford, or Chrysler, work for thirty years, then retire on a full pension with health and dental benefits. For some, this life was idyllic. By the time I was a teenager in the 1980s, however, automotive jobs were disappearing. When I graduated from high school in 1987, I knew that my peers and I would have to forge a new way of working in the world—and it probably would not involve working at one place for thirty years. So the fantasy of a tenure track job that provides a life of stability is like the fantasy of working at GM for thirty years—it is a fantasy that I dismissed twenty-five years ago—and so did major parts of the US economy.

What I learned as a young woman in Michigan, as a University of Michigan graduate in 1990 (during another bad recession), is that educated workers need to create their own opportunities in ways unimagined by our parents, by our mentors, by those who have walked before us. By saying this, I do not want to deny the structural problems in academia or in the current US economy. These structural problems affect all of us; efforts to address structural issues collectively are crucial and deserve our time and attention.

In addition, we must also imagine new work possibilities for ourselves, for our colleagues and friends, and for all people around us. Rather than likening our mentors to Haymitch, what if we looked to other scholars who have taken non-traditional paths? I think about John D’Emilio. In addition to his groundbreaking work in the history of sexuality, Professor D’Emilio worked for a few years at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force starting the Policy Institute, a vital organization that worked to create important linkages between academic research and gay and lesbian activism. He navigated a career trajectory that served his intellectual interests and the broader LGBT communities in important and meaningful ways. What if we imagined careers that linked worlds of academia and activism in both word and deed?

New wild imaginings about work and how people can find and create work in the world that is both remunerative and contributory is important to academia as well. Most jobs in academia focus on teaching and mentoring undergraduate students. These students face the same world we do, but, at least initially, they have less education and less experience. Part of our job as teachers and mentors is to help them imagine and find their place in the world.

In the past few months, I have had the extraordinary pleasure of being in contact with a handful of recent graduates of the University of Maryland with undergraduate degrees in the humanities, many in Women’s Studies. One young woman came to meet with me in December. She worried about work, how to pay her student loans. She was uncertain about the future. Scared. Doubtful of her own skills and abilities. I told her she had to imagine and create the feminist world she wanted to live in. She was skeptical (and here, I am being kind to myself.)

The other day, she emailed me and said that she has a job interview for a swell editorial fellowship at Lilith Magazine. I hope she gets it, but even if she does not, I know she will be successful. She is imagining a place for herself in the world where she is a creator and maker of meaning; she is imagining work that is feminist and supports her values and beliefs. What if we engaged in wild imaginings with our undergraduate students as a strategy to find and create jobs we want and, in the process, create new spaces in the world for scholars?

One way to create new imaginaries is spatial disruptions; we can step outside ourselves. This month, I joined the board of directors of The DC Center for the LGBT Community. I believe in community service and am thrilled to give the time to The DC Center. Arguably, I should be spending time on my book manuscript and polishing off articles, but it is not an either/or proposition. I am doing those projects and dedicating a few hours a month to The DC Center. This work reminds me of the importance of community and of the challenges that other people face.

Last year The DC Center helped fifteen people who were applying for asylum in the United States after fleeing anti-gay governments in other locations. I do not know the details of all of these cases, and I know the critiques of this work: it constructs the United States as an ideal location for LGBT people and as a benevolent force in the world. I am uneasy with these facts, but, at the board orientation, hearing briefly about people seeking asylum, I realized that my own sense of precarity in the world, as my year as a visiting assistant professor winds down and the tunnel of my own job search constricts, is modest. At The DC Center, people take action to make our local community better; volunteers struggle with their own precarious standing, their own concerns and anxieties, but they act to change our imperfect, broken, unfair, and hurtful world. It makes me ask, what work do I need to be doing now, urgently, and possibly against logic?

Maybe this utopian dream is less useful than dystopian parallels and sharp cultural criticism, but I want to imagine and create worlds where people work for fair wages. I want to imagine and create worlds where people contribute value to our society and, in doing so, inspire others to do the same. This, for me, is the imaginary of the humanities. A world of wild possibilities is where I wish to dwell.

Filed under: scholarship Tagged: Chronicle of Higher Education, DC Center, humanities, imagination, jobs, work

Who Is Your Tribe?

Last week, I worked with some undergraduate students to plan and organize a Feminist Tea Party for majors, minors, and certificate students in the Women’s Studies department. We had a fabulous event with over two dozen people happy to be back at school and excited to meet one another and feel more connected to the Women’s Studies department. The event reminded me of the meaning that Women’s Studies had in my life when I was an undergraduate student: it was the first time in my life when I felt like part of a tribe, a tribe of my choosing.

Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan was a magical place. From the large introductory lecture course to the core class on group process and gender to the senior seminar, it was the place where I met other students who wanted to develop the same principles, ideals, and analyses, and it was a place where I met professors (tenure track, adjunct, and graduate students) who cared about me and were interested in my growth and development as a human being. When I think about the things that I have done in my life and the contribution of education to those accomplishments, I credit them to Women’s Studies at Michigan.

So I want students at Maryland to have a similar experience. I want them to have a sense of arrival in the Women’s Studies department. I want them to feel Iike they have found a tribe. If feels like part of my generational giveback.

I have to be honest, I wonder if the sense of a tribe is different for students today in Women’s Studies than it was for me in the late eighties. Certainly, part of my memory of Women’s Studies is nostalgia. There were many moments of late adolescent anxiety. I could still tell you the list of students who were much cooler than I was, the list of students who were hipper and smarter. I can tell you uncomfortable conversations (some probably still verbatim) and recount some embarrassing incidents. Yet, there were transcendent moments. The day I found Lesbian Poetry in the library. The day I realized that there are things that happen in groups that are beyond individual people. The day I read Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions. The work that I did in at the Women’s Crisis Center as a volunteer. All experiences that gave me a foundation for the work I did after college. All things that now shape my memory to remember magical, to want to create this feeling, these new memories for others, that they may look back and think, that was special. I was special. That experience gave me what I needed to know to be in the world, to make things in the world, to change parts of the world.

All of this makes me think about the larger feelings of belonging, where we find those feelings, what they mean, and how people create experiences of belonging for themselves and for one another. I love the feeling of belonging. I am a junkie for belonging, yearning to feel it, to experience it, and equally to create experiences that create feelings of belonging for other people. Perhaps the desire to have the feeling is most acute at moments where I feel on the precipice of rejection, expulsion, denial of being ‘in’, being chosen, being in the tribe. This is a reminder that the answer to such rejection, expulsion, and denial is organizing and action, inviting the sense of belonging into our lives, reaching out for the tribe. June Jordan said it best, “things that I do in the dark reaching for you whoever you are and are you ready?”

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: belonging, community, june jordan, rejection

Picking Up Some Conversations…

Last week, the beloved and I went away for eight glorious days. Maybe it is the bit of michigan within each of us, but a little sunshine and sand seems to do so much to make January and February happier, to make our lives feel warmer. It is a good development that we are able to afford this luxury.

A number of great things happened while I was away and so this post is a mish-mash of links and small bits of conversation that I want to pick up and continue.

First, as I have discussed here, Sisterhood has started to get a few reviews. Most recently, Danika over at The Lesbrary, wrote these kind words about Sisterhood. I was tickled to come home and read it.

Speaking of reading, I read on vacation until my eyes bled. Two books of poetry that I have read recently and adored are Christina Davis’s An Ethic and Crystal Williams’s Detroit as Barn. Both are beautiful collections of poetry by poets making interesting poetic moves as their work develops. I recommend these books.

I have a number of books on my stack to read, including Hettie Jones’s memoir, which I ordered after Amiri Baraka died, and Ann Allen Shockley’s Say Jesus and Come to Me. So some good, fun reading ahead for these cold days.

Earlier in January! I wrote about paying for graduate school here and here. Karen Kelsky, who blogs at The Professor is In, started a Google doc survey of graduate student debt. You can see it here. The numbers are astounding and some of the stories are heartbreaking. There has been a good bit of media attention, including Slate and NPR. This is a crucial dialogue and I hope it shapes some new thinking and practice for both people in graduate school and for advisors.

Now, I am off to watch some TV. I am enjoying the new series True Detective and still need to pick up the most recent episode of Downton Abbey. And I have a number of new projects brewing. Much goodness for a cold January.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Books, debt, graduate school, poetry, Sisterhood

Lesbian Studies Listserv

So if you have been reading this blog, you know this happened. It was successful and wonderful and after it was over, I said, no more projects. I am just focusing on my own writing. I did. And am, but you know, my name is Julie and I am a work-a-holic. Especially when it comes to doing work that I think is going to build engagement I with lesbians and lesbian literature and lesbian history. So I thought, what do I do now to promote lesbian studies? Ah! A listserv! Turns out, this is surprisingly easy to do when you have a spot (even temporary, contingent) at a university and a smart mentor who is always like, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. So I am pleased to announce the LesbianStudies listserv. Interested? Join us!

To Subscribe to LesbianStudies:
send email to:
listserv@listserv.umd.edu
The mail item should contain:

subscribe lesbianstudies name-of-subscriber

For example, I would type:
subscribe lesbianstudies Julie Enszer

If you want to be in on the ground floor, do not dilly-dally and join in the next forty-eight hours. After that I am off the internet for a whole eight day!

Filed under: lesbian, lesbian studies, scholarship