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

Queertopia 2 and AWP in Seattle Do you want a Job or a Calling?

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.