Favorite quotes (so far) from Infinite Jest

From the “things you learn at a half-way house” section:

“That over 50% of persons with a Substance addiction suffer from some other recognized form of psychiatric disorder, too” (202).

“That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person” (202).

“That the cute Boston AA term for addictive-type thinking is: Analysis-Paralysis” (203).

“That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contigencies and consequences are never good.  That this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the literal loss of one’s mind” (204).

“In short that 99% of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself” (204).

“That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid” (204).

“That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else” (205).

“Analysis-paralysis” was kind of a thrilling term for me to read.  All of the writing in this book related to addiction and treatment are thrilling to me because they are so spot-on in some places with regard to my own personal experience (although I haven’t personally dealt with a substance abuse problem, I’ve been around a lot of addicts and the thinking patterns are similar for people with substance abuse problems and anxiety sufferers – the drugs are really just how some people learn to deal with their anxiety/depression.  This is why I’m fine with referring to addiction and alcoholism as a disease.  I’m not convinced they are genetic diseases (I think it’s more of a learned behavior that develops into a disease), but addiction is a mental illness that includes a lot more than just being chemically addicted to some substance.  It’s a whole set of sick behavior and thought patterns).

One thing, what he calls a half-way house really should be called a treatment center, but it doesn’t bother me all that much.  The AA speak rings true enough to make me laugh and makes me wonder if DFW actually spent some time in AA.  If he didn’t suffer from substance abuse problems himself, he’s got some real talent at imagining what it’s like.

I’m also convinced that DFW knows that the thinking patterns, etc. are the same (or very similar)  in anxiety as in addiction.   He’s talking about anxiety/depression and addiction in this book and linking up a lot of the same experiences and symptoms (that center a lot around fear and dread.  Dread especially.).  I really like this quote, from a character talking about her depressions:

“It’s like something horrible is about to happen, the most horrible thing you can imagine – no, worse, than you can imagine because there’s the feeling that there’s something you have to do right away to stop it but you don’t know what it is you have to do, and then it’s happening, all at the same time” (73).

I really like those quotes about learning from people who are stupid.  They’re doing a couple of things – telling us that there are things more important and valuable sometimes than intelligence, and, in frankly calling others stupid, that it’s also okay to acknowledge that some of us are more intelligent than others (and, in doing that, reinforcing the idea that there are things more important/valuable than intelligence).  There’s another quote that says something about how people who have high IQs are less likely to stay sober, which can be interpreted a couple of ways – which I think DFW was aware of when he wrote it.  I also like these quotes because, well, I thought a lot of the people I knew from AA were stupid.  But that doesn’t mean that they didn’t have something valuable to offer.

Of course, we do know that he did suffer from depression and anxiety (if not a substance abuse problem).  And I really don’t want to become a reader that is now going to turn everything he wrote into a suicide note (I really don’t).  However, I couldn’t help thinking about his suicide after I read this part of the book.  This idea of wanting to lose your mind, basically so that it will stop torturing you, stop scaring the hell out of you, was one that DFW talked about a lot, and I’m really sad that it seems like he finally had to lose his battle with it.  I wish, in the way that in these passages he partially trivializes being highly intelligent, showing us that there are more important, valuable things than the things we sit around thinking about to scare the shit out of ourselves and analyze to death, he could have won the battle against that part of his brain, because it wasn’t worth ending his life over.  I don’t mean to sound harsh or to imply that his depression wasn’t that serious or that his suffering wasn’t great, I’m just saying, I think he lost sight of what we (anxiety sufferers, addiction sufferers, probably people in general) need to keep our eye on.  I don’t know how to say exactly what that is, but it’s in these passages – it’s in realizing that being highly intelligent isn’t the most valuable thing in the world, that we have things to learn from other people, that we can overcome what our minds do to ourselves sometimes.

As an aside, in thinking about how he will acknowledge some contradiction to what he’s saying or seems to be arguing, often in the same passage, I’m reminded of what my friend Laura is trying to do with her MA thesis in Comp and Rhet.  She’s doing a meta-analysis and feeling some pressure to cover and account for everything in the topic she’s writing on, which she’s realizing makes it impossible to actually have an argument.  It might be that Infinite Jest is a meta-analysis of something (addiction, depression/anxiety, dread, the problem of communication, the pursuit of happiness, as someone at Infinite Summer pointed out) and is accounting for every thing, every contradiction on the topic, and therefore not really making an argument, at least not a focused or solid one.

One last thought.  In that scene with Katherine Gompert, the girl with depression who is talking to the psych intern, there are some quotes alluding to the fact that the intern feels like the girl is somehow aware and self-conscious of what she’s saying and what kind of image she’s portraying, as a depressed, suicidal person.  That he’s not really thinking she’s faking it, but that she is just maybe aware and somewhat apart from it.  I think this could point to how for a lot of us who deal with mental illness of whatever sort, it can become for some us something we actually sort of love.  For the image, for the part it plays in our identities.  I think many people who deal with mental illness are afraid of who they will be without their mental illness (when they start in the recover process).   So, I think he is just trying to point that out – that some of us learn to like it in a way, and it becomes part of how we define our identities.

Obesity Panic

This paper was written really hastily and I can’t be proud of it, but the topic is interesting and hopefully I’ll get to hear what some other people think about it.

Obesity Panic and How it Contributes to the Development of Eating Disorders
Chanel Brown
University of Washingto

Obesity Panic How It Contributes to the Development of Eating Disorders in The U.S.

Americans seem to be suffering from two diseases or disorders that appear to be opposite ends of issues with weight. With increasing numbers of individuals suffering from eating disorders and poor body image, there is a supposed obesity epidemic plaguing the nation at the same time. This paper will argue that the so-called problem of obesity is a fabrication, created by the medical community, pharmaceutical companies, and media, that in part drives the real problem of eating disorders in the US.
Our culture is obsessed with fat, and other cultures are quickly becoming just as obsessed. The media tells us we need to conform to an unrealistic standard of beauty. The medical community tells us that over half of us are overweight, alarming numbers of us are obese, and we are in medical danger because of it. The medical community disguises our culture’s obsession with beauty and thinness by encouraging us all to be “healthy,” and the diet industry is financially benefited by this rhetoric.
Medical researchers such as Paul Compos have written books and articles that examine the panic in the medical community and our culture regarding obesity. They argue that “the current rhetoric about an obesity-driven health crisis is being driven more by cultural and political factors than by any threat increasing body weight may pose to public health” (Compos, et al. 2005). In other words, the obesity epidemic is less a genuine medical crisis, and more a social construction shaped by a fat-phobic culture, and perpetuated by the people who reap the benefits of this fat-panic.
Compos and his colleagues make four major points in their article. The first two question the idea of whether or not the country is seeing an obesity epidemic, and whether the health risks associated with overweight and obesity are truly as serious as the medical community claims.
“The claim that we are seeing an ‘epidemic’ of overweight and obesity implies an exponential pattern of growth typical of epidemics. The available data do not support this claim” (Compos, et al. 2005). Compos and his colleagues write that the actual data reveals a slight shift to a heavier weight of average Americans, about three to five kilograms (or 6 to 11 pounds). Compos offered biologist Jeffery Friedman’s analogy to further explain:
Imagine that the average IQ was 100 and that five percent of the population had an IQ of 140 and were considered to be geniuses. Now let’s say that education improves and the average IQ increases to 107 and 10% of the population has an IQ of >140. You could present the data in two ways. You could say that average IQ is up seven points or you could say that because of improved education the number of geniuses has doubled. The whole obesity debate is equivalent to drawing conclusions about national education programmes by saying that the number of geniuses has doubled.
The shift from a BMI in the low 20s to one around 26 or 28, and the shift of heavier people from a BMI in the high 20s to 30 is basis of the so-called obesity epidemic (Compos et al 2005). This relatively modest increase (Compos also points out that these numbers, especially in children, are starting to decrease) is what the medical community uses to justify an obesity and overweight panic.
Compos et. al further interrogate the use of the word “epidemic” by arguing that in order for something to be considered an epidemic, it must be life threatening. The authors argue that overweight is not a significant health risk and not life threatening. “[T]he claim that ‘overweight’ (BMI 25–29.9) increases mortality risk in any meaningful way is impossible to reconcile with numerous large-scale studies that have found no increase in relative risk among the so-called ‘overweight’” (Compos, et al 2005). The authors also write that these studies do not show increased health benefits for individuals at lower BMIs, or “ideal” weights. They cite the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) I, II, and III, which showed no increased risk of increased mortality for individuals with an overweight BMI, but actually showed that they were at less risk for life threatening medical issues than individuals with “healthy” BMIs of 18.5-24.9. The most recent NHANES (1998) showed a “U-shaped relationship between BMI and mortality” (Compos 2005). Individuals who are most at risk of life threatening illnesses are those with very low BMIs or very high BMIs. These surveys demonstrated that individuals at 25-29.9 BMIs were healthier than individuals at their “ideal” weights.
In her article, “Can we Simultaneously Work toward the Prevention
of Obesity and Eating Disorders in Children and Adolescents?” Dianne Neumark-Sztainer argues for an integrated approach to treating eating disorders and obesity. She calls for integrated educational programs in schools that educate students on obesity and eating disorders at the same time. Having these integrated education programs, she argues, would prevent the possiblity of students leaving the education program with negative attitudes about their weight and bodies: “There is potential for unintentional negative side effects on body image after participation in an obesity treatment or prevention program that does not address body image concerns, or even sees body dissatisfaction as a necessary motivator for change” (Neumark-Sztainer, 2005, pg. 222).
While this approach to education about obesity and eating disorders as integrated programs is preferable to separate programs, more attention needs to be given to evidence that the obesity epidemic is largely an overreaction, and a panic producing invention that media and the medical community is creating to influence Americans to fear and abhor fat.
Feminist scholars have worked to expose the role of media and the standard of beauty in rising numbers of individuals with eating disorders. The so-called obesity epidemic is the other side of the same coin. The diet industry and pharmaceutical companies reap the rewards of a culture that has become deeply fat-phobic, and along with the myth that being thin means being beautiful, they now capitalize on the myth that the medical community is creating – that being thin means being healthy.

References
Campos, P., Ernsberger, P., Gaesser, G., Oliver, E., & Saguy, A. (2005). The epidemiology of overweight and obesity: public health crisis or moral panic? International Journal of Epidemiology, 35 (1), 55-60.
Neumakr-Sztainer, D. (2005). Can we Simultaneously Work toward the Prevention of Obesity and Eating Disorders in Children and Adolescents? International Journal of Eating Disorders, 38, 220-227.

The Loss of Women as Symbolic Mothers on the American Frontier in Blood Meridian

Chanel Brown

C. Hisayasu

ENGL 250

24 November 2008

The Loss of Women as Symbolic Mothers on the American Frontier in Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian works to demythologize the American frontier by portraying the violence of the West as senseless, rather than as a necessary means of furthering civilization as as we see in traditional Western narratives, and by depicting the work of the “cult of domesticity” and the position of women as symbolic mothers of the nation as unsuccessful and impossible. Manifest destiny constructs men as conquerors and women as domesticators in the noble goal of civilizing savagery. Blood Meridian counters this narrative by depicting the frontier as a place where men slaughter one another without reason or as a means to an end, and where the few women who are present are victims of either violence or an inability to mother, nurture, and domesticate. Blood Meridian treats American imperialism as a man’s project, but as a counter-narrative to the traditional white masculinity celebrated in manifest destiny as responsible for the furtherance of civilization, and nurtured by civilized, morally superior women.

Imperialism and empire building also requires the work of the cult of domesticity, which is to regulate and civilize the nation. In Manifest Domesticity, Amy Kaplan writes that “The idea of foreign policy depends on the sense of the nation as a domestic space” (582), or, as her title suggests, manifest destiny required manifest domesticity in order to work. While men perform the work of imperialism, “women, positioned at the center of the home, play a major role in defining the contours of the nation and its shifting borders with the foreign” (582). Women are at the center of this configuration of the domestic, becoming the symbolic mothers of the nation and responsible for its morality. While conquering inferior races is the project of ideal manhood, women are an important part in the mythology of the American frontier as the moral centers responsible for nurturing civilization.

Blood Meridian certainly depicts American westward expansion as man’s territory – women are almost completely absent from the novel. When we do see women, they are usually silent victims of violence. One female character with more presence in the novel is Sarah Borginnis, a woman at the Yuma camp who scolds Cloyce Bell for having his mentally retarded brother kept in a cage. She asks him what his mother would think if she could see how he was treating his brother, and he tells her his mother is dead. Any woman who should have been the nurturer and civilizer of the idiot is dead, unable to perform her role.

Borginnis orders the women around her who first found the idiot to get some soap and take him to the river, and then she baptizes him with all the women standing around him in the river. They continue to groom him and croon over him, and then Sarah Borginnis puts him to bed: “The Borginnis took the idiot to his pallet under a wagon-sheet and stripped him to his new underwear and she tucked him into his blanket and kissed him goodnight and the camp grew quiet” (McCarthy 258). Borginnis is trying to take over the role of mother for the idiot, caring for him and insisting that he be put in a bed wearing clean clothes instead of in his cage – to civilize him.

Later in the night, the judge discovers the idiot has taken his clothes off again and wondered to the river, where he’s fallen in and has almost drowned.

…[the judge] stepped into the river and seized up the drowning idiot, snatching it aloft by the heels like a great midwife and slapping it on the back to let the water out. A birth scene or a baptism or some ritual not yet inaugurated into any canon. He twisted the water from its hair and he gathered the naked and sobbing fool into his arms and carried it up into the camp and restored it among its fellows. (McCarthy 259).

Sarah Borginnis fails to “mother” the idiot, fails to domesticate and civilize him, and the judge takes him back to the group of men who will presumably put him in another cage. The judge appears to become the idiot’s mother, performing some bizarre “birth scene or a baptism” after Sarah Borginnis’s civilized baptism fails. By positioning the judge as the idiot’s mother, the novel seems to be suggesting that the idiot cannot be changed into a civilized and domesticated being, and perhaps further arguing that the work of the cult of domesticity does not work and cannot work just because a woman attempts it. The idiot is inherently handicapped in some way that prevents him from being nurtured by Sarah Borginnis and civlized by her, just as the novel depicts men as being inherently violent and the only place he can stay is under the judge’s care.

Like the idiot’s mother, the kid’s mother also dies before she can perform her role as civilizer. She dies during or right after his birth, and he’s left to be raised by a distant father.

The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man. (McCarthy 3).

In a traditional western, our protagonist would most likely have a nurturing and morally upstanding mother who raises him to be an example of civilized white masculinity. In Blood Meridian, that narrative is made impossible by the death of the kid’s mother. Instead, the kid is already displaying signs of his true nature as being capable of senseless violence. The novel seems to argue that violence is the nature of man, and the cult of domesticity is a failed attempt at painting that tendency as a tool for furthering civilization.

The few women in Blood Meridian are mothers who are either dead or unable to successfully perform the role of woman or mother in civilizing savagery. In Blood Meridian, the cult of domesticity is an unsuccessful attempt to cease savage violence and domesticate the foreign. By making the work of the cult of domesticity impossible, Blood Meridian unmasks the myth of violence on the American frontier as a means to furthering civilization, which is the duty of white men, and exposes it as being senseless, unnecessary and brutal. Like Amy Kaplan’s argument that manifest destiny required the work of manifest domesticity, Blood Meridian has to depict the cult of domesticity as ineffectual and impossible in order to deconstruct manifest destiny and demythologize the west.

Works Cited

Kaplan, Amy. “Manifest Domesticity.” American Literature 70 (1998): 581-606.

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian. New York: Random House Inc, 1985.

Ideal Womanhood in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Chanel Brown

C. Hisayasu

English 250 Introduction to American Literature

12 December 2008

Ideal Womanhood in Harlem

Nella Larsen’s Passing is the story of two women of ambiguous race, one of whom is passing as white, Clare, and Irene, who lives in “Negro society” in Harlem but is also able to pass. Clare is married to a white man and worries about the color of her children, particularly because her husband doesn’t know she’s passing. Irene’s husband and one of her sons have dark skin, and she imagines her race and theirs to be a large part of their identity and community in Harlem. Both women are trying to access and gain the power and benefits of white privilege, Clare by passing “full-time” and Irene by occasionally passing in public. Both of them are also trying to gain agency in society by attempting to adhere to the ideal womanhood set in place by the cult of domesticity in the 19th Century. The social power that women gained as housewives, responsible for the moral aptitude of their homes and by extension the nation, was a position reserved for white women. By passing as a white woman Clare also has to be the ideal wife and mother, and that includes not having a child who isn’t “white enough.” Irene is also passing, occasionally in public, but also by trying to gain agency in the domestic sphere that has been reserved for white women. Both women pass not just as white, but as the ideal white wife and mother. For both women, their inner lives become incongruent with their outer lives, Clare because she’s living as a white woman and Irene because she passes when outside of Harlem, making her a different person inside and outside of Harlem.

The domestic space and status that Clare and Irene are attempting is best explained in Rosemary Marangoly George’s essay on domesticity. She discusses the cult of domesticity in the 19th Century and the role that it prescribed for women as mothers and housewives. According to George, this ideology arose with essays like “Catherine E. Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School (1841) . . . a significant inaugurator of this ideology, since it newly venerated the white, middle-class home and placed central responsibility for it in the hands of the housewife” (90). She goes on to say, “This widespread rhetoric sentimentalized both the home and the housewife as the source and locations of national virtue and was manifest in a variety of cultural texts…” (90). Whether or not the cult of domesticity provided any real social power to women in the 19th Century is a matter of debate, but whatever limited agency it did provide was not accessible by black women of the same period. George writes that with the denial of the same position to black women, privacy became a privilege and luxury instead of a right. On the fiction of black women during this time she writes, “The establishment and celebration of happy marriages within domestic havens in these black women’s writings did powerful political and cultural work in a period when the attainment of a private sphere . . . was something fought for every day” (91). Aida Hurtado, cited in George’s essay, argues: “there is no such thing as a private sphere for people of Color except that which they manage to create and protect in an otherwise hostile environment” (91). In Passing, both Irene and Clare try to “create and protect” a private, domestic sphere “in an otherwise hostile environment” – white society, or the rest of the nation.

When George cites this passage from Hurtado, she’s arguing that the “intervention into domestic life continues to be systematically beneficial to white middle- and upper-class citizens” in the 20th Century (91). It should be easy for us to imagine that in the 1920s, the cult of domesticity was still a strongly held example or ideology of ideal womanhood. The ideology of the cult of domesticity is obvious in our culture currently, though its contemporary recreation mostly entails an emphasis on motherhood being the most important role for women, if we think about the stereotypes of women who never have children – “cold,” “infertile” or “weird” – or who live alone and don’t get married or have children – “she must be a lesbian.”

Because the ideology of the cult of domesticity has been so deeply rooted in our culture, Clare and Irene try to gain agency in society by acting as the moral centers of their families and households, responsible for everything that goes on in them. But, as George’s article points out, that position and the sphere of the domestic and the private has been withheld from lower classes and non-whites, and so has any power or agency it brings.

Clare’s position as passing as a white woman would make it possible for her to act as the ideal housewife, but her position is, for one thing, inauthentic. She realizes that the life she’s living is dishonest and throughout the course of the novel we see her wishing to tell her husband the truth and move to Harlem where she could live a more authentic life – though, as Irene at least unconsciously knows, her authenticity and any power she might gain would stop if she were ever outside of Harlem. Clare might also be found out, however, if she has children that give her away. During a visit with Irene, Clare and another friend who is able to pass, Gertrude, Clare tells her friends that she won’t have anymore children because during her pregnancy with her daughter she “nearly died of terror the whole nine months before Margery was born for fear that she might be dark” (168). She says Margery turned out “all right,” but that she’ll never risk it again. Gertrude “nodded in complete comprehension” and tells how she had the same fear, though she isn’t passing full-time as Clare is and her husband tells her she shouldn’t worry so much about it. “But of course,” she says, “nobody wants a dark child” (168). This anxiety is about more than exposing to Clare’s husband that she’s passing. As we can see with Gertrude, whose husband knows she’s “mulatta,” the fear is more importantly about having impure children. If Clare doesn’t have a purely white child, she will produce an un-virtuous and impure offspring, which would mean that she had failed at being the ideal white wife and mother.

After Gertrude’s declaration that no one wants a dark child, Irene says “in a voice of whose even tones she was proud: ‘One of my boys is dark.’” (168). She also tells them, with as much composure as she can though she is “struggling with a flood of feelings,” that her husband also “couldn’t exactly ‘pass’” (168). Irene does not pass full-time as a white woman like Clare does, and she feels that her identity is based largely on her race and has strong feelings of loyalty and allegiance to “Negroes,” and in this scene seems to want to proudly and boldly declare that her son and husband have dark skin. She is also acting as the good wife and mother who would defend the virtue of her son and husband. While she does not try to access white privilege as obviously as Clare does, she makes the same attempt at gaining the social agency held by white women as leaders of the domestic sphere by making the security and safety of her home and the virtue and morality of her children her most central concern.

Clare’s most central concern prior to this visit is the whiteness and purity of her children and not allowing her husband to find out she was passing. After this visit, Irene refuses to have contact with Clare for some time, but Clare refuses to let her go. She expresses longing to be around Irene in Harlem, and starts to spend more time at Irene’s house and at the parties in Harlem than in her own home. She’s starting to realize how inauthentic her life in white society is, and would rather be in Harlem, where she believes Irene is “free” and happy. She also sees that Irene has more agency in her life than Clare does. While Irene can exercise power through her position as the ideal wife and mother, Clare’s position as ideal wife and mother is really in subjugation to her husband. She has to perform this role to fulfill her husband’s desire to have a white wife and pure (white) children.

Irene keeps her husband, Brian, from moving to Brazil by using their family, especially the children. She emphasizes that keeping Brian from moving to Brazil had been completely unselfish: “Couldn’t he see, even now, that it had been best? Not for her, oh no, not for her – she had never really considered herself – but for him and the boys” (187). This self-sacrificing concern for her family is a facet of the cult of domesticity’s ideal woman/motherhood, however truly or untruly altruistic Irene is being. Irene exerts her will over Brian as leader of the domestic space to convince him to stay in Harlem.

Irene’s desire to stay in Harlem speaks to her desire for safety, and her belief that outside of Harlem she would not be safe, secure, or even herself. Irene can not be the same person outside Harlem as she is in Harlem. In her search for safety her inner life has become much different form her outer life. The dominant white society outside of Harlem does not allow her to be the same person outside as she is in Harlem, and because of that she has searched for safety within a racial identity that is unambiguous, and within an ideal womanhood that does not exist for her outside Harlem.

Toward the end of the novel, when Clare is staying away from her home and trying to become a part of Harlem society, Irene is suspicious that Clare is having an affair with Brian. She jumps to this conclusion after Brian says he’s already invited Clare to a party they’re going to. Throughout the novel Irene has been alternately repulsed by and fascinated by Clare, feeling affection for her but also feeling intruded on by her presence in her life. This belief that Clare is going to steal her husband speaks to Irene’s fear of losing the safety and security she has created for herself in her domestic life and in Harlem. Irene also describes feeling an “outer layer of callousness that had no relation to her tortured heart” and that when she believes that Clare wishes to move to Harlem (which she says she would do if her husband found out she was passing) and believes that she also wishes to take Brian from her, she describes an “absence of acute, unbearable pain” that “seems unjust, as if she had been denied some exquisite solace of suffering which the full acknowledgment should have given her” (234). Like Irene’s different lives in and outside of Harlem, her inner-self and outer-self also have no relation.

Clare had been able to artificially participate in the raced and gendered imagination of the nation, and perhaps gain access to white privilege. However, the inauthenticity of her life and the incongruity between her inner and outer lives motivated her try to leave the white society she was trying to participate in and become a part of Harlem. As with the incongruity in Clare’s and Irene’s inner and outer lives, there is an incongruity between Harlem and the rest of the country. For both women, Harlem is the only space for them to gain agency, identity, and safety, by acting in domestic roles of ideal womanhood that in the rest of the country and the racially homogeneous imagination of national community, did not exist for them.

Works Cited

George, Rosemary Marangoly. “Domesticity.” Keywords for American Cultural Studies. eds. Burgett, Bruce and Hendler, Glenn. New York: NY University Press, 2007. 88-91.

Larsen, Nella. Passing. Quicksand and Passing. ed. McDowell, Deborah E. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1986. 136-242.

homophobic/sexist anthro blog

I’ve read this blog from time to time, but was surprised and disappointed by it today when I saw this post.

I was somewhat annoyed by it, thinking that a skinny woman with long legs would be considered attractive by many because of the media images we are bombarded with daily telling us what to think an attractive woman looks like, and then I became even more annoyed and suspicious when I moved on to this post.

If you can stand it, please read the article he references and links to, Beautiful Wives and Gay Sons.

So, what is “feminine DNA”?  Homosexuality is caused in a male because his parents had too many “feminine genes” between them?  So, being a gay male means you’re just way too girly?  Has this writer not considered that the characteristics he puts forward as feminine (being very attractive, having a lot of children) are socialized more than they are genetic/biological differences between men and women?

“A certain lack of inhibition may be linked to the expression of the homosexual phenotype; this may explain why homosexuals tend to have more partners than average compared to heterosexuals.”

Oh, they do?  So homosexuals are girly, slutty men?  I guess they got all the worst aspects of “femininity.”

He doesn’t seem to mention female homosexuals too much, but they hardly matter, right?

“If this intuition is correct, then in layman’s terms, if your wife’s female relatives have big families, then on the up side there’s an increased chance that you have a beautiful and fertile wife, but on the down side there is an increased chance that your son will be gay.”

Cat Power

The quality isn’t great, but I love this song.  I really like everything she did on Jukebox.

the blog is back.

This post is long overdue.  I considered for a while just deleting this blog, wondering if I was really interested in keeping up with it anymore.  (Actually, I was going to delete it, and  just couldn’t figure out how.)

I think I will try to stick with it, though, even though I’ve been kind of insecure about the fact that it doesn’t have a theme, or a focus, and somehow that makes me feel less-than compared to some others.  Maybe one of the themes will be working on some self-acceptance.  (I hope I’m not making this post so honest that I’ll regret it later.)

I’m back at the UW in Seattle after living in Yakima for 6 or more months after my mother died.  I lived first with my dad and brother and then my boyfriend, Robert, moved there from Seattle with me while I (we) figured out what was going to happen next.  The plan was always to go back to Seattle and back to school, but I think for a while I didn’t really believe it.  We’re now renting a house and we took Jasmine and  Jasper, my mom’s cats, with us, and I will no longer worry about or think that I need to apologize for having a relationship because he’s older than I am, that somehow makes me less of a feminist, somehow makes me less interesting or less able to work or be my own individual.  (These are really just anxieties in my own head, probably, but sometimes I hear them in all the noise around me, too.)

Grief has been a far weirder thing than I thought it was going to be.  It has not been the concrete devestation  I had always imagined.  It’s been an abstract, disorienting incohesive thing.  I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking a couple months after my mom died, and while I couldn’t relate to some of the things she described about pathological grief, she really hit me with this “fact” (is it fact or “fact”?) while writing about how we imagine grief will be and how it actually is:

“Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference  between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the undending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself” (189).

Oh my god, yes.

I always imagined that after my mother died I would be wholly devestated, unable to function for some amount of time, and then after that time had passed, some profound meaning would come to me and I would have to write it down.  I would have to write down her story and my story and out of it would come this profound realization or meaning.  No.  It’s not like that.

I don’t know if anyone who has not lost someone very close to them can know what I’m talking about.  Maybe you can understand it intellectually, but most fundamentally, you won’t know it until it happens.

Going back to school and engaging in it the way I used to has been harder than I thought it would be.  It’s midterm week and I’m just now feeling like I’m starting to get my bearings back.  I don’t particularly care about any of my classes.  I wish I could have taken the Writing Center Theory class, and I wish I could work at the Writing Center.

I don’t think I will continue to pour my heart out like this here, but I don’t know what I’ll post about next.  And I don’t feel like figuring it out.

being useless

My laptop is going to die, so I can no longer work on the look of this blog.  I obviously need help with the whole thing, anyway.  I wonder if my brother can design a wordpress theme for me that I would like?

Sometimes I have to intentionally leave my power cord at home so that maybe I will do something useful.  I’m never taking another science class that is mathematically based.  Biology, anthropology, good.  Chem and physics… snore.

Privilege Meme (thanks Michael)

Found on Michael Faris’s blog (with credit to the developers and, as usual, more in-depth thought than can be found here).

I have mixed feelings about whether or not to bold “The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively” because of the way women are portrayed in media. Thoughts on that are more than welcome.

Privilege meme: Bold the items that apply to you.

1. Father went to college (Trade School)
2. Father finished college
3. Mother went to college (Community College)
4. Mother finished college
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
9. Were read children’s books by a parent
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
16. Went to a private high school
17. Went to summer camp

18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child
23. You and your family lived in a single-family house
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home (though not anymore)
25. You had your own room as a child

26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18
27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course
28. Had your own TV in your room in high school
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
31. Went on a cruise with your family.
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family.
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

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