Archive for the 'Feminist contentions' category

What does a “zaftig” romance heroine look like? Models for Bet Me’s Min

Dec 06 2011 Published by under Feminist contentions, Genre musings

I’m rereading Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me for class this week. The heroine, Min, has — thanks to her mother, her ex-boyfriend, and Society — significant body image issues, which create a barrier to satisfying relationships with men in general, and Cal, the gorgeous hero, in particular. The following conversation takes place about a third of the way into the book. At this point, Min and Cal are attracted to one another, and are spending some time together, but are resolutely “not dating”:

“Yeah,” Min said dismissively. “So what am I supposed to do about my weight?”

Cal put his fork down. “All right. Here’s the truth. You’re never going to be thin. You’re a round woman. You have wide hips and a round stomach and full breasts. You’re . . .”

“Healthy,” Min said bitterly.

“Lush,” Cal said, watching the gentle rise and fall of her breasts under her sweatshirt.

“Generous,” Min snarled.

“Opulent,” Cal said, remembering the soft curve of her under his hand.

“Zaftig,” Min said.

“Soft and round and hot, and I’m turning myself on,” Cal said, starting to feel dizzy.

“Do you have anything on under that sweatshirt?”

“Of course,” Min said, taken aback.

“Oh,” Cal said, ditching that fantasy. “Good. We should be eating. What were we talking about?”

“My weight?” Min said.

“Right,” Cal said, picking up his fork again. “The reason you can’t lose weight is that you’re not supposed to lose weight, you’re not built that way, and if you did manage through some stupid diet to take the weight off, you’d be like that chicken mess you just made. Some things are supposed to be made with butter. You’re one of them.”

It would be hard to overstate the significance of Min’s feelings about her body to this book. She doesn’t just have them, she talks about them, in every single scene with Cal, and in most other scenes. Even the very last page of the book has a reference to carbs. The repetition of themes or symbols (Krispy Creme Donuts, chicken marsala, Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella etc.) throughout the novel is signature Crusie, of course. Some readers find that Min’s focus on her appearance makes her unlikeable. Others object to it on more literary grounds: that it’s not quite believable, yet is forced on readers for plot purposes (got to have a reason Min and Cal can’t be together). Still others find it wholly believable and delight in a truly large heroine coming to terms with her size.

What do you picture when you picture Min, based on the above dialogue? I’ve gathered some photos, deliberately choosing ones in which the subjects are public figures posing for the press, and in general, looking fantastic (That is, no “shaming” pics of Kristie Alley in her bathrobe and bedhead grabbing her morning paper on her doorstep).

Kirstie Alley after weight loss

Actor Nikki Blonksy

Actor Melissa McCarthy

Min is described as having “smooth milky skin, wide-set dark eyes, a blob of a nose, and that lush, soft, full, rosy mouth.” Here’s how I picture Min:

Model Crystal Renn

Renn is model who suffered from anorexia, recovered, gained a lot of weight, wrote a book, had great success as a larger model, then lost all the weight, and has been criticized for it. (Renn also got in trouble in September 2011 for allowing her eyes to be “stretched” with tape  for a Japanese Vogue shoot). In 2010, at a Glamour event, former Sports Illustrated cover model Paulina Porizkova stood next to Renn, noting that although they were the same size (Paulina hasn’t gained weight in 20 years, I guess), today Renn is considered a plus sized model.

Conceptions of what is “zaftig”, “overweight”, “lush”, not only change over time, as the exchange between Paulina and Crustal indicates, but differ from person to person. As Renn has said, of reading blog comments,

one person will say, ‘Wow, she’s so fat. Look at her. She’s so obese.’ And then right underneath, someone else will say, ‘Look how emaciated she is. She’s so anorexic.’ Fat is relative. One person’s thin is someone else’s so-called fat.

Whenever we read, we have to fill in details about the physical appearance of the characters. As I was rereading Bet Me this time around, I realized that it mattered to me just how big Min was, that I was really trying to nail it down. I’ve even written a blog post about it! I’m guessing that’s partly the result of the fact that my attention was drawn over and over to the issue by the text, but that’s not all of it. There’s also my own complicity: my own anxiety and heightened interest in size due to being a woman living in a culture that is keenly interested in this question, and sharing that concern myself. Read this way, this whole post is just an exercise in further “policing” Min.

This is one of the things we’ll talk about in class today.

 

 

27 responses so far

The Gaze: A Guest Post by Joanna Chambers

Nov 14 2011 Published by under Feminist contentions, Genre musings

I’m delighted to welcome Joanna Chambers, aka Tumperkin, whose debut romance was just published by Carina Press. The Lady’s Secret, which I’ve read and loved, is set in London in 1810. Here’s the blurb:

Former actress Georgiana Knight always believed she and her brother were illegitimate—until they learn their parents were married, making them heirs to a great estate. To prove their claim, Georgy needs to find evidence of their union by infiltrating a ton house party as valet to Lord Nathaniel Harland. Though masquerading as a boy is a challenge, it pales in comparison to sharing such intimate quarters with the handsome, beguiling nobleman.

Nathan is also unsettled by Georgy’s presence. First intrigued by his unusual valet, he’s even more captivated when he discovers Georgy’s charade. The desire the marriage-shy earl feels for his enigmatic employee has him hoping for much more than a master-servant relationship…

But will Nathan still want Georgy when he learns who she truly is? Or will their future be destroyed by someone who would do anything to prevent Georgy from uncovering the truth?

***

One of the ideas that I was preoccupied with when I wrote The Lady’s Secret was Gaze.

The “male gaze” (a notion influenced particularly by film theory) is that in the mainstream media, consumers are generally invited to view the film/book/whatever it might be through the eyes of a heterosexual male.  However, whilst that is the norm, that norm can be subverted, and a “female gaze” substituted – something we (happily!) see a great deal of in romance novels.

In The Lady’s Secret, my heroine, Georgy, masquerades as a male valet, taking a position in the household of the hero, Nathan.  This conceit enabled me to play a little bit with the notion of male and female gaze.  While acting the role of a male servant puts Georgy in a subservient position, it also—paradoxically—gives her power she doesn’t otherwise have, in particular, the opportunity to gaze at a man she finds desirable.  By contrast, Georgy is somewhat masked from Nathan’s gaze.  Firstly, because she is in disguise and he is not seeing the real her, and secondly, because of their roles.  As a manservant, Georgy is always looking at Nathan—shaving him, dressing him etc.—whilst Nathan has no such reason to look at Georgy and indeed, feels the need to hide his interest in her.

I wanted to show Georgy seeing Nathan as a sexually desirable—well, object I suppose!  I wanted her to see his pure physical appeal in that way—and the reader to see his appeal too, through her eyes.  I wanted Georgy’s male disguise to let her *be* like a man in this way, at a time when women’s roles were narrowly drawn and female desire was unspeakable in the literal sense.

We are so used, as media consumers, to the norm of the male gaze, that women often see themselves primarily as the object of gaze rather than the gazer.  Many women find themselves being reactive romantically i.e. responding to the attention of men attracted to them, rather than looking for men they find attractive.  Of course, that might be put down to biology, genes etc.

Let me just say this: I am thirty eight years old.  I count myself a feminist, and always have – before I knew what the word meant.  I have made active choices all my life.  I am educated, a professional.

But.

It is only very recently that I have felt that my own gaze has “turned outward”, as it were.  And why should that be?

Well, it could be any one of a number of things.  Or a combination of them.  I am older and wiser.   I have had two children and don’t want any more.  I am happily married and am not looking for a romantic relationship.

But here’s a thing: I started reading romance again about 5 or 6 years ago after a 15 year hiatus, and that timeframe feels broadly contemporary with this change in me.  Might it therefore have something to do romance novels?

Romance novels are remarkable for having a primarily female gaze.  They invite us to *look* at the male protagonists and to do so intensely.  They linger over lengthy, rich descriptions of men’s physical appearance.  They use words and invoke images that appeal strongly to their readers.  And if you’re a romance reader you cannot help but have noticed the proliferation of male torsos on romance novel covers.

Romance readers are remarkable too, for being prolific readers—this is certainly true of me.  Could the immersion in a medium with a female gaze change the way readers view themselves and the world around them?

If so, this is empowerment.  This is permission.  This says – yes, look.  Feel desire.  Own it.

I think I’m seeing those mantitty covers in a whole new light…

***

Thanks, Jo!

You can also find Joanna on Facebook and Twitter (@ChambersJoanna).

The Lady’s Secret, a digital book, can be purchased directly from Carina Press, or from e-book retailers such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

15 responses so far

Review: Cinderella Ate My Daughter, by Peggy Orenstein

Oct 14 2011 Published by under Feminist contentions, Reviews

Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (Harper Collins, 2011) was sent to me by the publisher for possible adoption in a women’s studies course. I read it very quickly (a rare feat for me) and thought I would share a few thoughts.

Orenstein is a very successful writer. Here’s a bit of her bio:

Her previous books include The New York Times best-selling memoir, Waiting for Daisy; Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Kids, Love and Life in a Half-Changed World; and the best-selling SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap. A contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Peggy has also written for such publications as The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Vogue, Elle, Discover, More, Mother Jones, Salon, O: The Oprah Magazine, and The New Yorker, and has contributed commentaries to NPR’s All Things Considered. Her articles have been anthologized multiple times, including in The Best American Science Writing. She has been a keynote speaker at numerous colleges and conferences and has been featured on, among other programs, Nightline, Good Morning America, The Today Show, NPR’s Fresh Air and Morning Edition and CBC’s As It Happens.

Cinderella Ate My Daughter is a breezy, relatively short (179 pages) and entertaining read, taking the reader through the maze of girlhood, from the dreaded princess phase, through Bratz, Disney tween sensations like Miley Cyrus, and older girls’ online diversions like Facebook. Orenstein writes self-consciously as the loving mother of a young daughter and as a feminist steeped in Second Wave liberal feminist ideals. Much of the book describes her own struggle to raise her daughter Daisy, in a way that avoids the horns of that old tyme dilemma: how to be a strong, confident girl without, on the one hand, falling prey to the worst feminine stereotypes, the kind that say only pretty and sweet and sexy girls are valuable, and on the other, rejecting femininity altogether for a masculine ideal.

It’s hard for me to judge, because, given my occupation, I may have read more of this stuff than the average reader, but I saw little in this book that I had not seen somewhere before, and I don’t mean peer reviewed journals, but in Jezebel, Feministe and other online venues. I think sometimes writers, especially those who write in a casual autobiographical way, as Orenstein does here, confuse “new to me”, with “new.” Is there anyone who doesn’t know that “tween” is a marketing gimmick and not a psychologically significant developmental stage? Is there anyone on the planet who has missed all the critiques of Bella Swan as boy crazy and bland? Or who is not aware that, with the advent of the internet, “rumors can spread faster” and “The anonymity of the screen may also embolden bullies”?

Orenstein is highly critical of contemporary culture, especially its technological nature (the Internet, video and computer games, TV and film). Despite protesting that “I don’t mean to demonize the new technology”, that’s exactly what she does. Nostalgia for an earlier time, when, in her view, femininity, and the value of girls, was not so closely tied to good looks, saturates the pages of the book. Orenstein reserves her highest praise (wan though it is) for The Daring Book for Girls, which tells its young readers how to play croquet, host a horseshoe throwing contest and use Kool-Aid to dye hair.

She also writes, unselfconsciously, as a privileged, highly educated, white, married heterosexual woman. There is very little discussion in the book of the way beauty ideals are racist, classist, sexist, and ableist, an omission made a bit more surprising by the fact that she has (apparently, given my perusal of her bio) a biracial daughter (at one point, the author berates herself for buying a Barbie with “an ankh pendant and peculiar tan [as if that] made it all ok”). The unhappy marriage of nostalgia and unselfconscious privilege produces some very scary textual progeny, as in this passage:

As in the American Girl books, it seems as though the nineteenth century girl may have lived in a more repressive era — before women could vote, when girls’ sights were set solely on marriage and motherhood — her sense of self-worth was enviably internal, a matter of deed over dress. Whatever other constraints she felt, he femininity was not defined by the pursuit of physical perfection; it was about character. I wonder why we adult women, with all our economic, political and personal freedoms, have let this happen to our daughters.

Yes, because slavery was so liberating for the black gals!

A similarly surprising moment comes when Orenstein puzzles over why her daughter assumes that Lotte, the white sidekick, and not the black Tiana, is the titular character in The Princess and the Frog. It’s because Lotte swooned, wished on stars, dreamed of marrying a prince … everything but the, to me, screamingly obvious point that until Tiana, there had never been a black Disney princess.

Perhaps the most annoying tendency in the book is Orenstein’s failure to take a stand, despite all of the handwringing. She makes the case that femininity is defined more and more by looks, and not just looks, but a certain studied sexiness. That girls’ self-image is tied so closely to their appearance that they can’t even answer a question about how they feel without referring to how they look. And that the sexuality of girls (as opposed to their sexualization), their ability to feel and enjoy real sexual desire, gets subsumed by a culturally-induced focus on whether and how they are desired by others. This is not an academic study, so I guess I can’t take her to task for not asking why women have experienced educational, economic and political gains at the same time all of this other bad stuff is happening. But if this is a quasi-self-help read, then how about some help? She recognizes, “Now, this is where I should step in and give advice … about how to combat the outrageous expectations foisted on our daughters … and believe me, after twenty years of writing and talking about girls, I know what to say…”. And yet, now she has her own daughter, “it’s complicated”. And that’s where it, pretty much, ends.

The openness to options comes through most clearly in the chapter on toddler beauty pageants. Orenstein notes that self-objectification and sexualization are related to higher rates of “eating disorders, depression, low self-esteeem and impaired academic performance”, “undermine healthy sexuality”, and a cause host of other ills. But then writes both that the toddler and tiara set are just doing what everyday moms are doing, only a little more enthusiastically, and that she “was starting to see the girls as their parents did — as engaging in a little healthy fun, merely playing an elaborate version of dressup.” It’s not that she abandons her critique, it’s that she papers it over with a pastiche of backtracking, pseudo-empathizing, and wistful confusion that really don’t mesh well with the dire tones of the book.

Perhaps that’s the appeal of the book to the many women who seem to love it. Identifying and describing a problem readers already recognize well, while at the same time leaving its solution up to every individual mom, possibly alleviates anxiety. And it is moms. I was shocked at how non-present the menfolk were in this book. In one chapter, Orenstein is working herself into a lather about whether to buy her daughter a Fairytopia Barbie, and her spouse’s one contribution is to say, “You’re confusing her.” It’s not that I doubt mothers have unique gendered challenges with respect to raising girls, it’s just that I would have liked to have the absence of the men at the parties, the dress ups, the shopping trips, the pageants, and in general their (apparent) failure to see the problem of raising girls as their problem too, noted and discussed.

There’s some fun stuff on princesses, actually. Orenstein goes back to the Grimms tales, and does some interesting comparisons between those and the Disney versions. The scene where she reads the original, and horrifically violent, Rumpelstilskin to her daughter is laugh out loud funny. And the emphasis on the way consumerism drives the gendering of our boys and girls culture is important (why make blue bats and pink bats? Because then every family with a boy and a girl needs to buy two!). She also drops some fun tidbits, like the fact that the whole Disney Princess empire was launched when a Disney exec saw girls wearing homemade costumes to a Disney on Ice show, and realized a marketing opportunity had been missed.

But overall, especially given my perspective as a potential course adopter, I can’t recommend this book. Feminism has come a long way since the days of nature or nurture, femininity or masculinity. Cinderella Ate My Daughter is certainly well-written, and makes for a breezy read, but assigning this book would be taking my students back, and not in a good way, to the time before feminists recognized the multiplicity of not just genders but sexes, of the complex relationships between the US and other countries (not one mention of the child labor that probably went into the making of many of those princess products), of the the way gender and sexual identities are inseparable from other aspects of identity, etc.

6 responses so far

“Re-Reading Authorial Intention and Imagination over Two Centuries

Apr 15 2011 Published by under Academia, Cover commentary, Feminist contentions, Genre musings

… : the Romantic-Era’s Minerva Press Novels and Today’s Popular Romances.”

Ok, that was not my title. Can you tell the English professor half of our team wrote that presentation title? Here’s how a philosopher would write it:

“What is an author?”

So you can see why I left the title to my partner in crime, Elizabeth.

We gave our talk as part of a campus luncheon series put on by the Women in the Curriculum/Women’s Studies program. We had very good attendance, especially from faculty in the English department.

Elizabeth is working on Minerva Press novels, which were not technically romances, but definitely have elements that make them comparable to romance. We’ve been exploring some of the commonalities between Minerva press novels themselves, their production, their authorship, and their readership, and contemporary romance novels.

Rather than try to summarize the entire 90 minute event, I’ll just bullet point a few things, and then stick a couple of my slides in. If you have never heard of Minerva Press, you might start with this wonderful piece by author Carolyn Jewel.

  • “Minerva Press” serves as a metonym for all of the circulating library novels published during this period, although several were not actually published by Minerva. In much the same way, “Harlequin” serves as a metonym for all of romance.
  • Both Minerva Press novels and romance novels are subject to a bizarre juxtaposition, of being repetitive and boring, yet somehow at the same time, too exciting and salacious.
  • In both cases, thanks to writership and readership comprised mostly of women, the feminization of literature coincides with its commodification.
  • The ethos of authorship generated in the Romantic Era made it difficult to see Minerva Press authors as authors. Their originality was not easily detected, they wrote for money, they were women, etc. I would say the same is true of romance novelists.
  • The usual criticisms of Minerva Press and romance novels short circuit critics’ ability to read them as books (rather than as some other kind of productions).

The hurry to use the condemnations of novel reading as evidence of one thesis or another has prevented them from being read in anything but a roughly descriptive or referential way. Their high rhetoric makes them extremely quotable, yet at the same time, their repetitiveness has encouraged the illusion that that are ‘already read’, self-explanatory. –From E.J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800

  • We must read both texts horizontally, as genre, while keeping and eye open for imaginative and creative reformulations of genre.

Knowing my audience mostly doesn’t read romances and would think many of the common assumptions (namely, that it is one book being written over and over) were true, I spent half the time educating them about the genre.  I also spent some time on feminist critique, and on its similarities to nonfeminist critique. I discussed the import, from a feminist point of view, of not viewing romance novels as books. If they are not books, the 26 million women who read them regularly are not readers. This is not just constructing romance readers as passive. It is effacing them.  Here are a few of my slides:

Owning my fandom -- first slide

Education. Folks loved this cover.

More education.

Discussed diversity in cover styles, looking like other genres

Covers that show strong heroines

Probably my favorite moment was during the Q&A when one of our creative writing professors said that while he was used to SFF and mystery being treated with contempt, he had never even thought about the silence around romance novels. They are beneath notice and beneath contempt.

Well, there was a lot more, but that’s the gist of some of it. Thanks for reading along!

11 responses so far

This and That: What I’m Up To, Books Read but Not Reviewed, Etc.

Feb 04 2011 Published by under Feminist contentions, Genre musings, Navel gazing

A little birdie told me that the key to avoiding a blogging slump is to “lower my standards”. Hence this post.

1. My friend Elizabeth and I are giving talk on campus in April. She’s a faculty member in the English department who specializes in Minerva Press and the sensation novels of the 18th century. She plans to discuss The Mysterious Warning, by Eliza Parsons, which I am now reading.

Some of you might know this book through your reading of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. The following is from from Wikipedia:


The Northanger Horrid Novels are seven early works of Gothic fiction recommended by Isabella Thorpe to Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey (1818):

“Dear creature! how much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read The Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.”

“Have you, indeed! How glad I am! — What are they all?”

“I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.”

“Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?”

“Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them.”

Elizabeth and I are going to discuss critiques of Minerva Press novels, and compare them to critiques of today’s romance novels. Both types of novels, despite being separated by two centuries, share many features: female authors and readership, mass market publication, female protagonists, somewhat scandalous plots and characters, happy endings, not taken seriously as literature, etc. And the critiques also share similarities: conventional, formulaic, unimaginative, bad for women, etc.


Elizabeth is going to focus on Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist critique of Minerva Press books, and she is going to argue, using the Parsons, that in fact the books are more complex and more subversive than Wollstonecraft gave them credit for. I’m going to do the same.



I’d like to focus on one specific book as well, and I think it would be neat to find a romance published in the past 20 years which bears some similarities to The Mysterious Warning. Elizabeth will read whichever book I choose. If you have any suggestions, feel free to make them here.



2. I decided to contribute an essay to a forthcoming book, The Hunger Games and Philosophy. Here’s the title and abstract. Of course, the finished paper will likely look a bit different:

“She has no idea, the effect she can have”: The Gender of Success in the Hunger Games

In contrast to other wildly popular young adult SFF series, such as The Twilight Saga, The Hunger Games features a triumphant female protagonist who succeeds in virtue of her intelligence, strength, and loyalty. Katniss rejects many feminine norms: she is not forgiving, nice, or humble, she refuses to cry, she is untrusting, “sullen and hostile”. She enjoys hunting, her appearance is androgynous, and she has no desire to marry or have children.

Yet, undeniably, Katniss’s gender becomes significant to her chances of success when her fellow competitor from District 12, Peeta, declares his love for her.  Regardless of her gender neutral, or even masculine, self-image and lifestyle up to that point, Katniss is positioned as a “feminine lover” for the Games. As she prepares to win the favor of the audience, she adopts traditionally feminine mannerisms, such as giggling, “sitting like a lady”, twirling in a pretty dress, and,  later, during the Games, only allowing herself to show emotions appropriate to a young woman in love.

The proposed paper will explore the ways The Hunger Games both relies upon and subverts traditional notions of gender, with a focus on Katniss, as a means to explore the philosophical question of what gender is. Attention will also be paid to Peeta, and how his positioning as masculine, as “active lover”, is challenged by his status as passive recipient of Katniss’s ministrations and aid. The essay will help illuminate some contemporary issues in gender theory, including the social construction of gender, as well as challenges to the very concept of gender posed by some postmodern theorists such as Judith Butler.

3. I registered for RWA in New York City this summer, and I am so excited I can hardly stand it. I actually have family all over the city and on the Island, but the chance to room again with Carolyn Crane was too tempting to forgo. We already have all kind of exciting plans that include matching shoes, an in room fridge, and granola bars, but I can’t say any more about them right now. One of the most pathetic things I have been doing lately is searching for the hashtag #RWA11 on Twitter just to see who else is going and what they are planning to do. I’m so excited to meet several online friends I feel like I have known forever, and to see some of the folks I met at Romcon again.

4. Just prior to RWA is IASPR, also in NYC. I was privileged to read through the abstracts and am so excited for the presentation of some really diverse and fascinating work in popular romance studies. Thinking about IASPR will have to get me though the terrible withdrawal fits I will have when everybody is in Texas in April at the PCA/ACA.

5. I’ve been reading but not reviewing lately. I really liked What the Librarian Did by Karina Bliss, although I am not sure I loved it as much as so many other did. One book I absolutely loved, and wish I had time to review, was Collision Course by K.A. Mitchell. Another book I loved but cannot seem to write a review of was Ziska, by Marie Corelli. Obviously, I also read and really enjoyed The Hunger Games.

6. This has been a cold snowy winter in Maine, and I am so ready for it to be over. Unfortunately, winter sticks with us through at least March. We are heading to Disney World in TWENTY NINE DAYS, not that I am counting. As a result, I am back on the Disney forums, getting into debates about whether the installation of lap bars on Splash Mountain ruins the ride, and whether one should jog left or right to beat the rope drop crowds to Toy Story Mania in Disney Studios. Naturally, I have lunch and dinner reservations for every meal already and have had for weeks. And a spreadsheet.

7. I’ve been working out very enthusiastically, and am consequently suffering terribly from illiotibial band syndrome. I seem to spend half my time lying on the floor rolling on a foam thing. Ugh.

8. I have a new Hospice friend, a retired Melville scholar. He is awesome.

9. I’ve been pretty busy with a variety of things. I am teaching the senior seminar on narrative medicine, and I am so thrilled with the students. I think I will make this a regular part of my teaching rotation. I’ve given lots of talks and had lots of ethics calls at the hospital. I gave a talk to the OR recently and I used an  Alternative Pain Chart by Hyperbole and a Half. It went over very well.

10. I changed the pic in my About page. I took the new one yesterday in my office. I was motivated to do so after reading the dead on What People Are Trying to Communicate With Their Profile Pics. I am not sure what I am trying to communicate now.

11. We are going to a 25 course Chinese New Year party Sunday night. You can tell our friends are really into football. A few people on Twitter asked me to take pics, so look for those.

12. I really am going to write that Lover Awakened post, now called “10 Things I Noticed on a Reread of Lover Awakened”. Maybe even later today.

Time to make the breakfasts…

Happy Friday!

42 responses so far

Feminist Theory Syllabus

Nov 17 2010 Published by under Academia, Feminist contentions

A few readers have emailed me to ask for it, so this is my undergraduate feminist theory reading schedule for Fall 2010. Notice I have yet to choose a reading for the second class on postmodern and  third wave feminism. Feel free to make suggestions.

Course Description: This course is an introduction to feminist theory. We will read a popular history of the Second (and Third) Waves of American feminist movement. We will study different feminist theories from multiple perspectives, including liberal,Marxist, socialist, psychoanalytic, care focused, ecofeminist, postcolonial, third wave, and global feminisms. We will also spend significant time on feminist critiques of science, especially the science of gender differences as conducted by evolutionary psychologists, biologists, neuroscientists, and sociologists.

Course Objectives:

By the end of the course, students will be expected:

1. To understand what feminist theory is, its breadth and depth, and its variety.

2. To learn to use feminist theories to engage with pressing social issues.

3. To understand the ways in which multiculturalism, global, postmodern and third wave feminisms challenge and enrich the notion of feminist theory.

4. To “do theory”, i.e. to achieve the ability to participate thoughtfully in discussions of the issues at stake, to learn to critically evaluate theoretical assumptions, and to use theoretical tools in written and oral course-related activities.

Required Textbooks:



When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, Gail Collins (New York: Little, Brown, 2009)

Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction (3rd Edition), Rosemarie Tong (Westview Press, 2009)

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, Cordelia Fine, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010)

Tu 8/31 Introduction to Course

Th 9/2 Tong, Ch 1 Liberal Feminism

Tu 9/7 Collins, Introduction – Chapter 4

Th 9/9 Collins, Ch 5-8

Tu 9/14 Tong, Ch 2: Radical Feminism

Th 9/16 Cheshire Calhoun, “Separating Lesbian from Feminist Theory” Ethics 104, (April 1994), 558-591  (first page here)

Tu 9/21 Tong, Ch 3: Marxist and Socialist Feminism

Th 9/23 What is Socialist Feminism by Barbara Ehrenreich
Progress in women’s liberation in Latin America, by Lulu Garcia Larque
Freedom Socialist Party FAQ

Tu 9/28 Fine, Ch 1-4

Th 9/30 Fine, Ch 5-8

Tu 10/5 Collins, Ch 9-12

Th 10/7 Class cancelled – Professor at conference

Th 10/14 Tong, Ch 4: Psychoanalytic Feminism

Tu 10/19  “Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Future of Feminism: A Conversation“, Juliet Mitchell; Jacqueline Rose; Jean Radford, Women: A Cultural Review, Volume 21, Issue 1, April 2010 , pages 75 – 103.

Th 10/21 Class cancelled – Professor at conference

Tu 10/26 Tong, Ch. 5: Care Focused Feminism

Th 10/28 Film: A Walk to Beautiful

Tu 11/2  “The Personal is Philosophical is Political: A Philosopher and Mother of a Cognitively Disabled Person, Sends Notes from the Battlefield”, Eva Feder Kittay, METAPHILOSOPHY, Vol. 40, Nos. 3–4, July 2009 (link to abstract here)

“Care and Justice in the Global Context”, Virginia Held, Ratio Juris, Vol. 17 No. 2 June 2004 (141–55)

Th 11/4 Fine, Ch 9-12

Tu 11/9 Fine, Ch 13-16

Th 11/11 Collins, Chapter 13-Epilogue

Tu 11/16 Tong, Ch 6: Multicultural, Global, and Postcolonial Feminism

Th 11/18 “Recasting Global Feminisms: Toward a Comparative Historical Approach to Women’s Activism and Feminist Scholarship”, Jayati Lal, Kristin McGuire, Abigail J. Stewart, Magdalena Zaborowska, and Justine M. Pas, Feminist Studies, 34.1/2 (Spring 2010)

Tu 11/23 Fine, Ch 17-21

Tu 11/29 Tong, Ch 7: Ecofeminism

Th 12/2 Twine, Richard. 2010. “Intersectional disgust? Animals and (eco)feminism.” Feminism & Psychology 20, no. 3: 397-406. (abstract here), and Mallory, Chaone. 2010. “What Is Ecofeminist Political Philosophy? Gender, Nature, and the Political.” Environmental Ethics 32, no. 3: 305-322. 

Tu 12/7 Tong, Ch 8: Postmodern and Third Wave Feminism

Th 12/9 Reading on Postmodern and Third Wave Feminism TBA

7 responses so far

Interview With A Croatian Feminist, Anarchist, Speculative Fiction Writer, and Avid Genre Fiction Reader

Mar 07 2010 Published by under Academia, Blogs and blogging, Feminist contentions, Genre musings

Milena Benini, a regular reader of this blog, won my last contest. When I realized I had to send her prize to Croatia, I let out a blood curdling scream and hid my wallet,  took the opportunity to ask her a few questions. It turns out Milena is, in her words, an

anarchist, blogger, cat-feeder, cook, dog-minder, editor, feminist, fire-horse, human being, illustrator, journalist, mum, mum, reader, Sagittarius, theoretician, translator, web-mistress, wife, woman.

I couldn’t fit all that on the address label, so Milena kindly agreed to answer a few questions for RRR. She’s also a writer of speculative fiction and has written a paper on the online romance community for her workplace, the Centre For Women’s Studies (more on both below).

1. Say a little about your blog and what you do there.

Well, my tag-line includes women, genre and politics. I have a whole group of posts about women I like and/or admire, particularly early sufragettes, but also some contemporary stars — anyone whose life and work I happen to appreciate. I usually try to post about them on their birthdays, with the idea that, some day, I’ll have a whole “feminist calendar”.

I also write about genres; my primary focus is SF (interpreted as Speculative Fiction, not just sci-fi), but I also talk about mysteries and romances. Oh, and I published a novel at the blog, because I wanted to see how that would be accepted in Croatia. It’s a fantasy novel with a strong romantic element, although I wouldn’t call it exactly a romance. :)

I sometimes also talk about politics, although that’s mostly related to open-source issues and stuff like that, as well as women’s issues, and sometimes anarchism.

1b. Can you say more about your position on open source?

Writing this on a computer running Ubuntu and having given away a novel under a CC license, I think I can safely say that I am very much in favour of open source. FOSS has a pretty strong community in Croatia, although, as is the case everywhere, I think, a lot of people tend to keep away from it out of habit, or fear of the unknown. There is also the fact that people are often suspicious about things they get for free, because we’re very much conditioned to think that worth can only be measured in money. But there is also a growing number of people who can see the value of things like open source or creative commons. Mostly thanks to Cory Doctorow, probably. :)

2. Is there any way for those who do not read Croatian to read it? I tried Google translator but … unless you are in fact a drunk monkey at the keyboard, I cannot believe it does your words justice.

Oh, yes, Google translator is an endless source of humour, but very little correct translation. Unfortunately, I don’t think that there’s a simple way to resolve this.

3. How long have you been reading romance novels? What are your favorites?

Just about all my life. There is a very famous Croatian author, Marija Juric Zagorka, who wrote about a dozen historical romances — and they’re real monster-novels, one of six and one of twelve tomes! — and that’s where I started. Then I went on to the classics such as Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. When I started reading in English, I also passed through a — I suppose I should blush now — Kathleen E. Woodiwiss period. In my defense, I was very young at the time. :) . Then there was Georgette Heyer, of course!

I love Loretta Chase, Patricia Gaffney, Jennifer Crusie for the humour, and I also enjoy Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series, especially the first trilogy; Robin McKinley is also among my favourites… oh, there are too many to mention them all. I’ll also read anything with vampires in it — I even read Twilight! Research purposes and all that (I’m writing a book about parallels between vampire and spy fiction) — but, unfortunately, there aren’t that many really good vampire romances.

4. Do you read in English? Translations?

I read mostly in English, especially since translations of romances are few and far between in Croatia, not to mention usually more expensive (smaller print runs make for expensive books!). Furthermore, nowadays, I read a lot on my mobile phone, and there are almost no e-books in Croatian.

As for Croatian romances, I’m afraid the answer is — not any more. Apart from Zagorka, whom I have already mentioned (she was–and still is — probably the best-loved Croatian female author of all times, a very interesting woman who managed to also be a proto-feminist and one of the first female journalists in this part of Europe, and when she got poor in her old age her fans got together to feed and clothe her — a fascinating story, really), there was one woman who was pretty famous as a romance author some thirty years ago, but she stopped writing about a decade ago.

Oh, and there is one woman who writes under an English pseudonym and, allegedly, has a dayjob as a waitress. But we’re a small country (only 4.5 million people) and books are not a good way to make a living. In addition, romances are still mostly despised — even when there are actual romances translated, they’re never marketed as such. SEP is marketed as general fiction in Croatia, and Nora Roberts is invariably shelved in the mystery section.

5. What are some attitudes towards romance novels you’ve encountered?

Well, I have to stress that mine is not a typical situation: I am very much a part of the SF community — which is a lot stronger in Croatia than the romance community — and I don’t have any problems there, because we’re all outsiders together, in a way. And people in the SF community — at least here in Croatia — are not afraid of romance novels; in fact, there are several people who also read them, and when I post about romance novels, people generally react favourably.

Also, at the Centre for Women’s Studies, my interest in any genre was always welcomed, but they are all great women anyway.

6. Can you say a little more about the speculative fiction community in Croatia?

I think it’s more or less the same everywhere: SF-fans are viewed as those strange people who walk around with false pointy ears and recite poetry in Klingon. Even if you don’t speak a word of Klingon, you get marked as such once you publicly proclaim your interest in SF…

In Croatia, the SF community is something of an exception in its attitude towards women: for example, our national SF-award, SFera, has the largest percentage of female award-winners of all Croatian literary awards. I understand that this is something of an anomaly, caused probably by the fact that our fandom was started by grownups and not teenagers, so the more mature outlook rubbed off on the following generations.

7. What is the difference between “SFF” and “speculative fiction”?

Well, “speculative fiction” is the broader term. People first began using it when the borderlines between genres started getting blurred — particularly in the seventies, with New Wave — and it’s getting more and more used today because it’s often impossible to tell if something is science fiction or fantasy. When you look at people like China Mieville, for example, it’s impossible to define him as “science fiction” or “fantasy” or “horror”: there are elements of all three in his work. And “speculative fiction” is a nice umbrella-term for all the genres that, at heart, start from the question “what if”. A lot of people who are interested in one thing are also interested in another, whether as readers, writers, or both. So it makes a lot more sense to use one name for the whole thing.

8. Can you name a couple of your favorites in mystery and speculative fiction?

In mystery, I am a great admirer of the grandes dames — Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh — and from the newer authors, I have to single out Martha Grimes, who is doing weird and fantastic and wonderful things while staying strictly within her genre. And SF is my first love, so the list is very long… Terry Pratchett, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin and Michael Moorcock for the classics; Charlie Stross, Ken MacLeod and Cory Doctorow for the new voices; Steven Brust as an all together great guy; ditto for Neil Gaiman. And Robin Mckinley and Melissa Michaels, who also do strange and wonderful things. I think I better stop now…

9. Is there a Croatian romance community?

Not really, I’m afraid. There are two or three blogs that cover romance as one of their interests, but only one blog that I know of that focuses exclusively on romance. And in the “real life” sense, there’s nothing.

10. What did you say in the article you wrote?

Well, it’s basically an overview of the development of the romance community on the Internet, and it includes a (very) short history of the genre itself. The article will be published a special edition of the Centre’s magazine “Treca” (The Third, in female form — Croatian is much more gender-specific than English). There was a whole semester devoted to popular culture intersecting with feminist issues, and my article is part of that.

I tried to show that the Internet has given an opportunity to smart, educated women who like romance to get together and discuss their genre in a way which was difficult before the Internet. And I also tried to outline the way in which the genre has started looking at itself, after long being the object of fascination and disgust for outsiders. I find this somewhat similar to what happened in SF — at one point, SF fans got fed up with outsiders telling them what their genre was like, and started developing their own theory, combining it with the “official” academic approaches and reaching new and exciting things. And now we see a similar process at work in the romance community, which has to deal with the added problem of romance being, to a very large extent, a “female” genre, which is often the reason why it gets so much criticism, regardless of whether the bias is shown openly or not.

The thing is, although genre lit in general has not been overlooked in Croatian academic circles, romance is usually almost completely left out in such analyses, or is dealt with in a very offhandish manner. That’s why I was trying to give people a place to start, especially young women. I mentioned your analysis of ethics in Patricia Gaffney as an example of how romance can be approached not as a phenomenon, but rather as literature.

11. What is the Centre for Women’s Studies?

Well, it’s so far the only such place in Croatia, because our academic community is not really too keen on feminism, at least not in the upper echelons, where decisions are made. The Centre organises all kinds of educational programmes, publishes books, holds workshops, etc. One of the things I do is maintain their web-site, and there are at least some pages in English, so you can take a look if you want.

12. How about a blurb for your book?

Yes, I published a novel at the blog, because I wanted to see how that would be accepted in Croatia. It’s a fantasy novel with a strong romantic element, although I wouldn’t call it exactly  romance. :)

Kalaide, priestess of the Moon, is trying to hold her home together in the midst of war when a strange prisoner is brought: Enaor, an Elder, who lost his family, his city, and almost his sanity in the war for which he blames Kalaide’s gods — and his own brother. With the unnatural winter gripping the land, the two must form an unexpected alliance in order to survive… and maybe, just maybe, save the world as well.

Hvala, Milena! Thank you!

6 responses so far

Attitudes Towards Women in Loretta Chase’s Don’t Tempt Me

Jul 31 2009 Published by under Feminist contentions, Genre musings

I read a romance recently that disappointed me in a particular way — it seemed to uphold views of women that are very negative, even misogynistic.

Before going further I want to preface this with a reflection on my career in philosophy (you’ll see why in a minute). As a new undergraduate I enrolled in a course called “Philosophy of Woman” with a textbook edited by Mary Mahowald of the same name. As a  philosophy major, I was excited to learn what the tradition said about my gender. The textbook took us from the Bible to the twentieth century, and — surprise! –  almost everything in it was derogatory. Then, as now, I was mostly interested in ethical theory, and from Aristotle’s claim that women cannot be virtuous due to their reason’s inability to control their emotions, to Kant’s claim that women know nothing of duty or obligation, to Hegel’s rejection of women’s access to the universal, except through males. Heck, even women in philosophy, like Simone de Beauvoir, seemed to claim that women can only achieve transcendence by essentially becoming men.

Overwhelmingly, the view of women in the western philosophical tradition is that they are lesser versions of men, with diminished mental capacities, and little self-control, who are vain, superficial, and shallow. As Nietzsche put it “One half of mankind is weak, chronically sick, changeable, shifty.”

This was a blow, but I did not give up my philosophy major. I did not give up reading and enjoying Aristotle, Hegel, or Kant. And I did not even give up reading and valuing the very texts from which the passages in Philosophy of Woman were excerpted. 20 years later, I am still studying and learning and teaching philosophy. The tradition is rife with misogyny — almost more so in what it leaves out than when it bothers to mention sex, which is rarely –  but sophisticated (feminist, deconstructing, heck, just careful) readings reveal nuances and tensions within even the most straightforward dismissal of women.

What does this have to do with romance?

Well, I’m going to talk about a recent read, and I want to compare my reaction to my relationship to the philosophical tradition. I have read and enjoyed books by this author, and will continue to do so. And even the book under discussion in this post gave me some moments of genuine enjoyment. In this post, I want to talk about something that really bothered me, but it doesn’t reflect my attitudes toward the book as a whole, other books by this author, or the author herself.

Loretta Chase’s Don’t Tempt Me was my 6th book of Ms. Chase’s after Lord of Scoundrels, the Carsington series, and Your Scandalous Ways. She’s an author I enjoy and will continue to read.

In Don’t Tempt Me, the heroine, Zoe, has just returned to London after being kidnapped and held captive in a harem for 12 years.

Her four sisters, or the “Four Harridans of the Apocalypse” as the hero, Lucien, refers to them, are the portrayed as shallow, narcissistic, stupid, vain, and selfish. Physically, they are ridiculed. They’re compared to dumb animals, a “quartet of crows”, and the two pregnant sisters’ large forms are frequently described in unflattering terms. And they act it, screaming, weeping, gesturing wildly. They don’t care about Zoe, but only their own reputations.

In an early scene, Zoe mentions that she escaped the harem with jewels. Her sisters freeze. Zoe thinks,

“When it came to jewelry, women the world over were the same. If her future and everything for which she’d risked her life had not been at stake, she’d have laughed, because her sisters behaved exactly like the harem women they scorned.”

When Zoe is presented at court, Lucien notes “some of the ladies compressing a little more tightly and edging away from Zoe, as though in fear of contamination”. He thinks of them as “stupid” and again they are described in unflattering animalistic terms — bobbing plumed headdresses — that Lucien fantasizes about knocking off. Zoe notices, too, and compares the women in attendance unflatteringly to the women in the harem. The harem women were “silly”, “like spiteful children”. To compare, Lucien is described by Zoe in animalistic terms as well, but flatteringly, “prowling” like a “tiger”.

Zoe later says, comparing her sisters to women in the harem, “In the harem, we had outbursts all the time, much worse than this. Women screaming, threatening, complaining, hysterical.”

Lucien has a mistress, Lady Tarling. In this scene, Lucien is explaining gently to her that he will need to take Zoe under his wing so she is accepted in the ton. He brings her jewels, and Lady Tarling, of course, “knows exactly what becomes her”.  Again, women are portrayed as superficial gossips, competitive cats, nasty beasts:

“Lord Tarling’s handsome young widow was not on the patronesses’ list. Lady Jersey had taken in her dislike.

‘I preferred you not learn about it from one of the cats who will be there,’ he said. ‘or from the newspapers. They were likely to give you the wrong impression altogether.’

‘It must be a curious impression, indeed, to result in such a gift.’ She gave a little laugh. Her silvery laugh was famous. It was gentler and prettier, many thought than Lady Jersey’s tinkling laughter. This was but one reason Lady Jersey loathed her.”

Lucien explains that he has taken Zoe under his wing, and then this…

“‘My goodness.’ She moved away from him to the nearest chair and sat down hard — but tightly clutching the box, he noted.”

Later, when Lucien calls upon his mistress to break it off with her, he gifts her with jewels again, and we are told, “For what small regret she might feel, the magnificent brooches were more than adequate consolation.”

Again, in these scenes, we are expected to understand that women are competitive, jealous, and more partial to jewelry than anything else.

Later, Zoe and Lucien have an argument, and we get this, in the narrator’s voice:

“Zoe expressed her disgust with him in the time-honored fashion of women everywhere, by shopping exhaustively.”

When Zoe is mad, rather than having a rational disagreement, she flounces off, suggestively, “Zoe stormed out of the vestibule, hips swaying, skirts swishing.”

When Zoe and Lucien become engaged, Harrison, Lucien’s house steward, (who has already noted that Zoe “had her hooks in” his master) explains to his underlings that “Everyone knows there’s little in ladies’ heads but fashion and scandal.”

Lucien’s friend Adderwood notes, “women change their minds. They’re famous for it.”

Besides Zoe, the only female character who is deemed to have any value is Lucien’s aunt, probably because she is crazy. She says things like, “My ankles, as you know, have inspired odes.”. She’s “colorful” — but not really anyone to take seriously.

Am I saying that there are no women who are vain, stupid, shallow, and selfish? Of course not! Meljean Brook, Sherry Thomas, Nora Roberts, Jo Beverly, and many, many other authors have gifted us with very flawed heroines. But it’s one thing to portray flawed women, and another to use broad stereotypes as a shorthand to character. I object to the latter on both aesthetic and moral grounds.

Compare Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Was there ever a more laughable crew than Elizabeth Bennet’s family, especially her mother and sisters? But I can describe each sister and her unique character in detail to you. Mary Bennet and Kitty Bennet are laughably funny, but in very different ways. They are ridiculous, but never ridiculed. And Mr. Bennet does not come away as merely the male victim of these crazy women. No, his role in the family dynamic — his lassitude, his shirking of responsibility, his blameworthiness for the situation in which the Bennet family finds itself — is carefully developed as well.

The negative attitude towards women that comes across in Don’t Tempt Me is not just a view held by one character. It permeates this book. Nearly every character, including the heroine, and even the narrator (with whom I do not confuse the flesh and blood author) has a low opinion of the mass of womenkind. Of all of the women in the text, Zoe alone is fully fleshed out and portrayed as an individual.

It reminded me of old school romances that never questioned the misogynistic hero’s attitude towards Women, merely it’s applicability to Our Heroine, aka, The Exception that Proves the Rule. Reading those old romances as a teen, of course I identified with the heroine, not those vain, shallow ninnies who were always trying to bring her down. But at what price?

21 responses so far

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