Author Archives: Claire Potter

May 21, 2013, 1:52 pm

Annals of Recent History: The Book of Rumsfeld

Don’t you think Donald Rumsfeld should be tried as a war criminal? I do. Or maybe held for a decade or more, with no constitutional rights, while we sort the evidence against him and decide whether to bring him to trial.

But no. That’s not how we do things in the Land of the Free.

Like Henry Kissinger, Robert MacNamara and other architects of mass destruction, Rumsfeld has settled into the golden years of milking profits from his crimes. Instead of being interrogated with a wet washcloth over his face, he has authored a book that blends all of his life experiences into a few simple truths that we can all live by as we wait for the next lethal incident of blowback somewhere in America. Rumsfeld’s Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War, and Life (Broadside Books, 2013) is…

May 20, 2013, 4:31 pm

Post-Operative Snarky Shorts

By Claire Potter

I’ve had this tile for almost three decades, but it captures my current state. You can purchase it, and others, here.

You are used to faculty melting away at the end of the semester, not to be seen again until the first days of fall term. But bloggers? We are just getting going in May! So where has Tenured Radical been? And why doth ze not post?

Suffice to say that I am considering a name change to Tenured Bionic Radical, after having undergone full knee replacement surgery. Since I am back at the keyboard, things are obviously improving, but until more energy accrues, and the physical therapy regime is organized, fans of the Radical my have to be content with snarky shorts.

So let’s go!

Where’s the IRB on this one? If you were experimenting on captive schoolchildren as part of a university research…

May 12, 2013, 12:00 pm

Mama Tried: A Queer Mother’s Day Celebration

By Claire Potter

If you aren’t a mother, you have had one at some point, right? Talk about an all-inclusive holiday that is ripe for queering! So without further ado:

Madwoman With A Laptop Has A Mother Too! All us feminists come from somewhere, don’t we? Tracing the impact of the gifts our momz gave us is an important part of our generational history. Go here for my favorite queer English proffie and the impact a plane ticket can make on a young woman’s life. Mother’s Day is a dopey, reactionary holiday, but a mother’s touch can make all the difference.

Best Gay-Straight Alliance I Know: If one mother is good, two is better! Top of the day to Jennifer and Deirdre Finney-Boylan, who are once again making the rounds of talk shows and women’s mags on behalf of queer families everywhere. Has any couple in history ever had such a high tolerance for repeatedly answering the question: “But are…

May 6, 2013, 10:26 am

Where Are the Women At The New York Review of Books?

By Claire Potter

One of the paradoxes of being a female intellectual in my generation is that we grew up dreaming about being part of a literary and academic establishment that did not include people like us. This is, of course, doubly true for lesbians and women of color. My life history is informed by what is, and what used to be: sometimes the two collide. These collisions usually occur when I revisit the literary institutions that have shaped my aspirations and career since the 1960s.

My perspective on publishing is a comparatively long one. I have been a continuous subscriber to publications like The Nation, The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books since I was a teenager. When, as a young person, I imagined myself a writer, I imagined myself writing for those publications despite the fact that they were almost entirely written by men. Since feminism was only beginning to make an…

May 3, 2013, 8:31 am

It Isn’t Easy To Be Marx: Recent History in the Nineteenth Century

By Claire Potter

On the way to the airport, I began one of my travel activities: catching up with the paper publications that accumulate despite my best efforts to keep up. In this way I discovered John Gray’s review of Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life (Liveright, 2013). It’s a beautifully written essay about what sounds like a must-read summer book. According to Gray, this is a major revision of Marx, of his impact on history, and of the various willful readings and misinterpretations that made Marx’s work such a powerful influence on the twentieth century.

From my perspective, this is particularly timely. If you are a subscriber to Jacobin (which you should be), you will notice that Marxism is undergoing a revival of sorts, as young left intellectuals try to grapple with the turns history is taking and how we might think our way through to activist interventions….

April 30, 2013, 8:53 am

The I’m Too Busy to Blog Post: Fat Armpits, Supreme Court Mulligans, and Mad Men’s Recent History

By Claire Potter

There are papers to grade, classes to prepare, a search to finish, a conference to pack for, and yet….that last post gets colder and colder as the days roll by. So without further delay, here are some shorts to brighten your day:

Fat Armpits Are The Worst. Before returning to Brooklyn Sunday, I was in the newly-ronovated Acme Market in Bryn Mawr, PA loading up on my favorite diet foods — Tastykakes, scrapple — and reading gossip mags in the checkout line. The misogynist gem to the right caught my attention. Kim Kardashian, who was on the rampage last year because everyone could have a baby but her, has learned to her horror that a growing fetus can make a girl look dumpy.

It must be terrible to be so fragile. According to celeb mag In Touch, Kardashian is on the brink of a breakdown, having discovered that aging leads to age and pregnancy leads to weight gain. In her seventh…

April 24, 2013, 9:26 pm

Report From The Post-Feminist Mystique

By Claire Potter

If you are not a subscriber to The Nation you may have missed author Deborah Copaken Kogan’s “My So-Called Post-Feminist Lit Life.” Riffing off the title of the TV series about adolescent female angst that introduced us to Claire Danes back in 1994, Kogan rips the lid off what it means to be a female author in a literary world where men rule.

Kogan’s reflection follows her nomination for the Orange Prize, a British literary award given only to women, and is a reflection on the perennial (male) complaint that the time for “women’s” anything has passed. Because feminism finished the work — and anyway, if it’s for women it’s got to be second rate, right? Unlike things for men, like, say, Augusta National, the Joint Chiefs of Staff or President of the United States.

Revealing that she has not yet been allowed to pick a title for one of her four books (Shuttergirl, a 2002 memoir of…

April 21, 2013, 3:56 pm

On the Giving and Taking of Advice

By Claire Potter

The mother of us all: Pauline Friedman Phillips, aka Abigail “Dear Abby” van Buren

Ten years ago, in the midst of a conversation, a colleague temporarily lost her temper at me. “Please stop giving me advice!” she snapped. “I don’t want any advice. I just want to talk about this!”

Needless to say, I was shocked and a little hurt. But upon further reflection, I had to admit that a flaw in my socialization had been usefully uncovered. My friend had not asked for any advice, and yet I had offered it anyway. Why?

The giving and taking of advice is so ubiquitous in university life that it defines whole categories of activity that blur the line between personal and professional. In graduate school, members of my cohort gave each other advice, and it was often at least as good as the advice we got from faculty. …

April 18, 2013, 10:43 am

Can the GOP Walk the Walk With Black Voters?

By Claire Potter

Our guest blogger today is Leah M. Wright-Rigueur, assistant professor of History and African American Studies at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. She is currently finishing a book, The Loneliness of the Black Conservative: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power, which documents Black conservatives’ attempts to work within a Republican Party structure that increasingly invested in its relationship with white voters after World War II.

Last week, Senator Rand Paul visited Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, D.C. Pundits and journalists across the media spectrum lampooned and critiqued Paul’s visit as a silly effort given the history of African Americans and the Republican Party.

Most people assume that the relationship between black voters and the Republican Party is a hostile one. To some extent, that’s correct – black voters…

April 15, 2013, 9:45 pm