May 26, 2012, 6:25 pm
By Laurie Essig
Maybe it’s the start of the holiday weekend, that I just submitted my grades, that I just got a new grill, but I have been thinking a lot about eating and eating meat in particular. Which is why I so didn’t need to read this story (warning: stop now if you are hoping to eat a hot dog this weekend. No really, stop!).
Mao Sugiyama, a self-described “asexual” from Tokyo, cooked up, seasoned and served his own genitalia to five diners at a swanky banquet in Japan last month.
Just days after Sugiyama’s 22nd birthday, the artist underwent elective genital-removal surgery, divvied up the severed penis shaft, testicles, and scrotal skin between five people, and garnished it with button mushrooms and Italian parsley.
The sociological imagination fails me. There is nothing to do but turn to my more anthropological guideposts. The first and most obvious thing to say, a la Levi-Strauss, is that…
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May 23, 2012, 10:10 am
By Laurie Essig
" . . . and your pension and benefits too . . . " (photo by Flickr/CC user outcast104)
Just a few short years ago, vampires ruled. Twilight, True Blood, and other cultural obsessions posited the vampire as perfection–a strong predator who is not merely beautiful, but never ages. Joan Rivers with a mixed martial arts fighter’s body.
But perhaps it is a sign of our times that these ubervampires have morphed into the far more campy ones in Dark Shadows. As Americans lost our appetite for the sort of blood-sucking predators who ruled Hollywood and Wall Street, vampires no longer haunted our cultural imaginary as heroes, but as villains. By the time Matt Taibbi used the phrase “vampire squid” to describe Goldman Sacks in 2009, the vampire had lost his mojo.
So perhaps it should be no surprise that the …
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May 17, 2012, 4:24 pm
By Laurie Essig
We all know the GOP ain’t exactly feminist. After all, many Republicans want to control women’s reproductive lives, destroy equal pay for equal work laws, and limit civil rights and privileges to women who marry men. But the GOP-controlled House bill on violence against women that passed last night has been called by The American Bar Association
a retreat from the battle against domestic and sexual violence.
Although the Violence Against Women Act has previously enjoyed bipartisan support, in the current and highly ideological climate, Republicans in the House wanted to take away key protections for battered women. They also did not want to extend domestic violence protections to LGBT citizens, illegal aliens, and American Indians.
That’s why Jezebel calls the GOP House version of the bill “The violence against SOME women act.” According to Jezebel, the House bill is supported…
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May 10, 2012, 3:35 pm
By Laurie Essig
Fifteen years ago, Obama supported gay marriage, then he started “evolving” on the issue, and then yesterday he came out in support of gay marriage with a powerful statement that
At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.
Needless to say, this statement is incredibly important. As Richard Socarides wrote over at The New Yorker,
President Barack Obama’s announcement today that he fully supports marriage equality for gay and lesbian Americans is historic. It will certainly go down in record books with events like Stonewall as an important milestone in the equal-rights movement.
Whatever made the President change his mind, there is little doubt that coming out in favor of gay marriage is a political risk. How much of one remains to be seen, but the Right…
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May 7, 2012, 4:16 pm
By Laurie Essig
Amendment 1 is North Carolina’s attempt to stop any and all unmarried residents from having any legal rights whatsoever. This despite the fact that unmarried Americans are the majority of the population.
Amendment 1 defines
marriage between one man and one woman [as] the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State.
It would deny any registered domestic partnerships or civil unions legal status.
Billy Graham even got up off his deathbed to urge Evangelical Christians to vote for Amendment 1. Running full page ads in 14 of the state’s paper, Graham urged North Carolinans to vote for Amendment 1 saying:
At 93, I never thought we would have to debate the definition of marriage. The Bible is clear — God’s definition of marriage is between a man and a woman. I want to urge my fellow North Carolinians to vote for the marriage amendment on Tuesday, May 8…
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May 5, 2012, 4:07 pm
By Laurie Essig
The contretemps over Naomi Shaefer Riley’s call for the elimination of black studies has brought up all sorts of defensiveness and anger. It has bought up some important questions that deserve some further consideration.
One, is the mere act of calling for the elimination of black studies racist? And two, are people who claim that they are color blind (because they believe race no longer matters) racist?
Let me start with the first. It seems perfectly reasonable to imagine that black studies is no longer as useful an academic discipline as a more generalized field like critical race studies. No doubt there are some people in black-studies departments who consider changing the name to something that would neither appear to stabilize the term black nor leave whiteness unexamined. Reformulating black studies into critical race studies comes from the same impulse that motivates women’s…
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May 4, 2012, 11:13 am
By Laurie Essig
Is Brainstorm racist for publishing racist attacks?
I have been struggling with this question ever since my fellow blogger Naomi Shaefer Riley wrote a breathtakingly unfounded attack on graduate students working in Black Studies and went even further to call for the elimination of Black Studies all together. Normally I ignore the sort of blogs Ms. Shaefer Riley writes, even when they are about me. I ignore her mostly because I think there are far more important things to write about than bloggers at the Chronicle, but I also ignore her because her blogs are more attack than argument and have the same intellectual weight as Fox News broadcasts. Don’t get me wrong. I believe conservative arguments can have all sorts of intellectual merit. But there is a difference between an analysis of Black Studies as a field and the complete dismissal of an entire discipline without ever reading any…
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May 3, 2012, 1:47 pm
By Laurie Essig
The pastor of a Baptist church in Fayettesville, N.C., Sean Harris, told parents that if they have a boy who wants to act like a girl or a girl who wants to act like a boy, then they need to “squash like a cockroach” such gender diversity for the glory of God (you can watch the sermon here). According to Pastor Harris, parents need to enforce strict gender roles on their children:
Dads, the second you see your sons dropping the limp wrist you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up! Give a good punch… ‘You’re not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you’re going to act like a male.’ And when your daughter starts acting too butch you rein her in. You say ‘Oh No Sweetheart. You can play sports… but sometimes you’re going to act like a girl, walk like a girl, talk like a girl and smell like a girl. And that means you’re going to be beautiful and…
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May 2, 2012, 11:31 am
By Laurie Essig
(Image from Flickr/CC user jonny_goldstein)
Watch a gender reveal party here!
We live in incredibly uninteresting times when it comes to the meaning of sex and gender. Unlike the years of second-wave feminism’s ascendency, today most Americans accept that babies are born male or female and will grow up to be masculine or feminine as a result. Forget “free to be”; embrace sex as destiny.
Whether it’s our favorite gender theorist Larry Summers explaining that there are so few senior professors in the sciences because of differences in “intrinsic aptitude” or the many pop-neuroscience books that tell us women are hardwired to shop and men to be aggressive, we have a culture where it is now “commonsense” to believe that socialization is far less important than what is between your legs.
Given…
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April 25, 2012, 5:53 pm
By Laurie Essig
The recent media firestorm over the whiteness of the HBO series Girls is somewhat puzzling for two reasons: One, why pick on Girls when so much of television is glaringly white and two, why be surprised that a show set in New York City could still lack racial diversity?
Girls is being bashed for being all-white because it is at least not yet another show written by men about women. As Mauren Ryan writes over at the Huffington Post,
women and people of color, who are often treated as the tokens they usually are, are typically the junior members of a writing staff, hardly able to challenge those around them and push for the kind of stories that would reflect their lives and worldviews more accurately.
In other words, shows like How I Met Your Mother are forgiven their whiteness because they are not breaking through the glass ceiling in terms of who is writing the show.
The other…
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April 22, 2012, 9:47 am
By Laurie Essig
Ah David Brooks, op-ed columnist for the New York Times. Proponent of one good idea after another. For instance, Brooks once proposed the idea that empathy isn’t really all that important. Or Brooks’ claim that America is in decline because of the likes of Kanye.
Brooks’ latest dumb idea is that the solution for the high costs of higher ed would be some form of standardized testing. Referring to academe as a place of “grand fragility,” Brooks goes on to cite the Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa study, Academically Adrift. The study found that
nearly half the students showed no significant gain in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills during their first two years in college.
In his role as academe’s Cassandra, Brooks warns that
At some point, parents are going to decide that $160,000 is too high a price if all you get is an empty credential and a fancy car-window…
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April 13, 2012, 5:35 pm
By Laurie Essig
“Bullying” is now officially a moral panic. Second graders are accused of “bullying” for saying “I hate you” on the playground. Lady Gaga is so concerned about it she gave Harvard a small fortune to start an an anti-bullying institute. During moral panics, Stanley Cohen tells us,
a condition, episode, person or group of persons become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.
The most important thing to know about a moral panic is that the actual cause of the panic is often deflected onto some other group. For instance, increasing economic insecurity can result in panic about “sexual deviants.” Panicking about bullies might really be about something else entirely.
But perhaps the most important thing about a moral panic is that eventually the panic subsides and marks the boundaries of what we are and are not willing to believe. When the absurdity of a moral panic becomes…
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April 11, 2012, 11:41 am
By Laurie Essig
Masha Gessen's profile photo on FB
I spent a lot of years living in Soviet Russia and wrote my first book on Queer in Russia. Back then there was a joke:
In America, you send your gays to Camp San Francisco. Here we send our gays to Camp Siberia.
It wasn’t funny because it was more or less true (not to mention insane asylums, forced electroshock conversion therapies, etc.). Alas, the Russia of Vladimir Putin is an equally grim place to be queer.
Recently several regions have passed laws that make it illegal to disseminate “homosexual propaganda to minors.” Both the U.S. and the E.U. have expressed concern that the law will violate the human rights of Russia’s lgbt citizens. Last Thursday, such human rights violations occurred when two men protesting this law were arrested in St. Petersburg.
To …
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April 9, 2012, 2:49 pm
By Laurie Essig
Bank of America has been named Villain Number One by many of the Occupy protesters (not to mention most of the other 99%). Bank of America has played a central role in the housing disaster. It bought subprime mortgage giant Countrywide Financial back in 2008. Of the $750-billion in loans, about $250-billion are in foreclosure.
Deemed “too big to fail,” Bank of America was given billions in taxpayer money and trillions, yes trillions, in emergency loans. Meanwhile, Bank of America paid zero dollars in taxes but somehow got another $1-billion back from the IRS.
Bank of America has rewarded American taxpayers with more foreclosures, many of them apparently of dubious merit still. So what better way to reward Bank of America for their shady dealings with taxpayers than to move into their lobbies (which, technically, we have paid quite a bit of money for).
Needless to say the…
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April 6, 2012, 10:49 am
By Laurie Essig
Blame it on the stomach virus I was suffering, but yesterday some perverse impulse (could it be Satan?) made me watch “Fall from Grace,” the 2007 documentary about the Fred Phelps family and the Westboro Baptist Church. The documentary does a good job showing this bizarre tribal grouping in Topeka that has dedicated itself to spreading the message that Jesus hates you because you’re gay (or you’re a soldier or you’re Scandinavian or you’re Muslim or you’re anyone who is not a Phelps).
The Westboro Baptist Church has many websites, but their main one is godhatesfags.com. Other sites include GodHatesIslam, GodHatestheMedia, and GodHatestheWorld. At all of these sites, you can learn that God is angry, really really angry and that Jesus does NOT love everyone. Most importantly, you can learn that it is really much too late to repent since we are doomed as a nation and a world and God…
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April 4, 2012, 1:37 pm
By Laurie Essig
This has been a year when a lot of seriously bad laws concerning reproductive rights have been passed. In Wisconsin legislators voted that private health insurance is not allowed to cover abortions. In Tennessee, a bill calling for the publication of the names of doctors who perform abortions as well as detailed demographic information about the women who have them is moving through the legislature. Then there were the proposed “trans-vaginal rape” laws in Virginia, Texas, and Iowa. These laws would force women seeking abortion to have a trans-vaginal ultrasound, a procedure carried out by inserting a rather large and phallic instrument into a woman’s vagina. This would be mandatory even in cases of rape and incest.
But when it comes to just downright crazy laws, Arizona wins with reproductive rights (not to mention crazy racist and anti-immigration laws too. Go AZ!).
According …
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April 1, 2012, 4:31 pm
By Laurie Essig
As a professor, I am a professional slacker. After all, professors like me hardly work, are way over paid, and are the source of ever-increasing tuition at institutions of higher ed.
At least that is the conclusion of David C. Levy, a man who works for something called the Cambridge Information Group, does not list a single teaching position in his biography, and yet was somehow allowed to describe himself as “a career-long academic” in The Washington Post last week as he exposed me and my slacker colleagues.
Levy’s argument is simple: unions and professors are bad. See what happened is that
With the 1970s advent of collective bargaining in higher education, this began to change. The result… senior faculty at most state universities and colleges now earn $80,000 to $150,000, roughly in line with the average incomes of others with advanced degrees.
Not changed, however, are…
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March 24, 2012, 9:08 am
By Laurie Essig
President Obama finally spoke about Treyvon Martin’s murder yesterday saying
If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.
The President went on to say that
Every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this and that everybody pulls together — federal, state and local — to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened.
And with that universalizing of “parent,” President Obama carefully avoided the issue of race upon which this case rests. Actually, every parent in America may not understand this issue. Yesterday, as I looked at my own 16-year-old, in a black hoodie and ripped jeans at the breakfast table, I started to cry in relief. My teen is white and female, not black and male. She can go to the corner store for Skittles and not look suspicious.
The president’s reasons for avoiding the elephant of race…
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March 21, 2012, 11:34 am
By Laurie Essig
Was it the J.Crew that made my blood boil with class resentment?
That is a question I asked myself as I sat in the back of a colleague’s class. After all, I cannot afford J.Crew (unless it’s a thrift store find) and here she was, a young woman, shopping away at their online store. Or was it something deeper, something more important, that made me want to stand up and yell at her and all her classmates with their laptops open to Facebook and CNN and even a silent hockey game? Something about paying attention and basic human interaction and learning?
As I sat in my colleague’s classroom, I was struck by three things. One, he was giving a brilliant lecture. Really beautifully prepared, interesting stories, using images, props, writing on the board, and inviting student participation. Two, about one-third of his students couldn’t be bothered to notice. And three, it makes me really…
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March 14, 2012, 11:07 am
By Laurie Essig
I realize that some of my fellow bloggers rely on dismantling what I’ve written for their own posts, but at the risk of giving them nothing to write about (except important world events and news makers), I would like to take apart my last post on Joseph Kony as a form of white privilege, particularly the privilege of mothering while white.
Here’s what happened and here’s why I think that I was blinded by the white. My teenaged daughters became fired up by the Invisible Children “Kony 2012″ video. As any parent who wants her children to grow up to care about the world we live in, I was glad for this spark of moral outrage. That’s a good thing when really they could just be shopping. On the other hand, I understood, even without all the newest information about the connection between the Kony 2012 campaign and Evangelical Christianity, including anti-gay organizations, that this was…
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