Postdocly

Well, I am now back in the States and am officially a post-doc at New University. I have lots of thoughts and observations to share about this but I am also just a little bit busy and overwhelmed with thoughts and obligations and reflections about my move, my new job, my recent international travel, The Spider Bite, and so on. I need to think and process a lot and hopefully will post some laterz this week, espeically some thoughts about the transition from student to pseudo-not-student/postdoc, what it's like to finally work in a Collegial Environment, and some thoughts about how I am to go about Identifying My Research Agenda.

Meanwhile, I am trying to catch up with the blogosphere and noticed that Maude PhD has been preoccuped with quizziness and the implications of Radical Classist Revolution and inspired me to take a feminism quiz, with possibly suprising results below. I'll have to mull this over.

Your result for The Feminism Test...

Gender-Liberal

You scored 83% Gender-Abolitionist, 100% Sexually Liberal, and 40 % Socialist

You are the Gender-Liberal. This means that you share qualities with both Liberal Feminists and Gender Abolitionists. Like the Liberal Feminist, you feel political change needs to be done on a small-scale level through legislative change, not necessarily through a massive destruction of class society through the adoption of an extremist socialist stance. You are also very concerned with sexual liberation, and feel that women should be free to do what they please sexually without criticism, just as men should be free to do. However, you differ from the Liberal Feminist culturally, because you see gender as a social construction that needs to be destroyed. Like the Gender Abolitionist, you realize that gender is often perceived as one's identity, when it should only be perceived as a small, insignificant part of that person. We shouldn't be able to say "This person IS a woman". Rather one should say something more akin to "This person HAS the physical traits of a woman". This way, we wouldn't be assuming someone's physical traits are a part of their identity, and we couldn't use this difference to oppress them or categorize them. In short, you advocate extreme cultural change through the destruction of gender roles, but politically you are less extreme, instead focusing on individual or legislative change as opposed to a massive change of ideology.

The other feminist types:

The Housewife

The Marxist

The Liberal

The Liberal Extremist

The Gender Abolitionist

The Radical

The Gender-Liberal

The Revisionist

Take The Feminism Test at HelloQuizzy

The Post-Election Feminist Rift

I just read a blog post about sexism in regard to Clinton's campaign that directed me to Dahlia Lithwick's article about repairing the feminist gender rift that reared its ugly head in the recent Democratic nomination process.

[Disclosure: I was a state delegate for Clinton and, while saddened at her loss, will nevertheless happily vote for Obama in November.]

I have always been a bit annoyed by the ceaseless divisiveness in the feminist movement. Do generational changes in the feminist movement really need to be codified into hard and fast feminist typologies like the second and third waves? Sure things have changed in the movement...for example in regard to the treatment of race. But these divisions only serve to accentuate the differences between the movements and lead to a finger pointing and stereotyping. Witness the recent Rebecca Walker tell all and the (absurd and polarizing) motherhood-is-superior backlash against the generation of second wavers. (Not to mention that the use of sequentially numbered "feminist movements" seems to imply a hierarchy of achievement in our ways of thinking and being--a fundamentally non-feminist sort of thing to do.) But I digress.

The feminist "generational rift" in election 2008 politics is a sad reality of a movement that frequently loses touch with it's fundamental principles and too easily descends to reactionary blame games. de Beauvoir had it right the first time around (well, some of it) when she asserts, "For women it is not a question of asserting themselves as women, but of becoming full scale human beings."

Those who supported Obama are not any less feminist than those who supported Clinton. They haven't "let women down." They aren't minimizing the great accomplishments or turning their backs on previous generations of feminists. In fact, some would argue that Obama is in some ways more of a feminist than Clinton. Conversely, those who supported Clinton didn't necessarily "do the right thing" by supporting a woman. The highest glass ceiling of all is an alluring, symbolic, and important target...but a reactionary vote for a woman just for the sake of her gender or sex--even for the first viable female presidential candidate in the history of this country--isn't a feminist action.

Despite the undeserved baggage of the movement and all the sexist garbage in the media, feminism is alive and well and feminists of all generations should be proud. Millions of women and men across America recently made independent decisions about two historically underrepresented and qualified feminist presidential candidates. What an achievement....so why all the finger pointing?

Gender Equity in Academia

An article in the latest issue of Ms. magazine tackles the problem of gender equity in academia.

No surprise here to anybody who has ever set foot inside an ivory tower. Women are less likely than men to hold tenure track positions or to hold leadership positions in academia. Those who do are less likely to be married and less likely to have children. Unfortunately while suggesting that family friendly policies may help, this article doesn't really tackle the difficult issues of what those policies might look like and how they might be applied.

The Ms. Revolution

Props to Goldfish who recently wrote about the struggles of being a Ms. Like her, I am not really excited out being a “Ms.”—it’s just that I loathe being called a Miss or a Mrs.

Is it any business to anybody if I am married or not? The idea that my very identity is built on a foundation of my marital status is ridiculous.

But why is it that somehow people assume that women who request to be called “Ms.” are major bra-burning bitches?

Well, HELLOOOOO! I love my bras. But please call me Ms.

And for you naysayers…Okay, okay, so I took my husband’s surname. The truth is, I don’t like the whole system but I’m not throwing it out entirely. In fact I got into a big discussion about this over the weekend with a couple of women who had kept their maiden names. Did I feel like a major sellout? Actually no. (This is progress for me.) People need to get real and see the system for what it is. For the most part, women have 3 basic choices for a last name:
1- Keep your dad’s last name
2- Take your spouse’s last name (that came from his dad)
3- Make some kind of complicated hyphenation of names of the two dads, thus representing the joint male lineage that you should be so lucky to pass on.

The good news is that it’s becoming increasingly common for women to actually think it over and make their own decisions. Whether this is primarily driven by later age at marriage or other factors I’m not sure.