Archive for April, 2008

feminism, personally

Posted by LK on Apr 28 2008 | Hungary, feminism, motherhood

Bitch. ph.d. writes about the gendered assumptions behind attaining the American Middle Class Dream. It’s a very good post - and one which highlights the problems with assuming that life, happiness, and success are all a matter of working hard enough to get them. Which of course forgets all about the fact that there is a lot of unpaid or very badly paid labor that goes towards ensuring that someone can work hard enough to get success and happiness. In what follows I am intermingling my personal situation with larger questions I got to thinking about after reading Dr. B’s post.

You see, I’ve also been reading the controversial Amanda Marcotte book, and quite frankly, I feel that some of it is nearly as hostile as the upheaval surrounding it was within the feminist blogger community (I can’t even begin to link to everything that went on and won’t try here). There’s only a short bit in the book about women having careers vs. “opting out” and staying home with kids instead (see Lisa Belkin and her problematic Opt-Out Revolution), acknowledging that claiming all these women are really “opting out” is a fallacy - in one way or another, it’s more accurate to say women are typically forced to leave the work they are presented as opting out of. There is, however, nothing at all about the fact that there are realities specific to women’s lives because of which being a stay-at-home mom for some period of time should really be an option that can be chosen freely by women.

Personally, I’m tired of feeling bad about wanting the feminist collective to acknowledge these, to my mind, usually particularly feminine realities.

You see, I actually want to spend some time away from away from the workplace to take care of my child. Not an infinite amount of time but enough time not only my body to heal but for us to adjust to being a family. So for the first year or two of her life, until she is old enough to start spending chunks of time with other kids, without either of her parents there. Continue Reading »

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preparations

Posted by LK on Apr 23 2008 | Faustina, pregnancy

keszulodes1.jpgFaustina is definitely on her way now. At this week’s doctor’s visit I found out my cervix is 1 centimeter dilated and 60% effaced - which doesn’t mean very much except, as I see it, that this child is really and actually coming out of me in a month or so. And here I was, finally getting used to being pregnant: maybe it would be okay if this is how things would always be. And now, suddenly, there are only 30 days left until my due date. Not a lot of time even if she stays inside me for all of it!

keszulodes6.jpgWe’ve been preparing for Faustina’s arrival: A. painted one of the walls of her room a lovely warm shade of yellow which bathes the whole room in a sunny glow. She has a crib (from Ikea), colorful dressers (also from Ikea), and lots and lots of clothes - most of which given to us or acquired at a swap meet. I only bought a few onesies and the three items in the picture at the top of this post, which may turn out to be not very useful but were very inexpensive at a Baby Gap sale, and too adorable not to get. What can I say - she’s a girl, and girls are easy to buy clothes for, even when they’re very, very small.

keszulodes3.jpgI washed and organized her things so that if she decides to make an early appearance, things are sufficiently set up so that we’ll be okay. We have diapers, burp cloths, wash cloths, a tub, a few lotions and potions (newborns don’t really need them much), we still need a scale (I’ll be doing what my mother, sister, cousins and Hungarian friends did with their babies: weigh her at feedings to see how much she’s eaten - not better than only the pediatrician weighing her but I’m used to the idea and therefore find it comforting), night light, and a comfy chair for breastfeeding purposes.

She’s even got pictures for her walls! A. made a montage piece I adore just for her (hmm, the colors of this picture are actually a bit warmer but I can’t seem to get Photoshop to save it for the web that way):

forFaustina.jpgIt relates to another montage of A’s of which we have a huge print in our bedroom (but of which I don’t believe there’s a digital version). I generally love his montages; a while ago he gave me a smaller print of this one, which is now hanging in our bedroom too. This is a very cool side effect of being with an artist: one lives, sees, breathes, touches art right in one’s home, all of the time. And I hope we’ll figure out how to teach our daughter to appreciate it too.

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I want you to want me (and whales too)

Posted by LK on Apr 18 2008 | art, digital culture, social media

Iwantyoutowantme.jpg Jon Harris and Sep Kamvar have a wonderful installation piece up at MOMA: I want you to want me. They take profiles from dating web sites and use the information in them to present a view of humanity & our search for self and identity - as seen through the lens of the search for love (read the artists’ statement here). The piece is part of MOMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind show, up through May 12. If all goes well, I’ll be seeing it next Friday - yay! In the meantime, here’s a short video m ss ng p eces created about how the piece was made and how it works.

Jon is an amazingly talented and creative young artist - I met him while working on this project, for which he did the design work - very small potatoes compared with most of the creative work he does but it was wonderful to get to know him. Also take a look at his web piece The Whale Hunt, which is up for some Webby Awards (Best Personal Site and Best Visual Design) - go on and vote! This piece is about the spring whale hunt of a family of Inupiat Eskimos - one of the few people legally allowed to hunt whales in Alaska. Jon and A. took a trip together to spend 9 days with this family last May, and The Whale Hunt is what Jon created out of that experience. Me - I just worried they’d get eaten by polar bears, fall into icy cold water and die instantly, mundane things like that… In other words, I know how extreme the conditions were under which The Whale Hunt was created, which makes me have even more appreciation for its beauty.

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intelligent design?

Posted by LK on Apr 15 2008 | design

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about cravings

Posted by LK on Apr 14 2008 | pregnancy

People often ask me if I have any weird cravings. And I always answer, no, can’t say that I do… And then I realize I’m kind of lying because I do find myself with a far more profound appreciation of for certain foods than I ever did before getting pregnant. Like, for example, apples.
The other night I woke up at about 3 am because - first of all I had to go to the bathroom (this happens very frequently), then I realized I was thirsty, then I also realized I was hungry. The first item was easy to take care of. Annoying but without any need for decision-making or even much thought on my part. The second and third items, on the other hand, truly addled my only partially alert brain. And then, brilliance: I can kill my hunger AND my thirst in one fell swoop with just one apple!
That apple was possibly the most delicious apple I’ve ever had in my life. Every bite was pure heaven.
And in the name of no cravings, I’m off to eat some chocolate (link via a little pregnant).

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is tenure the problem with academia?

Posted by LK on Apr 11 2008 | universities

A couple of weeks ago a number of bloggers were talking pro and contra the tenure system (too many to list everyone - for which I feel kind of bad but what can I do). Though my response may be a bit old hat now, I want to record it anyway, since the problem I see at the root of any issues with tenure is not going anywhere.
First off, I don’t believe tenure per se is really “the” problem. Other things, like the corporatization of academia, deterioration of popular respect for knowledge (having to do with the corporatization of media), federal policies eroding the quality of education for the last several decades, and, last but probably most important: lack of universal healthcare and complete and utter and mind-boggling lack of any kind of federal support for mothers and parents are, in my view, the real culprits. And by the way, those two last things are related: they reflect an institutionalized disavowal of social responsibility on the part of the U.S. government.
In fact, I believe the lack of universal healthcare is responsible for many, if not most of the problems of the American work force: privately negotiated, employer-provided health insurance gives far too much power to employers over employees’ lives.
But let’s talk specifically of academia.

Timothy Burke and Lumpenprof make some points I want to pick up on. Burke writes that the conditions of labor outside the tenure track are exceptionally poor, but the tenure system itself is so frozen in a procedurality that it’s a risky investment to attempt getting into it. Lumpenprof writes that the problem is the amount of time it takes to get tenure, and that any academic work done prior to the tenure-track does not count towards the required number of apprentice years.

Two issues relate here: the amount of time and the conditions of work outside the tenure track. If the conditions of work outside the tenure track were comparable to conditions on it in everything except the nature of the contracts (i.e. that non-tenure-track contracts cannot result in tenure), then the amount of time issue would become far less pressing. But - for example - part-time work almost never comes with health insurance. Let alone a retirement account. Or (and this is as important as health insurance) any chance at maternity or childcare support. Tenure-track jobs or full-time lectureships do but full-time lectureships are fraught with the anxiety of falling downwards to part-time adjunct work, which would destroy most people’s ability to focus on their work sufficiently to achieve a tenure-track job.
As best I can tell, the only type of position that truly reliably affords health care is a tenured position.
Employees are of course not the only ones to suffer. It is a tremendous burden on employers that they are the ones who have to arrange that people have health insurance not least because health insurance is VERY expensive - anyone who’s been on COBRA or has ever bought an individual healthcare plan will know just how expensive. Having to provide it is an unfair burden on employers but it is even more unfair towards employees: it places far too much power over life and death questions into the hands of employers. We are all at their mercy for our health, and for the health of our children.
The point I’m trying to make is that the problems of academia may simply be symptoms of larger social problems in the U.S. - social problems that result in markedly different working conditions for tenure-track, tenured, and non-tenure-track academics. Tenure-track folks have health insurance and somewhat of a guarantee that they won’t suddenly lose it, while tenured professors can’t lose their health insurance in the same way Europeans or Canadians can’t lose theirs. Yet non-tenure-track academic workers typically have no way to get health insurance through their work.
These are the sorts of differences in working conditions that create strained and potentially poisonous power dynamics not only between universities (employers) and academic workers but also between tenured or tenure-eligible people, and those off the tenure-track. And amidst all the resulting tensions, the tenure system is what gets scapegoated for problems that stem from outside it. All this scapegoating very unfortunately threatens the kinds of freedoms - of speech, research, etc. - tenure is supposed to protect, and the kinds of freedoms essential to research and teaching. Of course, without truly free research and teaching society will be unable to become aware of its own problems and enact change… and begin the policy work necessary to achieve things like universal healthcare. Ironic, isn’t it?

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politics or healthcare

Posted by LK on Apr 11 2008 | healthcare, politics

In fact, Mrs. Clinton was accurately repeating the story as it was told to her — and it turns out that while some of the details were slightly off, the essentials of her story were correct. After all the fuss, The Washington Post eventually conceded that “Bachtel’s medical tragedy began with circumstances very close to the essence” of Mrs. Clinton’s account. And even more important, Mrs. Clinton was making a valid point about the state of health care in this country.


In other words, this was a disgraceful episode. It was particularly sad to see a number of Obama supporters (though not the Obama campaign itself) join enthusiastically in the catcalls against Mrs. Clinton’s good-faith effort to put a human face on the cruelty and injustice of the American health care system.


Look, I know that many progressives have their hearts set on seeing Barack Obama get the Democratic nomination. But politics is supposed to be about more than cheering your team and jeering the other side. It’s supposed to be about changing the country for the better.


And if being a progressive means anything, it means believing that we need universal health care, so that terrible stories like those of Monique White, Trina Bachtel and the thousands of other Americans who die each year from lack of insurance become a thing of the past.” (Paul Krugman in the New York Times)

Yes.

I am more and more firmly convinced that the lack of universal healthcare is the biggest problem of U.S. society today. It exacerbates economic issues - large numbers of small and medium-sized businesses can’t really take off because they can’t afford to provide their employees with health insurance. It’s one of the causes of prostitution. It’s bigger than the Iraq war, or rather, it’s a motivating factor: it gives disproportionate power over the lives of middle-class Americans to employers like the large corporations to whom the war’s been subcontracted, and to the military. And it causes the U.S. to spend more federal dollars on healthcare per capita than any other industrialized country.

Maybe I don’t like Hillary Clinton’s style much these days but I can’t fault her for continuing to point all this out, over and over and over again. Because people, this point needs to be gotten already.

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oh my

Posted by LK on Apr 01 2008 | travel

Apparently even something good like opening a new terminal can completely derail operations at Heathrow (via).
Ugh. My last experience there was when I was in London for a few days during August of 2006, right when the alleged potion-mixing terror plot unraveled. I say ‘alleged’ because apparently it’s not as easy as all that to just mix up some explosives using liquids or gels carried in cosmetics bottles or tubes of toothpaste. I spent 21 hours at the airport waiting for a flight to take me back to New York, any flight. Overnight we were given foil emergency blankets and some sandwiches and juice. Then once I got a flight and checked in, I had nothing but my wallet, passport and keys with me in transit. I bought a book and some magazines to read, which I couldn’t take on the flight. Nor could I take the lip balm I bought right there in the transit area too. Everyone waiting for flights looked thoroughly traumatized and lost. I still don’t know what the point was.
I confess I am kind of glad I can’t really get on airplanes for the next couple of months.

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