My Planned Parenthood

I've never used Planned Parenthood--I've been incredibly fortunate that my healthcare has been covered through my family for my whole life, and that my privilege to be a full-time at this point in my life has allowed me to keep that coverage into adulthood.

But that coverage has been dependent on a lot of things which were never certain--on my father keeping his job, on my maintaining a relationship with my father, on my ability to attend college and graduate school.  Without violating anyone else's privacy too much, I'll just say that I have both friends and family who currently or in the past have lacked health insurance to cover even the most basic care.  I have both friends and family whose health care is currently uncertain because it's being threatened by both state and federal budget cuts and government shutdowns, and being used as a bargaining chip by the so-called progressive left in this country.

I've been to Planned Parenthoods, various ones, several times, with friends who didn't have health insurance, who couldn't access health insurance for fear their parents would find out about their use of birth control, whose health insurance didn't cover the care they needed, who used to have health insurance, but who lost it due to unemployment, who had to leave college due to health issues and could no longer be covered by their parents' insurance, who left marriages and therefore lost health insurance.  Their lack of insurance has made me very aware of the temporariness, the contingency, of health insurance, and therefore care, in this country.

Emergency care is available to the uninsured in this country only to the extent that it stabilizes the emergency--care providers are under no obligation to treat the underlying problem which caused the emergency, or even to provide follow up care.  Government-assisted or -provided care is available on a contingent basis as well--contingent on what legislators believe to be moral, contingent on politically motivated budget cuts, contingent on the government staying open, which, as we're seeing on both a state and federal level, is not a guarantee.

I support Planned Parenthood because health care ought not be contingent.  It ought not depend on staying with an employer, in a relationship, on being born to the right parent, on maintaining a relationship with a parent, on student status, or on the moral, religious, political decisions of others, be they relatives or legislators.  Lacking either universal care or the political will to institute universal care in this country, I support Planned Parenthood because it offers care that is contingent on nothing more than individual need.

My Planned Parenthood

If you haven't heard already, Shakesville and What Tami Said will be hosting a blog carnival of posts in support of Planned Parenthood on July 7.  If you have been affected by access (or lack thereof) to Planned Parenthood, visit Shakesville or What Tami Said to see how to participate.  I have never accessed Planned Parenthood services myself directly; I'll be posting on the privilege which has enabled me to say that, and why it's important to me that Planned Parenthood be available (hint: it involves valuing affordable healthcare for everyone, even those who don't have the good fortune to be related to someone with a job which provides family healthcare).  If Planned Parenthood or affordable healthcare access is something you value, consider adding your own post.

Visibility and Women's Work

Since finding out our moving plans, I've had a bit of a blah.  Like emotionally just being relieved to have a direction, but not having the energy to do anything about it.  So we've made booze (basil vodka, steeped for two days--great with strawberry liqueur and a little ginger ale), and I've been thinking about my own position next year and the year after.

 I've never really thought explicitly about myself as someone who was defined by their job, but really, that's a big reason I'm in grad school.  My father is defined by his job and profoundly unhappy because of it; my mother defines herself (I think) much more as someone who paints, cooks, gardens, and mothers, and is happier for it.  Her job is important to her, but she's managed role shifts and job shifts within her career, and not been shaken by them, and that's always much more how I saw myself.

So I find myself a little adrift this summer trying to self-motivate towards research and writing, with the thought of picking up, moving, and self-motivating elsewhere for a year.  I'll teach in the fall, and I definitely don't see myself primarily as a teacher (although that is an important part of why I wanted to be an academic).  But this whole "you're done with coursework, go write a book!" thing with no road map leaves me feeling a little lost.

(Not a) Crafty Book Review

Ok, so this doesn't exactly fit with Freeze-dried's summer book club, but considering it's media and I hated the book I selected for this week's reading, I'm going to go ahead and review the videogame Kirby's Epic Yarn.

The book:  I tried reading Yarn by Jon Armstrong for this week, with emphasis on tried.  I couldn't finish it.  I think I've put down without finishing maybe four or five novels in my life.  It's got decent reviews on Amazon, and apparently got good reviews in Publisher's Weekly, the LA Times, and Locus, and was nominated for a Phillip K Dick Award, but I hated it almost as soon as I opened it.

Why?  It's supposedly fashionpunk, a twist on dystopic cyberpunk, and the story focuses on a master tailor who worked his way up through crime and intrigue from the neo-feudal corn based wastelands of America's heartlands to the global center of fashion.  I was pretty intrigued by the concept, since I love me some dystopic fiction and sewing, but I was very disappointed.  I've read my share of cyberpunk, and this was basically cyberpunk with programming replaced with sewing: the author seems to have a pretty good understanding of fashion and sewing terms, but threw them in in a way that, even as someone who knows the terms and is used to encountering a lot of jargon in genre fiction, I found off putting.  The writing, both dialogue and descriptive, was otherwise terribly stilted, with overly long, complex sentences put together with the same repetitive and boring adjectives.  And don't get me started on the gender politics: the only women I saw in about 150 pages were literally sex objects presented for the male gaze.

So that's how we get a review of a videogame rather than a book.  J and I picked up Kirby's Epic Yarn for the Wii on super-discount sale, so I'm not sure if I would love it as much if we'd paid full price (50USD), but for 20USD, I love it.  I tend to play a lot of games, but I would identify as neither a gamer nor the new-to-the gaming industry "female casual gamer" demographic.  Shooting zombies or matching jewels? No thank you.  Turning into a yarn robot who unravels sweater snowmen? Yes please.

I've never played anything in the Kirby franchise before, but the game doesn't require it to be enjoyable.  It's a platformer side scrolling game with about as much storyline as any Mario game (which is about maximum amount of story I want in my game, frankly).  There's no princess to save, and it's cooperative two player rather than competitive.  The aesthetics are awesome for someone who loves sewing/knitting/crafting, because the designers obviously put a lot of thought and care into tying both the game design and the game mechanics together aesthetically.  The image above doesn't really do the design justice: the fabric detail of the backgrounds and worlds are really detailed and beautiful, and the fabric design has a lot to do with the interactivity of the game play.  The point of the game is to collect points and objects to unlock more game, but a lot of the levels have such fun mechanics (ie, swimming as a dolphin, bouncing, etc) that they're very replayable.

The other thing I like about it is that it's challenging and varied but not difficult or demanding.  That is, there's enough puzzle solving to hold your attention, but it doesn't require you to try a level over and over to succeed or to memorize a bunch of nonsense key combinations to beat the bad guys.  I find overly dense interface to be a real barrier to my enjoyment of a game, so if I can't understand it without a long tutorial or memorizing a bunch of junk, I just don't play anymore.  Kirby has a good combination of being pretty, fun, and easy to play in short bursts while having more goal and variety than something like Bedazzled or Farmville.

Summer Book Club

I've finished my first summer book club book!  Admittedly, I picked it for my first book because it's super short: more of a novella than a novel (~140 pages/20K words).  I read Bone and Jewel Creatures, by Elizabeth Bear.  I've never read anything by Bear before, but I read Tor.com occasionally, which often has single book reviews and combined reviews of books with queer characters, strong feminist leanings, and other features of sff that don't get talked about enough.  Bear is a contributing writer over at Tor, and her books pop up frequently over there, so she's been on my radar for a while.

Anyway, the book at hand:  short and awesome.  It's not short and sweet because, well, it's not sweet.  It's pretty unsettling, but not in a horror-genre way.

Despite being very short, the characterization is both detailed and subtle.  The narrative sort of dumps us at the end of what could have been an epic multi-book fantasy series, full of court intrigue, political maneuvering, love and backstabbing, but without being about those.  It's more about what those people do with their lives once the epic change is accomplished, and what legacy they leave in the lives of those around them.  

The story centers on a very old woman and her relationship with a grown apprentice and a small child, in a way that is nurturing but not exactly mothering.  The main character's central power is to create life from death, which, when you think about it, is pretty metaphorical.  It's unusual to see older women in sff, or other fiction, and it's a book about self-determination and sacrifice without being about the idealization of sacrifice for women.

The main character is both strong and frail, and she is both strong and frail as a woman without the book centralizing her femininity.  For example, the plot centers around a long-past love triangle, and the betrayal and hurt that it caused, but her character hinges more on her friendship with another woman.  Her accomplishments and strengths are not exactly gender neutral, but they are more about the pursuit of intellectual accomplishment and teaching, rather than being about mothering.

(I guess in this case I would classify nurturing as more of teaching and supporting, while mothering is a more sentimental, emotional nurturing.  Not a perfect distinction, and not to say that there's something better about non-mothering nurturing than mothering, but it's not common to see older women in fiction in non-mothering roles).

I once had a conversation with one of my committee members, who is A Very Big Deal in women's history, who asked me what I thought feminist history ought to look like, if it necessarily had to be about women, and if you could have a feminist history that was not necessarily about women.  After a while of going around about what feminist history might look like, we arrived at this: while feminist history could be explicitly feminist and say that up front, it could also be only implicitly feminist in its presentation and interpretation, like a secret feminist handshake.  Bone and Jewel Creatures has a pretty firm handshake.

Me Made Kickoff

 

Me made June at chez Construct is rolling, although we had some technical difficulties yesterday--my camera is broken (and on its way to being fixed by my dad) and J takes his camera to work with him to document things they make at the shop.  I don't think I've mentioned yet, but J transitioned May 1 from working at the liquor store to working at the theater scene shop, and his work clothes for the shop are mostly me-made--I've patched and remade all of his pants, and made some of his work shirts.  

Anyway, back to the lady clothes.  The top above is self drafted from a bias cut thrifted Express top that I love.  And, despite not really being a ruffles kind of girl, I've caught ruffle mania from the rest of blogland and had to put ruffles and some lace on this. 

 This is a Vintage Vogue pattern that I had a terrible time getting to fit right, but I just love it.  When I first put it together, the shoulders were so large and so far apart, and the waist/bust so large, that it literally did not stay up on me.  It took a lot of cursing and modifications to get the neckline narrowed, but it's now one of my more comfortable go-to dresses because it's light enough to wear in summer but heavy enough for layering in the winter.

And finally, the air plant, because that's sort of how I'm feeling today.  I don't usually wear my hair down in public because A. it gets bigger as the day progresses B. it gets in my way when teaching and C. people touch it.  I ran errands today, and while I love getting compliments from strangers, I do not love being touched by strangers.  While walking, I had one man stop me and tell me I had "dropped my smile" and a lady waiting in line with me ask if she could touch my hair.  And then another woman touched my hair without asking.  People!  Leave strangers alone!  Young women do not exist in public for the gratification of strangers.  I appreciate that you may want to tell me how "wholesome" and "all-American" I look (code words, I think, for white, non-threatening, and retrograde, and things I am frequently told by strangers in public, at airports, in banks, at grocery stores, etc), but do not touch.  It's an invasion of personal space that I've never heard that a man of my acquaintance has experienced, like being told to smile. 

The questions we ask

I'm starting to think about the questions my dissertation asks, and the problem I see with the existing scholarship in my field is sometimes not that it answers important questions incorrectly, but that it asks the wrong questions.  Like a cat who likes to sit squished between both a window screen and a couch, the scholarship is awfully comfortable and doesn't want to go anywhere.  (Is that too much metaphor to put on one cat?  Sorry.  Had to work in the cat photo somehow).

I've been going round and round in trying to frame my dissertation, because I do find the way that the current scholarship answers the big questions to be wrong, but I also find the questions wrong in a way I couldn't articulate until recently.  Graduate education, or at least my graduate education, has focused on learning to engage with the terms of debate as they stand in the field.  There's nothing wrong with this; I think it's necessary to know how to engage a discussion as it stands in order to recognize your position in it and the limits of that debate's frame.  What it doesn't teach you is how to reframe the debate.  Some of the best scholarship does that, and while it may be overly ambitious for a dissertation project, at least in my subfield, the terms of debate are so broken and retrograde that I'm beginning to feel they're unusable for what I think my evidence is telling me.

Example:

Summer Goals

Monday was Memorial Day in the US; it's officially for reals summer here (90F helps prove it), so it's time to solidify summer research plans and other things.  On the slate for summer blogging plans:  Me Made June, the Summer Book Club, and Notorious/Another Damned Medivalist's Summer Writing Group.  I think I'm going to loosely tie the book club and the writing group together: my reading list (and book club related posting) is going to be heavy on sci fi/fantasy with a feminist angle, along with some more generalized posts on race, feminism, and material culture provoked by my more heavily theoretical reading for my writing project, a first draft of a dissertation chapter.  (omg)   A lot of what interests me about my dissertation topic is the systemic creation of the consumer culture we engage with now and the personal creation of identity through clothing; I hope the intersection of theoretical issues with consumerism and identity making might interest you as well.

In non-theoretical news, J and I spent the hottest day of the year (so far) biking and picnicing at Snooty U's arboretum.  By my conservative estimate, we biked around a thousand million miles, but J says it was more like ten.  Except for a broken shifter on my bike when we were almost home, it was basically one of the most perfect summer days you could ask for: homemade beer, at an empty park, eating fancy cheeses and warm strawberries with a nice boy.  More picnics are also on the summer to do list.  

In which links are substituted for content

Today is a sewing, errands, and perhaps even reading day, so here are some links that I'm thinking about.  The insightful Ethel Louise has a very smart post on the recent celebrations over Osama bin Laden's death, and her discomfort (which I share) regarding both the message such celebrations send abroad and their meaning for policy and thought at home.  While I saw my facebook overflow with the kind of nationalistic celebration at the news which is being reported in the media, I'm skeptical regarding the extent of such celebration.  The reports I've seen, at least of the street celebrations, seem to have been small in number and in participation, making me think that they are being reported out of proportion to the number of people participating in them.  Which makes me wonder why the media finds it important to focus on these celebrations--perhaps to convince viewers that the news of bin Laden's death is more important than it is, both symbolically and strategically?  EL has much more on the symbolic importance of the news.

Tenured Radical has a provocative piece on the intersection of war abroad and the war on women, responding in part to a piece in the Nation on the recent rollback of American women's access to basic health and reproductive services.  While teaching the 20th century history course this semester has been very difficult given my background, that course and the Obama administration's ambivalence towards the attack on half the nation's (and, through foreign aid spending policy, half the world's) population have convinced me of the conservative turn of both the GOP and the Democrats.  When Eisenhower, Nixon, and even Reagan look progressive compared to the sitting Democratic president, you know the left in this country is in trouble.  Which makes the use of socialist as a political slur all the more infuriating: what we have seen is the expansion of state power without the expansion of state protection.  Given the erosion of citizens' access to government after the Citizens United SCOTUS case, the non-wealthy in this country, especially women, are increasingly subject to the will of the government without a voice in its implementation.

In less upsetting news (or possibly more, depending on how you feel about sewing), I'm going to do So Zo's Me-Made-June challenge, and try to wear one item of self-sewn clothing during the month of June.  I'll be trying to take daily photos of what I'm wearing, but I'm only going to do weekly posts of the photos.  I like the idea of trying to move more away from purchased clothing, and I think I finally have enough clothing made to go for a month.  I'm planning on making a top or two to round things out, though, because I have a lot of dresses and skirts and not much else.

In RTW news, the jacket is coming along, but I'm stumbling on the handsewing in the jacket front.  Well, not so much stumbling as taking a long time.  I'm cheating all over the place by mixing methods.  I'm doing some of the RTW techniques, like the block fusing for some pieces, but the jacket front has different interfacing requirements, so I'm doing a mix of the pattern's couture methods and the pattern's suggested RTW methods.

As you can see in the photo, I'm doing fusible interfacing but also handstitching things like the tapes for the roll line and the pocket fold, as well as the pad stitching for the collar.  I also forgot somehow that the couture method requires an underlining (a layer between the outer shell fabric and the regular lining) to provide body, so I had to rip some seams and put in the underlining, which took some time.  It's also not benefiting from being schlepped around in my bag, which is the primary reason my knitting is on hold, because the second little sweater has suffered a few too many dropped stitches in my bag going from home to class for me to want to pick up for a while.  My jacket fronts were stuffed in my bag yesterday for between-class sewing, and suffered quite a bit of wrinkling in the interfacing.  It doesn't translate to the outer surface, but I hope it doesn't mean the interfacing will peel off at a later date from wash or wear.  Has anybody found a way to keep your bag from eating your projects?  (Or a way to follow the news without becoming totally disenchanted?)

On empathy, politics and feminism

Anyone who has been reading for any length of time knows that I've been struggling this semester with teaching a 20th century political history course far outside my background or training.  I just got done teaching The Conservative Ascendancy by Donald Critchlow and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory by Randall Balmer.  Critchlow writes about the social/political changes propelling the far right wing of the GOP into power since the defeat of Goldwater in 1964, and Balmer focuses on the social and emotional pull of evangelical Christianity in America.  What it's gotten me thinking about is the place of empathy in both politics and feminism.  Both Historiann and Echidne are relevant background readings for today's class.

The current narrative in politics seems to me to be about excising empathy from politics.  Barney Frank has called government "the name we give to those things we choose to do together."  The National Review, a right-wing publication, has called this "meaningless and stupid."  That, to me, sums up the problem we (in the US, and possibly Canada and the UK, with their right-leaning governments) are currently facing in the Right's rush to defund what social insurance the Progressive era won for the poor and middle class.  Government, even that which is not based on a Christian framework, should be about serving the least among us.

When your framework is selfishness (or some mythical context-free individual liberty), as Flint Knits recently posted about, government action and even individual charitable action becomes unnecessary and even an impediment to those at the bottom of the economy.  The free market and voluntary regulation which this philosophy seeks to "reinstate" not only never existed, as any thinking historian of either Adam Smith or the late 19th century will tell you, but it also does not work. It assumes the privilege of the upper middle class applies to everyone, even as the middle and lower middle class erodes into simply a gap between the working and upper middle class, because the upper middle class perceive themselves to be the norm.  As the NYTimes and Dean Dad have pointed out, markers of a well rounded, upper middle class liberal arts education like unpaid internships exacerbate the income gap by shutting out middle and lower middle class college student from the credentials race.

So what does that mean about government?

On Funding, Waiting and Nesting

Is it wet yet?  When will it be wet?  Will I like it when it's wet?

A non-update (and a cat picture, because when in doubt, cats illustrate many things).  I have had meetings, meetings, meetings the past week or so about my "funding situation," which is to say, various people want to know whether someone else has given me funding for next year so that I can be checked off as a problem to be taken care of.  For funding which various people are in charge of, though, the answer is: we'll know next month.  Wait and see.  We don't know yet.  

The problem seems to me to be a lack of planning.  I am not in the situation of needing a job or not having an income next year--I have two years of guaranteed funding left, so for at least two years I won't be kicked out into the cold.  But exactly what kind of funding I have, and whether it depends on my teaching in Overcast or not (and therefore, how much travel I will be able to do for research) is partially dependent on how many graduate students are admitted to the program for next year, and whether applications which my advisor has put in for me are accepted.

On Feminism, Clothing, and the Politics of Vintage

Does this dress make my feminism look too big?

I guess this last series of posts has started to look like me-made-March, but this post isn't exactly about this outfit.  This weekend was busy-busy-busy with hosting students admitted to the graduate program, and some comments made by the prospective student who stayed with J and I got me thinking about the politics of vintage and vintage-look.  Normally I wouldn't gender-identify someone, but I think it's important for the story to know that the guy who stayed with us was, in fact, a guy (although I've had the same reaction I got from him from women occasionally as well).

Our program doesn't have a lot of money, so to save prospective students from having to pay for their own hotel rooms, we arrange for them to stay with other graduate students, usually in their areas of study.  I didn't have anyone coming in this year in my area of study, but we do have a guest bedroom, so we got a prospective.  Our areas of study and methodological/theoretical approaches didn't overlap at all, but we had a lot of "you love that TV show?  I love that TV show!" type commonalities.

[Trigger warning]

What we did not have in common was our fondness for rape jokes: specifically, our guest's fondness for them, J and my lack thereof.  Who tells a rape joke to someone they've just met, especially someone whose house you're a guest in?