Terps Against Marriage for Marriage Equality (1.0)

October 11, 2012 by 14 Comments

[An edited version of this post was published yesterday in the QTU campus newspaper, The Diamondback. Like all authors, I prefer the unedited version, so I’ll exercise my blogger’s right to do it my way, with links, right here in my own little corner of the non-peer-reviewed and gatekeeper-free Interwebz. I was motivated to write the column in part because The Diamondback published an article last week in which leaders of the campus undergraduate LGBT organization announced that it wasn’t taking a position on a measure that would extend the right of civil marriage to same-sex couples in Turtle Country because “there are differing opinions on marriage, and we don’t want to invalidate one person’s stance.” And because “Queer relationships are not recognized even if gay marriage does become legalized.” True, I thought, but, oh, boy, this is what we get for teaching the children all that trouble with normal stuff. A little knowledge  can be a tricky thing. So I sat down at ye olde laptop and banged out a cranky old queer reply. See what you think. I’ve got a busy day on tap — There’s a civil rights battle to be won here, darlings, and apparently I’m helping to lead the charge. Peace out.]

I have lived happily in a state of unlicensed love with a same-sex partner for more than twenty-eight years. She and I have been fortunate in that we’ve never needed marriage to give us access to health insurance. We were both born in this country, so we also didn’t need marriage to ensure our rights to live and work here. When we reached middle age and realized we needed to give some thought to long-term planning, we could afford to hire an attorney to draw up wills to give our relationship protections similar to those enjoyed (for free) by married couples.

We haven’t needed marriage, and in many ways we didn’t want it. Indeed, you might say that we hated marriage before hating marriage was cool, though we are not really the hating types. As feminists, however, we have tended to view marriage skeptically, as an institution that oppressed women and shored up the social and economic powers of patriarchy and heterosexuality. We were proud of having built a secure, loving, mutually supportive relationship that was in many respects like a marriage yet remained outside the institution. Years before queer critics of marriage railed against the unfairness of forcing couples to marry in order to prove their worth or secure a set of rights and benefits that ought not be tied to relationship status, my partner and I were happy to sing along with Joni Mitchell that, “We don’t need no piece of paper/From the city hall/Keeping us tied and true” (“My Old Man”).

That’s what I mean when I say I am a Terp against marriage, much as I respect particular marriages and anyone’s desire to be married. Now let me tell you what I mean when I say I am a Terp against marriage who is also emphatically for marriage equality.

Marriage equality is a matter of civil rights, plain and simple, and as such I am committed to fighting for it, heart and soul, without a shred of doubt or ambivalence. If the state is going to be in the business of licensing relationships, then it cannot discriminate against same-sex couples that want to be civilly married. To do so is to set up classes of citizens and to engage in sex discrimination, which are in my judgment both abhorrent and unconstitutional. I may not want to be married, but that is my business and my decision. Legally, however, I should have the same right other citizens have to marry whomever I choose. The state should not deny me the right it extends to others. Grant me the right, and I will decide whether or not to exercise it. That is called freedom, and LGBT citizens cannot be denied the same freedom that non-LGBT citizens enjoy.

In a few weeks, Maryland voters will be called upon to uphold or reject the Civil Marriage Protection Act, which would extend the right of civil marriage to same-sex couples and protect the rights of clergy not to perform marriage ceremonies in violation of their religious beliefs. If the law is upheld by an affirmative vote on Question 6, Maryland would be the first state in the nation to approve the right to same-sex marriage through a popular vote. (Three other states – Maine, Minnesota, and Washington – will vote on similar measures on Nov. 6, but polls close first in Maryland, which is why we have a shot at being the first in the nation to win on marriage equality at the ballot box.)

I am opposed to subjecting the rights of minority groups to a popular vote. It violates my sense of fairness and a core conviction that rights are, as the authors of the Declaration of Independence put it, unalienable. They cannot be granted or taken away because they are part of our equipment as human beings and as citizens.

Nonetheless, my hope is that this time a majority of voters will recognize that same-sex couples deserve no more and nothing less than what opposite-sex couples have in the eyes of the law. My hope is that voters in the state I’ve been proud to call home for twenty-six years will vote out of love rather than fear and in support of justice rather than injustice. Polls currently show that a majority of likely voters say they will vote for Question 6, but we can’t take anything for granted. We need to work hard in the coming weeks to educate voters on the issue and to mobilize them to vote in support of it.

This Thursday, Oct. 11, is National Coming Out Day, a day when we celebrate being open about and inclusive of sex and gender diversity. There are two Question 6 events being held on campus that day: a panel discussion with four of Maryland’s openly gay legislators who helped to pass the Civil Marriage Protection Act in the general assembly and a rally with Sen. Ben Cardin and other leaders in support of marriage equality.

I hope you will consider attending these events and that you’ll support the cause of equality regardless of how you feel about marriage or homosexuality. I am not asking you to approve of me. And I’m not saying that marriage will be good for LGBT people or that LGBT people will be good for marriage. All I am saying is that no group of people should be denied equality before the law. If you agree with me on that single, enormously consequential point, please vote yes on Question 6.

Because this Terp who is against marriage but for marriage equality looks forward to the day when her decision not to marry the woman she adores will be legally meaningful in the Free State.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Learning from Madonna

September 30, 2012 by 3 Comments

MDNA Tour, Verizon Center, Washington, DC, 9/23/12. Photo Credit: The Madwoman

Yeah, I know the whole Madonna-Is-This-Epic-Pop-Cultural-Rorschach-Test is, like, so twenty years ago, but bear with me for a minute. A week after my baptism into the High Church of Please Don’t Call Me Madge, I’ve nearly got the ear worm of “Girl Gone Wild” out of my head, but I still find myself cogitating over something I turned to the Woman Formerly Known as Goose and said in the middle of the show. I had to whisper/yell it and repeat myself several times to be heard, of course, but once she caught the drift of what I was saying, she nodded in enthusiastic agreement. So, what was my high-on-MDNA revelation?

Early in the show, there’s an incredibly dark sequence in which Our Lady of Pop becomes a gun-toting gal on a rampage. It runs through three songs, the aforementioned “Girl Gone Wild,” “Revolver,” and “Gang Bang.” There’s a lot of shooting and a lot of blood, much of it projected in high-definition on the screen at the back of the stage. “Gang Bang” is an especially creepy and powerful song about a scorned woman shooting an ex-lover in the head. The refrain is a gleeful, “Bang Bang, shot you dead, shot my lover in the head.” It was riveting, but I don’t think my companion and I were alone in finding the spectacle both discomfiting and difficult to read. However, as “Gang Bang” transitions to a snippet of “Papa Don’t Preach,” the girls with guns scene gives way to four soldiers wearing camouflage pants and masks that seem both vaguely tribal and eerily reminiscent of the hoods worn by tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The soldiers surround Madonna, who is lying on the stage singing, wrap her in chains, hoist her above their heads, and march with her body to the back of the stage. Images of fire and implements of torture flicker on the screen. As she sings “Hung Up,” Madonna, accompanied, by the soldiers, walks across a wire suspended above the floor. They appear to be walking through fire. I realized in that moment that we weren’t being forced merely to revel in gratuitous violence for its own sake. The evocations of Abu Ghraib somberly recontextualized and geopoliticized the cartoonish violence of the earlier, Tarantino-esque scene and made its consequences starkly real. (Or, you know, as real as anything can be in the surreal spectacle of Madonna.) It was then that I turned to WFKG and said, “You know, I would despair of our species if it weren’t for popular culture. Our political system is so broken, so utterly incapable of addressing with any real thought or feeling the urgencies of our time. Popular culture at least tries, at least sometimes.” (Here is a link to a vid of the whole MDNA show. The scenes referred to in this paragraph are in the first 25 minutes.)

I wasn’t just thinking of Madonna, of course, though I do hereby declare that the mind-boggling multimedia extravaganza of “Nobody Knows Me” is the most compelling meditation on representation, violence, and non-identity the twenty-first century has produced. Even without the swastikas. (That “Nobody Knows Me” link is a pretty decent concert vid. Click on it to see if you agree with me or think my claims are proof that I’ve gone MADonna.) I’m also thinking of our old pal Bruce Springsteen, who’s been brooding on the painful gap between American ideals and American realities for decades and fighting off despair through rousing calls to consciousness, compassion, and engagement. It would never have occurred to me to compare these two artists, so deeply different in so many ways, but WFKG and I trooped down to Nationals Park to see Bruce for the eleventy-billionth time just a week before we saw Madonna, so the passion of the Boss’s live performance was fresh in my mind as I found myself caught up in the frenzy of “Like a Prayer” and “Celebration” that concludes the MDNA show. For all their differences, both Madonna and Springsteen demand that their audiences look into the darkness of their own and their country’s souls — but then lift us up into light, dance, a space in which we can see one another’s faces, move and sing together. It isn’t just a party, though it is that. It is a moment of shared agency and, perhaps, a shot at collective redemption. (Bruce, Madonna, and the Post-Catholic Allure of Redemption. Discuss.)

I’ve always been a sucker for the gospel of popular music, particularly in live performance. It’s also fascinating to me, though, that in this moment when our politics seems so stunningly dysfunctional we see evidence throughout popular culture of serious efforts to grapple with many of the intractable problems our leaders are barely able to acknowledge much less address. What am I talking about? Everything from The Hunger Games to Homeland, from the brand new Revolution to the salacious yet smart Scandal. These are all fundamentally dystopian stories of an America dying or destroyed by some combination of corruption, conspiracy, and neglect, but they are also stories of characters struggling to be decent in conditions of profound moral ambiguity and battling to reclaim power — literally in the case of Revolution, in which the rebels are trying to get the lights turned back on after a 15-year power outage. (Given the multi-day power outages we regularly experience in the Washington, DC area, this show feels entirely and excruciatingly apt to me. I imagine I am about two derechos away from being willing to kill to obtain one of those little amulet/flash drive thingies if it would help me to defeat the tyrant thugs of Pepco.)

This should be a longer post, a post that delves deeply into the kind of cultural work I see these shows and performances as doing, a post that explains eloquently and in great detail what we learn not only from Madonna but from any pop cultural text that challenges us to think, feel, act, and connect. This longer post would wrestle with the important question of whether my investment in such stories is not proof that I suffer from what Lauren Berlant in her latest book terms cruel optimism, an attachment to objects — “food, or a kind of love[,] . . . a fantasy of the good life, or a political project” — that “actively impede the aim” that brought me to them initially. It’s entirely possible that I do suffer from cruel optimism. It’s also possible I would rather have cruel optimism than no optimism at all. Because given the choice between dog-paddling and drowning, I would choose dog-paddling every time. Happily.

Sadly, however, it’s also true that it’s Sunday evening. I have work to do. And the new seasons of The Good Wife and Homeland begin in less than an hour. What are you watching? What are you listening to? What kind of work is it doing, and why does it matter? What have you learned and from whom have you learned it?

Peace out, Madpeople at your Laptops, and remember: Don’t be cruel.

Filed Under: books, kick-a$$ women, music, political follies

Mad Glances

September 23, 2012 by 7 Comments

Pedestrian tunnel in Terminal 1, O’Hare International Airport, 9/21/12.
Photo Credit: The Madwoman

Not to worry, darlings. I’m not dead and I haven’t been fired for nursing while teaching. (Of course, if I’d been nursing while teaching, you’d have heard about it — through the Vatican’s Miracle Investigation Unit.) Just busy. I was in the space-agey tunnel in O’Hare’s Terminal 1 on Friday returning from a whirlwind trip to Nebraska for a big-wiggish lecture I was invited to give on my old pal Willa Cather. Hey, it even made the newspaper, though I can’t say the earnest young reporter caught all the nuances of my analysis of Cather’s late life and early afterlife within the context of the post-WWII Lavender Scare. As I said when I posted the article to the Book of Faces, “If you tell a kid reporter that Willa Cather was ‘a tough broad,’ it’s going to show up in the paper the next morning. You were a kid reporter once. You know these things.” So true.

Anyhoo, I seem to be getting quoted in lots of newspapers lately. Because I have the good fortune to know a lot of tough and wonderful broads. Yes, I am a lucky woman. Some day I will get around to blogging the extraordinary news of a possible new photograph of Emily Dickinson and the searing yet brave story of my former teacher Susan Gubar’s experience of ovarian cancer. In the meantime, you follow those links like the dutiful little do-bees I know you are. You need to know these things.

Also: Mitt Romney will never be president, but he looks to have a solid future as a figure of speech. Historiann explains.

Speaking of tough broads, the Woman Formerly Known as Goose is taking me to see Madonna tonight. Because there’s more to life than rock and roll (but happy birthday, Boss). And apparently there’s more to life than course prep. Later, lovelies. I’ve got to go tone up my biceps to get ready for this evening. Wouldn’t want to disappoint the buffest middle-aged babe in show business. Peace out, material people.

Photo Credit: Chad Batka, New York Times

Filed Under: English profs, fluffity fluff, kick-a$$ women, political follies

My Theory Workbook

September 3, 2012 by 9 Comments

Or, a Brief Back-to-School Post on Retro Pedagogy

Undine had a useful post last week on tech tools for teachers. I read it, scratched my head over all the cool things I could and should be doing, then sat down to work on my syllabus — and ended up going in the opposite direction.

See that little quip over there in the sidebar about being a non-geek? Right under the pale imitation of an Alison Bechdel caricature? Quip, yes. Exaggeration, no. I blog, I tweet, I have a house and backpack full of Apple devices, but at heart I am a Luddite. And in the classroom, well, when I’m not teaching my blogging class, which I’m not this term, my instincts are strictly nineteenth century. I’ve dabbled in PowerPoint and been forced to make at least limited use of the odious Blackboard, but I’ve never been convinced any of these bells and whistles improved my teaching or, more importantly, my students’ learning. There, I said it.

Oh, boy. Why am I afraid that my good friends over at ProfHacker are never going to link to me again? George, Jason, love ya, dudes! Don’t give up on an old broad yet!

Here’s the thing. I’m teaching a new course this semester, a 400-level course called “Theories of Sexuality and Literature.” I’ve got 25 students, and I’m really, really committed to two important goals: 1. Getting the students to work together and take ownership of the course on a daily basis and 2. helping them overcome their anxieties about THEORY by having them write something about it for pretty much every class meeting. Thus was born the idea of “My Theory Workbook.”

I borrowed the idea from Kate Bornstein’s smart, funny, highly teachable My Gender Workbook, which I have found to be indispensable in helping students navigate the topsy-turviness of postmodern gender without losing their precious little minds. Bornstein is a popularizer, but she writes about complicated ideas in an accessible and often entertaining way without sacrificing all the nuance and complexity. That’s what I’ll be aiming to do in teaching this course, and it’s kind of what I hope my students will reach for, too. The “theory workbook” is a key strategy toward achieving those lofty goals. Here’s how I explained it on the syllabus:

Sex/Lit Theory Workbook: 25% of final grade, due daily and collected as scheduled. Get a file folder. Mark it, “My Sex/Lit Theory Workbook.” Bring it to class with you every day. You should have a new typed entry for each class, focused on the day’s reading. Sometimes I’ll give you a prompt to respond to. Sometimes I won’t. Your entry should focus on identifying key words, major concepts, and important moments in the argument. Identify points that confused you or excited you. Form a question you’d like to discuss in class. Come up with an example to which you think the concept might be usefully applied. We’ll begin class with small-group discussions of the day’s entries, which is why you need to print out your workbooks and bring them to class. I’ll collect them every 2-3 weeks throughout the semester.

The workbook, in addition to helping to frame and focus daily discussion, will also give students a space for launching ideas they might decide to develop into papers. It will also help them to prepare for the final exam, which will be an oral exercise focused on terms, concepts, and major figures. The class will generate a list of 25 terms. On the day of the exam, each student will pick a topic out of a hat and present on it for about 4 minutes. (A number of my colleagues, including the Woman Formerly Known as Goose, have been doing oral finals in the past few years, so students aren’t as terrified by this idea as you might suppose. Also, they truly will be preparing for it throughout the semester, as we build that assignment into our conversations all along the way.)

So, I thought about doing “My Theory Workbook” as a class blog or through discussion board, but I felt that the blog would be unwieldy with 25 students and that the discussion board probably wouldn’t work in the way I wanted it to. Perhaps it’s my lack of creativity or dedication, but in my experience discussion board feels like busy work. Students tend to post perfunctory comments to fulfill requirements, and the exercise usually doesn’t elevate class discussion or even get connected to it unless the instructor goes out of her way to bring it up. When I polled my students on their druthers, they unanimously preferred the idea of producing dead-tree workbooks and bringing them to class every day to posting to discussion board. They all said they were bored by discussion board. (OK, yeah, not a scientific poll, and it’s possible I predisposed them to answer that way with some snarky comment about discussion board, but still.)

Feel free to tell me I’ve forfeited my place in the Cool Kids Club. (Please, honey, I figured that out in the last century and am 100% over it!) Or, feel free to share with us the ten thousand ways in which you have successfully incorporated discussion board into your teaching. I would love for this gizmo to work in a way that made my life as a teacher easier and made my students brilliant, collaborative, and gainfully employable! I promise I am persuadable. In the meantime, I will let you know how my experiment in dead-tree pedagogy goes. My prediction is that the kids will do well with it and that I will have to be hospitalized by the tenth week of the semester from the ordeal of trying to keep up with what I’ve committed to do. Reading day, class! Teacher’s in the loony bin! Yippeeeee!

Peace out, pedagogues. May all your darlings be adorable and educable. And if all else fails, remember the Madwoman’s #1 Rule for Success in the Classroom: Wear Something Shiny!

Filed Under: English profs, teaching

Playing in the Dark (Again)

September 1, 2012 by 11 Comments

[T]he subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist presence is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity not to see this. — Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

Clint Eastwood at the Republican National Convention, 8/30/12

I did a post called “Playing in the Dark” four years ago when a cranky old white guy was facing off against a slender young half-black guy in the race for the White House. I recycle the title now because it seems dispiritingly apt in the wake of this week’s Republican convention, which was, long before actor Clint Eastwood took the stage Thursday evening for his bizarre colloquy with a chair, given over to boxing with a phantom: the America-hating, welfare-loving, freedom-killing, Muslim socialist “Barack Obama” conjured by the fevered imaginations of white men terrified of losing their power and privilege. Eastwood’s crude, contemptuous rant might have been the most off the wall, but it was by no means off message. From the moment Obama took office, Republicans have sought to depict him not only as a failed president but somehow an illegitimate one. They’ve indulged the birthers in their midsts, bragged about their determination to deny him a second term, and framed his every move as an assault on liberty. Eastwood’s suggestion to the Invisible Obama in the chair that he should “just step aside” so that “Mr. Romney can kind of take over” is perfectly consistent with this strategy. Republicans have been saying ever since they tried to remove a president from office over a sexual indiscretion that elections don’t matter. Voters don’t know what’s good for the country. We’re the ones who should be running things, as we always have. Step aside, boy, Eastwood might as well have said. The people had their tears of joy, their happy little moment of racial harmony. Step aside.

WaPo‘s Dan Balz thinks the effects of Eastwood’s speech will be short-lived, that “the big debate will reengage. Attention will shift back to the issues that really count” — though he recognizes that the focus on substance will only last “until the next Eastwood-like moment distracts everyone again.” I may be wrong, but I think the effects of Eastwood’s speech may be longer lasting and more damaging to the Republican campaign than Balz supposes. Viewed on television, Eastwood’s 12 minutes of semi-coherent public disrespect for a sitting (get it? sitting?) president came across not as funny but as callous, arrogant, and creepily anti-democratic. Oh, and more than a little bit racist. The party faithful in and out of the hall might have been amused, but I have a hunch those 12 minutes will turn off independent voters and fire up a Democratic base that up to this point has seemed lacking in enthusiasm for this election.

Eastwooding may prove to be more than an amusing meme or fodder for some rip-roaring good moments of Jon Stewart because those 12 minutes aren’t really off the Republican message. They are the message of a party worried about “not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” Eastwood’s speech is not unlike Rep. Todd Akin‘s recent remarks about “legitimate rape.” Both said exactly what they meant to say, and when a $hitstorm of controversy erupts both produce the kinds of reactions satirized in a New Yorker cartoon this week. A politician stands at a podium and earnestly addresses a camera: “I regret that my poor choice of words caused some people to understand what I was saying.” (Eastwood hasn’t said anything since his appearance at the convention. I’m referring to the GOP’s nervous backing away from his remarks as analogous to the politician in the cartoon.)

Here’s my prediction, which I will be bold enough to post before Nate Silver has a chance to gather and carefully analyze the post-convention polls: Romney’s post-convention bounce is going to be underwhelming and will quickly fade, even if Obama doesn’t get much of a bounce from a convention likely to be even less suspenseful than the GOP snooze-fest was. Romney will lose the election, by more than polls have been suggesting is likely. And when the history of the 2012 election is written, Clint Eastwood will be blamed for thwarting Romney’s momentum by crystalizing for voters the race and class resentments that are the heart and soul of today’s Republican party.

If I’m right, I’m a genius. If I’m wrong, I’m just an English prof who ought to keep her day job. Still, kids, mark my words: You play in the dark, sometimes you’re going to get lost. And sometimes you’re going to bump smack into your own damn self. Remember where you heard it.

Filed Under: political follies

Witty Comebacks

August 25, 2012 by 2 Comments

No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate.

That’s true, Mittens, but how about showing us your underwear?

Mormon temple garment, circa 1879, via Wikipedia.

This joke brought to you by the Woman Formerly Known as Goose, who objects strenuously to the lowering of political discourse in these United States but nonetheless can’t stop thinking about Mitt Romney’s underwear. I know that sounds strange and superficial, but WFKG’s curiosity goes to the deeper question of whether Americans are really ready to move a Mormon into the White House, despite a recent Gallup poll showing that 80% of voters would be “willing to vote for a well-qualified presidential candidate who happens to be Mormon.” I think that number is high, because I think that’s one of those poll questions likely to elicit horse $hit a polite-sounding answer rather than an honest one. (Interestingly, respondents are less polite when it comes to atheists and Muslims than when it comes to Mormons. Only 54% said they would be willing to vote for a candidate who identifies as atheist; 58% said they would be willing to vote for a Muslim. So much for pluralism, eh?)

The Romney campaign must harbor similar suspicions about the accuracy of the sure-I’d-vote-for-a-Mormon number. The Republican nominee for president has avoided the subject of his religion almost as assiduously as he has avoided disclosing his tax returns, though many observers of the campaign think that focusing more attention on his relationship to his church would be an effective way for Romney to humanize himself and “make[] the case for his worldview.” Perhaps, but it might also remind all those cranky evangelical voters Romney is so desperate to appease that their ministers — and Rick Santorum — used to tell them Mormonism was a cult. That same poll showed that four in ten respondents didn’t know that Romney is Mormon, and I have a hunch the Republican party is hoping to keep it that way. Which is why, when the pageantry and storytelling get underway in Tampa next week, my guess is you won’t be hearing the M-word. Or, you know, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

So, if it’s cool for Romney to make birther jokes, I say it’s cool for Obama to pop the underwear question. I mean, shucks, kids. Bill Clinton had to answer it. What do you think, Madpeople at your Laptops: Should Romney say more about his faith or continue to avoid the subject? How is this issue playing out in your neck of the political woods? Are we all Mormons or Mormon lovers now, or is there still resistance to the notion of a Mormon president? (We don’t endorse such resistance, of course, being as tolerant of Mormonism as we are of any cult religion. We’re just trying to get a bead on the culture.)

And if you’re scratching your head thinking, “Wow, you know, I actually don’t think it’s cool for Romney to make birther jokes,” go read this. It will help to explain that queasy feeling you’ve got. And if you’ve got a little time and want more context, go read this (Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Fear of a Black President” from The Atlantic). We live in interesting sick times, darlings. Some days, it’s hard to keep up with the Madness, but stick with us. We’ll muddle through it together, somehow. Peace out.

Filed Under: political follies

Beached

August 22, 2012 by 1 Comment

(Photo of Indian River Bridge by Jason Rudy. Photoshopping of Ruby on bridge by the Madwoman, with an able assist by Kiwiboy, Photoshop tutor extraordinaire, 8/19/12.)

Classes start next week at QTU, so we’re getting in some last-minute fun, sun, ice cream, and Photoshop lessons at a quiet town on the Delaware shore. We’ve kept half an ear tuned into what’s happening back in the real (and stunningly dysfunctional) world, which is why we can tell you that you really ought to go watch this Onion video on Tampa’s gay prostitutes gearing up for an onslaught of closeted gay Republicans coming to town for next week’s Akin-free convention. Srsly. Go watch it. It had four PhDs and a 12-year-old boy laughing so hard they nearly forgot for a moment that the party of homophobes, misogynists, and starve-the-beasters might actually run the country come November. Was I just musing here the other day about whether our political discourse could sink any lower? Why, yes, I believe I was.

Dear Universe: That was a rhetorical question. There was no need to supply dramatic evidence that the party of Lincoln had gone so completely off its rocker that it would bring the term “legitimate rape” into the political lexicon. Please stop — or I’ll have to run over to the old blog and pick up my laser-shooting vajayjay just to keep from going truly insane. Yours sincerely, The Madwoman.

Oh, and in case you need some guidance on how to tell whether your rape was legitimate or illegitimate — and, really, who doesn’t? — here is an informative and catchy tune to help you out. Click. Sing. You’ll feel better.

The Akins debacle has inspired Kate Harding to realize not only that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances but that American women should each have at least ten children to ensure that we are not depriving the country of the best and brightest. “Martin Luther King, Jr., was the second of three children,” Harding points out. “If his parents had stopped at one, who would have led the civil rights movement? International superstar Madonna is the third of six children. Had her parents decided to quit after two, we would live in a world without ‘Like a Virgin.’ Can you even imagine?”

Indeed, as the third of four children and a survivor of the disco years, I cannot! Wimmin, if your lady parts are still functioning, hop to! America cannot afford for you not to have as many children as you are physically capable of producing! You might have within you the seeds of the next Marie Curie! Or Kim Kardashian! Or Todd Akin! Get those buns in the oven before it’s too late!

If, on the other hand, you are not planning to fulfill your biological duty to the nation and plan to waste your time and love on really bad dogs, here’s a funny Tumblr devoted to Dogshaming. It’s pictures of dogs next to signs identifying their bad actions. For example: “I pooped by the elliptical machine.” “I ate a Herman Melville novel.”  If we were to submit one for Ms. Ruby this week, instead of “I went flying over the Indian River Bridge in my human’s blue goggles,” it would most likely say, “I went on vacation and forgot that tinkling is an outdoor activity.” Alas.

And if, on the other other hand, an orgy of syllabus-writing and other forms of back-to-school craziness have you rethinking your career plans, by all means go read this piece on leaving academe by Terran Lane. It clearly and succinctly maps out how changes on campus — e.g., centralization of authority and decrease of autonomy, budgetary contraints and pressure to raise money, poor incentives to do exploratory research outside one’s own speciality — have made higher education a far less appealing place to work in recent years. Reading it, I thought if I were a software engineer instead of an English prof who needed help from a 12-year-old to create an image of my dog flying over a bridge in a pair of swim goggles I might head for the exits, too. Hey, Google, got any jobs for a 50-something feminazi with limited no tech skill and a library full of queer theory? No? Well, thanks for your consideration.

Sigh. Looks like I’ll have to finish that syllabus after all. Later, darlings. Today, I’ve got a wave to catch. Peace out.

Filed Under: career, higher ed, political follies

Sheroes and Fools

August 17, 2012 by 7 Comments

I sincerely hope this is the most disgusting thing you read all day ever in your life if you live to be ten thousand years old. It’s a report in the print edition of this morning’s Washington Post by Ed O’Keefe:

SCHAUMBURG, Ill. — No matter what her opponent might think, Tammy Duckworth insists she doesn’t talk much about Iraq anymore.

Duckworth, the Democrat challenging Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), lost her legs in a 2004 helicopter accident during the Iraq war. She uses both a wheelchair and prosthetic limbs when speaking with voters.

“Most people are familiar” with her injuries, she said in a recent interview. “I don’t talk about what happened in Iraq much, unless people ask.”

Her opponent, Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), said last month that “all she talks about” are her war injuries.

“Our true heroes, the men and women who served us, it’s the last thing in the world they talk about,” Walsh said.

The comments quickly drew national attention and swift condemnation from veterans groups. Duckworth reaped the political rewards.

“We saw a tenfold increase in Web traffic and volunteers and $50 donations from the whole country, because it really went viral,” Duckworth said. Most of the donations came from fellow veterans.

Duckworth said that if Iraq comes up with voters, it’s because “they ask the ‘Why are you doing this?’ questions.”

“That’s when I tell the story about Iraq and that’s when I say, ‘Look, I should be dead and I’m not,’ ” she said. “And I have that to live up to. I’m not a parent, I’ve not been blessed with kids, so I can’t say I’m doing this for my kids’ futures. I’m doing this because a bunch of heroes saved my life one day and I owe them. It’s hard to explain that to folks who don’t understand the military and the bond you have with your buddies, but I have to do more with my life and live up to that.”

Please, lord, make it stop. Please tell us we’ve finally hit the bottom of what passes for political discourse in this country when a non-veteran has the indecency to comment on the nature of heroism or question the right of a veteran to speak of her experience and her grievous wounds. We can’t sink any lower than this, can we? Oh, wait. Of course we can. Pardon your Madwoman while she bangs her head against the retina display screen of her shiny new Laptop.

I’m doing this because a bunch of heroes saved my life one day and I owe them.

Tammy Duckworth, you are a hero, and we hope you send Joe Walsh and his foul mouth packing come November. He is a disgrace to the office he holds.

Meantime, Mad People with your Laptops, click here to help Tammy win. Congress needs Dems and sheroes, and with Duckworth you get both.

Here’s a linkable piece by Ed O’Keefe on the Walsh/Duckworth race. (Dear WaPo: Please explain the logic of your paywall. I want to bring eyeballs to your dying enterprise, but you make it really hard and utterly baffling. Yours sincerely, The Last WaPo Reader on Earth.)

Also, Dana Milbank points out that this campaign only feels nastier than others because this time around Dems, from the president on down, “are employing the same harsh tactics that have been used against them for so long, with so much success. They have ceased their traditional response of assuming the fetal position when attacked, and Obama’s campaign is giving as good as it gets — and then some.”

He’s right, but I think I’ll spend the rest of the political season paddling quietly away in a Swift Boat to some peaceful land without newspapers, Interwebz, or large-screen teevees.

Yeah, right. Well, I am going to the beach for a week. Catch up with you soon, kids. Keep the faith, and may you too have a chance to step away from the Laptop for a spell and enjoy the last fleeting moments of this scorching summer. Peace out.

M. Wuerker, Politico

Filed Under: kick-a$$ women, political follies

Bustin’ a Move with the SOS

August 8, 2012 by 3 Comments

Your Madwoman has a new Laptop, a sweet, snazzy little number with display so pretty it makes her eyes smile. How happy does this back-to-school gift from the taxpayers of Turtle Country make me? Why, very nearly as happy as global goddess Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears to have been last night in Pretoria, South Africa. Watch this video. It’ll put a grin on your face for the evening, even if you don’t have retina display on your laptop and even if you’re planning to hunker down and face those syllabi tonight instead of zoning out to another four hours of #NBCFail. You go, Hillz. If ever a girl deserved to cut loose and get down, it’s you. Peace out.

Filed Under: kick-a$$ women

Who You Calling Chikin?

July 31, 2012 by 13 Comments

I work on a Chick-fil-A campus.

And a Pepsi campus.

A Capital One campus.

A Comcast campus.

Oh, and let’s not forget: A Northrop Grumman campus.

You, too? Yeah, welcome to the neoliberal university. I’m not a big fan of any of these companies, all of whom (yes, whom — because corporations are persons) either make crappy, dangerous products or engage in practices that are at odds with my own values and commitments, even when they aren’t flat out illegal. Only one of them is currently being targeted by a petition aimed at booting them off campus, and I’m guessing you know it isn’t the one that once employed Scooter Libby as a consultant.

Here is a link to the petition to remove the homophobic chicken purveyor from the sacred space of the food court in the student union at QTU. (Attention, new readers: “QTU” stands for Queer the Turtle University. It’s the pseudonym for my employer that I started using on Roxie’s World several years ago. The pseudonym is explained here.) I imagine there are similar drives being launched on campuses all over the country. There are, for example, at least two going on in that hotbed of homo-enablement, Kansas. By all means sign or launch one of these petitions if you feel moved to do so. I haven’t and I doubt that I will. On the other hand, I’m delighted to support the effort by QTU grad student Brian Real to get folks to donate the cost of a Chick-fil-A value meal (about $6.50) to LGBT causes and organizations tomorrow, August 1. That effort is a response to former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s call to make tomorrow national “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” in support of Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy’s recent declaration that the company supports “the biblical definition of the family unit.” Cathy said in a radio interview in June, “I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.'”

Raising money for causes such as marriage equality or anti-bullying is an excellent way to shake our collective fist at Cathy’s bigotry, because it will materially help to counter the more than $2 million his company has contributed to anti-gay groups and causes over the years. That’s a positive tactic and one likely to be of significant political value, particularly in places like Turtle Country, where marriage equality will be on the ballot in November. (Hey, Turtles, if you’re looking for someplace to send your $6.50 [or more!], click here.) I would also support a boycott, but that would be pointless in my case because I haven’t eaten at Chick-fil-A since I escaped the malls of my Midwestern girlhood. I can’t, however, get behind the charge to kick the company off campus because, as the opening of this post suggests, the outrage here seems selectively applied. QTU did not, for example, kick ROTC off campus during the Vietnam war or over the military’s discriminatory policies on sexual orientation. As far as I know, there’s been no serious opposition to the university’s doing business with any of the other companies mentioned above, though I’ve heard rumors of contraband Cokes stored in top-secret refrigerators in rogue offices on campus. That is strictly entre nous, of course.

Look, consumers have every right not to give their money to companies whose policies or practices they find objectionable. Such withholding does not infringe on the company owner’s freedom of speech or religion, contrary to what the shrieking idiots of the right might want us to believe. I assert my own freedom by refusing to do business with homophobes, though, like a lot of bourgeois lefties, I manage to turn a blind eye to the labor practices of companies like Whole Foods and Apple because they sell stuff that I want a whole lot more than a fried-chicken sandwich. I would be delighted if Chick-fil-A would leave my campus because customers decided they would rather take their business elsewhere. I would feel uncomfortable booting them off campus for failing to represent the values of the university when it’s clear we don’t hold the vast majority of companies who do business with the institution to anything like that standard. We — and by “we” I don’t mean the administration; I mean all the consumer-citizens of the university community — turn a blind eye to the banks, cable companies, and defense contractors on campus either because they seem too big to fight or because they supply goodies we want. There are very serious questions here about who universities are doing business with these days and how we might pressure our schools to be more transparent about where money is coming from and how contract and licensing arrangements are made. We don’t look serious, however, if we target one chicken-$hit bigot and conveniently ignore the missile manufacturers in our midst.

Tell me if you think I’m wrong about this, Madpeople at your Laptops. Should I, as an official BDOC (you know — Big Dyke on Campus) be leading the charge to get the chicken-$hit purveyor of fried-chicken sandwiches off my campus? I’ll go pour a cold, frosty glass of unhealthy, illicit Coke while I await your replies. Remember, though, that tomorrow you are going to send $6.50 (or more!) to some totally gay cause or group as a way of annoying Dan Cathy, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, and assorted other chicken-$hit bigots. Need help finding a cause or group? The Madwoman likes this one, because she wants Turtle Country to be the first state in the nation to win a vote on marriage equality. You choose your own, though. It’s a free country, right? Peace out.

(Image Credits: Picked up here and here.)

Filed Under: higher ed, queer stuff
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