Author: aiross

On Privilege

Class is canceled tomorrow (not for President’s day, mind, but for Mardi Gras) and I thought, after reading an interesting piece on privilege by Belle Waring at Crooked Timber, I may use some of the extra time to write a proper blog post. The post itself serves as an invitation for her — unusually respectful — commentators to continue discussing the broader issues raised by the recent post — comment really — by Scott Aaronson on the relationship between male nerd culture and feminism. The gist of the matter is that some men feel that their status on the bottom of the masculine totem pole is evidence of their lack of “privilege” and feminism either a) is the cause of that problem or, more gently, b) hasn’t done enough to address it (Susan Bordo would probably disagree). At its extreme, these beliefs lead to men’s rights activists and gamergate, and more moderately, whines about how feminism ruined everything.

My desire to post on this was not about the whole issue, but rather to just try to lay out a couple of the more annoying misconceptions about what “privilege” means when its used in feminist, queer, and other minority discourses. I admit, however, that I rarely use the term myself when I teach, mostly because when I used to throw it around in my college years, it became a catch-all explanation for the operation of power. Rather than offering an analytical lens privilege became a cudgel, a self-evident explanation for all sorts of social relationships that are often much more complicated. I actually think that some of the problems people have in understanding the use of the term is related to this issue. When folks hear “male privilege” they understand that to mean “privilege defines masculinity,” when in fact there are all kinds of masculinities that operate in contemporary life, some of which are more privileged than others.

Anyway, there was a comment in Belle’s thread that got me thinking on these lines. Here’s the second half:

The idea that, when I encounter a daughter of wealth, who never had to deal with beatings, that I, the son of a blue collar worker, who picked radishes next to migrant workers as a teen, am the ‘privileged’ one, strikes me as more than a little hilarious.

Look, people are individuals, with individual circumstances, and life stories, and this business of assigning ‘privilege’ to entire genders or races, in complete disregard of those individual details, isn’t just nonsense. It’s destructive nonsense. Real life isn’t lived on the basis of nominal ‘privilege’ and ‘up/down’ relations that exist only in theory.

Real life is lived in the fine grain, where the daughter of Ivy league parents goes to college, meets the first son of Appalachian farmers to make it past K-12, and imagines she’s confronting an embodiment of the “patriarchy”, rather than a prole struggling to better himself.

Less assigning power relationships, people, and more observing what’s really there. You’re not living in feminist theory, you’re living in a world that isn’t constrained by it. Don’t let the theory blind you to what’s really around you.

Some thoughts:

1) Privilege is not all or nothing. Having one form of privilege does not mean that you won’t experience forms of oppression, nor does it mean that others who experience forms of oppression won’t also have privilege. This is because we all take on, act out, and are multiple identities. Our relationship to others and to the social world are shaped by the way those identities “intersect.”

2) Privilege cannot be measured by the oppression olympics. (I’ve really returned to college with this post). Measuring whether the “daughter of wealth” has more or less privilege than you is a fruitless endeavor because privilege isn’t something one simply “has” as a static effect written on your body or identity. Rather, it is something that “operates” in particular situations; it therefore cannot be quantified. In other words, at certain moments you may suffer because of who you are and how you present (yes, that sucks!), but at others, you benefit (go, you!).  (I’m struck by the way these arguments are essentially different ways of saying that “everything bad that happens is someone else’s fault, everything good that happens is due to my own accomplishments.”)

3) Privilege is not simply about the individual, individual circumstances, or life stories (another word for “anecdote”). Privilege is about structural benefits that accrue to people on the basis of their perceived or actual gender or gender identity, race, bodily shape, sexual orientation, etc. The emphasis on the individual are attempts to sideswipe the implications of the social structures of which we are a part and are of a piece with neoliberal emphases on “choice” as a substitute for freedom. The illusion that it is simply individual circumstance that defines one’s relation to others and to success. And this illusion that makes it harder to wrestle with the broader constraints we all face. We cannot simply “choose” to disown our privilege.

4) Privilege, therefore, is not something one can analyze simply by looking “to what’s really around you,” because we all act in a world that is designed to hide it away. This is partly what “cultural hegemony” means; the creation of a worldview for and by the powerful that becomes so dominant that one must struggle to recognize it as anything but the common sense of the day. Feminist theory in part tries to reveal the constructed nature of that worldview in order to better challenge it. It is therefore one of the things that can enable you to see “what’s really there.” Don’t make the mistake of reinforcing a false dichotomy between “theory” and “reality.”

Ultimately, a lot of these issues can be boiled down to a lack of basic empathy for others (“society”) and an over-indulgence on oneself (“the individual”). In this way, it’s similar to the anti-vaccine doctor who doesn’t care if his “personal choice” harms another child. The inability to put oneself in another’s shoes, the total faith that one’s one feelings must be the only possible explanation, the only possible legitimate way to feel, has made understanding about how we impact others, how we — despite ourself sometimes — contribute to inequality, incredibly difficult. The most shocking moment of Aaronson’s comment for me, in this regard, was when he said that “My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erdös did.” This statement not only shows a complete inability to comprehend what it means to be a woman, a gay man, or an asexual person in contemporary society, but also a complete unwillingness to try. Had he done so, he may have been able to recognize that feminism actually has identified one of the causes of his problems. It’s called patriarchy.

Edited for some grammatical mistakes.

Syllabi for Spring 2015

While I haven’t had time to blog since starting my new job at Southern Miss, I have continued to get periodic e-mails from folks who find the syllabi I’ve posted online, so I want to continue that tradition. Next semester, I’m teaching an honors section of World Civilizations Since 1500 and a Senior Seminar. I recognize that my World Civ syllabus is very much European oriented, but an emphasis on empire allows me to talk about other regions of the world at the same time. My senior seminar is a version of a course I introduced at Kenyon College and uses the theme “History and the Popular” to guide students through the process of crafting original research. Links to both syllabi are accessible in the menu above.

Changes

I’m extremely fortunate to be starting a new position at the University of Southern Mississippi this fall as an Assistant Professor of History. I’m taking the opportunity to begin thinking about how I use this site a bit differently regarding my teaching. The past two years I used it in lieu of traditional course manage systems. Sometimes, this meant requiring students to use WordPress to blog their reading responses. In other instances, I used the site to display final projects. While I may continue, in some manner, this latter use, generally speaking the use of my own system for weekly student assignments just created more work for all involved. Instead, I will be shifting to the course management system used at Southern Miss.

In addition, while I will continue to make my PowerPoint slides available to my students after each lecture, will leave the slides from past courses online, and am happy to send links to new slides to anyone so interested, I will not be making them immediately public each semester. These too will now be uploaded onto Blackboard. This decision is mainly because I want new students to encounter the slides in class, rather than seeing old versions online and figuring out an effective archiving system using WordPress seemed to be more effort than it is worth. Current and past syllabi will continue to be posted each semester, but they will only be connected to a separate course website in cases where I use the site for a final project.

I still want to make as much of my teaching materials public as possible, without sacrificing the in-class experience. I’ve been very happy to have been contacted by a few people interested in those materials after coming across them here and I hope that will continue. Don’t hesitate to get in touch at if that is you.

The History of Sexuality in Video Games

I’m looking forward to when academic discourse begins to catch up with ongoing discussions online regarding representations of gender and sexuality in video games and other geeky ephemera. Today in the genre is a short history of sex in video games by Cara Ellison in Vice. I think it focuses a bit too much on the explicitly sexual and thus misses some examples that aren’t meant to be titillating. The most obvious is Atlus’s Catherine, which explores desire and infidelity in the context of — because why not — a puzzle game. But otherwise, it’s a fun read that also gives some nice nods to the way the medium has grown and matured over the past few decades.

Conservative politics will have conservative results

I’m not infrequently asked why I think that gay marriage support has basically reached takeoff velocity in the past couple years. My ordinary response is obliquely related to what I’ve been talking about in my past couple posts; it’s largely the effect of more and more people coming out of the closet. The cumulative effect of these individual acts simply reveals first, the ordinariness of gay people and second, their prevalence. The regional differences I’ve noted are obviously important, but for the most part people have gotten used to the fact that queers are here and they’ve gotten used to it. Joan Walsh, however, points to why gay marriage demands have, in the grand scheme of things, been relatively easily been accommodated: its politics are essentially conservative:

I’ve come to believe that the difference exists because, except for far right religious extremists and outright homophobes, marriage equality is, at heart, a conservative demand – letting gays and lesbians settle down and start families and have mortgages just like the rest of us will contribute to the stability of families and society.

As she acknowledges, this echoes a long-standing and ultimately successful argument in favor of gay marriage by the likes of Andrew Sullivan and more recently Ted Olsen. But Walsh also puts this trend into dialog with more troubling developments regarding women’s rights. While we’ve seen the onward march of gay rights, feminist accomplishments are being rolled back.

Walsh tries to avoid putting LGBT accomplishments into conflict with women’s rights (“I don’t mean to pit women against the LGBT community, or suggest one side is “winning” at the expense of the other), but its actually a bit hard to do. If the movement, as represented by mainstream organizations like the Human Rights Campaign, has deployed an essentially conservative vision of the family, then should we not recognize the possibility that it has, in fact, contributed to the solidification of opposition to forms of sexuality outside it? Gay marriage advocates have very effectively normalized gay partnerships, but in doing so they’ve also normalized the family itself and so have perhaps contributed to the resistance to a politics dedicated to increasing not just women’s, but everyone’s sexual autonomy outside those confines.

Content Warning: “Homosexual Wedding”

gay wedding
Image from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/15/same-sex-marriage-economy_n_3267725.html

Today, I came across another article related to my continuing interest with people who apparently don’t know any gay people. This one is from a town in Pennsylvania whose high school has canceled a performance of Spamalot because there’s apparently a same-sex marriage. I’ll take the principal’s word on that, but the local news article, while largely sympathetic to those protesting the move, seemed to only reinforce the school’s claim that “homosexuality does not exist in a conservative community such as South Williamsport” with its reference to a “homosexual wedding” as if its some odd foreign custom, rather than an act that has been legal in Pennsylvania for a couple months now.

Evidence, however, apparently exists that homosexuality does, in fact, exist in South Williamsport: “I’d just seen one of my friends walk with her girlfriend the other day. It’s definitely in my school and all around,” said Gianna Goegard, a student from South Williamsport. I love this. Goegard had “seen” one of her friends walking with her girlfriend. Did her friend not introduce the two of them? Had the friend told Goegard that she was gay? Did they ever talk about girlfriends and boyfriends? Did those gay people who were “all around” reveal themselves? Its a quick quote, to be sure, but Goegard seems to be making an assumption, rather than speaking on the basis of actual knowledge.

Even in its attempt to poke at the principal’s assertion that there were no “homosexuals” in South Williamsport, the article enforces that very view by raising evidence that relies on the closet itself. In other words, even the attempt to reveal the existence of homosexuality in a “conservative community such as South Williamsport” relies on enforcing homosexuality’s otherness by virtue of its continuing status as the “secret which always gives itself away” (David Halperin, Saint Foucault, 35).

“Problem Description: Images of two homosexual men on television kissing.”

Image from: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/sports/michael-sam-celebrates-draft-pick-kiss-boyfriend-n102341

The title of this post comes from one of the complaints the FCC received in response to Michael Sam kissing his boyfriend after getting drafted into the NFL. I admit that I don’t particularly care about the NFL or about Michael Sam being added to the growing list of “first openly gay person to…” But I did find the language of the complaints to be really interesting. First, the repeated emphasis on display and “openness:”

“I was incensed at this vile, disgusting, inappropriate display of homosexual behaviour.” “The show depicted homosexual acts openly between two men”

This kind of talk stems less, I think, from a desire to pretend that homosexuality doesn’t exist, but rather from a different kind of sexual ethos that demands one speak around, rather than directly of, same-sex desires. In fact, second, the unwillingness to name what these viewers saw as “gay” — or even to use a pejorative — and instead the constant use of the term “homosexual” speaks, I think, to an attempt to name what is still essentially unnameable for a large segment of the population. For the most part, the complaints aren’t really about condemning same-sex desire as such — though that is clearly present — but rather about the fact that ESPN forced these viewers to engage with the existence of such desire on different terms. This is one reason why its important to not allow the national momentum seen by the gay marriage movement to overshadow continuing regional differences. Recently, the Human Rights Campaign announced a multimillion dollar program to promote gay rights in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama. The goals of the campaign are rightly focused, it seems, on community outreach, but number one is “Empower LGBT people (and straight allies) to come out” and I wonder if that is necessarily the right path to take when it’s clear that the movement speaks an entirely different language than the people it is trying to reach.

Brief Review: Anne-Marie Sohn, Du premier baiser à l’alcôve: La sexualité des Français au quotidien (1850-1950)

SohnAnne Marie Sohn’s Du premier baiser a l’alcove (1996) argues that the movement towards sexual liberation began in the century prior to the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s.1 Explicitly contrasting her study against those that have focused on expert discourses on sexuality — a trend that she blames on the work of Michel Foucault — Sohn attempts to recuperate the sexual lives of “ordinary people.” Through an analysis of a dazzling amount of judicial records drawn from all over France, Sohn describes the sexual mores, practices, beliefs, and fears of both elite and popular classes.

However, the shear breadth of the material leads to two problems, one historical and the other theoretical. First, the evidence is presented without a great deal of context. While there are exceptions where Sohn effectively signposts moments of historical change, more often we are left wondering when exactly these various beliefs and practices went into and out of vogue. Second, the sheer volume of material leads her to a form of analysis through description. Rather than questioning the source material, she treats it largely as a transparent window onto historical truth.

The book therefore remains extraordinarily useful for researchers such as myself because of its documentation and narrative sweep. But it ultimately reifies the “repressive hypothesis” not simply through its argument that the Third Republic saw “a moral rupture which paves the way towards sexual liberation” [une rupture éthique qui ouvre la voie à la liberté sexuelle], but also through its unwillingness to complicate and situate its sources.2 Foucault’s lesson was not simply to pay attention to discourse, but to recognize the ways in which the “reality” that Sohn seeks to recover does not exist outside it.

1. Sohn, Anne-Marie. Du premier baiser à l’alcôve: La sexualité des Français au quotidien (1850-1950). Paris: Aubier, 1996↩

2. Ibid, 307↩

Back to Life

After what was a rather stressful and busy semester (year?), I’m hoping to get this site back into shape and hopefully post something now and then. Consider this a placeholder/promise of that goal.

Digital History and Early Modern Europe

The major assignment in my survey of Early Modern Europe this past semester required that students work in groups to construct guides to digital history on any topic within the period. Each guide was to comprise of an introduction to the topic using “traditional” research and a list and description of relevant online resources, databases, and/or projects. Those guides have been placed online via the course website and are available here. Topics ranged from the Reformation to French Colonialism to interactions between Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire. I chose to ask students to complete this assignment in this particular course after attending the Digital Humanities Summer School at the University of Bern, Switzerland this past summer where, among other things, I was introduced to the sheer volume of digital work being done on early modern material. My students’ guides, I think, give a fairly diverse entry point to the field; materials range from basic primary source databases to complex digital mapping projects.

Most of my work in the digital humanities has involved these kinds of assignments and they pose particular difficulties, especially in a survey course. First, students often have very little preexisting experience using web publishing platforms such as WordPress, programming or markup languages, or digital humanities more broadly. This means that class time must be devoted to introducing students to at least some of these areas in order for them to be able to complete the project. Second, topics that may be very prominent in the historiography — the Reformation, say — may not be as represented online. This creates a unique tension when helping students choose their topics; while we’d prefer to see digital work on topics of digital interest, students also need to be able to locate relevant analog sources as well. The guides themselves demonstrate this difficulty. While some feature a great deal of secondary source research in the introductions and much less by way of digital history work, others show the complete opposite. Third, grading projects that can — and should be — continually in progress poses problems not simply because of the time it takes in a survey course, but also because the projects are never really finished. Students continue to have access to their projects and can edit them freely; others can comment on them and offer advice and new resources can be added. I attempted to solve this problem by having two due dates: first, the initial draft had to be put online, then two weeks later I would download whatever was available online and grade that version (I used Evernote and Skitch to mark up the pages).

Digital history in the classroom, put simply, must be much more than just another assignment. Rather, it adds an entirely new layer of inquiry to any given course. In the future, I will probably devote even more in-class time to the assignment, a task made easier by the fact that almost everyday there is a new, relevant digital source available for us to work with. How would our reading of Candide have changed had I had the time to prepare to work with the Bibliothèque nationale’s Candide app? Perhaps it would be worth considering ways that the survey itself could turn more fully around the theme of the digital without losing the narrative such a course is designed to provide.