More Berks: Reflections on Writing Body History

Along with learning heaps from other people at the Berks, I also had a chance to talk about my own work in a conference seminar called “What is the history of the body?” We pre-circulated the papers and then used the conference time to explore their overlapping themes, which allowed discussion to go both wider and deeper than at an ordinary conference panel. The papers ranged from Heather Munro Prescott’s research on students fighting for birth control and other health services in the 1960s to Jessica Luther’s explication of alchemists’ attempts to quite literally incarnate themselves as men with wombs: hermaphrodites who embodied both “male” creativity and “female” generativity.

My own paper, which I mentioned here when it was still a bundle of semi-formed ideas, was a theoretical piece on the relationship between discourses that shape bodies and actual lived, embodied experiences. I won’t try to rehash it all here, because it’s an adventure in scary theory; anyone who wants to know more about it should email me. Instead, I’d like to muse on the themes I addressed in my oral presentation for the seminar.

Writing my seminar paper pushed me to reflect on why I was drawn to the history of the body in the first place. And as I thought about this, I realized that even as historians or other scholars write the stories of others’ embodied experiences, our own experiences remain at an Olympic height. Yet clearly those experiences are bound to affect our ideas and interpretations. So it makes sense to turn a critical gaze back upon our own experiential motivations for studying the history of the body and ask how they may reveal some systematic biases and blind spots. My guinea pig for this was the test case I know best - myself - but with the idea that my own experiences and agendas may point to some broader themes and concerns. (And yes, this is more navel-gazing than I’ve ever done in an academic venue.)

I first got interested in the history of the body in the late 1980s when I realized that it offered fresh insights into areas that were already long-standing interests of mine: sexuality, motherhood, medicine, and power. When I embarked on researching experiences of pregnancy and childbirth for my dissertation, I was very excited about two books that had just come out: Emily Martin’s The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction and Barbara Duden’s The Woman Beneath the Skin. I was fascinated by the broad range of embodied experiences that their work depicted. While they both focused almost entirely on women’s bodies and experiences, they also illuminated broader themes in the human condition, which are often though not always gendered – particularly, how power relations within a society are reflected and contested in experiences that result from the interaction of culture and biology. This basically anthropological lens was exhilarating to me both intellectually and politically; it seemed to mesh well with Foucault and feminism, which were the two main avenues for my thinking about power. To this day, I think that the project of making the strange familiar, and the familiar strange (to echo anthropologist Roy Grinker’s phrasing in Unstrange Minds) remains a powerful tool for historians of the body. (Jessica’s paper for the seminar did just that impressively.)

But looking back, I can see that it wasn’t just intellectual excitement. I had other, more personal agendas in play, which I think also have a shared, generational basis. One reason the history of the body resonated with me is that it meshed with my post-hippie youth. My friends and I were ferociously hungry for all sorts of experience, much of which engaged the body. I was younger than the students Heather studied, but in the early 1980s I knew a guy who took acid every Thursday and went wandering in California’s coastal hills; he called it his tripping day. I wasn’t anywhere near that dedicated or foolhardy about pushing the limits of embodied experience, but I did go to a lot of Grateful Dead shows and some of what transpired there might be difficult to explain when I run for President someday.

Boiling it down to “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” might oversimplify it, and yet that not-so-holy trinity absolutely foregrounded embodied experience. Unlike earlier generations of young people, who surely took their own risks, we thought specifically about “experience” as something that was desirable, that we hungered for. This was a motivator for the students Heather studied. It was also an influence on some of us future historians of the body. I realize not everyone who came of age from the late 1960s through the early ‘80s had equivalent experiences, yet it was part of the Zeitgeist. Whether you embraced and pursued experience for its own sake or consciously rejected it, you could hardly avoid taking a position.

So the first question that this examination of my own “experience of experience” raises is how these sorts of experiences have shaped our research agendas in ways that we haven’t necessarily examined. Namely: Have they created a presumption that the body is somehow a privileged site for the workings of liberation and repression, freedom and social control, and can this presumption be sustained? (One influence on my thinking about this - along with a slew of academic stuff - was a discussion along these lines involving figleaf, Kochanie, and others.)

My paper for the seminar argued that this is indeed the case, that the often-unexamined character of embodied experience makes such experience particularly potent. I’m generally convinced that this is true, and yet I’ll also readily admit that it’s very hard to ground this assumption. That’s why I think in the end it should be regarded as a hypothesis – one that has to be proven and re-proven empirically to fit with the available evidence, in an iterative process. (My seminar paper went into this iterative idea in more depth. Jessica’s paper actually did this, quite beautifully, and I tried to do it as well in my dissertation.) Sometimes, though, the evidence may show that in a given set of circumstances, the presumption doesn’t hold much water or obscures more than it explains.

A second area where I see my embodied experience affecting the history I write – often in ways that may remain preconscious or only dimly perceived – is through the interaction of the writing process with my own embodiment. Here, too, I don’t think I’m alone, but I’ll speak for myself and you can let me know if it makes sense. Most often, this takes form as a process of effacement of the body while writing. A relatively trivial example, one I’m sure most of you have shared, is when we try to ignore a headache or backache while in order to focus on the work. Many people deal with chronic pain and their work would come to a halt if they didn’t tune out their discomfort.

But when I do this - when I tune out my body while writing - I re-enact Cartesian dualism. Ironically, my seminar paper was in part an argument against splitting our selves into body and mind. So a second set of questions would be: How does this act of bracketing out my own body affect the kind of body history I write? Does this habit of effacement create blind spots, and if so, how do I rout them out?

But simple effacement is not the only possibility here. An example of embodied experience more specific to my own work was my changing relation to childbirth between starting and completing my dissertation. When I embarked on my project, a number of women scholars – mothers, one and all – told me I really couldn’t write about pregnancy and childbirth without having experienced them myself. Mindful of Barbara Duden’s warning against using our bodies as a bridge to the past (and just plain ornery), I was determined to prove them wrong.

As it turned out, I had my first baby while in the midst of writing chapters on hospital birth and the emotional import of pregnancy. In my panic at the thought that I might never focus properly again, I became the queen of effacing my body. Someone might be kicking up a storm in my belly, but I tried my darnedest to ignore everything below my neck. Or so I thought.

My perspective on this changed radically when I began revising the manuscript and I realized how my own childbearing experience hadn’t necessarily created a bridge to the past but it had thrown into question some of the present-day dogma that I’d absorbed about childbearing. For instance, the now-current notion that pregnancy is basically healthy and not pathological had blunted my empathy and understanding of the physical challenges women have faced in performing their jobs and housework while pregnant. I had to experience morning sickness and deep exhaustion for myself before I recognized my own blind spot.

My third and final question would thus be: How can we use our own embodiment to write better, more perceptive, more empathetic histories without falling prey to the assumption that our body can serve as a simple bridge? Quite possibly, this question can only be answered in specific contexts, looking at our own experiences and how they may overlap – or not – with the kinds of experiences we’re studying.

I’ve used my own experiences as a starting point here, because I didn’t want to be presumptuous. I can’t speak directly for other writers’ and scholars’ experiences. And yet, judging from audience reaction at the seminar, I don’t think either my experiences or their implications are limited to me.

Similarly, I’ve laid out these thoughts from a historian’s perspective, but I think they may apply to at least some aspects of blogging. Most of us who don’t write strictly political blogs deal with personal experiences in one form or another. Sometimes those experiences are our own; sometimes they belong to other people; sometimes they’re shared property, so to speak. What sorts of assumptions about experience are lurking in the background as we blog about experiential stuff?

If you’ve stuck with me through all of this, I’d love to hear if any of these thoughts resonated with you.

Oh Joy! My 'Winger State Senator Defends the Flag

Photo by Flickr user cobalt123, used under a Creative Commons license.

My, I'm glad my state senator has her priorities straight. State Senator Joy Padgett's latest newsletter reports:

Padgett fights to end sale of foreign-made American flags

Senator Padgett recently introduced Senate Bill 316, legislation that would prohibit Ohio retailers from selling Ohio and American Flags that were not manufactured in the United States.

"The American flag is known throughout the world as a symbol of freedom and democracy," said Padgett. "Unfortunately, not only are our flags being manufactured outside of the United States, but a large number of foreign-made American flags come from China. The thought that the very symbol representing freedom from oppression could be made by a child worker in a sweatshop earning pennies a day is, to me, reprehensible."

SB 316 would make the retail sale of a foreign-made American or Ohio flag a third degree misdemeanor, which is punishable by up to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine.

(No link available, the newsletter came to me via snailmail.)

Sure, any reasonable person would conclude that we have a balance of trade problem, and that China is a big part of it. But I think redressing it will take more than just regulating the import of flags - to Ohio.

And of course Padgett is right that child labor is an issue. But since when is it unique to the manufacture of flags? Why doesn't she include sneakers or soccer balls if this isn't just pseudo-patriotic grandstanding?

Padgett is no newcomer to hypocrisy. This is the same vile politician who in her 2004 campaign for the state senate accused her Democratic opponent, Terry Anderson, of being anti-American and cozy with terrorists. A campaign flyer depicted Anderson meeting with a leader of Hezbollah.

Anderson is the former AP journalist who was held captive in Lebanon from 1985 to 1991, longer than any of the other hostages. His captors? Hezbollah.

Padgett won that race. We're still stuck with her.

That's why Padgett's newfound compassion for exploited children rings just a tad hollow.

What I Learned at the Berks

Earlier I promised I'd post about the coolest things I learned at this year's Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, and now I'm already at my next gig, the National Women's Studies Association annual meeting in Cincinnati. My ordinary weekend travels usually don't take me any farther than my local farmer's market, so I'm a bit disoriented to be on the road so much. I feel like a character in a David Lodge novel.

But before I forget all I learned, I'd like to take a quick romp through the Berk highlights of the Berks. It's probably skewed and idiosyncratic since I mostly sat in on panels related to bodies, reproduction, and sexuality. And I make no claim to fully represent the presenters' arguments. This is a rundown of ideas that I thought were way cool. (Presenters' names are in parentheses.)

• Contraception among native Canadian communities was, well, a community affair, and not just up to individuals. Unpublished notes by white Canadian anthropologists of the 1920s and 1930s show that there were indeed individual actions one could take, such as bathing in the creek or nursing one's baby to prevent conception. But many of the medicine women's prescriptions triggered social surveillance. A woman might be advised to wear an otterskin bracelet dring the new moon or to paint her face red and her belly yellow. While my immediate reaction was, "Oh, interesting varieties of magical thinking," that's far from the whole story. Such visible tactics signaled that the community would be watching to see whether that woman became pregnant - and her husband was well aware of this. Unlike many modern nations where low birth rates have inspired pronatalist policies, these Plains tribes collectively wanted to regulate their family size because too many babies would restrict the group's mobility. (Kristin Burnett)
• If you follow media reporting on evolutionary psychology, you might image that Darwinian theory and feminism have always been implacable enemies. That just ain't so. Early feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton embraced the theory of evolution because it offered a chance to rewrite Genesis. If Eve is the mother of humanity and the source of all sin and suffering, and if the serpent picked on her because he knew she was inherently weaker than Adam, it's hard to make a case for women's full equality. By embracing evolution, Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt, and others could argue that Eve wasn't simply derivative from Adam; because Eve came after Adam, she must actually be a higher life form! However, few of these early feminists advocated jettisoning religion altogether. They just argued for a more nuanced, less literalist reading of the Genesis story. (Kimberly Hamlin)
• It wasn't news to me that early American feminists also generally embraced eugenics and saw planned mating and breeding as a progressive force. (And this, despite Francis Galton's contention that eugenics was "a particularly virile creed.") What did surprise me was how adamantly American conservatives rejected eugenics. Today, neo-eugenic ideas such as Depo-Provera shots for the poor tend to be held by conservatives and racists. In early twentieth century Europe, left-wing and feminist reformers advocated eugenic programs, but so did many on the right, albeit with much stronger racist overtones. So I was surprised to hear that American conservatives accused feminists of treating men like livestock and of simply demanding too much of men. Press coverage of early women who became single mothers by choice insinuated that some women wanted to render men unnecessary altogether - anticipating Maureen Dowd by decades, I might add. (Susan Rensing)
• Wet nursing, a common practice in fifteenth-century Valencia, was tangled up in contradictory ideas about maternal duty and the balance of power between fathers and biological mothers. Contracts were struck between fathers and wet nurses that seemed to leave birth mothers out of the loop altogether. And yet, birth mothers exercised power in a variety of ways. In one case that landed in court, a birth mother named Lucretia - the concubine of a Dominican friar - claimed she'd been under contract to nurse her infant but gotten stiffed of her fees. Because the law held that if you fed your baby out of maternal love or piety you couldn't be paid for it, Lucretia had to argue, perversely, that she had no maternal feeling for the child whatsoever. In a second case, a widow named Isabella sued the executor of her dead husband's estate when he refused to fork over the fees for a wet nurse even though two surgeons and a midwife had certified her unable to breastfeed due to inverted nipples. She tried all manner of tricks: poultices made of chard, ointment, cupping glasses, and a technique called "opening" that I think I'd prefer not to explore further. The court ruled for Isabella, showing that mothers could hold their own in legal affairs and effectively defend the interests of their children. (Debra Blumenthal)
• Conventional wisdom holds that since at least ancient Greece, women's bodies were historically regarded as inferior and the male body as the healthy norm. This story turns out to be more complicated, though. A set of widely circulated broadsides sixteenth-century Germany depicted the female body as the norm. These anatomical pictures featured a lift-the-flap design, though not the transparent overlays that so fascinated me in the encyclopedia when I was a little girl. The female figure showed a small baby (not a fetus) inside the uterus. It also featured ducts running from the uterus to the nipples, reflecting the theory that menstrual blood nurtured the "fruit" during pregnancy and then transformed into breastmilk once the baby was born. The text alongside the diagrams describes the male figure as lacking a womb. Male spermatic vessels are said to be like the female spermatic vessels (that is, the ovaries). And most remarkably: the penis merited no discussion whatsoever! (Kathleen Crowther)
• In contemporary Poland, abortion rights have been progressively restricted since the early 1990s. Like other East-Bloc countries, Poland's Communists had legalized abortion. Between 1956 and 1993, first-trimester abortion was available on demand. Since 1993, women seeking an abortion have had to qualify under one of three possible indications: 1) genetic defects in the fetus, 2) rape or incest as the cause of pregnancy, or 3) health problems on the part of the pregnant woman. These indications are not so very different from the old West German framework. Yet abortion is vanishingly rare in Poland today, with only about 200 legal abortions performed annually. With a population of roughly 38 million, about 10 million of whom are fertile females, this figure is exceptionally low. Of course, it only points to the prevalence of illegal abortion. Even women with legal indications for abortion face insurmountable hurdles. Hospitals refuse to perform them. Women end up in the "abortion underground," where the same physicians who publicly declare themselves "too ethical" to do abortion willingly perform them for high fees! The driving forces behind this are the power of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, the idea that abortion was a Communist holdover, the lack of civil society including a women's movement, and the absence of a discourse on women's rights due to the old law portraying abortion solely as a public health imperative. The result? A fourteen-year-old rape victim was recently denied an abortion. Worse yet, she was taken out of her mother's custody on the presumption that the mother must be coercing the daughter! (Wanda Nowicka)
• Home pregnancy tests may be not only driving up the rate of recorded miscarriages. They may also be changing the meaning of miscarriage itself for American women today. Instead of waiting for confirmation of pregnancy after missing a period or two, or even waiting for quickening (fetal movements) as women did a century ago, women now use home tests even before they've missed a period. A positive line signals to many women not just that conception has occurred but that "there's a baby" in there. But this sets women up for grief and woe: Of 100 meetings of egg and sperm, 57 never implant (and thus wouldn't result in a positive test). Of the 43 that do implant, 10 miscarry before a doctor would declare the woman pregnant. These are the early pregnancies that home testing often picks up on. Of the 33 that continue, 4 will miscarry "clinically" and 29 will reach full term (give or take a few weeks). Your reporter Sungold exists only because her own mother experienced one of those 10-in-100 events a few months earlier. When she told me that she thought she'd had an "early miscarriage" just before conceiving me, I was incredulous: "What do you mean, you don't know if you were pregnant?" Today, she'd have experienced this as a certain loss, and thus possibly as a more painful one. Indeed, this presentation argued that women now face a cultural imperative to grieve these very early losses irrespective of how they actually feel. (Lara Friedenfels)

And now I'm realizing why I didn't have energy to blog the Berks right after the fact - my brain was still spinning. Now I'm back to the NWSA before I miss out on all the fun there.

I'm So High School

Hmm. All my intellectual pretensions have come to this:

My friend The Smirking Cat qualified as genius-level, and she writes about hockey (among other things). Go figure.

I've written about such esoterica as early medieval restrictions on sex, a critical history of patriarchy, and how women in the FLDS aren't much better off than ancient Babylonian women. I've bloviated about embodied experience and ahistoricism in the history of childbirth. I've rambled on about all manner of obscure medical and scientific ideas, from the health benefits of ejaculation to the link between testosterone and finger length (both of which get lots of Google hits, for some reason, though not quite as many as the Duggan family and their 18 children).

I've flirted with Marx, Irigaray, and Foucault, fer goodness sake. What more does a gal have to do to get dubbed pedantic?

Then again, assuming that the algorithm looks like stuff like sentence length and structure, being decidedly middlebrow might mean that my English hasn't been permanently Germanized. So perhaps I shouldn't be miffed. After all, I don't want my prose to sound like what Mark Twain lampooned in "The Awful German Language." It's bad enough when verbs get split in two in German or pile up at the end of a sentence like a train wreck (as a grad school colleague of mine loved to say). I don't want to start doing it in my mother tongue.

If you run your blog through this little analyzer, let me know in comments if you came out as more or less dumbed-down than Kittywampus!

Jon Stewart on Baracknophobia

Via the Huffington Post, Jon Stewart does a funny takedown of the media's rumor mill and its love affair with "the audacity of fear":



The "lady parts October surprise" would deserve a post of its own, but I've got no time for it. I'm in a hotel room at the National Women's Studies Association meeting and I need to get to my session.

And Walking Isn't a Medical Necessity, Either

According to Nate Jenkins at the AP, the state of Nebraska has decided that there's no need to help men who are struggling with erectile dysfunction. It already stopped Medicaid payments for Viagra and related drugs when the federal government did the same in 2006. Now it's excluding penile implants from Medicaid coverage as well.

I realize that the very term "penile implant" may have put you into a cringe. But before you close this window on your browser, consider that many men who suffer from erectile dysfunction after treatment for prostate cancer (including radiation as well as surgery) may not get much help from the drugs for erectile dysfunction. The Austin Powers vacuum pump works only for a minority. Their most effective remaining options are to try injections (yes, the needle goes where you think it does) or to undergo penile implant surgery.

These days, implants are inflatable. They're no longer a rigid rod that produces a permanent adolescent erection. The only outwardly visible sign of the implant is a fluid reservoir that apparently resembles a third testicle from close up.

From patient accounts that I've read, the erection resulting from the implant feels natural and pleasurable to both partners. Most of the men who have an implant wonder why they didn't get the surgery sooner. And while I'm not suggesting this should be anything other than a last resort, these guys sometimes brag just a little about how long they can go. Given what they've been through, I'd say they've earned bragging rights.

But apart from the cringe factor, this is what they're up against:

State Medicaid director Vivianne Chaumont said the change is consistent with a federal rule, approved in 2006, that barred the federal government from spending Medicaid dollars on erectile dysfunction drugs including Viagra. Nebraska followed suit a few months later and changed its rules to keep state Medicaid money from being spent on the drugs.

The federal government will still help pay for penile implants in states that choose to continue covering the procedure under their Medicaid plans.

“The decision was made not to cover the drugs, so it’s ... a good idea to have particular procedures for prosthesis not covered as well,” Chaumont said.

Medicaid is meant to pay for the medical necessities of needy people and “sex is not medically necessary,” she said.

(Associated Press via the Lincoln Journal-Star)

Do I even need to enumerate what's wrong with this? For one thing, it'll save small change. Jenkins reports that since 2003, a whopping three Nebraskans on Medicaid have had the surgery and the state's share for all three totaled $11,705.

The ruling is also blatantly sexist. The state Medicaid program covers breast reconstruction, as most private insurers are required to do in accordance with federal law. Where's the difference? Again, from the AP:

Chaumont, who moved to Nebraska about a year ago to take her current position, said she didn’t know why the decision was made to cover breast reconstruction under Nebraska Medicaid but added that it didn’t strike her as unreasonable.

“I don’t think breast cancer has anything to do with sexual dysfunction or sexual impotence,” she said.

Asked why it is important to cover breast reconstruction, she said that doing so “is in line with other insurers.”

I'm always uncomfortable when breast cancer and prostate cancer get pitted against each other. Both deserve adequate - no, generous - funding. It should never be a zero-sum game. And in this case, there's no conceivable reason to cover one but not the other. Breast cancer has effective advocates. Prostate cancer remains largely in the shadows. That's the only real difference.

Note also Chaumont's wholly bureaucratic justification. She has no idea why breast reconstruction is reimbursed! Maybe she implicitly sees breast reconstruction in terms of the politics of appearance and normative femininity. If you're missing a boob, you can't be a real woman. What's worse, if people have to look at your asymmetry, they might be reminded of the artificiality of the beauty ideal, the toll disease can take, and our shared mortality. Not that Chaumont is reflective enough to say any of this.

Of course, men with ED often say they no longer feel like real men. But their losses can be kept safely hidden from the public eye. Everyone else gets to pretend there's nothing wrong.

At bottom, Chaumont is enforcing the idea that sex is optional and probably downright icky or evil. That sex is not for people who are aging or ill (even if an increasing number of prostate cancer patients are in their 40s and 50s). That sex is not a part of mental health. She doesn't give a shit that their partners suffer nearly as much from the loss of marital "delight." But what gave her the right to impose her own anti-sex views on Nebraskans who've had the double bad luck to be both poor and seriously ill?

What's next? Will the state of Nebraska refuse to subsidize walkers or canes on the theory that walking is not a medical necessity? You can stay alive without walking, chewing, seeing, or fucking. And you can survive for decades without using your higher brain functions, including logic and empathy, as Chaumont's decision proves. It seems that even thinking is not a medical necessity.

Tuesday Recipe, Part II: The Tiger's Bunny Birthday Cake

This doesn't really count as a recipe, but it was just as yummy as it was silly - the Tiger's cake to celebrate his fifth birthday.

It's Max the bunny from the "Max and Ruby" books by Rosemary Wells. The cake is chocolate from a mix; the frosting is homemade buttercream with a dash of almond extract. I carved Max out of a 9 x 13 rectangle, basically by cutting away everything that wasn't bunny. The Tiger's daddy did most of the face with a little help from me.


The Tiger likes Max. The Tiger also is Max. That stinker-ish glint in the eye is one we know a little too well.

His actual birthday is still two days from now but we had to celebrate early because I'll be out of town (sniffle). I don't really expect he'll grow out of his mischief between now and then. But I do know that a lot happens in the sixth year of life, and by a year from now, he'll be a whole lot more civilized. I'd better stop now before I get all maudlin about how my baby is about to leave his early childhood behind.

Tuesday Recipe: Bright Lights Chard with Raisins and Pine Nuts

This is an adapted recipe that comes from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant. The original used spinach. The pictures below are all mine.

First, sometime in April, you plant Bright Lights chard seeds about a half-inch deep in a bed tilled with lots of compost and manure. Chard is easy to grow - except for last season, when I thought rabbits were eating it but was puzzled at why bunnies would systematically eat only the large leaves and leave a smooth edge where the stem began. It turned out a homeless person was living in a nearby empty house. That's why the "bunny" was so clever.

Anyway, a couple of weeks after germination, you thin it to about a six-inch spacing in every direction because chard is a beet relative and sprouts more than one plant per seed. You feed it organically, which here just meant leaving it alone because the bed was rich. You keep it watered until its tap roots are well established. It probably doesn't hurt to just generally love on it and tell it that it's beautiful.

And then, about six weeks after planting, it looks like this:


You'll notice the jungle features lots of volunteer clover, left to flourish while I do battle with the crab grass at the back of the bed. It'll grow larger and last until the very end of the season. Unlike spinach, chard won't bolt or turn bitter in the heat. I've had it survive until nearly Christmas. Since it's biennial, it will come back in the spring if we get even a slightly merciful winter.


Up close, you can see some of the color variations. For some reasons, red is predominating in my patch, though I do have some yellow, white, and pink.


When you're ready to start cooking, you cut off just the big outer leaves with a sharp paring knife so you can harvest more later. You wash them, enjoying the absence of aphids, leafminers, or other pests - so far I've been lucky this year.

Here's the chard displaying its finery before cooking fades it:


And here's what all you'll need to finish the job:

About 2 pounds of chard (you can sometimes buy Bright Lights at the grocery store, but any chard will do)
3 T. raisins (I use a bit more)
3 T. pine nuts (I use a lot more)
3 garlic cloves, sliced thinly (I usually quarter them first)
1/4 cup olive oil (I use less)

I put the pine nuts in the oven at 400 degrees to roast for about 5 minutes; you could also sauté them with the garlic in some olive oil in a non-stick pan (I use a wok). Either way, you want both to be golden. While doing this, I let the stems of the chard boil or steam for a few minutes until tender and let the raisins plump up in hot water. Once the garlic is light gold, the chard leaves can be added. Stir them on medium-high until they're wilted to your satisfaction. Add everything else, including salt and pepper to taste, and give it a few more stirs. Add more olive oil if desired (I didn't).

And here's what you've got. Yum! I used to make this a lot during the 1990s, before kids, while I was still living in Berlin and white chard (Mangold) was ubiquitous. Last night, even the Bear enjoyed it, and I wondered why I ever stopped making it regularly.

I Pass the Bear Test as a Mama

Well, here's the consolation for being a disaster as a 1930s housewife: I got the Bear's highest rating when I arrived home last night. Still sleepy from the ride to the airport, he informed me, "Mama, you get an A plus plus. And Daddy gets an A plus plus."

That's an A++. My students should be so lucky to get a grade like that from me - ever!

Okay, I'd just increased my market value by going out of town for a few days, but even so: I marvel at how forgiving my children are. I marvel at how they are thriving with their imperfect but (apparently) good-enough mother. I have so many moments where I'm impatient or distracted or just worn thin by their squabbling. And yet, at the core, they know how much I love them, and I know how much they love me.

Yet another of my mate's roses.

Feminist Blogrolling Bonanza

At the Berkshire Conference this weekend (which was outstanding; more on it later) I got to catch up with one of my grad school compatriots, Heather Munro Prescott, who blogs at Knitting Clio. By happy coincidence, we were even on same panel. I also had the pleasure of meeting Historiann, whose blog I've also been reading since I discovered it a couple months ago. Seeing them both was the kick in the butt I needed to add them both to my blogroll.

And while I was at it, I also added:

• Sally at Jump off the Bridge, who's got a new-ish blog with a clever mix of feminism and other stuff that tickles her curiosity - not so different from the Kittywampus concept, some to think of it.
• Lynn Alexander, whose eclectic writing I've enjoyed since she stopped by here a few weeks ago.
• And Natalia Antonova, who combines entertaining and original insights with the occasional link to "beautiful men" - such as her highlights from the 2008 European soccer championship. (And no, that link won't take you to the handsomest goals.)
  

Go say hi - and enjoy!

Sungold, the 1930s Housewife? Oh-oh!

I found this quiz via Sally at Jump off the Bridge (who scored even lower than I - should I be ashamed of myself?). I can't vouch for its authenticity but the gist of it definitely hits the right tone. (Guys, you don't get off scot-free. There's a version for husbands, too.)

31 As a 1930s wife, I am Poor Take the test!

Here are a few of my many failings as a 1930s Hausfrau:

• Doesn't want to get up to prepare breakfast. (But does it anyway, churlishly, which I think docked me another point, too, along with not being properly dressed for the occasion.)
• Eats onions, radishes, or garlic before a date or going to bed. (C'mon! Onion and garlic are two basic food groups.)
• Fails to sew on buttons or darn socks regularly. (I do the occasional button. But - darn it! - that's all.)
• Gives husband shampoo or manicure. (No, but come to think of it, the shampoo idea could be fun ...)
• Neat housekeeper--tidy and clean. (I do just enough to keep the health department at bay.)
• Puts her cold feet on husband at night to warm them. (Who else am I supposed to warm them on?)
• Saves punishment of children for father at night. (I'm not quite sure what the right answer is here ... but I think the 1930s housewife was supposed to defer to the father's authority. My kids would've long forgotten their offense by then.)
• Squeezes tooth paste at the top. (And wouldn't want to marry anyone anal enough to call that a dealbreaker.)
• Tells risque or vulgar stories. (Worse yet, occasionally posts them on the Internet.)
• Wears red nail polish. (On my toenails, which must count as doubly improper.)

I'm pretty sure I got good wifey points for these:

• Can play a musical instrument, as piano, violin, etc. (I love my piano.)
• Good seamstress--can make her own clothes or the children's clothes. (Not that I have, lately, but in theory I could. I also have been working on curtains for the kids' rooms for about the past two year and plan to finish them just in time for the kids to hit puberty.)
• Reacts with pleasure and delight to marital congress. (Delight is a nice word for it. But! I suspect that too much delight might collide with the "feminine" and "dainty" standard.)
• Seams in hose often crooked. (I don't wear hose, ergo I couldn't fall down on this score.)

Mostly, the bar is set pretty low for the gentlemen (though apparently onion and garlic are equal-opportunity failings):

• A chronic ailer or patent medicine addict.
• Angry if newspaper is disarranged.
• Belches without apology or blows nose at table.
• Leaves car for wife on days she may need it.

And then there are a few lovely holdovers from the 1920s invention of mutual marital pleasure:

• Ardent lover--sees that wife has orgasm in marital congress.
  
• Gives wife real movie kisses not dutiful "peck" on the cheek.
• Has date with wife at least once per week.

If you take the quiz, do share your score in comments (or link back to your blog)!

Transplanting

Last night, as I was finally putting my pepper plants into the ground (a coupla weeks late, as usual for my garden), I got to thinking again how odd it is that we use the word "transplant" both for that and for putting a new organ in a human body.

I've had some reason to ponder this because we've known for a while that the Bear's teacher would be receiving a kidney transplant as soon as the school year ended. She entered the hospital this afternoon and will receive her new kidney tomorrow. Ever since she survived a childhood kidney cancer, she's been running on half a kidney, and now that half-kidney has just worn out.

She was able to schedule the surgery so precisely because her donor is a close friend. It's an extraordinary story. After she went through a hard divorce (not that any are easy!), she became friends with her ex-husband's first wife. Apparently they found they had a lot more in common than just their overlapping marital history and the co-parenting of their children.

And so it's her ex's ex who is going to save her life. She volunteered and turned out to be a perfect match - one more thing they've found in common. Both of them feel it's a miracle. I'd say it's an amazing act of generosity and friendship, too, and a reflection of the Bear's teacher's own goodness and kindness. (If you want to read the rest of the story, it was reported last month by Nick Claussen in our local independent biweekly, the Athens News; I've been careful here not to include any details beyond what's already public.)

Her students don't quite grasp the gravity of the situation, though she's talked directly about it in an age-appropriate way. She's young and strong and courageous, as is her dear friend and donor, and I think it's going to be okay. Still, we'll all feel better once we know that the surgery gone well and they've gotten through the first few weeks.

I don't believe in the healing power of remote prayer, but I know she does, and I know she would appreciate the prayers of anyone who's so moved. Superstitious or not, I can't help but send up a little prayer, myself, even if it's addressed "to whom it may concern," that both of them will find strength and healing. And I'm sending out my warmest hopes that this new kidney will take root just as strongly as my tomatoes and peppers do in my garden.

The School Year that Wouldn't End

I'm going to miss my son the Bear's last day of school because the school year just got extended by a day. We're already deep into makeup days due to the oodles of snow days we had this year.

Night before last, I was talking with a friend of mine whose daughter is one of the Bear's good friends. We were speculating on whether yesterday's pool party for the elementary school would be canceled due to the forecast thunderstorms.

I said - flippantly - "Oh, I don't much care, as long as we don't have another snow day."

And thus jinxed us.

The whole town woke up around 4 a.m. yesterday to a spectacular light show. By the time it ended, the lights had gone off - not in most of the city, not in our house, but in the elementary school a hundred feet from our front door. By the time they went on again, school had been canceled, along with the pool party, and a makeup day declared for tomorrow.

As my friend said to me: "It's all your fault!!!"

I'll be out of town starting tomorrow morning for a three-day meeting in Minneapolis, the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. And so I'll miss the Bear's last day as a second-grader. I won't be home to give him his first kiss as a rising third-grader. I won't be among the first to hear who his teacher will be next year. I'm pretty sure I'm more bummed about this than him, since his dad will be home to do all those things. Plus he's got a shiny new bike.

I'll put a post or two up over the weekend, thanks to Blogger's new scheduling feature. If I have connectivity at the conference I might try to report in from Minneapolis. No promises, though.

This clematis got nailed during the storm; when it's not backlit, it's nearly black.

Philip Weiss Sets a New Low in Humorless Douchebaggery

Remember Philip Weiss's absurd New York Magazine article from a few weeks back, "The Affairs of Men," where he argued that men are wired to be non-monogamous? Oh, and maybe women are kind of that way too, but really, it's the men who need and deserve a twentysomething waitress on the side? He got eviscerated in feminist blogs for his knuckleheaded use of evolutionary psychology, his presentation of his stray lusts as entitlement, his ignorance of privilege, his contempt for strong women, his implication that women don't harbor equivalent desires. And then there's the fact that he says nothing new - and says it badly.

I have to admit, though, that as I wrote my own takedown of him, I wondered whether some snippets of his piece might have been ironic or tongue-in-cheek. Well, Weiss was on Stephen Colbert last night, and he put all such doubts to rest. The man is deaf to irony. He may have a sense of humor but if so it's as vestigial as the human appendix. Watch:



Just for instance, look how Weiss's mouth doesn't even twitch when Colbert says: "For women, sex is just part of the nesting instinct. There's nothing really sexual about it. They respond to our pheromones and they wish to breed."

Note to Mr. Weiss: Twentysomething waitresses like a sense of humor. So do fortysomething college instructors.

Weiss sort of concedes that women, too, might have unruly desires, but it's always an afterthought. I guess he's right - when it comes to self-important fiftysomething journalists, we're not much tempted.

Female Desire Week - Klinsi Edition

Since it's been declared female desire week, I'm going to post a few pictures of one of my favorite all-time lust objects. This is not a theoretical post. Nor is it a fitting response to the original question from Laura at the F-Word, who was asking why there are so few images of sexy men on sex-positive sites or porn for women sites. Kittywampus is neither of those things (well, I guess we're sort of ambivalently sex-positive) but we do like us our men. That's not to ignore those like belledame who were asking - rightly - what about lesbian and bi and queer desires. It's just that I'm an unreconstructed hetero gal and so I'm going to post what makes my pulse quicken.

And I might feel goofier about this if purtek hadn't already covered the hockey beat, or if Lynn Gazis-Sax hadn't declared her earlier penchant for Björn Borg, but here's the thing: for sheer perfection of the male form, soccer players leave me weak in the knees. They don't have the overdeveloped upper physique that football or baseball players tend to cultivate; they're not inconveniently tall like many basketball stars. Some do have an unfortunate tendency toward mullets, but that can be easily remedied with some sharp scissors.

I do love the game, too. That's one of the main things I gained from my time in Germany. I love the excitement of it, the aesthetics. I even kind of love how - to paraphrase Clausewitz - soccer is the continuation of war by other means, because it usually gets no uglier than Zinadine Zidane's famous head-butting incident in the final game of the 2006 World Cup. It's a pretty civilized way to carry out national rivalries (apart from the occasional hools). I love how it can bring a million thrilled fans onto the streets. I love how it's okay not to have a winner at the end of the game.

But: I also really, really love those legs. Tremendously powerful, muscled, well-defined legs.


And they are devilishly hard to find on the Internet. Believe me, I spent a chunk of this afternoon searching for photos that show my all-time favorite soccer player, Jürgen Klinsmann (aka Klinsi), from head to foot. I didn't find many but I sure had fun trying.
















Mostly I found some lovely head shots, maybe because he's a coach these days (for the German national team in the 2006 World Cup and now for Bayern München, Germany's strongest league team). I guess once you're a coach, you've landed on the mind side of mind/body dualism? I'm pretty sure he still has spectacular legs, but I can't muster actual recent evidence.

So note the forearms in the next shot, which are pretty hot in their own right. And then scroll down for some video that gives you a fuller picture from his days as an active player.

(AP)

(Reuters)

I've provided photo credits where the original source included them, but many were uncredited at their source. Clicking on the photos will take you to where I found them. Usually I try to be overscrupulous about copyright, but in the service of lust this time I picked up the nicest pictures. If anyone objects, I'll take 'em down.

And finally, for a glimpse of legs and motion and the unrestrained joy that I think makes him not just handsome but sexy (hit mute if you don't think the Europop adds to the atmosphere):

The Nanny Diaries' Classy Critique of Class

Here's my latest installment in my series, "Reviewing movies that everyone else has already seen." (The first one was "Juno.")

I watched "The Nanny Diaries" this weekend (on DVD, how else?) and thought it did a surprisingly nice job of reflecting critically yet unobtrusively on how social class functions in the United States. If you've seen it, you know that its portrayal of Upper East Side matrons is merciless. They're self-absorbed, petty, bored, materialistic, and completely unavailable to their kids. They scheme to get their children into the right preschools. They mandate hours of French instruction every week for their preschoolers. They spy on their employees with nannycams hidden in teddy bears. They're a more selfish but equally obsessive version of the mothers that Judith Warner profiles in Perfect Madness: Motherhead in the Age of Anxiety. It's easy to take potshots at them, which the movie plays for both laughs and tears.

While that's probably the most obvious level where the film deflates class privilege, it's not the most interesting one. There are more subtle - and sober - messages about the nannies themselves. And I thought that was cool, and unexpected, for a Hollywood movie.

The first of these is how class and race intersect in toxic ways. The central character, Annie, is a white gal from New Jersey, fresh out of college. When word spreads among the rapacious matrons, they fall all over each other trying to hire her because, as one of them says bluntly, "she's white." And she's not an immigrant.

Since the movie's a comedy, it's not going to give us a blistering critique of how nannies are often women who've been forced to emigrate in order to feed their children in a faraway country. But it doesn't ignore that reality either. There's a painfully funny scene where the matrons drag the nannies en route to a seminar on "conflict resolution" and the matrons sit on gilded chairs while the nannies are pressed up against a wall as if in a police lineup. While the nannies are being interrogated about their grievances (which of course will be punished, not resolved!), one of them, a black woman from Africa, says that she's had to leave her children in order to raise a rich family's kids. That moment is not played for laughs. There's no way you could. You see the discomfort of the matrons as they struggle to repress this knowledge, to sink back into their comfortable denial. And you're reminded of how easy it is for any of us with relative privilege to repress and deny the reality that poverty lives cheek-by-jowl with wealth - that the enjoyment of class privilege depends on that juxtaposition of the rich and poor.

The movie's most subtle insights on class privilege deal with Annie (played by Scarlett Johannson) and her post-college employment dilemmas. Her mother, a nurse who's struggled as a single parent, fiercely wants Annie to enter the financial world and enjoy the security she lacked. But Annie is burnt out after working her butt off in college and has neither the drive nor the desire to become a high-powered businesswoman. Becoming a nanny is her little rebellion against lower-middle-class ambition. It's a gentle but revealing commentary on how class privilege hurts even those who are above the poverty line but still feel constrained from taking chances. In the end, Annie does take a real chance, enrolling in an anthropology graduate program. (Well, humanities grad school is not just chancy; it's a pretty sure ticket to being perennially underpaid. But that would be another post.)

Sure, you could fault the movie for being mostly about a pretty young white girl whose problems are nowhere near as severe as those of the women of color tending their charges in Central Park. There's certainly a need for exposés of the exploitation - and even trafficking - that nannies and other domestic servants too often suffer. But given that it's a romantic comedy and not a crusading documentary, "The Nanny Diaries" went much further than I'd expected in untangling the fraught rat's nest that is social class in America.

Image from Flickr user Roger528, used under a Creative Commons license.

The VP Limbo

Limbo kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

We're sitting here in limbo ... waiting for Hillary Clinton's official concession. It had better be a real one and not just a deferral until the convention. I want to know what Hillary Clinton will do next: with her delegates, her candidacy, her talents, her life. As she herself asked in her non-concession speech Tuesday: "What does Hillary want? What does she want?" ROTUS has an inkling of the worst-case answer:

According to the Baltimore Sun, she is planning to “end her campaign and endorse Barack Obama” on Saturday. Clinton has no plans to concede and release her delegates, though. In August there will be floor demonstrations, drama and more food fights at the Democratic National Convention.

But what worries me more than the tornadic threat of disrupting the convention is the more immediate risk that Obama might offer Clinton the VP slot on the ticket to restore internal party peace. She's signaled she wants it. I can see why a dramatic olive branch might appeal to Obama's conciliatory side. What's more, as long as Clinton controls nearly half the delegates and holds sway with millions of disgruntled voters, she can create heaps of mischief if she's not appeased. It's not quite blackmail ... well, wait, exactly how is it not?

Bob Cesca predicts the trouble ahead if Obama passes over Clinton as his VP nominee:

What happens if she isn't offered the vice presidential slot? Will she continue to stomp her feet and draw attention away from the nominee? Yes she will. Will she carry her campaign (in name and support only) to the convention? Yes she will. Will she continue to distract attention away from challenging Senator McCain's awfulness? Yes she will. So should she be offered the vice presidential slot, then? No she shouldn't.

Yes, giving Clinton the VP nod would paste TP over their differences. The two candidates are often indistinguishable anyway in the policy realm, apart from that niggling little problem of war and peace. Their differences are mostly the product of the bitter primary campaign.

But the bitterness of the campaign still matters, and as I've argued before, Clinton has catered to our worst angels too often. She's the one who went on Meet the Press to tell Tim Russert that Obama was not a Muslim, "as far as I know." She's the one who brought us the 3 a.m. scare ad. She's the one who claimed that she could connect with white, working-class voters, implying 1) that Obama can't, and 2) that all such voters are presumptively racist. Too often, her surrogates who played the race card. She failed to disavow Rush Limbaugh's interference in the campaign on her behalf. She made a big deal out of the non-issue of Obama's title as a professor at the University of Chicaco. Sure, some of these tactics may have come from her henchmen, er, advisers. But she picked those guys. She chose to listen to their gutter-dwelling counsel.

Senator Clinton has run a campaign based on fear, not hope. How could she leave that behind during the general election? How could she subordinate herself to Obama's message of hope and empathy? How could she govern in ways substantially different from the last eight years of fearmongering?

Putting her on the ticket would set us up for untold turmoil as we head toward the general election for one other reason, too: because the Clintons are, well, the Clintons. ROTUS nails this, again:

Can you imagine a triumvarate of Barack, Hill and Bill squabbling over how to govern this country? Or trying to campaign together? It gives me nightmares.

Yikes! Who would be in charge in that unholy ménage a trois? Cesca connects the dots:

Because a would-be Obama-Clinton campaign would end up being entirely about the Clintons. What they said; what they're doing; who's in control; do they get along; is she undermining him from within. Me, me, me. And besides, if she really wanted to be on the ticket, she wouldn't have engaged in this infuriating slash-burn-point-clap strategy in the first place -- a strategy which, by the way, continued through last night's [Tuesday's] speech.

I'm a little weary of Bill Clinton, anyway. He bounded around the country like a big, untrained puppy, with none of his vaunted political self-discipline in evidence. He didn't help his own wife; so why do we think he could play third fiddle in support of Obama? I'm now picturing him at campaign events, earnestly explaining that as our first black president, he paved the way for Obama's candidacy.

So as much as I'd love to see Obama pick a woman, and as seductive as an Obama-Cinton ticket appeared to me back in February, that moment has been washed away by all the blood and bile of Clinton's negative campaigning. (Well, it's only negative if you're not a McCain fan, I suppose.) Odds may be against Clinton here, anyway; Jane Hamsher reports that "by all accounts Obama would rather lose a limb" than nominate Clinton. Let's hope he's not afraid of a little phantom pain.

Now, here's my alternative scheme. How 'bout promising to appoint Clinton to the Supreme Court? She'd have serious power - for life. As an accomplished attorney, she'd be well qualified. Her rulings would be as progressive as possible, within the constraints of the law. And a SCOTUS job would keep both her and her undisciplined hubby out of the executive branch altogether. And out of the campaign. It'd be a total win-win.

Media Misogyny, One More Time

As Hillary Clinton's campaign winds down (or so I hope), there's a video circulating on YouTube that serves as an ugly reminder of how the media trafficked in sexism over the past few months. It's worth watching unless you have poorly controlled blood pressure:



(Via Alternet.)

My favorite moments in this video feature Chris Matthews embarrassing himself yet again. He knows full well that he's being a sexist asshole. He just can't stop himself. At one point he even tells a guest on his show, "I get in trouble for this but you’re great looking obviously ..." which would be fine if he were asking her out. But again, she's a guest on his show, presumably invited to talk about politics, not to flirt. (Though to be honest, even in a social setting, I can't imagine Matthews would have the shadow of a chance with her.)

And then there's poor little Tucker Carlson, whose manhood is so fragile that he confesses to having to cross his legs whenever he sees Hillary Clinton.

This ugly media sexism wasn't enough to make me rally behind Clinton; it didn't cancel out her bellicosity. It does enrage me. And it again points out that while racism and sexism are both virulent, they often operate in different registers. While people won't 'fess up to their racism quite so publicly, they sure carry it with them into the polling booth.

But we didn't see open racism from the pundits in the same way that we saw blatant sexism. Imagine the casually stupid comment on women's hormonal moodiness (toward the end of the clip) transposed into racial pseudo-science. You'd have to go back to nineteenth-century phrenology and the toxic notion that people of African descent are closer to apes than to humans. Pinheaded comments about women PMSing have about as much place in the media as does discredited racial anthropology.

A Tornadic Threat

Photo from OAR/ERL/National Severe Storms Laboratory, posted to Flickr by pingnews.com, used under a Creative Commons license.

I watched Hillary Clinton's speech tonight in the penumbra of a tornado warning. Not a watch - a fucking warning.

Like any good North Dakota girl, I recognized the color of the sky at dusk, well before the official warning was issued. It had a yellowish, pinkish cast - and yes, that touch of sickly green that strikes me blind with fear.

I was all set to move the children into the basement for the night, but my mate vetoed that, knowing that they'd never fall asleep down there and believing that the danger was probably less than dire.

Of course he was wrong about that; by definition, a tornado warning is the scariest thing in the world. At least in my prairie-gal world. But so it came to pass that we watched Clinton's speech with the picture-in-picture feature tracking the Weather Channel.

The tornado warning was lifted shortly before 10 p.m., just as it became apparent that no concession would be forthcoming. It wasn't the visionary speech on gender that Anna Holmes yearned for in Sunday's New York Times (though that was always an exercise in wishful thinking anyway). It sounded a heck of a lot like a standard stump speech. In fact, as Alex Koppelman observed in Salon's War Room, it "sounded like nothing so much as a victory speech."

And that's when I learned a cool new word. The Weather Channel's alarming red crawl announced that the storm had weakened and now "posed no tornadic threat." Yes, "tornadic" is a real word - either that, or Google is hallucinating.

But beyond southeast Ohio, the tornadic danger hasn't lifted entirely. I assume that Clinton may be negotiating with the Obama camp, perhaps angling for the VP slot, perhaps inching toward another compromise. Maybe she's looking for a role in health care, judging from the intersection of her speech with Obama's gracious remarks on her?

Or maybe she's going to try to take this to the convention in Denver, arguing that she won the popular vote and trying to strong-arm some of Obama's superdelegates into her camp?

I realize that the "nuclear option" - which I hereby rename the "tornedic option" - is not the most likely scenario. It may be no more likely than my house getting hit by a tornado tonight (although the tornado watch goes until the wee hours). But I'll feel a lot better once Clinton takes it off the table. I'd prefer not to hide in the basement until the convention.

And while we're at it, how 'bout getting a tornado siren for my little town? While I was writing this my neighbor just called me and told me we don't have one.

Tuesday Recipe: Sometimes Size Matters

I'm making artichokes for dinner tonight. Okay, so I'm cheating on the Tuesday recipe. When it comes to arties, I really have a policy, not a recipe: The simpler, the better. Steam them. Eat them with vats of melted butter. That is all.

But these artichokes are remarkable for their size. I don't think I've ever seen any quite so large. I'm using my roast pan to steam them, which otherwise gets broken out for Thanksgiving and then collects dust all year.


Not that I'm obsessed with size, or anything ...


... but that measurement actually understates their size; the largest is close to six inches in diameter, but the shadows and the refraction of the camera lens distort it.

I hope they're as yummy as they look. Because, after all, sometimes size matters ... but size is rarely everything.

In fact, I'm not generally a believer in supersized foods - not at all - but I have one other mondo food product in my fridge right now, a container of cream from a wonderful local dairy, Snowville Creamery. Their milk is as luscious as their name. And I just discovered they sell cream, too.

Maybe it's because they're a small operation, but all their products come in the same sized carton: a half gallon. Which means I have a half gallon of heavy whipping cream that needs to be used. I think it's time for homemade ice cream.

Cancer, "Positive Thinking," and the War Metaphor

Toy soldier image by Flickr user atomicShed, used under a Creative Commons license.

Ted Kennedy underwent surgery today for a brain tumor. The press coverage of his illness has stressed two major themes so far: He has a particularly bad type of brain tumor, a glioma. And even in the face of his grim prognosis, Senator Kennedy is displaying courage. A fighting spirit.

Yesterday's New York Times finally tackled the obvious collision between these two themes with a wonderfully insightful article by Jan Hoffman. Now, I don't know anything about how Senator Kennedy is handling this. And really, it's not my business. (Of course, I do sincerely wish him well. Nobody should have to face such a tough diagnosis.)

But I do have a very personal stake in how popular culture portrays the "fight" against cancer. Far too often, the media and ordinary people employ metaphors that just violate the experiences I've had with my loved ones who've been stricken by it.** So I'm grateful that the NYT devoted some space to deconstructing them.

First, there's the relentless pressure to "think positive." An AP article posted after successful completion of Kennedy's surgery today quoted him as saying, "I feel like a million bucks. I think I'll do that again tomorrow." Obviously he's being flip about it. I'm genuinely glad for him that he can crack a joke while in recovery; black humor is one of the better coping mechanisms, in my experience. But boy, this sort of media chatter sets the bar high for the rest of us who might come out of surgery groggy, scared, shaking with cold, and - believe it or not - humorless.

If you get a cancer diagnosis, dozens of people will tell you to stay positive. Some of these will be people you barely know. Of course, if your remaining time on this earth turns out to be rather short, it's a wonderful gift if you can find pleasure in it. But it's just not so simple. You don't hear people exhorting hostages to "think positive" while a gun is being held to their heads, do you?

Hoffman's NYT article accurately describes the pressure patients come under to put a positive spin on their illness:

“Whether you’re a celebrity or an ordinary person, it’s obligatory, no matter how badly you’re feeling about it, to display optimism publicly,” said Dr. Barron H. Lerner, the author of “When Illness Goes Public.” [Dr. Lerner is a physician at Columbia who's also an expert on the history of breast cancer.]

That optimism reassures anxious relatives, the public and doctors, regardless of whether it accurately reflects the patient’s emotional state. “If Ted Kennedy wanted to stick up his middle finger,” Dr. Lerner added, “that would be the more appropriate finger, but he’s doing what he is supposed to.”

Whether such images inspire patients, or reinforce unrealistic expectations that they, too, should maintain a game face, remains an open question, say doctors, social workers, family members and patients themselves.

That middle finger would be such a relief! It would take a lot of pressure off patients to act brave for other people's sake. Sure, sometimes it's adaptive and helpful to act brave for your own sake; acting brave can help you feel brave. Sometimes you have to shield your young children from the whole truth, since it doesn't help a preschooler to hear that a parent might die when in fact that parent might live.

The problem arises when the patient feels unable ever to let her guard down - when platitudes take the place of real support and encouragement. Hoffman collected a few of the real prizewinners:

Uneasy well-wishers, steeped in near-superstitious belief about positive mental attitude, can exacerbate anxiety. On Cancerblog.com and ChemoChick’s “Excuse Me?” sites, lists of tone-deaf remarks include, “If anyone can beat it, it’s you,” “You gotta think positively” and “Just look at Lance,” a reference to Lance Armstrong, the champion cyclist and a cancer survivor.

What the NYT can't say, because it's a respectable publication, but I can, since Kittywampus is not: These platitudes are just bullshit. The superstition, of course, stems from the idea that positive thinking is not just a way to make the most of our remaining days but our best weapon in defeating the disease itself. Having had a birds-eye view of chemo at work, I can assure you that a resolute attitude might get you out of bed in the morning; it is not likely to make the difference between life and death.

The second load of bullshit that Hoffman exposes is what she felicitously calls the "stirring martial language" that we employ in discussing cancer.

Dr. Gary M. Reisfield, a palliative care specialist at the University of Florida, Jacksonville, believes that the language used by cancer patients and their supporters can galvanize or constrain them. Over the last 40 years, war has become the most common metaphor, with patients girding themselves against the enemy, doctors as generals, medicines as weapons. When the news broke about Senator Kennedy, he was ubiquitously described as a fighter. While the metaphor may be apt for some, said Dr. Reisfield, who has written about cancer metaphors, it may be a poor choice for others.

“Metaphors don’t just describe reality, they create reality,” he said. “You think you have to fight this war, and people expect you to fight.” But many patients must balance arduous, often ineffective therapy with quality-of-life issues. The war metaphor, he said, places them in retreat, or as losing a battle, when, in fact, they may have made peace with their decisions.

To describe a patient’s process through illness, he prefers the more richly ambiguous metaphor of a journey: its byways, crossroads, U-turns; its changing destinations; its absence of win, lose or fail.

Hoffman then describes a patient who's nearly ten years out from pancreatic cancer. He became angry once treatment was over and realized "Oh my God, I have nothing left to fight with." It's not at all uncommon to become depressed after treatment, and this sense of having run out of "ammunition," as Hoffman puts it, can be one contributor to depression. I've seen exactly this occur in someone near and dear to me. Studies have shown major depression to be common after breast cancer, as has lots of anecdotal evidence. I'm not aware of much research on other cancers but it stands to reason that breast cancer would not be unique in this respect.

One reason for post-treatment depression - and for its lack of recognition - is the idea that you should just get back to normal right away, especially if your disease was caught early and your prognosis is reasonably good. Everyone from employers to family members want this and expect it. (I'm sure that as a family member, I've had moments where I've let this desire show, too, as much as I've tried not to expect the "new normal" to look like the "old normal.") It's not that simple, of course. Even with a "good prognosis" you're still waiting for the ax to fall. And you're constantly reminded of this by the fact that your body is not the same anymore; maybe you've lost your hair, maybe your energy is permanently depleted, maybe you've lost a part of yourself to surgery.

Another contributor to post-treatment depression is personality and temperament. Those of us who are biased toward doing something - anything - will inevitably feel some let-down when there's nothing left to be done. And if this is how you're already wired, the ethos of modern Western medicine, which is similarly slanted toward action instead of watchful waiting, does nothing to counteract this tendency.

But surely the metaphors we use feed these post-treatment problems, too. We've been waging a "war against cancer" ever since President Nixon declared it in 1971. Since then, we're lost two real wars (counting the present one as unwinnable). The war metaphor might have provided some reassurance to Americans with a clear memory of sacrifice and triumph in World War II. I don't see it as reassuring at all today, and I don't think that's just due to my own pacifist leanings.

We speak of "survivors" in a well-intentioned attempt to remove the stigma and victimhood from cancer. It's good that we no longer treat the disease as taboo, speaking of it in hushed tones (if at all). But what does it mean when the word "survivor" comes to denote anyone with cancer from the moment of diagnosis up to the moment of death, whether from cancer or other causes? And even if you're lucky enough to die much later of something wholly unrelated, what do you gain from the implicit pressure in "survivor" to put the disease behind you as soon as treatment ends, never mind that the gun is still at your temple?

There are exceptions to the triumphalist military narrative. A recent memoir by Kathlyn Conway, who has struggled through both Hodgkins lymphoma and breast cancer, is refreshingly honest, though often bleak. In Ordinary Life: A Memoir of Illness she describes how her illness was just something she had to get through. It did not transform her. It did not make her a better person, nor did it lead her to deep religious faith. But stories like hers are still the exception that proves the rule.

Finally, it's worth asking what it means to have war metaphors mixed promiscuously and unthinkingly with all this talk about "positive thinking." It's not just that war-talk shapes how we think about cancer; the reverse is likely to be true, too. Isn't it likely that valorizing military language in our cancer discourse helps recast war as brave and noble even in times where it's clear that it's simply a lost cause? Certainly there's a long history of seeing "the enemy" in terms that evoke tumors and metastases. But that would be a whole 'nother post.

** I'm basing my reflections on experiences of several people close to me, including some immediate family members, but they're a composite because I want to respect everyone's privacy.

You Can Call Me Professor Sungold

Okay, I'm enough of a stickler for titles after my sojourn in Germany that I'd better qualify that. You can call me Visiting Assistant Professor Sungold.

Technically, I didn't quite get the job I interviewed for, but I'm still very, very happy with the outcome. I was offered a job I didn't know existed: a visiting gig that's renewable for up to three years. It's full time, but honestly it won't be that much more work than my current purportedly half-time deal. It carries benefits, which means I won't have to depend on my spouse anymore for health insurance. (He's now healthy, but his medical history is complicated enough that it's been nerve-wracking for him to be our sole safety net.) And here's the fun part: I expect I'll get to teach some new classes. Yay!

Oh, and I'll be making more money than I've ever earned in my life. This doesn't mean much, since the last time I had a full-time job (not a grad student stipend, not freelance contracts, not adjuncting work) was twenty years ago, and I was working as a pseudo-engineer at the time. So if you adjust for inflation, I was still "better off" before I quit my job for grad school in 1988. But let's pretend we're ignorant of basic economics and just celebrate my good fortune, okay? The dean was far more generous than I expected, and I'm tickled pink.


Another internal candidate who's already done a three-year visiting stint got the original job, and I'm pleased about that, too. She's smart, a fine teacher, and dedicated to the program. For a number of reasons that I won't go into here (because they belong to her story, not mine), hiring her represents exactly the commitment to fairness that I think Women's Studies ought to stand for. I'm not at all surprised to see this coming from my chair and colleagues. They're wonderful people in every way. I don't just respect them intellectually and politically, I like them very much for human reasons, too. Hovering in the background is a nice measure support from our dean, which portends well for the future of our program.

I don't know what'll happen for me after the next three years, but it opens some doors without slamming any shut. This could be a step toward a permanent position, especially if I do a good job. And from there, who knows? An endowed chair in feminist blogging? Empress of the universe? Wherever it ends, I'm feeling giddily, awesomely happy.

Chives/hardy geraniums, yellow rose whose name I forget, and Will Goodwin clematis from my garden. Actually the roses are my husband's babies, which is why I'm usually clueless about their names.