Numbers, Gender, Inertia

I do not want to grade my online class, but I am. I did not want to tutor for two hours at Smarthinking this morning, but I did. I did not want to clean out the top tray of my desk inbox--the one with actual paper in it, but I did.

Reading, with ambivalence, Simon DeDeo's response to the essay by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, "Numbers Trouble," in the Chicago Review 53:2/3. This essay is a version of a presentation that they gave at Feminaissance back at the end of April. I've not read the essay, but I was there at the talk and took notes. I remember thinking, "I am glad that someone counted, because now we don't have to argue about the numbers." Of course, we have to argue about what they might mean. That's a conversation worth having, but I'm not going to blog about it now, especially since I don't have the article in front of me.

Simon's comments about pussipo are similar to those expressed by some very dear friends who are men.

And I agree, without having any statistics, that men tend to submit their poems more than women, and tend to respond to queries for work more quickly and promptly. I certainly have been guilty of taking my sweet time to respond to enthusiastic editors. Why? It probably does have something to do with feelings I have about being assertive and public, and I'm sure those have something to do with how I was raised, and I'm sure that all has something to do with gender, too.

But I'm getting better! I have now responded to all outstanding requests for work or invitations to submit work with the exception of Absent. Yikes! But I have your deadline on my mind and on my calendar, and I think I know what to send.

This part of Simon's post also interested me:

"It is just as vital to assert that these images are very particular. While the number of male modes (for whites -- compare the treatment of Amiri Baraka to Fredrick Seidel) is broad to the point of freedom, it is, in my experience that women do not have this freedom. "

I've often felt the exact opposite--but, again, I don't have any evidence to back this up. It's a bit of a theoretical cliche for me to assert that as a woman my subjectivity is more, um, shifty than that of a man (woman as riot, etc). I've found that as more or less straight young woman, it's been ridiculously easy to get endless entry-level jobs in a variety of professions. It was relatively easy to shift my academic focus from modern Chinese history to English literature, and it was relatively easy to make a professional shift again out of the DC public policy world to teaching ESL and doing freelance graphic design. My CV is confusing. I have 6 different resumes that I use depending on the project I'm bidding on.

My life as a poet has been similar--I make "post-language" poems, procedural translations, procedural poems, things that kind of resemble new narrative, prose poems that kind of resemble, um, some combination of langpo and new narrative, visual poems, collages, sound poems, sound collages, short stories with narrative in the more traditional sense of the word... Now I'm working on a piece that involves choreography. Yay!

That's all very exciting, but it's a bit disturbing, too. I feel like one reason why I've had so much flexibility is because I'm perceived as so very unthreatening. I'm 29, pretty and nerdy. I am even happy and enthusiastic. I am unavailable! I like to party! I don't think anyone really gives a crap about what I say or do. That's a kind of freedom, I suppose. I'm overstating my point for effect, but some of what I've said must be true.

Potential Employer: "Are you on your husband's health insurance?"

Me: "I am not married."