"Does gender affect x, y and z?" Yes, gender affects everything

What have I been doing recently? I have been making poems, making films (and getting much better at it), hooping, doing acro yoga, choreographing, hanging out with friends, and organizing readings at Agitprop. I've also been working (as in the making money sense--teaching, bits of contract work, my RA duties at UCSD), riding the bus, finally taking advantage of student health insurance by updating some prescriptions, and doing a worse job than usual of putting my clothes away. I also gave myself a large bump on the forehead by walking into a metal lamp post--not my best moment. So, I've been away from blogland.

I am indeed tired of conversations about gender and blogging, gender and publishing, gender and self-promotion. But I'm not tired of the topics--or, at least, I still think the topics are essential. I wish that we lived in a happy land of gender (and racial and socioeconomic) equality, but we don't. So, conversations and actions continue. And will always have to, because even if the world were perfect, we'd still have to work to maintain perfection. But I don't turn to blogland to have great conversations--especially not about gender.

Yes, of course there are exceptions, and I turn to specific blogs for conversation--typically blogs written and moderated by friends that I knew before we interacted in blogland. I've met some people through blogland, and that's been great, but even there, the lasting virtual connections that I make tend to be the result of a whole network of community and social connections that exist alongside the virtual ones.


I do not turn to Harriet or Silliman's blog for conversation. I turn to them for information, but not conversation. In fact, unless I become a paid blogger for Harriet, I'm unlikely to ever join any comment stream on any post there, ever. The comment streams there tend to be repetitive and frustrating. I really do prefer to talk to someone at a bar, or cafe, or over food. I'd rather argue with someone that way, too.

Women do blog, and blog in interesting ways. Smart women and men know this, and read accordingly.

There's almost never any substantial debate in the comment stream on this blog because I rarely make statements like, "Workshopping sucks," "MFA programs are bogus and anyone who does one is a tool." "Women are smarter than men," "white space on the page is lame," "Flarf is more avant-garde than the avant-garde," etc. Blogs that make these kinds of statements are more likely to have overrun and often irritating, unproductive comment threads. My blog is too random, and I post too many pictures of my parrot for that to usually happen. This is fine with me.

The post on this blog that gets the most hits and has the most comments is "Today, I tried to spell fluctuate as 'fluxuate.'"

I think that repeated, community-minded actions and groups of people really do help shift gender (and racial, and socioeconomic) imbalances in the world of writing (and, when I'm feeling idealistic, the world). I can think of numerous examples that have been important to me personally and recently, in no particular order and off the top of my head: HOW2, Delirious Hem, Foursquare, the Press Conference 1, 2 and now 3, the Positions Colloquium in Vancouver, Bridge Street Books, The Flarf Collective, Pussipo, Ruthless Grip reading series in DC, In Your Ear reading series in DC, Palm Press, Tangent Press, Les Figues Press, the Cal Arts Conferences, Area Sneaks, the Poetic Research Bureau, my own attempts in conjunction with others to do a series at Agitprop here in San Diego, the Agitprop Gallery itself, Krikri, and any dinner hosted by Jerry and Diane Rothenberg.

My Life as Gilgamesh

I’m continuing to think about binaries, specifically gender binaries, and, yes, still in the context of Alma, although this post is going to noodle quite a bit. Basically, I grew up with some of the gender binaries that were important to certain kinds of 70s feminism—the kind of pop Feminism that celebrates and emphasizes woman’s connection to the earth, aboriginal peoples, and children. (Ah, even writing that sentence makes me want to leap out of my skin!) So, despite the many non-normative aspects of my childhood, no one was really overturning gender binaries. There was a lot of earth mother love though.

I received a pretty steady diet of hippie aesthetics and values as well as Western mythology growing up. Most of my friends came from global nomadic families, like mine, or else they were hippies (some wealthy, some genuinely not) who moved to Maine to establish communes and farm with various levels of success and failure. I lost touch with one particular high school friend after he graduated because he went to live in a teepee somewhere and was impossible to locate. Lao, if you’re reading this, drop me a line if you’re so inclined!

I moved around a lot as a child, but for several years I went to a Waldorf-inspired school in Blue Hill, Maine called the Bay School. Although the school now has an amazingly beautiful campus, when I went there, most of the classrooms were in a converted barn. We began everyday by lighting a candle and singing, reciting poetry, or playing musical instruments in what we called “opening circle.” I studied all of Mesopotamian, Greek, and Roman mythology. The only science I remember was the history of science—the Copernican revolution, Pythagoras, and stuff like that. I learned how to knit, and crochet, and how to weave on a loom. Although they didn’t do this at the time when I was there, during the third week of May every year, the fifth grade participates in a Greek Pentathlon with other Maine Waldorf schools “as a celebration of the harmonious nature of that age.”

It’s really too bad I didn’t study Sappho when I was learning to weave (that was in high school), because then I could have sung “O sweet mother, I cannot work the loom,” while working. Except that I probably wouldn’t have felt the perverse delight about it that I certainly would now.

It’s because of the Bay School, in part, that I can enjoy reading the section in Isadora Duncan’s My Life where she describes going to Greece in order to build a Greek temple. In retrospect, that section of the book is hilarious—she performs dances among the ruins and wears togas, all while being laughed at and at times cheated by the nearby villagers.

In yoga the other day, my teacher told us to imagine ourselves as maypoles—calm and steady while people were dancing all around you. Except that I actually do know how to dance around a maypole to create different weaving patterns. And a maypole is a big phallic symbol. So the whole class I kept on thinking that I didn’t want to imagine myself as a phallic symbol, and I don’t want to imagine myself as the happy child in floral dancing barefoot around the phallic symbol. Instead, I imagined the dead cat I’d seen on the road that morning.


And only a few days ago, I drew a picture of a maypole on the white board in my ESL classroom with little smiling stick figures holding attached ribbons, and tried to explain about dancing around a Maypole. My class of mostly Korean and Japanese 20-somethings looked at me, blankly. Finally, one young woman said. “That is strange.” And I said, “Most Americans do not know how to dance around a Maypole. Yes, it is strange.” Then I taught a lesson on conditionals (my favorite grammar!) The largest events at the Bay School were seasonal festivals. Apple fest in the fall, Nowell in winter, and May Day in the spring.

I like to make fun of the Bay School, but I’m so glad I went to school there and not in the suburbs. So very very very very glad. My education was better, and I was spared some of the hidden physical and emotional violence that comes with living in the suburbs. My teachers were amazingly intelligent and creative (and that bio doesn’t mention all the years Charles Hutchison, my 5th grade teacher, spent with Greenpeace); and many of them had very non-normative ideas about what success meant. My 6th grade teacher, for example, spent ten years of her life living in Hawaii, working as a waitress and surfing. I was a pretty uptight young kid, so I despised her and thought she was stupid while she was my teacher—what driving, intelligent person would want to hang out in Hawaii and surf? Now, of course I’m grateful that my adult role models weren’t all suggesting that I needed to grow up and become a doctor or a lawyer.

It wasn’t exactly a feminist curriculum, though, and why would it have been, I suppose, given the context. Given all the earth mother rhetoric, I’m surprised that I never developed the strong desire to have children—I’ve got the farm fantasy down, but not the baby fantasy. Still, I absorbed fairly classical masculine/feminine binaries. At the same time, though, I was allowed to play with being one or the other.


There were never any female heroines in any of the school plays, but I did get to enact the role of Gilgamesh in our end of the year 5th grade play. As Gilgamesh, I got to spurn the love of my best friend, J--, who was Ishtar. There’s a lot of gender tension and weirdness in that moment to unpack: I played the hero of a story that describes conquering the savage or feminine wilderness. I tame Enkidu, the beast in the desert, then love and spurn Ishtar, the goddess of fertility. After loosing my chance for immortality, I return home and build a walled city and write my story on the walls. How classically masculine is that?

I'm pointing you all towards what Nada Gordan said about Hilary Clinton, gender, and the recent primaries.

I admit that I voted for Edwards by mail before he dropped out.

Rat Year

Dim Sum over at Delirious Hem. I was too overwhelmed with student behavior problems, plagiarism issues, and two annual reviews to contribute to this forum, but do have a look. If you're even here, though, you probably already know about it. I'll be blogging/commenting on it soon. Maybe.

This was an awful week. I taught my students the verb "whine." Soon, I'll have to teach some of them how to say "momma's boy."