Sell It!

Like all good little professors, GayProf can be found on campus these days. He has been working hard at the start of the semester. He hasn’t, though, given up referring to himself in the third person.

The new semester is off to a rockin’start. Let’s see. . . Several of my senior colleagues with whom I have worked for the past two years introduced themselves to me for the first time the other day. They also asked if my move to Midwestern Funky Town had gone well over the summer. It was nice gesture even if it made it clear that they had absolutely no idea at all who I am.

Still, I can’t fault them. The department is massive. Heck, if one of us were kidnapped in the middle of a department meeting, it would probably take several days before we even noticed.

In other news, somebody that we shall call "Little Mister" is really pushing my buttons these days. It's probably unfair on my part, but for reasons I can't fully pinpoint, Little Mister really sticks in my craw. Such irritations almost always say more about you than the person who irritates you, no? Thus I have tried to take a positive attitude into our conversations, but I can't help thinking that Little Mister is just kinda rude. At a recent party, he spent twenty minutes lecturing me on the finer points of the subject of NERPoD.

Now, there are many, many things that I really don’t know about the history of this planet -- seriously. At another recent party I realized that my memory of the succession of all those Roman emperors gets a bit fuzzy: Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula (Bootsy to his friends), Claudius, Nero - then, um, that guy with the big nose and ... uh, that one from the Gladitor movie?

But there are two things that I do know backwards and forward: a) Wonder Woman’s three under-appreciated seasons on television; and b) the history within NERPoD. So I was less than impressed to be “informed” on the topic as if I had no idea that such things had ever happened in the world. I mean, I don’t try to give lessons to Little Mister about the things that he knows inside and out. You don’t see me telling him the best ways to act like a pompous idiot. No, no – I say, “GayProf, he is doing a fine job of that all on his own. He needs no pointers from you.”



Of course, to be fair, he hasn’t ever bothered to find out the subject of NERPoD. That would have involved acknowledging another person in the same room as himself. Ugh – It’s going to be a long year.

All of that pales, of course, to the fact that Big Midwestern University is finally acknowledging that the local/regional/national/global economic collapse will indeed impact our day-to-day operations after all. Last year the administration instructed us to don green-tinted sunglasses before setting foot on campus. Even though every major industry collapsed around campus, we saw only gumdrops and sunshine. Now that the little girl in the gingham dress has arrived with her yipping dog, there are some big cuts heading towards us.



Lean times mean lean budgets. I understand that. Everybody’s making sacrifices. People are driving less and taking fewer vacations. Working people are cooking meals at home more often than eating out. Banking executives are settling for last year’s multi-million dollar renovation of their toilets. It’s tough times all around.

So if the university puts some caps on expenses until things stabilize, I am cool with that. I also thank the goddess that I am fortunate enough not to be working in one the bankrupt California universities. Budgets have been cut so much there that the faculty are loitering around crime scenes hoping that they can score some free chalk once the cops finish tracing the body.

What does have me a bit anxious about my current university is the increasing scrutiny that we are facing in terms of our class sizes. The university bureaucracy has devised lots of nifty formulas and algorithms that they use to determine how much funding and bonus prizes each department will receive. They want to ensure that the ratio between university “resources” (that’s us, the faculty) and “revenue” (that’s the students (or, more accurately, the students’ parents’ money)) is at the right level. It’s the most cynical view of higher education since Lynn Cheney proposed replacing freshman U.S. History with reruns of Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier.

Big Midwestern U is certainly not alone in pushing to make their profs mini-sales agents. I do “get” why having a class of three people should be canceled. That’s costly. But how many students is enough? 50? 100? 400?



My enrollments are fine, but my classes aren’t exactly standing-room-only (despite my obvious appeal). I feel a certain pressure to keep the students who signed up in the class at least until the official “drop date.” This past semester more than others I found myself trying to use the first few lectures to convince the students that the entire semester was going to be a fifteen-week tickle fight. Rather than outlining course assignments and expectations, I proposed that my class’s subtitle should really be “The Happy Sunshine Good Time Hour.”

Students, as many of us have observed, already expect that classes should be another source of entertainment rather than a place to acquire new skills and knowledge. This past week (and this is not a joke), one student asked me if he absolutely had to do the required reading because he “found it really boring and hard to follow.” He then asked if he could substitute watching a few films (which I could select for him) instead of the reading.

That sound you just heard was dozens of humanities professors’ jaws dropping to the ground. Really, though, should we be surprised by such a request? The pitiful student evaluations that universities administer (along with those crude on-line course selecting web pages) have all contributed to making the classroom seem more like a daytime talkshow than a place for students to work.



I have therefore been brainstorming some ways to keep students from dropping and thus lowering my personal revenue:resource ratio. In my favorite genre, here is a modified list of things that I am thinking of promising my students if they stay enrolled:

* If they look under their seat, they will find that each and every one of them has a new car!

* By the end of my class, at least one of them will have a recording contract.

* Instead of lecturers, I will be interviewing numerous guest celebrities.

* Multiple choice exams will be replaced by connect-the-dot and color-by-number.

* My course is actually the recruiting center for a secret army that will be deployed to fight the agents of darkness.

* During the semester, I will reveal several new weight-loss techniques.

* Each and every week, students will have an opportunity to vote off one of their fellow classmates. The last one standing will be declared one of life’s winners.

* Every student will receive a Snuggie^©.

* I will consider updating their Facebook status as equivalent to attending class.



* I will teach class wearing star-spangled panties.




* I won’t teach class wearing star-spangled panties.

* At least one class per week will be devoted to matchmaking between students.

* Bar service will be available during classes starting after 1:00pm.

* Personal opinions, regardless of their basis, will be considered “fact” for the purposes of this class.

* With the purchase of any two of my classes, they will get the third class free!

* Instead of submitting a final paper, students can Tweet their ideas about U.S. History.

* Taking my class will guarantee them admission to the law school (or medical school) of their choice.

* Rather than having to suffer through reading historians’ complicated (read: boring) interpretations of World War II, students can substitute spending an hour playing any video game set in Nazi Germany or occupied France.



* If they bring in their current boring prof, I will give them a rebate towards the purchase of a more fuel-efficient new prof.

* Class lectures will be available as podcasts.

* My classes will now include 1/3 more discussion of vampires and their romantic foibles.

* Grades will be determined based on the same scoring as Uno.

* If they stay enrolled, I won’t blog about the astonishing requests that they make.

Burning and Itching

Huh – It turns out, based on the number of Google hits that I am getting, that a great number of you have “crazy colleagues.” At least one of you seems to have a colleague with a spider in hir hair. Who knew?

Of course, the new semester is upon us. This can mean only one thing: the end of the television summer season.

Longtime readers know that GayProf has two, sometimes overlapping, criteria for watching a television show: a) Does it have camp value and/or b) Does it have a hunky male lead. Usually “b” is the prime mover for me. What can I say? I am shallow, but pretty.

Longtime readers also know that I tend write volumes on television shows. Today is no different. Come to think of it, I am surprised that I have any longtime readers at all.

Given that “b” decides most of my viewing habits, you might imagine that my television selections are often quite low brow. You might also imagine that I watch these shows while in my underwear. You really shouldn’t have such dirty fantasies about GayProf.

More than any other, the basic cable network "USA" has cornered the market on summer-fluff. To borrow Kate Jackson’s comments about Charlie’s Angels, the scripts at USA are so thin that if you tossed one in the air, it would take a week to hit the floor. Something about one of its most popular shows, Burn Notice, seems to bother me.



For those who have higher standards than I do, let me give you Burn Notice’s basic premise. Michael Westen, the lead character played by the hunky Jeffrey Donovan (Remember: “b”), once worked as a spy until he was “burned” (essentially framed for a variety of crimes he did not commit – Or did commit, but it was okay because he committed those crimes on behalf of the good ol’ USA (the nation, not the network – I think)). The show’s major narrative focuses on Michael’s efforts to restore his good name and thus return to the spy world. Until he can do that, he takes on odd jobs of fighting crime within a colorful Miami locale.



The show’s appeal depends upon some fairly standard fantasies about power and heroics. Westen possesses a seemingly unending array of secret talents and abilities. He easily defeats whole armies of gunmen with well-timed punches and carefully crafted verbal zingers. Within fifty minutes, you have a guaranteed serving of [largely vigilante] justice.

So, what’s my problem with Burn Notice? The show veers into some problematic realms in terms of race and gender. Mostly it has to do with its valorization of white-straight men as the best and only hope for the future of the nation. Michael Westen’s heroism can only be construed through the vulnerability of his “clients.” Who are those clients? Disproportionately, they are women and racial minorities (and even especially women of color).

Am I arguing that real white-straight-men never fight on behalf of social justice or that we should never see such a representation? No, obviously not. Nor am I suggesting that executives and producers at USA network are participating in an intentional conspiracy to assure the dominance of the white race. I really have no idea if they are members of the Republican party.

We aren’t talking about real life. We are talking about representations. Who ends up as the main “hero” and who best fits the role of “victim” are entirely shaped by gender and race. And for the USA network, white heterosexuality rules. Let me give you another example. Even though USA’s show In Plain Sight is set in New Mexico, a non-white majority state, the lead character is still a remarkably blond Euro American. Indeed, that show has no Latino characters who are actually from the area (One Latino character does appear, but his origins are clearly not from NM).


Minority roles, when cast at all in USA shows, are most often relegated to side characters who need a good, white character to either save or defeat them (Though it is interesting to note that USA seems to like to cast minority actors to play white characters. Real-life Arab-American Tony Shalhoub plays the titular Monk and Latino James Roday (né James Rodríguez) stars in Psych. More could probably be written about those instances at some later point).

GLBTQ folk basically don’t exist at all on USA. According to the most recent GLAAD report, USA ranked 7 out of 10 in terms of cable networks. Although I will at least grant that Burn Notice mostly avoids the passive-aggressive homophobia found in its sister show Psych.

By making the white-straight-male lead an almost invincible hero in an all-white pantheon, Burn Notice and similar USA shows uphold the notion that white-straight-men are not at all the beneficiaries of institutionalized inequities. Nor is white straight manhood ever figured as a direct exercise of privilege and power. Rather, white-straight-male heroes make “noble sacrifices” to save minorities, women, or weaker white men from less scrupulous (most often foreign in the case of Burn Notice) foes. Being a white-straight-man is a type of burden because only they have the necessarily abilities to solve all the nation’s problems, including those created by other white men.

A typical Burn Notice episode will open with Michael’s newest client describing hir problems. If a woman character, she often does it through tears and with a quaking voice. Michael reassures hir; his mother (played by the seemingly downgraded Sharon Gless) offers them a place to stay; and Michael snaps to work with his team. His clients frequently report that they have been trying to solve their problem for years, but Michael usually has everything tied up over the period of a long weekend. Once the bad guys are secured in jail (or dead), Westen shows his beneficence by never accepting any actual payment for his work. It’s just the cost of being a white-male straight hero.



One typical episode focused on a Latina character, let’s call her “Marta,” who solicited Westen’s help to defeat the evil “South-American” Rufino Cortez. The bad-man Cortez evicted poor Marta’s entire family in order to sell their property to a greedy U.S. corporation. With the team emotionally invested in weak Marta’s problem, Westen devised a plan to defeat Cortez.

After a hard year of dispossessing peasants, Latin-American wannabe dictators apparently like to do nothing better than vacation in Miami. This proves to be a real time saver for Westen. The show, of course, ends with Rufino’s death and, apparently, a swift reordering of the entire political structure of the nameless Latin-American country in question. Marta and similar characters, beyond having a problem that Michael can solve, only appear when the audience needs more exposition. They are otherwise totally powerless in their own lives.

Even women and minorities who one might expect to be Michael’s peers, such as a Latina police officer (“Sophia”) who appeared in the second season, end up being fairly useless. Sophia was so inept at her job that she actually became a stalking victim of the man that she apparently spent years trying to arrest (!). She then had to appeal to Westen to not only help her arrest the drug dealer, retain her job, but also secure her own personal safety. Always chivalrous, Westen even allows her to take credit for the arrest.




Some might suggest that the main character Fiona Glenanne offers a woman character who is potentially Michael’s equal. Fiona, we are told, is an Irish national originally trained by the IRA. She does therefore have elements that push against some traditional gendered stereotypes. Fiona’s expertise on guns and explosives can even surpass Michael Westen’s. She also frequently holds her own in regular fist fights and, on a rare occasion, has rescued the male characters in the show.

Yet, her character’s basic premise is still mired in some pretty traditional gender ideas. Michael’s motives are rooted in lofty ideals and a sense of U.S. patriotism. In contrast, Fiona’s greatest ambitions center on building a romantic relationship with Michael. She actually finds it impossibly difficult to understand his noble aspirations to serve his country. Indeed, we are informed that she only joined the IRA to avenge the death of her sister, not out of any deeper political or nationalist ideology. So, while Michael and Fiona complete the same jobs, her motives are still rooted in traditionally feminine ideals: emotion, family, and an ultimate desire for heterosexual marriage. Michael uses his skills for justice. Fiona uses her skills to help her man. Oh, and by the way, Fiona herself became one of Michael’s “clients” in the end of this past season.



In this way, producers of Burn Notice get to have it both ways. On one hand, they can handle serious social issues like domestic abuse, human trafficking, and the drug trade. On the other hand, they get to divorce those problems from the bigger social structures that keep inequalities in place or from thorny questions about racism, sexism, or U.S. imperialism. They are treated as case-by-case problems that can be solved through the timely intervention of the right white-straight man. In this way, the show ignores the seriously hard work that goes into fighting for social justice. Far from being the work of individuals, it takes entire communities to fight for change.

Burn Notice is hardly unique in this formulation. All sorts of shows have been built around the good white guy who helps the Other. Maybe no other show took this premise to its greatest extreme than the eighties sci-fi clunker Quantum Leap. In that instance, the white-straight-male hero literally coopted the bodies of [white] women, men of color, and (in one memorable episode) a quasi-gay naval cadet. Quantum Leap often literally rewrote the history of civil rights in this nation. Rather than being a product of the hard work of minorities against a disinterested white straight majority, Quantum Leap proposed that white straight men even created the first impetuses for social justice. What minorities really needed was to get a little white-straight man in them before they could really improve their lives. Without white straight men to help them, women, minorities, and gays would have been forever degraded.


It is quite something to be living in a moment when the nation is willing to elect an African American man to lead the nation, but television networks are still frightened about casting a minority to lead an hour-long drama. Perhaps USA should change its slogan to“White Characters Welcome, All Others Enter Through the Back."

This Ain't No Garden of Eden and I Ain't No Eve

It was one of those weeks, kiddies. In the immortal words of Pearl Bailey, “I’m just tired.”

Each day seemed designed to put me in a deeper shade of blue. Sometimes the cosmos just drives me to drink. Of course, I really wouldn’t drink at all – It’s just that I can’t think of another way to get the alcohol into my bloodstream.

My week’s highlights start and end in my garden. At the start of the week, I finally admitted to myself that I am 90 percent certain that the amaranthus cauditis seeds that I planted last spring never really sprouted. Or if they sprouted, they were quickly devoured by the voracious vampire rabbits that inhabit my property.

But, you see, I thought the seeds had sprouted many months go. In the general area where I planted them there were many little buds coming out of the ground. So, for over eight weeks, I have been faithfully nurturing a patch of weeds. They are now quite robust.

Heading out of the garden and to my mailbox, I found some timely correspondence from my credit card companies. Since that mean ol' government is forcing them to at least try to play fair, they have decided to jack up their interest rates on existing customers. Will I ever get out debt? It seems unlikely.

In addition to my horticulture and financial failures, my romantic life made it a perfect hat trick. This week brought not one, but two separate rejections. Neither was major, but it doesn’t help a boy’s ego, you know? This has not been a week where I have enjoyed my singledom – at all.

So those stings probably only magnified a comment from an oh-so-precious graduate student. With little warning, ze decided to tell me, “I just can’t wait until I am as old you! I am really looking forward to being thoroughly middle aged.” Wasn’t that sweet? Cuz, you know, I wasn’t already feeling like Quasimodo thanks to the unending torrent of rejections coming my way. Nice. I would look into a bell-ringing gig, but I am apparently too withered and aged for that type of work.



Sometimes I wonder, where did such graduate students learn their manners? Did their parents/guardians make some type of calculated decision during their childhood? Did they decide to forgo the time it took to teach basic conversational etiquette so that they could cram in more grammar rules? All I can say is that I better never see a dangling preposition in this student’s papers.

Project Runway returned to the air this week. That might have been a bright spot, except now they film it in Los Angeles. Let’s be honest: it just isn’t the same show outside of New York. It’s over.

To bring the week to a close, this morning I headed out to check on my weeds’ progress to seed (‘cuz I am sure that all the Miracle-Gro^© that I have been giving them will insure that they spread like wildfire next spring. My neighbors will be so pleased.). As I stepped off my deck and into the lawn, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. In the lawn, there was something dark blowing in the breeze. Only there wasn’t any breeze. And then I realized, it was a motherfucking snake.



My reflexes had me jump backwards three feet. I thought that snakes only lived on planes! Where is Jeff Corwin when you need him? It wasn't the first time I asked that question this week . . .

Before you all go thinking that I am easily rattled (no pun intended), this was no simple little garter snake. I am from New Mexico. All sorts of reptiles have crossed my path. We are talking about a snake, though, that was at least sixteen inches long and two inches wide.

He wasn't one of those charming, Disney snakes either. Trust me, he had neither an ermine cape nor a captivating way with words.



What he did have was half a frog hanging out of his mouth. Yes, I surprised the snake during his breakfast hour. It was a horror show. The frog’s little legs still twitching as the snake reared its head towards me in an attack posture. Apparently his parents didn’t take the time to teach it proper attack etiquette. Didn’t he know it was rude to look menacing with its mouth full?

Being superstitious (or maybe I just want such a disturbing scene to have some meaning -- any meaning), I thought it must be a bad omen. Then I realized something important. My week may have been an unpleasant one, but it wasn’t worse than the week that the frog had.

The Good, the Bad, and the Crazy

My week of living blogfully concluded with a bang. I enjoyed a long weekend of visiting with VUBOQ. It’s interesting that two of my favorite bloggers, Dorian and VUBOQ, both happened to appear in Midwestern Funky Town in the same week.

Unlike the rest of you forgetful bitches, VUBOQ actually remembers the things that I wrote on this blog! He is a loyal disciple of GayProf and will inherit the earth – or the blogosphere – or whatever I have that is inheritable.

Kidding aside, VUBOQ was totally the awesome. He was the awesome and another half awesome extra. And his DC haircut attracted quite the attention in MFT. You can read about our hijinks over at his place.

His and Dorian’s visit reminded me of two things. First, there aren't that many bloggers left around from when I first started this blog (They are two of very few who are still publishing original content). Second, MFT offers only modest entertainment for visiting guests. While the town’s funkiness is readily apparent, so is its midwesterness.

Have I ever mentioned how annoying it is that there is only a single gay bar in a town this size? Well, if I haven’t, it’s really annoying. During the summer, things aren’t so bad because they have patio seating. Come winter time, however, things get much more bleak.



Speaking of the impending winter (**non sequitur alert**), it reminds me that the academic school year is about to start for most of us. Now is the time that those lucky few who obtained a job are settling into their new towns.

Some of the best advice that I think I have seen on blogs came from Rebekah. While I am paraphrasing, she once noted that it was important to act like the colleague that you would like to have rather than the colleagues who might actually surround you. I am lucky to have really fantastic colleagues at Big Midwestern U, but, as you might recall (Well, you might recall if you are VUBOQ, who actually remembers what I wrote on this blog), that was not always the case at my other gigs.

GayProf is far from being a perfect colleague (trust me), but Rebekah's words are sentiments that I generally try to follow. Since some are new to the whole working thing, I thought it might be helpful to outline some key difference between colleagues. Here is a simple guide to help you know what makes a good colleague, a bad colleague, and a crazy colleague.

***

When preparing a syllabus:


A good colleague will consider assigning material written by their fellow professors.

A bad colleague will assign hir own book.

A crazy colleague will be thinking about ways to sleep with hir students.




***

During a regular department meeting,


A good colleague will listen intently to other people's views and weigh in only when ze has direct experience or knowledge of the issue at hand.

A bad colleague will start a fight with another faculty member over a trivial issue.

A crazy colleague will give a monologue of no less than twenty minutes expounding on why they are under-appreciated within the department.


***

When a junior colleague explicitly asks a favor of a senior faculty member:


A good colleague will do hir best to fulfill the request, remembering how vulnerable junior faculty can be.

A bad colleague will ignore the junior faculty member’s request entirely and then complain that they are too busy and over extended.

A crazy colleague will use the request as evidence that the junior colleague doesn’t “deserve” tenure.


***

When a junior colleague explicitly asks a fellow junior faculty member to read a piece of work:


A good colleague will budget time to give a thoughtful reading and feedback of the piece.

A bad colleague will declare that they have more important things to do than to read anything from a junior person.

A crazy colleague will try to publish the work under their own name.


***

When passing in the hall,


A good colleague will say hello in a cheerful manner.

A bad colleague will avoid eye contact.

A crazy colleague will campaign to be made department chair.


***

In the department kitchen,


A good colleague will make the next pot of coffee if they take the last cup.

A bad colleague will empty the coffee pot into their personal thermos and walk away.

A crazy colleague will advocate replacing all coffee with Postum^©.


***

When interacting with the department staff,


A good colleague will remember that they are peers, but simply doing different types of labor.

A bad colleague will treat them like servants.

A crazy colleague will have had to go through a dean-ordered sensitivity training from HR.




***

While in your office,


A good colleague will keep music or other media at a low volume, remembering that the walls are paper-thin and that other people are trying to work.

A bad colleague will blast Bon Jovi’s greatest hits over and over again.

A crazy colleague will be singing hir heart out as if at the London Palladium.


***

With graduate students,


A good colleague will allow students to gravitate to the faculty who they find the most helpful to their project.

A bad colleague will have graduate students mowing hir lawn.

A crazy colleague will jealously guard graduate students as if they were made out of gold. They will have an ambition to create a small army of drones who all speak the same as themselves.



***

During a job search,


A good colleague will dutifully read the application materials and attend the job talks.

A bad colleague will assume that “somebody” will read the materials, but that they are really too busy to care.

A crazy colleague will hire whoever fits their political agenda without reading a single word of the application.


***

When a visiting professor arrives,


A good colleague will be a cordial host and attend meals with the visitor.

A bad colleague will ignore the event or whine that their friends weren’t invited instead.

A crazy colleague will corner the visitor and plead for a job at another university.




***
When scheduling next semester’s classes,


A good colleague will consider the needs of the program as a whole.

A bad colleague will teach whatever they want, whenever they want to teach it (even if they only ever get eight students at a time).

A crazy colleague will declare that all courses outside hir own field are “silly” and “boutique classes” that shouldn’t be offered at all.


***

When an important policy document is circulated,


A good colleague will read it and give feedback by the date requested.

A bad colleague will read it several months after the policy change went into effect but still demand that their opinion “be heard.”

A crazy colleague will declare it part of a mass conspiracy to deprive them of their basic rights.


****

On the road to tenure,


A good colleague will recognize that everybody is under the same stress and try to create a sense of community.

A bad colleague will believe that it’s a “dog-eat-dog” world and every professor is out for hirself.

A crazy colleague will complain that their work is soooo much more difficult and special than everybody else’s and therefore deserves “special consideration.”



***

In terms of personal hygiene,


A good colleague will shower at least daily.

A bad colleague will arrive at department meetings straight from the gym.

A crazy colleague will have spiders living in hir hair and/or beard.


***

In terms of sexism, racism, homophobia, and other institutionalized patterns of discrimination,


A good colleague will educate themselves on the issues and think about ways to change the status quo.

A bad colleague will declare that such things aren’t their problem.

A crazy colleague will advocate revoking the department’s non-discrimination clause because white straight men are the “real victims.”





***

When a colleague publishes a new book, article, or wins an award:


A good colleague will send a short note of congratulations.

A bad colleague will say that there were “better” journals/presses/awards where the work could have been placed.

A crazy colleague will call up the editor/awards committee and ask why their own work wasn’t considered.



***

When a newly hired professor arrives in the department,


A good colleague will invite hir for a meal and show hir around to feel welcome.

A bad colleague will remind hir that not having tenure makes them “temporary.”

A crazy colleague will tell hir just how many people voted against hiring hir.




***

When talking about research,


A good colleague will suggest helpful texts that might enhance their work.

A bad colleague will recommend their own work as a helpful model of "true" scholarship.

A crazy colleague will talk wistfully of the good times in graduate school when they were able to have “real” intellectual conversations and how disappointing it is to not have that in their current department.


***

After a department function off-campus,


A good colleague will offer a ride to anybody without a car.

A bad colleague will not have shown up in the first place.

A crazy colleague will trap a junior faculty member in the corner to discuss hir recent diagnosis of leaky bowel syndrome.



***

During an external review,


A good colleague will outline both the strengths and weaknesses of the department.

A bad colleague will complain that they are underpaid and deserve a massive raise.

A crazy colleague will declare that all of the department’s problems only started once they hired "all those women and minorities."





***

After a rocky department meeting,


A good colleague will try to put it in perspective and move forward with no hard feelings.

A bad colleague will carry a grudge for the next twenty years and have an "enemies" list longer than Nixon's.

A crazy colleague will write a blog post about it.

Inside the Blogging Studio with HistoriAnn

My week of living blogfully continues. For those of you who are following along at home, remember that today is the day that you click over to HistoriAnn for Part II of our conversation about blogging, life, death, and life. If you haven't read Part I, you are missing out. All the cool kids are reading it, why not you? Do you think that you are better than us?

In the meantime, you might have been wondering what GayProf would look like in the Mad Men universe (hat tip to VUBOQ). It turns out, given my already-existing love of retro, that I look basically the same -- Only I don't drink Martinis at the office. I mean, everybody knows that bourbon is the appropriate drink for faculty offices. You can make our own version here.



Now, if you will excuse me, I need to create a new SSD for my Dreadnought.

Inside the Blogging Studio with GayProf

Greetings, loyal readers and true believers. GayProf is having a week of living blogfully. My good fortune allowed me to finally meet (in RL) one of my favorite bloggers of all time: Dorian from Postmodern Barney. He and his friend John made a rest stop in Midwestern Funky Town on their cross-country journey.

When I first started this blog, Dorian was an early inspiration and a really generous reader. He was just as rockin' cool as I imagined (and pretty darn sweet). It was also a pleasure to meet John, one of the few other people I have ever encountered who played Starfleet Battles as a youngster (Yes, I was that type of nerd).

My week of living blogfully will include another blogger visiting Midwestern Funky Town later this week. Dare to guess the identity.

Today, the blogfully week continues with a the conversation that I recently had with HistoriAnn over blogging, academic priorities, and the solution to world hunger. Okay, maybe we didn’t quite tackle all of that. Still, read Part I of our conversation here today and then head over to her corral tomorrow for the conclusion.

***

Part I: Blogging the academic life

GayProf: It’s great that we are finally getting around to a joint post. Of course, my first choice would have been to debate the intricacies of the Wonder Woman episode where Formicida, Queen of the Insects, brings an environmental message to evil and polluting U.S. corporations. I suppose, though, discussing academia is good, too.



The relationship between blogs and academic life seems tricky. Some suggest that it should be construed as important as any other type of intellectual inquiry in tenure/promotion files.

I guess I am conflicted about what I think of that. For me, I liked my little bloggy because I could write about things that I probably wouldn’t have had a chance to write about in more narrow academic circles. Also, it gives a chance for academics to reach a much wider audience. Not many people outside of universities, for instance, would care to pick up a film journal. On a blog, though, they can read a quick post that contemplates the racial meanings of Ricardo Montálban’s roles in film and television (I was sad that he died, but I take comfort in knowing that his casket was upholstered in the richest Corinthian leather possible). Alas, I think more people will have read CoG than will ultimately ever read NERPoD (even if NERPoD is a bit sounder and has fewer typos).

HistoriAnn: I agree with you GayProf: My instinct is that my blog is not something I want to submit as part of my annual report or for my salary exercise.

GayProf: At a talk by Benedict Anderson I once attended, he speculated that the moment that a text becomes something that college students can be tested over it more-or-less loses its revolutionary potential. Maybe the moment that a blog becomes part of merit metrics, they also lose their fun. Then it’s no longer a way to pass the time cracking jokes, but actual work.

HistoriAnn: I also enjoy blogging because of the new people I've met (well, most of them, anyway) and the large audience who will read my blog and engage my opinions who will in fact never, ever pick up my books and articles. A lot of people -- mostly historians or feminist academics outside of History -- have let me know, either on the blog or in person, that HistoriAnn has been really professionally or even personally useful to them, and I'm thrilled that so many people seem to appreciate the community that we've built there.



GayProf: It seems like community is the most important aspect of blogging. Certainly one of the reasons that I started my own blog was that I was feeling a lack of community in many aspects of life in the dreaded state of Texas. Blogging allowed me to connect with different groups of like-minded folk: The queer, other scholars, those obsessed with seventies pop icons. It turns out that those are some rather overlapping communities.


HistoriAnn: Yes. At least, for feminist bloggers and most academic bloggers I think community is the most important thing. There’s a similar interest in creating safe spaces in which we can have conversations across vast geographies, and pretty much in real time. Although friends of mine have commented recently that they think that the historical profession is just too ‘nice’ these days—in that no one really wants to attack anyone’s ideas, they just ignore them instead—I think ‘nice’ is just fine by me in terms of the space I have in the blogosphere.

GayProf: Too nice?(!) I am not sure what conferences they are attending, but I see lots of meanspirited folk become sharks at various panels. Geez – Are they hoping for an Alexis-and- Krystal-in-the-pool sort of moment?



HistoriAnn: Well, who isn’t, so long as it’s not you getting wet? (Just kidding.) But, to return to the question of blogging on the clock versus for fun: blogging is a choice that I think of like a hobby, although "hobby" seems like I'm selling myself short--should I say "avocation," as opposed to my "vocation?" I never dreamed that my avocation would be something that would attract more than a few hundred regular readers. If I put it on my annual report, it would become another obligation, and as a middle-class woman in the early twenty-first century, I've got plenty of obligations to work and to other people in my life. Maybe it's illusory, but keeping it off the books makes it feel more like fun than work.



Realistically, even if I included my blog in my annual report, I'd only get a fraction of credit for it anyway. In my department, our effort distribution is 50% teaching, 35% research, and 15% service. Since blogging is neither teaching nor research -- although it may serve to facilitate both of these aspects of my work -- it would doubtlessly fall into the catchall category we call "service" (as in service to the department/university/profession/community, etc.)

So, all things considered, I like the fact that Historiann is "space off," although it's clearly linked to who I am and what I do professionally. It has brought me into contact with scholars like you, with whom I have a lot in common but who otherwise don’t attend the same conferences, generally speaking, and it’s always good to have more friends and connections than fewer, right? I don’t mean that in a careerist sense, but rather in the sense that it makes me feel connected to a broader community of likeminded scholars. (This is something I think I value more now from my wifi connection in the Colorado Territory than I would if I still lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts or even in Oxford, Ohio.)



GayProf: Yeah, I think blogging could only fall under the “Service” category, which nobody really counts towards anything anyway (No matter how many nifty percentages or fractions that they attach to it. While I have occasionally heard people complain that so-and-so doesn’t do their fair share of service, I have never seen it actually impact their status or potential for raises).

HistoriAnn: Me either! Funny, that. I also don’t see people punished enough for being jerks, but I guess that means I can always reserve my right to be a flaming a-hole should I feel so inclined.

GayProf: Ah, the privileges of tenure. . .

Still, I do think that academics are going to have to engage with internet publishing, including blogs, in more serious ways. I think there is a potential for blogging to be akin to the very early writings of second-wave feminists or African-American and Latino activists in the sixties and seventies. In those instances, most trade and academic presses didn’t want to have anything to do with those works. The ideas, however, were so important that people published them anyway that they could: small independent presses (a thing of the past), self-publishing, or even just mimeographing them so that they could circulate. I think that blogging has allowed a comparable opportunity for people to articulate views that just don’t get traction in the mainstream.

HistoriAnn: This is a great analogy—or, maybe like feminist ‘zines from the 1980s and early 1990s?

GayProf: Blogging also gives academics a chance to have a sense of humor about things. Working in academia, maybe especially in ethnic/race studies, I find that everybody tends to be a little too earnest and serious. Given that ethnic studies professors stand a chance of being arrested in their own home, that lack of humor is probably understandable. Nonetheless, I like to think that we could be irreverent more often, even if we are talking about really serious issues.

HistoriAnn: Exactly. What would you do with your Wonder Woman memorabilia, and what would I do with my Barbies and cowgirl pinups, if we didn't have blogs?

GayProf: Well, I would probably still send my Mego Wonder Woman doll on adventures.



HistoriAnn: Our students get to know us (within limits, one hopes) and we can't help but share a little of our personalities with them in the way we dress, talk, move, organize a class, etc. But academic publications are not about "us" as people -- rightly I think. Blogs even permit us to create alter-egos like a superhero who disguises herself by day as a naval secretary, or like a cowgirl on the High Plains Desert with an amazing library of sexy pin-ups by Gil Elvgren. I think your fascination with Wonder Woman -- bespectacled naval attache by day, superhero of the Allied Powers by night -- captures the fun of blogging. We can develop playful alter-egos who probably have very little to do with our actual everyday professional lives. (And I hope I haven’t disillusioned too many readers for suggesting that I may not actually be a cowgirl who owns a ranch with horses to tend to, fences to ride, and stalls to muck out.)

GayProf: Right, though my secret identity is the worst kept secret on the blogosphere. Diana Prince made it look so easy. Just toss on some glasses and wear a bun-of-steel and nobody second-guesses that you might be wearing a red-white-and-blue playboy bunny costume under that uniform. As there are only a dozen gay-Chicano-studies scholars in existence, you don’t have to be Angela Lansbury to figure my real identity out.



HistoriAnn: That’s another reason I decided to be “out” from the start. I was already tenured, but really—how many other people in the world are there whose research interests are exactly what I do? And how many of them live in Colorado? Anyone considering starting a blog should consider how likely it is you can remain anonymous or pseudonymous if you live in a small state or small metro area. If you live in L.A. or New York, you’ll probably hold onto your anonymity longer, but since most academic bloggers end up in small-town America and Canada, that’s probably unlikely.

GayProf: I never really thought anybody would actually read the blog. When I started, there were just things that I needed to express about my life that wasn’t possible in TexAss.

Setting aside my shaky decisions, and to harp on my previous analogy to the sixties writings (because I tend to like it today), I think that pseudonyms and alter-egos can reignite that previous generations’ notion that the ideas were more important than the individual. They believed that the identity of one particular author was less critical than getting a discussion going.

Still, blogging is simply not the same as other intellectual work. Blogging definitely rewards quantity over quality. The more one posts, the more readers one collects. Indeed, I have seen some really great blogs lose their sense of purpose because the authors wanted to increase their readership. In place of thoughtfully written pieces written every few days, they became a clearing house for news feeds posted dozens and dozens of times per day. It works, too. They have thousands of readers who are willing to comment on a post consisting of nothing more than a picture of a cup of coffee.



HistoriAnn: Yes -- even some academic blogs -- or rather, blogs by people who were once academics -- have fallen into this trap. I try to walk the line by posting pretty much every day, and levening the history geek posts with the political commentary, and the professional issues in academia posts with Barbies or other doll-related posts, just to lighten the mood. (Depressing blogs are to their readers as Kryptonite is to Superman! They will sap your superpowers.)

But there's no question: it's easier to just link to someone else and say simply "heh" or "interesting," than it is to analyze something and open up a question for your readers to reflect on. But then, that's in part why I linked my blog to my real life identity--I thought that people should know where I'm coming from, and that it might curb any temptation to become intellectually lazy.

GayProf: I agree – After all, I can read a newsfeed just as easily as anybody else. Why go to a blog for that?



And there are some topics I won’t do on my blog. People’s murders, beatings, or personal humiliations just don’t seem like appropriate content for a blog with campy comic book covers and jokes about having sex with a car.

Confirming Racism

Barack Obama has had a difficult relationship with two (sometimes overlapping) constituencies within the Democratic Party: Latinos and the gays. He never really won over either group during the tense primary season. Despite that fact, both groups nonetheless voted overwhelmingly for him in the general election (Before Clinton apologists jump on this, it is important to note that her stated positions toward both groups were almost identical to Obama’s – I have serious doubts her administration would have acted any different in these issues).

One would have imagined that Obama would therefore be more mindful of Latinos and gay concerns so that they remained on his side. Turns out, not so much.

For the gays, his administration has decided that we are expendable and is more than happy to toss us aside. He recently allowed his administration to file a legal brief comparing gay marriage to incest. Not only won’t Obama support equal marriage rights, but he has even balked at upholding the right of queer folk to serve their nation’s military. In place of real justice, he invited a few select A-list gays to the White House for a cocktail party.

During the campaign, Obama pledged to be a good “friend” to the queer community. Apparently Mr. Obama doesn’t see friendship as being about recognizing our basic equality before the law. Friendship seems to mean serving some soggy appetizers and watered-down cocktails in the East Room.

Or maybe Obama wants us to be the equivalent of adolescent “secret friends.” It’s cool if we come over to his house and play video games, but he doesn’t want the popular kids at school knowing that we hang out. He has his reputation to consider.

Latinos have not fared much better under Mr. Obama. Political considerations prompted him to appoint the notoriously anti-immigrant Arizona governor Janet Napolitano to head Homeland Security (the bureau that currently controls immigration for the entire U.S.). Obama also largely ignores Latin America until an absolute crisis forces him to pay attention.

He was, however, willing to throw [straight] Latinos a bone by nominating Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Don’t get me wrong – That’s a pretty good bone. There is lots of meat on it and all the marrow is intact. We could be chewing on it for decades to come. Well, that’s assuming that Nepolitano doesn’t deport us all.

Merely being Latina, though, is not enough to draw the support of the Latino community. After all, the Bushie administration frequently floated Alberto Gonzales’s name as a potential nominee to the Supreme Court. Latinos rarely supported the idea, even before Gonzales contracted that crippling case of amnesia that seemed to tear his life apart.



Still, I generally like Sotomayor. By all accounts, she has been a remarkably thorough and deliberate judge. What really sealed the deal for me was when she broke her ankle while traveling to meet with the Senate. Not only did Sotomayor still make her flight, she hobbled her way up the steps of Capitol Hill without missing an appointment. There is a woman who wants a job! Well, who can blame her given how high the unemployment rate is these days? I hear that Supreme Court Justice gig comes with a nice benefits package, maybe even dental!

Sotomayor’s path from nomination to confirmation has exposed the general public’s ambivalence about discussing race in the nation. Republicans know that they are in a precarious position with the public. Voters appear to finally have had it after decades of Republican mismanagement, corruption, and a disregard for the welfare of the majority of citizens. Since most Republicans don’t actually want to change their positions, they see their best bet at victory as whipping up hate. Hey, it worked for Bushie in 2004. Despite having driven the nation into the ground (and spending most of his time on vacation), he could still build a winning reelection campaign based on homophobia, anti-immigrant hysteria, and unending war. Republicans see a prime chance to use common racism as a means to get back into the limelight (They also conveniently ignore that it was Bush I who appointed Sotomayor to the U.S. District Court).




At the instant of her nomination, Republicans attacked viciously. Newt Gingrich and the various pundits declared her a “racist.” Mitt Romney declared her nomination “troubling.” Religious zealot Mike Huckabee released a scathing statement slamming Sotomayor. Of course, Huckabee was a bit confused and called her “Maria” Sotomayor rather than her actual name, Sonia Sotomayor. Apparently Huckabee just assumes that all Latinas are named Maria. Yeah, but Sotomayor is the “racist.”

More than anything else, Republicans have seized on Sotomayor’s now infamous statement that “a wise Latina woman” might make decisions about the law differently than an individual of another race or gender. If we are to believe Republicans, apparently Sotomayor will use her seat on the Supreme Court to institute a bloody race war that will only end when Puerto Rico has triumphed and enslaved the rest of the world.

Of course, Republicans also argue that Sotomayor is going to take away everybody’s guns. So, I guess it will be a race war fought with banana-cream pies.



What I find astounding about the whole debate is that we are seemingly expected to believe that the Supreme Court in the United States, up until this point, has been somehow “race blind.” If we accept what the Republicans are saying, then Sotomayor would radically alter the court because she *gasp* might be influenced in her interpretations of the law by her racial and gender identities.

Actually, the Supreme Court has often made decisions with racial implications (if not directly influenced by race). These were decisions that upheld a racial hierarchy within the United States by interpreting the Constitution in particular ways that benefited white men. They were also decisions made exclusively by white men.

Indeed, it was often cases involving race that helped solidify the Supreme Court’s authority within the U.S. Of course, there are the well-known ones: In Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court ruled that the drafters of the Constitution considered African Americans “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled the forced separation of the races was just dandy. Other cases, though, are not as frequently discussed. In the 1831 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, the Supreme Court ruled that Native-American tribes existed in a type of legal limbo as “domestic dependent nations.”

As residents in Puerto Rico, Sotomayor’s family felt the implications of the Supreme Court’s power directly. In 1901, the U.S. Supreme Court case Downes v. Bidwell more-or-less defined that island (and other occupied U.S. territories) as a colony of this nation. While ostensibly about taxes, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution did not extend to Puerto Rico or its inhabitants because it was merely a “possession” of the United States.



The majority of justices couldn’t find a consensus about how the law permitted that to be true. Instead, they submitted five different opinions, none of which received a majority endorsement. The one with the most support explained that Puerto Rico “was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.” In other words, Puerto Ricans just didn’t “fit in” with the rest of the U.S. They spoke a different language, looked different, and had different customs. As a result, the U.S. did not legally have to treat Puerto Rico as an equal part of the nation. One might hope that, had a Puerto Rican been on the Supreme Court in 1901, that ze might have objected to such logic (no matter how based in the “law” it was).

Such rulings, which certainly had racial implications, have had long-term implications that have yet to be resolved. The Pew Hispanic Center just recently released a report on Puerto Rican demographics in the fifty states. Today, more than four million Puerto Ricans live in the mainland United States, slightly more than live on the actual island of Puerto Rico (which, btw, is still a U.S. possession without a voting member of Congress – All Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens). Puerto Ricans are the second largest Latino population in the U.S., but are far overshadowed by Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Puerto Ricans account for only 9 percent of the total Latino population in the U.S., but Mexicans and Mexican Americans are a substantial majority (constituting 64 percent of the total Latino population). Puerto Ricans, like all Latinos, have less access to education and earn less than the general population. They also have lower rates of homeownership, lower than even the rate for Latinos overall.

So, it doesn’t surprise me that Sotomayor might have a particular take on the law based on her background. Of course, accusations that one’s racial and gender identities would bias their decisions is not something that seems to come up when white men are appointed to the court. The current Chief Justice, John Roberts, sailed through the confirmation process. Shortly thereafter, in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that Seattle, Washington’s defacto segregated school system did not violate the rights of minority students. The Court thus severely limited the ability of all the nation’s schools to consider race as a means to achieve integration. Roberts glibly promised that pretending that race doesn’t matter in this nation will make it so. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race,” he wrote, “is to stop discrimination on the basis of race.”



Did you hear that, people? Simply stop being racist and racism will be over. Why didn’t we think of that before? It’s all so simple! All these centuries and it took such a brilliant jurist to simply say, “stop discriminating based on race.” Oh, brave new world!

How can one not but conclude that Roberts’ naïve assumptions about racism are the result of his elite background and status as a middle-age white man? One guesses that he probably still believes that it was his clapping that brought Tinkerbell back to life.

The legal and social status quo means inequity for Puerto Ricans and other Latino groups (Not to mention women, other racial minorities, queer folk. . .) Existing injustices, some of which are written into our laws, are the legacy of racism in this nation. That can’t be wished away.

Another Year

Two friends both happened to be in this region over the weekend: a sassy friend from Texas visiting Decaying Midwestern Urban Center and the cowgirl blogger HistoriAnn. Seeing them both was nice.

Another year has also passed, meaning my birthday is upon us. The good news is that you all can now legally elect me to be the President of the United States. Truth be told, though, I am not in much of a celebratory mood. I am feeling a bit high-maintenance these days, so drawing more attention to myself seems like a lot to ask. The news also seems to be riddled with untimely deaths, which is kind of another downer.

Nonetheless, it is always good to think about one’s life in relationship to others. At age 35, what were other people doing?

If I were Mary Richards at age thirty-five, my closest friends, Phyllis and Rhoda, would move away to start two doomed shows new lives in San Francisco and New York.

If I were Elvis Presley, my final film, Change of Habit, would have been released last year. I would have costarred with Mary Tyler Moore in it.



If I were John F. Kennedy, I would currently be serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. This would be the year that I would meet Jacqueline Bouvier.

If I were Jesus at age thirty-five, I would have risen from the dead two years ago.

If I were Cher, this would be the year that I released a duet with Meatloaf. It would be another year before I starred in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean on Broadway.


If I were Oscar Wilde, this would be the year that I published “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” my first writings about romantic love between men.

If I were James Dean, I would have been dead for eleven years.

If I were Montgomery Clift, I would smash my car into a telephone pole and disfigure my face this year.

If I were Pancho Villa at age thirty five, I would be serving as provisional governor of Chihuahua in the midst of the Mexican Revolution. It would be another two years before I decided to launch an attack on New Mexico.

If I were Harvey Milk, it would be another 12 years before I became the first openly gay elected official in a major U.S. city.

If I were Saint Anthony of Padua, this would be my last year to live.



If I were either of my parents, I would already have three children. The youngest would be seven years old.

If I were Martin Luther King, Jr., I would become the youngest person to win a Noble Peace Prize this year.

If I were Paul Lynde, I would be enjoying success on Broadway as the father in Bye Bye Birdie.



If I were Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, I would be bankrupt from my failed expedition into New Mexico and would have been forced out of my governorship of Nueva Galicia this past year. I would also be very bitter.

If I were Marilyn Monroe, this would be the last year of my life.

If I were Pearl Bailey, this would be the year that I took the role of Frankie in the musical Carmen Jones.



If I were Manuel Armijo, I would serve as mayor of Albuquerque while enjoying my wealth from sheep trading.

If I were Walt Whitman, I would be finishing the first edition of Leaves of Grass for publication next year.

If I were Queen Isabella I, I would take the town of Loja this year in my merciless campaign to conquer and control the Iberian peninsula.

If I were Captain Kirk, I would have been commanding the U.S.S. Enterprise for four years. Unless I was the Captain Kirk from the recent film, in which case I would have skipped over all the hard work of earning that rank ten years ago.



If I were Popé, it would be another ten years before Spain’s religious authorities would arrest me for practicing “sorcery.”

If I were Truman Capote, this would be the year that I learned of the grisly murders of the Clutter family.

If I were Gore Vidal, I would have spent this past year working on the sceenplay for Ben Hur.

If I were the scholar George I. Sánchez, I would have just published my best known work Forgotten People, which drew attention to the poverty and unfair conditions in New Mexico.

If I were Anne Bancroft, I would be cast as the "older woman" Mrs. Robinson in the film The Graduate this year.



If I were GayProf, I would have finished (more or less) the Never Ending Research Project of Doom.

If I were Reies López Tijerina, I would travel to Mexico and meet with former president Lázaro Cárdenas this year.

If I were Wonder Woman, I would age another 2,456 years before joining Patriarch’s world to fight crime.