Of Geekery and Feminism

I had an unexpected free evening so I decided to go see Star Trek [insert colon here] Into Darkness.  I settled in, ready for good popcorn movie fun. But as the movie progressed, my joy in Benedict Cumberbatch and in Kirk and Spock’s bromance began to fade. My immersion in the story ended as I started to realize that this movie was failing the Bechdel test. 

Evidence for that failure and other bits of sexism:

1. Although two women are featured secondary characters, they never speak to each other. And both are defined in relation to men — one through her relationship with a fellow officer, the other through her relationship with her father and through audience awareness of her future relationship with Kirk.

2. The women still wear skimpy dresses with short sleeves and boots while the men wear pants and long-sleeved shirts. At the very least, they are chilly.

3.  Obligatory scene of woman in bra and panties.

4. Woman is allowed on-board the Enterprise not because of her impressive academic credentials, but because Kirk thinks she’s hot.

5. All but one of the senior command of Starfleet are men. 

Sure, the movie is based on a 1960s tv show — isn’t this what we expect? But Star Trek: The Original Series was a forward-thinking program. For a show of the 60s, it was progressive in its explorations of race and culture. The first scripted interracial kiss on television was on Star Trek.  In his determination to remain true to TOS, J.J. Abrams freezes the crew, halts the progressivism. He doesn’t reimagine a crew — he replicates a crew.  Unlike the Battlestar Galactica reboot which recast two major characters as women and depicted a post-feminist world by virtue of a nearly post-human world, Star Trek Into Darkness merely adds loud special effects and lots of lens flare to a world that is basically still 1960s America. Abrams had all the possibilities of the future and he chose to depict the past.

I’m tired of the assumption that geeky action movies are only for men. Half the audience in the theater tonight were middle-aged women. I’m tired of the assumption that men want to see objectified women. Many men are feminists. I wish I had an answer, a solution. I do know that we geeks fight hard. We got a cancelled tv show made into a movie. We brought back Futurama from the dead.  Let’s be geeky about feminism. Let’s demand more shows like BSG, like Firefly, like Buffy. Let’s demand a female Doctor, a female Obi Wan. 

Let’s see what happens when a movie like Star Trek creates female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man. And what happens when a big-budget science fiction movie imagines the future and reflects the present.

 

 

All That We Are

So I realize I’ve been discussing a lot of what is wrong or what can be better about my profession or myself or my school and not as much about what is good and right. This post is about what is good and right.

On Sunday, I took the members of Sigma Tau Delta, the English honor society, to Asheville for new member induction.  We usually have a more formal induction on campus with members of the faculty present, but at a recent Coffee and Conversation (biweekly informal chit chat time between English profs and students), we hatched the idea of taking induction on the road to the coolest town in the South. Seven students, Wheeler, and I drove the 90 minutes to Asheville (yes, we are really lucky to live that close) in the pouring rain (our plan to wear cute spring things abandoned) on Sunday and we had a wonderful time.

Lunch at Doc Chey’s, a fabulous Thai place, where we had giant bowls of noodles and real, house-made ginger ale. Induction at Malaprop’s, a wonderful independent bookstore — we recited our vow/pledge in front of a shelf of travel books. Smelling and buying at Asheville Tea and Spice Exchange — we reveled in the smells of tea and salt and sugar and spices. Chocolate and conversation at French Broad Chocolate Lounge — we drank liquid truffles and ate creme brulee and talked and talked.

The whole time these juniors and seniors, the beloved birds of the English department nest, demonstrated, naturally and effortlessly, all the things that we list as objectives and goals for our students. They discussed the Boston Bombings and how terrorism is defined, taking into account race, ethnicity, and religion. They were so happy to be in a town where everything they ate/bought was local, fair trade, and/or organic and they could articulate why fair trade is important to them. They made jokes and told funny stories and talked about wanting wombats and sloths for pets. They are interesting, quirky, thoughtful, knowledgeable critical thinkers.  They are funny and charming and curious about the world. They are, to paraphrase William Joyce, all that we have, all that we are, and all that we will ever be.  And in a week, we will tell some of them goodbye. We’ll watch them leave our nest, and we’ll cry and we’ll miss them.

But we’ll also know they can fly.

 

Be The Change You Want to See In Your University?

I turn in my tenure portfolio this summer, and my decision is set for February. I really want to get tenure. I want to be tenured so I can be more radical.

I’m a bit worried about radicalism until I have that security of tenure. I’m a bit worried about publishing this blog post. I want to do my part to “be the change,” but I’m afraid, too. (See this recent post on bravery in higher education.)

My radicalism is rather relative, I imagine. I teach at a small, private, Christian university in the South. My radical desires are things taken for granted at a lot of other schools. I want a campus policy against bullying that includes bullying based on sexual orientation, and I want campus-wide Safe Zone training. I want a more comprehensive sexual assault policy that includes an explanation of consent and stickers with numbers and resources in all the bathrooms. And I want mandatory professional development for all professors, tenured and otherwise, through our on-campus Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.  (I’ll work on open access issues later.)

Radical Desire #1 — I’ve discussed the origin of Neighbors for Equality in a previous post. Collyn Warner and Tyler McCall taught me the value of activism, the change each of us can make in our communities and in our own lives. After Amendment One passed, Neighbors for Equality switched focus to classrooms — how to address bullying in schools and to get sexual orientation added to non-harassment policies. Additionally, a group of faculty, staff, and a couple of students have founded a group we’re calling the Justice League (a joke that stuck) to tackle issues on campus. We’re working on Safe Zone training, on campus-wide sensitivity training, and on making sure students know about our non-harrassment policy. So far we are underground, but we’re meeting with a program director next week and we hope that leads to some visibility and action.  For now, we made our own Safe Zone signs to put on our office doors and students are responding and talking to us. (One sign made its way to a local coffee shop!)  And we are inviting an alum who is a member of both the religious and LGBT communities to speak in a forum next year.

Radical Desire #2 — People are nice on this campus. We like each other, we’re friendly, we get to know each other. And I think that is a major reason that no one wants to admit that sexual assault happens on our campus. It’s a Christian school — kids don’t get drunk and get assaulted here! But they do. We hear it too often. And victims are afraid to report sexual assault because it often happens at parties. If they admit they were drinking, they will be fined $200 and get a strike on their record. So they don’t report. Our student handbook has tips on avoiding rape, but they are tips that assume that rapes only happen in dark, isolated areas by complete strangers.  The handbook does not outline what constitutes sexual consent. We don’t have those stickers on bathroom mirrors with numbers and resources that other universities have. I know that people care and want to help and want to prevent rape or help those who have been raped. But it’s such a hush-hush culture and rapes are vastly underreported.

Radical Desire #3 — I have been helped so much in my teaching by colleagues, by CETL, by the members of #FYCChat on Twitter. In the past couple of years, I have completely changed the way I teach (see previous post). I couldn’t have done it without great mentors like Gayle Price, Janet Land, Jennifer Buckner, Shana Hartman, and Abby Nance. I couldn’t have done it without resource help from Emily Robertson in CETL. And it’s not done by any means, of course. I plan to meet with Emily several times this summer to change my project-based classes to problem-based classes. I get great ideas every week from #FYCChat led by Lee Skallerup (@readywriting). And I want this to be the norm. I want everyone to want to learn cool and wonderful things, but not everyone wants to do that. I understand that people are stretched thin. We all teach at least a 4/4, many are program directors, most are sponsors of an honor or social organization, all do committee and shared governance work. But universities are in a transition moment, a liminal space. We have the opportunity to be innovative and to restructure ourselves for the 21st century. And that takes professional development and trying something new.

So these are my goals in addition to continuing to improve my classes and to writing a book on imagined communities within 18th century England and on Twitter and to my family responsibilities. And until I have tenure, I’ll write blog posts and work with people underground and surround myself with Justice League and my mentors and colleagues and friends and family. Because when you stand your ground, you don’t always stand alone.

 

Found Poetry

In my Composition II class, we’ve been discussing writing. We’ve read bits from Stephen King’s On Writing, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, and Georgia Heard’s Writing Toward Home, and we’ve practiced writing using exercise from or inspired by those books. Today we used Georgia Heard’s “Found Poetry” prompt — “Gather books, newspapers, magazines, old journals, and first write down interesting words and sentences, then weave them together to make a found piece of writing.”

There are ten students in the class so we decided to make this a collaborative effort. First we took five minutes to find materials — our own daybooks, textbooks, sheet music plus stuff lying around like newspapers, flyers, discussion question handouts, pamphlets, Bibles. One student even took the Honor Code off the wall and added it to the mix.

Next, we sorted through the materials and found two lines each — some people used lines as they found them and others mashed lines together to make new ones. As each student found lines, he/she wrote them on the board. Finally, we read it and sorted it. They told me how to order the lines. One student typed it, then we added white space.

Here’s the result:

Imperative Act of Vandalism

There was so much energy in the room as we compiled, edited, laughed, negotiated. It was an amazing experience. We talked about where our words had come from and we discussed intellectual property rights. The questions that we work so hard for them to care about in Comp II came to them as natural implications of what we had done. Whose is this? Did we plagiarize? What if we are making art — is it plagiarism then? Do you make a Works Cited page for a found poem?

By the end of class, they wanted to set it up as an art installation — the poem, the materials, the questions about intellectual property — and they wanted to submit the poem to a journal. I left class with my heart thumping. This is why we teach. This is why we slog through grad school and pay student loans. When we throw something at them and they gleefully catch it and run with it — that’s a good day.

 

#Twitterclass

This semester I’m teaching an iPad pilot course. My Composition I students were each given an iPad for use during the semester. I received a Macbook Air for use during the semester, and I created an iBook for the course with it. The course has fifteen students — some passed Critical Literacy last semester (our remediated remedial comp course) and some had failed 101 in the fall. So this is an experiment — how does this first-year population use mobile learning technology? What can we do with iPads in comp that we can’t do otherwise?

Until today, the class just hasn’t been going well. It felt disjointed — here’s how we use this technology and here’s our comp activity today. I was rather flustered and out of my usual comp zone, and they just weren’t talking. So today I opened class by asking them to brainstorm about ways we could improve group discussion and class participation. They suggested several things, but one students said, “Let’s use Twitter for class discussion. Like for the whole class time.”  We immediately liked that idea and tried it out.

Having finished excerpts from Walden, the students are about to begin a simplicity experiment in which they give up something that complicates their lives for a week and journal the experience. (Yes, a bit ironic in an iPad pilot course. Funnily enough, not a single student picked a tech oriented thing to give up for the week.) I had planned to use a wiki to coordinate their ideas, but the Twitter class idea seemed even better. So we all got on Twitter (we had already set up accounts during the first week of class) and began tweeting our ideas using #simplicityexp as our hashtag.

Here’s the Storify of our class tweets:

http://storify.com/drbookwyrm/twitterclass-simplicityexp

They talked more on Twitter today than they have in four classes. They interacted with each other and with me in productive and playful ways. In our separateness, we were more together than we have been all semester.

I’m not sure what to make of that yet. Twitter is the social media that I personally love; I do feel connected to the people from around the country and the world that I only know via Twitter. I’ve made friends on Twitter. And I believe they are real friends, not just people I tweet with. One student said that it’s easier for shy students to connect via computer than face to face, and as a shy student, I understand that. What will be interesting is to see how they interact on Thursday — will they be more talkative and confident because they go to know each other via Twitter?

 

I and WAC and You

Wildacres is near Little Switzerland, NC, a mountain-top retreat of hotel style rooms and more charming cabins that caters to creative people looking for space and time to do their work.  Every year, a group of our faculty goes to Wildacres for a weekend to discuss and practice Writing Across the Curriculum.  At the WAC retreat, we discuss how we write, how our students write, how we use writing in classrooms across campus. And every year, for twenty years, Dr. Gayle Price had led the retreat, teaching “rookies” for hours and responding to the “veteran’s” ideas with enthusiasm and praise.  ”The spirit of Gayle is with us,” Dr. Janet Land told us , fighting tears, on our first night. 

 

The spititualists sit down at our table for dinner. They wear tie-dyed t-shirts and Life is Good pullovers. Both are middle-aged women, soft and round.  One holds the vegetarian entree, still wrapped in foil.  ”May we sit with you?” the white-haired woman asks.  ”Of course! Do! Sit!” we politely murmur, Southern girl hospitality kicking in by instinct. We pass bread and salt and comments.

“Who are you? Where are you from?” they ask. We tell them we are faculty, we are on a writing retreat for the weekend. “Oh, nice,” they say. They seem one entity.

“And you” we ask. “Where are you from? What do you do?”

“We’re Edgar Casey followers,” they say. They pause. “Spiritualism. Reincarnation. Past lives.” They seem shyly defiant.

“Oh, wow!” we say. We assure them. We even ask if they will conduct a seance. No, they say. We are disappointed.

We are comfortable. The food is comfort, the tea sweet, the coffee warm. We get silly. We start virtual tweeting. We fall into our grooves, we ignore the spiritualists. we sip coffee, we laugh at ourselves.

At seven, dinner ends. We murmur politely again. We get up and leave. 

Later, I think of the conversation we could have had.

 

The lobby at Wildacres has a large fireplace and lots of comfortable seating.  The various groups of guests use the space to talk, to sit and read, to write.  It is the place that “veterans” use to work on the projects that they will present on Saturday night.

 

We find chairs and footstools and spots of connectivity in the lobby with the glass windows overlooking the mountains.  The air is warmer than usual, musty and damp. It is the air of the 1940s, of paneling and grandmothers. 

We sit, we plug into computers, music, reading.

We open the doors to let in the cool mountain air. The group of spiritualists conducting a reading closes the door to keep the spirits in.

They begin scooping ashes out of the fireplace. Scrape, dump. The sound permeates the air before we identify the source. We read, they scrape. The ashes are scooped, they stack wood. The wood is stacked, they add newspaper, kindling, spark. The warmth is planned and deliberate.

They close the door. We sit near the hearth.

 

The rooms at Wildacres are plain but comfortable, and all have a lovely view of the mountains or trees.  The food is always exceptional and served family-style at round tables.  The library has tall, sloping ceilings and walls of windows and is the place that the sessions for WAC rookies always took place with Gayle.

 

We sit at lunch and pick at hominey salad. Stolidness eventually dissolves into giggles. 

“What exactly do students mean when they say they are ‘talking’ to a boy?” we ask. We laugh like schoolgirls. 

We pass chicken and buns and salad and stories. Outside, the rain falls, gathering in puddles and streaming over the hills.

In the library, we use her handouts, her ideas, her words. We freewrite using her prompts. We read her sample assignments. We stamp our papers as she once did. We replicate.

We wonder if she is with us.

 

At night, the lobby becomes a gathering place.  Our group always brings food and wine and tells stories around the fireplace. In past years, those stories mainly came from Gayle, her booming laugh punctuating the funny bits, her arms flung wide as if to embrace us all in the narrative.

 

We tell her stories, but they aren’t ours. Without her, they are just facts and information, they aren’t really stories. 

We toast her. We cry.

We hope that she is with us. 

We hope that our tellings are a reading, that we can evoke her spirit by calling on her memory.

Nearby, the spiritualists murmur politely.

 

 

What I Learned from the Back of the Room

I am teaching Critical Literacy, our re-mediated ”remedial” course, for the first time this semester.  Thankfully, my incredible colleagues are just a Skype chat away and they give me all kinds of experiments to conduct in the classroom. We’ve just finished a selection from Pedagogy of the Oppressed and to illustrate Pablo Freire’s banking and problem-solving concepts of education, Jennifer Buckner goes in the classroom and sits in the back. She stays there for a while, chatting, looking at her phone, and waiting for class to start. So that’s what I did today.

I walked into the dark classroom and didn’t turn on the lights. I sat in the back, propped up my feet, chatted with students around me a bit.  ”Are you sitting back here today?” and “I can’t get my assignment uploaded to Blackboard.” they said. Then they chatted for a bit among themselves.  A student who came in a couple of minutes late, sat down, opened his laptop, looked around, then said, “If she’s not here in 10 minutes, we can leave.” (I think it’s 15 minutes for a PhD, but whatev.) The other students started laughing. “What?” he demanded. “She’s right behind you, dude.” He looked around, saw me, and said, “Oh, I didn’t realize it was you. You’re sitting in the back.”

My transition from back in the class to up front was a bit awkward, but I did turn on the lights and the computer and start class.  I asked what they would have done if I had continued sitting in the back.  ”Watched Netflix,” one said from behind her iPad. “Gone back to the room,” one said from behind his laptop. I pulled up our class wiki and we started listing terms associated with their expectations of teachers and students. ( A screenshot of their lists is below.)  My role, from the ten minutes in which I didn’t fulfill it, apparently is to turn on the lights, stand in the front and be Keeper of the Computer, Keeper of Knowledge.

We then looked watched a clip from Declining by Degrees, a documentary on college fail, and a section of Freire on passivity.  ”So,” I said, “let’s revisit the list.” We went back to the wiki. The Teacher section included action verbs — teach, educate, make, tell. The Student section contained passive verbs and language of derision — apathy, hate, don’t know, too hard, boring. The students in the 240 seat lecture class in the video were disengaged. The fifteen students sitting with me were disengaged, absorbed by phones and iPads and laptops and their daydreams. “Why are you disengaged?” A few answers while eyes were on screens.  I kept prodding. I went meta and pointed out they were disengaged while we were discussing disengagement.

Finally I told them I didn’t believe them. I don’t believe they are apathetic or lazy or stupid. I don’t believe their list of themselves. I don’t know how to lead them to epiphanies and I’m not sure how much they are learning, but they sure are teaching me.

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