narrating kayoz

Group behaviour, boys and their cliques in school

Via the Twelfth Down Under Feminist Carnival, I've just been reading Andragy: CyberBullying, Feminism, Mean Girls, Queen Bees and Boys, and from there, the bit of Queen Bees and Wannabes that's online at Amazon.

Andra says of Wiseman's book:

I think that Queen Bees is a fine piece of feminist analysis, with racial and sexual prejudices opened up as well. Wiseman points out that she works equally with boys and girls, and that society's definition of masculinity influences boys away from strength, individuality and towards violence, bullying and groups in the same way that definitions of femininity trap girls.

I'd love to read a similar book about boys (though I note from the TOC of Queen Bees that there is a chapter on boys, and I have requested it from my local library). I do feel that ever since Liam began school the influence towards violence and group behaviour has certainly been growing.

He still does plenty of lovely creative play,* plays with girls as well as boys and so on. And I love his teacher and think she is working really well with them to teach them to be courteous, that making sure everyone gets a go is more important than winning a game etc. But the cliques seem to be forming, the popular children and less popular children are finding their places.

And I am starting to feel that I need more information. Liam is a boy, which I plainly am not. And also, he seems to be quite popular. Which, it might surprise you to know, I already was not by his age. I wasn't the lowest of the low at any time, but I was below the middle, right through until the end of year 10.**

So I'm not entirely sure how to teach him to - well, to be nice. To not fall in with group behaviour which is mean to others. To stick up for children who need support. Andra quotes Wiseman:

Boys and men who speak out against sexism or publicly support girls and women run the risk of being ridiculed by their peers as "fags", "sissies", "pussies" or in some circles "sensitive new age guys".

This is the sort of message I am afraid Liam might be picking up from his friend 'Craig'. That being kind, wearing a beany, playing co-operatively etc might may him some kind of 'sissy' (a word I would hope he's never heard, but I'm probably kidding myself), and that there's something wrong with that.

Any book recommendations for me?
__________
*Am I showing my biases here?
** Year 11 & 12 is at a different school in Canberra, and quite a different experience - for which I was extremely grateful.

One more year till it will be illegal for midwives to attend homebirths in Australia

I was just rather belatedly pleased to discover that my open letter to Nicola Rixon on cover for homebirth midwives was included in the Twelfth Down Under Feminist Carnival, back in May.

And on that subject...

A quick refresh:
Two pieces of legislation are combining to mean that midwifes will be unable to legally attend homebirths in Australia from 1 July 2010.

July 4 - that's next Saturday - is a national day of action organised by the Maternity Coalition. (The link takes you to a facebook page about it, which is all I can find so far).

And on Monday Sept 7,  Homebirth Australia has a major rally planned, in Canberra (outside Parliament House) from 11.30am.

Getting back on track: writing, blogging and the Fab Fatties Challenge #2

I have been back at work for nearly a year now (I started back at the beginning of July).

In that time I have written almost nothing, submitted absolutely nothing (despite having several pieces either ready and waiting or just about ready to submit), have blogged very little, have gained about five kilos, have had one miscarriage and have not (since then) gotten pregnant.

One of the reasons I haven't been blogging much is that people at work might read it (being in a web team is quite different that way, as it turns out, to being in a communications team). Not that I mind if they do, exactly, it's just that there are things one usually doesn't talk about at work - trying to get pregnant, for instance - that one might blog about ad infinitum.

So here's my little disclaimer* for work folk:
Feel free to read. Feel free to comment. Don't talk to me (or preferably anyone else) about it at work. At least, not if it's something you think I wouldn't talk about at work. Like trying to get pregnant - not always something that's good for one's career, though it's not politically correct to say so. But I learned that the hard way last time.

Also - some notes for anyone new to the blog, eg, someone from work:

• it took me 17 cycles and one miscarriage to conceive Mikaela.
• I only have one ovary.
• my mum started going through menopause before she hit 40.
• my sister took four years to produce her beautiful son
• I am 37, Chris is nearly 41...

So just because I'm trying to get pregnant, doesn't mean I'm going on maternity leave any time in the next year. Or ever. Just so we're clear.

Now, back to the point of this post, which is not that it's seven months since my miscarriage and I'm not pregnant, despite being convinced that May was the month it would happen. Nor about the lack of blogging lately.

No, it is about the fact that I've put on about five kilos since I started back at work.

There are a few reasons for this - too much junk food at work and not enough exercise being high on the list - but the main one is that I lost my focus.

I got back down to my goal weight of 63kg early last year.** I had a health check within a month of starting work that determined that my healthiest weight range is something like 62-66kg. All good. And then I started trying to get pregnant again. And then I got pregnant again. And then I had a miscarriage. And somewhere in there I told myself I could eat whatever I liked (ie lots and lots of chocolate) because obviously I deserved it.

Yes, I have issues around food and deserving and comfort and anger and self image and shame and probably all sorts of other things. As I'm sure have blogged before,*** I took a long time to acknowledge any of this, let alone to acknowledge that I was overweight, still less that I cared. I was a feminist. And we feminists don't care what we look like, do we? Right...

Actually it was two things that snapped me out of it. It was realising (shortly after Liam was born), that I was unhealthily overweight (and I was, trust me on this, I'm not talking putting on five kilos here), and also that that was not okay now that I was a mother, and realising that however much I pretended not to notice or care, other people just had to look at me to know I was unhealthily overweight. I was fooling no-one.

Despite all this, now that I am back to an ordinary sort of weight I have largely gone back to pretending that none of that happened. That I don't have any food/weight issues. That I am, in short, too cool to care.

Well, I'm not. And that is why I am now taking back my focus and my control. It may take me another year to get pregnant (although we've given ourselves a deadline of this December, so lets hope not), or it may never happen. So to say even half consciously to myself (as I have, if I'm honest, been doing) that I can wait till after the next baby's been born to get back on track is ridiculous. It is self-delusion.

Food tracking, I've discovered, is my best defence against over-eating. So food tracking is what I will do. And to jump start myself, I am signing up for the Fab Fatties Challenge #2 - there are about five hours left to sign up, but if you do, make sure you tell them I sent you so I get me some 25 points in the challenge!****

The challenge goes for two weeks from today (May 29) and involves the following - all of which I am going to try to do every day (except the one about not drinking 'soda pop' since I don't do that anyway).

• Eat 5 servings of fruits and vegetables daily- 5 points
• Drink 8 glasses of water a day- 8 points
• Exercise- 1 point per minute
• Do a random good deed- 5 points
• Stop drinking soda pop for a day- 1 point
• Actually read someone else’s blog post and leave a comment- 1 point
• Answer [their] Fab Fatties random bonus questions about [them]- 5 points
              -Bonus questions will be posted daily on [their] blog.
• Recommend 2 fabulous friends from twitter and tell us why we should follow them- 2 points
• Eat a healthy breakfast-1 point
• Lose weight- 1 point per pound
• Keep a food journal for the day- 5 points per day
• Take a walk during you lunch break- 5 points
• Have a friend join this challenge- 25 points per friend
              -make sure your friend tells us you recruited them!

_________
*I've probably said this before, I'm just a little paranoid and still haven't come to terms with this weird collision of offline-personal, work, and online lives that facebook has created.

**Back down not from all the weight I gained during pregnancy - though there was some of that - but from all the weight I gained while trying and failing to become pregnant beforehand.

***But it was a loong time ago, before categories, let alone tagging, when I still did each entry by hand in dreamweaver, and I can't find it.

****And thanks to Food Food Body Body which is where I discovered the challenge.

An open letter to Nicola Roxon (Federal Health Minister)

Dear Minister

Just after I discovered I was pregnant with my first child, almost eight years ago, the insurance rug was pulled out from under Australian midwifery's feet. Midwives operating outside of hospitals were suddenly unable to find insurance in Australia.

Before I fell pregnant I had read Michel Odent's Birth Reborn, and was excited about the idea of being pregnant and of giving birth. How distressing then to discover that in Canberra my only option for midwife led care was the birth centre at the Canberra Hospital. But I was lucky - I found a place at the birth centre despite not booking in until I was seven weeks pregnant. I have friends now who have been put on the waiting list after calling the day they found out they were pregnant.

And now the situation in Australia is set to become even worse. From July 2010 midwives will not be able to practice in Australia without insurance. Private midwives will have to cease homebirth practice, move overseas to work or face prosecution. You know women will still have homebirths, but they will be more likely to be unattended by skilled support. And many other women will end up clogging the hospital system simply because they cannot find a midwife to work with them at home.

Please Minister Roxon, do something about this. All the research shows that homebirths are at least as safe as hospital births for pregnancies of normal risk. And that midwife led care leads to lower intervention and better outcomes for women than obstetrician led care. The Government supported private obstetricians with insurance - make this happen for midwives as well. Not for their sake, but for the sake of women all over Australia.

[letter ends]

I just found out about this, over at the rachel papers (thanks Rachel).
What you can do:

1. Please sign this petition.

2. Watch the "Save private midwifery" video at Homebirth Australia.

3. Write to the Health Minister, Nicola Roxon and your local Federal MP.

More on motherhood and artistic pursuits...

The Mood Back Home: an exhibition inspired by Womanhouse (at mothering.com news bulletins):

A new exhibition at Momenta Art gallery in Brooklyn, New York addresses the challenges women face in simultaneously pursuing artistic careers, motherhood, and domestic lives. Once thought to be mutually exclusive pursuits, traditional gender roles and stereotypes about what it means to be an artist continue to suggest that women artists can't quite have it all. "The Mood Back Home", on view February 12 through March 16, 2009, disputes that notion, featuring topical work by 12 contemporary women artists.

(more of the article by Laura Andre at the link above)

On mother-writing, mothering and/while writing, and writing as a mother.

If the woman artist has been trained to believe that the activities of motherhood are trivial, tangential to main issues of life, irrelevant to the great themes of literature, she should untrain herself.  Alice Ostriker

This is the epigraph to the introduction to The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood, by Rachel Power. I blogged about this book before when I heard Power interviewed on the radio, and now I own it, thanks to my lovely husband who bought it for me for Christmas.

Of course, being a mother of children on school holidays, I've barely read any of it yet. But so far I think my favourite two quotes from the introduction (yes, I haven't even made it past the seven page introduction) are:

"Beyond giving birth, however, the stuff of mother's lives becomes worse than taboo - it becomes merely mundane. Mothering is such a prosaic term in our culture that it functions as a disguise for the true intensity of the experience, blocking any insight into the way this singular knowledge could be translated into good art."

You'd think we'd be over this by now, but we so are not! Just this morning I was discussing with one of my mother friends the sense one gets when talking to one's still single (or at least childless) friends - of being old and married with children and living in the suburbs (oh the horror!)*. I think being a mother is a bit like living in the suburbs. Actually, it can be very rewarding and intensely stimulating, but it still has such a dud reputation.  (Okay, I'm going a bit far as far as the suburbs go, but you get my point.)

"Every woman featured in this book defies the myth of the artist as tortured, self-obsessed genius with no option but to damage those who love them. Each is at a different stage along the path of reconciling the demands of domesticity with her desires as an artist...
"All the myths about art, as well as motherhood, are dismantled and reinvented by the voices collected here."

Soon, soon I will get to read more and I will enjoy those dismantlings and reinventions, I'm sure of it.

_____

*I hasten to add this is not a sense necessarily projected by the childless friends, just a message we have internalised from the broader culture.

Taboos and the trouble with abortion politics

In her book, A feminist account of pregnancy loss in America, Linda Layne talks about the way (wanted) ambryo's have personhood bestowed on them far earlier now than they would have a generation of two ago, when a woman often didn't even go to the doctor until the second missed period. But then, "the very people participating with us in the construction of this new social person - your mother-in-law or your friend or whoever was saying 'Everything you do is important to the health of the baby, every cup of coffee matters' - they suddenly revoke that personhood [when you have a miscarriage]. It's like nothing ever happened."

Peggy Orenstein quotes Layne in her article 'Mourning My Miscarriage' (New York Times Magazine, Apr 21, 2002, p.38-41). She talks about why people often don't talk about their miscarriages, why there is still a taboo. And then she goes on:

But for me, there is another uncomfortable truth: my own pro-abortion-rights politics defy me. Social personhood may be distinct from biological and legal personhood, yet the zing of connection between me and my embryo felt startingly real, and at direct odds with everything I believe about when life begins. Nor have those beliefs - a complicated calculus of science, politics and ethics - changed. I tell myself that this wasn't a person. It wasn't a child. At the same time, I can't deny that it was something. How can I mourn what I don't believe existed? The debate over abortion has become so polarized that exploring such a contradiction feels too risky. In the political discussion, there has been no vocabulary of nuance.

I have more to say about this, but no time to say it. Today is the day my master's project is supposed to be finished. It is basically done, though the essay still needs a significant amount of polish I think. I have the next several nights to get to that, plus to write an abstract and figure out what details need to go on the title page, then the plan is to print, bind and post the whole thing on Friday. That's the plan.

Quote of the day: what the hell is "post-feminism"?

"Journalists and commentators write of ‘post-feminism’, as if to suggest that the need to challenge patriarchal power or to analyse the complexities of gendered subjectivities had suddenly gone away, and as if texts were no longer the products of material realities in which bodies are shaped  and categorised not only by gender, but by class, race, religion and sexuality."
(Gill Plain and Susan Sellers in the 'Introduction' to A History of Feminist Literary Criticism, in the context of explaining that the book is not intended as a history of something complete, but more an 'our story so far' summary (and analysis) of an ongoing project.)

Nonsexist books - where they succeed and where they don't.

In "Learning to Be Little Women and Little Men: The Inequitable Gender Equality of Nonsexist Children's Literature," Amanda B. Dickman and Sara K. Murnen found that "Nonsexist books succeeded in portraying female characters as adopting the characteristics and roles identified with the masculine gender role, but they did not portray male characters as adopting aspects of the feminine gender role or female characters as shedding the feminine gender role" (381).

(Lisa Rowe Fraustino, 'The Berenstain Bears and the Reproduction of Mothering' The Lion and the Unicorn, 31.3 (2007), 250-263, p. 257)

I'm sure I've said this before, but there's no harm in repeating myself - any recommendations of children's books that succeed in doing any of the above (better yet all, but as the authors note, that is rare), I am all ears.

 

feminist thoughts on motherhood: a drama in three parts

Often, though not always, the story of feminists thinking about motherhood since the early 1960s is told as a drama in three acts: repudiation, recuperation, and, in the latest and most difficult stage to conceptualize, an emerging critique of recuperation that co-exists with ongoing efforts to deploy recuperative strategies.
(Hansen, ibid, p. 5)

This comes, of course, from a book published in 1997, a decade ago now. Any suggestions for movement beyond this point, or are we still there?

Also she observes in a note that

Simons, among others, argues that the gap between between feminist repudiation and recuperation of motherhood is less "absolute" than it is sometimes said to be, and she discusses the possibility of a more "integrative feminist resolution" of this opposition.
(p. 240, referring to Margaret A. Simons, "Motherhood, Feminism, and Identity" in Hypatia Reborn: Essays in Feminism Philosophy, ed Azizah Y. Al-Hibri and Simons, 1990.)

Mother without Child

...[C]onventional sentiments about motherhood inadequately describe and serve to mystify the actual circumstances of most women who mother, even as they may also sublimate the fear and resentment of men who cannot be mothers, or of the always unsatisfied inner child. It is commonly recognized, in some circles at least, that the position of the mother in our culture and our language is riddled with its history of psychic and social contradictions. Motherhood offers women a site of both power and oppression, self esteem and self-sacrifice, reverence and debasement.
(Hansen, ET, Mother Without Child: Contemporary Fiction and the Crisis of Motherhood, University of Califorina Press, Berkeley, 1997, p. 3.)

What is taken for granted... is the relational aspect of the concept of mother. Implicitly... mother in the primary sense of the word is someone, maybe a woman or maybe not, who gives birth to a child or seeks protection and control of a child or is affectionately reverenced and looked up to by a child. The force of those prepositions is felt in feminist argument as well. ...

Certainly we cannot and should not ignore the relational components of motherhood. yet this component merits and rewards closer scrutiny. Both mother and child are problematic terms to conceptualize, not least of all because they are relational words, marking partial, quasi-temporary identities. (p. 4)

I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with this idea - if anything - but it grabs me in a way. Mother is an important identity for many, and yet it is relational, dependant on someone else.

...[L]anguage is a conventional system and what we say always bears the burden of where we have been, what we have done, and that we believe. At the same time, language can function in a prescriptive as well as descriptive way; as others have argued, women have been harmed by cultural, legal, medical and psychological discourses about motherhood. (pp. 4-5)

Once people talk, things change (or thinking 'aloud' about my research project)

In a 2005 article Elissa Foster records a friend’s experience of pregnancy and miscarriage in 2000. Noting that keeping a pregnancy secret in the early months is a common practice, Foster wonders how her friend’s experience “may have been different if her story had joined others in a collective tale of desire and loss” (Foster, 2005, p. 67).

Geraldine Dooge answers this question, in part, in her forward to Always a part of me: Surviving Childbearing Loss (Collinge, A, et al., ABC Books, Sydney 2002) when she writes: "Once people talk, things change" (p. xiii). That may seem somewhat simplistic, but at the same time, it's true. Until people talk, nothing changes.

Foster notes that women’s stories have traditionally been consigned to the private rather than public sphere, considered as gossip. Following Dale Spender (1985) she notes that the “political implication of trivializing women’s talk is that women remain powerless when they remain isolated from each other, and unable to voice their experiences in ways that might transform existing power structures” (p. 63).

This is at least partially where my interest in life writing comes from, which in the context of my research project is extending to an interest in autoethnography, narrative theory, and of course literature. My piece of fiction for this project mimics (I think) autoethnography, but of course the narrator is fictional, and so are the stories she tells, her own and other's. So where does fiction fit into this process, and what's the difference between the roles of 'literature' and popular fiction?

I suppose one might expect that literature would tend to challenge, undermine or at least revise master narratives by giving voice to counter narratives. Whereas popular fiction would presumably be expected to support and reinforce the master narratives, or dominant narratives of our culture. For instance, that all women want children, that those who don't have them are to be pitied and/or reviled (to put it bluntly). But does popular fiction have to do this? And can't it reinforce some while undermining others? This literary vs popular fiction question is just a sidetrack really, but something I have kept coming back to ever since I started this masters.

Of course, part of my interest in all things life writing probably comes from the simple fact that I keep a blog; that I have been doing so now for eight years. But it goes both ways: one of my reasons to continue to keep a blog is this idea that when people talk, things change. And when we don't, nothing does. So maybe I'm only talking to five people. Maybe I'm not talking to anyone today. But if I don't put it out there...

And on that note I must close, because my house guests have just called for final directions to my house.  :)

__________

Dooge, G, (2002), 'Forward' in Collinge, A, et al., Always a part of me: Surviving Childbearing Loss, ABC Books, Sydney

Foster, E. (2005, Spring), “Desiring Dialectical Discourse: A Feminist Ponders the Transition to Motherhood”, Women’s Studies in Communication, Vol. 28, no. 1,  pp. 57-83.

Feminisim's 'dilemma of difference'

['The dilemma of difference'] refers to the way in which feminism and feminist theory must deny of disavow women's difference, and differences among women, in order to argue for women's equality and to mobilize women women as a group, but must also rely on the concept of difference to analyze the specificity of women's situations and experiences and to theorize differences among women. ...

By insisting on women's difference, for instance in analyzing women's situations and experience of mothering and their effects on consciousness and social relations, difference feminism jeopardizes feminism's claim to women's equal human subjectivity. On the other hand, the possible benefits for feminism and feminist theory of taking these risks of difference are also considerable. These benefits include the rearticulation of understandings of mothering that more adequately conceptualize mothering, more strenuously challenge individualism, and thus more strongly support the changes in the social organisation of mothering that feminism advocates. The difficulty for feminist theory is that, in an individualist ideological context, the subversive and liberatory possibilities of accounts of mothering that challenge individualism in terms of difference are never far removed from the risks of reconsolidating elements of essential motherhood that occur in the project of theorising motherhood.   
(Patrice DiQuinzio, The Impossibility of Motherhood, as previously cited, pp. xv-xvi.)

In other words, if we talk about how women, and their experience as mothers, are different to (say, for instance) men, then we set ourselves up for all the old sexist arguments about women's place (barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen etc). But if we don't, then we can't adequately theorise mothering at all, and also, for instance, can't challenge (western, capitalist) individualism in terms of its emphasis on subjectivity in traditionally 'masculine' terms. It's tricky.

PS must aim to get women's issues into the mainstream

From my latest CPSU (union) news:

Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Pru Goward, has challenged the Public Service to mainstream so-called 'women's issues' and link them more directly with the national interest. In a thought-provoking article in the Canberra Times, Goward argues that this should not mean "...every department having a dinky little women's unit producing pink-toned promotional pamphlets: it means all departments running a gender ruler over their programs, policies and legislation."

The body of the article is below the fold...

Too busy to blog...

I have numerous topics I want to blog about and just about no time.  I am writing now while Chris gives Liam a bath.  Following that is books & Mummy-milk (with me)  and bed time (with Chris).  I have vowed that tonight once bedtime hits, I will get straight to studying.  So this is it.

Of course, I wanted to write about the Jakarta bombing, except... no, actually I didn't.  I really have nothing useful to say  - another tragedy, more lives lost, for no valid reason that I can imagine.  Like others I hope the politicians avoid using it for election fodder, though I can't imagine they will.

I wanted to write about the Work & Family Test Case currently being heard: ACTU Claims Rights For Parents & Carers.    "Australia ranks very low internationally in terms of work and family. Leaving aside former Eastern bloc nations, Australia is ranked thirteenth out of fourteen OECD nations." That's not very good folks. Surely we can do better, especially when the evidence suggests that the cost for business would in fact be negligible if not non-existent. But I don't have time to give you the run down, so if you're interested take a look at those articles, or if you're really interested have a scan of Cath Bowtell’s Opening Address To The ACTU Work And Family Test Case (that's a 37 page pdf). She makes the case very well for the family friendly policies they're asking for.  Basic things like two years unpaid parental leave instead of one. Of course the Howard government is opposing the case.

Since I'm in a links away mode, here's a link to an interesting post at a blog Chris found recently. The key point of the post is "Cheney seems to be saying that the reason there won't be another attack if he is reelected is because he will keep fighting "preemptive" wars." Yep, that's certainly something to think about if you have the ability to vote in the US presidential elections. The blog is subtitled "Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion" and is written by a history professor at the University of Michigan.

There are numerous other things I wanted to blog about - Liam's new constant companion, for instance: Peter the dog, aka a green wooden pull along caterpillar. And I still haven't responded to David's questions over at  Treppenwitz, so if you think that maybe US foreign policy (for one) has played some part in the upsurge in international terrorism lately, feel free to go and answer him on my behalf. He makes such good points that they really deserve an equally considered response.

Right now I hear Liam packing up his bath toys, which means we're not far away from book time. So that's it for me.  Posting might be scarce over the next two weeks while I get this essay finished and then write that article. If it's not, that will be a bad sign!