Breastfeeding, by Guest Blogger Barbara Brickman

I am still on hiatus from blogging but happy to share guest blogger Barbara Brickman's take on the personal politics of breastfeeding:

Less than two years ago and a mere handful weeks after our son was born, my partner and I took our new baby to a faculty potluck. As might be expected, we were tired, we were struggling to figure out all the surprises of first-time parenthood, and we were learning daily the strange ways of being a same-sex couple with a baby in a very conservative small town in a very conservative state. This is a place that doesn’t recognize our marriage of nearly eight years and it is certainly not a place that recognizes my partner’s status as a parent, much less a mother (without the biological ‘connection’), or would consider granting her a second-parent adoption, which she should never have to seek in the first place as the only other parent our son has had since conception (and even before). So leaving that hostile environment outside for a safe faculty space inside seemed like a good idea. My partner strapped on our baby carrier, we loaded up the diaper bag, and we headed out for our first social function since our baby was born.

We had not been at the party five minutes when my partner ended up in a conversation with another female faculty member who had had a baby a few months before ours arrived and who also had her child nestled in a sling around her that evening. I went away to get us some food and came back to find my partner with a strained (and pained) look on her face and clearly eager for any excuse to leave the conversation. Part of me is glad now that I was not there to hear this other female faculty member turn to my partner as she got out our bottle of expressed milk and gasp in self-righteous indignation, “You aren’t breastfeeding?!” This might seem like a small statement (or accusation, to be more precise), but behind it lies a whole sea of nastiness and judgment and petty abuse from other mothers like this one. I have since daydreamed of having been there at that moment and punching this entitled, obnoxious woman in the face. No, my partner isn’t breastfeeding. She can’t. And thank you for reminding her of this fact when she is told every day by our culture, by our parents, by a tiny voice in her head that she isn’t really a mother without that biological tie. Of course, I’ve imagined many (what I think of as) biting comeback lines since this incident: “I know, why do you take your pre-Oedipal bliss and shove it up your tightly wound ass!” or perhaps the more direct, “I’ve got an idea; let’s say you mind your own fucking business.”

It boggles my mind to think of all the reasons why a new mother might not be breastfeeding and, therefore, might need you to keep your fucking mouth shut. Maybe she got an infection and can’t breastfeed because of the pain. Maybe she’s not producing enough milk and has to supplement with formula. Maybe her baby rejected her breast for whatever reason. Maybe she’s a single working mother who either cannot or chooses not to breastfeed and pump because of the incredible constraints on her time. Maybe (if you can wrap your tiny head around this) she’s an adoptive mother and is bonding with her baby though bottle feedings. All of these reasons and more cause so many women whom I know personally or have met through their writings to feel incredible sorrow, shame, and self-loathing. They feel less than women, less than mothers, or failures at the very start of the long, challenging road of parenthood. Many of them are professional women and/or academics who waited because of career goals to have a baby and who struggled just to conceive in the first place, much less take the baby to term. I know many academic women who wanted to have children and have lost their chance or who are still waiting, hoping. And now to top it all off, they have to listen to your blind ignorance, your ridiculous insensitivity, and your just plain cruel, self-involved bullshit. Maybe this new mother just didn’t want to breastfeed or pump and is giving her child perfectly good formula. Isn’t that her decision to make? I can’t believe I’m saying this in 2013, but isn’t it her body to do with as she sees fit?

In the short time I’ve been a parent, I have gotten unsolicited and, frankly, unnecessary advice on breastfeeding, on car carriers, on what I eat, on what the baby eats, on when the baby should sleep, on when I should sleep, on how to carry the baby, on where to send the baby to school. And all of it, I mean all of it, is meant to discipline me through shame, senseless competition, and insidious ‘well-meaning’ disapproval. Is the woman who said this to my partner and who has since offered innumerable pieces of unwanted ‘advice’ and ‘expertise’ an academic? Yes. Is she an avowed feminist? Yes. Was she, in that moment, more of a harm and antagonist to me and my partner than any person we have met on the streets or in the doctor’s offices and shops of our small, conservative town? Yes.

Somewhere, somehow, they have managed to divide us yet again with this bankrupt and many times deconstructed myth of motherhood. Mother and child union. The perfect bliss that only a mother can know. An attachment that is more important than your partner, than your job, than you. It’s like not being able to wake up from some patriarchal wet dream of the ‘appropriate’ relationship between mother and child with a voiceover narration by a supposed female ally. Or, someone’s cast me unwillingly in the role of Steinbeck’s Rose of Sharon and my director is one of these hellish, arrogant sanctimommies. How did this essentialist nonsense come back with such a vengeance? And shouldn’t we be committed with every atom inside us to destroy it once again. For my partner. For my friends. For women, period.

BIO:

Barbara Jane Brickman teaches at the University of Alabama where she will begin an assistant professorship in Media and Gender Studies this fall. Her book, New American Teenagers: The Lost Generation of Youth in 1970s Film, was published by Continuum Press in 2012.

Wage Gap Persists

This is a fascinating infographic on the continuing wage gap, even among the well educated.


http://www.learnstuff.com/equal-education-unequal-pay/

Beasts and Masters

This is a guest blog from Alexandra Juhasz, Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College, a film/video producer as well as a scholar

Check our her blog, Media Praxis, here: : http://aljean.wordpress.com
 **

Here's a short little blog post about the similarities and differences between this year's two remarkable brute flicks: Beasts of the Southern Wild and The Master. You'll soon see how mothers and mothering play an all important role, albeit in their absence.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA6FFnjvvmg&w=560&h=315]

There are notable echoes between the very beasts in question: Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) and Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) both live their lives outside any master's dogma, or related organized rules of etiquette or discipline. Each one is offered up by their directors (Benh Zeitlin and Paul Thomas Anderson) as retro-fueled models for a post-modern living that has been too tamed by technology, corporations, and stultifying social systems like race, gender, class and sexuality.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ1O1vb9AUU&w=560&h=315]

However, there the two must part, for Hushpuppy figures how to be part of a community (of outsiders) even so, has an ethical stance that is her personal amalgam of the many traditions (spiritual, philosophical, social, political and economic) that she rejects in toto, and uses violence with some consideration and moral compass.

While both the beasts spend quality narrative time being tamed by their Daddies, who each ultimately fail, the Mommy plays a different role in each triangle: for Hushpuppy she's entirely absent (except in dreams), flipping the racist stereotype that black children suffer from missing patriarchs and blaming poverty, instead, for her lack of schooling. Meanwhile, Freddie's matriarchal lady (Amy Adams) is both too present, and oddly absent (for him) as he only has eyes for Poppa. All the actors in The Master are pretty remarkable, and Adams plays Dodd's wife Peggy asexually, all cold cunning, leaving the prurient excesses to the man (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and his beast (which she also does in this weekend's stunningly ham-fisted The Trouble With the Curve, albeit, we assume, to please this crowd-pleaser's geriatric and juvenile audiences.)

So, it seems we have two tales of boys' beasts and girls', white beasts and black, and monsters who are adults and children, too, telling us what we need to know today about male masters' brutal if stale authority and everyone else's needs to reject them (hello Occupy). Both are spectacular spectaculars, amazing in form and craft, intelligent and affecting, too. But from this brief scrutiny, I'd want to say that the beast (of the southern wild) ultimately makes a stronger claim for me about what and who we might hope to follow, and how, if we were to have no Mommies and then say no to Daddy, too: a personal ethics that allows for a careful and piece-meal consideration and embracing of the best of past traditions, the possibility for willful and strategic loving communities committed to each other and our lived places, as well as a hope and politics for the future.

I see strong tinges of feminist politics and other often-female-led movements (like ecology and anti-globalization) in Hushpuppies' private beastdom; and The Master doesn't rail against mothers as the cause for its leads' beastdom, as did, say FIght Club. So we hard working Moms must be left to wonder who passes on these female or feminist values if Mothers play no part in the picture.

Mine

Contributed by a guest blogger who prefers to remain anonymous

1993. I lived in a small town in New England. It was an afternoon in late May. I sat on the toilet in the corner of my tiny bathroom, a yellow tunnel of translucent dust shooting out of the window. The pink and red Victorian wallpaper undulated in waves around me. I sat there, my heart in my throat, half panic-stricken, half disbelieving, at the white plastic stick perched on the edge of the pedestal sink. The blurry blue hieroglyphics slowly made symbols that would be the rest of my life. Either it would float along (my life, mine), this moment like a tiny crack in the sidewalk, or it would stop. I was twenty-one years old. It was positive.

At seventeen I had fled a claustrophobic Southern town with my feet pressing all the way down on the gas. I went flying, naively and idiotically, into a small liberal arts college. It was a place of unshaven legs and Birkenstocks. I came armed with makeup and hot rollers. I may as well have gone to Mars. It took about eight months for all the coils to unravel. I woke up in the middle of the night because my metal twin bed seemed to be banging against the wall, my heart was beating so hard. This happened over and over. I remember a dark-haired doctor looking me square in the eye and telling me my EEG was normal. Telling me to see a counselor. I remember a counselor looking me square in the eye and telling me to see a psychologist.

So I did. I learned how to talk in that shrink’s office. Months of silence became baby steps of words, became a torrent of fucked up shit. Once I started I had no more control over it than I did over the rotation of the earth. As I learned how to speak, all the pieces started breaking apart. Whatever fantasy I had about escaping the South and going to college was over. Major Depression crashed the party, held hands with Panic Disorder and then made out with Agoraphobia. (My diagnostic hydra.) I was a goddamn mess. I tried to go back to school sophomore year but after three more trips to the infirmary I was politely but firmly instructed to take a “medical leave.” This is administration-speak for “We don’t want you offing yourself in a campus bathtub.” It goes on like this for four more years.

Back to 1993. I have a serious mental illness. Somehow that year I’d managed to graduate. I had no idea what the hell I was going to do next. My degree, back then, probably cost $100,000, but I was only qualified to wait tables. And I was really sick. In a few short months I would have no health insurance. Now I was pregnant.

The vitriol and hatred aimed squarely at women right now knocks the wind out of me, takes me off guard like a sucker-punch. I don’t understand it. Freud, that bastard, named it best. The white men who hate gays with a fucking fervor they only otherwise reserve for homosexual trysts at a roadside Holiday Inn? Reaction formation. Those wackos outside of abortion clinics screaming about baby killers? Projection. But why women? Why now? Why this particular moment in time? Why the frantic, finger-pointing, bible-thumping, sweaty-browed rants? I mean, they’ve been there for a long time but now they seem to be swelling into some kind of misogynistic tsunami. It’s fucking nuts.

What gets lost in all that noise are the personal stories. Some politicians have acquiesced to allow women to make decisions about their own bodies “in the case of rape or incest.” Or, perhaps, if the pregnancy “threatens the woman’s life.” But what does that mean? I was fucking positive I could not survive a pregnancy. Pregnancy meant going off my meds meant getting sick meant slicing my wrists open. Does that “count?” Do I count?

I had an abortion. I chose it. Me. Twenty-one. Mentally ill. No health insurance.

I remember quietly telling my shrink it was the first decision I had ever, truly made for myself. Just. Myself. I could not have survived a pregnancy. So I did choose life. I chose mine. And I don’t regret it.

Where are the Women in ART?

By Courtney McDermott

           

Can you name three female visual artists? Artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson posed this challenge in her documentary !WomenArtRevolution, which relays the feminist art movement of the 1960s and 70s. I happened to come across this documentary on Netflix, when I was, naturally, procrastinating from my own art—writing. One of the most compelling, albeit horrifying, clips in the film was the opening clip when Leeson interviewed people coming in and out of the MET on the above question. Other than the notorious Frida Kahlo, people were at a loss.

            I felt smug. What about Mary Cassatt? Or Georgia O’Keeffe? Or Diane Arbus? I thought, but I acknowledge I have an unfair advantage—my mother was an art teacher, and I’ve been frequenting art museums since I was a baby. Even with that fortunate upbringing, I was still hard pressed to name many more than three artists.

            The documentary highlighted such fascinating works by Judy Chicago, Nancy Spero, and Hannah Wilke. As a writer, other artists intrigue me, so I became concerned that maybe the female artist is still threatened, still overlooked and unheard. Even in the literary world, the most oft-cited females these days are Stephanie Meyers and E.L. James (and don’t even get me started on them). The other day, a friend of mine (a smart, educated, witty woman my age) posted on her Facebook wall a link to the 25 best quotes on writing. Most of them were pretty fantastic. Only two of them were by women.

            Obviously, this is just one webpage, and it doesn’t mean that women don’t have great things to say about their art. They just aren’t being quoted or cited, or even taught.

            Last year, I taught English in the most hellatious prep school imaginable. I left mid-year for a number of reasons, but one (and not an insignificant one) was that I felt at odds with the curriculum being taught. In freshman English, only one poem on the entire curriculum was written by a woman. Nothing else. In American literature, in order to adapt to the new trimester system, a number of books had been cut from the curriculum. They axed Toni Morrison and Kate Chopin; Emily Dickinson was the one remaining female voice. We all need an Awakening! I tried to protest, but my indignation was met with silence.

            Silence has been the enemy of the female artists, so I was more than delighted to read the myriad news articles recently on Pussy Riot and their artistic reaction to the Putin regime. A number of YouTube comments derided the type of music, declaring that these women weren’t making music or art. I disagree; they have a point of view, they use an art medium, and they are reaching people. They’re artists. And they just happen to be women.

            The Pussy Riot incident (and no one was more gleeful than I to hear the words Pussy Riot uttered from the mouths of congressmen and women) propelled me to search out other female artists. Like Lena Denham and her hit HBO series Girls. I like this series so much Dunham gives voice to an array of 20-something women, without glamorizing their lifestyle. I get the distinct sense that I would be friends with Dunham if I ever met her.

            Then there is the Living Walls project in Atlanta (a project that encourages street art to enliven dilapidated neighborhoods), which only commissioned female artists this year. The fact that an art show must intentionally create a female-only show highlights how much women have been overlooked in the art world.  

             In my daily life, I write. But I decided to turn towards my childhood roots and create visual art. After watching !WomenArtRevolution, I scribbled down half a dozen ideas for drawings. I first completed the drawing, “Alone in this Duet,” and upon completion, I pulled out more art supplies, and I finished “Mutilation.”

          

            Don’t worry, I won’t quit my day job, but the very act of creating something, giving a physical body to the feelings and frustrations and delights I keep inside, is pretty liberating. Writing is my personal trick card that I need to pull out more often, because it lets me state what I think is important. I have decided to turn to my Twitter page (which has been underused and ignored) and devote its contents to the expression, support and acknowledgement of female artists (@courtmcdermott). Because women are out there making art, and as a woman, I find it not only important, but necessary to our very survival to acknowledge and teach about these artists, so that when someone else asks the question, “Can you name three female artists?” the answers will come readily.

            Hand over the crayons and the pencils, the violin bows and the paint cans, and let all girls, all women, create some art. In fact, I think I might go create some art now.