Write more about the kittens:
1) Early trauma creates coping strategies which make it possible to survive the trauma but difficult to connect with trustworthy others. Relationship-phobic. Fear of connection, loss. Fear of getting one's heart broken, again. A numbing, a disability to display or appear to feel or feel negative emotions. In the same way one has to manage resting bitch face, One has to manage one's emotions. Be stoic, through challenges. In the heat of battle, keeping a level head. The kind of leader who numbs themselves to physical pain, psychological pain, emotional pain, hypothetical pain, excruciating pain. No pain, no gain. And also, feel no pain so you may gain. These are discourses about "leadership". But back to kittens.
Many times we catch JiJi, the super freaked out kitten who also is named SuperBraveKitty for trying things like crossing the center of the room rather than slinking around the edges, stare at us constantly in fear for what appears to be his life. Terror. A resignation. A look like an orphan of war, a child soldier who has accepted his fate, pain of death, whatever, I knew this day would come.
How was he terrorized? Maybe a dog a the humane society shelter? Or maybe something earlier? Or maybe he was just a tiny sensitive little guy, who got climbed over and didn't get access to the teat as much as he'd have liked. Maybe he was just born a little sensitive, maybe a trauma while in utero or during delivery? A special kitten. But who also had a hard time of something and is now hard baked into patterns of resistance. It's dangerous to allow anyone too close. I'm only safe when I hide.
And he was inseparable from his brother. Trembling, crying, if they were apart for even a moment. Inconsolable, grieving aching. And now that they both are free to roam around the house (rather than be isolated in the guest bedroom, together) he's fine not seeing him for hours at a time. They still call to each other to check in, and wrestle and play a lot. They still announce "I'm about to poop" to each other, then follow each other to the litter box (to celebrate? to be reminded 'oh yes, I should poop now too'? to bear witness?)
Part of terror, trauma--It doesn't matter what I think or want. I just need to survive. It doesn't matter what my favorite treat is. Treats are a luxury I cannot expect, even after months of living in safety in a new environment. My wishes don't matter. (Clearly I'm trying to work through some Karen-kitten issues here--I'm safe in my new environment and I also feel fears that seem irrational given all that I have)
SO much more to write about the kittens--how to build trust, how to build repeated positive/neutral contacts, to reward positive behavior, to extinguish negative behavior, to read the cues, to recognize when my bigness/scariness/blinders to my own privilege enable me to take more pets/purrs from then than they were offering. How I center my needs for pets/purrs/cuddles rather than whatever the cat's needs are at the time, to assume that they enjoy the same things I enjoy with the same frequency.
Feedback I sent to Matt about his dissertation defense:
I think I see the binary between faculty/SA [university student affairs professionals: people who work in housing, extracurricular activities, advising, administrating, the "non" faculty in the binary which can also include graduate students and other non-faculty entities who also teach for the university as an additional duty or as part of their graduate assistantship to fund their education] as also a distinction between "Field knowledge" (having a PhD/expertise in ____, in Fem Theory. etc, content expert, "exhaustive knowledge of the canon, passing a comprehensive exam) versus "process/methodology"
Like the binary between "English" and "Writing", between Film Studies and Film making--any discipline where there is a "canon" to be learned versus developing the skills to create new content/meaning.
I think your work challenges the notion of faculty as content experts, as opposed to process experts, and that these Men/Masculinities classrooms are spaces of "feminist doings"--it's not about the fixed identity/meaning of "feminist" but the doing of this kind of work.
Also, that SA are process experts and concerned with the materiality of students' lives/experience, what it takes for a student's body to have what it needs to be successful.
One thing [the director of the program] omitted in his list of feminist stuff at the beginning was the focus on methodology (really Alecia's specialty) and what I think is special about your work here. It's the doing that matters, and how the doing is being done. :)
I think Higher Ed's (one of many) crisis is that we're shifting away from recognizing content expertise toward the fungible/interchangeable cogs of "instructors" who are pulled away from their "real work" in SA, who teach process work. This thinking is coming from my longtime teaching of writing courses, how (in my opinion) that work is some of the most important work being done in the academy and it is mostly done by contingent workforce, non-faculty (graduate students, adjunct faculty, SAs who have an additional teaching assignment on top of the "day job"). What's important is that students learn the process of things (of writing, of understanding and challenging a text or systems) rather than learning the "content" of things. (and in a world with wikipedia/the internet, the changing ways that "content" can be sought/reproduced on demand)
The word "feminist" has unspeakable power (as your interviewees who avoided the word seem to suggest). I resist the term too because making it fixed as an identity ("I am a feminist") sets it up to be used against me by others, whereas "I think about this problem using feminist theory" describes a doing, describes how it is a tool for analysis, description, inquiry.
Rural versus Urban: a friend of mine [JG] shared the idea that perhaps rural areas are the way they are because they have not had a civil rights reckoning the way major cities did in the 1960s. For rural areas (which I code as agricultural areas, which were constructed as white only spaces via Homsteading Acts, Redlining, systematic exclusion of non-Whites in owning farmland), White-centric (and White supremacist) life has gone on uninterrupted for generations. Non-white people were forcefully removed from the "rural areas" in order to make them available to exclusively White people to own and build up their built environment upon. There *are* other subjectivities (farm workers, meat processing plant employees, for example) which are specifically discounted as rural identities by design. They aren't considered to be the owner-class, much like farm laborers/servants in Enslavement Homesteads were considered chattel, fungible, ownable, not owners.
I've been researching the construction of Whiteness here in Milwaukee via the 1838 land agreement with the Indigenous People who had claim to this land before settlement. By 1837, a year before settlers were allowed to move onto this land, the ENTIRE tract was already divided up by a handful of men. I read about a town in Colorado whose platting also similarly benefitted a handful of people who had insider knowledge (where the railroad tracks were to be laid, in that case) and/or the opportunity to claim land before it was allowed to be done in a fair, recognized agreed-to way. Again, people who didn't recognize the authority of [the land office? the agreements made with the Indigenous people?] benefitted from jumping the gun, claiming something that wasn't theirs to claim, and experiencing no negative consequence for doing so (because of racism, because of a sense of White entitlement, male entitlement, Christian entitlement (I gotta write a section below about Catholicism and the 1600s and incursions into both what would become Green Bay, WI, and Santa Fe, NM)). Cheating/disregarding the agreed rules benefitted certain subjectivities at the expense of others. The construct of rurality, of rural Whiteness, has been long in the making/remaking, and we're sorta overdue to address its hegemony/functions.
I also have been thinking a lot about "midwestern nice" and its relation to being in relation with others--we want everyone to get along out of a desire to be on good terms with others, which is at odds with neoliberal, capitalist and other logics which drive high achievement behaviors. It also is in opposition to the fungibility--the need to be mobile for one's academic job--can't stay in your hometown to work. I'm writing about self-orphaning in relation to higher education, becoming out-of-relation(s) in order to conform to the needs of the university, which aren't so much the needs of the school but of the idea of what it means to be an academic, the construct we continually re-construct with every hiring committee decision for acceptance or rejection of a job offer, for tenure committees deciding to accept or reject a candidate. For a dissertation committee to accept or reject one's oral presentation.
See also relation to New England Congregations requiring congregants to defend how God has called them into the community, individually, on consequence of being banished from society (and access to food/life supporting resources and networks--I wrote about this in my masters program papers, was really struck by the similarities in Colonial New England conversion narratives, abduction captivity narratives and the at the time tv show "The X Files"'s representations of alien abduction narratives--and also the process of defending one's research to a court, the way individuals in Puritan congregations had to testify to God's work in their lives via these sorts of narratives ("My cow died last winter, but I didn't die so therefore I am among "the elect" who deserve to be members of this church", "I got abducted by Indians, but I escaped and didn't die, so therefore I'm among the elect and deserve a place in this community" (basically, I'm going to interpret some hardship event in my life as evidence from God that I'm special in ways that others (ie non-Christian, non-White, etc) are not and deserve special consideration).
Being out-of-relationship is a necessary condition for an academic career. It demands that either one appear to live like a monk or that one subdues the will of their sexual partner(s)/family to conform to the needs of the academy--leave their career/wishes/needs behind in order to follow the academic job candidate. Self-orphaning is the means to develop the out-of-relationship condition.
Academic Self-orphaning is related to the construction of Whiteness and separating oneself from being in relationship with land, with a reciprocal support system, with a community based on lifelong connections vs “leaving home for opportunity”
How are the 17th century (1600s) Catholics of Santa Fe like the Catholics of Green Bay? (Influence of the church on "exploration" "missionary work" "colonization" de-heathenization. Cultivating a Sense of Entitlement to the land, to the onto-epistemology of a Christian-centric worldview, "legitimizing" creating orphans by de-legitimizing a different way of being, justifying seizure of land and other resources)
1) Missionary work is in conflict with Indigenous peoples/ways of being
2) Genocidal: goal of eradicating an ethnic group through ideological assimilation, control of ports/waterways, (establishment of "Fort Howard" which became the city of Green Bay), foodways.
3) Incursion, withdrawal, left a trace of what was, which evolved in its isolation to be more self-authoritarian in its interpretations of ritual, more localized, personalized and also possibly more hybridized with local Indigenous culture/custom with which it is blended. Mixto. Mestiza. (I'll have to look at history of Santa Fe/San Luis Valley stuff I read a decade ago regarding initial colonization/missionary work up the Rio Grande towards what is now Alamosa, CO, southern Colorado, but because of the Natives pushing back during the Pueblo Revolts, the Church retreated, withdrew, and people made their own flavor of catholicism in absence of "official versions" discourses enforced by priests. Priests only came through but once a year. Still learning about catholicism influence in Wisconsin, the early settlement in Green Bay, Pere Marquette establishing a presence in what would become Milwaukee (namesake of Marquette Univ)
4) Colonizer. Treaties.
Native American Tribes (Menomonee Nation and New Mexico Pueblo people not being forced to leave their ancestral lands, having uninterrupted access/control of their lands, not relocated to reservations like other tribes (Trail of Tears, 1838 treaty to move Native peoples west of the Mississippi)
Santa Fe Menomonee
Southwestern Pueblo Cultures No revolt/pushback in 1700?
Pueblo Revolt, pushback
re-establishing hegemony
1500s-1600s
Onate
Spanish Catholic colony-building 1600s Frech catholic colony building projects/via Canada
The questions about "disappointment" and "disconnection" from Aaron: I think it's related to a disconnection from mission/role. In my diss I noted how it wasn't necessarily having a PhD in a subject which created an opportunity to teach--it's sometimes being in the right(wrong) place at the right(wrong) time, the instructor whose schedule is open during a time slot, or who needs an extra assignment to balance out the team etc. It's part of the critique of academic meritocracy in general that the right person gets the role of teacher/Sage on the Stage, when really the academy has been systematically reducing full-time TT faculty roles and expanding precarious roles. Like, the mission is supposed to be something like "the university uses teaching expertise to help students learn the process of [writing, thinking with feminist theory]" when really many parts seem to be operating in crisis mode--we need this work to be done--who is cheaply/readily available? Whose precarity means they won't ask tough questions or lead a student walk-out or something? (also, the question about "is feminist too political a term?") And also another good arguement for UBI: https://scottsantens.substack.com/p/we-need-ubi-because-we-all-need-money (Santens says we need UBI to rebalance power, to build trust in ourselves/others rather than fear)
"Paralyzing" "catatonic"--wow. Well, again, I think your work tells the story of a feminist doing, using feminist methodologies as pedagogy (Sara Ahmed), as a way to challenge structures, to deconstruct as a way of moving in the world.
Fundamental axioms of how to be: be present to each other, bear witness,
build resiliency
Mindset of resilience and acceptance
Re-evalutae social mores of family, sexuality,
engage with each others as social beings
Want to talk about notion of orphaning
September: ancestry.com genome, too extensive to explain, but trans-Atlantic slave trade, South America West Indies, Carolinas,
Broken up reorganized at least 5 times since birth of gggggreat grandfather. Five hundred years.
Sold off. Victim of rape. Conceived on a slave farm.
Orphaning and importance of family: can't imagine being broken away from larger family, not knowing who father was , who mother was.
And also
Thinking about the anti-trans discourse as my one-sided monologue against the speakers of such things. It's powerful to write words I'd like to hear from mouths that wouldn't otherwise say it. It's also powerful to write what I'd like to say to entitled/powerful people, forcing them to listen to me, which they otherwise wouldn't do. So below is what I'd say to lawmakers/spinners who talk about how important it is to know which of two genders a person is, based on their "biology," which is shorthand for unambiguous genital configuration. (this conversation arose as Marty and I were talking about how miserable his trans kid would have been attending a catholic school which required girls to wear those too-short pleated skirts)
"Oh, so you feel entitled to know what's between my legs? You need to know my gender clearly, male or female, before you engage with me? Is that because you need to figure out how to treat me--because you treat men differently from the way you treat women?
"It's just like when entitled people ask 'where are you from?' or 'what are you?' to people who don't immediately present as White. Because they need to know what category of "foreigner" to put that person into? To invoke whatever racialized stereotypes that person has for people from that part of the world or ethnicity? Because that's what it seems like those people are asking about, and feel entitled to demand that sort of information.
And also, Dr Prescod-Weinstein has a new book I should probably read, and she wrote this awesome article about just wanting to do the things rather than having to do all the other things:
https://catapult.co/stories/chanda-prescod-weinstein-black-physics-professor-facing-racism-of-academic-institutions
Regarding detitling Women: I have a doctorate. I worked hard to get it, much personal sacrifice and all that. But I don't work in an environment where it's appropriate to mark that distinction--I don't work in a university or as an administrator in a school district. There are very few people who do. A doctorate in my experience has only been used to exclude people. I have yet to see it open doors for me. I have seen it close doors for many people. Rather than having an issue with people not using my title appropriately, I'm more angry about how few opportunities to use it arise. I sat through a dissertation defense this week and listened to the director of the doctoral program talk about how important the candidate's research is, and I thought, really though? Is it? If it were, wouldn't there be structures in place to ensure they can continue to do this important research? Even in your own program, there aren't sufficient funds for supporting research. It sounded so hollow and empty, like the program is hollow and empty, like the promises of education are hollow and empty.
