Figures it would be a Wednesday! I don't have classes on Wednesday ... but I do need to go to Peterborough so that I will be there for my seminars tomorrow.
Fortunately, in spite of all the hype and carrying on on the news and the weather network, it really is not that bad. Might take us a bit longer than our usually 2.5 hours... and it is a royal pain that we will no doubt have to shovel at the other end as well... but it definitely could be worse.
They suck .... I have little doubt....BUT THEY ARE GONE.
Finished (using the term loosely) my practice comp exam today and sent them off.
Huge relief.
God - with this much pressure over a PRACTICE test, how the hell am I EVER going to survive the real thing?!
Received my first 3 questions for my comprehensive essay yesterday - these are "just" a practice run... and I have a bit more than a week to do them - but given that I have all sorts of other things going on in my life (tenants that don't pay rent, don't give notice, etc. for starters ... and that IS just for starters!) ....AND that I have not managed to yet READ all 55 books on my list never mind find a way to retain what I'm reading...
it's more than enough challenge.
Have I mentioned I love Inspiration software? I know I have .... but anyway ... I got the questions yesterday, late afternoon... and my first response on reading them was OMG I haven't read enough...I can't...I don't know....ACK!!! You know that initial total panic when you're first confronted with exam questions, right? Yeah, that....
After a brief (well, HE might not describe it as brief) whine to hubby "I TOLD her I wasn't ready - why is she pushing me so hard - blah blah blah...." though, I decided to open up Inspiration and plunked the first question into it. And then I started to play.
No brilliant flashes of inspiration, really ... but once I had broken each question down into bubbles and mucked about a bit with structures.... I was able to start plugging some of the authors in where they fit best ... not worrying about who said what when yet ... just stuff like well, Patricia Monture-Angus will fit here... where I need to talk about feminist writers and colonialism; Sangster goes here with class ... oh, and Smith can fit there too...and so on and so on....
I did the same with each of the three questions... didn't get as far with the one re: my criminalization & law section as I did with the others... but did as much as I could without resorting to burying myself in my notes and books and so on ... the plan was to not get bogged down and stressed out - just to PLAY... and then go to bed and hope that things would be more doable this morning.
And indeed, they are...I woke up thinking about ways to categorize different schools of thought about criminalization... AND how to bring in a lot of the theory/older stuff that is on my list even though the question refers to "current debates" (by speaking to how current "schools of thought" are drawing on Foucault et al ....
so ... I'm not ready to sit down and WRITE all 3 essays yet .... but I am a heck of a lot further than I am likely to have been without my very pretty blue and purple and yellow bubbles.... and now that I am finished my first coffee of the day and the puppies have quit harassing me and gone outside to play, I do believe it is time I get back to them ... the bubbles, I mean :)
Evans, Patricia M. And Gerda R. Wekerle, Eds. Women and the Canadian
Welfare State: Challenges and Change. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997. Ebrary.
[C]
*sigh* This book just depresses me. I read it. I retained a lot of it it was- much easier than many of them because THIS one I lived through and even, to some extent, was paying attention. I was, for example, a beneficiary of Ontario's Pay Equity Legislation, which, after several years of wrangling and being told that there were no male comparators that they could AFFORD to compare us to, finally resulted in a very nice pay raise.
The book is a collection of essays that for the most part deals with the period between 1985 - 1995 and the hollowing out of the Canadian welfare state - and especially, the potential (at that point) for significant harm to women, and especially, to the progress that feminist organizations had made during the 60s & 70s.
I found it depressing because, for the most part, the authors were exactly right. Throughout the whole book, the one recurring message is that we have to pay attention. We have to take action. Or else....
and here we are... in or-else hell.... pretty much all of the things they warned of have indeed come to pass.... only more-so.....
Neoliberalism - or, as Dr. Marjorie Griffin Cohen terms it in her essay, vampire capitalism, has indeed prevailed, and the women's movement - although still around in various (under/un-funded factions) - faces serious challenges.... not the least of which is that a lot of people - young women, especially, think that the battle is over; we've come as far as we need to; it's all good now....
except that IT. IS. NOT.
We were, for a bit, drawing closer in terms of pay equity ... but now we're moving in the absolute wrong direction again. All of those people that used to be cared for in nursing homes, hospitals (for much longer than they are now), and institutions did not suddenly become independent... and guess who is providing the majority of at home or in the community care?
Institutions were not great solutions for a lot of people - and it is great that we're no longer warehousing people the way we were (with the exception of the many, many, many mentally ill people who we are now "caring for" -~gag~ - in our prisons) .... but such closures mean that a whole lot more people are caring for people and not getting paid for it ...and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell us that the majority of the people doing that unpaid caring work are women.
One of the essays that I found the most disturbing was "The Shift to Market: Gender and Housing Disadvantage" by Wekerle. Her discussion about housing and the impact of cuts warned of the potential harm specifically to women .... while I was reading it, the thought occured to me that here is one are we are making some ~progress~ toward equality.... in 2004, the National Working Group on Women and Housing reported that young women account for 41% of youth staying in shelters, and the percentage increases as they age. There are lots of other statistics in that fact sheet too, if you need further evidence that issues of women's equality are losing ground and that there is still work to do.
The scariest part of fact sheets like that, though, is not the actual statistics, although those are disturbing enough - it is that, as Dr. Meg Luxton observed when she spoke to my women's studies class, a few years from now we won't have reliable statistics about many of the things they tell us. By ending the mandatory long form census, Harper & Co. are ensuring that we just won't have StatisticsCanada data to draw on.
Anyway, once again I feel as though I have barely scratched the surface of potential discussion points in this book... but time to move on and tackle the next.
Still have 3/4 that I have read but not yet blogged about... perhaps tomorrow...
For now, I'm moving on to bell hooks.... or maybe....FOOD first, then bell hooks. The chocolate I ate for lunch (on top of the pot of coffee I had for breakfast) just isn't cutting it! I need protein.
Read more...Razack, Sherene H. Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998. Ebrary. [C]
Well, actually more than 2 - but have not yet written them all up yet ... just finished writing about Sherene Razack's Looking White People in the Eye though, so it feels done while the others don't (yet!).
Writing about the books here is different than the sort of writing I do about them for my notes and annotated bibliography...which is why it is a good exercise, I think... it encourages me to think about them another way - and to think about how I might present them if I were to be teaching them, i.e. to students (or blog visitors) who are not as immersed in the whole Women's Studies thing as I am right now. So anyway ... Looking White People in the Eye...
I think the most important thing that I got from this particular reading is questions to consider as I read other work, watch TV or read the paper, pay attention to the dynamics in my classes (huh! I have no more classes as a student now.... it's all teaching for the time being! Cool, eh?). They include:
I really liked that she uses the term "stories" .... sometimes, the work that I am doing now seems so far from removed that the work that I did during my undergraduate work and even in my Masters - but it really is not. It is all about stories, and Razack reminded me of that, and her work encouraged me to think about how the things I worked on and learned before starting my Phd might still be of use.
Anyway....each of the essays in the book explores the way that the eyes of men and women of dominant groups see subordinate women in these complex, interlocking ways. Razack differentiates interlocking from intersectionality by the degree of interdependence; interlocking systems need one another, and by tracing the complex ways in which they help to secure one another, she writes, we learn how women are produced into positions that exist symbiotically but hierarchically (13). Razack argues that power relations deeply shape encounters, and that through attending to them, we can begin to unravel how subjectivity is constituted, how systems of domination are produced, and how better to disrupt and challenge them.
The most useful chapter (aside from the introduction and conclusion, anyway) for me was one in which Razack discusses developmental disability. She advocates for attitudes not of pity but of respect, and highlights ways in which gains fought for and achieved by feminist women may, in courts, work against women with disabilities. It is here, as she notes, that she is clearly in the dominant and privileged position so - for those of us who enjoy white privilege as a matter of course - this is the chapter that most closely models a discussion from our typical position.
I feel that I should clarify enjoying white privilege. This is not, at least from my standpoint - and remember that I have already said that I speak only for myself - a matter of lording my position over anyone else's. It is, rather, an acknowledgement that in our society, I do, by sheer virtue of being a white Canadian, benefit. I am, actually, exceedingly privileged - by not only race, but also in terms of class (I can take time out from working to go to university, and although there are certainly many more class privileged than I, that definitely places me in a privileged position relative to many others). And while I have, at some times in my life, experienced short term disability, here again, I am privileged - and certainly there can be little argument that I have a much easier life than someone who is poor, ill or disabled, and not-white. That does not mean that I am better than this hypothetical person, of course - in many ways, to my way of thinking, it means that my accomplishments mean rather less than theirs do.
So the only real area in which I am regularly in the subordinate position is because I am female - and in Canada, while there continue to be very real disadvantages to being a woman (we are a very long way from any sort of equality yet; patriarchy is alive and well albeit rather more subtle than it has been in the past - but that is a discussion for another day, as I'm trying to write a blog post, not a novel!) - that alone does not render me SO subordinate as to permit me to, as Razack suggests some feminists do, ignore the many ways in which my privilege puts others in the subordinate position.
Of course, in a neoliberal society, we are all equal and none of us are supposed to pay any attention to any of this but hey... there, too, is a rant for another time.
There are so many tangents I am tempted to go off in from here - but the unfortunate reality is that The Goffman Reader is due back at the library by tomorrow and I have not yet begun to read it.... so I shall stop here and get started.
