I live within walking distance to work, about a 35 minute walk uphill, through the university arboretum (with its signs, "Reunite Gondwana"), through the greenspace meadow, across a few parking lots and up to College 8, which houses my office and my department. I seldom walk, mostly bus but sometimes drive, the 1.5 miles up to campus.
This would not be as much of a problem if I weren't part of a group of professors establishing a "sustainability curriculum" on campus. In lecture after lecture, I am reminded about the fact that walking is good for me, that driving is bad for the environment, and that by taking the time to walk instead of driving, I would make a contribution to sustainability, fighting global warming, and lessening the huge traffic problem on campus. When the Campus Sustainability Coordinator speaks in our introduction to sustainability design class, she hammers the point home: our university carbon footprint comes from all the driving and flying professors do. If we could just convince professors to stay put, or to walk or bus or bike, we could make real progress in carbon reduction.
Which is why, whatever method I'm using to get to campus, I generally spend that time thinking about how to make it more possible to get there a better way. I keep thinking that, rather than providing disincentives by making it expensive to park on campus and hard to find a parking space when I do drive, perhaps the university should try to eliminate the obstacles to my walking, busing and biking to campus. Disincentives are annoying by definition and so as I drive to campus and notice how hard they make it to do otherwise, I take to a constant internal grumbling of "if only they would..."
A few years ago, the university actually responded to my internal grumbling (which I would occasionally express outwardly in various university transportation surveys). They put in a campus bus that passed close to my house every 15 minutes or so. When I get it together to step on the bus, a sense of peace falls upon me, I breathe more deeply, and maybe even smile as I thank the busdriver for picking me up. It seems almost perfect. Thank you! But this bus only works when classes are in session, 30 weeks a year. I work many more weeks than that.
But on those days when I walk, rushing because 35 minutes out of my day is a lot of time, I grumble. Why do they make it so hard to walk, with all the fences surrounding the university? Why can't I just walk straight up or down between my home and my office? Why did they take out the ladder fence that used to be there when I first arrived on campus, enabling me to walk a much more direct route? Why do I have to go out of my way and take extra time to walk around to the entrance to the arboretum? Why is it so unclear whether or not it's legal to bike through the arboretum to the bike path (much easier for my 51-year-old body than the alternate bike-path entrance)? Why is the greenspace so lacking in people and therefore so isolated that I feel the need to put up my female-at-risk antenna, the ones I grew when, in the early 80s, the Trailside Killer was my Glen Park, SF neighbor who stalked exactly this landscape? Why does the Trailside Killer have to have anything to do with the question of sustainability?
These are the sort of things I have thought about during my walks, although a kind of positive "unintended consequence" has recently saved me from growing my risk antennae quite so vigorously: the arboretum folks are taking over the meadows and "managing" them for specific landscape restoration goals. As a result, the path I take through the meadow is now lined with 12 foot deer fences, to keep deer from eating the new plants they have planted in the meadow. Because I have heard (from victims) the stories of how attacks have happened in places a lot like this (the person in the bushes waiting to step out and grab the unsuspecting off a trail) the presence of these fences is remarkably soothing to me. They make me feel, at least, that it would be tough for anyone to step out and grab me off the trail. Fortunately, rapists are not built like deer, who are not at all deterred by this new, tall obstacle. I always see them grazing inside the fence, eating those young plants.
The real reason I drive, investing in a day permit, at least once a week is the fact that I'm not just a driver, I'm a trucker. I "truck" in the traditional sense that my jobs (as professor and mother) require that I move things around, like computers and books for work and children for that other work of motherhood. If my leftie city had a schoolbus system the way many more conservative cities do, I would almost never need to drive to work. The university used to provide a bus system for my books as well, delivering them to my department mailbox. Despite their new dedication to lowering the school's carbon footprint, this policy will only force me to drive more.
Then there's the institutions involved at the other end of my kid pickup. If I felt confident that my daughter could safely walk from her school to my husband's office downtown, he and I wouldn't have to join the traffic jam that is constant at the intersection between downtown and the industrial park where her school is located. I realize that we are squandering carbon for what may be an overly middle-class mom concern for our daughter's safety, but I don't see too many other 13-year-old girls walking alone around this industrial park. I've asked the school to help me form a walking partner group, but school administrators have lots of other things on their minds. Their green committee has created a carpool list, but my daughter's schedule changes all the time; we haven't had the consistency to use it. Walking would be the flexible solution.
In the thin European vs. fat American discussions, it turns out that the amount of walking Europeans do is as important or more than differences in diet. When I get the chance to walk somewhere, it would be great not to have to think the whole time I'm walking, "Why can't I do this more?"
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Angry Men, Angry Mothers
There are usually only a few men in my Sociology of Food class. In their answers to questions in class and in homework, most are indistinguishable from the women: concerns over diet and body image, some hints of anorexia, love of cooking, wishing there were more time, and money, to cook well and to eat well with others.
But there are always a few men who are in the course but not of it. They sit uncomfortably in the back or the far sides of the classroom. The look on their faces during class discussion indicates that they think what we are doing is a waste of time. They come to me bewildered over the class assignments, or they write answers to the assignment questions that are mostly critiques of the questions.
I try to bring in all points of view in class, including the "why the hell does this class exist" point of view. But if I pay too much attention to the disengaged men, if I look at them too much during classtime, if I maintain what I consider a good measure of vulnerability to class dynamics during discussion and in my occasional lectures, I get nervous and start to teach badly. These men, I realize, are not just in my food class, there are always a few in the classroom whenever I teach, but the food class is particularly interactive and one of the smaller (at 86 students) that I teach, so I tend to notice them more there.
This quarter, I've created some new assignments, one of which was to interview three people about their "food-centered lives." As usual, these men made it clear that such an assignment is a waste of time, and that whatever I was asking them to do and whatever conceptual tools I was asking them to use to analyze these interviews were useless. But it was in the interviews themselves that I got a glimpse of where their disengagement comes from, where the anger that makes them refuse to listen to the ideas presented and, in particular, to the person presenting them. The anger comes from their mothers.
Nearly all the students interviewed family for this assignment. Many of them interviewed grandparents, but a number interviewed parents as well, particularly mothers. We had read Meredith Abarca's Voices in the Kitchen, which talks about how Latina women sometimes turn the kitchen, which can be a place of oppression for women, into as a space of creativity, power and independence. The kitchen is always both a place of subjugation and empowerment, but creative cooks play with this boundary, using their artistry to push into the realm of power over their lives. Several students interpreted this in their interviews as women learning to love their kitchen and their place in it, which isn't quite what Abarca was saying. They interpreted consent as creativity. However, the angry men had a very different take on the book: that it didn't tell them anything about their mother's food lives. Their mothers, they said, always wanted to be cooks in the home, but they had to work, and they spent their lives angry at their fathers because they wanted to stay home but couldn't, because their fathers didn't make enough money to be the sole breadwinner.
These were a separate set of moms from the other students in the class, the students who came from full-time mom households or from households where moms were happy with their paid work lives. These students told stories about their mom's happiness in the kitchen or about how their moms were constantly juggling their work and kitchen lives, or how their mom's and dads shared the cooking the way they shared bringing home the bacon. These stories weren't always about family contentment, but they were about how people coped with the lives they had, rather than wished for lives that were completely different.
The men with angry moms cared deeply about their mom's anger, and were angry for them. These, I realized, were also moms I didn't meet very often. As a professional mom, I live in a town and a neighborhood that requires an income that only high-earning men (high enough to also have stay-at-home wives) or two-professional families can make. The working class moms who have to work and are angry about it don't live where I live, don't go to school with my children. I only meet them in the presence of the angry men in my classroom.
Of course, that is another reason why these women and their sons are so angry. The feminist revolution that enabled me to have a life of professional juggling -- happy with both family and work even while it drove me crazy on a daily basis -- is the same one that took them away from the kitchen where they wanted to be. I benefited from this revolution by entering the workforce and competing with their husbands for education and the professional jobs available with that education. Standing in front of that classroom talking about kitchens, my brains chock full of the social capital that only comes from a huge social investment in a person's education, I stood for exactly what the angry mens' angry moms had lost: I was the professional woman describing the changing world in which fulfilling my dream came at their expense. These men grew up around this anger, which I suspect these women must have expressed not just as anger toward their low-earning husbands, but also anger toward women like me, who grew up with a mom who was happy to go into the workforce even if it was under the unfortunate circumstances of single momhood.
These angry men will never accept me as a professor, no matter what I say, or how I try to include their perspectives in class discussion. I can try to expand the concepts of the course to understand the frustrated kitchens they come from, part of a world in which single-earner families with happy moms spending hours in the kitchen only exist at the top of the heap. I can explain how academic women don't tend to tell the stories of the working class women who want to stay home. But the contradiction will remain apparent: I am what angry mens' angry moms are mad about. Simply by being who I am, I am an imperfect political contradiction that no amount of intellectual inclusivity can resolve.
But there are always a few men who are in the course but not of it. They sit uncomfortably in the back or the far sides of the classroom. The look on their faces during class discussion indicates that they think what we are doing is a waste of time. They come to me bewildered over the class assignments, or they write answers to the assignment questions that are mostly critiques of the questions.
I try to bring in all points of view in class, including the "why the hell does this class exist" point of view. But if I pay too much attention to the disengaged men, if I look at them too much during classtime, if I maintain what I consider a good measure of vulnerability to class dynamics during discussion and in my occasional lectures, I get nervous and start to teach badly. These men, I realize, are not just in my food class, there are always a few in the classroom whenever I teach, but the food class is particularly interactive and one of the smaller (at 86 students) that I teach, so I tend to notice them more there.
This quarter, I've created some new assignments, one of which was to interview three people about their "food-centered lives." As usual, these men made it clear that such an assignment is a waste of time, and that whatever I was asking them to do and whatever conceptual tools I was asking them to use to analyze these interviews were useless. But it was in the interviews themselves that I got a glimpse of where their disengagement comes from, where the anger that makes them refuse to listen to the ideas presented and, in particular, to the person presenting them. The anger comes from their mothers.
Nearly all the students interviewed family for this assignment. Many of them interviewed grandparents, but a number interviewed parents as well, particularly mothers. We had read Meredith Abarca's Voices in the Kitchen, which talks about how Latina women sometimes turn the kitchen, which can be a place of oppression for women, into as a space of creativity, power and independence. The kitchen is always both a place of subjugation and empowerment, but creative cooks play with this boundary, using their artistry to push into the realm of power over their lives. Several students interpreted this in their interviews as women learning to love their kitchen and their place in it, which isn't quite what Abarca was saying. They interpreted consent as creativity. However, the angry men had a very different take on the book: that it didn't tell them anything about their mother's food lives. Their mothers, they said, always wanted to be cooks in the home, but they had to work, and they spent their lives angry at their fathers because they wanted to stay home but couldn't, because their fathers didn't make enough money to be the sole breadwinner.
These were a separate set of moms from the other students in the class, the students who came from full-time mom households or from households where moms were happy with their paid work lives. These students told stories about their mom's happiness in the kitchen or about how their moms were constantly juggling their work and kitchen lives, or how their mom's and dads shared the cooking the way they shared bringing home the bacon. These stories weren't always about family contentment, but they were about how people coped with the lives they had, rather than wished for lives that were completely different.
The men with angry moms cared deeply about their mom's anger, and were angry for them. These, I realized, were also moms I didn't meet very often. As a professional mom, I live in a town and a neighborhood that requires an income that only high-earning men (high enough to also have stay-at-home wives) or two-professional families can make. The working class moms who have to work and are angry about it don't live where I live, don't go to school with my children. I only meet them in the presence of the angry men in my classroom.
Of course, that is another reason why these women and their sons are so angry. The feminist revolution that enabled me to have a life of professional juggling -- happy with both family and work even while it drove me crazy on a daily basis -- is the same one that took them away from the kitchen where they wanted to be. I benefited from this revolution by entering the workforce and competing with their husbands for education and the professional jobs available with that education. Standing in front of that classroom talking about kitchens, my brains chock full of the social capital that only comes from a huge social investment in a person's education, I stood for exactly what the angry mens' angry moms had lost: I was the professional woman describing the changing world in which fulfilling my dream came at their expense. These men grew up around this anger, which I suspect these women must have expressed not just as anger toward their low-earning husbands, but also anger toward women like me, who grew up with a mom who was happy to go into the workforce even if it was under the unfortunate circumstances of single momhood.
These angry men will never accept me as a professor, no matter what I say, or how I try to include their perspectives in class discussion. I can try to expand the concepts of the course to understand the frustrated kitchens they come from, part of a world in which single-earner families with happy moms spending hours in the kitchen only exist at the top of the heap. I can explain how academic women don't tend to tell the stories of the working class women who want to stay home. But the contradiction will remain apparent: I am what angry mens' angry moms are mad about. Simply by being who I am, I am an imperfect political contradiction that no amount of intellectual inclusivity can resolve.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)