Category: body

best laid plans · body · busy · family · good attitudes about crappy possibilities · writing

From the Archives: The More She Sleeps

erinewunker

Last Wednesday our daughter was born. Every day since then has been a wonderful–and somewhat exhausting–blur of getting our bearings in this new life of ours. While I plan to write a post on navigating being pregnant and on the job market that’s not what is on my mind today. Rather, after a bleary night of feeding and rocking and trying to sleep, I’m thinking about my partner who has a writing deadline. I am thinking about all of you heading to Congress. I am thinking about the summer research and writing plans. And of course, I am thinking about this wee little person who is strapped to my chest while I type.

Here, in the spirit of writing and sleeping and finding your bearings, is a post that Aimée wrote about how writing is like sleep training.
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When my daughter was an infant she and I both often sported the wild looks, red eyes, flailing movements, and terrible mood swings associated with chronic lack of sleep. Every day was a battle, both of us to try to stay awake, only one of us with reason. Sometimes, of an afternoon, I wandered glassy-eyed through the local grocery store with her staring glassy-eyed out of the sling. No morning nap, no afternoon nap, and oh dear lord the colic hours approaching. Well-meaning friends, strangers, and cashiers of all sorts would cluck and say, to comfort me, “Well, at least she’ll sleep tonight for sure!”

But here’s the thing: her worst nights for sleep were the ones that followed the days that she didn’t nap. And, those weird days where she’d get 2 hours of day-time sleep? She’d conk out at 7pm for 12 hours.

My husband and I developed a saying, repeated like a mantra to everyone who completely misunderstood her sleep cycle. The saying is this: The more she sleeps, the more she sleeps. And it was absolutely true.

Writing is like that, too, I’ve been recently thinking. Looking around at my friends and colleagues online and off, the conclusion I’ve come to is this:

The more you write, the more you write.


I’m thinking particularly about the relationship of informal, lower- or different-stakes writing to the much higher-stakes academic writing, the peer-reviewed articles, the dissertations, and the books. Extra-particularly, I’m thinking about the role that blogging plays in my practices and productivity as a writer.

I have written a ton more, in a ton more venues, and a ton more easily* since I began blogging. That’s the truth!

In the early days of academics blogging, many in the professoriate espoused the belief that time spent blogging was time away from research. It seemed to me that the view of “writing” was very narrow and very parsimonious. Certainly, blogs (and op-eds, and public talks) were held in much lower esteem than the gold standard represented by the peer-reviewed article. And that’s fine, as it goes. But there was something else, too, almost as though many in the academy believed that we had each only a finite lifetime allotment of usable words, and that it was a terrible waste to let these spill out onto the screens over the internet rather than pages through the library.

[You may develop your own quasi-religious metaphor involving masturbation and spilled seed here, if you wish. I’m not going to go there.]

But in my experience, words don’t work like that. Words are more like kittens: the more you have of them, the more you’re likely to get. If you nurture a couple of them, they’ll soon start to produce more and more of them without much conscious effort on your part to increase their number. And so it is with my words: I nurture a couple of small ones, and suddenly every computer I have has open documents full of jottings for a book project or an article or a syllabus or a blog post or an op-ed, a crazy crowded mishmash of self-multiplying words and ideas.

Why?

For me, first, blogging has developed the writing habit. I carry that mental pencil and pad with me all the time, always busy trying to convert my experience into blog bait. I’m pre-writing, that is, all the time. And this habit spills over to my research: I’m always busy trying to convert my reading into article-bait. This is a habit I did not have before blogging.

Second, the feedback I receive from blogging (and media appearances, and public talks) offers nearly immediate positive reinforcement, and that makes me write more. When people tell me they think an idea is great, I’m more likely to push harder to write something more substantial about it; when people tell me the like reading my writing, I know that the work is not solitary or without a point or audience. Writing starts to feel good.

Third, informal writing has clarified my voice and made me a more confident (and, I hope, effective) communicator. Blogging (etc.) does not tie me in compositional knots relating to disciplinary jargon (or, worse, interdisciplinary jargon). There’s no onerous citation requirement. I don’t have to tone down my metaphors for an imaginary international audience. I write to please myself, largely, and as a result the writing process is pleasant, and the results are more conversational. For high-stakes professional writing, jargon is necessary, adherence to strict rules of citation is necessary, and (I think) some of the enforced clunkiness of writing style is a historical artifact that I can only chip away at one little piece at a time. But that’s all very tiring. High-stakes writing is an 800m butterfly swim in a tech-suit at the Olympics; low-stakes writing is skinny dipping from the paddle-boat at 11pm at the cottage. It’s fun, but I’m probably still building muscle and endurance.

I know that many of you have digital lives or write in public as well. I would be very, very interested to hear how you think your own “low-stakes**” writing has an impact on your “high-stakes” work. We could maybe change the prevailing narrative!

Maybe we’ll start worrying about the productivity of people who don’t fart around writing stuff on teh intertubes 😉

—–
* “easily” is relative. I still really hate writing. It’s just that the hating part is so much less debilitating than it was before.


** the degree of stakeness is relative to your perspective, of course: in my JOB, articles count more than blogging or public appearances, but this month I’ve had a) an article appear in a big journal and b) a five minute appearance on national radio and I leave it to you to guess which of these events prompted more hallway talk and productive debate about digital culture, more emails from friends and relatives, more phone calls, more Facebook posts, more debates, more Twitter RTs, and more “Wow, I’m impressed.”

body · teaching · yoga

Embodied / Teaching

aimeemorrison6 Comments

Before class, I changed my shirt–I was just reviewing my lesson plan and I could see that what I was wearing was going to work against my teaching.

In class, I got a student to come to the front of the room. We linked arms and sat waaaaay back. People partnered up and swayed together.

“Watch me,” I said: “Can you see the curve in my low back?” And then: “Put your hand on your lower back–can you feel a curve there?” And then, turning around, “Now look–watch my shoulder blades come together when I move my arms like this.” (This was why I switched to racer-back tank top from the Internet t-shirt I had on originally.)

Obviously, this was an “Introduction to Yoga” class, not a “Digital Photography–Writing the #Selfie Online” class. These are the two courses I’m teaching this term, one to 11 graduate students in the English department, and one to 16 beginning yogis at Queen Street Yoga. My two classrooms are about a block and a half away from each others–in fact, I can see the yoga studio from the design classroom, and vice-versa–but they are worlds apart in how I experience them as a teacher.

I’ve written a lot about self-presentation as a teacher before: looking “professional”, from head to toe, and mostly about manifesting a particular kind of ethos and authority, where I want my embodiment to be, let’s face it, functionally invisible. I don’t want people to look at my body or my face the way we are all conditioned to look at women: as potential sexual conquests or rivals, as things to be looked at and assessed. When I’m teaching English, I want to look “nice” and “stylish” so far as matches some sort of sense I have of myself (blazers, but with sleeves rolled, and maybe a t-shirt from the internet) without really drawing attention to that as a performance of attention-seeking. I want to fall somewhere being effortlessly professionally cool and recognizably just myself. I often have an acute sense of myself as open to bodily scrutiny even as I try to focus on putting my ideas and teachings forward–this is particularly true in undergraduate classrooms where I stand at the front of the room in front of rows of seated students, where I frequently turn around and write things on the board and can’t see what they’re doing. This is uncomfortable and it often feels like I’m looking for a magic solution to make my self-presentation–my embodiment in the classroom–both acceptable and invisible. It’s a kind of awkward and self-conscious self-denial.

I note this particularly since I’ve begun teaching yoga. I teach beginners, and I teach intermediate and advanced students. I teach people older than me, sometimes by a lot, and people younger than me, sometimes by a lot. I teach people whose bodies do not much resemble mine, and some whose do. I teach students who are stronger and more flexible than me, and students who are weaker and tighter than me. Through it all, we bring our bodies to the forefront. I choose my clothes so that students can see my body move and align in particular ways when I demo poses, or mirror them in a flow. Sometimes we try things together: let’s all do this with our left arm, and I’ll do it with you.

I’m totally unselfconscious about this. My body feels right, even in its forties, even lumpy and full of moles. My body and my ideas and my teaching work together. I feel whole. “Look at the angle of my pelvis,” I ask them from downward dog, “see how I point my tailbone up to the ceiling here? And what happens to my low back when I don’t?” Or, in Firelog pose, “You’ll see that my leg doesn’t go very far here: I have very tight hips, but yours might be more open and your knee will get closer to the floor.” My body becomes a functional thing, a purposeful thing, a beautiful machine that is fully me, for the moment unlamented.

I’ve never felt so unified, and I’ve never felt so complete and so capable, even in my idiosyncratic frailties and my imperfect embodiment. I feel like I’m using my whole self, not squashing a big part of myself away from view, a potential liability to me and my goals. It feels good; it feels weird to feel good in this way. I begin, more and more, to wonder what I lose the rest of the time, when I’m so self-conscious, fighting myself, trying to hide away everything but my Brain.

body · language · pedagogy · yoga

Jargon, expertise, exclusion

aimeemorrison

My last twenty-hour yoga teacher training weekend intensive featured a full day of anatomy lessons. It was great! Jesse Enright came, with a bag full of variously sized bones and skeletons, and some other props, and we all worked on learning some of the technical terms for bones and how they move.

We stood up and practiced a kind of anatomy-dork “Simon says”: flex your left shoulder! pronate your right wrist! extend your right knee! invert your right foot! both feet dorsiflexion! adduct your left forearm! It was embodied pedagogy of the best kind.

But here’s what knocked my socks off: you know that what we call ‘the hip socket’ is just the colloquial term? The joint in question is referred to, medically, as the “acetabulum.” All the bones have Latin names. It’s all very precise and sciency and much more objective and important and learned than our analogic or metaphoric terms like “knee cap” or “collar bone” or “shoulder socket.” Doctors and scientists use the real words, the science words, right?

You know what “acetabulum” means, in Latin?

It means “small vinegar bowl.” Because the joint looks, to a vinegar-bowl-using anatomist who devised the term, like a a small vinegar bowl.

Wikimedia Commons

What?

There’s another bone, inside the whole shoulder apparatus, a little knobby pointy thing. It’s called the “coracoid process”. Want to know what that is in English? “Like a raven’s beak.” See?

Wikimedia Common

As a culture, we’re so very quick to draw hard lines between objective, scientific domains and squishy, subjective humanities domains. Even those of us who might decry the hierarchy this creates sometime even forget that this is a forced and ideological distinction in many ways. This is disingenuous. Anatomy is metaphorical, and, as my teacher suggests, speculative.

Speculative? Yes. Did you know that until a couple of months ago, humans only had four ligaments in our knees, but now we have five? Yeah. I’m going to guess that fifth ligament was there the whole time, but anatomists and doctors and other scientists just learned not to see it because they were told there was nothing there. Hm.

I’m going to let you assemble your own conclusion from this. Maybe it’s about how becoming a student in a new domain of knowledge can really add zip to your day job. Maybe it’s about the inevitability of metaphoric thinking. Maybe it’s about how jargon serves sometimes to clarify, but often to mark the boundaries of a community of knowledge and exclude outsiders. And maybe it’s about how sometimes the stories we tell ourselves turn out to be really wrong, and yet somehow persist in the face of a million knee surgeries that might daily correct the record. Maybe it’s about why we’re so invested in the difference between objective and subjective even when this distinction keeps collapsing in on itself. Huh.

balance · body · busy · grad school · modest proposal · parenting

In Praise of Sleep

janasmithelford4 Comments

It’s Reading Break! Phew….

Somehow I’ve managed to get halfway through my first semester of teaching, and coincidentally, half way through my first stack of papers. I’ve been grading leisurely this past week, with curling in the background (the Canadian Women’s Curling Championships ended a week ago), finally with space, it seems, to breathe.

This past weekend was one of the most relaxing I’ve had in quite some time. With no teaching pressures for the next week, I wasn’t trying to cram every spare moment with reading, writing lectures, or class prep of some sort or another. I took my daughter to an indoor playground, baked muffins, slept in, lazed around my house in my pajamas, and vacuumed my whole house for the first time in (gulp) over six months. It was really nice.

If I haven’t said so before, I’m going to say it now: teaching for the first time is intense and exhausting. Selecting books and writing the syllabus aside, the weekly lecture writing, assignment creation, and grading (my students do weekly reading responses), has made me, well…a bit frazzled. So far, I’ve been managing (with only a week of major slip-ups) to stick to my semester goal to keep my teaching prep to teaching days, write two days a week, and spend daily and weekend time with my family. But it has come at a cost: my sleep.

Sleep has been shown to be essential to all kinds of things: memory, focus, and concentration, safety, immune function, cardiovascular health…I could go on. But one of the things I’ve just started to piece together about myself and sleep is that when I don’t get enough of it, my stress levels go up exponentially. It doesn’t matter if all my work is done or if I’m fully on top of all my responsibilities, if I’m not getting enough sleep, I’m stressed. Period. And stress, apparently, does not do good things to your brain.

You’d think being several years into a PhD program would mean that I would have already figured out this crucial bit of information. But, believe it or not, PhD + Baby ≠ deep and intimate knowledge of the value of sleep. Although I’ve learned to deeply appreciate the moments when I have the “luxury” of sleep, I’ve failed to make it a priority.

This reading week, I’m determined change that, and I’m hoping my resolve will stick around for the semester. 

Do you prioritize sleep? Or is it often the first thing that falls to the wayside when you’re busy?

balance · body · classrooms · learning · openness · teaching · yoga

In which the teacher becomes the student. And it’s weird.

aimeemorrison

I spent 18 hours of last weekend in stretchy pants, making deliberate contact with various weight-bearing points of myself to a sticky mat, in a big sunny room, with 20 other people, taking notes, touching people with my “magic button” hands, directing their sun salutations, and being quizzed on the broader points of Ayurveda.

I’m in yoga teacher training. And it’s really weird to be a student.

Obviously, I’ve been a yoga student for years already, relinquishing the seat of the teacher to someone up at the front of the room, keeping my eyes on my own mat. Being a yoga student for me was an exercise in letting go of control, of letting someone else direct the show for a while, of keeping my eyes on my own mat and learning to be mindful. Getting into that flow is fairly easy for me. Yoga is a practice, not a perfect: you do it right by showing up, and continuing. Yoga in this way is a lot like writing: a lonely endeavour requiring grit and steady effort, over the long haul, accumulating into strength that manifests in individual ways.

But yoga teacher training is more like class: there are tests, and homework, and other assessments and you’re being taught a body of knowledge you have to master before you’re done.

So I’m that kind of student again, and it’s probably a useful experience for my life as a professor, now that I’m (ulp) fifteen years out of the graduate seminar, and seventeen years away from my undergradute experience. The gulf between my experience of university classrooms and that of my students is growing: I see class more and more as a pure learning space, as an obligation that needs to be regimented, too, if I’m going to get my other work done, as a luxury of dedicated time to be curious and access a subject area expert, as a set of names and stories I have to manage to make a connection, without burning out. I don’t know, really, how my students see class anymore.

But I just spent a weekend in their shoes. (Or bare feet. On a medidation cushion rather than a chair.) I have worried about how I’m going to find time to get the homework done–two hours of home yoga AND two classes a week? That’s hard! I can do the written homework fairly easily … oh and someone made digital flashcards for Sanskrit pose names. When is the courseware package going to be available? I’ve shot up my hand and given the wrong answer in front of 20 other people and been met with, “Yessssss, that’s interesting but no.” And I’ve shot my hand up enough to have my teacher’s eyes slide past me with, “Can we hear from someone who hasn’t given an answer yet?” I’ve been puzzled and I’ve been confident. I even got a little bored and my back hurt and I wanted a nap, at a certain point on Sunday. I’ve done group work, introducing myself awkwardly to strangers, and figuring out a process to take turns pushing on each others’ inner thighs, or leading sun salutations with verbal cues. the whole time I’m wondering if I’m doing it right, and how I would know that. It’s exciting and exhausting and confusing and worrying and fun.

At yoga teacher training, it seems, I’m learning (again) what it’s like to be a student, in a formal learning endeavour with real stakes. It’s humbling and illuminating.

I went back to my own class on Monday–the one I teach–and looked at my 14 sudents with a new kind of perspective. I heard what I was saying to them with a sort of doubled consciousness, like I used to when I was just starting. I could imagine what they felt like as students, even as I continued to occupy my role as teacher. Some of them are more or less curious. More or less prepared. More or less awake, or hungry, or distracted. Some have a burning desire to just graduate and others have a burning desire to learn to use Photoshop and some are too overwhelmed by the bombarbment of new information to desire much except a little respite and maybe a muffin. Just like me.

I am grateful for this unexpected extra benefit from my new training. I guess I forgot how long I’ve been in the classroom just as a professor, and not as a student, and didn’t realize what impact this might have on my teaching and on student learning. As I whipsaw between intellectual and physical/spiritual pursuits, between student and teacher, between satisfying learning and frustrating learning, I’ll keep in mind that that is what it is like to be a student. Any student. And we’ll see where that takes me, and my own students, in our time together.

Embodied learning: feet truly parallel, and active

balance · body · grad school · health · running · writing

Bird by Bird

melissadalgleish

I ran 16 kilometres yesterday. Even though it was my feet hitting the pavement, my breath making clouds in the cold air, that statement still shocks me a bit.

You see, it was only a little more than a year ago that I started running at all. I was out of shape (life of the mind, and all that) and just so envious of all of the local runners I saw out and about. I wanted to do that–to be a long-distance runner–and I was genuinely unsure if I could. Would I hate it? Would I be terrible at it? Would I fail?

Like any good student, I did the obvious–sought out a teacher. I enrolled in a Learn to Run class with the Running Room. Goal race: a Christmas 5k. The idea of running 5k was intimidating. It seemed unattainable. But we started small–we ran for one minute and walked for one minute. Then two and one. Then five, and eight, and ten minutes, with a one minute walk in the intervals. And we just kept stringing together those ten minute intervals. 3k. 4k. 5k. 6k.

I ran my 5k race, and had a blast doing it. Then I ran a 10k, and loved it too. And now I’m training for a half-marathon. I ran 16k yesterday. But what I really did was run for ten minutes, then walk. Over and over. Little by little, I ate away at those kilometres until there weren’t any left. The idea of running 23k (our longest training distance for the half-marathon) is still terribly intimidating, but ten minutes? I can do that.

It look me awhile–and the purchase of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird–to realize that in my running was also the answer to my search for a sustainable academic writing practice. With my dissertation proposal approved, the idea of writing an entire dissertation was terribly intimidating. All those pages! All those ideas! I found the scope of it difficult–and sometimes paralyzing–to wrap my head around.

But reading Bird by Bird (which I feel like I was the last writer on the planet to do) made me realize that ten-and-ones worked just as well for writing as for running. For those of you who haven’t read it, the key message of Bird by Bird is to break down large writing projects into small chunks–tiny ones, even–and tackle them one-by-one. It seems commonsensical, but when faced with writing a book, common sense sometimes flies out the window. But I got it–I didn’t have to write a dissertation. I just had to write for twenty-five minutes–one Pomodoro. And then do it again. Little by little, I’m eating away at those pages until there won’t be any left. The idea of writing an entire dissertation is still terribly intimidating, but writing for twenty-five minutes? I can do that.

So I’ll keep writing my Pomodoros and running my ten-and-ones. And little by little, my dissertation will get done, and my kilometres will add up. And who knows? The dissertation is definitely a marathon, but maybe I’ll run an actual one of those too.

What about you? What strategies for a sustainable writing practice do you use? How do you tackle projects or goals that are ambitious or intimidating?

balance · body · day in the life · health

No pain, no gain

erinewunker1 Comment

Academic work can be painful. I’m not being figurative here. I actually mean physically painful. After I wrote my comprehensive exams, my neck and mid-back were completely destroyed. I couldn’t stand-up straight. I needed a full chiropractic overhaul. I was prepared for comps as a mental exercise, but I hadn’t fully considered the extent to which that kind of intensive, one-week writing stint would be so physically demanding. Today, having finished my PhD, I find myself in a similar situation. I’m probably in the worst shape of my life. I just couldn’t stay on top of taking care of myself. Grading, articles, research work – they all add up to no time to work out and no time to buy groceries.

I should note, that I’m actually, generally, a pretty healthy person. I took ballet until my early 20s, I was on a rowing team during my MA, and I ran two half-marathons during my PhD. My PhD supervisor always started out meetings with the question, “are you still running?” She emphasized the importance of remaining physically healthy throughout the process. Graduate school can be long, stressful, alcohol-fueled, and surprisingly hard on our bodies; it is important that we make every possible effort to remain healthy.

Now, being generally healthy and not having any kids (or any pets for that matter), I would think it would be somehow easier for me to make sure that I have time to get some kind of physical exercise. I have no major obstacles to fitness, and no one dependent upon me that might get in the way of taking time for fitness. As multiple blog postings on this website regularly make clear, however, making time for ourselves somehow always ends up at the bottom of the priority list, no matter who we are or what we have going on. When we do finally find time to be good to ourselves, we still feel guilty as hell about it.

So here I am, on a Thursday morning, in pain. My back is seriously out of whack. I need to finish writing an article this week, and I’m not sure I can sit at the computer long enough to do it. Basically, I think it is resolution time. These are the commitments that I can make to myself, to avoid the physical toll of academic work on my body. I’m making them public, so you can hold me to them:

1) No more writing on my laptop – ever: I wrote my comps and my dissertation on a laptop, and every physio, chiro and RMT that I encounter scolds me for it. Laptops cause a little thing that I call “laptop neck,” that sloping bad posture that you get at the base of your neck from leaning into the screen. It’s time to go back to the desktop computer.

2) Get outside everyday: This one is a bit of a no brainer. We mandate that children run around outside everyday, and moral panics ensue when some piece of technology is deemed to interfere with this activity. Like most of you, I am guilty of always working, even when I’m not working. My little brain is constantly churning around ideas and sentences, so getting out for a long walk is actually a really important aspect of my writing process, one which I have tended to neglect lately.

3) No eating in front of the computer: Time to stop working, relocate to another room, and sit at an actual table while eating food like a normal person. I’m not ashamed that my dissertation laptop has food splatter all over the keyboard…but I am ready to make a different lifestyle choice.

4) Write everyday, not all day: The people I know who write for a couple of hours everyday are really prolific. The panicked, day-long write-a-thon seems like it should work, but I think we all know that it isn’t a great method. The stuff I write at the end of an 8-hour shift is never that great, and my neck generally looks like a J-hook by the time I’m done.

5) Keep a schedule: This is the thing that academic’s with kids are really great at, and it seems like a crazy indulgence for me to even list it as a “problem” that I have. When someone is dependent upon you making them food, taking them to ballet, helping with their homework, etc., you have no choice but to walk away from the computer. Scheduling is the only way that I have found to alleviate the academic guilt that comes with nights off. We can’t work all the time, and we need time away from the computer, so we might as well enjoy it when we have it (rather than feeling guilty about it).

These are changes that I am trying to make. I guess, by putting them up here, I am committing publicly to them. Maybe this will help. Maybe it’s just self-indulgent. In any case, I’d like you to hold me to them.

Oh, also, I’m going to eat salad. Salad is lame and I pretty much hate it, but I’ve heard that it is good for you or something…

bad academics · body · health · slow academy

The Tyranny of the Office Chair

erinewunker3 Comments

I have a not-so-secret fantasy. I really want a beanbag chair for my office. This is a well-known fact at my workplace. We joke about how I could make some extra money on the side by allowing other faculty and staff to sit in it for a small rental fee.

Like most office spaces, my office is dominated by hard, rectangular, pointy-cornered objects: the desk; the shelves; the filing cabinet; the books. Even my chair, while ergonomic, does not satisfy. Every now and then, I want to slouch. I want to sprawl. I want to find a way to let my body relax for a few minutes. Hence, the beanbag dream. I want a structureless blob of over-sized cushion plonked off in the corner that’s just for me.

I recognize that I’m fortunate in that I can entertain this fantasy: I have an office that would be large enough to accommodate such a wonderful object and a windowless door that would let me sprawl sans surveillance.

I think about seating a lot, especially at conferences. I love conferences because they give you the opportunity to meet and interact with lots of folks. You start having “conference buddies.” But even if the conference is awesome, the chairs are not. Conference chairs are always uncomfortable. And I’ve been well trained to not squirm around in my seat, no matter how uncomfortable it is.

One notable exception was at a Feminist Disability Studies panel that I attended last year. People were encouraged to move the furniture around. People were invited to stand. People were invited to do whatever they wanted to do to make their bodies feel as okay as possible in the space. Revolutionary! Why can’t we have more of this?

I remember how important comfortable spaces were to me as an undergraduate. The university that I attended had a large quiet room with red (slightly cruddy) sofas: in my last year, the space was renovated, the sofas were removed, and the space was repurposed for private functions only. I think these kinds of spaces are becoming less and less common in universities as they adopt more of a business culture. And I think that’s unfortunate. I don’t think it’s “unprofessional” to have a quiet space to take a break.

best laid plans · body · change · faster feminism · grad school · ideas for change · kid stuff · slow academy · wish list

Guest Post: Pumping on Campus

aimeemorrison4 Comments

Today’s post is from recent PhD-graduate Andrea Beverley–her post really struck a chord with me, because when I came back to work five months after my daughter was born, I was pumping breastmilk several times a day at work, for about 6 or 7 months: my main problem was teaching a three hour grad seminar in a far-flung building, and having to pump during the 15 minute class break. Mostly, I had the incalculable luxury of a private office, but I can tell you, it’s really never easy to bring this sort of routine into your worklife.

Thank you so much, Andrea, for sharing this story with us. And congratulations on your degree!

——————-

The first time that I brought my breast pump to school, I had a vague, naïve impression that I would find some kind of cozy, private den in which to extract my breast milk. Reality hit when I spent the better part of my lunch break searching for a spot to pump. The single-person washroom was locked with a sign on the door stating that I needed to apply to the Disabled Students Bureau for a key. I figured I’d set up in a stall in the larger bathroom, but to my dismay, there were no electrical outlets for my electric pump. I wandered over to the library and consulted a librarian at the information desk. She suggested the medical clinic or the nurses’ station (both necessitating a trek to the other side of campus, not to mention the allusion to the medicalisation of maternity, which is a whole other post!). She then offered to reserve one of the library’s group study rooms for me for a 15-minute period. It had an electrical outlet and a door, but a little window beside the door meant that anyone walking by could glance in. Nonetheless, I decided that this was my best option. I hunkered down on the floor with my back against the door as far as possible from the window and tried to visualize my suckling baby so that my milk would let down in this awkward, less-than-ideal spot.

Over the following months, I developed an efficient pumping routine. I bought batteries so that I wouldn’t need an outlet, and I pumped in a washroom stall while balancing on the toilet. I was very self-conscious about the mechanical noises that the pump made, so I tried to muffle it by wrapping the mechanical part of the pump in a sweater and leaving it in my backpack with only the cord protruding. I wasn’t ashamed of pumping my milk, but I did worry that people would hear the noise, have no idea what it was or a decidedly wrong idea about what it was, and find it laughable or bizarre. I’m still not sure why this bothered me so much. Recently, in one of the washrooms that I had so often used as my pumping station, I heard those familiar sounds emanating from one of the stalls and felt an incredible sense of kinship with that pumping mama!

 In recent years, a number of American campuses have created lactation rooms for nursing mothers and recent health care reform in the U.S. now requires employers to provide “a private, non-bathroom place” to express breast milk. While breastfeeding is considered a human right in Canada and workplaces are expected to accommodate nursing mothers, I couldn’t find much on-line evidence of Canadian campuses designating space for pumping, although the University of Toronto’s Family Care Office offers an list of “private, quiet and comfortable places” around campus where mothers can breastfeed or pump. Do any other campuses address this issue? I would have used a lactation room for sure, had it been conveniently located. But honestly, beyond my own experience, I’m not sure how much demand there would be for such a space, which testifies to the solitude that I experienced in my pumping adventures. I don’t know anyone else who went through the same situation. Profs can use their offices, and students coming to campus for short classes wouldn’t necessarily need to pump during that time. But I was a doctoral student working long days at my (shared) desk space. So this blog post is in part to ask: anyone else have campus breast milk anecdotes to share?

 Andrea Beverley

body · broken heart · clothes · femimenace · righteous feminist anger · sexist fail

This is not the female empowerment you are looking for

aimeemorrison8 Comments

Well, the shit has hit the fan, gender-wise, at Waterloo. Again. Please go read the news coverage to know what I’m talking about, and then come back. Let me just say there are bikinis, and Formula One racecars, a dean of engineering, and some corporate sponsors.

Wednesday’s headline: UW shuts down student car team over racy photograph

Thursday’s headline: Car sponsors decry UW decision on bikini photo

My reaction to these stories is complicated. Issues of money (corporate sponsors, the charity), power (the university, the engineering faculty), academic culture (grades and teamwork and academic integrity involved in facility use), sex (she’s not wearing coveralls in the photo), gender (the discussion of expressing femininity in a male-dominated faculty), and even feminism (the university’s efforts at equity and at female recruitment and retention, successful or not) intermingle in ways that are hard to disentangle, let alone understand.

I’ve tagged this post “righteous feminist anger,” but I’m not altogether sure who I’m angry with. I’ve tagged it “sexist fail,” too, without being able to say quite who has failed.

Overwhelmingly, though, this makes me sad. Here’s why:

  • I am sad that this student needs explicitly to look for an outlet to express her femininity–engineering is still a gendered course of study, I guess, and that gender seems to be male. Having part of yourself necessarily suppressed every day to fit in can make you wiggy.
  • I am even more sad that this expression–this self-expression!–of femininity takes as its form the the most clichéd of sexualized postures/costumes for the pleasure of the male gaze.
  • I am sad that the shoot was for a charity: how awful that the best thing a female engineer can contribute to charity is an image of her own hypersexualized body? 
  • I am sad that if we’re going to celebrate our beautiful bodies, we twist and contort them (hip jutted out, back arched, breasts out) instead of showing their strength and power. By way of contrast, this is beautiful and strong together, I think.
  • I am sad that I don’t know her name: out of delicacy, her name is deliberately never mentioned in the reporting. Her body we see, but her name is veiled. Is this to save her some anticipated shame at being exposed, while we are nevertheless entitled to enjoy our collective titillation, on the front page of the paper, over our morning coffee?
I don’t know what to think. 
I do know what it’s like to be a woman in a male-dominate field. I started my academic life in a male-dominated field–computer science–and I hated it. I felt alienated, and unheard, unimportant, and disregarded. Sometimes, the teachers made fun of me. I quit and moved to English, where I felt freer to be myself. How brave, how strong, do you have to be to stay in one of those fields? What kind of daily strength and perserverence might that take?
I also know what it’s like to be a young adult–a young woman–testing out the boundaries and contours of what it means to be a woman in a world where that … is second best. I think I was 25 before I felt comfortable being called a ‘woman’–it seemed to me I was more a ‘girl.’ It’s hard, growing into this role, this identity, this putatively second-best self. 
I know what it’s like, too, to test out the limits of self-presentation in this overdetermined body: in my early 20s, I went goth, and the bikinis I wore in public were made of PVC, paired with combat boots and blue lipstick. There were photo shoots. Did people stare, look at my boobs, make rude or lewd comments? Sure. And I tried to feel like I was in control of that. At 38, though, I tend to side more with Stacey and Clinton: people read you according to the scripts we share as a culture. 
Don’t get me wrong: I like bikinis. I like high heels! I don’t, however, see much empowerment in wearing them together, for a camera, while someone aims a gas-powered leaf-blower at you for that wind-blown effect. The clothing, composition, genre says object of the gaze, rather than subject of action. And aren’t we, girls reluctantly become women, finally ready to be the subjects of our own narratives, rather than the (leggy, nameless) objects of someone else’s?