Elsewhere, Jim talks about his own South Pole adventure, battling frostbite and altitude sickness as he dragged a 110-lb sled for 8 hours a day–burning 1000 calories per hour! That part, at least, sounds very good to me!
A flock of ungendered sparrows–ungendered to me, that is–swooped into my back yard this evening. One female cardinal, already taking a bath, seemed content with their company.
Male and female cardinals look to an untutored eye like two different species–he metrosexual red, she muted soft buff colors with just that subtle hint on her beak of scarlet. Her bright-red lipstick, my mother used to call it.
Sparrows have gender-signs their mating partners decode–but they don’t broadcast their mating preferences out to the parts of the universe they don’t want to mate with. Energy that could have gone into scarlet feathers or lipstick is leftover for sparrows to do other stuff they care about–seed-crushing muscle maybe, or louder cheep-cheepers.
Now my personal dress-style is much more like Mrs. Cardinal’s than like Ms. Sparrow’s–but one of the things I’ve loved about the Web is that it’s let me try on gender-neutral identities. In places like Slashdot or an IRC chatroom, a woman can jump into the conversation using some “nickname” that doesn’t yell “Hey, I’m a female!”
I’m told that Jane Austen never wrote a scene where men were talking together without any women–because she herself could never witness such happenings. If she could have hung out in IRC, posting as “darcy,” just think how much more fun and trouble she could have created.
June 14th, 2007 · Comments Off on Race? Class? Gender? Ooo, scary stuff, hide me!
Just finished writing a (rave) review on Amazon–thought this bit on its author might have general interest:
.. June Howard can discuss race, gender, and class while assuming a reader’s intelligent, sensible interest. Far too many academic authors treat these issues as if they were glowing chunks of kryptonite that might damage the morals of ignorant readers everywhere unless placated by an Author’s whimpering and trembling on our behalf.
I was born just a couple of months before she died.
My godmother and namesake, Elizabeth Jordan–a tiny woman, well-known in her long-ago day for her writing and editing, for her ostrich-plume hats and theatrical gestures. (Rumor claims she inspired the outspoken Henrietta Stackpole in Portrait of a Lady.)
By late 1946, when I was born, Aunt Jean (as our family mysteriously called her) had long outlived many, many admirers–for example Mark Twain (1835 -1910), Henry James (once rumored to be her fiancé(!)), and Frances Hodgson Burnet (1849-1924).
But when was Aunt Jean born? That was a family mystery, my mother told me, a deepest secret. My mother’s first clue to the mystery came when she brought her new baby, recently christened Elizabeth Jordan Devine, down from Massachusetts (where my father, post-World-War-II was finishing up at Harvard Law School) to New York City, where “the aunts” lived on Gramercy Park.
Aunt Jean was in bed, very sick, when we arrived–I was slid into the bed with her. She looked at me with great pleasure and whispered–though my mother heard–“Who would have imagined that this little baby is 83 years old?”
Even then, as so often before, my Aunt Jean was exaggerating. Because she herself was a mere 81 years old, having been born on May 19, 1865.
From an amazing short talk I heard today by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, about the humanities in general and her writing in particular:
“Standing on the outside looking in was a big advantage for me as a writer.”
“We have all spent a lot of time and thought at the boundary, the border–at the edge. It’s a place the rich have to police. Those outside study the edge and plot to break through it. Those inside fight to maintain belonging or to belong someplace else.”
“Literature is full of writers who betrayed their class (Harriet Beecher Stowe or Mark Twain) — who ran away from it to live in exile (Henry James) — who stood at the border so they could critique it (Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville)”
“A ruthless gaze at the center, whether from within or without the circle–that is the strength of the humanities. It has been my way to be at home in the world.”
Many thanks to Al and Bethellen for inviting me, as their guest, to today’s ceremony to see and hear Drew Gilpin Faust awarding the 2007 Radcliffe Medal to Toni Morrison.
p.s. And my sincere apologies to Ms. Morrison that my reconstruction of notes scribbled onto my program fail to do justice to her own Nobel-quality eloquence.
