Comments on: the mind’s eye is

By: guyda

guyda — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 16:12:09 +0000

Vika – I’ve never seen it as being secondary, I see it more as being collaborative, which I think is one of the great advantages of being a woman in academia (even if that collaborative tendency is a result of millennia of being stuck in the subordinate position, as it were.) We don’t necessarily have to buy into that patriarchal vertical hierarchy stuff any more. And of course right-minded men don’t, either.

It’s abundantly clear to all of us who work with you that you are intellectual powerhouse, driving force, cheerleader, and chivvy-er-along in one (and scuse my mixing of architectural, mechanical and occupational metaphors!)

Would write more, but am too busy Having It All, writing tomorrow’s lecture after putting my son to bed…

By: Cam

Cam — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 14:00:08 +0000

Vika – As Lois Griffin so eloquently put it: feminism is about choice. To me, feminism is not just about choice, but about choosing to be happy. In the bad old days, if you will, women were not given the choice to be anything other than homemakers, baristas (or the like) and mothers. In the good new days, women have the choice to be lawyers, academics, mechanics, and so on, but a choice to be happy as a barista, homemaker, or mother is frowned apon. That’s fucked up. Feminism should empower you to do what makes you happy; if being an assistant makes you happy, then be an assistant. “More Than That” is nothing short of sexism – it’s the sort of thing men might say to each other about a man in an assistant position, and it’s total fucking bullshit.

Anyway, I hope you feel better. In some ways, I think the ultimate academic achievement would be to pursue all of this knowledge, then work as a clerk for the rest of your life – that way, you’d take all of the good from academia (pursuit of knowledge) and leave all of the bad behind (the politics, self-importance, and intellectual masturbation).

By: molly

molly — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 13:05:59 +0000

Hey — I don’t have anything pithy to add, but I’d like to talk to you about this. I have similar, though clearly not identical, issues.

By: andrew

andrew — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 12:42:33 +0000

“very supportive of this unorthodox track of a PhD in humanities computing. Gosh darn it, that oughta count for something.”

And it does, if anyone’s keeping count.

I want to be a househusband. Raise kids, cook, clean, take care of crises at home, maybe work part-time at the local library, never come up with an original thought about anything NEEDED, just about stuff on the side. When I’m in RPGs, I want to be a player, not the gamemaster. I love being on bottom. Thinking and being proactive all the damn time is exhausting, and much less fun than it could be.

It’s not about male and female. I dare say it’s about innate energy level, extroversion, and how long we’ve been at this $#!t. It’s about dealing with our psychological baggage at the same time. It’s about a lot of things, but ovaries and testes have only the slightest influence on wanting life to be easier.

By: andrew

andrew — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 12:15:28 +0000

Hey. Comment link for the previous entry isn’t functional from my end, so I’m leaving my joke here.

A skeleton walks into a bar, and orders a beer and a mop.

By: cee

cee — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 04:50:39 +0000

I can’t relate to the academic lifestyle and its apparently endless ups and downs, but a lot of what you’re saying here jives with what my sister complains of in pursuing her doctorate: needing more validation, more of a way to feel that your work is valuable. I suspect that this is something that many grad students feel, whatever their gender.

By: ethan

ethan — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 03:20:42 +0000

The challenge here is that you do, to some extent, have to manage the impression your colleagues have of you. The tricky part is that this sort of self-modeling tends to collapse into self-consciousness.

Another element is that, until and unless you get tenure, your actual position *will* be tenuous, i.e. insecure. Options that mitigate that insecurity by staying well within your known competencies are understandably attractive.

All that being said, the merit of your work is not simply an index of how much people like you/your ideas. Many brilliant scholars were largely unrecognized during their lifetimes, especially women. Part of what helps me with insecurities like these is recognizing that not only do my colleagues not understand the true significance of my work, I don’t either. Therefore, spending a lot of time on worrying about whether your thoughts are “good enough” is ultimately fruitless because you can’t ever really know.

As far as the rest of the world is concerned, the work you are doing has the potential to revolutionize not just the way that scholarship is done in the humanities, but *all* narrative frameworks and their interpretation; something that covers law, history, and scientific explanations.

The irony is that I often feel the urge to just be your cabana boy; I want to devote all my energies to maintaining the household, programming RolandTheSoftware for you, and helping your ideas gain the foothold in the broader world that they deserve.

I think, in the end, you can have it all; you can be the kick-ass, WorldChanging scholar, devoted mother and fantastic wife (heck, you already have two out of three). The hard part is that you’ll never know exactly how you are any of them.