Et al.

Unanticipated problems

1. Having no one to list as my "emergency contact" who doesn't live at least one hour away.

2. Being unable to close my husband's email account, which now collects spam. I realize that by keeping it and deleting the spam, I am in some way pretending--even to myself--that he will need to use it. I clean off the desktop on his laptop for the same reason.

3. Trying to avoid the calorie-boosting snacks I bought for him as his appetite failed. They are stashed in every cupboard, every drawer, the car glove compartments.

4. Not having realized that I don't know where the car title and stock certificates are. I have most of the paperwork, but not the physical documents of his ownership.

5. Suddenly realizing that everyone who meets me from now on will assume that, given my age, I am divorced. That this fact shouldn't matter to me, but it does.

* * *

I had the amazing opportunity to hear ABDMom's jobtalk in progress. It was brilliant. Her work is both intellectually insightful and personally charged, and it reminds me about how much I loved my previous field. She generates a serenity and quiet confidence that are really lovely, and make an extraordinary change from the hyper-self-consciousness of most professional talks. Her presentation manages to be incredibly informative and "engaging" in the truest sense of the word; it draws you in, gives you a few tools, and allows you to feel a part of the inquiry, and to care about the subject (and her "subjects") the way that she does.

As I read the above, I worry that my praise is "too femme-y"; that I should be saying more about the obvious mastery she demonstrates over her subject (she does--in fact, she is so comfortable and knowledgeable that her mastery is transparent), or about her "command" of the theoretical framework (ditto), or about the intellectual value of her findings (considerable). But what stands out about her talk, to me, is the way in which those "masculinist" academic strengths are perfectly integrated into a much more nuanced and warm persona. Perhaps because I know her as a sympathetic friend, mother, and fabulous teacher, I privilege in her work the qualities I associate with those strengths.

On the other hand, why should we "apologize" for integrating the feminine into our work? Maybe it's part of what I envy about ABDMom's work; she is in a field where such strengths are understood as legitimate and powerful, while I went back to a field where they are less inherently accepted, and where the agonistic model of the job talk-as-intellectual-superiority-as-evinced-in-excessive-and-mindlessly-parroted-jargon still reigns. So I project instantly the defensiveness I feel (not, I think, untowardly) when someone associates my work with the "feminine"--as if those values were innately opposed to scholarly quality or "rigor."

So I guess what I am saying is that what impressed me most, and perhaps most unusually, about her scholarship was its seamless integration into what else I know of her. In a perfect world, all of us would be able to frame our work with such elegance and clarity, and to have its intellectual merit function to include, not to exclude.

posted by Unknown @ 12:09 PM