lou paulsen called it sexual harassment. i didn't. i would call what deans, chairs and male colleagues and students do BEING A DORK. i named another incident sexual harassment. you do not know what happened. inever told anyone. therefore, my example, jim wasn't an example of SH and you're a jackass.
for others: i'm not asking for sympathy. i tell my story merely because it is pretty typical, not universal, but certainly not rare. it is not something perpetrated by dirty old men who don't know better. 15 years ago, this guy was 35. he works in academia. how many 35 yo academics in 1985 would think that it was okay to plant a student up against the wall and lay a slobbery wet one on her? how many would think it appropriate to notice when i wore jeans and comment on it in front of the entire class? i was so stupid and innocent, i didn't even notice. one of my male friends notices, though. the guy had a history. well known. he was legendary among the fac for his harassment. i might have known had i lived on campus.
the chair i mentioned? he prides himself on having led the dept to become known for being a department that studies "the intersectionality of race, class and gender". he calls himself a feminist! there was a male graduate student in the dept that oogled undergrads all the time, too. i gave him a neck brace for whiplash once. that's the way to handle dorks!
rob you've lectured others on not knowing you. but you know me, you've read me for several years and you know i have a much more complicated view than you've let on. (i expl'd my snotty remarks at the end of my comments to steve: he ought to know better because of what he teaches)
what you initially said was that women and men grad studs are equally capable of handling grad student role. you acknowledged that there were systematic differences between those with family obligations and those without due to the structural factors of the modern capitalist family formation. but you seemed resistant to acknowledging women's different--systematically different--experiences that make graduate student life a little different than men's regardless of whether they have dependents to care for. these differences are, in part, why women have a higher attrition rate.
my response was to ask a few questions about whether you'd rec'd the same kind of treatment i and other women i know have received: you zeroed in on one thing, while ignoring other examples. i could have written about other examples, such as the sexist stereotyping i've rec'd from women--even feminist women!--or how the school calls me for a sick child, not my ex. i worked 50 miles from his school, the ex works 5. this is another bar in the system of oppression. i could have talked about how research shows systematic differences in student evaluations--another bar in gender oppression. i could have show more about gendered tracking in TA and RA assignments--another bar. i could have shown how pay for TAs and RAs reveals gender differences based on percent female in the discipline--another bar. etc.
being sexulaized in the work place is but one example of the ways in which women's experience at grad students are different from men's. taken as a whole, it forms but one bar in the system of gender oppression.
that's what i was originally discussing.
how about the time a professor in another dept maintained that black feminist theorists real problem was that they couldn't find suitable (marriageable) black men of their own station in life! this guy is not a product of another time!
sexual harassment is still around. and inappropriate sexualization -- BEING A DORK-- is still around. it is a bar in the system of gender oppression.
yes, things are changing. yes indeed they are. but i'm not going to talk about all that be/c it's not a space conducive to covering everything.
Todd, Mina was talking about how the system of gender oppression is unconscious. she was talking about how such incidents, while not conscious, do control the labor force. after all, i dropped out of college. a working class women drops out of college because she learns that it's not the promised land where i'll be treated according to talent and merit, not judged according to casabas/
consider another example, another chair, another university. a special task force on SexHarass had been set up with a liaison office staffed by grads, one man and one woman. their task was to work with dept chairs to set up programs educating about the Uni's sex harassment policy.before they went out to do their thing, they did a test pilot on a sympathetic chair, one widely known to supposedly support feminist issues and a member of the team that crafted sexual harassment policy.
they give him the pitch. the woman of the pair had to leave for an appointment. after she'd left the chair said to the man of the pair: "i don't know about you, mike, but i just couldn't concentrate on what you were saying, her legs are outstanding. how can you work every day in the same office." and he smacked him on the back as they walked out of his office for a bite to eat at the lunch room.
this was an act of power, plain and simple. conscious? probably not? but it was a good example of what sexual harassment really is about: power.
to address todd. Rob has read me for years, i assumed he knew better than to tag me the way he has. he ought to KNOW--it is on record in the archives--that i went at it with Katha Pollit over her denunciation of third wave feminisms and over her tendency to prefer to see the world as if it hasn't changed. i have decried that myself. i think i deserve some credit for that and I presume--wrongly obviously--that rob has tread this path before with women on the list, therefore, i think he knows that we have far more complex understandings of feminisms and women's oppression.
but what happened here was a denial that there are systematic differences between women grads and men grads. why deny that? why deny that women are systematically treated differently than men? rob would not deny that the children of working class whites are treated differently than the children of middle class professionals. why deny that women are treated differently than are men and they do have different burdens in grad school that makes taking on the grad student role a little more problematic. it may not mean life is impossible, but that's not what oppression is all about anyway. it's about lots of little things that interlock, that add up.
yes, things have changed, are changing, but they have not gone away.
--even other graduate students are sexist in their normative expectations of the grad student role. even supposedly sensitive multi-culti, pc, feminist, lefty type grads --as yoshie has demonostrated. we can also talk about how being a black peson, woman or man, makes it more difficult to negotiate grad student life
--i gave you examples of being sexualized that almost every woman i know in grad school experiences at one time or another. (you can also consult research). it may not be devastating, but combined with everything else it constitutes oppression. it is why women drop out of grad school at faster rates than men; it is why blacks drop out at faster rates than whites.
--i remember walking into a room where some black women were talking. they grew quiet. whaddup, I said. they told me they were debating whether to talk about the dorkiness of one of the black profs, a man in his early 40s. they didn't know if they should "air dirty laundry" and get the guy in trouble. would that be traitorous. does this not suck? to have to wonder whether standing up for what is right is worth suppressing in the interest of not making your "race" look bad. this stinks!
--we can talk about the ways in which poor whites and men and women of color have a hard time negotiation grad student life because they don't have 'cutlural capital' (see the emerging body of scholarship following through on the work of RJake Ryan and Charles Sackrey in _Strangers in Paradise_ )
--My friend Renee Spraggins' dissertation is on the Phd attrition rate among black women.
--see, for instance, Isabel Wilkerson in, for ex, "Middle Class Blacks Try to Grip a Ladder While Lending a Hand" there is just a ton of stuff out there about how difficult it is to fulfill the grad student role