Leisurely Labor, Laborious Leisure

It’s May Day! The day before my birthday! The pagan fertility holiday! International Workers’ Day! And as I draw (sort of) nearer to the end of my career as a graduate student, I have been exploring career options, soul searching, and imagining what my life might be like  when my doctoral degree is proverbially in hand (but really hanging on my wall). In short, I have been thinking about labor: What is it? How is it compensated? What “counts” as legitimate labor in the world I inhabit? I have more or less decided that I do not want to follow in the footsteps of Professor X, but am still uncertain about what kind of labor I would like to engage in, or what I want to be when I grow up.

Labor: The word implies difficult work, putting a great deal of effort into something. But it is also the term for the process of child birth, suggesting that while labor is difficult and even painful, it is also productive, vital.

The carpenter labors. We know, because we can see the house he has built. We hear him driving nails, see his back bend beneath the weight of boards and bricks. We can quantify his work, and reimburse him with a paycheck. We understand the labor that others do by the products they create and through our imaginative empathy for their efforts. When we benefit from someone else’s labor, are we not grateful? Within that very sentiment, we acknowledge and affirm our own belief that labor is the not-fun, not-pleasant enemy of leisure. But are we right to do so?

Leisure: Free time, in the sense of being both unoccupied and unpaid. What we do at our leisure, we do for our own enjoyment, for the pleasure it brings us. These activities are their own reward, or so we are told.

But labor and leisure are a false dichotomy that is based on the way that others compensate us for our time. What if I write a magazine article, and I put a great deal of effort or labor into it, but I also enjoy that effort? Maybe the story I craft becomes a blueprint of narrative in my reader’s imagination. Perhaps I select and join my words in such a way that they are like irregular stones which are cemented together, forming a firm foundation upon which a literary image can be built. If I do this for free (like I do in this blog), is this a laborious leisure activity? If I get paid to write the article, is it leisurely labor? This blog: what is it? If you read it, and you gain some pleasure or insight from the text, are you not glad that you have read it? Are you not also grateful (as you would be to the carpenter) that you did not have to do the writing (or building) yourself?

The Utterly Naïve "Artist" Redux: The Re-Artening

I'm pleased to announce that I'll be participating in my second art show this weekend; at the Des Lee Gallery, 1627 Washington Avenue in St. Louis. Another of my collages has been accepted in this year's Washington University graduate student art show, Parabola. The show opens Friday, 11/30 from 6pm-9pm, and can also be viewed on Saturday, 12/1 from 1pm-6pm.

If you're in St. Louis this weekend, please stop by. Parabola is always a fun event and here are some pictures of me and Laura Isaac arting it up at the show last year. (Photos courtesy of Laura Isaac, who is a fabulous artist; follow the link to check out her thoughtful and beautiful work).

If for some reason you can't attend the show--maybe you exist in some incompatible spatio-temporal dimension, or you have been called away on an urgent mission to forge peace in a war-torn land, or you can't walk because your bookie broke your legs (always pay the man on time!)--below you'll find a photographic facsimile of the collage I submitted, along with a description of the piece.

Dissertation Citation, mixed media collage, 9" x 12"

The academic dissertation is the culminating project in any Ph.D. program in the humanities. It must summarize and scrutinize the scholarship to date on the given topic, while also contributing some original and useful knowledge to the field. The writer accumulates knowledge, selects, cites, and interrogates the existing body of scholarship in order to construct this new work. Citations form the intellectual genealogy behind the dissertation; they are the breadcrumbs leading both writer and reader through the forest of research, thought, and literary labor that constitutes the Ph.D. 

Dissertation Citation is a mixed media collage that represents the intellectual work of dissertation writing. As a medium, collage is an act of visual citation. By selecting images and words from printed materials and arranging them in an original way, the collage recontextualizes familiar images and forms, inviting the viewer to scrutinize them with fresh eyes. It is a process of composition done via editing and creative reorganization. 

In Dissertation Citation, pages from magazines, business cards, maps, credit card receipts, museum tickets, advertisements, transit cards, and other ephemera constitute a series of frames within frames. Each layer becomes both an object of inquiry in itself, as well as a contextualizing frame through which to view the subsequent layers. Within the regimented rectangles, randomized bits of color and texture combine in surprising ways, forming unexpected symmetries and patterns. These layers emphasize the analytical rigor, as well as the creative serendipity, that are necessary to write the dissertation.

When Weird Gets Real: The Rhetoric of Marriage Inequality, or, Red Hot American Summer

Caveat lector! I'm probably going to piss off a lot of people with this post. But, you know what? It's been over 100 degrees F here for the past six weeks, I have to hear the words "Mitt" and "Romney" spoken in earnest all day long on the radio, and I'm feeling a little cranky. From the rhetoric of the presidential campaign and the stuff floating around the interwebs these days, I get the feeling that a lot of people are feeling cranky too. Leaving aside the presidential rhetoric about tax returns etc, I'm going to write a little bit about the debates going on concerning same-sex marriage, religion, and fast food. This comes out of a discussion I've been having on Twitter with Matt Moberly, who informed me that supporters of gay marriage are boycotting Chick-Fil-A and Christians opposed to gay marriage are boycotting Starbucks. (Sidebar: Does this seem like a weird way to carry on a debate about marriage rights? Yes. Yes it is.) From there we went on to discuss another rhetorical tactic of the proponents of gay marriage: comparing their cause with the civil rights movements of the 1960s.

Matt then referred me to an article by Voddie Baucham titled "Gay is Not the New Black," published on July 19, 2012 by The Gospel Coalition. I'm sure there are a lot of other articles that present Christian opposition to gay marriage in more well-reasoned terms. (A warning to the highly literate: this one displays poor logic in numerous areas.) I feel compelled to post my own response to the article here, not only because I support marriage equality rights, but because I find that this kind of rhetoric distorts what marriage means to me as a non-religious, feminist woman living in the 21st century. What follows is an excerpt of an email I sent to Matt:

"There are a lot of problems with the logic of that article. But I will focus on the primary one: In the United States, religion (any religion) is not the authoritative basis of marriage. A religious marriage is neither A) required for American persons to be considered "married," nor B) legally binding. The state provides that authority, along with all the legal rights and privileges granted to married peoples.

"This evidence is anecdotal, but bear with me. Dennis and I were married in Cook County marriage court in 2005. We are granted both legal and cultural benefits of marriage. So we have legal rights to each other's property (for example), and cultural benefits of being viewed favorably by the population for appearing to adhere to a hetero-normative bourgeois lifestyle. We don't appear to rock the social boat, so to speak. Religion doesn't enter into it, and frankly, I get a little irritated when folks (like the author of the article) insist that my marriage has any relationship to religious tradition. I have entered into a legal union, the name of which is coincidentally shared by a religious union to which I do not subscribe."

This is a photo of me taken after my non-religious wedding, courtesy of my best maid, Sara Stromer:

"Would you agree, that as a non-religious person, I still have a right (granted by the state, but upheld by the culture at large) to this legal union? I am going to assume that you do, and continue with my argument.

"Ok. So let's do a little hypothetical. What if, instead of being born with a y chromosome, Dennis had been born Denise, and we lived in a state where same-sex marriage was legal, and we decided to enter into the same legal union we have now, but with a gender difference? There would be a certain amount of cultural opposition to this union (religion being just one basis for that cultural objection). However, in this hypothetical situation, there would be no legal objection. Jessica & Dennis get married, or Jessica and Denise get married, it makes no difference to the state. And the state is who we are talking about when we are making claims about civil rights.

"Of course, under this hypothetical situation, there would still be states (most of them, in fact) where Jessica & Dennis would be granted legal rights that Jessica & Denise would not. And in this way, the gay marriage comparison actually does match up somewhat to the black civil rights movement. While we equate civil rights today with cultural and social equality, it was primarily directed at legal exclusions based on race. The civil rights movement didn't outlaw racism, but it did mean that an African-American person had to be treated equally by the laws of New York and Alabama.

"As I said before, the gay marriage/civil rights movement comparison is overstated. The subtle homophobia directed at the LGBT community has qualitatively different effects than the Jim Crow laws of the past. And frankly, I think that the gay marriage debate is a red herring designed to direct our collective gaze away from that more subtle and powerful homophobia, which we avoid by debating whether the state or the church governs marriage rights. But like riding at the front of the bus or sitting at a lunch counter, same-sex marriage has become emblematic of a movement for equal social treatment. What my critique of Baucham's article tries to show is just this: Churches and other cultural institutions don't get to decide who can get married in the United States today, the state does that. But there is a difference between the rights granted by the state, and the acceptance of those same rights by some people in the nation (and they don't all object based on religion). I'm just asking that we recognize that difference, and think hard about the reasons why the general culture accepts Jessica & Dennis but not Jessica & Denise."

If you have managed to read all the way through this rhetorical critique/rant, then let me reward you with some of the (slightly) more lighthearted weirdness that you have come to expect from this site. I recently visited the amazing "Underneath It All" exhibition about the history of women's silhouettes, and the undergarments required to create them, at the Missouri History Museum here in St. Louis. There I saw this:

It's a nursing corset. Apparently there was a time in recent human history when new mothers were expected to wear a corset while nursing their babies. Aren't the nipple flaps kind of incredible? I could go on to make some further point about how, as humans, our expectations for behavior are in a constant state of evolution, and that some of the constraints we have placed on ourselves in the past seem insane to us today. But I think I'll just leave it at that, and let you make what you will of the nursing corset, as well as the rest of it.

Comments welcome.

Weird Reading and Writing... and Publication!

I know what you're saying: "But Jess, you're a grad student; you read and write all the time. What's weird about that?"

Yes, I do these things (almost) every day. And yet, even with years of practice, I have yet to unlock the mysteries of written language. It is still unclear to me why some marks made on paper will come to life in our minds while others will not. But I am working on it, and I have been arguing with Jean-Paul Sartre a lot about it this week. But that is a story for another time.

Right now, I am pleased to announce that my first academic publication is expected to be released this June. Professor Rosemary Peters of Louisiana State University invited me to write a chapter for the volume Criminal Papers: Reading Crime in the French Nineteenth Century, and she had the foresight to include my piece in a section of the book titled "Reading Weird." Some things are just meant to be. Or, sometimes our weird reputations precede us. Or, sometimes, although we practice reading and writing every day (almost), we nonetheless continue to read in unconventional ways.

So three cheers for reading and writing weirdly. And three more cheers for the excellent Rosemary, who made this book possible. And yet three more cheers for all the contributors to the book, with whom I am delighted to share paper, ink, and hardback bindings. May we all read and write on...