Mid-Week Grab Bag

Flying Chihuahua Edition

My typist has an early morning meeting tomorrow -- one of those really wacko meetings that could only happen in the academy: the salary committee will meet to award merit points for a non-existent pool of merit money (call it Excellence Without Money: Keeping It [Un]Real!) -- so this will be quick. We know many of you count on us to be your eyes and ears on the culture, and, though that knowledge humbles and unnerves us, we feel an obligation to let you know what's on our radar screens even when we don't have time to blog it properly. We don't want you to embarrass yourselves by not knowing what all the other kids are talking about at the lunch table, so here you go. Here is what matters, right now, in Roxie's World:

1. Watch this heartwarming vid of a Detroit couple whose 6-pound Chihuahua, Tinker Bell, was picked up in a 70-mph wind gust and blown nearly a mile away during a sudden storm. The miraculous tale involves a flea market, a pet psychic, and two dog lovers named Dorothy and Lavern Utley. You know we don't make this stuff up. Watch the vid:

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2. Too busy to pay careful attention to all the Holy Crap, He Really IS the President! assessments of Obama's first 100 days in office? Newsweek does it quick and dirty in a 5-minute highlight reel. There really has been a lot going on, and we give the dude credit for staying cool as a cucumber. I'm pretty sure we would have melted down the moment Roberts screwed up the oath of office right there on Moment One of Day One, so paws up to the Big Guy with the Tall Wife and the Frisky Dog.

3. From the Office of Burning the Village in Order to Save It (Higher Ed. Division): You've probably seen the Times Op-Ed piece by Mark C. Taylor, chair of the religion department at Columbia, which proposes that "If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured." Among Taylor's suggestions -- and sing along if you've heard this song before -- are the abolition of tenure and the abolition of departments, which would be replaced by "problem-focused programs." By "problem-focused programs," Taylor means, um, well, for example, "Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water."

Moose's favorite line in the column was,"Consider, for example, a Water program," which set her mind spinning out a fantasy MLA interview in which the Water Program at Big Coastal Ag School seeks to add a lit critter to its crack team of H2O specialists. She imagined an interview committee comprised of an engineer, an economist, a meteorologist, and a microbiologist feigning interest as a desperate young job seeker tried valiantly to connect her dissertation on transatlantic modernism to the program's goals and foci. "Water is at the heart of the project," she gamely essays. "Transatlantic Modernism -- Get it?" Historiann offers a more substantive critique of Taylor's column here.

4. Further evidence that the term "post-feminist" may be premature, indeed, delusional: The MLA has released a study, aptly titled "Standing Still," which shows that English and foreign language departments "promote male associate professors to full professors on average at least a year -- and in some cases, depending on type of institutions, several years -- more speedily than they promote women," according to a summary of the report on Inside Higher Ed. In doctoral-granting English departments, men spend an average of 7.5 years as associate professors, while women spend an average of 9.8 years. The gap is even bigger in doctoral-granting foreign language departments, where men spend an average of 6.7 years as associate profs, while women average 10.2 years in the rank. I would spend time delving into the hows, whats, and whys of this gap, but my typist, who has been an associate professor for, um, awhile now, would like to move on to other topics. Go read the Inside Higher Ed analysis. It's really good, if sobering.

5. From the Office of You Say "Potato," I Say "Queer Studies," But I Wish You Would Just Stop Talking: If you haven't seen it, you really must go read Larry Kramer's petty, narcissistic, and wrong on a thousand levels speech to the Yale Gay and Lesbian Association, which bestowed its first Lifetime Achievement Award on the writer and activist. The speech is an attack not only on Yale, with whom Kramer has had a famously contentious relationship over his efforts to fund gay-related things at his alma mater, but on the projects of queer theory and gender studies and on versions of LGBT history that are, in Kramer's anything but humble opinion, overly influenced by those fields of inquiry and thus insufficiently committed to producing what Historiann wittily describes as The Big Book of Transhistorical Gayness. (Great discussion going on in the comments on this post, by the way. Don't skip 'em, or Historiann will catch you in her lasso!) Tenured Radical, herself a Yale alum, takes on Kramer, too, and Inside Higher Ed has a report with comments from several prominent historians, including a very diplomatic and now at Yale George Chauncey (whom Kramer, in his speech, tried to co-opt as an ally).

Note to self: When somebody is kind enough to give you an award, the most important thing to say is thank you. Here is a list of ten tips for writing an effective thank-you speech, and nowhere on it do I see, "Attack the institution hosting the event and fill your remarks with mean-spirited invective that demonstrates how little you know about anything other than Your Self."

Chew on that one, darlings, as you lull your own lovely selves to sleep. Sweet dreams.

To Bea or Not to Bea

Sorry for all the death blogging lately, kids, but people we care about are dropping like flies, so what are we to do? Anyway, at least with Bea Arthur we get to put up knee-slapping vids that make you laugh while you contemplate mortality. Regrettably, we can't put up the full six minutes of Bea's killer (get it?) performance at a 2005 Comedy Central roast of Pamela Anderson (because the meanies of Viacom have had it taken down off the YouTubes over a copyright claim), but here are a couple of choice morsels that show Bea at her dead(get it?)pan best. My typist is particularly enamored of these bits because Arthur, in reading selections from Anderson's 2005 novel Star Struck, compellingly reminds us of why, in the biopic of Moose's life, the part of her dissertation director, a formidable founder of feminist literary criticism, was to have been played by Beatrice Arthur. Alas.

Here's Arthur, setting up her readings from Anderson's novel, in full-on professorial style:

Roast of Pamela Anderson - Bea Arthur Roasts Pam's Novel | Movies & TV | SPIKE.com

And here she is on the subjects of intimate bargaining, the hydraulics and mechanics of sex, and, yes, anal eroticism:

Roast of Pamela Anderson
Bea Arthur Uncensored
comedycentral.com
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Yes, Bea Arthur was queerer than you are. And funnier, too, but that's all right. Need something a little less risqué to talk about around the water cooler tomorrow? Treat yourself to the full 7 minutes of this highlight reel from the first two seasons of Golden Girls. qta passed it along via Facebook, and we pass it along to you as a way of saying, you know, thank you for being a friend. Peace out.

RIP Bea Arthur

With thanks from the tall girls who, instead of going out for the basketball team, auditioned for the choir and stood shoulder to shoulder on the back row, belting out the alto line of "The Impossible Dream" with visions of you dancing in their heads.

With admiration from the pretty boys who couldn't help loving a genetic woman who really ought to be played by Harvey Fierstein in the biopic.

With gratitude from every golden person who ever sat alone in front of the TV laughing with delight at the wit, wisdom, and deep kindness of Dorothy Zbornak and her feisty pals.

Thanks for walking tall, singing loud, speaking out, going gray, taking up space, and offering the world an advanced seminar in the semiotics of eyebrows. We needed it. We needed you. You will be missed.

New York Times obit is here. Money quote? In response to a reporter's suggestion that her character on Golden Girls bore more than a faint resemblance to her path-breaking title character on Maude, Arthur said:

Look -- I'm 5-feet-9, I have a deep voice and I have a way with a line. What can I do about it? I can't stay home waiting for something different. I think it's a total waste of energy worrying about typecasting.

In high school, according to the Times, she was shy about her height but overcame it "by winning over her classmates with wisecracks. She was elected the wittiest girl in her class."

Ms. Arthur, my typist loves you with all her big and tall and sometimes witty girl's heart. Dogspeed.

And because you always felt like something of a bosom buddy, we'll send you off with this song from Mame (for which you won a Tony). Here is Arthur with Angela Lansbury. Wait for the 3-minute mark, when the two golden gals of the theater shimmy across the stage together for the big finish:



Sentimental Bonus Track: Arthur as Dorothy on The Golden Girls, singing "What'll I Do?" It's lovely and a little bit funny, as only Arthur could be:

Overkill

(Neighbors create a memorial to a Middletown, MD family wiped out in the murder-suicide of Christopher Wood. The bodies of Wood, his wife, Francie Billotti-Wood, and their three young children were discovered last Saturday morning. Photo Credit: Katherine Frey, Washington Post)

For White Guys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Remnants of Straight Male Privilege Are Not Enuf

You know it’s a weird news week when you see a headline about a business executive’s suicide and your first thought is, “Great – At least he didn’t take out the wife and kids, too!” (You know, like this guy and this guy did, just this week in Maryland alone.)

What’s going on out there, fellas? Is it the economy? The ready accessibility of guns? A little bit of a copy-cat thing? Or maybe a few of you missed the memo about post-patriarchal masculinity? Let me recap the highlights for you, slowly and simply.

1. Women and children are not your property, even if you married or fathered them. That means, among other things, that you don’t get to answer that basic “to be or not to be” question for them, ‘kay? They get to make that decision, and a whole lot of others, for themselves these days.

2. Dads are not, by and large, the sole breadwinners in a household nowadays, so you need to let go of this idea that if you can’t support your family you are a big fat loser who might as well be dead. A lot of the women-folk have jobs and so do many children. Heck, we hear tell that in some households even the dogs have been put to work – you know, on the show circuit, in the blogosphere. Our point is: the burden is not all on your shoulders. If the family is in financial trouble, perhaps the family can collectively figure out a way to address and manage the trouble.

3. On the other hand, you may or may not have noticed that the entire global economy is in the crapper right now, so perhaps a little perspective is in order. We are all big fat losers, sweet pea, so let’s just hunker down and suffer through it together rather than going all kamikaze.

4. Real men don’t solve problems through violence anymore. I know, I know – It was a lot more fun in the good old days when you could challenge someone to a duel or maybe go out and beat a slave or two to blow off steam, but the world just doesn’t work that way anymore. Now, men are expected to do crazy girlie things like communicate about their feelings – using actual, you know, words – and go to yoga classes to cultivate calmness and flexibility. Sure, it sucks, but so does being dead, when you think about it. You might want to consider some of these wacky alternatives to death and destruction.

Do we seem to make light of your suffering, underestimate the tragic dimensions of your difficulties, mock the terrors that fuel your murderous rage? Perhaps we do, big guy, but is that any worse than your grotesque overestimation of your rights and privileges vis-à-vis the people who are closest to you? We think not. Indeed, we think if you had a little more of our ability to make light of things perhaps you’d feel somewhat less inclined to make mayhem, but that’s just us, crazy bitches that we are. Peace out.

Trans Justice

Newsflash: Colorado jury finds Allen Andrade guilty of murder and hate crime in the July 2008 killing of trans woman Angie Zapata. Andrade was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. It was the first case in the country in which a hate-crime statute had been used to prosecute the killing of a transgender person. Here is the report by the Denver ABC news affiliate. Here is the report in the Denver Post. Here is where you can learn more about Angie Zapata and what her loss means to the people who knew and loved her. Here is a CNN report, with links to videos of Andrade hearing the verdicts and the judge rendering the sentence.

And here, according to Denver channel 7, is what prosecutor Robb Miller had to say in his closing arguments about Andrade, who, in his jail cell, was taped referring to Zapata as an "it" and saying that it wasn't as if he had killed "a straight, law-abiding citizen":

His own statements in the jail call betray the way he values Angie's life, the way he thought of her as less than, less than us because of who she was. And he's counting on society and the jury to do the same in this case . . . . Everyone deserves equal protection under the law and no one deserves to die like this.

Exactly so. Congratulations to the prosecution and to the good citizens of Greeley, CO (who must all be reading and learning sex/gender politics from their neighbor Historiann) for recognizing that (alleged) trans panic is not a defense. Well done!

Note to US Congress and Obama administration: Pass and sign a trans-inclusive federal hate crime law now. Such laws may not be perfect (the free-speech issues actually do make us a little queasy), but the law now before Congress is careful to focus on the conduct (i.e., intentionally selecting a victim on the basis of his or her perceived race, color, national origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability) of the defendant rather than on the beliefs of the defendant. The line may be fine, but it can be found and the message is well worth sending. What are you waiting for?

Further Regarding Sedgwick

Sorry for the light posting, kids. We are in rest and catch up mode, following the hugely successful Homopalooza held over at Queer the Turtle U this past weekend. The papers were top-notch, the discussions lively, the weather glorious, and the artichoke dip sublime. Both moms felt it was poignant and powerful to be gathered with a group of queer studies scholars just a few days after the death of one of the field's founding figures, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. For some in attendance, Sedgwick's passing was a devastating and deeply personal loss. For others, it was less personal but nonetheless profound. In some ways, the conference felt like the first tentative steps, on a local level, toward the fulfillment of a wish Sedgwick herself expressed in 1993, apropos of her use of the first-person singular:

"I have an intense wish to be assured that the people and communities I'm leaving behind can take care of themselves -- that they don't need 'me,' my thought, my labor of regenerating a first person to keep them going."

(Photo Credit: Carrie Boretz, New York Times)

Meanwhile, the tributes and stock-takings continue to roll in.

• The best thing we've seen so far is this marvelous piece by NYU's Ann Pellegrini, just published in The Chronicle of Higher Ed (subscription-access only, sorry). Pellegrini does a beautiful job of capturing what she describes as Sedgwick's "luminous, path-clearing, and sometimes wickedly playful role in the imagination and formation of lesbian and gay studies."
• Our buddy Katherine Franke was in Marrakech when Sedgwick died and muses eloquently, on Columbia's Gender and Sexuality Law blog, on how Sedgwick's relentless problematizations of the homo-hetero binary help to explain the lavish public displays of homosociality she observed in North Africa.
• Here's an interesting bit by David Shankbone, the photographer who took the Wikipedia photo of Sedgwick that we and a lot of other folks have used in writings since her death. Of the shot of a relaxed, grinning Sedgwick, with a photo of the Dalai Lama over her shoulder, Shankbone remarks: "I took perhaps 30 portrait shots of Sedgwick, but the one [that has been so widely circulated] I felt best captured her essence. She was concerned that photographs of her tended to be in the extremes: a deathly serious face, or she was uproariously laughing. She wanted something to capture several aspects of her spirit, and the smirk you see [in that photo] I think did it." We agree, except that we'd call it a grin rather than a smirk. George Bush smirked. Eve Sedgwick emphatically did not.
• Oh, and NYT did better in its second attempt at explaining the Cosmic Cultural Significance of Sedgwick than it did in its obituary. Read this, and see if you agree.
• Tenured Radical has a thing or two to say about Sedgwick's importance to historians in a piece that linked back to Roxie's World. Many thanks, TR -- A few more shout-outs, and we may forgive your inexplicable devotion to a breed other than the Wire Fox Terrier.

That's all for now, kids. My typist has to get ready to teach tomorrow. (Insert eye-rolling icon here.) Peace out.

Group Work

Singing Fat Lady Edition

My typist insists she is the Busiest Woman in (Anti-)Christendom this week, getting ready for the second annual Homopalooza being staged over at Queer the Turtle U on Friday and Saturday. (Local readers: Be there or be square. Attendance will be taken!) You know how nutty she gets when she's puttin' on a show, as she and her loyal sidekick qta put it, so we've decided to reduce some of the blogospheric pressure on her by designing a task our readers can work on together -- You know, just like teachers sometimes do when they don't have quite enough of a lesson plan to fill an entire class.

Here is your assignment. Run over to CBS News and watch this Mark Phillips story on Susan Boyle, the 47-year-old Scottish woman who wowed judges earlier this week on a show called Britain's Got Talent, which, we guess, is catchier sounding than Britain Used to Have an Empire But Now Just Has Cheesy TV Shows, but just barely. (Sorry to take you off-blog, but the vid is not embeddable.) Study it carefully. Take notes. Then come back here and identify five eye-poppingly revolting assumptions about women that figure into the story. (I know it will be hard, but limit yourself to five, please. You won't get extra credit for doing more than the assigned number.) Then, working in consultation with your peers in the class -- er, comments -- try to explain to us why people are always saying, "It ain't over till the fat lady sings," when it's perfectly clear that nobody actually believes that a woman of a certain size has the competence to perform on stage and really shouldn't be seen in public anyway unless she just enjoys being ridiculed for being fat and ugly and sexually unattractive, according to the sex and gender norms of heteropatriarchy.

Need some help on the assignment? Pretend you are Melissa McEwan off on one of her righteous rants about woman-hating and fat-hating. Better yet, pretend you are the recently deceased Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who is much on our hearts and minds right now and who, among her many other accomplishments, helped open the door to fat acceptance through works like this and this. Eve's gone, but her work goes on. Do it, beloveds.

Then run over to the YouTubes and watch the whole 7 minutes of Susan Boyle's appearance on Britain's Got Talent. Judge Simon Cowell will likely make you want to retch, but at least he isn't pretending to be a journalist. And Susan? Girl's got some pipes. Sing it, sister!

Your assignments are due on Sunday. Good luck!

[H/T to Hollis, who passed the CBS story along via Facebook.]