a winter's nap

As the earth prepares to bed down for a long winter's nap, so it goes that I, too, find myself waning into a period of rest and hibernation.

I survived the standardized exam, hellish experience that it was; I have now been measured and my score - whatever it might be - will reflect my acumen as accurately as it possibly could. If that's not very accurate, so be it. I'm confident that the other components of my application will suffice to prove my worth to these schools. And I've also come to realize that its no big thing if I'm not accepted to the law schools; I'll be able to thrive in any of the Ph.D. programs I've applied to, and I'll most certainly be accepted to one of them...

This evening I completed my last obligation for my only remaining class of the semester. Tomorrow I'll submit those book reviews, sit through one last book discussion, and then this semester will officially come to an end for me.

For the next several weeks I can take it slow and easy, breathe, and enjoy the holiday season with loved ones. There are a few loose ends to tidy up for my grad school application endeavors, and I have yet to get my schedule for next semester figured out. (Thanks to an uncharacteristic lack of response from one of my oldest and dearest professors who is acting as my interim advisor in the absence of our department chair, who would be my advisor were he not on a leave of absence due to ill health.) So there will be some semblance of productivity, but for the most part I can relax in the absence of any real obligations between semesters.

storms are raging inside and out

A cold front is battling warm gulf air for dominance in my region, resulting in a cold and dreary winter storm outside my window. And as I sit here all cozy in my warm, comfortable house, I'm grateful for the luxury to do so. I think of all the people who lived their lives without such soundly built homes or safe, effective indoor lighting, and I realize how much more in tune such people were with their surroundings, as well as how dependent they were on the weather.

Certainly the weather still affects us in modern times, as Hurricane Katrina effectively demonstrated, but here and now we are far less at the whim of nature than any of our ancestors ever were. To wit, that I am even now leisurely and luxuriously reading and writing -- actively engaged in the transmission of knowledge -- while a thunderstorm rages outside is testament to the very real ways that progress breeds progress.

Even still, I wonder about our modern disengagement with the natural world, and I ponder whether it will prove to be a foolhardy course of action for humanity to take or if technological innovation will indeed propel our species into a new mode of existence....

Obviously, the history of science and society is still on my mind. I hope that I have chosen the right path with this interdisciplinary foray I am taking into the history of law and society. Probably so, because the socio-cultural innovations which I see as akin to technological developments will likely require more in-depth study. With background training in the nuanced field of law, I can go on to later expand my area of expertise to include humanity's utilization of material technologies.

After all, if I wish to seriously investigate the two phenomenon, I'll have to begin with one of the two. Truly, I could do it either way, but I feel like I'm presently better situated to begin with the socio-cultural side of the coin.

abortion in historical perspective

I wrote this a while back, but came across it recently and realized that it ought to be posted here:

Abortion has always been a women’s issue. It has not always been a medical issue, or a legal issue, but it has always been an issue of personal liberty and reproductive freedom for women.

As a historian-in-training, I’m convinced of the value of perspective. All too often people don’t stop to consider the larger picture, and so they fail to see the context surrounding our many “contemporary social problems.” I think that, just as with any number of other such problems, abortion can and should be analyzed and considered in historical context; not as some abhorrent aberration, but as the result of complex historical happenstance. By seeking to understand the history surrounding the current debate we can reach a more nuanced, profound comprehension of the issue.

This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive telling of the history of birth control; rather, it is intended as a sketch of the sexual politics and power that have held sway over women’s lives for so many millennia, which is being played out presently, in part, in the abortion debate.

Before the advent of a reliable oral contraceptive in the 1950s, women’s lives were controlled by birth. Prior to that, a woman could not exert much control over her sexual and reproductive functions – that was the province of her father, her husband, or her brother. There was no such thing as reproductive freedom; ordinary women’s very lives were at the mercy of their husband’s sex drives. Who can imagine the countless sorrowful women who died in childbirth or from pregnancy complications? And how many of those pregnancies were unintentional?

Abortion is a form of birth control. For as long as women have been sentient they have dealt with issues of birth control, including abortion and infanticide. Since the dawn of civilization The Powers That Be have legislated dictates proscribing when and how such acts are acceptable. These are not new issues.

Women have not historically been afforded the personal liberty to determine for themselves when they might reproduce. They have been beholden unto their husbands' desires, and not free to decide whether or when they wanted to be mothers. It was a given: women were, by their biological nature, wives and mothers.

Only in the modern world have women been granted the freedom and – through the birth control pill and other, newer contraceptive innovations – the license to exercise any significant influence over the sexual and reproductive aspects of their persons. The abortion debate is about how much reproductive freedom society is willing to allow women. It is not about the sanctity of human life; that is an issue in the debate, no doubt, but it is not the central issue. The central issue of the abortion debate is female autonomy, and it always has been.

Women have always sought to control their procreative function — be it via contraception or abortion or infanticide — as a way to exert some measure of influence over their lot in life, and they always will. And that is precisely why they continue do so today, and why ardent feminists will always be in favor of granting women access to safe abortions.

standardized test blues

On Saturday I'm scheduled to sit for the LSAT so that I can complete my application to the American Legal History program at Penn, as well as the ad hoc dual degree program I'm trying to convince Tulane to allow me to pursue.

I've not studied. The test purports to measure my reading comprehension, logical reasoning, and analytical writing skills. Quite honestly I think that I'm in possession of these skills in abundance, and that I'm certainly not lacking in these skills any moreso than the average test taker. It is, after all, a standardized test, meant to rank me in line with the rest of the test takers; to assign my worth a numerical value by which I can be measured against others.

I abhor the standardized test. The ACT, SAT, GRE, the LSAT, and all the others seem to me little more than extortion. Because of the existence of such tests and the importance placed upon them by universities, one cannot get into the academy without spending hundreds of dollars between the test fee itself and the cost of the score reports. Hundreds of dollars, by the way, are not generally easily accessible to aspiring graduate students. (My tactic - while perhaps not wise, it was the most feasible option - was to max out my credit cards on the various test fees, application fees, and score report fees.)

And I'm offended at being whittled down to a percentile. If I score in the ninetieth percentile on the verbal section of the GRE, what does that really prove if my writing sample - also a required component of any grad school application - is not coherent and convincing? It only proves that I either had the time and/or money to take a course or buy a book that famliairzed me with the questions and that I have the ability to manipulate the system to my advantage.

That's not the case, however. I'm in another boat altogether. My test score, I fear, will be mediocre, but I remain hopeful that the other components of my application - writing sample, letters of recommendation, GPA, etc. - will prove my worth and allow me acceptance into one of my chosen schools.

As it is, I was prepared to review the official LSAT Preparation Booklet this evening and at least familiarize myself with the format and the types of questions that will appear on the exam. Unfortunately, it is my neighbor's daughter's first birthday, and I cannot concentrate on the exam prep materials for the merry-making-noise that continues to filter through the thin duplex walls. Alas, I fear my LSAT effort is doomed to mediocrity.

it's not up to me

The applications are complete.

I've done all that I can do for the grad school apps. It's now in the hands of the registrars who are forwarding my transcripts and my professors who are writing letters of recommendation.

I have yet to finalize the law school applications for Penn and Tulane. Or take the LSAT; that fateful experience is slated to occur on 12/5. But that's okay, because my deadlines for those applications are not immediately upon me.

And so the waiting begins. My future is in the hands of the various admissions committees.

Acceptance decisions aren't usually made until Spring, so I'm in for a long dark winter of uncertainty.

flappers of color

I recently read Flapper, by Josh Zeitz, for my American History class, and came to the realization that the lives of flappers of color is a topic that is ripe for dissertation-type research.

While I find this incredibly interesting, I'm not immediately drawn to it as a research topic for myself because I haven't yet found a connection to the law.

Unless it would be the relative freedom that women of color had to embrace a flapper lifestyle because they were not bound to the virtue of white womanhood... but is this a real legal freedom or simply a cultural freedom?

That's the initial research question, I suppose.

miscegenation

I want to research the sticky situation of mixed race children in America. I've done this in the past, with a focus on slavery times, but without a specific, coherent research strategy. (It was, in fact, the first upper-level research paper I authored!) Next time I aim to do it better.

The thing is that the existence of mixed race children in a racially stratified society is an affront to the power hierarchy of that society, and I'm curious to better learn how America has dealt with this problem.

I know from my previous research that antebellum America's solution -- assigning the status, slave or free, of a child based on that of its mother -- did not solve the problems that arose because of miscegenation.

What I'd like to research next is the legal status of mulatto bastards during Reconstruction and up to the Great Depression. I wonder what legal recourse did the mothers - black and white - have to seek financial support from the putative fathers? And in an era before genetic testing, what was the legal standard for proving paternity? How did this impact the lives of these children?

manufacturing the desire to consume

Thanks to Mark Bernhardt I've been able to recognize advertising as another socio-cultural innovation that wields great power in society. Unlike race, gender, and the rule of law, however, advertising is wholly of the modern age.

I'll have to gather my thoughts about this before I can write at length, but I wanted to pen blog the idea while it was still fresh.

At this point though it seems so obvious that advertising is indeed a socio-cultural innovation that I'm ashamed I didn't recognize it as such sooner.

Note to self: elaborating on how advertising is a socio-cultural innovation will help me in my quest for a working definition of socio-cultural technologies, i.e., stating the ways that it functions as such will help me identify the crucial criteria...

of politics and white privilege

This is a great oped piece which provides solid examples of the oft-overlooked and illunderstood phenomenon of White Privilege: This is Your Nation on White Privilege. You should read it.

Here's a highlight:

White privilege is being able to dump your first wife after she’s disfigured in a car crash so you can take up with a multi-millionaire beauty queen (who you go on to call the c-word in public) and still be thought of as a man of strong family values, while if you’re black and married for nearly twenty years to the same woman, your family is viewed as un-American and your gestures of affection for each other are called “terrorist fist bumps”

And if you aren't familiar with White Privilege in the first place, you should read Peggy McIntosh's essay, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, in which she sets out to define the phenomenon:

As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage. I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege.

As a white girl who has attended an HBCU for several years, and lived in one of the most racist states in the nation for almost a decade, I've become all too aware of the privileges bestowed upon me by virtue of my pale skin, so for me this is interesting stuff.

gender: a primordial socio-cultural innovation

Gender constructs constitute one of the most fundamental organizational mechanisms of human society. This has been almost universally true throughout time and space. The practical implications and the real consequences of this fact have profoundly impacted the course of human history. For this reason the phenomenon of gender, as opposed to the existence of two biological sexes, demands extensive inquiry. I could dedicate my life to pursuing myriad avenues of research into the varying application of gender constructs in human society and the resulting influences on world events.

As a bit of an aside:
Likewise, technology - from the plow to the cellular telephone - has profoundly influenced the course of human history. Technological innovations that allow for changes to human society deserve investigation, particularly those which directly and indirectly engage socio-cultural innovations.

technological dependence

It seems to me that even a cursory perusal and/or casually inquiring glimpse of the history of humanity indicates an intimate relationship between the domination of humankind over the rest of the planet and our technological innovations. Just think of how obsessively humanity has created tools and made the very best possible use of them throughout time. This begs the question: does the evidence really support humanity's seeming dependence on technology as the sole mechanism of progress?

this I know: race still matters

A little over 45 years ago, on a humid June night in Jackson, Mississippi, Medgar Evers was gunned down by a White Power Asshole. Medgar was unpacking "Jim Crow Must Go" tshirts from his car at the time he was shot, while his wife and three children waited for him to return home from a long day's work as Field Secretary for the NAACP.

Last night I spent an hour in the house where Medgar was shot. I heard the story of his life's work for racial equality in Jim Crow Mississippi and the ways his family coped with the dangers associated with that work. I saw his blood on the concrete in the carport, and heard the tale of his unjust treatment the night of his death: how there were no ambulances nor police patrol cars available to transport him to the hospital, how his family and neighbors made a makeshift ambulance by placing one of his children's matresses down in the back of a station wagon, and how he was refused treatment at the hospital once he finally arrived.

A 1942 law segregated facilities at hospitals in Mississippi. In 1963 white doctors did not treat black patients to save their lives and the life-saving blood of white folks was withheld from those with black skin. Such pernicious racist practices culminated on the night of June 12, 1963 with the death of Medgar Evers.

It took 30 years to convict the racist son of a bitch whose bullet killed Medgar and left Myrlie Evers a widowed housewife with three small children.

At the Evers' home last night, my husband and I were the only white people present.

Some Many people think that in the year 2008 racism doesn't matter any more; that the problems of slavery and Jim Crow have been left behind as the years have passed, but I'm convinced that these people are wrong. They are either ignorant or blind to the fact of the matter: that racism still plays heavily in the day-to-day lives of many Americans.

So it goes that I'm convinced that racism in America is the second-most insidious socio-cultural innovation to be implemented by humankind for the exploitation of one group by a more powerful group. (The all-time winner of that esteemed honor is, of course, gender.)

thoughts on case studies to investigate

The most interesting cases of human technological advancements are those wherein socio-cultural and material technologies come together and create progress. Other areas of interest include those wherein socio-cultural and material technologies combine in ways that are more confrontational than harmonious.

{As a philosophical aside, one must wonder: what exactly is progress?}

Robert McElvaine noted the instance of gender roles and agriculture occurring close enough in time to influence and propel the furtherance of one another in a sort of symbiotic, mutually dependent relationship.

Indeed, other examples abound throughout the history of humanity, such as:

Religion as a socio-cultural technology that aided in the consolidation of power wielded by early city-state rulers;
Spoken language as a socio-cultural technology that led to the development of the material technology of a written language;
Racism as a socio-cultural innovation that made feasible the material technology of a slave-labor system in the United States;
the Rule of Law as a socio-cultural technology which led to the legitimization of socio-political power structures, state sovereignty, and the like;

and countless others...

There are any number of instances where socio-cultural and material technologies have interested and interacted to profoundly affect the course of human history, if only I train myself to consider the world in such a manner.

defining technology

It occurs to me that it will be necessary that I develop a working definition for 'technology' if I intend to write or think extensively about it, and especially if I intend to make the case that ethereal things like race and gender ought to be classified as technologies.

Back in 2006, in my very first semester as a university student, I took a class called The History of Science and Society. Somehow, although I was interested in the class, I didn't realize at the time how profoundly that very idea - science and society - would affect my future studies and the very course of my life's work.

One of my first assignments in that class was to submit a definition of technology. At that early stage, before I had done much thinking on the matter, I submitted the following:

Technology is the body of knowledge that members of a society apply to their physical environment to meet their survival needs.

-- from Renzetti, Claire M., and Daniel H. Curran. Living Sociology. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1998.

Truly this is was a fairly good starting point considering how little I knew two years ago. Nevertheless, here I find myself still struggling to come up with a good, solid definition that will allow me to apply the term 'technology' to both material and socio-cultural innovations.

So far, I think I can say this:
Technology is the implementation of a method to manipulate the natural world to the advantage of humanity or in such a way as to further 'progress.' (Defining progress, of course, would be the stuff of another discussion entirely.)

While this may be a good beginning in that it allows for the expansion of 'technology' to go beyond material technologies, it does not succinctly and specifically convey my meaning that the term ought not be so narrowly defined as to only refer to physical manipulation of the environment. Alas, it does not readily convey the idea that the manipulation of the social environment (which is, after all, a part of the natural world since humans evolved as social creatures) is a form of technological advancement as well.

I must work on this. A good place to start doing this would be to draw comparisions between material and socio-cultural examples of human ingenuity, and I've got an entire career ahead of me to figure all this out.

how advertising promotes the patriarchy

Watch this and learn:

of sex work and feminism

To be, or not to be a feminist? I've recently had to reconsider my position. This is no doubt because I've been consumed lately with the idea of sex work. From writing aresearch paper about prostitution in Mississippi to wrap up my last undergrad semester, to perusing pleasure reading since graduation about the Dancing Girls of Lahore and an escort in San Francisco, I've had many perspectives to consider.

FRAMING SEX WORK AS A FEMINIST ISSUE

I’m taking the position that sex work is, indeed, a feminist issue. While I realize that men, too, participate in sex work and that it affects those men’s lives in very real and profound ways, I’m convinced that male sex workers are a minority in the global sex trade, and that males’ lives have not historically been as shaped by their sexual value as have the lives of females. Males have historically been afforded more avenues of achieving success in any given society, while women, in the absence of other means of subsistence, are more often left to rely upon their sexuality as their sole agency for survival.

If anyone has any evidence to offer that might convince me that sex work should not be framed as a feminist issue, please do share.

THE OWNERSHIP OF FEMALE SEXUALITY

Historically, women’s sexuality was not their own; ownership of female sexuality reverted to a male relative or husband. Throughout history proper, some form of femme covert or another has existed, which consistently included a woman’s sexuality as a part and parcel of her legal identity. That is, the male with the most immediate interest in a woman’s procreative activity – which will not always be one man; that will change as a girl grows into a woman and her marital status changes through divorce or death – exerted the most direct influence over her life course.

This is, of course, an phenomenon which primarily affects upper class women. The sexuality of women of the lower rungs of society, those who have already been ascribed a deviant label by virtue of their poverty, is less valuable, freeing such women to flout the dominant society’s moral dictates, and take ownership of their own sexuality in order to exploit it economically as a means of survival.

THE COMMODIFICATION OF FEMALE SEXUALITY

Since the very earliest literate societies, women’s sexuality has been commodified by the dominant patriarchal society. This is a pattern that has had millenniums to become etched into human society, and which we have only recently begun to question. Women's exploitation via their participation in sex work is but one manifestation of a primordial control-mechanism of the patriarchy, but a telling one indeed.

It is because of the realization of this truth that I have lately been questioning my hesitancy to embrace the feminist label. Perhaps it is, after all, an ism with which I ought to associate myself.

Choose Jackson State... I did!

academic assimilation

I have witnessed the presence of different cultures all my life. In the cultural milleau of South Florida, I had the good fortune to grow up among a diverse population of black and brown Carribean islanders, Jews from the Eastern Seaboard, and brown people from Asia, the Middle East, and other far-flung locales – all interspersed with black and white Americans. I have always found cultural diversity interesting and intriguing. I believe it was partly this exposure to so many different cultures in my formative years that I quickly and easily learned of the mutability of culture and the subjectivity of morality. For this happenstance I am forever grateful to the Universe.

Only when I moved to Mississippi, at the tender age of sixteen, did I come to realize that what I embraced as cultural diversity was associated by others many with fear and malice. Here in the stagnant swamp of the Great River, the vast social divisions are drawn along strict color lines. Race is a potent, narcotic feature of the cultural landscape in this place. Now, at the age of twenty five I find myself deeply immersed in this Mississippian black-and-white abyss, and yet I’m compelled to dive deeper before migrating to the Cold White North.

My undergraduate post-secondary Liberal Arts education at a Historically Black College has profoundly shaped my world view in a way that inspires my scholastic endeavors. To that end I shall travel this summer to UCLA to study the connections between institutionalized racism, ethnocentrism, and the formalization of the disciplines of anthropology and sociology. My research is being supported by the Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies. This fall, I shall extend my tenure at JSU to encompass graduate studies there until the designated time for the Big Move in summer 2009.

I’m eagerly anticipating the Summer Research Institute experience. There are many reasons for this: I’ve never before lived in a “dorm” situation before, and I’ve never been so far away from my husband for such an extended amount of time. If the demographic of participants of previous years is any indication, I’ll likely be the only white girl in the Humanities program, and I’ve chosen not to disclose my race to the University. As my career progresses, I’m continuously convinced that navigating the socio-cultural landscape of academia shall indeed prove a worthwhile occupational endeavor.

random research ideas

For history 383 –

Reconstruction era marriage and divorce patterns in Mississippi.
The majority of my primary sources would be precedent-setting Court cases, although I could also search the archives for letters, diaries, and the like. Other legal miscellanea, such as correspondence, motions, and memorandum, could also serve as primary sources if only I could get my hands on such.

For sociology 455 –

Race, Gender, and Otherization.
I still have a lot to consider here. This is on the verge of being yet another “broad, overarching idea” !

______________________________________________

I’m suddenly struck by the realization (and the thought: why didn’t I think of that sooner?) of a contradiction inherent of academia. Scholarship is said to be built upon the sharing of ideas - the recitation and criticism of other’s ideas. Why, then, is there the pressure to come up with “original scholarship”?

interdisciplinary ideas

During my sociology 455 class today I realized that I must find a way to coalesce some of the various assorted branches of the humanities (namely history, sociology, and anthropology) through the course of my future scholastic endeavors.

My genius idea about classifying gender and race as socio-cultural technologies seems to fit nicely with a functionalist sociological framework, although I was not consciously aware of that when I came upon the idea in the brambles of my mind.

I’m wondering if and how the ideas of latent and manifest functions, and dysfunctions, might be applied to this idea, but I have a good feeling that this course will point me in the right direction. That is, if it doesn’t outright provide an explanation/answer…

the wrong approach

Last night I had an epiphany: I realized where I’d gone wrong with this blog! I had thought of blogging here as a chore, and associated it with something I needed to be doing as a conscientious aspiring scholar, but I now see that that was all wrong, because this blog isn’t a chore at all; it is a tool!

Yay for me for discovering this.

I have now officially begin my last semester as an undergraduate, on a good note, too. Good, that is, other than the fact that my first class of the semester - Logic - didn’t meet because of a tornado warning.The five classes which will round out my undergraduate studies are: (1) Logic, (2) Contemporary US History, (3) Sociology 455 or, Race and Ethnic Relations, (4) Creative Writing, and (5) Women in US History. So far it’s shaping up to be an interesting semester. I’ll have to get to write a lot, which will be a fulfilling challenge that will allow me to expand and hone my skills as an academic. No worries, just learning new stuff.

The two things I must fret about now are: (1) the GRE, and (2) my UCLA application.

I’m struggling to come up with a feasible research topic. My mind seems stuck in broad, overarching-theme-mode, and I don’t know where or how to pare down. An alumnus of the institute advised me that the research doesn’t have to be self-contained, that it can be part of a larger research project, which is encouraging indeed.

Race and Gender are what I’m stuck on. Specifically, the ways that race and gender are both used to oppress segments of society. These two — for lack of a better description — soci-cultural technologies have profoundly shaped the course of history. This seems so obvious to me that I don’t know where to begin to try to prove it.

Then the thought of socio-cultural technology brings me back to that other historical truth that I have convinced myself of: that human culture - and, accordingly, its myriad assorted mechanism and functions - is a technological innovation just like any other that has made our existence on earth that much easier and efficient-in-a-primitive-sort-of-way.

So I’ve much to mull over.

In the meanwhile I need to do a little sociology 101 review.