Yeah, this blog was enjoyable, but I haven’t read a book for fun since August. Nor have I been able to expel decent thoughts for anything but assignments since the semester commenced. Now that it’s almost over, it’s gotten worse. Maybe I read and write some over winter break? Let’s not count on it.

For now, I would like to announce this blog’s official retirement. Good night and good luck? Maybe see you next summer!

I’m not done with the book, but so far I’ve been struck by a certain passage so much that I’ve thought about it almost daily. Probably because I’m part-time job hunting. Biju, the person mentioned in the excerpt, is a recent Indian illegal immigrant working in New York City restaurants. 

Biju at the Baby Bistro.

Above, the restaurant was French, but below in the kitchen it was Mexican and Indian.

Biju at Le Colonial for the authentic colonial experience.

On top, rich colonial, and down below, poor native. Colombian, Tunisian, Ecuadorian, Gambian.

On to the Stars and Stripes Diner. All America flag on top, all Guatemalan flag below.

Plus one Indian flag when Biju arrived. 

The reason why I think this particular passage has been on my mind is that while job hunting, I’ve had particular jobs on my mind. Nothing great (waitress, coffee shop ‘barista’- if that is a real word-, bookstore clerk), but nothing menial. Whenever I go into certain cafes, I see the white people in the front, taking orders and serving the food, and I also see the people of color in the back, coming out only to take away the dirty cups and plates. Do I think that I am above Biju’s class of worker? Given the fact that I’m a white girl in college, society tells me that I am. I want to go on to have a ‘career,’ and ‘do things’- why is that something that I can do, but Biju cannot? It’s institutionalized, internalized racism that is affecting my job choices and plans. 

This may seem to be a fairly elementary observation. Racial social injustice is a fact of life, and is something I’ve noticed since I was small. 

But isn’t it funny how we can be so ‘aware’ of a world that can be so cruel… and yet we are still so enmeshed in it that we don’t even notice that we are helping to maintain that cruelty? 

As a person who wants to work her hardest to be an anti-racist and an ally, I’m going to try harder to notice these things. I’m going to try to make some different job choices. I’m reading the story of Biju and his family (among others: this book is kind of an epic) and learning.

I did, however, just read a really good (and short!) book called The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. If I had the book on me right now, I’d write about it. (Although I am at work, so maybe I shouldn’t be saying that…). It was a wonderful story about how everyone has their own ‘Personal Legend’ that is intended for them to carry out, and while most people know theirs, they do not seek it out and instead settle for a stable, boring, socially respectable life. It was a great book for me to read because when I think about my future, I do tend to struggle- should I go for the already established (possibly high paying) yet potentially not as exciting job, or should I set out on my own and try to establish something just for me based on what I think is important (a path that wouldn’t pay..)? In The Alchemist, the main character found that when you set out to fulfill your Personal Legend, the world will help you on your path- because what you are doing is what you are supposed to be doing. The book had a lot of very religious elements, which I liked. It was also written in a beautiful, simple style. A perfect book for the metro! 

Huh, looks like I just wrote about it without meaning to! I’ll continue my little housekeeping bit in another post…

Why is that? Most literature I’ve read styles male EDs as being vocational (ie they’re wrestlers, so they purposefully gain weight, etc.), even while admitting that there has to be more to it. This book devotes a whole section on male body image through a discussion of body builders who simply cannot stop.

That’s all probably good and true. But a conversation with a male friend of mine last night makes me not so sure that that is all there is to it. Maybe males don’t develop EDs as a way to express their lack of control and power- that reinforces/proves the argument that while EDs happen because of a trauma/etc, the reason that they develop as eating disorders instead of ‘female hysteria’ (from the Victorian times) is our culture. But they do have body image issues (they are human!).

We can’t escape the fact that people use their physical, visually seen selves to express their identities. It’s a large part of adolescent development, and it continues through life. Men and women want their bodies to be expressions of their personalities, or at least, what they want other people to think their personalities are. How do we acknowledge this aspect of life without giving certain body types, male and female and of any race, value in a way that can be harmful?

Anyway, one of the major points that Bordo makes in this book is that eating disorders are less pathology and more a product of a misogynistic culture. Personally, while I feel like this is a very legitimate and truthful argument, I also think that there is a lot to gain from contemporary psychological theories and explanations- especially those that place eating disorders under the category of coping mechanisms. However, this entry isn’t really going to go into that. I’m just going to start with the very basics of eating disorders and negative body image as a result of Western culture. My starting point is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately (so much, in fact, that I got a book on Plato out from the library..), and that’s the separation of mind and body into a dualism.

This sort of dualism was really brought to the surface as problematic during feminism’s second wave (which I’m learning much more about, seeing how I’m currently working as an assistant on the production of a documentary about second-wave feminists. This group was ahead of it’s time- very white, but attune to intersectionality and the problems of the moderate movement). With women representing BODY and men representing MIND, in order to focus on endeavors outside of the household, women had to essentially become men, or at least genderless. “Traditional” gender roles had women in the home, caring for bodily needs (food, health, reproduction), with men working during the day only to come home at night and have their bodily needs taken care of.

While this has changed slightly since the sixties and seventies (we are at least aware of gender inequality and the normalization of socially created gender roles), this dualism has not been addressed in popular mass culture. I read an article by a blogger for The American Prophet today that really dug into that.

In a home where both parents work, women spend 11 hours a week caring for the kids and men spend…three. Whoa. Of course, this isn’t because husbands and wives sit down and set up a schedule where women do about four times as much child work. Rather, it just sort of…happens that way. People are busy. The guys look at the work and assume someone else will take care of it. The women look at the work and decide they’d better get it done. Societal expectations reinforce this division of labor.

…. Guys in the workplace don’t see why women can’t do what they did, and guys at home justify their reduced housework by pointing to their demanding jobs. Conversely, women have more housework and childcare responsibilities, and thus less time to devote to the workplace and less of the scheduling flexibility that’s currently required for advancement. So men advance professionally, and justify their personal habits on those grounds, and women pick up the slack, and thus don’t advance as far professionally.

Women still inhabit that body role, even as they seek and do intellectual work. From what this article is saying, it seems as if many men also see women this way, even if it’s not conscious.

You might now be thinking- what the hell does this have to do with eating disorders? You might have forgotten I mentioned that at all, in which case- I forgive you! Anyway, the separation of mind and body is problematic for reasons other than gender roles. It makes one think about one’s self in terms of the body and the mind, or intellectual self- two different entities. I’ll admit, that’s how I think about myself. That might be how you think about yourself. Our culture has made this very normal.

What’s problematic about this? Well, it might make one think that the body is something that the mind can control, or change, to fit certain values or traits that one wants to identity oneself with. If culture associates a slender body with power, a person in a stressful or powerless situation might seek to alter their body to fit this powerful image. When control is gone from one aspect of life, control over the body might seem like a logical way to cope.

As discussed above, the association of women with body and men with mind has historically given men the more powerful, valued roles in society. Valuing a specific type of MIND over body is one of the root reasons, in my view, for culturally induced eating disorders- and possibly even the fact that psychological problems manifest themselves through food at all. It’s suppression of the body and of female desire. As Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber writes in The Cult of Thinness,

The split between mind and body is central to our idea of what it means to be male and female- and our culture values mind over body. But dichotomous thinking is a powerful mechanism of social control and oppression. It separates groups into “we” and “they,” instead of allowing diversity to flourish. … [We] need to change the messages girls and women absorb from families, schools, and jobs- all places where women are rewarded or punished daily from being in the “right” or “wrong” body.

This quote is especially important to me because of my research/activist interest in the globalization of eating disorders, as a particular type of world bank driven development moves into third world nations.

So that’s a bit of an introduction of sorts on mind/body dichotomy and how it relates to women’s oppression and eating disorders. I honestly think of eating disorders, negative body image and low self esteem as violence against women- truly linked to such issues as domestic violence, sex trafficking, and more. It’s culture telling us we’re wrong, in a way that has lead some to suicide.

There are sure to be many more posts on this book, and one on The Cult of Thinness, which I just finished, coming soon.

…We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled slightly-academic-or-at-least-better-than-this-entry entries as soon as my head gets out of Harry Potter Land and lands back in the real world. Give it a few days.

What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what? Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness. Jealousy we understood and thought natural- a desireto have what somebody else had; but envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us. (Pg 74)

This was a book about “racial self-loathing” and “how one learns that.” (Quote from Toni Morrison’s afterward). That’s something that white privilege prevents me from understanding truthfully, though I do hope and try to be an ally in solidarity. This book was sad and beautiful. The way I see it, negative body image is a powerfully harmful force that we inflict upon ourselves willingly, and this book showed me that it’s a far more destructive, lively and complicated force than I ever imagined, like a mass of poisonous and beating flesh inside of ourselves that we take care of. The Bluest Eye really sought to find these complications, and more importantly, find the humanity that nourishes them.

In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self contempt by the heap. (Pg. 122)

Read this book.

• Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Chandra Talpade Mohanty
• Talkin’ up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism, Fiona Paisley
  

Also, here’s an article:

http://aboriginalrights.suite101.com/article.cfm/feminism_vs_native_rights

However, while well intended, feminist activism can sometimes be disempowering and even racist towards Aboriginal people, resulting in the same kind of dispossession as that inflicted by colonial governments.

Even where contemporary social relations are understood to be shaped by colonial and patriarchal practices, Aboriginal women are reluctant to use a gendered analysis to criticize Aboriginal men. Indeed, feminist analysis is widely considered to be divisive, corrosive of family and community, culturally inappropriate and even colonialist. A number of prominent Aboriginal intellectuals have dismissed feminism’s relevance for Aboriginal women while others have celebrated Aboriginal women’s traditional and maternalist roles to the exclusion of analysis of gendered power relations.

Considering feminism’s historic disregard for the racial identities of women of color (while assuming that all women can unite under some sort of ‘sisterhood,’ putting their womanness first), this makes sense. Feminism alone is not ‘for everybody,’ but “aboriginal feminism,” as outlined by Green and others,

“brings together the two critiques, feminism and anti-colonialism, to show how Aboriginal peoples, and in particular Aboriginal women, are affected by colonialism and patriarchy.”

This seems to me to be pretty necessary: native women have had to put up with a lot of bullshit. Colonialism and land theft, sexist legislation (this piece talked a lot about Canada’s Indian Act in this regard, and off the top of my head I’m reminded of the Hyde Amendment), forced sterilization (esp. in the US in the 70s, in the years between Roe and Hyde), economic oppression, and more. As a non-native woman, I’m really not one to talk. But historically, this is a group that has been given the least and taken from the most, and now it’s been reported that one in three American Indian women will be raped in her lifetime. That’s not just sexism.

Another topic addressed in this chapter was tradition, and how invoking it in opposition to feminism has been a very negative force for indigenous feminists. As a white girl, it’s made me think about where to stand in regards to tradition and culture. It’s been my thought for a while now that the voices that are most important in any community are those of its members- meaning, by commenting on (for example) gender relations in a native community, I would be undermining that community’s members and what they had to say. I would be an outsider voice. Reading this piece has not changed my mind in that sense, however, it has taught me a lot about what those voices are saying. Green says that feminism is thought to be a destroyer of traditions, however, she makes it clear that “tradition is neither a monolith nor is it axiomatically good,” and that “there are a number of versions of tradition… there are many who claim to be authoritative on this subject… [they should not] be permitted to deny others a voice.” This definitely brought to mind the common notion that native cultures are stagnant and only exist in the past, which allows for the dominant culture to ignore native people and dismiss their voices.

What has this piece made me want to learn more about? Legislation, definitely. This piece focused on Canada (oh, forgot to mention: Green uses the word Aboriginal to talk about native tribes in Canada and Indigenous to talk about the rest of the world), but for my own purposes I’d like to learn about more recent US legislation that’ve impacted native people. I know a lot about the 1800s, but I’d like to go further.

A note: what I’ve written here isn’t supposed to be a college paper, not is it claiming to be a definitive source. This blog is informal. I didn’t write about everything Joyce Green wrote about. You should read it! I’m just writing about what it made me think about and how these ideas are influencing me.

Here is a list of what I’m reading right now

• Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, ed. Joyce Green
• Empire Falls, Richard Russo
• The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula Le Guin (okay, I actually finished this a few days ago)

My plan for further reading is about the same as this: half academic, half fiction. While at this point I’m planning to write about everything, that might change. Expect a post on the first chapter of Making Space for Indigenous Feminism sometime soon. If you (oh imaginary reader) have any thoughts, suggestions, or anything feel free to comment- it’s unmoderated at this point because this is such a new blog.