Posts Tagged → marginal

How little I knew you Geraldine Ferraro

When Geraldine Ferraro ran for vice president in 1984, I had no idea what it meant to be a feminist and to be limited as a member of a marginalized group. But I did have the impression that Ferraro must have been a Very Bad Person, based on the people talked about her, both in terms of content and tone. It didn’t occur to me that her gender had anything to do with it. Her passing on the weekend provides me with an opportunity to reflect on how little I understood at the time about her and what she did for us.

That year, I was thirteen years old and in grade eight. I was not following politics at all. To me, the most significant event on the world stage was the birth of UK’s Prince Harry in September. I knew that there was a presidential election in the US and who candidates were. I knew that Geraldine Ferraro was running. I had no idea what the issues were in the election. But I did have the impression that Ferraro must be a Very Bad Person.

The news was always critical. She had said the wrong thing. She was doing things she shouldn’t have. Her past was questionable. More damaging than the facts were the implications, which read like a laundry list of words to marginalize someone: incompetent, immoral, not Christian, too uppity, exceeding her capabilities… The adults around me (both men and women) seemed to feel a sense of outrage; how dare she run for Vice President!

It did not strike me as remarkable that a woman was running for the position.  I had the mistaken idea that the world always was and will be this way. It didn’t occur to me that people expressed these sentiments about her, because she was a woman. I had the mistaken idea that men and women had equal opportunity in our society.

To give you an idea of how unenlightened I was, let me tell you about the most memorable scene (to me) from the move Top Gun. Maverick (Tom Cruise) had kept Charlie (Kelly McGillis) waiting, because he stayed to play beach volleyball with his mates. When Maverick arrived at Charlie’s place, he made weak excuses and asked her to wait some more while he had a shower. Charlie said no and made him talk to her un-showered. This scene amazed me, because it was an example of a woman not letting a man get away with bad behavior. In my daily life, male relatives often acted badly, and women just put up with it. It never occurred to me that there was something that we could do about it.

But, in a sense, there wasn’t anything we could do about it. On one occasion, I did resist and it didn’t work out well. My brother, sister, and I were supposed to take turns making lunch to bring to school. My brother, being the youngest and the only son, often shirked his duties with little reprimand from our parents. The job was often left to me and my sister. We probably should have just not made his lunch until he pitched in. But that was too blatant and would have drawn the ire of our parents. My sister and I hatched a plan: we would make his sandwich inside-out with the bread in the middle, the meat on the outside, and the condiments on top. We giggled like fiends as we prepared this messy revenge. When my brother came home, he was furious. (My husband says that it was probably because we embarrassed him in front of his friends.) He raged and yelled at us. And what did we do? We did what we saw our female role models did. We acquiesced and didn’t do it again. It’s astonishing, now that I look back on it. The me in 2011 would never put up with something like this. I don’t think we did our brother any favors either.

Reading Ferraro’s obituary gave me a new appreciation for what she did and how far I have come. I know what it’s like to be under attack. I know what it’s like to have special attacks lobbed at me with astonishing vitriol, because I was a woman and I dared. She held up remarkably against the barrage of attacks. She opened up possibilities for women who followed. Rest in peace, Geraldine Ferraro.

Accounting for Taste on International Women’s Day

It is International Women’s Day today, and I wanted to acknowledge it with a post. It can be difficult to explain to men why women’s rights is still an issue. After all, laws and regulations that prohibit women’s participation are decreasing and opportunities are increasing. But the point is that there is still lots left to do because women and women’s views are marginal, meaning they are not the default assumptions.

Let me try to explain using a story.

Movie star and activist, George Clooney, has a reputation for being a practical joker. One of his more elaborate pranks involved an enormous hideous painting that he had pick up  from the curb on garbage day.  George often played golf with his close friend, Richard Kind. For a year, whenever Richard asked him to go play golf, he would say, “I can’t. I’ve got art class.” Finally, Richard’s birthday rolled around and George gave him the big, garish painting, with his signature and in a frame. George said, “‘My art teacher’s really proud of me but this (painting) is the first one we’re both really proud of. You’ve been so supportive, I want you to have it.” It hung over Richard’s couch for two years and George would send instruct their mutual friends to go and compliment the painting in superlatives. Everyone else was in on the joke.

I want you to imagine what it was like being Richard. For years, he looked at this painting and thought it was awful, but everyone thought it looked amazing. He probably had many feelings of self-doubt, questioned his own taste, and his ability to appreciate art. He was the odd one out and constantly being reinforced by messages from his friends.

Being a woman is a bit like this. I’m constantly bombarded with tiny hints that I’m the odd one out, that I’m not the default. Karen Valby wrote, “When women rally around something in pop culture, it isn’t long before the objects of their attraction are loudly trivialized or dismissed.” Take the book (and movie) “Eat, Pray, Love” for example, which tells the story of how a woman got over being an unhappy divorcee by traveling the world. In other words, it’s a rite of passage story where the main character is a woman and the antagonists are inside of her. Not your typical story, which in part accounts for its success. The novel made it to number one on The New York Times paperback nonfiction list and was featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show. It doesn’t get much bigger than this.

Yet the page for this book on Amazon.com is filled with hateful comments, not just by men and not just by people who have read the book. Elizabeth Gilbert has stopped reading and responding to the reviews. She sums up the reaction to the popularity of the book and movie this way: “If women like it, it must be stupid.” In high school, there were certain musicians that girls liked, such as Duran Duran and Corey Hart, and boys always made fun of us for liking. I could never understand what was so bad about them. It’s like a twisted version of the prank that George Clooney pulled. But the worst part is it’s not a joke.

The blog “My Fault I’m Female” features anecdotes sent in by readers when they had to face stereotypes or deal with unequal treatment or plain old incomprehension, just because they were female. I like reading this blog because it reminds me that I’m not crazy and that it’s OK for me to be angry at the thousand tiny cuts that I suffer because my existence challenges assumptions.

Living on the margins is an odd thing. On the one hand, things are never easy, because I’m not one of the “cool kids,” to borrow a metaphor from high school social interactions. Interactions always have to be negotiated and discovered anew, because things can’t be taken for granted. On the other hand, there are advantages to being able to understand and appreciate cool and not cool. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

You can’t be both Hindu and Muslim

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Islam and Hinduism’s blurred lines

This BBC news story report on a community in Rajasthan that follow both Hindu and Muslim traditions. They are nominally Hindu, but follow three Muslim practices (circumcision for the newborn male children in the community, eating halal meat and burying their dead). They have done this without conflict for hundreds of years. However, tensions are rising because there is a feeling that one must be one or the other, not both. Consequently, there are people who are “converting” to one faith or another. This is crazy.

Whenever categories are formed, there is always something left over at the end. Geoff Bowker and Susan Leigh Star wrote about this in their book “Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences.” They described the miscellaneous categories as “residual” and they are unavoidable. So this elimination of the hybrid Hindu and Muslim can be seen as an effort to reduce “otherness.” The impetus comes from both outsiders who don’t understand or want to co-opt people to their causes, and from the people themselves out of a desire to reduce ambiguity. It’s often difficult to live with a queer label that challenges basic notions about how the world is organized.