I just got asked by a journalist whether Juliet, Daisy Buchanan, or Bella Swan should be regarded as “good” or “bad” role models for girls. Here is how I responded:
Office Hours (for my students in feminist theory and rhetorical criticism)
Resistance to the regulation
of women’s bodies
grows in the red chair.
We prepare for world traveling
where, like Maria Lugones said,
we learn to love each other,
to listen for the contexts of oppression,
to avoid the arrogance of the therapist,
to study the words
–and other actions–
of women resisting the colonization of everything,
including ourselves,
to recognize, like Vandana Shiva said:
The seed is both metaphor and
real life.
Happy Birthday, You’re Not a Person
Today is my birthday. North Carolina voters just decided I’m not fully human. Here is a response.
Whereas miscegenation
queered the rite’s unstable battle,
today another state banned endogamy,
the joining of like to like, ironically
as ever calling difference into being.
Not so much for domestication
but facing inhumanity ratified
by popular declaim,
I become monstrous in public,
skin peeling back to reveal
the fat melting off muscle
as my joints fail I topple first in
supplication then prostration
limbs spread apart in the face of
you who vote on the humanity of others.
My heart lands beating on the dry desert floor
and my parts strive for each other and on the way
find random dessicated limbs
a horned bony mask,
auto parts, twisted gutters,
railroad ties
odd ends
of rusted steel dragged through the dust to
fabricate a new miscegenated body
an unnatural cyborg warrior
the aftermarket subject.
Didn’t we always wish that
in the movie
Linda Hamilton were the one with the forbidden microchip
the indestructible frame and hardened heart
to save her self and the world?
A postapocalyptic mutation,
my arms and hands rattle with ugly vengeance.
If you think that I am less than fully human
I will show you how
very right you are.
Justice for Loretta Capeheart! Defend Free Speech in the Academy!
Friends and colleagues:
Please respond by signing onto the petition; please forward and circulate. This case has broad ramifications for freedom of expression on the part of faculty across the country.
THIS IS an urgent appeal for your support to defend Professor Loretta Capeheart in her struggle with her employer, Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) in Chicago. After four years of legal action, we are now awaiting a key decision from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals–a decision that could set a precedent for free speech rights on campus and possibly move the case on the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) wrote, “If upheld on review, the district court’s ruling would deal a major blow to professors’ academic freedom and free speech in the Seventh Circuit–and quite likely beyond, as it would send the unmistakable message that faculty members aiming to speak out and be active in campus dialogue risk having their careers damaged.”
Capeheart is a 10-year tenured professor at NEIU and a respected union and community activist. NEIU administrators have systematically targeted her for years. Administrators have engaged in slander against her, denied her a department chair position and earned merit pay increases. These attacks resulted from Capeheart’s union activities and anti-war work and her attempts to promote the rights of students and faculty, especially Latino/a faculty.
NEIU President Sharon K. Hahs is an arrogant opponent of student, worker and minority rights on campus and has presided over a spectacle of administrative scandal during her tenure.
In Capeheart v. Hahs et al, a federal judge concluded that Capeheart could be punished for speaking out against the war because she advised a student club. The court agreed with NEIU’s lawyers that academics have no right to free speech under the Supreme Court’s 2006 decision Garcetti v. Ceballos.
In Garcetti, the Supreme Court stripped most government workers of their rights to speak in the workplace but made a footnoted exception for professors. In deciding against Capeheart, the lower court effectively ignored this footnote and left workers with fewer rights.
Other federal courts have similarly misapplied Garcetti. Now the appeal before the 7th Circuit Court of appeals will either reject the new limits set by the lower courts or further establish them. Either way, this decision could lead to another hearing before the Supreme Court.
Visit the Justice for Loretta Capeheart website for updates on the case. Post a link to the website on Facebook and Twitter, and send it to your friends and coworkers. Sign the petition calling for justice for Loretta.
Send e-mails, phone calls and letters to NEIU President Sharon K. Hahs, S-Hahs@neiu.edu, 773-442-5400 and President Sharon K. Hahs, 5500 N. St. Louis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60625.
Support the campaign financially. You can make a donation to the legal fund via Paypal at the Justice for Loretta Capeheart website, or by sending a check to Thomas D. Rosenwein, Glickman, Flesch & Rosenwein, 230 W. Monroe St., Suite 800, Chicago, IL 60606, Memo: Loretta Capeheart Defense.
Show your solidarity by passing resolutions in your union, your faculty senate or other organization through which you can gain support. Send messages of support to justice4loretta@gmail.com.
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Signatories
Noam Chomsky, Institute professor (emeritus), MIT
Michael Ratner, President, Center for Constitutional Rights*
Jesse Sharkey, Vice President, Chicago Teachers Union*
Dave Zirin, Sports Editor, The Nation
Ahmed Shawki, Editor, International Socialist Review
Anthony Arnove, Editor, Haymarket Books
Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed*
David McNally, Professor of Political Science, York University, Toronto
The Coalition Against Corporate Higher Education (CACHE)
Mike Davis, Professor, UC Riverside
William Keach, Professor, Brown University
Deepa Kumar, Associate Professor, Rutgers University
Hector R. Reyes, Associate Professor, Harold Washington College, Vice Chair, HWC Chapter, AFT Local 1600
Helen C. Scott, Associate Professor, University of Vermont
Marvin Surkin, Professor, Long Island University, Ramapo College
Pranav Jani, Associate Professor, English, Ohio State University
*Organizations listed for identification only
Stonewall: History of a Rebellion
Audio of speech June 2009 by Dana Cloud.
Why Marry at all? A poem by Marge Piercy
Why marry at all?
By Marge Piercy
Why mar what has grown up between the cracks
and flourished like a weed
that discovers itself to bear rugged
spikes of magenta blossoms in August,
ironweed sturdy and bold,
a perennial that endures winters to persist?
Why register with the state?
Why enlist in the legions of the respectable?
Why risk the whole apparatus of roles
and rules, of laws and liabilities?
Why license our bed at the foot
like our Datsun truck: will the mileage improve?
Why encumber our love with patriarchal
word stones, with the old armor
of husband and the corset stays
and the chains of wife? Marriage
meant buying a breeding womb
and sole claim to enforced sexual service.
Marriage has built boxes in which women
have burst their hearts sooner
than those walls; boxes of private
slow murder and the fading of the bloom
in the blood; boxes in which secret
bruises appear like toadstools in the morning.
But we cannot invent a language
of new grunts. We start where we find
ourselves, at this time and place.
Which is always the crossing of roads
that began beyond the earth’s curve
but whose destination we can now alter.
This is a public saying to all our friends
that we want to stay together. We want
to share our lives. We mean to pledge
ourselves through times of broken stone
and seasons of rose and ripe plum;
we have found out, we know, we want to continue.