Want to know what women fantasize about? Being safe.

There’s this new policy at my school: at every Wednesday meeting we each get a summary of all the incident reports that have been filed since the last meeting. This helps us get a sense of how our students are doing in other classes and share strategies for those who give more than one of us trouble. This is good! But it means that this Wednesday everyone gets to read about a recent occurrence of sexual harassment that I reported. I keep having this fantasy: first I’m really embarrassed, as I expect to be, and then it somehow comes out that this stuff happened almost every day last year too, and then someone asks me why I never reported it before, and then I tell them how the first time another staff member overheard inappropriate comments about me she scolded me instead of the kids, and how when two of my students were sexually assaulted (one rape, one attempted rape) by another student another staff member said that they were just looking for attention and too young to be messing in the (18-year-old) assaulter’s business, and how that made me conclude that this was not a safe space for women to report such things, and how I’m only now getting up the courage to try to change that. Then of course everyone heaps imprecations on those staff members’ heads and proclaims me a heroine and the whole environment of the school changes and it’s safe forever and ever amen.

Equality FAIL, Part Two

Last Thursday was the first day of school. We teachers had been told beforehand (a) to devote our first advisory period to dealing with emergency forms and such, and (b) to enter our attendance electronically this year and use the physical folders only as backup in cases of computer or network failure.

When Thursday came, (a) none of the forms were ready for my advisees, and (b) halfway through the day an administrator came to my room looking for the hard copy of my attendance, wondering why I hadn’t turned it in to the office yet.

On Friday, I signed up (a) to use the school’s one working digital projector first period on Monday [even that projector's color is broken, and I've ordered a new one with my own money, but it hasn't shipped yet], and (b) to use the computer lab during my advisory on Monday.

Today (Monday), I came in to find that (a) the projector wasn’t ready and the person responsible for it wouldn’t be in until the end of first period, and (b) the computer lab still lacks internet access and saving and printing capabilities.

[My boyfriend's emailed response: "BABY THAT'S NOT THE COMPUTER LAB IT'S PROBABLY A PET STORE OR SOMETHING. DOES IT SMELL LIKE POOP?"]

Also today, I got to school at 7 in order to make a bunch of copies and found (a) the second floor copier and printers out of paper, (b) the fourth floor copier and printers out of paper, (c) the first floor copier out of paper, (d) the office printers out of paper, and (e) the custodian with access to the locked storage room nowhere to be found.

It’s “school,” urban style!

Equality FAIL

From a recent FAILblog post:

“As you guys know, lots of people FAIL all the time. But it’s especially funny when hotties FAIL, and they tend to FAIL pretty hard. So check out Hawtness, the Women of WTF.”

Sorry, did I miss a memo explaining that only people who are attracted to women are allowed to read this blog? That here gay men don’t exist, heterosexual women can be viewed objects but never viewing subjects, and gay women are supposed to play two incompatible roles at once? (Not to mention the memo claiming that attractiveness is rarely accompanied by intelligence, especially in women–but I think I’ve gotten that one before.)

I wanted to be a reader, but it turns out all I can do is be read.

-

“Who do we think we are? We for whom Hamlet is more real than our janitor?” – Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

Horror Story

So here’s Foucault’s whole argument in Discipine and Punish. He says:

“Word for word, from one century to the other, the same fundamental propositions are repeated. they reappear in each new, hard-won, finally accepted formulation of a reform that has hitherto always been lacking. The same sentences or almost the same could have been borrowed from other ‘fruitful’ periods of reform . . .

“One must not, therefore, regard the prison, its ‘failure’ and its more or less successful reform as three successive stages. One should think rather of a simultaneous system that historically has been superimposed on the juridical deprivation of liberty . . . [there is] the de facto reintroduction, if not actual increase, of a criminality that the prison ought to destroy–the element of inverted efficiency; lastly, the repetition of a ‘reform’ that is isomorphic, despite its ‘idealism,’ with the disciplinary functioning of the prison–the element of utopian duplication. The carceral system combines in a single figure . . . programmes for correcting delinquents and mechanisms that reinforce delinquency. Is not the supposed failure part of the functioning of the prison? . . .

“The prison, and no doubt punishment in general, is not intended to eliminate offences, but rather to distinguish them, to distribute them, to use them; that it is not so much that they render docile those who are liable to transgress the law, but that they tend to assimilate the transgression of the laws in a general tactics of subjection.”

More specifically:

“For the observation that the prison fails to eliminate crime, one should perhaps substitute the hypothesis that prison has succeeded extremely well in producing delinquency, a specific type, a politically or economically less dangerous–and, on occasion, usable–form of illegality; in producing delinquents, in an apparently marginal, but in fact centrally subervised mileau; in producing the delinquent as a pathologized subject.”

I won’t quote the whole 300 pages of anecdotal and logical evidence Foucault provides in support of his thesis, but there is one excerpt, the story of the famous petty criminal Lacenaire, of whom the author says:

“His fame owed nothing either ot the extent of his crimes or to the art of their conception; it was their ineptitude that gave cause for surprise. But it did owe a great deal to the visible play, in what he did and what he said, between illegality and delinquency. Swindling, desertion, petty theft, imprisonment, the revival of friendships made in prison, mutual blackmail, recidivism, up to the last, failed attempt at murder–Lacenaire is the typical ‘delinquent.’ But he brought with him, at least potentially, a horizon of illegalities that had, until quite recently, represented a threat: this ruined petty bourgeois, of good education, would, a generation earlier, have been a revolutionary, a Jacobin, a regicide; had he been a contemporary of Robespierre, his rejection of the law would have taken a directly political form. Born in 1800, at more or less the same time as Stendahl’s Julien Sorel, his character bears the trace of these possibilities; but they took the form of theft, murder and denunciation. All these potentialities become a delinquency of no great moment: in this sense, Lacenaire is a reassuring character.”

I had a professor in grad school who used to say that education was the second most dysfunctional system in the United States, surpassed only by the prison system. Foucault’s assessment of the latter seems scarily applicable to the former.

[looking at a plate of cookies]

me: I’ll take this one, because it’s ugly, poor thing.

friend: See, that’s why you teach at a school like ours.

It’s the last quotation from this book, I promise.

“The concept of European love has its roots in extracoital soil. The twentieth century, which boasts that it liberated morals and likes to laugh at romantic feelings, was not capable of filling the concept of love with any new content (this is one of its debacles), so that a young European who silently pronounces that great word to himself willy-nilly returns on the wings of enthusiasm to precisely the same point where Werther lived his great love for Lotte and where Dominique nearly fell off his horse.” – Kundera, Immortality

Just the other day I was thinking of writing a post on how annoying I find the influence of Cartesian dualism on my own thought. Now Kundera has written half of that post for me.

I’ve forgotten the other half, though. Oh well.