Tag: academia

Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia by Kate Manne

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Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia by Kate Manne

I had feelings reading Unshrinking. Lots and lots of feelings, feelings which made me reflect and assess, then reassess again.

Some part of my reaction is due to the particular place I am at in my life where I am actively trying to lose weight and return to a body shape and size that I used to be, and the fact that I, like Manne, am a woman in higher education, in the humanities to boot. This book hit on many levels for me. YMMV, of course, but I think most readers, regardless of their gender, occupation, and size will find that some part or whole of this book mirrors an experience they have had themselves, witnessed, or been party to.

Manne’s Unshrinking focuses on fatness and the fear and loathing around that subject as an oppressive force; an unrecognized and often invisible loci on the intersectional matrix dominated by Race, Class, and Gender. Fat, says Manne, ought to figure up there, alongside the big three — or at the very least, Fatness ought to be taken into account as one of the newer cohort of (though no less inferior) factors like Disability/Ability, Age, Education, etc.

Some chapters address what readers might expect in a conversation about fatness and size: the FDA approved Food Pyramid, the faulty application of Body Mass Index (BMI) to any and all, the near global obsession with “dieting,” and what constitutes — in many societies — the Ideal Body Figure for men, women, everyone. But Manne also devotes pages to the philosophical and ideological fallout of Fatphobic culture, and the effects of fatphobia and prejudice in academia and professional settings. What it comes down to, according to Manne, is the moral leverage thinness, paired with the moral condemnation of fatness, has to shape not only individual experiences, but society on a larger scale.

Unshrinking also offers the reader — and readers like me — a certain, if narrow, avenue of hope and empowerment. I felt seen, even though my fatness is not especially fat and more a reflection of my own fatphobia and internalization of what size I ought to be. Manne suggests that fatphobia can be acknowledged, addressed, and the situation ameliorated. We can and should change the way we see fatness; it shouldn’t be a moral yardstick, it isn’t a signal of health, and it isn’t up for public policing. Instead, fatness is another facet of our human diversity, a thing worth embracing and including.

Still, today I counted my calories.

Cities of Women: A Novel by Kathleen Jones

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Cities of Women: A Novel by Kathleen Jones

This is a historian’s historical novel, in every sense of the word. Not surprisingly, is is written by a former academic; Kathleen Jones began her writing career as a political scientist and professor, before turning to literary fiction. Cities of Women is a seamless blend of these two domains of their experience, reflecting a deep respect for the scholarly pursuit of history while offering readers a deeply textured and emotional perspective of the past.

The novel toggles between the modern present and the medieval past, beginning with a tenure track historian’s search for her place in the academia. Verity Frazier then encounters, by chance, that rare glimpse of an undiscovered history. This is the sort of thing historians dream of when they enter archives; Jones portrayal Verity’s hope and desire is palpable — or perhaps that is just my historian’s heart set aflutter. Buried, like so many women of his age, is the presence of a female illuminator, Anastasia.

The unfolding of Verity’s archival adventure draws the reader into a world that is both exotic and familiar. Verity and Anastasia (like us all) live in a patriarchal world, one which fails to take women seriously, which gaslights us, and forces us to make undesirable choices. This is a feminist novel, bringing to the fore these age-old prejudices and the battles women must fight to be heard, seen, remembered.

Then novel also contains more than one beautiful and flawed sapphic romance, highlighting the containment and self-sustaining world of womanhood. This is the beauty of Cities of Women; it is an illumination of women, an honest portrait of women’s struggles and successes, a tale of oppression and empowerment as the two sides of our collective experience. Readers should know this realist capturing of the female experience may trigger; who among us cannot point to some evidence of trauma in our lives?

Indeed, Jones’ characters are as made of flesh as ourselves, so well does her characterization reflect the depth of her historical research and her skill as an author. We can feel Verity’s pain, the elasticity of Anastasia’s tenacity, Christine’s boldness and pride. We can also recognize the women around them, the friends who succumbed to the status quo, the colleagues who share in the frustration of being a woman in a man’s world, the lovers who boost us and tear us down.

The novel revolves around these women and their lives, and as such, being character-driven, moves at a languid pace, stretching the length of lives for some characters and capturing mere months of others. Time, in fact, is fluid in this novel, a kind of ephemeral backdrop; the lives Jones tells us about cut across time, flatten it. Women have then, as now, experienced much the same things.

Dialogue between the characters is seamless, perhaps too much so sometimes; I was left wondering if people really talk like this? But then, the world is wide and there are many in it, so perhaps they do. Or perhaps Jones is referencing the physic unity between women, so One-Of-Mind are we that our words may zipper so flawlessly together. Overall, however, Jones’ prose is splendid, mature, and expressive; it is smooth, flowing, and sensuous in many parts. Readers will find themselves cradled in gorgeous text throughout.

Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides under China’s Global Rise by Monica Liu

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Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides under China’s Global Rise by Monica Liu

It’s been a minute since I’ve read an ethnography — and enjoyed it in the way I enjoy fiction. Liu does an amazing job making her subjects tangible for her reader and weaving story into the reality of her research. The result is brilliant academic anthropology; a portrait of women’s lives in modern China that transports the Western/Western-based reader into that world. This is a work suitable for all adult readers, those interested in the minute theoretical discussions of academia as well as a more general audience, those interested in simply knowing and witnessing a way of life foreign to their own.

Liu’s ethnography takes us to modern China and into the micro-world of online dating. The reader is specifically given entree into the kind of dating world that has been typically derided as disempowering for women, fostering unequal relationships between Western men and Asian women (or really women of color or those from less wealthy economies): (E)mail Order Brides. The popular narrative depicts the men as wielding both physical, material, and financial power over the women. The men “call the shots” and the women come a-running, lacking agency to refuse or to determine the parameters of the relationship.

Liu’s major point, and the one that makes this ethnography so appealing, is that this is absolutely not an accurate understanding of the power dynamics in China’s e-mail order bride and online dating world. I won’t give away Liu’s evidence or the ways in which Liu reveals this to the reader; that would spoil the fun of reading this! But suffice it say, Liu shows us how much more nuanced reality is.

Chinese women — and those of a particular age, class, and circumstance — possess far more agency and power in these relationships than we are trained to believe. As an Asian woman with East Asian descent, I was particularly intrigued by Liu’s work. In my own American world, women of my race and ethnicity remain stereotyped as submissive wives/girlfriends/spouses, as heteronormative sexual objects, or as “dragon ladies” or worse… simply invisible. Liu’s work was eye-opening and refreshing.

Liu’s work suggests a new world order in terms of Chinese gender and gender identity is coming, although, we should not expect revolutionary ideas necessarily. There are aspects of Liu’s findings that suggest the patriarchy is still strong in China, that the new world order is merely a reworking of it to fit into modern context. I don”t mean to be teleological, but “we have a long way to go” is still a valid comment.

The book is divided into short, easily digestible chapters, each one taking on a different perspective of the women studied. Liu discusses their class, their age, their personal goals in systematic form, allowing the reader to grasp the diversity of Chinese women in this world, from those who own the dating business to those who work for them, and of course, the women who are its customers and consumers. The men too, Western and Chinese, are included in this study, though their perspectives and voices are often filtered through the women. Geographically, Liu takes us into the heart of urban China, but also brings us along to America so we are able to follow along the full migration pathway of some of the women. Liu’s book possesses breadth in multiple ways.