Vulnerable Southerner

'Sad Days & Lonely Nights'

[pocarovna]

Mongolian costumes

[vulnerablesoutherner]

Lovely!

[vulnerablesoutherner]

Personal Aesthetics

When I was a young girl, I wanted nothing more than to have a cute nice husband and live in a cute nice house. And maybe eventually have some cute nice kids. We would all love each other in that perfectly blissful static way you imagine love to be when you’re young, a love that existed outside time and its influences. Of course this is not what I really wanted; it was just the only seeming option available at the time because in the South in the late nineteen eighties if you were a girl, being pretty was the ultimate goal nothing else mattered. Pretty girls could get away with virtually anything and to my young mind all roads pointed to marriage and family a sort of cloying overwhelming feminine security. A funny thing happened though in the mid-nineteen nineties, well a funny thing for me at least, I discovered a little show, Canadian in origin titled (rather unspectacularly), Fashion Television, hosted by an articulate brunette Fashion Television opened the door to a world I had only formerly glimpsed during trips to the museum, a sort of rarefied art world. In this world I learned that the rules were different, pretty wasn’t always obvious and women could do things outside the confines of family. They could wear giant sunglasses and be difficult; they could be artists, live in places like Vienna and be of an indeterminate age and consistently immaculately turned out. I suppose that fashion is an odd way to have a sort of feminist awaking, but aesthetics are important and clothes can be subversive, fashion can shock, and shock me it did. Right out of my Lisa Frank inspired sweat shirts and scrunchies. Now I’ve followed the call of aesthetics to a sort of personal end and I see that I have in fact paid a price for this. Some part of me successfully emulated those impossible women I found in fashion and I for me the process of becoming this ‘other’ person was both alienating and enlightening. So what’s the point? Aesthetics do mean something but they don’t mean everything. Like the ‘living saint’ from The Great Beauty says, ‘Why do I only eat roots? Because roots are important.’  I keep this in mind as I retrace some of my own roots/routes.

[anthmusings]

As scholars trained in anthropology, we argue that the discipline should be at the forefront of transforming raced and gendered inequalities, given its emphasis on self-reflexivity. Anthropology possesses tools - such as a willingness to look inwards - that may prove invaluable in dismantling oppressive environments. The work that remains to be done is applying these tools to the discipline itself, looking starkly at its embedded assumptions and hierarchies. Beginning this difficult work of critically examining the discipline will allow for not only the validation of more diverse research and researchers, but a radical transformation of the field of anthropology.

Sitting at the Kitchen Table: Fieldnotes from Women of Colour in Anthropology. Cultural Anthropology. Vol. 28, Issue 3, pp. 443-463.

This article, written by anthropologists Tami Navarro, Bianca Williams and Attiya Ahmad, brings a very important, yet often obscured, discussion to the fore, and should be read by anyone interested in anthropology as a discipline. 

I initially planned to quote from this as I do from other articles, however this would not give the message its due justice. These three women discuss the challenges faced by academic women of colour, particularly in the anthropology departments of university. The challenges they discuss include the expectations by both their students and colleagues, that they must, as women of colour, serve as ‘native’ anthropologists, or otherwise somehow justify their positions of authority in such a manner not required by their white, male colleagues. They discuss the issues of binary modes of thinking in anthropology, and how a break from these would help the movement towards true inclusivity. They speak from both personal and from well researched professional experiences.

It is a piece of great importance. A work which reflects upon the discipline of anthropology itself which is, as much as we may like to think otherwise, just as subject to our embedded assumptions and hierarchies as any other. Racism and sexism are still rife within our society, and only through allowing discussions such as these to come to the fore, do we have any hope of finding real lasting solutions, which will help us achieve true inclusivity in all walks of life.

(via anthmusings)

Anthropology as a discipline can be an intelligent voice for some populist causes, when it is not bogged down in academic elitism or navel gazing

[vintageanchorbooks]

“IN 1956 the Paris Review published a charmingly trenchant interview with William Faulkner. Like his novels, the man himself vacillated between cagey misdirection and evangelistic confidence:       INTERVIEWER: Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them? FAULKNER: Read it four times.” Read more in The Economist.

[vulnerablesoutherner]

Grumpy at its best

[vulnerablesoutherner]

Is it ‘Okay’ to be from the American South? or Et Tu Cletus?

Southerner here an irreligious, liberal, well-educated Southerner. Oh and I am a lady which adds that extra bit of ‘special’ when living in the South...but what I really want to know is-is it like okay to be from the South these days? I ask because since returning to the United States from planet Europe I’ve noticed quite the odd bit of anti-Southern prejudice in the mainstream media. Now, I acknowledge that the South has played a hand in this between its own complicated (and DARK) history and its confused present. I get it our politicians sometimes say and do ridiculous things and I often wonder is this a sort of rebellion against mainstream media and thought. So where does that leave us liberal Southerners? Many would say that leaves us not in the American South, that it leaves us with one option, to move away. This is a pretty crap choice for a number of reasons, one it feels like the cowards way out and secondly the amount of sheer prejudice you encounter outside the South from just being born there starts to make the anti-liberal crapolla you put up with while living in said Southern portion of the United States pretty minor by comparison. So to answer the question, no it’s not okay to be from the American South and not want to be either seen as part of the cast of Honey Boo Boo, a Duggar, a card carrying NRA member or a Tea Party supporter. The real enemy here, the fly in the ointment in liberal thought in the United States is that it has absorbed a sort of elitist class structure that if I had to put money on it I bet came from academia. Lately, this elitism has manifested itself in a nasty sort of regional prejudice.  Borrowing tenants from an area that exists within a rigid hierarchy (lots of genuflexion in academia) has hurt liberal thought because it has become divorced from populism. This has created a vacuum that the Republican Party has taken full advantage of and however you feel about their politics they have been brilliant at responding rising popular anxiety. The rising division between conservative and liberal thought in the US coupled with increased inequality in access to resources and income is I think a real threat to the stability of the United States. I wish we were working with each other because as it stands now these feels like a great pull between ideologies. So maybe the more important question for the US to ask as it heads into another election is;  what kind of country do we want to be?