College Feminists Connect!

Dr. Miranda Joseph: Gender, Entrepreneurial Subjectivity, and Pathologies of Personal Finance

Today, Macalester College's Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department hosted Dr. Miranda Joseph to talk about gendered subjects as constructed through economic hegemonies.  Dr. Miranda Joseph is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Arizona - her first book, Against the Romance of Community, utilizes Marxist theory to examine the hyper-idealized vocabulary of community. She is currently working on a project called A Debt to Society, which is the research she drew from for her speech tonight.

Dr. Joseph walked us through the basic progression of economics in the U.S. - starting with a production-based late 19th century, moving to a consumption-happy mid-20th century.  She argues that post-1970s, the idea of the individual as the financer came to the forefront in response to lowered wages.  Finance created a system of credit and debt to make up for this lost income.  Today, our personal identities are inextricably linked to our ability to finance, as Dr. Joseph highlighted in noting that "identity theft" primarily refers to a stolen credit card.  After the 2008 financial crisis, a narrative was constructed to explain the economic collapse, which blamed the individual for making poor choices about mortgages they couldn't afford or understand. Dr. Joseph's research analyzes how gender and sexuality are implicated in this narrative, via marketing strategies, popular culture, and social science scholarship/research.  

Let’s Talk About Rape Culture on Campus

It’s Fall Semester! Welcome back to school!

And welcome back to yet another example of the rape culture on our college campuses.

On my way to my faculty office, which is in the lower level of a residence hall, I spied a bulletin board titled “Hook Pick Up Line And Sinker” on prominent display in one of the main hallways.

“Um, what?!” I said to myself, as I began to examine the many items on the board, which were carefully printed on colored paper, cut out and double-mounted on a different color, and then artfully placed on the board. They were examples of pick up lines one might use to “hook up” and eventually “sink her.”  Here are a few gems: 

• Oh, I’m sorry . . . I thought that was a Braille name tag
• Your daddy must be a hunter because he sure caught a fox
• Ya know, if we cut your arms off, you’d look just like Venus de Milo
• Want to become a STUD. You know, you can’t spell stud without STD and U.

As Seth and Amy would say: Really!?! 

First, we have the line that is to be delivered as a phony apology after violating a woman’s body – one can only assume the line is to be said while a woman’s breast is being touched in the fashion of a person with blindness reading a Braille text. This one gets double points for demeaning both people with visual disabilities and women.