My last post is a whole week ago, marking my kids’ back to school daze. Maybe I had to get back to school, too, before I could feel energized about blogging again? My classes started yesterday, and I think I’ve got a great crop of students this term. I’m not yet sure they’ve got a great instructor. I nearly left my notes, handouts, and class roster at home this morning! My brain is mired somewhere around August 25th – jubilant to have a moment to think without hearing “Mama, Mama,” yet unencumbered by responsibility. Ha! Responsibility? That rump brain of mine had better catch up, stat.
Anyway. I taught my first Feminist Theory class today, and the students were an absolute joy – already engaged and passionate before I did anything to ignite them. They also show indications of thinking hard and deep, and while that’s just what I’d expect, it means I’d better get with the program! I asked them to introduce themselves by going around the room and describing what brought them to feminism/gender studies, and what most stuck with them from their coursework so far. Next thing you knew, we were in the midst of an old-tyme consciousness-raising session. After the break we got back to more detached theorizing, but our mini-CR session turned into a spirited ice-breaker.
All hell broke loose when a student I know well from a previous class described her frustrations: “I just feel so angry and bitter.” The class erupted in nods and yeses and “me toos.” By that point, several students had disclosed or hinted at some difficult personal situations: assault, family violence, and the like. Even more had described becoming aware of the little, everyday things that made them feel diminished because they were female-bodied.
Their response set me thinking about anger, and bitterness, and what’s politically useful, and what’s personally poisonous.
I see a big gulf between anger and bitterness. Both are legitimate emotions, and both may need to be expressed so that we can master them before they master us. But bitterness? It’s paralytic. Bitterness springs from hopelessness and despair. Bitterness rests on the assumption – or fear – that nothing can ever really improve. Bitterness consigns us to passivity and fatalism.
Anger, on the other hand, calls us to action. That only works if we can imagine strategies and tactics that will lead us toward a better world, which is easier said than done. Anger, too, can become toxic, especially if we direct it inward rather than outward, or if we keep it bottled up, or if we hallucinate that any and every expression of anger is productive. Sometimes, anger is just stupid and hurtful. But at least it doesn’t pin us down like captive butterflies. If we combine it with analysis, it can give us the energy to make the world incrementally better.
I don’t have all the answers. This is what I said to my students: When you’re feeling frustrated and hopeless, know that in time, you’ll observe how change occurs, even if it’s glacial. The signal issue that has changed during my adulthood is marriage equality. It wasn’t even on the map in the early 1980s, when I was the age of my students. Now it’s a no-brainer even among many conservative and/or fundamentalist students.
Basically, I launched into a far less eloquent version of Martin Luther King’s famous statement: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Except my version of it featured my youthful anger at James Bond movies, complete with steam puffing out my ears (for some reason, my students found that image hilarious), and I didn’t quite dare to offer them the promise of justice, someday. Instead, I held out the more modest promise that generational change would extinguish Neolithic ideas about gender.
I don’t have all the answers. I’ve merely lived roughly twice as long as my students. Which doesn’t stop them from being further and faster evolved than I: a whole bunch of them mentioned intersectionality and trans issues as dear to their hearts. I’m blown away by their casual use of the term “cis,” which no one even imagined publicly when I first explored gender issues in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Maybe I’m less caught up in anger and bitterness only because I’m old (in internet and cat years) and a natural slacker?
If you’ve got favorite tactics for turning anger – or even bitterness – into something positive, I’d love to hear about them.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
perhaps not everything you’re looking for in an answer:
applying for a volunteer position with planned parenthood; flipping off the pro-lifers who rally the street near where i work in cleveland (ok, not so positive)
sharing fem-centric books and the podcast ‘the lesbian mafia’ with friends. the podcast is by a feminist who shares her political views with a lot of laughs. very therapeutic indeed. as a young female with very few older feminists to talk to/look up to, listening to this lady talk has been very grounding.
a few months ago i started to bike across the country and then some all by my lonesome. not for charity or to fly my flag, but just because i could. this in the face of many trying to discourage me and tell me to find a job or work on my career. i have never experienced a better release of anger and gained such a sense of accomplishment, nor have i ever had so many people/women young and old tell me they were inspired by what i was doing. that’s positive! hopefully by inspired they meant encouraged to just do something that makes them happy.
again, my answer is probably far less political than what you may be looking for, but anger should in my opinion not be bottled up. to me at my age (23) this means doing f* you activities and rallying behind those share the same beliefs.
Well, there’s absolutely no “right” or “wrong” answer here. I am sure, though, that one way to ensure that one isn’t simply swamped by anger is to hold onto a part of one’s life that isn’t all about politics. By that I don’t mean that there are areas of life that remain untouched by politics. Rather, I think it’s important to shift one’s focus away from the political at least some of the time. The alternative is burn-out and despair.
What works at one phase of life may also differ in the next phase. It’s pretty tough to sustain anger over decades. A few people manage to do this, but most of us end up sublimating the anger into other directions, some of them politically productive, others just good for the soul. I’m probably more selective about what I allow to really rile me up than I was 25 years ago.
I totally agree that it’s not good to bottle up anger. It *is* good to channel it. And if that means saying – or gesturing – FU in certain instances, that’s one way to go.
It sounds like you had an awesome experience riding. It’s wonderful to hear from you! (I appreciated your comment on the salmonella thread, too, just didn’t get around to responding there because I’ve been trying to gear up for the new quarter and kick the late-summer cold I caught.)
You can thank the Internet for “cisgender.” We know it was coined independently twice on newsgroups in the mid-1990s, which suggests that individual transfolk probably thought of it earlier. But the existence of groups like alt.transgendered and soc.support.transgendered* made it possible for the term to spread within the trans community, from which it was eventually disseminated to the feminist community.
*Of course, these days, lots of us object to the use of “ed” on the end of “transgender,” for some very good reasons. I don’t know if any of these things had been articulated in the mid-1990s, though.
I don’t think I heard of the term “cis” until I started reading feminist blogs, which for me (as a relative latecomer) was 2006/07. I used to shy away from discussing trans issues in the classroom because I was worried that we wouldn’t get past the sort of “freak show” mentality that you find on Jerry Springer, etc. It’s only through online discussions that I’ve felt I’ve become clued-in enough to help students navigate around this. (What some of them believe privately may still be another matter, but they do grasp that being openly judgmental is not OK.)
Thanks to the link to Joanne Herman’s article. Someone set me straight on the -ed a couple of years ago (I think it may have been C.L. Minou?) but this is a nice, concise exposition of why the -ed is a bad idea.