Lake Mendota, today — fishing, kiting.

This is what's going on out in back of the Pyle Center, where I'm attending a law-race-feminism conference:





Blind item: What self-styled "feminist law professor" is trashing my blog because I'm blogging this conference? Hello? We're honoring the 25th Anniversary of the Feminism and Legal Theory Project and you're not here.

"Feminist theory offers students a way to think about gender as performance."

In college, performing gender.

"Some transmen want to be seen as men — they want to be accepted as born men. I want to be accepted as a transman — my brain is not gendered. There’s this crazy gender binary that’s built into all of life, that there are just two genders that are acceptable. I don’t want to have to fit into that."

Self-censorship for censorship.

A pro-Hillary DailyKos diarist is unhappy with the anti-Hillary Kos diarists and announces that he's not going to write until the administrators impose discipline. Silence to get other people to shut up? Does that ever work? Passive aggressive insistence on censorship? That's not very attractive.

"There once were two cats of Kilkenny/Each thought there was one cat too many..."

"So they fought and they fit, and they scratched and they bit/Till excepting their nails and the tips of their tails/Instead of two cats there weren't any."

Are Hillary and Barack taking each other out?

Asifa Quraishi: “Western feminists have lost opportunities to work with - rather than against - Islam and Muslim women."

At the Wisconsin Law School feminism conference, I'm listening to Wisconsin lawprof Asifa Quraishi. You can click on the link to the abstract of her paper here. Excerpt:

[Muslim women] are are a topic of feminist attention because Islam itself is considered to be a primary problem standing in the way of feminist work. More and more, Muslim women in my world feel the irony that dominant western feminism simultaneously ignores us and is obsessed with us. It is an attitude that echoes the colonialist mind.

Asifa finds and stresses the parts of the Islamic tradition that serve the interests of women and that make a stronger basis for arguments to people in Muslim countries than Western-style feminism and criticisms of Islam.

She asks: Why is the veil so important to Westerners? Aren't you subordinating Muslim women when you impose your interpretation that it symbolizes subordination? She says there could be an interpretation that veiling is empowering. Moreover, there is an Islamic tradition that can be understood to give women personal choice about covering her head.

Asifa is wearing a headscarf as she says this, and she talks about how she is perceived by Muslims and western feminists when she's wearing it. Then she removes the scarf and asks us if we now hear what she is saying differently. Something is gained and something is lost either wearing the scarf or not wearing the scarf — and she's seen this and struggled with it since she was a girl.

"Transgressive caregiving" and a view of a frozen lake.

At the race-and-feminism conference this morning, I'm sitting next to a huge window, with this view of Lake Mendota:



Ah! The warmth of home!

I'm listing to Utah lawprof Laura Kessler read from a paper about "Transgressive Caregiving." Transgressive caregiving? It sounds alarming. From her paper:

Can unpaid family caregiving be a form of political resistance or expression? I argue that it can, especially when done by people ordinarily denied the privilege of family privacy by the state. Unlike feminists from other disciplines, feminist and queer theorists within law have largely overlooked this aspect of caregiving, regarding unpaid family labor as a source of gender-based oppression or as an undervalued public good. Consequently, prominent feminist and queer theorists within law have set their sights on employment or sexual freedom as more promising sources of emancipation for women.

This book examines a less well-explored conception of family caregiving within law, revealing the way that family caregiving can be a liberating practice for caregivers. Specifically, sex, reproduction, parenting, and housework can constitute affirmative political practices of resistance to a host of discriminatory institutions and ideologies, including the family, workplace, and state, as well as patriarchy, racism, and homophobia. I label such political work “transgressive caregiving” and locate it most centrally—although not exclusively—in the care work of ethnic and racial minorities, gays and lesbians, and heterosexual men, whose family caregiving practices are the focus of the book.

Sex, reproduction, parenting, and housework can constitute affirmative political practices of resistance to a host of discriminatory institutions and ideologies.... Discuss!

ADDED: You can download Laura Kessler's article here.

Race and religion, Barack Obama and Clarence Thomas.

It's 3 a.m. ... And Ruth Anne Adams — commenter extraordinaire, historian of the Althouse blog, and Maternal Optimist blogger — is sending me email:

I spent a good bit of time reading the thread and the comments ["Barack Obama responds to the criticism over Jeremiah Wright"]. I kept thinking about Clarence Thomas' description of the nuns who, in the face of a segregated South, instilled in the students that they were all God's children, all worthy in dignity to learn and grow up in God's grace. I just think that there's something to chew on/turn over/mull. How did these two very prominent Black men look at the evil that is America's history with race and see it manifested in their personal religious worship? Clarence Thomas, as you may not know, has returned to full Communion with the Catholic Church. He did a fabulous interview with Raymond Arroyo of EWTN [Program #6, nun talk begins at 5:50 minutes into interview] when his book was published last year and he talked of the bitterness and hatred he could not carry. And I see Pastor Wright fomenting that bitterness and hatred.

In the Catholic Church, there are a few 'out there' parishes and the faithful know where they are. They are magnets for unorthodoxy of all kinds. If I were a politician and gaining some credibility because I called myself Catholic but I was going to these wayward parishes, I would justifiably get lots of flak. If I belonged to a 'Christian' white supremacist church, especially for 20 years, I couldn't wipe away that stink fast enough to become a credible candidate. Why is the reverse not obviously true? Is there a difference with John McCain accepting an endorsement from a daffy Catholic-hating powerful pastor with a brief visit and Barack Obama entrenching himself in his home parish? I think the Anchoress makes some reasonable points, but I think she's too generous to Barack. We're starting to see a pattern of America hatred with those people who are close to Obama. Glints of it appear when Michelle speaks [hey! has she been muzzled?] Most voters can't abide hating America to that extreme.

I bounced these off of you because I remember you simul-blogging Thomas' memoirs in the fall and I suspect you have a good basis to answer these questions that I'm merely musing about.

Glad you're back in Madison! The blog is so different there.

Ruth Anne :)

Thanks! And the blog's different without Ruth Anne in the comments, but I think she — and someone else you've probably missed — will be back in a week or so.

Lawprof Patricia Williams is giving a talk called "Moaning in America."

Now, I'm at the feminism conference here at the University of Wisconsin Law School, and Pat Williams is giving the keynote speech. She begins with the image of a "twinning doll" – an image she used in this column in The Nation.

She's looking at "3 narrative models": 1. the "neo-kumbayan moment" (denial, cynicism, Ward Connerly... "just stop talking about it"), 2. the "neo-biologizing moment, through the discourse of DNA," 3. economic choice ("I want to engage with the Law and Economics movement").

She's talking about the Democratic primary, the toxic identity politics. What can we do?

Pat is very interesting and funny talking about multiracial families: Angelina Jolie and her mixed race brood and a woman who is suing because a medical mix-up led to her giving birth to a partially black child.

What would Barack Obama look like if he were a woman? Would he look like Susan Estrich, Geraldine Ferraro, or Oprah Winfrey? When Oprah endorsed him, "race rushed in."

UPDATE, next morning: I have to apologize for not conveying more of what Pat said last night. It is extremely hard to convey the sense of what she says without giving long quotes, which I can't do in real time, because she also speaks very quickly and continually makes surprising connections. She has a beautiful voice and brings in a lot of detailed stories and images. This is mesmerizing, and I enjoyed listening closely, but I could not bring it to you convincingly. I don't want you to think this was because she wasn't saying anything. She was saying too much. This was not, however, an extemporaneous speech. She was reading. So go read some of her columns. I've linked one.

AND: Scroll down on this page and you'll find capsule descriptions and links to many of Pat's columns, some of which were the basis of the talk she gave last night. There is, for example, this one:

The March 22 [2007] New York Post offered a fascinating study in the contradictions of our culture. The top half of the front page was consumed by "a stunning mother-child portrait" of Angelina Jolie with her newest adopted child, or as the Post put it, her "Viet man." The lower half of the page was given over to a more lurid headline ("Baby Bungle: White Folks' Black Child") trumpeting "a Park Avenue fertility clinic's blunder" that "left a family devastated--after a black baby was born to a Hispanic woman and her white husband."

The story about Jolie's magical mothering of her rainbow brood was a fairy tale of happily ever after. The bungled baby story, meanwhile, was considerably less heartwarming: Long Islanders Nancy and Thomas Andrews had trouble conceiving after the birth of their first daughter. They employed in vitro fertilization and baby Jessica was born. Jessica is darker skinned than either of the Andrewses, a condition their obstetrician initially called an "abnormality." She'll "lighten up," said that good doctor. Subsequent paternity tests showed that Nancy's egg was fertilized by sperm other than Tom's. The couple has sued.

That column is old enough that you have to subscribe to The Nation to read the whole thing, but there are many others available in full, and I realize I've been remiss in not reading them and blogging them on a regular basis.

Here's her piece on Oprah and Obama. Excerpt:

[T]heir particular form of raced celebrity enshrines the notion of American mobility at a moment when it is--in reality--sorely vexed. ... Obama radiates a kind of hope that crosses the immigrant epic with a romantic desire for rainbow diversity. Similarly, Oprah is the black, female, Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches story of our day. From her humble beginnings as a traumatized little girl, albeit pluckier even than Orphan Annie (we Americans do love "pluck"), Oprah reinvented herself by sheer will and rose against all odds to the very top of the phantasmagorical bubble machine we call the entertainment industry. There's a general fear of, as well as attraction to, that bubble. Is the celebrity a platform or a dog-and-pony show? Is it serious debate or entertainment? How easy the purchase of cynicism.

But if we're lucky, maybe something enduring comes of artfully imagining our ideals.

"A person's a person, no matter how small."

Is "Horton Hears a Who" about abortion?

Photos from the cheese contest.

The international community of cheese judges converges on Madison, Wisconsin.

Barack Obama responds to the criticism over Jeremiah Wright.

I've been feeling remiss that I hadn't done a post yet about the Jeremiah Wright controversy, but since I'm entering the dispute late, let me start with Obama's response:

As I have written about in my books, I first joined Trinity United Church of Christ nearly twenty years ago. I knew Rev. Wright as someone who served this nation with honor as a United States Marine, as a respected biblical scholar, and as someone who taught or lectured at seminaries across the country, from Union Theological Seminary to the University of Chicago. He also led a diverse congregation that was and still is a pillar of the South Side and the entire city of Chicago. It's a congregation that does not merely preach social justice but acts it out each day, through ministries ranging from housing the homeless to reaching out to those with HIV/AIDS.

Most importantly, Rev. Wright preached the gospel of Jesus, a gospel on which I base my life. In other words, he has never been my political advisor; he's been my pastor. And the sermons I heard him preach always related to our obligation to love God and one another, to work on behalf of the poor, and to seek justice at every turn.

The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation. When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign. I made it clear at the time that I strongly condemned his comments. But because Rev. Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of my strong links to the Trinity faith community, where I married my wife and where my daughters were baptized, I did not think it appropriate to leave the church.

Isn't that enough?

ADDED: Here's the NYT article about the controversy, with an interesting photograph that makes Jeremiah Wright appear to be a white man.

So, yes, I've flown out of New York.

And I'm here in Madison. No race-and-feminism conferencing yet for me. I'm too late for the afternoon session. But I will make it to this evening's keynote speech from Columbia lawprof Patricia Williams. It's called "Moaning in America," and I'm expecting multilayered wordplay and... what? Anti-Reaganism? Suffering? Sex?

Meanwhile, I'm resting up — sipping cappuccino in my favorite Madison café.

It's not as if the trip was grueling, though we did spend an extra half hour on the ground. The air traffic was backed up this morning after President Bush flew in through La Guardia to give this talk at the Economic Club. (He said we're going through a "tough time" but we should "bounce back.") The only reason I knew is that my car service driver pointed out the helicopters flying overhead in formation.

The driver seemed pretty interested in politics. He had the news radio on and when the story on Eliot Spitzer elicited a barely audible scoff from me, he struck up a conversation about it. He assured me that all men, given the chance, would do what Spitzer did, and that Spitzer's enemies went after him and brought him down.

"I'm from Egypt," he said and proceeded to tell me about an Egyptian politician who was destroyed by a trumped up charge of rape against his son which tricked the man into trying to bribe the authorities, and so he was caught and destroyed. That is to say: there is human nature, and that is simply a given; the real problem is those people who set out to destroy a political opponent.

But don't you think that once someone is in power, it is his responsibility to refrain from doing those things that will allow his enemies to take him down?

No, all men will do this. This is the way men are.

Even Barack Obama?

I was going to say even Mitt Romney?, but I thought Barack Obama would make a better question, and in fact, he didn't want to say Barack Obama would do the same thing. He went back to stressing that it is the enemies who seek to destroy a man who deserve our scorn.



The plane was tiny and there was hardly anyone on it, but it was a smooth nonstop flight, and I passed the time this way:

1. I did a packet of Brooklyn-themed crosswords that Eric Berlin sent me after I blogged about the movie "Wordplay." (You can get them here for $1.99.) In the movie, they make a big deal about how the annual tournament must — as a matter of long tradition — take place at the Marriott in Stamford, Connecticut, but in fact, this year's tournament was in the Marriott that's 2 blocks away from where I was at Brooklyn Law School. Too bad I missed it! But it was really nice of Eric to notice and to send me the the Brooklyn-themed puzzles he'd constructed for the event.

2. I watched the new episode of "Survivor," the one where — spoiler alert — Jonathan's leg wound swells up and threatens his life and they need to tear him away from the game and the people he loves, and then Chet whines about a boo-boo on his foot that he thinks is getting infected and he insists that the others vote him out — which they do. The Jonathan-Chet contrast is a brilliant case study in masculinity. There was also some hilarious fake-idol-finding by Jason and impressive pole-carrying by James. And then, in the end, I totally fell for the editing that made me think dear, sweet, flexible, swimmy Ozzy was in danger. Surely, if they were blindsiding him, he'd have felt the vibe and played his real immunity idol, but it was nerve-racking there for a second.

3. I read the Peter Bagge comic in the new issue of Reason magazine — the one where he's traveling around New Hampshire, covering the primaries, almost adulating Ron Paul and then facing up to the reality of that racist newsletter. I don't think the comic is linkable yet on line, so pick up the paper copy of the magazine. I've been getting my courtesy copy in the mail ever since this encounter. If only the blogging life had more things like that in it. Not too many more, but a few.

4. With a little more time, I turned the magazine page and read this article about — guess what? — prostitutes!— completely unrelated to the Eliot Spitzer downfall. It's a review of "Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul," by Karen Abbott. The review begins with a description of a high class whorehouse, circa 1907:

The Everleigh Club was an ornate mansion. Thirty themed boudoirs (“the Japanese Parlor,” “the Moorish Room,” “the Egyptian Room”) included absurd touches of decadence, such as hidden buttons to ring for champagne and a fountain that fired a jet of perfume. The city’s finest chefs prepared the women’s dinners. They read poetry by the fire with guests, who included the writers Theodore Dreiser and Ring Lardner. Sometimes Minna and Ada let swarms of butterflies fly loose throughout the house.

Then, I got to thinking about that question I'd just posed on the blog before getting onto the plane. I reconsidered, picturing it with themed boudoirs, champagne buttons, perfume fountains, top chefs, famous writer clients, and butterflies.

5. I gazed out at the clouds and the brown-and-white Wisconsin land below and daydreamed.

No snowglobes.

If it was legal, would you want to be a prostitute?

Megan McArdle's readers insist that her support for legalized prostitution ought to force her to deal with the question whether she'd do the work herself. Her answer — sensible up to a point — is there are plenty of jobs she doesn't want to do. Her post doesn't explore whether we ought to protect young, weak, and economically hard-pressed individuals from doing things that will probably hurt them. The question is how harmful is the work — if you consider what it would be if it were legal? So thinking about whether you would want to do it — when you are not a weak or desperate person — is a decent test of whether it is so harmful that the law should be used to protect people from it. Admittedly, this is only looking at whether the prostitute is harmed by prostitution, but let's focus on that. Would you consider a career in prostitution? Assume reasonable benefits: great pay, excellent health care, a safe, well-run workplace, interesting colleagues. Would you?

ADDED: I reconsider the question in light of butterflies.

Very obedient doggies.

And a chimp who's obedient — but wily — and only up to a point.

Via Metafilter, where someone says no cat would do that which provokes a link to this.

Is this wrong? Is there an ethical violation in using animals for comedy? Speaking of animal ethics, did you watch "America's Next Top Model" this week? Whatever you think about meat generally, what do you think about a reality show competition where the women have to pose in meat panties?

Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro. She's important!

And she's certainly not the stereotypical "single mother" she's stood for in Obama campaign rhetoric.

ADDED Jezebel comments:

The Times posits that her legacy is apparent in Obama's "self-assurance and drive, his boundary bridging, even his apparent comfort with strong women." I think her legacy has other ramifications as well. If Barack wins the presidency, the specter of Stanley Ann could put the nail in the coffin on the right-wing love affair with the "nuclear family." It's obvious that in this country, and in much of the world, the shiny, suburban two-parent household is mostly a Dick Van Dyke-ian fantasy. If a boundary breaking, unapologetic single mother could raise a son who becomes President, the notion that being raised in a traditional household is ideal would take a real hit.

On the other hand, Obama seems to have embraced all that his mother eschewed: he married into a tightly knit, Christian family. He's never moved his kids around -- he and Michelle have (smartly) created a very stable world for their daughters, Malia and Natasha.