Day: July 30, 2011

How Would You Handle This?

~ Clarissa ~ 51 Comments

Miriam asked me to share one of my experiences with burqa-clad students that fuels my belief in the appropriateness of the ban on burqas in Western societies. Feel free to weigh in.

I had a burqa-wearing student in my Beginners language course at my very first university. This is a very interactive course where students are expected to speak to each other, enact scenes, move around the classroom, and interact with each other in a variety of ways. The burqa student, let’s call her A., sat in a corner during the entire semester and didn’t participate a single time. I never heard her (I assume, but who really knows?) voice. It is difficult as it is to create an environment in the classroom where students are not inhibited to speak in a new language. A silent, shrouded presence in the classroom definitely didn’t help. I always try to help students relax by telling them that everybody makes mistakes and that nobody will laugh at them because everybody is in the same boat. In this case, these arguments were a waste of time.

During the exams in these courses, students are supposed to place their IDs on their desks while they are writing the exam. An invigilator walks around and compares the ID with the face of the student writing the exam. This procedure is especially crucial for language classes because there have been cases when students sneaked a native speaker to take the exam in their  place.

I was confronted by a group of angry students from my course who demanded an explanation as to why A.’s identity didn’t have to be verified. One student aggressively told me that the next time he will come to the exam in a mask and we will just have to trust that it’s him and not his best friend from Mexico. I had no idea how to explain why one of the students was being given a preferential treatment during the entire course, as well as during the exams.

At that time, I was only learning how to be a college-level teacher. All I did in response was mumble incoherently and feel uncomfortable. Today, I know how I should have handled this issue.

What would you do in such a situation?

How Feminism Helped a Bad Student

~ Clarissa ~ 8 Comments

A reader just wrote in to say that she enjoys my stories about the Soviet Union. (Thank you, kind reader!) So I decided to share yet another story. It is post-Soviet but still fun.

In Ukraine, I was a university student at the Department of Foreign Languages. The way the system worked was that an oral final exam counted for 100% of the final grade. You had to show up a the exam at the end of the semester, choose a random piece of paper among the many on the professor’s desk, take a few minutes to prepare, and speak on the 2 or 3 topics on your paper. In some courses, you needed to write a final essay to be allowed to take the exam.

I worked hard to make a living when I was a student. For this reason, I rarely showed up at the university. Normally, I’d just read the textbook the day before the exam and get a top grade as a result. The quality of education was pathetically low, and I saw no reason to waste my time coming to classes where the professor did nothing but read the same textbook out loud.

One of the courses I had to take was Sociology. I didn’t attend a single lecture or seminar. At that point in time, I was busy finishing a big translation for the Academy of Arts and Sciences of the Russian Federation. There had been an accident a little while before where I had suffered severe burns to my arm. I still had to type up my translation for hours each day, which I did while shrieking in pain from my damaged arm and hand.

So, of course, the Sociology course was the last thing on my mind. I didn’t even find an opportunity to go to the library and take out the textbook before the exam. For my final essay, I went to the British Council, took out several books on feminism, and used them to write my essay. I translated the sources and even quoted them. I was very interested in feminism at that point and cared little that nobody around me had any knowledge about what the word stood for.

When I arrived at the exam and took the paper with my questions, I realized that I had not the slightest idea what the terminology used in the questions even meant. I had no textbook or notes or anything with me. So, of course, I prepared myself to failing the exam very spectacularly.

The professor in the course was a young, nerdy-looking guy. Since I had never come to class, that was the first time I saw him. Now I not only had missed every single day of class and came to the exam unprepared. I had also handed in an essay that passionately defended feminism to a male professor in a rabidly patriarchal society.

As I was sitting there, staring despondently at my questions, the professor suddenly asked,

“Which one of you is called Clarissa?”

“Me,” I answered in a tenuous little voice.

“You are the student who handed in an essay on feminism, right? It was absolutely brilliant! I loved it,” the professor suddenly announced. “You can go now, I will give you an A for the course.”

As I crept out of the room, I mused that feminism was even better than I’d thought before.

What I Have Done to Adapt

~ Clarissa ~ 27 Comments

People have somehow gathered from my recent posts that I defend the right of immigrants not to adapt in any way to their new country. Nothing could be further from my point of view. I emigrated twice, and every time worked hard on figuring out how things worked in my new country and adapting to them. Unless you are willing to engage in such efforts, you have no business emigrating, in my opinion. One of the reasons why emigration can be so helpful to one’s personal development is precisely that one goes through this transformative process and learn new things about oneself. (Zygmunt Bauman talks about it better than I ever could, so I won’t retell his ideas.)

So here are some of the things that I learned to do differently after I emigrated:

– I now pay taxes honestly and in full. What’s more, it makes me feel good to do so.

– I haven’t plagiarized a single assignment when I was a student. (In my country, you had to quote without attributing. It was required.)

– All of my whorish attires have been sacrificed. Oh, I miss them sorely. . .  🙂

– I now say “Hi, how are you?”, “Please” and “Thank you.” Sometimes, I even smile at strangers.

– I don’t steal office supplies from work. I have been tempted, I confess, but I haven’t done it.

– When a stranger politely addresses me in the street with “Excuse me, Ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you”, I don’t bark “What??” in response. I’ve even been known to say, “Yes, how can I help you?” a couple of times.

– I don’t toady to my supervisors at work.

– I don’t humiliate, offend or demean students in any way.

– During departmental meetings, I vote my conscience, even when everybody else’s vote is different.

– I refuse to be afraid of expressing my opinion.

– I have learned to enjoy a hamburger. (That’s one of the most surprising adjustments to me.)

– I don’t call people after 9 pm and don’t arrive unannounced at their doorstep.

– When a bar closes at an ungodly hour of 11 pm, I meekly pack up and go home.

– I don’t scoff at everything any man says the second he says it. I now listen and even engage in a dialogue.

– I have learned to wait in line for a bus, instead of running to the doors like a tornado, sweeping everybody off my path.

There is room for growth, of course, since I am yet to learn to operate a grill, remember what sport St. Louis Cardinals play, and wear jeans.

What did you do to adapt to a country where you emigrated, studied or lived for a while?

First Blogger, Now LiveJournal. Who’s Next?

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

First, Blogger started malfunctioning in April-May of this year. As a result, many people left the platform and moved their blogs somewhere else.

Now LiveJournal has crashed. From what I hear, LJ bloggers now have limits on how long their posts can be. And still, nobody guarantees that the blogs will work. (If you think Blogger’s customer service is bad, you need to meet LJ’s. That one is truly abysmal.)

This shows either that blogging is becoming more popular with every passing day or that somebody is sabotaging popular blogging platforms. I’m not very much into conspiracy theories, so, for me, blogging is on the rise.

Blogging offers so much creative freedom that no Twitter, Facebook or Google+ can substitute it. It is a way to go beyond the triviality of posting endless pictures of boring events and senseless status updates. Its goal is not to let you sort your small group of acquaintances into a great number of circles to convince yourself you are more important and popular than you are in reality.

Blogging is all about expressing yourself in a way that makes it quite obvious very soon whether you actually have a self to express.

Changes in the Ways of Making a Living

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

If people whose main form of entertainment is to whine about how everything is getting worse were simply to add “for men” to their statements, I’d have no problem with them. They never remember to do that, though. I see examples of this bemoaning of some vaguely defined prelapsarian moment when sugar was sweeter and salt was saltier on a regular basis. Here is one such article that attempts to tell us how horribly difficult it has become to make a living in Canada as opposed to an unnamed “before” when everything was so much better. I took the statements the article makes and applied them to the lives of women before the feminist revolution of the 70ies.

The old world was marked by full-time jobs, stable work environments and long-term employment.

For women, it was marked by either full-time housewifery or endless sexual harassment at work and inescapable discrimination in the job market. What a jolly place that old world was.

The new world, however, is characterized by short-term jobs. You may be on contract; you may be a temporary employee; you may work part-time. But the key is that you will probably be hired for a very short period (“just-in time work” is the moniker) and then “let go when the work is done.”

How is this new? Women were employed on precisely this basis pretty much forever. If anything, the situation has gotten better in the sense that now you are less likely to be stuck in the cycle of short-term employment based on gender.

You will have no pension, no benefits, no vacations, no sick days.

This was always the reality of women whose only way of making a living was to get married.

How do you find a job? The labour market is like a fish market: You are selling a commodity — in this case yourself.

In order to snag husbands who would feed them, women had to spend their formative years trying to sell themselves. They did it in ways far more demeaning than what today’s job applicant in Canada has to experience during the interview process.

And just as a fishmonger might wrap his mackerel in a fancy package, so you must make your labour power attractive to prospective buyers.

Women had to make themselves look as pretty, dumb, chirpy, and passive as possible in order to find a good, paying customer.

Constant retraining (what politicians call education) is a necessity in this new world. But it never allows you to escape; it just lets you keep up.

In order to retain the paying customer’s interest and avoid being swapped for a younger, fresher model, women read tons of crappy manuals that taught them to wrap themselves in transparent plastic, have the dinner always ready, and be constantly smiling.

People like this journalist can go on whining and moaning about the loss of paradise. For women, however, no moment in the past was greater than today. And tomorrow will be only better.

Femininity, Part III

~ Clarissa ~ 16 Comments

Now, the way things are is that some people enjoy enacting femininity. You will be shocked but many of us enjoy it not because we want to attract men* but simply because we enjoy it. I, for one, definitely don’t want to attract anybody because I’m in a very happy ultra-monogamous relationship and my partner adores me no matter how I look, what I wear, and what gender identity I choose to enact at any given moment. I know there is a crowd of pseudo-feminists who will rush to suggest that I’m too stupid to understand my own enslavement. For them, enacting femininity is always about pleasing some guy. This says a lot about them and nothing about me.

Culturally, spending an hour doing my make-up and lying in a bath-tub for two hours with my favorite mask on is my way of stating that I have a right to my time. My number one priority in life is enjoying myself and I’ll be damned if I feel guilty for not serving anybody else’s needs every second of my life, as the preceding generations of Soviet women did. On a personal level, I just dig it.

It is perfectly OK not to enjoy enacting your femininity in a very traditional (or any other) way. A decision not to enact it, however, does not make you any more feminist. Just like the decision to do it doesn’t make you any less so.

*In case you don’t believe me, check out this post by a lesbian autistic who loves enacting femininity and sharing this experience with her trans girl-friend.  I’m sure we can all agree that no male gaze is being targeted by this couple’s practice of femininity.