Hair

Recently I cut my hair shorter than I ever have before. Although I keep my hair long most of the time, I have regularly cut it quite short (usually in the spring) and let it grow back out again throughout my life. But this time was different. This time I went to the shop with pictures, explained what I wanted and when I got home and the next morning still felt like they hadn’t listened, I returned and asked them to cut off those extra few inches they left on top. Now my hair is 2-3 inches long and I love it. LOVE IT.

Here’s the thing. I don’t say this to brag, but I have stunningly beautiful hair. Like, Disney princess beautiful. It’s thick, luscious, and when it’s long, my locks are the color of spun gold that strangers can’t resist touching. But it wasn’t working for me.

See, after a heart-shattering breakup this last winter I finally decided I was ready to venture out of my lonely grieving and start dating again. So I went out to what seemed the most logical of places: the local gay bar. Unfortunately, as seems to be my sorry lot in life, my first few attempts at lady wooing turned up nothing but drunk, straight men who stared at my breasts and offered to buy me drinks. In short: it sucked.

I felt like I was screaming for a woman to notice me on the inside, but that on the outside I just looked like another Mormon girl looking for her post-missionary husband. I decided that if I’m going to start attracting women in this region of the world, I needed to do something to make myself more obvious as a dyke.

I wouldn’t exactly call my new pixie cut butch, nor do I look even a little androgynous in my typical skirt and bosom-flattering tee, however, I am ten days into this haircut and I feel a sense of freedom like I have never felt before. For the first time in my life I feel like I’m invisible to some men. And, better still, I feel like some women are nicer to me, smile at me more, and even flirt with me when I least expect it. I don’t know what it is about Deseret that makes women with short hair “automatically” lesbians, but I’ve started working with the system instead of against it and things are looking up.

What about you, dear reader? Do you think people treat you differently depending on your haircut? Do you have short hair or long? Why do you prefer one or the other?

Let's Talk Glee!

First, let me say that I consider myself a Gleek.
Second, I was disturbed by the direction of last night's depiction of domestic violence.

I think Alyssa Rosenberg writes very intelligently and provocatively about this and other issues with the show's depiction of characters in crisis in her recent article, ‘Glee’ Is an Immoral Television Show and It’s Time to Stop Watching It. I know it is easier to critique the things we don't like, but I believe it is often most important to interrogate what we do. Murphy is doing a lot of really interesting, really positive things with this show, but he and his writers are not perfect. We shouldn't gloss over their shortcomings just because we are all so excited to see two cheerleaders making out.

I'm really curious about what you all think of the show. And, in particular, I am curious about your reactions to the Coach Bieste storyline. Does Glee exploit the oppressed? Is it distracting and manipulating us with its portrayal of trauma?

Share your thoughts, readers! Let's talk Glee.

May Day 2012

May Day 2012

Although I can’t be certain that the students who tossed homemade explosives from their dorm windows last night were actually partaking in ancient pagan tradition, I’d like to think that they were and that this event had nothing to do with the growing tensions on our campus. It’s May Day and when I first started conceiving this entry I thought it might be a more joyous affair, a celebratory epistle to the blogosphere of my emergence from the dark, lonely coldness of winter into the warm sun of spring flowers and bird song. And, in preparation, I revisited Geoffrey Chaucer’s description of May festivities in The Court of Love (1561):

And furth goth all the Court, both most and lest,

To feche the floures fressh, and braunche and blome;

And namly, hawthorn brought both page and grome.

With fressh garlandës, in partie blewe and white,

And thaim rejoysen in their greet delyt. (1431-35)

I love the way these lines emphasize the communal experience and the congregation and unity of those great and small, “most and lest.” As the remnants of winter melted away to reveal a green, living, blossoming landscape, Chaucer portrays a court that has laid aside difference and gathered to celebrate in shared delight.

However, one can’t dwell in idealism. There is more to May Day than flower garlands and festive dance. Alongside the fertility and beginning of the planting season that the festival marks, are also the associated aspects of purging and cleansing. In the Celtic Beltane Fire Festival, the rites of lighting sacred fires at the beginning of May served as a precaution against sinister forces, like witchcraft, that were thought to be particularly rampant at the beginning of summer. Similarly, during the Germanic Walpurgis Night, celebrated on the Eve of May Day, branches were tied to cattle and houses to keep witches away and fires were lit at the dawn to burn them out.

I imagine our merry pranksters were probably lighting things on fire in an effort to purge the demons of stress and the pressure witches that fight so fiercely by semester’s end. But let’s not forget that this could have been more. Let’s not forget that the tensions on campus between administrators and faculty are not just felt by them. Let’s not forget that bigotry and prejudice against those outside the religious, racial, political, or sexual majority affects us all. Our community is weakened when we dwell in difference. Let’s light the fires that burn out discrimination. Let’s annihilate the sinister force of hate with our fires of love.

This May, let’s commune together. Let’s gather to celebrate life and to purge darkness.

Works Cited & Consulted

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer Vol. 7. Ed. Rev. Walter W. Skeat 2^nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899. Print.

James, E.O. Seasonal Feasts and Festivals. London: Thames and Hudson, 1961. Print. 

Too academic. Not enough dyke.

I scared myself away, and that totally misses the point. “So study evermore is overshot,” I’m inclined to sigh in honor of Berowne.[1] I set up this blog for creative freedom. As a place to write when I’m not really up for writing the items on my academic to do list. Must we recap? It exhausts me to think about everything I’ve written lately and it’s more exhausting still to think of everything I have left to write. And then, what woe, to scare myself away from my own blog and just when I needed a place to practice the craft without all the pressure.

But I set my own bar and lately I’ve had to confront some self-knowledge that I’d been blissfully denying. I’m an overachiever. And sometimes, so it would seem, this can yield negative results. Like when setting one’s own bar, for example.

Hereby, I will stop citing critical sources![2] And just write! Ah, to cry the charge of so many petulant writers before me! It satisfies. Try it.

And so I resolve to write with abandon. I will quench my insatiable thirst for (anonymous) publication by writing about my ordinary life.[3] But, ordinarily, my mind is on her. She inspires me to work and to rest, both to my fullest potential, and reminds me to learn the really important things first. And so, with Berowne, I sigh: “If knowledge be the mark, to know thee shall suffice.[4]”

---

[1] Shakespeare, William. Love’s Labor’s Lost (I.i.142), 1594.

[2] As a tribute to my students, who teach me everything I need to know most, I also dropped the requirement I had for a works cited page and critical sources from the draft of an analytical essay assignment before I published it.

[3] Which, by the way, totally makes me want to cite an article I just read in PMLA by Joshua Gamson, “The Unwatched Life Is Not Worth Living: The Elevation of the Ordinary in Celebrity Culture, 2011. Also, Modern Language Association, I apologize for totally obfuscating any sense of proper citation format. I’m abandoning it. For the blog’s sake. I’m switching to simplicity-focused footnotes, but only here. Don’t hate me.

[4] ---. (IIV.ii.228).

Definitions: Dykademic & Deseret

Dykademic

I am indebted to Bonnie J. Morris, a women's studies professor at George Washington University, for my use of the term dykademic. I ran across an article by Morris earlier this year during a rather lonely and depressing time for me and her powerful word gave me that unmatachable freedom and potential that comes from self-naming. Finally, I had a name for who/what I was. Although I had been well-aware of my same-sex attraction for a long time, I struggled with admitting it, living it, and naming it. I felt isolated, lonely, and without community. Moving west to continue graduate school only increased this sense of alienation and by late winter I was nearly inconsolable. And then I found Morris.

Morris wrote candidly and honestly about growing up lesbian and being a lesbian in academia:

"There is a peculiar assumption that the Goddess creates lesbian scholars, fully mature and ready to publish, in graduate school, that we had no childhoods or that our childhoods as readers and scribblers don't quite count as punched-in lesbian time" (91).

She highlighted the lonely isolation I felt was crushing my spirit both in the graduate seminars at my university and in the local religio-politics of my new home in the intermountain west, and she helped to realize that I wasn't the first to experience such desolate and heartwrenching solitude. However, most importantly, Morris offered me hope. She gave me a purpose that helped me to look beyond the bleak realities of my current situation and to see how I might use my experience to help another "different bookworm" reading somewhere in the isolation of silence. Morris asserts:

"It's a question of seeing the dykademic role model, which is rarely presented to us in youth, as the person who translates lesbian intelligence into quality work or historical research of value and meaning to a lesbian audience" (97).

I feel so lucky to have discovered Bonnie Morris as a dykademic role model, and I hope that through publicizing my own private experience as a lesbian academic I can not only help to give hope and direction to others, but might also begin to assuage my own despair and participate in the community that until now I have only dreamed about.

Deseret

Before I moved west, I probably would have thought that Deseret was a misspelling of either dessert or desert. In fact, the provisional State of Deseret was proposed by LDS settlers in 1849. It existed for a little over two years, but was never recognized by the US government.

However, the legacy of Deseret, remains. I live in what might be called the "mormon belt." If you look at an LDS population map, I live in the dark, bloody center of that United States maxi-pad.

Let me be clear, I do not intend for this blog to be a location for mormon bashing or religious debate. I was not raised mormon, I knew very little about the LDS church before moving to their epicenter, and I don't really feel it is my place to judge their beliefs or practices. That said, I do feel that my location is inseperable from my experience. I think the world in which I live can be big through digital media and social networking, but it can also be small, like the nearby town that finally decided to allow an LGBT float in their parade, but only if they promised not to display any rainbows or other "gay paraphanalia." Small like my university neighborhood through which I have searched, fruitlessly, for an HRC or a rainbow flag so that I might feel some safety in solidarity and have the courage to hang my own. Small like the TV stations that "accidentally" censor anything to sexy or gay, like the opening number at this year's Tony Awards.

Living in this place has been a huge culture shock and I don't think that I could write honestly about my experience if I refused to pay attention to the fact that I'm living in the ghost-state of the most conservative major religious group in the U.S.

Works Cited
Morris, Bonnie J. "A Different Bookworm: Coming Out, Brainy-Girl Style." NWSA Journal 7.1 (1995) 91-97. Print.

Welcome!

Hello Blogosphere!

I think there probably comes a time in most graduate students' lives when the isolation becomes too much. When the pressure of writing an extensive project like a dissertation overwhelms and discourages the soul. And so, like the many other imbalanced scholars before us, we begin new projects, we seek new means of producing, and we engage ourselves with the kind of tasks that will bring more immediate satisfaction than the next chapter of our 200+ page beautifully and insightfully written scholarship.

One of my own blogsperations, Brantley L. Bryant wrote of his work on "Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog" that when "faced with doubts about career prospects, I found it comforting to lead a secret life as "The Chaucer Blogger." (17-18) Bryant found that writing a blog "both complemented and relieved me from work on my heavily historicist dissertation on parliament, economics, and a variety of late-medieval poets (including Chaucer)." (18)

I think it is a similar sense of compliment and relief that I am seeking in this blog. I imagine that I will use this space to write about a variety of issues that matter to me, most of which are summed up in the title. As a Dykademic in Deseret, I hope to write about life in academia, life as a lesbian, and life in the "mormon belt." Most importantly, I hope to write about my experience and about what I read, feel, see and hear in the world around me. Here at Dykademic in Deseret I hope to give voice to what, up until now, has been my silent, or at least very quiet, experience.

In a speech at the 11th Annual Women's Event in the New York LGBT Community Center, Jennifer Beals said:

"And I believe that there is a seismic change coming. I believe that people want to turn from fear towards hope, from divisiveness towards unity, from intolerance to an understanding that we all belong to one great community. Within all the chaos, within the despair, the not knowing, the anger, the anxiety, there is always the possibility for change. There is a seed of hope. And I'm not talking about a pie-in-the-sky kind of hope, but a kind of hope that calls on each and every one of us to stand up and be counted -- a kind of hope that calls on each and every one of us to give the very best of ourselves -- not just for our own benefit, but for the benefit of all of us, collectively. And there may be times when we ask ourselves, 'What is my very best? What is it that I have to give?' And so often our best is within our personal narrative. It is often one's own story, one's own truth, which then becomes everyone's story; it becomes a part of everyone's truth. It is the beginning of community. I've seen how storytelling can help shift the paradigm. And with the advent of The L Word, I've come to understand that telling the stories of LGBT people is a radical and transformative act for all of us. And if history is written by the victors, then we have made ourselves victorious by writing our own history." (http://www.jennifer-beals.com/media/speeches/womens11.html)

When I heard this speech, courtesy of one of the bonus features at the end of my L Word Final Season DVD, I was inspired to seek out a medium in which I could share my own stories and begin to join in a community that I was just beginning to realize existed. I'll explain a little more about my first brushes with this community in my next blog where, in true academic fashion, I'll define my terms, a process that promises to bring both Bonnie J. Morris and Brigham Young into the same blog entry. You won't want to miss it!


Works Cited
Bryant, Brantley L. Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog: Medieval Studies and New Media. New York: Palgrave, 2010.