Posts tagged theory

My plan for two classes will go forward!

Monday is my public administration course which is taught by one of the faculty members who will be very important to my PhD. They are the gender person in the department. She greeted me in class with, “You are taking the sociology course, right?” Yes. “Great!” So yeah, right there I thought, two classes this semester.

Then I realized that Monday’s class is much more seminar-like than a traditional class. So yeah!

Thursday is sociology and WOW! I’ve taken some women’s studies courses from sociologists, but never a hard core sociology course, much less one required for their PhD program that ends in a mock comp exam.

So on a scale of 1 to 10, Mondays will be a 5 (I know the discussions will be fierce) and Thursdays will be a 10 (abstracts of each week’s readings are due!).

Actually Thursdays class may be harder than a 10. The whole class is about the concept of gender and already I’m hitting some walls. Mostly I think I have identified my hurdle to fully understanding radical gender theory - the fact that I didn’t conform to gender expectations growing up.

I can’t quite explain the click that happened this weekend while reading Paradoxes of Gender by Judith Lorber, but I know I had to do a lot of mental gymnastics to get to the place where I am right now…And that’s not even the full journey I know I need to take. Very long story short, I know that being proud to be a tomboy was partially me degrading girlhood/femininity as a kid. But the fact is that being a tomboy (any of us, not just me) isn’t radical enough to change gender in society. It might have helped changed expectations for women in terms of athleticism and strength, but it still hasn’t helped us break through how our society views gender itself. See what I mean!

I’m only 1/3 of the way done with the book. We have just a week to read it and then write an abstract, thus a lot of skimming has to happen. My professor actually said to skim rather than soak too long in the theory. But only one week into my second semester and I already see my world view shifting. This is gonna be an awesome semester.

Or where should a feminist public administrator fall?

Last class was about the divide/debate between empiricism (the idea that facts are facts) and relativism (there are no facts, things are relative). While it seems that most (75%) public administration scholars fall into the empiricism camp, I can definitely identify with the relativism camp.

And this ability to see both sides in a way that most of my classmates couldn’t can certainly help me, but is also trips me up.

I credit all my years learning from other feminists for this. See, an empiricist would say that because we need to count, we need to make things as simple as possible. That many of the things that makes life complex should be smoothed out as possible. This can best be seen in that most government forms that ask for people to choose between female and male. As a feminist activist I know why we should be asking at bare minimum a third box - transgender. Yet I also see why for calculation sake we should maintain a simplistic binary. It makes the math easier. But it erases part of the story we are trying to understand and document.

Empiricists also believe that fact is fact, no debating it. Relativists see the gray areas of the “facts.” Perfect example is the debate over mammograms. If science does say that having a mammogram under 40 risks a false-positive more often than it saves lives, we should agree and move on. But a lot of people know women or know a friend of a friend who was saved by a mammogram before her 40th birthday. How do we as administrators (the 75% of us who lean towards empiricism) work with the public who are far more prone towards relativism?

I have the heart of a relativist, but the mind of an empiricist.

As for mammograms, I fall in the middle. Especially with health care decisions, science is the guide, but providers and patients make the call.

But for trying to figure out how different policies impact different communities, I still fall towards relativism and wanting to represent as many as possible. Feminist theory falls more towards relativism as well.

Part of my journey towards this PhD is going to be finding a balance between my heart and my mind. Figuring out when to take the easier road and the more complex, longer road.

I can already foresee that trying to be an activist researcher is going to be tough. It won’t be hard staying in touch with the activist community, but it will be tough to connect my research tactics with my activist tactics. I hope that my community will be patient with me and supportive in their critiques. Yet, I know that the further I go into this academic world, that there are activists who will do all they can do tear me down. I just need to keep their critiques in mind and personal attacks aside.