Is Pro Child Anti Poor?

Last night I walked with my partner and my dog to get some take out from one of the many taco shops in our neighborhood. As I was waiting outside with the canine while my guy procured the tasty goodness, a two-door Honda Civic circa 1992 rolled up. Out of the car climbed two adults, one teenage girl, 3 boys under the age of 10, and an infant. Out of a two-door, four-seat civic.

I realized when the car pulled up how impossible the standard of child safety is for the working poor to maintain. At least 3 of the kids in that car should have been in car seats according to the CHP website, which says that kids 4-6 should use booster seats because seat belts can actually cause injury. For this family of 7 this means a much larger vehicle, which they most probably cannot afford. I wondered how or if these laws are enforced. If they are, ticketing poor people for not having the money to be safe is a horrible idea that does nothing to solve their problem -- which is that they don't have money. But if it's not enforced, it's a tacit acknowledgment that the standard is too high, and that it is a double standard -- that in fact it's not the children of the poor who we're interested in keeping safe.

Conservatives would argue that if they can't afford to buy 8-seat SUVs (and the gas and insurance that comes with them) and all the car seats and booster seats that the CHP requires to keep kids "safe," then they shouldn't have so many kids. This line of thinking revives the tired old eugenic discourse of privilege around who "should" reproduce. Telling poor people they can't have kids because they can't afford SUVs really isn't just or democratic. How about guaranteeing living wages and affordable housing so all families can be safe and well-fed?

It is this conservative rhetoric that is so mystifying. The New Right trots out the children to demonstrate their "compassion"; yet their policies run counter to their claims -- take Bush's vetoing of SCHIP. They decry the "welfare mothers" in thinly veiled culturally racist terms, yet they insist on abstinence-only sex "education."

So what do we do with policies that demand child safety but only for parents who can afford it?

San Diego Is Burning

Tonight is the second night of the "firestorm" in San Diego. There are fires to the southeast and to the northwest, but aside from the dry weather and warm Santa Ana winds, there's not much going on downtown to indicate that 500 houses have burned, 250,000+ people have been evacuated, and who knows how many thousands of acres have burned. These fires are being called the worst wild fires in the state's history. I've been obsessively listening to the news all day, which has made it even more unreal because I haven't seen any coverage, and there's not so much as an ash floating around in the air here.

I feel like I should be out volunteering but at the same time I just don't want to leave the house. I am one of the lucky ones who doesn't have to evacuate.

So the weather folks have been predicting this since Friday because of the Santa Ana weather conditions. Why do I have the nagging suspicion that real estate agents are responsible for this? Ok, maybe not responsible, but they must be gleefully tapping their finger tips in anticipation of a housing shortage to revive the bubble.

Cynical? Why, yes.

Seriously, losing a home and a lifetime of memories would be awful. Between fires and foreclosures, San Diego homeowners are not having a good year.

Gender politics

At the university, one is taught to expect a slightly higher level of consciousness informing the way people negotiate their social interactions. Especially in the Humanities, so much of our research as graduate students is focused on equity and social justice. Yet my male peers unapologetically retain their position of privilege and seem to unknowingly replay the gender norms we've been taught to critically deconstruct. Even when they attempt to point out gender inequities in social relations among peers, they remain unable to see the way they are themselves just as implicated in this process.

I'm constantly placed in the position of Girl Friday. When I step out of
my expected role--support--I'm "disciplined."

Why are men, even highly educated men, still so unable to perceive their own complacency in a system that continues to support their privilege on the backs of women?

Surprise! Nothing's New

I recently wrote a paper on the use of maternalist rhetoric in ecofeminist theory and the environmental justice movement. Tonight, while reading a book on pronatalism in the Progressive era, I was overwhelmed by the sense of how little things change. What kinds of things? you ask. Well, it turns out that 100 years ago, women who wanted to get involved in politics, hell, in any endeavor outside the home, had to manufacture needs for their maternal "instincts" beyond the hearth fires. So when women began to enter the political arena, their work was dubbed "municipal housecleaning." Pronatalist policies at the last turn of the century in fact do not appear to have been all that much more coercive than they are today. 100 years ago, women were pressured to reproduce for the "preservation of the race." While nativism is still fairly pervasive in the U.S., it lacks the legitimacy it once had. Yet women still often find themselves compelled to attribute their involvement in the political as an extension of the work they do at home.

Take the environmental justice movement. Women active in the environmental justice movement also often employ the metaphor of housekeeping--they're "cleaning up the environmental mess." They often emphasize the importance of their work to secure the health of their children and their family. While it is certainly true that today, women still do the majority of care labor in the U.S. (and most other places), reiterating that any work we do outside the home is simply an extension of our "natural" mothering and caring obfuscates the enormous amount of time and energy most women spend caring, while it also coercively universalizes women as mothers.

What does it mean that so often and for so long women have embraced maternalism? Defeatism? Expediency? Can women be political subjects without their mothering (or lack of) appropriating center stage?

As long as I can remember I've told my family I don't want kids. Yet that hasn't stopped anyone from continuously asking me when I'm going to pop one out. The message sent by this kind of badgering is that I am not a whole or complete woman until I've had a baby, despite any other accomplishments I might have under my belt. It seems we have not yet moved past the social imperative for women to reproduce. What is at stake when women refuse to have children? Why is this act (or non-act) so threatening?