Monthly Archives: November 2017

Lessons from insured underemployment

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In this post, Erika G Abad discusses lessons learned at intersections of race, class, and generation in the course of an interdisciplinary career. Erika G Abad, PhD is a full-time non-tenure track assistant professor in residence in the southwest. She first contributed to Write Where it Hurts reflecting on the contradiction of her income and social status. You can find her work on Latinx (formerly Mujeres) Talk, Centro Voices among other blogs. Her Oscar Lopez Rivera research is trying to make the case to write about him without a prisoner studies lens. Follow her @lionwanderer531. 

A professional mentor tells me to not talk about the call center. He insists because PhDs working two years at a call center right after their degree makes no sense. But I talked about the call center before receiving this advice, and in spite of it, because I wouldn’t want to work anywhere that didn’t understand the call center. A first-generation college student, the first PhD on both sides of my extended family, a queer Latina not ashamed of the struggle, a university would not be worthy of me if underemployment were a value statement.

Why do I care about the call center?

I got that job like I got others. Through social networks. Someone who vouched for me. Overqualified, they were worried that I was not going to last. And this white ally who saw me struggle said I would stay, and he stuck out his neck for me. I was frustrated then, PhD pride, that the moral obligation was placed on me. In hindsight, I needed that job. Car payments. Rent. My online summer class did not have enough students to afford those, let alone a trip back to Chicago. After three months picking up shifts to supplement the income my weekend part-time slot, a second-shift full-time post appeared. Because I needed dental work, because nothing else was biting, because the state of references for academic jobs was stale, I took it.

Within months they let me compost, a 64 oz old coffee can turned into a five-gallon bucket. The custodial worker hooked the car poolers up with free parking. White accomplice and I potlucked with others. In my off time, I spent Saturday mornings and Sunday afternoons helping Latina immigrant women raise funds to buy Latino-centric food for the food pantry.  Those two years echoed the interdependent ethic of the Latino community of my childhood. People who took care of each other. People who had to figure it out with others’ help because pride was too expensive to deny need; assets were too plenty to deny support. Social networks built and born into were my Latino Chicago norms.

This is not a story of romanticizing the poor. They were far better than me. This is not a story that seeks to ignore that I left because the call center was being outsourced like most global companies that found less expensive labor abroad. The call center years forced me to think critically about the purpose of academia and the sites of learning, practices our degrees require us to privilege. The few years I embodied economic instability and uncertainty were largely due to my inability to explain how I did Gender and Ethnic Studies with my American Studies degree, given committee members’ disclosure after I graduated. Much like that call center job, I relied on friends and chosen family to take care of me. I wrote extensively on that interdependency for Women in Higher Education thanks to Liana Silva.  That interdependency I learned from the Puerto Rican & other Latina women educator-practitioners who mentored me over the years, and something which they, along with my work dad (the mentor who told me to not talk about the call center) modeled for me to pay forward in whichever way I found possible.

Latino Community Capital

While the job market for the past two years appears to have recovered from the economic recession. It has done so only slightly. With more part-time instructors than full-time instructors, we are competing with colleagues and friends to obtain our positions. Little has changed in interdisciplinary studies that articulates that those of us with those degrees can be as flexibly employed as those within traditionally defined disciplines. The instability of the field and the field’s necessity to rely on the complexity and contradictions of practitioners sparks this meditation. I have wavered on writing this, however, as a first generation college student who spent four years on the market, I worry for the future generation of scholars who need to learn early on how to apply their skills to other markets. Despite the status of the field, the caste system within higher education has marked select alum from specific universities as more likely to evade underemployment, discrimination, respectability politics performance, some of whom have benefited from citizenist, ableist skin color, class, and/or repronormative privilege.

Chicago born, trained by leading scholars in Latino and Puerto Rican Studies since my first year in undergrad, I was groomed for this. Latino intellectual community capital was my norm. The majority of my undergraduate faculty were Latina. As I wrote in my homage to Judith Ortiz Cofer, I’ve met Latino writers, Puerto Rican and Latinx activists as a result of choosing a school based on the wealth of Latino knowledge that my alma mater has. Pursuing that logic didn’t necessarily make social networking sense, but I had yet shaken off ethno-centrism and, more importantly, I knew the struggle I wanted to have was not about centering, gaining or sustaining white validation. I took for granted that having a job meant that the struggle against internalized oppression or imposter syndrome was over; I took for granted that publishing and prospering did not mean leaders in the field knew how to extend, how to do it.

As a mentor once said, not all faculty teaching you know how to write, let alone teach writing.

Pursuing that meant coming to terms with the stories that needed to be told and the way I needed to tell them. Once I regained my voice, as a result of letting customer service turn off the pomp and circumstance and self-righteousness, I learned in my white-collar identity-based politics struggles, then came to consider where to embody what the intellectual shoulders I stood on had modeled for me. Not because they asked, no, more because I knew what it meant to have faculty who looked like me tell me I could be like them, they who were running departments and bringing award-winning Latinx writers into my life. I needed to write from that place of fulfilled yet growing hunger for greater voices. That also meant coming to terms with the “race for theory” and where I wanted to run (Christian 1987). Also meant gauging how fast I was willing to run so that I could use white scholarly voices to more critically bring to light the black, Caribbean, Latin American ones with whom I find home and decolonial reason.

And talking Foucault, composting and food sharing with the fellow customer service associates echoed the exchanges that inform all the reasons I wanted to write and teach. The debates about which books to save from displaced cultural centers; the joking exchanged during the late nights of protest sign making, and the questions answered during my childhood afternoons talking with priests about scripture, women priests, and the call to serve the poor. Following the advice of former Puerto Rican political prisoner Oscar Lopez Rivera provided in his letters to me, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work during those call center years (2008). While brief, and some would argue, minimal in comparison to the time I spent in the ivory tower, their relation to those years make them more profound.

The American Dream I embodied till graduation failed. It only resurrected because my sister insisted on bringing my exhausted heartbroken and proud behind home. It only resurrected because undocumented immigrant women gave me more to fight for in letting me partake in the work they were leading. It resurrected because activist leaders I critiqued allowed me to work through our disagreements when I returned to work with them in Chicago. Willingness to swallow my pride, work and serve across difference and work towards reconciliation continue to shape how I write, how I teach and continued efforts to sustain meaningful intellectual dialog beyond my own scholarly training.

The call center years remind me that intersectional, interdisciplinary professional communities have the potential to disrupt neoliberalism by being an exercising practicality in its intergenerational dialog. As contradictory, as distanced as we are—the we between disciplines, the we between junior and senior scholars—when we are willing and able to name where our intellectual and political forebears are, in spite of where we aim to be, we can create the opportunity to break bread together. The Catholic imagery I evoke functions analogously to intellectual ideas leading to traditional, creative works and or, if applicable, policy reform. Whether the border crossed us, our families, or they/we cross borders, we can still be a bridge for who’s and what’s to come.

Works Cited

Lopez Rivera, Oscar. Letters to author. 2008

Christian, Barbara. “A Race for Theory.” Cultural Critique: The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse. 6 (1987) 51-63.

 

Revisiting Trauma as a Graduate Student

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In this post, a graduate student in a social sciences program reflects on some ways graduate experience may involve revisiting and managing past trauma.  

Yesterday, I woke up to someone wailing at the top of their lungs. It was the type of noise you would hear when people grieve uncontrollably. When I quickly scrambled out of my bed to look out of the window, I discovered nothing unusual other than maintenance fixing the community gate. No one else was outside of my apartment. As I unlocked my bedroom door to peek around the corner of the hallway, I overheard the television playing in the living room. I then realized that my roommate was watching a movie and the person screaming was Angelina Jolie. Nevertheless, this horrific wail triggered me unexpectedly and brought me back to a dark place that I had avoided for most of my adult life.

I immediately retreated to my room and threw myself onto the bed out of desperation. Memories of previous traumatic events began to flood back in my mind. My body began to tremble, while I was sweating bullets. My eyes glazed over and my breathing was tremendously heavy. My limbs became temporarily immobile. I ultimately went into a state of panic and anxiousness, while spiraling out of control with my thoughts. All those years of therapy felt completely worthless during that moment and nothing else seemed to matter. Trauma memories were stored in mind and my body quickly remembered and reacted consequently.

What seemed like hours lying motionless in bed was only about ten minutes. My body slowly began to recover as I realized that I was in a safe environment. I crawled to my yellow bathroom and eventually managed to take a shower, which always seemed to be therapeutic to me oddly enough. As my face became flushed by the scalding, hot water, I was reassured that I was very much alive.

During my panic attack, I initially thought that my body had ‘betrayed’ me by releasing trauma that I had buried for years. But after reading literature on trauma management and previously discussing trauma with mentors, I knew that the human body contributes physiological responses in triggering events to protect itself from potentially hazardous situations. My body was releasing the indescribable grief I held for so long. This unpleasant incident, surprisingly, gave me clearer insight regarding my recent traumas within the academy as a graduate student.

Since starting graduate school, I had unexpectedly relived my ‘big T’ traumas and experienced multiple ‘little t’ traumas. From discussing my horrific experiences with students related to gender, sexuality, and religion to discussing rape culture during lecture, I had to confront these fears for the sake of my health and activism. I murmur the words ‘me too’ underneath my breath as students disclose their trauma memories of sexual assault. I cry tears of joy whenever I successfully provide support and resources to students exploring their sexualities and gender, while reflecting on my personal discoveries. These moments have assisted me in my own trauma management by making me more comfortable discussing these sensitive topics in the classroom and activism.

Practicing self-care outside of graduate school has significantly helped me cope with my trauma. I now go on long walks during the evenings and watch the sunset. I call friends and mentors for advice. I recently rekindled my old love of vinyl records and dusted off my record player to play Pat Benatar’s Crimes of Passion. I distance myself from the academic world sometimes to keep my individuality, relationships, and passions intact. I force myself every day to not give into ‘graduate school guilt’ and to enjoy all the moments that bring meaning to my human experience. As a social scientist in training and as an activist, I must continue to practice self-care and know my limitations, so I can best help those I am assisting without being a ‘wounded warrior’ during the process.

Despite my successful attempts to recharge, I still see and revisit trauma every day in graduate school. This could be partly due to my unique experiences and understandings of the social world while performing multiple roles as a researcher, teaching assistant, graduate student, and activist. Nevertheless, in the social sciences, we do have the unique opportunity to change these all too familiar struggles within the academy, by maintaining interactive dialogues regarding trauma management and actively supporting members of marginalized groups.

Why is it that the academy often fails to tackle or even acknowledge the experiences of trauma among students and faculty, especially those who are women, LGBTQ people, and people of color? Surely academics recognize the crucial need of providing a safe, empathetic space to share their experiences of trauma, harassment, and microaggressions within the academy without the fear of negative consequence? Trauma should not be stigmatized in the academy nor should academics attempt to silence those who express their trauma memories. Leaders must drastically change how we train, support, and treat survivors of trauma. I hope this essay can be insightful and reflective to members of the academy, especially to those who are graduate students learning how to navigate revisiting experiences of trauma.

Creating Homecoming Queens – a southern gothic bi+, poly, and trans love story

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In this post, J. Sumerau reflects on the process of composing and publishing Homecoming Queens, a southern gothic bi+, poly, and trans love story set in the south and based on their experiences as a bi+ poly trans person and researcher collecting stories of other sexual and gender minorities throughout the past couple decades.

Earlier this month, my third novel and second book in the Social Fictions Series of sociological based novels – Homecoming Queens – was officially released. The novel is a southern gothic bi+, poly, and trans love story based on hundreds of formal and informal interviews with sexual and gender minorities throughout the southeast I’ve collected over the past couple decades as, first, a curious bi+ trans and poly kid and later, as a researcher focused on sexualities, gender, religion, and health in the lives of sexual, gender, and religious minorities. In this post, I elaborate on the background and creation of the novel after doing so with Cigarettes & Wine, my first research based novel, has been useful both for readers interested in my work and fellow teachers using my stories to teach sexualities, sociology, gender, LGBTQIA studies, and Southern studies in classrooms to date. For more information about the novel or to purchase it, see here.

Background

Like many aspiring novelists I have met in my life, I dreamed of writing the next great American novel around the same time I was finishing college a decade ago. The seeds for Homecoming Queens emerged in early failed attempts to do this back then, and in fact, the scene in the diner between four of the main characters near the end of the book comes from an experience between four people I witnessed – including being in the diner scene of real life I recreated in the novel – over a decade ago. Like many other writers across genres, I have my favorites, and the southern gothic traditions of the likes of Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, and William Faulkner have always spoken to me via the use of real world complexities, the ways the past shapes and becomes active in the present, and the fine lines between the darkest and brightest moments of love, pain, and life itself. Homecoming Queens began as an entire handwritten journal in 2007 wherein I sought to translate small town life in Georgia through the eyes of a brilliant, older African American neighbor I had who told me so many stories about the world at the time in what was, in hindsight, a poor attempt at writing like other southern gothic writers – especially Toni Morrison – I worshiped then and now without the skills to do it myself in my own voice at the time. It was a learning experience that got put in the background of so many other failed novel attempts in my life at the time.

Fast forward to the year 2016, and the completion of my first novel, Cigarettes & Wine, and I found myself thirsty for trying to write more novels without any clue if I could do that well or publish the first one. I was celebrating the legalization of my primary life partnership, and began asking about the idea of Homecoming Queens in conversations with my spouse and my best friend. For some reason I still can’t explain though I’m beginning to agree with now, neither of them had any questions or doubts about my ability to write more novels, and both thought I should try it out since I had just resurrected my first novel from an earlier failed attempt in college and was well enough situated in academic and public writing credits to have the time and space to commit some time to fictional endeavors without other parts of my career falling behind. This led to priceless patience on both of their parts as I talked and ran through scenarios and data I had for the next novel relentlessly on late night walks, phone conversations, and over lunches and dinners for a while. I was more than a little fixated and obsessed in hindsight, and I was lucky enough that they were okay with that and supportive of it at the same time.

I was also repeatedly listening to the newest album by one of my favorite – and in my opinion, one of the most talented ever – songwriters. The entire album, Brandy Clark’s Big Day in a Small Town, was about small town adventures and experiences with a mixture of humor and heart. I kept coming back to the song “Homecoming Queen” and the memory of the former homecoming queen friend who moved back to her small town with her two spouses, and things that happened to them, good, bad and in between, in the process. I also kept talking about this one story, and how it related to so many other stories from my own life and the lives of others I had spoken to in the south with my patient supporters. I also thought about what it would look like to illustrate my own primary romantic relationship structure in terms of how it worked, how our rules were set up for each of us to always get what we want together and individually, and how other mono, poly, and fluid (sometimes mono, sometimes poly) unions operated. Finally, I started thinking about both how many things from the past are prevalent in the nation today, and my experiences (on both sides of mentor / mentee relationships over time now) of the different ways trans and other queer kids find community, support, rejection, and / or struggle in the world as they try to be themselves. These were the threads that I would weave together to create the novel.

Data and Methods

I began crafting character profiles and a small town that could be any southern small town, and looking at all these things as homecomings of a sort that happen in between the various connections and disconnections we each experience throughout our lives. I followed the same process I do in many qualitative and quantitative studies and outlined in relation to Cigarettes & Wine in a previous blog post. The data points from real people’s lives and stories – and my own lives and stories to date – became the ingredients for the town, the characters, the conflicts, the tensions, and the narrative arcs of the story itself. Even more than in Cigarettes & Wine – or my independently published novel Essence – I crafted a tale that could be anyone or anywhere in the places I have seen, lived in, and visited in the south over the years, and created a story where, as friends have said about each of my books, I was both everywhere and nowhere in the book at the same time. As I’ve done in other works, maybe it’s the researcher inside me, I once again also only used events and experiences that had happened to a wide variety of people in different ways, at different times, and in different settings to capture an overall set of common – or as we say in scholarship, generic – experiences anyone could potentially relate to, experience, or know of in the lives of other people to demonstrate both possibilities and probabilities in the world.

Results

As I’ve noted with the first two novels in conversations individually, in classrooms or at conferences where I’ve been invited to talk about such things, or otherwise, I do not believe it is ever up to the writer to gauge the results of the composition. I feel the same way – as many people know from other speeches related to my academic, journalistic, public, and other writing – about everything I write. It is up to the audience to decide what the book means in terms of messages, merits, and ideas, and I leave it up to audiences to figure such things out. I know what I sought to do. I sought to, as always, offer a realistic portrait of some of the many ways – good, bad, and everywhere in between – queer life takes place in the south, thrives and continues in the face of support and opposition, and speaks to broader norms and patterns in cultural notions of sexualities, romance, gender, family, history, relationships, and lives. I don’t know or want to decide what others will think of the work, but I feel confident that I accomplished what I wanted to do with the book and early responses to it (both good and bad) have suggested as much.

Instead of trying to ascertain any concrete result or metric, when I think about Homecoming Queens as a now published work available for purchase by anyone, I think about the stories that have and continue to inspire me, that others have kindly shared with me so many times over the past couple decades, that resonate with me in cases of both similarity and difference, and that speak to a much wider, more complex, and more varied Queer existence then I can usually find in academic or mainstream media portraits and publications.

If those last couple of lines sound familiar, it is because they are copied directly from my thoughts on Cigarettes & Wine right as it was published, and you could continue down that set of paragraphs in that blog with Homecoming Queens as well because, for me, the goal is the same. For me, these stories I write – like any other research or art or writing that blurs (or Queers) such distinctions – is about the same thing, revealing the beauty, complexity, pleasure, pain, and wonder of Queer experience in its many forms, places, and continuations for as many of us and as many others as possible in ways people can relate to, think about, and consider as they navigate the complexity and possibility of the world in their own lives and their treatment of others they may encounter.