Don’t Slam the Mural Slam, or Why this Feminist Doesn’t Like Censorship

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Last week our campus hosted the first ever “mural slam” featuring work by our students as well as artists from the local community. Much of the work is politically oriented and critiques war, conformity in higher education, surveillance by government, and so forth. Much to my surprise, some of my women colleagues think some of these images are misogynist and offensive to women and should be condemned.

Now, over the past couple of years we have several blatantly offensive articles and cartoons printed by our campus newspaper. However, I’m very uncomfortable with censoring student artwork that is ambiguous and open to interpretation and in several cases is being used to satisfy coursework requirements.

I pointed out that a recent exhibit at our university gallery, “Female Forms and Facets,” which featured artwork by such noted feminist artists as Judy Chicago and Carolee Schneemann, also caught some flack from a few student gallery workers who refused to help install the exhibit (I guess they didn’t like Schneemann’s vulvas and Chicago’s penises). I’m sure there are folks on campus who don’t like the “Vagina Monologues,” either.

So, I warned my colleagues to be careful about heading down the path of censorship, because it could backfire. I even pointed out that some of the murals are by female students and local artists and that it would be more constructive to engage them in a conversation about their work rather than condemn it outright.

For more on the subject, see Feminists for Free Expression.

P.S. Some readers have asked which ones were considered offensive. This one seems to have raised the most concern. The student who painted it said she was making a commentary on children as soldiers and the cycle of birth/death in wartime.

Historical note:  This year is the tenth anniversary of National Endowment for the Arts v. Karen Finley, in which the Supreme Court decided it was NOT unconstitutional for the NEA to vet grant proposals for “decency.”

Back to the Kitchen, ladies: Washington University will give honorary degree to Phyllis Schlafly

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Schlafly

According to this article in Inside Higher Ed, officials at Washington University in Saint Louis have announced they will award an honorary Ph.D. to noted conservative, anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly. Now, Mrs. Schlafly certainly has a number of impressive academic credentials, so why does she need this one? Given that she’s spent the past thirty-five years opposing equal rights for women, including Title IX, even going so far as to call feminist critics of Lawrence Summers a bunch of whiners, I wonder what kind of message this sends to the young women who will be graduating from WUSTL this year?

If you think this is a bad idea, please see this Facebook group.

Help Support Housing for Mentally Ill Persons

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Courtesy of NAMI National:

HR 5772 Proposes Innovative Section 811 Demonstration Program and Includes Long Overdue Reforms to Existing Section 811 Program

NAMI and our colleague disability advocacy organizations in the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities Housing Task Force (CCD Housing Task Force) and the Technical Assistance Collaborative (TAC) are pleased to announce that important legislation to spur investment in permanent supportive housing has been introduced in Congress.  The bill, known as the Frank Melville Supportive Housing Investment Act of 2008 (HR 5772), was introduced by Congressman Chris Murphy (D- CT) and Congresswoman Judy Biggert (R – IL).  The bill is named in honor of the late Frank Melville, a longtime member of NAMI Connecticut, and the first board President of the Melville Charitable Trust – a leading force in promoting supportive housing for people with severe disabilities.

This ground-breaking legislation proposes important and significant changes and improvements to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Section 811 Supportive Housing for Persons with Disabilities program.  The bill would authorize a new Section 811 Demonstration Program that fulfills the promise of true community integration as envisioned in the Americans with Disabilities Act, and would enact long over-due reforms and improvements to the existing Section 811 production program essential for the program’s long-term viability. These changes will provide states and localities with a new infusion of critically needed Section 811 capital and project-based rent subsidy funding to produce more permanent supported housing.

Act Now!

Contact Congress today and urge your House member to cosponsor HR 5772.  Help us address the enormous housing crisis faced by millions of extremely low income people with disabilities.

Learn More

View NAMI National’s letter of support for HR 5772. Read background information on HR 5772

Blogging Against Disabilism Day this Friday, May 1

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Blogging Against Disablism Day, May 1st 2008

This is really more a reminder to myself to have something ready to post on Friday. Still, I thought I’d give you all a heads up. More details about this can be found at Diary of a Goldfish.

Now that the day is here, I have something to post! This is a comment on the Inside Higher Ed article,”One Year Later,” on the Virginia Tech shootings. The article itself was okay, although as usual the discussion centered around gun laws, not the rights of mentally ill persons to adequate treatment. The disabilism was very apparent in the comments though. The first comment, from Clayton Cramer, concluded

“Deinstitutionalization was one of the major mistakes of the 1960s and 1970s. The mentally ill are paying the price for it today, and so is the rest of our society.”

Of course, this fellow opposes gun control (and supports home schooling, and criticizes affirmative action. citizens of Idaho — do not vote for him!) So, his solution is to lock all the “crazies” away — oh wait, we’re already doing that at least according to what my colleagues in criminal justice say about the high rates of mentally ill persons in prison.

Rod Bell, Adjunct Professor at College of DuPage, said something similar, blaming this all on the hippies in the sixties who revolted against authority. Sheesh, I hope this guy isn’t an adjunct professor of history. This is just a sloppy historical analysis that would get an “F” in any of my classes. For the record, dude, it was John F. Kennedy, not the hippies, who initiated the move away from warehousing the mentally ill in asylums in favor of community-centered mental health. Also, exposes of the hideous conditions inside psychiatric hospitals were made by WWII conscientious objectors, i.e. long before Ken Kesey’s novel.

Added later:  In reply to Mr. Cramer’s comments, I would say first that my point is that it is indeed simplistic to attribute the current mental health crisis solely to the anti-psychiatry movement and/or the anti-authoritarian impulses of the 1960s (whatever is meant by that — a subject for another post). As Gerald Grob and Howard H. Goldman observe in their recent book, The Dilemma of Federal Mental Health Policy, the move from mental hospitals to a community-based system of mental health care delivery was the product of a broad coalition of mental health experts, patients and their advocates, and politicians such as President Kennedy among many others.  The complexity of this movement, I think, gets lost because of the fame of Ken Kesey’s book and the academy-award winning film that was made from it, as well as the notoriety of Thomas Szasz’s work (for the record, I have multiple problems with Szasz, but that too is a subject for another post).

The reason the Community Mental Health programs initiated in the 1960s failed is not because they emptied the hospitals, but because there was never enough funding to meet the need for services.   We have millions of uninsured individuals in this country, and many insurance plans do not offer mental health parity.  Although the state of Connecticut mandates this for all health plans, the new Charter Oak Health plan proposed by our Governor to cover uninsured adults excludes mental health parity because it is too costly. A bill (HB 5617) has been proposed to solve this problem.

I could go on and on, but I do have to get ready for class, where we will look at all those crazy feminists who messed things up for the rest of America by asking for the radical notion that women be treated like human beings.

Angela Davis at CCSU

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This has been an exciting and busy week for Knitting Clio — including a trip to Philadelphia to present a paper at the Third Annual History of Women’s Health Conference at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. This gave me the opportunity to stay with my buddy Janet, and also engage in some friendly political sparring regarding the primary (she’s an Obama supporter but also a realistic one — i.e. she doesn’t think he’s a savior). I was polite enough to do my victory dance during Hillary’s Today Show interview while she and her husband were still asleep!

The highpoint of course was Angela Davis’ visit — and because she gave two lectures, both during my class meeting times, I didn’t have to prepare anything! 😉 Her first talk was based on her book, Are Prisons Obsolete. Her key point is that the prison, aka the penitentiary, was the product of a particular historical moment — i.e. the Enlightenment — and was created as a humane alternative to nasty and gruesome forms of punishment such as whipping, flaying alive, drawing and quartering, and so forth. [at this point I think she could have made a nod to Michel Foucault’s work, Discipline and Punish, but I guess she figured her audience would not get the reference.] She did, however, say that the prison was a “democratic” form of punishment in that in deprives a person of key features of democracy — i.e. liberty, civil rights, etc. She also said that the prison is a sign that the 13th amendment did not fully abolish slavery, i.e. the enslavement of the incarcerated population is allowed under this amendment. She was clear that she does not mean that there are not individuals who commit crimes, but she also wanted to focus on changing larger social and economic conditions — e.g. poverty, inequality, homelessness, lack of health care, etc. — that make certain individuals the target of the criminal justice system. [here she did briefly mention the problem of mentally ill persons in prison, although she also made what I considered an overly flippant comment about using drugs to control criminal behavior, but perhaps I misunderstood].

Her second talk of the day, which I found more useful for my teaching, was on gender, race, and class. This fit perfectly with my U.S. women’s history course, since we had just viewed Standing on My Sisters Shoulders, an outstanding documentary about key women involved the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi. Davis made some excellent points about historical memory, asking why is it that we remember the male leaders, but don’t remember the women who created the communities of resistance and did all the organizing to make the movement a success? One of my favorite lines from her talk was, “without Fanny Lou Hamer, there would have been no Barack Obama.” Right on, sister! She traced this selective historical memory to the American habit of hyper-individualism, which focuses on inspirational leaders and ignores the communities who prepare the ground.

During and question and answer period, an African-American gentleman asked her what she thought about the fact that Obama was poised to fulfill the American dream for African-Americans. Davis’ answer was that we’re still assuming that one white woman can stand for all women, and that one black male can stand for all African-Americans, and alluded to a classic anthology on black feminism. She pointed out that Obama is a politician within the existing two-party system, that he really isn’t all that progressive, and like my buddy Janet, said we have to get beyond our Messiah complex and focus on communities pushing for social change.

All in all, I was rather impressed with her modesty — especially her tribute to her mother, whom she described as a “model activist” and a symbol of how anyone can be an agent of social change. Awesome!

Taking the Piss?

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Hi again folks.  Ortho over at Baudrillard’s Bastard has asked for help with the question, what’s with all the pissing dogs in various pro/anti Revolution images from the late 18th century.  I’ve used the engraving above several times in classes, but never noticed the dog was peeing.  Not being a colonial historian, my only guess is that this is a reference to the English slang term “taking the piss.”  Anyone else have any ideas?

Meanwhile this thread reminds me I have to go walk my doggie. . .

Sad Anniversary

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Today is the one year anniversary of the murder-suicide at Virginia Tech, so I thought I’d write something even though it’s been a long day. According to an article in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, the main actions by Virginia governor Timothy Kaine have been to weaken privacy rights of individuals with mental illness, e.g. notify parents if a student has received treatment, and allow both public and private colleges to obtain records of mental health treatment from any other school the student has attended. Hopefully these records will only be used to help students, but somehow I doubt that this will lead to better care for the students in question, especially since this is an unfunded mandate like so many others. The round up of articles in today’s Chronicle doesn’t seem to address this issue — maybe I’ll write something when I have more time.

Meanwhile, my article giving a historical perspective on all this got accepted by the Harvard Review of Psychiatry and will be appearing soon. Also my former adviser and buddy Joan Jacobs Brumberg decided to hand over editing the collected volume on campus violence for Rutgers to me. She says that the main change at Cornell is there are now sirens on all the buildings. Now if they could just reduce the waiting time to get an appointment at the Counseling Service. . .

P.S.  Here is a really awesome way to commemorate April 16.  Reminds of me the “die-in” organized Women Strike for Peace after Nixon authorized bombing Cambodia.

AAHM continued

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I’m slowly getting caught up on all the stuff (i.e. student papers) that accumulated while I was at the conference, so now have a bit of time to write about the AAHM meeting. Today’s entry is on the women historian’s breakfast. We started off with a presenation by John Erlen on the European Union Library/Archives at the Hillman Library at the University of Pittsburgh. This looks like a pretty neat, albeit immense source. There appears to be loads of materials on health related topics. The only question is — how to get at what you want? There appears to be no collection guide (or really much information on the library website). The contact person is Dr. Phil Wilkin, pwilkin@pitt.edu

Monica Green suggested setting up a mentoring network, similar to those organized by other professional organizations to which she belongs.

We then did our usual round of introductions, celebrations of accomplishments, consoling for trials and tribulations. I wasn’t able to write them all down fast enough, so readers, please send them to this blog! My main accomplishment is of course the book, which you can order at a discount from the publisher:

I couldn’t attach the flyer, so here’s the discount info:

SPECIAL ONLINE DISCOUNT – sign up at www.press.umich.edu before 6/15/08 for your copy at 20% off list price. Enter code prescott08flyer