Journalist – Historian – Speaker
I actually really like Pink! These are proto-thoughts, very rough. What do you think? When I talk about raising girls and avoiding gender stereotyping, I often get the pushback – what if she really honestly just likes pink (or barbies, bratz, princesses, or whatever)? It’s a fair question. My answer, again still in progress, is …
At New Criticals, Alison Kinney has written a powerful piece comparing police violence against suffragists to the police violence against Occupy activist Cecily McMillan. She starts with this story: “Constables and plain-clothes men who were in the crowd passed their arms round me from the back and clutched hold of my breasts in as public …
♫I enjoy being a man!♫ Says the author of this piece on academic dads. http://t.co/ZLHhkltDDA — Karen Kelsky (@ProfessorIsIn) May 19, 2014 What do we, as writers, owe other writers? I’ve been thinking about this in the context of my “talking while privileged” argument. In general, when making arguments about privilege and power, I try …
I write a lot about privilege and I have a lot of privilege. I’ve long argued that it’s important to be very thoughtful when writing about academic labor while tenured, gender while male, race while white, disability while able-bodied, and so forth. When writing about a given power dynamic, I often have the power by …
In my Chronicle piece on being a father, I wrote: No one has ever questioned my work ethic to my face because I’m a father. In fact, one day I was so tired from caring for my two children—at the time a 2-year-old boy and a 3-month-old baby girl with colic—that I simply lost my ability …
There have been two debates about privilege recently. One was Tal Fortang’s barbaric yop that he, Princeton undergrad, is not privileged by his whiteness, because his family was persecuted by the Nazis. The second was a Thought Catalog essay on female privilege. The first essay demonstrated two key facts: Tal Fortgang does not understand the concept …
I don’t mind if my critics call me a lazy tenured socialist academic. But criticizing my earring is GOING TOO FAR! — David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) May 1, 2014 Today is my last day of grading for the year, so here’s a very quick post on reactions to my Sarah Palin essay. I’m continuously fascinated …
A little over a year ago, I wrote a piece for CNN on my daughter. It was the first piece I had written that hit a truly mass audience – well over two hundred thousand clicks, 32K facebook shares, incalculable tweets (because CNN does things with their URLs that makes it hard to count them). …
McDonald’s toys are in the zeitgeist. More specifically, the gender-normative ways in which McDonald’s describes their toys are in the zeitgest, and perhaps some progress has been made. Last year I wrote a “straight married white male feminist manifesto.” I wrote it for the Good Men Project which means I deliberately waved a red flag …
The day Pope Francis was elected, I got an email from local news asking me to be on a panel to discuss the new papacy. I demurred. First, I’m not really an expert on twenty-first century Catholicism. Oh, I know the macro just fine, but I don’t have the whole cast of characters memorized. On …