I have studied, taught, and worked toward social justice since before I discovered the concept of social justice and began to understand the legacies of the multi-pronged struggles for justice, equity, and basic human rights. Still, as I have embraced and espoused an intersectional framework, I have continued to struggle with the ways in which ability fits within the race, class, gender, and sexuality framework that undergirds what I teach, write, and research.

I have been that professor that feels exacerbated and frustrated when that one more thing is asked of me. For instance, the captioning of videos for my classes. I still do not feel that it is my sole responsibility to make my classes accessible, in part because I lack the knowledge and training—but, mostly, the time—to do so. I think that the institution needs to take more responsibility and recognize that we need time and support to develop new skills. Support exists—extra time does not. (Our current model is not sustainable. . . more on that shortly.) But part of this institutional responsibility is mine. I have to shift my perspective about accommodations. I have to understand my own responsibility to make changes that impact these larger systems and structures.

I have been using the opportunity of our academic theme, Disability Visibility, to not only educate our students, but to educate myself. This is one of the privileges and benefits of working in academia—we always have the opportunity to learn alongside our students. In the spring, I will be offering a one-credit class on the topic of Disability Visibility, not as an expert on the subject but as a facilitator in co-creating an environment of learning.

I recently attended the NWSA conference and tried to attend as many panels as possible that dealt with disability. The first session I attended practiced some of the norms of disability accommodation that I do not regularly engage with (for instance, descriptions of the presenter’s physical appearance and the images on the screen and print outs or QR codes for “access copies”). I panicked for a moment. I was scheduled to present in the next time slot and I had not prepared accommodations. Was this the new norm and I was out of the loop? Yes and no.

Only the disability rights-related panels at the NWSA made such accommodations (of the sessions I attended, which were not that many). Such norms are still making their way into academia, even in the most progressive of spaces. At UMA, we have been slowly implementing tools like automatic closed captioning in Zoom and software that rates the accessibility of documents and materials in our BrightSpace courses. Perhaps we have also been assessing the efficacy of our accommodation processes. But I regularly hear from students who feel frustrated and othered by the process, and I hear stories from students whose professors refuse to accept the accommodations that are required of them.

One thing that I learned at NWSA is that I have been practicing many of the suggested techniques for accommodations and for working toward disability rights for as long as I have been teaching. I have developed accommodations for all of my students that have also benefitted me, for instance flexible deadlines. Sometimes these make more work for me, but they also allow me to feel less guilty if I fall behind in grading. (Since I give my students leeway, the least they can do is extend me the same!) By creating this accommodation, I changed the culture of the classroom. I often get emails from students about the struggles of their lives and asking for an extension; it is easy to say: “my deadlines are flexible for just such reasons.”

Through my work over the last year or so, I have also developed a larger understanding of what accommodations are all about. Disability accommodations are not (just) about making academia more accessible for students who live and work with disabilities, they are about transforming a culture of impossible expectations and arbitrary (and insidious) barriers that we are all expected to function within without complaint or recognition.

Two related ideas that came up at a panel at NWSA were sustainability and collective access. Impossible expectations are not sustainable for individuals or for institutions. Impossible expectations lead to burn out and I know that many of my colleagues and students are feeling this, even if only some of us are willing or able to admit it. Collective access means that we need to rethink the bigger picture of what our classrooms, campuses, and curriculum look like. This too can help us to live and work in a sustainable way and can also help us to better care for ourselves and each other.

Can we imagine a world where accommodations don’t exist because we have changed the structures, systems, norms, and expectations of our culture as well as the ways in which we treat each other and the ways we expect to be treated? The short answer is: yes, because we have to.

One of the panels I attended drew from the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore who calls for the creation of “life-affirming institutions.” They argued that we can reimagine and transform academia which is, by design “inherently, intentionally, and iconically ablest.” Building on the idea of “prefigurative politics,” following the work of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, they argued that “another university is possible” and, in fact, “it is already here.” If we live the world that we want, that we need, then we realize that that world already exists.

We collectively make the present and the future that we want to live in, even when the structures that we work and live within seem impenetrable and inflexible. Our academic theme is an opportunity to shape our institution and bend it toward a better way of teaching and learning for all of us.

I've been enjoying designing yoga classes around different themes and ideas--like yoga for snow sports or my new "Yoga Outside the Box" series I will be offering at Shanti Yoga Studio in March--and finally got around to writing about one of my favorite themes, the 2016 Bangor Pride Festival theme, “Bye Bye Binary.”

The "Bye Bye Binary" theme inspired me to design a special yoga class on the subject of binaries--that tendency in our culture to think of everything as either/or. I offered this class to a group of people fairly new to yoga, many who attended my three previous weeks of gentle yoga classes, which gave a solid foundation in the basics of yoga. As I have been thinking about yoga and feminism, I was inspired to share my approach here and to expand it to other classes that I teach.

The ideas I write about here were woven together with movement designed to reinforce the ideas. The ideas are complex, but they can be broken down in classes to be more accessible and, like yoga, to be a life-long learning process.
*
In my work in American studies and Women’s and Gender studies, binaries are unpacked. Things we think about as being opposite are complementary. They are not polar opposites, they are two sides of the same coin. However, our culture tends to value one side of that binary, giving it power over its subordinate. Men are considered superior to women. White is seen as preferable to black. Straight is normal; gay is wrong. We are often uncomfortable with ambiguity.

Yoga, which roughly means union, is the perfect prism for breaking apart the binaries that can hold us back from feeling whole and connected. Yoga comes with its own inherent binary: mind/body, though we might add “spirit” to break up that binary. And in our culture, the mind is seen as having control over the body. This control is seen as an ideal and this narrow idea shapes how people are valued in our culture. For instance, people who are overweight are seen as having a lack of self conrtol. Our bodies dictate many of our opportunities. Our mind is influenced by the contradictions of our culture, and our mind impacts the health and well-being of our bodies.

How often does our mind allow us to love our own body, to be at peace with our body? Yoga gives us tools to find that peace, and part of this is about letting go of our preconceived notions of the limits and possibilities of our bodies. Yoga gives us perspective; it connects us to our breath and helps us find our mental and physical edges. It gives us the literal and figurative space to stretch and expand. Our mind and our body work together.

There are other binaries that yoga can help us break, clear, or heal: male/female, man/woman, masculine/feminine. Gender is not an either/or choice as much as our culture would have us understand it as one, though this is changing. And while the tradition of yoga is also based on this gender binary, and many classes are dominated by women, yoga is not gender specific.

When we breathe consciously, we are practicing yoga. In yoga we can be warriors—the survivor, the fighter that needs no gender. We fight for our cause and for the people who cannot fight for themselves. Men can be more in touch with their emotions and more open to the power of the feminine. Any body can participate in the movements that comprise yoga. There are options and variations that meet us where we are at that moment.

In terms of sexuality, binaries of gay/straight, or even the binary of bisexual, fixes sexuality rather than recognizing the fluidity of sexual affection, attraction, and action. Yoga can help us learn to focus and connect; it raises our awareness of our body. There are many poses and ideas in yoga that are focused on fostering healthy sexuality. The second chakra is thought to regulate the mind and body aspects of sexuality. And energy knows no gender.

Yoga helps us to take care of our minds and our bodies, to not give too much of ourselves and to practice self-care and self-love. We can see the self as a part of something bigger, but also better sense the permeable boundary between us the and the wide universe that surrounds us—the endless universe that we can never know. We do not have to choose between one binary; we can choose among the limitless possibilities.

And if this all sounds too good to be true or too scary to try, I would have thought so once. Yoga is many things and not everything I describe here will be found by everyone who practices yoga or with every yoga experience. In fact, most yoga classes will not unveil the power of yoga to break binaries. Like everything else, knowledge, practice, and an open mind are some of the necessary tools to chips away at the binaries that define and confine us.
 *
[Side note on yoga and gender: As I noted in a previous blog, I attended a Kundalini yoga class at a conference where a popular yoga personality gave us an option to choose one particular hand mudra (position) if we were a woman and another if we were a man. This position was supposed to be held with intense breathing for an extended period of time while periodically chanting along with the music. I changed from one to the other periodically wondering what I would do if I were questioning or genderqueer. Through my movements I felt like I was balancing the masculine and feminine that work together, and I wished I had the knowledge to challenge the instructor. As it was, I probably interrupted the energy flow of our collective ecstasy. But, such rebellion in the face of gendered yoga experiences is important for breaking binaries.]

“Fire is catching! And if we burn, you burn with us!”
—Katniss in Mockingjay

“And it would do nothing at all. It would change nothing at all. It would move no one at all, and so it really wouldn’t be art, would it?”
—June in The Summer Prince

“We were going to change how people think…. You can’t transform a society with violence, Ashala. Only with ideas.”
—Ember in The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf

American dystopia is a long-standing tradition, and Trump’s appearance on the scene of American politics has inspired many references to dystopia (like on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and in liberal campaigns). But we have long been a dystopia in the United States, and many brilliant authors have shed light on this quality from a variety of angles. War, apocalypse, unchecked technology, disease, climate change, natural disaster, invasion, slavery, violence, reproductive slavery, sexual violence, decimation, devastation.

When we talk about American dystopia today, we talk about George Orwell. We talk about the classics. We talk about men and power and the end of the world. And Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale is back on the bestseller list and being made into a television series in Trump’s dystopia. We need to look to other stories as well. We need to tell more stories.

The major issues of our times point toward a country, and a world, that we can find in the books of Octavia Butler, Suzanne Collins, Sherri L. Smith, Ambelin Kwaymullina, and Alaya Dawn Johnson. Many “Girls on Fire” tell us stories that speak to intersectional futures—to multifaceted ideas, people, and movements and to the possibilities of change in many possible futures.
*
This collection seeks critical and creative explorations of dystopia: short stories, essays, graphic art, interviews, poems, testimonials, or any format that uses dystopia as a means for understanding the present moment. This collection seeks the stories, the images, the ideas and ideals of “Girls on Fire”—to inspire hope, vision, and action through the power of dystopic visions. To get us all through the fear, disappointment, anger, and anxiety.

Tell a compelling story that sheds light on our present moment and inspires us to work for a better future. Write a scathing commentary that exposes the problems of the present and the possibilities of the future. Capture a moment, an image that speaks to today’s dystopia. Imagine a manifesto, a moment, a movement. Create an image that moves us and makes us think. Use your arts—your mind and your heart and your skills and your training—to speak back to the present through the lens of tomorrow.

Imagine what the future of America looks like—30 days, 4 years, or several decades or centuries into the future. How has Trump’s reign shaped our cities, the country, the world? How have we been divided; how have we been united? What is the state of the climate, our social and cultural institutions? What dystopic future grows from the present moment? What challenges do people face? Where is there hope? What are Girls on Fire making from this future?

This collection is intended as a sort of companion piece to (working title): Girls on Fire: American Dystopia and Intersectional Futures, Sarah Hentges’ forthcoming book from McFarland Publishing, Inc. This book explores the ways in which young adult dystopian texts with female protagonists can inspire social justice. It considers foundations and possibilities. It looks to “Girls on Fire”—in fiction, and in life—to lead the way to a better future.

See http://www.cultureandmovement.com/ya-dystopia.html for more information about Girls on Fire: American Dystopia and Intersectional Futures

pdf call for submissions
5,000 words maximum. Images should be high quality.
Inquiries and ideas can be emailed to sarah.hentges@maine.edu
Submit to: sarahdwh8@gmail.com by January 20, 2018

Intersections and Beginnings
Years ago, at my first job interview I was asked which aspect of race, class, gender, and sexuality I paid the least attention to in my teaching and research. I was not prepared for this question. My go-to answer, probably like most candidates’ answers, was that I really worked to be sure that I covered all of these aspects in my teaching. Each time I named one, I would second-guess that answer and talk myself out of it--my rambling process made awkwardly verbal. Race was central. So was gender. Class cannot be separated from race. I think I finally settled on sexuality, but I didn’t really have a good explanation for why. I could say out loud that I didn't focus on sexuality because I was not ready to be "out."

There were many reasons I did not get that job. One of those reasons could have been my lack of development as a scholar. I had not yet written my dissertation. I was still trying to figure out exactly what I should concentrate my work on, exactly which sub-field I should seek employment in. I was also naïve about politics and appearances. Because I was a white woman seeking a position in African American studies, I was immediately discounted by most of the students and potential colleagues that I met. The political climate--and the students' raw need for a professor of color--created a pretty tense situation, and understandably so. My intersectional approach, my commitment to diversity and social justice, my excellent teaching record, my published book and many conference presentations, the respect I had earned among my colleagues at my home institution--none of these mattered.

I was only what my appearance reflected, and my discount-store suit, untamed frizzy hair, and overall lack of polish didn't help. As much as I wanted a job, I knew that this job was not for me (and I was right; it was a failed search). I could not be the person they wanted and, in fact, each constituency--the students, the faculty, the administration--wanted a different person. The students wanted a black person who could understand where students of color were coming from. The faculty wanted a scholar who understood intersectionality within and beyond African American studies. And the administration wanted a person of color that they could parade around as a symbol of diversity. I was only one of these people, and I wanted my work to speak for itself.

Through my work, I have matured as a scholar and have come into my own; I feel (mostly) confident, especially in my abilities as a teacher, and especially in my interdisciplinary/intersectional approach. My work has grown from my educational foundations in American studies, women's studies, and comparative ethnic studies, and has given me the tools to write about Hip-Hop, literature, television, pedagogy, and so much more. I have also had the privilege to reconcile my personal and political interests through my work related to my book, Women and Fitness in American Culture, and my current research project about young adult dystopia.

I have found that my specialization is in the connections between and among all of the areas that I (am forced to) work in, but it is not easy to navigate the spaces between and among. As I have continued to teach, research, and write about race, class, gender and sexuality, this interview question--and my inability to answer it--has been at the back of my mind and I have worked hard to be sure that I am doing justice to each tenant of intersectionality, especially in their interlocking/intersecting/overlapping. This is not easy work. But it is work that I am passionate about.

The sexuality aspect of my work has not developed at the same rate as the race, class, or gender components. My radical ideas about sexuality have mostly stayed at the fringes of my work and the edges of my life. I have been afraid to engage with sexuality as a component of intersectionality for a variety of reasons, mostly because it is difficult to come out as something specific when I am still struggling to understand myself. I have not engaged this vector of intersectionality because I have the privilege to ignore it.

Just like my whiteness dictated how I was perceived as a candidate for a job teaching about race, my assumed heterosexuality means that I don't have to worry about being judged, belittled, or dismissed because my gender and sexuality are queer. I can stay silent and let people assume what they want to. Many times in the past people have assumed I am a lesbian (or so I have been told). I don't wear a wedding ring. I teach women's studies. I talk about my dog but not my partner/husband. I must be a lesbian, right?
 
But the beauty of the work that I do is that I have the freedom to explore my personal and scholarly interests from a variety of angles. I can rework the pieces and fill in the gaps. Recently I decided—for personal and professional reasons—that I need to bolster that sexuality piece of the puzzle. So, being the academic nerd that I am, I selected a number of books and started my own little reading/research/writing project.

I find time to read these books in the spaces in between my other work and they have already begun to inform my teaching and my thinking. They have already helped me to know myself better, to feel more confident in who I am, to feel less shame is being queer. So, when I have some spaces, I will share some of these books and the interesting intersections they push and pull. I am not sure exactly where this project will lead, but I am excited for the ride.