The Herald asked five writers for meditations on their fathers. They offer five perspectives on the arduous or fun ways that they learned their masculinities; on the intersection of fatherhood and manhood; on how they got their bearings in a gendered world.

My father grew up in Gretna, a town across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. It was there he learned to say pork like “poke” and shrimp like “shwimps,” and it was there he learned what a man sounds like.

And when he heard me speak twenty-some years later in a Sacramento suburb, he knew I did not fit the bill. I was 10 when he told me that my voice was too breathy and soft, like that of a little girl. He said it kept him up at night, thinking how no one would respect or listen to a man with a voice like mine.

My dad didn’t say these hurtful words to me in his thick southern accent, but with a strangled tongue that sprouted when he moved to San Francisco at the age of 22 to attend medical school. He arrived to a sea of wealthy white faces. My dad was poor and southern and black, and he knew too well that his peers and professors would look down on him because of it. He also knew his cajun tongue would make this problem worse, so he tightened his lips and spoke palatably. This worked for a while, but after a few years his throat turned on him. Genetics and unnatural stress made his vocal cords permanently tighten, making him sound perpetually out of breath. To this day he labors to control his cracks and sputters.

In my father’s voice I hear my own, doomed to be judged, like his. He tried to change his voice, but 32 years later, he still worries that it makes his patients quietly cringe. I might have tried to do the same but, thanks to him, I know it’s futile. Thanks to him, I speak freely — varied in pitch; full of drama; feminine, masculine, and uncompromising.

—Marc Boudreaux, ES ’21

When my Irish father noticed I was reading James Joyce’s Dubliners, he told me that I reminded him of the young narrator of “Araby.” I was like the young boy in Joyce’s story — hopeful until I realized that I could no longer get what I wanted, as easily prone to disillusionment as to illusion. My father had to be there — he would always be there — to meet my disappointment when my imagination no longer mapped onto any reality. Sometimes, he would be the one to break these illusions. Most of the time, though, he wouldn’t be able to stop them from breaking. I think that broke his heart.

Since then, I have seen my father cry many times. Teary-eyed, he asks me to bring down a box of Kleenex halfway through the movie Inside Out. During drives to and from the airport — the only drive we seem to be making together these days — his nose runs as he tells me things that shatter the imagination I get so used to wearing as armor.

Twice, I remember those thin, sheltered tears giving way to uncontrollable sobs — the sobs that make your lungs heave and your head ache.

These are the sobs you expect from Joyce’s characters. But few of his protagonists cry like this, even when most feel alone, are alone, think about death, or are dying. They stand tight-lipped and weighted to the ground, their lack of motion synonymous with a lack of emotion. We want them to snap out of their immobility, and we want this so much that crying becomes an opponent of paralysis, a symptom of living.

If I am the narrator in Joyce’s story, filled with illusions, my father tries his best to help me find what I don’t know I am looking for. Seeing him cry is a reminder of the all-consuming reality he lives in to allow me, his daughter, more time to indulge in unreality. I am thankful because no imagined pain hurts more than real pain.

In reality, there is a lot of pain. Joyce knew this, as does my father, which is why both show that there is little pleasure in not crying. In fact, we feel most hopeful when a pair of Dubliner’s eyes brims with tears.

—Helen Teegan, ES ’21, YH Staff

I kicked my soccer ball back under my bike, walked out of the garage, and came face to face with my dad, standing totally naked in the kitchen, flipping a fried egg by the stove. He turned, smiled the smile he always does when he knows he is being weird but also thinks whatever he is doing is hilarious, and said to me, “If you want to be a dude, then you’ve got to be nude.”

I owe so much of the comfort I have in my own body to my dad. Whenever we’d walk into a bathroom together when I was little, he’d stop in front the mirror and say, “Wow, I am handsome.” At the mall, sometimes he’d pick up a shirt and exclaim (to my intense and also vocalized embarrassment) just how good he would look in it. He has this strange ability to teach body positivity by example; without ever needing to convince or demonstrate his own attractiveness to anyone else, he is comfortable in himself.

Yet he is not without his own insecurities or self doubt. He gets upset when my mom posts a picture of him on Facebook that shows his chin at an unflattering angle. He’ll snap at me if I ask whether he should be having a second serving of ice cream. His comfort does not exclude concerns about his weight, about his hair, or what he is wearing on a given day. But it is with his attitude of bodily love that he deals with those insecurities and showed me how I could too.

So yes, if you want to be a dude, you’ve got to be nude. You’ve got to learn to love and relish in your own body, even if you can never escape your own self-doubts and fears about it. When my acne became so bad that I couldn’t look people in the eye when I spoke with them, or when I became totally obsessed with maintaining my weight during soccer season, that sense of bodily love, shown both quietly and, sometimes, loudly (“You’re handsome, you weigh 168 pounds and even if you weighed more you’d have nothing to worry about,” he’d groan) reminded me that my perception of my body might shift and change, but my love for it couldn’t. That love did not come easily or instantly, and it is still a love that I have to practice, but I am so grateful that I had my dad to model it, naked and beautiful and honest, for me first.

—Rasmus Schlutter, MC ’21, YH Staff

The first time I saw my dad cry was over FaceTime. He called to tell my mom and me that his father had died, and he broke into tears as he delivered the news, his words tripping over each other as his eyes welled. Something snapped in my brain as my image of my dad — a hardened, distant, self-made man who grew up poor in mid-20th century China, who constantly ribbed me for being too soft — jarringly diverged from the emotion that was spilling out before my eyes. My filial piety melted into overwhelming empathy.

About a thousand times, my mom has told me about my dad’s soaring joy at hearing that she was having a boy, but she never needed to tell me. From my earliest memories on, it was clear that my dad wanted a boy. He wanted a boy who played basketball, loved superhero movies, and got way too into video games. He wanted a boy who loved the wilderness, was obsessed with trucks, and wanted everything to be blue. He wanted a boy who didn’t cry. I was none of the above. I was a soft kid, at times unable to withstand my dad’s tough love. I cried when his chiding would become too harsh, breaking down under the weight of his disappointment amid confusion over norms I didn’t understand. My guilt at not being a boy’s boy was a subtle yet constant theme of childhood. My dad tugged me along the path of father-son masculinity lessons, chastising me for watching my sister’s TV shows, buying me countless action figures, and taking me to basketball games.

The pressure lessened as I aged and my dad eventually lost interest in breeding a masculine archetype. Public school would take over and indoctrinate me into American teenaged masculinity, a frightening monster that my dad never could have anticipated. His role would ironically shift into keeping me away from other manifestations of masculinity: chasing girls, proving drug tolerance, looking for any and all trouble. Yet he did so at a distance, while maintaining the importance of academics and making money–in short, becoming a successful man. Nowadays, though he continues to harp on these points, our relationship gradually evolves beyond the confines of masculinity.

As he dragged me through the strange process of masculinity education, my dad couldn’t help but show glimpses of his true character: a quirky, hilarious man, movingly dedicated to his family. The first time I saw him cry, I cried too. I cried because I knew exactly how he felt. He had seen his father in a vulnerable state, and I saw mine become vulnerable too. As a kid, I never understood why my dad wanted so badly for me to be such a typical son, why he cared so much that I was a boy, why he insisted on taking me to those games. I always thought it was just the way that dad’s are, trying to prove their own manliness by showing the manliness of their sons. But there’s more to it. Even as he strove to transfer the teachings of masculinity, my father couldn’t help but show something deeper. Underneath all the tropes and norms, behind all the games and jabs, he just wanted to connect with his son. I’m sure his dad wanted the same.

—Everest Fang, ES ’20, YH Staff

We’ve got these 12-foot-high built-in bookshelves at my home and they’re filled with John McPhee and Robert Caro tomes. Both were careful observers and meticulous researchers. (Caro is still going on his LBJ biographies, but, like George R.R. Martin, it seems like he’ll never finish.) They’re among my Dad’s favorite writers, and I see them in him all the time. He always has five pens and a little spiral notepad in his breast pocket. He keeps a farmers’ almanac of his entire life, assiduously documenting the weather, his biking mileage (daily and year to date), his garden yield (usually more rocks than potatoes, but what can you do with New England soil), and a thousand things I don’t know about. I’ll be going out for a drive and he’ll pull me aside, whip out a napkin, and diagram all the tough intersections, should Siri lead me astray. Or we’ll be in the car together and he’ll point out how half of each tree is covered in snow and half is bare and that’s how you know it was a nor’easter.

I’m way more scatterbrained than my Dad but I feel the same compulsion to document and observe. I guess I do the late-millennial farmers’ almanac. I keep a million lists in my Notes app and a hundred playlists on Spotify and they’re sporadic and fragmented. I try to slow down and read Caro and McPhee and biographies of Lincoln. Sometimes, we email articles from The Onion back and forth or listen to corny Taj Mahal songs or Bob Newhart stand-up bits and it feels like we’re on the same page. Once, I saw a double rainbow and called him at work and told him to look outside. It’s the only time I’ve ever noticed a beautiful sky before my Dad.

—Mark Rosenberg, PC ’20, YH Staff

Father Figure was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Evren Savcı is an assistant professor in the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies (WGSS) department. Savcı’s interest is in transnational sexualities, and she roots her work in feminist and queer theory as well as ethnographic methodology. Her past work has explored the intersections of language, knowledge, sexual politics, neoliberalism, and religion, and she is currently finishing her first book Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics Under Neoliberal Islam. Interview by Rachel Koh, SM ’20.

RK: Can you tell me about how sex work features in your area of scholarship?

ES: I’m not a scholar of sex work per se… but trans sex workers intersected with my research for my first book, which is about queer social movements in contemporary Turkey, as they’ve been critical in LGBT organizing, historically and contemporarily in Turkey. […] I’ve dedicated an entire chapter to trans sex workers’ relationships to public space, neoliberal urban redevelopment, changing political economy, the law and the police, and security regimes and the growing authoritarian state. So even though I don’t consider myself a scholar of sex work, I have written about sex workers, specifically about trans sex workers, who do end up having a very different place both in the national imaginary and in the way police treats them versus cis women who engage in sex work.

[…]I think a lot of progress that feminist work has done is in positioning [sex work] as a question of labour and not of morals, and also to think about the larger frameworks within which sex work can be discussed, with “trafficking” being one of the most current iterations of that.

RK: Can you explain a bit more about the particular experience of trans women sex workers in Turkey?

ES: […]The imaginaries of trans women as sex workers has a lot to do with the way the media has historically represented them as monstrous figures who are out to trick innocent men on the highway and attack the innocent male public body with switchblades and things like that. There was a big discourse about the so-called “transvestite terror” that was being unleashed. And this is in the context where a lot of trans women were being murdered by men, often times clients or potential clients. That representation, as well as the fact that they have little access to higher education and other forms of labour, means that they do find themselves structurally in a position where sex work is the most available form of labour. […] Trans women equals sex work in the eyes of the state, the police, the random average citizen. Their presence in public space spells out sex work. […] Even if [they] are not sex workers. Even if they’re going to the grocery store. There was a law passed [in Turkey] in 2005 that gives the police a lot of liberty to determine who is engaged in “unlawful occupation of public space,” that sometimes just means they can chase street vendors away. But they also use that law to give fines to trans women even when they are walking to the grocery store, or the bus stop, or to their friend’s house. Because it’s never imagined that they’re not soliciting when they’re in public space. Sex worker becomes a master status for trans women. That really affects how they live, what they’re able to do, their access to public space and their relationship vis-à-vis the police.

RK: What do you think are the main myths that people have about sex work, and how do they come up against the realities of sex work based on your experience and study?

ES: […] There are particular representations of sex work, such as the ’90s moment of movies like Pretty Woman, that show the undeserving, actually innocent, pretty, well-meaning, funny, smart woman who’s doing it to save money to go to college. It’s the angel-esque stereotype. Scholars point out the connection this has to narratives about sex trafficking, which operate on the back of the idea that there are bad actual prostitutes and then there are the good innocent women who wouldn’t do it if they could, or are doing it because they are trafficked. […] A lot of people enjoy sex and they don’t see a problem with doing it for money, the way that we don’t see a problem with selling other forms of labour for money — we are all doing it. So there’s an imagined binary between the deserving and undeserving sex workers: the kind that men will fantasize about marrying and saving, and the kind that is unsaveable.

RK: Do you think that there is an ideal policy regime that states should take towards sex work? For example, the Nordic model where you criminalize the purchase of sex but not the selling or sex, or total decriminalization.

ES: Looking at the model in Turkey, where sex work is not criminalized but legal and regulated by the state, I totally see the downfall. First of all, I don’t believe in any form of criminalization regarding sex work. I don’t believe in punishing sellers or buyers. But I would like to see protections of the laborers as laborers, the way you protect people who do other kinds of physical bodily labour. It’s not okay for people to be injured on a construction site. Similarly, there should be protections in place and ideally unionizing, so that people can have structures in place that protect them as workers.

But there also should not be state regulation. In Turkey, for example, the state decides how many brothels and therefore how many sex workers are allowed in the entire country. And if you heard the numbers, you would laugh. They’re ridiculously low. The work hours are nine to five, like you’re going to a state office, and you can’t choose your clients, the way most workers who work for the state don’t get to choose. You serve whoever comes for service. It’s really poor pay. […] It’s legal work, you do get a paycheck and you even get retirement and other benefits that come with a state job, but it’s really unappealing work conditions. This also means, and this has been historically true in a lot of places, the moment you legalize but make it state-regulated, you are opening an entire can of worms about illegal prostitution. So the same way that there’s a production of victims versus bad subjects, there’s now legal prostitutes versus illegal, clandestine sex work. […] Scholars in Turkey have written about how police have used that to harass women. This research is from the late ’90s but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still going on. […] So moral expectations play out in the strange legal liminal zone where anybody who’s not registered as a sex worker could be an illegal sex worker. So that gives a lot of powers to the police and to the state to harass people.

RK: How do you think issues surrounding sex work are employed in North American discourse, particularly in relation to countries and peoples who are perceived as less developed?

ES: There’s been great work on the discourse on sex trafficking, and how it creates a world order, basically, of more righteous and less righteous countries. East Asian countries, especially, have been pegged as countries that don’t do a good enough job preventing sex trafficking. […] It’s coming from the U.S. hegemonic power that has created a hierarchy between morally upright and morally failed nations based on how well they are doing in fighting sex trafficking. It happened rather fast — within ten years. Before that there was no such concern and then suddenly sex trafficking arose as a huge global concern.

And it seems a bit devoid of actual knowledge. […] There are a lot of women who engage in sex work but are not trafficked. And they treat [sex-trafficking] as different from other forms of labour trafficking. The problem with other forms of labour trafficking is that you don’t get paid. The problem with sex trafficking is that you do get paid for the labour. So it’s already a quite questionable construct. […] My class, Transnational Approaches to Gender and Sexuality, is asking these larger questions of how seemingly simple human rights issues are implicated in the larger global political economy, and how these particular and very specific supposed measures around “human rights violations” are used to discipline certain nations into behaving according to U.S. standards. This also produces a very racialized understanding of victims, villains, and heroes.

RK: What areas of sex work do you think are currently understudied and less understood as they can be?

ES: […] I would like to see more studies on the role sex trafficking is made to play in the neoliberal economy, and how it becomes — Elizabeth Bernstein has written eloquently about this, but I’d like to see more beyond a U.S.-centric perspective — how does sex trafficking become a moral flag that different corporations are waving to engage in a type of redemptive capitalism? It becomes a do-good project for a lot of corporations that are doing a lot of evil, and have been historically, so it would be interesting to see what that looks like in other locations and how that’s perceived. If, let’s say, Google is engaging in these projects — which it is — what does that do to Google’s relationship with Venezuela or China, which are put in the hot seat for their “failure”? I think these types of transnational political economy questions can be asked. The other thing is: […] sex trafficking is not at all a discourse in Turkey, and neither is it in most countries in the Middle East. Now that there’s a huge Syrian refugee population in the Turkey, I think questions of forced sexual labour are becoming more urgent […] But I think there’s a way in which the Middle East gets off the hot seat of the United States when it comes to sex trafficking because Muslims are seen as already “prudish” and “repressed” and “conservative” when it comes to sex. Obviously there is sex work everywhere in the world, including Muslim-majority countries. But it’s interesting to see what moral sticks East and Southeast Asia get beat up with, and which moral sticks the Middle East gets beat up with — which is mostly alleged homophobia, and patriarchy. So it would be interesting to look at these larger stories as well: not just sex trafficking in and of itself, but the disciplining and hierarchizing mechanisms of the moral map of the world.

Laboring Bodies: Interview with Evren Savcı was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Chalay Chalermkraivuth, SY ’20, Mariah Kreutter, BK ’20, and Eve Houghton, DC ’17, GRD ’24, have a roundtable discussion on Sally Rooney’s two acclaimed novels, Conversations With Friends and Normal People.

CC: So to start off: why are we talking about Sally Rooney’s two novels, Conversations with Friends and Normal People?

MK: So she is a very young novelist who’s gotten a lot of press and her books have been widely reviewed and read, which makes her “important.” But more specifically, what I find interesting is her status as a young female author writing about sex, power dynamics, the coming-of-age process. I think we are seeing a general cultural interest in some of these themes — Chalay brought up Cat Person [earlier], and there are lots of texts we could read in conversation with her.

CHALAY: So she’s really timely. What would you say, Eve?

EVE: Well, on a personal note, I just felt that this narrator Frances [in Conversations with Friends] is me. And that was a sort of painful recognition in some ways, with her hyper self-consciousness and habit of narrativizing her own life. But a lot of women seem to see themselves in these novels. Admittedly maybe women of a particular class and educational status, which we should talk about —

CHALAY: And race.

EVE: Right, exactly. But I think that is worth talking about: why is it that so many women seem to see themselves in these novels? And is “relatability” a metric of literary value that we find useful?

CHALAY: Yeah, let’s talk about that — relatability as an emerging metric of literary value.

MARIAH: There’s a long legacy within the English language novel of [female] bildungsromans, coming-of-age novels about young white women that often inspired a similar kind of reaction. Eve would know more about this than I do, but going back to the eighteenth century, looking at something like Pamela or Clarissa, the idea of identification with the protagonist has always been a part of it… But I think in the modern context, relatability is an interesting question because it’s something that relies on a kind of specificity that is inherently exclusive. I had the same reaction as Eve, I read this and thought, “Oh my god, I’m her.” That capacity to look at a text and see yourself — I think part of that is about emotional truth, but a lot of that is about detail. There are so many details in Sally Rooney’s novels about what her characters are reading, what kind of music they’re listening to, what kind of coffee they’re drinking. Which are all class markers and status markers; I mean, race is something that’s pretty much unexamined in her novels, but that’s part of it as well. I don’t know, I think it’s impossible for literature to be all things to all people, but it’s also not a neutral thing. What do you think, Chalay?

CHALAY: It’s interesting that you say that relatability has a longer history and trace it back to the eighteenth century. Because the bildungsroman does have a history of male authors, and you mention relatability as a pretty gendered metric… But it’s really only recently, in the twentieth century, that notions of situated knowledge and experience as a valuable way of interacting with a text have been accepted in more scholarly situations. Even though things like chick lit are still really denigrated. But the interesting thing about chick lit is that it’s about fantasy-fulfillment, whereas you’re saying that Sally Rooney is about relatability. So I’m wondering whether there’s a meaningful relationship between fantasy-fulfillment and relatability. Because to some extent Sally Rooney is about fantasy fulfillment… I mean, she writes about women who become very, very powerful.

EVE: I think the comparison with [Samuel] Richardson is interesting — I’m obsessed with Richardson, I can’t believe I finally got you to read Pamela, yes! I think both those novels, Pamela and Clarissa, are about sex, actually, in some fundamental ways. But they were also supposed to be morally edifying: the idea was that by reading these novels, young women would find models for how to live their lives. Which maybe connects to your point about the aspirational quality —

CHALAY: We’ll bookmark this, but I am interested in when relatability switched from being about moral uplift, edification, and became something else. Because I don’t think either of [Rooney’s] heroines are meant to be moral role models; I think anyone in her novels would literally scoff at the word “morality.”

EVE: But I do wonder if there’s something to say more broadly about the connections between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels and Sally Rooney. I mean, she’s self-consciously talked about that, critics have remarked on it, that she’s writing essentially novels of manners, comedies of manners, for the twenty-first century and for millennial culture. […]

CHALAY: I want to come back to the fantasy-fulfillment versus relatability thing, as well as the edification thing. What is the model of ethics in books about sex? I would say she’s pretty pessimistic, and what does that mean? And the other question is: how do forms like text and email shape our communication?

EVE: Yeah. Well, I wonder if those are related questions, in that I think what a lot of people seem to find powerful about Rooney’s sex scenes is the way they dramatize the clash between fantasy-fulfillment and reality. Her characters tend to construct themselves quite artfully in prose — I’m thinking of the emails that Frances writes, where she performs a kind of cool disengagement, and the way she finds herself unable in her sex life to maintain that detachment. So the books are interested in the confluence of those two questions, I think.

MARIAH: Definitely. In Conversations with Friends, which I’ve just been re-reading, Frances goes through her life imagining new identifies: she imagines herself looking like her friend Bobbie, she imagines what other people are thinking of her. She has that kind of hyper self-consciousness. And in the first sex scene, there’s the line: “I had been so terribly noisy and theatrical all the way through that it was impossible now to act indifferent like I did in emails.” And my question is, to what extent do these sex scenes actually reveal things, and to what extent is it another layer of…a power struggle, deception, the characters concealing things from each other?

EVE: And what I love about that line is that she says she’s being “noisy and theatrical,” but theatrical means performative…so she’s acting as if she’s disclosed something, but actually, as you say, it’s another layer of performance.

MARIAH: I think she’s disclosed the fact that she cares enough to perform. […] But I wanted to talk about the first question you raised, about fantasy, which of course relates back to sex. Something I think is relevant too, though, is that in Conversations with Friends, her protagonist Frances and in Normal People her protagonist Connell are both characters from working-class backgrounds who end up at an elite university surrounded by rich people. To what extent are the “fantasy elements” around culture, wealth, the scenes of going to literary readings or to France with this older couple, about being thrust into this new world in which cultural capital and literary capital are…?

CHALAY: Profoundly intertwined.

EVE: So I think that the fantasy-fulfillment is that you might be valued, not for your actual capital, but for your cultural capital. And that’s the kind of get-out-of-jail-free card. To me at least, that’s the fantasy the book is proffering: that you might be just so interesting, so engaging in conversation, that people would invite you to their dinner parties in France…so that you could partake of that culture and that lifestyle without feeling soiled by it.

CHALAY: You’re so right. […] And also the way that cultural capital can potentially be completely free of actual capital. They’re “communists.” Boo! Bullshit. What it means here to be a champagne socialist is that [you believe] you can genuinely pull [cultural capital and economic capital] apart. … I’m not in any meaningful [material] way a Marxist but I generally subscribe to the idea that you can’t have cultural capital without being supported by capital, you can’t have the production of art without the means of production. But I’ve heard people express the notion that art would be so much better without money behind it. So basically: can you be a Marxist and have nice things?

MARIAH: That’s a very contentious question at Yale.

CHALAY: Which is a silly question, right, because surely the answer is no? But I think for Sally Rooney, to some degree, the answer is yes.

MARIAH: Well, I think also her characters pretty blatantly lack moral authority, which is one thing I really enjoy about the books. Like, they all proclaim that they’re socialists, but they all know they’re hypocrites…it just is what it is, which I find really refreshing.

CHALAY: Yeah, I dislike that, but you like it.

MARIAH: Well, I don’t approve of it morally, but I think it’s a realistic representation of how a certain group of people thinks about things, both at Trinity College [in Dublin], where Normal People is set, or at Yale. I’m interested in fiction that represents reality.

[…]

MARIAH: I’d like to talk about email and texts, and even Tinder, which makes an appearance late in Conversation with Friends. I think there’s an interesting relationship, as Eve has stated, to the epistolary form. But I also think the instantaneousness of communication is quite relevant. There’s a lot of waiting a suitable amount of time to text back, a lot about whether you use capital letters or not…I mean, I think the treatment of electronic communication in the text is very concerned with performance and self-narrativizing. It’s a way for the characters to write about themselves, and it conceals and reveals in equal measure.

CHALAY: And it’s a new kind of reflexivity, an immediate form of reflexivity that maybe isn’t possible in other media.

EVE: What interests me about it, in part, is the commitment to artlessness as a literary effect … the kind of strategic use of the double exclamation point, for instance, or non-capitalization. And there’s a sense that these are literary forms that are coded and understood within particular circles, but require effort like any other form of literary production. And so I’m wondering if that resonated with you in your own writing habits, in writing to your friends, and what sort of effort or artfulness do we think is happening here?

CHALAY: I also think that the idea of artlessness is interesting to compare with “Cat Person,” because people thought that Kristen Roupenian was artless, that she was just writing something strictly autobiographical. But in her interview with The New Yorker, she said, I worked really hard on that. I’m 36 years old. I had to work really hard to create the interiority of a 20-year-old. So artlessness is gendered, basically. But let’s go back to this whole idea of commitment to artlessness in text and email…

EVE: Right. And maybe there’s a sense that that in that sex scene with Nick, what Frances feels self-conscious about is that the performance of artlessness has slipped, as you say, but it seems just into another sort of performance, not into authenticity. That mode of performativity is embarrassing because too obviously oriented towards pleasing him. And I think that’s really interesting, that to be seen to perform too effortfully seems to makes her feel contemptible…and I’m wondering whether that resonates with you at all, that to be seen to try too hard is exposing. […]

MARIAH: Yeah. Something I think is interesting is that Frances is Conversations with Friends is a poet, Connell in Normal People is a writer. We never see their poems and short stories (although we know that they’re good), but we do see quite a lot of their texting and email and that sort of literary output. And maybe that’s just because as an author it’s hard to stand behind something and say “this is good.” But I wonder also if texting and that sort of communication has almost become more expressive in that there’s a whole extra layer of punctuation, and capitalization, and abbreviation…

CHALAY: I wouldn’t call it an extra layer, but I would call it, like, different conventions.

EVE: I mean, I would even say it’s intrinsic to the medium itself, that you can’t un-imbricate form from content in this sense. I’m thinking about the way that, for instance, you might send multiple text messages instead of one, which is actually a formal literary choice. Because there’s a sense that to send a text that was a paragraph would seem…overly serious?

MARIAH: Desperate?

EVE: Right. And I mean — I can’t believe I’m admitting this in a Yale publication — but I actually would often compose texts as a paragraph, and then copy-and-paste them individually into four or five different messages if it’s a sort of high-stakes texting interaction, like if I were texting a boy that I liked.

CHALAY: That’s amazing! And obviously the only output we see is their text and email, which is highly, highly mediated, and part of the whole commitment to artlessness —

MARIAH: And that’s the performance of spontaneity, pretending that you’re just typing this out as you’re thinking.

[…]

EVECC: Are the sex scenes in this book erotic? Before we answer that question we should talk about what we mean by erotic in this context.

MK: I was thinking, like, “arousing.” Are they aspirational? Are they hot? Is this something people could potentially masturbate to? I guess that’s what I mean when I ask “are these erotic?”

CC: Let’s all raise our hands, and it won’t be captured on audio, who’s masturbated to these sex scenes?

MK: I have not but I could.

CC: You were supposed to not say anything. I wanted it to be a hilarious pause.

MK: I needed more, I needed language to express what I was thinking. […] I think what I find erotic about sex in these books is the intensity of desire. Which I think is revealed by its attempt to conceal itself. Like Frances’ sort of inner dialogue about how she cares so much about what Nick thinks of her, what he’s perceiving her as, and she cares so much about the experience. It’s written in a way that is complex and nuanced and not necessarily stereotypically sexy, but…

EH: And I think that’s to a certain extent the dynamic between Marianne and Connell too. And Connell is in fact disturbed by the strength of Marianne’s desire for him at times, in the sense that he feels he could hurt her without repercussion. Her desire to be with him is so strong that he’s aware of the power imbalance in the relationship.

CC: That’s not the only reason he feels like he could hurt her without repercussion. You can desire someone really, really strongly and feel like you cannot hurt me by any means, that’s a feature of Marianne.

MK: We should talk about sex and power. Especially in Normal People, that’s such an important theme.

EH: I guess one starting point might be to ask: does excessive desire as a woman make you less powerful? Because I think we can agree that usually excessive desire in men is figured as powerful — at least now, although that hasn’t been the case necessarily throughout all of literary history, needless to say. But I think that Rooney is interested in interrogating women’s desire. And at least Frances, certainly, seems to be afraid that her desire will abase her in some way. […] I think [women] still find ways to punish [themselves] for feeling desire. I think I’ve experienced that. I’ve found myself feeling self doubt or recrimination.

MK: I agree. I think that’s also why we see these characters trying to conceal their desire through text based communication. The whole thing of not texting back for several hours, I think that also relates to the attempt to conceal the strength of one’s desire, whether emotional or sexual. I think when women desire too much the idea is that they will be hurt. Because, within the heterosexual norm, which is mainly what these books are about —

CC: Entirely, I would say. There’s no queer sex.

MK: Yeah. Well —

CC: Oh, shit, there’s Bobbi.

MK: Do she and Frances actually have sex?

EH: I think your omission there is actually helpful, in that the erotic side of their relationship is really never described or depicted, which is interesting.

MK: I also never got a strong sense from the novel that Frances felt a really deep sexual desire for Bobbi.

CC: Like, can you be passively bi?

MK: She did strike me as passively bi! The flashback to when they got together was Bobbi saying to Frances, “Do you like girls?” and Frances saying “‘Sure,’ because Bobbi made it easy to go along with things” or something like that. Which also is an interesting question, of what kind of desires are privileged in this text.

CC: I think the sex and power question is one that preoccupies feminist and queer theory. […] As far as I’m aware of the history, on the one hand you have Catherine Mackinnon being like, “Sex is about domination and subordination, and that’s always bad, and we have to eradicate any domination and subordination whatsoever, because that’s a sign of a patriarchal power structure.” Then you have on the other hand most of queer theory, which is like, “That’s silly, sex needs power, and that’s why we have tops and bottoms. People want to let go. People want to subordinate themselves sometimes, and some people want to lead, and you can lead in a way that doesn’t exploit the other person, you can lead in a way that privileges their pleasure.” I think the difficult thing about reading Normal People for me is that it talks about BDSM in heterosexual terms. In one of Chris Kraus’ books —

EH: The patron saint of desiring female subjects.

CC: Also the patron saint of like, straight women who potentially misuse queer theory.

EH: Fair.

CC: I think she’s a narcissistic straight woman who misuses a lot of theory. […] She takes BDSM and her whole notion of BDSM is like, “It’s just a replication of patriarchal power in sex that is always present in straight sex, where you’re just clear on what’s happening.” It’s just taking what’s always there and making it deliberate. And therefore, in some way, the woman has some sense of control, because she knows exactly what she’s doing. And so that kind of pushes the power out into the open, and that’s what she finds so exciting. And with Sally Rooney, in Normal People anyway, there’s a parallel thing where BDSM exists within the constraints of straight sex, and it takes the patriarchal abuse that Marianne experiences and [acts as] a recapitulation of her trauma. […] By the end of the novel she would still let Connell walk over her, or do anything, but she knows that Connell would never do that. And that’s the redemption. And that’s interesting too, because that’s not BDSM. Like Catharine Mackinnon was wrong, right, you can’t get rid of power in sex, and maybe that would make sex not sex as we know it today, so how, knowing that, can you deal with it, especially if you’re a straight woman? […] And Normal People is in that sense, that somewhat limited sense, optimistic, because you just find someone who would just never ever ever abuse their power over you. Only ever for your pleasure. That’s really beautiful actually.

[…]

MK: I think historically excessive desire on the part of a man has been seen as a power to hurt. […] So is Connell a wish fulfillment of, like, the one good man?

[CC: Can we maybe talk about her writing from Connell’s perspective? Not from Connell’s perspective full stop, because it’s all in third person. She alternates between writing very close to Marianne and writing very close to Connell. I think she does an amazing job.

EH: Yeah, whereas CWF is just Frances, right? And is first person. […] When I say NP is a romantic novel, that’s what I mean — that it’s interested in the potential for healing and connection between two people.

CC: Yeah, because when you have two perspectives, there’s no possibility of something being miscommunicated to the reader. You can have those two people miscommunicating with each other, but at least everything is laid bare and there’s some hope that in spite all of this we can come together. Whereas, because it happens to a single person, there isn’t the same kind of redemptive…. There’s something about the omniscient narrator that is kind of redemptive.]

[…]

EH: I think the open-endedness of the ending might imply that we have to keep having sex under patriarchy? I mean, we don’t have to. But for those of us who would like to have sex, it’s going to be under patriarchy.

CC: Unless you’re queer. I mean, maybe even then. I won’t venture.

EH: I think that’s what might associate her with a later generation of feminist theorists than someone like Catharine Mackinnon. I think that stance is very typical of women of our age, and how we tend to think about these things. Which is to say, yes, we can talk about these power dynamics, we can interrogate them, but you have to keep connecting with others, physically and emotionally. And that, for me, is the optimism of this ending.

CC: I think these two novels ask a very very very timely question, which is “What do we do about heterosexuality?”

EH: Can it be saved?

CC: Can it be saved. What happens to those of us who stay on the sinking ship? And for Normal People the answer is to find the one good man. And for Conversations With Friends the answer is, like, polygamy.

MK: Is that the answer?

CC: I don’t think so. … The other thing I was gonna say is I think there’s a really interesting relationship between submissiveness and morality. That’s part of what Conversations with Friends is all about, about Frances and Nick not accepting any responsibility for their actions, like, “Oh, I didn’t instigate this, I’m submissive in this dynamic, everything just happened to me.” Those are thought patterns that I have had myself, where I’ll sort of perform everything up until the very last moment, and only at the very last moment, when I know there’s no way for any other outcome to occur — this was at my heterosexual peak — I pretend to forget, I put all the work in the back of my head, and have the… “object” of my pursuit perform the last action. And once I thought this through I called it manic vulnerability. I know other women who do this, and without exception they have some kind of power — cultural capital, sexual capital. … So part of what I’m saying is, how as a submissive partner can you not abdicate responsibility? How do you not let your submissiveness seep through everything and be like “Oh, I wasn’t responsible”? Like, submissiveness should never be an excuse for moral laxity. […] Should we talk about sexual capital maybe? Whatever that means.

MK: What does sexual capital mean? Like just being hot?

CC: Well, desirability. Is that a better way to put it?

MK: Both Marianne and Frances are generally presented as the thing that novels always do, where they’re thin and white, but —

EH: But she doesn’t know she’s pretty.

MK: Right, she’s not as pretty as Bobbi, she’s not as pretty as whatshername.

CC: She’s just so bored!

MK: Which I think is… a trope that I don’t love.

[…]

MK: Something I’m interested in is I’m looking at the blurb of this paperback copy of Conversations With Friends and there’s the New Yorker and the Paris Review and the millions and there’s also The Cut and BuzzFeed and Sarah Jessica Parker.

CC: From Sarah Jessica Parker’s Instagram! [Editor’s note: Sarah Jessica Parker posted a picture of Conversations with Friends on Instagram with the caption: “This book. This book. I read it in one day. I know I’m not alone.” This caption was quoted in the selected reviews within the book.] That itself is about the self construction of the book is a “millennial” book. It’s a cohesive object: everything that’s happening in the book is also happening on [the book] and as part of the way the book is publicized and constructs itself.

EH: I love your idea of the millennial book as a category that we might include in thinking about, say, different kinds of digital mediations. […] The codex format, the book as a physical object, is actually encompassing these various kinds of digital spaces. […] So, you’re finding a textual way of representing Instagram, text messaging conversations, that feels very seamless and fluid. I really like the point in the recent New Yorker profile where the writer points out that Rooney writes, “She read the internet.” And that an older novelist would write, “She surfed the internet.” There’s a kind of fluency with different forms of communication that might make this also a millennial book.

CC: [A final question:] How has this book informed your sexual practices?

MK: I think my experience is more like, “Oh my God, I definitely do that, I should stop doing it.”

CC But you haven’t stopped doing it?

MK: I don’t think I’ve stopped being manically vulnerable; I think I’m still manically vulnerable in general. Has it informed your sex practices, Chalay?

CC: I haven’t had any sex since reading these books. [laughs]

MK: We’ll table that for now.

CC: Well, I think this was very much in line with conversations I was having with myself and my one-time partner and my friends, especially my queer friends, I guess, about heterosexuality and its ills and woes, and the fact that I’d like to be finished with it. And that’s still true; I definitely read Conversations with Friends and was like, “Wow, I’m never going back,” you know, whereas like I said, Normal People still feels a little more redemptive to me.

MK: interesting. I mean, yeah I do think Normal People is more redemptive. But also reading Conversations with Friends i was kind of like, I have the reaction of like heterosexuality is fucked but —

EH: We’ve got to keep fucking?

MK: Yeah.

CC: [screeches] Heterosexuality is fucked but we’ve got to keep fucking. [END]

A Conversation with Friends was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We asked writers to take us back to their queer roots — to the crush or song or movie character that first made them question their sexualities. Here are three portraits of queerness in the making.

Wearing purple Skull Candy headphones, I lay in my lofted bed, listening to the sweet balladry of the Canadian indie-rock band Tegan and Sara’s 2007 hit record The Con. The album opened with an a cappella call and response: I married in the sun (tell me where tell me where). Against the stone of buildings built before. You and I were born (start again, start, again). It was six years before the Supreme Court’s landmark decision, United States v. Windsor, which struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).The LGBTQ community was disillusioned with the potentiality of legal acknowledgement of same sex love. Listening to “I Was Married,” Sara Quin’s ode to her and her partner’s civil ceremony, I was realized it was my love too.

I was at a loss for any romantic experience, let alone that of the queer variety. Yet I clung onto each lyric, mourning an imagined relationship lost to cowardice, convinced that they were singing not about, but to me. Built a wall of books between us in our bed. Repeat, repeat the words that I know we both said. In fetal position, I wept into my pillow.

It’s easy for me to mock my 12-year-old, melodramatic self, but to this day, it was the most authentically gut-wrenching emotional response I’ve had to a work of art. When the mulleted, pierced-lipped duo sang about the letters they buried in backyards and running away from vulnerability, it evoked utter dread in me. The slight of my hand hoping to touch hers, the irrational things I did for her attention, and then my paralysis when I had it.

Over the years, I grew into my gayness and out of my angst. My crushes ceased to be unrequited, and in college, I was lucky enough to find a queer community that came close to my idealized conception of romantic kinship. I felt less alone. But there are still some days when I crave a queer tragedy. That’s when I reach for my headphones.

— Addee Kim, JE ’21, YH Staff

Shrinking in my oversized t-shirt, I heaved my skinny body into the driver’s seat of my big, white Toyota Tundra pick-up truck. A true Florida boy’s car, I thought to myself, each time I drove — windows down, hair freely flowing, music blaring — from one air-conditioned Orlando haven to the next. The summer I got my truck, just one year after I came out, I was still trying to feel like a man. I can be gay and masculine. My sexuality won’t define my personality. The truck was a reminder of my ossified straightness, a steel exoskeleton of my internalized homophobia.

Speeding down the I-4 in my oversized shirt, in my even-more-oversized truck, I felt empowered, protected in my hetero-shield. Fuck that guy! He just cut me off! I would extend my slender arm out of my window and lift the finger in anger. But suddenly, I would be overcome with fear. I’ve transgressed my defence. I’ve sold myself out. Windows up, volume down.

Months passed, and I grew into my sexuality and femme presentation. At Yale, away from the Florida heat, I wear Glossier Cloud Paint and my friend’s tight pink sweater. I pout my lips in pictures and twerk to Kali Uchis. Yet the truck remains, parked in my suburban driveway. It’s no longer a symbol of my vestigial straightness: it’s now the biggest challenge of my queer expression, one I have yet to overcome. How do I fit my truck into the changing framework of my gay identity?

Over winter break, I sped down I-4, windows down again. Some jerk cut me off. Arm out, finger lifted, t-shirt tight, cheeks pink, volume high.

— Hamzah Jhaveri, TC ’22, YH Staff

— Jordan Powell, MY ’21, YH Staff

Roots was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Interview with Anna McNeil, BR ’20, Ry Walker, SY ’20, Ellie Singer, BF ’21, and David Tracey, TC ’08

YH: How long have you been working on this case, and what was the process of becoming a plaintiff with [discrimination attorneys] Sanford Heisler? Why Sanford Heisler specifically?

AM: We had known that we wanted to file some kind of complaint or eventually work towards a lawsuit for well over a year now. We were initially thinking of filing the complaint ourselves, but we had been looking for representation for around a year at this point. And we came to Sanford Heisler over the summer, and honestly working with them has been very good so far. We feel like they really understand our case. They’ve gone to pretty great lengths to help us get here, so I’ve been pretty happy with the outcome. […] I think that when we were looking for representation before we found Sanford Heisler, [it] was difficult because a lot of firms maybe had speciality in Title IX, or they had speciality in public accountability law […] Some of our first advisors were Yale Law School professors, and people who had affiliations with Yale were obviously reticent to officially file the complaint or take us as a client, so that was difficult. It was [also] difficult to find a firm that understood all of the complexities of the case… so that took awhile, to find that match.

YH: Could you speak more to Yale’s history of inaction, and how that played into your filing of the lawsuit?

RW: I think in terms of headlines about fraternities, or discussions that we had read about in the last few years, one of the earlier instances was the DKE pledge event with the “NO means YES, YES means Anal,” the “We love Yale sluts” in front of the Women’s Center incident, in addition to the 2015 SAE party in which they didn’t admit any black women, or rather had a “white girls only” policy. So I think there’s this much longer history where, after two of those instances, there were college students who reformed that Greek life. And Yale has revoked some [privileges] from some of these organizations, and has, at times, given them some sort of punishment with limited oversight. As far as there being real effects, or real change, there has been little policy and little oversight yielded by the administration over these organizations. That’s one thing that we came into a lot of trouble with when we started going to countless meetings in the Yale Dean’s Office […] The administration came to the conclusion that they were not willing […] to oversee and monitor these organizations that are putting students at risk — their students at risk — so often. So there’s this longer history, particularly with fraternities, that has made clear the great gap in Yale’s own ability and power [and] its responsibilities on this campus.

YH: What does it mean to file a lawsuit against Yale, and why did you guys choose to file against the University [as well as] the fraternities themselves?

AM: I think it kind of goes back to what Ry was saying. We wanted to make it clear that we oppose the fraternities as institutions, both the national and local chapters, but also we were trying to imply that Yale has an obligation to its students to keep them safe, and to keep them free from discrimination. Yale is violating that agreement, given that it is aware of the conditions of fraternities and fraternity culture, and has been aware for a decade or more. […] We were really trying to send a message that Yale’s policy — which is [currently that] these are independent, private off-campus organizations and therefore they cannot do anything about it — actually violates some of the undergrad regulations in Yale’s own policy. Furthermore, and as we argue within our complaint, it is well within their oversight to curb the behavior of these fraternities. And so that’s why we didn’t want to file against just the national and local chapters.

[…]

YH: What outcomes do you guys desire? Legal outcomes? Infrastructural support? More student support? And if it were the latter, what would that look like to you guys?

ES: Basically we’re looking for the University to end its hands off approach, and start taking comprehensive action. Making the fraternities not only integrate but [also] become safer party spaces. So that’s a list of things, [which] are in the complaint, but that includes having mix-gendered sober monitors, [and] bouncers to supervise [potentially] discriminatory admissions. And other items that would help end the toxic fraternity culture here.

AM: I think there are a number of steps that Yale has taken recently to distance itself from off-campus life. For example, they closed off-campus party registration. There may be talk about changes that further distance the University from being accountable for what happens off campus. A lot of our [provisions] in the complaint include things like some degree of University oversight, so that fraternities have to create some kind of regulation about how alcohol is served, availability of food and water, how dark the space is or how crowded the space is, in addition to gender integration. Because we agree that Yale’s current hands off system fails students on this front. Not just on the gender discrimination.

YH: What happens if Yale is found guilty? Or if they aren’t?

AM: Obviously David [Tracey, lawyer at Sanford Heisler] knows a lot more about this stuff than we do, because [the outcome] is very far down the line. Years. What we’re looking for is not for Yale to shut down, or anything like that. What we hope to happen is that Yale will have to work with us on some of those proposed reforms that we have in our complaint. […]

DT: I’d just like to qualify that slightly. We’re obviously open to talking, engaging in the process that Anna just described, but we seek a really comprehensive review of the complaint that includes gender-integrated fraternities — a real paradigm shift in the way that Yale regulates and engages with the social environment at the University, particularly off-campus social spaces. So I think that we will go to trial and prevail, and Yale will have to make those changes. And the fraternities will be required to gender-integrate.

YH: We just kind of got into this, but I was wondering what the general timeline of this, but how long you guys anticipate this taking…years?

AM: I think David, correct me if I’m wrong, but the timeline that we’re looking at is that once Ry and I graduate, and maybe Ellie, too, this won’t be finished at all. We’re thinking like years, like two years — ?

DT: Yeah, I think one to two years is fair. And we’re going to prosecute the case as aggressively and as quickly as possible, but I think one to two years.

YH: How do you guys see this ramifying on a national level?

AM: Well this is kind of a historic, well I won’t say historic, but the lawsuit is the first of its kind in that students challenge fraternities on the basis of gender discrimination. We would really like to pave the way for students at other universities, who face the same problems that we do here, to take action similarly. […] We are also trying to bring home the point that gender discrimination is really ines? If that messaging could really resonate with the national media, we’d be quite happy with that.

YH: How do you see this affecting your social lives at Yale? How are you feeling?

AM: I mean, it’s kind of hard to say because we’re not… Well, we were taking a lot of calls today, so it’s kind of difficult to see how students are approaching the lawsuit and taking the news of our filing. I would be interested to see how people react to it. There hasn’t been [much] beyond some individual messages, mostly in support, and a lot of them haven’t been from students on Yale’s campus, so I’m actually not quite sure [what] to expect in terms of how people will react.

RW: One difference between national media response and campus media response is that a lot of students on campus know about Engender. And most, if not all, fraternity members on campus know about Engender, and [know] that we filed a claim over the summer, and are aware of our efforts. And this is isn’t necessarily news… the lawsuit is certainly news, but it’s not as much of a paradigm shift in terms of [our] ideology. Although I’m sure it will have an impact — I’m sure I’ll be having conversations with our peers over the next few days about this lawsuit. It’s not necessarily like the arguments that we are making about gender discrimination and [fraternities’] hostile environment haven’t already been part of the Yale discourse.

YH: How can we support you guys other than signing the petition?

AM: This is a good question. I mean, this is interesting because sorority and fraternity recruitment are finishing up right now. Marvin Chun makes the suggestion in his report that students stop attending fraternity parties, and we agree with him to a certain extent, but beyond that, it would be great if students stopped joining fraternities and giving them so much money to continue exist here. [If] we could eliminate the demands for frats that would require a big shift towards raising funds et cetera that would go towards alternative spaces, that would be really great.

YH: Do you guys have anything else to add?

AM: I’d like to point out that when we say [that] we experienced sexual conduct in fraternities and [that] we’re trying to join those spaces, that’s not like — I think maybe this is clear to a Yale audience — we’d want to join those spaces with the intention of changing them for the better, not that we think that [it’s] women’s job is to police men in their actions. [It’s that] we think a co-ed membership would be more able to safely serve a co-ed public. I just want to make that messaging kind of clear.

Suiting Up was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is a new section for the Herald. We are excited to bring you visual content in various formats over the course of the semester. This week we asked our readers for a photograph of a drawing done on their forehead; here is what we received:

Fuzz: Week 1 was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

FROM THE ARCHIVES

In the November 1992 U.S. elections, female candidates ran for and were elected to political office in unprecedented numbers. A record 47 women won election to the U.S. House of Representatives, 24 for the first time, and four women were elected to the Senate, among them the first African American female senator.

Commentators labelled the phenomenon “The Year of the Woman”, and attributed the wave of support for female candidates to the anger and disillusionment following the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. One of the two female incumbents, then-Senator Barbara Mikulski, objected to the media’s moniker, remarking, “Calling 1992 the Year of the Woman makes it sound like the Year of the Caribou or the Year of the Asparagus. We’re not a fad, fancy, or a year.”

Last Tuesday, 100 women were elected to the House, 12 to the Senate and nine to governor’s mansions. Among them were Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland, the first Native American women elected to Congress, and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the first Muslim women elected to Congress. In the wake of the results, pundits have taken to calling 2018 “(Another) Year of the Woman.” As in 1992, the number of women elected has shattered records, bolstering arguments that Donald Trump and the Kavanaugh hearings have delivered an awakening to women, precipitating, in the words of the Washington Post, “A New Era of Women in Politics.”

Much has changed since 1992. Much hasn’t. This week, the Herald pulls from its archives an article written by Marny Helfrich, MC ’94, discussing her skepticism of the idea of “The Year of the Woman”, first published in the Herald on October 23, 1992, a few weeks before the election.

The Year of the Woman? Maybe not quite yet…

By Marny Helfrich, MC ’94

Did you watch the political conventions this summer? If you did, you probably noticed the red, white, and blue bunting, the balloons, the donkeys and elephants. You may also have noticed Democratic unity and Republican discord, a reversal of the expected pattern. But whether you were focusing on the speeches or the spectacle, you must have noticed the women.

Women running for Congress. Republican women for choice. Republican women for Clinton. Women with cookie recipes. Women with children. Women with AIDS. Women with children with aids. Hillary Clinton. Marilyn Quayle. Barbara Bush. Murphy Brown.

Never before have women been so prominent in presidential politics, not even when Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman on a major party presidential ticket in 1984. Democrats and Republicans, pundits and pollsters, all are calling 1992 “the year of the woman.”

In many ways the name is deserved. More women are running for the Senate than have been elected in the nation’s history. The number of women in the House is also likely to increase dramatically. Similar changes are happening in state and local government throughout the country.

In this year of Congressional scandal and widespread discontent with the status quo, the fact that women are often left out of the political mainstream has worked to the advantage of female candidates. Though some, like California senatorial candidate Diane (sic) Feinstein, are experienced political insiders, many are newcomers, like Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois and Lynn Yenkel of Pennsylvania, whose main qualification in the eyes of many voters is that they haven’t been “part of the system.”

Last fall’s Hill-Thomas hearings, before the entirely white male Judiciary Committee, showed many people that a nation that is 52 percent women is not well served by a Senate which is two percent women.

However positive these changes may be, the picture is not entirely rosy. First, even if every woman running for Congress won (which is guaranteed not to happen, since in several races women are opposing each other), neither the House nor the Senate would be even close to gender parity. There is still a long way to go.

Many of the women are running largely on the strength of their records and positions on “women’s issues”, a situation that in the long term is bad for these issues and for women. Until we come to see daycare as a “children’s issue”, parental leave as a family issue, breast and ovarian cancer as a health issue, comparable worth as an economic issue, and reproductive rights as a civil liberties issue, we cannot address them properly. The increase of women in Congress may be dramatic, but it will not be large enough to demand for these issues the attention they deserve until they are seen as “human issues,” not just “women’s issues.”

The association of women with these issues also means that female politics who are more interested in free trade than free formula or more concerned about B-2 bombers than about babysitters may have difficulty being taken seriously.

Concurrent with the increase in women’s participation in national politics has been an increase in anti-feminist rhetoric, especially from Republicans. As a result of feminism and other movements, the world in which people rear their children today is very different from the one in which they were reared. It is not surprising that many people, including those who have benefited from the women’s movement, remain fearful of “feminism.” The movement for gender equality has come far enough that to be openly anti-feminist is a political liability, but not far enough that political advantage can’t be gained by exploiting the fears of a changing society, as the Murphy Brown and “family values” rhetoric shows.

As George Bush said, 1992 is a weird political year. For the time being, women are benefitting from the chaos. It remains to be seen whether women candidates will be able to hold onto their giant in a year without rampant anti-incumbent sentiment and whether “family values” and other subtly anti-feminist tactics would have more impact if voters’ attention were not focused on a troubled economy, The “year of the woman” is a remarkable and positive phenomenon, but as long as eight women running for the Senate is surprising, the Congress and the country have a long way to go.

The Year of Fewer Men Than Usual was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

All photos taken on iPhone. Nika Zarazvand, TD ’20.

Kiarostami goes to the Louvre was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Flowers and notes have covered the Women’s Table this week, a reminder of the emotion and tumult caused by the Senate hearings concerning sexual assault allegations made by Christine Blasey Ford against then Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, ES ’87, LAW ’90. Amidst the most visible signs of protest were “We Believe” posters covering bulletin boards and the Rally for a Better Yale. Behind such initiatives? Solidarity with Survivors, an organization of student activists founded in the wake of the allegations against Kavanaugh. Valentina Connell, TD ’20, one of the main organizers behind the student group, speaks to the Yale Herald about Solidarity with Survivors’ inception and how it hopes to move forward.

YH: How quickly did this project come together after the first allegations by Christine Blasey Ford?

VC: This project actually started up on the Sunday when Deborah Ramirez made her allegations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh, saying he perpetrated sexual misconduct in Lawrence Hall during their first year at Yale. Obviously that hit very close to home and I was really upset by it. As I was reading the New Yorker article, one of my friends, with whom I’d been talking a lot about Kavanaugh, [Akhil Rajan, BR ’21], texted me basically saying, “Did you see this latest allegation? What are we gonna do about it?” He thought that we needed to have something like a protest or a vigil. So that night both of us came up with a list of few students we knew who might be interested in organizing, thinking about some of the most impactful people we know on campus, people who had done organizing before for different things, like Engender, and people who had been vocal about sexual misconduct on campus. So we put all of them in a Facebook group chat of about 15 people and we texted them saying, “Hey, this most recent allegation has come out, we’re super upset by it and we want to do something. We have no idea what it’s going to look like or what we even want it to look like. Do we want it to be a rally or a protest? Should it be a vigil at night? Should it be outside Lawrence? We have all these questions that we have no answers to so let’s meet tomorrow and figure this out.” We encouraged people to add their friends who might be interested and also let people know that if it was too emotionally charged for them, or they didn’t want to participate in this because it’s a very triggering and traumatic subject, to feel free to distance themselves.

YH: What were the next steps the initial group took to materialize this idea?

VC: We set up a time for Monday night to meet. Less than 24 hours after the time we first made the group chat, it had doubled so now there were 30 people interested in organizing with us. So Monday night we came together at the Women’s Center and talked for about two and a half hours, going pretty late into the night. We articulated what we were responding to and what we were upset about. A lot of it was Kavanaugh but obviously it was also connected to the larger culture of complicity around sexual misconduct at Yale and general misogyny at Yale. I think the biggest thing we were responding to was the fact that the administration continues to allow these things to happen. We also crafted a list of goals as well as values we want to see in the community, such as deep respect, a culture of consent, or a culture of more than consent. On Tuesday, we had another meeting, where we planned what we wanted the rally to look like in more detail. Someone suggested having a silent gathering on Old Campus and then marching to the Women’s Table, which was very powerful. Then from Tuesday night all the way until the rally (on Wednesday afternoon), people were working nonstop to draft speeches, to make chants, reach out to media, printing handouts. It was truly inspiring to see everyone become so mobilized all of a sudden and come together when we really needed to.

YH: Do you think that you might not have organized had the Ramirez allegations not arisen?

VC: Speaking personally, I was already upset about Kavanaugh, about Christine Blasey Ford, about the fact that Kavanaugh was a Yale man who went to Yale College and then Yale Law. I was upset about his politics all together and the fact that as a Supreme Court Justice he could threaten abortion law, environmental protection, immigration policies, and affordable healthcare. When Dr. Ford came out with her allegation, I was upset that he was an alleged perpetrator of sexual misconduct. But I think what rallied me was when it hit so close to home, when the allegation from Ramirez came out, which happened in Lawrence. That’s what really fired me up, personally. I know organizations like RALY, the Dems, and Yale Law School students have all been organizing around campus so I can’t say that if the Ramirez allegation hadn’t occurred we wouldn’t have the same response. But I think the closeness [of the Ramirez allegations] energized a lot of campus. I think for a lot of people on this campus who might have been apathetic or might have been trying not to think about it as much, the issue was really brought too close to home.

YH: Looking forward, how do you hope Solidarity with Survivors will balance supporting survivors with pursuing administrative change?

VC: So since everything happened so quickly, after the rally, we took the time to debrief and talk about our organizing strategies and what we could have done better so we talked about how we could best elevate marginalized voices in this community and survivors’ voices. So we’ve had lots of discussions about what we want our organization to look like next. But I think all of us do agree that we need to continue supporting survivors first and foremost. But I also think supporting survivors does mean demanding more action from the Yale administration and demanding that they listen to us and take allegations of sexual misconduct seriously and deal with perpetrators of sexual misconduct who are on this campus whether or not they’ve been suspended and then come back. I think addressing all those issues is part of supporting survivors. Personally, I would like to see us take time to learn as much as we can about the Yale administration, Title IX, the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct (UWC) policies, the University Tribunal’s policies, and what the Yale administration has done in the past. I want to take time to ask questions of the Yale administration and ask questions of each other and then I think over time we will be able to make concrete policy demands of the Yale administration. I think that process will take a long time, but that’s how I personally see the future.

YH: Some people have said that the support of sexual assault survivors should be apolitical. Do you think it’s possible to extricate politics from this issue?

VC: I think everything is political. I think everything is deeply connected to our administrations, institutions and government and general culture, which are all political. I think with Solidarity with Survivors we try to bring survivors’ voices to the forefront and support survivors first and foremost. A lot of the time when there is a lot of talk about politics, survivors’ voices get drowned out. Or the idea of supporting survivors gets swept up by the political discourse. However, I do think that all of us organizers are very political. The things that Kavanaugh might do as Supreme Court Justice are going to affect the most marginalized people in the country. I personally don’t think there’s a way to be apolitical about this because so many of our institutions and so much of our culture perpetuates the type of rape culture and the type of culture that allows powerful men to abuse their power. And for Yale to produce powerful, abusive men, I think makes this all very political.

YH: Obviously the issue of sexual assault and the silencing of women is pervasive across the country. Why specifically target the Yale administration instead of looking more nationally?

VC: I think that this issue is pervasive literally everywhere: at Yale, outside of Yale, and in the most powerful parts of this country. Our president is an alleged perpetrator of sexual misconduct, so are now two of our Supreme Court Justices (who are both Yale men), so obviously this is widespread all across the country, all the way up to our highest court in the land. However, I think the reason that I personally have been focusing so much on Yale is because Yale has such an important part to play in the production of these men who abuse their power. Yale is complicit in allowing a culture of disrespect and misogyny to perpetuate and so continues to produce men who will perpetrate sexual misconduct. And then those men will become very powerful people and hold very powerful positions, so I think Yale plays a critical role in what’s happening right now. Not only that but focusing on Yale is powerful for organizers because it allows us to effect change — even if as students we may not be important in the large scheme of things.

YH: How can Yale students make changes in an arena where such powerful institutional forces are at play?

VC: Yale produces some of the world’s most powerful leaders and as students we have the power to make changes in its culture not only on the administrative level but also in our ability to put forth a next generation of leaders that will not tolerate sexual misconduct or disrespect of any kind. So not only can we affect Yale’s administration, we can also affect a culture of leaders and I think that’s the immense power students have at Yale. For example, I come from a background where I don’t have any connections, and my voice might not matter that much but because we’re students at Yale and we’re mobilizing, speaking out and gaining media attention, the spotlight is really on Yale. I think that’s our power as Yale students: when we come together and speak out and speak up, the nation listens. And that’s why we can’t shut up; we have to keep talking about this and we have to let the administration know that if they don’t make changes, we will call them out and the country is going to know about it.

Speaking Up, Speaking Out was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This week, the Herald met with Patricia Melton, PC ’83, executive director of New Haven Promise (NHP), a non-profit dedicated to encouraging New Haven high school students to pursue a college education within Connecticut. By pledging to equip scholars with financial assistance, mentorship, and career-internship opportunities, New Haven Promise has incentivized these students to approach higher education with a fresh lens.

YH STAFF: How did New Haven Promise start up?

Patricia Melton: Well, it’s based on the model of a Promise program, the very first promise program, which was started in Kalamazoo. The mayor of New Haven, the superintendent, the President of Yale Rick Levin (GRD ’74), and Will Ginsberg from the Community Foundation — they were all interested in how to strengthen the public schools and the city. The whole premise of Promise is to incentivize parents and students to work really hard, to want to be dedicated to the city by living in the city, and to attend public schools in the city. For that dedication and commitment to strengthening the city and the school district, students get a tuition benefit to attend college in-state. The program was launched in 2010.

YH: How do students qualify for NHP?

PM: Students have to get a 3.0 GPA in high school, do 40 hours of community service, and have good attendance. If they do those things, and attend an in-state institution, they could have up to full tuition [covered]. And it’s a sliding scale based on how long they’ve been in the city.

YH: Where does New Haven Promise get its funding from?

PM: Well, our funding has come from primarily our anchor institutions: Yale covers the scholarship dollars, which is the largest amount at this point in time. But our program activities, for instance — creating the college-going culture, financial aid workshops, as well as following students through college — have a couple of really big donors big donors: Yale-New Haven Hospital, and the Community Foundation. The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven has been a huge supporter and anchor of our programming. We did have some start-up funds from Wells Fargo as well.

YH: Besides the ongoing scholarship, how does NHP support Promise scholars once they are in college?

PM: We really follow them [through] college. We have what’s called an ambassador program, where we identify scholars who help create a community on our various campuses. We work very closely with our partner institutions to support them while they’re in college. 80 percent of our students are low-income, first generation to college, under-represented minorities — so it’s very important that we work with programming [within college] that already exists to make sure that folks are accessing those resources. We [also] have a very robust, and paid, internship program that we’ve done — we’re actually going into our sixth year of that — and we’ve probably placed close to 350, almost 400 scholars in paid internships.

YH: I understand that the total amount given in a Promise scholarship depends on how long you’ve lived in New Haven. Why is that?

PM: Because [NHP] is really an economic development program, so it’s really focused on a parent’s commitment, and family’s commitment, to living in the city. So, for folks who have been here all along, they get the highest amount of the benefit. And that is pretty much the defining feature of a lot of Promise programs. And when we really look at it, over the eight years we’ve been in existence, New Haven Public Schools have seen an increase in both enrollment and graduation rates. Last year and this year, the schools have been at a 50 year high in terms of enrollment.

YH: Has there been any consideration of expanding the program to the areas beyond the city limits?

PM: [NHP] was something that was set up by the city to really strengthen the city of New Haven. There is a Promise program that started in Hartford a couple of years ago, and I think there is a Promise program that’s starting up in Bridgeport. I think the barrier is that folks are gonna have to figure out how to fund their Promise program. And so we do give out free advice on what’s worked here. Because even though we’ve certainly [helped students pay] out millions [in tuition bills], most of the money really comes from the federal aid, like the Pell Grant. A huge percent of our kids are low-income and they qualify for federal aid. So [New Haven] Promise is really an incentive that grabs the imagination of families who would turn down money [like loans] that students really need. What we tell them is: Promise makes college affordable, not free.

Unfortunately, when I first came, a lot of people misunderstood and thought it paid for a full-ride. I had a lot of angry parents at me in that first year. So we had to get more precise. Students still need to apply for other scholarships — for other merit-based aid, need-based aid — and then with all of that we are able to significantly decrease the amount of debt that students have. For instance, at University of Connecticut (UConn), a good percentage of the last couple of classes are coming out with no debt. They’re turning down all of their loans. But that’s not just not from Promise. UConn has added and committed additional scholarship dollars for every Promise scholar that comes to them. And a number of other institutions are starting to do the same.

YH: You went to Yale as the first person from your family to go to college — what was your experience here like?

PM: Well, I would say it was really difficult. I was an athlete, so that has its own challenges [and] demands that you have an intensive schedule. As a track athlete, I was competing year round. When I came I was also an independent student, meaning I did not have any financial support. So there were policies in place that made it challenging every year, like being on bursar hold because of the expected individual contribution. And of course, I didn’t have that money. But, I must say that I had support from my track coach and community — but it was still challenging. I can say today it’s a very different place. Yale has a lot of support [systems] in place now.

YH: Is there any advice you’d give to other first generation Promise scholars who come to Yale on how to succeed here?

PM: Absolutely. I participate in 1stGenYale. It’s been a group for a couple of years now, so I’m heavily involved with that organization, which is an alumni group. I’ve also been involved with the Yale Club of New Haven [and] the Yale Black Alumni Association, so I’m constantly giving advice. Now the advice that I give them (I’ve been talking about my involvement) is to take advantage of everything that’s here, to take advantage of the resources. Yale was difficult for me because I was very shy, I had come from a very small school, and I just didn’t take advantage of the resources that I could have taken advantage of. They were there, but I was too shy to even access those things. And so my advice is always to connect: you can develop your [own] small community. It’s really important to be in a place with people who look like you. Go to the Afro-Am Center. Go to La Casa. There’s just everything. And there are a lot of activities that bring first-gen students together with first-gen alums to share their stories. I think that’s very helpful as well.

YH: Are there any challenges New Haven Promise is facing right now? What is the next goal for New Haven Promise?

PM: We’ve just had very strong growth. And success is wonderful, but you have to always build your infrastructure to keep up with the growth. I’d say that’s the biggest challenge — that we’re successful. With success comes a lot of work. We’re looking at ways that we form new partnerships to deepen our work. Because of our success, a lot of other Promise programs and cities would like for us to share our practice. So, we are now working on a mini conference where we can bring individuals here and tell our story. I would have to say we’re one of the most successful Promise programs in the country given our impact. And we don’t spend the most money. We’re kind of on the small end in terms of the amount of money that we spend, but we’ve had a pretty large impact for the investment that we’ve made. And I think that’s because we’ve been quite strategic: we use technology, we use social media, we have great partnerships, and we have wonderful collaborators and really great leadership here. And I think all those things have helped make this the success that it is. Many other cities are struggling and thinking, “What can we do? Do we need to raise a hundred million dollars?” No, you don’t. You can do it with a lot less. Because Promise is an incentive, it really gets people motivated and energized so that everybody’s rowing in the right direction — rowing together. And through that, you can get so much more done. And I would say that’s pretty much been our mantra, and I think our results reinforce that.

YH: How long do you see yourself working for New Haven Promise?

PM: Well, there’s still a lot of work to be done! I love what I do, I love being back at Yale, working so closely with the University, and I’m really proud that my alma mater does this. Because there isn’t another college in the country that pays millions of dollars for the city kids to attend other universities. It’s really quite phenomenal. And so, you know, I think I’ll be here. I’m not thinking about anything else at this point because we still have plenty of work to do.

Promising Future was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.