Tales From the Gender Zone

Ah, the Conference, Academia's beloved replacement for old white men with pipes sitting around, having a brandy and formulating rhetorical arguments.

You have to love it. It looks so good on your résumé.

Last weekend Centenary (and by Centenary and mean Drs. Van-Hoosier-Carey and Wolkomir) hosted the ASC Gender Studies Conference. Of course we whipped up a panel and signed up. This is going to sound really narscissistic, but I think I'm terribly over-educated. Not just me, but all five of the girls in my panel. The one constant thought we seemed to share throughout the conference was: "some of these people are SOOOOO third-wave." I guess somehow implying that we're all fourth-wave feminists, which means we do whatever we want to and expect everyone to let us. Part of that is that is not only that we expect girls to be CEOs and play pro-Football, but that we expect boys to knit us scarves and fold our socks if they feel inspired.

It's a Centenary thing. I know it must be. There are so few boys here that it seems almost like a relief when they want a position of power. Nearly everyone on my Conglomerate staff is female. There's no competition. I have three straight and three gay professors this semester and four of them are rediculously powerful and independent women (the others being rediculously powerful and independent men). I'm not sure that I'm living in a universe that represents that "outside world" very accurately. This, I suspect, is partly why people just don't seem to get very far away from Centenary--it's so nice here. A dream come true, really.

Anyway, that has very little to do with the conference, which was a smash hit. If they had given out awards, our panel would have gotten them all.

And if you want to see pictures you can go here. I'm not in any of them, but one of them is a classic picture of Tim. It's the only picture you'll ever see of him within fifty feet of fried fish. (Say that ten times fast.)