99 Days of Something #7 – Pride
As Pride month is about to start, and there are a few Pride marches and celebrations happening this weekend, I am once again reflecting on my relationship with Pride. I haven’t been to many. I have never thought of Pride as somewhere I really wanted to be or something I wanted to be part of. I love seeing the pictures of the events, I love reading about them and I love that Pride events exist in a form that is celebratory, full of joy and love. I also understand the importance of visibility and protest and we need that now more than probably ever in my lifetime. I love seeing social media feeds from friends and colleagues who are involved somehow. I love Pride looking in from the outside. I just don’t want to be there. So I feel conflicted about Pride because I feel like I really should want to be part of it. I feel like I should be seeking out those spaces, be visible, take up space. I feel like I should be able to find fun, joy and power in those spaces. I also feel like I should be there to acknowledge that Pride is not just a celebration of love but that it is also a protest, that it is intensely political and a really important form of resistance. But somehow I also feel like I just want to watch Pride from the outside. I absolutely want it to exist, I want to be part of it in the same way that I want to watch some sport on TV – it’ll be fun as long as I don’t actually have to be there or participate.
I realise that is possibly selfish. I also know that it comes from a position of privilege. I don’t need Pride. I never have. I have always had support, I have always been seen for all of me. I never had to hide and have always been able to just be me. So finding and being part of a community and express that through events like Pride have never been important for my existence or my well being. Couple that with my dislike of big crowds, indifference about a lot of the music played and acts featured and generally having other things I’d rather do at the weekend, Pride never makes it to the top of the list of priorities. And then I feel guilty about that. I was vaguely thinking about joining the Leeds Pride march in July because it feels like I should, but I no longer have to worry about that as something else has come up on that date.
I have become increasingly aware of the importance of visibility and of resistance. I am conscious that as a pretty successful out gay woman I have both power and responsibility and a certain vulnerability. I don’t know if it is just getting older and wiser (ahem) that gives me some of that perspective or whether it is more to do with the political climate and all our rights being under threat in a way that I haven’t really experienced before. My consciousness of s28 for example was limited maybe because I didn’t go to school in England until I was 16 and I remember sex education, for example, being way way more useful in Germany. I don’t actually remember anything about ‘non traditional families’ but then there was already a lot on the school curriculum that I thought was nonsense. For example, I remember being one of only 2 kids in my class at grammar school whose parents were not seemingly happily married and together. And that was positioned as the absolute norm. All this talk of perfect nuclear families versus problematic single parent families made no sense to me because I was quite happy in my ‘broken’ family. I was surrounded by diverse family structures and living arrangements. In other words, I already understood that curricula in some ways are always political and always tell a particular story and that story might not at all reflect mine. I might not have been able to express that but I knew there was so much more to the world than the things we were talking about at school from a really early age. So because in my life outside school I was exposed to lots of different ways of living and thinking and because I was also encouraged to read a lot and to think and to not just accept what teachers or authority figures said, I was not looking to school to teach me anything about how families worked or who I was or should be. More and more I realise that while I am sure I have my share of internalised homophobia, it’s pretty limited and I have been incredibly lucky to have experienced exclusion, non acceptance, hate etc as rare exceptions rather than as something that is a constant in my life. In addition, for a lit of my adult life the story has sort of been one of progress. It saw s 28 abolished, it saw the introduction of civil partnerships and then equal marriage, it saw equality in adoption rights, the Gender Recognition Act was introduced, discrimination was outlawed. I am not saying that things were great but we seem to be heading in the right direction. I think taking all of those things together, resulted in it taking me an embarrassingly long time to realise that protest, resistance, visibility and using my voice are really important. Just because being gay and out has not been a struggle for me, doesn’t mean I am not part of the struggle.
But what does that actually mean in practical terms. What can I do that feels meaningful and doable. I am working on that and through June I want to really consciously think about that and maybe explore more queer literature, art and film (suggestions always welcome). I will continue to share snippets of my life and while I never hide and think I am fairly open, maybe I can be more explicit about who I mean when I see ‘we’ or about how I think about the family and life Kath and I have build. I will make more an effort to seek out queer spaces or queer owned businesses. And I will keep showing up as authentically as I can and I will try and really notice the occasions when I hesitate to do that, where the inevitable ongoing coming out that just happens when you chat with new people about your life (‘What does your husband do…, erm, he doesn’t exist) feels awkward or not really safe. Because those are the moments that require resistance and challenge. Those are the moments that doing it anyway is more important than ever – particular in my position of privilege and almost always physical safety.
Anyway, Happy Pride month. Let’s celebrate and protest in equally powerful measures in whatever way we can. I’d love to hear your plans or suggestions for other things I might like to try. Oh and also, here’s my ‘we’:
99 Days of Something #6 – Academic Travel to think better
I haven’t been in a writing mood today. I haven’t updated my running blog (I haven’t run but I have cycled) and I haven’t written anything else either. I had basically given up getting anything down today. Some days are just not for writing it seems. Although I always feel better when I do write. But then I was scrolling through social media and saw posts from people I know heading to or having fun in San Francisco for one of the big Law conferences. I don’t want to write about conferences as such but it did make me think about all the places work has taken me that I might never have gone to otherwise. Don’t get me wrong, when I look back, a tiny fraction of conference trips were funded by work, most of them I paid for myself and even the ones where I did get funding, that mostly only covered part of the cost – so this isn’t about seeing the world and having fun on public money, in fact academics are the only group of people I know who routinely pay out of pocket to do parts of their job. And actually conferences are really hard work! Anyway, maybe more about actual conferencing another day.
I have been to some pretty amazing places to conferences, for fieldwork and for fellowships etc over the last 20 years. I got to spend time in Hamburg early on in my career which meant I got to spend lots of time with my Dad (because I stayed with him throughout the fellowship) and my Oma who loved me coming round for breakfast several times a week. I also got to see bits of Bulgaria and Poland as well as cities in Germany I had never been to during fieldwork. I have been to conferences and events in Warsaw, Salzburg, Oslo, Freiburg, Berlin, Brussels, Lund, Paris, Barcelona, Toronto, Montreal, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Mexico City, Brisbane and those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head. In many of these locations, particularly those outside Europe, I have always tried to add a holiday to make it worth going that far. But even when I have only done the conference, I have always made time to see at least a little bit of the place. It’s a perk of the job in some ways because sometimes conferences give access to places you don’t otherwise get. For smaller events that might just be seeing the inside of the university hosting the event – but I love that. I love getting a sense of universities in other countries, the way they feel, what they show to the public and what you can glean from being behind the scenes a little, wandering corridors, reading noticeboards (where notice boards still exist) or looking at what pictures (if any) they choose to hang on their walls. Bigger events sometimes get you access to things historic buildings for drinks receptions or dinner, or special tours like the Supreme Court in Washington DC. It can also give you a very warped sense of a place though if you just stay in your conference bubble. There were a whole load of people who missed out on amazing street food in Mexico City because they never really ventured out from the conference hotel or recommended restaurants.
The overseas trips are of course often the ones that stick in your mind. The Brisbane conference was epic partly because it fell right in the middle of a 4 week Australia adventure that we designed around the conference. I had won a best paper prize which meant that the conference fee was waived and I received some money towards travel which basically paid for my flight. Anyway, most of my conferences and events have actually been UK based. I disproportionate number of them in London but UK travel has also seen my visit Edinburgh, Glasgow, Stirling, Cardiff, Swansea, Newcastle, York, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Leicester, Birmingham, Worcester, Stratford, Reading, Bath, Norwich, Brighton, and probably lots more I can’t think of now. I don’t tend to stay longer for UK events but I do often still try and see a bit of the place – that might be with a little tourist run or a walk. In some ways it is a great way to see little bits of a place which then means you can decide if you want to go back and actually spend some time there. I have a soft spot for Leicester because I was a student there. I’d never go there as a tourist but I will always jump at an opportunity to visit for work. Same for Birmingham. I would like to spend more time in Bath – good incentive to get on with the DBA, maybe a summer graduation with a day or two either side would be a nice way to spend a few days.
Anyway, what’s the point of writing this. Well, partly it just popped into my head that I have been to a lot of interesting places because of work and partly because it is a really good reminder that it’s not all about spreadsheets. Occasionally it can and must also be about exchanging interesting, exciting and complex and challenging ideas with other people who are interested in similar things, who can share their perspective and challenge your own. It’s about being asked and asking questions that make you re-think, tweak or abandon arguments, it’s about pushing each other to think differently and articulate more clearly. Not every conference achieves that but those that do go some way to rewiring the brain and changing the world for the better. For me that level of thinking, challenge, re-thinking and that level of clarity and focus is something I can rarely achieve when at home and doing the day job. It is something I know I struggle to achieve when attending events online. There is something about being in a physical space away from home and sharing that space with others and giving in to the intensity of the conversations and just rolling with it all in spite of imposter syndrome, in spite of sometimes not really understanding and in spite of always being completely over-peopled that makes my brain fire up. It’s where the magic happens. It’s where I am pushed to think better.
I hope all colleagues in San Francisco have an amazing time and come home buzzing with ideas and I wish the same to everyone else out there who has conferences or events coming up to challenge you to be better. Let’s accept that challenge and see where it takes us.
99 Days of Something #5 – Still resting
I have written something today – a running blog post. That’s something. I was toying with the idea of turning on the work computer and getting myself organised a bit, catch up with some stuff and maybe stop feeling like I am just falling further behind with every day. And then I remembered that I don’t do that anymore because that’s a slippery slope. Work can be organised, sorted and prioritised in work time. I did have a little burst earlier of checking recent case law of the Court of Justice of the EU for two different pieces of writing and making a note of the ones I need to look at in more detail.
It’s been a good day of balance – I had coffee in the garden, we went to Bolton Abbey and Kath went for a run and I went for a run/walk. We went to a farm shop, then home and had lunch with Kath’s mum. Then we had blackberry and apply pie we bought from the farm shot and watched TV trying to stay out of the heat. I had a short nap and then got on the Zwift bike and turned myself into a human puddle. We had scrambled eggs with spinach on amazing sourdough and beetroot bread (from the farm shop) for tea and watched the pilot episode of ER. I am about to have a bath and then maybe read.
I took this picture today. The smell of wild garlic was still strong, the sunlight made interesting patterns through the trees, it was hot but the woodland provided enough shade for it to not be too uncomfortable. I don’t remember thinking about much at all on my loop but reflecting on the day now, I feel like my brain is clearer than it has been. These last few days have done me good I think. I am not saying that I remember how to really rest, but I think it has been a good start to re-learning.
My Conversations 