Books

Dropping perfectionism and embracing purpose and joy

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 15:22:31 +0000

Dropping perfectionism and embracing purpose and joy Rachel Sauer Mon, 04/07/2025 - 09:22

Pam Moore

91�� alumna Julie Chavez reflects on her new memoir, which chronicles her journey through a mental health crisis to finding a new motto: ‘Be adequate’

When Julie Chavez (Span’00) graduated from the 91�� with a major in Spanish language and literature, she didn’t see herself becoming an author. As a self-proclaimed “lifelong reader” who blogged for fun, she’d been told many times that she should write a book.

Although flattered, Chavez, who lives in Pleasanton, California, with her husband Mando Chavez, a 1999 91�� graduate, and their two sons, was comfortable in her role as a librarian at her sons’ school. And besides, she says, “I didn’t know what I wanted my story to be.”

91�� alumna Julie Chavez (Span’00) describes learning to advocate for herself and let go of her perfectionist tendencies, embracing the motto “be adequate,” in her memoir Everyone But Myself.

That is, until her story found her.

When anxiety and perfectionism culminated in a debilitating panic attack and a paralyzing sense that she was always falling short no matter how hard she tried, Chavez’s world irrevocably changed.

After navigating many obstacles to accessing mental health services, working with a therapist to put her own proverbial oxygen mask on before tending to her family and finally learning to advocate for herself and let go of her perfectionist tendencies, she emerged with a new motto— “be adequate”—and the idea for the book she needed to write.

Told with humor and honesty, Chavez’s new memoir, Everyone But Myself, released last year and named a Washington Post noteworthy book and a USA Today bestseller, chronicles her journey from the depths of a crushing mental health crisis to a life filled with joy and purpose. Chavez spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine to explain the story behind the story.

Question: What motivated you to write Everyone But Myself?

Chavez: I knew that if I was going to write a book, it would have to have value for readers. Even though I loved writing, I didn’t see myself as a fiction writer and I didn’t think I had a story to tell.

But then I had my annual review with my principal. Over the prior year, my mental health had taken a nosedive, and I thanked her for having shared her own struggles with me during that time. Her candor really helped me through what I call my ‘mid-mom crisis’—which I later learned is something that many over-extended working moms struggle with as our elementary grade kids grow into humans who don’t need us intensely as they once did.

She said, ‘That’s what you should write your book about.’ That was when I realized that my story could truly be helpful for someone else.

Question: Who is Everyone But Myself for?

Chavez: I wish it hadn’t taken debilitating anxiety for me to finally understand that my self-care and creating boundaries around my own happiness was not only good, but necessary.

So, I wrote this for all the readers who see themselves in my story. It’s for the perfectionist moms, the anxious moms, the moms who, in trying to do their best for their families, have inadvertently abandoned themselves.

In her memoir Everyone But Myself, 91�� alumna Julie Chavez chronicles her journey from the depths of a crushing mental health crisis to a life filled with joy and purpose.

It’s also for all the moms who feel they don’t ‘deserve’ help. I love my life and my family so much. I feel grateful that I get to live a relatively comfortable life. And yet, even with all the privilege I’ve been afforded, I was taken aback at how aggressively and how quickly my mental health declined—and how hard it was to find a therapist when I needed one.

We tend to put our suffering on a ‘sliding scale’ or to minimize it by comparing it to other people’s problems but the truth is, when it’s hard, it’s hard, and it’s OK to ask for help.

Question: What challenges did you encounter on the road to publication?

Chavez: The book you have in your hands is my fourth rewrite. I can’t tell you how many times I asked myself whether it was worth it.

I started writing in the spring of 2019 and by the end of the year I had 30,000 words, which I thought was a book. It wasn’t. Then, I attended a class on publishing, where I learned that without a platform, it would be extremely difficult to find a publisher, particularly for a memoir.

So, I started working with a hybrid publisher, who recommended a rewrite. Meanwhile, [publisher] Zibby Owens’ Book Club published an essay of mine, which was an excerpt from the book, which did really well. Zibby ended up taking me on as one of her first acquisitions, and I parted ways with the hybrid publisher.

Following advice from Zibby’s team, I started a fresh rewrite. Instead of a memoir, it was an essay collection, but it just didn’t work. So now, I had an agent and I was starting with a blank page, which is actually kind of backward. Usually you get an agent once you have a fully written manuscript. I finished that version in December of 2022 and the book was published just over two years later.

Through it all, I had to re-learn the same lesson I learned in the pages of my book—that I had to keep showing up, remember my “why,” and not be too attached to the outcome.

Question: What has surprised you over the course of your publishing journey?

Chavez: There’s been a surprising number of women who have said, ‘You are telling my exact story.’ So many have said that after reading my story, they understand what they’re going through, which has been wonderful.

That was always my hope—that my book could be a friend to them and to open the door to the kinds of conversations we need to have.

But my favorite thing is when someone says they’re giving it to a friend or asks me to sign it for their sister.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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91�� alumna Julie Chavez reflects on her new memoir, which chronicles her journey through a mental health crisis to finding a new motto: ‘Be adequate.’

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91�� religious studies professor says Twelver Shi’ism is open to discourse

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 15:09:22 +0000

91�� religious studies professor says Twelver Shi’ism is open to discourse Rachel Sauer Mon, 03/17/2025 - 09:09

Bradley Worrell

Associate Professor Aun Hasan Ali’s book about Islam’s School of Hillah explores the dynamics and formation of Twelver Shi’ism, arguing that the faith was open to diverse intellectual traditions

Twelver Shi’ism, the largest branch of Shi’ite Islam, tends to be viewed as fundamentally authoritarian, particularly as seen through the lens of the ideology of the Iranian government.

Aun Hasan Ali, associate professor in the 91�� Department of Religious Studies whose area of focus is on Islamic intellectual history, particularly pre-modern Twelver Shi’i traditions, says he believes that modern perceptions of the faith have been colored by the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

“It was an unprecedented moment in a lot of ways, because for the first time in the history of Shi’ism, you had a theory of government where the jurist was the head of the state,” he says. “Traditionally, there was always a kind of separation between those two spheres.”

Aun Hasan Ali, 91�� associate professor of religious studies, argues that modern perceptions of Twelver Shi'ism have been colored by the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

As a result, Ali says the idea took root among some in the West and also in the Muslim Sunni tradition that Shi’i clerics were free to make whatever political or religious decisions they pleased, because they were not bound by the history of tradition. However, that’s not an accurate portrayal of how jurists and other followers come to decisions in Twelver Shi’i religious tradition, he adds.

Instead, Ali makes the case that Twelver Shi’ism is better understood as a “discursive tradition,” which, as defined by noted cultural anthropologist Talal Asad, involves researching foundational Islamic texts, such as the Quran and the writings of exemplary historical Shi’i religious figures, for context. Ali says his own definition of discursive tradition is tied less to foundational texts and more to how noted Shi’i religious figures interpreted those texts, as that is how most followers of the faith first engage on religious topics.

“In the same way that someone addressing ethics in contemporary philosophy needs to address (Immanuel) Kant, for instance, I view that as a parameter of the conversation,” he explains. “Similarly, when it comes to Islamic tradition, there are important figures that one needs to address. So, in the simplest terms, a discursive tradition should be thought of as a conversation across time and space among experts.”

In contrast to the idea that scholars make decisions based solely upon their authority, Ali contends that thinking of the Twelver Shi’i faith as a discursive tradition means the faith continually remains open to discussion, debate, mediation and modification.

Ali’s ideas on discursive tradition were shaped in part by his PhD dissertation on the School of Hillah, a center of religious learning that played a major role in preserving and promoting Twelver Shi’i Islamic religious traditions, while also being open to integrating diverse intellectual traditions, during its formative years, from the 12th to 14th centuries. Ali’s revised dissertation was published in 2023 by I.B. Taurus as the book, The School of Hillah and the Formation of Twelver Shi’i Islamic Tradition, which is being translated into Arabic for wider distribution.

Recently, Ali spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about the importance of the School of Hillah in the formation of Twelver Shi’ism and its profound effect on the Shi’i faith today. His answers have been lightly edited and condensed for space considerations.

Question: Why does the School of Hillah take root in what is now southern Iraq?

Ali: Hillah becomes a center of scholarship for two reasons. One is that you have a (regional) Shi’i dynasty come to power that patronizes these scholars. The second reason is that you have the Mongol invasion in the 13th century, which pushes a lot of people looking to escape that devastation southward.

So, you end up with a concentration of scholars who are sought-after in the region. People travel to Hillah from the Levant, from Bahrain and from Iran. They travel there because they were seeking expert education, and the major figures of Hillah were the undisputed experts. (Students) came there to receive that kind of education in the same way that today somebody might come to CU seeking a world-class program in astrophysics. The same thing was happening in Hillah; they came there to learn from these masters.

With the Mongol invasion, sure, there’s devastation, but there are also opportunities. There are trade routes that enrich particular families in the area, and, as we all know, education requires money, so the influx of wealth also becomes a reason why they’re able to offer patronage to those scholars.

In The School of Hillah and the Formation of Twelver Shi’i Islamic Tradition, which is being translated into Arabic for wider distribution, author Aun Hasan Ali explores the School of Hillah, a center of religious learning that played a major role in preserving and promoting Twelver Shi’i Islamic religious traditions.

Question: Is the School of Hillah equivalent to what we would think of today as a university or maybe a seminary?

Ali: Certainly, it’s different in the sense that it’s not primarily organized in brick-and-mortar institutions. It’s more unstructured. Classes took place in the home of an individual, a prominent scholar.

It’s similar in the sense of curriculum. What I mean is that certain texts come to be understood as definitive of a tradition. And that’s part of the reason why Hillah is so important. A lot of the texts that we think of today as being definitive of Shi’i tradition were written in Hillah and continue to be studied today, so we can think of it in terms of there is, not uniformity, but an expectation that anybody who masters this tradition would read these texts. In that sense, it’s similar.

It’s also similar in the sense of structures of authority. Just as someone wishing to put forth a view in, let’s say, American jurisprudence, has to engage particular jurists; similarly, somebody wishing to put forward a view in Shi’i theology has to engage with the views of particular jurists. So, structures of authority can be similar in that way. The idea of a curriculum can be similar in that way, but it’s not organized as a single space in primarily brick-and-mortar institutions.

That was actually one of the points in the book. The organizing principle of the School of Hillah is these large families in which particular types of expertise is concentrated. So, one family may have an expertise in genealogy; another family may have an expertise in philosophy; while another family may have an expertise in law. These large families (in the community) structure the School of Hillah. And, of course, people intermarry between these families, so it becomes a network of intellectuals.

Question: For the students who completed their studies at Hillah, did they generally go on to become clerics and religious scholars?

Ali: If we look at the contemporary Twelver Shi’i tradition, it runs the full gamut. Before you have modern schools, people learn basic numeracy and literacy in religious institutions, which is the same as it was in the West.

Some of those people, after getting basic literacy and numeracy, go on to become merchants or preachers, for example. A smaller group will become teachers within the institution, and then a (small percentage) of those will become the next generation of masters of the tradition. Most people don’t reach that level, because it takes a long time—we’re talking maybe 20 years or more—to be considered competent within that tradition. It’s a very grueling process, and most people leave before they finish the entire process.

Question: Can you talk about how your idea of discursive tradition contrasts with the idea of jurists having the authority to make whatever decisions they want?

Ali: That’s exactly the idea I was pushing back against in the book—this kind of free-for-all idea about authority. That’s not to say authority isn’t important, or that jurists don’t exercise that kind of authority. But again, they do it within the horizons of possibility that are shaped by discursive tradition, as a conversation across space and time.

And yes, there’s a kind of push and pull where a really important figure can push a conversation forward, can expand at the horizons of possibility, but it’s not an arbitrary process. It’s a process that’s linked to the past at the same time that it looks ahead.

Question: Were there any major developments or contributions that came out of the School of Hillah that made a profound impact on Islam today?

Ali: Philosophy becoming integrated into theology is something that we can look to Hillah for, within the Shi’i world. That development takes place earlier within the Sunni world, but in the Shi’i world, Avicenna’s philosophy, or Avicenna’s metaphysics, comes to be integrated into Shi’i theology. In that time period, the integration of mysticism into Shi’ism is also something that happens in Hillah.

"There’s a kind of push and pull where a really important figure can push a conversation forward, can expand at the horizons of possibility, but it’s not an arbitrary process. It’s a process that’s linked to the past at the same time that it looks ahead."

When we think of (Islamic) law, that’s really one of the most important contributions that happens at Hillah, and you see the integration of advanced mathematics and advanced science into law. For example, in Islamic law, figuring out the direction of prayer from a distance, given the curvature of the earth is also a complicated thing, which leads to advanced discussions of science and mathematics integrated into the chapter on ritual prayer, for instance. Those would be a few examples.

At Hillah, you also have the production of these kinds of biographical dictionaries. So, when Muslims evaluate a piece of information, part of the way they evaluate it is by looking at who communicated that information. You can imagine that it would be very useful to have a kind of a biographical dictionary, where you could look up a particular individual and see what they were like. Were they known to be somebody who had scholarly expertise? Were they known to be somebody who was an upright person? Or were they known to be unscrupulous in the way that they narrated information? These kinds of biographical dictionaries, which facilitate legal discussions and conversations, were produced at Hillah.

Question: Despite the School of Hillah’s contributions to Islamic thought, you say there is not much scholarship about it. Why do you think that is?

Ali: I believe a lot of it has to do with the history of Islamic studies in the West—and that only in recent years has Shi’ism gotten the attention it deserved. Previously, scholars who studied Islam largely dealt with Sunni sources. And so, even when they talked about Shi’ism, they were talking about it through the lens of Sunni authors and Sunni sources.

This is despite the fact that Shi’ites—while making up somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of the (Muslim) population—their contributions, intellectually, to Islamic tradition has been disproportionate.

Things started to change in the 1980s and 1990s, but even among scholars focused on Shi’ism, they have tended to focus on its origins, or trying to explain how the Iranian Revolution happened, so in both of those ways Hillah was ignored.

Question: Do you have any particular hopes for your book?

Ali: In general, the book has been received well. I think that people (in Islamic studies) recognize this was a crucial period in Shi’i religious history that hadn’t really been sketched out the way I did in the book.

In terms of contributing to a broader discussion, my hope is the book brings together theoretical conversations in religious studies with meticulous historical scholarship. In Islamic studies, it’s sometimes separated by people who do theoretically rigorous projects and people who do meticulous historical scholarship. I tried to do both, and I hope that the book contributes to bridging the gap between these two different approaches within Islamic studies.

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Associate Professor Aun Hasan Ali’s book about Islam’s School of Hillah explores the dynamics and formation of Twelver Shi’ism, arguing that the faith was open to diverse intellectual traditions.

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Historian still making a strong case for Black Majority

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 22:53:30 +0000

Historian still making a strong case for Black Majority Rachel Sauer Mon, 01/06/2025 - 15:53

Bradley Worrell

CU Adjunct Professor Peter H. Wood’s seminal 1974 book on race, rice and rebellion in Colonial America recently celebrated its 50th anniversary with an updated version

If Peter H. Wood wants to stump some University of Colorado history majors about early American history, he’ll ask them which of the original 13 colonies was the wealthiest before the American Revolution and also had an African American majority at the time.

“Often, they will see it as a trick question. Some might guess New Jersey or New York or Connecticut, so most people have no idea of the correct answer, which is South Carolina,” says Wood, a former Rhodes Scholar and a Duke University emeritus professor. He came to the 91�� Department of History as an adjunct professor in 2012, when his wife, Distinguished Professor Emerita Elizabeth Fenn, joined the department.

Peter H. Wood has been an associate professor at 91�� for more than a dozen years, following a lengthy career teaching American history at Duke University.

South Carolina colonial history is a topic with which Wood is intimately familiar, having written the book Black Majority: Race, Rice and Rebellion in South Carolina, which was first published in 1974 and has been described as one of the most influential books on the history of the American South of the past 50 years. W. W. Norton published a 50th anniversary edition of the book in 2024.

Recently, Wood spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about how he first brought the story of colonial South Carolina to light, reflecting on how the book was received at the time and why this part of history remains relevant today. His responses have been lightly edited for style and condensed for clarity.

Question: How did you become aware of this story of colonial South Carolina, which was unfamiliar to many Americans in 1974 and perhaps still is today?

Wood: I knew when I was an undergraduate that I wanted to study early American history. After a two-year stint at Oxford in the mid-1960s, I came back to Harvard for graduate school.

At that time, the Civil Rights Movement was going on. I’d been very interested in those events, as most of my generation was, and I wanted to see how I could put together my interest in interracial problems with my interest in early American history.

What I found was that early American history was very New England-oriented in those days. Ivy League schools were cranking out people writing about the Puritans, and when they wrote about the South, they would mainly write about Virginia. They talked about Jefferson and Washington. South Carolina had hardly been explored at all. There are only 13 British mainland colonies, after all, so to find that one of them had scarcely been studied was exciting.

Specifically, I was motivated by the Detroit riot in 1967, watching it unfold on television in the summer of 1967. Roger Mudd, the old CBS reporter, was flying over Detroit in a helicopter the way he’d been flying over Vietnam. He was saying, ‘I don’t know what’s going on down there.’ I realized that he was supposed to be explaining it to us, but he didn’t really have a very good feel for it himself. No white reporters did.

And the very next morning I went into Widener Library at Harvard and started looking at colonial history books to see if any of them covered Black history in the very early period … and South Carolina was completely blank. So, that was what set me going.

Question: If there wasn’t any significant scholarship about South Carolina prior to the American Revolution, particularly about African Americans living there, how did you conduct research for your book?

Wood: I went to the South Carolina State Archives in Columbia, not knowing what I would be able to find. I understood that if I did find materials, they would be written by the white colonists … because enslaved African Americans were not allowed to read and write. There wasn’t going to be anybody who was African American keeping a diary.

But what I did find was that the records were abundant. That’s partly because these enslaved people were being treated as property; they had a financial value. So, when I would open a book, there would be nothing in the index under ‘Negroes’ (that was the word used in those days). But I would look through the book itself and there were all kinds of references to them. They just hadn’t been indexed, because they weren’t considered important.

At every turn, there was more material than I expected, and often dealing with significant issues. …

And when you’re researching early African American history, you learn to read those documents critically. The silver lining of that sort of difficult research is that it forces you to be interdisciplinary and to use any approach you can.

Black Majority by CU Associate Professor Peter H. Wood was updated for its 50th anniversary in 2024. First published in 1974, the book broke new ground in showing how important slaves were to the South Carolina economy in Colonial times.

So, I ended up using some linguistics and some medical history (about malaria) and especially some agricultural history. Most people back then—and most Americans still today—don’t realize that the key product in South Carolina was rice. I argued successfully and for the first time in this book that it seemed to have originated with the enslaved Africans. The gist of the book is that these people were not unskilled labor; they were skilled and knowledgeable labor, and it was a West African product (rice) that made South Carolina the richest of the 13 colonies.

Question: With regard to Black Majority, you made the statement, ‘Demography matters.’ What do you mean by that?

Wood: I realized early on that demography was a very radical tool in the sense that it obliges you, or allows you, to treat everybody equally. In other words, to be a good demographer, you have to count everybody: Men, women and children, Black and white, gay and straight—everybody counts equally. As a born egalitarian, that was appealing, especially in a period where there were lots of radical ideas bouncing around that I was a little leery of.

But demography seems very straightforward, as in: All I have to do is count people. So, the very title of the book, Black Majority, is a demographic statement. It’s not saying, ‘These people are good or bad’ or anything else. It’s just saying, ‘Here they are.’ It becomes what I call a Rorschach test, meaning it’s up to the reader as to what they want to make out of these basic facts. …

The book—especially in those days—was particularly exciting for young African Americans, because they’d been told they didn’t have any history, or that it was inaccessible.

Remember, this was even before Alex Haley had published Roots. I actually met Alex while he was working on his book, because I was one of the only people he could find who was interested in slavery before the American Revolution. Most of the people who were studying Black history—which was only a very small, emerging field in those days—were either studying modern-day Civil Rights activities and Jim Crow activities, or maybe the Civil War and antebellum cotton plantations.

Question: You initially undertook your research on this topic to write your PhD dissertation. At what point in the process did you think your findings could make for a good, informative book?

Wood: Very early on, I thought I wanted to write a book. I mean, I wanted to be able to publish something and I wanted to start at the beginning. … If I could go all the way back to 1670, when this colony began, and find records, and tell the story moving forward—instead of going backwards from the Civil Rights movement—I wanted to do that.

If I could write a book about that, then it would show lots of other people that they could write a book about Blacks in 18th-century Georgia or 19th-century Alabama, for example. All of those topics had seemed off limits at the time.

So, I was going to start at the beginning and move forward and see how far I had to go to get a book. I thought, ‘I’ll probably have to go up to 1820,’ but by the time I got to 1740, by the time I got through the Stono Rebellion—which was the largest rebellion in Colonial North America, in 1739, and it was unknown to people—I had enough for a book.

I had enough (material) for a dissertation so I could get my degree, but I also had enough for a book. And, luckily for me, it was just at the time when there was a lot of pressure on universities to create Black Studies programs, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

That put a lot of pressure on New York publishers to find books about Black history. And so, Alfred Knopf in New York took the book and gave me a contract within two weeks. I was very lucky in that regard: That was a moment where it was just dawning on everybody that, ‘My goodness! There’s a huge area here where we have not shone a searchlight.’ …

I'll tell you a funny story. At Knopf, they said, ‘You should go talk to our publicity director,’ because they were excited about this book. I walked into her office, and she was this burly, blonde advertising woman. Her face just dropped. She said, ‘Oh, Dr. Wood, I thought you were Black!’ And then she brightened up. ‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘I'll get you on the radio.’ (laughs)

Peter H. Wood, here exploring chimney remains, is revising his book Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America, which will be published in an expanded edition this year.

So, that just illustrates, if I’d been Black, it would have been even better, but at that point, anything was grist for the mill, especially if it was opening up new territory in American history.

Question: That actually raises a question: Did you face any criticism as a white author writing about Black history, like author William Styron did?

Wood: That was the controversy about William Styron’s 1967 book, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Styron was a white Connecticut author, and quite well-informed and well-intended. He had been raised in Virginia himself, so he’d grown up with versions of this story.

He was not a historian. Still, he wanted to try to write about Nat Turner’s rebellion from Turner’s perspective. So, he had the freedom of a novelist, of trying to put himself inside Nat Turner’s head. That effort was troublesome to a lot of folks.

It bothered some Black folks because it was a white author trying to do that and showing a complicated version of things. It was also upsetting to some white folks. If they knew about Nat Turner at all, it was that he was some crazy madman who killed people, so the idea that you should try to get inside his head, that was upsetting to them.

But, in answer to your question, I was lucky in that … the critique that white people shouldn’t do Black history had not really taken hold. At that time (1974), very little was being written about African Americans in Colonial times … and so there was a desire for anything that could shine some light on the subject.

Question: Why do you think Black Majority has maintained its staying power over the years? And what changes were made for the 50th-anniversary edition that W. W. Norton published?

Wood: As I’ve said, it came along at the right time. Along with other works, it opened up a whole new area, and so early African American history is now a very active field.

When I did the revisions for this 50th-anniversary edition, I didn’t change it drastically, because it is a product of the early 1970s, of 50 years ago. I think the points I made then have held up pretty well. That’s why I’d say it has been influential in the academic community, but for the general public, not so much.

Question: Why do you think that is?

Wood: It’s very hard to change the mainstream narrative, especially in regard to our childhood education about early American history. From elementary school on, we hear about Jamestown and about the Puritans; we learn that colonists grew tobacco in Virginia, but almost nothing beyond that. …

I think that’s part of our failing over the last 50 years. The idea of having a national story that everyone can agree upon has fallen apart, and I wish we could knit it back together. It may be too little, too late. But if we if we can ever manage to knit it back together in a more thorough, honest way, African Americans in Colonial times will be one of the early chapters.

Twenty years ago, I worked on a very successful U.S. history textbook called Created Equal, where I wrote the first six chapters. Even then, our team was trying to tie all of American history together in a new and inclusive way—one that everyone could understand and share and discuss. … I hope that book, and Black Majority, is more relevant than ever.

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CU Adjunct Professor Peter H. Wood’s seminal 1974 book on race, rice and rebellion in Colonial America recently celebrated its 50th anniversary with an updated version.

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Top image: Remnants of rice fields along the Combahee River in South Carolina. (Photo: David Soliday/National Museum of African American History and Culture)

Spinning stories of birds, magic and 19th-century science

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 14:30:00 +0000

Spinning stories of birds, magic and 19th-century science Rachel Sauer Mon, 12/16/2024 - 07:30

Cody DeBos

In new novel The Naturalist Society, 91�� alum Carrie Vaughn offers a fresh take on historical fantasy

For New York Times bestselling author and 91�� graduate Carrie Vaughn (MEngl’00), the boundary between science and magic is a playground.

Her latest novel, The Naturalist Society, released last month, transports readers to an alternate Victorian era in which scientific discovery and arcane magic coexist. Here, the Latin binomial nomenclature used to classify plants and animals grants extraordinary powers to certain scientists.

The novel is a departure from Vaughn’s usual urban fantasy or mystery settings, for which she's been nominated several times for the Hugo Award and won the 2017 Colorado Book Award in the genre fiction category. She recalls a friend joking, “Hey, you like birds, you should write a book about them!”

In her new novel The Naturalist Society, Carrie Vaughn (MEngl’00) explores an alternate Victorian era in which scientific discovery and arcane magic coexist.

From that comment, she spun a tale blending 19th-century Victorian science and a distinctive magic system—with a splash of romance added for good measure.

“I tend to do this a lot, take several different ideas and smoosh them together to see what happens,” Vaughn says. “The story developed pretty quickly and went in some unexpected directions. It’s not just historical fantasy, but also alternate history.”

When research meets imagination

Creating an immersive world for the protagonist of The Naturalist Society to traverse was more than a work of imagination. Vaughn immersed herself in research while preparing to write the novel.

“I read a bunch of history of the natural sciences, about Darwin and the impact of his ideas,” she says. “And I kept my Sibley Field Guide to Birds on my desk the whole time.”

Vaughn also drew inspiration from Victorian-era literature.

“I read some Edith Wharton to get that flavor of upper-class New York City in the late 19th century,” she says.

As any writer can understand, Vaughn’s work on The Naturalist Society didn’t come without challenges. Stepping away from her familiar urban fantasy worlds—she reached the New York Times Bestseller list with her long-running novel series about Kitty Norville, a Denver DJ who is also a werewolf—to tackle a historical setting took Vaughn on a lengthy fact-finding journey.

Despite completing extensive research, Vaughn admits the process felt never-ending. “As much research as I do, it never feels like quite enough. It’s impossible to be completely thorough.

“Using a concrete historical setting means I’m very aware of all the possible mistakes I could make. I’m waiting for readers to start emailing me about what I got wrong,” she jokes.

Still, Vaughn considers these trials part of the creative process. She strives to remain open to all ideas and let her stories evolve naturally—a tricky balance to strike while keeping The Naturalist Society grounded in history.

The Naturalist Society is a departure from the urban fantasy and murder mystery genres in which Carrie Vaughn has widely written.

Embracing the unexpected

For Vaughn, The Naturalist Society is more than just her latest novel; it’s part of a larger journey as a writer. Throughout her career, Vaughn has written more than 20 novels and 100 short stories spanning every genre from urban fantasy to murder mystery.

“I’m always looking for new stories to tell,” she says. “I go where the stories tell me to go. I like the challenge of trying new genres and tropes.”

Vaughn’s exploratory approach to storytelling is rooted in experimentation. She says she enjoys the surprising outcomes that emerge after taking time to reconnoiter new settings or blur the lines between genres.

This approach helps The Naturalist Society exist as a historical fantasy novel while also transcending the conventions of the genre.

From 91�� to a career of discovery

Vaughn’s ability to weave complex stories is no accident. She credits her time at 91�� for giving her a firm foundation in her craft.

“I need to give a big shout out to Professor Kelly Hurley,” Vaughn says. “Her seminars on Victorian and Gothic literature have stayed with me.”

She says these classes, among others, helped shape her understanding of storytelling. Time spent reading and discussing books and literature during her degree studies also played a pivotal role in Vaughn’s career.

“If I can write across genres and settings, it’s because I’ve read across genres and settings,” she explains. “I go back to Professor Hurley’s ideas and reading lists all the time. She helped fill a well that I’m still drawing on.”

Advice for writers

Every aspiring writer’s journey is unique, Vaughn says, and her experiences emphasize the value of exploration and risk-taking. Her advice to writers looking to try new genres or settings?

“Read widely! Look for inspiration in unlikely places.”

She also encourages writers to embrace bold ideas and trust their instincts.

“When I’m working on an idea and find myself thinking, ‘This is crazy, people will never go for this,’ I know I’m on the right track,” she says.

With The Naturalist Society, Vaughn has unlocked yet another creative direction for her work, but her latest novel is just the beginning of her foray into historical fantasy. She’s already working on a sequel and aims to build further on the world she created.

Learn more about Carrie Vaughn and The Naturalist Society on her website.

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In new novel The Naturalist Society, 91�� alum Carrie Vaughn offers a fresh take on historical fantasy.

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Exploring the ‘musical audacity’ of funk

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 15:30:16 +0000

Exploring the ‘musical audacity’ of funk Rachel Sauer Mon, 12/09/2024 - 08:30

Rachel Sauer

In a newly published book, 91�� Professor Reiland Rabaka delves into the culture and sound of music’s ‘best-kept secret’

Barely two months into the ‘70s, Funkadelic—led by George Clinton, Jr.—released something of a musical manifesto with the song “Good Old Music”:

Everybody’s gettin’ funky

In the days when the funk was gone

I recall not long ago

When the funk it was goin’ strong.

91�� Professor Reiland Rabaka (left) recently published The Funk Movement: Music, Culture, and Politics.

In hindsight, the lyrics hint not only at funk’s musical and cultural impact, but at the forgotten shadows in which funk has often lived.

“One of the many reasons funk frequently is not understood to be funk has to do with its ghettoization within the music industry and White music critics’ tendency to lazily lump most post-1945 Black popular music under the ‘rhythm & blues’ moniker,” writes musicologist Reiland Rabaka.

“In other words, because White music critics often serve as musical gatekeepers for White music fans, telling them what is ‘hip’ and ‘hot’ and what is not, most White folks never developed an ear for, or serious appreciation of, classic funk in the ways they did for pre-funk Black popular music such as blues, jazz, rhythm & blues or even soul music.”

Rabaka, a 91�� professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and director of the Center for African and African American Studies, aims a scholar’s eye at funk in his newly published book The Funk Movement: Music, Culture, and Politics. Originally scheduled for 2025 release, a deluge of pre-orders prompted publisher Routledge to release it in late October.

“(Funk is) this musical gumbo, where you’ve got all these different kinds of music and not just distinctly Black music,” Rabaka explains. “African American culture is a hybrid heritage—we’re talking about an incredibly creolized culture, and as Black folk in America, we’re not searching for some sort of purity. Music reflects our multiple traditions and heritages and also allows us to live out loud. The musical audacity in funk, even if it’s just for three minutes and 30 seconds, when Parliament Funkaldelic says dance without constrictions, we’re dancing without constrictions.”

No rap without funk

The Funk Movement joins Black Power Music! Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement, released in 2022, and Black Women's Liberation Movement Music: Soul Sisters, Black Feminist Funksters, and Afro-Disco Divas, released in 2023, in Rabaka’s ongoing exploration of the confluences of music, culture, identity, politics, place and people.

"It’s not a coincidence that James Brown comes out and says, ‘Say it out loud, I’m Black and I’m proud’ after Martin Luther King was assassinated,” says Reiland Rabaka. (Photo: James Brown performing in the Musikhalle in Hamburg, Germany, February 1973. Heinrich Klaffs/WikiCommons)

He comes to this work not only as a scholar, but as a musician: “I was the kid from the projects who got bussed to these incredible creative arts schools,” he says. “From there, I was able to get a truckload of music scholarships, which is how I became the first person in my family to go to college.

“I really feel like my musicology is coming full circle, coming back to where I started. I was a performing jazz musician and have a performing arts degree, so in a way I’m what social scientists call a participant researcher—I’m deeply involved in a lot of the music I write about. It lends my work a kind of insider’s knowledge, a kind of intimacy with my subject. I’m not just somebody writing to achieve tenure; these are passion projects to me.”

Rabaka came to funk not only loving the music but fascinated by its place at the nexus of the women’s liberation movement, the sexual revolution, the Black power movement, the evolving civil rights and gay rights movements and all the other political and social upheavals of the 1970s. However, he acknowledges in his book that funk—both the music and the culture—is often subsumed into musical movements that are more broadly familiar to non-Black audiences.

“Most funk, both as a genre of music and a cultural movement, has not resonated with non-Black fans of Black popular music the way a lot of pre-funk Black popular music has,” Rabaka writes. “It is like funk is one of the best kept secrets of Black popular music, even though it, more than any other post-war Black popular music genre, laid the foundation for the mercurial rise of rap music and hip-hop culture in the 1980s and 1990s.”

In other words, Rabaka says, “there’s no rap, no hip-hop, without funk.”

Award winner

Reiland Rabaka’s book Black Women's Liberation Movement Music: Soul Sisters, Black Feminist Funksters, and Afro-Disco Divas was recently named Best History in the category Best Historical Research in Recorded Blues, R&B, Gospel, Hip Hop or Soul Music in the 2024 Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) Awards for Excellence.

The goal of the ARSC Awards Program, according to the organization, “is to recognize and draw attention to the finest work now being published in the field of recorded sound research.”

In the book, Rabaka, a professor in the University of Colorado Department of Ethnic Studies, critically explores the ways the soundtracks of the Black Women’s Liberation Movement often overlapped with those of other 1960s and 1970s social, political and cultural movements, such as the Black Power Movement, Women’s Liberation Movement and sexual revolution. His research reveals that “much of the soul, funk and disco performed by Black women was most often the very popular music of a very unpopular and unsung movement: The Black Women’s Liberation Movement.”

Rabaka and his fellow award winners will be recognized at an awards ceremony during ARSC’s annual conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May.

Say it out loud

However, funk—like the broader umbrella of “art” under which it lives—can be difficult to define; listeners know it when they hear it. And it’s more than music: “It’s the sound and the aesthetics of Black bohemia,” Rabaka says.

In his book, Rabaka approaches the funk movement as it encapsulates both the music and the culture of funk, focusing on the golden age of funk that’s generally categorized between 1965 and 1979. He notes that while funk is often dismissed as simple party music, it addressed and embodied the upheaval and frustrations of the times in which it was born.

“To adequately interpret funk, one needs to understand key moments in African American history and culture, especially the struggle to end racial segregation that culminated in the 1960s and the beginning (and unfulfilled promises) of the era of racial integration in the 1970s,” Rabaka writes.

“Funk can be interpreted as ‘a discourse of social protest’ and ‘the critical voice of a post-Civil Rights Movement counterculture’ that challenged mainstream histories that attempt to nicely and neatly paint the 1960s as the decade of racial segregation and the 1970s as the decade of racial integration, ‘equal opportunity,’ and ‘ubiquitous optimism.’”

When Marvin Gaye asked “What’s Going On,” Rabaka says, Sly Stone answered several months later with “There’s a Riot Goin’ On.”

“In the book I say it’s not a coincidence that James Brown comes out and says, ‘Say it out loud, I’m Black and I’m proud’ after Martin Luther King was assassinated,” Rabaka says. “There was mass disillusionment, mass depression, so funk is also a deeper and darker sound, a grittier sound. It exists in a lot of levels, where it can be good-time music, sure, but sometimes there are a lot of heavier topics and themes that go on in funk.”

Rabaka is particularly fascinated with the women of funk and is already working on a book that brings them out of the shadows.

“Funk, I argue, was a Black popular music response to the hippie movement, to the women’s movement, to Stonewall even,” Rabaka says. “Black America has a way of refracting things that are going on in mainstream America, saying, ‘How does that speak to us?’”

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In a newly published book, 91�� Professor Reiland Rabaka delves into the culture and sound of music’s ‘best-kept secret.'

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Top image: Earth, Wind & Fire perform in 1982 (Photo: Chris Hakkens/WikiCommons)

Kinship may not mean what you think it does

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 19:52:34 +0000

Kinship may not mean what you think it does Rachel Sauer Mon, 11/18/2024 - 12:52

Bradley Worrell

91�� anthropologist Kathryn Goldfarb spearheads new book that examines the difficult aspects of family connection.

Historically, anthropologists defining kinship tended to begin with who people are related to by birth and by marriage. Family was often considered a bedrock of society.

Over time, the idea of what constitutes kinship has evolved, but a key underlying assumption has remained largely unchanged when it comes to the idea of families being a source of caregiving support, says Kathryn Goldfarb, an associate professor in the 91�� Department of Anthropology, whose research focuses on social relationships, including kinship.

“The literature in anthropological scholarship on families often still supports this notion that, definitionally, family is what keeps us together,” she says. “There is a perception that kinship is where social solidarity lies, how social continuity works, how society hangs together.”

Kathryn Goldfarb, an associate professor in the 91�� Department of Anthropology, researches social relationships, including kinship.

The problem with that idea, Goldfarb says, is that empirical data, including Goldfarb’s own fieldwork in Japan connected to the child-welfare system, often contradicts that idealistic portrayal. That, in turn, posed a problem when assigning readings to her students.

“As I’ve taught kinship over the years, I had this increasing sense that many of my students don’t see themselves reflected in the literature,” she says. “We often talk about diversifying our syllabi, making sure that the authors come from diverse backgrounds and have diverse perspectives. That was really lacking in the materials that I had available to assign to students, because a lot of the reading doesn’t take serious the fact that some people’s lives with their families are really problematic and really hard.”

Goldfarb’s solution was to spearhead the book Difficult Attachments: Anxieties of Kinship and Care, which was recently published by Rutgers University Press. Goldfarb led the conceptualization of the book’s theme, served as co-editor and co-author of the introduction, and wrote one of the chapters.

As Goldfarb and her co-author, Sandra Bamford, note in the book’s introduction, “If family is, by definition, about nurturing and caregiving, then how do we understand kinship when it is not?” The authors do not attempt to redefine kinship, but instead seek to expand the types of scholarship that can be considered central to the field.

Recently, Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine spoke with Goldfarb about the book. Her responses were lightly edited for style and condensed.

Question: What is kinship, exactly? And how has the idea of kinship changed over time?

Goldfarb: The term ‘kinship’ is fairly academic and is taken to mean the systematic level of family relationships. In the old anthropology literature, it was about trying to discern what sort of kinship system each society had, allowing researchers to produce a systematic understanding of how people reckoned their social ties.

One of the reasons anthropologists cared about this was that they believed ‘primitive’ societies didn’t have politics; they just had kinship. Anthropologists were often tasked by colonial governments to determine these key social structures so colonizers could more effectively govern. …

From my perspective, now when we talk about kinship and anthropology, it is about how we think about relatedness more broadly—beyond just heterosexual reproduction and marriage. For example, if I ask my students to depict their own kinship networks, they may draw a genealogy, but when you actually find out what their real relationships are like, those may not be reflected in either their genealogies or legal documents. …

If you are just basing things on genealogy, you’re not seeing the foster child who is part of a family; depending on the local legal regime, you may not be seeing the same-sex couple; you’re not seeing the ghost of the grandmother who is still a part of a family’s daily life. These are all aspects of human life that you wouldn’t actually see if you are just looking at relationships that map onto a normative genealogy. So, definitionally, we need to be more open-minded about the ways that we categorize social relationships in order to analyze them.

Question: And the book specifically grapples with the idea that familial kinship doesn’t always carry the positives that many people tend to associate with it, correct?

Goldfarb: A very stubborn assumption continues to exist in both the academic literature and the popular imagination that kin ties are—or should be—loving, forever, unconditional and nurturing, and that the obligation to care should exist in perpetuity. The chapters presented in this collection paint a different picture.

In Difficult Attachments: Anxieties of Kinship and Care, authors seek to expand the types of scholarship that can be considered central to studying kinship.

In the ‘Ambiguities of Care’ section, we were thinking about situations where normative frameworks of caregiving were destabilized in some way, which often meant that care was delegated to nonfamilial others—so, either the carceral, the child welfare system, long-term care facilities or medical systems. …

For example, one essay looked at recidivism rates for older adults in Japan, where people tend to commit petty crimes so they can be re-arrested and incarcerated, as prison offers more comfort than life ‘outside’ if their family is not able to care for them. In those cases, they find being incarcerated more ‘homey’ than being at home.

The section ‘Toxic States’ is about the ways state formations shape the types of relationships that are possible, or that people produce in spite of these state formations. So, for example, one of the essays is about people who have been incarcerated after being caught at the U.S. border, and how American border policies impact kinship relationships and possibilities for connection and disconnection.

And the third section is ‘Negative Affects.’ The main idea in that section is that types of affect or emotion that are often considered negative, like anger or envy or favoritism, are actually constitutive aspects of how we understand ourselves in relation with others. …

My own essay, in that last section, talks about how in child-welfare contexts, the idea may be that family is a dangerous place; when children have been removed from their homes, it may be because their family of origin is not safe for them. From my fieldwork in Japan with child welfare institutions, I observed that one of the goals of those spaces was to produce what I call ‘sanitized relationality’—something that was not family, that was safe, not contaminated by arguments or worry and everyone was equal and was treated the same.

The argument I make in the essay is that that type of relationship is not the sort that helps people understand in adulthood how to maintain social ties. If you are going to continue to have a relationship with someone, you have to work through difficult things; you can’t just prohibit those things and you can’t have a substantive relationship that can be sanitized of all those things. So, it’s hard to grow up in a situation like that and know how to have relationships. To be able to argue with someone and still continue that relationship is a type of privilege.

Question: By extension, it seems that when kinship works like people envision it’s supposed to, it should be recognized and maybe respected because it’s not automatically the norm?

Goldfarb: Exactly. At least, the recognition that kinship relationships that feel positive and good take a lot of work; there is nothing natural or automatic about kinship ties being caring or based upon positive sociality.

Question: How did the idea for this book come together?

Goldfarb: We had proposed a session for the 2020 American Anthropological Association conference, which ended up being canceled because of COVID. … When the conference was cancelled, we decided to do two online workshops instead. For that, we had people send in drafts, and we grouped the participants in thematic groups. …

"If you are going to continue to have a relationship with someone, you have to work through difficult things; you can’t just prohibit those things and you can’t have a substantive relationship that can be sanitized of all those things."

We asked the authors to think about: What irritates you about the way kinship has been talked about in the literature? How can you think against the grain of typical arguments? …

For the volume as a whole, I wanted something that would be accessible to undergrads and good materials for graduate students; something that would be ethnographically rich and also theoretically exciting. We wanted these to be short, delicious essays of between 4,300 and 6,000 words, which is quite short for academic articles. …

And one thing that I love about the book is that there’s such diversity in the contributors. Some of them are junior grad students and others are emeritus professors.

Question: Who is the intended audience for this book? And, have there been any reactions to it thus far?

Goldfarb: As an academic press, it’s probably academics in general who are the audience. So, undergrad students, graduate students and faculty. But I also feel the essays are quite accessible, so I really hope that people beyond academia read it.

I taught portions of the book this fall in my undergraduate Kinship seminar, and the students have reacted really positively to it; some of them said they found it very validating of their own experiences.

We did a book launch on Oct. 24, where the first half was a cabaret performance by Ronan Viard, who is French actor and singer who lives in 91��. His story is exactly what the book is about. It was about him being abducted by his father and brought from France to the United States when he was a child. The story is about his experiences with that, but it’s also about his relationship to the United States, where he lives now, and his relationship with his father after all these years, and his children’s relationship with his father.

It was a powerful performance, and it brought up all these questions that were at the center of the book, like: How do you grapple with the types of family inheritances, including inherited trauma, that are perhaps unwelcome but hard to escape?

Ronan’s cabaret also raises questions about belonging that are very anthropological: How do we theorize belonging? How do we think about belonging to a nation or to a family or a community or to a language?

Kathryn Goldfarb’s solo-authored ethnography, Fragile Kinships: Child Welfare and Well-being in Japan, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

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91�� anthropologist Kathryn Goldfarb spearheads new book that examines the difficult aspects of family connection.

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Flying with the man behind the capes

Anonymous — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 18:44:03 +0000

Flying with the man behind the capes Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/18/2024 - 12:44

Doug McPherson

91�� alumnus Patrick Hamilton discusses his new book on influential comic book artist George Pérez during Hispanic Heritage Month

When alumnus Patrick Hamilton was growing up, he, like many kids, found comfort in comic books. “I’m an almost lifelong comics fan, and specifically a fan of ‘Avengers’,” Hamilton says.

As Hamilton continued enjoying comics and learning more about the people behind them, he eventually came across the name George Pérez. It’s a name you may not immediately recognize, and that’s a key point Hamilton makes in his new book, George Pérez, which hit shelves earlier this year.

“The main argument of the book [is] that Pérez had a larger impact on comics than he’s generally been given credit for,” says Hamilton, an English professor at Misericordia University in Pennsylvania who earned his PhD in English at the 91�� in 2006.

91�� alumnus Patrick Hamilton (PhDEngl'06), a lifelong comics fan, highlighted the groundbreaking work of Marvel Comics and DC Comics artist George Pérez in an eponymous new biography.

But in the comic book world, the name George Pérez and his work turn heads—not just for his impact on the art, style and story structure of comics, but because he was one of the first Hispanic artists to become a major name in the industry and helped pave the way for greater diversity in the field.

Pérez, who worked both as an artist and writer starting in the 1970s, played a significant role in blockbuster series such as Fantastic Four and The Avengers for Marvel Comics. In the 1980s, he created The New Teen Titans, which became a top-selling series for publisher DC Comics. And he developed DC Comic's landmark limited series Crisis on Infinite Earths, followed by relaunching Wonder Woman.

Hamilton says Pérez is also “pretty synonymous” with large event titles, most prominently DC Comic’s Superman revamp in 2011 and Marvel’s Infinity Gauntlet.

“And he developed a reputation for a dynamic and hyper-detailed style, particularly in terms of the number of characters and details he’d put into a page, that was highly regarded and ultimately influential in the … 1970s and 1980s and beyond.”

Hamilton says he sees his book as attempting to expand Pérez’s legacy.

“Despite his acclaim and prominence, he hasn’t really been seen as an artist that contributed to the style and genre of comics in ways artists before him … are seen,” he says. “I argue in the book that Pérez made contributions to the style of comics, not only in the layout of the page and what effects that could achieve, but especially in his way of building what we would call the story world around the characters, where he embraced the possibilities for the fantastic within comics.”

Paving the way

The book also speaks to Pérez’s interest in representations of race, disability and gender, the latter of which Hamilton says Pérez consciously strove to improve in his art over his career.

Artist George Pérez was reknown for his work with both DC Comics and Marvel Comics. (Photos: DC Comics, left, and Marvel Comics, right)

Hamilton adds that he believes a lot of other Black, Indigenous and artists of color working today likely see Pérez as “an influence and as carving out a space” for them within the industry.

“I think you can look at the significant number of Hispanic and Latinx creators working in comics today—many of them as artists—and see them as following, in some cases quite consciously, in Pérez’s footsteps.”

He adds that Pérez did much to help define the look and feel of modern superhero comics in the 1970s and 1980s, as did another Latino artist, José Luis García-López.

“Garcia-Lopez, who, among other things, created the official reference artwork for DC Comics that is still much in use today. So, you have two Latino creators working in the late 20th century, when the comic book industry was even more predominantly white than it is today, and shaping the look of it.”

Hamilton says one of the more interesting findings about Pérez that meshes with how Pérez has been overlooked is a kind of “invisibility or transparency” in his art.

“It [his art] is never meant to overshadow and … is always in service to the story or narrative. What surprised me is how much this was a conscious choice on Pérez’s part, that he never wanted his art to draw attention to itself in a way that was detrimental to the overall storytelling. It’s kind of ironic, and … surprising, because Pérez does have one of the most recognizable styles in comics, but his goal as an artist was always to do what’s best for the realization of the story first.”

Perez died in 2022 at age 67. You can see examples of his Marvel Comics art here and his DC Comics art here.

Top image: A group scene of DC Comics characters drawn by George Pérez (Photo: DC Comics)

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91�� alumnus Patrick Hamilton discusses his new book on influential comic book artist George Pérez during Hispanic Heritage Month.

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For medieval Iberian queens, love was a dangerous sickness

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 22:45:41 +0000

For medieval Iberian queens, love was a dangerous sickness Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/13/2024 - 16:45

Blake Puscher

In a newly published history of the region’s female monarchs, 91�� scholar shows the connections between love, grief and madness

Like many of their royal European counterparts of the time, the medieval queens of Spain and Portugal often married for politics, but rarely for love.

Instead, their marriages generally embodied the political intrigue facilitated by personal relationships in hereditary monarchical power structures. During a time of religious conflicts between Christian and Muslim kingdoms, as well as cultural and philosophical developments spurred by the rediscovery of Aristotle, their marriages were more political maneuvering than swooning.

And even when love was involved, it rarely ended well.

Núria Silleras-Fernández

In a newly published exploration of emotion and political power in the medieval Iberian Peninsula, which is composed largely of peninsular Spain and continental Portugal, 91�� scholar Núria Silleras-Fernández, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese, analyzes a time and place and the royal women who navigated the treacherous territory between heart and state.

In her book The Politics of Emotion: Love, Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, Silleras-Fernández focuses broadly on these powerful emotions through the individual stories of three queens, whose stories in some ways presage the issues that women in politics still face today.

Somewhat confusingly for the reader, several were named Isabel, so Silleras-Fernández gives each woman a brief distinguishing title: Isabel of Portugal (1428–96), who was the grandmother of Isabel of Aragon (1470–98) and Juana of Castile (1479–1555).

A comparative study of the three women, whom historians had not previously put together, is informative not only because their lives tell us about the politics and culture of their society, but because—despite facing similar tragedies—Juana, Isabel of Aragon, and Isabel of Portugal’s lives took very different directions.

‘El amor es un gusano’

According to Silleras-Fernández, these three women “suffered from very intense grief following the death of their spouses.” Their grief was ultimately viewed as excessive, in part because of the cultural attitude towards love— expressed in the poem “Las Mañas del Amor” by Florencia del Pinar, Silleras-Fernández says. “She describes love as un gusano, a worm.

“In medieval times, passionate love was seen as a sort of affliction. When someone was really in love, it was seen as dangerous.”

This is not to say that love had no place in court culture; in fact, according to a historian whom Silleras-Fernández cites, it was fashionable for Spanish lords to pretend to be in love.

In The Politics of Emotion: Love, Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, 91�� scholar Núria Silleras-Fernández notes that in medieval times, passionate love was seen as an affliction.

Nonetheless, authentic, passionate love was seen as a personal affliction, a spiritual danger and a political vulnerability. “Passionate love was even medicalized,” Silleras-Fernández says, and in a way, it “was seen as an affliction that was tied to melancholy,” with unrequited passions causing lovesickness.

When it came to medieval Christian culture in Spain, she explains, “there was something called the religion of love. For men, their lady was not merely the object of their desire, as in courtly love; she became more important to them than God.” This was understood as a form of idolatry and therefore a violation of the second of the 10 commandments from the Bible.

Moreover, Silleras-Fernández says, “royal marriages were arranged for political purposes, so it was common for women not to be in love with their husbands. The idea was that the couple would enjoy some sort of affection and collaborate in ruling the kingdom and producing heirs.”

To the extent that it interfered with remarriage, love was even an obstacle to the political maneuverings of the royalty. Ultimately, then, passionate love “was seen as dangerous, and it was not encouraged for royal partners.”

Conflict at court

Isabel of Portugal, who was born in Portugal but became Queen Consort of Castile and León through her marriage to King Juan II (as opposed to becoming a queen regnant in her own right by inheriting the throne), exemplified the dangers of “loving too much.”

According to Silleras-Fernández, the chronicles of her life suggest an unusually intense love for her husband. The conflict between her and Álvaro de Luna, the royal favorite and Constable, is an example of this.

Both Isabel and Álvaro exercised significant influence over Juan, Silleras-Fernández says: “Álvaro de Luna’s role as adviser put him in clear competition with the functions of the queen.” Isabel and her faction within the nobility and Juan’s entourage eventually won out, and she convinced the King to have Álvaro executed.

While overtly political, this situation may not seem at first to involve love. However, according to Silleras-Fernández, Álvaro wrote a letter to Juan’s advisors from prison, asking them to prevent the king from having too much sex, arguing it could compromise his health. This suggests the intimate nature of Álvaro’s interference with the king and queen’s relationship and demonstrates the importance of love to a queen consort’s political power.

Perhaps more illustratively, Isabel “felt such great pain at the death of her husband that she fell into a sickness so grave and long that she was never able to recover,” Silleras-Fernández writes, and lived the rest of her life without much political influence.

Mixing politics, religion and grief

Isabel of Aragon, one of Isabel of Portugal’s grandchildren, also suffered greatly after the death of her first husband. She became Princess of Portugal through her marriage to Crown Prince Afonso, and this marriage was, by all accounts, happy, Silleras-Fernández says—if brief.

"Infanta Isabel de Trastámara," artist unknown.

Unfortunately, Afonso died young, which caused national grief and inspired a series of consolatory texts by noted clergymen. Isabel of Aragon was “presented with works explaining that his death should be seen as an opportunity for her to become a better Christian, and that she needed to remember that it was important to love God above anyone else,” Silleras-Fernández explains.

Like her father-in-law, João II, Isabel received letters from important clergymen blaming the bereaved for the death of their loved ones, Silleras-Fernández explains. João was even accused of loving his son more than God, and informed that his son’s death was a form of retribution for this sin.

Despite Isabel’s continued mourning, she was a princess and therefore a political asset for the Catholic monarchs, most especially because she could secure a marriage alliance for them. Whether because she did not want to remarry, or because the religious messages in the consolatory letters had heightened her Catholic convictions, she requested, as a condition of her planned second marriage to Manuel I, that all the “heretics” be expelled from his kingdom, Portugal.

The exact meaning of “heretics” here is unclear, but according to Silleras-Fernández, “it probably meant that she wanted the expulsion of the Jews, the Muslims, and all the recent converts from Judaism to Christianity who had been prosecuted by the Inquisition.”

Regardless of Isabel’s motivations, it is clear that grief played a role. Hence, Silleras-Fernández says, grief and other emotions can have serious consequences when they interact with politics and religion, which were closely related in medieval and early modern times.

Juana the Mad

“Most people knew about Juana,” Silleras-Fernández says, “because she is famous as Juana the Mad.” Like Isabel of Aragon, she was a daughter of Isabel the Catholic, and she was the mother of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Like Isabel of Portugal, her grandmother, Juana was ultimately alienated from the political power she once possessed, Silleras-Fernández explains, spending the rest of her life put away.

“The difference between her grandmother and Juana’s eldest sister Isabel was that both of them were queen consorts, while Juana was queen in her own right, and she needed to rule.”

Perhaps the most extraordinary story of Juana’s grief—also incited by the unexpected death of her husband—was her insistence on personally accompanying the king’s remains to Granada, a trip of more than 400 miles, while she was in the third trimester of pregnancy. This trip was a perpetual funerary procession, taking more than two years and including religious services at every stop.

Juana is reported to have become ill along the way, and began to not change her clothes, as well as eat and sleep on the floor. After this, her father, King Fernando, sent her to a palace in Tordesillas where she was confined for the rest of her life.

"The Madness of Joanna of Castille" by Lorenzo Vallés (1866)

When she finally returned from her husband’s burial, she was in a bad place emotionally and mentally, but her condition improved. “If you read the letters that the people who were living with her sent to her son, Charles V, it was obvious that she was feeling better.

“The problem was that, when you send someone away because you have decided that person cannot rule, you cannot easily reestablish that person as a viable ruler,” Silleras-Fernández continues. “Neither her father nor her son was interested in rehabilitating Juana because they were already doing Juana’s job.” They had taken over out of necessity while Juana was gone and did not want to give up power. For her family to continue ruling, she had to be put away.

According to Silleras-Fernández, what makes her situation different from those of Isabel of Portugal and Isabel the Catholic is that the Isabels had more freedom as queen consorts. Since they were not formal rulers, they were not seen as a threat to the status quo, but “because Juana had the potential to personally take charge of the kingdom, she was dangerous.”

‘Backwards and wearing high heels’

These three Iberian queens embody the lesson that, as a ruler, “one needed to be perceived as someone could control their emotions, because they served as a mirror for their subjects,” Silleras-Fernández says. “A ruler needed to be in control, and the ruler needed to demonstrate balance and stability—what Aristotle called the golden mean.”

It was particularly difficult for women to present themselves this way because, she says, “as in the eyes of Aristotle, women were seen as imperfect males. It was harder for them because they were asked to perform like men but were not valued like men. At the same time, of course, women had to adhere to the standards and preconceptions of the time regarding gender. It’s a little bit like the old saying that Ginger Rogers had to dance as well as Fred Astaire, but in her case, going backwards and wearing high heels.

“In many ways, this is a period that is very far from today’s reality, but you would be amazed how much of the dynamics and prejudices surrounding gender and emotion are similar and how— despite the fact that we live in an age of science—medicine and health are still socially and culturally constructed. I expect that with recent events, we will see all of these dynamics at play today in the USA over the course of the next four months.”

Top image: Juana la Loca by Francisco Pradilla y Ortiz (1877)

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In a newly published history of the region’s female monarchs, 91�� scholar shows the connections between love, grief and madness.

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Prescribing kindness in modern medicine

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 21:43:30 +0000

Prescribing kindness in modern medicine Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/23/2024 - 15:43

Doug McPherson

In her new book, Microaggressions in Medicine, 91�� alum and bioethicist Heather Stewart writes that some healthcare professionals are causing emotional and psychological harm

Contrary to what is sworn in the Hippocratic Oath, a new book co-written by 91�� alumna Heather Stewart (MPhil'17) argues, those who vow to first do no harm are, in fact, causing harm regularly via microaggressions.

In the recently published Microaggressions in Medicine, Stewart defines microaggressions as “comments, actions, bodily gestures or even features of physical spaces” that subtly communicate bias or hostility toward those in marginalized groups.

In a newly published book, 91�� alumna and bioethicist Heather Stewart (MPhil'17) argues that the effects of microaggressions in medicine may compound over time.

“Microaggressions are particularly pernicious forms of bias or discrimination precisely because they’re frequent and subtle, and so they’re often disregarded as insignificant,” says Stewart, now an assistant professor of philosophy at Oklahoma State University. “From the perspective of those on the receiving end of microaggressions, however, they can be incredibly harmful, especially as their effects compound over time.”

A common example of microaggression, Stewart says, is misgendering a person who is trans or non-binary, referring to a person who is transmasculine with feminine identifiers such as “ma’am,” “Miss” or “Mrs.”

“When done unintentionally, the person committing the microaggression often doesn’t realize why it’s harmful, but it’s also likely that they assume their mistake is a one-off occurrence, and they fail to consider that trans and non-binary people may face misgendering regularly,” Stewart explains.

Stewart, who earned her master’s in philosophy from 91�� in 2017, adds that being misgendered, especially routinely, can be “incredibly harmful” to trans and non-binary people’s senses of who they are and how they want to be perceived and treated in the world. “From that perspective, microaggressions and their consequences really aren’t micro at all, but touch on core aspects of identity, belongingness and self-respect.”

Feeling unseen

In the book, Stewart and her co-writer, Lauren Freeman, describe several short- and long-term consequences of microaggressions. After a microaggression, they note, the person on the receiving end might feel confused, shocked, disrespected or unwelcomed.

“They might feel as if they’re not being seen, heard, recognized or respected,” Stewart says. “Over time, as microaggressions add up and wear on a person, they can cause real harm to one emotionally, psychologically and more. They can cause one to doubt themselves and question how others see them.

“The goal is to better understand the nature of this distrust so that we can work to form better relations between these communities and the important institutions which govern our lives,” says Heather Stewart.

“In medical contexts, the stakes can be incredibly high. Frequent microaggressions can cause marginalized patients to lose trust in their healthcare providers, which makes them less likely to communicate openly, and can even lead them to delay or avoid seeking medical care. This obviously has serious consequences for the health and wellbeing of marginalized people and communities.”

While she doesn’t share details of her personal healthcare experiences in the book, Stewart does say she’s had “first-hand experience” in not being taken seriously by a healthcare provider and that she’s faced “harmful consequences” such as misdiagnoses and delayed diagnoses.

“I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of microaggressions, including being doubted and dismissed when making claims of pain,” she says. “A long-term consequence of these experiences has been that my trust in healthcare has been shaken. It takes a lot for me to allow myself to be fully open and vulnerable in healthcare settings.”

But her own experiences aside, Stewart says she sees the book as a way to “amplify the voices” of others and their experiences navigating healthcare, and to think about how healthcare can and must do better by them.

A key in solving the problem, Stewart says, is to improve “structural and background conditions.”

“For example, when healthcare professionals are under intense time pressures and constraints, it can be harder to be fully thoughtful, deliberative and empathetic with patients,” she says. “And when healthcare workers haven’t been given adequate education and training about diverse identities and experiences, they might not realize how their words or actions can be harmful. This points to the need for more robust and inclusive training throughout medical education as well as continuing education.”

In a similar vein, Stewart also is studying marginalized groups’ distrust in institutions, specifically distrust that LGBTQ+ communities often have in healthcare institutions.

“The goal is to better understand the nature of this distrust,” Stewart says, “so that we can work to form better relations between these communities and the important institutions which govern our lives.”

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In her new book, Microaggressions in Medicine, 91�� alum and bioethicist Heather Stewart writes that some healthcare professionals are causing emotional and psychological harm.

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Dystopian ‘fissures of disaster’ intensify our own world

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 18:55:16 +0000

Dystopian ‘fissures of disaster’ intensify our own world Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/12/2024 - 12:55

Rachel Sauer

In newly published story collection The Rupture Files, 91��’s Nathan Alexander Moore explores identity and community in dystopian worlds

Nathan Alexander Moore was thinking about the end of the world—not how to survive the apocalypse or overcome it, necessarily, or even how to fix it, but rather the decisions we make when the world collapses around us.

“Who do you become?” asks Moore, an assistant professor in the 91�� Department of Women and Gender Studies. “What choices do we make in this new world? How do we understand ourselves, and understand ourselves in community, in the larger context of a world that is ending or starting anew?

“For me, as someone who loves all things speculative fiction, dystopias are so interesting because these worlds become dystopic because of who the events are happening to. And the largest impacts, in fiction and real life, often happen to people who are marginalized. Dystopia largely impacts people who are Black or Brown, in places that are underdeveloped and underfunded.”

Nathan Alexander Moore, an assistant professor of Black trans and queer studies in the 91�� Department of Women and Gender Studies, explores issues of identity in her newly published dystopian story collection The Rupture Files.

From that end—or beginning—of the world was born The Rupture Files, Moore’s newly published story collection. Touted by publisher Hajar Press as “supernatural stories of life in the fissures of disaster,” Moore’s tales actually plunge deeper into the ruined Earth, with Black and queer and trans characters exploring who they are and who they might become.

“I’m very aware of all of the history and the many cultural representations that have shaped Black people, and specifically Black queer people,” Moore explains. “I feel so much in our culture and in representations in film and television and literature, that Black characters and Black queer characters either become paragons or, on the opposite end, they’re kind of the worst of the worst, the villains, the despicable ones.

“For me, it’s about telling a story about a person who is nuanced. Some will see them as the hero, some as the villain, but at the core they are a person who is learning and growing and struggling. I want to show them—to show us—as beautiful, nuanced, complex characters, and that whatever their experience is, it’s a real experience. To try to be universal would strip us of what makes it interesting.”

Becoming a writer

Moore, who identifies as Black and trans, was a reader before she was a writer, finding motivation to finish her homework so she could crack open an Anne Rice novel. One of the first stories she wrote and shared with other people was called “Midnight and Nocturnes”—“I was using big words,” Moore recalls, “I thought I was so cute in high school”—about a vampire who was turned in ancient Egypt.

The vampire wakes at dusk “and she’s like, ‘I’m gonna go eat some people, I’m hungry.’ Then she runs into a vampire hunter, and for the first time she pauses at killing because he has the exact eyes of someone she knew in life. She says, ‘I remember when I was human, I loved you. You broke my heart, and I loved you’ and it ends with her making a big choice whether she’s going to live or die.”

Moore wrote it when she was 16 or 17 and submitted to a contest on Facebook and ended up winning third place. “It was the first story where I very much remember writing it and thinking, ‘OK, I think I’m writing, I think I might be a writer.’ And then when I came in third, I was like, ‘Oh, she’s on her way!’ It also helped that I wrote that story when Twilight/True Blood/Vampire Diaries was of the moment, and I was reading all of those books.”

Through graduate school, she focused on creative writing and Black literature and cultures, delving deeper into speculative fiction through a lens of feminism and collective memory. Her PhD, earned at the University of Texas at Austin, focused on contingency and Black temporal imaginations, and included a chapter titled “From Catastrophe to the Cataclysm: Black Speculations on the Limits of the Anthropocene & the Temporality of Disasters.”

In fact, writing The Rupture Files wasn’t completely Moore's idea. An editor at Hajar Press saw a presentation she gave for Black Women Radicals about writing Black geopolitics through speculative fiction and asked Moore if she wrote her own speculative fiction.

As it happened, there were some people she’d been living with for a while…

‘The world we’re living in’

“The first story (in The Rupture Files) is called ‘Sequela,’ and it’s about this far-future dystopia where the world is mostly ocean and everything is transient,” Moore says. “There were portions (of that story) I had written as series of prose poems, and they had been kind of living in my head. With the other stories, I had characters who weren’t fully realized—I had a snapshot, a photograph, they were peering over the fence and I was like, ‘Hmm, what are you doing?’ For a long time, they were thought experiments, and in writing them they became real.”

The story “Sequela” is about a woman named Shalomar, who lives in one of a series of stations in this new ocean world—“I imagine the stations like metallic squids, though I never said it in the story, and they kind of hunker on land and then jump around,” Moore explains—and whose job is station archivist. Whatever the station pulls out of the ocean, it’s her job to analyze it and think about its historical value. As a Black woman, Shalomar had been trying to document Black history before the apocalypse, and after it she discovered that the water wanted her to tell a different story, as did the mermaids.

In a story called “Ashes for Your Beauty,” Moore tells the story of a woman who is the consort (read: food source) of a vampire in a bombed-out, post-nuclear world, who discovers that she has power, and she can make power. “So, she has to decide, ‘Am I going to stay in this life that’s very scary and terrible but stable, or burn shit down?’” Moore says.

Writing the four stories in The Rupture Files was a different experience from the novel manuscript Moore wrote while earning her master’s.

“I was thinking about narrative arcs, about character development, who is the main person, whose perspective feels the most interesting,” Moore says. “I was balancing the expansiveness of living in a brand-new world that even I didn’t know all the rules of and also making it containable in short form. It was a steep learning curve but really fun.”

It also, she says, allowed her to more deeply consider the world as it currently is: “What’s always interesting about dystopias is they are projected as far futures, but any time someone’s writing a dystopia, they’re writing about the present—expanded and intensified, but the present. Dystopic writing is really about looking out at the world we’re living in today.”

Top: Background dystopia image by Daniele Gay

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In newly published story collection The Rupture Files, 91��’s Nathan Alexander Moore explores identity and community in dystopian worlds.

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