Today is about “inheritance” or what we’re taking from those who wrote about this before us.
I remember reading Mama PhD and Worst Prof Ever and (yes) even College Misery. I read Feminist Breeder and Hook and Eye and Dean Dad. Going through my old blogger RSS feed, I see so many blogs that I used to read that have gone by the wayside. Some of these blogs get mentioned in the book, as the posts I am writing react to them, as they were then. We were all writing for something, ourselves, and finding our people.
There were no book, no bibliographies on racism and sexism and ableism there way there are now. We read each other’s blogs because there wasn’t much else to read, not formally. Kelly Baker’s Sexism Ed is a great book to start with, and would be a foremother (or maybe sister, really) to my book. Virginia Valian’s Why So Slow is a great book that is a definite foremother of this book, of my writing, even though I hadn’t read it when I started writing.
(I just picked up An Inclusive Academy, her sequel to the first book for higher education. We’ll see how that goes)
So I’m flying blind. Is this an academic memoir? Is it just a collection of essays? A feminist screed? Am I still that mad, that sad, that disappointed? Does it show through?
I guess at the end of the day want to argue, this shit is real, impacting real people in real ways, and not just theoretically and hidden by statistics. This is a reality that warps our decisions every day, in every way.
To those who left, to those who stayed.