Time is an illusion. I figure if I tell myself that often enough, my readings for tomorrow will read themselves. Foolproof!
This is Bibliophile.
Today, we'll be looking at some of the new books available at Thompson Rivers University. Let's get to it.
Thompson Rivers University Library has two things immediately relevant to today's proceedings: a new books page, and 171 new books. It doesn't say whether that number refers to new books in the past week, month, or otherwise, but given the number, I think week is a safe bet.
Academic careers and the gender gap / Baker, Maureen.
Baker starts her analysis off with a statistic: women earn nearly half of all new PhDs (good, except for the nearly part) in Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and the UK, but men occopy 80% of the more prestigious academic jobs (less good). Through a series of interviews, research, and personal experience, Baker looks into why this state of affairs exists, arguing that university priorities and relations magnify the impact of gendered families and perpetuate the gender gap. From my personal experience, I think that English is traditionally better than many academic departments in this regard. But in my personal branch, game studies, and technology studies in general, there is still a disparate amount of dudes, and some prejudices in general: see this account, where dr. b showed up a game conference panel, only to have a group of men "helpfully" offer her directions because they assumed she was lost. And I know that a lot of my female colleagues stress out over the "when to have kids" issue, because it's viewed by many as an either/or choice between family and career. Baker's own studies turns up disparity between men and women in academia on the subjects of job security, working hours, rank, salary, job satisfaction, and career length. It's easy to say, from a Humanities perspective, that this problem will sort out itself, since the humanities in particular seem to be moving towards some sort of equalization. But that's a cop-out--it's unfair now, and it should be dealt with now.
Active bodies : a history of women's physical education in twentieth-century America / Verbrugge, Martha H.
Continuing the gender study, we have a history of women and gym. Back way back in my highschool days, gym was an elective. Despite the fact that I was (and am) terrible at everything related to gym, I enjoyed the class--in fact, a lack of skill might have helped there, since I was predisposed not to take losing too seriously. Of course I was going to lose. That's the natural state of things. ...I've just turned a discussion of women into a discussion of me, haven't I? How patriarchy of me. Anyway, the point I was moving toward is that the majority of the girls in my class did not elect to take gym. They dropped it like a hot potato, first chance they got. Why? Well, there's a number of possible reasons. There's a sense in society in general that girls don't have to try at sports. And the competitive aspect did feature a lot of male posturing. (And these two statements are ignoring the fact that the only Watson sports team that was ever worth a damn was the girls' volleyball team.) And it's hard to deny that, big picture, gym isn't really going to help you with your larger education, except in a "physical fitness/discipline" sort of way. Vergrugge, I imagine, did not go to school in rural Saskatchewan, so her perspective on the subject is probably somewhat different. First, she notes the obvious: whatever the gender difference, there were more opportunities for women in terms of exercise and sports in the 20th century than other historical periods. She draws on the archived history of female physical educators, and how they determined what the female body could and should do in comparison to boys and men, drawing on psychology, reproduction, physiology, anatomy. These opinions, Vergrugge argues, were determined by wider struggles, and historical developments in feminism and the law. It sounds like a fairly interesting historical study.
The athlete's clock : how biology and time affect sport performance
Continuing the athletic study--this bibliophile is all about the smooth segues--we're looking at sport performance and the clock. I assume that the direction we're going here is Foucauldian biopolitics, the way the human body is turned into a subject through measurement, then subsequently normalized into categories. Sports is traditionally quite big on their statistics--how many other pastimes acquire cool words like "sabermetrics" to refer to keeping track of numbers? Looking at the book's description, it's less theory, and more practical application--it answers questions such as the best time of day for training, stroke cadence in swimming, pacing for endurance athletes, aging and biological variations, cognition to overcome biological limits, and so forth. It seems well researched, though it's not something I'm particularly interested in. I'd rather get all my fitness advice from unsubstantiated web pages, thank you very much.
Bangs, crunches, whimpers, and shrieks : singularities and acausalities in relativistic spacetimes/ Earman, John.
I have never done worse on a test than the 48% I got on my Physics 101 midterm, first year of undergraduate. Granted, the class average was 28%, and the overall mark didn't wind up being my absolute lowest (that honor goes to Math 366: Advanced Linear Algebra), but it still felt like the universe was telling my that physics would not be my bag. Nevertheless, I still have a fond spot for the subject--you don't read science fiction for twenty years without getting an appreciation for the Sagan crowd. Thus, my interest in this book. As the title suggests, it's pop science (probably the only kind of science I can handle) and it was originally published in 1995. So no Higgs Boson, I guess. So originally, spacetime singularities were thought to be idealized rarities in Einstein's general theory of relativity. The the astronomical equivalent of a frictionless plane, they were more hypothetical than anything else. Hawking and Roger Penrose argued that they were a lot more common, and the question went to whether the singularities could exist on a long-term basis, or were inherently unstable. This book takes a step back, and looks at what the implications of singularities are for the philosophy of science at large. Okay, that kind of scientific discussion I get behind. It provides an overview of the literature on singularities, and analyzes their significance. Granted, there are probably more up-to-date versions of the same by now, but the staying power of this book (that it's still being published almost twenty years later) suggests that it's a particularly coherent account.
Breasts : a natural and unnatural history
1st ed. / Williams, Florence, 1967-
That's clearly a title designed to bait readers, and falling for it is rather contrary to the earlier gender issues we looked at. But... it's... by a woman? Which makes it okay? Somehow? Sorry. Rather than go on making a boob of myself (Sorry!) I'm going to just discuss the book. It's a pop science book on breasts,which is what's to be expected; I don't really expect that anyone was going into this thinking they were getting cutting-edge modern science. Here's an interesting fact: on the Internet, breast milk is sold for 262 times the price of oil. The market has spoken. But Williams is providing more than titillating tidbits (sorry). Using current research, she's looking into the spread of breast cancer, the growth in breasts, and why they're developing in young women earlier. My tasteless jokes aside, there really does seem to be something worth reading here concerning the cultural values that have become connected to the breast. You'll just have to shift through a lot of "humor" to get to it. (If you thought I was bad--chapter titles include "Fill Her Up," "What's For Dinner?" and "Are You Dense?".)
The case of the poisonous socks : tales from chemistry Brock, W. H. (William Hodson)
More enticement through titles. I'm not saying I *want* to poison someone with a pair of socks, but it's nice to know the option is there if I wanted it. Physics, Biology, now chemistry--we're certainly going through our science paces today. The book consists of 42 stories of chemists from the 19th and 20th centuries. The title one is a case where William Crookes analyzed a particular dye for socks to determine why it was causing people's feet to swell in 1868 London. Other stories include the early career of C. P. Snow, and the development of the modern chemical lab. I wouldn't mind a few more examples, but from the sound of things, the book would make a good bathroom reader, provided the entries are of suitable length.
The complexities of police corruption : gender, identity, and misconduct / Corsianos, Marilyn.
In this case, it's the subtitle that's garnered my attention. Corsianos looks at how gender relates to police corruption and general policing, as well as selective law enforcement, racial profiling, and other such actions, all building towards addressing why significantly fewer women are involved in police corruption. (I'm assuming that's in proportion to the total amount of women in the force--if it can be explained through "there are fewer corrupt female police officers because there are fewer female police officers, that's not much of a book..) Corsianos interviewed thirty police offers for the book, and, as one of the reviews notes, incorporates masculinity studies as well as broader gender studies to make its conclusions. If you're interested in power and gender issues, this book would probably provide some interesting examples.
Consent of the networked : the world-wide struggle for Internet freedom / MacKinnon, Rebecca.
Early 90s digital studies is famous (or, more properly, infamous) for its enthusiasm, for the conviction that the Internet (or rather, cyberspace in general) would be radically transformative to human culture and hugely emancipating. And there's still a lingering belief in the discipline that networks are inherently democratic and a good thing. There's some basis for this claim--see, for example, the use of Twitter and social media in the 2011 crisis in Egypt. But just as much, the network is used as tools of surveillance and big business. McKinnon talks about just these issues--how Apple removes politically controversial apps at the request of governments, how Google caves to censorship demands from governments claiming to be democracies. Her argument isn't that networks aren't as utopic as they pertain to be; as far as she's concerned, we've moved beyond that. The fight now is to establish our cyberspace rights before they are further programmed away, especially since government regulation moves so slowly in a digital arena. It's about how the technology should be used right now to empower people. Topics covered in the book include Google and China, Wikileaks, the dominance of Facebook, copyright, and the personal responsibility of the netizen. (She had me up to that neologism.)
Dominatrix : gender, eroticism, and control in the dungeon /Lindemann, Danielle J.
Sometimes, you just go for the sexy title. Lindemann does fieldwork and interviews with professional dominatrices in New York and San Francisco. Most research on sex work focuses on prostitutes, and folds BDSM into the larger group; she argues that the pro-domme/client relationships are unique, and deserve to be explored on their own. It's more than just a simple exchange; there's therapeutic and analytic aspects to these relationships. This is utterly outside of both my personal and professional experience (unless you count some of the more speculative articles on game players and masochism) but it certainly sounds like it has the potential to be interesting. I am surprised that she gained so much information through interviews; I would have thought there'd be some equivalent of dominatrix/client confidentiality. ...I don't even know if I'm joking anymore. Chapter titles are an interesting mix of bad puns and theory: see chapter 3, "Will the real Pro-Domme Please Stand Up: Art, Authenticity, and Pierre Bourdieu."
The end of men : and the rise of women / Rosin, Hanna.
This is turning into a very gendered Bibliophile. Rosin argues that the role of the dominant sex is about to have a recasting. Women have pulled ahead "by almost every measure." She looks at the new differences in how men and women today earn, learn, spend, couple up, and kill (!). It's a study of how things have changed, and how we can channel the change into a better future. It seems like it runs rather counter to Baker's book then. I think, out of the two, I'm more inclined to side with Baker. A really thorough review suggests that Rosin is right to point to a great economic shift, but her grounds for declaring a societal shift is much shakier. On a totally unconnected note, the book's blurb says that Rosin is "unhampered by ideology." Now, I understand the appeal of going beyond simple heterodoxy, and someone who refuses to change their view regardless of the facts is infuriating. But sometimes, "unhampered by ideology" is just a polite way of saying "my argument has no structure behind it." Not that this is what's going on here--I needed to get that off my chest. Moving on...
The ethics of reality TV : a philosophical examination / Wyatt, Wendy N., Kristie Bunton ed
It's our first anthology of the post! Man, usually, I come across a half dozen anthologies on the first page, but Thompson Rivers has made me work for it. On the surface, reality TV seems a bit of a straw man when it comes to ethics, especially decades into the form: of course people are manipulating the viewer, exploiting the participants, and creating false drama. It's been satirized and parodied for so long that the criticism has become a kind of white noise--which is all the more reason to reopen the question, really. As any Marxist can tell you, it's when you stop noticing the ideology that it's the most deeply lodged. Essays here include reality television in terms of ethical excellence, stereotypes, privacy, the manufacturing of marriage (really good topic), community, inspiration, commercialization, deception, democracy, and exploitation. I would have preferred a more detailed list of the exact programs under consideration, really. Tourism and the Amazing Race; Capitalism and Storage Wars; the American Family and Honey Boo-Boo. I guess this anthology is more interested in the genre at large than specific iterations. It mentions the Amazing Race, according to the index, but it's just a few offhand instances. I want my Race study! Wait, that doesn't sound right.
Television, sex and society : analyzing contemporary representations / Glynn, Basil, Games Aston, and Beth Johnson
And we'll end things with one more television-oriented glance. And... it's another anthology!The subject here is about the proliferation of sex on the screen in American, British, and Asian televisoin since the 90s. In particular, it's about the shift from authoritarian state and patriarchal order toward a more democratic form. Hmm. It's often difficult to show shifts like this in anthologies, as they tend to be better looking at individual examinations--the authors just aren't writing with unified arguments in mind. But that particular shift seems like a pretty common sensical one, so it won't take much to justify it. Part One is "TV and the Democratization of Sex": essays on Shameless, Buffy, True Blood (sexing the vampire, which is a good topic, albeit one that hardly started with True Blood), True blood and online fan culture. Part Two is "TV and the Absence of Sex": Beekeper Suits and Rubber Gloves in Pushing Daisies (I want to read that one), Television X, Xiaosan, and My Lovely Sam-soon. Part Three: "TV Sex and Heritage: Sexual Representation and Re-presentation": Erotic Austen, Costume Drama and Lesbian Sex on the BBC, Masculinity, sex and nationality in The Tudors. It's a rather small number of essays for an anthology (11), but the Asian essays are an interesting addition not usually seen in books of this nature.
That's it for this week.
Later Days.
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