Hey Political Science Students,

Interested in teaching overseas post COVID? I would encourage you to attend the following info session. Be sure to see the attached flyer as well.

Are you ready for a global adventure when the world reopens?

You are invited to a special session about opportunities to travel the world through English teaching.  Find out about:

• The kinds of English teaching jobs available internationally
• Short-term employment and long-term career possibilities in the field of international English teaching
• Training available at UMBC to open global doors for you

Date: March 25, 2021

Time: 11:00-12:00pm Eastern US time

Location: Online

Free Registration

Sign up by 23 March with an e-mail to TESOL@umbc.edu

Cradle to Kindergarten: A New Plan to Combat Inequality

Wednesday, March 17, 2021; 5:30 to 7 p.m. (ET)

Inequality in early experiences and education have impacts on long-term socioeconomic success. How can early childhood policies help? The Russell Sage Foundation and the School of Public Affairs at American University will host a discussion featuring co-authors Taryn Morrissey (American University), Ajay Chaudry (New York University), and Christina Weiland (University of Michigan), joined by Miriam Calderon (Oregon's Early Learning Division) and Melissa Boteach (National Women's Law Center), to talk about the second edition of their RSF book Cradle to Kindergarten: A New Plan to Combat Inequality. The book presents research on how inequality in early opportunity has life-long consequences and offers an evidence-based approach to expanding access to affordable, high-quality early care and education to all children.

The discussion will be moderated by Ruth Marcus, Washington Post columnist and 2019 Sine Institute Fellow.

U.S. Representative Bobby Scott (D-VA), Chair of the House Committee on Labor & Education, will offer remarks before the discussion.

This event is co-hosted by the Russell Sage Foundation, the nation's oldest foundation dedicated exclusively to research in the social sciences, and by the School of Public Affairs (SPA) at American University, which has been a hub for policy-related research and teaching for 85 years.

Read more about the book and purchase a copy.

The CAHSS Dean's Office has announced an opportunity to nominate up to one early-career faculty member for the William T. Grant Scholars Program, which supports career development for promising early-career researchers. 

Please see the attached PDF for guidelines and further information. Prospective nominees must email a set of specified materials to Preminda Jacob, Associate Dean for Research and Community Engagement (pjacob2@umbc.edu) by 11:59pm on April 1, 2021.  A selection committee will then review all internal submissions, and the UMBC nominee will be notified within two weeks. 

The selected nominee will then submit a complete proposal to the William T. Grant Foundation by July 7, 2021, with mentor and reference letters due in advance, by June 16, 2021.  

Celebrate Women's History Month by engaging and learning with these great events happening throughout March! Also check out our Women’s Center blog archive for deeper learning and reflection. 

Highlighted Events Hosted by the Women's Center and Campus Partners: 

University System of Maryland Women's Forum Scholarship and Awards Alert!

In the spirit of using this celebration to learn and expand your understanding of women’s history, we also recommend you check out some of these archives from the Women’s Center blog treasure trove!  

Liz Patton's new book, Easy Living: The Rise of the Home Office, was mentioned in an article on home office design on Quartz.com "WORKAHOLIC'S SANCTUM: How Frank Lloyd Wright designed a distraction-free home office."

  Nandi is a senior English major and student staff member.

Content Note: This post was written by a cishet woman after reading, thinking, and reading some more. I hope, more than anything, that it sparks a bigger conversation in the Women’s Center community.

There are references and comparisons to being institutionalized. I recognize the weight of this metaphor, and am using it to represent how this concept shows up in the world.

Heteropessimism: A Brief(ish) Definition 

     Sometimes you hear a word that you’ve never heard before and all these little pieces of your life click into place. Recently, I heard the word “heteropessimism” and experienced this type of enlightened curiosity. The source text is a feature essay in The New Inquiry written by Indiana Seresin, appropriately titled “On Heteropessimism”. Seresin provides specificity, details scenarios, and references LGBTQ+ literature to break down the culture she is naming. It is a broad, indefinite experience. The piece of it that I will focus on here is that heteropessimism is the repeated assertion that in an increasingly rainbow world, heterosexuality is an archaic prison, especially for hetero women.

     Straight people are learning that the institution of our sexuality is restrictive, dangerous, and dishonest at every turn. The unbridled possessiveness, normalized shame, and the constant need to pull some virtue out of abject disrespect from a partner eats away at our concept of self until all that’s left is stereotype. Then what? Where are we supposed to go from there?

     By Seresin’s estimation, and I think that many of us can cosign this, we are choosing to ironically bemoan the biological component of sexuality. We acknowledge the hurtful, socially constructed (by us) norms of straight society and then whine about them because it’s just so terrible to be born into this. Meanwhile, we completely erase the fact that LGBTQ+ people are born into the exact same world. 

     In complaining about these norms, we’ve been entrenching them deeper into our brains. You would think that we were born with social conditioning along with sexuality, but that’s not true at all. Removing heteronormativity from yourself and your areas of influence is a choice, and a choice that you have to make everyday.

     Succumbing to heteropessimism is a numb refusal to even engage with that option. 

Guilty as Charged

     I wanted to write about this because I read Seresin’s words and I took them to heart. In too many ways I’m the exact kind of woman she wrote about: performative, detached, and individualistic. Straight women can take a regular conversation and turn it into an Amy Schumer bit so quickly, and it’s always been so easy to go with the flow. In everyday conversation, the popularity of the heteropessimist attitude always overrides the real discomfort that it represents.  

     For example, the simple, honestly reductive phrase “nobody would choose to be attracted to men” has lulled me many times. I could say that I’ve worn it like a security blanket in a cold, mean patriarchal world. I reflect on times where I’ve had my crush talk over me, or when I’ve been someone else’s crush and he also talks over me and I feel comforted by the knowledge that I wouldn’t have chosen this. But when I step back and explore what I’m actually saying I recoil from it. As in, who cares what I would have chosen?

     I don’t live in the would-have universe. I live in the world where I am cishet, and that means something. 

When I’m self-deprecating about this identity, my gay and trans friends laugh, I laugh, and it’s really a cute bit. I shouldn’t be committed to the bit, though. I should be committed to destroying the norm that would have my loved ones treated as if they are strange and unnatural, and have me violently objectified. 

    My heteropessimist disposition relies heavily on useless cishet guilt. These jokes take on an analogous function to white guilt, where the affective value of saying you hate your whiteness is supposed to cloak your responsibility in dismantling whiteness. This type of relationship to your normative identities stems from a really cheap analysis. Even worse, it’s annoying. 

     Experiencing guilt for perpetuating oppressive systems is a necessary step on the way to ally/accompliceship, but getting stuck in a heteropessimist mindset is a short road to nowhere. 

Prison Riot

     Heterosexuality is not just a sexuality. It is a system, an industry, an institution; if you are like me, a straight woman who knows this, then that’s good. 

     If you acknowledge that marriage has been used as a coercive tool in the past, and around the world right now, then you help others learn their history. 

     If you critique the ways that capitalist propaganda keeps sneaking its way into your intimate relationships, then you give yourself and your partners a chance to clean house.

     We are in a position to wield this knowledge against the power structures that devalue and dehumanize us at every turn. Cisheteronormativity doesn’t serve us, and it never has. Rather than working from a desperate, listless place we should be using our experiences and our voices as fuel for resistance. The way we live, date, and love is far from normal. 

     Considering that our current ideas about sexuality come directly from colonialism, one could say that they are some of the most ugly and abnormal parts of our society (and I would be that one). Our concept of straightness was forged by colonizers committing unspeakably violent acts in order to expunge hundreds of rich, vibrant cultures from the face of the Earth. It makes a lot more sense for so-called “normal” people to not want anything to do with that legacy. 

     When we acknowledge the behemoth all around us, and the pain that it causes us, we’ve only BEGUN to fight it. If we truly believe that anything would be better than straightness, then we have to change straightness into something else. 

     Imagine what the world looks like when heteronormativity isn’t denying everyone of their dignity, and then Shawshank your way towards it.