What if we just… stopped?

Let’s take a moment to go back in time. To October, when I wrote this post, about sabbaticals. I used the OED to make the argument that sabbaticals historically are, and therefore ought still to be, as much about rest as research, more slowing down than amping up. This has been my mantra this sabbatical (which ends in two weeks – DO NOT MENTION THIS), one I’ve been reminded of again and again as I try, fail, and try and fail again, to prioritize resting, living, being.

Many trials make a habit, I can hope.

Reminder number one.

I’m in the UK, in late October, for the first time in two years. Everything looks the same, yet everything is different. Nobody here is wearing masks. (Current mileage may vary – though I’m glad not to be in London now.) It’s like there’s an apocalypse but nobody got the message. Like visiting 2019, but in Bizarro-land.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan was, as far as I could tell, more or less the only person on the Tube wearing a mask (and a fetching London Underground one at that).

This temporal weirdness produces stress just when I don’t need it. On the way in from Heathrow on the Tube, spooked by the non-masky-ness and woozy from jet lag, I get off the train with all my stuff at Hounslow Central, sure that eventually a train will arrive carrying only the mask-compliant. Forced into realpolitik, I finally arrive at my family’s home, only to feel simultaneously trapped and at ease. Maybe I’ll spend the whole three weeks in here, just lying around on the sofa?… Though that would not allow me to get done the interviews I’ve come here to accomplish, in order to qualify this trip as a “work trip”. Never mind that these interviews, as we all now know, could just as easily take place on Zoom. (DO NOT MENTION THIS.)

But I am here to conduct interviews, and, just to be sure of my graft cred, I accept an invitation to give an in-person talk at my former school, Queen Mary University of London. A talk I have yet to write, of course.

After some coffee to wake me up, I wander into the bedroom and discover that the books I ordered from the Guardian bookshop the last time I was here have long since arrived, and are gathering dust. Among them? The Slow Professor, by Maggie Berg and Barbara K Seeber.

The SP was published almost 5 years ago now, and it feels simultaneously dated and never, ever so true. As Julien Lefort-Favreau wrote in his 2019 review, “The book poses a difficult question: To what extent do professors themselves bend to the ideology of growth without their knowledge?”

I’m well aware of the extent to which I “bend” to the ideology of growth, speed, and productivity in my academic job. Confession: I get a frisson of pleasure every time I have to complete my supposedly-dreaded Annual Performance Evaluation, because I perform really well. I look forward to getting my “A”! In other words: the problem is less about awareness with me than it is – like it is for so many of us – about what Lefort-Favreau accurately calls hegemony:

“To what extent are the teachers themselves accomplices in this imprisonment, as if they are afraid of being accused of being lazy, under the pressure of implied adversarial criticisms they have integrated? This is a classic case of hegemony, where adherence to dominant values becomes so powerful that it is indistinguishable, like the (stale) air we breathe.”

The growth/speed/productivity thing is naturalized for us – when we don’t comply, we feel weird. Resistance makes me queazy. This is how norms work: they hit you in your belly.

Reminder number two.

By Monday morning, three days after my UK arrival and with a weekend of friends and catch-ups behind me, I start to panic about Getting Down To Work. I send slurries of interview-related emails, open the file of conference talks that holds what I hope will be the seed of my QM paper, and even do some Zoom yoga over the lunch hour. Productivity 101. By evening, I’m knackered (still jet lagged!) and ready for a drink. (Even though I don’t drink on Mondays… DO NOT MENTION THIS.)

One of my friend and colleague Erin Julian’s cats takes in my talk as part of the Zoom virtual audience. She looks like she might have a question…

By week’s end, though, I’m in Brighton, by the sea. I’m sitting on the pebbled beach, holding a heart-shaped stone in my palm, looking into the late afternoon sun. My pal and colleague Ben is going to meet me shortly for a work party, but the truth is we’ll mostly just gossip. After all, we haven’t seen each other properly – screens do not count – in ages!

I start to wonder if, perhaps, this – THIS, here and now – is actually a perfectly valid reason for me to be here, right now. The OED, after all, reminds me that sabbatical is time for rest and travel. Not for travel for work. The latter may happen. The former should take precedence.

Me by the sea.

Over the following two weeks I grow less and less attached to my interview schedule. The ones that happen, happen. The ones I can’t seem to nail down? Forget it, for now at least. That’s what Zoom is for. I lean into the sea air (back in Brighton!), walk the darkening, late autumn streets of London. This is me challenging, as much as I can, the hegemony that governs my days, shapes my sense of self. If I am not rush-rush productive, am I still me? If I JUST STOP, if I decide DUCK IT, will I wake up in the morning rested, or feeling mildly ill, a changeling, or – a fraud?

Hegemonies may be naturalized phenomena, but Berg and Seeber also remind us that the culture of speed and productivity that shapes late capitalism is destroying our planet – and in 2021 that is happening right in front of our eyes. Our naturalized slavishness will one day, probably not long from now, literally destroy nature, destroy us. The natural becomes a contradiction.

Reminder number three.

Everyone always wants to catch up on their reading during their sabbaticals, yes? I’m no different. Toward the end of my time in London I forego The Slow Professor for another book about living well: Motherwell: A Girlhood, by the late Guardian journalist Deborah Orr. Motherwell is a memoir of growing up under patriarchy, with a mom who is the staunchest patriarch of all. Orr writes with clarity, wit, ferocity, and tenderness about loving her mom and so much about her, and also hating her mom and being unable to live beside her. The contradiction that is her childhood burns her prose into my brain. I finish the book on the plane.

Back home, I try leaning into contradiction – I figure this might actually help. I am Push-Push Kim, and there’s no way around that. Perhaps I could be Stop-Stop Kim as well, and just live in the tension, noting it, trying to understand it? I put Motherwell on the bookshelf I reserve for women’s memoirs, and I put The Slow Professor – still not completed – by my bed, in the pile where academic books usually go to die.

I operate on the one-in-one-out rule with this pile, so I shuffle through and see what’s cooking. I pull some non-starters that bored me stupid right out, and I read a couple of dust jackets to remind myself WTF I bought other ones in the first place. I settle on a newly curated pile. Several of these, I realize, are books by academics about living: Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. The Right To Sex, by Amit Srinivasan.

Kimmerer on the left, her book cover on the right. There’s an audio book, friends! And shout-out to Cat Lady Erin (image of cat above) for the recommendation!

Kimmerer is my current bedtime inspiration. She is a citizen of the Potawatomi nation, a proud Anishinaabe woman, a home gardener, and a botanist trained in the Western academy, which tried to tell her from word go that her ways were not botany’s ways, that she couldn’t do ecology like that here. A scholar who called bullshit on that, then decided to reframe her college knowledge by learning her community’s language, and with it the lifeways it holds as knowledge. A teacher who roped her students into helping ready an old, off-grid farmhouse for a final Christmas celebration for an elder, a woman who could have easily been no more than a backwoods Kentucky neighbour. Someone for whom living is research practice, knowledge gathering as well as knowledge dissemination – as it is for so many Indigenous scholars.

Kimmerer doesn’t seem to experience her two interwoven worlds as contradiction; it’s just living. Living well and in balance, a key Indigenous principle, is something we all need to work at, something we need to remain consistently aware of. That’s because it’s something that affects others around us, our communities, our families, as well as our own bodies, and therefore deserves our considered attention and care. It’s not actually about stopping, nor is it about not giving a fuck. It’s about practice. And if we keep on it, eventually, I suspect, we’ll feel its goodness in our bodies.

(Speaking of not giving a …: this one is for fun. Happy holidays!)

Relax Your Head

It was my first visit to my new osteopath. After 18 months of bouncing around in my kitchen to Zoom cross-fit, I’d knackered my left foot. The inflammation was causing pain all up the side of my shin, and connecting to the Known Issue in my left hip. The earliest I could get an MRI was December. So I needed some assistance.

Crystal asked me to lie down on her table, and then she put gentle pressure on the trouble spots. In that way osteopaths do, she began sensing my story.

“Are you under a special amount of stress right now?” she asked me. “Your body is really amped up.”

I have no doubt she was right. But here’s the thing: no special stress at the moment, really. I’m on sabbatical.

Sabbaticals are gifts given by a combination of labour laws and historical workplace privilege to academics. They aren’t free: we’re meant to have projects to do that require concentrated research time; we earn sabbatical periods with accrued teaching time; and we take a pay cut during the sabbatical period. But still, they are gifts.

And I’m terrible at receiving them.

Here’s what the Oxford English Dictionary says about sabbaticals:

The first definition of “sabbatical” in the OED, as a screen shot. It reads, among other things, “A. adj. 1. a. Pertaining to or appropriate to the Sabbath.”

I was surprised to learn of sabbatical’s religious roots; it had never occurred to me that “sabbatical” is of course derived from the “sabbath”! (I’m most moved by the 1892 reference to “calm … contemplation of his labours”; more on that in a minute.) The link is unexpected, but also instructive.

I’m not a religious person; I have a strong spiritual sense, or at least I believe I do, but I’m agnostic in practice. Which is one reason, I suppose, that I do not rest well; I do not have a sense of rest as something that calls me, the way (perhaps) acts of spiritual devotion linked to rest days might call others. I like to be busy; busy-ness is distracting and I find distractions calming. (I’m working on it in therapy, don’t worry.) Rest, in other words, is hard work for me, and it does not come naturally.

If I worship anything, it’s my bicycle – and the connection to the road, the earth, my community it offers me. Here, rest is essential: you can’t do the kind of riding I do (usually somewhere between 40km and 80km at a go) without resting regularly. There’s a lot of strong evidence about the essential role rest plays in building strength, capacity, and physical endurance – full rest days let cyclists like me go faster, climb stronger, and avoid injuries.

A cat in repose, head on a pillow. CATS JUST KNOW.

Rest is also more than muscular, though – it provides a way for athletes (of all kinds – including writing athletes!) to regroup, adjust their headspace, reduce their cognitive load, and refocus. (I recommend this wonderful piece by the psychotherapist Susan Tarshis on searching for rest in her life, her exercise, and her work.)

Do I rest well off my bike? Nope. I know I should, but somehow on “rest days” I feel like I should be… doing something. So I garden, or I sneak in a lifting workout, or I do a short row on my ergometer, or I try a spot of yoga (complete with headstands).

My partner tells me, wryly, that my Facebook status should permanently say “sore”.

Clearly, though, my employer isn’t granting me sabbatical leave to ride my bike or to convert to Catholicism or Judaism. I’m meant to be writing a book (which I also did on my last leave, when I taught myself the power of a regular, controlled writing practice). I’m also undertaking two new teaching-research projects, complete with a stable of five (FIVE!) graduate fellows.

Here’s what the OED eventually says about this more familiar kind of sabbatical:

The OED’s second definition of sabbatical, item c.: “designating a period of leave from duty granted to university teachers at certain intervals…”

I note here with interest that this definition of sabbatical indicates the leave is “for the purposes of study and travel“; I think back to the “calm… contemplation of labours” in the first, religious definition. There’s something moving about the “meta” aspect here, the idea that I might use a sabbatical to reflect on how it’s going, on how my working practice is or is not serving me; the idea that I might use this time to learn to be a better, more capacious, kinder (to myself!) version of Professor Kim – not just to do Professor’s Kim’s research projects.

I’m also caught out by the phrase “designating rest or absence…”: sabbaticals, even MY kind of sabbaticals are… about REST?!

The definition I’m quoting here is the origin of meaning for the very thing I’m currently undertaking; in other words, the world’s most historically thorough and reliable wordsmiths are telling me plainly that sabbatical leave MEANS a period of study, travel, and rest.

If you talk to anyone working at a university who is coming up to a sabbatical, they will tell you how desperately they need it.

They are exhausted from the emotional labour of holding up the students in their charge, all of whom are in a liminal transition space between childhood and adulthood and are consequently undergoing constant, often difficult change. The independence of university instructors means so much of what we do is homegrown (no set curriculum), and quality prep is loads of work that has to happen before we even get into the room with those students. And don’t even get me started on university administration.

Like academics everywhere, I’ve always experienced the first month or two of sabbatical as a kind of falling over. I’m drained and I know it and what I really, really, need is to rest. But I’m also an excellent subject of power, and the prevailing wisdom of this culture is GO GO GO; rest is to be regarded with some suspicion. This is the flip side of the world of the bike, the world of the sabbath, where rest is to be cherished and revered; this is the world of publish-or-perish, the world of economic neoliberalism, where only the busy people are regarded as good enough, as fully human.

So I feel like I should fall over… but I can’t let myself. There’s a book to write, right? And ethics protocols to craft and graduate students to hire and … and … and …

This dog. I want to be this dog.

The 24/7 world is a lie, though, and increasingly we get it. The most productive among us are the ones who rest and work in balance, who rest MORE than they work, in fact. All over the globe, corporations large and small are trialling the four-day work week, to massive success. (The link here is to a short BBC article; if you want a deeper dive, I recommend a listen to this podcast episode, from Ed Miliband and Geoff Lloyd at Reasons to be Cheerful.)

Academics have some of the most flexible working lives on the planet, and yet the old joke is that we work all the time. We fetishize work as a badge of honour; then, we pass the fetish on to our graduate students, and we find them in the library on Saturday mornings. Could it be that we fear if we don’t perform our commitment to constant graft, we might be found out as – GASP – privileged? Free to rest whenever we need it?

I wonder what it would mean, for me and for anyone of us who feels somehow bad about themselves when they are resting, to take the OED definitions of “sabbatical” to heart. What if we regarded our leaves as periods of time when our jobs shift deliberately from work to rest – from work to calm contemplation about the many things we need in order to be our full selves? What if our sabbatical “projects” were not books or articles, but the recalibration of our bodies, traveling to see family and friends, a stack of work-unrelated books to read for fun?

What if the whole reason for the sabbatical was, unabashedly, to rest?

I’m still working on this, of course; even as I write this post I feel uneasy imagining myself prioritizing rest over the other things on my to-do list. It’s a hard lesson to unlearn; we live in a world that has naturalized a carelessness of self (principally so that it can sell products related to self-care back to us). It’s a trick of power – and it’s a very effective one.

But then, I find myself thinking back to my last sabbatical. When I wrote more or less a whole book in three months, simply by devoting two hours, or 1000 words, each weekday morning.

And I wonder: what could two hours of solid, devoted rest each weekday morning achieve for my aching foot? My sore hip?

I might even be able to wear my favourite shoes when I head back into the classroom in January.

This is Freddie, my road bike, enjoying a view of the Yorkshire moors above Hebden Bridge. This was taken in the first week of my last sabbatical, in 2017.

Rethinking “Work-Life Balance”

Ah, end of term. The race to the end of Week 12; snagging some advent chocolate here, or a festive cocktail there, to help the marking go down. Dreaming of sugar plum dreams – dreaming of getting to stay in bed.

Of course, I know nothing about this. I have been on sabbatical.

Being on sabbatical is supposed to lead directly to a recalibration of work-life balance. Spending the majority of my days *not* working at my academic work, and yet still more or less achieving all of my academic work goals, means that I’m supposed to have spent the remainder of my time on this fanciful thing called “life” – and thus that I am meant to be rejuvenated, happier, more fulfilled.

Right.

(Finding images for this post was like shooting fish in a barrel.)

What have I done this sabbatical? Well, as I’ll talk about in my next post, which will be an update on the “un-schedule” I made for myself in September, I’ve written 3/4 of a book for students. I’ve organized a small conference. I’ve vetted and accepted proposals for a special journal issue that will be coming out in 2019.

I’ve also moved house, renovated parts of said house, gotten used to a new community in a new city, traveled to England twice and Germany once, and worked at sustaining a new relationship. Note: these are all the “life” bits.

Sounds a lot like like work, though – doesn’t it?

(Here I am enjoying melted cheese in a baguette in Konstanz, Germany. I can officially say that eating this was work. Tasty work.)

This revelation – that “life” is also “work”, and that this fact might pose a problem for the elusive thing we call “work-life balance” – had not occurred to me until about a week ago. That’s when I felt the tell-tale pinching in my right eye that indicates I’m about to suffer a spell of anterior uveitis (aka iritis, the inflammation of the iris joint).

I have an auto-immune condition called Ankylosing Spondylitis; don’t worry, I have terrific healthcare and it’s mostly fine (thanks, Canada!). But it gets active when I’m feeling unusual levels of stress. It manifests in my hip, my jaw, and my eye.

Early in November, I could barely open my mouth. What’s up? I thought. The TMJ isn’t usually a big deal! Where is this coming from?

Eventually the jaw pain subsided. Then my hip started to ache; for a couple of days I struggled to get up out of beds and chairs, and walking was tough. I blamed the shift in my workout schedule, what with the move and everything, and I blamed my new penchant for stair-climbing on the Niagara Escarpment, one of my new home town of Hamilton’s many outdoor pleasures.

But, after the hip pain passed and my jaw was back to normal, I began to notice that looking into the light hurt my eye. (I’ve felt this many times before – I carry the drugs with me.) The iritis typically arrives in times of significant stress. I was confused. I wasn’t stressed! I was ON SABBATICAL!

I looked at the date on the bottle of drops I’m currently carrying in case of iritis while traveling (I’m in England this week). I was sure my last bout had been this time last year. But: the prescription date said 27 April 2017.

What was happening in late April? I thought to myself. My term was over. Marking was complete. Sabbatical was just ahead!

And: I had just started house-hunting.

The penny dropped.

Where does stress come from? For me, it comes from any labour I need to do, or expect myself to do, or am expected by others to do, that pressurizes me in some way. If I do not do this thing I will let someone down. I will let myself down. If X is not done now, Y cannot get done next. Things to do, work ahead.

“Work” in this case is a pressure born of expectations internal as well as external, and it does not actually distinguish between “paid” and “unpaid”, “professional” and “personal”. Ask every woman who has ever worked at home for free, keeping a house and raising kids. Not stressful? Not pressurizing? Not labour? NO WAY.

As a feminist scholar and a cultural materialist, I am very well aware that what has historically been called “women’s work” – the work of caring for lives, maintaining a life, for self and others – is every inch “work”, though it is often disregarded as “just life”, which is one key way that patriarchy systemically denigrates domestic and social labour as bon-bon eating privilege.

(FYI, I’d like to invite everyone who has ever had someone else maintain their home comforts for them to give home-work a shot for a week or so and see how many bon-bons you manage to swallow.)

So, anyway, as a clever feminist, you’d think I’d have cottoned on, long ago, to the fact that I was not actually working less on my sabbatical, that I was not just busy recalibrating and bouncing through the daisies.

Nope. I was actually working more.

Here, let me revisit again the things I have done on my sabbatical. This time, I’m going to list everything, all mixed together, that has been a source of pressure or anxiety – a source of physical, intellectual, OR emotional “work” – rather than distinguishing between “paid job” and “just life”. Suddenly things get both scarier, and clearer.

On Kim’s sabbatical she:

• wrote most of book (37,000 of 50,000 words)
• bought house in Hamilton, ON
• sold house in London, ON
• organized conference (with four other amazing humans who read this blog – thanks friends at Central!!)
• moved out of house in London, ON
• moved into house in Hamilton, ON
• read a whack of article abstracts for Research in Drama Education
• had new house painted up and down
• prepared new issue of journal I edit (Theatre Research in Canada)
• had new bathroom, carpets, skylight installed in new house
• helped dog manage moving stress
• discovered asbestos in new house, coped
• peer-reviewed book manuscript for a major university press
• peer-reviewed applications for fellowships at a European university
• collected non-driving new boyfriend from his house 30km away many times
• coped with having new boyfriend in house often, which is wonderful but also a source of disruption, of course
• wrote a bunch of reference letters for students as well as peers
• answered about a thousand emails
• met about 25 new neighbours (all of them splendid – yay! – but small talk is hard work)
• found new cycling club and new rowing club, tried them out, joined
• forwarded a bunch of emails not meant for me because SABBATICAL
• cooked a Thanksgiving turkey.

I know there are things I’m forgetting. But even so, oh my, what a lot of work I’ve been doing! And when you factor in the part where I’ve only actually been considering about 1/3 of the above list as actual “work” in my mind, and therefore shaming myself for being so tired and anxious all the time, it’s no wonder my lovely AS has gone into overdrive and knocked me sideways since early November.

I’ve been mulling all of this stuff over for the last week or so. I began by thinking to myself, “work-life balance” is total bullshit! But then I realized that what we are up against here is not a problem concept, but rather problem language. Words actualize our expectations; they caused a problem for me this autumn because I failed to see the “work” in “life” and therefore was very hard on myself.

What I really needed was not more “life”. What I needed was more REST. A lot of it.

What would it mean for us to recalibrate our expectations around work-life balance by renaming it “work-rest balance”? I don’t mean here to suggest that there aren’t many among us who could not do with a lot less time at the office, and a lot more time with spouse and kids and cooking and so forth, however much work those things might also bring with them. And I know for some of us the work of things like cooking and vacuuming is actually quite pleasurable. (In fact, I relax by ironing. NO REALLY.)

But we can’t stop there, because playing with your kids is ALSO tiring, right? And dressing them, feeding them, and taking them to soccer most certainly is. It’s essential we get enough rest, outside of all the work commitments in our busy work-lives; otherwise we will not be at our best, and we will not feel good in our bodies, and we will not feel good in our hearts.

This is a lesson I first learned from a cycling coach years ago, and it’s a lesson that I think applies universally. You need to rest your body and your mind in order to improve your performance next time. In order to sustain the gains you make, and make more gains, you need a lot of down time. It’s part of the cycle of renewal that leads to doing the good work we all want to do more of at home and at the office and out in the world.

It’s almost the winter break, for most of us. Let’s pledge to rest for real. Take stock of the work you need to do over the holiday – the home-work as well as the paid-work – and then set aside times for rest that equal, as much as possible, the time needed for the tasks on your plate.

This is the true purpose of the un-schedule, I suspect. More on that next week.

Warmest wishes,

Kim

How do you solve a problem like Kevin Spacey?

I’ve been watching the Weinstein shit-show from the sidelines with the same mix of excitement and horror as the next woman. I’ve not really known what to say; the constant stream of revelations represent, for me, not the watershed of the moment (although it is – knock wood – very much a watershed), but the depth and breadth of the problem we all knew was about but couldn’t constellate fully until now.

I am very, very lucky: I have no instances of sexual abuse in my past. But let me tell you, I’ve been both gobsmacked and completely unsurprised at the morning’s (every morning’s) headlines.

Because, like every human female, I have a lot of first-hand experience of how patriarchy grants men the impression that they are entitled to take whatever they want, while it grants women – as well as non-normative, queer, and non-cis-gendered others – the keen sense that they should watch their backs.

Let me stress here that this is no one person’s fault – although being a fecking bastard is ABSOLUTELY the fault of the arseholic guys being written up every day in the dailies.

Nope, this is not a post about ass-hatted individual actions.

This is a post about a system. And it’s a post about the theatre.

Aside from a complicated (and contradictory) mix of horror and relief, the number one thing I feel about this particular moment in history is this:

Thank god I am not teaching right now, and don’t have to talk about this with my students.

Don’t get me wrong: I secretly love nothing more than throwing the syllabus away on a news-damp morning and chatting the real stuff out with the gang in the room. But this occasion feels really heavy, really loaded. I can imagine some very tense conversations, some really challenging mediating. I can imagine the emotional toll.

But as I’ve been wading through all of this, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I might say (maybe, next term, will have every opportunity to say) in the classroom about the issues raised by this extraordinary moment. And, thankfully, I’ve been granted a gift by two remarkable pieces of theatre I’ve seen in the past few weeks in Toronto – both of which take up, at depth, the issues behind the issues we’ve been reading about in the headlines.

This is a post about them – and about the power of live theatre to communicate aspects of Weinstein-gate that the print and online media can barely touch.

Asking For It (created by millennial Ellie Moon and produced by Nightwood Theatre at Streetcar Crowsnest in October) is “documentary” theatre that begins with the Jian Ghomeshi revelations and goes on to explore Moon’s and her peers’ experiences with the challenges of consent. Moon interviewed scores of people (mostly known, some family, lots of friends) for the show, and their stories make up the content, voiced by four actors. In the first two thirds of the piece, performers Christine Horne, Steven McCarthy, Moon, and Jaa Smith-Johnson sit at a square table speaking the interview transcripts from binders into microphones, capturing the vocal intonation and gestures of the words’ owners. In the second half, they act out a handful of telling encounters Moon had during the interview process.

The show begins with Ellie (the “character” – the limits of autobiography aren’t totally transparent here) saying she wanted to know more, in the wake of Ghomeshi, about how consent works in practice: how we navigate it and how we all fall down around it. The show ends with her revealing that what she really wanted to figure out is why she seems to have a lot of rough sexual encounters, perhaps even want them, and what that says about her as a sexual agent, a feminist, and a human being.

Daughter is a bouffant show (in other words: expert clowning) that masquerades as stand-up comedy; the theme is, “wow, it’s so hard, man, to raise a little girl today!” Performer Adam Lazarus (who is the show’s co-creator, along with Jiv Parasram and Melissa D’Agostino, as well as director Ann-Marie Kerr) comes out as “Adam” (the character), all proud dad, wearing his 6-year-old’s butterfly wings and dancing to her playlist.

We love him more or less instantly, and we’re with him – until we can’t be with him anymore. By the end he has revealed himself to be a total jackass who wishes women would just go back to being simpler, the “tits” of his porn collection instead of the “cunts” of the real world. And though he admits to loving his daughter insanely, he also admits to thinking life would be simpler without her.

Toxic masculinity has by this point eaten the show, eaten him – and fucked his audience up completely.

These two pieces share as much in common as they don’t. Both, however, take issue with a culture that has created a pair of poisoned structures around sex and gender, and is now having to wrestle with their awkward, systemic dismantling.

For Moon, the problem of consent is BOTH that no means no, and that’s that, AND that consent is way, way pricklier and more confusing in practice than one endgame phrase conveys, for most well-intentioned humans, most of the time. For Lazarus, the problem is that love for his wife and daughter drives his character, but the tools he uses to shape his actions toward them were forged in a perilous melange of patriarchy-as-normal and extraordinary access to violent online pornography. He is also – as my colleague Karen Fricker pointed out to me over drinks the other day – apparently without family, beyond the women he perceives himself as responsible towards, and therefore without any (at least somewhat) objective mentorship and support as he flails into chaos.

One of the things that struck me right away about both of these shows was the way they were set up, spatially. (I’m thinking a tonne about space right now, because I’m deep into writing a book for students about theories of space, place, and meaning at the theatre in the twentieth century.)

When I entered the stage area of Asking For It, immediately I felt like a citizen, less like an observer. The space at Streetcar was configured as though for a debate, with banks of audience members facing each other, and more around the sides of the playing space. When the actors entered, they did so from our world: they came into the auditorium as the doors shut, and entered from the side of one of the rakes.

The message? We are all together in what is going to be a discussion, a series of provocations for us all to reckon with in a shared way.

Daughter was configured differently – though with equal critical aplomb. I entered a normal auditorium rake of seating, facing the stage. Shortly Adam appeared on that stage, dancing and flitting in the decorative wings. He was disarming, but also very clearly the (only) performer we were meant to watch. The configuration screamed: “stand-up comic! Also good dad!”

I admit I found Adam quite funny at first, but something about the character bothered me almost from the start. I felt like he had a gift for making everything – his daughter’s musical tastes; his wife’s pregnancy and difficult labour – completely about him. I remember thinking to myself, as he acted out (to hilarious and also astonished effect) his wife’s incredibly painful labour with their little girl: “does this guy really think it’s ok to make his loved one’s physical trauma about him?”

Turns out that question was, actually, the whole point.

With Asking For It, my experience was different – more cozy, and more personal. (I attribute this to Ellie’s femininity, as well as to some other experiences we shared, though we do not know each other. Similarity breeds patriotism – it really does.) Still, I found remarkable the show’s ability simultaneously to disarm me, and to put pressure on questions of extraordinary significance for me.

A case in point arrives in the second part of the show, when Moon and Horne re-create a conversation on a bus between Ellie and a friend with whom she’s had a boozy dinner, as part of the interview project. The friend notes that Ellie needs to step outside her comfort zone and interview strangers if her project is to have any significance. Push comes to shove, and Ellie approaches a man at the other end of the bus, brandishing her iPhone. She says something like: hey, hi, sorry to bother you. I’m doing interviews about peoples’ experiences of consent. Could I ask you some questions about how you experience consent, and navigate its challenges?

The guy is not interested. Nor is he sympathetic. He takes a totally understandable, very frustrated, position. He says something like: if I had approached YOU on this bus, what would you have thought? You admit you’re a bit tipsy, and you’re asking me about consent, asking me to talk into your phone, for some “project”; how would you feel in my position?

God, do we feel for this guy.

Until Ellie says, bluntly but quietly:

But: I ASKED you.

Adam means the very best – but his experience of love, care, and sex was forged in the crucible of brutal online rape culture. He’s been taught male entitlement in the womb, and the internet has reinforced his genital privilege.

He thinks EVERYTHING is about him. When it’s not, he freaks out – he actually does not know what to do.

So he hits people – including his friends, and his daughter.

Ellie wants answers: why is this CBC douchebag’s inappropriate and possibly criminal behaviour getting to me so much? What’s consent, and what’s crossing the line? Why do I sometimes want to cross the line myself?

Can I be a feminist and cross the line?

In the process, she meets a not insignificant number of people who think she’s being kind of a feminazi, or who think they are feminist allies, except they actually really aren’t.

They want stuff, and they’ve been taught to take stuff, and even though they want to be the most stand-up men imaginable, that training of wanting and taking stuff is deep, and it’s engrained.

I’ve thought about both of these two remarkable productions an awful lot in the last four weeks. It’s not lost on me that Moon’s piece is comprised of interview material – other peoples’ voices, however mediated by her expert dramaturgy – while Lazarus and his co-creators have deliberately built a show that demonstrates how powerful, seductive, and ultimately toxic a single, virtuosic, male voice can be, when offered as funny and chummy and bro-ey.

Until it makes you kind of literally feel sick. (I literally felt sick, by the end of Daughter.)

Toxic masculinity is a formation driven by parallel but totally contradictory assumptions: that men should be upstanding, good guys with a fair amount of feminist sensibility, but that they continue to deserve to be number one in the equation in all circumstances – because that’s what patriarchy teaches straight cis-men, full stop, OR ELSE. The end result of this messed up formula is easy to guess.

Moon’s character isn’t without selfishness, without problems. But the show constructed around her is polyvocal, and works actively to find others’ voices, to honour them, and to discover her own problems and challenges through the revelations they provide.

Daughter avoids polyvocality – deliberately – because Adam isn’t capable of admitting others into his worldview in a real and meaningful way.

Dismantling this logic – the logic of toxic masculinity – is the work ahead, or else. The point of both of these productions is that patriarchs aren’t always easily visible, but that they are always conditioned by the poisoned binaries of gender vs gender. Because the system under which we labour – in which men come first, have always come first, and anything else is an “accommodation”, even now – is entrenched, and dismantling that system is not just about deciding to be a good guy, or an easy-going girl.

It’s much harder than that. And it requires all of our labour. Together.

Kim

 

 

 

On scheduling

In my last post I mentioned I’m on sabbatical. When I did that, I bet some of you went: “ARGH! Why can’t I be on sabbatical too!”

Don’t feel too bad, at least not on my account. Because the truth is I suck at sabbaticals: nobody is worse than me at sorting out life during unscheduled, unplanned time. I’m pretty much useless without frameworks and extant demands to concentrate my focus. I joke that I only took on my last book project, Theatre & Feminism, because I was moving across the ocean, changing jobs, and taking on some caring responsibilities for my mom – I needed a work project to help de-stress my busy life.

Alas, I now have ANOTHER book project – the kind with a contract, a deadline, and a hard-at-work-already marketing team – and it needs to get written on this here research leave, which ends in late December. I spent July trying to recover from my winter and spring teaching obligations, August moving house, and September, so far, has been eaten up with a combination of works taking place at my new place, and self-imposed, utterly unproductive angst about all the other kinds of works NOT getting done around my new home office.

In other words: I need to fake up a framework for myself, and fast.

Cue the un-schedule.

What’s an unschedule? Basically, it’s a schedule you create for yourself that prioritizes all the life/fun/”in the way” stuff that normally gets left OUT of a schedule, and which then of course takes over anyway, and guarantees that your schedule is not actually going to function as intended.

I learned about the un-schedule when I first began my job at Western, during a Teaching Support Centre workshop on work-life balance, from my (now) friend Tracy Isaacs, one of the professors behind the terrific blog Fit is a Feminist Issue. I still recall Tracy opening her talk with these words: “I’m on sabbatical right now, so of course I have balance.” What strikes me as incredibly ironic – yet also entirely useful – looking back on that presentation now, is that Tracy located her work-life balance in her un-schedule. Without scheduling of some kind, in fact, sabbaticals do not generate balance; they are not magical work-life re-jiggers. A sabbatical can easily become a stressful black hole for people like me, who are normally workaholics and operate effectively under pressure.

So, how does one make an unschedule? Mileage varies, I’ve found, after some informal googling. The one rule is that you start with the immoveable stuff (food! sleep! school run!), followed by the “for you” stuff (exercise, haircuts, reading, coffee with friends). Then you either schedule, or leave blank, the spaces around them, which can in theory be filled with work tasks, life tasks, or whatever else needs doing. The principal is simply that, by starting with a realistic look at your habits, your commitments, your pleasures, and the actual time each takes, you can more logically set out a day or a week that genuinely represents your needs.

I spent today working at the British Library; in “un-schedule” fashion, I started with immoveable commitments (one fun: lunch with friend Bridget; one less so: adjusting a piece of writing I need to present on camera tomorrow). Then, once they were completed, I turned to my spreadsheet app, created a blank schedule document, and got to work.

Before I take you through my process, here’s what the finished product looks like:

My first order of business was to delete Saturday and Sunday from the picture altogether. I do not work on those days, period. (That’s a hard and fast rule, UNLESS it’s term time, I’m teaching, and something comes up that simply cannot be readjusted into the week. I also don’t check my work email on weekends, which is a decision I made last fall and it’s been a life-saver.)

Next, I tried to work out what blocks of time I needed: an hour? Less? More? I quickly realized that each day, for the purposes of creating a one-page, at-a-glance weekly schedule, needed to include the same time blocks, but that each day would never really look the same, task wise. I decided that this will simply mean that some days “10-12” will be more like “9:45-11:30” or “10:30-12:30”, depending on the day and the tasks at hand. Not a big deal; the schedule, after all, is a guide, not Big Brother. I can adjust on the fly.

My next job was to identify stuff that simply has to happen each day. Right now, given sabbatical, there’s honestly not a lot of that: few meetings, fewer demands on my time from colleagues or students. Cue momentary panic: my life is empty!! How can I be so unproductive?? Then, I closed my eyes and pictured Emma the dog giving me the side-eye she uses for all purposes of emotional blackmail. Problem solved.

(Emma says: you HAVE to take me walkies. RIGHT NOW.)

I began to un-schedule in earnest by filling in my morning routine. I am not an early riser (8:30 is optimistic, people!), and I like to walk Emma first thing (actually, I permit myself to be herded to the door first thing). I like to check email over coffee. This takes time. Empty the dishwasher, make a smoothie and some eggs, tidy up, water plants in the garden… I’m not going to pretend these things don’t happen, and don’t take up to 2 hours, depending, in the morning. That’s the way I like it. So into the schedule it went.

The next thing I noted – and this is slightly un-un-schedule-y, but whatevs – was that I wanted to block off at least 2 hours a day for sitting in front of my computer, email program closed, writing (or trying to write – staring blankly at text I reject as sub-par but have as yet no idea how to fix also counts for something). That damn book deadline means I need to generate about 4000 words a week until Christmas; that’s a lot of writing, but it’s not unmanageable for me. I reason that I’ll need 12-16 hours per week to generate that amount of content, unedited; so two hours each morning, every morning of the week, takes care of the bulk of that.

And so we come to lunch. I always eat lunch, but lunch for me rarely consists of just eating. I am extremely active: an avid cyclist, swimmer, rower, and I practice Iyengar yoga (among other kinds). Which basically means I’m an endorphin junkie. Without the endorphins, work goes less well, period. So, to be realistic, I blocked off 2.5 hours for lunch-hour activities each day; for two of those days I scheduled a bike ride (which, until the snow flies, will likely take the full 2.5 hours), while for one I scheduled a swim, and the other a yoga class.

This part of the scheduling task was actually hard – not because I don’t know how much time I need for lunch-hour activities, nor because I didn’t know what those activities might be, but because I’ve just moved to my new city, and so don’t actually have my new workout routine in place yet. (Will I like the yoga classes I’ve identified as “good timing”? Will I want to swim every Friday?) This realization prompted another brief moment of panic: how can you make a schedule when you don’t even know WTF about your new life yet AAGGHH?? Which I solved by reminding myself of another really important detail: the schedule is not fixed. It’s flexible!

If in three weeks it turns out my exercise routine *actually* looks very different to what I’ve scheduled, that’s fine: I can just change the schedule, moving the work stuff around as needed. That’s the power of the un-schedule.

Which brings us to the afternoon. I am not an early riser/morning person = I like to work late into the afternoons; that’s why that block begins each day at 2:30pm and continues until 5:30, with an option to extend to 6:30pm as needed. I know myself; I’ll get going in the afternoon and might not want to stop. I won’t want to cook, let alone eat, before 7pm, guaranteed. So this is a very logical, practical organization of my time.

And what about the tasks that slot into that 3-4 hour window? I’ve recorded these as “primary or secondary” tasks, to reflect that some days I’ll want to return to the morning’s writing, and some days I know I won’t. I also have other stuff on tap – blog posts to write, new work by colleagues to read, as well as other research projects bubbling to the surface. I edit a journal, Theatre Research in Canada / Recherches théâtrales au Canada, which requires some concentrated time; I’ve scheduled an afternoon a week for that work, and hope (for a change!) to restrict it to that window of time.

In four of these afternoon slots, you’ll notice that I’ve also added a note: “may include travel to Toronto.” I now live within Toronto’s public transit corridor, which means I can visit friends, see theatre or films, or head into the city for meetings very easily. The bus and the train are both options for me; both take an hour, and both are ideal work zones. I know I’ll want to visit the city at least once a week, and I know I can combine that travel with work on public transit very easily. It made sense to remind myself of this in the schedule, so that if someone invites me to a meeting in Toronto I can honestly say: I have M/T/Th/F from 2:30pm; what works for you?

Which brings us to 7pm. “Stop working!” I’ve told myself in each evening slot. Why? Because I might not stop otherwise. I might have not been as productive as I want to be in the day, or I might be stuck on a tricky paragraph; I know myself well enough to know that, if that happens, I’ll keep pushing until I fall down from hunger or exhaustion. (Again, the principal that drives the un-schedule is self-reflexive honesty.) But if I’ve followed the schedule, and it’s 7pm, then, dammit, it’s time to stop. Tomorrow’s another day. And look! Wednesday might include an optional evening activity (there’s nothing scheduled at lunch yet… we’ll see), plus there’s restorative yoga on Thursday nights at the studio near my house. A great excuse to shut the computer down.

(Looks odd, feels great. BKS Iyengar always knew when to stop working.)

How’s this going to go? Your guess is as good as mine. I’m going to stick as closely as possible to the schedule for the next couple of weeks and note what needs adjusting; then I’ll rejig it to reflect aspects of my weekly reality I could only glean from living through the schedule. (I might repost it at that point, if I learn useful things in the process; stay tuned.)

For now, I’m going to try to operate by the following three principals:

• all the activities in the schedule are valuable. I will make time for all of them – even the damn dog walking – as close to the slotted time as is reasonable.
• the schedule is a guide; adjustments on the fly do not equal failures.
• the schedule is flexible; it should flex with me. If I bend too hard to meet the schedule’s “demands”, it won’t be sustainable.

Meanwhile, if you work to a similar (or similarly-spirited) schedule, please let me know what you use and how it works for you! I’m very keen to understand how others cope with the sabbatical conundrum.

Kim