Monday, April 27, 2009

Don't cry over spilt (breast) milk

Ok, so I didn't actually spill breastmilk, but I did cry...

About 3 weeks ago, I presented at paper at SEWSA on biocultural (biology + culture) perspectives on breastfeeding. It focused on one evolutionary cost of not breastfeeding, precocious puberty (having your period before age 9 or developing breasts before age 8) and commented on ineffective public health campaigns that attempt to increase breastfeeding. It was well received. Many people asked questions and I felt great.

Flash forward to last Wednesday. The same paper was presented to my WMST seminar class who HATED it. They took offense to all the evolutionary stuff and couldn't believe that I, as a feminist, would include evolutionary perspectives. They asked me questions about lesbians and gay men who couldn't breastfeed. I explained that I wasn't advocating for all women or caregivers to breastfeed, just that those who want to face cultural barriers against doing so in public. They also complained about my stating the human breast was evolved for breastfeeding. Um, we are mammals? Evolution is a POPULATION based model, thus individual preferences don't matter fr the whole species (i.e. if you choose not to have children). Basically, I was so upset I snarkily replied to all they're comments that I would just toss all the evolution stuff because I didn't want to explain how evolution worked in my paper.

Well, that took made my paper substantially shorter than the 20 pages I originally wrote and the 18 page suggestion. Compounded with the other two papers I had to write this weekend, re-writing that breastfeeding paper was going to be difficult. Come Saturday night, I had one paragraph of my former paper that was salvageable, meaning I was going to need to write 13 pages tomorrow and re-research the topic. So feeling overwhelmed and frustrated and angry, I cried. And while crying wrote an "I have abandoned all hope on this paper and I have no clue what I am supposed to do" email to my professor. Real smart, Taylor. Real smart

The elusive grad school meltdown, which had escaped me all first semester finally hit me with one week on school to go. GREAT.

Anyway, I pulled myself together, and on Sunday, I magically pulled 12 pages of text, 4 pages of images, and 3 pages of citations out of my research on a completely different topic from the one I began with. Is it a good paper? Who knows. It's finished; it's passable; and I am slow getting over my perfectionism. Well, trying to...

2 comments:

Alison Piepmeier said...

Oh, Taylor, I'm so proud of you for finally having your grad school meltdown!

Honestly, the comments you cite from your classmate sound JUST like grad school. You're doing interdisciplinary work, which is harder (because humanities people don't understand evolution), but even if you weren't, people would find little nit-picky things to critique (just because gay men with children can't breastfeed doesn't mean that feminists can't talk about the value of breastfeeding!).

I'm sure you made the right decision to revise it for your class, but don't feel like your peers necessarily represent the feedback you're going to get from journal editors, etc. It's probably a very good idea for you to think about learning to translate evolution to the feminist crowd.

Jims said...

I just had a similar experience in the opposite direction--I worked with two other women and spent all semester doing a survey of women in academia (grad students and faculty) to ask about their experiences with childbearing. We were really trying to find out if stop the clock policies were being used or had much of their desired effect. The quantitative analysis class slammed us down hard on this--they asked a lot of questions I'm used to getting (why didn't you survey the menz?) but my partners weren't. We're spending the weekend redoing some models, but my essential response to my classmates' criticism was: fuck 'em.

I have to say--it disappoints me that your class was so adverse to this. Hasn't Anne Fausto-Sterling been going on for years about how absurd it is that we view the sciences and humanities as incompatible and the sciences as incompatible with feminist research?