Alison Piepmeier's blog

In the bio statement at the bottom of my article in Inside Higher Ed, editor Gwendolyn Beetham offered a link to this blog.

She is wearing a big piece of lycra
and a hat that one of my students
gave her.  So elegant!

Well, there hasn't been much going on here except for links to the public writing I've been doing.  So in case anybody hops over here from my Inside Higher Ed article--hello!  Here's a picture of my daughter.

Now do you feel that visiting was worth your while?

SC: the state where "compromise" means "well, yeah, we all agree that LGBTQ people are pretty disgusting."

Here's my latest piece in The City Paper.  Folks, it keeps getting sadder and sadder here.  I feel less outrage than heartbreak at this point.

Legislators, can't you get it?  Glenn McConnell, come on--you're going to be a college president!  And many students, faculty, and staff members are LGBTQ!

Follow up to my crappy mother column

It's good to write a column about fears that you're a crappy mother, because loads of other mothers share the ways in which they're crappy, too!  For instance, on Facebook friends wrote:

• "Recently I celebrated the fact that my daughter didn't have the iPad for one minute. For a whole day. Read into that the truism that usually she has it many minutes. I only started feeling better when I started practicing 'good enough' parenting. Benign neglect, baby."
• "Mothers in the mythical 50s got blamed for coddling their children, mothers today are blamed for raising entitled children - we're pretty much damned to be doing it wrong, no matter what we're doing."
• "Lately, one of my frequent interior monologues involves the phrase, 'there's good, and there's good enough.' It's pretty fitting for lots of situations -- house cleanliness levels, kid cleanliness levels, number of books read to children, number of minutes spent speed reading Berry Bitty Bakers, number of times I raised my voice in a day, number of times I raised my voice in an hour...you get the picture!"
• "It's all part of the same conspiracy of trying to snow the masses into the idea that 'perfect' and 'happy' exist but it's always on THAT side of the fence. Divide and conquer baby."

Good enough.  Benign neglect.  THAT side of the fence.  These are mothers who are recognizing that there are narratives out there that are unhealthy, and that are specifically targeting mothers.  And they're developing strategies for keeping those narratives from being effective.  I soooo appreciate their strategies.  I'm borrowing them.

And on to another motherhood thing.  The other day I wrote a post where the bike riding was a simile for life. Shitty bike riding and good bike riding, and on that day I was definitely in a place of shitty bike riding.  I mentioned that one sign of a good bike day was when Maybelle sang a song she wrote with alternative lyrics to the Beatles "The End."

Here was a day of good bike riding:

Bicycle song from Maybelle on Vimeo.

(In case you can't understand:  "Oh yeah, alright, are you gonna go on the bike? Okay.  Oh yeah, alright, are you gonna go on the bike?  Good job.")

This is actually an example of GOOD
parenting.  She was helping me cook!

I've got a new article up in the City Paper.  This one's not about outrage or horrific political things going on in South Carolina.  Instead, it's about parenting!

A nice change of pace.

"It's Okay If Your Children Watch TV All Morning."

A lousy simile

What, Alison Piepmeier writes a blog?  I thought she only wrote outraged columns and op-eds!

Yes, yes, I haven't been blogging much.  But a lousy simile on a Friday evening really isn't good material for The City Paper, so here I am, on Every little thing.

Clever photography, right?

The simile:  parenthood these days feels very much like biking on what Maybelle calls "our new bike": the tandem bike she and I started riding in October.

There are days when the bike is easy to ride.  Birds are chirping, the sky is blue, there are egrets in the swamp we pass, and Maybelle and I sing versions of the song she altered:

Oh, yeah
Alright!
We are going on our bike.
Good job.

(This is sung to the tune of The Beatles' "The End."  Maybelle really did start singing this with no prompting one morning when we were riding the bike.)

Days when I feel competent as a parent, comfortable because everything is okay (I felt that maybe I needed to make the simile obvious).

And then there are days when I can hardly balance, when the pedaling is exhausting.  Days when every movement made by Maybelle feels like the bike is swinging recklessly and I have to work hard to keep it from lunging from side to side.  Days when I feel like I've been biking forever, and I realize we're not even half the way home.  When the wind is blowing.  When I worry that it might start raining at any moment.

Days when I grieve not driving.  When it just feels like too much--"it" being making a plan for the weekend, doing my job, finding things that lift me, figuring out what I need, asking for what I need, then asking again and again and again.  Taking care of Maybelle while not crumbling.

Today was the latter.

So now I'm making myself brown sugar muffins.

We were safely stopped.  There
was no traffic.  No need to worry.

Fun Home: The Musical in Charleston

This is an unbelievably good opportunity.  I'm sort of astonished that the College of Charleston is getting such astonishing support from national performers and writers.  Please come out and see Fun Home, meet Alison Bechdel and the NYC cast, and applaud enthusiastically for academic freedom!

"We're Having to Fight Our Asses Off for Academic Freedom:  Fight the Power."

Lesbian recruitment; or, why the state of South Carolina continues to be a laughingstock

Don't look!   Your eyes will be damaged by the bigotry!

Senator Mike Fair is proudly announcing his homophobia and his lack of a sense of humor. He's on the homophobic bandwagon with Representative Garry Smith and many other South Carolina legislators.

While Representative Smith has been sending letters to his constituents arguing that “College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina-Upstate required that college students read blatantly pro-homosexual and pornographic propaganda,” Senator Fair has focused his attention on USC-Upstate. In the fall the university offered Out Loud: The Best of Rainbow Radio as a book for first-year students, and this spring they invited comedian Leigh Hendrix to campus to perform a comedic show called How to Be a Lesbian in 10 Days or Less. The show was part of academic conference called the Bodies of Knowledge Symposium. Rather than recognizing it has a humorous performance, Representative Smith said, “It’s recruiting.”

This elected official seems to actually believe that a comedy show is an effort to convert heterosexuals to lesbianism.

Senator Fair’s attack is troubling enough. But the situation gets worse: Tammy E. Whaley, assistant vice chancellor for university communications at USC Upstate, announced that the university would go along with Representative Smith’s demand. USC-Upstate canceled the event, saying that this was actually an action in favor of academic freedom: “The controversy surrounding this performance has become a distraction to the educational mission of USC Upstate and the overall purpose of the Bodies of Knowledge symposium.” I’m not sure how faculty can respond to this; it sends the message to faculty that they need to be careful about what they teach if their curriculum becomes “a distraction,” meaning it doesn’t fit with the beliefs of our state legislators.

President Benson eating pizza with students who'd
done a sit-in to protest homophobic awfulness.
My eyes aren't being damaged by the bigotry.  Go, George.

The College of Charleston is facing similar pressures from the legislature and our Board of Trustees, since the House cut our budget while the Board nodded their heads compliantly. I’d like to offer CofC some praise and some encouragement: our administrators haven’t bowed to the homophobic pronouncements of the legislature. They didn’t call Fun Home a distraction or remove it from all College bookstores and classrooms. They didn’t apologize for having it as the 2013-2014 College Reads! selection. In fact, at a meeting with the College’s Foundation Board on February 28, President George Benson announced that the College is “safe and welcoming” to everyone who’s part of the campus community—“whether they are gay or straight.” He continued, “we will not censor books because someone, somewhere is uncomfortable with the existence of LGBTQ students, faculty, or staff.”

This month, USC-Upstate’s Chancellor Tom Moore (finally) made a similar statement: "LGBTQ issues are part of any campus life. As a public university, it's our charge to equip and empower students to live engaged, authentic lives and be responsible citizens. Each student has to define each of those things for him or herself. We can't do that if we exclude some part of the population. We must be a safe place for those who come to us."

We all know that our communities—at our colleges and universities and beyond—are made up of people with a variety of gender identities, sexual orientations, and ways of being in the world. Yet as far as anyone knows, George Benson is the first College of Charleston president ever to announce this, and to publicly support the LGBTQ population at the school. Indeed, right before I got hired at CofC state representative John Graham criticized the College for considering a minor in LGBT Studies.  Former CofC president Leo Higdon shut the conversations down. He announced "We cannot support a proposal for a minor in gay and lesbian studies because it is not, for a number of reasons, in the overall best interest of the college."

I suspect that Tom Moore is the first at USC-Upstate, too.

To contradict legislators’ pressure was probably a challenging and potentially damaging stance for President Benson and Chancellor Moore to take, but of course it was the right stance. It was obviously the right stance for anyone committed to human rights. The fact that February 2014 was the first time that any president of the College has said this kind of statement, and April 2014 for USC-Upstate, is stunning.

We all know that South Carolina is full of frighteningly homophobic state legislators. The evidence is overwhelming, and they’re not trying to hide it: they’re proud of it. It’s the job of our academic institutions to make space for a diverse community and to offer a variety of performances, texts, and conversations. USC-Upstate has caved in terms of programming they’re offering, but perhaps they’re trying to climb out, to be a school that isn’t ridiculed by the national media for their fear of standing up for all their students, faculty, and staff.