Jane Juffer’s “Single Mother: The Emergence of the Domestic Intellectual”

Jane Juffer’s article “Single Mother: The Emergence of the Domestic Intellectual” discusses the idea of single motherhood as a choice. Juffer puts forth ideas such as the “nuclear family,” and the “othering” of single mothers. Today, more than half of women under 30 who have children are unmarried, and a total 1/3 of children are born to single mothers. Becauese of this, the idea of single motherhood and it’s issues are rapidly becoming important for not just the many mothers who are having the children without partners, but to the children as well. Despite the large number of children growing up with single mother’s, being a single mother, specifically in America has many disadvantages. These disadvantages, and especially the one’s Juffer focuses on are political and disadvantages that have to do with working and child care.

There is a great lack of child care in the United States and it is very difficult for single mothers to be satisfied with their work as women in the workforce, and in their work as mothers, parenting their children. It is hard for women to be successful in work because of the lack in child care and it is hard for women to be successful in parenting because they must seek childcare while they are at work, creating a paradox that seems to now allow mothers to be successful at either when they aim to succeed and do well as employees and mothers. Political setbacks also exist such as the Welfare Reform Act, passed in the 1990s, placed many limits on what single parents can do. This combined with the lack of childcare in the U.S places stress on single parents and makes it almost impossible for them to succeed.

There are also differences between single mothers who are white, black or Latina because things like assumptions about them and incomes differ between them. Despite these challenges, some positivity exists in being a single mother, such as a newly changed media perspective, which has positivity about single mothers embedded in it. This is apparent in shows like “Gilmore Girls.” However, with single mothers must deal with more than providing and caring for their child, they may also be in school while working and caring for their children and their children may also have disabilities or any other number of special circumstances. Although the “othering” of single mothers has somewhat faded because of the sheer large amount of single mothers that keeps growing every day, political reform and childcare would greatly improve the quality of single mother’s and their children’s lives.

“The Iraq War Is Not Taking Place,” Soldiers, Virtual Therapy, and their relation to Baudrillard

Robert Mackey’s article in The New York Times, “The Iraq War Is Not Taking Place,” discusses new forms of virtual therapy being used to treat Iraq War veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This new therapy is innovative and is done with the therapists conducting a virtual reality that is controlled by a tablet like device. The solider or patient being treated wears headphones, and goggles and the therapist slowly introduces and simulates war using his tablet-based interface, activating or removing the sounds of gunshots or the sight of smoke, depending on a patient’s reaction. The idea of the therapy is “to re-introduce the patients to the experiences that triggered the trauma, gradually, until the memory no longer incapacitates them.”

This brings up the ideas of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who famously claimed that the “gulf war did not take place.” This therapy used and the idea that the Iraq War isn’t taking place is similar to one of Baudrillard’s better known theories that postulates that we live in a world where simulated feelings and experiences have replaced the real thing. This seductive “hyperreality,” we live in where shopping malls, amusement parks and mass-produced images from the news, television shows and films dominate, is drained of authenticity and meaning. So, what better way to compare this therapy to this theory right? Maybe, although the therapy could be useful to getting soldiers to deal with their feelings and confront their PTSD, maybe this virtual reality could really offer breakthroughs for them that traditional therapy wouldn’t offer. However, in reading the explanation of how this simulation works, it seems as though this is nothing more than a video game, youtube-like video that the patient is watching or participating in.

This kind of therapy also blurs the lines between reality and unreality, and makes us aware of our “misunderstandings,” as Baudrillard would say, that we have about life in general and ideas like this type of virtual therapy. Mackey states that the NPR report on this project concludes with the observation that: “early results from trials suggest virtual reality therapy is uniquely suited to a generation raised on video games. The gaming aspect of the treatment also helps to lessen the stigma associated with getting therapy.” Although it is true that this type of therapy may be “uniquely suited to a generation raised on video games,” it doesn’t mean that it is the right way. Isn’t there the common idea that video games are not good for kids and expose them to things like violence and death way to early while the play video games like “Call of Duty,” “Grand Theft Auto”? Although the soldiers are “of age” for this type of “game,” shouldn’t we ask the larger question that they are at first so tainted and stressed by war to the point of them getting PTSD that they shouldn’t be exposed to this type of virtual reality as “therapy”?

Angela Davis’s “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism”

Angela Davis’s thesis “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism,” is basically that Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, among other flamboyant women blues singers of the 1920’s and 30’s, helped not only to articulate black working-class consciousness but also to shape it. ”Women’s blues,” Davis writes, ”provided a cultural space for community-building among working-class black women … in which the coercions of bourgeois notions of sexual purity and ‘true womanhood’ were absent.” The songs performed by Rainey and Smith, in particular, served as ”historical preparation” for a kind of social protest of which Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording of ”Strange Fruit,” a song that condemned lynching, is a prime example.

Davis informs us that the blues has always been implicitly ”gendered” as male, and that the songs performed by Ma Rainey refused to ”privilege” marriage over nonmarital or extramarital relationships and that most accounts of how Billie Holiday came to perform ”Strange Fruit” have tended to ”foreground” the contributions of white males. Davis however does not give much of any background on the women singers and her failure to say much of anything about her subjects’ personal lives is especially telling in the case of Smith, whose exploitation by a philandering husband might undermine Davis’s image of her as a positive role model for black working-class women.

Davis also skips over another potential ambiguity by ignoring Smith’s and Rainey’s the rhinestone and feather that the performers’ (presumably) black working-class audiences identified with as much as with their songs. Davis chastises those black women’s clubs of the 1920’s whose efforts to uplift their race entailed virtually disowning free-spirited women like Rainey and Smith. But in attempting to recast these singers as working-class heroines Davis is practicing her own brand of social uplift and moral purification.