When I was going through grad school. I remember a particular class where one of my professors suggested that the process of writing sometimes feels like that of birthing a child. Of course she had never had a child of her own, so I was skeptical of the analogy, but as I fought my way through every gruelling word of my own doctoral thesis, I was often reminded of the comparison. It hurt a lot, at least psychologically, and it went on for four long years (six if you count my course work). I definitely called it "my baby" a few times, though by the end it was the obnoxious teenager I wanted to boot out the door. I wonder, Is there any validity to this analogy?
There's an interesting, and decidedly sexist history of thinking of intellectual discovery as a kind of giving birth. For hundreds of years, old, dead, mostly white guys argued that while women sustained the species in the form of children, great men gave birth to the idea-children that sustained civilization. In a sense, the notion of passing ideas through the generations like so many children was a way of attempting to cut women out of the humanity equation altogether. Even the idea of the patronymic, taking the name of the father, suggests that while the body of the baby may come from the mother, the idea of it comes from the father.
While I'm still skeptical whether the comparison between physical and intellectual pain is valid, it's nice to see that this gendering of the intellect and the body has loosened up in recent years. Ideas are up for grabs now, and while it's still women who give birth to children, families can have any number of parental configurations. While some boring people lament this blurring of traditional roles, I see it as a huge and awesome multiplication of possibilities for our species. Rock that. Sexism obviously still exists, but there have been positive shifts that should be acknowledged as the victories they are.
The reason I also bring all this up was that I was reminded of this birth analogy again this week when the Higgs Boson discovery was announced. One of my favorite images was that of Peter Higgs, the one who first postulated the particle, weeping with joy over the fruition of his intellectual labour. He looked like someone who had just given birth. He may be an old white guy, but his discovery suggests we live in a world where the fundamentals underpinning reality are not as highly differentiated as we have historically made them out to be. Rock that times two.
Deep much? Let me leave it at that, and say happy Friday all! Hope you have a profound, reality-bending, brilliant (or, barring that, relaxing) weekend!
There's an interesting, and decidedly sexist history of thinking of intellectual discovery as a kind of giving birth. For hundreds of years, old, dead, mostly white guys argued that while women sustained the species in the form of children, great men gave birth to the idea-children that sustained civilization. In a sense, the notion of passing ideas through the generations like so many children was a way of attempting to cut women out of the humanity equation altogether. Even the idea of the patronymic, taking the name of the father, suggests that while the body of the baby may come from the mother, the idea of it comes from the father.
While I'm still skeptical whether the comparison between physical and intellectual pain is valid, it's nice to see that this gendering of the intellect and the body has loosened up in recent years. Ideas are up for grabs now, and while it's still women who give birth to children, families can have any number of parental configurations. While some boring people lament this blurring of traditional roles, I see it as a huge and awesome multiplication of possibilities for our species. Rock that. Sexism obviously still exists, but there have been positive shifts that should be acknowledged as the victories they are.
The reason I also bring all this up was that I was reminded of this birth analogy again this week when the Higgs Boson discovery was announced. One of my favorite images was that of Peter Higgs, the one who first postulated the particle, weeping with joy over the fruition of his intellectual labour. He looked like someone who had just given birth. He may be an old white guy, but his discovery suggests we live in a world where the fundamentals underpinning reality are not as highly differentiated as we have historically made them out to be. Rock that times two.
Deep much? Let me leave it at that, and say happy Friday all! Hope you have a profound, reality-bending, brilliant (or, barring that, relaxing) weekend!
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