08 abril 2014

mary poppins's bag

Last night, my potential new boyfriend (to quote Dolly), came back from a week away at work with a large duffle bag. Placing it upon my couch, he unzipped it, and pulled out 12 cans of Coca-Cola. We put them in the fridge. Then came several packets of chocolate chip cookies and small drinkable yogurt containers. We settled down to watch a movie, but he decided he wanted to see if he could get the cable to work, so out came his pocketknife/ beer&wine-opener/utensils. Today, when fishing around for his glasses, he pulled out a protective painter’s suit. Later he handed me a copy of my questionnaire he offered to conduct with some co-workers. And then, when we needed to strain the water from rice he pulled out some mesh cloth to do the trick.

“You’re like Mary Poppins,” I said with a twinge of jealousy, remember that day in college when I just happened to have sunscreen, a bottle of water, granola bars, and toothpicks in my purse, all of which came in quite handy. There’s something so fulfilling about being prepared. 



In those days in college I was often the lone female in my band of merry men. And though mother was never high on my priority list, I took pride in being the caretaker somehow. I was the studious one. I was the prepared one. I was the one who tried to help a too-drunk-Peter write a paper for his music theory class the next day (and if you know me, you know that a too-drunk-Peter is probably better off writing a music theory paper on his own). I enjoyed a kind of care work. And I suppose in a way I knew this had something to do with gender. But at the time I didn’t quite understand how. 

I suppose I never considered my purse a particularly gendered aspect of my life, because I’ve never had a particularly girly purse. It is an unwritten rule of my life that any bag I carry, aside from an occasional backpack while traveling, must be cross-body (not over the shoulder). I am at times a person obsessed with aesthetics, but this is clearly a practical concern. I should be able to run with the thing on without having to worry about my arm movements affecting my stride. I should be able to reach in while holding things in my other hand. I should be able to win a game of pingpong with it still draped over my shoulder and under my other arm. 

But despite the unobtrusiveness of my plain black zippered purse (of which several versions have existed), the purse is still a gendered space. As Tristan Bridges explains in his Sociological Images blog, Doing Gender with Wallets and Purses, “certain objects are simply more likely to be carried in purses… Indeed, many of us are able to travel without these objects because we can ‘count on’ purse-carriers as having them.”  That water bottle and granola bar were not necessarily a burden (emotionally or on my shoulder), but do represent a form of care work by which I cared for the male friends that accompanied me. I remember Verde thanking me profusely for the water, and I wonder if her assertion that this caring goes virtually unacknowledged is true. 

But more importantly, I want to return to my potential new boyfriend and his big work bag. From it he pulled food and beverage (not unlike water and granola bars), protective covering (a bit like sunscreen), and tools (maybe toothpicks are almost tools for tooth picking?). Ok, the toothpick/tool thing might be a bit of a stretch, but my point is, what he pulled out of his bag was not so different than what I had provided to my friends several years ago. Yet my items, at least in Bridges’s assessment are involved in care-work, while a common immediate reaction to my potential new boyfriend might be that they are items of “providing.” It is masculine to “provide” food for the “family” (not that I am in any way considering us a family at this point) or fix things. To protect male friends from the sun, to feed them, to sate their thirst, however, gets categorized as “motherly” care-work. 

I do not think that Bridges is wrong. Women do end up performing an inordinate amount of carework for their families, work colleagues, friends, and strangers, as Robin James alleges in Femininity as a Technology. But my point is, we still categorize it differently: Mary Poppins pulls bedtime medicine and mirror out of her bag and it is carework. Burt the chimneysweep provides magic brooms and a few tuppence. The process is more complex because not only are women expected to carry certain things for others’ use, but we then categorize the manner in which they do so as particularly feminine. When men do the same thing, we categorize their behavior not as carework, but as providing. In essence we expect similar things of both, and the consequences of not doing them are similar—failed notions of femininity or masculinity—but we use these different valuations to further instantiate our reified notions of gender difference. 

In sum, I still have fantasies about being Mary Poppins (even though being a nanny is about the worst job I could imagine). I still like pulling the perfect thing out of my bag to please a thirsty, bored, injured, or otherwise lacking friend. Whether this is a feeling I have been socialized into because I have a vagina I am unsure. I think we all like the pleasant surprise that lights up the face of someone we care about when we unexpectedly have what they need. 

But it is precisely the acknowledgement of this carework that makes it enjoyable. Perhaps as a friend, and not a mother, I have been lucky in this respect. I will continue to carry a bag that always has water, granola bars, Kleenex, pencils, and paper. But on the nights when I don’t feel like hauling my bag, I’ll ask my potential new boyfriend to carry my wallet and phone in his “banano” (known stateside as a fanny pack).