When Associate Professor of History Robert Self opened his mail earlier this month, he was "stunned" to learn he had received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, one of five Brown professors this year to do so. Self, who arrived at Brown in 2004, recently sat down with The Herald for a cup of coffee (cream, no sugar) and to talk about his upcoming book, "The Politics of Gender and Sexuality in America from Watts to Reagan," his upbringing and his inspirations.
Herald: With your fellowship, you'll be working on a project examining the politics of culture, sexuality, gender and race from the Watts riots to the Reagan presidency. What was your inspiration for choosing this topic?Self: The politics of gender and sexuality of this period are especially acute and influential. They shift dramatically the meaning of American liberalism, and I think they shift the meaning of American citizenship in some pretty important ways. I think there's just a general importance for them.
In terms of how I came to the topic - in all honesty, in my first book, "American Babylon," I dealt primarily with questions of civil rights, urban development, poverty, suburban politics. In presenting my work in various conferences and to various colleagues, a lot of people said, "Well, you've done a nice job with thinking about race and class here, but you haven't really thought very much about gender. Aren't a lot of processes you're talking about really gender?" You know, thinking about female poverty, for example, or the number of female-headed households in poverty or things like this. So I started saying, "Yeah, you're right." I haven't done nearly as good a job taking gender into account, so I started thinking about ways of doing that in my second book.
As you did in your first book, are you also going to delve into questions of race in this timeframe?Well, race is inseparable from these questions because all of the issues around how gender and sexuality are contested in American politics, all those processes are "raced" in some way. You think about the Moynihan report and the so-called crisis of the black family in the middle-1960s. You think about feminism, the sometimes cooperative, sometimes tension-filled relationship between white feminists, African-American feminists and Latina feminists. The ways that masculinity and femininity are defined are very raced and have a lot to do with how race is understood.
Is there anything in your personal life that inspired you to write these two books?Other than to say that I'm a child of the '70s, and that I think I was just shaped by the political culture that I'm now studying - it's not necessarily a good thing for all historians to study their own era.
And it may have had to do with the kind of family I was raised in. I remember my sister wanting to play Little League and to play baseball and not softball, and my parents fighting for her right to play baseball instead of softball. In my experience, it was a very personal, family issue, but then as I began to look at it I began to see, historically, that this was a very big issue around the country in the early 1970s - women's access to sports - so something like that which felt like an individual issue to me growing up turned out to be a much broader, historical question.
I think I was influenced by - and, of course, this is the romanticizing of it, thinking back on it - the relatively more opened gender systems of the 1970s, a little more accepting of gender-bending, for lack of a better word.
Looking at your work, one common theme is California. Your first book is about Oakland, Calif., and the title of your second book includes the Watts riots of Los Angeles and Ronald Reagan, two important parts of California history. Why is that?I think that one of the things historians are finding is that California is a central site in postwar America for many of the developments of the era - in particular, the rise of the kind of lifestyle and consumer culture focused around lifestyle, suburbanization, the military-industrial complex, the rise of the new right and new conservatism. These, of course, are national phenomena, but there is a particular way that California, as the major economic engine of the country in the postwar period, and its demographic explosion, its post-1965 immigration from Asia - all these things made it an archetypal place to study the major postwar national processes.
Let's shift this conversation to you. Who are some of your heroes? Who has inspired you?Muhammad Ali, L.L. Baker, Woody Guthrie, Kermit the Frog. Those will do.
Why them?Why Ali? (laughs) I think it goes back to the 70s, actually. If you can understand how Muhammad Ali and Kermit the Frog are so emblematically American and stand for a certain kind of American populism that I identify with and a certain of kind seriousness of purpose mixed with a kind of a self-deprecating humor, mixed with a total entrepreneurial spirit mixed with invention - all those things.
Last question: How much do you get for being a Guggenheim fellow?How much do I get? (laughs) I get a year of leave from Brown, is what I get.
