{"id":60608,"date":"2013-02-05T12:00:16","date_gmt":"2013-02-05T17:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=60608"},"modified":"2023-11-21T11:02:36","modified_gmt":"2023-11-21T16:02:36","slug":"figuring-out-erica-rand-the-scholar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2013\/02\/05\/figuring-out-erica-rand-the-scholar\/","title":{"rendered":"Figuring out Erica Rand, the scholar"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I set out to talk to Erica Rand about her new book, Red Nails, Black Skates<\/em>, I knew that other interviews and reviews focused on the book\u2019s thematic contents \u2014 figure skating and Rand\u2019s own experiences as an adult skater immersed in the sport she\u2019d tried out as a child.<\/p>\n

But I was more interested in the scholar than the skates.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A participant as well as scholar of culture, Rand often injects personal experiences into her work. Here, skating in Falmouth, she bends back her leg for a catch-foot spiral, a move she describes in Red Nails, Black Skates. Photograph by Mike Bradley\/Bates College.<\/p><\/div>\n

Red Nails, Black Skates <\/em>(Duke University Press, 2012) is something of a crash course in Rand\u2019s area of cultural criticism, specifically the overt and insidious ways that gender and sexuality, as well as race and class, shape all of our identities and experiences.<\/p>\n

That begs the question \u2014 in my case a series of questions \u2014 about the intertwined personal, scholarly and pedagogical commitments that influence cultural critics like Rand, the college\u2019s Whitehouse Professor of Art and Visual Culture and of Women and Gender Studies.<\/p>\n

In other words, how does she approach writing and teaching about something as both amorphous and intimate as culture?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe participate in culture,\u201d says Rand. \u201cI want to show how we are participating in culture by modeling a critic who also looks critically at her own investments and the things she studies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked about her intended audience, Rand replies, \u201cI envisioned the book being for a wide range of people. First of all, I have to admit I really wanted skaters to read it. I\u2019m always interested in having my writing be accessible within and outside academics.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlthough I wanted to say hard and complicated things, I wanted to say it in an accessible way,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

One such strategy was to divide the book into a series of short essays, allowing readers to encounter the ideas at their own pace.<\/p>\n

Whether writing about a cultural phenomenon or teaching one of her courses here at Bates, Rand encourages her audience to recognize how they, too, perform and respond to gender.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Nothing about figure skates is more obvious than their “gender coding” by color, Rand writes, which was popularized by Sonja Henie, seen here in Boston in the 1930s. Photo courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.<\/p><\/div>\n

In her course Women, Gender, Visual Culture, which she is teaching this semester, Rand asks her students to \u201cunderstand that it is not as if some people over there have a gender story. Everyone has a gender story.\u201d<\/p>\n

That said, she\u2019s not interested in \u201cbusting open all kinds of gender notions and throwing them all out.\u201d<\/p>\n

She explains that some people find pleasure in traditional expressions of femininity, herself included, and masculinity. What\u2019s important, however, is that those expressions not be the result of restrictive stereotypes.<\/p>\n

That self-awareness permeates Rand\u2019s writing. For her, it says something about what she calls \u201cthe politics of academic work and the politics of criticism.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a scholar, Rand recognizes that she participates in the cultural phenomena she studies and is not shy about putting her personal perspectives front and center.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople all have a personal stake in what they are studying and working on. They may tell you about it or they may not tell you about it. But I don\u2019t believe, not only with popular culture but in any critical or academic endeavor, that there is a critic at some elevated level looking down.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Red Nails, Black Skates is a crash course in Erica Rand’s areas of cultural criticism, through the lens of figure skating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":61436,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,11010,133,224],"tags":[2885,242],"class_list":["post-60608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","category-arts","category-creativity","category-society-culture","tag-art-and-visual-culture","tag-women-and-gender-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60608"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95610,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60608\/revisions\/95610"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}