Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez
Gloria González-López is a Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin, where she has worked since 2002. Her sociological research focuses on the areas of sexuality, gender, Mexican American and Mexican studies, and social inequality.
Q: I want to ask you about your workshops this summer. This past summer you gave some sessions for working professionals on radical self-care. What inspired the project?
Gloria: Around 2000, I established a relationship with professionals who had been working with women who were exposed to sexual violence in Ciudad Juárez. Now, I identify myself as a public sociologist; it is important for me to work in conversation with the communities that I care about. I became some sort of long-distance volunteer. I would go back and forth giving workshops in Juárez. For example, when I gave my job talk here at UT in December 2001, the next day I flew to El Paso and crossed to Juárez to give a workshop. I have a close relationship with people who have been working on these issues.
When COVID hit all of us, Ciudad Juárez was hit in a really bad way. Casa Amiga and I were touching base, and they said it would be great to have a workshop on self-care. I have been exploring ways to have a radical approach to self-care.
Q: What makes radical self-care radical?
Gloria: Self-care has become mainstream in a way. Radical self-care requires a deeper understanding of what this implies, especially the collective dimension. When I am there for others, that in itself takes care of myself, and based on my professional and personal experience, I think that could be one of the dimensions of radical self-care.
For me, here’s how it happened. I have conducted research on sexual violence, and I have worked in a lot of these communities that do a lot of care work. For example, I conducted a lot of field work on incest in Mexican families and wrote a book (Family Secrets) on it. This all happened because the community said if you want to help us, if you want to work on what is urgent, then come and conduct research on sexual violence in Mexican families. It was this idea of conducting work that has nothing to do with my own academic agenda, but instead it’s truly coming from the communities that I care about. Just from that very fact, people took care of me.
People will say “we will help you. We will take care of you. What do you need?” There is some sort of reciprocity. I always tell my students that in the U.S., in the English-speaking world, the “I” is always capitalized, in Spanish it is yo and it is not. It is fascinating. I think in Southern Africa, they use this concept of ubuntu. “I am because we are.”
When we explore the possibility of moving beyond the self, beyond the I and the ego, that’s where the term radical might have its special meaning.
Q: To push back against that a little: if my passions are small children and UT undergrads, sometimes there is a feeling that you give and you give and the reciprocity never comes. How can a person successfully choose their work knowing this risk?
Gloria: You take a risk, that is true. You are trusting that when you take care of the collective, it’s going to come back to you at some point.
It happened to me on Election Day in November 2020. I teach a class on sexual violence; I’m not going to cancel that class. This is exactly the time to talk! I do the check in and the check out. Some students are talking about how late they went to sleep that night. I say, would it be okay to share what time we went to sleep last night? I kept a record, 4 AM, 5 AM, and so on. We were all sleep deprived! We then worked on a free writing exercise on uncertainty: what does that feel like? The students produced some really beautiful pieces on uncertainty.
This also took care of me! I got to talk about my own uncertainty. I include myself. As a feminist scholar, I do my best to keep horizontal relationships. I do not teach down to the students, I try to remain teachable.
The other thing that I learned is that the idea of radical self-care is in thinking about what doesn’t help you to take care of yourself. What’s getting in your way? For example, even though you know you should get to sleep early, you should get three meals, etc., you still don’t do it!
Q: So instead of adding good behaviors, you are eliminating bad behaviors or barriers, cutting things out?
Gloria: Like I know I do not need new shoes, why bring in new shoes when there are shoes in the closet?
Also important is being open to what people actually need. When I was facilitating those workshops this summer 2020 in Juárez, I learned: these people are afraid of dying. These are hard-core care workers, truly caring people, they take care of the hardest-hit communities, they have been witness to disappearance of women and disappearance of male relatives. This meant absolutely we needed to have a conversation about death and dying.
Pulling an approach from Buddhist philosophy, one exercise we did that people really liked was to answer: what do you want your best friend to read at your funeral? It really touches something really deep in you. The workshop participants did the exercise and then read their writings. It was really moving, and I participated myself. We were moved to tears. It helped to put life --as well as death-- in perspective, it is incredibly powerful.
Q: it seems like you are talking about revisiting your purpose or your mission, and reaffirming those things so that you don’t feel lost.
Gloria: You really get to the core of what it means to be human and your purpose in that particular moment and place on Earth as well. I don’t know if you are familiar with the book Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. The book taught me a special lesion: life is about giving up this obsession with that conventional approach to happiness and exploring the possibility of profound meaning instead.
Q: What is your most recent act of radical self-care?
I think it has been this idea of rebelliousness against mainstream constructions of time, the concept of time under capitalism, the concept of being efficient, being on time, feeling so bad if you are late. I re-thought my schedule, my habits, everything. I gave myself the space to develop a new framework for how I handle my time.
Q: Are you talking about rebelling against productivity pressure?
Gloria: Yes. We need to make sure our professional habits do not kill the spirit. The spirit is precious; I do my best to defend and protect it. Interestingly, I am noticing, that is helping me be more productive, but in creative ways, and in ways that also help me take care of myself.
Yes. What doesn’t serve you, is gone.