MANDEVILLE, Manchester:

From a very tender age, 32-year-old Devene Sutherland learnt the art of fortifying her mind with wholesome content, speaking life into her circumstances and putting in the work, so the successes she seeks can be manifested.

Her brain is wired to see no task as too great, but as elements that can be broken down and managed.

Not only is Sutherland a high school teacher and university lecturer, she is also a single mother of two boys, business owner, a dance instructor, a debate coach, drama coach, a motivational/public speaker and a recent graduate of the St Mary University, where she received her master of science degree.

“I manage my schedules daily by starting and ending the day with prayer, which has become a habit and a part of my lifestyle, exercising proper time management, discipline, and being consistent to the point that sleep has never been my best friend. I usually have a planner to track my day-to-day progress and see what I could accomplish and what I couldn’t get done, and push hard to get it done,” she noted.

Never off the Clock

Anyone who knows the work of a teacher understands that one is never truly off the clock, but Sutherland says her passion and her choice was influenced by a need to help students reach their full potential.

“Although my mother was not a teacher by profession, her calm demeanour and approach was one reason I wanted to go into the teaching profession. I remember I was sitting in a math class one day, and I didn’t understand the lesson. Given my history of being aggressive, many of my teachers were not fond of me. The teacher said I would never amount to anything, and that day I decided to become a teacher to have a positive impact on children’s lives.”

“My love for my students goes beyond the realms of the classroom. One can achieve the best results from students by being kind, caring, empathic, and passionate. These are the key ingredients that I believe every great teacher should possess.”

But how does she truly manage all she has on her plate?

“It can be a rather difficult task to juggle being a mother of two very active boys, being a teacher from 8 a.m. to 2:40 p.m., and being a lecturer from 4 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., and trying to complete my thesis and completing orders. My business House of Deva Bandeau that specialises in hair accessories is known both locally and globally for its product durability and impeccable customer service. I consider myself extra blessed to have a stable and united family unit that comprises my mother, father, and brother.”

This family support, Sutherland says, is the reason for her very existence, as without it, she would have crumbled under pressure.

“Some nights I would cry as I was not able to pray with my children, help them with assignments, and tuck them into bed. Both of my parents, along with my brother, would help me these nights. I would ensure that I would stay up that said night to go through my son’s assignments and classwork thoroughly and wake him early in the mornings to make any necessary corrections. I am so blessed to have my mother help me with completing the orders. We work as a mother-and-daughter team. Had it not been for my mom, I don’t know what I would have done.”

Pressing On

As a human being, Sutherland said there were many times that she felt like giving up when the pressure consumed her, but she pressed on.

“There was one particular day, I broke down. I got wet in the rain and the only pair of shoes I had wearing every occasion for more than a year was soaked. I couldn’t afford to miss my tuition or my son’s tuition payment, so I sacrificed. As I was using the blow dryer to dry the shoes that night I cried out,” he said.

“My son said to me, ‘You are doing so good, Mommy. You can’t give up now’, and it dawned on me that I was doing an excellent job despite all I was doing.”

With a dream to opening her own literacy centre that will help children in and around her community become efficient readers and writers, Sutherland is also looking forward to writing her book and sharing her story of how she overcame the odds to living a happy life.

“… During my experience, many have done me wrong and hurt me. But, I realised if you do not love, you cannot forgive, and when you forgive someone, you can compromise, and the cycle begins again with love.”

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The late Christopher Chitty started a dissertation titled “Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System” while he was a PhD candidate. Writer, editor and friend Max Fox took on Chitty’s work—and it was recently released as a book.
Chitty earned his bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago. In 2008, he went on to the history of consciousness doctoral program at the University of California ( UC ), Santa Cruz. It was at Santa Cruz during Fox’s undergrad junior year where the two met as they participated in the UC Student Occupation Movement.

“It really made me feel like it was a possibility to take part in something larger than myself that could actually have an impact on the world,” said Fox, describing Chitty as a close friend. “I met all these brilliant people, and learned about certain kinds of bravery and inventiveness.”

“Chris was really huge for me in that way and I met him at a very formative moment, but he made a big impact on everybody,” Fox said, adding Chitty had a charismatic ringleader type of personality. “He was this really brilliant, beautiful, generous, intense person who was a community fixture.”

Fox described Chitty’s dissertation as basically complete at the time of his death in April 2015 and as was something he had spoken with Fox about many times.

“He was generating this really powerful, exciting theory and I was very impatient for him to finish writing the PhD so I could have it to point to when I wanted to explain what something was that I thought was going on with these questions because I thought he was someone who was really influential on me and my thinking,” said Fox.

When Chitty died, Fox was devastated. Ultimately, taking on this book as the editor, Fox said, was more than a way to grieve.

Friends and teachers were able to gather materials to get the school to award Chitty a degree posthumously, but with Fox’s attachment he did not want it to end there. Using his experience as an editor and time as a freelancer he decided to take it a step further.

“I was like I need to do this, I have the capacity and I really need this book to exist and I don’t know for sure that if I don’t do it someone else will,” Fox said, explaining how he discussed it with Chitty’s family and friends.

“Why I took this on I think was because I had to find a way of working through my feelings of loss of this person who meant so much to me and preserving him at some level and sharing him with people at some other level,” Fox explained. “It’s his work and it’s the possibility of totally new inventive uses of what he was working on that I probably won’t be able to foresee.”

Sexual Hegemony is a narrative of the centuries of capitalism’s effects on sexual relations, specifically studying class dynamics of the bourgeoisie’s attempts to regulate homosexuality ( sodomy, in particular ). Fox detailed it also lays out “the intellectual foundations or blueprints for a new way of thinking about sexuality through a recognition that it’s intimately tied up with the social form of property, which is a hallmark of class society, which means that you have to take in account the entire history of what comes through the capitalist world that we live in.”

“It’s a reflection on why and how sexuality has to have a history in the first place,” Fox explained. “Why do we think that you need to kind of justify a certain way of living in the present by making the claim that is has a lineage or past.”

“Unavoidably, the following text is limited to a reconstruction of what this work could have been,” Fox wrote in the book’s forward. He details that this book was a long time in the making and took much effort to release what he thought Chitty would have submitted.

Christopher Nealon—professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall—wrote the book’s introduction. He also served on Chitty’s dissertation committee.

Fox explained Chitty was a close reader of French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault and was definitely trying to do something new when writing Sexual Hegemony. Fox added that he thought Chitty wanted to intervene and point out “there’s much more going on than what people take from Foucault.”

“I think he thought [The History of Sexuality] was a very important book, or attempt or preliminary version of a crucial history that he thought wasn’t told in the right way or wasn’t complete,” said Fox of Chitty’s writing. “So I think Chris was trying to fix what he saw as the omissions or errors.”

“He was trying to say there’s a lot that’s valuable that’s introduced in the past, in the decades since the queer liberation movement forced the academy to open itself up to taking sexuality and queer studies seriously. That’s very valuable. And there’s something very valuable still in the kind of Marxian understanding of history as a process without a subject that is driven by collective action taken by the global proletariat to liberate itself, but the two traditions certainly don’t talk to each other very much. They have been the last couple of years and I’ve been really grateful to see it.”

People should read the book, Fox said, “if they are interested in how capitalism produces and is produced by what we understand as sexuality.

“I hope people find a rich roadmap to thinking in a new way about capitalism and sexuality. I think that he did an astounding amount of historical research and reconstruction, but there’s so much more still to do that I think he was hoping to do later. So, what I really hope people get out of this is the inspiration to start thinking about their own relation to structures of class and property and how that informs their sexuality in new ways than they already do.”

To learn more about Sexual Hegemony, visit dukeupress.edu/sexual-hegemony .

… finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in Fiction.
Millet, … by the National Book Foundation, the National Book Award is the … most prestigious honor in American literature. Publishers … a finalist for a National Book Award. She first heard …

… has written more than 30 books, including poetry and children… her distinguished career. Her latest book of poems and prose, … this month’s Wisconsin Book Festival.
Q: What inspired … your favorite poem in the book and why?

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                    <p>Key Club, a high school volunteer organization, began its book drive just one day before the high school switched to distance learning. Without the convenience of donating books in the drop boxes located in the high school, it was difficult for students to contribute. For this reason, we reached out to our community and were overwhelmed by the donations.</p>                            <p>We recently delivered over 1,600 books, a bag of new notebooks, and 25 hand-sewn book bags to Harrison Elementary School in Brainerd.</p>                            <p>On behalf of the Brainerd Key Club, I would like to thank all of you who helped make this book drive a success. Our community’s generosity put gently used, age-appropriate books in our youngest readers’ hands. </p>                            <p>A special thank you goes out to Fancy Pants Chocolates and Live Well Chiropractic Center for providing drop box locations for us.</p>    
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