By Aphrodite Kocięda and Kyle Romano

Tales from the Kraka Tower is a grassroots web-series that satirizes “diversity” in academia. What makes our series different from others is that we are all actually graduate students, not professional actors. The series was born out of our complete frustration with the academy, and the ways in which it refuses to accommodate certain bodies in spaces that claim to be progressive and diverse. With no budget at all, we sat together and formed small scripts out of narratives and experiences from our lives.

In this series, we aim to capture the many microaggressions we continuously experience in a space that is ostensibly designed to foster critical thinking. We want to expose the ways in which ‘diversity’ becomes appropriated as a tool not to actually promote change, but to perpetuate white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, and other discriminatory systems of domination.

All too often, media culture frames the college experience as only an undergraduate space where wild parties occur all night. Graduate school is largely invisible in these narratives. Through our show, we attempt to highlight the awkward, mundane moments that can occur in the academy, moments that are usually not reflected in the white-frat-boy-fantasy entertainment culture. Mainstream entertainment rarely centers on the stories of those who are marginalized. In particular, disabled characters are either completely invisible, played by able-bodied actors, or are used as inspirational props for able-bodied people.

As a person with a disability, Kyle has noticed that representations of disabled people in popular media function to construct the disabled person as a silent sufferer, whose existence creates a false narrative that we are martyrs “struggling to live with our disabilities,” and that we require the aid of able-bodied people to deliver us from the suffering caused by our impairments. Tales from the Kraka Tower seeks to disrupt this normalizing trend.

Aphrodite plays Lakisha Wisniewski, a biracial graduate student who is new to the Diversity Department at Kraka University, and Kyle plays Sam, another master’s student in the department who absolutely hates the program because of his overt marginalization and exclusion. For example, because the department doesn’t know which office to give him because the department is not accessible, they put him in an elevator with a desk.

Because Tales from the Kraka Tower is a satire many of the scenes are exaggerated, yet most of the narratives are sadly inspired by real life scenarios and people. Oftentimes bodies marked as “different” are hyper-visible in academic settings to give the illusion that the school is diverse, even though these same bodies are rarely accommodated. We merely become props for academic marketing.

While the conversation about minority exclusion on college campuses is not new, we aim to contribute to the conversation by sharing our stories. We do not claim in our series to speak for all minoritized people; we only aim to share what we have been through. Tales from the Kraka Tower has already been featured in Ebony, Slate, and Clutch, and we hope to slowly gain more visibility as students and minoritized people search for a political, critical media product they can relate to.

Those who are minoritized often feel isolated in the academy, and many of us do not share our experiences publicly out of fear of being disciplined. This is true for most spaces, not only academic ones. The academy operates through a kind of ‘rape culture’ logic, wherein victims are punished for speaking out about their victimization, so instances of violence are regularly silenced. Silence has understandably always been a tactic of survival for minoritized people; however, we aim to disrupt this trend by speaking out.

We currently live in a media culture where racism and sexism are framed as phenomena of the past. In most popular media, disability often lacks any representation or hyper-visibilizes ‘supercrips’ such as Oscar Pistorius before his trial. News outlets framed him as transcending his disability in the Olympics. Mainstream entertainment culture is rarely critical of contemporary spaces that perpetuate horrible discriminatory practices, and this is why we think Tales from the Kraka Tower is so important. We expose the ways in which “isms” are reproduced today.

Within the series, we strategically employ satire to complement the ways that the academy operates on conspicuous, self-congratulatory efforts to achieve diversity. For example, the hyperbolic characters of Dr. Kimball and Dr. Akintola serve as metaphors for the failed diversity efforts of the academy.

Please view and share our videos (linked below) to help build solidarity with others. Isolation is violence, and we aim to create community and camaraderie through our activist project.

Episode 1, “Conditionally Accepted“

Episode 2, “Dr. Kimball’s Diversity Class”

Episode 3, “Graduate Teaching Associate”

Tales from the Kraka Tower is a grassroots, activist project. We want to demonstrate that you don’t need giant connections or Hollywood blood in your body to create a critical, political media product. We will be releasing a Kickstarter for our project very soon so that we can continue to create more episodes. Look for it on our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/talesfromthekrakatower.

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Aphrodite Kocięda has a B.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies and an M.A. in Communication/Critical Cultural Studies. She is currently the website director for Natural Hair Mag, a site centering on intersections of race, gender, class, health, and natural hair.

Kyle Romano is currently a Master’s Student in Communication specializing in disability. In his research, he explores the ways in which communication about disability impacts the way that people come to “know” it. He approaches disability from a critical, cultural vantage; he looks at disabled people as belonging to a culture. Additionally, he looks at the ways in which able-bodiedness comes to define disability, and thus strips it of any power to create a definition all its own.

The post Tales from the Kraka Tower appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Cynthia Estremera

In college I was surrounded by white feminists and white feminism. I was co-President of our feminist group “The Third Wave” and made waves as a Latina who embraced the principles of feminism bravely. Yet every day I was “segregated” from the Latino Student Organization, and at every event I fought to unite these groups as I aimed to unite these facets of myself. It hurt to look for myself in the margins of research papers and textbooks, if I existed there. It was difficult to see the few women of color in my Women’s Studies class pour out their hearts about their differences and have theory and history laugh in their face. The Latina feminist remains illegible because of narratives and ideologies that are continuously marginalized by the dominant narrative, the mainstream form of feminism for white middle class women.

So when I found Black feminism in African American literature, I felt I belonged there more than I ever did in the Eve Ensler-esque world of women’s equality. I could not understand why my Latina hermanas, hijas, y madres were not as visible and important as the Lilly Ledbetters, the Jane Roes, and the Susan B. Anthonys. Black feminism taught me why women of color were invisible and ignored, “[it] emerged at the juncture between antiracist and antisexist struggles” (White 1). I was closest to Black girls growing up and while in school, yet when my language fluency was “discovered” our friendship waned; a fluency that seemed broken to me. In academia, I face the issue of wanting to study African American women’s literature, but when I express a desire to intersect Afro-with-Latina my research becomes “sub-genre’d” and there is no one who can help me. This is a critique of the dominant structures of my graduate programs, determining that my English degree is better suited with literature that doesn’t exhibit an alternate language or code switching, despite having to fulfill a language requirement for research purposes. My language exam that I chose to complete was, of course, in Spanish. Yet still Latinas occupy a unique space where we are more different than alike, therefore no carved out space exists for us instead we are forced to identify with what can represent us the most instead of what can represent all that we identify with.

So how can this representation of Latina feminists be accomplished? How can we exist in a space specifically designed to nurture us and ensure our survival? How can we become visible, how can our voices be heard? The most appropriate answer seems to be that we need to write ourselves and our feminism into existence.

I seek a space where I can exist in solidarity and in sisterhood. I seek a space where talking turns into doing, and theorizing turns into a movement; where they both create opportunity. I yearn for the chance to hear our mothers and aunts and grandmothers proclaim “yo soy una femenista” and have these words be significant to them. I want to take feminist activism out of the academic and privileged spaces and translate it for the world to see it, living, breathing and existing. I want it to be accessible. I want this for women, I want this for Latinas; we need it for us. This is not to say that this space does not exist yet; I see blogs, conferences, and advocacy groups that promote feminist values. I hear the stories written by women and written for them, documenting struggles and survivals.

Is this not feminism? It is safe to say that the “face of feminism” remains the same as it did decades ago.  So-called “traditional” feminism is still primarily geared towards white middle class women, isolating itself and ignoring the very groups of women who most remained marginalized and invisible to the American mainstream. There are a few white feminists I know who continually aim to build and recreate feminist action that encompasses women of difference.[1]  I appreciate these efforts.

Yet, Latina feminism remains on the outside looking in.  It is so often imagined as foreign and “exotic,” one that defies the particularities of mainstream feminism because of all that us Latinas entail, historically, physically, dimensionally. It is a subgenre, a perspective, or branch of feminism like Black feminism, radical, environmental, cultural, separatist, post-modern, and liberal—need I say more. As activists seek a way to unite, feminism becomes divided by people into these veins and tenets that insulate and protect “mainstream,” thus discouraging Latinas from identifying with a group that could be perceived to be a passing fad or reflective of a small special interest. Both the terms “fad” and “small” are extremely problematic given that Latinos are the fastest growing population in the U.S.[2] Where are the voices for the women who are birthing Latinos into the majority?

As I researched “Latina feminists,” I found numerous articles, blogs, and a single book encompassing this exact title.  I’ve discovered that there is a connection missing between the academic resources and writings available and the Latinas who could benefit from reading and experiencing them. The irony is that all Latina feminists that spoke on behalf of this perspective acquiesce in my sentiments of there not being enough active voices to represent us. There is a presence, but it’s not as powerful as it could be, as I envision it to be. One day on the featured page of The Feminist Wire, Juliana Britto Schwartz addressed this very issue in “Confessions of a Complicated Latina Feminist:”

Today I’m a Latina feminist, a feminist who concerns herself with and involves herself in struggles that are relevant to all women, particularly women of color. Particularly Latinas. Part of me hates that I have to modify my feminism to make it clear just what I stand for.  Why qualify something that already acknowledges the principles of intersectionality and transnationalism? But unfortunately, today’s modern, “mainstream” feminism has yet to prove its commitment to anti-racist projects and transnational movements. I’ve had too many conversations with Latinas who I would consider to be incredible feminists, and had them tell me that they feel excluded and out of place in the feminist movement. (Britto Schwartz)

Given my desires to articulate a version of feminism for Latinas, I see Britto Schwartz’s question as quintessential to understanding the lack of prominent Latina feminist voices as a lack of representation in the movement. To put plainly, the movement says it does these wonderful things that works for everyone, but it doesn’t and Latinas just aren’t visible in “that” feminism.

Published in 2001 (Duke University Press) Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios brings to life the life stories—or testimonios—of 18 academic Latinas from varied class, religious, ethnic, racial, linguistic, sexual, and national backgrounds. In producing Latina feminist narratives, they are writing us into existence, crossing borderlands and disciplines to pave a path for Latina solidarity and sisterhood. This mirrors my desire to build a writing collective for women across differences in pursuit of feminist initiatives. The difference was they had done it already. Yet, the problem they confronted remains a reality as I had to look hard in order to find these connections and writings that are making these voices and histories visible.

The feminist Latina presence is encumbered by a complicated history and false ideologies of patriarchal institutions controlling the Hispanic/Latina woman into submission. Roman Catholicism is thought to be the normative religion conservatizing Latinas in the U.S. into the realm of the right wing; however this is not true for every Latina. Similarly, the presence of a machismo male as an oppressive force of Latina women is not necessarily the norm for every family. Even then, the strength of our madres displaying feminism in the face of oppressive masculine forces is overlooked and disregarded. The U.S. immigration system is a reality for many Latinas, however, given the population changes, many Latinos are second or even third generation born Americans; some have never even been back to their “homeland.” We have also been restricted to the realm of stereotypes, reduced to mainstream media generalizations. Even our skin colors have been hyper-sexualized and over-represented as olive and exotic, even though we embrace a far more advanced color spectrum than many can fathom. Latinas range from the whitest skin and eye color to the blackest black, due to varying histories and colonialism. These histories are interwoven with an African diasporic identity for many Caribbean South American coastal nations. This is relative to the issues of racism experienced in Black feminism, but we still tend to be isolated because of our linguistic abilities.

In these moments, I revert back to Jewelle Gomez’s article “But Some of Us Are Brave Lesbians: The Absence of Black Lesbian Fiction” and I see the same questions regarding a feminista presence in literature and writings. Who is reading us and how can they find our writings? Though we face a reverse reality, that there is an ever-growing population of feminist Latina writers and poets, our literature is still in the corners of book shelves and hidden away. Why are we not reading us more? Why are we not writing about us more? And why are we not doing this more together?

I have tried to write down my theoretical analysis or poetic iteration of Latina identity; sometimes I find it too complex because of my personal investment and then I waver between that and feeling compelled to fulfill this feat. Sometimes I get too overwhelmed with the multiplicity of my identity, and then I think I should overwhelm society with my complexities instead of suffering in silence. “[T]he transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger” (Lorde, 42). By revealing the self we are creating a presence, providing visibility that transcends complexities and embraces the selves we consistently deny. Rejection and misunderstanding are the perils I face during self-revelation of my Latina presence, as an academic critical distance keeps us safe from falling too deeply into the subjective. But as Audre Lorde claims fiercely “[m]y silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you…. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language” (Lorde 41).

My goal in bringing together a coalition of Latina femenistas is not simply writing only our narrative into existence, but to begin a dialogic relationship between writings of different feminists and connect the women who claim the term femenista and the women who want to know why. Moreover, it will aid in encouraging women to articulate feminism without the language of an academic because you do not need to be an academic to theorize feminism. The voices of this potential collective are stronger than the isolated voice of one, and there is no place for silence anymore because future mothers, daughters and systers are waiting for the courage to tell their truths and their testimonios which will provide a narrative for our humanity, our rights, and our political capacity. This time we shouldn’t be worried about how loud we are.

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Cynthia Estremera is pursuing a PhD in English at Lehigh University and is a teaching fellow in the first-year English writing program. She specializes in African American literature, but also focuses on Hip Hop studies and the intersectionality of identities through race, gender, and feminism. Cynthia is a single mother to a boy of color, a Domini-Rican Latina, femenista, poet, activist, and dog lover. Her goals have remained steadfast about creating a systerhood for women of difference.

Works Consulted

Britto Schwartz, Juliana. “Confessions of a Complicated Latina Feminist – The Feminist Wire.” The Feminist Wire. The Feminist Wire, 30 Apr. 2014. Web. 30 Apr. 2014. <http://thefeministwire.com/2013/04/confessions-of-a-complicated-latina-feminist/>.

Fry, Richard, and Jeffrey S. Passel. “Latino Children: A Majority Are U.S.-Born Offspring of Immigrants.” Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project RSS. Pew Research Center, 28 May 2009. Web. 01 May 2014. <http://www.pewhispanic.org/2009/05/28/latino-children-a-majority-are-us-born-offspring-of-immigrants/>.

Gomez, Jewelle. “But Some of Us Are Brave Lesbians: The Absence of Black Lesbian Fiction.” Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. By E. Patrick Johnson and Mae Henderson. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005. 289. Print.

Latina Feminist Group. Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. Print.

Lorde, Audre. “The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing, 1984. N. pag. Print.

White, E. Frances. Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2001. Print.

The post La Femenista Presence appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Kaila Philo

At least, this is what I’ve taken from you all these years.

Black women aren’t meant to be love interests or high school crushes, dynamic leaders or multi-dimensional heroes; but rather, they are seen as wise God-fearing grammies and sassy big-boned caricatures. I’m a strong black woman who don’t need no man, right?

I mean, as evident in the media, it’s not as though I could get a man regardless. Black women are impervious to healthy relationships, and must forever fear being left for white girls, because eventually our men will yearn for something greater than brown lips and big hips. And it’s alright; it’s alright because then we grow into the sassy big-boneds who don’t need no men anyway.

Don’t get me wrong: sometimes we’re allowed to keep our men! Sometimes. How else will we grow into wise old grammies?

What kind of black woman am I right now, you ask? I’m not sure. There hasn’t been a manual on how to be a Black Girl yet, so I’m still sitting idly by for my inevitable chocolate husband to either plant his seed in me or sow his oats somewhere else.

No, at the moment, nobody yearns for me, dreams of me, writes for me, or sings to me. I may consider myself pretty—pretty decent, that is—but white people are immune to finding the coloreds attractive, and apparently I just don’t have It for black people. My hair is much too nappy, my nipples are much too dark. As a black girl, I resemble a monkey too closely. It’s not a racist claim to call black women monkeys—it’s allowed in high schools across the country. If black children call other black children “monkeys,” “niggers,” or “African booty-scratchers” it’s neither racist nor offensive, like apples calling apples red.

Oh, perhaps I can infect a white person with Jungle Fever. I’ve heard some of the crazier ones have weaker immune systems. Maybe he’ll call me exotic, the highest honor for colored girls in today’s post-racial society.

I can be exotic, but don’t dare be slutty or “fast-tailed.” Sexual independence is a White Right, but us black women should have more respect for ourselves considering men are ready to leave us at the drop of a hat. We can’t afford for our vaginas to be brown and dirty.

Pretty black girls just don’t exist, you see. Before we’re taken by men, we’re just amorphous molds devoid of vigor and beauty, tenderness, and strength. We have two aforementioned final forms, and at least it’s something for us to look forward to.  I can choose to be sassy, spunky Shaniqua or sweet, sagacious Sojourner in the end.

A couple of us have broken from the mold—you know, Kerry Washington, Toni Morrison—but a few rags-to-riches stories don’t write the whole book.

You, deeming “politically correct” a bad word.

You, calling Africa a country.

Or you, avoiding the sun in fears of a tan.

You, denouncing the color in your history.

Or you, fingering my coils and claiming you wish were black.

You, asking if my hair is real, asking if I can twerk, asking why I “sound so white.”

You, trying to dip me in white because the brown is too strong for you to handle.

What I’ve taken from you, dear reader, is the modus operandi, the way of being for myself and those alike. I’m thankful for such enlightenment; I was almost foolish enough to skip marriage altogether and pursue writing. Silly me.

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Kaila Philo is a student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County studying Philosophy and English with concentrations in ethics and creative writing, and learning languages on the side. She’s working toward a Bachelor’s in Philosophy/English, a Master’s each in both Applied Ethics and Creative Writing, and an eventual PhD in Applied Ethics. She hopes to become a novelist, poet, political writer, and literary critic. Kaila lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she spends her days planting flowers in art museums and wants nothing more in life than to leave a lasting positive impact on whatever she touches, and maybe become mildly photogenic along the way.

The post Pretty Black Girls Just Don’t Exist appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Christina Peterson

As a student, I never thought I would be stuck in a place where I face the possibility of failing a class because I refuse to conform to another person’s beliefs. During my junior year of college, I took a course that required me to make a survey, send it out to students, and analyze the information gathered. We could choose our own area of study based on the topics presented in class. I chose to focus on family structures and their role in juvenile behaviors. One important requirement was that our survey had to be approved by the professor before it was sent out to students.

When I received my rough draft back, I was stunned at the bold red mark across the second question of my survey. The question simply asked for the gender of the student. I had listed three options: male, female, or other, which gave people the option to self-identify. I sat in disbelief for a while because I didn’t understand what the issue was.

After class, I approached my professor to figure out the dilemma with my question. Sitting at her desk, she looked at me and said that she thought it was a mistake because I should know there are only two genders that I could use for my survey. She further stated “if you include anything else, it will result in a failing grade.” I was shocked because I couldn’t believe what she said and she was serious!

I looked at my survey from time to time, deleting the option and placing it back. I had a mental battle with myself. On one hand, I had no problem with rebelling against her request because I embrace all the ways people chose to identify themselves. On the other hand, I was risking a major portion of my grade that determined whether or not I pass the class. The next day I sent my survey out to students in my other classes requesting that they write down how they identify their gender if it was different from the categories of “male” and “female.” I wanted to prove to my professor the importance of including a variety of gender categories in survey research.

I received 53 respondents in total: 18 who identified as male, 31 who identified as female, and 4 that identified as transgendered. I was excited to see that my survey generated responses that did not fit into the traditional “male” or “female” categories. After handing in my survey results, my professor scheduled a meeting with the head of the department because I disobeyed her request. At this meeting, I felt ambushed because I was given the option of either abiding by “the rules” or accept whatever grade from my professor.

I couldn’t understand why my professor was so closed-minded to the reality of how gender is more varied and complex. Even though I understood she also worked as a youth pastor and often expressed her conservative views about society and traditional gender roles, I never expected her to force her personal beliefs onto me. She was asking me to exclude people who didn’t identify as male or female. However, I could not eliminate, ignore, or silence people’s identity. I spoke with a few people to figure out what I should do. Some people suggested to let it go and listen to my professor, while others said I should continue my assignment in the way that I wanted. I realized that I had to maintain my political beliefs.

When I handed in my final at the end of the semester, I dreaded the results. I couldn’t make myself submit to what she wanted me to do and write in my paper. The only way for me to complete the assignment was to refuse the exclusion of anyone and the ways in which they may identify their gender(s). I refused to back down because I am a lesbian who doesn’t conform completely to the gender role I have been assigned by society. I refuse to remove anyone who, like me, doesn’t conform. I cannot imagine sitting down in front of my survey and removing identities and people who defy the socially acceptable categories. This academic experience made me reflect on the times I struggled with being separated from different groups of people because I didn’t fit in. I felt if I maintained only two gender categories, I immediately silenced transgender and gender non-conforming people in my survey. In doing so, I would be an accomplice to oppression.

I was prepared to take the class over again the next semester, but to my surprise I received an A on the final paper. I didn’t expect the grade I received, but, I was more proud that I didn’t give in to the demand of removing the option of accepting all gender identities from my survey. By receiving the unexpected A, I realized that I could have changed my professor’s beliefs about gender identities. Being persistent in refusing to conform in this experience also strengthened my political stance for future encounters that may have larger stakes than a paper grade. Accepting the responsibility of not backing down from your belief’s enables you to embody power and create opportunities to make a purposeful change. After I had a chance to sit back and comprehend everything that took place over the semester, I realized this importance in staying strong in my beliefs.

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Christina Peterson is a college senior majoring in Criminal Justice and is a member of The National Society of Leadership and Success. She hopes to work in the field of juvenile probations and create programming for queer homeless youth.

The post Refusing to Compromise My Beliefs appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

Several members of The Feminist Wire will be in San Juan, PR for the National Women’s Studies Association annual conference this November! Will you? If so, please consider adding our presentations to your personal schedule and checking us out!

Friday, November 14

Tanisha C. Ford will be presenting during a round table entitled Electric Ladies: Black Women, (Hyper)Visibility, and Transgressive Body Politics at 7:45 am.

Heather M. Turcotte will be presenting during a round table entitled Feminisms and the Corporate Academy: A Collective Critique for the Future of Feminist Justice at 7:45 am.

Audrey Silvestre will be presenting a paper entitled “Embodying Topographies of Violence: Trans*Feminine Displacement, Erasure, and Voice” during the México Lindo y Qu(e)erido: Sexual Citizenship and Neocolonialism in Contemporary Mexico panel at 9:15 am.

During a panel entitled Bodies of Empire at 9:15 am, Monica J. Casper will be presenting a paper entitled “Subject to Loss: Puerto Rican Infant Death in Transnational Context. Mariko Nagai will also be presenting a paper entitled “Occupied Bodies: Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA) and Postwar Comfort Station in the Occupied Japan.”

Saturday, November 15

Alexis Pauline Gumbs will be presenting during the Forty Years of Black Feminist Struggle: The Work of Barbara Smith panel at 9:15 am.

Heather Laine Talley will be presenting a paper entitled “Disability and Lookism: The Vital Politics of Appearance” during the Feminist Disability Studies Demands a New Understanding of Love and Labor panel at 2:30 pm.

During the Igniting Interdisciplinary Activism: Creating Feminist Justice through Curriculum panel at 2:30 pm, Aishah Shahidah Simmons will be presenting a paper entitled “Using the Lorde’s Work to Centralize the Margins in the Academy and in Cyberspace.” Stephanie Troutman will also be presenting a paper entitled “Feminist Pedagogy/ies, Social Justice, and Curriculum.”

Heidi R. Lewis will be presenting a paper entitled “Damn, I Love the Strippers: An Examination of Rihanna’s ‘Pour It Up’” during the The Booty Don’t Lie: Black Women’s Movement Vocabularies panel at 2:30 pm.

Sunday, November 16

Audrey Silvestre will be presenting again during the Forging Transgressive Literatures: Jotería Small Presses and the Reshaping of Chicana/Latina Feminist Letters round table at 10:45 am.

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Please check us out at NWSA 2014! Additionally, if you’re presenting, let us know in the comments, and we’ll do our best to come see you!

The post TFW at the Upcoming National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Gwendolyn Beetham

“As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.”
                     —Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House

I came to women’s and gender studies as many do: on a search for answers. Between the pages of Patricia Hill Collins and Gloria Anzaldúa, Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, I began to find them. I started to heal from an abusive relationship that shaped my teens and early 20s. I came to understand the structural causes of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, and how these were all linked by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. I began to proclaim myself a feminist. I came to identify as queer. In short, I fell in love with women’s and gender studies.

It is therefore painful for me to write this essay, in which I express my disappointment with the women’s and gender studies community’s response to contingent faculty issues, and the current state of higher education more broadly.

I am certainly not the first person to call attention to the problems that WGS as a discipline has encountered from its birth from an activist movement, down the long road to institutionalization (a road that, in many respects, it is still traveling). Feminists both in and outside of academia have drawn attention to these issues over the years, including Ellen Messer-Davidow, Chandra Mohanty, Robyn Wiegman, and Jessica Yee, to name only a few. Nor am I the first feminist to draw attention to these issues in the broader context of higher education. Indeed, some of the most brilliant and critical voices speaking out on higher ed today—Tressie McMillan Cottom, Melonie Fullick, Rebecca Schuman, Sarah Kendzior—are feminist (though not WGS scholars).

Given this past and present history, women’s and gender studies as a discipline shouldn’t be joining the fight, we should be leading it. Instead, aside from a few outspoken critics, the current context is one in which senior scholars—as happened at a conference recently—describe women’s and gender studies grads as being in a “good place.” They point to the scores of jobs available in the field last year, severely inflating the situation by including contingent positions, including one-year visiting fellowships and temporary lectureships in the count.

Of course, folks working in women’s and gender studies are not the only ones guilty of fudging the numbers; such manipulation is common practice in higher ed. Nor do all people working in WGS rely upon these practices. Further, there are several field-specific reasons that someone working in WGS would misrepresent the number of sustainable jobs available in the field. Many WGS programs are chronically poorly funded and thus, some might argue, “airing dirty laundry” might reflect negatively on already struggling programs. Another reason is that WGS is still working to become fully institutionalized. What this means in the context of higher ed today is that you need to continuously “make the case” for your existence, including providing “evidence” of the “strength of the market” in the field.

Aside from being highly deceptive, by focusing only on the academic route (contingent or not), such arguments take a very narrow approach to WGS degrees. In fact, when compared to some of the more traditional disciplines, WGS is in a prime position to prepare students for the realities of today’s job market. I know WGS grads working as editors and in think tanks, as journalists and in NGOs (and I’ve had many of these jobs myself). Moreover, such a limited view of what is possible with a WGS Ph.D. demonstrates an extreme lack of concern for and awareness of the lived realities of soon-to-be and recent graduates. I am not going to detail the challenges posed by visiting and similarly temporary positions—entire essays have been written on this. I want to focus here on the larger issue at hand: that these arguments ignore the power dynamics between those differently positioned in WGS, dynamics that operate not only within the discipline, but throughout higher ed.

As Jennifer Ruth poignantly showed recently (though not speaking in the WGS context), we are all complicit in perpetuating these dynamics, including those working in “middle management.” While not making sweeping higher ed policy decisions, these “middle managers” are the actors, Ruth argues, who make the everyday decisions that continue to perpetuate this system: department chairs who accept non-TT positions to “grow” their programs, TT faculty who ask for adjunct coverage so they can finish that book. Those working in WGS should be held accountable when their actions uncritically perpetuate a racist, classist, and ableist system whose increasing corporatization is leading to a “winner-take-all” market for a tiny minority of faculty and increasing contingency for the rest. Significantly, 76% of faculty are contingent—with women and people of color making up a large percent.

As often happens, this example of the way we are not leading points to the ways that we might. The answer, I believe, lies within the “love praxis” that The Feminist Wire has been developing over the past few years. Critically, as described by managing editors Darnell L. Moore and Monica J. Casper in a recent article: “A radical love praxis means attending to uses of ‘love’ that are antithetical to social justice.” The current mobilization of love for women’s and gender studies has called for a love that allows it to grow (i.e. become institutionalized) no matter the cost. This mobilization is also dependent upon a passion for the subject: if we love what we do, the high cost shouldn’t matter. But it does. If left unchecked, such efforts not only perpetuate the exploitation of graduate students and contingent faculty, but they crumble the bridges between those working within the feminist academy and those working at the margins (not to mention outside). It is imperative that this antithetical love be attended to. To do so, we must, as Audre Lorde directs, recognize our differences, no matter how hard this becomes. In so doing, we begin to work in community, regardless of our relationship to the academy and our stakes in it. This is how we begin to harness “love’s possibilities for transformative justice and communal healing.”

Recently, there has been movement to address these issues more systematically, from a place of transformative love. The work being done at The Feminist Wire is a part of that movement. For my part, working together with a group of scholars from the continental US, Puerto Rico, and the UK, I will be participating in three roundtables organized around the theme of feminist perspectives on contingency at the National Women’s Studies Association conference this fall. Our approach is two-fold: first, to provide a space for contingent faculty to voice their concerns, to be heard and begin to heal, and second, to outline some concrete steps that WGS as a discipline can take to address the issue.

The journal Feminist Formation has recently put out a call for papers for a special issue on “Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women’s Studies in the Corporate University,” edited by Jennifer Nash and Emily Owens. This issue is important not only because it is the first academic journal to take this on, but because of the centrality of feelings and the space that such a focus offers for the kind of transformative justice and communal healing that “love praxis” demands.

And this brings me back to Audre Lorde. Lorde’s work has been hugely influential to my understanding of WGS, and the use of her words to introduce this post is intentional. “Master’s Tools” is one of Lorde’s most-quoted essays in and outside of feminist circles, yet the context of her words is often lost. Lorde delivered this speech to a group of feminists, in an academic setting (at the Second Sex Conference held at NYU in October 1979), and the righteous feelings of anger and frustration at the marginalization of black women in the movement are palpable. Yet another feeling overwhelms here and throughout much of Lorde’s work: determination. Like Lorde, I am determined not to give up on academic feminism’s potential for liberation.

I love it too much.

Wherever you fall on the academic feminist spectrum, if you care about these issues please make your voice heard. Respond to the call for papers for Feminist Formations. If you’ll be at the National Women’s Studies Association conference this fall, please join us! Speak your truth below in comments, elsewhere on social media (use the hashtag #WGScontingency), or–for those of you lucky enough to be in positions of stability and power–in faculty meetings and at university functions.

Gwendolyn Beetham received her Ph.D. in Gender from the London School of Economics. She is assistant editor of “University of Venus” at Inside Higher Ed and curator of “The Academic Feminist” at Feministing. She tweets here.

The post Love in a Time of Contingency: A Letter to Women’s and Gender Studies appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Eve Dunbar

Tayari Jones attended a brunch in Brooklyn to which I was also invited a few weeks ago.  Seven-deep in the a living room of our mutual friend, Tricia, the brunch party flitted from considering who among us would fight if threatened with being ”jumped“ by one of our students after class to the best pedagogical approach to the “N-Word” within the racially mixed classrooms that many of us teach.  In the midst of all this fun and food, Tayari often provided the perfect Toni Morrison quote or a textual example from some other black female writer that completely linked our conversation to the artistic universe of black female genius.

The fact that Tayari Jones comes bearing the gift of perfectly timed and aptly fitting literary allusions is just one of things you should know about her.  She is the author of three novels, Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling and, most recently, Silver Sparrow.  Silver Sparrow was just named among O Magazine’s 2014 “21 Books You Must Read Before the Summer Ends.”

Jones is also a teacher who teaches with ease, humor and a gently guiding hand—both inside and outside of the classroom.  Most important, she is a writer who reads, like all great writers.  And because she reads, she’s a writer who deeply values her own readers.

So when I sat down to interview Tayari Jones, I was most impressed by her generosity towards the women writers who mentored her and her black women readers, whom she refers to as her “base.”  What Tayari reveals in our interview is that for her, and many contemporary black American writers, the base of black women readers are key to black literary success, longevity and community.

This interview is, then, a love letter to “the base.”

*******************************************

Eve Dunbar: How did you come to be a writer?

Tayari Jones: Well it’s kind of a tricky question because it’s the question of how did I come to be a professional writer. I’ve enjoyed writing all my life. I often think that I’m of the generation of black writers that can say I started writing just because I dug it. I didn’t start writing because I felt like there was a hole in my life.  I enjoy reading and so I thought I would enjoy writing.

ED: How old were you when you first started writing?

TJ: A child. I used to write little books and staple them. I grew up in an all black environment, Atlanta, which is a black bourgeois mecca. Anything I could imagine someone doing, I could imagine a black person doing.  I liked to write stories about children taking trips to space, you know things like that.

I never knew writing could be a serious pursuit, and I think this is where it becomes interesting to me because the challenges in my life have been more gendered than racial. When girls like to read and write people don’t think that it’s because they’re smart or they’re an intellectual. If someone says that my daughter is always in the library, people don’t say she’s a genius; they say, “Oh she probably won’t get pregnant.”  Because with girls, there’s two kinds of girls. There’s “good girls” and “bad girls.” And smartness for girls is a goodness, not an intellectual kind of thing.

So I understood myself to be a nice girl and I like to read, it was like a hobby. I didn’t know that I could become a writer. It wasn’t until I went to Spelman College that I realized that I could potentially become a person of consequence and there were all these black women of consequence all around me. And it seemed like we learned to be people of consequence.

ED: So after graduating Spelman College, where did your journey to becoming a “woman of consequence” and a professional writer take you?

TJ:  I went to the University of Iowa to do a PhD in literature. I did not know that you could do a degree in creative writing. I’d never heard of it.  I thought that if you were a writer, you’re a writer in your soul. And so I went to Iowa and all these people were like, “We’re the writers.”  And I was like, “Oh, I’m a writer too, I published a story in a magazine.” And they were like, “No, you don’t understand, we’re the Iowa writers.” And I was like, “I’m a writer, I’m in Iowa.”  But they were just like, “No!”

It was good though because I learned that there was such a thing as a writer’s program and I learned that I wanted to be in one. I hated my PhD life, I hated it, it hated me. I wanted to quit but I didn’t want to disappoint my parents, my friends. And I wrote to Pearl Cleage this long letter. And she wrote me back a postcard, “You know you can quit don’t you?”  And I wrote her back, “No, I did not know this.” So I quit.

ED: Where did you go after quitting your first PhD Program?

TJ:  I taught adult literacy for a while and then I went to another PhD program split half creative writing half literature. Then I met a woman in an elevator, Jewell Parker Rhodes, and she said to me, “Come to Arizona, help me, I’ll get you a scholarship.” And I said, “Um ma’am no, I can’t move to Arizona. I can’t drop out of another program, it’s hot out there, they don’t have a King holiday.” And she said, “No! No! No! There has been a voter referendum, we’ll have you a King holiday by the time you get there.”

So I went to Arizona to do this MFA.  I wrote my first book while I was in graduate school. And everyone was proud of me, but no one believed that I could be a writer. They thought I was setting myself up.  There were no women doing anything bold and courageous.

ED: You’ve already said gender greatly influenced your writing career, it’s successes and failures, but how do you think it influences what you choose to write boldly and courageously about?

TJ: When I went to Spelman I realized the extent to which I’d been subjected fairly systematically to gender based expectations, like every woman. You know when you have that moment. And I did kind of write to explore that because that was a force that I felt overtly. So you know, I’m very interested in the way that black women try to navigate the world and I’m also interested in the intersection of class and gender.

ED:  Who is your imagined audience for fiction?

TJ: My imagined audience is, interestingly, a black woman who I met through my blog. She’s a black woman with a PhD, like me, but hers is in biochemistry or something. I have to think of her because she has degree in biochemistry. Obviously she’s smarter than me, but I know something that she doesn’t know. So I’m talking to someone who’s as smart as me but may not know what I’m saying. You see, so it gives you a lot of room. There’s nothing that I can’t talk about with someone like her but I still have something to offer so I think about her

ED: Do you think of your prose as speaking to a black middle class?

TJ:  I think about it talking mostly to black woman of my generation, that’s who reads my books. There’s a woman who works at the coffee cart at my job and I gave her my draft of Silver Sparrow before I finished it.

ED: Really?

TJ:  She sits up all day reading. When you work at a coffee shop you read a lot. Black women read a lot. Security guards read all the time. So if there is a black female security guard who works at my publishers’ office, I always have the publishers bring her a book.

ED: I think that’s really fascinating because many people rarely think about the reading habits of working women, working black women.

TJ: Black woman are the best readers. Nikki Giovanni told me to take care of your black female readers because they will take care of you. They’ll take care of you for the rest of your career. You can fall out of favor with the New York Times whatever and whatever…. [Black female readers] will always be there for you.

When I was in between books and I was having a hard time getting my book published, black ladies were sending me stuff in the mail, cookies, knit me an Afghan. All these things helped me write the next book, so I know who loves me. A lot of people read me, but I know who loves me.

A lot of people use the word….a lot of black writers say that a book is “just” for black people. Don’t use the word “just.” I hate the word “just,” I cringe at the word. Don’t talk bad about the base. That’s the base. You make sweet love to the base, you say hello to the base.

ED: Well some people take the base for granted and constantly want to “reach out.”

TJ: I love the base. My readers are often passionate but they’re not that powerful within the industry.

ED: What do you mean?

TJ: It means that they aren’t selected to review books in high profile venues. You know their opinions… there are a lot of very famous writers who have few readers but they get a lot of visibility because their base is powerful. Ain’t nobody reading that stuff. I don’t know, I’m fairly content.

_____________________________

Eve Dunbar

Eve Dunbar is an associate professor of English at Vassar College.  She specializes in African American literature and cultural expression, black feminism, and theories of black diaspora.  She is the author of Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers Between the Nation and the World (2012).

Tayari Jones

Tayari Jones is the author of three novels: Silver Sparrow (Algonquin, 2011), which was named one of the year’s best by O Magazine, Library Journal, Slate and Salon; The Untelling (Grand Central, 2006); and Leaving Atlanta (Warner Books, 2002). The recipient of fellowships from the United States Artist Foundation, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and The Hurston/Wright Foundation, Jones is an associate professor of English at Rutgers-Newark University. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Believer, and New Stories From The South.

The post Touching Base with Tayari Jones: An Interview on Black Female Writers and Readers appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Nicole Nguyen and R. Tina Catania

“There is a politics to exhaustion. Feeling depleted can be a measure of just what we are up against.”[1]

Meet Stuart. He’s a fellow doctoral student. Watching Stuart – a white, able-bodied, middle-class man – for a short time, one sees the ease with which he glides through the academy’s hallways. Stuart pops into professors’ offices and tosses around passages from Das Kapital he learned while attending an elite, private high school. Stuart knows, intimately, how to navigate the academy. More importantly, Stuart can move through the academy, meeting few, if any, obstacles along the way. As Stuart earns the accolades bestowed upon him by other white, able-bodied, academic men – the gatekeepers – we are reminded that social privilege is “an energy saving device” and so “no wonder that not to inherit privilege can be so trying,” especially in the U.S. academy.[2]

Supported by his family, Stuart spends summer days at the beach writing without struggling to survive on his meager stipend. After class, Stuart drives to the home he owns to write journal articles, free from the weight and violence that non-dominant students must often process and endure in the face of unrelenting microaggressions[3] before beginning their own work. Stuart doesn’t need to think about how to make his work intelligible or valued as “real” scholarship.[4] He is not invested in excavating personal stories and organizing for social change with/in communities.[5] Scholars never attack his research, conducted from the confines of his middle-class home and removed from the struggles of everyday life facing oppressed people worldwide, as “personal,” “too sensitive,” or “lacking theoretical heft.”

When Stuart arrives, his peers (and professors) read him as an intellectual. Meanwhile women, students of color, and students with disabilities struggle to prove they deserve a place in the academy. Occupying dominant social locations, Stuart dominates classrooms. In fact, like the white men (and women) who advise him, Stuart interrupts women graduate students in class, looks out the window when students of color speak, and fully ignores the contributions of students with disabilities. During one class, Stuart claimed that “queers shouldn’t have children,” a comment obfuscated by multi-syllabic words and a questionable interpretation of queer theory. Protected by the cover of theory, Stuart’s comment went uncontested and unnamed while its harm quietly seeped into the psyches of queer students and allies. While some depleted students wished to challenge Stuart, they also knew that faculty eagerly supported him and quickly condoned his inflictions of harm. This is how those in power maintain institutionalized oppression even as Stuart and others imagine themselves as radical activists, ignoring the ways they enact and extend the norms they seek to oppose. For Stuart, practice and theory never need to align.

The academy wasn’t just built by people who look like Stuart. It was built with his body in mind. Stuart doesn’t have to worry about how he will get in/to his classrooms. He just shows up, opens the door, and walks right in. Stuart doesn’t have to make endless calls to Disability Services, Parking Services, Dean’s Offices, and the like, just to secure a disabled parking permit to be near his classroom. He doesn’t have to think about getting up that hill. About the potential un-shoveled sidewalks and streets. About the ice and slush that jam in a wheelchair’s tires.

Stuart isn’t watched or marked. He doesn’t have to hear the whispers about his use of the “Handicap” button to open doors. Doors that are too heavy for this body. He doesn’t have to carry a cooler of food and medicine to class and with him at all times to regulate his blood sugar. He doesn’t have to spend days making special food so that he’ll have enough for the school week. For class, for unexpected meetings on campus. He can spend time reading Marx for fun because his body doesn’t require the amount of work or time that this body does.

People like Stuart can glide through academia not thinking about the ways the buildings they use, the classrooms they occupy, and the events they attend exclude certain bodies. Stuart’s body doesn’t just not experience battle fatigue because of dis/ability, or race, or class, or sex, or gender; Stuart’s body doesn’t get physically fatigued. Because for him a door is not an obstacle. Finding a gender-neutral and accessible bathroom is not an obstacle. Getting to campus is not an obstacle. Leaving the house is not an obstacle. Using a computer is not an obstacle. People like Stuart are not tired of fighting because they don’t have to fight for their bodies to exist in the spaces of academia.

The echoes of praise about Stuart’s productivity issued by faculty members sting. Their reverberations act as a constant reminder of who the academy values and whose knowledges count. Stuart doesn’t have to think about how to make his body read as smart, as academic, as belonging; smartness is already mapped onto his white, male, able-bodied self. Stuart, thus, embodies the white supremacist, capitalist, colonial, ableist, and gendered privilege coursing through everyday life in the academy. He represents how power and privilege shape the graduate school experience. This story, then, is not about Stuart qua Stuart: it is about how we, non-dominant students, encounter, negotiate, and confront structures of oppression within the academy.

Yet, in the telling of Stuart’s violence, we do not seek to center his actions. Rather, we begin with these stories to place the body, our bodies, within the colonial, ableist, patriarchal, white supremacist academy. Such stories purposefully sketch how privileged bodies effortlessly move through graduate school while the academy “wears” on those “who do not quite inhabit the norms of the institution.”[6]

We write, together, to name this institutionalized violence so endemic to the academy.

We write because we cannot remain silent. And the “we” that we envision is more than our own impulses. It is a collective we that cannot be and will not be silent in the face of oppression. As Audre Lorde writes, “Your silence will not protect you.” The silence[7] of individuals who are “waiting to get a job” or “waiting to get tenure” or “keeping their heads down and doing their own thing” does not protect them from microaggressions, from oppression, from depletion.[8] What it does do is continue to reify and entrench the oppressive nature of the academy; it disciplines us to stay silent, to reinforce oppression, and to participate in its reproduction.

Thus, we urge every-body, but especially those in positions of power (i.e., tenure-track and tenured faculty) to name oppression. To name sexism. To name ableism. To name racism. To be cognizant of how these -isms intersect to violently oppress and privilege particular bodies and identities.

We must name instances, call attention to the ways that the academy’s daily practices are multiply oppressive. And we should do so whether we experience them through someone like Stuart, a prototypical, privileged, white male, or through anyone else whether white feminists, able-bodied people of color, or male “allies.” These violences, from whomever they come and through whatever structures make such encounters possible, must be named. They must be resisted. And they must be transformed.

We recognize that, as Sara Ahmed warns, “exposing a problem is to become a problem.”[9] Yet, we refuse to be disciplined. We refuse to have our words, actions, and experiences foreclosed for fear of being read as the “problem,” always “stirring up trouble.” Fuck the fear that the discipline, field, department, administration, university, society tries to instill in us so that we do not speak up, so that we do not name our oppressions. We recognize the academic institution and its practices for what they are: inherently oppressive. We recognize that many have no desire to critique the academy because they do not want to jeopardize their privilege within it. We recognize that critiques of academia are necessarily limited by those who make them when they are invested in maintaining its structure, a structure that works for them.

We seek to radically reshape and remake the institution in more equitable ways. True solidarity cannot pay lip service to feminist, de-colonial, anti-racist projects while maintaining individual investments in a system that works for only the most privileged bodies. Marginalized individuals cannot but participate in the oppression of other marginalized people if they are invested in academia’s current structure. Increased “representation” merely reifies the system rather than expands the possibilities for solidarity, for change.

We see our colleagues, our cohorts, our faculty, our peers, and even ourselves as colluding in these oppressions when they (we) ignore them, when they ignore us, when they remain silent at their occurrence, when they are oblivious to their daily repetition. When your colleague does not plan an accessible, inclusive event from the beginning, they actively reproduce ableism and create exclusionary spaces. And our naming that problem, and therefore your collusion in ableist oppression, makes us the problem, rather than you or the institution. When the violent actions of white, male students not only go unpunished, but undiscussed and unrecognized by faculty, you actively participate in our racialized and gendered oppression.

Within a deeply inequitable institution, we strive to navigate a space for ourselves, for understanding. We understand that we are a part of the academy and that our actions can also work to sustain it. Yet we strive for a different academy. We seek to transform the institution. For us, this includes naming the violences of those like Stuart and rejecting the common call to discipline ourselves into not writing or voicing radical critiques of the academy.

So we begin here, with a naming of sorts. We write to name what we should not name.

Yet writing also serves as a way to carve out alternative spaces. Spaces that contribute to our survivability and to our resistance against these structural and everyday forms of oppression. These spaces are where we “recognize each other, find each other, create spaces of relief, spaces that might be breathing spaces, spaces in which we can be inventive.”[10]

We write together to claim our intersectional identities and recognize that for us, the academy must include the stories of our bodies, our exclusions, our resistances, our politics, our activism. We write to document our exhaustion in surviving, resisting, and reshaping this deeply violent institution even as we, as graduate students, occupy particularly precarious positions. Given these oppressions in the academy, this is a call for different, transnational, cross-border, and accessible forms of solidarity.

We write, ultimately, as an invitation to those other depleted-yet-vibrant bodies, bodies who imagine another kind of academy. An academy that is collaborative, feminist, and inclusive. It is an invitation to strategize, to survive, to heal.

Notes

The post On Feeling Depleted: Naming, Confronting, and Surviving Oppression in the Academy appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Michelle Téllez

I find it imperative to call attention to the disconnect between Ethnic Studies as a discipline and the communities from which it emerged. Universities, and many individual faculty members, have largely abandoned the original critical impetus.

I started graduate school at the cusp of the new millennium, following a three-year run as an elementary school teacher. There I sought answers to some deep-seated questions I had about formal educational systems and the formation of our future generations. Instead of answers, I found that the academy provided a space for the exchange of ideas, which excited me intellectually but troubled me politically.

Let me situate myself within a particular genealogy, political formation, and social/historical reality. I grew up along the San Diego/Tijuana border, acutely cognizant of the ways in which borders, militarization, and racism shaped our everyday lives. I formed part of the battles to retain and build Ethnic Studies programs as an undergraduate student at a large public university and started teaching at the university level ten years ago when I was a graduate student. I taught in an Ethnic and Women’s Studies program, and I loved it. The first article I ever published focused on bridging the divide between the academy and communities on the ground contesting the conditions of their lives. I can honestly say I was excited about the possibilities generated by exchanges in the classroom,  analytical debates, and collaborative potentials.

The U.S.-Mexico border. The U.S. is on the left. (Photo by Gerald L. Nino)

Over the years, though, I’ve felt embattled by an institution that primarily values Western histories and knowledge systems, which have little to do with my own epistemological position. In fact, more and more I find myself asking what makes my life at the university livable. I’ve served as an elected board member for a national organization committed to Ethnic Studies, and I have often participated in forums with smart, critical scholars and activists across the globe. Yet when I come back to my home in the desert, I feel that I am witnessing an ever-widening gulf between the University and the local communities in which it is situated.

One example that stands out occurred after implementation of the notorious SB1070 in Arizona, when I ran into a senior Chican@ colleague in the fall of 2010 and asked how they were doing. Their response shocked me: “Well you know this little thing SB1070?…It has been great for my career,” most likely speaking to the publications and lectures they had garnered following the law’s passage. I literally had no words. How can one’s scholarly success be based on the terror, violence, and fear that another faces in their life?

My thoughts immediately went to Carlos and Sandra Figueroa’s daughter, Katherine, who has spoken of the trauma she continues to work through after witnessing her parents being detained and arrested on the television after school one day. She and her caretaker watched the local news report about one of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s notorious roundups at the car wash where her parents worked. She was terrified that she would never see her parents again. How is it possible to claim success when our communities are being attacked? When our families are being separated? When a culture of fear permeates the lives of the most marginalized?

The reality, though, is that my senior colleague’s perspective is not inconsistent with the trends I am witnessing. When I arrived to the campus that I taught at for nine years – one of four campuses of the university – there was a thriving Ethnic Studies program with strong numbers of students majoring in the degree and signature campus events that drew community members, students, and other faculty. During my time there, the program was reduced to a mirage on the website as administrative support dwindled toward non-existent, part of the current national trend. The politics of these closures and re-closures can be debilitating to the faculty and students, particularly when one’s labor and commitment is devalued, ignored, and forgotten. Additionally, the university is no longer accountable to a decolonial curriculum, one that includes the histories and contemporary experiences of the diverse communities that form part of the very city, and original territories, that the university occupies.

This is precisely the critique that the national Critical Ethnic Studies Organization brings to the forefront when they point to the ways in which a curriculum created out of struggle has become coopted into a neoliberal model that defines success not by the lives we are saving, empowering, and making visible but instead by career success, the reification of culture and peoples, and the dollars one brings in to the University. This is certainly not what I had imagined, not as I entered the sacred space that has been carved out for us with great sacrifice.

When I think of my life outside the academy and what makes it livable, I find courage and motivation from the very families, workers, community members, and students who are most affected by regressive policies. In fact, I am routinely frustrated by the vilification of Arizona when the people I know are working everyday to make our lives more harmonious. We live in a system that has been shaped by a particular history of exploitation, genocide, and exclusion. In this, Arizona is not an anomaly but the norm. Let me underscore that I am not trying to idealize communities on the ground; I have seen the implosion of alliances over struggles of power and recognition. I have witnessed the brutal violence against women’s rights to self-determination, control of their own bodies, and futures. And I know what it feels like to be silenced.

It seems we are having parallel conversations and experiences within and outside of the university. My hope remains to find a way to bridge these seemingly disparate spaces. In the spring of 2012, several committed activists and scholars came together to form the Arizona Ethnic Studies Network in response to another one of Arizona’s legislative much publicized nightmares: HB2281. This house bill prohibits K-12 schools from “offering courses at any grade level that advocate ethnic solidarity, promote overthrow of the US government, or cater to specific ethnic groups” and has effectively dismantled Tucson’s Mexican-American studies programs. The effects of the bill have yet to be seen at the university level but the opposition that grew locally and nationally created both an opportunity for collective engagement and an opportunity for scholars to remember the original impetus for our discipline, to re-examine mistakes, and to recommit to a shared vision across our educational system.

I deeply value the relationships that have slowly built over the last two years via this network and the commitment to growing and supporting statewide efforts and actions that bring visibility to the role that racialization (and its intersections with class and gender) has played in the distribution of power and resources. This was recently visible in our support and advocacy of our colleague Dr. Ersula Ore who suffered egregious violations at the hands of university police. A call to action and accountability incited both a national and international movement of support. As Xamuel Bañales argues in The Future(s) of Ethnic Studies is in its Past(s)…and in the Surrounding Possibilities (2012, p. 19):

Ethnic Studies can strengthen its commitment to activism by moving away from seeing social change thinkable only through research and by liberating itself from the conducts of traditional disciplines and institutionalizations. The field can continue doing this by strengthening the commitment to being involved in the current issues affecting marginalized people and society, building and serving as a bridge to the community, and shaping and contributing the conceptual work necessary for decolonization.

The squeeze on ethnic studies, the slow choking of both its resources and its potential for relevance, is simultaneously sucking the oxygen from Arizona as a place. Thus, it is ever so important to remain committed to the political project of critical ethnic studies. When I think about the times my life in the desert has felt livable, forming part of this network and the collaborations that have ensued has certainly been an important marker.

I recognize this is not an easy transition. The credential imperative in academia is powerful. Students want to attend university to create opportunities for themselves that will lead to success, perhaps power. But what if we instead imagined an educational paradigm that strives for knowledge that can produce strength, wisdom, and harmony as taught to me by my Chican@ elders? As a professor, scholar, and community member, I try to live by the words that I learned so long ago from the Zapatistas: “We musn’t struggle to destroy, we must struggle to create.”

In Arizona and far beyond our state’s borders, we must continue to be creative in our alliances, to dismantle our perspectives on knowledge production and, perhaps, to concentrate a bit less on individual advancement and promotion, which all too often can happen at the expense of community solidarity.

____________________________________

Dr. Michelle Téllez is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in sociology, Chicana/o studies, community studies, and education. In her twenty years of community engagement and activism, she has been involved in multiple projects for change at the grassroots level utilizing critical pedagogy, principles of sustainability, community-based arts, performance, and visual media. Her writing and research projects seek to uncover stories of identity, transnational community formation, gendered migration, autonomy, resistance, and Chicana mothering. She is a founding member of the Arizona Ethnic Studies Network, the Entre Nosotras Collective, and on the advisory board for Performance in the Borderlands. Visit her website here.

The post Op-Ed: Why We Need Critical Ethnic Studies in Arizona (and Everywhere Else) appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

Wagatwe Wanjuki is a feminist activist working and living in the New York City area. She uses new media tools to advance social justice. You can learn more about her work here.

Stephanie: Wagatwe, I’ve been a fan of yours for years – we both fight sexual violence on college campuses. You have been an outspoken advocate for victims/survivors of sexual violence, and you have spoken openly about the assault you endured. What changes have you seen on college campuses in the time you’ve been doing activist work?

Wagatwe: Thank you! I think one of the biggest changes that I’ve seen on college campuses is that there is an overall increased awareness and acknowledgment that this is a widespread issue. Administrations (grudgingly or not) are increasingly admitting that students are enduring sexual violence on their campuses and that schools have to do something about it (even if the schools’ solutions may be way off the mark).  And when administrations fail to do their job, students–and even alumni–are speaking up about they and their friends have endured and are demanding what they need from schools to better protect them.

I also see that the movements on different campuses are a lot more interconnected, which I think is a big reason why the campus anti-sexual violence movement has had so much more visibility and success. One of the biggest perpetrators of sexual violence is silence and isolation, but now survivors can find community and support to combat these two forces to bring change.  I recently spoke at Tufts University at their It Happens Here event. It was so surreal to see so much change in so little time. It was clear that there was a close-knit community of survivors who supported each other. And the auditorium (where they held the event) was full and overflowing! It was amazing to see so many people come out in solidarity of the survivors. I definitely see the culture climate has changed for the better. And while I know not all campuses have seen this change, I think that the tools to produce change on college campuses are a lot more accessible and easy to find.

Stephanie: You recently spoke very publicly against RAINN’s new stance re: rape culture and what some call “carceral feminism.” Would you explain what happened and why you were compelled to respond the way you did?

Wagatwe: I came across RAINN’s suggestions to the Task Force through a Facebook friend’s post. The title stood out to me because it explicitly said that they thought using the courts & prison system to address campus sexual assault was the answer. I was immediately horrified because I know that the prison industrial complex has shown to be grossly inadequate in properly addressing sexual violence. It made no sense to me for RAINN to ask for its increased use when their own website admits that 97% of rapists never see a day in jail! It felt like the report was completely out of touch of the needs and wants of survivors close to the issue.

I felt compelled to respond because I wanted to make it clear that RAINN in no way spoke for folks like myself. Their opinion is not held by the majority of advocates and survivors I’ve met during my time as an activist. We have made so much progress in empowering survivors to come forward and I know that reporting to the police is simply NOT an option for survivors–especially those with marginalized identities. I worry that the “mainstream” organizations and narratives have been failing to take an intersectional analysis of the issue of sexual violence and have often ignored the needs and desires of survivors aren’t white, straight, cis, female, middle-class, etc. and I feel that RAINN’s report is a reflection of that.

Rape culture is one of the biggest reasons why administrators have been prioritizing the reputation of the school over the safety of their students. Personally, I know rape myths and misconceptions about domestic violence contributed to my old school’s inaction to my report. And the impact of rape culture contributes heavily to why so many survivors are afraid to report – whether it’s to their school and/or the police. Widespread rape myths are very harmful because they create a space where rapists can thrive, which is what they’ve been doing on college campuses. Sexual violence and the behaviors used to excuse it have been so normalized at the detriment of countless survivors. For RAINN to essentially take a position on rape culture that is often held by misogynists and so-called men’s right activists is very troubling. They are contributing to the problem where sexual violence is rampant, not challenging it. As someone who used to look up to RAINN for the resources it provided survivors and advocated, I felt compelled to respond for these reasons. I felt that someone had to publicly respond. 

Stephanie: You have been doing activism online and in person for quite a while now. What advice do you have for people who are just starting to think about and do activism?

One of the most important piece of advice I can give is to say don’t be afraid to experiment. I first got into online activism when I created the RapedAtTufts blog. I had no idea about making websites, registering domains, social media, etc. But I sat down, Googled, read, and tried to learn as I went.  I think the willingness to fumble around and make mistakes is a key part of learning the best way to get things done as an activist. It also gives you an opportunity to be a trailblazer in new techniques or platforms.

Also: make sure to network, network, network. I don’t mean networking in a shallow schmoozy kind of way. I am talking about making genuine connections with other people, groups, and organizations; they truly are invaluable. I have gained so much by graduating from New Organizing Institute’s New Media BootCamp, going to conferences such as Netroots, and connecting with leaders I admire in various spaces – both through social media and in person. Not only have the people in networks turned out to be great in terms of access to information, but they’ve also provided invaluable support and encouragement. As an activist – especially in the feminist and specifically anti-sexual violence fields – it is SO important to have a strong support network in your corner.

Stephanie: Earlier this year, The Feminist Wire hosted a forum entitled “Beyond Critique.” We invited people to discuss how we can move beyond visible and open hostility among feminists and how we can move gently into love as a site of activism. How do you handle and address criticism and cultivate love in your own work?

Wagatwe: I am very strategic about where, when, and how I address criticism. For example, it is a lot harder to communicate around certain topics in 140 character tidbits than it is during an open, in-person forum. So I try to make sure I am very clear in how I present and express my views that is best tailored to the medium I am using. If someone comes to me with criticisms, I am careful to take my time to think about where they may be coming from. Even if the criticism is said in a way that might be hurtful there could still be something valuable – and even correct – in what they said. I am not am a fan of tone-policing; I do think there are moments of justified anger and I don’t want to lose the bigger picture because someone expressed their outrage over something that legitimately warrants it in “harsh” tone. Overall, I aim to be just be thoughtful and open, which I think cultivates love and fights hostility. I have been fortunate to overwhelming avoid hostility in the feminism movement from allies. I honestly think it is because I try my best to be mindful and open to what others have to say as well as doing my research before I open my mouth (or move my fingers over the keyboard).

Stephanie: Self-care is so important to activists – well, to everyone, but activists who put ourselves out there for public critique really do have to find ways to care for ourselves. How do you take care of you?

Wagatwe: It’s taken me a long time to figure out what I want and need for self care; sometimes I think I am still figuring it out. One important thing I realize, though, is that I should just trust myself and listen to my body!

So I take care of myself primarily in a few ways:

• regularly disconnect from email;
• make sure to spend time with friends regularly (this can be hard since I am an introvert and can easily spend a lot of time alone); and
• work out regularly.

There are other things that I do to take care of myself (like get massages – thanks Groupon!), but these are the main points on my list. I make sure to do things that make me feel good both physically and mentally as well as be mindful of consuming content that might be upsetting to me.

Stephanie: Is there anything else you’d like to say?

Wagatwe: Last month, I started a hashtag on Twitter – #SurvivorPrivilege – that ended up trending nationally. I was prompted to start it due to rage over my own story because there has been a very real, tangible impact of being failed by an apathetic college administration after coming forward as a survivor. I know that recently Shonda Rhimes made headlines by denouncing hashtag activism as not “real” during a Dartmouth commencement speech. I want to say that I think that she’s completely wrong. I think movements lose something very real if we start to put down and discount certain types of activism. Everyone has their part and if they can only participate now by contributing to a hashtag to make it trend, then I think we need to appreciate what those people are doing. #SurvivorPrivilege trending nationally allowed new people to hear the stories of survivors and feel inspired to share their own stories, find community, and spring into action in their own communities to address sexual violence. There are different levels of engagement and they are all necessary and valuable.

Also, I love hearing from others so if folks have any questions/want to reach out, feel free to tweet at me @wagatwe or send a message to my FB page www.facebook.com/WagatweWanjuki. Also, if folks want to learn more, I do talks on online activism, feminism, and sexual violence–I would love to come to your event or campus!

The post Feminists We Love: Wagatwe Wanjuki appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Robin G. Kelley 

Dear Chancellor Wise,

Please do not ignore or delete this letter, or have your administrative assistant file it away.  I understand that you’ve been inundated with correspondence, petitions signed by some 13,000 + colleagues, phone calls, and messages via social media.  And my letter urging you to reverse your decision to rescind a tenured job offer to Professor Steven Salaita, a distinguished scholar who had been carefully vetted by your American Indian Studies Program, represents probably a drop in the bucket amidst a deluge of arguments and evidence.

Prof. Steven Salaita

I am urging you to read my letter, and to read all of the letters you receive because—like you—I believe that as academics we must not be afraid of arguments with which we may disagree.  Indeed, we might learn something, as you’ve suggested in previous speeches and writing.  Where we might disagree is on the question of tone or what is often mistakenly called “civility.”  I think you can agree that, in life or death situations, when one’s livelihood or survival or future (or the livelihood, survival or future of others for whom one hold deep sympathies) may be on the line, passion and even anger might be an appropriate response.

By the way, although I signed most petitions in defense of Professor Salaita, I’m only now getting around to writing you directly because—like Steven and many others—I’ve been devoting much of my time defending the right of Palestinian students and their families to live, to keep their school buildings from being destroyed, to keep their body parts in tact, to preserve what is left of civil society in the aftermath of what most intellectuals objectively recognize as disproportionate Israeli military force.  Oh, and also academic freedom for all, Palestinians included.

But I digress.  I confess I was very disappointed by your decision but not shocked.  When you issued a letter of 27 December 2013, attacking professional organizations that endorsed the boycott of Israeli academic institutions for their role in legitimizing, subsidizing, and underwriting the illegal occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and maintaining apartheid policies inside of Israel, you insisted that you were acting in defense of “academic freedom.”  As you explained, “we value academic freedom as one of our core principles and cherish the critical importance of the ability of faculty to pursue learning, discovery and engagement without regard to political considerations.”  Of course, such a strong statement would suggest that if any serious scholar were seeking a space where his/her free speech rights were vigorously protected, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign would seem ideal.  But, as I’ve argued elsewhere, that statement was never intended as a defense of free speech, but as an attack on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement (BDS) and the very idea that choosing not to do business with institutions complicit in state actions that violate international law and human rights is, itself, an expression of free speech.   My concern is that your decision to summarily fire Professor Salaita had more to do with outside pressure, including a strongly-worded letter from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, demanding that the University of Illinois rescind its offer because Salaita held “aberrational views” and thus “cannot be trusted to confine his discussions to his area of study.”  I hope this is not true, for if it is you’ve taken a very noble state university with a long tradition of producing diverse and divergent ideas back to the McCarthy era.

We all know you did not fire Professor Salaita because of his tweets, for as you acknowledged earlier this year, even the most offensive tweets are protected free speech and therefore not punishable.  It is a matter of public record that you weathered a storm (no pun intended) earlier this year when you refused to shut down the university due to cold temperatures, prompting dozens if not hundreds of whining students to pepper their complaints with vicious sexist and anti-Asian racist tweets.  You were right to be disturbed, as were many of us who watched what had happened from a distance.  You were right to respond that such racist speech can possibly cross the line, but you were also right to acknowledge that, “negative comments, as offensive as they were, are protected speech.”   Correctly, no one was punished for his or her tweets.  (“Moving Past Digital Hate,” Inside Higher Ed [Jan 30, 2014]).

So why did you fire Professor Salaita?  Clearly, if you are worried about upholding the principles of academic freedom, you know that firing Professor Salaita would not be in compliance with the AAUP 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure: “When [scholars] speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline. . . .  The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.”  And you could not have possibly overturned the faculty’s decision to hire him based on his scholarship.  Professor Salaita is considered a leading authority on Arab American literature and culture, and proven to be extraordinarily prolific, having authored six books in five years, notably, Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (2006); The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan (2006), The Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims, and the Poverty of Liberal Thought (2008), Anti-Arab Racism in the USA (2006), Israel’s Dead Soul (2011), and Modern Arab Fiction: A Reader’s Guide (2011).  And nothing in your public statements or related documents suggest that Professor Salaita’s scholarship is at issue.

So again, why did you fire Professor Steven Salaita?  The only conclusion I can draw from the evidence is that you, in fact, buckled under pressure.  You refuse to present his appointment to the Board of Trustees, perhaps out of fear of losing valuable financial resources or as a way to deflect attacks from the Simon Wiesenthal Center or other Zionist critics who deem Professor Salaita and others as a threat.

But I can assure you, if you were trying to avoid controversy by firing Professor Salaita, it has backfired.  By taking this unprecedented step, SWC and other organizations will pressure you to go after other faculty who may be stridently critical of Israel.  And then they will push you to ban Students for Justice in Palestine and related organizations from the campus.  And I do not need to remind you that some of the most strident critics of Israel and active members of SJP are, in fact, Jewish.  They refuse to accept anti-Semitic assumption that Israeli policies and Zionism, in general, represent the only authentic expressions of Jewish identity; that any critique of Israeli policies is an attack on all Jews.  Once you open this can of worms, it will be very difficult to go back to defending the principle of academic freedom.

I do hope you read this letter and all of the other letters that are now flooding your office and your in-box.  I urge you to do the right thing, restore Professor Salaita’s job and allow him to make the contributions for which the University of Illinois hired him in the first place.  Show the world that you refuse to buckle under pressure.  Keep in mind that, no matter what you might think about Professor Salaita, his life and livelihood are on the line.  He gave up a job at Virginia Tech to come to Urbana-Champaign, and if he is denied work at the 11^th hour and his reputation is besmirched as a consequence of lies and distortions and external pressure from conservative groups, this could have disastrous consequences for him and his family.   And while there will be consequences for your august institution, he will become collateral damage in a way that is unethical, immoral, and technically illegal.

If we are unable to persuade you of the moral, ethical, intellectual, and legal reasons why you should reverse course, I cannot in good conscience step foot on your campus so long as you hold the position as Chancellor. And I will encourage my colleagues to do the same.

________________________________

Robin D. G. Kelley, who teaches at UCLA, is the author of the remarkable biographyThelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009) and most recently Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (2012).

The post In Support of Professor Steven Salaita: A Letter to Chancellor Phyllis Wise appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

Error: Page Not Available

I’m sorry.

What you are asking for is not an option.

This page Is Not Available.

Error.

My breasts are my own.

Do not ask me if you can see them.

My waist is my own.

Do not touch it.

My lips belong to me.

As do the words that come from it.

My legs are made for climbing mountains,

not to distract adolescent boys and immature men.

My cheeks are not sweet,

nor am I your baby.

Error.

Ask me about my friends.

Other women.

who have been touched.

Violated.

Raped.

Ask me how they felt

when they begged for help and mercy

and were told:

This page Is Not Available

Error.

Ask me how I felt

when the Unspeakable

was threatened to be done.

That Page Is Available.

++++++++++++

“Fire!”

This is what I have been taught to scream

when someone is attacking me.

They say,

do not scream “rape!”

do not scream “help!”

do not scream “but please!”

Scream “fire!”

Because otherwise no one will want to help you.

No one will care.

Your body’s violation

is not as important

as the threat of an invisible flame.

Then I will get fined

for lying

because my single lie

held more power

than one disgusting

truth.

****************************************

Lorean Galarza is a sixteen-year-old high school student.  She aspires to be a pediatric nurse and hopes to help children around the world to receive higher quality health care. Lorean has been writing poems and short stories since middle school—both writing and feminism are very important to her.  She strives for a better future for all women through education and writing.  She advocates for humane feminism and the importance of feminism in her short stories and poems because she believes anti-feminism is harmful for everyone.

The post Two Poems by Lorean Galarza appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Raj Patel

In a recent opinion piece in The Guardian, Suzanne Moore likens inter-country surrogacy to a “twisted version of slavery,” one where “poor women are disposable receptacles for the privileged.” She claims that the recent Baby Gammy case highlights exactly what is wrong with the “whole process” of surrogacy and ends by saying that “trading wombs and babies on the free market devalues women [and] life.”

Moore is right on some of these points. But her commentary leaves much to be desired. In general, her focus on the ills of fertility tourism seem to cloud the deeper problem here: the problem of women’s reproductive labor in general. And by not focusing on the real issue at hand, her commentary leads to some potentially disastrous policy proposals.

The Baby Gammy case might actually shed (some) light on an older debate in postcolonial feminism, i.e. the debate that centers on the different relationships that women have to reproductive labor due to socioeconomic status. In general, the view is that postcolonial feminists might reject some Western feminist theory that focuses on the “traditional” feminist struggles because those struggles are typically focused on the problems of middle to upper class white women. The central claim here is that the exclusive focus on seemingly gynocentric analysis ignores the way issues of poverty and race acutely affect poor women and women of color alike. In other words: How should we track the exploitation? Should we pay more attention to class or sex? Where does race fit into the picture?

The problem the postcolonial critique highlights is that analysis of traditionally feminist problems is severely inadequate if it ignores cultural and socioeconomic context. Suzanne Moore’s piece is a good example of this kind of inadequate analysis. Her failure to appreciate cultural and socioeconomic context is, at least in part, the reason why she advocates for potentially disastrous policy proposals (i.e. ban surrogacy and adopt more). The deeper point here is that when cultural and socioeconomic context is ignored, it is poor women and/or women of color who are most affected.

We might question whether the postcolonial feminist critiques of some Western feminist thought are warranted. Indeed, we might claim that, at its core, feminist theory ought to be gynocentric. This is because, as Gemma Tang Nain puts it, while “[middle and upper class women] might be able to avoid that aspect of reproduction described as domestic labor [housework and childcare],” they will “still need to be involved in biological and human reproduction [such as pregnancy].” Thus even though middle and upper class women might be able to shirk some reproductive labor, they are nevertheless, in the end, subject to the same type of oppression as poor women and/or women of color. From this analysis, oppression is always there; it’s just a matter of severity.

I should note that by reproductive labor I mean labor that is usually invisible in capitalist economies, but which capitalist economies are typically reliant upon. This includes work inside the “domestic” or “private” sphere, including pregnancy, child-rearing, and other forms of labor needed to sustain households (and thus sustain productive persons). For some (e.g. Shulamith Firestone), it is the disproportionate burden that women face with regard to reproductive labor that is not a consequence, but a cause, of the gender inequality that characterizes modern society.

The Baby Gammy case might suggest that, actually, a middle or upper class woman (i.e. generally a woman who can afford a “gestational carrier”) might completely sidestep the reproductive labor of pregnancy by contracting with a gestational carrier. In other words, if a woman is rich enough, she can avoid much of the reproductive labor that some feminists take to be the origin of (or, at least, a central part of) the oppression that circumscribes their lives. Indeed, this view was behind Shulamith Firestone’s declaration that “matriarchy is a stage on the way to patriarchy.” It also underwrites Firestone’s support for a kind of state-run ectogenetic infrastructure (i.e. babies grown in external wombs in laboratories run by the state) that grows and rears children, freeing women from their biological bond(age) and bringing about true feminist emancipation.

Shulamith Firestone

In lieu of the kind of ectogenetic state-run infrastructure Firestone hoped for, it is typically poor and/or women of color who bear the brunt of this contracted out reproductive labor. They bear the brunt of our burdens—we are parasitic and reliant upon their labor. They are our burdens because, as stated above, reproductive labor is necessary to the functioning of capitalist economies. This is similar to the way that unpaid and underpaid labor in developing countries facilitates a level of consumption for Western countries that would otherwise be unsustainable. We are similarly parasitic and reliant upon the labor of workers in these countries.

Moore’s analysis skips all of these nuances. She refers to surrogacy as a “twisted form of slavery”—but what kind of slavery is not “twisted”? What does “twisted” mean here? What does she mean by “slavery” as well? We are not given answers to any of these questions. Instead, we are given potentially disastrous policy proposals. For example, she prefers that couples adopt children, instead of couples turning to the surrogacy process.

“What’s wrong with adoption?” she rhetorically asks. Well, it turns out that quite a lot might be wrong with adoption, particularly inter-country adoption. International adoption markets are breeding grounds for child kidnapping and/or laundering, where children are stolen from or sold by their families and presented as orphans in need of parents. Moreover, at least in some cases, the same set of concerns that Moore has about a woman’s (or family’s) context of choice applies to the adoption cases as well. Just as it seems unethical to “rent out a woman’s womb” if that woman is forced to make the choice to rent out her womb through dire socioeconomic circumstances, so it seems similarly unethical to “adopt a child” who was sold into adoption because of the family’s dire socioeconomic circumstances.

So Moore is right—this is “global capitalism in action.” It should make us uneasy (actually, more than uneasy). But statements such as “surrogacy is a twisted form of slavery” and “trading wombs and babies on the free market devalues women [and] life” are little more than rhetorical devices. We need better conceptual analysis to understand the ways in which global capitalism works. Only by gaining a better understanding of the socioeconomic forces that bring misery to peoples’ lives can we hope to combat those same forces. Specifically, we need to understand the position of women and their labor, and how this relationship plays out given different socioeconomic backdrops. Sloppy dictums are not what are needed here.

Raj Patel is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. He recently received his MPhil from the University of Cambridge in the History and Philosophy of Science. His interests are primarily in the philosophy of science and technology, and its relationship to political philosophy. He also has strong interests in postcolonial theory and Marxism. Twitter: @patellian.

The post Baby Gammy and the Problem of Women’s Labor appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Vanessa Lynn Lovelace

Associated Press/Jeff Roberson

On Saturday, August 9, 2014 at around noon, eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was gunned down by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer. Eyewitnesses report that Brown was unarmed when the officer opened fire on him. The autopsy reports that Brown was killed by multiple gunshot wounds, but the report initially did not reveal how many shots Brown sustained (we now know it is at least six). Two days later on Monday, August 11, 2014 several officers from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) shot and killed twenty-five year-old Ezell Ford. Ford was detained and placed on the ground when eyewitnesses say he was shot in the back. Brown and Ford are the most recent fatalities in the long list of young Black men and women who have been gunned down at the hands of those who deem themselves protectors of neighborhoods and communities—Darren Wilson, George Zimmerman, Theodore Wafer, Johannes Merserle, and the unnamed Los Angeles police officers to only name a few.

The fatal shooting of Michael Brown has sparked media and public outcry, and the town of Ferguson has erupted in multiday protests against police brutality and misconduct. Citizens of Ferguson and the surrounding areas, along with journalists from multiple sources, have taken to the streets to express their distrust and outrage at the constant and consistent denial of the value of Black lives by police departments, courts, government officials, and the media across the country. The protestors demand justice for Michael Brown through various campaigns, both violent and nonviolent. Many outside the area have taken to social media using #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, #Ferguson, and #MichaelBrown to show support and solidarity for the family and people of Ferguson who mourn the loss of one of its sons, as well as for the many other Black men and women who have, and will continue, to suffer the same fate.

Reuters/Lucas Jackson

It is significant for all of us that the town of Ferguson is protesting the use of excessive and fatal force by its police officers, and social media outlets are in an uproar about the killings of Brown and Ford.  This is of national and international importance because Ferguson is the first large scale protest in the name of justice for Black people in the United States, and against “civil protectors’’ since the LA riots of 1992 sparked by Rodney King’s beating by the LAPD. As a result, Ferguson has been turned into an occupied territory, surrounded by armed police forces and highway patrolmen who all wield ex-military gear, weapons, and tanks. Within this context of intense militarization, the protestors are being called violent, aggressive, and criminals.  They are presented as being in need of police monitoring, correction, and assault.

Associated Press/Jeff Roberson

I sit here angry, scared, and uncomfortable—not at the protestors, but at the turning of Ferguson into a war zone equipped with its own occupying forces. I have never been to Ferguson and only driven through Missouri. However, in this space there exist the geographical violences and memories of slavery that I seek to uncover and examine in my work as an academic. My passion for this subject grows from the fact that I am a Black woman with Black male relatives who have all been harassed, beaten, degraded, and arrested by the men and women we call our civil servants and protectors. My sister raises my three nephews knowing that one day she may have to bury them because they did not put their hands up fast enough. She has to tell my nephews that their silence and compliance will not always protect them. She has to remind them to remain quiet, still, and obedient, to never reach for anything, keep your hands up and on the dashboard, and maybe then you may walk away with only a beating as a warning.

Violence is in my blood. Violence is in my blood because it was beaten into my grandmother’s hands and stabbed into my uncle’s back. And yet, what I am hearing is that the people of Ferguson need to remain peaceful in their protest. They are told that they must maintain order in the distrust and contempt for those who are supposed to protect them. I ask: where was this order, peace, silence, diplomacy, and hands up policy when Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride, Emmett Till, Ezell Ford, Eric Garner, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Denise McNair, Marlene Pinnock, Stephon Watts, or Jordan Davis to name only a few, were made victims of “correctional violence?”

As Black feminist June Jordan, in her 1974 “Poem about Police Violence,” asks,

what you think would happen if

every time they kill a black boy

then we kill a cop (1989: 84)

 

All of these moments and spaces remain intimately connected. I write not to illuminate that fact, but to place Ferguson within a larger history of “corrective violence.” Slavery was a system of “corrective violence.” Colonialism was a system of “corrective violence.” Apartheid was a system of “corrective violence.” Jim Crow was a system of “corrective violence.” Reservations are a system of “corrective violence.”  Deportation and detention centers are “corrective violence.” Correctional violence is violence performed by individuals who are representatives of the state (read white men); it is used to correct the non-state sanctioned violence performed by deviant bodies. The U.S. leads the world in number of prisons in operation and of citizens incarcerated. The U.S. legal, policing, and prison systems—justice systems—are systems of “correctional

Associated Press/Jeff Roberson

violence.” Black, Brown and Native men, and oftentimes Black, Brown and Native women are always deemed the deviant bodies in need of policing and correcting.

As academic feminists, we often see corrective violence as something that we must bear witness to, but it remains outside of the hollow walls of our offices. We are aware, however, that our walls will not protect us from the racialized, sexualized violences universities enact on our students and ourselves. We are disciplined—coopted, silenced, denied tenure, harassed, arrested—into submission or erasure. Those of us who survive this may make it outside of these walls in order to study the men and women around the world who struggle against the restrictive power upon their lives and beings. The protests in Ferguson are demonstrations of anger at injustice, and therefore are a feminist concern.  The protests in Ferguson are part of a feminist project whether or not they take the form of violent or non-violent displays. In Ferguson, attention is being paid to Blackness and race.  People are demanding that race be talked about and that Black lives be valued. There has never been a moment in African American history where Black mothers and fathers did not have to worry about keeping their children—keeping them to raise them, keeping them safe, keeping them alive. The protests in Ferguson are central to feminism; they are a feminist fight.

Associated Press/Ron Harris

When June Jordan asks, what do you think will happen if every time they kill a black boy then we kill a cop, she is asking us to imagine what happens if corrective violence and its users had repercussions—repercussions that come from the communities who are subjected to this violence. How different would our history look, and how much would our justice system change if the statistics for dead white cops matched the number of unarmed dead Black boys? At every trial we hope justice will be served, but it never is because every day another unsuspecting Black man will be gunned down with his hands up. The history of racial violence in this country necessitates attention. It requires that we connect each gunned down Black man with each—raped woman of color, beaten and harassed Trans person, Muslim person called a terrorist and stripped of their civil rights, and every U.S. deportee. Race is a thing and an issue because it has been made that way by systems of corrective violence. It is for this reason that we cannot continue to close our eyes and pray that the world gets better. We have to demand that it change, as we do not have the privilege of having justice on our side. Justice does not favor communities of color’s rights and bodies; instead, justice (as it stands now) seeks only our systematic eradication.

Twitter/Alex Wroblewski

Protests cannot be peaceful and effectively disrupt the political, judicial, and police processes that continue to devalue Black lives. We must recognize violence as an alternative to peaceful protest. Rage against corrective violence is a valid space of resistance to the use of state sanctioned deadly violence. We must refuse the deceiving narratives that incite fear of deviant bodies who speak out against the killing of Black communities.  Communities of color do not have the luxury of seeing change, demanding liberty, or claiming their humanity through peaceful protests.

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Vanessa Lynn Lovelace is a doctoral candidate in Political Science and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her research interests include the gendering of Black bodies; the usage of violence as a means of revolution and rebellion; postcolonial feminist theory; the theoretical concept of liberty; and the history of African American radical movements and traditions. She is a poet and teacher, and currently on the academic job market.

The post On Ferguson’s Protest and Its Occupation appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Carolyn Davis

Just about 15 months ago, I sat in front of my television in Brookline, a Boston suburb, and watched on live TV as police officers rolled armored vehicles down the streets of neighboring Watertown. Many of the officers were outfitted in tactical gear fit for urban warfare. They swarmed the residential streets, assuming sniper positions atop cars and roofs. Others swept through homes, guns raised. When suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was finally found in a local resident’s dry-docked boat—lying wounded and curled in the fetal position—police strafed the boat with gunfire. Bullets lodged not only in the boat, but also in neighboring homes up to two doors down. Tsarnaev was later found to not have fired a single shot in that final exchange. In the short term, most of us felt relief. However, the sheer firepower exhibited by local police that day has continued to trouble me since.

The images coming out of Ferguson, MO, once again have revealed the startlingly vast capacities of modern police forces to rival advanced military units in tactical gear (regrettably, however, this comparison extends to neither discipline nor training). And we have seen as well the psychotropic powers of such scenarios. Civilian police forces seem increasingly imbued with a sense that they are engaged in urban warfare against enemy combatants. In Ferguson, the contrast is especially stark: a predominantly white police force, dressed for combat and armed to the teeth, facing off with predominantly black citizens and protestors.

Recent commentaries from Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall and Dan Arel at Patheos.com have sought to separate the discourses of police militarization from racist policing practices. They are each concerned that conflating the two risks obscuring or dismissing the long American history of racist police brutality. Their concerns are apt. In Ferguson, police outfitted in tactical fatigues atop armored vehicles aim guns at an unarmed black citizenry standing in protest. Such a confrontation is unmistakably the extrapolation of the volatile combination of racism and inordinate power that infects local police forces across the country. However, I suspect there is more nuanced connection between racism and police militarization in the United States that demands engagement.

How and why did we come to unquestioningly welcome tactical police gear and armored vehicles on our city streets? The presence of enough tactical equipment to support the defense needs of a small nation would not be possible without the establishment of a dangerous but profitable American ideology of state power at home and abroad. However, I would argue that the hyperaggression of police in Ferguson would not be possible without the state power amassed from the pervasive undercurrent of racist microaggressions that pervade American life.

The violence of recent days reveals the intersection of a host of critical issues that generally remain compartmentalized in public discourse. We talk about the rise of the prison industrial complex, of racism and brutality in law enforcement, of the questionable militarization of civilian police departments. Ferguson makes clear the desperate need for these phenomena to be examined as expressions of a larger problem. If we are willing to engage it, the situation in Ferguson has incited a powerful moment for the American conscience.

Overwhelming force against an unarmed citizenry can wake us up. But it is the compounding effect of so many stop-and-frisks, unwarranted traffic stops, questionable searches and seizures, and everyday oppressions that make it possible to incrementally advance a consolidated sense of unified (white) state power without public revolt (not to mention the demoralization of generations of people for whom incarceration is a fact of life for either themselves or their immediate family members). Further, the establishment of a relatively docile citizenry becomes relatively easy to achieve when white folks believe that they sit comfortably on the right side of state aggression.

Domestically, these ideas leave most Americans unwilling to question or challenge a system that quietly funnels a staggering number of black men into its machinations by beginning early. Policing and sentencing laws destroy the capacity of so many black youths to escape cycles of petty crime and drastic sentences of incarceration. At the heart of this system, not surprisingly, is profit—privatized prison contractors who benefit from increasingly high rates of recidivism. The system profits significantly from exploiting increasingly entrenched social ideas about deterrence and rehabilitation.

An armored police force is not, as Foucault would remind us, a necessity in such a system of pervasive racism. But police militarization can become a natural extension when one recalls its link to the state at large.

American foreign policy echoes the confidence in the capacity (and authority) of the state to exert disproportionate force for deterrence and social rehabilitation. The rise of nation-building as a foreign policy doctrine for most of the American Century proved equally profitable for defense and military contractors. It went equally unquestioned by most Americans, who retained confidence in the ideals of the United States as an ideological beacon for world order and democratic progress.

When this doctrine is turned outward, we run tanks down the streets of Baghdad. Turned inward, we run tanks down the streets of Watertown and Ferguson. And again, we are remiss not to recognize the role of profit and privatization in American police militarization. Weapons and defense contractors benefit from stoking the hypervigilance of the modern police force, outfitting American police units while enjoying the excesses of Defense Department contracts.

It must be recognized that the militarization of the American police force exists not apart from, but deeply enmeshed with the rise of a prison industrial complex that relies on the early and repeat incarceration of society’s disenfranchised. The personification of an American military as a global police force becomes a natural complement to domestic “values” as well as capitalist exploitation. Such ideology feeds on ideals of social purity, moral righteousness, and firm boundaries between enemies and allies. It is the same ideology that has empowered increasingly-armed police forces to carry out racist and mortally dangerous policing practices at the expense of basic civil liberties.

Meanwhile, many of us continue to live in the in-between. We are generally privileged to enjoy neither the regular and racialized threat of police intimidation and incarceration, nor the receiving end of troubling foreign policy. What does this mean, specifically, for those engaged in prophetic scholarship and public intellectualism? I think it means redoubling our efforts to raise questions about the links between racism, power, and the state. Speaking of armored vehicles and racist policing is not an either/or proposition, but a deeply enmeshed problem for the modern state. I urge Josh Marshall and Dan Arel to continue reflecting on these connections.

A Coda

Feminist scholars have the advantage of working and talking across often-siloed discourses. I hope that we can continue to find ways to integrate such questions into our research, writing, and teaching. What does it mean for a feminist to ask about the nature of policing a citizenry? Further, where do these questions intersect, on the ground, with the lives of women and the marginalized? Strong examples of such reflection have come from The Nation’s Dani McClain and The Feminist Wire’s Tamura Lomax, who each argue that the need for communities safe from police brutality and racist criminal “justice” is deeply tied to the feminist/womanist quest for flourishing.

In Frames of War, Judith Butler writes, “Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.” The precariousness of black life in America has been invoked again this week. The deployment of militarized instruments of force in Ferguson and elsewhere only reinforces the precarity of certain civilian lives before the modern state. I hope that feminists and public intellectuals alike can continue to link thoughtful and integrated responses to the pervasive idolatry of American firepower that has seduced our civic life.

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Carolyn Davis recently received her Ph.D. in Religion from Vanderbilt University, where she specialized in Theological Studies, Philosophy, and Women, Gender, and Religion. Her research examines the relationships between human sexuality, young people, popular and political rhetoric, and feminist theology and philosophy. She currently resides in Washington, DC, where she is engaged in several projects relating faith communities to reproductive justice and faith-based youth sexuality education. She is also an ordained minister in The United Methodist Church.

The post Police Militarization, Race, and American Ideology: A Response to Dan Arel and Josh Marshall appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

The Feminist Wire is honored to support Faculty Against Rape (FAR). We reprint their press release, issued today, in solidarity with FAR, faculty members who seek to address sexual violence on college campuses, student activists, and anyone who works toward a world without rape.

FACULTY GROUP FORMS TO ADDRESS CAMPUS RAPE

Faculty Against Rape (FAR) is the First National Organization of its Kind

Leading faculty members and sexual violence activists from across the nation have come together to form Faculty Against Rape (FAR), the first national faculty organization of its kind. FAR’s mission is to get more faculty involved in sexual assault issues on campus, and to protect faculty who experience retaliation for doing so. FAR’s website provides research and resources for faculty, and FAR staff are available to help faculty who want to push for policy reforms on their campus, organize with students, or file federal Title IX or Clery complaints. FAR’s name is a nod to the Feminist Alliance Against Rape (FAAR), the first national anti-rape organization established in 1974.

FAR’s advisory board includes the leading experts on sexual assault in the U.S., including Mary Koss, Jennifer Freyd, Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Jackson Katz, Walter DeKeseredy, Darnell Moore, John Foubert, Michael Flood, James Peterson, Kimberly Theidon, and others. FAR is endorsed by the American Association of University Professors, Know Your IX, One In Four USA, Students Active for Ending Rape (SAFER), and Men Can Stop Rape.

Simona Sharoni, FAR co-founder and Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at SUNY Plattsburgh notes that “Faculty must play a role in addressing the growing epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses because good teaching begins with compassion for students. Moreover, faculty are on the frontlines since survivors of rape or sexual assault tend approach a professor to share their experiences.”

Bill Flack, FAR co-founder and Associate Professor of Psychology at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania points out that “Researchers have known for decades about the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses. This information needs to be shared widely so that everyone understands the extent of this chronic public health crisis and the need for a serious, long-term commitment to eradicating it.”

Shira Tarrant, FAR co-founder and Associate Professor at California State University, Long Beach notes that “As faculty, we support students in honing their intellectual skills and thriving in their personal lives. A safe campus is crucial to meeting both of these goals.”

Caroline Heldman, FAR co-founder and Associate Professor of Politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles, thinks that faculty have significant power to bring about needed reform. “Administrators are notorious for stonewalling and glad handing student activists until they graduate. But faculty members do not graduate every four years, so faculty-student collaborations are especially effective in making lasting change.”

The post Faculty Against Rape: Press Release appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Ahmad Greene-Hayes

Inspired by the story of a Black enslaved woman, Margaret Garner, Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved explores the narrative of Sethe, who killed her daughter Beloved to protect her from the racialized and sexualized violence of slavery. After leaving her former plantation—Sweet Home—and rejected, Beloved’s ghost returns from the grave to haunt Sethe and those who live with her in 124. Her vengeance grows increasingly vehement once she reincarnates as a full-grown woman.

Once the town women catch wind of the devil-like happenings within 124, they galvanize. Led by Ella—who resembles Black feminist warrior Ella Baker—they head towards the house with prayer and song. Invoking the spirit of Baby Suggs, who had so diligently ministered to the women in this community for years, they are able to break the yoke of bondage from Sethe. Beloved’s grip—so strong a force that once held Sethe’s mind, body, and faculties—is relinquished as the chains that confined her to 124 are broken. Beloved was exorcised.

Morrison uses the novel, Beloved, to address how Blacks must exorcise themselves of the hurt, pain, and brokenness of slavery’s ghost. The novel also provides a useful lens for viewing the Black church and its role in this transgenerational healing process.

This summer, a plethora of Black churches joined together, like the women in Beloved, to exorcise themselves of spiritual ills. These gatherings occur under tents and are called “tent revivals.” They take place outside in the heat of summer, usually in the evenings as the cool summer breeze blows, the sun sets, and the sweet aroma of flowers grace the nostrils of the youngest child to the eldest congregant. Sermons are preached, people shout and dance, yell and scream, and their respective communities bear witness to the performative and spiritual practices typically confined to the four walls of their churches. The avowedly saved, sanctified, and Holy Ghost-filled saints gather under these erected tents to invoke the presence of God and to call down “revival.”

Though tent revivals are spaces for communal healing within many Black communities, only certain individuals are embraced under the tent. When some individuals enter, the significances of their lived experiences are relegated to the shadows. Two particular identity groups come to mind—Black queer folk and Black women— though there are so many others. When Black LGBT-identifying individuals attend church services and tent revivals, they are pathologized and deemed ungodly. When Black women, who make up a large portion of the Black church populace, enter the tent, they are called Sister, Evangelist or Pastor, and then told to submit and serve the men.

In many regards, Morrison’s Beloved shows us how some Black women counteract these norms by subversively disrupting notions that they remain silenced. In so doing, they travail for their own personal spiritual exorcisms in ways fully separate from men. However, twenty-seven years after Beloved’s publishing, the tent of Black churches—consumed with the adulation of the Black male patriarch—is still stuck in the days of female subjugation and heteropatriarchy, and are ultimately resistant to faith feminisms and queer inclusivity.

Tent revivals have deep histories. People in the U.S. South, historically former enslaved Blacks and African Americans living during Jim Crow, would gather hoping to receive manna from heaven to give them strength for the journey of resistance ahead [1]. When enslaved women were sexually abused on the plantation, as depicted in Morrison’s Beloved, these assemblies were spaces for them to heal together. When enslaved men were castrated or brutally beaten, these meetings afforded them the chance to cry, to breathe, and to gain strength from on high. When enslaved children were violated, these get-togethers gave them space to find restoration from their trauma. For my ancestors, the “tent” was metaphoric, if not solely representative of how God can hide the oppressed under an Almighty shadow.

The happenings in Morrison’s Beloved did not occur under a physical tent, but the events underscored irradiate communal healing. That is, a battered group of individuals—more specifically, Black women—joined together in the spirit of love, reconciliation, and as Morrison demonstrates, exorcism. It also accentuates how Black women have fought tirelessly to keep Black churches open; in fact, they have labored so church buildings, tent poles, and gathering grounds could remain accessible. Though the Black church has had its share of issues, it has been a space where the love and forgiveness of God can be exemplified in the lives of its believers.

How, then, do we reconcile the powerful history of Black churches and tents with the ways they also marginalize and disregard voices? Jesus said in Matthew 11:28, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Yet, so many come and are turned away by the pervasive bigotry—directed at Black queer folk and Black women—interwoven with the hateful and harmful theologies spewed from pulpits and fostered under summer revival tents.

***

Wholeness refers to at least three interrelated aspects of the Black struggle. First, it implies that an individual is whole, that is, spiritually, emotionally, psychically, and physically healed from the wounds of his/her oppression. Second, wholeness suggests that the Black community is not divided against itself in terms of harboring sexism, classism, colorism, or heterosexism. In other words, the community is free from “horizontal violence.” Finally, wholeness means that the community itself is free, liberated from oppression, so that each member of the community can fulfill his/her singular potential as a child of God.

–Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas (1999: 128)

***

I was raised in the Black church. I’ve heard church folk use the f-word and purport the myth of female inferiority all in one breath. These scenarios are all too common. They happen at almost every church gathering. For example, one evening after my church’s pastor taught a bible study class about sexual perversion, the openly gay, male mass choir secretary approached him saying, “I guess I’m going to bust hell wide open, because my Tim has been just too good to me.” And in reply, the Pastor told him, “You sure will,” without hesitancy. Many Black queer people and many Black women feel oppressed by the very same churches that they pay their tithes to or support at every waking moment. So many Black churches need to be exorcised from the social sins of homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, sexism, and heterosexism. Black queer folk and Black women who love Jesus should not have to sacrifice their humanity just to feel safe and protected while enjoying the Black cultural and spiritual practices inherent to Black churches and their summer revival tents.

When will the Black church-at-large speak and become inclusive to the unique lived experiences of queer Black women and men? When will the Black church stop making excuses for child molesters and down-low brothers in the pulpit like Eddie S. Long?

The Independent Lens documentary, The New Black, and PBS’ forthcoming segment on Gospel artist Tonex, are echoing these seemingly age-old questions and concerns. In 2014, we have witnessed so many racialized and gendered attacks on queer people of color—for instance, the attack of two Black trans women on a MARTA train in Atlanta, Georgia, the murder of Black lesbians Britney Cosby and Crystal Jackson from Houston, Texas, and the murders of 27-year-old Ahmed Said and 23-year-old Dwone Anderson-Young from Seattle, Washington this summer. Though these three cases may not be tied directly to the Black church, they are related. It is common in Black churches, among many other religious organizations, for queer violence to be preached in the name of a man-identified homophobic god. Harmful and hurtful theologies encourage physical violence, murder, and death—words, too, can kill.

Not only are these spaces complicit in anti-queer rhetoric, but they also perpetuate misogynoir, as seen in Pastor Jamal H. Bryant’s recent “these hoes ain’t loyal” comment in a sermon at his Baltimore church. Dr. Brittney Cooper penned, “Jesus Wasn’t A Slut-Shamer,” to accentuate the quandaries of attending Black churches while identifying as a faith feminist. Like Cooper, “I love Jesus, and I remain a person of faith, because I know, to put it in the parlance of the Black Churches of my youth, how good God has been to me.” Importantly as Cooper also writes, “what I am not is a person who will willingly check [their] brain, political convictions, or academic training at the door in order to enter the house of God or to participate in a community of faith.”

The God I serve is a god of love. In fact, they are love. God is not a man. God does not have a race. God is a spirit. A loving spirit. A spirit that reaches down to the deepest depths of the human spirit and loves without respect of persons. As the late Maya Angelou once said during Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul Sundays, “God is All.”

Tent revivals and black churches will not precipitate true communal healing unless they are driven and informed by “All.”  Communal healing comes from a love ethos predicated on anti-colonial, anti-misogynistic, feminist, and queer inclusive themes and ideologies. Unless the Black church addresses its involvement in preserving and perpetuating neoslavery narratives, it will remain dead. Black communities are in need of communal healing, as Black people continue facing the undying and persistent legacies of colonialism, enslavement, and Jim Crow. Sadly, the Black church and its tent—stuck in the bygone days of efficacy—may no longer provide transformation. Revivals need not be solely traditional, rather, they must embody a revolutionary theology, a Womanist theology, an all-inclusive theology. For truly, revival without “All” is not revival.

*****

[1] It should be noted, however, that white ministers from the slaveholding class proselytized blacks to a Christian God, and that the enslaved then adopted the spiritual and religious beliefs of their enslavers (Harrell, 1975). Blacks, then, formed a symbiosis of African culture and white religious practices. Creatively, they found enigmatic ways to incorporate African theological principles, healing tales and rituals, song, and dance, all while subsuming to the commands of their “holy-rolling” enslavers (Spillers, “Moving on Down the Line,” 1988). Though white influence cannot be denied, the gathering of Blacks on the plantation to commune with God and the ancestors was uniquely Black, that is, solely characteristic of peoples stolen from Africa and brought to the Americas.

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Ahmad Greene-Hayes is a student at Williams College, a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, a Jackie Robinson Scholar, a History major, and an Africana Studies concentrator. He is a male-Womanist and a radical voice in a generation of upcoming scholars and activists. Ahmad is co-founder of Kaleidoscopes: Diaspora Re-imagined, a student-run academic journal that offers a space for scholars and social activists to interrogate issues pertinent to the African diaspora, while concomitantly deconstructing dominant historical discourses involving people of African descent. Follow him on Twitter @_BrothaG.

The post Bringing “All” to the Tent of Communal Healing appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Princess Harmony-Jazmyne Rodriguez 

The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.

- Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, (1978)” in Sister Outsider, 2007

Dear Survivors of Violence, Friends and Allies of Survivors, Anti-Violence Activists, and Temple University,

Survivors of sexual and gender violence, in general, are not cut from the same cloth, especially survivors of sexual and gender violence on college campuses. Some of us are trans, some of us are male, some of us are lesbian, gay, or bisexual, some of us are people of color, some of us were raped while intoxicated, and some of us have mental illnesses even before the traumatic experience. There are still many whose voices have yet to be heard—some who because of societal expectations cannot speak out and some whose voices are suppressed under the weight of the image of what a survivor is supposed to be or look like.

I am Princess, and I have a silence of my own that must be broken. In fact, I will do much more than break my silence—I will smash it and never be silent again. Audre Lorde (2007 [1978]: 41) argues that “your silence will not protect you.” She was right, very much so. I write this today as a survivor of rape, stalking, and anti-trans hate violence. I have survived much more than that, but what makes these events stand out is that they all occurred on a college campus, at my dream school: Temple University. I thought my initial silence—fear masked as strength—would protect me from getting hurt more. I thought silence would protect me from the veil of pain I’d lived behind since the incident. I was wrong. There is nothing that I’ve ever been more wrong about. It has hurt me far more to stay silent and to speak my pain silently through rage and sadness toward my sister and best friend. I’ve made a better choice, I have chosen to shout my pain at the world—not in a fury, but in organized efforts to tell my story and hopefully encourage other survivors to demand the justice owed to them.

I’ve told my story to everyone I could find at Temple University who would listen, and whom I thought could bring me justice. From security officers to administrators, my story was met with feigned concern and eyes that betrayed their dishonesty.  I was raped on my very first weekend at Temple University during “Welcome Week.” It was also during those weeks in August that a man started stalking me.  He would never leave me alone, until I learned to hide in my room out of fear that he’d find me. It was the only place he couldn’t get me. The last act of violence that sealed my fear and silence into place was another man threatening to “crack my f*ggot skull.”

Temple University defended these men overtly and covertly. The rape was presented and put on display as something that I deserved because I’d been drinking. They pulled the, “I don’t mean to blame the victim, but…” card in articles written by the school paper. The entire time Temple University swore it was helping those of us who had been assaulted. I can’t speak for any of the others who were assaulted, but Temple did not help me.

My stalker was given free reign to stalk me because Campus Safety Services (CSS) didn’t do anything to ensure my safety and well being, and neither did Temple University’s Wellness Resource Center (WRC). CSS told me to investigate my own stalker. He would come up and harass me, and my sister, and there was nothing that could be done. The WRC refused to help me with the rape, their official reason being that it was “out of their jurisdiction.” Unofficially, they were not equipped to deal with trans survivors. Helping me would have been “the same as helping a male and they could not do that,” as I was told by one Temple University administrator.

These betrayals—although shattering my faith in the institution I wanted to take pride in—could have been survivable had it not been for the total isolation. I stayed silent because I was discouraged to speak.  Administrators and student employees told me that talking about my rape—even to say that I had been raped—was “negative.” I was asked, unofficially, not to make Temple University look bad. Officially I was told that if I continue to speak the truth about what happened, I was placing the future of my student life in jeopardy.  However, all I can think to say about this statement is that Temple makes itself look bad. Everything about my case is and looks bad.

Temple failed to investigate any of my experiences with violence. The very first incident could have been successfully dealt with, if only an attempt was made. Resident Assistants, security officers, Temple University Police Department officers, and paramedics had all been there—they all flooded the lobby of Temple Towers, my dorm at the time. They were all asking me questions and preparing to send me to the hospital because I was drunk. At the time of the questioning, I began to awaken from a short blackout. My assaulter was visibly panicked, but they let him walk away. Despite the ample physical evidence of a rape that he left on me, they didn’t ask me anything about him.

The failure of the authorities to take any physical evidence meant I would have an uphill battle, if I pressed charges. Shortly after the incident, I received an email notification stating that I violated the student code of conduct for drinking.  At the end of the conduct hearing, the Coordinator for Student Conduct forced me to talk about what happened to me. I didn’t receive any offers of help from anyone until after I had been hospitalized—a hospitalization that happened after I’d seen my rape paraded all over the newspapers on multiple occasions.  However, these delayed offers were short lived the moment I mentioned that I’m a trans woman.

When I decided to press charges, phone calls had been promised but none were made. That door was shut in my face and I could never open it again. I live knowing that my rapist is out there and I’ll never get justice. Worse, I live knowing that he will rape again and again because nobody will stop him—and they never stop at one.

Eventually, I went back to the Coordinator for Student Conduct. From the very start her face revealed that she could not care less. When I asked what happened with the case against my rapist, I was met with: “I don’t know, what do I care?” I will never forget the coldness in her eyes and outright contempt she showed for me when she forced me to report and spat out those words.

“I don’t know, what do I care?” is essentially Temple University’s motto when it comes to student-on-student violence. Temple University, nestled in North Philadelphia, is an area of the city that has a reputation for violent crime. Some even believe that students are targeted purposely by members of the surrounding community. Whether that is true or not is irrelevant because debating that narrative is used as a means to hide student-on-student violence. The people of North Philadelphia are scapegoated as the perpetrators of crime on campus.

However, the reality is that Temple is not any different from any other college campus in the U.S.—students rape, stalk, and attack other students. Student crimes are swept under the rug. Or, more appropriately for Temple University, swept under posters and colorful signs. Temple University prides itself on its participation in V-Day, the Clothesline Project, National Coming Out Week, and it even goes so far to title itself as the “Diversity University.” Violence against women and the LGBT community is hidden underneath all of these, perhaps purposely.

You can champion every single cause on the planet, but if you simultaneously betray all of them, you will be exposed. I will never stop shouting from the rooftops, even if I have to shout into the wind. I will never stop shouting for those survivors who aren’t convenient for their schools to deal with, or those survivors who aren’t the “conventional” image of the survivor (or, rather, “victim” since that is what they desire us to be forever). There is no undoing the damage this experience has caused me. My college dream turned into a nightmare. However, what I can and will do from this point forward is help others to find their voices and tell their stories.  Ultimately, I want to help ensure this will never happen to another person.

As I write this open letter, I await the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to make a decision to investigate my Title IX complaint. I have every hope they will. I will use every legal means at my disposal to fight for justice for myself and to reform Temple University and all other schools’ process for handling sexual violence against LGBTQ-identified people. Anti-violence work by University organizations requires more than slogans, posters, hashtags, and public relations campaigns. It requires mentioning, acknowledging, and dealing with issues or words that aren’t convenient for a PR campaign. It requires recognizing and dealing with a variety of violences. If Temple is still devoted to the mission set forth by its founder, Russell Conwell, then it should be brave and engage directly with the issue of student-on-student violence.

For the survivor who has not come out at Temple University, or anywhere else, know that you are not alone. There are thousands and tens of thousands of survivors here supporting you. I understand why you may not want to speak about what happened to you, and I support you if you choose not to.  If you want to, but are afraid, do it. Shout and make them hear you.  As Audre Lorde (1997 [1980]: 13) encourages us to consider,

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

I don’t know what happens from here, or what the future holds. All I know is that I will continue to fight against violence and tell my story until my very last breath. It may be a fool’s dream, but I want to see the day when universities are the institutions of higher learning and eternal culture that they were meant to be—free of violence and freely flowing with knowledge.

Perseverantia Vincit,

Princess Harmony R.

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Princess Harmony is a highly opinionated Afrolatin trans woman who is a survivor of sexual violence, drug addiction, and mental illness. She holds an Associates Degree in the Social Sciences and is currently pursuing Bachelors Degrees in History and Social Work at Temple University. Her writings include several published articles on HIV awareness, issues facing trans women, and campus sexual and gender-based violence.

The post Perseverance Conquers: An Open Letter appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Brittany Chávez and Louis Yako

The authors of this piece refuse the pitfalls of identity politics, but we both connect deeply and find ourselves situated with people, whom, in today’s world, count as “the wretched of the earth.” What is at stake in these two stories is far from just personal. We explicitly pull from the feminist adage “the personal is political” in politicizing our stories and choosing not to be silenced. We are also two dear friends, writing in two voices, together, both located at major Research One American universities and thriving in our doctoral programs. We found one another in a shared class during our doctoral coursework, and we cling to like- minded individuals so that we can be with those who understand, find a way to stay, and help each other not feel isolated and insignificant. As it will become clear to any reader of these stories, race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, citizenship and belonging are all intersectional, and oppression is systematic.

Voice 1

I am an Afro-diasporic, border-jumping artist-scholar-activist. I spend most of my time living and working in México. I am invested in decolonial projects of sensing, being, and doing.

At the end of last year, I attended the major conference for my discipline on the East Coast of the United States. At this conference, my former MA professor, a straight white heteronormative male whom I had stopped talking to because of his blatant sexist and racist aggressions towards me in the past, was present. In typical hypocritical academic “collegiality,” he approached me, uninvited, and began to spew his mouth, per usual. The hair on my back prickled as he came closer to me. “So how is the program going for you? Are you pissing off the right people?” he asked me sarcastically. (He was the only person I pissed off in my MA, because I intimidated him.) I told him, very casually, that I was doing great and would soon enter the exam and prospectus stages of the doctorate. He continued, “Well, you know, because you are a woman of color, people are going to be easy on you. Therefore, you seek out this white straight male professor to ask you the proper critical questions, because no one else is going to do that for you.” Incredulously, I stared at him in shock, saying I would never choose to work with the person he had recommended because it made no sense for my work. He continued to insist; meanwhile, in my total dumbfoundedness, I could not come up with a proper smart aleck retort that I later wished I had. I wish I would have come up with something that would have allowed me to walk away from that situation with a sense of my dignity being in tact.

I left that day furious and hurting and upset with myself for being so upset. What got to me the most was I knew how not to listen to men like him, men who want to undermine my process and those brilliant people who work with and push me. But what about the countless others who experience these microaggressions, who actually take them to heart, or for whatever reasons, do not have a way to see the bigger picture? What about how privileged men like him impose their own world views on others and convince them to believe it?

Later, I wrote him a long letter telling him he was not to ever write, approach, or speak to me again and that my career had no dependence on him and that I did not deserve that treatment. In the process of writing the letter, I was torn about whether to hate him or forgive him. On the one hand, I wanted to hate him because his actions have affected and will continue to affect countless others as he goes on unchecked. On the other hand, I understand and see profoundly that he is a product of indoctrination in American academic settings that privilege the straight, white European male over all others and that people like me really are seen as inferior, less intelligent, and insignificant. There are so few people like myself in higher education precisely because of these aggressions. Any psychological preparation oftentimes is not enough to completely put aside this kind of oppression. The hurt and the upset is still very real and a process one has to go through. My concern is that it can be so belittling, violent, and forceful that it pushes us out. We have to carve our own spaces so that we feel we can stay and be heard.

Voice 2

I am an Iraqi-American intellectual and scholar whose mission is to study and understand the turmoil Iraq in general and Iraqi academics in particular have endured during the last couple of decades. I try to understand this through all possible theoretical frameworks that may speak to their reality, rather than confine my world to Euro-American ways of understanding and explaining the world and its misfortunes, usually caused by the same people dominating theory and knowledge production.

Last year, I was invited to a conference in Washington, D.C. about the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war. I was on a panel of Iraqi scholars and American professors, including some who have provided “advice” to White House officials before, during, and after the occupation of Iraq. As the panel discussions started, one white, heteronormative American professor started talking about how the former Iraqi regime had to be toppled and that, despite the casualties in Iraq, it was worth it. He, along with other speakers, also emphasized that an ideological regime like the former Iraqi regime is dangerous for both Iraqis and the world. Subsequently, I cited Louis Althusser and some decolonial thinkers, in order to discuss how every system, including Western systems, are deeply and disturbingly ideological, and how all of Iraq’s ideological apparatus was negligible next to the American ideological apparatus. He cited the example of the Iraqi educational system under the Baath regime, that was designed to create an Iraqi subject that was in tune with the Baath teachings and ideologies. I responded with a question about the American education system and its part in an ideological apparatus that creates an American citizen and subject that views the world in a particular way, usually with an eye of superiority. I asked, “So what right does the U.S. have to come and destroy Iraq for such a reason?” The American professor did not like my comments. During the break, he approached me and asked, in a rather provocative way:  “So, you are at Duke?”

Me: “Yes, I am.”

Professor: “How did you make it to Duke? It is hard to get there, unless you graduate from an Ivy League school. You are lucky!”

There is so much to unpack in these provocative, racist, and mediocre statements. First, there is some truth in that Ivy League universities tend to circulate the elite, God’s chosen students who more or less dominate the scene. Second, there is the assumption that I got to Duke not because I am qualified, but because I am “lucky.” So, in other words, a white privileged person getting to Duke—or any Ivy League school—would be “smart” and “brilliant,” while students of color, minorities, or those of lower classes are simply “lucky” to be there. Besides being belittling and materially aggressive, these kinds of comments do not take into account the perspectives and insights that come from people with different experiences in the world, like people from war zones and people whose lives were not simply a journey of collecting butterflies and wildflowers at the riverbank. People whose life stories go beyond the theories that are imposed on us in Western academia as the Bible; peoples whose own stories are so powerful that they can become a means of theorizing, in a world where the shirt of the past no longer fits the present. This incident revealed to me the truly precarious position people like me hold in academic settings. Our very presence is an act of war that could shake the foundation from which comments like this professor’s arise. Not to mention that the violence we are up against is not just epistemic, it is material.

Voicing Together

American ideals about meritocracy and “pulling yourself up by your boot straps” are myths. They simply do not exist. Education in a capitalist system is not designed to take you out of the class you are born into. People—especially poor people—are duped into thinking that education is a way out of poverty. For example, my parents refused to accept our working class reality. They lived far beyond their means to make us feel like we were middle class. The further along I went in the education, while paying my way through, the more I became painfully aware of the reality of my class. I had to deal with the way my parents still wanted to believe otherwise, because it was too painful for them, as “professionals,” to accept that they would never escape their class either.

Along the same lines, not only are scholars underpaid and overworked in precarious positions, I have come to know a significant amount of graduate students whose financial means and responsibilities make their wages so tight that they have to depend on programs like food stamps and food pantries from time to time in order to make it, all of this while trying to meet the expectations of graduate school. Even if you earn the tenure-track position, these daily realities often do not change, the stage just looks different from the outside. Even if you “make it” through all of these nightmarish hoops, the best place that you can get as a person from a class and background that is deemed “less than” is serving the very people who made it a nightmare in the first place. Even if you are one of these minorities who makes it to the position of a professor at an institution of higher education, having an office and attending cocktail parties with colleagues is hardly an indication of leaving a particular class background. Being an underprivileged minorities in such institutions means we have to work ten times as hard just to stay and our position is as precarious as working class positions outside of the academy. This is the reality we are rarely told.

Another serious problem that we see in the academy is that it ostensibly trains you to be a critical thinker, yet when you are out in the world (even from inside academia) and are actually critical of what you see around you, you are often punished instead of being acknowledged for critically interrogating the system. This is particularly dangerous for intellectuals, artists, activists, and other people who participate in knowledge production, because people from these groups, when they write or create, purposefully speak directly to what distresses them rather than participating in avoidance or flowery language. There are countless examples of when scholars have had to pay for their critical interventions, by not getting tenured, getting fired, or being eternally marginzalized, all forms of intellectual death while still alive. To give just one example, Ricardo Dominguez was threatened with losing his job (revocation of tenure) in the University of California system for developing the idea of the Transborder Immigrant Tool, which was an application that would allow immigrants to use GPS technology via cheap cell phones to find water stored in the desert between Mexico and Southern California and to access poems, which Dominguez calls “survival poetry.” He was threatened with losing his job when this idea was still in the thought experiment phase. We see a great divide between what the academy claims to be training us to do and the workplace, which wants you to zip your mouth if you want to succeed and advance. As a result, we feel that we are in a very Kafka/Orwellian phase in which the most valued are often those who train people to get corporate and managerial positions, not those who are trained to think. Just look at the number of articles that have come out discouraging prospective humanities and social science students.

We do recognize that there are people who are supportive of difference and diversity, and because of their courage, we are still here. However, such people also come under attack for doing their work with honesty and candor. They are usually named “radical” in a derogatory way, and they often end up dealing with the same challenges that we encounter. They are hyper-scrutinized. They receive attacks that are meant to undermine them rather than foster healthy, scholarly conversation.

Hence, it is crucial to approach these issues and have these conversations very seriously and with great understanding, even in a confrontational manner, rather than use the mask of political correctness and the velvet gloves of hypocritical politeness. If we do not, we end up in a situation that reminds us of the Arabic phrase, “We are the dagger and the wound at the same time.” For injustice to end, the wound must stop cooperating with the dagger. Police us for writing this if you will, but any policing just further proves our point.

Brittany Chávez is an artist-scholar-activist. They are a performance artist with the internationally-renowned performance troupe La Pocha Nostra and a doctoral student in performance studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. Through their art and scholarship, they continue to push the boundaries of art and activism, life and practice, and body and text.

Louis Yako is an Iraqi-American writer, poet, and scholar of Cultural Anthropology, researching Iraqi higher education and intellectuals at Duke University.

The post The Myth of Diversity and Critical Thinking in American Academia appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Grace Corn

In today’s world, the very word “feminism” can stir up polarized reactions. As a feminist myself, I find it difficult to understand how feminism, in Pat Robertson’s words, “encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” Nevertheless, this interpretation prevails throughout history, especially through its documentation. Feminism has many definitions—a fact outlined, and used to belittle the meaning of feminism, in many online definitions.  For example, feminism is defined as “a word that has too many excessively long definitions.” However, feminism can also be considered  “the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men.” Because there are multiple feminisms, it is difficult to find a universal understanding or truth of feminism. Feminism offers a challenging, yet interesting, approach to history. Definitions can be dangerous because one definition can silence other interpretations, but I would like to focus on the understanding of feminism as “advocating equal rights” as an approach to history.

What does an historical feminist approach involve? For some, a feminist history refers to the re-reading of history from a feminist viewpoint. Part of this approach is to explore and illuminate women’s perspective of history because it has been silenced or overlooked. The feminist approach involves investigating history for the role of women’s participation and influence (be that of female artists, writers, musicians, etc.). This is different from the history of feminism, which highlights the development of the feminist movement through a chronological narrative of movements and their ideologies.  Likewise, women’s history, is not a historical approach, but rather outlines the  role that women have played in history. It generally involves studying the growth of women’s rights throughout recorded history, examining individuals or groups of historical importance, and the effect that historical events have had on women. In contrast, a feminist approach to history is an analytic method.

One of the main advantages of using a feminist approach to history is its potential use as a weapon against misogyny. For example, we can see echoes of the suffragette’s methods of direct protest  in the recent example of Malala Yousafzai’s demand for education in Pakistan.  When we are attentive to the history of women’s oppression and the struggles against it, then we can learn and build from these histories.

Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie (c. 1797)

For instance, after the death of early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797, her widower published her memoirs.  Her writings revealed her unorthodox lifestyle and unconventional personal relationships, which inadvertently destroyed her reputation in Victorian society because she contradicted the accepted norms about woman. However, when feminist historians rediscovered her seminal work “A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” it became a widely recognized document and cornerstone for gender equality.

History and historical documents are important guides for feminism because they provide alternative understandings of gender relations today—we look back so as to go forward.  If established gender roles and inequalities are revealed as socially constructed within a certain historical context, rather than occurring naturally or universally, then feminists are able to argue that gender inequalities are open to change. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries historians argued that women were largely absent from the history books. This insight led to an explosion in research that continues to impact women and gender relations. The historical works of English feminists such as, Alice Clark’s 1919 Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, Barbara Drake’s 1920 Women and Trade Unions, and Barbara Hutchins’ 1915 Women in Modern Industry, all illustrate the importance of a feminist approach to history because they transformed historical writing, gender, and the historical understanding of the U.K.

A feminist approach to history shows that inequalities are not universal; instead, it rediscovers the lives, experiences, and ideas of women from historical obscurity.  Importantly, feminism re-examines and potentially rewrites entire historical narratives of gender. Feminism has

http://travellingspouse.blogspot.com/2009/09/mary-seacole.html

transformed historical work and its understanding, and historians benefit from this approach. Another example of how using a feminist approach has rewritten history is the case of Mary Seacole.  Her efforts caring for the sick and injured British troops were largely overlooked. Following her death she was forgotten for almost a century and it seems unlikely that Seacole was ever formally rewarded during her lifetime. However, recently she is being widely recognized and celebrated for her work, and her story has even been added to the English Primary school curriculum. In 2005, London’s Mayor, Boris Johnson, exclaimed upon learning about Seacole: “I find myself facing the grim possibility that it was my own education that was blinkered.” Not only does this outline how history has been neglectful, it highlights how a feminist approach to history broadens our understanding of historical events.

However, the place of feminism in history remains unstable and can limit the work of a historian. Unfortunately some historians are not feminists, and few are likely to embrace this approach because it criticizes their own profession. Often, feminist historians are less likely to speak freely because of a variety of factors. Before ‘Women’s History’ became a recognized historical field, we saw the work of feminist historians  focus on women’s oppression, and as a result of the subject’s entrenchment into academia (and therefore its reliance on the establishment’s approval). Passionate, feminist statements have been in decline because the backlash to feminism has made it increasingly difficult for a historian to approach history from a feminist perspective without seeming to “blame men” or leaving out other identity categories. A feminist approach is often something to be frowned upon when searching for historical accuracy. Perhaps then a more appropriate approach to history would be to analyze a cross-section of subjects, such as race and class, alongside gender. By treating these subject matters on a level playing field and putting emphasis on the crossing of several factors, we can explore the similarities between systems of oppression instead. For this reason, this approach is far more useful to a historian than using singular one. Yet, for some, feminism has always been intersectional.  Singular forms of feminism, however, can overshadow these intersectional analyses.  For the feminist approach to remain useful it must avoid becoming a form of dominant feminism that oppresses other forms.

Nevertheless, there are problems that come with looking at history objectively. For a while I believed that a person’s gender should have no bearing on the recognition they receive for their achievements. This approach has its uses when looking at the development of humanity as a whole; however it completely omits something vital. For instance, if we were to look at the achievements of Rosa Bonheur, we can see how gender needs to be acknowledged. Bonheur is now recognized as one of the foremost female artists of the nineteenth century, however during her lifetime the highest praise she received was that she painted “like a man.”

Rosa Bonheur
“who before”
http://imgkid.com/rosa-bonheur-famous-paintings.shtml

As historians, we could look at her art and completely ignore her gender, but would this not completely undermine her achievements? Through being oblivious to her gender we are disregarding the fact that many women struggled against enormous odds to make a difference. In this respect, the slightly subjective nature of the feminist approach can offer a more complex historical narrative, as it takes into account female oppression in its historical context.

In conclusion, a feminist approach to history is incredibly useful to historians. Not only can this method recover unsung heroines, but it can also inspire change for the future. Feminism isn’t about getting revenge; it’s about engaging with the importance of differences and intervening when homogenous narratives begin to take root within society. It helps us to realize how histories of oppression continue to inform our social realities alongside how women and feminism has changed throughout history. In my opinion, the most significant action that the feminist approach can take is that of retrieving and saving the stories of those who were oppressed during their lifetimes and engaging with their experiences as a way to change the way we look at the future as well as the past.

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Grace Corn is a student in the UK.  She has just finished her first year of sixth form and is currently embarking on her second.  Grace is continuing her studies in English literature, History, and Politics and is currently applying to study Politics at University.  She aspires to become a serious journalist in the future. Feminism is something she feels extremely passionate about, not only in her everyday life, but also in her writing. Feminism, Grace explains, “is a part of who I am.”

The post How Useful is a Feminist Approach to History for Historians? appeared first on The Feminist Wire.