By Brooklyn Payton

Retrieved from http://izquotes.com/quote/238330

Reflecting on the plethora of suggestive social justice images in conjunction with a continual meditative praxis on desired results of social justice and healing, I have found the core desire of justice to be love. Whether it be through activism that rests within the thoughts of critical reflective minds (and their keyboards), community organizations assembling non-violent protests to workshops, or militant actions of black nationalists groups, the underlying motivating force of all these things is love. To love freely, or as M. Scott Peck defines, is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth;” it is the infrastructure of a true, or better yet, just world (Peck in hooks, p. 4). Western culture is cloaked in the act of productivity and we don’t genuinely know how to witness and empathize with suffering because it causes sensations of discomfort. The manifestation of productivity is our detachment from our own pain.  We shut ourselves down and, in turn, we try to “fix ourselves” through others.

We are born knowing how to grieve.  However, we are taught not to do so. Truth is, our global community is sitting upon so much grief.  Not only is grief uncomfortable, it is also normalized. As a group, through generations, we have become separated from crucial visceral knowledge and practices of self-care, along with practices of nurturing and healing our communities. Due to the history of colonization and capitalism, we live in a social construct where pain and the process of grief makes us feel so uneasy that we bury it and are unconscious of the fact that we cause ourselves, our communities, and prospective generations more pain. We navigate a society that survives and thrives on the negligence of the emotional self and community, as well as the connection that they have to each other. We end up rejecting the grace that rests within that grief—the love that is on the other side.  As we learn to build relationships with our pain and adversity, we will become conversant with the transformative power that lies within suffering.

In Change the World, Without Taking Power, John Holloway explores the power that rests within “the scream,” or the cries of rage, fear, and resistance. Holloway examines people’s innate action to invalidate the screams of the isolated and unseen through the dissonance of internalized racist logic and reasoning. As bell hooks argues, “Cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed or afraid heart” (p. xviii). Fear does not stop our heart from desiring love; instead it encourages us to look for love without vulnerability. However, love and truth do not exist without vulnerability. If we are working towards a true world, then we must understand ourselves as authentic human beings who hurt and experience suffering both directly and indirectly. To do so, we need to form relationships with the sources of our suffering. If we are to acquire love, we must acknowledge the lovelessness that is present in our lives.

How?

Simple.

We scream.

“It is from the rage that thought is born” (Holloway, p. 1).  Through the ownership of our scream, we begin to take the steps to suffer, or reside within the negative, gracefully.

In the past, and occasionally now, I have found myself in an internal battle trying to articulate my hurt and injustices in ways that are best, or easily digestible, for my perpetrators. In actuality, this action has never had anything to do with them—it was about me seeking legitimacy from them. As a result of my internalized oppression, I needed my persecutors to validate my suffering. For it to be real, I needed “them” to say it was so.  But they continually dismissed and/or pacified me. The importance of acknowledging our screams is the empowerment that comes with starting from the self. Our experiences are valid because we have encountered and felt them holistically.  We are constantly told to think objectively (which doesn’t exist) and view things from everyone else’s point of view, which only polarizes us from our own experiences, entitlements, and feelings of outrage, sorrow, or helplessness.

It is through the vilification and subjugation of the emotional and somatic responses to injustice, where the severing of human beings commence. No longer are we whole, but our mind, body, and souls become separate entities with disjointed roles—as if one could possibly thrive without the others. Additionally, systems of oppression, such as capitalism and religion, criminalize the human body and our intuitive ways of knowing. The internalization of criminality, along with a number of dichotomies present in Western culture, encourage us to live completely detached, untrusting, and/or solely in our bodies. This way of life causes us to have unhealthy relationships with ourselves and limits our understanding of how we see and know the world. The fragmentation present in Western culture fragments ourselves and all aspects of our relationships.

It is within this breakdown of the human experience—the dissonance between the physical body and the experiences encountered in addition to the normalization and acceptance of trauma—that it becomes difficult to locate, along with express, the emotions of anger, sadness, and grief as justifiable emotions. Consequently, what occurs is the search for the external approval of others who are often the beneficiaries of our very suffering.

Elaborating on the “polar self,” Holloway argues that

“The dissonance is not an external ‘us’ against ‘the world’: inevitably it is a dissonance that reaches into us against ourselves.”

John Holloway, 2010, p. 5

Claiming the rejection and negation that we witness within this world starts within an understanding of this dissonance. We own who we are, wherever we are, and often this is a process of discomfort. Again, to receive love, we must acknowledge that it isn’t there. This is a tender process. But we must allow our hearts to break open so that we can reveal and adhere ourselves to the vigor of our scream. In order to allow ourselves to heal and begin the practice of being loving, we must shed ourselves of assumed knowledge and face our lacks. Even if that means through the acceptance of love’s meaning—our scream—leads us to the awareness that at our present moment love is no where to be found. There is no stigma in that lack.

Healing begins with that confrontation.

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Brooklyn Renee’ Payton, from Oakland, California, is a recent graduate from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Brooklyn is devoted to social and community change and to rethinking how that change happens, and who it reaches, specifically in the Black community and with regards to women and children. This fall, Brooklyn will pursue her MSW at the University of Southern California and expand her research on intergenerational trauma within the Black community, and its manifestations in building and maintaining intimacy within the family structure.

The post COLLEGE FEMINISMS: Love Rests in the Scream appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Farrell Greenwald Brenner

The ultimate connection cannot be the enemy. The ultimate connection must be the need that we find between us. It is not only who you are, in other words, but what we can do for each other that will determine the connection.

– June Jordan, “Report from the Bahamas, 1982″

As we rolled out our sleeping bags onto the cold, brick floor under the gaze of public safety officers, I did not truly comprehend that my body had become both a weapon and a battlefield.

Photo by Whitney Garcia

Since the start of the Fall 2014 semester, students had repeatedly gathered on the steps of Hendricks Chapel to cry out in pain and anguish—since September, we had rallied, and rallied, and rallied, and rallied, until our throats were sore and our hands were smeared with ink.

When the Advocacy Center, a facility and community for survivors of sexual assault, was closed without our consent (how apropos!), we rallied. When the Board of Trustees chose to not divest the university endowment from fossil fuels in spite of widespread support from other governing bodies, we rallied. When the contract with the Posse Foundation, a scholarship primarily benefitting students of color and low-income students, was prematurely and unilaterally broken, we rallied.

And when we realized that these were part and parcel of the same system that provided only one psychiatrist for 25,000 students, that allowed for us to go for ten years without a full-time Americans with Disabilities Act coordinator, that did not report salary information to the American Association of University Professors for the first time in fifty years, that made our teaching assistants and graduate assistants some of the poorest-paid laborers in the entire city of Syracuse, that removed any mention of “diverse backgrounds” or “public good” from our mission and vision statements, we decided to rally one more time that year.

We are those students who are beat up on the street, assaulted in our beds, tormented in our homes, and left without money for rent. Peers and professors told us our struggles were irrelevant, and then defined and labeled us by them. I used to believe that an institution without a moral conscience would hear me and advocate for me.

So on November 3, 2014, we marched from the Chapel to Crouse-Hinds Hall, the building that hosts admissions, classrooms, and administrative functions. We delivered a document of grievances and demands that numbered forty-three pages to administrative staff, who then attempted to divert us to another building by blocking entrances. There was so much irony in the image of those men standing between us and the doors to the “admissions” building.

So we sat.

At first, we were told that we could only sit between the hours of 7:00 am and 10:00 pm.

We told them no, we will not be convenient for them. Then we were told that we could only have twenty-four bodies sleeping here overnight; fire codes that we were never allowed to see were cited. We told them no, you will not divide us nor make us choose who will labor and who will leave. So every night, forty bodies dreamt on the cold, brown bricks of Crouse-Hinds.

Then they sent an older woman of color—a dean—to mediate between the unreasonable protestors and the upper-level administration. We told them no, we will not be complicit in your sexist, racist labor practices. We waited to speak with the senior executive team.

And we sat.

Then they called us “unruly” and “irrational” because we had been loud, and because we had used student testimonies, not statistics, to demonstrate our grievances. We laughed, because we refused to play games of respectability and be policed into obedience. We laughed because our emotions and our stories were less valuable than data that did not exist because it could challenge the very institution that would collect and publish it.

And we sat.

Then they grabbed our ID cards from our hands and recorded them without our consent. That night, I whispered my name to myself over and over again, lest I forget that it was not theirs to own. When my eyes finally closed, the last thing I saw was the palatine gaze of a public safety officer.

And we sat.

Then they stood around the room as we shared stories of pain and hurt with each other. As we recounted histories of unbelonging and violence and silencing as a result of our classmates’ disrespect, which had been fostered by an institution that did not value us, one of the administrators recorded us on his cell phone. I saw another smile. When professors asked them (politely, in spite of our irrelevant, raging, radical politics) to respect our personal space, they refused to leave. As students continued to voice their discomfort, one white administrator boomed with bellicose authority over students and faculty of color. He marched out—what a luxury, to lose nothing in walking away!

And we sat.

Then they turned off the heat. So we huddled together, and the friction of an organic tenderness—sometimes called love—against an unfeeling, dark wall kept us warm.

And we sat.

Then they told us we could not use the classrooms for meetings. We told them no, you will not prevent us from educating ourselves. We held teach-ins every day, no tuition charged. Our attendance rate was stellar—hundreds of people came to learn for the sake of learning. Professors joined us, and they marched to Chancellor Syverud’s house to deliver a formal invitation to continue dialogues.

And we sat.

As the first weekend approached, they told us we would not be allowed re-entry between 5:00 pm Friday and 7:00 am Sunday. So we stayed, and sat. They told us that food would only be allowed into the building during two forty-five minute windows each day. So we went without. Still, there were teaching assistants who were eating better on donated food than they normally did on their substandard wages.

And we sat.

Then, we woke up to cameras trained on our tired, aching bodies. So we stuck out our tongues and said “cheese!”

And we sat.

Then they put up a tall, green fence around the building to hide us from view. So we turned that fence into a wall of remembrance for other students that had been lost to mental illness, who didn’t have the support they needed to survive. Those signs were torn down, but we were not.

And we sat.

Then they threw us envelopes with Codes of Conduct, cryptically highlighted with no explanations. Then they told us legal counsel would not be allowed into the building over the weekend. Our professors told them no, we will not let you criminalize our students. We will not let you “instill fear and compliance in our students.”

And we sat.

Then they told us that they had to balance our needs and those “of the 21,000 other students who attend our University” as if those other students would not also benefit from fairer wages, from more mental health services, from a more accessible campus. As if, in the event that our demands could not directly benefit the white, able-bodied, straight, upper-middle class students of the student body, that they would be any less meaningful.

And we sat.

When I stepped into Crouse-Hinds Hall, it became acceptable for my face and body to be photographed without consent; it became acceptable for me to be trivialized and objectified. Few folks outside of the movement realized that challenging and denigrating my activism was an attack upon my body as well. My politics aren’t spun from nothingness—they are a defense against the pain I have endured and a vow to never commit the same harm to Others. If you have no problem abusing my belief in structures of justice, I wondered to myself, how long before my physical presence, which relies on such justice, is also abused? I did not feel safe. I could not—cannot—separate my very public fight for a more supportive campus from my lived experiences of violence. Those who try to are erasing those experiences—another act of violence.

After days and days of this torment I reached my breaking point. At her keynote talk at the 2014 National Women’s Studies Association conference, bell hooks said, “If you stand up against certain forms of power, while that power has control over your life, it will use that power against you.” I was living in perpetual fear for my health, sanity, education, and willfulness. I had never wanted to run away from anything so bad. I contemplated transferring. I contemplated dying. Neither of these things happened, nor will happen—while I sit in discomfort as a continual participant in the academic industry, I could not empower it with my silence.

And because the collective was comprised of humans—individual, fallible humans—I can’t pretend this was some sort of immortal activist utopia. Sometimes these would be the first people I would turn to in the bouts of anxiety. But I also faced abuse at the hands of individuals who were sitting next to me. Just because we came together under a banner of solidarity does not mean we were solidly devoid of our own injustices. As we occupied one structure, we sometimes neglected the structures occupying us. One of my advisors remarked to me that certain mechanisms serve different purposes at different times—for now, I rest easier knowing that the recession of a particular group does not denote the extinction of its ideas.

Our bodies are any combination of Black, queer, disabled, ill, poor, assaulted, and undocumented. They aren’t the kinds of bodies accepted at respectable, alabaster dinner tables. If we had waited for an invitation, we would have been waiting ourselves into our graves. After eighteen days of protest, immeasurable community support, and administrative disregard, we left on our own terms. There is more work to be done, but it all starts from the ground on which we sit.

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Farrell Greenwald Brenner is a sophomore Women’s & Gender Studies and Citizenship & Civic Engagement double major at Syracuse University. When without a megaphone, Farrell can be found editing for The OutCrowd Magazine or facilitating discussions on gendered violence in academic contexts.

The post COLLEGE FEMINISMS: And We Sat: Violence against the Bodies of Diversity and Transparency (DAT) Student Movement at Syracuse University appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

“COLLECTIVE VOICE OF THE VOICELESS”: 
CAMPUS VIOLENCE, RESISTANCE, AND STRATEGIES FOR SURVIVAL

Editors: Martina “Mick” Powell (guest editor) and Heather M. Turcotte

~~~

In 2014, over fifty US college and university collectives filed formal Title IX complaints against their institutions for a variety of reasons, including the mishandling of sexual assault cases by the administration.  Students, faculty, and staff nationwide continue to face both blatant and covert entangled acts of racism, sexism, ableism, homo- and transantagonism, and xenophobia, which, when presented to administrations, are systematically ignored, rewritten, and/or co-opted for dismissive neoliberal civility campaigns. This recent mobilization across US campuses materializes within, and because of, historical and transnational contexts of violence against communities who resist and defy the intersecting structures of white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, and capitalism.

In her foreword to soulscript, an anthology of poetry edited by June Jordan, Staceyann Chin writes, “the collective voice of the voiceless is still one of the most powerful tools of change.” This forum is concerned with the ways in which “voiceless” members of college, university, and academic communities respond to the particular set of violences that surround them through coalition building, active resistance, and legal measurements. Additionally, we are interested in how campus collectives show solidarity with national and transnational publicized sites of violence, particularly around sexual assault, police brutality, and the lynchings, kidnappings, and mass murders of individuals, students, and communities. Importantly, this forum aims to serve as a space for critical conversations on surviving campus culture, academia, and international state violence.

Authors are invited to submit essays, poems, videos, pictures, and creative prose pieces that address any of these topics in relationship to college, university, and academic life from a variety of geopolitical locations (and in relationship to other educational structures):

• Institutionalized, individual, and intersectional violence: In what ways is violence operating individually and systematically in your space? How is it connected and informed by other sites of violence?;
• Shaping, structuring, and sustaining productive and safe coalitions, solidarities, and community;
• Responding to the reproduction of violence within coalitional work; 
• Accounting for identity, power, privilege, and inequality that shape movement participation and collective responses (e.g., intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, citizenship, religion, ability, and modes of embodiment);
• Transformative methods of knowledge production and exchange that builds accountable community praxis: How do you subvert violent, pervasive forms of knowledge? How do you disrupt discursively violent academic spaces?;
• Organizing acts of resistance: How, why, when? What mobilizations are most effective or not?;
• Creating a collective voice and ways of documenting it;
• The productivities and limitations of the law: What does law (and rights) offer us? What does it eclipse? How do we decriminalize our campuses and refuse increased militarization and surveillance of students, faculty, and staff?;
• Strategies for survival: Every day and long term visions;
• Communities of care: How do coalitions (whether formally or informally structured) care for one another? What is our collective sense of care?; and
• Self-Care

Submissions should be roughly 1,500 words and are due by March 30, 2015. Please submit your work for consideration to “College Feminisms Submissions,”  and indicate in your cover letter that you would like your submission to be considered for the forum. More general information on the submission process can be found at: submission guidelines.

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Selected News Articles and Writings on the Intersections of Campus, Academic, and State Violence and the Work of Building Collective Justice:

“Syracuse University Student Protestors Continue Weeklong Sit-In, Talk with Administration” By Catie O’Toole

“And We Sat: Violence against the Bodies of Diversity and Transparency (DAT) Student Movement at Syracuse University” by Farrell Greenwald Brenner

“Can You Hear Us Now?” by Jake New

“An Open Letter to UCONN President Susan Herbst” by Carolyn Luby

“An Open Letter Addressing the UCONN Community” by Victoria Rossetti, Rebecca Barton, and Stephanie Naranjo

“Racially Charged Incident at UCONN Triggers Concerns about Campus Atmosphere” by Gregory B. Hladky

“Perseverance Conquers: An Open Letter” by Princess Harmony-Jazmyne Rodriguez 

“Learning #EverdaySexualViolence: Women Telling Our Stories” by Stephanie Gilmore and Pia Guerrero

“Queering Sexual Violence” by Jennifer Patterson

“Transfiguring Masculinities in Black Women’s Studies” by C. Riley Snorton

“Buff, Black, Tattooed, and Feminist: On the Utility of a Bro-Feminist” by Marquis Bey

“TFW’s Sikivu Hutchinson and Aishah Shahidah Simmons Partner to Address Sexual Violence with Youth in South Los Angeles” by The Feminist Wire

Selected from the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education: “African American Old Miss Student Is a Victim of a Race Related Attack;” “Black Woman Scholar Earns $75,000 in Settlement of Race Discrimination Lawsuit;” “Racial Slur Written on Birthday Cake at the University of Maryland;” “Racial Incidents at the University of Massachusetts;” “Racial Incident at Saint Louis University”

“Racist Frat Prank at University of Chicago” in The Huffington Post

“#FergusonOctober: Francesca Griffin–A Black Woman and the Police State” by Ahmad Greene-Hayes

“The Cops Can’t Come Here: How a Predominantly White Institution is My Safe Haven” by ray(nise) cange

“An Open Letter of Love to Black Students: #BlackLivesMatter Dec” by blackspaceblog

“On Boko Haram, Missing Children, and Narcissism” by Niama Safia Sandy

“The Chapel Hill Shooting Was Anything but a Dispute Over Parking” by Nathan Lean

“SOAS Referendum on Academic Boycott”

“Salaita v. Kennedy, et. al.” at The Center for Constitutional Rights

“Paris, #BlackLivesMatter, the Cultural Violence, and the White Western State” by Malik Nashad Sharpe

“Ayotzinapa: A Timeline of the Mass Disappearance That Has Shaken Mexico” by VICE News

“Living on Borrowed Time: Six Young Trans Women of Color Have Been Murdered in America This Year” by Terrell Jermaine Starr

“White Terror: Spirituality, Ancestral Memory, and the Politics of Remembering” by Rajanie (Preity) Kumar

“In Solidarity with Anita Sarkeesian and All Women Who Speak Out” by The Feminist Wire

“Toward a Feminist Politics of De-Criminalization and Abolition: Why We Support Dr. Mireille Miller-Young” by Tamara L. Spira and Heather M. Turcotte

“Feminists We Love: Wagatwe Wanjuki” Interview by Stephanie Gilmore

“Dismantling Racism and White Supremacy Must Come from Within” by Aishah Shahidah Simmons

The post COLLEGE FEMINISMS: Call for Forum Submissions on Campus Violence, Resistance, and Strategies for Survival appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Rebecca Long

As awareness of the harmful affects of the presentation of distorted female bodies in media and advertising has risen, so too has the use of phrase “real woman.” Generally employed by advertisers in campaigns like Aerie Real and Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty,” the term is often applied to images of women whose physical appearances are supposed to challenge stereotypical depictions of beauty. Could it be that the media, corporations targeting women’s business, and advertising agencies are finally listening to criticism? Undoubtedly, the use of this phrase is intended to acknowledge the lack of true representation of women in physical images and in film. The average model is extremely thin, tall, and generally white, women in print ad-campaigns are more often than not photoshopped in order to adhere to popular conceptions of feminine beauty, and women of color, women with disabilities, transgender women, and women with larger bodies are rarely represented at all.

Dove Advertisement

True, the growing utilization of the phrase “real woman” in marketing campaigns and the pairing of such language with “real” images is an assertion that the majority of women we see in media are not in fact “real.” It also acknowledges that the mislabeling of artificial bodies as normal is a key component to constructing a false image of womanhood that is internalized by, and harmful to, women. In this way, the use of the term in advertising is an attempt at self-reflexivity, and perhaps even an apology for the decades of fake and damaging depictions of women’s bodies in media. However, the language of such a phrase is problematic and essentialist. By using the word “real,” the implication that some women qualify as legitimate and some do not is always present.

By pairing such a loaded phrase with a particular image, corporations assert that the women they depict in their advertisement are “real” while others are deviant. In this way, billboards, print ads, and online commercials that attempt to redefine womanhood and attractiveness still link beauty and normalcy with a specific representation of “woman.” In their eagerness to comply with growing criticisms of predominant images of women’s bodies, they essentialize the image of woman and overlook the very real differences among women. Moreover, companies that use such language like Aerie and Dove (which is owned by Unilever, the same company that owns Axe) are still ultimately trying to sell a product. Although they write gleaming taglines such as, “we now feature REAL women” and “this is what REAL beauty looks like,” they sell lingerie and beauty products – lotion, makeup, bleach, anti-wrinkle cream, self tanner, hair removal supplies, hair dye, soap, nail polish, deodorant, skin cleansers – and ultimately profit from women’s insecurity and the desire to fit a particular definition of women’s beauty.

Additionally, while many self identifying feminists are quick to admonish this growing marketing ploy as problematic, they at times fail to recognize the oppressive nature with which they use the same logic of “realness” to exclude trans women from so-called feminist spaces.

As suggested by Susan Stryker in Transgender History, it was a common belief among second-wave feminists, that “a feminine male-bodied person…should work for the social acceptability of sissies and be proudly effeminate instead of pretending to be a ‘normal’ woman, or a ‘real’ one” (2). This language sounds eerily similar to that used by advertisers to capitalize on women’s lack of body confidence. Both the sale of beauty products and the exclusion of trans women from feminist spaces operate on the assumption that some women are only “pretending,” and therefore unreal. REAL women buy the beauty products sold for “real women.” REAL women occupy feminist spaces; trans women do not. Just as marketing campaigns use the phrase to sell a product under the guise of inclusivity and normalcy, so too do feminists use the qualification, REAL, to justify their transphobia and transmisogyny. In both instances, the phrase is not just employed to exclude certain women, but also to devalue their experiences of womanhood.

Let me be explicit here: Trans women are not simply marginalized or excluded. Rather, their very identities are denied, and often by the very feminists who advocate for gender justice.

To illustrate this in Gender Outlaw: On men, women, and the rest of us, Kate Bornstein quotes Janice Raymond, an early proponent of trans exclusionary feminism. Raymond asserts, “ ‘Rape, although it is usually done by force, can also be accomplished by deception…in the case of the transexually constructed lesbian-feminist, often he is able to gain entrance and a dominant position in women’s spaces’ ” (in Bornstein 75).

Many, like Raymond, attempt to hide their transmisogyny by disguising it as a legitimate “feminist” concern. Trans women’s successful “penetration” of cisgender-feminist spaces is often compared with literal, forcible penetration: rape—a violent comparison that requires our feminist attentions. Above, Raymond invalidates trans women’s experiences by using male pronouns and undermines their self-identifications. Fearful of the adulteration of “women’s” spaces, Raymond intentionally misgenders and separates trans women to construct a “real,” cisgender women.

Feminist spaces often still have invisible and oppressive restrictions and caveats on their “Welcome!” signs. The transphobia originally expressed by Raymond in the 1970s remains today. For example, this summer, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival banned trans women for not being “woman” enough. Last year, prominent radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys published Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism, which attempts to dispel transgender people as “disordered.”

These examples do not exist on the fringes of feminist thought. Feminism has a long history of failing women with intersecting identities. Although bastions of acceptance for those who are white, middle class, and cisgender, dominant feminisms continue to marginalize people who challenge homogeneous and binary gender categories. Women’s spaces are regularly unwelcoming and unsafe for women.

The ramifications of transphobia extend far beyond the exclusion of trans women from feminist and women’s spaces. Recently, “Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey” found that 41% of the transgender individuals they surveyed had attempted suicide, well above the 1.6% suicide rate of the general population. According to GLAAD, 53% of documented anti-LGBTQ homicides were trans women in 2012. According to the US Office for Victims of Crime, 50% of all trans individuals in the US are sexually abused or assaulted within their lives. Trans people are turned away from shelters, discriminated against in the workplace, excluded from competitive sports, and forced to “match the gender…on their government issued ID[s]” to get through airport security. In all states but California, it is legal to us a “panic defense” to justify the murder of trans and gay individuals.

Jane Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More

Even as the subject of transgender identities becomes less taboo and trans activists like Janet Mock and Laverne Cox gain visibility, trans people, and particularly trans women of color, experience astonishing violence.

This in mind, the feminist community must rethink what it means to be a woman and reevaluate how it advocates for gender justice. Given the brief examples above, it is clear that Raymond’s argument is not only false, but also harmful and violent. As feminists, we must assert that all who self-identify as women are “real” women and seriously challenge this construction of the “real.” As Stryker notes, “a feminism that makes room for transgender people…calls into question the usefulness of ‘woman’ as the foundation of all feminist politics” (3).

More accurately, a feminism that makes room for transgender people calls into question the usefulness of female as the foundation of all feminist politics. Too often, the constructions of female and woman are conflated. A feminism that not only includes trans women, but also approaches the world through a trans women politics cannot function on the assumption that there is a universal, biologically female “real woman” or that sex and gender necessarily fit into neat, binary categories. To afford the label of realness to only some people based on cis-status, weight, race, ability, or sexuality in advertisements and in feminist spaces is exclusionary and, as illustrated above, harmful.

How can a movement rooted in challenging patriarchal power structures and striving for the liberation of all people, dehumanize trans women and define their identities as inherently fake or deceptive? In denying trans women as “real” women, many feminists essentially say, “I do not advocate for you.”

Although feminists aim to shift the oppressive institutions that disempower ALL marginalized people, we often reproduce the very violence we are trying to eradicate. In order to intervene in feminist transphobia, we must first examine the ways in which we actively or passively retain internalized prejudices.

As a white, heterosexual, able-bodied, cisgender woman, I will never experience the oppression that a trans, queer, women of color navigates every day. I cannot speak for the trans community, but I can acknowledge my privilege and speak up. To be a feminist means to be concerned with all instances of violence, regardless of whether or not they are directed at a community I identify with. All forms of oppression are feminist concerns; a feminism that only advocates for some is not a feminism I want to be apart of. As stated by Audre Lorde, “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even if her shackles are very different from my own” (The Uses of Anger). I must be self-reflexive and attentive, listening to others’ experiences, should they wish to share them.

I believe a truly radical feminism is able to recognize that womanhood is not predicated on femaleness. Women are more than their sex organs, which do not necessarily consist of ovaries, a uterus, or a vagina. A truly radical feminism is intersectional, inclusive of difference, unafraid of internal examination, and open to change. There is no universal, “real woman.” Rather, there are women, all of whom are real.

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Rebecca Long graduated in May 2014 from Allegheny College in Pennsylvania with a B.A. in English Literature and minors in Women’s Studies and History. She currently works as an Editorial Assistant at an academic publishing company in her sunny home state of California.

The post COLLEGE FEMINISMS: “Real” Women: A Critique of “Feminist” Transphobia appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Olivia Emin

I go to a school where the boys outnumber the girls. This isn’t a small difference; there are pretty much two and a half boys for every girl. I never noticed the difference until now. Since Emma Watson’s iconic speech, gender politics has been a hot topic at my school. I always knew I wanted to be equal to the boys when I grew up, and I always assumed that it would be a given. I never thought that I would ever have to fight for something that my friends who happen to be a different gender could simply take. I never understood why there were protests and petitions in the westernised world where I live to make things equal. I thought gender equalities already existed in today’s society. I never realised that things weren’t equal until recently.

I am a feminist. Maybe I am considered too young or too naive to be a feminist, but I like to think I am. You see, in class debates, the room would split. There would be six girls battling fourteen boys in the war of the sexes. At first, this was all considered light-hearted fun or “banter.” But then boys’ sports suddenly got more recognition than girls’ sports, boys had more lax uniform restrictions than girls, boys threw around terms like “slut,” “whore,” “ho,” and “slag” whilst girls were supposed to just patiently put up with it. But that wasn’t it. There was so much more. It was 2014, so why did it feel like 1912?

Unfortunately, I can say I did nothing. I dealt with the rules and restrictions. I accepted the naming and shaming, and I sat there and did nothing as so much of this went on. I blatantly put up a blind eye and ignored the fact that boys get “special treatment” compared to girls.

J. Howard Miller’s “We Can Do It!” poster from 1943

Once I realized this, the special treatment had to stop. I began to battle back – not just me, but all of us girls put up a fight. However in the battle for equality, strength comes in numbers and we didn’t have them. Additionally, boys tried to dismiss our actions by using the word “feminist” against us in a shrill disgusted tone.

Girls began to give up. Why? Because of the ways the boys reacted. We were labelled man haters and sluts. We grew scared. The boys were bigger, stronger, and more powerful than us. Why were we battling? Why were we fighting a war we could not win? Then it struck me.

We should not have been fighting in the first place. Gender equality is not a waging war between two genders. Gender equality should incorporate everyone regardless of their gender identifications. Feminism has just as many benefits for men as it does for women; it also challenges this idea that there are only two genders and that girls are lesser than boys. So why is it considered a battle of the sexes when gender justice is a battle for the sexes. Gender justice must benefit everyone.

I hope the young boys in my school will grow up into young men who understand that gender equality isn’t something they should protest against, but something they should help achieve. Equality should not be a battle or fight. Gender equality is about human rights and living without oppression.

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Olivia Emin is a fifteen year old from North London who discovered her huge interest and passion for writing recently.  She is an advocate for global equality and hopes to write more in the future.

The post ELEMENTARY FEMINISMS: Being a Feminist at Fourteen appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

Image credit: http://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2015/02/19/the-blame-game-how-guns-on-college-campuses-are-ignoring-the-problem-of-sexual-assault

By Julie Moreau

In February, the New York Times published an article on legislative initiatives to arm college students in an alleged attempt to reduce sexual assault on campuses. Surely this represents a desperate (and almost ironic) attempt by the American gun lobby to get back into the public’s good graces after the tragic events of Sandy Hook and other school shootings. But why now? What does the timing of the gun lobby’s proposal tell us?

For the past few months, both mainstream and social media have focused on the extrajudicial killings of young men of color. From Trayvon Martin, to Tamir Rice to Michael Brown, the deaths of young black and brown males are making the news. It is important to note that, while relatively more media attention has been paid to the loss of black life (broadly defined), the murder of trans women of color goes virtually unreported in the mainstream media. In fact, already this year three black trans women have been murdered. Nevertheless, white Americans have been challenged to confront deadly institutionalized racism on their television sets and in their twitter feeds.

It’s within this context that concern with the problem of collegiate sexual violence has erupted at unprecedented levels and that one solution proposed involves putting more guns into white hands. It is as though politicians and mainstream thought leaders have decided that enough attention has been paid to black victims of state violence, and now plan to make every effort to change the channel back to the white supremacist soap opera where guns are good and the victims of violence are always white. Ultimately, this bizarre proposal broached in the New York Times article results in people of color becoming more at risk of gun violence.

In her 2011 article “Jasbir Puar writes about Israeli “pinkwashing,” or Israel’s redirection of international attention from violent repression of Palestinians towards its “gay-friendly” policies and liberal democratic institutions. The same slight of hand is occurring right now in the US. The success of Black Lives Matter movements coincides with this ten-state legislative proposal. The end result is that attention is turned toward sexual assaults on university campuses and the quintessential victim of violence: the white woman.

This victim swapping, or victimwashing, is evident in the justification for allowing guns on college campuses provided by Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore:

If these young, hot little girls on campus have a firearm, I wonder how many men will want to assault them. The sexual assaults that are occurring would go down once these sexual predators get a bullet in their head.

First of all, GIRLS!?! As a faculty member at a large public university, I’m pretty sure my students are all adults, thank you. But more importantly, let’s just pause for a second and look at the image of the victim sexual assault Fiore has created.  Apparently all victims of sexual assault are “young,” “hot” and “girls.” Indeed, this is definitional. These characteristics provoke the assault. Anyone who does not fit into those categories is unimaginable as a victim of rape and therefore unworthy of protection. Fiore’s reliance on Americans’ perennial concern for the “hot” and “young” girl evinces the logical flimsiness of her proposal (I’m not convinced even she really believes this would reduce sexual assault.) and the real purpose of the campaign—distraction from the issue of gun violence against people of color.

Relatedly, this policy initiative reflects a total (and intentional) misunderstanding of sexual assault on campuses. The problem of sexual assault on campus is not lurking “predators,” it’s a culture of rape established and maintained by the institutions of higher ed. As someone who hails from Pennsylvania, I know that Penn State institutionally protected Jerry Sandusky for years while he committed rape.

Institutionally sanctioned sexual violence is why victims are often hesitant to report crimes committed against them. They fear of secondary victimization–when the institutions that are allegedly supposed to protect and listen to them instead vilify them and maintain sexism and patriarchy.  Change the institutions that facilitate rape, stop de-funding, ignoring or otherwise marginalizing Women’s and Gender Studies programs and other anti-oppressive disciplines like Ethnic Studies (I’m looking at you, Arizona), so that college students can have intelligent, informed conversations about sexual violence. Last but not least, give students the power to craft policies and initiatives they believe in and feel will work. Don’t co-opt the issue of sexual assault to push a firearms agenda.

Next, we need to talk about how this proposed legislation not only advocates turning college students into assassins, but is also designed to bypass any form of judicial process by putting “a bullet in [the] head” of alleged perpetrators. The state of Nevada already has a precedent for skipping due process with the systemic underrepresentation (bad lawyering) of death penalty cases, leading to wrongful conviction and execution…of black men. Extend state violence against people of color onto our campuses? I can’t wait.

Finally, it is not coincidence that the state legislatures pushing this are many of those with so-called “Stand your Ground” laws, including my current state of residence, Arizona. We need to do an intersectional analysis of gun violence as well as sexual assault. (See Kimberlé Crenshaw’s classic 1992 article, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” All the same rules apply).  Who gets killed by guns in Arizona? People of color. Who kills them? The police. THAT’S THE GUN ISSUE WE NEED TO BE TALKING ABOUT. (Here’s a link to one recent article, but there are numerous examples.)

This legislation is a distraction from a responsible and much needed conversation about gun violence and sexual assault through turning media attention to the “young, hot” [read: white] victim of sexual assault. I’m going to talk to both my female- and male-identified students about sexual assault. I’m also going to talk to them about victimwashing.

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Julie Moreau is a faculty member in the Women’s and Gender Studies program at Northern Arizona University. She studies sexuality and citizenship in the global South. She would like to thank the editors at The Feminist Wire for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this piece. She can be reached at Julie.moreau@nau.edu.

The post Victimwashing: Guns, Violence, and the Politics of Whose Lives Matter appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

We are so proud of Associate Editor David J. Leonard on his promotion to Full Professor!

David teaches in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University, where he is currently serving as Chair. He is the author of numerous books and articles, all of which address the ways racial meanings are constructed, transformed, and challenged across time and space. In addition to his work with The Feminist Wire, David also writes for NewBlackMan, UrbanCusp, and a variety of other publications.

Please join us in congratulating Professor Leonard!

The post TFW Celebrates David J. Leonard! appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

TFW Associate Editor Heidi R. Lewis will be speaking at her doctoral alma mater, Purdue University, on a panel entitled “Champions OUT Loud” during the “Championing Equality: LGBTQ Athletes & Allies” event today at 6 pm in Fowler Hall. The event is sponsored by the LGBTQ Student Alliance, the LGBTQ Center, the Black Cultural Center, Athletics, the Division of Diversity and Inclusion, and the Purdue Student Government. Panel participants include Dr. Sue Rankin, Bree Horrocks, Dorien Bryant, Ryan Dafforn, and Chris Mosier. Heidi will also be giving a talk entitled “When the Man You Are Isn’t the Man You Want to Be: Black Gay Men and the Black Church on FX’s The Shield” during “Lunch & Learn” at the LGBTQ Center on Tuesday, March 31 at 12:30 pm.

Heidi R. Lewis is an Assistant Professor of Feminist & Gender Studies at Colorado College. Her teaching and research focus on feminist theory, gender and sexuality, Black Studies, Critical Media Studies, Critical Race Theory, Critical Whiteness Studies, social justice, and activism. Her essay “An Examination of the Kanye West’s Higher Education Trilogy” is featured in The Cultural Impact of Kanye West, and her article “Let Me Just Taste You: Li’l Wayne and Rap’s Politics of Cunnlingus” is forthcoming in the Journal of Popular Culture. She has given invited talks at Kim Bevill’s Gender and the Brain Conference, the Frauenkreise Projekt in Berlin, the Educating Children of Color Summit, the Sankofa Lecture Series, the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, the Gender and Media Spring Convocation at Ohio University, and the Conference for Pre-Tenure Women at Purdue University, where she earned a Ph.D. in American Studies (2011) and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies (2008). Heidi has also been a contributor to Mark Anthony Neal’s NewBlackMan, NPR’s “Here and Now,” KOAA news in Colorado Springs, and KRCC radio (the Southeastern Colorado NPR affiliate), and she was featured as a Racialicious “Crush of the Week.” Learn more by following Heidi on Twitter at @therealphdmommy and/or by visiting her FemGeniuses website.

The post TFW’s Heidi R. Lewis to Speak at Purdue appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

Sterling Brown, 1901-1989

TFW Associate Editor Aishah Shahidah Simmons was invited to be the Sterling Brown Visiting Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College during the spring semester of the 2015-16 academic year by Professor James Manigault-Bryant, Associate Professor of African Studies and Chair of Africana Studies.

Established by gifts raised in a campaign led by members of the Williams Black Alumni Network, this professorship is named after one of America’s most influential poets and scholars, who was born in Washington, D.C. and attended Williams from 1918-1922. Each year, a distinguished visitor is invited to campus for one semester to teach an undergraduate course, to deliver a series of lectures open to the public, to work with students individually, and to contribute to the awareness and growth of the Williams community. Past recipients of this prestigious honor include Greg Tate (2014-2015), Kimberly Springer (2009-2010), the late Manning Marable (2007-2008), Marcellus Blount (2005-2006), Katie G. Cannon (2005-2006), Michael Awkward (2000-2001), Carrie Mae Weems (1999-2000), and Cornel West (1999-2000), among others.

Aishah Shahidah Simmons is a Black feminist lesbian documentary filmmaker, cultural worker, and international lecturer. An incest and rape survivor, she is the Creator of the Ford Foundation-funded internationally acclaimed and award-winning feature length film NO! The Rape Documentary. Presently, she teaches in the Women’s and LGBT Studies Program at Temple University. Previously, she was an O’Brien Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Scripps College and a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Committed to archiving, documenting, and telling Black women’s herstories and contemporary realities, Aishah was the Curator and Lead Editor of The Feminist Wire‘s (TFW), “Global Forum on Audre Lorde.” She was also the Co-Curator and Co-Editor, with Heidi R. Lewis, of TFW’s “Toni Cade Bambara 75th Birthday Anniversary Forum.” Aishah is the author of several essays  including the Foreword to the recently released Dear Sister: Letters to Survivors of Sexual Violence. She has screened her work, guest lectured, and facilitated workshops and dialogues about ending all forms of sexual violence; queer identity from an AfroLez®femcentric perspective; the grassroots process of making social change documentaries; and non-Christocentric spirituality at colleges and universities, high schools, conferences, international film festivals, rape crisis centers, battered women shelters, community centers, juvenile correctional facilities, and government sponsored events across the United States and Canada, throughout Italy, in South Africa, France, England, Croatia, Hungary, The Netherlands, Mexico, Kenya, Malaysia, and India. You can follow Aishah on twitter at @AfroLez and connect via her public Facebook page.

The post TFW’s Aishah Shahidah Simmons Receives Sterling Brown Professorship at Williams College appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

It is with grave concern that we, the undersigned Somali academics, researchers, students, writers, activists, community members and our non-Somali academic and activist allies, write to you today.

We are deeply troubled by the extraordinary omission of Somali academics and researchers from the board of editors, international advisory board, and published authors of the newly launched academic journal Somaliland Journal of African Studies (SJAS). We are further disturbed by comments made publicly on Facebook by advisory board member and social anthropologist Dr. Markus Hoehne in response to and dismissive of the Somali-led critique of academic exclusion and Western dominance in SJAS and the field of Somali Studies more generally.

In its recent inaugural issue, the Somaliland Journal of African Studies described itself as an academic journal “covering African affairs at large, but with a particular focus on East Africa and the Horn.” It also stated that the journal was the product of collaboration “with students and scholars of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies of the University of Hargeisa.” It was brought to our collective attention in late March that the editorial and advisory boards do not reflect this supposed partnership with UofH. Not a single Somali student or scholar from Hargeisa, the broader Somali region, or the vast Somali diaspora is represented in SJAS. Instead, the editorial and advisory board is made up of 9 Europe and US based academics – as well as two graduate student editors – and three Ethiopian academics affiliated with Addis Ababa University.

In response to this exclusion of Somali researchers and scholars from SJAS, there were conversations on Facebook between young Somali academics and activists on how to respond, and the announcement of a Twitter-based discussion on March 26th under the hashtag #CadaanStudies. “Cadaan” is the Somali term for whiteness, and the hashtag was intended to capture important questions of power, authority and knowledge production about the Somali territories, and how Somalis continue to be marginalized in academic and policy discussions concerning them.

It was in one of these Facebook conversation threads that Dr. Markus Hoehne entered in defense of SJAS and dismissal of this critique. It is necessary to quote his words at length:

I did NOT come accross [sic] many younger Somalis who would qualify as serious SCHOLARS – not because they lack access to sources, but because they seem not to value scholarship as such. Sorry to say, but to become a successful political scientist, social anthropologist, sociologist or human geographer, you study many years without an economically promising end in sight. You have to work hard before you get out one piece of text and even then, you often get more criticism than praise. You certainly do not become rich quickly as a social scientist, at least if you have to pay your bills in Europe or Northamerica. Now, where are all the ‘marginalised’ Somalis who do not get their share in academia? I guess you would have to first find all the young Somalis who are willing to sit on their butt for 8 hours a day and read and write for months to get one piece of text out. Okay, before you ‘crucify’ me now for my neo-colonial racist male writing, I ADMIT that given the lack of good quality higher education in social sciences INSIDE Somalia, one cannot enter into a fair competition between cadaan iyo madow [black] scholars here. BUT, there are many young Somalis in UK, USA and continental Europe who have a chance to get a degree from a well-established university in social sciences and become master analysts of Somali and other affairs (where are Somali sociologists who work on issues of discrimination or inequality in the USA or Europe, where are Somali religious scholars who engage in the debate about Islam in Europe? Sometimes you have to look beyond your Somali navel). But in my life, I met only very FEW diaspora Somalis who seriously pursued such a career (in social sciences). So, your activism is good, but what you actually would have to do – instead of getting outraged at cadaan scholars, is to sit down and get your analysis out and criticise not cadaan for writing sth, but your own brothers and sisters for not writing better stuff!

He continued to argue back and forth with over 30 educated Somalis, stating “there is not enough good and serious scholarship in the form of articles and books coming from Somali social scientists,” that he “did not see many young Somalis seriously engaging in social sciences,” and demanded they prove their existence to him: “Please send me the references to articles and books written by young Somali social scientists that have been published in well-established journals and with reputable publishers.”

When Hoehne was asked to leave the thread by many who felt patronized and attacked by his comments, he crudely responded in broken Somali translating to: “Fine. I will go. You and your friends can talk about a stupid white man who is colonizing you, but I think that when you are finished talking about colonialism, you will go back to your Somali tribalism.” In subsequent discussions on other Somali Facebook pages following the successful #CadaanStudies Twitter discussion, he continued to comment in incredibly divisive ways, questioning the authenticity of diaspora Somalis who participated in Twitter activism and reducing the critique of knowledge production and systemic power to one that pitted individual white against black, us (non-Somali Somali Studies scholars) versus them (Somalis, who he viewed as lacking the credentials and discipline to produce academic work and participate in the field). He positioned himself, a German anthropologist, as more in touch with Somali reality than the Somalis who were challenging him online, while continuing to argue that the conversations taking place online was not “real debate”:

“You all seem to be in the diaspora. INSIDE Somalia, I have never encountered this type of flat reaction towards me. Some people hated me for certain opinions, many challenged me – but there was a real debate about THE MATTER, not flat accusations of racism and white supremacy. In my subjective opinion, Somalis in Somalia had a much more constructive and interesting way of debating than many of you (whoever ‘you’ exactly is) in the diaspora, who have so many means compared to your brothers and sisters who never left the motherland. Maybe you should get your equation right: If I am a white supremacist, you are a black supremacist compared to your brothers and sisters back in Somalia who have not all the high quality education and economic means you can access.”

We are appalled by the words of Dr. Markus Hoehne, his lack of self-awareness regarding the seriousness and violence of his comments and thinking, and his inability and unwillingness to engage. We are concerned that these words should come from an academic who considers himself an expert on Somalis and has power in both the field of Somali Studies as well as policy about and within the Somali territories, evidenced by the decision to commission him for the project “Community Safety Forums & Community Police Dialogues in Somaliland, Puntland and South Central Somalia” by the Danish Demining Group and funding from the UK Department for International Development (DFID).

It is our collective belief that what Dr. Markus Hoehne’s comments and the exclusionary Somaliland Journal of Somali Studies show us is the necessity and urgency of discussing and deconstructing issues of power and authority in Somali Studies, and thinking through how this has shaped academic knowledge production about Somalis historically and into the present. We are keenly aware that Somali Studies emerged alongside the colonization of the Somali territories, and that inextricably linked to the expansion of European power in the Horn of Africa was the production of cultural and historical information about Somalis. In the postcolonial present, the production of knowledge about the Horn of Africa remains largely in the hands of European and American academics and analysts, increasingly linked to the informational needs of neocolonialism and the War on Terror. There is too much at stake for our voices and concerns to be dismissed.

Signed,

– Safia Aidid, PhD Candidate in History, Harvard University

– Ilyas Abukar, PhD Candidate in American Studies, University of Maryland-College Park

– Cawo Abdi, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota

– Abdi Latif Ega, author of “Guban” and PhD Candidate, Columbia University

– Abdi Ismail Samatar, Professor & Chair, Department of Geography, Environment and Society, University of Minnesota

– Yusuf Dirie, Teaching Fellow in Innovation and PhD Researcher, University of Sussex

– Hodan Mohamed, Co-Founder of Sahan Literary Forum and PhD Candidate in Population Health, University of Ottawa

– Fowsia Abdulkadir, PhD Candidate in Canadian Studies, Carleton University

– Ahmed Ibrahim, PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology, City University of New York

– Hared Mah, PhD Student in Economics, Southern Illinois University

– Fadumo Dayib, PhD Student, University of Helsinki, Mid-Career Masters of Public Administration and Mason Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School

– Jamal Adam, PhD Candidate in Education, University of Minnesota

– Sumaya Mohamed, Researcher, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington

– Safia Gahayr, poet, trade unionist, educator and PhD Candidate in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, OISE, University of Toronto

– Sofia Samatar, Assistant Professor of Literature and Writing, California State University Channel Islands

– Ifrah Abdullahi, PhD Candidate in Pediatrics and Child Health, University of Western Australia

– Maimuna Mohamud, Researcher at the Heritage Institute for Policy Studies (Mogadishu). Masters, Refugee & Forced Migration Studies, Oxford and Masters, Global Gender Studies, University at Buffalo

– Saeed Abdulkadir Said (Naji), PhD Candidate in Federation University Australia, Ex-Director of Training and Consultancy of Simad University, Mogadishu

– Mohammed Ibrahim Shire, author, documentary filmmaker and PhD Candidate in Management Science, Loughborough University

– Abdiwasa Abdilahi Bade, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and International Relations, Addis Ababa University

– Zamzam Ahmed Abdi, PhD Candidate in International Development Studies, Utrecht University Netherlands

– Ifrah Magan, MSW University of Chicago, PhD Candidate , University of Illinois at Chicago

– Sahro Ahmed Koshin, Activist, Author, Poet, MA Cultural Anthropology, Leiden University, MA Advanced Development Studies, Radboud University, PhD Candidate at the University of Nairobi

– Charmarkeh Houssein, PhD in Communication, Universite Sorbonne, Postdoctorate and Part-Time Professor, Department of Communication, University of Ottawa

– Hashim Yonis, PhD Candidate in Executive Leadership, University of Minnesota

– Deika Mohamed, PhD Student, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto

– Deika Omar Ahmed, PhD Candidate in Sociology, University of Ottawa

– Kalid Abdinasir, PhD Candidate, Department of Social Anthropology, Addis Ababa University

– Alexander Weheliye, Professor of African American Studies, Northwestern University

– Adan Makina, PhD Candidate in Public Policy & Administration, Walden University & WardheerNews Editor, Interviews and Books Section

– Hussein Mohamed Yusuf, MSc Environmental and Climate Change, Lecturer at Jigjiga University Ethiopia

– Mohamed Guudle, MSc in Economics, Bilgi University Turkey, incoming PhD Student

– Sharmaarke Abdullahi, MA Public Policy, Professor at Algonquin College Social Services Department and Business Consultant with the City of Ottawa

– Nasra Giama, Assistant Professor and DNP in Nursing, University of Minnesota

– Ismail Warsame, M.Ed., Somali Narrative Project, University of Maine

– Subeyda Mohamed, BA Hons Political Science, BEd York University, MA Candidate in Immigration and Settlement Studies, Ryerson University

– Mohamed Guleid, BA Kampala International University and Lecturer, University of Burao & Addis University Colleage – Burao Branch

– Mohamed Awil, MA Candidate, International Relations and Diplomacy, University of Hargeisa

– Ahmed Abdulhalim (Naaji), Banker, Researcher, Masters in Islamic Finance Practice, INCEIF Malaysia, incoming PhD Student in Political Economics, United Nations’ African Institute for Economic Development and Planning

– Aurala Uarsama, MA, M.Ed. University of Alberta, Independent Researcher

– Hawa Y. Mire, Masters in Environmental Studies, York University

– Mohammed Omar, MA Candidate in Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa

– Dirie Yusuf, graduate student, St. Cloud State University

– Hodan A. Mohamed, MA, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

– Hudda Ibrahim, Editor-in-Chief of Somalicurrent, graduate student in Peace Studies/Policy Analysis & Political Change, University of Notre Dame

– Nimmo Osman Elmi, award winning Norweigian anthropologist, Masters in Philosophy, University of Oslo and incoming PhD Student

– Amina Musa, graduate student in International Development and Social Change, Clark University

– Guled Jama, MB BChir Candidate, University of Cambridge and Researcher at King’s Centre for Global Health

– Abdi Aidid, JD Candidate, Yale University

– Ifrah F. Ahmed, JD Candidate, CUNY School of Law and Co-Founder and Editor of Araweelo Abroad Magazine

– Mahdi Hussein, JD Candidate, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University

– Subban Jama, JD Candidate, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University

– Aswan Salsal, JD/LLM, Programme de Droit Canadien, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa

– Marwo Abdi Bayow, JD Candidate, BA Sociology University of Victoria

– Yasin Ahmed Ismail, BA Politics & International Affairs, Wake Forest University and incoming JD Candidate

– Asha Noor, MS in Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University

– Abdi Egal, MPA/MSPS, Suffolk University

– Abdinafic Ali, Masters Candidate in Finance and Banking, Kadir Has University Turkey

– Warsan Noor, Masters in Spanish/Bilingual and Multicultural Studies, George Mason University

– Ayaan Moussa, Masters in Gender and Women’s Studies, George Mason University

– Mohamed Noor, Masters in Economics/Finance from American University.

– Iftin Fatah, Masters in Public Policy and International Commerce, George Mason University

– Omar Fateh, Masters in Public Administration, George Mason University

– Sadia Aden, Masters in Health Informatics, George Mason University

– Shakur Ali, MA International Politics and Human Rights, City University London

– Sagal Jibril, BA International Development Studies, MA Environmental Studies, Graduate Diploma Refugee and Migration Studies, York University

– Ahmed A. Abdullahi, MA Peace and Conflict Studies, Coventry University UK

– Ahmed Ahmed, M.Ed Candidate, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

– Zenab Abdirahman, MA Educational Planning, Economics and International Development, UCL Institute of Education, University of London and Co-Founder of Somali Heritage and Academic Network

– Khalid Bashir, DePaul University

– Sumaya Ugas, student, International Development and African Studies, McGill University and columnist at Ezibota

– Zeinab Aidid, student, Anthropology and Equity Studies, University of Toronto

– Ayan A Ibrahim, BA International Studies/BA Commerce, Deakin University, Melbourne

– Iman Mohamed, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service-Qatar

– Surer Qassim Mohamed, University of Western Ontario

– Abdirahman Aydarus Yussuf, student, Politics, Philosophy and Economics, University of Washington

– Huda Ismail, Brunel University (UK) Creator and collector of Xalwo Crafts

– Yasmin Yousof, undergraduate in Politics and Education, Brandeis University

– Mohamed Jamfa, Toronto community activist and organizer

– Shukri Harbi, BA English, BA Sociology, University of Utah

– Abdinasir Elmi, BA Sociology, Moi University

– Faiza Kanyare, BSc International Politics, Brunel University UK

– Saharla Musa, student, Paediatric Nursing, Middlesex University

– Dirir Abdullahi, student, Neurobiology and Chemistry, University of Washington

– Nimo Hussein Farah, 2014 Bush Fellow and Co-Founder of SALLI Arts, Independent Artist/Activist

– Samiya Abdi, Health Promotion Consultant, Public Health Ontario

– Marian Yusuf, MSc., Registered Dietitian and Public Health Nutrition Consultant

– Ahmed Busury, Biomedical Scientist/Specialist, Director of Public Health Agency of Jubaland State Somalia, MSc Cellular Pathology, University of Westminister

– Abdirahman Yousuf Mohamoud, Second Level Masters York University UK, Masters in Research and Development, Kampala University Uganda, BA Economics

– Anisa Ali Abdi Sabrie, graduate Masters of Business Administration, Specialty General Management, Asia e University, Malaysia

– Ayaan H Affan, Masters in Nursing and Postgraduate Family Nurse Practitioner, Winona State University

– Deeko O. Hassan, Pharm D. Candidate, University of Nebraska Medical Center

– Hanaansan Jasmin, Public Health and Infection Control Policy, Anglia Ruskin University, Public Health Practitioner at National Health Service (NHS)

– Fatuma Abdullahi, writer, digital publisher and founder, Warya Post

– Said Yussuf, founder, Somalia Online

– Zahra Jibril, BA Politics and International Relations, MA International Development Management University of Westminster. Co-Founder of Horizon Institute, Somaliland and Kenya

– Firdawsa Ahmed, BA Special Education and

– Hamda Yusuf, BA International Studies, University of Washington-Seattle

– Mohamed Ali, Toronto artist, The Control Group Art Collective

– Magan Muhumed, spoken word artist, political and human rights activist

– Hali Farah, Corporate Talent Advisor, Aon

– Sadia Abdullahi, Senior Youth Outreach Worker, Boys and Girls Club Ottawa

– Mohamud Mumin, photographer and visual storyteller, Hundred Miles Pictures

– Kowthar Omar, photographer, education researcher and educator, Toronto District School Board

– Leyla Bile, Filmmaker

– Khadra Ali, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Gashanti Unity, Co-Creator and Co-Executive Producer of Refuge Productions

– Kinsi Abdulleh, visual artist, founder of NUMBI Arts and editor of literary arts magazine SCARF

– Riya Jama, artist and founder of Artivists of Somalia

– Huda Hassan, writer, University of Toronto

– Lali Mohamed, health equity provider and non-profit leader

– Edil Ayan, writer

– Abdi Osman, MFA documentary media, Ryerson University

– Saynab Mohamud, community activist, antiracist campaigner and co-founder of Hawa’s Haven

– Hibaq Gelle, community activist, Toronto

– Amran Ali, Co-Founder of Sahan Literary Forum and Community Activist

– Muna Mohamed, Health and Safety Advisor and Co-Founder of Idylcollective

– Khadija Ahmed, English teacher, BA International Development Studies, York University

– SOMALIA ONLINE

– SOMALILAND NATION NEWS

– Somali Students’ Association, University of Toronto, Mississauga

– Adan Mohamed, Head, English Broadcasting Section, Somaliland National Television and BA (Hons) Journalism and Communication, Middlesex University London

– Ubax Cristina Ali Farah, writer

– Mahad Yusuf, Executive Director of Midaynta Community Services

– Kate Jama, Musician and Artist, BA Arts/Law (Gender, Diversity and Sexuality Studies), University of Latrobe/University of Sabanci (Melbourne, Istanbul)

– Abdi Roble, Documentary Photographer/Archivist, Founder of Somali Documentary Project

– Alas Ibrahim Ali, Mogadishu, Master of Arts in Development Studies, Kampala University

– Lucky Omaar, MA Candidate in Education, Gender and International Development at UCL Institute of Education, London & 2014-2015 Fulbright Scholar

– Abdifatah Ahmed, Clinical Library Science, University of North Dakota

– Ladan Yusuf, MPA, New York University, Executive Director, Crossing Barriers

– Suban Nur Coolay, MA Candidate in Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing, Michigan State University

– Mohamed Mohamud, MPA, Evergreen College

– Mohamed Ali, BS Public Health, Shenandoah University

– Abdifatah Aden, Candidate for Master in International Law and Master of Diplomacy, Australian National University, Canberra

– Sophia Abdi Yusuf Moreau, Community Advocate, Women in War

– ARAWEELO ABROAD

– Mukhtar A. Yasin, Masters in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Malaysia

– Abshir Askar, BA Economics University of Hargeisa, M.Ed University of Nairobi, Post-Graduate Diploma in Educational Research Studies, Islamic University of Uganda, Post-Graduate Diploma Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Hargeisa

– Amira Ashour, B.Comm. Honours in Accounting, Carleton University, working for Lockheed Martin

– Mohamed Omer Aidid, BA Public Administration, American University of Beirut

– Khalif Y. Ahmed, Engineer, BS University of Wyoming, MSc New Mexico State University, MSc Colorado State University

– Ali M. Osman, MSc in Development Studies at London Southbank University, active in development and peace-building process in Somalia

– Ayuub M Ragis, Masters in Pharmacology at Gothenburgs University, currently studying History

– Hafsa Ahmed, Medical Student, University of Sharjah

– Omar Yusuf Abdulle, MA Candidate Political Science & Public Administration, Sakarya University, Turkey

– Isahak Ahmed, BA Political Science & BA Economics in Society, Marymount University, Executive Director of ICOSAO (Somalia Relief Agency), Senior Consultant Somalia Peace Builders Initiative, Founder & Former Head, English Section SLNTV

– Mariam Awale, Student in Social Work at Seneca at York University, Applicant Specialist at Oral Aesthetic Advocacy Group Inc

– Mohamed Hussein, MBChB, University of Nairobi

– Hussein Jabiri, BA Broadcasting and Communication, Cal State LA, MA in Film, Ohio University

– Nassir Ahmed, MSc in Economics and Auditing and Masters Candidate in African Studies, Copenhagen University

– Faduma Ali, BA International Development Studies, York University

– Amina Yasin, MSc Planning, Land-Use and Regional Development, University of Guelph, OGS Scholar

– Ayan Mahamoud, Activist, Founder of Kayd Arts and Organiser of Somali Week Festival London

– Jama Musse Jama, Ethnomathematician, Researcher & Author, founder of Redsea Cultural Foundation and Hargeisa International Bookfair

– Dr. Ahmed Ali, Research Director (Compton Group), Cardiff School of Biosciences, Cardiff University UK

– Mohamed Hussein Gaas, PhD Fellow and Guest Lecturer at Noragric, Faculty of Social Sciences, Norwegian University of Life Sciences and Research Fellow at Fafo Institute of Applied International Studies

– Baar Hersi, secondary school teacher, community activist, and presenter

– Istar Nur Ahmed, MA in International Relations, Diplomacy and Affairs at United States International University, Nairobi Kenya

– Abdirasak Ismail Qalinle, Engineer, BSc (Honors) in Electronic and Electrical Engineering, International University of Africa, Khartoum Sudan

– Halima Ahmed, International Relations and Africana Studies, Mount Holyoke College, Founder and Editor of Somalia – the Nation of Poets

– Halima Salah, Civil Engineering Student, American University of Sharjah

– Sahra A. Yusuf, LL.M. in Environmental and Natural Resources Law, University of Oregon

In Solidarity

– Rinaldo Walcott, Director, Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto

– Allison Taylor, PhD Brandeis, sociocultural anthropologist

– Sean Hawkins, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Toronto

– Antoinette Handley, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

– Rima Berns-McGown, Associate Director, Centre for the Comparative Study of Muslim Societies and Cultures, Simon Frasier University

– John Comaroff, Professor of African and African American Studies and Anthropology, Harvard University

– Jean Comaroff, Professor of African and African American Studies and Anthropology, Harvard University

– Laura Correa Ochoa, PhD Student in History, Harvard University

– John Gee, PhD Candidate in History, Harvard University

– Rita Nketiah, PhD Student in Women’s Studies, University of Western Ontario

– Tshweu Moleme, Political Science researcher, Munk School at the University of Toronto

– Rachel Thompson, PhD Candidate in Anthropology, Harvard University

– Juliane Okot Bitek, poet and PhD Candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies, Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia

– Ryan Kelpin, MA Political Science at York University and Executive DIrector, Cities First

– Kelly-Mae Saville, Student Chair for Sociology and Policy, Aston University UK

– Tendisai Cromwell, writer and filmmaker

– Sakinah Hasib, student, University of Waterloo

– AFRICA IS A COUNTRY

– Binyavanga Wainaina, writer

– Melissa Finn, Lecturer in Political Science, Wilfrid Laurier University

– Erin MacLeod, PhD, Lecturer, University of West Indies, Mona Campus

– Jasmine Zine, Associate Professor of Sociology, Wilfrid Laurier University

– Elleni Centime Zeleke, Lecturer and PhD Candidate, Social and Political Thought, York University

– Amber Young, Graduate Student, Social Work, University of Calgary

– Harry Verhoeven, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University, Associate Member of Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University, Convener of Oxford China-Africa Network

– Yolande Bouka, PhD, Researcher, Institute of Security Studies Nairobi

– Bethlehem Seifu Belaineh, student, activist, community organizer and Racial Minority Senator, Brandeis University

– Rowa Mohamed, University of Western Ontario

– Tracian Meikle, PhD Candidate, Department of Geography, Planning, and International Development, University of Amsterdam

– Benjamin Dix, PhD Candidate in the Anthropology of Violence, Director of PositiveNegatives

– Kariima Ali, BSc Psychology, Goldsmiths University UK

– Netta Kornberg, Research Assistant, Faculty of Education, York University

– Juliane Hammer, Associate Professor, Department of Religions Studies, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

– Denise Spitzer, PhD, Canada Research Chair, University of Ottawa

– Caroline Elkins, Professor of African and African American Studies and History, Harvard University

– Monica Fagioli-Ndlovu, PhD Candidate in Anthropology, The New School for Social Research

– TRANSITION MAGAZINE

– Mulugeta Hailemariam Zegeye, BA Addis Ababa University, MSc University of Glasgow, Former Member of Ethiopian Parliament (Chairman of Budget Committee) and Fmr Chairman of Ethiopian Athletics, African Languages Program, Harvard University

– Jamilla Davis, student in Anthropology and Educational Studies, Bates College

– Hawa Noor, writer, BA International Relations and African Studies, University of Toronto

– Jacqueline Russel, MA, Health Research Specialist, Toronto Public Health

– Sarah Kennedy Bates, PhD Candidate in History, Harvard University

– Alemayehu Weldemariam, former Professor at Suffolk University, graduate studies George Mason University

– Nakanyike Musisi, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Toronto

– Yannick Marshall, poet, PhD Candidate, Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University

– James J.T. Roane, PhD Candidate in History, Columbia University

– Axelle Karera, PhD Candidate in Philosophy, Penn State University

– Tiffany Tsantsoulas, PhD Student in Philosophy, Penn State University

– Ricky Varghese, PhD, RSW, psychotherapist, art critic and writer, University of Toronto

– Kathy Kiloh, PhD, Instructor, OCAD University

– Vasuki Shanmuganathan, PhD Candidate in German and Women and Gender Studies, University of Toronto

– Ajamu Nangwaya, PhD, Instructor, Seneca College

– Rachael Hill, PhD Candidate in African History, Stanford University

– Lena Weber, MSc Candidate in Human Ecology, Lund University Sweden

– Bhakti Shringarpure, editor-in-chief Warscapes Magazine and Assistant Professor, University of Connecticut

– Hillina Seife, PhD Candidate in History, University of Michigan

– Natasha Issa Shivji, Lecturer, Department of History, University of Dodoma, Tanzaniaand PhD Candidate in History, New York University

– WARSCAPES MAGAZINE

– Natasha Obiri, blogger, BA History and Philosophy, University of Toronto

– Keguro Macharia, Independent Scholar, Nairobi

– Stephanie Belmer, PhD, Instructor, Vanier College

– Kay Kaufman Shelemay, G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

– Alessandra Di Maio, Associate Professor, Department of Humanities, University of Palermo, Italy

– Efe Levent, National Chiao Tung University, PhD Institute of Applied Arts

– Andrew Pope, PhD Candidate, Harvard University

– Chambi Chachage, PhD Candidate, Harvard University

– THE AFRICA COLLECTIVE

– Andreas Admasie, PhD Candidate, University of Basel

– Alula Eshete, MBA Candidate, Harvard Business School

– Molefi Kete Asante, Professor, Temple University

– Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies

– Afrocentricity International Inc.

– Maxi Schoeman, Professor and Head of Department of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria, South Africa

– David McGraw Schuchman, MSW, LICSW, Clinical Social Worker, Minneapolis

– Michael Busch, Senior Editor of Warscapes Magazine, and Doctoral Candidate in Political Science, The Graduate Center, CUNY

– Aaron Bady, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Texas, Austin

– Alexandra Berceanu, MA Communications & Culture, Ryerson University

– Moyosore Arewa, student, Wilfred Laurier University and Opinion Editor, The Chord

– George Brooke-Smith, BSc Philosophy, Politics and Economics, University of York

– Sinthujan Varatharajah, PhD Candidate in Political Geography, University College London, University of London

– Meghan Healy-Clancy, PhD, Lecturer on Social Studies and on Women, Gender and Sexuality, Harvard University

– Jeremy Rich, PhD, Chair, Social Sciences Department, Maywood University

– Karen Larbi, BA Hons, Law and Social Anthropology, SOAS, University of London

– Azeezat Johnson, PhD Student in Geography, University of Sheffield UK

– Jill Kelly, History, Southern Methodist University

– Bilal Zenab Ahmed, PhD Student, SOAS, University of London

– Arman Osmany, MA Comparative Literature, King’s College London

– Jonathan Paul Katz, MSc Student in Migration Studies, University of Oxford

– Keren Weitzberg, PhD, Postdoctorate Researcher, Joseph H. Lauder School of Management and International Studies, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania

– Nadiya Ali, PhD Candidate, SOAS, University of London and Co-Founder, Indigenous Insight-Africa

– MJ Rwigema, PhD Student in Social Work, University of Toronto

– Jonathan Paul Katz, MSc Student in Migration Studies, University of Oxford

– Sarah Nwafor, African Studies, University of Birmingham

– Jessica Cammaert, PhD, Sessional Lecturer, Department of Global Studies, Wilfrid Laurier

– Kabita Chakraborty, Assistant Professor, Children’s Studies, Humanities LAPS, York University

– Elisabeth Gade, MA Student, University of Oslo, Norway

– Nathaniel Matthews, PhD Candidate, Northwestern University

– Gatete TK, LLM Human Rights and Democratisation of Africa, University of Pretoria

– Shireen Ahmed, writer and sports activist

– Joakim Gundel, Political Analyst, Katuni Consult

– Robin Turner, PhD, Associate Professor of Political Science, Butler University

– Anni Movsisyan, BA Mixed Media Fine Art, University of Westminster UK and Activist

– Kim Yi Dionne, Assistant Professor of Government, Smith College

– Gurminder K. Bhambra, Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick UK

– Jasmine Gani, Lecturer, School of International Relations, University of St.Andrews

– Wossen Ayele, JD Candidate, Harvard Law School

– Emmanuel Akyeampong, Professor of History and African and African American Studies, Harvard University

– Rannveig Haga, Postdoctoral Researcher, Södertörn University College

– Simmi Dullay, Black Consciousness Decolonial Scholar and Cultural Producer

– Marcia Lynx Qualey, ARABLIT e-magazine

– Stephanie Lämmert, PhD Student in History, European University Institute

– Nishi Singh, MA Candidate in Globalization Studies, Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University

– Ylva Habel, Assistant Professor, Media and Communication Studies, Department of Learning and Communication, Södertörn University Sweden

– Uros Zver, Department of History and Civilization, European University Institute Italy

– Sara Ahmed, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London

– Muneer Karcher-Ramos, Community Faculty, University of Minnesota

– Tommaso Giordani, Doctor in History and Civilization, European University Institute, Florence

– Silvan Heinze, Student of Area Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin

– Monica J. Casper, PhD, Professor and Head, Gender and Women’s Studies, Affiliated Faculty in Africana Studies & School of Sociology, University of Arizona

– Stephanie Latty, PhD Student, Social Justice Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

– Dylan Lambert-Gilliam, Student of Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

– Aili Tripp, Professor of Political Science and Gender & Women’s Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

– Angela Last, PhD, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow

– Jesse Mills, PhD, Associate Professor and Chair of Ethnic Studies, University of San Diego

– Brian Kwoba, PhD Student in History, Oxford University and organizer of Oxford Pan-Afrikan Forum

Names are being continuously added (see here for updated list). To add your name, please post in the comments or email safia.aidid@gmail.com.

The post Can the Somali Speak?: Open Letter to Dr. Markus Hoehne and the Somaliland Journal of African Studies appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Petra Jans

Science has always been my calling, but it was not until I started studying feminism at Colorado College that I began to see the ways in which science was conflicting with my being a woman. Though I am now an aspiring physician scientist drawn to cancer research, studying feminism has revealed how science and medicine are deeply entrenched in sexism and patriarchy. Hence, I hope to not just join the fight against cancer, but be a critical part of changing the way we carry out the fight.

Cancer is defined as the uncontrolled growth of abnormal or malignant cells that are capable of spreading to distant sites throughout the body. Though cancer, which affects millions of Americans each year, is often grouped as one disease, it is many different diseases classified by the type of tissue from which the malignant cells originated. Cancer begins in our own cells where, over time, mutations have occurred, changing the genetic material and allowing the cells to escape the restraints of normal growth. It is a fascinating disease because it is one in which the cells of our own bodies seem to turn against us, exploiting us until there is no tissue left un-colonized. According to oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, “To confront cancer is to encounter a parallel species, one perhaps more adapted to survival than even we are” (pp. 39). Mukherjee weaves an intricate history of cancer and its treatment, and uncovers feminist issues, which beckon me to dig deeper into this cause to which I am hoping to dedicate my life.

A sketch of the radical mastectomy from William Stewart Halsted Surgical Papers

When I first became infatuated with cancer biology, I could not imagine anything unjust about the war on cancer, except maybe the cancer itself. Not until some recent digging did it become clear that, even in our recent history, women’s bodies have been a central battleground in this war. According to James Olson, at the end of the 19^th century, Dr. William Halsted took advantage of recent gains in aseptic surgical techniques, anesthesia, and pathology to develop the radical mastectomy (pp. 58). The radical mastectomy became the hallmark of breast cancer treatment, and Halsted became a medical hero. In his procedure, the entire breast, axillary lymph nodes, and chest muscles were cut away in a single motion with the hope of removing every trace of cancer before it was able to travel or metastasize to distant sites and become a systemic and fatal disease. However, Halsted’s radical mastectomy left women with concave chests, and for some this meant brutally disfigured. Simultaneously at this historical point, the world of medicine was transitioning from domestic medicine delivered primarily by women, to professional, academic medicine, which was male-dominated. As medicine became more grounded in science it suffered from depersonalization, and breast cancer patients became the “scientific objects” of surgeons, who were only keen on improving survival rates (Olson, pp. 64).

The radical mastectomy’s dominance over most of the 20^th century is an example of how science can turn into dogma−this is what makes it so concerning to feminists. The procedure was based on a theory that breast cancer started as a local disease, an isolated tumor, and only at a certain point did malignant cells begin to break off and spread beyond the initial site, metastasizing, to become a systemic disease and no longer curable. Thus, if all of the tissue containing and surrounding the tumor could be removed, the chance of the cancer spreading would be significantly reduced. Unfortunately, this theory turned out not to be true. As, in many cases, cancer is already a systemic disease long before distant metastases are visibly detected. In the early 1900s radiotherapy became another form of cancer treatment. In 1935, British physician Geoffrey Keynes performed a study comparing breast cancer patients treated with radical mastectomies to those treated with simple mastectomies followed by radiation, which was a much less invasive procedure. He found no difference in survival rates fifteen years later. Despite his scientific reason, accompanied by a few others over the years, it would not be until the 1970s, when breast cancer became more visible to the public, that the Halsted radical mastectomy’s reign over breast cancer treatment would come to an end.

As feminists revealed, women were the “guinea pigs” of the glorified medical establishment, and surgeons, who remain predominantly male even today, were the valiant heroes of the “war on cancer.” Not only did women fight against the radical mastectomy, but many, lead by Rose Kushner, also advocated against the common practice of combining breast biopsies and mastectomies into one procedure. It was common practice that if a surgeon found cancer, they would remove it without waking the patient. The patient would go to sleep not knowing if she had cancer and could wake up with her entire breast gone. In this practice, women had little to no role in the decisions about their bodies. Despite the work of activists, and the

The first edition of the book, “Our Bodies, Ourselves” by the Boston’s Women’s Health Book Collective in 1973

status of breast cancer as one of the most visible diseases in society, I fear the errors and hubris that cultivated the radical mastectomy to its peak in the 1950s did not disappear with the death of the procedure. Feminists recognized the paternalistic power relations of the physician-patient relationship, especially between male physicians and female patients. With the production of feminist texts like Our Bodies, Ourselves, women are encouraged to take charge of their own health and question the authority of the medical establishment, and demand multiple opinions as well as the pros and cons of each treatment. When it comes to cancer, the scientific community does not have all the answers, nor the “right” answers for people. Thus, as the holders of their bodily knowledge, women have an important role to play in partnership with their doctor, where their insights are valued just as much as those of the physician.

Care for cancer patients, however, does not end with the final dose of chemotherapy or the last stitch of a surgery to remove a tumor. There are many physical consequences of the treatment alone, like the hair-loss that everyone pictures when they think of cancer patients, not to mention the sometimes dangerously low white blood cell counts. And, we cannot forget the psychological and social effects as well. In addition to all of the cancer awareness organizations, there exists a large market of cancer support groups and countless literatures written by cancer survivors that offer words of encouragement and hope for those who are negotiating their experience with cancer. One of the most prominent struggles these authors confront is the assault that breast cancer makes on their identities and the instability of their identities, as women and as people. These literatures detail what it means to come to terms with what seems like an attack from within and the feeling of fragmentation when a body part must be amputated.

Estee Lauder breast cancer awareness advertisement, which raises questions about misrepresentation of survivors, body politics,  and marketing agendas.  What are the ethics of breast cancer awareness campaigns?

For example, in Diane Price Herndl’s feminist analysis of breast cancer literatures and memoirs, she argues that instead of embracing the transitory nature of identity and life, the narratives tend to focus on a single identity: survivor. Though these kinds of narratives create an important community for women with breast cancer that surely was not present thirty years ago, Price Herndl argues that it is but a small community that encourages normalization and “certainly does not move out to embrace the disability movement and its challenge to the idea that there is only one form of healthy embodiment” (pp. 241). There is so much inequity in the way we discuss and handle illness in this country. Breast cancer texts, as well as the mainstream breast cancer movement, do little to challenge the ablest norms of health, women, and patriarchal science.

Along these lines, Barbara Ehrenreich tells her own breast cancer story in “Welcome to Cancerland,” which offers some compelling critiques of the breast cancer movement that she cunningly renames the “breast cancer cult.” For example, the continued emphasis on mammograms, a technology that many studies have shown does very little to improve survival, simply extends the length of time that a woman is aware of having breast cancer.

America’s breast-cancer cult can be judged as an outbreak of mass delusion, celebrating survivorhood by downplaying mortality and promoting obedience to medical protocols known to have limited efficacy. And although we may imagine ourselves to be well past the era of patriarchal medicine, obedience is the message behind the infantilizing theme in breast-cancer culture, as represented by the teddy bears, the crayons, and the prevailing pinkness (Ehrenreich, 2001).

Peggy Orenstein, in “Our Feel-Good War on Breast Cancer,” also takes a critical stance on annual mammograms after conceding, “I used to believe that a mammogram saved my life.” Mammography is a screening tool based on a similar assumption that led to the radical mastectomy: early detection and early removal of the tumor are necessary to catch the cancer before it spreads. But as scientists have learned

Gayle Sulik‘s new book “Pink Ribbon Blues” offers another example of a feminist critique of the breast cancer movement.

more recently, the course of breast cancer from a local tumor to metastatic disease is far from uniform and is rather unpredictable. Some of the worst forms of cancer have often metastasized well before they are detectable by a mammogram, while other forms may never metastasize or they grow so slowly that they are equally treatable even after being found years later without a mammogram — meaning by the woman herself or by a physical exam. What this amounts to, Orenstein argues, is an unnecessary amount of over-diagnosis, putting many women through treatments that they may not have needed. Many of the women receiving what could be considered unnecessary treatment have the diagnosis of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), a pre-malignant abnormality of the milk duct, which may or may not progress to invasive cancer. Eliot Marshall discusses the problems with the DCIS diagnosis and the unwarranted psychological and physical damage it may be causing women. These issues surrounding DCIS are a consequence of the overuse of mammograms. Though annual mammograms can hardly be considered as traumatic as the radical mastectomy, their logic is systemic because the result is that women’s bodies become the objects of science and medicine and are often traumatized.

Dr. Teresa Woodruff in her Northwestern University Lab.

It has been unsettling to learn of the injustices woven into the history of cancer, but it motivates me to play a part in the changes that need to occur in the field of medicine and science. Because science necessitates change through new technologies and new discoveries, scientists and physicians must continue to question the “accepted” and challenge the status quo. What good is research if you always ask the same questions, always approaching the problem from the same point of view? There are many more women in science now than a century ago, but I often wonder how much has changed in the domineering masculine mentality of the science community. So, I “Googled” medical feminism, and found a medical student’s blog mentioning women who were changing medicine, which included Dr. Teresa K. Woodruff at Northwestern University. I watched Dr. Woodruff’s TEDx talk on oncofertility, and the more I read about her work, the more inspired I became. Dr. Woodruff’s research has revealed that significantly fewer young female cancer patients have the option to preserve their fertility before the damage done by chemotherapy than their male counterparts. This is a significant insight on the persistence of patriarchal science because it reflects a gender bias in the way cancer treatments and fertility are approached by physicians. Additionally, it reveals a gender bias in what scientists actually know about fertility preservation for cancer patients, which cannot simply be accounted for by the relative “complexity” of the female reproductive system. Woodruff’s work seeks to eliminate this gender bias in fertility preservation for cancer patients, as well as the gender bias that exists in much of basic science and medical research.

An immature human oocyte (egg) with a secondary follicle.

To do so, Dr. Woodruff has founded and directs the Oncofertility Consortium. The Consortium takes an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together oncologists and reproductive scientists, to increase our knowledge about the effect of chemotherapy and radiation on ovarian development, and improve methods of effectively preserving ovarian tissue for young women with cancer, among many other projects; it provides resources and options to patients and practicing health professionals. Dr. Woodruff’s research contributes to the ending the gender bias in science by advocating for the importance of recognizing and investigating sex differences in medical research. Additionally, she created the Women’s Health Research Institute at Northwestern University to promote interdisciplinary research and provide mentorship for young women in the biomedical sciences, as well as patient outreach. While these are all positive changes in addressing women’s issues in health and science, there is more to be done in the dismantling of gender inequality and health disparities.

As Dorothy Roberts argues, there are many shortcomings of the oncofertilty approach, particularly the need to address the social and economic issues surrounding fertility preservation. While an important implication of oncofertility is its protection of a woman’s reproductive autonomy, Roberts argues that more could be done to challenge reproductive norms that place more value on genetically related than adopted children. This would mean that oncofertility centers should work to remove the many barriers that prevent cancer survivors from adopting children. Roberts also reveals how oncofertility fits neatly into our social hierarchies of dominant gender roles, which emphasize the importance of motherhood in a woman’s life.

Does the desire to preserve this option and the distress from losing it [the ability to have a child] stem in part from a gender injustice? [or perhaps it is due to] …the unjust expectation that all women will become mothers, and the stigma of infertility (Roberts, 781).

Furthermore, economic barriers prevent many women from even accessing these new fertility preservation technologies. Instead of reproducing the patriarchal logic, Roberts argues for a focus on the reasons for fertility loss and ways we can prevent it as “a systemic change, rather than expensive technological interventions” (pp. 798).

Needless to say, solving these injustices in women’s health, in cancer and other diseases, cannot be done by one scientist, or scientists alone, but will require continued effort from feminist advocates in all areas of society. Woodruff, herself, seems to recognize the value of a more systemic solution, and she makes a hopeful prediction that the field of oncofertility will be obsolete in twenty years, believing that we are well on our way to developing new cancer therapeutics that will not cause as much damage to the reproductive system, and thus prevent the problem in the first place (Science 2034).

I think the social history of cancer has an important message to deliver, especially to young aspiring physicians and biomedical scientists. As we become a part of the ever-growing medical establishment, we have a lot of power and will have to choose: do we want to continue to practice medicine and science the way it has always been done? Or will we dare to question the status quo, consider new perspectives and complexities, and challenge our field to create a more just and livable society?

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

Petra Jans is a senior at Colorado College majoring in Biochemistry with a minor in Feminist and Gender Studies. Originally from England, she has called Colorado home since 2001. She enjoys hiking, singing, traveling, and visiting her family in Belgium. After graduation, she will be attending medical school and working towards her goal of becoming a physician scientist.

The post COLLEGE FEMINISMS: Oncofeminism appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Yehuda Sharim

Did you find all your terrorists, America?

1.3 million men, women and children from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, are dead and now: what is next America? Who is accountable for killing and treating black-brown-Arab looking men as subhuman? Is it a “war on terror” or just the instillation of terror that crosses borders? Aren’t you tired of killing America? How many terrorists are left America?

During a late-night vigil following the death of another young man of color, I heard your sons afraid that they are next. Who is next America?

Who allowed the Israeli Prime Minister to conquer your heart?

Who was there to applaud speeches that celebrate xenophobia and hate?

Who benefits from the murdering of our Mexican, African-American, and Palestinian young men? Who shamelessly claps in our face?

Who taught us to ignore injustice? How

Deeply do you sleep America? Do you feel

Safe in your dreams? Will you ever feel

Safe?

Maybe, America, there are wars that are not supposed to end?

Maybe, this world has nothing but terror, cynicism, and suspicion?

And maybe the Israeli Prime Minister is the real American President? And Hamas is ISIS? And Iran is Palestine? And Mexico is Palestine? And Compton is Palestine? When Palestine itself is disappearing by the day and we are already not sure we know what we mean when we talk about Palestine?

No, Hamas is not ISIS, Iran is not Palestine, and Mexico is not Palestine, and Compton is not Palestine, so who benefits from theories of suspicion that erase difference? Who is here to gain from presenting every man of color, Arab-looking, as a demon, and a potential terrorist? But to talk about gain and politicians and their lies is not enough, what are we losing together, as a society, all of us?

And what does it say about me — an Israeli man, ex-soldier and ex-prisoner — will you hunt me because my skin is like Ussama or will you celebrate my Jewish-white blood? How many times a day should I shave, America? How often I should shave my being, wax my Middle Eastern histories, cut off my sensitivity, so you will stop staring at me, questioning my accent, asking me where my parents are from because I don’t look Jewish-Ashkenazi-white enough, and then inviting me, the exotic-Jew, to entertain your liberal fantasies?

Who is afraid of Arabs running in droves to elect?

Who will kill us for a taillight being out?

Who will place guns in our hands in order to justify our shooting?

But we know that it is more than fear; it is the blunt refusal to deal with change. And that is why we, the ultimate criminals, Brown-Black and Arab-looking terrorists who dare to face blank pages for hours until we give meaning to this beautiful and violent storm, inappropriate Jews and Palestinians who dare to cross borders, soldiers of vision, radical academics, courageous soldiers of disobedience, rebels of great tenderness, asylum and compassion seekers, dancers who dance in cubicles and allow vulnerability against all odds, free style farmers with dirty hands and clear visions, commissioned brutes who are here to stay and work after the last pay check, ask you yet again:

Did you find all your terrorists, America? 1.3 million men, women and children are dead now, maddened but not hopeless, at times it seems that justice escapes us, but we are more than momentary news, we are real, and we are not here to get used to tragedies.

_______

Yehuda Sharim is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Rice University.

The post Did you find all your terrorists America? appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

~~~~~~~~~

Step by step is an understatement of the

Complexity

Confusion

Exhaustion

That comes along with this work,

Deconstruction

Reconstruction so that many of us can carry on

Carry onto a place of understanding

Willingness

Strength

Until the lion has a historian, the hunter will always be the hero.

– African Proverb

Histories

Histories is where we are grounded

To carry on the stepping stone to one after another

And another so we see we aren’t alone

Next comes the location

The identity

That we experience

Share

Unwind to others

The confusion of thoughts that are wrapped around

The history that we carry on our backs

Location

Locate ourselves in the world that puts the burden

We live in everyday without any

Relentless

Break—

To an understanding of our own

Locate the connections that we share in society

So we can catch a ride on the continuous waves that will be

Never-ending

Wave to the others that we want to join

Because that’s how we grow

Break from the identity

From the privilege

From the “us”

From the “them”

To the we

The collective

The confrontation of one’s own personal privilege only produces resistance or discomfort if one identifies with or is attached in some way to that privilege.

– Leela Fernandes, Transforming Feminist Practice, Pg. 29

To push back through these struggles that makes it so hard

To think clearly

Rationally

Without any outside influences

Or violence

No matter the circumstances that might push you

Toward the edge

I want to ask how feminist approaches to questions of social justice would change if the existing dichotomy between the material/ political/ social and the spiritual realms were to be set aside.

-Leela Fernandes, Transforming Feminist Practice, Pg. 10

While streets are swept clean from the broken glass

And the date of April 19^th and beyond are remembered

In the hearts of people from the Washington area

The contradictions

Ring in their ears

Just like Hooks

Fernandes

Wittig

Crenshaw

Anzaldúa

All ring in mine to show me a strong path to follow

Still passing on the stepping stone

To find

Myself

The kind of transformation that is needed now will require a fire burning from our deepest sources of spiritual strength and knowledge.

-Leela Fernandes, Transforming Feminist Practice, Pg. 22

This spirituality for social change, spirituality that recognizes the many differences among us yet insists on our commonalities and uses these commonalities as catalysts for transformation.

-AnaLouise Keating, “Charting Pathways, Making Thresholds…A Warning,” Pg. 18

Feminist theory can lead to many paths in the

World

Society

Community we live in

Along with intersections at every corner

But the crossroads we meet

Can always be drawn

And redrawn

When we are ready to accept a transformation

A spirituality

A light to pull from

For from a spiritualized perspective, transformation occurs through the practice itself rather than in the visible or material outcome of the practice.

-Leela Fernandes, Transforming Feminist Practice, Pg. 119

The material might be the graspable goal

Along the road we all travel upon

But only Fernandes

Can explain the goal almost every

Feminist

Theory

Individual struggling should strive to be

What then is the direction of spiritual revolution? I believe that the role of the spiritual revolutionary can never be predetermined or defined to fit a pre-given model. It will always be contingent on one’s choices and contextual circumstances and on the element of the unknowable. The spiritual revolutionary is no more than a worker who knows that utopias are real and who, with this knowledge, cannot live but to manifest a world in this image.

-Leela Fernandes, Transforming Feminist Practice, Pg.123

 

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

Wafa Simpore is a Women’s, Gender & Sexualities Studies major at the University of Connecticut. Currently a Senior at UConn, Wafa hopes to go on to a Master’s program in Social Work. Being an advocate for women’s issues and equality for all has been a central focus of her work.  Such a focus has helped Wafa find a place in society that challenges normative thought processes and has forged a way for her to step outside of her comfort zone.  Wafa hopes to bring her feminist insights and work, and all its difficulties, to where ever she might end up in life–particularly to strengthen her social worker’s career.

The post COLLEGE FEMINISMS: POETRY BY WAFA SIMPORE appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

On May 14, 2015 I resigned from my job as a part-time Visiting Assistant Professor at a university. For three years I believed in its quest for student success; faculty/staff excellence and inclusion through professional development and retention; research and innovation; community impact; and accountability. According to my CV, it was a perfect fit. Only it wasn’t. Something was missing. Something that tied my particular experience to a much larger narrative, a narrative that frames black women’s experiences in academic institutions more generally, a narrative that makes diversity rhetoric fall short in real life, a narrative whose exclusionary practices hides behind policy and procedures. So, I resigned. I resigned because my labor and my black life matters. I resigned, because, as Toni Cade Bambara teaches us, we sometimes have to walk away from the institution in order to tell the truth about it — not for only our lives but those beyond our own.

So what happens when black lives [don’t] matter, sexism and the academic industrial complex collides?

Unadulterated systemic and structural violence and exploitation.

The Black Lives Matter hashtag and movement unapologetically exclaims that black life, as living, breathing and innately valuable, matters. Both hashtag and movement resists the continued cross-pollination of antiblackness pervasive in what Saidiya Hartman notes (and what Zillah Eisenstein recently and rightly posited) as the “afterlife of slavery.” This “afterlife” highlights the present future created by not only slavocracy, but the particular locus of binary oppositions structured in a political economy that historically divided its population into free and captive classes, and systemically relegated lives and opportunities accordingly. #BlackLivesMatter within this context becomes necessary and important, particularly as many post-captive black experiences articulate the reality that free black life in fact does not matter, and free black women’s life more specifically equates to multiple negatives.

In 2014 Black Women’s Roundtable, a program of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, reported that though there have been strides since the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act and Brown v. Board of Education, black women and girls are overwhelmingly vulnerable to social risk factors due to race, class and gender such as cyclical poverty, poor health, physical and sexual abuse, and the criminal justice system. Other vulnerabilities include race/gender/class profiling, broken kinships, concomitant hyper-sexualization and degendering, inequitable access to quality education, healthcare and childcare, increased levels of punishment in academic contexts, employment discrimination and low wages.

In terms of vulnerabilities to violence, the Roundtable writes, “No woman is more likely to be murdered in America today than a Black woman. No woman is more likely to be raped than a Black woman. And no woman is more likely to be beaten, either by a stranger or by someone she loves and trusts than a Black woman.” In terms of the criminal justice system, the Roundtable notes, black women are more likely than any other group of women in the U.S. to go to prison, particularly as they, like black men, fall victim to “misplaced perceptions.” And each of these risks negatively impact black women’s health. They posit black women and girls’ mortality rate is equal to that of developing nations and three times that of white women. “A woman in Lebanon has a much greater likelihood of surviving childbirth than does a Black woman in America.” Not to mention elevated breast cancer and high blood pressure rates.

It should also be noted that black women often die of illness due to disparities in access to treatment. What is more, because black women overwhelming make up the majority of both low-wage earners and familial care providers, they often lose employment and income for staying home due to ailment or caring for sick loved ones. In short, black women’s multiple social risks are not only marginalizing but also can be death-dealing and/or deadly. Yet communal, social, political silence around these matters abound. Law professor and intersectionality theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw has been doing a lot of work in partnership with the African American Policy Forum to ensure that these challenges become front and center in public discussions and policymaking. Too often, the matter of black women and girls’ lives is swept under the rug, beneath those of black men and boys.

Regrettably, academia and the growing academic-corporate trend is a microcosm of the world house in its disappearing and disenfranchising of black women. This is particularly evidenced in the growing precariat in academia, “the growing class of people living with short-term and part-time work with precarious living standards and ‘without a narrative of occupational development’.” The AFT notes that while Affirmative Action bans preferential treatment based on race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin, underrepresented faculty are the most likely to be consigned to “contingent” (temporary non-tenure track/adjunct) and staff positions. Also, according the AFT black people make up approximately 4-5% of full-time faculty in higher education in the U.S. Of that number approximately 1 to less than 2% are tenured or on the tenure track. The rest are contingent. In an article titled “The New Old Labor Crisis,” sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom writes, “Tenure isn’t just about managing labor costs. Tenure is and always has been political. For minorities, particularly African-Americans, tenure and academic labor have long looked like managing bottom lines and keeping the upper echelons of the Ivory Tower white and male.”

According to AAUP, which includes data on full-time tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure track faculty as well as part-time faculty and graduate student employees, as of 2011 the instructional workforce in higher education in the U.S. was approximately 1,852,224. Of that number, 892,805 are noted as women and 959,419 as men. To put it in black and white: Of the 1,852,224, 616,805 were noted as white women and 664,518 as white men while 70,375 were noted as black women and 47,651 as black men. 87,565 of the white women were noted as full-time tenured employees versus 154,649 white men. 41,692 of the white women were noted as full-time tenure-track employees versus 44,201 white men. 6,681 of the black women were noted as full-time tenured employees versus 7,776 black men. 4,716 of the black women were noted as full-time tenure-track employees versus 3,438 black men. Of the total 70,375 black women instructional employees as of 2011, 58,978 were contingent while 36,437 of the 47,651 black men instructional staffers were contingent.

While finer grained analyses are needed, particularly along the lines of race and gender identity, to include transgender, gender non-conforming, bi- and multiracial, and black diasporic distinctions, what we can gauge from AAUP is that women, blacks and people of color are underrepresented employees in higher education institutions in general, particularly in terms of tenure and tenure-track positions, and black men have an overall lower representation than black women. However, while there are more black women instructional employees than black men, and admittedly, more work is needed here, black women are disproportionately relegated to the bottom tiers of academia. Using data from the American Association of University Professors, Cottom notes, “The proportion of African-Americans in non-tenure-track positions (15.2 percent) is more than 50% greater than that of whites (9.6 percent).” In an essay titled “The Rise of the Lady Adjuncts,” economist Kate Bahn writes that women adjuncts are more than 60% of the adjunct labor force.

But what happens when one is both black and a woman? All of these areas need our attention. But the difficulty I (and others) experienced in locating statistics or works on black women adjuncts specifically, suggests the ways in which the growing precariat functions along race and gender lines needs immediate attention. Despite higher overall representation, AAUP notes that, as of 2011, 23.5% black men were tenured or tenure-track versus 16.2% black women. Additionally, 83.8% of black women were contingent versus 76.5% black men. And despite the best party line explanations, anyone slightly familiar with black women’s history and status knows this reality is more than likely because they are black women. The social risks impacting black women’s lives beyond academe simultaneously influence their experiences within it. These issues are inextricably linked. We cannot think for one moment that these variances are innocuous, unique or disconnected from larger structural issues of race, sex and class employment discrimination, misplaced perceptions, profiling, inequitable access to resources and opportunities, low wages, the growing culture of punishment assigned to girls and women in academic contexts, or poor health.

One of The Feminist Wire’s most highly trafficked and shared forums was Black [Academic] Women’s Health. Even the most cursory perusal of the articles included makes it clear that, despite institutional language or policy around rhetoric like “diversity,” “inclusion,” et al., racism and sexism in America’s elite institutions is not only alive and well but literally sickening for black women — whether tenured, tenure-tracked, adjunct, contractual or staff. Too often diversity means everything but black women, tenure/tenure-track “black hires” typically mean black men, and “multiculturalism” really only applies to the student base. Truth is, black women academics in general tend to get pushed toward the outside of the “back of the bus” (and sometimes under it), regardless of the numerous ways our bodies and labors are used and are necessary for keeping the machine as we know it afloat. And no one seems to be talking about it.

Hortense Spillers argues that the colonial structure reimagined black life as mere flesh quantifiable by their ability to increase their owner’s stock. Black women were burdened with the particular task of laboring physically and sexually, by coercion and consent, in order to maintain the slave system. While archival research notes that black women explicitly resisted slavery and the use of their bodies in these ways, research also reveals that they sometimes chose to deploy their bodies in oppressive ways for survival purposes. In “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation,” Angela Y. Davis argues that the capitalistic structure, which wedded black women to ideas of domestic and public work, created a context where ex-slave women were often forced to use their bodies to care for families, pay for food, diminish the severity of inhumane treatment or increase safety for children.

In other words, black women’s bodies and grunt work have held capitalist institutions together for a long time. And it is their positioning within this structure, first as capital themselves and then as bottom rung laborers, that has led to sometimes desperate methods of survival to include but not limited to working within oppressive structures, performing backbreaking labor and for long hours, working without or for lower pay, taking jobs where they are overqualified, not attending to health, participating in sex work, and even selling blood. The North American academic structure and its proximation to the institution of slavery as well as its particular treatment of black women cannot be ignored.

Just as we should not close our eyes to the bound hands and economically free labor that literally built institutions of learning across the nation or the living flesh used in academic and scientific experimentation to advance the production of knowledge, we should not look the other way and ignore the overwhelming and present dependency on black women’s labor in the academic caste system, which excessively utilizes black and women of color as the mules of higher learning — and that black and women of color in turn participate in as one of many means to survive. We cannot turn a blind eye to this push and pull or how it creates an illiberal power structure of oppression based survival. I should note that I am emphatically not suggesting that academia is a slave economy or that black women faculty are slaves. I am, however, arguing that the current structure operates along oppressing racial and gender lines and that should give those of us who care about justice in real life pause.

I am also positing that we need to name, critique and rethink black women’s relationship to academia and vice versa, and that this work must take seriously the archival data on black women’s labor in the U.S., academia’s investment in the corporate model and capitalist structure, and the centrality of free and cheap racialized and gendered toil in each. Black women within academic institutions are expected to bend over backwards in order to keep the institution running, departments performing, classes full, programs functioning, administration efficient, food flowing, and the grounds kept. They are expected to labor fully and in silence — for less. And they are punished, banished and re-contextualized as problemed, problematic, narcissistic, angry, bitchy and aggressive for naming or refusing to accept the terms of subordination, exploitation or abuse as normative.

The stigmatizing of black women in particular for declining third class status as an acceptable mode of operating and existing is an unsophisticated old trick of the trade. It intends to dismiss lived experiences, however one tries to turn it. And what should also be noted here is black male and female complicity within this structure. Based on several of the articles submitted to the Black [Academic] Women’s Health forum, black women’s desire to live beyond what South African queer femme scholar Eddie Ndopu names as “the zero mentality” is sometimes met with “not right now,” “wait your turn,” “be happy for what you have,” and “only me” attitudes from senior black and supposedly allying faculty. In an essay titled “Able Normative Supremacy and the Zero Mentality,” Ndopu argues that “the measures of progress used to gauge the inclusion and liberation of disabled people within an able-normative supremacist culture tend to be organized around…’the zero mentality’,” where “disabled people, most of whom are bodies of color, experience structural violence, monstrous neglect and economic disenfranchisement in ways that render such conditions normal.”

He continues, “So, because our lives and bodies have been, and continue to be, systematically relegated to the margins of societal consciousness, we as disabled segments of society personify the bottom rung of otherness. Therefore, we are operating at “negative ten” as it were. And because we are operating at “negative ten,” “zero” is celebrated as the benchmark of our well-being, human dignity, and self-determination.” While I explicitly reject the idea that able bodied black cisgender women within academia share experiential space with disabled black cis and transgender sisters and brothers, Ndopu’s point about “the zero mentality” is instructive for thinking about black women and academia, particularly the points where white supremacy and the zero mentality are deployed to keep black women in line, marginalized, silenced, and out.

Within this structure the subpar treatment of black bodies, and black women’s bodies in particular, with the exception of a select few of superblackademics, becomes criterion, and mere visibility, a reasonable measurement of progress. That is, the hiring of black bodies, regardless of status (or politics), serves as *proof of institutional racial fairness and advancement. Any moves to call to consciousness otherwise are a disruption. To put it bluntly, to demand more than zero as a black woman in academia may mean to simultaneously dis/rupt and/or dis/connect from the institution, specifically those institutions that thrive off of dehumanizing praxis and the historical model of owners and workers, of master and servant classes, and of valuable and valueless flesh. And while there isn’t a legal or literal owning class in academia, there is indeed a master class with powerful controls — some of whom use their power to help and others who use their power solely to advance their careers and polish the machine.

White, black and other faculty may fall on either side of this coin. In my short career, I have personally experienced black and white faculty, female and male, who would have parted the red sea for me and other black women if they could have. These faculty work tirelessly to deconstruct the academic ranking system in real ways in their thinking and doing. Simultaneously, I’ve had experiences where faculty have used me and others to prove or display their allegiance to the status quo, or who had unfortunately come to believe that their own status was due solely to hard work and that of most other black women within academia was due to normal, acceptable or innocent “procedural” conditions. Yet the master/servant class model impacts everyone, including black faculty with institutional power. Still, it is exceptionally harmful to black untenured, adjunct, contractual and staff women whose place within and outside of the institution is among the most at-risk.

As a former visiting scholar at an academic institution (also a nicer way of saying adjunct), I’d like to pause there. The master/servant class model (full, tenured, tenure-track/contingent or adjunct and staff) constructs a socio-economic class structure within the institution that further divides black women’s labor, value, and power. The disproportionate number of black women in adjunct and staff positions is not happenstance and must be considered against the historical archives on black women’s labor. The Black Women’s Roundtable argues that while black women’s participation rates in U.S. labor top all other groups of women, they lag considerably behind in terms of wealth accumulation due to race and sex, historical beginnings of unpaid labor, and poverty-level wages owing to high representation in low-wage fields. In fact, they argue, “black women are more likely than any group in America to work for poverty-level wages, thereby making them the most likely of all Americans to be among the working poor.” Further, they experience a poverty rate five times that of white men.

There are at least two immediate concerns here: First, the capitalist structure has historically identified black women as either no or low wage earners. And second, the lack of wealth accumulation for black women makes them even more vulnerable to social risks, to include decision-making in oppressive contexts. That is, a staff or adjunct position in academia with less pay and power is better than other forms of labor, for example, fast food or domestic work, or no job at all. However, it is important to make it clear that decision-making in oppressive contexts is limited and exploitative at best. We need more work on black women adjuncts and staff specifically, and how their titles, low pay, and lack of job security, promotion opportunities, insurance and retirement plans, regardless of education, locate them within poor and working classes, thus exposing them and their families, especially women led households, to cyclical poverty, poor health, and subpar education (the latter of which namely applies to their children).

The Roundtable notes that black women are particularly at risk of poverty after sixty-five due to not only low wages and lack of access to pension plans but lower marriage rates, higher divorce rates, and decreased eligibility for Social Security Spouse or Widow Benefits. In fact, black women retirees have the lowest household income of any demographic group in the U.S. and are especially reliant on Social Security. The Roundtable posits if it were not for social security the poverty rate for black women would more than double. Additionally, those who do not qualify for spousal or widow benefits double that of white women. This calls to mind the unspoken pressures for black women in academia to remain un-partnered and childless. Like the slave system, it is believed that more labor can be extracted from black women’s bodies when unattached to loved ones.

If this discussion on poverty among academicians makes you uncomfortable it should. If you find it unbelievable, you’ve been under a rock or perhaps safely tucked away on a remote access resort writing and researching on the institutions dime for the past several years. Cottom argues that the adjunctification of black academics simultaneously normalizes a black academic underclass, many of which end up seeking second jobs, going on food stamps, or dying without health coverage. There is also a developing discourse on the systemic marginalization of women of color in academia, some of which examine the operation of class. See Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia and The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, and articles, “Hot Commodities, Cheap Labor: Women of Color in the Academy” and “An Unten(ur)able Position: The Politics of Teaching for Women of Color in the U.S.”

There is also a budding discourse on black adjuncts. However an extended body of literature on how the university system relegates black women in particular to adjunct and staff positions and how this impacts the institutional as well as the socio-political economy, as far as I can tell, is missing. This confirms deepened levels of black women’s systemic and simultaneous marginalization and invisibility within and beyond higher education. It raises the question of how deeply this disappearing is embedded within the nations moral narrative where black women’s oppression is so pivotal to empire that it’s interpreted as moral. While this may seem unthinkable, this kind of racialized moral reasoning was essential to slavery and remains essential to the maintenance of white supremacy. Ultimately, oppressive praxis that maintains the status quo becomes a virtue in terms of upward mobility in academe and elsewhere.

Of course there are many black, brown, and white scholars who excel within academia while going against the grain. Still, as the Combahee River Collective intimated years ago, it is the work of privileged persons to help end the oppressions faced by the underprivileged. Similarly, it is the work of those in positions of power in academia to actively and collectively decrease the gap between the precariat and everyone else. This kind of collective activism has yet to happen. To this end, and as of today, I’ve come to the conclusion that the academic industrial complex, and those who help it to soar, don’t care about black women. What the academic industrial complex cares about is fiscal solvency, corporate profit, new construction, outsourcing, and growing its customer base. Again, none of this is novel. The academic industrial complex has been imagining students as customers, professors as workers, administrators as CEOs, and campuses as neoliberal markets. However, our post chattel context marks black women instructional employees, particularly the untenured, contingent and staff, as a special academic auxiliary-underclass demographic (and staff even more so).

Black women’s visibility on university campuses attempts to erase and rewrite the very real and disproportionate systemic oppressions experienced — from lack of institutional support to limited tenure track opportunities to lesser resources to lower salaries to concrete ceilings to having to know, work and produce four times as much as white colleagues while enduring invisibility to choosing between remaining institutionally silent or personally solvent. Some may see these concerns as privileged middle class problems, problems that undermine the very real racialized socio-economic class plight and extrajudicial executions that black folk in urban cities are presently experiencing. But be clear, while these challenges absolutely differ, and while the disproportionate marginalization and adjunctification of black women may very well be a “privileged” problem, all of these oppressions flow from the house/s that slavery built.

Hierarchies of oppression will not make black life matter any more. In fact, as Audre Lorde reminds us, the machine, which orchestrates crisis after crisis, is intent on “grinding all our futures into dust” [italics mine]. She writes, “If we are to keep the enormity of the forces aligned against us from establishing a false hierarchy of oppression, we must school ourselves to recognize that any attack against Blacks, any attack against women, is an attack against all of us who recognize that our interests are not being served by the systems we support.” Black women’s lives matter within and outside of academia. The oppressions and decisions black women face and make within and outside of the institution are linked. Thank goodness Black Lives Matter makes room for a range of conversations. And though we prioritize black death as we should, it is black male demise that gets the bulk of our attention. Black women’s death, whether cis or transgender, largely falls under the radar. Yet black destruction takes on many forms.

Black women’s academic oppressions are real. The intricate interweaving of racism, sexism, classism, patriarchy, capitalism and misogyny within and beyond academia aids in black women’s disenfranchisement and literal death. Of course some might argue that we can simply choose another line of [privileged] work while “real” working class and poor black women have no such luxury. I understand that critique. While we should nuance class status in terms of access, education, etc., what we presently understand to be the poor and working class must be stretched and rethought. But also, some of us may resist simply looking for another job because this work, the work that we hoped to do in the academic arena, which sometimes rewards as it abuses, chose us. And more, many of us have invested our money and very breath in doing work that matters, changing lives, and making the world a better place – from within the institution.

So yes, we could choose another job or profession, but this *choosing still happens within the “future created by slavery,” a world house built upon an allegiance to black women and girls’ oppression and third class status. And it does not matter if academic institutions all of a sudden engage in a mass hiring of one hundred new black bodies, women or otherwise, if those bodies represent and maintain the status quo, or if their radical resistance is met by macro or micro aggressions and other silencing tactics. What matters is the incorporation of real institutional moves to make structural and ideological shifts away from master/servant class worker/customer models toward models that actually value black women’s lives and labor, and not as bottom feeders but as significant partners in the achievement of the goals listed for public viewing on the institutional website and promotional brochures. This shift is necessary because black academic women’s lives matter, but so do our students. The exploitation of black women in general, and black and women of color adjunct and staff specifically, ultimately hurts higher education.

And so, in the words of Toni Cade Bambara, I am inclined to ask, do [academic institutions] even “want to be well?” What does it mean to systemically harm both your “worker” and your “customer” base? I understand this is oxymoronic and possibly upsetting because Bambara quit academia in the 1970s for the very reasons mentioned here. She saw how abusive and oppressive it was, particularly for black women. In fact, she explicitly held that the academic industrial complex did not want black women to be well. Thus, she left with tenure and job security in hand and never looked back. In 2014 The Feminist Wire Associate Editors Aishah Shahidah Simmons and Heidi Renee Lewis curated a forum on Bambara’s Living Legacy for her 75th Birthday Anniversary. In an article titled “It’s Not the Salt; it’s the Sugar that Will Kill You,” New Orleans writer, filmmaker and educator Kalamu ya Salaam writes, “This Toni was never going to win major awards, never going to be enshrined in the Academy. This Toni would look back on America and turn to salt before she would abandon her people.”

I understand Bambara had little faith that the academic industrial complex would ever change. While I share her suspicions, I am at heart a dreamer. Truth is, we need academia well. There are too many black lives wrapped up in its structure as knowledge producers and seekers. And more, our black lives are still shaped in one way or another by our access to higher education. What better place to imagine, desire and require wellness? As Bambara notes, wellness is not free, however. The cost is laying oppressions bare wherever they may be, critical reflection, socio-political-spiritual struggling through “deep waters,” and doing the painful work of communal, political institutional and structural transformation. But Bambara also posits, wellness means “dumping the shit.” It means rallying against and refusing to participate in oppressive praxis. The problem is, and this is what Bambara understood clearly, wellness is not profitable in the academic-corporate model. So then what are we who believe in a more just society and academic experience, and we who concomitantly need to pay our bills, to do? I resisted internally. But once I realized that my resistance efforts were futile and often solo, I quit.

I quit my institution.

In the spirit of Bambara, I quit my institution and all other academic spaces that aren’t here for lived black thriving because I want to be well. I will not go into the details of what I experienced here but I will say that they were debilitating enough for me to walk away with little more than my integrity and sanity. Dissimilar to Bambara I am not tenured or even on “the track.” I am not closed to academia but I do understand that I may never regain entry, gain tenure, or like Bambara, “win major awards” or “be enshrined in the academy.” But perhaps my unwavering commitments to truth, justice, human flourishing and critical scholarship beyond it will help others or leave a living legacy as Bambara did. I should also mention here that I could quit. While I was relegated to the academic precariat, I am also a member of the upper-middle class with socio-economic privilege by way of my works beyond academia and marriage. So no, I didn’t take an adjunct salary, I refused certain adjunct work, and I didn’t have to pick up a second job, go on welfare or live without insurance or benefits. I acknowledge my privileges.

Nevertheless, my labor and person were marginalized, grossly undervalued and mostly invisible within the institution. I left because no one should be treated this way and because my privilege allowed me to take a stand for myself and others. I left because no matter what black women accomplish, the current neocolonial structuring of academia leads to the continued repositioning of the goal post. I left because the growing precariat within academe impacts those who are racialized and gendered in the most harmful ways and divides the academic master/servant class even further. To be sure, there are many who want to break up with their academic institutions but cannot. The capitalist academic machine knows that most cannot support themselves or their families if they do.

For many others academia is a source of significance. However, academia is my second career. I came with and continue to have significance beyond the institution. So while I love research, writing and teaching, it was never my identity. It was and will continue to be where I performed my work. What I am learning is that there are many places to do that. Yet regardless of any of the above, I will still pay a price for not only leaving but having the audacity to critique the machine and how it treats black women in general and untenured, contractual/contingent/adjunct and staff employees specifically, the latter of which I admittedly did not explicate here. It has been argued that academia can be like a jealous god or lover. The “unfaithful” are often made to pay through further isolation, academic “shade,” and limited or nonexistent academic opportunities.

Nevertheless, I resign.

My resignation refuses the narrative that black women’s lives don’t matter or that black women’s academic oppression is particular to one institution, a personal experience or a misguided interpretation. It draws attention to a structural problem beyond academia yet notes a very real problem particular to the structuring of the academic industrial complex along race and gender lines — within my former institution and academia at large. To this end, I am not solely quitting my former institution, I quit the parts of academia intent on mirroring plantation life by using black women’s bodies, labors, innovations, et al. while concurrently constructing contexts of devaluation and excessive devotion to the point where our means of production are sure to ultimately kill us. I quit the parts that do violence then demand our silence. I quit the parts that require us to know everyone else’s work as well as our own – three times better with two additional degrees – while praising and rewarding our non-black colleagues for not only mediocrity but sometimes our ideas.

I quit the parts that work to turn black women and men in academia into crabs in a barrel in hopes of gaining the coveted tenure prize by any means necessary. I quit the parts where 80/20 adjunct/tenure ratios are normative. I quit the parts where those who speak truth and who dare to value themselves over the machine are dismissed as rebel rousers (to be clear, that’s how the machine is maintained…and the machine has many worker bees of all colors and genders). I quit the parts that say black women’s lives and labors only matter as collateral, quotas, brand management, customer service, pseudo proof of progress, or only as they increase the owners profit.

But please be clear, to refuse this reality, to refuse to live life at or below zero, to name and claim your value as a black woman in academia is no trifling matter. Regardless of privilege, it’s an alienated road filled with interesting and intersecting moments of sadness and joyful liberation. Yet I resign anyhow. I resign because my wellness necessitates my refusal to participate in my own oppression and my active involvement in my own liberation.

**Thank you to The Feminist Wire Associate Editor Collective, specifically Aishah Shahidah Simmons, David J. Leonard, Heather Turcotte, and Heather Laine Talley, for reading and struggling through this piece with me. Thank you for your edits and advice. And thank you to Michael R. Lomax, Zillah Eisenstein and Tracy Sharpley-Whiting for your encouragement, inspiration and time.

***Parts of this article have been pulled from my forthcoming book Loosing The Yoke: The Black Female Body in Black Religion and Black Popular Culture under review with Duke University Press.

Tamura A. Lomax received her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in Religion, where she specialized in African American Religion, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, African American and Diaspora Studies, and Black British and U.S. Black Cultural Studies. Her research is concerned with race, gender, representation, religion and black popular culture. She recently published Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Cultural Productions (Palgrave Macmillan, June 2014), a co-authored edited volume with Rhon S. Manigault-Bryant and Carol B. Duncan, and is finishing up her first single authored monograph, Loosing the Yoke: The Black Female Body in Black Religion and Black Popular Culture (under review with Duke University Press). She is co-founder, along with Hortense Spillers, of The Feminist Wire.

The post Black Women’s Lives Don’t Matter in Academia Either, or Why I Quit Academic Spaces that Don’t Value Black Women’s Life and Labor appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Mariah Conn

Start workout.

My shoe feels loose.

Glance behind.

This hill is too steep.

Nailed it.

Oh, the tunnel.

Better take out one earbud.

I’m glad there’s shade.

Mile one.

This song is too loud.

Is there anyone behind me?

God, this sun is brutal.

I should’ve worn sunscreen.

Mile Two.

Seven minutes forty five seconds.

My time is getting better.

I would be too tired to fight off an attack.

I’m over-pronating.

These dragonflies are gorgeous.

Mile Three.

I feel incredible.

I should make sure no one sees me enter my apartment.

End Workout.

************* 

Mariah Conn is a graduating senior with a B.A. in both History and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. Mariah’s undergraduate thesis focused on women’s experiences in Nazi concentration camps. Mariah is excited to branch out to non-academic writing and has started a poetry compilation targeting issues of race, class, and gender on college campuses.

The post COLLEGE FEMINISMS: Everyday Athlete appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Lydia Lopez

Eleanor Roosevelt and The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Recently, I attended a panel called ​“Women’s Rights in the 21st Century: Fifteen Years After United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security,” was led by prominent members of the international human rights field. UN Resolution 1325, is colloquially known as the “international bill of rights for women” and addresses the presumption that human rights are women rights, particularly in the context of conflict, war, and peace-building efforts. In an effort to understand what group of women this panel was focused on, I asked them what was their working definition of “women.” Not surprisingly, their responses included:

“I believe all women are women.”

“We look for the lowest denominator.”

The problem with believing that “women” are all the same is that women are not—women are not monolithic and cannot be grouped together based on dominant perspectives of gender experience (and/or expression). Women are not homogenous. Historically, mainstream women’s movements have excluded minority and marginalized identities in an effort to elevate the dominant perception of “women.” The failure to comprehend differences within and between women displays a lack of understanding and awareness for a variety of women’s issues, plight, and circumstances.

I recognize that human rights in the 20th century may have revolutionized our thoughts on humanity. I recognize that these rights have gone to restore and repair violations against people. These rights are an important part of our collective human history. Yet, in order to ameliorate violence, our understanding of human rights should be analyzed, challenged and critiqued for the ways they produce new forms of violence for people. In this sense, challenging human rights through the lens of feminism that is attentive to the imperial power dynamics of rights can critically expose flaws in the study and practice of human rights. In the words of Niamh Reilly, co-Director of Global Women’s Studies at the National University of Ireland, “[i]n traditional feminist political theory, the interest in cosmopolitanism is reflected in attempts to theorize global feminism and transnational advocacy, especially in relation to women’s rights as human rights.” In other words, feminist analysis considers the power dynamics of who is using and claiming human rights, and who is not afforded these rights.

Take, for instance, the Women’s Suffrage Movement of the 1800s, which is a widely known historical example of women’s rights advocacy. From this movement, some of the most well-known women’s rights leaders entered US mainstream history. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of these leaders who started a movement for women’s right to vote. Stanton was part of abolitionist and women’s rights coalitions, but refused to support the ratification of the 15th amendment, in which Black men were given the right to vote, because women would not be granted that right. In an effort to garner support for the Women’s Rights Movement, Stanton invoked racist and anti-black tactics. An NPR interview with a Stanton biographer reveals the tactics and motivations behind Stanton’s anti-black, white supremacist rhetoric,

[Stanton] also descended to some rather ugly racist rhetoric along the lines of, “We educated, virtuous white women are more worthy of the vote.” She talked about how much worse Black men would be as voters than the White women about whom she was concerned, and she was really quite dismissive of Black women’s claims…

Clearly, to Stanton, rights were only reserved for white, middle class women. Stanton’s definitions of “women” and “rights” were grounded in liberal feminism, which is premised on gender equality. However, rights and liberal feminism was, and continues to be, detrimental to the Black community. Stanton and the Women’s Suffrage Movement had a lasting effect on communities of color, non-elites, and gender defined otherwise. How, then, can we continue to advocate for women’s rights knowing that rights were premised on providing further privileges to white, middle class women through the exclusion of many, and in particular, Black women?

The discourses of women’s rights and liberal feminism are not mutually exclusive. The core foundation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 is liberal feminism saturated in the protection of whiteness. Taking a critical look at history is imperative to shift rights frameworks focused on women. Historically, “universal human rights” was limited to white males. The contradictions of universal human rights are illustrated within examples of colonialism, slavery, and genocide, all of which negatively affected communities of color for the growth and protection of white society. While there exists important histories of abolitionism and social justice movements that challenged universal rights and expanded rights frameworks to include men of color, the logic of human rights as a white power structure has not changed.

The idea that a document exists to “resolve” human rights (sans women’s rights), to me, demonstrates the shortcomings of “universal human rights.” If these rights are indeed “universal” and therefore ethical and moral, why must these rights be indoctrinated? Universality, rather, pertains to the power afforded to a reigning system of rights that is patriarchal, racist, and classist. Again, the U.S women’s suffrage movement provides an example of how marginalized identities were not only denied recognition under “universal” human right’s, but were also not afforded representation within women’s rights rhetoric and policy.

Historically activists, such as Ida B. Wells, have always advocated for their own experiences with the intersections of race and gender within women’s and rights movements. Critical race feminisms and transnational feminisms have long critiqued the international state structure and the work of liberal feminism for producing racist and classist forms of “women’s rights as human rights.” Why then, if these histories of resistance and radical transformation exist, do the prominent leaders of human rights continue to deploy the rhetoric: “All women are women?”

If we, as a global society, are committed to ending violence for all peoples, then we must understand that “women” are already part of the construction and practice of human rights and something else has to change. “Women” is a complex category and rights frameworks must account for the varied and multiple intersections of gender expression, race, sexuality, and class that exist. Rights are about the full recognition of all our identities. Until human rights rhetoric recognizes, implements, and employs these elements, many of us are invisible. My existence is erased by both universal human rights and women’s rights. I remain in a paradoxical state of invisibility—I exist yet without recognition of my claims to rights or civic procedures. I cannot invest in a document that delineates humanity through my invisibility.

Human rights don’t work for me, and are you sure they even work for you?

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

Raised in Boston and a born-and-bred Salvadoreña, Lydia Lopez is currently a senior studying Political Science and International & Comparative Studies. Campus involvement has become an integral part of her undergraduate career. As a first generation Latina, she seeks to create a space on campus where minorities can be themselves and center their success, pain, and issues salient to their identities. After graduation, Lydia will work in Boston as a fellow for a local non-profit.

The post COLLEGE FEMINISMS: Why Human Rights Don’t Work for Me appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

I remember Justine Black from elementary school. She was smart. She was brown, but not brown like me. I was black like most of the other kids in our class. I remember Justine because she was a good friend of mine. I knew that she was from some other place outside of the U.S. and not Africa (in elementary school I didn’t know how vast the black diaspora was), but when she told me she was black I took her at her word.

I relished in the fact that black could exist, could be pronounced and claimed proudly by this person, who could, if she wanted, be some other thing, some other race. In our school, being black was a privilege; it gave you a certain kind of currency. I know because I remember what it felt like to be called “white” because I was just too something else…I remember that no matter what anyone told me, I knew I was indeed black. And blackness seemed to be more than a designation. I didn’t feel like I needed to fight for the obvious. But I remember Justine, and I remember if someone got mad at her, I knew the deepest cut would come when someone would say, “Your middle name is ain’t!” Then a chant would move from murmur to rumble, “JUSTINE AIN’T BLACK! JUSTINE AIN’T BLACK! JUSTINE AIN’T BLACK!”

Race, and more specifically, blackness, was policed socially and there were moments when some people were made more vulnerable to being ousted than others. I remember the moments when the same students who joined in the chant one day had a sudden change of heart the next. They would fight for and co-sign Justine’s claim on blackness. She could be one of us. And even within the “us” some of “us” could be kicked out and charged with the damned sentence of “white.” I write of this childhood moment because I think it does a great job at illustrating the complex nature of race, particularly blackness.

This past week I have been forced to reckon with the elasticity of the color line and its relationship to the gender line. Multiple memes, Facebook statuses, and tweets vilify Rachel Dolezal’s “becoming/being black” and the logic that has been used to damn her to “white” actually yields a transgender-antagonistic outcome.

The question many have asked: “If we accept Caitlyn Jenner as transgender, then must we also embrace Rachel Dolezal as “transracial”?[1] The response from many POC, Black, queer, transgender, organizers, scholars, theorists and artists has been to end the conversation with “Race and gender are separate.” To ask that question or put the two together in any way becomes transphobic. But the question itself isn’t transphobic. The answer that one arrives at, if you hold on to a historically situated notion of blackness and a presentist (gender is not only socially constructed, but historically naturalized) notion of gender, is transphobic.

In this moment we land in a messy and important intersection. The discourse surrounding the incident is both theoretically and materially destabilizing. Or perhaps this conjuncture once again reiterates the instability that is always already present when it comes to both the color line and the gender line. Race and gender are not the same, but they are both bio-social-historical categories that help to facilitate and enforce the unequal distribution of power and wealth under capitalism. It is important that in this moment we wrestle with these questions. We cannot just end the conversation because it makes us uncomfortable or angry. We must ask ourselves: What are the similarities between gender and race? What does this relationship reveal to us? How, why and when does it make us uneasy?

Many people in my circles (Black Radical, Queer, Trans, Feminist…) have decided that they no longer want to have this conversation regarding “transgender” and “transracial” because “they aren’t the same thing.” This is not a good answer and it is not a stupid question. It is a perplexing question; a hard one. The reason it is difficult is because it once again exposes us to what we already know — black is, and black ain’t. Many have responded to this conundrum of relation by stating that “I was born black and I don’t get to make a choice about that!” The truth is that many of us don’t get to make a choice. Our darker skin colors speak for us (and still it is not able to give the world the story of who we really are).

Rachel Dolezal

Rachel Dolezal made a choice; she decided to become black and whether or not you like it or agree with it is not the important question to me. A person can indeed become black because race is historically, biologically, and socially constructed! It is not just one of these things, it is all of these at work simultaneously. If you accept Caitlyn, then you have to accept Rachel. This incident pulls at the heartstrings of many people. Many black people who feel angry, harmed, and uncomfortable with the idea that someone who doesn’t posses the right historical and biological blood lineage is claiming blackness. But don’t we already know that the one-drop rule is a problematic one? And didn’t we all at some point originate biologically in Africa? How far back do we have to go to prove our racial allegiances?

Let us first discuss this term, Transgender. Transgender in this moment (this week) is represented or brought to us by Caitlyn Jenner. We have watched her transformation and we think that we somehow now know what transgender means, what it looks like, how to mark and name it. However, we take for granted the conjunctured nature of trans and gender. We say we know transgender, but I argue that we still really don’t know gender. Gender in the way that I understand it is also, like race, a bio-social-historical category that we all move through in different ways at different times.

• Gender is biological. I am not arguing that it is only biology, but we can agree that medical science assigns bodies at birth, via anatomic endowments a gender. We know that some people do not agree with that designation and decide to change it, perhaps to the opposite gender one was given at birth, perhaps to no assignment at all, or perhaps something for which we yet to have grasped within our grammar or politics of inclusion.

• Gender is socially constructed. Boys wear blue and play with trucks. Girls wear pink and play with dolls.

• Gender is also historically (re)produced. THIS IS a major point that must be reckoned with. For as my friend and colleague Michelle Wright noted in an email conversation, “…we understand race as historically produced and gender as ‘natural’ [but it is not].”[2] This is one of the most important places we need to go because this is the place where many are marking the distinction between race and gender, but it is an unproductive move. Gender like race has a history or multiple histories and it changes over time.

Now let us move on to race if we are to consider the new “transracial” to mean someone who changes their race, different from the one they were assigned at birth. Race, like gender is biologically determined, socially constructed, and historically (re)produced. There is a real logical connection between race and gender. The response for many has been: “This is my history that Dolezal is doing violence to!” It is about ownership over a past, one steeped in the colonial and white supremacist violence that traveled through the middle passage and continues to move (differently always) through present day white supremacist violence.

The black pasts and presents are not simply moments of struggle, loss, and pain. These are also moments of pleasure, joy, desire, and resiliency under horrific conditions. These are race- making moments—moments when the shape of blackness comes into view as it is defined as the deviant counter to whiteness’ tyranny. These histories and their contingent narratives are often carried in the flesh meaning that some people’s flesh sparks in others a memory of racialized terror. These folk look black like me, but there are other black people who don’t look black like me, some who look white like some other (dare I say) ancestor, but they too are black.

Race has boundaries. We police those boundaries, though we are not the only ones who do that policing. It is clear that Rachel Dolezal’s appearance has troubled the race police. I have heard arguments that she is purporting to take “our oppression” or she is pretending to be a black woman and her actions are disrespectful to real black people. These ARE the same arguments that people make regarding transgender bodies: “These men want to be women;” “They want to be oppressed and in so doing they distract from the real oppression real women face.”

When it comes to Dolezal the question is much more discomforting. She was born white. She decided to become black and live her life as a black woman. Geography matters: she made the choice to be black in Spokane—not, for example, Chicago or Atlanta. We are all responding to the question: Is she black or nah? We have too easily answered this question with a resounding NAH! But I think that’s the wrong question. The question we should be asking is when was/is she black?

Transgender visibility has appeared recently in a way that it has not before, mostly because before Caitlyn Jenner, the faces of this transgender moment/movement were transgender women of color like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock, but also organizers and activists like CeCe McDonald. What all of these women have in common is not simply their blackness and their transgender identity, but a radical black queer feminist politic. That is why I am so here for these women, because their embodiment of transgender is not the only way to embody transgender and they aren’t afraid to name that. Janet Mock calls out her own privilege, understanding that there are many stories that become further pushed into the shadows of now (and back then as in history) if we take her narrative as THE transgender narrative. There are many routes and many pathways to becoming. We need to pay attention to the multiplicity that is being named here and understand that there are many transgender bodies that don’t fit the scripts that are being most presented to us in popular media. I’m not arguing for more inclusion, I’m asking you to understand and be aware that there is always more there there.

Now that Caitlyn Jenner has made her debut as herself and many have applauded and affirmed her right to be and exist as she desires, we leave it at that. But Caitlyn Jenner is no CeCe McDonald. Caitlyn Jenner’s politics are not in line with mine. While I can support and affirm Jenner’s gender self determining processes that does not help to dismantle and create a new system whereby white supremacy and patriarchy are not the dominating structural formation that some of us seek to destroy.

Rachel Dolezal was outed by her biological parents as white. She has been lying to people and pretending to be something she is not, a black woman. People have said she’s been doing blackface. I disagree. I am not offended by Rachel Dolezal. I ask her the same question I ask Jenner: What do your politics look like? And what kind of work do you do?

It seems as though people have forgotten what we already know, which is that black has always been a porous entity. Some people do have a privileged relationship to blackness.[3] Not all black people relate to the category or are marked by the category in the same way. Your blackness might not be legible in certain places perhaps because of your complexion, or language, or accent, or hair texture. Dolezal reinforces and reiterates that black is a category that we all have the ability to move in and out of to a certain extent — my dark skin automatically situates me squarely as a physical manifestation of blackness, but there are people who are continuously questioned because their skin is of a lighter hue. We know this already. We also already know that racial passing has been going on since race was constructed, and no it wasn’t only black people passing for or becoming white. It was white people passing for or becoming a whole host of things (which included white too). When does passing stop being passing and become being?

I caution us to be very careful in this moment, as transgender can become a category that we take for granted. It is a category many think we know because we have seen it. It represents a move from one gender to another. But it is more than that. The gender binary is troubled and it is challenged. It is not only or always transgender people that we recognize as simply (or not so simply) moving from one place on the gender binary to another that do the troubling. There are many people for which transition isn’t just a moment and time to be completed. Some people live and reside outside or fluctuate between genders—this critique is one that collapses binaries.

The best response I heard in response to this whole matter came from writer Adrienne Maree Brown, co-editor of the new science fiction collection, Ocatvia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. She posed the question “Any good sci-fi explanations or transformative justice responses for #‎RachelDolezal?” I seek answers to this question as a black transgender man, who is unapologetically black and unapologetically transgender. I cannot think gender and race separately. I have some agency in identifying with these two identity categories. I am black yes, but I choose to be unapologetically black and that is political choice. That decision is how I make my blackness mean or matter.

But blackness in itself is not a self-fulfilling prophecy (not everyone is unapologetic about it). The fact of blackness exceeds the category black. This doesn’t mean that black doesn’t exist, that some people don’t embody it. It does not mean that some of us have no choice in the matter of how we carry certain histories in the flesh. But we do not all carry our history in the flesh. Some of us carry it in our language, some of us carry it in our sway, some of us carry it by proclaiming it. I am unapologetically black. The unapologetic nature of my blackness compels fugitivity. I think we are supposed to accept blackness as a thing that has only been done to us. I think of people who ask, “who would choose to be this oppressed? This black? This queer?” I would and I do choose to be black as long as black holds this possibility of fugitivity and the desire to escape hegemonic control and order.

So what does transformative justice look like in this situation? I’m not sure that I have a real answer here, but I can’t respond by refusing to have the conversation. As I wrote on Facebook: “No, it’s not the same. But, yes there is some overlap and the discussion needs to be had. We need to put on our thinking caps (critical analysis) first. It’s not as simple as #‎rachelDolezal gives us Trans–racial and #‎caitlynjenner gives us Trans–gender. The latter we are to applaud and commend while the former we are to condemn to ‘mental illness’ and ‘inauthenticity.’ Something isn’t right here which is why I’m putting my thinking cap on.”

While I continue to put this thinking cap to work, I know for sure that I will not be joining the chanting chorus line of, Rachel Dolezal AIN’T black (no more). I am more concerned with whose blood is spilling on the sidewalk than whose blood is running through Dolezal’s veins.

[1] Transracial is a thing, a word that has significance prior to this moment. I think Lisa Marie Rollins does a great job of clarifying that here: http://www.thelostdaughters.com/2015/06/transracial-lives-matter-rachel-dolezal.html. I don’t think that forecloses the need to talk about the possibility of “transracial” in the Dolezal sense.

[2] I encourage everyone to read Michelle Wright’s new book, The Physics Of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology

[3] Thank you Fred Moten for stating this so plainly.

Kai M. Green is a writer, scholar, poet, filmmaker, abolitionist, feminist and whatever else it takes to make a new and more just world. Kai is invested in developing models of healthy and loving Black masculinities. As a leader, teacher, and brother he is committed to raising consciousness around self-care, self-love, sexual health, emotional health, sexual and state violence, healthy masculinities, and Black feminism. He believes that writing and story telling are revolutionary acts, especially for those who are often erased by heteronormative and Eurocentric histories. He is currently a professor and Postdoctoral Fellow in Sexuality Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. Twitter: @Kai_MG

The post “Race and gender are not the same!” is not a Good Response to the “Transracial” / Transgender Question OR We Can and Must Do Better appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Maria Hengeveld 

Since its opening in 1895, Low Memorial Library has become one of Columbia University’s most admired architectural sites. Its magnificent façade and columns draw photographic attention from tourists, guests, and prospective students on a daily basis. A few weeks ago, the building’s attic confronted visitors, most of whom prospective students, with an unequivocal message. With bright blue flashing letters, a projector wrote over the attic’s statements on the public good and the grace of almighty divinities with three sobering words. “RAPE HAPPENS HERE”. The intervention was organized by No Red Tape, whose mission is to raise the visibility of sexual assaults on college campuses and to confront the culture of impunity that too often haunts these cases. As a city, state, and country, however, we will have to broaden the conversation around college sexual assaults if our goal is to dismantle, rather than reinforce, the classed, raced, and educational lines that divide young New Yorkers.

Try a Google news search for ‘sexual assaults’ and ‘New York’ and you’ll find that more than half of the resulting hits will lead you to a college campus. Mirroring a broader national trend, New York’s imagination around vulnerability, risk, and injustice seems too narrow when it comes to the various forms of gender-based violence that we are facing. By highlighting one group of learners (college students), New York risks privileging the privileged.

Governor Cuomo and New York City’s Public Advocate Letitia James are both pushing for legislation to protect college students from assaults and ensure they get relevant education, training, and information as early as orientation. According to Christine Quinn, who wrote about Cuomo’s proposals in the Huffington Post, “[t]hese measures will ensure that all of New York’s college and university students have a very clear understanding of consent, their rights as victims, and the safeguards in place to keep them protected.” The Campus Safety and Accountability Act, which was recently reintroduced by a bipartisan group of twelve senators, similarly pushes for the creation of new campus resources for survivors and training programs for college personnel. While these steps are necessary, their impact would be much greater if they were to focus on educational institutions that reach New Yorkers from all walks of life, including public high school and middle school students. Not every college-aged New Yorker is actually in college, an absence that does not protect them from risk and certainly does not render their need for resources less urgent.

As Callie Marie Rennison pointed out in the New York Times last December, “young women who don’t go to college are more likely to be raped.” Having analyzed more than 15 years of victimization survey data from the National Department of Justice, she argued that women who don’t attend college “are victims of sexual violence at a rate around 30 percent greater than their more educated counterparts.” There is no reason to assume that these national dynamics would somehow skip New York. Neither should we be under the impression that gender-based violence issues only start after high school. In 2011, no less than 10.4 percent of male and female high school students reported that they had been “hit, slapped or physically hurt on purpose by a boyfriend/girlfriend within the past year.” In addition, a 2013 study by La Vida es Preciosa, a New York City based organization that supports Latina teens with mental health problems, found that thirty-five percent of the young women they served had suffered sexual abuse. Many of these young women live in poor neighborhoods. Under the new legislative proposals, these individuals may become less likely than their peers with access to educational opportunity to obtain the crucial information and education that could protect them from sexual violence and to provide justice and support in cases where sexual assault occur.

Much of this information is not readily available in public high schools in New York. According to Stephanie Nilva, the Executive Director of Day One, “sex education in high school may tell you how to use a condom, but no one tells you what to do when your partner refuses to use one.” Kristine Gallagher, from the Sex and Law Committee of New York City’s Bar Association, added that this type of prevention programs should start as early as Kindergarten. “To prevent sexual violence before it even starts we must connect norms of sexual violence with the need to prepare young people to engage in healthy relationships from an early age.”

Statistics reveal that gender-based violence affects school-aged New Yorkers in other ways as well. New York City police responded to an average of 765 domestic violence incidents every day in 2013. Given the notoriously low reporting rates on domestic violence, we can only guess what the actual numbers are and how many children are involved as victims and witnesses. What we do know is that there are many, and that they will have special needs.

If inclusiveness is the goal, then heteronormativity, as a form of gender-based violence deserves a central place in these conversations and initiatives as well. LGBT bullying often begins at a young age and, if unchallenged, often matures into physical assaults. A 2011 study shows that young people with non-conforming gender identities are at higher risk of sexual assault, attempted suicide and mental health issues than their heterosexual peers. It is only a couple of months ago that the 12 year old Ronin Shimizu, from California, committed suicide after having being bullied for his cheerleading activities. These tragedies highlight that young people need to start thinking about gender norms, gender identities in primary school.

College sexual assaults may thus be better conceived as a symptom of the sexism and heteropatriarchy that exist throughout society. Because these ills are not confined to the boundaries of college campuses, legislation focusing exclusively on college students, by definition, is a partial solution.   We must reach out to all students of all ages and equip them with the resources and information they need to challenge and change the gendered norms and dynamics that fuel such violence, vulnerability, and the impunity of perpetrators. New initiatives are being carved out and promoted, and New York is hailed as a leader; the state, and our nation, must ensure that legislation is inclusive of all young people, in college and not.
Cited:
http://www.dayoneny.org/

http://www.nycbar.org/sex-and-law

http://www.voicesofny.org/2014/07/suicide-haunts-latina-youth-in-nyc/
http://www.nyc.gov/html/ocdv/downloads/pdf/Statistics_Annual_Fact_Sheet_2013.pdf

http://www.popsugar.com/moms/Bullied-12-Year-Old-Cheerleader-Commits-Suicide-36238728http://homeless.samhsa.gov/ResourceFiles/hrc_factsheet.pdf

_________________

Maria Hengeveld studies women’s rights at Columbia University. She is interested in youth and gender in Southern Africa and writes for different websites, such as Africa is a Country and Dutch feminist magazine Tijdschrift Lover

The post Op-Ed: Broaden Sexual Assault Education and Legislation to Include All Students, in College and Not appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

400 Lux

Clouds forming cosmic rats—patchouli

              were the first and last words I wrote in my physics notebook

in a stale lecture hall,

flooded with fluorescents too dim

              for anything to grow on its own.

The off-color lecture preached

              to justify the corpses we’ve unknowingly counted.

                            It’s not our fault.

We believed regardless of common sense—

              regardless of the irony—

              We were already rooted in our doomsday bunker.

My cramped and potted pothos still continues to grow thick vines

along my poorly sun-lit windowsill

despite my apathy to transplant it

from the thin plastic container that came from the Big-Y floral department

after finally bringing it home from the hospital

along with my father who came close to dying from colon cancer,

though really it wasn’t the cancer

that would have killed him.

The absence of sun

              helped me to appreciate mornings not

dictated by artificial air encased in concrete walls.

I sip my loose-leaf tea

              perched on the cool cement front stoop

                            until it gets cold and I will remember I am not a
                            morning person.

My appreciation is still wedged between the drooping leaves and the dew,

              the same dirge written everyday by the morning air.

The sun pretends to rise like the rest of us;

a failed mission.

The sunless sky bleeds from the horizon

mocking our earthly investment in blood.

Virulent beams will force themselves west

through the earth like hungry rats

until they flower in front of your grave.

To be snuffed like a candle just lit—

              is to be spared the image of this country burning;

              bloodless limbs uprooted

to fuel it.

I have dreams of flowers licking my tombstone.

I drown what’s left of them in white noise—

              vaporize them with electric heat—

before the sun has its chance to burn up

what’s left of the night.

~~~~~~~~~~

Route 275

I was the meanest woman

I had known up until

that point.

I sat on the sofa and

watched the news, but all

I could focus on was the high-pitched

noise coming from the tube; it was

making me nauseous. Those pompous

bastards lisped their affirmation

of their path to nirvana funded and fueled

by dollars that hadn’t even been printed.

The skin tightened on my ribs

when I found

my reflection

drinking in the kitchen window.

I was skilled at self-damnation.

I sat back down on the same sofa

and opened the bottle. I poured myself

a good-sized glass, though I didn’t even

like drinking.

It seems there is a lot to forget.

MUTE hovered and vibrated in the

right corner of the screen. The sterile blue

haze baptized the budding calendula

outside the opposite window.

I stepped out onto the deck because

I didn’t remember the last time I had

been outside. There was no point anymore.

Lights flickered from what

used to be the backyard. These were

our new stars now. Water filled

an old citronella candle; I would have

poured it out, but mosquitos

weren’t a problem anymore—

without the hills,

without the trees.

I grazed my fingers over my chapped lips

to remind myself I still haven’t eaten

since Thursday.

I think it was 9PM by the looks of

the traffic, even though the flow

is always the same

around here now, no matter

what time of day. The cool hue

of electric light

poured out onto the lawn from

the refrigerator I must have

left open from just looking.

I wonder if any of the passing cars

knew that our house was still here,

or was the soft light extinguished

by the steady stream of

headlights.

~~~~~~~~~~

Expensive Women Finger Avocados with Red Plastic Nails

I stand in front of the open refrigerator because I have enough money

to pay my electric bill or buy groceries but not both.

My attention shifts from the empty shelves to the congested intersection outside

that stirs the kitchen from the inside out.

The flow of the traffic is always the same around here now,

no matter what time of day.

I take a trip to the store, mostly to get away from watching the traffic.

My unfilled cart ticks past miles of over-branded cans and raw meat.

Her almost perfect body hesitates on the cement path,

I see her through the glass doors,

and she makes a beeline for the produce.

Across from her now, I am mesmerized by the even sway of her legs like fresh wheat,

and the authoritative clack of her high-heels on the laminate.

She swaddles the new fruit in a thin veil of green plastic

and I do the same. The golden hair above her kneecaps is exaggerated in the fluorescents

making her steps a bit more ethereal.

She thumbs a pock-marked avocado, and the muddy green skin apologizes

to her blushing fingers.

I ignore the tollbooth lanes of checkout lines, merge through the sliding doors,

and contemplate the dew on her cheekbones and the uneven cement.

As I climb the stairs, I hear

the refrigerator doors swing with the flow of traffic.

I must have left them open from just looking.

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

Kathryn Eichner is a senior at the University in Connecticut. She is double-majoring in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and English with a concentration in Creative Writing. Her recent work has appeared in The Long River Review.

The post COLLEGE FEMINISMS: In the Hour of Consciousness: Three Poems by Kathryn Eichner appeared first on The Feminist Wire.

By Emily Schultz

One

When she tried to keep up with the neighborhood boys.

All skinned knees and firefly-lit kickball games,

She understood that sports were not hers to master.

The little girl with wide eyes and an even wider heart witnessed one boy shout to another,

“You kick like a girl!”

She was the worst thing boys could imagine being compared to.

It’s no wonder she was chosen last.

Two

When she flipped through the pages of a magazine and realized that her shape didn’t fit the feminine mold that Teen Vogue deemed worthy of advertising.

The thirteen-year-old girl with a sharp tongue and mind

Learned that her value was to be found in her appearance above all else.

This newfound norm had been weaved into her cultural practice since birth, but for the first time,

These images struck her as imposing, almost instructional.

She began to alter herself for other people’s pleasure.

This vastly contradicted her religious upbringing,

Which taught her that true worth was found in the love of oneself and of mankind.

The only things she perceived others cared about were facial symmetry and overly sexualized bodies.

Subconsciously succumbing to societal norms, she learned to adjust.

Three

When the boy she liked in high school said she was only good enough to love behind closed doors.

She was his, so long as no one knew that in the streetlight,

Their hands fit together just like puzzle pieces.

She mastered the concept of secrecy, along with the dark cloud of silence that accompanied it,

And found her value in the receipt of male approval.

But by letting others decide her self-worth, she discovered that it disappeared in their absence.

Rejection wasn’t being alone,

It was seeing him lower his head as he passed her by in the hallway.

Four

When she decided that her body occupied more space than it deserved.

She ate less, exercised more, and made room for the entrance of men into her life,

Never really knowing what to do once they left her for someone with a smaller frame.

Her unhealthy relationship with food was rewarded with approving glances and positive reinforcement.

“You look beautiful.”

Five

When she was catcalled for the first time on the streets of her college town.

The man asked her why she didn’t say “thank you,” and suggested that she smile more.

She knew better than to accept this objectification as flattery.

This man thought she needed his validation to feel beautiful.

Her skin thickened as she internalized this experience and used it to define womanhood.

Unwanted attention.

Six

When she began to notice her own voice shrinking.

As if the weight of insecurity and the male gaze wrapped itself around her vocal chords.

When she spoke, her words desperately tried to crawl themselves out of her mouth.

A male peer in college referenced her appearance before each meeting they attended together.

He said, “It’s just adorable when you give presentations.

Your face is so cute, it makes me want to listen.”

She hid the quiver in her speech with loud opinions and hyperbolic happiness.

She wondered if the men she worked with in the future would ever take her seriously.

Seven

When a man she hardly knew decided that it was his right to take control of her whole body.

He criticized her for apologizing in every sentence.

Yet, as he placed his hand over her mouth,

She could see clearly that he had no problem silencing her voice for the purpose of his own pleasure.

To be female meant to be eternally responsible.

It was always her fault, and this time was no exception.

Her stoplight was his green light.

The word “no” did not seem to hold its original promise.

“Aren’t you glad I didn’t stop?”

Eight

When the man whom she loved for two and a half years told her that she was easy to manipulate.

Her good-natured soul and well-intentioned smile marked her as easy prey.

In this relationship, she felt chastised for merely existing.

She walked on the eggshells of his temper, and did so in stride.

After all, practice makes perfect.

Over and over, she assured him that she would never leave.

He held ownership over her personhood, and that seemed to make him feel better.

And on his absolute worst day, he knew that she would still be there,

Standing firm in the wind like a flag after battle.

She learned that staying is the only thing you can do for a man who hates the sound of his own heartbeat.

Nine

When she realized that the men she loved came back,
But did so only to be reminded of how much people missed them when they left.

She fell for someone who had no problem acquiring a second girlfriend in a neighboring state.

Her Christmas was spent bedridden, while he spent Winter Break inside of another woman.

She wrote down his goodbye, word for word, and memorized the feeling of worthlessness.

It was etched into her eyelids,

Waking up was a reminder of the control he still had over her.

Only when free from his hold did she realize that good still existed in this world.

Although she need not have an inherent distrust in the people around her,

She will remain guarded.

Moving Forward

She learned that the best thing a woman could do for herself was become her own “home.”

Significant others are supposed to protect your heart, ensuring its safety through their stability.

They are houses personified.

But what happens when they leave you?

Homes aren’t meant to disappear.

She never wanted to discover that her soul had been evicted from its dwelling place,

But this discovery signaled a turning point.

              To learn to love the beat of her own heart.

              To appreciate the sound of her own voice.

The minute a woman decides to build a home within her very own body,

A place for her spirit to soar and her value to be recognized,

She will be free.

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

Emily Schultz is a learner, traveler, vocalist, and positive thinking enthusiast. Originally from Pennsylvania, Emily is an undergraduate Educational Studies major at a small school in Ohio. She plans to someday serve as a professor and education researcher. Emily has a heart for social justice work and enjoys writing poetry, reading books, and frequenting local coffee shops. Engaging in her passion for advocacy has inspired Emily to more publicly address her thoughts and concerns through the art of the written word.

The post COLLEGE FEMINISMS: Nine Times She Felt Less Than Human appeared first on The Feminist Wire.