Transformational Learning at The Scholar and Feminist 2013

Written by Zai Gilles

Everyone has had both challenging and positive experiences in the realm of education, from experiencing racism in the classroom to supportive professors. What allows for these positive experiences to take place? Dean Spade of Seattle University School of Law and activist Rickke Mananzala sought to answer this question during the Open Education workshop at The Scholar & Feminist 2013: Utopia conference.

Dean Spade and Rikke Mananzala talk in the background, a small group of participants discuss in the foreground

Participants break into groups during the Transformational Learning workshop

Dean and Rickke explained their view of educational spaces: there are 3 main points to keep in mind when learning: approach, content, and purpose. These aspects add a reflective layer to the educational process. Teaching is more than a dictation of information. Learning calls for an exchange between teacher and student that creates an open space for true expansion of ideas and perspectives. There is a need for an environment that supports open and honest dialogue rather than a place of senseless note taking.

But should this environment be seen as a “safe space?” The “safe space” is far from a new idea, but it has yet to be given a definition. So what is a “safe space” exactly? Is it a place to feel at ease and open?  Or is it a space where you feel uneasy because your ideas are challenged and you are forced to look at things in a new light? The latter seemed to win as the definition supported by the snaps and resounding “woots.”

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Engaging the Production of Violence

Written by Shilpa Guha

This post is part of a series of reflections on the interdisciplinary winter seminar, “Mumbai At Home and in the World: Gender, Sexuality and the Postcolonial City.” BCRW Associate Director Catherine Sameh introduced the seminar in part 1, BCRW Research Assistant Nicci Yin reflected on occupying space in an urban environment in part 2, and Liz Gipson discussed understandings of queer space in part 3.

students and faculty gather around plastic tables set up on a lawn, eating and talking

Students and faculty eat lunch and discuss the themes of the seminar at Sophia College in Mumbai

I spent two fleeting days at the Mumbai Winter Seminar. And yet, it served as a crucial conduit between my Barnard experiences (notably the Global Symposium in Mumbai) and my new position at the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh. Connecting three women’s colleges across the globe; transporting and translating ideas, philosophies, literatures, values.

In preparation for teaching a student body that represents the entirety of continental Asia, I was particularly keen on finding comparative elements in each session. Collectively, the few segments I attended offered some really interesting comparative insights into patterns of physical, sexual, and structural violence.

The session that best exemplified these themes was conducted by BCRW Associate Director Catherine Sameh. She applied a transnational feminist framework to recent incidents of severe violence, such as the December 2012 rape in Delhi and the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, which allowed us to locate similar (if not the same) theoretical principles in an analysis of extremely different cases (that one might otherwise deem entirely unrelated). Often, ‘western’ discourses shame non-western cultures for breeding violent mentalities. In reality, we are guilty of the same, and it is imperative to also turn the critiques westward if we wish to really understand violence as a global cultural phenomenon. Perhaps Indian culture has cultivated an environment in which men feel overly entitled, women are overly objectified, and the sociopolitical, legal structures in place rarely serve the needs of victims. If so, then American culture has created a space for gun possession to become normalized, gun violence to take place all too frequently, and victims of any act of violence unfairly undervalued (if not entirely blamed).

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Queering Utopia: Circus Amok! at the S&F Conference

Written by Michelle Chen

“Stay cool, stay calm, you have the right to remain silent. / Don’t run, don’t resist, and get that badge number.”

So goes the catchy and campy tune performed by Circus Amok! that teaches people what to do when they are stopped and frisked by police. A “New York-based, one ring, no animal, queerly-situated, political circus spectacular,” Circus Amok! has been touring since 1989 to bring free shows to NYC parks. Exploring topics that include citizenship and healthcare access, the circus educates audiences on social justice issues through vivacious performances that involve acrobats, puppeteers, and stilt dancers. Circus Amok! founder and Pratt Associate Professor Jennifer Miller delivered an afternoon keynote address at the Scholar & Feminist Conference on Utopia, in which she talked about queer pedagogies in public spaces. Viewing Circus Amok! as a locus of solidarity and education, Miller looked to performance as an enactment of utopia.

At Circus Amok! the bearded woman is the ringmaster, not the sideshow. In queering the circus, Miller has revealed the potentiality of queer pedagogy. She advocates employing the body in queering performance work. Queer stylings of the body through song and dance disrupt the normalized (i.e., racialized, classed, gendered, etc.) terms of engagement in public spaces. The Pratt professor of performance extends this thinking to the classroom, where she destabilizes heteronormativity to create a welcoming, inclusive space, where students are “all out [of the closet].” In this genderqueer classroom, Miller advises her students to learn with their bodies—to “[try] on different gendered behaviors” and “stretch” in new directions.

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Safe Spaces, Queer Spaces & Public Spaces

Written by Liz Gipson

This post is part of a series of reflections on the interdisciplinary winter seminar, “Mumbai At Home and in the World: Gender, Sexuality and the Postcolonial City.” BCRW Associate Director Catherine Sameh introduced the seminar in part 1, and BCRW Research Assistant Nicci Yin reflected on occupying space in an urban environment in part 2.

Growing up in Washington, DC and then moving to New York for college, I’ve been surrounded by “open-minded” and “accepting” people my whole life, the types of people who wear rainbow pins and have HRC bumper stickers because they’re “allies.” Of course this kind of liberal support is important for the queer community, but it also means I’ve been conditioned to perform queerness in public urban spaces in a specific way, especially as a femme-lesbian who is rarely read as queer. While not a revolutionary notion, my trip to Mumbai forced me to rethink queerness, and how queerness is embodied and embedded in different spaces. Perhaps because I’m a queer woman living in New York City, whenever I see two men or two women holding hands or snuggling in public I assume they’re a romantic couple – not “just” friends. Yet walking around Mumbai constantly challenged me to rethink my notions of public affection, public space, friendships and romance. Mumbai is a city much like New York, where the streets are almost theatrical in their variety of people and activities. Every time I stepped outside my apartment in Mumbai, I saw a different set of women holding hands while crossing the street, or men sitting in each other’s laps on a park bench.

Group of about 18 college students in an auditorium setting, listening as one studnet [Liz] talks into the microphone.

Liz Gipson (holding microphone) talks with other students at the Mumbai Winter Seminar.

This constant and seemingly banal performance of affection caught me off guard at first. Yet Mumbai’s notions of platonic affection – which in the US is rarely so publicly physical – eventually became normalized for me. When talking to the two women from Lady Shri Ram College about public affection – both romantic and platonic – they were surprised to hear my interest in the culture of platonic public affection. They didn’t give a second thought to these couples, just as most New Yorkers probably wouldn’t to a man and a woman holding hands on the subway. To them, it was part of the white noise of the city and they struggled to articulate why people hold their friends’ hands. In turn, when asked why it was commonplace and accepted to hold your partners’ hand in New York I stumbled over my own explanation. When, why and where is public affection acceptable?

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Art with intention: visions of newness and reform

Written by Phoebe Lytle

What do a quilt, a scarf, and a vision of a feminist Utopia all have in common?

They are all at work changing the realities of our world. In the morning keynotes opening up this year’s 38th annual Scholar and Feminist conference “Utopia” we heard from several feminists at work changing the material realities of what is represented and who is seen and heard, using craft and critical design to challenge existing realities and create alternatives. Most striking was the extent to which our utopia needs be constructed; physically, in the objects we interact with, and perceptually, in the images we use to represent people and movements.

Activism Through Craft

Shaowen Bardzell, Youngsuk Altieri, Melanie Cervantes, and Elandria Williams at the morning keynotes during Scholar & Feminist 2013

Melanie Cervantes presented to the audience her philosophy of activism through craft, centered around “stitching lessons from stories and visions of women who shaped who we are.” A member of Dignidad Rebelde (rebel dignity) she spoke of the group’s founding motivation to push back against the idea of individualism that is dominant in US society and culture.

How? By reflecting solidarity with indigenous and international struggles through images that “agitate and inspire,” produced in her living room and reaching organizers and activists as far away as Bangkok. Reacting to day laborers’ inability to be the face of their own movement because of being “vilified” in the minds-eye of greater America, she makes images that re-incorporate and re-present the faces of those “on the frontline of a battle for dignity and human rights for all of us;” faces otherwise subsumed by a narrative over which they have no authorship.

Speaking to the theme of the conference, Cervantes said that to her, “working for a better world” means “working with other artists and movement leaders to lift up the women who don’t get to be put on a pedestal, whose names don’t get put in the history book, to understand how incredibly influential they will be… it is our responsibility to hold up those stories.”

This Utopia, she asserted, is built by connecting stitches and juxtaposing tapestries, and remembering every step of the way that “in many cultures there are roots within which we need to reach for because they have lessons for us.”

Melanie Cervantes and Elandria Williams, “Building Utopia: Stitching the Lessons from Stories and Visions of Women in Our Lives”

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Strategic Scrapbooks: Media Sharing in the 19th Century

Written by Dina Tyson

How do you save and share media? Do you have a Pinterest page for pinning images you like? Perhaps a Tumblr for reblogging others’ posts? Maybe you just add links to articles you found particularly poignant to your Bookmarks on Google Chrome. Indeed, with today’s technology, there are myriad ways to experience, share and hold on to media, be it articles, videos, pictures or something else entirely. While the technology we use to do these things has evolved rapidly over the past twenty years, saving and compiling articles and publications (a la Buzzfeed) goes back to before the computer was even invented and can be found in nineteenth century use of scrapbooks.

Two old newspaper images, one of a woman, one of a US map that says "Votes for Women"

On Tuesday, March 5, the BCRW hosted English Professor and Historian Ellen Gruber Garvey for a presentation entitled, “Strategic Scrapbooks: 19th Century Activists Remake the Newspaper for African American History and Women’s Rights.” Garvey shared with attendees the research for her most recent book, “Writing With Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance.” Going into this panel, I could hardly conceptualize what a strategic scrapbook would look like; my associations with scrapbooks were ones of family photos, personal letters and cute photo corners. As it turns out, in the nineteenth century, scrapbooking was an incredibly common and popular form of documenting and circulating information and ideas, and primarily consisted of cutting and pasting newspaper clippings into any sort of book that was no longer needed. In this way, people of this era documented war happenings, obituaries, articles, poetry and more while curating their own versions of the press in order to remember and share responses to media.

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An Open Letter to Caribbean Men on Gender-based Violence

Written by Patrice Daniel

Originally published by International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region at http://www.ippfwhr.org/en/blog/open-letter-caribbean-men-gender-based-violence

three men smile at something out of the frame

Dear Caribbean Men,

We do not have to smile for you. Our smiles are our own. Our lips are our own and our smiles are a celebration of our happiness. We do not have to smile on command. We are not pretty, little, Black dolls whose smiles were painted on with red paint and a plastic brush. Sometimes, we’re busy. We’re busy thinking about geo-political trends, the next ten-mile run, and the latest cricket match. We’re too busy to be the smiling decoration that we, as women, are expected to be. Our faces can be thoughtful, angry, sad, peaceful, meditative, or bored. So stop, Caribbean men. Stop walking up to us, harassing us, and demanding that we smile. We do not have to smile for you. Our smiles are our own.

We do not have to answer you. Our names are our own. We were not christened, “Eh! Baby!” We do not have to turn around and pretend that we enjoy being summoned like pets. We are not charmed when you follow us and invade our space. We do not have to make conversation with you as you block our paths. We do not feel flattered when you stand in a group and leer at our figures, competing to see who can make the vilest remark. We do not take it as a compliment when you comment on our bodies and tell us what you intend to do with them. So stop, Caribbean men. Stop making us feel uncomfortable, afraid to walk the streets of our homelands alone. We do not have to answer you. Our names are our own.

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The Wild, Wild West

Written by Carly Crane

When I offer the introduction: “I’m from North Dakota,” the usual answer is a snarky/incredulous, “People live there?” Well, I am standing before you, and I wasn’t exactly raised by buffalo, although that would be fun. I understand the reaction, and I don’t begrudge the occasional comparison to Siberia, because, in the scheme of the lives of hundreds of millions of American citizens, a state as under-populated as ND just sort of fades in with the rest of the Mid West in the rolling recesses of America’s mind. But the nation is starting to take notice of my scrappy little home state. Why? OIL. And we’ve got lots of it. North Dakota is changing at a booming rate, thanks to its vast shale oil fields, effecting major socio-economic changes in communities that have been static or in decline for decades; many of these changes are acutely affecting the lives of women in North Dakota.

Landscape photo of green field and blue sky

Here’s some background information on the ND oil boom: on February 3, North Dakota made the cover of New York Times Magazine and boasted the (intended-to-be-ironic) heading “The Luckiest Place on Earth.” The article “North Dakota Went Boom” depicts the rapid growth of the state’s population and oil industry in western ND, which climbed from the country’s 9th oil producer to its second, behind only Texas. ND is even projected to pass them, and soon. Eat your heart out, Texas. The influx in oil production began about 7 years ago, fueled by technological advancements in hydraulic fracturing (known scathingly as “fracking” on the East coast) that made it easier and cheaper to extract oil from the rocks.

Most of the oil comes from the Bakken Formation, also known as the Williston Basin. Oil towns in the area have been rocked by the population growth. Williston, ND, a hub of oil production, has grown from a steady, if not slightly declining, 12,000 people, to a bloated 20,000 in the last four years. Much of the growth is attributed to incoming single, able-bodied young men who flock to the high paying jobs in the oil fields. As the New York Times summed it up: Oil Towns Where Men are Many, and Women are Hounded. The article cites that in 2011, the census data showed 58% of North Dakotans ages 18-35 were men. And in the areas most affected by the oil boom, the disparity in gender ratios becomes even more obvious: there were more than 1.6 men for every 1 woman, and that’s only data for those who have reported a permanent residence, which many of the short-term oil labor and construction workers have not. As an aside, strippers often make more money on an average night in Williston than they would in Las Vegas. As women become fewer and farther between, the objectification of women has skyrocketed.

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Occupying Space: A Transnational Feminist Dialogue

Written by Nicci Yin

As a student of gender studies, a feminist, and someone who spent most of her life outside of the US, I wanted to be a part of the Mumbai seminar for the ways in which it brought my academic interests–feminism, postcolonialism, performance, transnationalism, etc.–into the context of a global South Asian city, somewhere that is “not-US”. I wanted to see how the perspectives and theoretical tools I gained in the classroom at Barnard would change, or if they would at all. How would these often abstract theories inform or alter the ways in which I experience a city which: a) has a colonial history, b) is still strongly involved in feminist struggles, and c) is constantly undergoing cultural, economic, and social change due to the influences of the West and of capitalism, very much like my own home of Taipei?

Group of students in auditorium style classroom, listening turned towards someone in the audience

Nicci Yin, center, at the Mumbai Winter Seminar

Aside from my own curiosities on how the seminar would place theory in dialogue with lived experience, some of the biggest questions that emerged from this cross-cultural exchange between Mumbai and New York were: in what ways do women inhabit or occupy space (or are prevented from doing so)? What specific negotiations need to take place for women to occupy urban space, specifically within cities like New York, Mumbai, and Delhi? The word ‘occupy’ is also somewhat deliberate, as it seems that the energy from Occupy as a movement seems to have influenced the tone of the protests surrounding female and feminist occupations of space, ignited by the Delhi gang rape. Though the rape took place around 900 miles away from where we were, it remained on our minds throughout our conversations within these seminars and outside of them.

Being in a foreign city already makes you especially attentive to what spaces you can or cannot occupy as an outsider. As students from New York, we were curious as to the spaces the students from Sophia and Lady Shri Ram Colleges for Women could occupy in their own cities. To that end, we specifically exchanged personal anecdotes of living in the city as women; the most common questions we asked each other had to do with street harassment and safety, and in doing so, engaged in a transnational feminist dialogue of sorts through the sharing of personal experiences. Our friends from Lady Shri Ram mentioned that they personally didn’t feel as safe to wander around Delhi at night as they did in Mumbai. When talking about street harassment in NYC, I felt stuck when a student from Sophia asked, “So do you say something to them?” The question only underlined the paralysis that ends up taking the place of speaking up when we do get catcalled on the streets.

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Gender-based Violence and Sexual Rights: Intersecting Forces in Women’s Lives

Written by Jimena Valades

Originally published by International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region at http://www.ippfwhr.org/en/blog/gender-based-violence-and-sexual-rights-intersecting-forces-women%E2%80%99s-lives

The 57th session of the Commission on the Status of Women kicked off last week in New York. Its focus is on the elimination of violence against women and girls. Nine of the 45 countries that comprise the commission, tasked with negotiating an agreed conclusion document, hail from Latin America and the Caribbean. Yet every country in the region (and the world) has a stake in this major event.

Marchers hold a banner stating "For a life free from Violence Against Women and Girls!"

Gender-based violence (GBV) remains an all too pervasive reality for women and girls in the region, regardless of religion, cultural context, or socioeconomic status. While the roots of such violence are vast and complicated, the impacts are equally immense and wide reaching. In particular, GBV is linked to sexual and reproductive health. Although it is difficult to draw a direct, causal relationship between the two, the issues are closely woven together to form an important backdrop for the lives of women and girls in the region.

Experiencing violence can set in motion a pattern of poor reproductive health that is hard to undo. Worldwide, studies show that women who report abuse by an intimate partner are also more likely to report poor general health, including reproductive health. Women experiencing violence are also more likely to report depression. In Latin America in particular, with only a handful of exceptions, national-level studies show that women experiencing physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner are also more likely to have unwanted or unintended pregnancies. Women experiencing abuse also report higher incidents of miscarriage and induced abortion.

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