feminism = feminism

I have three T-shirts that people will consistently comment on: 1. The green T-shirt that has the bloke riding a dinosaur; it says, “Real life would be much cooler if we all rode dinosaurs to work.” 2. My Lost t-shirt which is based on the show’s fifth season, so please don’t actually look at that shirt if you don’t want spoilers. 3. My green Women’s Centre T-shirt, in women’s medium size, which boldly and plainly says “feminist.” across the front of the shirt.

Several females (*exceptionally off topic tangent at the end of post) on random encounters commented positively on my Women's Centre shirt the various times I wore it. "Nice shirt!" said somebody I don't know as I walked through Central. So far so good.

Where I ran into more skepticism with my shirt was with a few (incidentally male) friends. “What IS feminism? Why do you feel the need to tell people that you’re a...feminist?” As if my proclaiming that opinion was the most outlandish thing ever. As tends to be the case with my blog posts, I will now flesh out the response that I wish I had prepared at the time – one that will show why I am an ally of feminism. This is why I believe in feminism, and why it’s a topic that we shouldn’t shoot down without a second thought, but rather, a conversation that needs to continue and be agreed and disagreed upon.

My first point is that feminism is a more inclusive term then we’ve let it become. Women’s rights have been an arduous battle – for rights, equality of opportunity, cultural recognition, economic standing, and fair media representation, to name a few. In the US at least, these are indicators that have changed for the better over the last 100 or so years. At worst, it’s not unreasonable to think that these are important rights for women that we should not forget. Assuming that the battle is completely over is wrong in my opinion. Moreover, to not recognize these struggles is to forget an important part of human history. I think many of us are too quick to say, “yes, feminism did the job in the 60s. It’s done; let’s stop talking about it.” I literally just asked my friend while writing this post what she thought of feminism. Her knee jerk reaction: “um, pointless.” I haven’t done my research so maybe I’m wrong and maybe everything’s okay. But I hypothesize that most of us have this instinctive reaction nowadays that even if feminism is a relatively agreeable thing, it’s nowhere near the top of the priority list of things to fix in this world.

However, feminism isn’t done. The US debate on sexual health policy on contraception and abortion is a significant piece of proof that feminism is still needed. In particular, members of the US government who are not only predominantly male, but also misguided, have been pushing for unreasonable policies. There’s more that could be said about this topic, but I will defer to the smarter and cleverer people – I just wanted to highlight one recent issue in which it makes sense for feminism to continue to exist as a movement.

Feminism runs into the problem that the word itself connotes a movement that is “too extreme.” Every movement has its extremists, but feminism is all the aforementioned rights that we would mostly consider inalienable. Feminism also certainly isn’t about making women better than everyone else. In my personal conception of the movement, a big part of feminism is about removing the barriers that we still hold over the women in our society. I arrived at this conclusion in thinking about sports. It used to surprise me back in high school cross country, the amount of girls who were faster than me. In my so called glory days, I was an average to better-than-average runner. I will not, however, try to tell you I ran a 2:50 marathon. Just like you can do with Paul Ryan, you can simply search my name on Google to find out my running records. (You won’t find a voting record though because the one thing I have ever voted on so far has been Amendment 1). Anyhow, there were a fair amount of girls who would be minutes faster than me – these crazy chicks who were doing six minute miles. Three times in a row. This was always a point of macho-joking amongst the sophomore boys on our team who were just starting to taste varsity racing and stop training with our fastest girls. We were never actually “fast” until we were faster than the girls. We’re men. We’re supposed to be better than them!

I do not mean to disregard that the average female is biologically different from the average male. Male athletes are indeed stronger and faster at many major sports (but not all of them!) However, our society has interpreted the biological averages without also weighing the possibility for humans to excel beyond those trends. Humankind has constantly outdone itself in every possible field (or track, pool, etc.) Everyone can do better. However, I would argue that on the whole, our culture assumes women will be less talented or less well-equipped in life. We fulfill that prophecy, and there are actual outcomes that result from this – the gender divide in CEOs of major corporations, for example. I’ve now heard multiple times from my friends, “My adviser [at Duke] keeps asking me if I’m really sure about biophysics because he says it’s a lot of work, but he never says anything like that to his male advisees,” or “I chose to study to be a nurse instead of a doctor because everybody told me being a doctor would be too hard for a girl” or “I don’t want to go to Wall Street because I always hear women can’t handle the stress.” By no means am I saying that every girl should become a soulless premed or enter the soul-crushing walls of Wall Street. Rather, we must remove the inhibitions and voices in the heads of women everywhere that they should not try to do something because their gender is expected to hinder them.

So, remember those shirts I was talking about at the beginning of this blog post? One shirt that does not make that list is my green Love = Love shirt. That’s an amazing thing really, that I have walked around the Duke Campus and downtown Durham wearing a pro-LGBT shirt without getting a single comment on it. When it comes to the LGBT community, defining a feminine identity is another spectrum to consider. I won’t go into that because that would mean trying to speak for too many people I don’t have the right to speak for. However, one idea still applies here, always – there is more that brings us together than drives us apart. Both feminism and LGBT advocacy are movements that want to equalize the mainstream and the marginalized group(s). For example, I especially believe that we should try to erode the pervasiveness of heteronormativity because in the end, why should two blokes getting married and adopting a kid be considered abnormal? Yet along the way, the LGBT community and the feminist movement have forged their own identities and subidentities through the persistence of their resistance to marginalization, or at least in their escapism from the mainstream. These identities of course, lead to stereotypes, you know, the flaming gay or the Femnazi.

Many of us have internalized the most extreme images of the activists for our respective causes. We’re all guilty of it, but I’m not going to try and point fingers and say that women have been wronged more severely than LGBT individuals or that the subcultures associated with oppressed racial, ethnic, gender/sexual groups should not exist. Instead, I want to put this out as an open question to those who are reading this – is it somehow more socially acceptable or fashionable to say you’re an LGBT ally than it is to be a feminist? My impression is that because the legal gains of women and feminism are on average, more advanced than those of the LGBT community, people are more likely to assume feminism is no longer necessary. And for whatever reason, we also think what is left of feminism are just vestigial extremists, caricatures and stereotypes. As I hope I’ve convinced you about by now, there are still reasons why feminism or something similar to exist.

 “Well I’m an equalist,” said a friend in the LGBT Centre, somewhat humorously. Equality is indeed what we should be striving for, but there are only three ways to create equality – A. bring someone down, B. bring someone up, or C. make everyone better off through trade. Now option A. certainly is not optimal. I’ll also note here that I believe affirmative action is a dangerous thing that has been abused although the motivations behind such policies should not be disregarded entirely given that people indeed originate from different contexts on the basis of race, gender, and sexual orientation (this in itself is also another talk to be had by smarter people than me). The need empowerment is why we give the names we give to these marginalized subgroups – that’s why it’s LGBT, feminism (referring to women), etc. This is why I’m not so quick to shoot down “feminism” as an overly generic term and how I’ve come to rationalize the acronym LGBT as a term that highlights some (but unfortunately not all) the groups that want and need to be empowered.

So that leaves us with B. and C. Empowerment is a very powerful force, but those who hold power in our society will naturally want to hold on to their power. Feminism is in a transition state where the movement has gotten oh-so-close in many ways but is lacking in others - making it particularly prone to the pushback by those who might not necessarily want to see women empowering themselves. Within the way I am talking about this, it’s hard to really have any one-sided endowment of power. That brings me to C. When I talk about trade, I’m not talking about meat and potatoes because I’m a vegetarian, so let’s go with potatoes and beans. Bringing more women to the game means a lot of things. The reality is that there are certain short-term sacrifices that need to be made to accommodate for the empowerment of more people.

A friend of mine tells me that she’s afraid of medical school since she wants to be married by 25 or 30 and having kids. Residency would be a nightmare, no? There’s a brilliant article by Anne-Marie Slaughter about the challenges facing women today in terms of the doubled expectations to be successful as professionals and as family-starters. Some scientific literature actually suggests the transition to two working parents has helped contribute to a decrease in healthy eating in the US. In other words, we need a multidimensional solution – labor laws and work culture need to change to accommodate for a more gender - equal workplace and home setting and men in mainstream heterosexual marriages need to assume some responsibility over the traditional housewife realm, to name a couple changes that could help this issue. Optimizing this scenario could potentially benefit families and couples, allowing any young person to grow into a world where they don’t have to do everything (get a job, save the world, have a family). If we can integrate this type of thinking into our politics and culture, that we need to optimize not only for profit, but also for resource allocation and lower social cost given feminist considerations, then we can do what humans were made (evolved?) to do: exceed everyone that came before us.

Feminism represents the new compromises and trades that we need to make across genders to make sure everybody is empowered and endowed with equal opportunities.

If nothing else, please give me more free shirts. They’re more empowering than you’d think.

*Tangential discussion point – Can someone comment on what the most neutral but also not-awkward-sounding words for “female” and “vagina” might be? I find it rather telling that we have nice-sounding informal words that are accepted for males and their genitals – “guy” and “dick.” Woman is too formal, girl is too condescending, and lady just sounds off for some reason. There isn’t really a word for vagina that isn’t an anatomical vocabulary word, a huge swear word or doesn’t sound plain ridiculous. Why isn’t this a part of our vocabulary? Are vaginas just that icky? 

LGBTQ Female Role Models: Dorothy Allison [at DUKE!]

Who is Dorothy Allison?

To begin, Dorothy Allison is the feminist and queer writer who is COMING to DUKE this Friday, September 23rd to give presentations around campus! [See the bottom of the post for event times and dates.]

Duke acquired Dorothy Allison's papers September of last year, and was excited to bring her work to our Rare Books and Manuscript, and Special Collections Library (RBMSCL) here at Duke. Born in Greenville, South Carolina, Allison is a natural fit as a Southern writer who is one of the foremost queer and feminist American writers of the 21st century in her fields.

As the first person in her family to graduate from high school or college, Allison studied anthropology in Eckerd College on a National Merit scholarship, and pursued graduate studies at Florida State University. She held a variety of jobs, and later

moved to NYC, where she enrolled in The New School (a historically progressive academic college in NYC) and in 1981 recieved her M.A. in urban anthropology. While in college, Allison credits a feminist "collective" for introducing her to feminism and credits "militant feminists" for encouraging her to write.

Allison is both a non-fiction and fiction writer, writing novels such as Cavedweller, which brings up issues on class, sexuality, female bonds, domestic violence, Southern society, child sexual abuse, and non-fiction pieces such as "The Women Who Hate Me", which was a response of Allison to critics of her political and social activism. Winner of three Lambda Book Awards, the Lesbian Book award and the National Book Award (p.s. Alice Walker won the National Book Award too! Notice a queer women's authorship trend??) today she continues to write and is a visiting professor at Emory University and Davidson College.

Her social activism takes varied forms, and she is one of the co-founders of the "Lesbian Sex Mafia" in New York City, a LGBTQ women's support group that promotes safer sex regardless of sexual preferences and type of sexual act, emphasizing a woman's choice, unihibited gender and sexual expression, consent, and BDSM.

After realizing Dorothy Allison was coming to Duke-I decided to start reading her collection of semi-autobiographical short stories, "Trash", which has won the Lambda and Lesbian Book Awards. It's moving and powerful and vulnerability and strength all in the same text:

"There was a day in my life when I decided to live..."

"I became an escapee-one of the ones others talk about. I became the one who got away, who got glasses from the Lions Club, a job from Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, and finally went to college on a scholarship."

"Even now I cannot believe how it was that everything I survived became one more reason to want to die."

"I wrote out my memories of the women. My terror and lust for my own kind; the souts and arguments; the long, slow glances and slower approaches; the way my hands always shook when I would finally touch the flesh I could barely admit I wanted, the way I could never ask for what I wanted, never accept it if they offered....-all the stories of my family, my childhood, and the relentless deadening poverty and shame I had always tried to hide because I knew no one would believe what I could tell them about it."

"I write stories...I put on a page a third look at what I've seen in life-the condensed and reinvented experience of a cross-eyed working clas lesbian, addicted to violence, language and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine."

-Dorothy Allison, "Trash" (1988).

Here at Duke we are lucky enough to have prominent scholars and leaders in various fields come to our campus, to give lectures to students, engage us, and allow us to ask questions that explore their works. Don't miss this chance to meet Dorothy Allison and discuss her works in person!

Where can we meet Dorothy Allison?

Two or Three Things: Readings from the Works of Dorothy Allison

Thursday, September 22, 4:00 p.m.

Biddle Rare Book Room, Perkins Library

Dorothy Allison in Conversation with Students

Friday, September 23, 12:00 p.m.

Center for LGBT Life

Out in the South: Writers in Conversation Featuring Dorothy Allison, Shirlette Ammons, Jim Grimsley, and Minnie Bruce Pratt

Friday, September 23, 7:00 p.m.

White Lecture Hall, East Campus

[See the Duke University Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture in the RBMSCL website for more information, here.]

LGBTQ Female Role Models: Joan Jett

Who is Joan Jett?

"The Queen of Rock and Roll"

- as referred to several times during her career

A legendary American punk rock musician, Joan Jett is best known for her song,

"I Love Rock and Roll",

a cover of an Arrows' song of the same name. It's one of the most iconic songs in the world, and it was a U.S. Billboard Hot 100 track for seven weeks in 1981.

Joan Jett's accomplishments today might be taken for granted, but the historical, cultural and societal context of her success cannot be overlooked. Jett was one of the members of the all-female punk band, The Runways (1975-1979), in a time when all-girl punk bands were literally, unheard of. Today, it's easy to think of successful all-women groups, or punk bands

with female leads, but it was only through artists like Jett who transformed the idea from unthinkable, to something possible. Later, she formed her own group called Jett Joan and the Blackhearts, which released hits like "I Love Rock and Roll" and "Crimson and Clover".

A few weeks ago, I would have guessed that Joan Jett was just following in the footsteps of other all-female punk bands, but after working on my 12 page paper on the Riot Grrrl movement for my Spanish class (on pop culture), I realized that Joan Jett wasn't following in any woman's footsteps: she made the path for women in the hardcore punk scene. When she first started out, she was told that "girls don't play electric guitar", and she was laughed at when she tried to buy a black leather jacket and pants. Punk has traditionally been a male-dominated scene, and that was especially true in the late 70s and early 80s when Jett gained popularity. (Women were grouped at punk shows, and pushed to the back of concerts, demeaningly labeled as "coat racks".) Jett's band itself, The Runaways, was not treated very well, and Jett expressed her frustrations as follows [italics added]:

"I didn't understand people's reactions and why they thought it was so strange for women to play music. There were people who looked at us like we had seven heads....I wonder how many women actually looked at what we were doing in the Runaways and said, 'Hey, that's great.' Or, 'You make me feel stronger.' Because it seemed like the Runaways had a mostly male audience, waiting to see us take our clothes off or something-that's what they expected us to do."

In addition to being a woman pioneer in the male-dominated punk genre, Joan Jett is also a success story of the "I think I can" attitude. When she wanted to produce music on her own, she didn't take "no" for an answer. She was rejected by 23 major record labels, until she eventually decided to start her own record-label, called "Blackheart Records". This was another previous "impossibility", as Jett was the first woman to ever start her own recording label. Her "Do-It-Yourself" (DIY) feminist attitude was characteristic of the genre that followed Jett, the Riot Grrrl movement, and so it's no surprise that Jett is also known as "The Godmother of Punk" and the "Original Riot Grrrl". (Riot Grrrl was a feminist music genre in the early 90s that focused on all-female bands, promoting feminine individuality and strength through uninhibited music.) Jett collaborated with one of the most famous pioneer Riot Grrl bands, Bikini Kill, and helped get their band (and thus, the Riot Grrrl movement) off the ground.

I wanted to write about Joan Jett on the blog, because I wasn't very familiar with her as a person, and I certainly had no idea she was queer. Wikipedia won't tell you how she identifies (maybe just an oversight?), but after doing some research, I found that both AfterEllen and 365Gay.com report that she is "open" and "out". (Fun fact: GLBTQ Encyclopedia reports that she has a "Dykes Rule" sticker on her guitar.) Also, when you listen to her hit song "Crimson and Clover", check out the lyrics-they're pretty queer.

I can't think of a better role model. She was one of two women listed in Rolling Stone's Top 100 Guitarists of all time, and she continues to play her powerful music. She still tours (at the age of 52) with The Blackhearts, and most recently, she just played for Greenday's Europe 2010 tour. This woman's strength, and her visible rejection of traditionally rigid female roles (demur, submissive, subservient) in place for an angry, enthusiastic and passionate love affair with music (and life) demonstrate, literally, how cool rule-breaking feminism can be.

LGBTQ Female Role Models: Alice Walker

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it." -The Color Purple

I started to write this blog post on Alice Walker, and then I realized that I had never actually read any of her works; I had only heard of her through feminism that I had read. (Fun feminist fact: Walker was an editor for Ms. magazine in the 70s.) I didn't really feel comfortable with the realization that I hadn't read her actual work; if Alice Walker is one of the most famous LGBTQ female authors alive today, why haven't I read anything of hers? That didn't sit well with me.

So, earlier last week, I picked up Alice Walker's most famous novel at Perkins Library and sat down to read The Color Purple.

The Color Purple was written in 1982, and Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1983 (she was the first black woman to win this award, as well as the National Book Award in the same year). The story chronicles the life of a young black woman living in an impoverished community of rural Georgia in the 1930s.

As I was researching the book, I learned that it was one of the "100 Most Frequently Challenged Books" due to the fact of its explicit mention of violence. But there's no doubt about it, that what Walker describes in her novel is definitely real. Domestic violence and child abuse are a part of Walker's novel because they are a part of life, and that's something I actually found myself very much appreciating about her work; her style of writing is so real and accessible:

[Note on the below quote: "Mr _____" is the husband that Celie has no choice but to marry, and "fixed" refers to Celie's infertility.]

Pa said to Mr_______, She ugly. But she no stranger to hard work. And she clean. And God done fixed her. You can do everything just like you want to and she ain’t gonna make you feed it or clothe it.

I take out the picture of Shug Avery. I look into her eyes. Her eyes say Yeah, it bees that way sometime.

Something else that I appreciated was the way Walker approaches the bisexuality (or perhaps, lesbianism?) of her characters. The theme of same-sex attraction is just so well articulated in The Color Purple. Same-sex attraction isn't gross; it isn't unnatural. It's literally the best thing that happens to her [the protagonist]:

Shug Avery was a woman. The most beautiful woman I ever saw. She more pretty than my mama. She bout ten thousand times more prettier than me....I ast [the woman] to give me the picture. An all night long I stare at it. An now when I dream, I dream of Shug Avery.. She dress to kill, whirling an laughing.

Shug Avery standing upside a piano, elbow crook, hand on her hip. Lord I wants to go [with her] so bad. Not to dance. Not to drink. Not to play card. Not even to hear Shug Avery sing. I just be thankful to lay eyes on her.

I found the book to be beautifully crafted. I'm particularly impressed by the way Walker uses simple, unflowerly language to capture some of the deepest of human expression that I've ever read. She is truly a genius writer:

I feel bad sometimes Nettie done pass me in learnin. But look like nothing she says can git in my brain and stay.

She try to tell me something bout the ground not being flat. I just say, Yeah, like I know it.

I never tell her how flat it look to me.

The strength of Walker's characters would seem to parallel instances from her own life as well. When Walker was a child she had an accident that left her blind in one eye. Later, thanks to medical advances, she was able to gain sight in it again, but it forever impacted the way she viewed the world. She wrote that it "helped her to really see people and things, to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out."

If you're interested in Alice Walker's work, particularly on black feminism, you might also like to check out Tyler Perry's film, For Colored Girls, while it's currently in theaters. (I saw it this past weekend and was glad that I did.) The playwright, Ntozake Shange, is Alice Walker's contemporary, and wrote the play in 1975 around the same time of The Color Purple. (There's also a dialogue with the African and African-American studies department tonight, at 7pm in the Mary Lou.)