Intergenerational Learning with Barbara Smith & Alethia Jones

 Barbara Smith was a part of the Combahee River Collective and is  among some of the first to theorize black feminism. Alethia Jones, is the co-editor of their book, Ain’t Nobody Gonna Turn Me Around, where they highlight the beginnings of black feminist organizing in the sixties and seventies. Barbara Smith is currently working for the first woman mayor of Albany.

 

Activism can often be a rewarding, yet tiring process. Barbara Smith is no stranger to the  stress activism and organizing puts on one’s health. She suggests that through the process, one must remind one’s self why one got involved. Remembering the experiences, emotions and importance of cause often reinvigorates our commitment. Additionally, Smith challenged us on our framing of activism because she saw activism as a single issue cause whereas organizing is a more comprehensive way of seeing and seeking to eradicate oppression through a systemic lens. Next, she suggested that even when it seems like you're not making any tangible process to keep going because just like athletes, you can’t just train for the big event, rather you must practice and stay strong for multiple battles. For example, Black Lives Matter was able to come to forefront because they steadily asked  what is unjust and how can they continue to destabilize power as it exist.

 

Barbara Smith (back row, sixth from left) meets with students, faculty, and staff at Colgate on International Women's Day.

What also sustains movements is to do it with other people and not in isolation. Moreover, we must seek to not be afraid of anger because righteous anger often fuels our organizing. Instead, we must find ways engage our anger productively. Denying the presence of anger  may make it easy at first but also strains the body. One of my favorite quotes was from Alethia joins who posited that “Anger is an indication that boundaries have been crossed.” Likewise we must use these indications as opportunities for growth rather than wounding, ourselves or others.

There is an inherent healing in social justice that Jones is drawn to, but sometimes we let our health go to plan the next thing. Indeed, we must ask how do we cultivate ways to take care of ourselves as a political act. Health problems especially in marginalized communities are often political and structural issues. However, we must be careful and cognizant of the line between self-care as a political act and self-indulgence that perpetuates class violence. Self- care and consciousness of health, although a growing popular movement, is not new and has been a staple in organizing culture. Therefore, we have have a lot to learn from elders and intergenerational knowledge.

- Aidan Davis '16, Women's Health Intern

Voting?!???

So I know we’re all of age here (except for the occasional young ambitious student or the year-skippers out there), but even as a senior, I find myself incredibly confused about the voting process. Where does one go to vote? Am I registered? Does my registration expire? How do I get an absentee ballot if I’m in state? Or out of state? What? .... Oh god. 

What’s strange is that we’re positioned at a college that likes to think of itself as pretty prestigious and on top of everything. (I mean, we’re literally on top of a hill here.) A few of my peers and I are rather surprised that no one is tabling for absentee ballots or reminding us that we need to vote, that we should be making a difference in this upcoming presidential election… or really any election. Where are our student organizations, the College Democrats, Democracy Matters or even the College Republicans? No one is sending out widespread public information on this campus to remind us that we should be the ones going out and voting. 

But when I take a moment to think about it… it doesn’t really surprise me. I’m not seriously sure people want to make the voting process easier or clearer at all. We’re also used to being far too busy on this campus, engulfed by this “Colgate bubble” to really pay attention to the outside world. But the “rest of the world” is still chugging along, with us right inside it. This bubble we’ve got is self-made and we need to pop it. Now.

It’s not even just within Colgate, the U.S. voting system as a whole isn’t all that clear either. With the internet, social media, unnecessary amounts of emails and even snail mail, why aren’t we being bombarded with more information, need I say CLARITY, about voting? Especially to the youth. If all the youth were voting, the primaries might look very different from what they look like now.

So in my realization that the primaries have begun for the Presidential election, I searched google for some sort of answer to the mysterious world of voting. And here’s the most helpful site I found… https://www.usvotefoundation.org/

This organization is actually set up to help get more people to vote, and students are one of their target demographics. They have voting deadlines and dates set up easily by state. They also have links to register to vote and to request an absentee ballot.

But so far, this is what the primaries look like. To me, it’s a little scary, and it looks like we need to get out there and shake it up. If you feel a little confused about who you might agree with, here’s a short quiz that might help you figure it out from the Washington Post. There is also a quiz here, at I Side With that may help. I Side With also has news and polls that you might be interested in looking at!

Last thing, the New York state primary is on April 19th and you can vote at the Hamilton Public Library downtown. Or you can sign up for an absentee ballot on the website that I mentioned earlier.

While I know it’s not everything it could be but it’s a start, so get on this website and seriously GO VOTE! 

 

 - Monica Hoh '16, Information Technology and Resources Intern

The Battle Over Bathrooms: Why We Need Gender-Inclusive Bathrooms at Colgate

Two weeks ago I interviewed two wonderful human beings: Jake Mahr ‘17 and Em Rubey ‘18. Em is the Media and Outreach LGBTQ Initiatives intern. Jake Mahr contributes zines to the Center for Women’s Studies. Both Jake and Em are Lambda leaders. Lambda is a student-run organization meant to give agency to LGBTQ people in the space by not making assumptions or subjecting  people to gender binaries. Jake, Em, and other members of Lambda gathered to make engaging and thought-provoking posters raising awareness about the lack of gender neutral bathrooms on this campus. Although the posters were quickly taken down, they sparked conversation that we all should continue to engage in. Hopefully the poster campaign and this blog post are just the first steps in an ongoing dialogue for Colgate.

Ashleandra Opoku: Can you speak about the poster and what sparked the campaign?

Jake Mahr: Lambda has been steadily growing this semester which is great; in that growth we have seen an expansion with identities and fluidity.The growth is great, but we still live in a world and a campus that has very strict ideals and normative systems. Gender should be something we are all be able to choose, but that is not always the case.  

Em Rubey: For me personally, one of the things that started the bathroom campaign is that we do not have many gender inclusive bathrooms on campus. The fact is that people who have  identities that do not match up with men or women’s or even whose expression do not look like the stereotypical man or woman are unsafe to use a bathroom just because their identity does not fit into that box. They cannot use the bathroom or they risk  being harassed or assaulted in that space. It is really important that everyone can use a bathroom in a building where they go to school, and it seems like a really simple request to me. The posters went up as a way to begin a conversation where people start thinking on how bathrooms affect people whose identities are not in the mainstream binary.

Ashleandra: What was it like speaking to administration about this campaign?

Jake: Change does happen on this campus when you get a good unification of students and faculty. After the posters went up, we emailed a set of administrators in various position from a couple deans, vice president, to people to work in facilities, people that work equity and diversity. It laid out some general steps that we hope to see in the future, we just want to make sure that no matter where anyone is on campus, where they are living, where they study, or what department they are in, they don’t have to worry about their safety every time they use the restroom.  It hard to be student when you go to the restroom and you are not sure which restroom to use. It’s a stressful situation to be unsure which restroom to use or  to feel as if the outside world is imposing a gender on you that is not your identity.

Em: I know that right now there are 15 gender neutral stalls out of 218 gender bathroom stalls on campus. That means only seven percent of the bathrooms on campus are gender inclusive. We sent several emails back and forth between deans and administrators just to say this is what we are doing. We also explained how gender diversity is not appreciated on our campus. We need bathrooms and spaces to use  in all of the buildings on campus.

Ashleandra: What do you want people to gain from the campaign?

Jake: We also emailed a lot of people we consider to be allies or advocates on this campus, including other students, student groups, faculty members and some administrators. They were all supportive, and there was a lot of  positive feedback. We had professors who reached out who said they would love to talk about it in classes, which I see as an important part to this.

Em: I want people to gain a deeper understanding of how gender is socially constructed because gender is so ingrained in our society that people do not even realize that the reason they are a man or a women is because they were told that the minute they were born. I want people to be able to understand more of the complexities of gender and what it means to be a man and women and the fact that these ideas of gender are not real, yet they do have very real consequences on people. I want students to think about the gender binary and the way it does not fit for everyone and how it is enforced upon all of us. There are many gender identities and gender expressions in the world and at Colgate; these identities need to be recognized and honored.

Jake: The ultimate goal for the posters was to get people to start having conversations. Whether or not people felt uncomfortable was not a concern of mine because we feel uncomfortable by the signs that are on the bathroom. It is kind of easy for people to say, well, we have a gender neutral restroom in the Center for Women’s Studies and we have some in other academic buildings. Sometimes people advertise it as a positive thing, making it seem as if the institution is actually doing something, but we forget to still be critical and to remember that it is not as great as it could be. I want people to just know that students around them are affected by this on a daily basis, and we can’t just sit silently and continue to ignore it.

Ashleandra: Do you see yourself continuing this campaign next year?

Jake: Yeah, on this campus, this thing happens where someone will bring up an issue and people will acknowledge the problem, and then everyone will sort of forget about it. I am sure we can always find ways to disrupt that.’

Em: Whether that be through poster campaigns or other events such as working to promote Drag Ball during Queerfest, which is another sort of gender-bending event on campus -- yes, I definitely see this being a continuous process because obviously putting up some posters in the bathroom is not going to immediately open up everyone's mind. However, it is a start. This year a lot of our members have expressed concerns about gender and how it does not really make sense to them and does not really go with themselves personally and how they live in the world. So gender has been a bigger conversation in those spaces but we all exist outside of the Rainbow Room, a room reserved for Lambda meetings as a safe space, so those conversations must be and should be happening outside of Lambda.

Gender inclusive restrooms are most accessible way to guarantee we all use the bathroom safely. For more info check out these articles. Lastly, I want to thank both Jake and Em for letting me interview them. Let’s continue the conversation, continue to resist, and continue to challenge ourselves. With love from your favorite blogger.

- Ashleandra Opoku '17, Multicultural & LGBTQ Affairs Intern

Brown bag reflections: Vagina Monologues

On 17th Feb, Women's Studies Center held a brown bag to discuss the Vagina Monologues with some of the cast and crew of the show. The show was held the weekend earlier from Feb 14-16 in Brehmer Theater to a packed audience all three nights. The brown bag began with some of the cast in the audience performing bits of their monologues. The director of the show this year, Natasha Torres '15, then began the conversation talking about her own experience seeing VM for the first time her first year, "I thought it was one of the most radical things I'd seen. There were women telling 'cunt'! I was also like what is wrong with them…" The next year she decided to audition for a role and she has been a part of it every year since. "I hadn't seen my vagina before I don't think. It made me realize I needed to get in touch with myself." Her words were echoed by some of the other panelists Sahara Zamudio, Monica Hoh, Anika Rutah and Nina Cook. Torres also talked about her role as a director, and how bonding within the cast/crew and conversations between them, and fostering that community was the most important aspect of the job for her. She reminisced that the community built around the show without her even realizing it. She also touched upon some of the problematic aspects within the show: its rigidity, and silences for instance. Those two in particular lingered in the discussion even as praises for the show featured in all the panelists' experience. 

Having been a part of the show myself, I have been thinking about the silences within the script myself. I remember Natasha's concerns about it and her efforts to alleviate some of them through the charity element of the show and the clit-tail hour that adds local Colgate experiences to the show. Even then, the show, while phenomenal, can often feel cripplingly inadequate, particularly in its limited inclusion of trans women and their experiences. Not misleading to its name, Vagina Monologues, only does include monologues and experiences--while pioneering and wide-ranging--of not women, but persons with vaginas. It has been a controversial issue for the show in recent years, with Mt. Holyoke College even scrapping the performance of the show entirely for the same reason.

It leads me to wonder however, about how helpful banning or not performing the show is in the big picture. The show is still pretty radical in its concept. Especially at a place like Colgate, so rife in slut-shaming and sexual assault and yet so silenced in the topic of sexuality of women, a group of women leading the stage talking about experiences with vaginas is incredibly powerful. As Hoh talked about her reaction after seeing the show her first time her first year, "That's probably the first time I have heard the word 'vagina' so many times." She is more than likely not alone in her reaction. As she remarked subsequently, "Why is it so?" Why are we not talking about this more? I think the show helped me have more honest conversations with my friends." Similar to Hoh, if the show nudges students on this campus to think about vaginas, and sexuality, and consent, say if it makes a drunk fratbro wonder about his partner's needs for once, then the show has more than done its job. On the show defense, there is only so much awareness and ground one show can cover--and the show already goes for three hours! This is not to say however, that the show couldn't do a better job of including more wide-ranging experiences. For now, maybe one way to go about improving the show without scrapping it altogether would be to encourage those silences to be filled in the optional clit-tail hour, as this year's show tried to. 

-Liza Paudel

Brown Bag Reflection: Feminist Organizations

On 27^th January 2015, the Women’s Studies Center held a brownbag introduction to some of the feminist organizations on campus. Present were Advocates, Lambda, Sisters of the Round Table (SORT), Vox, The Network, Organization of Asian Sisters in Solidarity (OASIS) and Anti-Racism Coalition (ARC). Providence Ryan from Advocates, a lgbtq+ and ally student group, started the talk off with her description of the club, and its new trajectory of intersectionality. In fact, intersectionality remained a central theme throughout the brown bag. SORT chair Christelle Boursiquot talked about the progression of the women and women of color organization; Chrissie Chen of OASIS, an Asian women support group, talked about bridging gaps between women at Colgate; and Michelle Sagalchik of ARC elaborated on intersectionality and its central place in the mission of the organization—the interconnectedness nature of structural oppressions of patriarchy, racism and heteronormativity. Julia Hooks, the president of Vox, the student branch of Planned Parenthood talked about the need for more conversations regarding pro-choice and abortion rights on campus, and Kendall Murtha, co-president of The Network, the sexual assault and relationship violence awareness group on campus, explained the origins of the club and the events they conduct each year. The brown bag ended after opening up to individual questions and passing of sign-up sheets.

One issue that bugged me throughout the brown bag was how none in the panel really talked about what feminism means. Given that the brown bag was held in Women’s Studies, all the panelists seemed to implicitly assume that everyone present would already know the meaning, which is unlikely. Not to mention, not everyone understands and relates to ‘feminism’ in the same way. Perhaps the panel could have touched upon their idea of what it means and how they practice it within their groups. In their defense however, 5 minutes is perhaps too little a time. I couldn’t shake the question away though: Can a club even claim to be feminist unless organized explicitly as such? Especially if not all of its members might identify as feminist? As a founding member of OASIS, one of the clubs in the panel, I know that not all members in it identify with the word; the concept of equality for everyone perhaps, but not the word itself. Yes, I realize that that means they are feminists because ‘equality’ is quite literally what the word means, but identifying as a feminist is also an inherently political stance. So, even if the club primarily works with feminist issues and advocates for them, does it get to put its members in the political position of identifying as a ‘feminist’, especially if they do not wish to do so? After all, the club is only the sum of its members, and thus, as feminist as its members.

The issue of non-identification with the word ‘feminism’ but identification with the concept is not a new phenomenon at all. Take, for instance, the ‘I don’t need feminism’ and meninist backlash (which, just so we’re clear—is utter um, BALDERDASH.) The refusal to call oneself ‘feminist’ stems manly from ignorance of what the word means, but more and more, I have been confused about the word myself. Make no mistake, I identify strongly as a feminist, and have for a long time, but the more I learn about it, the more I realize that it is subjective. (Note our plural form of the word in our blog title for instance.) A person’s individual experiences and identities are inherently a part of their feminism—at least in my iteration of it. Does that mean that if a person believes in eradication of sexual and gender oppression and/or all other oppressions but does not feel inclined to take a political side in any of the bullahalloo of women’s and other marginalized groups’ rights, is that their own non-identifying-as-such feminism? I most likely wouldn’t count it as such, but more and more I’m not sure. Does explicit identification with the word matter more, or even as much as, standing up for its beliefs?

Overall, the brown bag did not answer my question, but it provided for an excellent opportunity for students to connect with some of the most progressive and activist groups on campus, and feminist-identifying or not, to perhaps find an intersectional space for themselves within those organizations. Considering the sit-in and other events of last semester and the angry backlash that followed, our campus desperately needs it.

-Liza Paudel '15

WMST Brown Bag: Colgate At MichFest

 

On Tuesday, for Brown Bag “Colgate at Michfest", Panelists Prof. Meika Loe, Prof. Mary Simonson and students Susan Miller ‘16 and Sarah Wooton ’15 spoke about their personal experiences attending the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival this summer. 

Sarah Wooton started the Brown Bag explaining to the crowd about the big controversy in this year’s MichFest in particular: whether or not to let trans women attend the festival. While the issue caught a lot of press over the summer having been debated vigorously for years, it has yet to come to a resolution. On the one hand, some people argue that the “safe” nature of the space for women-born women can be threatened by the presence of trans women, especially ones who have not “fully transitioned.” On the other, the festival is seen as an inclusive space, trusting and accepting of all women. One of the arguments Sarah explained, made by some of the women in the latter group: giving into the huge pressure to transition that trans women receive might be considered a sign of giving into the patriarchy itself, was something I had never heard or considered before. However, it does not seem fair, to me, that a group that already deals with so much oppression, hate crimes and pain on a daily basis be subject to more punishment for not being radical enough. Especially to strip them of one of the few safe spaces that is supposedly welcome and available to all women is almost absurd.

Susan Miller, who had been to the festival twice before, talked about how she has seen it change and how she has seen herself change, especially in trying new things in the festival. Prof. Simonson then talked about her experience helping in the kitchen with its high standard for safety and hygiene protocols, even for a festival that gathers 9,000 attendees! Finally, Prof. Loe shed light on her attendance as a mom—going to the festival with her 7 year old daughter Levi. She was amazed at the “full spectrum of gender play” and its acceptance in the festival. Coming in as a Women’s Studies professor, she revelled on how it was almost an idealized space to her—this level of lack of judgment, and total liberation of expression and motion. Being there with her young daughter, who got to see such radical expressions—everything from people with beards to people in costumes and everything in between—and grew to appreciate it, and who Prof. Loe was able to just let wander and trust to a group of individuals she’d never met before to watch over, was to her, like no other. “Only in Michigan Womyn’s Festival,” she said. 

The festival, almost 40 years old and with humble roots of establishment by a 19 year old Lisa Vogel, enjoys a level of prestige and popularity that is quite astounding. While the future of the festival is still in question given declining revenues from music shows and the controversies surrounding it, it is one of the few spaces women today and in the past have had that is just for them, accepts them and indeed, celebrates them. This is especially meaningful and significant for traditionally marginalised slices within the woman demographic, including the trans population. Thus, to many regular attendees (and our panelists seem to agree!) MichFest means "home.”

-Liza Paudel