Second Brown Bag of the Semester!

Join us on Tuesday, January 31 for the second Brown Bag of the spring semester!!  We're happy to welcome back Liz Thompson, who was Colgate's WMST Program Assistant from 2007-2009!  She will be giving a talk entitled "Interdependence is for Everybody: Perspectives from a Former Program Assistant".  As always, we expect to have a large crowd of interested students, faculty, and staff and look forward to having a great discussion with one of our own. Please come join and eat a delicious free lunch!

1/24/12 Brown Bag Response: Environmental Racism

When I heard the term 'environmental racism', I thought, "oh child, this is going to be interesting..."; I have very different ideas about ecology than most people today, and I definitely saw no possible connection between ecology and feminism or racism. But listening to the panel on Tuesday's brown bag talk "Exploring Environmental Racism in the Wake of MLK's Legacy" opened up some interesting avenues of discussion.  The first is the issue above: what does ecofeminism even mean?  What does environmental racism mean?  What's the connection?  At first glance, the idea of such a thing seems a stretch; the environment is the environment, and it effects everybody equally, and we all affect it in certain ways.  This has nothing to do with race, gender, etc.  However environmental racism points to this problem-- because the geographic distribution of races is unequal, different races are affected by different environmental conditions.  In the metaphysical (i.e. before human intervention) sense, this is not racist, just correlative.  The racism part comes in through the human-made.  That is, because we affect our environments, we can create environmental situations that impact other people.  When this environmental change affects people of a certain race disproportionately, this is environmental racism.  There is of course then a question of intent: was the environment changed because the affected parties were of a different (or the same) race, or was this coincidental?  Is it even possible for this to be coincidental?

I have a problem with the environmental movement's premise that because the environment is worth protecting in some respects, it is everyone's duty to measures to protect it.  My problem of course is not necessarily that people shouldn't respect the environment, but that the idea that every environmental nuance is our personal responsibility, regardless of cause, is flawed.  I find a difference between respecting the environment (not using resources lavishly and wastefully, preserving climate, reducing pollution) and putting it before individual needs and wants (using only resourses as absolutely necessary for subsistence, preventing environmental change in any respect, forbidding any human impact).  I support the former, not the latter-- to clarify, I think individuals and entities are obligated to take responsibility for their impact on the environment, and only their own impact.  The implications then for enivronmental racism is this: individuals and entities should minimize their impact on others' environments, should keep their impact to their own corner of the environment.  To the extent that their environment overlaps with others', there needs to be a recognition of the ways race affects geography, and therefore environmental distribution, how these overlaps may be racialized, and thus how to combat this complication.

Xavia Publius

A Victory in Trans* Legitimacy

When you’re not part of a marginalized group then there are certain things that you may take for granted; things that may seem commonplace or trivial, but really aren’t if you have certain kinds of identities that restrict your access to those “simple” things.

One of these things is safe and accurate healthcare. Do you ever have anxiety about a doctor’s appointment because you don’t want to deal with potential discrimination? What if they’re dismissive about a problem that you bring up because they don’t “understand” it? I mean, how do you know they’ve been trained to handle someone with your identity?

This week, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released a statement addressing these fears from the trans* community and pushing for doctors to provide adequate services for individuals with these identities. Part of the reason for this improvement  is a discrimination survey conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force that found “nearly 30% of transgender and gender-nonconforming patients postpone care due to discrimination concerns.” The ACOG is now expecting its doctors the be knowledgeable of the health issues  that trans* individuals face. A Denver ob-gyn  sums up well what type of impact these changes implicate: “[b]y increasing the number of ob-gyns providing care to transgender patients, we can help improve the overall health of the transgender community.”

by Che J. Hatter

The Power of WMST - Reflection by WMST 202 student Faith Benson

I have always been interested in women's studies and issues, so taking the class was a no brainer. And it's true, most people who set foot in the center are people who are already feminists or aware of women's studies. However, taking WMST 202 last year with Prof Loe really changed me so I can't imagine what kind of effect the class can have on someone totally indifferent to the subject. So I asked Prof Loe to refer a student in her class this semester who experienced just that:

I enrolled in Women's Studies this semester largely because it was the only class I could get into during registration. My attitude towards feminism has always been passive at least, if not strongly anti-feminist. I was dreading a semester full of man-hating women telling me to burn my bras, stop listening to Beyonce and (God forbid) chop off all of my hair. I did not want to talk about how men are the evil race or how my actions perpetuate sexism. As a matter of fact, I did not want to address that sexism existed at all.

 

However, as the semester progressed, Women's Studies quickly became my favorite class. I was able to candidly share my thoughts about what it means to be a woman, especially at Colgate, without feeling like I would be labled a man-hating feminist. I began working events at the Women's Studies Center into my weekly schedule, and they were often what I looked forward to the most during the week.

 

One of the major turning points for me during the semester happened around midterms in a different class of mine. The class was having a discussion about the role of a woman in one of the texts we read, and I was very outspoken (as I always am) about the ways in which she was oppressed by the patriarchal society that was present in the storyline. After class, one of my classmates approached me and said, "Wow, Faith, I didn't know that you were such a feminist until now." I had a minor mental breakdown after that - what was happening to me?! Was I really stepping to the bad side and standing with the feminists?

 

After this experience, I was home for Thanksgiving break and spending time with my six best friends from home, all of whom are male. I told them what my classmate said to me and how I was terrified that I was being converted to feminism. I thought that they, of all people, would be able to feel my pain. However, they all seemed extremely confused. They told me that they had all thought of me as not only a feminist, but an OUTSPOKEN one since second grade when I made them read the chapter in our history book about women's suffrage. They then proceeded to recount every incident in our lives that proved me to be a feminist. How could these six men know more about what feminism truly is at the heart than I as a woman did? They made me understand that I had been so blinded by all of the stereotypes surrounding feminism that I couldn't see how I was defining it for myself. Taking a class in Women's Studies made me realize that it isn't feminists who are wrong, but instead their false portrayals; most people would sympathize with the feminist fight if they only knew what it was.

 

I am now proud to say that I can call myself a feminist without feeling at all guilty or ashamed, and I am working on building a Center for Women's Empowerment in South Sudan through my non-profit called The Women's Worth Project. Taking Women's Studies at Colgate has truly changed my life.

by Faith Benson

- posted by Catherine Yeh

12/6 BB Response: Body Talk: Messages Behind Mainstream Dance Moves

Today's brown bag was certainly different than most others, taking place in Ryan 212 instead of the Center.  Instead of a presentation per se, the attendees participated by doing dance moves as instructed by Tehmekah MacPherson '02 to show how we use our bodies to communicate and the gendered aspects of these communications.

As a trans woman, I'm very aware of body epistemology: what do we know about people and how from the way they are bodied and physically oriented?  Tehmekah had everyone demonstrate either a hyper-"masculine" or hyper-"feminine" image to show what physical cues we associate with those genders, with the implication that there are other cues that are less explicitly gendered, and therefore there exists language-- body language-- outside this binary...a transgender body language?

A bit of a stretch? (oh look a pun!) Perhaps.  But that was the explicit goal of this workshop: to create body language (a "body vocabulary") that does not explicitly rely on normative gender assumptions.  Although the message of the final dance was explicitly feminist due to the inclusion of lyrics (adding another epistemic layer), the process of deriving the dance steps was narrative (descriptive, not normative) in nature; we charaded emotions, then stylized them into two-beat motions, then strung them together, refined the transitions, and threw in verbal and musical epistemic layers.  The dance was a translation of experience into art in a gender-neutral way; people across the gender and body spectrums participated and made no explicit reference to gender archetypes physically.

One participant said she found herself adapting the moves to her own experience, trying to make them sexy or more feminine.  I found this an interesting observation.  Is it possible, or even advisable, for dance to be gender-neutral?  The dance itself is, but it's performance depends on the particular bodies performing it, each of which have a different gender positionality.  Thus the same dance had feminine flares in some people, masculine in others; some made it sexier, some funnier, some more technical, some more artistic.  In this way the gendered was melded into the dance on a particular (personal) level, and not imposed upon the subjects by the dance's nature.

Xavia Publius