• the217
• LGBT
• Gender, race, sexuality, nationality and class are all in cahoots

Right now, I am a senior in Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS) at the University of Illinois (Go Tigers!) and am currently enrolled in a senior seminar where all of us undergraduate GWS students get together to talk about what we’ve learned. The goal of the class is to write a 20-25 page paper on a topic of our choosing. It was a class I was kind of excited for at the beginning of the semester: how often do you get the opportunity to sit in a room for three hours a week to discuss issues with like-minded individuals?

Well, I might have had much too lofty ideals for this class, because apparently some people learned their GWS very differently than I did. How did they learn their GWS, Eric? What’s so different about it?

Okay, let’s just take a step back and say that from the get-go (Get-Go Tigers!) I was a little taken aback by the number of white people in the class. Maybe I was naïve. Out of fear of not placing this concern within a historical context, and out of fear of completely pulling a history out of my ass, I will construct an attempt at a brief history of “Women’s Studies.” Contemporary Women’s Studies (not those house-keeping classes offered by the University’s Woman’s college in the early part of this century) is directly indebted to the second-wave feminist movement. The term “second-wave” as a description of the 1970s US feminist movement has been critiqued by many as being problematic for its ignoring of feminism prior to and the fluid proliferation of ideas, but it is useful in designating a period of time in which many women actively engaged in struggles for “women’s liberation.” Important to understanding the legacy of second-wave feminists is the almost universally accepted critique that this feminism was a largely white, hetero, middle class movement. That is not to say that there were not feminists of color or queer feminists producing work around this time period; The Combahee River Collective was a radical black lesbian feminist organization that called attention to the ways in which race, sexuality, gender, and class all intersected as an structure of oppression. They have a fucking killer manifesto that’s like five pages long, if you’re interested just post a comment with your email and I can send it to you. Or just look it up at your local library (Go Tigers!)

But this leads us to intersectionality, a method of critique provided to us by black feminists of this time period. What intersectionality allows us to do is articulate the many ways in which multiple “identities” function in cahoots with one another. So that it becomes impossible to talk about gender without talking about race or class or sexuality (or a lot of things, like able-bodiedness or age that tend to get ignored). At least, we would hope that it would become impossible to do so.

I say all of this to contextualize my complete astonishment when a fellow senior in GWS claimed that she wanted to write her paper without even mentioning how race influenced her subject (Go Tigers?). 30 years later and this discipline apparently still retains its white privilege and desire for completely ignoring this privilege! How!? I am fucking baffled by this because in everyone of my classes, race has either been central to the class itself (Black Women’s Activism; Race, Gender and Music; Transnational Sexualities, etc.) or it has at least played an important role in theorizing how gender functions. Have people skipped all of those readings that deal with race? What baffles me is this common claim that “analyzing race will make this too broad.” Again, I repeat myself: How!? No one’s gender is completely stripped of their race, nationality, sexuality, class, geographic location, etc. To ignore these factors is to ignore the ways in which gender is socially constructed in cahoots with all these things (I must think of “cahoots” as an angry word, because I don’t think I’ve ever used it before and I’ve already used it twice [Cahoots Tigers!]).

Fuck. I don’t know what to think. I’m the undergraduate representative on The Gender and Women’s Studies Advisory Committee, and my project for the year was to get kids from GWS to socialize with kids from ethnic studies and community studies majors on campus, because there is no facilitated discussion between the groups. Apparently that is more necessary than I anticipated (and it will probably be more difficult than I anticipated as well). That unchecked whiteness and privilege can continue to loom over a discipline so steeped in social justice is beyond me.

Well fuck. I hope you all had a better day than I did. I need to go to bed.