The first panel I went to, "How Intersectionality Enlarges Feminist Community," was about politics and activism, and grouped under "Feminism and Other Social Change Movements." The pocket program description is:
The panel was E. Cabell Hankinson-Gutman, Ian Hagemann, Betsy Lundsten, Isabel Schechter, and Shveta Thakrar. I chose this panel partly for the topic, and partly for the panelists, since I already knew most of them are good at con panels; it turned out they all are. Ian arrived late and apologized for not really being awake yet. Overall, the panel was quite good: I enjoyed it, and it felt as though it had been the right length. (I've been too, and even moderated, panels where there really wasn't 75 minutes of material, or even the 50-55 most sf cons schedule for.)
Cabell is a graduate student in sociology. She opened by talking about addressing chunks of this in the intro class she TAs (I think it's "Intro to LGBT studies"), which a lot of people sign up for because they think it's an easy way to meet a university requirement. Mostly they seem willing to do the work, and are interested in the material when it's presented. So part of the time the task is simply to point out how varied people's experiences and therefore attitudes and needs are. Not always, obviously, or we wouldn't have to have such panels.
Isabel talked about the ways thinking about these questions has changed how she identifies, and thus affected how she lives: specifically, that over the last few years she has changed from "A Jewish woman who happens to be Hispanic" to "A Latina who is Jewish," and that's a major difference. Also that "Hispanic" is a census category; people she knows identify as Mexican or Ecuadoran or Peruvian or Puerto Rican, not as "Hispanic," and while outsiders may elide those differences, they matter to people who they describe.
She also talked about class, and the ways that mostly white, mostly middle- to upper-class feminism can be irrelevant to a lot of people: that there are few female CEOs seems very distant if you're trying desperately to get a job at all. Carbon trade-and-cap is abstract and distant if your children are sick because they're breathing horribly polluted air, and nobody seems to care because it's politically easier to put those factories and bus depots in poor neighborhoods. Her metaphor was "ten steps behind," that there are problems that some of us have the privilege of not seeing. Not that they aren't real issues, but that they aren't the only ones, and that it's not reasonable to expect everyone to focus on the same things. Environmental justice is about significantly more than preventing climate change, and reproductive justice is a much larger set of issues than the right to a legal abortion. And terminology matters.
I think it was also Isabel who talked about the ways that the recent Wisconsin protests against the governor's union-busting have seemed focused on white and middle-class people. There was some discussion of small farmers, but not of the people who pick crops on other people's land, who really need unions to ensure that they get even their minimal wages, and protect them from supervisors demanding sex as a condition of employment.
(I think part of that is that the progressive side was fighting a defensive action, to keep what was immediately being threatened rather than "and how else can unions help us?" Race was almost certainly a factor, consciously or otherwise: middle-class white people who work in offices and schools are likely to identify more with other middle-class white people who are trying to keep that status. Class was definitely a factor, and I am not remotely qualified to sort out the relative influence of each, in a society where they are so tangled and people try so hard to deny that either exists or matters.)
I remember Shveta talking about her experience asan immigrant the daughter of an immigrant [ETA: corrected based on a comment by Shveta], and as a Hindu, and the reactions non-Indian people have when she wears a bindi: it's not even that they're necessarily negative, it's that they identify and react to her as an outsider, not part of the fuzzy American "us." Conversely, when she doesn't she has to deal with people who think "I don't think of you as brown" is a positive thing to say to her.
Ian discussed some ways to support people in marginalized groups without speaking instead of them, or being seen as speaking for them. (Someone had brought up Tim Wise, a white man who gets speaking fees to talk about doing anti-racist work, in places that won't invite people of color to talk about their experiences and anti-racist activism.) One suggestion was, if the person running the meeting will call on you but not the person from the group, to stand up and say "I think $person has some interesting things to say here, and I'd like to hear from her."
He also talked about his opposition to cross-racial adoption, based on his background as a black man who was adopted into/raised by a white family, in a context where he was literally the only black child on the playground. I don't know what the answers are, but it does seem like a perfect example of where good intentions may not be enough. The motives of the people arranging the adoptions are sometimes questionable at best, but the adoptive parents usually mean well, wanting good things for the children in addition to all the reasons that people want to be parents. I don't remember how that was connected to the panel topic at the time, maybe in terms of who is listened to: actual or would-be adoptive parents have more of a voice than children raised by adoptive families, and there's little interest in hearing from the biological parents in such cases.
(I don't mean to suggest that Betsy didn't say anything, it's just that none of it is coming to mind right now.)
The panel flowed a lot more smoothly than this report, in part because I wasn't taking notes. The only thing I wrote down is an essay title: "The Implicit Racism of the Trans Inclusion Debate." As described, the writer's argument is that when people are arguing over whether trans women should be allowed into events/places that are defined as "women-only," the argument against is largely that there are certain commonalities of experience that come from being raised female, and that those experiences are essential to being a woman. And at least some of those shared experiences are the results not just of gender but of being raised as a girl in a white, probably middle-class American family. So the exclusionary position comes at least close to defining those events as "white women only."
Later in the day, I was on the phone to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cattitude and had to back up and define "intersectionality." It was an odd moment of realizing that despite living together and talking a lot, we aren't having all the same conversations. It makes sense: we spend a chunk of our online time in different places, and a bunch of my conversations about this have been one-on-one with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
adrian_turtle. Adrian suggested, later, that this is partly a matter of knowing the jargon, which makes sense: Cattitude didn't seem to find the idea of looking at places where different kinds of privilege or oppression intersect odd. But sitting in the Wiscon hotel, I'd forgotten that it isn't a term that I can assume people know. Though, again, that it isn't well-known connects to why this work is needed.
One note: if I've said something here you disagree with, say so, but allow for the possibility that I am misremembering the panel, since I'm writing this a week later and from memory.
Although feminism has historically focused on gender, there are a lot of different axes of oppression in the world and the daily lives of most people interact with those oppressions at least as much as gender. A forward-looking, relevant feminism needs to take that into account and work for people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, people of size, and people who speak different languages, to name just a few. What are the challenges and opportunities available if we expand our focus to include other oppressions? How do we do so without losing our soul or asking our allies to lose theirs? How do we do so without engaging in "the Oppression Olympics"?
The panel was E. Cabell Hankinson-Gutman, Ian Hagemann, Betsy Lundsten, Isabel Schechter, and Shveta Thakrar. I chose this panel partly for the topic, and partly for the panelists, since I already knew most of them are good at con panels; it turned out they all are. Ian arrived late and apologized for not really being awake yet. Overall, the panel was quite good: I enjoyed it, and it felt as though it had been the right length. (I've been too, and even moderated, panels where there really wasn't 75 minutes of material, or even the 50-55 most sf cons schedule for.)
Cabell is a graduate student in sociology. She opened by talking about addressing chunks of this in the intro class she TAs (I think it's "Intro to LGBT studies"), which a lot of people sign up for because they think it's an easy way to meet a university requirement. Mostly they seem willing to do the work, and are interested in the material when it's presented. So part of the time the task is simply to point out how varied people's experiences and therefore attitudes and needs are. Not always, obviously, or we wouldn't have to have such panels.
Isabel talked about the ways thinking about these questions has changed how she identifies, and thus affected how she lives: specifically, that over the last few years she has changed from "A Jewish woman who happens to be Hispanic" to "A Latina who is Jewish," and that's a major difference. Also that "Hispanic" is a census category; people she knows identify as Mexican or Ecuadoran or Peruvian or Puerto Rican, not as "Hispanic," and while outsiders may elide those differences, they matter to people who they describe.
She also talked about class, and the ways that mostly white, mostly middle- to upper-class feminism can be irrelevant to a lot of people: that there are few female CEOs seems very distant if you're trying desperately to get a job at all. Carbon trade-and-cap is abstract and distant if your children are sick because they're breathing horribly polluted air, and nobody seems to care because it's politically easier to put those factories and bus depots in poor neighborhoods. Her metaphor was "ten steps behind," that there are problems that some of us have the privilege of not seeing. Not that they aren't real issues, but that they aren't the only ones, and that it's not reasonable to expect everyone to focus on the same things. Environmental justice is about significantly more than preventing climate change, and reproductive justice is a much larger set of issues than the right to a legal abortion. And terminology matters.
I think it was also Isabel who talked about the ways that the recent Wisconsin protests against the governor's union-busting have seemed focused on white and middle-class people. There was some discussion of small farmers, but not of the people who pick crops on other people's land, who really need unions to ensure that they get even their minimal wages, and protect them from supervisors demanding sex as a condition of employment.
(I think part of that is that the progressive side was fighting a defensive action, to keep what was immediately being threatened rather than "and how else can unions help us?" Race was almost certainly a factor, consciously or otherwise: middle-class white people who work in offices and schools are likely to identify more with other middle-class white people who are trying to keep that status. Class was definitely a factor, and I am not remotely qualified to sort out the relative influence of each, in a society where they are so tangled and people try so hard to deny that either exists or matters.)
I remember Shveta talking about her experience as
Ian discussed some ways to support people in marginalized groups without speaking instead of them, or being seen as speaking for them. (Someone had brought up Tim Wise, a white man who gets speaking fees to talk about doing anti-racist work, in places that won't invite people of color to talk about their experiences and anti-racist activism.) One suggestion was, if the person running the meeting will call on you but not the person from the group, to stand up and say "I think $person has some interesting things to say here, and I'd like to hear from her."
He also talked about his opposition to cross-racial adoption, based on his background as a black man who was adopted into/raised by a white family, in a context where he was literally the only black child on the playground. I don't know what the answers are, but it does seem like a perfect example of where good intentions may not be enough. The motives of the people arranging the adoptions are sometimes questionable at best, but the adoptive parents usually mean well, wanting good things for the children in addition to all the reasons that people want to be parents. I don't remember how that was connected to the panel topic at the time, maybe in terms of who is listened to: actual or would-be adoptive parents have more of a voice than children raised by adoptive families, and there's little interest in hearing from the biological parents in such cases.
(I don't mean to suggest that Betsy didn't say anything, it's just that none of it is coming to mind right now.)
The panel flowed a lot more smoothly than this report, in part because I wasn't taking notes. The only thing I wrote down is an essay title: "The Implicit Racism of the Trans Inclusion Debate." As described, the writer's argument is that when people are arguing over whether trans women should be allowed into events/places that are defined as "women-only," the argument against is largely that there are certain commonalities of experience that come from being raised female, and that those experiences are essential to being a woman. And at least some of those shared experiences are the results not just of gender but of being raised as a girl in a white, probably middle-class American family. So the exclusionary position comes at least close to defining those events as "white women only."
Later in the day, I was on the phone to
cattitude and had to back up and define "intersectionality." It was an odd moment of realizing that despite living together and talking a lot, we aren't having all the same conversations. It makes sense: we spend a chunk of our online time in different places, and a bunch of my conversations about this have been one-on-one with adrian_turtle. Adrian suggested, later, that this is partly a matter of knowing the jargon, which makes sense: Cattitude didn't seem to find the idea of looking at places where different kinds of privilege or oppression intersect odd. But sitting in the Wiscon hotel, I'd forgotten that it isn't a term that I can assume people know. Though, again, that it isn't well-known connects to why this work is needed.One note: if I've said something here you disagree with, say so, but allow for the possibility that I am misremembering the panel, since I'm writing this a week later and from memory.
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How old were the panelists? I completely agree with her observation, but I have been hearing it (and occasionally saying it myself) for, literally, more than 40 years. It seems to me that 40+ years should have been long enough to make some progress on this issue, but some of the things I hear/read today are EXACTLY the same things I heard/read back then (though back then they were more often from white working-class and poor women and less often from women of color of any class).
(I'm going to make my comments separate, on separate issues.)
From:
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I think feminists who fall outside of white middle-to-upper class feminism have formed their own groups, but they are not the ones with power (unsurprisingly) nor the ones with much of an audience, so the traditional feminist groups have the majority of the attention. Without actual progress within those groups, there's not really much chance of "drowning out" the overwhelming imbalance, especially since it's representative of a systemic issue within the culture as a whole.
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Similarly, the fact that we still need feminist activism despite centuries of saying some of these things doesn't mean that they aren't valid: it means that there's a lot of resistance to change, both from people who benefit from some of the inequalities and from people of all groups who find change scary, because they have learned how to cope with the situation they're already in.
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In the case of Korean children adopted by white Americans, that's getting to be less and less true. The oldest Korean American adoptees are now in their 50s and 60s, and particularly in the generation my kids belong to (20s and 30s) there is a huge amount of activism. Opinions among the adult adopted people are highly divided and sometimes contentious on the issue of adoption. Agencies have changed a lot of policies and practices because of the input of adult adopted Korean Americans.
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anyhow.
betsy spent a lot of the panel with her food stuck in her mouth, that's what. and is now spending a lot of time pondering exactly that, and is going to not be on the similar panel next year (which she has already gone and suggested because boy do we at wiscon need to have more of that conversation and boy does she need to spend more time listening and less talking), she said, talking about herself in the third person.
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[*] Honestly the more I learn about the history of feminism as practiced by white middle/upper-class women, the more depressing and baffling I find it. Totally not my feminism even before I discovered a racial identity.
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It's really difficult to propose policies on the basis of personal experience. And frankly, anyone adopting out of our foster care system (as opposed to spending thousands of dollars on the perfect baby from [insert trendy country of the moment here]) deserves a medal. Race shouldn't be a factor; it's family structure and personalities which matter most.
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