Fairfield University celebrated Women the entire month of March for Women’s History Month.  Various student led initiatives brought attention to the issues women and men face on campus and within our community relating to gender and sexuality, as well as class, race, and religion.

Starting with a film screening of Miss Representation sparked discussion about women in the media and the ongoing pressure to achieve unattainable feminine ideals. Especially relevant at Fairfield, women and men feel these pressures which they expressed at a student led forum that was held in response to ongoing hate and intolerance on campus called Students Act Against. At the forum, men and women stood up in front of their peers, mentors, professors, and administrators to raise their voice about the intolerance they face every single day.

Sophomore, Crystal Rodriquez initiated discussion on gender by sharing her story about the disparities she faces as a woman on our campus. In a poem that she wrote for the forum, Crystal addressed sexism starting by warning all women in the audience that we were “about to get very angry”. She read her poem about the pressures of feminine ideals and how she is told from society that, “women are submissive, small, meek, [there] only value is to serve, [and they are] at a constant struggle to please men”.

After her poem, students responded with their own grievances and stories with similar concerns and struggles. Students brought up their fears in speaking out against these standards and for those that do, they feel ostracized. These fears force students to be silenced on campus unable to speak against said issues which further perpetuates stereotypes and intolerance. Male students stood up and expressed the pressures of masculinity and the idea that today; men are either “masculine” or gay. Junior, Josh Robichaud took  on an initiative to address this issue with men for men by starting a mentor group called Man to Man. One student who is now a mentor in the Man to Man program said this,

“I am not allowed to stutter, not allowed to be emotional because I’m a man. It is difficult for me to get up here and be emotional. If I was a woman you would empathize. Thank you Dan (a student who spoke before him) for standing up and saying you were crying because I was crying too…We as a culture have not stop seeing one another as men and woman, girls and boys, guys and gals. We have to see each other as people.”

The Act Against student led forum allowed students to express their grievances, stories and share strategies for change inspiring a student movement that hopes to continue to allow students a place to express grievances and make a difference. Student leaders contributed in writing a petition to Act Against Hate which has been circulating on campus since the event, allowing conversations about intolerance to continue and no longer allowing students stories to be silenced.

Later in the month, senior, Erin Eife shared her passion in raising awareness of the disparities within the criminal justice system in the United States by bringing Piper Kerman author of, Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, to discuss gender in prison. Some of Kerman’s main points included the cycles within the criminal justice program, and power dynamics within prison. She brings attention to the false depiction of female prisoners in the media and how they are very much sexualized.

Many women who enter the criminal justice system are from low socioeconomic status and have been incarcerated for non-violent crimes. Given 10-15 years in prison with little contact to their children, according to Piper, their children are then forced into foster care as the children’s fathers are not active or around to support them while their mother is in prison. Obvious cycles are continued as children within the foster care system and living in low socioeconomic communities are more at risk of being involved in crime or gangs therefore will also most likely enter the criminal justice system. Power dynamics are also at play within prison between female prisoners and between female prisoners and the male guards. Female prisoners literally have no power or control over many of their situations between male guards. In her book, Piper Kerman talks more about this and the way gender functions within prisons in the United States.

Concluding the month with V-Day events, Take Back the Night and a Women’s Day Celebration, along with Fairfield’s own Gender Bender Ball, the Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Commons worked with Alliance, Diversity Office, Dean of Students and others to celebrate the women in our lives and community. This year Women’s Day took on the theme of EMPOWERMENT, raising awareness of the various issues we face and the things both men and women are doing to empower others. One way we did this was by spreading the words of “She Loves You” to remind others that the women in our lives such as are moms, sisters, and friends, love us, and that they and other women should be treated with respect and equity. Bringing together more student groups than ever, GSSC had student clubs, initiatives, and programs come to Women’s Day to present their passion in conjunction with the theme of empowerment. By bringing in a diverse group of students we felt we could attract a larger population of students to the event, as well as come up with new ideas that enabled students to interact with these different clubs and initiatives.

This year, we were especially interested in involving more men in the planning process as well as attracting them to the event itself.  With the leadership of Josh Robichaud from Man to Man, we asked men to post comments about women in their lives who inspire them, as well as “pledge their penis” in a interactive way promising to take initiative of their own sexual health as well as their partners. Performances were organized by Jasmine Fernandez which featured stories of inspirational women throughout history such as Betty Friedan, and Abigail Adams, to Eve Ensler, as well as personal pieces written by students.

The event was held in the campus center with an assortment of tables, with information on women’s and sexual health, Spanish Saints, women’s ordination, veiling within the Muslim community, body image, Rape Aggression Defense Training and student artwork that contributed to the theme. Going into the night with the Gender Bender Ball, students were asked to “bend their gender” by dressing up as the opposite gender. This celebration of gender and self-empowerment was a great way to learn about oneself and others through the lenses of gender, sex, and sexuality.

Thanks to everyone who voted for the Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Commons for the White House Champions Campus Challenge for Change! GSSC did not make it into the top 5 but we still had the opportunity to attend the top 5 panel discussion at the White House to meet the other top 15 Champions.

Shout out to all the amazing leaders we met and congrats to the top 5 projects ranging from sustainability gardens, micro-finance initiatives, and programs to end hunger. GSSC loved all of the projects and two of our favorites are Kirsten Foster’s EMPOWER  project that addresses health disparities of women affected by domestic violence, and Grace Phillip’s Local Loans  Project that manages domestic micro-finance no-interest loans, for low-income families in her community to help break the cycles of poverty and dept.

Read more about the top 5 here or watch the panel discussion.

Fairfield University’s Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Commons (GSSC) is the only LGBTQ advocacy group in the Top 15 finalists of the White House & MTVU Campus Champions of Change Challenge. It is currently up to a public vote to decide the Top 5. Top 5 winners will be invited to an event at the White House and featured by mtvU and MTV Act. GSSC is a small grassroots student initiative working within a private Jesuit university in need of student and institutional support to continue their mission of supporting the LGBTQ community and combating issues relating to gender and women.

Please help GSSC reach more people by voting for The Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Commons!  Vote Here (you receive up to 3 votes and the deadline to vote is March 3).

It’s important that the voices that advocate for the LGBTQ community and women are heard.

At Fairfield University in CT, student leaders Alicia Bissonnette, Alex Cody, Marissa Tota, Rachel Lang, Jesus Nunez, and Astrid Quinones, have been working with faculty and staff to establish a more inclusive environment for all students. They created the Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Commons.

While Fairfield University has a proud history of social justice through the tradition of Jesuit Catholic Social Teaching, Fairfield’s campus has lacked an open atmosphere towards tolerance of various genders and sexualities. In 2010, Princeton Review listed Fairfield University at #19 on the list of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender unfriendly campuses.  Student leaders felt that it was not always hate that fueled the acts of intolerance, but ignorance.  Therefore, they set out to create a safe space to converse about not only LGBTQ issues, but any issues pertaining to gender, sex, or sexuality.  As student activists, they found it necessary to claim a space to create and foster an all-inclusive community for students of various genders, sexes, and sexualities, and thus established the Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Commons (GSSC). As a group, leaders recognized the need to establish a campus wide continuous dialogue that went beyond a single event or club’s network. They realized that creating a physical space could enable various other student groups to meet, engage, and network as a campus wide social justice entity.

GSSC, collaborating with various other student clubs and networks, has put on a number of events addressing sexual assault on campus, LGBTQ rights, and gender. Currently they are working on a film series to raise awareness of body image and gender in the media. March 5 they will show Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s film, Miss Representation, in the student center followed by a student led discussion.  Taking part in the international movement V Day, GSSC will be hosting both Take Back the Night and Women’s Day at the end of March.  Women’s Day, with the theme of empowerment, will culminate with a Gender Bender Ball hosted by the Alliance club.  GSSC has also begun working with the Diversity Office to establish a student-run and facilitated Safe Space LGBTQ Ally student awareness program. This year, the first year, GSSC has made great strides in impacting Fairfield community to encourage tolerance and acceptance of all genders, sexes, and sexualities.

The Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Commons is a unique project at a Catholic institution. They are focused on making Fairfield University a more diverse and accepting university. Through their efforts, GSSC has created an inclusive and welcoming space that is a home for those who feel they do not have a voice or place at a Catholic and Jesuit University.

With your support the Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Commons can make it to the Top 5 in the White House & MTVU Campus Champions for Change Challenge, helping GSSC to continue working towards their mission.

Please spread the word and vote for the only LGBTQ advocacy project to make it to the Top 15 finalists!

Thanks you for your support.

Welcome back to The Academic Feminist, the series that bridges the blogging/academic divide by linking discussions in feminist academia to those taking place online. Today’s interviewee is Mimi Arbeit, a doctoral student in Child Development at Tufts University. You can learn more about Arbeit’s work on her blog.  All comments and suggestions for The Academic Feminist can sent to the editor here or on Twitter @gwendolynb.

Can you talk a little about your main research interests, and what led you to choose this area? 

I study adolescent sexuality using a positive approach, which means I believe sex and sexuality are important, meaningful, and potentially positive elements of adolescent development. I’m interested in how school-based and out-of-school-time programs can help adolescents develop a sense of embodiment and sexual agency, and cultivate the social, emotional, and cognitive skills they need to make healthy decisions and engage in fulfilling relationships.

My whole life has led me to choose this area of research! In high school, I taught workshops to eighth grade students about gender stereotypes, sexual harassment, and gender violence. My classroom experience helped me frame my analysis of my own problems, and the problems I saw in the world, through a lens of gender.  In college, I provided education and counseling to students seeking HIV tests. I’ll never forget when they told us at our training, “We are pro-sex and pro-gay.” The idea was that it’s good for people to have sex, and it’s good for them to choose with whom to do so.  It seems obvious, right? But at the time, I was just starting to learn the meaning of sex positivity. Then, as a counselor, I heard people’s stories. I am so grateful to all of them for showing me that window into their lived experiences. What I heard from them solidified my desire to do prevention work, to focus on education, and to get it started at as early an age as possible.

These experiences shaped my current work, which is about promoting positive possibilities for adolescent sexuality development. I’m thinking about what positive sexuality development in adolescence could look like—what are the key elements? What people, institutions, and experiences could or should be involved? How can we, as a society, prioritize healthy sexuality, and what steps can we take to make positive change?

You are now working towards a degree in Applied Child Development.  What was behind your decision to work on sex education from that perspective?

I didn’t always expect to go the academic route. After college, all I wanted to do was teach. I taught health and sexuality education at a middle school in a city near Boston. I loved lesson planning, and I adored my students. I wanted more time to hone my sex ed lessons and weave them into a great curriculum. But the debate around abstinence-only versus comprehensive sex education has all but stifled more nuanced conversation about differing visions for “comprehensive” sex ed. I want to do cutting-edge work, and I felt the need to spend time developing my own knowledge and skills about adolescent development and adolescents’ lives in all their wondrous complexity.

Studying in an applied department was really important to me. To me, sex and sexuality are lusciously personal aspects of our lives that reveal how utterly politicized our world is. Human sexuality is strongly shaped by socialization, prescribed by patriarchy and fought for through generations of resistance. History matters. Politics matter. How we treat youth matters. Applied Child Development takes all of that into account.

I think that sexuality education and youth development can do a lot for each other. Youth development is about nourishing the strengths of diverse youth, connecting youth and adults, building life skills, and providing opportunities for leadership and civic engagement. Sex ed should be all of those things, too. I would love to see more sex ed programs built through a youth development approach. Furthermore, I think the youth development approach can be invigorated by an infusion of feminist and sex-positive values. Some of that is happening already, some of that is on its way, and some of that we need to be working on for a long time coming. I named my blog “Sex Ed Transforms” in order to play on that duality. I write about how we can transform sex ed; I also write about how sex ed can transform how we live our lives and how we run the world.

As you know, Jessica Valenti recently published The Purity Myth, a book which exposed some pretty disturbing trends in sex education (or lack thereof!) nationwide.  She also talks about the lack of a comprehensive sex education standard, something that I know that you’re working on.  Can you describe your vision for such a program?

The way I think about it now, I see three essential elements to a comprehensive, medically-accurate, age-appropriate sex education program: safe space, critical analysis, and positive possibilities.

Safe space: How youth feel when they learn about sex will impact how they feel about sex. Building a safe space involves both the behavior of the teacher and the behavior of the students. It means that all questions are important, all individuals are taken seriously and respected, and everyone is held accountable. Boundaries should be clear and reinforced; students and teachers should practice giving and getting consent during classroom activities. The skills involved in building these safe spaces together are essential lessons to be learned from sex education.

Critical analysis: Great sex education encourages students to think critically about the world around them. Students need words and strategies with which to identify messages and practices that constrain them. They need to have words for sexism, homophobia, and racism. They need to talk about media images that conflate sexuality with violence, that sexualize women and girls, and that cast men as sexual predators. They need to discuss with each other the messages they get from family, friends, religion, and other institutions, and then they need to share their methods of resistance. They need to learn to question, and from there they need to learn to communicate, to cooperate and to create.

Promoting positive possibilities: With a safe space and a critical approach, sex ed can help youth strive for positive experiences of embodiment, relationship, and citizenship. They can identify good and beauty in themselves and in others that defies narrow, unrealistic standards. They can build the skills they need to engage in authentic relationships—practicing assertive communication, identifying their emotions, and sharing with each other. They can actually talk about pleasure and the capacity for pleasure in one’s body, mind, and relationships. They can explore different kinds of desire, including desire for friendship, desire for love, and desire for sex. And, through pursuing their own desires, they can change the world. Empowerment means having agency in one’s personal life and fighting for what matters: imagining a sex-positive, sexually healthy world, and finding ways to work towards that world for oneself and for others.

That said, each sex ed program needs to be carefully and creatively attuned to the needs and interests of the community and the particular group of youth involved. I have learned through my own experiences working with youth of different backgrounds that there is no single curriculum or program that will work for all youth or in all schools. We must use an intersectional lens to appreciate how race, class, nationality, gender, and other aspects of young people’s lives and their positions in relation to power and privilege impact their experience of sexuality. It’s important to get to know young people: to work with them, listen to them, and respect their input and their leadership. We must also strengthen and perhaps transform our social institutions that serve youth: justice in our public education system and in our health care system is essential for the achievement of health equity, especially for promoting adolescent sexual health.

4. Where can people – young people as well as those who interact with younger folks – go to get reliable information on sex education now (before your work is published)?

Here are three great Sex Ed websites for teens:

• Sex, Etc
• Scarleteen
• Go Ask Alice!

Also, Planned Parenthood has resources for teens, parents, and educators. Although national and state laws have a huge impact on rules and resources available for sex education, most of the decisions are made at the local level. Call your school principal or your district superintendent to find out what kind of sex education, if any, is available to students in your neighborhood. Ask a lot of questions about when sex ed is taught, where, to whom, by whom, for how long, and how often. Ask to see a copy of the textbook or other materials used. Ask about the core messages or the objectives of the lessons. And if you’re not fully satisfied with what you find, take action. For more resources, check out:

• Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS)
• Advocates for Youth
• Guttmacher Institute

Extra Credit

Below is a list of resources taken from the above conversation, where those interested in some of the topics discussed here can go to find out more. Add relevant resources in comments.

• Diamond, L. M. & Savin-Williams, R. C. (2009). Adolescent sexuality. In R. M. Lerner & L. Steinberg (Eds.), Handbook of Adolescent Psychology (3rd ed.) (pp. 479-523). New York: John Wiley and Sons.
• Fine, F. & McClelland, S. (2006). Sexuality education and desire: Still missing after all these years. Harvard Educational Review, 76(3), 297-338.
• Tolman, D. L. & McClelland, S. (2011). Normative sexuality development in adolescence: A decade in review. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 21(1), 242-255.
• Get Real: Comprehensive Sex Education that Works (PPLM curriculum)
• Our Whole Lives (UUA, UCC curriculum)

Welcome back to The Academic Feminist, a series that aims to bridge the blogging/academic divide by linking discussions in feminist academia to those taking place online. Today’s interviewee is Imani Perry, Professor at the Center for African American Studies at Princeton. You can learn more about Perry’s work on her website . All comments on the series and suggestions for future interviewees can be sent here. And thank you to all the Feministing readers who have offered suggestions and positive feedback on the series so far!

*Editor’s note: Due to concerns raised that there might be confusion with Barnard Center for Research on Women’s awesome The Scholar and Feminist Conference and S&F Journal, we have renamed The Scholarly Feminist to The Academic Feminist.

1) Your work lies at the intersection of law, history, culture, and literature.  You wrote a 2007 law journal article that combines these elements to argue that third wave feminists understand sexual harassment in different ways than their predecessors. Can you describe the main points of this article and how your views may have shifted (or not)?

In that piece I wanted to consider how the concept of sexual harassment can at times work to punish rituals of courting, and not simply harassment. I wanted to fine tune an understanding of what harassment is, because we sometimes talk about it in ways that cast the net too wide. So I tried to develop a basis for distinguishing between harassment and an acceptable expression of romantic interest. Then I tried to offer an way of thinking about how people ought to respond to indicate they aren’t interested, at which point we need to see how interested party replies to the rejection: do they persist, or do they accept that response and move on? I think this is important to consider in what we deem harassment. In particular, I was thinking about the way that “hollering” commonplace African American practices of approach in public spaces, is frequently universally called “harassment” when there are significant variations in how it is performed.

Additionally, part of what I wanted to do with that piece was to revive the second wave feminist language of “talking back” or “taking back the night” or “speaking out” in ways that are useful for today. Unfortunately, in legal terms, the way feminist causes are sometimes recognized depends upon an idea of victimization that can discourage or implicitly punish assertiveness.

This is related to my interest in the gender dynamics that don’t fit into clear legal categories. For example, I think there is an under-discussed area of sexual trauma and woundedness that comes from women “going along” with sexual encounters. This is significantly different from rape and sexual assault, but still necessary to address. I’m thinking of instances in which they haven’t said no, and may have even explicitly said yes, but really don’t want to. I recall a conversation with two friends, many years ago, explaining how they’d both said yes a number of times because they were afraid that if they didn’t that they might be raped. That is technically consensual, but emotionally tragic. I find this heartbreaking, and the fact that we have a culture that socializes women into this kind of acceptance, infuriating. So I believe that it is good idea to encourage young women and men to feel empowered to say, “No, I’m not interested in you.” Or “No I don’t want this.” We want to create a feminist culture in which speaking out and claiming power is valued, and a society in which talking back and being assertive is safe.

A point also about my thoughts about the “waves” of feminism: I came of age during the third wave of feminism, and I think there were some important interventions: we were talking about feminisms in plural, about multiple women’s experiences, about how gender coexisted with race and class and sexuality, identities and experiences. However, somewhere along the way, certain branches of third (and fourth) wave feminism got caught up in the neoliberal fixation on personal choice and the individual experience, embracing sexiness without challenging the larger power relations that socialize the very ideas about what sexy is. We need to keep what is good about third and fourth wave interventions, but also keep alive the second wave focus on broader liberation and justice, alongside the truths from non-mainstream feminist and queer thought and activism.

2) More recently, your review of Ralph Richard Banks’ book, Is Marriage for White People? gained a lot of attention in the mainstream press, especially from feminists of color.  What are some of the impacts of this article, and the book itself?

Honestly, I’m somewhat ambivalent about the attention to both the book and the subject of rates of marriage in the African American community. Philosophically, I think that we ought to pursue healthy networks of support, and value multiple family configurations. I believe that heterosexual marriage should be de-centered as the normative ideal for family structure, and that we ought to explicitly embrace extended families, fictive kinship relations, single parent households, same-sex couples, intergeneration child rearing, and really any and all types of families that are healthy and happy. For example, in my book I talk about how, historically, extended family and multiple nuclear family collective living have been incredibly important for people of color as ways of sharing responsibilities for childcare and pooling resources. The devaluation of these family structures has had deleterious effects, particularly for poor and working class people. In my ideal world, marriage would be something conducted by churches, but the state would only recognize civil unions. Moreover, I would advocate that civil unions be nothing more than two adults sharing domestic and economic ties, but would not require an assumption of a romantic partnership.

However, and this is a big caveat, the social reality that is revealed by low rates of marriage among African Americans is an important one that MUST be addressed. Mass incarceration, high unemployment, and poor educational outcomes for Black males, have led to the growing class divide in which middle class African Americans are disproportionately female, and the poor are disproportionately male, which, in turn, is indicative of a particular kind of gender and race-based marginalization experienced by Black males in this society. I am frankly frustrated by feminists who don’t recognize that what happens to Black men in this country is a gender issue. Around the world we understand that the relatively lower access to education, increased encounters with physical violence, and exclusion from job markets, are all features of gender oppression. This is true of both Black men and  women in this country, although with different valences and patterns. And the outcomes are worse for Black men and boys.

3) You recently featured a post on your blog titled “The revolution WILL be tweeted”  and I think that your points on the subject will resonate with a lot of Feministing readers. How do you think that social media works to both strengthen activism and popularize academic ideas? And who are some of your favorite revolutionary tweeters?

I think social media has enormous potential to network activists and also to provide knowledge of social movement and issues that otherwise are generally inaccessible. It is a wonderful tool and pathway, and I think some of those who don’t “get it,” are thinking that people think tweeting is the activism itself. That is like saying the mimeograph machine or the leaflet was the activism in the 60s. No, they, like twitter, were tools for dissemination and communication for people committed to changing the world. The reason I got hooked on twitter is largely because I generally don’t watch corporate news programming. It rarely satisfies my interest for substantive content, nor is it consistent with my left politics. I find the articles and commentary of people I follow on twitter to be far more satisfying intellectually and politically.

I don’t want to list favorite tweeters, simply because there are so many. I think the best approach is to begin by following people and organizations you respect and then allow your list to grow organically by following who they retweet or follow. I also appreciate that I can share ideas that are in my books and articles with a wider audience, including people that might not otherwise pick up anything I write.

4) Who are some of the feminist thinkers who have most influenced you? And do you have a few reading suggestions for Feministing readers who might be interested in following up on the topics discussed here?

In college, I began to think about what it would mean to live the life of a feminist intellectual. The summer after my sophomore year I worked at South End Press and got to know bell hooks, who was a South End Press author. That summer I fell in love with Yearning that summer, which is still one my favorites of hers.  Then, in my senior year of college, I took a class called Sociology of Culture taught by Joshua Gamson (who many years later would become the author of the biography of queer icon Sylvester.) In that class we read Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins . Collins’ work moved me not only because it spoke to my experience specifically as an African American woman, but because that experience was an entry point for her complex analysis of inequality and also struggle with far reaching implications. I remember going home for spring break, setting the book on the kitchen table and telling my mother “This is what I want to do with my life.” Her response was, “Oh, I know Pat from back in the day.” It turned out that Patricia Hill Collins and my mother had been involved in community school work together in the late 60s, which wasn’t surprising because I grew up amidst activists and feminists of various stripes.

Growing up amidst this type of activism, the archive of feminist writing, from various places and time periods, that has influenced me is huge. Recently, I have spent a lot of time re-reading Angela Davis’s essay from 40 years ago, “Women and Capitalism.” While it is a challenging read, it has some really important ideas that I think are still relevant. I’m also reading The Feminist Press’s series of books, “Women Writing Africa“, and re-reading Robyn Weigman’s American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender . Over the years, however, I have been influenced by so many feminist thinkers: Mary Helen Washington, Hortense Spillers, Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua, Donna Haraway, Carolyn Heilbrun, Alice Walker, Gabriela Mistral, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nawal El Sadaawi, Jamaica Kincaid, Rosario Ferre, Julia de Burgos, Bonnie Thornton Dill, the list goes on. So, while I try to find my own footing in the politics and ideas of today, the way I think about gender and justice draws from a remarkable tradition.

Extra Credit!

Adding to the links above, below is a list of resources where those interested in some of the topics discussed here can go to find out more. Add relevant resources in comments.

• Imani Perry (2011) More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States. New York: NYU Press
• Imani Perry (2007) “Let Me Holler at You: African American Culture, Postmodern Feminism, and Revisiting the Law of Sexual Harassment,” Georgetown Journal of Gender and Law
• Patricia Hill Collins (2000) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge.
• Stanlie M. James, Frances Smith Foster, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, eds. (2009) Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women’s Studies. New York: The Feminist Press.
• Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds. (1983) This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press.

I read Natalia’s own story about student debt and it got me mad. It reminded me of my own story and I thought I could share to show why good sexual assault policies matter. How rape changes lives. Why schools need to act responsibly and be held accountable for their reaction to rape survivors. The impact can go way beyond academics.

Setting the stage.

I was fortunate enough to be able to go to prep school for grades 8 through 12. My family did not pay full tuition; I was one of those A Better Chance alums who got a good education thanks to a good dose of financial aid. I struggled during those years (what adolescent doesn’t?!) I worked hard and got into 8 of the 9 schools to which I applied.

I remember when I got my acceptance letter – and scholarship offer – from Tufts University. It was spring break of senior year and I excitedly ran around the house alone with the letter in hand. Unfortunately, even with the financial aid + scholarship we had to take out some loans. This is where we made some decisions that would bite us in the ass years later:

• we used Tufts’ preferred lender (which didn’t mean much for us);
• the preferred lender was a bank, which means all the rules I read (and improvements that Obama has implemented) about federal student loans do not apply to me;
• we took out a PLUS loan – so it was really my dad’s loan, meaning his credit takes a hit, which hurts not only me, but my family – my mom, my sister, myself.

Now I went to a high school that was more than $20,000/year per girl (yes it was an all girls’ school). Our college counselors helped us get into college. Not so much pay for college. As being a first generation American, we did not have many resources to know how to make it all work. At our prep school you just went to expensive schools. Because it was the thing you did. Because it was worth it.

Rape and abuse on a college campus.

I got involved with an individual who was great at psychological torture and not knowing the meaning of consent. My stellar academic record that helped me get into great schools was dashed. For years I struggled not knowing why I couldn’t JUST CONCENTRATE or just NOT BE SCARED to walk around campus.

I finally figured out that, hey, abuse and rape aren’t cool. And they obviously are illegal and must be against school rules. Let me report to the school what happened.

That didn’t go over with them so well. They refused to hear my judicial complaint or offer academic help or any type of concrete support.

Then they expelled me.

The apathy of an academic institution.

So it took a lot to even summon the courage to tell the story of what I’ve gone through. To not only to get my rape and emotional and physical abuse ignored (I was apparently deemed “crazy” by the Student Affairs office), but to also lose the last thing that mattered to me. It was hard. And lucky me – the recession started really hitting.

I knew what happened to me was wrong, but that didn’t change the school’s mind. It didn’t make the Department of Education work any more quickly to respond to my Title IX complaint. It didn’t make the people who gave me my loans any more lenient.

The aftermath.

Taking into account for interest, I have about $100,000 in student debt from my time at a school that told me my rape didn’t matter. That it wasn’t true and my body wasn’t worth it. I basically am a college dropout with no degree, tons of debt, black, female, and no job.

The lovely bank ONLY gives a 6 month forbearance (even if you’re having financial difficulty! They dont care! Poor? Unemployed? Raped? You’re just shit out of luck!) and they defaulted my loan December 23, 2010. Merry-fucking-Christmas. Mind you, I had spoken to many representatives of the lovely bank. I told them I was going back to school Jan 2011. They said that would be okay and they would be able to hold off on the default. Apparently not.

The point of this? I want to share that rape has very real consequences. This is beyond PTSD – beyond depression – beyond getting triggered if a male raises his voice at me. This is a very real scenario that could hurt my chances of getting my own place to live (if I ever get a job, harr harr) and maybe even threaten the home I share with my parents.

Reminders of rape subsequent survivor guilt.

I get multiple calls a day from the bank. These are like multiple phone calls that remind me (hey! you! You got raped and couldn’t handle it like a wuss and now you’re paying for it! Literally!) I tell them I’ve been a full-time student all year, but the loan is in collections and we can “set up payments” except I am so fucking poor that I get full financial aid at a $100/credit community college (read: $2,500/semester). I can’t afford it.

Like the isolation isn’t enough of a reminder of being raped. Like the unemployment isn’t enough of a remind that I was raped. The lack of a college degree and watching people I went to school with get their second and third degrees while I am taking intro classes at a two-year school to maybe one day get a bachelors is reminder enough.

Honestly, I shouldn’t fucking feel guilty for being traumatized not being able to know what to do. But I do. This is what happens with schools are allowed to pick and choose which acts of violence are worth addressing. This is what happens when we live in a rape culture that allowed administrators to sweep rape up under the rug instead of support survivors and hold rapists accountable.

I cry a lot because I feel like I fucked up by being raped. It is terrifying to think I will forever (or for a very fucking long time) be weighed down by this huge debt and I might take my family down with me.

Welcome to the first edition of The Scholarly Feminist, a bi-weekly series featuring interviews with feminist academics.  The aim of the series is to bridge the blogging/academic divide by linking discussions in academia to those taking place online. Today’s interviewee is Kate Eichhorn, Assistant Professor of Culture and Media Studies at  The New School for Liberal Arts.  You can learn more about Eichhorn’s work on her website . You can email any comments or suggestions for future Scholarly Feminist interviewees here. Enjoy!

1) You are currently doing work on feminist archives, tell us about that, and how you became interested in the subject.

My current research reflects an ongoing interest in questions of temporality and history, but my forthcoming book is also a deeply political and personal project. It started with an attempt to off load my own archive of queer feminist materials. First by chance and then somewhat more intentionally, I found myself accumulating a rather substantial collection. It included hundreds of zines collected in the early 1990s, but also six boxes of lesbian small press publications—a “donation” from a former professor. I’m not sure when, but at some point, I realized I was creating an archive of queer feminist print culture and started to look for a public home for my haphazard archive. That’s when I discovered that my archival impulse was not necessarily unique.

By 2006, there were already several substantial collections of girl zines that had been donated to university libraries, including the collections housed at Duke University and Barnard College . I decided to visit these collections. It was quite amazing to me that a zine produced by fifteen-year-old queer girl in 1994 in a print run of 30 or so copies could find its way, only a decade later, to a rare book library half way across the continent. There’s no history of such girls’ voices being remembered or valued, so how were their zines suddenly showing up in rare book libraries and archives? That’s where this project begins—I was interested in exploring why women of my generation, women who grew up during the second wave feminist movement—had not only carefully collected the documentary traces of their activism and cultural production but were, only a decade later, donating their collections to established archives.

So you might read my forthcoming book as a study on feminist archives, but it is also a response to those very tired debates about intergenerational tensions in the feminist movement. While most of us have moved on, these debates are still circulating. Only last year, Susan Faludi’s article published in Harper’s Magazine claimed that “feminism’s heritage is repeatedly hurled onto the scrap heap.” My book argues that this is not the case at all. Women of my generation have always been deeply committed to imagining what might be gained by returning, if only provisionally, to the partially completed social transformations of the 1970s and 1980s, and feminism’s “scrap heap” is one site among many where this work is being carried out. That’s what attracts me to the archival question—it’s partially about history but more crucially, the archive is a place where we can examine contemporary feminist activism in relation to an entire history of feminist thought and action.

2) You have a piece in that forthcoming book, Sometimes You Have to Make Your Own History: Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism , about the Riot Grrrl collection at NYU. The piece is titled “Redefining a Movement” – in what sense was the Riot Grrrl movement redefined through the archival process?

When I was first writing about riot grrrl in 1994 or 1995, I was theorizing the movement, like others at the time, as a type of all-girl subculture. In some respects, this categorization was correct, but it also missed the point. Riot grrrl was also a movement informed by the various theoretical discourses circulating in the academy and by earlier generations of avant-garde women writers and performers. In contrast to some of the existing collections of riot grrrl materials, which primarily contain zines, NYU’s Riot Grrrl Collection brings together the personal papers of several women who were integral to riot grrrl’s development in the early 1990s. This other story of riot grrrl—the story that focuses on riot grrrl’s status as a movement that was as much about ideas and art as it was about youthful rebellion—is very visible in the Riot Grrrl Collection at NYU’s Fales Library. This is partly due to who Lisa Darms, the collection’s archivist, invited to donate materials but it is also about proximity. Fales has a really amazing collection of materials related to New York’s downtown art and music scenes in the 1970s and 1980s and other collections focused on the history of avant-garde art movements, so locating the Riot Grrrl Collection in this context makes a very strong statement about riot grrrl’s intellectual and aesthetic lineage, which hasn’t yet been acknowledged. This is just one example of how riot grrrl is being redefined through the archival process.

3) (How) are current online feminist movements being archived? Do you see any evidence of the pull of the archives in current movements, such as the SlutWalk or in feminist participation in Occupy Wall Street? How might the shift to online activism change the way that future generations of feminists think about the archives?

Today, it seems like everything is being archived, but whether or not all those pictures and tweets and updates are still circulating in another 20 or 80 years is a question we can’t yet answer. We have an excess of technologies available to document and archive movements of all kinds, but I worry that we may be spending more time documenting movements than participating in them. When I went down to Occupy Wall Street, I was overwhelmed by the number of people participating but only through the lens of a camera. But this doesn’t mean that the OWS is doing a particularly good job occupying virtual space—at least not the virtual networks that support the capitalist system they seek to critique, and at this point, occupying networks is more essential than occupying space. I also think we need to bear in mind that there is nothing inherently political about documenting and archiving movements.

To illustrate this point, it is useful to look back at feminist journals and magazines from the late 1960s to early 1970s. You’ll notice that there are very few photographs. I always thought this was due to the cost of reproducing images. While this may have been a factor, it was not the sole factor. Only last year, my colleague Ann Snitow, one of the founding members of the New York Radical Feminists , gave me a copy of Notes from the Second Year—yes, the issue where the “Bitch Manifesto” originally appeared. It was Ann who pointed out to me that one of the reasons there were so few photographs in the publication is that in the late 1960s to early 1970s, women were actively avoiding such documentary practices. At the time, the lens was still so closely linked to historical forms of objectification of women that rejecting photographic documentation seemed more important than leaving an extensive visual archive of the movement. Of course, the absence of a substantial photographic or video archive doesn’t necessarily mean that a movement will be less likely to appear in the historical record—it does mean that its presence there will take a different form.

So how we choose to document or not document a movement is something we need to pay attention to. If we are now documenting and archiving our every move, or so it seems, what does this say about our relationship to history at this particular moment? At the same time, we need to remind ourselves that the absence of documentation—the absence of an archive—may also be a way to make a powerful political statement.

4)  Do you have a few reading suggestions for Feministing readers who might be interested in the topics discussed here?

On the topic of feminist and queer feminist archives, there are some books that I am always coming back to, like Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings and Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds. I have also been really influenced by the work of my colleagues who are writing from the perspective of working librarians and archivists, including Jenna Freedman, Emily Drabinski, and Alana Kumbier. There are also some online exciting archival projects currently under development—in particular, watch out for Bobby Noble and Lisa Sloniowski’s Feminist Porn Archive.

If you are interested in exploring feminist archives and history, I also recommend an entire body of theorizing on queer temporalities—the work of people like José Muñoz and Judith Halberstam is important to this dialogue. In terms of thinking through questions of temporality, history, affects and activism, I’m also always coming back to Lauren Berlant’s theorizing.

Finally, since I’m a huge supporter of feminist small presses, I’ll use this opportunity to send everyone to Belladonna Books —a New York based avant-garde feminist press, which started modestly as a reading/chapbook series at Bluestockings Bookstore over a decade ago but keeps evolving and growing. From their relatively d.i.y. beginnings, they’ve managed to publish works by over 150 contemporary innovative women writers. The history of Belladonna Books reminds us that building a collective project under the name of feminism, like Feministing, is always difficult but also generative work.

Extra Credit!

Adding to the links above, below is a list of resources taken from the above conversation, where those interested in some of the topics discussed here can go to find out more.  You can add relevant resources in comments or send suggestions to scholarlyfeminist@gmail.com

• Activism and Archives: The Contemporary Turn (podcast and video of panel at the Scholar & Feminist Conference, Barnard College, September 2011)
• Documents from the Women’s Liberation Movement: An On-line Archival Collection
• Feminist Memory
• Lesbian Herstory Archives (the archives house a full collection of Lesbian Ladder, referenced above)
• NYC Feminist Zinefest
• QZAP: The Queer Zine Archive Project
• Redstockings Archive for Action
• Lauren Berlant Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011
• Ann Cvetkovich An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Duke University Press, 2003
• Kate Eichhorn, “D.I.Y. Collectors, Archiving Scholars and Activist Librarians,” Women’s Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal, 39 (2010), 622-646.
• Elizabeth Freeman Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Perverse Modernities). Duke University Press, 2010

We’re thrilled to announce a very new exciting series starting today on feminism and the academy, The Scholarly Feminist!

As some of y’all may know, there are some amazing feminist academics out there making some serious headway in issues around feminist thought, so our dear Feministing friend and new contributor Gwendolyn Beetham is going to bring them out of their classes and into the blogosphere. A freelance researcher and writer for local and international organizations dedicated to gender justice, Gwendolyn blogs for the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics (where she received her PhD) and is involved in various queer, feminist, and food justice projects. And we’re pumped to have her aboard.

The Scholarly Feminist series will aim to bridge the academic/online divide, allow academics to showcase their important work, connect online conversations that are also taking place in the classroom (and other academic venues), and relate feminist and queer theory to feminist blogosphere discussions. Bring it, brainy feminists! Look out for the first post later today.

Today finds me crawling out of blog hibernation to point ya’ll to the latest installment of “College Boys Just Want to Have Fun…By Demeaning Women and Making Jokes About Rape.” Today’s episode takes place at the University of Vermont, where a puzzling and revolting survey was recently distributed to the brothers of Sigma Phi Epsilon. We were sent a copy of the questionnaire, which mostly consists of benign questions like name, birthday, major, amount of time with SigEp and favorite SigEp memories, hobbies, future goals, etc. It’s actually kind of nerdy and cute, until you get to the final three “personal questions.”

1. Where in public would I want to have sex?

2. Who’s my favorite artist?

3. If I could rape someone, who would it be?

We come across a lot of gross stuff at SAFER, but the contrast here makes this particularly jarring and offensive. It’s not the usual litany of purposefully offensive garbage; it’s a seemingly legit, “normal” survey with this one horrifying nuggets thrown in at the end. The normalization of the question—the nonchalance—is so…disturbing.

As often happens with these kind of “frat shenanigans,” the survey made it into the hands of other folks on campus, who were understandably upset and are taking action. This petition was started last night by “Feminists from UVM” and is already up to 375 signatures. This is what they have to say:

This egregious expression of rape culture is only the most recent example of systemic sexism at UVM. The past year alone has witnessed rape, multiple sexual assaults, and anti-abortion chalking in public spaces. While the university administration has laid off long-time Women’s and Gender Studies faculty and supported sexist institutions like Sigma Phi Epsilon, it has refused to take concerted action to combat sexism and rape culture. We demand that instead of diverting resources into vast salaries for its administrators, UVM should launch an aggressive campaign against sexism and rape culture, and it should expand institutions such as Women’s and Gender Studies and the Women’s Center at UVM. Furthermore, UVM must immediately disband Sigma Phi Epsilon. An institution that discusses who it wants to rape has no place at UVM or in the Burlington community.

Sign the UVM petition and look for updates over at FedUp Vermont, a local grassroots feminist organization. The story hasn’t hit the news yet (campus or otherwise) so there is no word on whether the school will take any action or if the men of Sigma Phi Epsilon have anything to say for themselves, but we’ll let you know if they do. Something tells me this was supposed to “funny.” Ha. Ha. Ha.

Cross-posted from Change Happens