The short answer is, I'm a post-colonial feminist.
The long answer... here is my feminist autobiography:
Writing about gender has become my favorite thing to write about in the past year. Preceding this, writing about race was at the top of my list. However neither gender, race, nor writing were subjects that ever crossed my mind before coming to college. As I declared my major as International Studies, I looked to foreign countries to find issues that I would become passionate about. But over the years, I noticed that I do not have to look too far to find pressing issues that require my attention. The historic bans on abortion in Mississippi, Alabama, and a few other states, trans women of color being murdered at higher and higher rates, and the lack of cohesive vision for the future of women in America have lead me to feminist theory, as pain and hurt similarly did to bell hooks. Reading up on the social and historical contexts for these issues and more has allowed me to better understand the nature of gender inequality. It would be ridiculous to pretend as though gender inequality does not exist, because there is evidence on a systematic and idealistic level which claims otherwise (a realization that I did not fully grasp until a year ago). Acknowledging the patriarchy is not an issue, especially as a person impacted by gender inequality, though coming into my feminist consciousness, I am constantly choosing to exist differently in the patriarchy, while creating space for other people to do the same.
My freshman year
Before taking my first Women and Gender studies course, “Women in Perspective” with Dr. Jameta Barlow in my freshman year, I was sure that feminism was a cult of women who hated men and fought for the rights they already had. I believed that their goals were to make the world a politically correct haven where everyone had to refer to women in the ways which they wanted. Their space was always seeking safety, while my creative outlets such as comedy and rap music sought to push boundaries, branch out, and be anything but “safe”. With this belief of feminism, I regarded myself as a maverick, an unorthodox woman that did not need a safe space. However my opinions of feminism changed on the first day of class; my professor said “raise your hand if you believe in equal rights”. When I rose my hand, she said “Congratulations, you are a feminist.” This of course planted the seed of feminism into my mind, challenging everything I thought I knew about feminism. That semester I learned about several issues pertaining to women all over the world-- though at the time, I engaged in the material from a more sympathetic standpoint than an empathetic one-- and connected my passion for international studies to gender justice.
My sophomore year
In my sophomore year, I read a ton of books; from Assia Djebar, to Nawal El Sadaawi, to Fanon, to Spivak. Reading nonfiction and historical fiction gave me a colonial context I had not received prior to college. This semester a professor of mine also mentioned that I should join a new club on campus called Towson Freedom School (TFS)- a club creating a space for black studies due to the lack of space at Towson (The Towerlight, 2016). I did not think the club would be for me, however after a few weeks of attending the meetings, I found community in people who share a similar racial struggle as well as a desire to learn about their culture. It was at these TFS meetings where I also began to see the intersection of blackness and woman. I also joined what started out as a research study led by Dr.Barlow but later became a full-fledged club, Sister Circle- a group of young and diverse black women speaking on our health and well-being while supporting each other in the process. Listening to women like me talk about their struggles allowed me to see commonalities between our circumstances and to then attribute certain issues to issues of gender, similar to the Conscious Raising groups developed by radical feminists. While all my classes and clubs sprinkled in a chapter or two devoted to issues pertaining to women, the monumental change this particular year was going to therapy. There I learned that people could achieve a balance between masculinity and femininity. Struggling with this balance showed me how 19 years of gender expression and norms can suppress one’s true identity, allowing me to drop all previous beliefs about gender in its entirety.
My junior year
I began my junior year in Morocco, studying abroad. As I barely knew anyone in my cohort, I established my identity as a feminist in the beginning 15 minutes of introduction. Luckily enough my three roommates all identified as feminists as well, an throughout the course of the semester, we were able to engage in elementary feminist theory, as we were all enrolled in Gender Studies: A Case of Morocco. Another thing that brought us closer together as future social justice warriors was the immense sexism we faced on the streets. We engaged in debates over when to use our American privilege for our protection and whether covering up is the best solution to cat-calling. Other experiences that lead me to think about gender during this semester include solo-travelling, meeting with Moroccan students to exchange ideas, volunteering with Amnesty International to end violence against women, as well as practicing vulnerability. The following semester I took the French course, African Literature, where we read books like So Long a Letter, and the discussions in this class taught me to be less shy when speaking about issues that intimately affect women’s lives- this rise in comfort became the catalyst for me "heading" the Feminist Collective (FEMCO) on campus (quotes because we were a collective), and personally subverting the patriarchy through individual means.
My senior year
As I just recently concluded my senior year, I acknowledge the significant strides I have made in terms of my gender consciousness while also grapple with the many things I have yet to learn. FEMCO has allowed me to be a leader for change against gender inequality and create the space for other people to do the same. Though at the same time I was dealing with my own lingering beliefs concerning gender that needed to be dismantled- I embraced my natural hair, went braless most of the year, lead a discussion on menstruation in FEMCO, wrote about my femininity, danced in public in Towson’s Ballroom Dance club, and exposed my vulnerability in Ghana (I cried a lot from the site of slave castles). I could not say that I stood for the freedom for all women and not include myself. I personally challenged myself and my beliefs this semester because in the development of a strong feminist consciousness, I need to know what I stand for and constantly check myself for normative beliefs I have yet to unlearn.
Issues I am most passionate about
In coming into this current state of consciousness, I found that issues that concern me the most are issues of freedom, identity, and solidarity. Freedom to me is existing without restraints, it is the verb “to be”. The imposition of gender norms keeps men and women from accessing their full humanity, and being their full selves. As mentioned before, it is important that people acknowledge the patriarchy which create models of how one should behave due to gender, and it is also important to constantly choose to exist differently from those models; to not fit the mold of what it means to be a man or women while being aware that that mold exists. Why? As W.E.B. DuBois says in The Souls of Black Folk, it burden to feel this sense of “two-ness,” have to see the world through your eyes as well as through a male gaze (DuBois, 2). Letting go of this gaze is liberating. In addition, I want people to think critically about gender and its repercussions on the division between people; There is little solidarity between queer folk in the US and queer folk in Morocco; There is little solidarity between cis-women and trans-women.There is tremendous interconnectedness between these groups of people, though patriarchy says that divisions work to certain groups’ favor, placing certain women over others and instilling constant competition. Coming together reveals how constructed the divides are.
The theories that I find most useful are the theories which are the most disruptive, and do the most damage to the patriarchy. These theories include queer theory, trans theory, postmodern theory, and postcolonial/transnational theory (all linked if you would like further information). Though a few of these theories contradict each other, together they compliment each other and work in tandem with each other. For example, though global feminists theorizes global power dynamics in a core/periphery sort of framework, postcolonial theorists would say that this way of looking at the dynamics as remnants of eurocentrism tied within it. However the core/periphery theory helps to expose the influence that colonizer countries have over their former colonies even to this day.
Theories I like/use
The reason that I often look to postmodern theory is because I am a French language major. I was exposed to thinkers such as Lacan, Derrida and Foucault early on in my coming to feminist consciousness. However The famous French feminist philosophers, like Ciroux, Irigaray, and Kristeva, all have an interest in deconstructing language due to its intrinsic patriarchal nature. This interests me as I have witnessed how language can erase people or write them into existence. Non-binary folk must cease to exist in the French language due to their lack of gender-neutral pronouns. In addition there is no word for “homosexual” in French besides the technical term l'homosexuel, or the anglicism gay. Language is fluid but as language is also a core part of people’s sense of identity, it is often the last feature of society that gets changed because expanding language would mean validating an existence that one may not agree with. This aspect of postmodernism intrigues me.
Post-colonial theory focuses on culture and identity. It provides historical contexts while re-writing women into existence. Transnational theory applies to one of my main issues pertaining to gender: solidarity. There are patriarchal issues that keep women oppressed across borders, including the issue of migration, and forced informal labor that women are often victim to. Due to transnationalism, a shoe company such as Nike may not be based in any particular country but can have some factories in Africa, some in Asia, and some in Latin America as low-waged workers create different parts of the shoes to be bought and sold. Susan Mann speaks on these “Global Factories” and how the the division of labor inside and outside of these factories create competition and conflict between women (330). Transnational theory explains how the connection between women despite borders can actually cultivate a solidarity among women, where women are not oppressing each other in the struggle for resources and privileges.
My utopian vision for the future of gender justice
My utopian vision for the future of gender justice is freedom for all people. It has always been easy for me to vision utopias because my parents raised me to believe that Malcolm X, Martin Luther King jr., and Rosa Parks were just average people (and not caricatured superheros) who wanted the world to be better and do better. My personal motivation for doing good work in the world was never to end up seeing results because like X, King and Parks, I did not believe this to be a possibility. But the works of black women before me (including Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou...) have inspired me to live my best life, destroying patriarchy with 1,000 cuts alongside them as a way of paying it forward to the next generation of strong-willed young people.
For me, freedom for all people looks like the abolition of prisons and the re-institution of restorative justice practices; it means autonomy for all people (power to make decisions and choose for yourself); it means the acceptance of all people. I recently just heard of case where the black sorority, Zeta Phi Beta, refuses to accept and pledge black trans women into their sorority (here is the story). In my utopia, there is no adoption of the same tired systems that seek to grab power in oppose to liberty. Solidarity only occurs through acknowledging our differences and the consequences that result from living with those different intersecting and ever-changing identities in this society.
If the creative energy used to build South Africa’s pervasive and multi-faceted racism was put into creating a utopia, we would have been free by now. But the imperialist capitalist white-supremacist patriarchy demands that individuals strive for power over their own freedom.