Email to my IPE lecturer on how to teach feminist theory

So I feel like I'm getting in the habit of emailing my lecturers to complain about stuff way too much. My mum thinks I should be spending the time more usefully doing assignments. Maybe. But this one at least has given me context for how I want to do my next assignment, so its useful in that sense.

This is a response to the lecture I talked about at the start of my previous post (oops, by start I mean beginning in the 9th paragraph :P) when my IPE (international political economy - think international relations smooshed with economics) lecturer managed to get through an entire lecture on feminism without mentioning patriarchy and barely using female authors. 

I chatted to him about it afterwards, but I approached it more in the context of me wanting to find female authors, rather than critiquing his lecture. But it continued to bother me, so when he emailed me with a bunch of suggested readings (which was very nice of him, and he is a lovely guy) I really felt the need to respond with my thoughts.

Here's what I said:

Thanks for the suggestions, I appreciate you following up on this.

I've decided not to do that question. Instead, I'm going to do the question on the global financial crisis from an eco-feminist perspective. I think that while it is important to look at how our current system affects women, an equally important aspect of feminist analysis is looking at the way that the system as a whole is fundamentally flawed - not just in terms of how it negatively impacts women, but also its impacts on the entire planet. I plan to argue that feminist/ecological/radical/non-orthodox approaches have explained the GFC better than any of the mainstream analysis, but have not had a big enough impact on "the global politics of finance".

I have also been thinking about the lecture the other day, and realised I didn't articulate myself very well. I guess the point that I wanted to make (but didn't,really) was not so much that I was looking for feminist authors to use myself (although this is appreciated), but that I think it would have been really great if more female perspectives were used in the lecture. I think that the whole discipline of economics is biased in favour of men, and it is alarming that female perspectives are barely even used in the one lecture on feminism (let alone the rest of the course!!). What example does it set for young women if almost all the theorists we look at, even the experts on gender inequality, are men? To be clear, I think men engaging in feminism is absolutely fantastic. It is only problematic when this is done at the expense of women.

I was also interested that, although you gave a bunch of possible explanations for the gender wage gap, the concept of patriarchy was not mentioned (that I noticed). I think that patriarchy is probably the most fundamental element of any feminist analysis. Women are not paid less simply due to a bunch of related reasons that were mentioned, but because of the overarching social and economic system skewed in favour of men - patriarchy. We can't look at these factors as discrete issues and try to pinpoint "causes" for the wage gap without looking at this overarching system as an explanation.

Anyway those were just some of my thoughts in response to the lecture. This is not about your teaching in particular, but rather my frustration at the way that gender inequality continues to be entrenched in an academic setting, despite the gains that feminism has made. In fact, alarmingly, I think in many respects we are going backwards. I am aware that there used to be a paper on feminist economics, and now there isn't. In light of this, it is even more important to be include feminist critiques in every paper as much as possible. This is what I would like to see more of.

Cheers

Better articulated thoughts on feminism and men's inclusion

My history lecturer started our class the other day by talking about feelings. She asked us to talk to each other about emotional reactions we’ve had to reading history.  This made me really happy, mostly because it’s absolutely the LAST thing most of my lecturers would do, and I think it’s brilliant. Too often we learn in the abstract, and are taught to detach from what we are studying, and forget that people – real, living, breathing, creatures – are at the centre of everything we do.

My lecturer told us to think about our emotions as we went through the class. To recognise them. And to acknowledge them. But also to not let them get in the way. Emotions can distort good history, and good writing generally, because if a piece is too emotionally-laden, its factual merits are far less likely to be taken seriously. Emotions can also make us prone to exaggeration, which undermines our entire argument.

This seems obvious, and it is. But in the moment, it is very easy to forget.

So it was with a great deal of cringe that I re-read my post on the WSA conference the other day. It is very different to my usual style. Full of swearing, bold assertions, wild accusations, and just a whole bunch of inarticulate rage.

I would be very ashamed if any of the older members of WSA read that post and knew it was me, but thankfully, this is the advantage of writing under a pseudonym. Nothing in it was constructive in the slightest, and while I do appreciate the platform of my blog as a space for venting, this has its limits and should be done respectfully.

I was tempted to thoroughly edit the post, at least removing the offensive language and toning it down. But then I realised that most people who are going to read it probably have already – and also that this is not a particularly honest way to respond. Plus, I think that post has the value of reflecting a certain emotional space that I was in at the time.

I want to revisit the topic in an attempt to articulate myself more coherently. I want to look at the nuances of arguments for and against cis-men’s inclusion in feminist spaces. I want to point out, again, that discussion around including gender minorities, and especially transwomen is far more urgent than including men, although I feel strongly about both. The need to explicitly include transwomen seems pretty obvious and I feel I’ve made a decent stab at addressing why in my last post. The inclusion of other gender minorities in women-only spaces, as I am learning, is a highly complex issue, because of all the different layers of privilege society gives people based on what gender they are assumed to be. I don’t feel qualified to discuss this, so I won’t in this post – but I think it is a glaring issue which should absolutely be on the table.

On the subject of cis-men’s inclusion, I’ll start by explaining why women’s only spaces are important. After spending the weekend with feminists, it was a bit of a shock to go back to uni. I have a new lecturer for one of my law courses, who seems to be just as much a  fan of sexist jokes as the previous one. He referred to a man’s ex-wife’s divorce lawyer as an example of his point that every story has a villain.

And in my international political economy course, we had a token lecture on feminism. Although it was barely even about feminism, really. Only a very narrow aspect of it, namely income inequality between men and women. This is an important subject, and I’m glad we discussed it, but a deeper inquiry into feminist economic thought would have been nice.

A range of explanations for the wage gap were given. Societal perceptions of men as breadwinners, women as carers. The value of work done at home, which isn’t part of the market economy. Babies. Unequal access to education and training. Different cultural expectations of men and women. All legitimate reasons, sure, but I found it really interesting, and shocking, that the word patriarchy was not mentioned at all.  I don’t know of any strand of feminism that doesn’t use the concept of patriarchy as the basis of its analysis, but please, correct me if I am wrong on this. Maybe you can mansplain it to me. 

And on the topic of mansplaining, I found it deeply offensive that the author that the lecturer drew on for 80% of the class was male. When I asked him about this, the response was that this author was the most prominent theorist on the topic. Which he probably is, but that is, I would imagine, the result of gender discrimination in the field of IPE, and more broadly, a conception of economics which is biased towards men. I think the ideal place to challenge these perceptions would probably be a 200 level paper. I have decided, rather than getting pissed off and writing an email to the lecturer, I’m going to usefully channel that energy by using entirely female authors for my next essay. Which won’t actually be hard at all, because heaps of awesome critical types are women anyway. This is probably another reason why they are ignored by the mainstream literature. But I digress, this is a topic for another day.

The class made me realise the context from which the need for a women’s only academic space emerged. And why this space matters. Women are still not taken seriously in an academic setting, and the issues that these second wave feminists were fighting in the 70s are absolutely still there. In some cases they are more subtle (for example, there are now more female than male undergrad students, although this does not translate into academic positions, and especially high-up positions) and in others more glaring (Vic used to have a feminist economics paper; now it doesn’t. And of course it used to have a whole Women’s Studies department. Go figure.).

I think this is why women’s only spaces are so valued. They are a space to be taken seriously, to be heard, for once, on equal terms. A chance to escape the insanity of the world we live in and the people we have to deal with, to be surrounded with those who share in our struggle. And, given that those spaces had to be fought for so desperately, I can understand the reluctance to give that up.

On the other hand, I stand by my argument that Women’s Studies must be a space where men are included. They too have a role to play in this struggle, and we should be encouraging that.

The thing is, it is largely men who are responsible for rape, domestic violence, objectification of women, paying women less, passing ridiculous retrogressive laws, etc etc etc. And that most men think that feminists are a bunch of angry, hairy, man-hating lesbians, or that feminism has already achieved its victories so shut up and stop complaining, or both. Of course there's nothing wrong with being lesbian or hairy, and we have every right to be angry, even if it's unconstructive. But the way that society clings to this stereotype in a negative way is harmful to feminism as a whole.

I am not convinced that we are going to get much further in these struggles without engaging with them. I am all for sitting around theorizing about the problems, and I absolutely think this has its place. But social change is always about engagement, and men have to be a part of the solution, otherwise we will just continue to inhabit completely distinct worlds. At least, distinct academic worlds, because the world we actually live in involves all genders, and we need to figure out how to function alongside each other.

I also suspect that young men are far more likely to look up to older men as role models than a bunch of what they perceive as angry-man-hating-lesbians. Men learn about sex and relationships from other men, or from the media, or porn, or whatever. I imagine they don’t learn about rape culture, or male privilege, or how to respect women, unless they have really strong male role models demonstrating this behaviour, and actively fighting for change.

I imagine lots of men are put off feminism because they see it as separatist, and I can understand why. But for most feminists, we don't want separatism, we want equality. It is not helpful moving forward if we continue to exclude, because this leads to increasing divisions, and I'm sure for many men, complete disengagement from feminist thought. Anyone who wants to fight for equality should be encouraged to do so, and warmly welcomed. This should of course, come with the caveat that they have a basic understanding of feminism and acknowledge their own privilege.

And there's plenty of awesome men, whose perspectives on feminism I would love to see included. Like this guy. 

There are also lots of less awesome guys. I don’t think we want conferences to be overrun with men who don’t actually understand feminism, and who just want to be in control and tell women what to do. And I think that’s part of the reason for excluding them. We don’t want a bunch of trolls coming along and derailing the conversation. And that’s a totally valid point. But I’m sure that there can be procedures to address this, like being able to throw people out if they are making others uncomfortable.

And most guys that I know who are actually feminists (and yeah, there’s not many of them) would really benefit from attending this kind of conference. They would benefit from hearing women’s perspectives, and they would benefit from the experience of being in the minority and not feeling entirely comfortable in the space. They would also have a lot to contribute, in terms of how we can educate and engage with other men.

Another argument, of course, is that as feminism moves into the 21^st century, it needs to become intersectional. I think by now it’s uncontroversial that second-wave feminism focuses on middle/upper class, white, able-bodied, cis-gendered women, to the exclusion of everyone else. I do think that the inclusion of all women is more urgent than the inclusion of men. But if we accept the existence of intersections of oppression, and reject gender binary as a social construct, then why not include everyone in our struggles for equality?

I still believe in women’s only spaces, and I think it’s a really good, practical solution for conferences to have some spaces open to everyone, and others only open to women, maybe with parallel workshops for men at the same time. (I don’t know how this would work in terms of how to include gender minorities in women’s only spaces, and this also needs to be part of any discussion, of course.) There would also have to be rules and boundaries about how men are to be included.

So I don’t proclaim to have any of the answers, and I do realise that the issues are rather more complex than my last post made them out to be. My point though, is that this issue absolutely has to be on the table if feminism is to remain relevant and engaged with society as a whole.