My view from the (feminism) closet
I consider myself a people person. It’s important in a piece such as this to make this very clear from the start. I am quick to smile at strangers on my daily commute or strike up casual conversation with a customer at the café where I work. And every so often, more often than I would like to admit, I end these casual conversations with a
pinched smile and a quick nod and find a way to disengage.
I am a closeted feminist. When I was first coming into this sensibility in my adolescence, it was hell on my parents. Endless screaming matches, groundings, and circular conversations taught me that feminism had no place in polite conversation. It really had no place anywhere people had ears to listen or eyes to roll. It is for this reason that I smile politely at my new co-worker when he berates the scantily- clad women he encountered at his bachelor party the weekend before (“I mean I’m a guy, I like to look but that doesn’t mean it should be out there”) and it is for this same reason that I bite my tongue when a customer attempts to compliment me as I clean my station after handing him his coffee (“You’re going to make a great wife one day”). You see, for the vast majority, ‘feminist’ is the antipode of ‘people person’ and dodging much harsher labels usually means regressing to that closet with a smile.
It was by accident that I stumbled upon Women and Gender Studies in my undergraduate studies at University of Toronto. One introductory class was the beginning of a four- year adventure as I pursued a minor in the program. I was left in raptures by the theory, the thinkers, the writers, and the professors I immediately admired. I was not only free to explore and critique different global perspectives, but I was actively encouraged to do so. Never was I exposed to anything resembling man- hating; in fact, several of my professors had opted out of the gender binary altogether. The ironic part of my experience was that from what I could tell, the feminist was the ultimate ‘people person’. I learned about inequity, about injustice, and about compassion and advocacy from the role models I found in my instructors and my peers. I am far more respectful of people, particularly those who are different from myself, because of my time in this department. It felt like home.
So when anonymous posts surfaced on BlogTO on September 5 encouraging violence against feminists and students of Gender Studies and Sociology at U of T, I could feel my heart breaking. The posts, made under the handle KillFeminists, are not only stomach- churning, they are explicit in how feminists and female professors and students should be treated if they disrespect you or try “to ruin your life with a false sex rape allegation”. The post also offers suggestions on where you can find the weapons necessary to carry out this violence. When my friends receive notice of the threats from the University a week after the original post, it is vague about the threats and, worse yet, the targets.
My heartbreak is not limited to the terrible threat itself, nor the public response described by the liaison for the WGS Union, Zahra Vaid, that the threat was being blown out of proportion by feminists “because that is what they do”. I am disheartened by the way this threat echoes another violent act against women almost 26 years ago in Quebec, and by their inextricable link to women and education. I bristle at the knowledge that a woman’s choice to study or her choice of what to study can make her a target, that it can be seen as a trespass on male territory or an organized movement against men.
Beyond my affective response, however, I also find an opportunity for reflection. In the midst of such aggression, my fortress of a closet begins to feel like a prison cell and I have to not only reconceptualise the make-up of that enclosure but also who is constructing that cell and what lies beyond the confines of its walls. To be silent about such issues, about justice and about safety, no longer seems like a justifiable concession to being a ‘people person’. Rather, it feels like a submission to public opinion, to the eye-rollers and the internet- dwellers and the KillFeminists of the world. I worry that the same culture that berated feminists for overreacting to a homicidal threat “because this is what they do” might have also conditioned me to smile politely. The silence I once adopted as a defence mechanism no longer feels like a choice so much as it does a sentence. The most helpful conclusion I can draw from this event is not that I need feminism, but that I need feminism louder so that the misogyny underlying these threats and the ambivalent public response to them cannot be ignored. So that the issues that feminism addresses and their impact on the lives of Canadians can no longer be denied, joked about, or ignored completely.
The facts also seem to point to this need. Under Harper’s government, Canada’s “gender-gap index” standing slipped from 14th to 25th out of 115 countries included in the World Forum. The report sent to the UN in 2010 cited “a systematic erosion of the human rights of women and girls in Canada” and pointed out that the influences were not merely political but also comprised “’deep, cultural’ forces working against women’s equality”. This is the cultural context within which we live as Canadians and even still there is a pervasive notion that Canadians don’t need feminism, and that we are the progressive and just country that we are too- often perceived to be. In my research I came across a Bustle article entitled “9 Reasons Canada is an Awesomely Feminist Place to Live” which makes a worrisome number of claims about the lives of Canadian women, including our lack of a glass ceiling and absolute acceptance and respect of same-sex couples. My concern with this article, and my reason for bringing it up here, is that this article though flawed seems to me a decent representation of the public opinion of Canadian society.
I need feminism so loud that it can wake us from the collective, nationalistic dream we share of our country and draw attention to the realities of oppression and inequality we face. Whoever posted those comments on BlogTO was not only expressing anger, he or she was trying to incite fear in order to silence the voices with whom they did not agree. Their level of success on the grand scale has yet to be measured, and I can only pray it has not affected students’ and faculty members’ willingness to speak their mind. Personally, however, I have never been more aware of my need to be mindful of and involved in the dialogue surrounding inclusive, anti-racist, anti-colonial discourse in my local community and beyond.
