A truly significant literacy I’ve been developing over the last few years has been my feminist literacy. I am learning, growing, and owning feminism through conversations with amazing women, blogs and books. From that feminism, I am constructing a breathable armor and an arsenal of weapons that allows me to name the patriarchy where I see it and defend my position. It is an armour that is always under construction, ready to hear from veterans and allies. It is for an army that is fighting ideas, not the people who have not finished undergoing the radical unlearning needed to truly give equity and love to all people. Because who has truly finished that unlearning? Not me, not Gloria E. Anzaldua, not Gloria Steinem. I believe my feminist knowledge and my supportive relationships have protected me from the full force of oppression, and this beautiful shining armor I made is something I want everyone to have. Yes, even folks who don’t identify as women! The patriarchy is trying to keep everyone in a box! To bring this around to my future classroom for a minute, the idea of being feminism’s recruitment officer in my classroom is something that really excites me about teaching.
To explain how I got here, I will back up to Finlandia. Finlandia is the Co-op on the East Side of Providence where I lived for two and half years starting in 2011. It was the first place I ever met young women who vocalized their enjoyment of being friends with other women, and young men who didn’t ask me to acknowledge that my gender sucked just a little bit before being friends with them. “I’m one of those girls who doesn’t like girls, I usually just have a lot of guy friends,” had been this secret password used my whole life between potential female friends and I to make sure we were going to get along. “You’re not one of those caddy girls who spends all her time at the mall,” had been this weird stamp of approval from male friends which meant I could socialize in groups of mixed company. None of this happened at Finlandia. I felt comfortable there right away, but putting my finger on (one of the big reasons) why I felt so comfortable only happened over time. I also realized that these attitudes were not accidents. These folks were compassionate about learning to be better people, and about creating equity and love. Between living at the Co-op and deciding to become a teacher, I have become more politicized in the last 3 to 4 years than the rest of my life combined. It feels great!!
My literacy in feminism grew in very small increments out of conversations with my fellow Co-opers. I got pointed to blogs like Jezebel.com (which I have since come to question greatly) and BlackGirlDangerous.org. I stumbled upon The SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas and relished in its radicalism. More recently I read The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and felt joy digging into her thorough arguments. As I had more honest conversations with my female peers, I realized that my personal and frequent experiences with sexism were the rule and not the exception. This fact remains one of the most compelling reasons for me to be vocal about feminism and why the world needs it.
A significant development in my feminist literacy is realizing that it has meant and continues to mean different things to different women along barriers of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and class. American Feminism has consistently privileged straight, white, middle and upper-class women. In other words, women like me! Realizing this, and trying not to commit the same mistakes as I practice my feminism is really really important to me. The fact that the American Feminist movement had a racist history had been brought to my attention before but I only understood it on a superficial level. What really made it sink in for me was a talk between Melissa Harris-Perry and bell hooks at The New School in November called “Black Female Voices”. Those two women blew my mind. I had never even heard of either of them before, but the video was posted on colorlines.com which I try to read frequently because it has amazing articles and clues me into amazing things. I now regularly watch Melissa Harris-Perry on her brilliant program on MSNBC and have recently just finished Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks. Feminism is super important to me, and these two women remind me to look at the many aspects of a person’s identity which intersect.
Developing my feminist literacy feels similar to traditional ideas of literacy to me because it has a lot to do with developing content specific vocabulary, exposing myself to published works, and discovering trustworthy sources. However, a really important aspect of it to me has been reading the ways people treat each other in day to day life with a feminist lens. For example, reflecting on the way I formed friendships in the past and realizing I was internalizing and perpetuating the idea that women are less desirable to be friends with. To be able to see these hidden aspects of sexism and to point them out in a productive way is not a part of feminism I am yet literate in. In some situations it is clear that after a warm, polite conversation someone will realize that the word “girl” should not be used as an insult. Sometimes the way a woman is written in a movie aggravates me, and while acknowledging this makes makes me angry can be satisfying, not letting that anger go doesn’t really get me anywhere. I’m working on it. Something I do know, is that feminism is a kind of literacy that empowers me and impacts my life in positive ways, which pretty much guarantees I will be a lifelong learner of it.
