 Welcome to the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. My name is Leon Cifuentes and I am the Academic Programs Coordinator here at the Education Division of the Museum. Today we're very happy to present Courtney Martin, co-editor of the Anthology Click when we knew we were feminists, leading a panel of pretty phenomenal women in a discussion of how they discovered feminism. So we're really hoping this will be a good conversation. So I'm going to introduce Courtney Martin and then Ms. Martin will be introducing the rest of the panelists. Courtney Martin is a writer, teacher and speaker living in Brooklyn. Her first book, Perfect Girl, Starving Daughters, How the Quest for Perfection is Harming Young Women, led her to speak at over 50 colleges and universities across the nation. She's also an editor at Feministing.com, the most highly read feminist publication in the world. And a senior correspondent for the American Prospect. She has had an ongoing collaboration here with the Sackler Center for several years and has moderated several panels. We're very, very happy to have her here. So thank you very much. Please help me welcome Courtney Martin. Thank you very much. Thanks so much for being here. It's very exciting to see that a panel on young feminism gets a crowd like this. So I am going to introduce each of these talented people right before they talk, but I wanted to first give you a bit of an introduction about how CLIC came to be. Courtney Sullivan, who's right here to my left, and I are friends and she's a novelist, and she was writing a scene where she had to figure out she had a contemporary young woman character who was going to have her feminist CLIC moment. So Courtney decided I'm going to email a bunch of my young feminist friends and say what was your CLIC moment to make sure this is kind of authentic and interesting. So what emerged was this email thread where people sort of owned up about, oh, it was this documentary film, it was this, you know, academic experience. It was, you know, when I got raped, it was when I saw, this is mine, someone wearing fishnet stockings, longer story, I'll explain later. So we read all of these threads and I said to Courtney, I think we were having lunch at the time and I was like, that was really interesting because if we had sent that same email, for example, to a group of my mom's friends, I think we would have gotten a very, very different list. And maybe we would have actually gotten some of the same items, but it sort of like expanded in terms of the entry points that people have to feminism. And wouldn't it be cool to actually anthologize that in some way, create some sort of document that goes beyond our very exclusive email chain and helps people understand that the contemporary feminist movement is both incredibly diverse in terms of the way people engage it, different kinds of activism, writing, blogging, community organizing, changing institutions from the inside out, but also that that's mirrored by the way people come to feminism these days, that there are so many amazing different entry points. So that's how it came about. We also want to pay homage to the woman who really coined this idea of the feminist click moment. Does anyone know who has not read the anthology, where that comes from? Anyone in the audience raise your hand? Really? Come on. There were some Ms. Magazine readers in here from the 70s. I see you ladies. All right. So Jane O'Reilly in 1971 wrote an essay in Ms. Magazine about the click moment. And I want to read just a little bit of that to you to give you a sense of how different it might be from what you're going to be hearing in a second. Jane O'Reilly reclaimed the click for the ladies in her 1971 Ms. Magazine cover story entitled The Housewife's Moment of Truth. Not a lot of housewives on the stage, but you'll see that soon. Appearing in the inaugural issue, it opened with a group of women lying on the floor in Aspen. This is a quote, floating free and uneasy on the indoor-outdoor carpet, eyes closed being led through the first phase of a workshop in approaching unisexuality. The women quote recognized the click of recognition, that parentheses of truth around a little thing that completes the puzzle of reality in women's minds. The moment that brings a gleam to our eyes and means the revolution has begun. The backdrop of O'Reilly's stories distinctly early 70s and the realizations that occur on that no doubt shag carpet seems somewhat fixed in time too. One by one, the women O'Reilly describes realize that they can no longer tolerate the sexism all around. She writes, in Houston, Texas, a friend of mine stood and watched her husband step over a pile of toys on the stairs put there to be carried up. Why can't you get this stuff put away? He mumbled. Click, you have two hands, she said, turning away. Last summer, I got a letter from a man who wrote, I do not agree with your last article and I am canceling my wife's subscription. The next day, I got a letter from his wife saying, I am not canceling my subscription. Click. Last August, I was on a boat leaving an island in Maine. Two families were with me and the mothers were discussing the troubles of cleaning up after a rental summer. Bob cleaned up the bathroom for me, didn't you, honey? She confided, gratefully patting her husband's knee. Well, what the hell, it's vacation, he said fondly. The two women looked at each other and the queerest change came over their faces. I got up at six this morning to make the sandwiches for the trip home from this vacation, the first one said. So I wonder why I've thanked him at least six times for cleaning the bathroom. Click, click, click. So this is sort of the 70s era version of what we tried to do in our anthology. As you'll see, it sounds very, very different, but we wanted to express our gratitude to that article and to sort of this continuum of that conversation. The other really, like, modern, wonderful thing is that we've become Facebook friends with Jane O'Reilly. And so she, like, loves to comment on our stuff and, like, we're all buddies now. So yeah, she's into clicks, so that's a great tribute. In any case, what you're going to be hearing, so Courtney and I created this anthology, that's the punchline, right, with seal press. And it was our attempt to, as I said, represent the diversity of this movement and all the different ways in which women enter into it. And it was incredible for us because we really weren't terribly proficient about getting the call for submissions out into the world, because we'd never done this before, we posted on Feministing, et cetera, but we had a flood of amazing work. So the challenge was really narrowing it down to fit into this one book. I mean, there could be volumes of the ways in which young women and men are entering this movement, but we're so proud of the work that's in here and the voices that are represented, and even more proud that three of them, four of them, Counting Court, are here today to really give you a piece of their essay in their own voices. And Dr. Sackler, who obviously endowed this center, specifically requested this panel and requested these voices, because she read the anthology and was so moved by it. So she's actually ill today, so she couldn't be here, but that was something that I was incredibly touched by for a woman who's such a hero of this movement to really hear these voices and say, I want to hear them myself in person was really exciting. So we'll start without further ado. We're definitely going to have time for questions and to really make this interactive, but we'll start out by hearing an excerpt from each of the essayists. We're going to start with Miriam Perez, who is a writer, blogger, and reproductive justice activist. She's an editor at Feministing.com and the founder of RadicalDula.com, which is a really awesome site if anyone hasn't checked it out. Her work has appeared in Bitch Magazine, The Nation, Alternate, and the American Prospect. She had a piece this week in Color Lines Magazine that's really provocative and interesting, so you should check that out. Perez was named one of the Lambda Literary Foundation's 2010 emerging LGBT voices, and she is a dear friend of mine. Go ahead. Thank you, Courtney. Hi, everyone. Thanks for being here. And feel free to file in and sit on the floor if you don't want to stand in the corner over there. So I'm going to read a short excerpt from my essay, which is called, Pillow Dancing and Other Failed Hetero-Experiments. After a big family dinner, my dad and stepmom were settled into the couch watching Crossfire, a favorite conservative political show of Pops. My brother and I call him Pop, short for Poppy. Fourteen and full of angst, I walked into the living room and blurted out, but what if I got pregnant? I was still burning up from our debate during dinner about teen pregnancy. You wouldn't get pregnant, first of all, but if you did, Pop stated definitively, I think you should be sent away as a punishment. This was not an atypical exchange for us. You name a political wedge issue and we probably debated it. His challenges and talking points taught me how to hone my arguments and make them as opposition ready as possible. Want to talk about abortion? I could run down the list of typical anti-choice arguments and come up with my standard responses. Want to debate about biological differences between the sexes? I had a retort for all the standard challenges. What about sports, muscle definition, intelligence? It's not easy for me to admit that conversations with my conservative father, most of which put him on the decidedly anti-feminist side of things, were a large part of my feminist formation. While I no longer have the patience for these kinds of debates with Pop, I do have to give him credit for always making me feel respected during our back and forth. Just the fact that he was willing to engage me with me, beginning as early as 11 or 12 years old, showed me that my ideas did matter, regardless of how wrong he thought I was. I wish I could point to a day when one of these arguments really crystallized my feminist identity. I wish I could say that one night, over Arroz con Pollo, I declared to my family around the table, I'm a feminist! Unfortunately, I can't, and that's because I didn't come to feminism in any one single moment. I pretty much rejected the term for a long time, afraid of the connotations that came with it, not wanting to differentiate myself from my peers. But long before I embraced the term, my experiences slowly shaped my feminist perspective. I'm skipping around a little bit, so apologize for that. My friends and I spent the majority of our social lives through high school, trying to perfect the art of relating to and understanding boys. From a really young age, I had my first boyfriend in first grade. Boys were all I talked about with my circle of friends, boys were our world. From elementary school until the day I graduated high school, dating boys with what we did, talked about, and breathed. When we were young, it was pretty innocent. Take, for example, my third grade boyfriend, William. He and I only had one face-to-face conversation during the entirety of our relationship, before I decided it was time to end things. I used the 1990s version of the text message breakup, avoiding any direct contact with him, by asking my friend to tell his friend to tell him it was over. This was standard practice. My friends and I went through multiple boyfriends this way, and it kept things feeling light and inconsequential. As we reached middle school, things turned slightly more racy, and stories of friends hitting the bases with their boyfriends were common. Actual sex was still rare, but the other bases, French, feel, finger, the four F's we called them, you can fill in the four, were a fair game. I was really into hearing about my friend's escapades, even though my streak with boys ended after it was no longer acceptable to ask someone out using the telephone game. Each day there was a new object of my affection. Entries about who danced with whom at the middle school dance, complete with a full report at the 20 girls' sleepover at Catherine's house afterwards. I remember one such night clearly, because after not being asked to slow dance at all, I usually spent those songs consoling some crying friend in the girls' bathroom. I initiated a new game, Dancing with Pillows. After making up a dance to Montell Jordan's, this is how we do it. Remember that song? Ten of us grabbed pillows from the living room couch and slow danced with them, pretending they were our imaginary boyfriends. I didn't see much more action than that pillow dancing for the rest of middle and most of high school. I liked a joke that I peaked early with boys. I had more boyfriends before the fifth grade than the rest of my dating career combined. It wasn't for a lack of trying, that's for sure. I was the girl who the boys never liked, at least not in that way. Friends would all explain that they couldn't possibly understand why. They all liked me so much, they'd tell me after yet another rejection by one of my crushes. Then I skip over my story about how I lost my virginity and all sorts of things that you'll have to pick up the book and then also talk about going to college and coming out as queer and reflecting back on a lot of those relationships with guys and why we were all sort of doing it pretty badly and pretty inauthentically and having negative experiences. So all those experiences growing up were fundamentally about pushing at the way gender roles were shaping my life and the lives of the people around me. I constantly argued about these limitations with my dad. Why did girl sports have different rules than boy sports? I questioned what my friends and I were doing with the boys in the back seats of our cars. Why was it so different from what we said we wanted? It wasn't until later that I found support for this questioning through my feminist community on my college campus and beyond. I no longer feel alone in these critiques. I benefit from a community of people who share a similar desire to break down the gender categories that limit and who question the structures that promote stereotypes. I won't argue with my dad about politics anymore and I'm miles from those high school backseat moments, but I know they've landed me here and for that I am grateful. Right. Thank you, Pris. Next we have Dr. and I want to say that because I'm so impressed. She said I didn't have to. Mathusa Brahmanian, who is an Indian-American writer and educator. She's currently the director of content in the Department of International Education Research and Outreach at, get ready for this, Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces Sesame Street, where she manages educational aspects of Sesame's initiatives in Africa, South Asia, and Haiti. How awesome is that? Thanks. She is active in the South Asian-American community and currently serves on the board of the South Asian women's creative collective. Her children's fiction has appeared in Kahani magazine and her scholarly work has appeared in Penn GSC perspectives on urban education, current issues in comparative education, and the encyclopedia of women and Islamic cultures. I love that from academia to Sesame Street and everything in between. She currently lives in New York City with her pet rabbit, who shares her love of crunchy vegetables and afternoon naps. And she is nobody's wife and nobody's mother. All right, Matthew. I didn't realize I left that line. The line about the rabbit is for the children's magazine, so we have to have bios up, so I put the rabbit in. I do have a rabbit though. Thank you so much for being here. It's such an honor to be on this panel. So I'm going to skip around in my essay as well. I was actually planning on reading different parts that I'm going to read right now, but my little brother is here and he's actually in the essay, so I can't not read his part. All right, so my essay is called The Brown Girl's Guide to Labels, 1998. When they heard that I had been accepted at Brown University, friends from my suburban high school filled my yearbook with dire warnings and heartfelt advice about the cosmetic consequences of my potential liberalization. Don't forget to shave your armpits, was a popular one. Don't let me see you burning your bra on CNN next year, was another. When I got to Brown, I was told that getting a degree was important, but that the real reason we were in college was to find ourselves. I soon discovered that the most common way to find oneself was to adopt a label. Among my white girlfriends, the most popular of these labels was feminist. I'm not saying that men and women shouldn't be different, I'm just saying they should be equal. This sounded about right to me, so I decided to investigate. In between my highly practical science classes, I listened in on spirited conversations about the need to move away from the image of bra burning pierced heritons with hairy armpits, this sounded familiar, and toward embracing and celebrating our desire to wear lipstick and short skirts without judgment. Other than a modicum of knowledge I had gained in seventh grade, which is the year I spent wearing foundation and designer skirts in an effort attempt to cover up my acne and naivete. I didn't know much about fashion. Then there was a whole battle to reclaim the word sexy. A battle I couldn't join simply because I couldn't bring myself to invest in reclaiming a word I had never claimed in the first place, and probably never would. White girls were sexy. These spectacled Indian girls who took AP Physics and ran for president of a debate team were not. Of course, the whole Indian thing presented another option, released from the whitewash suburbs, I discovered a contingent of South Asian Americans who embraced their ethnic identities by labeling themselves as either daisy or brown. I occasionally ate lunch with them before lab or spent late nights with them working on problem sets. The girls ironed their hair, wore huge earrings and lusted after South Asian boys who shortened their names to J or ace and wore too much cologne. Oh my god, did you hear the deep feel like J when a typical conversation? Seriously, you know she's just trying to snag a husband, it continued. Gross. I totally saw the perfect wedding sorry online yesterday. Want to see it? It usually ended. Clearly this wasn't going to work. It wasn't until years later that I discovered that these girls were the minority and that there was a whole subset of daisy women who fantasized about political activism and artistic fame rather than elaborate weddings. At the time though, I thought that brown was not the label for me. By the end of my freshman year I had picked out several potential majors and no potential labels. So then the next year is 1999 and I end up going to India and at the beginning of this section there's a conversation with my mom and my grandmother in which my grandmother says you're getting old, you better get married and my mother says she can do whatever she wants, she can find a choice and then I walk into the main room out from the balcony and my brother is looking at the want ads for me trying to find me a husband. So this is that section of the essay. So I walked inside and found my brother huddled beneath a ceiling fan reading the paper. What are you doing? I asked him. Finding you a husband, he said without looking up. Seriously? I said. Yeah. He said pushing his glasses up on his nose but you're doomed. He said doomed the way my family always said the word to each other with a thick Indian accent rolling our tongues and they want someone to cook them curry. What? I said I make a damn good curry. It's not about how good the curry is, he said. It's about focusing your skill set as in only being able to make curry. In this market autonomy and independent thought seem to be discouraged but hey, if you drop out of college you might still make the cut. I mean, if you finish you'll be over-qualified. My grandmother slid up beside me and placed her narrowed hand on my shoulder. My mom's skin always reminded me of walnuts. Moth and ghee, she said. Men are useless. Your mother is right, don't get married. Oh, I said, okay, thanks. Good, she said. She nodded, adjusted her sorry and walked resolutely into the kitchen. My brother tapped the paper excitedly. Hey, this guy wants someone with a master's degree. I bet he settled with someone for someone with a bachelor's, he said this is it, this is your man. Be still my beating heart, I said. So then the rest of the essay is kind of about my journey to find a word for feminism that reconciles being Indian and being American at the same time. So, but if you want to find out, you'll have to read the essay. Bro got called out. All right. So next up we have Hoshunda Sanders who is a religion reporter at the Austin American Statesman a journalism instructor at the University of Texas and my personal favorite, a part-time reference librarian at the Austin Community College. I have a big thing for librarians. She has contributed half a dozen essays for seal press anthologies including Clicks, Secrets and Confidences, P.S. What I Didn't Say and Homelands. Her work has appeared in Bitch Magazine, Vibe and several national newspaper and she lives in Austin, Texas with her adorable mast of shepherd, Cleo. Aw. Thanks for being here everybody. I said I wouldn't yell because of my voice so I might be too soft. I'll try to keep it up. The name of my essay is What's the Female Version of a Hustler? Woman is Training for a Bronx Nerd. And it basically talks about I never really identified as a feminist because I thought it was associated with white women and for me making the choice between becoming a rapper and being a writer ended up being about making this choice between being a feminist and being a feminist which I try to explain in the essay. I have loved stories since I was a little girl. I ordered Florida Romances by Mail and stole Sweet Valley High books from the double day bookstore on Fifth Avenue. Before I knew better, the stories I enjoyed were mostly escapist literature for me. Tales of white women that involved lounging in bikinis or falling in love or doing what they wanted. This was a novel to me. What was accessible. Black girls did not lounge by Crotona Pool for example where the water was shallow and there were likely to be dirty needles around. In the inner city, relaxation was not an option. Still in 7th grade, when I was a skinny, introverted girl who checked out piles of books from the New York Public Library, I read everything from academics, Bell Hooks and Cornell West to Jackie Collins' Lucky Series, still one of my favorites. I believed some version of a plentiful intellectual life was possible but it looked white. My private junior high school was full of black nerds just like me so I felt encouraged. Then we all graduated and my closest friends went off to boarding school where financial aid and academic scholarships had catapulted them. Without either of those things I was left behind without a supportive intellectual community and as a freshman at Aquinas, an all girls Catholic school in the hood. Instead of studying though, I decided to shut down emotionally and to become the meanest chick ever. Specifically, I wanted to be a gangster bitch like the Apache rap song of the same name. You can see how improbable this is, right? Okay. I started dating John who was a few years older than me and worked in the locker room at the Boys and Girls Club where I went after school with my home girl, Lanelle. After work, he and his friends would wrap outside of his apartment building a couple times a week and this inspired me to start writing my own raps and there were none of them in this essay. There's always Q&A! Don't you threaten me with that, okay. One day, John asked me to spit a rhyme for him and after he heard it he was so excited that he deemed me lady raw and intelligent. He was raw and intelligent, so I was the lady version. My heart wanted something different, something that seemed impossible. I wanted to be a writer but I thought that dream was impractical and definitely out of my reach. The writers I emulated were black women like Audre Lorde, Niki Giovanni, Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker but none of them had come from where I had come from. They were also years older than me and in my generation black girls who were smart got teased and beat up for it. I was tossed into a dumpster in the schoolyard of CS67 for instance after getting 100 on too many spelling tests. How I thought would I get from the trash bins of the Bronx to bookstores like Double Day. Besides it seemed uppity to John and his friends and later to me to think that to be a real writer I needed to write essays or books. In my generation I would need to become a rapper. It required courage as a brute force decision, one that looked brave like the rest of the women and men in my hood. I was striving for some kind of mediocrity, some way to fit in with what I was supposed to become instead of alienating myself from my friends, my home boys and my men. There's a description of womanism if you guys are not familiar with it that I won't read here but it's basically about being a black woman who also believes in the equality of women but also feels like womanish so it's from a black folk expression and it's about outrageous audacious behavior and being grown up and acting grown up which I wasn't at that time. Feminism to me was a Manhattan brand of freedom. Being valued as a feminist required cash a fly crib and a burrow where people mattered in a sense of entitlement. I had nothing but pride and no time to be pissed off at John or any man who appreciated me as I was when the rest of the world a world in fact that included feminists ignored me but I've also always loved words and wrangling with sentences in bravado essays and thoughtful styling more than lyrical barbs in the rap game with all of its posturing I was being more of a girl not a woman I was immature regressing by embodying the stereotypes others have threatened to render me invisible Walker's definition of womanism revised the space for me in a larger worldly context. I had believed as a rapper that to be like feminists I had to be a woman who was equal to or even more aggressive than any man it sounds stupid now even as I admitted to myself but that's the problem with youth you have lots of energy and time to come up with half baked theories about things but not a look of sense to really make it all come together thankfully the second time I applied to boarding school I got in and when I left the Bronx when I was around war white women who more frequently used the word feminism I carved out in my mind a space for myself as a newly branded womanist. I stopped rapping and started to sing this time as a hobby and this time it was songs written by bands like extreme and the indigo girls. Claiming my voice gave me room to write too which I've been doing passionately ever since. Most women don't use the word womanist as a journalist writer and bookworm who reads avidly I have yet to see in the word inter mainstream discourse on a consistent basis not that it matters as Sandy Banks a writer for the Los Angeles Times wrote in April the newest generation of would be feminists or womanists is the beneficiary of the work of women before us. But it's more than a question of terminology she wrote it's the evolution of a movement that succeeds by making itself obsolete thank you. All right thank you so much I am so honored by like how talented everyone is in this anthology I wish you all could hear them longer but we are going to do Q&A so you'll hear their voices more um so my partner in crime next to me is Jay Courtney sylvan she's the author of the New York Times best-selling novel Commencement which if you haven't checked it out is amazing and is is largely based on Smith College and these young women's friendships and it's just for this crowd I'm sure it's like the perfect novel so check it out. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Chicago Tribune, New York Magazine Elle Glammer, Men's Vogue and the New York Observer among others. She's the contributor to the essay anthology the secret currency of love and obviously the co-editor of this anthology her second novel Maine will be published by Knopf in June 2011 so definitely look out for that and she lives in Brooklyn, New York thankfully here she is Courtney did a Ted women talk this last week in front of 700 people so I'm just basking in the glow of her right now just wanted everyone to know about that one of the themes that really kept coming up in click in the click essays was the fact that sort of mothers loom very large for women as they're kind of claiming their identities and when that came to feminism half the time it seemed like in the case of Jessica Valenti's essay that you know her mother was this proud second wave feminist and as a result she was like I want nothing to do with feminism get me away from that but eventually she came around which is good for all the readers of feministing I was the opposite and so that's what my essay is about one of the sounds I associate most with my childhood is the click clicking of high heels on the front walk sometime after dusk each night through the window I'd hear my mother coming home from work and feel a little jolt of excitement when the door opened she'd often be laden down with grocery bags and the smell of her perfume it was called creation filled the hallway she worked in television and later had her own public relations firm she won two Emmy awards before she turned 30 some years she out earned my father a lawyer who worked from home when both I and my sister were small in some ways he has always been the more stereotypically feminine of the pair he is sweet and sensitive and gentle when they got engaged my mother told him she didn't do laundry to this day all dirty clothes at 32 garden street are the province of my dad as a little girl I went to the office with my mother from time to time she set me up at a desk where I worked on various imaginary projects and treated her indulgent assistant as my own but for the most part my mother's professional self was a mystery to me the clothes she wore to work dark skirt suits and silk scarves and three inch pointy toed heels were like a uniform for that other part of her life the part that existed off stage they suggested something bigger and better and more exciting that our suburban existence had to offer after bedtime while my parents watched the news downstairs I would occasionally snoop about in their room sneaking one of my mother's scarves out of her closet and wrapping it around my head Marilyn Monroe's style I'd breathe in the scent of creation and imagine who I might become I liked boys a lot but unlike many of my friends I never planned a wedding when we played house I was always the mom the working mom who walked in the door at seven and kicked off her stilettos before starting dinner I thought a lot about my career I wanted to be a writer an actress a hairstylist a lawyer and a fashion designer I saw no reason why I couldn't be all five at once instead of stickers I collected while you were out notepads on which my imaginary secretary Denise this is true left me dozens of urgent messages without discussing it in any sort of academic way without discussing it at all really my parents taught me through their actions about the possibilities of gender balance in a marriage they taught me that a woman can be powerful and opinionated and strong-willed and at the same time be maternal that a man can be simultaneously masculine and nurturing and he might just know things about fabric softener that his wife could never guess mostly because of what I saw in other people's homes I knew that our life was atypical for both our town and our traditional extended Irish Catholic family sometimes playing at a friend's house I'd hear her mother threaten just wait until your father gets home in my house there was no such threat my mother could be silly and fun and tender but if she got mad look out another common remark from kids around the neighborhood we get to have pizza tonight I thought this was strange even then how can your parent be babysitting you in my family dad was just as likely as mom to stay home with you if you were sick or bring your lunch to school if you forgot it on the kitchen counter this is not to say that we lived a life of egalitarian bliss or that I ever gazed out over my Tyson chicken nuggets and complimented my mother on being a perfect model of modern women I was fiercely proud of her and in my precocious way I might remark to a schoolmate oh your mom's a teacher that's nice mine's VP of communication even so I was often jealous of the fact that other kids in my neighborhood didn't come home to babysitters after school or have to go to day camp in the summertime their stay at home moms effortlessly made French braids and brownies or decorated sweatshirts with iron-on Easter Bunny applique and puffy paint my mother didn't have time for that and her braids were usually still up in March if I begged her for a puffy paint sweatshirt she'd make me one but her letters were off the iron-on slightly lumpy I'd let her know that her handy work was not up to snuff by cruelly choosing to wear the perfect shirt my friend Caitlin's mother had made me instead so me in middle school the word feminism was just beginning to make its way into my consciousness like a lot of women from her generation even though my mother embodied what it meant to be a feminist she never called herself one if anything she grew embarrassed and self-conscious when I tried to engage her in a conversation about what it meant to be an independent, professionally successful woman like her as if I were really just criticizing her for being lousy on the home front she came from a no frills working class family she was the first one of them to go to college she seemed to think there was something negative or self-indulgent about calling one self a feminist she once told me only half joking that the women's movement might be a ploy to get females to do more work both at the office and around the house and that's when I began to realize that my mother was overwhelmed she seemed to suspect that feminism if it applied to her at all was part of what had gotten her into the jam in the first place as it is with many girls my relationship with my mother quickly went from taking her as a kid to misunderstanding and disliking her as an adolescent I had a high school English teacher named Maxine a writer who understood the importance and also the limitations of words she seemed different from my mother in most every way and I adored her at once Maxine had long tan limbs and dark hair with flecks of gray mixed in she always wore pants and sensible flats and no children my freshman year she married an artist in a wedding ceremony officiated by Howard Zinn how cool was that it's really cool most important of all she was a loud and proud card carrying feminist Maxine was the rare sort of teacher who I just wanted to be around all the time who more to the point I just wanted to be I spent many after school hours sitting at her desk talking about literature and life and love feminism always made its way into the conversation and she spoke the language with passion by junior year my bedroom door was plastered with bumper stickers that said, in goddess we trust and feminism is the radical notion that women are people which I think Katha Pallett was the first person who said that and Katha Pallett's daughter Sophie Pallett Cohen has an essay in our anthology which is very interesting she read it my bookshaws were crammed full of Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin I attended rallies and lectures and attempted to engage my uncles in debates about abortion while they were trying to watch Notre Dame football on the couch I decided to attend a women's college known for its fierce feminist underpinnings my parents mostly seemed amused by all of this viewing it as a byproduct of teenagehood something rough and overly intense that would be tamed in time with the streaks in my hair or the ox blood flu-vog bootside war even in August you're a feminist I would tell my mother over and over again no I'm not she'd say well why, what do you think it means anyway oh please not this again and it goes on and eventually my mom did start calling herself a feminist you'll have to read to find out why we'll start with a follow up to Courtney because you just invited it my dad has also admitted that he's a feminist where does he stand sure I still don't quite know do we call men feminists or do we call them like feminist sympathizers when I was in college I thought the latter but now I think the former so I don't think I ever bothered to ask my dad and it also seemed clear that he was already on the page whereas my mother probably having been asked later in the essay I started to talk about ways in which my mother probably like she never changed her name but people always called her Mrs. Sullivan to the point where even when she had her own company it had Gallagher which is her maiden name it was called Gallagher-Sullivan Communications you know it's like so she in some ways really embodied it and I think my father does as well but in some ways the culture isn't always ready for it or wasn't especially where we live and it sounds like she was actually more defensive about the label in some ways my father was probably saying sure yeah I'm a feminist great I was kind of pushing back against it it's really interesting so Miriam I wanted to ask you some of what you talked about arguing about with your dad because I know you now it's so touching to me because it's essentially essentialism right this idea that men and women are inherently different in various ways and I know now that that's a lot of where you're drawn to right and sort of argue both of folks who are not feminists but also really feminist movement we've got a large kind of swath of people who talk about feminism in very essentialist terms these are people who would say if women ruled the world there would be no war right like that's the most obvious and common example so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the fact that that was in your heart it's such a young age and it's still part of your work like do you see that as a continuum for you or yeah I mean it started with just a lot of questions right like asking questions about the stuff I saw around me and I grew up with a brother so and in you know is he here can we embarrass him too he's not but my mom is here though and I do want to say that hey yes Miriam's mom is here actually and she is in the essay and I do talk about her as sort of a feminist role model for me because she did my parents divorce at a very young age and she sort of raised me and my brother as an independent woman and that was a very big feminist model for me so in contrast to my conservative sort of anti feminist father but but yeah you know I feel like these questions about gender difference are at the root of feminism and they're at the root they're sort of at the root of my coming to feminism is sort of just asking very basic questions of why do we treat boys differently than girls and why are you know boys sports rules different than girls sports and what do we think about you know the differences between boys and girls in that way and I think what for me has evolved is feminism has evolved those questions the questions are still there the answers are different and the realities are different because feminism has come so far because in many ways our lives my life is very different than my mom's life because of the work of the feminists who've come before us so I think the questions we ask are different so now the question of like is a man a feminist to me shouldn't be a question anymore right because I think that feminism shouldn't be about women versus men and women's equality and women can do everything that men can do it should be about kind of creating a world where people aren't limited by their gender identity period whatever it may be so it's that's because feminists have come so far so I think there's a lot of that's what I'm invested in is that conversation about how is feminism moving around this issue of gender identity because of what's come before us right it also seems like a real kernel about the performance of gender because in your essay there's this whole thing of you kind of performing heteronormativity and all the girls are performing it because no one even wants to date boys yet but we're all pretending we do and so it's like it's interesting that part of the continuum is also recognizing that gender is a performance so that you can then perform it in the way you want to like you kind of reclaim the performance in a certain way would you talk a little bit about that yeah I mean I talk about kind of you know I sort of followed in line as a kid because the only models I had were sort of very straight you know very gendered models of girls wear this and boys wear that and you know you buy whatever is on the rack and have a coming fit and only in the girls side never on the boys side kind of thing and then going to college sort of starting to meet moral models and friends of mine who are less gender conforming and kind of like tomboy's or like you know you know just sort of dressed more boyishly and I talk sometimes about this experience of going with a friend of mine to an American eagle and she immediately went over to like the left side of the store where all the guys clothes was and I was like what are you doing we're allowed to do that and she's like what are you talking about I like I you know I buy guys clothes I was like and I had this moment of like oh my god you can do that there was this like you know this like fence that you couldn't cross and if you tried to buy something they would like frown at you which you know that could happen but so is this moment of like oh my god there's this whole other world like I have a whole other way of being a whole other way of like presenting myself gender wise so yeah there's this sort of idea of gender as performance that's a piece of that right that but I sort of was like okay here's all these other role models that I have now yeah for what you can do what it means to be a woman or what it means to kind of present yourself in the world and that was a big piece of my own coming out in my own and I think like I bring that to feminism definitely awesome thank you Matthew I was thinking a lot there's a piece in Matthew's essay which she didn't read which is about discovering the work of Chandra Mohanty who for those who don't know is just this like incredibly gifted academic feminist and I recently heard her at the National Women's Studies Association meeting I was sitting with Samita Mukhopadai who's co-editor with us at Feministing and by the end I was so alienated because she's just like so smart and it was so academic that I couldn't even and I have a master's degree whatever but I could not kind of wrap my head around it so I was thinking about the contrast between being able to find okay there's all these incredible South Asian feminists writing this stuff but and particularly since you work at Sesame Street and also do academic stuff I wondered if you could talk about kind of that academic continuum and the tension between the potential alienation of very academic writing and in the power of obviously seeing someone like Chandra Mohanty writing the kind of stuff she writes like how do you deal with that struggle? So the essay that I actually referenced in my essay is Feminism Without Borders which is one of her more I think accessible works but I mean I think for me the thing is it's like my I come from a long line of women who I think are considered feminists I mean my grandmother who's in this essay she was you know she was one of the first female doctors in India and she my mom you know my mom is a my family is very politically active and very kind of politicized but because we're Indian I just never thought we could be feminists right? So to me the power of someone like an Ominarayan or Chandra Mohanty is actually I mean it's not I mean it's not even just reading their essays it's the fact that here's a woman who looks like me who thinks like me who's from my part of the world who looks like my mom who looks like my grandma and she's a feminist right you know so I think I think that there's there's it's I mean and I guess the other thing that comes to mind is this um great TED talk by Chimananda Diichi who writes um Haffie Ella Sun she's like an Nigerian author and she talks in the talk it's about the danger of a single story and for me feminism was always a single story it was always Gloria Sinem you know it was always Naomi Klein so just seeing these other women and seeing these other stories and feeling like my story fit with theirs and not the way that these same women are writing about you know India because these you know someone like even if it's easy to read uh Naomi Klein or Gloria Sinem neither of whom writes about India the way that they write about it didn't feel accessible you know this like all these women are oppressed they have a hundred babies they have you know whatever like I don't know I mean I'm related to really a lot of really loud domineering women like I you know like I don't know anyone like the woman in Brick Lane like my my aunties are in charge and there's no question about it you know right so I think for me it's just seeing that in the world and seeing it seeing someone like that in the academy getting called an academic and a leading scholar for me is the most important piece of it right right and and it's interesting you say that because part of your job now is to create stories on this international level for children right so how does your you know feminist sensibility come into that work are you really just on a regular basis of trying to present all these different stories for kids yeah and I think it goes into my work as a writer and my work on on saucy on the board of this organization as well I think it's just about you know kids learn gender from and this is my doctoral head on kids learn their gender roles at the age of two and three is what psychologists usually say I mean that's very early to know that girls are supposed to play with dolls and boys are supposed to play with trucks and it happens in families where parents are very consciously not trying to do those things right so a lot of my job is kind of distilling those things down and making them you know easy for kids and also you know the children's fiction I write is like that as well I mean it's not it's not easy but I think a lot of it is the mindset you come at I mean just the idea that the protagonist in a story can be a seven year old Indian girl right you know and that you know it doesn't have to be a story about India right it could be a detective novel she just happens to be Indian right you know so I think it's understanding the concept but it's also shifting your mindset I think a lot of it is right and that seems like a really awesome moment we're at I feel like there's there diversity used to mean you have the person on the panel representing their particular you know location of diversity right and I feel like there's a new consciousness about have people of diverse background who are not there to represent the entire population of those they are identified with right so it does seem to be like we're starting to get there to some degree and ocean I wanted to ask you the the quote at the end that you read is so provocative right the idea that if the movement becomes obsolete like that that's the point is that the movement should become obsolete do you feel like the movement is moving towards being obsolete do you feel because it's it's it's so kind of fragmented right I mean there's I mean even the people on this panel like we all do such different kinds of work even though we all had this anthology in common it's certainly not the movement that either womanist or feminist that we've seen before in terms of the cohesion what do you think about that all right that's a really hard question also let me just point that out but I mean man okay I almost would have rather you'd ask me to rap I mean oh it's a total option if you prefer to rap I was just joking I was joking no I mean I'm saying I mean oh well so I mean I think I wish I wish that we're on its way to becoming obsolete but I think that it's kind of like anything else like my favorite thing about December is that it's a time of reflection right as you get ready for the new year and so I think of that as my time to revise my dreams right because I've achieved some of them and some of them are still out there in the universe and I think that's how it is for feminism I think that there are some things that have been achieved but clearly women still don't make as much as men you know there are women who become CEOs and then you know opt out and there's like this odd discussion about that so they become mothers so then they're not the same they're not as valuable to some people and so I think there are all these other kinds of discussions that have started to happen that mean that the movement still has life in it but it's going to maybe look like something else and so the question is how to keep that conversation going in any kind of cohesive way because as women achieve some of their dreams and you know maybe male feminists if we want to you know add them as they see those things shift the question is what are your new dreams going to be what is your new vision of feminism going to become and you know I don't really know that anyone knows yeah which is such an important question because I feel like many of us do the kind of work where we're constantly in response you know at feminist when we're blogging we're like what's the news of the day what do we need to say in response to all the shitty stuff going on as opposed to like what do we want to envision like what can we put out there that's a new you know we could try to do that in our leadership obviously or other ways but that's a really important vital point thank you Court I'm going to throw one more at you let the audience so Courtney occupies an interesting space and she's a novelist and I think a lot about this because her novel when I read it my first reaction was like oh my gosh fictional heroines can be just like me like it was one of the first times I read about young women that I really identified in a contemporary novel because it seems like sort of the world of the novel is a fairly male world still or like a world that just didn't feel close to my experience like my experience wasn't romantic enough to be in a novel you know and that was kind of what my first reaction out of Courtney's novel and I was and of course people tried to target it as chick lit like in this respectful way it was like oh it's a smart woman's chick lit right which is like a really bizarre thing to say because you're like what are you saying about people who like chick lit and what is chick lit I don't know it's a very complicated question but I wanted you to just speak to what it's like to be a feminist and a novelist and write about young women and do you feel that pressure to be fit into a particular kind of box around those labels interesting well commencement in many ways that's the name of the novel does deal with feminism one of the four main characters ends up working particularly on the issue of sex trafficking which is something that is very important to me I had worked for four years for Bob Herbert one of the op-ed columnist at the New York Times and did quite a lot of research on that and I think being a newspaper researcher and writer especially with the kind of shrinking word counts that you're allowed to have these days sometimes the most interesting parts of the story end up on the cutting room floor and fiction is such a wonderful place to use those so in some ways I loved that and I wanted to explore feminism in that very direct way and also kind of what happens to like a campus activist when they go out into the real world what is it like and then how does feminism fit into these characters lives in smaller ways in the beginning of the book one of them is getting married and no one can believe she's going to change her last name and she's registered for KitchenAid mixer and all of these things like you went to Smith how the hell did this happen but you know there but at the same time this is a character who works for now and who's very interested in embracing feminism in her own way and so they're all kind of trying to make sense of it I guess in that sense and what I was like oh the chicklet thing you know in some ways I feel like it's a little bit like that Jessica Seinfeld cookbook where she puts a spinach and brownies or something because a lot of women have told me oh I thought your book would be this fun beach read but I really did learn a lot about the women's movement and women's issues from it so I think in a way that's kind of good but descriptions and definitions of fiction are so odd like I saw I mean my book has been described as literary fiction it's been described as chicklet and I was in a bookstore in I think Ann Arbor and they had a little write up like staff recommends and they said this thriller will keep you up all night and I'm like thriller but okay I'll take it but actually something that you said to me really put me at ease which was that my book had the first feminist villain you'd ever seen and you liked that and that made me happy because with fiction you know unlike writing a newspaper piece or a magazine piece you really don't know where the characters are going to go and there is a character in commencement who she is not based on anyone sort of second wave feminist but she's very radical personally I would identify as a McKinnon knight I think Katherine McKinnon is an absolute genius and not everyone necessarily does but I do and you know I think that in some ways this character is radical in the sense that some people in the movement have kind of pushed her away and in that she's not based on Katherine McKinnon nobody would write that on a blog or anything I don't want to get an email from Katherine McKinnon but just that idea of a radical feminist and people even within her own movement not being quite sure at the same time she's a person who creates massive amounts of change but this character wasn't a villain initially but in the end she did become one and with fiction you can't always control you know it's not like a message thing it would be good so that was something I sort of worried about but then you put me at ease by telling me that oh that's good alright so let's hear from the audience I'm sure this is such a big group we really appreciate everyone coming out anyone have questions about the essays you heard specifically about you know women's perspectives on young feminism in particular yes the question was where Courtney had gone to school Courtney is a Smith grad all women's colleges are definitely in the house at least I had grown up in this fairly traditional Irish Catholic family and I was constantly just waging war on my uncles in particular who are very conservative about everything all issues but mostly women's issues and they're lawyers and they're really good fighters so many times in high school I would be fighting them and I would end up in tears and I would end up tongue tied and one of them said to me good point just good point oh my god I was so full of pride I could not believe it and so I was so used to kind of fighting fighting fighting and when I got to Smith in a way it was almost disturbing because it suddenly felt everyone agreed and it would be like I'd be like wait a minute so then I would sort of start playing devil's advocate just because I thought well now I have to and in a way I think it kind of helped me be more fully formed that I came from that sort of idea of like pushing back pushing back against a family member but then you know sometimes you'll just remember what they said and bits bits seep in that's funny I didn't go to a women's college because when I was looking at college I was like well I can't go to a women's college I want to date men whoops any other questions thought I saw a hand back there is everyone shy? yes it's one of the years younger than you guys and I sort of wonder what's going to happen and how she sees it I know how she sees it but it's just cool think of what you're doing and what you're thinking about thank you that's really sweet yes I'm just wondering you brought up Shondra Monty and we're working here for like 3-4 years and it's like the second time her name has come up and for me personally it was a total opposite experience that you had it was the first time I could really go that makes sense that feels like my mother in an African village and what she's doing and having never heard of feminism but taking care of poor things and doing tons of other stuff so I'm curious as to how concepts like feminism without borders would seem right at the center of what needs to happen and the movement to come to the next level is the one thing I continually watch is sort of the racial stratification of stuff all the time how how do you guys work to bring that more into the center of the conversation because it kind of scares me to hear that that had like a lot of that had flown over your head because for me that was actually the entry point where I went wow I did what she said and I should be very clear I was at the National Women's Studies Association meeting so it's a place the context is such I think that's where someone like Shondra Mahanti feels like she can give out her like most sophisticated like potentially esoteric ideas because it's like these are academic feminists I don't happen to have a lot of academic feminist training so perhaps it was more I mean I've read her stuff and not been alienated but hearing her speak I was like well and the other meta thing was she was speaking about on borders like speaking about how do we create this accessibility but her language was so inaccessible that I was just like my mind was sort of being blown but I think does anyone want to speak to that idea I mean one of the things I hear talking about is kind of this intersectionality idea so feminism is not about you know as we have repeatedly said here women's equality necessarily but about race class gender ability sexual orientation all of these things coming together transforming our experiences as men and women and how do we sort of create a liberation around people getting to truly be who they are in the world without these prescriptive roles or these systemic inequalities that hold them back that's the lens through which I try to write my work it's the lens through which we at Feministing try to do our work does anyone else want to speak about how you see those intersections coming together so I think it's a hard question I think I mean I completely agree with you and actually Chandra Mahante led me to Patricia Hill Collins and a lot of kind of black feminist this was kind of my entry point into this whole women of color type feminism that really resonated with me in a way that white feminism did not and actually the woman who gave it to me she's one of the most amazing professors I've ever had and she was white and she was like I think you'll like this you know I know you're feeling alienated this is white but I think that at least when I was in grad school and now I'm in the middle of the world there's there's just there's not a lot of panels like this where there's conversation between the two worlds particularly at academic panels I mean when I present at academic conferences and I present my work on South Asia the room is full of South Asians and when I happen to go to a panel that's about African Americans the room is full of African Americans and I don't want to those spaces are really important and they're very important to me in particular I'm the only brown person for miles around other than my brother right so like you know you have a great tan was a very common thing that I heard growing up in Wisconsin so those spaces where you have people I mean I think there needs to be space for both those safe spaces where you can all you know like when you read commencement that was a space for you where you felt like oh this is me this is somebody I can see but I don't think that there's a lot of conversation happening between between the people that it needs to happen you know for that was completely incoherent but I think there needs to be more conversation between people who come from different places in order for solidarity to happen and I think at least my experience these movements are just kind of coming together at least in my job like a lot of us are just kind of finding our feet within the spaces and so there hasn't been a lot of movement between spaces because I mean Chandra Mohanty's essay came out in what like 98 maybe one so and that's not very long by academic standards you know I do think it's a direction things need to be going in but there's in you know even writing my dissertation I think I found four authors maybe who I could use who were from that movement so I think it's a combination of building it up and also starting to realize where we're coming from when we're talking to each other and young adult fiction to which I think is really key you know it's not just Sweet Valley High anymore right it's like Yeah I mean a different experience my brother is here as well and you can ask him at the age of like 11 I think I declared my favorite book was The Bluest Eye by Tony Morrison which for a little white girl in color springs is slightly strange looking through these identity politics right why does the blue-eyed you know blonde at the time girl so moved by Tony Morrison's work so I think obviously I had a different experience than then you know a young black girl who was reading that at the same time would have had but I think I think there's all of these entry points and I think one of the kind of elephants in the room around this conversation is like white women have to deal with white privilege if we're ever going to have if we are going to show up to these meetings and if we are going to have these conversations so that's I mean that's such an undone piece of this whole conversation is the majority of us who grew up with white privilege still don't even know how to talk about that how to think about it from my generation we grew up listening to hip-hop politics so that complicates I mean there's just this whole huge to my mind very unhad conversation about white privilege that needs to happen in order for that piece of it to get done I was going to just mention the post-racial moniker that I hate very much because I think it lets us off the hook as a society about things that we have not talked about and that we are not usually brave enough to talk about outside our circles of power and privilege and influence and so I think it's very much about having the courage to tell your story because there's not just one story and also to bring up stuff like white privilege and company to have a conversation about it but there just aren't that many opportunities across races and genders I don't think to have those authentic kind of conversations Yeah I just add that you know I think part of the core of this is that an intersectional feminism is a decentralized feminism because it's really hard to think about an intersectional feminism with like one leader right because that one leader unless they happen to embody every you know they're never going to embody every single piece of the identities that people bring right so for me I feel like the way to centralize different communities voices and perspectives is to bring feminism to those communities and to those movements right so and this is a debate I've had with kind of prominent older feminists a lot like what work is feminist work can you do immigration work and do it as a feminist and I think immigration work can be feminist and the key is bringing the gender analysis to the immigration work right and so in that way then you're no longer just sort of centralizing the experience of necessarily white you know cisgender straight feminist women but you're bringing feminism to immigration work which inherently has these roots and all these different movements so I feel like that's the struggle the media wants to see a centralized feminism with one leader and everybody rallying with the same sign saying this is what a feminist looks like but actually feminism is infiltrating in all these different movements across class and race and sort of issue boundaries and so we don't know how to see it in the same way but I think it's there if we look for it and that's a success of sort of intersectional feminism kind of bringing it away from this one central piece about you know gender you know pay equity or whatever the key central feminist issue was you know so and we've also at feminism struggled with this in like super practical ways because we are technically a collective but the two white cisgendered women myself and Jessica are the ones who get the majority of media calls get the majority of like speaking opportunities at this point and so we've tried a lot to figure out like how do we buck this system because even when we would say to CNN like I'm actually not the right person to talk about that too, Perez is writing about birth politics and far more of an expert on it than I am we find that they're reluctant because they know they're like this is their paradigm is like the young pretty white feminist girl talking about feminism so one of the things we try to do is declared Sumita Mukapada the executive editor of Feminist and she actually has taken this leadership role because she's like totally badass and amazing but that wasn't our intention initially we were like let's give her this title that the rest of the world understands as like the leader and then when they call we can say actually the executive editor and then they're like oh yes put us on the phone with the exact thank you you know so I mean and it hasn't been terribly effective I have to admit even on that level but but it's interesting I mean it comes down to even like the most practical things for us of trying to be so conscious of it that we can figure out how to even like manipulate outsiders perspectives of what what a feminist looks like etc so it's complicated yes I mean in addition to men doing the laundry which is fantastic if that's what they want to do I think that more and more you are seeing women within the movement understanding that the involvement of man is so crucial and I mean the thing that most keeps me awake at night and makes me sure that I need to call myself a feminist and claim that word for me personally it's around the area of sexual violence sex trafficking all of these issues and you know it's like you go to women's college they're going to give every woman a rape whistle that you can blow if someone's attacking you that's great but why don't we also talk about the male side of the equation and who are the men who are going to be chasing me through Smith campus and what do we do about that how are they raised what are they taught about sexuality about women versus men I mean it's not just sexuality of course it's also housework and everything down the spectrum but I think there are a lot of incredible men's groups that have formed in the last several years that are really talking I mean I know Jack there's so many but Robert Jensen who's at UT particularly talking about pornography he is oh he's such a genius I want to meet him he's amazing Jackson Katz who I think is in Boston and he talks particularly about men in groups that you know one individual man they act very differently and think very differently than he might in a group and so he looks at the kind of like stereotypically male groups like sports teams men in the military fraternities and kind of talking about their ideas of masculinity and sort of how to turn it on its head and I think a lot of particularly within sex trafficking a lot of the focus in the last few years has turned to the demand side of that equation who are the men what makes them think this is okay and what do we do about it so I think that more and more men are becoming involved and as I said in college I didn't think a man could call himself a feminist but now I absolutely do and I think it's crucial that men do I'd also like to throw out Byron Hertz Beyond Beats and Rhymes which is like an incredible documentary film about masculinity and hip hop and heteronormativity and a bunch of stuff and just add that I think one of the most interesting things from my perspective happening with male feminists is this notion of you know try to end violence against women which is the entry point for a lot of men into the movement how do you get past that keep doing that but get to the idea that this movement is liberating for you like it's not just about stopping violence against me like you get to be a more realized authentic fulfilled human being if you're not being repressed by the notions of what appropriate masculinity is so that I don't feel like we're quite there in the sort of public conversation I feel like actually Gloria Steinem and Eve Ensler both in the last year I've heard say that you know that they are encouraging men to just picture what would it be like if you didn't have all these structures telling you this is what a boy does you know a boy doesn't cry a boy likes sports a boy whatever it is like imagine the freedom you would feel if we didn't have this sort of binary structure in place and we do have a man in the anthology I just wanted to say who writes about becoming a feminist via these two wonderful totally different things one is his incredibly strong African-American mother and grandmother and Martha Stewart we were like whoa okay that's interesting Mary you guys want to take that anyone I think it's a good thing I think it's did everyone hear the question the question was about women's studies to gender studies and a lot of a lot of campuses are also going to women and gender studies so this idea of trying to be inclusive I mean this connects to the last conversation right because I think I like to talk about it as feminism's gender identity this right because I think it's both a question of think about that for a second about the question of the role of men but also the question of what's the role of a women's movement in today's era right and for young women especially I think there's a less of an immediate relationship to a women's movement then maybe there was and also depends on what kind of women you are right and what identity is sort of what labels you prioritize so I think what's happening on college campus is sort of reflective of that question like what's the need of a women's movement and what's the role of men in feminism or in like the conversation about sexism and I think like Courtney saying we're getting to this point where we understand that women are not the only ones affected by gender oppression right and this isn't just about women can do you know it isn't just about women's equality right it's about gender it's sort of about how does gender affect all of us in our lives and I think we're seeing it in the mainstream conversation now more when we're starting to see things like boys are falling behind right which a lot of women are falling behind is you know BS kind of use of statistics but there are all these places in which you know not as many men on college campuses you know boys are doing worse in elementary school than girls now and the he's session the he's session right and yeah men are losing their jobs and women aren't and all that kind of stuff but so I this idea that the recession is affecting men more than women yeah but so you know I think it's so it sort of comes people are starting to understand that oh wait boys are right and it's not just women's oppression right but that there is obviously gender differences in the way that people kind of live their lives and are treated and are what things they're able to do so I think that it's good if we can kind of broaden our perspective to talk about how gender affects everyone right how boys are limited by gender how girls transgender how trans folks I mean across the spectrum how gender kind of structures our world and limits our world and kind of you know lays out the path for us in many ways and so I think the problem you know on the college campus side is that the name might change but as the study changing and academics takes a long time to catch up right so but I think it's important to to both say you know saying it's gender studies says does makes it a little bit easier for a guy who wants to study it for people want to know why you women studies major you know so it makes there's an opening for non-female identified people and it also tries to reflect this this question that it's not just about women's oppression anymore you know it's a bigger conversation sorry go ahead I was just going to say I think it's also important to talk about where we locate the accountability for the problem so you you can't expect the oppressed to overturn everything without the help of the oppressor changing so the idea of doing gender studies and anti-racism studies it's like it's not just up to women to change the world like men have to be involved too you know so I was going to say something slightly off topic something that you said kind of made me think this that one of the reasons we wanted to do this book in the first place was because it's a very popular sort of media message feminism is dead there's no more feminism blah blah blah and you know I also went to Smith and I had this great opportunity to interview her for our alumni magazine and it was a long long long interview that probably got you know condensed down to this but I don't care because I got to hear all the answers and now I can just regurgitate them all the time and you know I said something to her about do you find it concerning that so few women young women identify as feminists and she said compared to what she said there was never it was never all women are feminists you know it wasn't like 1970 and every single woman in America is a feminist you know so I think there's this important question which we're sort of trying to get at in this book but I also think about a lot what does bring young women and young men to this table and sort of how do we do that Courtney and I did an interview and we were doing some publicity for click with Cosmopolitan the website version of Cosmo which in a way is great exposure because so many women read Cosmo so many women who probably wouldn't identify as feminists but at the same time it's frustrating because you're being asked to kind of explain what this does for us what can we get out of it you know like it's frustrating so literally they asked you know this anthology full of these fascinating voices like so tell us do you pick up the paycheck at the end of the date and I was like really this is what we're going to talk about it's hard because you do want to infiltrate those spaces obviously we're very happy they're writing about it on the other hand it's so frustrating the quality of the kinds of engagement in those spaces is like there's one in the back I can't see your face but it's a great question that's a really good question and I think that this is part of what's sort of difficult about identifying yourself with a word and wishing that other people will also identify themselves with the same word and finding a sense of community with those who identify but also sometimes there's friction there's this is what you think feminism is well this is what I think feminism is personally as I said I think Catherine McKinnon is a genius I really don't believe that pornography is empowering I don't believe that I really don't believe in the idea of sex work I don't believe that that I think in this culture pornography is a more lucrative industry than Hollywood so the message they have the power to send a message that this is empowering that this is fun that this is whatever is huge it's strong I mean there are probably people sitting right here with me who disagree but you know when you have the average age of entrance into prostitution in this country being 11 or 12 I find it very hard to think of it as an empowered choice and going back to the issue of race Rachel Lloyd who runs Gems who is this amazing woman you know she told me a story about how she works with young girls who are in prostitution and how it stands for girls empowering empowerment mentoring services if you haven't checked it out you should totally check it out and give them money and give them attention they're amazing they're amazing and you know she told me about how Oprah had come to them and wanted them to be on the show and so she was really excited and they said okay and she has certain girls who are sort of trained to speak to the media and sort of savvy in a place where they can and they said okay so we want basically three white girls from suburbia she's like well those aren't the girls who are trafficked into prostitution we have a lot of teenage girls who come from pretty bad family situations most of whom are black who grew up in Harlem which is where she's based well no they don't want that they want like the three girls from suburbia and often you'll see the story on the news that's like this could be your neighbor the white girl has been trafficked into well it doesn't really happen so it's hard for us like when we live in a media culture that's sort of so interested in like you said having you know you on the panel or you on the whatever or Rachel Lloyd non-existent white 15 year old prostitute who ended up going to Harvard or whatever because those aren't really the stories right Prez do you want to jump in? we're all about respectful disagreement so I'm glad you brought up this question not to get into the like dynamics of sex work and sex trafficking I think it's a complicated issue that you know feminists have disagreed about for a long time but I think the you know it's never simple enough it's never we can just be anti-porn or pro-porn or anti-sex work or pro-sex work it's really I think it's really complicated based on the context based on the people involved based on the political situation so that's what I think you're getting at is that it's never easy it's never simple and I think sometimes the sort of historical positions, feminist positions have been too simple and too sort of like blanket like you know we're totally anti this and we're totally anti that and this is always always oppressive to women period ever you know and so it's not that simple our lives are not that simple we live in a capitalist system we can't avoid that you know so that's the challenge is trying to have a nuanced position on some of these issues that it really matters what you know what region you're talking about what people you're talking about and the context of it and I find that the sort of black in my positions are just it's too simple you know so I think that's the challenge is both sitting you know in a room of feminist and knowing that you disagree vehemently with someone about a big issue like you know this one of porn and sex work or another issue you know and still feel like well we still have something in common and then to take an extreme example right it's like Sarah Palin is a feminist right and like what does that mean to share so there's I think there's bigger questions about who is a feminist even now that are that we're asking that are even bigger than these sort of like more nuanced disagreements about certain issues it's like our whole feminist platform is sort of being co-opted and what you know who gets to do that so I think it's a challenge and not you know I'm going to answer for it that Sarah Palin is a feminist she's in an article talking about Camille Poglia who many feminists don't think is a feminist but she calls herself a pro sex pro art pro female Camille but so she said Sarah is a feminist and then she named after naming Madonna a feminist it was in the context of naming Madonna a feminist and then now is moving forward and saying yes I see Sarah Palin as a feminist so which is interesting because she is herself right so it's a question we're going to draw a line in the sand and say if you're on this side you're a feminist you're not you know and what issues would be in that line and like I don't know you know I'd doubt we could come to agreement on that right to be really hard well I'd even like to bring it back to the womanist feminist question who shouldn't erase because I think that that's a really interesting one I mean at this point are you like you said you don't see the word womanist use regularly do you want to do you want to see it use regularly do you want to be someone who uses it regularly like how how do you interact with those terms at this point I mean I think it's complicated because I'm a person who resists labels I don't like boxes right and I think that most feminists are most most people who who would consider themselves feminist or womanists are like that they are complex and then so they resist being in a box but you can't build community by being individual in that way you know what I mean so you can't really have an alliance or a movement where you're saying I resist being you know associated or affiliated with you by the use of this word at the same time I think it's important to not it's like living in a colorblind society or opposed racial society that is the ideal right we would like to to not necessarily discriminate or classify people specifically according to race or color but at the same time when you do that you you make them sort of this monotonous group of people where you don't see any difference at all and that's not the point so if you don't see the difference then we can have a conversation because you don't know what's different about me and how it makes me feel that you don't see me if you just call me a feminist if I could be something else and also be in allegiance with you if we agree and we overlap in some places then that's a really powerful place to come from so I mean I don't necessarily call myself a womanist or a feminist I try to live my life as a womanist as someone who you know both appreciates and loves feminism and the work that it does and also can see where Audra Lord and other you know Alice Walker and other people have been at the margins of feminist work and this idea of a movement where you know black women were just kind of you know we always worked we always worked I mean we always worked so so feminism feminism as a movement became this thing about working outside of the home you know and so where do I fit in that you know that there wasn't really a pathway that I could see and when I found a word I felt like oh my god like yeah I could totally understand you know like and it became it became my path to feminism right so so yeah that way it's not only race-based but also class-based which is a huge basis of all of this because when Betty Friedan was writing about you know the oppression of being home and having to play tennis a lot of women you know white and black were saying screw you I mean I worked my ass off right talking about you know not that that wasn't valid what she was writing about because for her and for a lot of other women it was but but there's a long legacy of women of all races working in this culture and many other going way way back pre-Friedan right right yeah brother I have a question about that we're talking about gender you're defining your method for yourself in every way and that's something that came up a lot in the book especially in 60% of this group that about learning to be feminist and be Indian learning to be feminist and support African-American rights or rights and there are other things to say about that in the book yeah learning to not define yourself is a lot to do yeah do you feel like you're still kind of fighting for everybody do you feel like you're still kind of fighting between the areas where there's a clash between trying to be feminist and trying to be something else, trying to be Indian or anything else he's my brother I'm not interviewing I think it means you should have to answer it I think that's a great question it's a great question thank you first of all are you read the book wow to be fair I know I think it's a hard question and I think all of this panel is really making me think about what are these words for why is it important to be called a feminist why is it important to be called these different things the idea of intersectionality really helps the idea that you can be lots of things at once and you experience oppression and privilege in many places at once I'm not really answering the question though no not necessarily not necessarily not the way that intersectionality is defined I mean I guess it's for me it's about having words like this is about kind of moving beyond the individual moving to the structures in society that keep you from being all of those things at once I mean even the question before about sex trafficking I mean I think the big point that you made in that question was like why aren't there other options for women you know like why is this considered a viable life choice I mean one of the things that I did when I was in grad school is I taught in this school for kids who were it was an alternative sentencing program so these kids got sentenced to this program where they had to go to school and things like that instead of going to Rikers these are some of the smartest kids I've ever met in my life and for them they had gone to prison because selling drugs on the street was more interesting and more rewarding than going to school I mean that's a problem but there's not a school in their neighborhood that they can you know go to and that they have these options so for me I think it's a lot about changing the structures that keep you from doing all these things at once and being all these things at once and then also just going back to the idea of a single story I mean having more voices like this out there where you can proudly say you know I am more than one thing and the rest of the world just has to deal with it because that's who I am so I agree I don't necessarily think of myself as fighting I mean I definitely do a lot of different things because I feel like I want to resist the classification of black women as being one thing or another and I feel like I enter spaces with the thought in mind that I can live what I believe instead of having to be a part of a label or a box at the same time you know and I actually kind of hate semantics you know so I mean like women as feminists like whatever I just want to live whatever it is that I believe at the same time I think that it's really useful because there's so much silence about expectations of women you know still and I think that's my biggest fight if there is one is that you know there's silence around you know women who resist being mothers women who resist being wives and if you don't do that then you're basically not normal still I mean and now that I'm 32 I know this because you know most of my friends are getting married and having babies and I don't judge them for that but they there is judgment in the other direction so and to me that's still problematic we'll do one more question I know that's always a lot of pressure to be the last question but no one feels what do you mean how do you trust unpack that idea for me we'll have conversations about sex work or have conversations about pornography forget that we come from a society that at some point went into other societies Native American society, African society, plucked human leaves out from those societies, pulled them into this society, sold them as child, breeded them made family and intimacy and everything totally devoid of meaning not just for those people but for the people who have inflicted it upon them now we come to this stage without ever having clearly ever worked that out it just becomes very hard for me to imagine trusting myself saying well sex work I think it someone should be able to sell their body coming from that particular history that doesn't seem like it ever gets dealt with or comes up in conversation these conversations happen without a Native American being addressed how do we even know we have the right to be having some of these conversations I think a lot, oh can I start that that's a deep question that's big so I'm gonna try to get to it a little bit I mean I think a lot of the ways in which you see especially well it's mostly young girls in prostitution there's this shocking and you can totally disagree with me if you want to say so but in my opinion there are these shocking similarities to exactly the way that slavery occurred a lot of these girls are branded by their pimps for example so that you know who the owner of the girl is that to me is a direct thing that's from slavery recently I was in Nashville for a book conference and this wasn't a very bad idea but my boyfriend and I were at Best Buy for goodness sakes and on the way back we're driving and there's Andrew Jackson's Homestead you can go do a tour so I'm like that might be interesting let's go do that it was one of the most disturbing and upsetting things I've ever seen in my life because here was this president of our country and he was one of the most massive slave holders at that time and the way in which they describe him as a slave holder even now is so creepy has anyone ever been there do not go it's like innocuous they also charge a bloody fortune so his family's still kind of making money on slavery I mean they have a hay ride you can do the freaking slave I could talk about this for like a whole other panel but but even the descriptions of like he was kind of paternal to everyone around him his slaves and his children he you know he could be very harsh for example if he thought he might take their child away and sell them to someone else but he could also be very warm and paternalistic it's like what no no no can you hold up and when you some of the girls who Rachel Lloyd has helped out of prostitution I interviewed quite a few of them when I worked for Bob Herbert at the time and they would describe to me the men who paid for sex and you know the gamut from married men to single men to but this one girl talked about this frequent customer she has who will come in and show her photographs of his children like and his wife I mean she's a child herself you know but his mentality is like I pay for this therefore I get it and there's something to me very disturbing and very direct about the connection between slavery in this country and the way that sex trafficking occurs in this country I think it's like it's our modern day form of slavery in the world not just in this country I mean I think you know I feel like I have to defend myself because you're because I didn't clarify like it sounds like I'm you know for the sex trafficking of like 11 year old girls so that's the thing I think you know the point is right one thing is like what we believe in theory and like what we think should happen in theory and the other part is the reality of the life that we live or not that we live but that people live right and the realities of our world our capitalist system our history of slavery and kind of how that plays out and so I think the disconnect for me sometimes is the theoretical beliefs of like what should and shouldn't happen and what girls and women and people should and shouldn't do with their bodies and what the realities of their lives are like your example about Rikers you know like there's a reason why those kids you know why they're selling drugs rather than going to school and does the criminalization of the drug trade and the fact that they were criminalized themselves for selling drugs do anything to change this reality right and so I think that's part of where I come down has to do with this idea of criminalization and how criminalization affects both the girls and women who do sex work and whether it improves their situation at all I think that's sort of a piece of it has to do with criminalization so I'm not you know condoning the sort of sex trafficking industry obviously but I think there's points in which again the nuance is lost in our sort of theoretical attempt at saying this is what's okay and this is what's not versus what's the reality and I think an example that I've written about recently that brings this up in a less extreme way is this idea of surrogacy which is a kind of not very talked about debate but it's something that is really kind of coming into more for as the science and the technology change and has an international piece with sort of India being a very center of the surrogacy kind of market and even you know places like California and Washington state trying to legalize surrogacy in certain contexts and so again it brings up these questions about the market and like women's bodies even when you can when you believe that there's consent when someone is an adult who's consenting to do something like for example carry a child for someone else when is it okay and was it not okay and I mean there's absolutely no consensus feminist or otherwise around this issue so again I feel like for me it comes down to like what's theoretically what we would believe we would want in a theoretical beautiful universe where everyone gets to choose and has access to lots of types of employment and then what is the reality of the not at all ideal world we live in that's completely stratified based on race and class and what's best for kind of improving those conditions while that's the reality of it so that was sort of lofty well that makes a lot of sense, makes a lot of sense I think if you want to tackle it I was just going to say one thing if you want to think if you want to look at an amazing model in terms of the legalization dealing with prostitution I think the Swedish model is absolutely incredible in which the women are not ever dealt with in a legal way except given sort of services but the the pimps and the johns are the ones who are prosecuted which is not what happens in the United States at all no I mean it's so the opposite in fact you know in New York I mean now we have the safe harbor act I don't know if that's made a big difference but before that it was it was like a a much lesser crime to be selling a woman on the street than selling drugs on the street so you know a lot of of men who had been brought in for drugs once or whatever they've turned to pimping because it's like it's a lesser crime it's not and also it's a hidden crime I mean especially now the Craigslist and all of this stuff that most of the pimps are not on the street the girls are so they're the ones who end up criminally responsible so I think the Swedish model is interesting to look at if you're interested any final words you know I actually don't know that much about sex trafficking so I don't feel comfortable talking about it but I will say that again not to go into tear about the post-racial word but I do think that part of that discussion and that narrative since Obama became president has sort of silenced people around slavery and I think that the narrative basically now is we have a black president so we don't have to talk about slavery anymore or that it's not permissible for black people to consider it a legacy of cattle being cattle in this country and so that's part of the reason why I actually I hate it so much because I feel like it completely obscures the conversation and represses it when it comes to the sexualization of black bodies in America specifically and so I think the only way you can ever trust any kind of narrative that you see around black bodies in America is if you investigate the source of those narratives and determine whether or not you trust them to accurately and authentically reflect that story and contextualize any other kind of trafficking that you see. Yeah and I would just say to kind of bring it together as we're closing here that I think one of the things you're talking about is this sort of amnesia about what has gone on but also an invisibility about what is going on right now as we all sit in this pristine atmosphere of the Brooklyn Museum so part of the most radical work of feminism is getting those narratives not the post-racial bootstrap narrative not the feminist many more because everything's equal narrative but the narratives that honor our histories both incredibly disturbing and beautifully positive and kind of bring those threads with us as we continue to do this work so it's a heavy legacy we got on our backs up here but I think that's part of the effort of this anthology is to give people some more narratives and I hope there are many more anthologies like this that reflect even more voices that I see emerging and really shaping how people think about what feminism is or could be the kind of lives we can all lead liberated from our specific identity boxes as Ocean to puts it so thank you so much for being here a quick note I wrote a book called do it anyway the new generation of activists there are postcards up here if anyone's interested Prez do you want to explain a little bit about this postcard it's just an anthology coming out in the spring that I have a piece in called persistence let's check it out with a really awesome cover so please come up and grab postcards thank you so much for being here you guys have been really awesome thank you all very very much for coming this concludes our program