Today I had the awesome experience of hearing from two founders of the Women’s Studies Program at UAlbany, Joan Schultz and Judith Fetterley. They had a lot to say on a multitude of subjects ranging from how they awakened to feminism to how they stuffed hiring and promotion committees to get feminist professors hired and promoted.
What struck me and the rest of the audience was their opinion on the interchangeable use of the words sex and gender and their assumptions that the words are fundamentally the same. Further they questioned how “sex/gender” can be socially constructed if they are in face based on biology.
As any good 21st century student of women’s studies knows sex is between the legs and gender is between the ears. This means that while sex is a biological fact, gender is a social construct. Judith Butler further taught us that gender is a performance and that those who do not perform the correct gender are punished by society.
As I tried to do in my previous post, Butler
I also learned tonight the difficulty with the terms gender/feminist/queer studies. Gender studies allow the women to become lost. Queer studies allow the lesbian to become lost. Feminist studies allow the lesbian to become lost. As feminists we need to become careful of the terms we use so that we do not leave any group out of the discourse. Furthermore when interviewing subjects we need to keep in mind our position and location of ourselves so we receive the answers we need.
Finally, tonight I was praised by Joan and Judith as well as my classmates for being a man in the program. I agree that feminist men need to be included in the discourse to allow research to be valid as well as to teach other men to be feminists. Without this the girls feminists educate will just return to the world of patriarchy with no cross-gender partners to help them change the world.
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