Reflecting on Reality Through Fiction
One of my most memorable humanities moments came during a period of my life where I was not enrolled in any academic institution, but instead working full-time in a secretarial position in the private sector. It was during this time, shortly after President Donald Trump’s election, that I first read Margaret Atwood’s <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em>. Even during my undergraduate education, I had been minimally exposed to feminist critiques and gender studies, despite receiving both an anthropology and a humanities degree. For much of my own life I had done my best to ignore the way in which being a woman affected the way I moved through the world, but as I read through <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> I experienced a fundamental shift in how I viewed myself and society within the United States. <br /><br />For those of you who are unfamiliar with the book, <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> is a dystopian novel that takes place in a United States that has been taken over by a new state called Gilead. In this dystopian world, the birth rate has plummeted and fertility is rare among women globally. Part of Gilead’s intention in taking over the United States was done for the sake of taking control of women’s reproductive capacity in order to maximize the potential of any and all fertile women by making them sex slaves to the most politically powerful men in the country. <br /><br />Gilead is a strictly hierarchical structure in which men occupy all political positions of power and women serve exclusively in domestic or sexual roles. The only exceptions to these assigned positions are women deemed as “unwomen,” who are sent to work and die in radioactive wastelands. To be deemed an “unwoman,” a woman would first need to be infertile and secondly would have been someone whose identity put them in conflict with Gilead’s ideals, such as an academic in the humanities. <br /><br />The book’s primary plot follows the life of Offred, who was a “handmaid,” a woman selected as a sex slave because of her ability to bear children. As a read through Offred’s harrowing story I began to feel overwhelmingly vulnerable to social and political changes happening around me in the United States. Suddenly my identity as a woman was something I needed to contend with and think about constantly in my understanding of how I operated within society. <br /><br />Although I had been reminded repeatedly in college about women’s absence in places of power and in our understanding of history, it was not until reading <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> that I learned to appreciate the implications of these absences. Something about the horror and vulnerability I felt from reading the book made issues relating to gender feel far more pressing then they ever had before. Instead of trying to push against gender inequalities and sexism by ignoring it, I began treating gender as an essential part to every story in history and society at large.
Margaret Atwood
<em>The Handmaid's Tale</em>
2018
Clara Bergamini, 27, graduate student
reflecting-reality-through-fiction
Feminist Killjoys
In my 'Problems and Issues in Feminist Theory' graduate course in the Women's and Gender Studies Department, my professor assigned a new release in feminist and queer theory called <em>Living a Feminist Life</em> by independent scholar Sara Ahmed. Reading the book, I laughed, cried, and underlined more than any other academic book. I had never felt so seen in a book, and the accessibility but depth of the concepts in the book were mesmerizing. <br /><br />The Humanities Moment came when the class came together to discuss the book - all of us had the same response to the book. My professor asked us to be vulnerable and share some intimate moments in our lives while weaving academic theory and lived experience. In this space we shared the laughs, tears, and validated each other's experiences of moving and living in this world as someone assigned female at birth, committed to feminism, and navigating academia. <br /><br />The end of the book shares a resource called the "Feminist Killjoy Toolkit" and it encourages readers to build their toolkit, which includes your other Humanities Moments that are important to you and keep them in your back pocket. To use, learn from, lean on, and rest with. We all created our own toolkits and I've carried it with me throughout graduate school. The intellectual and feminist community and solidarity I felt in the classroom that day, connecting over this book and the shared experiences it spoke to and brought forth, also stays with me.
Sara Ahmed
<em>Living a Feminist Life</em>
Fall 2017
A.F. Lewis, 27, Ph.D. candidate and graduate instructor
feminist-killjoys
Coming Into My Feminist Consciousness
My Humanities Moment occurred during my Junior year in college, when I attended an evening session with Gerda Lerner, the author of <em>The Creation of Feminist Consciousness</em> and one of the founders of the academic field called women’s history. <br /><br />I read only short sections of the book assigned in my women’s studies class. (The course itself was a revelation to me, and a requirement because I didn’t score a 5 on my high school AP History exam. Being forced to take history courses in college was the bright side of this failure, because it was in those classes that I learned that history is more than the dates of battles, treaties, and founding documents -- all activities of men. I realized that women were doing cool (and important) things while all that other business was going on.) <br /><br />I remember almost nothing about the event except a single line by the speaker, which I can only approximate here. Dr. Lerner said that the tragedy of women’s history is the sheer waste of intellectual capital for millenia. She asked us to consider what our culture might have lost -- what all the world’s cultures have lost -- due to women’s subjugation and their lack of access to education. How many books were never written? How many works of art never made? How many ideas in philosophy and politics and religion and science were never engendered because of one gender’s systematic oppression? <br /><br />I remember sobbing in my chair. I remember the choking anger I felt at this injustice. I also remember the feeling I finally had an answer to a question my father had once posed. <br /><br />Now, you have to understand a bit about me to understand this moment, my coming to feminist consciousness. I was the only girl in a family of three boys. I was the daughter of a man who could have given the Great Santini a run for his money. Our household was run with military precision, my father being a retired Army officer, Vietnam veteran, helicopter pilot, and Ranger instructor, and my mother a traditional, mild-mannered wife. Our house was patriarchal, to be sure, and I did my best to measure up to a standard that placed male bodies and minds above all else. (My father, in fact, once told me that I was the “best son he ever had,” a true compliment coming from him.) <br /><br />I understand now that my father was a product of his time, born in 1931 and raised in Tennessee, but as a young girl I received mixed messages about my place. He appreciated my intellect and we often spent evenings together watching Masterpiece Theater or some other PBS documentary that would be “wasted” on my brothers. During one of these evenings, my father asked me, “Why do you suppose there are no women composers?” <br /><br />I cannot remember the exact tone of his question; he could very well have been taunting me, reinforcing the idea that women were inferior because, look, there’s the proof. There are no women composers. They must be bad at composing. Taunting me was one of my father’s unfortunate habits. But I like to think my father’s tone also included some confusion and curiosity. Here he was with this brainy daughter -- who was, in his words, “smarter than all three boys put together” -- but where could she really succeed if there were no women composers? <br /><br />I certainly don’t recall my answer to my father’s question, but I do remember the roiling of my brain and the shame I felt at not having a good explanation for why there were no women composers, few women authors, no women presidents, and certainly no female helicopter pilots. I remember the queasy sense of defeat that whatever my intellect, I couldn’t amount to much -- or at least not to the level of men. And I wanted to be a good man -- the best son -- for my terrifying, mercurial father. <br /><br />Gerda Lerner’s words gave me the answer I needed. There were no women composers because, according to Lerner, patriarchy had “skewed the intellectual development of women as a group, since their major intellectual endeavor had to be to counteract the pervasive patriarchal assumptions of their inferiority and incompleteness as human beings.” <br /><br />That’s exactly what I had been doing in my family for 20-something years, trying to counteract the idea that I was inferior. <br /><br />I never got to explain all this to my father, partly because I was too afraid, partly because I hadn’t worked it all out in a bell ringer, iron-clad speech that would once and for all convince him of women’s equality, and partly because he died soon after I graduated. But Gerda Lerner’s words have never left me, and they’ve helped me understand how the humanities -- the intellectual endeavors of both women and men -- can and do nurture the mind and the soul.
<em>The Creation of Feminist Consciousness</em> by Gerda Lerner
1993-1994
C. N. Bernstein
coming-into-my-feminist-consciousness
Damaged Goods? Learning about (Mis)information about Sexuality in the Clinic
<p>My humanities moment connects to a book, titled <em>Damaged Goods: Women Living With Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases</em> written by Adina Nack, a sociologist and women’s and gender studies (WGS) scholar writing about health, sexuality, and society. This book is about women’s experiences living with HPV. I read this book in my undergrad in a WGS course about medicine, right around the time I was starting to learn more about WGS and before I decided to double major in this discipline. In particular, one of the book’s themes focuses on provider-patient interactions and the misinformation that spreads surrounding women’s sexuality and who can be affected by HPV, which really stood out to me at the time. Women reported being told inaccurate information about their risk of contracting the disease based on their sexuality.</p>
<p>Flash forward to the end of my first year of graduate school, where I was at the gynecologist for an annual pap smear. In the back of my head, I was always curious about the themes from this book and about how providers might share inaccurate information with their patients. Unfortunately, as it turns out, I was not disappointed. I don’t remember how the conversation started per se, but I know that I initiated a line of questioning about STIs and the risks of contracting HPV as a queer woman and that my gynecologist did not. In response to my inquiries, my gynecologist responded saying that women who have sex with women are not as at risk as others, saying something along of the lines of “it doesn’t go in as far” — whatever that means.</p>
<p>This moment was important to me for two reasons: 1) in the moment, I remembered from Nack’s book that this type of (mis)information contributed to women’s misunderstandings of their risk of getting HPV and subsequently their contraction of this STI; and 2) later, I would reflect on and unpack whatever “it doesn’t go in as far” means and the types of ideologies about gender and sexuality circulating there. This provider held a lot of assumptions about gender and sexuality that informed this response: assumptions about the types of sex people are having; about how sexual identity and behavior relate to one another; and about binary sex/gender. These assumptions contributed to inferior care and did not take into account people’s lived experiences of their gender and sexuality.</p>
<p>Nack highlighted women’s perspectives on their health and sexual selves in her book to capture a more complex understanding of women’s sexuality. As demonstrated by my provider, the complexity of people’s lived experiences of their gender and sexuality are incompatible at times with a biomedical framework or understanding of gender and sexuality, and misinformation about health, sexuality, and gender can flourish in this space. These types of themes of this incompatibility between biomedical and WGS informed understandings of sexuality and gender and the stakes for patients have turned into questions that guide my research. With my research, I am interested in how gender and sexuality get transformed in the clinical encounter and how doctors teach and learn about gender and sexuality. Within the classroom, how is a patient’s gender/sexuality, and the complexity inherent in these lived experiences, understood? Physicians, in some ways, elided the sexualities and gender identities of women in Nack’s book, and my own. To me WGS perspectives on gender and sexuality make room for possibilities to transcend gender and sexuality binaries. These understandings of gender and sexuality from the two sources — biomedical and WGS — do not necessarily map onto one another, and I want to know why and how WGS perspectives can impact medical education to be able to provide care for LGBTQ identities in a nuanced way.</p>
Adina Nack, <em>Women Living With Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases</em>
Jessica Herling, 27, Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies graduate student
damaged-goods