My women's studies class is total shit. I was actually really excited about it, which is why I decided to take it despite it fulfilling no requirements for my major or graduation. Perhaps it will get better, but I worry it will not. There are a couple of main reasons why it's shit. Evaluating this has actually taught me more at a meta-level than the class ever could. You'll see as I talk about it.

A major thing is that we're not actually engaging with feminist works. We have two professors who assign two readings per class, and one prof talks about each in class. We started with the introduction to Simone de Beauvoir's “The Second Sex”, which is a foundational feminist text, and two speeches by Audre Lorde, critiquing dominant white feminism from a black lesbian perspective. I agree with Audre Lorde overall; her thesis is that feminism is only enriched by including the experiences of various types of women, which I agree with.

But parts of her speech were counterproductive to this goal, I feel. In “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”, Lorde wrote,

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.

Someone in my class picked up this quote as the most impactful part of the reading, and everyone in the class nodded and snapped. The professor who was discussing this reading concurred. But to me, this statement is establishing a hierarchy: the problems women share are not even comparable to the problems experienced by black people. This is just Oppression Olympics; it is not a constructive observation or even an accurate one.

I start with this example because it only went downhill from here. Lorde was actually talking about feminism, although I disagreed with a few of her points that overemphasized racism in relation to sexism. We're now reading texts that barely mention women or gender; they just happen to be by a woman (even better if they're a lesbian). We most recently read a few chapters from “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza” by Gloria Anzaldúa. She more often references her race rather than her gender; I don't think this is a bad thing in itself, I just want to focus on gender in a women's studies course.

I have a lot of issues with this book. One of them is that half of it is in Spanish. I think — and she thinks — that academia and scholarship should be accessible to various types of people. But she will intersperse Spanish that is impossible to translate via context clues — that information is only accessible if you know the language. Sure, in today's age we can Google Translate (though that takes a long time when you have to copy and paste five times a page), but the book was written in the 1980s. Anzaldúa's basis for including both English and Spanish is that it is her language as someone from the “borderlands”, as a mestiza. And that's fine, but I want a translation. She can speak both English and Spanish, it shouldn't be hard for her. To be clear, it's not like the Spanish passages are communicating ideas that are difficult or impossible to understand in English words — it's usually just Spanish for the sake of Spanish. This interspersing is only done for the sake of interspersing. It's being “radical” for the sake of being “radical”. Sometimes, something that is “radical” is fucking stupid. It's not just virtue signaling, it's also hurting her message. She says that she shouldn't have to translate, that other people should have to adapt to her. That's fine if it's a piece of art, but this is a work of academia. Having information be exclusive because “ugh, I'm done” is not a good reason. This is the exact thing she criticizes about the “Ivory Tower”, but instead of academic jargon, it's a whole other language.

Her use of Spanish was celebrated in our class. People are allowed to have different opinions (even if they're wrong) but the class should not be structured in a way that limits dissent. The professor asked an unabashedly leading question along the lines of “Why is it good that Anzaldúa uses Spanish and English in this book?” This theme of groupthink and hindering dissent is a constant in this class.

Another issue I have with the book is when she discusses her “psychic experiences”. She brings up the time when a red snake crossed her path, and she realized that the wind, the trees, the snake, were talking to her. I want to say that she's just being metaphorical, but she claims a reality to them. She writes,

Like many Indians and Mexicans, I did not deem my psychic experiences real. I denied their occurrences and let my inner senses atrophy. I allowed white rationality to tell me that the existence of the “other world” was mere pagan superstition. I accepted their reality, the “official” reality of the rational, reasoning mode which is connected with external reality, the upper world, and is considered the most developed consciousness — the consciousness of duality.

The other mode of consciousness facilitates images from the soul and the unconscious through dreams and the imagination. Its work is labeled “fiction” make-believe, wish-fulfillment. White anthropologists claim that Indians have “primitive” and therefore deficient minds, that we cannot think in the higher mode of consciousness — rationality. They are fascinated by what they call the “magical” mind, the “savage” mind, the participation mystique of the mind that says the world of the imagination—the world of the soul — and of the spirit is just as real as physical reality. In trying to become “objective,” Western culture made “objects” of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing “touch” with them. This dichotomy is the root of all violence.

This is fucking stupid. Rationality is not “white”; formal systems of logic were developed independently all over the world. To require proof is a necessary precondition to believe something. Saying “it's real because I say so” is not a good reason.

But if it is, I have to tell you that when I was 13, I woke from a dream and saw an owl on my bookshelf. It stared at me, but it slowly disappeared. At that moment, I felt something otherworldly happening. I'm literally not joking or saying this as just a point — this actually happened. But as I awoke — as evil white rationality infested my brain — I realized that it was most likely just a hallucination from being in a dream-like state.

There are tons of stories of people being at their lowest point and then going to church and hearing the choir. They feel so moved by the music that they claim that it was the voice of God speaking to them. But finding pleasure in beauty does not mean that you are interacting with God or with the spirit world.

I've talked about why rationality is important in this blog before (see Big ideas); I don't need to talk about it more. But what “strengthens” this argument by Anzaldúa is that it links rationality to white supremacy and non-rationality to oppressed groups. In the Vassar classroom, guess which side was taken? And again, it's ok to have other opinions, but this was a hegemon. And as the one of two white men in the class, was I going to argue against Spanish? Was I going to argue against the super valid experiences of indigenous peoples?

I legitimately had an anxiety attack during class, thinking about how all these people were learning that rationality is bad and that I couldn't say anything lest be labeled as a bigot. Luckily I have the self-awareness to not turn into a conservative from this, but I think it's a legitimate problem that not everyone's opinions are treated as valid. If we want cishet white men to become fellow liberators, we need to treat their opinions as products of their individual experiences, not as bigotry (even if it is).

I'm a strong believer that we need to come to conclusions for the right reasons. That means we criticize our own “side” when people are making faulty arguments. Otherwise, we reinforce incorrect reasoning that could be used to come to a conclusion we disagree with. I don't care if people irrationally think that I'm a presumptuous white male (of course, if there's merit to that claim, I will listen); I'm going to say what I think.