Category: General (Page 5 of 27)

– Mathilde Sergent

I.

I had been living with God
eating plump fruits that gave in my hand
to no-one
my soft fealty

girl, I had desires likes waves, reaching
relentless, pushing up, their heavy roar
then falling sibylline and blue

My mother
impressed on me the importance of surrender

II.

I have not grown white
I was not born white

but tell me you
who are the needle to my thread
do you know? What damage
imposes your impression

‘Break first
the soft outer shell
to carve into the flesh
small, spaced-out, tiny holes’

I assumed the holes were for breathing
not a leash

III.

Now I am tall and sharp
I am my own fabric’s needle
but it is you

not me, who have shaped the clay
of this heart; who have made me doubt
and bend

No it’s you
you have made me feel
and forget
you have dirtied me—you, dog
you have bit my hand—

– Martha Perotto-Wills 

[content note: discussions of misogyny and homophobia, mentions of slurs & sexual harassment]

So Hesham Mashour, depressingly omnipresent and opportunistically faux-left-wing student journo, has outdone former journalistic glories (e.g. that article arguing mentally ill and disabled students are just not tough enough and shouldn’t have applied to Cambridge in the first place) by writing this thinkpiece about gay men, misogyny, and feminism for Get Real.

Read it? Yeah, I know. Grim. Also, full disclosure before I go on, I said this was a bad article on Twitter and then Hesham replied (in a tweet that has since been deleted) “You’re not even queer”, so like, this is a bit personal – but I don’t have to have been sexuality-policed and insulted by the author to recognise that the thinkpiece itself is a pile of steaming shit on every level possible, to the extent where it’s difficult to even know where to begin criticising it.

But I hear that the very beginning is a very good place to start, so first off, and relatively innocuously: man, read a history book. Pretty much every historical point in this article is wrong – from the popular misconception that Classical Greece was a Utopian pride parade for 2010s-style gay male relationships and not a society that venerated and institutionalised highly heteronormative pedophilia, to the complete failure to recognise the fact that sexual identity as we conceive of it today is really a very modern (i.e. within the last 150 years) invention. Using current terms to discuss historical sexual practices, and viewing historical attitudes to sexuality through a lens of modern systems of oppression, is just plain bad intellectual practice. It invalidates any arguments an author could possibly be making based on historical example, and belies a pretty damning ignorance of the topic they’re writing about.

Anyway, after this misinformed romp through times past we are treated to the argument that, because both gay men and women (notice something missing here? yeah, I’ll get to that) suffer from pay gaps in the UK compared to their straight and male colleagues respectively, misogyny and homophobia are the same thing. I mean, it’s certainly true that, because of the structure of our society, different oppressions often manifest themselves in similar forms: both women and queer men face discrimination at work, lack of positive media representation, and the threat of violence in public spaces, to give just a few examples. It takes a bizarre, twisted logical leap to argue that this means they face the exact same form of oppression.

Hesham has also said that gay men should be allowed to “reclaim” the word “slut” as someone who has been called a slut before, and thus apparently faces the same structural misogyny as women. The issue of reclaiming slurs is a contended one in liberation politics discourse, but there is a very basic consensus that reclaiming slurs is the sole decision of members of the marginalised groups that those words are used to control, humiliate, and oppress – by definition, you simply cannot ‘reclaim’ a slur directed at a group you’re not part of, especially not if you (e.g. a man) are a member of the group that oppresses them (e.g. women). That’s not reclamation, it’s upholding existing hierarchies of oppression. But I’m waiting on the edge of my seat for another Get Real article arguing that straight men who’ve been called “fag” in locker-room fights with their bros should be encouraged to ‘reclaim’ that term for themselves!

After that, the author seems to deal with some latent annoyance at both drinking society homophobia and the fact that CUSU LGBT+ doesn’t have a campaign to combat this (both certainly real problems that need tackling) by blaming it on, um, all of feminism. “This would be misogyny if I were female,” Hesham writes, as The Point whistles merrily past several thousand miles above. Yes! If you were a woman, you would experience misogyny. But you’re not. So you don’t. This seems to me like a relatively simple concept to grasp. Both these points – even aside from not recognising that the work the CUSU Women’s Campaign does against drinking societies is to fight all the oppressive aspects of them, whether those are based on gender, sexuality, race, class, etc – fundamentally fail to grasp a pretty vital fact about feminism: yeah, feminism can help men, because part of feminism is getting rid of the patriarchy, and the patriarchy (as we are so often reminded by the more self-centred and loud-voiced of our ‘allies’) hurts men too. But feminism isn’t about men. It’s about the liberation of women. And if men, regardless of their sexuality, are distracting from that fact by demanding that feminism has a “duty” to pay more attention to them, and then refusing to listen to women who tell them they’re wrong, they very clearly do not care as much as they claim to about the elimination of gendered oppression or the liberation of those who face misogyny.

Actually though, while what the article does say is odious enough, I’m really more concerned with what it doesn’t talk about, and I think its omission of a couple of key points is very revealing of how insincere the author’s supposed commitment to anti-misogyny is. What I mean is this: if someone asked me my thoughts on possible links between misogyny and homophobia, two key points would come to mind, and neither of them would be ‘they’re the same thing and gay men have it worse off’.

One link I’d make is the perpetuation of misogyny by gay men. Pretty much every woman I know (regardless of sexuality) can think of instances where they’ve faced sexism from a gay man. Getting groped in clubs by men who defend their objectification and harassment with “it’s fine, I’m not attracted to you”, Perez-Hilton-style gendered shaming of women’s bodies and fashion/life choices, gay men who talk often and loudly about how disgusting vaginas are (thereby adding cissexism and transphobia into the bigotry mix) – this is a well-documented and widespread problem. To completely fail to bring this issue up in an article about the links between homophobia and misogyny is disingenuous, and belies the author’s real lack of compassion for the people who really face misogyny.

The second point is to finally address the conspicuously missing piece in the article: ACTUALLY, QUEER WOMEN EXIST. To write a thousand words on the link between homophobia and misogyny and fail to consider intersectionality, to not even once mention that there are real people who face homophobia and misogyny simultaneously, is bafflingly ignorant at best and actively thoughtless and offensive at worst. Queer women exist, Hesham, hi, no matter how much you police our sexuality over Twitter! And unlike you we actually do deal with the combined weights of misogyny and homophobia every day, and your self-obsessed erasure of our existence and experiences from your sub-par thinkpiece about the links between those oppressions is pretty fucking misogynistic and homophobic in itself.

And maybe I’m being unfair – and maybe not – but if you use the word “controversial” in every social media post you make about your article on feminism and say you “can’t wait” for the “haters”, you probably don’t need feminism. If feminism for you is an edgy thinkpiece topic to get your student magazine’s website a higher hit count, you probably don’t need feminism. If feminism for you isn’t something that touches the entire way you view the world, every single interaction you have with another human, the way you think about yourself – if feminism isn’t life-or-death work for you, but a way to boost your fucking web brand, you probably don’t need feminism.

One last point: I know for a fact I’m not the only member of the Cambridge LGBT+ community who has not written for Get Real because Hesham Mashour is editing it. In the absence of a better alternative or a Get Real editorial coup (hint hint), the Gender Agenda blog is always open to submissions and we’d really love to accept anything queer-related you’d like to write.

The Tragedy Paper needs to check its privilege. 

~Daisy Hughes

Reading for my tragedy essay this week, I came across a really great quote. The writer was saying of the ability to aestheticize suffering in tragedy that, “that vantage point, surely, is available only to those who can afford the most comfortable seats.”

She then moved swiftly on, but my interest was piqued. She seemed to be making a really great point about privilege.

Last week, my supervisor advised me that I might want to take a less “single-mindedly feminist” approach to the tragedy paper. I was angry. But it was good advice. Within the terms of the paper as it stands, a consistently feminist approach is a disadvantage if you want to do well. (“Well”, of course, in the limited sense of “get a good mark.”)

The reason for this is, in part at least, that by taking a feminist line of analysis, by pointing out critically the instances of patriarchal female oppression, misogyny and gynephobia (not to mention the frequent and explicit violence against women) that permeates tragic texts, you are “missing the point”. “It’s all art,” we’re told, so part of what we have to write about is why it’s beautiful. We’re meant to detach ourselves, perform “objective” criticism (as though that is even possible) of “the work itself”.

The problem is that the ability to perform the kind of criticism the paper asks for depends, absolutely, on privilege. To be “objective” in these moments, requires that you don’t feel overwhelmingly personally and politically engaged with the material.

I want to talk for a moment about the idea of “triggering” subject matter. “Trigger warnings” are a relatively new phenomenon and have not yet become widely accepted beyond certain corners of the internet. Part of the problem with this is that society has yet to place any concrete – or perhaps political – value on psychological “harm” to an individual. (Hence the persistent liberal objection to “no platforming,” but that’s a different discussion…)

In reading tragedy we all, of course, face material that is potentially triggering. So, before you start getting worried and asking “what about the men?”, I’m not denying that (white, able-bodied,) male privilege precludes the possibility that men may be triggered by tragedy.

What I’m saying is that while men may face triggering material based on their individual experiences, women and other communities facing oppression face triggering material precisely because they belong to that community – because they face systematic and structural oppression, on top of any individual trauma they may have encountered.

So in ignoring the implications of triggering for the study of tragedy, Cambridge and the English Faculty are enabling the academic privileging of the already privileged. They require of students that “vantage point” described at the beginning, which “is only available to those who can afford the most comfortable seats.”

The problem is also that the paper is compulsory. We do not enter into it having been offered the opportunity to consider and accept the ways in which this privileging of privilege may play out for us personally. We are forced into this traumatising term of studying potentially damaging material, and yet when we point out its damaging nature, we are penalised for a lack of “aesthetic appreciation” and told to broaden our approaches.

What I want to know is, why is is considered as “repeating content” for me to write three “feminist answers” in my exam when it is perfectly acceptable for the faculty to set content which is consistently (if not exclusively) patriarchal, misogynistic, gynephobic, and violent towards both the women characters and the women readers?

A space for women’s voices in Cambridge?

– Daisy Hughes 

Before I came to Cambridge, I’d never particularly noticed that I was a woman. Of course, I was aware of my sex in a physical sense, and even my gender in a social sense. But I’d never really politically identified as a woman. I’d never really felt in my admittedly very privileged upbringing that there was less space in the world for me and my voice because I was a woman. I would’ve called myself a ‘feminist’, but I’d never really noticed how that term had specific relevance to me.

But then I came to Cambridge. And not only did I come to Cambridge, but I decided that while I was here I wanted to try and change some things about this place.

I began my involvement with the Living Wage Campaign towards the end of my first year. It had taken me a while to settle in to this strange world and I finally felt that I was able and ready to engage with it in a different way. It was during the course of this campaign, however, that I really began to notice how little space there is here for women who want to take part in, let alone lead, any form of political action.

I was running the campaign with a male friend of mine, who I have a huge amount of respect for. However, each time there was any reporting on the campaign it was always his name and not mine that was mentioned. Each time anyone had a question about what we were doing and why, they would address him and not me. It was as though people were assuming that he was the leader, while I was the secretary. I found myself in JCR meetings in which his voice was privileged over mine – in which he was listened to, while I was spoken over and dismissed.

Finally, a man with whom I had previously been involved, suggested to me that the reason I was doing these things – the reason I was dedicating hours of my time and all of my emotional energy to a campaign I was sure I believed in myself – was because I had become friends with another strong, vocal woman in our college. I was quite literally being denied a voice of my own, by someone who I had previously assumed respected me. Implicit in his comment was a fear of women who speak out, and it was framed as ‘concern’ for the influence she appeared to have over me. Clearly, I couldn’t be doing these things because I wanted to do them.

As a woman involved in ‘activism’, I found I was far more likely to be painted as a ‘radical’ than my male counterparts – although clearly this goes alongside a fundamental misunderstanding of what this term actually means. Very simply, I was ‘radical’ because I had noticed an injustice taking place in our community, and as a woman, my place in pointing this out and fighting against it was unexpected and unwanted.

It is too easy, in this very male-dominated and male-orientated environment, for women who speak out to be silenced. One only has to look at the treatment of the Women’s Campaign in the student press to see a persistent fear of the female voice. There is very little space here for women to have this voice and trying to carve one out is, frankly, exhausting.