On Bernie Sanders and Who Gets a Voice

Posted on August 10, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

While many are reflecting and debating the interruption of Bernie Sanders by Black Lives Matter, black men were shot in Ferguson, Missouri, marking the one-year anniversary of the death of Michael Brown.

I find the discussion around Sanders fascinating – a microcosm of tensions involving race, class, gender, and age.

And while supporters of the protesters claim victory in Sander’s release of a statement on racial justice and detractors of the protesters point to Sanders’ long history organizing with SNCC and marching with Dr. Martin Luther King – all I can think is that black people will continue to die unless we can find some way to put an end to it. To radically reshape our society.

All I can think about is Christian Taylor, the 19-year-old football player who was shot and killed by a police trainee Friday morning.

The nerdy activist in me would love to have long debates about what strategies and tactics are most appropriate and effective, but at the same time…I hardly care. I just want to live in a world where black people aren’t dying at a disproportional rate.

And honestly, I don’t know how to get there.

It’s a fine academic exercise to study and evaluate the action, but as an ally in the movement towards racial justice – my role is to support not to evaluate.

It’s not my life on the line. It’s not my heart and soul that’s at risk. Who am I to tell a person of color what they should settle for?

With disruptive actions more common, there are some good questions being raised about bringing people into a movement versus potentially alienating them.

These are good questions, but – at least within the realm of racial justice – I’m not sure they are my questions to answer.

Activists of color are debating these questions as well. They are, and should be, the leaders of this work – it is their right to choose what strategies and tactics to employ. As an ally, I then have a simple choice – I can choose to support them or not.

There may be times when I’m welcomed to provide constructive criticism or strategic feedback, as a partner working towards the same goal. If not, that’s okay – there are other times in my life when my voice can be heard.

Because after all, really, this is not about me and its not about my agency.

It’s about black people dying and about black voices being oppressed.

And its about working together to change that, in the best ways we know how.

Mad Max

Posted on July 24, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

While its been several months since the latest Mad Max movie came out, I was only just recently able to slip in a chance to see before it left the big screen.

I’m generally a fan of action movies, but I was particularly intrigued when early reviews praised Mad Max as a feminist dystopic. That’s not what I expected based on my recollections of post-apocalyptic barbarian men fighting each other from tricked out, dilapidated vehicles from earlier films.

By the time I started seeing reviews that, perhaps, the film wasn’t as feminist as some might hope (or fear), my interest was already too piqued to miss it.

Now, before I get into a feminist critique of the film, let me start with this: I enjoyed it. It was a fun movie. There were lots of explosions, and I like explosions. There were some decent fight sequences with good choreography. Nothing of the caliber of, say, the first Transporter movie or even of the new Daredevil tv series, but it was better than the CGI nonsense some films try to pass off as action these days.

It was as enjoyable as any other action movie I might go see in theaters.

But. Mad Max: Fury Road is not a feminist movie.

Put another way, if Mad Max meets our standards for feminism, our standards are terribly low.

It surely does a better job of representing women than most Hollywood films, but “better than completely sexist” is not my definition of feminism.

The film stars a woman – not the titular character, but arguably the main protagonist nonetheless – who is a tough, competent, fighter. She is even a better shot than the male protagonist; a trait which, I suppose, brought some men close to fainting.

But the idea that a woman can defend herself – and that she might even be tougher than men – should not be radical. We should expect strong women in all our movies.

And the fact that Furiousa is the only truly tough woman in the movie should give us pause.

Similarly, Mad Max passes the famous Bechdel test – indicating that the film includes at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man.

It is great that Mad Max passes this test which is failed by Terminator Genisys, Amazing Spider-Man 2, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, and many other movies.

But, again, women talking to each other is a pretty low bar. I expect more than that.

Perhaps what struck me most about Mad Max was the tenderness of the women. All the female characters – even bad ass Furiousa – had a certain softness to them. A warmth and a love.

The message of the movie seemed to be: the hardness of men destroyed the world; the softness of women can repair it.

There were some excellent scenes emphasizing the injustice of male dominance and boldly advocating for women’s sexual freedom, but the pervasiveness of stereotypes seemed to balance them out.

It wasn’t a terribly sexist movie, but it wasn’t feminist either.

At least no one tried running from dinosaurs in heels.

Gender in an Ideal World

Posted on July 22, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

I’ve had some great discussions following my post on Feminism and the Transgender Community.

The topic has stuck with me as I’ve reflected more on this simmering rift between progressive communities.

The good news, as some have pointed out, is that younger cis women tend to be more welcoming of their transgender peers than those who came of age in earlier waves of feminism. But that doesn’t change the fact that there are still plenty of feminists who actively disparage and discriminate against transgender men and women.

That doesn’t sit well with me. That doesn’t sit well with me at all. It strikes me as deeply unjust that women who would proclaim themselves as advocates for equity would discriminate so intentionally.

Not that this is a new or unique issue. There have long been tensions between the white feminist community and the feminist communities of people of color, for example. But those topics deserve their own post.

Today, I’d like to think about what gender or gender identity might look like in an ideal world. There are many tensions between feminists and transgender communities, to be sure, but I think this might be one of them.

Both groups may share a view that gender expression as its normalized now is stifling, but I wonder if there’s a subtle but important difference deeper in these views.

Imagine first a feminist utopia: people do whatever they’re interested in and are respected for whoever they are. There may be some functional differences to restrooms, but overall gender is not a “thing” that defines us.

You may even be inclined to envision this a little more radically: seeing a society where gender is not a binary, but a spectrum encompassing a rich diversity of thoughts, feelings, looks, and expressions.

Now ask yourself: would there be transgender people in such a society?

This is where we start to get into trouble. I think – and I may be entirely wrong about this – that there is a certain flavor of feminist who would be inclined to imagine that “transgender” would be obsolete in such society.

If you are truly free to express yourself regardless of your gender, how can your assigned gender be “wrong”?

There’s a reasonable logic to that argument and a certain comforting simplicity.

But it also has some disconcerting undertones. It implies that transgender people are only a temporary element of society – that “transgender” is not a real thing, but rather a response to a paternalistic paradigm.

Under this model, you may be willing to accept a transgender person as choosing to express their gender a certain way as a means of survival.

It’s not unlike accepting the person who wishes public schools were better, but still elects to send their children to private school: they have to play into the system to make the right choice for themselves, but ultimately the act is a symbol of a broken system.

But what if we were to imagine that yes, there would be transgender people in a more gender fluid society?

Suddenly, the valuation of transgender people seems to change. They aren’t just playing a broken system instead of trying to change the rules. They are genuinely trying to express themselves, express who they are in a meaningful, ineffable way.

As a cis person myself, I don’t really know what that means. But the more I talk to transgender people, the more I hear their stories of discovery and transition, the more I’m convinced that being transgender is more complex and more deeply rooted than our society’s broken gender norms.

That our existing gender system is broken certainly complicates matters – creating false ideas of what is “feminine” and what is “masculine.” But even if we were to do away with those tired tropes, I don’t think that the identity of transgender would just wash away.

Being transgender is something deeper than that, something more fundamental to a person’s being, something which we as a collective society are only beginning to understand.

Creating Space for Dialogue

Posted on July 17, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

A few different conversations over the last few weeks have made me more deeply appreciate just how difficult it is to have real dialogue.

It might be easy to brush this off as a problem of the Internet caused by a few particularly nasty trolls – and I have no doubt that is a problem – but I think the problem is broader than that.

Most of us don’t have opportunities to participate in productive dialogue in person, much less online. It’s generally considered polite to avoid contentious items, instead sticking to those topics where everyone can agree.

In Pygmalion, for example, Henry Higgins’ explains his plan to pass Eliza Doolittle off as upper class, saying, “I’ve taught her to speak properly; and she has strict orders as to her behavior. She’s to keep to two subjects: the weather and everybody’s health.”

Sticking to those topics may avoid conflict, but they in no way help people have real conversations across differences.

Having no experience with productive dialogue tends to lead to one of two responses when conflict does arise: either engaging in the conflict by arguing your point of view or shying away from the conflict by changing the topic.

But those aren’t the only options.

Those who have participated in productive dialogue know that conversation shouldn’t be about avoiding conflict or about having your way. It should be about learning.

I myself am still learning how to create safe spaces for real dialogue, but, I think, the most important thing I’ve learned is this:

Dialogue should be about trying to understand someone else’s point of view. It should about trying to see where someone else is coming from and appreciating the logic that leads them to their beliefs. It’s about respecting another person’s point of view and about expanding your own thinking by trying to see through someone else’s eyes.

On the Challenges of Social Interaction

Posted on July 16, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

Years ago my sister went to an event where they did the most brilliant thing: along with a name tag, attendees selected a color to indicate their interest in social interaction.

One color meant, “I’m very social, please talk to me!” while another indicated simply, “I am having fun, but please don’t talk to me.” I believe there was a level or two in between, but it’s those extremes that stand out in my memory.

I was always a little jealous: just think how handy that color coding would be in every day life.

But here’s the thing: that event my sister attended was for her job as a social worker. The social indicators color coding was done because many of the attendees had mental illnesses which made them, supposedly, less capable than the rest of us of socializing appropriately.

I’m pretty sure that analysis isn’t accurate, though – most of us have trouble socializing appropriately.

Far too many people feel isolated because they don’t know how to find the friendships around them.

Far too many people isolate themselves because they’d rather not have to deal with the madness that is socializing with new people.

(And then there’s the creepers who just ruin it for the rest of us. Seriously, the next time a guy randomly tries to pick me up on the street I’m going to tell him he’s ruining civil society. I bet that’ll smart.)

Meeting new people is hard – especially since “please don’t talk to me” tends to be the default assumption.

But there are ways we can change that.

Several months ago I went to a gaming convention that had an “open chair” policy. That is, any time a group of people were hanging out, they were encouraged to leave an empty chair as a sign that they welcomed more people. It didn’t matter if you didn’t know any one in the group, you were welcome to take the empty chair – provided you brought another chair to welcome whoever came after you.

That was really handy.

So, here’s my proposal: let’s come up with a universal sign. Some non-creepy way of saying, “hey, I want to make friends!”

Especially at events which are supposed to be social in nature. This weekend, for example, hundreds of people will be in Davis for ArtBeat, but, I’d guess, most people will only talk to the people they already know.

Which is unfortunate because ArtBeat should be a great place for meeting new friends.

Somerville is a small, engaged community and I feel like we ought to be able to figure this out. We ought to be able to come up with some way of non-awkwardly show who’s open to talking with strangers.

So, if you’re interested in meeting new people…wear a yellow ribbon or something. I don’t know. Let’s figure it out.

Feminism and the Transgender Community

Posted on July 14, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

I’ve been deeply struck recently by the narratives I’ve heard from some feminists about transgender people. There is a disconnect, or a tension, it seems, between certain conceptions of feminism and a full embrace of transgender people.

Among many older feminists, for example, there seems to be a general confusion about transgender identities and, perhaps, a too-eager willingness to dismiss those identities.

I mention age here not to imply that older people’s idea are inherently out of date or old-fashioned – this isn’t like when everybody rolls their eyes at the kind-of-racist thing your grandparent just said.

Rather – the women I’m thinking of are deep, liberal, radical feminists. Their age is important because they fought on the front lines of sexual liberation. They’ve personally felt that glass ceiling pushing them down. They know what it’s like to be sexually harassed and discriminated against as part of institutions that didn’t even put up the appearance of condemning such behavior.

They knew the first women in their families who were allowed to vote.

These women have been leaders in the battle not only only for women’s rights and equality, but for women’s freedom of self-expression.

Being a woman, they’ve rightly argued, is no single thing. There is no perfect body type. No thing you must enjoy or activities you must hate. It’s not clothes or hair, attitude or aptitude that define femininity.

In this way, the women’s movement isn’t just about the right to be treated equally, it’s about the right to be ourselves.

This concept runs into challenges with the transgender movement which – correctly or not – is often interpreted as arguing that, for example, a transgender woman is someone who feels like a woman.

A radical feminist doesn’t know what that means.

How can someone “feel like a woman” when womanhood itself is something that eludes definition?

This approach interprets transgender men and women as people who are simply conforming to the gender binary: transgender men were assigned female at birth but were too macho to be stereotypical women. Transgender women liked princesses too much to live by their assigned gender of male.

And while I am not at all convinced that the above interpretation of transgender people is accurate, it does create tension between the two communities as feminists bemoan the reinforcement of gender norms and see people of privilege – those assigned male at birth – claim the title of womanhood.I don’t know the way out of this tension. I have no idea what it feels like to be a gender other than the one I was assigned to at birth, but I have to trust people when they tell me that’s who they are. For me, that is enough. But as a society I think we need something more.

This conflict is particularly tragic because there should be no greater allies to the transgender community than feminists. There should be no one better able to appreciate the struggle of being unable to genuinely be yourself.

In many ways, that is, we are all in the same fight – all struggling to find and be our true selves.

Feedback

Posted on July 10, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

People tend to be really bad with feedback. Both giving feedback and receiving feedback. And on really a wide range of topics.

Psychologist Roy F. Baumeister has written that “Bad emotions, bad parents and bad feedback have more impact than good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones.”

This may be in part because of neurochemistry, as Judith E. Glaser and Richard D. Glaser explain in the Harvard Business Review: “When we face criticism, rejection or fear, when we feel marginalized or minimized, our bodies produce higher levels of cortisol, a hormone that shuts down the thinking center of our brains and activates conflict aversion and protection behaviors. We become more reactive and sensitive. We often perceive even greater judgment and negativity than actually exists. And these effects can last for 26 hours or more, imprinting the interaction on our memories and magnifying the impact it has on our future behavior. Cortisol functions like a sustained-release tablet – the more we ruminate about our fear, the longer the impact.”

In addition to the severe implications for those who experienced trauma, this chemical reaction has an important role in our daily lives as well.

Coupled with the challenges many of us face in accepting compliments, it can seem nearly impossible to process critical feedback in a productive way. It’s easier to deny or discredit your accuser.

This is one of the challenges at the root of white fragility – that is, when white people shut down rather than acknowledge that something they did or said was experienced as racist by a person of color.

But the experience is more universal – it is a subtle, persistent reality of every day life.

Our smallest actions can have a profound impact – both positive and negative – on those around us. But too often, we are unaware of the experiences we are leaving in our wake. How could we unless someone told us?

Feedback is one of the most cherished gifts a person can give you. They may be thanking for your words, or explaining why your actions were harmful. It may be a compliment or it may be criticism. But either way, we should appreciate what a remarkable gift it is.

When someone gives you feedback, they share a moment of their world with you. A moment you could not have seen by yourself. That is amazing. It is beautiful.

I want more of that, not less.

I want everyone to share little moments of their world with me.

La Japonaise

Posted on July 8, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts has recently come under fire for inviting patrons to “Channel your inner Camille Monet and try on a replica of the kimono she’s wearing in La Japonaise.”

It’s worth taking a moment to look at the image they used to promote the opportunity: A white American woman pretending to be a white French woman pretending to be Japanese. There’s a lot going on there.

After several complaints from Boston’s Asian American community, the MFA has decided to remove the dress up portion of the activity, instead inviting guests to “touch and engage with” the kimonos, but “not to try on.”

I’ve seen this story pop up on my newsfeed the last few days, but it really caught my attention with the morning news announced the change from the MFA.

The (white) news anchors said that the MFA received “a small number of complaints” from a “handful of activists.” They added that the MFA initially responded that it would continue with the demonstrations, but eventually shifted their position after the complaints “went viral.”

The news anchors expressed general confusion as to why anyone was offended by the exhibit, and appeared disheartened that the MFA had changed it’s policy in response what they saw as a small number of protestors. They called it a case of “political correctness going to far.”

That got my attention.

Now. I do appreciate a general concern about the dangers of political correctness. The last thing that serves a productive conversation about race is an atmosphere in which people feel shut down from expressing themselves – where they’d rather say nothing than run the risk of saying the wrong thing. This is the approach that led to the fallacy of a “color blind” society – as if denying our problems would make them go away.

But “political correctness gone to far” is also a conveniently safe out for people who don’t see – or don’t want to see – a problem.

Frankly, when you have a group of Asian Americans saying they find an exhibit of Kimono dress-up offensive, I think you have to stop and try to understand why they feel that way. It doesn’t matter whether you don’t find it offensive – it’s about not thoughtlessly discrediting someone with a different view from you.

Blogger Evan Smith has a great post explaining why the “be Camille Monet” activity is problematic:

The painting in question, a work from 1876, is a singular example of Orientalism, a tradition in Western art that broadly caricatures regions as disparate as North Africa and East Asia with the aim of cultivating a Romantic visual language around Western cultural imperialism. Japonisme, the particular subset of Orientalism that Monet’s canvas depicts, is a loose interpretation of Japanese culture by French aesthetes marked by ornamentation, hyper-femininity and a sense of escapism bordering on pure fantasy. In La Japonaise the artificiality of the genre is underscored by the blonde wig Camille donned when posing for the painting in order to emphasize her whiteness, contrasting her body to the Otherness of her garments and surroundings.

That’s not to say we need to dismiss the artwork all together, but neither should we celebrate the Orientalism it embodies.

The painting took place less than 30 years after Commodore Perry’s “opening of Japan.” It was a time when Europeans were fascinated by the “topsy turvey” world of Japanese culture – seen as both civilized and barbaric.

In fairness, the Japanese were equally intrigued by European culture – seen as both civilized and barbaric. And there is some great Japanese art that depicts the ape-ishness of Europeans, just as European art captured the beauty and brutality they saw in Japan.

Orientalism was an important movement in European culture, and it seems reasonable that Western society should study it, seek to understand it, and possibly even celebrate the art that came out of it.

But we shouldn’t seek to recreate it.

We should seek to appreciate and understand other cultures, not seek to appropriate them. We shouldn’t celebrate their seeming exoticism, but seek to truly understand them.

Mobilizing a Movement: A Pro-Life Case Study

Posted on July 1, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

I heard a statistic last week which blew my mind: half of all pro-life advocates start as neutral or even pro-choice. Brought into the movement through social networks, these people eventually convert their view points and become pro-life activists.

In a classic case of the backfire effect, I simply refused to believe the speaker. Pro-choice supporters don’t become pro-life advocates to fit in with a different social group. That’s crazy talk.

So I looked into it a little more.

In The Making of Pro-life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works, Ziad W. Munson documents the mobilization efforts of pro-life activists around the country. His initial goal was to understand the difference between mobilized activists and unmobilized supporters. But as he studied mobilization he found this question didn’t make sense: activists were mobilized from a broader pool than simply unmobilized supporters. As Munson explains:

One of the central arguments of this book is that individuals get involved in pro-life activism before they develop solid beliefs or firm ideas about abortion. Individuals mobilized into the pro-life movement in fact begin the mobilization process with a surprisingly diverse range of ideas about the issue. A quarter of those who are now activists were more sympathetic to the movement’s opponents when they first became involved, expressing beliefs that abortion should be a woman’s right or that abortion is (at least sometimes) morally acceptable. Only after they participated in pro-life movement activities did their views begin to change. Another quarter of all activists first became mobilized with an ambivalent attitude towards the issue. They saw valid arguments on both sides of the controversy and admit that they could have been persuaded either way about abortion.

…This argument does not claim that individuals have no ideas about abortion before they get involved in the movement, nor that everyone is equally likely to become mobilized regardless of his or her preexisting beliefs. Some individuals, because of their person biographies and beliefs, are more likely to know others who are involved in the movement and thus are more likely to come into personal contact with the movement – a key condition in the mobilization process. And although fully a quarter of the activists once held pro-choice views, none of them were strongly invested in this position or were active on the other side of the debate. The point is not that people are completely empty vessels, waiting to be filled with ideas from social movements, but only that our view of social movement activity as expressive behavior that presupposes commitment misses the mark.

That made me feel much better about the initial statistic – which had sounded like liberal activists suddenly become conservative ones. The number started to make a lot more sense: when people with generally ambivalent views become engaged in the work, they develop stronger views.

Munson adds that the half of pro-life activists who started with pro-life beliefs held only “thin beliefs” on the topic: their views were “poorly thought out, often contradictory, and seldom related to a larger moral vision.”

This way of understanding social movement mobilization raises important questions about socialization and group interactions. It emphasizes the importance of social and collaborative relationships, of engaging together in working to make change. And it highlights the importance of dissension, of creating spaces where all ideas are robustly considered.

And perhaps most fundamentally, it demonstrates the critical role of civic education: people can form their views on issues later, but we need to educate them to think coherently and critically, to learn from others but to form their own opinions, to be skeptical of popular opinions. And we need to teach them to explore all sides of an issue as they begin to get involved, to seek out ideas and opinions which differ from the ones the are forming.

Otherwise…they may just find themselves as activists on the wrong side of an issue!