WGST 2800 Intersectional Identities Syllabus Part Two

Hi everyone.

This is part two of the intersectional identities, Syllabus video

and the sun has gone down since I film philosophy.

A so I think the lighting is making me a

bit washed out Anyhow.

This is part two where we left off in the

last video, I had gone through the course format, the

main assignments, um, and a bit more about the learning

outcomes and I wanted to just talk for a moment

about the weekly optional tutorial.

I do hope you'll join us.

Um, it's a really good group discussion.

I expect the cameras will be on because it helps

us connect with each other.

The best.

Obviously there are issues for a variety of reasons where

folks might feel, um, it more appropriate to keep your

cameras off.

But if you are able, I would really appreciate it.

If cameras are on the last class I taught, I

was often the only person with the camera on I

was speaking in to avoid, this is not a telephone

based class.

It's a video based class.

Um, recordings will not be available and that's because, um,

when we're dealing with feminist content and we're talking about

major issues and reforming community, there are disclosures that come

out right.

And so, you know, I have promised the videos will

be available in the past and then things have come

up in tutorial that I just didn't feel comfortable posting

publicly. So no video will be available.

But the tutorial itself is an opportunity for you to

have a say in the final exam.

So as I said in the last video, every week,

every class, twice a week that we gather, we will

be work shopping an exam question.

And at the end of the semester I will give

you a draft of the exam and again, there's no

attendance grade.

So I wanted to give you a sense of what

we're going to be talking about in the next six

weeks for today.

I've assigned a short reading called the Kentucky River Collective

statement and I'll post another video that kind of offer

some context around it.

But basically this is one of the foundational documents within

feminist studies that really articulates the importance of theorizing race

class, gender militarism parenthood altogether at the same time.

This is really the a document that stands the test

of time.

There are very few documents written in 1970s that remain

as relevant today as they did back then.

Um, but the Comedy River Collective statement does the combine

the River Collective statement came out of black feminist activism

and it was written by feminists who were black, but

Capital B Capital F.

Black feminism is a strand within feminist theorizing that organized

itself to offer theoretical models and by that, I mean

metaphors and symbols that act as tools for understanding.

So the concept of intersectionality is itself one of those

tools that came out of black feminism.

Black feminism emerged out of activist struggles where activists were

working together to understand um what it meant to live

in a hierarchical society, how racism and sexism informed each

other and were often the same thing, but also could

be theorized distinctly in some cases, and at the same

time, white feminists, those who were a middle and upper

class, we're gaining entry into um Major positions of power

on an unprecedented level.

So for the first time in the 1970s, white women

were becoming professors where there had never been any women

professors and white women were becoming lawyers and doctors and

so on.

And as a result, with all that institutional power, white

feminists began theorizing um thinking through what it meant to

live in a world that had been until then reserved

for men because from a white upper middle class feminist

standpoint, gender was the only thing holding them back.

And that's because the sexism that white feminists were theorizing

was in fact a racist sexism.

Yeah, and that's why it looked at them like sexism

because they benefited from the racist parts of it, right?

The racist parts told them that they were race less

and that they were just women and that that was

the issue they had to organize around.

When black feminists theorized the hierarchical social order, black feminists

talked about power not in terms of different identities, but

rather webs of oppression interlocking forms of oppression, intersections where

different oppressions met in the middle.

There were all these symbols and metaphors that not only

theorized the black female experience, but also offered a framework

for white women to theorize their own experience.

So whereas white women had theorized sex and gender and

race in a way that literally excluded black women, Capital

B, Capital F.

Black feminists.

And I say that just to differentiate those who were

leading the struggle from feminists who happened to be black,

right, Capital B capital F.

Black feminists came up with a body of theoretical work

that continues to be the most rigorous way of theorizing

identity in feminist scholarship.

So when we talk about intersectionality, we're talking about the

legacy of black feminist thought.

So the combat the river collective statement is one of

those foundational documents that came out of black feminist scholars,

activists and poets working together to come up with a

shared understanding of how the world works.

So I really encourage you to read that document and

to spend some time trying to appreciate the arguments being

made in that document and the kind of world that

is being imagined in that document.

So then on Tuesday we're going to be talking about

the genealogy of intersectional feminism's and so genealogy is like

a family tree.

So we're going to go through the history of feminist

theorizing and understand.

What is this legacy of intersectionality?

Why is this important to talk about?

And the reading that we're going to be reading is

called uh getting the title around with something like intersectionality

is a buzzword, how intersectionality became a buzzword.

And that's because intersectionality is used all the time and

people talk about it as though everyone knows what it

means. But the thing is intersectionality as a concept has

become broadly adopted and when anything is broadly adopted, its

adopted because many different people can use that concept and

put it into practice from wherever they are located.

So rather than trying to land on the perfect definition

of intersectionality, we're going to begin to trace the legacy

of the history, the ways in which different people have

engaged with intersectionality, to develop a sense of it as

an expansive, nuanced notion.

And then we'll start looking at some texts that help

us move beyond our training in either or thinking and

be located in a both and a framework.

So, uh there's one class is called Multiplicity as method

and it's one way of contending with um identity is

something that's multiple rather than trying to lock it down

and explain it.

When we study de colonizing narratives will be looking at

what it means to d colonists one's life story both

of the limits of that practice and the benefits of

that practice.

And um we're going to be reading a short, powerful

book called You Have the Right to Remain Fat by

Virgie Tovar, who is an intersectional feminist woman who writing

in California, she is fabulous and she's written a book

that does a really good job of bringing an intersectional

perspective too fat phobia.

And so the purpose here is to become fluent in

fat phobia as a form of social oppression and how

it entered sex with race, class, gender, disability and so

on. Then we're going to be reading two memoirs, a

thick by Tracy, Mcmillan cotton who is african american, um

sociologist, I believe she teaches out of one of the

Carolinas and she has a podcast with Roxanne gay, which

is perhaps, I mean she's wonderful in her own right,

but I think it's super cool that Shane roxane gay

have a podcast.

Uh and then a book called A Mind spread out

on the ground by Alicia Elliott who is a mohawk

um memoirist living in Ontario, both thick and a vine

spread out on the ground are memoirs where each author

describes their own life story and through story describes the

various intersections at stake in their lives.

So we're going to be alternating between chapters of those

memoirs and then theory because theory gives us a bunch

of ideas to think about and deepen our understanding of

power and then the memoirs will allow us to apply

them, will be reading theory one day and then talking

about memoir the next and we'll bounce back and forth

as we deepen our understanding of those concepts.

My favorite reading almost in the whole world is a

reading called and see if I can remember our bodies

are not ourselves.

Um uh huh trans guys and the racialized politics incoherence

by bobby noble, bobby noble is a trans scholar out

of york university white guy who um describes whiteness and

studies whiteness in a way I have not found anywhere

else. And I have learned the most about whiteness from

the reading that will be doing together.

It is dense and so we'll have to break it

down and take it slowly because I have read it

over the course of 10 years to fully grasp everything

he's saying.

Um but he advances notions of intersectionality in order to

theorize whiteness quite beautifully.

And then we will finish the semester by looking at

disability and then the concept of unmovic tim eyes, ability,

the privilege.

Um Some people have of yeah being believed when they

have been victimized and how we can apply an intersectional

lens to the notion that some bodies are considered to

be unmik tim Izabal, where um the violence that some

bodies encounter is so um tolerated by various systems of

power, that it's almost as though one can never be

a believable victim.

And so that's a concept will be working with as

we close the course.

So that is the scope of the course on intersectionality

and identity will be focusing on memoir.

Will be reading some fabulous theory, will be having great

conversations with the class.

I love this course and I'm really excited about meeting

you. Mm So, final thoughts, I just want to flag

that. I am kind of unreliable and email and by

that I am referring both to the fact that I'm

very busy and have a lot of students.

And so it takes me two business days to get

back to people and that includes weekends.

So if you email me on thursday night, one business

day is friday.

Another business day is monday.

I might not get back to you until Tuesday morning.

And in my experience, my students often expect that I

will get back to them very quickly and I do

not have that capacity, nor is my contract allow for

that kind of attentive labor to email.

So the syllabus has been designed to answer questions in

and of themselves.

So I encourage you.

If you've got a question, please check the syllabus first

and if not then email me, but not in a

panic or in a rush because that is not something

I can meet very easily.

I hope that you will take care of yourselves this

semester. This I just want to acknowledge as I did

in the earlier video that this remains a very difficult

uh pandemic to live through and we're all doing our

best and I hope and encourage you to be generous

with each other.

We all enter this work from different places, and as

the professor, it's my job to find the balanced set

point of the group.

So sometimes I will be introducing material from a fairly

beginner place because I this is the second year class.

And so for those who are more versed in these

issues, I invite you to be compassionate with yourselves and

others and make room for other people's learning.

I also want to say that there's

WGST 2800 Intersectional Identities Syllabus Part Two

Chapters

Audio TranscriptAuto-generated