academia

Watching porn in an auditorium filled with people helped me take a critical look at my sexuality.

Some books are easy to read, yet stay with you long after you've finished the last chapter. Nivedita Menon’s Seeing Like a Feminist (Penguin/Zubaan, 2012) is a timely work that explains a complicated subject without over-simplifying it.

Being queer at a private Christian school, I thought I’d heard homosexuality compared to just about everything. But I was caught off guard by the recent remarks of Dr. Erik Thoennes, a professor at my alma mater, Southern California’s Biola University. At a panel discussion nominally on homosexuality—a discussion that conveniently didn’t feature even one LGBTQ-affirming speaker—Dr. Thoennes likened homosexuality to racism.

I’ll just let that sink in.

Women make up a majority of college students, but at the top of the academic ladder, the percentage of women wanes: only 26 percent of college presidents are female. Why is this?

I don’t exactly remember  how I discovered the Empowering Women of Color Conference (EWOCC) in Berkeley, California but I first attended the event last year. Far from the stuffy conference rooms of a fancy-dancy hotel, EWOCC is a grassroots conference geared toward women of color, and open to all. 

Today, six men accused of gang rape in India head to court. If that sounds eerily familiar, it's because just two months ago, six other men also went to trial for gang rape in India in a high-profile case involving a woman fatally assaulted on the bus in New Dehli. 

After these terrible crimes come to light, we all want to see them result in major change. Harvard University is sponsoring a policy task force “to offer recommendations to India and other South Asian countries." But the group received a critique from Delhi blogger Nivedita Menon, who wrote in a post called "Harvard to the Rescue!" that Harvard would be better able to discuss rapein South Asia not from the ivory tower, but by consulting with feminists on the ground in India.

When do you know that you have arrived, as an academic field of study? Has queer studies arrived?

Patricia J. Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University, published these words twenty-five years ago in her renowned essay on slavery, race, gender, and rights called "On Being the Object of Property":

There are moments in my life when I feel as though a part of me is missing. There are days when I feel so invisible that I can't remember what day of the week it is, when I feel so manipulated that I can't remember my own name, when I feel so lost and angry that I can't speak a civil word to the people who love me best. Those are the times when I catch sight of my reflection in stores windows and am surprised to see a whole person looking back.

In a symposium last week at Columbia Law School that celebrated her continued work in law, critical race theory, and intersectional feminism, she recalled the climate in which she wrote this reflection on the dispossession of black people in general and black women in particular.

Women’s colleges were born out of institutionalized sexism. So, do we still need women’s colleges?

In mid-December the Huffington Post published a guest editorial by Elizabeth Pfeiffer titled, “Don't Like the Gender Gap? Women's Colleges Might Just Be the Answer.” In her post, Pfeiffer defends the all-female Scripps College. She argues that a school should be defined by “the richness of the community…and the possibilities this kind of environment offers.”

I agree: Schools should be defined by the richness of their community. But that goes beyond a gender binary. How about those whose identity does not fit within this heteronormative binary of man or woman? 

Pfeiffer asks,  “Why is Scripps, or any women's college, still relevant?” Pfeiffer believes one reason is because of the leadership roles she was able to take on, as well as the idea that women’s colleges instill a sense of leadership. She cites the fact that women's college graduates make up “more than 20 percent of women in Congress and 30 percent of a Businessweek list of rising women in corporate America.”

One of my greatest high school regrets is that I never took an auto shop class. I would have had a chance to learn some practical skills like changing oil and changing a tire. At the time, I doubt it fit into my schedule, but entering a class of mostly boys scared me as well. It's not that I was afraid of boys—I considered myself a feminist despite not fully understanding what that meant—but it would still have been intimidating to walk into a classroom full of dudes.