In this blog post, I will be doing a critical response of the second general meeting I attended at the Feminist Club (I missed the first general meeting but luckily I made it to the second!). This is the first year the Feminist Club will be operating as they are a newly formed club on the UBC campus. The club’s application was admitted late by UBC’s Alma Matter Society (AMS), so unfortunately they were not able to get a booth open to promote their club at some of the promotional events happening on campus at the beginning of the year that were open to clubs (i.e. Imagine Day, Clubs Day). Fortunately, I happened to come across it on my Facebook newsfeed and followed up with “liking” them on Facebook to get the details of how to get involved and lend my support to them.
The meeting took place in a study room at a library on campus. When I walked in, quite a few people turned to the door to say, “Hi!” Everyone sat in chairs around some tables in a circle formation, so I went to join them. Very soon after, the meeting started. The student leading the meeting led a round-table discussion to introduce everyone to one another. We went around the circle of students saying our name and an area of interest we have within the broad topic of feminism that we hoped to explore through the club. Some recurring themes were brought up:
(1) Feminism had become a “dirty word” and, while we recognized this was a large issue, we wanted to tackle it through the club.
(2) Ridged gendered boundaries for masculinity and femininity were harmful for all and we hoped to address them.
(3) We wanted to make feminism accessible to the public in a language that they could understand and not be intimidated by in order to get more people to enter the conversation.
Of course, there were more issues brought up in the meeting, but those three themes were brought up frequently. There are about 15 people at the meeting (myself included) and, looking around the room, I could not help but notice that there were only 4 men at the meeting—the other attendees were women. It was also hard to ignore that we were all had privileged backgrounds. We were all students who had gone on to post-secondary education at one of the country’s top-ranking universities. We had all sought out the club in order to be there—after all, the club had not been able to promote itself in the same way other clubs at UBC had had the opportunity to at the popular Imagine Day and Clubs Day events. That we sought out the club as we did, spoke further to our privileged backgrounds: we had some knowledge of what feminism was because we had many resources available to us to learn and we were able to lend our free time to go to a club meeting.
Feminism is important as a systematic broad-based movement, but certainly individuals who “the patriarchy” effects the most drastically are those from less privileged backgrounds, those who did not have so many resources available to them, and those who might not be so economically well-endowed as to have free time off work to be actively seeking out a group to talk about feminism or to attend a club meeting. Of course, I definitely recognize that it is important to empower feminists to speak out and perhaps the club could function as a “support group” of sorts for existing self-identified feminists on UBC’s campus to gain confidence in speaking amongst themselves about issues important to the feminist cause. However, as for the three recurring themes we spoke about during the meeting, it would be more fruitful to open the club to a wider populace. The recurring three themes spoke to the necessity of a larger public dialogue and so it would make sense that this would need to include a wider dynamic of individuals from perhaps less privileged backgrounds.
Michael Kimmel (2008) writes about fraternities being developed to create a “white man’s space” with the introduction of women, immigrants, and freed blacks onto university campuses in North America. Kimmel explains that fraternities were created as a space that white males could “get away” to in order to separate themselves from the new additions to their campuses. Certainly Kimmel addresses a very loaded subject, but I believe a club like the Feminist Club has wrongly-garnered a “privileged woman’s space” status—which would explain the lack of male presence at the club meeting. Although the club attendees do not want to “get away” from others on campus like the fraternity example highlights, club non-attendees can very easily frame them as wanting to.
Jewkes and Murcott (1996) offer a perspective on community and belonging that can help us understand the differing perspectives that insiders and outsiders may have on the same club. They explain that “community members’ perceptions of sharing are central to the delineation of [community] boundaries” (Jewkes & Murcott, 1996, p. 555). Club attendees are able to create an atmosphere of community amongst themselves as they share their thoughts and experiences relating to feminism, but club non-attendees do not have this basis of sharing to draw on—thus club non-attendees are easily able to revert to making assumptions of the club attendees through their apparent positionality. Smith (2005) defines positionality in terms of ‘standpoint’. The standpoint of current club attendees is a privileged, university-educated one and so non-attendees can revert to making snap judgements about the club by making assumptions of the attendees’ positionality and recognize it as a space for the privileged and the university-educated.
Thus, the challenge then becomes one of trying to bridge the gap between club attendees and club non-attendees who may have different perceptions on what the club is because of their respective insider and outsider positions. That being said, I really enjoyed attending the meeting and meeting some of the other attendees. It was a very welcoming atmosphere! During the roundtable discussion, I brought up the issue of inaccessibility that the feminism conversation tends to have in the public sphere outside the privileged setting of the university. Others agreed with me and we had a brief conversation about how we could bridge that university-public gap in the conversation. We tossed around the idea of having some seminars open to the public in various locations around the city that are not on campus. The club leader wanted me to talk with her further about ideas we could implement together. I am very much up for this challenge and can’t wait to see where we will go from here!
References
Jewkes, R., & Murcott, A. (1996). Meanings of Community. Social Science and Medicine, 43(4), 555-563.
Kimmel, M. (2008). Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. Toronto, Canada: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
Smith, D. (2005). Institutional Ethnography: A sociology for people. Lanham, MD: Rowman AltaMira