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The New F-Word
The New F-Word
new
F-word
by
Marianne
Cooper
on
02/28/11
at
9:39
am
A
few
years
ago
English
professor,
Michele
Elam,
noticed
something
curious
in
her
introduction
to
feminist
studies
class
very
few
of
her
forty
students
felt
comfortable
using
the
word
feminism,
and
still
fewer
identified
themselves
as
feminists.
Despite
being
interested
in
gender
equality,
it
was
as
if,
Elam
said,
being
called
a
feminist
was
to
suspect
that
some
foul
epithet
had
been
hurled
your
way.
As
one
student
put
it,
Feminism
is
the
new
F
Word.
You
cant
use
it.
Elam
also
noticed
a
similar
dynamic
playing
out
in
classes
she
teaches
on
race.
Students
seemed
to
have
a
hard
time
talking
about
it.
Explaining
why,
a
student
told
Elam,
Its
touchy,
its
delicate,
its
a
total
killjoy
in
polite
society
to
bring
it
up.
With
students
distancing
themselves
from
feminist
theory
and
practice
and
silencing
themselves
on
the
topic
of
race,
Elam
believes
that
race
and
gender
have
become
unspeakable,
and
accordingly
unteachable
in
the
classroom.
In
her
talk,
The
New
F
Word
(Feminism)
and
Beyond:
Gender,
Race,
and
other
Classroom
Unspeakables,
sponsored
by
the
Center
for
Teaching
and
Learning
at
Stanford,
Elam
linked
the
dynamic
she
saw
unfolding
in
her
classes
with
a
larger
cultural
trend
that
dismisses
race
and
gender
as
serious
academic
subjects.
She
noted,
for
example,
1917
Feminists:
Women
suffragists
picketing
in
front
that
President
Obama,
in
his
July
2010
Urban
of
the
White
House.
Source:
Library
of
Congress
League
address
implied
that
the
study
of
race
is
best
left
out
of
higher
education
when
he
said
that
meaningful
conversations
about
race
would
not
occur
at
a
bunch
of
academic
symposia
or
fancy
commissions
or
panels
but
instead
around
kitchen
tables
and
water
coolers
and
church
basements
and
in
our
schools
and
with
our
kids
all
across
the
country.
Elam
pointed
out
that
this
same
type
of
anti-intellectual
stance
toward
race
and
gender
can
be
found
at
the
other
end
of
the
political
spectrum
too
like
when
Sarah
Palin
in
her
recent
address
to
the
Susan
B.
Anthony
List
took
a
swipe
at
academic
feminism.
After
thanking
the
SBA
List
for
being
a
home
to
a
new
conservative feminist movement and identity, Palin said, [For] far too long, when people heard the word feminist, they thought of the faculty lounge at some East Coast womens college, right? And no offense to them, they have their opinions and their voice, and God bless them; theyre just great. But thats not the only voice of women in America. Elam argued that these kinds of anti-intellectual and casual approaches to addressing social justice issues (i.e. water cooler chats instead of academic symposia) direct people to suspend critical thought in lieu of uniformed, ahistorical, and emotionally based understandings of race and gender. In doing so, race and gender become casualized and thus delegitimized as proper fields of inquiry. As opposed, then, to subjects like math or physics, race and gender are not seen as serious academic disciplines in their own right that need to be studied in an in-depth and informed way. Rather, Elam said, they are often seen as harboring an activism at odds with disinterested intellectual inquiry. Politically, this type of thinking has led some state legislatures, like in Arizona, to go after ethnic studies departments and try to shut them down. As a race and gender scholar, Elam uses ethnic and feminist studies to better illuminate the power relations she seeks to investigate in her own research. In the classroom she uses this scholarship to provide her students with a rigorous analytic framework through which they can better examine, understand, and thus discuss how race and gender operate in the social world. By doing so, Elams students are more able to talk about such topics and issues, making race and gender speakable and consequently teachable in the classroom. While the recent cultural pushback against critical race and gender studies has made sharing her insights with her students more challenging, it has also made Elam more committed than ever to teaching these subjects. Race and gender, Elam said, cannot be confined to private conversations around the kitchen table. There also needs to be passionate, committed academic study. And students need to see how race and gender function as critical intellectual tools for social and literary analysis. Michele Elam is a Faculty Affiliate of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
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