Forgetting our elders, forgetting our past

Yesterday, my class had the honor of hearing from two women who helped found the Women's Studies department at my university.  One spoke of her feminist awakening after reading a pamphlet on the political economy of women in 1969.  She explained how, of course, it is all very clear in hindsight that women were second-class citizens, but it wasn't until she read this pamphlet that she realized there was another way to be.  Shortly afterward, the women, both English professors, started a course on women's literature and then founded the teaching collective (which still exists) in 1977.  It took nearly 20 years from the time they first course the women's literature to found the Women's Studies master's degree program, a program that has experienced dramatic funding setbacks even within the time that I have been at this university.  The teaching collective they began is in a very different place today, in part because feminism and Women's Studies is in a very different place today.  Their recollections of where it began put where we are now in stark relief.

While they spoke, I was deeply struck by how rarely young feminists speak to or engage our foremothers.  It is our loss, because they carry our liberation on their backs.  It is in the wrinkles on their face, the mix of joy and mischief in their eyes as they recount the ways they worked within the system to defy it.  There is so much that they know that we are in danger of forgetting, and that fear seemed palpable to them, too.  They have seen not only gains, but the erosion of those gains as they have aged and as the feminist mantle has been taken on by younger, fresher faces with new initiatives.  They've had to watch as feminism (or pseudofeminism) has gone off in directions they may have never predicted or desired.  Much has been written about the ageism within feminist activism, but I don't think I felt it so deeply until I was confronted by these brilliant, impossibly brave women whom I would never have otherwise encountered.  We have failed to actively center the experiences and memories of these women in our everyday feminism (and maybe not we...maybe I).  For that reason, I found their visit personally humbling.

But there are other reasons we must engage our elders that became clear to me while they spoke.  We must engage them not just to listen to them and heed their guidance, but to share all of the revolutionary ideas, research, and theories that have followed in the wake of their work.  If we do not, we risk losing them - and ourselves - along the way. 

Although the format of our class was to ask them questions, near the end of the session, they turned the tables and asked our class a question.  They expressed their discomfort about what they saw as the growing conflation of "sex" and "gender" in our theorizing.  "Today, when scholars write about 'gender,'" they said, "they use it when they are clearly referring to sex."  They wanted to know what this meant and what we made of it.  They wanted us to explain why it is that we do it this way, or perhaps, more likely, to tell us that they are concerned that we are doing it.

I found myself uncertain of how to answer their question or to allay their fears.  For them, even if they challenged feminine gender presentation, they still identified as "women" and felt very strongly that male/female was the central social hierarchy meant to be dismantled by feminist work.  But theorizing has moved into understanding and interrogating gender, not sex.  Gender as socialization process.  Gender as done.  Gender as performance.  Gender roles, not sex roles.  

I realized in that moment that I had so accepted the favored terminology of gender (well, it is as young as my own scholarship) as being a central problem that I had never thought to understand why elder feminists would find it so threatening.  Because it was their fear that was in the subtext of their question, and the worried look on their faces as they asked it.  It was not really a question of mixing up words.  Rather, they were afraid that, amidst all this gendering, we were losing sight of women.

The point is not that one of us is wrong and the other is right.  We have come to understand that sex itself, the material reality of chromosomes and genitalia, is also a social construction.  We have begun, in an explosive way, to theorize on trans experiences (also an issue of gender, although the elders contained it within the realm of sex).  But the point, really, is not to engage in a debate and convince anyone that either sex or gender is more important - they are both important, and, if anything, feminist scholarship illuminates how very complicated sex and gender as categories of analysis really are. 

Instead, the point is to hear what it is our elders are really asking us.  Our knowledge is informed by theirs, but it doesn't have to stay the same course or come to the same conclusions.  It didn't seem to me that either women expected it to. 

What they wanted, though, was to heed us of the dangers ahead if we do forget where it is we came from.