You Can Handle the Truth:
Monitoring Power, Privilege, & Oppression in Feminist Relationships
Jennifer J. Gusman & Jeffrey S. Bucholtz
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Why do any of us choose a women’s studies graduate program? After two years in our program, we believe that women’s studies students are searching for a community and safe space from which they can work toward their aspirations to facilitate social change. As two graduate students in San Diego State University’s Women’s Studies department, we have experienced firsthand the positive, motivating and productive process of building such relationships. What we did not expect, though, was that even in a feminist environment, our desires to create a safe-space could, in fact, suppress the much needed and often uncomfortable acknowledgement that real power differences affected us. The need for this acknowledgement was highlighted by our program’s admittance of its first and only male graduate student. His introduction to the program acted as a catalyst for an examination of both the valuable and dangerous aspects of creating relationships between privileged and oppressed groups. Through that process we came to understand how we had sabotaged some of our best intentions by ignoring one of the most important insights women’s studies has proffered: that societal power differences structure our personal relationships whether we want them to or not.
Within the first few weeks of our program, our class quickly became emotionally invested in our growing friendships, and excited about our mutual desires to create a more just world. Our relationships developed rapidly, since as women’s studies students we believed it important to create a safe space. However, in doing so, we often – unintentionally – would avoid highlighting the differences between individuals for fear of seeming non-inclusive and damaging the safe space we were working hard to establish. For our class, with its one male student, the fallacy of this approach would become glaringly obvious. Historically, women’s studies has created a safe space for women to study and explore their subjugation to men, and for that reason, the presence of a man in our program created a fundamental change to that space. This made the gender differences between us all the more important to acknowledge, because with Jeff in the room, the social power inequalities between men and women that we so readily analyzed with respect to the outside world, now lived and breathed inside our own classes and conversations. Addressing this power difference proved difficult, though, as our unspoken assumption was that to acknowledge the gender difference was to threaten our community, our safe space.
Instead, many of the women in our class would tell Jeff that they didn’t think of him as a man. While Jeff initially took this as a compliment about his incorporation into the program, during our studies we came across Ruth Frankenberg’s discussion of the problematic “colorblindness” that seeks to erase differences in interracial alliances, but instead ignores them.(1) She calls this “power evasive discourse” and in our case, the women in the program were erasing Jeff’s gender in an attempt to avoid the complex and painful realities it suggested about our relationships. In retrospect, we believe there are several reasons why the women in the program engaged in “gender blind” discourse. Perhaps the two most pertinent to this discussion are:
1) Over time, women’s studies has become more and more focused on building alliances and this notion of inclusivity has been extended to men, and
2) as the women developed friendships with Jeff, they did not want to hurt him.(2)
We continue to wonder how this focus on inclusivity and emotional safety in women’s studies affects our ability to examine the workings of social privileges and oppressions within our relationships. Grateful for the camaraderie of other feminists, it can be both harder to recognize the operation of power in those relationships, and more painful to address. As feminist author Uma Narayan points out, avoidance of difficult conversations about privilege and oppression exacts a heavier price on those of the oppressed group.(3) This price is illustrated by a classroom experience described by Jeff:
The class was engaged in a discussion of the ways men belittle women. One of the students expressed her anger towards men, and then turned to me to qualify her response by saying “We know not all men are like this.” The conversation changed. When my presence was highlighted, all of these women seemed not to be angry with men anymore. An important discussion where women addressed their anger with men stopped to keep me from feeling uncomfortable.
Thus, in alliances between privileged and oppressed groups, the oppressed group member will get hurt or compromised, despite the “good will” from the privileged group member.(4) Recognizing and discussing this reality does not change it, but rather mitigates its effects by enabling group members to make deliberate choices regarding their interactions with an awareness of the potential effects. Such a conversation might have prevented an uncomfortable situation in which Jeff made a deliberate choice not to participate in a class discussion on pregnancy and motherhood, but the women did not know how to interpret his silence. The result, as Jennifer recounts, was that at least one woman in the room felt silenced:
There was an undercurrent of tension, as eyes kept glancing at Jeff. His silence was unnerving, as it seemed to highlight his exclusion from the conversation. As the discussion went on, I began to question whether or not I should contribute and extend the conversation. Then the instructor pointedly apologized for excluding Jeff, and asked if he had anything to share. He didn’t, but as the attention focused on him, I realized my opportunity to speak was gone.
Once we began to analyze power dynamics within the emotional safety we had created through our friendships, we were able to engage in a process of self-reflective dialogues about how power impacted our relationships. We believe that the need for this process goes far beyond the relatively few instances in which men are part of graduate level women’s studies. Any group of students will need to maintain constant vigilance and open communication regarding the complex ways social privileges and oppressions impact them. Therefore, our unintentional replications of power-infused relationships, and our attempts to address them, have useful applications for any women’s studies student/faculty who wishes to reconcile her/his hopes for a healthy and productive graduate program with the realities of power, privilege and oppression
1 Frankenberg, Ruth. 1993. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
2 Dr. Oliva Espin, 2004. San Diego State University (personal communication, March 2004)
3 Narayan, Uma. 1998. “Working Together Across Difference: Some Considerations on Emotions and Political Practice.” Hypatia 3.2 (Summer): 31-47.
4 ibid.