Today in class we were
discussing Napels' piece and one of the questions that was posed to us is what
the dangers are of creating a movement and how we might minimize those risks.
There were the obvious risks like getting arrested or physically hurt or
drawing in yet more negative attention than there likely was previously. We’ve
also been discussing the idea of what the difference between an individual and
a collective experience is, and it occurred to me that a collective mentality
could have some potential dangers.
Sometimes, when I was
younger, I’d go to hockey games with my Dad. I don’t care about hockey. I never
have. But once I was in the arena with all the yelling fans and the horns and
the cheerleaders and the lights, I forgot that I didn’t care about hockey. All
the pomp and fanfare energized me about something I wasn’t even interested in
at all. In winter term last year, when the campus pro-life group put up their
demonstration in quad and people gathered to surround it and block the
triggering images, I forgot that crowds and screaming and confrontation make me
anxious. Yet there I was for two days, pumping a sign up and down and chanting
the chants. And that was a cause I did care about.
I think it’s really easy to
get swept up into mob mentality and it can be fun and it can be exciting but I
also think it causes you to miss things. At the pro-life protest, it didn’t
occur to me that one of the organizers of the counter-protest I was taking part
in was a cis-white guy, who was often leading cheers, asking “WHOSE BODY?” into
his megaphone while us protestors answered “OUR BODY” and he asked back “WHOSE
CHOICE?” to which we responded “OUR CHOICE.” And it didn’t really occur to me
that this was probably an event that he probably should have taken a backseat
in. I talked to him and he was a very lovely individual but was this really his
place to be taking a leadership role? I didn’t even notice this. In fact, I
admired him for standing up for women’s issues when I should have been thinking
about whether or not he was supporting women’s issue in the best way he could.
Collective mentality I think
can cause us to feel a lot of really heightened emotion that can, at the time,
feel wonderful and freeing and exciting but I definitely think that even in
spaces where a collective experience is being shared, it’s vital to remember
that every voice contributes something different to the conversation. I think
this is one of the dangers of the feminist movement, some feminists (read:
white feminists) tend to forget that womanhood is not universal. The second we
start universalizing experience and emotion is the second people start being
forgotten. And isn’t the entire point of a movement to acknowledge those who
have been made invisible?
When I read your post I recognize two different dangers of movements. The first being an erasure of individual difference and the second being a re-inscription of the movement's goals by dominant groups. I think that Naples' emphasis on survivor discourse within a feminist movement concerned with childhood sexual assault attempts to alleviate the second danger of movements that you discuss.
ReplyDeleteNaples argues that it must be the survivors participating in discourse that intentionally "stands in opposition to expert discourses" (1178). Central to this is that it must be survivors who are speaking out and leading the movement. I believe that Naples is also arguing that the discourse of survivors must be directed against the dominant oppressive beliefs. As Naples emphasizes, survivor discourse requires an “engaged political struggle” (1176). Although I am still unsure of what Naples defines as a “political struggle” I believe we can understand it as efforts to undo, complicate, or resist oppressive norms. If a movement needs to be led by those who are being harmed by dominant discourses, such as sexual abuse survivors, and it must be directed at undoing these oppressive discourses/understandings, as soon as a movement is led by those within the dominant group or lacks political intent, it is no longer a movement.