The Risks of Collectivization of Experience

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?