Translator: Denise Pelusch Reviewer: Claudia Sander Friends, I will try to thread four polemic words into my talk today: "feminism," "gender," "privilege," and "social equity. " I wasn't born a feminist. I also wasn't born knowing what gender is.
When I was a little over 20 years old, at my aunt's house, I found by chance a book called: "The Hite Report on Female Sexuality. " The book is exactly about what the title says: a deep study on women sexuality, done by American-born German researcher Shere Hite. Reading the book, I realized three things.
First, that Shere Hite was a feminist. Still is, she is alive. Second, what feminism is.
And third, that I was also a feminist. Reading through the experiences described in the book, and comparing them to my own experiences, I realized that I always knew that the world was unfair for women. I just lacked the words to convey this injustice.
At that moment I decided to dedicate myself to studying deeply about gender feminist theories. When I started to study gender, a little over 10 years ago, people mixed up "gender" and "genre": "Is it a musical or a literary genre? " This gave me an idea of how widely unknown the subject was.
After all this time, it is still very unknown, and there is still much confusion about "gender" and "genre. " "Genre" is a word very full of meanings. It means musical genre, samba or funk, or literary genre, comedy and drama, but what I study is gender, which is also full of meanings and definitions.
A very accurate demonstration of what the word "gender" is about is our definitions of masculine and feminine. We constantly go through this, so just a few examples: when we go to a restroom, we have "men's" or "ladies'"; when we fill out a form, we have "male" or "female"; when we have to try clothes on, we go to either the men's or the ladies' fitting room, and so on. Another definition also very accurate of gender is the social hierarchy; a way of organizing society where women and men take on very different roles.
If we think about governments, companies, and the job market, the leadership roles are mainly taken by men, while the majority of caregiver jobs are done by women. Gender has yet another definition, which is that of gender studies. These studies are a social reading, an analysis, the empirical observations and the formal studies of hierarchies, and the way they characterize how we understand masculine and feminine.
There are a lot of definitions. Why do we study gender? Why we, working in this field, dedicate ourselves to studying gender?
Because gender is a regulatory tool. It regulates speech, as we have seen, and also behavior, politics, and even what we understand as reason, what we understand as true. We talk about signs in the restrooms.
We know how to make a decision. Everyone has had to make this decision once in their lifetime and looked at the signs and saw it. We recognize the signs by their symbols, men's or ladies', and we usually know which one is the ladies' based on the skirt.
I will invite you to do something - especially here in Rio Grande do Sul where this happens very often - to think about restroom signs with different symbols, for instance, a lipstick and a cane, or a fan and a cigar, right? Neither the lipstick, nor the cane, or the fan, or the cigar, or not even the skirt, as the Scottish have shown us, are inherently masculine or feminine. We attribute gender values to these inanimate objects.
The same goes to things such as colors, for example. It is common knowledge that pink is for girls and blue, for boys. Neither pink nor blue are inherently feminine or masculine, there is no correlation.
If this stopped in the language realm, maybe it would be trivial to think about all that. But it does not, the issue reaches further to more political and problematical places. For example, it regulates behavior, regulates our existence on Earth.
All men here, all boys here, I am sure, have heard at some point that "men don't cry. " Right? But they do.
They have eyes, nasolacrimal ducts, they have feelings, they suffer; they cry. When we insist on this narrative of gender that men don't cry, it has at least one very negative effect, which is to disconnect men from their own feelings. We end up creating men who lack the ability to deal with their own emotions, what's more with other people's emotions.
Women also suffer from these expected behavior, and that's the reason I am a feminist. All of us have heard, at some point, "Close your legs, girl. " There is an obsession about women being aware of their parts.
Men, meanwhile - I ask you to look at the guy sitting next to you - have their legs wide open and nobody says anything. (Laughter) This obsession over body awareness has at least one negative effect, which is that it subdues our sexuality. We know that women's sexuality is very restricted.
So, we study gender not only because of pink and blue, lipstick and fan. We study gender because there are identity restrictions, behavioral restrictions, there are restrictions in our lives that have deep political consequences. This is why we say that one definition for gender is it's social order, as something that effectively orients the world in which we live.
The origins of knowledge of gender, of all theories of gender that we study today, are feminist. Feminist women started to move in the direction of thinking about gender in these terms. Then we add another polemic word to the mix, the very objected word "feminism.
" What is feminism, after all? There are many definitions and many of them add to one another, but I will use here one of my favorites, which is attributed to American journalist Marie Shear. It goes: "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
" This can be good and bad. (Applause) This can be good and bad, and it confirms something that feminists everywhere have been trying to show to society for a long time: the same way we don't comply and don't feel less than men, we are not interested in being more than men. We don't want to live in a world where girls don't cry and have to wear blue, and boys have to close their legs and wear pink.
This is not the point. What we want, in fact, is a new model for society, which has been discussed a lot at this TEDx event. What we want is called "social equity.
" Another term I mentioned earlier, social equity. Equality, if we think about it, is a beautiful word, but it is elusive. Not even identical twins, with the same DNA, are exactly the same.
We say that they are identical in medical terms, but if you know any twins, you know that they are not exactly the same. So, expecting equality is a little overly utopic. But social equity is this.
Social equity is equality in accessibility and opportunity. Social equity is equality in diversity. That is why we talk about gender equity, so people have the same fair accessibility; accessibility to health, education, housing, body and financial autonomy for all.
When we talk about gender equity, we are actually talking about equity for all people, regardless of their being gay, lesbian, bissexual, trans, transvestite, and even heterossexual. Heterossexuals are not out of the equity equation, and we need to understand this once and for all. Feminism always fought for women to be considered as human as men.
It was through feminism that I first saw these gender studies, when I found Shere Hite's book. The fact that I found feminism and found myself as a feminist, or rather, I realized I was a feminist - "found" is not a good word - and that I started studying gender does not mean that I know everything about feminism or gender. We are always learning.
In this learning process, I have learned many things that, had I walked a different path, in my experience alone, I would have never had any idea. My experience is a very privileged one, to the point that I found feminism by chance. But black feminism, for example, has taught me that, as a white woman, I don't worry about race, about racial issues.
I started to worry, to become racially aware, after I started to study black feminism. Up until then, as a white woman, I was an universal human being, and race wasn't an issue. Black feminism made me aware of that.
Being a white woman, being white in a racist world, is similar to being a man in a sexist world. We benefit from a series of privileges without even realizing it. Someone has to alert us about it.
(Applause) I have always had privileges. I was born into a family that was able to provide me with many things, and class wasn't something I thought about. And feminists concerned with class-based oppression have taught me how important it is to think about it, and also, especially in Brazil, and all around the world, that poverty has a race and a gender.
We need to wake up to these things. Queer feminists who work specially with LGBT issues have taught me that it is very important to think about sexual diversity as well and not only about women against men. It is very important to think about sexual diversity.
And if we think about it, any story, any narrative, book, film, there is always the princess and the prince, the girl and the boy. In LGBT stories, it seems like that all that is left to these characters is violence. They do not have the right to a love story, a romance, an adventure.
There is no gay action hero, for example. We need to wake up to that, specially those of us who benefit from privileges of not being represented that way, or of being represented all the time. These oppression systems, these issues, and I only mentioned three of them, they cross one another, and they affect different people in different ways.
My experience as a heterossexual white woman, for example, is very different from that of a black transgender man in this world, this society. When I go to the bathroom, I choose the ladies' one. Peeing can be a problem for a black transgender man.
In a supermarket, nobody follows me, suspecting of my character, thinking that I might steal something from the shelves. A transgender black man, very likely, has this experience repeatedly in his life. That's also true in terms of social recognition.
My identity is well acknowledged. A black transgender man still raises strange feelings. "Do you feel like a man?
" "Are you a man? " He is who he is. And we need to respect that.
However, we have things in common, me, this white heterossexual woman and this black transgender man. Neither of us has utter rights to our body autonomy, for example. In Brazil, a woman is raped every 11 minutes.
Every 23 minutes, a black man is killed by the State. And we are the country that most kills transgender people in the world. It is a shameful ranking.
The systems of oppression operate in a pervasive and dangerous way, which I've been trying to talk to you about. Those who profit from them become blind. A white person does not experience racism, and therefore it is hard for us to see what racism is, we don't experience it.
A man doesn't experience male chauvinism, so it is hard for a man to see and understand it, how it operates. Heterossexuals don't endure LGBTphobia. So it is hard for us to understand what it means to live in a world that often delegitimizes sexual desire.
For me, this is why gender studies are so important, so fundamental. I actually think that they are pressing. We immediately need to understand this way of thinking, specially the more privileged people.
Being a feminist, for me, is like wearing lenses, lenses that allow me to see a world that is not my world; that in fact introduces me to other perspectives; what is more: perspectives that alert me to how much we are maintaining oppressive social structures. I'm a feminist, not to indoctrinate people into who they should or shouldn't be. Society already does that very well; after all, we are in a world where we expect boys not to cry; girls to close their legs; gays, lesbians, bissexuals, transsexuals, and transvestites to stay in the closet; and that the natural fate of the black population is to live in poverty.
None of that is natural. This is all fabricated. If it was fabricated, we can refabricate it in a better and more fair manner.
My invitation to you today is that you wear these lenses with me, so that we can all see it together. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you.
