My Struggle with Feminism

This is a guest post of the presentation given by our incredible student panelist at the University of Iowa for our college tour, Conner Spinks. Just a freshman, Conner’s insight, brilliance and general bad-assery absolutely blew us away.
To begin, I want to explain my own relationship to feminism. Personally, it has never been a word I shied away from. I was a loud mouth tom boy and I saw how my interest in tools and trucks over dolls was thought of as strange. I saw how confused my father was when I refused to put on a dress and if forced, would sit with my legs as wide as possible, which eventually led to pants anyway. My independent minded mother would try to calmly explain to aghast relatives that “No, she doesn’t think she’s boy, she just doesn’t like dresses.” Or her favorite, “No, she’s just being Conner.” Clearly, my mom doesn’t subscribe to traditional gender norms. My name is Conner.
As I grew up and learned about the inequalities faced by marginalized populations, and discovered there was a word for the fight against those inequitable distributions of power, I was all over it! I was eager to claim the identity of feminist. That identity is something I still debate about labeling myself because that label to some is enough. There is no need to truly question your own relative privileges or power, you’re a feminist. There’s no need to listen to claims of struggle that you don’t face, you’re a feminist. Because of that label, you can’t be ableist or transphobic, you’re a feminist!
I am not calling in to question how a good a feminist someone is. I am questioning what feminism means to the students on this campus and that ambiguity is what causes me pause when it comes to applying the label to myself.
This campus especially has shown me these feminist in name only. People who have regressive views of gender are looked at like Neanderthals and openly argued against. But regressive views of race that are patently obvious to me, go unquestioned or even unnoticed. Sometimes, I have literally looked around and asked, “Am I the only who heard that?”

As a woman of color, it offends me more than anything to witness ridiculous displays of ignorance about race on this campus. Race is not talked about enough here because it’s thought that we are post-racial because of all the progress made for communities of color. Even when there are obvious instances of racism, it is downplayed.
So the incidents where international students from China have racist graffiti written on their boards and people openly mock Chinese accents are treated as if cultural miscommunications. Ideas about English Only and mistaken ideas about America having an official language are not only condoned but widely held. Though this wasn’t here on this campus, at ISU, a friend of mine who is both Asian American and lesbian was forced to break her housing contract and move out of the dorms because of the harassment she faced for being lesbian and Asian American. She had little recourse besides to leave.
There is some resentment of the largely black populations from larger cities that live in Iowa City. When searching for apartments, I saw multiple notices of “NO CHILDREN” or “NO SECTION 8.” At the beginning of this school year, there was an editorial in our school paper, the Daily Iowan that noted how divisive Iowa City has become because of the North/South division, with the Southside being the largely black low income area. The talks surrounding the concentration of black people to the Southside never referenced the refusal on rental properties to rent to low income and/or people with families. Responses to the piece used euphemisms like “those people” and said everything but black. Even a highly racialized situation like that, there is a refusal to acknowledge race.
I have seen absolutely egregious displays of ignorance from women and men who claim the title of feminist. Within a gender studies classes, I have heard a young woman who claimed to be a feminist explain to me that a picture of a black woman dressed in jeans and a t-shirt was overly sexual. When I pressed for a reason why, she looked confused as if the answer were obvious. I sat staring at her in my own jeans and t-shirt, wondering how obscene my own body must be.
But my experiences with my fellow feminists are best summed up by an encounter with a young woman last semester. I just finished arguing with a friend of mine about the label of feminist because my friend believes in everything feminist oriented but the label. The young woman approached me to say that she proudly identified as feminist. We high-fived and after a beat, she did what a lot of black women fear. She raised her hand and asked me, “Can I touch your hair?”
That is not to say that my every experience with feminist on this campus was as offensive as someone trying to touch my hair, but it really is depictive of the state of feminism on this campus. There is a serious discrepancy between what it is in theory and how it is performed on this campus.
When I bring up issues of racism or nativism to some, they ask me how that relates to feminism. Feminism is especially for marginalized groups like POC and our struggles. Feminism is about explicitly fighting against the “-isms” that harass us POC on this campus. This is my feminism. I am a feminist.