Exploring Places and Sharing Thoughts: A Graduate Student’s Experience on the Road
By Reema Faris
Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies (GSWS), my home department at Simon Fraser University (SFU), offers a community outreach program called the Travelling Speakers Series (Series). The Series, which started in 1990, sends a member of the GSWS group, whether faculty, associate faculty, or a graduate student, to communities within British Columbia (BC) and outside the Lower Mainland, to speak to various audiences, including women’s groups and community colleges.
The program is an important link between the university, the department, and communities throughout the province. It is an example of what some call gown-to-town. It describes the way knowledge-holders from within the academy carry information about their research beyond the confines of campus to exchange ideas and share their expertise with others and not just academic others. It is not, however, a one-sided interaction. Just as information travels out, it also travels back in. The presenter brings back learning, from town-to-gown, that enriches their scholarship, makes it more relevant, and ensures that it reflects what is happening in the world.
To me, building dynamic, reciprocal connections from gown-to-town and town-to-gown are crucial in ensuring the viability and meaningfulness of higher education. To live the life of a scholar, researcher, and educator is a privilege. However, one can get lost in the minutiae of theory and wallow in esoteric debates. In this process, the work becomes incomprehensible to those who do not have the language, the lingo, and the jargon of a university discipline or access to a university setting. Taking the knowledge that is generated on campus, sharing it with others, and absorbing the wisdom of others into it, without being exploitative or extractive, is crucial. If scholarship fails to reflect social realities, if it is not responsive to current events, if it is not connected to the world beyond academic spaces, then it is doomed to stay mired in debates about the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin.
As a GSWS graduate student, I always agree to have my name, and the descriptions of the presentations I can offer, on the list of potential speakers that communities and organizations can access through the Series. I do so because I enjoy sharing what I know, and I value learning from others. Being a participating member in the Series has allowed me the opportunity to present, in-person and virtually, several times. I also love to travel and participating in the Series has allowed me to visit different places, including Haida Gwaii, Vernon, and Nelson. These are all places in BC that I had never visited before and may not have had the chance to do so without the opportunity to present.
My most recent foray for the Series, at the invitation of the Nelson and District Women’s Centre, was a trip to Nelson for a presentation on September 14, 2023. The Centre, as per their website, “is a feminist organization that has been celebrating, supporting, and empowering Kootenay women since 1973. The Centre believes that advancing gender equality helps to build a healthy community for everyone.” Malia Joy, the Centre’s Executive Director, and Programs Manager Anna Jauncey had asked if I would make the trip to Nelson and if I would deliver my presentation on gender that was described in the promotional material from GSWS.
This presentation, which I call “It’s a fact! Or is it? The Turbulence of Gender”, is one that I have made a few times and one that I continue to refine. I have adapted it for high school classes and community presentations, and I also use it in the SFU seminars I lead as a Sessional Instructor. It is a helpful overview for students that provides them with a sense of the discourses swirling and whirling around them. Such an introduction is especially important for those students who register in my courses with no prior GSWS experience.
In my view, one of the reasons that this presentation continues to attract interest is because the conversations around gender today are contentious. I use the word turbulence in my title because I have found that people feel unsettled when they talk about gender. They struggle with the concepts that underlie new ways of understanding gender, and they are navigating their way through the cacophony of competing viewpoints and clashing ideologies. People are searching for information that will help them establish the parameters of their investigations and that will help them better grasp what is at stake.
Gender, when people understand it as a choice between male or female, is a binary based on a visible physical difference. It is a sorting mechanism and helps to establish order in a life that can be random and chaotic. It is also one of the simplest ways to organize the world, and in its simplicity, it is inherently exclusionary. When we start to question the assumptions that offer only two choices for identifying people — not because academics tell us that there are more options, but because the historical reality of human lives shows us that there are — we are shaking the foundation of something that seems so certain, so stable, so unchanging. Opening conversations about gender also introduces a scope of deliberation that overwhelms folks because it raises questions about so many other things beyond the issue of individual identity. Talking about gender challenges assumptions and beliefs that seem cast in stone and that have formed the basis for almost every aspect of the ways humans live, the ways they have organized society and culture, and the ways they have understood themselves.
There are many spokes that construct the wheel of gender and many ways to disassemble them. Cultural practices are one such spoke, so whenever I give this presentation, I like to interrogate the phenomenon of gender reveal parties with the audience. A gender reveal party is a celebration, like a baby shower, with the added excitement of revealing the biologically assigned sex of the baby. Gender reveals are incredibly popular and are replicated over and over and over again. For example, when I was preparing my Nelson presentation, I typed the phrase “gender reveal party” in the Google search bar and was rewarded with 134 million results in .74 seconds demonstrating the scope of this phenomenon. However, the rush to be a part of the gender reveal trend has also resulted in tragedies. There have been instances of significant property damage and even of people dying because gender reveals have gone horribly wrong as people try to outdo each other in staging bigger, more spectacular stunts coded in pink or blue. The event becomes less about a familial celebration and more about competing to be the best, to go viral, to capture views, likes, and subscribers.
The truth is that at its very core a gender reveal party is about celebrating the baby’s genitalia and all the assumptions that go with that marker of physical difference. In my opinion, it is characteristic of the posturing that has become endemic to modes of expression and self-expression today on social media and in cultural practices. That is, although hosts of gender reveal parties — the parents of the child-to-be — believe themselves to be distinctive, individual, and unique, they are in fact mimicking a rite or a ritual that serves to cement and codify patterns of behaviour along with systems, structures, and institutions that perpetuate inequities, inequalities, and injustices.
If we think about it in a historical context, a baby with a penis is being born into a world of unlimited potential because in patriarchal societies, authority, power, and privilege are centred in being a man. A baby with a vagina is being born into a world of constrained potential because the traditional assumption is that as a woman her ultimate destiny is to grow up, find a husband, get married, and have children. In other words, gender reveal parties celebrate the patriarchal status quo and the associated social norms that have been constructed based on the difference in genitalia. It is a status quo that has marginalized and oppressed anyone considered other than and less than. I know the world has changed in terms of the opportunities available to those with different gender identities in many parts of the world, especially for women, and yet I find myself astonished in moments and instances when I realize how little has changed in terms of the social scripts that we live with, and which still dictate the shape and pattern of our lives.
The venue for my Nelson presentation was the Oxygen Art Centre, a multi-use artist’s studio and performance space, and the audience was warm and welcoming, receptive, engaged, curious, and inquisitive. The questions I received, and the dialogue we shared, covered issues such as pronouns, intergenerational differences, and the fear people express about the concept of gender fluidity. A member of the audience, in sharing an anecdote about their interaction with an older family member, demonstrated how sometimes those who identify as a woman or a man in the conventional sense (cisgender if we use terminology) are often afraid that their gender identities are under threat. That they cannot be who they want to be in the world in the way they want to be and in the way they have learned it is acceptable to be. That’s a fallacy. Accepting gender fluidity as a concept is about opening the space for all people to be who they are and to feel safe in being who they are. It is about allowing people to be this-and/or-that. It is not about telling people you are this-and-not-that.
As always, I picked up several points in Nelson that I plan to incorporate into future versions of my presentation. For example, I think it would be helpful to provide more information about intersex. Intersex describes the condition of a child born with anatomy that does not fit the either/or designation of boy or girl. The fact that biology produces humans with a type of physiology that precludes a definitive gender assignment is evidence of the social construction of gender. It shows the way that biology has been forced to correspond with human ideas about a binary based on genital differences rather than accepting the complex variations of the human body and refusing to acknowledge the social meanings, norms, and expectations that have been grafted on to a singular physical difference.
There is another anecdote from Nelson that I will hold on to. One of the audience members, a baker, has clients who ask her to prepare cakes for gender reveal parties coded according to the dominant understanding (even though this too has changed over the course of time) that pink is for girls and blue is for boys. In one instance, she was asked to make a cake that would show pink when it was cut, and this request was based on a medical image the client provided — one that was not definitive. In due course, after a pink be-dazzled gender reveal party, a baby was born. A baby who was male assigned at birth contradicting the months the family would have spent thinking of the baby as a girl. This, too, shows the artificiality of the gender reveal craze, one that celebrities and influencers have embraced in ways that build their personal brands and help sell the products they endorse or manufacture. Today’s modern conception of the gender reveal party has taken a joyous event, the impending birth of a child, and made it into a commercial, consumer spectacle about genitals.
These were some of the discussion points I covered during my presentation in Nelson, and I was very grateful to have the opportunity to exchange ideas with a we-have-come-to-listen group. Another aspect that made this experience so memorable for me was the drive. It is a long drive, one that covers approximately 670 kilometres and takes a Google-map estimated seven hours and thirty-two minutes to complete. I could have flown into Castlegar and travelled from there, but I love a road trip and since I taught this summer, and am teaching this fall, I thought I would take the opportunity to make the journey part of a working holiday for me. Because I was on my own, and given the distance, I stopped for one night in Osoyoos, another place I had never been, on the way to Nelson and for another night on the way back home.
The drive was spectacular, the other drivers on the road less so. The travelling speeds for those zooming past me and launching themselves around corners and switchbacks at road-runner speeds was disconcerting. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the journey even as my awareness of the contentious histories in these areas, the unceded territories, the conflicts, let alone threats and concerns about potential forest fires, tempered my enthusiasm. The region is a site of colonization, oppression, and incarceration. There is the legacy of Japanese internment camps to contend with among other atrocities that have left their mark on the land and on the people who have lived here since time immemorial, who inhabit these spaces and places now, and who come from all over the world to make this part of BC their future home. Conversely, it is also a place where people have fled in pursuit of freedom.
Overall, my trip to Nelson was another amazing Series experience, and I am indebted to GSWS and the Nelson and District Women’s Centre for the opportunity. There was another opportunity I was able to seize when I was in the Kootenays. On the Friday night, at the Capitol Theatre, I enjoyed a literary event featuring four authors who were reading and performing as part of the Elephant Mountain Lit Fest. One of the featured speakers that evening was Ivan Coyote, an author, advocate, artist, storyteller, and activist that I admire and respect, and whose work I have often shared with my students. It was the first time I have ever seen Ivan in-person and I could not have asked for a greater treat to cap my journey.
Before I draw this reflection to a close, I would like to leave you with a challenge, the same challenge I leave with those who are gracious enough to give me their time and attention when I offer this presentation on gender. I always ask the audience to consider, reflect on, and explore the links between gender as an organizing principle — I argue that gender is an ideology — and inequality. When we do this work together, I also address the issue of people who insist that gender is a simple binary of two categories.
As I point out, the question for those who have only two boxes for all of humanity’s gender expressions is this: what will they do with those individuals who do not fit nicely and neatly into either of the two categories, male or female? Is the answer to pathologize non-conforming individuals, punish them, and exclude them? Or will people step back, recognize the essential humanity of those who identify in other ways, and focus instead on questioning the systems, structures, and institutions that relegate those who identify differently to being the other, the lesser, the not valued, the discarded, the bullied? Having the ability to explore those questions and without having to struggle with the question personally or to suffer the consequences for not fitting into an externally dictated binary choice, is in fact a privileged position and one that demonstrates an individual’s freedom. The question to everyone is can you put yourself in the shoes of others to understand the discrimination and oppression they face, and what are you prepared to do to secure and sustain their civil and human rights?
To end my presentation about gender turbulence, I show a photograph that I took in 2012 during a visit to Rome, Italy. One day as I was walking in the city, I noticed the crowds gathering along the Via dei Fori Imperiali in front of the Roman Colosseum. My curiousity was peaked, and I decided to linger on the sidewalk to see what the fuss was all about. Before I knew it, I found myself in the middle of a crowd for Rome’s pride parade, Roma Pride. It struck me at that time, well before I had started my PhD program with GSWS, before I gained the benefit of the learning I have done over the past few years, with less awareness that I have now, that gender is an all around the world issue. It is a social justice issue, especially if we explore the intersections of gender with other identity markers such as race, class, sexuality, location, and disability. It is a global social justice issue. It is an issue that I have become passionate about, and I hope my contributions, such as presenting on the topic of gender to various audiences, will help to bring about changes that ensure everyone respects and accepts each other as they are, as they want to be, and as they know themselves to be. It is, as always, about building a better and more equitable world. It is about building a world that is more just.
Student Biography
Reema Faris (she/her) is a PhD candidate with the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the Simon Fraser University. Her work includes exploring, analyzing, and considering the ramifications of gender discourses.
Research areas: The intersection of popular culture and feminism fascinates Reema. In particular, her research work examines the relationships between women readers and the deluge of “happily-ever-after/happy-for-now” narratives they face. Another issue Reema grapples with is the coupling imperative in public discourse that amounts to an erasure of the single woman and obscures the potentials and possibilities of alternate social arrangements.